The Distance Between Us (4 page)

“And soon, very soon, we discuss this New York transfer again,” Mike says. “But seriously.”

“Right-o.”

“In the meantime, you can listen to your music or snorkel
in the Red Sea or explore the holy sites. They owe you nine weeks’ vacation anyway. Until Jon leaves, until we talk, stay off the job.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it, Caddie. No fooling around. This isn’t only from me. It’s orders from on high.”

“On High,” she repeats, liking the weight the editor gives the phrase. Liking that she will be defying On High, the very thing that betrayed her.

Two

T
HEY ZOOM UP
the narrow, winding embankment to Jerusalem, the road everyone takes fast and careless as if they’re racing to shake the hand of God, as if they’re so joyful to be in the land of Abraham that they’re willing to die the moment they get there. The windows are down and Caddie strains forward. The air blasts her face, supports her shoulders and forces shut her eyes. The car leans and at that moment the memory of Marcus intrudes. She can’t feel his full weight, only his hand, its fierce pressing at the small of her back, and his breath at her ear as though he were whispering.

“I don’t
know
why,” she says, pushing his image away. “For Christ’s sake.”

“What?” the taxi driver asks.

Caddie clears her throat. “Nothing.”

The driver nods knowingly. A person muttering as she enters
the Holy City is not uncommon; he takes it in stride. Caddie’s colleagues will not so easily overlook it.

“Your first time?” the driver asks with misplaced confidence. She guesses from his accent that he is from eastern Europe, and two weeks ago she would have engaged him in conversation, asked where he was born and how he finds it here, what he likes and what he doesn’t, how many children and grandchildren he has and what they do, because you never know where a good story might begin.

Now, though, she wants to eavesdrop on her own thoughts. She shakes her head. “Nope.” Leans back and closes her eyes. The driver, giving up—what a shame, his passenger is lousy for conversation—turns up the radio and begins to hum along.

Caddie mentally lists the photojournalists she’s known who died. Samuel Harris, a freelance television cameraman she had drinks with in a Vienna bar: hacked to death by a crazed mob in Jo’burg. Yuri, on assignment for Russian TV, who didn’t talk much but was always smiling: reduced to crumbs by a roadside bomb in Lebanon. Reuters photographer Sandra Hutchison, who shared a breakfast with Caddie in Cairo: taken down by crossfire in Sierra Leone.

Caddie has refused to allow herself to picture these deaths. She walked away each time the topic came up in a group of reporters, hating the sentimentality in the voices of some of her colleagues, the undercurrent of greedy thrill in others. Part of a journalist’s job is to stay detached, no matter how severe the tragedy or how close it lands. Reflect the story; don’t absorb it,
because if you allow yourself to feel the full force of sorrows and horrors, you will succumb to them—that much Caddie knows. The desperate moments will at best numb her, and at worst cripple her, and she will be unable to collect the quotes or the color, do her job. The repercussions of random destruction or deliberate hostility often lead to the most profound moments in people’s lives. She has to be there fully to record that, and so, Caddie has learned to shut down a piece of herself. Disconnect, at least some.

Besides, getting drawn in was dangerous; everyone knew that, everyone who lasted. Kevin Carter—the name, to Caddie, was like a warning signal. Nothing, not even the Big One he won for his shot of a vulture lurking next to a cadaverous Sudanese child, could rescue him from the opaque morass he sank into once he lost his detachment, once the clear spot inside him went muddy. The horrors he’d witnessed were bad enough—including that near-dead child dragging herself along the ground, who brought to mind his own daughter. Then came the shrill criticism he faced for not helping the kid to the feeding center, for being caught up in the composition of a great photo, for sticking to the role of one who records—his job, after all.

A “Carter Moment” is how she’s thought of it since. When a journalist teeters between getting the story and getting
into
the story. Compassion serves a limited purpose, as Carter proved. Three months after taking home that Pulitzer, he hooked up a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and gassed himself inside his red pickup.

Measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings—that’s what she has had to learn. That gets her the interview
and
keeps her safe.

Usually.

