She takes a deep breath, searching for the words that will appease Pete. “It should be obvious,” she says. “I’ve got to see what’s going on.”
“Gotta fucking get plugged, you mean.” Pete twists the key violently to start the engine. “You can see from the wall. Christ. You can actually see from the office by looking at my stuff. You wordies don’t need this.”
She might have said that herself an hour ago, but now she rejects it. “I can’t write it if I’m not in it. You know that.”
“Screw the writing. Don’t do that again, damnit,” he says. “Don’t run out in front like that. Not when I’m your ride.”
She looks out her window, turning her head away from him.
“You got some fucking death wish, fulfill it somewhere else. I don’t have time to take you to the fucking hosp—” He cuts off suddenly. Maybe thinking of Marcus, maybe thinking he’s gone too far.
They drive in silence for a few minutes. Then Pete lets air out loudly through his mouth. “You even get anything you can use?”
“Quote here, quote there.” Actually, Caddie doesn’t think she took a single note after Halima, the woman with the cucumber. And she still doesn’t know precisely what her story is. She’s half-sitting on her notebook. She shoves it into her waist pouch.
“Yeah, but no bodies—not unless that one guy goes down,” Pete says. “So what is it, besides a caption?”
A part of a story that eventually will pull together all her scattered pieces. Or maybe just something to drown out this craving to hunt down those Lebanese killers and castrate them, whack their balls off, one by one.
“I’ll cover a couple more,” she answers. “Then, don’t worry about it, I’ll have something to write. I’ll have my story.”
THREE MESSAGE WAIT on the office answering machine. The first is from the Gaza City hospital. “I am sorry, we are not at liberty to report on the status of our medical supplies. I can confirm, however, that it is a priority of Chairman Arafat’s to make sure our wounded get the best possible medical care. Let me also remind you that journalists are not allowed in the hospital without having obtained prior permission. As to the status of the patient you inquired about, that information is private.”
For the girl, Caddie has little hope. But, with the details Goronsky provided, she should be able to scare up a confirmation or a denial on medical supplies somehow, even without the hospital’s cooperation. Maybe Hikmet could direct her—she seems to remember he has a nephew who works at Shifa.
The second message is from Moshe, who agrees to let her stay overnight with his family. “We have nothing to hide,” he says. She must call him to arrange the time.
There’s a pleasant piece of news. If she can toss in the experience of being in the clashes with that of being in the settlements plus an interview with the cucumber girl, it’ll make a decent piece. She’s on to something, and to hell with Pete. She’s not chasing bullets or playing some roulette game. She’s doing her job.
The third message. A man’s voice. “I have an idea for dinner.”
The words make her stomach tumble. She feels Marcus leaning in toward her as the Land Rover takes a turn. I have an idea for dinner tonight. Smelling her cheek. Flirtatious. Dinner tonight.
“It’s Alexander Goronsky,” the voice goes on. “I’m at the Mount of Olives Hotel, Room 211.”
An accidental turn of phrase, one that carried an accidental echo.
She won’t return his call. She has no interest in being observed by him. No interest in making herself appear available.
Pete and some other journalists pass in the hallway, laughing. “Hey, Caddie,” Pete calls, his anger evaporated. “Want to get a bite with us?”
“Thanks, but I’m busy,” she lies.
“Okay, then,” he says. “Later.”
This Goronsky, who is he? Probably a traditionalist who favors Johann Strauss, and Tolstoy. He would never take his spoon and pretend to ski down a mountain of sugar on his cereal, like Marcus did. If he even eats cereal for breakfast. Which Caddie doesn’t intend to find out.
As the elevator down the hall jerks open and then closes, the voices of Pete and the others are extinguished.
Of course, dinner has nothing to do with breakfast.
Caddie holds the receiver in her hand for a long moment before dialing Goronsky’s number.
HE ARRIVES AT HER OFFICE around five, too early to eat, so they begin by unspoken agreement to stroll the sidewalk. It’s another loud evening: bus brakes squealing, soldiers arguing as they inhale pita sandwiches, merchants yanking down metal shutters to close up their shops. Caddie can’t squeeze in a decent piece of conversation. But she doesn’t mind letting any possibility of shared words be overtaken by horn blasts and radio static.
