The Wanting (6 page)

D
EAR
Y
OU
,

M
Y FATHER IS A MESS
, and that is why I am writing this incantation. I believe that if I write it correctly, my father’s life will be more like the story I am writing and less like the life he is living.
My writing is magic. My writing is magic. My writing is magic
. I can write his story, and he can jump right into it. I can be in it, too. And Shana. And even Mom, if he wants. I know this kind of thing mostly happens only in manga and science fiction movies and graphic novels. But I am hoping this will work on my father. I ask forgiveness for stealing the idea from
Fushigi Yûgi
, but I don’t know any other actual incantations. I am not stupid. I know that
Fushigi Yûgi
is just a made-up fantasy, and so it is not a real incantation. I have actually transformed it, though. Subtly, and you may not have noticed it. I have moved some words around and changed some, too. This way God will listen to me.

Pop doesn’t know this, but I have been talking to a rabbi. He would kill me if he knew. He hates religious guys. He thinks they are to blame for everything. He told me once it was hard for him not to spit when he passed one of those “morons with side curls” (his exact words). That’s how much he hates them. But my rabbi is
not ultra ultra. He’s just, I don’t know, he talks to me. My friend Yohanan, he is from a religious home, not haredi, just kippah sruga, you know, regular. He goes to his own school, of course, but they live in our complex, and he hangs out with me and some of my friends. I like him. He’s different from the other boys. Not that he can’t be mean, but he thinks about things, he’s more interested in what’s inside, not just what’s on the surface. Of course he does not read
Fushigi Yûgi
, no boys do, but he likes graphic novels, too, only he prefers things like
Vampire Hunter, Transmetropolitan
, and
Sin City
, all of which he has to hide from his parents. Recently he brought a copy of
Maus
home. His parents didn’t know what to think about it, because it’s about the concentration camps and anti-Semitism and things like that, but after a while they made him throw it away. He didn’t, of course. He gave it to me. Actually, I keep all his graphic novels. My dad doesn’t care about these things. He says I can read whatever I want. He believes in freedom. Anyway, I was talking to Yohanan about my problem, and he said I should talk to Rabbi Keren about it, so one day I did. He just sat me down and asked me what it was I was worried about. I told him. He said, Anna, the way you feel is exactly as you should feel. And then he said, Sometimes people imagine things. And sometimes what you see is really what you see.

We are not exactly studying Torah or anything like it, though he gives me quotations and stuff from Torah or the prophets or whatever. Then he has to tell me the story that it comes from and what the comments about it are, and finally I decided it’s just easier to read it all for myself. So he gave me a Bible and some commentary, and I took it home. I mean, we study the Bible in my school but mostly for history, and everyone hates it. Pop came into my room once when I was reading it. What are you reading
that
for? he asked me. It’s just crap. Throw it away.

I knew he wouldn’t make me throw it away, but I decided not to read it at home anymore. It’s the one book I keep at Yohanan’s! Isn’t that funny?

I began to write this journal for Pop not long ago, just yesterday actually. That’s when I thought of it. I would do a
Fushigi
Yûgi
for Pop. At first I thought I would make him rich and famous, but then I thought probably not, because in a story you always have to take away what someone has, and they have to struggle to get it back, but when they get it back it’s not what they thought it was. That is your basic story line. But I don’t want Pop to struggle.

What I want is for him to SEE.

Also, since this is the first entry in my journal, I will confess it is not my idea to keep one. I got it from a book called
Finding the Good When Things Go Bad
. It’s basically the stupidest book I ever read, but I liked the journal idea, so here you are. I didn’t know what to call it until that last sentence, but as I wrote it, it just came to me. Here
you
are. Get it? I’m calling it “
YOU
.” Which is all kind of circular, but so is algebra. And nobody seems to have a problem with
that
.

P
ERHAPS
I
DID NOT MENTION
that I was on pretty heavy painkillers, Demerol, in fact, though at some point I believe I was taking OxyContin. I can’t remember, which is the one happy outcome of opiates. But by now, my doctors were strict with me. They pulled me off the medication long before I wanted them to, and I ended up, basically, with a handful of aspirin. Probably that explains what happened.

I had bused into Tel Aviv to have my dressings changed at the clinic. I hadn’t been out on my own in some time, and the idea of sharing some fresh air with the rest of humanity seemed especially pleasing, so I went for a walk. It was a busy time of day and the streets were crowded. I noticed immediately people were staring at me—it was the bandages, of course, and, I guess, the dragging lower lip and the purple neck. One could see in their faces the usual mixture of horror and pity. This was entirely normal, I told myself. I would have stared, too—anyone would.

At the crosswalk, the light changed. I took a step off the curb, and there right in front of me, stepping off the curb opposite, was a young Arab. Modern. Secular. Jeans. Striped polo. Running shoes. Shiny watch. He looked straight at me. He neither grimaced nor raised his eyebrows in sympathy, no acknowledgment at all; he just moved toward me, his gaze fixed. I found myself also staring at him, locking onto his eyes: dull eyes, lacking in all inquisitiveness. He was passing to my left, he in his flow of pedestrians, I in mine. So slowly did this unfold that I saw a bird flap its wings, one, two, three, as it passed just above us; I saw a woman pull at her ear,
watched the skin stretch like taffy; in the middle of all this stood a policeman, and in his whistle I could clearly see the sounding ball bounce up and down, up and down, almost glacially, though I could not yet even hear the sound. Then the Arab blinked, and I smashed him in the face with my fist.

