All the Rivers Read online

  My sudden flow of speech, and particularly the effort I had made in the past few minutes to give my voice a measure of calm and an odd sort of levity – as though I were finding this situation increasingly amusing – had completely exhausted me.

  ‘Now tell me, please,’ his voice sounded light and carefree now, almost friendly, ‘how you write your translation work.’ He shut the passport and handed it to me. ‘Pen and paper, or on a computer?’

  I certainly wasn’t expecting that. ‘Computer.’

  ‘A laptop?’

  I couldn’t believe it was still going on. ‘Yes, I…’

  He interlaced the fingers of both hands and put them on the table in front of him. ‘Here, at home?’

  ‘Either here, or at the university library.’

  ‘And in coffee shops? Do you work on your laptop at coffee shops?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes.’

  ‘Is there a particular place you go to regularly?’

  ‘A particular place?’ I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t understand…’

  ‘Ma’am, have you recently visited a café not far from here, on the corner of Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue?’ His partner passed him the pen and he signed the bottom of the form. ‘Café Aquarium?’

  ‘The Aquarium, oh yes…’

  ‘Might you have been there last week? On Tuesday evening?’

  ‘Tuesday? I might have been. It’s—’

  He closed his eyes for a second, looking gratified. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  chapter 2

  As it turned out, that very same day, less than an hour after the agents left the apartment, I went back to Café Aquarium. Earlier in the week, Andrew and I had arranged to meet there on Saturday afternoon. It was 3.20 when they finally left, but by the time I got showered and dressed and decided to call him – I wanted to meet somewhere else, a different café in the neighbourhood, anywhere but there – I got the answering machine.

  ‘We’re not home at the moment!’ the family chorus recited in three joyful voices. Andrew and Sandra had separated the year before, but he still hadn’t plucked up the courage to change the outgoing message. A long beep cut off the rolling laughter of their little girl, Josie.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said to the image in the hall mirror as I wriggled into my coat. ‘Have you already left?’ I waited another moment, hoping he would answer. The vacuum cleaner, mop, bucket and rags were all in the same place they had been before the investigators’ surprise visit. ‘OK, never mind.’

  Café Aquarium is just up the street from the public library on Sixth Avenue, looking out onto the corner of West 10th Street. I walked up to the glass door, peered inside, and the door sounded a chime when I opened it and another when it shut behind me. Outside there was a cold, needling wind, and the sharp passage from the bustling street into the heated air of the café, a serene, almost tropical warmth, was stunning. I was struck by the smell of fresh coffee and pastries and the sound of sleepy piano jazz punctured by the espresso machine’s expirations. I found a window table and ordered a cappuccino.

  The investigators still accompanied my thoughts like a pair of bodyguards, and I pictured them sitting down opposite me. I adopted what I hoped was a nonchalant expression and scanned the other café patrons. Five people were sitting at the dark wooden tables, deep in conversation or paging through magazines. Two men leaned on the counter. A young mother communed with her baby in a far corner. No sideways or suspicious glances were turned at me, and one of the men at the counter, who looked up for a moment over the Metro section of the Times, soon went back to his paper with total indifference.

  My Middle Eastern appearance did not seem to be troubling anyone this time. The agents had told me that some idiot, a model citizen who’d seen me here on Tuesday evening, had called the police to complain about a Middle-Eastern-looking young woman engaged in suspicious activity. They said he reported that I was writing e-mails in Arabic, but other than his linguistic mistake – he must have seen me writing Hebrew, from right to left, and assumed it was Arabic – I couldn’t really understand what it was about me or my behaviour that made him believe he was on to an Al Qaeda operative. They apologized for taking up my time and explained that since 9/11 there had been a very tense atmosphere in the city and lots of fear and confusion, but they were obliged to look into every complaint.

  ‘But how did you find me?’ The question only occurred to me when I walked them to the door. ‘How did this man know where I live?’ They said he’d probably followed me home and seen me enter the building, noted which apartment I went up to, and given the police the address.

