Yoav, the dark kid, his cousin, his cousin’s kid: only in that darkness would David ever recognize the boy already had a father.
The first time David met his cousin Yoav was 14 years before all this, when after 14 years of marriage his wife had caught him screwing, nailing, doing something industrious to an employee: doing some industry to Ruth.
David and Bonnie King, who was about to again become Bonnie Dhimmaj—a former calendar girl for a sportscar importer/exporter that David had longhaul dealings with—had been living in Jersey at the time, in a trophy mcmansion big enough for him to mope, her to rage, and their daughter to mourn in, but still: Bonnie threw him out, threw a garmentbag of suits to the porch. Jersey had been her dream, specifically the Jersey suburbs, specifically the suburb of Summit, the summit of success for the cityborn, and Bonnie was from the Bronx, an Eastern Orthodox who’d converted. David was facing a summer laid out in front of him like a scorched brittle lawn. He was facing a divorce and an attempt to invalidate the prenup. Bonnie would claim that her signature had been coerced, or forged, and regardless, he’d misreported assets. She’d also claim that he’d abused her and tried to get Tammy, bat mitzvah aged then, to back her up.
David moved into Manhattan but without his passport, considered breaking into the house to retrieve it on a day his accountant had told him that Bonnie was meeting with her own accountant, but then had reservations, took advice. He reported his passport as lost or stolen, applied to have a replacement expedited.
The day it arrived he went out and bought six of the same velcrotic insulated coolerbags, stopped by Citibank and dragged his suitcase into a cab to JFK, where he was met by Paul Gall and Pete Simonyi. He bought three roundtrip tickets and charged through the manifold security checks, hoping they might irradiate and change him.
The skin below his weddingband, where his weddingband had been, would tan.
Paul Gall, shift supervisor, was the most experienced, most decorated staffmember at King’s Moving: back then, before the diabetes and arthritis, a big shambolic gorillalimbed guy with a widow’s peak, a former mover’s physique, and that egregious admiration for perceived Jewish business acumen so prevalent among the ex-Yugoslavs.
Pete Simonyi was David’s lawyer: a small compact suit and tie guy with kinky hair and the solicitous airs of a minor advisor to a megalomaniacal regent.
For the flight to Tel Aviv, they sat toward the back of the plane, three in a three row with David lapsed insomniac in the middle through ten and a half hours, eight Nicorette lozenges, six Chivas Regals, and the disastrous mistaking of two pills of Fastin (the amphetamined weightloss supplement) for the identically colored, identically shaped, slowmaking, sleepmaking Ambien (generic Ambien)—meaning that he was always getting up and so making Paul Gall or Pete Simonyi get up and then sitting down again frenetic and tapping or shuffling his feet atop their carryons, which he’d had them shove under the seatrow in front.
He wouldn’t, and wouldn’t let anyone, stow them in the overheads.
There was a spate of blurry spy movies that’d been edited for sex and airborne violence, but David’s English channel was broken, the dubbing was Hebrew, and the subtitles were Arabic, so he switched to a documentary about Israel.
David had first visited the country in the 1960s, when his father, who’d never been on a plane before, had flown the family over to be reunited with his younger brother, who’d been given up for dead in Poland. David returned solo in the 1970s, to pick citrus on a commie polyamory kibbutz, and then had tried taking Bonnie, from Paris, on their honeymoon, 1988 or so, just after the first bloom of the Intifada, but she’d refused.
“It wasn’t the bombings that had her skittish,” David said to his rowmates, “it was the hijackings, the planejackings.”
He’d eaten the rolls off both neighboring trays and was now summoning a flightattendant for that transparent liquid she was pouring down the aisle: arak.
“I was going to take Tammy for her bat mitzvah, but Bonnie put the kibosh.”
The flightattendant poured the arak into a cup and then, from a pitcher, added a sip of another transparent liquid, water, and his cup clouded over.
“There’s nothing I don’t regret.”
El Al Flight 2 was expected to, but seldom did, arrive daily at Ben Gurion at 11:06 IDT. David sent his shift supervisor and lawyer to fetch his checked luggage, while he went to find a phone and find out how the phone worked and make a call.
He’d scrawled the number on a receipt he’d folded into his passport—to call Israel from within Israel he had to jettison the +00972: “Hello?”
A kid’s voice picked up, in Hebrew.
“It’s David King, hello? English? I’m calling for my cousin Dina. Put your mom on.”
