Look for Me (9 page)

Daniel and I lived together for seven years and two months. Daniel designed buildings and I worked at an insurance office. I enjoyed my job: I typed letters in English, handled overseas phone calls, brought lunch for everyone, and watered the plants. The office was full of interesting exotic plants because our employer, a bald, friendly man who was, however, capable of ruthless decisions when it came to client claims, was an amateur horticulturist; he had taped instructions about each
plant to the wall and it was a compliment that he trusted me with their care. “I can count on you, Dana,” he used to say.

In the evenings Daniel and I nearly always went out: to concerts, comedy shows, plays, lectures. We wore matching outfits and everywhere we went there were people we knew. We had friends who were artists and musicians, waiters and drifters, students and left-wing lawyers; we got together with them for dinner or at parties that lasted all night. Daniel invented our own private language, called Kamatzit, in which the syllables of words were all vocalized with a short
a
sound, in honor of my name.

We tried to have a child, and I finally succeeded in getting pregnant, but I miscarried in my sixth month. Daniel was convinced that he had saved my life by harassing everyone in the hospital and insisting they take me in and look after me instead of letting nature take its course, as they suggested, and I was angry at him for being rude and alienating the entire hospital staff, but we were both just stressed out and disappointed. The experience brought us even closer, if that was possible. We breathed the same air and a few times we had the same dreams at night. Once we both dreamed we were in a field filled with rabbits and we were feeding them lettuce; another time we dreamed we were on a sailboat with Asian sailors.

Before Daniel I had hardly thought about men, or about how they might be different from women. I now felt that there was such a thing as maleness (men were never cold, for example); this uncharted territory was interesting, and also moving. I watched Daniel, the things he did, the way he looked at the world. I watched how he held a coffee mug or undressed, I noticed his attitude to his body, his work, other people. I had dreams in which I found myself on a planet inhabited only by men and I tried to pass for one as well, and no one guessed I was really a woman because I’d come to know Daniel so well.

When I came home from the beach it was past midnight. I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day, so I boiled two eggs and made myself a sandwich. Then I undressed, turned on the air conditioner, and lay in bed. On some nights, as soon as I shut my eyes I saw a tangled dam, the kind a small, industrious animal might construct out of sticks and leaves and mud. The image interfered with sleep and in fact was no more than a visual projection of insomnia. When that happened, I would summon three memories and try to slide with them through the dam and into sleep.

The first memory was of a sandstorm. I was twelve; we were about to move to the city and our flat was full of boxes. The ones my father had packed were neatly marked
dishes
and
books
, while my mother’s packing style was reflected in her less disciplined scrawls:
junk from drawers
and
junk from office.

We’d been warned that day that a sandstorm was coming our way; there were continual reminders on the radio, and our teachers instructed us to roll wet towels and place them under doors. And yet somehow from one moment to the next it slipped my mind, and shortly after I came home from school I decided to walk to the corner store to buy a snack. My parents were still at work and there was nothing tempting in the fridge or pantry. I left the building and began crossing the parking lot. All at once it came. I didn’t understand at first what was happening—I only knew that I couldn’t open my eyes or breathe or move. I kneeled on the ground, pulled off my shirt, and wrapped it around my head. The sand burned my skin, sank into my hair, entered my mouth and nose through the shirt. And yet I found that if I covered my face with the palms of my hands, inside the shirt, I could breathe, and I was after all, alive, a tiny living cocoon, breathing inside my hands, inside the
shirt, inside the sandstorm. I decided that it was precisely because people were so small that they managed to survive on this huge and dangerous planet: how much air did we really need, and what did we need apart from air? Eventually someone noticed me; I felt strong arms lifting me into a car. I was rescued.

The second memory was a remnant from my army days. I’d been sitting on my bed trying to clean my weapon and as usual everything was going wrong. I finally threw the rifle on the floor in disgust and ran out of the barracks. I made my way to the edge of the camp, looked out at the trees beyond the fence, and decided that I was nothing more or less than a prisoner. A prisoner in a jail operated by cruel and insane jailers. I heard someone call my name and I turned. Sheera, the girl who had given me the gold locket, came up to me. She handed me my weapon, but as if it were something else—a birthday present, or a lovely sweater. “You’re smarter than everyone here,” she said. I noticed her long brown hands, her long slender fingers and perfectly curved fingernails. She had beautiful hands. “I’m not, I’m stupid,” I said. “Well,” she conceded, “you are a little obstinate. But you’ll grow out of it. Come, the army needs you.” She took my hand and led me back to the barracks, and for once, thanks to her and to my good luck, I didn’t get caught.

