The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  Shawn wore his hair in a mohawk at the time, something Kravetz couldn’t get away with, having curly hair that would have looked like a strip of carpet. Girls curious about Shawn always wanted to touch his hair.

  He told Kravetz how he had gotten redheaded Jenn Liska drunk on peppermint schnapps, how she had ridden him like a horse in her parents’ bed, with her tights rolled down to her knees, and how her breath tasted like an ashtray.

  “Wow,” Kravetz had said, half excited, half disgusted by the blow-by-blow details that made him hard.

  “You’ll get there, my son. You’ll get there,” Shawn said. When Kravetz finally did sleep with a Montreal cocktail waitress ten years his senior that New Year’s Eve, Shawn burst into the bedroom as soon as they were done, snapping the two strangers in bed with his Nikon.

  “My boy Kravetz’s first time,” he had told the horrified waitress, laughing as she disappeared under the wrinkled sheets like a ghost.

  Kravetz closed the book of poetry and felt the weight of loneliness all around him. Jana, he thought, “You are beautiful like . . .”

  Kravetz had not heard the hum of the noisy elevator and the slam of its heavy door.

  “Honey, I’m home,” Shawn called, opening the apartment door. He appeared on the balcony a few minutes later, with the waitress from Elijah’s Cup at his side. “Stuart, this is Ravit.” She extended her hand, and Kravetz shook it, realizing she was the one wearing patchouli in the bar that night. She was tall and had dark hair, was maybe a Yemenite or Moroccan. She had a bright smile, and wore a loose red shirt.

  “Ravit wants to be a star,” Shawn said.

  “Shut up, stupid,” she said, hitting him lightly on the shoulder. Shawn pulled away and said, “Ow.”

  Kravetz knew now that they had had sex, or would soon have sex. He knew Shawn’s gambit well — baiting, antagonizing, then feigning hurt to gain the girl’s sympathies.

  “Come on, we’re going for a walk,” Shawn said, adjusting his camera at his neck. “You can’t study all day.”

  “You aren’t religious, are you?” Ravit said. “I hate the religious.”

  “It’s poetry,” Kravetz said lamely.

  “She hates the army, too. She just turned eighteen,” Shawn said, grabbing a handful of her hair. “You’re a nice girl,” he said, leaning in close to kiss her.

  “Fuck the army,” she said, pulling away. “And fuck the crazy religious of this city. I’m going to Thailand next week.” She laughed a loud, mannish laugh as she pretended to take a drag from a joint.

  Kravetz noticed that her eyes seemed to be almost spinning with energy and were a deep, piercing green, the color of liquor-soaked lime rinds. He put his book down and said, “I gotta be at work in an hour.”

  Shawn popped open the back of his camera, reached into his vest, slid in a roll of film, and snapped it shut again without even looking at what he was doing, like a gunslinger loading up in the wild west. “Come on. Call in. Kids are united,” Shawn said and stuck out his fist as he had so many times during their youth. Kravetz hesitated and then punched it with his own, adding his lines, “Never be divided.”

  A half an hour later they arrived at an ultraorthodox neighborhood that looked like an eighteenth-century Jewish ghetto. It was built like a stone fortress, with Yiddish posters plastered everywhere to the blackened walls. The streets were gray and potholed, and black-garbed men with beards and side curls walked through the crowded streets speaking in Yiddish. Shawn wore an open motorcycle jacket with a T-shirt that had “Social Distortion” written across the front. Kravetz noticed that Ravit walked with supreme confidence, taking dramatic, modelesque strides, not unlike Jana when she had felt the world was hers. Ravit spoke in a tuneless yet musical way and laughed, sometimes touching Kravetz on the shoulder.

  “So serious,” she said, frowning. “You must to have fun.” She smiled.

  They stopped before a sign that said, “ATTENTION! YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE ULTRAORTHODOX NEIGHBORHOOD OF MEA SHEARIM. WOMEN ARE TO DRESS MODESTLY.” The sign said that women should wear sleeves that reached at least to their elbow, and skirts that reached below their knees. Necklines were to be no lower than the collarbone.

  Ravit undid the top two buttons of her cherry red shirt.

