They grabbed Yoel in the thick of the wadi. He was wearing the white Sabbath clothes that his parents insisted on even though they did not go to temple or recite any of the blessings. Yoel vaguely recognized the kids—there were always a few who merged into a single face—from the towers on the hill that loomed at the end of their block and sometimes blacked out the sky. Yoel hadn’t provoked them, he’d simply walked by humming “Purple Rain” to show how undaunted he was, but they knew, God knows how, that he craved their downfall. And now he was alone in the wadi, without Yonatan. When he realized the tower kids were going to jump him, he was surprised to discover that, more than being afraid, he was delighted to confirm that he and Yonatan hadn’t been imagining their hostility for all those years. A shiver prickled his skin and a strange warmth spread through his skull.
They grabbed him and knocked him down, rolled him in the mud with their feet, rolled him over the stones, rolled him onto the thistles on either side of the path. They stepped on him and kicked his ribs and waist, one of them pressed his boot onto Yoel’s neck until he screamed that he couldn’t breathe. Only when they saw blood on his arm and trickling from his cheek did they let go and walk away, poking fun at his shouts, mimicking his whimpered threats. “How are you guys gonna kill us?” they laughed.
Yoel told Yonatan that he lay there listening to their voices grow farther away until it started to rain and everything around him went silent, and for the first time he considered the price he would pay at home when he showed up with his white clothes recolored reddish-brown by the wadi’s dirt. He got up without bothering to shake the dust and mud off. Every so often he felt a sharp pain from the thorns that had pierced his skin. Odd how the pain was not constant, he mused, but came and went. He wanted to get out of the neighborhood, take the number 14 bus and go somewhere, maybe to the tennis center in Katamon, where they used to play for hours when they could get a free court. It was a wintery week, the days were cold and the nights even colder, yet still he imagined he could lie down on one of the courts and spend the night there. But he knew that in the end, after the blood on his face clotted, he would go home to his parents, and that every minute he wasted thinking about other places would only prolong the misery. They did not yet have that other place, the one they’d talked about for years, a place neither in the seemingly menacing neighborhood of Beit HaKerem nor fully outside of it. They had yet to create it by uniting their separate imaginations into a cohesive vision, still trying to each impose their dreams on the other.
They sat in the wadi, fifty yards from the two buildings they lived in, which faced each other at the end of the street. From atop a mound of dirt, they looked out at the rocky hill with a muddy path winding up to its peak, where the towers loomed. They liked that spot: from here they could observe the whole world, unseen by it.
Yoel played cards and talked about the animals that disappeared from the wadi in winter: squirrels, hyraxes, cats, foxes. Yonatan replied impatiently that he’d never seen anything there in summer either, except cats. Foxes? What was Yoel talking about? Next he’d be missing the springtime leopards. Yoel focused on his card game, but Yonatan hated these games Yoel made up, always full of arbitrary rules that made no sense. When he leaned over to pick up the apricot pit they used as a ball, Yonatan beat him to it and threw it away.
“Are you an idiot?” Yoel shouted and glared at him. “I was in the middle.”
“Not anymore.”
“Go to hell,” said Yoel, “I’m going home.”
“Is everything okay?” He grabbed Yoel by the shoulder. He was stronger, and they both knew it.
“Everything’s fine.”
“Fine how?”
Yoel ignored the question. He sat on the ground, smoothed out the creases in his button-down shirt, and started talking about Soviet rockets that shot into space and then fell back to Earth. He was currently investigating whether that was really possible; if the rockets flew through space at high speed, then they should return to an Earth that was already much older than them. His father was reading a book called Perfect Spy and he said everyone in the USSR and the US was a spy, the whole Cold War was only so that people could keep their salaries.
Yonatan commented that this was pretty much Yoel’s father’s explanation about everything. He asked Yoel again: Is everything okay? And Yoel nodded. Okay how? It had been a week since that Saturday, and Yoel hadn’t said another word about how the kids from the towers had rolled him in mud and thistles. His patience wearing thin, Yonatan put his hand in a puddle, picked up a leaf and held it to his nose—he couldn’t smell anything—then ran it over Yoel’s coat collar. As expected, Yoel grimaced and pulled back.
