Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  Cautiously, the General lowers his gaze to his lap to find that the two bowls are where the two bowls belong. A comfort, followed immediately by another. His dear Lily—he has been calling for her—peers out from the kitchen, a towel in her hand.

  The General wants to ask her what is amiss. But then there is the sound of the shot—distracting.

  Leaning back, the General says aloud to himself (for he knows, already, his dear Lily will not answer), “Maybe it is that I am not well.”

  He is a legendary strategist, the General. He has always been able to see the best way out, even in the midst of chaos.

  Quagmire after quagmire, failure atop failure, with all his repeated ruinations and unravelings, the General has managed to reach all the way to the office of prime minister. Him! With all that blood on his hands.

  Yes, the General knows this to be true. He is their leader. He knows too this must mean he’s already old.

  This must mean he has already given up Gaza. This must mean he is busy planning for a Palestinian state. These decisions, he knows he has made them and that they fly in the face of all he’d ever believed.

  He takes particular interest in these concessions. Look at how his aged self is able to wield compromise as a new brutality. If he’s come to those conclusions it can mean only one thing. This must mean there’s some trickery behind it. He must somewhere believe it’s the only way to win the Palestinians’ ruthless, fecund, demographic war.

  The General flexes his stiffening fingers. He rolls his stiff shoulders. He tries on his now-creaky old self for size. It is not bad, this body, rickety as it is. And it fits so well, in his equally rickety, form-fitting old chair.

  This taking of stock, he finds it pleasing and so reflects upon a long life lived. He remembers his way back to boyhood and finds himself in short pants under the Tel Aviv sun. He stands in his mother’s yard as she walks toward him with a cluster of purple grapes held aloft. He can feel himself reaching.

  He fights his way forward, through the endless battles, military and political. He forges on until he hears it, not the shot but a different sound, like a wave crashing down. He hears the great rush of voices as the people chant his name. He has been crowned King of Israel, their savior. The General stands tall on the Temple Mount, bathed in this rallying call. He cannot see their faces, shielded by a phalanx, a show of strength.

  He is letting his people know that however painful the sacrifices he will ask—this place, hallowed ground, he will never surrender. Not the jewel of their unified, undividable city.

  To the edge of that thought is as far as the General’s mind will go.

  2002, Paris

  They do not exit through the door but climb out the bedroom window onto the little sloped roof of the caretaker’s shed. The waitress does not hesitate as they shimmy down on their bottoms toward the eaves.

  “Does anything rattle you?” Z whispers, astonished by the waitress’s alacrity and calm.

  “If the roof was higher, maybe,” she says. She then turns around and, slipping down over the edge, hangs for a moment before dropping the couple of feet to the ground.

  Z passes her the bag and joins her with a quiet thud. She helps him up, and while Z dusts himself off he peers toward the darkened archway at the front of the building.

  Seeing no one, he swings the bag over his shoulder and leads the waitress past the rear entrances, and beneath the second arch, beyond which stands a neglected garden, its trellis affixed to the perimeter wall.

  “This was actually once a road,” Z says of the cobbled path beneath their feet. “It was the first that ran directly from the river to the Sorbonne. That’s why the front entry is so wide.”

  “A perfect time for a tour.”

  “A relevant time,” he says.

  Z kneels down, as if he is going to propose, and, interlocking fingers, he offers her his linked hands as a step.

  They hop the wall and find themselves on the continuation of that path, in a courtyard that mirrors the one they just left. They pass under the archways and at the other building’s front gate they press the button to release it, stepping out onto the street.

  “You rented an apartment with its own escape route?”

  “I did,” Z says. “It’s not so paranoid when you use it to do just that.”

  Ready to bolt, Z takes hold of the waitress’s wrist. She pulls it free and takes hold of his.

