The UnAmericans: Stories (8 page)

“I left a message at the canning factories in Sederot and Kiryat Gat,” my mother said. The open-air markets wouldn’t buy blemished produce, so at this point all we could do was sell them for sauce. But if end rot was happening here it was affecting every farm in the north, and the others probably had the sense to call the canneries the moment the first black splotch appeared. Usually my mother would have been five steps ahead and it frustrated me that no one on the moshav had picked up her slack this week—but I had a feeling they’d tried and she just hadn’t let them.

“Tell me what I can do,” I said.

She was staring at the vines with the same strained expression I’d always assumed she reserved for me, and as I watched her now, I knew my mother wasn’t harsh—she just had the face of a person who’d spent too much of her life looking at terrible things.

“Nothing else to do out here,” she said quietly. “But Asaaf needs his lunch,” so I ran home and brought him a glass of grapefruit juice and a sandwich.

“The crop’s rotting,” I said, unfolding the legs of his tray. “Think there’s any place that’ll take them?”

“How would I know?” he said, more to the basketball game on TV than to me, and I blinked: he’d always at least pretended to know the answer.

“We’re pretty much screwed out of thousands of shekels,” I said.

“Oren?”

I stepped closer.

“I just want to be alone. Would you shut the door behind you?” he said, closing his eyes and falling into a sleep so deep and fast it had to be false.

I roamed the house, wondering if I should go back outside but knowing my mother would want me home with Asaaf. I opened the refrigerator, scrutinizing the cool shelves until the motor kicked in. Outside the window, Uri chugged by on the tractor, cutting through the fields and up to the toolshed. Finally I flopped on the living room sofa, settling on the same basketball game my brother had on two doors down.

Israel was up 76 to 48 against Montenegro, but one of our players was still running to the sidelines and waving his hands in the referee’s face, arguing over the basket, when my mother returned. Sweat lined her upper lip and the neck of her t-shirt. When she knocked on my brother’s door and he yelled “Sleeping!” her shoulders sagged and she went into the kitchen. She pulled a mug off the dish rack, her hand rattling as she stirred in Nescafé. “The canneries aren’t buying anymore,” she said. “I tried all four.” She kicked out the chair beside her and I sat down. “We’ll lose fifteen thousand shekels, easy. And this one,” she said, nodding toward Asaaf’s closed door, “he can’t even
try
to get on his crutches?”

She pressed her fingers to her face and rubbed her temples, and I noticed the lines fanning the corners of her mouth. I hadn’t seen her show this much of herself since I found her on the couch after a bad first date, years ago, listening to Yehoram Gaon with her knees tucked beneath her. I took her hand now, callused and tanned with rims of dirt wedged beneath her nails. “Listen,” I said. “I know it’s been rough. Let me know what I can do.”

“Thanks, Oren,” she said, squeezing back. “You know what you
can
do?”

I looked up at her. I smiled. “Anything.”

“Start tackling these dishes. They’ve been piling up all week and I’ve got to find Uri and Hadas.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but going from a lifesaving drive to dish patrol in under two weeks wasn’t it. But I had a feeling that drive no longer mattered to my mother. There would be no more praise, no bravery medal engraved in my honor to hang from the living room shelf. Mine were minor heroics, at best, and when I returned to work, I knew the lieutenant would continue to ignore me as I turned out of the loud, dusty base and onto the highway. No one was thinking about my drive anymore, and in a week we wouldn’t even be thinking about the tomatoes: there would be something else to deal with, and something after that—the way it had been since I could remember, and sensed it always would be.

So I stood up and cleared the table. My mother kissed my head and walked outside, and a moment later I watched her bicycle wheels kick up dirt and wind down the narrow driveway, growing smaller until she was just a glittery black speck in the day.

I hadn’t even finished scrubbing the pans when it was time for Asaaf’s next round of pills. When I let myself into his room, his sheets were tangled on the floor, giving me my first real look at the stump. A plastic brace kept his leg in place, and covering the bottom was an ace bandage, wrapped tightly up his thigh. He saw me watching and I turned away.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t care if you look.” He sat up and unwound the cloth.

Up close, freckles of dried blood circled the wound. The skin around it was red and puckered, and the stitches were starting to fall out. I didn’t know what I wanted more: to touch the ripples of raised skin, running my fingers over the bumps, or to bolt from the room. “Does it still hurt?”

“The first few days? Like a motherfucker. Now, not so much.” Maybe it was the morphine making Asaaf forget his room was off-limits, but still I edged onto his bed. “Another month and they’ll fit me for the prosthetic.”

I tried, but I couldn’t imagine something so pink and slick attached to Asaaf’s hairy thigh. “Why not get it sooner?”

“If I put weight on the stump before it’s healed, it could crack.”

“Nasty.”

“Seriously nasty. Only grosser is if it gets infected,” Asaaf said, and for a moment he seemed not to be talking about himself anymore, but as if he were examining the stump like a specimen, the way we would light ants on fire with a magnifying glass as kids, watching them crackle and siss.

“Is Yael here for dinner tonight?” I said.

“Depends on how long it takes in Jerusalem—she’s getting her passport renewed.”

I didn’t know what to say. The socks Yael must have kicked off in her sleep were balled on the floor. I picked them up and tossed them in the hamper, and when I turned around Asaaf sat all the way up. “Listen, Oren, before you start buying things for the trip, go through my closet. I just bought a good backpack, a sleeping pad and a fleece—”

“Why are you alright with this?”

“What do you mean, why?” He looked right at me. “You saved my life, right? Even though you’re too weird to ever say it. So take all the gear I bought before you start charging things you know you can’t afford.”

