Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “I do not sing,” says the radioman, “unless, of course, that’s an order.”

  “No, no,” the General says, shifting the weight of an arm, and then a shoulder, to turn himself toward the boy. He does this in the way one might when rolling onto one’s elbow to talk to a lover in bed.

  From this position, up there in the air, the General pantomimes fiddling with knobs. “The radio,” he says. “See if you can get a station.”

  “Sir,” says the boy, “it’s not that kind of transceiver.”

  “Come, come,” says the General. “That sounds like defeat. That sounds like the attitude of a soldier fighting to lose. Why not give it a shot? How can you know, until you try?” The boy hesitates, and the General continues to egg him on. “Flip a switch,” he says. “What about that button you’re always paddling at on the side.”

  The boy pulls the body of the radio around front, careful not to drop it. He turns the knobs and, with a bit of fine-tuning, he holds up the handset right there between them. Out of it comes music, Arabic music. It is Umm Kulthum, the legendary singer, so legendary that both of these flying Israelis are already familiar with the ballad they hear. A song so famous even the Jews cannot not know it. “We are very far south,” the boy says, apologizing for the station. “No, no,” says the General, tilting his head, bringing his ear closer to the receiver. “It is a lovely song. Let’s listen.” And together, they take in this plaintive voice crooning in Arabic, and they fly.

  2002, Paris

  He shouldn’t have gone back to the restaurant to find her. Not the first time or any of the days that followed. He’d kept returning, though the waitress had never appeared again. Neither had that horrible, threatening Huguenot waiter, whose vanishing Z had taken as a positive sign.

  He told himself that the visits weren’t about her. He was crossing the river simply to satisfy his cravings for eggplant salad and poppy seed cake. He was exposing himself on those walks because, except for those lunches, he was left hiding in his apartment on an as-yet-uncommenced emergency family leave, a long-dormant excuse that was supposed to be Z’s fallback means of escape. His boss had invited him to kick it off early, which Z accepted over showing up at the office to act bizarrely normal, while being treated with threatening normalcy in return. He was afraid to drink a cup of tea there, or enter the bathroom or the stairwell, or to be out of view of the many coworkers who had no idea what his cohort at their company really did.

  Hunting for a better out, Z would run through every alternate scheme he could come up with, from mad dashes to the American embassy, to plastic surgery, to faking his own death. But he knew how his pursuers worked, because he worked for them. It was chaos theory and game theory and psyops and all the best intelligence and counterintelligence whisked up together. He’d think a plot through and then reverse engineer his own behavior in light of theirs, and then, working his way back forward, he’d map the steps he’d need to take to extricate himself from this bind in the face of their counter to his counter to their counter. He could see nothing better than his original plan, already muddled, which would have already seen him flown home to tend to his sick and dying mother, who was absolutely fine.

  He was losing his mind, he knew. He was rapidly going stir-crazy, harassed by the cycling of his own nightmarish thoughts. The best way he could describe it, the image that arose for a man who spent his time studying his room, was to think back to the walls of his first hovel in Jerusalem, the one he’d shared with his roommate, Yoel, while they were both studying at Hebrew U. When the rainy season started, the apartment walls would first turn very cold, and then very damp, and eventually, battered and battered by the rain and the wind, they would bead up with moisture, never drying, as wet inside as out. It would get so bad, you could run your finger along them and scoop up the water.

  At each spot where a droplet formed, a little black flower of mold would eventually bloom, and, as the winter dragged on, they’d open out, spreading and connecting up, until, by the middle of the season, the whole of those walls had turned black.

  That was what was happening in his mind, Z knew. With every day of worry and every day of waiting for what-he-did-not-know-and-could-not-fathom, he could see the quality of his thoughts changing, the bad ideas beading up and starting to glisten. He could feel the temperature of his consciousness shift and sensed the first black spots on the surface of his sanity taking hold.

