The Wanting Read online

  “Look!” she said.

  She stretched out her mittened finger. There was something decidedly shiny, decidedly pointy, sticking out of Chinese Mountain. Our eyes widened.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I think it’s gold,” I answered and grasped her hand.

  I imagine that if you could look down from that cloudless sky, you would, even now, see Katya and me, two dots in a sea of snow, frozen for all eternity, the earflaps of my hat curling up like question marks, the red of her cap like a drop of blood on a white page, the hems of our coats flaring like the bottoms of Christmas trees, the breath coming out of us in ripe plumes, locking our gaze on that mountain of junk as if it were the lost ark of the Lord.

  Katya dropped to a crouch and hugged her knees. “I’m freezing,” she complained.

  But I said to her, “I’m going to get it.”

  “Don’t!”

  “It’s gold!” I told her.

  I took a step forward and stopped. But what could I do? She was watching me carefully. All right! I said to myself. And just like that I marched up to Chinese Mountain. The very smell of it made me dizzy. It was all tangles and decoupage—everything pasted together in a jumble: devil’s horns here, giant eyes there. Terrified, I reached out and grabbed the golden object. The feel of it in my hand, even in the cold of December, burned through my mitten. I turned around and faced Katya. Her eyes were as big as five-kopek coins. I held the treasure high above my head. In triumph I called, “It’s a magic picture frame!”

  From the vantage point of so many years, and remembering this as I did from a hospital bed in Jerusalem after almost being blown up by a decapitated Arab, it would seem a small and odd thing to remember. But when something explodes—a heavenly object, a star, a planet, or a person for that matter—all the parts of it that ever existed are blown out into space, where they persist forever.

  What happened next was this. I ran from the Chinese Mountain as if I had just filched the pot of gold from under the dragon’s nose; I cried out in victory, Hurrah! Hurrah!; waved my head of Goliath before Katya’s awestruck gaze; and took my victory lap around the courtyard.

  I could not wait to show it to my mother. It was so beautiful, and hardly broken at all. True, it had no glass, but the wood was turned quite delicately, and the gilding was largely intact. Plus, it was big enough to slip over my head and wear like a necklace.

  We ran up the three flights of stairs and raced into the apartment. Mother was in the kitchen with Babushka peeling potatoes. Grandfather was asleep in the big chair, a copy of Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad still in his hands. Father was not yet home, and neither was Uncle Maxim or Aunt Sopha; Julia and Danka were at the dining table doing their homework.

  “Oh!” cried my grandmother with delight. “And what’s this?”

  But Mother took one look and said, “Where did you get it?”

  “Roman got it off Chinese Mountain!” Katya blurted with pride.

  “Oh, and what is Chinese Mountain?”

  Katya fell silent.

  “Well?” said my mother.

  I had no choice but to tell her. The color drained from her face. “Show me.”

  So we all traipsed down the stairs and out into the yard. We stood some distance from the pile. Mother held the picture frame carefully in the palms of her hands, like an offering. It was already growing dark.

  “Where exactly?” she asked.

  I pointed to the right side.

  “Where? How far up?”

  I told her about a half a meter from the top: there, where the piece of concrete was jutting out.

  “Was it on the concrete?” she asked.

  I told her, no, it was just over there between the broken jar and the bit of metal tubing, where some emaciated weeds had tried to sprout before the winter cold had set in. But it was dark and I could barely see.

  “You’re certain?” she said.

  My mountain seemed more like a hulking bear than a mountain, more like a shadow to itself, a darker black than the black all around us, more like a hole in space, and not at all like a treasure trove of precious objects.

  “Well? Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then take this,” she handed me the frame, “and place it back exactly where it was when you found it. Exactly. Not a bit to the right or to the left or too much up or too much down. Put it back exactly where it was.”

