Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  And here it comes again, the laughter! Who would have thought that it would be with laughter that the General goes? To him it is funny to have to try so hard. How many had given their all to be the one to kill him? How many times had he given everything he had, simply to hold on?

  The General takes a last, deep breath. He shoulders that ancient and legendary drive, forcing what he knew as himself the other way. He settles back into his chair, and hears the shot, and runs to the road. He flies through the air with his radioman by his side and plants his feet atop the Temple Mount—a colossus. It is deafening now as the multitudes cheer him on, chanting “General, General, King of Israel!” He basks in the adulation. And from somewhere over it, he can just make out, in Arabic, the sound of that plaintive song.

  Ruthi stands over him, though he cannot see it. It is night, the broader family gone from the room, the mothers home tucking in children, the two sons standing outside the building in the always-perfect weather discussing what is to come. The night nurse, who was sound asleep in the corner, jarred by Ruthi, is already mumbling herself awake.

  Ruthi hovers over the General’s bed, pressing and pressing the call button and crying out, her voice rolling down the hall.

  One of the useless schoolboy doctors is on night shift. He comes groggy from his cot, fast-walking down the corridor because doctors do not run. A pair of staff nurses trail him, and when they enter, Ruthi points to the General and says, “Look!”

  The night nurse is up now, holding her cell phone in her hand, ready to summon the sons back to the room.

  While Ruthi points, demanding of the physician that he do whatever it takes, all in attendance now look at her like she’s a madwoman. The doctor, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, says, “There is no change.”

  “He is dying,” Ruthi says. “It is happening now.”

  She can tell from how they gawk at her. “How embarrassing,” “How pitiful” is what they all think.

  As that baby doctor opens his mouth to placate Ruthi, to tell her to calm herself down, it is not the General but all his machines that suddenly wake up.

  There are bells and whistles. There is a gaudy show of flashing numbers and spiking line, like a jackpot struck. The room awash with all that terrible information.

  In the split second where thoughts turn to deed, all look to Ruthi.

  Somehow, she’d caught it.

  This woman. Astounding. How could she know?

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  It’s always worse after the weekends, with Prisoner Z acting hurt and abandoned, and the guard, feeling high-spirited and refreshed after some time at home, returning to face his prisoner and be reminded of how trapped they both are.

  And now, it’s all that much harder.

  The guard sets up the backgammon board on Prisoner Z’s bed, and Prisoner Z, starting right in on him, says, “You’re acting weird again. And don’t tell me you’re not. It’s been a solid week straight.”

  “You’re projecting,” the guard says. “Because this place has made you insane, and you try and put it on me.”

  Prisoner Z tilts his head and gives the guard his best stink-eyed look. He’s not buying it. He shrugs and goes over to his shelf. He pulls the letter he’s written the General from where it juts out of the pile of magazines.

  He hands it to the guard, who puts it straight into his bag and, without looking up, shakes a die, tossing it to see who rolls first.

  The guard throws a five, and Prisoner Z throws a six. But Prisoner Z, on the edge of the bed, sits still.

  The guard, staring at the board so that he doesn’t have to look at Prisoner Z, holds out until he’s fully frustrated and then says, almost yelling, “There’s only one move to make. It’s a standard opening. I’ve seen you make it thousands of times.”

  “Do you know how many times I’ve made it, exactly?”

  “Please don’t freak me out with your crazy math,” the guard says, looking up. “Please, don’t tell me you remember exactly how many times you’ve had a six-five.”

  “Nope, I don’t,” Prisoner Z says. “But I can tell you that the score is now 21,797 to 24,446. You’re making great strides. I have less than a three-thousand-game lead.”

  Prisoner Z presses his eyes closed and, opening them, says, “If we play like seven and a quarter games a day, you could catch up in a year. But you’d have to win them all.”

  “It’s terrifying when you do that.”

  “All I’m saying is, it would be great to be tied again. I love it when we’re even.”

  “It’s your obsession with being even that put you in here in the first place. Nothing is even. The world, that way, is not fair.”

  Prisoner Z does not like this at all. Not the answer, and not the peculiar mode in which the guard is talking.

  “You’re being philosophical,” Prisoner Z says. “Or your dum-dum’s version of it. And you can’t tell me I’m making it up. You only reflect in here when things are dire.”

  Prisoner Z is stunned at the response he receives. He was poking about but did not expect to strike a chord.

  The guard’s color drains, and Prisoner Z thinks, if someone walked in on them, they’d have trouble guessing who had last seen the light of day.

  He reaches into his bag and takes out Prisoner Z’s letter. He places it on the board, between them.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you,” the guard says. “There has been a development.”

  “In my case? With this extraordinary miscarriage of justice?”

  “Sort of,” the guard says. “It’s about the General.”

  “Did he finally answer one of my letters? Is that why you’re giving this one back?”

  “He’s dead,” the guard says. “He died.”

  “Who died?” Prisoner Z says, his tone completely flat.

  “The General.”

  “That would be something,” Prisoner Z says, and he closes those eyes again, trying to picture it.

  “It is something. It’s happened.”

