He wondered how they could fail to see it, the kids from the towers, and Yoel, and Shimon and Bentz and David Tzivony, and his parents, and even his big brother in New York—how could they not see that the sky in the wadi was crumpling toward the earth and sharp little needles were dangling dangerously above them all? How could they not hear that the whistles of the wind were twisting into a scream, that the gusts were carrying waves of sand and yellow dust, dry leaves, twigs and branches from the wadi to their buildings, that a sandy dome was gradually forming above their world and the sandy dust was clumping in the air, penetrating their nostrils, crawling on their skin, scraping their breath. Children walked down the streets unable to see a thing beyond their own bodies—how could anyone fail to see the certainty of disaster?
During recess he stayed at his desk in the back row and filled his notebook with a jumble of possible routes for the trench. They had dug too close to the military factory’s electric fence, and now the trench had to make a sharp left turn to circumvent the factory and meander through an area they had never gone near before, in order to lead them to the back of the towers. Someone must have called his name and he hadn’t heard, because a hand was placed on his notebook, and when he looked up he saw that they were standing too close to his desk. It was a group of boys from his class. Their cheeks were flushed, and he could smell wool, mothballs, baby oil and laundry softener. A thin stripe of toothpaste slunk over the lower lip of a boy standing on a skateboard.
“Get your hand off,” Yonatan said.
The boy slid his hand off the notebook, slowly enough to crumple the illustrated pages as if by accident. Then he said there was going to be a class discussion in an hour about what he’d done: the insults, the curses, the hitting. To allow the other kids to speak openly, they said, he would have to leave the class during the discussion.
Yonatan eyed them and wondered if he saw a shadow of fear flashing in their eyes. Then they hardened their expressions. He realized they must have been plotting their revenge for a long time, uniting forces. But he didn’t have time for their nonsense, he had to devote his shrewdness to a more urgent front. He briefly considered an angry outburst, but he was too tired to tease them and his whole body was burning.
Yesterday he and Yoel had dug until 7 p.m. When they’d begun, in the morning, they’d been in a great mood and competed over who could stick the shovel deeper into the earth. When they took a break, Yonatan described the day when they would finish the trench and walk through it upright without anyone seeing them, and Yoel talked about how the bums could sleep there on winter nights. But toward the end of the day the winds kicked up and they felt their skin peeling away until all that was left were bones, and when they could no longer bear the stinging, they fled from the gusts that chased them down and slapped their bodies.
“Are you listening?” the boy said loudly, his hand now drumming on the scratched desk. Another boy let out a snort of laughter. Yonatan looked down at his black Air Jordans and his eyes narrowed into two thin hexagons—they used to make fun of him for having eyes like Optimus Prime’s. His brother had sent him the sneakers last week, after a few girls had made fun of his old ones, a brand no one had ever heard of. When he’d gone home that day, according to his mother, he’d “raged and terrorized them” until they said Shaul would buy him a pair of Air Jordans in New York.
He’d learned the method from Shaul. On his brother’s annual visits, Yonatan always insisted on dragging his mattress into Shaul’s room, and for those two weeks he waited impatiently from the moment he woke up for the hours to go by and darken the sky so he could lie next to his brother, stifling every yawn and worrying about Shaul’s, because at night the room was engulfed in a mysterious grandeur from faraway lands. His brother recounted episodes of Columbo and let him solve the mysteries, and invented characters with strange super-powers, like Clarisse Deph, who could touch a person’s chest and know when they were going to die.
But most of all he looked forward to hearing stories about their family before he was born. For example, about how one day, around 1972, Shaul was walking on Jaffa Street with their mother, and they stopped to look at fur coats and wool scarves draped on tall, beautiful women whom he did not immediately recognize as mannequins, in the display window of an upscale shop called Epstein & Feldheim. Their mother confidently strides into the store, where men in light striped suits start dancing around her, scurrying back and forth to show her dresses, skirts and belts, singing her praises is if she were not standing right there. “So elegant, the lady!” one enthuses. “Just stepped out of the opera house in Vienna!” his bespectacled, sharp-chinned colleague squawks. A third claps his hands and asks where her parents were born. “Guess,” she replies with a tentative smile.
“Vienna? Berlin? Hamburg?” they call out. “Please, don’t say you’re from Warsaw.” She informs them her parents were born in Israel and does not say another word. Shaul, who was about nine at the time, knew that his grandfather Albert was born in Aden, Yemen. Sometimes Shaul’s parents took him to the old neighborhood of Nachalat Shiva, where Grandpa Albert would sit with his elderly mother, who knew roughly twenty words in Hebrew and whose friends knew her by the Arabic moniker Um Aziz. They would wax nostalgic with her in Arabic about Aden (translating for Shaul every so often), comparing it with miserable Jerusalem, which Albert viewed as a paradise for talentless provincial crooks, and that was why he’d left his wife and moved to Haifa.