The kid hung up, so David tried again. He liked the long beeps, the long sheepish beeps, the phones in Israel rang with.
“It’s me,” he told Dina, once he got her. “Cousin David.”
She said, “David,” but like it wasn’t Hebrew.
“I’m in Tel Aviv and free tomorrow if you’re around.”
The luggage was plunked in the trunk of the cab, but the carryons stayed on their laps—three men sitting scrunched again holding the insulated coolerbags with their shoeprints shifty all over them and pricetags still attached.
They rode through the insatiably bright Tel Aviv light that struck David like a divine obfuscation straight to the stark whitewashed cube that served as the international banking center of Bank Leumi.
They left the suitcases by a rindcolored bench under the watch of a hefty receptionist and followed a young guy who was friends or just colleagues with another young guy David had met all of a month ago at a stockbroker bar down on Pearl Street, to the rear of the bank and behind a flimsy felt partition, where they dumped the contents of the carryons: six bags, $50,000 each, $300,000—the inaugural deposit of David’s new account.
David was entrusting this money to Bank Leumi Israel with the explicit if unwritten understanding that if he’d ever have to access it, he’d just have to take a loan from Bank Leumi USA, essentially a sham loan to be collateralized in secret by the sum—by the tidy bundles of rubberbanded $100s—abiding innocently in Tel Aviv.
This arrangement—which was illegal and recommended by his lawyer—would allow David to deduct the interest paid on any loans as a legitimate business expense in the States, while his full intact sum earned taxfree interest abroad. Above all, though, this arrangement would allow him to keep considerable cash assets hidden from his wife, who was bent on taking him for everything, he was sure of it.
It was tough not to appreciate: the illegitimacy, the sleight, borrowing your own money, borrowing from yourself and never reporting it—David’s future of meeting Israeli bankers in banyas and massageparlors in Manhattan to review the paperwork every quarter, because no statements would ever be sent through the mails.
The banker took the threesome out to lunch at a seaside fish restaurant and once the plates were all bones and the napkins wadded, he put in a call for a cab to take Pete Simonyi and Paul Gall back to Ben Gurion for the next return flight, whose duration would be just about equal to the amount of time they’d spent in Israel.
The lawyer had a trial and the shift supervisor had work too or was just daunted.
David’s cab dropped the banker off at the bank (bank), and continued on through the citycenter (mercaz ha’ir) to the Dan Hotel (malon Dan), to an upgrade suite roughly the size and swankness of his new bachelorized apartment—but with a broad balconied view over the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean beats Central Park South.
This was David just daring himself, powering through, prodigalizing for confidence. He’d had enough of husbandly restraint. He was giving room to his native acquisitiveness. Four rooms with two full baths—everything here would validate his voracity.
The next morning, the second day—the day that God divided the sky from the waters below and so created the conditions for jetlag—David’s cousins were waiting in the lobby: Dina and Yoav Matzav. There they were, standing—as if they didn’t have the permission to do anything but stand—amid that zoo of Bauhausy loungery.
Dina Matzav was a nervous and yet, when she had to be, demonstratively hard woman, heavy at bottom, light in the waist and birdy above, and so she gave the impression of being both grounded and vulnerable, with that eggshell face still flawless but the hair even blacker than he’d remembered. She was the type who’d never dye her hair anything except the color it’d been when she was young, used makeup only to swear that she didn’t, and moisturized furiously. She kept her clear manicure on her son’s shoulders. Yoav was a skinny darkskinned kid like Aladdin from the Disney cartoon, six or seven years younger than Tammy, but scrawnier, taller, with that Maghrebi Jewish swarthiness, its stature and stretch. Between his mother and David, he stuck out, or was being stuck out, prodded into the heat of David’s hug, which he accepted unwillingly and gawky, and David kissed his mother’s cheek over his head. David had packed a moneybag with all the kidfriendly contents of his suite’s minibar and welcomebasket—chocolate, pistachios, dried apricots and dates—and he presented it now like a gift for every belated occasion, and Yoav humped it out to the lot around the ficus and traffic bollards.
Along the way, Dina asked—she tried to ask—what brought David to Israel.
He said, “I figured we’d visit Jerusalem.”
