Girl Unwrapped (22 page)

“You’re famished,” Janet says, surprised. “I thought you’d have eaten by now.”

“Went to the
Kotel,
lost track of time. What a trip. People dancing, singing, high on Shabbas. Aw, man, you should have come.”

Janet considers him for a long a moment.

“You said you were going to synagogue.” She pauses. “Meet anyone?” Her voice is guarded.

“Yeah.” He chews thoughtfully and swallows. “Elijah the Prophet. After the
Kotel,
I went up the Mount of Olives. Sat on a wall above the cemetery. Black as tombs all around me, and across the valley the lit-up city floated in mid-air. Elijah said to me: ‘Far fucking out!’ Those were his very words.”

All this is said deadpan. Janet makes a face and finally smiles. She pushes a teasing finger into the cleft of his chin.

“Aren’t you a scream.”

“Anything else to eat?”

Wordlessly, Janet slips off her stool and pads across the flagstone patio. She returns with another plate of tidbits from the fridge. While David eats, she sits close beside him, touching his arm and shoulder and watching the food disappear with obvious pleasure. At the end of the meal, David picks his front teeth with the edge of the long fingernail at the end of his pinkie finger. Toni stares in fascination. It’s a custom for Middle Eastern men—both Jewish and Arab—to grow that one long nail, so uncouth to European eyes, Toni knows. She has not seen a single Western Jew thus equipped. David smiles and belches loudly.

“The Bedouins consider burping a compliment to the host. Opposite of Western culture where bodily functions are dirty. I consider the human body holy, don’t you?”

Toni detects a glint of merriment in those studying eyes.

“Sure. Every hole is holy,” she banters back at David.

David guffaws and nudges her hard, so that she nearly falls off her wicker stool.

“Toni really is spiritually minded,” Janet says, smiling at them both, pleased to see them getting along. “She’s nuts about Jerusalem.”

David beams. “Thought you might be. Could see that you’ve got depth. I can read a face pretty well.”

“This town is too serious and uptight for me,” Janet says peevishly. “I prefer gritty old Tel Aviv.”

“Jerusalem will grow on you, babe. Give it a chance.”

David takes one of her hands in his own big paws and traces the lines with his thumb.

“These lines don’t lie. I see you discovering your deep-down soul. I see an amazing spiritual journey on the way.”

He presses Janet’s palm to his lips. Janet sucks in her breath and her body seems to melt toward him. Jerking her head away, Toni studies the ghostly white roses by the garden wall.

“It’s late,” she says. “I should go.”

“Should or want to?” David drawls. “‘Should’ is the most evil word in our vocabulary. William Blake said, ‘Better to strangle an infant in its grave than to listen to the dictates of should.’ He said something like that, anyway. Are you telling me you
want
to leave?”

“Three’s a crowd.”

At this, David and Janet both burst into laughter. Janet reaches across the table and pats Toni’s hand.

“You’re a sweet kid. Have some more beer.”

The three of them clink bottles together.

“So, what’s your trip, Toni?” David asks, folding his hands behind his head and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Whatcha seeking?”

Not wanting to repeat the tale Janet found so tedious (Six-Day War, being part of history, blah, blah), Toni focuses on her university plans, her excitement about being accepted into a science program. David utters an unimpressed “humph” that seems to say you’ll soon be rid of those illusions. An awkward silence ensues.

“David’s got a degree in philosophy. He’s been to graduate school too,” Janet says.

“Dropped out of graduate school,” he corrects her. “Flew the coop. Whoosh.” His hand arrows through the air to suggest a plane taking off. “Couldn’t stand the bullshit. Univer-shitty. That’s where they try to stifle independent minds.”

Toni tries to take this in. Dropping out seems almost criminal, an act of breath-taking recklessness. Yet David clearly has no regrets. He relates some of the adventures he’s had since chucking his exam booklet into the garbage and sticking out his thumb on the open road. He camped with the Navaho in the desert and on a houseboat with a fisherman who could have been Hemingway’s twin. He did an ashram. Got busted in Paris. Wooed a girl in Rome. As he talks, David rocks his body and his hands tell the stories along with his voice. In a country where everyone talks with their hands, his fluid gestures still seem unusually expressive.

By and by, he pulls a silver-foil packet the size of a sugar cube from the lining of his embroidered cap. From his pocket he produces a penknife and a metal pipe.

