Page 54 of Here I Am


  Irv genuinely and forcefully advocated for every Jewish American of fighting age going to Israel. Categorically. With the exception of the one he couldn’t not love more than the others. He was a hypocrite, a father.

  “And yet some people can choose otherwise,” Jacob said.

  “Like?”

  “Well, the first example that comes to mind is the first Jew: Abraham.”

  “Senator, I served with Abraham. I knew Abraham. Abraham was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Abraham.”

  “I’m not saying I could choose otherwise. Obviously I couldn’t.”

  Was that obvious? Irv had collapsed the circle of concern to the youngest in his family, but was that the center? What about oneself? Julia had asked Jacob if it made him sad that they loved the kids more than each other. But did Jacob love his children more than he loved himself? He ought to, but could he?

  For other American Jews, it wasn’t Israel’s actions that created an emotional distance, but how those actions were perceived—those whose good faith in Israel could always be counted on either switched sides or fell silent, and left American Jews feeling more alone than indignantly righteous.

  For others, it was the discomfort of Israel being neither a scrappy underdog nor a bitty superpower capable of bombing its Stone Age neighbors back into the pre–Stone Age. David was good. Goliath was good. But you’d better be one or the other.

  The prime minister had set the goal of bringing one million American Jews to Israel with Operation Arms of Moses. Twenty thousand went on the first day of flights—if not in the same ballpark as the hoped-for fifty thousand, at least playing the same sport. But instead of reaching three hundred thousand by the end of the third day, the numbers kept halving, like box office receipts. The Times estimated that fewer than thirty-five thousand American Jews ultimately went, and that three-quarters of those were forty-five or older. Israel survived without them—the army pulled back to its defensible borders and allowed disease to do the work of killing; the tragedy lasted five hundred televised hours. But neither Israelis nor American Jews could deny what was exposed.

  Jacob still thought of Tel Aviv as vibrant and cultured, and Jerusalem as irresistibly spiritual. He still felt an almost sexual delight when he recalled the actual places where almost-make-believe things actually happened to almost-make-believe people. The women with guns still gave him an actual sexual delight. The ultra-Orthodox still disgusted him, and he still couldn’t repress the misplaced gratitude he felt for them. But something had changed.

  What was Israel to him? What were Israelis? They were his more aggressive, more obnoxious, more crazed, more hairy, more muscular brothers…over there. They were ridiculous, and they were his. They were more brave, more beautiful, more piggish and delusional, less self-conscious, more reckless, more themselves. Over there. That’s where they were those things. And they were his.

  After the near-destruction, they were still over there, but they were no longer his.

  At each step, Jacob had made efforts to rationalize Israel’s actions—to defend, or at least excuse, them. And at each step, he believed what he said. Was it right to regulate incoming aid shipments if it slowed down their delivery? It was necessary, in order to maintain order and security. Was it right to take the Temple Mount? It was necessary, in order to protect it. Was it right to withhold equal medical care from anyone with equal needs? It was necessary, in order to fully care for Israel’s citizens, who, unlike its Arab neighbors, had nowhere else to turn. “Ought implies can.” And yet the destination to which those defensible, or at least excusable, steps led was an Israel that sat on urgently needed aid, conquered the most contentious Muslim territory in the world, and forced the mothers of children who didn’t need to die to pound on locked hospital doors. Even if there couldn’t have been another way, there ought to have been.

  Would anyone notice, the next morning, if the ocean widened by a foot overnight? If it widened by a mile? By half? The horizon conceals the distance, as does the distance itself. American Jews didn’t think of themselves as having pulled back, and would never have described their relationship to Israel that way—not to others, not to themselves. But even as they claimed relief and joy that Israel had triumphed, even as they marched in parades and sent uncomfortably large checks to the rebuilding effort, the Israeli waves took longer to reach the American shore.

