Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  More than anything it is Qibya they can’t forgive him, and it is Qibya that he recalls sitting in the chair in his living room, sipping from the tea that rests on the Egyptian copper tray Lily has converted into a side table.

  He does the math—October now, and Qibya, it’s almost exactly fourteen years ago.

  Not until 1967, and the miracle of their six-day victory, did anyone dare treat him like a hero again. Fourteen years. That’s how long it took for him to be welcomed back into the fold.

  Forget Lazarus and his four days, the General thinks. This was a resurrection.

  In Qibya, he’d razed a good part of the village.

  From Qibya, he’d returned without losing a man.

  Then the call came from Lavon. Not congratulations from the defense minister. Not kudos on a successful mission—the riskiest, boldest ever pulled off by their fledgling state. All he heard through the phone was, “What have you done?”

  A massacre, is what Lavon said. Women and children. And again the refrain, “What have you done?”

  The General finds Lily out brushing the horses. She feeds her favorite apples and carrots while the General explains.

  “It appears” is the phrase the General uses to tell his wife. “It appears the Arabs were hiding in the houses. Women and children,” he says, “as the saying goes.”

  “All women and children?”

  “Among the dead there were many. The Arabs always inflate the numbers, but they’re saying sixty-nine all told. The full count.”

  “It’s tragic,” she says. “This bloody, endless tit for tat.”

  “It is,” says her husband. “It is.”

  Ben-Gurion almost immediately denied it—denied him—to the press. The old man told the world, “Vigilantes! It was our poor Jews of Arab Lands, our Holocaust survivors. They live on our borders and suffer attacks without end. What can I do? They take matters into their own hands. An uprising gotten out of hand.”

  The General knew it would sound as ridiculous to the world as it sounded to him. Angry Israeli civilians with mortars and mines? Angry Israeli villagers crossing into Jordan in darkness, carrying enough explosives to level a village made of stone? A foolish lie. How could the old man not think in the moment how such a claim might play out?

  Ben-Gurion summons him to his home in Sde Boker, for a visit in the desert. He invites the General into his simple quarters, where he sits on his single bed, monkish in the way of so many founders of nations. The prime minister wears an undershirt and short pants. He’s managed to cross his legs beneath him, a limber old Buddha.

  Ben-Gurion says, “Tell me. Tell me what went on that night.”

  The General says nothing. And the prime minister climbs off the bed and, slipping into his sandals, says, “Let’s walk.”

  The General understands immediately. It is easier to discuss some things facing forward than when looking each other in the eye.

  They wander out to the very edge of the desert in silence and stand side by side on a cliff overlooking the great barrens. The old man says, “This is where my grave will be. Picture what the Negev will look like a century from now. Picture standing at my marker and everything before you in bloom.”

  The General stares out over the wadis and the tabletop mountains, setting his gaze on the vast blue sky. He keeps his focus there and guides the old man through the mission, explaining how they breached the defenses around the village itself, and how they first fired upon Qibya and, also, the next village over, a place called Budrus to the south.

  The General explains his way to the house in which he set up command, and where he drank the coffee, still hot, from the finjan on the stove.

  He knows the old man wants operational analysis, the tactical details laid out.

  What the General tells him right then is about the ancient phonograph. How he’d dispatched the two soldiers and called his radioman in.

  And there it was, against the wall in its wooden case, holding pride of place.

  He tells the old man that, even in the moment, he was shocked to think how easily one can miss something right before his very eyes.

  The General had his radioman crank it up. And the first thing they heard was the needle scratching itself dull at the record’s empty center, the speaker playing the sound of no sound.

  He relays to Ben-Gurion how he told the radioman to go raise up the lid and move the needle. Everything from the General’s mouth, an order.

  He had said, “Let us hear the last song this house ever played.”

  They stood there, he tells Ben-Gurion, listening, in Arabic, to the most beautiful voice in the world.

  That’s when the sappers began returning, rolling out their wire on the spools, the wheels turning, the men bent and backing away from their targets, as if prostrate with respect for the destruction to come. And all during this, the General standing in the doorway, the album playing, and—with the convoy revving up—that voice faintly heard.

  That is when the first soldier came running up along with part of the General’s demolition team.

  The old man, listening closely, says to the General, “The first?”

  “There was a pair. First and second. The first had a tear in his shirt. I’d instructed him earlier to come back and prep the house.”

  He’d watched, the General had, as explosives were set around that living room at a satisfying rate. Yes. He’d trained them up well.

  The General re-cranked the phonograph and then, waiting by the entrance, stepped aside as the last charge was drilled into the doorpost where the children’s heights were marked. When the song was over, the speaker hissed, all crackle and heartbeat, the needle pushing against an empty groove. “Right then,” he tells the old man, “I gave the signal. The radioman radioed, and the last of us mounted the jeeps and trucks and rumbled off.”

  The General turns to the old man, who stares out into the desert.

  “That’s when we blew Qibya to the ground.”

  The General leans back in his chair in his living room, and he thinks about that record. More than any of the spoils of any war, it was that album he wishes he’d carried home.

