In the evenings Daniel and I nearly always went out: to concerts, comedy shows, plays, lectures. We wore matching out ts and everywhere we went there were people we knew. We had friends who were artists and musicians, waiters and drifters, students and left-wing lawyers; we got together with them for dinner or at parties that lasted al night. Daniel invented our own private language, cal ed Kamatzit, in which the syl ables of words were al vocalized with a short a sound, in honor of my name.
We tried to have a child, and I nal y succeeded in get ing pregnant, but I miscarried in my sixth month. Daniel was convinced that he had saved my life by harassing everyone in the hospital and insisting they take me in and look after me instead of let ing nature take its course, as they suggested, and I was angry at him for being rude and alienating the entire hospital sta , but we were both just stressed out and disappointed. The experience brought us even closer, if that was possible. We breathed the same air and a few times we had the same dreams at night. Once we both dreamed we were in a eld l ed with rabbits and we were feeding them let uce; another time we dreamed
dreams at night. Once we both dreamed we were in a eld l ed with rabbits and we were feeding them let uce; another time we dreamed we were on a sailboat with Asian sailors.
Before Daniel I had hardly thought about men, or about how they might be di erent from women. I now felt that there was such a thing as maleness (men were never cold, for example); this uncharted territory was interesting, and also moving. I watched Daniel, the things he did, the way he looked at the world. I watched how he held a co ee mug or undressed, I noticed his at itude to his body, his work, other people.
I had dreams in which I found myself on a planet inhabited only by men and I tried to pass for one as wel , and no one guessed I was real y a woman because I’d come to know Daniel so wel .
When I came home from the beach it was past midnight. I realized that I hadn’t eaten al day, so I boiled two eggs and made myself a sandwich. Then I undressed, turned on the air conditioner, and lay in bed. On some nights, as soon as I shut my eyes I saw a tangled dam, the kind a smal , industrious animal might construct out of sticks and leaves and mud. The image interfered with sleep and in fact was no more than a visual projection of insomnia. When that happened, I would summon three memories and try to slide with them through the dam and into sleep.
The rst memory was of a sandstorm. I was twelve; we were about to move to the city and our at was ful of boxes. The ones my father had packed were neatly marked dishes and books, while my mother’s packing style was re ected in her less disciplined scrawls: junk from drawers and junk from of ice.
We’d been warned that day that a sandstorm was coming our way; there were continual reminders on the radio, and our teachers instructed us to rol wet towels and place them under doors. And yet somehow from one moment to the next it slipped my mind, and shortly after I came home from school I decided to walk to the corner store to buy a snack. My parents were stil at work and there was nothing tempting in the fridge or pantry. I left the building and began crossing the parking lot. Al at once it came. I didn’t understand at rst what was happening—I only knew that I couldn’t open my eyes or breathe or move. I kneeled on the ground, pul ed o my shirt, and wrapped it around my head. The sand burned my skin, sank into my hair, entered my mouth and nose through the shirt. And yet I found that if I covered my face with the palms of my hands, inside the shirt, I could breathe, and I was after al , alive, a tiny living cocoon, breathing inside my hands, inside the shirt, inside the sandstorm. I decided that it was precisely because people were so smal that they managed to survive on this huge and dangerous planet: how much air did we real y need, and what did we need apart from air? Eventual y someone noticed me; I felt strong arms lifting me into a car. I was rescued.
The second memory was a remnant from my army days. I’d been sit ing on my bed trying to clean my weapon and as usual everything was going wrong. I nal y threw the ri e on the oor in disgust and ran out of the barracks. I made my way to the edge of the camp, looked out at the trees beyond the fence, and decided that I was nothing more or less than a prisoner. A prisoner in a jail operated by cruel and insane jailers. I heard someone cal my name and I turned. Sheera, the girl who had given me the gold locket, came up to me. She handed me my weapon, but as if it were something else—a birthday present, or a lovely sweater. “You’re smarter than everyone here,” she said. I noticed her long brown hands, her long slender ngers and perfectly curved ngernails. She had beautiful hands. “I’m not, I’m stupid,” I said. “Wel ,”
she conceded, “you are a lit le obstinate. But you’l grow out of it. Come, the army needs you.” She took my hand and led me back to the barracks, and for once, thanks to her and to my good luck, I didn’t get caught.
The third memory dated back to the second year of my marriage. I had dragged Daniel to a lecture about civil rights in some remote town in the north; he had not wanted to go but gave in for my sake. When we arrived we found that the lecture had been canceled. The people there invited us to stay for supper, but Daniel was too angry to accept. As we headed home a downpour hit us and our car got stuck in the mud. There was no one around, so we had to abandon the car and start walking. Neither of us was adequately dressed, and the rain chil ed us as we trudged through the shal ow puddles on the dirt road. By this time Daniel was in such a bad mood that I sat down in the mud and cried. Daniel began laughing, and then we both laughed and he sat down next to me and we kissed. Eventual y a Druze came by in a truck.
He tied a rope to the fender of our car and pul ed us out.
These memories were wonderful y dense and heavy, like an imaginary object that can’t be lifted even though it’s the size of a pea. They began to merge as I grew drowsy: I was in the mud, sand was blowing around me, Sheera was handing me my weapon, Daniel was kissing me but we couldn’t kiss properly because there was sand in my mouth. Sheera’s long brown ngers, the rope the Druze tied to our car …
The pleasant confusion of near-sleep—the last stage before drifting of —took over and I yielded to it.
Daniel and I quarreled again, about a month after our rst ght. We quarreled about the mess in the house, and it was a con ict we never resolved, it came up again and again, and we argued about it again and again. My father had been neater than my mother, but it never seemed to bother them. Sometimes my father tidied up after my mother and sometimes he didn’t.
But in our case the clash between Daniel’s approach to his environment and mine was a problem we didn’t know how to solve. Daniel was calm, usual y; he felt that keeping one’s cool was a national duty. He said that if people became nervous and irritable about everything that was wrong with the country, they became part of what was wrong, because one of the main things wrong with the country was that everyone was nervous and irritable. He either joked about things that bothered him or tackled problems pragmatical y. Sometimes he had an outburst —when our tires were slashed, for example, because I’d put a sticker on the car that said AIDS KILLS: WEAR CONDOMS / THE OCCUPATION KILLS: WITHDRAW, but there was something theatrical and innocuous about his anger, as if even he didn’t take it seriously.
At rst he tried to understand me. “How can you live like this?” he’d ask, truly ba ed. “How can it not bother you? It’s so ugly. It’s so ugly and disgusting. Don’t you care whether you step on apple peels at night on your way
