The Distance Between Us (9 page)

She crosses her wrists on her lap. “Don’t know what you mean.”

He looks into his coffee cup. “How about this one?” he says after a moment. “What made you become a reporter?”

“What made you become a psychology professor?” she asks. “If that’s what you really are?”

“It’s such an awful story, yours is, then,” he asks, “that you won’t even answer?”

“Okay, okay. Let me think. My grandmother probably had something to do with it. She read the newspaper and the Bible aloud to me in equal measure, as though both were crucial. When time came to get a job, there were no openings for Bible writers.”

When he smiles, the darkness at his edges vanishes. “Then?” he asks.

“That’s it. The rest is no big deal.”

“No big deal,” he repeats, solemn again. “The fly cannot get into the closed mouth, can it?”

It’s not that he’s charming. There’s something in his eyes, though, something to do with his intensity. An element of risk he seems to hold within himself. He is staring at her, waiting.

After a moment, she shrugs. “And then, when I was nineteen, maybe twenty, I was working for the wire service on Friday and Saturday nights in Indiana—that’s where we lived. It was still only a job, late shift, mainly recording high school basketball scores. One night a tornado hit this little town forty miles away and the news editor told me to hop in my car and fly.”

Goronsky leans forward, his long fingers fluttering softly on the tabletop like moths against the window.

“I’d never been to the town before, never even heard of it.
It was dark and I started to get lost, but then I could see I was in the right area because of the snapped tree trunks, the flattened bushes. The wind made that shrill warning howl and I thought, what am I, crazy? I could drive right into the damn storm.”

His stare deepens. “You were scared?”

“No.” She licks her lips, remembering. “At least, that wasn’t the main thing. I felt focused. I had to find my way to wherever the story was happening. So I kept driving and it kept blowing and then I heard an ambulance siren. I tailed it all the way into pandemonium, clean and simple. The county hospital. Seven dead, a dozen or so injured. I spent the night interviewing and calling in reports, then drove out at dawn to assess the damage. And there it was, everywhere you looked—smashed houses, scattered toys, as though some god had flown into a fury.”

She looks up to see Goronsky watching her, and not with the fearful admiration that she’s been getting since Lebanon. Again, his stare holds intimacy. Again, that recognition.

Something inside her drums like his fingertips on the table. She looks away, pretends to survey the room.

“So that’s it,” she says after a moment, going on almost against her will. “That’s how I got addicted. A chance to find the seams. Live more than one life.”

She takes a deep breath, surprised by the words, committed to stopping them. And in that second, she feels his hand covering hers. Before she can be startled, he pulls away. She
doesn’t look at him, and she can sense that he, too, avoids glancing at her. When he speaks, his voice is taut, controlled.

“It’s how much you can take, isn’t it?” he says. “How much blood and breast-beating. That’s what makes a success in your business.”

Caddie almost rises from her seat. He’s drawing too close, this bosom stranger. She manages—just—to still the impulse to walk out.

It takes a moment to summon her will. Then she gives him a grin of indiscriminate friendliness, professional and proscribed.

“That,” she says, “and how closely you follow the howling wind.”

Four

C
ADDIE SPOTS THE SMOKE FIRST
. Then she sees several dozen forms agitating by the roadside like drops of water sizzling on a skillet. She and Pete are driving down a side street, and by the time they are close enough for a wide shot—
here we have Bethlehem, scene of today’s clash
—the stench of burning rubber forces its way through the closed windows. A smoldering tire sends up its signals. An ambulance lingers nearby. Pete shoves a red-and-white
keffiyeh
—a solidarity symbol—on the dash next to the sign that says “journalist” in large Arabic letters. “For what fucking good it’ll do,” he mutters. He backs up, points his car down an alley and parks in a sheltered area behind the Israeli checkpoint.

He shrugs into his flak jacket and tosses Caddie a bicycle helmet that belongs to his neighbor’s son. “Let’s rock,” he says, and they move forward together, slowly at first, then a dash alongside the street where Palestinian-thrown rocks and broken
glass are landing. They take cover in a shuttered gas station as an Israeli soldier fires off a round. Caddie slips in close to the building, breathing fast. A sour taste forms in the back of her throat.

