What to Do About the Solomons

by Bethany Ball

  Fifty feet in, Marc finds his mark. The click of the final device is the gladdest sound he’ll hear all day. He holds the light while Skymatsky attaches the brick-like mine to the side of the ship with a heavy magnet. He begins to hold his breath now as they head back to the port.

  Marc’s mind takes in, in slow motion, the flailing of his arms and legs as a wave knocks him into a tiny cave, a hole in the rocks that line the port. He works hard to scramble out, before the next wave pushes him in deeper. He discovers that the cord that holds his gun to his chest is caught in the rocks. Marc can’t get out. He has no more oxygen. He thinks: It happens like this sometimes. Skymatsky tugs three times on the rope attached to Marc’s wrist. Tug back once. If Marc doesn’t respond, he’ll send up a flare and the boat will come and Marc will be pulled out. Who knows if he will still be conscious when the boat comes?

  A month before, on a previous dive, the commander had called everyone in; the tide was too high. Everyone had returned except one man. From the boat the unit searched the water and around the reef all night for the soldier and his light, but the waves were wild, throwing men off their feet. A flare was fired, but instead of placing the flare gun on his shoulder, a rookie had set it down and thirty feet of flames shot out, taking his right hand off. The hand had been thrown one hundred feet into the sea. As the man was dragged screaming from the reef, the commander stopped all activities that night, and the next day Marc was the one who swam out and found the missing soldier’s body, cold and smashed against the rocks.

  Marc thinks about his current girlfriend, an officer. Will she mourn him? Or will she move on to the next promising soldier with a diamond on his dick?

  Marc thinks about his ex-girlfriend Maya, back in the kibbutz. He’s loved her on and off since they were kids and the kibbutz had tried to break them up, telling them they were too young. They’d carried on for a while after that, secretly, but he still carries a torch for her.

  If Marc is lucky, he will be pulled from the sea and resuscitated. He will have the next day off and his weekend furlough will be secured—so long as he stays underwater right now. Marc imagines how he will tell this story to the officer, the one he likes to fuck with the shirt of her uniform still on, but unbuttoned to show her cleavage. Marc could cut his gun loose with the knife strapped to his ankle, but it would be an infraction—a lost gun—and any more of those and Marc will be sent back down the ranks, and that he can’t let happen. He will humiliate the whole kibbutz. He will humiliate his father.

  Marc works at the strap, but his fingers are useless. If he cuts the gun loose, the commander will ask Marc to wear his dress whites for a “talk.” He’s seen the men go up for their talk and never return again. But there’s a chance he will live. For every death reported there are twenty men pulled safely out and left puking on a dock.

  Skymatsky’s face looms before Marc in the murk. He works the strap loose and sets Marc free from the rocks that held him.

  Marc surfaces and clambers up over the dock to see another soldier in his unit. Y-y-okay? Eli Kaplan asks. Y-y-you were d-d-down there too long. Marc’s heart warms and thuds heavily in his chest. Tick off this mission; there are only two hundred more such missions to go. The muscles in his chest relax. The muscles in his neck relax. The muscles around his knees relax to stop his legs from shaking.

  The sun is rising behind the shipyards. Marc turns to the sergeant, who stands off to the side, a cigarette clamped hard in his jaws, and asks, What the fuck happened to him? He gestures to Kaplan.

  Fucking rat fell on his head, just as he was climbing out, the sergeant says. He’ll be okay in a few days. The sergeant laughs.

  He strips off his equipment and suit and stands naked at the port, while Kaplan, who will never live down his rat fright, hoses Marc down. The water at the Kishon Port is radioactive from pollution. In twenty years Marc will receive a letter at his home in Los Angeles recommending that he have his head examined for brain tumors.

