Chains of Sand Read online

  Oz thinks he should return to the army. He is proud already to have one highly ranked son and he would be prouder still to have two. Batia however cannot weigh any amount of national fervour against anything that could see him again on the front line. Again in a hospital bed. But Oz hasn’t asked her opinion. He says Udi lacks focus.

  The sound of a car engine disturbs the silence, intruding on Batia’s pondering, and a few moments later the front door scrapes across the worn tiles of the floor. Batia remembers when Oz laid them. It was the final job in making the house habitable and he had stood back and admired his work with a puffed-out chest. Ari and Avigail were only children then, Udi not yet born, but she had gathered them around their father and served tea on the front step where they had all stood, gazing inwards. Now the grout needs refilling and one of the tiles has been replaced by a new one that creaks when it’s stepped on and doesn’t quite match. Batia hears only one set of footsteps crossing.

  “Udi is not with you?”

  “He has gone out.” Oz sits on the stool in front of the kitchen counter and stirs a generous helping of sugar into the glass of Arabic tea Batia has already poured for him.

  “He is working?”

  “No.”

  “With Ella.” This is not a query. “So?” She runs her hands quickly through her cropped hair then reaches for the sugar to flavour her own brew. “Does he have the job?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is good?”

  “Yes.” Oz stares into his tea.

  “So?” She leans over to touch his hand. “We can smile.” She kisses his forehead. He smiles.

  “He will be okay,” Oz decrees suddenly, firmly, leaving his calloused hand under Batia’s. Only she would be able to detect that this is a question.

  “Of course. He is strong,” she affirms.

  They drain their cups in silence. “Y’allah,” he says.

  ***

  Udi grinds his foot hard into the accelerator as he speeds away from his father. “Qus!” he hears himself exclaiming more than once in Oz’s voice, this in itself an irritation.

  The car behind him beeps impatiently and Udi adds his own horn to the racket. There is traffic. Nobody can move and it is impossible to progress. It makes Udi uncomfortable. He bangs his fist again on the horn and offers a few belligerent hand gestures out of the open window. There will be at least another 20 minutes of this. He is only at the first of the three giant billboards he and Chaim use to mark the distance between each other’s homes. When they were still in highschool and the ‘Hello Boys’ Wonderbra campaign first appeared on the billboard closest to Udi’s house, they began assigning names to each of the signs depending on which advert was adorning it. Neither of them used to mind getting stuck in traffic if they were close enough to Eva Herzigova and her splendid breasts. Eva however has long ago disappeared and there is an old image of the Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, occupying the 20-foot space out of Udi’s right-hand window. Udi lights a cigarette and thinks instead of Ella. He imagines her in a Wonderbra.

  Finally the traffic begins to move but by the time he reaches Chaim’s house he is hungry and needs to take a piss. The house is similar to the one in which Udi lives, except for the extension Chaim’s parents have recently completed turning unused lawn into a larger, granite-topped kitchen. White floors meet white walls, the paint a little old, a little sun-soaked, but the idea of freshness still perceptible. The furniture is an eclectic mix of aged patterned fabric and crisp Ikea leather. The main rooms are open plan and seem to melt into each other, despite the cool tiles underfoot and Chaim’s working air conditioning. Every ornament – of which there are many – is polished and cared for, the surface dusted underneath. Chaim is watching TV when Udi enters. He is the only person Udi knows who would do this in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. Udi himself only finished his bar shift at four o’clock that morning and would have been working in the café now had he not had the interview with Yacov. Chaim however has just returned from India and will work only to save enough money to go travelling again. In the meantime he insists on a day off – God promised a day of rest – laughing when someone responds that the day of rest was also promised on a Saturday. Chaim would never rest on Shabbat. It is by far the best day to earn extra cash.

  Udi slaps his friend’s hand in greeting then goes to the bathroom where he thinks again of Ella. When he returns, Chaim is standing in the new kitchen eating from a vat of salad his mother has prepared. Udi takes a Coke from the fridge and finds a piece of pita bread into which he spoons some salad. He adds hummus and a couple of meatballs he discovers in another tin-foiled bowl readied by Chaim’s mother, then slaps Chaim hard on the back.

  “Y’allah,” he says, and Chaim grabs his own pita, which he fills deftly before following Udi out to the car.

  Loud American music smacks them as soon as Udi turns on the engine. He likes to listen at such a volume that all other sounds are muted and doesn’t need to turn it down for Chaim’s sake, but there is only one song before the hourly news beeps sound again. Chaim turns off the radio and inserts an old cassette full of Indian tunes. He takes a small bag from his pocket and expertly rolls a spliff, licking the paper and carefully moulding the end into a cone before lighting it. While Udi drives, they take it in turns to savour long, deep drags.

  Udi’s phone rings.

  It is his home number. He has been gone barely an hour but it is probably his father checking he’s not drinking or remembering another pre-job pearl of wisdom. Udi ignores the phone. It rings again and he turns the whole thing off. Chaim nods. He never leaves his phone on and is stubborn in this rare, disconnected eccentricity. Udi takes another drag of the spliff. Drummed bass pushes through the windy melody of Indi-pop. If he closed his eyes, it would almost be possible to believe they were somewhere else.

