The Wanting (5 page)

Whenever he tells it, he makes it sound very funny.

He was the first to show up that morning.

“I’m so pleased God was your ambulance driver!”

“I told you, Lonya, he wasn’t the driver. He was the medic. And it wasn’t God necessarily. It could have been an angel.”

“Oh, well then. Not such a big deal after all.”

Lonya was not quite the man he used to be. He reminded me of Ariel Sharon: in the old days all muscle, now all fat. He also wore short pants and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Add to this the glass eye and the cigarette always in his mouth, the eternal three-day-old stubble, and that is Lonya.

“Still, these things mean something,” he insisted.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It was a dream. Haven’t you had a million dreams, and in your whole life has any of them come true?”

“They don’t have to come true because they already are true.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “I’m going to need help replacing my fucking window.”

“Oh!” he cried.

“What?”

But I saw it, too. The Arab’s head floating past my patio doors.

“How is that possible?” I said.

“What?” he said.

“That fellow’s head.”

“What head?”

And then I realized he hadn’t seen the head at all. He’d cried “Oh!” because Daphne had entered the room.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he asked.

At the last minute there was a face, a young girl looking out the window of the bus, and not even looking at me, just out the window, her eyes wide with the life that was so new to her. Perhaps she was thinking she had not done her homework, and the wide eyes were imagining the scene when she would be called upon to do her report, or maybe she was just watching the people pass by, I don’t know. But her eyes were blue, like mine. I decided to press the button, but not on the bus. Just like that, things change. So the last thing I saw before I pushed the unlock on the key that Ra’id Mashriki had given me was the way this little girl blinked, so slowly, as if she could not bear to close those wide eyes to this beautiful world even for a fraction of a second.

I was not intending to kill anyone specifically, with the exception of course of myself, but I certainly had it in my mind to destroy as many of my enemies as I could. So in spite of the girl, I am proud of that. I am content.

But I am confused that I am not in Paradise with my dark-eyed maidens and rivers of wine, at peace with the pleasure of Allah and his angels. I am aware I have been following this man, Roman Guttman. I understand, though I don’t know how, that he is an architect, famous for a certain style, which his admirers refer to as “Roman-esque.” It is a style you will not see in the neighborhood in which my mother, Najya, is now secretly weeping uncontrollably and my father, Abdul-Latif, is sitting on the floor staring at his hands. The apartment Roman Guttman designed in Netanya with the swimming pool in the living room, or the house on Mount Carmel, which looks rather like a tarantula wearing a golden skull
cap—these you will not find in Jabal or Hebron, in Qalqilia or my own Beit Ibrahim.

Shouldn’t Roman Guttman be as dead as I am? Shouldn’t he be suffering the torments of Hell? Apparently Allah had other plans, since He sent my head to warn him, why I cannot say. Who am I that Allah might confide in me? I would quote from the Holy Qur’an at this point, but that is the problem, that is the essence of the whole problem: I have never been able to memorize it. Not really any of it, save the seven tender verses, and not even those very well.

Perhaps I’m supposed to speak to him, but where are my vocal cords? It seems I am all thought and no sensation! Except for this feeling of mute giddiness, the kind one gets when dreaming of flying—weightless but always on the verge of falling, as if held aloft by an endless length of twine that at any moment could be cut and down you go.

It’s not a bad feeling, really.

On a hillside above our town there was a ruin, some stones piled in a heap, white as lye, the bare outline of a foundation. Probably it was just an old Arab house, but perhaps it was a Roman villa, or a merchant’s stables from the time of Saladin, or a Turkish outpost, or maybe it was the threshing floor of my great-great-uncle Kemal, or perhaps the French army stored sacks of their soft white flour there, or it was a remote British armory blown up by the Jews or ransacked by the Mufti; whatever it was then, it was peaceful now, the goats gracefully tiptoeing through the rubble, munching the bits of grass that shot up through the fissures in the stones, scenting the air green. I was munching something, too—cucumber, on the edge of a knife, and tomato, sliced into quarter moons, with salt and savlik—yes, that was me. I watched my feet hanging over the remains of the ancient wall, and alongside me I felt with all my senses, more than the jingling of goats’ bells and the gentle bleating of the lambs—his laughter. I furrowed my brow. Was he laughing at me again?

“Oh, Amir,” he said. “Look at that! A hawk. Coming right at us. No, stay put. It won’t come that close.”

“But it wants my cucumber!” I cried.

“It thinks you are a mouse. It wants you!”

I heard myself bleat just like the baby goats, “Go away, bird!”

“Hold up your cucumber!” he said. “Maybe he’ll take that instead of you!”

Desperately I ducked down, holding the cucumber as high as I could, an offering to the wide-winged beast. But when I looked up, the hawk was gone, floating somewhere among the clouds.

Fadi laughed again but held me tight. “It’s all right, little one,” he said. “He’s gone. And anyway, I was only joking. Come on, don’t cry. I’ll give you my mammoul.” He took the mammoul from the basket and put it in front of my nose. I could smell the walnuts, the butter.

