Vox Humana Literary Journal

by Kyle Garvey

I was certainly feeling it… a sad, soul-squeezing hurt I didn’t—and wouldn’t, or couldn’t—escape from. Funny, though, how nice and regular and uncontroversial it all was, this feeling. “MIZRACHI, LATIFA,” that’s what it said her name was. She was so beautiful, so severely stunning and stunningly severe, that just looking at her picture was scary and difficult for me; and I wanted to drop everything, shut up this book, and go hide under my covers. But I stayed where I was, sitting on my bed with my hands curled under my chin, staring intently at the opened Dekel Vilnai Junior High yearbook propped on a pillow in front of me.

This was what people my age did, right? Stared at pictures of pretty girls in yearbooks? It seemed awful: frustrating and weak-minded and typical, especially if there was no one around to even witness or record a profound show of emotion like it. But I kept on, since it was the scary thing and the hard thing and the stupid thing to do (why else?), and for a while it was just as uncomfortable and pleasureless as anything I would have occasion to do on a late Wednesday afternoon in a crummy little village like Ma’ale Adumim.

Then, something happened that made it not so bad. I started to see just Latifa. Not my ugly picture two rows below hers, not the other smiling faces on the page, not the book itself. Just her. Short,papery black hair; a modest but powerful nose; eyes so unassuming and milky-sweet and calm that it felt like she knew, on a deep and personal level, whoever looked at her. Outside of her little square in the upper-left, everything else started to get a little fuzzy, a little washed-out, and then disappeared. All of the distinct pictures in the world of my mind started to lose clarity—the color of my bedspread, the sight of my unscarred and too-precious bare hands. And noises too—the pitiful scrape of palm leaves against my window,
groaning buses and trucks in the street below… and the footsteps outside my door, which were creaking the floorboards in a perfect, instantaneous pattern, like electricity.

“You are going to go out with that special girl tonight, huh?” Aba was poking his upper body into my half-open door, a fatherly arch in his eyebrow, one hand resting on the jamb and the other just itching to give a thumbs-up. He wore a sweaty A-shirt, his dark chest hair poking out at the top, with a pair of paint-spattered jeans. He was a civil servant, an artist who made portraits of Knesset members and important politicians. He also sometimes set up canvases in our apartment—I assumed that’s what he was doing downstairs tonight—and painted historical things for libraries and such. It seemed haphazard and nasty, and a crass career move for a recent widower.

“Yep, I’m going to.” I scanned the page like I was reading it, then I flipped to the next page like I was looking at them all. If this book were a mikraot gedolot and I were a scholar, then maybe my thoughts could be serious commentary, something that rabbis could talk about and write about and think about, instead of the idle fantasy of some desperate, fourteen year old dipshit. Maybe.

“I could change if you wanted me to meet her—” he began to offer. His body tensed up ineffectually.

“No, I just need a ride, that’s all.”

“—because,” he went on like I hadn’t answered already, “I know that what I’m wearing wouldn’t be the most attractive outfit for meeting somebody,” and he laughed his big fake ho-ho laugh while examining the clothes he had on. I looked up at him expectantly, since I’d given him my answer, and someone needed to make it clear when he was being an idiot, waiting for answers that he’d already talked over.

“So no then?” he asked after a moment.

“No,” I repeated, and then (probably when he was out of earshot), “thanks.” I watched his shadow disappear down the hall.

When my eyes turned back to the page, I experienced a moment of joyful panic. I was so stupid that I’d already forgotten, in that minutetalking to Aba, that there was this amazingly gorgeous girl who existed in the world. Before the hard truth came back to me a millisecond later—she was her, I was me, this was only a book with an

old photo of her in it, we were all caught in a boring town in the middle of nowhere—before I remembered any of that, it was exciting and strange and freaky. I was exhilirated that she was there but crushed that I myself had to be there too, to fuck it all up. These two impulses exploded together in that instant, with her picture and me, before I remembered reality.

