Choose Somebody Else Read online

  They say Jewels cry easily. That has not been my experience, notwithstanding—or perhaps the exception proving the rule—sacred ancestors who wept by the legendary rivers of Babylon. They could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land; neither, ultimately, could my sister and I. So I will speak no more of lamenting. I will merely continue the story of my slender Jewel sister and the suit I found outside our apartment which I gave to her because it was too small for me. I wish it hadn’t been.

  I always wanted to be a hero. I think I would have made a good one. Perhaps all those who cannot wear the suit harbour this belief. On three sides are countries full of Others, and on the fourth, the sea. Under siege, our option is to stand and fight or drown. I am a strong swimmer, buoyant and fast through the water as I could never be on land where Newton’s rigid laws constrain me. Archimedes’ laws are far better suited to my roundness. I displace what I must and still the water embraces me. Even so, I could not swim to the next friendly port, should it come to that. The sea is not an option—not for me and certainly not for the thin ones who make up the majority.

  In Israel every second shingle on every second wall is a lawyer’s. Before I achieved employment, I had to sit for examinations requiring extraordinary levels of skill and language to pass. Israel did not need more lawyers.

  Doctors, on the other hand, were at a premium and my sister’s degree from Galus was highly regarded. Bureaucracy cleared the way for her to practise within weeks and I feared for her. She would go into places where the Other lived and tend to them. Once, when an explosive device detonated in a coffee shop, she was around the corner at the market, buying fragile fabric, perfect for a wedding veil. She rushed to the scene.

  A few streets away I was sitting in our apartment, studying for yet another exam. I heard the explosion and felt the aftershock. I knew Margalit was tending to the wounded, the bleeding, the dying. Be careful, I said to her in my mind, and she telegraphed back: Leave me alone. You’re always interfering. Are you wearing the suit? I asked her. Of course, she answered, but so furiously that her reply set up a ringing in my brain and I had to shut down. Which was exactly what she wanted. I did not even have the chance to warn her about secondary bomb placements and the possibility of another explosion occurring exactly where she stood. Not that she needed me to remind her of that. So, I lay on my bed with a headache for the rest of the day.

  Thoughts roiled in my brain. The suit has to fit; if it doesn’t fit, you can’t wear it, but if it does fit you still might not wear it, especially if you’ve never worn it, and the not daring to wear it is what causes its eternal never-wornness, so maybe it isn’t about the suit at all but—I swallowed drugs to slow the flow. I didn’t want to know or go where the thoughts were taking me.

  Margalit became legend. All over Israel, little children, boys and girls alike, begged their mothers to be allowed to wear three tiny drops of opal pierced and punched into their right earlobes. To be like Margalit, they said. When the sun shone, the opals flashed scarlet and blue fire, flaring in Margalit’s earlobe, turning green and violet as she moved. The clergy had to close their eyes as they passed her, hoping her brightness would disappear from Israel as swiftly and as mysteriously as it had appeared.

  Margalit had always been the brave one, never running, standing her ground, often in front of me, defending me from the torments of a Galus childhood. She was my shield long before the suit became hers. When finally, she came to wear the strange garment, she would stretch the supple yet impermeable skin over her own, pale golden body. It served only to deepen her natural-born talent for sitting on the edge of the abyss, one foot swinging out jauntily, taunting the void.

  The doctors on standby duty at the hospitals did not shut their eyes or their hearts when ambulances came in with the maimed and bleeding—Others and Jewels—but they were mostly men. They left it to Margalit to be the on-site doctor. In Israel and beyond, hers was the face people saw on their televisions, their tablets and their phones when the pizzerias blew and the discotheques detonated. Her willowy form in its tailored skirt and white crimson-spattered coat was beamed around the world. Only I knew the reality beneath that calm exterior.

  It was magical stuff, that suit. Once washed, it dried almost immediately. Which was fortunate, for times were that blood seeped through her outer garments and soaked the suit so she had no choice but to wash it. And each time she washed it, it shrank just a little.

