The Inbetween People (10 page)

The day comes, and when you awake, early, you close your eyes, and you will the sleep to come for another moment. You think of your mother, you remember her touch, the light way she moved, her bare feet on the cold floor, you remember how she used to say the past is exactly that—the past; you remember this house, how it was when it was still filled with her. Karim is sleeping in his bed. Bye, Karim, you say, but he does not open his eyes. You watch him sleeping, but he is not sleeping, he is awake, and you turn from him. You open the window of your room, the heat pours in, you peer outside, at the women working in the fields picking swollen watermelons. They are like ants in the distance, and beyond them the mountains, and beyond these mountains, Safsaf. The smell of the jasmine drifts up from the yard and you gaze down at that dark place, sheltered by the walls of the surrounding houses. It is at the entrance to a small laneway opposite your window that the jasmine grows, clinging to life by draping itself around a weeping willow, planted by Grandmother, opposite her kitchen window, a weeping willow tree, a safsaf, in memory of her other home, enabling it to spiral upwards towards the sun. You gaze at the blackened crates piled up in the corner, the rubbish strewn around—old shoes, even the bonnet of Uncle Sabri’s blue minivan, rusted now, with holes in it—but still there is just the smell of jasmine.

You walk down the stairs and place your bags at the door. Grandmother is at the sink, and your father is sitting at the table, drinking his morning coffee. He nods at you, but your grandmother does not turn.

Do you want coffee? your father asks. No, you answer, no, I will get some on the way. He nods. Well, he says, off you go then. Goodbye, you say. I’ll be back soon. He nods and stares into his coffee.

Goodbye Grandmother, you say, but she doesn’t turn. She is slicing bread, fresh bread that she baked that morning.

It’s best to go now, your father says, and you turn from them, and then Basmah is in the doorway, her eyes are smiling at you, and that catches your heart. I’m going, you say, and she follows you outside. Your bag, it’s heavy, she says, your father will bring you to the bus station. No, you say, no, I’m okay, I will carry it myself. You’ll phone, won’t you, she says. Yes, you say, when I get a chance I will call.

You turn away from the house, the bus station is a blur in the distance, and you stumble over the cracks in the concrete. It’s nothing, you tell yourself, three years, one of the elements of living in this country, becoming part of things, something we should have done long ago. You walk past two women drying watermelon seeds on a blanket, they nod at you and you smile in return. The morning sun is already hot on your back, and the house, Safsaf, your mother’s grave, all of it is behind you, and the future is blank, you can colour it whatever colour you want, shape it to the shape of your thoughts, it is all your decision, all of it.

C
HAPTER
13

T
he rain is heavier now, the darkness is full of it, cracks of thunder explode across the night, each one returns to us again and again, through the darkness, the empty desert caves giving back to the night an answering cry. The jackals are silent, their thirst temporarily satiated by the rain, the hardship of summer has dissipated, and winter is yet to come. I cannot write, the onslaught of the late autumn rain has obliterated any desire to write, a deep exhaustion has descended upon me, the memories are suddenly vague, scattered, yet I cannot sleep, a sudden cold penetrates my bones. I hear David pacing up and down in his cell. Already the world is colder with the dust of summer gone from the air. I stand at my window and place my hands on the cool bars, lean my forehead against it but outside there is only darkness, and the rain.

Back at my desk now, the plastic is cold in my hands. I stare through the darkness at my photograph, captured before the explosion, the words on the page declaring that Avi Goldberg is a citizen of the United Kingdom. I trace my finger across the page. The pages are crisp and new, though there are traces of clay across them. The passport arrived at noon. We collect our post at the same time every day, after we have completed the morning work, before lunch is served, we stand in line and they call out our identification number. It was the first letter I received here, and for a fleeting moment I thought it might be a letter from my mother, that her words might reach me here; only when I held the crisp envelope in my hands and read the typed words I realised that it could not possibly be from her, for how can she know that I am here. Yet for a brief moment, as I stepped forward to receive the letter, the anticipation of the boy was there again, the anticipation of walking home from school knowing there might be a letter from her, my mother; I reached out my hands and the guard passed it to me, a Russian guard, the monotony of his army service etched across his face. Our eyes met, there was contempt in his, I am unsure as to what he read in mine, and then the letter was in my hands, a padded envelope, a passport.

David paces about his cell, I hear him opening his window as far as he can until it crashes against the black bars. Gusts of cold air dart through my cell, for my window is already open and the wind rushes through in a great draft, I can taste the rain in it.

W
HEN
I was four years old, my mother ran away. A May evening, she was standing on the patio uncorking a bottle of red wine, the sun was low, throwing fingers of orange across the sky. Father had returned home from the gardens, shirtless, his face red from the sun and glazed with sweat, he wore a purple handkerchief around his head. Let’s drink some wine, she said, I’ll just wash, he said, oh, come on, Daniel, she said, can’t you just have a glass of wine as you are, you can shower afterwards. He hesitated, no, he said, I’d like to have a shower now.

