The Wanting (29 page)

And with that they all quietly disappeared from the room, and I heard the key turn in the lock.

Dear You,

I guess you could call this “Confessions of a Young Girl on the Brink.” But I don’t feel crazy, just impatient. Miriam didn’t show
up, and we’re
still
sitting here in the basement with all the windows painted over. I know this sounds so crazy. Who is this Anyusha who does all this hiding in basements and studying Torah and everything? But Pop, it was God who led me here to this basement. Yes, I can see the look on your face when I say that, but it’s true. OK, now I have to go backward in time, even though I said I wanted to tell you everything in order as it happened. Sorry, but I have to.

This was like six months ago. I was in one of my sessions with Rabbi Keren, and I was saying about how things talk to me, stones, bugs, trees, cartons of milk. And he said, OK, I want you to go someplace for me. I said, Why? And he said, I want to see if you hear anything. It made me nervous, but I said OK anyway, because, I don’t know, and he said we’ll drive together. I told Pop that I was doing something with Shana, and I jumped school early and met up with the rabbi, and holy smokes, we drove all the way to Nahariya, like over an hour, and that’s where we picked up this new woman, Efra. And I said, Where’s Miriam? and Rabbi said, She couldn’t come, she was too busy. This Efra was religious, too, with her scarf and long skirt and no makeup at all. By now it’s almost two o’clock and we haven’t eaten a thing, and I’m starving, and it just comes out of me.
Where’s the food? Where are we going?
And Rabbi Keren just smiles and says, Let’s eat after. After what, already? And Efra suggested a place where we could stop, but Rabbi Keren said it was getting late and it wouldn’t be long, but actually it was long, winding all through the Galilee past lots of little Arab villages and Ma’alot and Sasa, until,
finally
, where the road bends really sharply, he pulls into a parking lot. Food! I’m thinking, but Rabbi Keren shushed me and said, Anna, we’re now in a very special place, a very special and mystical place, where a great rabbi, none other than the author of the Zohar, is buried. Do you remember what the Zohar is? You have to be an idiot not to know that, I said, Shimon Bar Yochai. He could burn people up with his eyes! (At least that’s the story: he spent twenty years in a cave, buried up to his neck in sand, and when he got out he was so pure that anything he looked at that wasn’t as pure as he—which
was everything—burned up. So God made him go back in his cave for another twenty years! And this was where he was buried.) Aren’t you excited? Efra asked. I tried to say yes, but I really was trying not to lie anymore (except to Pop, sorry), so she says, Well, you will be! You will be! and links arms with me, and down the stairs we go toward whatever was awaiting us. (Of course I now know what was awaiting us, but then I didn’t, so I’m writing it as if I didn’t, because that’s how you tell a story.) And why is this Efra there in the first place? No mention of an Efra when Rabbi Keren laid out the plot for me. Because, she explained, women can’t go where men go, and you need a chaperone. I wanted to ask her if she thought this was 1970. Anyway, we’re in this little courtyard now, and Rabbi Keren disappears into one of the men-only chapels, and I’m standing in the courtyard, and some big fat Haredi rabbi with a big gap in his front teeth and a beard that splits in two like twin goat horns is exhorting the crowd, and then I don’t know—all of a sudden, POW!
Voices
. From deep down below, from a hundred meters, a thousand meters, from the very core of the earth—not speaking, but murmuring, vibrating, pulsating, not actually saying anything at all, and they made me think of seaweed stuck to the bottom of the ocean, swaying with the flow of the water. They were stuck in the mud, these voices, but because of the tides and jet streams they let out sounds that resembled speech but weren’t. Like when the wind resembles alley cats.

All I wanted was to escape those sad, gloomy voices stuck in the mud; they upset me so much because I couldn’t make out a single word, nothing to separate one voice from another. I started getting dizzy, and I thought I was going to throw up. It seemed like it was getting dark even though the sun was shining bright, and it was too hot, and then—I don’t know—honestly, I’m not making it up—I think I fainted, and when I opened my eyes I was looking straight up into the sky, and I saw a dot of pure white in that blue sky, a pinprick of white light so small you wouldn’t see it unless you were looking directly at it, and even if you were looking directly at it you might miss it. And I could see right into it, and it was a tunnel, and then I understood: if you were to go into that
tunnel you would hear complete and perfect silence. I didn’t know where it went, I didn’t even know what it was, but if you went into that tunnel of white, there would be only silence. And then Efra was leaning over me and saying, Anna, are you all right? Anna!

When Rabbi Keren came out from praying, he took one look at me and got really pale, and Efra said, I told you we should have stopped for food! She was very upset and didn’t say a word the whole way back, though we did stop for hummus and kunafa in one of the Druze villages. Of course, neither Rabbi nor Efra would eat anything, because it wasn’t glatt kosher, but I did. And maybe it all happened because I was too hungry and hypoglycemic, but even after I’d eaten I couldn’t shake what had happened—the voices without voice that were so sad, the pinprick of white, the silence that lived only in that tunnel.

