Look for Me Read online

  Further down, behind a brash pop drink sign, our miniature La Scala maintained its dignity, despite the yellow and maroon sheets nailed to its arches. The real La Scala’s arches are on the ground floor, but here the four arches had been reproduced on all three stories, and the building, which stands at an intersection, curves gently around the corner. I often thought about the surge of enthusiasm that lay behind the design of this building, when the city was very young. And though the arches were now smudged and dingy and someone told me that people did drugs behind the yellow and maroon sheets, the faith that had inspired this doomed project still had the power to move me.

  I walked past the defunct Bar Sexe, past our miniature La Scala, past the chairs scattered on the sidewalk outside the little convenience store, past the store’s mounted television, set permanently to the sports channel, across the street to the paved boardwalk, with its patterns of concentric circles echoing the movement of the waves, and down the stairs to the beach. The change from walking on a hard surface to sinking unpredictably with each step was always a surprise. At this time of night the sea was black, except for strips of pearl white foam along the edge of waves, and navy blue shadows where light from the street or moon happened to fall. There were couples lying on blankets here and there, a few joggers, and one or two determined late-night swimmers. A voice said, “Mia?”

  I turned and saw a man with a long oval face standing behind me. He was dark-skinned, tall and very broad, like a weight lifter.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

  Normally I would not have answered because I had a rule about pickups and the rule was that I didn’t do them. A year after Daniel vanished I had yielded to the relentless pressure of friends and acquaintances, and allowed someone to follow me home. I met him at a little video store down the street from my flat. There was barely room to move between the three crowded shelves, and our bodies kept brushing against one another as we looked for movies. Finally he spoke to me. I suppose it was partly his height that misled me about his age, though it’s also possible that I was too detached to worry about how old he might be. I didn’t discourage him, and when I left the store he trotted next to me like a colt. He came into my flat, and then remembered to ask my name. I didn’t want to tell him. “What do I look like?” I asked him. He considered. “You look like a Simone,” he said. “That’s me, Simone,” I said. He let it go; he was too excited to insist. I liked him: his soft green eyes, his anxious shoulders, the way he talked about his collie and his trip to Italy on the way to my place.

  But in bed, he barely knew what he was doing—though he wouldn’t admit it and tried hard not to show it. I had to explain some things to him; he was embarrassed and pretended he’d known all along. Everyone had told me I needed to see other men, but it didn’t work. The experience had no relation to anything that was going on in my life, to who I was or how I felt. After he left I soaked the sheets in soapy water and called Odelia. “I wonder why everyone thinks adultery is such a good thing,” I said. I told her about the boy and about the sheets soaking in the tub. “Washing sheets after the guy leaves … that’s always a bad sign,” she agreed. And then she apologized, because she’d been one of the people advising me to date. “Do what you feel is right,” she said.

  For weeks afterward he called me every day, came knocking at my door. It turned out that he was sixteen and in high school. He was desperate, and it took a lot of energy getting rid of him, and I hurt him. I promised myself that this would be the last time, and it was.

  But that night, after the demonstration in Ein Mazra’a and the two intrusive sentences in the letter to my father—that night I wanted distraction. And though I had no intention of letting this man follow me home, I didn’t send him away.

  “I’ve seen you here,” the man said. “I’ve seen you walking here at all hours, as solitary as a wolf in the forest.”

  I continued strolling along the shore, where the tide had created a smooth shelf of wet sand, flat and generous, giving us back the imprints of our shoes as we walked.

  “Once I saw you with a camera slung around your neck,” the man said. “You were taking photographs at dusk. Is it okay with you that I’m walking next to you? Tell me if it isn’t. I don’t want to intrude.”

  And this is where normally I would have said, “It isn’t okay, go away, I need to be alone.”

  But I said, “I don’t mind.”

  His spirits lifted. “You’re very kind,” he said. “You have a compassionate heart. It really shows on you, it sits on you like a coat. A coat of many colors,” he chuckled.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” I asked him.

  “I just came back from reserve duty, I came for a jog, to clear my mind,” he said. “To breathe in some sea air. You can feel the heat coming from the waves, but it’s a pleasant heat.”

  I took another look at him, and it was true, he was dressed for jogging: running shoes, shorts, T-shirt. He looked reliable; he looked like someone you could trust to pick you up in his large arms and carry you if you fainted or had a seizure from tear gas. He would know not only what to do but also how to do it, because he was clever. You could tell these things from his eyes, his hands, and especially his way of speaking—not just his voice but also the interesting words he used, his perfect grammar. It was pleasing to the ear, his poetic use of language.

  “You use nice words,” I said.

  “Nice words?” He was puzzled.

  “Yes.”

  “No one ever said that to me.”

  “People don’t notice things.”

  “I never noticed,” he laughed. “What sort of nice words?”

  “The way you speak, the phrases you use.”

  “Come to think of it, I did very well on the vocabulary part of my psychometric exam. I remember they remarked on that, they were impressed. I just have a good memory. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel. About reincarnation. A man who was a warrior in the days of the Bible, reborn today …a hero from ancient times, like Samson, let’s say. Fighting the Philistines. The whole story of Samson repeated, because he’s a reincarnation. Do you believe in reincarnation? I do.”

