The Wanting (9 page)

“I think she has some sort of answer for me.”

“Because she’s Russian?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you are ashamed of your survival?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“And I don’t know if it’s such a good idea,” she said.

“But a deal is a deal,” I reminded her.

“Not yet,” she said.

I kept returning to see her, but the only reason was my desire to connect with Dasha Cohen. I had become obsessed with the idea of seeing her. Maybe I could help her. Maybe I could—who knew what I could do?

So I sat on Sepha’s couch, and she sat on a large rattan fan-back chair that made her look like Buddha with a cigarette stuck in his mouth, and it always went more or less the same way:

Dr. Sepha was driven by the belief that I should confront the event. But what could that possibly mean? How can you confront
the purely physical? It’s like saying I’m going to come to terms with that mountain in front of me. I’m going to understand why it’s standing in my way. I’m going to dig deep into the fact of that mountain, and then somehow it is going to melt into the air or just flatten itself out like a mud pie. That if I just got to know the mountain, I would never again be in its shadow no matter how the sun happened to fall upon it, and as for all the life on it—the goats, the trees, the snakes, the gazelles, the insects—well, to hell with them, they don’t need to exist either. I ask you, who was the trauma victim, me or Sepha? She was the one who wanted to vaporize the facts and process them into extinction. She was the one who spoke of assimilation and absorption. It was the alimentary school of psychotherapy. But you cannot eat your life. That’s what I told her. And this, she actually found funny. That’s when she finally gave me the details on Dasha Cohen.

It turned out she had been moved to a facility south of Be’er Sheva called Ganei Z’rikha—Sunrise Gardens, I guess you would say—to be nearer her family. It wasn’t a hospital, of course, just a holding tank. There was nothing more they could do for her. From now on it was all machines and IVs.

I plotted my move.

Anyusha was already up that morning, hogging the bathroom. In the old days, the bathroom door was always open; now it was bolted like a Mossad safe house. What did she think I would see? Not that I wanted to see, God knows. I could not have put into words the horror I felt at the very idea of her—even now I can’t quite say it—but the truth was, she already had two tiny Katyushas shooting out of her blouse, aimed at—I didn’t want to know whom, either. I realized I was supposed to have had a talk with her, but somehow I could never bring myself to do it. Instead, I purchased three or four varieties of sanitary products and left them in the cupboard. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Papoola,” she said, “you didn’t even get my brand.”

Anyway, the door was finally unlocked and out she came, all dressed except for the Elvis Presley slippers, which flopped on the floor like lazy, long-haired castanets.

“Hey, Pop,” she said, “don’t worry about breakfast. I’ll pick up something.”

“I can make you breakfast,” I replied.

“Not hungry.”

“I’ll drive you to school,” I said.

“It’s okay, I’ll take the bus.”

“I don’t want you taking the bus. I told you that.”

“Then I’ll get a ride with Shana. Or walk even. What a concept!”

“Why don’t you let me take you?”

“You’re not dressed.”

“I can get dressed.”

“Don’t get all crazy, Pop. It’s fine.” She packed her book bag, glanced inside the refrigerator, let out a sad little sigh, and went to put on her shoes. Then she came back, took me by both hands, and sat me down at the kitchen table. “Okay,” she said, “tonight for the thing at school, what time?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“Five thirty!”

“Right. I know that.”

“I put it on the refrigerator, see?”

“Okay,” I said, “I got it.”

“So five thirty we have to actually be there.”

“Enough, Anka.”

She finally let go of my hands, hefted her bag, smiled that milky smile of hers, and called out in English, “See you later, alligator!”

“Just don’t take the bus,” I said. And she was out the door.

I sat there for a minute listening to her footsteps clack down the front path and disappear beyond the gate. In the sad, empty well she’d left behind her, I could almost taste her sweetness and thought how lucky I was to have such a daughter.

Then I looked at my watch. I could drive down to Be’er Sheva and be back by five thirty, easy.

I packed a lunch—nothing much: a banana, a bottle of kefir, some halvah, a half loaf of stale black bread, a bottle of water. I don’t know why, but I grabbed my old army knife, probably because it was sitting in the basket with the keys. I slipped behind the wheel of the Fiat. Nothing felt right. I fiddled with the seat, adjusted the mirror, pressed the key into the ignition, went back to adjusting the mirror, caught sight of myself: blue eyes, like in the severed head of Amir Hamid. Indeed, I half expected to see him staring back at me. Finally, I kicked the starter, threw it into gear, and there I was, on the road again. I got on the 4 and swung over to Highway 40 at Ashdod. From there, I simply pointed the car in the direction of the Negev. Back in those days, the Negev was still mostly empty space, 40 was still a two-laner, and though it was only a two-hour drive at most, even if you stopped for a nice lunch, which I didn’t, I felt I was on an adventure. As I passed Rahat, I ate my banana. Then I had to drive through Be’er Sheva itself. They say Abraham lived here. And here Sarah learned that her husband tried to murder their only son. Her broken heart still hovers over the city in a rainless cloud. Through the open window I heard a lot of Russian and whatever it is Ethiopians speak. I finished my halvah and kefir.

I arrived at the convalescent home just at noon. The sky was cloudless and ethereally blue; the sun, of course, was scorching, and a fiery wind swirled through the parking lot tossing up eddies of dust. As I stepped from the car, sand and pebble swirled around my feet and pelted my face. They’d put Dasha in the middle of nowhere. Jesus, I thought, there’s Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva—why hadn’t they taken her there? Through the vortex of flying sand, I could make out the security guy already lumbering toward me.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he replied, looking me over. “What happened to you?”

“A terrorist incident,” I said.

