After a quick sponge bath, Kleiner checked the door again and dressed for bed, feeling vulnerable in his shortie nightgown. The second his head hit the pillow, the walls of the room shook from the sonic boom of an Israeli Mirage. As if in response, prayer floated up from the walled city. Then the phone rang, causing his heart to pound, even though he had recently passed a stress test with flying colors.
He picked up the receiver cautiously.
“Yes?”
“This is Mahmoud,” said the familiar voice at the other end. “I thought you might want some halvah.”
Kleiner flew out of bed the next morning, all thoughts of the troubling incident erased from his mind. If there were an award for making fresh starts in the morning, Kleiner would win it, hands down. He dressed quickly and enthusiastically—after all, there was a whole new country out there, full of surprises. It would be hours before he had a chance to feel miserable again.
Kleiner plunged into the lobby. It was filled with women from New Jersey, making preparations to visit historical and religious sites, and also lining up poolside cabanas. As he grew older, Kleiner increasingly sought out the company of Jews. Once he was actually among them, however, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was enjoying himself. Since he was uneasy in the company of gentiles too, what did that mean? That he was only happy around studio executives?
On a couch, in a corner of the lobby, the sad young Frenchman held hands with an attractive woman. She had shoulder-length black hair and long graceful legs. Kleiner marveled at the man’s ability to attract such a lovely creature so soon after his loss. With no tragedy to his credit, Kleiner was unable to do the same.
The Frenchman waved over Kleiner and introduced his friend, Naomi Glickstein, a teacher of junior high who lived in midtown Manhattan.
Eyes glued to the Frenchman, the woman extended a snow-white hand.
“My pleasure.”
“Look,” said the Frenchman, as if Kleiner were about to judge him. “It was a terrible thing I went through. But what should I do, kill myself?”
“You have to go on,” said Kleiner supportively.
“I told him the same thing,” said Naomi.
The Frenchman nodded, then groaned sorrowfully, raining kisses on the woman’s arm.
Sick with envy, Kleiner excused himself and headed for the dining room.
There he was confronted by a sea of breakfast delicacies, chief among them smoked and pickled fish of a hundred different varieties. It was a dream come true for Kleiner, who quickly grabbed a plate. With his mouth watering, he approached the display. But after circling the banquet several times, he was unable to make a choice and settled for a slice of grapefruit and some cornflakes, for his health.
After breakfast, he took a seat in the lobby and checked the Jerusalem Post, to see if by some wild coincidence one of his old movies had finally made it to the Middle East.
When he next looked up, he saw a tall, handsome fellow in denim shorts and hiking shoes come bounding across the lobby toward him, the man’s legs exploding with vitality. He introduced himself as Hilly, a veteran of four wars and currently with the film office.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked in the booming voice of a tank commander.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” said Kleiner.
He was exhausted just looking at the man.
“It’s important to get one thing straight,” said Hilly as they headed for the hotel entrance. “I can’t show you Yankee Stadium or the Stork Club or Radio City Music Hall. And if you’re expecting an introduction to Mickey Rooney or Cher, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
Kleiner took note of the man’s scrambled and time-warped vision of American culture. He gave what he felt was the expected reply.
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Good,” said Hilly as they left the hotel. “Because I can show you something that in my opinion is much more important.”
“And that is … ?”
“History.”
He pointed to a ditch beside the road that was covered by an iron grate.
“Look down there, for example.”
Kleiner peered inside and saw a dark hole, nothing more.
“Right below you,” said Hilly, “Roman centurions played cards two thousand years ago. What do you think?”
Kleiner said it was fascinating, but that he didn’t think he could fit a camera crew into such a narrow space.
“You can’t?” said Hilly, clearly disappointed. “Oh, well, don’t worry. There’s more, much more. We’re not finished by a long shot.”
After a short walk, they reached the Walled City and entered through the Jaffa Gate. Goats brushed against Kleiner, as did weaving camels and Bedouin women with bowls on their heads. Bearded Coptics pushed their way past blind Ethiopians who leaned on biblical staffs and stared at the sun. His head swimming, Kleiner threw up his hands, as if to protect himself from a shower of history. A black man in a Saints jacket reached out to steady him.
“I’m St. Germain from New Orleans. My hand and my heart.”
Kleiner thanked the man for assisting him, then joined Hilly, who seemed to be enjoying his disassociated state.
“You see that,” he said. “And you thought Forty-Second Street was hot shit.”
They entered the Arab Quarter and were quickly swept up in a stream of shopkeepers who had closed for the day out of respect for the intifada. Sullen men in kaffiyehs pressed in upon Kleiner; though there wasn’t a peep out of them, he had never before felt such quiet rage. Hilly, seemingly impervious to their hostility, strolled along in a carefree manner, whistling a tune from Fiddler. Kleiner thought he saw the gleam of a knife.
“Just out of curiosity, do you carry a weapon?”
“I can’t answer that because of security reasons. But I can tell you this. These people are happy, if only they would relax a little and stop worrying so much. We’re completely safe.”
