whenever amram was in, he left his door ajar — whether out of habit or as a sign to us that he was well I do not know. He had various health problems and an enormous belly, which he would bare throughout the summer as he sat alone in his green gym shorts watching soccer or TV movies. Just across the hallway we shared, his apartment was actually a single large room, sparsely furnished and dotted with several old framed pictures of a rabbi, his own late mother, and himself as a glowering young Rabat brute, his then-narrow face softened somewhat by a greased cowlick and bisected by a thin black mustache that looked painted on. Besides his bad heart, he had trouble with his eyes and for some time after an operation shed nonstop crocodile tears, which he hid behind a buggish set of pink plastic women’s sunglasses when he ventured out into the bright light — a vision so disturbing the first time I saw it, I could only respond by gesturing for him to lean down and let me peel off the price tag from the middle of one lens. He did so with sheepish obedience and then thanked me by means of a wordless little grunt before he plodded off, his cheeks still streaked with tears.
He slept on the couch, kept the entirety of his modest belongings in a few standing closets, and did his cooking on a camp stove in the tight corridor of a kitchen in the back. His diet consisted mostly of fried frozen fish, according to the smells that wafted into our own apartment, along with the airborne savor of the dozens of artichokes or multiple kilos of green beans that he would, in their respective seasons, lug home in large plastic bags from the shuk and boil all at once, to eat throughout the week. He had no hot water and, when we first moved in, no phone, though in time he made this small concession to the neighborhood’s modernization. Still, it rang very rarely, maybe once every two weeks. His family was made up of a bevy of sisters and brothers and their children and grandchildren, with whom he dutifully passed the holidays and an occasional Shabbat. When he needed to speak to us he would usually just tap on the door, open it, then step into our apartment, his gigantic bare belly clearing space before him like a late-term pregnancy. But on those weekends when he took the bus to go visit his relatives in Beer Sheva, he would tell us he was going by knocking with a formal rat-a-tat-tat, then greeting me with the familiar diminutive that he understood was my name in full, “Shalom, Dina.” His suddenly decorous demeanor was apparently inspired by the shower, shave, and clean cotton shirt he’d affected for the occasion. Perhaps he wanted to show off. He was well past sixty years old and had lived alone, taken care of himself for decades now, and yet, as he stood there in the front hall, his gray hair neatly combed, knitted skullcap planted on his bald spot, one fist clutching a bit anxiously at the handle of the little plaid suitcase he had packed for the weekend, he always seemed to me a small boy, nervous at having to travel alone. And I, despite myself, would be swept by what I imagine to be an almost maternal wistfulness at sending him off unprotected into the unknown.
He had never married. Grumbled reference was made to his one true love, a canceled engagement some forty-five years before, and his broken heart, though he also made it plain that he had grown to prefer — in fact enjoy — his autonomy to any other still-feasible arrangement. He would often cut those family visits short and come whizzing home on the very first bus after the Saturday-night dark was official and it was kosher to travel.
One sister in Marseilles, he said, had invited him to come live with her, offering him a room in her house, but he had refused her out of hand. This place was his home, his corner in the world, his life. (He assumed an indignant tone as he made this declaration.) He’d made do well enough in the same room for the last forty-eight years, hadn’t he, watching and listening as dozens of people clattered through the house and past his windows — noisy young families, loudmouthed patriarchs, shrill grandmothers, delinquents, whores, junkies, gentrifiers, journalists, the drunken kook who once lived in what was now our apartment and who had spent every night, according to Amram, delivering fiery political addresses to a room full of empty bottles. (For some time, a group of rowdy teenagers thought it hilarious to stand at the window and hoot prime ministers’ names in ghoulish tones, to spook the old lush, but Amram had chased the good-for-nothing punks away.) And he remained now, a kind of survivor, one who did not take his long-awaited privacy lightly or for granted. When he first came to this country, the building was a sort of welfare dormitory for single men, and he’d lived in this same room with three or four others, an experience he described with a nearly nostalgic strain of gallows humor: Once, he rhapsodized sardonically, he came home after a few days out of town to find the guy in the next cot, a Romanian, dead. (He knew by the smell.) Another time, when there was no work, he and his roommates had gone for a whole month eating nothing but bread. With the years, the others left, one at a time or a few together, due to marriage, illness, conscription, lodging or work found elsewhere, emigration, lack of funds, a sudden windfall, and he stayed on, till at last he was the sole remaining boarder.