  It’s that beautiful voice he hears right then, as if it were singing directly into his ears. First the voice and then the not-voice that replaces it, the needle turning against silence, living beyond the last groove.

  This stretch of quiet, the General knows, would soon be pierced by that crack rolling across the fields. The waiting makes his chest go tight.

  While the quiet is still his, he recalls what the old man had said to him. He remembers and he observes as, right before him, Ben-Gurion takes a deep, dry breath of that hot desert air. He watches as the old man turns his back on the view and begins his trek toward the kibbutz with its low-slung buildings and its walkways lined with patchy, burnt grass.

  The General follows, devoted, at his heels.

  As if passing judgment, as if sharing a terrible truth, the old man says, “You are our bulldog. You know that, yes?”

  The old man turns to see what his protégé might say in response. The General, catching up, walking at the old man’s side, answers with the same silence that now runs, a simultaneous loop, in his head.

  “I still can’t tell if having you will be for this nation a blessing or a curse. Not since bar Kokhba came popping out of his tunnels to bloody the Romans have we had one man who can do so much harm.”

  “A nation needs to defend itself.”

  “It does, doesn’t it,” the old man says.

  They consider this as they stroll back to Ben-Gurion’s quarters.

  At his door, he says, “The world hates us, and always has. They kill us, and always will. But you, you raise up the price,” the old man tells him. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop until our neighbors get the message. Don’t stop until killing a Jew becomes too expensive for even the rich and profligate man. That is your whole purpose on this earth,” Ben-Gurion says. “You, put here solely to raise the bounty hu
ng on the Jewish head. Make it expensive. Make it a rare and fine delicacy for those with a taste for Jewish blood.”

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  It’s amazing what skills one can master given enough time to perfect them. Prisoner Z sits up in bed, in the dark, the stack of magazines on his lap as a desk, writing. Over the years, on the nights he cannot sleep, which are legion, Prisoner Z has not only greatly improved his penmanship in both Hebrew and English, but has become adept at composing without any light. It’s easier than one would think.

  He is busy writing a letter to the General, his pen pal. In the morning he will give it to the guard, to give to his mother, to give to the General, who never writes back.

  It’s the only avenue by which a prisoner-unnamed, in a cell-unlisted, might plead his case-that’s-not-a-case. The thrust of his letters has changed over time. Prisoner Z is no longer requesting to be freed, to be exonerated, to be sent to the States, so much as he is asking, only, to be made into a person again—an actual detainee, entered into a system that might see him properly pay for his crimes. He is inquiring most politely, wondering if his being might be returned.

  Sometimes the content of these letters is legally bent, sometimes political, and, though the guard has limited Prisoner Z to one sheet per missive, sometimes they are much more expository and personal in tone. It’s a tricky thing trying to touch the heart of a man who has, toward you, been only heartless. Hard to personalize yourself to the person who has seen you undone.

  Feeling it out, hoping to connect, he is hoping to stress only this:

  “We are birds of a feather, me and you,” he writes the General. “How many times did you do what you needed to save Israel? Against all accepted wisdom. Against all advice. Misrepresenting your intentions. In defiance of our, and everyone’s, laws.

  “You did what you needed to rescue the people even when they didn’t know they needed to be saved.

  “We are the same, you and I.

  “To lose this war with the Palestinians, to cede ground, to raise the white flag of surrender—it is the only way for us to win. History will prove it. Only now, the history for which I fight is, as yet, the future unknown.”

  And when writing to the man responsible for his erasure, Prisoner Z very well understands he should act erased. A writer must know his audience, is his position. And so on all these letters to the General, he always signs, as he signs right now,

  Most Sincerely Yours,

  Prisoner Z

  2002, Berlin

  The wind on the lake picks up, and the boat rocks beneath the Glienicke Bridge. Farid, who sometimes drinks on the water, his one exception, is having a beer plucked from the cornucopia that is the picnic basket sent along by Joshua’s household staff.

  They’d dropped anchor and drifted until the line went taut, yet Joshua sits frozen on the deck, his knuckles white around the tiller, as if he’s still steering. Farid thinks his friend looks a little green.

  “You know, you can’t get seasick on a lake. It’s almost impossible. Or, maybe it’s completely so.”

  Joshua smiles a weak smile.

  “Sorry. That’s what my girlfriend calls my misery face. I don’t have much of a filter,” Joshua says, very obviously attempting to perk up. “Do I really look seasick?”

  Farid tells him that he does.

  “Just suffering,” Joshua says. “But not from the water. It’s more a personal sort of queasiness.”

  “Is it trouble with that girlfriend?”

  “I should be so lucky. It’s work. And it’s exactly what I came out here to forget. Look at this nice bridge! So distracting and full of history.”

  Farid laughs at that.

  “That’s why I sail,” Farid says. “These lakes are the only place I calm down.”

  “Sadly, it seems my problems also float.”

  “Well?” Farid says, offering the opening his companion clearly seeks.

  “I don’t want to complain.”

  Farid opens another beer and, before passing it, reaches over and physically removes Joshua’s hand from the bar.

  “You’re complaining already. What you’re not doing is being specific about why.”