  “Here we are,” Shawn said as two men passed. “On your right you’ll notice the latest ghetto fashions of the year of our Lord seventeen ninety-two. The bearded gentleman,” and here Shawn laughed. Ravit hummed along to his commentary. “Oh, they’re both bearded. The taller gentleman models a fur streimel, made out of the finest rat fur, trapped in the kitchens of Schmuel the baker.”

  Kravetz felt his stomach turn. “Shawn, what are you doing?”

  Two more men passed and scowled at the three of them.

  “You can’t talk like that,” Kravetz said.

  “Why not? They don’t speak English.”

  “They don’t speak Hebrew, either,” Ravit said. “Only to pray. God forbid you wipe your ass in God’s Hebrew.”

  Now a woman pushing a baby carriage approached, her young daughter slowly walking at her side.

  “Like a queen, her wig glistens in the sunlight, a wig this gorgeous you wouldn’t dare cover with a babababushka. . . .”

  The girl lowered her head and sped up.

  Shawn began to jump around singing, “Crucify-i-i-i-i me, Crucify-i-i-i-i me.”

  “Stop it,” Kravetz said.

  “Crucify-i-i-i-i me,” Shawn continued.

  Ravit grabbed him, pressed close, and whispered in his ear, “Be a good boy.”

  “You’re gonna start a riot,” Kravetz said, stepping away.

  “Hey, that’s cool,” Shawn said.

  “So I get stoned here instead of Thailand,” Ravit said matter-of-factly.

  “This isn’t fucking Disneyland,” Kravetz said.

  “No. It’s the fucking Holyland,” Shawn said. “And you’re playing Goofy.”

  At that moment, Kravetz hated Shawn, as he had hated him a thousand times before. But he knew that Shawn only wanted to have fun, and that he was trying to draw him out of his gloom. He really didn’t understand, he hadn’t seen the anger in the eyes of those men. And if Ravit was supposed to be a gift for him, like the Montreal cocktail waitress had been, he was not interested.

  A gray-bearded man wearing a rumpled suit and black hat burst out of a building and charged toward them, calling Ravit a whore. His clenched fists looked like steel hammers, and he cursed at Shawn from beneath the sign. “She’s not a whore,” Shawn said. “She’s the Virgin Mary.” Kravetz was afraid somebody would get hurt, and pulled Ravit close to him by the shoulders. She was stronger than he thought, and pushed him away. Kravetz fell to the ground and he heard prayers from all around, as he scrambled to pick up his glasses. When Kravetz looked up again he saw that Shawn had his camera ready, aimed at the man, and that the man had covered his face with his hat to protect himself against breaching the Second Commandment forbidding graven images. And now Ravit unbuttoned the rest of her shirt, and pulled it open. She leaned close to the man, and blew a dramatic kiss at him, her bra and tattooed midriff bared for all to see.

  Then the clickclickclickclickclickclick of Shawn’s Nikon.

  That was A Marriage Made in Heaven, and the beginning of FLICK Photos and Postcards.

  Come Hither, Woman, Thy Breasts Are as Comely as Doves

  Shawn thought it was so clever to spell the name FLICK in all capital letters, giving the illusion of the word FUCK as in the smudgy old comic books. He found a man named Sammi Shaloub who ran a camera store in East Jerusalem and who let Shawn use his darkroom for his black and white photos and would develop Shawn’s color prints without asking any questions.

  While Kravetz was busy studying, Shawn wandered through the city with his cameras trying to catch gold in his crosshairs. During his first week, he had been cursed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where he had an Australian girl, on the last leg of her three-year walkabout, slip out of her d
ress and lie on the Stone of Unction, smoking a cigarette where the body of Christ had been laid after he was removed from the cross. An Orthodox monk had chased him out with a burning censer into the stone courtyard, shouting “American” and “Fuck.”

  “It’s like a dirty butcher’s slab,” Shawn had told Kravetz of the Stone of Unction, “and these pilgrims are tongue kissing it.”

  At the Dome of the Rock where the Prophet Muhammad had begun his night journey to heaven, where Muslims prostrate themselves in prayer, he snapped a Swedish girl he had just met, face to the ground, dress thrown over her head, bare behind in the air, praying to the mighty Allah. The Ass of an Angel even got a quiet “tsk, tsk” from Sammi Shaloub.

