All I Love and Know (7 page)

The window was slid open to the chilly night air, and a lovely smell was wafting in. Matt tried to place it. When Daniel came back into the room, he looked at his still face and closed eyes. “Yeast,” he said. “The Angel bread factory is right across the valley.”

They were so tired, they crawled into the small double bed without brushing their teeth. Daniel let out a sigh and turned his back to Matt, curling into a ball. Matt gently spooned him, careful to make his touch feel like solace and not a demand. Daniel was hot and sticky from sweat and tears, the air cool and yeasty, and a kind of sensuous peace came over Matt. They fell asleep within minutes.

But two hours later, Matt awoke to find Daniel lying awake beside him. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

They lay in silence for a while, the only sound the ticking of the desk clock. Matt drifted off for a few minutes, then awoke again, looked over at Daniel and saw his eyelids blinking. “Do you want to tell me what you said about your brother in your eulogy?” he asked.

Daniel continued to stare into space. Matt heard the dry sound of his chapped lips opening. “I said,” he whispered, “that Joel and Ilana would not want their deaths to be used as an opportunity for another wave of violence. They would not want people killed in their name. They were people who worked for social justice.”

“You said that?”

Daniel nodded.

“That's beautiful, honey. And brave to say.”

Daniel shrugged. His face twitched. “A lot of good it'll do,” he said.

Matt fell back asleep, and when he awoke two hours later, he found that Gal was in their bed, between them, breathing raucously, one arm flung over his neck. He removed her arm gently and turned toward her and Daniel. Daniel was awake; Matt could see the movement of his eyelids blinking. He fell asleep again and awoke exactly two hours later, grief and jet lag seeming to have planted in him a diabolically precise clock. As the night crawled on, he dreamed ponderous dreams about problems with the designs he was working on back home. He woke again, got up and went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and explored the leftovers: pea soup in a pot, some baked chicken in a dish covered with foil, a tiny bit of rice in a Tupperware container. Ilana's food, he thought; the prospect of eating it seemed deeply symbolic of something, but he was too tired to figure out what. He took out some milk, closed the refrigerator door, and fixed himself a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios from a box with Hebrew writing on it. He sat down at the table where Joel's wedding ring and tattered wallet sat, along with Sam's watch, some worn and folded pieces of paper, the social worker's business card. He picked up the wallet and opened it, and found another two tiny nails caught in the lining. He got up and threw them in the garbage.

The cereal was sweet and comforting; he ate in big mouthfuls, wiping milk off his chin. He wondered if he and Daniel would be the kind of parents who gave their kids apples or grapes for dessert instead of chocolate pudding, and sent them to school with horrible
Little House on the Prairie
sandwiches on organic whole wheat bread. He thought that if your parents had been blown up, a Ho Ho probably wasn't the worst thing that would ever happen to you. He went back to bed as dawn was breaking, hearing a donkey's strident bray from down below. In the dim light, Gal was blinking at him, sleepy and solemn. She reached a hand toward his face as he settled in beside her, and he kissed it, and her eyes filled with tears. “I want Ema,” she said in a tiny voice. The sound of those words, her wish aloud in the air, made her face crumple. Her grief, Matt thought, already seemed weary and resigned.

“I know, Boo,” he whispered. He sat up and pulled her limp body onto his lap, kissed her wet face, and rocked her.

W
HEN HE AWOKE
in the mornings, there was a moment when Daniel's spirit felt light. Then a vague unsettled feeling came over him, and a sense of dread that hardly got its footing before his awareness broke over him and crushed him with such ruthlessness he could only cower and whimper before it. The morning after Joel's funeral, he lay in bed, his arms thrown over his head, whispering the only word he could think of in any language:
Please
.

He could sense that he was in Jerusalem, and that it was warm. His undershirt stuck to his back. He tried to bring Joel's face to his mind, but he couldn't. His throat cramped with the effort not to cry and awaken the sleeping man and child beside him.