“Ah,” Janet murmurs happily. “I’ve been dying for some shit.”

“Moroccan gold.” David chuckles. “The best.”

He shaves the lump with his penknife, fills the pipe, and lights up, filling the air with a burnt hay aroma. The pipe passes from hand to hand. Toni hesitates for just a heartbeat. The intimate glow of the lanterns, Janet’s dreamy smile, and David’s nodding head snuff out silly admonitions from another lifetime about frying one’s brains and landing in jail. She clutches the pipe, sucks hard, and explodes in a coughing fit as the hot smoke sears her lungs.

“What a waste,” Janet says with a shake of her head, but David instructs Toni in the art of taking small, manageable puffs and holding them down as long as she can. She waits eagerly for something to happen, and presently—is it her imagination or is it real?—she feels light as thistledown, heavy as clay, aware of the bigness of her body but not unpleasantly so. After what seems a long time, Janet rises and drifts toward the path by the side of the house, her palms uplifted as if feeling for rain from the cloudless sky. David gets up too, encircles an arm around Janet’s waist and beckons Toni to follow.

They walk out the front gate, across the road, to a border of wild cactus bushes along the lip of the wadi. David leads the way through a gap in the bushes, down a narrow sloping path into black nothingness. Clusters of lights glitter here and there on the hills in the distance, but immediately around them solid gloom presses in. Janet takes Toni’s hand as they stumble along, single file, over stones and between thorny plants that scratch their bare ankles. They reach level ground and stop. Then Toni is on her backside in soft cool dust. She smells the remnants of a campfire, hears the silky rustle of nearby olive trees. The vast dome of the sky blossoms with stars.

“Where are we?”

“Our favourite spot,” Janet’s voice says through the thick dark.

“The centre of the universe,” David chortles.

A match flares to reveal David’s pursed lips sucking on the pipe, his eyes crinkled against the smoke. Janet snuggles up against his shoulder. A few moments later—or has an hour gone by?—the three of them lie flat on their backs, their bodies radiating outwards like spokes in a wheel, heads touching. Toni breathes in a cloud of heavenly scents— hash, smoke, dust, the dry grasses and thistles of the field, the lemony fragrance of Janet’s hair—each smell perfectly distinguishable and also beautifully blended. Laughter rolls around beneath her ribs.

“Good vibes, eh?” David’s elbow nudges her side. “How d’you like my city so far?”

“Your city? How come it’s your city?”

David mimics her tone of indignation. “How come it’s
your
city?”

Again he and Janet burst into giggles.

“It’s the City of David. Okay?”

“Okay,” Toni agrees. She’s feeling most agreeable.

“And my name is David Konig. King David. Get it?”

He tells them a story. In ancient days, Jerusalem belonged to a Canaanite folk called the Jebusites. King David conquered them but did not drive them out, marrying one of their princesses—Bathsheba— and absorbing them into his people instead. Jerusalem, a central point in the lands of the Israelite tribes, became his capital to which, with much fanfare, he brought the Ark of the Covenant. The King himself led the procession, dancing out in front to the tambourines and drums.

“Guy was a fucking genius,” David says, exhaling smoke with a whistling breath. “He had vision. He got down with the people.”

Janet’s sweet voice pierces the night. She sings an old Hebrew folk song Toni remembers from camp about David, King of Israel. In Janet’s mouth, the childlike ditty becomes a wistful ballad, exquisitely tender.

How very odd, Toni thinks, to be here, enveloped by the magical darkness, stoned out of her mind and talking with Janet and David, as if the three of them have been pals forever. Earlier today she was grasping for connection, and now—is this really now? Or are they back at a campfire under the stars? Or is it another time altogether, 200 generations ago, when King David wooed the lovely Bathsheba? Where have they landed, the three of them? At the bottom of a crater in their own dusty, sweet-smelling planet, while her room at the dorm is as distant as the moon.

Later, as they clamber giddily up the steep path toward the winking lights of houses above, Toni stops abruptly to announce to Janet, “I’m not the same, you know. Not like I was back then. I want you to understand.”