“Look up,” Yonatan said, pointing to the hilltop. “We can’t get to the towers without them seeing us, right?” They had already discussed this many times: only one path led to the top of the hill, and whoever walked it was visible from anywhere around the towers.
“So we’ll climb at night,” Yoel said.
“Don’t be dumb,” he snapped, “we’ve talked about that: at night they’re asleep at home, we don’t even know exactly where they live. And, even if we find out, are we going to attack them at home? And their parents?” He was surprised at having to spell it all out again: this score could only be settled in daylight. “We have to find a way to get there during the day, you understand?”
He leaned over, happily inhaling the smell of fresh earth after the rain. His fingers pulled up wet weeds and he realized that he was tearing them into shreds. He put his muddy fingernails up to his nose and smelled, and when he looked up he saw Yoel watching him wide-eyed. He wondered if Yoel had guessed his idea, and now he knew that they both understood that something big had been put down between them, perhaps the thing they’d been looking for since they met.
A year, and another year, and they were in first grade and third grade and now already sixth grade, and still they were searching for their point of unity. Sometimes, when one of them had an idea that the other found boring, they wondered why they were friends at all, and what they had in common. But they were fully aware of the answer. Yonatan lived in number 7 and Yoel lived across the street in number 10. When they played soccer they kicked and pushed and badgered each other, at school they expressed no affection, and did not play together at recess. Their world existed at the bottom end of their street, the steepest one in the neighborhood. It existed between their two buildings and the wadi, the forest that abutted it to the west, and the military factory that was bordered on the east by the towers. Year after year they entertained all sorts of grandiose plans that led to moments of elation—had they finally found the brilliant idea that would unite them?—before they crashed into yet another failure.
But now perhaps something had changed. They must not talk about that idea yet, they weren’t ready. If they talked it might dissipate. For now they had to shield it, get out of that place and not mention it at all.
They stood up and ran along the mud. The cold wind whipped at their skin, and they felt almost naked. Their eyes watered, and they could not see anything, but still they charged over the soft dirt to the two last buildings on the street, which they could find blindfolded. When they finally reached the dirt lot, out of breath, they parted ways without a word, and Yonatan climbed up the steps to the third floor.
To his relief the apartment was dark and silent, the windows and blinds shut. He stood in the entryway and looked at the round armchair by the phone, which in the dark always glowed in a strange brilliant black. On the kitchen table was a plastic bag containing blackened pieces of avocado and two half-pitas. He went onto the kitchen balcony and flung the bag onto the strip of earth behind the fence that separated his building from the ones on HaShachar Street.
Yonatan looked out at the building farthest to the left, most of which was hidden by trees. That was where his nanny Ahuva lived, and her home was the site of his earliest memories, apart from the first one: he was two and a half, with his back up against the hospital room door, while his grandmother, Sarah, lay in bed. She smiles at him, her hair is wrapped in a headscarf, thick blankets cover her body, and he, at least in his memory, sees her for the first time in his life. She reaches out to the nightstand and feels around for something, and another pair of hands, smooth and young, rummage in the drawer with her, and finally she holds out a square of chocolate for him. But he doesn’t want to go any closer. Everyone urges him to come forward. The grin does not leave her face, but something goes crooked, perhaps in her lips. He was seven at her funeral, and a man in a black fedora who looked vaguely familiar walked past him, stood near a distant row of graves and said something. He asked his father what the man was saying, and his father said it was Grandpa Albert, who’d come from Haifa.
“That’s Grandpa?” he wondered.
“Yes,” his father replied. “He is saying that his heart is heavy today.”
The idea still sat at the center of his consciousness like a massive boulder. He knew it had to be revitalized, enhanced, its plot rewritten. It was clear to them both that this winter, something pivotal had to happen.
