Sometimes you have to set the record straight. But I never do. I just let people take their swings and roll with the punches. It’s easier than worrying someone might be mad at me. No, I’m not in high school. I’m a fully grown adult and didn’t want that dessert at all. For the record, I don’t eat gluten. But Mikella made me order it, said a fat person can’t ask for dessert and that my body type will let me get away with just about anything.
The evening was a fancy affair, if a kosher restaurant can ever truly be considered fancy, especially one beyond the Green Line, with more than the occasional diner casually bearing a pistol at his hip. If I had looked at a map of Israel before ordering the cab, I might have graciously bailed, blaming a migraine which would surely have come on within an hour. There’s nothing worse than the fear of being found out. But who looks at a map before ordering a cab?
The dinner was a fancy affair because Act for Access—the American NGO that the dozen of us gathered around the table workedfor, which funds the legal fees of plaintiffs in class action lawsuits—had recently landed a windfall sum from a hedge fund mogul riding the trend of rich people betting on the outcome of not rich people standing up to corporate misdeeds in a court of law. In the event of a conviction, Mr.Mogul would bring home a handsome share of the settlement.
The advantage of my contribution to the company is that, as an editor, I’m not emotionally invested in it. I live in the language of a text, trying on the words like an outfit, then arranging and rearranging them until they look like a million bucks. And if the content is emotionally taxing? As I said, I’m not invested. To be good at what I do, I have to compartmentalize, to not think for a moment about what it must feel like to soften your baby’s bottom with talcum powder only to learn, years later, that you were poisoning her. Or to discover that the seeds in your favorite raspberry jam were actually plastic pellets sourced from a medical packaging factory in Warsaw. AFA is only one of my sources of income. I also edit travel brochures, grant proposals, resumes, and daily reports of ISIS-related activity in Africa, many attached with trigger warnings. When all is said and done, it’s a job, and pays the bills, or at least some of them. I don’t expect anyone to stand back, admire the goods and say, Wow.
The problem was not ordering dessert per se; it was ordering it to go, on the company tab, because the very same taxi that I had ordered to take me to the dinner would be waiting outside—now for four of us—at 8:30, to bring us back to Tel Aviv. 8:30 and not a minute longer. A minute longer, and the driver would be mad at me.
“Um, Barbara?” I spoke up, barely. It was eight-fifteen.
Barbara looked at me in horror, and I hadn’t even put in my request yet.
“Sivan just informed me we’re in the West Bank, in a settlement,” she rasped, leaning in. “And I was the one who chose the restaurant.”
That my addressing Barbara wasn’t the source of her horror was only a slight comfort, since now I had an additional thing to address.“You couldn’t have known,” I offered, stopping short of patting her hand. I looked out the picture window at the grove of acacia trees and the low range of mountains behind them. The Hebron hills, maybe? Jordan? “We can make a donation to Combatants for Peace in the amount of the dinner, and that way we’ll be able to eat dessert with a clearer conscience.”
Nobody likes to feel guilty, especially on an unsated stomach. Barbara felt bad enough for patronizing a kosher establishment (to accommodate Roi, our one religious colleague who himself felt bad for needing accommodation), an act that helped fill the pockets of the people who found common cause with the people who had made her divorce proceedings at the Tel Aviv Rabbinate so miserable, a few years back. Something about having to don a Darth Vader-like modesty cloak before anyone would agree to talk to her.
“I could have known and should have known,” she countered, as if reviewing the rules of modal verbs in addition to berating herself. She shook her head as she spoke, maybe in disbelief by how embarrassingly small Israel was, which is what I might have been thinking at that moment, were Mikella not kicking me under the table. “I’ve totally lost my appetite.”
“Me too,” I said, for I absolutely had. My hands were sweating by the whole turn of events, and it didn’t make things any easier when the cab driver texted me a moment later, informing me that he had arrived and was parked outside the entrance.
Throwing caution to the wind, I suggested ordering the dessert to go.
