The Inbetween People (25 page)

I see you reading this, a small glass of sherry before you, your smoky eyes half-closed, a cynical frown across your forehead. I will say what I have to say and leave you alone:

I am writing because for the last weeks that image of you painting has remained in my mind. It is often the case that, once resurrected, memories can refuse to dissipate, and I have carried the image of that evening with me since I last wrote to you. And how many associated memories that one recollection has triggered! I’ve been tempted over the past few days to wonder what might have happened had I complied with your wishes when you wrote, some years ago now, and expressed a desire to return. I’ve been tempted to believe that the desire alone to return would have been enough, that what we had was sufficient, and that perhaps had you come back the years in between would have fallen away into nothing, so that they did not matter anymore. Perhaps you were right, perhaps we could have lived as a family again, perhaps I was wrong to deny you that opportunity. For there is this: you painted a picture one night and when you turned to me you told me you loved me, without speaking, there were no words involved, but I knew absolutely that you loved me. You and I fell in love on the steps of a dining hall surrounded by the endless Galilee mountains, I was wearing a filthy soiled soldier’s uniform, you an apron, and your hair was pulled back from your face, but some of it had fallen lose and tumbled into your grey eyes. It was December, winter, and there was some rain in the air, a very light rain, delicious after the desert dust, and you turned your face upwards so that you almost seemed to drink it.

If you are unable to come back now it is of no matter; indeed, if that is the case please excuse this letter as the ramblings that have emerged from the depths of a deep exhaustion I have never before experienced. And from the realisation as to how many moments of our life slip away because we cannot find the right words. I originally wrote to you because I know absolutely that it was important for Avi to find the right words in the supermarket that day. He didn’t find them. Never mind: I never had much luck finding the right words at the right moment either. I’ve somehow managed to discover them inside me now, it was something of a struggle, but I found them and they are here somewhere in the midst of this garbled letter; if you can find them perhaps it’s not too late. Will you come back, Sareet?

Daniel

C
HAPTER
37

T
he bus to Ben Gurion airport weaves through desert roads, carved out of the yellow rock; curving through endless mountains, their outlines quiver in the noonday heat.

For a time I stare out the window, the sun throbs against my forehead, I absorb the mauve desert landscape, the forlorn shrubs that sprout amongst the rocky crevices, alive only because of their stubborn refusal to submit to the persistent white light that beats down on them all day throughout a summer that must seem endless, their ability to put down deep roots that somehow prevent them from being washed away in torrents of cloudy water when the autumn rain arrives.

There are not many passengers on the bus. There is a man on the other side of the aisle, his eyes are closed, his rotund stomach rises and falls and occasionally a snore escapes from his throat. In front of him there is a young woman with three children; one of the children, a boy, is crying and reaching towards an orange lollipop that a chubby toddler clutches in her hand, her face is sticky with sugar, the young woman searches in her bag for another lollipop. I know I have one somewhere, she says to the boy in a soothing voice, and at the same time tries to wipe the toddler’s face with a tissue. The eldest child stands before them, leaning against a metal pole, staring out the window at the desert, his face a blank canvas, oblivious to his mother and the other children. Behind me there is a Bedouin woman, sweating under layers of black clothing; she cracks sunflower seeds between her teeth, removes the sodden shells from her mouth, places them on a white handkerchief that rests in an exact square on the seat beside her.

I flick through the pages that detail the scenes from Saleem’s life and a sudden thought occurs to me: I am seized by an obscure desire, the notion that I can leave him here, here in the desert now, it is entirely up to me. I open the window a crack, the warm breeze caresses my face, I release the first page, it flutters through the air, floats in the breeze for a time, before finding a place to rest. My eyes glide over the next page, and then I reach to the window and it meets the same fate. One by one the pages disappear, soar towards the heavens for a glorious moment before faltering, then drift towards the ground, to remain forever in the desert under the sun, where they will be covered in dust, partly eaten by insects, until they gradually become grey with the passing of time, bleached words staring at the sky, part of this land, a testament to what we lost.

