The Distance Between Us (15 page)

Now Ya’el gives her a hug. “I drove up for lunch break and saw your car. Come on up and eat with me, okay?” Then she sees Goronsky, who is sitting up, buttoning his shirt. “Sorry. Am I bothering you? Barging in, bad timing . . .”

Goronsky offers an unembarrassed smile.

“I met him on a story,” Caddie says, introducing him. She doesn’t try to explain what he is doing sleeping, disheveled, on her couch at midmorning. She doesn’t
have
an explanation for that. “My neighbor, Ya’el Givon,” she says to Goronsky, glancing at him briefly, then looking away.

“Forgive me for falling asleep,” he says. He rises. Caddie watches him stretch his arms.

“Yes, it’s pretty unusual to find someone snoozing on Caddie’s couch,” Ya’el says. “Sometimes I think
Caddie
doesn’t even sleep here. She’s always running around, one story or another.” She laughs. “Where’s home?” she asks Goronsky.

“Good question,” Goronsky says. Then he doesn’t say anything else, his gaze resting in some middle distance.

Ya’el gives Caddie a raised-eyebrow glance. “So?” she prompts Goronsky after a moment.

“I was born in Moscow.”

“And what do you do?”

Caddie wants to hear him say he’s a professor again. She wants to see if she believes it this time around.

“Sorry for being nosy,” Ya’el goes on after a long moment, but it doesn’t sound like an apology.

Goronsky rubs his forehead as though trying to soften the creases. “I’m a professor.” It still sounds like a lie.

“Of what?” Ya’el asks.

Goronsky studies Ya’el. Caddie wonders if Ya’el has the same sense she did the first time, of being absorbed by those eyes, but Ya’el’s face shows nothing.

“Psychology,” Goronsky says.

“Really? With which university?”

“Moscow State University.”

“Hmm. How long have you been here?”

“Eight months,” Goronsky says. The answer is a surprise. They never talked about it, but Caddie had assumed, somehow, that he’d arrived more recently.

“And you’re here because . . . ?” Ya’el asks.

Goronsky’s cheek muscles are starting to look strained. Not everyone is accustomed to neighbors like Caddie’s, who consider everyone’s business their own.

“Ya’el,” Caddie says, a warning in her voice, but Goronsky waves his hand.

“I’m working on a study,” he says slowly, “for the Russian government.”

“On psychology?”

“On extremism.” He enunciates each syllable precisely.

“Extremism.” Ya’el studies him a minute.

“Yeah, and now—” Caddie begins, but Ya’el ignores her.

“You go around psychoanalyzing the right-wingers?”

He shrugs. “Both ends of the spectrum. The people we call extremists often start out like us. Then something happens to them, something they feel would be immoral to ignore.”

“So they’re more
moral
than the rest of us?” Ya’el laughs. Goronsky shrugs again.

Ya’el turns to Caddie. “And what are you interviewing him for?” She smiles, but she’s being annoyingly persistent.

“He was able to provide some information I needed on medical supplies at the Gaza hospital,” Caddie says. She sounds formal, she knows, and defensive. She hopes Ya’el will take the hint and leave.

“Medical supplies?” Ya’el’s voice rises in surprise. “So it’s not only psychology that interests you?”

A look of impatience floods Goronsky’s face for a second before being replaced by a smile. “It’s broad,” he says.

“Must be.” Ya’el is usually so warm—too quick, in Caddie’s view, to treat strangers as family—but now she’s cool, slit-eyed.

“Ya’el,” Caddie says, “how about some coffee? Or do you have to get going?”

Ya’el shakes her head. “So, how much longer will you be in Israel?” she asks Goronsky.

“Not sure yet.” Now, instead of speaking slowly, Goronsky runs the words together. “You have a young child, I take it?”

The non sequitur seems to surprise Ya’el as much as it does Caddie. She hesitates before answering. “Two, actually.” Now her look, Caddie sees, is even more cautious.

“And you are a bookkeeper? An accountant?”

“I work at Bank Leumi,” Ya’el says. “I help new customers, usually people who have recently made
aliya
. You know what that is?”

“Of course.” Goronsky sits down again and looks at Caddie. He is suddenly—but clearly—oblivious of Ya’el. Caddie has felt flattered by the way Goronsky seems to shut out everything else when he focuses on her. In front of Ya’el, though, it’s embarrassing.

