It was Saturday, the day after Alona’s party, and they turned up at the school gates during a soccer match. For an instant nothing else moved, not even the birds on the lampposts, while everyone stared at them. The rays of sun that had emerged after a few gray days illuminated their muscular arms, the black stubble on their faces, their friendship bracelets, and the shiny rifles slung over their shoulders on colorful straps. They seemed to be bathed in a golden halo of light, while the rest of the schoolyard was drowned in the dreariness of a Beit HaKerem winter. Despite the cold weather, they wore surfer shorts with white tank tops and sneakers. One of them was barefoot. And suddenly their ebullience ran through the yard like an electrical current and rattled the older boys, who crowded around them, touching their arms, shoving each other aside to stroke their rifles.
Yonatan saw Shimon, David Tzivony and Bentz slapping the soldiers’ backs, competing for their attention. He’d never imagined that the boys who lorded over the block could look so tiny.
Then they stood in the middle of the yard and everyone kicked the balls to them. They launched a couple of balls over the gate toward the school windows, but lost interest and sat down on the benches smoking cigarettes. Some younger kids hung on the fence outside looking in at them.
Everyone whispered that they were home on leave after a couple of months in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were handling the Arabs who’d been rioting for a long time. They didn’t talk about it, wouldn’t answer any questions, and said they weren’t allowed to say anything. But the kids spread the facts around in whispers: they were serving in a unit full of tough guys who would stop at nothing; even the other soldiers were afraid to talk to them; they beat the crap out of the Arabs with batons and chains, they cracked their asses open with rifle stocks; it was said they’d grabbed a few kids in Gaza who’d thrown stones and made them run naked in the fields and hit their legs with chains and forced them to eat dirt; they could pass right through Molotov cocktail fire because they had special fireproof uniforms; at nights they painted their faces with charcoal and no one could see them. They were crazy and everyone knew it, they got drunk at the clubs in Tel Aviv and slept with girls in cars and on the beach and sometimes videotaped everything, and whenever an Arab caught sight of them he’d run and hide in a sewage trench or in a baby stroller.
Fat Gideon, who called himself a Zionist punk and liked bands no one else had heard of, like Killing Joke, and was always quoting things famous people had said when they were young, said that in fifty years they’d appreciate what great things these soldiers had done, and he asked how he could join their unit. David Tzivony said Gideon was too fat, and everyone laughed but the laughter was swallowed up in a whistle of wind that shook the treetops, and suddenly there were menacing faces everywhere, with rows of big teeth, and each kid’s smile was twisted in a different way as the whole yard laughed. Gideon turned red and looked around. Finally, he picked up a large stone and threw it on the asphalt between David Tzivony’s feet.
Tzivony dodged the stone and almost fell. Everyone clapped and yelled: “Don’t let him get away with it!” He had no choice but to attack Fat Gideon, who stood there staring at the stone and then at Tzivony as if he didn’t remember throwing it. They fell to the ground and punched each other, while the four soldiers sat on the benches with their legs splayed, blowing rings of smoke. When Gideon and Tzivony stood up—their shirts were ripped, their faces and necks were zigzagged with bloody scratches, and Tzivony’s cheek was swollen like a balloon—and Tzivony reached for the stone, the barefoot soldier stood up. “No stones!” he shouted. Tzivony didn’t stop, and the barefoot one yelled, “I said no stones!” The yard went silent again.
There was an air of recklessness in the crowded yard, and Yonatan wanted to get out, but he was afraid to draw attention to himself, and decided it was better to stay put and do nothing. It was only the night before, at Alona’s party, that he’d felt mature because he’d slow-danced with Hila and she pressed up against him and looked into his eyes. But in fact he didn’t understand anything, because the real grown-ups dealt with very different things that were occurring in places he’d never seen, far beyond the neighborhood’s borders—downtown, and in Jenin or Gaza, and in all those nightclubs.
Suddenly the barefoot soldier glared at Yonatan as if he’d guessed what was going through his mind, and barked: “Kid, get over here.” Yonatan stared back, convinced he was imagining things—the nightmare couldn’t be coming true so quickly. But the dull pain in his stomach and the tremor in his body slammed him back to the asphalt. He grasped at the hope that perhaps he’d misunderstood and the soldier was talking to another kid standing behind him. But then he realized: he was the only boy left in the yard.
