by Judith Frank
He found his sandals and wallet, and looked for the key to Joel and Ilana’s car for a long time, rummaging through every kitchen drawer, thrumming with the memory of Ilana’s periodic tantrums, her bellowing, “I can’t go on living in such a shit hole!” It occurred to him that Joel must have had their car keys with him, and there followed a moment in which Daniel tried and failed to ward off the thought that the bomb’s impact had driven the keys through Joel’s pockets and into the flesh of his thighs, mashing them into his bones. A little starburst of horror went off in his chest, and he had to sit down. A few minutes passed, and he stood again and looked into the open drawer, which was spilling over with lightbulbs, batteries, hair ties, stamps, pens, and paper clips. Suddenly, his eyes lit miraculously upon a single car key, marked with a tag that said extra car key. He held it up with two fingers, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.
He closed the front door quietly on his way out. He was glad to leave his mother with the baby; she was being a marvel of strength, he thought, but if she didn’t have the children to take care of, she’d probably never be able to get out of bed again. She clearly assumed that she and Sam were going to take them, and for a moment Daniel regretted that Joel and Ilana hadn’t made that happen. And yet it was hard to imagine that she and Sam would be thrilled to take on two little kids at their age. He considered calling Joel’s lawyer, Assaf Schwartz. He, Daniel, sure as hell wasn’t going to be the person who broke the news. Let his parents’ wrath descend upon a neutral person. He looked at his watch, and then realized he’d see Assaf at the shiva.
HE DROVE DOWN THE narrow street toward the center of the neighborhood, flooded by sense memory—sun, stone, squeaking iron gates, narrow streets, little stores like caves crammed with goodies. Last September, he’d spent ten days with Joel and Ilana, having come to Jerusalem to interview and shadow an alumnus who was now a member of the Knesset. At the time, Noam was tiny and Ilana was staying home with him, and Daniel, pulling some of his tastiest recipes out of his hat, cooked for her and Joel and Gal to great applause. It was the best time he’d ever had with his brother. They’d spent much of their lives pulled away from each other in the interest of differentiation, beginning in high school, where being referred to as “one of the Rosen twins” had been a dagger in the heart of teenage boys trying to define themselves. They scoffed at the clichéd schemes people liked to egg them on to do, like switching classes to fool the teacher, or taking each other’s exams, and when they co-won the senior prize for best student in English, having to share the prize ruined it for them both. When Joel started getting good at track, Daniel quit sports altogether and began focusing on music, becoming first violinist in the regional youth orchestra and picking up acoustic guitar. They thought of themselves as anti-twins, and during college, where they split up for the first time—Joel to Princeton and Daniel to Oberlin—they invented the semifacetious idea of twinsism: the act of stereotyping or fetishizing twins, into which fell such things as Doublemint commercials, fantasizing about having sex with twins, Mengele’s experiments on twins, and Diane Arbus photographs.
They spent their junior year in the same overseas program in Jerusalem, deciding, after many negotiations, that after two years apart they could risk venturing into a program that put them in the same place. They lived in the dormitories up on Mount Scopus that looked out over the pale hills all around, which were attached by bus route to the small neighborhood of Givat Tzarfatit and then to the great apartment buildings of Ramat Eshkol. That was Daniel’s mental map of the area in which he had lived. It was only much later that his reading brought to his attention that this area was surrounded by Arab villages and a large Palestinian refugee camp. They had been utterly invisible to him.
It was a year of great transformation for them both. They had grown up in a Jewish suburb of Chicago and had spent summers at a Jewish camp they both adored, where they had learned Hebrew and had Israeli counselors, and been steeped in Israeli culture. For Joel, there was a deep feeling of coming home. He lucked out by having a genial and outgoing roommate, and he became friends with his group of friends, thereby winning the unspoken contest in his program for best assimilation into Israeli culture.
