Читать книгу Safekeeping - Jessamyn Hope - Страница 17

Ofir sweltered in the back of an army truck zigzagging down a hill. Only hours ago he had been at the piano. In American movies, GIs took ocean liners and stopped at foreign cities on the way to the front, but he had only an hour on a public bus and a short hitchhike between kissing his mom goodbye and heading down to stifle a West Bank riot.

Everyone in the truck was mum. Postings were supposed to last four months in the territories, but their unit had been in Nablus half a year already. Ofir leaned over to see what his friend Gadi viewed through a hole in the truck’s dark green canvas. Mostly half-finished houses with flat roofs and burs of black antennas. A young woman stood in front of a gate, blocking the sunlight from her eyes, her blue skirt whipping in the wind. Gadi joked: “I did her.”

Ofir sat back again and reached for his cigarettes. He held the pack out to the others, and the truck filled with smoke. Taking a drag, Ofir considered his composition. He was so damn close. But something, some quality, was missing, like a word on the tip of the tongue. The melody was about taking flight; no, it was about the feeling of taking flight, but . . . If only he were at home right now, figuring it out. Why did he have to be in this fucking truck?

He noticed Gadi’s leg shaking, and glanced sideways at his diminutive face. Poor Gadi. Never mind the Palestinian girl, he’d never done any girl. After every weekend leave, he came back with some story about a beach bonfire or a desert trance party where he almost, always almost, did it with some hot girl. Ofir never gave him a hard time because Gadi was the only one who didn’t tease him about the cassette in his Walkman—Bach instead of Paul van Dyk. Gadi, drawing on his cigarette, gave Ofir a shrug that said, This sucks, but what can you do?

“All right, listen up.” Their commander, Dan, looked at them from the front passenger seat. “No escalation. Just containment. No shouting, no threatening, no rubber bullets. Just keep things contained. Beseder?”

The soldier across from Ofir, Shai, rolled his eyes and clucked his tongue. Last night at dinner Shai had demanded, as he demanded every dinner, why didn’t we just bomb the place until all the terrorists were dead? Why did we have to risk our lives? It wasn’t our fault the assholes built their bombs right in the middle of their towns, surrounded by women and children. Hell, he said, their women loved them for it. Cheered them on. What would Paris do if bombs were going off in her subways? Just deal? For the first time in thousands of years, Jews didn’t have to be victims; we could fight back, so why the hell weren’t we fighting back with everything we’ve got? Because of world opinion? Fuck the world. The last thing a Jew should take into consideration is the world’s opinion. The world would sit back and watch us all die. Again.

Dan pointed at Shai. “I mean it. Keep cool. I’m going to watch you.”

Dan was only four years older than the rest of them, and Ofir often amused himself with the idea that this whole show was being carried out by kids barely old enough for The Real World. Ofir regularly compared his life to an alternative version of himself living in the United States, a doppelgänger based partly on TV and movies, but mostly on the photos in the booklets he ordered from Julliard and the Yale School of Music. Ofir nagged his mother until she signed the forms allowing him to start his army service a year early. Her tears left wrinkled spots on the papers. But he didn’t want to be so much older than his doppelgänger when he started music school. Still, it was hard to do it to his mom. When he was still a lump in her belly, his father was shot and killed on a hill in the Golan.

As the truck neared the town square, the dissonance of the riot grew louder, like an orchestra warming up. Remaining cigarettes were crushed in the sand-bucket ashtray. It’s okay, Ofir told himself as he rolled up his sleeves. Today his American alter ego was at the piano while he was at a riot, but he could still end up being the better artist, for whatever he lost in technical proficiency during these long days and nights when his fingers busied with binoculars and firearms instead of ivory and ebony keys, he gained in poetic urgency. That was the salvation of being an artist. The worst experiences could be transformed into meaning and beauty.

The truck stopped. The soldiers scrambled out the back. Smoldering tires poisoned the air. Chanting supporters brandished portraits of the suicide bomber who blew up a bus last week in Jerusalem. Glass crashed. Car alarms whined. Men swarmed, shouted, climbed on top of cars and shook their fists. Dan led his unit along the chain of soldiers bordering the square until he found a weak link. “Here!”

