When Vivi leaves the coffee bar she never takes the short, direct route home. First, in nearly any weather, she steps outside the shopping arcade, parks herself on the nearest bench—a slatted wooden affair that the Tel Aviv municipality occasionally paints green—and smokes one of the three daily cigarettes she allows herself. She stretches her legs out as far as they will go, wriggles her toes, watches passersby and birds, and enjoys each deep inhalation of her Winstons. When she has had her fill of smoking and looking, she rises slowly, as if with regret, and chooses a direction. Sometimes she will walk to the right because the woman who just walked by was wearing a beautiful pair of shoes, and sometimes she will walk to the left because there are a few clouds in that direction. There are days when she closes her eyes and spins around, then chooses left or right, and days when she stands waiting for a sign, any sign, and does not move until that sign appears. It always does, though once it took a full five minutes, during which a little boy stopped to ask if she were lost.
Then she begins her perambulations, wending her way from street to street in concentric, uneven circles. She walks eastward down Kaplan Street past the peaked-roof houses with flowerboxes built by the Templars, toward Azrieli Center, where she bends her head backward to stare at the edge of the triangular tower as it spikes the sky. She walks north to the open emptiness of Rabin Square. She walks west under ficus trees dangling vines like moss to the shade of the Royal Poincianas at Masaryk Square. And mostly she walks south, where Tel Aviv really happens.
She has what she calls her Theme Walks, still capricious but with a motif. So there is Scent Walk, where she picks up on the smells of coffee and steamed milk, falafel and shaved lamb’s meat, hyssop seasoning and roasting cashews and coriander and chicken on a spit and even certain people, leaning into their wakes as they pass; there is Foliage Walk, for noticing and naming the great many flowering plants she encounters; there are Jewish Walks, mostly at holiday times, when she counts Stars of David and synagogues and Orthodox passersby and Chabad emissaries and old men selling skullcaps on overturned orange crates. She has Graffiti Walks and Merchandise Walks and Architecture Walks and People Walks. Her most frequent are Baby Walks, featuring soft, cuddly babies of every color and size and women with bellies in various stages of pregnancy. On bad days she has Ugly Walks: dog shit on the sidewalk, people spitting, honking cars, the junkies and pimps near the old Central Bus Station. No matter what kind of walk she is having, though, she is aware of the stunning, relentless blue sky and green leaves nearly all year round. She wanders past old stores—Zion the Tailor, Madame Julie’s Institute of Beauty, a hardware store offering “Hebrew labor”—and shiny new places, their names written in English only. She cuts through parking lots and apartment buildings and hotels in order to reach backstreets, she emerges at the seashore and traverses beach after beach, each with its own crowd and style. There are people she waves at along her way—some whom she knows, some just because they seem pleasant—and at times she stops to exchange a word about the weather or the traffic or a cute baby or an elegant dress. She talks more to women than to men, since the men usually misinterpret her intentions, but children get more of her attention than anyone else. She walks like this for an hour, sometimes two, until finally she has had her fill of the city and can go in peace and silence to her apartment.
This ritual began years earlier, in a different country and climate, and continued quite naturally, almost compulsively, after her dramatic return to Israel. Mostly, in the twenty years that have passed since then, she has not missed a day, whether she has just finished work in a bicycle repair shop, a nursery school, a pastry shop, a library—after all her jobs, no matter whether she spends her days on her feet or at a desk, she walks, clears her mind and fills it up again, tries to observe but not to think or even feel. Her footsteps grow slower as she approaches home; she smiles less. There will be no messages on the answering machine save those from her worried mother, Leah; there will be breakfast dishes to wash and rumpled sheets either to stretch taut or nap on, there will be walls taunting her loneliness and framed photographs flaunting other people’s happiness and her own, long ago.
Maybe her flatmate, Pincho, will be home and awake, maybe not. She likes finding him there, a genial, patient presence, a good listener, someone who, like Vivi herself, has few plans outside work and welcomes time-consuming disruptions, always ready for a new project, an adventure. She loves, too, his perfect, effortless male beauty, the way every feature seems expertly crafted. After nearly two years sharing a flat, that beauty still catches her under the rib cage, tingles in her fingers and toes. She wipes her face of all interest or attentiveness but secretly she watches every movement and gesture: the way his pale gray eyes grow luminous with excitement; the way his smile spreads slowly, evenly, across his face until no corner of it remains untouched; the nervous thrum of his fingers when about to meet a member of his family; and the tightening of his countenance—eyes that narrow, lips that purse, all of this puzzling to Vivi—when he realizes that a man or a woman has taken notice of his looks and is wooing him.
She lets herself into the apartment and knows at once she is alone there. Pincho’s door is ajar, the flat is fresh with open windows and cross breezes. His favorite mug and another—one neither she nor he drinks from—stand drying on the countertop. She peers into the waste bin and sees tissues, the glint of a shiny packet farther down. She assumes it is a condom but she closes the lid before she can tell for sure. She glances about the kitchen, uncertain what to do now or for the next bundle of hours that stand before her like a dark thicket of pines.