The UnAmericans: Stories (19 page)

Talia was in line
at Café Noah when she noticed a man watching her. He was at the group table by the window, handsome in a nerdy, chaotic way, wearing a rumpled orange t-shirt and metallic glasses a shade lighter than his hair. He smiled. She smiled back. He smiled again, and Talia, interested more in the light buzz of flirtation than an actual conversation, gave him one last look, then tossed her change in the tip jar.

Out on Ahad Ha’am Street, people were clustered around little tables lining the sidewalk, sipping coffee and smoking leisurely though it was noon on a Wednesday. The sun was out after an entire April of rain, and as Talia rounded the corner, she wondered if she was the only person in all of Tel Aviv rushing back to eat at her desk, the only person who would have left the café so quickly when one day, she knew, these situations could magically stop presenting themselves. So she turned back—and saw the man in the orange t-shirt barreling toward her.

“Did I forget something?” she asked him.

“What?”

“In the café.”

“No,” he said. “You look familiar—Hebrew University?” and when she shook her head he said, “Maybe from the neighborhood?” Before Talia could think of an answer, before she could tilt her head and say “possibly” in an alluring and noncommittal way, rather than the truth, which was that, at twenty-nine, her career was shot, she’d moved back home with her parents in Rehovot, a half-hour south of the city, and the only reason she was even
in
the neighborhood was because she’d picked up fact-checking work nearby at the local paper they left out for free on trains and in Laundromats, Mr. Orange T-shirt blinked a couple times, then said, “Oh, fuck it. You were flirting with me in there, right?”

She
had
been flirting, and the realization made her feel better—at least it was interesting. Better than going back to her office, where a deadline and a morning’s worth of unopened emails loomed. The man looked about forty, with large blue eyes and pale, stubbled skin. Though they were standing still, he was out of breath, and his sense of personal space was off by a centimeter or two. She did a quick ring check and pegged him as recently divorced, the type who patrolled cafés for love during his lunch hour.

“It’s hard to tell,” he continued. “Maybe you were just being nice.”

“No,” Talia conceded, “I was flirting.” She’d said a lot of bold things in her life but never something so direct to a person she didn’t know, and it threw her so off-balance that when he started to walk, Talia fell into step with him. She was aware they were heading away from the paper, but she could feel the day breaking open. She liked that neither of them seemed to have a particular destination, that they were just ambling around, something she only did on vacation. They turned down a narrow street, and she watched two girls, quick and earnest, chase each other through a courtyard while an older man, several stories above, watered his plants. Everything felt squintingly bright and a little too in focus, as if she’d just stumbled into the daylight after a heavy night of drinking: the cloudless sky, the sparkly asphalt road, the squares of silver foil covering a woman’s hair in a salon window. At the corner Talia and the man made a right, then crossed a boulevard and walked up another road until they were standing in front of a junior high school. “I have to go,” he said, and Talia realized that on her supposedly aimless, carefree walk she’d actually followed this man back to work.

“You’re a teacher?” She felt so exposed. What had she expected—to run off to some hotel room together; that an hour with a stranger, something she only right then realized she’d even been contemplating, was going to fix everything?

“I have a meeting with the principal. My daughter’s been cutting class.”

“I was terrible in school,” Talia said, to say something. “I cheated on all my tests.”

“I’m late,” he said, “but can I call you?”

Talia hesitated. But she liked his messy hair and light eyes and the open and slightly injured way he stared at her, so she gave him her work number. “Thanks,” he said, buoyant with approval.

He waved and sprinted across the street. At the sidewalk he turned around. “I’m Tomer,” he yelled.

“Talia,” she called back.

“Ah,” he yelled. “Dahlia. What a beautiful name,” and then dashed up the steps of the school, disappearing into the crowd of teenagers being beckoned inside.

S
HE WAS
surprised to discover how giddy she felt when Tomer didn’t wait the requisite three days to phone but did so that afternoon, when she was still at her desk, waiting for a callback on a story.

“Do you like food?” he said when she picked up.

“Only when I’m hungry.”

“
Indian
food,” he said, as if it were her problem for not inferring that in his question. “There’s a new place on Rothschild that has the best curry, made by guys from Goa. They cook it different there.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve been.”

“What are the chances?”

“I’d say they’re pretty high,” she said. Asking a Tel Avivian if they’d been to Goa was like asking if they’d been to Jerusalem, and in fact the main reason Talia lasted only a month in India was that it had felt like an extension of college, the army, her old neighborhood in Rehovot. She’d left Israel to meet new people, not to run into her neighbor on a trek through Netravali or her father’s cousin Rivka at a full-moon beach party. And so, when a job finally opened in Kiev, Talia had taken off immediately. When are you coming back? her parents would ask during their weekly calls—they thought she was insane for wanting to report on the very city her grandparents had worked so hard to leave. The moment Talia heard their voices, she felt as if she’d been yanked across the Mediterranean and transported back home, her father on the porch listening to the radio, her mother always beside him, shelling fava beans or peeling beets, her two sisters chasing after their toddlers while their husbands relaxed on the lawn.

“Things are working out here,” Talia would tell them, wondering how just having them on the end of the line could make her feel as defensive as she’d been at sixteen. Though they never said it outright, she could hear the question that always lurked beneath: when was she going to get this silly rebelliousness out of her system and move home to start a family? But the truth was that things
had
been working out. Talia had wanted to be a reporter since she could remember, and it had stunned her, sitting in her cubicle in Kiev, that her life was actually unfolding the way she had fantasized. She’d started at the Jerusalem bureau of an American paper right out of college, doing whatever grunt work was needed: filing, fact-checking, going on coffee runs when the intern was busy. But her English was near-fluent, and after years of begging and badgering the bureau chief, he finally started giving her work, as if the very behavior that had gotten her sent to the corner as a child was the thing that garnered his respect.