  Unexpectedly, the distance between Irv and Jacob closed. For a year, they went to shul together and said Kaddish for Isaac, three times a day every day—or at least once, most days. And on the days they didn’t go, they threw minyan to the wind and mourned in Irv’s living room, facing the bookshelves, whatever their compass direction. They found a new language—not free of jokes, irony, and argument, but no longer dependent on them. Maybe it was a rediscovered language.

  No one was less qualified than Irv to help Jacob move—he didn’t know a fitted sheet from a slotted spoon—but no one helped him more. They made trips to IKEA together, to Pottery Barn, and Home Depot, and Gap Kids. They bought two brooms and talked about transitions, and beginnings, and impermanence, while brushing at what felt like infinite dust. Or they brushed in silence.

  “It isn’t good to be alone,” Irv said, trying to figure out the vacuum cleaner.

  “I’ll try again,” Jacob said. “I’m just not ready yet.”

  “I meant me.”

  “Did something happen with Mom?”

  “No, your mother’s the best of them all. I’m just thinking about the people I’ve pushed away.”

  Packing up his things had been emotionally easier than Jacob had imagined, but the logistics were surprisingly fraught. The problem wasn’t the volume of things—despite having accumulated things for sixteen years, there was a surprising scarcity of things. The problem—at the end of the day, at the end of the end of their marriage—was addressing the question of what makes something yours and not someone else’s. How did life reach the point where that question mattered? And what took life so long?

  If he’d known that he was going to get divorced, he would have better set the table for the end—bought one of those old-fashioned “Library of Jacob Bloch” embossers and marked the title page of every book; perhaps stashed away money in small, unnoticeable increments; started moving things whose absence would never be noticed, but whose presence in his new home would make a real difference.

  It was scary how quickly and completely his past could be rewritten, or overwritten. All those years felt worthwhile while they were happening, but only a few months on the other side of them and they were a gigantic waste of time. Of a life. It was an almost irrepressible urge of his brain to see the worst in that which had failed. To see it as something that had failed, rather than something that had succeeded until the end. Was he protecting himself from the loss by denying anything was lost? Or simply achieving some pathetic emotional nonvictory by not caring?

  When a friend would express sympathy, why did Jacob insist on opposing it? Why did he have to turn his decade and a half of marriage into stupid puns and ironic observations? Why couldn’t he express to a single person—to himself—that even if he understood that divorce was the right thing to do, even if he was hopeful about the future, even if there was happiness ahead, it was sad? Things can be for the best and the worst at the same time.

  —

  Three days after returning to Israel, Tamir e-mailed Jacob from an outpost in the Negev, where his tank unit was awaiting its next order: “Today I fired a gun, and my son fired a gun. I never doubted the rightness of my firing a weapon to defend my home, or of Noam doing so. But the fact of us both doing it on the same day cannot be right. Can you understand that?”

  “You drive the tank?” Jacob asked.

  “Did you read what I wrote?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  “I reload the ammunition.”

  Five days later, as they turned to the bookshelves to say Kaddish, Irv said, “So listen,” and
Jacob knew something had happened. And more, he knew it was Noam. He hadn’t seen it coming, but like someone watching the tracks from the back of a train, he saw that it couldn’t have been any other way.

  Noam had been injured. Critically, but not fatally. Rivka was with him. Tamir was on his way.

  “How did you find out?” Jacob asked.

  “Tamir called me last night.”

  “Did he ask you to tell me?”

  “I think I’m a kind of father figure to him.”

  Jacob’s first instinct was to suggest they go to Israel. He wouldn’t get on the plane to fight beside his cousin, but he would go to sit at his cousin’s son’s bedside and offer the kind of strength that involves only heart muscle.

  Tamir’s first instinct was to cling to Rivka. If someone had told him, a month or year or decade earlier, that Noam would be wounded in a war, he would have predicted the end of his marriage. And yet when the unimaginable happened, it was just the opposite of what he’d imagined.

