About the Night (40 page)

From the distance of the day that had passed since then—she was still on her bed, barely having moved—she thought that it was not the words that had killed her, or even the blow of three children. It was the silence that followed, a silence that meant this is what happened, this is what was decreed, this is my life, and that is that. Signed and sealed like the sound of an iron lock incarcerating a prisoner in his dungeon.

She found it difficult to recall what had been said after that or how they had made their way back. Who could revive the moments following a devastation? Suddenly, there was an enormous noise followed by silence and darkness, a plunge into the abyss.

And in her cramped quarters, the very ones he was familiar with, she tormented herself and mourned and collapsed into an inconsolable desolation, and she was stabbed again and again with the knowledge that there was nothing more to wait for or to hope for. There was no more tomorrow.

All that night she lay there, curled up on her bed like the lone survivor of an earthquake that had destroyed the world. She had been crushed under the ruins, trapped between the bricks and the concrete, paralyzed, her limbs mangled, gray dust settling in her eyes. No light made its way in, nor the consoling voice of any savior. She tried to speak, but her vocal cords had fallen mute. Something warm trickled between her thighs. It was a flow of urine that brought relief and, with it, dread. Now her body had been emptied of fluids, parched for water, and she tried to squeeze a sound from her throat. She fell asleep, then awakened with a shout.

Her body shook from the cold and wet. She dragged herself to the shower, took off her clothes, and threw them to the floor. That sobbing, which attacked her from every corner, tried to grab hold of her once again, but the water that poured down around her enveloped her in warmth, and for a few moments, it was possible to believe that she might be all right.

Part 2

2006

Munir rubbed his hands with a clear liquid hand sanitizer from a small bottle he kept in the pocket of his jacket like a drinker’s flask of whiskey. “I get it from a friend, a pharmacist,” he said almost apologetically, but Nomi smiled as if she understood him. “Germs, viruses, parasites,” Munir said, “have a field day in hospitals, growing and multiplying all the time. If we’re not careful, a plague could break out, and there are new germs that researchers can’t even identify. I don’t know where they come from. Maybe from that Jewish disease, the travel bug. All that flying and sailing and driving and climbing.”

A gray drizzle had started up outside the car, causing a gloom to fall on the city and Munir to fall silent. The cold that reached them through Munir’s open window reminded Nomi that it was that very same biting cold that had made Nomi leave the city in the first place. She considered Jerusalem a city for Europeans, people accustomed to a cold climate and heights and snow. But Nomi, like her father, whose family came from the desert, dry and cloudless, had never developed a body suited to the rainy, frigid mountains.

“People married to doctors,” Munir said, “they’re never sick. They develop an immunity to all those germs. But for people like us, hospitals are life threatening.”

“That’s why I want to get him out of there,” Nomi said. She knew that Munir’s fear of sickness would make him her ally.

“Elias wants to leave there, too,” Munir hastened to point out.

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“Who wants to stay in a hospital?” Munir retorted.

“Someone with no reason to leave there,” Nomi told him.

“They’ve blocked off the road again,” Munir said, sounding desperate. “Who’s it for this time?”

“I think it’s Condoleezza Rice,” Nomi said.

“She’s got no more hope of succeeding than anyone else,” Munir said. “Nobody can bring peace here. It’s not something you can import from America. It has to come from this place, from the people.”

“If we only had a leader who spoke Arabic and understood Arabs and was sensitive to their pride and honor,” Nomi said, and in the same breath added, “Today I’ll take you home to Sheikh Jarrah.”

“That’s out of your way,” Munir protested. “And you’re always in a hurry to get back to Tel Aviv.”

In this traffic jam near Terra Sancta College, she realized that that was no longer true, that she was no longer running away from Jerusalem. The more she visited Elias, the longer she was able to stay in the city, like gradually increasing exposure to something that causes allergic reactions. There were times, she recalled, when she would drive all the way to the entrance to Jerusalem, and before she could even set one tire inside the city limits, something inside her would flinch. Then she would turn the car around and head back to Tel Aviv, pursued by this feeling of choking all the way down the hills to the plains.

“How are your children?” Munir asked.

Of course he was not referring to the children she had never given birth to, but it took her a moment to understand. She smiled in relief at not having to explain about not having children of her own. People almost always asked directly, or at least raised an eyebrow.

