The Ascent of Eli Israel (14 page)

V
ery early on the morning of his twenty-third birthday, Stuart Kravetz and his friend Shawn Silver stepped out of a misty rain and through a rusty ornamented gate, into the subterranean gloom and smoke of Elijah's Cup. They stepped down three stone stairs, careful not to slip on splashes of beer or vomit as they ducked their heads below an iron pipe, Kravetz holding on for balance. Shawn smiled at every face he met. He wore light meter and camera around his neck and carried a silver briefcase in his left hand and a suitcase in his right. He wore a stylish black linen suit and a small ponytail that seemed grossly out of place for both the Holy City and Elijah's Cup. But Kravetz remembered that Shawn always dressed to travel, whether it was a road trip to Boston or a plane flight across the world. The room was filled with barefoot English travelers, blond Swedish tourists, wayward rabbinical students, wild-eyed mystics, mustached Palestinian laborers, broad-shouldered U.N. troopers, Russian whores, and bullshitters of all political stripes pounding back cheap Israeli beer, hummus, and olives.

Kravetz had not seen Shawn since leaving for Israel six months earlier, and besides having grown a goatee that covered his cleft chin, he also seemed to have gained weight. Kravetz noticed that Shawn's face seemed somehow harder, and though he was only a year older than Kravetz, he looked dried out and bloated at the same time.

The prime minister had been buried on Mount Herzl that morning, and after a long day Kravetz had gone to bed early, with his radio tuned to
Galei Tzahal
playing mournful music from the darkness. The telephone woke him at midnight. “Happy birthday, kid,” the familiar voice said. “How about a drink?”

Kravetz was silent and clicked on his bedside lamp.

“I'm at the airport, brother,” his old friend, Shawn Silver, said, sounding more nasal than usual. “Meet me outside Elijah's Cup in an hour.”

And now they were under the smoky dome of Elijah's Cup, passing old Ministry of Tourism posters for Tiberias, Eilat, and the Dead Sea tacked to the wall. A dustpan-sized ceramic
hamsa
hung behind the bar, the shape of a hand, a dreamy blue eye centered in its palm to ward off evil. Faded photos of rabbis — a hawk-nosed Baba Sali, a turbaned Ovadiah Yosef, and other Sephardi mystics — were taped to the mirror behind the bar. A stained and tattered petition sat on the bar; the bar's owner had been caught with drugs in the Sinai, and was currently serving twenty-five years in an Egyptian prison. A wooden barrel of black olives stood nearby; customers dipped their hands in and sometimes spat the pits back into the barrel.

Shawn found a table covered with graffiti and sat down beneath a television that mutely flashed CNN's
World Report.
Kravetz could see the Kings of Israel Square on the television screen as he sat down. He could see blood on the pavement where the prime minister had been shot, and his stomach tensed.

“What are you doing here?” Kravetz said, still buzzing from nerves. Shawn had a history of surprising Stuart, and it usually meant trouble. They had been friends since second grade in Hebrew school when Shawn had dropped his pen so he could catch a peek up Miss Makhlabani's skirt and was smacked on the head with a ruler. Shawn had been his best friend, but that was a long time ago.

“Two Goldstars,
Motek.
” Shawn snapped a finger in the air to get the waitress's attention. “Shit. She's the bomb.”

Kravetz nodded his head, and thought women were always bombs, or chicks, or puss to Shawn.

“What am I doing here?” Shawn said, returning to Stuart's question. “I told you I'd come. I'm good for my word. You must be lonely, anyway. The literary exile. Shit, your parents haven't heard from you in months.”

It was Kravetz's parents who had sent him to Israel in the first place, and it had nothing to do with Zionism, or making the desert bloom, or becoming a light unto nations. Five years earlier he and Shawn played in a punk band called Bitefinger Baby, and their drummer had stabbed someone at one of the clubs they were playing. His parents figured something bad was bound to happen if he stayed in the city, and he was too old for summer camp. So Kravetz and Shawn went to Israel.

They had spent a wild summer drinking together after their senior year of high school, as they traveled from the Golan Heights in the north to Masada and Eilat in the south. They had promised one day, stuffing notes into the Wailing Wall, that they would return to Jerusalem together.

“I kind of like the quiet,” Kravetz said. “Gives me time to think.”

“The last thing you want to do is think, my friend. Can I stay?”

“How long?”

