The Wanting (16 page)

He studied me for a moment and seemed to make up his mind. “Okay, I’ll take a look.” He motioned me to open the hood and start the engine. He listened for a minute, stuck his head into the engine compartment, then motioned me to shut it off.

“What happened to you?” he said, pointing at my face.

I didn’t answer him, and he didn’t press me.

“Your timing is off, and you need new plugs. I’ll change the oil and filter, take a look at the brakes, transmission fluid. Anything else?”

“No, that’s good.”

“It will cost you a hundred twenty, plus parts.”

“Okay.”

“It will take an hour or so. You don’t have a ride, so you can wait here or take a walk, I guess.”

I glanced up the road and saw that the boys had vanished. “I’ll be safe walking around?”

“Who’s safe in this world?” he answered. “George!” he called. “Bring the clipboard.”

The big man lumbered out with the clipboard, and Abdul-Latif filled in the estimate and had me write down my name and phone number.

“Mr. Guttman,” he said, more to himself than to me. I handed him the keys, and he said, “Come back in an hour. It will all be done.”

•    •    •

I immediately regretted writing down my real name but was happy to escape, because I suddenly had no idea why I had come to Beit Ibrahim. Why hadn’t I just said who I was and what I wanted? Now that I had created this charade, how could I extricate myself? I would never be able to confront the parents of Amir Hamid, not with any dignity, anyway. I began walking back up the hill toward the center of town but then turned around and walked toward the edge of the village, where the houses petered out among some hardscrabble hills dotted with a few twisted olive trees and acacias. The earth there was covered in dry sheep pellets, and I supposed that in winter there must have been a bit of grass there. On the next hill I could see the ruins of an old Arab building surrounded by a largely fallen stone wall and, beyond that, past the Jewish villages of Nokdim and Teko’a, a cruel, rocky desert descended to the Dead Sea. I walked along the goat path toward the ruins, suffering a little under the hot wind that came up from Jordan. I descended into a gully, wandered through a dry little wadi, and then began my ascent. But as I rounded a little outcropping of rock, I realized I had made a mistake. I was nowhere near that old building. And then six or seven boys jumped out and surrounded me.

One of them stepped forward and said something in Arabic. I said to him in Hebrew that I didn’t understand. He said something else in Arabic, and by his tone it was clear he meant to humiliate or goad me.

I said, “Doesn’t anyone understand Hebrew?” No one answered, but I didn’t believe them. “I don’t want trouble. I’m only here to fix my car.”

One of them spat at my feet. Then two or three of them began hissing at me, taunting me with words I could not understand. Their voices grew louder, more threatening. I put my hand in my pocket for my knife, but it must have fallen out in the car.

“Okay, okay,” I said, “take it easy. I’m going.” In Arabic I said, “Salaam, salaam!” But as I backed away, they inched ever toward me, step for step. My army training kicked in and I reached out and grabbed the biggest kid, twisted his arm behind him, and
started screaming at the top of my lungs anything that came into my head. They were only boys, after all, and they were stunned, and then I pushed the kid away from me as hard as I could, right into the pack of them, and ran like hell.

When I turned around I must have been two hundred meters from them, and they were still crouched around their friend, whose arm must have hurt pretty badly, because he was crying.

“Jesus,” I said to myself.

And then I swung around and ran as fast as my legs could carry me.

When I finally stopped, mostly because my lungs were exploding, I realized I had continued to run in the wrong direction, directly into the desert. I decided I wasn’t exactly lost, but I also had no idea where I’d ended up. It was hot. I didn’t have any water. But for the moment, at least, I was safe.

I tried to get my bearings—perhaps I might make out some famous rock formation, but frankly they all looked the same. I briefly considered hiding under a ledge to catch some shade, but there wasn’t one close by, and anyway it seemed easiest just to close my eyes and relax, if only for a moment. So I sat myself down upon the ground. The heat from the earth seared through my trousers, but in a pleasant way, and my fingers found solace wandering through the arid soil and smooth, glassine pebbles. Above me, the ball of the sun was shooting great swaths of orange fire into the sky, and below me, insects had huddled in their burrows, and snakes and lizards had curled themselves into crevices or found shade beneath the sand. I needed a minute to think things through. First, my situation. I knew I wasn’t that far from the village, though when I checked my watch I realized I had been traveling away from it for more than an hour. This was not a good thing, because it’s not such an easy matter getting out of a desert, even one as small as this. All those canyons, meandering riverbeds, caverns, ridges. When you are absolutely certain you are headed west, you could actually be going east and end up right back where
you started. Or you just get deeper and deeper in. These wadis, you think they’re going somewhere, and then they just spill out into more wilderness. But really, I told myself, I was minutes from help from one of the Jewish settlements. I couldn’t call, because my phone was out of power, and anyway, I’d left it in the glove compartment, but, hell, I could just walk all the way to Jerusalem if I wanted to. So why not enjoy the quiet? I had been born in the largest country on earth, the greatest landmass the world has ever known, and here I was lost in the smallest, with nothing around me as far as the eye could see—just barren cliffs, patches of sand, dried-up wadis, and endless stretches of empty sky. What an amazing life! I thought.

