I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  The place I walked to the next morning was Me’a Shearim, the center of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, once a planned neighborhood of garden apartments for middle-class secular Jews, now a slum without gardens, trees, or vegetation of any kind. The cement or concrete buildings had deteriorated into something that looked remarkably like a modern version of an eighteenth-century shtetl, a place of sagging floors and flaking paint, no ornament other than the practicalities of business signs and political and religious bulletins. Laundry hung in the spaces between the beige and gray buildings. Car exhaust, litter, broken toys. It was a shtetl not by design but by choice, a ghetto or a Lower East Side slum not by design but by choice. If I’d been less irrational that morning, I might have remembered that no one had asked me to go to Me’a Shearim—in fact, there were large signs urging strangers not to intrude. It was the Sabbath, and would be the third night of Hanukkah, and so there were people out shopping for the evening meal, the storefronts open to reveal a few pale apples, onions, sacks of potatoes. I felt like a stranger in the broadest sense. “Strange,” because although the people around me were Jews, as was I, none of them looked at me, not even by accident, not once. The men wore black hats and dark suits with white shirts, or they wore outlandish silk robes and silk stockings, round fur-trimmed crowns called shtreimlech. The women were sexless, all but invisible. I was from some other place and time—probably I wasn’t a Jew at all in their minds. Rachel had invited me to Shabbat dinner at her house that night but I had declined, because in addition to Hanukkah and Shabbat, it was also the third anniversary of David Bellen’s murder. I imagined the prayers and rituals I wouldn’t know, the yahrzeit candle in its glass, and I thought of Gila’s word yored. The prayers and rituals in light of that word seemed like ash from some fire that had burned through generations of strangers who happened to be my ancestors. I didn’t want to speak to my ancestors. I didn’t want to hear what they thought of me.

  In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve. To weak eyes it becomes solid, to weaker eyes it shows fists, before still weaker eyes it feels ashamed and smites down him who dares to look at it.

  Dumpsters, air-conditioning units, the street beneath my feet crumbling and rutted with potholes, almost a dirt road in places. I tried to remember that the people before me were meant to be uninterested in the griminess of the physical world, that in their devoutness they were focused instead on the imminent, holy presence beneath its surface. But the more I looked at them, the more I thought of another passage from Kafka:

  What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

  The third anniversary of Bellen’s murder. When I got back to my hotel that afternoon, I looked over the piece I’d written about it in 2009, particularly at the ending, where I quote an e-mail, presumably from Oded Voss, tying the murder to organized crime:

  He arranges a deal—his letters and papers, worth more when he’s dead, sold through someone who could get their full worth, someone from his old neighborhood. Proceeds will go to the useless son. The son has no idea about any of this. Any number of scenarios after that. Maybe Bellen’s broker/collaborator is so disgusted by the idea of Bellen contemplating all this that he kills Bellen himself, just because he can. Maybe that was somehow implied in their conversation all along. Maybe Bellen killed himself. Maybe they drove him to Beit Sahour and let him blow his own brains out behind a construction site. Maybe they let him do it in Tel Aviv. The people I’m talking about can arrange these things anywhere. They hate the Arabs but they also work with the Arabs. Was it Bellen’s inspiration or theirs to dump the body in Beit Sahour?

  I realized that after almost three years I no longer believed in these theories of the crime. They spoke to me now more of the theory’s probable creator, Oded Voss, than of the mystery itself. I thought of what Rachel had said, that Eliav had inherited only a small amount of money. I thought of Eliav’s nightmare. “I was in the room where it happened,” Eliav would say. I thought of my waking dream the day before of those boys with their rifles marching Bellen across the rocky field.

  I went to Tel Aviv that Monday, still not having managed to talk to Voss since my arrival. We’d been playing phone tag, perhaps half deliberately, and so when I got to Tel Aviv I went by myself to Bellen’s childhood neighborhood, Hatikvah, and to the steakhouse on Etzel Street that Voss had taken me to the last time we’d been together. I had forgotten how small the restaurant was, how brightly lit. There on the side wall were those signed and framed photographs of Israeli athletes and politicians and movie stars, along with a picture of the former owner, Yehezkel Aslan, one of the gangsters who appears in Kid Bethlehem. I chose a table behind the only other customers, a pair of Mizrahi men seated before a spread of a dozen salads in tiny dishes, pita bread, kebabs. One was on his cell phone, the other talked to the waitress while he fingered a large stack of shekel notes beside two other stacks in rubber bands. I realize how unreal that sounds, how like a movie, but it’s the paradox of places like the steakhouse that they don’t seem quite real, even when you’re there. Bellen’s picture was not on the wall—it hadn’t been there before either, but the absence struck me this time as deliberate, ghostly. Perhaps I was wrong about Voss’s theory. Perhaps outside the restaurant, somewhere in Hatikvah, Bellen’s killers really were still at large.