It was only after we dropped Efra off that Rabbi Keren asked me what happened to me at the grave of Shimon Bar Yochai. I thought about it. I turned it over in my mind: the noise from below and the white from above. And it made me think. Everybody in life is the seaweed stuck to the bottom of the sea, and we all look like we are moving, and we all look like we are dancing, and playing, and laughing. But it is only the sea that is moving us. And if it would suddenly stop flowing, we would all drop to the ground and lie there, and we would finally understand what we really are. That is why the voices were so unhappy. You would think, oh, she went to the grave of the famous rabbi who is the hero of the Kabbalah (and by the way, there are tons of big rabbis buried around there), so naturally she heard all the dead people coming up from the earth, and naturally that’s why they were so sad. No. That is not what happened. It was the living I heard; it was all the people who came to that place for salvation or who came and didn’t care about salvation. Who prayed or didn’t pray. Who ate or didn’t eat. Why were they so sad? Because inside they all know. They are stuck in the mud, and the movement of life is nothing but an illusion. That is what I thought, and what I still think. But that is not what I told Rabbi Keren. I told him I heard some voices, and I thought they were the voices of the saints. And he asked, What did they
say? And I answered, They said they were happy. And he looked at me funny, and asked, Is that all? And I answered, They said God is everywhere, and the Messiah is coming. And then Rabbi Keren stopped asking.

So I lied. But I don’t care because now I know. Dearest Pop, silence exists in only one place. Freedom from the mud, in only one place. Real life exists in only one place.

All these years since I started hearing this stuff, I kept trying to get there. It’s not that I mind the voices. It’s that I would prefer they speak to someone else. That’s why I am here. That’s what I understood when I saw the white dot at the grave of the great rabbi. And so I kept to this path.

But only when Yohanan took my hand at the bus stop and it really
was
quiet, did I understand completely that, yes, I am on the correct path. That is what I want you to understand. You can only hear if it’s quiet. Please please please get it. God has led me here, to this basement. And God will lead me in all my steps to come.

I
N THE GENERAL SCOPE OF THINGS
, I should have considered the appearance of Abdul-Latif a true miracle. Why would he search for me, and how had he found me? I had allowed the desert to overtake me, to embrace me, but he had decided otherwise. In life, odd things do happen: certainly one could accidentally come upon what the Bedouin call a camila, a spot, invisible to all but the Bedouin himself, where it is possible to scoop down into the sand until a black circle of water magically emerges; or you might search the horizon for an enclave of rushes or acacia and, lo and behold, some fifteen meters down, or, more likely, forty, you find a drop or two to drink—they say there is an ocean of fresh water beneath this desert. But Abdul-Latif, father of my enemy, was an oasis to me. How else could I describe it? And yet I could not bring myself to drink his water or tell him the truth. Instead I lay in that bed, drifting between the life in my hands and the one I had left behind so many years ago.

One Saturday evening, in the summer of 1981, I returned to the apartment I shared with my mother with my arms full of the drawings for the house I was designing for Zagoryanka. I kicked open the door and called, “It’s done! I’m ready to build!” Mother did not answer immediately, which was unusual: she always pounced upon me the moment I arrived home, relieved I’d somehow survived the day. “Thank God! You could have fallen through the ice!” she once said when I was a few minutes late. Who could have an
answer to this? Did she imagine I had sledded across the Moskva? So when she didn’t rush to greet me, I grew a little alarmed.

I stalked the hall, checking our few rooms. Hers was at the end. It was frantically neat, as if one misplaced pin could endanger the entire household. I peeked in the bathroom, vaguely worried I’d find her unconscious in the bathtub, but she wasn’t there. In the kitchen, two cups were set out as always, waiting for my return. In the entryway, the slippers were all in their places, but, as I scanned the row of shoes, there was a gap between the first and second pair. I dialed Katya to see if, finally, Mother had gone over there by herself, an idea that seemed absurd, since she rarely stepped out of the house without me. No one answered. I considered going out to look for her—who knows, maybe
she
fell in the Moskva—but really, she was a grown woman, what was there to worry about? I grabbed a beer, something I rarely did, flipped on the television, and sat myself down on the sofa, something I never did either except to watch football.
Goodnight Children
had just started. As usual, it ran short snippets of animated films—maybe Dr. Aybolit or something with the Hedgehog or Cheburashka. My favorites were the classics from the Stalinist days,
The Snow Maiden, Prince Vladimir
. But it didn’t matter. I allowed the song of Krokodil and Genya and the grizzly voice of Carlson to wash over me, and also the pretty announcer, Auntie Valentina, with her wide-eyed smile and sugary lips. I took deep slugs off my bottle of beer, which was Estonian so it wasn’t completely undrinkable. I threw my feet up on the couch, took another swig of beer. This was great. I’d never been alone in this apartment before. I’d never really been alone in Veshnaya either. I went to the refrigerator, pulled out my mother’s jar of pickled mushrooms, found a half-open can of sprats, cut off a chunk of bread, and carried it all back to the sofa. Auntie Valentina was talking to the puppets now. I liked this part. They were just hand puppets, Stepashka, Karkusha, Khrusha, but who could not love them? I threw my feet back up on the couch and slurped down a sprat dripping in oil. I followed this with a slimy baby mushroom. Now they were singing a song. “Goluboy Vagon.” I
wondered if there was anything else I might want to eat. Maybe an apple or some cheese. My beer was sadly near its end, but there were a couple more in the refrigerator. I’d been saving them, I had no idea why. I put down my plate, skittled as quick as one of Dr. Aybolit’s rabbits to the kitchen so as not to miss too much of
Goodnight Children
—and slumped back down on the sofa loaded up with new treats and more beer. I didn’t even bother to take off my slippers. Don’t think I’m coldhearted.
Goodnight Children
is not very long. I would look for Mother as soon as it was over. But this was what I had been longing for. This very moment. My moment. My beer. My show. This is what freedom meant to me at that point in my life.