  Early one morning I awoke to the sound of muted moaning coming from Margalit’s bedroom. In my own lonely bed, I rolled my eyes. Jasper must have come in during the night again. His own Other people would kill him if they knew, and our Israeli military would arrest and interrogate him. What was to be done with the two of them and their impossible love?

  Still, I could understand her loving a builder of bridges and viaducts and overpasses, a man whose eyes glowed like gold- brown quartz. How often had he lamented his own people’s penchant for discharging explosives beneath his carefully designed structures and Margalit’s—my—people’s propensity for refusing to allow his people to cross them. Margalit’s moans ceased abruptly. Her door opened and she went into the kitchen, fully clothed, to make coffee. I arose, too, and saw her bedroom was empty. No sign of Jasper.

  In my dreams at night I heard those moans of hers. During the day, no matter if we were at opposite ends of the city, her pain penetrated my thoughts. In my third-rate lawyer’s office, a third-rate, dreadlocked rock singer of emptiness and noise was suing a soft drink company for reasons I was still struggling to wrap my Galus-speaking brain around. Across from me, he sat in my shabby visitor’s chair and pounded my desk, fist clenched, demanding satisfaction. Through the tumult of his tantrum came the still small voice of Margalit. It hurts, she whispered. It hurts. The rock singer pounded, my sister whimpered, sirens shrieked. Somewhere, Margalit was trying to tend the wounded, mend the wounded, the never-ending tending and mending that was making me sweat although I never lifted a hand. Whenever she went out to do her work, I sweated and she hurt, and God help me, I was unable to tell whose pain was the greater.

  She came into my room a few nights later and filled the vacant space beside me with her shivering body.

  ‘The suit is too small. It hurts when I wear it now,’ she said.

  ‘You washed it too often.’

  ‘I had no choice.’

  We lay in silence until she rose and brought the suit to me from its hidden place. I was shocked to see how it had shrunk. I said to her, ‘Clearly the next person destined for the suit must be someone smaller than you’.

  ‘But only a child could fit into it the way it is.’

  We looked at each other. Had it come to this?

  Margalit allowed me to take the suit. I had to shut her out of my mind’s ear completely because her circular thought torture was giving me vertigo. Am I brave because of the suit or am I brave despite the suit? If the suit had never come to me, could I have helped those people or did it come to me because I went to help them? Without the suit, can I ever help anyone who–—

  Shutdown. Enough.

  Not far from our apartment, I sit in an outdoor café only metres away from the place on the footpath where I first found the suit. The savagery of the long summer’s heat has not yet reached its zenith and the morning is peaceful. I watch. Who will rescue the suit from the pavement this time?

  I open up my channels, let a stillness flow through me and through all Jewels on my wave-length. That way they can listen as I look on. I register that Margalit’s heart has stopped its frenzied fibrillating and I can even sense a low, slow vibration telling me that Jasper must be within touching distance of her.

  A chubby child, one of the Others, I think, walks past. She reminds me of myself at that age. It seems she does not see the suit and will keep walking, but perhaps its colours, faded yet still distinctive, are captured in her peripheral vision. She stops, walks back and st
udies it.

  Pick it up, I urge her silently, even knowing that my Jewel frequency cannot register with her. You’re a bulky little thing but it will fit you. Who knows where it will take you? Take us all?

  She actually bends down to examine it. In the distance a bus rumbles toward the stop near the café. She looks up at its approach, down at the suit and, in the unselfconscious way of children, hoists up her ragged skirt. From around her middle, which I see now is not really so bulky, she removes an outlandish belt, its diverse, gun-metal grey segments welded together with all of an amateur’s deadly art. She lays it gently on the footpath, not twenty-five metres away from where we sit, many Jewels in the sunlight. She picks up the suit so recently worn by my sister and scrambles into it. The bus hisses to a halt in front of her and she manages to hoist herself up the stairs just before it drives away. Closing my eyes for only a moment, I think the future rides with her.