  The cappuccino came with a little butter cookie. It was 4.10 when I looked at the waitress’s watch. The bell chimed again: a woman came in, followed by another one. Someone walked out. Behind the glass a procession of yellow cabs crawled along. Above them, the Gothic octagonal structure of the public library peered down from the corner of 10th Street. Its turrets towered above the rooftops, with the Roman numerals of the clock tower the highest of all. Those hands showed 4.10 as well.

  ‘Excuse me?’ A young man was standing on the other side of my table. ‘Are you Liat by any chance?’

  I nodded expectantly while a crazy thought flew through my mind: this curly-haired man was connected to the FBI, it was a ploy, he was an undercover agent sent to entrap me. Even before I nodded and stood up, perplexed, I straightened my neck and my hand reached up to smooth down my hair.

  His face lit up with a flash of relief. ‘I’m a friend of Andrew’s. He wanted me to let you know that he’s sorry but he can’t make it.’

  How do I describe him now? Where do I start? How do I distill the first impression created in those few distant seconds? How do I extract his finished portrait, composed of layer upon layer of colour, back into the pale, hasty pencil sketch that my eyes drew the first time they landed on him? How can I use a mere few lines to paint the whole picture, with all its breadth and depth? Is it even possible to attain that sort of scrutiny, that measure of lucidity, when the hands of loss keep touching the memory, staining it with their fingerprints?

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘Everything’s fine. There was some miscommunication with his wife, he had to go pick up the girl.’

  His voice was hoarse and sensitive. His English was good, flexible and easy and confident, and the strong accent in its lilt was clearly Arab.

  ‘I’m Hilmi.’ His guttural h released a deep, foreign echo into the café. He took my hand and seemed in no hurry to let go of it. ‘Hilmi Nasser.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re Hilmi.’ It all made sense now. ‘You’re his Arabic teacher…’

  His hand was cold and dry from the weather, but his fingers pressed mine warmly. I tried to remember what else Andrew had told me about him. ‘He’s such an awesome, talented guy, you have to meet him,’ I remembered him saying, and for some reason I thought he’d told me Hilmi was an actor or a theatre student.

  ‘We were just finishing our lesson,’ he said, letting go of my hand and pointing vaguely at the avenue, ‘when his ex-wife called.’

  I kept gazing at his hand while I tried to think of something to say.

  Hilmi’s smile widened, bringing a dimple to his stubbly face. ‘He’s a good man, Andrew. He’s all right.’ One of his two front teeth was slightly yellowed, and his grin revealed pale pink upper gums.

  ‘You…’ I hesitated awkwardly. ‘You’re from Ramallah, right?’

  He nodded slightly. ‘Hebron, then Ramallah.’

  ‘Then we’re practically neighbours. I’m from Tel Aviv.’

  My voice must have dipped a little when I said that, sinking nervously into my throat, because Hilmi leaned over the table and whispered as if it were a big secret: ‘I know.’

  I struggle again to draw this one man’s face in a crowd of faces: which frayed lines and what shading do I use? How do I sketch his visage the way it looked to me then, at first sight, still mysterious? A
mong countless pairs of brown eyes, how to distinguish those two soft, open, wise ones, their gaze alert but slightly awkward, marvelling? How to outline the lips, nose, brows, chin, a portrait on a café napkin, so that I can see them freshly, devoid of emotion, perhaps through the eyes of a person sitting at a nearby table, or of the waitress who walked over to us.

  ‘Would you like anything?’ she asked him.

  He was still standing. He looked at the chair. ‘May I?’

  He had an overgrown mane of hair, a sea of frizzy charcoal curls twisting in every direction. He had soft, cinnamon eyes with eyelashes so long and thick that for a moment I thought he was wearing mascara. He was about five foot seven. He wore brown corduroy trousers, a grey sweater and a faded suede jacket. When the espresso and water he’d ordered arrived, he emptied the glass of water in one quick gulp, while I secretly examined the tufts of hair on the knuckles of his beautiful hands. He rolled up his sleeves and there were bands of hair on his forearms and veins bulging at his wrists.

  He thanked the waitress, who came back with another glass of water, and raised his glass at me with a little grin: ‘Cheers.’

