All I Love and Know (49 page)

On the flight, Gal and Yossi switched seats so she could sit next to Rafi, and she watched movies with a headset while Rafi worked tiny travel puzzles and a Game Boy with his thumbs. He sat slumped with his heels on the seat, tucked under his butt, and sometimes he'd gaze at the screen on the seat back in front of her, blinking with sleepy absorption, and she wondered, as she often did when they watched TV together—the sound turned up and the English subtitles making her eyes scramble all over the screen—how much he could understand. She took off her own headset and just watched the pictures, to see if she could follow the story, and he looked sideways at her, his lips curling up in a smile, then fished out his own headset from the seat pocket. He mimed putting them on and turning up the volume, and arranged his face into an expression of sage contemplation, and she laughed; he was showing her that he could hear if he put those on. He'd gotten a haircut for Israel, which made him look older, less elfin.

It was thrilling to choose and examine and eat their own dinner without the help of a parent. Yossi came by and poked his head in, but they yelled at him to go away till he slunk off, hands raised in surrender. They found the little packets of salt and pepper, the tiny tubs of margarine for their rolls—and they agreed with great pleasure that the meal was disgusting except for the carrot cake.

THEY PARTED FROM YOSSI
and Rafi at the Pelephone booth outside of customs, where Daniel needed to stop and rent a cell phone. When Yossi lifted Gal and hugged her, she wrapped her legs around his back and laid her head on his shoulder. She felt his back vibrate as he murmured in her ear, and then he looked in her face and rubbed his beard stubble on her cheek, making her swat at him. “We'll see you next week at the memorial,” he said. He put her down and bent to kiss Noam's head. Rafi waggled his fingers good-bye and slipped something into her coat pocket; when she took it out, she found it was a trial-sized tube of Jergens Ultra Healing moisturizer. She watched them walk off with a throb of unease.

The sound of native Hebrew jingled in her ears, and her brain rearranged itself with a smart click, like a metal washer onto a magnet. After he'd signed for the phone, Daniel put his wallet back in his pocket and ushered them away from the line, gesturing for Gal to wheel Noam in the little folding stroller while he wheeled the cart with the suitcases. He stopped, peered at the phone in his palm, and dialed Yaakov's cell phone. “Yaakov?” he said loudly. “It's Daniel!” He listened for a while, and Gal heard a torrent of noisy, distorted male speech come from the phone on his ear. Sabba, she realized with alarm, wasn't at the airport. Daniel kept trying to cut in and tell him it was no problem, they'd take a
sherut
. “Don't worry,” he said. “Yaakov. Yaakov. Don't worry. Okay,
le'hitraot
. See you soon.”

“Okay, guys,” he told the kids. “Sabba isn't going to make it—he got a flat tire. So we're taking a
sherut
. C'mon. Gal, you push your brother, okay?”

“Did he get into an accident?” Gal asked as he herded her out the doors and into the crowd. Would Daniel know how to get them to Jerusalem, and remember that he had to pay with shekels, not dollars?

“No, no,” he said. “He got a flat tire when the car was parked in front of the house.”

“Are we still going to see him?” She was hurrying with the stroller to keep up with him.

“What?”

“Are we still going to see him? Wait for me!”

“Of course!”

The air smelled of exhaust and cigarette smoke, the high whine of idling planes punctuated by quick blasts of car horns and brake squeals. People were holding up signs, exclaiming, hugging. Taxi drivers approached and solicited his business in English, and Daniel waved them off till he saw a Shemesh van. “
Yerushalayim?
” he asked the driver, and when he nodded, Daniel wheeled the bags to the back, supervised their getting lifted into the trunk, and lifted Gal's backpack off her back so she could get in. He tossed it in after her, lifted Noam out of his stroller and struggled to collapse it with one hand, sweating in his winter coat, remembering the woman in the security line who'd said, “I'd help you with that, but I don't have a degree in advanced engineering.”

He handed the folded stroller to the driver to stow away, lifted Noam into the van, and sat him next to Gal in the middle row, then climbed in beside him. The van vibrated loudly. In the back sat a religious couple with two little girls wearing sweatshirts over dresses. Daniel unzipped his coat and squirmed it off, feeling his shirt stick to his back and a trickle of sweat on his temple. “Whoosh,” he sighed. “One more little drive and we're there.”