***
People in Tel Aviv were always falling in and out of love. It was often hard to tell which state someone was in, since in either one, they always seemed to be arguing. Knowing I was conflict averse, my friends regularly turned to me for advice, as if being conflict averse meant I knew something about love, when in fact I was looking for it just as actively as the next woman. But in the meantime, instead of paying attention to my date sitting across from me, explaining the wisdom of purchasing investment properties in inner-city Philadelphia, I was still ruminating about that dinner. Why, when Seth had declined plate after plate of tapas, passing them to the person next to him while delineating the dangers of each item to his digestive system, did he lean in to me and announce, “Everyone probably hates me now”—but with pride? Was there a lesson to be learned here?
“They call it ‘blight’ in English,” Aviad distracted me.
“Call what ‘blight’?”
“What’s going on in Philadelphia.”
I didn’t need to ask Aviad if he had ever been to Philadelphia.
“Have you ever thought about the ethics of real estate speculation?” I asked instead.
“What is ‘speculation’?” Aviad asked back.
And so our argument began. I was startled at first, not by my date’s oblivious disregard for humanity, but by my sudden ability to take more than my allotted portion of the sushi that we were sharing, and to do so while looking Aviad directly in the eye. It was an attractive eye, that much I would give him. And the face it was attached to wasn’t bad either. If we had only stuck to the usual script, I might even have slept with him.But Tel Aviv was a scriptless city; I could no more have choreographed the conversation than expected the server to bring the check promptly after I asked for it. With every crescendo, she probably thought Aviad and I were falling deeper in love, and didn’t want our argument to end. One morning I received an email from Seth with the subject line “good news & request.”
From the coupling of “good news” with “request,” I was sure the former was linked to the latter, and that the message was nothing more than a means to convey whatever good tidings Seth had been bestowed with on that particular day. I’m often the address for those kinds of things. But no, that wasn’t his intention at all. His intention was to let me know that we—that is, AFA—had won another case, this one against a transport app for allowing customers to request Jewish-only drivers. The settlement in favor of the Arab drivers who had filed the lawsuit was large, and would have warranted another dinner, had the last one not worn everyone out. No invitation followed this news, only the request that my eye had been impatient to skip ahead to, even as it stayed responsibly fixed on the details about the case.
“On another matter,” the request began, “would you be interested in editing this book I translated?”
Below, in bold, was a description of Zachariah: in Remembrance, which I assumed was written by Seth’s religious brother-in-law—about whom Seth had spoken fondly as he rejected the tapas—and had something to do with the ancient prophet by the same name, or maybe a dead Uncle/Grandpa/Cousin Zachariah, who had embodied the prophet’s values, in addition to enjoying a good game of pinochle and visits with his grand-children/nieces & nephews/cousins.
It was hard to say which would have been the more tedious to read.
But when I opened the attachment and started to read, I saw that the book, far from being about a prophet or dead uncle, was in fact a love letter, addressed to one “Zachariah” and penned in a stream-of-consciousness style that disavowed the conventions of both form and punctuation. Such that it took me a full three pages before I understood just who Zachariah was, that Seth’s translation was not just bad but barely intelligible, and that the book was an ode to the author’s dead cat.
For the record, I fell for the author before Seth did. For Rotem. Possibly from the first paragraph, after I had cleaned up the garbled syntax, killed the malapropisms, rearranged the sentence structure and removed layer upon layer of ill-fitting renderings, all the product of Seth’s overeager pen. As I put the finishing touches on the opening lines, an insecure abstractness emerged that made my heart skip a beat:
When I describe Zachariah as neither foe nor friend, I mean something else entirely: that his dignity upheld mine, and helped me master myself, helped me like myself just the little that I could allow. He did not count his many years on a calendar, but I could see them pile up with the stiffening of his tail, with the sideways stance he took to protest the passage of time. There were days we didn’t speak to each other, days when we spoke only to each other, the world outside too loud to let in. You could say we raised each other from birth, why not. Why not give voice to what evades understanding. To the forces that fill you with self-doubt. That’s what language can do. And love. Rearrange themselves to soften the blows. And then you wake up one morning to a new coat of fur.