“I said get over here,” he repeated, and Yonatan took a few small steps toward him, with his head bowed and his eyes scrutinizing the little stones and leaves and the white stripes bordering the soccer court. He stood before the barefoot soldier, who held his burly arm up to his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and his forearm muscles ballooned into a mountain. Yonatan could smell the sharp sweat from the soldier’s armpits, and the damp circles on his white tank top widened. He asked Yonatan who his brother was, but he didn’t immediately respond, fearing the answer might get him into trouble. Finally he said, “Shaul,” and the barefoot guy mussed his hair with a hand that smelled of cigarettes and hair gel, and gave him an affectionate slap on the cheek. “Say hi to him from Ofer Alon. I used to play ping pong with him and Gavriel Mansour in your basement.”
“I will.”
“Bullet with my name on it,” Ofer added, in English, “tell him that. We were crazy about that song.” And his thick lips curled into a smile though it left no other mark on his expressionless face. “We used to make the whole basement shake until your neighbor, the religious guy—what’s his name?”
“Ratzon.”
“Yeah, Ratzon, until he lost his shit. Now all the Arabs in Gaza know that song.”
A strange warmth prickled Yonatan’s stomach and climbed all the way up to his forehead. He considered a series of brazen answers—in moments of elation he tended to lose his inhibition—but he pressed his tongue against his lower teeth and forced himself to be silent.
The soldier put his rifle up to Yonatan’s face and the strong smell—he wasn’t sure how to describe it; a sort of acidic metal—filled his nostrils. He held his breath and moved his face away slightly and ran both hands over the smooth and incredibly shiny handle, the only part of the rifle that had no holes or apertures that his fingers might get stuck in. The soldier laughed: “Pull the trigger, don’t be scared.” He was afraid his fingers would get cut on something; he’d always avoided the heavy machinery in shop class, unable to understand how it worked and convinced he would lacerate himself. But he put his finger on the trigger. The soldier put his large hand on Yonatan’s and pressed their fingers together, and his dry, rough skin enfolded Yonatan’s hand and it felt as if a dry leaf was touching him. To his surprise it was a pleasant feeling, igniting a warming recognition of something he dimly recalled from his distant past: that he was protected, perhaps even invincible. The soldier loosened his grip and moved his hand away, and all at once Yonatan was on the cold, wet asphalt alone. Having no choice, he pressed the trigger but it didn’t budge, and he quickly moved his hand off the rifle. The soldier gave him a surprised look and swung the rifle around his back. “If anyone messes with you, just let me know,” he said as he walked away.
“Thank you very much,” Yonatan said, sounding too obsequious. He turned back to look at Tzivony, Shimon and Bentz, who were staring at him with astonishment mixed with fear. The spectacle had clearly been so peculiar that they still hadn’t fully grasped the implied threat. He felt dizzied by his newfound power: he had only to point in their direction, and they’d be sorry for all the times they’d bullied him and Yoel. Over summer vacation they’d caught him and Yoel playing poker in the wadi and threatened to tell their parents, and in return they’d demanded to know whether they jerked off to girls from class, their friends’ sisters, Scouts counselors, girls from Playboy, or imaginary girls. Every time he and Yoel refused to answer or gave a feeble reply, they kicked them and forced them to write “Bentz & Tzivony & King Shimon” on the hot sand with their fingers, and they kept wiping the letters away with their shoes and making them write it again. If they hadn’t been in a hurry to get home to call into the pop music quiz show on the radio, there was no telling how it might have ended. But he wasn’t stupid enough to talk now; it was clear that the threat hanging in the air was more powerful than anything the barefoot soldier might really do to them, and that they would appreciate his not taking advantage of the moment to turn them in. Besides, that soldier seemed like too heavy a punishment. And even without all these considerations—Yonatan was no snitch.
It also dawned on him that they could be useful.
He caught up with them in Esrim Park. They were standing by the benches at the edge of the park, lighting matches and flicking them. Whenever smoke started curling up from the lawn or the dry leaves, one of them would get up and smother it with his shoe. They talked about the soldiers and the secret devices they supposedly used, each trying to come up with something more exciting than the other: Tzivony described gloves that delivered electric shocks to any Arab they touched; Shimon hyped the special goggles that you could look through in the middle of the night in pitch-black Gaza and see sunny blue skies like on the beach in Eilat; Bentz yelled that there was no such thing—maybe Shimon had read about them in Penthouse. They seemed agitated and kept shoving each other, kicking trash cans, accusing each other of lying, but they eventually agreed on two things: paratroopers had much better rifles than the barefoot soldier and his friends, and fuck if the story about the fireproof uniforms was true. Everyone was always exaggerating in the schoolyard, they grumbled. There was a brief silence, and they fell into the ominous boredom that lurked at the end of every bout of high spirits and drove them to keep the crowd happy by finding a new victim; that was when people like him had to make themselves scarce.