  He had a large, crooked nose and wide nostrils that quivered as he drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His skin was lighter than mine, a slightly pale olive tone, and his face was unshaven. Traces of white, sticky thirst were still congealed in the corners of his mouth even after he sighed, his thirst sated, and put his glass down with a clang. ‘Wow,’ he said, wiping his mouth, which had turned very red, ‘I really needed that.’

  It turned out Hilmi was a painter, not an actor. He was two years younger than me: twenty-seven. He told me he’d done a BFA in Baghdad and had come to New York on an artist’s visa in ’99, almost four years ago. He lived in Brooklyn and that’s where his studio was, on Bay Ridge Avenue. He shared an apartment with a roommate named Jenny, a half-Lebanese woman who was studying architecture, and her mother was the landlady.

  ‘But Jenny’s been at her fiancé’s in Paris since August,’ he said, biting his lip for a second. He did that every so often, his lips turning in and tightening over each other, as if to mark the end of a sentence. ‘And so far they haven’t rented out her room.’

  I’m not sure what he said that made me think of the FBI agents. ‘You won’t believe what happened to me today,’ I suddenly said excitedly, ‘right before I came here.’ After a moment, stretching and pursing and licking my own lips, I realized I was mimicking him, that I had copied the gesture from his mouth to my own. When I started telling him about the cowboy and his partner who had turned up at my door while I was cleaning the apartment, I found myself shocked and upset again, still struggling to believe it had all really happened just two hours earlier. But now it sounded ridiculous, almost comical.

  ‘That’s never happened to you before?’

  ‘What, being followed?’

  ‘No, someone thinking you’re an Arab.’ He smiled. ‘Because you do look a little…’

  It was a lovely smile. ‘What? Like a menacing Middle Eastern entity?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Actually when I was travelling in the Far East they said I looked Indian, or Pakistani.’

  ‘That happens to me all the time too.’

  ‘And here people often think I’m Greek, or Mexican…’

  ‘What don’t I get! Brazilian, Cuban, Spanish. Someone even thought I was Israeli once. A guy on the subway started asking me something in Hebrew. I told him, “Sorry, mister…”’ He was distracted by something. ‘“I don’t speak Heb—”’ He trailed off and started rummaging distractedly through his coat pocket, jangling a heap of coins. ‘Just a sec, I have to check something.’

  He leaned over and picked up his bag, a bedraggled orange backpack that was wide open, and frantically started pulling out its contents: long wool scarf, brown glove, thick spiral-bound notebook, crumpled pharmacy bag, zippered denim pencil pouch, subway map, crushed pack of Lucky Strikes, another glove.

  I caught a silver-coloured disc that fell out and rolled across the table. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he mumbled, ‘it’s just money, but where did I put it…’

  He dug his thumb into the notebook and flipped the pages backwards, and a series of pencil sketches raced by: rounded eyelashes, ripples of water and curls, seashells, line after line of curling Arabic full of crossed-out words spiralling up and down among the sketches. He plunged his arm elbow-deep into the backpack, dug around, then quickly pulled it out and patted himself on the chest. He reached under his sweater into his shirt pocket and looked relieved when he fished out a bundle of bills: a twenty, a fifty, and a greying hundred.

  I almost asked him to show me the notebook so I could see the sketches, but he was already gathering up the subway tickets and scraps of paper from the table, and said he had to get going. The Roman numerals on the clock tower showed 5.05. He said he had to make it to the art supply store to buy paint. He put down a twenty-dollar bill and called the waitress. ‘They close at six and I’m out of blues.’

  ‘Just blues?’

  The blues and greens always ran out, he said, because he painted a lot of water. ‘You’ll see when you come to my studio,’ he added when I looked back from the approaching waitress. ‘Lots of water and sky.’

  ‘I guess I could.’ I turned and furrowed my brow as if trying to remember something, as though I had been seized at that very moment by distraction. ‘Maybe with Andrew some time.’

  But Hilmi just kept sitting there looking at me even when I stood up and pulled my coat on. ‘Why some time? Why don’t you come now?’

  chapter 3

  Outside, the busy avenue had gone dark. The first snow had fallen a few nights earlier, and the pre-Christmas bustle was in the air. Glassy skyscrapers glimmered in the distance, and even the street lamps, headlights and traffic lights seemed brighter than usual this evening. Perhaps it was only the cold that polished the air with its wintery dampness and brought tears to my eyes.