The salesclerk with glasses turns to Shaul. “Do you know how many times we’ve begged your mother to let us photograph her in a dress and put the picture up in our display window? We’ve promised to give her anything her heart desires from the shop in return.”
Their mother laughs and waves her hand dismissively, and tells them to stop sweet-talking her. But her face glows and she twirls around on her tiptoes, holding her dress, and the clerks applaud, put their hands over their hearts and swear they will call the photographer right then and there. She curtsies graciously.
“Did she end up getting the pictures taken?” he asked Shaul when they woke up the next morning.
“The pictures?” Shaul repeated.
“For that clothing store,” he said, and it occurred to him that Shaul had made up the story.
“How should I know?” Shaul said. “Mom, getting her picture taken? You know her, don’t you?”
Another day his brother told him that as a young boy his parents hadn’t given him money for the snack bar near his high school, and every recess when his friends crowded around to buy food, he would find an excuse to disappear, and the kids made fun of him for being cheap. Then his brother said something that was engraved on Yonatan’s memory: “All Mom and Dad understand is force.”
His arms itched. He touched them, followed the scratch lines, then focused on his adversaries. They were looking at the ceiling and at the window while stealing glances at him, and he realized he had to keep his gaze steady; anything he did, even if it was only to touch his hair, might be interpreted as weakness. He accepted their proposal without complaining and even suggested that he not come to class at all.
“Don’t you want to hear what goes on?” one of them asked.
“I do, but I’m afraid I’ll get bored,” he replied scornfully.
They were surprised by his tone but ignored it. They seemed to have been expecting him to get angry. They insisted that he come to class and leave before the discussion started. At first he was afraid they wanted to humiliate him, but they kept dancing around him to make sure they weren’t doing him an injustice. He realized that even their cruelest deeds, like the way they’d bullied Vered Saragusti until she’d left the school, came packaged in a language of justice and morality, castigating the victim so that he would mend his ways. That was something they’d learned from their parents, some of whom hung around the schoolyard, the shopping center and the park, scolding everyone they came across, reminding people about the values of the decent world—the one that no longer existed—“which are being crushed and pulverized under the boot of the corrupt times we live in,” as Yoav Gordon’s father once said. They really did believe that one day the masses would understand that only a life lived by these values could be considered worthy.
In fourth period, Tomer Shoshani and Yoav Gordon stood before the class. Yonatan watched his enemies preparing for their big moment, exchanging looks and notes. Clutching his notebook, now full of sketches of the trench, he stood up to leave the classroom. The homeroom teacher realized that a plan had been hatched behind her back, and she stopped him by the door. “Such chutzpah,” she said, with a hint of a smile. “Sixth grade children do not get to decide what will happen in class.” As he stood there with all his classmates watching him, he imagined thousands of fingers scratching his skin, and wondered if they could see the cuts on his legs and arms through his clothes.
He frantically scanned the room until he found Yoel, who sat in the fourth row next to the window. Yoel had turned his back on the class, propped his notebook against the windowpane and was scribbling in it. Yonatan squinted, but Yoel moved the notebook and shielded it with his body, and he stayed in that peculiar position while his right hand moved his pen over the page. It was clear that Yoel knew Yonatan’s eyes were stabbing him from behind, and that if Yonatan were to confront him about his behavior later, he would deny it. He was more skilled at playing innocent than anyone Yonatan knew, sticking to his lies even when they were exposed. He never admitted that he’d lied, just as he never admitted defeat or that he’d wronged another kid, and that might have been the biggest difference between them. Yoel did not walk the streets of Beit HaKerem like a sinner; he genuinely believed he was a virtuous boy who deserved to be liked.
Yonatan remembered that yesterday, when they’d been digging in the wadi, Yoel had asked if he believed their revenge would change things. “That’s not the point,” Yonatan had answered. “If we don’t finish the trench before the fight we’ll get beaten up at Rivka’s kindergarten, right? Without the trench we won’t survive this winter.” But Yoel insisted that he answer the question. Yonatan became worried: had Yoel told anyone about the trench? His big brother Noam? Yoel swore he hadn’t.
