The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  “Sarah,” says Moshe, as though she can’t be trusted to pronounce her own name. Caddie would stomp on the foot of such a husband, but Sarah doesn’t react. “I’m going to get cleaned up,” Moshe says, and leaves them alone.

  “Thanks so much for having me for the night,” Caddie says.

  “The night?” says Sarah. “Of course.” Her scarf is tied under her hair in a large knot like an unnatural flower blooming at the back of her neck. Three children hover. A long minute inches by.“We’ll eat soon,” Sarah says. “Would you like some water? Or juice?” Her voice is soft but hoarse, like a heavy smoker’s.

  “Water would be fine.”

  Sarah motions Caddie into the dining room, where the table is set, then excuses herself. A few moments later one of the older boys, maybe twelve, with the onset of acne and a refusal to meet her eyes, brings Caddie a glass of water. She takes a sip. Lukewarm, it slides down her throat reluctantly. He silently stands before her, arms hanging limply. “So,” she says, “how long have you lived here?”

  “Year.” He’s looking at her right ear. “About.”

  “And before that?”

  “Kiryat Arba,” he names another settlement.

  “Are there many children in this neighborhood? Do you go to yeshiva here?”

  Two questions at once have been too much. The boy looks at his feet while nodding quickly, a gesture that could mean anything, then slips out of the room.

  Within minutes, the family begins gathering at the table. No one introduces her. Only the little ones even glance at her directly. “Sit, sit.” Moshe speaks to her in a large voice, gesturing to an empty chair.

  Caddie counts the children—seven—as they follow Moshe’s lead in intoning a blessing. “Baruch ata Adonai Elohainu . . .” Their faces remind her of marshmallows: pale and spongy. She takes a few bites from her plate, then looks around in vain for salt or pepper. The food, by appearance, texture and flavor, is tasteless and unrecognizable. But no one asks her if she needs anything. She pretends to eat. She’s not hungry anyway. She wonders if, despite all these children, sex between Moshe and Sarah is as bland as the food; then she banishes the thought as Moshe asks each child in turn what he or she has learned that day and they rise to their feet to tell him. The younger ones recite phrases from the Torah; the older ones reflect on their meanings. Only the baby is exempt. Moshe strokes his wispy beard and nods as each one speaks. His smile is subdued, but his eyes speak of pride. This ritual, Caddie suspects, is his primary contribution to child-rearing. Sarah looks up from her plate only to spoon food into the baby’s mouth.

  After dinner, Moshe nods at his wife as he leaves the dining room. Caddie jumps to follow him, but he steps into a room and closes the door firmly behind him. The bathroom, perhaps? She returns to the dining table and starts to help clear it until the oldest boy, looking like a bird ready to give flight, waves his arms and mumbles something about kashrut. Of course. As with every religion, there are laws, and in this case they concern separation of dairy and meat products. Special flatware and dishes, special sinks and special sponges, dish towels and drain racks. There can be no merging. If a mistake occurs, whole sets of dishes may have to be tossed. They don’t want to bother explaining and then checking to make sure she does it right.

  She returns to the living room. There are no books or magazines, so she sits, then rises to look out the window. She opens a hall closet, looking idly for Moshe’s rifle. He has one stashed somewhere, she’s sure. At least one. But this closet holds only coats.

  She takes a few steps down the hallway. “Moshe?” No one answers. In the kitchen, Sarah and her children are still washing dishes. Caddie tentatively opens the door that Moshe disappeared behind. It leads to a small mudroom and, beyond it, the street. Moshe is gone; he’s given her the slip.

  She eases out the door. The settlement, surrounded by barbed wire, is stripped down like a version of a toy town with blacktop streets, a gas station, a playground. The identical five dozen red-roofed houses look spacious by Jerusalem standards. No obvious clues as to where Moshe might be.

  Outside one home, a light is on, and a woman kneels over a planted pot by her front door. “Shalom,” Caddie calls as she approaches. The fact that she’s passed the guard and is inside indicates she is an invited guest, and that should give her some measure of acceptance. She hopes it’s enough.

  “Shalom.” The woman straightens, but she’s hesitant, searching Caddie’s face.

