On my gap year I ran away from my family to spend a couple months in Guatemala. I’d always wanted to travel after high school, but I knew the stereotypes about gap years and wanted to avoid them. So I found myself in a cooperatively-run Guatemalan school in the mountains, being taught Cervantes’s tongue by a motley crew of aging former guerillas and new, middle-class hires, who for some reason tended to be horny Guatemalan men. It was one of the lonelier periods of my life. Spanish remained stubbornly incomprehensible. At the end of the seventh week, three American girls that I had become friends with put together a plan to hire a local guide and make the 50-mile-or-so trek to Lake Atitlan, a volcanic lake in the center of the country ringed by small hostels, ritual centers, and mansions of both the Guatemalan and international elite.
One of the girls had booked three nights at the Mr. Moustache hostel, located on the eastern side of the lake. We walked into the complex at the end of our trek around sundown. It had three floors, and prison-block like hallways that led into bunked rooms. On the first floor was a hang-out spot. Hungover travelers sat around in hammocks having smoothies. At least half of the women, and a quarter of the men, sported dreads.
The girls went back to our private room. I walked up to the rooftop bar. The novelty of ordering drinks hadn’t worn off, though I never knew what to order. A tall long-haired man leaned against the bar alone. He was attractive, I think, but thin enough that if he was a girl somebody would have called him rail-thin. I sat next to him, caught a stare from him, turned back to the bartender and ordered a Cabro. I didn’t say anything, barely drank the beer, and didn’t even pull out my phone. From the roof, the lake was beautiful. It was beautiful from the street too, but looking at here you could see the whole sweep of it. The mountains around it were bare, ugly things, scrubby and dirty, except for the volcanos ringing the northwest side, which at the top became something from another world, something way beyond this Guatemala of hippies and the poor fucks that served them fake ket. I found that I was whispering to myself, inaudibly, that it was a gem. And below I could hear the bustle of the street.
“You know what he’s saying?”
I turned to my right, to the tall guy who had scooched over a seat to get closer to me. His accent was from somewhere between Australia and Israel.
“What?”
“That guy over there. Do you know what he’s saying?”
I shrugged.
“He’s selling paintings. Paintings of the volcanos, cool psychedelic shit.” I looked down and tried to make out from fifteen feet up the detail of the hawker’s paintings. They were typical Atitlan fare, ‘psychedelic’ paintings. DMT elves, intricate geometric patterns stenciled and then spray-painted. Mushrooms the size of mountains, staircases that led to nowhere, and volcanos. He also had a bunch of wooden flutes carved into the shapes of figures and animals.
“Yeah, they’re cool.”
I didn’t know why he was telling me about some Guatemalan’s tourist junk.
“Well, he’s saying ‘painting lessons’ in Hebrew.”
My ears perked up. I looked again. Half the hawker’s signs were written in Hebrew.
“Huh.” I said, though it was clear I was interested.
“Isn’t that crazy? That nowadays, when everybody wants our fucking guts, there’s a town in Guatemala where they love us, where they even learn Hebrew so they can sell us their shit? It’s like a second Jerusalem here.”
He said that bit about a second Jerusalem without a bit of conviction.
“How did you know I was Jewish?”
He pointed to my driver’s license that I had been fiddling with and left on the bar. Weinstein, it said, in big block letters on the fourth line. Then he put his arm around me and squeezed me tight. I stayed stock still.
“So what’s with all the Hebrew? Why are you Israelis flocking to Lake Atitlan?”
His face lit up, and he started speaking without interruption. First he introduced himself, breathlessly, as Amichai. Then he explained: the Jewish presence in that pearl-string of Guatemalan villages had become a world-center of the spiritual movement. It was a post-army destination, cheap and exotic. It helped that Guatemalan evangelicals were passionate Zionists. The country was the first in Latin America to recognize the state of Israel. Invariably one would find above a cross at the top of local mountains that white-blue flag flying; one could even find preachers ministering a Guatemalan mother speaking into tongues while donning tallit and a yarmulke, the sun beating down their sweating faces, the mother getting as close as she would ever get to God, a God that spoke Hebrew and believed passionately in the complete annihilation of all enemies that dared stand in the face of an ethnostate an ocean away.
