All Russians Love Birch Trees (19 page)

Tal let out a contented moan and slowly relaxed. I opened her bikini top. My fingers now kneaded specific muscles, then I stroked her back with my flat palm and finally I bent down and traced her back with my mouth, from tailbone to neck.

A military plane passed over us and left a white condensation trail in the sky.

“Maybe they’re finally off to bomb Iran.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“A Douglas A4,” Tal said.

The condensation trail dissolved. I took a sip from the water bottle in my bag. A cool breeze swept by. I lay down on top of her and breathed in the scent of her skin.

8

It was a while before I got my bearings. I’d taken a lot of sleeping pills the night before—to be expected, given the date—and was now having trouble orienting myself. I had been awoken by jackhammers. The noise invaded my bedroom through the open window along with the fine sea breeze.

I padded barefoot onto the deck to make sure that the world outside of my apartment still existed. It did. The sun burned in the sky, old ladies and gentlemen marched toward the beach, cars honked, and the renovation of the house at the end of the street was in full swing. My neighborhood was in a permanent state of noise. In the morning the heavy cleaning trucks
arrived, followed by construction, hammering, drilling, and later the buses, cars, and Vespas. And the passersby contributed their fair share.

I went back in to shower. I’d forgotten to turn on the boiler and the water was cold. I dried myself off, went to the kitchen, dissolved an aspirin in a glass of water, and made Turkish coffee. I took Elisha’s photo from my wallet, leaned it against the wall, and lit a candle in front of it. I often looked through his photos, and in my mind reexamined every second of our last night. Why hadn’t I woken up earlier? How could I have prevented his death?

This photo had been taken in Morocco, during our sole, but long, trip together. Elisha was smiling into the camera. My face was buried in his hair. Looking at the photo I smelled him and clearly saw the texture of his skin in front of me. In a tea house, I had asked a man with a mouth full of gold teeth to take a picture of us. The man immediately identified himself as a tour guide and tried to talk us into a guided tour. I politely declined while Elias was busy adjusting and double-checking the settings on the camera. I dissolved another aspirin in water, quickly got dressed, and left the apartment.

The conference was organized by the French embassy in a hotel not far from my apartment. I hurried
along the beach promenade toward the hotel: the sea and blue beach chairs to my left, to my right towering hotels, built in honeycomb design. The street was crowded with taxis and Vespas. I arrived sweaty and out of breath, opened my bag for the security check at the entrance, and was let in. I picked up my badge at reception and went straight to the booths.

I’d been booked on short notice, as a replacement and after lots of back-and-forth. As a result, I was nervous as hell. I introduced myself and the two other interpreters—the one for Hebrew and one of the English guys—shook my hand. As it turned out, the head of our team was nowhere to be found and neither was my booth colleague. More and more interpreters showed up. Nobody knew anything and it was only a few hours until the conference was set to start. We didn’t know where the organizers were, nor did we have the documents or even the order of the speakers. My palms were slick with sweat.

My colleagues stood in a circle, looking very relaxed, assuring me that this conference would be a cakewalk. Among them a few legendary interpreters. My shivering intensified. A colleague grabbed my elbow and pointed to a man walking toward us, whistling. Our head of booth had long slender limbs, closely set eyes, and frameless glasses. His whole presence was somehow disarmingly amiable, even though
I knew that this was an illusion, as he was famous for his choleric fits. He introduced himself, handed out the documents, and assigned us to our booths. When I asked about my booth colleague he smiled mischievously and said, “That would be me.”

“What an honor,” I said and swallowed hard.

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “You’re our youngest colleague and if I’m not mistaken, this is your first time working for us. I’ll keep an eye on you. You have to know that this will be a pretty easy event. It’s only about cultural exchange. Nevertheless, focus and hand over immediately when you start to struggle. I expect the utmost professionalism!”

From my booth I observed the room. Only three people were listening to the Russian channel. That calmed me down a little bit and I returned my attention to the speaker, watching him gesticulating on the video screen.

I was supposed to interpret the opening address of the French cultural attaché before the first coffee break as well as the initial part of a talk by a professor emeritus on Jewish identity in French literature after 1990.

