The Distance Between Us (27 page)

She doesn’t correct him.

“Efraim and his brother were close. Best friends, you might say. They grew up together, studied together, fought in the same army unit. They got married on the same day, a combined wedding.” Avraham looks at the ground, then up again. “One afternoon last year, the brother was driving to Ofra when he saw a pregnant woman standing beside a parked car at the side of the road, waving. She was an Arab, but he stopped anyway. It was a setup. A man appeared from behind a tree and shot him in the head.”

Caddie remembers this killing. She even wrote about it—a paragraph in a roundup of the day’s violence. She takes a deep breath.

“At that very second,” Avraham says, “Efraim was calling his brother on his mobile phone. The Arab answered and said, ‘He’s dead.’ He said it over and over. Laughing.” Avraham shakes his head. “He dropped the phone when another Israeli motorist approached. Then he got into the car with the pregnant woman and they sped away.” Avraham turns partly away from her. His shoulders slump slightly and he looks for a moment like he might spit, but he doesn’t. He straightens. “When you think of tonight,” he says, “think of that.”

When she thinks of tonight, whenever she can think of it, she knows it won’t be of Efraim or his brother.

“You know how rare it is for someone like you to be permitted to go with us?” Avraham asks. “An outsider, a woman. Sasha said you were
with
us. He said you sympathized.”

“I—” She clears her throat. She needs to speak, but words feel awkward. “I sympathize with everyone here,” she says.

He shakes his head. “That’s not how it works. Not even for a reporter, not if she’s allowed this close. Either someone’s your enemy, or they’re not.”

And was he their enemy, that Palestinian?
Her
enemy?

“Remember what you said before?” Caddie asks. “How our lives don’t turn out like we expected? How
we
don’t turn out . . .” She trails off, swallows. “I can write that.”

“You can’t write about this,” Avraham says. Not insistently, the way Moshe would. Just decisively, coolly. Maybe a little sadly. “You print it, in any way, and we’ll deny it. Totally and fully. We all will.”

They stand there leaning against Avraham’s car, the two of them. The moon, halfway up in the sky, is badly formed, like a smeared thumbprint. The night has turned breezy. “Avraham.” She hesitates, shivering, chilled by the perspiration that has gathered at her temples and the base of her neck. “Tell me about Goronsky.”

“Sasha?” Avraham stares at her.

“About what he does for you.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“Does he ever go with you?”

Avraham shrugs. “The key part he provides is information.”

“Information?”

“About terrorists.”

She swallows a laugh. “Terrorists? Like the boy tonight?”

“Their names, where they live, where they work,” Avraham says, ignoring her. “He knows things, he knows how to find out. Our own Shin Bet refuses to give us those details, unfortunately. Our leaders live in their homes in Jerusalem, a long way from here. Sasha understands the nature of our struggle. He understands from his own past.”

“He told you about his past?” Something he said only the two of them shared?

“Terrorists killing his wife and child? From the beginning.”

“Wife? Child? No. He was—” Caddie stops herself. Avraham has it wrong. Or
she
does—and if she does, she has it very wrong. She tries to speak slowly. “So he tells you who to go after.”

She feels Avraham’s stare. He swings shut the door to his Subaru, locks it. “I’ll walk you,” he says, gesturing to her car parked on the other side of the road.

“Avraham? Is that what he does?”

“Ask him yourself.” He crosses the street, then turns and faces her. “I’m done,” he says.

Something in the way he says those words triggers a wave of nausea. She looks away and waits for it to subside before speaking. “So that’s how it will be?”

“This isn’t my
story
,” he says. “It’s my life.”

. . .

H
ER CAR FIRES
straight down the settlers’ West Bank highway in the dark of night. Her hands on the steering wheel look ghostly; her veins stand out. Her mouth feels full of sour saliva. She needs to stand beneath a shower.

She tries to summon forth the image of Marcus, the weight of his body leaning against hers. She tries to reawaken her righteous anger. All she sees is the Palestinian’s eyes, his ruined body.

She feels dampness on her cheeks. “Fuck this,” she says aloud. “That’s so beside the point: you crying.”