Dina’s was a beaten red Renault and David was uncomfortable, both with how shoddy it was and how she was driving it. He sat up front and tried not to yank at the wheel. Yoav, in the clawed crumbstrewn rear, had gotten into the chocolate and was now bouncing a sticky smeared ball up against David’s seatback and catching it, and then up against the back of David’s headrest and catching it—until Dina yelled in Hebrew.
To David that defined Hebrew: the speech of the beleaguered, the last exasperation before a spanking.
She apologized—most of Dina’s English was apology, mostly for her English, or for Yoav’s behavior. The rest was all veterinary terminology and guidebook phrases that she’d repeat as if stalling, keeping her mouth limber until her mind had compromised between what she meant and an available expression.
Among her phrases were: “From time to time,” “So nice,” “That’s incredible,” and “The way it is.” “From time to time” answered David’s questions about how often she visited her father (whose name was Shoyl), and how often they used their air raid shelter because of rocket attacks (they lived in Bat Yam). “So nice” answered David’s questions about how she liked living in Bat Yam and how Shoyl liked living in the senior home. “That’s incredible” was Dina’s response to David telling her about expanding his business into commuter Connecticut. “The way it is” was Dina’s response to David telling her about his recent separation from his wife. David had said, “My shikse wife,” despite Bonnie’s conversion, and kept calling Dina’s father by his Yiddish name, Shoyl, even while Dina stuck with the Hebrew, Sha’ul.
David talked through the hills, picking pet fur from his pants and twiddling the vents. As rubbleshouldered Route 1 rose into eyesquint and earpop, Dina had, or asked, just a single question: “We make the dinner after with Ilan?”
“Who’s Ilan?”
“The husband of me. My husband.”
Jerusalem, God’s dwelling, overcharged for parking.
Dina huffed them up a ramp and through a ramparted gate into the Old City, only to slack and slow as if disoriented: she hadn’t planned on anything beyond this point, she hadn’t planned on having to do anything, beyond just picking up her cousin and bringing him here—that’d absorbed enough of her energies.
She’d just turned around and David had already bought Yoav a popsicle.
Anyway, it’s not like there was anything to do but pray and shop. The Old City was just one continuous shop—a mall, but a stone mall, whose concourses were bound by stone and corrugated sheetmetal that kept the sun off.
“What you want to do?”
David wanted to sleep. To work. To have his daughter not turned against him. To buy a hamsa keychain as a charm against death.
Yoav handed the popsicle to his mother and tarried by a table of souvenir shofars and icons and olivewood camels. He picked up a metal knot, two nails bent around each other.
David took it from him and solved the puzzle—aligning the nails and disentangling them: you had to bring them together to take them apart.
He put the pieces in Yoav’s palm, and Yoav held his gaze with awe.
Yoav was trying to tangle them up again, but Dina took the pieces away and left them on the table.
David was down the street, trying to find that café he’d once liked. Where he’d gotten drunk on slivovitz with those Dutch blonde girls with whom he’d harvested oranges. Where he’d gotten silly high with those Dutch blonde girls as firm and smooth as oranges. He was trying to remember that one café that’d spiked its hookahs with opium.
“Remember the winter I was here?” he asked. “76 or 77?”
Dina handed him the popsicle. “Not very.”
She’d been too much a child then, too related to him to be interested.
The younger David would’ve climbed the citadel of David, but the ticketbooth was closed now and he was older and worried about lacking the lungs for it.
“What year was King David?” he asked. “What century? He was before zero, I know. Before Jesus.”
Dina replied what she replied: “So nice,” “That’s incredible.”
That’s how it went: with David putting questions to Dina about the sites—about the Sepulchre church atop where Jesus was buried? or atop where Jesus was crucified? which was built during which of the Crusades? and how many Crusades were there, anyway? Not that he was asking for a tour, not that he’d ever admit he was asking, but only because he enjoyed his cousin’s bewilderment, he enjoyed—the few times she ventured to answer—cutting her off and correcting: “There definitely weren’t seven Crusades, I’m thinking the number’s like five.”
An order of nuns was crossing the Via Dolorosa and, while David went elbowing through, Dina stepped into an alley, tugging Yoav by the collar and muttering a remark that her son picked up like a shiny shekel from the gutter. He laughed. He wouldn’t stop repeating it. A rough translation would be: “There were seven Crusades, you rabid asshole”—and a scraggly Armenian priest streaking by stiffened and winced and the Palestinians outside their shops leaning against their flipflop racks grinned.