He lay there for a while, his breathing ragged, the sound of sobbing roaring in his ears. His consciousness began to wash over the sound
Joel
; and the idea of Joel, Joel's shining essence, came to him. Joel as he was, all at once, gorgeous in full, imperfect personhood, and not as Daniel, swayed by his own ego and needs, had thought of him over the years, as too this or too that. He imagined himself holding his brother, their hearts clamoring against each other, and the mayhem in his mind became something clearer and sweeter, a grief that pierced him through.

He lay there till it subsided, till he felt himself to have been washed ashore, half-dead, panting. He felt the living bodies beside him sigh and stir. His ears made out the rush of traffic on the far side of the valley, and closer, the voices of neighboring women talking over their balconies. And then the baby's sharp wail.

He rose quietly and closed the bedroom door behind him, walked barefoot to the kids' bedroom. His mother was up, walking around the small cluttered room in a housedress with the baby over her shoulder, patting him and murmuring, “I know, I know, honey, I know.” Noam was wearing only a diaper, and his red face was covered with tears and snot.

“How long has he been up?” Daniel asked, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat.

“Since about five. Close the door, will you? The whole house will wake up.”

Daniel closed it. “Has he eaten?”

“I tried to give him some Cheerios, but he wouldn't eat. I'm trying to get him to at least take a bottle,” Lydia said.

“Did you change him?”

“Of course,” she said. “I have some experience at this, in case you've forgotten.”

An old skepticism wormed its way up Daniel's throat. He knew that twin babies had been hard for her; she loved the idea of motherhood better than the actuality. He and Joel had always joked that she couldn't relate to them till they were speaking in sentences with subordinate clauses. Her own mother had died suddenly during Lydia's pregnancy—one of those unlucky people who go into a hospital for a simple procedure and never come out again—and by the time he and Joel were born, Lydia was wrung out by months of grief.

“Could you pick up some of this crap on the floor?” she asked. “There seems to be the entire contents of a toy ark. I've already stubbed my toe three times.”

Daniel stooped and began collecting Lego pieces and small animal figures fused together in male and female pairs, tossing them into a big plastic toy box in the corner of the room. Above the crib was one of those black-and-white mobiles that were supposed to be good for a baby's development in some way, but whose elemental faces made Daniel shudder. Noam was screaming and arching backward, and Lydia was struggling to hang on to him.

“Do you want me to take him?” Daniel asked.

“No,” Lydia said over the baby's crying. “Thank God Ilana weaned him already. That would have been an utter horror.” She sat down on the rocking chair in the corner, wrestled him into a reclining position on her lap, and offered him the bottle again. He twisted his face away. “I know, bubbie,” Lydia said softly, her eyes becoming shiny with tears.

Daniel straightened, his eyes filling, too. “You're nice with him.”

“One is easier than two,” she shrugged, laying the bottle's nipple against Noam's lips. “Nothing can prepare you for two.” She slipped it in his mouth and he grasped the bottle and began to suck, sighing and shuddering. “There,” she crooned. “What a clever boy.” She looked evenly at Daniel. “Grandchildren are easier than your own, too,” she said.

She was conceding something, Daniel realized. He fixed his eyes on Noam's working cheeks, arms hugging his chest. “Mom,” he whispered. “How am I going to survive this?”

Her face broke and sagged, and then composed itself. She spoke to him sharply. “By getting up every morning and putting one foot in front of the other, that's how. By faking it, until it gets real again. That's what we're all going to do.”

“Okay,” Daniel said in a small voice.

“And by taking care of these children. Listen.” Her voice had lowered, become conspiratorial. “We will not let those Grossmans take them. I won't have them raised in that house.”

“One step at a time, Mom,” Daniel said. “Let's get through the shiva.” He was suddenly dying to get away from this conversation before it got too specific. “There's no milk in the house. I'm going to go out and get some.”

Lydia nodded. “And while you're out, see if you can find something better than that awful Nescafé, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And what about some cookies, at least, for the shiva?”

“I don't think so, Mom,” he said. “We have to trust Shoshi on this one.” She had told them—as Daniel had assumed—that, according to custom, the family doesn't provide food for the shiva, that the visitors feed them instead.

