It was six years after Israel occupied the east side of Jerusalem and three years after my dad killed himself with an army gun while guarding the Jordanian border. It was my first date.
David, who was a year older than I, left a note in my backpack inviting me to join him for a trip to the old city. Six years later he died, while training to fly a new F16 the army had just received from the US.
He knocked on my door exactly at four. His hair, still wet, was combed to the side; his hands buried in his jeans; a green and yellow striped shirt and a blue sweater lay on his shoulders. On the top of his shoes, on the white rubber, he had written and then scratched out, the name of the girl he loved. His Grandmother, who had emigrated from Germany to America, had sent them to him – red Old-Star shoes – a dream Hanukkah gift.
A bus card was peeping through his shirt pocket.
To hide my excitement I wore the usual patched jeans, my favorite worn-out red sweater and sandals. A few minutes before four, I was still at the bathroom mirror trying to clutch onto a defiant eyebrow hair with my mom’s old tweezers. Each pluck was followed by a strong tinge in my nose and a watery eye. I wondered how my mom plucked her eyebrows so casually. It was my first time. As I heard the doorbell I saw a big red splotch right between my eyes, which I tried to hide by covering my forehead.
The bus announced its full stop in a loud exhalation. David directed me in with a light touch on my back just above my new bra. From behind me he handed the driver his ticket and said in the lowest voice I have yet heard “twice please”. Did he mean to stand so close to me? A cloud of fresh laundry detergent rose from his shirt and wrapped us together in an invisible cloak. For a moment I forgot about the curious looks of people on the bus. There was only that moment liquefying my limbs in a wave from the neck to my heels.
Again, he directed me with a light touch towards the empty seat at the back of the bus. I sat near the window feeling the cool wind blowing on the warm spot between my eyebrows. I gave up hiding the spot but the embarrassment lingered.
He sat so close to me that there was room for another person on the bench. I admired his courage.
“When do your parents expect you back?” He asked and for the first time lost his cool — blushing — he started again “ I mean your mom, when does she need you back, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that…”
I wanted to tell him that it didn’t remind me of my father’s death because I was always aware of his absence. I was used to people asking about my parents. But I only said, looking out the window, “she does not care much when I come back.”
I imagined telling him how much I wanted her to tell me when to come back… not to forget my sweater, or to ask me who am I going out with. I wanted to tell him how she would sit in her room gazing out the window nodding her head to whatever I said. I wanted him to know that we no longer celebrate any of the holidays because it reminds her of the past.
David’s mother was very different than my mother. A bit aloof and pedantic like other Germans, she was, nevertheless, the perfect mom to David and to David’s friends. She was caring and devoted. Like a magician who pulls doves from hats, she had the sweater, the sandwich, or the water always handy.
At my dad’s funeral, she wore a black dress and black sunglasses in the midst of a hot sunny day. She looked down at her feet with poetic sadness — so collected and so proper. Unlike my mother, she seemed like someone who would never come undone.
David opened a map of east Jerusalem and showed me the plan for the evening. He pointed to the blue line he drew on the map. For the first time, I noticed the gold tan on his long graceful fingers with trimmed nails.
I pushed my hands with my bitten nails and bleeding cuticles into the tight pockets in my jeans.
“We’ll get off at Gaffe gate, walk thorough the Armenian quarter to the bagel place, then walk through Via Dolorosa to the big church and then…”
“Do we have to follow the plan… can we just see how we feel?” I said with a protesting tone in spite of my admiration of his purposefulness and planning.
David looked down admonished, but quickly reclaimed his optimistic openness. “Yes” he said,
“It’s a plan that will be a base for changes… as we go.” He sounded so mature, so confident, and so safe.
With sudden remorse and gratitude I laid my hand on his knee and said, “this is fun”.
He then looked shyly to the other side and put his dry warm hand on mine.
That was the moment I remembered six years later on the edge of his open grave while his mother was wrestling with the soldiers that were carrying his coffin.
Not the first kiss at the end of that evening; not the night that we spent together in his sleeping bag a few years later, at the summer camp; not his letter informing me that he was now a combat pilot; and not his next letter that accepted our break up in a short curt sentence: “I hope you’ll find what you are looking for”.
It was the memory of a gentle squeeze of his elegant hand cupping my tormented chewed fingers into a warm secure shell.