I walked through the arrival doors of the
“There you are, little brother,” I heard from behind a tall man holding a sign and saw the crowd part like the Red sea and Daniel emerge, a typical Moses in a sheepskin coat and a hat. He always calls me his little brother, even though I am younger only by eight minutes. In the six months since I last saw him, Daniel grew a short beard, probably to compensate for the diminishing hair on top of his head. As fit as ever, or, maybe even fitter than before, he looked at ease and spoke English without an accent.
“I am finally here,” I said and hugged him. “You don’t stand out from the crowd. Even with your tan never going away.”
He grabbed my suitcase and propelled me toward the door leading to the parking lot. I was used to English spoken in
“I’m glad you came, Gabi,” Daniel’s arm still around my shoulder. “What exactly are you here to do?”
“Assist our professor Levi, I guess.” I didn’t feel like going into details about my thesis, not yet.
“Okay, I get it, you don’t want to talk about it. Later then.” Daniel stopped next to a grey Volvo and stuffed my suitcase in the trunk. “Do you have a coat? Don’t you know it’s winter here in February? I can’t believe Mom let you go without a coat.”
“It slipped my mind, actually. And parents didn’t see me off.” Only now I realized how freezing it was outside. I got inside the car and quickly slammed the door shut.
“Never mind, you can wear mine, I have another one at the apartment.” Daniel took of his sheepskin, threw it to me, and sat in the driver’s seat.
“But you will freeze. Can’t I buy a coat here?”
“Sure you can, but it’s Sunday night and stores close early on Sunday. Believe me, I know what I am talking about.” Driving through a maze of streets with signs overhead, Daniel got us to a wide highway.
I marveled at the number of cars and trucks on the roads, at the white flat snowflakes coming down and covering everything in sight.
“Let’s drop your stuff at the apartment and grab dinner.” Alex tossed a cigarette butt out his window and turned on a radio. He listened to a newscast for a minute and turned it off. “So, how are you? And how are Mom and Dad?”
“They are great. Better than ever. Busy enough to complain about you being here and neither one of us providing them with grandchildren any time soon.” I told the truth. Almost.
“Do you ever wonder how you and I wound up born twins? Look at us! We are so different. Nobody in their right mind would spot us for brothers, let alone identical twins.” He was right. Not only did we look totally different, his muscles bulging, mine non-existent, our personalities always seemed to lean in the opposite directions. Daniel, born to be a soldier, remained in the army a year longer than necessary. I, born to be a pacifist, refused to serve and struggled through years of national service fighting for my right not to bear arms.
“Nah, I think we’re very much alike. Only we’re not there yet. You end your private security shtick here, and, I bet, you’ll become a scientist in your old age.” I laughed. “I, on the other hand, will learn to swim and go for senior Olympics, or something.” Suddenly, I couldn’t stop laughing. We couldn’t stop laughing.
“Let’s get a drink first.” Daniel said, still laughing and lighting another cigarette.
We reached
“Gabi,” Daniel’s voice surprised me out of my reverie. “They have the best beer here,” he said turning off the engine.
I stepped on the snow-covered sidewalk and shuddered at the cold. Living in the warm and sunny
“The music is also good, but the food is ordinary.” Wearing a jacket over a sweater, Daniel didn’t even acknowledge how cold it was. “I was here several times before.”
“With whom?” I managed to say, my teeth chattering. I stuck my hands in the coat pockets and we entered.
“My boss comes to visit his son here now and then.” Daniel opened another door and we found ourselves in a dimly lit bar with red tables. As a matter of fact, everything here seemed red, walls, floors, ceilings. We sat at an empty table and looked at the small stage where a band was in the process of tuning their instruments.
“Looks like we’re just in time. These guys’re great.” Daniel motioned to a waiter and asked me: “Do you want to take off the coat?”
“No, I am too cold.” My hands still in the pockets, I felt a cold metal something in the left one. Tracing it with my fingers, I knew it was a gun. My left hand flew out of the pocket in alarm and I almost screamed at Daniel, but caught myself and switching to Hebrew whispered: “You have a gun in your pocket!”
“Oh? I always have one on me, it’s my job, I’m a bodyguard, you know.” Daniel answered reading the menu, unperturbed as always.
“You know how I feel about guns.” Getting a bit calmer, I decided to keep the coat on for a little longer. It was warmer than outside, but far from comfortable.
“I know how you feel about guns, and, frankly, I don’t get it.” Daniel said after ordering. “You know what I thought about your escapades with the army and almost going to jail for refusing to serve.”
We sat in silence for a moment until the waiter brought our drinks. Daniel remembered not to order me beer, but dry red wine instead.
“So, tell me what you’ll be doing here.” Daniel polished off half his mug and waited.