  I ventured a few steps into the darkness. When I looked back, my mother and sister seemed to fade away, black holes in black space, having no mass, no substance. My hands were shaking violently, and my feet were two frozen bricks. The approaching night had crushed Chinese Mountain into a ball, and all its detail had merged into a strange, misshapen singularity. What could I do? I threw the frame onto the pile, not even looking where it landed. Then I ran back to where my mother and sister were waiting. I took a breath only when I reached them.

  “Very well,” my mother said. “Now no one will ever know.”

  And with that she led us back to the house.

  This was the fear my mother instilled in me, the fear I always sensed lurking in my heart. But Anyusha sat beside my bed with folded hands and the smile of an evangelist and explained to me how it was completely possible that a messenger of God had come down in the form of Moishe the medic in order to set me on a certain path. What this path was, she could not yet discern. And she said all this in the same tone she employed to describe the two Japanese cartoon girls who became characters in a book they were reading. I did not want her to fall into an existential confusion, and even more so I did not like her talking about messengers from God. I hate everything having to do with my religion except the food. When she said messenger of God, I thought only of the head flying by my window. The former brain in that head had received messages, too.

  “It wasn’t God,” I finally said to her.

  I got out of the hospital a few days later. My face would be scarred for the rest of my life, but as Moishe said, scars are good on a man. But the people at the bus stop were not so lucky. Nine died instantly, including the bomber, whose head I believe swept across my sky in the split second before my window shattered. One more died in the hospital. Forty-two others were wounded, quite a number of them Arabs. Some went blind; others lost limbs; several lost vital organs that had to be replaced. There were those who both went blind and also lost limbs; these I would say were the worst off. Worse even than the one who became a vegetable—count her among the dead. She was only sixteen and very beautiful, at least from the pictures they showed of her on television. Her name was Dasha. All of us lost our hearing for a while. Several will never get it back. I myself still have the ringing, and one of my eardrums did not heal quite right. They tell me I need an operation. Dasha, I knew, was really Darya. She was Soviet, like me, but she was probably too young to remember any of it. Still, I could see from her photo that she retained that Russian look—it had to do with her hair and the gold threads in the sweater she’d been wearing.

  Before the hospital released me, they sent round a psychologist to see me. She introduced herself as Sepha Katsir, Ph.D. She said she was a grief and trauma counselor.

  “I know you don’t realize it now,” Sepha Katsir said, “but you will have issues.”

  She gave me a pamphlet and told me she was available for counseling. “Unless you prefer someone in Russian,” she added.

  As soon as she left, the Minister of Blown-Up People came by. He was an underdeputy of some cabinet member who thought someone ought to say something reassuring to people who’ve been blown up by Arabs. He was a small man, in his late seventies, I guessed, still with the look of the old pioneers, even though he was in fact too young to have been one. But there it was: the open, flared collar, the suit jacket that looked like a potato sack, worn-out leather sandals over navy blue socks, his skin tan, chin smooth-shaven, hair—what there was of it—wild around the edges, sausagelike fingers on hands that once far
med and perhaps still gardened and whose owner spoke Hebrew with a touch of Polish. He had the whole shtick going for him, avuncular yet somehow also cold-blooded.

  He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels, and assured me that, one, retribution would be enacted; two, I was a hero of the Jewish People; and, three, all my medical bills including rehabilitation, counseling by Ms. Katsir or the Russian speaker of my choice, and any necessary prosthetics would be taken care of courtesy of that same Jewish People for whom I had so recently become a hero. “And no copay!” he added. Finally he inched a little closer, patted the air above my hand, and asked me if there was anything else I needed. I could tell he was not much moved by my plight. I had only a torn-up face, busted eardrums, and a severed bicep. He was probably, and rightly, thinking of Dasha Cohen, the girl in the coma, only sixteen years old; or rather he was probably thinking he did not want to face her parents. Her picture had been in Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth that morning. And even though the doctors forbade me to read the papers, Anyusha brought in several anyway, because I asked her to, including Vesti, which I never read because I don’t want my news in Russian, but, in this case, I did. This was on the second day of my internment, the first time I saw Dasha’s face, but of course at the time I only vaguely understood her importance to me. In fact, I was more interested in finding out what had happened to me. Natural enough. Where exactly did the bomb go off? When exactly? How strong was the explosion? Of what did the bomb consist? How much of my lovely street corner was in ruins?

