Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  Since the start of the last Intifada, in the long months since the Israelis began leveling Gaza and the West Bank, Farid would come to the water near daily just to breathe and to try not to feel guilty for the wonderful, peaceful life he’d built. He thought of his brother fighting the fight, and all the young warriors by his side on the front lines, and of all the good and peaceful people whose lives were upended. Farid had always taken comfort in the part he played from afar. And he’d turn red, and turn hot, at his hubris and greed, at all he had ventured, the free money of the tech boom wiped away in an instant. And now, when he was needed most, he had nothing to give.

  On nights like this, when thoughts of the uprising—and the attempt to crush that uprising—would not leave him by the lake, when thoughts of his own extraordinary missteps would not abate, he’d make a game out of his hopes, like a little boy. A fact by which he was embarrassed and a little bit ashamed.

  He’d pretend the path from the street down to the water, running between the two grand houses, was a right-of-way between the dry hills of the West Bank and the beaches of Gaza. That’s what peace would be like if there ever were two states.

  If he was feeling momentarily heartened, he’d dream of a complete Palestinian victory, of the Zionists driven out and back to wherever it was they came from. What heights would Jerusalem reach, he would think, if it were ever united under a green Hamas flag? He need look no farther than his adopted city, than beautiful Berlin. There was no end to what a city could achieve without East or West, but thriving as a singular, vibrant whole.

  2014, Limbo

  The General is startled by the shot and looks back over his shoulder, at the patterned wall hanging behind him. Something Lily has hung. Many-colored, woven of yarn, some sort of local craft, like an unfinished coat. Whether Indian or Mexican, he does not know.

  It is not the weaving he has twisted his head around to see. It’s not to peer out the window at the burn barrel smoking at the edge of the fields and clouding the view beyond.

  Perplexed, for he cannot recall why he has turned, he finds himself staring at the hardy ficus in the corner of the room. Healthy, healthy, with its green, thumb-fat leaves. His Lily could make anything grow.

  He is frozen staring at that plant, struggling to recall something, his head still turned, the tendons of his neck stretched taut. What he remembers right then is the Latin. A ficus is the same family as the fig tree.

  And the General finds himself looking back into his lap. Beneath the paper, balanced—a bowl of salted almonds.

  A bowl of fat figs.

  There is a gun missing. That’s what he’s been looking for, why he again cranes his neck. It’s the sound of the shot that has reminded him. That old embossed prize of an antique gun, and the wrought-iron brackets that hold it affixed to the wall, empty, above Lily’s weaving.

  Where has it gone, his treasure?

  The gun was given to him right after the war, a Janissary’s rifle, a trophy retrieved from the Syrian front.

  Such craftsmanship he’d never seen before in a weapon, the vernacular tradition at its murderous best. This one had an octagonal barrel, the stock sheltered in ivory, and a five-sided brass butt end, inlaid with polished stones. All that fanciness, and still simple. The barrel bands looked, at first glance, to be of gold thread, but—and he thought it a lovely bit of restraint on a weapon so ornate—upon inspection, they were made of some sort of sturdy twine.

  As soon as he’d been given it, he’d walked his visitor out to the gate of his ranch, and, without going back into the house, the General climbed into an Egyptian jeep that he’d driven back from the Suez, another keepsake. With the rifle as his passenger, the General raced over to the blacksmith who did all the ranch’s ironwork and shoed all the horses in his stable.

  “What can I do you for, General? Something broke off that jeep?” They are old friends, the General and the blacksmith. The blacksmith is also an orthopedist in Be’er Sheva when not living his country life. He and his neighbors all wear multiple hats, their identities defined by the uniform of the day.

  The General runs around the front of the jeep with his heavy, thumping plod. He reaches into the passenger side and brings the rifle to the blacksmith, who wipes his hand on the pair of fatigues he wears under his leather apron. “Magnificent,” he says.

  “I want to hang it,” the General says. “In the living room or the den. Something pretty for the wall.”

  “You could have just called to tell me you wanted to put up an old rifle,” the blacksmith says. “No need to lug it.”

  The General, not one you’d ever call sheepish, turns his eyes down and says, “I wanted you to see.”

  For the blacksmith, it’s a simple request. He already has two perfect brackets ready. But he wants his friend to be happy—a hero, a legend now for the ages. And a modern blacksmith owes spectacle to his patrons. Everyone wants to see the searing metal hit the bucket and hear the hiss of steam. He pumps his bellows and starts the show.

  If this wasn’t the dream of Israel incarnate, the General thinks, watching. Here is this man, hammer to the anvil, the socialist dream, the hot sparks flying, the iron embers sitting red, sticking like mosquitoes to the leather of his bib. In perfect complement, two French-built Mirages come screaming overhead, the jets’ wingtips marked with the Jewish star.

  They are heading south to the Suez, the Sinai ours up to the edge of the canal. Suddenly there is a country big enough to justify a flight to get from one place to another. A country whose perimeter can’t be patrolled on foot between breakfast and lunch. Now they are a nation with defensible borders, not too skinny at the neck, with that head always begging to be lopped off.

