The Distance Between Us (11 page)

One cloudy autumn evening not long after dinner, when the baby was six months old, one daughter was three and the son six, the old woman who lived next door came bustling all in a fright and said she’d seen men, Arab men, landing a small boat on the shore.

“How do you know this, in the dark, that they’re Arabs?” Vera’s husband asked, but the woman insisted she did. He gave his wife a skeptical look, but still the two of them, their children and the frightened old woman hid, crowded into a tiny coat closet in the upstairs hallway. After only a minute, though, the baby began to cry.

“She needs her bottle,” Vera said, because she had already
stopped nursing, thinking to get pregnant again, and her breasts were as dry as the desert.

“I’ll fetch it,” said her husband.

“Me too, Poppa,” said the three-year-old girl.

“Safer for you to stay here,” said the husband.

“Oh, she’ll be fine with you,” Vera said. So out they went, father and daughter, downstairs. And while they were rummaging in the refrigerator, the men from the boat burst through the back door that opened right into the kitchen. In separate, isolated notes that sounded like instrument solos, those hidden in the closet heard the girl scream, but not too loudly; they heard glass break on the floor; they heard the father pronounce a phrase of prayer in Hebrew and the intruders talk in a jumble of urgent Arabic words. The boy, the six-year-old son, didn’t have enough self-control to prevent a gasp.

“Who else is here?” one intruder asked in accented English.

“No one,” said the husband, and his words, clear and strong like the muscles in his arms when he worked in the fields, floated up to the hidden ones. “My wife, she is visiting her mother.”

“But, Poppa,” began the girl in Hebrew in her pure, childish voice.

“Hush, dear one,” said the father. And the girl, of course, behaved.

Vera and her son heard the intruders leave with father and child. The old woman sank to the floor of the closet and knelt there trembling. Vera held the baby tight to her chest so she would not cry again, so no one would hear her if she did.
“Hush, dear one,” she whispered over and over. “Hush or we’ll all be taken. And that is what your daddy, brave and good, forever strong, does not want. That’s what he was trying to tell us. Hush, dear one. Hush.”

They stayed there in the upstairs closet, the old woman clutching the twigs of a broom, Vera upright and rocking her baby, her son crouched with his head lowered between his knees. They stayed so long that the boy lost all sense of how long they’d been there. He smelled his mother’s hot desperation and it reminded him of curdled milk. He smelled the tangy scent of his father that came from the coat he wore for army reserve duty. The boy didn’t know it then, but he would never forget those smells.

He waited for his father to return, to tell them it was okay, they were safe, the trespassers gone. He was confident his father would return. In the end, though, his father did not come, but only other men, men speaking Hebrew, saying, “Here we are, it’s all right now, all right.”

Vera hugging the baby, the old woman clutching the broom, the boy clinging to his father’s coat. All three stepped cautiously from the closet, and even before the men spoke, the boy could read the facts in their faces. His father and sister had been shot to death on the narrow beach by their home. And as his mother lowered his sister from her chest, he knew by the way the baby lay that she’d been suffocated. That his mother had killed her trying to prevent her cries.

When dawn broke, his mother stretched out face down on the same beach where his father and sister had fallen. She
waited to die too. When that didn’t happen—when they reminded Vera of her son and pulled her inside and gave her pills of calm—she packed her bags. She told her aging parents she was returning to her native land. When they protested, she said, “Yes, I know of pogroms, I know what can happen to a Jew in Russia, but in Russia there is no illusion of safety. No trickery. A mother does not unwittingly become murderer of her children, her husband.”

Once Vera and her son got back to Moscow, she no longer mentioned what had happened. Not even when she found she was pregnant, she’d been with child all along on that thirsty, moonless night. Only during the birth of her fourth baby, the one all the neighbors thought was her second and probably illegitimate, did she break her silence to howl, an unintelligible, guttural sound like waves crashing, so uncontrolled that the nurses summoned the chief doctor to scold her harshly for her lack of courage. They scolded her even as she bled onto the grayish-white sheets, even after the baby was born dead.

