The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (35 page)

H
E HAD
been drunk, so all he could remember was falling asleep to the sound of his own moaning, but he woke to the sound of someone else’s. It was still dark out.

He found her in his bathroom, her face red. She had been crying, but now she just held his towel to her face and stared, frozen, sitting on the tiles of the floor.

He turned on the light and the yellow blinded him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Do you regret … this?”

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am such a mess.”

“You don’t ever have to be sorry with me,” he said and sat by her on the cold floor. “Whatever it is.”

“You don’t want to be with me,” she said and smiled. “I told you, I am not a good person. I have done disgusting things.”

Even in his hungover, sleepy state, he was still a smart guy. He could guess what this was about.

“You mean to the people at the checkpoints?” he asked.

She nodded.

“That’s everyone who has been there. It’s not you. It’s this fucked-up army; it fucks you up,” he said.

“You don’t know what I did,” she said.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “it won’t change a thing. Tell me you had to kick a grandpa in the balls and I wouldn’t care.” Ron felt angry, sickened, at the city, at the country—at whatever circumstances had made Lea cry like that. It wasn’t right. It had never been right, this whole seventy-year-long war. He had never realized that before now.

“What are we?” Lea said and laughed. “Are you saying we are like some sort of item now, as they say in this city?”

“Yes,” Ron said. “We are an item. Come back to bed.”

He would fix it, he decided then. Whatever it was that made her eyes so knowing the first time he saw her, he would fix. This was what he had to work with, and he would make it work. That’s pragmatism right there.

H
E TOOK
it very far very quick—but he couldn’t help it. The month he found out the sandwich shop was finally doing more than breaking even, that it was beginning to make a profit less than a year after he had opened it, he told Lea, “In a few years there will be enough money to start a family with.” He was amazed at how well it was going. Were there any other food places in Tel Aviv that had managed to establish themselves this quickly? His brother had told him he would have to invest money for a good two years before it would start paying off.

“Watch it there, tiger,” she said. She wiped the counter. She smiled. At him.

After the lunch rush, a middle-school girl with a brace on her face was giving Lea trouble.

“Your sign says that you will put whatever I ask for in the sandwich, and I want a baguette with pot brownies,” the middle-school girl spat out.

“I wish I could do it, but we don’t even have a liquor license,” Lea tried to reason with her.

“I want what I want,” the girl replied. She was avoiding the gentle way in which Lea tried to catch her eyes, the way Lea tried to humor her in whatever way she could.

“I know, sweetheart, I know—but my hands are tied.”

Before they were together, “an item” as she called it, Ron
had wondered where Lea’s supernatural patience for the customers came from, but now that they had been together for a few months, he knew. Still, Lea had yet to let him come see her apartment, hadn’t even agreed to share a cab or tell him where she lived.

“You know what it is like in this city,” she said, resorting to cliché when he asked her about it. “Your apartment is all you are.”

Still. He knew more than just the Lea who worked at the shop; he knew another Lea too. He knew two Leas. Three, actually. There was the Lea who wore dresses short enough to be shirts to dance clubs, who dragged him through the streets of the city from one club to another: the Cat & Dog club, the Oman 17, all the big names. This was the Lea who could dance for hours, whom everyone at the bar knew and liked, and they would chant for her as she finished her fifth, then sixth drink. The Lea who came to his bed almost every night, giggling, laughing, acting as silly as a child and all at once entirely a woman.

Then there was the other Lea, the one whose crying woke him close to dawn, the one he caught in his arms as she tried to run out of the bed, the one with hardly any words.

The third Lea, still his favorite, was the Lea from the sandwich shop, the star employee. She behaved exactly as she had on her first day. But it was he who was different. How could he not be?

“How about you get the fuck out of here?” Ron screamed at the middle-school girl. “You are not being funny. Or cute. Your face looks like a Rottweiler with that brace.”

“You’ll be sorry,” the girl said. She flung her Manga backpack on her back and walked away.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Lea said. “I had it under control.” She turned to peel roasted eggplants.

Ron was trying to calm down. Tel Aviv people pissed him off. This shit would never go down anywhere else, but in this city everything was fair game. A man could not even get away with a gimmick. When Domino’s said they would provide thirty-minute delivery to anywhere in the city or the pizza would be on them, hundreds of people waited for when it was daylight saving time and then yelled at the delivery guy that he was an hour late and demanded their pizza for free. Ron had even started suspecting that the people of the city were stealing things when Lea and Vera looked away. Things had a tendency to disappear—utensils, cups—that day he couldn’t even find the butane torch.

