You Deserve Nothing (15 page)

GILAD

S
ilver had tried to continue the discussion, end it with some kind of normalcy, but when the bell rang we were for once all grateful. Ariel had gone quiet. The rest of us too. On the
métro
home that afternoon I tried to understand what it was that made her fight him so hard. It made no sense to me. All her friends were doing their best to have him notice them.

As far as I knew there’d been no repercussions after Colin’s explosion. Since then we’d begun saying hello to each other in the halls.

“What’s up, man?” he’d say.

It made me feel stronger. I found intimacy in those exchanges. I looked forward to them.

And now, weeks later, a cold Friday afternoon, the poplar trees across the field waving in long, slow gestures, their yellow leaves full of sunlight, I listened to Silver read the week to an end:

“‘Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know, is this the same as rushing to your doom? Once again, without respite, let us race to our destruction. I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.’”

He looked up.

“Don’t follow along. Look out the window. Close your eyes. But listen.” I did and it felt to me that I wasn’t alone.

“From Albert Camus’s ‘The Sea Close By’” he told us and then repeated a line obviously memorized, “‘I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.’”

And then uncharacteristically he used the first person: “I’ve always felt this way.”

I opened my eyes and when I saw him I thought he was going to cry. He wasn’t acting. He couldn’t have been. It would’ve been impossible.

He looked out the window, then returned to his yellowed paperback. “‘There are women in Genoa whose smile I loved for a whole morning. I shall never see them again and certainly nothing is simpler. But words will never smother the flame of my regret. I watched the pigeons flying past the little well at the cloister in San Francisco, and forgot my thirst. But a moment always came when I was thirsty again.’”

There were only a few minutes left before the bell. He looked, after reading this last line, the same line he’d read on Monday, wistful in a way I’d never seen him.

“What was it that Camus was thirsty for?” he asked. “What are you thirsty for?”

Hala raised her hand, but he shook his head, “Have a good weekend,” he said. “And read.”

* * *

Friday after school I walked with Colin to the
métro
. It wasn’t planned. We simply didn’t avoid each other. I’d seen him before, walking ahead, lighting a cigarette as he passed through the gates, calling a casual good-bye to the guards. Countless times I’d walked behind him among other kids wandering along the street, laughing and shouting, free from school. We poured out of there. The joy of temporary freedom. And I didn’t mind those walks alone, among but not with the rest of them. I liked watching and not participating. It made me feel stronger, and for months I was convinced that I wasn’t lonely. I also liked to be alone because I thought it might endear me to Silver, whom I’d occasionally see walking with other kids, waving, exchanging jokes with other kids as he made his way quickly away from school.

Perhaps he’d find me more interesting if I were alone, pensive, pondering great ideas—a young philosopher, an independent mind. But at best, he patted my shoulder in passing. See you tomorrow, Gilad. See you tomorrow.

So that Friday, finding myself side by side with Colin as we left the school, I was surprised by how grateful I was for his company.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Then I was as they were. Which is to say with someone else. All those months of isolation, all those months alone, and then here was Colin.

He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.

“I should quit,” he told me. “Silver’s always giving me shit about smoking.”

“Really?” I felt a shot of jealousy.

“Yeah, you know. We had this talk one day where he said how I thought I was a rebel for smoking. Like, I was all tough smoking cigarettes. And then he gives me this whole lecture about how smoking is totally
not
rebellious, about the tobacco industry or some shit. He was fucking right too. As always. So anyway, I’m going to quit. I’m trying to.” He laughed.

I waited for the jealousy to pass. The sense of betrayal even. As if, all this time, Silver had been mine alone.

I said, “You know the day that guy was killed, Silver took me to a café. We spent the afternoon there.”

Colin looked at me, “Yeah? That must have been intense, man. Seeing a guy like that. Fucked up.”

“Yeah it was.”

“What’d it sound like?”

“I don’t know. It was. To be honest? The noise was hidden by the sound of the train. It was fast. Then there was nothing. Then there was crunching. Like branches being broken in half. But all of it was kind of far away. Like it was underwater. Or I was. I don’t know.”

“Fuck,” he said and glanced at me sideways. He seemed impressed.

We walked quietly for a while, Colin blowing smoke. We walked down the stairs into the
métro
.

“So you going to this protest on Saturday?” he asked as we slumped down into two forward-facing seats.

“I guess. You?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“We can go together if you want,” I said, after a long pause.

He nodded. “Yeah, O.K. Sure, that’d be cool. All right. Cool.”

We exchanged numbers and he got off the train at Nation. He raised his chin at me as the train rushed on. For the first time since arriving at ISF, the fact that it was the weekend meant something to me.

* * *

I opened the door. My mom was crying and in the midst of an angry sentence when I walked into the room. My father, in a black suit, red tie in hand, white shirt opened at the collar, stood close to her.

“Gilad, go to your room, please.”

He didn’t look at me but instead kept his eyes on my mother, whose expression softened as she saw me.

I pushed the door closed. It was the first time I’d seen my father in weeks.

“Gilad, go to your room.”

I didn’t move. I said nothing. And then he turned to me angrily. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“I’m not messing around, Gilad. Either get the fuck out of the apartment or go to your room and stay there.”