“I love you, too, buddy. Do you remember when those skinheads tried to steal your Doc Martens?” Shawn said. “They called you a Jew and I convinced them that you weren't Jewish.” Shawn poked Kravetz in the ribs and crushed him in a headlock. Kravetz gagged from the smell of his friend's Drakkar Noir cologne.

“But I am Jewish,” he started to say before Shawn's bicep muffled his words.

“I saved you,” Shawn said, letting go after a moment.

“Yeah. Thanks,” Kravetz said, remembering that he once felt that Shawn and he were as close as brothers. “How long?”

“I don't know. Until I strike gold.”

Shawn always seemed to get his way, and was not afraid to point out an obligation to him. He called in his favors again and again as if the debt lasted a lifetime.

“You know,” Shawn said. “Until I milk this place for enough pics for a show.”

A man and a woman sat together at a small table in the corner. The woman was crying. Kravetz wondered if the woman was crying because she and her boyfriend were breaking up, or whether she was mourning the death of the prime minister.

“I placed the ad,” Shawn said after a moment. He lifted his silver briefcase onto the table and opened it. Kravetz could see another camera with a flash attached to it and a long zoom lens strapped in against the foam bedding. A small Polaroid camera lay beside the lens. Film canisters were strung across the top half of the case like a bandolier.

Kravetz remembered Shawn's idea for a spread for the upstart Heart-Shaped Jeans Company. He thought it was a stupid idea at the time: a bunch of beautiful, naked models frolicking in a heart-shaped pool, with their clothes crumpled and scattered around the deck like sex-deflated bodies. But now that he pulled a folded magazine out of his silver case and showed him the glossy ad, with the heading “Good Jean Pool,” he had to laugh.

“If you will it, it is no dream,” Shawn said, quoting Herzl with a smirk. He lit a filterless Noblesse cigarette. “It's brilliant, isn't it?”

“Yeah, it is,” Kravetz said, and paused as the beers arrived. “Have you heard from Jana?” His voice almost caught in his throat.

“Nah, haven't seen her,” Shawn said, sipping from his Goldstar. “This tastes like chlorine.”

Kravetz was silent, and he thought of Jana again, his Janushka, and felt sick in his stomach and somewhat amazed that he could ever have been close enough to her to call her something as childish as Janushka. He wondered how she could be so far away and yet seem as if she were still in the room with him. Whenever he smelled patchouli oil, he always turned around to see if Jana had come looking for him.

Three Russians at the next table began singing an offkey, operatic rendition of “Hotel California.” Jana hated Russians and never failed to give the finger to anyone on the road who drove a Lada.

“This place hasn't changed a bit,” Shawn said.

“It's the only place open tonight,” Kravetz said, thinking of the long lines of mourners making their way up to Mount Herzl that morning. “You're lucky.”

“Always have been, always will.” Shawn picked up his camera and looked through it. There was seldom a time that Kravetz remembered seeing Shawn without a camera around his neck or pressed to his face, so he wasn't surprised when Shawn pointed his camera toward a bald giant with a cinder-block head and thin purple lips who sat alone with his head down at a table across the room. “What's the deal with that guy?”

“That's Asher,” Kravetz said. “He's a survivor. Sobibor.”

“Fucking golem,” he said and turned his camera toward a bearded man with a cell phone pressed to his ear. Shawn played with the lens as if he were focusing for a shot.

“That's Shmuelik. He used to be a rabbi, now he sells guns,” Kravetz said, taking the first sip of his beer. “One of the guys who helped liquidate the Warsaw or the Lódź ghetto is living in Canada. Shmuelik knows a man who will pay anyone fifty thousand dollars to kill him.”

“Shit, who wants to go to Canada?” Shawn said and spun in his seat, aiming his camera at Kravetz. “You look good. Better. Really.”

“I don't know,” Kravetz said. “Sometimes I'm thinking about what I want to eat or something, and suddenly Jana pops into my head. You know, the way she stood. I see trees that remind me of her. And sometimes I see a woman holding a baby on the bus or something, and she doesn't even look like Jana, but you know — ”

“Fuck her,” Shawn said, finishing his beer. “You've got to be part animal, part machine.” Shawn always felt empowered by paraphrasing punk-rock lyrics. He raised his camera to his face again, blinding Kravetz with his flash. “A fuckin' hot animal machine,” he said, expelling a mouth full of smoke.