So Lago Atitlan now counted 3 Chabad houses on its shores, and at least an equal number of kosher restaurants and falafel trucks. He was secular, Amichai told me, but prone to occasional bouts of religiosity, and the kosher spot the block next over was fantastic, the best falafel he had since he had got out of the war. He must have noticed something change in my disposition when he mentioned the war. But he interpreted my unease as nervous admiration and launched into a brief account of his exploits in Gaza. He was a paratrooper, he told me. Which didn’t mean that he dropped in from a plane, but he knew how to do it if they needed him to, if shit went down in the north. He had killed at least two terrorists, though he judiciously mentioned that he wasn’t sure if he had really killed one of them when that building came down, because they had probably snuck through the tunnels. He was sure he had killed the other one, he had seen his face, and he had spit on it. He wasn’t religious, but he had seen Amalek in that corpse blown beyond recognition. Then he showed me a picture of the message he had scratched into the wall of some Gazan’s apartment building with his combat knife. He stood next to it in full combat gear, with a smirk for his family back in Sydney.
TO MOM AND DAD
HAPPY 20TH ANNIVERSARY
LOVE YOU LOTS
XX OO
MARCO
I imagined (if that building survived, if anybody survived), the family returning to their home one day. A father, maybe a bricklayer, and a mother, small, with a round face, who worked in the market through the week, selling fruit and knick-knacks. And three children, all still little then, with ashen eyes from the war, two brothers and a little sister. The two brothers always stuck up for the sister; they learned to provide for her, to sacrifice meals for her, long before most learned. They’d all lay down their mattresses and crockery and books and nightstands and family mementos and notebooks and tools. They’d cry, and they’d fuck, and they’d laugh or have silent, sad dinners, or lunch with scrambled eggs and tomatoes cooked in a big pot, and they’d bring family over to sit and have tea in the living room, that whole time that message from another world, in another language, one only the kids would learn etched into their wall, screaming at them:
TO MOM AND DAD
HAPPY 20TH ANNIVERSARY
LOVE YOU LOTS
XOXO
MARCO
And I twitched. But I didn’t say anything.
After two months the unit (or was it just him?) had been discharged. He took that as his chance to see the world, maybe learn Spanish, go fuck around for a bit, forget about the war. He tried to impress me with his new language skills, but I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. It was unlike any Spanish I had ever heard, but I was deep into four or beers at this point, beers that he had been buying for me through the conversation, and maybe he was fluent, and I just had no idea.
Then we talked about nothing for a bit, and about what it was like to be Jewish in America. He said it was shit, or fake. I told him maybe I agreed. He did most of the talking. I stood up and stumbled to the bathroom, and when I came back he was leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette. He offered me one and I inhaled it. I think it was my second cigarette ever. I took the entire thing down in a few minutes, and he offered me another, which I also inhaled. Then he asked if he could kiss me, and I must not have said anything, because I remember his face pushing up against mine, his tongue pressing into my mouth as far as I could, and I laughed for a second, out of the sheer shock of it, and maybe a sort of glee, and then I vomited my guts out. I pulled away from his mouth after half a second, pushed him away, and retched out the night’s worth of Guatemalan beer down to the quiet street below. The drunkenness wore away, and I could see the green stuff fall in glops and chunks for hours until it hit the floor with a splat. I think I apologized without even looking at him. He laughed and said he was sorry, and tried to kiss me again, and I pushed him away before he could get close. Then he said he was sorry, for real this time. I could see in his eyes that something had really sunk. And he mentioned something that he had said earlier when he was blabbering to me, that he was sorry again and that he had an extra ticket for the famous Mr. Moustaches’ boat party the next morning, and if I’d like to come that he was sure I’d have fun. It was next morning at nine a.m. I promised him I’d think about it, and sat in bed, my head swimming, until finally the world and that bunk room fell away, the humidity the only thing that remained.
I dreamt that night that I was walking through an Arab city. I was in one of those old, thin streets, the kind I used to imagine I could get lost in. Above me sat a thickly woven spider’s web. It blocked out the sun and extended the entire length of the street’s length. At first I walked with an anxiety that I couldn’t shake, though neither could I place the source of it. I asked a street seller what was going on, and he looked at me blankly, shrugging with his eyebrows. Eventually I turned to walking down the street. After some time figures started to appear above me, on the roofs of the buildings to either side. I couldn’t make them out; they were shadows or were wearing masks, and saying, again and again, in a language I didn’t know, that they were going to aim for my eyes. I tried to ignore them. I noticed that the street had emptied around me. And they started throwing bricks at the net, the bricks slowing and slowing until the net sunk inches from my face and groaned under the weight of them all. I kept walking, but the net sunk under the weight of every brick, and I crawled and crawled until the net collapsed and I woke up to the sound of my alarm. I had somehow set it just for the boat party.