  After four and a half years in the army he will be discharged. He will not take the position offered him in the Mossad but will travel instead to Koh Phangan to smoke hash on the beach and live in a tiny hut and sleep in a hammock. There will be nights when he will sweat out his dysentery. Later, Marc will visit the opium dens and take as a cautionary tale the emaciated men with their lips clamped tight around ancient brass pipes. His girlfriend, the officer—who now works at a mall kiosk in New Jersey—will call Marc frantically on the pay phone at a ratty local bar near the beach, the only number at which Marc can be reached. Desperate for attention, for love, for the promise of marriage. He will shoo the bar owner and refuse the officer girlfriend’s calls. She wants to get married, she told him before he left. She thinks Marc is quite a catch and Marc is just cocky enough to think she’s right, and just self-aware enough to know she’s wrong. Besides, Marc loves Maya Frank. Would she be proud of him? It was his dream always to join Shayetet 13. Marc has heard reports she is moving to Amsterdam, or Copenhagen. She is an artist now. Marc has always wanted to go to Europe. On the beach in Koh Phangan, Marc resolves to go to Amsterdam when he is finished with the Far East and find Maya and marry her. Or he will move to America and become a millionaire.

  Marc plays Frisbee, drops acid, and floats on his back in the sea. He grows his hair long and wooly and dreadlocked. His skin is as brown as the Ethiopians back home. He loses himself; forgets who he is and who he ever wanted to be. That person who wanted to be the person he wanted to be is gone now anyway. Thai girls with brown baby skin will pour coconut oil on his back and massage him on rickety cots set up on the beach. A screen around the cot means for two dollars more they’ll give you a hand job. A man will drown and Marc will be the one to rush into the sea to pull his body out and try to resuscitate him while everyone around him panics. Marc realizes the man’s not coming back and that he himself has turned to stone. He gives up trying to bring the dead man back to life and notices an empty bottle of one-and-a-half-dollar Mekhong whiskey stuck between the man’s denim shorts and his terrible white skin. A crazed, stoned Frenchman performs mouth to mouth on the dead body over and over and over again. He picks up the dead man’s legs and pumps them back and forth as Marc shouts at him, in English, This is not a cartoon, man.

  Marc does ecstasy at three consecutive full-moon parties until the rains come and then he heads for Goa, where the beaches are filled with Israelis. The thick air sings with Hebrew and beautiful half-naked girls from Tel Aviv. There, Marc will lose his mind on mushrooms, and spend the next few weeks trying to find whatever it was that had once given him purpose. The propelling forward. The universe withholds something from Marc and it’s up to him to find it again, that click, the sound of the mark found underwater as the device attaches to the ship. Marc will search forever to find it.

  Over the years to come, he will work to forget that ceremony after surviving the four and a half years of training—the hardest training of almost any military in the world. But it will be difficult to forget how he felt that day in his pressed, white military uniform at the Western Wall. There was no war those four and a half years, Marc will say later to Americans when they ask. Thank God. It was meant to make him proud, his accomplishment. It was meant to fill him up and make him whole.

  It is Marc’s first lesson that no earthly thing can do that. Not the money and success that comes later: the university degrees, the blond American wife, or the German sports car that takes him downtown where he makes a million-dollars-a-year profit. He never forgets the cold sea spilling down the back of his wet suit. Marc’s three blond American children will never understand his aversion to the sand and sea. His oldest son will tell him he’d rather give his passport back to the consulate than go into the army. Marc will agree. You’re right, he will say. If we loved our children, would we send them to war? He will hit middle age when he wakes up from a dream in which he sees the general’s face, his own white uniform, the way he felt nothing
as the general shook his hand. That morning he will suddenly understand that the substance of ambition is only ever a shadow of what we thought we wanted.

  Chapter 19

  Funeral

  Everyone in the kibbutz dining room is tense. Vivienne, the widow, is stoic. She closes her eyes and she sees Yakov. All those breakfasts made. She remembers the years of Shabbat dinners, Pesachs, and birthdays. The little Hanukkah procession winding through the kibbutz with Yakov Solomon by her side. Vivienne had once been beautiful and, more important, she’d been good and where had that gotten her? She might have married someone else. She might still.

  Guy Gever walks through the dining hall. He is animated. He is his old self again, only different, deeper somehow, and everyone is overjoyed to see him. It is said he is going to take money Keren has saved and the money they’ve inherited and that others have invested and open a paintball facility on the kibbutz. After all, he says, the splatter of paint on the trees and soil is an expression of art. The colors excite him. Keren’s brother Ziv has promised a large sum of money. He is wiring it from Singapore. But Ziv is not coming to his father’s funeral. No one has seen him in years.

