The whole incident with Avishai Abudi should, in my opinion, set a red light flashing for us all. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more average Joe. He’s not the type to go around kicking over garbage pails or starting fights in bars. In fact, he never does anything to set himself apart. And yet, one day, out of nowhere, a pair of thugs are banging at his door. They drag him down the stairs, stick him in the back of some van, and haul him straight to his parents’ place. This, with a terrified Avishai in the back yelling, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“That’s not what you should be asking,” the driver says, and the brute at his side is nodding. “What you mean to say is ‘Who am I?’ And ‘What do I want?’”Afterward the two of them laugh as if Avishai’s just told the best joke in the world.
“I’m Avishai Abudi!” Avishai says in a tone intended to sound threatening. “And I want to talk to your superiors. Do you hear me?” That’s when the two of them park the van in the lot outside Avishai’s parents’ building and turn to face him. He’s sure they’re going to hit him and, also, that he doesn’t deserve it. Not at all. “You’re in deep,” Avishai says, careful to protect his face. “You guys have messed up, big-time !” he says as they pull him out of the van.
But the truth is, they don’t beat him at all. Avishai can’t see exactly what they’re up to, but he senses it. And what he senses is that they are stripping his clothes from him, but not in a sexual way, it’s all very proper. After they’ve finished dressing him back up, they put some sort of heavy pack on his back and say, “Hurry up, run along home to Mommy and Daddy. You wouldn’t want to be late.” And Avishai runs. He runs as fast as he possibly can. He takes the stairs three at a time, until he reaches the brown wooden door to his parents’ apartment. He knocks on it, panting, and when Mommy opens the door, he hurries inside, closes it behind him, and double locks it. “What’s gotten into you?” Mommy asks. “Why are you sweating like that.”
“I ran,” Avishai pants, “in the stairwell. People. Don’t open.”
“I don’t understand a thing,” Mommy says, “but never mind. Come, put your bag down and go wash your hands and face. Dinner’s already on the table.” Avishai takes off the knapsack, goes into the bathroom, and washes his face. In the mirror over the sink he sees that he’s in his school uniform. When he opens the knapsack in the living room he discovers notebooks and textbooks lined in flowered paper. There’s a math book, and a box of colored pencils, and a little metal compass with an eraser shoved on the point. His mother comes over to chide him. “This isn’t the time for homework. Come and eat. Hurry up, chop-chop, before all the vitamins escape from the salad.” Avishai sits at the table and eats in silence. The food is delicious. He’d been surviving solely on takeout and cheap restaurants for so many years, he’d honestly forgotten that food could taste this good. “Daddy left you money for your after-school program.” Mommy points to a sealed white envelope resting on the little hall table next to the rotary phone. “But I’m warning you, Avi, if you pull the same stunt you did with the model-airplane club and change your mind after one class, you’re better off telling us now, before we pay.”
Avishai thinks to himself: It’s just a dream. And after that he says, “Yes, Mommy,” because even if it is just a dream, there’s no need to be impolite. He thinks to himself: If I just will it, I can wake myself at any moment. Not that he knows what, exactly, you do to wake up in the middle of a dream. You can pinch yourself, but that’s generally used in the opposite situation. Pinching is what you do to prove you’re already awake. Maybe he could hold his breath, or just say to himself, “Wake up! Wake up!” And maybe if he simply refuses to absorb everything around him, if he casts doubt, it’ll all suddenly melt away. In either case, there’s no need to stress. He might as well eat first. Yes, after dinner is probably an excellent time to wake himself up. And when Avishai really gets to thinking about it, even when he’s done eating, it’s not exactly urgent. He can go to his after-school group first—he’s honestly curious which one it is—and later, if it’s still light out, he can play a little soccer in the schoolyard. And only when Daddy gets home from work, only then will he wake up. He could even stretch it out another day or two, until right before some especially hard exam. “Now what are you daydreaming about?” Mommy asks, stroking his balding head. “So many thoughts spinning around behind those big, round eyes of yours, just looking at them makes me feel tired.”
“I was thinking of dessert,” Avishai lies, “wondering if you’d made Jell-O or chocolate pudding.”
“What would you like there to be?” Mommy asks.
“Pudding,” Avishai says, all playful.
