“In this case? It’s easy. It’s Egypt. Someone who doesn’t like me knows someone and made a call, and now I’ve got about a zillion dollars’ worth of phones stuck at port. Five forty-footers filled with Nokias and Motorolas. And I have another five containers on a cargo ship that, unlike this boat, I can’t turn around. I assume, sitting here on your beautiful wooden yacht, that you understand how liquidity works.”
Farid sees the way his friend is looking at him. And Farid laughs, this time more deeply, and with a sincere knee slap, because it’s all so offensive and all so good. He stands up and takes hold of the winch. He can’t believe he didn’t see it coming.
“Here you are,” he says, “with a new Arab confidant who does import-export, who may also just have contacts in Egypt, and the whole time you act like talking business is the last thing on your mind.”
“I promise, it’s not because you’re an Arab.”
“It never is. And I’m sorry to disappoint, but I can’t do the magical baksheesh trick and get your merchandise out for you.”
“Did I ask you that? I haven’t treated you with disrespect,” Joshua says, looking honestly wounded.
“It’s the disrespected one who gets to decide that.”
“Trust me, I was just looking for a break and some time on the water. I wasn’t being coy and I don’t do business like that. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I want you to know, I do appreciate this day. Anyway, I should probably get back to my castle and start working the phones.”
Farid obliges, sailing them back quickly and in silence. It’s as they pull into their slip at the marina, and weighed down by some adopted Germanic sense of comportment, that Farid says he could take Joshua out again next week.
“Only if you let me tack and jibe,” Joshua says, chipper. “Only if I can prove that I’ve learned.”
2002, Paris
She stays the night and the next day, and then stays on for another. She tells Z she has roommates in an apartment not even fit for one. There is only a standing shower. She has a very uncomfortable bed.
She tells him this to make clear that he shouldn’t take her staying as a compliment. It isn’t him. It is that deep, giant tub.
She takes long baths, and then, after running out for supplies, she takes them with bubbles, and after the bubbles, she starts taking them with him.
She goes home on the third day for some clothes and better shoes. This is also when she starts grilling him over his very strange hermetic life. “I’m an out-of-work waitress,” she says. “A professional bohemian. You have no excuse for living in Paris and hiding at home. Also, when you think I don’t see, you make a face that looks like you’re going to die.”
“Problems,” is what he tells her. “I have problems that I’m trying to solve.”
“Should I be worried?”
“They aren’t contagious. They’re troubles of the ethical sort.”
“You have ethical troubles?”
“It’s more that I don’t have ethical troubles. What it is, is I got myself into a bind trying to fix the world.”
“That sounds mad.”
“Okay,” he says.
“Like pazzo-mad. Like, insane. It does not sound like what you say if you’re well.”
“Okay,” he says, again.
“You’re not going to tell me? With us all cozy, and me practically living here, doing whatever it is we are doing together?” She stares at Z, and he stands there, resolute, as if, no, he isn’t going to say.
“Fine!” she says, studying the man before her, deducing. “This isn’t a drug dealer’s house. Of that I’m sure. Even a bad one lives better than this. And I know you’re not in the Mafia, because I know what that looks like too.” She squints and takes a spin around the apartment, before settling in front of him once more. “You’re not running weapons.”
“You can tell that from the apartment?”
“Yes,” she says. “Because I once dated a man who sold submarines. You should have seen what his house looked like.”
“You dated a man who sold submarines?”
“That is not the issue right now. The issue is you, being loving, and kind, and looking secretly miserable, and hiding out. If we’re supposed to be falling in love—are we supposed to be falling in love?”
“Yes,” he says.
“All right. Then I want to know, right now, what it is you do.”
Z goes to talk, and before he utters a word, she, with her hands on her hips and her lips pursed, shakes her head.
“No,” the waitress says. She’s not having it. “I can see already that I’m going to get nonsense. I want the truth. If you’re going to trust me, trust me now, or I go. I learned this lesson with the submarine man, too late.”
Z already can’t picture being without her. Not just out of love, but at the thought of facing a loneliness that was often greater than the fear.
Oh, how he has been dying to tell her. Oh, how nice it would feel. He could cry just imagining the relief.
Z takes a deep breath. The waitress, taking it to be a sincere action, relaxes her body and drops her hands.
“It’s what I think it is, then?” she says.
“What do you think?”
“It really is crazier than I first thought,” she says. “Right? There’s only one thing I can guess in a house with no personal details of any kind, and a man who tells me only stories from when he was young. You’re a spy? Yes?”
“Sort of,” is Z’s unsatisfactory answer.
“Sort of?”
“The term. It really gets misused.” And trying to appease her, Z says, “I mean, colloquially.”
“So you’re a smart spy, who cares about grammar?”
“To me, a spy is more someone who spies against his or her own country. I’d never do that. That’s treasonous. Or, it’s the wrong kind of treasonous.”
“Is there a right kind?”
“I’m saying, it’s wrong. But that some wrong things, in certain circumstances, are inherently right.”
“But you are a spy?”
“I’m an operative. More or less.”
“For who?”
“For whom?”
“You’re very annoying for someone asking a great amount of understanding from the new woman in his life.”
“Sorry. Precision, when I’m under stress. I know it’s an issue.”
“It’s annoying.”
“You said, and I apologized.”
The waitress puts her hands back on her hips, she taps a foot, and she considers Z, in his new, spy-ish form.
“It still sounds crazy,” she says. “But it also makes some sense.” Then, at least fleetingly passing judgment in his favor, Z thinks, she kisses him for a good, long while.
2014, Jerusalem
The Shabbat siren sounds, and Ruthi yells at her secular son to turn off the TV. “Go stream nonsense on your computer in the bedroom,” she says, “and put on a shirt with buttons for dinner.”
Ruthi lights the candles on the tiny patch of open counter next to the sink. The table, they carry back and forth to the balcony, depending on the height of the sun in the summer and the rain in its season. So she does her lighting in the kitchen, as, during the Sabbath, the candlesticks are not to be moved.