The Wanting Page 6

  “And what’s that?” the tall one said, pointing with his white fingers to the third floor of our building. We all turned.

  “Oh!” gasped Mr. Nashir. “Oh no!”

  Someone had hung a flag from the window of the science room. Not a real flag exactly, just something someone painted on a small piece of burlap. We hadn’t even noticed it.

  “That flag is illegal,” the smallest soldier barked in his perfect Arabic. He was an Arab Jew. They were always the worst. “You,” he said to the fat kid, Mu’ad Shafri, “take it down.”

  Mu’ad was two years older than I, but he froze into some kind of rock, a rock of fat flesh, shivering like an olive branch. His eyes flew about like two crazy mosquitoes, but his feet would not move.

  Mr. Nashir said to him, “Go ahead, Mu’ad. It’s in room 305. Yes, yes, go ahead. Just lean out the window and pull it in. Go, my child.”

  “Run!” cried the soldier.

  And Mu’ad ran. He ran so hard it seemed to us we could hear him clanking up the staircases with his heavy feet, his breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps. You could almost feel the sweat running down his sides into his underpants, and you had to resist the urge to tug at your own.

  Then the little soldier said in Arabic—it wasn’t so perfect after all, maybe it was Iraqi, maybe Moroccan—“How is it you have a PLO flag? Are you hiding terrorists here? What are you teaching them, you son of a bitch? We’ll have to search the whole goddamned building.”

  “It’s just boys,” Mr. Nashir said. “Just boys. You know boys. They do pranks.”

  “Pranks?”

  “They like flags,” he said.

  Mu’ad Shafri’s head appeared at the window.

  Beneath him, the flag was but a speck of green and black, red and white, held in place by two nails, which Mu’ad now tried to yank out with his fat fingers.

  “What’s the matter with you? Pull it out!” yelled the soldiers. “Are you so weak you can’t pull out a fucking tack?”

  “Goddamn it!” they screamed.

  “Forget the nails. Just rip the goddamned thing out.”

  “Do it!”

  But anyone could see that Mu’ad was shaking like a leaf and could no longer understand what they were saying to him. Half of it was in Hebrew anyway, half in that foreign Arabic, and some even in English because when they thought you couldn’t understand them, for some reason they talked to you in English. Mu’ad tugged at the flag with all his might.

  One of the soldiers started to laugh, and then another.

  Mu’ad called down, “I’m trying! I’m trying!”

  But he could barely get the words out because of all the tears he was trying to choke back into his throat.

  And then the Arab Jew soldier looked around at all of us, deciding. He pointed to Isa Mohammad, even though he was only in the first year and couldn’t even read yet. “Should we send this little baby up there to help you, you stupid little prick?” he shouted.

  Mr. Nashir, his head still bent, took another step forward. “He’s only five.”

  The Arab soldier shrugged. “All right. Then let’s find someone else to help him.”

  He scanned our little group. He pointed here, pointed there. Then he pointed directly to me.

  I felt a hot, horrible, wet spreading in my pants. O Allah, I prayed, no!

  Mr. Nashir came as close to the soldier as he dared. “Please,” he said, “please. They’re just boys.”

  Suddenly, one of the other soldiers snapped, “For God’s sake, Shimi.” He threw his weapon over his shoulder and ran inside the school. This time we really did hear the clanking up the stairs.

  Mu’ad’s head disappeared, and the soldier leaned out the window. He waved to the others below, and in less than a second our precious banner fluttered to the ground like a fallen angel, its wings sheared from its body. It lay there in the school yard, just a piece of burlap.

  I slipped to the back of the group of boys and stood, bent over at the waist, hands covering my groin, fighting now my own tears, tears that had nothing to do with flags and soldiers and Mu’ad.

  Mr. Nashir reached down and picked up the flag, folded it in two, and handed it to the soldiers.

  When they were gone, Mr. Nashir sat down on the edge of the fountain and waved us back to our games. Upon his face was the look of a person asleep in his own head, and when the boys came near, he smiled at them exactly as I had seen my parents smile at a sick person or a beggar, without blinking, without looking, without speaking.

