The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  “Quiet,” Shuki said. “Operation Secret Messiah.”

  The frightened cows moved away from them as one, their hooves rumbling against the earth. Mordechai and Shuki followed them twice around the pen under the moonless sky. The cows were brown and black and some were just brown.

  “Okay,” Shuki said, “let’s get this one, she’s stopped moving.”

  “She’s too big,” Mordechai said, laughing. “Even bigger than Tamar.”

  “My sister’s having twins, idiot. Just grab one,” Shuki answered. “Grab it by the tail.”

  But they couldn’t catch the other cows, who kept circling around and around the pen in the darkness.

  “Let’s get this one before she wakes up,” Mordechai said, slapping the fat sleepy cow on the rump. “Yala!”

  It wasn’t easy to get the giant brown cow into the truck. She wouldn’t move after being prodded out of the pen. When she finally did move she stepped on Mordechai’s foot and then didn’t move again.

  “Ouch,” Mordechai called. “She’s on my foot.”

  “Punch her,” Shuki said.

  “What?”

  “In the nose.”

  “No. You punch her.”

  “Tickle her, then,” Shuki said, spitting onto the ground. “Like she’s your girlfriend.”

  When they finally got her into the truck they covered her with a tarp and gunned the engine past the guard when his back was turned.

  When they pulled back onto the highway, Mordechai and Shuki sang the song that they thought was so hilarious calling for the Messiah. “Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach! Ai, ai, ai, ai . . .”

  “We should call her ‘one million burgers,’ ” Mordechai said as they drove back up toward the holy city.

  “She’s the red heifer,” Shuki said. “And I’m a blond.”

  In the alleyway behind the King of Falafel they slathered red paint onto the cow and worked it into her coat.

  “The hairdresser at work,” Mordechai said.

  “If that will keep me from the army,” Shuki said, kissing the cow dramatically on the forehead.

  The cow stood still, big-eyed, oblivious.

  It was nearly four o’clock in the morning when they led the red-painted cow across King George Street. Mordechai and Shuki were as red as the cow, their hands and faces smeared with paint. They were high from the paint fumes.

  “Ai, ai ai, ai, wo-o, wo-o, wo-o . . .” Mordechai sang.

  “Quiet,” Shuki said.

  “Jews are depending on you, big girl,” Mordechai whispered. “In the morning they will wake to trumpets and flutes and harps. . . .”

  “Shut up,” Shuki said, leading the cow into the alleyway behind the King of the King of Falafel.

  “At last the Messiah can come,” Mordechai added, patting her on the head. “Isn’t that right, Red?”

  Not even a moo.

  Shuki jimmied open the back door of Benny Ovadiah’s King of the King of Falafel with a pocket knife he carried in his jeans. They had difficulty leading the beefy cow through the back door, her wet paint rubbing off against the door, but they forced her through, laughing as they went.

  “Through the red door, destiny awaits,” Mordechai said.

  They left her standing alone in the dark, in the middle of the restaurant.

  From across the street they could hear the red-painted cow rattling around in the darkness, a breaking of glass, battering against the steel shutter that said: King of the King of Falafel, and then the graffito, “Is the king of nothing.” They heard hooves stamping and long, loud moos.

  Mordechai imagined Benny Ovadiah’s unblemished marble tables shattering on the floor, his tapestries trod upon, his bronze tchotchkes battered and stomped on. He imagined the Lubavitcher rebbe climbing out of the photo from beside the mandate-era register to sweep the cluttered floor muttering lamentations, and the frightened cow nuzzling close, dripping snot on the black-clad rabbi.

  From the time they locked the cow inside, there was not a moment of silence. Afraid that the paint fumes had made her crazy as a bull, they agonized all night under the moonless sky, without a star to wish on.

  “You go see her,” Mordechai said.

  “No! You!”

  “She’s destroying the place.”

  “She’s destroying the place,” Shuki repeated, and they both broke out laughing.

  Mordechai’s insides heaved as he laughed and he felt a warm glow inside him. He laughed so hard he could not tell if sweat or tears poured down his face.

  For a moment before the sun rose, the sky filled with stars and then morning burst out of the east to greet them.

