The Distance Between Us (26 page)

Marcus chose two shots for his journal. One shows a man lying stretched on his bed, grinning, his head cocked as though gazing at the heavens. Caddie would not guess he was crazed if she didn’t look closely at his vacant eyes. The other shot is of a man in the opposite physical position: curled into a ball, his arms wrapped around his head, one open eye visible. Different ways of being crazy? Is that what Marcus intended to show? Or maybe nothing that specific. Maybe he was simply being loose. That was the advice he always gave her when she groaned in front of her computer, fighting with a story. “Write loose,” he’d say. “Sometimes some zigzagging is necessary in order to reach the center.”

The next photographs, then, are wholly unexpected after all the other shots in the journal, the pictures of bloodshed and journalists covering it.

One snap shows a dining room table laid out with food. By a
keffiyeh
in the corner, Caddie sees it is a Palestinian home. A second photo is of a girl holding a doll. The picture doesn’t show the girl’s face or body, only her slender arm, her hand and the doll.

Then a shot of three Moslems standing in a row, hands clasped in front as they pray in a small room somewhere. Except for the photograph’s mood of tranquillity, this is closer to trademark Marcus. An overdone subject, actually; a cliché in another’s hands. But not with what Marcus managed to capture in those three faces—stubbornness in the fully devout old man in the middle, rebellion mixed with piety in the younger two on either side of him.

How did he manage it, eliciting these plays of feature, then trapping them with a push of the button? Had he acted invisible? Not in her presence. She’d seen him chat with his subjects between pictures—sometimes even during. Engaging them, often charming them. Yet he managed to catch them as if they were totally alone. Nothing artificial in their demeanors, nothing held back. That’s why he’d won the awards.

The next: a close-up of some gray, dusty shrub in clear, bright focus. Absolutely unremarkable. Prescient, though, in a way that startles her.

Then a thumbprint-sized photo that shows only the outline of a face, the features themselves darkened. Caddie recognizes it as herself. Staring at it, a wild hair of an idea comes.
This is it. Proof that he intended to ask me to go with him.
Looking at that ID-sized snapshot, she’s convinced momentarily. Then she realizes, it’s just a picture.

And besides, would I? Would I have left the story for him?

She quickly drains her teacup in an effort to stop the stinging of her eyes.

The final photo is of him. The only one in the journal. He
took it with a timer, she guesses. He turned his back to the camera, bent over with his blond hair hanging, stared at the lens from between his legs. And he smiled. A childish, carefree pose. Caddie can almost hear his laughter. She’d loved that laugh, for all it promised her. She’d depended on it. And he knew it. So he kept giving it to her. Even, apparently, when he had to pretend.

This smile, though, is genuine. He’s not feigning here. The photo is worth the whole journal to her.

She almost wishes that was it, the final thought. But a last bit of writing follows.

“War strips us naked. I’m horrified by what I find in me.”

Nothing more.

Horrified by what I find in me
. It means he would have forgiven her. Forgiven her erratic reactions over the last few weeks: leaping close, dashing away, teetering on a sheer edge of too much or too little. Pardoned, even, her refusal to listen when he tried to tell her—more than once, she’s sure—that he didn’t want to keep taking pictures filled with black and white and red. Didn’t want to aim his lens at more wounded, more dead, another survivor or aggressor. Didn’t want, goddamnit, to catch a flight to Lebanon to hunt for more.

Her selective deafness. Her rigid boundaries.

She flings her cup across the room. It hits the wall with a thud but refuses to break. She presses her forehead against the joyful, captured image of Marcus, and stays there, frozen, as though waiting for an answer.

Twelve

A
VRAHAM IS IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT
again and she’s sandwiched in the back and they’ve just drawn away from this evening’s “Village of the Condemned”—a different village but a catchall name, Caddie has learned. Avraham’s car is in front, with the companion vehicle from the other settlement behind them. This trip has been, until now, what Caddie figures must be the usual: screaming of vulgar threats, releasing of random shots into the dark. Somewhere in the middle of it, Avraham called back to her a Torah riddle: “What kind of man was Boaz before he got married? Ruth-less.” And he laughed, like a man cheered by an evening out.

