Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  2014, Hospital (near Tel Aviv)

  Let us first listen to the sounds of the fat man endlessly dying. The beep and whirr, the hiss, pump, hiss of it. An adjustment is made, a suctioning and clearing, and then we are back to the endless electrical rhythm of the machines.

  Ruthi smooths at his blanket, tucking a corner, when the night nurse arrives.

  “I don’t like it,” Ruthi says. “I don’t like the way he looks.”

  The way he looks? The night nurse raises an eyebrow, stepping back to consider him—this big bear of a man in his big mechanical hospital bed. She cannot see a lick of difference from the way he looked last night, or the night before that, or in the weeks or months or years that preceded.

  She tries her best to appear deferential to Ruthi, who is neither doctor nor nurse, not even a relative, but some sort of functionary who’d become indispensable to the man during the height of his powers and, at low ebb, is still the one whispering into his now stroke-deaf ears.

  Both women are private hires of the General’s sons, who insisted—even in this fine institution—that their father live, at every moment, with someone by his side.

  The nurse, under Ruthi’s gaze, closes her eyes for a moment and considers the cadence of the General’s steady machine-fed breathing. Then, touching his cheek with the back of her hand, she takes his temperature in the way only one who truly knows could. No change to him. This she lets Ruthi know with a glance.

  “Well?” Ruthi says, waiting for some kind of diagnosis.

  What can the nurse say for the nine thousandth time, when nothing at all is amiss, when the great general lies there on his bed, waxed and rouged like a Red Delicious, looking like a fat Lenin on display. Their dear departed murderous leader, whose family will not let him die.

  What can she say to appease this unrelenting worrier, who—the nurse is convinced—has kept the General alive, year after year, solely through the power of her constant declarations that he was about to be dead?

  “Has the doctor been by?” the nurse asks, hoping only to engage and calm Ruthi and then usher her from the room.

  “Of course the doctor has been by,” Ruthi says. “It was Brodie today, and what does that old fool ever see? He runs an intensive care like he’s getting kickbacks from the morgue.”

  “Didn’t he say anything?”

  “You think I listen when that walking death sentence talks?”

  Ruthi glowers and takes up a towel, which she uses to wipe at the edges of the General’s mouth. She checks all his tubes and feeds, the ins and outs of them; she drums with a fingernail at all the digital vitals flashing on their tiny screens, as if to increase their accuracy with a tap.

  The night nurse, God help her, would have pulled the plug on this whole operation long ago. She is sure there are plenty of folks waiting for the General down below. Scores to be settled in the afterlife, long-dead enemies sharpening swords.

  Still not satisfied, Ruthi leans over the bed’s railing and presses her lips to the General’s forehead. “I’m telling you, he feels hot to me.”

  “Maybe it’s you that’s a little cold. The room tonight—”

  “The room is fine. It’s him that’s not right. Anyway, it’s not your concern, because you know I’m not leaving.”

  “My shift—”

  “You can forget your shift. Head home.”

  “Now, Ruthi,” the nurse says. “Any longer and you’ll miss your bus to Jerusalem. You can sleep with your phone under the pillow. I’ll text you if an eyelid so much as flutters. Eight years in that bed. Without a word. Without moving.”

  “The eyes, though, when they’re open . . . and the first finger, when his son talks, or when I read—”

  “Yes, yes. He’s ready for the Tel Aviv Marathon. I’ll sign him up.”

  Ruthi scowls, full of affront. “Something changes and no one sees. The doctors are blind to it, you are blind to it.”

  It’s clear on the nurse’s face that she marks no difference. “You look tired, is what I see.”

  “I’m not tired,” Ruthi says, now trying for tenderness. “Honestly. You go. Sleep an extra night for once. Anyway, tomorrow is my day off—easy for me to see the week through.”

  Ruthi takes a step forward and gives a friendly pat to the back of the nurse’s hand. In that touch, it is the nurse—who indeed notices everything—who thinks, yes, it is Ruthi running cold.