At school, that yearbook had a purpose; and no matter how hard I tried to make it mean something outside those walls (with my own mental processes, mostly), it never meant anything. Away from lockers slamming and bookbags zipping up, the pictures had nothing behind them. I still opened the book up and looked at them sometimes, though… like now. And wasn’t that good for something?

She sat at my table in Algebra class, two seats to my right. The girl between us was Daphne, a girlfriend of hers and (to my peripheral vision) plain and uninteresting; she did, however, make a good comparison between a ridiculously beautiful goddess like Latifa and the rest of the female population of Dekel Vilnai. (Most of the rest of the school’s girls were not half-bad, mind you, just not as good as Latifa—I was discerning with my gawking, you know.) The two of them

talked together, and I listened for chances to contribute. The conversations were often about the U.S., especially New York City, and what an exotic and brilliant place it was, and how they wanted to move there one day and become nurses. Separately, of course; not as a team or anything.

When I made the trek to the front of the classroom one day to complete an equation on the chalkboard, I glanced at Latifa, whom I rarely had a chance to look at directly. Her sweatpants were grey, the legs under them slim and strong, and her lap looked like the perfect place for a boy like me to lie across. I admired the curve from her underarms to her hips, creamy and sharp like the edge of cream cheese spread onto a felafel. She scooted in her chair carefully when I climbed behind her and craned her neck to make sure I could get through; I said, “Seliha rega,” and squeezed past, and she smiled up at me. I dropped my gaze back to my Naot trainers and shuffled up to the board.

3x + 3 = 18

3x = 15

x = 5

“Ani ohev otach” I wanted to write along with it. Three little words, to speak for me when my quietness, my non-threatening niceness, my obliqueness, all my horrible qualities grew too burdensome to express anything. When I wanted to vomit out my love in front of everybody and squirm bashfully beside the puddle, instead of holding all of it inside and swallowing it whenever it surfaced. I wanted to write it there, and write it next to everything I would ever write down, and say it alongside everything I would ever say to her.

But I didn’t. When my piece of chalk finished marking the number 5, I looked to Ge’veret Zahavi’s desk. When she smiled primly and nodded at the board, I set my chalk back in the tray and then heard her call Avi to do the next problem. I walked back to my seat.

I couldn’t write those words, nor could I say them. I couldn’t write or say anything positive, anything that would make me feel less alone… or anyone else feel like I had any feelings for them at all. Those words were good and decent and unimpeachable, so apparently they couldn’t pass through a mouth as evil as mine, could they? I could have used a phrase with Aba, “Ani ohev otcha,” to say the same thing and reassure him that I wasn’t a horrible, ungrateful son, but I couldn’t say that one either.

—

All I needed was the money, but Divri was still stalling, still playing the part of Hard-Working Domestic, standing in front of the sink with an apron over his tee shirt and shorts. I had asked him for the money this afternoon, when he was in his bedroom practicing on his keyboard, and he’d told me to ask him again later. Aba would certainly give me a hundred shekels if I said it was for dinner with a girl, but I preferred getting it from a brother to getting it from a father, since fraternal relations seemed to me a little less complicated than paternal ones. I’d told Divri I would need it by 7 o’clock, so that Aba could drive me to meet a girl at a restaurant by 7:30, and Divri had said he would give me it by seven, and I’d left

before he could make me listen to any of his bad music. Now it was almost 7:15, and I was watching him scrub plates and silverware, which he said he needed to finish before he could find enough cash for me.

What’s worse is that he was talking to me about sex, counseling me about girls and relationships and how to get them to sleep with you after the first date, and all the while making me feel like a very small and stupid child.

“…and it will be very tender at first, so you don’t want to touch it right away…”

It felt bad to be talked to like this. Older brothers are allowed to tease their little brothers, I know, but why did the teasing have to so smart? If his little talk were bizarre or outlandish or gross, like seducing animals, I could just say, “You’re weird,” and shrug it off. Or if it were obvious and unthinking, like not yanking on their pigtails, I could just let him jabber on and then say, “Azoi? Wow, thanks!” in a sarcastic voice when he finished. But the terrible thing was that the advice was really good. It was reasonable and wise and it hit me at the perfect level, which, if I knew myself, would have had to be an infantile and dumb level for me to be at it. Harah.