  “I support the Palestinian struggle,” I told him.

  “Oh well,” he said. He didn’t care. He only cared about whether he was going to get anywhere with me. “This is romantic,” he said, “walking along the shore with you.”

  “It would be, if I knew you,” I said. “If I knew you and we were in love. Then it would be romantic. As it is, I can’t think of anything less romantic.”

  “We were destined to meet, it was preordained,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “How do I know you’re not a psychotic rapist?” I asked him.

  He paused, surprised. “I’m safe,” he said.

  “Do you have children?”

  “Yes, a son. I missed him while I was away. I’m glad to be back from reserve duty. He’s in kindergarten. A very naughty boy. Naughty, but clever. You know what he asked me the other day?”

  “No.”

  “Where is yesterday’s time? Is it gone, or is it in our thoughts? That’s what he asked. Isn’t that clever?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s nice to be home.”

  “Where were you?”

  “In Dar al-Damar. I’m in a special unit.”

  “What do you do, in civilian life?”

  “I teach programming.”

  “You could be lying,” I said. “I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you. Maybe you just escaped from prison. Where you were serving time for killing your wife with a chain saw.”

  “I’ll show you my ID if that helps. My army ID too, if you want, I think it’s still in my pocket. I’d show you my business card but I don’t have my wallet on me—I just came to jog.”

  I laughed. He was very happy when I laughed.

  “Okay, show me your ID,” I said.

  He pulled
his ID out of his pocket. His name was Aaron and he was forty years old. Then he showed me his army ID. He looked about eighteen in the photo.

  “Well, now that I’ve seen your ID and I even know your serial number, I guess you can come over.”

  “Thank you. You can trust me.”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “Why not? Why not? This is perfect—you, me, a perfect night.”

  “No,” I said.

  I didn’t say anything more. Aaron went on talking about how much he loved the sea, and then he talked about his son, but I wasn’t listening. He gave up and walked silently next to me.

  We reached the southern end of the beach. “I have to go now,” I told him. “It’s getting late.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend waiting for you?”

  “No, I live alone. Good-bye.”

  “Maybe I’ll run into you another time.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I climbed the stairs to the boardwalk and walked back to my flat.

  Daniel and I lived together for seven years and two months. Daniel designed buildings and I worked at an insurance office. I enjoyed my job: I typed letters in English, handled overseas phone calls, brought lunch for everyone, and watered the plants. The office was full of interesting exotic plants because our employer, a bald, friendly man who was, however, capable of ruthless decisions when it came to client claims, was an amateur horticulturist; he had taped instructions about each plant to the wall and it was a compliment that he trusted me with their care. “I can count on you, Dana,” he used to say.

  In the evenings Daniel and I nearly always went out: to concerts, comedy shows, plays, lectures. We wore matching outfits and everywhere we went there were people we knew. We had friends who were artists and musicians, waiters and drifters, students and left-wing lawyers; we got together with them for dinner or at parties that lasted all night. Daniel invented our own private language, called Kamatzit, in which the syllables of words were all vocalized with a short a sound, in honor of my name.

  We tried to have a child, and I finally succeeded in getting pregnant, but I miscarried in my sixth month. Daniel was convinced that he had saved my life by harassing everyone in the hospital and insisting they take me in and look after me instead of letting nature take its course, as they suggested, and I was angry at him for being rude and alienating the entire hospital staff, but we were both just stressed out and disappointed. The experience brought us even closer, if that was possible. We breathed the same air and a few times we had the same dreams at night. Once we both dreamed we were in a field filled with rabbits and we were feeding them lettuce; another time we dreamed we were on a sailboat with Asian sailors.

  Before Daniel I had hardly thought about men, or about how they might be different from women. I now felt that there was such a thing as maleness (men were never cold, for example); this uncharted territory was interesting, and also moving. I watched Daniel, the things he did, the way he looked at the world. I watched how he held a coffee mug or undressed, I noticed his attitude to his body, his work, other people. I had dreams in which I found myself on a planet inhabited only by men and I tried to pass for one as well, and no one guessed I was really a woman because I’d come to know Daniel so well.

  When I came home from the beach it was past midnight. I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day, so I boiled two eggs and made myself a sandwich. Then I undressed, turned on the air conditioner, and lay in bed. On some nights, as soon as I shut my eyes I saw a tangled dam, the kind a small, industrious animal might construct out of sticks and leaves and mud. The image interfered with sleep and in fact was no more than a visual projection of insomnia. When that happened, I would summon three memories and try to slide with them through the dam and into sleep.

  The first memory was of a sandstorm. I was twelve; we were about to move to the city and our flat was full of boxes. The ones my father had packed were neatly marked dishes and books, while my mother’s packing style was reflected in her less disciplined scrawls: junk from drawers and junk from office.

