The Distance Between Us (5 page)

Mr. Gruizin sighs. “We’re ready already. What did the rabbi say?”

Ya’el, pouring them all coffee, gives Caddie a private grin. They’ve often laughed at how like an old married couple Mr. Gruizin and Mrs. Weizman are.

“
Nu
, this is the point,” Mrs. Weizman says. “He told me I needed to make peace with my sister, we’d been arguing for months—about what, it’s not important. And I thought,
feh!
A little squabble with my sister should cause this
tsouris?
The rebbe must be, forgive my disrespectful tongue,
meshugener
. But I was desperate. And what do you think? We made up. Three hours later my itching was gone.”

“A miracle worker,” says Mr. Gruizin.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Mrs. Weizman turns eagerly to Caddie. “So if you won’t go to one of ours, you could see
your . . .” she waves a hand, “whoever you go to see. Everyone can use a bit of God sometimes. Am I wrong, Ya’akov?”

Mr. Gruizin nods and begins to talk, but Caddie lets his words slide by unattended. She remembers the town church of her childhood, a smooth and generous pew, the congregation’s voices soaring in hymn.

All praise to Him who came to saaave,
Who conquer’d death and scorned the graaave

She remembers the hard bread on her tongue, the heat of gathered bodies, and Grandma Jos leaning close, smelling of Ivory soap and talcum and mint tea.
A simple trust, Caddie, will lead us into the calm valley
.

Caddie never replied. She understood that Grandma Jos needed to imagine His arms around her to soften the hard angles of a life gone strangely amiss: her spouse—Caddie’s grandfather—living twenty miles away with another family in a white house with yellow shutters, her daughter—Caddie’s mother—sleeping somewhere in a corrupt city and bathing too infrequently, her granddaughter—Caddie herself—abandoned at her doorstep. To blame Him would have been foolhardy, because who would Grandma Jos have then? Grandma Jos thought she was teaching Caddie about religion, but what she was really teaching was what it meant to be alone.

Caddie knew even then, though, that a calm valley was not what
she
sought—it sounded, in fact, like torture. Nor, despite Grandma Jos’s dire warnings, did she want redemption. Nor a
savior, nor a tearful walk to the front to be welcomed into the community of believers. God, she already knew to be as icy as a winter dawn. He rarely paid attention, and was not to be trusted when He did. Grandma Jos used Him as an excuse for living with things as they were. Caddie had no use for Him at all.

“Caddie! Are you listening?” Ya’el touches her arm and Caddie looks into her friend’s face and there it is again, Ya’el’s effort to hide a worried expression.

Caddie can’t still an involuntary shudder. “Sorry,” she says. “Go ahead, say it again.”

There is a moment of quiet, an exchange of glances, before Mr. Gruizin speaks. “You are worn from the flight. Of course, of course. Ladies, let’s go.”

“I’m all right.” But Caddie’s false words are lost in the bustle of everyone except her rising.

Mrs. Weizman’s cheek, surprisingly supple, is against hers. “Your friend? He is between God’s hands.”

Ya’el speaks softly in Caddie’s ear. “Tomorrow we’ll talk.”

Caddie forces a jaunty wave as though her homecoming were a delight, a celebration. She keeps waving until finally the door is pulled shut.

S
LEEP DROWNS HER, QUICK AND WELCOME
, but she wakes in the night to a sharp jab of panic. The five minutes replay. The driver slows. A bush moves. Marcus rises, then sinks. The Land
Rover turns. Marcus’s lips: a scribbled line. His expression: surprised, then gone.

She lingers over those minutes as though they’d lasted hours, searches for clues as to how they could have
not happened
. Berates herself for going with a driver no one really knew. For making him pause for the woman with the child—perhaps without those wasted minutes, they would have sped past unprepared ambushers. And for being a woman. If she’d been a man, Marcus wouldn’t have shielded her with his body.

She gets up to scrub the bathroom sink. She rubs the yellowing porcelain rhythmically, uselessly, as though it mattered. Not so long ago, Marcus brushed his teeth here. Not so long ago, he shot a roll of her coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel. Pseudoannoyed, she waved him away—“Cut it out!”—and they both laughed. Now she scours until her arm muscles ache. And keeps scouring.