  Ruthi, like the rest of Israel, had watched him from afar for nearly the whole of her life. In his last years among us, when he was actively ruling, and leading, still stomping about and warring, she had—more than most anyone—the privilege of serving at his side before that became the literal embodiment of her days.

  Sitting by his bed, she never saw any quantifiable change to his warm, gray, seemingly empty self. But Ruthi could always tell when his soul was leaning back her way. There was no way to explain it. She could sense when his mind stirred and swam up, peering out from just below that shimmering surface. The body that held it quietly chugging away.

  When the worrying sons asked, or the doctors, when the occasional reporter who still remembered tried to get her to shed some light, she would not use the image of water, or talk of his soul as if it were a kind of man lost in the woods. She would tell them that he suddenly fills up the room and then is gone just as quick. A consciousness rolling in, like a storm coming through.

  When this did not suffice, which was always, she would simply revert to the stories she’d been raised on. She would recount the tale of King Saul’s visit to the Witch of Ein Dor, of Elijah appearing at the cave of Shimon bar Yochai. Her point was that spirits far more removed than his have long, in this land, returned to advise. That before Heaven and before Hell, before those newfangled Christian notions became all the rage, there was another place where souls rested after life was done. The good and bad penned up together without judgment, and always within reach for counsel. If that was possible, how much more likely was it that the General was somewhere alert and at the ready, especially when his body—a wonder—still hung on in our world?

  “It is a time of grave danger for the nation,” Ruthi would say, when her telling inevitably turned to a plea, “and the Jews left rudderless at the helm.” Sounding desperate, she’d say, “Everyone’s moved on, and him, right here, ready to lead.”

  The listeners would nod kindly, or nod politely, or nod with an understandable indifference. Often, that nod might hold a contempt that Ruthi was unafraid to address.

  “The answers are in there,” she’d say. “In him. There has to be an expert somewhere who knows how to ask and get answered.”

  She could see how they regarded her, a sad soul herself. They treated her as a ghost in the room.

  It was a lesson in how power shifts. When the General was seated behind his desk in the prime minister’s office, his laughter billowing out through closed doors, the waiting heads of state would curry Ruthi’s favor, wooing and deferring, knowing that, more than the General’s generals, or his cabinet stooges, the woman who worried over his snacks and his ChapStick, who made sure his hotels had the right pillows and that his plane never, ever took off without the newest pictures of his grandchildren stowed aboard, that she was the one who could best get Israel’s obstinate, unyielding leader to hear the other side.

  On the days when the medical staff listened to Ruthi politely, she would point them to the Bible she read daily by the General’s bed. This should be their only guide, she’d tell them.

  They would prattle back at her in the language she’d become fluent in. They would talk of in vivo connectivity and corticothalamic function, reference the newest research and the unpublished studies that they always spoke of as being on the horizon, as if ideas rose up from behind the ocean every morning along with the sun.

  Scientifically, what they held to be absolute and undisputable when it came to the inner life of the General was, even more than Ruthi’s religiosity, still a matter of faith.

 
; That night, with Ruthi beside him, is not a peaceful one for the General. There is only the crack of the gun, the one shot, one son. A fever dream is what we’d call it, if we could still call it dreaming. A simple, horrible nightmare, if he were asleep.

  But he is neither of those. He is living in the infinite, ever-present unendingness of that single shot. Of all his bullets fired, of all his endless wars, all of existence for the General is a bright sunny morning, reading the paper in the den, and then that crack rippling the calm. The one shot he did not fire is the one that now keeps firing, a ball set loose from a prize Ottoman gun.

  “Lily!” he calls. But she does not come.

  He had heard a shot. He had been hearing that shot, lifting his head from the paper, turning an eye toward the sound, while judging distance and caliber, playing the echoes off the hills and fields of his farm.

  He is already calculating return fire, judging how a bullet aimed might bend and drop on the currents of air, his body lit by every susurration of October breeze.