  We’d been warned that day that a sandstorm was coming our way; there were continual reminders on the radio, and our teachers instructed us to roll wet towels and place them under doors. And yet somehow from one moment to the next it slipped my mind, and shortly after I came home from school I decided to walk to the corner store to buy a snack. My parents were still at work and there was nothing tempting in the fridge or pantry. I left the building and began crossing the parking lot. All at once it came. I didn’t understand at first what was happening—I only knew that I couldn’t open my eyes or breathe or move. I kneeled on the ground, pulled off my shirt, and wrapped it around my head. The sand burned my skin, sank into my hair, entered my mouth and nose through the shirt. And yet I found that if I covered my face with the palms of my hands, inside the shirt, I could breathe, and I was after all, alive, a tiny living cocoon, breathing inside my hands, inside the shirt, inside the sandstorm. I decided that it was precisely because people were so small that they managed to survive on this huge and dangerous planet: how much air did we really need, and what did we need apart from air? Eventually someone noticed me; I felt strong arms lifting me into a car. I was rescued.

  The second memory was a remnant from my army days. I’d been sitting on my bed trying to clean my weapon and as usual everything was going wrong. I finally threw the rifle on the floor in disgust and ran out of the barracks. I made my way to the edge of the camp, looked out at the trees beyond the fence, and decided that I was nothing more or less than a prisoner. A prisoner in a jail operated by cruel and insane jailers. I heard someone call my name and I turned. Sheera, the girl who had given me the gold locket, came up to me. She handed me my weapon, but as if it were something else—a birthday present, or a lovely sweater. “You’re smarter than everyone here,” she said. I noticed her long brown hands, her long slender fingers and perfectly curved fingernails. She had beautiful hands. “I’m not, I’m stupid,” I said. “Well,” she conceded, “you are a little obstinate. But you’ll grow out of it. Come, the army needs you.” She took my hand and led me back to the barracks, and for once, thanks to her and to my good luck, I didn’t get caught.

  The third memory dated back to the second year of my marriage. I had dragged Daniel to a lecture about civil rights in some remote town in the north; he had not wanted to go but gave in for my sake. When we arrived we found that the lecture had been canceled. The people there invited us to stay for supper, but Daniel was too angry to accept. As we headed home a downpour hit us and our car got stuck in the mud. There was no one around, so we had to abandon the car and start walking. Neither of us was adequately dressed, and the rain chilled us as we trudged through the shallow puddles on the dirt road. By this time Daniel was in such a bad mood that I sat down in the mud and cried. Daniel began laughing, and then we both laughed and he sat down next to me and we kissed. Eventually a Druze came by in a truck. He tied a rope to the fender of our car and pulled us out.

  These memories were wonderfully dense and heavy, like an imaginary object that can’t be lifted even though it’s the size of a pea. They began to merge as I grew drowsy: I was in the mud, sand was blowing around me, Sheera was handing me my weapon, Daniel was kissing me but we couldn’t kiss properly because there was sand in my mouth. Sheera’s long brown fingers, the rope the Druze tied to our car … The pleasant confusion of near-sleep—the last stage before drifting off—took over and I yielded to it.

  Daniel and I quarreled again, about a month after our first fight. We quarreled about the mess in the house, and it was a conflict we never resolved, it came up again and again, and we argued about it again and again. My father had been neater than my mother, but it never seemed to bother them. Sometimes my father tidied up after my mother and sometimes he didn’t.

  But in our case the clash between Daniel’s approach to his environment and mine was a problem we didn’t know how to solve. Daniel was calm, usually; he felt that keeping one’s cool was a
national duty. He said that if people became nervous and irritable about everything that was wrong with the country, they became part of what was wrong, because one of the main things wrong with the country was that everyone was nervous and irritable. He either joked about things that bothered him or tackled problems pragmatically. Sometimes he had an outburst—when our tires were slashed, for example, because I’d put a sticker on the car that said AIDS KILLS: WEAR CONDOMS / THE OCCUPATION KILLS: WITHDRAW, but there was something theatrical and innocuous about his anger, as if even he didn’t take it seriously.

  At first he tried to understand me. “How can you live like this?” he’d ask, truly baffled. “How can it not bother you? It’s so ugly. It’s so ugly and disgusting. Don’t you care whether you step on apple peels at night on your way to the bathroom? How can you not be grossed out by gobs of hair in the sink? Disembodied hair …it’s like seeing a corpse. Beauty matters. How can someone not care about beauty?”

  “I don’t mind if you clean up,” I offered generously.

  “I can’t spend my life cleaning up after you, and I resent it. And I just hate coming home from work to this; it makes me think you don’t care about me or about how I feel. Why is it so hard for you, Dana, to put a cup in the sink, or hang up a shirt?”

  “I feel as nervous when things are neat as you do when they aren’t,” I said.

  “You’re just lazy.”

  “I feel more at home, cozier, if there’s a mess. This isn’t a museum, it’s a place where we live. I like having our stuff all over the place. I get scared when things are too orderly, it makes me think of being forced to do things. Besides, if I put things away I’ll forget about them. I need to be reminded that there are bills to pay, and activities coming up.”

  “Look,” he’d say, pulling an empty box of tissues out of a tiny garbage pail. “Even when you put things in the garbage you don’t really bother. This box is bigger than the pail, what’s the point?”