The girls I was with were still sleeping, and after groaning for me to turn off my alarm they went back to tossing and turning in their beds. I shot off a text that I’d be gone all day, put on a swimsuit, drank the quarter-full water bottle lying on the floor, and headed to the dock. I still felt drunk. The day was brighter than hell; everyone, everything, seemed to shrivel in the sun. The street sellers laid against the walls, hiding from the heat, each one stunned into exhaustion. Waiters huddled in the corners of restaurants, speaking in hushed, cool voices. Tourists on the streets looked, without exception, miserable. They turned to each other to comment on how good this or that psychedelic Rick-and-Morty t-shirt would look on each other, but I couldn’t believe that anyone meant what they said. Nothing could possibly mean anything in this heat.
Mr. Moustaches’ party boat was filling up with women with multicolored bikinis and a bunch of shirtless Australian guys. The crew was packing the final carts of alcohol onto the boat. There was a general sense of levity, and the boat already smelled like weed (though it was hard to say whether that was just because the stench had sunk itself into the rusted metal of the old fishing raft or because someone had thought a joint would be nice.) I hopped on and milled around for a bit, not spotting my Australian oleh and too timid to introduce myself to anybody new. Eventually I walked over to a Guatemalan guy sitting on a milk crate handing out beers, and was able to make out through my shitty, 3-month-old Spanish that he loved San Francisco, had a friend who had went across the border and made shitloads there, and also – after he pulled out his phone to show me YouTube compilations of it – that he loved psytrance music. I pulled up another milk carton and listened, my ear pressed up against the speaker, the thumps of the beat and a woman’s voice crooning about the night crackling out the phone. Then I spotted Amichai and went over to go stand by him and nurse my beer. I had never drunk before 11 am before. It tasted worse in the morning, though the beer was frosted just like in those ads where people are running on the beach and falling into the water and sipping Coronas. The boat, by now, had set off from dock, and I had to cling onto the railings to avoid spilling over the deck. I shoved past what was now a crowd swaying to music pumped by two speakers. Reggae would whiplash into 2010s indie, and then into “spiritual music”, one of the most vacuous labels ever dreamed up by man.
When I crossed the ship, the Australian guy pulled me in for a hug. He was already a few drinks in, taking down a pink cocktail and, it seemed, not talking to anybody. After asking how I slept and if I was still hungover, he told me he wanted to introduce me to someone. “Who is she?”
“Her name’s Anne. She’s been living in San Pedro for 20 years or something. I don’t know. You’re going to like talking to her. She’s had an interesting life.”
He pulled me down a short flight of stairs and the minute I was below deck the temperature became unfearingly hot. Without even a gasp of wind the miserable heat of above became something much more suffocating. I teared up from the humidity almost immediately. When I wiped my eyes I saw an old lady sitting on a sort of makeshift throne, a cushy, stained sofa chair that had foam popping out of the arms. Her head was back, and her eyes were half-open, so it was hard to tell whether she was sleeping, or just watching us with a desire to keep us in the dark about whether she was conscious or not.
I remembered, watching her, how my grandmother would sit in a sweltering room, her reclined bed sat half-up, and I would fear that she had died. Sometimes I would visit her and that’s all she would do: sit there, half-reclined, eyes moving wildly behind her lids, dreaming she could walk and talk and think.
She opened her eyes. She looked at the Australian, then at me, turning her head quicker than I thought her neck could sustain. When she beckoned us over, I saw her arm fly out a little further than she wanted it to, like she had early-stage Parkinsons. Her finger quivered unsteadily. She had grey hair that used to be blonde, a nose that I imagined was once much more elegant, and bangs that evenly covered her forehead. And she was ugly, truly ugly, due to no fault of her god-given beauty but rather the way she had let her body go. Her teeth were yellow, possibly rotten (I’m unsure where the line between seniority and rot begins and ends), her hands blackened, and what I could see of her body underneath a rough hessian cloth was a skeleton that had a veiny, uneven skin draped over it. Then she spoke, and her voice was like a crystal.