For Daniel, the feeling of living in Israel was harder to describe. He had been struggling to accept that he was gay, and when he looked back on it years later, he realized that going to Israel was an attempt to shore up his manhood, which felt compromised among his sexually active college friends. But instead, aroused by sensory Israel—the heady sunshine and cool mountain air of Jerusalem, warm challah and harsh coffee, beautiful men in sandals or in uniform, the language that brought his teeth, palate, throat, and tongue into a new, more vigorous rapport—he was certain for the first time that he was gay. He was also sure that he was the only gay man in his entire acquaintance, and was terrified that anyone would find out.
His own roommate was a neuroscience major who spent most of his time in the lab, and to whom Daniel had nothing to say. During those long, lonely days, he’d sit in his crummy dorm room, listening to Israeli music, learning the chords on his guitar, and then poring over the dictionary to learn the words, many of which came in elevated or archaic constructions. It was how he learned Hebrew, and to this day he loved Israeli folk music: it was hardwired in him as surely as Beatles tunes were, so that when he died and they autopsied his brain, they’d find a marble-sized space for all the information he’d ever learned, and a wrinkly hunk of that matter devoted to the lyrics of Israeli songs. Everybody knew them and who had written them; many of them were poems by the great Israeli poets set to music. They were about beloved places and landscapes—sea, mountain, field—about army life, yearning for peace, clinging to love in the face of craziness. His critique of them became increasingly harsh over the years: he found them baldly nationalistic, staking out biblical and emotional claims to various lands, the songs about longing for peace completely empty and hypocritical. Now when Daniel listened to the playfully simple songs about shoelaces, or thunder, or galoshes, sung by men in childishly flattened nasal voices, he heard them trying to show that they were just boys after all, not part of a highly trained occupying force. But his critique of the songs couldn’t prevent them from stirring his heart.
When Daniel came out the following year, back at Oberlin, after he got involved with his first boyfriend, Jonathan, Joel was clumsy and defensive; he wrote Daniel a stiff letter from Princeton in which he said that, while he had some gay friends, he didn’t believe any of them were very happy people. Daniel and Jonathan had been scathing about it, imagining him to be threatened by his own sexuality.
Over the ensuing years, though, as he and Joel had moved into their adult lives and inhabited different continents, those conflicts had been forgiven, if not entirely forgotten. Then, last September, Joel had joyfully, and twinfully, stepped toward him. He’d sent him excited emails weeks before Daniel’s trip about the things they’d do together if Daniel had time, he’d proudly introduced him to the writers and producers at Israel Today, he’d plopped his baby boy in Daniel’s arms and marveled at how much Noam and Daniel looked alike. When he took Daniel to the airport to fly back to the States, and the security agent at the entrance to the check-in line asked Daniel how he and Joel were related, Joel grabbed Daniel around the neck and pulled his face close to his, and said, “How do you think we’re related?!”
It was as though, Daniel thought, they could now finally rest in their twinship, and love and admire each other. It was during that visit that Joel and Ilana told him they were making out their wills, and that they wanted to designate him the guardian of their children if they should die. It was in the morning, on Joel’s day off, and Gal was at gan; he and Joel were on their third cups of coffee, sitting around the kitchen table, the sink piled with dishes, and Ilana was running a finger across Noam’s cheek to keep him from falling asleep at her breast.
“Are you sure?” Daniel asked. Pleasure and surprise and pride had flared up i
n him, along with a little panic. “We couldn’t raise them here, it’d mean taking them to Northampton with us.”
Ilana looked down at the sated baby on her lap—his head thrown back, his eyes rolling back in his head, milk dribbling from the side of his mouth—and laughed. She took her giant breast in her two hands and packed it back into her bra, pulled down her shirt. “Look,” she said, her face, which was usually tuned toward the comic, becoming brooding. “I grew up in a very, very sad house. I don’t want my children to grow up in a house like that. If we will die, take them away from here. Enough is enough.” She flicked her wrist, her hand flying out in a gesture of dismissal.
Daniel looked at Joel, who was sitting back in his chair, a hand resting on the table. He switched to English. “And the whole being-raised-by-homos thing? You don’t worry that Noam will turn into a big sissy?”
