by Judith Frank
“It’s mostly my stuff now,” he told her.
“But does it smell like them?” she asked, yanking her hand away when he reached for her.
“I don’t think it does anymore,” he said. “Do you want me to go in and give it one more sniff?”
“I’m gonna hold my nose,” she said, and she held it the entire time they were in there—held it sitting at the edge of the bed, peeking into the bathroom, and turning the TV on and off.
“This is where you used to come late at night and early in the morning, right?” he said gently, standing at the door. He didn’t want to press it, but he did want to acknowledge it. “And when you were sick or scared.”
“Yeah,” she said in a small, nasal voice.
“Gal, you’re making me laugh sitting there holding your nose.”
“Don’t!” she said reproachfully.
MALKA HAD TOLD HIM that she wanted to take him somewhere; she wouldn’t say where, but they’d arranged to go on Tuesday morning. It was all very hush-hush; when they left, leaving the kids with Yaakov, she didn’t even tell Yaakov where they were going. Daniel drove her car on the honking, bleating, chaotic Jerusalem streets, buses barreling by them in the bus lane and snorting huge blasts of exhaust, obeying her directions and stealing the occasional glance at her face. “Right here,” she finally said.
“Har Herzl?” He slowed the car, looked at the gate, and pulled into visitor parking. They got out into the cool dry air and slammed the car doors shut.
“Come,” she said.
She led him out of the parking lot and into the cool, spacious rock tunnel that served as the entrance to the national military cemetery, and he felt the chill of flagstones untouched by sun. He remembered visiting this place during his junior year abroad, when the Jerusalem memorial sites had affected him deeply, conjuring images of young Jewish warriors, men like himself, only called by history to be more selfless and valiant, and forming, astonishingly, the best army in the world. He’d wonder how he would have fared as a soldier during the early days of the state, and feel privileged and soft, and decide that he really couldn’t know, because as an Israeli soldier he just wouldn’t have been the same person he was back then. Then he’d wonder if that was just the easy way out.
He didn’t feel that way anymore. Now the old romance seemed just that, romance. For one, he’d been a gay man for years now, and he understood how that vague shame over being soft came uncomfortably close to shame about being gay. For another, well, there’d been a lot of water under the bridge in his relationship to the State of Israel, and its idealized self-image. He prepared himself for some kind of lesson from Malka in national sacrifice, or national pride. It was a nice day, and he didn’t have anywhere else to be; he could indulge her, he thought, especially since she’d been easy and kind since they’d arrived.
They emerged into a large sunny plaza and stepped up to the cemetery map. The areas were coded by number, and by places or wars in which the soldiers were killed: “Road to Jerusalem,” “Yom Kippur,” “Mount Castel.” Then Malka led him into the cemetery. They walked among beautifully tended stone graves that resembled coffin-shaped raised gardens, with plaques on the headstones and small rocks placed by mourners here and there on the headstones or the edges of the grave. It was quiet here; through breaks in the pines along the edges of the hill, Jerusalem glinted, bright and dusty. Malka pointed toward a crane in the distance of the cemetery. “I wanted to show you this,” she said.
Daniel followed her, his gaze lingering on the details of this grave and that, skipping over the Hebrew dates to find the dates he could recognize, reading the names of men who were born in South Africa, Poland, Germany, and died in battles he’d never heard of. Walking quietly with Malka, who wore slacks and a sweater and sneakers he’d brought her from the U.S., and large sunglasses that gave her the look of an aging incognito movie star, he felt more comfortable with her than he ever had before. After a few minutes he heard the ping of chisel on stone, multiple pings, then hollow hammering, and soon they came to a large space surrounded by a crane, a flatbed truck, several vans, and men at work. On a white stone wall was written, in iron Hebrew letters, Monument to the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism. There was a large rectangular stone sculpture standing on its end, with a hole with wavy sides carved into it; a flight of stairs led down to a plaza surrounded by stone walls on which bronze plaques with engraved names had begun to be mounted.
“Wow,” he said. He studied the rectangle, and said, “So that’s supposed to be a wall with a hole blown into it?”