She began to speak as if she was picking up the thread from a conversation that was just interrupted, or as if she was already speaking but her voice had suddenly become audible to our ears. She explained to us that it was possible, against all odds, to be free from metaphor. Direct, unmediated experience, she said, had been taken from us in prehistory; she had written a number of books of history on this tragic event (worse, she said for effect, than the Holocaust, or all the dead of all the wars of China), which had also been the starting shot in all the misery of civilization which was to follow. Out marched direct experience and in came metaphor, and culture, and armies and war, and bloodshed and nations, gods and bibles, and atheists too. To her, figurative language was parallel to attachment (or maybe it was that experience was analogous to the Spinozan god?) Worst of all was poetry, which was all metaphor which pretended not to be, or claimed to find an end-route back home (only miring the reader in more and more mirrors). This, she explained to us, was the fundamental truth of life: that poetry was a room where each wall was a mirror, so if you looked at one you could see each mirror reflected, a little light lost each time, until the room was pitch-black. Thank god, she said, there was a way to smash all those fucking mirrors up (she said that musically), a way to render homo translatus extinct. Then she told a story.
The story she told, I felt, encapsulated something fundamental in my own sorry life. Her telling, which went for hours in excruciating detail, began to extend and fold into itself. It had an intoxicating scent that came part and parcel of its own exhausting length.
Anne Fowling was born 75 or 80 years ago in her family’s home outside of Oxford. Her father was a Cambridge man who had, supposedly, been rejected from the Bloomsbury group because of his marked conservatism; her mother was a German-French aristocrat who had spent most of her life trying and failing to return to her family’s ancestral home in Provence while designing castles that were never built. The two were able to retain his ancestral manor but couldn’t quite afford to keep the lights on. The father passed most of his time writing family histories and spending the little money the family had on printing them in lavish volumes. Anne could recall watching him wrap the books and sending them to distant relatives, who rarely wrote back thanks. The books recounted the dates of acquisitions of different properties which the family no longer owned. It was interspersed with deeply researched accounts of the Fowlings’ many extramarital affairs, including one member who, worried that the Fowling patriarch would discover his affair with a feuding family’s heir, had meticulously documented in a code of his own making her every orgasm, under the ruse that he was documenting how many fowls he had shot in the previous weeks. How Anne’s father had deduced this fact was unclear, but it was something, at least, that had made a lasting impression on the girl herself. Her mother, after they had gotten rid of most of the manor’s staff and servants, had learned to cook, but the few meals she did learn were dull English dinners, potatoes and tough undifferentiated slabs of meat.
At seventeen Anne had a panic attack which she attributed to the fear that she would live her whole life in that house, and then other English homes, going from jubilee to university to kitchen to grave, without having done anything singularly unique. The panic attack lasted for two days. During those two days she locked herself in her bedroom, bursting into wails of uncontrollable tears so extreme she could not eat and refusing every pleading advance from her mother, father, or servant. The room itself was not a bad place to die; the high ceilings had, by some cosmopolitan recusant ancestor, been fitted with wooden Spanish inlays of an extinct American tree, and the four-poster bed, though not particularly comfortable, had the most beautiful velvets of the entire home hanging from it. Her father would appeal to her on these terms; on how someone could be so terribly stricken in such a lovely room.
The panic attack, which nearly killed her, was fortuitously interrupted by the arrival of a letter with no return address, folded into a stained waxed-paper envelope. The night it arrived a ceaseless rain had soaked every parcel, but the wax prevented just enough water from getting in that the writing remained legible. It detailed another equally improbable story, of her godfather – an old family friend – who years ago had vanished from his academic post, where he specialized in German occultism at Oxford. Apparently, he had worked as a spy for a number of years before going AWOL to live as a monk in Ceylon. He asked that nobody look for him.
The letter placed in Anne a calm formed by decisiveness, and shook her out of her catatonic anguish. She had to search for him. She must not leave him in peace. Ceylon and its bathing monks, Ceylon and its strange, exotic language, its people comfortably anglicized but still exotic. It called for her, pulled her heart as it had never been pulled before. And her godfather would surely take her in. The letter was practically an invitation. She packed her bags that night, entered her parents’ bedroom to kiss each one of them on the cheeks, and snuck through the window before either had any idea of where she was going, though she was kind enough to leave a letter on her bed explaining that she might not be back. Her parents were beside themselves, as any parent would be, but they put on a stiff upper lip; she would be back, and she would come back a woman, with wings and experiences and possibly even a husband she found wherever she went (they imagined Spain, Germany, maybe even America and its hippies – never had they imagined that the strange letter of his old Cambridge man was not merely impetus but direct inspiration for her journey.