She opens her eyes and shrugs to rid herself of the doubts that stick to her like a burr. They’re off the highway now, driving among the blond bricks of the city, following a finger of Jerusalem to its very palm. The driver drops her at the corner of her sinewy street and she walks the rest of the way, a few steps behind a nun. Three Hasidim hovering around a newsstand glance her way as she passes. A young Israeli in leather sandals spits out the shells of sunflower seeds as he hums a tune she recognizes, “At Khaki li Ve’echzor,” about a fallen soldier. Someone’s wash hangs from a rope strung between buildings, dark clothes coupling with pale sheets.

What a concoction, Jerusalem. It took Caddie no short while to come to terms with its heap of competing religious rituals: rabbis issuing eerie and obscure edicts about light switches and women’s wigs; imams with their barely coded urgings to the street; priests swinging platters of incense and muttering in inconsequential Latin. All of it colliding and overlapping like an exaltation of crows within a city that often seems far too compressed.

She remembers striding off into Jerusalem alone that first day nearly five years ago, eager to absorb the territory she’d been newly assigned to cover. She tramped through the walled Old City, paused at an Arab café for a sesame-covered bread ring, and practiced her Arabic with the owner. She fumbled
with the still unfamiliar shekels, then boarded a bus full of Israeli soldiers and eventually got lost in Mea She’arim.

By day’s end, she sensed what lay over the city like a quilt: large rules with horrifying consequences. Rules way beyond the superficial restrictions of manners she’d known before. Absolute, binding, primitive rules that got their backbone from blood and stones and God. Rules that she didn’t yet fully understand, but knew she had to follow.

T
HE FIRST THING SHE NOTICE
as she steps into the building is that Mr. Gruizin has painted a thick scarlet stripe on her mailbox. Of course. He invariably heads downstairs with his paintbrush whenever one of his neighbors travels, whether on annual reserve duty, business trip, or vacation. He claims the stripe is a barrier to danger, intended to keep a wanderer safe. The paint on Caddie’s mailbox feels rough and substantial beneath her fingertips. Does he consider his effort successful this time?

She unlocks her apartment door. Usually when she’s been gone, she heads directly for her bedroom, dumping bags and jacket along the hallway. Usually she wants to inhale the leftover scent of
her
that lingers on the sheets, the towels. She’s eager for the sight of the window across from her bed, its familiar view of the street below.

Now, though, she’s brought to a halt by—
shit, by a bunch of inanimate objects.
Her desk against the wall, computer atop. She can see Marcus standing there kneading her shoulders, lacing his fingers through her hair, urging her to stop working. (Why
hadn’t
she stopped working?) The coffee-table photography book of Paris he gave her last Christmas when they came back here after covering Bethlehem to sit side by side on the floor, opening presents, eating popcorn. The tall glass on the table next to the couch. He drank water from it—held in his right hand, touched to his lips—minutes before they left for the airport.

The air vibrates, becomes dense and watery.

Kill the bastards.

But how?

She looks at her own hands: these hands that twice wrung a chicken’s neck. When Caddie was sixteen, Grandma Jos grew sick, so the chore of killing the chickens fell briefly to Caddie—before she gave up and bought them already killed and cleaned. Both times, she’d turned her head away and let her hands act on their own. And except for the initial revulsion, it was much easier than she’d expected. A chicken’s neck is startlingly tenuous.

Now, though, her hands seem too small, too distant from her body to be of any real use.

Behind her, the front door opens. Ya’el has used her spare key. One arm is outstretched to embrace, the other wrapped around a can of Boker coffee. Ya’el’s uncontrolled frizzy hair clashes with her off-the-rack blazer in earth tones, creased from a day working at the bank. “Oh my God, Caddie.” Ya’el hugs her again and directs her toward the couch. “And Marcus. God.” She smells of lipstick and black olives. “Which arm?” she demands in her husky voice.

Caddie lifts her left arm slightly and pulls away. “I’m all right.”

Ya’el sits back. “I’m so glad you’re finally home. I thought somebody would try to talk you into staying away for good.”

“No way. Back to work. That’s what I need.”

Ya’el shakes her head. “Not back to work, not right away. But back here, yes. Where we understand, where we’ve been through it, too. This is your
home
. Now, tell me. Everything.”

Caddie draws a large couch pillow toward her, covering her stomach.

