Any Day Now (14 page)

The food cart was coming, pushed by the two unsmiling women who did this job every lunchtime. Both wore kerchiefs tied at the back, wore them a little too low on the forehead to look attractive. “
Gveenah
,” said Aviva. She'd stopped saying “please.” It didn't change anything on the faces of the women. “
Gveenah
,” however, was the signal for one to stab two squares of cheese onto a plate and for the other to scoop two mounds of carrots and potatoes on top. Aviva always had to clear the vegetables off to the side.

Leon, the kid from South Africa, slid in next to her. He looked at her plate.

“Oh, God,” he said.

“Mah?”
one of the women said to him. He shook his head. The other woman made a “tsk” and pushed on to the next table.

“What are you going to eat?” Aviva asked him, starting in on the cheese. She was starving. She was always starving here. She could smell Leon's work sweat.

“Bread, the staff of life,” he said, and reached for half a dozen slices from the plastic plate between them.

“Chin-chin,” he said, clinking his water glass with hers and started telling her about the worms in the apples that morning. “The apples are rotting faster than we can pick them,” he said. “Next week they'll be applesauce.”

She told him about the fish. “Who do you think?” she asked.

He shrugged, ate another piece of the thin, beige bread that passed for whole wheat.

“The kibbutz kids?” she asked.

He shrugged again. “They're a bizarre lot,” he said. “But driven by the urge to do right, I'd say.” He looked up, alarmed. “It wasn't me.” His brown curls were pasted to his temples. He was an attractive boy. Maybe twenty. She quite liked his accent.

“I know, Leon,” she said, putting her hand for a moment on his shoulder. It was warm. Their bodies were the same temperature.

“I hate fish,” he said. The bread plate was empty. Leon continued to look hungry.

“I'll get more,” she offered. She already had a reputation as someone who could get things. It was tricky, asking for anything — even an extra tube of toothpaste — in this place. You had to be direct, not obsequious in any way, not too needy and just grateful enough.

On the way to the kitchen, she passed the bulletin board. Every few days, the kibbutz secretary typed up a list of the volunteers who had mail. Then you had to go to his office, open only at certain hours, and pick it up. An inefficient way to run things, but it was
the
way. Her name, Miss Aviva Klein, was typed crookedly on today's list. It must be from her mother. No one else wrote anymore; the few friends who'd managed to get through to her at various American Express offices over the years had finally dropped away.

She managed to get six more slices of bread out of the woman in food storage, but when she got back to the table, Leon was gone. She put the bread on the table, though no one was sitting there any more, and looked around the room. Maybe Leon had moved. Then she saw him through the window, walking down the path toward the Ghetto with one of the kibbutzniks, a dark-haired beauty of a girl. Damn kid.

It was too late to pick up the letter and too late to buy an ice cream from the kibbutz store. She'd forget the last two bathrooms, go back to her room, lie down and light up. The heat always got to her this time of day. It was insane to work past nine, but then the whole thing was insane. She looked at the plate of bread on the table, decided to leave it there rather than return it to the kitchen. It would be too hard to explain. They'd hassle her.

The last letter from her mother had given her an out, or at least a way back. “Sweetie, you'll never guess what happened. I got a job! Yes, me, Madam Volunteer actually got a job that pays money. It's the job at the library that old Mrs. Polinski had for a century. She didn't die or anything. Just wanted to spend all her time with her flowers and cats. So! That means I'm gone a lot. You could have the run of the house. I'm not begging. I'm not asking even. Just, you know, it's been a long while, more than two years this time. My eyes need to see you. Think about it. I'll make it easy for you.”

Your mother carries you, one of her old lovers had said. She'd been furious at the time. Now it just made her want to go to sleep. Aviva looked around the lawn in front of the dining hall. Hardly anybody she knew: a few older kibbutzniks who didn't have to hurry back to the trucks and the fields. Nice to see that at some point, the work organizer, the bosses, let up on people.