  Eventually they reach Tel Aviv and wind their way through the busy streets towards Ha’Carmel. Parking is never easy but the shuk is worth the extra stress. Without the need for consultation they amble their way past the stalls of fish and meat, kitchenware and designer knock-offs. Narrow alleys are buffered on both sides by rails of tablecloths for the locals, and gleaming Judaica for the tourists, and between them wafts the smell of cooking. Antiquity and practicality clashing, or converging, on sustenance: hummus, schwarma, fresh falafel. Udi quickly slips a strong mint into his mouth, but he is too slow. The scent never fails to upend him. The passage of 20 years has choked off some off the pungency, but still…

  He is six years old. He is excited over some object he can no longer picture but he feels vividly the rush of adrenalin in ducking through the stalls to grab it. He reaches up, climbs on something to unhook it, he has it in his hands. Victorious. Turning to show his father, Udi is smiling. The object – whatever it is – is something he is sure will please Oz. But suddenly in front of him are legs he does not recognise, a moving sea of limbs that hem him in, and his father, who had instructed him to stay close, is not smiling back at him but is nowhere to be seen. The object – which must have been something hard because it clatters on the cobbled stone below – tumbles from his hands. Udi’s throat is gripped by a surging, shameful, terror. And he cannot move. He feels tears welling. He hears voices around him – the language of his cousins and his aunts and his grandparents, but not his father who will not speak it. And still he cannot move. At last an Iraqi woman at a falafel stall takes him by the wrist and encourages him to chop parsley. For him who can’t, she shouts across the bustle. She does not seem concerned. And a moment later, nor does Oz. It has been merely minutes and as he appears like a mirage through the crowd, he ruffles Udi’s hair casually, laughing at his poor attempts with the parsley, purchasing for him a falafel. But Udi cannot eat it. He is too ashamed, shamed by his terror that remains stuck in his throat, shamed by his failure to act, his inability to be as strong as his father.

  It is this shame that to this day the smell of falafel conjures, despite the intervening years of obsession with act
ion movies and superheroes and ambition to be chosen for the most elite of combat units, and success in that. Shame still smells of falafel. He has at least grown better at shrugging it away.

  It doesn’t take long to reach the nut stall. After a token barter, Udi digs into the bag of pistachios they have purchased, dropping the salty shells underfoot until they reach the coffee house that is their final destination. This is a relatively new part of their shuk routine. Café Carmel opened only a few months ago but they are addicted. Udi orders a coffee and sits down at a table outside. It is in the shade, there is a slight breeze, and at last the air is bearable. While Chaim is still ordering, Udi turns his phone back on to check for messages. In the space of an hour he has acquired 12 texts and three voicemails. This is excessive even for him, but before he can open any of them the phone rings again. The number flashes across the screen. His sister.

  “Yes, Avigail,” he says into the phone, spitting another pistachio shell out of his mouth and starting a pile of them on a paper napkin.

  “Udi. Thank God. You’re not in Tel Aviv?”

  “Yes, I’m at the shuk.”

  “You are okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He says this with practised patience. If it is not his father hounding him, or his mother, it is his sister Avigail. He has no siblings but multiple parents.

  “Then why the hell aren’t you answering your phone?! Ima has been going mad.”

  “Why?” he asks, sitting a little straighter. “What’s happened?”

  “Udi, don’t you even listen to the news?”

  Udi puts down the nuts. Peering now inside the café he notices a close huddle of people near the till, Chaim amongst them. One of the women is gesticulating wildly. Everybody is on their phones. Udi spins back to look at the market. In front of him on the pavement there is a woman around his mother’s age standing unmoving. She has been there for a number of minutes, Udi had noticed her already. But now he sees that her eyes bore into the empty space just above her own head. And that the fingers of her right hand have contracted into a claw.

  “You should listen,” Avigail scolds him. “You should listen.” By now she barely needs to say the words, but does: “There’s been a bomb.”

  Udi exhales so sharply that the sound is audible, and he is glad he is alone. His throat contracts, but he attempts to ignore these spasms, that shameful terror.

  “Udi?”

  “Where?” he croaks. “Where was it?”

  “Shaul Hamelech street.”

  Udi’s mind races through his mental address book, checking through the people he knows who live or work nearby, or who simply could have been there.

  “Dana and David are alright,” Avigail pre-empts him. These are their cousins. “So is Uriel.”

  Udi’s voice eases a little. “Where did it happen?” he asks.

  “On a bus, but-”

  “How many?”

  “They haven’t said yet, but, Udi, there is something else. Ima can’t get hold of Abba.”

  “Abba? But he’s at home.”

  “He was meeting Uriel.”

  “What?” Udi’s throat closes in on him again. Rapidly this time. Like hands around his neck. “But no, I just saw him. Anyway, he would be in his car.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s probably just caught up in diversions.”

  “Yes.”

