by Bethany Ball
I have no big brother, Joseph says.
You have! Don’t you know? The soldier throws his arms out in front of him as though to hug Joseph. Joseph backs away toward his bedroom.
You can stay on the couch, Joseph says to Gabriel. You can stay if you will be quiet. And you can go tomorrow.
Where is your mother? When is she coming back?
Joseph slumps. She’s in Los Angeles, he says. She comes home the day after tomorrow.
Why are you alone?
I don’t want to go to my father’s, Joseph says. He doesn’t want me. He has a new family now. You will have to leave tomorrow, Joseph says again.
Ah, you see, Joseph. That is the problem. I can’t go anywhere. I’m stuck here. If I’m going to go anywhere, I’m going to need help.
What do you mean? Joseph asks. The soldier wears army fatigues. Black boots laced tightly up his calves. His large AK-47 lies on the parquet beside the door. Neil Young sings in English. Joseph hears the word “moon.” The soldier speaks with an American accent but his Hebrew is good. What do you mean? Joseph asks again. You can go back to your army barracks. You have a place to go.
The soldier says, I’m not a soldier anymore. I’ve run away from the army.
Joseph shakes his head. It is unheard of for a soldier to run away. When you are caught, you are thrown in jail. Sometimes for months. In the end, your army conscription is not lessened, the months you were in jail are tacked on to the end of your service.
You must go back, Joseph says. Have you lost your head?
Yes, the soldier says. He begins to weep again. I’ve lost my head. It’s back in Los Angeles where my mother and brothers are and my heart is, I think. Joseph. Will you help me find it? But I cannot go. I can’t. It is unconscionable for me to remain.
Joseph sits quietly, stunned, watching the soldier weep. How do I know you are you? Joseph asks.
Your brother, you mean?
No, just you. The son of—the son of my mother’s ex-boyfriend.
Avi Strauss was my father, the soldier says. He’s dead now. The soldier pulls out an Israeli passport. He looks like a kid in the picture. Not much older than Joseph. “Gabriel Strauss” is the name on the passport.
I met your father once, Joseph says. He nods. Avi Strauss. He makes movies. My mother told me. I saw him in a café with his wife. My mother was furious and we left even without paying. Later, my cousins told me why. They said he was my father. He used to send birthday cards on my birthday, but my mother would throw them away. Sometimes there were checks inside.
Joseph feels exhilarated and also grown-up. Your mother sent my father Turkish coffee once, Gabriel says.
The soldier puts his identification away and picks up his gun.
What did you think of my father? the soldier asks.
He was fat, Joseph says. And your mother was old.
Did your mother ever talk about him?
No, Joseph says. But my cousins did. They call me Joey Strauss to tease me. How can you leave the army? Joseph asks. It will be difficult for you to get a job.
The soldier shrugs. Not in America. In America only poor people go into the army. I was going to be a professional soccer player. I was scouted and everything.
So what will you do? Joseph asks. How will you get back?
Let’s go eat, okay, Joseph? What would you like? I have a little pocket money. I have a debit card and I think I have a little money left.
All the city is out on the streets. It is Thursday night, the weekend after all. A handful of people work on Fridays, but half-day only. Soldiers pass by, a whole clump of them, their AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders. Joseph feels safe with the soldier Gabriel. My brother, he thinks. He leans into him and Gabriel throws his arm around Joseph and pulls him close. Ach sheli! I have always wanted a little brother, the soldier says.
Everyone is loud and drunk at the pizzeria. Joseph orders two slices topped with sliced hard-boiled eggs. Gabriel orders plain cheese. Joseph shoves the pizza into his mouth. He is ravenous, so hungry that to chew the food is torture. He tries to swallow it whole. To inhale it. He eats the crusts too, slurps down his soda. Gabriel barely eats. Can I have yours as well? Joseph asks.
Betach, Gabriel says, shoving the half-eaten slice across the table.
They walk through the city together. The winds have started and the temperature begins to drop. Gabriel is visibly sweating through his fatigues. In fact, he smells bad.