When they pause at a corner, he takes her arm right above the elbow. “What kinds of stories do you like to cover?” he asks.
It’s a neutral question, but it makes her uncomfortable. What’s he hinting at? A stranger’s appeal is supposed to be that he doesn’t know anything beyond what she tells him. A fresh start.
“The nasty stories,” she says. “Two sides killing each other, me watching.” She doesn’t grin, giving him nothing to hang his hat on.
His cell phone rings then. He tilts his head to one side, cups the phone to his ear and listens a minute. “Okay,” he says. He hangs up, stares into the distance and seems to slip away. He walks ahead, crossing the street as though he’s alone. His stride is long. She hurries to catch up.
Marcus did this, too, sometimes. Vanished on me, distracted by the shadows within his negatives. But it passed. It always passed.
The hair that curls on Goronsky’s forehead looks damp. His brown eyes have darkened, and she sees herself reflected there. He moves closer to her. “A release,” he says, his voice so quiet she has to lean forward to hear. “That’s what it is, this journalism, no? You’re part of it, but it’s bigger than you, more meaningful than you alone can ever be.”
This time his intensity sets her on edge. “That’s not quite it,” she says.
“Everybody seeks the drug of risk-taking from time to time. Dangerous jobs, dangerous sports. Reckless driving. Fierce drinking. Makes life less bland.” He looks directly at her. “Or dulls the pain.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not my appetite for violence that’s at issue here. It’s the appetite of the newspaper’s readers.”
He stares at her a moment, but doesn’t reply.
HE TAKES HER to a new restaurant run by an Orthodox Jew who greets him by name.
“You know an odd variety of people,” she says.
He ignores the comment. “You were an only child, I’d bet,” he says.
“Lucky guess,” she answers. “Why are you staying at the Mount of Olives, anyway? Isn’t that mainly Christian tour groups?”
“Nice view,” he says.
“I would have expected King David, for a professor doing a government study.”
“Too formal.”
“Or, security simply too tight for someone studying extremism?”
He glances away. A waiter brings a bowl of green olives, a plate of tomatoes and cucumbers drenched in vinegar, another plate of fish and fresh hummus seasoned with paprika. Goronsky fingers a piece of warm pita. “Were you close to your parents?” he asks.
“My father died before I was born.”
He leans forward, suddenly intent. He’s not wearing a tie this time and his shirt is unbuttoned at the neck. His shoulders are broader than she’d realized before.
She’s surprised at this show of interest in her childhood. But it feels safer than his other probes. She doesn’t want to talk about violence, what it means to her or what part she plays in it. On the topic of long-dead parents, she’s practiced and comfortable.
“He was an amateur racecar driver.” She pops an olive into her mouth. “He wanted to be in the Indy 500. But he crashed first, some minor race in Toledo. Lost control taking a curve. All
I have is the newspaper clipping. And an impression, from my grandmother, that he lived hard.”
Goronsky’s hands are on the table, one cupped in the other. Even at rest they seem more the hands of a farmer than an academic. He has a scar on his chin, curved like a sliver of moon.
“My mother took off soon after I was born. Ditched me, basically. I think the pregnancy was an accident anyway.” Caddie smiles, sips her Bitter Lemon soda. “She was a potter—when she could afford the clay and the fee for a wheel. She moved a lot, sent postcards. A couple times she sent pots she’d made, quirky shapes glazed in dark colors. My grandmother lined them up chronologically on a shelf in my bedroom. When I was nine, my mother was in San Francisco, out on a street late at night alone, and she got mugged and beaten up. She died in the hospital.”
“Your grandparents raised you, then?” Goronsky asks.
“Grandmother. My grandfather was already gone, so it was only Grandma Jos and me.”