M
Y
MOTHER
knew a man once, before the Yom Kippur war changed her life forever. They grew up together on the kibbutz, were close from an early age, inseparable. People on the kibbutz often referred to them over the years, remember Sareet and Uri they would say, remember how they were always together, and they would smile and their eyes would take on a tender look. One week into the war Uri was declared missing in the Sinai desert. He never returned. She wrote to me about those days, how she waited for word of him, wandered the mountains around the kibbutz all through that October, devoured by grief, paced up and down amongst the lists of the dead they posted in the dining room, how sleep refused to come so that a crazed exhaustion descended upon her, and how later she watched other soldiers returning safely, how they were welcomed and duly honoured. Only Uri did not return, and eventually traces of him were removed or disappeared, and people stopped talking about him, that was the hardest part.

Later she met my father, recently returned from the war. They met on the steps of the dining room one day in late December, and she made an instant decision, she said, she made a decision to love again, or to try her very best to love again. There were many reasons she fell for him, she said, he was handsome and there was a kind of optimism about him in those days, he had so many ideas and plans for the future. She liked how he had left his past behind, how he just got up one day and left, travelled to a country he had only read about and made it his home. She liked how he never looked back. And, she said, he knew nothing about her, she was a mystery to him, and everyone on the kibbutz knew all about her, and she liked that he knew nothing. Things were never meant to turn out the way they did, she wrote, how was she to know that she wouldn’t forget; that the memory of Uri, the way he moved, the sound of his voice, would never diminish for her, that her mind would refuse to forget. If I’d known that then, she wrote, I’d never have entered into what I did. And then she signed her name, posted the letter, and never mentioned him to me again.

I don’t know if there was ever a time when I didn’t know about Uri; long before she told me the details I knew of him, he was always there, ever-present in our lives. Sometimes she would stop what she was doing, and a strange look would enter her eyes. I came to recognise those moments and I understood without ever possessing the words—for after all I was just a child—that he was there for her then, in a ray of light, or the odour of dust, or an unexpected shower of rain, the smell of burning pine in autumn fires, the perfume of the July lilies and the summer jasmine she begged Father to plant on the patio. It had been there before me, their love, before Father and me, and I accepted it, drifted through it, existed perfectly and happily in the same world where she lived without him, understood her loneliness without ever knowing that she was lonely.

Eventually I came to believe that her life with my father and me was doomed long before she left that July day, for she understood something, my mother, about life, how very short it is; and how could my father have known that day, on the steps of the dining room, how could he have known in the face of her beauty that her mind would refuse to forget and that she would never let go.

I
CONTINUE
to discard the pages from the window. The Bedouin woman behind me has noticed, she leans forward, places the sunflower seeds beside the white handkerchief and presses her oily wrinkled face up against the window as the pages drift through the air. The bus snakes through a banana grove, one of the pages is entangled in the branches, and a short burst of laughter escapes from her. She looks at me and her eyes dance.

It is liberating. I cannot know where each page will settle, if someone will one day come upon it, hold it in their hands, touch the child, Saleem, his lost mother, for just an instant. There is emptiness too as each page, each word, is sucked into the desert, abandoned to choke forever under layers of dust in this land burdened under the weight of time and history. For words, after all, are things full of life, humanity, and after the last page flutters from the window a void descends, and I sink back, exhausted.

A town looms in the distance, buildings black against the bright horizon, the desert is coming to an end, the terrain becomes less inhospitable and more plants grow among the stones, the mountains fade away into the distance. Soon the immensity of the sky will diminish, and we will reach the city, and eventually the airport. We stop at a bus stop and a group of teenagers board the bus, pushing against each other in a bid to reach the rear end first.

M
Y
MOTHER
left in July. Father told me a little about that day, years later, that it was hot, the hottest day that year. When she woke that morning she cried and begged him to take her to England. He explained to her that he could not leave because there was work to be done on the kibbutz where they lived, and he believed in that work and in the future, not just for him he said, but for the country, for future generations.

It’s not about individual happiness, he said. It’s about the collective happiness of the community. You must remember that.

And with those words we became the inbetween people, Father and I, the people who were left behind, condemned to live only with the memory of her, days that contained the possibility of stumbling, however blindly, into her, so that once the smell of paint drying on an easel brought her back to me so completely that I believed for a moment she had never left, and another time the smell of freshly cut geraniums in a vase on a table gave her back to me again in such stark reality that I had to turn away so that people could not glimpse my face; and if I lived my entire childhood anticipating such moments, I never hated her for leaving, nor did I ever question why I waited, or why the belief that she would one day return occasionally surged through me.