What to Do About the Solomons

by Bethany Ball

  Dawn comes and Guy and Keren wake up entwined and stiff in the hammock. Morning dew and sweat have made them damp. Guy agrees to go again to a doctor. He shakes his head. But I’m not crazy, he says. I am an artist. Must everything be work and war and commerce?

  This time the doctor’s office is located in a Druze village. This way, no one in the kibbutz will know. The neighbors will not know. The doctor is supposed to be very good. He is revered by the Christian and Druze communities.

  Guy Gever and Keren drive together through the hills and up the lonely canyon roads. The building is low and modern on the outskirts of the village. The doctor reads from a standard questionnaire: Do you think you are the Messiah? Do you hear voices?

  What number question is that? Guy asks the doctor. The doctor has blue eyes and is named Josef.

  Sixteen, the doctor says.

  Guy Gever watches the doctor’s finger slide across the paper as he makes his little notes. Sixteen is a crucial number, Guy thinks. In every pile from this point onward, there will be sixteen branches of eucalyptus tree.

  Maya has come back to the kibbutz from Amsterdam after finding neither fame nor fortune. What a relief it had been to live among the peaceful Europeans. So much better than the unrepentant kibbutzniks who watch the rockets fall into Beit She’an but take no responsibility. In Amsterdam, there was hash and there was pain and then a solid march to opiates, and on the cycle went. She was beautiful and talented still. Everyone in the kibbutz had thought she would one day be famous. She might even have gone to America where her father has lived since she was a child. Her father whom she has not heard from in ten years or more. But America was the only place anyone went and made anything of themselves. Even the Russians she teaches in her government ulpan job confide in her that they are only in Israel as a way to get to America. She might have gone too if not for the ease of her Dutch passport. The passport as token prize of Holocaust survivor relatives notwithstanding: The Dutch did hate their foreigners. Her dreadlocked hair dyed platinum blond, with dark black roots, her black eyes and tiny, straight figure. Slim and boyish. Passport or no, she would never really be Dutch.

  At midnight, she leaves her mother’s house with her iPod. She plugs the earbuds deep into her ears and blasts the music she used to listen to back in Amsterdam. Here in the kibbutz she cannot paint. She has no room to paint, no canvas to paint on, no paint with which to paint. Maya walks through the kibbutz, past the children’s house where she slept from age three months to thirteen, past the volunteer house, past the block of apartments where she moved after the children’s house. All the houses and apartments are private now. The children’s houses now occupied by Ethiopians airlifted to Israel in the early nineties.

  She pulls down a ripe peach and eats it neatly. She throws the pit into the bushes and climbs the fence that surrounds the pool. She drags a cement block used in winter to hold the plastic pool cover in place. Maya fusses around with clothing and bits of rope that she ties tightly around her leg. She checks her knots. Then she turns off the iPod and sets it down on the grass. Let the last song played, the German punk song “Selbst­mord Schlampe Hundchen,” be her notification. The air is so dry it singes the inside of her mouth.

  She launches herself into the pool. The rope slices tight into her ankle. A strong swimmer, she thrashes about. The cement block settles on the pool floor without dragging her under. The rope is too long and the pool is too shallow. Bad luck. Maya’s bad luck. What will we do about Maya? She dives down to untie the knot but the water is too dark, too cold. The knot is too strong. She comes up, cold and tired and furious with herself.

  Kobi Benjamin, walking along the road and smoking a joint, sees that someone is in the pool. He climbs the fence quickly. It might be a dog.

  He does not touch Maya. The soft way he talks to her makes her weep a little. Once, when they were teenagers, he kissed her in the dining room. They were there to clean up after the Hanukkah party. It was empty. Marc, her boyfriend back then, had gone back to his room already. Does Kobi remember? It seems inconceivable that he has children, slow Kobi Benjamin. He dives in and hauls up the cement block and carries it to the side of the pool. She paddles after him and he cuts the rope with his pocketknife, setting her free.

