The Wanting

  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.

  PS3612.A94425W36 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

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  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, Papoola!” 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.”

  “Where did you learn to talk like this?”

  “I’m smart.”

  “Get me some water,” I said.

  “I have to get the doctor. They told me to tell them when you woke up.” She skipped out of the room.

  A moment later she came back, her brilliant white arms shining like silver candlesticks. “I told the nurse.” She spit out her chewing gum and sat down in the chair. “They said you were hallucinating when you came in,” she said matter-of-factly. “You were talking in Russian so they got a Russian doctor. What were you hallucinating?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something weird about your ambulance. I’ll ask the doctor what you were saying.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important,” she said.

  “I was in shock,” I said. “I was just yammering.”

  “That’s when the truth comes out,” she explained.

  “What’s that comic book you’re reading?” I asked her.

  “It’s not a comic book. It’s manga. A graphic novel.”

  “Ah.”

  “Fushigi Yûgi.”

  “What?”

  “Fushigi Yûgi. It’s about Yui and Miaka. They go to see the oracle Tai Yi-Jun, and Miaka is trapped inside a magic mirror while her reflection—who is very, very evil—takes her place in the real world, so Yui has to save her. It’s very complicated, Papoola. You see, they find this book (they find it in the first chapter, because this is chapter eight), and they can be in the book, and whatever they read happens to them, although they can change things, too—anyway, they have to use the power of the Four Gods of Earth and Sky because Miaka is actually the Priestess of Suzaku, which is the God of Fire.”

  “You should be reading Pushkin,” I said.

  The doctor came in. He was Feldman, a Russian, and he spoke to me in Russian, even though he heard me speaking Hebrew with Anyusha.

  “You’re awake! That’s good! Let’s take a look!” He pried open my eyes, shining his little searchlight into the irises. “Looks good,” he said. Then he evoked a serious tone. “You know why you’re here?”

  “I think so.”

  “Still fuzzy. That’s normal. What’s the date?”

  “It’s Wednesday, May 8, 1996.”

  “It’s Thursday, actually.”

  “I lost a day?”

  “You’ve been out for a while,” he said, “but now you’re back. And that’s what matters.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I want to thank the paramedic who brought me here. I think his name was Moishe.”

  “I’ll check on it,” said the doctor. “In the meantime your stitches look good. We’re going to keep you bandaged up for a while, going to watch for infection.”

  “Pretty bad, huh?”

  “You should see the other guy!” he quipped.

  That’s when I remembered the head, soaring past my window with a look, I now realized, of envy in its eyes.

  Obviously, there was no Moishe. A mere hallucination. Why then could I never forget him? The event itself was lost in haze, a dream, but this imaginary medic was now part of my life. And as for the head? My nightmares.

  I have always been a dreamy person. I think I may have inherited this disposition from my father. I am not saying that my mother is not also an imaginative person; it is just that I did not partake of her dreams. It was her fears I lived. Here is an example.

  At a certain age, we lived in a strange apartment building on Veshnaya Street in the center of Moscow. It had been constructed in the thirties at the specific request of the NKVD boss, Yezhov, and it was still filled with party functionaries and a few midlevel KGB officers. How our family got there was an entirely different story—but suffice it to say every wall of every room was implanted with a secret microphone, every telephone in every foyer was connected to a single exchange for easy recording, and every day, twenty-four hours a day, stalwart teams of spooks with binoculars and photographic cameras watched the comings and goings of everyone in the building—or at least we thought so, because no one ever saw anything or heard so much as a peep or a chirp or a muffled cough or anything at all, for that matter, and their invisibility only gave us greater assurance of the
ir immanence, their power, and the purpose they gave to our lives.

  One day, my little sister Katya and I went out to play in the courtyard. Unlike the typical Moscow courtyard that could be entered from the street and from many doorways and passageways, our courtyard had but one entrance from the back of our building, cut off from the street. The yard itself was surrounded by three gateless, unpainted concrete walls, walls so high neither Katya nor I could see to the top. Even from our apartment, which was on the third floor, it was impossible to see over the wall. We were forbidden to set foot in that yard, but unknown to our parents, there was, in fact, a great treasure lurking there. It was a pile of debris we liked to call Chinese Mountain. We called it Chinese Mountain because of an old print that hung in our living room, an ink drawing of a strange mountain, a thin cloudlike waterfall cascading down its side, and a tiny monk leaning on his staff far below. Faded Chinese characters were stamped in one corner, and birds flew off another. Our backyard mountain looked just like that, especially when it rained or when the snow began to melt. For a long time we were content to watch it from our window, but eventually we could resist no longer. Why? The sheer joy of its mystery. From whence arose this magic pile of treasures? Lengths of wood, metal pipe, old shoes, rusty nails, empty tin cans—all precious materials—and all abandoned. After all, no one went back there, and even if they did, no one would ever throw anything away in that yard—because no one ever threw anything away, period. One afternoon, we secretly made our way down and, with huge effort, pushed open the old rusted door that led to the yard. It was the beginning of December, and the first snows had fallen—the best snows, really, clean and dry—and the ground was white milk against a clear blue sky, the snow shimmering like diamonds in the sunshine, just like the enchanted forests in our storybooks. Even the few, sadly bent birches in the far corner of the yard looked stately, and the mangy squirrel who had to forage even in winter took on the luster of the sly red fox.

  Katya was five, I was six, and we stood before Chinese Mountain like two explorers on the moon, only she was wearing a knit cap of red wool that tied under her chin with a bow, and I a fur-lined hat, the earflaps hanging down like puppy dog tongues, bouncing whenever I moved.