Читать книгу The Distance Between Us - Masha Hamilton - Страница 8

THEY ZOOM UP the narrow, winding embankment to Jerusalem, the road everyone takes fast and careless as if they’re racing to shake the hand of God, as if they’re so joyful to be in the land of Abraham that they’re willing to die the moment they get there. The windows are down and Caddie strains forward. The air blasts her face, supports her shoulders and forces shut her eyes. The car leans and at that moment the memory of Marcus intrudes. She can’t feel his full weight, only his hand, its fierce pressing at the small of her back, and his breath at her ear as though he were whispering.

“I don’t know why,” she says, pushing his image away. “For Christ’s sake.”

“What?” the taxi driver asks.

Caddie clears her throat. “Nothing.”

The driver nods knowingly. A person muttering as she enters the Holy City is not uncommon; he takes it in stride. Caddie’s colleagues will not so easily overlook it.

“Your first time?” the driver asks with misplaced confidence. She guesses from his accent that he is from eastern Europe, and two weeks ago she would have engaged him in conversation, asked where he was born and how he finds it here, what he likes and what he doesn’t, how many children and grandchildren he has and what they do, because you never know where a good story might begin.

Now, though, she wants to eavesdrop on her own thoughts. She shakes her head. “Nope.” Leans back and closes her eyes. The driver, giving up—what a shame, his passenger is lousy for conversation—turns up the radio and begins to hum along.

Caddie mentally lists the photojournalists she’s known who died. Samuel Harris, a freelance television cameraman she had drinks with in a Vienna bar: hacked to death by a crazed mob in Jo’burg. Yuri, on assignment for Russian TV, who didn’t talk much but was always smiling: reduced to crumbs by a roadside bomb in Lebanon. Reuters photographer Sandra Hutchison, who shared a breakfast with Caddie in Cairo: taken down by crossfire in Sierra Leone.

Caddie has refused to allow herself to picture these deaths. She walked away each time the topic came up in a group of reporters, hating the sentimentality in the voices of some of her colleagues, the undercurrent of greedy thrill in others. Part of a journalist’s job is to stay detached, no matter how severe the tragedy or how close it lands. Reflect the story; don’t absorb it, because if you allow yourself to feel the full force of sorrows and horrors, you will succumb to them—that much Caddie knows. The desperate moments will at best numb her, and at worst cripple her, and she will be unable to collect the quotes or the color, do her job. The repercussions of random destruction or deliberate hostility often lead to the most profound moments in people’s lives. She has to be there fully to record that, and so, Caddie has learned to shut down a piece of herself. Disconnect, at least some.

Besides, getting drawn in was dangerous; everyone knew that, everyone who lasted. Kevin Carter—the name, to Caddie, was like a warning signal. Nothing, not even the Big One he won for his shot of a vulture lurking next to a cadaverous Sudanese child, could rescue him from the opaque morass he sank into once he lost his detachment, once the clear spot inside him went muddy. The horrors he’d witnessed were bad enough—including that near-dead child dragging herself along the ground, who brought to mind his own daughter. Then came the shrill criticism he faced for not helping the kid to the feeding center, for being caught up in the composition of a great photo, for sticking to the role of one who records—his job, after all.

A “Carter Moment” is how she’s thought of it since. When a journalist teeters between getting the story and getting into the story. Compassion serves a limited purpose, as Carter proved. Three months after taking home that Pulitzer, he hooked up a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and gassed himself inside his red pickup.

Measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings—that’s what she has had to learn. That gets her the interview and keeps her safe.

Usually.

She opens her eyes and shrugs to rid herself of the doubts that stick to her like a burr. They’re off the highway now, driving among the blond bricks of the city, following a finger of Jerusalem to its very palm. The driver drops her at the corner of her sinewy street and she walks the rest of the way, a few steps behind a nun. Three Hasidim hovering around a newsstand glance her way as she passes. A young Israeli in leather sandals spits out the shells of sunflower seeds as he hums a tune she recognizes, “At Khaki li Ve’echzor,” about a fallen soldier. Someone’s wash hangs from a rope strung between buildings, dark clothes coupling with pale sheets.

What a concoction, Jerusalem. It took Caddie no short while to come to terms with its heap of competing religious rituals: rabbis issuing eerie and obscure edicts about light switches and women’s wigs; imams with their barely coded urgings to the street; priests swinging platters of incense and muttering in inconsequential Latin. All of it colliding and overlapping like an exaltation of crows within a city that often seems far too compressed.