  Her attempt was one of a rash of suicides, Vivienne says out loud. She has just heard the story of Maya from Aliza next door. First, there was the boy who jumped from the silo. Then, the girl who set herself on fire outside the dining room. Another boy who killed himself on a moonlit night hunting boar. No one knew if it was an accident or not. And now Maya.

  Yakov, in the next room, shouts to her over the television news. That is not a rash! Those suicides had ten years at least between them.

  Vivienne wonders if Guy Gever will kill himself. He is a good shot. For years, not a night went by that trucks filled with Gever men and their cronies had not taken off into the valleys, near the ruins around Beit She’an, to shoot the wild birds.

  And Keren wonders, who am I?

  She walks and she wonders about the way she walks. How does her speech come out? How does an organic material, the weird flesh of the eyeball, allow her to see? When did her gait acquire this rhythm? This quality of sound as she pads across the tiled floor of the house that she and Guy have just remodeled.

  She sits in the garden chair on her and Guy’s patio and crosses her legs. The plastic of the chair bites into the back of her thigh. The neighborhood children play on the lawn. Her son is just returning from school. The boy who lives next door stands shyly off to the side of the children on the lawn not daring to join. Vivienne sits on the bench and watches Keren and Keren’s friend Sagit, who joins them for a cup of Nescafé. Since the children are bigger now, Keren hasn’t much use for her mother. Vivienne wishes to be her ally, her confidante. Like when Keren was a child and she helped Vivienne with her younger siblings.

  The children beg for cartiv, Popsicles.

  Keren’s friend Sagit explains to Keren why she still breast-feeds her four-year-old and insists on carrying him around in a sling.

  In Africa, Sagit says, the children’s feet don’t touch the ground until they are five years old.

  So that’s what I did wrong with my children, Keren says. Her lips grip like a vise onto the cigarette in her mouth. She has taken to smoking again. Is that what you mean?

  Guy returns to the house that night. Keren sees the pickup truck approaching. She stiffens. Their two children mill around with their friends, kicking a soccer ball between them. When they see Guy, they brace themselves. Vivienne watches and waits. Men have always gone crazy. They are the more fragile sex. Even Yakov had his bad time when he found out about Ziv. Guy is clean and carrying flowers he picked from the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor, Mrs. Benjamin, the Englishwoman, comes out shaking an umbrella and shouting in English. This makes them laugh. Mrs. Benjamin did three ulpans and still can’t speak Hebrew. The Gevers know no English.

  Guy gets down on one knee in front of Keren. The two Gever children and neighbor child edge away from him and Guy turns and shouts, Lech mi po! Get out of here! He rips the flowers, pulls the petals off the pretty stems and tears the bald heads off. He holds the petals in his hand. What a work of nature those petals are!

  Abba, Yael says, you have to go. You’re not well. You’re frightening us. She is so beautiful, at eleven years old. She is the oldest. Born to Keren just nine months after she’d finished her army service.

  Look, girl, Guy says, crossing the patio. This is my house. I’m not going anywhere. It’s all of you who must leave. Only she can stay. He points at his mother-in-law, Vivienne. She’s the only one who was ever nice to me! She is the only one who understands what it is to have an artistic soul.

  Vivienne turns her face away and walks quickly off the porch and into the darkness.

  Guy Gever screws up into a rage. He begins to shout. His son, Ari, tries to calm him. He
is so small and helpless. Yael threatens to call the police.

  Ima, the children cry.

  Keren can’t think. She grabs the children by their arms and hugs them close. She says, Everyone out, please go. Go to your savta Vivienne’s house and she will make you dinner, she says to Yael. Take your brother. Everything will be calm. Don’t worry.

  Guy smirks at them as they leave. He grabs another handful of Mrs. Benjamin’s petals from the cement of the patio and sprinkles them over each child’s head as they pass. This, he says, is the blessing of the father.

  Keren is shaking. Guy Gever grips her hand and leads her into the house to the bedroom. Keren sits on the bed. He hums a song, a love song from fifteen years ago, when they were young. We were going to try and have another baby, do you remember? he says. It is time, he says. Ari is already seven. Two children is not a proper family. Keren falls to the bed and moans, covering her face with her hands.