  As for me, I ran from the yard, rolled in the dirt to cover my shame, and made my way through alleys and back ways, through bushes and under eaves, until I was safely at home.

  “Umma!” I burst out. But she merely held out her hand to me, and I gave her my pants. All I could think to do was go to the sink to bathe.

  Now the face of Mu’ad Shafri fills my mind—and the tears he refused to shed cut through my heart like razors through time. They find their way to my own eyes where they have long ago thickened into the black blood of martyrdom. Now, do not ask me, Shahid, why do you kill the innocent? There are no innocent.

  Chapter Five

  Dear You,

  I wasn’t going to even write about what happened the other day, but it happened, and therefore it’s history, and you don’t hide history or try to change it, unless you’re Stalin or something. I know that history is supposed to be written by the winners, but it seems to me that is not a good approach. Take the Bible. It’s the first history, but it’s actually told by the losers, since in the end the Israelites are expelled from their own land and they have to go to Babylon, as in, by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept (psalm whatever), and I think it’s because they’re so weepy that the writing is so good. Take the story of David. The way poor King Saul gets written about, it’s like he’s an idiot and a maniac, because you think, well, it was written by David’s guys. But by the end, David looks more like the idiot and maniac, even though he’s supposed to be the hero. Point: there comes a time in everyone’s life when only the truth will do, and you have to look reality square in the eyes. This is one of those times. Also, when you look into the past, you see the future. This is physics.

  So this is what happened. As per usual, Pop was lying on the couch with a bowl of prostokvasha on his lap (translation: disgusting homemade clabbered milk that Babushka still makes), and his sweat suit stunk like the Carmel fish market, and his socks were absolutely despicable on the bottom because he insists on walking into the garden with them on, and here it was two in the afternoon, and I was already back from school because it was Friday, and I said to him, Pop come on, let’s DO something, even though to be honest, I don’t usually want to do that much stuff with him. I’m fine, he said, go have fun, I’m working. But of course he wasn’t working. He acts like he’s working, but he hasn’t done anything for weeks. So I said, Let’s go see Ramat Ginsberg. Ramat Ginsberg is the new neighborhood where he is supposed to be building this amazing house for the guy who invented Kree, the moronic video game, and I know he was very focused on it before the bombing, but of course he hasn’t mentioned it since. So I said, I bet it’s already built by now, and wouldn’t it be great to see it? He said, They built it? What the fuck? Who told them to? Bladt! Bladt! Bladt! (Sorry, but I’m going for historical accuracy.) And I said, I don’t know, maybe we should check it out? But Pop’s driving the car is not a great idea, at least not yet, as you will see when I finish telling everything. So I told him I was going to call Yehudah. Yehudah is our driver. Not like our driver like we’re rich, but just when Pop is away, Yehudah is the one who drives me, and also he takes Pop to the airport or whatever. (Basically, Yehudah owns his own cab.) I also suggested Pop take a shower or at least wash off the effluvium from the corners of his mouth—it’s Latin, I explained. However, about fifteen minutes later he emerged in actual clothing. He had on his khakis and a pressed hunter-green short-sleeved shirt, the kind of thing he wears only when he wants to look
very official, and his hair was combed, and his teeth appeared to be brushed. Then he pointed to his pants and shirt and said, Is this OK? I couldn’t answer, and he said, That bad? But it wasn’t bad. It was beautiful. The way flowers that open up suddenly are beautiful. I thought it would be best if I just went ahead and called Yehudah.

  When he showed up at the door, Pop naturally said, “I don’t know why you’re here. I can drive myself.”

  “I don’t know either,” Yehudah said, “but I’m here, so get in.”

  And off we went. Ramat Ginsberg is north of us, not exactly on the coast, but it’s ritzy, or at least it’s going to be. It’s not skyscrapers; it’s mansions, which is the new thing. They named it after the poet Allen Ginsberg, which is quite ironic if you ask me, because (a) he was a Buddhist, and (b) mansions? But he once visited the moshav that used to be there, and so when the moshavniks decided to become developers instead of farmers they insisted on Ramat Ginsberg. That is Israel in a nutshell.

