She shrugs, “Every day I am in combat.”
“I meant in the army.”
“Ah, you have romantic thoughts about the Israeli army.” She smiles, I believe. Hard to tell with her. “Americans think, Women serve, they let the gay people in, everyone’s on reserve, it’s egalitarian, but it’s really so much macho bullshit.”
“My brother used to say the same.”
“What?”
“He came over here to serve.”
“You have a brother?”
“He’s dead.” I blurt this out so fast I’m stunned. I don’t share personal information easily, if at all. Gila’s face ices over, and that’s exactly why. When you drop bombs, you’ve got to clean up the debris. “It wasn’t here, happened a little later,” I nervously add. She is silent for a long while, then shakes her head. “I had no idea.”
“Well, it’s not something for the bio.”
Staring beyond me, as if she might not have heard me or might have but despises the levity, so damn American, she repeats herself. She had no idea. Around us, others laugh, converse, provoke, and we’re stuck in the silence... until her phone coughs up a symphony.
I jump slightly. “Sorry.”
She purses her lips, raises a forefinger, shakes her head. “No.” All of this one seamless gesture before she fishes the yammering phone from her bag and checks the number, her face a declarative sentence. I feel feverish.
Gila doesn’t take the call but says we must go. She has work still for tomorrow. It’s been a long night, we agree. Then silently leave the café.
Eight. Why I don’t drink
Late into the night, fueled by Scotch and jetlag, wishing I’d taken her pill, then playing out worst-case scenarios — you betray a lover, cause an accident, someone’s death, your own, why am I doing this? — the way I’d practiced in rehab, when counting wasn’t enough... I Google her. Gila Zyskun is a common name. I find the conference website. She’s on the staff list, no picture. Beyond that, a roulette wheel of possibilities: graphic novelist, advertising executive, espionage consultant, entomologist, rare-glass collector, government bureaucrat, teenage chess champion. I flip on the TV: CNN: I’m old enough to remember the network’s coming of age during the first Gulf War. At twenty-three, I was here with my brother and felt the fear of Scud missiles pointed at damp, wintry Tel Aviv, the smell of gunpowder over the Mediterranean, people trolling the streets in gas masks, the orthodox lobbying for expensive masks to fit their beards inside, the anti-Semitism rabid in this seaside town. Tonight there are hard-luck stories of those displaced by the pullout. I’m captivated. Sleep experts say Thomas Edison revolutionized insomnia when he invented the lightbulb, extending the day into oblivion, to say nothing of TV sets and wireless Internet. I throw open the curtains and stare out at the charcoal waves to remind myself it’s nighttime, a few hours away from the conference, and I am so small.
Seven. Slacking off
Gila Zyskun shows up the next morning at the Sheraton in a tight miniskirt, curls still wet, maroon-tinged sunglasses, balancing coffee in tall paper cups like martini shakers. She’d called from downstairs, said take your bathing suit, we’re going to the beach, be fast. Though my day was slated for panels and prospecting, I’d fallen asleep thinking about her, the way her pinkie nail grazed the rim of her cloudy glass, her tall tales of moonlit reconnaissance — overnment bureaucrat? entomologist? — and while it’s impossible to visit this country without thinking of my brother, our stay at the kibbutz, all the fig trees we’d planted, the hash in Dahab, I wish I’d left him out of it. Loose lips sink ships.
That was a propaganda campaign during the Second World War: how the gossipy women back home could fuck up troop movements over a cup of coffee.
In the lobby, Gila hands me a caffeine cocktail, says she thought it would make me less disoriented. “I’m juiced up already,” I say, but it tastes very good.
“There is never too much coffee. That’s why Israel has so many cafés. We take coffee sitting down; it’s hard to find anywhere with paper cups. Starbucks couldn’t make it.”
“I thought the politics drove them out.”
“Everyone always assumes politics, sometimes it’s just life,” she says. We are walking through the parking lot. It’s already hot and my bones are jumpy, expectant. I see her Honda a few cars off. “It’s my turn now for a question,” she says, as we split, each to our own side. “Why did you stop skating?”
Her lock clicks open like a shot. “Did I tell you that? When—”
“You don’t remember,” she shrugs, pulls open her door, still looking at me over the roof. I remember drinking a few Scotches and telling her my brother was dead. Not much more. “Jetlag is very powerful. Once after a terrible rocky flight I married a man I just met.”
“Married? You don’t seem the type.”
“I’m not.”
She dips beneath the roof, slams the door. Beyond the parking lot, frothy waves tumble into the beach, already too crowded. Years ago I watched a woman dive from the top of this hotel. Saw bodies on the beach hive together, as if in a disaster film — tourists, police, men in fatigues — but it was too late. The Sheraton is a tall building and she’d landed on concrete. People couldn’t fathom it. Even in a land where soldiers caressed their guns in restaurants, poised always to shoot, and Arab children threw rocks at tanks (this was before the era of suicide bombers), nobody wanted to believe a pretty young woman — Dutch, no less — would throw herself from a building. But sometimes everywhere you look is death.
Inside Gila’s car, I let the cool leather vanquish me. We are going to a beautiful place, she tells me. Private, she says knowingly. We can swim, have lunch at the spa, even return for the afternoon sessions. Nothing is too far from anything else.
Israel is paved with primitive two-lane highways. Marc and I hitchhiked everywhere, once he’d had enough of the army and quit. He left me frantic messages, begging me to come, just don’t tell the old bastard — my father had arranged the army after the cops seized fifty pounds of mushrooms from Marc’s apartment, Hefty bags full of them. The old bastard was capable of tectonic shifts in time and space, could bend the law with one phone call. He’d been prospecting in Israel since the Six-Day War, helping to modernize the desert ravaged for centuries by explorers and asylum seekers, his belief in the land holy, rehabilitative. The Jews would make a man of my brother. But my father underestimated Marc’s resistance, and though I was about to begin aggressive training for my second Olympics, the one I’d fantasized about every day since flopping Calgary, I left the country to be with my brother. I never qualified.
At the beach, we climb up on big rocks and lay out a few towels. Gila has come prepared. She says I can change into my suit but don’t worry about the top. It’s European style. The water is a shallow green today, like a drained emerald. I don’t want to be topless in front of her, plagued by an atavistic terror of shared hotel suites, locker rooms, shower stalls: You’re afraid to look but more afraid to not-look too hard. But you get good at pretending. We lie next to each other absorbing the day, talking easily.