The Wanting (13 page)

S
INCE THE INTIFADA
they had begun to set up roadblocks. Generally cars with Israeli plates had little trouble, but when I saw the soldiers and the lineup of cars, I found myself driving past the exit to Bethlehem and instead headed straight into Jerusalem. It was late anyway. I took a room, called Anyusha, who still wasn’t home from her awards, and climbed into bed.

I lay there staring at the ceiling. Sepha said I would have days like this, manic, confused. She also said we would work it out. So why hadn’t she set up the appointment as she promised? In the end you have to come up with your own answers. But the answer is never actually available to you. It’s like the conscious mind asking itself what consciousness is.

Still, I said to myself, it must be possible that I was saved for some reason. That surely is why Moishe was in my life, and why Dasha Cohen spoke to me with her cuneiform legs and lettered eyes, and why that head followed me wherever I went, even though it would not speak. It was also why the story of my days unwound itself upon the map of my crazy wanderings, even though I didn’t want to remember any of it.

And there I was again, back in Moscow, Collette pressing her shoulder against mine as we walked that first night through Razina Street, her voice singing in my ear like a woodlark, a wondrous bird. I stole glances at her skin, white as a loon’s between the folds of her scarf and the brim of her beret, and wondered at this remarkable woman. We barely knew each other, but the brightly colored churches of Razina melted away before her, and
all that was left was the alabaster of her skin and the silk of her voice.

Her mother, she told me, had died in childbirth, and her father had disappeared when she was only a few months old.

Oh, I said, my father left us, too, when I was about fourteen.

No, she snapped, he
disappeared
. They came for him, I’m certain.

It was in the fifties, just exactly the time of the Doctors’ Plot when Stalin was going after the Jews. Her father was suddenly overcome by a passion to write, and he wrote about everything: he wrote love poems to his dead wife, and poems about hope and freedom, he wrote an entire story that took place while the characters were waiting in line for sour cream; he mocked the new Soviet Man; he mocked the little people who ran the local council; finally he mocked Stalin himself, but he called him something else, Omar Omarsky, who ruled the land of Omarka, the place where only Good prevails. Her father, she said, was afraid of nothing. She had found his journals hidden in a false drawer of an old armoire—found them seventeen years later.

All of it could have been avoided. Her whole life, she said, was a kind of mistake. Her grandfather had been “the great Sergey Abramovich Chernoff. What? Never heard of him?” she laughed. The family—her family—was very rich before the revolution. They even had an estate—“the only Jewish estate in all of Russia,” her grandfather boasted, “except for the Ginzburgs’ and Rosenheims’.” Her grandfather had become a Communist and had to flee abroad with all the great Bolsheviks—Lenin, Trotsky, Zinovyev, Bukharin. Even so he still lived in high style in a grand apartment on the rue de la Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement not far from the Invalides. The Communists didn’t mind: they loved him because he knew how to raise money, and after the revolution they even made him an economic attaché to the embassy in Paris. But when Lenin had his stroke in ’22, he was promptly recalled to Moscow. Her grandmother was pregnant with a child, Collette’s father, Pierre, and naturally wanted to stay in Paris, but Sergey Abramovich
smiled at her, stroked her cheek, assured her the very best doctors in the world were now in Moscow, and instructed the valet to pack their bags. Thus the child, her father, Pierre Sergeyevich, was born in a communal flat in Moscow, and so was Collette.

“I don’t belong here,” she said. “I never belonged here. It’s all a terrible miscarriage of fate.”

“I feel that, too, sometimes,” I said rather lamely.

By this time we’d crossed the river and were walking past the reconfigured mansions that served as embassies for the French and British. Traffic had awakened the boulevards: the swarms of taxis and official cars, a few private Zhigulis and Moskvitchs, an ancient Pobyeda held together by nothing but wire and electrical tape, the occasional Zil with its police escort. In this particular neighborhood, foreign cars were also a fairly common sight: gleaming Volvos and Mercedes, as if from another planet rather than just across the national border.

“It was his writing, then, that got him arrested?”

“I don’t see how. They would have confiscated his papers, but I found them in the armoire.”

“Maybe there were other copies.”

“Maybe. But also he never went back to his work in the factory after I was born. That’s what my grandfather said. He spent all his time on me. They accused him of being a shirker, a malingerer. And you know where it goes from there.”

“You cannot think it’s your fault,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“You were an infant.”

“Of course.”

“Collette, you were an infant.”

“Oh look!” she said. “It’s morning!” The sun had finally risen over the eastern skyline casting a bright winter gold upon the river. Collette unknotted her fuzzy pink scarf and gulped in the foul city air as if she were standing in a field of sunflowers. “I have to go.”

“But we could have breakfast,” I said.

“Not today,” she replied.

We found the nearest metro. Once inside, she threw open her coat and slipped off her gloves. I had not until this moment noticed her scent. It was not of perfume at all, but of hay and earth.

Without thinking, I bent down and kissed her. For the first time she looked directly at me, and her eyes were little bees in full swarm.

Night had fallen so profoundly upon Jerusalem that nothing stirred, not even a breeze, as if God had stopped breathing. Tomorrow I would rouse myself and seek out Abdul-Latif Hamid and his wife, Najya.

It’s not that I wanted an explanation. There was none. Nor did I want an apology. What I think I wanted was a way in. I kept thinking, how could they be impervious to the tearing of their son’s flesh? Wasn’t it Amir himself who led me here?

And yet in the room in which I had placed myself, under the thin covers and upon the hard bed, I felt nothing present but my own body. The spirit that had been assailing me—the head of dripping blood—had apparently abandoned me to myself and my useless memories. I thought this absence would give me some peace, but in fact, it only left me more sleepless than before. And I asked the walls and demanded of the ceiling that was a firmament between us: Why will he not speak to me? Why is there between us only silence and pain?

