I went out onto the balcony to take in the view a last time. Or to scan the waves for a sign of the whale. Or just to measure again how close Gaza really was. In a small boat with an outboard motor, it wouldn’t have taken long to go the forty-four miles to where the Palestinians looked out at the same horizon, at the same approximation of infinite space, and were unable to go anywhere.
Down in the lobby there was a line at reception. A large group was checking in—aunts, uncles, and cousins all come from America to celebrate the arrival into manhood of one of their own, now perched on a bulging piece of Louis Vuitton luggage, busily trying to shake loose into his mouth the last pieces from a box of Nerds. I waited my turn, watching the security guard at the door digging down into an enormous white purse that contained in its soft, leathery depths an unknown pocket of the universe. I, too, wanted to look. The tanned woman with painted nails waiting patiently for her bag to be returned believed it was being searched for a gun or a bomb, but the thorough devotion of the guard suggested that he was looking for something of far greater significance.
The general manager emerged from the back office. A look of recognition lit up his face when he spotted me, and he sailed over to where I stood. Clasping my hand between his, he asked after my grandfather, whom he’d known for twenty years. My grandfather was dead, I told him; he’d died the year before. The general manager couldn’t believe this and seemed on the verge of suggesting that I’d made it up, as I had made up all of the other things I’d claimed had happened in my books. But he stopped short of that, and, after expressing his regret, asked whether I’d enjoyed the fruit basket he’d sent up to my room. I said I had, because there was no sense in telling him that I had not received any fruit basket, with all of the drama that might kick up. I explained that I wished to check out. More surprise and concern—hadn’t I just arrived? I was brought to the front of the line, bypassing the bar mitzvah party, and the general manager slipped behind the desk to attend to me himself, handling everything with speed and elegance. When my account was settled, he escorted me to the door and instructed the porter to hail me a taxi. He seemed in a hurry to see me off. Presumably it was because he had many other things to tend to, but it occurred to me that he might know I’d heard about the man who had fallen to his death. Effie, or even Matti, my journalist friend, might have called the hotel on my behalf, and news of their inquiries would have been passed on to the general manager. Or perhaps the alarmed housekeeper had alerted her superior an hour ago. While I considered this, my suitcase was dispatched to the trunk of the waiting taxi, and before I could formulate the appropriate question, the general manager had loaded me into the backseat and, with an air of bright professionalism, smiled, slammed the door, and rapped the flank of the taxi with his knuckles to send it on its way.
We’d only gone five minutes down the road when the driver swerved toward the curb and brought the taxi to a halt. A bus honked, and through the rear window I saw it come screeching on its brakes toward us, stopping within inches of the rear bumper. The taxi driver got out, cursed the driver of the bus, and disappeared behind the open hood of his car. I followed him around to the front and asked what was going on, but he ignored me and continued to engross himself in the overheated innards of the engine. Pedestrians on the street gathered to watch. America is a place with no time on its hands, but in the Middle East there is time, and so the world gets more looked at there, and as it’s looked at, opinions are formed about what is seen, and naturally opinions are different, so that an abundance of time, in a certain equation, leads to argument. Now an argument broke out about whether the taxi driver should have stopped where he did, blocking the bus stop. A man in a tank top stained with sweat joined the driver under the hood, and they, too, began to argue about what was happening there. To my husband, the world was always what it appeared to be, and to me the world was never what it appeared to be, but in Israel no one can ever agree on the way the world appears, and despite the violence of the never-ending argument, this basic admittance of discord had always been a relief to me.
I repeated my question, and at last the driver lifted his sweaty face, took in everything he ever wanted to know about me, sauntered around to the back, popped the trunk, dumped my suitcase onto the street, and went back to his tinkering. I dragged the suitcase behind me onto the sidewalk, and the small crowd parted, just barely, to let me pass. Stationing myself a few yards farther up the street, I scanned the oncoming traffic for another taxi. But it was rush hour, and they were all full. Finally I saw a sherut—a communal taxi van that follows a set route, stopping along the way when people shout out to the driver—and waved it down. But just as it began to slow for me, a car pulled up and the window was lowered.
It was Friedman behind the wheel, still wearing his safari vest.
“Nu?” he said, in the old Yiddish way of taking another’s pulse. “What happened?” He reached across the passenger seat and opened the door, then lowered the volume of the symphony on the radio.
Did I get in? Narrative may be unable to sustain formlessness, but life also has little chance, given that it is processed by the mind whose function it is to produce coherence at any cost. To produce, in other words, a credible story.
“You’re going to tell me that was a coincidence?” I demanded as Friedman merged back into the traffic. “My taxi broke down, and you just happened to be passing by?”
But the truth was that I was relieved to see him.
“I went to drop this off for you at the Hilton.”
Without taking his eyes off the road he reached behind my seat, scooped up a large, grubby brown paper bag, and deposited it in my lap.
“They told me you’d just checked out, and I remembered that you’d said you were planning to move to your sister’s apartment on Brenner Street. I was on my way there when I spotted you on the side of the road.”
I couldn’t remember mentioning my sister’s place, but then my memory was foggy from lack of sleep. Yesterday afternoon I’d forgotten an appointment I’d made to have coffee with my Hebrew translator, and after visiting an old friend, the choreographer Ohad Naharin, I’d left my bag behind at his apartment. And yet I was also ready to believe that Friedman knew everything there was to know about me; that he’d read my file. Maybe I even wanted to believe it, too, since it would let me off the hook.
I unrolled the paper bag, and a smell of mildew wafted up. Jumbled at the bottom was a pile of brittle Kafka paperbacks, the spines cracked from use.