“It’s already waiting,” his mother says happily and opens the fridge. “But if you change your mind, Jell-O is just as easy. It won’t take a minute to make.”
It began with a kiss. It almost always begins with a kiss. Ella and Tsiki were in bed, naked, with only their tongues touching—when she felt something prick her. “Did I hurt you?” Tsiki asked, and when she shook her head, he quickly added, “You’re bleeding.” And she was, from the mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he started a frantic search in the kitchen, pulling ice-cube trays out of the freezer and banging them against the counter. “Here, take these,” he said, handing her some ice with a shivering hand, “put them against your lip. It’ll stop the bleeding.” Tsiki had always been good at those things. In the army he’d been a paramedic. He was a trained tour guide too. “I’m sorry,” he went on, turning paler, “I must have bitten you. You know, in the heat of passion.” “Never——ind.” She smiled at him, the ice cube sticking to her lower lip. “No——ing ha——ened.” Which was a lie, of course. Because some——ing had ha——ened. It isn’t every day that someone you’re living with makes you bleed, and then lies to you and says he bit you, when you distinctly felt something pricking you.
They didn’t kiss for a few days after that, because of her cut. Lips are a very sensitive part of the body. And later, when they could, they had to be very careful. She could tell he was hiding something. And sure enough, one night, taking advantage of the fact that he slept with his mouth open, she gently slipped her finger under his tongue—and found it. It was a zipper. A teensy zipper. But when she pulled at it, her whole Tsiki opened up like an oyster, and inside was Jurgen. Unlike Tsiki, Jurgen had a goatee, meticulously shaped sideburns, and an uncircumcised penis. Ella watched him in his sleep. Very, very quietly she folded up the Tsiki wrapping and hid it in the kitchen cabinet behind the trash can, where they kept the garbage bags.
Life with Jurgen wasn’t easy. The sex was fantastic, but he drank a lot, and when he did, he’d make a racket and get into all kinds of embarrassing situations. On top of that, he liked to make her feel guilty for being the reason he’d left Europe and come to live here. Whenever anything bad happened in this country, whether it was in real life or on TV, he’d say to her, “Look what your country is coming to.” His Hebrew was lousy, and that “your” of his always sounded very accusatory. Her parents didn’t like him. Her mother, who had actually been fond of Tsiki, called Jurgen the goy. Her father would always ask him about work, and Jurgen would snigger and say, “Work is like a mustache, Mr. Shviro. It went out of style a long time ago.” Which nobody ever found amusing, certainly not Ella’s father, who still happened to sport a mustache.
Finally, Jurgen left. He went back to Düsseldorf to make music and live on benefits. He’d never be able to make it as a singer in this country, he said, because they’d hold his accent against him. People here were prejudiced. They didn’t like Germans. Ella thought that even in Germany his weird music and kitschy lyrics wouldn’t really get him very far. He’d even written a song about her. It was called “Goddess” and the whole thing was about having sex on the breakwater and about how when she came, it was “like a wave breaking against a rock”—and that’s a quote.
Six months after Jurgen left she was looking for a garbage bag and found the Tsiki wrapping. Maybe it had been a mistake to open his zipper, she thought. Could be. With things like that it’s hard to say for sure. That same evening, while she was brushing her teeth, she thought back over that kiss, over the pain of being pricked. She rinsed her mouth with lots of water and looked in the mirror. She still had a scar, and when she studied it up close, she noticed a little zipper under her tongue. Ella fingered it hesitantly, and tried to imagine what she’d be like inside. It made her very hopeful, but also a little worried—mainly about freckled hands and a dry complexion. Maybe she’d have a tattoo, she thought, of a rose. She’d always wanted to have one, but never had the nerve. She’d thought it would hurt a lot.