  He tries to steer that Jerusalem memory to one of happier times, to warmer days up the mountain at the university, to sitting with Yoel and drinking beers in the empty amphitheater at the back of campus, the two of them silent, marveling at the sandy hills dropping down to the Dead Sea, and staring out over the heights of Moab and right into Jordan. Those peaceful thoughts, even when he reaches them, won’t take hold. Those perfect moments in that perfect place are all, for him, now ruined.

  Disconsolate, he trolls further and further back, trying to map every decision from childhood onward that had put him in this mess. How could he have ended up here? How had a little, religious, Jewish-American boy from Long Island become an Israeli operative, living undercover in Paris, and now a traitor to his adopted state? How could he have ended up being so many kinds of people at once?

  Z, with a hand over his mouth, pulls at his face, despairing, surprised that he suddenly has an answer. At least, as to how and when it all started. He has found the seed. The instant he’d discovered that inside one, there could as easily be two.

  He is maybe eight, maybe nine, walking home from Ace’s candy store in West Hempstead, his sleepy suburb, with a Hershey’s bar in his pocket. And he sees on the street where the anti-Semites live, he sees the big boys out in force, the tough kids, and the mean kids, wearing their denim jackets with patches, and their denim jackets with the sleeves ripped off. And him, in his saddle shoes, and him in his khakis, the line visible on his pant legs where his mother has let down the hems.

  It is then that Z discovers in himself a propensity for the life he has ended up living. For he can remember the little-boy judgments he made. He is already too close to turn around without catching their attention, though they do not consciously acknowledge him yet. Confidence, he decides, is his best bet. He will walk a straight line, maybe nod his head when he passes, the safest route. There is only one problem. He recognizes, as if outside of himself, that his whole identity, the only one he’s ever known, is that of a tantalizingly beat-up-able religious Jewish child, with a yarmulke pinned to the very head he’s about to nod.

  That, right then, is the first time he does it. With a practiced motion, as if he’s done it a million times before, his arm swings up, and the hand—the hand with which Z now covers his own mouth—slides up across his head, as if smoothing out his hair. In one perfect action, the yarmulke is gone, palmed, and slipped into the pocket, where it’s swapped out for the chocolate. Suddenly, like that, Z is as Gentile as them. He feels it, because he has become it. And they, who would beat him on another day, pay him no mind. For Z is someone else, another child, passing with the candy bar that he’s already unwrapping.

  Even this memory, in its sweetness, is too much, considering all its attendant personal pain. Z cannot anymore handle his loneliness, or his isolation, cannot bear the tenor of his thoughts.

  It is evening, and morning is infinitely far off, and his lunchtime outing somewhere further. He cannot go on this way, and though he’s previously weighed the risks and found the plus side wanting, he will head out after dusk. He isn’t going far, and he isn’t going for long, and the peril outside his apartment seems better than what he faces inside his mind.

  If only Z had known in his perfectly lovely rooms in Paris what he’d come to know in his single cell hidden, he guessed, somewhere in the desert. If he’d had an inkling in that breezy French apartment of what true boredom felt like and true loneliness, and true limbo—what it might actually be like to be locked up, hidden away without hope. If he’d tasted real madness at that point, he�
��d not have decided that he was so bored and so crazy that, without TV or radio or a suitably advanced French, at the very least, he deserved a taste of the night air and something decent to read.

  With the summer sun forever setting, Z dresses in the half-darkness. He pulls on his jeans and peers out both windows, and heads down into his alley of a street.

  Z rounds the far corner and walks speedily downhill, past the little movie theater, to the churchyard park. Crossing through, he stops for a moment beneath what is known to be the oldest tree in all of Paris. Some things, he thinks, have survival in them. Some things stand, against all logic and all likelihood.

  He stops a second time at the fountain outside the bookstore. He cups his hands beneath the trickle of water. He drinks, and splashes his face, feeling happy to be out in the world.