Ya’el looks back and forth between them. “Well,” she says, and she draws the word out. “So since you have company—or is this an interview?—well, anyway, you probably can’t—”

“Actually, I’ve just spoken with my office,” Caddie says. “I’ve got to make a couple calls and rush in. Sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” says Ya’el, her voice finally warming again. She steps closer to Caddie and half-turns her back to Goronsky.
“So we didn’t get to talk after you came in from some godforsaken clash the other day. What are you working on, anyway?”

Caddie considers trying to explain briefly the story she envisions, the effect of violence, the context, the layers. “Settlers,” she says, opting for simplicity. “Spent last night at a settlement with a family.”

“Sounds like a nightmare,” Ya’el says. “Sleeping with our fringe element.”

Caddie shrugs. “It’s an interesting time. They’re like cornered animals right now.”

Ya’el’s eyebrows rise. “That’s what’s dangerous.”

“It’s manageable.”

“You’re out of touch with what’s manageable,” Ya’el says.

“Well, don’t worry,” Caddie says. “The settlers haven’t exactly warmed up to me. They aren’t letting me in much.”

“Good.” Ya’el hugs Caddie, puts a hand on the doorknob but then doesn’t open it. She looks again at Goronsky. After a moment she clears her throat. “Come see me later, okay?”

Only after Ya’el is gone does Caddie realize it might have looked odd—Ya’el leaving, but Goronsky making no move to go. He heads into the kitchen now and she follows. He opens a cupboard door and pulls out two cups as though he already knows where they are. He pours coffee for himself, and then for her.

“I have this connection to Gaza and the West Bank, too,” he says speculatively, as if continuing a conversation. “I grew up with snow on the boulevards, but it turns out I was meant
for those dusty alleyways. The curses and wails. The frank emotion.” He sits at the kitchen table and stares at his hands. “That honesty. I could never emulate that. Still, it attracts me.” He blows across the top of his coffee, then drinks. “You want to join one of these settler patrols? Be there when they do their justice?”

She hadn’t mentioned patrols to Ya’el, had she? “How,” she asks, “did you guess all that about Ya’el?”

“What, the child, the job?” He shifts his shoulders. “She had a stuffed toy and a calculator sticking out the top of her purse. Then I saw her stroking her fingertips with her thumb, as though they ached.” He smiles. “I
wondered
where you were in the middle of the night,” he says.

Though he says it matter-of-factly, her breath quickens. She watches his hands embracing the coffee cup. He has a small scratch near one knuckle. She turns away with effort, opens the refrigerator, stares in blankly, then turns back. “How long were you there? At my door?”

He sweeps the table with his palm as though wiping away invisible crumbs. “You know what I told you the other evening? About my family? That was the first time I ever told anyone.”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“My mother didn’t want to talk about it, not ever,” he says. “And no one asked me about my father when I was growing up. Why would they? A fatherless boy was common in my neighborhood. People stayed out of one another’s business.”

She feels him gauging her reaction, and hopes her expression
shows the full measure of her skepticism. “So no one knew?” She doesn’t want to let him turn this into a “first time” with all that emotional responsibility.

“Ludmilla Federova knows,” he says. “She’s my supervisor at the university. She has a long acquaintance with my mother.”

Caddie reaches into her refrigerator and pulls out a juice bottle. She can’t believe that she’s the first. The story was so smoothly told, so practiced.

When she turns back, Goronsky is holding a spoon between two fingers like a cigarette.

“I used to smoke,” he says. “It’s not only the nicotine. There’s something about holding live fire between your fingers. Bringing it close to your face.
Owning
it.” She watches him wrap both hands around the spoon as if smothering a cigarette. “But only for a few moments.”

“How long were you waiting outside my apartment?” Caddie leans against the open refrigerator door, waiting.

“I’m planning a trip to Lebanon,” he says. “I thought you might want to go with me.”

“What,” Caddie tightens her hold on the juice bottle, “the hell are you talking about?”

“Three, four days in Beirut. For my study.”

She shoves the juice back unopened and leans in to study the mustard, the jar of pickles. To block her face from his view.

“You have things to do there.” He says it like a fact, not a question.

“I have,” Caddie closes the refrigerator, “a call to make.
And work to get to. Finish the coffee. If you want. Then let yourself out.”

