My clothes were scattered all over my tiny room. It was a glimpse into my life, like opening a diary. He reached for me—not hard but just testing it, touching my arm, above the elbow. He was a head taller than me, and I had to tilt my face up when he pushed his fingers into the hair at the base of my skull and leaned over me. His mouth tasted like cigarettes, but I wanted him and so the staleness just tasted like Voss, his old indifferent self. The room was too dark when I switched off the lights, so I left the one on in the bathroom. It cast a faint reflection on the glass of the framed painting opposite the bed. It doesn’t happen often, the slide into a vagueness that you didn’t instigate or even try to shape. The feeling takes in the shadows of the room, the orange glow behind the window, the clock radio and the phone on the night table. His BlackBerry buzzed from the pocket of his pants on the floor, the ringer turned off. It would buzz for a while, then stop, then buzz once more when someone left a message.
“I didn’t expect all this,” I said.
His face was just above mine, his lips not far from my ear. “You know my story now. The war story.”
“You never thought about living somewhere else after a story like that?”
“That story’s the reason I have to live here.”
“Then I guess I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to understand. I’m just explaining why.”
My flight left a little before midnight the next night. Voss put my luggage in the trunk and then he sat in the driver’s seat, his face dim in the angled glow of the streetlight, his beard harsh against his cheek. His little black car had a combination lock that made loud shrill beeps when he punched in the code in the dark. I touched the sleeve of his coat and he held my hand for a second or two, then put the car into gear. We drove onto the highway toward the airport, listening to the radio, the commentator reporting the news in Hebrew in a voice somehow urgent but reassuring at the same time. I couldn’t understand anything he was saying, but I took in the general ambience. It was as if his reporting of the events in such a sane tone could render those events harmless, rational rather than emotional, almost theoretical. I asked Voss once again about the investigation into Bellen’s death and he told me, as he’d told me many times, that investigations like that seldom yield results, that cases like Bellen’s are almost never solved. I realized that knowing who actually killed Bellen no longer mattered as much to me as it once had. I realized that it would only lead to the greater mystery of why anyone kills anyone—why violence persists and why we continue believing or hoping that someday it will stop. That was the question Bellen explored in his work, the reason he wrote Kid Bethlehem and the reason he wrote “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” It was not in the hope of finding an answer, I thought, but in the hope of creating a space in which to think through the question. He was thinking about it in the days before he died, I knew now, walking to the apartment at 4 Be’eri Street where he and Gila and Lansky had all found a few moments of respite in a country that, perhaps more than any other, foregrounds the transience of our lives.
At the airport, I gave Voss a kiss and looked into his eyes. You want to close your eyes, but if you leave them open and look it’s a way of holding on to them. There in the drop-off lane I kept my face close to his for a long moment. The fatigue made everything light, slow, increasingly deliberate. I was thinking of my father—that old cliché about the allure of unavailable men. But as that other old cliché goes, clichés are always truer than we’d like to believe. Perhaps I was just more simplistic than I liked to believe. More simplistic and more adrift.
“I’ll see you,” I said.
“I hope so.”
“You will. You’ll come to New York.”
We said goodbye and he watched me as I walked my suitcase through the terminal’s sliding doors and headed for the check-in line. I didn’t turn around. I should say that I imagine he was watching me as I walked through the doors.
That May, they started jury selection in my father’s trial. I thought, I should call him. He should call me. But I was in the middle of writing this book and we both knew that in some ways this book, like most of my writing, is a commentary on us, on our past. My father knew that I was including him here not only because of what he has told me but because of what he hasn’t told me. Because of what I suspect, not only about his current predicament but about his life. You’re my daughter, he’d said when I told him I was going ahead with this project. Even then, I don’t think it was just the story of his affair with Gila that troubled him. I think it was the larger story and the fact that I was going to place him inside it. I had never thought I had the kind of family it was possible to “dishonor”—my family wasn’t given to such old-fashioned notions—but that’s one way I found myself interpreting his silence now. The more I thought about it, the more I understood this book as a kind of betrayal. I don’t have any children of my own. I have never wanted children and I no longer know what that says about me. I know and have known for a long time now that my alienation is just alienation, not a sign of any deeper spiritual insight. I know that, but I don’t know what to do with the alienation itself. There’s a condition called Jerusalem Syndrome in which visitors to the city fall into religious-tinged delusions or even psychosis, as if the very atmosphere there is permeated with madness. The affected people tend to recover shortly after they return home. Almost all of them do.