Shimon turned to David Tzivony and said something about the stone he hadn’t picked up because the barefoot soldier had told him not to. “You were shaking,” he jeered. “I could smell your wet boxers from thirty fucking feet away.” Bentz backed him up: “And then Gideon beat the crap out of you and walked away without a scratch. Look at you—it’s like half your face got thrown in a frying pan.”
Tzivony, who did have an enormous blue-pink bruise puffing up on his cheek, hissed, “That fat fuck is gonna pay for that. But what was I supposed to do? Step up to Ofer Alon? Do you know what kind of things they do over there? The guy’s a murderer.”
They sat down on a bench and he watched them through the trees. Shimon and Bentz drummed on a broken stool and sang softly: “Honey, spread your legs, for seven oppressed men, seven Palestinians. Twenty years of occupation—we’re done waiting! Here we come with our hard-ons, to free Palestine!”
“Enough, you fucking Arabs, you’re making me crazy with that song,” Tzivony snapped.
Yonatan knew all the songs from the underground musical, Mami, because Noam had played it for Yoel, after making him swear he wouldn’t tell their parents; he said the clubs downtown played it every night.
He’d already changed his mind and decided to leave and talk to them another time, but he was flooded with pictures from Alona’s party and the hours following it. He’d stood there like an idiot while Hila told him things about Yoel and Tali that all the girls already knew, and then he’d hurried home but instead of going upstairs he’d walked back and forth between Yoel’s and Tali’s apartment buildings, which were both opposite his own, secretly hoping to catch Yoel coming home from some other place, which would mean the whole story was a lie, just a trick Hila and the other girls had played on him. When he gave up and walked into his building, he looked back, and for the first time in his life the street was divided up differently: no longer their two buildings at the edge against all the others up the street, but Yoel and Tali’s on one side, versus his on the other.
In the morning he walked to the wadi and loitered near the trench, waiting for Yoel or even Tali to come down, because he had no doubt that they were watching him from their windows. But there was no sign of them. Then he had an even worse thought: they weren’t here, they’d gone for a walk together in some park in town, or worse—to one of his and Yoel’s places, like the indoor pool at the Ramada Hotel. All day long he tortured himself with doubts, seeking evidence to verify or disprove the story: they were together or perhaps apart, in his home or perhaps hers, where he’d never been but he imagined it bursting with paintings and bookshelves, with brightly lit rooms.
He made up his mind: he had to do it. He walked straight up to Tzivony, Bentz and Shimon. It was a dangerous maneuver, but it was his only chance to restore things to their previous state, to reunite with Yoel and get rid of Tali.
They weren’t surprised to see him, probably still picturing him with the barefoot soldier. “Look, it’s Ofer Alon’s new buddy,” Shimon jabbed. Bentz flashed a crafty smile and whistled an old folk song, and when David Tzivony looked at him there were blood vessels visible in the whites of his eyes. Tzivony frightened him. He knew they couldn’t touch him now, and they knew it too, but in a couple of months things would be back to normal: in their world, the last thing that happened was all that matters.
“Remember we arranged a fight with the kids from the towers because they beat up Yoel?” he said, talking quickly before he could change his mind. He smelled burned leaves, fresh grass. Shimon flicked a lit cigarette a few feet over Yonatan’s head. He didn’t duck, didn’t even flinch. That surprised them.
“We did?” Shimon asked, and he did not seem to be teasing; he really didn’t remember.
Yoel had accused Yonatan of secretly liking Shimon, like everyone did, and said he failed to understand that this was exactly what made him the most dangerous of the three. Yoel was immune to feeling any affection for their enemies, intent on their total downfall. Yonatan would have preferred to be like him.
“We agreed that me and Yoel would fight them,” Yonatan said, “in the sandbox at Rivka’s kindergarten.”
“You must be kidding,” Bentz said. “You think we have time for your games? We never talked about that.”
“Don’t you remember?” he insisted. “It was in our basement, we talked about it, you said you’d arrange a fight, and then Tali and her friend came.”
There was a silence. Shimon squinted furiously at the sky, Tzivony trampled more dry leaves under his shoes, and Bentz arched his neck and spat at the trees behind him.
