Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “Now I owe him respect? Do you know how many nights I almost got killed because of his crackpot politics?”

  “During your service?”

  “Yes, during my service.”

  “What danger did you face? You demolished terrorists’ houses in the night. Houses don’t fight back.”

  “You don’t think that’s a crazy job? Sneaking into some village with a bag of explosives and leveling homes?”

  “If the terrorists were still in them, maybe. But this is the relatives. These are the houses where the already-dead terrorists once lived.”

  “Which raises its own issues, no, Mother? Giving five-minute warnings to old women who never race out the door with anything but their olive oil and a picture of Arafat? It’s pitiful.”

  “How else do you punish someone who’s already gone? It’s a deterrent.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I don’t have to think so. I’m not the one who did it, you are. Do you think so?”

  “I was doing my service. That was my job.”

  “So it’s a deterrent, then.”

  “No, it isn’t. I think it’s an incentive. I think it’s a fucking terrorist recruitment campaign.”

  “So now it’s your fault when they send us terrorists?”

  She loves to do this, his mother, to dispense her clipped and nagging motivational speeches and unasked-for life advice. Much like the blowing up houses, her son thinks, his mother’s talks seem to have the opposite of the intended effect.

  As to this age-old argument about the usefulness of the General’s many crusades, they were both careful to stick with the latest uprising, so as not to slide back to Lebanon and Tyre and the war from which the father he couldn’t remember hadn’t returned.

  The guard closes his eyes and takes a pull. He needs a moment to self-medicate before engaging again.

  He counts down in his head, and then blows a long puff of smoke toward the Knesset across the way. He blinks away the dryness before turning to his mother, who now leans back against the railing, the panorama behind her.

  “I think it’s the General’s fault,” he says. “That whole shitty Second Intifada and the ruined future that’s followed. And let’s not forget the prospect of all the spectacular shittiness yet to unfold.”

  “You blame both the past and the future on the General? That’s quite a lot of power to afford someone. Maybe you respect him more than I know.”

  “When you torpedo peace, it reaches both ways.”

  “The lost peace you put on him too? On the General who pulled every last one of his beloved settlers out of Gaza, as he once did in Yamit? The very father of those settlements and the only one to take concrete steps toward withdrawal? That is your enemy of progress?”

  “When telling the Palestinians different mattered most, he took a thousand men up to Haram al-Sharif to let them know who’s boss. The Second Intifada was just them telling him back something different.”

  “Again with the thousand men and that stupid walk up the hill?”

  “It’s symbolic. Symbols matter. They give shape to a time,” the guard says. “Shape to the abstractions.”

  “Shapes to abstractions? From your mouth?” His mother is not having it. “You should only be so smart. This,” she says, waving at his words as if they still hang above him along with the smoke. “It’s because you sit all day babysitting that brain in a cage. What you just said, it comes from him. I can tell.”

  The guard gets up, frustrated, and grabs hold of the rail.

  “Better to babysit a brain than to babysit a body.”

  His mother takes hold of the balustrade beside him.

  “No, son,” she says. “Not a body. I babysit a dead man so powerful, he continues to live. You, you sit over the living, already dead. A coward who earned his spot in the dark.”

  “I’ll agree that he’s an idiot, but he’s actually sort of brave. He risked everything, and lost everything, for what he believes.”

  “What does he believe?”

  The guard looks to his mother, embarrassed. “He never says.”

  Ruthi pats her son sweetly, lovingly, on his pale, pale arm.

  “It bothers me that you truly don’t understand the world and yet somehow think you do. What worries your mother is another generation of Israeli men like yourself, who think they know it all and don’t have a clue.”

  Ruthi moves away from him, shifting over to the plastic window boxes hanging from the railings.

  One of the planters is completely overgrown with giant flowering basil. Ruthi snaps off the tops and starts to pull the dead leaves. She talks without turning.

  “You’re beyond ignorant, my left-wing son, if you think the Palestinians needed the General to start that Intifada.”

