Look for Me Page 5

  I did my best to make his dismal one-room flat habitable, and I arranged for a series of volunteers to come during the week. When no one was available, I helped him bathe and kept him company. On top of all his other problems, he had hemorrhoids, an ailment on which I was now unfortunately an expert. In the beginning he tried to drag me down with him by explaining that all happiness was immoral because what about the person next to you who had lost his legs? But he failed to convince me and he gave up and liked me for resisting. When he was in a particularly gloomy frame of mind he asked me to read him pornography, though he insisted that his interest in such things was purely scientific: he wanted to study the effect of sexual material on a man who had lost his sexuality along with his legs. I refused, and we compromised on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a few selected passages from Ulysses, and the work of a well-known local poet who was famous for, among other things, his lurid, transgressive writing.

  I knocked lightly on Volvo’s door, but there was no answer: he was asleep. I returned to my flat and switched on the television to see whether by some miracle there would be something about the demonstration, but the local news stations were occupied with the funerals of yesterday’s restaurant victims. One mother had lost three children; she was brought to the funeral in a wheelchair and despite everyone’s efforts she passed out. This was followed by a commercial promoting a cure for male impotence, which showed an overweight middle-aged man getting ready for sex and rejoicing in his recovered prowess. I flipped through the channels and landed on a game show in which two teams, women against men, were given sixty seconds to think of songs with specific words like happiness or land. An attack of masochism prevented me from turning off the television; I wondered whether Daniel was watching this show, wherever he was, and whether he was thinking of me, of the way we liked to laugh at what he called Torture TV.

  I finally pulled myself out of the stupor I’d sunk into and wondered about dinner. I wasn’t very hungry, so I made myself café et lait and checked my e-mail.

  There was a letter from my father; he wrote every two or three days. His letters were nearly identical, not because he lacked imagination but because his life was repetitive, and he liked it that way. He wrote,

  Dearest duckie,

  I was very pleased to hear from you. Before I forget, it’s Gitte’s birthday in three weeks, so please send her a little card. She kept the one you sent last year (with the pressed flowers) on the mantelpiece for months. It means a lot to her, so please don’t forget, thank you darling. It’s raining today, and we are sitting by our third fire of the season. For a while we had some trouble with the fireplace and a man came in to have a look, but the problem appears to have solved itself, or was scared away by the appearance of the man, the way my toothache always vanishes in the dentist’s waiting room. Gitte is concocting some new dessert in the kitchen and the fabulous smell is making me hungry. For the hundredth time, darling, I wish you would come and visit. You would love it here, and a vacation will do you good. There are many young people in the neighborhood who would be very interested in meeting someone from Over There, and in seeing your photographs, etc. I’ve said this before, and will probably keep needling you until you give in. Alain and Sylvie are coming by later for dinner, to be followed by a vigorous walk in the woods if we can get off our lazy arses. We are all getting too fat. I miss you terribly, so please come. The choir is taking a day off today, some sort of important soccer match everyone has to watch and we couldn’t find another suitable time. The Messiah will have to wait. There is nothing new to say about the dismal news so I will not say it, except keep me up to date with everything you do. Be well, have fun, go out dancing. Love, Dad. Love from Gitte. Many many hugs and kisses. P.S. I’ve put two novels in the mail for you, haven’t read them yet but they look good.

  I replied at once. I gave my father a detailed account of the demonstration: the walk through the field, the woman who’d had a seizure, the two Palestinian friends. At the end of the letter I wrote without thinking, A guy from the demo sat next to me on the bus. He was in jail a few months ago for refusing to serve and I sent him a postcard, but I didn’t recognize him at first, because he used to shave his head. I looked at the two sentences, quickly deleted them and sent the message.

  The phone rang. For a second I thought it might be Rafi, and I was afraid to answer.

