The Wanting Read online

  “Still, these things mean something,” he insisted.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It was a dream. Haven’t you had a million dreams, and in your whole life has any of them come true?”

  “They don’t have to come true because they already are true.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I’m going to need help replacing my fucking window.”

  “Oh!” he cried.

  “What?”

  But I saw it, too. The Arab’s head floating past my patio doors.

  “How is that possible?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “That fellow’s head.”

  “What head?”

  And then I realized he hadn’t seen the head at all. He’d cried “Oh!” because Daphne had entered the room.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked.

  At the last minute there was a face, a young girl looking out the window of the bus, and not even looking at me, just out the window, her eyes wide with the life that was so new to her. Perhaps she was thinking she had not done her homework, and the wide eyes were imagining the scene when she would be called upon to do her report, or maybe she was just watching the people pass by, I don’t know. But her eyes were blue, like mine. I decided to press the button, but not on the bus. Just like that, things change. So the last thing I saw before I pushed the unlock on the key that Ra’id Mashriki had given me was the way this little girl blinked, so slowly, as if she could not bear to close those wide eyes to this beautiful world even for a fraction of a second.

  I was not intending to kill anyone specifically, with the exception of course of myself, but I certainly had it in my mind to destroy as many of my enemies as I could. So in spite of the girl, I am proud of that. I am content.

  But I am confused that I am not in Paradise with my dark-eyed maidens and rivers of wine, at peace with the pleasure of Allah and his angels. I am aware I have been following this man, Roman Guttman. I understand, though I don’t know how, that he is an architect, famous for a certain style, which his admirers refer to as “Roman-esque.” It is a style you will not see in the neighborhood in which my mother, Najya, is now secretly weeping uncontrollably and my father, Abdul-Latif, is sitting on the floor staring at his hands. The apartment Roman Guttman designed in Netanya with the swimming pool in the living room, or the house on Mount Carmel, which looks rather like a tarantula wearing a golden skull cap—these you will not find in Jabal or Hebron, in Qalqilia or my own Beit Ibrahim.

  Shouldn’t Roman Guttman be as dead as I am? Shouldn’t he be suffering the torments of Hell? Apparently Allah had other plans, since He sent my head to warn him, why I cannot say. Who am I that Allah might confide in me? I would quote from the Holy Qur’an at this point, but that is the problem, that is the essence of the whole problem: I have never been able to memorize it. Not really any of it, save the seven tender verses, and not even those very well.

  Perhaps I’m supposed to speak to him, but where are my vocal cords? It seems I am all thought and no sensation! Except for this feeling of mute giddiness, the kind one gets when dreaming of flying—weightless but always on the verge of falling, as if held aloft by an endless length of twine that at any moment could be cut and down you go.

  It’s not a bad feeling, really.

  On a hillside above our town there was a ruin, some stones piled in a heap, white as lye, the bare outline of a foundation. Probably it was just an old Arab house, but perhaps it was a Roman villa, or a merchant’s stables from the time of Saladin, or a Turkish outpost, or maybe it was the threshing floor of my great-great-uncle Kemal, or perhaps the French army stored sacks of their soft white flour there, or it was a remote British armory blown up by the Jews or ransacked by the Mufti; whatever it was then, it was peaceful now, the goats gracefully tiptoeing through the rubble, munching the bits of grass that shot up through the fissures in the stones, scenting the air green. I was munching something, too—cucumber, on the edge of a knife, and tomato, sliced into quarter moons, with salt and savlik—yes, that was me. I watched my feet hanging over the remains of the ancient wall, and alongside me I felt with all my senses, more than the jingling of goats’ bells and the gentle bleating of the lambs—his laughter. I furrowed my brow. Was he laughing at me again?

  “Oh, Amir,” he said. “Look at that! A hawk. Coming right at us. No, stay put. It won’t come that close.”

  “But it wants my cucumber!” I cried.

  “It thinks you are a mouse. It wants you!”

  I heard myself bleat just like the baby goats, “Go away, bird!”

  “Hold up your cucumber!” he said. “Maybe he’ll take that instead of you!”