A King David psalm:
… I am poured out like water,
And all my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It is melted within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd;
And my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
And you lay me in the dust of death.
I went to see Gila’s friend Hugh that spring. I told him I’d found the building in Tel Aviv but that I’d never know for sure if Gila’s story was true or not. He showed me some more photographs—Gila at the beach, Gila at her house in Sag Harbor, Gila at a party for her birthday in a simple black dress and two strands of pearls. Her smile as she posed between Hugh and his partner, their heads brought close together to fit in the frame, was more vivacious than I would have imagined possible. An image began to emerge of Gila remade as an American, practically assimilated—more or less ordinary, more or less happy. I remembered something Rachel Kessler had told me in Jerusalem. Because the world is also like this: a glass of white wine on a nice day. Even for someone like Gila, even for someone like me. As a kind of parting gift, Hugh gave me something he’d taken as a keepsake from her house. It was a framed poster from the thirties, a black-and-white photo of the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, her name at the bottom, and at the top, in pink letters, the single word Shocking!
“Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” he said.
But of course I did take it. Like everything else, I included it in this book. I have it here now in the alcove in my apartment. Procrastinating, checking e-mail, I get a note from Voss that says, Skype me. Here for another hour. It’s one o’clock in the morning where he is, in his office in Jerusalem. We chat on our respective screens, his facial gestures split up somewhat like the panels in a comic strip, the picture frozen, then in motion again, then frozen. I sometimes wish I didn’t write about these subjects. I have told myself many times that I write about violence to understand it, not just out of morbid curiosity, but it can often seem like a fine distinction. It can seem like a distinction without a difference. I tell this to Voss and he says that the world we live in is more perverse than people like to think. He tells me about a recent murder in Ramat Gan in which the killers shot their victim in his own garage. He barked like a dog when they shot him, the killers said, and they were being literal. The victim’s wife, who was inside the house, came out to the garage because she’d heard a dog barking and she thought it was strange that there would be a dog in the garage because they didn’t own a dog.
“I’m just a journalist,” Voss says. “I’m not,
what, a belletrist like you.”
“I don’t know what I am,” I say.
“You’re a voyeur. Like me. So what? There are worse things.”
His face is fixed on the screen again, then the screen goes gray, an entirely textureless blank. His disembodied voice tells me then that he’s considering coming to New York in a few months. It’s something we’ve talked about before. When we’ve talked about it, I’ve always realized that it would mean him staying for at least a week, probably closer to two. A round-trip ticket between Ben-Gurion and JFK is about fourteen hundred dollars with tax, a lot of money.
“We hardly know each other,” I say, still unable to see him clearly.
“I’d say we know each other in some ways,” his voice says.
“In some ways maybe.”
“I’m asking if you want me to come or not.”
His image reappears, moving once more in that stuttering way. I see his beard, the pupils of his eyes, the ring at the end of the zipper of his sweater. His face pulses in and out of clarity—stark, shadowed, volatile. There seems to be no answer in that moment other than to say yes. I tell him okay. His face is there and then not there, the light shifting as if I’m seeing him through flames.