  But it was Beatrice, my freckled red-haired friend. I didn’t hear from her very often. She was an activist and also a philosophy teacher, and she had a very hectic life, running from one international conference to another while she tried at the same time to raise a family, correct student papers, organize events, and write books. Sometimes in desperation she dumped a pile of essays on my bed and begged me to correct them for her. She visited about once a month, and usually stayed the night.

  “Darling, Dana, how are you?” she asked. “I heard about the demo, I couldn’t make it. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Good. It’s been absolutely crazy. I haven’t seen you in so long, maybe I’ll drop by next weekend? My car broke down, it’s just been insane. I need some quiet time with you, dear.”

  “Come on Friday, but call first to make sure I’m home. We’re going to South Lifna, I don’t know how long we’ll be. Some rabbis are coming with us, so we’re supposed to get back before sunset, but who knows.”

  “Perfect. I can’t wait, dear. We’ll talk on Friday. Yalla, bye, love.”

  I met Beatrice five years after Daniel left. I was taking photographs of a candlelight vigil at the Women’s Reconciliation Tent, and Beatrice came up to me and asked about my work. At the end of the evening she insisted on giving me a ride home. “There’s a chicken sandwich in my bag,” she said, when we were in the car. She turned the ignition. “See if you can find it, I’m famished.” I looked inside her huge, messy bag, which was stuffed with books, papers, makeup, hand lotion, sunscreen, and a lot of other junk. At the very bottom I found the sandwich, wrapped in tinfoil. She offered me half and we ate as we drove. “Delicious,” I said.

  When we reached my building she asked if she could come in.

  “Of course,” I said.

  She wanted to see my photographs, and she was very excited about some of them. She was an excitable person in general. We sat on the living room floor, and she spread the photos out on the faded Turkish carpet until we were surrounded by a sea of images.

  When I first took up photography I tried to capture the patterns and moods of people on the beach. I loved the dots of color sprinkled against the sand—no artist could have deliberately planned more intriguing compositions: streaks and splashes of brick red, bright yellow, pale blue, lollipop orange, black crescents on lime green. And I loved the way people let go at the beach: their bodies expanded with joy or wistful contentment or, at worst, resignation. The photos were of families and couples and solitary men or women; small naked children playing beach tennis or balancing on the edges of chairs; tubby people and thin young couples; a dark young man asleep on his stomach, his leg curled up toward his chest, sunk in the sand, exhausted, unable to bear the exhaustion, demanding comfort from the sand and finding it.

  But most of my photographs were of the conflict, the physical ugliness of war, the people lost inside it. War destroys the landscape: for example, the metal lockers and cement blocks at checkpoints, crumbling stone and pieces of bent metal everywhere, human cages, watchtowers, ripped asphalt, barbed wire, floating garbage pinned to the barbed wire; shredded rubbery camouflage, flimsy and amorphous, like the khaki skin of a sea monster; improvised structures at military posts, all of them cheap, makeshift cement squares, slightly askew, because who can be bothered with architecture in wartime? No one worries about beauty when people are killing each other. Inside the mess and chaos floated an endless multitude of faces and bodies, extraordinary because of the extraordinary circumstances. They left their signatures on the landscape in the form of competing graffiti. Palestinian graffiti was trilin
gual: Long live the PFF, I am the son of the PFF (Arabic); Come and see what you have done (misspelled Hebrew); American Occupation of Palestine (English). In response, young soldiers sprayed available surfaces with their own defiant strokes: the name of their unit, a Star of David, a fighter plane.

  “How did you get into photography?” Beatrice asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m going to publish these photos,” she said. “Good thing I married a man who has not only a heart but also money! Now, what about your personal life?” she asked.

  “Nothing much going on.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of. You can’t live like a cloistered nun, you know.”

  “Yes, yes …” I said vaguely.

  “Don’t ‘yes yes’ me, dear. Are you having any sex at all?”

  “No.”

  “Since when?”

  “Four years, seven months. There was someone a year after Daniel left, just a onetime thing, it was a disaster.”

