The Distance Between Us (25 page)

“That’s always dangerous,” Caddie says. She picks up an old
Herald Trib
from the desk, spreads it on her lap, runs a finger blindly over the front-page headline.

Jon falls silent. He opens the desk drawer, pulls out small needle-nosed pliers and uses them to finish straightening the paper clip.

Shit. Did I do this to Marcus? Push him away when he wanted to open up?

Marcus, here in this office. It was a Wednesday, the day of
the regular foreign ministry briefing, four days before Beirut. That would make it, what? Six days before the ambush. Both of them leaning against the edge of the desk.

“I need out, Caddie.” That’s what he’d told her, his voice grave. “I truly—”

She’d cut him off. “I know, I know. You need breaks. One every three months—that’s your credo,” she said.

“But that’s not what I mean. This time—”

She waved her hands to stop him. “So fine, take off. Only Lebanon first. Please.”

He stood, ran a hand through his hair in clear frustration. “What’s the big deal?”

Caddie shrugged. “Sven e-mailed me. He and Rob are going. He wouldn’t say exactly what they had cooking, but he said it would be good.”

“Caddie. In the Middle East, there are a million good stories today, and another million waiting to happen tomorrow.” He hesitated. “Is it that you want me to stay?”

“It’s that I want you to go to Lebanon with me. Your work, Marcus, is unmatchable.”

He groaned and looked away. “My damned photographs.” But then he dropped it, putting on the light touch she needed. “All right. Anything for you, m’dear.”

Now she lets the newspaper fall to the floor. “Sorry, Jon. Thinking what?”

Jon tips his head in a way that makes him look even more boyish than usual. “My mom used to say if she imagined something bad, like her kids being kidnapped or hit by a car,
it wouldn’t happen. As though the thought itself was a vaccine against tragedy. Or at least that
particular
tragedy.” He focuses on a growing pile of bent and straightened paper clips while he talks. “Growing up, I made fun of her,” he says, braiding two paper clips together. “But I ended up just as superstitious. I had an idea, deep down, that if I could hang on to this
distance
, watching other people’s lives flipped inside out, I’d be immune. Like being a reporter kept me safe or something. Which is an insane idea, of course.” He lowers his paper clips to look directly at her. “Go to New York, Caddie,” he says.

“Jeez, Jon. They’d have to torture me to get me to talk as earnestly as you do.” Then she winces. She’s doing it again.

“What you, what Marcus—” Jon stumbles, and returns to working with the pliers. “It got me thinking. Trying to figure out why
I
do what I do—instead of, say, archaeology.”

She takes a deep breath. “And so, why?”

He hesitates, looking at a corner of the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he says at last.

She leans toward him across the desk. “For Christ’s sake,
I’ll
tell you why. Because we get a front-row seat to all this
passion
. We get to write about it, make it ours. Because the life-and-death drama of this story raises our adrenalin and clarifies our minds and keeps us so busy we
can’t
get bogged down in the bullshit minutiae of normal life—the mortgages, the Sunday barbecues, the PTA meetings. All that stuff is—goddamnit, face it—boring. What do you want, to spend the rest of your years as a
dead white male?
”

Then she stops, silenced by the phrase. Its coldness. Its literal meaning.

Jon, however, merely looks amused. “I don’t think you’d be bored in New York,” he says.

“We’re recording people at their most profound moments,” she says. “This is a critical conflict. Maybe
the
critical conflict. We’re trying to understand, and then explain. Isn’t that a noble goal?” She hesitates before going on. “And besides, maybe being here, reporting on it, is the best answer to the violence. To the deaths.” She leans back in her chair, suddenly weary, and wondering how much she believes of what she just said.

Jon seems to be concentrating on his paper clips. “Think of the people we know who’ve been at this a long time,” he says mildly. “They’re all single, or divorced, or with grown kids they see once every three years.”

“Your point?”

He smiles at her arch tone. “This is an unhealthy addiction. There’s only so much one can take before pulling out—or going nuts.”

“
If
it is an addiction,” she says, “it’s one that makes us more alive.”

“All addicts think that, don’t they?” Jon clears his throat, and she sees a blush creep up his neck. “I’m not trying to say anything about
you
, by the way,” he adds.

