Authors: Edeet Ravel
“I hate you,” I said. I was crying.
Daniel said, “I’ll make tea.”
“No, I don’t want anything.”
“If you want to leave, it’s okay.”
“That’s what you’d like, isn’t it?”
“No, I think we should talk. But if you want to go, I’ll understand.”
“How could you have done this to me? How could you be so cruel? And what sort of bullshit is that about being another person! You’re exactly the same person. What’s changed? Nothing! And for some crazy imaginary neurotic insane reason you leave me and hurt me and don’t contact me and don’t phone me and I have to wonder whether you’re still alive and worry about you all the time and long for you and suffer. And not even know that I can write to you and then I find out that someone is picking up your mail, and I have to go around like some desperate beggar, pleading for your address and everyone saying
you have the address, you have it.
And you sit here like some sort of Hunchback of Notre Dame and you make statues of me which I never knew you even knew how to do, suddenly you’re a sculptor, and it’s creepy, when all along you could have me, and don’t try to fool me, I know you’re perfectly sane, you don’t fool me. You’re just a fucking asshole, that’s what you are.”
Daniel said, “Come upstairs, Dana.”
He began climbing up the spiral stairs. I followed him. I noticed that he’d lost weight.
“You’re thinner than you were.”
“I guess I’m more active.”
There was a kitchen area at the far end of the second floor and a double bed near the stairway. Shelves holding neat rows of books and CDs lined the walls.
Daniel lit the stove and put the kettle on.
We both sat at the table and stared at each other. Then Daniel smiled. His face changed completely; he looked like a grinning cat. A grinning Martian cat.
“What are you smiling about?” I asked. I was sulking now.
“You haven’t changed at all, Dana. I’m happy to see you.”
The kettle whistled and Daniel placed mint leaves in two glass cups with handles and poured water over them and stirred in sugar. He placed the glass cups on the table and sat down facing me.
I didn’t drink the tea. Instead, I folded my arms and looked at Daniel defiantly.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“I met a man on the beach. And he said how come you don’t have a family. And I said, I have a husband but he’s fucking hiding and he said well I’m in a special fucking unit and I have access to every fucking citizen in this fucking country and if you want I’ll get his address for you from my fucking computer. Only he didn’t of course. But at least he told me the army knew. So I looked for someone in Intelligence. That’s how.”
“Ella told me you threw yourself on someone under arrest at the checkpoint.”
“Yeah.”
“You must have known it would get you into trouble.”
“Yes, it’s my fault I had trouble getting here. It’s my fault I never thought to ask Ella, hey, by the way, do you happen to
have my husband’s address and are you the one who picks up his mail? And it’s my fault that every office I went to they gave me that fake address and said you were there. And it’s my fault I spent a year of my life trying to find you, hiring private detectives, running to every office I could, stalking that building so I could see who was putting those signs on the door, sitting in the rain an entire night hoping I’d catch them, it’s my fault. What is this, some sort of hide-and-seek game?”
“You know, Dana, that’s not what I meant. I meant that it was very brave of you to do that, knowing you’d get into trouble, and given how badly you wanted to see me. I’m sure those men appreciated it. I didn’t mean that you planned it in order to avoid seeing me. I know you wanted to see me.”
“Why did you agree, all of a sudden?”
“I didn’t have a choice. Ella said you’d found me.”
“And if you had a choice I wouldn’t be sitting here right now?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
He brought a bowl of delicious-looking chocolate squares to the table, but I didn’t touch them either. I said, “Maybe you fell in love with someone else?”
“No, I haven’t been with anyone.”
“And now?”
“I still love you.”
“No, no—you can’t love me. You’d never do this to someone you loved. You didn’t even leave me a child!”
“I was sure you’d find someone else.”
“I guess you just don’t know anything about me.”
“Lots of guys wanted you when we were together.”
“Who? What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I thought you’d have a lot of offers and that you’d take one.”
