Elegy on Kinderklavier (22 page)

Midway between the two settlements, in the darkness, they heard something hit the car, or the car hit something, and though they'd been warned not to, they stopped. Apparently my wife Yoheved made her brother stop the car. She believed, in error, that they'd somehow hit a child walking in the dark.

But the affectless voice is what she wants, isn't it? His pretension of having confronted the trauma, the loss—just another kind of repression, Hava's handlers would have told her. “It's just another kind of repression,” Yoheved said to him in her steely voice, during one of their many fights about the documentary, “but it's worse because it's willful.”

As they searched the shoulders of the road for the injured child, a small crowd from the nearby village gathered. My wife's brother, who spoke good Arabic, made the mistake of trying to explain. Men in the crowd began to shout and cry out about a child struck and killed, and the crowd grew.

She couldn't think he would say this, not on camera, not even now, in Mendelbaum's living room. By that point, Yoheved had turned their apartment into a jungle of her beloved houseplants, though. “Doing these interviews,” Gershon had screamed back, staring into the leaves and tendrils of green, though he had seen none of the footage yet and did not know what she was saying in it, “that's what's willful repression! Repression by force!”

Later, the official investigation, aided by informants, would discover that a good deal of the agitation was accomplished by a small core of men, which group had thrown the large rock at the passing car, creating the illusion of impact in the first place.

“My monument?” Gershon says now, out loud.

Hava's face is changing, she looks confused. Mendelbaum is looking at her now.

Gershon could say it, if he wanted to.

People in the crowd, which was by now a mob, grabbed my wife's brother. Then they grabbed my wife. Someone was shouting about them being Israeli spies, my wife's brother managed to tell her, but then they were beating him. Spies? my wife shouted uselessly, in Hebrew. Spies? Spies? An unknown member of the band of men stepped forward as my wife's brother was dragged out of sight.

“You haven't told her, then?” Mendelbaum says to Gershon.

Gershon feels very tired. He sets down his drink. When Yoheved gave him the rough cut of the documentary to watch, she'd left the apartment to give him privacy. “I want to talk about it when I get back,” she said. “I'll be home in two hours.” He'd watched the first few interviews, then digitally skipped ahead to the last one, the only one that really mattered. When she came back, he was gone.

“They beat my wife's brother with their fists and feet, and then beat him to death with stones until his head caved in,” he says, looking at Hava. “Somebody stepped forward out of the crowd and threw
a Molotov cocktail into the car. I don't know whether they knew Shmuli was in there, strapped in his car seat. I don't know if they saw him. He was burned alive in the car. While this was happening, they dragged my wife Yoheved away into a building where she was beaten and violently raped, repeatedly. Thirty-two hours later, when the IDF moved in, they found her there, barely alive. So I don't have a monument here, I guess.”

Hava is sitting very still, her eyes unblinking. She looks ill.

“But then you knew all that,” Gershon says. “You've seen the documentary.”

There's a pause.

“The foundation documentary,” she says quietly. “
Ad Astra Per Aspera
. About the first settlers here.”

Mendelbaum rubs his eyes.

•

Outside the low-slung house, Gershon hurriedly resecures the crate of sweetbread to the cargo rack on the back of the vehicle. He has been spun into a stunned silence at his own mistake. He hops down and waves once more goodbye to Mendelbaum.

His friend is standing at the window of the house, watching Gershon get into the vehicle and prepare to leave. Gershon was undecided for weeks as to whether or not to come and speak to Mendelbaum about the tiny line item, the request for one more kind of seed in the customs and horticulture delivery invoice, which Gershon came across purely by accident.

But on this visit, before coming out to the car to leave, Gershon went through into the greenhouse, Mendelbaum explaining to teary Hava back in the living room that he and Gershon were going to pick
out some of his synthetic produce to take back with them, it'd just be a few minutes.

Mendelbaum had found Gershon standing in front of the plant, its droopy flowers a brilliant, unbelievable purple.

“That color,” Gershon said, not looking at him. “That color is just . . .”

Mendelbaum stepped around him and lightly touched a few of the petals.

“I didn't think it would actually look like a monk's hood,” Gershon said, his voice skating as he looked at his friend.

“This,” Mendelbaum said, holding one of the bulbs delicately between two fingers, “is only one tiny mutation away from being a tomatillo. Can you believe that?”

Neither man said anything, both looking at the plant. Gershon could stop this, they both knew, could stop Mendelbaum from harvesting the rare plant, from poisoning himself with it. But Gershon knew he wasn't going to impede Mendelbaum, had always known the appalling mercy he was capable of, and now Mendelbaum knew it too.

“What a place we've come from,” Mendelbaum had said, quietly.

And now Mendelbaum's figure in the darkened bay window recedes in the rear camera of the vehicle as Gershon drives into the desolate landscape, the town burning electrically in the distance. When they trace their way back to the canyon, on an impulse Gershon turns away from the road, and steers the vehicle up a steep crest.

“Where are we going now?” Hava says, the first time she's spoken since the living room. She sounds exhausted. Gershon doesn't answer, but speeds up.

Soon they're on the old road, which curves before one last ridge. Nestled along the elbow of the path are a few dark, angled shapes huddling against one another, vacant sockets of shadow against the hill.

“Oh,” Hava says quietly. “There they are. The shacks.”