The stones now increased in size, until the individual blocks seemed to outgrow their cuts and became pure stone itself, the surfaced substance of the earth through which the narrowing corridors had been quarried. Yoav quieted. He walked by David’s side, then walked slower, behind him, with Dina coming last. They were being pressured, singlefiled, lined.
The Hasid just ahead of them put his book into a bin, which he nudged down the conveyor to get xrayed, but the French just ahead of the Hasid kept setting off the metal detectors and so were returned again through the gantries to remove their belts. A Scandinavian woman plumped by middleage and with hair like a wilted palmtree was trying to banish the ecstasy from her face while being patted down.
That was it, David realized, as he helped Yoav on the steps—as he helped Yoav leap between the steps—Jerusalem wasn’t a mall, its walls only contained a mall, because given all its gates and security checkpoints, it was more like another airport. A mystical airport. A ruined terminal connecting future and past. More than international, interstellar. And there lording it over the wide thronged plaza was the board. But instead of listing the Arrivals and Departures, the Kotel, the Western Wall, was cracked and brown and blank. Travelers kept glancing up at it, as if expecting the announcement of a delay. They scrambled to keep up with their groups: Japanese with the Japanese, Georgians and Russians with the Russians, Australians and Canadians with the British, everyone hustling toward their linguistically appropriate flags, which were held aloft by guides who shrieked through megaphones, distorting histories.
David helped himself from a trough of flimsy nylon yarmulkes, palmed one onto Yoav—“We boys will meet you here,” he said, and steered Yoav to the line to the left, to the men’s prayer area, and Dina shrugged, but instead of joining the line to the right, to the women’s, she stepped back from the corrals to make a phonecall.
The stones were beset by men swaying, jostling, shuckling, bowing from the waist, wrapped up in tallis and tefillin. It was all uniform, or all about the uniform, the heavy gabardines of the European ghettos interlayered with modern weatherproofed fatigues, and it was this semblance, this belonging, which inverted the usual fashion dynamic and made the secular civilian visitors seem suspicious, out of place: the religious were in charge here, and the soldiers were too, and everyone else was a tourist, garbed in tshirts, shorts, and shame, lotioned up, in visors.
David bowed his head. He inclined himself toward concentration, as if the lower his head, the better his chances of remembering, because memory was deep. His face up against the stones, he tried to summon psalms, but all that came to mind was whether his co-op would approve a dog, and if so, of what size. Ruth knew he wasn’t going to marry her, because of which, he knew, she wasn’t going to quit and he wasn’t going to fire her, which would mean getting hit for wrongful termination atop harassment. Maybe he’d adopt a feral tabby, maybe a passive aggressive Abyssinian bred by a colleague of Dina’s. Or else he’d just get an aquarium. Or like a greenhouse but for lizards. His brain wasn’t wired for prayer, just panic. He hadn’t spoken to his God since Bonnie had gone into labor with Tammy.
Bonnie, the Fordham Road Albanian Orthodox who’d dipped in the mikveh and stepped out dripping for him—so as to always have leverage on him—had been the one who’d gone to shul, while David had shown up begrudgingly only twice a year, thrice this past year if he counted Tammy’s bat mitzvah, to which he’d invited his office manager.
Bonnie had been livid—the goal was to cut down the guestlist, the affair was already getting out of control—but David had prevailed.
He was inviting his foremen, his facility chiefs—why not his office manager? Wasn’t Ruth the employee he worked the closest with?
She wouldn’t be allowed to bring a date, she’d be seated with Tammy’s old babysitters. Peace had to be maintained among the staff.
It was a week or two after that everything collapsed. Bonnie knew it all. He still didn’t know whether Bonnie had followed them herself or had paid to have them followed. Romantic Bayonne: sirloins at the Broadway Diner and noodles and Guinness at Thai O’Brien’s, because Ruth wasn’t the type you had to bring into the city.
David confessed, he had to, and what Bonnie blurted out would remain her grievance, or the only grievance she ever aired in front of Tammy: “You invited that bitch to the bat mitzvah, where you danced with her.”
She’d burned with incredulity: “That’s when I knew, when you danced with that Jew bitch, in front of all our friends and family.”
All this came back to David at the Wall, and he was crying, and a child’s hand squeezed his.
“What?” he said. “Everything’s OK.”
Yoav tugged—his face, upturned, had the anonymous expectancy of an entire audience in it, an entire congregation: wellwishing but impatient, under a thicket of curls and a dimpled yarmulke. David had invited his office manager to the bat mitzvah, but not his cousins.