Then the dormitory closed for good and Amram arranged to pay a pittance in key money to call the room his own. After all that, he certainly wasn’t about to give up and slink off to Marseilles, or around the block for that matter. No thank you. No one would tell him what to eat, when to sleep, when to shower, and — despite the incorrigible neighborhood meddlers, who would mutter at what a mizken, a poor thing, he was to live alone, to fend for himself all these years; He has no wife, he has no children, they would shake their heads and condescend in a buzzardlike chorus — there was something quietly heroic about Amram’s independence. I cannot, of course, know if he’d chosen this way of life, though if he was suffering in his solitude, he showed no obvious signs. I had a strong hunch that he was telling the truth when he defended with defiance “his life” and all the minute daily choices that this term entailed. And why not? He knew his own needs and likes better than anyone. He watched the soccer games till late at night, working his way in rabbitlike contentment through a paper bag filled with sunflower seeds, played his favorite radio station when he swept the floor on Friday mornings, and sometimes prepared himself a special feast. One day we smelled something burning at midday and knocked at his half-open door to be sure nothing was wrong — Amram? Everything all right? On hearing our knocks and calls, he emerged bare-bellied and triumphant from his tiny back courtyard, spatula in hand: He was cooking himself some liver on the barbecue, he said, through a sloped half smile and mouth full of food. Nothing’s burning. That’s my lunch.
We were not being overly cautious. Once Amram’s room had been threatened by fire, and we had no desire to see that dismal scene repeated. It was late afternoon and I was alone in our apartment, washing the dishes with distracted movements as I mused. I did not hear the sounds at first, so accustomed had I become to blocking out the children’s calls and workers’ clatter from the street. It took at least ten minutes, in fact, and the advent of a strong acrid smell for me to realize that something was indeed very wrong and that a low but steady groan was seeping from a place nearby — from Amram’s apartment just a few feet away, or was it from the front hallway …?
I rushed to open our door and found the entry filled with thickening gray smoke and Amram slumped along one wall. He clutched a burn on his arm, squeezed his eyes shut, and whimpered softly as a wounded animal. Beside him, his apartment door hung open and the noxious scent was pouring steadily toward us. The front door was locked from the inside and by now a few other neighbors had begun to pound from the street, in the hope that someone inside would hear and open up. I scrambled for the key, let them in, and ran to call the fire department, which soon arrived. The flames turned out to be more minor than they first had seemed: His cooking-gas cannister had exploded and blackened the wall and table nearby but otherwise caused little damage, injuring him just slightly. But no matter that the actual harm was negligible, the effect had been dramatic, and only after the trucks had pulled away, the other neighbors begun to disperse, and the scent of dampened soot turned to a sweet and mocking perfume did I find that I was shaking. Amram continued to slouch but had relocated to a safer spot across the street, and as I heaved myself down on the stoop beside him, I saw that he was also shivering and that his eyes, though now open, were still clouded with fear — as if he’d seen his own death brush up against him and then for some reason move on, leaving him here to breathe heavily and tremble as he cradled the reddened patch on his arm. From his war stories, the several heart attacks he had suffered in the last few years, and the stunned expression he wore on the day he staggered home from the shuk after missing a terrorist’s bomb by a few hundred yards, I knew this was not the first time that his mortality had come to call then turned and walked away.
He had, he’d once twisted to show me, with his typically undiluted blend of gruff pride, testy anger, and childlike shyness, shrapnel from the Sinai Campaign still lodged in the back of his neck. When he had at last come home, bandaged, from the field hospital in ’56, the whole neighborhood was stunned: The army had listed him among the dead and now here he was, walking toward them! He had risen! He liked this story and would tell it often, obviously pleased to think how the premature report of his demise had made his sisters weep. Maybe one day he would also laugh at the tale of this cooking fire, but as we sat in silence, side by side, recovering from the sudden frenzy and the just-as-sudden denouement the past hour had brought, Amram looked utterly spent, as if he knew that by now he’d almost exhausted his stockpile of heavenly reprieves and couldn’t manage too many times more to avoid his own grand finale — the real and irreversible one, whose outline could never be repeated as amusing anecdote.… Thinking back, it seems that what scared me most that day, what made my teeth rattle and pulse pound in my ears, was not the fire itself, but the image of this heavy-shouldered, self-sufficient lug of a man reduced to wailing faintly in the front hallway as he prepared himself to die. For that split second, Amram did seem to me alone — terribly alone and as vulnerable as anyone could be. If I’d moved to act efficiently, without panicking, it seems to me in retrospect not bravery but a kind of cowardice, acute embarrassment at seeing him so helpless and exposed.