They were the last ones in the van; the driver got in and pulled away. Now that Daniel was settled and had caught his breath, he remembered sitting in a van with his parents and Matt a year ago, the one that had taken them to the morgue, and for a moment something of the old shock came over him. When he could breathe again, he was glad to be alone, without his parents to manage and ward off, without reporters in his face. He put his arm around Noam and scooted him in closer.

He dozed, and was awoken when the van lurched into low gear as they began to ascend. It was warm in the van, and one of the little girls behind him was kicking at his seat; just when he was about to turn around, she'd stop, and then when he settled down, she'd kick again. He looked down at Gal, who was nodding and dozing with her head resting on the window. A scent memory of the morgue floated past him, and he concentrated on it for a second, trying to make it comprehensible, before letting it go in revulsion. The swing of the van through curves and the slash of sunlight in and out of his field of vision began to nauseate him. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was dark, the sun blocked by the massive wall of the cemetery where his brother was buried. Tears sprang to his eyes. His brother—
brother
—never had a word pierced his heart so sharply. A silent cry rushed through his chest and head.

Matt!

The slip was startling—although, he quickly reminded himself, it certainly wasn't the first time he'd called Joel “Matt,” or vice versa. After all, hadn't Joel been his first beloved, the model for all future beloveds? He rubbed his eyes before the tears could fall, and shrugged off the soreness and longing in his heart.

THE APARTMENT WAS CHILLY
and dark, the blinds on the porch making a hollow shuddering sound in the wind. They entered, sniffing and twitching. There was a faint smell of cleaning chemicals; Malka had had her housekeeper clean it.

Daniel dumped his bags in the hall and helped Gal off with her backpack. He turned on all the lights within reach, and flipped on the boiler switch next to the bathroom. He wheeled Noam into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, peering in as if it would offer him the key to an important mystery. It was empty except for some condiments in the door—mustard, mayonnaise, capers—and had been wiped out by someone who'd done a half-assed job; tiny crumbs lined the edges of the vegetable drawers, and there was an intractable juice syrup spot with tiny shreds of paper towel fuzzed around its edges.

Gal went automatically to her after-school destination, the snack drawer, sliding it open and finding a few loose Bamba and pretzel pieces and crumbs in the corners. She put a piece of Bamba in her mouth but when she bit down on it, it felt like biting into a sponge and she spat it into her hand. She looked around for the garbage, or a paper towel, then held her hand with the tooth-marked yellow paste out to Daniel, and he wrinkled his nose and brought her by the wrist to the sink. The faucet coughed loudly twice before water came out and washed it off.

She wandered into the living room; there were the blue couch and the leather lounge chair around the pocked octagonal wood coffee table that she had jumped off of thousands of times—first, as a little kid, onto the couch, landing on her knees, and then, later, with a big thud onto the floor, making her parents scold her about disturbing the downstairs neighbors. There, on a shelf under the TV, were the DVDs:
The Sound of Music
, Uzi Chitman,
The Little Mermaid
. The TV had a light film of dust over its face. She put her finger to it to draw her name, and was nipped by an electric shock. Her heartbeat sped up, then slowed down. An unnatural quiet saturated the house; she wanted to speak into the silence but couldn't coax the sound out of her throat.

She walked down the hall to her room, studiously avoiding looking into her parents' room ahead of her. Her room was dim and stripped: just her bed and Noam's crib, no sheets or pillowcases, comforters uncovered and folded; no toys. With only its thin mattress, the crib looked like a tiny jail cell. The pictures were up, though, and in the middle of the floor, the rug with the frog. Sunlight bled through the blinds' closed slats. She sat down on her bed, then curled up around the cold, bare pillow and put her thumb in her mouth. She was chilled. She thought she could fall asleep.

She heard Daniel's footsteps and felt his shadow come over her. “Your grandparents are on their way,” he said. “When they get here I'll go to the
makolet
and get some food into this house.” He stood there for a few more moments; she could hear him breathing and then scratching his cheek stubble. “Okay,” he said.

A minute later there was a knock on the door, light and peppy. Gal sat up, and from Daniel's delighted greeting she registered that it wasn't her grandparents. She came out of her bedroom to see who was there, slowed shyly. There stood Leora, wearing glasses!, and holding a plastic-wrapped plate with cookies and candy. And her mother, Gabrielle, in flowing bell-bottoms, a flowered blouse, and silver trinkets at her neck and wrists. “Welcome back!” Gabrielle cried as she and Daniel embraced. She caught sight of Gal over his shoulder. “Kookie, are you shy?” she said, her voice suffused with amused tenderness.

