The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  Sarah gives Caddie herbal tea and a pumpkin muffin for breakfast, then hands her another muffin and a banana for the bus ride home.

  “I look forward to seeing what you write,” Moshe says, his tone formal.

  Caddie doesn’t reveal that she won’t write anything yet. “I may call you with some questions. And I’d still like to sit in on one of your meetings. Get a firsthand view of your decision process.”

  Moshe acts as though she hasn’t spoken. He takes Sarah by the arm and they walk her to the door. “Shalom. Safe trip.” His voice rings out, falsely hearty.

  Caddie glances back once. They stand together, waving, as she heads toward the bus stop. A sham of a tableau. It disturbs her. She thinks about Goronsky, and about the danger of promises between couples. Deep and lasting is only a momentary trick of the light, she suspects—everything in her life so far would back that up. Maybe those who try to make vows end up with a lie—or monotony, and that’s just as bad. Living a consistent, predictable life is deadly, she knows from her teenage years. It would have killed her long before she met up with any ambusher in Lebanon.

  The bus grumbles to a stop. She settles into an empty seat, joining fewer than a dozen settlers headed into Jerusalem early. The hills that rise next to the road seem, this morning, timeless rather than terrifying. The tawny dawn desert is pristine, cheerful even. Enviably wiped clean of yesterday’s losses and sorrows.

  Six

  WHEN SHE ARRIVES HOME from Moshe’s, there he is, leaning against her apartment door. She opens her mouth to speak, but fine sand seems to coat her throat, making it impossible. She nods at him silently and he straightens. His eyes are nearly black this morning. His shoulders are wider and higher than she’d remembered. She feels him watch her as she shifts the mail into her left arm, unlocking the door. She knows she’s breathing too quickly. She’s aware of his eyes slipping from her hands to her face and back down. She notices, again, that salt-and-wind scent he seems to carry.

  She swallows audibly, embarrassingly. “Want to come in?”

  He clears his throat. “Would it be uncomfortable?”

  “Of course not.” She hopes it sounds casual. He nods and lowers his face so his eyes are washed out, but she catches the expression of satisfaction on his lips. She’s not sure she wants to please him. “I’ve got to get to the office. But I need coffee first.”

  Maybe it’s her abrupt tone that causes him to revert to formality. “My visit is too much trouble right now?” he repeats.

  “You can drink coffee, too. If you want.” She pushes open the door. “Or not.”

  He glances away, toward the building’s central stairs. “I thought—since you weren’t home last night—”

  Damned awkwardness. She works at making her voice lighthearted. “For God’s sake. Come in.”

  She steps aside and watches him enter. The first time Marcus came to her apartment, he switched on all the lights, walked around and studied her possessions from different angles, his head tilted slightly, his attention taut, as if he were preparing to take a still life. He kept silent. Sometimes he touched things, but so carefully as to leave them unmoved. Occasionally he paused to scan her face, and she had the sense that he was assessing her freshly based on what she owned, what she didn’t. The way he carried out his inspection, it became a sort of undressing.

  This is Goronsky’s second visit to her apartment, and neither time has he glanced at anything. It’s as though her physical surroundings are irrelevant, or else thoroughly known. His eyes stay on her.

  She takes a deep breath, giving him her back as she closes the door, and turns to find herself in his arms. She stiffens for a second, then wills her brain to be still, go blank. She wants—painfully wants—to let everything go and drown herself in the ocean in front of her, to sink into this man who won’t be shocked by the things she’s seen and touched, the things she can’t forget.

  Somewhere in the midst of their merging, he pauses and smooths her hair away from her face. “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” he says. Only then does she realize she was apologizing aloud; she doesn’t tell Goronsky the appeal for forgiveness was not intended for him. For Marcus, maybe, though she’s not even sure about that.

  She loses track of time and can’t say how much has passed before they roll away from one another. She only knows she must break this addiction before it gets dangerous, if she still can. “Now for that coffee,” she says.

  “I’ll help.”

  “No.” She pulls on her shirt, tugs on her jeans. “Stay.”