“Ah,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You know, stylized.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think we can go down inside?”
Malka looked around at the workers. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not supposed to open for a few weeks, on Memorial Day.”
He was quiet, then it occurred to him to ask, “Are Joel’s and Ilana’s names on one of those plaques?”
She nodded, and told him that she’d gone onto a website through which the National Insurance Institute was tracking names, and corroborated their information.
Men were calling out to one another, and two of them were consulting a map laid out on the bed of a truck. Daniel went up to a few of the plaques that were already hung and peered at them, but they were all dated much earlier. He looked around for a place to sit, and finally just stepped up alongside Malka and put his arm gently around her shoulders. They stood there for a few moments, and then she stepped out of his arm and gave his hand a squeeze before letting it go. “There’s been a lot of controversy about this memorial,” she said.
“Really?” Daniel said. “Why?”
“This is a military cemetery,” she said. “The victims of terrorist attacks are civilians, not heroes. So the families of young men killed in war believe that it’s unfair. The victims of terror are also going to be honored on Memorial Day from now on, and they don’t like that either.”
Daniel thought about that. “I guess I can see that,” he said. “Their sons and brothers died fighting, while ours were—”
“Sitting in cafeterias and coffee shops,” Malka said.
They turned to walk back. “How do you feel about it?” Daniel asked.
She shrugged. “I’m used to it. It reminds me of survivors of the Holocaust.”
He tried to make the link in his mind.
“We are everything they don’t want to be,” she said, her face weary and bitter. “Victims. Weaklings. Everything this country does is supposed to be in our name, but really, they despise us.”
He’d always wondered about that, but he was shocked that Malka thought it. “Do you think they despise victims of terrorism?” he asked.
She was quiet, then she gestured toward the military graves they were passing. “The message of this cemetery is: This is what we did to protect you. The message of the new memorial is: We can’t protect you. How is anybody supposed to tolerate that?”
Whoa, he thought.
She sighed. “Ain ma la’asot,” she said, “there’s nothing to do about it.”
He glanced at her. Her mouth had tightened; she’d reverted back into banality, drawn back that tantalizingly sharp and trenchant part of herself. They turned back to the parking lot; she was no longer looking at him, and he thrust his hands in his pockets. He wondered if he’d ever see that part of her again.
JOEL’S PRODUCER, ROTEM, HAD wanted to have lunch with him, but her schedule didn’t open up till the day before the memorial. She was a middle-aged woman with fancy glasses and sleek black hair that fell to her shoulders; she came from a famous military family, and projected an aura of cool authority. Joel—who called her ha-mefakedet, Commander—had told Daniel more than once that he would have looked like a total clown on camera without her supervision. Now, at a small, crowded café nestled among boutiques in a square near the TV station, Daniel watched her drench her salad with the dressing she’d
asked for on the side, and this little war between discipline and appetite made him remember her husband, whom he’d met once at a dinner party at Joel’s. What was his name again? He remembered that he was voluble and balding with ginger tufts of hair that sprang out from above his ears, and had a ready laugh that gobbled into a snort.
When Rotem had put down the small dressing cup, she leaned on her elbows and looked warmly into his face. “So,” she said.
“So,” he smiled, looking her over, assessing her as a possible friend.
“I was wondering if you’d like to be on our show.”
He’d been about to take a bite out of a fancy little sandwich with prosciutto and goat cheese and esoteric greens, but now he lowered it to his plate. “For the year anniversary,” Rotem explained. “We’re planning a short retrospective, showing clips from some of the more famous shows Joel did. And we thought it might be interesting, and touching, to follow that up with an interview with you in the studio.”
Daniel rubbed his chin with his hand. “I don’t think so, Rotem,” he said. “I just—I honestly don’t know how I’d talk about my life.” His relation to the terrorist attack, he said, was clearly unbelievable or repugnant to most people. And after some hesitation, knowing that Joel had probably already told her, he told her that he was gay, with that old familiar feeling of making a big deal out of nothing.
Rotem looked at him shrewdly, the journalist in her sizing him up. “So you think nobody’s ever reacted to the death of a family member from terror the way you have? That your life is beyond the pale of what Israelis can hear, because you’re gay and left-wing?”