  “Then tell me which of his endless enemies finally put a bullet in his big fat head? Was the assassin domestic or imported? Arab or Jew? I really can’t guess.”

  “Not killed, just dead,” the guard says. “I’m not kidding. He passed away Sunday.”

  Prisoner Z is staring at the guard, blank.

  “This one?”

  “The one before. It’s taken me a few days to get the courage up.”

  This, it is a lot to process for Prisoner Z. It sounds like the guard is saying that the General, the one who locked him up and erased him, the only one who could bring him back into being and free him, is no longer.

  “I don’t believe you,” Prisoner Z says, not wanting to believe.

  The guard stays silent, which is its own sort of reply.

  “Then what did he die of, if he’s dead and no one killed him?”

  “Technically?”

  “Why ‘technically’?”

  “He died of complications of a stroke.”

  “He had a stroke? How do you not tell me that the only one who knows I’m here had a stroke?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “Well, when did he have it?”

  “Earlier.”

  “What are you saying? Was it in the papers? Did regular people know? Or is this something your mother told you during pillow talk?”

  “Fuck you,” the guard says. “And, yes, the stroke was in the papers.”

  “Fuck,” Prisoner Z says. “Fuck, fuck.” Then, with his eyes full of water, and looking right at the guard, intimate, “When?”

  “When was the article?”

  “The stroke. When did he have the stroke?”

  Here the guard gets up and, in a very Prisoner Z–like way, paces nervously in the cell. When the guard stops, he has his eyes down to the floor and scratches at a spot that isn’t there with his toe.

  Prisoner Z has never seen anything like this from him before. A c
ompletely new action he’s never cataloged in all these years.

  Again, Prisoner Z asks, “When did he have this stroke?”

  The guard steels himself. He looks into the prisoner’s eyes with real love. He’d honestly just been trying to protect him.

  “In 2005. Late December, I’d guess. Really, the big one, it was 2006. It sort of all happened right before and right after Sylvester.”

  “What?”

  “Eight years ago. The big one, right after the New Year.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “I mean, you’re kidding me,” Prisoner Z says. “You have to be kidding.”

  “He’s been in a coma.”

  “The General has been living in a coma.”

  “Sort of.”

  “In a coma?”

  “Sort of living. Since 2006.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “The only one outside this prison who knows I’m here has a stroke. The one person in charge of my fate—my freedom—has a stroke and you don’t say anything for nine years?”

  “Eight.”

  “What?”

  “Eight years.”

  “Fuck! How could you keep that from me?”

  “My mother and I. Well, more my mother. She prays. And she was hopeful. For his sake. For yours.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we were hoping, the two of us, and really, when you get down to it also the nation! We were all hoping, together, that one day the General—maybe he would just wake up.”

  2002, Berlin

  Joshua sits in the sunroom, overlooking the lake. He bounces a leg and wipes the sleep from his eyes.

  The kitchen door opens, and in comes the boy with two coffees on a tray. He hurries to serve and hurries away. Before the kitchen door closes behind him, Sander is already pushing through the formal entrance, his silk vest undone and, yet more shocking, his crisp shirt unbuttoned beneath that vest.

  Joshua can see Sander’s tanned and hairy stomach right out there in the open. He turns to the wall of windows, through which anyone with a pair of binoculars might see this break with decorum.

  Sander follows Joshua’s gaze and seems to understand his concern, and also not to care.

  He drops down in the chair next to Joshua’s and picks up one of the coffees. Taking a boiling sip, he says, “Shit,” and then, “Shit, that’s hot.”

  He blows atop the tiny cup with what Joshua can only acknowledge is a mighty exhalation and takes another sip. “Have you ever heard of anyone getting burned on an espresso after it’s already made its way to the table? Jesus,” Sander says, “that kid.” And then, squinting his eyes as if uncovering the conspiratorial, “Is there some way to turn up the boiler on those machines? Can you make it extra hot on purpose?”

  “I don’t think so,” Joshua says, listening nervously. For he cannot quite grasp how Sander, his reserved and stoic and generally silent German house manager, seems to have switched from speaking English to Hebrew.

  “Then that little shit must have run it in here just to spite me. He’s the most dangerous character under this roof, and the only one who’s not supposed to mean any harm. Even that evil little chef does his job without incident.”

  “I don’t understand,” Joshua says, stressing the English.

  He’s doing his best to catch his breath, though it hasn’t, since the phone call, fully returned. He looks out the windows again, this time at a racing shell passing nearby. He focuses hard on it, trying to mine the calm from all those oars breaking the water with an even grace.

  “You don’t understand what?” Sander says, fully committed to the Hebrew. “Is it the point I’m making that’s confusing, or the words themselves?”

  “Please, Sander,” Joshua says, practically begging. He knows the boy who brought the coffee can hear this in the kitchen. “I really don’t understand.”

  “Is that all you have in your fucking arsenal?” Sander says. Then, twisting his face up, mocking Joshua, he employs a tone that Joshua finds to be unfairly whiny. “‘What? What? Who is this? I don’t understand!’”

  Edging into a full-on panic, Joshua slides into Hebrew himself, pleading for Sander to quiet himself down. “What if the boy hears?”