A
ND
I
SUPPOSE
that was the last loss she could face, that she used up all her emotions then,” Goronsky says. “Because after that, even if I kissed her a hundred times, still she could not feel that I was there. And even if I’d wanted to talk about what happened to us, she would have refused.”

Caddie’s eyes are open now.
Why? Why did you reveal this horror to me? I barely know you. You barely know me.

He takes her hands. “I knew you’d understand.”

She doesn’t reply. She can’t.

After a moment he stands. She rises, too. This time she leads the way.

At her apartment he trails her up the stairs. She unlocks the door and steps in, allowing him to follow but without invitation, without ceremony. She switches on a light in the living room.

He does not look around her apartment. He watches her as though he knows her well and has been here many times. She knows she should find this irritating, the confident intimacy in his gaze. She finds it hypnotic.

She considers offering him something to drink, rejects the idea. “Excuse me a moment,” she says.

She has to be alone. Wash her hands, maybe scrub her face. Try to wipe herself clean somehow. Break the connection between them.

She slips into her bedroom. Leaves the door to the living room open a crack, not wanting to switch on any more lights. Preferring shadows just now.

In the bathroom she turns on the faucet and puts her hands beneath the water. As it spills over her knuckles, her palms, she closes her eyes, drops her head and urges her shoulders to unclench. She tries to thwart thought. A hot shiver arcs over her.

Since they left the bench, Goronsky has not spoken at all; Caddie has said only four words. But even as she dries her hands, she knows how it will be. She knows before she steps back into her bedroom that he will be there.

Their movements then are quick. It is not a celebration in
the revelation of an unknown thigh, the surprise of a new touch. It is the pull of a cord that seals a draw-bag.

He is above her, an airless night. She tastes the salt in the hollow beneath his collarbone.

The shadows that fall into the room are distinct. They slice up his body, and hers, and theirs. She turns her head into her own shoulder. She still smells of tear gas and sweat.

She looks into his face, half-darkened, and sees something in his expression that she’s seen before in one war zone or another, though never this close. Something stark and fearless and terrified and desperate. She wants to turn her head, but she can’t stop looking.

Then he is lifting her legs to the ceiling, bending them back toward her head and she pushes upward, needing that desperate scared fearlessness inside her, because it already is inside. The sound of breath takes over. She loses track of where her body ends and his begins. She forgets her name.

And as they merge again and again, she understands that her reporter’s gift of precise recall will fail her this time. All she’ll be left with is a blur. Because, for the first time that she can remember, she’s not holding herself in check at all. She has abandoned the one who until now has been her most trusted friend: Caddie the sidelined, cautious observer. This time, she is so much
part
that she cannot locate
apart
. This time, there is no distance from which to watch.

When dawn shadows slip into the room, they separate. Her cheeks are wet, though she can’t remember crying, and she’s exhausted, as if her bones have been crushed beneath stones.
She never let this happen with Marcus. She doesn’t know clearly how it happened now.

But it doesn’t matter, none of it. Marcus is dead. She might have been killed with him. Chances are she
will
be killed. Later.

At this moment, only one thing scares her: the sense that something unnamed has been settled between her and Goronsky, that this unlikely coupling has linked them—no, more, lashed them together, as if with a cord of hemp that already twists and tears at her skin.

Five

I
T’S AN EARLY DARK
. The Egged bus is heavy with the intimacy of a bedroom just before sleep. Men speak without urgency, a woman hums to her baby, even the children have abandoned their bickering in favor of melding into their mothers. They have shrugged off their day in Jerusalem like a heavy coat and are traveling light, in the comfort of dusk, toward their settlement homes. Lulled, all, by the maternal bounce of the bus and the hushed murmuring of voices like moths spreading their wings.

Caddie is among them, among strangers. Moshe, her settler contact and the only person she knows here, sits two seats ahead with the men. Though she has covered her hair with a scarf in hopes of going unnoticed, and though the night has smudged the expressions of faces near her, she is aware of drawing sidelong glances. Everyone knows everyone on this route. These Israelis, in fact, share a bond deeper than mere
neighbors, something akin to wagon-train dependency. They are part of a tapestry tightly woven with ideology and religion. She is the mismatched strand of wool—she and the Israeli Arab driver. He, at least, has an acknowledged role.

