songs had also come out in recent years. Back in high school they shared you in the shed like a package from home, but they’re not the sort who get caught, they’re the sort who get medals.
At eight-thirty Odelia knocked on the door. I saved the few paragraphs I had writ en and we walked to her car.
I fol owed Daniel to his smal , tinny-looking car, the kind you expect wil shat er, cartoon-style, into a thousand pieces, leaving a heap of metal in the middle of the street. But miraculously it worked.
“I don’t know,” he said as he drove down the dark streets. “You’re sort of young. Is this even legal?”
“You can’t be much older than me!”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“Real y? You don’t look it. I guess because you’re a singer— performers always look young. Anyhow, I’m nineteen. Nineteen and two months. My birthday is March 15. The Ides of March.”
He smiled. “The band’s just a hobby—a way to earn some extra cash. I’m an architect. I’m saving up so I can build my own house, one day when I’m eighty. I live with my grandmother, by the way, so be warned. But she won’t bother us.”
“Oh.” I was disappointed. A grandmother wasn’t as bad as a girlfriend, of course, but could definitely put a damper on my plans.
“She’s nearly blind,” he reassured me. “And I’m sure she’s asleep by now.”
“How come you live with her?”
“She doesn’t want to go to a residence, the idea terri es her. She was in the camps; I guess she’s get ing a bit mixed up and she thinks we want to take her back there. We drove her to see a residence, it was such a nice place, but she had hysterics the whole time. We can’t a ord a ful -time nurse, of course, so I look after her. I don’t mind, it’s bet er than living with flatmates. What about you, Dana? Where do you live?”
“Oh, it’s a long story. Nowhere, real y.”
“Oh, it’s a long story. Nowhere, real y.”
“Nowhere?”
“It’s a long story—I’l tel you another time.”
“The mystery soldier from nowhere.”
Daniel’s grandmother lived in a four-story apartment house on a quiet street lined with palm trees.
“It’s a bit cramped,” Daniel warned me as we climbed the stairs to the third floor.
I watched him unlock the door, and it seemed to me this was the most erotic and exciting thing I would ever experience, no mat er how long I lived and no mat er how many wonderful things happened to me. Daniel unlocking the door at that moment, unlocking it for the two of us, his beautiful hand on the key, the key turning: the entire universe was compressed into this smal motion, and I was the person who’d been chosen to witness it.
Al the lights were on in the at. A narrow hal way lined with old books opened onto a living room decorated with ugly, imsy furniture from the fifties. It was the sort of furniture I always found heartbreaking: the square, bright orange sofa cushions, the sofa’s thin wooden arms, rickety side tables, matching scarlet and green horse-head lamps, the shortwave radio from the Mandate period, the mandatory maroon carpet on the stone oor. There were two doors along the wal on the right. The farthest one was half open and evidently led to a bedroom: soft, irregular snores drifted out of the room like crooked musical notes. Daniel smiled at me. “No need to whisper,” he said. “She sleeps like a log.” Even there, where Daniel’s grandmother was sleeping, the light had been left on.
The second door, closer to the entrance, was a two-paneled folding door with horizontal slits, painted white; beyond it lay the kitchen. The toilet and bath were adjacent to the hal way, also on our right. The at smel ed of a hundred years of chicken soup; I was sure no amount of paint and plaster and detergent could remove that smel , and who would want to? This way you’d always know where you were.
“Cute place,” I said. “Where’s your room?”
“O the kitchen. It was a balcony—I turned it into a bedroom. I thought I would have to chop o my feet in order to sleep there, but in the end it worked out fine, I got to keep my feet.”
“Don’t say things like that. I visualize everything.”
“That must be hard.”
“Sometimes. How come al the lights are on?”
“It’s the only way my grandmother can see anything. Even with the lights on she can just make out the outlines of objects.”
“Do you read to her?”
“I’l make cof ee and then I’l answer al your questions.”
I fol owed him into the kitchen and sat down at what appeared to be a bridge table. Daniel struck a match and lit the stove, put on water to boil. “What did you say your name was?” he asked.
“Dana.”
“Dana, Dana, Dana. I don’t know how I’m going to remember that name. I might get it wrong the rst few times, don’t get o ended. I might cal you Lana by mistake, or Tina.”
I laughed. “How am I going to know when you’re joking about things?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we could have a code. I could pul my earlobe, for example.”
He made regular co ee for me and cafe et lait for himself, then sat down facing me at the bridge table. I asked to taste the cafe et lait, and I liked it, so he spil ed my cof ee into the sink, handed me his mug, and made himself