She remembers striding off into Jerusalem alone that first day nearly five years ago, eager to absorb the territory she’d been newly assigned to cover. She tramped through the walled Old City, paused at an Arab café for a sesame-covered bread ring, and practiced her Arabic with the owner. She fumbled with the still unfamiliar shekels, then boarded a bus full of Israeli soldiers and eventually got lost in Mea She’arim.

By day’s end, she sensed what lay over the city like a quilt: large rules with horrifying consequences. Rules way beyond the superficial restrictions of manners she’d known before. Absolute, binding, primitive rules that got their backbone from blood and stones and God. Rules that she didn’t yet fully understand, but knew she had to follow.

THE FIRST THING SHE NOTICE as she steps into the building is that Mr. Gruizin has painted a thick scarlet stripe on her mailbox. Of course. He invariably heads downstairs with his paintbrush whenever one of his neighbors travels, whether on annual reserve duty, business trip, or vacation. He claims the stripe is a barrier to danger, intended to keep a wanderer safe. The paint on Caddie’s mailbox feels rough and substantial beneath her fingertips. Does he consider his effort successful this time?

She unlocks her apartment door. Usually when she’s been gone, she heads directly for her bedroom, dumping bags and jacket along the hallway. Usually she wants to inhale the leftover scent of her that lingers on the sheets, the towels. She’s eager for the sight of the window across from her bed, its familiar view of the street below.

Now, though, she’s brought to a halt by—shit, by a bunch of inanimate objects. Her desk against the wall, computer atop. She can see Marcus standing there kneading her shoulders, lacing his fingers through her hair, urging her to stop working. (Why hadn’t she stopped working?) The coffee-table photography book of Paris he gave her last Christmas when they came back here after covering Bethlehem to sit side by side on the floor, opening presents, eating popcorn. The tall glass on the table next to the couch. He drank water from it—held in his right hand, touched to his lips—minutes before they left for the airport.

The air vibrates, becomes dense and watery.

Kill the bastards.

But how?

She looks at her own hands: these hands that twice wrung a chicken’s neck. When Caddie was sixteen, Grandma Jos grew sick, so the chore of killing the chickens fell briefly to Caddie—before she gave up and bought them already killed and cleaned. Both times, she’d turned her head away and let her hands act on their own. And except for the initial revulsion, it was much easier than she’d expected. A chicken’s neck is startlingly tenuous.

Now, though, her hands seem too small, too distant from her body to be of any real use.

Behind her, the front door opens. Ya’el has used her spare key. One arm is outstretched to embrace, the other wrapped around a can of Boker coffee. Ya’el’s uncontrolled frizzy hair clashes with her off-the-rack blazer in earth tones, creased from a day working at the bank. “Oh my God, Caddie.” Ya’el hugs her again and directs her toward the couch. “And Marcus. God.” She smells of lipstick and black olives. “Which arm?” she demands in her husky voice.

Caddie lifts her left arm slightly and pulls away. “I’m all right.”

Ya’el sits back. “I’m so glad you’re finally home. I thought somebody would try to talk you into staying away for good.”

“No way. Back to work. That’s what I need.”

Ya’el shakes her head. “Not back to work, not right away. But back here, yes. Where we understand, where we’ve been through it, too. This is your home. Now, tell me. Everything.”

Caddie draws a large couch pillow toward her, covering her stomach.

“I know, Caddie,” Ya’el says after a moment. “I thought I couldn’t talk about it either. But it was a relief to talk with you. A relief, trust me,”

Ya’el puts her hand on Caddie’s. Ya’el thinks she knows what Caddie feels. Her brother was kidnapped while on army duty along the Lebanese border, tortured and killed. Ya’el received a photograph of his bruised and mangled body in the mail from an unknown sender. For nearly two years she held futility like a knot in her gut. Then Caddie moved in, and the two women began talking. And maybe because Caddie was an outsider, attentive in a way that tended to draw people out, or maybe simply because the timing was right, Ya’el spilled it one evening. How furious she’d become. Afraid and sad. And, finally, how much better she felt after telling it all to Caddie.

Caddie never understood how releasing a flood of words could possibly be comfort enough. She couldn’t understand why Ya’el didn’t try harder to find out who sent that photograph, who murdered her brother. That submissiveness, a reminder of Grandma Jos, irritated her. But she never said so. She listened. A journalist’s job.