“You okay?”

“Yep. Just—” Caddie hesitates, unzips her waist pouch, feels around inside. “Making sure I have everything.”

Pete studies her for an extra beat, then nods and moves forward.

This fear is unexpected, damnit. She’s going to give herself about five minutes to feel it. Then she’s going to get over it.

She paces, the fingers of one hand grazing the rough brick wall, studying the position of the four-dozen
shabab
and the three Israeli soldiers. She needs to get a sense of where the stones and rubber bullets are likely to land; that will make her feel better. She needs to find her comfort zone within the hollow boom of tear gas, the sharper rap of rubber bullets, the whiz of hurled stones. No live ammo on either side so far. Only photographers are here, grouped near the gas pumps where they can zoom in on the clash. They exude a vague sense of indifference, a bit bored as they wait for that moment of loss or anguish that could propel their work to the front page, the top of the newscast. Occasionally they chat or someone cracks a joke.

It seems safe enough. Of course it is. And anyway, it’s been five minutes. She won’t regain her nerve hugging the wall.

She edges toward Pete. “This gang shot—it’s no fucking good,” he says half to himself as he turns toward her. “Besides,
the light sucks. Over there would be better.” He points his chin in the direction of the Palestinian protesters.

An ambulance pulls forward to reposition itself, and Pete dashes toward it, using it for cover. He holds his camera near his face for protection. Without thinking, Caddie follows. The vehicle shields them briefly, then turns onto a side road. For half a dozen heartbeats, Caddie is fully exposed, directly between protesters and soldiers, in line of both stones and bullets. She stretches her legs, clears the street and flattens herself against a lime-colored wall—a bakery, closed for now. She’s panting slightly.

Pete hasn’t paused. He keeps his back close to the shops, his camera to his eye, snapping.

Before Caddie can assess her new position, a young woman, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, grabs her arm. The touch makes Caddie jump. The woman holds a cucumber in one hand, which she waves as she talks in a half-crazed voice about Israeli settlers creeping to their house before dawn a week ago, dragging away her cousin and his best friend, beating the cousin and murdering the friend. “He was not involved in crime, like they say,” she says. “He was a good boy, my cousin’s friend. And now he dies and no one notices. It is wrong.” She swings the cucumber, narrowly missing Caddie’s cheek. “Can I tell you his name?” she pleads. “Only his name, to include among the martyrs?”

Could be decent. Maybe Caddie can weave it into whatever she manages to get from Moshe. But not now. She takes the woman’s name, Halima Bisharat, and her address and
promises to stop in to see her family next week. “We will talk more, Halima,” Caddie says. “You tell me everything then, okay?” The young woman nods gratefully and Caddie turns back to the clash, aware of the intensifying fury of the protesters around her.

The “demo car” pulls up, delivering fresh stones and bottles to the protesters. Its driver, his features hidden behind a ski mask, fires a rifle into the air and draws cheers from the crowd. He fires again toward the Israeli checkpoint, then hits the gas, raising dust and sending his car skidding away. The calls to Allah, chanting and obscenities become louder.
“Allahu Akhbar.”
“Kill the Zionists.” God and gunfire, the combustible combination.

Pete scoots forward occasionally to grab a shot from behind the shelter of a demonstrator. But mainly he paces within his invisible safety zone.
Safety zone, what a pathetic concept. Like trying to walk between raindrops.

What would Marcus shoot if he were here? Because he
would
be here. He sometimes covered three clashes a day—he had incredible stamina, for which he credited those boxes of raisins. He’d look for dead and wounded, of course, but also for pictures of the youngest demonstrators, the nine- and ten-year-olds. They’d argued about that, the two of them.

Why always the kids, the kids, like they’re the only ones here? Why not the men?

With their sneers and pockmarked faces? No. For me, the children are the story.

She squints and can nearly see Marcus joining this dangerous
dance, his hands cupping the lens the way a florist might an orchid, his face pressed to the viewfinder, staring through the lustful eye of his camera, absorbed in the poetry of the scene.

Stones arcing beneath tear-gas canisters:
click
.

Molotov cocktails answered by rubber bullets:
click
.