Asaaf was saying all of this as casually as if he were offering me half his sandwich, and as I sat beside him, I’d never hated myself more. “I’m in love with her,” I blurted. “I have been for years.”

For a second he was quiet, as if considering every one of my words. Then he said, “Everybody knows, Oren. There’s a reason they didn’t put you undercover.”

“But I’m spending the next four months traveling with your girlfriend, Asaaf, and the whole time, while you’re here in bed, I’ll be thinking about how to make something happen with her.” I couldn’t believe I was telling him these things, but once I’d started talking it was like a valve had opened, and I couldn’t screw it closed. “And the thing is,” I said, realizing as I heard my own voice that it might actually be true, “I think something could.”

Asaaf shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it will.”

“What are you even talking about?” I said. “She’s your
girlfriend
. Doesn’t this situation seem fucked to you?”

“A lot of things seem fucked,” Asaaf said quietly, then turned back to the TV.

He’d never sounded like such a defeatist. The brother I knew would have found his way onto that plane to the U.S. The brother I knew would have wheeled himself down the bumpy path to the yoga farm and spent the next four months sleeping on some uncomfortable floor mat, just to be with her. The brother I knew would have told me I was a betraying little fool for making a move on his girlfriend—not, he would add, that I had a fraction of a chance anyway—and then would have kicked me out of the room, yelling not to let the door hit me on the way out. Any of that would have been better than this, so I said, a little wildly, “If you wanted things to be good with her, maybe you shouldn’t have asked for her help taking a piss.”

Finally he faced me, and it wasn’t the anger I expected but genuine bewilderment. “She told you that?”

“Who do you think she’s been confiding in?”

“Get out.”

I didn’t move.

“I mean it, Oren.” He tried to kick me off the bed with his right leg, but I scooted out of his reach. He tried again. Only the breakfast tray rattled.

“I’m warning you to get out right now,” Asaaf said, but it was so hard to take his threats seriously that I couldn’t even look at him. I stared at the TV, watching a player sprint across the court, and that’s when Asaaf grabbed me from behind and knocked me to the bed. I smelled his sweat on the sheets and when I rolled over, he hit my jaw, then my nose. The punches seemed to be the best he could muster, and I had a feeling they were hurting him more than they were me. But he kept at it. He climbed on top, teetering on his right side for support, and when he hit me between the eyes my head pulsed and my vision went blurry. In my spotty white haze I saw how easily I could push him over and take the upper hand. But I didn’t. I lay back and took the hit, and then another, because for that second I had my brother back, towering over me with those dark muscled arms, his green eyes bright and flashing and victorious.

Some say the story begins
in Europe, and your mother would no doubt interrupt and say it begins in New York, but that’s just because she can’t imagine the world before she entered it. And yes, I know you think it begins specifically in Belarus, because that’s what your grandfather tells you. I’ve heard him describing those black sedans speeding down Pinsker Street. I’ve been married to the man almost sixty years and know how he is with you—he makes every word sound like a secret. But he wasn’t even there. He was with his youth group by then and even though I
was
there I don’t remember being scared—even when they knocked on our door, I didn’t know what was happening. Even when they dragged us outside with our overstuffed suitcases spilling into the street, shouting through megaphones to walk in the road with the livestock, I still didn’t know. I was thirteen.

The story really starts in the sewers. Everybody in the uniform factory whispered about them, and everybody had a different theory. Some said they were an escape route a plumber had spent years charting, an underground system of tunnels running from Poland to Belarus to Lithuania. Others said they were an impossible maze with no way out. But the truth was that when my mother pulled me aside after only six days in the factory and whispered that she’d worked out a plan for me—smuggled vodka for the guards, a shoulder bared, my poor father, a lifetime of loving a woman who knew just how to spark another man’s sympathy—I simply stood there, taking notes in my head. After dinner, she said, I’d slip past the guards and down the street, around two corners and up a road where I’d see the slats of a sewer. The grate would slide off easily, she said, and she and my father would find me soon. I had no reason not to believe that was true, no way of knowing the sewers would lead me to the forest—that night all I knew, as I climbed inside the manhole and down the metal ladder, was that it smelled worse than anything I’d imagined, of shit and piss and garbage.

It was black in there, and dank and cool, the ceiling so low I sank to my knees and crawled. I just kept following the crowd of voices—in Yiddish, which was both comforting and horrible, hearing that language forbidden in the factory. Then there was a rumble, and water rushed in and knocked me down. I gasped and tried to wade forward. The sewer started filling up and I felt around in the slimy water for the person in front of me. But everybody seemed far ahead, and it took me a minute to realize dinner must have been ending aboveground, everybody washing dishes and taking baths and pouring water down the drain all at once.

Soon I had no sense of how long I’d been underground. My eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw the shapes around me. The woman up ahead, the hunched slope of her back, the walls of the sewer. The shadow of a rat before it ran across my arm. Then my whole body started to wobble and I knew I wouldn’t make it through a wave of morning dishwashing, so when I saw lines of light through the grate, I stopped.

Keep moving, the woman behind me whispered.

But I couldn’t. I waited for the group to go by and when I heard nothing above, I slowly lifted the grate and climbed onto the streets of a village that looked as if it had been passed over by the war. I wasn’t used to the sun after an entire night in the sewers—it was just rolling up over the houses, and the forest beyond was so bright it looked painted. Dirt, river, sky—everything stunned me. That the wooden cottages lining the road were still intact, that people were feeding their horses and selling vegetables and sweeping leaves into the gutter.

A man walked past with his young daughter and she stared. The father took one look at me, yanked her arm and hurried down the road. I knew not to spend another minute standing there in the daylight, so I crossed the road and entered the forest. It was cold and dim, and when I leaned against a tree trunk, exhaustion came right at me.