And beyond that, it was for the most part pretty sincere, so I kept searching for some sort of awful, cynical attack underneath it all, but I couldn’t find anything, which frustrated the hell out of me the whole time he was talking.

“…when she has a voice that’s low—” He groaned deeply. “—that’s usually better than when her voice is high—” He squealed softly.

“Both are good, though!”

Bilhan, meanwhile, was sitting on the sofa in the adjacent room, his feet nowadays just barely touching the floor. He was facing me, both arms groping around his own body, with his eyes intensely shut and his mouth spluttering. You could tell that he wanted to collapse into laughter, but he was working very earnestly, like children are able to do sometimes when they need to keep a game or a ruse going.

“You know, Bilhan,” I told him, “It’s only funny if you have your back to me. That way it looks as if you’re making out with a girl.” He stopped and grinned at me. “Oh, I know, but I don’t care.” I looked at him with my utterly confused expression, the one that meant to cry out “Then why the fuck do you do these things?” which I know would have made me horribly embarrassed if someone had used it with me when I was his age. It didn’t work that way with him, though, because he just asked me, “What’s that face?”

“Oh, shut up. I’m not in the mood.” I turned. “Divri, the money!”

“Yes, yes, okay.” He wiped his hands on the back of his trousers as he came out of the kitchen. “Stop your kvetching, Rapha.” Once his hands were sufficiently dry, he leaned over in a broad comedic-fat-guy sort of way to take his wallet out of his back pocket. Bilhan giggled a little; but I only saw in Divri’s little move a dog preparing to urinate. He looked through and selected some bills.

Seeing the wallet, Bilhan affected a squeaky, mocking, girlish tone of voice: “Oh, Rapha, you paid for this all? You are so very handsome. I want to kiss you for a very long time! Please kiss m—” I punched him in the shoulder, so he stopped.

Divri laughed and then shoved me in the shoulder in return. “Don’t hit Bilhan, you idiot.” He set a hundred and fifty shekels down on the table next to us. “And don’t be such a pussy. Can’t you take a joke?”

No, I don’t think I could. I looked into Divri’s eyes and saw not the well-meaning jester he was trying to be but a mean and petty tormentor. My situation tonight (whatever it was—the “first date” business of a young and stupid wretch; the birth of a fragile and timid romance in a cold and pitch-black soul like mine; as transparent an erotic coup as a backward little retard like me had yet participated in; or whatever…) was not a welcome spot for him and Bilhan to poke at. It was tough; didn’t they understand? I was having enough of a time with all of it myself—I didn’t need them to shit on the experience before it even started. To me, it was almost as if tonight’s rendezvous was something momentous and sinister, like coming out as a homosexual. I knew it was nothing of the sort, and to treat it like that would actually be sort of offensive (to homosexuals, I mean), but I couldn’t help myself. I pushed Divri as hard as I could in his chest, yelling “Shut up!” He tumbled backward a step or two.

“What the hell?” he said to me in surprise. Bilhan put his finger to his lips and said “Language.”

I grabbed the money off the table, said “Thanks for the kesef, you dick,” and prepared to quickly rouse Aba and get out of there. Buthe’d been disturbed by the noise and came to the doorway, looking atus, with a paintbrush in his hand.

“What’s going on here? Be nice to achichem, Rapha, for G-d’s sake!”All three of us were shocked. Aba hadn’t sworn like that since wewere at the hospital when Ima died, and he’d yelled about G-d makinghim sleep alone. Now didn’t seem like such a big deal as then, especially when the idea was for me to be nicer to such mean people. I glared at Divri and Bilhan and followed Aba out the door to the car.

