“You packed this yourself?” He pointed at the suitcase from Spinoza Street.
“Myself?” I echoed, stalling. Around us, the other cars were being waved through, their passengers eyeing us with heavy-lidded curiosity. I thought it would be nice if one them recognized me now, and got out of their car to tell me they had named a miserable child after one of my characters. But as the cars went by at a distance, it was clear my fantasy had little chance of coming to fruition, which in a cosmic sense was for the best, since the moment readers become useful to writers should always be suspect, anyway.
“It’s been in your possession the entire time? Anyone gave you something to carry?”
I knew I should have lied outright, but instead I said, “No, I didn’t pack it. We picked it up an hour ago in Tel Aviv. But it’s only papers inside. Go ahead and see for yourself.” I thought to ask him whether he had read Kafka. Surely The Metamorphosis or Ha Gilgul or whatever name it went by had been assigned in his high school in Ra’anana or Givatayim. “This is all just a simple misunderstanding,” I went on. “Everything will be cleared up if you’d just open—”
I felt the pressure of Friedman’s hand on my arm, but it was too late. The soldier had unhooked the walkie-talkie from his belt and began to radio his superior. A garbled reply, deep-throated and filled with static, arrived as if from far away. The soldier listened, eyes fixed on the suitcase, and when it came his turn to respond, he seemed to deliver a disquisition, not only on the beat-up piece of luggage extracted from the apartment of the elderly daughter of Max Brod’s lover, but on many other things—the patterns of history, the flawed nature of human relations, the irony of the incommensurate, the genius of Kafka. Twice I heard him say it, turning his back on us and gesturing expansively toward the foothills, where bits of white stone showed through the red dirt like bone: Kafka, and then again, Franz Kafka, though later I wondered whether it was the word davka I’d heard, which has no translation in English beyond its literal meaning, exactly, but which sums up the Jewish mode of something done just to be contrary.
“Can’t you do something?” I hissed at Friedman, now losing my patience with everything I had been asked, or allowed myself, to go along with. “Why don’t you talk to someone higher up?”
The soldier, still gesticulating over the phone, grabbed the suitcase from the trunk and hauled it to the ground, where it landed with a sickening thud. Yanking up the collapsible handle, he rolled it over to the female soldier, who tested its weight with a skeptical look, as if she suspected the dead Kafka himself to be curled up inside of it. Slowly, she began to tug it toward the row of army vehicles.
“You think I didn’t try?” Friedman said, sounding resigned, even melancholy. If I’d managed to imbue him with a certain authority until then, now it was vanishing before my eyes. He seemed not only old but helpless, and the invincible plural—the “We” he’d summoned when he spoke of pride in my work—had now dissolved into the eccentric singular. “He wanted to make a problem, so he made one. It should give one hope, no? That they don’t only torment the Arabs.”
The soldier came back around to my side.
“You have your passport?”
I dug around in my handbag until I found it at the bottom. He narrowed his eyes and looked from the photograph to me, and back again. It was true that it had been some years since the picture was taken.
“Remove the glasses.”
Everything dissolved into a blur.
“You look better in the picture,” he snapped, slipping the passport into his shirt pocket.
He ordered us to get out of the car. The dog, which until then had remained calm, broke into a fit of frantic barking as soon as Friedman reached for the door handle, causing the soldier to flinch, his hands flying reflexively to his rifle. I braced myself for the worst, imagining a bullet through the animal’s skull. But a moment later he relaxed his fingers, and gingerly reached an open hand through the window and patted the dog. A faraway smile twitched on his lips.
“Wait here,” he ordered me, still cradling the rifle. “Someone will come.”
Only as I watched Friedman walk away, clutching his worn leather portfolio to his chest, and disappear into the back of an army truck, glancing back at me over his shoulder, did I begin to consider, with mounting panic, that what he’d taken from Eva Hoffe’s apartment he might have had no right to take. I replayed the scene of him hurrying out of the lobby on Spinoza Street, and the sweat he’d wiped from his forehead as he started up the car.