She had, she knows, a moment in which she could have changed everything. And now she owns that moment. It belongs to her, as much as it does to the Palestinian and to the settler who pulled the trigger. Maybe more.

She remembers, suddenly, a promise she made to herself a year and a half ago in Ramallah, when Marcus was still alive, when they still kissed and made love and had arguments about how involved a journalist should be, where the line was drawn. Caddie was standing in the street after a clash—three dead, six wounded—when she saw a group of men stumble around a corner, maneuvering as awkwardly as a party of drunks, except instead of arms flung around shoulders, they clutched a plank of splintery scrap wood. On it lay a small girl, about two years old. The men were yelling for an ambulance, their urgent voices colliding. Caddie stared at the child. Apart from a bit of cherry-colored blood around the corner of her
mouth like sloppily applied lipstick, she looked asleep. But by the limp way her body bounced and the bleached-bone shade of her skin, Caddie knew her for dead.

The men were blind to it, though. They kept screaming for help until an unearthly wail rose above their voices. It came from a grandmother who followed them, recognizing what they had not.

They stopped, looking in confusion from each other to the child and back again. Gently they set the plank on the ground. Then backed off a few steps as the grandmother, eyes of glass, took the toddler’s head in her lap, stroked her cheek and rocked.

She began to hum then, that grandmother. And it was her lullaby, fragmented by gasps for air, that cut through Caddie’s body as sharply as any bullet could. Aware of Marcus taking pictures of the child, she turned away to interview others. But she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder. After Marcus finished, Caddie approached the grandmother and knelt, notepad in hand. The old woman gazed at her. Openly, with plain brokenness. Without seeing Caddie at all. Any question Caddie asked, it was clear—even the woman’s name—would be unanswerable.

“C’mon, Caddie. Let’s move,” Marcus called, patting his pockets to make sure he had all his film.

And so Caddie left. And that night—really, right away, but by that night for sure—she knew she’d made a mistake. She should have gone to the mourning house and eaten the hummus and eggplants and watched the neighbors visit and stayed
too long and asked too many questions and then been too silent and waited until it was not just another death, but a particular death, a particular girl and her grandmother. A story that she could write that would become real, and maybe take a sliver of the thorn out of the old woman’s chest and put it in someone else’s. She didn’t talk to Marcus about it, she was temporarily incapable of bantering and she didn’t want to hear his I-told-you-so, so she just made a private promise. Next time, she’d stay. Next time, she’d write the story.

Only she forgot.

Tomorrow, there would be a mourning house in the Village of the Condemned.

But tomorrow, she’d be on a flight to Lebanon.

A blaring horn interrupts her. She’s left behind the West Bank and entered Jerusalem’s limits without noticing. Finding herself halted at a traffic light that has long since turned green, she hits the gas too quickly, scorching rubber as she speeds on.

Thirteen

C
ADDIE HESITATES
outside the door to Goronsky’s second-floor hotel room. The fluorescent lights in the hallway hurt her eyes. She’s achy, in need of a deep sleep that has eluded her but will come, she is sure, after Lebanon. After whatever Lebanon will be.

When she knocks, he answers instantly, as if he’d been hovering, waiting. A damp towel rests on his shoulders and the room is slightly steamy. Except for shoes, though, he’s fully dressed. Black socks, slacks, a blue shirt. No tie.

He reaches to her waist and pulls her into the room. “Good, you’re here. The flight to Cyprus has been delayed an hour and a half. I called.”

“Goronsky—”

He waves his hand, cutting her off. “Give me just a minute.” He steps into the bathroom.

She glances around his room. Fleetingly his. About to be
abandoned. One suitcase stands upright near the door. Another is open on the bed, partially packed, with a pile of papers arranged on top. In the trashbin lies a disposable razor. Atop the television sits a glass. Everything appears intentionally placed and orderly, except newspapers that are scattered on the edge of the couch, and the city of Jerusalem that insinuates itself through the expansive window.