  When the house shook with the middle-of-the-night knocking against the door, Tamir was at a forward operating base near Dimona; his commander woke him with the news. Later, he and Rivka would try to pinpoint the exact moment that each learned of what happened, as if something profound depended on who knew first, and what the amount of time was that one parent knew and the other still believed Noam to be OK. For those first five or thirty minutes, there would have existed a greater distance between them than the one that separated them before they met. Perhaps if Tamir had been home, the shared experience would have driven them apart, into competitive suffering, misplaced fury, blame. But the apartness drew them together.

  How many times, in those first weeks, did he enter the room and stand by the door, unable to speak? How many times did she ask, “Do you need anything?”

  And he would say, “No.”

  And she would say, “Are you sure?”

  And he would say, “Yes,” but think, Ask again.

  And she would say, “I know,” but think, Come to me.

  And he would say, “Ask again.”

  And she would say, “Come to me.”

  And saying nothing, he would.

  There they would be, side by side, her hand on his thigh, his head resting on her chest. If they had been teenagers, it would have looked like the beginning of love, but they’d been married for twenty years, and it was the exhumation of love.

  After being informed of Noam’s injury, Tamir was given a week’s leave. He was with Rivka at the hospital three hours later, and when darkness fell, they were told they had to go home. Rivka instinctively went to sleep in the guest room. In the middle of the night, Tamir entered and stood by the door.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked.

  And he said, “No.”

  And she said, “Are you sure?”

  And he said, “Yes.”

  And she said, “I know.”

  And he said, “Ask again.”

  And she said, “Come to me,” and saying nothing, he went to her.

  He needed the distance to traverse. So she gave it to him. Every night she would go to the guest room. Every night he would come to her.

  When Tamir sat with his son’s body, he thought of what Jacob had told him about sitting with Isaac’s body, Max’s desire to be close to it. Noam’s face was misshapen, shades of a purple that appeared nowhere in nature, his cheeks and brow forced together by the swelling. Why isn’t health as shocking as illness, as demanding of prayer? Tamir had been capable of going weeks without speaking to his son, but he wouldn’t willingly leave his son’s unconscious body.

  Noam emerged from his coma the day before the cease-fire. It would take time to learn the extent of his injuries: the ways his body would never function as it once did, the psychological damage. He hadn’t been buried alive or burned to death. But he had been broken.

  When the cease-fire was signed, there was no celebrating in the streets. There were no fireworks, or passed bottles, or singing from windows. Rivka slept in the bedroom that night. The loving distance they’d found in crisis had closed with peace. Across the country and the world, Jews were already writing editorials blaming other Jews—for lack of preparedness, of wisdom, of ethics, of sufficient force, of help. The prime minister’s coalition collapsed and elections were scheduled. Unable to sleep, Tamir took his phone from the bedside table and wrote a one-sentence text to Jacob: We’ve won, but we’ve lost.

  It was nine in the evening in D.C. Jacob was in the Airbnb one-bedroom that he had been renting by the week, three blocks from his sleeping children. He went after putting the kids down and returned before they awoke. They knew he didn’t spend the night at home, and he knew they knew it, but the charade felt necessary. Nothing would be harder for Jacob than this period between houses, which lasted half a year. Everything that was necessary was punishing: the pretending, the extreme early rising, the aloneness.

  Jacob’s thumb was constantly pushing his list of contacts, as if some new person might materialize with whom he could share the sadness he couldn’t confess. He wanted to reach out to Tamir, but it was impossible: not after Islip, not after Noam’s injury. So when the text from Tamir came through—We’ve won, but we’ve lost—Jacob was relieved and grateful, but careful about expanding his shame by revealing it.

  Won what? Lost what?

  Won the war. Lost peace.

  But it sounds like everyone is accepting

  the conditions of the armistice?

  Peace with ourselves.

  How is Noam?

  He will be OK.

  I’m so relieved to hear that.

