“Another lay-of at work, someone we real y liked. We’ve been depressed about it al week. I think I’m next … How’s Vronsky?”
“Same as always.” Odelia was convinced that my friend Vronsky, a bone specialist with whom I had dinner every Wednesday, was in love with me and that we should get married.
We drove for an hour. As we approached the capital, the landscape widened into mute green hil s and incongruous sprinklings of smal , distant neighborhoods, sterile and symmetrical, which had sprouted on the hil s in recent years. We entered the city and headed for Liberty Bel Park, our usual meeting place. Odelia tried to remember the way and her wrinkled brow became slightly more furrowed than usual. The streets were ful of Hassidic families, the men brisk and determined in their long black coats, the women strol ing leisurely amidst broods of children. I tried to repress my hostility toward them; I knew it was wrong and irrational. Our problems were not their fault.
After a few uncertain turns and a phone cal to a friend who lived nearby, we found the park. We were a lit le late, but these activities always started later than planned. Odelia parked her car on the street and we walked to the graveled parking lot. Five sturdy-looking tour buses stood side by side at one end of the parking lot and two minimalist army Jeeps were stationed on the other. Between them, a large crowd of demonstrators mul ed around, waiting for instructions: they al looked scrubbed and relaxed, as if they’d just stepped out of a shower and discovered that while they were soaping themselves the conflict had nearly resolved itself, and only needed this one last push.
The soldiers had deserted their Jeeps and were talking to the organizers, trying to persuade them to cancel the demonstration: the towns were under curfew, the entire area was sealed o . It was the usual ritual, the army on one side, the demonstrators on the other. No one expected a new and startling outcome:—Yes, you’re right, we’l cancel the demonstration, we’l change our plans and go home, because you’ve asked us to.—Yes, go ahead, we’l lift the curfew and let you through, good for you that you’re making these e orts. We boarded the buses and set of .
The army Jeeps fol owed the buses as we drove through the city. We didn’t take the main road to Mejwan; we knew it would be blocked.
The hired bus drivers were instructed to drive instead to a barren eld on the outskirts of Ein Mazra’a, the town adjacent to Mejwan.
Everyone got o the buses and pul ed out signs from the baggage compartment, which slid open at the side of the bus like the bel y of a whale. Arise, go to Nineveh.
We walked single le along a path that cut through the eld; trudging with our signs through this landscape that we loved, pale beige stones, pale beige earth, a thousand shades of pale beige and a thousand pat erns of stone and earth, motionless under the pale sky. Up ahead, the houses of Ein Mazra’a, with their tiny black square windows, looked like dice scat ered on the earth, and the pink- owered thorns that grew close to the ground seemed to be breathing softly around our ankles.
On one side of the path a solitary donkey strol ed amidst a car graveyard: twenty or thirty cars and trucks and vans, al of them white except for one red station wagon and the remains of a yel ow school bus. They were in varying stages of disuse and ruin; some were nothing but rusty metal shel s crushed into the ground, while others were perhaps stil salvageable, missing only doors or wheels.
I stopped to take a photograph of the donkey wandering among the car carcasses, and another one of the remains of a house, now a heap of broken blocks and cement fragments with wires coming out of them like twisted insect legs. The house must have been demolished some time ago, since nothing remained apart from the broken blocks and shapeless cement fragments with the wires poking out. Golden grass covered the spaces between the house fragments and even the fragments themselves. In the distance we heard the explosion of a stun grenade. Tear gas was sure to fol ow.
I had never so much as kissed a man before Daniel. The boys I knew in high school didn’t appeal to me, or maybe I was too preoccupied with staying a oat to notice them. Shortly after my mother died my father moved to Belgium to marry his childhood sweetheart, taking with him only a single suitcase of clothing and his chess set, leaving me the rest. He asked me to come along, but I refused: what would I do in Belgium? I didn’t even speak the language—what did they speak in Belgium, anyhow? French? German? I persuaded him to go without me.
He didn’t need much persuasion; he trusted me. Scandalized neighbors and relatives and family friends competed with each other to feed me and worry about me, and I drifted from sofa bed to sofa bed. I enjoyed the endless at ention and eased myself into the role of orphaned and deserted daughter, at first with a slight sense of disorientation and then with total submission to hedonism.
But my life was disorganized, and I never knew where I’d be from one day to the next. It is possible that boys who might have been interested in me gave up and went after girls who were easier to locate. My friends and I often planned overnight hikes, and on the last summer before our induction almost everyone paired up. I’d hear soft sounds of pleasure coming from the sleeping bags next to me and sometimes I watched the swaying hil s and bumps formed by my friends’ movements; it al looked very charming, but I wasn’t envious. Now and then a boy tentatively slid an arm around my shoulder and I tried not to hurt his feelings as I gently moved away. I told him I was too confused to date; the real reason was that he was too bony or too con dent or too talkative. And so I was stil a virgin when I entered the army, one of only four in our barracks. I was wel informed about sex, though, because the more experienced girls in high school were very forthcoming with details and advice, and in the army a few conscripts gave some memorable demonstrations of various erotic options.
I didn’t tel Daniel I was a virgin, but he guessed at once. I stil don’t know how he guessed, and neither did he. “I just had a feeling,” he said later. Maybe the look on my face gave me away: I was self-conscious but also de ant, and I probably looked pleased with myself, as though I’d just won a prize for public speaking or for coming in first in the sixty-meter dash.
“Is this your first time?” Daniel said, standing in the doorway and looking at me lying there on the bed, waiting for him.
“Sort of,” I said.
He laughed. “Sort of?”
“I know a lot,” I said proudly.
“That’s a relief,” he teased. He was very amused.
“What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”