Unsettled by the gun’s presence near my body, I sipped my wine and gathered my thoughts.
“You remember Professor Levi, my thesis advisor and mentor? He is teaching a course on Modern Hebrew Novel at
“Wow, my little brother will lecture at
“Agnon, Grossman, Oz, Yehoshua, and some younger ones, not so well known.” I said.
“The usual lefties.” Daniel laughed. “Are the younger ones any good? Any I should read?”
“You read?” Surprised and pleased I felt warmth seeping through me.
“Why, are you surprised? I can hold a book in one hand and a gun in another. Of course, I read. I read even more since I came here. When you come to my place, you’ll be shocked to find stacks of books, mostly in Hebrew.”
As our food arrived, a guy on stage came forward and wished everyone a fun evening. A bunch of college students to our right shouted their approval, but loud music muffled their shouts. I could hardly make out the words of the song so we ate and talked, pausing at times, then going back to our conversation. It felt like old times, before years of our disagreements about the army, when we twin-brothers and best friends could talk about anything and everything.
“What about girls? Seeing anyone you could bring home to mom and dad?” Daniel asked after we finished the last of our food and he ordered a second round of drinks.
“Yes, about that,” I stalled for a bit, “I’m thinking of marrying Lucy. You don’t know her yet, but I do want you to meet her next time you come home.”
“Marry? Really?” Astonished Daniel couldn’t hide his curiosity. “Why so sudden? You never mentioned her before, and now marriage?” He drank and waited for my answer.
“Not so sudden, we’ve known each other since September. I plan to introduce her to mom and dad as soon as I get back. What about you?” Now it was my turn to wait for an answer.
“Wait, do you at least have a photo of this Lucy?” Daniel wanted to know.
I found my wallet and searched for a small snapshot. “Hold on, I have one somewhere here,” I said, but was interrupted by a loud voice from the right.
“Hey, you two, what is this language you are talking?” A tall visibly drunk youth with nearly shaved blond hair stood next to our table.
Sitting and not moving a muscle, Daniel smiled at the guy and said in his perfect English: “What business is it of yours, young man?”
All of a sudden, half a dozen guys backed their friend, all looking like his brothers. “Billy, leave the men alone,” said one of them, contradicting his friend’s desire to learn a life’s lesson or two.
“Hold on Tom. What business is it of mine?” Billy couldn’t resist, -“I’ll tell you, go back to your medieval f-ng country and speak your f-ng language there. This is
“Are you gonna make me?” Daniel slowly rose to face Billy.
Dumbfounded by the speed with which the fight was approaching, I looked at my brother outnumbered by the drunken students and panicked. Music booming in the background, our waiter serving other tables with his back to us, no one paid any attention to what was happening. Without thinking I stood, stuck a hand in my left pocket and immediately felt Daniel grabbing and holding my left shoulder, keeping my hand where it was.
“No need, Gabi, no need.” He said calmly and squeezed my shoulder. “These young men will remember that they live in a free country of many nationalities. And if not, I will show them how well we were trained in the Israeli army.”
Hearing this, Billy and his friends broke rank and stepped backward. Tom pushed his friends to their table, then turned to us and said: “Thanks, man.”
Daniel let go of me, took some bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table.
“Let’s go, little brother.” He said in Hebrew. Passing the table of our almost assailants he stopped briefly to say: “Shalom, young men,” and waved.
Back on the street I realized I could breathe again.
“And to think all these years you, Gabi, pretended to hate guns!” Daniel laughed at me.
“And you, Dani, are in the wrong field!” I joined him. “You were born to be a diplomat, big brother!”
Distracted
My legs took me outside, as if stuffed with cotton, still, they somehow managed to keep me vertical. My brain disengaged from the present launched only one impulse to disappear. I wished to merge with the grayness of the evening, to be swept away by unforgiving gusts of late fall wind, to dissolve in the icy drops of an intermittent rain. There I stood in the middle of an empty street, as if the city was vacuumed clean of people, cars, sounds, without knowing which way to turn.
The day played scene by scene in my mind’s eye, kept returning to one frame, the one frame I had to erase from my memory in order to survive, or at least to get home safely. Yes, I waited for four months, for this day planning, agonizing about the every detail.
My rain-soaked jacket finally roused me and made me start moving, slowly at first, faster with every block. I walked uptown not noticing anything around me, crossing streets without paying attention to traffic lights. I should’ve known the day would turn disastrous when my boss avoided looking at me when he announced Mike’s new promotion to manager of the Eastern seaboard division: the job that should have been mine, the job I had slaved for the last two years. Oh, how I wished to wipe that smug grin off Mike’s self-confident face! Remembering it anew, blinding anger flashed over me as I dashed through a puddle in the middle of a street. Water sloshed in my shoes and spurted with each step.