Part Five
Epilogue
13
The End
TEL AVIV, 2008
One of the boys was tugging on the sleeve of Eliav’s jacket now, a different boy this time, his hair grown out in black curls that were almost like stubby dreadlocks. The standing water on the floor rose above the tops of their shoes. In front of them, a rectangle of yellowish light shone weakly on the far wall, cast there by a humming carousel slide projector that sat on a long card table at the room’s rear corner. It was dark except for that rectangle of light and the center of the room, where two floodlamps clipped to the ceiling pipes lit up a listless body seated in a chair, the bare bulbs burning a fierce white inside the opened corollas of their housings.
The body in the chair was Eliav’s father, Bellen. They had stripped him to his undershirt, his broken glasses strapped around his head with what appeared to be shoelaces. The sides of his father’s head were smeared dark with blood. Eliav had heard the screams from outside, a gun at his back, his face against the concrete fence. Seeing his father now, he found it impossible to stop looking. His father sat in the chair beneath the floodlights with an almost childlike inattention, the lenses of his broken glasses glinting in the bright light. They’d given Eliav the pistol by then, a Jericho 941, its dark grip textured in a grid pattern that had no temperature. He felt it in his hand, the smooth-rough surface of the metal. There was a thinness to his breathing, which caught in his throat like a little boy’s.
“I don’t know what he thought, that we were going to make it easy for him?” said the one in the denim jacket who was standing between Eliav and his father. He sniffed and shook his head, scratching his neck, the torn cuff of the jacket hanging from his forearm. He held a bandanna with which he’d been dabbing his sweat, and he let the rag drop now with a slow splash into the standing water.
“All those ideas of his, that’s why you’re here now. You’re here because he was asking for this—not this exactly, but you know what I mean. He wanted to be some kind of martyr. A martyr for what? Or maybe he just wanted to die. I don’t really know.”
He turned to Bellen then. “Look who’s here,” he said. “Does it make it easier to know that he’s here? That your son will remember all this, just like in the old prayers?”
His father looked scalded and pale beneath the bright lights, his hair glistening like a baby’s hair, his eyebrows almost transparent.
The boy looked back at Eliav then, fierce, his jacket twisted off his shoulder, boots splashing in the water. “Show some mercy, you piece of shit,” he said. “Don’t you think he’s a little ready for it to be over with?”
The water smelled like dead fish and gasoline. It was cold on Eliav’s feet, saturating his shoes. His father raised his chin just enough for the lenses of his glasses to stop reflecting the light of the floodlamps. It was impossible to see any movement or color in those eyes.
He felt the way his hand conformed to the pistol’s grip, the easy way his fingers fit around its contours. He felt the heft of the gun and the tension behind the trigger and the pressure of the metal against his skin. The boy in the denim jacket was still talking. He was looking down at the water, moving the heel of his boot gently over its surface. Eliav felt a sudden connection across the dark room, an intimate physical charge between himself and his father. He felt it as a tingling in his throat and his chest and he started sobbing.
Was the boy talking anymore? Were his father’s eyes even open?
There was a boom and then a silence. A tight connection across all that space and then a snapping of that connection. A boom and then a body slumped over in a chair. Something heavy slung from bones.
He felt the explosion through the barrel, the double action in the chamber, the grip jerking upward. He felt it resonate in his hand, the ringing soreness in his shoulder.
There was a dark smear on his father’s undershirt, an oblong stain partly covered by his head. There was the stillness of his father’s hands. There were the shoelaces tied to his glasses, cutting a swath through the nearly bald skin at the back of his head.
For two thousand years, the Jews were not a race but a scattering, a dispersion. A multinational culture. It’s what has always made us hated and feared, the perversity of having a culture without a land. No land that embodies the culture and is something to fight for, to die for. Only a weak, clever people could have devised such a culture. That was the way we were thought of for two thousand years.