——
The older kids whose apartments were also at number 10 heard about the incident and declared that this could not be allowed to happen on their street: a whole gang beating up one kid in the wadi? Was there no decency in the world? There was only one way to settle the matter: the kids from the towers would send two representatives to the yard at Rivka’s kindergarten, where all the kids from the block had gone, and they’d hold a fair fight in the sandbox. The tower kids had to be the same age as they were, roughly in sixth grade.
The older boys—Shimon, David Tzivony and Tomer Fainaru—found Yonatan and Yoel in the windowless basement of his building, sitting under the dusty ping-pong table—they had always been enchanted by legends of the long-ago days when their older brothers had played on it—surrounded by a sofa with ripped cushions, a BMX frame with its handlebars wrapped in yellow foam, a heap of dusty books in Russian, a garden hose, and various other bits of junk the neighbors had no interest in ever seeing again. They were conferring over the outline of the trench, which ran too close to the electric fence around the military factory. They sketched possible routes in a notebook, discussed every twist and turn, and carefully mapped the path on a large piece of white cardstock they’d bought. They were making good progress and every so often they lay down on an old mattress with their eyes shut, but they couldn’t stop talking about the trench and their retaliation against the towers, and also about how Yoel’s mother said that in a year or two she wanted to have a baby girl, after the two boys, and they were in a cheerful mood, and they raised their voices a lot and complimented each other on the things they said.
As soon as they saw the older boys they flipped over the cardstock, threw their coats on it, and stood up. All at once the basement felt cold. The boys consoled Yoel over the terrible incident in the wadi, and said that, if any gang of kids attacked him again, he should tell them. They asked about his injuries and his parents’ reaction, and Yoel kept saying, “It’s nothing.” It was obvious that their gentleness was masking a threat, and Yonatan was surprised that Yoel failed to understand this, instead riding high on their attention, boasting about the scratches that had already faded on his arms and cheeks. When they got bored with Yoel they headed to the door. “So we’ll have a talk with the towers. We’ll explain the facts of life, as they say, and we’ll let you know when it’s happening,” Shimon summed up. “We’re thinking Friday afternoon,” added David Tzivony, who always insisted on having the last word.
Yonatan’s legs were shaking. He struggled to steady them and pressed his shoes against the floor. “We want to talk about it first,” Yoel said, “we might not want to get back at them anymore.”
Shimon and his friends looked at him, surprised that he was under the impression that anything was up to him. Yoel glanced at Yonatan, who gave an encouraging glance back, wanting to wink but afraid of getting caught. Neither of them wanted this battle, they’d always been afraid of fights that had no rules and ended in someone’s surrender. They’d seen Shimon kicking Itai in the face, and David Tzivony riding Amir while he writhed and screamed, “I can’t see, I can’t see,” a line that every boy on the block kept mimicking for months. These were not the loser kids from his class, who loathed him but were scared of him and would only fight him if they were sure someone in the crowd would break it up after a minute. Besides, they were working on a plan that was going to stun the kids from the towers.
The older boys’ smiles were gone. “Talk as much as you want, as long as you show up for the fight on time,” said Shimon, who was wearing his usual ironed jeans and a black belt with a shiny silver triangular buckle. Tomer Fainaru, who was known as Bentz because his head was rectangular like Bert’s Israeli counterpart, and who always got mad when anyone hummed the Sesame Street theme song, took off his glasses, as he always did before issuing a threat. “We’ll bust up whoever doesn’t show up,” he said. “And if no one shows up,” David Tzivony added, “we’ll kill you all.”
There was a knock on the basement door. Yonatan knew it was the girls—no one else knocked on that door. There were rumors that at night girls and boys made out in the basement and even had sex, and Yoel swore he’d found a condom there once. Shimon opened the heavy white door, and to Yonatan’s surprise he saw Tali with a girl he didn’t know; she was wearing a wool coat over a colorful dress that fluttered above shiny red boots; no girl in his class had boots like those. “Get the hell out of here, Tali!” he yelled.
Shimon slapped him. “You don’t swear at girls.”