They shook their heads. “In fact,” Joel said, his face lighting up with a bright idea, “you’re welcome to take them both right now!”
“No, really,” Daniel said, laughing.
“No,” Joel said, “we’re not worried about that.”
THE GUY BEHIND THE counter at the makolet did a bewildered double take when he saw Daniel, who murmured, “His twin brother.” The grocer told him that he participated in his sorrow, the Hebrew way of expressing condolence. Daniel laid milk and bread on the counter, stood pondering the different kinds of coffee on the shelf and hesitantly selected one labeled for a French press. Before paying, he stepped back outside to pick up a paper from the newsstand. The front page of Ma’ariv made his heart jump. There was a picture of Matt, handsome and imperious, his face wrapped in dark glasses, his hand on Daniel’s back. It had been taken outside the airport; the rest of the family was huddled with the social worker, only the backs of their heads visible. He picked up a copy of the Jerusalem Post, which ran the same picture, only beneath the fold, and went back in to pay.
As he got into the car, the driver’s seat already hot in the morning sun, he thought about his prickliness, his lack of generosity, around Matt these days. An ethic of rigorous self-examination had made him ask himself over the years whether he had just jumped at the chance of having any boyfriend, living as he did in a town that was a mecca for lesbians—a town that posted on the municipal parking garage a sign reading Northampton: Where the coffee is strong and so are the women—but something of a wasteland for gay men. Over and over, he had come to the position that while Matt wasn’t the man he’d expected to love, life sometimes sent you something wonderful you’d never imagined. Now all he could think was that, given the choice between Joel dying and Matt, he would have chosen Matt to be the one to die. It was a thought that had come to him more than once, and its randomness, its sheer primitiveness, bewildered and horrified him. How could you think that about the man you loved? What did it mean about the quality of his love for Matt?
When he returned home, Matt was up, sitting with Lydia at the kitchen table, eating a piece of toast. Daniel felt his heart hurtle toward him in compensatory love and remorse. “Check this out,” he said, tossing the Ma’ariv onto the table. Matt looked at it and his eyes widened. “Shit,” he breathed.
“What?” Lydia asked. He turned the paper toward her and she studied it for a moment. “You look like a movie star caught by paparazzi,” she said.
Matt flushed. “What does the caption say?”
Daniel stooped over the paper. “ ‘Television personality Joel Rosen’s family arrived at Ben Gurion Airport from Newark, New Jersey, yesterday, en route to identifying his remains.’ ” His finger dropped to a headline under the fold. “Wait, there’s a little story here about Joel and his show. There’s apparently going to be a profile of him in the Friday paper.” He looked toward the guest room. “Where’s Gal? Still sleeping?”
Matt nodded.
“We’re going to have to get her up for the shiva,” Lydia said.
Sam came in wearing chinos and a white shirt, his eyes bruised and hollow-looking. He peered down at the paper on the table and frowned. “Is that Matt?” he asked. He bent over, squinting, then looked up. “Look, Matt, you made it into the newspaper.”
Matt looked at Daniel, who looked up from the paper and gave him a shrug. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” Matt said lamely. He was thinking how bummed they must be to have his be the face of the Rosen family.
Daniel’s fingers were running under the lines of a story in the paper, his lips moving. He tsked, suddenly irritable, and looked up again. “These profiles of the dead,” he said. He read, “ ‘Aviva was always smiling, always happy.’ Why do they always have to turn the dead into grinning idiots? What if Aviva was really depressed, went around moping all the time? Would she deserve to be blown up? And here’s another one,” he said, warming to his theme as they all raised their heads in surprise. “A sixteen-year-old survivor of the shuk bombing, who’s going to have half a kilo of shrapnel remaining in her body. She says, ‘My hopes? Everybody wants to get married and have a family—I want to live like everybody else.’ Why do they always want to be like everybody else? Why is that the most complimentary thing you can say about someone in this goddamn country?”
They were silent. Then Sam clucked, “They’re just traumatized kids, Dan.”