  In the meantime the Minister of Blown-Up People set a little Israeli flag in a tiny stand upon my night table, beside which he placed his card. And with that he said shalom and left the room.

  Anyusha got up from her chair, made her way around my bed, and picked up the card.

  “Cool,” she declared.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just think it’s nice.”

  Suddenly I was frightened for her. Who was taking care of her?

  “Where’s Babushka?” I said.

  “Don’t worry about Babushka. I’m staying with Shana.”

  “Shana?”

  “Don’t you remember her mom came with me this morning? She already told you I was staying there.”

  “So you’re okay?”

  “Of course, I’m okay. I’m always okay. Or don’t you know that by now?”

  “So you’re okay?” I repeated, or at least I think I did, but maybe I fell back asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, she was gone.

  • • •

  It had been Anyusha who first mentioned the name Amir Hamid. He had not yet made it into the papers, but his face was already on Channel 1, “At least once every five minutes,” Anyusha exclaimed.

  “Then it will be in Maariv this evening, for sure,” I said. “Bring me a copy.”

  “No problem, Papoola,” she smiled.

  The newspaper photos Anyusha smuggled in were not very helpful, and the doctors wouldn’t let me watch TV. “For God’s sake, just rest,” they’d ordered. But I needed to see, not sleep. I needed to gauge exactly how close I’d come to dying, by what measure the thread of my life was frayed. I needed this in order to appreciate my woundedness, to feel the gravity of my suffering, to let the pleasant shudder of horror sweep over me, to be afraid. And so I craved to see with my own eyes the headless torsos, the severed limbs, the twisted metal, the broken glass, the blood-soaked benches shredded into splinters. Otherwise, I was just in the hospital with a few stitches on my forehead. I might as well have slipped in the tub or walked through the patio door on my way to the barbecue. So I studied the newspaper photos with great, even exquisite care. But all they were were shots of emergency workers lifting gurneys into ambulances.

  “Have you been to see it?” I asked my daughter.

  “I’m sure it’s already cleaned up. The only thing different is probably the bus shelter is gone.”

  “Well,” I said, “don’t go over there. You understand?”

  She shrugged and returned to her comic book. “By tomorrow the shelter will be back, too.”

  Over time, I gleaned the facts. Young Amir Hamid from a town somewhere near Bethlehem in the Judean Hills, the son of Abdul-Latif Hamid, a shopkeeper specializing in auto repair, and Najya Hamid, the mother of four—Amir had three sisters—was given a vest into which were sewn eight small tubes of C-4, a high explosive popular in American action movies, which were activated by pressing the unlock button of a Mercedes-Benz ignition key. The key had been wired to a simple detonator fitted into a small pocket in the suicide vest and was powered by two double-A batteries that had previously lived in the remote control of Amir Hamid’s father’s television set. This was the small detail that finally ripped the veil of lassitude from my eyes.