They didn’t like Tali Meltzer. She’d lived at number 8 since her family had moved to the neighborhood from Haifa, when she was in second grade and they were in third, and she used to monitor them from her balcony that looked onto the wadi. Once she snitched to Yonatan’s parents that they were throwing mud balls at people, and another time she squealed on him because he’d called her “a peeping whore,” although she insisted she’d only been standing on the balcony, doing nothing. Her father was a therapist and her mother an architect, both friendly people who made a point of saying hello to everyone, and they spoke a clearly accentuated Hebrew. They talked to kids and grown-ups in the same tone, because in their view—which they took the trouble to elucidate for his parents—“the child’s position must be respected.”
No one had any doubt that the Meltzers were different from all the other residents on the block, and it was also clear that, having despaired of educating their neighbors, they had decided not to befriend them. Yonatan’s father viewed the Meltzers as an annoyance, the way he viewed everyone on the street who insisted on voicing his opinion on any matter, while his mother secretly might have envied how they lived, and the polite, cheerful way they and their two children spoke. “Life is one big party, I see,” she hissed when she spotted them loading bags and a surfboard into their car on a Saturday morning.
After their altercations with Tali, Mr. Meltzer asked to visit them for a meeting, and for Yoel and his parents to be invited as well. (Only Yoel’s mother came, and she sat there saying nothing, pulling out bits of her short hair.) Mr. Meltzer sat with a straight back, asked Yonatan’s parents how they were and what they did for a living, and after twenty minutes laid out his arguments: firstly, Tali came back from the wadi saying ugly words that he would not repeat, and even if she was saying them jokingly, these things did seep in; secondly, they shouted and horsed around between two and four in the afternoon, and now Tali didn’t respect the siesta hours either; and thirdly, it seemed they were treating her disrespectfully and failed to appreciate her virtues—she was a smart girl with integrity and a good sense of humor.
“Well, we could see that as soon as you moved here,” Yonatan’s father pointed out, though he wouldn’t have recognized Tali if he’d run into her. Yoel tapped Yonatan’s black shoe with his white sneaker, and he tapped Yoel back. The two of them muffled a giggle when his father gave them a cautionary look.
“But we’re not your daughter’s friends,” Yoel said finally.
Meltzer stared at him until Yoel looked down. He was a broad-shouldered man, with piercing if friendly brown eyes. His expression was always polite, and it was only his pale pink lips and sharp chin that disclosed anything malicious. He’d recently joined forces with two fathers who were pillars of the community to establish an “exercise club,” whose members gathered every Saturday to run at the stadium on the Givat Ram campus. (One boy who was invited said they made their kids run ten thousand meters on the track, and it was a wonder no one had dropped dead yet. “They’re total Nazis, they’re animals,” he whined.)
Meltzer sipped his tea and seemed surprised by Yoel’s remark. Yonatan looked at him, then at Yoel, and it finally dawned on him how credulous Meltzer was. “If you’re not her friends,” Meltzer finally said in a dry tone, “then there’s no reason for you not to cut off ties with her. Sometimes good children don’t get along, it’s disappointing but not a rare thing.”
“But there’s nothing to cut off,” Yoel insisted, while his mother put her hand on his knee and he put his hand on top of hers.
Meltzer had apparently expected her to restrain her son; he didn’t know that Yoel and his mother sometimes acted like friends, that she knew all the kids in class, and was the type of mother who would ask if two girls who weren’t talking to each other had made up yet. He cleared his throat and, in a slightly comical tone, said that in the interest of fairness he would now say something in their defense—was that acceptable to them?
Yoel and Yonatan both nodded.
“Truly acceptable?” he insisted with a meaningful smile and looked back and forth between them, searching for signs of admiration or at the very least surprise.
“Go on, they said yes,” Yonatan’s father snapped, and Yoel’s mother lit a cigarette.
Of course he would never put words in their mouths, Meltzer explained, but perhaps Tali did not respect their games? Was that a fair point?
Yonatan proudly replied that he didn’t want to say bad things about Tali when she wasn’t there, and Yoel quietly waved his mother’s cigarette smoke away.