What had I gotten myself into? Why hadn’t I questioned him when he came out of the fanatically protected fortress of Eva’s apartment, dragging a suitcase? Who cared who he was? He could have been David Ben Gurion himself, and what difference would it have made to a woman who obsessively guarded the papers after her mother’s death, who claimed to feel biologically connected to them, who’d fought tooth and nail to keep them in her possession, who would, she’d said, only allow them to be taken away over her dead body? What had led me to accept that Friedman, of all people, with his safari vest and his tinted glasses, should have been granted special privileges, should have been permitted to remove even a page, let alone an entire suitcase?
But it was too late for questions now. The pigeon-toed soldier had returned, and without a word motioned me to follow her. She walked with a stoop, one of those girls who for years will move through the low-ceilinged, narrow cave of her life until one day, if she is lucky, she’ll finally emerge under an open sky. She led me to a covered jeep with benches on each side, presumably used for the transport of soldiers.
“Get in.”
“In there? I don’t think so. I’m not going anywhere until someone explains to me what’s going on. I have a right to speak to someone,” I said. “I want a phone call put in to the American embassy.”
The girl clucked her tongue, and shimmied her shoulders to shift the strap of the heavy rifle.
“You’ll speak, you’ll speak. Calm down. There’s nothing to worry about. You can call who you want. You have a phone, no?”
“I’m an internationally published writer,” I said stupidly. “You can’t just cart me off like this, without reasonable cause.”
“I know who you are,” she said, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “My ex-boyfriend gave me one of your books. If you want to know, it wasn’t my thing. No offense. But relax, OK? Feel easy. The sooner you get in the jeep, the sooner you’ll be on your way. Schectman here will take care of you.”
She exchanged a joke in Hebrew with the tall soldier waiting in the back of the jeep, with a face like half of the boys I went to high school with. He reached out his hand to help me up, and the gesture inspired a confused trust, or maybe I was just too tired to argue any further. Under the canvas roof, it smelled of rubber, mildew, and sweat.
As the driver started up the engine, the girl slapped her forehead. She instructed Schectman to hold on a minute, and he called out to the driver in the front. Then, while she ran back for whatever she’d forgotten, Schectman folded his hands over his knee and smiled at me.
“So,” he said, “you like Israel?”
When the soldier returned, she was leading Friedman’s dog by her collar. I protested, trying to explain that she wasn’t mine, that she belonged to Friedman, but the soldier seemed to have no idea who Friedman was; already she’d forgotten he existed. What a cute dog, she said, petting her behind her wilted ears. She wanted to get a dog like that herself one day, when she finally got out of here.
“Go on,” I said hopefully, “you can take this one.”
But Schectman climbed down and lifted the old dog into his arms and placed it inside the jeep, and for a moment, while it lay cradled in his arms, I thought that we looked, the three of us, like some sort of demented crèche. Then the dog skittered down onto the floor, and as if she knew something that I didn’t—as if she, too, had forgotten Friedman’s existence—she licked my knees, turned around twice, and curled up at my feet. T
he soldier handed up my plastic bag, the one that I’d taken from my sister’s apartment with a change of clothes and my bathing suit, and Schectman tucked it carefully under his seat, next to Friedman’s suitcase.
