The Inbetween People (5 page)

We have fun too. Last month I brought him to a new water park that opened here in the Galilee. We travelled there during the holidays. There were long queues for each ride, I should have anticipated it as part of the autumn holidays we celebrate here in this country, yet we enjoyed it just the same. Once a month we go together to the cinema, and he always gets to choose the movie he would like to see the night before.

He kills creatures.

I mean insects. It took me some time to realise this. I didn’t pay enough attention when I found several dead wasps and bees around the place, nothing strange except these had been sliced exactly in half, with a fine blade. Then there were the dead spiders, or parts of spiders with their legs laid out separately from their bodies, and their webs in neat balls beside them. After that there were the cockroaches, but I simply despise those creatures and I was not sorry to see them dead.

I ignored it until the dead butterflies, and for a long time I did not realise what they were. Small blobs of colour on the doorstep or on the grass, rolled up into untidy balls. I kicked out at them several times, not comprehending what they were until one day I saw him approaching one of my jasmine plants (the one you requested I plant) on tiptoe. It was a bright day, not too far past midday, and I saw him, suspended in gravity, approaching my jasmine plant, creeping towards it, and then his hand, swiping out, fingers clawing the air, catching a yellow butterfly in mid-flight, enclosing it in the palm of his hand, squeezing his hand tighter and tighter, before opening it out, and staring at it, then wiping it in the grass, near the area where you liked to sit on summer evenings, and going indoors.

I inspected the mess for some time after he disappeared inside. My thoughts at the time are similar to what they are now, which is why I am writing to you: I wonder if it is because of our situation, because of the fact that he lives here on this kibbutz, a family orientated place indeed, without his mother, you. He never complains, nor does he speak about our situation, nor about the fact that there is only him and I, and I thought he was developing nicely, and saw it as a small victory on my part, until I discovered this business with the butterflies and the other insects.

Therefore, I am writing to you, Sareet, to request that you have more contact with the boy, indeed I am asking you to write to him once a month, so that he feels loved and wanted. I know you have said in the past that one can’t put a time frame on these things, and that you and Avi have a bond that I don’t understand, and that your soul is linked to his, and his to yours, but Avi has not heard from you in years, and frankly I don’t see that he feels any kind of bond. I will admit that I was hoping that he would forget about you as the years pass, but clearly he hasn’t because he asks me about you sometimes, where you are and what you are doing and if you will return one day, and really, now that we are running into difficulties the situation is completely unsatisfactory.

He needs you. A boy needs his mother, and he needs you now. He needs to hear from you, Sareet. I will leave it in your hands for the moment, and I trust you will deal with this situation accordingly.

Daniel

C
HAPTER
7

W
inter is coming. I am in the gardens, digging up lettuce. The sting has deserted the fiery Arabian wind, the bright hot intensity cooled by a breeze that drifts in from the west, spreading swirling clouds across the sky.

I have a wheelbarrow piled high with lettuces; my work here completed for the day, I sit and write.

Why don’t you talk about that girl who comes to visit? says David.

I sit on the wall, drive my pen far into one of the cracks, as far as it will go, and watch him dig. He works hard, preparing the ground for the winter potatoes.

David, I say. Why don’t you mind doing this menial work? What makes you think you should do it?

He doesn’t answer, pauses for a single moment, smiles and continues digging. He discovers something in the soil, halts his work, picks it up, wipes the clay away. I watch him; there is something about him that is different from the other prisoners impounded in this place. His movements are moderate, quiet, and he seems taller in the confined gardens than he really is, his long face poised in concentration as he stares at what he holds in the palm of his hand.

A ring, he says. I wonder how long it’s been here in the earth. Another soldier must have lost it. He holds it up to the light, though the clouds are cutting across the sun, then puts it in his pocket and starts to dig again.

He rests his foot on his rake, shakes the clay from his boots. I watch him, despite the fact that he is a stocky man, his movements are delicate. You know, he says, I could ask why you don’t work, what the hell it is you are writing. I dig because there is nothing else to do here except the work they expect us to do. That’s why I do it, I’m bored. I don’t like doing nothing.

He puts his head in his hands and there are streaks of mud across his high forehead. I’ve never done nothing, he says. He looks at the sky. It’s raining, he says. He unfolds his palms in front of him and touches the rain, stares at the drops that fall into his open hands. I know nothing about you, Avi, he says, nothing at all. I don’t know what it is you are doing here, why that girl comes. You don’t talk, you don’t tell us anything. Part of being here is talking, people need a support network. We are only human.