“So can we,” Meltzer asked warmly, “agree in genuine friendship to cut off ties?”
They all nodded.
Yonatan’s father said, “Thank you for a successful visit,” and stood up abruptly, held out his hand, and walked Meltzer to the door, slapping his back but in fact shoving him out the door. Once he’d left, his father laughed. “If you’re going to suck up to someone before giving them bad news, make sure they really will think it’s bad news, otherwise you’ve wasted everyone’s time.”
His mother added: “Mr. Meltzer is outflanking you to reach a goal that’s already been achieved,” and all the adults laughed.
His parents ignored Meltzer’s visit, perhaps because they found his behavior peculiar: it was acceptable on the block that if someone beat up your kid or insulted him more than was necessary, you didn’t sit down in their living room for a friendly talk and expect to be served tea, but you yelled at his parents like Shimon’s mother had yelled at his mother after Shaul, Yonatan’s big brother, had strangled Shimon with a garden hose: “Aren’t you ashamed? Your husband is a respectable man!” Or the way Yoel’s father had threatened Bentz after he poured glue on his son’s hair: “I’ll wring your neck with my bare hands!”
“Do anything you want, as long as he doesn’t come back here,” his father told them after Meltzer had left. But the truth was that Tali had defeated them, and after the visit they ignored her completely. Even when she was bold enough to follow them into the wadi and ask what they were doing, they didn’t curse or threaten her, but sat there doing nothing until she gave up.
“Well, hello, ladies!” Shimon greeted the two girls who walked into the basement with impressive synchronization. It was clear to everyone that only in the inaccessible kingdom of girls was such precision possible. Yonatan wondered if the uninhibited closeness he sometimes longed for (even to hug Yoel or someone else really tight), but was always careful to suppress, existed only in the girls’ world.
Tali took off her wool hat and shook out her brown hair, and for the first time it occurred to him that she might be not ugly. She ignored him and the other boys and turned to Yoel, toward whom she was obliged to demonstrate loathing simply because he hated her, and asked if they were doing something in the wadi. She said they’d found a strange mound of earth, “and it’s obviously you.” Yoel just stared at the cobwebs clustered above the girls’ heads.
“A mound of earth?” he snorted, hoping Yoel would keep quiet and let him speak. “Do you know how many people hang around in the wadi?”
“We almost tripped on your stupid mound,” Tali grumbled without looking at him, “it’s dangerous.”
“Where’s the mound?” asked one of the older boys without much interest.
“We’ll be there whenever you say!” Yonatan shouted. “But we want it to be clear that there’s no sticks and stones, and that Shimon will be umpire.” He was pleased with that last part (he didn’t really care who was umpire), which immediately created a stir among the big kids, who exchanged looks.
“Fine, you little fucker,” Bentz said with a giggle, “you want Shimon, you get Shimon.” He delivered a slap on the back to Shimon, who maintained a blank expression, like a man acknowledging the weight of responsibility he bore.
Before Tali could say anything else, her friend, who seemed bored with the recent exchange, started doing cartwheels like they do in the Olympics. Every time she stood on her hands her dress fell down to her white underwear dotted with orange teddy bears or pink hearts—he couldn’t tell—and everyone saw it and they also saw her thighs, which were whiter than her tanned shins. The boys spent a moment yearning, then started complimenting her and asking how many times a week she did ballet and what kind of things she learned in class. She answered tersely in a deep, languid voice that enchanted them, and when they asked her not to stop she shrugged and did some more cartwheels.
The basement was silent, and he wondered if he and Yoel could leave yet, but the older kids were blocking the door. David Tzivony asked Tali’s friend if she’d be willing to do her cartwheels without her underwear on, and she said okay and took off her underwear and folded it and wiped the dust off the edge of the ping-pong table with her hand and put it down there, and now he could see that they were pink teddy bears of various sizes. He heard Bentz breathing heavily and he looked at her hole, the likes of which he’d only seen in Playboy magazines at Bentz’s—once, last summer, he was asked over there and immediately warned: “Here is just for looking; you jerk off at home”—and turned to Yoel, who gave him a furious glare because he’d agreed to the fight without consulting him.