Matt, meanwhile, was suppressing a grin, thinking, That’s my boy. He tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but Daniel pushed his chair back and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
And there was Lydia looking at him with her big, probing brown eyes. Matt composed his face and cleared his throat. “You know, honey,” she said. “Daniel is going to need a lot of support.”
Matt blinked at her, not knowing how to answer, the statement was so insultingly obvious. Support was an understatement: Did she know he was going to be a parent of her grandchildren? “I’m aware of that, Lydia,” he finally said.
THE APARTMENT WAS PACKED all day with people who had come to sit shiva. They all recognized Matt from the newspaper. He was introduced over and over as Daniel’s “friend.” In their mouths, his name was pronounced “Mett.” He noted that Israelis seemed to favor the limp handshake over the muscular American one. He continued to find them beautiful, with their blend of Middle Eastern and European looks, the women with stylish hair with henna highlights, the men hunched forward to talk with their cell phones in their fists, sunglasses perched on top of their heads. Many people seemed to be avoiding him, though, and he couldn’t tell if they were shy, or rude, or uncomfortable speaking English, or homophobic. One guy, a friend of Ilana’s, had “closet case” written all over him. He had turned away just as Daniel introduced Matt, but he kept staring at Matt and looking away, and whenever Matt drifted in his direction, he scurried off under some invisible pretext. It could be amusing, Matt thought, to spend the entire shiva chasing after the poor guy. Instead, he stood against a counter, which was crowded with coffee cakes and casseroles, his palms resting on it, with the aim of looking as though he was in charge of something.
A reporter was making his way around the room, nodding sympathetically to the people he was talking to and taking discreet notes on a little pad without looking down at it. Ilana’s parents were seated on the couch, and Matt watched them with a heavy heart. They were Holocaust survivors; their lives had pretty much sucked from beginning to end, he thought. He had heard a lot about Malka, things he wasn’t supposed to know. She was one of the few children to survive Auschwitz, and her mother had saved her by hiding her in a pile of corpses, where Malka had remained for several days. She suffered from bouts of severe depression; Ilana had once told Daniel that, in those moments, it seemed as if she was returning to the pile of bodies, pledging her loyalty to them by being dead herself. But she didn’t look like the wreck Matt had been led to expect she’d be. In fact, he found her kind of lovely. Her posture, bent forward in courtesy or deference or an inability to hear well, expressed a kind of polite earnestness. Her blue eyes were washed out to their faintest color, and reddish-silver
hair hung down to her shoulders, one side held back with a barrette—a girlish effect on a woman in her seventies, but not in a weird Baby Jane kind of way. Matt wondered what she had made of her bruising, loudmouthed daughter, and imagined many a migraine requiring lying on the couch with a cold compress on her head. She had a way of narrowing her eyes that made her look chronically puzzled, or a little dim. Lydia, he knew, thought Malka was stupid. But maybe, he thought, she narrowed her eyes to let everything in more slowly, until her nervous system could stand it.
He knew that taking her grandchildren to the States would be the last straw. Even thinking about it made him have to close his eyes against the awfulness of it. He heaved himself off the counter and went out onto the tiny balcony.
The social worker was there, leaning meditatively over the railing with a lit cigarette in her fingers. “Shalom, Shoshi,” he said, glad to see her. “May I bum a cigarette?” He gestured toward the small table her cigarettes and lighter lay upon.
“Sure.”
“I’m an ex-smoker,” he confided, after lighting up and exhaling.
She shrugged comically. “So am I,” she said. “Until there is a pigua.”
He had heard that word enough times to know that it referred to a terrorist attack. Daniel had explained that it came from the root “to hurt,” so that literally it meant something like an injury.
They smoked for a little while, leaning over the railing and looking down at the street, where a cluster of little girls with backpacks was coming home from school, all of them chattering at once. Matt shot a sideways glance at Shoshi. She wore patterned pants and a short-sleeved shell, small gold hoop earrings; she was well put together, if not particularly stylish. He pondered what to say to her, and settled upon, “You must see a lot of horrible things.”