  “Fair enough,” he says. And feeling like he maybe, just maybe, might survive this night, he takes off with her on a happy sprint over to the main thoroughfare and across the first bridge, where they meld into the nighttime crowd outside Notre-Dame. At Rue de Rivoli they slow their pace and step into a taxi waiting at a light.

  They sit there quietly, and the driver looks to them, properly annoyed.

  “Your call,” Z says to the waitress. “As promised.”

  The waitress leans her head toward the space between the seats and asks for the Hôtel de Crillon.

  “Are you kidding?” Z says. “That’s the fanciest hotel in the city.”

  “My thought exactly. No one is going to be looking for you there.”

  The waitress takes charge, putting Z at a table in the high-flown lobby so she can go check them in. He has questions that she shows no interest in hearing. All she wants to know is if Z wants to be awake or asleep. And when he doesn’t understand, she says, “Coffee or alcohol?”

  He opts for the former, and the waitress orders him an espresso and a champagne for herself. She goes off to get them a room with a confidence that truly surprises.

  Z maps the lobby, looking for pattern and broken pattern, for aberrancy and awkwardness, for sturdy shoes whose quality is at odds with the suit above, for greetings overly performative, for meaningful eye contact between strangers, for furtive checkings of phones or a nervous glance at a watch. He hunts the employee in one sort of uniform inexplicably manning the wrong station.

  In the midst of this, lit with hyperarousal and at his fight-or-flight best, Z sees the waitress throw her head back and laugh. He hears the sound of her laughter from across the room as their drinks arrive.

  Feeling a kind of ease, Z sips his coffee and eats the micro-sized heart-shaped cookie plucked off the side of his saucer. He forces himself to savor it, even though it tastes as if it were made of some elegant mix of pistachios and butter, rosewater and sand. He tells himself—maybe the least harmful deception of late—that it is a treat.

  As the waitress comes happily his way, he thinks fate should have switched their roles. She is gifted at compartmentalizing and looks more natural on the run than he does. She sits in the ridiculous bergère chair across the table. She knocks back her champagne, and, standing, leaves a few coins. “They’ll put it on the room,” she says. “Now let’s go hide in style.”

  “Holy shit,” is what Z says. He’s never seen anything like it. The sitting room is extraordinarily grand, as is the view out onto Place de la Concorde.

  “It’s like being on a honeymoon,” he says.

  “Yes, a honeymoon where someone is also trying to kill you.”

  “Like that, exactly,” Z says. He opens the door to the bedroom and says, “Holy shit,” a second time. As there is no bedroom, but a staircase leading to it.

  “Come up here,” he calls. “This is unreal.”

  The waitress joins him, taking it all in stride.

  “Yes,” she says. “It’s very nice.”

  “We can’t pay for this,” he says. “I can’t. You can’t.”

  “I can,” she says. “That is, my father can and already is. It’s on his card. And, please,” she says, putting up a hand as Z tenses, “don’t start with the paranoia about him being linked to me and then me to you. I told them not to put through any charges until we leave.” The waitress goes over to the window and pulls aside the curtains. “My family, we stay here all the time.”

  “All the time?”

  “Since I was little.”

  �
�I thought you were sharing a tiny place with too many roommates. Remember? No tub!”

  “I am.”

  “For sport?”

  “To build character.”

  “So you’re super-rich, then?”

  “The super-rich find the ‘super’ part unpleasant to admit. It’s not polite.”

  “But you are?”

  “Do you think I’d have come along if I wasn’t? This is not a poor girl’s escapade. It’s for someone who does not worry about having very big problems be made to go away. Anyway, have you ever heard the average Italian speak English? Listen to me,” she says, of her fluency. “Growing up in Rome, English like mine does not come cheap. You’re the one who works in intelligence. These are some very obvious signals to miss.”

  Z agrees with her, both aloud and to himself. He thinks again that they should really swap places. The waitress is so much better at all of this than him.

