Look for Me (24 page)

“I feel so detached from all that now. Even the images in my mind, it’s as if I’m watching the scene from above, from a distance, and I see myself as one of the figures in the scene.”

“How’s your arm?”

“Better now. Those pills are working … What do you take them for?”

“My period, sometimes.”

“Can I take off your clothes now?”

“Yes. I’ve had sex since Daniel left me, but it hasn’t felt like this. This is different.”

“For me too. Do you want to use a condom?”

“No.”

“I’m happy.”

“I hope we won’t be sorry.”

“Of course we’ll be sorry. You can’t live and not be sorry.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

S
ATURDAY

H
E LEFT AT FOUR IN THE MORNING.

“What will you tell Graciela?”

“She won’t ask. What are you doing today?”

“I’m in a dilemma. There are two events, and I want to go to both, but it’s impossible. I wish these things were a little better coordinated. There’s the condolence call and the gay thing.”

“I haven’t heard about any gay event today.”

“It wasn’t very well publicized. The army is sending these gay and lesbian soldiers to the High School Pride Club to convince the kids that the army is gay-friendly.”

“They must really be getting desperate.”

“There’s going to be a protest outside, a drag carnival, they’re going to parody army uniforms and hand out free tickets to the Hague or the military cemetery. So that’s going to be colorful. But the condolence call seems more important. Are you going to that?”

“No, I can’t, I have a soccer game with my after-school kids.
And I want to spend some time with my daughter today. Call me when you get home.”

I walked him to the door.

“Will you be okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He kissed me one last time, and left. I returned to my flat, our flat, mine and Daniel’s, and sat cross-legged on the unmade bed.

Everything had changed: I had betrayed Daniel. I had held someone else, loved someone else. I would not have believed it possible and I still didn’t understand exactly how it had happened, or why.

At the start, during the first few seconds of sex, I had not been able to stop thinking of Daniel; it was as if Rafi and Daniel shared one body. I remembered dreams in which people I knew had merged into one person: Daniel and my mother, Tanya and Odelia, Ella and the woman at the photography store. In my dreams the transformations seemed natural, as though all humans had shifting identities and were continually exchanging one for the other. In waking life the confusion was frightening.

But Daniel faded almost immediately, because Rafi’s style in bed was very different. Daniel was funny, playful, imaginative. He joked, he entertained me. Rafi was quiet and intense. It was a serious undertaking for him, sex. Serious and complex, an exploration of another person and of himself. Daniel and I talked about what we wanted to do as though discussing some trip we were going to take and what hotels we would stay at. Rafi did say a few things, but they were not in the category of discussion. Remembering those things now made my stomach lurch, and I longed for him to come back.

What would I tell Daniel when I saw him? It was distressing to think that I would have a secret from him, but the idea of
hurting him was unbearable. Maybe I could telescope the years of his absence and make them vanish, make them inconsequential; maybe we could start over. But I wanted to know about his life over the past eleven years and I wanted him to know what had happened to me. It occurred to me that maybe this was the reason I’d started taking photographs: I wanted a record of my life for him. I would show him the photographs, and he would know what I’d seen and, if the photo was good, what I’d felt.

What would I say when I reached the one of Rafi?

I quickly pulled out the shoe box that held the photo of Rafi and removed it from the box. I stared at it and wondered what to do; I felt like a fairy-tale hero who has to find a clever way to dispose of a magic object without activating some dreadful curse.

First I would find Daniel, then I’d decide. In the meantime I placed the photograph on my work table.

I showered, slept for two hours, had a container of yogurt, and set out for the condolence call. It would be a lot harder than the drag carnival, but it was more urgent. I took a taxi to our meeting place at the train station. The taxi driver was in a good mood and whistled cheerfully as he sped down the empty streets. “Where are you off to this early?” he asked conversationally.

“A condolence call,” I said. “Two children were killed.”