  “Fair enough,” Joshua says, raising his beer in a half-hearted toast. “One of our big deals is going sour. I’ve basically been printing money since I started this company, and now I think maybe I’m in over my head. I never should have switched to computers.”

  Farid takes a perfect apple from the basket and sits on the deck opposite, stretching his feet out into the cockpit.

  “What were you doing before?”

  “It’s what you said at dinner, about your father and boring business? I may have made the single dullest fortune in the world. I got rich off sand.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Very much so. Construction aggregate. Industrial and recreational. Pretty sand to rebuild the dunes and beaches everyone pretends aren’t washing away. Sand for playgrounds and horse arenas. In L.A., we supplied to movies and TV. We sold mountains of the stuff for mixing into concrete. Fascinating, I know.”

  “So how do you get from sand to computers?”

  “I didn’t. I went to metals. Aluminum, and then nickel, which took me to Russia, where it became very obvious, very quickly, that I really was in way over my head. And here I am, working in computers, and ready to crash again.”

  “It’s too late for that. Everyone underwater with computers already drowned last year. Myself included.”

  Some schoolchildren up by the foot of the bridge wave and scream until Joshua and Farid pay them mind. When the two men wave back, the kids erupt and fairly burst from ecstasy.

  “You’re talking dot-com stuff,” Joshua says. “It’s the sexy side of the industry that tanked. As I told you, I don’t do sexy. I sell refurbished hardware.”

  “You must sell a lot of it then.”

  The comment seems to cheer Joshua, as if reminding him of the savvy part of what he does.

  “Do you know how many machines a single large company turns over in a year? They flip about a third of their inventory. Desktops, laptops. For someplace with fifty or sixty thousand employees, that’s twenty thousand computers. Obviously, those are the dream contracts. So divide that by ten. If you find a business with six thousand people, of which there are endless in North America, that’s two thousand units, and the companies are happy to have someone haul it all away. To pay them for the privilege, they take as a boon. I fix everything up, good as new, then ship it abroad.”

  Farid stares out over the water. He is already running the idea through his businessman’s head.

  “How much of it is salvageable?”

  “You wouldn’t believe the mismanagement at these places. Some of it has never come out of the boxes. And of what does, I’d say upwards of forty percent of what we get is A-grade. Another twenty is a solid B. The rest, I strip for parts.”

  “And it’s all corporate?”

  “I won’t touch the universities. They use everything to death. I do have a guy in New Jersey who gets me the old U.S. government computers. They come without the hard drives, which makes the margins worse, though people are tickled to have them. Where I do enormous volume is in cell phones. There’s maybe five years left before they’ll be so cheap, people will just toss them. But now, they’re gold.”

  “Can I ask the numbers? How does a regular deal break down?”

  “Don’t be shy!” Joshua says.

  “I live like a German, but I think Palestinian. We are not a reserved people.”

  “With the laptops, I can fit a thousand in a container. My markup?” Joshua says, and signals to Farid that he’d better hold on to something so he doesn’t fall out of the boat. “Embarrassing as it is to admit, I net between five and seven hundred percent, depending.”

  “What does that translate to?”

  “With laptops, or flat-screen monitors, I pocket two hundred thousand.” Joshua tips his bottle back to hi
s mouth and drains his beer. Farid thinks it’s to hide his obvious pride.

  “That is a tremendous profit, for what sounds like not too much work.”

  “Yes, at this point it’s basically a couple of e-mails on each end. When things were running smoothly, that came out to a hundred thousand dollars every time I hit send.”

  “So what’s the problem with the most perfect business model I’ve ever heard?”

  “The more I ship to a place, the more I eat into the profits of the folk getting rich off new machines. My model works no matter what, theirs doesn’t if all those teenagers aren’t crying for the new phone, the new computer, the new everything every season. They don’t want ‘refurbished’ to become too attractive a term. People need to believe their electronics are all outdated after six months.”

  “So how do they stop you?”

  “In this case? It’s easy. It’s Egypt. Someone who doesn’t like me knows someone and made a call, and now I’ve got about a zillion dollars’ worth of phones stuck at port. Five forty-footers filled with Nokias and Motorolas. And I have another five containers on a cargo ship that, unlike this boat, I can’t turn around. I assume, sitting here on your beautiful wooden yacht, that you understand how liquidity works.”

  Farid sees the way his friend is looking at him. And Farid laughs, this time more deeply, and with a sincere knee slap, because it’s all so offensive and all so good. He stands up and takes hold of the winch. He can’t believe he didn’t see it coming.

  “Here you are,” he says, “with a new Arab confidant who does import-export, who may also just have contacts in Egypt, and the whole time you act like talking business is the last thing on your mind.”

  “I promise, it’s not because you’re an Arab.”

  “It never is. And I’m sorry to disappoint, but I can’t do the magical baksheesh trick and get your merchandise out for you.”

  “Did I ask you that? I haven’t treated you with disrespect,” Joshua says, looking honestly wounded.

  “It’s the disrespected one who gets to decide that.”

  “Trust me, I was just looking for a break and some time on the water. I wasn’t being coy and I don’t do business like that. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I want you to know, I do appreciate this day. Anyway, I should probably get back to my castle and start working the phones.”