The Wanting Read online

  “I did not know that,” she admitted.

  “Well, there you are.”

  “Isn’t there anything else you like to talk about?” she asked. “Other than palaces and houses?”

  “I like constructivist architecture as well,” I replied.

  “Ah.”

  “I’m joking,” I said.

  I looked to see if she was smiling, but her scarf covered her lips, and her eyelids were closed. When she looked up again she said suddenly, “I’ve applied for Israel twice already. That makes me a refusenik. Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  “I think it does. Your crew isn’t political, I know that.”

  “Why should it bother me?” I said.

  She slipped her arm through mine. “Never mind. Look at the sky. See how peaceful it is! It’s almost morning, isn’t it? The dawn has crept up on us, like a thief.”

  “I think we still have a few hours yet till dawn,” I said.

  “Even so …”

  Razina is a tiny street, very famous for tourists and architects, that runs more or less easterly from the southern tip of Red Square toward Nogina Square and Kitay Gorod. It lies somewhat lower than the modern street level, as if you were walking through a little gully of antiquity. The old houses are preserved, as are a series of small, beautiful churches. I wanted to tell her about these churches in some detail, but I resisted, and in the quiet that followed she said, “I used to come here as a child.” And then, out of the blue, she told me her story.

  But a bright greenish light interrupted my memories, the headlights of a truck, which I could hear rolling toward me across the long miles of desert road. It was soon upon me; its great brakes squealed under the weight of its huge tires. The driver leaned out his window and shouted, “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just taking a leak.”

  “All right then. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Be careful out here.”

  “I will.”

  He set the truck in gear and continued his way south. I also started up my engine. I would be home in an hour and a half. Anyusha would be angry, of course, disappointed in me, which was hard to bear, but it would pass quickly because—well, she was Anyusha. It was so easy to visualize her face—the crazy haircut, the onyx eyes that always blazed with troublemaking, the goofy smile with teeth still too big for her face, the white, doll-like skin—but then, down by the horizon, rising like a second moon in an alien sky, I saw it, blotting out every pixel of Anyusha’s face, its Cheshire fangs grinning, the gore of its torn neck forming a crescent of blood, a smirk, a wink, a suggestion, a dare—and just like that I turned the car about and headed toward Bethlehem.

  I lied to Shana’s mother and told her Babushka was coming to stay with me. I still call her Babushka, the Russian way, I can’t stop myself. But I just wanted to wait for Dad by myself, and also I was already bored with them, well not bored, because Shana’s not boring, but they don’t really talk about anything. I’m not saying they’re not fun or they’re not nice, because they are and I love them, but I have been thinking about things lately. I have been thinking about what’s going on and why things seem so difficult for me. I have been thinking about my problem a lot, which I have never actually written about in my diary. So I came home to the empty house. Everyone is very worried about Pop, but Daphne, Shana’s mom, keeps saying he’s just dealing, by which she means he’s basically psycho right now. I feel that sometimes I am, too, but I always have been. I’m just psycho. So what?

  I like our house, I do, but it’s not like normal houses. It’s sort of bare. Actually barren would be the word. Everyone else has all these photos of their family on their refrigerator, or they put up all the drawings of their kids from the time they were two, stuff like that. But this is against Dad’s aesthetic. He’s a postmodernist or a neomodernist, I’m not sure which, only I know he’s not a modernist, because everything modernist is so straight lines and he doesn’t believe in straight lines. He is what he calls a minimalist. One picture all by itself on the wall. One chair all alone in the middle of the room. And nothing on the refrigerator! On the other hand, the place currently is a total complete gross-out. Dad threw out all the flowers people sent, but aside from that he just stopped picking up, and crap is piling up everywhere. Dishes, clothes, newspapers, everything. This is called entropy. (Greek.) You can’t blame me, because I’ve barely been home.

