The Distance Between Us (16 page)

She backs away. She wants him to quit talking. She needs to get to the living room.

“I once saw a man shoot another point-blank,” Goronsky says in a voice so distant from emotion that it brings her to a halt.

“Right-o,” she says.

He ignores her arch tone. “They faced each other. The one with the gun was standing, the other kneeling with his back to a parked car, only three feet between them. And another three feet between them and me.”

“For your government study, this was?”

“Their knowing came about thirty seconds before the shot was fired. It was clear then that there was no turning back. Fear flooded the face of the kneeling one, a runny, liquid kind of fear, painful to watch. The one standing, he had this implacable expression, but he had fear, too. His was hard and sharp. They were scared of the same moment. Of the border each was about to cross.”

Goronsky is concentrated on somewhere Caddie cannot see. “So what happened?” she asks, half-believing in spite of herself.

Goronsky seems to refocus then, and looks at Caddie with surprise. “He fired.”

“And where, exactly, did this happen?”

“Time passes,” he says, “and still it doesn’t turn into a memory, not in the normal way. In my mind, I’m first one of them, then the other. The shooting itself remains frozen in perfect focus. Like a photograph. Often, it seems more crucial to me than my own history.” He spreads his arms in a palms-up gesture. “So you see, I understand.”

A flush of confusion washes over her cheeks. The way he refers to a photograph gives her the sense that he’s talking about Marcus.

“I can get you what you want,” he says.

“If you mean Lebanon—” she begins curtly, but he interrupts.

“This time I mean the settlers. A nighttime patrol.”

She gestures dismissively.

“I got the list of medicines, didn’t I?”

“How, exactly,” she asks, “does a professor get hooked into a renegade settler movement?”

“I’m studying the psychology of extremism,” he says patiently, as though explaining the constellations to a child.

“So?”

“I meet these people.” He shrugs and gives that smile, surprising, self-deprecating. She resists it.

“I meet them, too, Goronsky.”

“I’ve managed to build relationships.” He steps closer. The sudden charge between them makes her slightly dizzy, empty of breath. “I can get you on a patrol,” he says. “Why not trust that, use it? You want me to set something up?”

No. Absolutely not.

He puts his hand lightly on her shoulder, barely touching it.

A patrol. Her thoughts come haltingly, as though her brain is taking a nap. A patrol with the settlers would give her the story. And she won’t get that kind of access without help from someone.

He slides his hand to her elbow, then to her hip.

“No.” She steps away and brushes back her hair with both hands. “No. Thank you. I’m all set.”

He straightens. They stand unmoving, inches apart. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “If you change your mind, let me know.” Then he surprises her. “You need to get to work,” he says. He heads down her hallway toward the front door.

She wants him to go. She’s glad he is leaving.

“Wait,” she says.

He pauses.

“You know what you said about reporters prying into other people’s lives basically to escape their own?” she says. “That’s a cliché.” She tries to force herself not to blink, like in the childhood staring contest.

“Okay,” Goronsky says after a long moment.

He turns. She hears the door close behind him. She is relieved to have escaped his intensity, the way he crowds her. But she notices the scent of sea seems to linger in her apartment. And while she pulls on her boots—only then, only briefly—she allows herself to remember the way his eyelids looked while he slept.

Seven

“S
O HE SAYS
his unit’s headed somewhere dangerous next week, he won’t say where, of course, but he wants to point out that maybe I should consider
that
, surely
that’s
more important than whether or not my kids see him in his boxers.” Ya’el, legs crossed in the passenger seat, gives a subdued snort and waves her hand as though shooing a fly, then glances sideways. “Caddie! You listening?”

“Yes.”
Sort of.
But a million preoccupations swoop like bats through her brain. Driving, for one thing. She’s headed to the mechanic’s shop so Ya’el can pick up her car, and it’s in southeast Jerusalem, where the roads are particularly pockmarked, the traffic especially crunched. Horns blare at all sides for no reason other than general frustration. A gunshot goes off behind her, making her jump even as she knows it’s not a gun, just a taxi backfiring. She grips the wheel.

“The tired old last-sex-before-I-die line,” Ya’el says. “Like
every woman in Israel over the age of fourteen hasn’t heard that message a million times.”

