Girl Unwrapped (21 page)

“You fucker,” she howls. “You’ve got your bloody nerve.”

Toni raises her hands defensively because those fists look like they’re about to make contact with her head. But then Janet stops, freezes, peers intently.

“What the fu …?”

“Janet, it’s me. Toni. Toni Goldblatt.”

Janet’s hand covers her mouth in a gesture of wonder. Or is it dismay?

“Remember me? From Montreal. From … Jewish camp.”

“Right,” Janet says finally, but without much conviction.

“You said I should visit. I’m so sorry. I meant to write, and then I meant to phone, but they said you wouldn’t have one and that in Israel people just drop in, and I … if this is a bad time …”

“I thought you were David. You’re his size,” Janet says in a tone of accusation, as if, just by resembling this object of her wrath, Toni deserved a good dose of it herself. Then, turning on her heel, Janet makes a vague gesture over her shoulder which Toni interprets as an invitation to follow into the candlelit room. Janet flops onto a mattress laid directly on the bare tiled floor and heaped with rumpled bedding and cushions. She covers her eyes with her arm.

“Are you all right?” Toni asks.

“Yeah, yeah. Kind of bummed out at the moment. Make yourself at home.”

Toni looks around for somewhere to sit. She finds herself in a low-ceilinged, spectacularly messy room, jam-packed with astonishing objects, none of which resemble anything so ordinary as a chair. There’s a tall glass hookah, a clay drum, a pile of salt-encrusted driftwood, a spent mortar shell holding a bouquet of dried thistles, a fishing net draped across one wall and ornamented with broken seashells and coloured glass, a big round brass tray covered with dirty dishes, an empty tire lying on its side (the treads still gripping the dirt from its final encounter with a road), and a nose-less plaster bust of Elvis with a leather peace symbol covering one eye. There are empty cans and crumpled papers and books and butt-filled ashtrays and a bucket of soaking laundry and, in one corner, the ripped, foam-rubber-spewing back seat of a car. A mobile made of coat hangers dangles from the ceiling and gyrates slowly. And the whole crowd of objects—particularly the coat hanger mobile—casts crazy shadows in this flickering cave of a room.

Beside the wrecked car seat, Toni spies a passable leather hassock. Dragging it over near Janet, Toni lowers herself, sinks into the yielding material, almost topples backward but manages to hunch awkwardly with her long legs jack-knifed beneath her chin. She stares woefully at the dirty soles of Janet’s feet, while Janet continues to lie on her back in bummed-out silence.

“I forgot how tall you were,” Janet finally says from beneath her arm. “You really are as tall as David.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

Janet utters a strangled laugh.

“That sounds so high school prom and hearts and flowers. He’s my man, I guess.” Janet sighs.

Glancing around the room again, Toni now notices signs of this man. A leather cowboy hat hung over a lamp. Other masculine clothes. It had never occurred to her that Janet could be part of a couple. Awe, anxiety, and resentment chase one another around in her mind. Then something else in the room catches her eye: leaning against a wall, beneath a poster of three dancing Hassids, she recognizes Janet’s old blond-wood, acoustic guitar. It’s a comforting sight, like a long-lost friend, and she is almost inclined to give the Gibson a hug.

“What does David do?” she presently asks, not because she really wants to know, but for something to say.

Janet sits up abruptly, crosses her arms over her chest.

“He doesn’t ‘do’!” she says severely. “He just
is
. I mean, he does all kinds of stuff—gardening, religious studies, learning Arabic—but he’s not into that achievement shit. He doesn’t believe in identifying with a role.”

Toni bows her head at this chastisement. When she’s sure she’s regained control of her voice she says, “Maybe I should go home.”

“But you just got here!” Then in a gentler tone: “Don’t go. Sorry. I’m not being the hostess with the mostess. My head’s kind of elsewhere. Nice to see someone from back home. Really.”

Janet rummages around in the bedding and locates a pack of cigarettes.

“Smoke?”

Toni lights up and tries to look like she does it all the time.

“Dubeks,” Janet says apologetically. “Cheap Israeli brand. But better than nothing.”

She takes a deep drag and contemplates Toni steadily out of her wide green eyes.

“Yeah, I remember you,” she drawls, as if little bits of memory are clicking into place. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

The blithe assessment stings. Toni wants to launch into the tale of all the ways in which she has become a completely new person. Her eyes catch Janet’s smoky green gaze and words fail her. Janet herself has certainly changed. Slimmer than she was at camp, her face still densely freckled but more finely sculpted, with sophisticated hollows and lines, and a grave, sad, distracted air. Her red hair is longer and less kinky than Toni remembers, cascading over her shoulders and down her back. She wears a loose cotton skirt and a gauzy blouse with a green and yellow pattern of swirling lines that seems jungle-like, bringing to mind some rare tropical salamander disappearing into the underbrush. There are beads and tiny mirrors sewn into the cloth. Janet’s necklace of silvery coins winks in the candlelight.

