From a Sealed Room Read online

  The next day and the day after, Dov sat in his room and refused to eat or to answer the telephone. Nachum tried to talk to him, but Dov only turned his back. “Come on outside,” Nachum attempted, the soccer ball cradled against his chest. “We’ll play, just you and me. As slow as you want,”

  Dov’s passing glance at Nachum was condemning in its indifference. “No, Abba,” he said. And when Nachum came out of the boy’s room there was such a look of bewilderment in his eyes that Tami felt sorry for him and vindicated at the same time. She followed him through the living room, where he let the soccer ball roll out of one hand and onto the sofa. She followed him out to the balcony and watched him brace himself against the railing with both hands and look down through the glare of sun and dust onto the street. For the first time since she had known him he seemed lonely, and she was ashamed of the sudden tenderness she felt. She hesitated, then reached out and rubbed his shoulders. He patted her hand absently before going back into the apartment.

  The third night was relentless; the forecaster said the heat had spent itself, but the hamsin did not break. Nachum took Ariela out for ice cream and a movie; he thought she needed extra attention. Tami agreed without a word.

  She sat on the balcony in the sagging plastic chair. She had showered again, turning her face up into the cool stream of water. Already, sweat prickled at the back of her neck through her wet hair. She watched the moths circle the light bulb that dangled above her. Framed in a window across the street, a woman combed the hair of a girl who sat between her knees. In the blackness of the Valley of the Cross, a light burned in an upper room of the monastery, and a few pieces of the monks’ laundry could be seen, white underclothes and long, dark robes bobbing on the line. On the hill, near the gates to the Knesset building, a driver honked his horn.

  From inside the apartment Tami heard a muffled sound that repeated twice and then, after a pause, again. Rising slowly, she wrapped her robe more snugly around herself, then pushed aside the curtain and stepped in.

  In the sealed room, Dov stood motionless. His hair was matted and his uniform hung on his body. Blood laced over the knuckles of his right fist in spidery-thin lines and dripped onto the floor.

  “Oh, God.” Tami stepped forward to touch his hand. He pulled it away.

  In the wall, beneath the taped and unshuttered window, was a ragged hole, plaster chipping from its edges. Tami gazed at it; she expected somehow to find cool night air pouring into the room at last, bringing with it stars, the smell of eucalyptus. But Dov’s fist had only knocked away the plaster, only smashed the surface and exposed the concrete behind.

  “Leave me alone,” Dov said, and when Tami did not speak or move he looked at her with eyes full of hate. “Leave me alone,” he shouted.

  She stood barefoot, staring at the spots of blood on the cool tile floor, and a sudden fury blew through her. What right had he to look at her that way? As if she had chosen for the world to be the way it was, as if she had ordered the wars and the terrorism, the dust wind and the desert with its patches of black sand that heated like furnaces and killed boys without warning. The rage that gripped her now, making her hands tremble and her jaw ache, was a comfortable rage; it was a collective, inevitable, irrefutable rage, so complete it absolved her of whatever she alone had done. What right had he? As if she had chosen this path for them, as if she had chosen that they live clinging to each other’s bodies and the soil and the here and now, lest someone catch them without their roots deep in each other and all would be lost, with no second chances.

  Looking at the soldier before her, she saw that his hand was damaged and ugly, and the sight tightened her throat until it burned.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted into the quiet apartment. “What’s wrong with you? Did you think you’d punch through? Did you think you could? Did you?”

  She waited for an answer, her feet trembling on the stone tiles. Dov was sobbing softly with his head bent to his chest. His hands hung loose at his sides.

  It was the simplest of steps that carried her forward, as easy and unwilled as a heartbeat. She held him, held his lean battered body, and she felt herself becoming something huge and primal and ancient.

  He cried into her shoulder, he held her tightly, he did not let her go.

  Part Two

  2

  The sun is burning the street. Burning the pale-veined buildings. There is pounding too, pounding like a fever on the head. Today the blacks are hammering. Over apartment doorways, on balconies, they fix their cardboard signs. Blinding signs, yellow signs, signs swaying above drizzling laundry. Yellow rectangles flash brightness at me like the shock of a newsbulb: sudden daylight sears the heart.

