The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  Five silent men, faces like closed curtains. She knows only one—the driver, Avraham. Know—that’s too strong a word. She met him an hour ago at the entrance to the settlement. He nodded and smiled when she introduced herself. She couldn’t see his expression: the reflection from his wire-rimmed glasses hid his eyes, leaving only a thin nose, narrow lips, side curls. His bookworm build, wispy beard and soft-looking skin made him seem not much beyond boyhood. She was surprised when he said he was a father, and even more when he pulled pictures of “my children” from his wallet: five of them, all age four or under, no twins among them. Caddie was trying to figure the math when he explained: Palestinians killed his wife’s sister, pregnant at the time, in a drive-by shooting. She left behind two children. The husband fell apart, fled to the States and ensconced himself in a conservative yeshiva. So Avraham and his wife took the kids—what else, he asked Caddie rhetorically, could they do? They are raising the two to remember their dead mother, and every night they refer to her in their prayers. “I expected better than this,” Avraham admitted at one point, and it sounded like something he said often. “Better than this,” he repeated softly.

  He turned away, then, to shove four M-16s into the trunk of his Subaru, though it was easier to imagine him reading the Torah by candlelight than toting rifles. He cleared his throat and kicked at the ground. “What excuse did Adam give to his children for why he was expelled from Eden?” he asked.

  “You’re asking me a riddle?” she said.

  “He told them, ‘Your mother ate us out of the garden,’” Avraham answered with a smile. “My oldest loves that one.” And Caddie had laughed, not at the joke but at the incongruity of the moment and the pleased expression on Avraham’s face.

  She hasn’t told any of her colleagues she’s being allowed to go along on this nighttime mission. She knows they’d be stunned to hear she’d managed it, particularly now, with tensions high and getting higher. She still can’t figure how Goronsky worked it, how he even knows Avraham. Nor does she know what he told Avraham about her. Whatever it was, Avraham seems cautiously trusting. “Sasha speaks well of you,” he’d said. She had to search through her memory before she recalled that Sasha was the diminutive for Alexander. “And I trust Sasha, so his word is good for me. But the others . . . well, it’s best to stay quiet in the car. We can talk afterward, if you want.”

  After a dozen minutes another car pulls up. The driver—big, much taller and wider than Avraham—squeezes out. He wears a yarmulke, as do all the men in her car. His shirt is short-sleeved. The dark hair that coats his arms moves in the night air and makes Caddie think of the legs of a thousand overturned spiders. He grins at Avraham, then reaches across to grasp the hand of the man in the front passenger seat. He sees her in the back and glances at Avraham with a clear query in his eyes. Avraham apparently answers with an expression. The man shrugs with his eyebrows, then returns to his vehicle without speaking. The other car’s windows are fogged and impenetrable, so she cannot count how many people are inside. Avraham pulls back onto the road, followed by the second vehicle.

  She tightens her scarf around her head and rubs her right hand along the leg of her jeans. They drive for about eight minutes before reaching a small hillside village, maybe four dozen houses and a mosque. “The Village of the Condemned.” That’s what Avraham called it when she’d asked where they were going. He’d said it simply, without inflection, as though she would know what he was talking about, as though it would answer questions instead of raising them. The Village of the Condemned.

  A man’s voice comes again through the crackling of Avraham’s walkie-talkie and he turns off the car radio. He mumbles into the walkie-talkie, something Caddie can’t make out. They park in front of a home next to the mosque. A cat freezes in their headlights, then darts away. On a clothesline atop the flat roof, two small pairs of a young boy’s pants flap in the breeze. A flowering vine reaches over the top of the walled courtyard, which is covered with the graffiti of spray-painted political slogans, the letters as large as a toddler. An orange plastic ball rests in front, along with a child’s miniature dump truck carrying a load of dirt.