He told Yoel about a picture their chess club teacher had shown them once, something that happened after a duel between a famous Russian poet and some other deadbeat. The picture showed two people holding this guy back while they watched a horse-drawn carriage cart the poet’s body away, covered with a fur, down a snowy track. The chess teacher explained the picture to them by discussing a Japanese tenet of warfare, which they copied into their notebooks. The avenger, according to this tenet, does not celebrate and is not happy, perhaps even the opposite: he’s just doing his duty. “And that’s the story here: we’re going to teach the tower kids a lesson, so that you never go home to your parents covered with blood and thistles again, and we will have done our duty.”
“That teacher you worship got kicked out because he turned up at the chess club wearing a woman’s fur coat, screaming about how no one in this neighborhood was afraid of death, only of crazy people, and said he was going to burn down the clubhouse,” Yoel remarked.
“Okay, whatever, but that happened later.”
Every time he mentioned the chess teacher, Yoel’s face clouded over. Most people—kids and grown-ups alike—were more fond of Yoel than of Yonatan, but the chess teacher liked him and was often belligerent with Yoel, who did not admit that he was hurt by this, and insisted there was nothing unusual about the way the teacher treated him. It was as if he couldn’t acknowledge the existence of someone who disliked everything about him, and it wasn’t until their last club meeting that Yoel had an outburst. The teacher reached for Yoel’s knight and told him for the umpteenth time that there was nothing consistent in the way he played, nothing authentic, that his game wasn’t improving because he kept imitating different players.
Yoel grabbed his hand. “Get your filthy hands off that,” he hissed. He stood up, put on his coat and wool hat, stared straight at the teacher and left the room.
Yonatan heard a shout, the turmoil in the class surged, and he realized the teacher had told him to go back to his seat. She explained that she wasn’t proposing they cancel the discussion, just that they allow him to make his case. How could she not realize that was far worse? He sat down at his desk in the back row and listened to the boys; none of the girls participated. One after the other, they put their hands up and proceeded to complain about his behavior.
One said he’d called him a “fucking Dutchman” (he interrupted to point out that it was actually “Dutch trash”), another said he’d threatened to stick thumbtacks in his eyes. He’d kicked a ball in someone’s face on purpose (“But it’s impossible to aim”—that was his second interruption), and they all said he was always cursing and that the curses were contagious: no one used to say “son of a thousand whores” until he started to, and even the counselors in the youth movement said there was a difference between a whore and a son of a thousand whores. And why, every time a kid kicked the ball over the goal, did he call him “You Arab”? The counselors were even more shocked by this, and said it was what happened to kids who dropped out of the youth movements, and besides, “Arab” wasn’t a bad word.
Later, out in the yard, when he walked past Yoel who was flying a paper airplane, he felt his muscles contract and the sweat drip down his face. He was afraid he would resent Yoel for the way he’d sat hunched over his notebook without looking up even once, and that he would be unable to suppress his anger at him. How had he ended up needing the trench more than Yoel did? Hadn’t this whole thing started because they’d rolled that whiner Yoel around in the wadi, in mud and thistles, until his whole face was covered with blood?
Yonatan walked away from Yoel, whose paper plane had crumpled, and headed to the school gate. His forehead and neck were still burning. His undershirt and pants were clinging to his skin. He walked to the park and sat down on the damp ground on the lower lawn. The earth was covered with leaves that had changed to dark brown, which he crumbled between his fingers. Green threads still wove their way through some of the leaves, and he felt them over and over again, struggling to understand why he felt so weak. Perhaps that flourishing remnant alluded to a departed era, as with their soccer matches, when even in the throes of a big win he was already mourning its passing. He dug among the branches until he found what he wanted. A few mothers were sitting on benches with their babies. He smiled and blew kisses, and wondered if he envied them.
A few minutes later he heard the voices. There were two of them, on the other side of the lawn. He stood up. They walked toward him, speaking too loudly and bursting into laughter every so often. Their carefree ease annoyed him less than the way they kept touching each other’s shoulders, reaching out to fake-strangle each other. During his flashes of honesty, when his contempt for the neighborhood kids could no longer disguise what he really wanted, he had to admit that he found them and their families enviable.
When they rounded the path they spotted him, and they all recognized their inevitable movement toward the same point. They fell silent, moved slightly away from each other, looked at him, at the stick he had found among the branches, at the mothers on the benches, at the sky above the park, which a flock of birds was cutting across. Even if they’d wanted to, they could not stop now. He moved closer to them, tapping the stick on the rough asphalt. One of them reached into his bag and rummaged around, and his face fell; the other zipped up his coat. Perhaps they were still trying to believe they’d run into him by chance, that they could walk past him and go their own way. They slowed down. He also measured his pace: no one wanted to be the first to reach the steps.