  But I will not befooled. I have no use for such signs.

  I should not have gone out with the sun so strong, I should have waited. Until the vegetable man pulled down his awnings, the toothless Arab women turned for home, unsold wildflowers balanced on their heads. But today I was distracted by so many things. A moth fluttering against the ceiling, the sound of a car horn, an unfamiliar step in the stairwell. The path of the sun across the sky escaped me today, tricked me into venturing outside before it was time.

  Four of the blacks, pale like parchment and squinting in this ugly Jerusalem light, are stringing a banner across the street. It is the same as the signs, this banner: red sunrise reaching across yellow background, sharp lettering that blinds the opened eye. My bag is filled with the groceries I will need so not to step onto the sun-beaten street for another week. I walk faster, my arms burning from the weight of this cabbage and this borscht, potatoes and powdered pea soup. Sour cream in a plastic tub. My knees hit the grocery bag at every step, signs catch the glare and turn it back on me. I squeeze my eyes shut, but there are holes in the pavement and children who throw pebbles in the yards, and these things are not to be trusted, so I open my eyes to slits and watch. I walk past the blacks as fast as I can without looking at them or at their yellow twisting message. They do not glance at me, only shout directions to other blacks on ladders or greetings to those tying signs to the tops of battered cars.

  I have no use for blacks and they have none for me.

  My arms feel like two stones and I draw the bag closer to my belly. I will not forget again, next week I will not forget about the sun, I make up sun-remembering rhymes. Crowding heat, song of beet.

  Vision withers at my feet.

  The pathway to my building beckons at last. An overgrown green, even in this dry season it is shaded and waits to receive me. The heat makes me weep but I am almost there, I have reached the pathway and now the forgiving shadows of the overhang, I drop my bag inside the entryway. I gasp like a fish, touch the rough plaster wall and try to drive the sun from my brain. I think cool water thoughts.

  The postman is here. Gleeful gossip, he rubs his beardless chin and speaks smooth braids of words. About an American moving into the apartment building this afternoon. Just this afternoon, he informs me. Very polite for an American. A student, visiting Israel. Of all weeks, such a shame she should arrive now. Isn’t it simply terrible, the racket these religious people make hammering those signs?

  I hide myself in the corner and this man at last smiles a weary smile and leaves me be. He is on the garden path, then gone.

  And now the rug peddler begins his calls. His Arab words are the mesh cast through the neighborhood, they gather the driving daylight to some faraway place. Rolled carpet over his bent shoulder, his strange words invite the bending of the sky, cooling air of evening.

  I marry my whisper to his cry.

  Soon the burning sun will leave this Jerusalem street, there will be cool dark and clouds running faint overhead. Soon only the mute stones of the buildings will give this neighborhood their quivering light that is like moonlight. Soon the day will turn its glare from this city, soon. Soon the cool jewel night, the blown flown night. The night that settles into the heart like water in a ditch, sinking at last, bringing sleep.

&n
bsp; An American. So many years it has been since I longed to see one of their faces.

  I turn and climb the stairs.

  Moving to this neighborhood was Gil’s idea.

  Emek Refaim. My dictionary translates the name as “Valley of Ghosts.” Which might have made me superstitious about moving here—except for the way the Jerusalem sun claps down on your shoulders like a weight each time you step outside. It seems to me it would take a pretty stubborn ghost to survive in this climate.

  I try to picture some obstinate spirit, shimmying through the alleys of the neighborhood. Throwing its feeble shadow against the sun-warmed rock, flitting between the bars of garden gates, whispering into the flowering caper bushes. But after all, the most determined ghost would still be too flimsy to last. At the thought of my imaginary spirit perishing, struck down by the Jerusalem heat, I even feel a bit sad.

  Gil leans against the bare wall of the living room. “Maya. Ghosts?” His eyes tease. “Must be nice to be an American. Americans have no real worries, they get to invent.” He pushes off the wall and steps behind me. I face him, but he moves behind me once more and his breath whispers against the back of my neck. “Whoo, whoo,” he calls.

