“What are you saying? Are you really sick?”
“Of course I am. I have cancer. I am dying, dying, dying. And you with your secrets. What kind of child have I raised?”
Z starts to answer.
“Don’t,” she says. “Spare me. I already know. It’s just as I told your father. We’ve got ourselves a rotten egg.”
The waitress drives, with Z in the passenger seat sporting dark sunglasses (one of the few props he’d stuffed in his bag). Z keeps an eye on the side mirror and attempts his best impression of someone relaxed, well aware that he appears rigid, and miserable, and like he’s up to no good. He can’t shake the dispiriting exchange with his dying or not-dying mother.
It’s she who always used to warn him, “Never steal anything. And, if you do, never get caught. You look like a murderer when you feel guilty. Even innocent, they’d hang you for that face.”
He goes to share the memory with the waitress, but somehow it shames him, and he tells the waitress this instead: “When we were learning countersurveillance, we had this really brilliant instructor who was—no matter how well we did—disappointed in us. She’d always say, ‘The biggest challenge at a Jewish spy service is training everyone not to look so guilty. A less nervous nation might, as the anti-Semites believe, truly take over the world.’”
They cruise along the highway, making progress, unimpeded. It’s beautiful, windows-rolled-down weather and once they’ve put a couple of hours between themselves and Paris, once Z manages to stop jumping at every siren and horn honk, to stop stiffening at the sight of every car switching into their lane, he begins, at least outwardly, to resemble a person calming down.
They listen to the radio and sing to the eighties American classics and the “Ella, elle l’a” France Gall–style French hits in perpetual play.
In those first four hours they stop to get waters and chocolate, to pee and gas up, and to buy a pack of cigarettes to smoke out of boredom along the way. As the kilometers roll by, and the road rolls on, and the day unfolds, they make good time.
When they near the border, Z feels the muscles in his neck seize up, his whole body gone tight. The waitress reaches over and pats a knee. She coos at him, as one might at a child or a dog. Z takes a breath and holds it.
Together, they drive into Italy as if there’s no border at all, passports in their pockets, her foot on the gas.
2014, Jerusalem
Ruthi has her lazy son drag up a rusted bathtub from among the weeds in the empty lot below. She makes him punch holes in the bottom for extra drainage and paint the outside a nice no-evil-eye blue. There is a perfect spot for it on the balcony, right by the door, that gets excellent light but nothing too harsh.
She sends the guard to the garden shop to buy dirt and fertilizer and mulch. When the tub is loaded up, and a healthy bed made, she sends him back for young tomato plants and tells him to let the nice Iraqi boy who works there choose.
Ruthi sinks a stake at each end of the tub and runs string in between for a trellis. She plants her seedlings, tamping the dirt down: she waters them and then spends the day in her housecoat watching them grow. By nightfall, she is sure they’re already taller. The Jerusalem air, it is miraculously healthy for all God’s creations.
The guard notes that the window boxes hanging from the balcony’s rails have been pruned to perfection. The outdoor tiles gleam, and lining the wall of the house on the other side of the door from that tub is a row of tin cans potted with herbs that have hardly broken the soil. Alongside them, a trio of avocado pits, impaled on toothpicks and half submerged, wait to sprout their wild roots in glass jars.
When the guard is ready for bed, he goes out to smoke and finds his mother, still in her housecoat, standing in the moonlight and staring at that bathtub. She holds, in her hand, a glass of wine.
The guard comes up behind her and, leaning down, rests his chin on her shoulder.
“You know,” he says, “we live right by the market. You can buy tomatoes for a penny each. It’s stupid to grow them here.”
“They taste better when they’re yours.”
“Also, when you make a blessing before eating them, they’re ten times as sweet.”
“You mock,” she says, “but that’s true too.”
“Don’t become a crazy woman, Ruthi, that’s all I’m asking.” He calls her by her first name, as he does whenever he’s being fresh.
The guard straightens up and lights his joint.
“And don’t wait around for another prime minister to end up in a coma. That job is a hard one to get twice.”
“What should I do then to keep busy?”
“Volunteer. Go back to school. Start a new career. Challenge yourself, Ima. Keeping watch on tomatoes is not so hard.”
“Who would hire me at this point, at this age? What am I good at but caring for dying men who take forever to let go?”
“You and me, both,” he says. “The family business.”
She studies him and sips her wine, her grown-up son, who never bloomed. Maybe the air here didn’t do everything she thought.
Ruthi reaches up and pinches his cheek, hard enough that he pulls her hand away.
“And you? Don’t you hang your whole life on one person. Hero or villain, when they’re gone, you are left without any personal meaning of your own.”
“Don’t say that, Ima. Not about yourself. You were hired by the General, but you were working always for Jerusalem. Why not go back down into it? Walk around. See how the city you’ve slaved for has changed.”
Wise boy, she thinks. Wise boy. Maybe he has matured more than she knows.
2002, Capri
They sleep in the car near Molo Beverello and wake to get the early ferry from port. As soon as that hydrofoil lifts itself above the water, Z dares to unbend. He is thrilled to watch Naples turn small behind them.
When they disembark at Capri, Z and the waitress take a canopied taxi up the winding drive to the top of the island and the edge of the main square.
The waitress leads Z through it, and then down the charming laneways, where she stops at all the boutique windows—they’ll both need to come back for proper clothes.
They take a cliff-top path that dead-ends at the hotel’s overlook. It’s just as she’d promised, hanging above the Faraglioni and the wide-open sea.
It has been some time since Z has been breathless from anything but fear.
“You grew up doing this?” he says to her.
“I grew up doing this, yes. The Crillon in Paris. The Punta Tragara in Capri. In every place there is one hotel, considered to be ‘the hotel,’ and that is where we stay.”
“But you still felt the need to do the fake-modest, honest-work, too-many-roommates thing.”
“It’s a rite of passage wealthy parents insist upon so their children don’t become beasts. Or, at least, so we learn how to pretend we are thankful.”