“With these kids,” she told Munir, “things are always changing, you know. Nothing’s ever really finished or settled quickly. Hardships last for years, and sometimes the solutions take years as well.”

“There’s nothing sadder than children without homes,” Munir said.

Nomi told him about the boy in her care who ran away from every framework: institutions, foster homes, visits with his parents. He kept a small backpack under his bed at all times with a bus ticket and some money. He could live on tap water. “The last time he ran away, he had the entire Adoption Services and a special police search party up in arms. Eventually, he was found at the Tel Aviv central bus station, swallowed up by the crowd. He had spent his time riding buses to nowhere. A woman on the way to Hadera shared her sandwich with him; an old lady on the bus to Netanya gave him an apple and some chocolates she had bought for her grandchildren. He managed like that for five days. He’s a boy in search of himself who winds up leading himself to nowhere.”

“Why does he run away?” Munir asked.

“He feels that no one really wants him,” Nomi said. “He runs away so that he won’t need anyone. When nobody wants you, you make yourself disappear. That way, you gain control, in a sense. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You want to get rid of me. Well, I’ll get rid of you first. I’ll show you.’”

Nomi’s car inched along in the traffic jam caused by yet another false alarm of peace, this one set off by the ambitious Dr. Rice. But there had been many others: Gunnar Jarring, Henry Kissinger, Joseph Sisco, James Baker, Dennis Ross. They were all special envoys for peace in the Middle East; each had been in Jerusalem and each had failed.

Adoption Services employees were forbidden to share information about the children in their care, but Nomi allowed herself to stray from the rules in Munir’s company. “A few weeks ago,” she told him, “he disappeared again. This time from an orphanage in south Tel Aviv. That night a newspaper deliveryman reported seeing a child sleeping in a public park in another city entirely, and according to the description, I knew it had to be him.” She drove out to retrieve him from the local police department first thing in the morning, where she found him wrapped in a blanket, like a victim of a terrorist attack.

She did not know where to seat him in the car and eventually decided on the backseat, but she insisted he fasten his safety belt. She also locked all the doors from within; the alert expression on his reflection in the rearview mirror made it clear that he understood she did not trust him. Would he try to escape from her car? She had promised to find him a home but had failed again and again because he never fit in anywhere. Each and every place she tried admitted failure and returned him to Adoption Services at the end of the trial period, like some popcorn machine that nobody wanted. He trusted no one, not even Nomi, who was his only connection to hope, his last chance.

Nomi had stopped at a café in a small shopping plaza that was just coming to life for the day and bought egg sandwiches and hot chocolate for them both. From an adjacent table, several old women smiled at them. They looked like a mother and her son out for a day of fun together, just like the days Margo had promised and that never came to pass. The boy even looked like her, with thick hair like hers, brown eyes like hers, and the thin body and scrawny legs she had had when she was his age. There was also something smoldering in him that had characterized her as well.

As her anger waned and her worry dissipated, she smiled and offered her pinkie as a sign of peace. The boy had no idea he was supposed to link his own pinkie in hers and wiggle it, perhaps because none of the many people who had passed through his life had ever taught it to him. Nomi patted his head, and he did not reject her in anger this time. She told him she understood him, and that she, too, had been a disappearing child. After the hot chocolate and a hug from Nomi, he fell asleep on the backseat of the car with his backpack in his arms.

The next day, she brought him a puppy, sweet and soft. It had just been brought in to an animal shelter, and now a home had already been found for it. Nomi hoped the puppy would give the boy something to care for so that he would not wish to run away or neglect it. Indeed, the two became inseparable, even in sleep.

“He wants people to look for him,” Munir said. “He wants to worry them.”

“I can’t find him a home,” Nomi admitted. She knew what he felt like; she’d never managed to find a home for herself, either. Like her as a child, he had a huge intake of food but remained gaunt because his anger gnawed away at everything that entered his body.

“What does he look like?” Munir asked.

“He’s cute,” Nomi said. “Intelligent eyes; thin body; thick, cropped hair. He catches frogs and cuts their legs off. He toasts ants and other insects. He pinches himself hard enough to leave black-and-blue marks on his arms. He is angry, a loner. He tears the fine hair on his arms off with his teeth.” Nomi very nearly demonstrated how she herself had done the same thing years earlier.

“That’s painful,” Munir said.