Now Caddie clears her throat. “Tell me about the girls. And how’s work?”

Ya’el stares a moment, then shakes her head. “I guess a sore must become a scab before it heals,” she says.

The doorbell saves Caddie from having to reply. Ya’el opens the door to Mr. Gruizin, the mailbox painter, followed by Mrs. Weizman, carrying her rose-patterned soup tureen.

“Now, bubeleh, don’t get up,” Mrs. Weizman says.

Goulash. Mrs. Weizman’s famous opinionated goulash—absolutely no to the green peppers but you can never add too much paprika—brought forth for each death, disaster, or even infection. So then. That means everyone in the building knows what happened. But Caddie should have figured that. Nothing is secret in this country for long; it’s always been that way. Probably every Israeli over the age of ten knew when their enemy King Hussein toured Tel Aviv in bearded disguise, though no journalist reported it for more than a decade. For months, they all knew that Ethiopian Jews were being spirited into the country, even knew the government had dubbed it Operation Magic Carpet, though the censor had forbidden a word of it in the local or international media. When a military operation goes awry, the street knows hours before it’s broadcast. So what’s the surprise that news of the ambush has traveled from Ya’el on the fifth floor to Mr. Gruizin at ground level, back up to Mrs. Weizman on third?

Ya’el heads into Caddie’s open kitchen with the soup. “I’ll make coffee.”

“How did you all know I was coming back today?” Caddie asks.

“We didn’t,” Mr. Gruizin says.

“I did,” Mrs. Weizman says. Mr. Gruizin’s eyebrows lunge into his forehead. “No, I did, Ya’akov. I felt it.” She strokes Caddie’s cheek with her papery fingers. “Feh, what a sorrow to see you so pale.”

“What do you mean? She looks wonderful,” argues Mr. Gruizin. “Am I right, Ya’el?” he calls.

Ya’el steps back into the living room. “She’s coping.” It comes out sounding like a lie, and Ya’el blushes and withdraws again.

Mrs. Weizman leans closer to Caddie. “How can you say so, with those washed-out cheeks?”

Caddie lowers her face but can’t escape their stares. She starts to rise. “Ya’el, you need help?”

Mrs. Weizman reaches out a hand to stop her. “Sit, bubeleh.”

“She looks better than should be expected, anyway,” Mr. Gruizin says after a moment. “She’s a strong girl. It’s my red, you know. Did the trick. Kept her safe.”

“Ya’akov!” Mrs. Weizman shakes her head. “I’ve never known such a superstitious man. Caddie isn’t so superstitious. Are you, dear?”

Caddie manages what she thinks is a smile, but it fails to translate somehow, because Mrs. Weizman quickly takes Caddie’s hands and squeezes them between her own, as though Caddie had broken down, instead of borne up.

“Oh, bubeleh,” she says, her voice thick with intent to comfort. “Sometimes it’s not the doctor but the rebbe who knows the cure. I remember once my palms started itching; they were itching for a week, all the time, night and day. I couldn’t sleep, it was that bad. This cream or that cream, the doctors said, but nothing worked. Of course I thought of the old superstition, my grand-uncle used to say it all the time when I was a little girl, he would say, ‘Nala, when your palms itch, you are going to come into some money.’ But for a few shekels, I should keep waiting? I went to see Rebbe Kroyanker. ‘Gevalt!’ I said. And he told me. He knew how to cure it.”

Mr. Gruizin sighs. “We’re ready already. What did the rabbi say?”

Ya’el, pouring them all coffee, gives Caddie a private grin. They’ve often laughed at how like an old married couple Mr. Gruizin and Mrs. Weizman are.

“Nu, this is the point,” Mrs. Weizman says. “He told me I needed to make peace with my sister, we’d been arguing for months—about what, it’s not important. And I thought, feh! A little squabble with my sister should cause this tsouris? The rebbe must be, forgive my disrespectful tongue, meshugener. But I was desperate. And what do you think? We made up. Three hours later my itching was gone.”

“A miracle worker,” says Mr. Gruizin.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Mrs. Weizman turns eagerly to Caddie. “So if you won’t go to one of ours, you could see your . . .” she waves a hand, “whoever you go to see. Everyone can use a bit of God sometimes. Am I wrong, Ya’akov?”

Mr. Gruizin nods and begins to talk, but Caddie lets his words slide by unattended. She remembers the town church of her childhood, a smooth and generous pew, the congregation’s voices soaring in hymn.