They were both looking at me, my mother’s eyes pleading.

“Gilad, are you fucking deaf?”

“Don’t talk to him like that.” My mother spoke to the floor. Whatever fury there’d been before I walked in had drained from her. Now this pathetic effort to defend me. He ignored her. I couldn’t move.

He took a step. My father, a few inches taller than I was, thicker, came forward, careful, hesitant even, as if he didn’t want to leave my mother alone where she was.

“Gilad,” he said again, “I’m not fucking around. This isn’t your problem. Get out.”

I met his eyes and didn’t look away. I felt as if I might dissolve. I needed to keep looking. If I broke the whole thing might fall, whatever balance there was, whatever was keeping us all still. I couldn’t look away.

“Touch him and you’ll never see me again,” she said. This time in a stronger voice, gathering whatever she could of herself.

And then, still looking at me, he took a quick step toward my mother, swung his right arm backward, and struck her squarely across the face. It was as graceful and precise a stroke as every sweeping backhand I’d ever watched him hit on tennis courts around the world. There was a dull, flat sound. My mother gave a slight contained cry, a fast expulsion of breath. And it seemed as if his eyes had never left mine. He opened his mouth wider as if to speak. At first, nothing, and then, softly, “Do you understand me, Gilad?”

I wanted, with everything in me, to leap at him. I could see it. Feel my fist crushing his jaw. Throwing him through the door. Through the window. Cutting his throat. Tearing him apart. His blood on my knuckles. I felt myself rising to action, building, it was coming, I was tight, I would move, take him by the throat. I’d murder him.

Instead, I looked away toward my mother who was pretending to be concerned rather than afraid. She raised her head slightly and we looked at each other. Then I looked above her head, through the window. There was cold sky behind her. The branch of a plane tree coming and going in the window. Trees beyond bending in the gusting wind. A piece of wire dangling from a rooftop, twirling behind the double-glazed glass. I saw Sacré Coeur, silent and pale in the far distance, pasted to the sky.

“Gilad, get the fuck out.”

Ignoring him, I looked back at her. A spill of red rising across her right cheek, flecks of blood on her lips. Her eyes dull.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to me. And again, “I’m sorry.”

In that apology I found my escape. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my job.

So I left them there.

* * *

That night I stayed in my room. I pissed out the window into the courtyard below. I read. I walked back and forth. I held the door handle. Imagined opening it. Breaking down their door. Cross the fucking room. Dig down. Push. Go.

But I was a coward. I stayed where I was. I looked out into the night and put it all away. I looked out my window and knew that Silver, somewhere in the city, was in his apartment. He’d be reading. Listening to John Coltrane or something. Or at his desk, grading papers. Writing poems maybe. The light low, a beautiful bare-shouldered woman reading on the couch. There he was living his honorable life. I saw it clear as anything.

I thought about the morning, about meeting Colin. The next day we’d fight. We’d fight against something important. Tomorrow we’d be brave.

* * *

I woke up very early and left. Their bedroom door was closed. In the weak morning light, everything looked as it always did, the pillows on the couch returned to order.

And then one day you live in France.

I stepped out onto the rue de Tournon. I ran to Boulevard St. Germain and turned east. I kept running. It was a little after six and the streets were quiet. Cafés were opening, tired waiters lining the sidewalk terraces with chairs, smoking their morning cigarettes. I ran past the street cleaners dressed in green, sweeping away last night’s trash. I ran to the Pont de Sully. I ran until I was exhausted. I opened my coat and began to walk, the chill morning air cooling the sweat on my chest, my face, the back of my neck. I crossed the bridge and stopped to watch the sunrise over the dull industrial buildings to the east. I walked up Boulevard Henri IV until I came to the Place de la Bastille and took a table at the Café Français. Waiters were still arranging chairs when I sat down. The wind was very cold. I ordered a crème and a croissant. The waiter didn’t speak. The coffee and milk came in separate steel pitchers, both scalding hot, and the croissant was still warm. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. I ate very fast and then, remembering Silver, poured the coffee and milk very slowly.

The first thing I thought after my hunger had subsided and the coffee began to brighten me was that he’d approve. He’d like that I was sitting there alone, so early in the morning, paying such careful attention to simple, beautiful things. Paris morning, coffee, milk, pitcher. His imagined approval made me feel as if it would be O.K. Whatever was wrong, it would be O.K.

They had nothing to do with me. My mother had made her own choices and she continued to make them. What did that have to do with me? She’d married him. She’d given up. She stayed. My life was my own, I’d soon be free of them, and my anger, my new easy conviction, propelled me into the day.

I opened my backpack and found
The Stranger
. How proud he’d be of me sitting alone in the cold morning, the book on the table next to the remains of my breakfast. All alone, the day unfolding. I moved the book with its uncracked spine as if arranging the subject of a still life, moving a cup this way, an ashtray the other.

From my backpack I took out the French
poche
version I’d bought at L’Ecume des Pages. I would read it first, make clever observations about translation and how much more I’d enjoyed the novel in its original language.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.

Those first words. I was wide-awake. It’s embarrassing even now, after all the time that’s passed. How many teenagers had fallen for that book by the time I found it? But I didn’t know and I suppose that’s to his credit. He never told us and I didn’t think to ask.