by Judith Frank
A man approached Daniel, bent, and murmured something in his ear. Daniel cleared his throat and rose, and removed the folded eulogy from his overcoat pocket. The coat was Joel’s; he’d taken it because he hadn’t brought a warm enough jacket, and in the van, he kept sniffing at the lapels and fighting back tears.
The paper crackled under the microphone as Daniel smoothed it with shaking fingers. He cleared his throat and neared his face to the microphone and said, “Shalom.” He said, “I’m Daniel Rosen, Joel’s brother.” His voice was hoarse; he cleared his throat. “I have a big strawberry birthmark on my back,” he said. “I’ve always thought that Joel was in such a hurry to get out and take the world by storm, he shoved me aside, right there.” There was a wave of low laughter. “But I loved Joel more than anybody in the world.”
Matt took in the complicated message and stored it for future rumination, when he was less exhausted and more mature. That was the last thing he understood, because Daniel delivered the rest of his eulogy in Hebrew. Daniel had learned Hebrew in Jewish summer camp and during the year he spent in Israel; he had learned it quickly—he had a facility for languages, spoke French and German as well—and was vain about it. Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Lydia whisper in Sam’s ear and wring the handkerchief she held in both hands, and he thought it was sad that they weren’t able to understand the eulogy. But as Daniel spoke and got into it, Matt found he didn’t mind. The actual words might have destroyed him. Instead, he heard a Jewish man speaking the language of Jewish prayer. It was weird: Speaking Hebrew, Daniel seemed somehow more authoritative. More masculine, even—the microphone took his everyday tenor and wove it in rich, colored strands. He gripped the sides of the podium. His mouth moved in ways Matt had never seen before, his lips and tongue making all the consonants juicy. His language was leaving the mundane world of the queer everyday, and elevating itself to the universal. Matt looked on, enthralled, conscious in a tiny part of his mind that he was idealizing his partner’s speech, that it was, after all, coming from the same mouth that kissed him and sucked him. But watching Daniel, he felt proud to belong to him.
There were tears, and the honks and sniffles of people blowing their noses. The baby had fallen asleep on his Israeli grandmother’s shoulder. He heard Daniel say in Hebrew, “I love you, Joel”—Ani ohev otcha, words he had taught Matt long ago, and uttered from time to time when they were in bed, after sex or right before falling asleep. He whispered a few last broken words, and stepped down. He looked over the crowd, blind and disoriented; Matt stood so Daniel could see him, and he stumbled over to his seat.
He sat beside Matt with his face in his hands, sobbing freely. In the swing of crying, he’d picked up the rhythm of marathon crying rather than sprinting, his sobs low and regular and inconsolable. A box of Kleenex was passed their way, and Matt fed tissues to Daniel, and took the used ones off his lap, laying them on the floor between his own feet. The air was chilly, but damp with body heat. Up on the podium, Sam was sighing into the microphone, making a shuddery crackling sound. He was saying that Joel had never hurt anyone, that he had many Arab friends and colleagues, that he didn’t deserve to be claimed by this terrible conflict. “What kind of person,” he pondered, “blows himself up in order to harm innocent people?”
Matt bit his lip and looked down at the floor. Sam was gripping the podium and looking out into the sea of mourners as though waiting for a reply. He spoke, Matt thought, as if he was the first person to ponder this problem. As if the fact that he—a wealthy and powerful American man—didn’t understand was supposed to mean that nobody could, that it was utterly unfathomable. Sam sighed heavily and shook his head. “I just don’t get it,” he said. “I just don’t get it.”
Matt shifted. A rancor was rising in him that he wanted to shake off. Have some respect, he told himself furiously. The man was mourning his son, talking about his death the best way he knew how; he had no right to criticize him. Matt’s ruminations were interrupted by a squeeze of his hand. Daniel was cutting his eyes toward him. His mind tumbled rapidly over the meaning of this communication, and his spirit lifted a little.