Most of our interactions with Amram were hardly so existential: We learned to allow each other as wide a berth as possible, given our very close quarters. Sometimes we wouldn’t see his face once for a few days running, but would register his presence almost unconsciously, according to the sight of his partly opened door and to a familiar sequence of sounds — of his radio or TV set, of hissing oil in his one frying pan, of his wooden door clicking closed in its frame, followed immediately by the soft jangle of keys turning in his lock, of his halting footsteps and the prayer he mumbled upon leaving the house each morning. Mishmish, our sensitive tomcat, took this instinctive awareness one step farther, and could distinguish the sound of Amram’s door keys from our own, even from the street. If I were in the apartment alone and Peter’s key turned in the front lock, the cat would wrest himself from the heaviest, most tightly wound slumber to go greet the newcomer with a luxuriant little roll at his feet; if it was Amram, he knew, without fail, to snooze on.
One year, after we canceled our cable TV subscription — thereby rendering our set nothing more than a VCR screen, since without this rented service there was no reception in our house, locked as we were into the hill’s slope — I happened upon Amram at his post before Mani’s mini-market, where he rested under the awning on warm-weather afternoons. This was part of the fixed if considerably slowed-down schedule he insisted on maintaining at least a decade past retirement from his construction job: He shuffled in the morning to the community center to sit at the “club” there, with the other old people, after which he would lumber home for lunch, then move onto Mani’s, where for several hours he would occupy a white plastic chair, suck Popsicles, and talk with the bleary-looking shop owner and other passersby, his mouth gone purple or blue from the flavor of the day. If Mani was occupied inside and the customers were few, Amram seemed content to tilt his head toward his chest, fold his hands before him, and rest in patient silence.
Although this lounging spot was just a few blocks from our house, he would greet me when I came to shop there with the hearty, slightly startled Hello-and-how-are-you one might save for an old friend encountered after years and by chance on a busy street in a far-off country.
On this particular afternoon, our conversation turned to the inevitable subject of the ongoing World Cup. His face lit up at the suggestion that Peter might even consider missing the Game, whichever the Game was that day. “You don’t have television?” he asked, incredulous. (He himself had agreed to pay the steep cable fees even before he conceded to telephone installation.) “Then he’ll watch with me! We’ll drink coffee! We’ll eat watermelon! He should come!” Peter himself had been reluctant to ask. “Maybe he wants to watch alone,” he said, but I doubted it — I could tell from the tenor of Amram’s greeting when he was feeling lonely. If he called out “Shalom, Dina!” before I greeted him, I could see he wanted company and would linger a few extra minutes near the front of the store, making formulaic but affectionate small talk. And so it was arranged: Peter went, they watched, and at halftime he was treated to a spontaneous photography exhibit, an array of snapshots of his host as teenage Moroccan bruiser, kicking a soccer ball across an open lot. “Now,” Amram explained importantly, “the king is buried under that field. They have guards around his tomb. Guards with guns!” I was nearly asleep when Peter returned to our side of the foyer, bearing a gift from Amram to us — his old, freestanding antenna that should, our neighbor promised, bring us at least partial reception. Peter said he was insistent, almost scandalized at the thought that we were living in such a state of technological deprivation. “How else can you pass the hours?”
Another time, our upstairs neighbor, Ezra, the widower whose wife had been killed in a terrorist carjacking, neglected to pay our joint water bill for so long that the municipality removed the meter and cut our pipes off from the main. The moment the flow in our faucet vanished to a trickle and then stopped, I knew what had happened. We’d been hassling Ezra for months to settle his — and by extension our — growing debt, at which he would blush and look askance and promise to pay up tomorrow, translated loosely as meaning “not now.” But to be sure I crossed the hallway to check with Amram and see if by some fluke he still had water. He did not.
“WHAT IS THIS?” he roared, in an early-morning slur, after checking his own dried-out spigot. “WHAT?”
