The Wanting (23 page)

Instead of food, he handed me a cigarette. In fact, he gave me the whole pack. “Here, take this shit. I don’t want their goddamned Israeli cigarettes anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Where are your eyes? How long can we go on this way? How long can we put up with this shit? First they take our land, then they take all we have left, rule us like we were nothing but donkeys. As if we were pigs. They’re the pigs, not us!”

“I hate them, too,” I said.

“No, you don’t. But you should. And you think anyone cares about us? You think abu-Amar cares about us?”

“He does, too.” I saw in my mind his posters:
ARAFAT
!
LEADER
!
ONE PEOPLE
!
ONE LAND
! They popped up everywhere and just as quickly were torn down by the soldiers. “Who else cares for us?”

“All right, he does, but what good is it doing? What has he done? Where is he? Tunis? Algeria? I don’t know. Who knows? Who cares? Look at reality, Amir. What are we, huddled here in this garbage pile like two rats!”

“But we love this place.”

“We do, we do. But I’m too old for it anymore, Amir.”

My eyes filled with tears.

“Amir, listen to me. We have to stop all this crying. We have to stop being little boys. You see what they did in Lebanon, don’t you? You’ve heard of the massacres there, haven’t you? You see them in our streets, don’t you? Look up on the hill, just above us. Nobody ever was on that hill! What kind of place is that hill? And
there they are. They build their big houses with their red roofs and their pretty gardens and all around their village they cultivate their fields, or they have their little factories. Do we have money to build houses? Do we have water to cultivate new fields? Where are our factories? Didn’t you hear how they murdered little Fatma Sahour? Just walking to school! Just like you! Walking, walking, walking, boom! That’s all. Who is to pay for that? Who is to help little Fatma Sahour? Amir, we used to sit up on that hill. Remember the time with the cucumber and the falcon? Come on, come with me.”

He took me by the arm and urged me toward the door.

“But we just got here. And anyway, I have to work in the garage today.”

“Work in the garage? Work in the garage? What a baby you are! Come on, Amir. I’m telling you the truth here. There is a mufti I want you to hear. He speaks the truth. It comes out of his mouth like nothing you have ever heard. Never has to pause, never has to think about the next sentence, because he knows what he is saying. He teaches the true meaning of Islam. Let’s go. You’ll learn something.”

He thrust open the door. The light behind him was so bright I could no longer see his face.

“Come learn something,” he said.

But in the shadow where Fadi’s face should have been, I saw my father’s twisted features.

As if he were reading my mind, Fadi lowered his voice and drew me closer to him. “At some point he’ll stop hitting you, Amir. They all do. No one hits me anymore. The same will happen to you. Don’t worry about it. Trust me.”

“But in the meantime, he’s still hitting me.”

“It’s time to stop thinking about your father and think about your people.”

But it was not easy to stop thinking about my father. The hand going to the strap, and the veins in his forehead swelling with anger, the bitter grunts as he let forth the blows. As for the people,
all that came to mind was the gang of kids I hung around with and the old men loitering wherever there was the slightest space for loitering and the women hovering around the market stalls arguing with the butcher.

“Fadi, I have to work,” I said.

“So that’s it?” he sighed. “That’s all you have to say?”

He let his hand slip out of mine. With the door open behind him, his shape, which was really only a silhouette against the brightness of the sun, was suddenly gone. There came a brilliant, blinding moment and then the door swung shut on its spring and I was left alone in the darkness of the Glass Palace—only in my eyes everything went yellow, and I had to sit there quite a few minutes until I could see again.

Fadi had been trying to take me to these mullahs or Fatah or whatnot for ages now. He didn’t get it. I wasn’t interested. All I wanted was to go to school and have a business that was not a garage. Maybe write a book of stories, my own
Book of Tales
. The Israelis whom I knew were not so bad. Sure, the soldiers could be assholes, but the ones who came to the garage with their cars—what was so wrong with them, after all?

Finally I got up and went out. I actually had plenty of time before I had to be at the garage. I knew my village in every single one of its ins and outs, even as it had grown into a town spilling across the valley like a pool of milk toward Bethlehem, and I knew how to travel so as not to run into Fadi. I didn’t know exactly where his mufti lectured, but I knew he wouldn’t be in this direction, because it was probably in the camp or in the Dar al-Qur’an, and anyway, I was going along the eastern edge of town and I intended to keep to the alleys and the backs of houses. Of course people said hello to me, and I said hello back. Salaam! And to you, salaam! How are you? Thanks be to God! And you? Thanks be to God! Little Amir! Greetings to your father! And greetings to you, abu-Mahmed.

At last, I turned the corner and slipped into the yard and hid among the bushes near the windows, which had been opened to
let in the afternoon breeze. She had turned up the radio and was sitting, drumming her fingers lazily on the table. She took a last drag on her cigarette and crushed it in the aluminum ashtray next to her Coca-Cola bottle. Immediately she lit another. Her hair was done up with a few pins, but everywhere skeins of it had slipped out, down the nape of her neck and along the front of her ears like the side curls of the Jewish boys. One feathery strand flopped in front of her nose, and she kept blowing it away with her lower lip. She sighed because there was no one to talk to. She was wearing a striped jersey, and it clung to her like honey clings to the lips. It had a scooped neck, which made her look like a swan. Even Nadirah would not dare wear this outside the house. She sighed again: the music was boring her. She blew away the wild hair with a puff of smoke, put the cigarette down, and rested her chin in her arms. I don’t know if she was sad or just thinking of something, maybe she was thinking of Fadi, but suddenly she stood up, marched over to the radio, and fussed with the knob until she found something she liked. A slow song, in English or maybe Italian, I couldn’t tell. Then she picked up her cigarette and put it in her mouth, and it just dangled there, the smoke rising toward her eyes, which she now closed, and then she began to sway, right and left, making lazy circles with her hips, like a hawk with nothing to do but hang all afternoon in the blue sky, her cigarette just dangling in her mouth, her hips just back and forth, her jersey just melting onto her body as she moved inside it, her eyes just closed and never opening, the smoke just rising, the music just singing, and the breeze just passing over my shoulders on its way into the house to cool her face and neck, and the smell of fried eggplant coming from somewhere across the yard.