The settlers seem marginally more comfortable in her presence. Though they still are vigilant about not touching her, they hold their bodies less stiffly and have met her glance once or twice. She’ll wheedle some quotes tonight somehow, and she’ll write this story, though she can’t quite see its shape yet.
She has time to find the words, though, because tomorrow is Lebanon. She’ll fly via Cyprus and land in Beirut and walk into the Intercon and avoid the bar and the third floor where she stayed last time, and it will be okay, it will be fine. She’ll do other things there, not writing, but what exactly, she isn’t sure yet. She’s been trying not to think too much about that.

To block it out now—the future, the past, the checkpoint and the driver, the woman and the child—she leans forward to study the darkness. That’s when she notices, to her left, an eerie radiance. A small glow seeping from a cave-like area in the rocks to their right.

Her confusion is brief, followed by certainty. Ambushers. Ambushers hiding in the fissure, warming their hands by a tiny fire, waiting for the revenge she knew was coming.

Another surprise attack. To tell the truth, she’s been expecting it.

But how many are there? Is it a shallow cave that hides one or two, or a deep tunnel that harbors ten? And how well armed?

She sees herself as if from the sky. Crammed in the backseat between two men, again. No one else noticing, again. Blood pulses at her temples. Avraham’s Subaru isn’t as open as a Land Rover, but at this close proximity, she and the others are easy targets.

“Wait.” Again, her voice is soft, damnit, so quiet that Avraham doesn’t hear. “Wait,” she repeats more loudly.

Avraham slows the car, glances back. She gestures toward the cave.

He sees it, then. Proof that she’s not inventing phantoms in
the night. They all see, and all lean forward in the car. Avraham murmurs into his walkie-talkie, brakes and kills the headlights. He nods and the man sitting next to him gets out, joined by someone from the second car. Their abrupt, wind-up-toy strides tempt Caddie to inappropriate laughter.

Through the open window, she hears one of the settlers yell in Hebrew, “Who’s in there?”

No reply. The rocks look slimy in the moonlight. Her breathing quickens.

This time, it’ll turn out differently. This time, none of hers will get killed.

“Get out,” the other settler says harshly in loud Arabic. “Now.”

Still no response. The two Israeli settlers exchange words. By the way they bend their knees, Caddie knows they’re preparing to charge. She tightens her body, waiting.

Before they can storm the mouth of the cavern, though, three men shoot out from behind the boulders. Caddie ducks, fingernails digging into her palms, but there is no immediate ping of gunshots. So she peeks up to see each body flinging itself in a different direction. Three sets of stick-arms and narrow legs rotate wildly. Half a dozen scuttling feet scatter pebbles.

One settler fires a shot. The other pursues the fleeing forms.

Get them, get them.

The man on her right swings out of their car. The one on her left is breathing hard as he follows. Only she and Avraham are left behind. A settler from Avraham’s car—
her car
—catches
one, jerks him by a scrawny arm to the cave. Hauls him with that tight knot of anger that does not shock Caddie, that in fact has become as familiar as the inside of her own arms. Avraham switches on his headlights, and the two of them, Israeli and Arab, are lit up in a way that seems garish, unreal. The villager wears a white T-shirt bearing the word “Marlboro” in red letters. He is hollow-chested, about twenty-five. His face is hairless, rigid. His mouth: a flat horizon. His eyes: holes.

The expression of one who would kill.

In a quick, fluid movement, the settler pushes the Palestinian’s head to the ground. His forehead hits first, a split second before his palms can break the fall. “What were you doing in there, you fucking baby-killer? Making bombs?” The settler shoves his M-16 into the back of the man’s neck.

She turns to peer out the car’s rear window. No one is pursuing the other two who fled from behind the boulders. Those two are vanished in the dark, huddled somewhere or still running, out of reach. They’ve escaped. But this time it’s not so hard to accept, because this time, one is in their hands.

And now at last she can see how it turns out when one is caught. How it might have turned out that day in Lebanon.

Five Israeli settlers surround the lone villager. She scoots to the door, intending to join them. She presses down the handle.

A breath of hesitation. And then time stretches.

