The Inbetween People (7 page)

Her voice is ice. It’s nothing, she says. The child is confused, it must look like that other room to him. You can go now, boys, and you all rush to leave, each one of you trying to reach the door first. Karim is in your room when you get there.

What was that about? he says.

Father is getting married.

He begins to sob. His nose begins to run the way it always does when he cries. He lies on his bed and he cries. Grandmother is in the kitchen and you hear the sound of pots being moved around, and later Father goes to your room and slaps Karim for running away from Grandmother; and you move outside to the yard where you can’t hear Karim crying, and kick your football against the wall. The ball thuds against the wall and back to you, and you know Father will come, and when he does you feel his presence behind you but you don’t turn.

Saleem, he says. Do not mention Safsaf like that again. It is not your right to remind Grandmother of the past and the things that happened to her, the things she lost.

Sorry, you say.

It is not the same room anyway, he says. It can’t be.

It is, you whisper, and you kick your ball hard against the wall, but that makes him angry.

Saleem, he says, your grandmother says it is not the same room. There are certain similarities all right, but it is not the same as the room in Safsaf.

You hold the football in your hands but still you don’t turn to him. You stand facing the wall, you can smell urine where the feral cats mark their territory every night. Father, you say, you didn’t see the room. You were not in it. Grandmother said you only lived in it when you were very small.

He hits you across the back of the head, and your face smashes against the wall, cracking open your forehead, and blood trickles down your face. Father, you gasp, and you swallow your own blood. He says, it is not your right to speak of these things. You don’t understand about the past, you are not old enough to understand it, we don’t expect you to understand. But do not speak of what you do not understand.

There is blood in your mouth, mingling with the salt of the tears, and you strain with all your body to keep those tears from overflowing. Sorry, Father, you say.

You will apologise to your grandmother.

Yes, you say.

Follow me, he says. He leads you to the kitchen. She is standing erect over a pot of soup, stirring it over the heat, her mouth set firmly; her face is wet, and you don’t know if it is because she is hot or because she has been crying. Sorry, Grandmother, you say. She doesn’t turn to you, instead she nods once, an affirmation that she accepts the apology.

Tell her you know it is not the same room, your father says.

I know it is not the same room, you say. After that you don’t go back to the room, nor do you speak about it to anybody.

Did you come to understand about the past, the importance of it to them, I asked, but no, you said, there is nothing to be found there, that’s all you learnt about the past. Bricks are bricks, you said, and anyone who spends their time grieving for bricks, for a room that stares out over white mountains, for a vase on an oak table, their life stands still, you said. There is nothing for them.

C
HAPTER
9

July 30th, 1990

D
ear Sareet,

Thank you for your letter. I received it on the anniversary of your departure from this kibbutz, and indeed from this country. It is hot, yes, July is a painful month here. The kibbutz is very much as I am sure you remember it, today was most similar to the day you left, there has been no release from this heat for almost two weeks, though now that it is evening the hot haze of the day has lifted somewhat, and there is a very slight breeze. The same plants that I watered this morning are wilting after the heat of the day. How optimistic I was this morning after I irrigated them, thinking foolishly it was enough water for at least two days! Do you ever think of the July day that you left all of this behind you, the people who once filled your life, the heat of that summer—it almost destroyed you, you said.

For some reason I imagine you reading this letter in a very European room: high-ceilinged with enormous windows, a book-lined wall, an empty fireplace, sitting alone at an ebony desk, a manicured garden beyond the bay window, an exact square of lawn surrounded by a strip of concrete, your children playing quietly in a sandpit. They have manners, these children, they are quiet and civilised, they do not make unreasonable demands, cry and shout and scream, scratch, lash out, throw tantrums in supermarkets. Beyond you are more houses, similar to that of your own pretty, semi-detached pretty houses, suburbia. Somewhere inside you there was always the longing for suburbia, perhaps you finally discovered a place where you belong absolutely. Beyond you are the flat plains of Amsterdam, unadorned with hill or tree, dazzling brightly in the sunshine, a gentle sun, kind and benevolent and not too hot, the window is open and the fresh air drifts in to you, vaguely perfumed by the tidy row of roses you grow at the back of the garden.

I am writing to you as though the years since we last met have fallen away, as though we were standing face to face, here on our patio with the scent of your lilies (I’ve never liked them though continue to grow them, yet I admit their brief summer display is quite magnificent, though short-lived) all around us.

To answer your question, I am not sure, in fact I have no idea, as to why Avi has not written to you for two months. I have received no indication from him that this is the case, nor do I have any idea as to his motives in not writing, if indeed there are any. Surely you realise that we do not speak of you often, or does your own shameless vanity allow you to believe that we do? You must remember that he has not seen you for exactly nine years, a lifetime for a fourteen-year-old boy. You left him, and all that was his, everything he knew; you live another life in another country with other children whom he has never seen. He has not learnt from me who his mother is, from me he learns nothing of you. It is far more likely that when you left some favourite images of you remained with him, linking him to you, living within him, so that his image of you has not aged, for Avi you are just the same as you were that July. Nothing is different.

My own belief is that it is probable he has not written because he is enjoying his summer holidays, and the routine of the winter months is nonexistent for him.