  “You don’t sound like a ghost,” I say, but he has me in his arms and tickles me until, my ribs aching, I admit that his sound effect was perfect, that all ghosts haunt with Israeli accents, that there is no one who could have done it better. Only then do the lines of his face waver, and break into his all-engulfing smile.

  Gil’s joy is like an unpredictable tide, sweeping his pale freckled face without warning. Sweeping me along with him into a fit of laughter. Gil is tall, his body bony and restless, and as he tells me where we will put the furniture I bend my neck and touch my forehead to the hollow of his chest, nodding to the rumbling rise and fall of his voice.

  Emek Refaim is thirty minutes by foot southwest of the Old City, twenty-five west of the Promenade, a quiet dip in the hills of Jerusalem. The bustle of the city center is only half a dozen bus stops away, but here in the valley the streets curve around one another and those other parts of Jerusalem seem much farther away, more like rumored destinations than real places.

  April 10, 1993

  Mom,

  I read what you wrote in your last letter about Gil, and taking things slowly. I know I’m young. But as you said, it’s my life and my decision.

  And I’m sure if you met him you’d agree this is right. You’re always talking about the importance of commitment to something you believe in. I came to Israel this semester because I have always wanted to learn about this country. I guess one commitment leads to another—I knew the minute I met Gil that he was the person for me. You once said you thought I’d never care for something outside myself. Actually, I do. I’m in love.

  As for my schoolwork, don’t worry. Moving out of the dorms doesn’t mean I’m going to neglect classes. I’ll take the bus back to Mount Scopus every day, and I think I’ll study more without the distractions of dorm life. Besides, Gil and I have agreed to speak only Hebrew in our apartment, which is good although it’s hard for me. And hard for him, too. He says my American pronunciation hurts his ears.

  I am planning on calling your cousin Tami, by the way. I have the number, and I promise I’ll do it soon. It’s just that things have been busy.

  You said in your letter you’re trying out some new programs at the Center. What’s going on? I hope you’ll write to me about it. I really do want to know.

  Maya

  The day Gil and I met was the day he’d gotten word of his job at a new gallery in Yemin Moshe. One of the students at Hebrew University was giving a party that night. Gil came because he felt like celebrating, even though he rarely went to student parties anymore—not since leaving the art program. He likes to say that his old classmates aren’t particularly evolved.

  But that night there was a party and he went. I was there with my dormitory roommate, Orit, who had announced her mission of introducing me to so many Israel is that I would have more friends here than in America. Since the gray February morning when I had arrived from New York and braved the drafty Mount Scopus hallways with my dorm assignment card in hand, Orit had taken it upon herself to be my guide to Hebrew University. Wherever we went she would summon other students. “Maya is here to study for the semester,” she would inform them, twisting her dark curls into a rope and flinging it over one shoulder. “Be nice to her, make her at home. Show her some good Israeli manners.” I waited beside her with an overready smile meant to communicate all that my shaky Hebrew could not.

  At the party that night, Orit’s friends applauded her invitation. They motioned for me to join them on the tattered sofa, and promised a display of their best manners. After bowing elaborately and calling for silence, Orit’s chemistry lab partner, Magen, screwed his eyes back and stuck two french fries up his nose.

  A blond-haired student named Shulamit eyed Magen’s contortions with disgust. “There goes all the foreign aid,” she said.

  “Where are your priorities?” Orit wagged a finger. “Hell with the foreign aid. Be nice to Maya, be nice to all the Americans, or we’ll never get a McDonald’s in Jerusalem.” Grinning, she patted my knee as if I were a new and prized possession. “McDonald’s, that’s all Israel needs for what ails it. The soldiers and diplomats have been handling matters wrong all along. I’ve heard that no two countries with McDonald’s have ever gone to war with each other. Who knew peace could be so simple?”