  Things were not so hilarious by the time Benny Ovadiah arrived to open the King of the King of Falafel. Both Mordechai and Shuki were exhausted and a little afraid.

  “Caught with red hands,” Shuki said, but he did not laugh.

  The sun was out now, and there was nowhere for the two boys to hide. They stood by the side of the road and could hear Benny Ovadiah screaming and cursing, calling them sons of whores, sons of bitches, sons of shit. Mordechai turned to Shuki and offered a prayer for his soul. He was only half joking.

  When Benny Ovadiah emerged from his battered restaurant, he was completely red, covered in paint or blood or both.

  He carried a bloody butcher knife in his shaking hand. “You had better hope the Messiah comes now,” Benny Ovadiah shouted, stepping into the street. “Then, the dead can rise again. And you will be the first.”

  “You can’t kill us,” Mordechai said.

  “Why not? I can share a cell with your father.”

  He reached the sidewalk and grabbed Mordechai by the hair.

  “It was just a joke,” Mordechai said, almost in tears.

  “I’ve slaughtered your joke,” Benny Ovadiah boomed.

  “But, we’re neighbors,” Mordechai said, the words almost swallowed. “Look,” he said, pointing to the pathetic sight of Benny Ovadiah’s ruined falafel restaurant across the street.

  “No! Look!” Shuki cried, wide-eyed.

  And, from behind an overturned table, Mordechai saw a little red calf stumble unsteadily out of the wreckage, its legs buckling like a drunk, as it mooed and stepped out to join the morning traffic.

  Lucky Eighteen

  Elijah’s Cup

  Very early on the morning of his twenty-third birthday, Stuart Kravetz and his friend Shawn Silver stepped out of a misty rain and through a rusty ornamented gate, into the subterranean gloom and smoke of Elijah’s Cup. They stepped down three stone stairs, careful not to slip on splashes of beer or vomit as they ducked their heads below an iron pipe, Kravetz holding on for balance. Shawn smiled at every face he met. He wore light meter and camera around his neck and carried a silver briefcase in his left hand and a suitcase in his right. He wore a stylish black linen suit and a small ponytail that seemed grossly out of place for both the Holy City and Elijah’s Cup. But Kravetz remembered that Shawn always dressed to travel, whether it was a road trip to Boston or a plane flight across the world. The room was filled with barefoot English travelers, blond Swedish tourists, wayward rabbinical students, wild-eyed mystics, mustached Palestinian laborers, broad-shouldered U.N. troopers, Russian whores, and bullshitters of all political stripes pounding back cheap Israeli beer, hummus, and olives.

  Kravetz had not seen Shawn since leaving for Israel six months earlier, and besides having grown a goatee that covered his cleft chin, he also seemed to have gained weight. Kravetz noticed that Shawn’s face seemed somehow harder, and though he was only a year older than Kravetz, he looked dried out and bloated at the same time.

  The prime minister had been buried on Mount Herzl that morning, and after a long day Kravetz had gone to bed early, with his radio tuned to Galei Tzahal playing mournful music from the darkness. The telephone woke him at midnight. “Happy birthday, kid,” the familiar voice said. “How about a drink?”

  Kravetz was silent and clicked on his bedside lamp.

  “
I’m at the airport, brother,” his old friend, Shawn Silver, said, sounding more nasal than usual. “Meet me outside Elijah’s Cup in an hour.”

  And now they were under the smoky dome of Elijah’s Cup, passing old Ministry of Tourism posters for Tiberias, Eilat, and the Dead Sea tacked to the wall. A dustpan-sized ceramic hamsa hung behind the bar, the shape of a hand, a dreamy blue eye centered in its palm to ward off evil. Faded photos of rabbis — a hawk-nosed Baba Sali, a turbaned Ovadiah Yosef, and other Sephardi mystics — were taped to the mirror behind the bar. A stained and tattered petition sat on the bar; the bar’s owner had been caught with drugs in the Sinai, and was currently serving twenty-five years in an Egyptian prison. A wooden barrel of black olives stood nearby; customers dipped their hands in and sometimes spat the pits back into the barrel.

  Shawn found a table covered with graffiti and sat down beneath a television that mutely flashed CNN’s World Report. Kravetz could see the Kings of Israel Square on the television screen as he sat down. He could see blood on the pavement where the prime minister had been shot, and his stomach tensed.

