Look for Me Page 4

  My parents were called in, and my mother, who was not in the habit of keeping her thoughts to herself, had a huge fight with the principal. She called him an impotent, narrow-minded pimp, a poor excuse for an educator, a limp, spineless State puppet. She said she felt sorry for him and sorry that her daughter had to be exposed to his stupidity. Then she swept out of his office like a diva and slammed the door. I was sitting in the hallway outside, and I felt both proud and dismayed. I admired my mother but I took after my father, who was averse to conflict.

  I was happy about our move to the city; I had just reached the age at which small towns become irredeemably boring. My mother’s death two years later left my father literally speechless: for several weeks he walked around in a daze, confused and unable to concentrate on anything. When he finally began speaking he was mostly incoherent, and he sat and stared into space for hours, a puzzled look on his face. I think he contacted Gitte because the only life he could make sense of was one that had not included my mother. Gitte was divorced, lonely, and excited to hear from him. Letters with foreign stamps began arriving at our place; shortly afterward my father flew to Belgium for a week, and when he returned he announced that he was going to marry Gitte, and that I would be happy in Belgium. I didn’t believe him.

  He became convinced, later, that his anachronistic flight into the arms of love was irresponsible and that, like Anna Karenina, he had made a drastic choice. For as a result of the disorder in my life after he left, I did not graduate from high school. I failed all my subjects apart from English, which didn’t require any exertion on my part. I was bilingual, not only because my parents spoke English at home, but also because I loved to read novels about the mystifying world of adults and the best ones came from my parents’ bookshelves: I was particularly fond of Iris Murdoch and George Eliot, but I was also a Miss Reed addict.

  He blamed himself, but I felt he’d made the right decision and I was happy for him. His letters suggested an ideal life: a two-hundred-year-old house with sweeping staircases and secret panels; a place in the local men’s choir; close friends who came over for dinner and chess. He often spent his evenings reading by the fireplace or, when it was warm, on a patio facing the tulip garden; his French was improving and he’d picked up some Flemish as well. As for Gitte, she had not disappointed him. He said she spoiled him, and his letters were full of cassoulet and soufflé à l’orange: his tone when he described these dishes was reverent. It was obvious that he and Gitte were generally compatible. They both liked theater and books and conversation and, oddly, knitting; my eccentric father had taken up knitting, which he found “relaxing, touching, and spiritually satisfying.” This late romance was the inspiration for one of my novels, though of course I had to change most of the details. My father was transformed from a slightly overweight, myopic engineer to a young, dashing horse breeder (who obviously did not knit). My mother became delicate and innocent, a flower taken in her youth. As for Gitte, I had never met her, and so was free to invent her both in fiction and in life. My father sent me a photo of the two of them next to their large house, but the photo was taken from a distance, and Gitte is wearing a wide-brimmed hat which throws a concealing shadow over most of her face.

  Benny was sitting at my kitchen table when I came home from Ein Mazra’a. He lived upstairs from me and had a key to my flat, in case I lost mine; sometimes when I wasn’t home he went inside and waited for me. I was on friendly terms with everyone in my building: my legless and maddening neighbor Volvo, who had moved into the small one-room flat adjacent to ours shortly after Daniel left; Jacky, former rock star and prince of the city; Tanya, former prostitute, now a successful fortune-teller; and Tanya’s mother. Benny lived on the top floor, next to two large flats that had remained empty for as long as anyone could remember because of some dispute that had been tied up in the courts for decades.

  Benny was a restless, impatient person. He drove a taxi, and lately he’d been struggling to make ends meet; the tourist industry had nearly vanished and the collapsing economy affected everyone. On the other hand more people were taking taxis because they were afraid of being blown up on a bus. That helped a little, but not enough.

  Benny had other worries, too. He had a very emotional relationship with his ex-wife Miriam. The two of them still fought and still had sex, behind her boyfriend’s back. He hated her and loved her and couldn’t rid himself of his desire for her. He vowed to quit smoking and he vowed to stop seeing Miriam, but he hadn’t had much success with either plan.

  He was burly and hairy, though in recent years he’d started balding, much to his dismay. His real age was forty-one, but he liked to tell people he was thirty-five. He did repairs in my flat, bought me small practical gifts like coat hooks, and worried about my safety. Often he gave me long, mournful lectures about my political views, trying to explain, patiently and hopelessly, why I was wrong to help and trust the enemy. He pitied the Palestinians too—but their miserable situation wasn’t our fault. It was their fault, because they had terrible leaders and because they hated us and would never accept us and because they would always want all the land, including our State. And for the past seventy years they’d been trying to kill us; even before the State was founded they’d already started with their wild attacks, plunging knives into women and children, slicing off their heads.