  Desperately I ducked down, holding the cucumber as high as I could, an offering to the wide-winged beast. But when I looked up, the hawk was gone, floating somewhere among the clouds.

  Fadi laughed again but held me tight. “It’s all right, little one,” he said. “He’s gone. And anyway, I was only joking. Come on, don’t cry. I’ll give you my mammoul.” He took the mammoul from the basket and put it in front of my nose. I could smell the walnuts, the butter.

  “I’m telling Ummi.” I pouted.

  “Don’t be a baby. Take the mammoul, and we’re even.”

  Who could resist mammoul? Even now, if someone were to offer it to me, I might feel regret for having given up life so easily; to smell that sticky scent again, to have the mammoul melt in my mouth, my tongue awash in honey and walnut paste.

  Of course, Fadi had brought two mammoul and we both fell into a happy eating. Down below, our village was like a pop-up book against the open pages of hillsides and roads and, in the distance, the edge of Bethlehem and its teeming thousands. Between the two was the refugee camp—not a camp—this word confused me because there was no army and there were no tents—but, pressing upon one another, little huts and shacks and then big buildings, too, lots of them—it was more or less a city, wasn’t it? I never went there to play. The boys were too rough, Umm always said. Everyone draws on the walls there, she said. Everywhere they were hanging illegal flags.

  We finished our mammoul, Fadi wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then I very carefully did the same.

  “See that?” he pointed. “That’s your house.”

  “Which one?”

  “That one.”

  “But which one?”

  “Pretend you are that hawk, Amir. Pretend you are flying high above. Swoop down from the hills, and see—there is the minaret of the White Mosque, and there, the other one with the round roof, is the Jabir, see it?”

  “I’ve never been in it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’re a hawk, remember? Now, fly from the White Mosque to the Mosque of Jabir, and you go one two three four five six seven eight, ah! And you see the little house with the brown roof, and you go over that roof, straight ahead—”

  “Which way?”

  “Away from where we were now, straight ahead. And you see one tall house—that is Mukhtar’s house, yes, your friend Mukhtar—and so just beyond that one … you see that TV antenna? You see it? That is your house, Amir. That’s where you live.”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, even though I wasn’t sure I actually saw it. It didn’t matter. What I did see was a beautiful sky, a shining village, hillsides of goats and bright grasses, fields of soybean, orchards of pistachio and almond, olives and figs.

  I looked over at Fadi. He was already standing up, brushing off his shorts.

  Fadi. Like a brother but not a brother. Like a father but not a father. Fadi.

  “Come on,” he said. And he took my hand.

  Roman Guttman walks in his gardens. Inside, the guests are arriving, wondering where he is. They hover in the kitchen, not knowing whether to eat something or not. Everything in this kitchen is icy steel, although at the moment it’s covered with flowers, and that is beautiful. There are also three bedrooms in this house, one his, one his little girl’s, and the th
ird is empty. It is completely empty. It contains nothing. This room, this empty room, stops me, stops me colder than the stainless steel, and disturbs me more than the two bathrooms with their elaborate fixtures, more than the washer and dryer hidden behind folding doors, and more than the second bathroom with its marble tub, and more than the two TVs and the Nintendo with its maze of wires. I think of this empty room and my head goes spinning, literally, round and round, nobody to stop it, no gravity, no connection to anything but the disturbance going on inside it.

  He loiters in his garden. He searches the sky once more, looking for me. Can he see me? For some reason, I have to be honest, I hope that he can’t.

  The house was beginning to fill up. My mother had arrived, my old army buddies, some Russians, my employees. They all did the same thing when they opened the door. They gasped. My mother fanned herself with a magazine and wailed, “Bojha moi! Bojha moi! My God! My God!” But as soon as she realized Daphne had gone into the kitchen to cook something, she threw down the magazine. “My darling,” she said to Daphne, “go. Sit. Let a mother do her work.” She spoke in Russian, but I suppose the language of mothers requires no actual words, and Daphne slipped gracefully out of the way.

  Lonya watched all this carefully. “Where did you find her?” he asked.

  “She’s a neighbor. Leave her alone.”

  “Not for me,” he said. “For you!”