  He’s already mapped where his own weapons are, knows how much ammunition he has, and counted off those whose lives he might be responsible for in his midst. All of this takes place outside of language, and outside of thought, assembled in another kind of consciousness. And all this information is processed and acted upon within an instant, even less—a gift that, when coupled with a great amount of luck (or some kind of mythic national fate to which he was inextricably tied), has kept him alive, has gotten him through what he should not have survived, leaving him in the fall of 1967 in his den, with a newspaper, and a hot mint tea—already cooling.

  And a bowl of salted almonds.

  And a bowl of fat figs.

  It is those bowls in front of him, the sight of those bowls beneath the edge of his newspaper, the stain of salted fingers smearing newsprint, that tells his mind where he is, tells him that he has heard a shot but does not need to dive for cover, does not need to scramble for his gun, does not need to defend or conquer, and so he begins to lift his head and calls, “Lily.” But Lily does not come.

  It is the lifting of the head that seems to go on for centuries. This is the part that he cannot make sense of.

  That shot—it never seems to go away.

  2002, Berlin

  It is ridiculous, Farid knows, to compare this perfect, placid lake to the ocean, or these tiny sailboats of mahogany and teak to the floating bucket he’d learned to fish on as a boy. But, still, sitting out on the dock in the evening, watching the sunset drawn out across the water, it reminds him of home—an idealized, dreamy version of his miserable, embattled home.

  He sits on that dock, behind a mansion on Lake Wannsee. He is a member of a small yacht club, made up of the aforementioned fleet of classic, pristine boats.

  One of the perks the membership affords him is a prized right-of-way. He has a key to a modest gate nearly invisible in its plainness, set as it is among the puddled iron entrances to the manses of Am Sandwerder. Through it, he may walk along the narrow path between two towering residences and, climbing down the hill, reach the little marina where, of late, he sits more often than he sails. He comes now a few evenings a week.

  He’d heard of the place through a friend of a friend, who knew that he’d grown up “sailing.” Farid had laughed out loud at the word.

  What he’d grown up doing, he’d said, was surviving.

  He’d been born into a formerly landlocked and land-loving Ramla family, refugees who’d been driven to Gaza by the Naqba. First his grandfather and then his father had eked out a living working other people’s fishing boats, learning the craft, before they’d squirreled away enough to buy a broken-down boat of their own.

  It was on that boat that Farid and his brother had learned to haul the nets, mend the nets, how to pilot the boat and fix an engine, which, more often than not, meant knowing where to hit it with a wrench to start it up again when it conked out.

  He also learned where to find fish when the Israeli Navy declared a blockade or a high alert, when they moved the accepted mile marker back to where the trawling was harder and where you could—with the Palestinian fishermen anchored side by side—practically skip from the deck of one boat to another all the way back to the beach.

  It was from that family boat, nearly a decade prior, that Farid had been willingly plucked up and hauled over the bow onto another, larger ship while out at sea. While the Egyptian smugglers reached out their hands, it was his brother who steadied the boat, who made sure Farid did not fall into the sea. It was his brother who’d said to him, “The big fight is yet to come. We will need money, we will need strategy. We will need distant bases, manned by those who look good in a suit.” Farid had laughed at his brother, who smiled back, sad. “You could never take a punch,” his brother said. “I will do the warring, and you can fight the fight from afar.” Then the Egyptian smugglers who’d taken him on, and taken the money he’d saved for years toward that purpose, gunned their engines and aimed the bow toward Spain, from where—no thanks to those pariahs—he’d eventually made his way here, to Berlin.

  Farid didn’t have two pennies to rub together back when he’d been mistaken for a yachtsman. The night it had been said, his stomach was grumbling from hunger, and his back hurt from the grunt work he’d been doing, but he was wearing the suit he’d just bought—for he understood that his brother was right. He had a look to him that would work in his favor, if ever he got the clothes to match.