You ask me to describe to you how he spends his days? Given that it is difficult to pinpoint what exact details you want, I will describe a typical day in his summer for you. Avi wakes early, far earlier than most of his peers, it has always been that way with him, and sometimes he visits me in the gardens while he waits for his friends to appear. It’s cool in the gardens in the early mornings, in fact it is the time when most of the work gets done, for the sun seems to be extraordinarily hot this year, and he helps me with my work. Most of his ideas are quite impractical; he loves to read my gardening books and he often wants to plant flowers that are native to the British Isles here on the kibbutz, a semi-arid region! Of course, I explain to him that it is impossible to grow such plants under these conditions, the sun is cruel I tell him, they cannot possibly thrive in this climate, but he believes with special care it is very possible. We argue about it and at times I have given in to him, with the understanding that once planted, these non-native plants will be his responsibility. But then there are mornings that he sleeps late, or his friends rise early, or he simply forgets, and they wilt and die. He despairs when he finds them like this, tries to revive them with copious amounts of water, but it is pointless growing non-native plants in this sun, which is why I do not assist him in his endeavours. I refuse to irrigate the non-native plants when he neglects his duties. There are things he needs to learn.

His friends appear in time for breakfast, and after they eat there are a number of things they like to do. One of their favourite pastimes is soccer; they play it most mornings, continuing from the relative cool of the morning directly after breakfast until midmorning when the sun becomes a golden furnace in the sky. Avi is a master at soccer, the moment his feet touch the ball he becomes a kind of king among the other children; how can I describe him to you? He always plays barefoot, he is fast and nimble, he dodges through the older boys, his supple brown body weaving in and out between them. He is a consistent footballer, a good team player, an asset to a team, unafraid to take risks. They can play soccer like this, even in this sun, for one hour, two hours, pausing occasionally for water. Avi hurls it over his head so that his hair sticks to his forehead, and the water trickles down his face, mingling with the sweat.

Soccer is their morning pastime, they never tire of it, but the sun is hot and eventually one of the boys, hair soaked with sweat, will suggest another activity, perhaps a trip to the fields, where there is the shelter of the plants and sometimes the cool water of the irrigation system. Then, off they race, through the dirt that clings to their sandals, their feet, their ankles, accumulates under their nails, inside their nostrils, to the kibbutz fields, where the corn, tomatoes and watermelons are growing. They particularly love to play in the cornfields, the ears of corn tower over their heads, and of course if Moshe Levi (do you remember him?) catches them he becomes very angry, and his red face turns purple, though he rarely does catch them. Do you remember how the corn reaches up towards the sky at this time of year? You used to love to walk amongst it in the evenings, the sound of the sprinklers, that cool splash of water on your face in the dust of a summer evening in Galilee.

They eat lunch together in the dining room, I encourage Avi to take a siesta, but he tries to avoid this, along with his peers, and in the afternoon they make their way to the beach, where they plunge into the water, only their soaked heads visible among the waves, their voices carried towards the shore by the sea breeze. When they have had their fill of the salt water they lie on the sand, and presently they begin to play soccer again, this time on the beach, until they become too hot and run again to the waves, where they remain until nightfall.

Clumps of the rough sand from the beaches in this region are permanently pasted to his skull, and he smells of the sea and the dust of summer. He is of average height for his age, with burnished white-gold hair that reaches to his shoulders, golden sun-scorched skin, a firm athletic body—he is not the child that you remember. How could he be, Sareet?

Though I admit that I do wonder sometimes as I watch them among the waves, I wonder if Avi feels that he is different to them. Does he seem to them to be a boy with no past, for let’s face it, unlike them there are no siblings, no rooms filled with family portraits, no relatives who come and visit during the holidays. There is a sadness about him, a knowingness, that is impossible to describe. I see it in him sometimes, on rare occasions admittedly, but it is there nonetheless, and I’ve noticed that he stands back from things, does not thrust himself forward into everything, as his peers do. There is a shyness about him, a reluctance to be in the spotlight, and when I see it in him it wrenches at my heart, and I wonder was he always that boy or did he become that boy when you left.

In the evening when he returns home he eats a light meal (we no longer eat our evening meal in the kibbutz dining room, apart from Fridays and holiday eves), and then disappears with his friends again. Their night activities are more furtive, less open, though I usually take a walk around the kibbutz at this time, and I spot them sitting around under the eucalyptus trees that grow behind the laundry, their whispers a part of the night here, familiar as the screaming jackals, and the sudden silences that echo through these mountains. They sit in the same spot as that in which their predecessors once sat, grown men and women now; it is the same now as it was then, nothing has changed.

Soon he will return to school—the summer is short—routine will return to his life in the autumn, and I believe he will write to you again then, he has not forgotten, nor will he forget. In answer to your question, yes, I remember when he came home that time, when he was very ill with scarlet fever and they sent him home to be with us. I have not forgotten those nights, you lying beside him watching as he slept, huddled up, his cheeks burning red, his breath heavy, his hair barely visible over the blanket that was bunched against his forehead—how could I forget? They are only memories now, Sareet, our combined memories, he is nothing of that child now.

How still this July night is. I can almost touch the silence. Tranquillity has descended on the kibbutz, and the heat and sweat of tomorrow is almost impossible to imagine. Now a slight breeze is moving through the cypress trees, now a cat is climbing the little lemon tree that you planted here the summer you left, now an army patrol is moving along the distant border, lights beaming across the surrounding hills, the tangled barbed wire a black mass behind them, the beams of light reassuring in the black darkness. Beyond my garden a television set flickers in a neighbour’s house, and beyond that house two lovers are sitting drinking wine on their patio—she is whispering in his ear and he is leaning towards her. It is time for bed.