Her voice swells with earnest avowals. Janet squeezes her hand.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I know.”

chapter 16

Rush out of Hebrew class. Slap along the flagstone walk in sandalled feet. Hurry, hurry, hurry, across the lush campus lawns, past splashing fountains, rose gardens, white marble buildings, down dusty shortcuts and into the sun-parched wadi. Scramble along the rocky, dusty path, up the thorny slope, through the gap in the tangle of prickly pears
,
to the little house in the cul-de-sac. Heart thumping, throat parched, head a-throb with the heat.

“You again,” Mrs Katz, the landlady, croaks. She keeps watch in the shade of her porch during the day, dozing in her chair. Still as a gecko until she hears the sound of shoe leather on pavement, then she twitches awake.

“Very good. Give that other one something to worry about. She’s too snooty.”

The old lady cackles. Off her rocker, Toni thinks, not for the first time, as she hurries down the garden path to the whitewashed cinder-block hideaway with the green metal doors.

“Knock, knock,” Toni calls breathlessly, though the doors stand wide open.

“What’s this knocking shit?” David roars.

She helps herself to water from an earthenware pitcher on the floor, drinking straight from the jug in big gulps, the cool liquid spilling onto her shirtfront. No formalities required. In this room, formalities are forbidden. In the daylight, the room’s colours come to life—the reds, purples, greens of the fabrics from the Arab market, the deep rust of Janet’s hair, the cool turquoise of the walls. David chose to paint the room this particular shade of blue-green, soothing as the sea and popular throughout the Middle East, except in the homes of European Jews, where all plaster is treated with mildew-fighting whitewash.

Seated cross-legged on the mattress while strumming her nylon-stringed guitar, Janet looks up and smiles vaguely. David, beside her, bends back to his books. He seems to be reading several at once. There’s a volume open in his lap, others scattered about, bristling with notes. Toni thinks of her father in his cherished library, how he would approve of David’s voracious reading appetite, though perhaps not of books left open, face down on the floor in spine-cracking positions, or the choice of titles. There are texts on the Kabbalah, Hassidism, Sufism. There’s Buber, Heschel, Hesse.
Siddhartha
and
I and
Thou
and
The Prophet
by Khalil Gibran. There’s also a tattered paperback— Leonard Cohen’s
Beautiful Losers
—which David found when it dropped out of some hippie’s knapsack at the central bus station. An excited smile plays across David’s lips as he reads, rocking back and forth, yeshiva-style, and humming a Sabbath hymn in soft falsetto beneath his breath. The white Bukharian cap embroidered with doves and vines in gold and silver threads—so much groovier than a plain old yarmulka—adorns his head.

Toni plops down on some cushions and pretends to be engrossed in her Hebrew homework, but she’s too distracted to study. She steals glances at her friends instead, at Janet, who often turns toward David as her fingers strum gentle chords that take up the theme of his hymn. Janet seems fascinated by David’s keen concentration. Her eyes are puzzled, envious, resentful, and tender, by turns. And he appears as unaware of her gaze as she of Toni’s. The moment stretches out, strangely sweet and melancholy, reminding Toni of a scene painted on a vase that arrested her attention at the Israel Museum. Three damsels chased a hunter who chased a lion who chased the damsels, round and round, all of them with limbs extended, frozen in motion.

They lie on their backs on the mattress in the afternoon heat. The oscillating electric fan sends intermittent puffs of soupy breeze across their flushed faces. David, in the middle, passes the joint to Janet on his right and Toni on his left. The butt end is flattened and soggy from three pairs of lips. The fan hums. The coat-hanger mobile jangles. A jingle-jangle afternoon. Hey, Mr Sandman.

“Eilat,” David murmurs as if answering a question that’s been brewing in his mind. “Let’s go to Eilat.”

He talks about the freaks camped out year-round on the beach, about the wind-carved copper-coloured mountains and how everyone shares food and dope while the sun fires their brains into incandescent wires and visions shimmer upon the horizon of the Red Sea.

“Better than acid, man. That’s how the prophets … that’s how Jesus …” He hoists himself up into a half-sitting position, his eyes aglow. “Or, hey, we could do Sinai, climb the mountain where Moses saw the burning bush, saw God face-to-face in the thundercloud. And there’s Nuweiba, an oasis where the Bedouins hang out.”

“But I want to go to Tel Aviv,” Janet groans.

“If you want a city, we’ll go to Haifa and see the Bahai Temple. You’ve never been to the Bahai Temple? Shit, man. Shit!” He thumps the mattress with an enthusiastic fist while his lips stretch in a white-toothed grin.