It was a good question. After mounting the staircase to Ezra’s and finding no one there but the two little boys and the noisy pacifier of a TV cartoon I realized I had no choice but to give up a workday, take our own checkbook, and venture out toward City Hall myself, in the hope of restoring our water supply sometime before next week. “I’m coming too,” announced Amram, his tone stubborn and brow knotted darkly. And then he gurgled again, to himself this time: “What is this?” He continued to mumble and curse as we walked side by side the short uphill distance to City Hall. We must have cut quite a figure, the slight young woman with the Western stride and leather pocketbook and the towering older Moroccan man in his skullcap and sandals, wiping sweat from his forehead as he muttered to himself, circling compulsively around a few choice phrases. “What kind of a man is that? What kind of father? Doesn’t pay his bills … bastard. What is this? Who does he think he is?” The longer he went on in this agitated vein, the more convinced he seemed to grow of the personal nature of Ezra’s offense — as if our neighbor’s failure to pay the water bill were intended as conscious insult to Amram himself. He didn’t spare me his self-pity, and grew angrier the farther we walked. “I’m a simple man. I don’t have many needs. Just simple things. A roof, a bed, some food, a shower — but I can’t take a shower today. We don’t have water! That son of a bitch didn’t pay the bill! What is this, no water? What?” and so forth.
In some detached way I recognized the hilarity of our joint march on City Hall. But the depressing prospect of the hassles before us was enough to keep me sober. As we progressed from desk to desk, relating our predicament to a long line of indifferent bureaucrats (each of whom would listen blankly then direct us with a passive shrug to another department on another floor), it grew harder to keep a straight face — though as always in such cases the question of whether to laugh or to cry was a good one. In each instance, I would begin a bit timidly in the careful Hebrew sentences I’d rehearsed in my head before speaking, and each time, midway through my explanation, Amram would bellow at the top of his lungs. “WHAT IS THIS? THEY TURNED OFF OUR WATER! WE HAVE NO WATER! THIEVES!” Neither strategy worked very well, since the clerks continued to send us elsewhere, down newly carpeted, fluorescent-lit hallways and into crowded elevators. All this traipsing was rough on Amram and at a certain point, after we’d descended to the labyrinth of the basement and been told to ask at yet another office down yet another corridor, I could see that he was in pain. His breathing had become labored, he was sweating profusely and had stopped his muttering. “Are you okay, Amram?” I asked him, nervous that the strain of the morning might bring on another heart attack. “Why don’t you go back home? I can finish this myself.…”
“No.” He took a heavy breath and leaned for a minute against the wall then, pulling himself to stand upright again, issued an elephantine groan and ordered me firmly, “Come on.” So on we walked, eventually arriving in a large office where all the city’s confiscated water meters were arrayed across folding tables as if for inspection. That did it: The actual, physical proximity of our own meter gave Amram enough strength to bellow once more, even more loudly than before: “GIVE US OUR METER! YOU TOOK OUR METER! CROOKS!” At this, the cold-eyed clerk stared at Amram with undisguised European contempt and ordered “the gentleman” to lower his voice. The man cast a pitying look at me, then through a pinched little sneer arranged for us to receive our meter later that same day. As I limped off alone to go pay the cashier, I thought it fortunate that Amram had come along that day. Although I could write a check to cover our bill, I could never have blustered with his no-holds-barred conviction. It seems that the clerk had acted with such haughty dispatch not because he was persuaded by Amram but simply to shut him up. This rude slap of a fact might have offended or mortified another, but not Amram, who had long ago put basic needs above etiquette and was clearly accustomed — to the point of obliviousness — to the absorption of insults.
Which didn’t mean he lacked pride. Later that evening, when our water finally sputtered back on, he knocked at our door to ask, “Okay?” and perhaps to gloat just a bit at having played a lead role in its restoration.
“Okay,” I assured him.
“Me too,” he announced loftily, then exhaled his weary good-night and shuffled the three steps home.
Without ever admitting that he could not read, Amram used his brusque manner well, to get us to explain his mail. The invitation he received to Ezra’s wedding was no exception. “What is this?” He demanded to know, irritated. “What?” he thrust the pink, daisy-and-butterfly-strewn card before him in the same heated way he would push a phone bill or Social Security statement at one of us and ask with annoyance, “What do they want from me?”