  Lonya casually made his way over to Daphne, and I stepped out into the garden. What was it I had seen? It was not possible, of course. It was just a symptom. But I was absolutely certain it was there anyway, hovering just beyond my periphery. Whenever I turned, it was gone. Idiot, I told myself. What are you looking for?

  • • •

  I tried to relax and breathe in the perfume of the garden. How different this was from the yard in Moscow, contained not by towering gray walls but by meandering garlands of morning glory and tea roses bursting from trellises Anyusha and I had built together. There was also a small square of velvet lawn and three happy banks of flowers: bulbs in spring; foxglove, delphinium, hydrangea, and scarlet in summer.

  I checked the bird feeders. This was one of the first things Anyusha ordered me to do when I got home. “You might be half dead, Papoola, but that doesn’t mean our little birds have to be. And after that,” she chirped, “you can feed me.”

  It would be a while till I’d be able to cook for her; at least I could attend to the birds. But when I bent down to pick up the bag of seed, my head began to throb, my chest constricted, and great shining swords of electricity sparked at the corners of my eyes. The doves and swallows, the warblers, whitethroats, and finches that for so many years had come to my little garden for their evening meal would fly away hungry tonight, and my heart broke for them.

  So I went in, saw my well-wishers, and after about half an hour, collapsed into my bed, even though it was only four in the afternoon.

  Chapter Three

  DEAR YOU,

  Mysterious Gods of the Seven Winds

  Power of Seven Wonders and Seven Sins

  Seven times Seven times Seven again

  Open your Portal and Let Me In!

  MY FATHER IS A MESS, and that is why I am writing this incantation. I believe that if I write it correctly, my father’s life will be more like the story I am writing and less like the life he is living. My writing is magic. My writing is magic. My writing is magic. I can write his story, and he can jump right into it. I can be in it, too. And Shana. And even Mom, if he wants. I know this kind of thing mostly happens only in manga and science fiction movies and graphic novels. But I am hoping this will work on my father. I ask forgiveness for stealing the idea from Fushigi Yûgi, but I don’t know any other actual incantations. I am not stupid. I know that Fushigi Yûgi is just a made-up fantasy, and so it is not a real incantation. I have actually transformed it, though. Subtly, and you may not have noticed it. I have moved some words around and changed some, too. This way God will listen to me.

  Pop doesn’t know this, but I have been talking to a rabbi. He would kill me if he knew. He hates religious guys. He thinks they are to blame for everything. He told me once it was hard for him not to spit when he passed one of those “morons with side curls” (his exact words). That’s how much he hates them. But my rabbi is not ultra ultra. He’s just, I don’t know, he talks to me. My friend Yohanan, he is from a religious home, not haredi, just kippah sruga, you know, regular. He goes to his own school, of course, but they live in our complex, and he hangs out with me and some of my friends. I like him. He’s different from the other boys. Not that he can’t be mean, but he thinks about things, he’s more interested in what’s inside, not just what’s on the surface. Of course he does not read Fushigi Yûgi, no boys do, but he likes graphic novels, too, only he prefers things like Vampire Hunter, Transmetropolitan, and Sin City, all of which he has to hide from his parents. Recently he brought a copy of Maus home. His parents didn’t know what to think about it, because it’s about the concentration camps and anti-Semitism and things like that, but after a while they made him throw it away. He didn’t, of course. He gave it to me. Actually, I keep all his graphic novels. My dad doesn’t care about these things. He says I can read whatever I want. He believes in freedom. Anyway, I was talking to Yohanan about my problem, and he said I should talk to Rabbi Keren about it, so one day I did. He just sat me down and asked me what it was I was worried about. I told him. He said, Anna, the way you feel is exactly as you should feel. And then he said, Sometimes people imagine things. And sometimes what you see is really what you see.

  We are not exactly studying Torah or anything like it, though he gives me quotations and stuff from Torah or the prophets or whatever. Then he has to tell me the story that it comes from and what the comments about it are, and finally I decided it’s just easier to read it all for myself. So he gave me a Bible and some commentary, and I took it home. I mean, we study the Bible in my school but mostly for history, and everyone hates it. Pop came into my room once when I was reading it. What are you reading that for? he asked me. It’s just crap. Throw it away.