The jeep’s engine roared into action, and we went bumping along the graveled shoulder until the enormous wheels grabbed hold of the tarmac. But instead of turning around and heading back to Jerusalem, we continued the way Friedman had been headed, right out to where everything planned and constructed ended and it was, quite suddenly and irrevocably, desert. And as we did, the incongruous thought of Kafka’s gardens came to me, gardens Friedman had told me he’d cultivated wherever he’d lived, in the kibbutz in the north, and behind the various houses he’d occupied in Tel Aviv, before he finally became famous enough, and—because he never really aged, because he never stopped looking exactly like the Kafka one inevitably falls a little in love with when one sees him on a postcard for the first time—he had to leave the city for good. I pictured his gardens filled with roses and honeysuckle, cactus and huge fragrant lilacs. As our military vehicle plowed on into the yellow hills, I saw Kafka with startling clarity, delicately leaning his little trowel against a stone wall and looking up at the sky as if to inspect it for signs of a gathering rain. And suddenly—they always come suddenly, these bright sparks of childhood—I remembered something that had happened a year after my brother found the earring in the Hilton pool. We had been staying at our grandparents’ house in London while our parents were abroad in Russia, and one afternoon my brother and I were overcome with the desire for the chocolate sold in a nearby shop. I don’t know why we didn’t ask my grandmother for the money: we must have thought she’d refuse, or maybe we were thrilled by the idea of laying hold of the chocolate surreptitiously. In the garden in front of their semidetached house, my grandfather grew roses that remain, for me, the archetype of a rose; I can’t think or say the word without summoning those delicate, fragrant English flowers. We found my grandmother’s heavy metal shears in the kitchen, and squeezed the stems between the blades, high up under the flowers’ sepals, until the large heads rolled. Coolly, we wrapped the stumps in aluminum foil, and decided that a lie would be necessary to convince people to buy them. We stood out on the street, and began to sing: “Roses for sale, roses for sale, roses for children’s charity!” A woman stopped. I remember her as lovely, with tidy, dark hair beneath her woolen hat. She set down the bags she was carrying. “Are you sure it’s for charity?” she asked us. Later it was her question that undid us. She had given us the chance to reconsider and come clean, but instead of taking it, we dug ourselves more deeply in. We nodded: quite sure, yes. She took out her wallet and unburdened us of our handfuls of roses—six or eight of them. My brother took the coins, and we began to walk quickly in silence. But as we made our way toward the shop, a crushing black guilt descended on us. We had done something we couldn’t undo: beheaded our grandfather’s roses, sold them off, lied to a stranger, all to serve our appetite. The sense of the permanence of our wrongdoing, our inability to ever correct it, was immensely heavy. I don’t remember whether I turned to my brother and finally spoke, or whether it was he who turned to me, but I remember the words clearly: Are you feeling what I’m feeling? There was nothing more to be said. We bent down in the earth alongside the sidewalk, dug a hole, and buried the coins. That we would never breathe a word of what we had done to anyone was implicit. One day, I told my children the story. They were crazy for it, and wanted to hear it again and again. For days, they continued to bring it up. But why did you bury the money? my younger son kept asking. To be rid of it, I told him. But it’s still there, he said, shaking his head. To this day, if you go to that spot and dig, the coins will still be there.
From time to time, as the wind sailed in through the back of the jeep, lifting the canvas sides and causing them to flap like a trapped bird, Schectman would catch my eyes, and then he would venture to smile at me, a gentle and knowing smile, possibly even touched with sadness, and the dog, whose name I’d never asked, would let out a groan as if it had already lived a thousand years, and already knew the end of every story.