  2002, Berlin

  Joshua slaps at the night table, hunting the clock, then feels his way around the wall above the headboard, searching for the switch that sets the sconces over the bed alight.

  “What time is it?” he says into the phone, now for the second time, and still without reply.

  He knows Farid is the night caller, and that Farid has been holding his silence for an inordinately long stretch, breathing heavily down the line.

  Joshua believes the breathing to be a kind of soft cry, a noise he could not imagine coming from this man.

  “What time is it?” he says again as he collects himself, though at this point, he can see the clock flashing 3:55.

  “You are the new one,” Farid says.

  “I don’t understand,” Joshua tells him. “I am the new what? What’s going on?”

  “You. You are new. It’s not a collaborator on the ground. Not a drone in the sky. It’s only you.”

  “What is not a drone in the sky? I don’t understand, Farid.”

  “Tonight, all of this, it’s a godsend, for you, yes? An added bonus beyond the strike? All of us trying to figure it out together. Everyone talking without thinking. All that new chatter for you to sift through, so you can better map relationships, better string the pictures together, moving all the tacked photos around on your boards.”

  “What boards, Farid? I don’t understand.”

  “It is sloppy behavior on all our parts, I know. But a leak this big must be patched. There is someone inside, the only option anyone can figure. As everything is perfectly secure on the Gaza end. Then it hits me—here in Berlin, a world away from the fighting. I am the one. I am the weak link. It’s all too neat and all too convenient, for you to suddenly arrive.”

  “What’s happened?” Joshua says. “You need to tell me.”

  “Even now, you continue.”

  “Honestly, it’s four in the morning. I’m not continuing anything. I was asleep.”

  “A massacre, Joshua.”

  “I don’t understand,” Joshua says, his voice gone high, and sweating already in his bed.

  “In Gaza they are pulling bodies from the rubble while the houses still burn. You hit your target. You killed my brother. Good for you, Joshua. You made him a martyr, which we can always accept. It is the children, Joshua. The building next door. The whole family dead. What have you done?”

  “What are you saying, friend? We are in Berlin. I am in Berlin.”

  “The Israelis dropped a bomb on my brother’s building. Only, when they leveled it, they leveled the one next door too.”

  “Please,” Joshua says, his heart racing. “Take a deep breath,” he says.

  He requests this of Farid but is really only trying to command it of himself. The panic—he is so bad with the panic, the panic is beginning to bubble and stir.

  “There’s no one,” Farid says. “No one new in our circle. Nothing new on the ground. Nothing has changed in Gaza, nothing in Damascus, nothing in Beirut. No one can come up with anything, until—”

  “Until what, Farid?”

  “Until I come up with you. It’s the phones, isn’t it! You show up with your business. You show up with free money, just when we need. Computers when we need. And I take them. I take your fucking refurbished phones. And I get them to my people in Gaza. And now my brother, and all those near him, are dead.”

  “Oh my God,” Joshua says, rushing to process. “You don’t really think—”

  “What I don’t think is that I can get over that gate. If I thought I could make it in there to strangle you myself, I would.”

  “Please, friend, what are you saying? I, honestly, don’t understand.”

  “How much better would this day be if I also afforded you the excuse to shoot me dead on your front lawn?”

  “No one wants to shoot you, Farid.”

  “Still, for this, for what you have done, we will have our revenge. Already, the streets of Gaza are filled with mourners. Already the people march. Turn on your TV. Find the news. You will see. A river of people five kilometers long.”

  “But I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Don’t embarrass yourself any further. This is a courtesy call from your enemy. I just wanted to let you know, the economy of terror only strengthens. For the children you have just taken, we will take from yours. That’s what I wanted to tell you, Joshua. There is a price to be paid. You have, tonight, just murdered your own.”

  “Now wait, Farid,” Joshua says. “Don’t say such a terrible thing.”

  “What is terrible to a Canadian? What does a sailor from Toronto care about Jews and Arabs around the world.”

