The Wanting (11 page)

“I don’t have that much money,” I finally said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he cried in his biggest voice, the voice he used at parties and with girls. He threw a big wad of bills and a lot of coins on the table. “Here,” he said. “When the waiter comes, order yourself whatever you want.”

“I already know what I want,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Ice cream!” I said.

“Good for you!” he laughed. “But if I were you I’d try the banana split. It’s their specialty. Everybody knows Matti’s banana split!”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“It’s the best ice cream in the world,” he said.

“Is that what
you
want?” I asked him.

He smiled and put down the menu. “Listen, Amir,” he said, “I have to go back to the Faisal Café for a few minutes, okay? I have some business there. You stay here and have whatever you want.” He bent his head close to mine, almost touching foreheads. “Enjoy yourself for once!”

“What business?” I demanded.

“Have as much ice cream as you want. Eat the whole store up.”

But there was a terrible lump in my throat. “I don’t want ice cream,” I heard myself say.

“Come on, Amir, don’t be that way.”

“I don’t want ice cream!” I repeated.

“Then have baklava. Whatever you want.”

“I don’t want anything! Why do you have to go?”

“Don’t be a pest, Amir. Just stay put and I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Fadi was already on his feet, patting my head the way he always
did when he was about to leave me. With his other hand he grabbed up some of the money because when you looked at it, anyone could see it was way too much.

“You’re too young for business,” I shouted at him.

“Have fun!” he cried, and even before he finished his sentence, he was out the door and gone.

I sat at the table by myself, insulted by all the happy faces around me. The din of silverware and coffee cups, laughter and conversation, and in the background Amr Diab singing about love.

I noticed my right leg fluttering up and down like a hummingbird’s wing and my fingers drumming on the table and the money just sitting there, abandoned and looking worthless, even though it was worth everything.

All of a sudden the waiter was standing beside me.

“What would you like?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“What would you like?”

I looked at the money on the table, at the door through which Fadi had just gone and through which I already knew he would not return, and at the waiter whose eyes were riddled with the disappointment of his life and the impatience of one whose every second was counted in shekels and agorot; and I jumped up from my seat, and all Fadi’s money went flying everywhere, and I said, “To hell with you all!” and ran from that place as from Satan’s mouth.

Some blocks away, I stopped. I fell against a wall, and all I could think of was what an idiot I was, how I had missed my chance to try, for once in my life, the famous Matti’s Ice Cream Palace banana split. And I thought about that thing, that banana split, whose taste I could not even imagine, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine it. Fadi’s shadow! Who cared about Fadi or his shadow! Not me! Not Amir! And if something burned in my eyes, believe me, they weren’t tears. And if something pounded in my chest, it was only because I’d been running too fast. I took a deep breath, and then another, and thought to myself, well, if
I just wait here a few more minutes, maybe Fadi will come back after all.

I cannot say how long I leaned upon that wall, or if, indeed, I am leaning there still, being the baby that Fadi knew I was. I only know that here, in the gateway to their Jewish Negev, where the Jew Roman Guttman seems to have fallen asleep in the front seat of his car with his motor running and the air-conditioning blasting, I am certain that what I felt that day, I also feel today: a wanting. A wanting for something I have never tasted, but without which life cannot be said to have been properly lived.

I
DO NOT BELIEVE
I
HAVE MENTIONED
the name of Anyusha’s mother, have I?

Somehow I had fallen asleep by the side of the road, and when I awoke I realized it had grown dark. I looked at my watch and cursed. Even if I could fly I wouldn’t get to Anyusha’s school before the awards were given out. I sighed the sigh of the father who is a total fuckup. Surely I was not always this way. Surely until this moment there had been nothing more important to me than my Anyusha. But I didn’t rush off. The Negev stars had burst forth from the wide sky like shimmering schools of minnows, and the deep silence of the desert wrapped itself around me.

I had been dreaming of my friend Marik, who lived somewhere in this part of Israel, and that led me naturally to thinking about Bracha, his wife, and the fact that she was his second wife, his religious wife, and this, of course, made me think about Irina, his Russian wife—really Russian, not Jewish. She was insufferably beautiful, tall, slender, hair the color of sunflowers, elegant features, and lovely, remarkably weightless breasts the size of Jaffa oranges; she never wore a bra, her nipples were always taut, and there was not a man alive who could keep his eyes off them. Her mind was as sharp as her nipples, ruthlessly witty even though she had read hardly anything. I fell in love with her from the first, when Marik brought her back from the Urals, already his wife. In most of the years we knew each other, she was blithely unaware I went to sleep each night thinking of her. In the meantime, Marik was fucking anything that moved. I once tried to tell her what he
was up to. She blew little rings of smoke toward the ceiling and spit in her palms. “What is it? Do you want to get in my pants?” she said. “Why else would you say such a thing?”

When Marik decided to emigrate, she refused to emigrate with him and refused to let their son, Alex, leave either. “If I knew anything about anything,” she said, “I’m sure I would want to leave this place. But I am an uncultured Russian peasant. Where else in the world could I live so happily in such ignorance?” As it happens, she never remarried.

But that night, stepping out of my car and standing under that ancient sky, I saw her once more as she was all those years ago. And then, naturally, my thoughts turned to Collette.

It was my last year at the Architectural Institute. On Fridays I always still met with my old crew, Fima, Lonya, Marik, Pavlik. I would walk down Zdanova to Dzerzhinsky Square and meet up with them at a little coffee bar not far from the famous toy store Children’s World, where we could look out upon the Lubyanka. It was October, and the weather had already turned bitter, early even for Moscow; the first, feathery snows had already spilled from our murky clouds, and the gray of winter had begun to settle in our souls. Steam obscured the windows of the little café and burst from the door each time it was opened. As always, I approached with my heart racing, in the hope Irina would be joining us. I knew I ought to hate myself for coveting my friend’s wife, but the fact is, I didn’t. If I’d had the chance, I would have stolen her.

