The Wanting (44 page)

At first I was very confused. They were asking me questions to which I had no answers.
Tell us in detail what you were doing in Beit Ibrahim. And what precisely was the nature of your visit
to Darya Cohen? What are these blueprints we found in the back of your car? And now, what can you tell us about your daughter, Anna? Who are her associates? Please think. We’d like names
.

“Why do you want to know about Anna?” I said.

It was four days before they would let me see her. Her face was bruised, but little else showed how deeply she had been injured. They’d propped her up so she could sit and watch TV, and when I came in, she tried to jump up—but the most she could do was lift her arms to embrace me. I held her for a long time, breathed in the honeyed scent of her skin and felt the breath of her rise beneath my chest—her life, so powerful, so precious, so frail. When I finally let her go, she gave me a little wink. We sat for a long time, saying nothing. I was careful not to stare at her, not to make her think I was worried. But I was watching her from the corner of my eye all the time, until at last she seemed to be ready to talk.

“Hey Pop,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Something happened to me I can’t explain.”

“You were hit with a rock.”

“No. Before.”

“Before?”

“Yeah. I was somewhere. I guess near the wall. No. On the Mughrabi Ascent. Going up to the mount. I was going up there.”

“Yes.”

“I was going to do what they wanted. It was just to put some stuff there, for others.”

“I see.”

“All of a sudden there was a kind of racket in my brain—not exactly a million voices, but a voice I hadn’t heard before.”

“Voice? You hear voices?”

“I never told you about them. Stuff just seems to talk to me. It’s not like psycho voices. It’s just—I don’t know.”

“It’s all right. I have something like that, too. I guess we’re two peas in a pod.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But this was a sad voice I could just barely make out, a kind of nagging voice, a whiney voice—and I realized it was my own voice I was hearing, and it wasn’t happy with me.”

“No?”

“It wasn’t only not happy, it was scared. It felt something was wrong, really wrong. And my feet stopped me right there.”

“As if your feet knew more than you did.”

“Yeah. Then—I know you’re not going to believe me—I heard Mom’s voice. Mom! I mean, I never heard her voice in real life, so how could I even know it was hers? But I
did
know it was hers. It was definitely Mom, and she was saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, go ahead and do it, do it. It was her voice, for sure—and she said, It’s the
right
thing to do, and you should always do the right thing, to stand up to all of them and be courageous and do what is right!”

“Yes, sounds like her.”

“But this other voice was kind of yelling at me, too, and it kept stopping my feet from moving. Mom was saying, Be strong! Go on! But the other voice, if it was a voice, was just sort of shaking and asking me, Are you sure? Are you sure? Because my feet just wouldn’t move!”

“Honey, sometimes our bodies—”

“So I had no choice but to just stand there and think! And I thought about Mom, and I tried to picture her, to see her, though all I could see was that photograph you have. You know the one, with the hat. But even though I really couldn’t see her, I could feel what she was saying to me, you know what I mean? And I got it, you know? How what she did when I was born—how important it was. How big it was. And it was just the same as what I was doing now—I mean, what I was about to do—it was just as big, just as important—so I could really get inside what she went through and how she made her decisions—and I just, I just, honestly—Pop—
I … couldn’t understand it
. I don’t get it! I don’t. Not that I ever knew exactly what she did, only that—in the end, are you supposed to hurt people? Are you supposed to hurt people to help them? Because look at us. Look at you, look at me. What good did she do us?”

“She gave us life, Anyusha.”

“That’s when I said to myself,
No
. No. I don’t want to be her. I don’t want to be like her at all. I won’t hurt other people just to be good. I’d rather be bad. I’d rather be weak. I’d rather be a great big nothing and never do anything at all.”

“No, sweetheart, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

“And then I couldn’t. I just started running, I don’t even know where. And I let everyone down.”

“No.”

“And that’s why God punished me.”

“No, no, my sweet.”

“Yes, he did. He did. He did.”

And she cried in a way I had never seen her cry before. Not as a baby, and not yet as a woman, but as a young soul who already was broken in two.

I
WOULD CRY FOR MERCY, BUT THERE
is none. I have not ascended, nor found peace. I seek death. He taunts me with life.

Yet Allah, Shaper of Beauty, has not rejected me. No, no. He waits for me. He waits for the hour in which I finally find a voice that can be heard amongst the living.

