The Wanting (26 page)

The idea of it made me laugh out loud with pleasure. Belkina glanced up at me. “What?”

Collette did not even bother to look over.

Later she said, “I have to go home now. Charlie is coming over. Probably you won’t want to be there.”

Belkina. Charlie. Zagoryanka. What were these things to me anymore? Now there was only Anyusha, the Head, the Sunbird, Moishe, and the bedroom door, which Abdul-Latif had locked behind him when he went out.

S
TILL IN THIS BASEMENT IN
J
ERUSALEM
, waiting around for something to happen and naturally thinking about things, in this case, Pop.

The thing is, it isn’t so easy being him. Take what happened to him when he was a kid. He grew up in a place where no one trusted anyone, not even your best friend or your mother or father or anyone. I mean, if I couldn’t trust Yohanan or Miriam, I don’t know what I’d do.

He used to tell me this story about some strange guy who lived in the basement of his house in Moscow—an old guy who had been in the Gulag and everything—and this is what he told my pop, word for word (I know because Pop told it to
me
so many times). In this story my dad is like six or seven years old. So imagine this old guy’s voice, or rather Pop talking in this old guy’s voice, with a thick Georgian accent and coughing up phlegm for effect, saying: “So, Roman, do you know what a traitor looks like? I will tell you! If he smiles at you too easily, he is an informer. If he doesn’t smile at all, he’s also an informer. If he wants to know what happened next, never tell him. If he makes a great show of not wanting to know, that is even worse. If he brings you real coffee, he will betray you. If he invites himself in, or if he never allows himself to come in, beware! If he says, ‘I’ll bring you something from the store; after all, I’m going out anyway,’ then stay away from him! If he’s very humorous, he will turn you in without any remorse. If he’s strict as a commissar, then that’s exactly what he is. If he showers you with kisses, if he gets you tickets to the Bolshoi, if he makes
an effort to keep the hallway clean, if he complains about every aspect of his life, if he reads
Pravda
even once a week, if he always criticizes the leadership, if he’s the nicest guy you ever met, it’s all the same. You only have to do one thing, my Little Octobrist—look into his eyes! That’s right. Look into his eyes. If they sparkle with joy and yet you feel the coldness of death, then he is the one. It’s very simple. Even you can do it. Your parents taught you a lot, but they did not teach you everything. Oh! Somewhere in this world there is a county in which you can trust your neighbor and count on your friend, but not this one!”

When Pop tells me this story, I always ask him, But what was that guy doing in your basement? And he says, Oh, he had an important job! He sorted through the stuff coming out of our toilets. We flushed so many secrets down the bowl—they couldn’t let all that information go down the drain. He was the last and the best of the Communists!

Then my father always laughed and kissed me good night.

But
I
think this story tells a lot about what Pop went through as a kid and how hard it was for him to be him. And that’s what I want everyone to understand.

Luckily, Miriam and I spend tons of time together. Pop doesn’t know anything about it. Miriam takes me everywhere. When we were talking about Noah (because there is this whole thing having to do with redemption in our time if everyone, even non-Jews, just follows the Seven Laws of Noah), she took me to the
zoo
to teach me.(!!) Then we went into Jerusalem and prayed at the wall—well, she prayed at the wall. I kind of watched and waited for something to happen, but nothing did. I thought she would be upset with me, but she just took me for falafel. Another time we went to visit the Temple Institute where they have this model of Solomon’s Temple and all these crazy implements to use when they rebuild the temple again—you know, the menorah and the fire pans and the things to collect blood and everything, all of gold and silver and bronze. They even built an Ark of the Covenant, like Moses made. It was
crazy, but it was also very exciting, to be so close to things that were exactly like they were in the Bible. Sometimes we didn’t do anything religious at all and just talked about stuff, and I told her a lot about my life and also about Pop. She seemed to know a lot about him anyway. After all, he’s an architect. Anyway, one day she said to me, Why don’t you ever talk about your mother? And I said, I don’t have a mother. She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, It must be hard, and I said, Not really, and she said, Yes, really, and then I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. Once we went to her house with her husband, and she cooked, and that was the first time I wondered why she didn’t have any kids, because Orthodox have kids when they’re like thirteen or something, and I kind of let it slip, and she looked at her husband, and then she did that smile of hers and she said, HaShem—that’s what she calls God—will deliver in his time. I wanted to tell her, I don’t have a mother and you don’t have a kid! But I didn’t.

The question she really wanted me to focus on was what was the right way to live your life and what was the wrong way. As far as she was concerned, the Law is the right way, and protecting the Jewish People and the Land of Israel is the right way, and it’s our duty, and nothing else is as important as that, because only that way will the Messiah arrive to heal the world.

But let’s be honest. Forget the Messiah. He’s not coming. Because something that’s made up cannot actually appear. So I’m not interested in the Messiah, even for Miriam’s sake. And as for leading a holy life, I’d really like to, but so far I can’t. It just won’t happen. I mean, I still eat shrimp.

But
, when it comes to protecting the Jewish People? Well, after what happened to my father, things got a lot clearer for me.

You just can’t let someone kick you out of your own land.