  “That’s scandalous. Someone like you! Don’t you miss it?”

  “I miss Daniel.”

  “You feel you have to be loyal to him.” It was a mild reprimand: she clearly didn’t think much of my approach.

  “I can’t help the way I feel,” I said apologetically.

  “Listen, dear. Would you feel it’s less of a betrayal if we slept together?”

  I considered her question. “Yes,” I said at last. “Daniel wouldn’t mind. It wouldn’t bother him.”

  She looked at me a little pityingly, as if I were slightly backward. “I’ll stay the night, then.”

  “All right. But I’m not experienced with women.”

  She laughed. “I’ll let you read the manual first.” She phoned her husband and told him she wasn’t coming home. “Dudu, my love, I’ll be back in the morning, I’m staying with Dana, poor sweet thing,” she said, smiling at me. “Don’t forget Hagari has her project, and there’s that pizza in the freezer …yes…yes…fine. Bye for now, honey.”

  “He sends his regards,” she told me, putting her phone away. “So, let’s have some fun.”

  I didn’t know how old Beatrice was; she never told anyone, and it was impossible to guess, partly because she was covered with freckles. There were times when I thought she was in her early forties, but then under bright morning light, just waking up, her russet hair spiky and silly on the pillow, she seemed older. She never discussed her past, she only talked about her current projects and her hopes for an end to the endless war, but I knew she had lost a son in the first Palestinian uprising. Sometimes she let me read her poems, which she scribbled on receipts, student papers, or any handy scrap of paper. The poems were ruthless: the sergeant twists in his muddy bed one last oh fuck / in the evening nothing remains but the television fantasy of one more hero helping his country / over there lie the remains of the Palestinian girl he sported with this morning. Nothing about Beatrice suggested that she harbored such poems and she seemed rather embarrassed when she showed them to me. I had a sense that I was the only person who saw these poetry scraps before they were stuffed into drawers.

  We had an easy friendship, casual and simple. But I knew that Beatrice didn’t approve of the way I conducted my life. She believed in looking ahead. It seemed to me that there was a price to pay for detachment, even if it helped Beatrice survive. In any case, detachment was not an option for me: Daniel was alive.

  Daniel was not interested in politics, as far as I could tell. When I brought up political subjects, his eyes would glaze over or else he’d start kidding around. “Saint Dana,” he’d tease me. But I wasn’t a saint; I acted as I did in order to stay afloat. I was living in the midst of a Swiftian farce and the only way for me to stay sane and keep my perspective was to become Gulliver. That was probably the reason I’d never joined any party or group. When I was growing up my father took me to demonstrations, and after he left the country I went on my own. I was a few feet away from the grenade that killed a demonstrator and wounded others, at one of our largest peace rallies. A Jewish extremist had thrown a grenade into the crowd. I heard a deafening explosion, the air filled with smoke, and everyone began running and screaming. For a while I was nervous about taking part in demonstrations, but the fear passed. You never knew how or when you’d die. No one can control fate, not by staying home and not by going out.

  Daniel, on the other hand, had never been to a demonstration in his life before he met me. After we were married he came along a few times, but found the small subdued gatherings boring and hopeless. He liked to joke about the conflict. “The solution to the Palestinian problem,” he’d say, “is the body-double plan.” Each of us would have a Palestinian body double, and we’d switch places on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and alternating Thursdays. On those days the body double would take on the name Moishie Lipshuitz, for example, and move into Moishie’s house, and Moishie would move into his double’s house and take on the name Raid Ahmed Bashar. People could be matched by profession, taste in the opposite (or same, as the case might be) sex, and hair color.