  Shawn found two urchins throwing rotten fruit at frightened tourists outside of the Jaffa Gate and he convinced them to sell his provocative postcards for two dollars each, and before long he had a squad of six kids selling his photos throughout the city.

  It was a rainy December day and Shawn had been staying with Kravetz for more than a month. The Old City was only twenty minutes from their King George Street apartment and they made the journey together about twice a week in search of sickeningly sweet Nablus-style kanafi, thick Turkish coffee, prickly pears, and any old trinket that caught their eyes. Shawn had bought a bullwhip on his last trip to the Old City and chased Kravetz all the way home, snapping the whip at him as he ran.

  The streets were slick and luminous, seeming almost to glow in the gray light, and they passed a fruit stand and carpet and souvenir shops that sold olive-wood camels and manger scenes. They passed people in the streets, Arabs, Jews, and Christians, and Kravetz looked in every face as it passed, swearing that he saw something in each that reminded him of Jana. A boy carrying a large wooden tray of pita bread on his head bumped into Kravetz and mumbled something in Arabic that Shawn figured must be about Kravetz’s mother. A shopkeeper shouted out “Special price,” and waved a checkered kaffiyeh at Kravetz and Shawn as they descended deeper into the city. They reached a small mosque where, through the open door, they could see a man stretched out in prayer on the floor. Shawn had raised his camera and began to focus, but Kravetz said, “Let’s go.”

  They arrived at a darkened shop where old black and white photographs dating from the time of the Ottomans and the British mandate hung in the window. Kravetz could see photos of a sheep market outside of Damascus Gate, slick water buffaloes trudging through the malarial Hula swamp, pilgrims dragging crosses down the Via Dolorosa, a man with an impossibly large mustache smoking from a water pipe. Shawn entered the store followed by Kravetz, and greeted the man behind the counter, who, it seemed, had been sleeping with his head in his arms.

  “Welcome,” the man said, jumping up.

  The room smelled of old books and coffee, and a large color photo of the Dome of the Rock hung behind him. The man pulled back a curtain and disappeared for a moment, returning with a folded paper in his hand.

  Shawn was looking at some color photographs of young boys throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Kravetz could hear him chuckle, “Now that is what I call punk.”

  “Five hundred dollars,” the man said, unfolding the piece of paper. “Only five hundred dollars. Look. Look,” the man said.

  Kravetz could see what looked like Hebrew letters and a bloodstain, with a hole in the middle of the page.

  “You remember the prime minister,” the man said. “Terrible thing.”

  “Robert Capa,” Shawn said. “Bullshit pedestrian portraits. Look at this shit,” Shawn said.

  He flipped through a book of photos dating from the first days of the State of Israel. Pioneers, Kravetz thought, and smiled.

  “Look,” Shawn said. “Man building a fucking house, street scene Tel Aviv, ugly face no shirt, ugly face sun hat, rabbi, man with gun, eyepatch, ugly, ugly, ugly. These pictures are boring and ugly,” Shawn said.

  From the time he was a kid, Kravetz had always thought that Moshe Dayan in his eyepatch looked dashing. “And I suppose you are here to capture the beauty of Jerusalem’s golden light,” Kravetz said. “Its majestic architecture, from Herod to Süleyman the Magnificent . . .”

  “No,” Shawn said, shaking his head. “I’m here to be interesting. This shit is boring.”

  The man leaned in close to Kravetz, holding the page close to his face. He could see Hebrew lettering on the page.

  “The Song of Peace,” the man said.

  “There will never be peace,” Shawn said, picking up a book.

  “Look,” the man said. “The Song of Peace.”

  Kravetz remembered that the prime minister had been awkwardly singing the Song of Peace at the rally, only moments before he had been killed. He had folded the page and placed it in his breast pocket. “Only three hundred dollars,” the man said.

  “Let me see that,” Kravetz said.

  “No. No,” the man said. “You can’t touch it.”

  “Look at this,” Shawn called. He waved an old leather-bound book. “A guide book.”

  “Two hundred fifty,” the man said. “Look. The bullet hole. A Jewish bullet hole.”

  “Check this out,” Shawn said, mumbling something in mangled Hebrew. “I have many gold pieces and many treasures . . .”