He stopped, they paused and scanned the park again, eyeing the mothers on the benches. Then they took off and sprinted to the steps, and he ran after them, whacking his stick on the path. The babies behind him started crying and the mothers cursed him. They ran down the path, he chased them, and when they had no choice but to turn and face him, he was already at their side. They looked taller than he’d expected but he was still bigger. “Watch out,” one of them said, “haven’t you had enough in class today?”
He moved the stick from one hand to the other. He felt encouraged by the distance that had opened up between the two boys—how easily he had dissolved their union. They dropped their backpacks to the ground. He swung the stick with his right hand, but as he did so they fell on him. “I told you to watch out!” the first one yelled, grabbing his wrist and digging his fingernails into his flesh. It was too late to swing again, but he still struggled to hold onto the stick while the other boy grabbed it, panting. The boy blinked, looked sideways, and Yonatan remembered that once, in the rain, this boy had offered to share his umbrella on the walk home.
He suddenly couldn’t understand how he’d even wanted to hit him with a stick. Sometimes his inability to un-remember things was maddening. It weakened him, the way even long-past days were never completely flushed out of his body but lay dormant until his memory shone a ray of warmth on them, like a laser, and they heated up again—not as warm as they once were, but enough to undermine the equations of the present so that he could not truly hate anyone he had once liked.
They might have sensed his nagging doubts. “Watch out!” the first one yelled, and the freckles on his face looked like blood cells from the illustrations in biology class. Yonatan was surprised by their lack of fear. They used to be afraid, but something had changed. Perhaps they’d grown stronger and taller when he wasn’t paying attention. The mothers by the benches shouted: “Stop it, you thugs!” and one of them started marching over to them. He was ashamed to feel relieved.
All three of them took off down the steps. They turned right, he turned left, and he breathed in the smell of burnt pine needles. He could see that one of the boys was clutching his waist, even though Yonatan hadn’t hit him, and the other hugged his shoulder. For a moment he wanted them to touch him too, with the same affection and concern, and was overcome by a desire to run after them and fall on them, to make the taste of defeat disappear. His fury had evaporated, and now he tried to fight off his sense of regret.
“Regret for real, or because you were scared?” Yoel would ask, if Yonatan ever talked to him again after the way he’d ignored him in class today.
On the way home the world turned yellow, the sights became blurry and muddied, and he could no longer gauge the distance between himself and the cars parked beside the road. He heard shouts, thunder, engines, and had no idea where the sounds were coming from. Near his building he saw two shadows moving in the wadi with that swift, self-assured movement that only those who knew all of the terrain’s secrets could pull off. He thought it was Yoel and Tali, but the idea was preposterous. Maybe it was the kids from the towers spying on them.
The phone rang as soon as he took off his coat. He knew it was his mother. How was your day? she’d ask, bothering him with questions to which she didn’t really want to know the answers. She couldn’t help him, and neither could Dad, and anyway she’d been in a good mood yesterday and he didn’t want to make her sad. He lit the kerosene heater with a match. He wasn’t allowed to touch it when he was home alone. In the middle of the heater there were five rectangles burning in purple-white, orange-pink, and pink-blue. The colors kept changing, and he liked to look at them until his eyes teared up. Through the glass balcony door he looked at the other side of the street, at Yoel’s window, but a bubble of yellow fog was hovering between them.
Something in the familiar order of things had come loose. He saw the living room without walls, high up in the sky and very cold—Shaul said the air outside an airplane was so cold that it would kill you in five minutes—and the wind propelled the living room into the yellow fog. He saw a street with two stripes of mud running all along it and nothing else, not even earth or asphalt, only translucent-blue tree trunks like the pillars of light you sometimes see after the rain, towering up from the ground to the sky. He’d always wanted to find out if you could touch something in them or if it was just a specter, a trick of the light like a rainbow in a cloud: you couldn’t believe anything until you touched it. People were suspended in mid-air above the street, and two ugly boys, their faces smeared with golden paint yet their pockmarks still visible, told everyone that there used to be a street there, with people and cars and kids and all of that. Yes, they swear there was once a street here.
——
The girls didn’t hate Yonatan and they didn’t mock him: they were simply oblivious to his existence. He wasn’t one of the good-looking and funny kids they danced around, or one of the well-mannered ones like Ran Horesh—who was known by some mothers, including Yonatan’s, as ‘the gentleman’—or even one of the weak smart-asses, whose witticisms they laughed at even as they pitied them.
