The Wanting (2 page)

“Where did you learn to talk like this?”

“I’m smart.”

“Get me some water,” I said.

“I have to get the doctor. They told me to tell them when you woke up.” She skipped out of the room.

A moment later she came back, her brilliant white arms shining like silver candlesticks. “I told the nurse.” She spit out her chewing gum and sat down in the chair. “They said you were hallucinating when you came in,” she said matter-of-factly. “You were talking in Russian so they got a Russian doctor. What were you hallucinating?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something weird about your ambulance. I’ll ask the doctor what you were saying.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important,” she said.

“I was in shock,” I said. “I was just yammering.”

“That’s when the truth comes out,” she explained.

“What’s that comic book you’re reading?” I asked her.

“It’s not a comic book. It’s manga. A graphic novel.”

“Ah.”

“Fushigi Yûgi.”

“What?”

“
Fushigi Yûgi
. It’s about Yui and Miaka. They go to see the oracle Tai Yi-Jun, and Miaka is trapped inside a magic mirror while her reflection—who is very, very evil—takes her place in the real world, so Yui has to save her. It’s very complicated, Papoola. You see, they find this book (they find it in the first chapter, because this is chapter eight), and they can be
in
the book, and whatever they read happens to them, although they can change things, too—anyway, they have to use the power of the Four Gods of Earth and Sky because Miaka is actually the Priestess of Suzaku, which is the God of Fire.”

“You should be reading Pushkin,” I said.

The doctor came in. He was Feldman, a Russian, and he spoke to me in Russian, even though he heard me speaking Hebrew with Anyusha.

“You’re awake! That’s good! Let’s take a look!” He pried open my eyes, shining his little searchlight into the irises. “Looks good,” he said. Then he evoked a serious tone. “You know why you’re here?”

“I think so.”

“Still fuzzy. That’s normal. What’s the date?”

“It’s Wednesday, May 8, 1996.”

“It’s Thursday, actually.”

“I lost a day?”

“You’ve been out for a while,” he said, “but now you’re back. And that’s what matters.”

“Listen,” I said, “I want to thank the paramedic who brought me here. I think his name was Moishe.”

“I’ll check on it,” said the doctor. “In the meantime your stitches look good. We’re going to keep you bandaged up for a while, going to watch for infection.”

“Pretty bad, huh?”

“You should see the other guy!” he quipped.

That’s when I remembered the head, soaring past my window with a look, I now realized, of envy in its eyes.

Obviously, there was no Moishe. A mere hallucination. Why then could I never forget him? The event itself was lost in haze, a dream, but this imaginary medic was now part of my life. And as for the head? My nightmares.

I have always been a dreamy person. I think I may have inherited this disposition from my father. I am not saying that my mother is not also an imaginative person; it is just that I did not partake of her dreams. It was her fears I lived. Here is an example.

At a certain age, we lived in a strange apartment building on Veshnaya Street in the center of Moscow. It had been constructed
in the thirties at the specific request of the NKVD boss, Yezhov, and it was still filled with party functionaries and a few midlevel KGB officers. How our family got there was an entirely different story—but suffice it to say every wall of every room was implanted with a secret microphone, every telephone in every foyer was connected to a single exchange for easy recording, and every day, twenty-four hours a day, stalwart teams of spooks with binoculars and photographic cameras watched the comings and goings of everyone in the building—or at least we thought so, because no one ever saw anything or heard so much as a peep or a chirp or a muffled cough or anything at all, for that matter, and their invisibility only gave us greater assurance of their immanence, their power, and the purpose they gave to our lives.