She looks at her hands. “Right-o.”

“Probably I’m burned out right now,” Jon says. “Temporarily.”

The silence, then, is self-conscious. After a moment he holds up the paper clips for her inspection. Amazingly, he has fashioned them into a tiny, intricately chorded bridge that arches as though over water.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I was a kid. I played with paper clips. It beat sitting around doing nothing but listen to my parents argue on Sunday afternoons.” He offers it to her.

She takes it, oddly touched and embarrassed at once. This confessional session hasn’t ended badly, but she still prefers the way interviews usually finish: a handshake and a thank-you. A hell of a lot less awkward.

“What brought you by, anyway?” Jon asks after a moment.

She rises. “Nothing in particular.” Enough confidences for one day; she doesn’t have the energy to mention Lebanon now. “Just getting air.”

W
ITH SPEED
, but aimlessly, Caddie walks the Jerusalem streets.

She shoots past the open-air cafés with their scent of
falafel
and
baba ghanouj
, the taxi drivers yelling greetings to one another out their open windows.

Past the dawdling tourists floating bewildered in a sea of fast-moving foot traffic, like leaves above a current.

Past a stand of money changers, an Armenian ceramic shop, a Steimatsky bookstore.

Why did I prevent him from speaking?

She finds herself on the edge of Mea She’arim. One of the
city’s extremes. She didn’t plan it, not consciously, but it suits her perfectly. She covers her hair with the scarf she always carries in her backpack and parks herself on the steps in front of the main square. It’s still lunchtime, so children are outside playing: girls with long braids, boys with their
peyot
. Women wearing wigs beneath their scarves and men in layers of black pass her quickly, most without a glance in her direction. The children, not quite so well trained yet, even in this strict ultra-Orthodox ghetto, peek at her sideways for several minutes before becoming bored, more interested in their own diversions. A group of kneeling girls plays
kugelach
. A half-dozen boys with a ball argue in Yiddish.

On the walls around Caddie, posters warn against television and mixed-gender swimming. The children don’t think to question the message—don’t, in fact, even notice these placards of admonition. They’re simply part of the daily landscape.
What comfort, when one is without doubts
. Every child must experience this phase, however briefly, though as far as Caddie can remember, she was always skeptical.

One girl disengages herself from the
kugelach
players and skips toward Caddie. “Hello,” she says in English. “You don’t remember me?”

Caddie studies her face, then recognizes something in her smile. “Of course,” she says. Not by name. But this is one of Moshe and Sarah’s daughters. The one who came into the kitchen and recited part of her mother’s doughnut poem. “How are you? What are you doing here?”

A darkness passes over the girl’s face so briefly Caddie almost
misses it, then she smiles again. “Visiting. Ema is here also. She will want to see you.”

“Oh, well,” Caddie begins. She doubts that is true. But before she can devise a way to object politely, the girl takes her hand and pulls her into a narrow alleyway. Here the houses are stacked and huddled together in tight rows. Frail balconies reaching from both sides of the street meet above their heads. The sound of male voices reading the Torah pours from a
yeshiva
.

The girl presses against a door on a ground floor, pushing it open with her shoulder. “Ema?” she calls.

“Here, Ruthie.” Sarah appears from an inner room followed by another woman. She is carrying a dish rag. She wears a blue-and-white loose dress that reaches to her ankles and, again, a brightly colored scarf. Her eyes widen.
“Shalom,”
she says.

“Look who I found,” says Ruthie proudly, and she pushes Caddie in the direction of her mother.

“A surprise,” Sarah says.

“I was taking a walk when your daughter spotted me and . . .” Caddie breaks off. “You’re visiting friends?”

Sarah nods. “Come in.” She is gracious, but Caddie hears the caution in her tone.

“I don’t want to intrude,” Caddie says. “I was only—”

“Ruthie, the
burekas
are almost ready,” Sarah says. “We eat in half an hour.” She turns toward Caddie. “But come in now. Please.”

“I can only stay a minute.”

The girl waves to her mother and heads out the door, back
to her game. The other woman slips away, too, deeper into the house, closing a door behind her.