And then there’s the message Rob left on her machine yesterday afternoon: “Hi, Caddie. Guess what?” Followed by static and dead air. Cut off before the punch line.
Guess what?
It’s the first time she’s heard from him since Lebanon and she must have replayed his voice half a dozen times, lingering over the few floating words, imagining his next ones.

Guess what? I think we should go back to Beirut together. Guess what? It’s time for us to grab those thugs by their short hairs. Guess what? I’m finally ready to smell
their
blood.

“What I really want, of course, is to
connect
with somebody. I don’t mean just in bed,” Ya’el says. “For what I want, he has too much swagger.”

“Hmmm.” Swagger. That’s what the protest boys have: swagger and bravado. It’s been two days since Caddie has “been out”—the euphemism for going to cover the violence. Two days since she’s stood next to the protesters as they shoot marbles with slingshots, tolerating the tear gas, feeling dread punch from inside her stomach like a trapped creature. This morning she has an appointment to interview Halima, the cucumber girl. But afterward, she’ll find some fighting. Perhaps in Hebron, where a funeral is scheduled. When she calls Pete on his mobile, she wonders if he’ll tell her what’s going on where, or if he’ll say, “Nothing cooking, Caddie,” as has been his wont lately. Maybe she’ll call one of the other photographers instead.

“And it all lacks playfulness.” Ya’el is still complaining.
“For him, it’s sex as an act of desperation. A distraction from hopelessness.”

Caddie leans forward, her attention suddenly snagged. “Desperate?” she says.

But Ya’el switches topics. “Oh well, he’s too Orthodox for me anyway. By Jerusalem standards, I’m a heathen.” She sighs. “Here I am, in great condition after the divorcee’s diet, and what do I get? I’ve got to face it: I’m a firmed-up old lady with two kids. And I love them, but I had them so fast, so blindly, that sometimes it seems like one long birth broken only by nausea and nursing. God, I should have held off. The way you have.”

“Held off. Yeah, right.” Caddie makes a face and Ya’el laughs.

“No, really. I think, someday . . .” Ya’el says.

Caddie stops listening. She
knows
all about the emotional buzz of having kids. She’s
seen
the look on Ya’el’s face when she pulls one of her daughters close. And sure, she’s felt a quick stab, a glimpse of possibility. In weak moments, she’s even wondered if having a child might save her from herself somehow, plant her in one place, solidify her.

But those moments are short-lived. What sticks with her longer is the diminishing power of motherhood, the way choices seem reduced. Moms either erase part of themselves, as Grandma Jos did, or flee, like Caddie’s mom.

Without doubt, getting quotes from children is far preferable to having them. That’s exactly what she told Marcus one early dawn when the yielding light coming in through the
windows lent itself to dreamy visions and he wanted to talk about kids. Caddie refused to succumb to the mood. “No way, no, never,” she said, slipping out of his grasp, rolling away to get a drink of water, silent a few moments and then changing the subject, her mind moving from birth to death, reminding him of the severed leg they’d seen on the field the day before, a suicide-bombing victim, the limb turned into an object so disconnected from life that Caddie had trouble imagining that it had ever been part of a breathing person.

Now Ya’el reaches to touch Caddie’s arm. “You okay?”

Caddie realizes her eyes are moist. “Dust in the air. Makes my eyes water. That’s all.”

“Dust?”

“Absolutely.” She reaches for her bottle of water, takes a sip.

Ya’el stares at her another moment, sighs, then throws back her head and sings out the window, “I need a lover that won’t drive me crazy.”

“Who,” Caddie corrects.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Ya’el slouches in her seat and fiddles with her purse. “And speaking of men.”

Caddie glances her direction. “I know. You don’t like him.” She doesn’t have to say the name. Even though they haven’t spoken about him since Ya’el met him three days ago, Caddie knew this was coming.

“It’s not a matter of like or dislike, Caddie,” Ya’el says. “
Anyone
can see his posts are not well planted.”

Ya’el would be more sympathetic if she knew Goronsky’s story. But Caddie cannot share it with her neighbor. What he told her that night belongs to her.

“He’s manipulative,” Ya’el is saying. “And angry.”