One day, my little sister Katya and I went out to play in the courtyard. Unlike the typical Moscow courtyard that could be entered from the street and from many doorways and passageways, our courtyard had but one entrance from the back of our building, cut off from the street. The yard itself was surrounded by three gateless, unpainted concrete walls, walls so high neither Katya nor I could see to the top. Even from our apartment, which was on the third floor, it was impossible to see over the wall. We were forbidden to set foot in that yard, but unknown to our parents, there was, in fact, a great treasure lurking there. It was a pile of debris we liked to call Chinese Mountain. We called it Chinese Mountain because of an old print that hung in our living room, an ink drawing of a strange mountain, a thin cloudlike waterfall cascading down its side, and a tiny monk leaning on his staff far below. Faded Chinese characters were stamped in one corner, and birds flew off another. Our backyard mountain looked just like that, especially when it rained or when the snow began to melt. For a long time we were content to watch it from our window, but eventually we could resist no longer. Why? The sheer joy of its mystery. From whence arose this magic pile of treasures? Lengths of wood, metal pipe, old shoes, rusty nails, empty tin cans—all precious materials—and all abandoned. After all, no one went back there, and even if they did, no one would ever throw anything
away in that yard—because no one ever threw anything away, period. One afternoon, we secretly made our way down and, with huge effort, pushed open the old rusted door that led to the yard. It was the beginning of December, and the first snows had fallen—the best snows, really, clean and dry—and the ground was white milk against a clear blue sky, the snow shimmering like diamonds in the sunshine, just like the enchanted forests in our storybooks. Even the few, sadly bent birches in the far corner of the yard looked stately, and the mangy squirrel who had to forage even in winter took on the luster of the sly red fox.

Katya was five, I was six, and we stood before Chinese Mountain like two explorers on the moon, only she was wearing a knit cap of red wool that tied under her chin with a bow, and I a fur-lined hat, the earflaps hanging down like puppy dog tongues, bouncing whenever I moved.

“Look!” she said.

She stretched out her mittened finger. There was something decidedly shiny, decidedly pointy, sticking out of Chinese Mountain. Our eyes widened.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I think it’s gold,” I answered and grasped her hand.

I imagine that if you could look down from that cloudless sky, you would, even now, see Katya and me, two dots in a sea of snow, frozen for all eternity, the earflaps of my hat curling up like question marks, the red of her cap like a drop of blood on a white page, the hems of our coats flaring like the bottoms of Christmas trees, the breath coming out of us in ripe plumes, locking our gaze on that mountain of junk as if it were the lost ark of the Lord.

Katya dropped to a crouch and hugged her knees. “I’m freezing,” she complained.

But I said to her, “I’m going to get it.”

“Don’t!”

“It’s gold!” I told her.

I took a step forward and stopped. But what could I do? She was watching me carefully. All right! I said to myself. And just like
that I marched up to Chinese Mountain. The very smell of it made me dizzy. It was all tangles and decoupage—everything pasted together in a jumble: devil’s horns here, giant eyes there. Terrified, I reached out and grabbed the golden object. The feel of it in my hand, even in the cold of December, burned through my mitten. I turned around and faced Katya. Her eyes were as big as five-kopek coins. I held the treasure high above my head. In triumph I called, “It’s a magic picture frame!”

From the vantage point of so many years, and remembering this as I did from a hospital bed in Jerusalem after almost being blown up by a decapitated Arab, it would seem a small and odd thing to remember. But when something explodes—a heavenly object, a star, a planet, or a person for that matter—all the parts of it that ever existed are blown out into space, where they persist forever.

What happened next was this. I ran from the Chinese Mountain as if I had just filched the pot of gold from under the dragon’s nose; I cried out in victory, Hurrah! Hurrah!; waved my head of Goliath before Katya’s awestruck gaze; and took my victory lap around the courtyard.

I could not wait to show it to my mother. It was so beautiful, and hardly broken at all. True, it had no glass, but the wood was turned quite delicately, and the gilding was largely intact. Plus, it was big enough to slip over my head and wear like a necklace.

We ran up the three flights of stairs and raced into the apartment. Mother was in the kitchen with Babushka peeling potatoes. Grandfather was asleep in the big chair, a copy of
Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad
still in his hands. Father was not yet home, and neither was Uncle Maxim or Aunt Sopha; Julia and Danka were at the dining table doing their homework.

“Oh!” cried my grandmother with delight. “And what’s this?”

But Mother took one look and said, “Where did you get it?”

“Roman got it off Chinese Mountain!” Katya blurted with pride.

“Oh, and what is Chinese Mountain?”

Katya fell silent.

“Well?” said my mother.

I had no choice but to tell her. The color drained from her face. “Show me.”