  You must go, Guy Gever. You must go. You can’t stay here and frighten everyone like this! You must go somewhere until you get well. Or you find yourself. Or whatever it is you need!

  He freezes, hardens. Where will I go? I have no money. I have no job.

  I don’t know, she says. She looks up at him.

  He sits on the bed beside her and considers it. You have to give me money, then. Money to eat. Money to create. Money for shovels and rakes. Perhaps a pair of gardening gloves. My hands are so rough now.

  How much?

  Eight hundred.

  She’s got twelve hundred shekels hidden away in the laundry room. Money she’d taken from the account two months ago when he’d started to spend so much of it. Before he’d quit his job in Beit She’an. She goes to the laundry room, returns, and hands the money to Guy Gever. He kisses her hard on the mouth, backs out the door. He rips up the bills, one by one by one, kicking them into Mrs. Benjamin’s flower beds. The door closes with a bang. Who needs money? he says. The whole world is my canvas. Trees and shrubs are abundant. They are here for me to work with. I will take care of all of us. You don’t believe me now but you wait and see.

  Keren does not believe him.

  Guy Gever is on the main road by the tree. He stacks the bushes he’s ripped from the neighbor’s patio one on top of the other. It is obvious to him, if to no one else, that they are sacred shrubs with a high spiritual vibration. They are the bushes his forefathers walked beside and prayed beside and they were longing to be freed from the earth. He will strap them to his back and take them to Moses who waits on the other side of the Red Sea. They will speak to him as they did to Moses. Their roots have been under the ground for so long, doing their dark work.

  Maya heads out to the grove of pecan trees with her bag and her iPod. She walks through the wadi, along the path to the Yam Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. She has walked this path so many times. The water bends the light of the moon. The peacocks howl in the night. She hears shotgun fire. Crazy Guy Gever and his hunting friends chasing poor animals through the fields. Shooting birds from the sky and rabbits in the ground. Nothing ever changes around here.

  The trees lean down to her, caught in the wind. If she could grip the tip of one of them, it would launch her into the sky.

  She swallows the tranquilizers and sits down heavily on the small rocks of the shore. She pulls off her sandals and stretches her legs until they meet the quiet water. She sees the lights of Tiberias across the sea. Soon she will get up and wade in. What to do about Maya? Maya will take care of herself, thank you very much.

  Oh, the voice says, so you’re giving yourself a little mikvah, is that it? The Ethiopians have set up a perfectly good one just down the hill, you know. It’s very clean. They are devout, the little cushim. I hear they steal chlorine from the pool shed.

  Hands reach under her arms and pull her away from the shore. She is dragged into brush, hidden from the shore and the path. Did you come all the way from Amsterdam to drown yourself? Have they no water in the Netherlands?

  Maya had, in fact, once been baptized by born-again Christians. They’d dosed her with methadone, prayed over her in a caravan, and nearly drowned her in the Amstel.

  Maya looks behind her to see Guy Gever, who turns a finger clockwise around his ear. We are the crazy ones in the kibbutz. You and I.

  She shakes her head. She is nothing like Guy Gever.

  You want something in you killed but you don’t want killing it to kill you, yet you’re willing to kill yourself in order to kill it if that’s what it takes. Is that right?

  Maya blinks at him.

  That’s no good, now is it? Life is heaped up full of disappointment. You have to be crazy enough to keep carrying one boulder up the hill after the other. To fill your pockets and the back of your truck with branches and sticks. To spend hours sweating in the sun making sculptures and then setting them on fire. Guy takes off his filthy shirt and dries her face with it. “And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God, who gave it.” I dig up the dust and give the spirit back to God, but what you need, Maya, is an anchor. Guy Gever stands up and cuts the boughs of a pine, with the large hunting knife he keeps strapped to his leg. He lays the boughs down on the dry ground. Here you go, this will be soft-like. Lie down here and I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

  She lies on the ground while Guy Gever works. It is nice, finally, to have someone fuss over her. He builds a low wall the length of her body. I will be right back, he tells her. As he walks away, he wonders, Should I just shoot her? He has his pistol in the truck, under the seat. Should I just shoot her? He heard about all her problems in Amsterdam. Before his mother died, she was best friends with Maya’s mother. Over the years, Guy has heard about Maya’s drug addiction, abortions, and divorce. And worst of all for her mother: her brief conversion to Christianity.

