Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 13

July 25

I hurled my last full whiskey bottle out into the ocean last night and soon much regretted it. I didn’t sleep a wink, my skin crawling with muscle hurt, fear ricocheting off my mind’s walls. I left the tent on the hour—about every time I thought I was dozing off—to see if it was bears I heard out on the tundra. All I saw was the flashing tail of what might have been a fox.

I was too tired to make breakfast. Instead, I packed the boat haphazardly and stuffed my shirt pockets with dry granola and pushed off. I fell asleep with the sail up.

I slept nearly twenty minutes, I think. That’s terrifying. I easily could have died. I could have sailed through a mystery web of cracked apart ice right to the North Pole that might, as it was several summers ago, actually be open water this year. And what would I do then? Fucking die is what I’d do. I’d die dead. I slept and dreamt. I only woke up because in my dream they were shooting closer and closer to me and there was no where else to turn but consciousness. I’m beginning to wonder if I actually want to make it. I’m beginning to question whether part of me simply wants to die here, curl up in a ball and fade into arctic winter.

This isn’t the first time in my life that I’ve thought I would die out on the water. But all the other times there were specific, adrenaline producing things happening right then and there that made me think I was going to die and fight off death at the same time. This is different. This is watching myself drift further and further from the beginning of what seems a doomed mission, an impossible mission. It’s days without end waiting for my own end to catch me like the monster in a nightmare and swallow me whole. It’s like living in Jerusalem when the bombs are going off daily in Ben Yehudah Square, and parents are afraid to let their kids play in Har Hertzel and snipers take nightly aim at the streets of Kiriat Moshe. Except here there’s no one to buck up in front of, no one to make moribund comments to, no one to share terror with. There’s no one. And my nap helped, and when I woke up I was as grateful as I was glad as I was angry because I was alive and I felt slightly if ever so slightly better rested. I was even on course. I felt a tremendous wave of guilt for not da’avening this morning.

Perhaps things will be better without the booze.

I can hardly enjoy the landscape these days, I’m so self-obsessed, so riveted with questions of my own survival, and then questions of whether I care about my own survival and then questions about what that must mean about my faith. I just want a break from my own company, a little time off from myself. There were clouds for the first time today, and I suspect rain will soon be here. A surprising twist, given how dry this climate usually is, precipitation only coming a few times a year, in the winter. Ugh. I once read a book in which the first person narrator stated that the reader should always assume he was smoking a cigarette unless he specifically stated otherwise; assume the same for me about spraying myself down with Uncle Bens. If I run out of this stuff, I’m going to wish it was winter.

At some point I’m going to have to deal with what happened to my parents and my own recovery.

Eventually, I’ll have to confront the relief I felt yesterday when I bathed without any mirror to confront me, the way I didn’t look down at my own body when I stood up out of the sea.

I can’t hide from this text forever.

It’s a lot easier to think about my return to Jerusalem now that I’ve begun planning out this apartment. I pity the real estate agent that helps me find it. I’m not going to be at all open to suggestions. I’ll need exactly what I’ve dreamt up here. But it’s happy thinking about my life to come, my life as Sara.

I imagine shopping for the bedroom. Sara will take the bus to Kiriat Yoel to the Lavanah superstore to shop for linens and paints. Of course I picked out the color today, though I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a kind of green, the green of the stunted willows here: pea-green up close but nearly frosted blue when viewed from a distance, cool, soothing, trimmed with dark brown window and door frames and a white ceiling. Even stranger than the apartment is to think of people. Sara will be on the bus and perhaps after a stop or two a soldier will get on and sit next to her, his Galil resting, butt down, between his legs. Maybe Sara will notice something quiet, haunted even, in the way the skin around his eyes sags. He’ll catch her looking and smile. A real smile but a sad smile. For a moment, they won’t notice the noise of the bus, Army Radio blaring its hourly update of doom, the other passengers jabbering away at each other. For a moment, it will only be the two of them.

Sara will notice that he’s not as young as she first thought, just fit and tan. In fact, there’s gray sprinkled through his short hair, peeking out from beneath his small, knit yarmulke. And the lines that accentuate his grief also speak of age, place him in his forties even. He’ll look away from her eyes, look down at Sara’s hands, see her calluses. My hands are getting very calloused from all this rowing, weathered and wrinkled from salt water and sun. Looking at her hands, he’ll notice the sleeves that creep below her wrists, threaten her palms. It will occur to him, to Udi—yes, he will be Udi—that this woman is ultra-orthodox, that in the strange caste system that exists amongst religious Israeli Jews, defined for men by yarmulke style, she’s really a large black felt yarmulke, possibly even a black hat, not a small knit yarmulke that some aspiring lover, or loving relative, has made by hand and inscribed with the three Hebrew letters that spell his name, ayan, daled, yud. But Sara will speak to him, after all. She’ll ask him if it’s his forty days. “No,” Udi will reply, he’s career, a soldier for life. Then Sara will notice the insignia on his collar, realize his rank, colonel. Then why the rifle? Maybe he isn’t carrying a rifle. Perhaps he’s just in uniform, holding a beret in his hands, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, that look of loss ringing his face unmistakably.

He will ask Sara why she’s so tan. It isn’t often one sees an ultra-orthodox woman so tan. “We all have our burdens to bear,” she’ll point out. And something in the way she’ll say “bear,” the choice of phrase will make him think she’s American, though her face is not American. And after she’s said “burden,” she will notice the way he swallows his own breath, as if a private tide was rising, one he couldn’t afford to let out on a bus.

She’ll ask, “Where are you going?”

“You’re American.”

Sara will nod. He’ll squint his eyes shut, his mouth puckering, lips sucked in, a lot of emotion for a colonel. Then he’ll blurt it out. “I have to tell a mother her son is dead. It happened this morning. He was in my command. He tried to stop two men in a car. I had trained him not to shoot too quickly.”

“And they killed him?”

“No, that never would have happened. Another man, also in my command, a reservist, opened fire. There was a ricochet. His throat. He died this morning. I have to tell his mother.”

Sara’s own losses will swim around her, and then she’ll let her mind drift on a warm red ray of arctic sun. It will calm her, the rhythm of paddling in her shoulders, the trained immobility of legs accustomed to the bind of a kayak’s hull. She’ll respectfully avoid staring at the beret Udi slowly twists into a taut felt rope. Then he will look up at her, a look of hope on his face even less colonel-like than his previous show of emotion. He’ll seem desperate. He’ll ask her to come with him. Not to see the mother, no, but to wait downstairs at a café, and to have a cup of tea afterwards, so he’ll know someone’s there when he finishes. “I’m not so good with cafes anymore,” she’ll say, quietly.

“We all have our own burdens to bear. I’m sorry I bothered you. It was inappropriate.”

“No, I’ll go,” Sara will say and laugh (not a carefree laugh, though, more the wistful kind). “I can’t stay out of cafes for the rest of my life. Not in this country. Not with my caffeine addiction.” And he’ll laugh too, and sniffle, and she’ll realize how close to tears he was.

“Thank you—.”

“Sara.”

“Thank you, Sara.” Udi will say, not even bothering to pretend he doesn’t need her, doesn’t need someone waiting downstairs for him. And it will occur to her that this is strange. She’ll ask him about it later, and eventually, when she learns the truth, that the boy’s mother was once Udi’s wife, his child’s mother, she’ll realize his hesitancy, his need in a way she won’t have before.

Love is complex but need is simple. Hashem made the yetzer harah to inflict us with taivah. But taivah differs from need. I know that now. It’s a complexity I didn’t understand for a long time. Needs are forgivable, even by Hashem, even when they lead to sin.