The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  “I don’t know if they’ll ever speak to me again.”

  “Forget it,” Zev said. “Keep on keepin’ on. We’ll find you a real wife, a Jewish wife.”

  “But, I loved — ” Eli started to say.

  “You didn’t love anyone. Now, listen and listen good. It’s not the same. Not even close,” Zev said. “That is your goyish little family. This man is a major player in Jewish history we’re talking about.”

  Each day Eli’s flock became smaller. He wandered back and forth, both against the sun and toward it, not bothering any longer to prepare an altar for each sacrifice. Sometimes he tore at the sheep with his bare hands and they screamed like crying infants. He ate the flesh raw and wore the skins on his back, or stuffed them into his bag. He prayed hard and waited for an answer. A nauseating hunger tore through his stomach and he thought, “The closer you get to God, the faster and harder you get smacked. But I am getting closer.”

  He stared at the full moon, at the curve of its edges pulsing against an endless night sky and it was as if he was gazing into the eye of God. He prayed with fury for hours, shaking and calling out to the sky, “I am dust, and there is nothing lower than dust.” Sweat began to pour down his face and he cried out, “Don’t you understand me?” He buried his face in the rough wool of his pack and wept.

  Eli thought he heard a child’s voice calling him and he woke up clinging to his pack. The moon was at the top of the sky now and lit the hillsides with a brilliant silvery glow. Then he heard it: “Eli Israel, son of man.”

  “Hello!” Eli called.

  He heard thousands of wings flapping near him, and then closer still. He leaped to his feet and jumped up and down, batting at his head as if a swarm of bees had flown into his ears and were working their way into his brain. A flash of color filled his eyes, a prism of colors that he had never seen before. All the organs of his body began to tremble and he was sure he was going to die, as excrement and urine and vomit poured out of him.

  “You are purified,” a voice said at last. “Go to the mountain. Go to Jerusalem and speak my words.”

  “You need to find a wife,” Zev said to Eli one day. “A Jewish wife.”

  He had been with Zev for nearly a year and had spent most of his time studying. Eli had not thought of women in a long time. “It says in the Torah you’re only half a person if you’re not married.”

  “But, you’re not married,” Eli said.

  “I’m not ready yet. But you, my friend, have come so far.”

  It was true. Eli could quote the Torah, the Talmud, the Zohar, and other texts as if he had been studying for years.

  “I know a rabbi in Jerusalem. Rabbi Lev, the Love Rabbi. I’m sure he can arrange a shiduch.”

  “Why haven’t you gone to see him?” Eli asked.

  “I have, man. But it was a disaster,” Zev said. “One was a Moroccan widow with six kids who could cook couscous with chicken that melted from the bone and knew Torah left to right and right to left, but I didn’t want to get tangled up with someone else’s children, if you know what I mean? Another wanted to move to Brooklyn to wait for a sign from the Lubavitcher rebbe, but I’m not going back to Babylon, man. Listen, some didn’t even speak English. Could you imagine smearing the language of the Torah, to order McDonald’s cheeseburgers, to buy toilet paper, to discuss the weather? It was a total disaster. That only proves that I’m not ready. But you,” Zev said, embracing Eli in a warm bear hug, “you have achieved tschuva, redemption.”

  Eli felt his stomach drop and he thought of Kate and Josh and how things had fallen apart. “No. I’m not ready.”

  “Yeah, man, you are. You’re, like, fucking clean. A clean slate.”

  “Do you remember when the show went off the air, Spy, Berliner? And I told you I got drunk and came home from the set wearing that long-nosed opera mask, with a pistol and fired blanks at Kate, just scared the hell out of her. And I really thought Josh was out on a sleepover. So the whole thing started as a joke.”

  Zev nodded his head and smiled. Eli could see him absently fingering the handle of his pistol.

  “Well, I didn’t tell you that after she ran out, I just started bawling. Like I knew that I was on the edge of a really deep pit, and I was crying and crying, I thought I was such a schmuck, you know I was messing around with every guest star on the show and Kate must have known. I was feeling sorry for myself, and she slipped in through the screen door and came over and put her arms around me.” Eli wiped a tear from his eye with his finger and then slid the finger into his mouth. “She put her arms around me and said it’ll be all right or something, and this is after I fired the gun at her. And then I just snapped, I was still wearing that ugly mask, I don’t know what I was thinking, I just sort of threw her on the floor and started to, started to . . .”