—

I made my way around to the passenger’s side of the Volvo 164 parked in front of our building. Aba got into the driver’s seat. When he turned the key, the whole car seemed to cough, and the engine under us began to rumble. The radio clicked on and oozed the last few bars of some sappy European pop song, all complicated drumbeats and messy guitar. Aba turned his whole body, with his right hand on the headrest behind me and his left on the steering wheel. I was afraid to catch his gaze when he turned, but he didn’t look at me at all.

“So your friend goes to school with you?” I’d been preparing myself for something about pushing Divri. It didn’t come up.

I nodded yes, but Aba was still concentrating on the road behind us and didn’t see. A silence passed, then he dropped his gaze down to my face.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a nice girl?” he asked me after that. Then he nudged me with his elbow and gave a conspiratorial chuckle: “Good-looking?” I shrugged my shoulders and said something like Sure. We drove out of the lot next to our building and turned onto Netiv Afikim, to follow the highway around Central Park.

Yes! I wanted to scream. Nice and good-looking and everything else too! Like a movie star. And not just physically beautiful like a movie star, although she was. It was the way the outside world seemed set up beforehand, pre-programmed for her graceful and delicate hands. Like everywhere she went was a movie set; grips and technical advisors and all sorts of crewmembers had already been there and dusted everything off and set things in the perfect place—phones in cradles, pens on desks, or how many buttons were fastened on a blouse. All her actions were choreographed and practiced.

My actions, on the other hand, seemed like the full, wicked brunt of ordinary life. Not only a non-actor trying to work with these movie stars, but a clumsy mishugenah. No, not even just that—retarded, unquestionably retarded. An unbelonging freak set down in the midst of something, some ungodly important thing happening all around. And so I was just begging, constantly, for some accident or defeat. A terminal awkwardness, inching toward disaster.

Aba drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Warm air blew out of the dashboard. “Well, that’s nice.”

The streets of Ma’ale Adumim seemed neither straight enough nor narrow enough on the landscape to be proper roads, just as the sloppy graph lines that Ge’veret Zahavi put up on the chalkboard at school weren’t crisp enough to match the perfection of the maths they demonstrated. They just weren’t, and everything suffered as a result. No one else seemed to notice these small wrongs, these inconsistencies and mistakes, unless they just accepted it unquestioningly. You could say the same for my habits of daily life—that tepid soup of classrooms, birthday parties, and American TV shows (Oi, was that what filled all my days?)—which, if I could observe objectively, would never belong alongside the hellish broil of my miserable adolescence.

And the streets were peaceable and sheltered and clean as well, much too much. Could these safe suburban roads really belong in the fury of Yisra’el, as a settlement in Palestinian territory, amid fighting and blood and explosions? Everything was a mismatch here. Nothing fit.

I looked out the window and saw building after building of empty apartments, set up by the Gush Etzion Regional Council then abandoned. It was wasteful, couldn’t they see? The storefront across the street, split up into groceries and electronics shops and government offices, was much more pleasant. Not because of anything on the inside, the cruel and noisy interior, but rather the way it was all lined up, bordered, squared off in little pockets of organization… unlike the enormous and obnoxious blankness of those empty apartment buildings, all brick-gray and with so many windows.

Aba turned left at Yahalom Square, pulling at the wheel as if he were steering a big pirate ship. The restaurant was up on the left, part of a strip of gaudy, Western-themed attractions. I hoped Latifa would like it… either that or hate it, in which case we could joke about it together and walk somewhere else.

—

I entered Burger House and stood near the benches at the front; I wasn’t yet going to mark myself “customer.” I smelled the plastic bite that American restaurants like this often have, grease and sweaty paper cups, and my stomach made a sickly quiver, like it was considering jumping up my throat and out my mouth, but it only made a tiny moan and settled back down.

