*
I finally cried, but not because of what everyone thought — because my big brother, Gidi, had been killed, even though I loved him very much and my throat burned after the soldiers who came in the middle of the night left and Mum started screaming — but because all of a sudden I was sick and tired of no one paying attention to me. It all started when I cut my finger making salad for the people who came to the shivah and because of the onion that makes clouds around your eyes so you can’t see where your finger is or where the knife is. The blood started coming out and filled the space between my nail and the pad of my finger — Mum taught me what to call that part of the finger — and Dad, who didn’t do anything but fiddle with his pipe and sit next to Uncle Menashe without talking, said, can’t you see I’m busy, Yotam, why are you making such a big deal out of it, it’s just a little cut, where are the plasters, go and ask your mother where the plasters are. But Mum was in the middle of one of her ‘Gidi, oy Gidi’s and all her friends were sitting around her trying to calm her down, and to get to her I had to walk past all of them, so I stood behind a chair in a corner of the living room, not sure whether to go back to Dad or break through the circle around Mum, and in the meantime, the blood had already filled my whole hand, which is a very scary sight, even though I’m not a chicken, and all of a sudden, before I could control it and swallow the tears like I do sometimes when someone hurts my feelings in class, I started to cry, not a soft, small kind of crying, but a loud sobbing kind of crying, like a baby, and naturally all the ladies jumped right up and made a circle around me, and Mum hugged me tight and Aunt Miriam, her sister, ran to get a plaster, and they all whispered to each other, poor child, they were so close, and yelled for Miriam to hurry up, and the television guy who was outside interviewing Uncle Amiram — the family’s official spokesman, not only because Mum and Dad didn’t want to talk, but also because he’s the head of a department in the Electric Company and knows how to express himself — the television guy must have heard that something was going on inside and he came in with his cameraman and tried to shove a microphone into Mum’s mouth, but Uncle Amiram ran in after them saying, what are you doing, what are you doing, we agreed you wouldn’t film inside the house, and the ladies shouted, get out, leeches, have you no shame, and started pushing the cameraman, they actually put their hands on his chest and shoved him till he was thrown outside with his huge camera, and then they went at Uncle Amiram, why did you let them in? and he said, I didn’t, they just walked around me and went in, those bastards, and Aunt Miriam came back with a plaster and wrapped it around my finger gently, without hurting me, and stroked my hand and my cheek and whispered in my ear, I’ll make the salad, OK?
*
When you say the word ‘landlord’, you think of an older, annoying man. This is not the case with Moshe Zakian. He’s only a couple of years older than Amir (though he’s Sima’s husband and the father of two). A bus driver with a bald patch and a small potbelly hanging over his belt. He knows how to fix everything: locks, electrics, a blocked sewer. He doesn’t talk much, he’s more of a doer. And he’s crazy about his wife. Anyone can see that. The way he always moons at her, as if she were a movie star. He does whatever she says. Nods his head yes whenever she talks. And when it comes to talking, she’s one of a kind. Sharp tongue, sharp mind. You’ll enjoy being here in the Castel, she says when Amir and Noa arrive with their belongings, you’ll see. Everyone knows everyone else here, like a family. And it’s quiet, so you can study without any noise to bother you. I wasn’t always like this, she says, looking into Noa’s eyes, I went to college too. Took courses in accounting. But now I stay at home because with the children, there’s so much to do.
*
It took us only a day or two to set up the apartment. After all, what did we have? Not much. A sofa from my aunt, a desk from her parents, a few chairs from friends, knick-knacks and bric-à-brac we’d accumulated separately in our previous apartments, some of Noa’s framed photographs on the wall, a mattress stained with our fucking, a TV with a colour button that didn’t work. And that was it. The first few days, after all those communal dumps we’d lived in, fighting about bills and waiting in line for the shower, we felt as if we were in a palace. A king and queen. A man and a woman. We could talk on the phone for hours on end without a second thought. We could fill the fridge with things we liked. We could walk around the living room in our underwear or without it. We could make love anywhere in the apartment, any time we wanted to, without worrying that a room-mate might come home early. All we had to do was lower the blinds beforehand. The neighbours across the way are still in mourning and we didn’t want to deliberately offend them.
*
Not enough time has gone by. This story is still bubbling away.
The only way to touch it is to dip a finger in it.
And snatch it out without delay.
*
The first picture in the album doesn’t even show us, Amir and me, together. I mean together in the sense of a couple who can’t keep their hands off each other. Modi took that picture, I think, at the hidden spring of the Dargot River. It was a surprise shot, no saying cheese and no posing, and that’s exactly what I love about it. Even though it’s overexposed and the focus is far from perfect, it captures something real. Everybody looks wiped out, in a good way, like after a long hike. Yaniv is stretched out with his hat over his face. Yael, who was his girlfriend then, is lying with her head of curls on his stomach, and one curl has dropped to the ground. Amichai is passing an army canteen to Nir, whose red cheeks show how much he needs it. Hila, the one who asked me to come along ‘not to get to know guys, just to get to know the desert’, is looking for something in her bag, maybe a sweatshirt, because the tank top she’s wearing is too thin for the wind that’s blowing. Adi the bookworm is holding a book, something published by Am Oved, judging by the size, but she isn’t reading it. Her green eyes are peering over it, smiling at Modi. She’s the only one who knows he’s sneaked up on us to take the picture, maybe because they were going out.
All of them — Yaniv, Yael, Ami, Nir, Hila and Adi — are more or less together, that is, close enough to each other to put them into an imaginary circle not very large in diameter, maybe three metres. Only two people are outside the circle: Amir and me.
Amir is sitting on a boulder that protrudes over the spring, hugging his knees to his chest, staring at everyone. I’m leaning against my bag on the other side of the spring, staring at everyone.
It’s incredible how similar our expressions are.
Every time I look at that picture, I laugh. The two observers. It’s no wonder it took us three days of mutual observation before we talked, three days of me thinking he was alternately ugly and handsome, interesting and tire-some, shy and arrogant, three days of waiting for him to hit on me and, at the same time, hoping he wouldn’t. It wasn’t till the fourth day, the last day of the trip, that I realised that if I kept on waiting it would end up being one of those might-have-beens, so I worked up my courage, made the most of a moment when we were far from everyone else, and asked him a stupid question: did he know why only the boulders on the right were coloured, and he said no, he didn’t know, he didn’t really understand that kind of stuff. He held out his hand to help me over the next boulder and the touch of his hand was soft, much softer than I’d imagined. But none of that has anything to do with the picture. I’ve got carried away.