The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (33 page)

R
on looked at Lea. She looked like the world’s mother when she worked. She cut open the wheat bread with delicate twists of her wrist, as if she felt each jag of the knife as it cut through the dough. She rested the romaine lettuce on top of the strawberry wedges as if she were tucking in children for sleep. She wiped her hands on her black apron and her large breasts swung under her loose shirt. She looked up. Her gray eyes met Ron’s.

“What?” Lea asked. Ron realized he must have been staring at her, at his new employee. There were no customers in line. He was sitting on a plastic chair under the striped roof of the kiosk.

“Just thinking. What are you doing with your money?” His ears burned from having to come up with something on
the spot. The sun hit the yellow leaves scattered on the boulevard so that he could see the heat in waves.

“I pay rent,” she said.

“Yeah, but aside from that,” Ron said. He recognized a tired quality in her eyes, one that did not exist in the eyes of all the other wannabes who came to the city. Still, it was clear she was from out of town. Her colorful T-shirts’ necklines were all cut by scissors, and she had a backpack instead of a purse. Ron wondered what she had come to Tel Aviv to become. An actress? An architect? Nothing he thought of seemed quite right. He had been looking for an older employee, someone out of high school, past the army, and he had lucked out with her.

“I just pay rent. I have a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment on a pricey street.”

Ron wondered why she called her street pricey, instead of just saying the name of the street. He wondered why someone would live in Tel Aviv and work twelve hours a day just so they could afford the rent. He wondered what it meant, he always had, to say that an apartment has one and a half bedrooms. So he asked her.

“One and a half bedrooms? I never got that.”

“What’s not to get? There is a bedroom and then half a bedroom,” Lea said.

She smiled. But she was not smiling at Ron. Two middle-school boys with a poodle ordered a sandwich with salami, banana pickles, basil, and popcorn, and her gaze had turned to them.

I
N THE
midst of the city, where the Japanica sushi stand used to be, where Rothschild Avenue meets Allenby Street, Ron had opened the We Don’t Judge sandwich kiosk. His buddies and parents were skeptical. The Japanica had been popular among the drunks who filled the clubs on both sides of the stand, but the city demanded a disgusting amount of rent for the space because of its location. Even though the Japanese cook and Israeli cashier had had to turn away about eighty customers each night, the business had still bled money and the Japanica chain owners had decided to cut their losses and close up after five years.

Ron had always been drawn to a challenge. He had gotten the idea for the sandwich shop at 7:00 a.m. on a bus home to Ra’anana after a night of drinking in Tel Aviv during a weekend break from the army. He hadn’t eaten all night, but he was always picky about food and couldn’t find quite what he wanted. Indian, vegan, fusion, Yemenite, pizza—nothing could be quite as good as the breakfast he would make out of his parents’ fridge at home. So he decided to wait, and in his famished drunken state he got the idea for the sandwich shop. He thought the idea was great when he was drunk; he liked it even more after rolling it around his head while sober, back at his desk on the base. He served as an Arabic translator in one of the intel bases, transcribing and translating radio broadcasts from Jordan all day. The job was boring but cushy, and it gave him three years to think.

O
NE OF
the lunch regulars, an old man who spat when he shouted instructions, was giving Lea a hard time.

“Now, baby cakes, I want my yellow peppers roasted for two minutes and my red peppers roasted for ten minutes, and I want the edges cut off from the turkey slice,” the man said for the second time.

“Of course,” Lea said and placed her hand over the counter to touch his sun-spotted arm. “The usual,” she winked.

“Ump,” the man grunted. “Last time I could swear you roasted both types of peppers for the same amount of time.”

She hadn’t. She had followed his exact instructions.

“I am
so
sorry that happened to you,” Lea said with a deliberate, grave face, as if the man had just reported that his granddaughter had been murdered while under Lea’s care. “I am going to do everything I can to help.”

It made Ron feel good, warm, that Lea took her job as seriously as she did. He put his heart into this kiosk. He wanted it to succeed, whatever it took. He had dropped quite a bit of money on a pepper-peeling machine (copper; made in Sweden). He had dropped even more money on a butane torch for crème brûlée (aluminum; France). It had taken him hours to figure out how the massive thing worked, but when Lea used it, it was a matter of seconds before the flame burst yellow and orange. Her eyes danced with it.