He found his sandals and wallet, and looked for the key to Joel and Ilana's car for a long time, rummaging through every kitchen drawer, thrumming with the memory of Ilana's periodic tantrums, her bellowing, “I can't go on living in such a shit hole!” It occurred to him that Joel must have had their car keys with him, and there followed a moment in which Daniel tried and failed to ward off the thought that the bomb's impact had driven the keys through Joel's pockets and into the flesh of his thighs, mashing them into his bones. A little starburst of horror went off in his chest, and he had to sit down. A few minutes passed, and he stood again and looked into the open drawer, which was spilling over with lightbulbs, batteries, hair ties, stamps, pens, and paper clips. Suddenly, his eyes lit miraculously upon a single car key, marked with a tag that said
extra car key
. He held it up with two fingers, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

He closed the front door quietly on his way out. He was glad to leave his mother with the baby; she was being a marvel of strength, he thought, but if she didn't have the children to take care of, she'd probably never be able to get out of bed again. She clearly assumed that she and Sam were going to take them, and for a moment Daniel regretted that Joel and Ilana hadn't made that happen. And yet it was hard to imagine that she and Sam would be thrilled to take on two little kids at their age. He considered calling Joel's lawyer, Assaf Schwartz. He, Daniel, sure as hell wasn't going to be the person who broke the news. Let his parents' wrath descend upon a neutral person. He looked at his watch, and then realized he'd see Assaf at the shiva.

HE DROVE DOWN THE
narrow street toward the center of the neighborhood, flooded by sense memory—sun, stone, squeaking iron gates, narrow streets, little stores like caves crammed with goodies. Last September, he'd spent ten days with Joel and Ilana, having come to Jerusalem to interview and shadow an alumnus who was now a member of the Knesset. At the time, Noam was tiny and Ilana was staying home with him, and Daniel, pulling some of his tastiest recipes out of his hat, cooked for her and Joel and Gal to great applause. It was the best time he'd ever had with his brother. They'd spent much of their lives pulled away from each other in the interest of differentiation, beginning in high school, where being referred to as “one of the Rosen twins” had been a dagger in the heart of teenage boys trying to define themselves. They scoffed at the clichéd schemes people liked to egg them on to do, like switching classes to fool the teacher, or taking each other's exams, and when they co-won the senior prize for best student in English, having to share the prize ruined it for them both. When Joel started getting good at track, Daniel quit sports altogether and began focusing on music, becoming first violinist in the regional youth orchestra and picking up acoustic guitar. They thought of themselves as anti-twins, and during college, where they split up for the first time—Joel to Princeton and Daniel to Oberlin—they invented the semifacetious idea of
twinsism
: the act of stereotyping or fetishizing twins, into which fell such things as Doublemint commercials, fantasizing about having sex with twins, Mengele's experiments on twins, and Diane Arbus photographs.

They spent their junior year in the same overseas program in Jerusalem, deciding, after many negotiations, that after two years apart they could risk venturing into a program that put them in the same place. They lived in the dormitories up on Mount Scopus that looked out over the pale hills all around, which were attached by bus route to the small neighborhood of Givat Tzarfatit and then to the great apartment buildings of Ramat Eshkol. That was Daniel's mental map of the area in which he had lived. It was only much later that his reading brought to his attention that this area was surrounded by Arab villages and a large Palestinian refugee camp. They had been utterly invisible to him.

It was a year of great transformation for them both. They had grown up in a Jewish suburb of Chicago and had spent summers at a Jewish camp they both adored, where they had learned Hebrew and had Israeli counselors, and been steeped in Israeli culture. For Joel, there was a deep feeling of coming home. He lucked out by having a genial and outgoing roommate, and he became friends with his group of friends, thereby winning the unspoken contest in his program for best assimilation into Israeli culture.

For Daniel, the feeling of living in Israel was harder to describe. He had been struggling to accept that he was gay, and when he looked back on it years later, he realized that going to Israel was an attempt to shore up his manhood, which felt compromised among his sexually active college friends. But instead, aroused by sensory Israel—the heady sunshine and cool mountain air of Jerusalem, warm challah and harsh coffee, beautiful men in sandals or in uniform, the language that brought his teeth, palate, throat, and tongue into a new, more vigorous rapport—he was certain for the first time that he was gay. He was also sure that he was the only gay man in his entire acquaintance, and was terrified that anyone would find out.