  When we were at your kitchen table,

  stoned, you told me something

  about a daytime hole in a nighttime sky.

  What was that?

  The dinosaur thing?

  Yes, that.

  So it was actually a nighttime hole in a daytime sky.

  And how?

  Imagine shooting a bullet through water.

  That’s all you had to say. Now I remember.

  What made you think of it?

  I can’t sleep. So instead I think.

  I haven’t been sleeping too much, either.

  For people who talk about being tired

  as much as we do, we don’t do a lot of sleeping.

  We’re not going to move.

  I didn’t think you were.

  We were.

  Rivka was coming around.

  But not anymore.

  What changed?

  Everything. Nothing.

  Right.

  We are who we are.

  Admitting that is what changed.

  I’m working on that myself.

  What if it had been night?

  When?

  When the asteroid came.

  Then they would

  have become extinct at night.

  But what would they have seen?

  A nighttime hole in a nighttime sky?

  And what do you think that would look like?

  Maybe like nothing?

  Over the next few years, they would exchange brief texts and e-mails, all matter-of-fact updates, mostly about the kids, never with any tone or tangents. Tamir didn’t come for Max’s bar mitzvah, or Benjy’s, or Julia’s wedding (despite her kind invitation, and Jacob’s appeal), or either Deborah’s or Irv’s funeral.

  After the kids’ first visit to his new house—the first and worst day of the rest of his life—Jacob closed the door, lay with Argus for half an hour, telling him what a good dog he was, the best dog, then sat with a cup of coffee that gave its heat to the room as he wrote a long, never-to-be-sent e-mail to Tamir, then stood up, keys in hand, finally ready to go to the veterinarian. The e-mail began: “We’ve lost, but we’ve lost.”

  Some of the losing was giving away. Some was having things taken. Jacob was often surprised by what he found himself clutching, and what he freely released—what he felt was his, what he felt he needed.


  What about that copy of Disgrace? He’d bought it—he remembered finding it at the used bookstore in Great Barrington one summer; he even remembered the beautiful set of Tennessee Williams plays he didn’t buy because Julia was there, and he didn’t want to be forced to confront his desire to own books he had no intention of reading.

  Julia had taken Disgrace from his bedside table, on the grounds of it having sat there untouched for more than a year. (Untouched was her word. Unread would have been his.) Did his having bought it entitle him to it? Did her having read—touched—it? Did her having touched and read it forfeit her claim to it, as it was now his to touch and read? Such thoughts felt disgraceful. The only way to be spared them was to give away everything, but only a more enlightened or stupid person would rub his palms together and think, They’re only things.

  What about the blue vase on the mantel? Her parents had given it to him as a gift. Not to them, but to him. It was a birthday present. Or Father’s Day. He could remember, at least, that it was a gift placed in his hands, with an attached card addressed to him, that it had been carefully chosen for him, because they prided themselves on knowing him, which, to their credit, they did.

  Was it somehow ungenerous to assume ownership of something paid for by her parents, which, while undeniably given to him, was clearly intended for their shared home? And beautiful as the vase was, did he want that psychic energy in his sanctuary and symbol of new beginnings? Would it really give his flowers the best chance of blooming?

  Most things he could let go of:

  He loved the Big Red Chair, curled into whose corduroy he’d done virtually all his reading in the last dozen years. Hadn’t it absorbed something? Taken on qualities beyond chairness? Was the sweat stain on the back the only remnant of all that experience? What was trapped in the wide wales? Let it go, he thought.

  The silverware. It had brought food to his mouth, to his children’s mouths. The most fundamental of all human activities, that which we can’t live without. He had washed them in the sink before positioning them in the dishwasher. He had unbent the spoons after Sam’s clumsy psychokinesis; used knives to pry off the lids of paint cans and scrape hardened who-knows-what from the sink; guided forks down the back of his shirt to scratch an out-of-reach itch. Let them go. Let it all go until it’s all gone.