  She picks her mail up from the floor and takes it with her to the kitchen. She puts everything down except the most tempting piece: a package from London with the name of Marcus’s parents in the left-hand corner. She feels its weight and rests her hand on the manila wrapping for a moment before she puts on coffee. Glancing through the wide opening from the kitchen to the living room, she sees Goronsky, dressed now but with shirt unbuttoned, extended on her couch. He seems so at ease that it startles her. “Make yourself at home.”

  He smiles. “Thank you.”

  She has that sense, again, of being at a loss for small talk. “It’s percolating.” She gestures behind her. “I’m going to look at my mail.” Then she grimaces. Why does she feel the need to explain this to him?

  She positions herself at the kitchen table out of Goronsky’s view. Again she lingers over the package from Marcus’s parents. She’s never met them. Sven must have given them her address. Perhaps Sven told them about talking to her. Perhaps they are sending something intended to soothe, to dissuade her from any plans to return to Lebanon.

  “How do you want your coffee?” she calls, still staring at the cursive handwriting on the package. Goronsky doesn’t answer. “Hey, you there?” She returns to the living room. He’s asleep, but holding himself tightly in his slumber, like a soldier on a battlefield, full of distrust, ready to leap up at any minute. Marcus slept sprawled—as if he were an accident victim, she told him once. Every part of him exposed, unafraid.

  She should shake Goronsky awake, send him on his way, then go to the office. Instead, she sits in a chair across from him. She watches him, which is so much easier to do when his eyes are closed. The night he was here, she didn’t watch him sleep. She can’t even remember if they did sleep. If she dozed at all, it must have been blitz-like, consuming, a crossing over into a lost moment before slipping back into wakefulness.

  One arm is tucked close to his body. The other arcs over his head, the hand palm-down. She notices again his fingers, long and narrow like a pianist’s. The lines of his muscles beneath his shirt. His neck above his collar. She feels a flash of heat, low, and she looks away, concentrating on slowing her breathing.

  She turns back to watch his face, a merging of feminine and masculine, curved and chiseled. She doesn’t think she’ll be found out—he seems so thoroughly gone. She inches closer. Above his square chin, his lips are parted. They flutter as though beginning to form a word. His eyelids are like sun on icicles, translucent. His pupils dart beneath them.

  His hair is unnaturally soft, like a child’s. She recalls it brushing against her neck and puts her hand to her own collarbone. The stubble on his cheeks is stiff; that she remembers. It left a rash on her face. She considers stroking his cheek now, touching his lips.

  She drops her hands instead, squeezes the padded surface of her chair and waits for the impulse to pass. Then she leaves him and goes to the kitchen, to the waiting package from Marcus’s parents.

  The way it arrived, wrapped in brown paper, strikes her as funereal. But she caresses it as if it were a present. Then she can’t delay any more: she rips it open. Inside is a journal—one of the four or five Marcus kept, each with a different cover. She never looked in them. Sometimes when she spent the night at his place, she awoke to find him at the kitchen table, hair sticking up in funny places, photos fanned out on the table, glue and scissors and a pen at his side. He didn’t jump up or act embarrassed, just
closed the notebook and gathered his stuff, grinning all the while, talking about the predawn light or the universal language of morning garbage trucks. When she’d ask, “Whatchadoin?” running it all together to make it casual, he’d make some vague reply or change the subject. And she’d let it go. Because this was, after all, the kernel of their relationship. No crowding.

  Holding the journal in her hands now, Caddie’s stomach coils. The enormity of this violation of Marcus, her possessing his private journal, brings to mind other violations since he died. Violations of his memory and his work—the piece in Newsweek that felt so false, including the photo of him, when what he would have wanted was a photo by him. And violations of his limp body. Gripping the journal, Caddie sees the vision she’d buried almost the minute it occurred. Out there on that dirt road, after it happened, somebody pulled up in a pickup, somebody brave or stupid, she never found out which. Their driver, that pockmarked man with his squinty eyes, seized Marcus’s shoulders while Sven, his face half-averted, hauled Marcus’s feet, and together they lugged him to the back of that passing truck. Such a violation, the way they clutched his body, letting their hands fall anywhere they could get a grip, squeezing their fingers tight. That driver, especially, so close to Marcus’s face.