Tan boots, scuffed and square-toed. Gray lace-ups, army issue. She sees them as if they were huge, as if they were all that could fit on the screen of her vision. She tries to look away, but cannot. Legs cocked. Feet released with force. Grunting.
Stomping. Boots inclined again. Thick black soles caked with dried mud. Milliseconds that last beyond the Second Coming. Then released again.

The man’s face is turning pulpy. Caddie suddenly needs more air.

She looks away, and then back again, and finds that instead of his face, she notices the movement of his body, and it startles her, the way it crumples and closes in on itself and then arches and curls again. Jerkily, like an uncoordinated dancer trying to follow the beat.

Only it isn’t dancing.

She is outside the car now, but halted, as, abruptly, a settler grabs the Palestinian’s right hand and flattens it to the ground, holding it there until another steps on his arm. A third shoves his boot against the man’s back so he’s lying flat. A fourth lifts his boot and brings it down, hard, his long side curls bouncing. Crushing the Palestinian’s fingers. Three times.

The air vibrates. Out the car window, the men blur. Images flash in Caddie’s head—Marcus, Kevin Carter, Goronsky—and she is hit with the rush of half-a-dozen competing emotions, but there’s no time to sort them out.

The settler with the gun grips the Palestinian’s mangled, bloody digits and snaps back his wrist. It makes a cracking sound. The man cries out, turning his mouth into the ground as if suckling his mother. “There,” says the settler. “It’ll be a little harder for you to attack us now, you son of a whore.”

Caddie stands suspended between the Palestinian and the idling car.

Avraham is yelling out the window. “
Maspeak
. Enough, I said. Let’s go.”

The settler who caught this runaway in the first place steps back, reluctance vivid on his face. One settler gives the Palestinian a final booting.

And then the prone man—a boy, really, Caddie sees—is alone.

He is facing her direction. His cheeks are bloody, unrecognizable. She cannot see his eyes, only the shadows where they once were. He is bent improbably at the waist.

He isn’t moving, not even the up-and-down of breath.

Oh God.

“Shouldn’t we—?” Her words feel thick and unwieldy in her mouth.

Avraham looks at her. “Get in,” he says. Then he turns toward the men. “C’mon.” The engine growls. There’s a long moment of superawareness: Caddie tastes smoke from the cave’s fire and exhaust from Avraham’s car. She hears, amplified, the sound of the settlers’ footsteps on the dirt and her own thin breathing.

Then, incredibly, the beaten boy manages to speak. Somehow he musters the strength.
“Airi fe sabahak,”
he says. Caddie knows the curse. My dick on your forehead.

One of the settlers stops, turns toward the boy. “What did you say?” he says in Arabic, his voice like the cold steel of a gun barrel.

The settler is close to her; she knows even as he hoists his M-16 that she can tell him to stop; she can reach out to grab
his arm. She starts to raise her hand. The settler points his rifle three feet above the boy’s body. If he fires now, it will be a warning. Harmless.

Behind her, she hears Avraham’s sharp intake of breath. She wants to twist around to look at him, to verify that he—this joking, wispy father of five—will prevent anything more from happening. But she can’t turn away from the boy, who has shifted his head so that she can now see his eyes, calm, appraising. Watching her, not the settler with the gun.

From the car behind her, she hears the sound of cloth sliding along car upholstery. Someone is going to break this moment. She’s sure of it.

And then everything slips into fast-forward, like she’s a balled-up child, hurtling down a hill, dizzy with speed. The settler lowers his gun; with one arm slack at his side, he fires, almost casually, as if it were an afterthought. The Palestinian boy blinks as darkness spurts from just below his neck. Caddie stumbles back, finds herself in the car, finds the car pulling away, the black of the night draining air from her, the boy’s eyes still on her long after they’ve left.

In the car, none of them speak. None of them touch. She is reduced to one eye, one pursed mouth, no body and no mind at all.

A
T THE SETTLEMENT
the men in the backseat push themselves from the car, trying to purge themselves of her as they would
spit out a bad taste. Only Avraham hesitates, leaving the driver’s door open to give them a little light.

“I want to tell you something. About Efraim. The one who was—” He hesitates, his face holding a glare. “Kicking the Arab,” he says.