The Distance Between Us

by Masha Hamilton

  Caddie takes both of Anya’s hands in hers again. “Can you tell me what you wanted to say about my friend?”

  “Your friend.” Anya’s face is growing ashen again, her expression frightened. She begins to breathe quickly, and points down the street toward the soldier. “Him,” she says. “Oh God, I am sorry. You will never see him alive again.”

  The soldier looks up as if he senses he is being spoken about. He smiles slightly, a little vainly, at the two women watching him.

  Anya groans, drops to her haunches. “Only the greedy man. Should desire to live. When all the world. Is at an end,” she says in a chant, her body rocking slightly.

  Caddie suddenly sees herself as if from afar, bent over this poor crazy woman, imploring her for answers. She reaches down and gently pulls Anya to her feet. “It’s okay. Never mind, it’s okay.”

  Anya blinks as if she’s suddenly stepped into sunlight. “Thank you.” Her smile is weak. She holds a finger to her lips, requesting silence. “Sir Thomas Browne,” she says. “‘We carry within us the wonders and love we seek without.’”

  Her color is coming back. Her voice is taking on a preacher’s ardency. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you. How often have I longed to collect your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks.” She shakes her head sorrowfully and makes a quarter-turn, melodramatically, as though on a stage, her arms held slightly apart from her body.

  The line between intuition and insanity is narrow, so narrow. Like the difference between a reporter’s best instincts and her blind arrogance. “’Bye, Anya.” Caddie speaks so softly that she thinks at first she is not heard.

  Anya waves slightly. “But you were not willing,” she says as she steps away. “And now your house is left desolate.”

  Ten

  “IT’S ME.”

  She leans against the wall, telephone pressed to her ear, weakened a little by the intimacy of this shorthand between them. Her desire is sharp and immediate, triggered only by hearing those words. But she reminds herself that she doesn’t actually know who the hell “me” is. A professor? Or a right-wing extremist?

  He gives up waiting through the phone’s dead air. “I need to see you. Okay?”

  God, she loves the way his voice sounds, how it mirrors her own neediness. She takes a deep breath.

  “Now?” he asks.

  “I was on my way out,” she says. I can stay in, she wants to say.

  “This afternoon, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come to your apartment?” he says.

  No. Because if he comes here, she’ll reach for him, she’ll fall into him, she’ll forget that she has to ask him something. She has to ask, straight out, about his association with Avraham. She has a vision that keeps intruding. Not one of him with her. One of him breaking a windshield. Him pointing a rifle.

  “I’ll meet you on Ammunition Hill,” she says.

  “A battlefield?”

  She laughs at his tone. “The weather is great. So is the view. No one’s there except the tourists, and they’re preoccupied by trenches.” She takes a deep breath. “Two o’clock,” she says, and hangs up.

  HE COMES BEARING CHEESE and crackers and sparkling water, his eyes soft and eager. Her stomach tightens when she sees him. Butterflies? She wishes they were butterflies; that would tickle. Instead, the sensation feels more like something chewing her insides out. She wishes now that they were alone, somewhere private.

  They walk past a bench and sit beneath a pine tree. He spreads out a handkerchief and places everything down precisely, as though it could determine his future. Caddie can’t stop herself from touching his hand. He looks up, his expression vulnerable.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I forgot the glasses.”

  “Glasses, on a picnic?”

  “Each picnic should have its own character,” he says.

  “Some require glasses?”

  “And others fine china. And others only black olives and bread.”

  She can’t prevent a smile. He is watching her, waiting. “So?” she says after a minute.

  “I want to clarify some matters.”

  “Sometimes you speak so formally,” Caddie says. “Is it only in English? Or in Russian, too?”

  “First, about Lebanon. I apologize for telling Avraham.”

  Caddie waves her hand, looks away.

  “I should have apologized from the start,” he says. “But morning is wiser than evening.”

  “It’s forgotten.”

  “I don’t want to forget. I want to know about it. From you.”

  She looks at him closely; she can tell he does want to know. But she shakes her head.

