Maiden Voyages (62 page)

“Yes, come next week. I want to do your portrait. Come—I insist on it!” She spoke in the insinuating, nagging way in which some timid people try to exert their wills. Luda was a despised hanger-on in this artistic circle, and she knew it. I looked closely at her and realized that she was wearing a present I had given her as a joke back in the fall: a miniature Coca-Cola can hung on her necklace chain. I had chuckled about this silly present often enough, but now it seemed like a truly wicked thing to have done. I went on talking to her, and thought that my head would split with depression and fatigue. It was about three o’clock in the morning.

Two tables had been pushed together in the main room, covered with white cloths, and spread with a handsome array of
zakuski
: cold meats and cheeses, radishes and fresh coriander, cucumber and tomato sandwiches. In the middle lay two bowls of hard-boiled eggs that had been decorated with dyes, and between them lay the traditional Easter
kulich
and the sweetened raisin-filled farmer cheese that is traditionally served with it. I was approaching the table when a painter whom I vaguely knew, a balding man with purplish cheeks and a skewed eye, came up to me and tried in a vigorous whisper to convince me that I
should try to smuggle a portfolio of his enormous canvases out to a dealer in New York.

“I’d get caught the same as anyone would,” I protested, trying to maneuver out of the corner where he had pulled me.

“Nonsense. You could slip them right in among your luggage. Americans always have a great deal of luggage.… You materialists!” he added, wagging his finger at me in playful admonishment. “Tell me, my beauty,” he went on in the same low voice. “When are we going to meet privately? Foreign women are always drawn to Russian men, with good reason! We’re real men! Once I met a French woman who was a
lesbianka
—hated men. But I convinced her differently!” He began an interminable smutty story, and I glanced around the room, whose walls were covered every few weeks with an exhibition of works by a different artist. This time there was a really wonderful set of paintings, showing Breughelesque scenes of traditional life in a Russian peasant village. Lidia Borisovna had turned off the harsh overhead light and had lit candles on the table, and the figures in the paintings—short-legged, broad-faced peasants in the marketplace, in the bathhouse, by the frozen river—seemed to take on life in the moving light. It seemed to me that they bore more relationship to the Easter service we’d just attended than did the people in the room around me.

Chairs were drawn up to the tables, and we sat down to eat pieces of Easter cake; as we ate, we chose eggs and dueled with our neighbors in a tapping game to see which shell was the strongest. Tom sat discussing Paul Robeson with a short musician with a droll winged mustache, while I played the tapping game with a young man with big glistening dark eyes and perspiring hands. Apropos of nothing, he remarked to me, “My grandfather, you know, spoke French.”

“Why was that?” I asked. “Was he French?”

“No,” he said, picking up a piece of shattered eggshell with the end of his moist white finger, and then, leaning earnestly toward me: “But he was, well, an officer … ah … in the Guards … before the Revolution, if you know what I mean …”

“Are you trying to hint that you have noble blood?” I asked sharply, and the frigid hauteur of my tone shocked me as much as it did the
young man, who at once pretended that he had to reach for another Easter egg, and began talking briskly with the woman on his left. Far away, at the other end of the table, I heard someone say, “I disagree. It’s literary mitosis!”

Then came that strange hour in a sleepless night when everything seems distorted; lights are too bright; darkness, unfathomable; conversations seem to stretch out into infinity, and the barrier between dream and observation seems to have dissolved. The hour itself seemed to last only for a minute, and suddenly it was five o’clock, the candles were drowning in pools of wax on the chaotic table, and the big square windows at the end of the room were gleaming with a pale light. From the divan in the corner came a medley of snores, and I saw the skew-eyed painter sleeping among other supine figures. My annoyance at the idiocy of the party had suddenly evaporated, and as I looked at the few people left—Lidia, our hostess, and a beautiful red-haired writer sitting whispering to each other on one hard chair, their arms around each other’s necks; the short musician and a large group of others still arguing about literature, their elbows among the eggshells and empty bottles at one end of the table—I found that their voices and faces had softened, that the advent of the dawn had given a measure of dignity and humility and happiness to their manner as the Easter service had to the crowd at the church. Some kind of passion—for company, for art, for a good time—had kept them vigiliant tonight as it had other nights, and any vigil makes dawn seem a blessing. Our hostess stretched, ran her fingers through her thick hair, then rose and opened the curtains to a watery sky the bluish color of skim milk. “See, friends, it’s the dawn of a holy day,” she said in her deep, clever voice. “
Khristos Voskres!
”

I repeated the answer with the others.

(1941–)

from
THE DEMON LOVER

Look closely at her.