  Anyway, I decided to call Yohanan. I’ve been spending a lot of time with him lately, but it’s not what you might think. We’re not doing anything. It’s completely platonic, totally intellectual. Plato of course was a homosexual, so it’s not clear to me what “platonic” really means. I have not yet read too much Plato, but he is on the list. Yohanan and I discuss our graphic novels and manga, and then we study things Rabbi Keren has given us. We do the graphic novels at my house and the Rabbi Keren stuff at his house. I can’t tell Pop, and I also can’t stop the reading and the talks with the rabbi because if I did, well, I think I truly would go psycho. So maybe I am a liar. But I don’t think it’s so awful that I don’t tell my father everything I do. It was too late for Yohanan to come over anyway. I could hear his mother screaming at him to put the phone down, who would call at such an hour? It was only nine, but they’re religious.

  Actually I’ve hidden some of my religious stuff in my room. I made this secret compartment in my dresser. A little box attached with Velcro under the bottom drawers. When I want what’s in it, I reach my arm underneath and pull it off. That’s what I did this evening. I started reading, taking notes, which is what I like to do, because otherwise nothing makes sense. But I didn’t get very far. In the middle of it Yohanan shows up at my window. I thought you couldn’t come out, I said. I can’t, he answered. In that case, I told him, come in.

  I made him sneak in through the window, I don’t know why. Yohanan is a little chubby, to say the least, and I knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to squeeze in. His kippah fell off his head. He had to go back outside to get it. I had calculated this would happen. Now I had to decide whether to make him go back out through the window again.

  Of course when he found out my dad wasn’t even home, he got pissed off. But then I asked him how come he came over when he wasn’t supposed to. Were you worried about me? I asked. No, why should I be worried? he said. Because my dad didn’t show up tonight. For what? he asked. (I’d forgotten that Yohanan wasn’t even in my school, so when would I have told him?) Where is he now? he asked. I don’t know, I told him. He just went off in the car and isn’t back yet, he probably has some business, and just got stuck. Probably, he said. Then he said, There’s a special class tonight, wanna come? Right now? Yeah. At the rabbi’s? Yeah, it’s supposed to be great. You have to sit with the girls, though. Sure, I said, let’s go.

  Rabbi Keren is different because he teaches boys and girls together, but not exactly together. The boys are in front and the girls are all in the back. He’s American, maybe that’s how they do it. Anyway, I stuffed my pillows under the covers so Pop would think I was asleep when he got home.

  “But we have to go back out the window,” I said to Yohanan. “I don’t want anyone to see us.”

  When I got home it was very late. This time I knew I really would have to sneak in the window. But there was something wrong from the first moment. I could feel it. The house was telling me. Pop wasn’t home. He’d never been home. He wasn’t coming home. I picked up the phone because there was a message from him. It was kind of garbled. He said he was on his way to some business thing. I knew it was bull. He never went anywhere on business or anything else without tons of planning and having Yehudah drive me everywhere and Babushka moving in. Even when he had a hot date, he never stayed out all night, not once, never, ever. But tonight, obviously, something was fishy in Denmark.

  Which is funny because I usually know things already. I don’t see the future or anything like that, but I do see things
around me. I mean, I hear it, sort of. That’s the problem I wanted to tell you about. For instance, Daphne is not healthy. I don’t know what she is sick with, but I know that she is. She just isn’t aware of it yet. Or when I look into a tree, I can see all the birds and insects hidden in the leaves. I can see them talking to each other. I can tell that they are frightened all the time. Or I can look into a car and know if the people inside it are happy or not. I can be on a bus, and I can pass a grocery store, and I can know if there is a mother in that store who hates her children even though she’s smiling at them. I can see a soldier, and I can know if he has killed someone. I can look at a rock, and I can know whether it is willing to shelter a snake or a family of worms, or if it prefers only dead things, like other stones. I have been this way for a while now. It just suddenly started, I’m not sure exactly when. And then everything was speaking to me, telling me secrets.

  I told Yohanan about it. He said maybe I should go see Rabbi Keren. This was, like, a year ago at least.