Do you have a way to get back to America? Joseph asks. Can you call your mother?
Gabriel is silent for a moment and then shakes his head. I am ashamed. She might say no, and I cannot stay here.
Yes. Joseph commiserates. I can help you, Gabriel. I can help you. I can buy you a ticket home.
How?
Joseph reaches into the back pocket of his jeans. He pulls out his phone and pulls out a credit card. Here, he says. It is my Saba’s. There is no limit.
Gabriel stops in the street. He puts his hands up. But I can’t, he says.
Joseph keeps walking and calls over his shoulder, You can. You can order airline tickets from my computer. It is no trouble. I order food from the restaurant all the time. There is no limit and the delivery guy likes me.
Chapter 14
The Happy Couple
Marc sits at the kitchen table and Carolyn stands. She is too agitated to sit. Carolyn is on the phone with the bank. Their accounts have been frozen and emptied. They are worried about checks bouncing and overdraft fees.
Their credit cards are worthless—such a loaded piece of plastic, Carolyn tells Marc. He doesn’t look at her. Late the night before, she’d heard what sounded like a sob coming from his study. She’d tiptoed out of the kitchen and upstairs to bed. Carolyn says, There’s no point in shredding them. Ours are identities no one would be interested in stealing. Carolyn laughs. For some reason I can’t wait to tell my father, she says.
It will kill him, Marc says.
Yes, she says, and returns to the conversation on the phone with the bank.
The entire Solomon family will hear finally about Marc’s arrest, through Marc’s brother Dror and his wife. What’s her name? Dror has already called and left messages on Marc’s voice mail. Marc does not call him back.
We don’t remember her name because she’s a cunt, Carolyn tells Marc. She sets a cup of coffee in front of him. Carolyn is on fire. Your brother is a bit of a cunt too, she says.
Marc Solomon takes a sip. He shakes his head. Nathalie is the second wife, he says. We only remember the names of the first wives.
I wonder why they never had children, Carolyn says. Marc shrugs.
She empties the trash, lining the bags up at the kitchen door.
Carolyn never knew the first wife. But Marc remembers her well. The hot little cusit who later became a man, a gay man. Imagine that. Marc sets his phone on the kitchen table. Carolyn has gone to lie down.
The children have been complaining to him. Mom is always lying down. Mom doesn’t feel well. Mom has a headache.
The lawyers call. There are three of them. They all talk at once. It is difficult for Marc to decipher what they are saying. He understands each individual word well enough but cannot put them together. There is no indictment. They have not charged him. The DA wants money, etcetera, etcetera. It will move to civil court. Civil forfeiture. They keep the money, you keep your hide. Pretty standard procedure in America. Try and get your money back and they will drag you in front of a grand jury. The lawyers, two of them ex–state prosecutors, tell him this is how police departments fund themselves these days. It could have been worse. You could have been in any other state other than California where they can take all your money. In California they can take only a percentage if you have not been convicted of a crime. You will be able to keep your house provided you can get your firm up and ru
nning. You can refinance your house. Marc hangs up and the phone rings again. He answers it, speaks quietly. And the phone rings again.
In the afternoon, Carolyn gathers the boys to take them to their baseball games, their soccer practices. She will drop them off. She tells Marc she will be too ashamed to get out of the car.
But why? Marc nearly shouts. I haven’t done anything! I haven’t even been charged with a crime. In fact, the lawyers tell him he probably never will be. The DA could care less if an actual crime has been committed. He tried to explain this to Carolyn, who is paranoid. It was on the news, she says. It was in the newspaper.
It will die down, Marc says. Marc crosses the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. He must eat something. He hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday.
Then why don’t you fight it?
Marc looks defeated. Too much money in lawyer fees, too many newspaper articles. It’s not worth it. All the lawyers say so.