He thrusts the rake into the earth. So why don’t you work, Avi? Why don’t you ever help out? Why do you sit on a wall while I dig? While I fill your wheelbarrow with lettuces to keep them happy? He points towards the building. Why do you need nobody here? The rake scrapes against a rock, he pushes his foot down on it, it is futile, the rake does not budge, but still he stands on it, driving it against the rock. The rain continues to fall, strengthening in intensity, great panes of water. The first rain, he says. I always love the first rain.

It is heavy now, and I hold out my hands to it, summer is gone in that instant.

Why are you here, Avi? he says. Everybody’s story is equally important. You must understand that. Nobody here is more important than anyone else, nobody has something to say that is more important than what you have to say. Everybody came here for a reason and each individual circumstance is equally valid.

I
COULDN
’
T
sleep the night I met Saleem, my foot was throbbing and I’d slept too late that afternoon. For a time I tried, I lay in the heat; but my foot ached, and the mosquitoes whistled in my ears and landed on my skin until eventually I rose and limped to the fire, and did what I could with it though I was already hot, for I liked how it glowed orange against the night. I sat back from it and enjoyed the flames, watching them dance in the night.

There were jackals in the distance, I listened to their cries; but I dozed then, nodding by the hot fire, until I felt a presence near me, and the smell of something foul. Instinctively I turned away from it, but then I jerked awake because it came to me through my sleep that there were jackals near me.

Their footsteps were soft and I watched their quivering tails, paralysed with fear, for their mouths were dripping with saliva and their golden eyes that flashed in the light of the fire had a hint of the madness that comes with hunger. But there was cunning too in those eyes and their ears were alert and their mouths hung open.

They circled the fire on tiptoe, their slender bodies moving in a deft manner, and I watched the foam drip from their jaws. One came nearer than the rest. His muzzle was soft and his nose was moist and he stood so close to me that I could have reached out and stroked him. He raised his head and sniffed this unfamiliar smell, his nose twitching above me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I saw that his were staring into mine. I wasn’t scared, but I felt vulnerable lying down. I pushed myself upwards so that I was leaning on one elbow, so slowly that he wouldn’t notice. There were seven of them. I remained like that for some time, the jackals rummaging around the fire, unearthing scraps of food. There were three younger ones, close to their mother, and two older ones. It was the father who stood closest to me looking into my eyes.

My arm grew stiff beneath me, until they moved away to the lake, and drank there, encouraging the young ones to drink, and while I watched them I realised that I felt happy, more knowledgeable about things, what exactly I couldn’t say, but a dart of ecstasy rushed through me, and I felt that I was better for what I had seen. I turned around and Saleem was there, sitting in the shade of his tent, and I read in his eyes what I was thinking.

You been there long? I said.

He said, were you scared, tell me, were you scared? When you were sleeping and he was right up against your face? That was the adult male.

You saw everything?

Everything. I was just coming out. I couldn’t sleep and I heard something. I saw them approaching but it was too late to warn you.

I didn’t know you were there.

He said, it was amazing wasn’t it? They completely surrounded you. They acted like you weren’t here, like you are nothing. He lit a cigarette. Were you shaking, he said, when he came right up to you?

I don’t know, I said. I didn’t have time to think about what I was thinking and now I can’t remember.

He was striding towards me. The cigarette glowed in his hand. It was something, he said. I almost think they didn’t realise you were human. They weren’t scared of you. There were two helpers, he said. Did you notice the helpers?

Helpers?

It’s unique to jackals, he said. Sometimes the grown offspring remain with their parents, assist the new family, they help guard the cubs and they also bring them food. He stared out into the darkness, where the cry of the jackals drifted back to us through the night. Their remaining on as helpers, he said, increases the family’s chance of survival.

After that, any unease between us was gone. We sat awake all night drinking Turkish coffee, and he told me about his life; the fire grew pale and eventually went out, and the butt of his cigarette glowed orange in the night. Presently I told him about my life, the people who lived on the kibbutz, my mother, how she left and how she wrote me letters, though she hadn’t at the beginning. It was as if she remembered me one day, I said. I told him about her children, how they lived in Holland and were much younger than me. But mostly we talked about his life, for it was fascinating to me—he had his own manner of thinking, his own definite ideas about the past.

When the sun ascended over the horizon, I was surprised because I had been planning to go to sleep. We sat back and allowed it to warm us, until it became too hot, and he said it was time for him to leave. He studied my foot before he left, his fingers probed my wound, examining it for shards of glass in the morning light.

T
HE
RAIN
continues to fall on my skin and I look at the sky. Sometimes when winter is coming it is hard to imagine that night on the beach, the heat and the mosquitoes and the way summer felt to me then. David, I say, perhaps we should go inside. The lightning is flashing across the sky, and the rain that I waited for has come at last, the autumn rain, enormous, angry, incessant.