While Prisoner Z sets up the board he says, “You’re really spoiling me today. Our best preholiday party yet.”
“There’s something else!” the guard says, excitement in his voice.
Prisoner Z smiles faintly, already knowing. Every gloomy year in that cell, the guard marks one of the three big holidays with a present. The same gift, every time.
The guard pulls it out, wrapped. Prisoner Z says thanks and sets it, in its festive paper, aside.
They play backgammon. They drink until they’re more or less soused. The prisoner acting as close to himself as he has in a while.
As the guard leaves, the prisoner asks, “Is it rude that I didn’t open it? I can open it in front of you if you want.”
“No, no. To open it will make us both shy.”
The guard tosses the trash in the plastic bag he’d brought the lafa in. He stows the vodka and the backgammon board in his knapsack and, reaching over to the peg by the shower, removes Prisoner Z’s worn robe.
“I’ll just take the old one,” he says, standing by the open door.
“Do,” Prisoner Z says. “And enjoy the holiday with your mother. I imagine I’ll be here when you get back.”
“I imagine so,” the guard says, and locks that heavy door behind him.
Feeling too tipsy to drive and with two more hours to his shift, he sits in the dark of the supply closet that has been, for all these years, his office.
He taps at his keyboard and moves around the mouse, choosing which of the pictures to enlarge.
It’s the camera over the entrance that offers the best angle. It’s as if the guard, himself, floats above the prisoner in the cell, staring down.
He watches his friend sitting alone on the bed. The way the prisoner’s shoulders are rolled forward, the guard wonders if the prisoner is quietly crying, or simply considering his toes.
Prisoner Z straightens up then. He reaches over and takes the package, in its jolly wrapping. He undoes the paper carefully, as if he might reuse it for someone else’s gift.
The guard can see that the prisoner is, for once, laughing. It is his annual robe.
Prisoner Z holds it up, a new color. He stands up, puts it on, and, pulling the two lapels closed, he reaches—
Prisoner Z reaches down and reaches back, a habit with robes that he’s surprised he has not lost. Or is it that he subconsciously absorbed what he had not before consciously noticed, but—it cannot be.
The belt is on the robe. The belt is still there, hanging through its loops.
Prisoner Z first tries tying it loosely around his waist. He undoes the belt and reties it, more snugly.
He simply cannot imagine that the guard has forgotten.
The guard stays there, in the dark, at his desk and watches Prisoner Z tie and untie, tie and untie. And then slip the sash from its loops.
Prisoner Z holds it there, strung across both palms, its length hanging down on both sides.
The guard watches as the prisoner, his friend, slowly raises his eyes and looks right into the camera above the door. They know each other well.
From the guard’s perspective, it’s as if there’s nothing between them, no screen and no camera, no walls or metal doors, no numbers rolling and rolling in waves of code to build the picture that he sees. For the guard, it is simply and purely the prisoner looking up at him, mournful, staring right into his eyes.
It is a face of confusion, and a face of understanding. What the guard cannot tell is if it’s also a look of thanks.
But this the guard will leave for himself to wonder over. There are some things a friend should not see.
Easy as that, his prisoner steps toward the shower, into the one space to which the camera he monitors is blind. The guard does not change views. Instead, he reaches around to the backs of the displays and clicks them off for the first time in years. So rarely is this done, it is as if the devices themselves have their own capacity for shock. They make a sort of strange, crackling sigh as the electricity empties out.
With his foot, the guard flips the glowing switch to the power strip on the floor, and then, fiddling with the computer tower, he pinches the Ethernet cable from its port.
These actions, of course, do not serve to undo the moment itself. They stop time for the guard but do not, in the prisoner’s cell, slow anything down.
All the guard has done is shut his own eyes in three different ways. What he’s done is deny a record of a certain amount of time, though the cameras are still there looking, even if they can no longer share what it is they see.
It’s that notion the guard thinks about on his drive home for the holidays, racing to beat the traffic where it jams up by Motsa. He’s supposed to have dinner on the balcony with his mother, and, for that, he does not want to be late.
2014, Limbo
The General stands atop the Temple Mount, where the Holy of Holies once stood. He waits for a sign from God, a sign to make peace or make war, to make anything more than another tired political point.
He receives no signals, no auguries, no omens, no wonders. It was right here, in this place, that Abraham, lucky man, was sent a ram to offer in Isaac’s stead. The General himself was not, as a father, spared.
Listening, he suddenly hears it, the sound of that tune. That voice singing the song he so loves. He looks to the force that surrounds him, a thousand strong, to see if anyone else hears the same.
The men do not show it. And the General is confused, for each of those assembled now wears the face of his lost son.
The sons of Israel, they are all his.
Up here on this sacred, contested site, the General finally makes sense of it. He looks straight up to Heaven, and then out to the Valley of Hinnom, over the Old City walls, where the perverse kings of Judah sacrificed their own.
The General knows—warrior, peacemaker, murderer, saint—that his time on this earth must be up. He stands there listening to that voice, then to the sound of the needle as that silent record spins.
