The Place Will Comfort You (18 page)

She drew a heart in the grit of the floor. She sifted out the larger particles and formed a small mound. She looked over the shapes cut in the walls. She observed the dust-dulled strands of her meal partner's hair. The hair was dull to begin with, an ugly blond, like terrier fur.

If only the lecture were audible here, no matter how stultifying. When she applied herself to listening, she found she could, with some effort, discern the words through the wall.

“The perdurability of human hair!” he said, as if he had been following her eye around the punishment room. “Provisionally, of course. Conditions allowing, climate permitting, stability, exceptional dryness. Naturally our thoughts turn to Masada.”

Masada? They were nowhere near Masada. Masada was last year. She put her finger to the floor again, then raised it to her mouth, discreetly, tasted not much of anything, or rather much of nothing, coatingly, chalk. At Masada the lecture had been as needlessly abstruse, as unending, but at least it had contained the grain of a better story. The men killed the women and the young, the men killed themselves. The Roman slavers found dead bodies. For the generations after there remained a girl's braid, in a glass display case, caked with a gray paste of desert dust. She saw it herself. Very dry hair. Time tore the braid from the head and time conserved it. That most definitely had been a better Trip. On Masada there had been other groups. She remembered seeking shelter with a Japanese tour. Their guide she hadn't understood at all, but the propulsive intonation
tilted her, and tilted her, till she was angled in among them, equally, and they had made room, respectful. Of her kinship to the braid. They had seen it: where her curls ended, hair unlike theirs. They could imagine her two thousand years needing shampoo.

She knew of their regard for suicide. She had followed every episode of
Shogun
on TV. In class of course they'd all been mad for Richard Chamberlain but Shulee liked the samurai. Squat though he was, but what ferocity compressed! And how she had triumphed in bending the eye to see the facial strangenesses as ornament. No one in class had believed that she could. On a woman, all right, they'd said, on the women it was like makeup, like adornment, for example take Chamberlain's love interest, a doll, a stunner, but the men? The men were not like men, too strange, fierce as beasts and fussy as girls with their silks and hairdos. Impossible that her feelings for the samurai were real. They said she was just trying to stand out. Untrue. His single-minded hatred for the leading man had won her heart. Then the hara-kiri episode had come and after that nobody scoffed, she was given space. The act had shaken foe and friend alike. What would the show be without the samurai? At break she had chalked an elegy to him upon the blackboard, just his name, over and over, Omi Omi Omi, with the proper honor suffixes:
san
and
of blessed memory.

But that was last year, a somewhat childish episode—sincere, but after all a character on television. This year she was committed to Marcus Bentov, the drummer from the rock group Neft, the bald one, a real personality. Everyone went for the pretty singer boy, but there was always so much more life behind the frontman.

When at last the time had come to leave the manufactory, Yona Rodelheim was roused and made to crawl out first, practically, the Dress Patterns teacher before her, the armed escort behind. All the way out, a murmured comforting, or goading, could be heard ahead.

•   •   •

A grate was slammed, the emptied crawlway swallowing the echo. From her seat Shulee could hear the Dress Patterns teacher urging a more efficient drift towards the vehicles. Through the broad windshield just ahead she saw green all around, swept by silvered ripples in the breeze. The driver peered at her through the rearview mirror, spitting a lump of gum into a coffee can electric-taped onto his dashboard. She saw the guide adjusting the strap of his gun and climbing onto the Clerical bus.

Finally every girl had boarded the two buses. The drivers started the engines, but did not yet pull out. Two teachers stood facing Shulee, who was sitting on their assigned front seat.

“Bouzaglo, Shulee.” This was the Art History teacher, her head turned so her left eye honed more sharply on her student.

“Present!”

The teacher closed her eyes, then opened them. The Dress Patterns teacher stood beside her, gazing off along the center aisle.

“What is wrong with your assigned place?” the Art History teacher said. “I see your partner is doing a fine job of saving it.”

“I want to sit with you,” Shulee said.