I yanked the door open, felt the hot air rush over me pungent with coffee, cigarettes, and smoked fish—the specialty here was paper-thin slices of sturgeon on meager wafers of stale white bread; that, and tiny cups of coffee, which required many cubes of sugar to overcome the fact that they tasted like beets. Irina wasn’t there. Lonya, on the other hand, had brought someone with him. “My cousin,” he announced, “Chernova, Collette Petrovna. As kids we always knew her as Galya, but now she bravely employs her very foreign first name. Collette, this is my friend, Guttman, Roman Leopoldovich. He is in need of a good woman. You could be it. Look! He blushes! A good sign.”

“Please,” I said.

She smiled in a friendly enough way.

As usual someone said, “We should have gone to the Green Beast. The coffee’s better there.”

As usual, everyone agreed. Then the talk began about the weekend, and it was decided, also as usual, that we would drink. Collette melted effortlessly into our little group, as if by a sort of coffeehouse osmosis; we knew that she was a distant cousin of Lonya’s, and that they had only recently reconnected. Aside from that, no one asked her anything about herself; in return, she showed no interest in anyone. We passed around cigarettes, had a few more coffees, more sturgeon, another round of pastries—exactly as we always did. Later we went together to some party, I can’t even remember where—maybe at Volodya Menchkin’s—we ate from whomever’s table it was, we got drunk, the same as always. Fima passed out. Lonya wandered off with some girl. Marik headed home, or maybe decided to stop by Alla Friedman’s, which he often did—she was always glad to see him. I don’t know what happened to Pavlik.

It was about two in the morning. Most of the guests had gone home or fallen asleep on one of the couches or were curled up on the carpets in a heap. I had gotten into several raucous political discussions—the kind that only happened in the kitchen after several bottles of vodka—and I felt riled up, strangely excited. Naturally, someone produced a guitar at this point and began playing “Kalinka Kalinka,” and then someone else, Tolya Lucharsky, cursed at him, grabbed the guitar out of his hands, and started in with the chastushki:
My sweetheart has great sex appeal / Gives me a blow job every day / And by the way we are all outraged by the actions of General Pinochet
. And then there was:
Uncle Saveli had a trick / Broke three boards with one stroke of his dick / Just another confirmation / Of the growing might of the Soviet nation!
But soon no one could think of any more verses, and Tolya’s fingers were so benumbed by alcohol, the guitar kept falling to the floor. I wanted to escape before they decided to make breakfast and start all over again. That’s when I noticed Collette standing
on the balcony smoking a cigarette and spitting bits of tobacco onto her fingertips. The sound of the door surprised her, and she turned to face me, revealing a remarkably pale skin in the glow of the apartment lights, a skin so white and flawless it was almost like a geisha’s mask, troubling, erotic, necromantic. Against this skin, cascades of profoundly black hair glistened even in the dark of night, and beneath this sea of hair blazed bloodred lips. When she smiled, however, I saw that her teeth were slightly crooked and widely spaced, a sign of good luck. She brought her cigarette to her mouth and released a languid cloud of smoke. Once again she spit out the few shreds of tobacco that had clung to her teeth.

She was utterly unlike Irina. Where Irina was slender and tan with short blond hair, upturned nose, a sharp tongue, and a straightforward, rather hard intelligence, Collette was rounded, with a full bosom and voluptuous thighs, and when she spoke, as she did to me that night, it was more in circles than straight lines. Perhaps it was because she was so unlike Irina that I hadn’t really noticed her. I’d only gone out to talk because I couldn’t take another round of songs.

I tore my eyes from her and took in the view, which was nothing but the haggard apartment house across the street. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t mind it at all.”

“I guess it’s better than the music.”

“I don’t mind that, either.” She took a long, luxurious drag on her cigarette, let it drop from her fingers, crushed it under her high-heeled shoe, then bent down and picked it up.

“Here,” I said. I took the cigarette butt from her, slipped it into my jacket pocket.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested. “I’m bored.”

She grabbed her coat, put on a pair of leather gloves, a fuzzy pink scarf, a little woolen beret. We rode the elevator down and stepped out into the black Moscow night. All the apartment windows were dark except for our hosts’, and most of the lights in
the courtyard had long ago burned out, though here and there a putrid glow spilled from a lamppost onto the broken pavement. We made our way through the underpass and out onto the street.

“Let’s go down to Razina. I like to look at the churches,” she said. From where we were we could easily walk, and we strolled along like any couple, me with my hands in my pockets, she with her arms folded in front of her to ward off the cold. Across the way, a drunk was falling against a telephone pole; down the block, another lay collapsed in a doorway. There were almost no cars on the streets, of course, and the buses and trams had already been garaged for the night. Every so often a taxi would swing by, slow down, then move on, or a traffic cop in his Lada would speed by—sometimes these would slow down, too, but in the end, they just waved us along.

“So,” she said at some point, “you are the great Roman Guttman.”

“I have a reputation?”

“But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? No one wants to be anonymous.”

“In our country,” I said, “everyone wants to be anonymous.”

She laughed.

We walked down Chernyshevsky, and I pointed out some of the old houses—the Apraksin Palace, the Botkin House—and explained how they were constructed, some of their history.

“I know all this,” she said. “Talk about something else.”