A Wall of Light (6 page)

S
ONYA

M
atar looked surprised when I asked him to stay, but only for a second. He assumed I needed a favor and that I was going to ask him to look up an article for me or move heavy boxes.

There was something shocking about Matar’s eyes, which were far too intense for his age—or any age, for that matter. I couldn’t get used to the discrepancy between those eyes and everything else about him. He seemed to be in his mid-twenties, and he was a good-looking guy, with dark hair and fine features. His build was slight, but one sensed that he was athletic, or at least very fit. He was, apart from his eyes, ordinary in every way, an ordinary student like a thousand others on campus.

His eyes didn’t suggest to me that he’d been through anything horrifying, or even that he’d passed the stage of horror. We tend to recover from distressing events; I’m a perfect example. And if we don’t, if we’re still wandering the corridors of a psychiatric hospital, or walking stunned through life, then our eyes betray shock, or pain, or rage. Matar’s eyes didn’t express any of those things. The intensity of his eyes seemed to have more to do with a secret burden, as if he knew something no one else did but upon which our existence on this planet depended. Even when he laughed at one of my dumb jokes, or whispered slyly to his best friend—a fellow with a sun-bleached afro who was his exact opposite: loose, free, relaxed, crossing one hairy leg over the other, ankle over knee, arms clasped behind his head, leaning so far back in his chair that I was sure it would topple over one of these days—even then his eyes didn’t relent. If I were his mother, I would feel I’d lost him, and I’d grieve.

I told Ma’ayan she could go. Before she left the room she winked at me and signed, secretively, “Remember the harassment regulations!”

Matar remained in his seat, looking at me and waiting patiently for his assignment. He always sat near the window, three seats from my desk.

I motioned him to come over to the board, and with my blue marker I wrote,
“How are you?”

He grinned, picked up a green marker, and drew a happy face next to my question.

“Tell me a little about yourself.”

He wrote:
“b. 1979. Dad: engineer. Mom: daycare worker. Two sisters, 14, 16. One brother, 9. 1983–1997: nursery, kindergarten, grade school, high school. 1997–2003, army. 2003–present: university. Favorite teacher: Sonya.”

I said, “You left out something.”

He looked at me for a few seconds, weighing his answer.

“Secret,”
he wrote, and drew the opposite of a smiley face, a face with the mouth turned down. He added a semicircle of vertical rays for hair.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Not that kind of secret. End-up-in-prison kind of secret.”
He picked up the black marker and drew bars over the sad face. He enclosed the bars in a square: the face was looking out of a prison window.

“It’s okay. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You notice everything, Sonya.”

“Hard not to notice in your case, Matar.”

“I like it when you say my name.”

Embarrassed, suddenly uneasy, I turned away and began organizing the papers on my desk.

He drew a square on the board to lure me back. I watched him. Inside the square he wrote
target.
Around the square he drew five Xs. Next to the Xs he wrote,
Unimportant people, aged 4, 7, 17, 19, 61.
Then he added a body to the sad face behind bars, and drew a medal on the figure’s shirt.
Good boy in elite commando unit gets medal
, he wrote, and smiled. His smile was the kind one often sees in this country among the male population: half-cynical, half-challenging.

I wondered whether to let my paranoia get the better of me. Did he think it was safe to tell me military secrets because as a deaf person I didn’t really count? On the other hand, this sort of thing wasn’t a secret, it was reported in the papers all the time.

At least six different emotions, one of which was fear, collided in me. Meanwhile Matar had walked very deliberately to the door and shut it. He came back to where I was standing rather foolishly, unable to move, because I couldn’t decide which of all the things I felt I ought to act upon. He placed his hands on my shoulders and I became aware of a sensation I couldn’t quite place, something very pleasant. It took me a second to realize that what I was feeling was a tongue, and that it was moving gently in my mouth.

N
OAH’S DIARY
, F
EBRUARY
28, 1983.

In the news: 5 kids in Haifa stole 200 grenades and 300 flares from an army base! No one noticed! They were 11 years old! The IDF spokesman has “declined to comment.”

I
’ve pretty much moved out for the winter—I’m in Oren’s room now. I’ve been here since January 2. Today is the twelfth consecutive day of snow in Jerusalem, which is a record. We saw on TV everyone getting their cars stuck in the snow. The previous record was in 1919, when they had seven snowy days in a row, and a total of nineteen for the winter. Tel Aviv is pretty cold, too, but it’s nice and warm here—we have the kerosene heater on. I miss the porch, even though it’s too cold to sleep there now. Oren’s parents feel sorry for me that my bedroom is a porch. That’s fine with me, it makes them really generous, so I don’t tell them how great it is. Adults see things differently at all times.

Oren has a nice flat: huge with two bathrooms and a bidet (which he had to explain to me, and which I still don’t really get) and you can see the whole neighborhood from the balcony. They also have these big art books which they let me borrow. They’re not rich but they work like crazy and they have about seven mortgages and loans. Oren’s dad is a contractor. I’m not sure what that is but everywhere I go someone seems to be a contractor. There must be more contractors in this country than any other profession. His mom is a nurse at a home for old people and she tells very gross stories from her job. Oren thinks they’re hilarious but I find them disgusting.

I told Oren’s mother about Gran. I don’t know if it’s the vodka or what, but she’s becoming sort of mixed up. She’s pretty old, around sixty. Oren’s mother says sixty isn’t old, but that’s to make herself feel better, because she’s probably close to sixty herself, or at least forty.