  At other times he spoke just as mournfully and hopelessly about Miriam. He worried that she was neglecting their children; he didn’t trust her new boyfriend. A self-centered pig, he said, who was drawing Miriam away from the children, and she was too blind to grasp what was going on. What she saw in that poor excuse for a human being, that petty crook who was born with his brain in his arse and his nose in other people’s arses, he would never know. Benny was a devoted father, and sometimes when I walked along the seashore with my jeans rolled up to my knees I’d see him sitting Buddha-style on a blanket, surrounded by his four small children. One would ride on his broad shoulders while the others poured sand over his crossed legs or tried to impress him with their acrobatics. He’d grin at me from the midst of his clan, but he’d never invite me to join him.

  “Benny, I’m too tired for a visit today, I’m worn out from the demo.” I took off my shoes and flopped down on my bed.

  He sighed. “Why, why, why do you do these things? Where were you, anyhow?” He sat down at the edge of the bed.

  I told him about the demonstration. It had not been reported on the news, he didn’t know it had taken place.

  “The last place on earth I would want to be, the last thing on earth I would want to do,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I’m sure there are a zillion things you would want to do even less,” I said. “Swallowing a live cockroach. Getting into a booth full of scorpions. Shooting a child.”

  “You have an answer for everything.” He sighed again. “So I can’t stay? I just had another visit from Miriam, I need someone sane to talk to.”

  “I’m sure I’m as messed up as Miriam. Come back later, I’m going to sleep.”

  “Your eyes are red.”

  “From the tear gas.”

  “I can’t understand why you do these things to yourself. On behalf of people who are trying to kill you, people who cheer every time a bus with someone like you on it explodes.”

  “Please, Benny. I’m tired.”

  “Okay, I’m going, do you need anything?”

  “Just sleep.”

  “What does tear gas feel like?’ he asked, curious.

  “It stings. Your lungs burn. You feel like throwing up, or at least I do. You get scared.”

  “Poor Dana.”

  “No, poor Palestinians.”

  Benny sighed heavily. “You have a good heart, Dana, but you refuse to see the writing on the wall. I’ll drop by later, unless business picks up.”

  “Great.” I shut my eyes, and the sound of Benny shutting the door as he left was already mingling with a dream.

  First Daniel and I fixed up o
ur flat, then we married, and then we fought.

  When Daniel and I bought the three rooms that became our ground-floor flat, they looked as if they’d drawn inspiration from those black-and-white Time-Life photos of inner-city blight: broken sinks, cakes of dirt in every corner, spotted mirrors nailed to the wall. Prostitutes had lived in the building, and they’d left behind not only mirrors but also their shiny damask bedspreads. Daniel was horrified when I suggested we wash the bedspreads and use them as sofa covers.

  The building was also stained and run down. But this was prime seaside property, and even the smallest of the three flats was very expensive. Daniel’s parents were heavily in debt, so my father came to the rescue. “It’s the least I can do, duckie,” he said.

  Daniel’s younger sister Nina moved in with their grandmother, though she chose to sleep in the living room and to use the converted balcony for meditation. Nina was twenty-two and recently divorced; she was also unemployed and “off men” for the time being. Moving in with Granny suited her; in any case it was better than going back to her parents’ house. At Granny’s she could play tapes of her guru’s teachings and listen to Ravi Shankar to her heart’s content. She had even started giving yoga lessons to Elena, the prim Russian woman who came to read to Granny, and who, as it turned out, had back problems.

  Daniel and I set up a tent in one of the rooms and lived in it while we worked on the flat. We broke down walls, retiled the floor, plastered and painted. Daniel was good with his hands, and he engraved small angels in the molding along the ceiling. The walls were replaced by arched passages: Daniel didn’t like doors.

  When the flat was ready we folded up the tent and bought a bed and olive green sofas and a faded olive and pink Turkish carpet for the living room. Then we invited everyone we knew to celebrate our marriage. My father arrived without Gitte, who had lost her parents in an air crash and was afraid of flying. She sent profuse apologies and a charming tapestry of tiny happy people enjoying themselves in a park. The wedding party lasted all night: over three hundred guests crowded into the two empty apartments on the third floor, which we had illegally taken over for the evening. Eventually the party spread to the beach, where we danced to live music and stuffed ourselves with catered food until sunrise.

  In the early morning, after all the guests had left, Daniel and I walked slowly back to our flat and flopped down onto the new green sofas. The caterers had tidied up, more or less, but gifts lay scattered everywhere, a sea of boxes and packages. The smell of grass and hashish and ordinary cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.

  “The emperors of hash and grass have fled,” I said, “leaving a trail behind them.”

  “You’re more stoned than I thought.”

  “I’m not. I didn’t smoke.”

  “It’s enough to breathe in the air here.”

  “It’s childish to humanize objects. I read that somewhere. But I can’t help it. You’ve married a childish person, Daniel.”

  This was Daniel’s cue to say something affectionate and reassuring, but he didn’t answer. It was the first time he used silence against me, and I understood that we were moving toward a fight, though I was still hoping to stop it.