To them he was just one of the regular kids, a strong, sweaty boy who yelled a lot. He believed that if they saw him playing soccer they’d think more highly of him, but they never did. Except that now, after the class discussion, the girls realized they’d made a mistake by positioning him on an uninteresting rung down the social ladder, because most of the boys loathed him, including the ones on his soccer team. The girls started trying to cheer him up, they said he was “a poor boy” and decided the whole episode was dumb, and that it was all because of their crazy teacher with the puffy red cheeks. But the girls from HaShomer HaTzair—who took their socialist youth movement’s values to heart and always had a bad word for the kids who guzzled hamburgers at MacDavid or soft-serve American-style ice-cream at Caravel or spat out gum on the floor—remained wary of him. As he and Yoel always said, “HaShomer HaTzair kids aren’t as dumb as the ones in the Scouts, but they’re believers, so actually they’re dumber.”
Perhaps that was why Alona Mishor stopped him in the hallway one day and invited him to her birthday party the following Friday evening at seven, and pinned her green eyes on him until he swore he would be there. He worshipped Alona, who was considered a wild girl with eccentric outfits (“her mother is a California-sixties type artist,” the other girls whispered, parroting their own mothers) that included baggy sweaters with rainbows and various Sanskrit symbols, faded jeans ripped at the knee like the girls downtown wore, and silver chains with big pendants shaped like shells or swords. A few of the parents had called Alona’s mother to ask that she “not wear the sword pendant, which might encourage violence.” Seven was considered late—birthdays were always held in the afternoons—yet not late enough to arouse suspicion. And there was some excitement among the girls, who whispered among themselves a lot and kept their distance from the boys; it was clear they were plotting something.
In recent days the girls had let Yonatan straggle after them on the way home from school. They walked in a gang, and when they got to the wide path between Beit HaKerem Street and HaHalutz Street, which was surrounded by trees and fences with signs warning against barking dogs and poisonous mushrooms, they used to take a red tape deck out of one of the backpacks and shriek along with the singers, laughing out loud, accusing each other of being out of tune, and mangling the English lyrics. They listened to Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and someone called Tiffany, whom they claimed girls in the United States were crazy about. Alona and her friend Michal, who meandered on the outskirts of the group, played “Time After Time” on their walkmans, and also listened to “Touch Me,” which many parents forbade their children to hear. When it wasn’t raining, they would stop in the middle of the path, try on each other’s sunglasses and big, gold-plated earrings, exchange barrettes and hair ties, shake their hair out and slather it with gel to make it stand up in a puffy mane. Alona was accused of being slutty because she’d stolen her mom’s red lipstick (the girls wiped it off her lips with the hem of her shirt), and Michal of being a whore because she dyed a strip of her blonde hair black. On that pathway, hidden from the world, they were different, as if they’d escaped the borders of Beit HaKerem and entered a vortex of uninhibited, screechy delight. As soon as they emerged back on HaHalutz Street, they looked just as they did in school. Watching them always raised his spirits. They projected a power that would one day disrupt the old order of the neighborhood; he had no doubt that it was already happening.
On the evening of the party he showered and combed his hair for a long time, then put on white pants and a mauve sweater that said ‘Oxford.’ The pants were too tight around his waist, but he didn’t have anything nicer. He didn’t like his face, especially not his bulging eyes. “You look wonderful,” said his mother, who was going dancing with Kaufman, as she sometimes did when his father was away. Kaufman, who until recently had worked at the communications office with Yonatan’s mother and had since got rich from various business dealings with Frenchmen, used to turn up at their house in a smart suit, bright tie, elegant wool coat and shiny boots with pointy toes. He once heard his mother say to a girlfriend: “He’s not like all those men who wear Israeli brands.” He had a silver wristwatch with three little inset watches, and he always used to say, “Name a place and I’ll tell you what time it is there.” Kaufman’s presence cheered Yonatan up. The apartment seemed to wake up and fill with glimmering lights when he was there, only to fold back into silent darkness when he left.
They drove off in Kaufman’s black car, which smelled of cigars and aftershave. It was raining lightly. The yellow dust lifted from the road and stuck to the stone walls, the fences, the curbs. He wanted to ask his mother if she could see it. Next to the Reich Hotel he saw Yoel walking up HaGuy Street, wearing his brother’s shiny jacket and a scarf Yonatan had never seen. The colored lights on the hotel balcony tinted his hair with red and blue sparks. Yoel was dragging his feet from side to side, perhaps wanting to prolong his walk to the party. They hadn’t talked since the class discussion. And Yoel, just as he’d expected, hadn’t apologized. Nor had he gone anywhere near their trench.