  Goronsky picks up a pine needle, uses it to prick his palm gently, then lets it fall. “I got angry the other night.”

  She glances away, pretends an interest in a guide loudly conducting a tour in German twenty feet away. The guide, flanked by about two dozen tourists, carries a canary-yellow flag.

  “It’s because my mother used to refuse to look at me, too,” Goronsky says. “My strongest childhood memory is of knowing I was invisible to her. Nonexistent.”

  But at least, Caddie considers saying, at least you knew why. As a child once, Caddie asked Grandma Jos why her mother didn’t live with them. Grandma Jos, grating hard chocolate for a pudding, stared into middle distance and grimaced as if the question pained her. “She doesn’t like staying,” she said after a moment. “That’s it. Now leave it alone.” Then she popped a sliver of bitter chocolate into Caddie’s mouth, ending the discussion forever.

  Caddie says nothing to Goronsky. Why does speaking seem more frightening than covering the clashes? She watches the guide point in broad, looping gestures as the tourists rotate their bodies to follow her motions.

  “Some days my mother became so depressed she couldn’t see anything,” Goronsky says after a moment. “She would forget to shop for bread or milk. We could have put our teeth on a shelf, we had so little to eat.” He leans forward and she finally looks at him directly. His face is composed, his eyes dark. He seems to be gauging her.

  “Then she had other days,” he says. “Remember the first time we went out together to that café? You told me about covering a tornado. When you described it, I knew that was the word I’d been looking for. My mother would become a tornado. Everything she touched, she would hurl. Shattered dishes, dented lampshades. Books with splintered spines.”

  Caddie wants him to slow down. She doesn’t want to miss any part of his story. The air rushing past the Jerusalem slopes has turned raw and she rubs her arms against the chill.

  “She talked to herself during it all,” Goronsky says. “I could never fully make out the words. Sometimes I would grab her waist, her arms. No more, no more, I would say. But I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t—”

  His tone, the expression in his eyes, make it impossible for Caddie to stop herself from reaching out to touch his cheek. He takes her hand, holds it.

  “It’s funny, but those were our best times in some ways.” His fingers entwine with hers. “Afterward, when she was spent, she would hold me. Cling to me, even. Sometimes tell me she was sorry.” He falls silent for a moment. “She smelled like damp tea leaves and cinnamon.”

  A few feet away, the guide is speaking in a somber, indistinguishable murmur. Describing, probably, the predawn battle here in 1967, a huge concrete bunker exploding into chunks small enough for a child to cradle in his hand. Hand-to-hand combat that took thirty-six lives by sunrise. Body parts tossed like salad. All that day, a thick smoke hung over this hill as if to hide something shameful.

  The tourists knot themselves around their guide. And Caddie, in a single flash, feels Marcus leaning into her. She senses the heat and weight of his body, hears the grinding noise as the Land Rover swerves sharply. “They popped up out of nowhere,” she says, almost against her will. “It was another interview, that’s all. We had no way of
knowing. No way.” She takes a breath, her eyes on the hills. “But I keep thinking I should have known. That, in fact, I did know, only I didn’t pay close enough attention. The day felt off from the very start. So what was I doing, letting myself be distracted?”

  As lost as she is in those moments, she’s still aware of Goronsky sliding closer. “By the time I was together enough to write,” she says, “it was already written. Old news. So I couldn’t even turn it into a story. You know, Marcus thought we should connect to the people in our stories, and I didn’t. And now I don’t know what’s right—what to close myself off to and what to let in. All I know is—” She takes a deep breath, catches herself. “I don’t think they should live if Marcus . . .”

  She tries to focus on a cumulus cloud overhead. Goronsky is stroking her right palm with his callused fingers now. She imagines him digging a hole in garden dirt with his hands, planting something.

  “How about if we go back?” he says after a minute.

  “Already?” It’s not the response she expected. She’s a little disappointed, but she doesn’t want to show it. “Okay, sure.” She pulls away, starts to get up.

