The Distance Between Us Read Online Free PDF

concoction, Jerusalem. It took Caddie no short while to come to terms with its heap of competing religious rituals: rabbis issuing eerie and obscure edicts about light switches and women’s wigs; imams with their barely coded urgings to the street; priests swinging platters of incense and muttering in inconsequential Latin. All of it colliding and overlapping like an exaltation of crows within a city that often seems far too compressed.
    She remembers striding off into Jerusalem alone that first day nearly five years ago, eager to absorb the territory she’d been newly assigned to cover. She tramped through the walled Old City, paused at an Arab café for a sesame-covered bread ring, and practiced her Arabic with the owner. She fumbledwith the still unfamiliar shekels, then boarded a bus full of Israeli soldiers and eventually got lost in Mea She’arim.
    By day’s end, she sensed what lay over the city like a quilt: large rules with horrifying consequences. Rules way beyond the superficial restrictions of manners she’d known before. Absolute, binding, primitive rules that got their backbone from blood and stones and God. Rules that she didn’t yet fully understand, but knew she had to follow.
    T HE FIRST THING SHE NOTICE as she steps into the building is that Mr. Gruizin has painted a thick scarlet stripe on her mailbox. Of course. He invariably heads downstairs with his paintbrush whenever one of his neighbors travels, whether on annual reserve duty, business trip, or vacation. He claims the stripe is a barrier to danger, intended to keep a wanderer safe. The paint on Caddie’s mailbox feels rough and substantial beneath her fingertips. Does he consider his effort successful this time?
    She unlocks her apartment door. Usually when she’s been gone, she heads directly for her bedroom, dumping bags and jacket along the hallway. Usually she wants to inhale the leftover scent of her that lingers on the sheets, the towels. She’s eager for the sight of the window across from her bed, its familiar view of the street below.
    Now, though, she’s brought to a halt by— shit, by a bunch of inanimate objects. Her desk against the wall, computer atop. She can see Marcus standing there kneading her shoulders, lacing his fingers through her hair, urging her to stop working. (Why hadn’t she stopped working?) The coffee-table photography book of Paris he gave her last Christmas when they came back here after covering Bethlehem to sit side by side on the floor, opening presents, eating popcorn. The tall glass on the table next to the couch. He drank water from it—held in his right hand, touched to his lips—minutes before they left for the airport.
    The air vibrates, becomes dense and watery.
    Kill the bastards.
    But how?
    She looks at her own hands: these hands that twice wrung a chicken’s neck. When Caddie was sixteen, Grandma Jos grew sick, so the chore of killing the chickens fell briefly to Caddie—before she gave up and bought them already killed and cleaned. Both times, she’d turned her head away and let her hands act on their own. And except for the initial revulsion, it was much easier than she’d expected. A chicken’s neck is startlingly tenuous.
    Now, though, her hands seem too small, too distant from her body to be of any real use.
    Behind her, the front door opens. Ya’el has used her spare key. One arm is outstretched to embrace, the other wrapped around a can of Boker coffee. Ya’el’s uncontrolled frizzy hair clashes with her off-the-rack blazer in earth tones, creased from a day working at the bank. “Oh my God, Caddie.” Ya’el hugs her again and directs her toward the couch. “And Marcus. God.” She smells of lipstick and black olives. “Which arm?” she demands in her husky voice.
    Caddie lifts her left arm slightly and pulls away. “I’m all right.”
    Ya’el sits back. “I’m so glad you’re finally home. I thought somebody would try to talk you into staying away for