“No,” he said, feeling heat rise into his face, hearing in her questions the implication that he was emotionally fragile, self-congratulatory in his politics. Or else—the thought moved swiftly through him—she was just Israeli, and would be totally shocked to hear that her straightforward questions had given offense. “But look, I was already burned once for an interview I did in the U.S., and that was for a teeny local paper in Northampton.” He told her about what he’d said in the interview, and the hate mail that ensued. “The nicest comment I got was that I was a self-hating Jew,” he said. “But it was more like I was a faggot who wanted to be fucked by terrorists.” He spat the word faggot in English, because Hebrew didn’t have, as far as he was aware, a slur quite as juicy and potent.
“Idiots,” Rotem said with a grimace. “Idiots. I’m sorry.”
He sat back, mostly mollified, and picked up his sandwich, bit into the crunchy end of the baguette. He realized that with Rotem he was speaking in his straight register, his hands still, his voice compressed into a shorter range of notes; and as soon as he realized that, he realized that he’d been speaking like that since arriving in Israel, and that a strange fatigue was coming over him. Rotem was stabbing lettuce, peppers, chickpeas onto her fork with quick precision.
“Did you know,” Daniel said, “that Ilana wanted the kids taken out of the country if anything happened to her and Joel? She was a daughter of Holocaust survivors.” Rotem nodded. “She told me, if anything happens to us, get them out of here. I can’t imagine an interview where I wasn’t asked why I was raising them in the U.S. How could I explain that on Israeli TV?”
“That’s a thought-provoking feature story,” Rotem said.
“But I don’t want to provide a thought-provoking feature story,” he said heatedly. “If I did the interview, it would be to honor them, not to make people scrutinize their choices.”
He saw that that displeased and disappointed her, and they were quiet for a few minutes, eating. The waiter came by to ask if everything was satisfactory. Daniel wondered how much he needed, or wanted, to tell Rotem, whom he was experiencing as something of a shark—“a thought-provoking feature story!”—and strangely, as something of a confessor. She’d been close to his brother, and that meant something to him. Finally, he ventured, “And I’ve broken up with my partner. So now the kids are being raised by a single parent on top of everything else.”
She looked up from her food with interest, clearly lifted out of her brooding about the show. “So what, you’re worried about looking like a failure on Israeli TV?”
“Yes,” he said. “When gay people break up, it just goes to show that their relationships aren’t lasting and legitimate.”
“But marriages break up after a family member dies in a terrorist incident all the time,” she said. “It’s very common.”
He sat back in his chair with a rush of feeling. It made total sense, but it stunned him, too, stunned and moved him to think that after the attack, he and Matt had been fighting against the odds. Why, he wondered, hadn’t anybody told him that before? It might have helped!
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Matt,” Daniel said. “Matthew Greene. He’s younger than I am. He’s handsome—I don’t know why I said that, it doesn’t really matter—and funny, and he took on the kids with enthusiasm, against every expectation I had.”
“So what was the problem?”
His eyes fluttered closed and he shook his head. What was the problem? “He did something that broke my trust,” he told Rotem, and the words sounded grandiose and unconvincing.
Rotem studied his face for a few minutes, and then wiped her mouth and set her crumpled napkin on top of the salad remnants on her plate. “Well, tell me you’ll at least think about doing the show,” she said. “Mark is a wonderful interviewer. And it would mean a lot to people to see Joel’s face again.”
A laugh sprung out of him. “You do realize that I’m not Joel, right?” he said drolly.
“I do,” she said.
He’d hurt her feelings, he saw. He felt bad about that, although there was the slightest flicker of satisfaction that he had that power.
An awkward silence followed, then they both spoke at once. “Which shows were the famous ones?” Daniel asked, just as Rotem was bursting out with “It’s just so amazing, how much you look, and sound, alike!”
“Oh, quite a few,” she said, sitting back. “The profile of Amos Oz, where Joel got him to sing with him. The one about the security barrier. He interviewed the construction workers who were building it. There are parodies of it all over the place all the time.” She laughed. “A columnist in Ha’aretz compared it to the gravedigger scene in Hamlet.”