Seeing the street sign, I realized I’d walked for twenty blocks. I stopped in the back of a subway staircase, near my favorite ad, the one I passed many times in the last months while searching for the ring. In the ad, a couple looking exactly like two halves of a whole, jeans clad, bright eyed, her hand in his, barely showing the diamond ring, his other hand on her shoulder exuding such tenderness, that for months every time I saw the ad I saw their pure joy and it made me believe in my future. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid me.
I don’t know how long I stood this time in front of the ad. Finally, turning west, I strode with no particular destination in mind, just to get away from the damn, lying picture. When I mentioned my decision to propose to Sarah, to Laura, my recently married friend at work, she knew exactly where to take me shopping. The first time we spent our lunch hour browsing jewelry stores Laura, showed me the blissful couple ad and mentioned how much they looked like Sarah and me. Yes, at the time, we were that sort of couple.
I marveled at the rain’s persistence and tried to remember where I left my umbrella, to think of anything but the disaster. ”Avoidance of a problem is often its solution,” my father always said. But how could I avoid thinking about the losses of today? Sarah’s eyes distant and full of regret when we entered the restaurant made her look as if she didn’t want to be there, but I saw nothing. I was high on the present, anticipating her ”Yes!” never doubting our love. She stabbed me with her ”No!” before our desert arrived, with her ”I am breaking up with you”, with her quiet and dignified walk to the doors and her disappearance into the night. Now, hours later, I stopped in front of a window where eyeglasses displayed. I can see Sarah’s eyes in every lens in the window burrowing through me, denying me, rejecting me.
With the weather worsening by the minute, people rushed to hide behind welcoming doors, to be embraced by the warmth of their homes. I started walking again, my face wet and coarse, rivulets of rain streaming down my jacket reminding me about my raincoat forgotten at the restaurant. I paid no attention to a young man in a hooded windbreaker walking fast, almost running, in my direction until I strode to the right to evade another huge puddle. He bumped into me, hard. I heard an ”Excuse me” as he continued on his way without slowing down. I reached the end of the block and waited for a taxi to pass. Why not grab that cab and go home? I checked my pocket to see how much cash I had left, but my wallet wasn’t there. Had I left it at the restaurant too, along with my raincoat and umbrella? No, I distinctly remembered folding my nearly empty wallet after paying for the unhappy meal and slipping it into my jacket pocket. It hit me then and there. I turned around and scurried in the direction of the hooded windbreaker. He probably managed to get far away or vanish altogether. Searching for the thief, my gaze swept the street in step with my wildly pounding heart. Two blocks, three, four. No one in sight. About to give up my pursuit, I saw a familiar outline another block away and raced to catch him before he disappeared. Barely able to breathe, I reached the guy, grabbed his shoulder and spun him around to face me. His eyes full of fear, one earphone dangling on a wire, the guy turned out to be a boy of no more than eighteen. My side was killing me, and I couldn’t produce a coherent sound, so we just stood there, my hand still clutching his shoulder.
”The wallet! Give me the wallet,” I managed to whisper. I had to reverse my luck. I had to fight this darkness descending on my life. Right now, right here.
No comprehension registered in the boy’s eyes as he continued to stare at me, not moving or even trying to free himself from my grip.
”Give me the wallet!” I said louder this time.
”Okay, okay, mister!” Hands shaking, it was hard for the boy to extract the wallet from the pocket of his jeans. When he finally did, I took it calmly, stuffed it in my jacket, and let go of his shoulder. The incident over, I raised my hand, to hail the cab that turned into the street and, without saying another word, sat in the back seat slamming the door behind me. As if glued to the spot, the boy was still standing there when my cab peeled away.
The cab ride, uneventful, compared to the rest of the day, has calmed me and, not in a rush to see my empty apartment, I chatted for a bit with a doorman.
Upstairs, the unusual quietness of the corridor made me think the building had been evacuated, not a sound heard, not even my neighbor’s dog who always barked on my approach.
Hungry, I was ridiculously hungry. I dropped the wallet and keys on a shelf in the hallway, took a yogurt from a nearly empty fridge. I sat on a sofa in the dark.
I tried to push all thoughts of Sarah from my mind, but they stubbornly seeped back in. She didn’t love me enough, or at all. How could I have been so blind? How could I have missed the clues? With Sarah gone from my life, all I had to look forward was my job, the job I couldn’t stand any more. Mike’s triumphant face would remind me everyday what a loser I was. Exhausted, I lay on the sofa without removing my wet shoes. Something in my pants pocket pressed into my thigh.
It was my wallet, free of cash.
“It has never happened to me before in my life!” He turned on a lamp, sat on his side of the bed and dropped his hands in his lap.( Read more... )
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