  “What are you doing here?” Kravetz said, still buzzing from nerves. Shawn had a history of surprising Stuart, and it usually meant trouble. They had been friends since second grade in Hebrew school when Shawn had dropped his pen so he could catch a peek up Miss Makhlabani’s skirt and was smacked on the head with a ruler. Shawn had been his best friend, but that was a long time ago.

  “Two Goldstars, Motek.” Shawn snapped a finger in the air to get the waitress’s attention. “Shit. She’s the bomb.”

  Kravetz nodded his head, and thought women were always bombs, or chicks, or puss to Shawn.

  “What am I doing here?” Shawn said, returning to Stuart’s question. “I told you I’d come. I’m good for my word. You must be lonely, anyway. The literary exile. Shit, your parents haven’t heard from you in months.”

  It was Kravetz’s parents who had sent him to Israel in the first place, and it had nothing to do with Zionism, or making the desert bloom, or becoming a light unto nations. Five years earlier he and Shawn played in a punk band called Bitefinger Baby, and their drummer had stabbed someone at one of the clubs they were playing. His parents figured something bad was bound to happen if he stayed in the city, and he was too old for summer camp. So Kravetz and Shawn went to Israel.

  They had spent a wild summer drinking together after their senior year of high school, as they traveled from the Golan Heights in the north to Masada and Eilat in the south. They had promised one day, stuffing notes into the Wailing Wall, that they would return to Jerusalem together.

  “I kind of like the quiet,” Kravetz said. “Gives me time to think.”

  “The last thing you want to do is think, my friend. Can I stay?”

  “How long?”

  “I love you, too, buddy. Do you remember when those skinheads tried to steal your Doc Martens?” Shawn said. “They called you a Jew and I convinced them that you weren’t Jewish.” Shawn poked Kravetz in the ribs and crushed him in a headlock. Kravetz gagged from the smell of his friend’s Drakkar Noir cologne.

  “But I am Jewish,” he started to say before Shawn’s bicep muffled his words.

  “I saved you,” Shawn said, letting go after a moment.

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Kravetz said, remembering that he once felt that Shawn and he were as close as brothers. “How long?”

  “I don’t know. Until I strike gold.”

  Shawn always seemed to get his way, and was not afraid to point out an obligation to him. He called in his favors again and again as if the debt lasted a lifetime.

  “You know,” Shawn said. “Until I milk this place for enough pics for a show.”

  A man and a woman sat together at a small table in the corner. The woman was crying. Kravetz wondered if the woman was crying because she and her boyfriend were breaking up, or whether she was mourning the death of the prime minister.

  “I placed the ad,” Shawn said after a moment. He lifted his silver briefcase onto the table and opened it. Kravetz could see another camera with a flash attached to it and a long zoom lens strapped in against the foam bedding. A small Polaroid camera lay beside the lens. Film canisters were strung across the top half of the case like a bandolier.

  Kravetz remembered Shawn’s idea for a spread for the upstart Heart-Shaped Jeans Company. He thought it was a stupid idea at the time: a bunch of beautiful, naked models frolicking in a heart-shaped pool, with their clothes crumpled and scattered around the deck like sex-deflated bodies. But now that he pulled a folded magazine out of his silver case and showed him the glossy ad, with the heading “Good Jean Pool,” he had to laugh.

  “If you will it, it is no dream,” Shawn said, quoting Herzl with a smirk. He lit a filterless Noblesse cigarette. “It’s brilliant, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Kravetz said, and paused as the beers arrived. “Have you heard from Jana?” His voice almost caught in his throat.

  “Nah, haven’t seen her,” Shawn said, sipping from his Goldstar. “This tastes like chlorine.”

  Kravetz was silent, and he thought of Jana again, his Janushka, and felt sick in his stomach and somewhat amazed that he could ever have been close enough to her to call her something as childish as Janushka. He wondered how she could be so far away and yet seem as if she were still in the room with him. Whenever he smelled patchouli oil, he always turned around to see if Jana had come looking for him.

  Three Russians at the next table began singing an offkey, operatic rendition of “Hotel California.” Jana hated Russians and never failed to give the finger to anyone on the road who drove a Lada.

