Girl Unwrapped (26 page)

“What did you call me?” she asks the boy.

“
Golem
,” he says again, unfazed.

Freak, monster,
Toni silently translates to herself. A lava of words bubbles up in her brain.
You little shit, you pompous little asshole with
your inherited pretensions to superior morality. I’ll give you the evil
eye like you’ve never seen before.
She gnashes her teeth, takes a step forward. The boy’s face crumples. He runs across the courtyard blubbering, “Ima, Ima, Ima.” The moment, for the short time it lasts, is ridiculously satisfying.

“I want to join the army,” Toni declares.

Behind the desk in a big noisy room at the Ministry of Defence sits a girl soldier with officer’s stripes on her shoulders. At other desks, girls in khaki uniforms type letters and answer phones.

“Why?”

The question erupts, brusque, incredulous, from the officer’s mouth. A question Toni hadn’t anticipated.

“Because, I … I love this country. This is my country.”

The officer waits for further explanation. She has short, dark curls, cherub cheeks, a cupid mouth, and shrewd Slavic eyes. Her small, competent-looking hands are folded over the passport and other papers Toni has given her.

Taking a deep breath, Toni launches into a monologue in both Hebrew and English about her desire to become a real Israeli, to integrate totally, and about her admiration for the military, her patriotism. As she rattles on, her face prickles with heat despite the big ceiling fan that whirls above. The officer eyes her with intent curiosity.

“But you are enrolled at the university,” she says. “You have the stipend for foreign students.”

Toni stammers that she is willing to pay it back, that it doesn’t seem fair that foreigners get a head start at the university while Israelis have to go to the army first. The officer’s brow furrows.

“Fair? You have funny ideas. If you are entitled to something, why not take it?”

She leans forward confidingly, eyes brightening, and says she herself intends to study abroad one day. Paris. London. Has Toni ever been? She smiles for the first time in their conversation. The digression strikes Toni as some kind of test. She swallows hard and tells the officer her goal is not merely the standard two years in the army but an additional year with the pioneering brigade that sets up border settlements. She’s willing to go wherever posted. She’s not afraid of death. Her interlocutor draws back with a frown at the word “death.”

“You must take a psychological test to join the army,” she says sharply. “Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Toni lies. “I know.” She hopes the officer doesn’t notice the blood draining from her face.

“Let me ask you a frank question.” The officer leans forward again. Her eyes narrow. “Have you been drinking?”

Toni jerks up in her seat. “No!”

Well, maybe a bit, she has to admit. Hours ago. But she’s not drunk. She’ll take any test to prove it. Sweat from her armpits trickles down her sides.

“I suggest you think this over a little longer,” the officer says. “Talk about it with your parents.” She pushes Toni’s papers forward, wrapping up the interview.

“I’m rejected for the army?” Toni tries to keep her voice steady.

The officer makes that “
tzuk
” sound, that disdainful click of the tongue. “It’s not for me to reject or accept,” she says with a shrug. “We have nothing to do with recruitment here. You wandered into the wrong department. I’ll give you the address. But I suggest you not make a hasty decision. The army is not as romantic as you think. Look!” She motions to the typing clerks behind her. “Does this look romantic?”

The officer rises and calls for one of the typists to accompany Toni back outside. “Good luck,” she says.

The flash of pity in her eyes hurts more than if she’d uttered words of contempt.

The Arab boy, Samir, is here, in her room. He found her stumbling around the warren of alleys in the Old City at dusk. He could see she was sad. And lost perhaps? He offered to help. He said it was not good for a girl to walk the dark streets alone. She let him lead her up from the belly of the market to Jaffa Gate and then she let him follow her all the way to Hotel Vienna, up the dim stairway, into her room. She didn’t care.

Now Samir does a little wiggling barefoot dance around the room, one hand on his stomach, the other waving above his head, and Toni can’t help but laugh. Her first real laugh shared with another human being in what seems an eternity. They collide together in hilarity.

“You are a fine girl, Miss Toni, very fine and beautiful too. Perhaps no one has ever told you about your special beauty? You must not be sad.”