When the attaché began speaking my heartbeat accelerated. I was convinced my three listeners would hear it as well. But the attaché spoke slowly and used
the first fifteen minutes to welcome the majority of the audience by name. Afterward, he read out the names of the speakers and the titles of their talks. Both were also displayed on a second video screen. When he started talking about the purpose of this conference my booth colleague tapped me and took over. I felt like I’d just been fucked over.

Half an hour later, I got to take over again. The attaché was still talking, slowly and deliberately, interspersing jokes that I translated quite freely into Russian. My listeners smiled. The speech was not very challenging and I interpreted at a suitable pace. My boss’s face relaxed. When polite applause for the speaker set in, he even left me alone in the booth for a minute. The professor, on the other hand, didn’t make life easy for me. Despite the fact that the subject of his talk was contemporary literature, his choice of words was antiquated. And he delivered the speech at a breakneck pace.

The air in the booth grew increasingly stuffy. Suddenly I was an entire sentence behind and my colleague kept writing technical terms on his pad and pushing them toward me. But all I needed was a short pause—as my speaker cleared his throat I spoke even faster into the microphone and caught up.

After the coffee break had been announced we both exhaled. The head of booth even smiled at me and asked in French, “Where did you study?”

“In Germany.”

“Not bad at all. You’ll definitely get there.”

Then he went off to the dining hall and I locked myself in a bathroom stall for the entirety of the lunch break.

When I got home that night, I was dead tired. Paralyzed with exhaustion. The candle in front of Elisha’s photo had burned down. The concrete mixer outside was still running.

My mother had left a message on the answering machine. They’d gone to the cemetery and had placed a stone on the grave for me. I should call her back. That day Elisha’s death had become something final—a fact that left no room for hope.

9

In Germany the season had long ago turned into fall, but here the summer heat prevailed. The dried bodies of cockroaches piled up in the hallway. The days melted into one another. The weekends and holidays I spent at the beach or visiting boutiques. I almost never bought anything and only occasionally let a shop assistant talk me into trying on a dress. On Frishman Street I found a shop that carried old clothes from Berlin. Refashioned. Israeli-style. In general, everyone loved Berlin that summer. Most had already been and couldn’t wait to go back.

I would visit Ori in his workshop in the south of Tel Aviv. The noise and intensity of the city concentrated
there. Refugees from Sudan, nurses from the Philippines, artists, students—they all lived in Florentin. Ori was a cabinetmaker who channeled his love of wood into big, heavy pieces of furniture. We often sat on the stoop of his workshop, with watermelons and cold beer. Sometimes, the owner of the upholstery shop joined us. The entire street was filled with furniture makers. And our favorite bar, Hoodna, wasn’t far either.

It was only my fabricated worries that distracted me. I feared that Tal would get into an accident, imagined her crashing head-on into a truck. Her motorcycle under the rear end and her ribcage smashed. Or she could fall in her entryway, or get attacked and robbed. A serial killer could sneak up on her and plunge a knife into her back. Tal would slowly bleed to death. Her hands twitching. A pool of blood spreading around her. Most of all, I was afraid that something would happen to her at one of the protests, that she would get hit by a stray bullet or crushed by a tank. There were so many possibilities. I toyed with the idea of anonymously reporting her to the police. On the grounds of her political activism, for example. At least she’d be safe in prison.

I called her.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes,” she responded, bored.

“Why are you breathing so heavily?”

“I’m not.”

“OK.”

“Masha, is anything wrong?”

“No.”

“OK. I’m at work. I can’t talk right now.”

“OK.”

“I’m hanging up then.”

“Don’t drive so fast,” I said.

“I’m not driving. I’m at work.”

“But later, you will. When you go home.”

“You’re not my mother.”

“I’m just worried.”

Tal let out an exasperated sigh.

“I was in the West Bank. One trip home won’t kill me.”

“Statistically, more people here die in traffic accidents than in terrorist attacks.”

“You’re sick.”

She hung up. I couldn’t understand how I had become so dependent on her so quickly. Mostly I just called to make sure she was still breathing. I would call, waiting for her to answer and hanging up with her first breath. When she called back I didn’t respond. Said my phone was messing up. The key lock. Not my fault. Tal gave me a new phone.