She wandered France and Italy, working on farms, eating Nutella and peanut butter, and occasionally having extravagant dinners thrown for her by distant relatives or people she thought were distant relatives, when she would show up at their country mansions at night. Aristocracy, she learned, was well and alive on the Continent; it just had a few more spider-webs and a few less servants than before.
By the end of her first winter roving she had grown exhausted of the travel, of the country dinners, of the cold, cold nights sleeping by frozen rivers, of the anonymous hostels and poor-hotels in European cities that began to feel each exactly identical, mirrors of a world she already knew perfectly well, and a world that she had discovered was completely and wholly vacuous. Perhaps if she had traveled in the summer she would have stuck around in Europe, vagabonding in the French Rivera or sleeping in some cave in Western France, the light and heat forging some new aspect of that well-trod continent. She explained, though, that she was glad the wind was so bitter and biting, for without it she never would have wound up in Lebanon.
It drew me in, the way she said Lebanon so deliciously. My eyes zeroed in on her. I stopped thinking, absolutely could not think about anything else – the swaying of the boat, the pit in my stomach, the throbbing headache, that strange smell which I couldn’t identify but which I thought must be feces. Just Lebanon, not even the place but the name, which activated a set of orientalist images that, try as I might, I had never been able to kick; paintings of mounted camels, images of besieged Maronites, the sound of a feud transformed into another endless war over nothing or everything.
She told me brightly that in Lebanon she had held the only paid job of her life. She had found employment with a Lebanese Christian family as their au pair through confidentials in the French-language news (her whole life she would never learn more than English and French, a decision she took pride in). They brought her up for the Christmas holiday to a vacation home they kept up in Southern Lebanon, where it was pleasantly cool and away from the crushing heat and noise of the city and its port. Like all real work, it was boring. There were three children; a four-year old boy who had managed already to be startlingly fat, a six-year-old girl who would cry incessantly about the fat boy stealing her toys and books, and a nine-year old boy who tried to show to Anne that he was above their squabbles. In reality, he was the one stealing her toys and books, something he wasn’t subtle about. Every night, as Anne put the little fat boy to bed, she would hear the nine-year old tip-toe into the girl’s room, his agile feet creaking against the home’s old wooden planks. Then he would nick her toys and stick them in the top shelf of his closet. The girl was a heavy sleeper.
For the first three months, a postman would arrive with a sack of mail too large for his weekly circuit. It seemed he rarely had more than a few letters to deliver in a whole day of work. He was an ancient man; he’d been delivering mail to that family for decades at that point and had watched the children grow. He had never had a family of his own (or if he did, it laid far back in his past.) Some days he would spend a few hours trying to play with the kids, but they treated him as a known and exceedingly boring entity. At times, they even seemed disgusted by him; by the dirt between his wrinkles, by the way he pulled ancient sweets out of his dusty pockets. They of course still took them, but they reached out to his hands like someone trying to pick an eggshell out of a frying pan. Then, after he tried to pour his care onto these children, and when they denied it with unlimited disgust, he would walk away, flashing a smile to Anne which suggested an infinite exasperation. He mocked the idea of contentment.
Then he would go out to the backyard and, under the same knobby olive tree, sleep fitfully. One day he died sleeping against the tree, and the gardener found him dead (Anne had been too petrified to say anything), and a few donkeys were brought up, and he was lugged down from the top of the hill where the house was.
They were two weeks without mail afterwards. They were strange weeks for Anne. The staff of the home was live-in, and so outside of the postman there was really very little interaction with the outside world. A war began impossibly brief, to the south. The parents immediately decamped for Beirut the moment the first shots rang out, leaving her and the cleaning staff with the children. They said they would be back in a few days, though after four days they had still not sent word. The already thin trickle of people that would pass by the home – on the way to a farm, or back from work – went dry. Dark, low clouds gathered around the home, and rare, unceasing thunderstorms lingered for the week. The storms were strangely localized. A kilometer outside of the home and it would be sunny and arid, but the house managed to get drenched, and the moistened dust left a sad, nostalgic smell in the air. It was impossible to tell between the bangs and roars of the storm and the war. Her dreams suffered. The mangy stray dogs that ordinarily stalked the kids began to howl for hours and hours, day and night. They entered Anne’s sleeping life, a narrow crying in the back of her head always behind the thunder and the artillery that rocked the night. Four days into the war the dogs left, the howling stopped, and Anne repeated to herself a thankful prayer that their crying was over.