He stepped over to my car. “You mind opening the trunk?”

“Not at all.”

He sniffed more than looked, circled the car, came back to where I was standing.

“What’s your business here?” he asked.

“I’m visiting someone.”

“Name?”

“Dasha Cohen. It’s probably written as Darya.”

“No, your name.”

I gave him my name.

He scanned his list. “I don’t see you here.”

“Do I have to be there?”

“Yeah, you do.”

“Well, then, I’m there.”

He looked again. “No. Not here.”

“Here’s my ID.”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re not on the list. You can close the trunk,” he said.

“I’m supposed to be there.”

“But you’re not.”

“It’s not an army base, for God’s sake,” I cried. “It’s just a rehab center.”

“Sorry. It’s how it is.”

“Shit. I’m going to call the doctor who was supposed to set this up.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He walked back to his station in front of the clinic and sat himself down on his beach chair. I got into the Fiat, dug up Sepha’s card, and dialed her on my cell. Naturally, I got her voice mail.

I stared out the window. Except for the tiny clinic and its parking lot ringed with flower beds and a bit of lawn set up for croquet, all was wilderness. Ragged shrubs, piles of rock, and in the distance a few scraggly goats grubbing for a blade or two of Egyptian broom. I heard the beep at the end of her message.

“Okay, Sepha, it’s me, Guttman, the one from the bombing who hit the Iranian guy. Well, I’m down here in Be’er Sheva where you said I could see Dasha Cohen, but guess what? My name’s not on the list. So I’d appreciate if you called and straightened this out and then called me back.” I recited my number and hung up.

There was nothing to do but sit there. The security guy seemed
to have forgotten all about me and went back to reading an old copy of
Blazer
. But the car was stifling, so I stepped out onto the driveway. The goats had moved on toward the crest of a little hill, impervious to the heat. The only shade was under the overhang above the entrance, which was taken up by the guard and his beach chair plus a small table on which he had placed his radio and can of Coca-Cola, so I moved off in the direction of the goats without any real plan in mind. As always in the desert, the horizon seemed to flee before me. Blades of hot air, rising like serpents, resolved into amusing images: a hat, a man on a bicycle, a three-legged camel, a caravan of shoes. But what was that? Blacker than the stream of mirages, something quite solid. Ah! The tip of a Bedouin tent peeking over the edge of the hill. It flapped silently in the burning wind. I admired it for its forlorn shape, how it sagged bowlegged like an old beggar. And yet, you outlived the golden palaces of emirs and caliphs, I thought, and even the great temples of Pharaoh.

I stepped over the border of poppies they’d planted along the edge of the parking lot and felt the desert floor crunch beneath my sneakers. The wind picked up, and the tent bent with it willingly, and I thought of all the things I had ever built and wondered, what creature has ever built a nest better than this? I was determined to take a closer look, but as I approached, a young man came rushing toward me, cursing and waving me away. His brother was beside him, holding up a fist. “Private land! Private land!” they cried. “No pictures! Get out!” Maybe they thought I was a government agent trying to serve them orders to move. The thing everyone says about Bedouins is that since they stay in no place in particular, everywhere they are is home. But it’s not true. They mark out their territory just like anyone else, and within their boundaries they are just as lost as the rest of us.

I turned around and made my way back to the guard. He looked up warily from his magazine.

“Nobody trusts anybody anymore,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“Come on. I’m just here to see this girl.”

“Sorry, I can’t do that.”

“I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to not do anything.”

He laughed. “You were really in a bombing?”

“It’s nothing. Just a few bruises.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to have some beautiful scars. You want a Coke?”

I squatted down beside him. He reached into his cooler and handed me a can. I opened it beneath my nose so I could feel the spritz.

“I could get you a chair,” he said.

“No, I’m good.”

“You’re not on the list, my friend,” he said.

“I understand that. Really, it was just some sort of miscommunication. Is this not how we do things in the Middle East?”

He laughed. “I can’t place the accent.”

“International.”

He laughed again. “You’re still not on the list.”

“Actually, I’m closely related to your patient, Dasha Cohen.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. I’m not lying to you.”

“How can you prove that?”

“I can take off the last of these bandages.”

“She was in the same event?”

“Yes.”

“And if you took off those bandages, I would see what that I haven’t seen before?”

“Not a goddamned thing. What’s your name?”

“Carmi.”

“Nothing you’ve not seen before, Carmi.”

He clicked his tongue. “You don’t want to tell me the particulars.”

“No.”

“You want an ice cream? I’ve got some Eskimos.”

“Take pity on me, Carmi.”

“I do pity you,” he said.

“Then be a friend.”

We finished our Cokes in silence. Then he got up and said, “You have to avoid the nurses. If anyone is there, you have to come back.”

“I promise,” I said, and he unlocked the side door.

I felt like I had stumbled into one of those abandoned churches in Moscow, all cobwebs and echoes and ghosts, although without the cobwebs, since the floors were sparkling with wax and the walls had been freshly scrubbed with disinfectant, but the halls were empty and there was not even the hum of a water cooler. I made my way down the corridor, scanning the name tags on the doors.
MEYER, BEN YONA, NAPHTALI, TARPIS
, and, finally,
COHEN
. Below her name the inevitable notation,
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
.
Lamed. Hey
. Two letters, that would be the end of her. Each door had a little window, like in a prison. I pressed my face to the glass. Her room was all flowers, get-well cards, balloons. It looked like a little party was going on in there, but when I opened the door, it wasn’t flowers I smelled but piss, stale breath, unwashed skin. I almost fell backward into the hall. Still, I let the door close behind me, swinging shut on its hydraulic arm with a great hiss, as if the air were being let out of a tin of coffee.