Besides, if Ya’el were clued in to the intimacy of that conversation, she’d probably guess all the rest. Caddie doesn’t want that.

“Maybe you don’t see it,” Ya’el is saying. “I remember after my brother. You lose someone that way, it throws off your judgment for a while.”

Caddie hits a pothole and releases a loud, frustrated breath. “My judgment’s fine.”

“I don’t think so. Because this is as obvious as a mountain in the middle of a highway. Steer clear of this guy, you hear me?”

“Ya’el. You meet him for, what, ten minutes? You think you’ve got a complete reading? He’s not a beach book, you know.”

“I ask him a simple question, and he gets nervous; I ask another, and he gets mad. He’s focused one minute, distracted the next.” Ya’el turns to look at her. “Shit, Caddie. You’re not in love with him, are you?”

In love
. The mad thing that springs from indecipherable logic and runs on its own internal steam. The thing that leaves her more exposed and exhilarated even than covering the clashes. Caddie sucks in two small, careful breaths. “Maybe he got tired of your endless questions, Ya’el. You wouldn’t let go of him. He’s a professor, for God’s sake, and you treated him like a terrorist.”

“I don’t care what he calls himself. After a few decades living in Jerusalem, I recognize the wild-eyed ones from a hundred meters. The ones who turn dangerous if you get too close.”

Caddie is aware of her hands tightening on the steering wheel. Yes, Goronsky
is
a little wild-eyed. Who can blame him? And maybe that’s part of the draw.

Is that
in love?
She’d like to know. But Ya’el is not the one to ask.

“What about Mr. Gruizin?” she says to change the subject. “He paints red on the mailboxes to save lives, for God’s sake. Is that unbalanced? Or me. Can you, with your extensive powers, tell that
I’m
another Anya in the making?”

Ya’el doesn’t return Caddie’s grin. “Since you bring it up, what’s with this pervasive need of yours to see the bullet come out of the barrel? You didn’t used to be like that.”

Caddie scoots closer to the driver’s-side door. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ve seen you coming in, day after day, black from the ashes, reeking like one of your photographer friends. I smell it in the stairwell.” Ya’el shakes her head.

“And what do you suggest I cover, Ya’el? Political discussions in the Knesset? Archaeological excavations? Maybe religious holidays?”

“You used to, when I first met you.”

“That was a different time. The violence is the story now.” Caddie pulls up in front of the mechanic’s shop where Ya’el’s repaired car is waiting. Ya’el makes no move to get out.

“Okay,” Ya’el says, “then cover it. But why obsessively?”

Caddie squeezes the steering wheel. For the adrenalin hit, damnit. Which is—as long as she survives—no more harmful than a nightly drink or a daily cigarette. But she won’t get into a discussion about that.

“This is what reporters do, Ya’el.” She bites her bottom lip, willing herself to stop before she says more.

“If you don’t have a camera in your hand,” Ya’el says, “you don’t need to be there all the time.
You
told me that.”

That was then. Now she’s living with the privilege of having survived.

“You know shit about this,” Caddie says. “You work in a
bank
, for God’s sake.”

She stops, sucks in her breath. She and Ya’el move carefully around their differences; they always have. They don’t speak this way to one another, not ever.

Ya’el looks out her window. She turns toward Caddie. “Okay.
Your
story.
Your
friend.”

Caddie knows she should apologize, but she can’t find the words. After a minute, Ya’el shakes her head. She gets out of the car, then leans down to stick her head through the open door. “Be careful today,” she says a little stiffly.

“Yeah.” Caddie nods her head several times. “Yeah, thanks.”

Ya’el turns, and the door clicks closed.

W
ITHIN MINUTES
, Caddie is past the Israeli checkpoint, into Palestinian territory, and taking deep breaths. She loves Jerusalem,
loves how her own carefully tended neutrality stands out against its biases. But today, what a relief to leave behind the city’s adamant judgments. Being alone, headed down a West Bank road, feels like a holiday compared to Ya’el’s interrogation.

She soon reaches a narrow dirt track that climbs to a hillside village. Amber marshmallows of dust rise from the car wheels. She rounds a corner to find a gray-haired goat blocking the road. She taps her horn. The beast answers with a stubborn stare.