The Place Will Comfort You (26 page)

Just past five that morning, the spool of twine having rolled off along a crooked floorboard, she unfolded the
Crier
and snapped it flat. In the photo feature the man with the nice beard and impressive tackle, a Felix Esquivel, was quoted saying this: “I just puzzle over how they used to make them. They're terrible. Either they had a whole lot more time then or there was a lot more fish.” She turned the page. On the reverse side came into view two words alone.

Neer Shabazi.

The name appeared in unexceptional print within a single small article continued from the first page, but the letters pulsed like a gaudy zone. She did not see letters at all. She saw a narrow teenager with black, wing-shaped brows on a young forehead complected medium brown. She saw a row of white apartment buildings, rust trailed down them in long stains as if from ducts at the lower corners of repeated porch rails, in the city where they had both lived. She recalled the upper-story view, the rocky hills west of Jerusalem blurred through a haze of distance and factory mists.

She had gone through so much before happening on this, disaster and achievement, violence and attempts to change the law, caricatures, thumbnail portraits, telling and less telling shots, recipes worth studying or not, mystifying rows of numbers, the outside layer of Sports, readership letters, and her own reactions by turn
curious, afraid, sorrowful, hostile, tickled, proud, hopeful, distracted, despairing, prurient, and exhausted, dreading the workday when she saw the time. At last she felt peace. Neer Shabazi, here where she lived now. A morning breeze blew through the kinked Venetian blinds, scented of seaweed. Birds had wakened in the walnut and were agitating for activity. At the gate the bottle gleaner sorted through the recyclables with a methodic chiming. Neer, here where she was now, this peaceful place, this cape of cod.

Spell the name, the phone voice at the cranberry plant requested when the workday kicked in at nine, and recited the letters back in a convincing show of ignorance. For nearly two weeks Adi was made to go along with this. No matter how she pressed, the voice promised only that he would receive the message if he was there. One morning she picked up a call to hear a man verifying her name in the proper accent. She said in Hebrew that it was she speaking. He identified himself, unnecessarily. She asked did her name mean something, and he said, Of course. The younger Poresch girl from the top-floor flat.

Seven years old. She had been making her way home late after school one day, having attended her extra music lesson in the Con-servatorion by the city hall. The streets would have been wakeful in the dimming afternoon but emptied of contemporaries in her school uniform. In her backpack would have been the bone-colored plastic recorder which she had considered a great thing.

What she had learned at the Conservatorion that afternoon who remembered, but the first full tune the teacher taught to them stayed. Slow-paced fingering within one octave, to these words:
The worker rests under the hero trees
—pause, and the same again—
The worker rests under
—the last notes altered to resolve—
the hero trees
— and climbing higher so the phrase closed like a call before response—
The river wind through eucalypti leaves caresses the bent
neck.
A melancholy song but accessible to beginners, written before the time of radio for the men and the imported trees who had dried up the malarial swamps and built this city, the neck referring to the lives the disease had claimed.

It would have been something to walk home and consider certain trees great, but on that mid-year day this wouldn't have been the song. With the recorder on her back she had reached Alfasi Street, or Captain Wingate, or was it Alterman? On a street within a radius of more or less three blocks from Mendeleh Shapira, where she lived, a man in a white shirt had taken her hand. Together they had turned to bring her home by a new way. The man knew to predict that this new way would pass a garden. In the garden stood a dwarf poured of cement. On the dwarf's feet would be seen genuine Dutch clogs.

But before they had reached the Dutch dwarf, an Israeli boy had approached, medium-brown skinned, a son of Yemeni Jews, teenaged, with a familiar thinness and floating gait. At some distance he had stopped his floating, and had looked, and kept looking, and finally had said, She's my neighbor from my building. This was true. The man in the white shirt had walked away with calm dispatch.