Unconvinced, Kleiner was relieved when Hilly led them away from the crowd; with Kleiner following, the Israeli mounted a narrow flight of stairs to the rooftop of the Arab marketplace. All Jerusalem stretched out before them. Kleiner nodded sagely as Hilly ticked off its wonders—the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, Mount Scopus, and a cluster of new condos on a hill. Kleiner was embarrassed by his thin knowledge of biblical times. He had some small expertise on Hammurabi and recalled that the ancient Jews had invented the Right of First Refusal, later to be refined by contract negotiators at Warner Bros. History in general ran through Kleiner like a sieve. He knew of Lenin’s self-consciousness about his sparse hair, Bazin’s curiously effeminate manner of sitting a horse, and Gallieni’s prostate condition as he valiantly defended Paris in the Great War. But not much more.
Kleiner wondered about the Mount of Olives cemetery. As of yet, he’d made no arrangements for his own burial, although he was leaning toward a plot beside his beloved parents and the cleaning lady. Another possibility was that he be laid to rest with other location scouts.
Correctly reading his thoughts, Hilly told him to forget about the ancient burial ground. It was felt that the Messiah would walk through it on his approach to Jerusalem; therefore the site was reserved for high-ranking dignitaries and an occasional blue-jeans manufacturer.
“It would cost you at least fifty thousand to be buried there.”
A few feet away, a sharp-featured man in a fedora overheard them. He looked up from his guidebook and handed Kleiner a card.
“I can get you in for twenty-five,” he said.
He tipped his hat and slipped away.
Kleiner pocketed the card. Who knows, if he made a score, it might come in handy.
After a respectful trip to the Western Wall, the two men returned to Kleiner’s hotel, passing a lone vendor along the way.
Kleiner stopped to look at a goatskin
credit-card holder, then put it back when Hilly insisted the price was exorbitant.
When the two men walked off, the vendor cried out after them.
“Go ahead, my friend. Take him to buy from a Jew. But be careful. When night falls, don’t turn your back.”
Though the words were chilling, the cadence was appealing. Kleiner wondered momentarily if, with a little shaping, they could form the basis of a Levantine rock lyric, the vendor, of course, to be compensated. The man’s voice, its commercial use notwithstanding, followed Kleiner back to the hotel. It reminded him that his first order of business was to see to it that his own Arab, the troubled man from room service, wasn’t lying in wait for him.
When he was reasonably sure this wasn’t the case, Kleiner lay down on the bed and allowed himself to wonder what it would be like to live in Jerusalem and never again feel the sting of anti-Semitism. Only weeks before, at a bar in Brooklyn Heights, he had been accosted by a sheetrock salesman who said you had to be a Jew to direct a movie. Kleiner had fired back with the examples of Preston Sturges and John Ford, receiving the support of several cineastes at the bar. But the man was unpersuaded. The attack rankled.
Kleiner’s own wife had been called a kike at a posh Connecticut reception, despite the fact that she was a practicing Catholic. Kleiner, of course, defended her with a quick fistfight that brought down an otherwise wonderful evening.
All of this would be unthinkable in the Holy Land.
He had few ties to the States—a fading career, a paper-thin marriage, a cousin who made irritating calls to see if he had anything on the fire. Employment in Israel might be a problem—he would never take a job away from a Russian. But most were violinists. How many location scouts could there be among them? Still, a move would mean a farewell to Scotty Pippin, not to mention Dan Rather, Puerto Ricans, and Kevin Spacey. It’s true that the Carnegie Delicatessen wasn’t what it once was—but there was still Shun Lee East, Gallaghers, and Joe Allen, not to mention Spago on the West Coast, if they would still let him in. Without getting into his deeper ties to the founding fathers, his hero Grant, and the Hudson Bay Company, he could see that a move to the Holy Land would be premature at the moment. He decided not to send for his files in New York.
Kleiner had dinner in his room. Then, as if he wasn’t lonely enough, he walked out on the bleak terrace for a look at the stars. There, standing in the moonlight, was Naomi Glickstein, dressed in a tailored suit and high heels, as if for a convention.
A product of the old school, Kleiner raised his hand to his hat, even though he wasn’t wearing one.
“Good evening.”
“Oh, hi,” said Naomi, fanning her large bosom. “I just came out for some air. It’s like a steam bath in that lobby. For a second, I thought I would plotz.”
The harsh Yiddish word was jarring to Kleiner’s ear. Yet at the same time, he found it oddly stimulating, perhaps because it had been spoken so unexpectedly by an attractive contemporary person. He felt what he could only describe as a frisson. Kleiner had read about the sensation in connection with the novels of Stendhal and had always wanted to experience one. It may have been his first frisson. He joined her on the patio below.
“Are you enjoying your stay in Israel?” he asked.
“I was until I met that meshuggeneh Frenchman. The man buried his wife two minutes ago and already he’s hot to trot.”
“He just wants to get back on the horse,” said Kleiner, attracted of course to the woman and aware that he may have been undermining his own position.
“Let him find another customer. I have my own mishegoss.”