  Vivienne does not cry. Though she is heartbroken, as much for Ziv’s absence and Marc’s troubles as Yakov’s death.

  Vivienne’s best friend, Aliza, and Aliza’s neighbor Amos Solomon—Yakov’s oldest living brother—stand nearby and argue about the pecan tree in their backyard. Aliza likes to make pecan pie. She is telling Amos that pecans are very healthy and they are preventive of many illnesses, like heart disease. She gestures toward Amos Solomon’s belly. Look at you! she says. What? he asks, looking down. He is actually quite skinny, except for an abdomen that protrudes over his belted waist. Aliza gesticulates wildly, so animated she has forgotten they are at the funeral of her best friend’s husband and that she is talking to the dead man’s brother. One woman, a distant cousin, weeps alone at a table. Why anyone would cry for Yakov Solomon is beyond Aliza. He is not the kind of man you mourn for, he is a man you celebrate! Amos stands with his arms folded across his chest and juts out his chin. I am allergic to the pecans, he says. In another few weeks his eyes will be swollen and his nose will run nonstop. Aliza asks, Have you tried allergy medicine?

  The family waits for Marc to arrive. They steal glances at the door, turning the direction of anyone new who enters the dining room, hoping it is him. They have all recently seen his picture in the newspaper. They have not seen him in person for so long. Some are surprised he still has all his hair.

  Vivienne thinks Marc’s hair is too long. He wears a beard now that shows gray hair and has a paunch. If only his wife, Carolyn, had taken care of him properly. He never would have aged so. Perhaps none of this would have happened, if not for America and that American wife. Perhaps Yakov would still be alive, if not for this American wife and Marc’s problems over there.

  The news of Marc looms large over the kibbutz. Will Carolyn come? Cold, frosty Carolyn. They feel sorry for Marc and sorry for Vivienne. To have a daughter-in-law like that. Not strong. Beautiful in a blond American way, but fragile. Never helps with the cooking or the washing up. How her hands shake at big gatherings. How she spaces out when everyone around is speaking. How terrible her Hebrew is, mixing tenses and gender. Not Jewish.

  There is a large spread of food. Within ten minutes, it is decimated. Amos stands beside the empty plates and picks up crumbs with his wet finger. Empty trays are stacked with empty plates. Cups of soda are left to warm in the April heat.

  The fans work hard. It is hotter than it should be at this time of the year. The cavernous room is hushed. The dining room was once the place where everyone ate three meals a day, excepting the Friday evening meal. Everyone but the very old ate the Shabbat meal at home. The dining room was built by a famous Russian architect, but no one can remember his name. Now it is the decaying symbol of a once thriving kibbutz. With its soaring 1950s buttresses, it looks like a Soviet airport terminal. It is rented out to the kibbutzniks for weddings and funerals and their Hanukkah parties.

  Dror walks in with his wife, Nathalie, but Vivienne can’t bear to look at him. Or her. They have driven in from Haifa, where they live now. This wife, the new wife, strides purposefully through the dining hall. She acts as though she already knows everyone. Nathalie walks over to Vivienne and greets her, hugging her tight. Vivienne stiffens. Nathalie speaks French to Vivienne, using the familiar. She is overly familiar and conspiratorial. She is not unsympathetic, but Vivienne distrusts her. They were both born in Algeria. Nathalie says she is also from Algiers, but Vivienne knows she is not from the city. Her accent is more aravi, Arabic. Nathalie is more likely from some smaller town. In Algiers, Vivienne had gone to French schools. Vivienne knows nothing about Algerian history or geography—she learned French and about France. She learned French history and literature, and about French cuisine. In the French schools, Vivienne learned to dress, modestly and with taste. She learned to stand and walk and sit. Nathalie wears four-inch heels. Her breasts are pushed up and out and revealed through the straining buttons of her blouse. Her perfume is loud and barely masks an odor of need, of greed, and famine. No, Nathalie and Vivienne are nothing alike.

