“Ha ha,” said Halimi, knitting his eyebrows together. “I’ll kill them all.”
We watched a few episodes of a British detective show while eatingmujadarawith tahini and tomatoes that Halimi made. He fell asleep in the middle of the third episode, and I began nodding off too. From outside, I heard the sounds of children coming home from school and cars returning from shopping for the weekend. A pigeon settled on the table on the balcony and began pecking at crumbs.
“Limi,” I said quietly. “Li-mi,” I repeated, extending the syllables.
“Give me five,” he mumbled.
I called Simone. They were already at the hotel. Lily had slept all the way there in the car and was now lively and talkative. Simone carried on a conversation with her while she was talking to me, so it was hard to tellwhether they were on their way to the swimming pool or on their way back from it. Either way, Halimi was right: Lily was fine.
I got off the couch and stretched. A sense of sweet indolence spread through me. I’d earned it. I stood on the balcony and looked out at the sea. I inhaled the salty air and sipped my now-cold coffee.
I went back inside and saw that Halimi had woken up and was handling the mushrooms with excessive precision, adding and removing bits from a tiny digital scale.
“How much are we taking?” I asked.
“Dan said between two and a half to five grams,” Halimi replied, adding a little more.
“So I’ll make it five. He said they’re pretty mild.”
As I locked the front door of the house, I had a nagging feeling I’d forgotten something. We left Halimi’s phone at home, taking only my own old phone in Halimi’s backpack in case Simone called with something urgent. “Did you bring water?” I asked Halimi, who was already standing on the sidewalk.
“Of course, Diti. Let’s get going,” he answered, staring northward to the end of the street.
I dropped the house key in my purse and stroked the door handle in an almost involuntary gesture, as if I didn’t know when I’d be back. I shook off the feeling and followed Halimi.
Like most times when I left the house, I was aware of the discrepancy between the manicured gardens around me and our own wild backyard with the Persian lilac tree whose foliage reached in every direction. A beautiful red and yellow lantana, whose thorns pricked anyone who came too close, was entangled in the bars of the garden fence; this was the real border between our house and the rest of the world.
A silver Jeep raced toward us. Halimi grimaced. He had a general aversion to vehicles, and he absolutely loathed Jeeps—in his heart ofhearts, he was a true Tel Avivian who got around exclusively on bicycle or, when absolutely necessary, by taxi. Since our move to Atlit, we had needed the car more, which aroused his defiance.
As we walked hand in hand, I felt a sense of serenity.
I loved Fridays in Atlit as much as I’d loved them in Tel Aviv, and in Jerusalem before that. The impending quietude, the clatter of pots and pans from the windows of nearby houses, the gradual stillness of the road.
The air was warm, shot through with cool gusts of salty breeze. The smell of fried onions and garlic that wafted through windows grew fainter the farther we walked away from the neighborhood. Halimi’s hand tightened around my wrist as we left the paved road and continued onto a dirt track.
The rich, dark taste of the dried mushrooms we had eaten lingered in my mouth. I imagined them migrating down to my stomach, stirring nerves and stimulating synapses in my brain. We kept going, our eyes on the strip of beach to the west, toward the ruined fortress and military base. We also looked northward, in the direction of Le Destroit—an Old French name meaning “Narrow Passage”—and all the construction work in between. I knew that Le Destroit had been built by the Knights Templar in the early twelfth century as a fortified watchtower hewn from living rock—sandstone—to protect coastal travelers; they had then dismantled it once the larger fortress, Château Pèlerin, was complete. But unlike the château, the ruins of Destroit were open to public, offering a romantic and somewhat melancholic gaze to the past.
The sun was dazzling, despite the wide-brimmed hat I wore. I sat down on a rock by the side of the track. “Pass me the water?” I asked. He took the bottle out of his backpack. I heard the faint sound of string instruments coming from far away and a high-pitched singing voice. “Can you hear that?” I asked him. He inclined his head while I drank water in big gulps.
“The birds?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “strange music. I can barely hear it myself. Probably hikers with a guitar.”
“Stop freaking out, Diti,” Halimi said. His pupils were dilated. He was skittish and excited, raring to go. If he’d been alone, Halimi would have walked all the way up the coastal road to Haifa without stopping.
We kept walking without talking. We took deep breaths, and each time I inhaled, the air reverberated in my chest. Everything around me resonated with everything else.
“Wow, this is powerful,” I said, panting a little. “It’s only just hit me, and I’m already seeing spirals in the bushes.”
“Look, look,” Halimi said and suddenly grabbed me by the arm. “Look!” I raised my eyes in the direction he was pointing and saw a flock of flamingos descending upon the salt pools, gigantic pink birds whose wide wings I heard flapping before I even understood what was happening.
“Is this real, or am I hallucinating?” Halimi didn’t answer and I focused on the flamingos as they landed. How had Halimi noticed them with his terrible vision? I stared at the flamingos for a long time, and in my mind’s eye I saw them going up in flames and being reborn out of their ashes.
All at once, I become hyperconscious of my own body and everything covering it—linen pants the color of slate and a pale-gray tunic in finer linen. The sun hat protected my eyes and kept my mind inside my head. I knew that if I removed it, the whirlpool in my brain would overflow. I felt beads of sweat appearing on my forehead, my heartbeat reverberating in my veins, the tampon I’d inserted before we left widening inside me, drenched in blood.
The coin hanging on my neck felt hot and pulsing. I placed a hand over it and felt it throbbing in sync with the beat of the flamingos’ wings overhead. Now and then, one of them flew above us, raising its tremendous wings, and sometimes two or three joined the group—awesomedelusions in flaming pink. We stared at them for an indeterminate amount of time—perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour.
Halimi was the first to snap out of it.
