The Wanting (20 page)

I placed my hand on my wounds. The explosion had happened weeks before, and by now I’d removed most of the bandages, but what was revealed felt alien under my fingers. I could not quite believe that this was my face, my skin. I thought of my friend Lonya who now calls himself Ari and who missed dying by only a few seconds because he always dawdles to check out the girls, and of all the echoes of that frightful blast that so quickly faded into the white noise of our troubled city. And to be honest, I did not know if I wanted to go out and kill something myself or endlessly talk it through as Dr. Sepha wanted me to or translate it into a bright new apartment building as my assistant, Amoz, suggested or simply forget about the whole thing and go sunbathing in Crete as Daphne wanted to do or somehow, as I wished with all my heart I could do for Anyusha’s sake, transform it into some sort of act of love, whatever that might be.

Lost in these thoughts, I was awakened by the sound of … well, I couldn’t tell—a bird, maybe, or the high-pitched buzzing of a bee. Looking toward the sound, I noticed a small bluff, just a big rock, really, about half a kilometer to the southwest. I didn’t recall seeing it there earlier, so I thought I’d go over and investigate. I shouldn’t have, of course. I should have been making my way back to my car—without being seen if at all possible—and getting myself home. Or hiking to the nearest checkpoint or even working up the courage to face Abdul-Latif with the truth, although why I would do that I could no longer fathom. But the sound called to me, and I stood up quite stiffly—I had been sitting for such a very long time—and made my way toward a bootless little wadi that meandered vaguely toward the bluff. It was among the longest days of the year, and at this hour the sun was directly above me, so I cast no shadow, almost as if I weren’t there. If the sun cannot find you, if the earth does not recognize you, what have you become?
A phantom? Of course nothing else cast a shadow either, not the scrubby little bushes with their desiccated needles and dead buds, not the beetle I spotted scurrying along the baked mud, not the arid eddies of rock and moraine left behind by the wild, improbable torrents of winter. If I were to come upon a snake or a scorpion, I wouldn’t see him until he struck, but I trampled over the rocks anyway. The bluff was only a short walk, but in this heat it seemed an endless march. Still, I turned aside to listen for the little song I’d been hearing. It seemed somehow familiar, heartening. I followed the wadi as it wound between two rock faces—an easy path up to the top of the bluff. But I noticed that as it rose the pathway began to narrow and finally peter out, and I would have to climb between two sheer walls for the last few meters to the top. Once in this crevice, I inched along, thrusting my arm upward for a handhold and squeezing my torso around the jutting shale and ragged pinions of stone. As I climbed, the cleft narrowed, and the two walls closed in upon me. The rock was cool and pleasant against my skin, but I knew if I climbed any farther I’d get stuck. I figured I’d just back down, but then my arm got jammed between two jagged extrusions. The more I twisted, the worse it got. I tried to move forward again, but now I couldn’t do that either. So I hung there, pinned on four sides, no way forward, no way back, sun above, nothing at all below.

“Whores full of shit! Stinking cock!” I cried in Russian.

The sun burned down upon my skull—I had stupidly forgotten to take a hat—but in spite of the heat, I shivered: could this be my grave, hanging upright, my body pinned like a butterfly’s, my head a mass of blistering pus? I mentally thumbed through my IDF training manual. Radio for help, select one of your platoon to go for help, go for help yourself, create a signal by the use of flags, fire, flashlight, make yourself known using coded whistles, animal sounds, or specific phrases prearranged with your commanders.

“Fucking commanders,” I said.
“Pizda! Pizdyulina zloebuchaya!”

Then I felt something sharp, like a stiletto boring into my head. And there was that buzz again, too. I could feel small bits
of flesh shear off from my forehead, and the stinging burn of the dentist’s drill. With a great heave, I managed to crane my neck upward. First the sun, utter white. And then something placed itself between the sun and my eyes. On the ledge just above me, preening its green and red feathers, was a tiny iridescent Palestinian sunbird. He picked some lice from under his wing. Then he turned his beak on me.

I’m so far from home, I thought.