All praise to Him who came to saaave, Who conquer’d death and scorned the graaave

She remembers the hard bread on her tongue, the heat of gathered bodies, and Grandma Jos leaning close, smelling of Ivory soap and talcum and mint tea. A simple trust, Caddie, will lead us into the calm valley.

Caddie never replied. She understood that Grandma Jos needed to imagine His arms around her to soften the hard angles of a life gone strangely amiss: her spouse—Caddie’s grandfather—living twenty miles away with another family in a white house with yellow shutters, her daughter—Caddie’s mother—sleeping somewhere in a corrupt city and bathing too infrequently, her granddaughter—Caddie herself—abandoned at her doorstep. To blame Him would have been foolhardy, because who would Grandma Jos have then? Grandma Jos thought she was teaching Caddie about religion, but what she was really teaching was what it meant to be alone.

Caddie knew even then, though, that a calm valley was not what she sought—it sounded, in fact, like torture. Nor, despite Grandma Jos’s dire warnings, did she want redemption. Nor a savior, nor a tearful walk to the front to be welcomed into the community of believers. God, she already knew to be as icy as a winter dawn. He rarely paid attention, and was not to be trusted when He did. Grandma Jos used Him as an excuse for living with things as they were. Caddie had no use for Him at all.

“Caddie! Are you listening?” Ya’el touches her arm and Caddie looks into her friend’s face and there it is again, Ya’el’s effort to hide a worried expression.

Caddie can’t still an involuntary shudder. “Sorry,” she says. “Go ahead, say it again.”

There is a moment of quiet, an exchange of glances, before Mr. Gruizin speaks. “You are worn from the flight. Of course, of course. Ladies, let’s go.”

“I’m all right.” But Caddie’s false words are lost in the bustle of everyone except her rising.

Mrs. Weizman’s cheek, surprisingly supple, is against hers. “Your friend? He is between God’s hands.”

Ya’el speaks softly in Caddie’s ear. “Tomorrow we’ll talk.”

Caddie forces a jaunty wave as though her homecoming were a delight, a celebration. She keeps waving until finally the door is pulled shut.

SLEEP DROWNS HER, QUICK AND WELCOME, but she wakes in the night to a sharp jab of panic. The five minutes replay. The driver slows. A bush moves. Marcus rises, then sinks. The Land Rover turns. Marcus’s lips: a scribbled line. His expression: surprised, then gone.

She lingers over those minutes as though they’d lasted hours, searches for clues as to how they could have not happened. Berates herself for going with a driver no one really knew. For making him pause for the woman with the child—perhaps without those wasted minutes, they would have sped past unprepared ambushers. And for being a woman. If she’d been a man, Marcus wouldn’t have shielded her with his body.

She gets up to scrub the bathroom sink. She rubs the yellowing porcelain rhythmically, uselessly, as though it mattered. Not so long ago, Marcus brushed his teeth here. Not so long ago, he shot a roll of her coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel. Pseudoannoyed, she waved him away—“Cut it out!”—and they both laughed. Now she scours until her arm muscles ache. And keeps scouring.

Finally she moves restlessly to the couch near the open window. On the other side of the city, a siren weeps. Down the street, a car horn wails. Next door a man and a woman quarrel in Hebrew, the woman in trailing sentences shaded with meaning, the man with tiny bites:

“I don’t care if he is your boss. You don’t overlook something like that. That’s pathetic. You have to—”

“Now I’m pathetic?”

“Look, what I’m saying is, you have to respond. It’s a matter of how . . .”

How much it would cost to have one killed, just one?

It’s a crazy idea. A nighttime thought, dark and fleeting. Caddie goes to the kitchen to warm some milk. There are two sorts of people, she sees. The innocent—Caddie used to be one—shut their eyes and sleep through the dark. Then there are the rest, knowingly guilty one way or another. Denied the nocturnal gift of oblivion and purification, they rise once and again to escape a vision or a memory, to yearn for dawn while fearing it, to quarrel or to plot. The texture of their daytimes, then, is distorted by the weakened quality of their sleep. Presidents, rebels, peacemakers and assassins: history itself has been radically altered by the toll of interrupted nights. There’s a whole damn story there.

Eventually her chest loosens, her musings stutter and stop, her body slackens. The disagreement next door persists, its taut rhythm invading her dreams.