  “I’m Catherine Blair.” Caddie holds out a hand. “I’m visiting Moshe Bar Lev. He’s gone to a meeting and I’m supposed to be there, too, but,” she shakes her head, touches one hand to her forehead and smiles, “I’ve forgotten the house number.” She waits. The woman says nothing, glancing down at a handful of herbs she holds in her hand. “Do you know, perhaps?” Caddie asks at last.

  The woman shakes her head slowly. “Why don’t you ask Sarah?”

  “Of course. She was busy with the children, so I thought—but now I guess—” She motions toward Moshe’s home.

  The woman nods. “That would be best.”

  Caddie staves off a moment of doubt. These endless awkward requests, this shuffling around in foreign neighborhoods and living rooms, this thrusting of herself into settings where she’s so clearly the outsider, if not the enemy. Why does she do it?

  She once thought that she’d become a journalist out of an entirely personal impulse: the need to observe people who were, on some level, more real than she. People who enmeshed themselves in a community instead of observing it. Who kept address books with names of friends, not contacts. Who shared confidences, talked about feelings, groaned about getting together with family on holidays. People she might have been. People she still might be under certain carefully controlled circumstances—though she doubts it.

  Right now, though, she’s not interested in comparing herself to others, or in imagining a different life. She wants the story. And the story, undeniably, is taking place beyond her reach.

  She walks back to Moshe’s house, feeling the neighbor’s eyes upon her. The phone rings as she enters. Hearing the murmur of a girl’s voice, she strains to listen but can’t make out a word. After a few minutes, she peeks into the kitchen—no one there—and begins to walk down the hallway, calling out, “Hello?” No one answers. All doors are shut. She raps on one. The oldest boy opens it, the boy full of elbows who fled at her questions.

  “Sorry to trouble you,” Caddie says. “I was looking for your father. Or mother.”

  The boy’s eyes, fastened somewhere to the right of her cheek, widen as though she’d asked whether he drinks wine for breakfast. Without a word, he walks down the hall through the kitchen and slips into another room that must be a walk-in pantry. He closes the door in her face.

  She raises a fist to knock there, too, but before she can, Sarah opens it and comes out, wiping her hands on her apron, her eyebrows raised in question. The son follows, and hurries away.

  “Still working, are you?” Caddie asks. “Don’t you ever long for a microwave or dishwasher?”

  Sarah’s smile is so slight as to resemble a grimace. “We set our priorities, Moshe and I.”

  “Yes, Moshe,” Caddie says. “He forgot to tell me where the meeting is. Can you direct me?”

  “Meeting?” Sarah shrugs. She reaches in her apron’s pocket as though looking for something, but comes out empty-handed.

  “Wherever they usually meet, then?”

  “He’ll probably be home soon.”

  “I really can’t miss this,” Caddie says. “I’m working on a story, and I need it to be—”

  “I can’t help you.” Sarah’s tone is disinterested.

  Sarah: a woman married to a man who won’t even let her introduce herself. Gravity already defines the shape of her cheek. Her thick lashes, which might have been glamorous, are camel-like. She would never do anything her husband might not like. This avenue is useless.

  “Well, then,” says Caddie, “
maybe I can help you with something?” Her gesture includes the whole kitchen. Sarah’s expression is startled, uncertain. “Better than sitting around.” Caddie offers a smile. “Surely you have something even a goy journalist can do?”

  Sarah studies her a moment. “I’m getting ready to make bread,” she says finally. “I’m always happy for an extra set of hands.”

  Bread-making. Oh, great. But Caddie follows Sarah into the oversized pantry, which is also a workroom. She dusts her hands with flour and begins kneading, tentative at first. Then she uses greater force. She punches the rubbery dough, throws it onto the table and pounds it. Her fisted right hand grows rhythmic, unyielding, furious. The dough will have to amend itself, not Caddie. The dough will have to give up.

  Caddie notices Sarah watching with the same curious expression Moshe had during their walk home from the bus. She eases off the kneading.

  “I heard about Lebanon,” Sarah says abruptly. “About what happened to you there.”