  The crowds across the way still teem in front of Notre-Dame, and the tourists stream through the front door of the shop. Z relaxes just a hair. It would be an impossible place to take a life in any of the standard and messier manners, a difficult place to drag him into a van.

  Z circles the ground-floor labyrinth, making a pile under his arm, then climbs upstairs to see what else he might find. It’s here, straight down the narrow hall, that he sees a woman standing on her tiptoes and reaching for some high-shelved volume, her back and beautiful behind turned his way.

  He knows immediately who it is, and he knows that he is in love for real.

  Of course, he shouldn’t approach. He should take it as an ominous sign. After all, wangled coincidence, contrived serendipity, this is his bread and butter. It is how they do business, in his business.

  But, really, how could this woman end up on the second floor of the bookstore, her back to him, and already up on tippy-toes reaching? That would be too good, and too polished, and the fact that he is even considering the machinations of it is only a testament to the rotted-through-with-paranoia workings of his brain. Also, a mitigating factor: seeing the waitress again was all he’d been wishing for and dreaming of, maybe even more often than he fantasized about strolling down a bouncing gangway and stepping across the threshold to a direct, JFK-bound, New York City flight.

  When the waitress lowers herself onto the flats of her feet without a book in hand, Z is already over, tapping her on the shoulder.

  “Long arms,” he says as she turns. “I have them, if you need.”

  “Only browsing,” she says, and, taking in the sizable stack he holds, “I’m not as decisive as you.”

  “I read fast,” he says, and, considering the pile himself, standing there awkwardly, “I’m kind of a homebody these days.”

  The waitress, plainly feeling his awkwardness, stares down at her shoes.

  Raising her eyes, she points toward one of his novels. A big fat copy of Lonesome Dove.

  “That’s exactly the sort of book I’ve been meaning to read.”

  “This?” he says. “You want to read about cowboys and cattle for eight hundred pages? In English?”

  “I do. I’ve been thinking about America a lot.”

  “You have?” he says, too excitedly, as if it meant she were thinking of him. Trying to erase that question, to back away from his eagerness, he says, “Can I buy it for you, then? I’d like to.”

  “You can. But that would be odd.” Then, attempting greater clarity, the waitress says, “I think maybe ‘forward’ is what I mean. Or ‘intimate.’ It is a strange offer from you. ‘Odd,’ yes? Does that make sense?”

  He imagines she is going on because he has not properly responded. It’s not that he’s misunderstood. It’s that Z is doing his best to listen, trying to maintain eye contact, to engage with this woman. The waitress seems to have chipped a front tooth since he last saw her. And Z just wants to stare at that chipped tooth for a lifetime, preferably without interruption of any kind.

  He apologizes for making so forward an offer and then offers to buy it for her, still.

  The waitress lets him. And the novel goes into a tote along with all of his. From there, they walk the neighborhood, and she accepts when he invites her for a drink.

  They sit at Café St. Victor, one of the infinitely repeated, nondescript but effortlessly special bistros in the city. They joke and laugh and trade stories. They drink Kir Royales and eat fries, both talking nonstop, their conversation quieting only when he gazes at her lovingly or when she, having decided on dessert, is besotted by her chocolate mousse.

  He asks her about her particularly excellent English, which was extra-particularly strong for an Italian. “Yes, we’re unparalleled in all of Europe for not caring how good our English is,” she says. “There’s a small, private bilingual school in Rome, and that’s where I went.”

  “Is someone American?”

  “My parents thought it would give me an advantage.”

  “And has it?”

  “It’s made this date especially nice.”

  They have such a lovely time, such a warm and open time, that it surprises neither of them when she follows him home. He brings her back to his apartment, not caring if she knows where he lives. In fact, he desperately wants her to know where she might find him. Terrified that if she slips off, he might lose her again.