  If that didn’t work, Daniel said, we could all leave. We could desert the entire region and spend the rest of our lives on Club Med cruise ships, only they’d be renamed Club Mid. Some of Daniel’s jokes were macabre and in poor taste; they were about things like recycling body parts and obligatory victim suits, with pictures of corpses on them, which all citizens should be forced to wear, in order to garner sympathy from our critics abroad and also to raise money. Instead of relying on posters of a child with missing limbs lying in a hospital bed, the foreign ministry could print an aerial view of the entire population dressed in victim suits.

  When I came to know Daniel better I understood that he felt there was something trivial and tedious about endless analyses of the situation, endless conversations in living rooms. A few months after we married there was a problem with an Arab at the firm he worked for. The army approached the company and asked them to design a big military complex. It was a great contract for them, huge. The army said this guy, Isa, who was one of the architects, couldn’t be part of the project, or even part of the firm, because he didn’t have clearance. The firm didn’t want to fire Isa, but they promised to keep him away from the project. They took away his keys to the filing cabinets and moved him to an isolated office. He had an entire floor to himself, but he was all alone there. Daniel quit in protest, and one other woman left, too. Daniel didn’t tell me about any of this while it was going on. He just came home one day and announced that he’d quit his job. “Why?” I asked. “Too many racist cowards,” he said. I had to ply him with questions to get the full story.

  It was time for the sea, my drug and my salvation. The sea kept me from drowning myself, a notion I had never seriously contemplated, but I knew that if I did, the sea would be there to hold me up and send me back. Every evening I walked the one hundred steps from my flat to the beach, to the soft hot sand or the soft cool sand, depending on the season. There were times when I didn’t go out until late at night, but my favorite time was dusk, when the waves turned into white satin and pale blue silk with gray transparent strips of light shimmering under the fading sun.

  I stepped out of our building and waved to Marik, a young immigrant with smooth skin and slanted eyes who guarded the gleaming new City Beach Hotel across the street. Poor Marik sat on his stool all day, sullen and languid behind an incongruous office desk that was taken out to the street every morning and removed at midnight.

  I once had a very embarrassing experience with Marik. One sweltering summer night I had left the house wearing a long cotton dress. I rarely wore anything but jeans, but I had a yeast problem at the time and the doctor had recommended loose clothing until it went away. So I bought an ankle-length Indian dress; I wanted it to be light and colorful because I didn’t want to be mistaken for a religious woman. I wasn’t wearing panties; they only made matters worse, and the dress was long enough to provide a feeling of security. Unfortunately, on
my way back from the beach, just as I reached my building, I stepped on a sidewalk grate, the kind that produced such winsome cinematic results when Marilyn Monroe encountered it in her white skirt. In my case, the dress blew skyward above my shoulders, leaving me completely naked on the street.

  I didn’t understand at first what had happened, which made the dreadful moment last even longer. I tried to pull down my dress, without success; my second idea was to crouch down. Only then did it occur to me that I had to move away from the grate under my feet. Luckily it was already dark, and the street was deserted, but Marik was still on duty. He had ducked inside the hotel in a panic.

  I decided to ignore the event entirely, and made a point of waving to him as usual when I left the building the following morning. But Marik never recovered, and though he continued to nod back in his usual sullen way, after that day he looked mortified every time he saw me.

  I waved at him now, then headed west, toward the sea.

  Though I had walked down this street ten thousand times on ten thousand evenings, the pangs of my unrequited love for it never diminished. The buildings on my side of the street were weather-stained in competing layers of black, sepia, ash, bone, peach. Geometric patterns emerged from the edges and rims of windows, doors, security bars, the metal rods of air-conditioner supports, the fat, hairy trunks of palm trees next to narrow electric poles. A multitude of details interrupted the patterns: black and gray graffiti, abandoned scraps in the alley, crevices and cracks in the walls, the tips of new sunny-white buildings peeking from other streets. In the midst of this collage a naked neon woman reclined on a white panel like an oblivious angel; she had once reigned over Bar Sexe. The caged cavern under the sign no longer led to a bar but was still an important meeting place for certain citizens who, as I quickly discovered, did not like to be photographed.