A few days later, Kravetz sat on his sixth-floor balcony with a volume of Amichai's poems open in front of him. He read, “You are beautiful, like prophecies / And sad, like those which come true.” And he thought of the time when he and Jana walked through the shallows of the water at Brighton Beach after visiting her aunt and eating some lardy meat prepared in the style of the “old country.” Her hair was wet and she smelled seaweedy in the last purple light of day and she came up close to him almost shouting, “Hey!” as she pulled a damp pack of cigarettes out of her shorts pocket. “So 'cause I'm not Jewish or anything, does that mean you would never marry me?”

“You could convert,” Kravetz had said, not sure if he was serious or joking.

The sun burst through the hard gray sky, its rays refracted like spotlights throughout the city. Kravetz looked out beyond the slope of Independence Park and the remains of the Mamilla Cemetery toward the Old City; the city that Twain had called the knobbiest town in the world with its crooked streets and countless domes, a city where Melville had written in disgust about the Crusader church being a sickening cheat where all is glitter and nothing is gold. But, looking toward the golden Dome of the Rock, Kravetz thought of how far he was from New York and Jana. He knew he would never run into her in the winding streets and alleys, and he felt glad for a moment.

That week Kravetz and Shawn sat up late drinking Goldstars and talking. Shawn knew Kravetz better than anybody, except Jana, and he built him up, saying, “You're a handsome guy. Look at those deep poetic eyes of yours. You're the handsomest guy.”

Kravetz recounted every detail of his relationship to Shawn, told him how she kissed with her eyes open, how the blonde hair on her arms held the sun in the morning, and her secret nickname for him. He felt somehow lighter, as if he had unburdened himself of a great weight, and was thankful Shawn never once asked, “How was she?”

Kravetz was still a virgin, a junior in high school, when Shawn Silver had woken him with a drunken phone call at two in the morning to announce, “Gentlemen, that's lucky eighteen.”

Lucky eighteen had always been sort of a joke between Shawn and Kravetz, but it seemed somehow appropriate that Shawn would invoke it after his eighteenth lay, since his first came shortly after his bar mitzvah. It was always the cheapskates who didn't have the class to buy them bar mitzvah gifts that handed them crumpled handfuls of money that always added up to eighteen dollars. Eighteen signified
chai,
or life, and was supposed to bring good luck.

Shawn wore his hair in a mohawk at the time, something Kravetz couldn't get away with, having curly hair that would have looked like a strip of carpet. Girls curious about Shawn always wanted to touch his hair.

He told Kravetz how he had gotten redheaded Jenn Liska drunk on peppermint schnapps, how she had ridden him like a horse in her parents' bed, with her tights rolled down to her knees, and how her breath tasted like an ashtray.

“Wow,” Kravetz had said, half excited, half disgusted by the blow-by-blow details that made him hard.

“You'll get there, my son. You'll get there,” Shawn said. When Kravetz finally did sleep with a Montreal cocktail waitress ten years his senior that New Year's Eve, Shawn burst into the bedroom as soon as they were done, snapping the two strangers in bed with his Nikon.

“My boy Kravetz's first time,” he had told the horrified waitress, laughing as she disappeared under the wrinkled sheets like a ghost.

Kravetz closed the book of poetry and felt the weight of loneliness all around him. Jana, he thought, “You are beautiful like . . .”

Kravetz had not heard the hum of the noisy elevator and the slam of its heavy door.

“Honey, I'm home,” Shawn called, opening the apartment door. He appeared on the balcony a few minutes later, with the waitress from Elijah's Cup at his side. “Stuart, this is Ravit.” She extended her hand, and Kravetz shook it, realizing she was the one wearing patchouli in the bar that night. She was tall and had dark hair, was maybe a Yemenite or Moroccan. She had a bright smile, and wore a loose red shirt.

“Ravit wants to be a star,” Shawn said.

“Shut up, stupid,” she said, hitting him lightly on the shoulder. Shawn pulled away and said, “Ow.”

Kravetz knew now that they had had sex, or would soon have sex. He knew Shawn's gambit well — baiting, antagonizing, then feigning hurt to gain the girl's sympathies.

“Come on, we're going for a walk,” Shawn said, adjusting his camera at his neck. “You can't study all day.”

“You aren't religious, are you?” Ravit said. “I
hate
the religious.”

“It's poetry,” Kravetz said lamely.

“She hates the army, too. She just turned eighteen,” Shawn said, grabbing a handful of her hair. “You're a nice girl,” he said, leaning in close to kiss her.

“Fuck the army,” she said, pulling away. “And fuck the crazy religious of this city. I'm going to Thailand next week.” She laughed a loud, mannish laugh as she pretended to take a drag from a joint.