I was sitting in the corner of the patio, playing with a fleet of John Deere tractors that I had accumulated over the years. A neat pile of soil lay in front of the parked tractors, waiting to be scooped up. My mother, her face flushed, placed the bottle of wine on the table and went indoors. After a time Father appeared on the patio, where is your mother, he said, where has she gone. He disappeared back indoors to search for her and when he reappeared he was muttering to himself. The bottle of wine was on the table, he poured himself a glass—she should be back soon he said aloud, wherever it is she has disappeared to.

Father sat back and sipped his wine, closed his eyes for a time. When the first traces of darkness appeared in the sky he sprung up, paced from one end of the patio to the other, stared into the distance—where is your mother, he said aloud, where can she be, and then something else, inaudible, under his breath. Gone, I said, and I crumbled balls of clay between my fingers. Father came towards me, grabbed my hands and dusted the soil from them.

I must look for her, he said, he picked me up and began to circle the kibbutz, where can she be, he murmured, what is wrong, where can she be. I must have grown heavy in his arms, for he placed me beside him and began to pull me after him. My legs grew tired and after a time he looked at me absently, I’ll have to bring you to the children’s house for the night, he said. He checked his watch, it’s still early, he said. Never mind, someone will be there, and he strode towards the children’s house, though I had begun to cry, for Mother was gone and my legs were weary, and we did not know where she was in the descending darkness.

Father, I said, I’ll help find Mother, but he ignored my pleas, and strode through the darkness towards the light of the children’s house. Yefat was there, warm and soft, and anxious, she gathered my face to her chest; the poor boy, she said, it’s early, he does not have to be back for almost another hour. Father explained to her that he had to leave me there, so she held me tight, and he strode away into the darkness to find my vanished mother.

I slept that night in the end, though I vowed to myself I would not sleep until my mother was safe; it came to me, descended upon me, an anxious tortured sleep, even now I remember that. I remember that night, waking in the darkness, raising my head to look around me, the peaceful breath of my sleeping comrades, the dim light where Yefat sat reading a book and humming to herself, the large windows of light the moon cast across the floor. And all the time knowing that she was gone, lost, that Father and I could not find her, could not locate her in the darkness.

A
VI
, D
AVID
says, his whisper loud in the night, you are awake, I can hear you. He is pacing around his cell again, his footfall relentless, purposeful in the silence. Avi, he says, don’t you wonder why I am here. You want to know why I’m here, don’t you, Avi? You want to know?

David, I answer, we are all here by choice. I walk to the door of my cell, his face appears through the bars of the door opposite me. It’s good to talk, Avi, he says. A jackal howls in the distance, and I move to my window, waiting for dawn to arrive. One month, I say, I’m here for one month, you’re here for one month. The time we should be in the Reserves doing our service. After that we leave, I say, that’s it.

David calls after me, my last army service, he says. I sit down on the stone floor of my cell, trace my finger through the dust, the scar on my face throbs in the cooler night air. We were on the way to the territories, he says, when we were diverted. Some sort of protest, he says, things got out of control, and we were diverted there to help regain control of the situation. He sighs. A man, he says, a man got shot. I was near him.

I hear him shuffling around in the darkness, turning away from the door of his cell, moving back to the bars. I didn’t pull the trigger, he says, but I was near him. I saw everything. He is silent for a few moments. He went down right away, he says. There was a woman with him, she was pregnant and in distress. I tried to help her, he says, I tried to calm her down, but it was obvious pretty quickly that something was wrong. I stand, move to my doorway again, he is standing at his door, hands clasped against the bars. Something wrong medically I mean, he says. Maybe shock, I don’t know. But she couldn’t calm down, she was leaning over the man and she was hysterical, clutching her stomach and screaming. I tried to tell her he was dead and that she needed to save herself. And the baby. He starts to cry. She was about six months pregnant. I held her hand, he says, I tried to calm her down, tried everything I could think of, though I don’t think she realised I was there, but then I was ordered to move away.

What did you do, I say.

I moved away, he says, what else was there to do. I don’t know what happened after I left, but I heard her screams for a long time.

David, I say, you need to be quiet. They will hear you. He turns away. He says, they are watching television they won’t hear, and anyway they don’t really care most of the time. They will, I say, they will hear and they’ll punish us. After I left her, he says, I noticed the crowd watching her, but they were scared to approach. I stare into the dimly lit corridor, at the black door of his cell opposite me. I knew the man was dead immediately, David says, I knew he was dead. She did too. I took his hand to feel for a pulse but there was none there. When I let go, his hand just fell to the ground.