  The guard laughs out loud at this. “Left-wing? Mother, I’m a secret prison guard, and a Golani soldier, and a Beitar fan. I listen to the Shadow on my iPhone and vote Likud every time.”

  “Your point?”

  “I’m only saying, the right has moved so far over that, from where you stand, I look left.”

  Ruthi snorts at that. “Well, don’t call the Temple Mount ‘Haram al-Sharif’ in my house. It already has a name, a Jewish name.” Ruthi lets the handful of yellowed leaves she is holding drop from the balcony into the empty, garbage-strewn lot below. “And know that the last Intifada was inevitable. If you don’t believe me, ask any Arab. They were looking for an opening and the General gave it to them. They could have stayed quiet. They could have kept their casino and their airport. They could have had a capital right here in Abu Dis. They could have had near everything they wanted. And they threw it all away.”

  “Sometimes, almost what you want just isn’t enough.”

  “Fair enough. Only remember, it was your mother who had to welcome the parents of our murdered schoolchildren. Your mother who had to sit with the parents of the soldiers whose bodies were dragged through the streets. Their protests left a lot of bodies, and a lot of survivors that your mother had to lead into the General’s office, so he could tell them their children hadn’t died in vain.”

  “Now your boyfriend is also a social worker?” And now the guard can’t control himself, now he goes where he shouldn’t. “Let’s not make the man behind Qibya, and Sabra and Shatila—”

  “In Beirut, he only turned a blind eye,” his mother says, stopping him. “It was the Phalangists who did the killing.”

  “A murderer, Mother. A butcher.”

  “I know what he did in the past,” she says, “same as you. But that same General saved this country from certain destruction many times.”

  “No one disputes that.”

  “But your mother is trying to tell you something else. I’m trying to tell you what the General had planned for the future. He’d have given you and your Palestinian friends just what you wanted. He’d have saved this country for good too. I know what would’ve come next. If only—” she says.

  “If only he’d lived?”

  “If he’d gone on as he was. The General was going to make two states. He was going to make peace. A tactical choice as strategic and painful as war. Peace was the bomb the General was going to drop.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “If he ever finds his way back, he’ll end up looking more lefty than you.”

  The guard shrugs and takes a pull off the joint, extinguished. He lights it and pulls again, holding smoke, and then offers it to his mother, an invitation she’s refused a thousand times. “Try it,” he says. “I promise, it’ll help you calm down.”

  She demurs, but it makes Ruthi think. “You know what?” she says. “Go fetch your mother a glass of wine.”

  “For breakfast?”

  “Look who’s talking. I’ve been up for more than a day. I think, in this instance, it’s all right.”

  The guard nods. He goes off toward the door, and Ruthi watches his beautiful, skinny self, her son in his worn briefs, with his amateurish
tattoos horribly prominent wherever she looks—dolphins and tigers, a child’s choices etched onto a grown man.

  The guard returns with an open bottle of white wine from the fridge and, along with it, a box of chocolate wafers and an empty jelly jar for a glass.

  He finds his mother already sitting in his chair and goes back and drags out another to join her. She drinks in silence, and he smokes in silence, and they eat the cookies together.

  It feels quite lovely between them, and at some point they both tip their chairs back and both hang their feet over the edge of the balcony’s rail. They stare out over the city, a span of red-tiled roofs and then that beautiful carpet of cypress and evergreen trees stretching out toward the Jerusalem Hills.

  2014, Limbo

  A dozen. Ten dozen. A hundred dozen Egyptian tanks rolling in. Four times that number in armored vehicles, and another four times that in men. A Yom Kippur bloodbath, as thousands of Egyptian troops bound across the Suez. Their engineers drop bridges and the infantry swarm. They clog the canal with rubber dinghies, bear-crawling up the berms on the Israeli side. If God had split the sea for them, they’d still not have gotten across that fast.

  And what do they find waiting at the Bar Lev Line?

