The Inbetween People (18 page)

Avi, you say. He nods at you. The older man turns to him, a question in his pale eyes, but Avi does not meet his gaze and the man turns away, opens a box of eggs and examines the contents, discarding it, and opening a new box, peering at the eggs contained within. Sometimes he holds an egg up to the light, twirls it around between his fingers, and in the end he begins to move the eggs between the boxes, assembling them carefully until one box contains the six eggs that have met his approval. He stands in front of Avi with the box of eggs in his hands.

What happened? you say.

Avi glances at the other man. Is that your father, you say, yes, he says, but makes no move to introduce him, then picks a cucumber out of the trolley in front of him, holds it in his hands. A bomb, he says. About seven weeks ago.

You take a step back. He stares at the cucumber, does not raise his eyes to you. His father pushes the box of eggs towards him, put these in the trolley, he says, I am going to buy the meat. Avi takes the eggs, holds the box in his hands, opens it, examines the speckled eggs inside. He picks one up, holds it in his hand, it fits perfectly in his palm.

It was one of three in the same evening, he says, about seven weeks ago. Maybe you remember. He raises his hand to his head, runs his fingers along the scar. There are people moving around you, brushing past you. A heavyset Moroccan woman drops a bottle of wine, it shatters with a bang. Avi jumps, his eyes flicker alarm for an instant, and the red liquid spreads out before you in a great puddle. You don’t move, don’t speak, it feels like you don’t breathe, but you do breathe, you are aware that you are breathing and he is breathing but there is no sound, the silence between you is absolute.

A man pushes forward, pressing his elbow into your back so you move backwards, away from Avi. Hey you, the man shouts at the Moroccan woman, he points his fingers at her eyes, hey you, you need to find someone to come clean this mess up, what do you think we are, animals; but she is turning away from him, pushing her trolley in between two women who are talking. Listen lady, the man shouts, who do you think you are leaving this mess behind you?

Where was the bomb, you ask, you raise your voice, for he hasn’t heard you, where was the bomb, you say.

The first bomb, he says, the first bomb we just heard, it was nearby. And as people fled the scene, another one was detonated. A bomber ran into the restaurant where we were drinking coffee.

Tel Aviv, you say, I remember. It was in Tel Aviv. He doesn’t answer, the red wine spreads across the floor, towards his plastered foot. Why were you there, you say?

I was drinking coffee with a girl, he says, a friend from the army.

He stops talking. He begins to wheel the trolley and you walk beside him, he leans on the trolley as he walks, putting little weight on his injured leg. We were talking, he says, she was laughing, and when we heard the blast we joined the people running from the scene, masses of us running up the street. It was night and some of the lights had gone out, and there was confusion everywhere. He stops talking, his voice drifts away, a woman pushes her trolley against him, he flinches, pulls back.

I remember that evening, you say. The bombs.

I saw one of the bombers, he says, he rushed past me into the restaurant. His eyes rest on you, but they are somewhere else. It was that bomb that got me, he says, the second one. There was another one afterwards, he says, as the rescue services arrived, but I don’t remember that. I was unconscious by then.

He begins to wheel the trolley again and you see his father coming towards him. You begin to back away, you feel that he is accusing you of something, what you are not sure, but his eyes are darker, sadder, more knowing than before; and the man with him is moving towards him, reaching his arm out, placing it beneath his elbow in a gesture of support. We should go home, he says, you need to rest.

Just then it seems to you that the world you stand in is his, the supermarket, the mall, the town, all creations of his people, and that he belongs to it, absolutely, and it to him.

I need to go, you say, I need to go now. He turns his maimed face towards you, and in that instant there is nothing left of the man you met on the beach that hot July day, the man you made your friend, the man you talked to about the past, your past, the man who gripped your hand before you left that first weekend. You know about these wounds, the agony, the nails tearing through the flesh, the damage that even one nail can do, the burning ball bearings, the slow course of the healing, the long dark days, for a body so burnt cannot go out into the sun.

Sahar, you say, Sahar is expecting a baby, maybe you will come and visit us, she would love to see you, but he is staring at the ground. Your voice trails off and you begin to turn away from him.

Your wounds, you say, how bad are they—you aren’t looking at him now, for there is a part of you that can’t.

They are getting better, he says, but the woman I was with was killed. There is nothing in his eyes when he says this.

I’m sorry, you say, and he nods, but you don’t see him anymore, he is a blur. You come out of the store in a rush, discarding the shopping you carry in your hands on the shelves inside the door. The light outside is dull, and the air seems muffled, it is cold; something brushes against your cheek and you hold out your hand—it is snowing. It is the first time you’ve seen snow. You stare at the sky and the thin white covering on the shivering earth. You walk towards your car, bend towards it, touch the snow, feel it, crunch it in your hands, rub it against your cheeks. You stand by your car and you brush the snow off and mould it in your hands.