She stares out the window at the charcoal outline of the Judean Hills. The bus wheels croon. Behind her, two women laugh discreetly.

Here I am, Marcus. Hoping I still believe in this story.

“Now, now,” soothes the woman next to her, wearing a stiff wig beneath her scarf. She holds out a hand, offering an open container of square Saltine-like crackers.

Christ. Caddie’s been muttering aloud. And worse, she doesn’t want to stop. She wants to talk and keep talking until she gets an answer, direct from Marcus. She wants to tell him about Goronsky. Not about his eyes, or his shoulders or the place where his abdomen dips into his groin or the curve of his knees. Not about how often she’s been thinking of him—a constant undercurrent that surprises and frightens her. But about her own stupidity.

How did I get so suckered? Haven’t I heard a million sad stories? And what about his dark edges—or is it just me, just that everything feels risky right now?

The woman sitting next to Caddie taps her on the arm and pushes the package of crackers forward. “Take one,” she urges. “Something in the stomach will settle the nerves
chik chak
.”

Caddie meets her neighbor’s gaze. “Widow Murphy,” she says.

“What, dear?” the woman asks.

“Someone I used to know,” Caddie says. “She did this, too—talk aloud to people none of us could see.”

The woman pats Caddie’s arm. “Happens to us all, from time to time.” She sinks back in her seat and chews another cracker.

Grandma Jos was kind to Widow Murphy, as this woman is being kind to Caddie. Grandma Jos invited the widow for coffee, ignored her private asides to the air and urged Caddie to do the same. “It’s Christian,” she said. But Caddie defied her, rushing off to work on pretend homework whenever the old woman walked in the door, staying as far away as possible. Fear drove her upstairs. If she had too much contact with wild-eyed people, she knew, she’d become infected and turn wild-eyed herself. “Be careful, girl, because you’re susceptible to instability,” Grandma Jos once told her. “Your own mother was always more than half crazy. And these things run in the blood.” She didn’t say—she didn’t have to—that this hereditary curse came from her disloyal, drifter husband’s side of the family.

Now Caddie has proven Grandma Jos right. Though she thought it would happen later, and involve a loss of words instead of an overabundance of them: a graying grouchy woman, alone, unable to find the phrase she needed, beating down panic, calling out to bemused passersby in an incomprehensible mix of languages, gibberish misfiring from her no-longer-useful brain. Instead, this falling into—lust, or whatever it is—has made her dumb before her time.

The story, the story must be her anchor, not a hunger for
this barely known man. She has to do what she’s always done as a journalist: be here, now. Close all else off.

With effort, she turns her attention to her fellow passengers. In the front, a round-shouldered man with side curls uses a book light to read. Behind her, a young girl sleeps against her mother. Caddie pulls the notepad out of her waist pouch and begins to scrawl in the semidark: “Radio on low. Mood light, peaceful.”

A sudden, sharp scent reminiscent of sweat startles her. With her peripheral vision, she sees a circle of flame jump up on the blacktop to the side of the bus. A firebomb, she knows instantly. Everything slips into slow motion. A stone the size of a fist zings through her window. It brushes by her cheek. Glass shards strike her chin, her nose. A Dead Sea sulfur odor pours through the shattered window. Scorched, chemical-laden air stings her throat.

“Stop!” a woman shouts. Her voice jars Caddie.

The Israeli Arab driver pulls to a halt and looks over his shoulder, eyes wide. She hears three sharp cracks. Then comes a long second that’s sucked dry of movement, of sound. And the harsh, cracking voice of a boy: “Arabs! Get them.”

The woman next to Caddie, her crackers spilled onto the floor, begins to bob her head in mumbled prayer, eyes knotted. For her, it is another time, another country, another convoy of Jews.

“No, don’t touch it,” implores a woman behind Caddie. Caddie turns to see the girl who had been sleeping moments
before. Her face is covered in glass dust. Her mother tries to blow it off and simultaneously restrain the girl’s hands.