“Isn’t that Yoel?” his mother asked, and motioned for Kaufman to stop the car. They waited for Yonatan to get out—Yoel looked lonely out there, alone in the rain, rubbing his scarf against his cheeks—but he knew his own tendency to exaggerate the unhappiness of anyone he’d had a fight with, especially his mother and Yoel, so that he could justify his desire to please them. This time he decided that pleasing Yoel would only make it harder to truly forgive him, and it would pollute the arteries of their friendship. The two of them always had the capacity to make up stories and lie to everyone else, but at the foundation of their friendship stood a shared recognition—free of illusions and affectionate chatter—that no lie would ever come between them.
“It’s Tamir,” he said.
His mother turned around. “Who’s Tamir?”
“Just a kid I hate from the other class.”
Kaufman sped up and Yoel disappeared from their view.
“Did you have a fight again?” his mother asked.
“I told you, it wasn’t Yoel!” he snapped.
“If the boy says it’s not Yoel, it’s not Yoel,” Kaufman summed up cheerfully, though he’d never met Yoel.
The two of them fell silent and Kaufman turned on the radio and they listened to an upbeat song in Spanish. Kaufman hummed along, and every so often said something in a foreign language his mother said was French, and they laughed. They were getting on Yonatan’s nerves. It was clear from their exuberance that they were looking forward to their evening of dancing, while he was fearing the moment when he would knock on Alona’s door. Lots of bad things could happen at this party. Most of the boys probably wouldn’t understand how he had the gall to show up, and if he and Yoel hadn’t fought they’d probably be doing something else tonight.
He got out of the car next to the round synagogue, where in a year he would have his bar mitzvah, and took the narrow alley between Beit HaKerem and HaHalutz streets, where kids who were scared of getting bullied by the girls on the nearby path sometimes hid. It was, essentially, the nerds’ alley. And it was where he expected Yoel to appear. But maybe he’d missed him.
In Alona’s living room, which was smaller than he’d expected, balloons hung from the ceiling on colorful ribbons and there was a string of lights wrapped in bright cellophane. A birthday sign made by the girls said “For Beautiful Alona!” The walls were bare and there were lots of nails protruding from them. Alona and her mother must have removed all the pictures before the party. He thought that looked phony. Now that he saw where she lived, he realized that, after she walked down the path with the girls every day, she must go back up to her house through the nerds’ alley. Was she really such a rebel? Could it be that all the boys and girls wanted the same things, and the only difference was how they disguised their desire?
The boys sat in a semicircle on the right side of the living room, near the wall. Behind them were two white sculptures of hook-nosed eagles. Stripes of light from the colorful bulbs ran over the floor, across the boys’ bodies, and brushed the sculptures. He followed the movement of the light—he had always taken pleasure in the way light moved across a set course. A few girls huddled near the hallway, next to a large tape deck hooked up to speakers on either side of the room, and he heard “Touch Me” at a birthday party for the first time. Instead of the usual bowls of chips, pretzel sticks, and half pitas with humus, there were only bottles of Coke and Sprite, and something that looked like slightly set grape juice. He walked over to the boys.
“Where’s Yoel?” one of the girls asked teasingly.
“How should I know?” he said and thought he heard her laugh, but the loud music made him uncertain.
He sat down next to the boys. A few said hello indifferently, and some smiled. One of them looked at his clothes and asked, “You getting married today?” Two boys were discussing a picture that Maor Feldman’s grandfather had shown them when he came to talk to the class. It showed a prison yard in some European city after all the Jews had died. Everything suddenly looked so stupid. The huge tension that had engulfed him all day was gone, his body softened and his muscles felt light, and even his pants felt a little looser. His whole day had been a nightmare because of this party, but no one cared if he was here or not. Perhaps he was no longer capable of seeing things as they were.
Alona and a few other girls stood before the boys with secretive looks. Now he noticed they were all wearing black and white dresses or skirts, apart from Alona, who sported a blue dress with gold stars and long black socks, and Michal, who had on a pink dress that was shorter than the other girls’ and a thin gold chain around her neck. Her eyes looked odd, slanted. Most of the girls wore long thin socks in various colors and black shoes, but Hila had on boots. They all had different hairstyles than they wore to school, and then he realized: they looked like they did on the pathway.