  Later, when the conversation had narrowed to an intense debate over some classroom gossip and the heat in my cheeks had begun to fade, Shulamit turned to me. “Why do you people want to see Israel?” While I struggled to frame an answer in Hebrew, she leaned close, elbows propped on her knees, and continued in stilted English. “This is what I never understand. I know you are Jewish. Still, why not go to France, where people can eat dinner at one a.m. and the restaurant stays open all night? Why not go to New York, a real city? That is where I would go.”

  I shifted against the spongy cushions of an armchair and looked at her. She had a smooth face, dark unwavering eyes, and a strong oval jaw which, I guessed, wasted no effort holding back opinions. A familiar hopelessness settled in my chest. After two weeks around Israelis, I still couldn’t help feeling deferential. They all seemed to have something I lacked. Confidence, maybe. But something else too: authenticity. This college student, only one or two years older than I, had already been a soldier. She lived in a world of practical choices, she knew what it took to seize a corner of the world and push.

  During the weeks I’d lived in Israel, everything American about me had begun to appear irrelevant. My dance-troupe friends and our shopping sprees, my university with its scores of extracurricular activities (“Bell-ringing clubs?” Orit echoed in disbelief). Drinking contests, the friends on the hockey team who head-butted campus lamps until the plastic sconces came loose and they could take them home to wear as space helmets. The academic advisor pushing her glasses higher on her nose, shaking her head over one of the biggest discrepancies between ability and achievement in all my years of. In America, I didn’t have to think about life and death and sacrifice, or even my French history midterm. In America, I chose to think about dance routines instead. I chose not to attend the local political rallies my mother called from New York to notify me about or, on my infrequent trips to Brooklyn, to join the volunteers stuffing envelopes in her apartment through the night. Instead, I stepped between piles of flyers, nudged envelopes out of the way with my feet, and pulled the telephone into the bathroom for privacy.

  “Suit yourself,” my mother said. And I understood, from the way her eyes flicked past me as she said it, that she wasn’t going to bother with me anymore. She pushed a lock of hair off her forehead and pointed a new volunteer toward the brochures for the Center for Community Renewal. Another volunteer handed her a slice of pizza. She took a bite, then set the rest aside and picked up a stack of flyers. “If you’re not going
to help, then just stay out of the way, Maya.”

  “I want to see Israel,” I told Shulamit in Hebrew. “I want to understand the country and the history and the politics.”

  She was silent. At first I thought she was considering what I’d said; then I realized she was simply puzzling out my accent. She shrugged: Why was I wasting her time if I wasn’t going to give a real reason?

  Orit had disappeared, and there was no other help in sight. “It’s that I want to . . .” I searched for the proper words in Hebrew or even English. Shulamit’s gaze drifted with boredom. “I need to understand Israel, because all my life—”

  “Go to Australia,” Magen called out. He put his hands behind his head and reclined, fry-less, on the sofa. “Go to Greece and camp out on the beach. Go to a country where there’s room to turn around and scratch your rear end. Israel is tiny, Israel—”

  “Israel is the size of Magen’s dick,” someone said from across the room. “It’s that small. Could you believe such a thing possible?”

  The others hooted, confirming my understanding of the slang. I blushed.

  Grinning, Magen went on the attack. “I didn’t know you were such a right-winger, Yossi. Because clearly you mean Greater Israel.” Magen gestured broadly. Shulamit groaned her annoyance. “Oh, yes. Greater Israel it is. In fact, we’ll need some further territorial expansion, even more than the rightest of the right demand. We’ll need to expand even beyond the West Bank. You’re talking an Israel the size of the Soviet Union, may it rest in peace.”

  “May it burn in hell,” said a low-voiced student. His Hebrew was heavy, Russian-accented. There were some nods of acknowledgment from the others.

  I sank back in my chair, grateful to have been forgotten. Thinking of my resolution to pay close attention to discussions of politics, I blinked at these former soldiers. They were passing a bowl of pretzels; someone was calling for ice cream bars. I wondered what my mother would make of this mode of political conversation. I wondered whether anyone would notice if I didn’t say a word for the rest of the evening.