Ofir took his place, legs shoulder-width apart, M-16 in front of his abdomen, ready to swing it into position, even though it was only loaded with rubber bullets that he wasn’t allowed to shoot. There were a hundred Palestinians to every soldier. More. What if, despite their guns, they all charged at once? It wasn’t clear who was more afraid of whom. What was the sound of fear? Its pitch? Did it have breaks, like a pounding heart, or was it more like the whistle of an approaching Katyusha rocket, getting louder and higher and louder and higher? No, that was too easy. He had to think of something else.

A boy ran up to the soldiers and shouted, “Jewish whores take it up the ass.” Shai snorted: “I wish.” That was the extent of their Hebrew, one-liners about the promiscuity of Israeli sisters or mothers and slurs about the ugliness or evilness of Jews. Sometimes just the word Jew was yelled, as if something so vile required no adjective. Ofir’s Arabic was also made of one-liners: hurry; show me your ID; go; halt; hands in the air.

“I don’t get it.” Yaron, the soldier next to Ofir, a skinny kid of Iraqi Jewish descent, pointed his chin at the ground strewn with stones. “They must be dismantling their own homes to round up all these rocks.”

Soon, Ofir thought. Soon this would all be over. A few months ago Arafat and Rabin shook hands in front of the White House, shook hands in front of the world, in front of his mother, who collapsed on the sofa in front of the television with her hand over her chest, while his stepfather, eyes shining, whispered, “Would you look at that? That’s what three thousand years of fighting coming to an end looks like.” Soon the army might be pulling out of Gaza City and Jericho. Maybe he wouldn’t have to serve a whole three years?

Over the clamor of the square floated the adhan. The hallowed call to prayer fanned the riot’s fire. More plastic bottles and cardboard boxes were thrown into the flames, and the noxious fumes thickened. Young men began pitching stones at the soldiers. Maybe that’s what was missing from his composition: the sound of fear. Could that be it? It wasn’t only about taking flight, but taking flight from something . . . Ofir rolled his head to release the tension in his neck. If it was the sound of fear, he had a lot more work to do. But he would do it. He wasn’t aiming for good enough. Now every muscle ached to be at the piano. While he scanned the square, he hummed the melody, listening for where he could balance the—

Smack! Stone, just below the groin. Inner thigh. Ofir struggled to withhold a cry. God damn it. Fuck. He clenched his teeth. His whole body clenched, muscles gripping the bones. Tears escaped. He couldn’t help it. Also, a little urine.

When his breath returned, and the world reemerged from behind a sheet of tears, his eyes picked out a Palestinian boy about his age, sixteen or seventeen, not thirty yards away. The boy stood still and looked right at him. His China-made fake American T-shirt read: I’M A HOT DOG, MAN! At the end of one of his long skinny arms was another stone. The boy smiled at Ofir, a smile that out of context might have seemed good-natured. Ofir, pretending not to notice, scanned the square without letting the boy slip from his vision.

Behind the boy, to his left, was the last entryway into the kasbah. He had only seen pictures of the kasbah’s narrow, cobblestoned alleyways, the same National Geographic–type shots his American doppelgänger would have seen: women in headdresses milling past barrels of vivid spices; butchers’ stands with raw carcasses dangling from hooks; silversmiths’ workshops glistening in the shadows like polished buttons on a dark coat. It was so near, but so foreign. So near, but that entrance into the kasbah might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was strange living next door to the other side of the world.

The boy ran at Ofir, testing. Ofir lowered his head, leveled his eyes on him. The boy stopped. Now he was only twenty or so yards away. Ofir looked to his commander, but Dan squinted elsewhere.

“Yalla!” Ofir waved at the boy to move back. “Go back!”

The boy stood his ground.

“Yalla! Back! Back!”

The boy raised his arm and pitched the stone so hard and fast, Ofir barely managed to skip-dance out of the way. The stone whooshed an inch past his ear.

“Fucking asshole.” Yaron shook his head.

Gadi, standing on the other side of Ofir, appearing even shorter in a lineup, said, “That was close, Ofi.”

Ofir straightened his ammunition belt and took up his position again, widening his stance. The Arab boy laughed at him. Of course. He must have looked hilarious, loaded down with an M-16, a helmet, combat boots, pockets full of grenades, and dancing around a stone.