  A few score Israelis dug into holes.

  The General stares into the sandstorm churned up by all that movement. Like a curtain draped across the world, tawnying the October sky. Last time he was down here—right here—it was as peaceful as an empty beach. Nothing but silence, so that he picked up on the drumming of its little feet as a yellow scorpion scuttled across his boot. Now the ground shakes from the noise as if from an earthquake that never ends. And with all that billowing sand as backdrop, making the light so strange.

  Ruthi reads to him from the Bible, the portion of the week. She cobbles together her own version of the Hayom Yoms, psalm and song, prayer and piety, and whatever commentary of the ancients she can uncover that is relevant to the goings-on of the broader world. Because of this practice, she has become learned and sage.

  Growing up in Darb al-Barabira, her oral tradition was drawn from the kitchen. Her lessons learned from her mother as Ruthi sat in a corner, grinding away with mortar and pestle locked between her knees. Her family had stayed after so many others had gone. And she knows she has it in her, a hereditary ability, in the face of all hopelessness, to hang on and believe.

  The General knows they could’ve turned this war around at the onset if they’d taken the position at Missouri during the first three days. He’d arrived there to find a quarter of the Egyptian heavy armor blasting away. Infantrymen swarming, a force that quickly grew beyond counting.

  He has not slept from the start of the fighting, hunting a route to rescue that still eludes. How the Egyptians were able to breach. How they sneaked up without sneaking—with the government watching every move. It is the thought he is mulling when his scouts bring back word. Water cannons, do you believe it? Embankments a hundred feet high, and the Egyptians use water to blast their way through. They laid their pontoon bridges at eventide and drove through the fresh valleys they’d made.

  A moon in early evening and then pitch-black until dawn, perfect cover for a crossing. And the Jews anyway distracted by penance, their stomachs stuffed for the fast, and their heads chock-full of atonement.

  He had warned Military Command about the Bar Lev forts months before. “Sitting ducks,” he’d told them. “Mobile defense is the only way.” They ignored him. His ideas too big, his plans without respect for scale or budget or boundary. His record filled with rashness and ruthlessness and missions too costly for both attacker and attacked. “Look at the Vietnamese,” he’d said. “Look how they strike, light and quick and unencumbered. If we can catch Egypt off guard,” he’d said, not knowing that surprise is exactly what the Egyptians had planned.

  The General pressed on and on, brawling in the war rooms as he did in the wars. He would not stop until Command paid him heed. They gave in. They were making changes. But, like everything in Israel—a two-year wait to get a telephone line—here, along the borders, the forts were half shuttered and the mobile units still locked in place, beached and unprepared.

  All his warnings, and always they told him, “Don’t worry, my friend, the Egyptians are weak. The Egyptians are frightened. Look at how they bungled ’67.”

  Ruthi reads to him from Jeremiah, and she reads to him from Isaiah, stressing the appropriate passages again and again. “Who else but you ‘with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked’?”

  She takes the sponge on its stick, a little lollipop of pale yellow foam, and dips it into a cup of glycerine-thickened water. One sip going down the wrong tube could be, for their fearsome, unstoppable leader, his end. She reaches over and wets his cracking mouth, splitting and scabbed at the corners.

  “Come back,” she says, openly begging. “Come finish what you started.”

  Southern Command had set up flamethrowers along the canal, a child’s imagining of a solution. They were going to send the Egyptians running from jets of fire, toast the enemy up like bread. And where is this man-made inferno? The General focuses his binoculars in the distance, though he knows the answer. No gas. No flame for the flamethrowers, while the Egyptians, with their water cannons, come rolling through.

  The enemy, they fight beautifully. Batteries of SAM-3s to keep our air force at bay. The Saggers tearing everything to shreds. All of this, it must be the Russians, and the Germans, and maybe some brand-new Libyan planes in the sky. A shopping spree is behind a war like this. The Egyptians push ahead like real soldiers—they have been training hard over the last six years. No motivation like humiliating defeat. They must hear every splash of a Jewish dive into that Red Sea water, every sizzle of a kosher steak on the grill, every moan of Jewish romance on Israeli cotton sheets amplified, all of it on seized Egyptian land.