We had also been invited to the big event, Ezra’s mid-June nuptials to his much-younger girlfriend, to be held at a banquet hall in the city’s industrial zone, the location of choice for such affairs. When Amram heard what was printed on the card he relaxed, grinned, and patted his stomach, as if in hungry anticipation of the many courses of the wedding feast. “We’ll go together,” he declared, not one to bear a grudge over water bills now long since paid. “We’ll take a taxi. We’ll do this the right way.” We agreed, and on the day of the wedding, fifteen minutes before the ceremony was due to start, I tapped lightly on his door.
“Amram? I’m going to call a taxi now.”
“Now?” The soccer game blasted from his TV set and he sat, still barefoot, wearing nothing but his green gym shorts. “It’s early,” he assured me. “No one gets there on time.” Unsure, I retreated to our own apartment and waited another quarter hour or so before I went ahead and called.
“Amram? I called,” I announced, and heard a loud sigh from inside his room.
A few minutes later he emerged in a clean shirt and pants and as the three of us moved to the corner to await the cab, Amram grumbled, shaking his head. “We’ll be the first ones there, you’ll see.”
After a rather farcical ride in which Amram and the driver parried boisterously and exchanged a cheerful battery of insults (“How long have you been driving a cab and you don’t know where _____ is?” “Longer than you’ve been driving a cab!”), we wound up circling around and around the designated block, in search of the right banquet hall. There were dozens along this particular stretch and as it turned out, the name on our invitation was a misprint. Eventually we found the right building and Amram pulled a wad of cash from his pocket, adamant that we let him pay for the taxi. By now, his tone had developed a sweetly avuncular edge, as it seemed to have occurred to him that all the book learning in the world — our ability to speak English and decipher the fine print on his Hebrew pension check — would not help get us through the evening ahead. On the subject of How to Be a Guest at a Big Moroccan Wedding, he was the authority, we the illiterates, and as he swept out of the taxi — “Come!” he gestured grandly — it was plain he’d decided to act as both our valet and host, take us under his wing, guide his innocent young American friends with gentle patience and force through all the wonders he knew the evening held in store.
As we made our way past the dimly lit sign and into the shabby foyer, with its peeling paint and battered elevator, it was clear that he’d been right on at least the first score: Although we were technically half an hour late we were still very early, some of the first guests to show. A few of the bride’s older brothers smoked outside and a group of little boys in white shirts and sneakers were racing up and down the stairs. Otherwise the only other arrivals were several stragglers like us and the parents of the bride and groom, waiting uncomfortably to receive guests. The two women wore low-cut, sequined evening gowns and heavy costume jewelry, as well as high spike heels that made them seem taller than their husbands, both of whom looked fairly miserable in their baggy new suits. Ezra’s children and their friends had just made their entrance. The girls held hands and compared mini-dresses and the boys played a loud game of tag. Meanwhile, long before most of the guests had appeared, a battalion of teenage waiters and waitresses in red vests and black bow ties were already distractedly distributing their large trays of pickles, salads, pitot, and sweet wine across the strangely floating, shiplike expanse of a banquet hall.
A forest of mirror-covered pillars interrupted the vast room, the entire second floor of a building, which was filled with dozens and dozens of identically set tables and gold-gift-ribbon-wrapped chairs. The low but endless-looking ceiling flashed a full constellation of tiny colored lights, and although the white satin bridal canopy rested atop a small flight of stairs at the end of a theatrical strip of red carpet — thus forming the would-be centerpiece of the entire hall and evening — it seemed to me that in fact the true source of the room’s insistent sparkle, its hideous, fascinating glow, was not this token religious object but the huge glass sun of a disco ball that hung and winked from above. An electric guitar player with long, pomaded curls and a shiny tux was testing the amplifiers while American pop music trickled faintly over the loudspeakers, interrupted by an occasional, abrupt snort of feedback from the stage. Although the hall was still mostly empty, a ponytailed barmaid stood near the entrance, rattling her little pushcart with its rows of salted shot glasses and a silver-capped bottle. “Tequila, tequila,” she called in singsong, as if at a boozy ballgame.
As we took in this typical yet astounding scene, Amram declared it was time for a drink and insisted with unusual cheer that he bring us our choice from the bar. “What will you have, Dina?” He gestured for us to sit. “Visky?”
“Vodka,” I said, and soon found myself, glass in hand, ensconced at the table Amram had selected, the surface before me already arrayed with more than half a dozen small plates of food.