In the morning her legs are unsteady and her left arm twitches. The second cup of coffee stills her limbs.

She pulls on a long-sleeved shirt, tan pants and lace-up hiking boots. At a glance, she resembles a granola-munching tourist, a kibbutz lodger or visiting peacenik. Still wholesome, still healthy. Only the observant could pick up signs of her internal frays: she knows she’s given to long pauses, and that bruise-like shadows underline her eyes, and that her skin has taken on a grayish cast she can’t scrub off.

She shoves a change of clothing, a towel and two bed sheets into a sack, and makes sure she has a notebook and her press card. She won’t be checking in with her office this morning. She knows she’d be advised against heading alone for the religiously rigid Gaza Strip, focal point of anger and poverty and reprisals. And especially advised against pausing for a swim.

If you require a bloody sacrosanct dip into baptismal water, not there, not there. It’s Marcus’s voice. She doesn’t imagine it; she hears it. And when, by the way, did you get so devout?

She turns away. She wants neither questions nor warnings, not from anyone. Gaza is a place that has borne violence and survived. It’s where she’ll go.

TAKING THE ROAD that traces the curve of the Mediterranean, she flashes her press card to pass the Erez checkpoint. The next stretch is littered with garbage, the buildings graffiti-soaked. Two boys on a donkey stare sullenly as she passes. The air, ripe with diesel oil and fish blood, deposits a slippery film on her cheeks. The beach stands empty, an outcast despite its tenderly beckoning waves.

On good days, days without gunfire, men in jallabiyas and women in embroidered linen skirts crowd themselves into the sea. When they emerge, wet and heavy, they disappear into separate tents to change. But the locals are home today, preparing for a funeral or a demonstration, on strike or maybe sinking into collective exhaustion. Gaza is not a tourist destination. This is where Samson was thrown into a dungeon and died. It’s where, only months ago, Islamic militants burned down every liquor store, every hotel that served alcohol. It is also where, sometimes, an eccentric foreigner who chooses to pause can find solitude.

Though Caddie thinks she is prepared for the sea’s chill, it startles. She swims the breaststroke for a few minutes to warm up, then dives under. Once she’s beneath the water, it comforts like the weight of a hefty blanket. As she breaks the surface, though, old images assert themselves. Again she submerges, walking her fingers along the sandy floor. She stays under until her lungs ache. After a few gasping breaths, she sees with a shock that pale crocodiles lie stranded on the beach, waiting for her.

Driftwood. Only driftwood, of course. Crocodiles don’t live in Gaza.

This won’t work, this attempt at renewal. “Go drink the sea at Gaza,” the Palestinians say, when they mean go to hell. Why did she think she could find consolation here?

She emerges, throws the sheets over her car to block the windows and, within the car’s confines, struggles out of her wet clothing, into the dry shirt and pants. Then, instead of heading back to Jerusalem, she aims for Gaza City. She passes a Palestinian refugee camp, its plywood and aluminum shacks peeking from behind a brick wall. Few cars travel through the streets paved with stones and broken bottles. Almost on autopilot, she heads toward Hikmet Masri’s shop. She stops to see Hikmet every time she’s in Gaza. Her most reliable source, calm and articulate. Plus, he lives above his store, so she can usually find him even when it’s closed.

This time the door stands ajar. She peers inside to see the jumble of the shelves, the mix of colors and shapes crammed together as though Hikmet simply gathered whatever manna fell from heaven and dragged it in, planning to organize it all another day. Hikmet himself sits on a stool, the traditional checkered cloth draped over his head.

“Caddie! Allah blesses me in directing you here once again. What can I offer you? Today I have fresh limes and ribbons in a dozen colors. Also two volumes of a French-language dictionary and some slightly used crayons.” Then Hikmet chuckles. “Or perhaps you want only a good quote?”

He pours overheated Turkish coffee from a samovar and offers her cigarettes, which she declines. His shop smells of cardamom. She suddenly feels leaden.

“And your photographer friend?” Hikmet asks. “Where is he today?”

Only then does Caddie recall that Marcus accompanied her last time she visited Hikmet, last time she inhaled in one breath the scent of cardamom and crayon and citrus together. She tries to wet her lips, but her tongue is dry. “He’s not working anymore,” she says. Hikmet raises his eyebrows. “Sometimes this job is dangerous,” she says. “We were in Lebanon and—” She picks up buttons from a basket, rubbing her fingers over their indented surfaces, pretending to inspect them before letting them fall. “He decided he’d had enough.”