It seemed to have been agreed upon in advance that Malka would not speak. And at the last moment, Lydia didn’t rise to the podium either; her arm grew rigid against Sam’s hand, and a look of terror came over her face. “I can’t,” she whispered. Yaakov spoke, in a manner so dazed that Matt wished several times that someone would do him a favor and lead him away from the podium. His head and lips sagged like a stroke victim’s; it was hard to tell when he’d finished, he trailed off so many times. Finally, he sighed and turned away, walking in the wrong direction; a man jumped to his feet and led him back to his seat. There was a long respectful pause. Then a friend of Joel’s named Shmulik, a man with a round droll face and a very slight lisp, got up and told some story in a rapid-fire delivery that sent waves of laughter over the hall. Matt watched Daniel’s face break and redden, taken by surprise, and hearing the peal of his laughter made Matt love him so much he could hardly stand it.
There was a brief speech by a fat honcho. And then a bunch of Hasids came and took hold of the pallets the bodies lay upon, and the mourners walked out to the cemetery through the chilly night air, Lydia clutching Daniel’s arm, up a long paved incline and onto this hillside. The Hasids swayed and prayed over the bodies, and Matt gazed at their long beards and side curls, thinking that if Ilana was standing beside him, she’d have something sarcastic to say. They laid the bodies straight into the ground without coffins, and each person shoveled dirt over the grave. He looked quickly at Gal, hidden behind her grandfather’s leg. She was crying, her eyes darting around, as if trying to alight upon the person who would save her; the wind was whipping at her face, making her hair fly. Matt burst into tears. He cried through the singing of the national anthem. The women’s voices rose tearfully at first, tinny and a little shrill, then took strength in numbers and grew in beauty and texture. The sound of voices in unison, men and women an octave apart, in the cold night air, with the stars shining fiercely, pierced him through with grief and something like joy. He looked at Gal and saw that her lips were moving too, even as tears ran down her face. He told himself to remember that singing would bring her solace.
WHEN THEY GOT HOME they were quiet. Ilana’s parents had gone to their own house, leaving the children with the Rosens. The baby was fast asleep in his car seat; Daniel reached in and eased him over his shoulder, carried him in. “Should I change him?” he murmured to his mother.
“No,” she said. “Never wake a sleeping baby.”
Daniel laid him in his crib without waking him. Lydia went into the bathroom to wash up for bed. In the kitchen, Sam was taking a Ziploc bag out of his briefcase. “I just remembered this,” he said, and then looked up to see whom he was talking to. His eyes fell on Matt, who sat down with him at the table. Sam sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs and pondered Joel’s effects. He removed Joel’s wedding ring and slipped it over his pinkie, where it caught on the second knuckle. Matt saw that his fingers had thickened over the years and his own wedding band was now a tight squeeze. There was a filthy wallet. Sam went through it and took out dirty cash, tiny wrinkled photographs of Ilana and the kids, and laid them on the table. And then Joel’s cell phone, still in its holder. Daniel came into the room. “What’s that?” he asked.
Sam undid the Velcro fastener and pulled out the phone. Two small black nails clattered onto the table. Sam inhaled sharply. The three of them stared at one another. Daniel reached down and picked them up, brought them to his face, and sniffed them.
“What are you doing?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” Daniel said, stuffing the nails into his pocket.
They fell out later, when he and Matt undressed and folded their pants over the tiny guest room’s desk chair. Matt stooped and gathered them off the floor, and suppressing a strong desire to throw them in the trash, set them on the desk. Daniel was taking the pillows off the fo
ldout couch and laying them in a stack in a corner of the room. He slid the bed open and went in search of sheets. At the other end of the apartment, Lydia and Sam were putting Gal to bed.
The window was slid open to the chilly night air, and a lovely smell was wafting in. Matt tried to place it. When Daniel came back into the room, he looked at his still face and closed eyes. “Yeast,” he said. “The Angel bread factory is right across the valley.”
