“Really?”
“Spy mission,” he said, propping himself up on one elbow.
The park had begun to fill with early-morning joggers, and the homeless man watched them go by on the path.
“If you’re not looking for drones, then what?”
“A hawk, actually.”
“You missed him. Wind-fucker. Already caught a pigeon this morning. Ripped its head off in one bite.”
“Really!”
But the homeless man had pulled the blanket back up to his nose.
Haaroon zipped up his collar and watched the wind swiftly carry the clouds. He knew that the hawk preferred to wait until the sky was fully light before flinging himself out for the hunt. Feeling himself beginning to nod off, the doorman blinked and drove his fingernails into his palm. After the night shift he normally went straight home to bed, and slowly his fatigue began to win out, his eyes drifted closed, and his chin fell forward onto his chest.
He couldn’t have been asleep for long before he jerked awake and saw the white underside of the hawk soaring above. Heart pounding, head thrown back, he leaped to his feet with a shout. Oh, the magnificence! What beauty under heaven! The doorman could barely believe his luck. Riding a current of air, the hawk’s wings were outstretched and nearly still; it was only the tilt of its body that caused it to wheel, turning a circle high above the treetops. Then it stopped in tense idle, hovering, and plummeted down in a dive.
Haaroon raced in the direction where it had gone down, pushing the lashing branches out of his way until he was through to the grassy clearing on the other side of the trees. And there, in a patch of sunlight, stood the magnificent bird, shoulders hunched and neck curved almost tenderly over the prey struggling in its talons. In a moment, it was over. The limp mouse hung from the hawk’s beak, and the bird flapped, its heavy wing beats carrying it up again.
Only after he had lost sight of the hawk did Haaroon look down and realize that his own hands were empty. Once more he shouted. Heart pounding, he raced back through the trees toward the bench. But he could already see that it was empty. Not wanting to believe it, he desperately ran his fingers over the wooden seat, as if the Madonna might still be shining there invisibly.
When he turned, he saw that the bench where the homeless man had lain was now empty, too, but for the brown blanket that hung shapelessly from the seat. The doorman moaned, raised his hands to his head, and pulled on his thin hair. Turning in a desperate circle, he scanned the paths and trees. But all was still but for the sparrows.
To the Desert
I had no sense of how much time passed after Schectman dropped me there. In the silence of the desert, at the mercy of a fever, I lost track completely. It could have been a week or ten days, or far longer. By then my family might have been searching for me quite desperately. My father would have been the most stalwart and indefatigable of the searchers. He has an extraordinary capacity to organize and accomplish under great duress, my father; has what people often call a commanding presence and an iron will. Right away he would have gotten Shimon Peres—who’d been an acquaintance of my grandfather’s half a century ago, attended my parents’ wedding at the Hilton, and once even told me over an expensive meal that he had read my books and liked them, though I was not inclined to believe him—on the phone. But despite all of these threadbare connections, what Shimon Peres could have done for my father is anyone’s guess, since by then Peres was only a figurehead of what he knew had been lost. Yes, I decided, my father would have been the most obvious and cogent leader of the search party, whereas my mother, in her distress, would have been disorganized and largely useless. Surely my children would not yet have been told anything. As for my husband, I really had no idea how he would have responded to the news that I’d disappeared: it was very possible that he might have felt ambivalent, and perhaps even relieved at the prospect of being able to go through the rest of his life without me looking skeptically over at him.
