The Best Place on Earth (21 page)

Still, she said nothing about this to Karin. She enjoyed having Karin envy her; so often with friends it had been the other way around.

On their second day in Eilat,
they went for a shallow dive, just the two of them, close to the shore. Na’ama had been itching to get in the water. Diving, to her, was a kind of miracle, the way the surface
of the water rippled above them, instead of below, the sky liquid blue, like a reflection of itself. She found comfort in knowing that underwater everybody was a guest, an alien, everyone there on borrowed time. If anything, she belonged there more than most: she had learned to swim in these waters after all, amongst these corals and fish. And she was a good diver, a natural, Ari had once told her. Her body knew how to control its buoyancy, how to breathe slowly and steadily, how to move through water with the gliding, elegant grace she sensed she lacked on land. Some days she felt more at home underwater, where verbal communication and social skills were of no use, where more value was placed on being inconspicuous, on leaving no impression.

After the dive they sat at a shaded picnic table and sipped Cokes, quenching the intense thirst that being immersed in salt water induced. In the brightness of the afternoon, the beach appeared blanched, the sounds muffled by the wavering heat. Na’ama was straddling the wooden bench, her diving suit folded down to her hips, when someone sat down behind her and said, “You have a beautiful back.”

She turned around and saw Samir. “Sorry,” she said, blushing, thinking he was being sarcastic, that he thought her rude for sitting with her back to him.

“Why are you sorry? It’s a compliment.” He smiled, exposing a gap between his front teeth the width of a wooden match.

Karin got up. “I’m going to get smokes.”

Na’ama half-smiled in Samir’s direction. She noticed a sandalwood necklace resting on his collarbones, a coppery tint in his green eyes. “So why do they call you Samir?” she asked.

“It was my Arabic name in the army,” he said, squinting at the sea. “I was a mistarev, you know, undercover.”

She picked at the wooden table and watched Karin at the counter, unwrapping her pack of smokes, laughing with one of the instructors, who quickly produced a lighter for her cigarette.

Ari joined them, handing Samir a chilled Goldstar. He offered her one too, which she declined. Karin landed in Ari’s lap, hooking her arm around his neck.

“There’s a group heading to Sinai to dive this weekend,” Ari said to Samir, his hand on Karin’s ribs. “You coming?”

“Na’ama grew up in Sinai,” Karin said, poking her with a foot under the table.

“Did you really?” Samir said.

“In Nuweiba,” Karin said.

“No shit,” Ari said. “My uncle was at that rock festival they had there in … what was it, ‘78?”

Na’ama nodded.

“He said it was wild. He still talks about it. Israel’s Woodstock. Everyone sleeping with everyone, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Man, I wish I could have been there.”

Na’ama pushed her nail into a groove in the wood. She remembered that festival. Her mom had left her with Tariq for the evening, and Na’ama had asked him why he didn’t go, but he just laughed. For dinner they drove to his family’s tent, where Na’ama watched the veiled women squatting in their long dresses, slapping dough between their palms and burying it under the embers. One of them, a young woman with too much kohl around her eyes kept glancing at them, smiling and lowering her gaze—his fiancée, Tariq told Na’ama when she asked. Later, Na’ama could hear Tariq’s mother reprimanding him in quiet, stern Arabic while eyeing her. Tariq ended up sleeping on the couch in their living room that night; Mira hadn’t come home as promised. All night
long the bass boomed through the desert, reverberating against the mountains. Outside her window, the night sky was steely and brimming with lights, the air thick with bonfire smoke and the smell of something electric.

“How old were you when you had to leave?” Ari propped his sunglasses on his head.

“Eight,” she said.

“That must have been hard.”

“They were settlers,” Samir said. “They must have known that it was temporary.”

“I wouldn’t call them settlers.” Na’ama shifted in her seat. Settlers made her think of gun-toting fundamentalist Jews living in the West Bank. “It was different then. They didn’t go there for ideological reasons.”

“Still, they settled on occupied land,” Samir said. “Everyone makes it sound all romantic, but facts are facts. That famous guest house in Nuweiba that everybody talks about? That was built on Bedouin land.”

“It wasn’t like that.” She sat on her hands, annoyed. “They were just a bunch of hippies looking for a place off the grid.”