  Anyway, it used to be orange groves, but now it’s just dirt and junk in various states of construction.

  “I thought you said they finished it,” Pop said.

  “I guess I was wrong,” I replied.

  In fact, all they’d done was put in the foundation and then left it, and it was like a dried-up riverbed down there, cracked earth and broken concrete.

  Pop began his walk around the property—the architect walk, I call it—and as usual I went with him. We strolled to where the back of the house will be, and Pop knelt down and I knelt down with him, and he touched the earth with his fingers and I touched the earth with mine. Pool goes here, he said. Gazebo there. I saved some of the orange trees, he said, and we’ll replant them here. The client likes his juice.

  He actually smiled at the thought of this rich Jew and his fresh orange juice, and I thought … but then he stood up and said, OK, let’s go home. Suddenly I got the idea that I was incredibly hungry, so I cried, Let’s get ice cream! To which, of course, he replied, No. OK, I said, but what if Yehudah drops us at the movies? We can always take a cab home. Pop said he was tired, and there was nothing good playing anyway. But I’m so bored, I said, aren’t you just bored to death? No, he said. I’m not bored. I’m tired.

  But then something happened. Something I cannot explain to this day. He yelled, “What was that?”

  “What was what?” I said.

  “In the sky.”

  “Where?”

  “There—what the fucking hell was that?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Don’t you see it?”

  “It’s clouds,” I explained.

  “It’s not clouds! For God’s sake, it’s not clouds—he won’t stop looking at me!”

  And then—wham!—he fell down. He just slipped off the edge of the concrete and fell into the open foundation. I didn’t know what to do. It was like my voice got lost somewhere in my throat. He was lying there in that hole, and I wanted to say something, but I just couldn’t. I should have said something. I should have done something. But. I don’t know, all I could think was: He fell. And he was so, I don’t know, fallen.

  I think I started to sweat because I was a little dizzy, but then just like that he stood up, brushed himself off, and reached his hand up to me. He was shaking, I think, and his eyes were red, and there was mud on his face. Come on, he said, help me up and let’s get the hell out of here. Finally I could do something. I put my arm around him, and I think I was actually holding him up, because he was so heavy, but my own legs were shaking like crazy, too.

  Finally I said to him, “Abba, what were you looking at? What were you yelling about?”

  “I wasn’t looking at anything,” he said.

  But he was looking at something. And he fell.

  That’s how it happened. That is history. And it is not so easy to write this kind of thing.

  It is highly unlikely that I believe in God, and not only because I grew up in a Communist country and loved Lenin more than I loved my own father until I was twelve years old: I simply don’t have a feel for it. So, why then, lying in bed, my nerves ready to spring at the slightest creak from any dark corner, did I obsess about Moishe, my imaginary paramedic, whom, I had come to believe, was, yes, a messenger from God. Even though there is no God.

  I jumped at the sound of every passing ambulance and sometimes even raced to the scene to get another glimpse of Moishe lifting some new victim onto his high-tech gurney. To be honest, there were no more bombings in the few months after mine—the intifada was over, peace reigned supreme!—but if I came upon a traffic accident, a heart attack, a beating, a suicide, I pushed my way past the yellow tape to grab the medic by the shoulders and cry, Moishe! It’s me! only to be met by a confused and alarmed glare and the outstretched baton of a policeman. And each time I asked myself, why are all of these paramedics who so closely resemble Moishe with their beards flowering like bougainvillea and their side curls neatly twined over the tops of their ears not, in fact, Moishe? Yes, yes, I knew he was a hallucination. What else could he be? But one with divine powers. And I knew that at every moment of every day, somewhere in this country a siren was playing its heartrending song on its way to someone’s wrecked body, and Moishe was on his way with it—to breathe his salami breath up some poor guy’s smashed nose.

  A few weeks after my run-in with the law, I called the shrink, Sepha, and made my appointment as promised. Her office was in a fairly upscale section of Ramat Aviv, which she shared with three or four other shrinks.