  They sit on his sad sofa and kiss for a long time, and talk for a long time, and then kiss some more. They move to the bed, and take off some clothes, with the waitress firmly returning Z’s hands to him whenever they stray too far. Z, overcome with excitement, kisses her and kisses her, happily losing his mind in a completely fresh and different way. They doze, with Z drifting off overjoyed. At some point in the night, they drowsily kiss some more, before falling into a deeper round of sleep.

  When Z opens his eyes in the morning, he cannot believe that the waitress lies by his side. The light shines brightly through the arched bedroom door, and a softer light brightens the room from the courtyard-facing window.

  The waitress opens her eyes, feeling his stare, and pulls the pillow over her head.

  “That was fun,” she says from underneath. “All that kissing.”

  “I thought so too.”

  She lifts a corner of the pillow to look at him. “Then we’re in agreement,” she says, lowering that corner and going back to sleep for quite a spell.

  Z runs out to the bakery for a baguette de campagne. He stops at the open-air market for fresh yogurt in little glass jars that make him feel even more in love. He buys fruit from three different farm stalls, berries and peaches, and a watermelon, which sends him into the closest shop for Bulgarian cheese.

  He sets out the whole spread on the apartment’s old wooden table and then hovers between the arch of the bedroom door and the kitchen, so he can start on a coffee as soon as she stirs.

  When the waitress finally stumbles out, she’s wearing her underwear and his T-shirt, the one he met her in last night.

  In place of a “good morning” Z says, “After I saw you at the restaurant the first time, I hoped, every day, that you’d come back.”

  “They stopped giving me shifts. The day I met you was my first and last.”

  “Sounds like waitressing may not be your greatest strength.”

  “It does, doesn’t it,” she says, sitting at the table and popping a berry into her mouth. “But maybe it’s yours? Let’s see how well you wait on me.”

  Z scoops and steeps and plunges. He pours the coffee into a bowl and brings it to her at the table, with a towel folded over his arm.

  “How am I doing so far?” he says.

  “Excellent service. I’d come back to this place.”

  “Would you?” he says. “Honestly?”

  She looks at him, taking real time to consider.

  “I’ve never dated a Jewish boy before,” she says. “We have kind of a shortage in Rome. But the way you act so vulnerable and so needy, the way you’re so polite and unaggressive in bed, all of it together is really sexy to me.”

  “So you’d see me again?”

  The waitress bites into h
er bread and takes a sip of the coffee, and she tells him to get her some butter. When he presents it to her on a saucer, she looks into his eyes, and—the whole of it, as far as he’s concerned, whistling through the space of that broken tooth—she says, “Who knows? I just might.”

  2014, Limbo

  Never has the General dispatched a single soldier for glory or sport. His detractors accuse him of spending their brave sons on nothing—when it is he, more than anyone, who values each and every life.

  The problem is that his most careful sacrifices still look like recklessness if one ignores a central fact: The General is tasked with fighting their wars.

  And wars are fed on men.

  They’d used him as scapegoat from the beginning. His own prime minister acting aghast, Ben-Gurion pretending he couldn’t grasp what the General had always, in every battle, made clear. He was fighting to win.

  The General would kill ninety and lose nine. He’d recede from a field of battle strewn with dozens of dead, carrying the two who were his back home. No other unit in the world fought with the General’s numbers.

  Whipping boy or no, the General’s job has always been to deliver vengeance. They’d hint coyly and speak in hushed tones when they needed something done. And when the General returned? They’d shake their heads and bury their faces in their hands while he stood before them, victorious.

  Never did anyone give a direct order. They simply let him loose as if he fought his own private wars.

  After every routing and reprisal they’d tell him, You cannot keep winning so well.

  “Winning so well?” the General says, and looks to Ben-Gurion, who gives no response. He turns to Dayan, who offers him the eye patch, tilting his seeing side away.

  Peres sits silently in a corner; ever the diplomat, he lets the other two men speak on his behalf.

  Ben-Gurion says, “They kill one of ours and you run off like Samson to bring back a hundred heads. The world will not take it. The enemy’s losses are too great.”