“We told you not to talk about that, didn’t we?” Shimon said finally with a twinkle. His grin was captivating—his lips, eyes, dimples.
“I haven’t said anything to anyone yet,” Yonatan declared, “I’m talking about taking revenge on the towers. They beat up Yoel, ten against one, and you said that wasn’t allowed. You said there was still justice in the world.”
“There isn’t,” Tzivony muttered.
“But you said there was,” he insisted.
“We asked if there was,” Shimon corrected him.
From the spark in Shimon’s eyes it was obvious that he remembered everything now. “Yes,” he murmured ponderously, and combed his fingers through his crest of hair. “We talked to them about it afterwards, with the towers, but they said they didn’t know who you guys were or something like that. They had no idea what we were talking about.”
“They’re fucking with you, they know exactly who we are,” Yonatan argued. “They must have been scared of you so they lied. They grabbed Yoel in the wadi and rolled him around in mud and thorns, and we said we’d get back at them, and nothing’s happened yet.”
“Don’t get so worked up,” Shimon said, his voice softening.
“Why don’t you talk to your friend Ofer Alon about it?” Tzivony grumbled.
Shimon gave Tzivony a menacing look, and Tzivony tried to laugh it off, but his cheek swelled and turned darker.
It was almost evening, and Yonatan didn’t want to be in the park with them in the dark. “I can talk to him about it,” he lied. “He wants Shaul’s phone number in New York, he might go work for him after he gets out of the army.”
“But he’s only just started his service—”
“Well, the guy’s a visionary, he’s planning ahead,” Bentz interrupted. “But what the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing, I know.” He was suddenly overcome with weakness. He felt hot and cold.
“How come you’re suddenly into the fight?” Shimon seemed sincerely interested, but people were always in the fog when it came to Yonatan, whose expressions were often unrelated to the things he did. “You acted like a little girl that day in the basement. Even Yoel wasn’t as scared as you. You put your finger on a rifle and now you’re a man?”
“That doesn’t matter either,” Bentz snapped. “The kid wants a fight with the towers, we’ll get him a fight with the towers!”
Shimon nodded.
“Just don’t come crying to me if they slaughter you,” Tzivony added, lighting a match and staring at it until he seemed to be holding the flame between his fingers. He looked completely deranged.
“You were right,” Yonatan said, reciting the answer he’d prepared in the schoolyard, although it was probably unnecessary now. “We have to settle the score with those fuckers, and there isn’t much time left.”
——
When his fever climbed, his mother took him in a taxi to see Dr. Tzitzianov, who treated all the neighborhood children. Dr. Tzitzianov’s face was centered around the most enormous, lumpy nose he’d ever seen, and she always pinched his cheeks and whispered that he should take care of his mother, whose blood sediment levels were too high and who wasn’t as strong as she used to be. Every time he walked into her office, he was struck by his memory of that day in fourth grade, when his parents had rushed him to the clinic early in the morning and she’d listened to his lungs and pronounced: “Get to the hospital immediately, the boy has pneumonia.”
His parents looked at each other and their faces turned pale as quickly as his had reddened. His father, half asserting, half asking, said, “But everything will be all right?” in the loud, throaty voice he sometimes used for political arguments at Yonatan’s grandmother’s house on Friday nights, and he looked like a scolded child. The doctor said everything would be fine, he was a strong boy, but they had to take him immediately. She waved them out of the office, leaving Yonatan to secretly celebrate when he realized he wouldn’t have to go to school for several days.
He listened to his father panting as he carried him down the steps, and saw beads of sweat on his forehead. He put his cheek closer to his father’s face and it stuck to his skin, and he became aware of something he usually did not notice: his father was not as young as most of his friends’ fathers, and he was obviously feeling guilty about not bringing him to the doctor sooner, so he wasn’t going to complain. But he had trouble tolerating his father’s weakness and insisted on walking to the car. His mother and father supported him on either side, and he looked around and amused himself with the idea that he was seeing the skies of Beit HaKerem—always glimpsed through the green manes of trees—for the very last time.
His father honked and cursed and swerved from one lane to the next, and his mother said they should have called an ambulance. She reminded his father of something David Ben Gurion said to his driver: “Drive slowly, I’m in a hurry.”
“May he be buried a thousand times,” his father hissed, “that midget bastard.”
