The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  Ibrahim Issa turns to Caddie with a hard and fabricated smile. “And you have heard her answer about talking to her cousin. I must ask you to let go of this request. The topic is at a close.”

  The silence then is awkward. Halima’s mother pours more tea for Ibrahim Issa and urges Caddie to put food on her plate. The baby must be sleeping in a back room.

  “Did Halima tell you what happened to her grandmother six months ago?” Ibrahim Issa asks after a few moments.

  Caddie shakes her head as Halima sinks into her seat, withdrawn but watching her uncle politely. Ibrahim Issa warms up slightly as he recounts how the grandmother got angry at some trespassing settlers, charged at them with a stick, fell ill the next day and died. “They killed her, as they did Nazir,” Ibrahim Issa says intently. He waves toward Caddie’s notebook, as though ordering her to write it all down. She jots a couple words and looks up in time to catch the disappointment in his eyes. If she were with a television cameraman, he wouldn’t pay attention to whether or not she was writing every word he said. He’d be buoyed by the belief that the camera was recording it all.

  “So what are you going to do about all this?” Caddie asks. “The harassment, the kidnappings?”

  “What can we do?” Ibrahim Issa responds, his face wide open, sky-like. He spreads his arms. “It is the Israelis who are so well armed, not us.”

  But she knows. Responses can be made. Bombs assembled, weapons gathered. Suicide bombers can be recruited, ambushes launched. Otherwise, the men lose face. She leans forward. “Revenge,” she says quietly. “Don’t you want to retaliate? Don’t your victims deserve it?”

  Halima rises and takes a step toward Caddie, but Caddie doesn’t glance her way. She doesn’t want to be restrained. She notices she is squeezing her own knees, and forces herself to loosen her grip. “You have meetings, don’t you?” she asks. “In the mosque? In one of your homes?”

  Ibrahim Issa lights another cigarette, his face rigid. “You speak, perhaps, of one of the factions. I’m with those who follow Arafat.”

  “I’m talking realities, not factions.” Caddie scoots even further forward on her seat. “You can’t let them keep getting away with it. Don’t you have to do something, if only to honor the memory of those killed?”

  Ibrahim Issa leans into his chair, away from her, and stares as though she were distasteful.

  “There’s a moral imperative, isn’t there,” Caddie says, “to respond when attacked?”

  Ibrahim Issa clears his throat. “Even if what you suppose is true,” he says deliberately, “tell me, what would you do with this information if you were to hold it in your hands? You would write it in the papers? It would find its way to the Israeli prime minister’s coffee table? Do you think that is something we would want?”

  Caddie feels her blood rush to her cheeks. She stares into her cup. All Halima sought was a simple interview. To tell her story and maybe help her cousin somehow. It had to be humiliating, turning to a foreigner, then finding the only interested one was American and female. No wonder she didn’t want the family’s men to know.

  Now that reporter has disgraced her. Caddie is acting like some naïve neophyte who is trying to find out the date and time of the next Palestinian strike against Israel, and who seems to actually expect to be told.

  Caddie places the cup carefully in its saucer. “Of course. I understand.”

  Halima sits back down and gives her a quick smile, vaguely sympathetic, but says nothing. Ibrahim Issa’s lips are sewn tight. Halima’s mother has retreated and Caddie hears the baby crying somewhere out of sight. It’s the only sound in the room.

  A swell of nausea rushes over Caddie. This is probably the clumsiest interview she’s ever conducted. After what she’s just done, it would take a stroke of enormous luck—no, more, a miracle—to give her the kind of access she’s looking for here.

  She searches for an inappropriate question to break her inner tension, but cannot even start to think of one. Instead, the question is for herself. What the hell were you thinking?

  She rises, signaling her readiness to leave, and feels their shared relief, palpable and alive. “Please forgive my bluntness,” she says, addressing Halima. “I want to thank you for your time.”

  “But will you write about it?” Halima asks. “About what happened to my cousin?”

  “I will. It’ll be a few more weeks. But I’ll mail you a copy, or drop one by sometime.”

