Look for Me Page 12

  “You have to forget him. That’s all I can say. You have to move on, find someone else.”

  “Has he? Has he found someone else?”

  “No, he’s alone. Please don’t ask any more questions, because that’s all I can say.”

  “Why? Why can’t you tell me? Why?”

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, thank you, you did your best. At least now I know that everyone’s lying to me. That’s something.”

  “Well, bye for now. Take care of yourself, Dana.” He hung up.

  I had told Rafi I would be at the demonstration in front of the Ministry of Defense, but I couldn’t move. I held the phone in my hand, stared at the waves, and tried to understand what had just happened. I couldn’t think straight: I was in some sort of trance. I shut my eyes and remembered a veiled and bangled belly dancer I’d once seen at a party, long ago. The chiming gold bangles had hypnotized me, and Daniel had laughed as he called my name to bring me back to the real world. I roused myself and phoned Rafi.

  “It’s me, Dana,” I said.

  “Dana who, please?” he teased.

  “I’m on the beach.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I found out something about Daniel.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t tell you on the phone. Are you going to the demo?”

  “I have to, I’m bringing the signs, remember? We can meet after.”

  “No, okay, I’ll come. I can’t just sit here staring at the sea. I’ll be there soon.”

  Usually I enjoyed walking and it was only on rare occasions that I took the bus. The entire city had an unsettled look to it, as if the small angular apartment houses and the people walking puposefully through the streets and the cages filled with empty plastic bottles for recycling were all aware that they were part of a theatrical production—though whether farce or Greek tragedy, nobody knew. This was a world that made no effort to seduce you, for it was too caught up in its own satisfied, uncertain presence. I was particularly attached to the little stores and kiosks that sold newspapers and snacks. They never changed, the kiosks and small stores; the world advanced around them, but they adhered to their own time zone. It was hard to believe that these bottles of grapefruit juice and rows of salted bagels could keep these enterprises going, but so far they had. Lately, though, the kiosk operators and store owners had been looking very depressed, and I wondered whether they would finally cave in and vanish.

  But now as I walked down the familiar streets, the city could have been invisible, I could have been sleepwalking through it.

  The Ministry of Defense was inside a military complex surrounded by a tall wall and barbed wire. Demonstrations against the ministry were held on a small raised lot facing the entrance to the complex. A few bored soldiers were stationed on the sidewalk in order to protect us from ruffians, though if a drive-by shooter decided to target us, there was nothing they’d be able to do. The odds were against a violent attack, though. Most of the lunatics lived in the territories and they spent their energy tormenting Palestinians.

  Rafi was already at the lot, standing next to a stack of signs. Sixty or seventy protesters had come to demonstrate, and they were milling around in their usual bewildered way, holding signs that condemned the latest bombing attack on a Palestinian town.

  I climbed up to the lot and approached Rafi. I noticed when I stood next to him that we were exactly the same height. He didn’t have his hat on, and he wasn’t wearing sunglasses.

  “What did you find out?” he asked, as though we were in the middle of a conversation.

  “I’m not sure. It’s very strange.”

  “Do you want to go for supper after the demonstration? You can tell me about it then.”

  “Yes.”

  Down below, on the sidewalk, a few women dressed in black had wrapped their heads in kaffiyehs and were holding stones in their hands, to show solidarity with the Palestinians. Not everyone approved of the women and some demonstrators grumbled, but there wasn’t much they could do. One of the women had a can of orange spray paint. She came up to us and offered to spray our IDs orange; she also handed out little stickers for the inside flaps that said MY DEATH MAY NOT BE USED FOR ACTS OF REVENGE. My ID was already half orange (some of the paint had come off) but I took a sticker and so did Rafi.

  A soldier from Army Radio came over to Rafi and asked him to say something about why people were demonstrating. She had round puffy cheeks and bangs that reached her eyebrows. I took several photos of her young, open face; she was gazing at Rafi like someone caught in limbo, on the verge of entering either heaven or hell: it wasn’t clear to her which one it was likely to be, so she was hedging her bets. When Rafi was through, she thanked him and moved on to someone else.

  The demonstration lasted an hour. Cars passed by on the street and the drivers looked at us with interest. Some of them shouted out insults, and some honked. A long honk meant they were angry and a few short honks meant they agreed with us—at least that was my interpretation.

  At eight o’clock everyone piled the signs in a heap and went home. Rafi carried them to his van, which was parked nearby. I followed him and helped load the signs in back. Then we left the van where it was and began walking toward a street with a lot of restaurants. As we walked, Rafi phoned Graciela on his mobile phone.

  “I met Dana at the demonstration and we’re going to have a bite,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Do you need anything?”

  But Graciela didn’t need anything.

  “She doesn’t mind?” I asked.

  “Not at all. She likes having the place to herself in the evening. She takes a long bath, listens to requiems and operas. She’s a solitary person.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “At the supermarket. Do you want to eat here?” He stopped at a sidewalk restaurant. We bought sandwiches and french fries at the counter and sat down with our trays at one of the tables. The metal lattice tabletops had tiny diamond-shaped gaps between the strips and I ran my fingers along the pattern.