Usually when Caddie tells these stories, her listeners give her a puppy-dog gaze. A child orphan, all these untimely deaths, what a shame. And usually she nods and thinks how easy it is to fool people into believing she’s been open, merely by pulling out a stale story.
In Goronsky’s face now, however, there is none of the typical pity. Just, again, that recognition.
Marcus was spontaneity and irony and a joke. Marcus was a noontime sun flooding the room, washing out its corners. This Goronsky is a single, eye-stinging beam that claims to know her even better than she knows herself.
Unexpectedly, that pleases her.
. . .
HALFWAY THROUGHT THE MEAL, she catches him staring at her.
“Is it awful?” he asks.
“What?”
“The food. You’re mostly rearranging instead of eating.”
She looks at her plate. She’s hidden the fish under the salad and hasn’t touched the bread. In fact, she realizes that she hasn’t eaten dinner for weeks, starting in the Cyprus hospital. The one meal she’s been skipping. “I’m not too hungry,” she says.
After dinner, they walk again. They do not touch, but their shoulders are close. Too close. She sits on a bench and places her backpack between them as he, too, sits. “Now you tell me a story,” she says. “A story of your childhood.”
“Hmm,” he says vaguely. “You are interviewing me?”
“You already interviewed me.”
“A typical Russian childhood,” he says. “We went to school as a number, not a name. We sat in neat rows behind blond desks. We dressed the same, drew the same pictures, spoke to the teacher in unison.” His tone grows impatient. “Sasha is the diminutive for boys named Alexander or girls named Aleksandra. You know how many Sashas were in my class? Nine. Every year, the same nine of us, growing older as one.” He presses his lips together and looks, for a second, as though he is going to spit. “As one of many Sashas, I was invisible. I could get away with anything.”
Although she’s seen enough rage in the last few years to recognize it now, it surprises her. Even controlled, it seems out of proportion. To be invisible doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. How much better than being known as the girl whose mother, plainly put, couldn’t find a reason to stay.
He grows so silent that she thinks he may not speak again tonight. “I like Jerusalem, don’t you?” she says after a few minutes. “The hills, the history.”
He doesn’t answer but leans slightly over her backpack. The intensity of his attention attracts and chills her. She’s careful not to touch him, but he is near enough for her to breathe in the smell of him: a scent of sea salt.
“I only wish Jerusalem had the ocean,” she says. “That’s the single advantage to Tel Aviv.”
His body grows board-like. He rubs his arms as though chilled and looks away. “You like the ocean, then?” he asks.
She hesitates. “I like its power.”
“You’ve been to the seaside a lot?”
“I didn’t ever leave Indiana as a kid. But later, after I was older, I spent a vacation in San Diego. For a week I collected shells and stones. Obsessive, almost—handfuls of them every day. Always looking for the perfect ones. Finally, I got over it. I gave them all away to a bum on the boardwalk.”
“And since then you’ve collected, what? The maimed and the marred?”
She laughs, ignoring the coolness of his tone. “Essentially.”
He doesn’t speak for a few minutes. “I have a beach story,” he says at last, his voice inflectionless. “It’s about Israel. About a woman who emigrated from Russia. Do you want to hear?” He doesn’t wait for her answer. “Lean back, then,” he says, the scratchiness of his voice combining with his accent to set free a kind of music. He slides her backpack off the bench and scoots closer so their shoulders nearly touch, so his lips almost brush the hair that covers her ear. “Close your eyes.” His words float to her.
VERA MOVED FROM MOSCOW to Jerusalem with her parents at the age of sixteen and got married at eighteen to a sabra, a nice Israeli-born boy who liked to work the land. She loved that her husband worked with his hands, that he knew every inch of her adopted country. They moved north to a village on the Mediterranean called Neve Shalot, with green fields on one side and blue water on the other. They had a son first, then two daughters. The days were a weave of salt breezes and childish laughter.
One cloudy autumn evening not long after dinner, when the baby was six months old, one daughter was three and the son six, the old woman who lived next door came bustling all in a fright and said she’d seen men, Arab men, landing a small boat on the shore.