On the fifth day a new mailman came. He was dashing, olive-skinned, with big, wide eyes that peered through round-wire glasses. As he handed over the mail, he also handed a pamphlet, written a clean Arabic script on a solid black background. She asked him, in French, what it said. In a halting French, he explained something about struggle against the occupiers and the retaking of Jerusalem.
She paused to explain to me that in this moment she didn’t think much of the Jews, literally so. They were for her a minor curiosity; her father had studied with a few in university, and she had once read a biography of Disraeli, by her father’s recommendation. But them and their lives didn’t intersect with her or her parents’ lives. But she had grown to love them, and she said love with an unmistakable viciousness. But in that moment, given her honest lack of knowledge — she had had a vague notion that they were responsible for the Crucifixion, which she disapproved of, though she didn’t quite believe in the divinity of Christ – she was vulnerable to the young man’s appeals. And he was dashing. The mailman shirked his duties and played with the children, who were grateful for diversion after the days of the war.
They talked the whole afternoon. He was the first person her age she had seen in months, and his French – though halting – was understandable. He could construct castles out of his limited vocabulary; soaring, intimate fortresses that sheltered her, that felt like they could last forever though they were built of sticks. She told me now that he was a liar, one of the greatest liars that she had ever met. But he was also astonishingly charming, as all great liars are. After hours of conversation, he made a point of looking at his watch, sighed, and asked if he could sleep out in the back; he had lingered too long to return home before dark. Anne nodded fervently.
That night, after putting the children to bed, she sat in bed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, imagining the young man in bed with her, imagining his words in her ear. Then she heard a rustling from outside her window (she lived in a closet-sized bedroom on the second floor) – it must have been him, coming up to see her. She was sure of it. She’d surprise him first.
Tiptoeing down the stairs, opening the door with a creak, she saw a shadow, about his size, slipping out of the yard, heading not toward the house but south. She chased it. Then she began to follow it, out of pure curiosity, a few kilometers down the road. Her slippers were ripping on the gravel. The shadow snapped still. It turned around and headed towards her.
He asked, first in Arabic, but then, as he recognized her, in French, what she was doing. She remarked to me then that she must have looked ridiculous, in her nightgown, shivering in the cold, slippers in the mud that hadn’t yet dried, trying to flirt with the postman. She cracked a joke to him, asked him where he was going, why didn’t he come to the house and rest until the morning when he could leave. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she heard in his voice the second time he spoke a quiver, like the added responsibility of managing one person had triggered some sort of fear response that had transformed him again into a pubescent boy. Gone was the confidence that lied beneath his shaky French, a confidence that could rebuild the whole world. Now there was just the French, more alien, less intelligible.
He told her he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a postman. She said of course that she knew that, so quickly that it was clear that she hadn’t really listened. But she was already conjuring up a fantasy of him, a fantasy that did, in the end, turn out to be true; he was a spy, an infiltrator, one of a long line of clock-and-dagger operators. He swore her to secrecy – what he thought this would do for such a talkative woman I am not so sure – and told her; he was an infiltrator sent in to enter the areas of the Galilee then under a lapsing military rule that still galvanized -groups of young Palestinian boys to join Fatah cells. She asked him how many missions he had been on, and he said many; eight or nine times he had crisscrossed the border. And then, in a flourish that Anna didn’t hesitate to believe, he told her he’d slit her throat if she said a word.
And then there was the roar of a plane or the light of a distant patrol or something along these lines, Anna couldn’t quite remember, and the infiltrator rushed off into the dark. She followed him. They walked the whole morning, the infiltrator insincerely begging her to leave, that they were too slow, the two of them. Gradually a terror seeped into his voice, as the shock of his new comrade joining him wore off and he realized the danger of her arrival. And he stopped in the mountains and begged her to break off, and she refused, laughing, shaking her head. And finally they really were caught, this time by the clop of horses and their riders, wearing Bedouin outfits. They shouted stop, their headlights gleaming in the dark. Then they shot, or arrested, or knocked out the spy, and picked up Anne and carried her into the dark.