One of the girls turned the lights off, and Alona, who was holding a white candle, said, “Today we’re going to do something different. Today we’re dancing.” A song that he didn’t know came on, and everyone froze: the girls in their fancy dresses and the boys in jeans or faded corduroys or sweatpants, with the same shirts they wore to school, and muddy sneakers. He was overcome by an inexplicable desire to soak up the vitality radiating from the girls and their excitement about a new era approaching; perhaps he even longed to be a girl like them. For a while his mind suspended this newly elucidated yearning, which left a shadow inside him, faded evidence of an idea he was already ashamed of. Then the boys started shouting and whistling, and he shouted too, and a couple of them got up, and danced together in the living room, crashing into the group of girls over and over again.
The commotion soon died down. The girls stood in the middle of the room ignoring the boys, whose jollity was gone. They blinked a lot, touched their faces, ran their fingers through their hair, and looked miserable. He wondered if he looked like that, because he was actually feeling better. It was a simple equation: when they grew weaker, he grew stronger. He noticed Ran Horesh, in a black button-down shirt and white pants, standing next to Alona’s mom, who was smoking a cigarette and holding a bottle of wine. They whispered and laughed, and the girls grew more excited. They pushed each other toward Ran, and finally Alona broke away from the group and stood close to him. Yonatan noticed that his clammy hands were clutched together, and he knew that of all the girls, she was the one he’d feared might break away.
Ran Horesh ceremoniously took Alona’s hand, while her mother winked at them and blew smoke in their faces, and they walked back toward the girls, who scattered in every direction. Their linked hands swung up and down, and from Alona’s look, which had changed from festive to surprised, it was clear that she had forgotten that when Ran Horesh walked he actually bounced slightly. All the boys who said they liked him—because being fond of someone like Ran meant that you were virtuous—secretly hated him, and often mimicked his billy-goat gait. Finally they stopped. Alona put her hands on Ran’s shoulders, and he reached his out to her waist, though at times they seemed to be holding onto thin air. The boys stared at the two of them in gloomy silence, as if seeing a landscape they’d never looked at before. He looked at the wall clock: it was eight-thirty. He’d been here for more than an hour, and Yoel still hadn’t turned up.
When Hila came over to him there were five couples dancing, and the rest were busy negotiating. Messengers ran back and forth between the girls and the boys, made a match, suggested another, earned contempt or amazement or excitement or silence, and went back to update their group. There had to be a certain logic behind every new couple: they both had a dog, or a library card, or an annoying big brother.
He got up and walked after Hila. They passed Alona and Ran Horesh, who giggled with their bodies pressed together. Ran’s hands curved around Alona’s waist. A red bubble of light isolated them from the other couples, and to him they seemed sublime. Hila stopped too close to Ran and Alona, and Yonatan stood opposite her. She suddenly looked pretty. When she placed his hands on her waist, his heart pounded and his legs shook, and he prayed the palms of his hands were not burning her skin through her dress. They danced at some distance from one another, but every so often she pressed up against him, perhaps by accident, and his stomach rubbed against her chest. The touch of her fingers on his shoulder was delicate and slightly cool, and he breathed in the smell of her curly hair, which reminded him of sweet lemon, if there is such a thing. Then her hand touched his cheek and tilted his head toward her, and she asked if he was embarrassed. He said he wasn’t, but she declared: “You are embarrassed.” He admitted that he was, a little, and found he couldn’t look into her eyes. “But you’re not a bad dancer,” she commented.
Feeling buoyed, he told her that his mother and Kaufman were dancing at the Moriah Hotel, and maybe they would dance there one day. She looked around at the other dancers and asked who Kaufman was—his mother’s secret boyfriend? Hila always spoke succinctly, and her questions were assertions: if you agreed with them, it was a sign you’d understood, and if you didn’t, perhaps you’d understand one day. He said Kaufman was his parents’ friend. She asked if it didn’t bother his dad, and he said of course it didn’t, Kaufman was his dad’s friend. She asked if his parents danced at Moriah Hotel together too, and he said no, and she laughed and said it was cute the way he didn’t understand anything. He wanted to tell her things: that the warmth of her body was invading his body and now both of their warmths were merging inside him. That he was afraid the next few days would swallow up this night and he didn’t know how to ensure that something of all this would still be there tomorrow. But every sentence he thought of saying sounded more excitable and exaggerated than the last. Whenever he shared a moment of intimacy with someone, he tended to express too much affection and turn them off, so he kept quiet.
Hila asked if his head was spinning. He said, “Vertigo,” and asked if she’d seen the film. “What film?” she asked, and he explained that it was by a director called Hitchcock, who his father said was the only genius other than some Russian dictator, and she said, “Great,” with a lack of interest, and complained that her head was spinning because Alona’s mom had let them sip wine.
“Really?” he asked and wondered if she was hinting that she’d rather stop dancing.