  “Mercedes came over,” I said. “She cleaned up. And I had my fortune told by Tanya, who lives upstairs.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “It was a scam. She gives massages.”

  “Well, at least you got something for your money.”

  “I dreamed you were trying on outfits,” I said.

  “Did I find one?”

  “You asked me for advice, but I didn’t have all the facts, so I couldn’t decide. You’re acting like it’s no big deal that we’re here,” I said. “You’re acting like it’s okay that you’re here with me at this restaurant and it doesn’t matter and no one cares and so what?”

  “It does matter. It matters a lot. And it’s okay, for me. I can’t speak for you.”

  “It isn’t okay. I love my husband.”

  “You can love more than one person,” he said.

  “No, no you can’t. That’s not love. Love means that the person you love is enough for you, and you don’t want or need anyone else and no one else interests you.”

  “Love means you are completely helpless and there’s nothing you can do about it except duck or plunge. But you can’t change it, you can’t change the way you feel.”

  “You’re making things worse, letting this happen between us. You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “There are some things even I can’t control. I’d like to control my appearance in your dreams, for example, but I can’t.”

  “You could have stayed away from me.”

  “You could have stayed away from me, Dana. What did you find out about Daniel?”

  “I met a guy in Intelligence. Just by chance, on the beach. And when he heard about Daniel he said all he had to do was look him up on his special computer and he’d be able to tell me where he was really living. Not his fake address, the re
al one. I didn’t think he’d find anything, but he seemed so sure. He told me to call him today at six in the evening. But when I called he said he couldn’t tell me anything and I’d just have to forget Daniel. But he didn’t say he didn’t have the address. He did have it, but for some reason he couldn’t tell me. I don’t understand it. On the beach he said I had a right to know. But now that he has the information, he’s changed his mind. So he must have found out something he didn’t expect. But what?”

  “That’s strange. It’s strange that Daniel managed to hide in the first place. Such a small country, surely someone would find out and tell you.”

  “No one knows what he looks like now. And he probably uses another name. Maybe he never goes out. Maybe he’s in an attic somewhere, and someone brings him food and whatever he needs. Maybe a friend of his is hiding him, the one who used to leave those notes on the door. I’ve thought of everything. I even thought he might be living in a tent somewhere in the desert. Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel Daniel.”

  “Do you think what that Intelligence guy found out is that Daniel is living with another woman?”

  “No, I asked him that. He said Daniel is alive and he lives alone. And that’s all he would tell me. He’s the sort of person who can’t lie. You know the type?”

  “Yes. They’re rare enough. Well, maybe he’s in some sort of institution?”

  “No, I checked every single institution when he first vanished. I hired a private detective, she checked every place like that. Resorts, rest homes, mental institutions, everything. And she still checks them once a year. Besides, why wouldn’t this guy want to tell me something like that? He wouldn’t hide that sort of information. No, it’s something else.”

  “What would you do if you got his address?”

  “Knock on his door. And I wouldn’t move or eat until he came out. I’d go on strike. He’d have no choice but to relent.”

  We didn’t say anything more after that. When we finished our meal he said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I want to walk. I like walking.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “All right.”

  As we walked toward the sea, I had a fantasy of the city rising like a floating island and soaring away. I held Rafi’s arm for balance, but only for a few seconds, until the sensation passed.

  “Looks habitable now,” Rafi said as he entered my flat. He sat down on the faded pink and green Turkish carpet. I made coffee and handed him the mug, then settled on the sofa closest to him, my legs curled under me. He said, “I finished my training one month before the uprising broke out. I spent the next two and a half years fighting the riots. Then I was released, and they gave me a big chunk of money. I didn’t go back to my parents. I rented a room and every night I went to a bar and drank until I couldn’t see straight and usually I woke up with someone in my room and I couldn’t remember who she was or how she got there. Then the money ran out. I lay in bed and took my penknife and considered slashing my wrists, but I decided my penknife was too blunt. Basically I didn’t have the courage to do it. I got out of bed and showered and went to the supermarket to buy a bottle of vodka—I figured I’d get drunk and then maybe I’d have more courage. But I didn’t have enough money for vodka, so I bought fruit juice. That’s when I met Graciela. I was having trouble holding the bottle of juice, it almost slipped from my hands, and she caught it. She was well dressed and clean and orderly. I followed her home, to her clean orderly flat—she already had her own place, the one we still live in. She played the piano for me, a piece by Erik Satie. I was in very bad shape, and that piece almost did me in. I stayed there, I didn’t leave. We decided to marry. Her parents were against it, they’d been hoping for someone with a better background, someone with money and a profession and fair skin. But they didn’t want her to be unhappy. They didn’t want anything to interfere with her music, and they were afraid that if they put up a big fuss she’d be upset. She started getting migraines, and she couldn’t sleep. Other things started bothering her too. She’d always hated dirt, but her cleaning became obsessive. She felt sick if she saw dirt, and she couldn’t go out for long periods of time because she wouldn’t use public toilets, or even toilets in other people’s houses. She tried seeing a psychiatrist, but nothing came of it. She wouldn’t let me touch her when we fucked, she couldn’t bear to look at my cock or touch it, and I had to find ways of getting inside without touching any other part of her and without her having to see anything. After Naomi was born, even that stopped. I left her before I knew she was pregnant. Then I heard that she was pregnant—someone who had seen her on the street called me and told me, and I came back. I didn’t trust her alone with Naomi. And I was right, she didn’t want to touch her, she carried her in a plastic carrier, she never held her or stroked her or touched her. She placed her on a pillow when she wanted to give her a bottle. I suggested we divorce and I take the baby, but she was horrified. She loves Naomi. She loves her, but she can’t touch her. I look after Naomi and Graciela plays the piano and gives recitals and concerts and we manage that way. I had a few one-nighters, but I stopped, it was pointless. We have an income from a fund her parents set up for her, and I also work at an after-school program with teens in distress, but there’s no money in that, our budget keeps getting cut, we’re almost volunteers at this point. I can’t leave because the kids depend on me. That’s my story, Dana.”