The frustration Ofir had suppressed all morning rose inside him, a tingling, angry upswell. It surged through every cell in his body and gathered in his head. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to fucking be here. Fuck this kid! If it weren’t for fuckers like him and all this fucking bullshit, he could be in the dining hall right now working on his music, or, better yet, he could be packing for fucking university. Like his doppelgänger. He hated the Arab boy. He hated them for making him hate them—

No. Stop. He took a deep inhale. We are all human. An artist can’t lose sight of that. An artist has to hold on to the humanity. We are all pawns of history. Aren’t we? Are we? He couldn’t think straight.

He pretended to survey the square, looking left and right, as if he could see anything other than the boy. They were two teenagers locked in a game, a game that might be photographed by an ambitious journalist and put on the front page of the New York Times. The paper would sit on his doppelgänger’s kitchen table, next to a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, him looking like the bad guy. It wouldn’t say underneath it that the only thing the teenager with the M-16 wanted to be doing at that moment was playing the piano. Ofir tried to remember: Arafat and Rabin shook hands. In front of the world. Peace was here. This was the last bang of thunder before the sky cleared. Six months in Nablus, though. He was so tired.

The boy, not taking his eyes off Ofir, crouched down and picked up another stone. He stepped forward. Ofir gripped his rifle, bent his knees, braced to dance around like a soldier-clown again. Face twisting from the effort, the boy hurled the stone. It flew. Ofir could see it. Then he couldn’t. He jerked to the left, the right, and, jumping back, took it right in the chin.

He buckled forward, retching. No pretending it didn’t hurt this time. Dark blood dripped onto the dirt, the dirt his stepfather liked to say these two peoples had been fighting over since the Book of Kings. He brought his fingers to his chin. He was going to need stitches.

Gadi laid his hand on his back. “Ofir, you all right?”

Ofir raised his head. The Palestinian boy came into sharp focus as the rest of the world, Gadi’s voice, the burning tires, the wailing alarms, even the sun itself, receded. Now there really was only him and the boy. The Palestinian boy was everything. He fucked up his chin, killed his father, made his mom a fat tearful mess. Even put his grandmother in Treblinka. Why? Because the Palestinian boy in his stupid I’M A HOT DOG, MAN! T-shirt became the face of the undying hate for the Jews. Everything that kept him from his fucking piano.

Dan placed his hand on his shoulder. “Go to the police station and sit it out.”

Ofir stared at the boy, and the boy stared back with an expression that said, Your move.

“Nu, Ofir. Go to the station . . .”

Dan’s words trailed behind him. He was running. Running like water after a dam breaks. Running like blood through the veins. And it felt so good. Free. It took the boy three or four seconds to realize what was happening and make a break for it. If he was going to catch the boy, it had to be before the kasbah, and that wasn’t going to be easy, weighed down by all this gear. The boy stumbled on a rusty exhaust pipe, and Ofir gained a few yards.

He was reaching out for the hot dog T-shirt when the boy ran into the shade of the kasbah. Ofir jogged to a halt and watched the boy beat it down the cobblestoned alleyway. He stood with his heart pounding, not ready to stop running, to calm down, to turn around and go back to the usual hell. He flipped out the rubber cartridges, chambered in a live round, and ran into the kasbah.

The shouts and sirens of the riot were dampened inside. The cool air smelled of cumin and wet stone. Ofir dodged a woman in a black robe and white headscarf. Otherwise the street was deserted. All the men and boys were at the riot, the women and girls indoors. Ofir didn’t glance behind to see if he was being followed; he didn’t want to know.

The boy was nowhere in sight. He must have taken the first turn off the alleyway. This lane was even narrower, cooler, covered by a blue tarpaulin that glowed with sunlight. The old stone walls and the steel grids lowered over the store entrances were scrawled with red, green, and black graffiti. Ofir glimpsed the boy disappearing to the left and charged, though he no longer knew what he was going to do if he caught up to him.

Shouts and footfalls echoed behind him. Ofir searched for a place to hide. He ran to a wood door that was slightly ajar. He ducked inside, praying no one was in there. He closed the door and, panting, tiptoed backward in the darkness. No windows, no lamps, it was too black to see. The sliver of brightness along the door’s edge provided the only light.