“I know, Caddie,” Ya’el says after a moment. “I thought I couldn’t talk about it either. But it was a relief to talk with you. A
relief
, trust me,”

Ya’el puts her hand on Caddie’s. Ya’el thinks she knows what Caddie feels. Her brother was kidnapped while on army duty along the Lebanese border, tortured and killed. Ya’el received a photograph of his bruised and mangled body in the mail from an unknown sender. For nearly two years she held futility like a knot in her gut. Then Caddie moved in, and the two women began talking. And maybe because Caddie was an outsider, attentive in a way that tended to draw people out, or maybe simply because the timing was right, Ya’el spilled it one evening. How furious she’d become. Afraid and sad. And, finally, how much better she felt after telling it all to Caddie.

Caddie never understood how releasing a flood of words could possibly be comfort enough. She couldn’t understand why Ya’el didn’t try harder to find out who sent that photograph, who murdered her brother. That submissiveness, a reminder
of Grandma Jos, irritated her. But she never said so. She listened. A journalist’s job.

Now Caddie clears her throat. “Tell me about the girls. And how’s work?”

Ya’el stares a moment, then shakes her head. “I guess a sore must become a scab before it heals,” she says.

The doorbell saves Caddie from having to reply. Ya’el opens the door to Mr. Gruizin, the mailbox painter, followed by Mrs. Weizman, carrying her rose-patterned soup tureen.

“Now,
bubeleh
, don’t get up,” Mrs. Weizman says.

Goulash. Mrs. Weizman’s famous opinionated goulash—absolutely no to the green peppers but you can never add too much paprika—brought forth for each death, disaster, or even infection. So then. That means everyone in the building knows what happened. But Caddie should have figured that. Nothing is secret in this country for long; it’s always been that way. Probably every Israeli over the age of ten knew when their enemy King Hussein toured Tel Aviv in bearded disguise, though no journalist reported it for more than a decade. For months, they all knew that Ethiopian Jews were being spirited into the country, even knew the government had dubbed it Operation Magic Carpet, though the censor had forbidden a word of it in the local or international media. When a military operation goes awry, the street knows hours before it’s broadcast. So what’s the surprise that news of the ambush has traveled from Ya’el on the fifth floor to Mr. Gruizin at ground level, back up to Mrs. Weizman on third?

Ya’el heads into Caddie’s open kitchen with the soup. “I’ll make coffee.”

“How did you all know I was coming back today?” Caddie asks.

“We didn’t,” Mr. Gruizin says.

“
I
did,” Mrs. Weizman says. Mr. Gruizin’s eyebrows lunge into his forehead. “No, I did, Ya’akov. I
felt
it.” She strokes Caddie’s cheek with her papery fingers. “
Feh
, what a sorrow to see you so pale.”

“What do you mean? She looks wonderful,” argues Mr. Gruizin. “Am I right, Ya’el?” he calls.

Ya’el steps back into the living room. “She’s coping.” It comes out sounding like a lie, and Ya’el blushes and withdraws again.

Mrs. Weizman leans closer to Caddie. “How can you say so, with those washed-out cheeks?”

Caddie lowers her face but can’t escape their stares. She starts to rise. “Ya’el, you need help?”

Mrs. Weizman reaches out a hand to stop her. “Sit,
bubeleh.
”

“She looks better than should be expected, anyway,” Mr. Gruizin says after a moment. “She’s a strong girl. It’s my red, you know. Did the trick. Kept her safe.”

“Ya’akov!” Mrs. Weizman shakes her head. “I’ve never known such a superstitious man. Caddie isn’t so superstitious. Are you, dear?”

Caddie manages what she thinks is a smile, but it fails to translate somehow, because Mrs. Weizman quickly takes Caddie’s
hands and squeezes them between her own, as though Caddie had broken down, instead of borne up.

“Oh,
bubeleh
,” she says, her voice thick with intent to comfort. “Sometimes it’s not the doctor but the rebbe who knows the cure. I remember once my palms started itching; they were itching for a week, all the time, night and day. I couldn’t sleep, it was that bad. This cream or that cream, the doctors said, but nothing worked. Of course I thought of the old superstition, my grand-uncle used to say it all the time when I was a little girl, he would say, ‘Nala, when your palms itch, you are going to come into some money.’ But for a few shekels, I should keep waiting? I went to see Rebbe Kroyanker.
‘Gevalt!’
I said. And he told me. He knew how to cure it.”