  I don’t know why, but I told Rabbi Keren much more than I told Yohanan, and he said, Don’t worry, the world is not as it appears. The truth is not really visible to any of us. Sometimes we get little glimpses of reality, little tidbits like your bug. As long as you don’t forget to live in the world as it is given to us, it’s OK. He asked me if I heard voices, and I said no, and he looked relieved. So no one is telling you to do things in your head? he said. I guess he was worried I was schizo. And honestly, I had to ask him, Am I crazy? He said, You think you’re crazy? I said, No. He said, I don’t think you’re crazy, either. I just think you are a highly sensitive person. Sensitive? I said. Yes, very sensitive. It’s a blessing. It’s a good thing. It is? It is. Then he laughed. If you think you’re nuts, he said, you should read Ezekiel! And then we both laughed, but I had no idea why I was laughing. (Now I do, because I’ve read Ezekiel, and believe me, he is a nut.) One time Rabbi said to me, All these words in the Bible, these words are for you, just for you. What about you? I said. For me, too, he said, but the way you read them, the way you understand them, the things you see and you hear, this is a message meant just for you. It was written that way from the beginning. From the beginning of time. Before Moses. Before Abraham. Before Adam. Moses didn’t write the Torah. He just wrote it down. Same for crazy Ezekiel and the Psalms and all of it. It was written before time began. It has a million, million hidden meanings, and what you are seeing was written just for you. And since the world was created through Torah, what you read in the world is also a message just for you. Put there from eternity for your eyes. Your eyes. You merely had to choose to see it, he said. But I didn’t choose, I said. Then it was chosen for you. Those were his exact words.

  I don’t know. He’s a little weird, and maybe I don’t like him so much, but I decided it was something I wanted to do, studying the religious stuff. I asked him once about not telling my father. I asked him, What about the truth? Doesn’t God want us to tell the truth? I don’t know, he told me, what about when it will hurt someone? He then described this thing from the Talmud, where there is a story of the ugly bride. Is it better to tell the husband, oh, you have an ugly bride, or to look through the husband’s eyes and say, oh you have a lovely bride? He told me to think about that. I said, I think you shouldn’t say anything at all. I asked him, Am I right? He answered, Are you right? That’s how they teach this religious stuff.

  I just wish Pop would come home. I checked all the doors and windows about twelve times. I was a little cry-y before, and I almost called Babushka, but now I’m totally fine.

  Chapter Eight

  SINCE THE INTIFADA they had begun to set up roadblocks. Generally cars with Israeli plates had little trouble, but when I saw the soldiers and the lineup of cars, I found myself driving past the exit to Bethlehem and instead headed straight into Jerusalem. It was late anyway. I took a room, called Anyusha, who still wasn’t home from her awards, and climbed into bed.

  I lay there staring at the ceiling. Sepha said I would have days like this, manic, confused. She also said we would work it out. So why hadn’t she set up the appointment as she promised? In the end you have to come up with your own answers. But the answer is never actually available to you. It’s like the conscious mind asking itself what consciousness is.

  Still, I said to myself, it must be possible that I was saved for some reason. That surely is why Moishe was in my life, and why Dasha Cohen spoke to me with her cuneiform legs and lettered eyes, and why that head followed me wherever I went, even though it would not speak. It was also why the story of my days unwound itself upon the map of my crazy wanderings, even though I didn’t want to remember any of it.

  And there I was again, back in Moscow, Collette pressing her shoulder against mine as we walked that first night through Razina Street, her voice singing in my ear like a woodlark, a wondrous bird. I stole glances at her skin, white as a loon’s between the folds of her scarf and the brim of her beret, and wondered at this remarkable woman. We barely knew each other, but the brightly colored churches of Razina melted away before her, and all that was left was the alabaster of her skin and the silk of her voice.

  Her mother, she told me, had died in childbirth, and her father had disappeared when she was only a few months old.

  Oh, I said, my father left us, too, when I was about fourteen.

