all right.” But Caddie’s false words are lost in the bustle of everyone except her rising.
Mrs. Weizman’s cheek, surprisingly supple, is against hers. “Your friend? He is between God’s hands.”
Ya’el speaks softly in Caddie’s ear. “Tomorrow we’ll talk.”
Caddie forces a jaunty wave as though her homecoming were a delight, a celebration. She keeps waving until finally the door is pulled shut.
SLEEP DROWNS HER, QUICK AND WELCOME, but she wakes in the night to a sharp jab of panic. The five minutes replay. The driver slows. A bush moves. Marcus rises, then sinks. The Land Rover turns. Marcus’s lips: a scribbled line. His expression: surprised, then gone.
She lingers over those minutes as though they’d lasted hours, searches for clues as to how they could have not happened. Berates herself for going with a driver no one really knew. For making him pause for the woman with the child—perhaps without those wasted minutes, they would have sped past unprepared ambushers. And for being a woman. If she’d been a man, Marcus wouldn’t have shielded her with his body.
She gets up to scrub the bathroom sink. She rubs the yellowing porcelain rhythmically, uselessly, as though it mattered. Not so long ago, Marcus brushed his teeth here. Not so long ago, he shot a roll of her coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel. Pseudoannoyed, she waved him away—“Cut it out!”—and they both laughed. Now she scours until her arm muscles ache. And keeps scouring.
Finally she moves restlessly to the couch near the open window. On the other side of the city, a siren weeps. Down the street, a car horn wails. Next door a man and a woman quarrel in Hebrew, the woman in trailing sentences shaded with meaning, the man with tiny bites:
“I don’t care if he is your boss. You don’t overlook something like that. That’s pathetic. You have to—”
“Now I’m pathetic?”
“Look, what I’m saying is, you have to respond. It’s a matter of how . . .”
How much it would cost to have one killed, just one?
It’s a crazy idea. A nighttime thought, dark and fleeting. Caddie goes to the kitchen to warm some milk. There are two sorts of people, she sees. The innocent—Caddie used to be one—shut their eyes and sleep through the dark. Then there are the rest, knowingly guilty one way or another. Denied the nocturnal gift of oblivion and purification, they rise once and again to escape a vision or a memory, to yearn for dawn while fearing it, to quarrel or to plot. The texture of their daytimes, then, is distorted by the weakened quality of their sleep. Presidents, rebels, peacemakers and assassins: history itself has been radically altered by the toll of interrupted nights. There’s a whole damn story there.
Eventually her chest loosens, her musings stutter and stop, her body slackens. The disagreement next door persists, its taut rhythm invading her dreams.
In the morning her legs are unsteady and her left arm twitches. The second cup of coffee stills her limbs.
She pulls on a long-sleeved shirt, tan pants and lace-up hiking boots. At a glance, she resembles a granola-munching tourist, a kibbutz lodger or visiting peacenik. Still wholesome, still healthy. Only the observant could pick up signs of her internal frays: she knows she’s given to long pauses, and that bruise-like shadows underline her eyes, and that her skin has taken on a grayish cast she can’t scrub off.
She shoves a change of clothing, a towel and two bed sheets into a sack, and makes sure she has a notebook and her press card. She won’t be checking in with her office this morning. She knows she’d be advised against heading alone for the religiously rigid Gaza Strip, focal point of anger and poverty and reprisals. And especially advised against pausing for a swim.
If you require a bloody sacrosanct dip into baptismal water, not there, not there. It’s Marcus’s voice. She doesn’t imagine it; she hears it. And when, by the way, did you get so devout?
She turns away. She wants neither questions nor warnings, not from anyone. Gaza is a place that has borne violence and survived. It’s where she’ll go.
TAKING THE ROAD that traces the curve of the Mediterranean, she flashes her press card to pass the Erez checkpoint. The next stretch is littered with garbage, the buildings graffiti-soaked. Two boys on a donkey stare sullenly as she passes. The air, ripe with diesel oil and fish blood, deposits a slippery film on her cheeks. The beach stands empty, an outcast despite its tenderly beckoning waves.
On good days, days without gunfire, men in jallabiyas and women in embroidered linen skirts crowd themselves into the sea. When they emerge, wet and heavy, they disappear into separate tents to change. But the locals are home today, preparing for a funeral or a demonstration, on strike or maybe sinking into collective exhaustion. Gaza is not a tourist destination. This is where Samson was thrown into a dungeon and died. It’s where, only months ago, Islamic militants burned down every liquor store, every hotel that served alcohol. It is also where, sometimes, an eccentric foreigner who chooses to pause can find solitude.
Though Caddie thinks she is prepared for the sea’s chill, it startles. She swims the breaststroke for a few minutes to warm up, then dives under. Once she’s beneath the water, it comforts like the weight of a hefty blanket. As she breaks the surface, though, old images assert themselves. Again she submerges, walking her fingers along the sandy floor. She stays under until her lungs ache. After a few gasping breaths, she sees with a shock that pale crocodiles lie stranded on the beach, waiting for her.
Driftwood. Only driftwood, of course. Crocodiles don’t live in Gaza.
This won’t work, this attempt at renewal. “Go drink the sea at Gaza,” the Palestinians say, when they mean go to hell. Why did she think she could find consolation here?
She emerges, throws the sheets over her car to block the windows and, within the car’s confines, struggles out of her wet clothing, into the dry shirt and pants. Then, instead of heading back to Jerusalem, she aims for Gaza City. She passes a Palestinian refugee camp, its plywood and aluminum shacks peeking from behind a brick wall. Few cars travel through the streets paved with stones and broken bottles. Almost on autopilot, she heads toward Hikmet Masri’s shop. She stops to see Hikmet every time she’s in Gaza. Her most reliable source, calm and articulate. Plus, he lives above his store, so she can usually find him even when it’s closed.
This time the door stands ajar. She peers inside to see the jumble of the shelves, the mix of colors and shapes crammed together as though Hikmet simply gathered whatever manna fell from heaven and dragged it in, planning to organize it all another day. Hikmet himself sits on a stool, the traditional checkered cloth draped over his head.
“Caddie! Allah blesses me in directing you here once again. What can I offer you? Today I have fresh limes and ribbons in a dozen colors. Also two volumes of a French-language dictionary and some slightly used crayons.” Then Hikmet chuckles. “Or perhaps you want only a good quote?”
He pours overheated Turkish coffee from a samovar and offers her cigarettes, which she declines. His shop smells of cardamom. She suddenly feels leaden.
“And your photographer friend?” Hikmet asks. “Where is he today?”
Only then does Caddie recall that Marcus accompanied her last time she visited Hikmet, last time she inhaled in one breath the scent of cardamom and crayon and citrus together. She tries to wet her lips, but her tongue is dry. “He’s not working anymore,” she says. Hikmet raises