“What’s going on, bud?”
Whatever Yoav was saying teemed with urgency. He was also grabbing his crotch.
“Bathroom—you have to go to the bathroom? Fuck. OK. Number one or number two?”
Yoav picked at his zipper.
“Can you ask someone? I mean, where—I don’t know where—I’m sorry, I don’t know Hebrew. Lo speak ivrit, OK? I’ll find someone, and you’ll just ask them.”
It had to be down by the plaza’s edge: shitting and pissing were definitely prohibited in such close proximity to the most sacred.
They waited their turn—“You can do this on your own?”
Huddled in the stall, David was relieved that his cousin stood. When Yoav was finished, David kicked out a loafer and flushed the toilet with his foot—“Keeps your hands clean,” he said, and Yoav’s smile had understanding.
Coming back from the WC complex to the meetingpoint, Dina wasn’t there.
David surveyed the crowd and then circled around and checked the lines: for the women’s WCs, they were eternal.
“Let’s go up to the Mount,” he said. He took off his yarmulke, and then Yoav’s, crumpled them in a fist—“the Temple Mount, what do you say, bud?”
They had to pass through another checkpoint: Yoav slipped through, but David was made to stand to the side as a wand was waved over him, as if in a rite of purification.
The ascent was steep, up a sort of scaffolded gangway, a provisional span of juryrigged piping and plywood, to the platform above the Wall, and of which the Wall was but the western retainer—the Kotel being structural, loadbearing, which means the Muslims can never move it, all their mosques would fall.
David took Yoav around the mosques like they owned them, or were inspecting them, preparing estimates on properties they’d have to haul out—stripping the smaller dome of its leaded silver, stripping the bigger dome of its low karat gold, and then clearing them both of all the rugs and lanterns and loudspeakers inside, all the ewers and lavers and shoes removed by worshippers, and even that pocked lunar rock, where the altar of the temple used to be, where the ten commandments, the holy stone tablets, used to be: the ark of the covenant had been a box—should’ve been easy to port, easy to store, two Puerto Ricans could’ve handled it.
A man blocked the way—“No to visit”—and other men rose from their feetwashing in the vestibule and gathered behind him and David hugged Yoav close just as the man spit and the gob of phlegm landed on the cuff of David’s pants. Men massed toward them, beckoning, yelling, with only one of them coherent, “I am sorrow for all this,” he said, and though the others were only yelling at the one who’d spit, David didn’t notice, he just turned, lifted Yoav up in his arms and quickened his steps and as the Arabic faded another thing flew—not a rock, not even a pebble, just like a clod of fertilized dirt whizzed through the air between their heads, hit the ground ahead of them and scattered toward the scandalously baretrunked trees at platform’s ledge, as David shielded Yoav, and heaved them both toward the exit.
Yoav was in tears and David didn’t recognize the streets.
“Hey bud, hey, it’s alright.”
The street was lined with nuts and sesame seeds and vendors curious.
“It’s alright, calm down. Everything’s fine, bud.”
But Yoav wouldn’t hush until David had bought him the exact same metal knot from a different stand that sold the exact same things.
Coming around to the descent to the plaza again, they had to pass through the security checkpoint again, and the nails set off the detector, and as David was trying to explain to the guards what a puzzle was, Dina rushed up shaking admonishment with her phone—“To where you go?”
“We weren’t sure where you were.”
Dina snapped at the guards, exited the wrong way and tossed herself onto her son. “I make the phonecall with the patient who have the parrot that do not talking.”
“We went up to the Temple Mount.”
Dina bit a lip and then asked Yoav, who confirmed for her in Hebrew, and then she said to David, “You can not.”
“We did.”
“You can not to go, it not safe. The warning he is there to say that, we forbidden.”
“We?”
But she, who was frantic, meant only Yoav—because with Americans, who cared? Did it ever matter what they violated?
“Anyway,” David said, “what causes a parrot to lose its speech? Does it forget what it regularly says or just lose its vocal ability completely?”
All the ride back Dina was silent and fuming.
They passed a sign for Ben Gurion—in Israel, it felt like you were always going to, or from, or merely passing the airport, and every sign told you how far you were from the airport, as if it were important to be constantly aware of the precise kilometer distance between this life and an escape.
At the Tel Aviv limits, they left Route 1 for Bat Yam.