So much had transpired in the last few days. The truncated visit to Dasha Cohen—why? What was I trying to unravel? The decision (who can say why—because a decapitated Arab challenged me to?) to come to Beit Ibrahim. Crazy.

My eyes suddenly felt as if they had been scourged with steel wool. I blinked over and over, but no tears, no moisture, just the grinding of my eyelids that only made it worse.

And what about Anyusha?

Mother no doubt was already at the house, taking care of her. Naturally, she would be furious with me. And Anyusha—well, who knew what she was thinking? She was always so cool about everything, nothing ever seemed to faze her. She was a remarkable kid, a good kid, a great kid, I never had to worry about her.

I brushed the sand from between my fingers and wondered briefly where these grains had begun their lives. I tried to conceive the eons of time they had endured only to end up here, on me. Time. The one incalculable, moving in all directions, coming to rest where you least expect it.

A few days after our late-night walk, Collette called from a pay phone near the Tretyakov and asked if I wanted to meet her. We met outside the museum entrance on Lavrushinsky. It had already gotten cooler, and she was bundled in her woolen coat, but this
time she wore no cap and her raven hair sparkled in the few brave rays of sunshine that had forced their way through the gathering winter clouds. Shreds of light sparkled on her moist lips, bright red as always, set off like rubies against her pale skin. She put out her hand in a friendly way, and I took it.

“You like museums?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Too bad,” she said. “I want you to meet my friends. I just didn’t want to say so on the phone.”

She was so beautiful standing there, and I had only tasted her lips. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We hurried down the block and jumped on a trolleybus, got off some blocks from Pushkinskaya, and turned into Little Gnezdnikovsky Lane. She led me to an older apartment building, redbrick, turrets, cupolas, probably 1860s. We were quickly buzzed in, and I followed her up several flights of stairs. She knocked on a door; a woman in a purple beret stuck her head out, studied us for a moment, then motioned us into the tiny flat. Like the tram, it was overflowing with people; and, almost as one, they looked up and smiled at Collette. They were Jews and foreigners, not that I had actually met a foreigner before. Still, you had to be blind not to pick them out: the smooth, soft haircuts, the fine leather of the shoes, the perfect fit of the jeans. These people had an easy, confident manner, and the Americans especially affected a natural, lazy posture, hands in pockets, heads cocked to one side. But it was their smiles—open, almost stupid—that mesmerized me; when they laughed it was like just-popped champagne. One of them held court beside the bookcases, his audience of hungry Soviets hanging on every word as if the syllables coming from his mouth were droplets of honey. The whole room was enveloped in a golden light.

Collette said, “Come. I’m sweltering. Help me out of my coat.”

I placed my hands upon her shoulders and lifted the coat. As she pulled her arms through the sleeves, her neck was revealed to me, and, beneath the opening of her blouse, the white cup of her bra.

“Just throw it in the bedroom,” she said. “And introduce yourself if you want. Or leave if you’re afraid.”

“Why would I be afraid?” I said.

I took her coat, but when I came back, I couldn’t seem to find her. I strolled over to the window, instinctively pulled aside the curtains. Two white Zhigulis were parked near the back. I made out two more around the side. Someone came up beside me. “You seem worried. Don’t be. They won’t do anything.” He spoke well but had an accent—sort of like an old Jewish man from Odessa, but he wasn’t old and I doubted he was Jewish. In fact, he was the American I had been watching mesmerize the Russians with his speech.

“I’m not worried,” I said to him.

“All these Americans and Brits—we’re your safety net.” He gulped some wine and patted me on the back. “I’m Charlie.”