  Eli took a deep breath, but couldn’t get enough air.

  “I know, man,” Zev said. “But she was your wife, that’s part of the deal.”

  “No!” Eli shouted suddenly. “With the fucking nose. That’s how I did it, maybe I thought it would be fun, or different, and I know now I was hurting her, it was like I was nodding my head, yes, yes, yes, into her as she was saying no, no, no. And then the kid walks in, and she starts screaming bloody murder, ‘Get out! Get out of my house.’ And that was it.”

  “Hey, man. Don’t sweat it. God forgives you.”

  “It was awful. You should have seen his face. He didn’t know what his father was doing with that mask. But he saw his mother curled up on the floor like a wounded kitten or something.”

  “Hey,” Zev said. “It’s over. You paid for it. God knows you did. That’s what counts. You’re even-steven, now.”

  A few days later Eli called to speak with Rabbi Lev.

  “Eli,” Rabbi Lev said, with his Brooklyn accent. “I found your beshert. A terrific girl. A regular Bess Myerson. Come to Jerusalem and meet her.”

  Beneath a steady rain, Eli Israel dug in the rocky earth with his penknife and then with his hands, until he had grooved out a shallow pit. His hands were raw and bloody and he lifted the bag he had fashioned from the old riding blanket and tossed it into the groove in the earth. He hastily covered it as he mumbled Kaddish.

  He walked all afternoon before reaching a highway, and continued, warmed by his thoughts. He felt light and his groin pulsed. He allowed himself to think about having a woman again without fear, knowing that he was pure of mind and spirit. “Children,” he thought. “Imagine, one for each tribe of Israel: Judah, Levi, Gad, Asher, Binyamin, Zevulun, Reuven, Naphtali, Simeon, Dan, Issachar, Joseph, all of them populating the land.” Eli smiled. He thought of returning to Rabbi Lev, but knew he could find his own woman now.

  When he finally reached Jerusalem, his feet were raw and bruised and he thought of what it says in the Talmud: that of the ten portions of beauty in the world, nine were deposited in Jerusalem. He arrived late that night and was stunned to see the city, as if seeing it for the first time. Across the darkness, buried in the mountains, floating in the sky, surrounded by hills were the walls of a city that was like a dream. Jerusalem was almost there, and almost not, more spirit than stone, a ghost against the sky, domes and towers climbing straight to heaven.

  Eli thought of Zev back in Hebron and wondered if they would soon meet again. He smiled and took a deep breath, remembering what Zev had said about going up to Jerusalem: “You are going into the eye of the hurricane, man, the tip of the arrow, the top of the mountain. How can you not feel like one of God’s angels?”

  The first morning light seemed to rise out of the stones themselves. As he walked down into the Hinnom Valley he saw silhouettes of trees and bushes and heard bells peal across the gray sky, and voices from all around, wailing, echoing through the valley. Then, still silence. Nothing moved at all and a pink blush spread from the east into the full colors of morning, then a brilliant white sun, huge palm trees, and the vaulted entrance of Jaffa Gate.

  Eli felt as if he was two thou
sand years old, three thousand even. He felt as if he had just been born. In the month of Nisan in the year 5756, Eli entered Jerusalem prepared to bring the Messiah at last to Israel and the Jewish people.

  Eli borrowed Zev’s car for the last time as he drove up to Jerusalem to meet his beshert. He had to drive through Halhul, a dusty Arab village, and always gunned his engine through to the main highway. He knew the Arab urchins along the road could pick out yellow Israeli plates from a mile away and sometimes threw stones at cars as they passed.