  We were not used to discord. Until then we had only wondered, day after day and night after night, at how alike we were: the coincidences were almost alarming, and had we been inclined toward mysticism we might have posited fantastic phenomena: twins in another lifetime, carriers of sibling souls. We had the same hairbrush and toothbrush; we owned the same scarf, which we had both picked up at the same street stall. Our handwriting was nearly identical. In high school we had both given oral presentations on manipulation in the media, and a week before we met we had clipped the same cartoon from the newspaper. We even had male and female versions of the same name.

  And now, married, exhausted, trying to hold on to my happiness, I said, “I wonder how a person knows. I wonder how you know when you see someone that this person is right for you, just by watching them sing and tell dumb jokes onstage.”

  “You must have a sixth sense, Dana. I had no clue at all.”

  “I know.”

  “I barely noticed you at the wedding.”

  “Don’t rub it in!”

  Again, Daniel said nothing. “You told me you thought I was cute,” I reminded him, still hoping to recapture the bliss I’d felt only seconds before. But it was no longer possible to avoid the tension in the air, which was sliding and slipping around us like a filament of barbed wire.

  “I just wondered why you’d come in your uniform—I thought you were probably one of those people who wanted to show off that they were in the army.”

  “I didn’t have a dress!”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that during the wedding.”

  “What else? What else did you think?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And what about when I came up to you? What did you think then?”

  “I figured you were horny.”

  We’d had this conversation before—lovers always go back to the first innocent moments that spawned their love—but he had said kind and flattering things. “Weren’t you at all attracted to me as a person?”

  “I didn’t know you.”

  “You thought I was some sort of desperate, pathetic loser?”

  “No, I just thought you wanted sex.”

  “So … when were you sure?”

  “Well, I’m sure now, of course.”

  I got up from the sofa and stared at him. I felt the fury rising in me. “Now! You weren’t sure until now? Can I ask why you suggested getting married three days after we met?”

  “You’re the one who suggested it, Dana. And I agreed, partly to help you get out of the army. I figured we could always get divorced if things didn’t work out.”

  I burst into tears. I was heartbroken, and nothing he said could console me.

  “I said ‘partly,’” he reminded me. “Partly to help you, partly because I thought I could fall in love with you. I’m not as impulsive as you are, Dana. I’m more cautious.”

  “So it was all a big act,” I sobbed. “You were just pretending all along! You acted as if you were in love, otherwise I would never have brought up marriage!”

  “I wasn’t pretending, I loved having sex with you.”

  I stormed out of the flat and began walking along the main street: I didn’t want to be alone. It was too early for the usual bustle, but here and there I passed people heading out for early-morning jobs or returning from night shifts, and soon the stores and restaurants would be opening. I knew Daniel was following me but I didn’t turn. Finally I flopped down in exhaustion on a chair at a sidewalk café.

  A few minutes later Daniel caught up with me. He ordered coffee for both of us and sat down facing me across the round white table. He said, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I was afraid of my feelings for you, Dana. I didn’t trust you, and it had nothing to do with you, but with me—it’s hard for me to trust people right away. I’m not like you. What if I let myself go and then you left me? What if it was only a whim on your part? What if you did this all the time, went up to people and offered yourself? I couldn’t know. But you know how much I love you now, I’ve told you a hundred times. Men get nervous when they love a woman this much. It’s nerve-wracking, it makes us mean sometimes. You must be tired, Dana. Let’s take a taxi home and get into bed and say a prayer of thanks to the gods.” And right there, sitting at the table, he began to sing. He sang me one of his favorite songs. Praise is due to the Creator for the dark and the light and the things that fly and the things that crawl and Noah and Cain and the fools and the prophets and the kings and your feet and your elbow and your smile and your light and the dark.

  It was impossible to stay angry after that. We took a taxi back to our new flat as he’d suggested, and we got into bed and thanked the gods.

  I didn’t wake up until evening. I was hot and sweaty; I had not turned on the air conditioner before I fell
asleep. I was also confused by my dream: Benny was crouching by the bed, stroking my hair. It was a dream I often had, especially when I fell asleep during the day, and it baffled me a little. The sensation was pleasant and I yielded to it easily, though at the same time I always thought, Good thing I’m asleep and this isn’t real life.

  I turned on the air conditioner and returned to bed for a few minutes because I needed to come. Usually I fantasized about Daniel, though not about actual encounters we’d had: my fantasies involved an imagined reunion in unfamiliar, faraway settings. On rare occasions Daniel was absent and I found myself conjuring surprising images of people I didn’t know.

  When I was finished, I took off my black top, poured cool water over my shoulders, put on one of Daniel’s T-shirts, and went to check in on Volvo, my legless neighbor.

  Volvo moved into the flat next to ours shortly after Daniel left. I saw at once that he was going to be difficult. His goal in life was apparently to impose his dark mood upon the entire world, and he reacted with bitter satisfaction to news of suffering and disaster. Since he had broken off all contact with his family and with friends he’d had before he lost his legs, it fell to me to look after him.