She put her finger up for the waiter, and when he came over she ordered an espresso, and Daniel said he’d have one, too. Another silence opened up the air. Then Daniel spoke. “You miss him,” he said.
“I do,” Rotem said, her eyes glistening.
“I do, too,” he said, but he was thinking something else. It would mean a lot to people to see Joel’s face again. What would Joel have said about that comment? Daniel imagined viewers from all over the country seeing him on their televisions, gasping, recovering, gabbling to their spouses about how fooled they’d been. Twinsism, of course, that’s what Joel would have called it. Because how was it different from one of them sitting in on the other’s exam? And then a thought followed that sank and spread into his chest. He was staying in Israel, sleeping in his brother’s bed, raising his children in his house, taking on Joel’s friends as his own. How was that different?
They parted outside in the windy square, Rotem’s hair whipping across her face. “Ad machar,” they said. Until tomorrow. Daniel watched her walk back toward the station, hitching her purse higher on her shoulder. He walked to the bus stop and stood under the Plexiglas shelter with the cleaning women going home for the day. The wind battering its sides made his thoughts whirl like debris caught up in it. People stood and crowded toward the curb as the bus approached. He shouldered his way forward, snaking his arm around several bodies and clasping the cool bar to hoist himself in.
He could stay here and be Joel, fulfill the life Joel had been robbed of. But as he handed the driver his cartisia, saw the strong blunt fingers curled around the hole punch, he remembered that time so many years ago when he’d been st
aying in Joel’s house, when stealing out of bed at night and hurrying out into the Jerusalem darkness to find men like himself had been his heart’s desire.
THE UNVEILING HAD BEEN held at the shloshim, thirty days after the burial, but they’d decided to hold a service at the twelve-month anniversary as well, now that they could all come together without a custody battle to divide them. They stood on the outcropping of rock looking over the city, whose colors were muted under cloudy skies, the stone chalky and pale, the conifers dark gray-green, listening to the rabbi praying. Daniel held Noam on his hip, kipot on both their heads; lately, Noam had taken to putting his arm around Daniel’s neck when he held him that way, which Daniel found totally heartbreaking. He counted around seventy people clustered about the headstones, which stated the dates of Joel’s and Ilana’s births and deaths in Hebrew and English, their love of their children, the love of their children for them. Their colleagues were there, standing with hands behind their backs and heads bowed, including the teachers and school administrators Daniel had come to know and Joel’s coworkers too, Mark, Rotem and her husband, and the others.
The warm wind whipped at their hair and the women’s skirts. Daniel’s eye kept being drawn to movement in the distance, and he realized that part of him thought Matt might magically appear, surprise them as he had a year ago, the day before they loaded up their ark and sailed to Northampton. But when he looked up, it would just be a tree branch, or once, a solitary mourner approaching someone else’s grave. Across from him, Gal stood next to Leora and Rafi, who had a kipa pinned to his hair and the spaced-out look he got when undirected speech was going on around him. Looking at them, Daniel saw that Gal did have friends, that among these children she didn’t count as awkward or inappropriate at all, and that gladdened him. I’m doing my best with them, he silently told his brother and sister-in-law. I really am. He also vowed to do better.
Noam shifted on his hip and pointed to the headstones, let out an interested, tuneful cluck that made the people around them smile. “Ema and Abba,” Daniel whispered into his ear. He’d been thinking about Rotem’s assertion that it was common for couples to break up after they lost a child to a terrorist attack. Thinking that terrorism had broken him and Matt up, not a sex act at a party. Standing there half-listening to the rabbi’s singsong, he thought about the blast of rage with which he’d cast Matt out, and felt shaken for a moment by the residue of that commotion. He handed Noam to Yaakov and stood for a second with his hands on his knees, like a winded runner. Who was he kidding? Matt wasn’t dangerous. A fool maybe, for wantonly flirting with danger in a world that held plenty of horrors even if you just sat home in your chair all day and read a book. But he wasn’t the cause of danger in the world, or at least not more than most people were. Daniel himself had almost lost Gal.