  Avraham pops the trunk. The men next to her swing out and move to the back to collect their M-16s. She knows M-16s. She knows them as weapons of revenge, not simply destruction. The bullets that come from them do not bore through bodies, but somersault. They leave desperate, ragged holes in torsos and limbs. Once she saw a Palestinian doctor kick a chair in fury at the damage a single slug had caused in the chest of an eight-year-old boy.

  She slides over to the door to follow the men from the car, but Avraham stops her. “Stay here.” The first spoken words since this trip began and she briefly considers ignoring them. But she still needs this man. She wants, in fact, to make a contact with him directly so she can use him again without Goronsky’s involvement.

  So she’ll do as he says. As long as she can keep an eye on the men through the car window, she’ll stay put.

  Nine of them move in a throng into the courtyard and toward the door of the house. Their steps are jerky; their arms swing oddly. Two glance quickly over their shoulders. One moves around the side of the house, disappearing into dark-green shadows. Another takes the butt of his rifle and raps it against the door. Caddie leans forward. She sees no life signs, no glow of light or shift of curtain. The settler bangs on the door more urgently. Still no response.

  But this does not appear to frustrate her group. In fact it is, it seems, not unexpected. After a few minutes they back up to the cars in what appears to be a coordinated movement, though there’s been no discussion. One yells in Arabic. “Your sons are dogs, the offspring of bitches and whores. Keep them lashed up, or we will.” Three settlers fire shots over the top of the house—rapid-fire, one boom eclipsing the other like a fire-works finale—as the rest surge back to the vehicles.

  The two men who’d been sitting next to her yank open the doors and shove in, panting, suddenly expanded, straining for space within the confines of the backseat. The shooters turn to come back, and Avraham starts up the engine.

  “Shall we do the mosque?” one of the men in the backseat asks, and his eagerness is audible.

  Avraham shakes his head. “Not this time.” As soon as everyone is in, he pulls away. But he does so deliberately and without rush, as though he has every right to be here and he wants to make that clear to anyone who might be peeking from behind a curtain. He keeps his window down, his elbow hanging lazily out. He’s going two, maybe three, miles an hour, followed by the other vehicle.

  “Who was the greatest financier in the Torah?” he says over his shoulder to Caddie in an offhand voice. She stares at him, wordless. He goes on, “Noah, because he was floating his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.” He laughs softly. Caddie manages a smile. No one else responds.

  Do they consider this foray successful? To Caddie’s eyes, it’s as though they’ve spent the day in preparations for a party that has now been canceled. The man to her right is urgently stroking his trigger with one finger. She shifts in her seat, hoping his safety is on. “That’s it? We leave now?” she asks, but no one answers.

  When they reach the village’s edge, Avraham’s walkie-talkie grumbles. He pulls to a halt near two parked cars, one sky-blue, the other white. Avraham and the man sitting next to him slide out, joined by two from the other settler vehicle. The small troupe advances. The parked cars are empty, as far as Caddie can see, but the men pace around hungrily, as if they were playing hide-and-seek and searching for someone within, or underneath, or behind.

  Then, without warning, Avraham draws back the butt of his rifle and thrusts it against the blue car’s windshield. It shatters with a sharp crack. Caddie flinches at the noise.

  She straightens to watch Avraham batter the windshield again. Tiny sections of glass hang, then fall. She sees in his eyes that he is alone—he and his gun and the car. His face is taut; his movements are unexpectedly fluid and fierce. His sc
rawny arms seem to have grown longer, more muscular. He wipes his upper lip on his sleeve. In two long strides, he moves on to the other car, the other windshield. This time, Caddie watches steadily as he shatters it.

  “No,” Caddie murmurs aloud.

  Another man pulls out a knife. He squats and slashes the tires. They deflate with such a loud whoosh that she can hear it through the closed car window, so fast that it seems like part of a slapstick comedy. In under a minute, shredded black rubber hangs limp.

  Yes. An involuntary thought.

  The other two men break side windows, reach in to yank open doors and then slice through the upholstery with long and furious swipes of their arms. There is no mistaking the hot frenzy in their faces.