I look down upon the beautiful and mostly dead Dasha Cohen. Strangely, I have not been able to leave her to her feeding tubes and catheters but hang here in the lovely desert sky of my most precious homeland, looking through the skylight, it seems, but that cannot be, since there isn’t one. Somehow I see her, yet remain outside, shut out. Why do you not cry out, Dasha Cohen? Why do
you not curse the world that brought you to this end? Because you are nothing. Less than nothing. Less even than a ghost or a vapor. You are simply what is left over when everyone else is done with you. A melody with no words, a story with no end … and what good is a story, Dasha, that has no end?

They always said I was a liar.

Where were you?

I had to help Mr. Nashir in school. He asked me to help grade papers
.

Why would he do that?

He has an eye infection and can’t read. I read the papers aloud to him
.

Is this the truth?

I can bring home a note tomorrow if you don’t believe me
.

Amir, where did you get that watch? You know we don’t have money to spend on watches
.

Oh, I didn’t buy it. It was a gift from Farid bin-Barzi. He gave all the boys watches
.

What?

In honor of his son becoming something in America
.

What do you mean?

His son is the main judge in America now. It’s huge. Didn’t you see it in the news?

I didn’t see a thing
.

Oh. Then let me tell you all about it
.

I didn’t know why I did it, only that I couldn’t help myself. Other things, too. Sometimes I would walk through town, sit down in some empty lot, and imagine what life was like for the insects there. I could imagine the rise of their civilization, its downfall every time the grass was cut. I would sit near the fountain and watch people go by, and I would dress abu-Gazen in rich robes, and Nadiah Khamal would be a famous pop singer, and Mukhtar Astof was an alien from another planet.

One day I said to my father, “I just want to get out of this fucking town.”

He didn’t say anything. He just slapped me with the back of his fist. I took the slap and went back to work. I thought, at least he can be proud that I took it like a man.

It was afternoon, dinnertime.

I had just come home from somewhere—from school, of course, although I may have stopped at the library, because I often went there to be alone. I read whatever they had, which was usually all the same things, so I often read the same book over and over. When I entered the courtyard, my uncle was sitting on the back stoop waiting for the midday cooking to be done, smoking his pipe and talking to himself. His lips were continuously moving, his long fingers never stopped gesturing, his eyes looking off into nowhere through the thick cataracts that clouded his sight. My father said he had the palsy, but to me it always looked like he was talking to someone no one else could see.

“Uncle Ahmad!”

“Is that you, Amir?”

“Yes, it’s me!”

“Well then, come sit by me if you have a minute.”

He squeezed over to make room, and I sat down beside him on the concrete step, taking in the dark smell of unwashed clothes and tobacco that was Uncle Ahmad. He was much poorer than we, and every day he appeared at a different house for his meals. I always regretted our family was so big—it meant he came to us only every few months.

“Will you stay for lunch?” I said, knowing full well he had already been invited by everyone else in the house.

“Allah willing,” he replied.

My uncle Ahmad was the storyteller in our family. He knew all the classical tales and new ones, too, ones he created out of his mind. He also knew the history of everyone’s father and mother going back many generations, and whenever there was a wedding
or anniversary Uncle Ahmad would weave wonderful stories about the bride and groom’s ancestors, all the way down to the very moment these two were betrothed. Sometimes he played the oud, sometimes not. Even when we used to gather to welcome some guest at the madhafah, which still existed when I was very little, where everyone was allowed to tell stories, his were always the best.

“What’s that in your hand?” he asked me.

“Books,” I told him.

“Which books?”

“This is algebra. This is history. This is Arabic.”

“That’s all? That’s all they teach you?”

“No, there’s more.”

“Good!” he said, much relieved. “But I don’t know if they teach you this.” He reached into his satchel and brought forth a small volume. The cover was worn to tatters and all the pages were dog-eared and it had the smell of sour rags.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“You can read, can’t you?”

“Of course I can read!”

“Then see for yourself.”

I took it in my hands. It was remarkably light but also a little sticky. I could make out the title only by rubbing off the dirt and squeezing my eyes almost shut to focus on the faded letters.
A Book of Tales
.

“Open it,” said Uncle Ahmad.

If I expected jinns and ghouls and princesses and caliphs to jump from the pages and into my yard, I was not that far wrong, because the names did jump out and dance before my eyes: Antar and Abla, King Azadbekht, Kalilah and Dimna, and, best of all, a whole section on Joha and Mulla Nasruddin.

One day Joha declared, “I have become a Sufi Sheik! These are my acolytes—I am helping them reach enlightenment!” “How do you know when they reach enlightenment?” asked his friend, the merchant. “Nothing to it! Every morning I count them. The ones who have left have reached enlightenment!”

“But that’s not how it goes,” I said.

“Everyone has the right to tell a story the way he sees fit,” replied Uncle Ahmad. “I tell it my way. This book, another. Someday you’ll tell the story your own way, too.”

“Oh no, I don’t tell stories.”

“That’s not what I hear.” Uncle Ahmad scratched his chin with his shaky fingers. Whenever he scratched, I knew he was about to tell me what he was thinking about. “I’ve been thinking about you, Amir,” he said. “I see how you watch everything, and I realize stories are always happening before your eyes. You can’t help yourself, can you? The world is too boring for you. So it was for me at your age. The world must not be allowed to be an ordinary place—am I right?—where things happen and that’s that. It has to be filled with characters you want to understand, with plots and subplots, with beautiful pictures and unforgettable melodies.”