“Eat, Dina!” he ordered, beaming over his Jim Beam. “Petter! Eat! What’s the matter with you two? What? You’re not hungry?” He reached for a fried meat pastry and I knew I should do the same. Though I’d heard all the jokes about the way the plates clatter, tongues wag, and cola sloshes right through the sideshow ceremony at the average Israeli wedding — known in Hebrew as a “quarter-chicken” affair, because of the standard, uninspired menu — this hardly seemed the time to start playing Miss Manners. Our host had just suggested that we eat, so we would eat. This was Amram’s party now. He looked ecstatic as he chewed and explained that he only drank whiskey at such events. With his heart, of course, it wasn’t a good idea — but for a wedding? What could he do? Drink! L’chaim! (Early on, I noticed that one young waiter seemed to have appointed himself our personal attendant, standing close by at all times, waiting to replenish a dwindling pile of bourekas or plate of cabbage salad. Only later did Peter nudge me to look as Amram peeled a large bill from his wad and handed it to the boy, as he’d apparently been doing throughout the evening.) After another glass or two, he began to whisper about Ezra’s first, murdered wife, and indicated, with a conspiratorial little roll of the hand before his own bursting belly, that Ezra’s second wife-to-be was already visibly pregnant.
Bit by bit, other guests filtered in — I recognized very few of them — and our table became the assembly point for a peculiar array of misfits, ourselves most definitely included. First there was Shlomi, the jumpy soccer fan and hummus-joint waiter who lived across the street and remained dangerously in awe of Peter’s gardening skills. (That is, the more he appreciated the fruit trees, roses, and jasmine that Peter had planted and tended with such care, the greater the threat he would try and “help out” by paving the courtyard with cement blocks.) “What’s happening?” he asked us all as he sat down and in the same movement reached for a plate of tehina salad. Then, mouth full, “What do you say, Amram?” Naturally, he’d waited to come till the Game was over, and so spent the next ten minutes rehashing for Amram in thick monotone a complete and numbing play-by-play.
Then in came Mani, the neighborhood’s lesser grocer, minus his wife and children. He looked worn (up since five, he announced with a yawn) and flopped in the seat beside me, cigarette in hand. Although he still was no match for Meir-the-master, his own shopkeeping skills had improved immeasurably of late. He was more confident, friendlier, and the merchandise on his shelves seemed to reflect his new-and-improved outlook: He kept it fresh and varied, and had even begun stocking items that Meir himself didn’t have, such as parsley and tonic water. I’d had a few silly, heated discussions with my best college friend, Lauren, who had recently moved right next door to Mani’s store and who went so far as to insist that he and not Meir commanded the best mini-market for miles.… It was, admittedly, a stupid subject for an argument (roughly on an intellectual par with our ongoing, reductive debate about the relative beauty and intelligence of dogs, which she claimed were superior creatures, and cats, my own animal of choice), but we each clung so fiercely to our partisan beliefs that we had, in the end, to call it a draw and admit that the two blocks that separated our apartments might have seemed scant from a distance but in fact constituted an ocean of perspective-altering difference. In effect, we lived in separate neighborhoods, each with its own local heroes.
Even so, as Mani sat down beside me, I felt my old critique of him peeking out like a crooked slip from under my hem. And now I was obliged to make small talk. How was business? How were his kids? He seemed slightly amused to find us at this wedding, and when I’d run through the usual list of personal–impersonal topics for chatter, I asked him if he had grown up in the neighborhood, where was his childhood house, what was it like to live by the border. He answered a few of my questions in an opaque and mechanical way, then locked me with a knowing stare and informed me, through a puff of indifferent smoke (getting even at last for my preference in grocers?), that I was writing a book. Busted, I gulped hard and took a big swig of my vodka. Yes, I was, in fact. How had he known? He smiled only faintly and shrugged, not particularly interested. I just knew.