  “This place hasn’t changed a bit,” Shawn said.

  “It’s the only place open tonight,” Kravetz said, thinking of the long lines of mourners making their way up to Mount Herzl that morning. “You’re lucky.”

  “Always have been, always will.” Shawn picked up his camera and looked through it. There was seldom a time that Kravetz remembered seeing Shawn without a camera around his neck or pressed to his face, so he wasn’t surprised when Shawn pointed his camera toward a bald giant with a cinder-block head and thin purple lips who sat alone with his head down at a table across the room. “What’s the deal with that guy?”

  “That’s Asher,” Kravetz said. “He’s a survivor. Sobibor.”

  “Fucking golem,” he said and turned his camera toward a bearded man with a cell phone pressed to his ear. Shawn played with the lens as if he were focusing for a shot.

  “That’s Shmuelik. He used to be a rabbi, now he sells guns,” Kravetz said, taking the first sip of his beer. “One of the guys who helped liquidate the Warsaw or the Lódź ghetto is living in Canada. Shmuelik knows a man who will pay anyone fifty thousand dollars to kill him.”

  “Shit, who wants to go to Canada?” Shawn said and spun in his seat, aiming his camera at Kravetz. “You look good. Better. Really.”

  “I don’t know,” Kravetz said. “Sometimes I’m thinking about what I want to eat or something, and suddenly Jana pops into my head. You know, the way she stood. I see trees that remind me of her. And sometimes I see a woman holding a baby on the bus or something, and she doesn’t even look like Jana, but you know — ”

  “Fuck her,” Shawn said, finishing his beer. “You’ve got to be part animal, part machine.” Shawn always felt empowered by paraphrasing punk-rock lyrics. He raised his camera to his face again, blinding Kravetz with his flash. “A fuckin’ hot animal machine,” he said, expelling a mouth full of smoke.

  A Marriage Made in Heaven

  A few days later, Kravetz sat on his sixth-floor balcony with a volume of Amichai’s poems open in front of him. He read, “You are beautiful, like prophecies / And sad, like those which come true.” And he thought of the time when he and Jana walked through the shallows of the water at Brighton Beach after visiting her aunt and eating some lardy meat prepared in the style of the “old country.” Her hair was wet and she smelled seawee
dy in the last purple light of day and she came up close to him almost shouting, “Hey!” as she pulled a damp pack of cigarettes out of her shorts pocket. “So ’cause I’m not Jewish or anything, does that mean you would never marry me?”

  “You could convert,” Kravetz had said, not sure if he was serious or joking.

  The sun burst through the hard gray sky, its rays refracted like spotlights throughout the city. Kravetz looked out beyond the slope of Independence Park and the remains of the Mamilla Cemetery toward the Old City; the city that Twain had called the knobbiest town in the world with its crooked streets and countless domes, a city where Melville had written in disgust about the Crusader church being a sickening cheat where all is glitter and nothing is gold. But, looking toward the golden Dome of the Rock, Kravetz thought of how far he was from New York and Jana. He knew he would never run into her in the winding streets and alleys, and he felt glad for a moment.

  That week Kravetz and Shawn sat up late drinking Goldstars and talking. Shawn knew Kravetz better than anybody, except Jana, and he built him up, saying, “You’re a handsome guy. Look at those deep poetic eyes of yours. You’re the handsomest guy.”

  Kravetz recounted every detail of his relationship to Shawn, told him how she kissed with her eyes open, how the blonde hair on her arms held the sun in the morning, and her secret nickname for him. He felt somehow lighter, as if he had unburdened himself of a great weight, and was thankful Shawn never once asked, “How was she?”

  Kravetz was still a virgin, a junior in high school, when Shawn Silver had woken him with a drunken phone call at two in the morning to announce, “Gentlemen, that’s lucky eighteen.”

  Lucky eighteen had always been sort of a joke between Shawn and Kravetz, but it seemed somehow appropriate that Shawn would invoke it after his eighteenth lay, since his first came shortly after his bar mitzvah. It was always the cheapskates who didn’t have the class to buy them bar mitzvah gifts that handed them crumpled handfuls of money that always added up to eighteen dollars. Eighteen signified chai, or life, and was supposed to bring good luck.