The teacher anchored her fists at her waist. Under the caked dirt, her jeans, a good fit and in vogue, confirmed the rumor sparked in school by something in this woman's bearing, in the composition of her clothes, in her unsaddened spinsterhood at very possibly already twenty-five, that outside teaching hours she wasn't observant. These jeans were well worn and an investment. They had a life outside of school, as did this woman, admirably lean, with flat, wide hip bones propped on widely spaced thighs. To school she always wore silver filaments in her earlobes and sleeveless dresses of Indian cotton with sleeved shirts underneath to comply with the code. Now her mouth was curving in a sealed, downturned smile, succumbing.

Shulee smiled back. Normally their relationship was troubled, the teacher too often distracted from the substance of Shulee's in-class observations, too hung up on their loudness and sweep. But
on the Trip there was a hope. Here academics were irrelevant except for having forged a preexisting, intradepartmental fealty, familial warmth. Shulee knew this woman and the woman knew her. This teacher would have heard her swearing in the tunnel, would have recognized the voice, and didn't care.

“The jeans on you are something, Teacher,” she said. “Where did you get them? You're a bomb. You look good normally but these show off your figure like we can't see as a matter of routine. That I should look so good when I'm your age, Amen.”

The Dress Patterns teacher took a deep breath, and blew it slowly out, mastering her envy. She would have to. Her colleague was everything she was not, lovely and dark, with black hair cropped close to a delicate skull, a Yemeni with deep brown skin, today splotched with gray. Clean her up, and she belonged on the chair of a sidewalk cafe in an artist's neighborhood in Tel Aviv, where she would sit engrossed in conversation, uninterested in people-watching, since she was the people to watch.

“All of our clothes on all of us right now are something,” she said. “We're all coated with deposits.”

Shulee enjoyed the sound of this. The teacher's throaty accent beautified a burnished university Hebrew. “Are they from Dizengoff Center?” Shulee said. “Billy Jean Modelle, right?”

“We're all tired,” the teacher said. “Not one of us had an easy time in there. I'm sure we'd all appreciate a measure of release right now but, Shulee, you must try to find yours via channels more constructive than this incessant unruliness.”

“Authentic,” Shulee said. “Not the knockoff. I can tell the knockoffs.”

She locked her eyes on those of her teacher's. Now the teacher knew. Shulee, also, was a contemporary woman in her private life, regularly shopping for pants, knowing the popular labels.

The teacher sought the pale face beside her, then attended back to her student. She squatted down. Her thighs even squashed in
this position remained thin and Shulee admired this like everything else. A near bus honked. She found the teacher's eyes peering at her level.

“I'll go sit with your friend,” the woman said. She rose and left Shulee's field of vision.

The bus gathered its strength, strained, growled and pulled away as the Dress Patterns teacher sank into the window seat. Shulee sat stiffly, looking forward. The teacher twisted in her place, probably reaching in a pocket, then put something in her mouth, probably a pill. She gulped water from a canteen, and swallowed.

The cord of a microphone whipped back and forth below the dashboard, Shulee following its movements. She had gotten what she wanted, a seat away from Yona. Why was she still unhappy? Your friend, the teacher had said. Two wounds dealt as one. Shulee was not Yona's friend! Yet her favorite person on this Trip thought so, and had seen in her the betrayer of a friend. Once again Shulee was stuck in the Reverent woman's grim company, and once again she had brought the punishment on herself. The sins were only building up with every hour. She meant so well.

By now she was nearly positive this teacher did not recognize her voice. As a final test, she cleared her throat with resonance. The woman did not snap her head, accusatory. She didn't recognize the voice. God above had chosen to deal with Shulee in addressing that especially bad case of swearing. If she had only sat with Yona, as a friend, she would have been entirely redeemed by now.

The microphone cord swayed back and forth with the leanings of the bus. The wire-covered head sparkled. Very soon the girls would be bidding again for turns to sing. She turned towards the window seat. The Dress Patterns teacher returned the scrutiny, then attended to the task she had been busy with, arranging a bundled shirt against the shuddering pane. She leaned her cheek against the shirt and closed her eyes. She emptied her lungs with a sigh. Her white neck was glossy with sweat, her hair visible only at the nape,
where it protruded in a tangle of dark wisps from under a traditional wife's kerchief. Soon her shoulders mellowed, slumping like butter in the sun. She reverted to a curious breathing pattern. The lips locked just prior to each exhalation, so each breath emerged with a soft pop.