  He puts a hand on her leg to stop her. “No, I don’t—I mean Lebanon.”

  Her chest tightens. “This again?” She keeps her voice light.

  “Don’t say no,” he says. “You have things to do there, Caddie. A balance to restore.”

  Balance. The same word she used with Rob. How is it that Goronsky so often sounds like her echo?

  “Just moving on is not a virtue when people we care about are destroyed,” he says. “Integrity requires something more.” He hesitates. “Let’s take a trip together. Don’t plan. See what happens. Sometimes the appetite comes during the meal.” He leans forward. “Besides,” he says slowly, “Ludmilla Federova, my supervisor, sent a fax. I have to finish here, Caddie. They want me back in Moscow. I’d like those last few days with you.”

  So there’s an end. Another one. “We’re still going with this professor fairy tale?” Caddie asks, more bitterly than she intended.

  “Let’s talk about Moscow later,” he says. “First Beirut. Four or five days. This is the time.”

  She knows so little about his Moscow life. Where he lives, where he goes for picnics, with whom. She turns away from him. The guide has finished her spiel and the German tourists are staring through their sunglasses down into the winding trenches with such intensity that Caddie would think, if she didn’t know better, that the ditches themselves held a vital secret. This is their few minutes to wander. But they aren’t wandering. They practically cling to one another, immobilized not by the awful history of bloody Ammunition Hill, but by their inability to truly imagine it. Not only is it a remote and odd tourist stop, but there aren’t any souvenirs, not even postcards. It’s just something that happened once, and that is over now.

  Goronsky clears his throat to reclaim her attention. “I could set up a meeting with Yaladi, if you want.”

  She is startled to hear him say that name aloud. “Yaladi? What’s he to do with you?”

  “He funds extremists.”

  “But why would he talk with you?”

  “I have links,” Goronsky says.

  Caddie remembers a particular photograph of Yaladi, widely published. She remembers his thin face and wide eyes, his apparent sincerity as he leaned forward into the camera. All things to all people, a good-looking man’s man. “Have you ever spoken to him?”

  Goronsky shakes his head. “I could find a way.”

  As strange as it sounds, almost presumptuous, she believes him.

  She remembers Yaladi quoted as saying at a rare news conference in Beirut that he “loved” journalists, that through them he stood the best chance of being understood. She never expected to be able to ask Yaladi directly how a journalist on the way to a prearranged interview with him could have ended up dead. She tries to imagine what his expression would be as he faced that question. She feels certain he knows who did it, if not why, and wonders if he would tell her. Maybe he would even help set up a hit—no, it would have to be someone else. But there are always seedy characters hanging around Beirut hotels. She could find the right person, even without help from Rob or Sven. A thousand bucks would be plenty to arrange a killing in that country.

  “You’re not going to die there,” Goronsky says abruptly.

  She hadn’t been thinking of that, but the conviction with which he speaks makes her sit back.

  “You’ll be fine,” he says. “Pushing, questioning, writing it all down—you’ll be doing it for a long time.”

  A rush of something close to rage shoots through her. “We all feel that way. We all see ourselves as going on, even as being crucial in a small way. We can’t imagine our little burning flame,” she says the words sarcastically, “being extinguished. And it’s only a comment on the weakness of our imaginations.” She stands. “Marcus felt invincible, too,” she says. “He felt invincible that very day. And he had plans. Lots of them.”

  Goronsky leans back against the tree. “When I was studying psychology, my classmates sat around dreaming of an intriguing psychotic patient who would, one day, walk into their offices and elevate their status. Like Luria’s famous S. All I wanted, for years, was to understand my mother’s mind.”

  “This is to do with Lebanon?” she asks.

  He looks out over the city. “The first thing I did when I got here was to go up along the coast. To where my parents were attacked. To smell the ocean, touch stones, walk the beach. See if I felt anything.” His face is composed. “I didn’t. A sense of waste, yes. But no greater understanding of my mother. No finality. Not even a rush of self-pity, though I expected that.”