Suddenly there was a huge commotion. Someone grabbed me from behind, and some other fellow, I had no idea who, was on the ground in front of me, screaming,
Help, Help, Help!

“Stop it!” someone shouted in my ear.

I looked over my shoulder. It was the cop.

The man on the ground was still screaming, “You maniac! You crazy person!”

“Calm down!” the policeman said to me.

“Me?”

I was confused, though, because the man on the ground was screaming in such excellent Hebrew.

Some hours later I was given the police report. According to Mordecai Kashani, a sabra of Iranian-Jewish descent, he had been crossing Ibn Gvirol Street thinking of what to get his son for his graduation from the third grade, which was happening in less than a week, so he was not paying attention to anyone, when out of the blue this “lunatic hit me on the chin and began to pummel me mercilessly and call me a stinking Arab, a goddamned murderer, a motherfucking Hezbollah rag-head baby killer, I’m going to shove a fucking pipe bomb up your ass, how would you like that, you Hamas piece-of-shit garbage?” Mr. Kashani went on to write, “This is word for word, exactly as I recall it. I never saw the man before. I never saw the man when I was crossing the street. In fact, I never noticed him until he hit me. But never will I forget him. Even when all those bandages come off, I will recognize him.”

I laughed. “I never said any of that,” I told the officer.

“No?”

“Of course not. I’m an educated person. As a matter of fact,
I belong to Peace Now. I would never say such things. Here. I’ll show you my membership card.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” he said.

My policeman was about fifty, with a full head of hair and tanned, well-furrowed skin. When he lit a cigarette I noticed he had the same thick, fat fingers as the Minister of Blown-Up People. His nails were dirty, too, probably also from gardening. Another ex-kibutznik. Could never quite tear themselves away from the soil. On the other hand he had a couple of tennis rackets tucked in the corner. He assumed a very casual pose with me, just two guys having a chat. It was being made clear to me that this was not an interrogation, which was why I knew that that was exactly what it was.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was crossing the street and the next thing I knew this guy was … well, actually, I don’t know. He did something. Came at me or something.”

“But you hit him?”

“I think I did. But just once. I wasn’t ‘
pummeling
’ him, for God’s sake. That’s nuts. Why would I do that?”

“So you hit him the one time?”

“I think so.”

“Do you think that was the right thing to do?”

“Of course not, no. I’m sorry I did it.”

“Then why did you?”

“I—actually, I can’t remember. He must have done something. Pushed me or something.”

“That’s it? He pushed you and you slugged him? Does that sound like something you would do? He must have done something worse.”

“I suppose I must have thought he had a bomb.”

“Any reason for that?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, suddenly tired of the game.

He stood up, came around, and placed his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot.”

“Not so much.”

Immediately the face of Dasha Cohen, the girl in the coma, flashed before me.

“Guttman,” he said, “you’ve had a trauma. You are a victim of terrorism. We all know that. We all appreciate your sacrifice.”

“Except for Mr. Kashani,” I said.

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “perhaps he has his reasons.” He placed two photos on the desk and slid them over to me. Two photos of the same guy, first from the front, then from the side. His face was a patchwork of black and blue, his left eye a swollen orange, his chin mottled with dried blood, his nose like a squashed soda can.

“Who is that?” I said.

The lieutenant held out several typed sheets. These were statements of witnesses, he told me. “Read a little,” he suggested.

They described a gruesome scene. A madman in bloodstained bandages screaming obscenities and racial epithets and beating an innocent pedestrian. No provocation. No reason. Onlookers taken by surprise. Policeman and three others pull him off.

“He wants to press charges.”

I looked up at the lieutenant. “I did this?”

He nodded.

“Maybe you should lock me up, then.”

Instead he motioned to someone behind me. An older woman, a grandmother, really, in a simple floral dress. She looked vaguely familiar. But it wasn’t possible. It could not have been Golda Meir. I thought she was dead—of course she was dead! But there she was. I knew I had been seeing things, heads, angels, but it was definitely Golda! And now she, Golda, beckoned to me, raising one formidable eyebrow. Even for such an old woman, she was overflowing with—what can I say?—erotic energy, the energy of the all-night dream that you’d rather not have had at all.

She led me to a small room down the corridor. I looked around. No one-way mirror, so I decided the interrogation was over. A long Formica table, a number of plastic chairs all orange and green, the lunchroom. Golda took a chair from the far side of the table and
dragged it all the way around so she could sit down beside me. So I got up, moved my chair to the other side of the table, and sat down facing her. Above me I was certain a bloodstain was forming on the ceiling and emerging from it a pair of eyes and then, perhaps, the outline of a head—his head.

“Look,” she said to me, “I’m here to help you.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps you are having hallucinations,” she began. “You’ve been looking at the ceiling and calling me Golda. Do you think I’m Golda Meir?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re the shrink from the hospital.”

“And you think I resemble Golda Meir?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I don’t think I resemble her.”

“No,” I said.

“Only insofar as all old Jewish women resemble her.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“So you are not hallucinating.”

“No.”

“What about the incident with—what was his name?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Kashani. His name is Kashani.”

“It’s hard to remember.”

“You find it hard to remember his name?” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

“So tell me, have you gone back to work?” She waited awhile for me to answer. “Have you asked what will happen when your bandages are removed? I understand that will be in just a few days. Maybe you wonder if you are disfigured?” She fiddled with her eyeglasses. “No doubt you want to forget the whole thing. But I’m guessing it’s just about the only thing you ever think about.”