By now the hall was crowded, the dishes were indeed clinking on all sides, and the music had grown louder. At the back of the room, a voluminous wedding dress and dark mound of sprayed curls were visible, though the bride’s face was obscured by a crowd of spangled and stiletto-heeled well-wishers. Our other upstairs neighbors slipped in at this point and seemed relieved to find us there. He was a charming cynic of an Italian journalist whose native-sounding American English came from a New York childhood, his immaculate wardrobe from Rome, and she, his girlfriend, a gregarious Australian divorcée with coiffed blond hair and ambassadorial social skills. A few years after we moved into our apartment, they’d bought half the top floor of the building and set to thundering work raising the roof and turning the inside of their apartment into a luxurious two-story penthouse — at once defacing the outside of the structure with a few rows of new stone and, ironically enough, bringing the house back around full circle to its original function, as spacious home of the well-off. Though we were unhappy with what they had done to the house’s facade, we couldn’t very well blame them for it, since they knew well what an irreversible and costly mess they had made and were furious at their contractor. After the initial tensions between us were defused, we’d grown to be friends of a formal but gradually warming sort, kindred spirits drawn closer by the trials of living in the neighborhood … by the band of beefy, sneering teenagers, for instance, who would lounge on the corner and see if they could get a rise out of one of us by muttering “Ashke-Nazi” as we walked by, or by Shlomi-the-soccer-fan’s decision to hire someone — “my Romanian,” as he called the worker who had lately replaced “my Arab” — to cut down the quartet of old cypresses that stood above Ahmed’s garden (in Ahmed’s absence: He had never returned). Peter had at least managed to intervene and convince him that only one, long dead, required chopping down, and that perhaps a tree surgeon might be better equipped to do the job. But this wasn’t enough to stop Shlomi, who still wanted to do something. In a fit of destructive busyness, he proceeded to get “his” Romanian drunk, and sent him up another trunk, to hack a bit. Alarmed to see a soused stranger hard at work mangling the view out his window, Carl called downstairs to ask what was going on. Peter explained, and in a moment of the peculiar intimacy that shared disaster can bring, the two of them stood — weary, disgusted, telephones in hand — looking out from their respective floors.
We had also exchanged invitations for dinner and drinks with Carl and Sylvia. They had come downstairs to chat and nibble olives on our porch and, in turn, had asked us several times to parties at their place, which was just upstairs but seemed to exist in another galaxy, on high. Most of the guests at those evening gatherings were handsome Italians, women with smooth tans and bangle bracelets, smoking and sipping imported white wine, and men who managed to look at once casual and dressed to kill in their roomy linen jackets. While the talk was always animated, its cadences were distinct from those of spirited local conversation: That it was more refined goes without saying. Its music seemed closer to that of a burbling fountain than to the geyser gusts that punctuated most Israeli speech. I do not speak Italian, but found that an evening spent listening to others do so was a comfort. And when the conversation was stripped of its exotic, lilting sound and gave way to broken English, I was always pleasantly surprised at the dryly fatalistic wit that tinged most of what was being said. Carl’s Italian friends were knowing in an elegant, unpretentious way that few Americans ever manage, and as a group they challenged my prejudice against foreign journalists. Reporting seemed to be, for many of them, a job rather than a worldview, an enterprise like any other, to be treated with a certain skeptical sense of humor. One man, with a trim mustache and a deep, caustic laugh, explained as he nursed his dwindling cigarette and swished the grappa in his glass that he much preferred newspapers but worked, for now, “in the television,” about which he sighed wearily: “Is so shallow, so silly. No time to explain things.”
Given the usual company he kept, it was no wonder that Carl looked unhappy now, surrounded by flashing lights and the outlandish hodgepodge of people at our table. We broke into English over the din, while Sylvia eased herself into the incredible situation with her usual steady grace — offering her most serene smile as she greeted all the members of our group individually and by name, in the appropriate language. (Of the some five hundred guests, the four of us were probably the only Ashkenazis and the only foreigners there, a fact that seemed to me glaring, though I doubt that anyone else even noticed.) Carl relaxed a bit when our zealous waiter scrambled to find him a carafe of cold wine and we silently toasted.
It was time for the ceremony to begin. The American pop halted, the music modulated to a more stately key, and the bride began to mince down the carpet, mother and mother-in-law-to-be stationed on either arm. Whether or not she was truly pregnant was difficult to tell, since the overall effect of her elaborately “sexy” costume was a total negation of body and skin: She’d been tied, pushed, wrapped, and buttoned so thoroughly into her corset and frothy meringue of synthetic skirting, I couldn’t say for sure who — or what — was in there. Even later, when the veil came off and she removed the little lace bolero she’d worn over her bare shoulders to satisfy the rabbi, I wasn’t sure what she really looked like, or even if I had ever seen her before. Her face was covered with several layers of makeup so thick, it was unclear if she was blushing or blanched. She appeared to be embalmed.
