The Wanting Read online

  “Hey, Pop,” she said, “don’t worry about breakfast. I’ll pick up something.”

  “I can make you breakfast,” I replied.

  “Not hungry.”

  “I’ll drive you to school,” I said.

  “It’s okay, I’ll take the bus.”

  “I don’t want you taking the bus. I told you that.”

  “Then I’ll get a ride with Shana. Or walk even. What a concept!”

  “Why don’t you let me take you?”

  “You’re not dressed.”

  “I can get dressed.”

  “Don’t get all crazy, Pop. It’s fine.” She packed her book bag, glanced inside the refrigerator, let out a sad little sigh, and went to put on her shoes. Then she came back, took me by both hands, and sat me down at the kitchen table. “Okay,” she said, “tonight for the thing at school, what time?”

  “Seven o’clock.”

  “Five thirty!”

  “Right. I know that.”

  “I put it on the refrigerator, see?”

  “Okay,” I said, “I got it.”

  “So five thirty we have to actually be there.”

  “Enough, Anka.”

  She finally let go of my hands, hefted her bag, smiled that milky smile of hers, and called out in English, “See you later, alligator!”

  “Just don’t take the bus,” I said. And she was out the door.

  I sat there for a minute listening to her footsteps clack down the front path and disappear beyond the gate. In the sad, empty well she’d left behind her, I could almost taste her sweetness and thought how lucky I was to have such a daughter.

  Then I looked at my watch. I could drive down to Be’er Sheva and be back by five thirty, easy.

  I packed a lunch—nothing much: a banana, a bottle of kefir, some halvah, a half loaf of stale black bread, a bottle of water. I don’t know why, but I grabbed my old army knife, probably because it was sitting in the basket with the keys. I slipped behind the wheel of the Fiat. Nothing felt right. I fiddled with the seat, adjusted the mirror, pressed the key into the ignition, went back to adjusting the mirror, caught sight of myself: blue eyes, like in the severed head of Amir Hamid. Indeed, I half expected to see him staring back at me. Finally, I kicked the starter, threw it into gear, and there I was, on the road again. I got on the 4 and swung over to Highway 40 at Ashdod. From there, I simply pointed the car in the direction of the Negev. Back in those days, the Negev was still mostly empty space, 40 was still a two-laner, and though it was only a two-hour drive at most, even if you stopped for a nice lunch, which I didn’t, I felt I was on an adventure. As I passed Rahat, I ate my banana. Then I had to drive through Be’er Sheva itself. They say Abraham lived here. And here Sarah learned that her husband tried to murder their only son. Her broken heart still hovers over the city in a rainless cloud. Through the open window I heard a lot of Russian and whatever it is Ethiopians speak. I finished my halvah and kefir.

  I arrived at the convalescent home just at noon. The sky was cloudless and ethereally blue; the sun, of course, was scorching, and a fiery wind swirled through the parking lot tossing up eddies of dust. As I stepped from the car, sand and pebble swirled around my feet and pelted my face. They’d put Dasha in the middle of nowhere. Jesus, I thought, there’s Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva—why hadn’t they taken her there? Through the vortex of flying sand, I could make out the security guy already lumbering toward me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he replied, looking me over. “What happened to you?”

  “A terrorist incident,” I said.

  He stepped over to my car. “You mind opening the trunk?”

  “Not at all.”

  He sniffed more than looked, circled the car, came back to where I was standing.

  “What’s your business here?” he asked.

  “I’m visiting someone.”

  “Name?”

  “Dasha Cohen. It’s probably written as Darya.”

  “No, your name.”

  I gave him my name.

  He scanned his list. “I don’t see you here.”

  “Do I have to be there?”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “Well, then, I’m there.”

  He looked again. “No. Not here.”

  “Here’s my ID.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re not on the list. You can close the trunk,” he said.

  “I’m supposed to be there.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “It’s not an army base, for God’s sake,” I cried. “It’s just a rehab center.”

