The Wanting (21 page)

Of course, it didn’t last. They sent us to an absorption center in Dimona. I was delighted to be there, even though the huge apartment complexes reminded me too much of home. The one difference was I could go outside and it was never cold. The air was remarkably clear, and when you took a deep breath, notwithstanding the fact that you were killing yourself with radiation from the nearby reactor, it seemed like you were taking in 100 percent oxygen with none of the pollutants, the fumes of sadness, regret, frustration. Maybe that’s why I have always felt solace in the desert.

They provided child care for Anyusha, and I went to Ulpan, where I was quite literally bathed in the Hebrew language. I was astonished by what happened. Hebrew came to me as if I were merely excavating some forgotten stratum of my existence. Almost without trying, I was speaking, reading, writing. There emerged almost instantly a naturalness to my Hebrew that belied my origins. The distinctive grammatical errors and mispronunciations of the Russian immigrant are largely invisible in my speech. It is not exactly native Hebrew the way sabras speak it, but someone once said to me it was like how Hebrew must have sounded three thousand years ago, in the time of David. I think she meant a barbarous Hebrew, a violent and poetic Hebrew, a literary Hebrew that refuses to look over its own shoulder or search for new words, a Hebrew without history. As you can imagine, my teachers marveled at my progress. I went straight to the head of the class.

The next obstacle was the army. In those days, a person of my age—I was only twenty-six—would normally be inducted rather quickly, become assimilated, master the nuances of slang and the general military culture that permeates the social fabric of Israel. Of course, I wanted to get my architect’s license, but I wanted to be in the military even more, which strikes me as odd, since I’d spent so much time and trouble getting out of the Soviet draft. But with Anyusha, how could I? There was no wife, no sister, no cousin, no aunt, no grandmother to care for her. Plus she had been crying more or less continually since our arrival. I began to think the place was disagreeable to her. On top of this, I didn’t know what to do with her, how to feel about her. She was just a baby, I hardly knew her. Then, miraculously, my mother was given her visa, and, two months later, I left Anyusha in her care and went off to basic training. I knew these months in the army would be the best, the most precious I would ever have in my life. And I must say, I was deliriously happy.

But now all these years later, as I studied the dead skin on my arms with a decidedly benign detachment, it was clear to me that that happiness had been an illusion. It was not without a jolt of nausea that I realized that whispered Arabic was seeping through the walls. I could not understand what they were saying any more than I understood the head hovering in my demented sky or the soldier greeting us in the Jetway, but I had the feeling they were not talking about my health.

I now took a moment to look around the room. On the walls, a few photos, a rug, some prints of sayings, I guessed, from the Koran. I grimaced when I saw the photographs and thought back to the head. I hadn’t seen it since I’d left Ganei Z’rikha, but right now I really wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for what he did. I wanted to ask him if he was satisfied with himself, flying around with no body all over Israel. But we never did seem to connect. The asshole.

And here I was in his bed.

Dear You,

I never finished telling about Miriam. That’s because I had to go. I have to meet Yohanan, and I’m waiting for him right now at the bus stop.

But I think before I go any further with all this telling of everything, I absolutely
must
describe myself on this day, everything about me. OK. My hair, as everyone knows, looks exactly like Billy Idol’s, only it’s black, and I don’t put anything in it, no goo or spray or any of that crap. I would describe my hair as a mop with a few sharpened points, like tongues of fire. Frequently, almost always, I have magenta streaks in it, ergo the fire, but today I rinsed it out because I wanted the world to see my hair in its pure state, what I would call my hair as a thing in itself. I used to have long, beautiful princess hair, and Babushka literally cried like a baby when I cut it; well, actually she cried
before
I cut it, and pleaded, yelled, offered me some of her famous “smile cake,” threatened to shoot herself, all the classic Babushka tricks, but I was determined 100%, and when I make up my mind—SNIP!—short hair. Pop didn’t say anything. He just shook his head and said, “It starts.” Very annoying. But where was I? Yes, no magenta today. Now my hair is pure, absolute, and cosmically black, absorbing the entire spectrum of sunlight into its huge and terrifying blackness, a black hole in the middle of Ha’atzmayut Street, get out of its path, that’s my hair. My skin, however, is (as always) very, very white, also unlike every other Israeli I know. I like it white. If it wasn’t so white naturally, I’d put talcum on just to make it white. But all I have to do is use
Lady Lot SPF 40 sunscreen on every single inch of me, even on the parts that never show, because you never know when you will have to take off some piece of clothing that you never took off before, and though this has yet to happen to me, it could, it could maybe happen today. That could be quite a spectacular thing. Naturally, I did put on a little lipstick and eyeliner. I use Jade. I like the candy gloss for the lips, and the deep black eyeliner. Also today, blue iris eye shadow. As for clothes, I’m wearing my thigh-length black skirt over my pink-striped three-quarter leggings. I have on my red high-top sneakers and black-and-white polka-dot socks. You can only see about five centimeters of skin on my leg, but they are an amazing and mind-boggling five centimeters. I am also wearing a sleeveless black camisole that has a row of lace running along the top that I got on Neve Tzedek when Pop took me to Tel Aviv. I have on three bracelets, one yellow, one pink, and one the color of tropical seas. I have my three rings on my fingers, and just my black dot earrings, because today is not a day for dangles.

That’s it. That is me today.