  And as for Dror. How can Vivienne forget the way he came to her and Yakov? Driving all the way to the kibbutz from Haifa and rushing into their house. The asinine grin lighting up his otherwise pinched face. So? Dror had asked. You sit here so calmly while your youngest son is in jail? You have not heard? You have not heard the news of Marc? So happy he could not hide his glee. Like a dog who brings a carcass to his owners and drops it at their feet. But the carcass was Marc.

  Nathalie rests on a chair, alone. Her feet are swollen in her shoes. The kibbutzniks mill around her, the men’s eyes flick over her. Bolder men hold her gaze. She likes their flirting. But she’s got a top dog: a Solomon. So don’t even think about it, mister. All these women in ill-fitting T-shirts and athletic sandals. Would it kill them to dress up a little? The Solomons—the Ashkenazi, in general—don’t know how to host a party. How much work Nathalie must do to keep things flowing nicely. She hasn’t been there even an hour and already she’s exhausted. But there is a good turnout, at least there is that. Dror talks to his uncle Amos. His hands in his pockets, Dror rocks from heel to toe, heel to toe. He is not the successful man Nathalie had imagined him to be. He carries the Solomon last name, but beyond that, he is impoverished. But still. There is a will and in just a few days’ time it will be read. Everyone loved Yakov Solomon, it’s true. But it is no secret he died a wealthy man.

  It wasn’t Dror who fucked up this time, Nathalie thinks with satisfaction. Even Dror can scarcely believe his good luck. Marc’s prison tragedy. Marc’s company shuttered. The American Solomons, penniless. It is sad but his father’s death and his brother’s troubles mean a new beginning for Dror Solomon. He can reinvent himself. He will no longer be in the shadow of his successful father. It was not Dror’s disappointments that killed his father. It was his two brothers, the commandos, the money makers: one gay, the other jailed! And Dror was so lucky to have found Nathalie. He’d wandered through the wilderness until he’d stumbled upon this treasure. She would steer him onto the path of success. He didn’t feel nearly fifty. He felt twenty, younger even! And Nathalie. She had taken all those self-help seminars and was bursting with wisdom!

  Nathalie had dressed carefully, consulting her more conservative sisters. She’d toned down the cleavage. She’d worn slacks and lower heels and a cooler shade of lipstick. Leave the animal prints behind, they told her. These are Ashkenazi, her sister had said. And worse: kibbutzniks. They are plain. Wear dark blue. Wear black or cream.

  She chose to wear black. Leopard only on her shoes and the muted print of her blouse. You would have to stand very close to distinguish the print of Nathalie Amsalem’s blouse.

  Chapter 20

  The Return

  Failure should really k
ill you, Marc thought as he hustled off the plane. He would be late for the burial, and Yakov would never forgive him if Marc were late for Yakov’s funeral. But permission from the DA’s office was slow in coming and the flight he’d finally gotten on was three hours late, of course, out of LAX: third-world airport of the first world. Carolyn would arrive with the children tomorrow. His middle son, Sam, had the regional championship tonight.

  Carolyn. Marc thought of her now and her yoga pants vortex. When she’d first quit the marketing firm job, he’d been angry she spent all her days in yoga pants and his old sweatshirts. But then they’d at least been clean. Now she wore and rewore the same pair. The same splotch of tomato sauce would get crusty and finally, by day five, just blend into the black spandex. It repulsed him. She didn’t seem to understand that what had happened, had happened to him. Not her. And he had no time for the kind of depression she seemed to have fallen into.

  The boys kept to their rooms. She seemed not to notice. Her eyes were bleary and swam in seas of Xanax. Marc wasn’t sure she’d make it onto the plane tomorrow when she should be flying to Israel with the children. Izaac, the oldest, would get her there on time and packed with at least the essentials. They’d once flown to Israel when Izaac was eighteen months old. Carolyn had forgotten the diapers. You’ll never forgive me for this, will you, Carolyn had said as they got off the airplane, disaster averted, laughing.

  She was right. He never had.

  Izaac had inherited Marc’s good sense and Carolyn’s straight blond hair. He wore it long. It hung thickly over his eyes. Izaac enjoyed the ritual of tossing it back off his forehead. He was good in school. He liked to skateboard at the skate park near the pier. He played video games and hated all team sports as a rule.