  I asked her to okay it with the parents to let me visit Dasha Cohen.

  “A deal is a deal,” she said, “but now I do want to know, why do you want to see her?”

  “I think she has some sort of answer for me.”

  “Because she’s Russian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because you are ashamed of your survival?”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “And I don’t know if it’s such a good idea,” she said.

  “But a deal is a deal,” I reminded her.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  I kept returning to see her, but the only reason was my desire to connect with Dasha Cohen. I had become obsessed with the idea of seeing her. Maybe I could help her. Maybe I could—who knew what I could do?

  So I sat on Sepha’s couch, and she sat on a large rattan fan-back chair that made her look like Buddha with a cigarette stuck in his mouth, and it always went more or less the same way:

  Dr. Sepha: So?

  Me: So what? Silence.

  Me: Okay. I had a few negative thoughts today. Silence.

  Me: I got angry at the garbage guy. He left a mess around the trash bins.

  Dr. Sepha: Did you say anything to him?

  Me: Who?

  Dr. Sepha: The garbageman.

  Me: No.

  Dr. Sepha: Why not?

  Me: Because he comes by at five o’clock in the morning. He was already in Hebron by the time I got up.

  Dr. Sepha: And this makes you angry.

  Me: What?

  Dr. Sepha: That he was in Hebron.

  Me: He wasn’t really in Hebron. How the hell do I know where he was?

  Dr. Sepha: But you said Hebron.

  Me: It was a joke.

  Dr. Sepha: Ah. Should I laugh?

  Me: Yes, you should laugh. Silence. I sigh. She adjusts her skirt. More silence.

  Dr. Sepha Tell me about Anna.

  Me: Anna’s great.

  Dr. Sepha: By which you mean?

  Me: She’s terrific. She’s wonderful. She’s been a real soldier.

  Dr. Sepha: So you don’t think this whole thing has affected her?

  Me: Of course it’s affected her.

  Dr. Sepha So you’ve spoken to her about it.

  Me: Spoken? Not really.

  Dr. Sepha: Why? Is she also in Hebron?

  Dr. Sepha was driven by the belief that I should confront the event. But what could that possibly mean?
How can you confront the purely physical? It’s like saying I’m going to come to terms with that mountain in front of me. I’m going to understand why it’s standing in my way. I’m going to dig deep into the fact of that mountain, and then somehow it is going to melt into the air or just flatten itself out like a mud pie. That if I just got to know the mountain, I would never again be in its shadow no matter how the sun happened to fall upon it, and as for all the life on it—the goats, the trees, the snakes, the gazelles, the insects—well, to hell with them, they don’t need to exist either. I ask you, who was the trauma victim, me or Sepha? She was the one who wanted to vaporize the facts and process them into extinction. She was the one who spoke of assimilation and absorption. It was the alimentary school of psychotherapy. But you cannot eat your life. That’s what I told her. And this, she actually found funny. That’s when she finally gave me the details on Dasha Cohen.

  It turned out she had been moved to a facility south of Be’er Sheva called Ganei Z’rikha—Sunrise Gardens, I guess you would say—to be nearer her family. It wasn’t a hospital, of course, just a holding tank. There was nothing more they could do for her. From now on it was all machines and IVs.

  I plotted my move.

  Anyusha was already up that morning, hogging the bathroom. In the old days, the bathroom door was always open; now it was bolted like a Mossad safe house. What did she think I would see? Not that I wanted to see, God knows. I could not have put into words the horror I felt at the very idea of her—even now I can’t quite say it—but the truth was, she already had two tiny Katyushas shooting out of her blouse, aimed at—I didn’t want to know whom, either. I realized I was supposed to have had a talk with her, but somehow I could never bring myself to do it. Instead, I purchased three or four varieties of sanitary products and left them in the cupboard. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Papoola,” she said, “you didn’t even get my brand.”

  Anyway, the door was finally unlocked and out she came, all dressed except for the Elvis Presley slippers, which flopped on the floor like lazy, long-haired castanets.