Schectman had said that someone would come for me. His orders had been to drop me in that desert shack with the suitcase and the dog, and in due time, presumably after I’d completed my assignment, someone would be back to get me. The assignment itself was never mentioned outright. He must have assumed that I knew what I was supposed to be doing there. Carefully, with the shy, delicate pride of a groom leading his bride into their new abode, he brought me into the house and showed me the kitchen with its black stove, the narrow bed covered in a tartan wool blanket, and finally the worktable by the window, on whose sill two or three flies had given up the ghost. The house was tiny, almost comically so in proportion to the vastness pressing up against it from all sides. On the desk was a glass containing a few pens, a stack of paper held down by a smooth oval stone, and an old typewriter. But it’s Hebrew, I said, awkwardly clutching the shopping bag with my change of clothing. I’d never written anything on a typewriter, and had no use for one, and so I can only surmise that my reason for pointing this out was to subtly bring to Schectman’s attention the problematic nature of the situation in general. But he kept up an air of insouciance, and only looked at the typewriter appraisingly, with, at best, the interest of someone who likes to take mechanical things apart into tiny pieces.
He offered to make me coffee, and I stood leaning against the wall with my arms crossed, watching him move about the tiny kitchen. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, but he handled the kettle and the stove in a way that suggested he’d been used to doing things for himself from a young age. The window was framed by the sort of white lace associated with alpine chalets, as if whoever had hung it had hoped to look past it to drifts of sparkling snow. But all that could be seen was the blanched, dry landscape stretching out in all directions, and the driver smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the jeep.
I could have refused, or yelled, or otherwise put up a fight so that they wouldn’t have left me there. I couldn’t have called anyone, because my phone had no reception. But I had the impression that I could have appealed to them, or at least to Schectman, who from time to time continued to regard me with his gentle, sad smile, as if he regretted having to leave me there on my own. But I didn’t object or even complain; at most, I pointed out that the typewriter was useless to me. Maybe I wanted to impress him with my independence and professionalism. Or didn’t want to disabuse him of the notion of untold talents, which, the moment he drove off, would be put to use for the good of the Jews. Or maybe I suspected that I’d already gone far enough that there was no turning back anymore. Whatever the case, from the moment Schectman extended his hand to help me up into the back of the jeep, I’d gone along with everything. As far as I remember, the only question I asked was about Friedman.
I was worried about him, I explained to Schectman, as we drank our coffee. I wanted to know where they had taken him, and if he was all right. But Schectman showed no sign of recognition of Friedman’s name, and when I pushed him further, he admitted that he had never heard of any Friedman. He had arrived in the story midway, it seemed, without knowing anything about what had happened prior to my becoming his charge, or what would happen after. All he knew was his part, which involved getting me from a roadblock at the edge of Jerusalem to this shack in the desert, with the suitcase and the dog. But I suppose that’s how they do things in the army, never giving any of the participants the whole story. In the military, the entire idea of narrative must be completely different, I thought. You learn to be satisfied with your small piece, without having any real idea of how it fits, and yet you never have to worry about the whole because somewhere someone who knows everything has thought it all out, down to the last detail. The story exists, who knows where it arrived from and where it is going, all you have to do is apply yourself to your part, which you can polish until it shines in what is otherwise darkness all around. In light of this model, it really did seem like sheer vanity to ever imagine that one could possibly know the whole thing, and, considering this, I momentarily forgot about Friedman, too.
But when I caught Schectman looking at me over the top of his coffee cup, all my concern surged back with a force that took me by surprise. I would have given a lot to be told that Friedman was all right. I’d known him so briefly, but at that moment I missed him the way I’d missed my grandfather the last day I’d seen him alive in the hospital, when I’d said good-bye and he’d called after me, Come back if you can. And then, Go, I’ll wait. If you don’t hear from me, open the door. It seemed to me that Friedman had been trying to tell me things that I had been too slow to grasp.
I need to know what happened to him, I told Schectman again. My anxiety must have been plain, because he reached out and touched my shoulder and told me not to worry. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, and wanted to believe him. This must be how it begins with captives who develop a bond with their captors, I thought: one small, unexpected gesture of mercy begets what can only be called love. I pictured us watching soccer games on the little TV Schectman would bring for my birthday, which we would only be able to get in Arabic.