“Have you ever had wine?” she asked.
“Of course,” he lied, and said that at home they drank lots of wine from some region in France.
She seemed satisfied by his answer: “Then you’re not so boring,” she said.
He rummaged through his memory, desperate to recall a time when something inside him had burned for Hila—this couldn’t all be happening only now.
Sometimes he theorized that there were a number of different children inside him, each with different qualities: some were restrained and polite, some were cheerful and charming and universally liked, some genuinely liked being lonely. Under certain circumstances, any of these kids could steal his body. Perhaps it was no coincidence that this moment seemed too dreamy, and it was simply happening to one of the children inside him, who was slightly him yet different. If this was how things might be from now on, he would gladly give that child his body.
Hila shut her eyes and her face looked serene, and he realized deep down that anything she did would seem magical to him. For a moment he panicked that he was really disappearing, so he commanded his mind to conjure up pictures from his life: Yoel and him waiting in his room for evening to fall, then lying on his bed rearranging the map of Beit HaKerem that was projected on the ceiling by streetlights and headlights: “Beit HaKerem of the Night,” they called it, and they would whisk away entire streets and make all their residents vanish; walking with Mom and Dad at night with the Old City walls towering above, the wind blowing away their umbrella and Mom’s hat, her hair flying as they ran to the car, and his face burning in the wind but he doesn’t want it to stop because his parents look young and strong; his big brother disappearing up the stairs to the departure lounge at the airport again, and the last mornings of summer, always in shades of concrete, crashing down on him when he wakes up at 6 a.m. in an empty room facing the bed where his brother had slept for two weeks, now piled with clothes, new sneakers, monopoly and chess boards. But all the pictures blurred, like crumbling postcards of the trivial things that had preoccupied him before this storm surged in his body.
Later, shortly before midnight, in Alona’s dark bedroom, Hila sat on the bed and he stood facing her, looking at the floor, which was piled with photographs and pictures in black frames. In the drawing at the edge of the pile he saw a row of little children in red uniforms and tall pointy blue hats, and they knelt on the grass aiming rifles at a woman whose black hair hid her face. Her arms hugged the tree trunks around her, and only by straining his eyes did he realize that the tree leaves were made of her hair. He rubbed his arms. He was cold, mostly in his chest, and he couldn’t remember where he’d left his coat.
Hila said maybe they could be boyfriend and girlfriend. He asked why. She replied that she liked Ran Horesh and he liked Alona—he was about to deny it, but he realized from her expression that there was no point, and for a moment he felt close to her, because she’d taken the trouble to find out his secrets and made sure he knew that his lies would do no good—but Alona and Ran were dancing together, so they couldn’t get what they really wanted, but that didn’t mean they had to suffer and be jealous: they could be a couple, at least for now.
He stammered a little when he asked if they weren’t supposed to like each other, and Hila smiled and said he was a romantic boy, even though he didn’t look it, and that maybe his parents should buy him a button-down shirt. She thought they could be a couple for now and sometimes do things together: after all, they both liked movies. Her businesslike tone, as if she’d already planned everything out, angered him. Perhaps girls like her didn’t understand what it was like to have an unshakable passion for something and be unable to relinquish it, even though you know it will never happen, and for your imagination to keep recreating it in minute detail. He pictured himself pushing away the other children inside him and returning fully to his own body.
She asked if he was afraid of Yoel’s reaction and gave him a piercing look, as if expecting him to tell her the truth. The idea amused him: one kid meets another, and within two hours demands the truth. She asked what was the real reason he and Yoel spent so much time together in that wadi. He looked at the crumbs of chocolate on the straps of her white dress and said that he and Yoel lived in the same world. She straightened up on the bed and looked thoughtful, as if she were trying to understand, then said that everyone lived in the same world. He rubbed his arms and knees, trying in vain to warm them. How could it be that only five minutes ago he’d still believed his life was just background noise for this evening?
“You are afraid!” she said, and before he could respond she added there was no reason for him to be scared, and how come Yoel hadn’t come to the party? He said he didn’t know, he’d seen him walking up HaGuy Street but he must have changed his mind. She laughed and said Yoel had turned around and gone back down HaGuy, because a few days ago he’d asked Tali, their neighbor, to be his girlfriend—it was a secret, but all the girls knew. Yoel must have told his parents and everyone else that he’d be at the party, but in fact he was watching a movie at Tali’s. Hila asked if he hadn’t suspected anything—she seemed disappointed that he was so surprised. He touched the cold fabric of a pile of clothes on Alona’s desk and said it couldn’t be true.