  The radio was turned up loud, tuned to a pirate station that played American music. Eli had almost made it by the vegetable stands and the last cluster of houses at the edge of town when he saw a group of boys gathered at the side of the road. He pressed the gas harder, just as they started hurling stones at his car. One of the boys slingshotted a fist-sized stone that smashed his window, cracking a huge spiderweb on Eli’s windshield. Eli tried to turn the car away as a second volley of stones flew at it, but the car skidded into a ditch, nearly spinning completely around. With the car stuck in the ditch, Eli suddenly realized how bright the sun was and how his eyes hurt. At first Eli began to pray, terrified now that with his car idle another kid might launch a Molotov cocktail at him. He’d seen Jewish cars burned up at the side of the road before, and he reached into the glove compartment and grabbed his .38. Eli jumped out of the car. Most of the kids had scattered into the narrow side streets, but Eli could see a young Arab boy riding away on a donkey, calling, “Itbah al-Yahud,” “kill the Jew.”

  Everything became quiet for a moment as he drew his pistol. The whole world seemed to be frozen in that blazing white light. All he could think was never again, never again, never again, never again, never again. Then, total clarity. The sort of locked-in feeling he had felt during prayer. No sound, smell, taste. Nothing. Just the visual, intense, superreal, a tunnel of light and colors from him to the boy.

  Eli fired until the gun was empty and dropped the kid into the dirt at the side of the road. It seemed to take forever for the bullets to reach him and then the bright yellow dust came up all around him and Eli was back in the world. The boy’s donkey skittered off as Eli reached into his utility vest pocket for more bullets. His hands shook and he could only press two bullets into the gun, dropping the rest onto the ground. The boy lay still at the side of the road. He was dead, Eli knew that right away. His ears rang with a high-pitched hum as he walked toward the boy with the gun still in his hand.

  Lying there in the dirt the boy looked so young, no more than thirteen, Eli thought. He could have been his kid. He smelled of sweat and still wore a backward smile and the first hints of a mustache on his face. Eli brushed his hand through his brown hair and closed his own eyes. For a moment, he saw the darkness of his eyelids and wondered, “Is this what death looks like?”

  One of the bullets had come out the boy’s chest and another had gone in his shoulder. Eli pushed the body over with his foot so he wouldn’t have to look at him anymore.

  The boy’s red, black, and green riding blanket lay crumpled on the ground not five feet from him. Eli picked it up and shook out the dust. He wrapped the thick blanket around the boy, who was bleeding furiously from the chest and mouth.

  The boy wasn’t very heavy, maybe eighty or ninety pounds, like a small deer. He could have lifted the boy’s weight three times over. And for a moment, he remembered carrying Josh with a fever of a hundred and three, up the stairs to his room, and laying him on his bed.

  The boy’s bare feet dangled from the blanket, slapping together as Eli walked. There was no one around — no Arabs, no Jews, no one. Not even the sound of a distant car engine to break the silence. It seemed to Eli that even God had winked and turned his back at that moment. He felt nothing carrying the boy back to Zev’s car, as if he weren’t even there but only imagining the whole scene. Somewhere in the distance black smoke rose into the sky where the local Arabs burned garbage.

  Eli opened the trunk and threw the boy in next to the spare tire. The blanket covered his face but his body was twisted in a strange way. Eli closed the trunk, and for a moment his head spun, like it was being ripped open from the inside. He opened the trunk again and placed the boy inside the blanket and wrapped it twice around him, covering him completely.

  He got into the car and prayed, hoping the engine would start before anyone returned. And the car revved and pulled itself out of the ditch and back onto the road. The radio was blaring Presley’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Eli turned the volume down and opened the glove compartment. He tossed in his pistol, and pulled out an old pair of Zev’s mirrored sunglasses.

  “God teaches you hard,” Eli thought, putting the glasses on. “These things happen on the road to redemption, on the road to Jerusalem. But God forgives you for what you do and I love Him.”

  For as Long as the Lamp Is Burning

  For Merilyn Papernick, 1944–2010

  The week before, Avshalom Cohen and his aging mother, Miriam, sat drinking tea together in her Rehavia apartment. It was summer, and violin music played through the trees and gardens outside the open kitchen window. In the next building Mr. Herzog scratched out the music that had saved his life at Auschwitz with a deeper sadness than usual, his arthritic hands fumbling across the strings, the bow just missing the right note. Miriam Cohen told her son that Mr. Herzog had fallen on Azza Street on his way home from the shuk and had refused, as he had his whole life, to visit a doctor. He was finally ready to meet his wife again in the Great Beyond.