  “Mail is fine.” Halima trails Caddie to the door. Ibrahim Issa remains sitting. “My uncles tell me to forget it, leave it alone,” Halima says out of earshot of Ibrahim Issa. “Live your life, they say. Go to school, help your mother with the baby and wait for better times. Better times.” Her tight expression is half-smile, half-grimace. “Well, maybe they are right. Maybe that’s all someone like me can do.”

  “It’s not,” Caddie says. “It’s not all you can do. It’s wrong to simply let things happen. If you do nothing, it’s like killing your cousin’s friend all over again.”

  Halima is silent for a moment. She looks at Caddie sadly. Then she extends her hand. “I am sorry,” she says. “Ma’a salama.” Go without fear.

  Outside, the dirt track is empty. The boys have abandoned their martyr game and moved on to some other amusement. Caddie’s legs are rubbery, her arms overcooked spaghetti. It takes an act of will to get into the car, pull out her key and put it in the ignition.

  She’s done here. She might as well call to find out where they are clashing. She cups her cell phone in her left hand and takes a deep breath.

  Then, without conscious thought, she presses down the number three button, the one with the letters “d-e-f” on it. The button she programmed, long ago, to dial Marcus’s cell phone number automatically.

  She assumes it will be disconnected. But she hangs on while it dials and rings. After the fourth ring, she hears his voice: “Marcus Lancour,” and then the beep to allow her to leave a message. She hangs up, then dials it again, and listens to him say his name once more. This time she leaves a message. “Marcus,” she says. She can’t imagine what else to say. Or, more accurately, everything she would say sounds ridiculous even as it runs through her mind. “Marcus,” she repeats. Then she hangs up.

  WHEN THE PHONE RINGS that evening, for a split second Caddie imagines—lets herself imagine—it’s Marcus returning her call. She invents his banter: “You missed three incredible stories today, kiddo. I don’t know why that paper keeps you. Luckily, you have me. I’ll be over in ten minutes to fill you in on the day’s disasters.”

  She takes a deep breath before she answers. It’s Mike, her foreign editor.

  “Glad I caught you at home. How you doing, Caddie?”

  “Fine, Mike. I’ve told you that by e-mail about a dozen times.”

  He laughs. “Listen. It’s been two weeks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Though she does.

  “New York.”

  “Oh.” She shakes her head, and even though he can’t see her, he catches her tone.

  “Hear me out,” he says. “It’s mainly reporting, only a little desk work.”

  “I’m still not—” she begins, but he cuts her off.

  “You’d travel abroad and in the States. Features and breaking news. We’d use your experience. There’s a pay raise, not enormous but something. And a title. Special correspondent.”

  “Special firefighter, you mean. Parachuting into places I know squat about and writing shallow pieces. Thanks very much, but—”

  “I’m not,” Mike interrupts, “going to let you dismiss this out of hand. This is a terrific career move. Think about it. Think hard. Then call me with the right answer.”

  “I can tell you now. I don’t want the job.” She takes a deep breath. “Not right now, at least.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Caddie. Next time we talk, if you don’t have ten good reasons why not, or no
t yet, you are taking this job.”

  “Mike—” But the line cuts off before she can say more.

  He wouldn’t let her speak. There’s good reason Number One.

  Of course, if she can’t handle interviews any better than she did today, she’s of no use here, and she might as well go to New York. Half the time that she’s in the field, she’s caught up in the futile act of taking mental photographs for Marcus. And maybe she wouldn’t hear his voice so often if she were in a new place.

  She goes to her bedroom, stands in front of the bed a minute, then reaches down and pulls out Marcus’s journal. Balancing it in her hands, she’s overcome again by that mixture of desire and aversion. For three days, she has restrained herself from looking at his pictures or reading his words. It’s getting more difficult.

  If she looks at it, she’s decided, it will be section by section, exactly as he put it together. She will follow the unwritten rules that came—implicitly—with the journal. And this is Rule Number One: Take it in order, page by page.

  Rule Number Two: Look at it only when alone, and don’t talk to anyone about what you find there. This is between you and Marcus.

  And Rule Number Three: No rushing, no skimming. Study each picture long enough to understand what he’d been thinking, to see the path of his mind.