“Our psychologist says that children do it in order to feel,” she explained.

“To feel what?” Munir asked.

“That they’re alive,” Nomi said.

A more compatible Adoption Services caseworker could not have been found for this boy than Nomi. Without sharing a single genetic marker, he carried traits and behaviors astonishingly similar to hers. Like him, she remembered vanishing often and for long hours when she was a child. Her parents were caught in their own battles, their shouting too loud for them to hear the door slamming as she left. She would climb to the top of the building and sit there on a square of cold floor between the banister and the door to the roof, her back against the wall and her legs pulled in to her chest. This would serve as her refuge for hours on end.

She felt courageous when she ran away and took her fate into her own hands. It wasn’t beatings or heavy punishments that drove her away, or even the way her little brother was glorified. It was actually the alienation, being ignored, the fact that she was invisible. The only thing that took up space in their home was that emptiness that could never be filled. Her mother gave out conflicting messages and undermined her confidence, constantly on the lookout for inadequacies and demanding absolute obedience. She was a mother who did not see her daughter.

Years later, a therapist used hypnosis to give Nomi back the detached little girl who would rip the hair from her scalp, who had to fight in order not to disappear, who ate in bulk to compensate for the emotional starvation, who feared people would not remember her, and who also feared her mother and tyrannical behavior and being hurt by others.

In her hideaway, Nomi could hear the sounds of the building. Water flowing through the pipes, a door opening in the hallway and then closing, the jangling of keys, footsteps. No one knew that all the way up at the top of the stairs a little girl was hiding. She had no watch, no sense of time. All she had to go by was the changing light in the stairwell and her own hunger. She was certain her body could manage it until they looked for her, until they worried, until they went out of their minds. She wanted them to run up and down the stairs, call her name. But the smells coming from the apartment told a different story: their quarrels were put aside for a moment in order to make an omelet for her little brother.

She could hear the buses turning off from the main road and heading for their nighttime parking area. She grew weak, the tears stole in—tears of hunger and thirst and fatigue. She was abandoned, neglected. They were not even looking for her. Shutters clattered shut, pigeons landed and took flight, and she bit her arms and left marks, as if merely existing was not painful enough.

Now her home was functioning like a regular household—no worries, her parents’ shouting silenced. If a person doing a survey on families were to knock at their door, he would surely be impressed by the cleanliness, the neatness, the quiet, the smells of an evening meal, and the members of the house all busy taking care of their own business. The telephone rang, but that did not cause anyone to wonder where she was. She imagined her mother working hard at her knitting machine, spitting out the dresses that filled her closets but left her husband with only enough room for a pair of jeans and a khaki shirt, two pairs of pajamas, a sweater, and a green military uniform that he had kept from his glory days in the army. Her mother’s own closet was stuffed full of suits, coats, skirts, dresses, belts, gloves, scarves, shoes, bags. She saved the choicest clothing for her forays into the outside world, when she could dress as a fashionable, elegant lady.

And what was her father doing while she sat alone upstairs? Probably showering after a long day on the road, smearing eczema remedies on his toes, preparing his bag for another day of work.

Nomi was overwhelmed with sadness and went out to the large water tanks on the roof. She climbed on the pipes that connected them and popped asphalt bubbles underfoot. She looked for ways to endanger herself, get injured. She leaned over the edge to look down at the street, feeling the cool whitewashed wall with her stomach. White fluorescent light from surrounding kitchens was visible. In the square below, people were testing the loudspeakers for an upcoming rally.

Not a soul knew she was up there. If she fell or fainted, an entire night would go by before anyone found her. Should she give in? After hours of having made herself disappear she wished to go back home. Now she had to overcome the insult that pulled her into the abyss and made her feel mistrust toward the entire world. Her presence was not felt, nor her absence. Even in school, during roll call, she did not immediately answer so that her teacher would have to lift her eyes from the page in order to see her.

Slowly, noiselessly, she came down the stairs. She had no key and was forced to ring the bell. Her little brother’s slippers padded to the door in a hurry. He opened the door sated and bathed and pajamaed, ready for bed. Nomi entered the apartment feeling alien, not as a member of the household. No one came to greet her or expressed astonishment at her return or at her absence. Even in the small apartment, she had not been missed. She washed her hands, and the water in the sink turned gray. She took four slices of bread, spread them with soft white cheese, and ate them with big bites.