They looked pathetic and funny, and Yonatan wanted to reassure them, because their tone frightened him more than his own frail body. Now that the mask of parenthood had fallen from their faces, he realized he preferred it to this startled expression. “Stop going crazy,” he considered scolding them, “you’re scaring me.” Their extreme concern surprised him, and he was intoxicated by the recognition that he was loved after all, and that he was the center of their being. He considered repaying them in kind but was too tired.
He spent two weeks in hospital, with a needle in his arm attached to “a balloon where the water keeps running out.” His father slept in his room, and bought him chocolates and cookies and told him stories about his childhood adventures, but when Yonatan told his father about his own exploits, his eyes roamed to the newspapers and books and the nurses’ shoes as they patrolled the hallway, and so he condensed his stories so much that they lost all their sting. He resented his father for this, but decided they could get along fine if he listened to his father and took an interest in his stories, because his father answered questions patiently and their nights were pleasant—at least as long as he didn’t get too close to the bed. His father was so clumsy that he was liable to cause damage: squeeze the balloon, dislodge the tube, press on Yonatan’s shoulder. Once he got tangled up with the tube and the needle came out and blood spurted from Yonatan’s arm, and his father dashed to the corridor in his undershirt and screeched: “Nurse! Quick, nurse!” Yonatan groaned with pain and laughter as the sheet around him grew bloodier, and two nurses leapt into action. Peeking behind them was his father’s head, with drops of Yonatan’s blood on his chin.
His mother said something in English to Dr. Tzitzianov, and he prayed that she would once again diagnose pneumonia or something just as serious, and they would drive back to the hospital and he would spend a few days there. He could not be at school and see Yoel and Tali acting as if nothing was going on between them, lying for no one. Because the whole class knew. For the past two days, instead of going to school he’d walked down to the wadi, hid in the trench and looked out at the towers. As soon as his mother left for work, he went back to the empty home and lay in bed until midday watching the rain through the window. Once he saw Yoel and Tali walking down the street together after school. Shimon and Tzivony, sitting on the curb, called out, “What a pair of lovebirds! Are you holding hands yet?” When his mother called to ask how school was, he simply said everything was fine. But he assumed his teacher would call them soon.
Dr. Tzitzianov said it was just a cold and he could go back to school tomorrow. She offered him candy, as usual, and he felt like hurling the bowl at the wall. He was about to describe his stomach pains when he was hit by exhaustion, and when he stood up, feeling furious, the ceiling gleamed with a blinding whiteness that stung his eyes, and his whole body ached—how lucky, he thought cheerfully, it really is something serious. Or was he actually faking it now? How would he know? His chest and back were sweating, he felt cold, and a strange pain crawled along his forehead. In the mirror he saw a miniature, doll-like shadow that looked like him but with the long hair of a girl, or like Shaul in his teenaged photos.
They put him on the exam table, his mother wiped his sweat with the cuffs of her white shirt. Her curls looked large, made of brown sewing thread, and her black eyes were too button-like. He turned away from her face, which seemed less and less familiar by the moment, but still gripped her arm. His eyes relaxed on the white wall and he saw pictures from soccer matches that failed to capture the stunning perfection of the game, in which he was the only thing that existed and all his aches and troubles had vanished—that was how it felt when they’d beaten Beit Nehemiah last month. He asked Dr. Tzitzianov if he was going to die, and she laughed: he would live for a long time and go to law school and compensate his mother for all the tough years. Her voice echoed from all over the room, and he asked if he would play soccer again and she said yes, and he murmured that there was an important fight with the tower kids soon. Dr. Tzitzianov, who wasn’t listening properly by now, agreed that it would be best if he stayed home for a few days—they didn’t learn much in seventh grade anyway. “He’s in sixth grade,” his mother corrected her.
He lay in bed looking at the white ceiling. When his body sweated he felt better, and when his skin turned rigid and bumpy he was overcome by nausea, then panic, because his limbs felt unfamiliar, as if he’d been wrapped in an old man’s skin. People kept appearing, saying something and disappearing. Mom and Dad and Ratzon, they took things and brought them back, shoved, pushed, opened and closed. The closet drawers creaked all day and night, raindrops glistened on the door mirrors. Everyone looked tall, their hair touching the ceiling, even Mom’s. “You! I know you all!” he called out. “Stop looking different!”
Sometimes he warned them that the ceiling was about to crush their heads and they told him to go to sleep. Every time his fever rose, he felt the existence of a scheming entity that moved around him and devoured things, especially when he slept and had delirious visions. Usually it was the ceiling, or something on the ceiling, and sometimes he saw a hint of eyes, a facial feature or a mask, or the woods. But no single clue could be isolated, and all he knew was that the entity was devouring his space. When there were other people there, it stopped moving or slowed down, plotting its next attack.