  Here these Jewish pilots, Israeli pilots, flying those Mirages down across the desert—some of the most advanced technology in the world. And the General down on earth, caught up in this ancient practice, smithing in an ancient Jewish land—revived.

  There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.

  2002, Berlin

  Farid is alone at the marina but for an old man, puttering around in the cockpit of his boat, tinkering and polishing and drinking a bottle of wine. He offers Farid a glass, which Farid declines, though the gesture takes him away from thoughts of war and returns him to a peaceful state of mind.

  He sits in his preferred spot, at the far edge of the dock, beneath one of the linden trees that overhang it. He has settled in to admire the lake, his back against the retaining wall.

  No matter how long Farid lives in Berlin, he’s still amazed by how late the sun sets in summer. Twilight seems to stretch on forever, as the blue of the water deepens and the orange haze lining the sky above the forests on the far shore glows.

  It’s not long after the other man leaves that Farid—relishing his solitude—gets up to go. As he brushes off the back of his trousers and takes one last look at the lake, he sees the club’s Soling, tacking jaggedly toward the marina’s last open slip.

  He knows who it is, for he has been watching this terrible sailor for a week. It pains Farid every time, though he can’t help but watch, sometimes from between the fingers of his own hand.

  Farid stays as the captain poorly trims the sails and poorly steers his craft. As the boat closes in, Farid isn’t sure if the ineptitude hasn’t now turned into a controlled assault. The man seems to regain the most minimal control, which is then promptly lost. If not for the bumpers he remembers to toss over the sides, and a final adjustment as he steers his way in, Farid expected to watch him go down with his ship.

  When the man moors the boat, he tangles his lines and ties them sloppily.

  Fully pained, Farid finds himself approaching.

  He says, in German, “Can I help?”

  When the man doesn’t answer, Farid tries English, at which t
he hapless sailor brightens up.

  “I know I’m a mess,” the man says.

  Farid does not disagree. He only nods and unties the bow line, before slowly, didactically, leading him through the motions.

  “First, you always start under the . . . horn?”

  “Cleat,” the man offers, happily. “In this case, with boats, that’s a cleat.”

  “Then, always, first, it’s under the cleat.”

  When the man nods, Farid makes his figure eights, ending with a slow, obvious underhand loop.

  “You always want to finish like this. Then you pull the free end tight-tight and coil it so it looks neat. No loose ends,” he says, to show that he knows some good phrases, and that his English is more than up to par. “Not in Germany, and not with boats. Everything, always, nice and tight and clean.”

  Farid is about to make a joke about American ease and American indifference when the man moves toward the next cleat to refasten the line as he’d been shown. It’s then Farid sees the insignia woven into the man’s jacket.

  “You’re a Canadian!”

  “How’d you figure that?” the man says, surprised. “Everyone here calls me American, even after I tell them where I’m from.”

  “The Bluenose,” Farid says. “On your jacket. Pretty much every Canadian who passes through here to sail is wearing a Bluenose jacket or shirt, or wears a Bluenose hat on his head.”

  “We’re a proud people,” the man says, as he tries and fails to cleat the stern line properly. Clearly thinking better of another attempt, he hands the rope to Farid. “But not too proud to recognize when we’re outclassed.”

  Though the Canadian did not exactly grow up poor in Gaza, neither did he grow up rich, as did nearly everyone else who ends up trodding that dock. He’d been a regular kid, the son of a dentist, who’d flitted around the lake in a friend’s fiberglass fourteen-foot dinghy, while growing up in Montreal. He’d crewed in some races over a couple of summers half a lifetime ago. Now, doing a stint in Germany for work, and with no friends, and no language, and some time to spare, he is suddenly back to the boats.

  He says he’s renting a house on the lake, which can only mean that he—or his enterprise—is very wealthy. He says he saw the yacht club through his telescope, and thought, with time on his hands and sweet memories of sailing, he’d give it a try.

  All this he shares between observing Farid retying the stern line and coiling the tail. They walk the path together, up between the mansions, and out onto Am Sandwerder.

  “So, which house is yours?”

  The man points back out across an expanse of water that they can no longer see. “If you walk down the street until you get to the Saudi Arabian embassy,” he says, “I think mine is, more or less, directly opposite.”

  The man then clicks a key, and a car beeps somewhere down in that direction.

  Farid says his good nights and turns to go. He starts walking for the train station and doesn’t make it two steps before thinking of Takumi, and all the kindnesses shown to him when he was new in town.

  It is also, he knows, the right thing to do. He thinks back to his schooldays and recalls the story of Abu Talha and Umm Sulaim feeding what little they had to their guest in darkness, so that they might pretend they too ate by his side.

  The Canadian is already walking off, and Farid calls to him awkwardly, speaking at a clip.

  “I’m not sure if you want to travel into the city now when you’re already so close to your bed,” Farid says, “but I was going to get something to eat. If you want to join.”

  In an instant, the man is at his side.

  “If you thought you were going to get away with being polite and then disappearing, you messed up good.” The man claps Farid on the back, as if they’re already familiar. “I’ve been surviving on doner kebabs from outside the train station, and any fruit I can eat without peeling. A decent meal would be an absolute joy.”

  “There’s no kitchen at your house?”