  I went for a walk after lunch through the outdoor market, a place oddly reminiscent of a large train station, with its rows of prefabricated stalls, roofed by large white plastic panels like the ones at the restaurant at which I’d had lunch with Rachel. People browsed through bins of multicolored candies, dried fruits, nuts, spices, olive oil, the women dragging behind them those graceless wheeled carts made of plaid vinyl, the men carrying their purchases in pale orange plastic bags. Shoes, key chains, wallets, kitchenware, plungers. The drama of buying and selling, a thousand actors playing themselves with a slightly heightened vigor amid the dry goods and the bins laden with produce. Not ghostly Me’a Shearim but strident Tel Aviv. Not the pious in their ghetto but ordinary people focused on the simple comings and goings of daily life. I walked all the way back to my hotel through the parts of the city that Eliav would have known, endless stretches of shabby little shops, noise, buildings the color of wet cement, traffic, smog. In Levinsky Park, crowds of African men loitered or waited for day work, refugees from war and genocide in Eritrea and South Sudan, their belongings in shopping carts or just piled beside a tree—foam pads, carpets, blankets. Homeless people without status in a country frightened by their arrival. Not far from where they gathered was the bus station, where Eliav had bought drugs in his twenties and early thirties and perhaps again that November. It was a few blocks down from the no-man’s-land on either side of Highway 20, a place of vacant lots full of dust and weeds and the abandoned shell of what might once have been a municipal garage, now covered in graffiti. The wasteland around that highway reminded me of Bellen’s conjuration of Eliav in the midst of one of his relapses. He remembers something about a sign that says PAZ—blue letters on a yellow ground, PAZ—but what he no longer knows is if this sign was a part of his friend’s directions or whether its vivid colors and letters have only made it seem that it was part of those directions. I took a photograph of the abandoned garagelike structure—it didn’t have a sign that said PAZ but the graffiti on it called out to me for reasons I could only guess at in that moment. I learned later that the graffiti was a religious invocation. It was the name of a revered Hasidic rabbi, Nachman of Breslov, who among other things wrote mystical tales that influenced Kafka.

  That afternoon, I went back to my hotel near the beach. I sat at the bar off the sunlit lobby and looked at the picture on my cell phone of Gila and me, more and more perturbed by the expressionless look on my face, the quality of numb detachment, even immateriality. I remembered that lunch we’d had, the sense I’d gotten then that Gila, in her illness and isolation, so
mehow thought of us as kindred spirits. I felt that kinship myself now, sitting at the hotel bar, imagining Gila as a waitress thirty years ago, keeping her back straight as she bent down with a balanced tray of drinks. I suppose the kinship I really felt was not so much with Gila as with her absence, or with whatever faint traces I imagined still remained of her in Tel Aviv. I had learned from the manager at the Dan Hotel that a Gila Konig had been an employee there from 1969 to 1977. No one who worked there now of course had ever met her. I couldn’t find any information about what she’d done between 1977 and 1980, the year she finally came to New York. It occurred to me that I was probably the last person in Israel who still knew her name.

  When I finished my drink, I walked up Frishman Street, past Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, the sudden open spaces of what is now called Rabin Square—pigeons and litter, discount stores fronted by cafés with white tables. I had been walking all day and I kept walking now, into a neighborhood of modern apartment buildings, flowering trees, benches in the shade, the streets named for artists and musicians. At 4 Be’eri Street, I found the building—the ordinary building that Lansky’s biographer Robert Lacey describes as a “run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv.” Through the window of one of the apartments I could see simple birch furniture, a lamp on the ceiling in the reds and blacks of a Calder mobile. There was no one else out on the street and so I came closer, following the sidewalk to a pair of clipped hedges that led to the entryway. Nine buzzers on a metal doorjamb. The kind of building that in my childhood in New York would have contained the office of a podiatrist or an orthodontist. I looked through the glass door and saw the dim foyer with its low ceiling, the beige linoleum on the walls and floor—looking through that glass was like looking at a photograph from 1972, a black-and-white photograph of a crime scene. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.

  Bellen had remembered it thirty-five years later, the run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. As for Gila, she had almost certainly forgotten about Bellen by the time she told me her story. It was not Bellen but Lansky she wanted to tell me about, Lansky who made her story matter. I thought about all three of them having entered this nondescript building where I now stood. To stare in through the glass of its door was to understand insignificance not as a desert or a sea or a night sky but as nothing at all, as a silence.

  Every once in a while she went back to the apartment to see that it was still there, still waiting for her. Three empty rooms with marks on the bare white walls from where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung. Broken slats in the closet door. The water in the kitchen sink would sputter out brown until it ran clear. Such a strange, unwanted gift, as if he were finally telling her something crucial.

  I had started writing this book already, before I’d actually seen the building. Standing there outside it, I heard in my head how the first section should end.