“And you continue on?” Hikmet draws on his cigarette and holds the smoke a moment before exhaling. “A man is not what he wants to be, but what he must. Sometimes, perhaps, it is the same for a woman.”

She pushes the basket of buttons aside. “What’s been happening?”

He begins to grumble about the clashes, a noose around his neck, always followed by the funerals, which require him to close his business for a day, and then there are more clashes, more dead, another funeral. A downward spiral, he says. He pauses as though to consider the colorful phrase he will come up with, the quote so perfect she won’t be able to put it any lower than the third graph. Before he can speak, though, they’re interrupted by a noise from outside. Muffled, it’s hardly louder than a generous sneeze. But they’re attuned, both of them, to sounds of a certain timbre.

Hikmet invokes Allah’s name. “Always it’s something,” he mutters as he tucks his prayer beads into his pocket and rushes to the street.

Caddie’s knees soften; her fingernails drive into her palm. There is Marcus, with his chilled, wide-eyed expression.

She pushes him off. Too heavy.

His right shoulder slams against the door of the jeep.

His head falls carelessly at an odd angle, oh God.

She tears her gaze away from him and spots Rob staring at her with something she can’t identify. Not at first. Then, sharply, she recognizes it as accusation, as if she were responsible.

She hears a woman trilling. The blast is here, in Gaza. Not Lebanon.

Notepad already in hand, she pushes through the shop’s door in time to catch an ambulance slicing up the street, and the ululating woman lifting over her head a scrap of cloth stained with blood. On the next block, a section of wall is missing from a second-floor apartment. She looks up to see a man stumbling through the building entrance carrying a girl who looks to be about ten years old. The child’s eyes are closed. Her chest and right leg are burned.

Caddie imagines this moment framed through Marcus’s lens. Woman dropping to her knees: click. Man emerging from the smoke with girl in his arms: click. Close-up of girl, delicate face above damaged body, glazed eyes half-open: click, click. It’s odd, seeing it this way—at once more focused on tiny details, and more distant from them.

Emergency workers converge on the girl, and then three men lift her into the ambulance. Others rush upstairs to the smoking apartment.

There is no surprise in the accidental explosion of a firebomb. Materials used to make such bombs in the Strip are old and unstable, and the bomb-makers themselves—kids, often—are trying to patch together deadly explosives the way they might, in another culture, use rubber cement to assemble a model airplane. Mistakes are common. Still, there might be a story.

Caddie jogs to her car and drives fast to the Strip’s main hospital. She runs up the steps, discolored with blood, and shoves open the doors. No trace of antiseptic scent lingers in the halls; instead it smells of chickpeas, sweat and mold. Women in headscarves gossip as they cook over Bunsen burners in the hallway, while children toss jacks near their feet. A knot of men under knitted caps huddle, their foreheads nearly touching. One drops a cigarette butt to the floor and grinds it with his heel. A nurse strolls past, pushing a patient in a wheelchair, his head slumped and eyes closed as he hums loudly, tunelessly. He is shushed by one of three men who sit on their haunches around a radio plugged into a hallway outlet, listening to the news.

A tall man wearing a stylish charcoal-gray tie stands awkwardly in the hallway. He is neither Palestinian nor patient, doctor nor common visitor, but clearly an outsider, like Caddie. He is taking in everything but he’s not a journalist—she’s sure from that silk tie. He meets her glance. His eyes are so dark they startle. He lifts an arm as though to stop her, to ask a question perhaps. But she hasn’t time. She glances away and moves past him.

Caddie knows from previous visits that the emergency room has been turned into nothing more than another ward: too many emergencies, too little space. Most new patients, whatever their conditions, are simply hustled into one of the large dorms. Nurses don’t waste time trying to group them according to the type or even seriousness of their ailments. A boy whose leg hangs in a cast lies next to a comatose woman hooked up to a ventilator.

Shooting through the hallways, Caddie finds the girl in a room that holds about twenty beds, all filled. She imagines some poor soul being carted to a grave minutes earlier, and the girl taking his place atop a still warm, rumpled and discolored sheet. The family is gathering: wailing women and sullen men. Caddie backs against the wall near the girl’s bed, trying for invisibility. Listening to their talk, she learns that the youth who had been making the bomb is dead. The injured girl is his sister. Her burns are severe, especially on the chest. A woman—mother or aunt—opens the child’s shirt slightly to show a red mass, skin almost gone, and what’s left looks crisp in places, leathery or wet in others. She is conscious. A moan emerges from far inside her.