Night-haired boys pitched against their helmeted half-brothers on an ancient battlefield, one or two folding to the stained ground:
click, click, click
.

She inches closer to the crowd, as Marcus would. Crouches, processing the scene from various angles. An Israeli soldier lunges from behind his concrete barricade and, with the skill of a starting pitcher, hurls a tear-gas canister with one arm and a stun grenade with another. He swears in Hebrew, a long slur that sounds like a medieval curse. Caddie’s eyes are watering. A Palestinian boy with a pink scar from eye to jawbone grabs Caddie’s arm and offers a dampened bandana as protection against the acrid tear gas. Caddie ties it around her nose and mouth and inhales deeply from under the bandana.

Wrapped around her face like that, it becomes a disguise that frees her. She begins to drift among the protesters like an invisible vapor, taking in their mood. Determination, yes, but also playfulness—they are, after all, mostly kids. A heightened sense of drama, too, runs between them. One of them may die today, so these moments must be full, valiant, colorful. A boy uses a rock to scratch a hand of Fatima in the dirt and then flings the stone toward the Israeli checkpoint with a cry. Two others hold their wrists together for a moment in what
seems to be a gesture of solidarity before dashing closer to the soldiers.

“Caddie!”

Three feet away from her, a bullet hits a Palestinian boy in his right shoulder. He looks to be about twelve. The force drives him to the ground and he falls with a sickening thud. He opens his mouth, but no sound emerges, and then he is hit again, this time in his groin. Blood splatters as though from the brush of a careless painter. He curls up and rolls onto his stomach. At the exit wound on his shoulder blade, a red spot appears through his clothing, then blooms like a flower, but fast like one of those speeded-up nature films.

She is closest to him, and she moves toward him.
Got to drag him to the ambulance.
Then she draws back. What she’s got to do is
not
assist the boy, but pay attention to the air turning frantic with
keffiyehs
and curses, the tear-gas stink replaced by the syrupy odor of blood, the guns of the Israeli soldiers now swinging slowly from right to left and back again. She has to be able to report it all.

Why, though, is no one helping the boy?

Finally, after what seems like a dozen minutes, several young men make their way to him and half-lift, half-drag him to the ambulance about a block away. The boy is not crying, not even whimpering, and what that costs him is etched on his face.

“Get back!” She turns toward Pete’s voice and realizes she is standing six yards in the open, without cover. Four boys stoop nearby behind two burned trash barrels. She drops to a
crouch and scuttles to join them. They barely glance at her, intent on their stone throwing.

Now more tear gas, more coughing. The barrel she’s hunched behind is hit dead-on by a bullet; it lurches like a man punched in the stomach. Rubber-coated or brass-tipped? From the thud of impact, she guesses the former.

Her forearms are covered with bits of ash. She brushes one off, then the other, aware of her sharp wrist bones, the rubbery texture of her palms. She feels a stare hot on the side of her neck and turns toward the shops. A girl, perhaps nine years old, stands watching. Despite the distance between them, everything about the child is magnified—long lashes, tiny hands, old straw basket on her arm.

Caddie should be where the girl is instead of kneeling in the center of the street.

But she wants to be closer to the violence than that, as close as possible. This rush is unmatchable. Far better than drugs or alcohol, better than collecting quotes like spent ammo after the fighting is finished. The talcum-dirt under her knees, the suspended smoke, the wide-eyed child, the percussion of her own heart—every element in this moment is rich, and essential.

She peeks out to judge the distance of the soldiers and catches sight of a rifle pointed in her direction. She ducks back. The boys are grinning at her now. One tugs her sleeve, pulling her gently to a safer position. She scrunches up more tightly behind the barrel. Another shot ricochets off its metal side. “Bang, you dead,” one of the kids teases in English, his
smile friendly. She laughs back, tosses her head and closes her eyes in a mock-dead posture.

A siren fused with a woman’s wail is the coda. As if the movement were prearranged, the protesters retreat like closing credits. Sometimes it goes on until nightfall, but this time they’ve decided to end it early, share a meal—who knows, maybe log on and read a backlog of e-mail.
Her
boys, the ones she took cover with, wave as they run off. “See you next time, lady,” one calls.