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Authors: Michael Lavigne

The Wanting

BOOK: The Wanting
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The Wanting

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Michael Lavigne

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Permissions Company, Inc.: Excerpt from “Requiem” from
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder. Copyright © 1989, 1992, 1997 by Judith Hemschemeyer. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Zephyr Press,
www.zephyrpress.org
.

University of California Press: Excerpt from “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” from
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. Translation copyright © 1996 by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lavigne, Michael.
The wanting / Michael Lavigne.
p.    cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8052-1257-0
1. Israelis—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
3. Suicide bombings—Israel—Fiction. 4. Life change events—Fiction.
5. Extremists—Fiction. 6. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS
3612.
A
94425
W
36 2012      813′.6—dc23      2012020642

www.Schocken.com
Drawings by Annie Blackman
Jacket photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images
Jacket design by Linda Huang

v3.1

For my Russian family, Nuka, Anyula, Sasha, Masha, Dasha, and Vitya Ortenberg and Olya, Seryogja, and Liza Ratchetnikov—for the love they showered upon me when I was a stranger in Moscow. And for my beloved Gayle, forever the source of home
.

Contents

God has pity on kindergarten children
.

He has less pity on school children
.

And on grownups he has no pity at all
.

—Yehudah Amichai

Like birds in flight

He sends them on their way

To what shore or branch

Or outstretched arm

I cannot say

Only that, once gone
,

They may never return

—Pierre Chernoff, “The Children,”
from
The Winter Notebook
,
discovered at the former
Gulag Kolyma, 2003

 

The Third Temple movement is dedicated to the creation of a new Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. “Finding a red heifer is one precondition to building the Temple. Another, it is generally assumed, is removing the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount.”

—From Gershom Gorenberg,
The End of Days

Chapter One

I
DON

T KNOW WHAT IT WAS
. It might have been a head, or perhaps a hand or foot, it went by so fast, but following it, as if pulling a wire, came the explosion, and instantaneously the window I was sitting beside shattered. I can remember distinctly the feeling of glass slicing my skin—it was remarkably painless. At the same time, I fell sideways off my chair and landed at the foot of the drafting table, which I suppose is what saved me, for the entire window, the window I loved, the window that gave my studio an enchanting hint of antiquity in this otherwise modern neighborhood and suffused the entire room with light all the seasons of the year, crashed down in a thunder of tinker-bells, but not upon me. The drafting table was my umbrella. When it was finally quiet—and it was a quiet I had never heard before, a quiet that was a chasm between the breath before and the breath after—I looked up and saw a huge spur of glass hanging over the edge of the table, teetering just above my face. In that second, I thought of two things. I thought of God, and I thought of
Kristallnacht
. Then everything was noise—I couldn’t tell what—screaming? sirens? cries for help?—and an incredible ringing in my ears that I thought might be angels crying, or laughing, or perhaps it was the ringing you hear when you are actually deaf.

Looking up at the overhang of glass, I almost thought I was standing behind a waterfall, and the thunder I was feeling was the water careening down the cliff face. But I understood this was an illusion. I was on the floor and a bomb had just gone off. And the object flying past my window? It probably had been the head of
the bomber, winking at me. But I was also aware that Amoz and Tsipa were speaking to me. Their desks were situated far from the window, all the way on the other side of the office, where I had put them. Now they were bending over me, breaking the curtain of water. I could see they were moving their mouths, but I could not hear them, so I smiled up at them and said shalom. But they did not seem to hear me either, and they did not smile back. And that is all I remember of that moment.

I woke up in the ambulance. The paramedic was ultra-orthodox, like the guys who come around afterward and pick up body parts. His name tag read
MOISHE
. He had a greenish piece of salami stuck between his teeth and a beard that would be hanging down to his navel except that it was stuffed in a paper bonnet. He was wearing a Day-Glo orange security vest, a black scull cap, and eyeglasses that had slipped down onto the tip of his nose. But he seemed to know what he was doing.

“Keep calm,” he said.

“Where am I?”

He looked out the back window. “On Yehudah Street.”

Literalness, I had learned, was often a consequence of studying Talmud. “I mean, what happened?”

He patted my hand. “You were in a terrorist attack. I’m guessing it’s Hamas, but it could be Fatah or Islamic Jihad. I don’t think it was Hezbollah. Yes, most likely Hamas.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “You get a feeling for these things.”

“Am I going to die?”

“It’s possible.” He felt my torso. “But highly unlikely. It looks like you have some superficial cuts.”

I tried getting a glimpse out the window.

“Don’t move! One move and you could push that piece of glass right into your brain. Then you definitely would die.”

“There’s glass sticking out of my head?”

“A very big piece. If it was a mirror, I could do my makeup in
it. And frankly I wouldn’t talk so much, there’s also glass jutting out of your cheek. You don’t want to cut your tongue off. But don’t worry. I’m here to save you. That’s my job.”

“You’re a religious man, right?”

“Of course.”

“What does God say about all this?”

“About what?”

“About bombs going off in cafés and architectural offices and innocent people having their heads blown off and me with so much glass in me I could pass for a Tiffany lamp?”

“Not a café. It was the bus stop at the corner under your building. But you knew that from the trajectory of the head I sent as a warning.”

“Yes, I saw it. I ducked.”

“You didn’t duck, you moved five centimeters to the left and raised your right arm ten centimeters from its position above your drafting table, which caused the flying glass to be deflected from your carotid artery and instead cut the nerve in your triceps brachii, which will cause you only minor annoyance for the rest of the year, instead of having killed you instantly.”

“What about the glass in my forehead and my cheek?”

“Incidental. It will give you scars of which you will be justly proud. It will possibly end in several highly successful sexual encounters, if you play your cards right.”

“So you saved my life?”

“I did.”

“But why?”

“But why?” he asked back.

“Yes, but why?”

“Hold on, I have to check your fluids.”

Being in the hands of someone so experienced seemed to calm me down, and I passed out again. When I next awoke I was still in the ambulance, but there was a beautiful Sephardic woman leaning over me, green eyes and coffee skin.

“Where’s the other guy?” I said.

“What other guy?”

I attempted to search the ambulance, but my neck was in a brace and I couldn’t move.

“It’s just me,” she said. “You’ll have to settle for me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You were in a terrorist attack,” she explained.

“How …?”

“I don’t know. A bus stop, I think.”

“But how did you get here?”

She took my hand. “We’re almost there.”

“Where’s that Moishe guy?”

“Stay calm.”

“But he knew what he was doing!”

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the hospital, and Anyusha was sitting next to the bed reading a comic book. “Hi, Pa
poo
la!” she said. She called me Dad using the Russian diminutive because I hated when she did that.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Duh,” she replied.

Anna, whom I call Anyusha—a name I made up one day, although sometimes I call her Anya, Anyula, Anechka, Anyuta, or Anka depending on my mood—was only thirteen at the time. She set her comic book on the chair and moved closer to me. She was staring at my face with what I thought was morbid curiosity.

“Is it bad?” I asked her.

“Well, it’s gross, but it’s not bad in medical terms. You have two black eyes and lots of little cuts all over, and then there is a big thing on your forehead where they gave you stitches and one long one going down this side of your face”—she traced a line on her cheek—“and your face is all bandaged except where the stitches are, well actually a lot of you is all bandaged—arms, legs—and your right ear is kind of messed up and also your right arm. That’s going to hurt most, they said. You have some glass in your other arm that they still have to pull out, and your hands are cut up, but
the doctor said you are really, really lucky, because nothing got in your eyes and no nerves in your face were severed.”

BOOK: The Wanting
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