Finally she moves restlessly to the couch near the open window. On the other side of the city, a siren weeps. Down the street, a car horn wails. Next door a man and a woman quarrel in Hebrew, the woman in trailing sentences shaded with meaning, the man with tiny bites:

“I don’t care if he is your boss. You don’t overlook something like that. That’s pathetic. You have to—”

“Now I’m
pathetic?
”

“Look, what I’m saying is, you have to respond. It’s a matter of how . . .”

How much it would cost to have one killed, just one?

It’s a crazy idea. A nighttime thought, dark and fleeting. Caddie goes to the kitchen to warm some milk. There are two sorts of people, she sees. The innocent—Caddie used to be one—shut their eyes and sleep through the dark. Then there are the rest, knowingly guilty one way or another. Denied the nocturnal gift of oblivion and purification, they rise once and again to escape a vision or a memory, to yearn for dawn while fearing it, to quarrel or to plot. The texture of their daytimes, then, is distorted by the weakened quality of their sleep. Presidents, rebels, peacemakers and assassins: history itself has been radically altered by the toll of interrupted nights. There’s a whole damn story there.

Eventually her chest loosens, her musings stutter and stop, her body slackens. The disagreement next door persists, its taut rhythm invading her dreams.

In the morning her legs are unsteady and her left arm twitches. The second cup of coffee stills her limbs.

She pulls on a long-sleeved shirt, tan pants and lace-up hiking boots. At a glance, she resembles a granola-munching tourist, a kibbutz lodger or visiting peacenik. Still wholesome, still healthy. Only the observant could pick up signs of her internal frays: she knows she’s given to long pauses, and that bruise-like shadows underline her eyes, and that her skin has taken on a grayish cast she can’t scrub off.

She shoves a change of clothing, a towel and two bed sheets into a sack, and makes sure she has a notebook and her press card. She won’t be checking in with her office this morning.
She knows she’d be advised against heading alone for the religiously rigid Gaza Strip, focal point of anger and poverty and reprisals. And especially advised against pausing for a swim.

If you require a bloody sacrosanct dip into baptismal water, not there, not there
. It’s Marcus’s voice. She doesn’t imagine it; she
hears
it.
And when, by the way, did you get so devout?

She turns away. She wants neither questions nor warnings, not from anyone. Gaza is a place that has borne violence and survived. It’s where she’ll go.

T
AKING THE ROAD
that traces the curve of the Mediterranean, she flashes her press card to pass the Erez checkpoint. The next stretch is littered with garbage, the buildings graffiti-soaked. Two boys on a donkey stare sullenly as she passes. The air, ripe with diesel oil and fish blood, deposits a slippery film on her cheeks. The beach stands empty, an outcast despite its tenderly beckoning waves.

On good days, days without gunfire, men in
jallabiyas
and women in embroidered linen skirts crowd themselves into the sea. When they emerge, wet and heavy, they disappear into separate tents to change. But the locals are home today, preparing for a funeral or a demonstration, on strike or maybe sinking into collective exhaustion. Gaza is not a tourist destination. This is where Samson was thrown into a dungeon and died. It’s where, only months ago, Islamic militants burned down every liquor store, every hotel that served alcohol. It is
also where, sometimes, an eccentric foreigner who chooses to pause can find solitude.

Though Caddie thinks she is prepared for the sea’s chill, it startles. She swims the breaststroke for a few minutes to warm up, then dives under. Once she’s beneath the water, it comforts like the weight of a hefty blanket. As she breaks the surface, though, old images assert themselves. Again she submerges, walking her fingers along the sandy floor. She stays under until her lungs ache. After a few gasping breaths, she sees with a shock that pale crocodiles lie stranded on the beach, waiting for her.

Driftwood. Only driftwood, of course. Crocodiles don’t live in Gaza.

This won’t work, this attempt at renewal. “Go drink the sea at Gaza,” the Palestinians say, when they mean
go to hell
. Why did she think she could find consolation here?

She emerges, throws the sheets over her car to block the windows and, within the car’s confines, struggles out of her wet clothing, into the dry shirt and pants. Then, instead of heading back to Jerusalem, she aims for Gaza City. She passes a Palestinian refugee camp, its plywood and aluminum shacks peeking from behind a brick wall. Few cars travel through the streets paved with stones and broken bottles. Almost on autopilot, she heads toward Hikmet Masri’s shop. She stops to see Hikmet every time she’s in Gaza. Her most reliable source, calm and articulate. Plus, he lives above his store, so she can usually find him even when it’s closed.