  The General comes to an immediate decision. It’s time they forge their own passage back into Egypt. The Jews made it both ways before, they can find their way again.

  He will find his own lane between enemy battalions. He will sneak along it and surprise the invaders, attacking from behind. It was a brilliant Egyptian assault with a brilliant Egyptian defense, but somewhere there must be a gap in the rampart.

  The General can already see that, while the Egyptians fight well, they are already drunk with success. They probably only planned to take the eastern bank of the Suez—and no more. But they already taste progress, taste victory. Sadat must have his eyes set on liberating the Holy City, on Jericho, on every name mentioned in the holy books.

  The General is calling for maps. Demanding aerial photos. He is sure the Egyptians won’t see it coming. They won’t envision a tap on the shoulder and then a punch in the mouth. He will find a way to cross, and then, like Moses, he will hide in the reeds.

  The General can picture it already. The first of Sadat’s soldiers to remember his sweetheart, to pull a photograph from his breast pocket, the first one to shed a tear thinking of flag and country, all full of national pride, he is the one who will be first to turn back toward his beloved Cairo. And what will he see? Who will he find there but the Israelis charging his way.

  Ruthi knows the Messiah will come at a time when all Jews are good. Or when all are guilty. And to the General she says, I don’t know if we’ll ever get closer to one of those days than right now, yes? Either the world is right or we are right. Greater Israel, either our greatest pride or our shame.

  Ruthi dips her sponge.

  Ruthi wets his lips.

  Maybe that’s what you wait around to see? A born competitor. You need to know how it ends.

  The General stands where he should not stand, out in the open in front of his troops. His radio operator says, “Before the medic has to put you back together, sir, would you mind, maybe—” And this is when the tank right next to them takes a hit.

  A Sagger missile sneaks right into that wedge of negative space under the scoop of the turret.
A weak point on the Pat-tons, a fatal little fissure between the moving parts. It’s what he hates about the M48. Its top section sitting there like a melon rind, with that vulnerable edge curving up. The tank rears back, throwing its front end off the ground.

  The General watches the blast waves rippling, the way one watches the heat billowing off a tarmac, the pulses of energy barreling toward him. He feels himself lifted from the ground. His radio operator is tossed up into the air along with him. The boy, upended, looks like a turtle with that unit strapped to his back. Side by side, they seem to be airborne a very long time. What they both notice—for the General points downward and the radioman nods—is that the space where the radio operator was begging him to move is now under a tread of the tank, and that tread swallowed up in a ball of fire. In recognition of this, understanding, the radioman turns to him in the air and shrugs.

  He is aware that it is taking too long to land, and the General laughs at himself. Such a heavy man, what a mighty explosion it must have been to throw him this high. Always on duty, the General cannot resist taking advantage of vantage. To be able to peer down at the war, to see the battlefield laid out. It’s an opportunity not to be lost.

  The General turns again to the radio operator, still sailing through the air by his side. He can see that this brave boy is frightened. Not battle frightened but scared of this strange flying. The terror is clear on his face.

  A leader must know how to lead in every situation, and the General, taking charge, reaches out. He takes hold of the boy’s hand and he says, “Look at me. Just look at me.” The General says, “Tell me, from which part of the country do you hail?” When the boy answers, the General, who knows every inch of the Promised Land, all of it his home, asks a follow-up question, sweetly specific to that place. The boy locks eyes and, still agitated, begins to calm. The General, who never suffers remorse over a battle, finds himself, in mid-flight, feeling a rare pang of guilt.

  He feels bad about enjoying this restful soaring while the boy clearly endures. “I have an idea,” the General says, hoping to make things better. “Maybe it would be nice to hear a song?”