On the radio was a love song, years old and a bit embarrassing (honest to G-d) for me to revisit: “Duet Preida” by Gali Atari and Menny Beger. It must have come out when I was only ten. I listened to the woozy synthesizer and fuzzy organ, on top of the oddly-comforting clang of a big, ugly xylophone, and thought of Ima, who loved the song and played it loud when giving Divri, Bilhan, and me our lunch—she was a beautiful lady, as quick to smack one of us as to give us a hug. Mothers can be like that sometimes, when they’re alive.

Out the window, I could see Aba in his car driving away. I didn’t see him wave, but maybe he’d been waving when I wasn’t looking and had only now decided to give up and drive away. That’s certainly the sort of thing that I consider when I wave to someone… how long I’ll need to pretend before I can give up on them.

Oh, Latifa!—oh, heart-wrenching and pitiful infatuation! What bullshit do I need to pull together, I thought, to justify the irrational and idiotic hopes I have for me and her? It was useless. The reason I kept her in my mind—when she was beautiful, I was me, and all the forces of the universe conspired to keep us no more than idle buddies—was either I was waiting for the clash of a miracle, for her to drop all her plans (going to America? Being successful? Nonsense; ta’ase li tova!) and our lives to intertwine by themselves and love to grow out of nowhere, or I thrived on disappointment. The strings tying her to New York City, to being a nurse somewhere on the other side of the world, maybe these would fall away or be snipped off by someone whose scissors were sharper than mine. That’s what I hoped; but it was hopeless.

A tray clattered to the floor somewhere inside. As soon as I began listening to the sounds behind me, a storm of English and Hebrew and Yiddish broke out, as if all the mouths had been waiting for my ears. I couldn’t tell what any of them were saying, and maybe that was best, since I’m fairly sure I would’ve found the conversations pathetic and dull.

But the impossible wouldn’t happen: not this impossible, nor the other impossibles that were waiting in the queues for some lost cause like me to think up and hope for. None of them. I knew Latifa and I weren’t meant for each other, just as I knew I wasn’t meant for anyone on Earth. It was a sickening realization, honestly, the fact that I was always so unsettled and cold and detached around people (and when I was alone too, sure; but it got worse when I was with other people). When I should have been the warmest, the least disconnected—standing, oh, with dozens and dozens of friendly people; Burger House; Ma’ale Adumim, Israel; 24 April 1990; 7:41 PM—I was instead flung out suddenly into the sad and boring void of my mind, in a cruel and counter-intuitive way. Like drinking soda might seem to quench your thirst, but all the salt in it is really just sucking up the water from your body and making you more and more dehydrated.

“Can I help you, sir?” A woman leaned toward me and bent her head, condescending both in speech and posture. I studied her cleavage (what else?) and formulated my reply.

“No,” I said, “I’m just—” She smiled. Had I said something funny? What gall this girl had! “—meeting someone, thanks.” She nodded and retreated behind her counter.

So I was cursed to friendship instead of love, I decided; but only until (and this was inevitable!) I’d used the love to poison the friendship and thereby ruined them both before anything had even started A shlimazel in a world of machers, a sadsack standing just out of reach of everything he truly wants, right at the limit of possibility. But so be it? People deserve lots of things they don’t get, but they grab on to whatever they can and just wait. It’s regrettable, the scraping and snarling over tenuous things, but it must be endured. And I would wait too. Like a whisky-hearted rebel with a dream of my own Zion. What a figure I cut? ha! I would make an encampment near this girl Latifa—my own kibbutzim, a holy and angry and illegal place—in the hope that she’d come around one day and let me have what’s mine.

My eyes got lost for a moment in the small swirl of jackets, hairstyles, and glistening tableware. But then I found the window on the far wall, and my gaze recentered there. Outside was the Judean desert, brown and quiet and inscrutable, wreathed in long-ago battles and the hollers of men. The sand was flat like a floor and hardly moved, but I could tell it seethed with anger. And here I was inside, in a comfortable, well-lit, air-conditioned building, ready to shame my forebears, who’d worked so hard to claim this land—but, you know, I was another of them, another hearty and irrational mityashvim, putting my stake down in a cruel and beautiful desert of my own. You know? *