She looked at me a lit le pityingly, as if I were slightly backward. “I’l stay the night, then.”
“Al right. But I’m not experienced with women.”
She laughed. “I’l let you read the manual rst.” She phoned her husband and told him she wasn’t coming home. “Dudu, my love, I’l be back in the morning, I’m staying with Dana, poor sweet thing,” she said, smiling at me. “Don’t forget Hagari has her project, and there’s that pizza in the freezer …yes…yes…fine. Bye for now, honey.”
“He sends his regards,” she told me, put ing her phone away. “So, let’s have some fun.”
I didn’t know how old Beatrice was; she never told anyone, and it was impossible to guess, partly because she was covered with freckles.
There were times when I thought she was in her early forties, but then under bright morning light, just waking up, her russet hair spiky and sil y on the pil ow, she seemed older. She never discussed her past, she only talked about her current projects and her hopes for an end to the endless war, but I knew she had lost a son in the rst Palestinian uprising. Sometimes she let me read her poems, which she scribbled on receipts, student papers, or any handy scrap of paper. The poems were ruthless: the sergeant twists in his muddy bed one last oh fuck / in the evening nothing remains but the television fantasy of one more hero helping his country / over there lie the remains of the Palestinian girl he sported with this morning. Nothing about Beatrice suggested that she harbored such poems and she seemed rather embarrassed when she showed them to me. I had a sense that I was the only person who saw these poetry scraps before they were stuf ed into drawers.
We had an easy friendship, casual and simple. But I knew that Beatrice didn’t approve of the way I conducted my life. She believed in looking ahead. It seemed to me that there was a price to pay for detachment, even if it helped Beatrice survive. In any case, detachment was not an option for me: Daniel was alive.
Daniel was not interested in politics, as far as I could tel . When I brought up political subjects, his eyes would glaze over or else he’d start kidding around. “Saint Dana,” he’d tease me. But I wasn’t a saint; I acted as I did in order to stay a oat. I was living in the midst of a Swiftian farce and the only way for me to stay sane and keep my perspective was to become Gul iver. That was probably the reason I’d never joined any party or group. When I was growing up my father took me to demonstrations, and after he left the country I went on my own. I was a few feet away from the grenade that kil ed a demonstrator and wounded others, at one of our largest peace ral ies. A Jewish extremist had thrown a grenade into the crowd. I heard a deafening explosion, the air l ed with smoke, and everyone began running and screaming. For a while I was nervous about taking part in demonstrations, but the fear passed. You never knew how or when you’d die. No one can control fate, not by staying home and not by going out.
Daniel, on the other hand, had never been to a demonstration in his life before he met me. After we were married he came along a few times, but found the smal subdued gatherings boring and hopeless. He liked to joke about the con ict. “The solution to the Palestinian problem,” he’d say, “is the body-double plan.” Each of us would have a Palestinian body double, and we’d switch places on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and alternating Thursdays. On those days the body double would take on the name Moishie Lipshuitz, for example, and move into Moishie’s house, and Moishie would move into his double’s house and take on the name Raid Ahmed Bashar. People could be matched by profession, taste in the opposite (or same, as the case might be) sex, and hair color.
If that didn’t work, Daniel said, we could al leave. We could desert the entire region and spend the rest of our lives on Club Med cruise ships, only they’d be renamed Club Mid. Some of Daniel’s jokes were macabre and in poor taste; they were about things like recycling body parts and obligatory victim suits, with pictures of corpses on them, which al citizens should be forced to wear, in order to garner sympathy from our critics abroad and also to raise money. Instead of relying on posters of a child with missing limbs lying in a hospital bed, the foreign ministry could print an aerial view of the entire population dressed in victim suits.
When I came to know Daniel bet er I understood that he felt there was something trivial and tedious about endless analyses of the situation, endless conversations in living rooms. A few months after we married there was a problem with an Arab at the rm he worked for.
The army approached the company and asked them to design a big military complex. It was a great contract for them, huge. The army said this guy, Isa, who was one of the architects, couldn’t be part of the project, or even part of the rm, because he didn’t have clearance. The rm didn’t want to re Isa, but they promised to keep him away from the project. They took away his keys to the ling cabinets and moved him to an isolated o ce. He had an entire oor to himself, but he was al alone there. Daniel quit in protest, and one other woman left, too.
Daniel didn’t tel me about any of this while it was going on. He just came home one day and announced that he’d quit his job. “Why?” I asked. “Too many racist cowards,” he said. I had to ply him with questions to get the ful story.
It was time for the sea, my drug and my salvation. The sea kept me from drowning myself, a notion I had never seriously contemplated, but I knew that if I did, the sea would be there to hold me up and send me back. Every evening I walked the one hundred steps from my at to the beach, to the soft hot sand or the soft cool sand, depending on the season. There were times when I didn’t go out until late at night, but my favorite time was dusk, when the waves turned into white satin and pale blue silk with gray transparent strips of light shimmering under the fading sun.
I stepped out of our building and waved to Marik, a young immigrant with smooth skin and slanted eyes who guarded the gleaming new City Beach Hotel across the street. Poor Marik sat on his stool al day, sul en and languid behind an incongruous o ce desk that was taken out to the street every morning and removed at midnight.
I once had a very embarrassing experience with Marik. One sweltering summer night I had left the house wearing a long cot on dress. I rarely wore anything but jeans, but I had a yeast problem at the time and the doctor had recommended loose clothing until it went away. So I bought an ankle-length Indian dress; I wanted it to be light and colorful because I didn’t want to be mistaken for a religious woman. I wasn’t wearing panties; they only made mat ers worse, and the dress was long enough to provide a feeling of security. Unfortunately, on my way back from the beach, just as I reached my building, I stepped on a sidewalk grate, the kind that produced such winsome cinematic results when Marilyn Monroe encountered it in her white skirt. In my case, the dress blew skyward above my shoulders, leaving me completely naked on the street.
I didn’t understand at rst what had happened, which made the dreadful moment last even longer. I tried to pul down my dress, without success; my second idea was to crouch down. Only then did it occur to me that I had to move away from the grate under my feet. Luckily it was already dark, and the street was deserted, but Marik was stil on duty. He had ducked inside the hotel in a panic.
I decided to ignore the event entirely, and made a point of waving to him as usual when I left the building the