His eyes glow with the ardour he once bestowed on Janet, a look hungry and pleading, but also a bit ruthless, inflamed by a need not easily thwarted. She couldn’t care less about this either. Tipping her head back, she guzzles the last of her brandy from the bottle and wipes her numb mouth with her numb hand. As soon as she puts down the empty bottle, he’s on top of her, squirming, tugging, panting, struggling with buttons. His eyes express urgency, and also the astonishment of someone who cannot believe his luck. He murmurs words in Arabic that sound like endearments. To her surprise, he says her name.
Toni
. It strikes her as odd that he should remember her name.

His fumbling fingers tell him she is a virgin, which he acknowledges with happy cries. A Jewish virgin, a Western girl, offering him the gift of paradise. But he must not reveal his inexperience. He must pleasure her too. She senses this thought dawn on him as he attempts to kiss her. A mouth like warm glue.

“Hurry up before I change my mind,” she growls.

She hasn’t a smidgeon of doubt that she could roll him off the narrow bed and fling him onto the hard-tiled floor if she wanted. But she chooses to remain passively spread-eagled instead. She wants free of her virginity. Away with it, away with fairy tales of virginal innocence and Prince Charmings. Be gone, too, the myth of wedding-night tenderness. Such tales have nothing to do with her, never did. But this hard, sordid pain she’s invited into herself, courtesy of Samir, is truly her own experience. This is something she can fully possess.

And now she floats away to another place, another time, a damp forest floor with Arnold straddled on top of her, trying to break her will with his punishing thumbnail.
I win
, says her unfeeling flesh.

A few wild thrusts and Samir is done. The dead weight of his spent body sinks heavily onto her own. She pushes him off roughly, lets him know it’s time to leave. The molten bliss in his eyes hardens into a look of displeasure. She is telling
him
to leave? Yes, he’d better go before the hotel manager comes to kick him out. She’s not supposed to have guests, certainly not male ones. Samir scoffs at the warning, as well he might, since Hotel Vienna is clearly the kind of place where all manner of trysts occur. The mist of romance in his face has totally vanished.

“You are hairy,” he sneers, with a contemptuous glance between her legs. “Like a monkey. Arab girls remove all that hair before they give themselves to a man. I have drunk from a dirty cup.”

“Get out,” Toni roars. “I’ll call the police.”

She’s on her feet, the whole stark-naked length of her towering above the bed, brandishing the bottle she so recently drained.

He wastes little time in pulling on his pants, nervously opening the door a crack, and peeking into the corridor. He casts a stern look in her direction as if to say,
I’m not running away, see, and I’m certainly
not letting you boot me out, because I’m the one in charge here
. Then he scampers down the stairs.

She is alone with the thick smells, the lingering ache in her groin, the dingy smoke-grimed room. On the ceiling above her head, a riot of insects executes an endless dance of repetitive loops.

Hours later, she wakes to the noise of pounding on the door, a coarse female voice shouting, “Open up. Open up.”

Toni’s head feels like a well-kicked soccer ball, her tongue like burnt toast. The woman refuses to identify herself and keeps pounding until Toni opens the door a crack. The clerk from downstairs stands upon the threshold, arms crossed over her chest.

“I need the room,” she says curtly. Her eyes roam up and down Toni’s scantily clad body and scrutinize the havoc beyond. Her mouth wears a nasty little smile. “You have to leave.”

“What? Now? Why? I paid you. I paid you yesterday for the whole week.”

“I don’t want you here anymore.”

Her sandaled foot taps the floor. She scowls with sour self-importance.

“But why?”

The clerk bares her teeth, the same grimace she uses when she aims her spray of Flit at a scuttling cockroach.

“Don’t pretend innocence with me,
habibti
. That boy last night. I know where he’s from. You sleep with Arabs. You can do whatever you want, but not in my hotel.”

Your hotel?
The question floats into Toni’s mind, but she’s too stunned to say a word.

To telephone overseas is no simple matter. She has to go to the Central Post Office, wait in a long queue to book her call. The huge, vaulted hall, built in the British mandate days, booms with echoing voices, a mirror of the chaos in her head. When her turn comes at last, the man behind the window tells her she’s in luck. Usually, one has to wait hours, even days, but a phone line has become available. She can go directly into the booth. “Well, do you want it or not?” he snaps, seeing her hesitation. She enters the cubicle.