Did you know that I have children? I asked him quietly, wishing to extend the moment of intimacy. He shook his head. Two boys, I told him. The older one must be nearly half your age. And the younger? he asked, politely. For some reason, I don’t why, I said: The younger one is probably standing by the window, waiting for me right now.
I watched a drop of darkness seep under Schectman’s eyes. Maybe I was trying to test him, to see where his true feeling lay. But when I looked down, I saw that it was my own fingers that were shaking.
We drank the rest of our coffee in silence, and then it was time for him to go. He offered me some cigarettes, which I took, as I would have taken anything he offered me. I watched from the doorway as he climbed into the passenger seat next to the driver. I could see the jeep for a long time, getting smaller and smaller until finally it became only a cloud of dust, and when even the cloud vanished, I turned back into the house.
I washed the cups and left them to dry on the edge of the sink, and gave the dog more water. Then I went into the only other room of the house and eyed the suitcase still standing upright by the door. But it was not yet the moment for that, I decided. Instead, I turned my attention to the few old books on the shelves. They were all in Hebrew, and I tried to work out the titles. One caught my eye. It was called —Forests of Israel—and inside were black-and-white photographs of places that didn’t look like they could be in Israel at all: wild forests where one might still have a chance of being raised by wolves; thick, dark woods swept through with snow. I looked at the pictures for a long time, and because I couldn’t understand the captions, I had to content myself with imagining what they said, but as I could not very well imagine what the captions of photographs of forests that couldn’t possibly grow in Israel and yet had been gathered together under the title Forests of Israel might say, I was free to enjoy the magic of that discordance. In one photo I found a small white hare almost completely camouflaged by snow.
In the closet there were some rusted tools, a couple of shovels, what looked like a metal milk pail, a first aid kit, some rolls of twine, a wool scarf, a canvas backpack, and a pair of leather slippers worn smooth at the heels. I kicked off my shoes, put them on, and padded to the bathroom. The tap ran brown as if the desert itself were coming in through the pipes, while the kitchen faucet produced water that was merely cloudy and bitter. I drank from there.
When I’d seen everything there was to see inside, I went outside to explore. On one side of the house was a small picnic table scored by knife marks, and at the back was a covered stone well. There must have been an underground spring or aquifer, because there was a lot of scrub surrounding the house, and three or four small thorny trees. Tamarisk maybe, or acacia. Soon the rain would arrive here, too, and the desert would be carpeted in green, but here it was still dry and barren except for a few lone spots of life. I saw quite a lot of animals; their drinking source must have been nearby. There were horned ibex in the hills, and a family of small antelopes that came to chew on the scrub, and once a desert fox with amber fur, huge pointed ears, and a little thin snout came hurrying past the house and stopped to look through the open door, as if he half expected to greet someone familiar. But when he saw me, he trotted off again, not bothering to get involved. There were plenty of mice, too, which came and went as they pleased.
Only after investigating the house inside and out did I approach the worktable. Approached it casually, I should say, with no plans whatsoever of doing anything there, least of all writing. And it was only then, as I sat down in the chair and mindlessly lay my fingers on the typewriter’s letters, that it dawned on me that this was Kafka’s house that I’d been brought to. The house where he’d lived alone at the end of his life—lived and died for the second time, under the minimal conditions he yearned for, confined at last to only that which was unquestionably within himself. That this was where Friedman had intended to bring me all along.