Dina’s house formed one wall of a dusky courtyard: a clumpy sandbox litterbox, a swingset without swings, a slide without a ladder, and a seesaw jutting up from the weeds like an errant missile. The unit itself was groundfloor and underventilated, a lair of wetsplotched drywall and lumpy carpet, where Dina’s husband, Ilan Matzav—a stocky man with resentful muscles and sparse facial hair, a nativeborn Israeli who resembled Arafat—sat detached and spraddled macho atop a Genuine Leather Couch, whose ruff had a label that read Genuine Leather Couch, surrounded by hairball and shed and two cute aloof girls somewhere between Tammy’s age and Yoav’s: tawny cousins from the Matzav side, who resided in the opposite unit. There was a palsied dog in a cage that David assumed was named Shollie, but that turned out to be the breed, German shepherd/border collie, and its name instead was Simba. There were cats too, stippled mixes swingdooring in and out of the house, and a fuzzy Siberian without a tail that the girls passed between their laps and might’ve called Shirazi. Yoav was sitting crosslegged atop the maybe leather maybe not ottoman of his father’s maybe leather maybe not clubchair, which had been surrendered—in an unrecognized, at least unappreciated, surrender—to David. Yoav’s grandmother, Ilan’s mother, Safta Sara, whiskered in sniffing warily—it was like she’d just managed to sneak out of the kitchen alive and with this tray of bourekas she offered around, but wouldn’t let go of, she wouldn’t put it down, she wouldn’t sit down. Dina was in the kitchen, chopping salads, chopping—because David was in the midst of retelling what’d happened, but now lightly, as if he were telling a joke, because the anecdote had already become, like the round mosaic table, patterned, stylized. He kept prodding with his loafer at Yoav’s ottoman, prodding anxiously at the kid to agree, but Yoav was too transfixed by the spit dried on David’s pantscuff and Simba barked until brought to heel by Ilan with a green bone treat.
Ilan’s English was decent—or just familiar to his cousin by marriage—because though he was now a master welder responsible for the lines at the Ashdod refinery that attached to the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline, his previous jobs had taken him to rigs and platforms all over the world, whose guttural lingua franca was Fucking Shit: “Fucking Arabushim,” he said, and pointed at a chromeframed photo on the wall of who he said was his only brother Shachar who’d died in Lebanon, “Shit the brain Arabushim,” and Dina called out from the kitchen something in Hebrew as thick and gristly as her lamb tajine, gulped down with lukewarm Schweppes.
After, the whole family accompanied David to the door. Even Safta Sara who, each time she waved, put her hand to the mezuzah, then to her lips. The girl cousins rowdied around in the yard chasing beetles. Yoav tried to follow Dina and David to the car, but Ilan held him back, held him as he squirmed, and night beat its wing over his farewell: “Byegoodbye.”
A hypermarket, a pharmacy, a dun huttish structure topped with a blinking red neon star that didn’t mean synagogue but ambulance dispatch—Dina was wrenching the Renault around the roundabouts, taking grim turns at sharp angles.
A crumbling aggregate of residential buildings quaked up on rickety struts as if they were about to falter on prostheses. She parked beneath them and across two spaces, leaned her head against the wheel and said, “Infection of bacteria or fungus, but if she losing the feathers also then maybe parasite or herpes, or maybe only that a feed pellet she is eating is sticking. That is how the parrot she is losing the voice.”
“So it doesn’t have to do with memory?” David said.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “it more better to make the visit tomorrow. To make prepare for him.”
“But I fly back in the morning,” David insisted and Dina sighed and offed the engine.
“Thanks,” he said. “Todah rabah. Been meaning to say, that son of yours is a good smart kid. Didn’t want to forget that.”
A bell had to be pressed, and the door buzzed like locusts into a utilitarian lobby lined with padded railings, tacked agendas flapping blank and, toward the back, under the missing panels of the dropceiling, a librarianlike attendant in a smock, with hair and makeup seared the purple of a sweet Carmel wine, and on her chin a lesion shaped like Ukraine.
Dina, after pleasantries that weren’t returned, translated her gist for David almost triumphantly: “She say to me that we too late.”
The attendant, not to be shown up, reverted to that language: “It is no more the hours of visiting.”
“But he’s her father,” David said. “He’s my father’s brother and in the morning I fly.”
The attendant opened her crossword book, but turned away. David, like he was marking her page, laid down the rest of his shekels.