“Yes, and that’s all I needed, offers, and I’d accept them,
because anyone will do, after all, what does it matter, one man is as good as another. And by the way I had no offers at all. Because everyone knew how I felt. Because for a year I couldn’t even see straight. Literally. I thought I was going blind. Every morning I’d wake up with blurred vision. I thought I had a brain tumor and I didn’t care, because I didn’t want to go on living without you.”
“You were angry.”
“No, I wasn’t angry. Because I’m an idiot. I should have said to myself, well forget him, because he obviously doesn’t love you because if he loved you he wouldn’t do this to you. But all I thought about was how you didn’t understand and I just had to explain it to you. But now I realize that there’s nothing to understand. You knew how I felt and you didn’t care. Those statues, they’re just lies. And since when are you a sculptor anyhow?”
“I always liked doing that sort of thing, as you know.”
“I don’t know anything about you, apparently.”
“Do you want a different kind of tea? Or maybe some hummus?”
“No thanks.” I got up from the table and began inspecting my surroundings. The bed was covered with an elaborate embroidered bedspread.
“Where did you get the bedspread?”
“It was a gift from the mother of one of the kids I taught.”
I examined the CDs and books and videos on his shelves. He had all the latest music, along with his old favorites. He had the most recent novels, too.
There were a few books in Arabic. “Was Arabic hard to learn?”
“Pretty hard.”
“Ella said you’re a teacher now.”
“I teach at the local school.”
“Well, you always were brainy. I guess you designed this house?”
“Yes.”
“Who built it?”
“Local builders.”
“Did they think it was weird?”
“No, they liked it. This house isn’t mine, technically. I rent the land, and I rent the house. But the plot was vacant, so I designed the house myself. The owners got a good deal.”
“How could you afford it?”
“My mother sold Granny’s flat and sent me the money. She figured I’d need it, wherever I was.”
“I can’t believe she never told me she was writing to you.”
“One of the things she mentioned in her letters was that you’d stopped going over to see them, or answering their calls. So she probably never had a chance to tell you.”
“How could you not answer her letters?”
“She never asked for an answer. She always wrote,
I know that you’re receiving my letters, and that’s enough for me.”
“Yes, that’s why I was so angry at your family—they thought it should be enough for me, too.”
“No, they knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. My mother chided me quite a bit about that.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you pick up the letters I wrote you at the start? Do you have any idea how much that hurt me?”
“You would have been even angrier if the letters had been picked up and you never got an answer. But you kept me informed through your interviews.”
“That’s what Ella said. Well, it would have been a lot easier to write to you! Did you see my ads?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get the people here to trust you right in the middle of the riots? How come they didn’t kill you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Tell me.” I leaned against the wall, my arms still folded. Daniel remained sitting at the table, drinking his tea.
“I didn’t come here to move in. I got into a taxi outside the hospital and I told the driver to take me to an isolated part of the coast. He lived in a coastal settlement, as it happened. It was just a fluke. He dropped me off at their beach, a little reluctantly, and I walked along the shore, southward. I guess I knew it was dangerous, but I didn’t care. Finally I got tired and I sat on the sand, trying to figure out what to do with my life. Some people passed by, but when they saw me they got scared and ran away. I had a bottle of Valium I’d stolen from the hospital and I finally decided that the best thing would be to swallow all the pills. So that’s what I did. But some Palestinians found me, maybe the ones who had run away, and they took me home with them. Well, you know how the Palestinians are. They had no idea what was wrong with me, so they just put me to bed, and three days later I woke up. I still don’t understand why I didn’t die.”
“People don’t die from too much Valium. It’s not toxic enough. I used to volunteer at a suicide hotline, they taught us that stuff.”