  It matters, even now, that the driver handled Marcus like an ungainly piece of furniture. Though it shouldn’t, since clearly that wasn’t Marcus anymore. This was the first time Caddie had ever experienced it in quite that way—someone with her the moment before, with her so intimately she could imagine licking the sweat from the pulse points on those perfect wrists of his, and then so gone, so not Marcus.

  She’d stood beside the Land Rover stiff, immobile. And Sven had come back and led her into the front seat—no, more like lifted her. That’s the last moment she remembers before the hospital in Cyprus.

  She missed Marcus’s burial. She missed the memorial service. If only she’d had the presence of mind to get the name of their driver, or even of the driver of the passing pickup truck. Or if she’d written down exactly where they were at the time of the ambush. That way, she could go back there again—alone, if she had to.

  Goronsky, she sees from the kitchen doorway, is still sleeping, so she returns to Marcus’s journal. She hesitates, then opens the note on top, a sheet of creamy paper folded in half.

  Dear Caddie, Thank you for your letter after our son’s death. My husband and I know your loss, too, is great. We thought you might like this. Please find us when you next come to London. Sincerely, Marilyn Lancour.

  She tries to picture Marcus’s mother wrapping this journal, this piece of her son, to send to a woman she’d never met. Marcus kept a photograph of his mother, but it’s a blur in Caddie’s memory. A smallish woman with blond hair, maybe. Or was it brown? She tends to forget the details of people’s framed family photos, which always look so similar.

  Surely his parents—his mother, at least—decided to give Caddie this journal for some reason. This one in particular. She goes to the sink to get water, then lifts the journal. It’s the size of a school binder and surprisingly soft, covered with rust-colored leather. She lowers her face to inhale, hoping for a scent of Marcus. There is none, of course. He had no scent, he always told her. Skeptical, she’d sniffed his shirts a couple times and, in fact, found nothing except the smells of the places he’d been. No matter how he ran and lifted and perspired, he remained remarkably without odor.

  Curiosity finally wins out over respect for the dead—as maybe it always does—and she opens to the first page. A photo of her, standing among five men holding Kalashnikov rifles. One appears to be leering; the others look serious. She is grinning jauntily at the camera. Underneath the photo, in Marcus’s scrawl: “Catherine. March 1998.”

  So this is one of his later journals, begun a little over two years ago. She’d nearly forgotten that quick trip into the southern zone of Lebanon. She can’t remember the story she’d been chasing, but she does recall the two of them stopping at a roadside stand, sharing a warm Sprite, leaning into one another and laughing over nothing: the dust that had settled in the hollow at the base of her neck, the tickle of the soda bubbles in her throat.

  She studies the photo again. Beneath the date, he had jotted something else: “It’s not war she’s wary of.”

  Sitting baldly on the page, those half-dozen words stop her breath. They look like an indictment. They remind her of the conversation she and Marcus had in the hotel bar the night before the ambush, when he told her she’d never settle for real life.

  But they’d agreed, she and Marcus. They’d agreed on keeping their relationship casual. On not wasting time talking about it, or even considering it too closely. And on keeping it hidden as much as possible from their colleagues. It had been a mutual call, she’s certain.

  Her hands, she notices, are shaking.

  She can’t do this now, not with anyone else in her apartment, and certainly not Goronsky, even a sleeping Goronsky.

  She rises quietly, goes to her bedroom and stuffs Marcus’s journal under her bed. Then she calls Jon to check in.

  “Hey,” Jon says. “Did you get my e-mail? I was hoping to hear from you. Did you pick up anything from your settlers on the trouble?”

  “What trouble?” She should have logged in, read the news.

  “Last night.”

  She draws in a breath. “Bus attack, that’s all I saw, but don’t mention it to the foreign desk, okay? No dead, no big deal. I’m going to use it in a feature, and I don’t want Mike coming down on me, handing out more rules about what I am and am not allowed to cover.” She pauses. “What are you talking about?”