  Sander shakes his head, as if there were someone else there besides Joshua, to register his disappointment. “That was the boy’s last coffee. He’s already gone. What you need to worry about is how we fix the mess that you made. What if the Germans were listening? What if the Americans, who listen to the Germans, were listening to them listening to us? The sirens may already be headed this way. And that’s without considering what happens if Hamas wants to fight it out right here. You, with your big mouth, have fucked us good.”

  Joshua presses at his chin with his palm, rotating it until his neck gives an audible crack. “What even happened over there? They’re talking about a massacre on every channel. There are pictures of people carrying dead children over their heads.”

  “Yes,” Sander says. “Evidently, our target was hiding in a taller building that tipped over onto a smaller building, where there was an unrelated family. A large family, judging by the reports.”

  Joshua turns pale. He can feel the tips of his fingers tingling, as if he might pass out. “So then, it’s really us who did that? We just killed a houseful of children?”

  “It’s not us. It’s that the larger building fell funny. It’s gravity behind that. Gravity unforeseen.”

  Sander then scratches at his hairy chest, and Joshua takes note of how powerful a man he is. It does not show, all that muscle under his clothes.

  “A baby girl,” Joshua says. “Two months old.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? It’s twenty of our kids on purpose, or ten of theirs by accident. No one forced our target to dispatch a stream of killers. No one made him make bombs.”

  “We just dropped a one-ton bomb onto a slum. We used a fucking fighter jet to strike inside our own borders. It’s not even an enemy state.”

  “No, no, no. That’s where you get it wrong. Palestine isn’t a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it’s a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country for the purpose of war.”

  “Do you know how insane that sounds?”

  “And do you know how many Israelis have been killed in the last week? The last month? Because I do. I know by heart. When you’re worried about the unlucky people killed today, think of the five Israelis killed last week in Tel Aviv, and the nine killed the day before them in Emmanuel, and the seven killed the month before that on French Hill, and the nineteen blown up less than a day prior in Gilo, and the seventeen blown up on a bus in Megiddo the week before. And that’s only June. All of those attacks facilitated by that one man. And those same attacks were all financed by, and likely plotted with, his brother, your friend.”

  “He is my friend. He was. We should still use him. If Farid can plan these things, he can also unplan them.”

  “You’re finished with Farid. And probably with the Mossad. We’ll see what the fallout is from blowing your own cover on that call.”

  “But he knew. He figured it out. He said it was me and those phones.”

  “He can say what he wants, you didn’t need to confirm it. I cannot tell you the ramifications of that slip, they reach far beyond the mission to which we were assigned.”

  “I’m the problem? I’m the fuckup here—because of that call? What about what we just made happen, you and I? What about that murdered family?” Joshua, as if absorbing what he’s said only after saying it, drops his face in his hands and lets out a moan. He looks back to Sander, who is unfazed. “I thought I was selling computers,” Joshua says. “I thought I was opening a pipeline so we could listen in. It would have been a dream, that kind of access.”

  “You? No, you are not selling anything, or opening
anything. You are just an idiot, who screwed up a simple, simple conversation. It was Joshua. Joshua was selling the computers. He was the one on the job.”

  “Yes?” Joshua says.

  “Joshua, for you, is done.”

  Joshua doesn’t dare say that he doesn’t understand. As a workaround, he goes with “I am trying to grasp,” which seems to enrage Sander in exactly the same way.

  Taking the arms of Joshua’s chair, Sander turns it from the table, pulling it forcefully, the chair’s feet shrieking against the tile.

  Sander does not release his grip, even when the two are facing each other, knee to knee.

  “Listen carefully,” he says, bringing his face close, as if to aid comprehension. “For you, Joshua is gornisht. The Gaza deal is gornisht. Berlin itself is gornisht. And, depending on how these next hours go, the Mossad is maybe gornisht for us both.”

  “Like that? For one single slip?”

  “Yes. For one treaty-breaching, illegal-action-on-foreign-soil-stating, possibly Geneva-Convention-violating admission of a slip. Now, you need to run upstairs and get me Joshua’s passport and the international license and the business cards right away. Go get me everything with his name written on it. You don’t want to miss your train.” Before Joshua can ask, Sander says, “We’ve got you on the seven forty-six out of Hauptbahnhof, switching at Hannover and then at Karlsruhe. If you make it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be back in Paris by tonight, as if none of this ever happened. Tomorrow morning, you’ll be at your old front, selling printer paper and mouse pads to the Iranians all day. The people of Tel Aviv will again be able to rest easy.”

  “How can it have been worth blowing the operation for one man? We could have kept it going. They’d have bought everything. Printers, scanners, laptops, copy machines. We could have been completely tapped in. Total access to all communication,” Joshua says. “I’ve only just finished the first part of the deal!”

  “This, we’ve been over,” Sander says, impatient. “Someone else is already Joshua this morning. Someone better and smarter and much more dangerous than you. I’m sure he’d have loved to explain it all himself. Unfortunately, Joshua had to run. He has some pressing business to attend to in Shanghai.” Sander looks at his watch. “By now, he’s already boarded his flight at Tegel and is busy telling the person stuck next to him all about what Joshua does.”