But do not pity me. Save that for yourselves, you who live—who still have hope!

Anyusha, Roman Guttman, farewell! Live on this land as if it were your own. But every so often look up and see: it is I and not the moon that illuminates your night.

Allahu Akhbar!
For the peace that never comes!

O
NLY LATER
, I read the stories in the papers.

The one that sticks out most in my mind is this:

Over the next months, Lonya came to visit often. By this time he was already with Daphne, and I could see that even with all his concern and anguish over Anyusha, he was happy and so was she. My mother did her best, too, but her best was always so very little. Katya called from America and flew over for a few weeks. She brought her kids, but not Oleg, who, she said, was sick. She stayed with Mother. We saw them when we could, which was not often.

Anyusha went through therapy, first in Tel Aviv, then at Lowenstein in Ra’anana, and finally at home. As far as I know, she never saw her friend Yohanan again.

One day I saw her sitting in the garden watching a pair of finches feed in the birdhouse. We had been circling around each other for weeks, months—I don’t know how long. Her hair had grown long again, and she had taken to blue jeans and sweaters. She did her homework in the privacy of her room and took her meals as if eating were a kind of punishment.

“Two little siskins,” I said, “male and female. It’s nice to see the birds are back.”

“Yeah,” she said.

I plopped down beside her on the patio stoop. Her hands were gathered around her knees, probably because her legs hurt so much. Without fully realizing it, I did the same. The birds fluttered and pecked, and then flew off.

“Oh, well,” I said.

Anyusha grabbed for her crutches and began the arduous work of standing up. I remember wishing with all my heart that she would just stay with me awhile. And then, for some reason, she let go of the crutches and sat back down.

“Pop?” she said.

“Yes, honey?”

“Pop, I need to ask you—”

“What?”

“About—”

“What?”

“Mom, I guess.”

“What about Mom?”

“About Mom and me. About why she—I don’t know.”

“Why she left you?”

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t.”

“Yes, she did.”

“No, Anyusha. She loved you so much she gave up herself to give you freedom.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Wait here,” I said.

I went into my bedroom and took down the photograph of her mother that had found its place again on the wall and brought it out to the garden. There I pried open the backing from the frame and removed from it the letter I’d kept hidden there—the letter Colonel Vasin had given me that day in his office. It had grown old and yellow, the creases hardened with time; but when I unfolded it, the scent of Moscow in all its beauty and terror seemed to billow forth, and the strong, brittle handwriting of the woman I loved flew off the page and danced through the flowers and bushes of our little Israeli garden. I held the letter up to the sun and read it to my daughter, word for word, omitting nothing.

It was then, for the first time in so many, many months, that she folded herself into my chest and allowed my arms to hold her.
We sat there that way for a long time, until I noticed she had fallen asleep.

And so the years have passed. We’ve gone through another intifada, dozens of peace initiatives, a war in Lebanon, withdrawal from Gaza, and then we invaded Gaza again. It doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve gone to America many times now to see my father and also Katya. Her kids are grown, and she’s grown lonely. Love, however, has also bloomed in places. Daphne and Lonya, I’ve already mentioned, and though Daphne has breast cancer, her chances of survival are good. My father remarried yet again. And just a few weeks ago, Marik’s first wife, Irina, asked me to come back to Moscow to see her. We’ve been e-mailing and talking on the phone. She has not changed at all, and when I speak with her, I feel I have not changed all that much either. I know this is a lie, but it is the kind of lie that yields results.

Sometimes I still see a head fly by my window, but it no longer seems to be weeping. Sometimes I still drive to the desert but don’t stay so long, and I take along water and food. I often visit Dasha Cohen, who is still alive, and still in a coma. She is twenty-five.

Anyusha, unfortunately, never fully recovered from her wounds. She always had a pronounced limp. She called it her Peace Prize. I was grateful for it, because it would keep her out of the army. As a teenager she joined several Israeli-Palestinian youth groups and wrote wonderful stories about imaginary universes. Instead of the army, she volunteered for ambulance duty in the territories. She was killed in Jenin by a sniper. She was nineteen.

I try to visit her every day. It’s on my way to work. I made a little bench for myself, and I sit there and tell her I love her. I bring her my drawings, so I can show her where the gazebo is going to go.