Sometimes, I guess, but very rarely, sunbirds do live in acacia trees in the wilds of the Judean Desert, but usually you find them in parks getting drunk on wildflowers or hanging around garden fences in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or having their fill of insects and nectar on their favorite kibbutz. But here he was, in the middle of summer, in the driest of months, in the heat of the day, in the hottest spot on the entire globe, pecking my forehead into Swiss cheese. He hadn’t so much as a branch to hang upon, not a flower, not even a telephone wire. He stretched out his long, slender beak and jabbed at my head again.

I’ve always hated the Palestinian sunbird. In the wild, they like to suspend their nests from a sheltered branch or under the eaves of a barn, but in Israel, these birds are just happy to hang a nest from a lampshade, a houseplant, or the edge of a bookcase. In other words, they’d just as soon live in your house as theirs. Everybody here seems to love them. Except me. I can’t stand the sunbird. Too glamorous. Too self-assured. You can sense its sangfroid in the way it plumps its feathers on your dining room table. And this in a bird the size of my fucking forefinger. But now, at least, I knew the source of that unpleasant sound. These little Palestinian sunbirds can’t carry a tune. It’s sad, but true.

Suddenly, the bird looked me straight in the eye, as if to say, What the fuck are you doing here? You expect me to help you? I admit I hang around with Jews, I’ll even set up house with Jews, but that puts me under no obligation to help any of you bastards.

“Well, just don’t start singing,” I said.

He cocked his head and smiled. “What are you?” he said. “Frank
Sinatra? Hassan Ammar? Nancy Ajram?” He stuck his beak in my ear and opened his clacky little mouth. His song went through me like an ice pick.

“Get away from me!” I yelled up at him.

“Why should I? I live here. Where the hell do you live?”

“You don’t live here. You live on some kibbutz, or you came from Bethlehem or someplace. Get out of here.”

“Why? I was here first.”

“No, I was here first.”

“No, you got stuck here. But I was always here.”

“Lie!” I said. “Lie!”

“True! True! Plus I could poke your eyes out if I felt like it.”

“All I have to do is turn my head back down and not look at you.”

“Then I’ll poke at the top of your head. Make you bleed.”

“You’re a fucking insect eater. Go eat an insect. I’m a man. You can’t eat me.”

“I can try.”

I thought about this a minute. “Okay,” I told him, “here’s the truth. You weren’t here first. We were here first. You little Palestine birds are always so full of shit. You think I don’t know ornithology? In 1900, maybe twenty of you in the whole goddamned country; now you’re the most common little rat bird in Israel. No problem. Live and be well. Just stop singing the same old song.”

“Let’s face it,” he squeaked, “you’re not subtle enough to appreciate the song of the Palestine sunbird, never have been and never will be. And by the way, you were born in Moscow. So who’s the latecomer?”

With this, he began chomping at my hairline in earnest.

“Stop! You son of a bitch! Stop!” I cried.

But he kept on pecking, harder and harder, deeper and deeper, like he was churning a corkscrew through my skull.

“God in heaven!” I screamed at him. “I don’t want to die like this!”

And then all of a sudden I was grabbing at that little bastard
with my fingers. I felt his gummy little feathers in my palm and then a crazy flurry of wings and his wildly thumping heart, and then …

“Hey, mister. What are you doing there? Let me help you.”

I felt a hand upon my leg.

“You’re stuck pretty good. I’ll go around the other way to get to the top.”

Blood trickled over my eyebrows and down onto my lip, and I couldn’t move my head enough to see who it was. But a moment later I realized my hand was free.

“There, now pull up!”

I stretched my arm as far as I could in the direction of the sky, grabbed at the ledge above me, sucked in my torso, and, like a rat squeezing under a door, I pulled myself free. And there I was, standing atop the rock, with the whole desert spread before me all the way to the sea. And next to me was Abdul-Latif.

He squatted, like Arabs do, with his arms around his knees, and watched me. “I heard about the boys and I feared for you. Been looking for two hours at least. Here.” He handed me an old soda bottle filled with water. “I am full of regret for them.”

I watched him carefully. I did not trust his water and set it aside.

Meanwhile, the bird had taken up a station on the far edge of the bluff. I noticed there was a small stream percolating up at the base of the rock, which until now had been hidden from my view. It was really just a puddle beneath a swarm of bulrush, but for those few meters the soil was moist and dark, giving life to a garden of thick plants and bushes. Well, so much for the mystery of my sunbird. I gulped down the wild perfumes of the date and hollyhock but felt no need for the water. There was a rustle among the leaves, and suddenly, miraculously, a beautiful ibex emerged from the brush and gracefully bent to drink from the spring. A male, it had vast curved horns, a feathery black beard, and silver hooves.