Slowly, Shulee rose. She questioned the driver's eyes with hers. He shrugged. She extracted his microphone from its clamp.

She spun slowly to keep her balance, and blew into the mike. The Dress Patterns teacher stirred but didn't awaken. The steel mesh of the mike was cool and rough against the lips, and smelled like batteries dipped in mint. The instrument was narrow but weighty. She pursed her lips and sang:

“She loves the pain in him the pain of him she left me for his pain, ooh wahh! If she could see mine now.”

Two Textile girls in the neighboring front seat watched, scowling, incredulous. Of course they wouldn't know this song. This was like nothing witnessed on the bus so far. Not a ululating love song from a market stall cassette, not the latest winner from the Eurovision fest. Not sung-poems of high purpose, love of land and sacrificed youth. No, this was the nation's first homegrown hard rock, a new sound for the nineteen eighties. And on the drums! Her beloved. Her baldie Marcus Bentov at the drums!

He didn't sing, she had to simulate him as the verse repeated. She turned her gaze skyward, enraptured by a mounting strain. She saw the roof hatch cracked, showing a crescent of blue, but screwed her eyes shut at the view as Marcus always did, sticking the tongue out as far as it would go. She turned her face towards her fanship, nostrils flexing, but did not engage their eye. Hers opened only to the drums.

They were everywhere. They were diverse. Her Marcus was a traveler as he told the interviewer sent by Maariv for Teens. He didn't use the ethnic instruments as much as he would like but when he could he liked to augment the sound, when the hide could
be heard he liked to use it. She couldn't remember any of the names in his collection. She could only see them. Mosty, like her Marcus, she stuck to the modern ones, with a pounding of sticks. The solo grew more and more complex, the grimaces more wrenching. She wiped her brow.

She was almost at the point to give the crowd their first real glimpse of naked fury when her vision was interrupted. In the aisle before her stood the Art History teacher, looking on all this with high esteem. She was tapping her foot. She ran a palm over her elegant scalp but stopped the motion early to correct her balance. She watched the performer and nodded, and of course she would. She would appreciate a Marcus Bentov, an overlooked beauty, stumpy and cold-eyed, bulky and snarling, shorn so that the private details of his skull were common knowledge, young but imaginable as old and still as furious—a woman of sprawling aesthetic horizons would see why him. This was after all a teacher who could project onto a screen nothing but smears and dribbles and say, Now here we see before us an artistic milestone, very controversial in its time.

Light beamed through the cracked roof hatch, illuminating the aisle—not an aisle, the middle longitude of an enormous concert hall.

The teacher held out a slender brown hand and removed the microphone from Shulee's grip.

“You have gone over the acceptable time,” she said. She turned and called for a showing of interested hands. As she awaited the next singer, she shifted her feet in constant adjustment to the vehicle.

Shulee ducked deeper and deeper into the woods, glancing over her shoulder. When the time had come to sit to lunch there was no avoiding the girl any longer. And now Yona Rodelheim was at large, tramping over the loose red soil with their food, under the pines. Twice Shulee had heard the quiet voice call for her.

That was a long time ago. Now she was safe. Black pearls of goat droppings gleamed on the ground. No one but she would venture this far from the group. Only Shulee. When she returned she would be in spectacular trouble, a star, and she would also have eaten. For, looking out from the bus, over the teacher's sleeping head, she had seen a food stand on the side of the road. She stepped onto a gravelly shoulder and gazed across. An old Arab woman sat on a bucket, selling treats on a rough table of plywood propped on cinder blocks. No traffic was coming, and it seemed none would come for a long time.

There were pines on the other side, too, the same kind. Needle leaves hissed mildly all around. Needles had fallen on the woman's table. Some rested on the silver tops of unfamiliar soda cans. The branches behind the woman let through shards of man-made color, far-off Arab laundry hanging, and doors and shutter slats painted in Arab blue. The cans were brighter than any of this. The type
was
familiar, after all, though also unfamiliar. This was Pepsi, which you could not get in the country because it was not distributed in the markets, due to the Arab Nations Boycott, as her cousin Tomer would have explained whenever he explained it.