  “Sorry. It’s how it is.”

  “Shit. I’m going to call the doctor who was supposed to set this up.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He walked back to his station in front of the clinic and sat himself down on his beach chair. I got into the Fiat, dug up Sepha’s card, and dialed her on my cell. Naturally, I got her voice mail.

  I stared out the window. Except for the tiny clinic and its parking lot ringed with flower beds and a bit of lawn set up for croquet, all was wilderness. Ragged shrubs, piles of rock, and in the distance a few scraggly goats grubbing for a blade or two of Egyptian broom. I heard the beep at the end of her message.

  “Okay, Sepha, it’s me, Guttman, the one from the bombing who hit the Iranian guy. Well, I’m down here in Be’er Sheva where you said I could see Dasha Cohen, but guess what? My name’s not on the list. So I’d appreciate if you called and straightened this out and then called me back.” I recited my number and hung up.

  There was nothing to do but sit there. The security guy seemed to have forgotten all about me and went back to reading an old copy of Blazer. But the car was stifling, so I stepped out onto the driveway. The goats had moved on toward the crest of a little hill, impervious to the heat. The only shade was under the overhang above the entrance, which was taken up by the guard and his beach chair plus a small table on which he had placed his radio and can of Coca-Cola, so I moved off in the direction of the goats without any real plan in mind. As always in the desert, the horizon seemed to flee before me. Blades of hot air, rising like serpents, resolved into amusing images: a hat, a man on a bicycle, a three-legged camel, a caravan of shoes. But what was that? Blacker than the stream of mirages, something quite solid. Ah! The tip of a Bedouin tent peeking over the edge of the hill. It flapped silently in the burning wind. I admired it for its forlorn shape, how it sagged bowlegged like an old beggar. And yet, you outlived the golden palaces of emirs and caliphs, I thought, and even the great temples of Pharaoh.

  I stepped over the border of poppies they’d planted along the edge of the parking lot and felt the desert floor crunch beneath my sneakers. The wind picked up, and the tent bent with it willingly, and I thought of all the things I had ever built and wondered, what creature has ever built a nest better than this? I was determined to take a closer look, but as I approached, a young man came rushing toward me, cursing and waving me away. His brother was beside him, holding up a fist. “Private land! Private land!” they cried. “No pictures! Get out!” Maybe they thought I was a government agent trying to serve them orders to move. The thing everyone says about Bedouins is that since they stay in no place in particular, everywhere they are is home. But it’s not true. They mark out their territory just like anyone else, and within their boundaries they are just as lost as the rest of us.

  I turned around and made my way back to the guard. He looked up warily from his magazine.

  “Nobody trusts anybody anymore,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Come on. I’m just here to see this girl.”

  “Sorry, I can’t do that.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to not do anything.”

  He laughed. “You were really in a bombing?”

  “It’s nothing. Just a few bruises.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re going to have some beautiful scars. You want a Coke?”

  I sq
uatted down beside him. He reached into his cooler and handed me a can. I opened it beneath my nose so I could feel the spritz.

  “I could get you a chair,” he said.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “You’re not on the list, my friend,” he said.

  “I understand that. Really, it was just some sort of miscommunication. Is this not how we do things in the Middle East?”

  He laughed. “I can’t place the accent.”

  “International.”

  He laughed again. “You’re still not on the list.”

  “Actually, I’m closely related to your patient, Dasha Cohen.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. I’m not lying to you.”

  “How can you prove that?”

  “I can take off the last of these bandages.”

  “She was in the same event?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you took off those bandages, I would see what that I haven’t seen before?”

  “Not a goddamned thing. What’s your name?”

  “Carmi.”

  “Nothing you’ve not seen before, Carmi.”

  He clicked his tongue. “You don’t want to tell me the particulars.”

  “No.”

  “You want an ice cream? I’ve got some Eskimos.”