  Yes. For the sake of Avraham’s dead sister-in-law. For her unborn baby.

  Both cars, heavily wounded now, list to one side. Upholstery stuffing bleeds out of them. Still, there is more to do. One man jerks a strand of wooden beads off a rearview mirror, hurls it to the ground and grinds it under his heel. Then he twists off the mirror itself.

  For the tears of Avraham’s wife.

  Another man grabs a paperback book from the backseat of the white car, rips it apart with his hands. His mouth is open, his teeth unexpectedly pink in the moonlight. He hurls the pages and picks up a rock, which he uses to shatter the headlights.

  For the two children who are already forgetting their mother’s face.

  Avraham rams the door of one car with the butt of his rifle. The man with the knife, his face lit by the headlights, kicks the side of the other vehicle, kicks it over and over, batters it uncontrollably with his booted foot. Shuddering blows that continue beyond the point of purpose.

  That, that is for Marcus.

  Her own right leg, she realizes, is trembling as if with exertion. Her hands are gripped, her nails digging into palms, her cheeks chilled. She breathes with such effort that the men sitting next to her surely have noticed. She glances to one side, then the other. They both stare straight ahead, unmoving, lips taut. She holds her breath and tries to still herself. To restore the distance.

  Out the rear window, she sees the village behind them, silent, lifeless, though surely the villagers hear the ruckus. Inside their homes, certainly, they are huddled against the darkness of this night. Now frightened by the fury, they will later plan their own vengeance, retribution carried out against Israelis who are unstained by this crime, exactly as the owners of these cars are innocent of the crime against Avraham and his sister-in-law, against Marcus and her.

  She sinks back as the havoc hushes. The four settlers abandon the vanquished cars. The one who was sitting in the front passenger seat pushes in, followed on the other side by Avraham, who leans into the back to speak to his companions. Avraham’s face is blotchy, blood stains his lower lip where he has bitten it, his shirt is wrinkled. “We’ll wipe them out,” he says in his soft, throaty voice, the same tone she’s sure he uses to recite evening prayers with the five children. “We’ll hunt them down and destroy them, little by little.”

  Little by little. My enemy is fled into the bush, Caddie thinks. For now, yours will have to do.

  BACK AT THE SETTLEMENT, all except Avraham collect their weapons and disperse quickly.

  Avraham looks at her as though his eyes are feet testing a bog for solid ground. That look of open tentativeness surprises her, and reminds her of her first boyfriend, the one from the cornfields. “You did good,” he says. “You stayed quiet. Now what will you do?” He kicks at the dirt, not angrily but casually, like a schoolboy. “Will you write about a bunch of insane settlers? A gang of Israeli cowboys?”

  “Of course not.”

  Still studying her, still cautious and appraising, he nods. “Good,” he says. “Sasha said you wouldn’t, but I didn’t know, for sure, if you could resist—if any reporter could. He said you understood. The way he tells it, you have a right to be angry, too. You’ve had your own trouble.”

  My own trouble. Goronsky knows about Lebanon then, somehow. Her stomach feels hollow. But she’d suspected as much, she reminds herself. Besides, she cannot consider it now. “That’s right,” she says.

  “So you know it’s not simple,” he says. “We have no common language with these terrorists except violence.”

  “I understand,” Caddie says.

  He clears his throat. “So. What are you going to do with what you saw?”

  “I’m not going to do anything with it,” she says steadily.

  Avraham’s eyes narrow. “Nothing?”

  “Not yet.”

  Avraham shifts his weight. “Why not?” he says after a moment.

  “I want to see more.”

  “More what?”

  She hunts for a neutral word to describe what she has seen. “More of these patrols.”

  “Why more?”

  “Seeing takes time,” she says.

  Avraham looks off into the night and his eyes grow vague. “I didn’t plan for this, you know,” he says. “Life takes unexpected turns. It disappoints. Then you either sink—or you act.”

  Caddie holds her pen over her notepad. “How can I get in touch with you?”