Gal blushed and trotted over, let herself be lifted and squeezed, her face tickled by Gabrielle's hair, her nostrils by her scent, which was like cucumbers. Gabrielle set her down and beamed at her. “You've gotten so big! How many teeth have you lost?” She peered into Gal's mouth, which was opened for inspection, and said “Psssh!” with an impressed expression. She caught sight of Noam sitting on the living room rug and crouched beside him. “Do you remember me?
Oy vey
, what happened to your poor cheek?” He reached out his hand and touched her face. “Num-num,” she growled, pretending to gnaw on his hand. “Where's Matt? What, he didn't come?”

“Hi,” Gal was saying to Leora, a little shy because Leora looked older and more serious with glasses on.

“Here's a Purim
mana
,” Leora said, and thrust it at her with a smile.

IT WAS PURIM, AND
the little-girl Queen Esthers in their pretty dresses were out in force. As were the teenagers with their faces minimally, wittily painted, and the men in drag, one of whom waited on Daniel in the coffee shop the next morning when the kids were at their grandparents'—a miniskirt encasing his slender hips, his breasts askew, his Adam's apple a-bobbing. That evening, Malka and Yaakov took the kids to shul for the reading of the book of Esther, and Daniel spent that time at home unpacking and cleaning up, then pouring himself a scotch and looking all over the house, fruitlessly, for a Bible, so he could reread Esther himself. He finally gave up and turned on his computer to check for wireless coverage, not very hopeful, although as the chord and the white apple greeted him, he marveled at how the sight of his own computer booting up could help him feel just a little more at home. And the wireless was working! Either his father had continued paying for Internet, or Netvision had forgotten to turn it off.

He read, sipping scotch. Vashti, the first queen, a feminist hero, who refused to dance for the king and his court. Then Esther, and her shadowy, ambiguous uncle/counselor/friend Mordechai. And at the end of the story, massacre. That surprised him, even though he'd read it before. Skimming along a chain of Google pages, he found a commentary from Elie Wiesel:

I confess I never did understand this part of the Book of Esther. After all, the catastrophe was averted; the massacre did not take place. Why then this call for bloodshed? Five hundred men were slain in Shushan in one day and three hundred the next. Seventy-five thousand persons lost their lives elsewhere. . . . Is this why we are told to get drunk and forget? To erase the boundaries between reality and fantasy—and think that it all happened only in a dream?

Daniel wondered how much of the story Gal was understanding, and he wished Matt was there to appreciate and deplore with him the way things hadn't changed in this latest version of Jewish nationhood, where disproportionate revenge remained such a central tactic. The scotch was beginning to warm him and soften the edges of his vigilant consciousness, and for a minute or two he allowed himself to miss Matt, to feel how much he picked up the slack, both parentally and emotionally. Who else would understand by a mere glance how Daniel felt reading the book of Esther? Without Matt to carry the indignation over the Occupation for the two of them, he now had to carry it himself. Along with ironic, queeny commentary about all aesthetic affronts. It was exhausting. Sure, Matt might snort a little too vociferously, jump to judgment a little too quickly and without sufficient nuance, but if he was being fair about it, shouldn't Daniel acknowledge that you really couldn't ask anybody always to have the most exact and perfect moral touch?

That thought came and then receded, too complex to hold on to in the vague glow of his buzz, but it left him feeling lonely. His eyes skirted the kitchen where he sat, the essential foods—coffee, crackers, cereal, two cans of cracked Syrian olives, two ripening avocados, the crunchy oily treat called “eastern cookies” that Gal loved, a few bars of Elite chocolate—that he'd lined neatly on the counter instead of actually putting into a cabinet, and the apartment's cold provisional half-emptiness made him feel provisional and half-empty, too. He thought he might write Derrick an email, and got up to pour himself another scotch beforehand. He sat and logged on, and found emails from work, from the producer of Joel's old show asking when the memorial would be and inviting him to the studio to look at the new editing room they'd dedicated to Joel's memory, and from an old friend of Daniel's from Oberlin who had married an Israeli man and moved to Jerusalem. Debra Frankel had been a smart, spiky presence around the edges of his social circle at college, and he had seen her at his ten-year reunion, where they'd ended up in line together at a sandwich shop, joking about her impression of him back then as an aloof aesthete and his impression of her as someone who might eat him alive. It turned out that since the Peace Train bombing she'd been keeping track of him, which kind of touched him but also made him think,
You couldn't send a card?
He wrote to Joel's producer to set up a time, and left Debra's email for another day when he was less tired and vulnerable, more sober.