  “Take pity on me, Carmi.”

  “I do pity you,” he said.

  “Then be a friend.”

  We finished our Cokes in silence. Then he got up and said, “You have to avoid the nurses. If anyone is there, you have to come back.”

  “I promise,” I said, and he unlocked the side door.

  I felt like I had stumbled into one of those abandoned churches in Moscow, all cobwebs and echoes and ghosts, although without the cobwebs, since the floors were sparkling with wax and the walls had been freshly scrubbed with disinfectant, but the halls were empty and there was not even the hum of a water cooler. I made my way down the corridor, scanning the name tags on the doors. MEYER, BEN YONA, NAPHTALI, TARPIS, and, finally, COHEN. Below her name the inevitable notation, DO NOT RESUSCITATE. Lamed. Hey. Two letters, that would be the end of her. Each door had a little window, like in a prison. I pressed my face to the glass. Her room was all flowers, get-well cards, balloons. It looked like a little party was going on in there, but when I opened the door, it wasn’t flowers I smelled but piss, stale breath, unwashed skin. I almost fell backward into the hall. Still, I let the door close behind me, swinging shut on its hydraulic arm with a great hiss, as if the air were being let out of a tin of coffee.

  Dasha Cohen no longer looked like her photographs. Her mouth was slightly parted, revealing teeth that had been allowed to yellow, and here and there, in the cracks and joints and along the creases of her gums, the color of green tea. I bent over her. The scent of her breath pooled around me, thick, soupy, palpable, almost edible, like strong cheese. Her skin was white as chalk, leprous, yet blotchy, the blood having settled on the underside of her arms and neck. She looked like a two-tone Moskvitch, white and purple. They’d covered her in a thin sheet that did nothing to hide the contours of her rag-doll body—not fleshy and round as I knew she must have once been, but twiggy, skeletal, a girl of straw. Her two legs shot straight out from her hips, but her feet were skewed unnaturally, as if broken, which indeed they might have been. I felt I should have been able to read into them some intention, as though she were speaking through her limbs, drawing herself into a pictograph that, had I but the key, would reveal the meaning of all this, of her pain, her loss, her shattered life. Yet her hair, remarkably, was in perfect order; someone had brushed it. In her photo, it had been short, spiky, punkish, like Anyusha’s. Now it was all soft ringlets upon her thin shoulders. Perhaps this made her mother happier.

  But why, why couldn’t they also brush her teeth?

  I set my hand upon her forehead. It was neither cool nor hot. I checked my own just to see: we were the same. Then I let my fingers run along her cheek, her jaw, her lip. Her skin should have been smooth and fat, but it was dry and coarse, almost like salt, and the fine, golden hairs on her lip had become wiry, like an old woman’s. I whispered, “Oh! Dasha!”

  If I thought she would be moved by my tenderness I was wrong. She remained a stone beneath my hand. I leaned even closer. My lips grazed her earlobe, and the pores of her cheek were like moon pits in the corners of my eyes. She seemed to say to me, “Is this why we came here? All this long way? Is this the salvation we were promised?”

  “I’m here to help you,” I whispered.

  “Who can help me now?” she seemed to say.

  Her torpid breath plumed up my nostrils and reeled down my throat. “I have a daughter, she’s only a little younger than you. You two would get along. You could teach each other.”

  But she said, “Look at me. Look at my young body. I’m snapped into pieces like dry crackers.”

  The sun cut through the jalousies and laid a swath of gold across Dasha’s broken chest. “If you wake up right now, I’ll take you home with me, I promise!” I said.

  Overwhelmed, I took hold of her shoulders. I wanted her to know there was a bond between us that nothing could sever. “You’ve seen him, too, haven’t you?” I cried. “That bastard!”

  Just then the door opened.

  “What are you doing here?” It was the nurse.

  My hands went back into my pockets.

  “I’m just visiting,” I said.

  “Poor thing,” she sighed.

