“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.” And she took my hand in hers, looked for my response, and when I smiled, she tightened her grip and tugged me down the road, saying again, “Where the hell do you have the cash for Cavalier from?”
I had the cash. Ruchaleh had shoved it into my wallet before throwing me out of the house.
“You can go to a hotel, you can go wherever you want, but you’re not staying here,” she had said at first when I begged her to let me stay.
That was the first change in the plan. I wasn’t sure whether she’d known it all along or if it was something she’d decided on when Yonatan’s oximeter started to beep, as it had been doing every night for the past few weeks.
That night, after getting Yonatan ready for bed, we strayed from our usual dinner routine.
“I’m not hungry,” I told Ruchaleh, who sat, inanimate, on the couch.
“I want to sell the house,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t want to be in this place anymore.”
We must have sat there in silence for something like an hour, until the gauge started to beep. That was my cue to run upstairs to the attic and connect the plastic contraption bulging out of Yonatan’s throat to the life-support system. Ruchaleh looked at me. I bowed my head and stayed seated. According to her plan, fifteen minutes would suffice. The beeping bounced off the walls, careened inside my head, pinged against the walls of my skull. I envisioned Yonatan gasping, choking, sputtering, his body convulsing, a shocked expression on his face.
“Where are you going?” she yelled, following me as I ran up the stairs. The oximeter, a small device clipped to his finger, beeped hysterically. I stood at the foot of the bed and stared at Yonatan. He looked exactly the same, lying there with the same placid expression on his face, no apparent convulsions or torment wracking his body. Ruchaleh walked over to her son’s side, to the oximeter, and turned down the volume of the beeping.
The plan was that she would wait fifteen minutes and then call an ambulance, pleading, panic-stricken, for a mobile ICU unit. “My son has stopped breathing.” That was her line. While she was on the phone, I was supposed to hook him up to the ventilator so that when the crew arrived they’d find him on life support, even though Ruchaleh said that the doctors wouldn’t be asking any unnecessary questions.
“Doctors tend to encourage end-of-life decisions on far less severe cases,” she said, “but who knows, with our luck, we could get some religious doctor and he could cause trouble.”
She was supposed to meet the ambulance crew outside. I was supposed to wait by the side of the bed. Ruchaleh said that an ICU doctor coming to the big house in Beit Hakerem, seeing Yonatan on his eggshell mattress, surrounded by the best life-support system money could buy, would probably issue a death certificate on the spot, without ordering an autopsy or any other kind of investigation. They’d probably skip the CPR, since he was on life support already, and just confirm his death, at which point she’d burst into tears.
“I just hope I’ll be able to pull it off,” she said.
When the doctor asked whether he should issue the death certificate, she’d dissolve in tears and send me to take care of it.
“By then,” she said, when the idea first came up, around a year earlier, “I hope you’ll have decided which ID card to give to the doctors.”
Ruchaleh said that our plan was virtually risk-free. We’ve already taken care of the tricky part, she said once — the identity change. We both preferred the words change and update rather than theft when speaking of Yonatan’s ID.
“It was written from above,” Ruchaleh said once. “You think it’s coincidence that your name is Amir Lahav, a kosher lemahadrin Jewish name?”
My name, written out in Hebrew, really does sound totally Jewish, but in Arabic it’s different — Lahab—meaning flames. I remembered from a young age that whenever I went to the doctor’s office in Petach Tikva or to see my mother when she was in the hospital, Jews always got my name wrong. The way they pronounced it always made me laugh and I would tell my mother about their mistake. Later, as a teenager, it no longer bothered me and I was actually happy to have my name Hebraized, a phenomenon that saved me many a sideways glance. When I went to college the fact that my name could be read both ways turned into a real bonus: it’s how I wound up with a good dorm room at Hebrew University, near campus, unlike the Arabs, who, as freshmen, if they didn’t have connections, were housed in the notorious Eleph dorms on the Givat Ram campus. A day before school started, I discovered that my roommate was Jewish, an economics major, a freshman. He couldn’t keep the surprise off his face when I introduced myself and made a point of pronouncing my name properly, in Arabic.
“Where are you from?’ he asked, the way soldiers do.
“Jaljulia,” I said.
“Cool,” he said, and a moment later he went out for a smoke. Ten minutes later an administrator showed up. “There was a little bit of a misunderstanding here,” she said, explaining that university rules require that, barring written consent to the contrary, Jews and Arabs had to live in separate quarters.
“It’s fine with me,” I said.
“I see,” she said, consulting her clipboard. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
My Jewish roommate came back to the room a few minutes later and started packing up his things. “Bro, they got the living situation a little confused at the office,” he said before leaving.
My new roommate was an Arab from I’billin in the Galilee. I’ll never forget the expression on his face and the dance of joy he did when he came into the room. “They told me I was in Eleph. They sent me a letter — Eleph, it said — and here I am up on Mount Scopus,” he exclaimed. “My friends over at Eleph are going to die when they see this. A steam radiator, on campus. Do you know what Eleph looks like? It’s where they throw all the Arabs. Maybe they started letting Christians get rooms on Mount Scopus. Maybe that’s what happened. This is a miracle. I’m telling you, it’s the miracle of the Virgin Mary.” He kissed his cross, and frowned when he found out I was a Muslim, but he did not leave. “What does it matter — Muslim, Christian? At the end of the day it says Arab next to both of our names.”
Before leaving the house that night, Ruchaleh said, “I need one of the ID cards.” I took one out and gave it to her. The other one I put in my wallet. She opened up the little blue book, smiled, and tears started to well in her eyes. “Everything’s going to work out,” she said, and then she hugged me hard. “Go, go,” she said, “get out of here,” and she shut the door behind me.
GOLDSTAR
I want to be like them. That’s the sentence that was bouncing around my head as I followed Noa into the Ha’sira pub. She said “hey” to a few of the people there, exchanged kisses with a few others, introduced me to them. “Guys, this is Yonatan.”
She walked over to the DJ booth. The guy looked familiar. He slipped off his headphones and smiled at her, leaned over his turntables and his mixer, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Come here,” I read her lips as she motioned me over. “Meet Aviad,” she said. “He’s third-year, visual media.”
I shook his hand.
I want to be like them.
Noa asked what I wanted to drink and smiled when I said red wine, suggesting that I go with beer. I agreed. She preferred sitting at the bar, she said, but we took seats at a little wooden table in the corner because all the bar stools were taken. The DJ played some Radiohead and Noa moved her body to the music, saying that at this hour you could still enjoy the music.