The older boys whispered and David Tzivony left the basement. Tali, who was blushing, stood near the door, and, while the girl did more cartwheels, seized the chance and said she had to go home. She urged her friend to join her—her mother would make them pancakes, she said—and the girl said she probably should go. Shimon and Bentz said they were really enjoying her cartwheels, but she could do whatever she wanted. She flashed an indifferent smile, though her expression remained unaltered, and Tali snapped, “Well then?” and the girl said, “Soon,” in a slightly sardonic tone while she stood on her hands, and everyone laughed, except for Tali, who walked out.
To his surprise, he was relieved they’d let her go. Yoel took advantage of the break and walked to the door. Bentz stopped him.
“Let him go,” Shimon said.
“It’s too cold outside,” Bentz scoffed.
“Let him go, I said,” Shimon grunted, and Bentz moved aside.
Yoel walked past them, resigning himself to the thump that landed on his back, and to Shimon’s kick.
“Wait, one important thing we didn’t tell you,” Bentz called after him, his voice sounding more mature and serious.
“What?” Yoel turned back and his face looked gloomy. His arm was dangling behind him, as though he were dragging something with it.
“Tell your mamma we can’t make it tonight, maybe we’ll send the Arab gardener instead!” Bentz cawed, and by the end of the sentence he was roaring with laughter. Shimon laughed too, and they exchanged back-slaps and high fives. Yonatan wanted to laugh but he held back. The girl stared at them uncomprehendingly.
Yonatan was left alone with the kids and the girl and wondered why he didn’t leave, since he wasn’t all that excited about the cartwheels, and seeing the hole over and over again. He couldn’t understand why it thrilled them. David Tzivony came back to the basement and shoved something rolled up in a rag into Shimon’s hand. Shimon, who’d been humming a song, went over to the girl—it was obvious that he was the only one she liked—and coughed lightly, the way he did before he spoke to girls or adults. He asked if she wouldn’t mind doing another few cartwheels but slower, or maybe even a handstand, and she said she wouldn’t mind, and Shimon asked if she’d mind if they took a picture of her so they’d have a souvenir.
The girl didn’t answer and the other kids stared at her, enchanted, as she stood on her hands again, and Tzivony whispered to the others, “Do you understand what’s going on here?” Yonatan was overcome by an ominous feeling. He wanted to tell the girl that she should go home because it was late, but he knew the others would kill him if he interfered, and he also knew that he would not leave the room now: under no circumstances would he leave her alone with them.
Shimon glanced at his watch. “The A-Team’s starting,” he exclaimed, and David Tzivony narrowed his eyes at him as if waking up. Shimon and Bentz turned to the door but David Tzivony didn’t move.
“Wait,” he said to Shimon, “aren’t we going to do anything?” He pointed to the camera.
“No,” Shimon declared. He walked over to Tzivony, put his free arm around his back and shoved him toward the door, but halfway through the motion he changed his mind and went back to the girl and told her she was very pretty, and that she would be a wonderful dancer or something like that, but no one was going to say anything about what had happened here, were they? She stared at Shimon with her green eyes, squinting. Yonatan was surprised to notice crowded freckles around her eyes, which reminded him that she was younger than he was, and her expression saddened him and he looked up at the cobwebs again.
Her response did not satisfy Shimon. He kept standing there looking at her, until he picked up the underwear from the ping-pong table, kneeled down in front of her and handed it to her. She took it and turned her back and put it on. Shimon waited for her to finish and straighten out her dress and then he headed for the door.
“Don’t talk too much,” Bentz told Yonatan and gave him a look.
They didn’t shut the door behind them. He hoped the girl wouldn’t hear them laughing in the hallway, and to his relief all he could hear were footsteps and hushed voices. The girl stood there for a moment longer. He wanted to talk to her but did not have the courage, and he stared at the clumps of dried mud on his shoes. He soon heard her footsteps in the hallway, then in the passage leading out to the yard. After that it was silent.