The Silhouette was empty when she arrived to meet him, closer to the happy hour than lunch. Behind the bar watching Comedy Central was a serious young woman with a punk pompadour, hair bleached to a frazzle, teased and fastened with conspicuous clips. The television was fairly loud but the near absence of the bartender's voice seemed unrelated to the blare. Adi read her lips, guessed at their message and responded a little too loudly. The woman poured a liberal shot, then added mixer and pushed over a napkin.

At the end booth Adi sat facing the entrance. In this way she
faced also the television. She gazed up at the skittering light, sucking a thin streak of cocktail through the stirrer. For a while she kept noticing also the bartender with her aura of damaged hair.

Soon Adi was sinking into her seat. She pushed a broad strap off her shoulder and let the weight of her backpack shift entirely off.

On the screen a figure popular in cinema was collaborating with the regular crew of a TV skit show. Normally he was cast grimly but now he was eager for a laugh, his eyelids popped wide. His pleading smile mesmerized her, his premature timing. Her skin crawled. Worse was to know that since his poor performance the guest had died, and died violently, at the hands of the mad wife for whom he had been caring many years unbeknownst to the public. A passing van blocked the afternoon shining through the bar door. She felt her face frozen in an anxious gawk. This would be the sight of her to anyone walking in. She rose and moved to the seat across, facing the area of the toilets and games.

To touch a major influence. To reconnect with the past. To press the hand that eighteen years ago had blocked a push to turn her life badly against her. A girl who had left the country that had raised her risked surrendering this kind of opportunity. Yet here it was.

The television continued to broadcast the skit, involving a catchphrase that drew increasingly uproarious laughter on being repeated. The phrase was “Honeychild, don't you even
go
there,” and each new character would arrive at this same exclamation after a setup with the guest. During one tense interlude between catchphrase and uproar, Adi heard footsteps. She splayed the fingers of both her hands and clamped them over the vinyl edge of her seat. A man in a blue uniform strolled past. Not Neer Shabazi, but a thickset repairman, hair nutmeg-colored striped with white. He stopped by the pool table and set upon it a heavy canvas tote. He smoothed away the strap and undid a zipper.

He stood not far from her booth. She could see the marbled rose of his hands, the thickness of his fingers, but she couldn't identify
the implements that he went on to produce from his bag and arrange side by side on the green felt. Several objects were box-shaped, flat and rectangular and appearing to be covered with narrow drawstring sacks. He set down a tool with a coral grip. Beyond the pool table an electronic lottery screen flashed the minutes remaining to the next drawing in gold on blue. A wall-mounted jukebox was colored to appear flaming, a transparent window in the middle displaying greenish stacked disks.

He took out a fistful of something and then in his other fist the same, brought both fists together and joined the two items into one with twisting motions. What resulted he placed on the felt, no more than a thick, nutted bolt to judge by its appearance. Whatever it was, it disappeared when becoming obscured by a pair of tan slacks worn over narrow male hips, which had come between her and the repairman at work.

“So I found it,” Neer Shabazi said.

“My directions were all right?” she said.

“I have a map,” he said. He slipped between the opposite seat and the table. She pushed upwards.

He leaned in. She extended her arm.

He kept leaning in. His forehead, finely lined above the brows, neared and neared until it could be only that his habit of greeting was to kiss the face. If this wasn't the custom around here still there was no reason she couldn't cooperate except for blind panic, which she wrested down just as he canceled his motion, attempting to disguise it. He was tall and made a long descent to sitting. When the seat stopped him, his bowed trunk straightened slowly in its collared shirt of gray tricot. She watched the phases as he settled on the other side. He smelled good, if somewhat too powerfully, of lemon cologne. She guessed he was someone for whom to feel fresh and clean was a festive high point. More exciting to her, more promising of an enduring chapter, would have been a man careful to walk around with rips in his pants and enjoying a tipple. Could there still
be hope? Neer was holding a brown bottle of beer, a Budweiser. He lowered the bottle to the table and spun it slowly on its base, one half of a full rotation, so the insignia faced him while she remained in view of the ingredients and warning. Nevertheless she went on to picture his legs, hoping them not entirely smooth. The more thought she gave the legs the more hair she added, aspiring ever closer to the density of bear pelt. Such man fur would have shocked her in the past but with every year now she was finding she wanted more hair. He arranged his legs under the table and prepared to plant an elbow on top. Next he would cup his chin in his hand.