Why do I tell you my brand of lipstick and where I bought my camisole? Because every detail of today is of utmost importance. And now is the time for me to tell it all, everything, all my secrets. Of course, God probably knows how I am dressed today, but my father doesn’t. Perhaps my mother knows, but I guess I don’t believe that. Maybe God doesn’t know either. Why should he? This is not his world, that’s for sure. But I do hope someday my father will read this. I hope when he does, he will be able to see me exactly, precisely, as I am today, because when this day is over, the person who I am right now will be gone forever. You may think that is just a truism. But I hope he will read this and say Anna’s outfit really kicked! Anna’s eyeliner was absolutely fabulous! Anna’s lips were glowing and shimmery with the perfect color. I hope he will see me just as I am and think, Anna was beautiful today. That’s all I want.

So, Miriam.

First of all, it was really Yohanan who started teaching me all this stuff. He knows an amazing amount. He can read Talmud in
Aramaic, and he studies midrash. But after a while he said to me, I can’t teach you anymore. You’re too smart for me. That’s when I started going to see Rabbi Keren. I think this was about a year ago.

You think girls don’t study, but the modern Orthodox are not Haredi, and you’d be surprised how many girls study. Usually they have a woman teacher, but not me! But I didn’t want to be in a class, so for a long time it was just Rabbi and me, or just Rabbi, me, and Yohanan, because I felt better when Yohanan was there, and Rabbi didn’t care. If I said something stupid and Rabbi’s eyes went blank, Yohanan would say, “I think what Anna meant was …” Some people wouldn’t like that, but I did, even when it wasn’t exactly what I meant. Yohanan always said I would outgrow him because I’m smarter than he is, but that’s ridiculous.

So I started studying. You can always tell when you’re special, and I could see I was special to Rabbi Keren. It wasn’t like school—I always wanted to go and I rushed there after class. But Shabbat was my big problem. Women don’t have to go to shul, but I loved being there, and Pop would have killed me, but sometimes when he decided to go to work I did go. And also on Shabbat night I could say I was going over to one of my friends, and then I could stop by and do Havdalah with Yohanan’s family. But then after the bombing, Rabbi Keren introduced us to Shlomo, and as I said, Shlomo introduced us to Miriam. And right away, you know, I liked her.

It was when Shlomo explained about Kach and the martyred Rabbi Kahane and the twentieth mitzvah and the Institute for Redemption.

Now don’t go saying, oh my God,
Kach!
Right-wing crazies and all that. First of all, it’s not true. They’re not terrible people at all. After all, a person has to defend himself (or herself in my case). A whole people has a right to exist and to defend their right to exist and to exist in their true homeland, even if you don’t necessarily completely believe that God gave it to you. Still, it’s been your home for like four thousand years, way before anyone else who’s around today. Because let me give you the idea, OK? The whole history of Jews is weakness. Being pushed around. Being
everybody’s slave. You know the song—Calves are easily bound and slaughtered never knowing the reason why. That was about us. Israelis are different, for sure. But what do we do? When we finally win the Six-Day War and we finally get back Jerusalem, what do we do? We give the Temple right back to the Arabs. They don’t even let us go there to pray. We want to do a little archaeology to find the remains of the Temple, they riot. They store weapons there, too. And they destroy all the evidence down in the tunnels and the cisterns where you can see the remains of the real Temple. Is that fair? Why don’t we do something about that? And when Jews want to bomb someone, our police stop them. But when they want to bomb us, their police help them. They have so many children, just more and more and they all want to move back here and push us into the sea. Why should we let them? Why shouldn’t we be able to pray at the Temple Mount? Why should we be so afraid of them? That’s more or less how they explained it to us.

But I couldn’t help myself. I raised my hand (even though it was just the four of us) and said, You want to rebuild the Temple and have animal sacrifices? With, like, the blood and all? I tried to explain to them that, based on what I read in the Bible and what little I knew of Talmud, God probably has moved on from that. For instance, I said, when Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac, God was saying, “Don’t need no more human sacrifice! Not my thing anymore.” And it also seemed to me that if God destroyed the Temple (because he
is
in charge of history, after all), then he’s probably saying, “That’s it for me with the animals! Let’s sing some songs, read some prayers, and eat bagels.” Because if God wanted animal sacrifice, we’d still have a Temple—
obviously!

You could see Shlomo was very upset and about to say something terrible, when Miriam stopped him with a little wave of her hand. Actually, she couldn’t stop laughing, and she said to me, Anna, come with me, and let me show you.

The first thing we did was go for coffee—well, she had coffee. I had a Coke. That’s when she told me she liked my brain.

“You’re always thinking,” she said. “God wants us to think.”

“I guess,” I said.

“But he also wants us to see.”

“See what?”

“That’s what I’m going to show you.”

After the Coke we went outside for a walk. We were walking very close to each other, and I didn’t mind, and I also didn’t mind the way she looked, with the long skirt and the long-sleeved blouse, because it was actually a pretty blouse and because, I don’t know.

Then she asked me, Why do you think your father got bombed? I told her I didn’t know. Think about it, she said. Why did he lose everything he worked for? Why do you think he hit that guy on the street?

I said, “What guy on the street?”

She kept saying, “Don’t you think there’s a reason?”

“Well, I guess they hate us,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, “but why you?”

“Me?”

“Exactly,” she said. “You.”

“It wasn’t me. It was my father.”

“It’s funny with fathers,” she said. “My own father didn’t understand me when I became religious.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he went crazy. He even cried. He thought this was the end of everything. That he’d lost me forever.”

“Did he?”

“Of course not. Yes, he has to become kosher for me to go to the house, and he has to observe Shabbat and some other things—then we can definitely be together again. But, no, it’s not that he lost me. It’s that
he’s
lost. Know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But no matter what, Anna, when they strike the father, don’t you think they are also striking the daughter?”

That felt like the truth to me. And I told her so. And then she took hold of my hands and said, “Everything has a divine purpose, doesn’t it Anna?”