  Should I shoot her?

  Maya lies on the soft boughs, near sleeping; her jeans are wet and cold on her skin. She half listens to the forest around her. It drones on above her.

  Guy Gever returns. Glistening with sweat, he hoists a large, flat paver from his shoulders and sets it carefully on a pile of cement blocks, so that her body is only a third or so covered. The paver is warm. It retains heat from the sun. Don’t want it to crush you, he says. I made that wall strong. You need to be anchored, otherwise you will fly up to the sky. You need to stay here and make your art, Guy says. Trust me, you want to stay here a little longer among the living. You will find your way. He laughs and disappears again. He returns again with another paver and sets this one over the top half of her body. He grunts as the paver settles on the blocks. Inside the tomb Guy has built, Maya is passed out and snoring.

  Guy Gever stands a moment, swaying slightly over her. He has cared for her well. With his cell phone he dials the number for his uncle who mans the front gate. There is no answer so he leaves a message with Maya’s whereabouts. Then walks away, scattering a handful of sunflower seeds and his cell phone into the sea.

  Now who’s crazy, Guy says. After all, only a maniac can stop time.

  He knows the direction to go. Guy leaves his truck by the side of the wadi, and heads to Jordan, to the red rocks of Petra, on foot.

  Chapter 2

  In the Meantime

  Guy Gever shuffles along the corridor of the new house. He is taking the medication the doctors have prescribed. They are trying to beat the art out of him. He knows. But he is trying to save his marriage. If he doesn’t take his medication and go back to work, Keren says she will leave. The house they’ve built on the outskirts of the kibbutz costs just a little more per month than Keren can bring in and they are going to need the money. He will have to go back to work. They have debts from the renovations they did while he was working. His bank account is minus. She cannot ask her father for a loan. Guy forbids it.

  He is fascinated by what registers with him and what escapes him. What escapes him
is white and blank. What registers is pulpy like flesh, the sun streaming in through the living room window. He is walking into that light. Warmth on his arms. Since the army, he has never left Israel. Not even once. Not even to Sinai to hang out and smoke hashish with the Bedouin.

  Keren breathes a sigh of relief. She’s hidden the Xanax and she is waiting for that veil to lift. At least he’s up and walking around. Her mother, Vivienne, looks away. Mon Dieu, she says. I’ve just made ktsitsot, Vivienne says, meatballs made from the wild boar the kibbutzniks shot the night before. Would you like some, motek?

  The doctors tell her he shouldn’t have such a strong reaction to the medication, but they’ve already spent years trying to adjust it. She would like to take him to a private doctor but it costs a fortune. She would like to borrow money from her father for this, but Guy says no. He refuses to take money from anyone.

  The rabbi Yoni Keret, who lives in the metal caravans on the outskirts of the kibbutz, says this madness is God’s curative for Guy Gever’s once wayward ways. The rabbi uses words like “palliative” and “tonic.” Prayer will wash him clean, the rabbi says. Yoni Keret thrusts prayer books into Guy’s hands. Guy steals money from Keren’s bag and gives it to Yoni Keret, who gives the money to the poor children of the men who pray in Jerusalem. This irritates Keren. Those poor religious children wouldn’t be so impoverished if their fathers stopped praying and went to work. They wouldn’t be so poor if their mothers stopped having babies. But it makes Guy happy. It soothes him to imagine God is looking down on him, smiling at him for his good deeds.

  If he becomes religious on top of everything else, Keren will leave him.

  Guy Gever wears workman’s trousers, the kind the men in the kibbutz wear to muck out the chicken house, and they are held up with a rope tied in a knot. She has never seen him wear such clothing. He has always been neatly dressed, even dapper. Guy clumsily attempts to untie the knot. Because of his medication, he has balance issues. He has constipation issues. He is impotent.