He wore gray corduroy jeans and under his jacket a thick, ropey sweater that hung loosely on his lanky frame. His feet were encased in a pair of massive square-toe boots. “One good thing about America, we don’t care what anyone does. You ever hear of Berkeley, California? You can walk down Telegraph Avenue with your dick hanging out and no one will even bat an eye. Here, you put on a pair of Levi’s and you’re immediately under suspicion.”

“It’s not true about the jeans, but your Russian is very good,” I said.

Collette now appeared out of nowhere.

“Charlie!” she called.

“There you are, my girl!” he said.

They linked arms. “Let’s talk,” she suggested. “Roma, you come, too.”

We stepped out to the vestibule and pressed ourselves onto the landing beneath a grimy blacked-out window. Charlie and Collette talked in whispers, and it took me a moment to realize they had switched to French. Maybe they thought the KGB didn’t know French. It seemed silly. After a while, she wrote something down on a slip of paper, the names of some scientific books and journals, and asked Charlie if he might be able to get them for her.
He said he would try. Then he reached into a jacket pocket and brought out a small jar of instant coffee. She dropped this into her purse. At the same moment, she slipped him a little bundle. He put it into his pocket the same way a train conductor collects a ticket: without so much as looking at it.

I stood there in the half dark wondering again what I was doing there yet feeling strangely elated. Collette moved quite close to me. I was aware of the pressure of her hips. Her hand came around the small of my back and settled there.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “It’s cold.”

We hung around the apartment for a while. I believe I was a success. With the foreigners I tried my English, and with the Jews I found myself more and more at ease as the afternoon wore on, even though they were Zionists and dissidents and academics and artists, most of them refuseniks and quite a few of them what we used to call “names”—they were in the upper reaches of some alternative social order, celebrities of oppression. As for Charlie, he came up to me when he was ready to leave.

“Roman!” he said. “You’re a most interesting guy. I’d like to speak with you again sometime. Maybe see a concert or a play. I can easily get tickets. Maybe you’ll come to Spaso House for a movie? That’s the ambassador’s residence. Everybody comes for the movies. Food’s great. What do you think?”

“Oh,” Collette interjected, “we’ll have Charlie over for dinner, how about that?”

I did not know how to understand this remark, and in any case I didn’t think I’d really be going to the American ambassador’s house, so I soon forgot about the whole thing. I continued my waltz around the room, stopping to chat with this little group of three and that little group of four, but every few seconds I found myself checking for Collette. I did not have to search hard: she was a neon sign,
ALL GLORY TO THE SOVIETS, CHAMPIONS OF THE REVOLUTION
! Her mouth was the crimson star over the Kremlin. With the blinking of her eyelids, flecks of amethyst floated into the room. I was now completely and brilliantly aware that my life had changed. I stood in the ranks of a whole new company, on the
shores of a whole new world, a more beautiful world, possibly, even hopefully, a more dangerous world.

I brought Collette her coat and followed her out the door and into the metro. We boarded the train, sat in silence as the stations came into view, vomited up their passengers, and disappeared again as the train raced off into darkness. It did not seem to matter that, in fact, she had not asked me to join her on her way home. I had this new knowledge, and it included the realization that, no matter how impossible it seemed only a few hours before, we were together.

Her place was located on the northern edge of the city, in what, not all that long ago, had been the village of Medvedkovo and was now the last stop on the orange line, an ugly little station, brand-new, the walls hammered to look like serpent’s teeth waiting to devour the poor commuters who, like hordes of fat, sluggish potato bugs, ventured forth onto its narrow platforms. We rode the escalator up to Shirokaya Street. Whatever might have charmed the eye in bucolic Medvedkovo had been pitilessly obliterated by the new apartment blocks, massive bulwarks sprouting from the soil like Spartoi—only what were they guarding? The metro station? At the feet of these giant buildings cowered, muddy and dwarflike, an astounding array of identical kiosks—ice cream, kvass, cigarettes … ice cream, kvass, cigarettes—and, interspersed among them, glass message boards on which were posted the latest from
Pravda
and
Izvestia
. A few old men stood before them, reading, as if the revolution might yet produce some good news. The bread shop was emptied of all but a few stale loaves, all black; a line of shoppers snaked halfway around the block from the milk store; the shoe emporium proudly displayed its one model of oxfords, three pairs in every window, and the restaurant sat empty, awaiting its first customer of the day, or perhaps the week.