A doctor arrives and begins an examination. Two weeping women are led from the room by the others, leaving three young men, probably cousins, to await the doctor’s verdict. Before he can pronounce it, a second doctor enters, two nurses on his heels. His graying hair, and the way he holds himself, make it clear he is the senior. “She should be intubated and on IV,” he tells the first doctor.

“I’ve ordered it.”

The senior doctor sends a nurse away to check on what’s become of the drip, and then examines the girl himself. He straightens. “Wait outside,” he orders the remaining relatives. He glances toward Caddie, who quickly kneels beside the unconscious patient in the next bed, her eyes closed as though praying. He turns away from her and back to the girl. “The burn penetrated the subcutaneous tissue,” he says.

“In one or two places.” The younger doctor sounds as though he equivocates. Caddie leans toward them slightly to better catch the Arabic.

“Third degree on the chest, that’s clear. She had trouble breathing in the ambulance, no?”

“She needs morphine,” the junior doctor says. “Penicillin.”

The senior doctor doesn’t reply at first. He looks at the girl thoughtfully with large, liquid eyes. A skeletal cat prowls the ward, meowing loudly. “You know the state of our supplies?” he finally asks.

“We’ll use what we have,” the junior doctor replies.

Still studying the girl, the senior doctor speaks in a rhetorical tone, as if he were teaching. “Is that practical?”

Caddie doesn’t understand what he means at first. She wonders if she’s misinterpreted the Arabic.

“Either way, we must alleviate the pain,” the younger doctor says, his tone growing peevish. “The question you raise is in Allah’s hands.”

The senior doctor crosses his arms and taps the fingers of his right hand. “We have twenty vials left of morphine. Penicillin is also short.”

The ward is suddenly quiet; even the patients’ moans seem to die on their lips. Only the doctors speak, quickly, one’s voice falling on the other’s.

“And you suggest?”

“Codeine.”

“Oral codeine.” The junior doctor grunts. “The corruption of our own government . . .”

“Fortunately, some nerve endings—”

“. . . means we never have enough. And for infection?”

“—are already dead. So the pain—”

“Infection, I said.”

The senior doctor picks up the girl’s chart and writes. His voice is painstakingly slow now and Caddie has no trouble following his words. “There’s been a clash with some settlers. Two teenagers and a child are on their way in right now, Ahmed. Another child. This one eight years old. Bullet wound to the leg. Decent chance of survival. But without painkillers, the boy may tear at his wound. Infection and death could follow. Needless death.” He sighs. “You know this, Ahmed.”

“In Allah’s name, look at her,” the younger doctor says.

The senior doctor looks at his colleague sadly but from a great distance, as though mourning a son’s obstinate refusal to learn. “You can invoke Allah,” he says. “But I have to allot the supplies.” He hands the chart to the nurse. “I’ll return in two hours. Let me know if there is change before then.”

The child is no longer crying. She stares at Caddie with stunned eyes that hold fear—though surely, and please let this be so, she is too young to comprehend the sentence just pronounced on her. It must be the possibility of more pain that frightens her. Not the promise of nonexistence.

The first doctor has his back to her; he is already moving on to the next patient. “Excuse me,” Caddie calls. “I’d like to talk to you about the medicine shortages.” He turns. For the briefest instant, she sees a flicker of interest in his eyes. Then he looks her up and down, and scowls. “We can talk as you work, if you’d like. Or I’ll wait.”

“You are—who?” the doctor asks in English.

“Newspaper reporter.”

“Which country?”

“America.”

His frown stiffens. “You aren’t allowed in here. I have nothing to say to you.”

“I heard you talking,” Caddie says.

“You heard? And in what language did you hear?”

“My Arabic is fine,” she says, slipping back into that tongue.

“Mistakes are easy to make when it is not your language.” The doctor continues to speak English. “Not your people.”

“I might be able to help.”

“You think we will get more money because you write that a bomb-maker’s sister suffers? If it were so simple, you think our own would not have already achieved it?” He shoves his right hand into his pocket and tilts his head. His look turns suddenly softer, appraising. “You want to help? Go to an Israeli hospital and bring us back the medicine we need.” He steps toward her. “But go quickly. The child can’t wait.”