It was true, he had said, that she was living in one of the hardest countries to find staff jobs: no one ever left their positions at the Israeli papers, and reporters from all over the world competed for work at the foreign ones. But with her language skills—she also had Ukrainian from her grandparents and Russian from college, probably the one time her Slavic literature degree made her
more
employable—he’d lobby the higher-ups in Chicago to send her to Kiev if things got bad enough to need someone on the ground. That was four years ago, in the fall of 2004, and Talia remembered sitting in the flickering, fluorescent-lit conference room of the Jerusalem bureau, watching it all unfold on TV—the election fraud allegations, Yushchenko’s terrifying, ever-changing face—and holding on to a shameful, selfish hope for things to keep spiraling.

She’d always felt so envious of the other reporters at her paper in Jerusalem, none of them Israeli, all of them cabbing over to the bar at the American Colony Hotel every night after work, as if living out some vintage fantasy. They were all smart, they all spoke the language, many had relatives there and knew the country even before they were hired. But there was something so romantic about the way they saw their jobs, sinking into chairs in the garden bar, press passes still dangling from their necks, immediately launching into thrilling tales of how they were
this
close to danger that day, before pausing and taking a handful of the free cashews on the table. Even her bureau chief, whom Talia genuinely admired, still acted as though he was playing the part of the daredevil reporter, always driving himself into the territories, traveling with a separate passport through Lebanon and Syria, as if relentlessly performing for a rapt, imaginary audience back home in Chicago. It had always bothered Talia, listening to them debate her country’s politics, when it was implicitly understood that the moment their brushes with danger went from being
this close
to
way too fucking close
, they could leave. But then she was given the same opportunity, to be lifted from her life and plunked down in a place to which she had an even flimsier connection than many of her coworkers had to Israel, and she’d found herself guilty of that same excitement. Anyone would have felt it covering the demonstrations, of course. But she’d been just as amped in the months that followed, sitting in the stuffy, windowless media room in the district courthouse, or transcribing at her desk for hours, eating meal after meal of crackers with chocolate spread, as if everything took on a significance she’d never felt back home: the thrill of living on the other side of the glass.

Even the things in Kiev that should have frustrated her—the weather, the drunks who catcalled her on her way to work, the horrible bureaucracy that made even cashing her paycheck feel like that nightmare where she was walking down a long hallway and every door led to yet another endless hallway of doors—seemed funny and removed, as if they were simply anecdotes in an elaborate story she’d tell one day to her
own
imaginary audience back home. Her office building in Kiev housed foreign correspondents from all over the world, and she loved how easily they buffered the loneliness of living in a new place, heading down to Baraban, which had quickly become their default bar, every evening after work. Those nights, squeezed into a booth with her office mates and a roving crew of aid workers and NGO groupies, even her life in Israel seemed a little lighter, a little more entertaining, than it had actually been—as if she weren’t even describing her own neighborhood, her own family, but a cast of pushy and lovable characters on some wacky sitcom.

Then came the financial crash and her bureau chief called from Jerusalem with the news that the Chicago paper was closing some of its foreign desks, Kiev among them. It had nothing to do with her work, he said—they just couldn’t afford to keep her when they could get copy from the AP. “Try not to panic,” he said. “What’s that saying about things going to shit right before they’re good again?” He laughed, but it came out as more of a hiccup. Then he cleared his throat and suggested she go freelance. Which Talia did, though soon even that became difficult and she had to cut her rates by half, and one night she walked over to Baraban for a much-needed drink and found the place full of twentysomething American bloggers. A few months before she’d had a bad and wholly forgettable night with one of them—Ethan from Michigan—and had prayed he’d gone back to the States once jobs became scarce. But instead it appeared he’d invited all his friends from college to set up shop there, a cluster of them laughing and yelling in English, the other patrons forced to weave around their power cords, as if the Americans and their laptops had become as essential to the bar as its wobbly chairs and shelves of bottles that lined the wall.

“You’re lucky,” one of her old office mates said. He seemed to have implanted himself at the bar since his own layoff, and had the sallow pallor of a man who’d spent too many consecutive days drinking indoors. “You can go home and some war will start up again.” He was Danish, and Talia detected a spark of envy in his gaze. “Go back and wait,” he said. So Talia wrote to every contact she had in Israel, including her former boss at the American paper, who said he’d gotten word that they were now closing all the foreign desks and reshuffling the staff back home, and that he could tell her exactly what the job market was like, because after thirty-three years he was back in it, groveling for positions at wires he’d been overqualified for two decades ago. The one place where he could put in a call for her, he said, was at
Boker Yisraeli.
It was the free city paper the two of them used to mock, singsonging the glowing profiles of the wealthy businessmen who clearly funded it and their Judaica artist wives. But Talia knew she had no choice but to gratefully accept the offer. And though it was even worse than the first job she’d taken out of college, and though the pay was so low she’d had to move back in with her parents, back into her childhood bedroom, which was no longer her bedroom but her mother’s extended storage closet, the key, she told Tomer later that week at the Indian place, was to view her time home as a disappointing but brief blip in her real life abroad. “I’ve been home two months and I’ll stay through the summer,” she said. “The only way to get back into reporting is to be a one-man band, and the second I’ve saved enough for a video camera, editing software and sound equipment, I’m leaving again. But for now I’m here, fact-checking the features.”