“Hippie settlers.” He grinned.

“Don’t be an asshole.” Ari smacked Samir on the back of the head. “Forgive my leftist buddy here,” he said to Na’ama. “He spent too much time pretending to be an Arab in the army. It made him all fucked in the head.”

“Samir,” the blonde from the counter yelled, waving a telephone, and he hopped off the bench and left. Karin leaned over and whispered, “He’s better looking when he isn’t talking,” and Na’ama forced a smile.

The next morning
they joined a group on their certification dives. Karin was Ari’s partner, so Na’ama teamed up with Samir. She avoided his eyes as they performed the buddy check, conscious of the intimacy in these routine tasks: inflating and deflating each other’s buoyancy compensator vests, pulling on straps to ensure they were secure, breathing through each other’s regulators.

It was a deep, short dive down to thirty metres, where the reds, yellows and oranges faded, blended into a murky purple. On their way up, they hovered for a three-minute safety stop, allowing their bodies to decompress. Na’ama watched the blue deepening in the distance, the water above shimmering like Cellophane. With the sea floor so far below her, she was flying, weightless, suspended in midair. She stretched out her arms and closed her eyes, listening to the rhythmic gurgle of bubbles releasing from her regulator. She didn’t notice she was sinking until something tugged at the strap of her buoyancy compensator. She looked up and saw everyone’s feet floating above her. Samir swooped down and grabbed her by the hand. With a quick press on her inflation valve, she filled her vest with air, glad that no one could see her face turning red. Samir’s eyes smiled at her through his mask, and she was aware of his hand still holding hers. When he let it go he slowly ran his finger across her palm.

Later, at lunch, he slid into the seat next to her. “Good dive,” he said, chewing on a toothpick.

“That was kind of embarrassing,” she said, briefly glancing at him.

“What, that? Don’t worry about it.”

She crossed her legs and stared at the boats, the windsurfers’ bright-coloured sails bobbing in the distance.

“A few people saw King Hussein’s boat this month,” he said, cupping his eyes with his palm. “Sometimes he sails from Aqaba toward the sea border between Jordan and Israel and waves.”

“Really?”

Samir nodded. “Wouldn’t it be cool if he could just keep sailing and dock right here? Sit and have a beer? It seems so strange that there’s this invisible border you can’t cross.”

She studied him, following the blue veins that sliced through his forearms. His skin was smooth and hairless. He smelled good too, clean and salty, like he was carrying wet seashells in his pockets.

He drew the toothpick out and nodded at her plate of french fries. “You shouldn’t be eating this shit every day.”

She blushed.

“How about dinner later? Tonight?”

“Um …” She swallowed, looking over at Karin, who was sitting at the other end of the table with Ari. Karin glanced back.

He stood up, plucked a couple fries off her plate and ate them in one bite. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”

By the time she thought to say something in response he was already gone. She watched him walk back to the counter, chin up, arms slightly bent away from his body. Karin examined her from across the table, eyebrows raised. Na’ama nodded and Karin gave her an exaggerated, excited smile.

Over dinner at a fish restaurant
across the road, Na’ama started to wonder if Karin was right. It was embarrassing, being a seventeen-year-old virgin. And Samir was twenty-five and obviously knew what he was doing. She enjoyed sitting at a candlelit table across from him, sipping red wine, her cheeks flushed, her skin tanned against Karin’s white summer dress, her hair wavy and soft on her shoulders. She felt almost beautiful, a woman.

“Have you ever been back to Sinai?” he asked.

She shook her head. “My mother never wanted to. Too hard.”

“Was it a difficult adjustment for you? When you left?”

She swirled the wine in her glass. “My grandma used to say that when I came back from Sinai I was like a little Bedouin, walking everywhere barefoot, playing in the sand. We had no TV or phone or anything like that in Sinai, so I just wanted to be outside all the time. She said: ‘We left Egypt to come to Israel, but somehow we ended up with a Bedouin granddaughter.’” Na’ama smiled, trying to lend the story a light-hearted tone, when in fact her grandmother often sighed when she said it, shaking her head. Mira’s lifestyle had been a source of great sorrow to her devout, traditional parents. They disapproved of the way she raised Na’ama, were heartbroken that their daughter had never married, devastated that their only granddaughter had been fathered by a goy.