She crosses a city street, juggling her briefcase and her sack of groceries. Or she walks down a dirt road, balancing a basket on her head. Or she hurries toward her locked car, pulling a small child along with her. Or she trudges home from the fields, the baby strapped to her back.

Suddenly there are footsteps behind her. Heavy, rapid. A man’s footsteps. She knows this immediately, just as she knows that she must not look around. She quickens her pace in time to the quickening of her pulse. She is afraid. He could be a rapist. He could be a soldier, a harasser, a robber, a killer. He could be none of these. He could be a man in a hurry. He could be a man merely walking at his normal pace. But she fears him. She fears him because he is a man. She has reason to fear.

She does not feel the same way—on city street or dirt road, in parking lot or field—if she hears a woman’s footsteps behind her.

It is the footstep of a man she fears. This moment she shares with every human being who is female.

This is the democratization of fear.

(1951–)

from
SEASON OF STONES

The weeks wore on, and little changed except that intermittent rains were falling, rains that soaked into the dirt and turned it dark. Occasionally the clouds parted and the sun warmed the earth. It was on just such a sunny day that I returned to the village from Jerusalem, carrying with me medicines and books for some of my friends. I tried driving in first from Kilo Sabatash but found the army had been hard at work refurbishing the roadblock, closing off the
shabab
detour permanently by bulldozing a wide pile of dirt up against the multi-ton rocks, the refrigerator shell and the upturned car chassis, which were already in place.

As I was turning back, I paused for a few minutes to watch a shepherd herding his long-haired goats in a rocky field below the new Neve Daniel houses. It was a warm afternoon made strangely moody by half-white,
half-blue clouds lingering in the autumnal sky. The branches of the leafless fig trees stood out gray against the sky.

I had noticed soldiers everywhere on the way out. It was a Palestinian strike day, to protest the demolition of houses in the occupied territories. Because of the strike, most West Bankers were not working in Israel but were at home waiting for trouble to come along. Aware that more rocks were thrown on strike days, I did not take the next most obvious route back to the village. I avoided the villages of Husan and El Khader, where the Palestinians did not know me well, as they did in Nahalin, and drove around past the settlements to Nahalin’s south. At Kfar Etzion, I was struck by the anomaly of an old white-bearded Palestinian wearing a white headcloth and riding a white donkey along the newly paved black road that runs between the kibbutz and the neighboring religious settlement. I was aware of details that afternoon, or I thought I was.

At the turn into the valley by Abu al-Koroun, I met a woman I knew. I had a chat with her and admired the embroidery of her dress. All was auspicious. I continued down the road and looked for, but could not see, the flag on the minaret of the mosque. Was it down? I wondered. Had the lack of wind let it flop out of sight? But I did notice a smaller flag on a rough pole stuck in a rock wall perpendicular to the road about halfway down from Abu al-Koroun. Near the flag I came to a line of rocks across the road. I stopped and, without thinking, put the car in neutral and got out to move a few of the rocks so that I could go on to the village. I had my
SEHAFI
sign on the windshield and the red
kefiyeh
^*
across the dashboard. I was thinking that I had nothing to worry about since most people in the village would recognize me. Besides books for Sena, I was bringing rheumatism medicine for Halima, the Najajra grandmother with whom I had worked in the olives. The books and medicines were on the passenger seat.

Without warning, rocks began hitting the car, the road and all around me. Hard. I was being ambushed. I twirled around and rushed for the car. More rocks came but they missed me somehow. I leapt into the driver’s seat and reversed crazily down the narrow, windy road under
a further hail of rocks. Coming out from behind a grove of olives on the right and from behind the boulders on the left were
mulethamin
, translated as “wrapped ones,”
shabab
with their faces covered in black-checkered
kefiyehs
so that only the slits of their eyes were showing. They chased me and stopped only when it was obvious I had outdistanced them.

Once out of range, I stopped. I was trembling, shocked by the attack and by the realization that these were Nahalinis,
shabab
from Nahalin, behind the
kefiyehs
. This was the village where I had spent so many days and nights, where I had tried again and again to prove that I was not an enemy, that my aim was to learn about the village, not to injure it. I couldn’t tell who had ambushed me, and I didn’t know why they had done it. I only knew that if I kept retreating now, these
mulethamin
would be convinced that I was frightened. And I was, but I couldn’t show my fear, or I might not get back into the village. I also believed that my attackers would soften when they realized I was returning to Nahalin with no ill intent.

I rolled down the car window and waved the red
kefiyeh
. I shouted that I was a journalist. Some of the
mulethamin
walked toward me a little and then beckoned, making big welcoming motions with their arms, that I should come forward. I did, pulling back abreast of several of them. I said again that I was a journalist, and I motioned to the books and boxes of pills, saying I was bringing medicine to an old woman.