—Reb Zvi Netanel, 2008
Fanatics, extremists. The kind of people Eliav had himself accused when I’d talked to him back in 2009. On the evening of December 22, 2008, two groups of young men abducted first Bellen and then Eliav, Bellen outside his apartment building on Levinsky Street, Eliav outside a 24-hour restaurant on the south side of Tel Aviv. They drove them separately to an abandoned storage facility in Bat Yam, where they tortured Bellen for three hours, then brought in Eliav. On July 27, 2012, the Judea and Samaria Division of the Israeli National Police arrested a twenty-two-year-old man named Sami Orlov, who was suspected of conspiring to explode a mosque in East Jerusalem. During his interrogation, Orlov confessed to his role in the Bellen murder three and a half years earlier. Sami Orlov is a follower of a rabbi named Zvi Netanel, who lives on an illegal outpost in the West Bank near Hebron. Netanel denies any connection to Sami Orlov or to Bellen’s murder. But the goal of Netanel’s movement, according to Netanel himself, is the restoration of a Jewish monarchy throughout the territory of the ancient one, a new Kingdom of David.
It was Voss who told me the story. When he told me, I reminded him of Bellen’s poem “Kid Bethlehem”: God is the small hard stone / in the boy’s sling.
“They’re the fringe,” Voss said. “Crazy people.”
“It’s not just Israel,” I said. “That isn’t what I meant. That’s never been what I’ve meant.”
The question of course was whether I was going to go back to Israel to do the assignment. The Sami Orlov assignment. It was July of 2012 and I had just filed the James Holmes assignment, the one about the psychotic student in Aurora, Colorado, who’d gone into a movie theater with a private arsenal and full body armor during a Batman premiere and shot seventy people, killing twelve of them. I was tired of such assignments, tired of such personalities. I told Voss about the strange vision I’d had in Jerusalem of the Hilltop Youth, those boys in their cargo pants marching David Bellen across the rocky field. How my fascination now seemed to me more than just a fascination. How it seemed more like an identification. How I somehow saw a part of myself not only in Bellen but in those boys—in their anger, in their thirst for extremes. How it seemed to me that someone else could perfectly well do the Sami Orlov story and I could be free of it.
/> As for Voss, he’s coming to New York in a few days. Maybe we’ll take a walk through my old neighborhood on the Upper East Side, his hand in mine, our backs to the traffic on Lexington as we leave the subway and pass the Starbucks, the shoe repair, the wine shop, the Korean deli with its newspapers and sunflowers. We’ll go to the temple on 79th Street where I first met my teacher, Gila, then a few blocks down and across the street to my father’s old antiques shop, its green awnings now replaced by the blue awnings of a national vitamin and health-food chain. I’ll show him Gila’s old apartment on 75th Street, the signs for H. KOTZ MEDICAL SUPPLIES and SYLVIE’S EUROPEAN ALTERATIONS still there, the block still like a vestige of some other time—my grandparents’ time, Meyer Lansky’s time, the block like an echo of the Brownsville slum where all their American stories began. Then I’ll take Voss to the safe white building I grew up in on East End Avenue, its doorman and its boxwoods and its dwarf cherry trees, then finally we’ll take a cab back across town to my current, equally safe life in Chelsea.
If I go back to Israel, I tell Voss, it won’t be to do the Sami Orlov story.
If I go back, it won’t even be for Voss.
If I go back to Israel, it will have to be for reasons of my own.
Acknowledgments
Most of the quotations from the Bible come from Robert Alter’s The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. As a source on organized crime in Israel, Douglas Century’s series “Holy Land Gangland” in the online magazine Tablet was of great value. My experience in Israel was enormously enhanced by the warm welcome given me by Maya Roman, Ellen Spolsky, and Marcela Sulak, among others. For their support while writing this book, I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Princeton University for its Hodder Fellowship. For their help and advice along the way, I would like to thank John Dalton, Jameson Ellis, Joshua Ferris, Mary Jo Bang, Peter Ho Davies, Marshall Klimasewiski, Edmund White, Bill Clegg, Pat Strachan, Victoria Matsui, and most of all my wife, Sarah.
I Pity the Poor Immigrant Page 18