He watched Lea crack walnuts by rolling them on the wooden cutting board. Her ponytail swished. Something was different. He watched her as she bent below the sink to throw out the walnut shells. She moved slowly, methodically, bending her knees, keeping her back straight.

“Did you hurt your back or something?”

“Didn’t I just say I had things under control?” Lea said. She stood upright again, grabbed a butter knife. She gave Ron an unnerving look.

“I am sorry, I am sorry. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Ron said.

“
You
are gonna get hurt unless you shut your mouth,” Lea said. She pointed at him with the butter knife. Then she stepped closer, dropped the knife on the counter, reached over. She grabbed Ron’s hand. Her hand was soft, and when she smiled, Ron forgot his annoyance, forgot his question, forgot that questions could even be born into this world.

“I
LIKE
my job a lot.” She suddenly spoke during one of those premorning hours when he held her in his arms. “I like being able to give people what they want. At the checkpoints you’d hear all these fantastical stories—everyone had a mother who had less than a day to live somewhere, the wedding of a child who had survived an attack by evil wolves—and all I could do was say that my hands were tied because they didn’t have the right color permits, or because they were five minutes late.”

Ron didn’t know what he could say. He kissed her shoulder.

“Thanks for giving me the job,” she said.

“Did you ever feel like looking the other way, letting someone through the checkpoint when you weren’t supposed to?” he asked after a few silent minutes.

“I thought about it, a little, sometimes. Then that man stabbed one of us in the neck through a car window. We weren’t supposed to come so close to the cars, but that soldier did—I guess the man in the car pretended to have a story too. And when I was an officer I couldn’t just let people through, because then I was an officer.”

Lea’s body was much smaller than Ron’s; it felt even smaller when he held it. When she drank too much, he sometimes carried her up the stairs. And still he knew she had done things that he couldn’t; well, maybe he could have done them, but either way he hadn’t. He had transcribed Arabic in an office. Knowing this made it easier and harder to hold this naked woman in his arms. Easier because he knew she was stronger; she didn’t need him; she merely wanted him. Harder because he always wondered if his arms were clutching her strongly enough. “Couldn’t have been easy,”
he said finally. His words still failed him, but he had to say something, and holding her so close, he hoped Lea would understand.

“It wasn’t,” she said. “Even though I never even liked Yaniv, the boy who was stabbed. He had these pointed bushy eyebrows, like furry arrows.”

“That’s why you didn’t like him?” Ron asked.

“They looked like surprised worms.”

“It is Ok not to like someone. You didn’t know.”

“Maybe.”

T
HE EVENING
after the girl asked for pot brownies, another jokester came. He was drunk, Russian, fat.

“I want baby meat in challah bread,” he demanded.

“Baby lamb? Baby cow?” Lea asked.

“Baby
baby
, bitch,” he said. “That’s what I want.”

Lea froze and looked at him.

“I can see it in your eyes you’d do it,” the man said. The rims around his eyes glowed sickly yellow. “Your sign does say, ‘whatever you want,’ doesn’t it?” he asked. “I can see it in your eyes you’d do it.”

Lea looked at her sandals. Then she looked up. She looked to the left, to the right. Ron had never seen her so scared. It was as if the man had a gun to her head, as if the whole world were out there, waiting to chase her.

She ran out of the kiosk.

Ron heard her sandals slapping the pavement at a steady pace. “Wait!” he called.

He took a five-hundred-shekel bill out of the register and
handed it to the old man who always ordered the red-and-yellow-peppers sandwich.

“If you can just keep an eye on the place until Vera gets in for the night shift, I’ll give you more,” he mumbled.

He didn’t wait for the old man to respond. He ran.

She was quick, but he was quick too. He caught a glimpse of her hopping in a cab and lucked into one of his own. Lea did not look back. He wanted to tell the driver, “Follow that cab!” but he felt silly. He didn’t even know if saying something like that was legal in real life. Instead, he just told the driver he’d give him street-by-street directions. He told the driver he remembered the road to where he wanted to go; he just could not remember the place itself.