She walked as quickly as she could down the back way to the Ghetto. As she stepped up onto the cement porch of her barrack, she heard her next-door neighbour — a Russian kid named Vlad — and his new American girlfriend talking inside. They were speaking Hebrew; they sounded like Dick and Jane. At least she wasn't the only refugee from the almighty work ethic this afternoon. She undid the padlock on the door, slipped inside. Weed
now
.

“Aviva?”

She tried to make out the word in English.Viva?
Viva Las Vegas
? That funny movie with Elvis and Ann-Margret? She got to the door, not remembering after she opened it and saw Leon standing there in his swimming trunks, how she'd gotten there.

“Is it dinner yet?” she asked, all she could think of.

“Long past,” said Leon. “I pirated some bread in my room. You can have it.” His pupils were huge. “Can I come in?”

She moved away from the door, sat in the one chair, leaving him to sit on the bed. It was a mess. She should have sent her sheets to the laundry this morning. Now she'd have to wait another week. New ones were issued only on Sundays, and the laundry workers wouldn't give you new ones without turning in the old ones.

“Aviva?”

“Yes, Leon.” She was still asleep. She made herself look at him.

“Aviva, I just found a fish on your doorstep.”

She started to laugh. “Dead or alive?”

“Very, very dead.” He was very, very stoned.

She was, too, still. But when he said dead, she felt the Spain feeling with an added flourish.

“I think I'm scared,” she said.

Leon got up and came to her, leaned down. He whispered, “I threw it away. You don't have to be scared any more.”

“What time is it?” she asked. Maybe it was time to work again. The darkness outside could be any hour at all.

“Still early for fun,” he said and got her standing, got her to the door, got her out the door.

“What's going on?” she asked. She could hear other doors opening, could hear whispers in the dark.

“Come on,” he said and took her by the hand. It was the first time in so long that anyone had taken her hand, that she kept walking, one foot, other foot. She could make out Vlad and his girl in front of them. They were wearing bathing suits.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“SSSSHHHH!!” went up around her. There were more people out there in the dark than she'd first thought and they all seemed to be moving up the hill that divided the Ghetto from the rest of the kibbutz. Maybe they were going to raid the kitchen. They'd done that once, a few of them. Having missed dinner, she was game. But at the point on the dirt road where they should have turned toward the dining hall, they turned left instead, toward the buildings where the kibbutzniks lived.

“Where are we going?” she asked again. She couldn't seem to whisper.

This time Leon clapped his hand over her mouth. She squinted, heard the quiet crunch of rubber soles on gravel. They walked. And then she heard a splash, the huge splash of a body hitting water, then another and another. Of course, the pool. She heard water and clothes being flung into the bushes behind her.

“I don't have my suit,” she said. No one answered. She stood there, waiting for direction. Leon seemed to have slipped away. Her mind felt blurry, the tail end of a high mixed with six hours of too-early sleep.

“Here, my lovely,” someone, a male someone, said at her elbow. A reefer was slipped in between her fingers. She put it to her lips, inhaled, swallowed. It was good stuff. Strong stuff. She felt things tumbling around already, that wonderful, disorientating clarity. She unbuttoned her shorts, her shirt, stood on the rough grass in bra and bikini, hesitated. The day's heat was still coming up through the ground. She felt her way to the pool's edge. There were no lights on. No one would be that stupid. But from the light in the sky, that little bit of light even with no moon, she could see movement in the water, hands flying, heads bobbing. Someone pushed her from behind — hard — and she lost her footing, sailed for a long moment before hitting water. She went completely under, a cold shock, seemed to stay under for too long, then came slowly to the surface. It was heaven, this immersion into cool, liquid space. She felt her body completely give way, lay on her back, let the water move her. She was a raft, a slow boat to nowhere.

She felt hands lift her to standing so that her feet grazed the bottom. The hands were behind her. They weren't rough hands, but they were certain of what they were doing. She felt breath on her neck, not unpleasant either, but determined. One hand pulled at the elastic of her bikini pants, the other pushed her forward slightly. She felt something else, something familiar, rubbing against her buttock.