She sits on the couch and begins scanning the top newspaper. She hasn’t kept up with the daily news, and that will have to change once she’s back from this trip. The paper is folded open to a story of a Palestinian woman and her daughter shot dead in their home. The article says the grandmother had been forced outside, but looked through a window to see her daughter-in-law kneeling to shield the child. The grandmother heard a shot then, and fled. The article says four of the brothers are in Israeli jails, accused of being involved in terror attacks, and that local Palestinians blamed Israeli settlers for killing the mother and child. It ends with that standard line: the incident is under investigation.

She tosses the story aside, glances at the next newspaper and notices it is opened to an article on the very same incident. In fact, she sees as she flips through the stack quickly, there are four different papers in all, each one folded open to that story, the slaying of Randa and Salwa Silwadi.

In a flash, she remembers. His body leaning forward, drawing out her words. His long fingers touching hers so briefly for the first time. His shrug in the direction of the café owner. Silwadi Café. Randa and Salwa Silwadi: these are the killings
Halima’s uncle was talking about, the ones on his poster. She hadn’t linked them to Goronsky until just now.

Her vision blurs. Her head feels thick. She lifts it to see Goronsky a few steps away, watching her. “I think I’ve got everything packed,” he says, gesturing around the room.

She looks down at the newspaper in her hands, and back up at him.

He straightens.

She opens her mouth, but her throat clamps, preventing speech.

He steps closer, then seems to read the resistance in her expression and moves back. “I gave Avraham information,” he says. “I only did for him what I did for you. Like the list of supplies the hospital needed.”

She shakes her head and lifts the newspaper slightly in her hand. “It wasn’t the same.”

He sits on the arm of the couch, lifts his shoulders, then drops them. “When someone you love is killed and you do nothing, that’s wrong.”

“I don’t want to discuss that.”

“But that’s the crucial point.”

“The mother. The child,” she says. “Silwadi Café.”

He looks up at the ceiling. “I never touched anyone myself. That’s a line I never crossed.”

The way he says that cuts through her. Me neither, she wants to say. But those words are so deceptive. “What kind of person are you?” she asks instead.

He looks down at his hands. “An enabler,” he says.

“Enabler.” Something tightens in her gut, then springs loose. “You persuade other people to do your work. People like me.”

“Please, Caddie.”

“This story you
never told anyone before
. Your personal tragedy. Which was it, Goronsky? Was it actually your wife and child? Is that why you wanted to hurt someone else’s wife and child?”

He turns his face to one side as though she’s slapped him, but then he straightens and meets her gaze. “It was my father and my sister,” he says. “I told you the truth about that. I don’t blame you for not believing. But it was true.”

“And to Avraham, you lied?”

“I wanted him to trust me. I wanted him to know some part of it, but not all. So I changed it a little. With you, it was different. Right away, I
knew
. The way you carried yourself. The way you protected yourself. And then, our childhoods.” He’s leaning forward, toward her. “I wanted closeness. You understand?”

She doesn’t answer. She won’t be pulled in, won’t be made an accomplice. Father, or wife? Neither? Maybe it was the most important thing between them once, but it’s not anymore, not even close.

“You came here,” she asks, “planning from the beginning to find an Avraham?”

“Nothing that clear.” He paces the room. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I tried to make contacts. The Palestinians were easier than the settlers. At least until I met Avraham. I liked him right away. I mentioned some of the Palestinians I knew, gave him some details. He asked for more. That’s how it started.”

“You knew how they used your information?”

He hesitates for a second, long enough for her to shudder at the hopefulness built into her question.

“It would be easy to lie to you, Caddie,” he says. “That’s the opposite of what I want now.”

She sits on the couch next to the open suitcase. “Did it help? Did it feel like payback, giving Avraham your information?”
Or letting Efraim shoot the villager?

Goronsky stands and walks to the window, his back to her.

“Because of you, a child is dead,” she says, looking at her own hands.

He doesn’t turn when he answers. “I was a child, too.”

She rises, touches her neck. She is intensely conscious of her arms, her legs, her chest. She doesn’t recognize them.

When he finally faces her, she expects to be repulsed. Instead, it’s as though she can fully identify, at last, the quality that draws her to him, that connects them more profoundly than she’s ever been connected to anything. The same something within her, something corruptible. The trait she kept hidden, even from herself.