Very soon after that, maybe even the following day, I fell ill. It came as a wave of weakness and heaviness in the limbs, and at first I thought it was just exhaustion from lack of sleep. All afternoon I lay on the bed looking listlessly out the window at the desert ever changing in the light. Lay unmoving, as if already exhausted by whatever it was that I was going toward. When I began to shiver, and a low ache spread down from my skull and through my limbs, I thought it must be psychosomatic, a way to avoid having to try to write, or to confront what I was really doing there, or to fully consider what in my heart I already knew was to come. I no longer feared physical pain, but I did fear emotional pain—my own, but far more so the pain I might inflict on my children, which everything in me leaped to shield them from for as long as possible. Forever, if I could. But by then I had begun to sense that I could only delay their pain, and that the more I delayed it, the more their father and I continued to uphold a form we no longer believed in, the more hurt they would ultimately be. I know I should add that I feared the pain my husband would feel, too, and as much as I did, I find it difficult to write that sentence now. In the years that followed, he behaved in ways that continually shocked me despite their near constancy. We walked away from our marriage side by side, and though afterward both of our sufferings were great, I do believe I could have gone on feeling very much for him all my life, this man with whom I’d borne our children, who had poured his love into them, had he not become someone I could no longer recognize. Not just his face, which I continued to study with perplexity for a long time afterward, but his whole being. I think it must often be the case that after one parts from someone one has been with a long time, many things spring out that were suppressed or constrained by the presence of the other. In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds, but in reality the person has been growing all along, under the surface, and it is only in their new freedom, in their hair-raising aloneness, that the person can allow for these underground things to break through and unfurl themselves in the light. But there had been so much restraint and silence between my husband and me that when we parted and broke into our separate light and volume at last, the person that came into view was impossible to hold close. Perhaps he didn’t wish to be held close, or couldn’t, for which I don’t blame him. And now, far enough on the other side of grief, I find I feel only surprise when I think of him. Surprise that for a time we ever believed we were walking in the same direction at all.
At what moment does one fall out of a marriage? Unlike love and care, the promise of time can be measured, and so to marry another is to bind oneself to him for a lifetime. And now I think that I left mine by falling out of time, which was the only way for me, just as packing my suitcase in the haze of insomnia was the only way. Awake in Kafka’s bed, I fell out of time’s old order and into another. Outside the window there was only time, and inside, too: the light that crossed the floor was time,
as was the hum of electricity from the generator, the tick of the bulb that brought a dim illumination to the room, the wind whistling around the corner of the house, all of it only time swept up from somewhere and deposited here, having given up any attachment to sequence.
A long time ago, before I was married, I read a book about ancient Greek. It was during a period when I was particularly interested in Greece, and went to the Peloponnese with a boyfriend whom I lived with for a while on the long finger of the Mani that juts impertinently into the sea, where we both tried to write, but mostly just fucked and fought savagely in a tiny cottage infested with rats. The book was filled with many fascinating things, and I remember that it went quite deeply into the ancient Greek words for time, for which there were two: chronos, which referred to chronological time, and kairos, used to signify an indeterminate period in which something of great significance happens, a time that is not quantitative but rather has a permanent nature, and contains what might be called “the supreme moment.” And as I lay in Kafka’s bed, it seemed that what was gathering up all around me was that kind of time, and that when I was well enough again, I would endeavor to sift through it all to locate the supreme moment around which my life until now had secretly coalesced. Finding this needle in the haystack seemed to me of urgent importance, as presumably the moment had come and gone without my having the least understanding of what it had offered. I became convinced that it must have come along during my childhood, come like a moth going toward the light, only to slam into an obtuse screen, a screen newly placed there by some nascent responsibility to what was expected of me now that I was eight or ten, whereas before I lived with all of my windows and doors wide open to the night. I remembered that from that book I’d read in the front garden of the cottage, while in the kitchen the rats were scurrying along the weighted pulleys that held up the shelves, and in the shade of the back garden the boyfriend was producing pages upon pages as if just innocently passing time while he waited for me to find yet another reason to unleash on him my fury—from that book, I’d also learnt that in the ancient art of rhetoric, the word kairos referred to the passing instant when an opening occurs that must be driven through with force, with all the force one can muster if one wishes to overwhelm any remaining resistance. And now I grasped that, in my ignorance, I’d failed to seize upon or even recognize this instant, which—had I possessed the necessary force—might have allowed me to break right through to that other world I’d always sensed existed beneath. In my obliviousness, I’d missed my chance, and since then I’d had to resort to trying to claw my way there with my fingernails.