  It’s a sideswipe Caddie hadn’t expected. “How—?” Caddie breaks off.

  “Moshe.” Sarah looks down, avoiding Caddie’s eyes. “He says it must have made you more sympathetic to us.”

  So that’s what Moshe thinks, is it? That’s how she got permission to spend the night here. Still, being ambushed and almost killed didn’t boost her credentials quite enough, did it? Wasn’t good enough to get her into that damn meeting. And if she says, oh yes, now she can understand so much more clearly how the settlers feel, how attacked and beleaguered, will Sarah then tell her where the meeting is? Wasn’t she thinking, only a few hours ago, that she would do anything, say anything, to gain access, to get this story?

  Well, on second thought, that’s a hunk of meat she’s not going to chew.

  Caddie begins to ask questions, half-idly, like a tennis pro warming up: Where do the kids go to school? Where does Sarah do her shopping? How did she meet Moshe? Then she makes it a little lower and deep to the backhand. Was it hard to adjust to a constant undercurrent of tension? How are the children affected? Does she ever have moments of doubt, when she sees it from another viewpoint? Moshe would handle these questions smoothly, a simple lob with no real glimpse of what he thinks. Caddie waits for Sarah’s response, hoping she’ll dump one into the waiting net.

  “This place is as connected to me as my arm or leg,” Sarah says, her voice expanding to fill the small room, taking on a richer tenor for the first time in Caddie’s presence. “Four of my children were born in this home. No one will drive me out. I will fight if I have to. So will most of my neighbors.”

  Four children born here? Sarah’s son said they’d lived here only a year. Of course, the habit of sources to stretch the truth is one of the few facts of this beat. Caddie doesn’t bother to challenge her. After several minutes of silence, Sarah coughs and asks Caddie a few questions, all containing the word not. “Are you not married? Do you not want a family?” It isn’t disapproval she exudes exactly. More the sense that Caddie is an alien creature, beyond understanding.

  “Time to let them rise,” Sarah says at last, covering the loaves with damp rags. They move into the pristine kitchen and Sarah puts on water for tea.

  Caddie sits at the table. “I understand you’re not going to tell me,” she says, “but I know that you know where they’re holding this meeting.” Sarah, expressionless, brings the sugar over to the kitchen table. “I could tell by your eyes. You’re an awful liar.”

  A brief look of bemusement slides over Sarah’s face and, for a second, she looks younger. “That’s what my husband says, too.”

  “It’s not a bad thing, to be a lousy liar.”

  Sarah waves her hand as though to brush away the charge. “It implies naïveté.”

  “You’re not naïve. You can’t be, if you live out here.” Caddie runs her fingers through her hair. “This isn’t an easy life, but you meet it head-on. You’ve made a place for yourself.”

  “I love it here.”

  This settlement jammed in the midst of hostile territory is not a place Caddie could stomach for long. She is aware, though, of a tightening in her chest, a distant ache, a desire she doesn’t even want to name. Things seem simpler here, somehow. You get married, have a family, choose a side. All of it with conviction. All of it for life.

  One of Sarah’s daughters, about ten years old, comes into the kitchen and sits near her mother.

  “Isn’t there anything you miss from the States?” Caddie asks Sarah. “Something from childhood?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Okay, unimportant then.”

  Sarah gazes out the window, though it is now too dark to see anything. Then her eyes settle on her daughter’s face. “Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  “Food groups of our childhood. For me, it was beef jerky. Long sticks of it, from the corner store,” Caddie says.

  Sarah smooths her scarf with one hand. “When I was twelve, I wrote a poem about Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  Caddie clears her throat. “A poem?”

  “I remember, Ema,” the girl says. “You won a twenty-five-dollar savings bond.”

  “Pretty silly, really.” Sarah sounds as if she already regrets having said anything this revealing in front of a stranger, a foreigner.

  “No, no,” Caddie says. “It’s just—unexpected. You remember any of it?”

  Sarah grimaces, shakes her head.

  “I think I do.” The daughter giggles. “I remember the end.

  The powdered, the glazed, the jelly stick.

  Each could be my favorite.

