Edeet Ravel - Look for Me

Daniel, on the other hand, had never been to a demonstration in his life before he met me. After we were married he came along a few times, but found the smal subdued gatherings boring and hopeless. He liked to joke about the con ict. “The solution to the Palestinian problem,” he’d say, “is the body-double plan.” Each of us would have a Palestinian body double, and we’d switch places on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and alternating Thursdays. On those days the body double would take on the name Moishie Lipshuitz, for example, and move into Moishie’s house, and Moishie would move into his double’s house and take on the name Raid Ahmed Bashar. People could be matched by profession, taste in the opposite (or same, as the case might be) sex, and hair color.

If that didn’t work, Daniel said, we could al leave. We could desert the entire region and spend the rest of our lives on Club Med cruise ships, only they’d be renamed Club Mid. Some of Daniel’s jokes were macabre and in poor taste; they were about things like recycling body parts and obligatory victim suits, with pictures of corpses on them, which al citizens should be forced to wear, in order to garner sympathy from our critics abroad and also to raise money. Instead of relying on posters of a child with missing limbs lying in a hospital bed, the foreign ministry could print an aerial view of the entire population dressed in victim suits.

When I came to know Daniel bet er I understood that he felt there was something trivial and tedious about endless analyses of the situation, endless conversations in living rooms. A few months after we married there was a problem with an Arab at the rm he worked for.

The army approached the company and asked them to design a big military complex. It was a great contract for them, huge. The army said this guy, Isa, who was one of the architects, couldn’t be part of the project, or even part of the rm, because he didn’t have clearance. The rm didn’t want to re Isa, but they promised to keep him away from the project. They took away his keys to the ling cabinets and moved him to an isolated o ce. He had an entire oor to himself, but he was al alone there. Daniel quit in protest, and one other woman left, too.

Daniel didn’t tel me about any of this while it was going on. He just came home one day and announced that he’d quit his job. “Why?” I asked. “Too many racist cowards,” he said. I had to ply him with questions to get the ful story.

It was time for the sea, my drug and my salvation. The sea kept me from drowning myself, a notion I had never seriously contemplated, but I knew that if I did, the sea would be there to hold me up and send me back. Every evening I walked the one hundred steps from my at to the beach, to the soft hot sand or the soft cool sand, depending on the season. There were times when I didn’t go out until late at night, but my favorite time was dusk, when the waves turned into white satin and pale blue silk with gray transparent strips of light shimmering under the fading sun.

I stepped out of our building and waved to Marik, a young immigrant with smooth skin and slanted eyes who guarded the gleaming new City Beach Hotel across the street. Poor Marik sat on his stool al day, sul en and languid behind an incongruous o ce desk that was taken out to the street every morning and removed at midnight.

I once had a very embarrassing experience with Marik. One sweltering summer night I had left the house wearing a long cot on dress. I rarely wore anything but jeans, but I had a yeast problem at the time and the doctor had recommended loose clothing until it went away. So I bought an ankle-length Indian dress; I wanted it to be light and colorful because I didn’t want to be mistaken for a religious woman. I wasn’t wearing panties; they only made mat ers worse, and the dress was long enough to provide a feeling of security. Unfortunately, on my way back from the beach, just as I reached my building, I stepped on a sidewalk grate, the kind that produced such winsome cinematic results when Marilyn Monroe encountered it in her white skirt. In my case, the dress blew skyward above my shoulders, leaving me completely naked on the street.

I didn’t understand at rst what had happened, which made the dreadful moment last even longer. I tried to pul down my dress, without success; my second idea was to crouch down. Only then did it occur to me that I had to move away from the grate under my feet. Luckily it was already dark, and the street was deserted, but Marik was stil on duty. He had ducked inside the hotel in a panic.

I decided to ignore the event entirely, and made a point of waving to him as usual when I left the building the fol owing morning. But I decided to ignore the event entirely, and made a point of waving to him as usual when I left the building the fol owing morning. But Marik never recovered, and though he continued to nod back in his usual sul en way, after that day he looked morti ed every time he saw me.I waved at him now, then headed west, toward the sea.

Though I had walked down this street ten thousand times on ten thousand evenings, the pangs of my unrequited love for it never diminished. The buildings on my side of the street were weather-stained in competing layers of black, sepia, ash, bone, peach. Geometric pat erns emerged from the edges and rims of windows, doors, security bars, the metal rods of air-conditioner supports, the fat, hairy trunks of palm trees next to narrow electric poles. A multitude of details interrupted the pat erns: black and gray gra ti, abandoned scraps in the al ey, crevices and cracks in the wal s, the tips of new sunny-white buildings peeking from other streets. In the midst of this col age a naked neon woman reclined on a white panel like an oblivious angel; she had once reigned over Bar Sexe. The caged cavern under the sign no longer led to a bar but was stil an important meeting place for certain citizens who, as I quickly discovered, did not like to be photographed.

Further down, behind a brash pop drink sign, our miniature La Scala maintained its dignity, despite the yel ow and maroon sheets nailed to its arches. The real La Scala’s arches are on the ground oor, but here the four arches had been reproduced on al three stories, and the building, which stands at an intersection, curves gently around the corner. I often thought about the surge of enthusiasm that lay behind the design of this building, when the city was very young. And though the arches were now smudged and dingy and someone told me that people did drugs behind the yel ow and maroon sheets, the faith that had inspired this doomed project stil had the power to move me.

I walked past the defunct Bar Sexe, past our miniature La Scala, past the chairs scat ered on the sidewalk outside the lit le convenience store, past the store’s mounted television, set permanently to the sports channel, across the street to the paved boardwalk, with its pat erns of concentric circles echoing the movement of the waves, and down the stairs to the beach. The change from walking on a hard surface to sinking unpredictably with each step was always a surprise. At this time of night the sea was black, except for strips of pearl white foam along the edge of waves, and navy blue shadows where light from the street or moon happened to fal . There were couples lying on blankets here and there, a few joggers, and one or two determined late-night swimmers. A voice said, “Mia?”

I turned and saw a man with a long oval face standing behind me. He was dark-skinned, tal and very broad, like a weight lifter.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”

Normal y I would not have answered because I had a rule about pickups and the rule was that I didn’t do them. A year after Daniel vanished I had yielded to the relentless pressure of friends and acquaintances, and al owed someone to fol ow me home. I met him at a lit le video store down the street from my at. There was barely room to move between the three crowded shelves, and our bodies kept brushing against one another as we looked for movies. Final y he spoke to me. I suppose it was partly his height that misled me about his age, though it’s also possible that I was too detached to worry about how old he might be. I didn’t discourage him, and when I left the store he trot ed next to me like a colt. He came into my at, and then remembered to ask my name. I didn’t want to tel him. “What do I look like?” I asked him. He considered. “You look like a Simone,” he said. “That’s me, Simone,” I said. He let it go; he was too excited to insist. I liked him: his soft green eyes, his anxious shoulders, the way he talked about his col ie and his trip to Italy on the way to my place.