Though Kleiner didn’t press her for details, Naomi volunteered that she had just ended a six-month affair with a famed urologist who had been a consultant on more than one hundred thousand penises.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of him. Sol Brown.”
“The name is vaguely familiar. Doesn’t he write novels?”
“No, no, that’s Dan Brown. Sol is strictly penises.
“Don’t misunderstand,” she said sadly. “Sol is a lovely man and we had six beautiful months. The sex, dare I say, was mind-blowing. But it turned out he was married and neglected to mention it.”
“Maybe he forgot,” said Kleiner, attempting a limp defense of the renowned specialist.
“Maybe I’m a shiksa,” said Naomi, with a rueful chuckle.
“That you’re not,” said Kleiner, drawing a sharp look.
Nonetheless, she hooked her arm through his and said, “Come, let’s take a walk. It’ll do us both good.”
Kleiner appreciated the physical contact, although he quickly realized that she may have been holding on to him to keep from stumbling in her high heels. In truth, she was a little clumsy, and this, too, he found strangely appealing. After years of being attracted to graceful women, he now found himself drawn to klutzes, evidence perhaps of an enlarged humanity.
“What’s it like to teach junior high?” he asked, although he had little interest in the subject. (While he couldn’t deny the importance of molding young minds, he preferred to be spared the details.)
“If you could teach, it would be fine. But all they do is try to look up my dress. Then they leave notes on my desk with such schmutz that even Sol himself was embarrassed when he read them.”
Kleiner sympathized with her. But he also felt a measure of understanding for the tortured adolescents, trying to concentrate on social science in the disconcerting presence of their sensuous teacher.
“Maybe if you were homely, they would learn.”
“Thank you, kind sir. And flattery will get you everywhere.”
It was a tired remark, repeated a thousand times at singles bars, but Kleiner enjoyed it all the same. Why shouldn’t he have a little innocuous repartee in his life? Where was it written that he had to restrict his conversation to Spinoza and the mysteries of the cosmos?
They stopped at a garden beside the pool, where the air was sweet and aromatic, possibly enriched by the clean gardenia fragrance that came from the direction of Naomi’s shoulders.
“May I ask what your work is?” she said. “That is, if I’m not meddling.”
“Not at all,” said Kleiner.
He told her that he was in the movie business, not bothering to point out that he was hanging on by his thumbs as a lowly location scout.
“May I read you a little something of mine?” she asked.
“Please,” said Kleiner, praying it wasn’t a screenplay.
Rummaging around in her purse, she produced what appeared to be a rolled-up piece of parchment, delicately tied with a pink ribbon. Unfurling it, she put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and began to read:
When I look at
the moon and the stars
I could burst
When I contemplate
the soul and the universe
I could burst
Sometimes I think
of the Hereafter
and the Here and Now
as well
and I could burst
The poem went on to describe all the considerations that could cause the narrator to burst—war, hunger in Darfur, the deficit, the population explosion, unfair hiring practices, the plight of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka—all of it leading to a final verse, for the recitation of which Naomi removed her glasses and addressed the heavens:
But most of all, my darling
When I think of your humane face
THEN I COULD REALLY BURST.
Kleiner had some quibbles with the text and certain aspects of the construction. But he was not about to deny the sincerity and conviction that had gone into its creation.
“It’s lovely.”
Naomi lowered her eyes.
“Thank you. Sol liked it too, but it means more coming from a professional. I plan to call it
‘I Could Burst.’”
“You almost have to,” said Kleiner.
Both realized the hour was late. Kleiner walked Naomi back to the lobby. A sexual lunatic in the ’70s, he now practiced a more decorous style, no doubt in response to the turbulent climate of the previous decades.
“May I kiss you good night?”
“Go right ahead,” said Naomi, who appeared to contradict herself by turning her head away.
He found her mouth all the same, enjoying the freshness of it, the clean gardenia scent, and feeling the alarming size of her breasts against him.
Instinctively, he lowered one hand, which she slapped away.
“Please, Mr. Kleiner,” she said. “A kiss is one thing. But I’ll go wild if you touch me on the toches.”
The harsh Yiddish phrases, the crazy poem, even the romance with a penis expert—the whole package was so unlikely it made his head spin. Yet when he returned to his room, he could think of nothing but Naomi Glickstein. What puzzled him was that his preference in women had always ranged from the heartbreaking gamin—did anyone feel the loss of Audrey Hepburn more than Kleiner?—to the thin, windswept blonde who spoke in the accent of good schools. The very mention of Bryn Mawr was arousing, though he knew little of its academic standards. So how to account for his powerful feelings toward Naomi Glickstein? Had he been deluding himself, waiting all his life for a big-breasted Borscht Belt beauty? Time would tell.
Disgracefully, as he stood beneath the shower, he thought of those massive breasts; at the moment he would have sacrificed a small finger, or at least the top joint, for a look at them. (The thought was no doubt engendered by the harsh penal codes of the Middle East.) To the best of his knowledge, he had no particular fixation on breasts. He had always prided himself on a civilized appreciation of the whole package, so to speak. But here too he may have been papering over another deep longing.
The Peace Process Page 13