“I’m telling Ummi.” I pouted.

“Don’t be a baby. Take the mammoul, and we’re even.”

Who could resist mammoul? Even now, if someone were to offer it to me, I might feel regret for having given up life so easily; to smell that sticky scent again, to have the mammoul melt in my mouth, my tongue awash in honey and walnut paste.

Of course, Fadi had brought two mammoul and we both fell into a happy eating. Down below, our village was like a pop-up book against the open pages of hillsides and roads and, in the distance, the edge of Bethlehem and its teeming thousands. Between the two was the refugee camp—not a camp—this word confused me because there was no army and there were no tents—but, pressing upon one another, little huts and shacks and then big buildings, too, lots of them—it was more or less a city, wasn’t it? I never went there to play. The boys were too rough, Umm always said. Everyone draws on the walls there, she said. Everywhere they were hanging illegal flags.

We finished our mammoul, Fadi wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then I very carefully did the same.

“See that?” he pointed. “That’s your house.”

“Which one?”

“That one.”

“But which one?”

“Pretend you are that hawk, Amir. Pretend you are flying high above. Swoop down from the hills, and see—there is the minaret of the White Mosque, and there, the other one with the round roof, is the Jabir, see it?”

“I’ve never been in it.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’re a hawk, remember? Now, fly from the White Mosque to the Mosque of Jabir, and you go one two three four five six seven eight, ah! And you see the little house with the brown roof, and you go over that roof, straight ahead—”

“Which way?”

“Away from where we were now, straight ahead. And you see one tall house—that is Mukhtar’s house, yes, your friend Mukhtar—and so just beyond that one … you see that TV antenna? You see it? That is your house, Amir. That’s where you live.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed, even though I wasn’t sure I actually saw it. It didn’t matter. What I did see was a beautiful sky, a shining village, hillsides of goats and bright grasses, fields of soybean, orchards of pistachio and almond, olives and figs.

I looked over at Fadi. He was already standing up, brushing off his shorts.

Fadi. Like a brother but not a brother. Like a father but not a father. Fadi.

“Come on,” he said. And he took my hand.

Roman Guttman walks in his gardens. Inside, the guests are arriving, wondering where he is. They hover in the kitchen, not knowing whether to eat something or not. Everything in this kitchen is icy steel, although at the moment it’s covered with flowers, and that is beautiful. There are also three bedrooms in this house, one his, one his little girl’s, and the third is empty. It is completely empty. It contains nothing. This room, this empty room, stops me, stops me colder than the stainless steel, and disturbs me more than the two
bathrooms with their elaborate fixtures, more than the washer and dryer hidden behind folding doors, and more than the second bathroom with its marble tub, and more than the two TVs and the Nintendo with its maze of wires. I think of this empty room and my head goes spinning, literally, round and round, nobody to stop it, no gravity, no connection to anything but the disturbance going on inside it.

He loiters in his garden. He searches the sky once more, looking for me. Can he see me? For some reason, I have to be honest, I hope that he can’t.

The house was beginning to fill up. My mother had arrived, my old army buddies, some Russians, my employees. They all did the same thing when they opened the door. They gasped. My mother fanned herself with a magazine and wailed, “Bojha moi! Bojha moi! My God! My God!” But as soon as she realized Daphne had gone into the kitchen to cook something, she threw down the magazine. “My darling,” she said to Daphne, “go. Sit. Let a mother do her work.” She spoke in Russian, but I suppose the language of mothers requires no actual words, and Daphne slipped gracefully out of the way.

Lonya watched all this carefully. “Where did you find her?” he asked.

“She’s a neighbor. Leave her alone.”

“Not for me,” he said. “For you!”

Lonya casually made his way over to Daphne, and I stepped out into the garden. What was it I had seen? It was not possible, of course. It was just a symptom. But I was absolutely certain it was there anyway, hovering just beyond my periphery. Whenever I turned, it was gone. Idiot, I told myself. What are you looking for?

•    •    •

I tried to relax and breathe in the perfume of the garden. How different this was from the yard in Moscow, contained not by towering gray walls but by meandering garlands of morning glory and tea roses bursting from trellises Anyusha and I had built together. There was also a small square of velvet lawn and three happy banks of flowers: bulbs in spring; foxglove, delphinium, hydrangea, and scarlet in summer.

I checked the bird feeders. This was one of the first things Anyusha ordered me to do when I got home. “You might be half dead, Pa
po
ola, but that doesn’t mean our little birds have to be. And after that,” she chirped, “you can feed
me
.”

It would be a while till I’d be able to cook for her; at least I could attend to the birds. But when I bent down to pick up the bag of seed, my head began to throb, my chest constricted, and great shining swords of electricity sparked at the corners of my eyes. The doves and swallows, the warblers, whitethroats, and finches that for so many years had come to my little garden for their evening meal would fly away hungry tonight, and my heart broke for them.

So I went in, saw my well-wishers, and after about half an hour, collapsed into my bed, even though it was only four in the afternoon.