  A dog comes to nose around the alien object the girl has discarded from around her waist and it is as though the animal’s movement breaks a spell. All of us who have been watching the little pantomime of the girl and the suit in some sort of trance are suddenly galvanised. The belt the child wore was not really a belt. This time the cigar was not just a cigar.

  Every Jewel knows by heart the emergency number that exists for just such crises. As though directed by some invisible conductor, countless fingers play the identical panicked symphony on their mobile phones. In a rare display of harmony, perhaps we jam the switchboard at the bomb disposal unit. Perhaps our deadly synchronicity even detonates the explosion.

  When it comes, the blast from the belt flings me through the air. I hear glass but do not feel it. I am flying. All my channels are open. I hear the cries and screams of other Jewels quite close by, but somehow they mingle with the soft, sweet sighs of Margalit. For a blinding moment I actually see her naked body. It makes a victory arch beneath Jasper as the two of them continue to defy the odds.

  ‘Wow!’ The blue of Bethany’s eyes seemed to darken as the sun went down. ‘Did all that really happen?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve told it as I remember it.’

  ‘Are you saying the suit was magic?’

  ‘More like Kevlar. With benefits.’

  ‘What happened to Marg…Marga…?’ She stumbled over the syllables.

  ‘You can call her Pearl. It’s English for Margalit.’

  ‘So, what happened to her?’

  ‘She died. A bomb next to an ambulance. No suit. Nothing to protect her.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ said Bethany. ‘Why do they hate you so much; why do they keep killing you?’

  ‘We keep killing them, too. That’s what it’s come down to.’

  ‘But that’s just stupid.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s been stupid for a long time.’

  ‘So when will it end? How will it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe never.’

  Bethany’s eyes became an even darker blue. Tears aren’t italics but somehow, they’re louder.

  THE TEACHER

  Iwas ushered into her life in the springtime of my tenth year. She was only fifty-five but her face was already deeply furrowed. It seemed to me then that she must have been at least ninety-nine or a hundred. And she was tiny. I could not understand why she would choose to inhabit the frame of a girl my age. In spite of that, her black, gleaming eyes level with my own could still strip me of my pre-adolescent secrets. Although I would tower over her in only a few years, she could still make me quake if ever I provoked her to anger. Which I tried, with limited success, not to do.

  She was volatile, too. I learned soon that silence was safest. There were older girls in the class, and later, older women. Perhaps their lives had meshed with hers too late to learn the secret I intuited so quickly. Locate and inhabit the eye of the storm or bend in the face of the gale and survive.

  When I was in my twenties she would still harry me.

  ‘You are late, Jacqueline! If I were as unreliable as you are, these classes would surely disintegrate.’

  ‘There is a hole in your tights, Jacqueline. You cannot master the simplicities of a needle and thread? Remain behind. I will teach you.’

  ‘You do not concentrate, Jacqueline. Yoga is for the mind, the mind as well as the body. In here we must discover how to make our brains as supple as the rest of our anatomy.’

  ‘You are not a star in the firmament, Jacqueline. You may not glitter when you find an exercise easy and then fade when that concrete band you call your spine will not do your bidding. Be consistent. Practise at home. By coming here once a week you will achieve nothing I value.’

  Even when she was admonishing me, the way she uttered my name in its every syllable made it sound like all things beautiful on the Champs Elysees. Yet she was Polish, from Warsaw, then Palestine, with an extraordinary gift for languages. She spoke German and French, Polish and Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, as though each language had been her mother tongue. But all those European accents had superimposed themselves onto her English so that her pronunciation and inflections would forever expose her as a stranger in a strange land.

  As we both grew older, for some reason she would consult with me.

  ‘Roll over now, girls, onto the chest. Raise the right leg. Bend it slowly. Now grip the right ankle with the left hand and raise the thigh gently but thoroughly. What does it mean, Jacqueline, “peripatetic”?’