“So what brought you here?” Janet asks after a fretful glance toward the rustling dark beyond the doors.

Has she forgotten the postcard? Her exhortations?
This funny little
country …Ya gotta come
. But perhaps she wants to know what motivated Toni to answer the call, why it touched a chord in Toni’s heart. She rakes her fingers through her tousled hair. Where to begin? She needs to say everything, thoughts that have accumulated for months. She starts by describing her rambles in the city, jumps backward in time to the Six-Day War, the victory that suggested the hand of God—not literally of course, because she doesn’t believe in that Old-Man-in-the-Sky stuff—nevertheless something big did happen. And Jerusalem! Four thousand years of history—battles, exiles, tragedies, dead-ends, the Jews kicked out, but never losing their ties to the land, and then she’s back to the Six-Day War. She’s no longer merely Toni Goldblatt, the kid from Snowdon, whose biggest accomplishment so far has been to graduate from high school with the fifty-dollar Steinberg’s bursary. Standing on Jerusalem’s sun-baked hills, she feels she’s swallowed thousands of years, lived thousands of lives. All this she tries to express, waving her hands and leaning forward, the hassock half off the floor. She sees her listener’s expression change from gentle indulgence to strain to a grimace of endurance. She is boring Janet to death.

“I’m so sorry. I talk too much.”

She squeezes her hands together between her knees. Janet’s face lights up in a genuine smile for the first time this evening.

“Same old Toni. It’s okay. I understand where you’re at.” The smoke streams out of Janet’s mouth in a sigh. “You’re in the honeymoon stage. I felt a lot like you do when I came, which was just after the war. I didn’t plan to come. Happened by accident. I was hitching around Europe, met up with this neat bunch of freaks and someone says, ‘Let’s take a boat from Athens.’ Next thing I know, I’m on the beach in Acre. Far-out scene. People drunk with happiness because Israel didn’t get wiped off the map. Strangers hugging one another. We had a
kumzits
that lasted weeks. But the euphoria wears off. The daily stuff catches up with you. You need elbows and a thick skin in this country.”

“But you’re a performer. You’re doing so well!”

“Was doing well. Was starting to get somewhere.” Janet frowns and bunches her necklace of coins in her fist. “Had this fight with my agent.”

“You have an agent!” Toni marvels.

“Real asshole. David says the music biz is a rat race like any other. I dunno. Maybe he’s right. I should do my own thing. Oh well, if my career was still on track you wouldn’t have found me here. I’d be in Tel Aviv, where the action is.”

After a forced smile, she sinks back into gloomy reverie. Toni is struck dumb by the glamour of Janet’s troubles, this unfathomable otherworld of the music business. She imagines men with slicked-back hair and cigars, women in glittery gowns, fights in dressing rooms, mirrors smashed. A dozen questions dance on her lips, but all seem equally foolish. Finally, to break the silence, she asks, “Where’s David now?”

“I don’t fucking know.”

Janet leaps up and paces back and forth in front of the doorway, head bowed, arms crossed over her chest. Her bare feet slap softly on the terrazzo floor. The movement of her billowing skirt makes the candle flames shiver. She stops abruptly, looks keenly at Toni as if noticing her properly at last.

“Hey, you must be starving. I am. I’ll get some food. To hell with him.”

Despite the long hike from the dorm and the lateness of the hour, Toni isn’t the least bit hungry. Her throat feels closed to food, but she nods eagerly anyway and follows Janet across the patio and the garden to a galley kitchen in the main house. Janet loads a tray with salads, hummus, cheese, a loaf of rye bread.

“No booze,” she apologizes. “That fucker was supposed to bring the booze.”

They return to the patio where several wicker stools and a small wooden table wait under the gnarled branches of a tree. Janet lights lanterns and suddenly the garden is alive with dancing light and shadows.

“This is where we eat most of our meals. David does the garden. He rescued it from near death. We’ve got roses, cactus, bougainvillea, our own herbs. He pruned this fig tree. He’s got the touch.”