So we all traipsed down the stairs and out into the yard. We stood some distance from the pile. Mother held the picture frame carefully in the palms of her hands, like an offering. It was already growing dark.

“Where exactly?” she asked.

I pointed to the right side.

“Where? How far up?”

I told her about a half a meter from the top: there, where the piece of concrete was jutting out.

“Was it on the concrete?” she asked.

I told her, no, it was just over there between the broken jar and the bit of metal tubing, where some emaciated weeds had tried to sprout before the winter cold had set in. But it was dark and I could barely see.

“You’re certain?” she said.

My mountain seemed more like a hulking bear than a mountain, more like a shadow to itself, a darker black than the black all around us, more like a hole in space, and not at all like a treasure trove of precious objects.

“Well? Are you certain?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then take this,” she handed me the frame, “and place it back exactly where it was when you found it. Exactly. Not a bit to the right or to the left or too much up or too much down. Put it back exactly where it was.”

I ventured a few steps into the darkness. When I looked back, my mother and sister seemed to fade away, black holes in black space, having no mass, no substance. My hands were shaking violently, and my feet were two frozen bricks. The approaching night had crushed Chinese Mountain into a ball, and all its detail had merged into a strange, misshapen singularity. What could I do? I threw the frame onto the pile, not even looking where it landed.
Then I ran back to where my mother and sister were waiting. I took a breath only when I reached them.

“Very well,” my mother said. “Now no one will ever know.”

And with that she led us back to the house.

This was the fear my mother instilled in me, the fear I always sensed lurking in my heart. But Anyusha sat beside my bed with folded hands and the smile of an evangelist and explained to me how it was completely possible that a messenger of God had come down in the form of Moishe the medic in order to set me on a certain path. What this path was, she could not yet discern. And she said all this in the same tone she employed to describe the two Japanese cartoon girls who became characters in a book they were reading. I did not want her to fall into an existential confusion, and even more so I did not like her talking about messengers from God. I hate everything having to do with my religion except the food. When she said messenger of God, I thought only of the head flying by my window. The former brain in that head had received messages, too.

“It wasn’t God,” I finally said to her.

I got out of the hospital a few days later. My face would be scarred for the rest of my life, but as Moishe said, scars are good on a man. But the people at the bus stop were not so lucky. Nine died instantly, including the bomber, whose head I believe swept across my sky in the split second before my window shattered. One more died in the hospital. Forty-two others were wounded, quite a number of them Arabs. Some went blind; others lost limbs; several lost vital organs that had to be replaced. There were those who both went blind and also lost limbs; these I would say were the worst off. Worse even than the one who became a vegetable—count her among the dead. She was only sixteen and very beautiful, at least from the pictures they showed of her on television. Her name was Dasha. All of us lost our hearing for a while. Several will never get it back. I myself still have the ringing, and one of my eardrums did not heal quite right. They tell me I need an operation. Dasha, I
knew, was really Darya. She was Soviet, like me, but she was probably too young to remember any of it. Still, I could see from her photo that she retained that Russian look—it had to do with her hair and the gold threads in the sweater she’d been wearing.

Before the hospital released me, they sent round a psychologist to see me. She introduced herself as Sepha Katsir, Ph.D. She said she was a grief and trauma counselor.

“I know you don’t realize it now,” Sepha Katsir said, “but you will have issues.”

She gave me a pamphlet and told me she was available for counseling. “Unless you prefer someone in Russian,” she added.

As soon as she left, the Minister of Blown-Up People came by. He was an underdeputy of some cabinet member who thought someone ought to say something reassuring to people who’ve been blown up by Arabs. He was a small man, in his late seventies, I guessed, still with the look of the old pioneers, even though he was in fact too young to have been one. But there it was: the open, flared collar, the suit jacket that looked like a potato sack, worn-out leather sandals over navy blue socks, his skin tan, chin smooth-shaven, hair—what there was of it—wild around the edges, sausagelike fingers on hands that once farmed and perhaps still gardened and whose owner spoke Hebrew with a touch of Polish. He had the whole shtick going for him, avuncular yet somehow also cold-blooded.