In his bedroom closet there were a sewing kit, jackets, coats, dresses, umbrellas, hats, an iron and a pile of old uniforms. People kept sliding the doors open and he could see Shaul’s old army uniform. He had begun to suspect that Shaul was tired of the family, which seemed to be evidence of something. But now he realized he was wrong: he pictured Shaul walking slowly through Rivka’s kindergarten, tall and handsome, even the kindergarten teachers said so, and the other kids froze while Yonatan leapt out of the circle and threw his arms around his brother. They were going to have an adventure: they would go downtown to catch a movie at Edison Cinema—where they’d seen Raiders of the Lost Ark five times—then eat blintzes drowning in chocolate sauce and ice cream, and flip through LPs in the department store.
In his heart he believed that his mother’s repeated complaints about his behavior had made Shaul turn his back on him on his last visit. She strongly objected to him sleeping in Shaul’s room this time, and on some nights his brother sided with her, but on others he gave in to Yonatan’s pleas. Their father feigned ignorance of the conflict and hovered around the apartment with his typical ability to be both guest and resident. “What are you whispering about in there all night?” his mother grumbled. He couldn’t reconcile her behavior with her insistence that she wanted her sons to be close. Yoel couldn’t understand it either, and asked Yonatan if he’d done anything to annoy his brother—maybe he was blaming his mother because it was easier? But when he told Hila about his mother’s contradictory behavior at Alona’s party that night, she cut him off halfway through: “It’s so obvious, you idiot. Of course it’s contradictory: she doesn’t really want you two to be friends.”
He wanted to hurl this at his mother, to offload his anger when she fed him hot chicken soup with rice, dabbed his feverish body with a towel full of ice cubes, drew him a bath with foamy bubbles, read to him from East End Boys and supported him when he begged to go out onto the balcony for some fresh air—he held onto her with one hand and ran the other over the wet, rusty railing. She listened when he pointed to the wadi and said, “The yellow dust is coming back. It was here but then it vanished, and now it’s coming back!” He was excited, knowing she didn’t understand and that when she did it would be too late. “This time it’s coming up from the wadi like mist. That’s a good sign, we need a huge disaster to rearrange everything.”
At dusk, when his fever broke and there was talk of him going back to school, he lay on his stomach and closed his eyes, and when he opened them the sky had turned black and the streetlamp outside his window looked like a snake spewing luminance. His mother touched his shoulder. He turned to her. A spot of light trembled on her forehead when she said he had a visitor waiting in the living room. He hoped it was Hila, but the tone his mother used implied that it was someone she knew.
He asked his mother to tell Tali to wait, and he pulled on an undershirt, sweater, pants and socks. He breathed in the familiar sweaty odor from Shaul’s uniform in the closet, shoved it into a large bag and pushed it deeper into the closet. Then he tiptoed to the bathroom and listened to his mother’s ringing laughter from the living room and the praises she heaped on Tali, who must have been telling her about the books she’d read recently. His mother said that Yonatan only read “books about soccer, and adventures and fantasies,” and he noticed how beautiful her voice was. Tali said all the boys were like that, she should be happy he read anything at all, and that you could tell by his vocabulary that he was a reader. He thought he detected a slight note of reproof in her voice, as if she found his mother’s criticism distasteful. He remembered something Shaul had once told him: their mother was wonderful to her friends, who made pilgrimages to seek her advice and confess things to her, cherishing her bright face, her curiosity, and the tenderness with which she accepted their transgressions. But when she talked about her own life she often complained about her children and gloried in everyone else’s.
The living room went quiet. He battled his surge of warmth for Tali, as well as his concern at being forced to acknowledge his adversary’s advantages: she did not sound like the little snitch he used to know. He wondered if his mother was treating Tali with genuine affection or just doing a good job of hiding her loathing of the Meltzers. She urged Tali to eat a piece of coconut cake and drink her tea, and there was the sound of spoons and dishes clinking. They laughed and he heard his mother say, “It’s hard to believe you’re a year younger than the boys, only in fifth grade.” Their voices grew softer, the way it sounds when you play the piano all the way from the high notes to the “dead ones,” as he called them. He wasn’t surprised at the intimacy; after all, his mother always claimed she wished she had a daughter to share her secrets with and see the world the way she did.