  We made our way through the crowds, talking the whole time. For the blink of an eye, on two separate occasions, I thought I recognized someone among the faces: a woman who looked a bit like my dentist, then an acquaintance from Tel Aviv. After they appeared and vanished, I could still see myself as they did, me and Hilmi through the eyes of the people passing us by. I could already hear myself telling my sister on the phone the next day what we’d said to each other, and I could hear her laughing at the mad idea that ran through my mind in that first second: that it was all a conspiracy – Andrew’s last-minute cancellation, his Arabic teacher, the chance meeting at a café – all a plot orchestrated by federal agents to entrap me.

  As we walked past Union Square and the George Washington statue, then north on Broadway, we picked up our pace and our conversation became more supple. I found myself caught up in the joy of spontaneous, light-hearted chatter. Any self-consciousness that had shadowed us before seemed to lift, and we grew braver and more assured with each other. When we jostled our way through the crowds I felt his hand lightly guiding my arm, resting for a moment on the back of my coat as we crossed the street. He glanced ahead then straight back at me, so as not to miss a word, alert to every shadow of expression on my face.

  ‘And then we broke up,’ I said, skipping ahead to the end of the story. ‘I took all my stuff out of the apartment and two weeks later I was here.’

  He stopped and crouched down on the pavement to tie his shoelace. ‘Four years…’ he said after a minute, somewhat gravely, and kept looking up at me from the kerb as if I might flee at any moment. ‘That’s a chunk of time.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘A chunk of time.’

  I looked away at the little concrete square at the corner of 23rd Street, and I knew he was still looking at me. Further down I could see the Flatiron Building’s rounded snout, the trees in Madison Square Park, the traffic. ‘What?’

  He’d shifted his weight to the other foot and leaned down to t
ie his left shoe. ‘I said it looks like you got over it pretty well. Didn’t you?’

  My gaze was drawn to his fingers, so delicate beneath the dark tufts of hair. ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ I quipped, and realized his head was bowed again and he’d missed my fake arrogant shrug of the shoulders. I though guiltily about Noam and wondered what he’d say if he saw how easily I had shaken him off and all the pain of our separation that summer. I wondered whether he was already talking about me with such cool-headedness and whether he too, far away in Tel Aviv, was telling a new woman about me with a shrug.

  ‘Yeah, right? We have that saying too: Ba’id an el’ayn, ba’id an el’kalb. “Far from the eye, far from the heart.”’ He tightened the bow. ‘It’s amazing how true it is.’

  The sounds of Arabic from his lips somehow made me think of a joke Noam brought home from reserve duty once, which we always found hilarious. He and the other guys used it to trip up the Palestinians going through their checkpoint. ‘Inta bidoobi?’ he said they’d ask when they checked someone’s papers – Are you bidoobi? Are you? And he’d mimic the puzzled Palestinians’ response: ‘Shu?’ they’d ask: What? ‘Shu bidoobi?’

  When Hilmi stood up, I wondered what Noam would say if he saw me now, what he’d think of me.

  ‘Where did you live?’ he asked as we kept walking. ‘In Tel Aviv?’

  I couldn’t explain why, but something in the way he said that, something about his Arab accent – ‘In Telabib?’ – added a bold new band of warmth to the intimacy I felt with him.

  ‘We lived near the sea, in his parents’ apart—’

  ‘Really?’ His eyes opened wide. ‘By the sea?’

  His response made me laugh. ‘Two minutes from the beach.’

  ‘Wow!’ And a few steps later: ‘Could you see it from your window?’

  I laughed again. I told him our bathroom was the only room with a west-facing window, and from there, if you peered between the rooftops, you could see a little strip of water. For a moment I pictured the way the sea looked when I used to hang out the laundry, winking at me like a blue shard of glass over the hot-water tanks and satellite dishes on the rooftops, squeezed in between the Sheraton and the building next door. Overcome with sentimentality, I looked up to the sky with my heart brimming and my eyes welling, and breathed deeply. ‘There’s nothing like the sea.’