For example, when she reads—unless she’s out late she reads to Sonya at night, and sometimes I sort of sit in the doorway because I like her voice. She leans back on her pillows with her hair in braids and she has a nice smell—vodka, but also perfume and something else, like cinnamon. Sometimes she reads about knights and witches—she does a good witch’s voice—and sometimes she reads poetry in English or even a bit of
Romeo and Juliet
, that’s her favorite play. I like the way she says, “‘What, drawn and talk of peace?’” Sort of soft and sharp at the same time.

She also tells Sonya stories about her past, which interest me because I get to hear about my grandfather, Dad’s father, who was a physicist but married—to someone else, I mean. Also about how she and Dad escaped, which is like from a movie. They hid money for bribes in Dad’s teddy bear and they had to sneak past a guard who was asleep just by miracle, and then they almost got caught at the airport in Vienna, but Gran ducked into the bathroom and put on a different outfit. In the Soviet Union they had to learn Hebrew in a basement by candlelight—if they’d been caught they would have been in huge trouble, maybe even sent to the gulag or something to be a slave. Nobody liked Jews. NOW WE DON’T HAVE TO CARE HA HA.

But to return to Gran, lately she starts saying something and halfway through she forgets what it’s about. Or she starts reading some poem about kids skating on a pond and in the middle she tells us we need to buy more rice. And yesterday Dad and Sonya were playing their screechy violins and suddenly she said, right out of the blue, “I’m against bird migration.” That was creepy, I have to admit. I tried to joke around with her about it, figure out what she meant, but it turned out she barely realized she’d said anything.

The worst was when she forgot my age, and she wasn’t just off by a year, like twelve instead of thirteen, or fourteen instead of thirteen. She thought I was going into the army!! Not yet, thank you. Actually I don’t even know whether I’ll go into the army at all. There’s a new thing now—this group got started, these people are starting to say it’s wrong to go in because of the occupation and the invasion into Lebanon, they say you should go to jail instead. Mom is really into all that. She put up a big banner in the corridor,
TWO STATES FOR TWO PEOPLES.
Now I can’t invite anyone over, apart from Oren. I think I’d really hate the army, and that’s the real reason I don’t want to go. I could try to get a mental health exemption (I think I could act crazy if I had to, look at the house I’m growing up in!!!). It won’t matter for my career if I’m a fashion designer.

Unless I design uniforms ha ha!

Maybe I should start doing crazy things now, so it gets into some sort of medical record. I could walk naked on the street singing “Hatikva” or something like that. It’s good to plan ahead. Because the truth is, the army is really, really not for me, I can tell. No, I have to go, it’s my duty. If I don’t go that means I’m a coward and I don’t deserve to be Israeli. It’s the least I can do for my state. Maybe I can ask to be a jobnik—I don’t have to go into combat. Dad says the most important thing in life, more important than brains or talent or any other assets, is to have courage, and everything else will follow from that. He says if you don’t have courage you’ll never have any kind of decent life. He doesn’t mean the army specifically, he means just a general approach of facing things. But Mom says if I go into combat she’ll consider me a war criminal. She always goes too far!! For the Vietnam War you could say you were gay—I saw that in a movie. I’m not gay but even pretending to be gay doesn’t work here. No one cares. I know because someone told me that Mani’s son is gay and he’s a corporal. So I asked Mani about it one time after soccer practice when there was no one else around, and he told me his son decided on a military career because he wanted to be surrounded by men ha ha! People think fashion design means you’re gay but they’re ignorant. If I were gay I’d be in love with Oren and I’m not.

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, F
EBRUARY
26, 1957

D
earest, not a word from you in so long, but I keep on writing in the hope that you will eventually get my letters and write back. I had a dreadful dream about you, dearest, that you were caught with my letters and they found out how you helped me in Vienna—and they shot you, and also poor Heinrich! In the snow, and you both fell. Olga was there, it was terrible. If only I had a word from you!

I am very homesick. I just came home from rehearsal, which followed a long day at the restaurant, and I felt so miserable I poured myself a drink and got straight into bed. Kostya makes his own meals now; he’s so resourceful. He’s borrowed a cookbook from Carmela, who also invited him over a few times to show him how to make kugel and vegetable stew and all sorts of inexpensive dishes. Oh, I don’t know what I’m writing, I’m in such a swirl at the moment. I am not disappointed in this country, even if it isn’t as I imagined it, and I don’t regret leaving, as we had no choice, dearest. Kostya’s future, ours, the risks involved … but I am lonely here. I’ve met many interesting people, and you know, everyone loves to read, there are bookstores at every corner, with boxes full of inexpensive books. There isn’t a book that is too dog-eared or moldy to make it into a box. I’ve found some real treasures for only a few
grushim
(our lowest coin). Kostya is happy here. He has a future in this country, he can do something with his life.

Above all, we are free. There is much more nationalistic fervor than I expected, but it’s not oppressive; on the contrary, there’s something almost touching about it. I shouldn’t be surprised—after all, my poor father was always so passionate about the idea of a homeland. I remember the hope in his eyes when he whispered news that leaked in. People here are the same, they want this project to work, and they’re so excited about having a new country just for themselves, ourselves. I’m very tired, dearest. I will go to sleep now and hope that I won’t wake up in the middle of the night with a cockroach making its way across my forehead: they are fearless, this breed. Good night, dearest. Wrap yourself up well. You and I are past our dancing days.…