“Well, anyhow, I woke up, and they were really happy. The family had a retarded boy and I taught him to eat by himself. Then after about two weeks a group of men came to visit me. They were very friendly, apologetic, but they said they needed to know what my plans were. I told them I’d like to stay. It seemed to me that if I had to remain alive, this would be the best place. No one knew me here—I could have a new identity. They wanted to know how I’d been injured, and what my political views were, and what I thought of their struggle and
whether I knew any Palestinians. I told them about Isa, the architect who had his keys taken away in that place I worked at, remember him? By coincidence, they knew him—he has some relatives in one of the camps. They spoke to him and I guess he gave me a good reference. I told them I wanted to stay and learn Arabic and that I could be a teacher and help out. I’m making it a lot shorter than it was. It really took longer, and it was more complicated, but that’s the essence. After all these years, the people here are still a bit of a mystery to me. Sometimes they all start laughing, and you have no idea what the joke is. They have some sort of collective understanding about things, and you have no idea how they reached it. They rely less on words than we do—they often communicate in more subtle ways. So I don’t exactly know why they decided to accept me. Maybe it was just luck.”
“Why, Daniel? Why did you leave me? Why?”
“I heard what you told Alex. You thought I was asleep but I wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In the hospital room, when you thought I was sleeping.”
“I was never in that room. They wouldn’t let me in.”
“But I heard you, Dana. You said you were in love with another man, and you had planned to tell me when I came back from reserve duty, but now that I looked like a monster you couldn’t do it, and you’d stay with me. I even know the man’s name. Leopold.”
“Leopold! The only Leopold I know is King Leopold. Or Leopold Bloom. Daniel, you dreamed it. Or you were hallucinating. I can’t believe you thought that was real.”
“I remember it so vividly.”
“Do you think I’d say something like that in your presence? Do you think I’d come when you were asleep but not when you were awake? Daniel, if this is why you left, because of some
crazy dream you had, that is the saddest, most ridiculous thing I ever heard in my life. It’s like something out of
Wuthering Heights.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter whether it was or wasn’t a dream. It would never have worked out between us. If it was a dream, then that’s what the dream was telling me.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’? You think I’m lying to you?”
“I think you might want to protect me, or you might be embarrassed.”
“I never lied to you.”
“How can I know that?”
“Did you ever catch me lying?”
“Once or twice.”
“About what?”
“Well, small things.”
“Like what?”
“You said you couldn’t find the healthy kind of cat food.”
“Cat food! Well, there’s a life-and-death issue. Can you have sex, by the way?”
“Yes.”
“Have you?”
“Who with? There’s no casual sex here, you know.”
“I’m even angrier with you now. Angry and insulted. You obviously don’t have a shred of trust. And I’ve waited eleven years to stand here and be called a liar by someone who can’t even tell a dream from reality.”
“Your tea’s getting cold. And you must be hungry.”
“I don’t want to have tea with someone who has such a low opinion of me.”
I continued my inspection of the room. I touched objects, looked inside the wardrobe, opened drawers. I touched his clothes, his sandals. I noticed a few small bowls filled with water on the kitchen floor. “Do you have a cat?”
“Three cats.”
“Where are they?”
“Hiding. They’re not used to visitors.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
“Downstairs.”
“What’s upstairs?”
“My workshop and the computer.”
“Do you have friends?”
“People are friendly to me.”
“Are you lonely?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you watch TV?”
“All the time.”
“Do you watch Torture TV?”
“Yes.”
“Ella said you had cable.”
“I did, but it doesn’t work now. Everything’s messed up here, as you know.”
“I brought you a present. Not that you deserve it.” I pulled the dressing gown out of my bag. It was creased from being scrunched up all day.
He came over and took the bundle from my hand. “What is this?”
“A dressing gown. It’s silk. I bought it for you the day before I was supposed to see you at the hospital. Well, I saved it for you, even though you don’t need it anymore. It only got creased today—it was in perfect condition until now. I kept it in plastic.”
He unraveled the bundle, held up the gown. “It’s beautiful, Dana. Thank you.” He slipped it on over his clothes.
“You have to steam it to get the creases out. Is it true that you saw me from your window when I came to photograph?”