  “Why? Why did you want to kill yourself?”

  “The usual: guilt, remorse. You can get over killing people, there are ways to think about it. You can say it was self-defense, it was war, that’s what you’re trained to do in a war, you’re trained to think it’s me or them, and you’re defending your country, it’s your highest duty. So you can say, well, I had no choice, and that’s what the interpretation was then, that’s how it looked and felt. You can say, I was attacked, I fought back. I didn’t think about whether we should be there in the first place. That wasn’t something we thought about. But if you beat people up in front of their kids or watch your friends shoot someone’s balls off, you can’t justify that sort of thing. And since you can’t justify it, you have to face that this is who you are, this is the sort of person you are. I didn’t think I could live with that in constant replay another forty or fifty years, day in, day out, night in, night out.”

  “You really shot someone’s balls off? I never heard that one before.”

  “We caught some guy who’d just killed a couple of soldiers, and these two guys in my unit, who were friends of the soldiers who were killed, more or less lynched him. They started with his balls. Coby was there, too.”

  “Coby from the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about now? Are things in constant replay?”

  “No, it’s different now. I have perspective now about what was going on then, and I can do something about it.”

  “Is your daughter waiting for you?”

  “She’s probably in bed by now. She’s a very easy child. She never puts up a fuss about anything. It worries me, sometimes.”

  I said, “I met my husband at a wedding, he was the singer— even though the band was just a hobby he had, a way of earning extra cash. His real passion was architecture, and that’s what he was doing, designing houses and buildings. I was nineteen, in the army, and he was a lot older, ten years older than me, but we didn’t feel any sort of gap. We were like one person. We even had our own language that we invented. We had a name for each other, Daneli, we were both Daneli, we were almost one person. We told each other everything, and whenever he went out of the house he left me a note with a cartoon—he was very talented, his cartoons were so brilliant, and he did them in just two seconds. We couldn’t stay away from each other, we had sex every day, we invented things no one ever heard of or did before. He said he was going to move into my cunt. We laughed because he was very funny, he did imitations of people and he was witty and cracked jokes all the time. Sometimes his humor was very
dark, and we fought because I didn’t like it. I thought there were some things you shouldn’t laugh about, but now I think he was right and I was wrong, but he was older than me, and he knew more about life. We used to go out and everyone would smile at us. We’d wear matching clothes and I was a female version of him and he was a male version of me. I wore sexy clothes, sexier than people wore in those days. After the accident, at the hospital, they wouldn’t let me see him, but I thought it was temporary, so I didn’t insist. They told me he didn’t want visitors and that he was in a lot of pain and on a lot of drugs and that we should give him time. So we did, we gave him time. Now of course I really regret doing that, I should have gone in right away, every day, until it became natural for him. And then they told me he was much better, he was out of danger, they said he was very lucky and there was no infection or internal damage. They said I could see him the next morning and I went out to get him a present, I bought a silk dressing gown, wine-colored with a black collar. But that night he vanished from the hospital. I got there and they said he’d escaped. They were very upset. He hadn’t filled in the forms, he just sneaked out. He sent me a letter a few weeks later. And in the letter he said that it was over between us, and he was going to start a new life, a different life—he didn’t know yet how or what it would be, but that I had to find a way to forget him because he was no longer the same person, the person I had known was no longer him.”

  “What about his family?”

  “They were upset, but for them, for his parents and sister, the main thing was that he was alive. They didn’t understand me, and I was angry so I stopped visiting them. Maybe I was just jealous that they had a consolation I didn’t have. He didn’t even leave me a child. If only I had got pregnant! I tried, we tried, and I did get pregnant once, but I had a miscarriage in my sixth month. Maybe something went wrong when I miscarried. After that we kept trying but nothing happened.”

  “How long were you together?”