Ezra, for his part, seemed nervous and hot as he stood beneath the chuppa, wiping his brow almost constantly. I wondered if the sweating came from the bright lights that shined down all around him (the photographer and video cameraman were already hard at work, snapping and circling for a better angle) or from an unfathomable set of fears and hesitations. Except when her name was whispered by Amram and then brushed away (bad luck), and probably muttered at other tables, in the same fleet hush, Ezra’s first wife wasn’t mentioned throughout the whole evening, though her memory couldn’t possibly be absent — not from Ezra’s mind, nor his parents’ nor children’s nor friends’. And what of the bride’s awareness of the much-loved first wife and her violent end? Later, when the slippery emcee invited the newlyweds onto the floor for their first married dance (to the theme from Titanic, which struck me as a rather morbid way to kick off a life together), he referred to them compulsively as “the young couple.” Did it sting Ezra, this generic, inaccurate term, the thoughtless public erasure of his first wife’s memory? Or did it come as a relief? Young, of course, was a relative term, and Ezra was young for a man with four children, two of whom were his new wife’s junior by just a few crucial years. Still, in this context young also implied a kind of innocence that Ezra could no longer claim.
As expected, most of the guests ate right through the ceremony and clapped when Ezra smashed the glass with his foot — a rite that symbolized at one and the same time the end of the ritual, the start of the marriage, the destruction of the Temple, and the cue for the waiters to bring out the main course. Out it came, and round and round: Amram signaled his attendant to bring ours speedily and he obliged, spreading before us another impressive, exhausting array of meat, chicken, fish, vegetables, rice, and even a towering plate of fried brains that Amram insisted I try. He dug in to set an example.
A belly dancer appeared now, her distant half smile apparently part of the show, and began to shimmy for the newlyweds, inviting the bride to wiggle along with her, eye to eye. And wiggle she did, her arms raised in a loose but snakelike manner, hips and breasts swinging in apparent freedom yet in fact (the longer I watched, the more I understood) confined to tracing a fixed swishing pattern.… By then the musicians had recalibrated and switched to a syncopated Eastern beat as the bride and the belly dancer, gazes locked, jiggled together out onto the floor, in a ritual crackling with both the charge of seduction and contest. Shosh, the bride, was a fine dancer and a good sport, though as the evening went on and the whole hall joined in the gyrations, I saw the bizarre power of this dancing to turn the least attractive women, their skin haggard, hair thinned by dye and age, stomachs stretched from frequent childbirth, into almost purely sexual creatures — not in a vulgar way, but through the sly sort of understatement that infected even the most loudly dressed and rowdy of them as they wordlessly twisted their hips. The women danced with one another, their arms curved above their heads, never touching but coordinating their movements and keeping close. And they all wore a similar expression of dreamy pleasure at their bodies (vanity is too strong a word). Each held herself as if she were the bride, the queen, the most beautiful one in the hall.
We watched and ate, and after a while the copious amounts of food and booze we’d ingested had begun to weigh down and slow the talk and laughter. Amram was a bit drunk, but in a gentle, interior way. His earlier effusive bearing had evolved by now into a more taciturn aspect, and turned him back in on his own thoughts. Peter and I considered getting up to dance — go, dance, dance, Amram encouraged us muddily, as if he were talking to himself — and finding ourselves in the middle of these packs of wiggling women, we danced together the only way we knew how, hand in hand, with our usual Occidental dips, twirls, and shuffles. By the time we came back to the table we were thirsty and in high spirits. Amram sat still, cryptic in his silence. Was this contentment or melancholy? His eyes scanned the room but didn’t seem to see what was there. He had been to so many weddings before; this one might already, as it unfolded, be sinking into the hazily remembered pile. Would he like to dance? I asked him, and he chuckled a bit ruefully to himself. No, no. He couldn’t dance any more. His heart …
After I deposited the requisite check and card in the designated box (to give any other gift, I’d been warned, was offensive), we started home: Carl and Sylvia offered to drive us and after we explained that we’d come with Amram, the five of us piled into their car. We spoke a muted, dinner-party English most of the way, as Amram sat, uncomprehending and hushed, docile as a weary child in the front seat. But when we arrived home, I wanted, somehow, to thank him for the evening, to finish the night in his own language, as it had begun.
“Thank you —” I started to say. “Thank you, Amram —”
“Pah.” He interrupted me with a dismissive grunt. “For what? I didn’t do anything.”
Then he turned, smiling so faintly I couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t in fact grimaced, unlocked his door, and went off to sleep in his room.