“Good for you!” he exclaimed. He’d misunderstood, and I didn’t have the energy to correct him and get yelled at. Maybe he wouldn’t yell at me, maybe he’d only shake his head and sigh, but I didn’t want to take a chance. Once a taxi driver had thrown me out of the car because of my views. That was the only time, though, that I was banished altogether, and it was because the driver had narrowly missed being blown up that afternoon, had seen body parts flying through the air.

“You’re an asset to the State,” the happy driver told me. “Please give them my condolences, too.”

“I will,” I said.

He whistled all the way to the train station. He’d probably had sex the night before. Just like me.

There were two minivans at the train station, waiting to collect everyone. We were a small group: sixteen people in all. The condolence call was in Hroush, which normally would have been a short drive from the city, but it took us nearly eight hours to get there because our two vans were stopped and held up so many times. At one point we were told we had to turn back altogether. Desperate, we climbed out of the vans and sat on the road so that other vehicles would not be able to pass either. There were only two soldiers at this isolated road-stop, and they couldn’t drag us all away.

A furious taxi driver who was delivering a group of settlers to their burgundy-roofed homes in the territories flew out of his car and started shouting at us. “What have I done to you?” he cried out, his body tense with rage. “I might like you, if you didn’t do things like this. Now you’re just making me hate you more!” He turned to the soldier. “Why don’t you do something! Why don’t you make them move?”

“I’m just waiting to hear from the commander, take it easy,” the soldier said. He looked very depressed.

“I can’t wait! I have a car full of people here. They need to get home. Idiots!” He meant us.

“He’s right, just let us through!” shouted a white-haired man who was sitting next to me. I knew him a little; we had spoken several times on buses or marches. His name was Ezra, and though he was in his eighties he never missed an activity. He wore plaid hiking shorts and his thin, muscular legs were covered with white hair. I pictured him on a farm; I pictured him
pushing wheelbarrows for several decades. “Just let us through,” he repeated, this time calmly.

“I can’t, I have to wait for orders,” the soldier replied.

“Why are you here in the first place!” a woman behind me cried out at the soldier. She sounded exasperated and plaintive, as if she were his mother and wanted him to clean up his room. “Why are you cooperating with the occupation!”

“Leave him alone,” Ezra said. “It isn’t his fault. He’s just a soldier.”

The driver couldn’t control himself any longer. He grabbed Ezra and began pulling him unceremoniously by forearm and shirt collar. Some people rushed to protect Ezra, but he shouted at us, “Don’t move! Don’t get up!”

The soldier came over and announced, “Okay, you can go through, everyone can go through,
yallah
, get a move on.”

We reached Hroush in the late afternoon, but we were not immediately permitted to enter the town. A large ditch had been dug on the main road in order to prevent anyone from getting through. We parked the vans near the ditch and negotiated with the army. The negotiations began with phone calls to various army officials, who all said the decision wasn’t up to them, and ended with begging, nagging, and harassing the soldiers until they got bored and relented. I wandered a little off the road to photograph the grotesque remains of an uprooted olive orchard. The twisted trunks and amputated arms of the trees looked like mute messengers of some unspeakable doom, the details of which, perhaps fortunately, we were unable to decipher.

The soldiers watched us as we began crossing the ditch; it was hard to tell what they were thinking. We slipped going down and we slipped climbing up the other side. Those who reached the top first helped the others; I was reminded of a hundred scenes of Palestinians pulling their children up over
walls, over rocky mounds of earth, up steep hillsides. By the time we reached Hroush our hands and legs were covered with mud, and the feet of people who had worn sandals were no longer visible.