  No, she snapped, he disappeared. They came for him, I’m certain.

  It was in the fifties, just exactly the time of the Doctors’ Plot when Stalin was going after the Jews. Her father was suddenly overcome by a passion to write, and he wrote about everything: he wrote love poems to his dead wife, and poems about hope and freedom, he wrote an entire story that took place while the characters were waiting in line for sour cream; he mocked the new Soviet Man; he mocked the little people who ran the local council; finally he mocked Stalin himself, but he called him something else, Omar Omarsky, who ruled the land of Omarka, the place where only Good prevails. Her father, she said, was afraid of nothing. She had found his journals hidden in a false drawer of an old armoire—found them seventeen years later.

  All of it could have been avoided. Her whole life, she said, was a kind of mistake. Her grandfather had been “the great Sergey Abramovich Chernoff. What? Never heard of him?” she laughed. The family—her family—was very rich before the revolution. They even had an estate—“the only Jewish estate in all of Russia,” her grandfather boasted, “except for the Ginzburgs’ and Rosenheims’.” Her grandfather had become a Communist and had to flee abroad with all the great Bolsheviks—Lenin, Trotsky, Zinovyev, Bukharin. Even so he still lived in high style in a grand apartment on the rue de la Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement not far from the Invalides. The Communists didn’t mind: they loved him because he knew how to raise money, and after the revolution they even made him an economic attaché to the embassy in Paris. But when Lenin had his stroke in ’22, he was promptly recalled to Moscow. Her grandmother was pregnant with a child, Collette’s father, Pierre, and naturally wanted to stay in Paris, but Sergey Abramovich smiled at her, stroked her cheek, assured her the very best doctors in the world were now in Moscow, and instructed the valet to pack their bags. Thus the child, her father, Pierre Sergeyevich, was born in a communal flat in Moscow, and so was Collette.

  “I don’t belong here,” she said. “I never belonged here. It’s all a terrible miscarriage of fate.”

  “I feel that, too, sometimes,” I said rather lamely.

  By this time we’d crossed the river and were walking past the reconfigured mansions that served as embassies for the French and British. Traffic had awakened the boulevards: the swarms of taxis and official cars, a few private Zhigulis and Moskvitchs, an ancient Pobyeda held together by nothing but wire and electrical tape, the occasional Zil with its police escort. In this particular neighborhood, foreign cars were also a fairly common sight: gleaming Volvos and Mercedes, as if from another planet rather than just across the national border.

  “It was
his writing, then, that got him arrested?”

  “I don’t see how. They would have confiscated his papers, but I found them in the armoire.”

  “Maybe there were other copies.”

  “Maybe. But also he never went back to his work in the factory after I was born. That’s what my grandfather said. He spent all his time on me. They accused him of being a shirker, a malingerer. And you know where it goes from there.”

  “You cannot think it’s your fault,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You were an infant.”

  “Of course.”

  “Collette, you were an infant.”

  “Oh look!” she said. “It’s morning!” The sun had finally risen over the eastern skyline casting a bright winter gold upon the river. Collette unknotted her fuzzy pink scarf and gulped in the foul city air as if she were standing in a field of sunflowers. “I have to go.”

  “But we could have breakfast,” I said.

  “Not today,” she replied.

  We found the nearest metro. Once inside, she threw open her coat and slipped off her gloves. I had not until this moment noticed her scent. It was not of perfume at all, but of hay and earth.

  Without thinking, I bent down and kissed her. For the first time she looked directly at me, and her eyes were little bees in full swarm.

  Night had fallen so profoundly upon Jerusalem that nothing stirred, not even a breeze, as if God had stopped breathing. Tomorrow I would rouse myself and seek out Abdul-Latif Hamid and his wife, Najya.

  It’s not that I wanted an explanation. There was none. Nor did I want an apology. What I think I wanted was a way in. I kept thinking, how could they be impervious to the tearing of their son’s flesh? Wasn’t it Amir himself who led me here?