  But dear Dunkin’ Donuts, best of all,

  Thanks for making that crème-filled ball.”

  Caddie chuckles, which seems permissible.

  Sarah laughs, too, then shakes her head. “No more talk of doughnuts.” Her voice holds finality but her face, Caddie notices, looks softer, her cheek and mouth muscles more relaxed. “Ruthie,” she says, stroking her daughter’s hair, “you get to bed.”

  The daughter kisses her mother, but lingers. The three of them are still at the table when Moshe comes in. He seems surprised to see Caddie sitting in the kitchen with his wife and daughter. He looks at Sarah carefully. Sarah rises, asks him how he is and begins to clean up the tea glasses. It is clear the women’s conversation is finished.

  “So?” Caddie asks Moshe.

  “We’ve decided on a letter to the prime minister.”

  “I’d hoped to attend any meetings.” She allows some irritation into her voice, but she can’t show him how pissed off she is or she’ll get nothing at all.

  “It was a closed session,” he says. “I can tell you about it, though. We talked, we formed a committee, we took a vote. We’ll write the letter tonight and then we’ll collect signatures.”

  “That’s all? A letter?”

  “The prime minister governs a coalition. The right sort of pressure from us could trigger a no-confidence vote. I think we’ll be heard.”

  It sounds as unconvincing as a spokesman’s sound bite. “I expected a more direct warning,” Caddie says.

  Moshe raises his eyebrows, ostentatious in his amusement. “You’ve been persuaded by some caricature of us as Orthodox Tarzans, swinging from trees, eager to claim an eye for an eye.” He tilts his head, a half-smile sweeping briefly over his face as though he enjoys that unlikely image of himself. Then he shakes his head and goes on, “Actually, we’re very reasonable. All we want is safe roads. Our Israeli military and political machine can accomplish that, if called upon.”

  There’s a soft knock at the door. Moshe opens it to a bespectacled man so thin he seems to drift within his clothes. “This is Joseph,” Moshe says. “We are drafting the letter together. You are welcome to stay with us, if you want to see us in action.” He chuckles.

  Joseph looks more like a Talmudic scholar than a social activist. The tzitzit of his prayer shawl hang below his shirt. He doesn’t meet her eyes, and she knows better than to offer him a hand to shake. When he speaks, she c
an barely hear him. He and Moshe talk about language, about words from the Torah that will best remind the prime minister of his responsibility to his people.

  It’s an intellectual exercise, nothing more. To believe this will change anything is delusional. But who isn’t, in this region, deluding himself about something? Still, she doesn’t want to see some sanitized version of justice. She wants to see getting even.

  Caddie listens for ten minutes, then excuses herself and goes to the bedroom she is sharing with two of the daughters. Lights are out, the girls asleep in one bed, leaving the other for her. She slips out of her jeans and into sweatpants. Despite the open window, it’s stuffy in the way of overcrowded places, too hot to lie beneath the covers.

  She stands for a moment over the girls, about four and six years old. How similar they look at this age. She wonders when their faces will begin to betray their differences. She’s seen it before, usually by adolescence—a way of pursing lips or folding arms, a certain shine in an eye. Subtle indicators that reveal to the attentive observer which child is defiant and which is innocent; who is quick and who slow-witted. Perhaps, even—though she’s never looked for this trait before—what sort of bravery a child has: the kind that would allow her to avenge a killing, or permit her to turn away.

  For the moment, though, these characteristics are submerged. The younger girl murmurs in her sleep and rolls closer to her sister, her face smooth. How secure they still feel, falling asleep each night to the same sounds within—quiet breathing in the crowded house, the sighing of the walls—and the same sounds without—the crackle of walkie-talkies as the armed and watchful settlers carry out their patrols.

  BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING is rushed and foggy—both Moshe and Sarah are up, although only Caddie will take the dawn bus into Jerusalem. Moshe hands her a copy of the letter he says will go to the prime minister. He worked until two, or so he claims, though he seems damned perky. Caddie’s legs ache and she longs for a strong, hot cup of coffee. She won’t allow herself to think of this visit as a waste. But she missed an opportunity, no denying that.