“Wait,” she said. “I need to see.”

Now the hands began working together, not independently. They took her by both hips as if they would rein her in. At the same time, a foot wedged between her feet. She had no weight. She lifted off the bottom of the pool, landed lightly, legs wide, torso pitched. What she'd felt, what she now knew, slid in. Again, again. The hands were on her breasts, squeezing her nipples through the bra. The breath at her neck said not a word, seemed hardly to take air in. It was all out, out, out. The water turned choppy. And then the hands let go and the water went still.

She felt her breasts. Her bra was still on. Even the straps were still in place. She felt for her bikinis. They floated at her thighs. She walked, didn't swim, to the edge of the pool. That's when someone turned on the lights.

≈

Two people were speaking Hebrew. One shushed the other. Someone laughed and she heard the slap of flip-flops speeding off.

The remaining someone knocked on her door. She didn't move. She didn't know if she could move. That stuff had been laced with something. She couldn't make her eyes open.

Knocking, knocking. “Go away,” she whispered.

“Aviva, open the door.”

“I can't,” she whispered. She couldn't pick her head up either.

“
Mah zeh
, Aviva?” And there he was standing against the sunlight again. Then no light and he was standing over her. “You are sick,” Ari said.

“I don't think so,” she said.

“You did not go to work today,” he said.

“I'm sick,” she said and turned her head into the pillow, the room spinning as she did so.

“Make up your mind, Aviva.”

“Please help me sit,” she said. And with a surprising slowness, he helped lift her.

“We are asking you to leave,” Ari said. “Leon, Vlad, Rebecca, Jerome, you. All the perpetrators.” Perpetrators. She didn't know his English was so precise. Or perhaps, reservist that he was, he knew the terms of war.

“I wasn't a perpetrator. I was just there.”

“You think this is funny, don't you? That it is harmless.”

“I don't think it's funny,” she said. How was anything funny anymore? “Please, can you sit down?”

“There is nowhere to sit,” he said, looking around at the mounds of sheets and clothes on the chair, on the floor. “You missed the laundry.”

“Please give me another chance,” she said. Something was coming back, some memory of water, something watery.

“You people come in with your drugs,” he said. “You are like sirens. Our kids see you smoking, playing, wasting time. We work here, we have to work very, very hard. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, but didn't he see how complicated it was? She thought of the kibbutz boys, the way they devoured and dismissed her: We want you, we hate you, go home, give us what you have. “Someone has been leaving dead fish for me.”

Ari looked at her with something so blank it could almost be taken for sympathy. “More fish?” he asked, and she remembered he'd been there in the shower.

“Last night, outside,” she told him. “I can't go home. I have no home.” Panicky feelings were surfacing. The fish, the pool, last night.

“Your country was still there the last time I looked,” Ari said. “
Mah?
Mommy won't take you back?” He glanced at the door, then sat with a quick, surprising heaviness at the end of the bed. He didn't look at her.

She knew he wasn't talking about her mother in particular; she'd never said a word about Audrey Klein of Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania. Mommy was all American Jewish mothers — indulgent, forgiving, ready to throw more money at vaguely adult children. Mothers the opposite of tough pioneers,
chalutzim
.

“I have nowhere else to go,” she said and realized it was the truth. It would be nice for a week…her mother's eager-to-please fluttering, home-cooked meals, sleeping late. But soon she'd want to run from that house, from Wyndmoor with its Safeways and A&Ws. Kiryat Shmona was less numbing. She'd have to leave again soon, but the world didn't feel so inviting anymore.

“Please don't make me go back,” said Aviva, beginning to cry.

“Aviva.” And the way he said this struck her somewhere.

“I will try very hard,” she said, and touched his shoulder. His skin was warmer than hers. He was so warm. “Put me in the
mattah
again, I don't care.”

He looked away, but she saw that he was blushing through his sunned skin. “I will find out who is doing this with the fish,” he said.