“You are such a good retailer,” Ron said after the peppers man left the kiosk. He had intended for days to say something nice to her and then, maybe, ask her out to dinner. He wanted to wait for a good opportunity. “You are Russian, right?” he asked.

“Half German,” she said. “And half Moroccan, but it doesn’t show.”

She looked sad that day, even sadder than usual. A few times she froze, stared, took small breaths like a child sipping soup.

“You are doing such a good job. Is this really your first job after the army?” Ron asked. Lea had ignored his compliment and turned her back to wash the guts of the peppers from the cutting board.

“Yes,” she answered. “I told you at the interview I just finished my service.”

“Did you work on the side during your service?” Ron asked. His shoulders were slouching; he had wanted to give her a compliment, but here he was annoying her with interrogations. This was not how he wanted the conversation to go.

“Not all of us were lucky enough to have Mommy and Daddy set us up with an office job. I barely got breaks,” Lea said. She dumped a handful of caramelized onions into the blender but waited before she pressed the “on” button.

Ron was expected to respond. He had the urge to tell her that his parents did nothing for his army posting, that he had just worked really hard during high school on his Arabic classes because he knew combat was not for him, but he resisted the urge. His instincts had not gotten him very far. He was a pragmatic guy in business, and he wanted to be one in love. He suddenly remembered the slogan of the ministry of transportation safety campaign: “On the road don’t be right; be smart.”

“Where did you serve?” Ron asked.

“Military police. I was an officer.”

“Like snitching on soldiers who do drugs and all?”

“No. Transitions unit. Checkpoints. West Bank.”

“Wow,” Ron said. He reached for what to say next, like an arm reaching through a hole too small for the rest of the body. “Couldn’t have been easy,” he said finally.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Lea said.

“Did you know anyone at the checkpoint where they stabbed that soldier right in the neck?” Ron asked. He remembered reading about it a while before. The newspaper had said the neck was cut almost in two, and he had wondered then what they meant by “almost.”

That’s when Lea turned on the blender. The blades spun, scratching the plastic, an ungodly screech.

T
HE TRUTH
was, Ron’s parents were not well off at all. After his time in the army, he worked like a dog at a gas station for two years so he could collect the preferential job benefits for postservice citizens from the government. You’d be surprised, but that’s some money. His work friends blew it on trips to Thailand and Peru or university entrance exam prep courses. But Ron played with the money. He played in real estate, and then he had more money to play with. He played in the market, then real estate again. He had always been good with money, a risk taker, even when he was just a twelve-year-old dog sitter. He had never thought it would be so easy. By the time he was twenty-seven he had so much money in the bank he was embarrassed to look at the exact number. The bank statement burned a hole in his jeans pocket. He had nightmares about his parents finding out just how much money he
had. He still lived with them in their three-bedroom apartment in Ra’anana. He was looking for apartments to rent in Tel Aviv. In the end he still settled on a one-bedroom apartment, because the price in the city for anything more was so revolting, his good sense did not let him pay it, no matter how much money he had. But before he found a place, when he was still looking through newspaper ads while sitting around the kitchen table and eating his avocado, lemon pickle, and French fries pita, that’s when he read that the Japanica was closing, that they were renting the kiosk out. His mother kissed his ear before she headed off to work in the textile factory. That’s when he knew. It was time. Life was starting, and he was ready to jump in headfirst.

O
NE NIGHT
shift, Ron wondered if he was becoming obsessed with Lea. It bugged him that he thought about her so much, even though there was so little he actually knew about her, even though he knew he should stay focused on the business. For all he knew, she could be shooting him down because she was some sort of prude, a former religious settler, maybe? After all, there were plenty of other girls, girls in plastic heels, swarming in circles all over the city. And it’s not that he was even looking. Throughout his service, he had been sleeping with a blonde from Kfar Saba who transcribed Spanish intel. She was a sweet girl, generic. After the army she got on a plane to Thailand like everyone else. Then came the e-mail, the one about someone else, someone specific.

Ron told himself not to lose his focus. Two film students
from TAU were still yapping about the new Natalie Portman movie, even though they had long been served their green olive and steak sandwich and it was past midnight.

“I just think the movie could have been a lot more interesting if she actually fucked the brother when she thought her husband was dead, if her husband didn’t just suspect it because he was war crazy. Now
that’s
complexity,” one of them said. His feet were too long for the bar stools of the kiosk’s counter.