The third memory dated back to the second year of my marriage. I had dragged Daniel to a lecture about civil rights in some remote town in the north; he had not wanted to go but gave in for my sake. When we arrived we found that the lecture had been canceled. The people there invited us to stay for supper, but Daniel was too angry to accept. As we headed home a downpour hit us and our car got stuck in the mud. There was no one around, so we had to abandon the car and start walking. Neither of us was adequately dressed, and the rain chilled
us as we trudged through the shallow puddles on the dirt road. By this time Daniel was in such a bad mood that I sat down in the mud and cried. Daniel began laughing, and then we both laughed and he sat down next to me and we kissed. Eventually a Druze came by in a truck. He tied a rope to the fender of our car and pulled us out.

These memories were wonderfully dense and heavy, like an imaginary object that can’t be lifted even though it’s the size of a pea. They began to merge as I grew drowsy: I was in the mud, sand was blowing around me, Sheera was handing me my weapon, Daniel was kissing me but we couldn’t kiss properly because there was sand in my mouth. Sheera’s long brown fingers, the rope the Druze tied to our car … The pleasant confusion of near-sleep—the last stage before drifting off—took over and I yielded to it.

Daniel and I quarreled again, about a month after our first fight. We quarreled about the mess in the house, and it was a conflict we never resolved, it came up again and again, and we argued about it again and again. My father had been neater than my mother, but it never seemed to bother them. Sometimes my father tidied up after my mother and sometimes he didn’t.

But in our case the clash between Daniel’s approach to his environment and mine was a problem we didn’t know how to solve. Daniel was calm, usually; he felt that keeping one’s cool was a national duty. He said that if people became nervous and irritable about everything that was wrong with the country, they became part of what was wrong, because one of the main things wrong with the country was that everyone was nervous and irritable. He either joked about things that bothered him or tackled problems pragmatically. Sometimes he had an outburst—when
our tires were slashed, for example, because I’d put a sticker on the car that said
AIDS KILLS: WEAR CONDOMS
/
THE OCCUPATION KILLS: WITHDRAW
, but there was something theatrical and innocuous about his anger, as if even he didn’t take it seriously.

At first he tried to understand me. “How can you live like this?” he’d ask, truly baffled. “How can it not bother you? It’s so ugly. It’s so ugly and disgusting. Don’t you care whether you step on apple peels at night on your way to the bathroom? How can you not be grossed out by gobs of hair in the sink? Disembodied hair …it’s like seeing a corpse. Beauty matters. How can someone not care about beauty?”

“I don’t mind if you clean up,” I offered generously.

“I can’t spend my life cleaning up after you, and I resent it. And I just hate coming home from work to this; it makes me think you don’t care about me or about how I feel. Why is it so hard for you, Dana, to put a cup in the sink, or hang up a shirt?”

“I feel as nervous when things are neat as you do when they aren’t,” I said.

“You’re just lazy.”

“I feel more at home, cozier, if there’s a mess. This isn’t a museum, it’s a place where we live. I like having our stuff all over the place. I get scared when things are too orderly, it makes me think of being forced to do things. Besides, if I put things away I’ll forget about them. I need to be reminded that there are bills to pay, and activities coming up.”

“Look,” he’d say, pulling an empty box of tissues out of a tiny garbage pail. “Even when you put things in the garbage you don’t really bother. This box is bigger than the pail, what’s the point?”

“It’s a reminder. A reminder that it’s on the way to that great big garbage dump in the sky.”

“I don’t think it’s funny. I think you’re being selfish.”

“But why aren’t you the one who’s selfish, wanting me to conform?”

“I can’t believe anyone can prefer ugliness to beauty.”

“You have a very narrow definition of beauty, Daniel.”

That would hurt him. He felt then that I was attacking the most essential thing about him, the thing that defined him: his passion for architecture. And I would feel remorseful and penitent. I’d start cleaning up, but Daniel’s mood would be ruined; the evening would be ruined. And I had no talent for cleaning up. “I don’t know how to organize stuff,” I said. “This place is too small. There’s no room for anything.”

So Daniel built all sorts of clever shelves and cupboards for me. But nothing helped. I never reformed, and he never got used to my slovenly habits. We hired a woman to come two afternoons a week and bring order to chaos, but her good work never lasted. “Like the sand in
Woman of the Dunes,”
Daniel said when he was in a good mood and trying to joke about it. But most of the time he wasn’t amused and every now and then he walked out of the house in protest, leaving me to sit in the squalor and sulk.

S
UNDAY

I
WAS WORKING ON MY NOVEL
when the phone rang. I ignored it, and continued writing.

He took her in his strong arms and murmured in her ear, “Angela, Angela. Why did I read that letter before I left for St. Petersburg? If Sir Anthony returns tomorrow, nay, if he returns tonight—

Fifteen minutes later it rang again. I answered this time, though I knew it would be Rafi.

“Hello, is Dana there, please?” he joked.

“Don’t call,” I said.