Fear grips her heart as she waits for the connection to go through. Not that she doesn’t want to talk to her parents. She does, she’s been longing to hear them again—her mother’s passionate exclamations, her father’s dry cough and reserved questions about her health. She aches for the reassuring familiarity. But what to tell them? She hasn’t been able to string a story together.

I want to go home.
But why? What happened?
I have no money, nowhere to live.
But how can that be?

No matter what explanation she concocts, she suspects the hurricane blast of parental concern will be more than she can bear. She hopes that somehow, through the course of the conversation, the right words will come.

The phone’s metallic cry, reverberating through the cubicle, runs through her like a jolt of electricity. She picks up the receiver. Through the hiss and crackle, she hears her mother.

“Toni? Is that you?
Gott sei dank!
Thank God, thank God, you called at last. I’ve been trying to reach you for days, but no one could tell me where you were. You disappeared off the face of the earth. I’ve been going crazy.”

“Mama, it’s okay,” Toni says, her voice shaking. “I’m all right, everything’s all right.”

“Oh, my poor child, my poor child.”

“Don’t worry, Mama. Calm down.”

An agonized sob vibrates in Toni’s ear. Toni’s neck prickles at an uncanny thought. Her mother’s sixth sense! Does she know? Has she had visions of her daughter at Hotel Vienna? Impossible! Yet a sick foreboding invades Toni’s gut. Something’s going on.

“Mama?”

“Oh, Toni, Toni.”

The voice fades.

“What is it, Mama?”

Dead air. Toni wonders if the connection has been suddenly interrupted. Then her mother again, loud and clear, though trembling.

“Your father, Toni. Something terrible has happened.”

Who is this hysterical, blubbering creature at the other end of the line? She’s not the mother Toni has known all her life. Why doesn’t her father take the receiver out of her hand? Why doesn’t he do something to bring her back to normal?

Part IV

Loulou’s

chapter 20

Two strange figures await her amid the throng on the other side of the glass partition in the arrivals hall of Dorval Airport. A man’s hand shoots up in a wave. Toni pushes forward through the automatic doors, through the gauntlet of greeters.

“
Mein kind!
”

A small, frail body collapses against her, arms cling, a head of permed hair shakes beneath Toni’s chin, tears soak through her shirt. Toni awkwardly pats the heaving shoulders. The noisy crying seems to last forever. People are forced to step around the bottleneck created by the long, gangly girl and the little bawling woman. To Toni’s relief, this woman, this mother transformed into a sobbing alien, finally lets go to fish for a Kleenex in her purse. She seems small and crumpled. The man who stands beside her, a burly, sweaty-faced fellow in a dark suit, steps forward, half smiling, half grimacing. His moist brown eyes shine with sympathy.

“I am your Uncle Franz, Francesco they call me in Italy. I wish I could have met my dear niece in better circumstances.” He speaks a carefully enunciated English. The accent is similar to that of her parents. He encloses Toni’s hand in his two big paws and squeezes so hard it almost hurts. “Be strong,” he says hoarsely. “Your mother needs you now.”

Her mother has covered her wet eyes with a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses too big for her face and a bad match for her smart black dress. The choice of accessory is so unlike what she would naturally wear that Toni wonders if she picked up someone else’s sunglasses by mistake. Now the drawn face with the large dark shades tilts up at her, looking almost comical, like something out of
Mad Magazine
.

“I’m afraid we have to rush, dear. Franz will take your suitcase and get the car. I brought you some clothes. From Mrs Shmelzer. She picked out what she thought suitable from her racks. Very kind. Hopefully they will fit. You’re thinner than I remember, but the tan is nice. We’ll both go together to the ladies room. Come!”

With each sentence Lisa seems to recover her composure a bit more so that the last word, though a croak, sounds almost like her old self. She hooks her arm in Toni’s and, half-leaning on her daughter, half pulling, leads her down the hall toward the washroom. Behind the locked door of the cubicle Toni unpacks a large paper bag with tissue-wrapped parcels: a black wool jacket and skirt, a satiny gold blouse, pantyhose. The shoes are in a separate plastic bag. Dress flats with a satin bow. Vaguely she remembers them and the last time she wore them, at her high-school graduation. Her mother must have dug the shoes out from the back of Toni’s closet.