The phone rings. Don’t answer it, Carolyn says, and she hustles the boys out the back door to the garage. Marc watches out the window as they each climb, in their brightly colored uniforms, into their places in the Volvo station wagon. What a tasteful American family, Marc thinks. The car not ostentatious. The blond mother not too blond. The oldest blond child and the younger two a darker blond. The six-year-old wears brand-new cleats. Marc didn’t have soccer shoes until he was sixteen years old. In the kibbutz he’d often played barefoot. How Marc would like to go to that place now. Just uproot everyone, abandon this sinking ship of his reputation and run away.
The car drives off and the clock in the living room, a giant grandfather clock that Carolyn inherited from one ancestor or another, chimes and ticks. The ticking gets to him. Time gets to him and he stands up and walks through the kitchen, through the living room to the clock. He opens its heavy glass door and stills the pendulum.
When he first met Carolyn, neither of them owned anything they cared about. They’d asked Carolyn’s parents to hang onto the wedding gifts and moved out of their tiny Upper West Side apartment to Connecticut, packing everything they wanted in the back of their used Camry and leaving everything else on West 76th Street to be picked at by people. Carolyn was already four months pregnant, though they’d only been married one month. They’d been dating for five. This was before they’d decided to move to Los Angeles.
The phone rings.
We heard everything, Yakov Solomon shouts into the phone.
Marc groans. Abba, how could you know?
Your stupid brother, hamor. What do you think? Ima wants to know if she should come. Should she come? How is Carolyn? She is very nervous. Carolyn is very tense. So tense! Ima is worried about the children. Should Ima come?
Carolyn is fine. The children don’t know. We will be okay. Everything will be okay. I have good lawyers. I’m not going to jail.
Yakov whispers, Where is this Skymatsky boy? Dror told us everything! He says he fled the country with your money. Imagine! You hired your friend’s brother! And then this. Nepotism never pays. I tell you! I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a hundred times. Your mother asks me why I don’t find your brother Dror a better job. Well, now you see. Nepotism never pays. Never!
It will be fine. We are fine.
Talk to your mother!
No, Abba. I have calls coming in. I have to go.
Goodbye, Marchuk!
Marc hangs up the phone. He pads down the hallway and climbs the stairs to the master bedroom. Marc lies down on his side of the bed. He closes his eyes and for a few blessed moments . . .
Later, when the children have had their dinner and gone off to their rooms and their televisions, computers, and devices, Carolyn comes upstairs. She puts a pill in her mouth and swallows it with no water, a talent Marc has always marveled at.
She kisses Marc on the mouth. Do you want to? she asks. No, he shakes his head. By the time he gets it up she’ll be a zombie.
Marc fingers the remote and finds a basketball game on mute. The television makes the dark room feel like it’s underwater. Marc closes his eyes and remembers all those hours he spent underwater, in the army. It was a kind of terror but a manageable terror. A terror with borders. Carolyn arranges herself on the bed and falls asleep.
She sleeps beside him like the drugged and the damned. Her mouth hangs open. Her eyelids flutter. A tiny intake, a tiny rush of breath. The Xanax wraps its chains around her ankles and pulls.
The boys pass through to say good night. Good night, Abba. Good night, yeled. Good night, Abba. Good night, motek. Good night, Abba. Good night, heblon katan.
Marc thinks about his brother Dror.
This is a typical conversation between them:
My brother! Are you sitting down? Are you sure? Make sure you are sitting down. This is going to make your day! You really aren’t going to believe what I have to tell you!
The sisters have spent X amount of money on Yakov’s credit cards. Shira has been siphoning money from her savings to support an anarchist boyfriend twenty years younger! Her boy was left alone when she visited you in LA! The school found out and she was given a citation. She might lose custody! Did you hear? Ziv is moving back to haaretz with his boyfriend. They are going to live in Tel Aviv, in Shenkin! Abba will have a heart attack when he finds out! Guy Gever and Keren walk like somnambulant zombies all over the kibbutz. They say Guy has begun to drink. He lost another job. He’s becoming religious. He’s given up art. He’s looking for someone to invest in a paintball facility on the kibbutz, of all things. He’s spending a lot of time with Yoni Keret, who has become Orthodox and lives in poverty in a trailer with his five girls and one boy who is no doubt autistic; he left the army after just six months on medical leave. The younger girl is no longer religious and she is dating an Ethiopian! Can you imagine?