They were so tired, they crawled into the small double bed without brushing their teeth. Daniel let out a sigh and turned his back to Matt, curling into a ball. Matt gently spooned him, careful to make his touch feel like solace and not a demand. Daniel was hot and sticky from sweat and tears, the air cool and yeasty, and a kind of sensuous peace came over Matt. They fell asleep within minutes.
But two hours later, Matt awoke to find Daniel lying awake beside him. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
They lay in silence for a while, the only sound the ticking of the desk clock. Matt drifted off for a few minutes, then awoke again, looked over at Daniel and saw his eyelids blinking. “Do you want to tell me what you said about your brother in your eulogy?” he asked.
Daniel continued to stare into space. Matt heard the dry sound of his chapped lips opening. “I said,” he whispered, “that Joel and Ilana would not want their deaths to be used as an opportunity for another wave of violence. They would not want people killed in their name. They were people who worked for social justice.”
“You said that?”
Daniel nodded.
“That’s beautiful, honey. And brave to say.”
Daniel shrugged. His face twitched. “A lot of good it’ll do,” he said.
Matt fell back asleep, and when he awoke two hours later, he found that Gal was in their bed, between them, breathing raucously, one arm flung over his neck. He removed her arm gently and turned toward her and Daniel. Daniel was awake; Matt could see the movement of his eyelids blinking. He fell asleep again and awoke exactly two hours later, grief and jet lag seeming to have planted in him a diabolically precise clock. As the night crawled on, he dreamed ponderous dreams about problems with the designs he was working on back home. He woke again, got up and went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and explored the leftovers: pea soup in a pot, some baked chicken in a dish covered with foil, a tiny bit of rice in a Tupperware container. Ilana’s food, he thought; the prospect of eating it seemed deeply symbolic of something, but he was too tired to figure out what. He took out some milk, closed the refrigerator door, and fixed himself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios from a box with Hebrew writing on it. He sat down at the table where Joel’s wedding ring and tattered wallet sat, along with Sam’s watch, some worn and folded pieces of paper, the social worker’s business card. He picked up the wallet and opened it, and found another two tiny nails caught in the lining. He got up and threw them in the garbage.
The cereal was sweet and comforting; he ate in big mouthfuls, wiping milk off his chin. He wondered if he and Daniel would be the kind of parents who gave their kids apples or grapes for dessert instead of chocolate pudding, and sent them to school with horrible Little House on the Prairie sandwiches on organic whole wheat bread. He thought that if your parents had been blown up, a Ho Ho probably wasn’t the worst thing that would ever happen to you. He went back to bed as dawn was breaking, hearing a donkey’s strident bray from down below. In the dim light, Gal was blinking at him, sleepy and solemn. She reached a hand toward his face as he settled in beside her, and he kissed it, and her eyes filled with tears. “I want Ema,” she said in a tiny voice. The sound of those words, her wish aloud in the air, made her face crumple. Her grief, Matt thought, already seemed weary and resigned.
“I know, Boo,” he whispered. He sat up and pulled her limp body onto his lap, kissed her wet face, and rocked her.
CHAPTER 3
WHEN HE AWOKE in the mornings, there was a moment when Daniel’s spirit felt light. Then a vague unsettled feeling came over him, and a sense of dread that hardly got its footing before his awareness broke over him and crushed him with such ruthlessness he could only cower and whimper before it. The morning after Joel’s funeral, he lay in bed, his arms thrown over his head, whispering the only word he could think of in any language: Please.
He could sense that he was in Jerusalem, and that it was warm. His undershirt stuck to his back. He tried to bring Joel’s face to his mind, but he couldn’t. His throat cramped with the effort not to cry and awaken the sleeping man and child beside him.
He lay there for a while, his breathing ragged, the sound of sobbing roaring in his ears. His consciousness began to wash over the sound Joel; and the idea of Joel, Joel’s shining essence, came to him. Joel as he was, all at once, gorgeous in full, imperfect personhood, and not as Daniel, swayed by his own ego and needs, had thought of him over the years, as too this or too that. He imagined himself holding his brother, their hearts clamoring against each other, and the mayhem in his mind became something clearer and sweeter, a grief that pierced him through.