In the poorly lit bathroom, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, wet and combed his hair, then walked to the living room. Tali was sitting erect on the couch opposite him, with her legs pressed together and her white shoes shining. She wore a blue wool skirt and a striped black turtleneck sweater, and his mother was leaning over as if trying to please her. Tali looked straight at him, and he did not avert his eyes. He took two steps toward them. His mother stretched, and Tali brushed imaginary crumbs off her sweater. His mother got up and said she would leave them to talk, and then she read their looks and realized this was not a courtesy visit and that Tali was not bringing good tidings. She said goodbye in a dry voice and stopped to stroke his hair and kiss him on the cheek.
Standing close to her, he was flooded with affection: as long as she was in the living room, he was protected. He thought back to a day when he was six, waiting with her for the elevator in the Klal Building downtown: he’d jumped in excitedly while she lingered for a moment and the doors began to slide shut, and he stared at her horrified face but could not hear what she was saying, and suddenly it went dark. Then a few strong young men picked him up and carried him up the steps, and the time until he was in her arms stretched out eternally, and when they were united she sat down on the filthy floor in her black leather pants and hugged him tightly and there was nothing else he needed. He saw his face in her eyes, and he knew that they would only be apart if the world ceased to exist. She still yearned desperately, if sometimes hatefully, for those early childhood years. This past week, when she’d danced around him while he was sick, granting his every wish, he’d been filled with gratitude and had wondered if, just as they were digging a trench in the earth, one could dig into someone’s soul, or body, because surely everything that throbbed in him with such power must leave a mark? It was not the memory he was looking for, but the kernel of love itself, which might be able to warm him up and breathe life into him. And then he wondered: Could she? Which love exactly was she grieving—his or hers?
He sat down on the couch, in the indentation left by his mother’s body, and Tali said she’d heard he was sick. She drummed on the glass-top table with her fingers and her eyes darted around until they focused on the chest of drawers with the white china bowl and the gold-rimmed ladle, and the pewter forks and knifes. Finally he decided to talk. “There was no point in you coming here. I already know.”
“I know you do,” Tali replied, “Yoel knows too.”
“So you just wanted to see if I was okay?”
“Yoel and I have been a couple for more than two weeks,” Tali said, hardening her tone. “It’s true, and you can’t change it, but that doesn’t mean you and him aren’t friends anymore.”
“How do you know what it does or doesn’t mean?”
“I know.”
“How?”
“He told me things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Stop asking dumb questions,” she grumbled. It did seem as though she’d planned to treat him warmly, but she couldn’t keep it up. “I don’t want to fight, and you’re sick. I want you to know that Yoel talks about you a lot, even if he doesn’t mean to. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said submissively, “I understand.”
“And this whole thing is dumb, the two of you are dumb.” She smoothed out creases in her skirt with a supposedly absentminded movement. “You’re fighting because Yoel has a girlfriend?”
“Not just that, it’s also because in class that day…”
“Were you Yoel’s girlfriend?”
“Yeah, right. Don’t be an idiot.” He had the urge to kick her leg, already measuring the distance with his eyes.
“Do you want to be Yoel’s girlfriend?”
“Of course not.” He suspected she’d been practicing the last two questions.
“Then what do you want?”
“For you to not be here.”
“I can go,” she said.
“I don’t mean here, now,” he explained, so she’d know it would never occur to him to kick her out, “I mean in general.”
“That’ll happen in your dreams,” she declared. With her black hair combed to one side and pinned back with two colorful barrettes, the black glint in her large eyes which people called “owlish,” her smooth cheeks tinged with a slight winter flush, and her round, vivacious face—she looked enchanting, even beautiful. “Maybe something changed and you weren’t paying attention,” she said.
“You’ve known Yoel for two weeks and you already know?” He felt cold, and considered covering himself with the woolen blanket folded on the chair opposite him.
“But this is what I wanted to tell you. It’s not over, it’ll just be a little different.” Her relaxed tone reminded him of her father when he’d sat there in the living room a few months ago. It was as if she were quoting him.
“With you around?” Their honesty was waking him, and he no longer felt cold. He wondered if they might both be slightly terrified; they’d never spoken alone before.
“Get this into your head: Yoel and I are a couple now, even though we’re not in the same grade.” Tali crossed her legs lazily and put her hands on her lap, and she seemed to be celebrating her victory over all the years when they’d viewed her as a nuisance and insulted her. “We meet every couple of days. Yesterday we went to the library together.”
“And after that you went for pizza?”