By now my father would be looking at the clock on the wall above the rack of tires and guessing to himself whether I would be punctual or late as usual, and each time the minute hand dropped another notch, he would feel a slight tremor in his neck. If he was with a customer, he would be smiling and talking with good humor, because that’s how you talk to customers, tell them whatever
they want to hear, but even as he promised the carburetor could definitely be rebuilt in two days, with every intention that the carburetor indeed would be rebuilt in two days even though he had six other things to do first and he never fixed a carburetor in two days and never would, his eyes would dart, every few seconds, back to the clock, because what he was really thinking was how unreliable I was, and he would absorb into his bloodstream this insult to himself and to his fatherhood, where it would boil up like hot oil until the top of his head felt like it must explode; and there would be only one way he could think of to relieve this pressure, this insult. Already his hand would be shaking as it touched the buckle of his belt, even as he nodded to his customer and told him to come back in two days, it will be ready without fail. I knew all this, and yet I could not pull myself from Nadirah’s window.

Why did Fadi leave her alone like this? Look at her—so vulnerable, so fragile. Women needed to be controlled, didn’t they? My father had taught me this. You must discipline your wife, he had counseled me, you must keep her from the dark ways.

Nadirah changed the station yet again and now was listening to Egypt, to Ahmed Adaweya singing his sha’abi. She lazily opened her mouth, and his song came to me through her voice, dark, warm, thick with smoke:

As Nadirah sang, her voice grew bolder, her mouth wider, until at last she was dancing with happiness, her arms above her head, her eyes wide with some vision of herself dancing. She spun around, and I had to quickly duck under the windowsill.

And then, bent like a little old man, I ran out of the courtyard and all the way to my father’s garage.

I hear Nadirah’s song even now, and my heart breaks in my own throat. But when I open my eyes, it is still Dasha Cohen I
see—and in my ears nothing but her tortured breath. Is this your song, Dasha Cohen? Is this your dancing? Around her bed are all kinds of shapes and chimeras, jinns and demons, strange sea creatures and spirits, dim and sickly, like blighted wheat. And the whole world seems to me cast in shades of ocher, as if I am looking through a window whose shade is drawn.

“I
WANT TO GET UP
, I
WANT
to go,” I cried out, but perhaps I’d only exhaled, because I could not actually hear my own voice. I tried to sit up, but when I raised my head I was attacked by a terrible vertigo, and I collapsed back onto the bed. I heard scampering and realized that several young girls had been standing in a corner watching me, and now they ran out. Abdul-Latif came in and sat beside me.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

I nodded.

“We’re not like Bedouins. We have real beds.”

“Why … are you … helping me?” I asked in what voice I had.

When he made out my words, he laughed. “You’re my only customer today.”

“I … have … to go.”

“I can barely hear you. I can’t understand what you’re saying. Don’t move around so much.”

“Let me call,” I wheezed.

“We don’t have a phone.”

“Mobile phone? Do you know … anyone … mobile phone?”

“No.” He stood up. “My friend, you will be well here, if only you drink some water. It was at least forty-five degrees out there. You did not drink then, and you do not drink now. I press water on you, and you spit it out. I made you drink a few drops when you were sleeping, but you need more, much more. What, do you
want to die? Rest a few hours, then you will drink, and you will be on your way.”

Did you call a doctor?
I wanted to say.

“Rest, my friend. Rest.”

Through the tiny window I could see only a bit of sky. Where the sunlight hit a table or a chair, or me for that matter, it cast long, moody shadows against the whitewashed walls of the small room. It seemed to me a kind of sign. With the passage of time, the shadows we carry take on a stronger reality, outlining us in the black chalk of our sins, until finally we and our shadows merge into a single, impenetrable, absolving mist.

And so, against the screen of my eyes, that sacred play, whose chorus was the Judean wind and the bleating muezzin, held me down upon that bed as if with pins of iron.

In that time, I came to Collette every day; if she was not yet at home, I waited for her outside her apartment. The neighbors came to know me, and though I suspected they pitied me, I didn’t care. I would listen for the elevator, and each time it was called down, I was filled with hope. When finally she did arrive, she would say, “Oh, Roman, it’s you. Have you been waiting?” I would answer, “No, not long.” This is how it went for weeks on end.

Then, suddenly, an idea began percolating in me; one night, I lay awake in the apartment I shared with my mother on Tishinskaya, seeing shapes upon the ceiling while my mother snored away in the room she’d taken over after Katya left to live with her husband near Moscow University. It was the first time in her life that my mother had a room of her own.

So I began by thinking about mother and her bedroom. From this, I wandered back to the house on Veshnaya, where we moved when I was four and from which we were so painfully evicted. Why did I think of this? Because I had conceived the idea of building a
house, a house for Collette—and myself, too, of course—and that led me to thinking about Uncle Max, who owned a dacha where I could build my new house, and thinking about Uncle Max led me to recall the sleeping arrangements at Veshnaya. Here’s how it went: my parents slept in the living room, sharing it with Babushka and Dyedushka, giving Katya and me and my cousins Julia and Danka the one bedroom, and Uncle Maxim and Aunt Sophie the other. Why did Uncle Maxim and Aunt Sophie have their own room instead of my grandparents or my parents? Because it was Uncle Maxim’s apartment. All of us were there because of him.