The polite little boy knocked on the door. His parents were too busy fighting to answer, and after he’d knocked a few times he went in anyway. “A mistake,” the father said to the mother, “that’s what we are, a mistake, like in those pictures where they show you how not to do something. That’s what we are, with a big ‘No!’ underneath and the face crossed out with a big X.” “What do you want me to say?” the mother said to the father. “I mean, anything I say now I’ll regret later.” “Say it, say it,” the father snarled. “Why wait till later when you can regret it right now?” The polite little boy had a model airplane in his hand. He’d built it himself. The instructions were in a language he didn’t understand, but there were good drawings, with arrows, and the polite little boy, whose father always said he had good hands, managed to figure them out and to build the model airplane, with no help from grownups. “I used to laugh,” the mother said, “I’d laugh a lot, every day. And now …” She stroked the polite little boy’s hair distractedly. “I don’t anymore, that’s all.” “That’s all?” the father roared. “That’s all? That’s your ‘I’ll regret saying it later’: ‘I used to laugh’? Big fucking deal!”
“What a nice plane,” the mother said, and she very deliberately turned her gaze away from the father. “Why don’t you go outside and play with it?” “May I?” the polite little boy asked. “Of course you may.” The mother smiled and stroked his hair again, the way you stroke a dog’s head. “And how long may I stay outside?” the polite little boy asked. “As long as you want,” the father blurted, “and if you like it out there, you don’t have to come back at all. Just pick up the phone from time to time, so Mother doesn’t worry.” The mother got up and slapped the father as hard as she could. It was strange, because it looked as if this slap only made the father happy, and it was actually the mother who started crying. “Go on, go ahead,” the mother told the polite little boy between her sobs, “Go out and play, while there’s still light outside, but be back before it gets dark.” Maybe his face is hard as a stone, the polite little boy thought to himself as he walked down the stairs, and that’s why it hurts your hand when you hit it.
The polite little boy threw the model airplane in the air as high as he could. It made a loop, went on gliding a little in parallel with the ground, and bumped into a drinking fountain. The wing was a little bent out of shape and the polite little boy tried hard to straighten it. “Wow,” said a freckle-faced little girl he hadn’t noticed until then, and she held out her freckled hand. “What a cool plane. Can I fly it too?” “It isn’t a plane,” the little boy corrected. “It’s a model airplane. A plane is only if it has a motor.” “C’mon, let me try it,” the little girl ordered without lowering her hand. “Don’t be mean.” “I have to fix the wing first,” the little boy stalled. “Can’t you see it’s bent out of shape?” “You’re mean,” the little girl said. “I hope lots of horrible things happen to you.” She wrinkled her forehead, trying to think of something more specific, and when it came to her, she smiled: “I hope your mommy dies. That’s it, I hope she dies. Amen.” The polite little boy paid no attention to her, just like he’d been taught to do. He was a head taller than the little girl and if he’d wanted to he could have slapped her, and it would have hurt the little girl a lot, much more than it would have hurt him, because her freckled face was definitely not made of stone. But he didn’t, and he didn’t kick her either, or throw a pebble, or swear back at her, because he was polite. “And I hope your daddy dies too,” the little girl added, as if it were an afterthought, and walked away.
The polite little boy flew the model airplane a few more times. On his best throw, it made three whole loops in the air before dropping to the ground. The sun was beginning to drop too, and the sky all around was getting redder and redder. His father had told him once that if you look at the sun for a very long time without blinking, you can go blind, and that’s why the polite little boy was careful to close his eyes every few seconds. But even with his eyes closed, he could still see the redness of the sky. It was strange, and the polite little boy was very eager to understand it a little better, but he knew that unless he got home on time, his mother would worry. “The sun always rises,” the polite little boy thought to himself, and bent over to pick up the model airplane off the lawn, “and I’m never late.”
When the polite little boy went indoors, his mother was still in the living room crying, clutching her hand. The father wasn’t there. She said he was in their bedroom, asleep, because he was doing a night shift, and she went to make the polite little boy his scrambled supper. The bedroom door was ajar and the polite little boy gave it a gentle push. The father was lying on the bed with his shoes and his street clothes on. He was on his stomach with his eyes open, and when the polite little boy peeked inside, he asked without lifting his head up off the bed, “How’s the model airplane?” “It’s okay,” the polite little boy said, and when he felt that what he’d said wasn’t enough, he added, “It’s really okay.” “Mother and I fight sometimes and say things to hurt one another,” the father said, looking down at the floor and then at him, “but you know that I’ll always love you. Always. No matter what anyone says. Don’t you?” “Yes.” The polite little boy nodded and started closing the door behind him. “I know. Thank you.”