And also, if you don’t stand for something, if you’re just for yourself, what kind of person are you? Selfish, that’s what. And that is exactly what I
don’t
want to be.

So then this whole thing came up with the Temple Mount, and they kept asking me, like every day, and every day I couldn’t say
yes and I couldn’t say no, and it was really horrible, plus I had no idea what they were actually asking me to do, they were kind of vague, and then when Pop didn’t come home that night and when Yohanan came through the window, and when the house was so noisy and insane with laundry and everything, and I went to Rabbi’s and they asked me one last time because it’s all happening today, and it was Miriam herself who asked me and it was never Miriam who had asked before—I don’t know—I just said yes.

And that was when everything seemed to happen. Yohanan and I and the others went off with Shlomo, and he told us where to be and when and how important it was, and asked us a million times if he could count on us, and made us repeat our oath like a thousand times, and grilled us on our quotations, and made us repeat our history, and talked to us for what seemed like hours and hours about Torah and Mishnah and Talmud and Akiba and Bar Kokhba and Israel and Zionism and how there needs to be a new Temple, a Third Temple, because without the Third Temple how could we ever make the korban, the four kinds of sacrifices: the sacrifice of peace, the sacrifice of guilt, the sacrifice of sin, and the burnt offering, because without sacrifice, my children, how can we come close to God etc. etc. etc. And I kept saying to myself, I don’t have to exactly believe this, and that’s OK. I don’t have to be 100% sure, I just have to listen to what Miriam and Rabbi Keren tell me, and follow the commandments with an open heart. I just have to
do
.

Because, you see, during that whole time they were working with us, I couldn’t tell them the truth. Not even Miriam. I was supposed to be ready to hear, but the noises around me got so loud that sometimes I could barely hear
myself
.

And then, this afternoon, when Yohanan took my hand, all the noise went away. That is worth thinking about.

Oh! I’ll finish this later. They just brought us some McDonald’s from the new kosher one at the mall in Mevaseret Zion—Shlomo thought he was bringing us gold and diamonds. All I really want to know is if Miriam is coming or not.

I saw Fadi less and less. The older I got, the more angry with me he seemed to be. His whole life was angry.

“How is it you’re
not
angry?” he said to me.

“I don’t know” was all I could think of to reply.

I knew that other boys my age were already trying to be in al-Shabiba so they could graduate into Fatah or even into the Fatah Hawks and go kill Israelis, or they hung around with the Popular Front or Islamic Jihad, but Fadi was Democratic Front. That’s what he was always spouting about. And then he ran off every day to be with his new friends. He wore only black pants and a black shirt and a black band around his head. It was pretty obvious he created this uniform on his own—all his friends wore ordinary clothes, T-shirts, jeans, whatever they had; they were poor, but he had money now, so he bought American clothes and sunglasses. Once I mocked him for that, calling him a Paul Newman. He just laughed at me and said, “Go to your mother, little baby.” Most of the time, though, he still tried to convince me. “Come on, Amir, come on. What’s the matter with you? What are you still doing with playhouses and card games?” He looked at me sadly. “Don’t you read the news? Don’t you watch TV? Everything is happening right now! Are you deaf? Or maybe you’re just an idiot.”

But sometimes the old days returned to us, and Fadi was just Fadi again.

One evening we walked out by the Wadi Ibrahim, the small winter river that gave our town its name, or maybe it was the other way around, nobody really knew. The spring flowers were still in bloom, though the water was already down to a trickle running through the spine of the wadi, and the earth around it was already turning hard, like baked brick. This, oh this, was our time of the year! The smell of the drying earth, the fresh scent coming off the stream, the slight perfume of the flowers and shrubs, and the sound of our feet scratching along the rock and mud. How many scorpions had I killed here? And how many scarabs had I held in
my palm for good luck? Each year we found a new stone upon which to carve our names. The first time, Fadi showed me how:

F
ADI

——

Amir
1980

And every year since, the same, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984.

But then one year he didn’t want to do it anymore. “We’re not girls,” he said.

So I went there by myself, found a decent rock, and carved,

F
ADI

——

Amir
1985

But now we were together again, strolling along the edge of the stream, looking for snails.

“Did you see what Djamel Zidane did?” cried Fadi in his old voice. “Three goals all by himself! Especially that one from at least twenty-five meters—pow!”

“And the one where Madjer was all over him, and then from nowhere …,” I answered.

“The kick! Ya-ala!” Fadi threw his arms in the air. “That is what you call real poetry!”

When his arm came down, it rested on my shoulder. Nothing would have been more natural than to reach up and take his hand, but I didn’t. We walked along this way for a while, feeling like we used to feel, Fadi towering over me, his long, thin body embracing me in its shadow. In a year I’d probably be as tall as he. Then, I supposed, these moments would be over for good.

We spoke of nothing much—my school, his work, his problems with Nadirah, which I enjoyed talking about quite a bit, my parents, my sisters, more football, all the things that carry a person
from one step to the next. Then he looked up and rubbed his eyes: the sun had begun to set.

“Let’s get back,” he said.

“Why don’t we watch the sun go down together?” I suggested.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Just for the sake of it.”

“You’re getting crazy as you grow up, you know that, Amir?”