  They pause again. Udi pictures his father parking his car at the mall near Uriel’s house. Heaving his expanding belly out of it. Taking Batia’s advice and walking the extra distance because there are no parking restrictions at the mall and anyway, the exercise is good for you. Lighting a cigarette as he walks. Stopping as he always does to say hello to the old men at the café behind the bus stop. The bus stop. Seeing an arriving bus.

  “I’ll call when I hear,” says Avigail.

  “Okay,” says Udi, but he doesn’t want to put down the phone. Across the café, Chaim is walking towards him, his own phone to his ear.

  “Okay,” says Avigail, but she doesn’t hang up either.

  There is another pause.

  “He’ll be okay, Udi,” she says finally. “Just call Ima. And answer your phone.”

  Chaim sits down and Udi hangs up. “Fuck the Arabs,” Chaim declares, banging his coffee onto the table.

  Udi places his phone carefully on the table in front of him, screen side up.

  Chaim notices his gaze. “Hannah and Noam are okay.”

  “Good,” says Udi. But he looks at the screen again. The same screen that just an hour ago he turned off, to avoid his father. It has been less than a minute since he hung up on Avigail. She would barely have had time to call him, to call anyone. Still… All around them other phones are buzzing, buzzing.

  “You okay?” asks Chaim.

  Udi nods and waves his hand dismissively, but he looks down again. He can’t speak. He can’t breathe. They sit, the pistachio shells forming a small mountain between them. Chaim begins saying something about the bus and where they think the bomber boarded, but Udi can’t concentrate.

  What was the last thing he said to his father? That he was not coming in? That he was not working? That he clearly didn’t want the job, or his help? When did it happen? When did admiration turn to suffocation?

  Would it be suffocation? He has read that losing vast amounts of blood feels like suffocation.

  Udi pushes the pile of pistachio shells closer to Chaim. They smell of falafel.

  Inside, the owner of the coffee house switches on a television and customers gather around to watch it. Udi cranes his neck, but he can imagine the visuals without even looking. Shattered glass, screaming people, rage, devastation. Humanity pushed to its farthest edge and scrawled upon faces. No bodies are shown, no dismembered arms or legs, no close-ups of dead children, though this is what the Palestinians like to show when it is their dead, their disaster. And though these are the images hovering just beyond the filmed visuals, emblazoned in Udi’s mind, in all of their minds, even now, eight years since the last intifada when there was no fence and so these scenes came often. The news cameras show the orange-vested volunteers, the paramedics and the hundreds of people who run towards the site of the tragedy to help. To lay a hand, perhaps, onto the wrist of a hapless child. Udi stares hard at the orange blur but he can see no rounded stomachs. No un-tucked shirts. Y’allah. Y’allah.

  Udi’s phone rings.

  He snatches it up, but it is Ella. “Shit,” he says to Chaim. Then to her, before hello: “I only just heard.”

  “I’ve been ringing you, Udi.” She is wavering between rage and tears. “I’ve been worried.”

  Udi forces an even tone. “You knew I was going to the shuk. I’m nowhere near Shaul Hamelech.”

  “I didn’t know for sure.” Her voice cracks with the hint of a scream. “It’s selfish.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, and for a moment he contemplates telling Ella about his father. About the hands around his neck. “Are you still coming to meet us?” he asks instead.

  There is an extended pause, and then a sigh, but eventually she answers. “Yes. Where are you?”

  “Still at the shuk.”

  “The roads are a mess. They’ve closed off the motorway. I’ll be a while.”

  “So okay, we’ll meet you in an hour or so, at the beach.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” Udi wonders if he can hang up. He wants to hang up, Avigail may be calling. Or his father. But Ella often pauses without meaning to say goodbye.

  “I love you, Udi,” she says finally.

  “You too.”

  “Leave your phone on, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Udi hangs up and turns his phone off. “Qus,” he says, and turns it on again.

  “Fucking Arabs,” Chaim says and digs his hand deeply into Udi’s bag of nuts. He offers them to Udi, but Udi pushes them away.

  They wait.

  They wait.

  It is clear they are waiting and Chaim says noth
ing. He sits. Udi does not take his eyes off the screen. Around them other diners are draining their coffees, paying their bills, continuing on. Chatter is returning to the market. Udi drums his thumb against the table in quick, successive pulses. His throat tightens and releases. His shoulders spasm upward. He wills his phone to ring.

  At last it does.

  “He’s fine.” Avigail breathes this as soon as Udi picks up. “Lost service and was stuck in the jam near the site. He’s fine.”

  A gulp of suppressed air rockets out of Udi’s throat and surprises him with a high gasp. Chaim raises an eyebrow.

  “He’s fine,” Avigail says again, gently.

  “Of course he is.”

  “Okay.” She pauses. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, Avigail.”

  “Okay.” She stops again. “Udi, call Ima.”

  They say goodbye and now Udi turns off his phone.

  With effort, he steadies his shoulders, his throat, his hands, and reaches for his cup, taking a long gulp of his cold coffee. For a moment he holds the liquid in his mouth and closes his eyes. For another moment. And another. Then he swallows, grins, and claps his hand onto the table-top. Chaim nods.