  “That is a pilgrims’ guide book to the holy city from the time of the Crusaders,” the man said. He had a mustache that was just beginning to turn gray, and he wore a thick pair of glasses. He pulled Kravetz closer to him by the shoulder and said, “For you, two hundred fifty. That is his real blood. Smell it.”

  Kravetz turned away. He had lost sixty dollars in a shell game in Times Square when he was sixteen and had no interest in being ripped off again. He turned back to Shawn.

  “What else does it say?”

  Shawn laughed. “Here. This one is great. ‘Come Hither, Woman, Thy Breasts Are as Comely as Doves.’ Do you think that would work?”

  “You’ve gotten away with worse,” Kravetz said.

  “You know, it’s the Crusaders who fucked this place up in the first place,” Shawn said. The man quietly folded the paper and put it back in his breast pocket. “You know, you’ve seen these Arabs with blond hair or blue eyes walking around. That’s because they’ve been fucked by Crusaders, probably raped in the name of Christ.”

  “Come on,” Kravetz said.

  “You are living in the land of the perennially fucked,” Shawn said. “A fantasy land of ghosts and fucking kooks.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kravetz said.

  “The place was built directly on the ashes of the Holocaust.”

  “Bullshit,” Kravetz said.

  “It wasn’t? So was that a picnic over there in Europe? When the world stops feeling guilty about what happened over there, Israel will be wiped off the map.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Kravetz said.

  “Let’s go, man, this place stinks,” Shawn said, walking toward the door.

  “Yes, yes, you go,” the man said. “But first you must buy. I have the bullets,” the man added, reaching into his pocket. “Look how they have been flattened.”

  “So this is the golden Medina,” Shawn said.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Bullshit. Even Herzl, your father of modern Zionism, said the only thing special about a Jewish state would be that the prostitutes would be Jewish, the thieves would be Jewish. . . .”

  “It’s not that . . .” Kravetz started to say.

  “No, it’s worse,” Shawn said. “Living next door to terrorists, Scud missiles flying overhead, religious fanatics.” He pulled the door open, looked at the man, and said, “This is a fucking garage sale. I’m outta here,” Shawn said, curling his lips into a scowl.

  Kravetz followed Shawn out into the street, not looking at the man as he left. Kravetz felt like arguing with Shawn, but by the time he caught up to him, Shawn was smiling. A pair of Arab women walked toward Shawn and Kravetz with their faces covered.

  “Check it out, man.” Shawn tried to say, “Com
e hither, woman, thy breasts are as comely as doves,” as the two women passed.

  “That’s ancient Hebrew,” Kravetz said. “They’re not going to understand that.”

  The two women passed, ignoring Shawn and Kravetz. Shawn shouted down the street after them, “Your breasts are like two pillows, like two water balloons, two floppy, flapping, bouncing titties.”

  “Shut up,” Kravetz said.

  “They don’t understand,” Shawn said. “It’s like the time we were in Montreal and we would point at our wrist, as if we’re asking for the time.”

  “They knew you were asking them to suck your dick.”

  Now another woman walked toward them, carrying a string bag in her arms.

  “Come on,” Shawn said, “you try. We’re going to get you laid.”

  “No way. That’s obnoxious.”

  “Do you want me to get you laid or not?” Shawn said.

  Two summers earlier, Jana had told Kravetz that she was going upstate for the summer solstice with some of her friends and that he couldn’t come. “It’s sort of a Baltic Bash,” she had said.

  “Tribalism,” Shawn had said to Kravetz. “That cunt will never really accept you because you are not part of her tribe. Worse still, you’re a Jew. She’s probably cheating on you right now. Huh, some of that Polish kielbasa.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Kravetz said. “You’re talking about my girlfriend?”

  “Then why doesn’t the bitch want you to go?”

  Shawn was always putting doubts into Kravetz’s head. At first Kravetz thought it was only jealousy, since Shawn never seemed to have a girlfriend for very long. But this time Kravetz was worried that something was going to happen. When Jana returned from the weekend away, she said the weekend was fine, but she drank too much. That worried Kravetz even more, and then he noticed the hair.

  He told Shawn that she always had an inch-long black hair on her left breast, and when she came back from her trip it was gone.

  “The bitch cut it off,” Shawn said, “because she knew she was going to get fucked. I’ll bet she shaved her bikini line, too, for the first time in a year.”