  The wind is picking up. She leans closer to catch his words.

  “Afterward, though,” he says, “I did see what I had to do next. That’s why I’m suggesting it for you.”

  She wants to return to Lebanon, that’s a given. She wants to return even though this unspoken pact she’d imagined among her and Sven and Rob—to come up with a plan, to go together, to set things right—doesn’t exist.

  His hand on her arm feels unnaturally warm, almost hot. “I’ve got to get back to work,” she says.

  “Shall I book the flight to Lebanon, then? We’ll go through Cyprus?”

  She glances toward the tour guide, who is waving her flag and leading the group away. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” he says. Nodding. “Good.” He takes her shoulders, kisses her.

  Dizzy, she digs her heels into the ground for a moment. Then she turns and walks down from the old front line.

  SHABBAT AFTERNOON. Caddie slouches in an easy chair, bare feet propped on the windowsill to catch the breeze with her toes. Ya’el is on the couch, escaping her kids for a few moments. Despite her presence, the air is heavy with silence. The machinery of the apartment building buzzes as though to comfort. Two cars, maybe three, murmur on the street below, traveling far slower than the speed limit. Children speak at some distance, behind perhaps a half-dozen closed doors, their soft-hued tones holding a sense of gravity. This is the hush born of a holy day, a day meant for introspection.

  The relentless, horrid hush. The one she’s been avoiding.

  The quiet of Caddie’s childhood was a painful, enforced restriction. Now that she can choose, she shuns, out of conviction, all those stuffy places where No Noise is required: churches, libraries, lecture halls. She and days of mandatory silence are as compatible as a Jewish prayer shawl and a Palestinian keffiyeh.

  “I can hear my grandmother,” Caddie says. “She would warn me that it’s a sin to dislike God’s days for any reason—let alone because they’re too damn quiet. But I can’t help it.”

  “Not me. I’ll perform any ritual in the book for ten minutes’ peace. Now hush.” Ya’el closes her eyes.

  Caddie stands, circles the border of her living room. What does someone who’s trying to avoid thinking do with a day of compulsory in
trospection? If she found herself in a dark hallway, she wouldn’t waste time considering. She’d step forward and strike a match.

  “Caddie,” Ya’el says, eyes still closed. “Sit down. Please.”

  Caddie positions herself in the easy chair again. All right, then. Goronsky’s proposal: one issue she’s been avoiding.

  She could keep it as simple as a pilgrimage, this trip to Lebanon. A return to that place where the bush began to move, then morphed into a man, then fired a gun. She fears certain details may soon escape her: the sharp cerulean of the sky, the way the dust lay on her cheeks, how the birds cried out skittishly as Caddie and the others shot along that naked track in the Land Rover. In an effort to preserve at least the place, she could take a camera, a tape recorder, perhaps a baggie to fill with dirt. It’s sentimental, but no one would ever have to know. And maybe she’d have a chance to identify those bastards. Look them directly in the eyes.

  Even though she doesn’t know who’s responsible for killing Marcus, the “street” surely does. She can’t find a killer-for-hire online, and no colleague is going to come up with a recommendation. But she could find one herself. She’d make some calls, say she is working on a story. How much would it take? A thousand dollars would surely cover it. She’d have to ask for proof of a job done. She wouldn’t want a photograph—too graphic, too tangible. Maybe a small, vague article in a Beirut newspaper confirming the death? Then she’d have a single face-to-face meeting, shove the cash into waiting hands and leave. Leave Beirut for good. She wouldn’t tell Goronsky, but even if he guessed something, he’d soon vanish back to Moscow. That would be the end of it.

  She’d love to look that driver in the face again. That bastard. She remembers the heavy way he stared at her when she insisted he stop for the woman. There’s the off-chance, of course, that he wasn’t in on the ambush. Maybe she’d see only an impoverished, struggling Beruiti, a fundamentalist but still just a man, bumbling along, doing the best he can. It’s possible, she guesses.

  And if she saw the other, that’s where her thousand dollars would go. No regrets.