They order a whole sea bass baked in salt, cold noodles, and spicy tofu. The Canadian orders shumai, and har gow, drinking ice-cold pilsners along with it, one after the other. Farid figures he must already be too drunk to handle the astonishing sports car in which they arrived, though, in Joshua’s speech and his manner, it does not seem to show.
They talk easily about their families, and their childhoods, and a lot about sailing.
Takumi had not offered the Canadian any lessons after taking him out. “I was good enough to eke by,” he says, “but not bad enough, apparently, to have lessons forced on me. I was lucky. The wind was right where it should be whenever I went looking.”
“It’s hard to be lucky with sailing,” Farid says, refilling his tea. “I’m surprised he lets you take the boat out.”
“Considering what you saw?”
“Yes, considering what I saw.”
Joshua smiles and laughs and toasts his host, knocking his beer glass against Farid’s teacup.
“I promise, I was bad that day too. But it was the ideal, shining version of my badness.”
Farid likes this man. There is something charming about him.
“If you want,” Farid says, “I could give you a lesson or two.”
“I couldn’t,” Joshua says.
“It would be my pleasure,” Farid says. And he finds, as he says it, that he really means it. “It’s a slow time for me. A distraction would be a favor.”
Joshua raises an eyebrow, holding Farid’s gaze, and giving him what feels like the chance to back out.
“Choose a morning,” Farid says.
“This week I’m traveling on business. But next week, I’m around.”
“Fantastic,” Farid says. And, not wanting to pry, for he’s not one who likes to be interrogated, he still asks Joshua what he does that brings him all the way here.
“Trust me, it’s boring. It’ll ruin a perfectly good meal.”
“You know what my father used to tell me? The more boring the business, the more money there is to be made. He would walk me by the biggest houses in Gaza and say, ‘There is the man who makes cement.’ ‘There is the family that puts the buttons on your shirt.’ We’d stand outside this huge villa, and he’d say, ‘That whole mansion is built from hummus and pita, one customer at a time.’ I was so little when he’d take me, I actually thought that house was made of hummus, spackled from floor to ceiling.”
“I hear you,” Joshua says. “Honestly, it’s just dull. I’m basically a junk dealer.”
“A junk dealer, with a hundred-thousand-euro car.”
“More like a hundred fifty. That sports car has the added sports package built in.”
“From selling junk.”
“From importing and exporting that junk, I guess. Resale is maybe the best way to put it. Anyway, the car is leased.”
“Still, it must be a big lease,” Farid says. “And import and export is a big umbrella. A lot of us fit underneath it.”
“I sell used computers. Used cell phones. Used copiers. Anything with a chip inside. Which is why I should try and sleep a few minutes. I need to wake up when Beijing does and start working the phone.”
“You’re not on Canada time?”
“This horrible octopus of a deal—the part that’s killing me right now is with the Chinese.”
Joshua reaches for the bill, and Farid stops him, insisting.
His guest is clearly touched and says, “It won’t make up for it, but why not come for breakfast before we sail. We’ll let that evil chef clog all our arteries, and then you can teach me to tie a proper knot.”
2014, Jerusalem
Ruthi’s son sits in a chair at the edge of the balcony, his feet up and hanging over the rail. He’s out in his boxers and a pair of flip-flops, and Ruthi can smell the woodsy, bubblegum odor that’s mixed in with the tobacco, her son smoking a joint on a Friday morning and taking in the day.
The guard doesn’t put it out at the sound of his mother’s approach, only cracks open his eyes, one at a time, as if it’s better to absorb her in stages.
“You didn’t come home last night,” he says.
“And you didn’t call to see why.”
“I already know why, don’t I? Same as always—you were worried your boyfriend might give up the ghost.”
His mother raises a cautioning finger.
“Halas. Don’t be disrespectful.”
“Now I owe him respect? Do you know how many nights I almost got killed because of his crackpot politics?”
“During your service?”
“Yes, during my service.”
“What danger did you face? You demolished terrorists’ houses in the night. Houses don’t fight back.”
“You don’t think that’s a crazy job? Sneaking into some village with a bag of explosives and leveling homes?”
“If the terrorists were still in them, maybe. But this is the relatives. These are the houses where the already-dead terrorists once lived.”
“Which raises its own issues, no, Mother? Giving five-minute warnings to old women who never race out the door with anything but their olive oil and a picture of Arafat? It’s pitiful.”
“How else do you punish someone who’s already gone? It’s a deterrent.”
“Do you think so?”
“I don’t have to think so. I’m not the one who did it, you are. Do you think so?”
“I was doing my service. That was my job.”
“So it’s a deterrent, then.”
“No, it isn’t. I think it’s an incentive. I think it’s a fucking terrorist recruitment campaign.”
“So now it’s your fault when they send us terrorists?”
She loves to do this, his mother, to dispense her clipped and nagging motivational speeches and unasked-for life advice. Much like the blowing up houses, her son thinks, his mother’s talks seem to have the opposite of the intended effect.
As to this age-old argument about the usefulness of the General’s many crusades, they were both careful to stick with the latest uprising, so as not to slide back to Lebanon and Tyre and the war from which the father he couldn’t remember hadn’t returned.
The guard closes his eyes and takes a pull. He needs a moment to self-medicate before engaging again.
He counts down in his head, and then blows a long puff of smoke toward the Knesset across the way. He blinks away the dryness before turning to his mother, who now leans back against the railing, the panorama behind her.
“I think it’s the General’s fault,” he says. “That whole shitty Second Intifada and the ruined future that’s followed. And let’s not forget the prospect of all the spectacular shittiness yet to unfold.”
“You blame both the past and the future on the General? That’s quite a lot of power to afford someone. Maybe you respect him more than I know.”
“When you torpedo peace, it reaches both ways.”