She could do it. Get in her car and zoom back to Jerusalem. She might be able to persuade some leftist-peacenik doctor to give her the morphine, the penicillin, whatever is needed. For a little girl, a few supplies to ease her pain. Maybe even save her life.

Caddie rubs her right wrist, remembering the leather band Marcus wore at his. It was a gift from a woman whose demolished home he photographed, whose coffee he drank, whose children he admired. He’d given her back her dignity, the woman told him, so she gave him the bracelet. They called each other habibi, friend.

Caddie had scoffed. “A story is a story,” she’d told Marcus later. “These people aren’t our friends. We don’t share their lives in any sense of the word. We slip in, dig up what we need and move out, fast. All that buddy-buddy stuff is only worth it if it gets you a better photo.”

“Bullshit,” he’d answered. “You want something more, too. Something to make us more than friggin’ voyeurs.”

“Us? I know better.”

Now, watching her, the doctor’s stare slowly grows hard. “I’m very busy,” he says, and turns away.

Caddie studies his long, narrow back. She imagines a series of interview questions. Have you ever been so tired you dispensed the wrong medicine? Have you ever made a mistake that cost a patient his life, and then lied to the family? She watches him leave the room. She can no longer see him, but in her imagination, he blushes.

Still, it’s difficult to leave. The girl’s family has not yet returned, and she is watching Caddie with eyes that pull. It’s as though she’s waiting for an answer to a question.

Get too close, feel too much, and you’re sunk. That’s what she’d told Marcus. What she believes.

Caddie forces herself from the hospital room into the hallway and halts before a window that overlooks an inner courtyard where recovering patients sit surrounded by extended families. The floor feels gritty beneath her feet. She leans against a wall. She’s done here.

As she fights sluggishness, an emaciated man moves past, one hand pressed against the wall for support. The patient’s eyes are large above hollow cheeks. Each step is a labor. He’s maybe twenty-five years old, strikingly young for one so strikingly ill.

The flesh is weak.

The first time she’d heard the minister say that, she thought he referred to Grandma Jos, who had been having more and more accidents as her eyesight worsened, who’d cut herself that very morning with a paring knife. And Caddie wondered, how did he know, this minister? How did he know that Grandma Jos was aging fast? Did he, as God’s emissary, have God’s ability to see straight into their home? Was Grandma Jos really right, with her faith that seemed so inept?

Later, much later, when she learned the minister meant something else, something obscure about lust and sin and redemption, she rejected his interpretation as overblown and unrealistic, the explanation of the cloistered. No, she’d been right from the start: “the flesh is weak” was a maxim—or, better, a protest cry—about the inescapable vulnerability of the human body. Everyone has to die—in an armchair, on the pavement, in a bed. Caddie can’t prevent it.

She turns to leave and almost runs into two orderlies rushing past, pushing empty beds. “Fucking son-of-dog Zionist settlers,” one curses loudly to the other.

“Any dead?” Caddie calls after them.

The orderly glances at her over his shoulder. “Yeah. There’s dead.”

“How many?” she asks, but he’s already moving out of earshot. To her right, there is a quick movement, and she turns to see the man with the silk tie lean forward from a chair against the wall as though he, too, is waiting for the answer. His hands rest on his lap, cupping a cell phone. His dark curls contrast with his angled cheeks and chin. His mouth is a narrow leaf. A deep dimple cleaves his chin. His eyes sweep down the hallway, following the orderlies, then anchor on her. His stare is intense, yet vacant. Caddie has seen this expression before. In the woman, smelling of vinegar and sweat, who collapsed on her in front of a bombed building. In the child whose father had been shot that same day. In Sven, that afternoon.

“Something happened to you.” He says it to her, even though she’s thinking it of him. He speaks English with an accent. Russian, she thinks.

“Many things.” She speaks with deliberate indifference as she begins walking away.

“The earth is hungry, it takes as it needs,” he calls after her. “If we knew where we were going to fall, we could spread straw.”

It sounds like something he has said before many times, a personal truism that is unfamiliar to her. His tone, however, is familiar. And he speaks as though he recognizes her.

But no. He’s a stranger, just some stranger. Caddie stiffens her shoulders. “Poetic,” she says. “And ridiculous. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He isn’t angered by her curtness. In fact, he seems amused, maybe slightly intrigued. The way Marcus would be. He’s about to speak again. She doesn’t want that. She turns and strides down the hall, making her escape.