  She settles herself in bed, leaning against the pillows with the journal on her lap, a muggy breeze blown in by the Jerusalem night. She takes a deep breath and turns to the second page.

  The colors strike her straight away. Marcus clipped and pasted from photographs to create a mosaic that spells out three large letters: RED. The letters are black, white or red only. The different shades and shapes of red, though, surprise her: daring red, injured red, innocent red, in drops and splatters and waves.

  At first the effect is merely interesting, but the more Caddie looks at each letter, the more awed she is by what he did. The pieces of photographs are cut largely from scenes of attacks and fighting that he’d covered. She recognizes a number of them—she’d been there, too. A leg blown off in a bus stop bombing. A pregnant woman, wounded and hemorrhaging from her distended belly. A little boy holding his sliced-open cheek with spread fingers in a desperate effort to keep blood and flesh in place.

  The only exceptions to the violence-linked scenes are the faces of leaders. Marcus apparently took those during one speech or another. In each tiny black-and-white headshot, their mouths are contorted, caught in midexclamation. These are the very shots that would be rejected by mainstream newspapers and magazines for unfairly making a head-of-state look ridiculous, but Marcus found a use for them. He selected and cut and positioned each photo next to its neighbors. So carefully, in fact, that it almost seems predestined, as perfect and unlikely as the pyramids. She closes her eyes and imagines him composing this collage. She can picture his concentration, the hair falling over his forehead. That habit he had of lightly biting his bottom lip. She can almost hear his music in the background, Coltrane or Elvis Costello.

  That page is followed by six others covered with photographs enlarged far too much for professional use, blown up like hyperbole, a storm of graininess. Real scenes made unreal. Those shots are from the worst of it. A woman lying dead on her side, a watermelon cradled in her arms. A girl in school uniform slumped against a brick wall, head tilted, mouth ajar and an open book on her lap, as though she were sleeping in class instead of slain in crossfire. A boy, five, shot through his right eye. The Red Crescent worker who’d been trying to reach that boy when he took a bullet himself, photographed sprawled on his back beneath the front wheel of his ambulance, so recently dead he still looks surprised.

  Most of these events, Caddie remembers witnessing. But on second glance she realizes these aren’t the same snaps he’d published to such acclaim on front pages or magazine covers. Each photo has a journalist in the frame—a fellow photographer or reporter from print, radio, TV. And that’s what he chose to bring into sharp focus: the faces of journalists. How had he managed, during the crunch of a breaking story, to remember to take these shots too, these shots that had to be for personal use only?

  Pete is in one shot, clearly evaluating the scene, his fingers on his right hand making indents in his cheek, his eyes taut. Marcus captured the Pete she knows, always watching, always analyzing. Another photo shows Sandra, the one who’d ended up dead in Sierra Leone, crouched as though to protect herself, one hand holding the camera to her eye, the other held out like a traffic cop stopping an oncoming vehicle. Her body is shadowed by the neighboring building as though she is half-in, half-out of this world. Eerily prescient.

  No one shows fear, Caddie notices. A couple of the journalists even appear blasé, as if they were strolling down the Champs Elysees. Caddie had never paid attention to any of this in the field, never thought to turn her eye on us instead of them.

  She is the subject in two of the shots. In one, her eyes are slightly closed—perhaps in reaction to the sound of a gunshot or an explosion? She can only guess.

  In the other, a boy lies on the street in front of her, wounded or dead, out of focus. Herself, she barely recognizes. Her hair is pulled back, her stance erect. What interests her most is her expression—determined and defiant, yet tinged with exhilaration. There seems to be, in her face, an actual hunger for moments of violence. Had Marcus seen that in her? Is it what she’d really felt? She rubs her forehead, wishing she could remember with clarity.

  “You’re Victorian,” Marcus had told her once.

  They’d been lying together on the rumpled sheets of her bed. It was late at night; they’d covered a difficult story that day, five dead. She doesn’t remember the details of the sex they’d shared but she remembers that they hadn’t talked at all, not about work, not about anything. Those were the first words she remembered him saying to her that day. And she’d found them insulting, and rolled away.