He huddled in a corner. He was never going to catch the boy now, and he didn’t care. He didn’t want to fight him anymore, risk busting up his fingers. The anger was gone. The fear back. He’d never been so scared. The best he could do was wait until the footsteps passed and pray he made it out of the kasbah alive.

When Ofir’s eyes adjusted, he found himself surrounded by mirrors—piled against the walls, hanging from the ceiling, skinny mirrors framed by iron vines, square mirrors bordered by tiles, round mirrors in brass fretwork. Ofir was wondering if he could take a small mirror as a memento of having been in this magical forbidden place, having survived it, when his gaze fell on the boy. He too was backed into a dark corner. His widened eyes reflected the door’s sliver of light, the door that stood dead center between them.

The boy didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. Ofir kept equally still. The boy looked like he couldn’t believe Ofir was here any more than Ofir could. They surveyed each other—the boy afraid Ofir would shoot, Ofir afraid the boy would scream and in moments he would be surrounded by Arabs.

He tightened his grip on his rifle. Oh, God. What should he do? He could shoot the boy and run for it. What if it were the other way around? What if he, the Jew, were unarmed in the corner and the Arab had the gun? What then? He would shoot him, wouldn’t he? Would he? He didn’t know. Didn’t matter. He didn’t want to shoot the boy. How had he ended up here? All he wanted now was to take a small mirror and get the hell out. He wanted to live. He wanted to finish his composition. But who knew what the Palestinian boy wanted?

Eyeing the boy, Ofir slowly rose from his corner. The boy stiffened. Ofir let go of his rifle and raised his palms in the air. The M-16 hung in front of him as they searched each other’s eyes. The boy’s face relaxed.

Ofir kept one hand in the air and reached his other hand into his pants pocket. The boy, nervous again, jumped to his feet. Ofir pulled out a twenty-shekel bill, and the boy watched with a furrowed brow as Ofir laid the money on the counter and picked up a mirror the size of a dessert plate. Ofir held the mirror up to the boy, as if to ask his permission, and the boy shook his head. With a raised finger, the boy walked around the darkness, inspecting the mirrors. He lifted one from the wall, one that was slightly larger, the size of a dinner plate, bordered by red and blue tiles, and held it out to Ofir. Ofir took it, tucked it under his armored vest, and stuffed his green army shirt back into his pants. He gave the boy one last look before slipping out the shallow door.

He bolted down the street, heart pounding against the mirror. Turning the corner, he found his unit holding back a small crowd.

“What?” Dan screamed at him. “Are you fucked in the head?”

Ofir had never seen his commander so incensed. Gadi’s eyes shone with terror as he pointed his M-16 left and right at the shouting throng. Yaron’s rifle trembled, and Shai’s face was flushed, sweaty, as he squinted down his barrel; if he shot someone, Ofir would have that on his conscience. Dan ordered the soldiers to push through the people, but the angry mob wouldn’t break apart for them.

People shouted: “Where’s the boy? He’s killed the boy!”

Dan’s face reddened. “Don’t make me shoot! I’m going to shoot! I’m about to shoot!”

The crowd broke open enough to let them through.

The soldiers ran behind Dan down the labyrinthine alleys. They didn’t say a word. Just moved. As they bolted down the last passage toward the sunlight of the square and the noise of the riot, Ofir had to fight not to laugh. It was wrong to have endangered his unit, and the Palestinians they might have hurt to rescue him, but he loved the mirror tucked under his vest. He loved that moment he and the boy had in the dark room, as miraculous as that handshake on the White House lawn. He felt ready to inherit the world. The new century. His century, which promised to be so much better than the last one.

The sunburst at the end of the dim alley wasn’t just the sunlight of the square, but life, and Ofir was running headlong into it, wishing time would hurry up already, the way his mother claimed only a seventeen-year-old would. It felt like if he just kept on running and breathing in the good feeling, he would soon outrun gravity and take leave of the cobblestones. His chest ached as if his soul were too big for his body, and all at once he knew what was missing from his composition. Not fear. It was this ache. The ache of feeling like you should be taking leave of the cobblestones, but you’re not. The ache of gravity.