I had expected something different, a more direct, say-it-like-it-is style, of the kind I was used to from my interactions with virtually everyone, everywhere, including at my annual pap smear exam, when I asked Dr.Brondwein why there was no paper blanket to cover up and she muttered something about the efficiency of socialized medicine, before telling me to spread my legs and launching into a lengthy monologue extolling the virtues of secularism. I had never edited a text as tentative as Rotem’s, and had certainly never worked with anything that could be called a love story. With every real-life encounter that left me second-guessing myself, I dove deeper into the hesitancy of Rotem’s prose, and when I came up for air, I was tingling with something bordering on confidence.
Seth adored my obliteration of his work.
“Your edits are amazing!” he texted me within an hour of receiving them. “I forwarded Chapter One to Rotem.”
By now both Seth and I had done our homework and knew that Rotem was not only a cat lover. He was also a philosophy professor of repute, a citizen of the world, a pacifist son in a long line of highly decorated military men, and an apparent bachelor. Not for a minute did I believe that my intimate involvement with Rotem’s prose would lead to a corresponding closeness between author and editor, to a spark flying off the page and landing serendipitously into the former’s heart. But neither did I believe that within an hour of forwarding Chapter One to Rotem, Seth would receive the following response:
Masterful magician Seth! How your observant eye (you) captures my intention (attention), and calls to mind the words of the great Walter Benjamin: ‘True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.’Thank you—toda—dear masterful magician Seth, for your radiants [sic].”
“Wow!” I replied with a single embittered syllable, then casually asked to be cc’d on any future correspondence.
***
I hadn’t meant my Combatants for Peace donation suggestion to be taken as a joke, but Barbara had clearly taken it as one, failing to follow up on my idea and leaving me no choice but to attend a CFP event in lieu of offering up funds I didn’t possess. Out of sheer inertia, I brought Aviad along, vaguely hoping that being among so many idealistic people would have a salutary effect on his character. We arrived early at a clearing in the Ganei Yehoshua woods, where other early birds were milling about and makeshift tables being set up to accommodate the crates of water bottles and T-shirts sitting among the pine needles, waiting for pairs of arms to hoist them into place. With my chin, I prodded Aviad into action.
On the third crate, a spurt of adrenaline must have kicked in, because Aviad’s impassive face suddenly became animated, and he asked, for the first time, “So what’s the deal with this group?”
I might have been flattered that he trusted my judgment enough not to ask such a question until now, had the question not been accompanied by Aviad throwing a suspicious glance at a woman in a hijab approaching the table, and a pocketing of his arms to indicate that his volunteering duties had been fulfilled.
“I guess we’ll soon find out,” I said, not because I didn’t know what the deal was, but because trying to convey it to Aviad would have required me to use words such as “dialogue,” “coexistence,” “non-violence” and “occupation,” and it had been hard enough to explain Philadelphia.
While I stood off to the side to read an incoming text from Seth, part of me wondered whether insisting on acknowledgement—on being seen—was worth the trouble, whether it wouldn’t be easier to just stayin the shadows and observe the world from afar, as I was basically doing now, reading an incoming text from Seth while Aviad dialogued with the woman in the hijab, directly engaging, however difficult the topic.
“Hey!” the email began. “i didn’t think my translation would need so much editing, so i didn’t mention you to rotem, and now it would be weird to.”
I felt like he was challenging me to a duel, forgetting that pens are mightier than the sword, and that mine was full of ink.
“Wouldn’t it be weirder not to?” I ventured, armed only with simple logic.
“The thing is, we switched to whatsapp, so i can’t cc you.”