  I knew he wouldn’t make me throw it away, but I decided not to read it at home anymore. It’s the one book I keep at Yohanan’s! Isn’t that funny?

  I began to write this journal for Pop not long ago, just yesterday actually. That’s when I thought of it. I would do a Fushigi Yûgi for Pop. At first I thought I would make him rich and famous, but then I thought probably not, because in a story you always have to take away what someone has, and they have to struggle to get it back, but when they get it back it’s not what they thought it was. That is your basic story line. But I don’t want Pop to struggle.

  What I want is for him to SEE.

  Also, since this is the first entry in my journal, I will confess it is not my idea to keep one. I got it from a book called Finding the Good When Things Go Bad. It’s basically the stupidest book I ever read, but I liked the journal idea, so here you are. I didn’t know what to call it until that last sentence, but as I wrote it, it just came to me. Here you are. Get it? I’m calling it “YOU.” Which is all kind of circular, but so is algebra. And nobody seems to have a problem with that.

  Chapter Four

  PERHAPS I DID NOT MENTION that I was on pretty heavy painkillers, Demerol, in fact, though at some point I believe I was taking OxyContin. I can’t remember, which is the one happy outcome of opiates. But by now, my doctors were strict with me. They pulled me off the medication long before I wanted them to, and I ended up, basically, with a handful of aspirin. Probably that explains what happened.

  I had bused into Tel Aviv to have my dressings changed at the clinic. I hadn’t been out on my own in some time, and the idea of sharing some fresh air with the rest of humanity seemed especially pleasing, so I went for a walk. It was a busy time of day and the streets were crowded. I noticed immediately people were staring at me—it was the bandages, of course, and, I guess, the dragging lower lip and the purple neck. One
could see in their faces the usual mixture of horror and pity. This was entirely normal, I told myself. I would have stared, too—anyone would.

  At the crosswalk, the light changed. I took a step off the curb, and there right in front of me, stepping off the curb opposite, was a young Arab. Modern. Secular. Jeans. Striped polo. Running shoes. Shiny watch. He looked straight at me. He neither grimaced nor raised his eyebrows in sympathy, no acknowledgment at all; he just moved toward me, his gaze fixed. I found myself also staring at him, locking onto his eyes: dull eyes, lacking in all inquisitiveness. He was passing to my left, he in his flow of pedestrians, I in mine. So slowly did this unfold that I saw a bird flap its wings, one, two, three, as it passed just above us; I saw a woman pull at her ear, watched the skin stretch like taffy; in the middle of all this stood a policeman, and in his whistle I could clearly see the sounding ball bounce up and down, up and down, almost glacially, though I could not yet even hear the sound. Then the Arab blinked, and I smashed him in the face with my fist.

  Suddenly there was a huge commotion. Someone grabbed me from behind, and some other fellow, I had no idea who, was on the ground in front of me, screaming, Help, Help, Help!

  “Stop it!” someone shouted in my ear.

  I looked over my shoulder. It was the cop.

  The man on the ground was still screaming, “You maniac! You crazy person!”

  “Calm down!” the policeman said to me.

  “Me?”

  I was confused, though, because the man on the ground was screaming in such excellent Hebrew.

  Some hours later I was given the police report. According to Mordecai Kashani, a sabra of Iranian-Jewish descent, he had been crossing Ibn Gvirol Street thinking of what to get his son for his graduation from the third grade, which was happening in less than a week, so he was not paying attention to anyone, when out of the blue this “lunatic hit me on the chin and began to pummel me mercilessly and call me a stinking Arab, a goddamned murderer, a motherfucking Hezbollah rag-head baby killer, I’m going to shove a fucking pipe bomb up your ass, how would you like that, you Hamas piece-of-shit garbage?” Mr. Kashani went on to write, “This is word for word, exactly as I recall it. I never saw the man before. I never saw the man when I was crossing the street. In fact, I never noticed him until he hit me. But never will I forget him. Even when all those bandages come off, I will recognize him.”