Kravetz noticed that her eyes seemed to be almost spinning with energy and were a deep, piercing green, the color of liquor-soaked lime rinds. He put his book down and said, “I gotta be at work in an hour.”

Shawn popped open the back of his camera, reached into his vest, slid in a roll of film, and snapped it shut again without even looking at what he was doing, like a gunslinger loading up in the wild west. “Come on. Call in. Kids are united,” Shawn said and stuck out his fist as he had so many times during their youth. Kravetz hesitated and then punched it with his own, adding his lines, “Never be divided.”

A half an hour later they arrived at an ultraorthodox neighborhood that looked like an eighteenth-century Jewish ghetto. It was built like a stone fortress, with Yiddish posters plastered everywhere to the blackened walls. The streets were gray and potholed, and black-garbed men with beards and side curls walked through the crowded streets speaking in Yiddish. Shawn wore an open motorcycle jacket with a T-shirt that had “Social Distortion” written across the front. Kravetz noticed that Ravit walked with supreme confidence, taking dramatic, modelesque strides, not unlike Jana when she had felt the world was hers. Ravit spoke in a tuneless yet musical way and laughed, sometimes touching Kravetz on the shoulder.

“So serious,” she said, frowning. “You must to have fun.” She smiled.

They stopped before a sign that said, “
ATTENTION! YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE ULTRAORTHODOX NEIGHBORHOOD OF MEA SHEARIM. WOMEN ARE TO DRESS MODESTLY.
” The sign said that women should wear sleeves that reached at least to their elbow, and skirts that reached below their knees. Necklines were to be no lower than the collarbone.

Ravit undid the top two buttons of her cherry red shirt.

“Here we are,” Shawn said as two men passed. “On your right you'll notice the latest ghetto fashions of the year of our Lord seventeen ninety-two. The bearded gentleman,” and here Shawn laughed. Ravit hummed along to his commentary. “Oh, they're both bearded. The taller gentleman models a fur
streimel,
made out of the finest rat fur, trapped in the kitchens of Schmuel the baker.”

Kravetz felt his stomach turn. “Shawn, what are you doing?”

Two more men passed and scowled at the three of them.

“You can't talk like that,” Kravetz said.

“Why not? They don't speak English.”

“They don't speak Hebrew, either,” Ravit said. “Only to pray. God forbid you wipe your ass in God's Hebrew.”

Now a woman pushing a baby carriage approached, her young daughter slowly walking at her side.

“Like a queen, her wig glistens in the sunlight, a wig this gorgeous you wouldn't dare cover with a babababushka. . . .”

The girl lowered her head and sped up.

Shawn began to jump around singing, “Crucify-i-i-i-i me, Crucify-i-i-i-i me.”

“Stop it,” Kravetz said.

“Crucify-i-i-i-i me,” Shawn continued.

Ravit grabbed him, pressed close, and whispered in his ear, “Be a good boy.”

“You're gonna start a riot,” Kravetz said, stepping away.

“Hey, that's cool,” Shawn said.

“So I get stoned here instead of Thailand,” Ravit said matter-of-factly.

“This isn't fucking Disneyland,” Kravetz said.

“No. It's the fucking Holyland,” Shawn said. “And you're playing Goofy.”

At that moment, Kravetz hated Shawn, as he had hated him a thousand times before. But he knew that Shawn only wanted to have fun, and that he was trying to draw him out of his gloom. He really didn't understand, he hadn't seen the anger in the eyes of those men. And if Ravit was supposed to be a gift for him, like the Montreal cocktail waitress had been, he was not interested.

A gray-bearded man wearing a rumpled suit and black hat burst out of a building and charged toward them, calling Ravit a whore. His clenched fists looked like steel hammers, and he cursed at Shawn from beneath the sign. “She's not a whore,” Shawn said. “She's the Virgin Mary.” Kravetz was afraid somebody would get hurt, and pulled Ravit close to him by the shoulders. She was stronger than he thought, and pushed him away. Kravetz fell to the ground and he heard prayers from all around, as he scrambled to pick up his glasses. When Kravetz looked up again he saw that Shawn had his camera ready, aimed at the man, and that the man had covered his face with his hat to protect himself against breaching the Second Commandment forbidding graven images. And now Ravit unbuttoned the rest of her shirt, and pulled it open. She leaned close to the man, and blew a dramatic kiss at him, her bra and tattooed midriff bared for all to see.

Then the clickclickclickclickclickclick of Shawn's Nikon.

That was
A Marriage Made in Heaven,
and the beginning of FLICK Photos and Postcards.