He lay there till it subsided, till he felt himself to have been washed ashore, half-dead, panting. He felt the living bodies beside him sigh and stir. His ears made out the rush of traffic on the far side of the valley, and closer, the voices of neighboring women talking over their balconies. And then the baby’s sharp wail.
He rose quietly and closed the bedroom door behind him, walked barefoot to the kids’ bedroom. His mother was up, walking around the small cluttered room in a housedress with the baby over her shoulder, patting him and murmuring, “I know, I know, honey, I know.” Noam was wearing only a diaper, and his red face was covered with tears and snot.
“How long has he been up?” Daniel asked, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat.
“Since about five. Close the door, will you? The whole house will wake up.”
Daniel closed it. “Has he eaten?”
“I tried to give him some Cheerios, but he wouldn’t eat. I’m trying to get him to at least take a bottle,” Lydia said.
“Did you change him?”
“Of course,” she said. “I have some experience at this, in case you’ve forgotten.”
An old skepticism wormed its way up Daniel’s throat. He knew that twin babies had been hard for her; she loved the idea of motherhood better than the actuality. He and Joel had always joked that she couldn’t relate to them till they were speaking in sentences with subordinate clauses. Her own mother had died suddenly during Lydia’s pregnancy—one of those unlucky people who go into a hospital for a simple procedure and never come out again—and by the time he and Joel were born, Lydia was wrung out by months of grief.
“Could you pick up some of this crap on the floor?” she asked. “There seems to be the entire contents of a toy ark. I’ve already stubbed my toe three times.”
Daniel stooped and began collecting Lego pieces and small animal figures fused together in male and female pairs, tossing them into a big plastic toy box in the corner of the room. Above the crib was one of those black-and-white mobiles that were supposed to be good for a baby’s development in some way, but whose elemental faces made Daniel shudder. Noam was screaming and arching backward, and Lydia was struggling to hang on to him.
“Do you want me to take him?” Daniel asked.
“No,” Lydia said over the baby’s crying. “Thank God Ilana weaned him already. That would have been an utter horror.” She sat down on the rocking chair in the corner, wrestled him into a reclining position on her lap, and offered him the bottle again. He twisted his face away. “I know, bubbie,” Lydia said softly, her eyes becoming shiny with tears.
Daniel straightened, his eyes filling, too. “You’re nice with him.”
“One is easier than two,” she shrugged, laying the bottle’s nipple against Noam’s lips. “Nothing can prepare you for two.” She slipped it in his mouth and he grasped the bottle and began to suck, sighing and shuddering. “There,” she crooned. “What a
clever boy.” She looked evenly at Daniel. “Grandchildren are easier than your own, too,” she said.
She was conceding something, Daniel realized. He fixed his eyes on Noam’s working cheeks, arms hugging his chest. “Mom,” he whispered. “How am I going to survive this?”
Her face broke and sagged, and then composed itself. She spoke to him sharply. “By getting up every morning and putting one foot in front of the other, that’s how. By faking it, until it gets real again. That’s what we’re all going to do.”
“Okay,” Daniel said in a small voice.
“And by taking care of these children. Listen.” Her voice had lowered, become conspiratorial. “We will not let those Grossmans take them. I won’t have them raised in that house.”
“One step at a time, Mom,” Daniel said. “Let’s get through the shiva.” He was suddenly dying to get away from this conversation before it got too specific. “There’s no milk in the house. I’m going to go out and get some.”
Lydia nodded. “And while you’re out, see if you can find something better than that awful Nescafé, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And what about some cookies, at least, for the shiva?”
“I don’t think so, Mom,” he said. “We have to trust Shoshi on this one.” She had told them—as Daniel had assumed—that, according to custom, the family doesn’t provide food for the shiva, that the visitors feed them instead.
