The Distance Between Us. Masha Hamilton
not important. And I thought, feh! A little squabble with my sister should cause this tsouris? The rebbe must be, forgive my disrespectful tongue, meshugener. But I was desperate. And what do you think? We made up. Three hours later my itching was gone.”
“A miracle worker,” says Mr. Gruizin.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.” Mrs. Weizman turns eagerly to Caddie. “So if you won’t go to one of ours, you could see your . . .” she waves a hand, “whoever you go to see. Everyone can use a bit of God sometimes. Am I wrong, Ya’akov?”
Mr. Gruizin nods and begins to talk, but Caddie lets his words slide by unattended. She remembers the town church of her childhood, a smooth and generous pew, the congregation’s voices soaring in hymn.
All praise to Him who came to saaave, Who conquer’d death and scorned the graaave
She remembers the hard bread on her tongue, the heat of gathered bodies, and Grandma Jos leaning close, smelling of Ivory soap and talcum and mint tea. A simple trust, Caddie, will lead us into the calm valley.
Caddie never replied. She understood that Grandma Jos needed to imagine His arms around her to soften the hard angles of a life gone strangely amiss: her spouse—Caddie’s grandfather—living twenty miles away with another family in a white house with yellow shutters, her daughter—Caddie’s mother—sleeping somewhere in a corrupt city and bathing too infrequently, her granddaughter—Caddie herself—abandoned at her doorstep. To blame Him would have been foolhardy, because who would Grandma Jos have then? Grandma Jos thought she was teaching Caddie about religion, but what she was really teaching was what it meant to be alone.
Caddie knew even then, though, that a calm valley was not what she sought—it sounded, in fact, like torture. Nor, despite Grandma Jos’s dire warnings, did she want redemption. Nor a savior, nor a tearful walk to the front to be welcomed into the community of believers. God, she already knew to be as icy as a winter dawn. He rarely paid attention, and was not to be trusted when He did. Grandma Jos used Him as an excuse for living with things as they were. Caddie had no use for Him at all.
“Caddie! Are you listening?” Ya’el touches her arm and Caddie looks into her friend’s face and there it is again, Ya’el’s effort to hide a worried expression.
Caddie can’t still an involuntary shudder. “Sorry,” she says. “Go ahead, say it again.”
There is a moment of quiet, an exchange of glances, before Mr. Gruizin speaks. “You are worn from the flight. Of course, of course. Ladies, let’s go.”
“I’m 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