  As she talked, she would stalk around her sun-filled classroom, noting our every movement of muscle and sinew; smiling slightly if our breath came faster or sweat appeared on our foreheads.

  ‘Jacqueline, what does it mean?’

  How to explain with my leg angled skyward and my whole body protesting?

  ‘You,’ I would say on a sigh. ‘It means you as you are right now, walking and talking and teaching. Like Aristotle. But instead of lying on the carpet, we should be following you.’

  ‘Then you are in error. Our class is not peripatetic, but you will all be my disciples nevertheless…Back, bend your spines be-a-ack.’

  Yoga was her life and her obsession.

  ‘When I was forty, my entire body was crippled by arthritis. I woke up one morning and I knew—from everything I had read, everything I had heard—that this exercise, this yoga, would be my salvation. So, I worked. I fought my body and I conquered it. It submits to me because I command its obedience. Do you understand that, Jacqueline? What it is to work? Not to dream. Not always to dream.

  ‘Lie on your backs, girls. Lift both your legs high in the air. Straighten those legs. Have them in the air at perfect, perrrfect right angles to the floor. Now raise your hands and grip your toes. With integrity.’

  Until I was seventeen I went to those Saturday morning classes, scared to go, scared not to. Compelled by the force of her. Then I was promoted and permitted to attend on Wednesday evenings.

  ‘You may join the women henceforth, Jacqueline. You, too, are a woman.’ Did she smile?

  ‘Sit up straight, ladies. Legs together directly out in front of you. Now grip your left ankle and place it on your right thigh. The lotus position is not difficult if you would practise, ladies. At the end of the day, do not collapse mindlessly in front of the television. If you must watch, sit on the floor and work your legs. If you have time to rest, you have time to work. It is not a paradox. Turn around ladies and look at Jacqueline. Her ankles are supple and her hip joints pliable. Look how she sits with such ease. This is what we are aiming for.’

  Her words were a cool breeze drying the perspiration on my hairline.

  Another year passed. I finished school and travelled overseas to study at the university in Jerusalem. Although I did not see her, come Wednesday nights, my joints would tingle, my blood quicken. Occasionally I exercised, chiefly to amaze my new friends with my rock-steady head stand or my limber lotus.

>   Then I returned—from milk and honey to vinegar.

  ‘So, you have come back, Jacqueline, and you have not worked. You are betrayed by your body. I can see that you have not worked for the entire twelve months.’

  ‘Well, not at yoga, perhaps, but at the univer—–’ I had forgotten how to be silent and safe.

  ‘If you have done no yoga, then for me you have not worked. You are here so I presume this is where you wish to be. But you must understand that I cannot waste the time of the ladies, Jacqueline, teaching beginners who are not supposed to be beginners. Perhaps you would prefer to return to the Saturday morning class with the children.’

  At nights and in the mornings before lectures I worked. I wouldn’t let her say again that I belonged with the children. In under two months my body had regained its old suppleness. She smiled and knew her power. I did not realise then that she thought she could channel her iron into my soul.

  ‘You dream, Jacqueline, and you do not concentrate on what I say. Do you confuse my carpet for your bed at home that you should so relax and allow into your eyes such…such womanhood?’

  She was too honest not to have completed the sentence once she had begun it, but she surprised even herself with its conclusion. Yet the colour that flamed in my face confirmed her judgement. Sweat made my leotards prickle, but I said nothing. I was back on those well-worn paths of silence and obedience.

  ‘So, you have had a man, Jacqueline,’ she said at session’s end, ‘or a man has had you. Would you like to take a bow at the Sydney Opera House? And next time will you want a shout of encore? Please make sure that your methods of contraception are safe. I had one son, born when I was no older than you, and he took away my youth. That is where it all ends, this…this fire in your loins. So, you have had a man, Jacqueline? It is nothing of which you need be so proud.’

  When, some few years later I married, my husband was incredulous at the hold she had over me. He did not understand that I could be ill and not miss a class, or tired, or needing to make love, but put it all aside just to go.