  Did Hamas suicide vests come with a label that read BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED? There must have been a story, more than what I learned when Najya, the mother, appeared on Al Jazeera and Palestine TV triumphantly holding up the remote control with its empty battery compartment and crying, “These are the batteries of martyrdom! Victory is Allah’s, mighty and benevolent, and to his servant, Muhammad, may a prayer of peace be upon him!” No. They’d done a little test, his Hamas babysitter and Amir, and the original batteries were duds. “I have some at home,” Amir must have told him, probably thinking, Why spend money on new batteries that are only going to be used once? I imagined the frustration when Amir opened the back of his radio and found it used C batteries. The camera, Walkman, and nose-hair clipper—they all took triple-As. Finally, in desperation he popped open his dad’s beloved remote control. He must have known how pissed off Abdul-Latif would be when he came home and tried to turn on Who Wants to Win a Million? on Syria TV. But what could he do? Mr. Hamas was waiting at the safe house with a vest full of C-4 and a video camera, so he muttered a prayer of regret, stuffed his father’s CopperTops into his pocket, and placed the now-lifeless remote on his father’s pillow with a little note—“Sorry, but your batteries are needed to liberate Palestine. Love, Amir.” Maybe he thought he should have left a few shekels for new ones but decided he needed what little he had in his pockets for carfare. Perhaps then he took one last look around his father’s house, the house of his childhood, his youth, his young adulthood now come to an end, took in with a sigh the photos on the walls—the family portrait taken when little Salah was only two, or the one of himself on his twelfth birthday, or his parents’ wedding photo, or his three sisters in their school uniforms—perhaps he hesitated one moment more to inhale the scent of tobacco, the musty carpet, last night’s eggplant fatteh, and the peculiar residue of motor oil that permeated any room his father long inhabited; I can only hope his mother was then taking her midmorning nap, so he could, at last, having refocused his mind on the Koran and the blessings of Allah, quietly slip through the door and run back to the moldy basement where Mr. Hamas was waiting impatiently, perhaps worrying that Amir had changed his mind.

  Hamas must have been using some crappy batteries from India, I thought.

  But crappy batteries or not, Najya Hamid was a proud mom. Even some weeks later, after the IDF bulldozed her house, and she, Abdul-Latif, and the girls had to move in with Abdul-Latif’s brother a few blocks away on Armenia Street, she said she wished Amir would come back to life so that he could blow himself up all over again. This was in a little film called Mothers of Martyrs that was broadcast repeatedly on PBC.

  I was struck by this incident of the batteries. I wondered what Mr. Abdul-Latif Hamid felt when he learned that it was his own batteries that set off the explosion that blew his son to pieces and massacred eight other people, including Suliman bin-Sula and Mukhtar Raif, two Arab construction workers on the first leg of their long commute back to Ramalah. I remember thinking this weeks later, and in great agitation rising from my chair and walking across the living room to Anyusha who was doing homework at the kitchen table, and running my fingers through her thick, dark hair,
which she had recently cut short and spiky to look like her Japanese comic book heroes, and thinking: What of mine will you steal to kill yourself with?

  The bomb went off at exactly 4:23 p.m. on that Wednesday afternoon in 1996, in a bus shelter on the corner of the street my office is on. Even though the explosion was timed with the onset of rush hour, the authorities speculated that it ignited prematurely, perhaps even accidentally, as the C-4 would have caused significantly more damage had Amir actually stepped onto the bus before pressing the unlock button on the Mercedes key. As it was, the pressure wave shattered windows in a fifty-meter radius and sent debris flying in a more or less perfect circle at a velocity approaching the speed of sound. This short (less than one second) but quite lethal (nine dead, forty-two wounded) shock wave exceeded one thousand tons per square millimeter at the epicenter of the blast; by the time it reached my office, approximately twenty-four meters away, the pressure had decreased to a mere three hundred and twenty kilograms per square millimeter, enough to break glass and pop eardrums and throw a seventy-five-kilo man off his chair but not enough to rip apart my innards or soften the masonry in my three-hundred-year-old building significantly enough to bring the walls down around my head. However, the Egged bus that had, some seconds earlier, come to a halt in front of Amir was thrown three meters into the air and landed across the street, on its side, like a dead horse. The bus shelter was vaporized. There remained only a few stems of twisted aluminum poking up from the ground. On one of these, a life-size poster of Rita on the cover of her new album doggedly hung on, flapping in the wind, her face dripping with blood.

  This particular detail I know because it was described to me by several bystanders, mostly people who were in the coffee shop across the square, a coffee shop I myself frequented most days of the week. Everyone knows me there, and everyone found it necessary to tell me the same story. I wondered if they had all seen it or if they had merely heard it from one another. It didn’t really matter. I asked my friend Lonya—who now calls himself Ari—who happened to be coming to see me that day and had just turned the corner onto my street when the bomb exploded. He could not remember the poster.