Everything from this moment I don’t believe. Or I hate to believe it. All I can verify as having seen with my own two eyes was the small scar behind Anne’s short bangs. By the morning, the Bedouins had taken her far into northeast of Israel, not far from the newly-occupied Golan Heights. Anne’s shock quickly faded (she was an easily adaptable person; her eyes seemed to slither from person to person as she looked at me and the Australian) and her infatuation shifted, quickly and seamlessly, from the spy to her captor. He was the only actual Bedouin out of the bunch, the rest a group of Israeli scouts led by the chieftain, who was familiar with the area’s rough, low hills and scrub. He wasn’t a particularly handsome man; paunchy and with a scraggly beard, he really looked the type of a chieftain’s middle son. But she had grown up reading Lawrence of Arabia, and Forster on India, even some Kipling, and all of this imbued him with an irresistible attractiveness to her. She agreed, as per his request, to join his harem. It occurred to her as a wonderful, strange adventure. And she dwelled there for almost two years. She told me the air was always dry; the sky was always a light, copacetic blue; and that she had never bothered to learn Arabic. She communicated solely with the chief, in his school-taught French.
After two months at the harem she grew bored and restless. There were not so many books; the air had grown stiller; spring was slipping out of the door, replaced with unbearably hot, shadeless days without so much as a small creek to cool off one’s feet in. One night she dreamt of a scalding ocean, and a beach next to the ocean. She sat at the beach every day, staring at the ocean, which always shined so bright that she had to squint her eyes until she could hardly make out anything. She roasted under the sun, unable to move, unable to even flip over. Before the sand could engulf her, she stood up and walked into the ocean.
She told the chieftain that she needed to leave and he said that before she left he wanted to familiarize her with a certain local tradition. He told her to stay two more days while they prepared. She was unsure if she was hearing him right but agreed. After the two days the chieftain roused her on a hot morning and escorted her to his tent. She laid on his bed as he stood and watched her. They spoke for a few minutes before she noticed, off to the side, in the shadows of the tent, a very small man, hardly five feet, verging on dwarfism, who had lost an eye and spoke his Arabic in squeals. The chieftain introduced him as a doctor. The chieftain ordered the doctor over and he pulled out of his bag a small wooden hand drill with a stone tip. Anne stayed stock-still on the bench. The doctor told the chieftain something, and the chieftain told Anne to close her eyes. Then the doctor held the drill up to Anne’s skull, between and above the eyes, and began, slowly, carefully, precisely to drill in.
Anne felt, first, a sharp pain, which deepened and sweetened through the entire surface of her skull. Then she passed out from the sensation of it all. Upon waking she felt irretrievably broken. Then, like a bouquet of flowers, thought bloomed out of the hole in her head. Language, pouring out, an expanding cataract, the pressure unbearable, every thought possible, out and out, dancing thoughts, dancing words, verdant. And she realized that if this was the final atomic glow, she’d better let it flare, one last time. She wouldn’t dam a flood in spring; she wouldn’t stop the last exhale of a dying thing. And when each possible thought had exhausted itself, and the embers had burned, she was left empty. It was as if she had lived at the bottom of the ocean her whole life, and someone had pulled a distant drainplug. She could feel herself being pulled, with the weight of all the water around her, towards the drainplug (which may as well have been thousands of kilometers away) until the water, rushing even faster than her, sloshed past and she was left alone at the bottom of the barren, drained, rough, seafloor. And the water, which she had breathed and carried her voice through (like oxygen or food, without a second thought) was gone; and the clarity was blinding and transparent, she said.
She offered me some tea. I took it. It was too sweet. The Australian sat there and took it as well. He pretended to sip. He looked at me; looked at me as if he was trying to say something. But he didn’t raise his eyebrows, or wink, or do something with his hands. I had no idea what he wanted to convey. The music outside had gone quiet. The boat was pulling onto shore. Anne’s mouth shut tight after she handed us tea; I had a strange sense that suddenly, instantly, she had gone mute, and that she would never speak again. I’m sorry for such a long story, she said. I don’t mean to take up all your fun. I hardly read anymore, and I can’t do anything but tell the truth, you see. Amichai said that it was all alright, and we left the room together, bumping into each other on the way out. Before I turned the corner out into hot, soggy air, I turned back to see her silent lips; her wispy, dying hair; her miserable, lifeless face.