“So wait a second,” Samir said. “Your family is from Egypt?”

She sipped wine. “My mom was born in Israel, but my grandparents came to Israel from Alexandria. Totally different from Sinai, though. Two different continents.” The wine was loosening her tongue; she was talking too much, tangling one story with another. By dessert, she had counted on her fingers the many places she had lived after they left Sinai, coastal towns of various sizes clumped against the Mediterranean shore. But not Eilat, never Eilat. Mira hated the tourist town, the monstrous hotels that claimed the waterline, bullied the desert, destroyed the view; so close to Sinai, yet miles away. Samir listened to her, nodded and smiled in the appropriate places.

They continued talking as they left the restaurant. The night was warm, but brief gusts of wind cooled it, carrying the smell of sea salt and fresh fish and downtown dinners. The sky was shot with stars, and across the gulf the lights of Aqaba flickered, festive. Her
body, warmed by the wine, felt at ease; she hadn’t once worried about what to do with her hands. So when they made it back to the hostel, she asked if he wanted to come in.

The air inside her room was stale and hot. Karin was spending the night at Ari’s, and both their roommates had checked out earlier that day. Na’ama unlatched the window, placed an incense stick in a wooden holder and lit a match. When she turned to look at Samir, he was on the bed, leaning against the wall, browsing through the stack of photos she had left on her nightstand.

“Is this you?” He turned one of the baby photos to her.

She nodded and sat next to him.

He flipped through the photos. “Who’s that holding you?” he asked. “Your dad?”

“What?” She snorted. “Of course not.” She paused. “Why would you say that?”

He squinted. “I don’t know. The way he’s holding you, I guess. And you said before you were like a little Bedouin when you came back.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“The nose, the eyes.” He cocked his head. “The long face. You look like you could be related.”

Na’ama leaned in to look at the photo, zeroed in on Tariq’s face. Tariq’s black eyes stared back at her—at her mother behind the camera—his gaze soft and knowing. Na’ama felt as though she was barging in on an intimate moment she was not meant to witness. Her stomach caved in as from a direct blow, leaving her breathless. Her body went numb.

“So who is he anyway?” Samir asked.

She turned sharply toward him and slapped a hard kiss on his lips. “Whoa.” He recoiled and laughed, rubbing his lips. “Easy.”

She stared down, cheeks tingling. Then he leaned in and kissed her, and she parted her lips and closed her eyes and tried not to think about Tariq or her mom or the hole in her gut. Samir laid her on the bed and hovered over her body, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from him as he kissed down her neck, his lips sinking into the nooks over her collarbones. He took off his shirt, and she reached out and touched his chest, tracing the line down the middle with one finger, stalling when she reached his belly, unsure of how to proceed, and finally pulling away. Stop thinking. She took a long breath in. Stop thinking. She watched with silent fascination as he lifted her dress and rolled down her underwear; then he grabbed her protruding hip bones as though they were handles and lowered his head between her legs. She gasped, surprised, rising on her elbows to look at him, feeling something wet and tickling, a flutter, hot and cold all at once, pulsating and swelling, like something in her was about to break open, spill out. Stop thinking. She leaned back and stared at the metal bars overhead. Stop thinking. Goosebumps spread over her belly, her nipples, down to her toes. She wiggled her pelvis one way, then another, knees closing, muscles contracting, fingernails digging into the mattress, crumpling the sheets. “Relax,” he whispered, looking up at her. Stop thinking. She closed her eyes. Stop thinking. But her mind kept looping back to the same place. Was there ever a José Luis? Had her mother lied to her all these years? How could she? Her body stiffened, her anger defusing the pleasant sensation, turning it off like a dimmer switch, until she felt nothing but mild irritation, his tongue rough and gritty on her skin. She closed her eyes and shook her head. Stop. Thinking. But then she worried that Samir would want her to reciprocate, because she wouldn’t know what to do. The farthest she’d ever
gone was to give a kibbutznik a hand job on the beach last year, and she hadn’t been very good at it; the guy had had to finish himself off. And how well did she know Samir, anyway? She had talked so much over dinner that she hadn’t even asked where he was from. She knew nothing about him. Nothing. She didn’t even know his real name.