“OK,” I replied, renouncing my request as quickly as I had made it, averting conflict via the easiest route. “Masterful magician” indeed, pulling a translation right out of his sleeve, passing on plates of tapas without fear of retribution, casting me out of the correspondence loop like a stray sock, and then finding the chutzpah to wish me luck with Chapter Two. When I returned to Aviad, it was hard to stay who was in a fouler mood; it felt like only a few minutes had passed, but it had likely been close to half an hour, the minimum amount of time it always seemed to take to complete a text conversation, when you added up the extra minutes of parallel screen activity. My mood had been fouled by Seth, but it could just as easily have soured by the news of crackdowns on political dissent in Hong Kong, tornados in Kentucky, or a House deadline on helping atomic bomb victims in Nevada (but not New Mexico).
“What happened?” I inquired, observing that Aviad’s expression, when disgruntled, took on a sheen of intelligence that it didn’t have undermore placid circumstances, whereas mine looked aggrieved, maybe a little murderous.
“That woman over there? She raised her son to be a suicide bomber,” Aviad said simply, with just the right amount of disdain.
“Oh my god,” I said.
“And then she changed her mind and joined Combatants for Peace,” he added with even more disdain.
“Oh, whew,” I said.
“What, ‘whew’?” Aviad countered. “A suicide bomber!”
“With a change of heart.”
“What heart? She changed her mind. And could change it again.”
“It’s an expression.”
“You Americans, with all your words.” Aviad turned one of our first conversations on its head. He had professed to love the English language only a few weeks ago. “How many did you say it was?”
“Two hundred thousand, if you count the 50,000 obsolete ones.”
“Well, Hebrew is less than half of this, but we don’t hide the thorns from the roses. We present the whole flower up front, you understand? What you say is what you get. Sometimes it’s pretty and sometimes it’s sharp.” Aviad bent down, picked up a single pine needle from under his shoe, and offered it to me. “Come, with all these combatants here, there will be today no peace. We go back now to my place for a shtup.”
***
I did what I was tasked to do. Detached myself like a leaky valve and edited Seth’s translation. When Rotem observed Zachariah retreat to a dark corner of the closet and stay there, he steeled himself for the end, but I didn’t reach out for him. And when, two days later, his beloved companion of eighteen years departed from the world, I didn’t cry. Did the pages reflect my dispassion? Did I distort my skills for ill and submit second-rate work, to punish Seth for his meanness and mediocrity? On the contrary, I gave it all that I had, and Seth was happy. Rotem, with his philosophical soul and despite his avowed atheism, must have thought he had been sent to him from above.
But then something strange happened. I got mad. I thought it was because of the old man I caught stealing mangos from the yard—to be precise, stealing the entirety of the mangos that had fallen overnight in the yard, leaving not even one for us tenants to fight over; but when he explained to me (heaving his bucket) that the city offered an app providing the location of every fruit tree in Tel Aviv, I knew I had to back off, if only to try to make sense of the situation.
“I’m not stealing anything,” he said with conviction, wiping bat droppings from his hands onto his pants. “I’ve been coming here for years, before any technology told me to. And I wasn’t stealing then either.”
“I don’t think anyone in the building even realizes this is a fruit-bearing tree,” I said in defense, holding out my clean but empty palms.
“It’s a pity,” the man said, shaking his head but then tapping it a moment later to imply that I should start putting mine to use. “You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s a Maya tree, the best around.”
The reason I knew it wasn’t the old man who had made me mad was because after the old man left, I realized that if I were to wake up before him the following morning with my own bucket to fill (the contents to be distributed equally among my neighbors), I would feel like a thief. I just would. Which meant I couldn’t win this battle, because it was with myself. I stewed for a good part of that day, and when evening fell, I stewed some more.
One evening, while Aviad was pontificating from my bed about Israel being a land that devours its inhabitants, and what impact this volatility might have on the value of Bitcoin, my phone rang.
“Meow, this is Zachariah, risen from the dead!” Seth quipped from the other end.
“Hi Seth.” At this point there was no reason to pretend to like him.
“So I have a favor to ask. Remember that lawsuit we won against the Jewish-only app?”
“Yup.”
"Well, it’s a huge victory, of course, and long overdue.” He paused, and all I could hear in my pounding head was that meow, amplified to fever pitch. “So I have this religious brother-in-law who lives in Beit El, and his daughter is getting married in Petah Tikva, and he’s going to need a taxi to take a ton of people to the wedding and back, and wants to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the driver…”
“He wants a Jewish driver.”