He stiffened and glanced impatiently away, as if she and not gravity had brought him down. She snapped alert, mortified. These after all were Neer Shabazi's legs she had been furring in her mind, legs of a savior, not some guy in his clothes. He looked back. He cupped his chin in his hand. His brows were not wing-shaped but rather straight.

“It was hard to get the cranberry people to admit you were even here,” she said.

“Admit?” he said. “I'm no secret.”

“You're telling me you're not,” she said. “You're in the paper.”

“I was in mid-interaction when we spoke on the phone,” he said. “I thought, but then I dismissed. Really?
The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal?”
Even in this heightened state of interest it seemed he was distractible. He peered up at the TV and back.
“The Globe.”

“The local
Crier.
This was my point to the receptionist. They release a statement, I call, and they deny it.”

“They denied our award?”

“We never got that far. I asked for you.”

“You expected the person at the telephone to know my name?” he said.

“I expected? I assumed. You were in the paper.”

“Have you been to the plant?”

“Big?”

“Not every level is equally engaged by my visit.”

“I misunderstood then,” she said.

“You never know.”

“How do you mean?”

But he only flipped his palm up to dismiss his last remark. He raised his beer to his mouth. He drank in a manner that suggested he wouldn't drink many more than one. He appeared to be listening to what he drank, the sound neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Having made the observation, she found she resented him, as if this right now were an insult in a series. Distant neighbors before, closemouthed strangers here. She was surprised at how quickly her mission had switched to sour corroboration.

He was not handsome. He was very narrow-headed. She imagined the trait had made it easier on his mother in birthing but she couldn't go any farther to picture him as a child without altering his features too improbably. Big eyes, big wise dark eyes, she had remembered beneath the gracefully shaped brows, which indeed were here today, if unwinglike, but his eyes were small and sunken and tending to flit. Perhaps she had been recalling his older brother, Yiftah, or his little sister, Kineret. She remembered Kineret, her own age, on a bike looping among the stucco pillars in the building's parking lot. She remembered pretending not to see her, although she herself would have been playing alone by the tough oleander where the cats hid. Why hadn't they hit it off, two girls in one lot? Above them four floors, eight porches, and not to mention the posterior flats: sixteen families to a building. Bonds couldn't be established among everyone. Her family was religious, the Shabazis not. The children wouldn't attend the same schools. They would never meet in synagogue. Their conventions of greeting would differ. If you were short an egg you would knock on a nearer door.

Everything could have been different had his family kept a strictly kosher kitchen and scaled the stairs to ring the Poresch bell.
Hers would have climbed down for a meal every so often on Shabbat and would have reciprocated. But yes, first genialities on the Shabazis' part would have been required, the outreach, because in that country her family had been checked, mannered too mildly, correct by the norms of another place, correct or conserved, newcomers and their kids waiting for a handle on the scene. The Shabazis on the other hand, parents and children, would have been two native-born generations since the grandparents had newly come, though to think back on their demeanor, perhaps newcoming wasn't bound to lift away on schedule.

So, a balance if not a relationship. The Poresch family the guarded Americans on the top floor, the Shabazis the guarded Yemenis downstairs.

Flat Four, southwest. Flat One, southwest. Draftswoman and pharmacist. Nursery school assistant, courthouse guard. Eldest a daughter, middle child a son, the younger daughter by the oleander looking for cats. Eldest and middle both sons, and the youngest riding solitary through the pillars on her bike.

She raised her glass and tipped it. Oily threads of vodka twirled through the cranberry juice. “Congratulations on your accomplishment.”

“Mine?” Neer Shabazi said. “Not mine. It's a whole team.” But anyway he slanted the neck of his bottle without touching her rim, shrugged and drank.