But our appearance was appropriate for Hroush. Hroush wasn’t anything like Ein Mazra’a, which had managed to hold itself together. Nor was it in ruins, like Dar al-Damar, which I had seen only once, after an incursion. Militants had holed up in Dar al-Damar several times, and the army had fired at buildings from helicopters and shelled them with tanks; there had also been fighting in the streets. The town had been reduced to heaps of rubble: houses had spewed out their insides as they collapsed, and bits of furniture—cribs, dishes, mattresses, lamps, embroidered pillows—lay in random patterns on the uneven mounds of stone and dust. Some buildings had survived, but they did not seem habitable.

Here the devastation was more subtle. The village was deserted: everyone was indoors because of the curfew, though there were women and children on the balconies and roofs, silent and watchful, as if decorating their houses with their bodies. No two houses were alike because they’d been built at different times by different people, with whatever material was at hand or had struck the fancy of the builder. The result was a genial display of textures and types of stone or concrete or plaster—porous and rough, smooth and symmetrical, each one a different variation on off-white. Hopeful metal rods protruded from the flat roofs and the beginnings of staircases clung to the sides of the houses, stopping Escher-like in midair: they were vestiges of an intention to expand. Poured concrete pillars would cover the rods and support higher floors, which the stairs would then reach.

The stores were all shuttered down: metal shutter after metal shutter, closed and locked. The awning of one of the
empty stores had come loose and lay in a tangled heap on the ground. The fabric had Arabic and English print on it, and I could make out the words
Abu-Jiab Optic
, and a drawing of a pair of glasses. Litter clung to the edges of the wide path that ran through the town, and in a corner formed by two crumbling walls I saw what looked like human shit covered with blue-green flies. Some soldier with nowhere to defecate must have used this improvised outhouse in the middle of the night; the soldiers were still there, inside two armored carriers. Three of them sat on the roofs of their carriers and watched us with stony faces. I took a photograph of the crumbling walls, which were covered with graffiti, and of the horrible excrement in the corner. Remarkably, ordinary cars, including a Red Crescent ambulance, were parked here and there: incongruous signs of the outside world in this closed-down paleoscape.

We considered our sorry state and wondered what we could do about it. The mud had clung to our skin and clothes and we did not feel presentable. We walked over to an outdoor water faucet next to the ambulance and turned it on. Yellow, evil-smelling liquid spluttered out, choked, then vanished altogether. We searched our bags for tissues, poured a few drops of bottled water on them, and did our best to wipe our hands. Ezra went up to the soldiers and asked for a thermos of water. The soldiers ignored him.

We followed the organizer, a short, rotund woman who looked even shorter under her wide-brimmed straw hat. She was holding a piece of paper on which she’d printed directions, but she didn’t really need to consult her notes, because as we walked sturdy-looking men leaned out of windows, greeted us, and told us which way to go.

Near the center of the village the buildings were closer together and the houses were older, with pretty domes rising from the roofs. It wasn’t as eerie here, because the tanks were
farther away and people felt freer. Women sat on chairs just outside their houses and children played noisily on the rooftops.

We knocked on the door of the bereaved family, and a young man with almond-shaped cat eyes and a struggling mustache opened the door. “Yes, yes, please, my parents wait. Thank you, we are happy you come,” he said in English, but his voice was unconvincing. He sounded tired and very angry.

It was a relief stepping indoors: the house was full of people, and brought us back to reality. The visiting room was spotless and the walls were bare apart from a few framed photographs of family members and an Arabic text in elaborate calligraphy, also framed. The television was on, but the volume was so low that I wasn’t sure what language the man on the screen was speaking. Folding chairs had been brought in to accommodate the several generations represented here: older children held bcobys on their laps, the knees of teenagers touched those of the aged. Everyone looked unhappy, but they welcomed us enthusiastically and urged us to sit down. The children gave us their seats and moved to the carpet; one of the bcobys began to cry and her mother, who appeared to be about sixteen, took the baby away to the kitchen to nurse her. We’d brought a few bags of food and diapers and we set them discreetly in the corner. The young man with the cat eyes served us sweetened tea in small glasses. I wondered whether the sixteen-year-old mother was his wife.