  “There’s a kitchen about the size of a football stadium. But it holds a mean little troll of a chef who is offended by my palate and who’s convinced I shave off my taste buds every morning after brushing my teeth. It’s classic German, all cream and meat and gastronomic foams. If I ate that stuff every night, I’d either have a heart attack or explode. I miss my neighborhood in Toronto. I miss having a good quiet place on the corner where I can eat a green salad and have a drink.”

  “So what are you hungry for?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Of course.”

  “Anything ethnic—but not German ethnic. Mexican. Italian. Thai.”

  “How about Chinese food?”

  “I would pretty much die for some Chinese.”

  “Good Friends,” Farid says—which he understands, by the man’s expression, sounds more like a proclamation than the name of a restaurant. “It’s in Charlottenburg, right down from the Paris Bar.”

  When his guest shows no sign of recognition, Farid says, “You really are new here.”

  “I am. And I’m in your hands,” the Canadian says. Then, looking a touch embarrassed, “I’m a good businessman, I promise. But I’d make a terrible politician. I already know you too well not to know your name.”

  “Farid,” Farid says.

  The Canadian’s name is Joshua—“Call me Josh.” When Farid asks if he wants to join him on the train, the Canadian holds up his keys and says, “You’re going to shit when you see the car they got me.”

  They order a whole sea bass baked in salt, cold noodles, and spicy tofu. The Canadian orders shumai, and har gow, drinking ice-cold pilsners along with it, one after the other. Farid figures he must already be too drunk to handle the astonishing sports car in which they arrived, though, in Joshua’s speech and his manner, it does not seem to show.

  They talk easily about their families, and their childhoods, and a lot about sailing.

  Takumi had not offered the Canadian any lessons after taking him out. “I was good enough to eke by,” he says, “but not bad enough, apparently, to have lessons forced on me. I was lucky. The wind was right where it should be whenever I went looking.”

  “It’s hard to be lucky with sailing,” Farid says, refilling his tea. “I’m surprised he lets you take the boat out.”

  “Considering what you saw?”

  “Yes, considering what I saw.”

  Joshua smiles and laughs and toasts his host, knocking his beer glass against Farid’s teacup.

  “I promise, I was bad that day too. But it was the ideal, shining version of my badness.”

  Farid likes this man. There is something charming about him.

  “If you want,” Farid says, “I could give you a lesson or two.”

  “I couldn’t,” Joshua says.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Farid says. And he finds, as he says it, that he really means it. “It’s a slow time for me. A distraction would be a favor.”

  Joshua raises an eyebrow, holding Farid’s gaze, and giving him what feels like the chance to back out.

  “Choose a morning,” Farid says.

  “This week I’m traveling on business. But next week, I’m around.”

  “Fantastic,” Farid says. And, not wanting to pry, for he’s not one who likes to be interrogated, he still asks Joshua what he does that brings him all the way here.

  “Trust me, it’s boring. It’ll ruin a perfectly good meal.”

  “You know what my father used to tell me? The more boring the business, the more money there is to be made. He would walk me by the biggest houses in Gaza and say, ‘There is the man who makes cement.’ ‘There is the family that puts the buttons on your shirt.’ We’d stand outside this huge villa, and he’d say, ‘That whole mansion is built from hummus and pita, one customer at a time.’ I was so little when he’d take me, I actually thought that house was made of hummus, spackled from floor to ceiling.”

  “I hear you,” Joshua says. “Honestly, it’s just dull. I’m basi
cally a junk dealer.”

  “A junk dealer, with a hundred-thousand-euro car.”

  “More like a hundred fifty. That sports car has the added sports package built in.”

  “From selling junk.”

  “From importing and exporting that junk, I guess. Resale is maybe the best way to put it. Anyway, the car is leased.”

  “Still, it must be a big lease,” Farid says. “And import and export is a big umbrella. A lot of us fit underneath it.”

  “I sell used computers. Used cell phones. Used copiers. Anything with a chip inside. Which is why I should try and sleep a few minutes. I need to wake up when Beijing does and start working the phone.”

  “You’re not on Canada time?”

  “This horrible octopus of a deal—the part that’s killing me right now is with the Chinese.”

  Joshua reaches for the bill, and Farid stops him, insisting.

  His guest is clearly touched and says, “It won’t make up for it, but why not come for breakfast before we sail. We’ll let that evil chef clog all our arteries, and then you can teach me to tie a proper knot.”

  2014, Jerusalem

  Ruthi’s son sits in a chair at the edge of the balcony, his feet up and hanging over the rail. He’s out in his boxers and a pair of flip-flops, and Ruthi can smell the woodsy, bubblegum odor that’s mixed in with the tobacco, her son smoking a joint on a Friday morning and taking in the day.

  The guard doesn’t put it out at the sound of his mother’s approach, only cracks open his eyes, one at a time, as if it’s better to absorb her in stages.

  “You didn’t come home last night,” he says.

  “And you didn’t call to see why.”

  “I already know why, don’t I? Same as always—you were worried your boyfriend might give up the ghost.”

  His mother raises a cautioning finger.

  “Halas. Don’t be disrespectful.”