  “A couple things. A house was torched in a Palestinian village near your buddy Moshe’s settlement. And just outside Jerusalem, a Palestinian woman and her daughter were gunned down in their home. They were from an old Jerusalem family whose sons are supposedly Fatah fighters, half of them in jail. Silwadi is the name, I think—something like that.”

  “Sounds familiar,” she says.

  “Anyway, in both cases the Pals are blaming your settlers.”

  “Stop calling them mine.”

  “The Israelis deny it,” Jon goes on. “Internal disputes between the Arabs, they say. Nothing to do with them. But I thought you might have heard something.”

  Her cheeks flush hot. “Shit, Jon.” She can’t believe Moshe’s group is behind the two deaths, but torching a home is another matter. She wonders if Moshe pulled a fast one.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m just doing a couple hundred words and I thought maybe.”

  “Let me make a couple calls,” she says in a rush. “I’ll get back to you.”

  She dials Moshe’s office, gets the machine. She won’t leave a message. He might not return her call, and he’ll be rehearsed if he does. She’d rather catch him off guard.

  As she hangs up, the doorbell rings. It’s Ya’el, purse slung over one arm, her expression determined. Caddie flushes. When she last saw Ya’el two days ago, Caddie was walking in from covering the clashes—distracted, soot on her pants, hair in disarray. Ya’el looked at her strangely but didn’t, thank the heavens, have time to talk.

  Now Ya’el gives her a hug. “I drove up for lunch break and saw your car. Come on up and eat with me, okay?” Then she sees Goronsky, who is sitting up, buttoning his shirt. “Sorry. Am I bothering you? Barging in, bad timing . . .”

  Goronsky offers an unembarrassed smile.

  “I met him on a story,” Caddie says, introducing him. She doesn’t try to explain what he is doing sleeping, disheveled, on her couch at midmorning. She doesn’t have an explanation for that. “My neighbor, Ya’el Givon,” she says to Goronsky, glancing at him briefly, then looking away.

  “Forgive me for falling asleep,” he says. He rises. Caddie watches him stretch his arms.

  “Yes, it’s pretty unusual to find someone snoozing on Caddie’s couch,” Ya’el says. “Sometimes I think Caddie doesn’t even sleep here. She’s al
ways running around, one story or another.” She laughs. “Where’s home?” she asks Goronsky.

  “Good question,” Goronsky says. Then he doesn’t say anything else, his gaze resting in some middle distance.

  Ya’el gives Caddie a raised-eyebrow glance. “So?” she prompts Goronsky after a moment.

  “I was born in Moscow.”

  “And what do you do?”

  Caddie wants to hear him say he’s a professor again. She wants to see if she believes it this time around.

  “Sorry for being nosy,” Ya’el goes on after a long moment, but it doesn’t sound like an apology.

  Goronsky rubs his forehead as though trying to soften the creases. “I’m a professor.” It still sounds like a lie.

  “Of what?” Ya’el asks.

  Goronsky studies Ya’el. Caddie wonders if Ya’el has the same sense she did the first time, of being absorbed by those eyes, but Ya’el’s face shows nothing.

  “Psychology,” Goronsky says.

  “Really? With which university?”

  “Moscow State University.”

  “Hmm. How long have you been here?”

  “Eight months,” Goronsky says. The answer is a surprise. They never talked about it, but Caddie had assumed, somehow, that he’d arrived more recently.

  “And you’re here because . . . ?” Ya’el asks.

  Goronsky’s cheek muscles are starting to look strained. Not everyone is accustomed to neighbors like Caddie’s, who consider everyone’s business their own.

  “Ya’el,” Caddie says, a warning in her voice, but Goronsky waves his hand.

  “I’m working on a study,” he says slowly, “for the Russian government.”

  “On psychology?”

  “On extremism.” He enunciates each syllable precisely.

  “Extremism.” Ya’el studies him a minute.

  “Yeah, and now—” Caddie begins, but Ya’el ignores her.

  “You go around psychoanalyzing the right-wingers?”