“How do you know this, in the dark, that they’re Arabs?” Vera’s husband asked, but the woman insisted she did. He gave his wife a skeptical look, but still the two of them, their children and the frightened old woman hid, crowded into a tiny coat closet in the upstairs hallway. After only a minute, though, the baby began to cry.
“She needs her bottle,” Vera said, because she had already stopped nursing, thinking to get pregnant again, and her breasts were as dry as the desert.
“I’ll fetch it,” said her husband.
“Me too, Poppa,” said the three-year-old girl.
“Safer for you to stay here,” said the husband.
“Oh, she’ll be fine with you,” Vera said. So out they went, father and daughter, downstairs. And while they were rummaging in the refrigerator, the men from the boat burst through the back door that opened right into the kitchen. In separate, isolated notes that sounded like instrument solos, those hidden in the closet heard the girl scream, but not too loudly; they heard glass break on the floor; they heard the father pronounce a phrase of prayer in Hebrew and the intruders talk in a jumble of urgent Arabic words. The boy, the six-year-old son, didn’t have enough self-control to prevent a gasp.
“Who else is here?” one intruder asked in accented English.
“No one,” said the husband, and his words, clear and strong like the muscles in his arms when he worked in the fields, floated up to the hidden ones. “My wife, she is visiting her mother.”
“But, Poppa,” began the girl in Hebrew in her pure, childish voice.
“Hush, dear one,” said the father. And the girl, of course, behaved.
Vera and her son heard the intruders leave with father and child. The old woman sank to the floor of the closet and knelt there trembling. Vera held the baby tight to her chest so she would not cry again, so no one would hear her if she did. “Hush, dear one,” she whispered over and over. “Hush or we’ll all be taken. And that is what your daddy, brave and good, forever strong, does not want. That’s what he was trying to tell us. Hush, dear one. Hush.”
They stayed there in the upstairs closet, the old woman clutching the twigs of a broom, Vera upright and rocking her baby, her son crouched with his head lowered between his knees. They stayed so long that the boy lost all sense of how long they’d been there. He smelled his mother’s hot desperation and it reminded him of curdled milk.
He smelled the tangy scent of his father that came from the coat he wore for army reserve duty. The boy didn’t know it then, but he would never forget those smells.
He waited for his father to return, to tell them it was okay, they were safe, the trespassers gone. He was confident his father would return. In the end, though, his father did not come, but only other men, men speaking Hebrew, saying, “Here we are, it’s all right now, all right.”
Vera hugging the baby, the old woman clutching the broom, the boy clinging to his father’s coat. All three stepped cautiously from the closet, and even before the men spoke, the boy could read the facts in their faces. His father and sister had been shot to death on the narrow beach by their home. And as his mother lowered his sister from her chest, he knew by the way the baby lay that she’d been suffocated. That his mother had killed her trying to prevent her cries.
When dawn broke, his mother stretched out face down on the same beach where his father and sister had fallen. She waited to die too. When that didn’t happen—when they reminded Vera of her son and pulled her inside and gave her pills of calm—she packed her bags. She told her aging parents she was returning to her native land. When they protested, she said, “Yes, I know of pogroms, I know what can happen to a Jew in Russia, but in Russia there is no illusion of safety. No trickery. A mother does not unwittingly become murderer of her children, her husband.”
Once Vera and her son got back to Moscow, she no longer mentioned what had happened. Not even when she found she was pregnant, she’d been with child all along on that thirsty, moonless night. Only during the birth of her fourth baby, the one all the neighbors thought was her second and probably illegitimate, did she break her silence to howl, an unintelligible, guttural sound like waves crashing, so uncontrolled that the nurses summoned the chief doctor to scold her harshly for her lack of courage. They scolded her even as she bled onto the grayish-white sheets, even after the baby was born dead.
AND I SUPPOSE that was the last loss she could face, that she used up all her emotions then,” Goronsky says. “Because after that, even if I kissed her a hundred times, still she could not feel that I was there. And even if I’d wanted to talk about what happened to us, she would have refused.”
The Distance Between Us Page 8