“Well, I thought of the one who took you to the AFA dinner and back. He was great, right?”
“He ran through several red lights and smoked the whole way back.”
“Do you still have his number?”
I glanced over my shoulder, certain I would catch a camera in action, filming the call and documenting the absurdity of it. Was this what people meant when they claimed we were living in a simulation? That things sometimes felt so improbable and uncanny they could only be staged? Instead, I saw Aviad—a scene only slightly less absurd—his face buried in his phone.
“I don’t know,” I said, the camera zooming in.
“What don’t you know?” Aviad suddenly raised his head.
After I received the payment for my work, Rotem had sent me a message through Seth, thanking me for “dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s,” clearly an expression he had learned from Seth after being made to understand that every text needs a proofreader, and that I was known to be a proficient one. To Rotem’s thank-you, Seth had added one of his own, in the form of an emoji of a dog, followed by a “no good” emoji of a girl with her arms crossed in an X, followed by an emoji of a cat, followed by a beating heart.
“Could you check and get back to me?” Seth asked, undermining Aviad’s profound question with a perverse one.
Outside my window, the bats had begun their nocturnal activities. I could hear the flapping of their wings, and their high-pitched squeaks around the mango tree. It was one thing not to be afraid of the dark—I myself had learned to almost enjoy walking along the beach at night, letting the waves almost convince me that their soothing sound would ward off any random acts of violence until the morning; but it was another not to fear the shadows, where the bats felt they were safe, despite the light filtering through. That unsettling in-between state, where nothing ever needs defining.
Aviad was fully sitting up when I got off the phone, as if preparing to leave and get on with his life.
“Are you leaving?” I didn’t want him to leave. “Made any investments lately?” I asked, wanting him to stay.
Aviad perked up. “A friend’s sister asked me if I wanted to help her open a ceramica store. With a wheel and the whole megila. She said it was her dream.” Aviad chuckled. “Who buys ceramica?”
I chuckled back, even though I loved ceramica and had bought lots of it, including a teapot that sat smack in the center of my kitchen table, which I would now have to send into hiding.
“Come, let’s eat. You have food?”
“Let’s check,” I said, and held out my hand.
Save for a few items that I had forgotten buying and that had seen better days, my refrigerator was totally empty. “In the morning we can pick a mango,” I suggested, an alternate plan, despite the probability of its execution being zero, owing to the old man and his bucket.
“Why in the morning?” Aviad asked.
I pointed in the direction of the yard. “Because of the bats,” I said.
Aviad shook his head at me as if I had said something stupid. Or maybe he had spotted the teapot?
“Tell me, why you moved to Israel?” he asked. It was a question I got a lot, and usually made me feel like a pioneer. This time it made me feel stupid. And a little mad.
A moment later he was out the door. I figured he wouldn’t go far, just as far as the mango tree and the ladder leaning against it, which he would probably find a reason to climb even if there wasn’t one. While I waited for him to come back, I salvaged an onion from the fridge and went about frying it, settling into its sizzling which soon drowned out the shrieks of the bats. But when he didn’t come back, I decided to go out to the yard myself, to see what I was made of and what the night’s yield had brought. What I saw instead was the old man, lurking in the shadows; he had beaten me to it again. The sizzling still in my ears, I marched right up to have some words with him. But at that moment, among the circling bats and flitting shadows, my gaze fell on the ladder leaning against the tree, and what did I see but a cat, sitting guard on the highest rung. Zachariah’s ghost, no doubt.
“It’s a Maya tree, the best around,” a voice suddenly said.
I turned to face the old man, who was standing in place as if planted in the ground, empty bucket in hand. My eyes adjusting to the darkness, I marveled at all the fruits around me that had survived their fall, and equally at the bats, diving in and out of the branches but never at each other. Then I loosened the old man’s grip on the bucket and started to fill it.