Everything recounted with a smile and a chuckle. Abject glee. Sometimes Dror can’t restrain himself. He laughs until he chokes. It’s a spectacle. There is horror in the world and no one can get enough of it and this is the trade Dror Solomon deals in.
Your brother, Carolyn has always said, is a terrible person.
My brother is a terrible person! Marc says aloud. Too loud.
Carolyn stirs, wakes up a little, rolls over and stares at the ceiling.
You never say anything bad about your family, she says.
My brother Dror does it for all of us, Marc says. He’s already told my parents. That bastard. He gets up and leaves her in the bed to go sleep on the couch in his office.
The next day, Marc hears Carolyn come downstairs and grind a shot of espresso. The two younger boys are in the driveway playing basketball. Wind sweeps up from the ocean. There is a strong gust and the lights flicker. The clocks reset themselves to midnight.
Izaac, the oldest, is no doubt on his computer playing Minecraft, firing emails and texts to his friends and his cousin Joseph. Uploading videos to YouTube. Carolyn is barefoot and wearing loose yoga pants. Her ass is a shapeless mass of black Lycra. Since quitting her marketing job six months ago, she hardly gets dressed anymore. In the weeks since Marc’s arrest, she hardly gets out of bed. Carolyn is in a kind of depression, or funk. She lights up dimly when the children come home from school and puts herself to bed just after they have fallen asleep, and sometimes before.
Marc Solomon sits at their kitchen table and watches Carolyn thumb through a magazine. He rubs his eyes until they are bloodshot. The skin around his eyes is purple and aged. He is worn-out, thinner. He’d been expanding and expanding all these years.
He contracts.
Carolyn, Marc says. Nothing has ever stuck to me. I’ve gotten away with everything and nothing has ever stuck.
Carolyn looks away. She sets the magazine down and stares at its cover.
Congratulations, she says. You have joined the human race.
Marc watches her fine, pale fingers. America
n. Protestant. Nervous. No lines on her white enameled face. Yet when she smiles her face shatters into lines. She has always been his beitzah kasheh: a hard-boiled egg.
Nothing sticks to the WASPs, he thinks.
I long for you, Carolyn, Marc says. I long for you every day.
Carolyn looks up at him. Her eyes cut him open. His bones are suddenly exposed. That’s what he’s always loved about her. The way she can cut him open with a look.
She says, You’ve been gone so long, Marc Solomon.
Later, the kids are watching a movie, sprawled across the couch in the living room. Upstairs, they lie beside each other and Carolyn remembers him, beneath the girth, the gray temples. White, wiry hairs poke out from under his shirt and stop at his clavicle. She re-members him. She puts him back together.
Marc wakes the next day and goes to his lawyer’s office. For the time being, Marc’s office is closed. They will reopen as soon as they can. In the meantime, the detectives have taken all his computers. The savings will dwindle. The firm will struggle to survive. Clients send panicked emails. Marc calls in favors, old friends from Wall Street, but it’s difficult.
Carolyn makes phone calls and sets up interviews. She’ll have to go back to work. She even calls her old boss, at the agency. But when she’d quit six months ago, she’d simply walked out. No explanation. It doesn’t surprise her when her boss doesn’t call her back. One day she and Marc will say to each other, This is the best thing that has ever happened to us. And tomorrow she will be old. The children will be grown. She and Marc will die.
These days, Carolyn looks at Marc and thinks: I hate him less. I hate him less and less each day.
Izaac logs onto his computer and tries to Skype his cousin Joseph. But his cousin is not online. Joseph is always online. He must be in the kibbutz or perhaps he’s traveling with his mother. Of the three boys only Izaac knows everything about his father’s crimes from the newspaper articles he has found online.
It is a secret he guards jealously. He’s the only one of his brothers who knows. The secret is his alone.