  “Not sailing, but surviving,” he’d said in response, and his friend’s friend had laughed and given him a happy shove. From then on, Farid dreamed of the day he could call himself a sailor, and he was driven toward that day by the dreaming itself.

  He knew then he would find a way to make enough money, beyond what he needed to live, and beyond what he needed to send home, and beyond the great sums he’d need to provide for the cause, if he’d wanted to guiltlessly join his friend’s friend—as there was an invitation involved—at the “little yacht club, not even yachts, really. A rinky-dink operation, a few boats barely bigger than Sunfish.” This oasis (which was anything but “rinky-dink”) was out on the edge of the city, along the necklace of lakes that curled up to the forest, with the airport and the autobahn—the empty stands from the AVUS’s racetrack days—just on the other side of the trees.

  Farid made a name for himself in business, importing and exporting his way into the upper economy if not the upper class. He moved what needed moving to make money. And moved what he might to help his fellow Gazans in their plight. And so that his money might make money on its own, he’d invested in the markets and exchanges of the world. He bought stocks. He bought real estate. He owned part of a bowling alley in Manhattan, and a grocery store in Blantyre, which took in almost as much on a Saturday as the government of Malawi itself.

  Farid finally wore those fine suits and got himself expensive haircuts that other rich people might note. And, despite a drink now and then, and a woman, when a woman would have him, he still went around with the welt of the faithful man marking the center of his forehead and, aside from his brotherly commitments, paid his own personal zakat many times over each year.

  When he’d felt secure in Germany and German, as well as with his wealth, he pushed his way through that gate and walked down to the lake and the boathouse. With great confidence, he’d told the Japanese man who ran the place that he’d grown up on the water.

  Dressed, once again, for the part he wished to have, he lied about his proficiency, twisting his wrist to show off the weight of his fancy watch, as if this might hypnotize Takumi, who actually didn’t seem to care at all, amiable man that he was.

  All Takumi said was, “Take me out for a sail.”

  The pair set out in a quick twenty-six-foot Soling, the lone vessel that belonged to the club itself. Farid failed miserably at his certification run. As he did, Takumi just smiled and cheered him on, and helped him raise the spinnaker and helped him not get killed by the swing of the boo
m, and did not allow him to drown them both, when it seemed, with barely any wind to push them, that he still might upend them. It was the perfect mix of Japanese politeness and fault-finding German unspokenness, so different from the frank, no-nonsense ways of Farid’s rough-and-tumble youth.

  It made Farid love this man, who allowed him, in a dignified manner, to come clean and admit everything he had said was false. That’s when Takumi said, “Even better! I love to teach.”

  It was as vulnerable a moment as Farid had had since leaving home.

  Other than the fact that Takumi, without irony, referred to himself as “The Commodore” when addressing yacht club–related matters, Farid found him to be an excellent teacher and an easygoing and generous man.

  After that, the two of them went out twice a week, sometimes three. Takumi told Farid he was a quick study. Farid had never been happier than at that time, fully engaged in the moment, and at complete peace, cutting through the water with this magical fellow, in this magical place, with one man speaking in Japanese-accented German, teaching another with his Arabic-accented German, how to sail from what was the American International Yacht Club based on a lake in Berlin.

  Four years later, Farid felt as comfortable, and knowledgeable, as anyone else who belonged.

  Comfortable enough to come while away the evening as if it were his own stretch of waterfront, as if the mansion up the hill behind him were his own. And as he once had pictured himself occupying the spot where he now sat, he now pictured a day where a house like the one looming high at his back might also be his.

  But mostly, when he was out there sitting, Farid simply was. It was the only time he managed to shut off. He’d always thought meditation must be like prayer without God. But, sitting on the edge of that lake of an evening, he’d come to understand it was something like this.

  On quiet nights, when there was a little wind coming up, barely enough for him to read the ripple on the water, he’d watch the boats rock in their moorings and listen to the perfect sound of those halyards hitting against the masts, and ringing out like bells.