Gershon catches some movement out of the corner of his eye and is trying to process it when they both hear the bump and crunch, something changing, momentarily, about the vehicle. Gershon slows but doesn't stop, though both he and Hava look around. Two very dirty children are sprinting out from the hollow behind one of the piles of wood that used to be a shack, oversized respirators slipping on their faces. The vehicle's slowed progress has brought it to the top of the ridge above the ruins of the encampment. Gershon stops sharply.

They both look down at the stretch they've just come from, following the path of the two children—boys?—to their objective: the mangled crate of sweetbread that has come untethered from the vehicle's cargo rack and crashed down into the dust of the road. The two kids struggle to drag the pallet back into their hidey-hole. It's slow going but they're getting it there, throwing wild glances at the stilled vehicle above them. Gershon exhales and looks forward again.

“There's also this,” he says, nodding to the view out the windshield.

Hava gives a little gasp.

It is night now, and the sky is laid out before them in its penetrating blackness. Beneath it, revealed by the ridge's elevation, is the great liquid sea, its darkened silver face waveless, vast and inconsolable before them.

And Gershon wants to tell her, wants to tell Hava about that final interview in the documentary it turns out she has not seen, wants to describe what it was like watching his wife sit there with the man—the boy, really; fidgety, nervous, scared to have been pulled out of his cell for these cameras, for this woman whose face he doesn't remember—who lit the rag and flung the bottle of alcohol into the vehicle where Shmuli sat, strapped into his car seat, screaming in terror. What it was like watching her sit there with him and hear him out,
hear him admit what he did. And then Gershon wants to tell Hava what it was to watch his wife lean forward and forgive him.

Hava is already distracted, though, turning around to look through the back of the vehicle at where the two kids are still dragging the box, a little quicker now. Gershon looks out at the sea, the blue moon of the Earth hanging still above it. Where is Yoheved at this moment, he thinks; what is she doing? It's four years in the future where she is, four years since she's sent this girl, this Hava, to him on the ship. Hava, the last insult, Gershon suddenly understands. Pretty, unmourning Hava is Yoheved's last forgiveness, sent out to him across the unbridgeable distance. Hava is her way of forgiving him, and he will have to suffer it.

Gershon turns the vehicle around and then stops. Below, the kids have almost got the crate to their cave. They'll live on that bread for months, Gershon idly thinks.

And how could Hava ever understand that it was, all of it—New Jerusalem, yes, but also Earth, also the real Jerusalem; Yoheved combing her hair slowly by light of his dorm room's open window the morning after their first night together; Shmuli trundling around the small apartment, his laughter rising, rising; also Hava's own life, the slightly sweaty scent of the first boy from school that made her smile, her father's rough hand in the garden as the late afternoon sun slid past the brim of his wide hat; and also the future, the years and years to come, Hava's skin cool against Gershon's in bed; and still somewhere, continuing, Shmuli's squeals of delight at being chased around the kitchen—all of it was the territory of grief. You are always living in it, he wants to say. You have never lived anywhere else.

One child has disappeared into the cave. The end of the box is still visible. Gershon can see they are already celebrating.

Elegy on Kinderklavier

A child is sick. A child is sick. You open the door to the room, or you look up, or you wake up and there is your son, sick, changed, and even with the scaled-down hospital bed they use in the pediatric oncology unit, even though he's been there for months, there is still a micromoment of near panic, of your reptilian brain sending up the signal, running the sentence through every level of your mental processes. A child is sick. A child is sick. You want to tell someone. Though, of course, they all already know.

Sunday breaks on the pediatric oncology ward; I can see the sun, with its tired golden aspect, creeping down the wide corridor from the huge windows at the end of the floor, where the playroom is. Some of the children have been encouraged to paint the smaller windowpanes over with pictures that are supposed to “best represent themselves” in the words of the “play specialist,” a woman with short, auburn curls whose whole body seems to have been wrinkled, like a balled-up napkin. My son Haim painted his square of glass completely black; he did this with an undefined level of self-satisfied humor, depending on how much irony you believe an eight-year-old to be capable of. It seemed at least clear that he meant to piss off the
play specialist. “It's too bright in here,” he said flatly, when she asked him to explain his work.

In his quiet, angry humor he is most like me, though this seems to be merely an unfortunate genetic accident to everyone (my mother-in-law, my own mother, a plurality of the nurses) except my wife, Charlie, to whom it is a continuous insult. “Is this real life?” Haim sometimes deadpans as they wheel him back from the radiation therapy, parroting a popular Internet clip. “Will this be forever?”

The first time Charlie heard him do this she looked right at me, made her eyes go hard and flat, glaring. There is too much awareness in his tone when he says this kind of thing, his face held too purposefully empty, affect disarmed, hollowed out by what seems to be his unnervingly firm grasp of his situation. This disturbs the nurses, either because this prescience in an eight-year-old is spooky, or because it undermines the game we're all playing, pretending he might get better.

I think they're also unsettled by how it's never clear how much he really means by what he says, how much he seems to be accusing whoever is listening of some responsibility for his sickness—a sense that is both discomfiting and mysterious even to me. This is another way that Haim is like me, at least to Charlie: the way he guards his thoughts jealously, until often when he speaks it's like a judgment is being pronounced, though you can never be quite sure what the ruling is, exactly. I go back and forth about whether or not it's terrible that I find his caustic, indicting little one-liners funny.