A cat springs from a skip howling, and you jump back; its mouth is open and it is screaming, and on its side is a gash, deep and red and raw. You sit in your car for a time and then you drive, slowly, for it is snowing. You don’t wipe it from the windows, you let it fall against the windscreen, the starlike flakes melting against it, disappearing, becoming almost nothing but a drop of smudged rain on your window.

C
HAPTER
25

Y
ou remember that day, of course, Sahar says. I stare at the packet of cigarettes, yes, I say, I remember.

Will you bring me to England, she says, and she does not meet my eyes. She reaches her hand towards a large flowerpot beside her, placed exactly between my cubicle and the one beside it, toward the distorted stems of cacti reaching out in all directions.

Ruti is gathering the children to leave. She bends over the smaller boy, grabs his hand and waves bye bye for him to his father. Ruti, there is something else, David says, there is something else, there is integrity, there is gentleness, there is beauty. There is goodness. If you stay with me I will show you. He looks at the boys. I will show them, he says. I will show them, for they will see enough ugliness if they have to go where I went. He is standing and his voice carries across the room, so that Zaki and the warden at the door turn to stare at him.

She grimaces. Stop it, she says. Leave it now.

He stands there, a well-built man, not tall, the same height as her, his blue eyes flash at her, pleading with her not to leave. He looks around him, desperate for someone to back him up, add credibility to his words, the statistics are gone from him now. He gropes blindly towards me, Avi, he says, she is leaving, she is going, what will I do. There are tears in his eyes. He bends towards the cigarettes in front of me, fumbles with the packaging. I take them from him, remove the packaging, hand him a cigarette. Ruti is at the door, she turns back, he signals to her with his cigarette, wait, he says, but she is gone then, all that remains is one of the little boys, he stands in the doorway looking back at his father, and then disappears after his mother. David sits again, pulls his chair closer to us, casts his eyes downwards, he sucks on his cigarette.

A
FEW
years after my mother left, she sent us a photograph. This is your half-sister, she wrote, her name is Iseult. I looked at Iseult, held her photograph between my hands. A brown-eyed child with dark hair that curled just like my mother’s. He was there also, or so I had to assume, the man with the laugh, Ienja. I examined every last detail of the photograph: Ienja in a huge sweater that seemed too big for him, one of the dark bearded men from the dining room, raising a cigarette to his mouth, a tiny stub of light between his enormous fingers. There wasn’t much to see: a man who was not particularly memorable, striding through the snow wearing just a sweater and jeans, squinting into the winter light, the child rolling a snowball, staring up at him, laughter in her eyes. And my mother, standing beside them, a vacant smile on her face. She was wrapped up in a heavy duffel coat, her face almost covered by a woolly turquoise cap, and she wore mittens and a scarf that matched. Her face was blue with the cold, her lips a thin streak, and she looked tired and anemic in that snowy landscape. She didn’t look at Ienja and the child, or at the camera—she gazed instead at some distant spot. After a time I pushed it towards Father, who was sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee, a gardening book open in front of him. He regarded it for a time, then pushed himself upwards, reaching towards the uppermost shelf on the kitchen cupboard, he placed it there, between two of my mother’s plates, so that you could just see the child. The man was obscured by the edge of a plate, and my mother was not visible at all.

I would examine the picture sometimes when I was alone in his house. I came to know it so well that I could see it in my mind without holding it in front of me. Whenever I wanted I could envisage her before me, the thinness of the face, the blue lips, the distant eyes. There was a look on her face that I found mysterious, as if she didn’t belong with those people at all, Ienja and Iseult, there was something about her stance, the way she gazed into the distance, that separated her from them absolutely. Then I would hear footsteps on the patio and I would rush to the chair, stand on it, reach upwards to the uppermost shelf of the cupboard, and thrust the photograph back between the plates.

The photo remained there between the plates, but eventually I ceased to examine it; and over time it was pushed further back, so that the child too became obscured, and eventually disappeared, and just a corner of snowy landscape was visible. Years later I remembered the photo, and reached behind the plates, but it was gone, and my fingers instead landed on layers of accumulated dust.

She never sent another photo, my mother, though at times I supposed that perhaps she had, only that my father had learnt to intercept the post.

D
AVID
’
S
CIGARETTE
has almost burnt out, he holds it to his parched lips. We’ve been together since we were sixteen, he says, me and Ruti. He turns towards Sahar. We’ve been together forever, he says. He takes another cigarette from the box, lights it off the cigarette he was smoking.

She nods, then turns away from him, towards me. I must go soon, she says, we are nearly out of time. She glances back at Zaki and he points to his watch.