Dina summoned the elevator. The moon of wired plexiglas lit.
The topfloor hall reeked of bleach. All toilets handicapped, a rollingcart slavered with babywipes, rummikub tiles, and novels in Hebrew, English, the Cyrillics, and what was either Arabic or Persian. A scrum of IV stanchions. A gurney.
Namecards marked the doors, and theirs was at the end. Dina knocked, but it was unlocked, it didn’t have a lock, and she entered knocking, into a room the size of a cell in solitary. A cubby held folded tracksuits, a pill slicer, pills. Some device, which might’ve served some pulmonary function, was off, and so now was just the expensive medical pedestal for a boombox. The man appeared to be nude, besides the artbook covering his sex splayed wide to a doublepage spread that reproduced another nude, lusher and Flemish, and the immense headphones clamped to his bulbous baldness that leaked a string music, soaring, jarring, Viennese. He sat on a backless aluminum stool, his scabbed shins straddling a quadcane wrapped with electrical tape like a sticky black mummy. His skin was sheetwhite, his gut untucked and stitched with scars and parchmentcolored patches. And there, on his forearm, was his camp number, its zeroes smudged.
Dina brought her face close to her father’s and touched his temples, and the man startled up, but timidly, and she lifted the headphones off and removed the book, under which he was wearing just a faded figleaf of diaper.
David said, “Shalom, Uncle Shoyl—it’s Yudy’s son, David,” but the man just sat there and Dina stood smug. “It may be for him that he is not now knowing English,” she said to David and then, “Aba, Aba, English, Anglit—yes no hello?”
Still the man didn’t stir and Dina shrugged, “The way it is from time to time.”
“Yudy, your brother? He was my father, my tate. I’m David, you understand—you farshteyn? The last I visited you I was young—a hippie, a schlep. I’d come to Israel running away from the business. Running away from Dad.”
The man seemed to be clearing a nest from his throat and David turned to Dina, who raised her palms, “He forget also Yiddish, I thinking. You tell me.”
David tried again, “From Vrbau, you remember?”
Vrbau, or Verbó, or Vrbové, was the town in Austro-Hungary, then later in Czechoslovakia, where it all began: the nativity of David’s father Yudy and his younger brother, Shoyl, who now cocked his head at David and said, “This is the BBC.”
“Who?”
“This is London calling.”
Yudy and Shoyl were the only members of the Klinger family to survive the Hlinka Guard and the Nazi SS. In summer 1942 they were deported to the Sered transit and labor camp, in summer 1944 Yudy was sent to Theresienstadt and then, because he’d become a skilled mason, to Buchenwald, while Shoyl, who was underweight and tubercular, was sent to Auschwitz. After Liberation, Yudy married a woman from the DP pens and went to meet the remnant of her family, who’d made it to the States. In New York, he Americanized his name to Jay King and worked as a driver for a freight agency, until he’d saved up enough to buy his own truck, to fix it up, then a legion of trucks, bought marshland and threw up a garage, established a moving concern.
His brother, Shoyl, the man sitting there while David fed him his memories, staggered around Europe until he reached Trieste, from which he smuggled himself by boat to Corfu, and then to Jaffa in what was Palestine, Hebraicized his name to Sha’ul Ben Kinor, joined the Palmach, distinguished himself fighting both the British and Arabs, and sometime after the founding of Israel married a Polish survivor whose family was setting up a grocery. The brothers got back in touch in the 60s, through a Vrbové newsletter.
Sha’ul, David’s uncle, would only say: “Yudy—Yehudah—he went to America,” and though David encouraged him, all the man would say after was, “He is working as mechanic, with oil on his hands, because he is not educated,” which referred, it seemed, because Dina was grumbling, to Dina’s husband, Ilan.
Sha’ul said, “Mizrahi. This means Sephardi, Arab Jew, but he is more like Arab, not Jew. If Mizrahim are being religious they stupid and if not being religious more stupid. Because the religion is all they have.”
David was nearly yelling, “I’m Yudy’s son, David. From America. From New York. Visiting you in Israel. Today we went to Jerusalem. You ever go up on top of the Wall—the Temple Mount?”
Dina grunted, as David retold again what’d happened until Sha’ul’s face wandered to a leak in the ceiling.
“The last time,” he said and David stopped and Sha’ul assembled his breath, “the last time I go up to Jerusalem was 1948 when I liberate it.”