  The next evening I walked into the lobby of the Dan Hotel to finally meet Voss. I had made a point of arriving late, not wanting to have to sit there waiting for him, not sure I even wanted to see him again, but there he was, sitting in the far corner in one of the gray armchairs in the faint light reading a newspaper. The windows’ tinted glass, even with the Mediterranean glare behind it, created a muted stillness, as if time had stopped and no one else would ever enter that room, or try to leave it—dark brown walls, brushed steel tables, black and gray chairs arranged in precise geometrical groups. Voss didn’t stand when he saw me coming, even though the room is vast in a way that would have caused most people to stand or at least shift in their seat. He wore a charcoal suit with a white dress shirt that had thin gold panes. He was a little more heavyset than I remembered, or perhaps it was just that his beard had grown in more thickly than before—that beard and the tousled graying hair were so tirelessly deployed, all the more effective for being so. As I walked toward him, he put two fingers to the bone behind his ear and let his elbow rest on the arm of his chair, looking at me, not trying to pretend otherwise.

  “I’m sorry about Eliav,” he said, after we said hello. “He meant something to you. I should have been more aware of that.”

  I tilted my head, dismissing what now seemed like a tired sentiment. I’d been angry the last time we’d spoken, over Skype, the little box with Voss’s face in it pixilated and badly lit, as if he were sitting in a cell, speaking against his will. If he’d told me about Eliav earlier, I’d insisted, I could have gone to the funeral, but we both knew I wouldn’t have flown all that way for the funeral, that I’d barely known Eliav. I was angry for other reasons. Angry for who knew what reasons.

  “He was a little tragic,” I said. “But you were right about him. He was poisonous.”

  “It must be hard having a father like that and not having any talent of your own.”

  “He did have talent. But he was also poisonous.” I put my purse on the glass tabletop and sat down, looking abstractedly for the waiter. “Everyone’s family is poisonous. Isn’t yours?”

  “My parents are Holocaust survivors.” He folded his newspaper with a firm crease and left it resting on the table. “Small, gentle people who came through it all and loved everything my brother and I did. That’s another kind of problem.”

  We ordered drinks—a red wine for me, a club soda for Voss. I told him then that I’d read his book when it came out in English last year. It was about his combat duty in the First Lebanon War, a memoir written in the voice of Voss’s nineteen-year-old self, a boy sarcastically eager for the very trauma that would soon diminish him. Near the end, Voss accidentally shoots a civilian on the outskirts of Beirut, a sixteen-year-old girl he sees running between two houses. When he comes to clear the area, having panicked and fired on her, he finds that she’s not quite dead. A bubble of blood and saliva pulses from her lips, her breathing shallow and rapid, her eyes open but fixed. He is standing right above her where she lies on the ground but he is incapable of putting her suffering to an end. He shoots once at her head and misses to the left, then shoots again and misses to the right. The sounds the girl makes are almost sexual—he recognizes it from the movies, not from experience—little moans each time he fires and misses. I told him now how sad I thought the book was, how sad for all its cynicism.

  “I think about you sometimes,” he said then.

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to think about me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess, what, I’m insecure.”

  “I’m sorry things worked out the way they did the last time. I read your Bellen piece. There were other things that happened between us too. Better things. You didn’t write about those things quite as much.”

  The drinks came, and then after a silence he finally sighed and said he couldn’t stay long, he had work the next day. He looked down at his hand on the table—impatience, contempt, I wasn’t sure what he was feeling at that moment. I was surprised by the solemn cast to his face. I saw how easy it would be to touch his hand, to run my fingers down the cuff of his jacket to his wrist—I wanted to touch him and I didn’t really understand why. The last time I’d touched him, more than two years ago, he had hit me.

  “I sometimes thought about you too,” I said then, sipping my wine. “But then I thought about how you live here and I live there and what a waste of time it would be to keep thinking about you.”

  He reached across the table and put his hand on my bare arm. I thought he might even try to kiss me, but he just looked at his hand there. It was a physical sensation, I told myself, only that. It was mostly just a consequence of doing this story, almost a coincidence in that way.

  I told him the story of Gila then, sitting there in the mostly empty lobby of the Dan Hotel, showing him the pictures I’d taken
on Be’eri Street, and the picture of Gila and me at lunch. Gila and Lansky. Gila and Bellen. Gila and my father. I could somehow sense that Voss didn’t believe all or even most of what I was saying, that he was even more incredulous than I might have expected, but I could also sense that incredulity for Voss was a common enough feeling—he’d heard a lot of stories he didn’t believe. If he was surprised to find me purveying another such story, then he was also forbearing. It was as if he thought it could happen to anyone, not deliberately lying but believing and then recounting a story that could never be verified.

  Later, he parked on the street across from my hotel—I couldn’t afford to stay at the Dan—and we walked past the African guard into the drab lobby with its glass tables and Judaica. There were people sleeping on the couches with their luggage, waiting for check-in time the next morning. It was the last night of Hanukkah and there were menorahs out with eight candles burning in each, as well as a large electric menorah with waxy plastic arms, all of them lit up orange. Something about the plastic menorah made me wonder if I was going to be able to sustain whatever impulse had led me this far with Voss. There was a crowd in the elevator, Orthodox Jews speaking French. They didn’t look at us.