——
“Put your hands inside your sweater,” Yoel told him. “Do you want them to freeze?”
The wind blew from the north and struck their faces every time they put their heads up. A few dark blocks of clouds hung above them, but they were not rainclouds. They had no time to waste: the fight with the towers was inevitable, and it would either happen in their world or in the other kids’ world; it was up to them. They wore wool hats and ugly parkas—his was from Florida, where a friend of his mother lived and sent annual packages of hand-me-downs—and Yoel had red Liverpool gloves. In the wadi they saw only two thin boys in wool coats who ambled down the path toward their street, smoking. Yonatan thought they looked big and beautiful, and he envied their interesting lives.
They had a shovel they’d pilfered from the garden where they worked in agriculture class, and two flashlights, some large plastic bags, a little bottle of kerosene they’d found in the basement, a loaf of whole wheat bread, sliced cheese and a bottle of Coke. Yonatan did not mention what had happened the day before in the basement, assuming Yoel was regretting leaving him alone there. But Yoel said nothing and he wasn’t about to let anything come between them now. He knew what was worrying Yoel: why were they digging instead of preparing for the imminent fight? He was afraid Yoel might ask this question, in the next hour or the next day, and that then everything would collapse, because the things Yonatan did alone existed only in an unsteady way until Yoel joined in. He once again felt obliged to glue the fragments together with the fervor of words—with storylines he would invent about the wonderful things that would happen when they finished—and to present Yoel with a complete picture.
The first twenty feet of the trench were dug in soft earth that felt good to crush between one’s fingers, taking handfuls of it and kneading it into shapes, and they easily dug up the few little stones and twigs. They made fast progress, each taking turns holding the shovel while the other loaded the dirt into bags and rolled them over to a black heap of trash that someone had burned. Yoel said his hand hurt, and when he removed the gloves that now smelled like leaves, they both stared at a pinkish-white blister that had developed on one of his fingers.
It was disgusting, but Yonatan could not look away. “Don’t worry, I always get those,” he said, and remembered that Yoel usually knew when he was lying.
Yoel blew on the blister and a little smile emerged. Yonatan felt a surge of emotion toward him and remembered how lovely Yoel’s smile was when the skin around his hazel eyes rounded into crescents that also laughed. Like the wholeness of a baby’s smile. He offered to switch, but Yoel refused; he had dug less than Yonatan today.
Yoel shook out his brown, frizzy hair and it fell on his high, acne-dotted forehead. His eyes were small for his head, but when he opened them wide they looked large and beautiful, giving his face a mature look. Even though Yonatan was a couple of inches taller, with broader shoulders and a slightly chubby face, when people saw them together—perhaps because of Yoel’s moustache fuzz, his deep voice and flawless articulation, and the pressed button-down shirts he wore to school, always tucked in—they said Yoel looked older, like a seventh or eighth grader. Yonatan’s mother even said Yoel looked like “a little man.”
From faraway they heard the soft rattle of an engine, and soon a deafening screech rolled down the wadi, and at the edge of their street they saw puffs of smoke. He assumed his father was driving downtown for a meeting, even though his mother disliked it when he arranged meetings on Saturdays. They were used to that noise. On winter mornings the residents of their block often sat in their cars trying to start their engines, pumping the gas pedals. Only in the past couple of years had people begun to part with their old cars and nonchalantly slide into new Mitsubishis or Subarus—white, silver or blue—whose engines started up in an instant. Yoel’s father had already bought a light blue Mitsubishi, and there was talk of a new car in Yonatan’s home, too. It was the clearest divide on the block now: between those who sailed away in their cars and those who did not. If the car you bought was too expensive, however, like a BMW, you were branded a show-off, or worse: a potential member of the flighty, uneducated, bourgeois business world of Tel Aviv, as his uncle used to remark at family get-togethers on Fridays.
They both knew Yoel’s mother would come out onto their balcony any minute to call him home for dinner.
“This was a good day,” Yonatan said to Yoel. “Right?”
“Yes,” Yoel replied, “this was a very good day.”