Toni makes out soft blooms against the foliage and breathes in sweet and spicy scents. The stone wall, about as high as her shoulders, surrounding the enclosure creates a cosy space, reminding her of bonfire nights at Camp Tikvah. Beyond the wall is the solid darkness of the wadi. How often Toni lay on her cot at the dorm or sat at Hebrew class at the university campus and tried to imagine this place, and now she is here, at last. Her jittery fingers pinch pieces of rye bread into a heap of pellets while Janet, leaning over the table, busily eats. It is a great piece of luck, Toni decides, that David has gone AWOL, allowing her this reunion with Janet on her own.

“I was saying that the euphoria about Israel wears away,” Janet says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “But not for everyone. David’s still high on being in Jerusalem, the Holy City. Of course, he’s just high, period. He lives in his own zone, a different level. Know what I mean?”

Toni isn’t sure, but an uncomfortable truth strikes her. “You really like him.”

She is appalled at how resentful her statement sounds, but Janet doesn’t seem to notice.

“Huh!” is all that Janet offers as reply. A skeptical snort. Or a preoccupied grunt. Or perhaps a defensive “don’t-remind-me-of-what-I-feel.” But whatever the case, Toni’s comment is a conversation stopper as Janet rummages for cigarettes, lights up, and drags deeply, eyes shut in concentration like a condemned man on a firing line trying to savour his last request. After a long pause, Janet’s eyes blink open.

“So what is it you’re doing here again?” she asks, her gaze drifting from Toni’s face to the depths of the darkness beyond the garden wall, where trees rustle and a cool breeze wells up.

Happy to change the subject, delighted at another chance to present her new self—the grownup, scholarly, almost-Hebrew-speaking self—Toni tips forward on her three-legged stool. She babbles. She rearranges Janet’s cutlery. She marches the army of bread pellets back and forth. A sudden stiffening of Janet’s posture stops the army in its tracks. Janet’s head shoots upward in a listening position, and now Toni hears it too, a faint whistling in the distance, which grows stronger as it approaches, resolving itself from a wispy sound into one of the Singing Rabbi’s hypnotic melodies. The whistled tune is accompanied by the tinkle of glass.

“That’s him!” Janet pronounces breathlessly. She stubs out her cigarette, smoothes her hair, straightens her shoulders and stares hard in the direction of the whistling. There’s a scrambling by the wall, and then a tall, lean figure swings over and drops to the ground in a deft movement, noiseless, except for the clinking of bottles. “Hey, babe. How’s it going? I see you got grub on the table. Sweet darling! I’m starved.”

The voice is rich and deep. The words flow like melted chocolate poured from a vat.

“Where were you, you shithead?”

David grins, showing a flash of white teeth beneath a droopy black moustache. He removes a small embroidered cap, the kind worn by religious Jews in the Bukharian Quarter, and scratches the scalp beneath a shaggy mane of hair.

“Places, man. Places!” he says in a tone both emphatic and wondering, as if no other explanation were needed, but as if he is amazed at these vague, mysterious places he’s been privileged to visit. With sinking heart, Toni notes he is undeniably handsome. Tall, but with a slight scholarly stoop, giving him a gentler air than the forceful Israeli masculinity common in the streets. He wears some kind of ethnic shirt of soft white cotton, a leather choker, patched jeans, and sandals. Big, gardener’s hands. Arched, quizzical eyebrows. An impish cleft in his chin. Intense dark eyes.

“I could kill you. I could bloody well kill you.”

Janet has reared off her stool and grabbed the butter knife and waves it menacingly toward his chest.

“Aw, don’t be like that, babe.”

He drops before Janet on one knee, opens his knapsack and pulls out several bottles of beer along with some kind of liquor, which he places at her feet. A pack of cigarettes follows. He adds a handful of change from his pocket to the offerings. Next, he starts to take off his shirt as if he means to give her that too.

“Oh quit it, you asshole.”

But a grudging softness has come into her voice, and to Toni’s astonishment she allows him to pull her down to the ground and envelope her in a hard embrace. His hair falls forward to cover both their faces.

“This is Toni,” Janet says in a slightly breathless voice when they’ve staggered to their feet. David studies Toni with a frank, unsmiling curiosity that makes her blood rise. She’s become accustomed to these cool, appraising looks—from young men in particular—who seem to want to figure out what’s not quite right about her, what ingredient is missing. She stares back, jaws clamped tight, until his hand shoots out to enclose hers in a firm, manly grip, the kind of handshake one fellow might give to another. An unexpected spark of pleasure warms her chest. The keen look on his face is one of interest, not judgement, she realizes, and she can’t help but be flattered. Introductions over, David opens the beer he brought, squats down on a stool, and helps himself to supper, including the leftovers on Janet’s plate—the crusts and smeared hummus. He stuffs food into his mouth with his fingers, eating heartily, smacking his lips, and wiping his hands on the legs of his patched jeans.