Abdul-Latif did not move. The sunbird hopped over and sat beside me.

“Idyllic, isn’t it?” he said.

“Shhh,” I said to the bird, “you’ll scare him away.”

Now the ibex raised his head, sniffed the air, became still as the rock we were sitting upon, and searched the horizon with its soft brown eyes.

“It’s a stupid weak animal,” the bird said.

“No, it’s beautiful,” I replied.

He whistled.

The ibex bolted, charged from the water’s edge, and dashed across the stand of date palms.

“I told you to be quiet!” I said.

“Not me,” he replied, and pointed with his glassy wing.

Now I saw it. A small leopard had sprung from a furrow in the rock and leapt at the ibex, corralling him with his powerful legs into smaller and smaller circles—the ibex, its eyes melting with fear, darted back and forth as the trap closed upon him—but they were both so glorious, and I did not know whom to love better, whom to hope for, root for: the leopard, nearly extinct, with his snowy body and deadly eyes, desperate for anything to eat, or the ibex, with his startling grace and resplendent horns, not in the least rare, yet all the more fragile.

“To the death,” the little bird said.

And then the ibex made a run for open desert, suddenly, crazily, brilliantly, but too late. The leopard had him in his teeth, and they went down together.

In despair, I said to the bird, “Why did he save me?”

“I don’t know,” replied the bird. “For the hell of it.” He winked at me, rose into the air, hovered there a moment as sunbirds can do, purposely annoyed me with his miserable little song, and then flew off toward Ein Gedi like a stone flung from a sling. I followed him until he was well out of sight, which was less than a second, so swift was he, and so small.

“Mister! Mister! We have to get you home. You are talking crazy. You have to drink that water.”

“I drank.”

“No, mister. You haven’t drunk anything. Drink!”

But I don’t believe I drank the water, because the next thing I knew I was in a bed, and the smell of fried kibbe was in my nose.

Lying there, I recalled the sunbird’s song. It occurred to me, maybe it hadn’t been singing at all. Maybe it was just the ringing in my ears. It never stops. I just ignore it. I forget about it. But of course it’s always there, and maybe it fooled me, because how could any of that have happened? I held my hands out in front of me. My skin was coated with what looked like white powder. I must have been in the sun even longer than I thought. This country was out to kill me one way or another.

In Moscow, my father had once told me the only safe place for Jews was the Land of Israel. Here they say: Go to America.

Oh, we all had the same ridiculous ideas. How surprised we were to come here and find that half of Israelis were from Iraq or Syria, the other half acting as though they were still living in a Polish village in the seventeenth century, and the third half considered us Russians too loud, too garish, too aggressive, and altogether too dishonest. There was no crime in Israel until the Russians! Maybe so. They say we brought the Mafia to Israel; well, in Moscow, everything was Mafia, from top to bottom. If you didn’t game the system, you were an idiot. The truth is, it’s not so different here. The worst sin in this country is to be called a sucker, and as always, you wish you were someone else living somewhere else.

But for me it was not like that. For me, it was like entering a magical kingdom and finding the mystical house of Baba Yaga in the middle of the dark forest where all my wishes were granted.

I arrived at Ben Gurion with Anyusha in my arms. She already had a cowl of shocking black hair and those daring blue eyes. On the flight she ate continually and never cried. But that was Anyusha. She took in everything with her eager eyes and apparently found it good. Only when we stepped from the plane onto the Jetway did the howling begin. Perhaps it was the sudden change in temperature—we were met with a blast of hot air—but I think more likely she was frightened by the soldier with the Uzi resting
on his hip. The poor guy reached out to soothe her. “Shoo, shoo,” he said. But I said to him, “Let her cry. It means she’s finally alive.” He didn’t speak Russian, so I tried it in Hebrew, “She shalom!” He laughed and said something I didn’t understand, either.

But I must say, not understanding and not being understood—for the first time, I loved the Russian language. I now spoke a language that carried with it no consequences. My words flew out into space and never came back. As for Hebrew, it made no impression on me at all. It bounced off my head as if it had been varnished with clear coat. I experienced a miraculous and unexpected feeling of peace.