She doesn’t wait for his response. She goes to her bedroom, trying to slow her breathing. She picks up the phone, misdialing Moshe’s office once before she gets it right. This time he answers. “I hear from you so soon?” He doesn’t sound surprised.

“What’s with the house burning?” She sounds angrier than she wants to, Caddie realizes as soon as she’s spoken.

“
What
house burning?”

“C’mon, Moshe.” She makes her voice reasonable. “Settlers set a house on fire in the village to the north. The same village that your neighbors were blaming for last night’s attack.”

“Caddie, I’m beginning to be insulted by your insistence on linking me to acts of violence that occur anywhere within fifty miles of my home.” Mock outrage in his voice.

“Perhaps your committee decided upon a dual action?” Caddie asks. “A letter to the prime minister
and
a punishment for the village?”

“Don’t you know yet that most of these stories are invented by the Arabs? I can’t think of another people anywhere who, given the situation we live under, would show such restraint.”

His voice is too smooth, his outrage too practiced. He’s lying, but she’s got to come at this right or she might as well hang up now.

“You put me in a tough position, Moshe, by not letting me attend that meeting.”

“Closed session. I told you.”

“If I’d seen it myself, I’d know what happened. I could speak with authority.”

“All of our meetings are closed, as a matter of course.”

“As is, I have no proof.”

“That way, everyone can speak freely.”

“Now it’s your word against theirs in the copy.”

She’s working Moshe so hard that she’s almost forgotten Goronsky. Almost. Now she feels his presence as palpably as a sharp change in temperature. He’s come into her bedroom and is standing behind her. Part fear, part anticipation rolls through her. The same feeling that comes when she’s covering the clashes.

He’s looking at her hair. She thinks he might touch it. She resists the temptation to go into the bathroom and lock the door. She walks to the window instead. She focuses on Moshe, who is in the process of saying no in different ways. No one at last night’s meeting would have agreed to include an outsider, particularly not a journalist. And no one would have violated the decision reached during the meeting. No one would take aggressive vigilante action. It’s a dust storm of words. She has to stop it.

“I know there were people who were interested in revenge,” she says.

“They lost the vote.”

“Fine, then, let me be there. For everything, not only the moments like your kids reciting what they’ve learned during the day.”

Moshe sighs.

“I need to see how you handle attacks,” Caddie says. “How you argue these things through. And how you go about protecting yourselves.”

“Caddie—” Moshe begins, and she can tell from his tone he’s going to be negative, so she doesn’t let him finish.

“You can’t be afraid of people knowing you, Moshe. In fact, it’s to your benefit. The more people who understand your position, the greater your advantage.”

“Caddie,” Moshe says, “we aren’t responsible for burning down anyone’s house.”

“I need,” she says, “to witness the process.”

She hears him take a sip of something. “Getting you into a meeting,” he says. “That’s a long shot. Long, long.”

Damn. She can decipher that tone.

If Moshe won’t be the source, maybe he could be the conduit. “What about a series of interviews in the settlement?” Caddie asks, thinking aloud. “That could give me a full range of opinions and you could still have your meetings private. If you urged your neighbors to talk frankly to me, I think they might.”

As she’s speaking, she notices Anya on the sidewalk below, walking woodenly, turning her head from side to side as though searching. Her hair is in disarray; the front of her shirt looks stained.

“Let me see what I can do,” Moshe is saying. “I’m not promising. We’ll talk next week.”

“Good.” But even as she hangs up, she knows this will
come to nothing. She’s going to have to find another way to gain access to the settlers who are patrolling the night, burning homes, harassing their enemy-neighbors.

Anya is looking up toward her window, squinting. She spots Caddie, and suddenly she opens her mouth wide, as though yelling a single word. Her face creases in apparent pain. She turns and rushes out of sight.

Caddie steps quickly away from the window. It’s Anya, she reminds herself. Poor, disturbed Anya. Exactly what she and Marcus said to each other before Lebanon. Nothing more.

Goronsky is behind her. “I know why you want this so much,” he says.

“Want what?” She faces Goronsky.

“To be with the settlers.” He brushes her hair out of her face. The skin on his fingers burns like sandpaper. “It’s a relief, isn’t it, to be immersed in
someone else’s
fury?” She smells the coffee on his breath. “And they wouldn’t scare you, would they? All cats are gray at night. An old Russian proverb.”