The Last King
Epstein, new again to everything—new to the blazing white light off the waves, to the crying of the muezzin at dawn, new to the loss of appetite, to the body lightening, to a release from order, to the departing shore of the rational, new again to miracles, to poetry—took an apartment where he would never have lived in a thousand years, had he been living a thousand years, which, new again most of all to himself, he might have been. The sun didn’t wake him because he was already awake, the windows all thrown open so that the waves sounded as if they were crashing right inside his room. Agitated, pacing barefoot, he discovered that the whole floor sloped toward the shower drain, as if the house had been built for a time when the sea would finally try to drown it. The agent had barely unlocked the door when Epstein announced he would take it, offering three months’ rent in cash on the spot. In his polished shoes, he must have looked out of place in the broken-down apartment, which is to say, perfectly fitting the part. How many times had the agent seen him? The wealthy American, come to Israel to dip into the rich, authentic Jewish vein all those US dollars have gone to protect, so that he knows it’s still alive over here and doesn’t have to regret too much; come to turn himself on again in the bracing atmosphere of Middle Eastern passion. The agent had already been shrewd enough to inflate the rent, while claiming to be giving him a special deal as a friend of Yael’s. But one look at Epstein’s rapture as he surrendered to the horizon and he regretted not raising it higher. Still, he knew better than to trust the first flush of American enthusiasm. Knew how they came, and for a week fell in love with the urgency and the argument and the warmth, with the way everyone sits in the cafés and talks and gets into each other’s lives; the way that even if on the outside Israel is obsessed with borders, on the inside it lives without boundaries. How there’s no disease of loneliness here, and every taxi driver is a prophet, and every salesman at the shouk will tell you the story of his brother and his wife, and next thing you know the guy behind you in line is chiming in, and soon enough the crummy quality of the towels doesn’t matter anymore, because the stories and the mess and the craziness—all that life!—are so much more essential. They come to Tel Aviv and find it so sexy, the sea and the strength, the nearness to violence and the hunger for life, and how, even if Israelis are living in an existential crisis all the time, and sense their country is lost, at least they live in a world where everything still matters and is worth fighting for. Most of all, they fall in love with how they feel here. This is where we come from, they think as they duck through the tunnels under the Western Wall, slink through the tunnels dug by Bar Kochba, scale Masada, stand in Levantine sunlight, hike the Judean, camp in the Negev, come to the Kinneret, where the children that could have been their own grow up wild and barefoot and related to the past mostly through acts of discontinuity: It’s this that we didn’t know we missed.
But the agent knew well that after a week or two they start to feel differently, these Americans. The strength starts to stink of aggression, and the directness becomes pushy, it begins to grate how Israelis don’t have any manners, how they have no respect for personal space, no respect for anything, and doesn’t anyone do anything in Tel Aviv aside from sit around talking and going to the beach? The city really is a shithole, isn’t it, everything that isn’t new is falling apart, the whole place smells of cat piss, there’s a sewage problem right under the window and no one can come for a week, and actually Israelis are impossible to deal with, so stubborn and intractable, so frustratingly immune to logic, so damn rude, and it turns out most of them don’t care for anything Jewish, their grandparents and parents ran as far away from it as they could, and the ones that do care, they’re over the top, those settlers, totally out of their minds, and frankly the whole country is a bunch of Arab-hating racists. And so just in the nick of time, before they put down the dep
osit on a two-bedroom in the new glass high-rise going up over Neve Tzedek, it’s back in the cab to the airport with their suitcases fragrant with za’atar and laden with silver Judaica from Hazorfim, and their Lexus keys newly hung on a hamsa.
And so the agent, lighting a cigarette, letting the smoke curl out his mouth and inhaling it back through his nostrils, squinted at his well-heeled client and said it was a deal if he was willing to drive to the ATM right then and there. He had his motorbike parked in front, he added, cracking open a window so that the smell of the sea could help Epstein think. But Epstein didn’t need to think, and five minutes later he was clutching the agent’s waist as they flew over the potholes, not caring a bit if someone somewhere might confuse him for a cliché.
That evening, the sky going orange to violet, Epstein stood shirtless before the sea and felt an exuberance, a birdlike freedom, and believed that he at last understood what all his giving up and giving away had been in service of: This sea. This lightness. This hunger. This ancientness. This flexibility to become a person drunk on the colors of Jaffa, waiting for his cell phone to illuminate with a message from the other side; from a larger existence; from Moses on Mount Sinai who had seen it all and was hurrying down now to tell him; from a woman to whom he had nothing left but himself to give; from the people he had entreated to deliver four hundred thousand trees to a barren mountainside in the desert.
His days became diffuse. The line between water and sky was lost; the line between himself and the world. He watched the waves, and felt himself to be also endless, repeating, filled with unseen life. The lines from the books on his table swam up from the pages before his eyes. At dusk, he would go out and walk, agitated, waiting, lost among the narrow streets, until, turning a corner and coming upon the sea all over again, he was unskinned.