The General, who does not panic, who never hid from death, does not worry even now.
He looks one more time out over his mighty troops, out over his united Jerusalem, out to the Judean Hills that hold all of the history that to him ever mattered. The General stands on that high point, in God’s beloved city, the one He held above the waters when He flooded, in anger, the world.
2014, Down Under and In Between
Shells hit, and missiles strike, the walls around them shake. The tunnel, solid as it is, well built as it is, withstands. The part Shira can see, as if they’re in the belly of a serpent, ripples up ahead. She wonders if the whole thing might slither away with the two of them inside. The seams of the concrete sections rain down dust and then settle like old bones, when the moments of quiet come.
The lanterns stay lit. The candle he promised holds its place on the table and still burns.
The mapmaker, as if they don’t have a care in the world, pours her more wine, my love, my sweet.
“We have picked a bad night for our dinner,” he says.
“Unless, for us, it’s the best.”
Always positive, always seeing the bright side, this is why he has fallen for her. Though he can’t not ask, “How could that possibly be?”
“Maybe our horrible, self-destructive peoples, maybe our vacillating cowardly nations, maybe our brave soldiers always looking to die, maybe tonight they’ll finally all kill each other and see this conflict done. It is time, Old World style, to fly the bloodred flag of no quarter and fight until no one is left.”
“And how would that be to our advantage?” he asks, quite sweetly.
“We’ll just walk out one side of the tunnel and step into the future. We’ll live in whichever horrible world remains.”
“You do not mean that,” he says.
“I don’t mean that,” she says.
They eat their dinner as the supports around them groan and strain. They hear grim, ungodly noises reaching downward, as
if the land itself aches.
And though they are made for each other, and ready to die for each other, and overjoyed to be in the same place, the war breaking out above becomes too much to pretend to ignore.
Shira says, “For the first time in my life, I am deeply afraid.”
“Come here, then,” he says. And he pats his lap.
She pats her lap right back. “Being comforted would be nice. But not at the price of power. Why don’t you come to me?”
The mapmaker stands, and, instead of moving toward her, he pulls the tablecloth from the table. He does this without skill, a very bad magician. Everything set on it goes flying.
Amid the clatter, he says, “Should we not, then, just meet in the middle?”
“Yes,” she says. “In the middle of our middle. In the center of our dinner at the center of the earth.”
They sit on the table and put their arms around each other in a deep, satisfying hug.
The candle has gone out in the mapmaker’s rough clearing, and the toppled electric lantern has turned itself off. There is a single lantern left, hung on a bit of steel rebar poking out from the wall. It puts them in the softest of lights, in this very harsh place.
In this way, the pair sit like lovers at the sea’s edge, curled together in the sand. They lean farther into each other, feeling the full weight of the war above, both unsure in the moment, from which direction victory comes.
Acknowledgments
A heartfelt and colossal thank-you to Jordan Pavlin, whose commitment to this novel has been without bounds. I cannot thank her enough for her brilliant contributions and editorial advice. Thanks to my agent Nicole Aragi (who read this book when it was still hidden inside another). A truly special thanks to Lauren Holmes for her inexhaustible support and endless good nature, all of it inseparable from these pages. Her help has been an act of true friendship.
My thanks to Joel Weiss, wise counsel and sounding board, now for more than half a life.
For his substantial assistance with research, thank you to Darragh McKeon, a Hunter College Hertog Fellow. To the sailors, Louis Silver and Ari Haberberg, for sharing their know-how with the terrestrially bound. To all the friends and fine folk who came to the rescue with key facts on a wide variety of subjects, especially Dr. Daniel, Wendy Sherman, Isabella Hammad, Kevin Slavin, Mieke Woelky, Silvia Pareschi (who is already busy translating the book into Italian), and Farmer Steve.
At Knopf, I want to thank the amazing Jordan Rodman—a force from first meeting, as well as Nicholas Thomson, Betty Lew, Claire Ong, Victoria Pearson, Sara Eagle, and the many wonderful people there who have had a hand in this book. And the same goes for Duvall Osteen and Grace Dietshe at Aragi, Inc.
My deepest gratitude to Chris Adrian and Merle Englander for always reading and believing. To John Wray for his generosity and ping pong. To Deborah Landau at NYU for all kinds of unhesitating support.
I’d like to acknowledge the city of Zomba, Malawi, where a critical draft of this novel was written.
And to Rachel and Olivia, who have all my love and give everything its meaning.
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Also by Nathan Englander
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
The Ministry of Special Cases
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
About the Author
Nathan Englander is the author of the internationally bestselling story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. Translated into twenty-two languages, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O’Connor Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He lives in Brooklyn.
www.nathanenglander.com
@NathanEnglander
www.facebook.com/NEnglander
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Copyright
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook edition published in 2017
by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © Nathan Englander 2017
The right of Nathan Englander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
978 1 4746 0798 8
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Dinner at the Centre of the Earth Page 20