This time the door stands ajar. She peers inside to see the
jumble of the shelves, the mix of colors and shapes crammed together as though Hikmet simply gathered whatever manna fell from heaven and dragged it in, planning to organize it all another day. Hikmet himself sits on a stool, the traditional checkered cloth draped over his head.

“Caddie! Allah blesses me in directing you here once again. What can I offer you? Today I have fresh limes and ribbons in a dozen colors. Also two volumes of a French-language dictionary and some slightly used crayons.” Then Hikmet chuckles. “Or perhaps you want only a good quote?”

He pours overheated Turkish coffee from a samovar and offers her cigarettes, which she declines. His shop smells of cardamom. She suddenly feels leaden.

“And your photographer friend?” Hikmet asks. “Where is he today?”

Only then does Caddie recall that Marcus accompanied her last time she visited Hikmet, last time she inhaled in one breath the scent of cardamom and crayon and citrus together. She tries to wet her lips, but her tongue is dry. “He’s not working anymore,” she says. Hikmet raises his eyebrows. “Sometimes this job is dangerous,” she says. “We were in Lebanon and—” She picks up buttons from a basket, rubbing her fingers over their indented surfaces, pretending to inspect them before letting them fall. “He decided he’d had enough.”

“And you continue on?” Hikmet draws on his cigarette and holds the smoke a moment before exhaling. “A man is not what he wants to be, but what he must. Sometimes, perhaps, it is the same for a woman.”

She pushes the basket of buttons aside. “What’s been happening?”

He begins to grumble about the clashes, a noose around his neck, always followed by the funerals, which require him to close his business for a day, and then there are more clashes, more dead, another funeral. A downward spiral, he says. He pauses as though to consider the colorful phrase he will come up with, the quote so perfect she won’t be able to put it any lower than the third graph. Before he can speak, though, they’re interrupted by a noise from outside. Muffled, it’s hardly louder than a generous sneeze. But they’re attuned, both of them, to sounds of a certain timbre.

Hikmet invokes Allah’s name. “Always it’s something,” he mutters as he tucks his prayer beads into his pocket and rushes to the street.

Caddie’s knees soften; her fingernails drive into her palm. There is Marcus, with his chilled, wide-eyed expression.

She pushes him off. Too heavy.

His right shoulder slams against the door of the jeep.

His head falls carelessly at an odd angle, oh God.

She tears her gaze away from him and spots Rob staring at her with something she can’t identify. Not at first. Then, sharply, she recognizes it as accusation, as if she were responsible.

She hears a woman trilling.
The blast is here, in Gaza. Not Lebanon.

Notepad already in hand, she pushes through the shop’s door in time to catch an ambulance slicing up the street, and
the ululating woman lifting over her head a scrap of cloth stained with blood. On the next block, a section of wall is missing from a second-floor apartment. She looks up to see a man stumbling through the building entrance carrying a girl who looks to be about ten years old. The child’s eyes are closed. Her chest and right leg are burned.

Caddie imagines this moment framed through Marcus’s lens. Woman dropping to her knees:
click.
Man emerging from the smoke with girl in his arms:
click.
Close-up of girl, delicate face above damaged body, glazed eyes half-open:
click, click.
It’s odd, seeing it this way—at once more focused on tiny details, and more distant from them.

Emergency workers converge on the girl, and then three men lift her into the ambulance. Others rush upstairs to the smoking apartment.

There is no surprise in the accidental explosion of a firebomb. Materials used to make such bombs in the Strip are old and unstable, and the bomb-makers themselves—kids, often—are trying to patch together deadly explosives the way they might, in another culture, use rubber cement to assemble a model airplane. Mistakes are common. Still, there might be a story.

Caddie jogs to her car and drives fast to the Strip’s main hospital. She runs up the steps, discolored with blood, and shoves open the doors. No trace of antiseptic scent lingers in the halls; instead it smells of chickpeas, sweat and mold. Women in headscarves gossip as they cook over Bunsen burners in the hallway, while children toss jacks near their feet. A knot of
men under knitted caps huddle, their foreheads nearly touching. One drops a cigarette butt to the floor and grinds it with his heel. A nurse strolls past, pushing a patient in a wheelchair, his head slumped and eyes closed as he hums loudly, tunelessly. He is shushed by one of three men who sit on their haunches around a radio plugged into a hallway outlet, listening to the news.