10

A hot, dry chamsin blew in and brought nothing good. The air was stuffy and I felt the taste of dust on my skin and lips. Ori had asked me to drive him to a meeting point in the Negev. We would take his car and I could bring it back to Tel Aviv and use it for the next three weeks. Or drive out to Sinai for a nice trip. He presented these options like a salesman laying out his goods, although I’d said yes right away. He sounded so exhausted and depressed that I didn’t have a choice.

He was waiting for me in front of his house, wearing a khaki military uniform, a machine gun slung over his shoulder. Seeing him made me sick. My thoughts immediately turned to Farid, who hadn’t come back
either. Suddenly I remembered what he had looked like: a gangly boy with a gap between his front teeth. I saw him descending the stairs, wearing my father’s jacket, which was way too big for him. A tote bag over his shoulder. I was sure I’d never see Ori again. Israel had me.

“I won’t let you go,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No.”

Ori laughed insecurely.

“I won’t drive you,” I said coldly.

“Fine by me. I’ll just take the bus.”

I felt that I had it in me to kill him and that I’d rather do it myself than wait for the news of his death to reach me.

“I don’t want you to go!” I yelled at him. Two Thai girls shot us a puzzled look.

“I have to.”

“You don’t have to do shit!”

He shook his head and gently touched my shoulder. I whimpered, asked him not to go. He ran a hand through my hair. I yelled at him, called him Elias. Elias, Elias, Elias. He looked at me, perfectly calm. My fists hammered his shoulders and he stifled my cries by pulling me close to his chest. He held me tight. I gasped for air, but none came. My tongue swelled and my throat constricted, and no air came. And when I
shivered and ran out of breath and begged him not to go, he tried to calm me down, but no air came. Ori carried me into his apartment, the machine gun bobbing against his back. Gently he put me down on the sofa, covered my shoulders with a blanket, stroked my back, along the spine down to the tailbone. Once I’d recovered a bit, we drank coffee and smoked pot. In the evening he left to join his unit.

11

It was sunny, hot, and humid. The moment I stepped onto the street, sweat was trailing down my skin. I sat, freezing, under the A/C unit, working on a translation that turned out to be more difficult than I’d expected. It was a sociological paper, studded with footnotes and bold technical terms. But since it was Friday and the office was almost empty, I took generous breaks. I couldn’t concentrate, I looked out the window and forced myself to plan something for the evening, even though I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. I could go out with Tal—she might even agree to that—but then I would have to shower, shave, get dressed, and put on makeup. Afterward I’d be stuck waiting
for her on my deck, since I’d be done way too early. She would cancel on me last minute and I would have to ask myself some existential questions. All in all, it could turn into a nice Shabbat that would stretch into desperation late at night, leaving me with no choice but to numb it with alcohol.

I made myself a coffee in the kitchen. Mushy sandwiches from an unknown benefactor were spread out on the table. I decided to buy
burekas
. On my way I saw a man slowly strolling down the street, pushing his bike. He had hardly changed. Our clothes touched in passing and I followed him. He went down the street, turned into an alley, then into another one, until we were back on King George Street. The sidewalk was crowded and I had to give way to people again and again. It was as if they’d united into a single collective body that was in my way. At the crossing with Bograshov Street he locked his bike in front of a small shop. I followed him inside. On the rails hung Goa hippie clothes in even brighter colors than usual. My throat was dry. I wanted to drink something, but didn’t have my water bottle. A pair of pants over his arm, he stood next to the dressing room, looking at me questioningly. He, too, wore things that didn’t match. But it wasn’t Elisha. The shop assistant asked whether she could help me, her tone and volume bordering on hysterical. Colors and sounds mixed, as if a fuse had just
popped in my head. I began shivering and sweating and ran outside, across the street, toward the sea. At some point, I collided with a corpulent woman. From her shopping bag tomatoes spilled out across the pavement. Overly red and overly meaty. A soldier with dimples and an Uzi asked me if I was OK. His voice beating my eardrum. I shivered and ran on. Everything was unbearably loud and vivid. I leaned against a wall for support, felt a hand on my shoulder, screamed, shook it off and ran a few steps. Toward the sea. When the panic subsided a little I fell into the sand. The sea was calm. I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct Elias’s face, but the image remained blurry. Were his lashes brown or black? And how much did his right ear stick out? The shivering intensified. I sweat and shivered and sweat. Taking a seat in a cafe, I ordered a glass of cold milk.