  “I was in the same attack.” I pointed to my wounds.

  “Aha,” she said.

  “My doctor said I should come see her,” I explained.

  “But why?”

  “She said it was part of my cure. I really don’t know.”

  I felt the nurse’s hand gently come to rest upon my forearm.

  “Look!” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “She opened her eyes.”

  “No, love, she didn’t.”

  “She did.”

  “It’s an illusion. People often think that. But if it really happened the monitor would register it.”

  “You didn’t see her open her eyes?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “It was just for a split second.”

  “Sometimes people in a coma do open their eyes, but it’s just a reflex. But in this case, I was looking at her, too. It didn’t happen. You wanted it to, that’s all.”

  “There was writing on them.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “On her eyes. There was some kind of writing on them. I think she was trying to communicate.”

  “Sweetheart, maybe it’s time for you to go home now,” she said.

  “Let me show you. Look, I’ll just open her eyes.”

  She tightened her grip on my arm. “Don’t touch her!”

  “It’s all right,” I assured her, “really.”

  She must have pressed a button or screamed or something because the room was suddenly filled with people—men actually—and they swallowed me in choke holds and armlocks and dragged me outside. Vaguely I heard Carmi saying, “I don’t know how the hell he got in. I thought he was still in his car.”

  When everything finally calmed down, I said, “You can call the police if you like.”

  “Look, habibi,” someone said, “it’s okay. We get it. You’re suffering. But get some help, okay? Get help.”

  Someone else said, “There are places that specialize in that. In terrorist victims.”

  “In Jerusalem. At Herzog.”

  “Just go up there. Check yourself in.”

  “He doesn’t have to check himself in. He just needs rest.”

  “He needs help. Are you seeing a shrink?”

  “But that’s who sent me here,” I said.

  I looked to Carmi for some sort of support, but instead he more or less shoved me all the way to the Fiat. He waited impatiently until I started the engine and only then felt it safe to go back to his Coca-Cola an
d magazine. I pulled out of the driveway.

  Obviously she hadn’t opened her eyes. Obviously there was no writing on them. Still, I said to myself, what had those letters meant?

  I felt my head drop to the steering wheel and let out a cry of pain. I had landed on stitches that were still unhealed. I pulled the car to the side of the highway and sat there for a very long time.

  Dear You,

  My father is a complete a-hole and I don’t care if he reads this. Totally messed in the head. So I come home and he’s not there and this afternoon is the presentation at school, so of course I waited and waited and it was already five fifteen and I was all dressed and I don’t know, I called Shana, and her mother said we should go over together, I shouldn’t wait, we could walk. So we all walked to school. She said don’t worry, he’ll be there. Tonight was awards night, and I won third for my Green Israel project, which he helped me design, by the way. It was so stupid—I saved a seat for him and everything, between me and Avi Issachar’s father who kept making funny noises with his nose—and I couldn’t concentrate because I kept looking at the door waiting for him, so I entirely missed them calling my name, and the principal said I guess she’s not here, and Shana’s mom yelled, “Yes, she is!” and had to nudge me. Oh God, I wanted to run out of there as fast as I could, but of course I didn’t, I just went up to the stage—and the guy from the Technion shook my hand and said something I can’t even remember although I bet it was really important, like you have a scholarship when you grow up, or here’s a million shekels or something, your idea is absolutely brilliant! Who knows what he said! I didn’t even notice the plaque in my hands until I sat down—next to an empty seat, of course. Everybody else’s father was there. Most kids had two parents there, even the divorced ones. I don’t care if he is a terrorist victim. I hate him.

  Chapter Six

  ALLAH, Fashioner of Forms, Indulgent One, I pray, release me!

  Was it because I didn’t go inside that stupid bus? Is this the source of Your enmity toward me? If I could do it again, I swear before You I would step on that bus! I would show no mercy! I wouldn’t care one bit about the girl with the beautiful eyes!