  “Of course I care,” Joshua says. “Children are children. Whatever you’re saying, whatever you’re threatening—”

  “No one is threatening,” Farid says. “This is not about what we want to do, this is not about a plan to be made. I am calling so that you understand, what has already been put into motion did not have to happen. What already cannot be stopped was started because of this, because of you.”

  Joshua, who knows he should say nothing, who has been trained not to say a word, feels a deviant sort of urge to reply. It’s as if he’s somehow ended up on the wrong side of all the bulwarks and firewalls and partitions put in place to keep him from feeling, for Farid, an actual, human emotion.

  He makes a split-second decision. He says, “We didn’t start this fight.”

  “But you did.”

  “Whatever you’re going to do, I beg you, please—a sensible man. Let’s talk this out.”

  “Whatever I am going to do is already done.”

  2014, Limbo

  Hauling himself from the chair, the General folds the newspaper along its creases and places it, along with the bowls from his lap, on the tray, next to his tea. The sound of the shot, it pulls him. But he resists running toward it. Instead the General drives himself back to that mirror, where he tears off the sheet.

  What he finds for a reflection is his prime-ministerial self, and his mighty-warrior self, and his wounded-soldier bleeding-out self, licking his lips and dying of thirst. There in that mirror is his smiling, purple-smeared, grape-faced, short-pantsed self, whom the General is tickled to be.

  This iteration, built of iterations, fascinates the General more than it unsettles. He calls excitedly to his wife in the kitchen. He wants to catalog for her all these odd ruptures and twists in time.

  The General calls to Lily. But Lily does not come.

  He has never been without responsibility, never moved without purpose, and knows to this task too he must now urgently attend. He coolly and methodically tries to make sense.

  He thinks it absurd to posit that he is in Heaven, simply because he ends up in his beloved chair, on his beloved farm, time and time again.

  Equally illogical is to assume that he is in Hell, solely because of the sound of that shot and what he knows, racing toward it, he will find.

  Where is he then, he wonders, where time leaks the way it does, crossing and uncrossing, where a moment plays in an en
dless loop? He knows he is not dead, but this cannot be a life.

  And then he wonders, could it be some in-between place? A threshold from which to wait. A kind of Sheol, a limbo space, from where he could not, without his own approval, move on. There is precedent, of course. There have been, haunting this realm, other Israeli kings.

  The General laughs at that, an uproarious belly laugh. He has always said it—as a sign of confidence; to intimidate and threaten and cow—and maybe it has finally come to pass. Maybe it is all over, but nothing can kill him until he lets it. The General, stronger than death.

  Considering this last option, he lowers his newspaper and raises up his head from where he sits, relaxing. He has an article he’s been meaning to finish and his tea to drink. He could stay here forever. If not for the shot, he might contentedly sit in that chair for all time.

  “Come, come,” the General tells himself. For him, a man of action, to sit static for eternity. No, it is not a proper everlasting for a man of change.

  But how to remedy it? The tactician, yet again, finds himself fully taxed.

  The General looks to the empty brackets on the wall, the rifle gone. And he thinks, for such a job, of the curved Caucasian dagger in its sheath that sits in a shadow box atop his desk. It was a bar mitzvah gift from his father. A gift and also a responsibility. A bestowal at maturity, meant to signal what direction his life was expected to take. The others got fountain pens, and for him—smart boy, well-behaved boy, newly minted man—from his father he is given a weapon of war.

  He does not move to go get it. He cannot slit his own throat, he is aware. Not because of cowardice, of which he truly has none. It is because the General, though never a religious man, lives by Jewish principles. It is against all he has ever believed to take his own life.

  It would follow, then, that moving on from this place must defy physical action. The change, he hypothesizes, must come through an effort of mind.

  What if it were no more of an effort than waking oneself from a dream? The same quick, messy struggle, but with an opposite exertion, wrestling his way toward a deeper, darker sleep.