Caddie and Sarah sit next to one another on a worn plaid couch. The living room, with small windows and a low ceiling, is cave-like, lit by a single lamp. It smells of sour milk and dust. Caddie hears the clatter of dishes being stacked in the kitchen. “A vacation?” she asks.

“Of sorts, I guess.” Sarah, straight-backed, spreads the dish-rag on her lap, folds it. “Until tomorrow.”

“Is Moshe with you, then?”

Sarah shakes her head. “He has work.”

Caddie looks at her questioningly, but says nothing.

Sarah’s chest moves as though she is silently sighing. “It’s the children.”

“They’re okay?”

“Samuel is doing poorly at school and the girls worked themselves into a fit of tears last week. Moshe and I agreed we needed to get them away for a few days.” She smoothes the rag on her lap. “We don’t allow television or radio, of course. But somehow they hear about every ambush, every explosion—”

“Hard to escape it,” Caddie says.

“I try to explain,” Sarah says. “It will be all right, once our leaders stop restraining the army. Right now, however, the Arabs are so bold against us.”

“So the settlers are taking steps of their own?” Caddie asks, probing lightly.

Sarah looks at her hands. “The Arabs were never alone in
Judea and Samaria, you know. Before us, it was the Jordanians, and before them, the British, and before them, the Turks. But we love this land more than all of them put together. And that makes them hate us.”

It’s all Caddie can do not to wave her hand, to wipe away fake generalities like this. “Don’t you ever think about moving?” she asks. “Taking your children somewhere where daily life would be easier?”

Without hesitation, Sarah shakes her head. “Two kinds of people find their way to this place. Those who leave, and those who stay.”

As simple as that. Caddie imagines Sarah pigeonholing people into two neat groups: those who
move
on versus those who
hang
on. She knows, now, on which side of that line Marcus fell. As for herself, that paragraph is still unwritten.

“You’re so sure about things, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I envy you that.” Caddie leans forward to pick up the only item sitting on the scuffed coffee table: a plain-looking periodical called
Consistency, a Journal of Ultra-Orthodox Thought
. “What would you do, though, if, despite all this certainty, you found that you
had
made a mistake?”

She is thinking of her and of Marcus, but as soon as the words are out of her mouth, she feels a flush spread on her cheeks. She flips through the periodical, trying to look casual. How crazy must she sound? To invent such a question, to ask it in her mind, is fine. But, dear God, not aloud, not aloud.

Sarah, though, acts as if her words were entirely natural.
“Teshuva,”
she says. “It means you recognize what you did wrong, you’re sincerely sorry for it and won’t do it anymore.”

“And that’s all it takes?” Caddie gives a small smile.

“Of course, you need to set things right if you can. But perhaps the restitution lies in changing yourself.”

Caddie closes the periodical, replaces it on the coffee table. Sarah’s advice seems, at once, too easy and too difficult.

“Well, I’d better go back and help with the cooking.” Sarah rises and Caddie follows her to the door. There, Sarah stops. “By the way,” she says, “I
have
made mistakes.”

Caddie hesitates. “Any you want to share?”

She is surprised that Sarah returns her smile, and even more surprised when she reaches to squeeze Caddie’s hand. “Maybe,” she says. “Next time.”

C
ADDIE BREWS A CUP OF CHAMOMILE TEA
, slips on an oversized sweatshirt, lights a candle and sets it on the windowsill in the living room. Then she pulls out Marcus’s journal and settles on the couch, leaning against the pillows, a blanket over her knees.

She rests the journal on her hands, battling her own reluctance to open it. She’s not angry with him anymore, not that. It’s that she knows when she’s finished, when she’s examined all the pictures and read all the words, it’ll be over. He’ll be dead. Again.

She moves her hands over the cover, opens it and looks at that first picture, the one of her among the men and the weapons. Then she lets the journal fall open to the final section.

The first photographs of this part show Palestinian men in a small West Bank facility for the insane. She remembers doing that story with him. Victims of fighting who’d gone nuts, many now chained to their beds. One thought he was Cleopatra’s husband. Another snapped at her like a mad dog. Young, most of them. Men who, after gazing with clear vision at the rest of their lives and realizing what they could expect, became irretrievably distant from this world. And who could blame them?