  “Revenge is ancient,” Avraham goes on, his tone insistent. “It defines the limits for the other side.”

  She drops her arms and raises her chin so he can see her face square-on. “I know, Avraham,” she says.

  Still he hesitates.

  “A phone number?” she asks again.

  He looks down at the car’s tire, kicks it once, but casually, his previous fury fully spent.

  He wants to be understood. They all want to be understood.

  He rattles off a number. She repeats it as she writes it down and thanks him one last time.

  SHE DRIVES HOME with the radio tuned to music—American-emigrant-turned-Israeli-rock-star Rami Kleinstein, whom she normally doesn’t like, but now she turns the volume way up and hums along, willing herself not to think about the night, the shattered cars, the silent village, the expression on Avraham’s face, her own quickened pulse.

  Mr. Gruizin is at the entrance to the building when she gets there a few minutes after midnight. He seems to be pacing. “Up howling at the moon, are you?” she asks with a smile.

  “You expecting anyone?” His voice is low, protective.

  Oh God, oh yes, she thinks. She didn’t want to hope that he’d be here, but she was hoping.

  “Someone is at your door.”

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I’m sure it’s fine. I think I had an appointment.”

  “At this hour?” Mr. Gruizin shakes his head. “Not likely.” He offers her his arm. “I’ll walk you up.”

  “Really, no need—”

  “I’ve seen this fellow hanging around before,” Mr. Gruizin goes on. “I don’t like his looks.” Then he actually seems to blush, though it’s hard to tell in the poorly lit hallway. He lowers his head. “What a thing to say. I’m sorry. In these times, though, we must be cautious.”

  “Kind of you, Mr. Gruizin. But you don’t—”

  He’s already taken her hand and settled it on his arm, covering it firmly with his own. He’s on a mission and not to be stopped now.

  “Hope you had a pleasant evening, my dear?” Mr. Gruizin says in a loud voice as they climb the steps. “Enjoyed yourself, did you?” He is talking simply to be heard and she doesn’t answer. They reach the landing that leads to her apartment, and there he is. He stands straight. His face looks pale in the dim light, his eyes are black obsidians.

  “Hello, Goronsky,” Caddie says. “Mr. Gruizin, this is Alexander Goronsky. He helped me on a story I was covering tonight.”

  “Oh yes? Well, but business can be discussed tomorrow. Surely you should rest now, my dear?”

  “Hello,” Goronsky says. He takes Caddie’s hand as though to hold it. She shakes hands with him, turning it into a formal gesture.

  Mr. Gruizin looks back and forth between them, chuckles and shakes his head. “For
give me. I’ve become a meddlesome worrier in my old age.” He pats her arm. “Good night, my dear.”

  Mr. Gruizin walks back down the stairs, his footsteps resounding in the night’s quiet. Caddie quickly opens her door and Goronsky follows her inside. “So? You were with them?”

  She doesn’t want talk. She has jumped from a high dive, is tumbling through air and needs something to break the fall. She begins to unbutton his shirt.

  “You saw how they work?” Goronsky asks.

  She touches his chin with her fingertips, kisses it, then peels his shirt back from his shoulders, inhaling him, but he is still talking.

  “What did you think? Avraham, he’s committed, yes?”

  She doesn’t understand what he’s getting at, and it’s difficult to concentrate on his words. She mainly notices his animated tone.

  He takes her arms, making her stop and look at him. “Avraham acts,” he says. “He doesn’t crumble. He responds.”

  She swallows and straightens. “You want to talk?” She rubs her forehead. “Avraham responds, yes. But is responding necessarily good?”

  “Always. As long as it is measured. You have to respond when you are hurt. Otherwise, you lose yourself. I saw it in my mother.” He studies her a moment. “And you. Did you find what you needed?”

  What you needed. A neutral question, one a reporter might ask a colleague about a story, but from Goronsky, it seems broader, more encompassing. She doesn’t normally talk about what she needs. For years, she’s told herself she doesn’t have the same requirements as other people.