  “Such nonsense,” Miriam said. “I know my Hershel is not waiting for me. He has gone to dust and there he will stay.”

  “Momma,” Avshalom said for the thousandth time. “Of course Poppa is waiting for you.”

  “That’s why he has written my name across the stars,” she said bitterly. “He has forgotten me, left me behind. I will never forget. Never forget.”

  Avshalom knew that another one of her crying fits was coming on — whenever she said she would never forget, she wept, tore at her hair, waved her tattooed left arm in her son’s face, cursed at him.

  “You were such a good boy, Avshi. As good, maybe, as your brother and sister. And then you left me, too, and moved to Mevaseret with the Sephardi school teacher.”

  “It is only a twenty-minute drive,” he said, ignoring the jab at his wife.

  “You never visit,” she said. “The only visitors I have are the gestapo and their black dogs gnashing their teeth when I try and sleep.”

  “Momma, don’t talk that way. Put it out of your mind.”

  “Never!” she said. “I don’t sleep anymore. They are in my room. I can hear them whispering. Last night, I woke up and could not breathe and I went to the kitchen and someone had snuck in and turned on the gas. I could have died. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “It was just bad dreams and your emphysema,” Avshalom said.

  “I have no such thing. I can’t even pronounce the word. I’m telling you, the Nazi Arabs came to my home. They move things when I am not looking so I can’t find them.”

  He placed his hand on her veined, shaking hand. “Momma, I’m going to leave now.”

  “Leave!” she said. And then, all at once, Mr. Herzog’s lugubrious playing came to an abrupt end.

  Avshalom’s telephone rang sometime after midnight. He was in bed with his wife, Shira. She picked up the phone.

  “Avshi, your mother.”

  “Hello, Momma,” he said, taking up the telephone.

  Her voice was thin and scared on the other end of the phone. “Where were you when I called?”

  “We were only in Eilat with the boys for a couple of days.”

  “You must come over. The Nazis, they are here again.”

  “But Momma,” he said.

  “Did I give you the last milk of my breast?” she asked.

  He hung up the phone and turned to Shira, softly kissing her cheek.

  “Sad dreams?” Shira asked.

  “Another one of he
r fits,” he said.

  When he arrived at his mother’s home, Avshalom found her standing in the door of her apartment brandishing a worn slipper in her hand.

  “Hurry, Avshi, hurry!” she called as he got out of his car.

  “How are you feeling, Momma?”

  “The Nazis,” she cried. “They were here.”

  He climbed the stairs slowly, his tiny mother waving her slipper to speed him up.

  “You heard Mr. Herzog died,” she said.

  “No,” Avshalom said, taking his mother’s soft hand. She wore a brown cardigan sweater over her cotton nightgown. She squeezed his hand tightly.

  “He died and stayed in his home for three days before someone found him.”

  “He was a nice man,” Avshalom said.

  “And look where that got him,” she said.

  His mother’s usually immaculate apartment was a mess: plates were piled in the sink; papers lay everywhere, on the floor, the table, the sofa; the curtains were pulled closed; the room smelled stale; even his father’s study, a model of German order, was a testament to chaos — his large leather-bound books had been pulled from their shelves and strewn about; his ashtray that had lain full for the last eight years since his death had been turned over on his desk; his banker’s lamp lay smashed and broken.

  She had always been neat in the German tradition. She once joked with Avshalom as a child that if he went out to play after dinner without brushing his teeth and has v’chalila he died in an attack, she promised to pry open his coffin with her stirring ladle to clean his teeth for the journey.

  “What happened, Momma?” Avshalom said, surveying the damage.

  She threw the slipper at him, missing his head by a few feet. “I told you, the Nazis came and took things.”

  He pulled his mother close to him and held her in his arms, an embrace so warm he hoped it would chase away every phantasm until Judgment Day. She, too, carried an odd smell about her, a smell of age and neglect that he had never noticed before. She pulled herself violently from his arms.