  “Not about sex,” he’d said, reaching to trace her shoulder bone with one finger. “Not that. But about the rest of it. You’re buttoned-up and voyeuristic at the same time, like the Victorians were.”

  She’d gotten up, gone into the bathroom. She’d stayed there for half an hour, until he’d fallen asleep. She didn’t know how to explain to him, she didn’t want to try to explain, if he didn’t know himself. Voyeurism, as he called it—focusing on getting in close, nabbing the quote, catching the color—was a way to dehumanize death. To keep it nameless and remote and rob it of its power. And that was necessary if she was going to be able to cover it. If she was going to be able to live through it.

  After the photographs is a yellow page that seems intended to serve only as a divider marking the end of a section. On it is a bit of writing in Marcus’s hand:

  We used to be as one. Now I’m odd man out. I’ve stolen a piece of these lives, these deaths. Someday I’ll pay them back for the theft.

  That first part is more cryptic than the photos by far. What could he have meant? Marcus was at the center of any gathering he joined. Charming, funny. Everybody liked him.

  The idea of stolen lives has a more familiar ring. He’d mentioned it once or twice. A late night two months ago, for instance. They’d been in Syndrome, a Jerusalem jazz-and-blues bar. Earlier in the day they’d covered a house demolition with all that jarring pathos. A Palestinian family clung to one another outside, the teenaged son accused of being a “terrorist” the one absent relative. The family watched a roaring bulldozer slam into their home. Then it climbed over the rubble to swipe its shovel at a lemon tree in what had, only moments before, been their backyard. Two birds flew from the branches a second before the shovel hit, uprooting the plant. Marcus managed to get it all in one terrific shot—escaping birds, weeping family, bulldozer, tree. A front-pager for sure. Maybe even a magazine cover.

  They’d been with a group of colleagues that night, but now it was only the two of them, and his earlier excitement over the day’s photograph had vanished. He began to talk in a quiet voice, his words like isl
ands surrounded by silences. He said he’d spent years making his reputation and money off anguish or death and then escaping it whenever he wanted. The people whose images he’d greedily taken were always left behind. He felt he owed them.

  For a rant, it was brief. But she was more accustomed to laughter than darkness from him—more comfortable with it, too. She had no easy response. “Your pictures make a difference,” she said at last. It took too long to say it, though, and sounded lame, even to her. He studied her. “Shall we have another drink or head home?” she asked, searching for a way to break the tension.

  Then, abruptly, he did it for her. He cracked a joke, something about how when he won the Pulitzer, he would demand that they engrave on a plaque the names of everyone he’d ever photographed, dead or alive. She laughed, relieved. She’s not sure, now, whether or not he laughed too.

  She wishes she could return to that moment, argue further. She’d be more articulate second time around. Yes, she’d tell Marcus, photographers and reporters do suck up images and details at the worst moments in people’s lives, becoming briefly as intimate as lovers before vanishing. But it’s not immoral. Recording people in moments of anguish, documenting it and then moving on, serves a purpose. It yanks the privileged from their complacency, sometimes. And sometimes, someone comes to help. At the very least, the horrors don’t go altogether unnoticed.

  She can think of only one way to get what she needs. It’s for Marcus, she tells herself. For Marcus as much as for her. She reaches for the telephone, cradles it in her hands for a second, then dials Goronsky’s number.

  Eight

  DOWNPOUR ALL DAY that ended only at sunset, leaving the heavens washed clean. Now the clouds have drained from the sky, and a full moon helps her track the car’s direction: east, then south, then east again. The radio is on low, a woman’s voice singing. They pull off the main road, still the engine, quench the lights. Three of the men are smoking; a pack of Marlboros sits on the dashboard, and the car upholstery stinks of stale tobacco. The man on her right pushes the button to roll down his window. The first burst of moist air refreshes, but it quickly turns heavy like a hand over her mouth. The walkie-talkie in the front hisses, and out of it issues a male voice, command-like words indistinguishable to Caddie. She wants to ask why they are waiting, when they will go again. But when she clears her throat, the men on either side of her grow rigid. Words will not be welcome, evidently. Questions are not permitted. Observation only.