“Yes.”
“Great, I hope you’re having fun. There’ve already been all kinds, and then they were gone.”
“There’ve been all kinds where?” she asked, and then she understood. “Do you know that the way you talk about each other is totally crazy? But I’m telling you,” she said, leaning on the couch arm closest to him, and her voice softened, “and I’m not saying this to make you sad, but things are changing with Yoel. Everyone can see that, and you can change too.”
“Where is Yoel? Wasn’t he ashamed to send you here alone?” He wondered if he’d managed to wipe the traces of hurt pride from his voice.
“He doesn’t know I’m here.”
He believed her.
“You could ask Hila to be your girlfriend,” she said, scanning him as if to gauge his chances. “If she says yes we can double-date sometimes. We’ll do stuff together, we can go downtown to see movies. They’ll let us if it’s the four of us.”
“I’m not interested in that, and neither is he.”
“Because you’re busy with your big plans.” Her laughter sounded forced, yet he found himself liking it a little.
It occurred to him that Yoel hadn’t told her about the towers and the trench and the upcoming fight, and he felt encouraged—maybe nothing was over. Had Yoel heard from Shimon, Bentz and Tzivony about the date for the fight? Had the fuckers done anything about it since that day in the park?
“If you had your own friends, maybe you wouldn’t keep poking your nose in our business,” he said.
“You and your business, it’s more funny than stupid.”
“Then laugh.”
She smiled, leaned back and looked up, and he smiled too and looked at the lamp on the table. Since they were smiling together, even though it wasn’t at each other, they must have needed a slight reprieve from the tension.
“You’re only sixth graders.”
“You figured that out all by yourself?”
“If I tell you that Yoel’s been happy since we’ve been together, will that make any difference?”
“That’s impossible,” he said with a huff. His palms were itchy and they stung, and he kept rubbing them on the cold cup of tea his mother had left on the table.
“You can be sure it’s true.”
“Well, if he’s happy and you’re even happier, then what difference does it make if I care or not?” He immediately regretted his words—he sounded too bitter.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me. If you want to know the truth, then I’d also like you not to be here.” She seemed lost between a victor’s desire to be magnanimous, and her urge to gloat. “But Yoel misses you, and I’m not like you—that does matter to me.”
“That’s not true, it matters to me.”
“Then here you go: Yoel does like to go downtown, see movies, listen to cassette tapes. He wants to do things other than your games, interesting things, not just in his imagination. Ever since we got here you’ve been stuck in that dumb wadi. You’re not third graders anymore.”
“It’s all interesting until something suddenly happens.”
“What something?” She bit her lower lip and glanced toward Yoel’s building through the glass balcony doors. Maybe she’d finally noticed that the world out there was yellow and devious. Maybe she was rattled by the idea that something might be hidden from her but visible to others.
“Things,” he said, searching her face for a sign that she knew about the towers after all. “Things that once existed and might exist again. Can’t you see that the air is turning yellow?”
A smile made her cheeks swell, and he was certain: she didn’t know anything.
They both got up at the same time and stood facing each other. He measured her with his eyes: he was taller and broader than her, while Yoel was about her height. He liked the way she stood—she raised her left heel slightly and shifted her weight to her right foot—and found it provocative, and her body looked so supple. He remembered that she did ballet or folk dancing, and sometimes they saw her practicing on her balcony. She’d always been there, determined to break into their world—how had he failed to see that?
“If you need homework,” she said, “call Yoel.” She brushed a few strands of brown hair back with her fingers and adjusted her barrette. He was afraid that after this meeting he would no longer be able to fuel the hatred he needed to defeat her. He realized with anger that he now found her beautiful, and he couldn’t afford to be so impressionable—just because Yoel had decided she was pretty, was she now pretty? But perhaps it made sense because, after all, their minds merged in so many places. That was what Tali did not understand: there were things that could not be separated.
“And get as much rest as you can.”
“Thanks,” he said, annoyed to realize that he’d hoped to hear a more supportive tone. She touched his shoulder politely, nodded and left the living room.
He stayed there until he heard the front door shut. Then he glued his face to the glass balcony door and watched her cross the street, surprised to discover how fearful he was of seeing her going into Yoel’s building. But, to his relief, she went into her own. When he went back to his room, his head was spinning and he felt exhausted. He caught sight of his mother lying in bed. “She’s a little haughty, Miss Meltzer,” she said, inviting him to talk.
“She is,” he said, “but she’s also more honest than anyone else around here.”