Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “Since always. It’s high season on Capri. We never miss it, my family,” the waitress says. “It’s not the trip that’s sudden, it’s your knowing that is.”

  She stands now and, looking toward the staircase to the bedroom, extends a hand, which he takes.

  “Were you just going to leave me?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  No, is what Z thinks, getting up. He really wouldn’t leave her.

  As for the great throng of people lining up to rescue him, the waitress is offering the only option he has. Access to someone with access, it could help.

  “What if we get there and your father doesn’t want to get involved? What if he turns me in?”

  “To who? The hotel bartender? This is what excites him in a life where little does. He’ll be thrilled. In any event, you haven’t broken any laws in Italy, which makes you better off there than here. And if they catch you on the island a week from now, instead of here tomorrow? At least we can fuck the whole time while we stay in the finest hotel I’ve ever seen.”

  Z chews at his lip.

  “Better than this?”

  “By far! There’s more to look at out the window than some old obelisk. Have you ever seen the Faraglioni up close?”

  “No,” Z says, he hasn’t. “Your plan, it actually kind of does make sense.”

  “Because of the fucking?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Because of that. Only, how am I supposed to get there? The passport issue is the same.”

  “You really are the worst. They must have trained you at some point.”

  “Logistics was not my strong suit. I was best at knowing when I was being followed. Paranoia is where I shined.”

  “Well, we can drive all the way,” she says. “Right up to the ferry. There’s no reason to stop us in a car, if you can manage not to look as terrified as you do right now. Paris to Naples. EU country to EU country, with a little luck we won’t even have to slow down at the border to wave. I bet we can do it in twelve hours, not much more.”

  “Like New York to Chicago?”

  “If you say so. Either way, chi non fa non sbaglia.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you don’t try, you don’t fail.”

  “That’s not exactly calming considering the consequences. Do you have something better?”

  “Vedi Napoli e poi muori,” she says. “See Naples and then die.”

  2002, Paris

  “You said you’d come home! You said you’d be by my side.”

  “Please, Mother, please.”

  “I’m dying, and you’re not here.”

  “Complications, Mother. I’m on my way.”

  “You keep saying that, but you don’t show, and the days tick by. The doctors. The prognosis. I won’t be here long. And you, waking a sick woman in the middle of the night.”

  Z waits and he waits, and he really can’t tell, is no longer sure.

  “Are you really dying, Mother? Was the news really that bad?”

  “Who lies about such a thing? What kind of monster?” Here she begins weeping. “I tell my own son I’m dying, and still he doesn’t come.”

  “I’m on my way, Mother. You can’t imagine what’s gone wrong.”

  “So tell me.”

  Z doesn’t tell her. He doesn’t say a word. Not about the hotel room in which he stands, or the car parked outside, or the woman he is smitten with, who waits impatiently at the door.

  He offers the waitress a hangdog grimace and holds up a finger, he needs just a minute more, pacing with the hotel phone.

  Let his pursuers track it. Let them see where he’s calling from. When they arrive, he’ll already be gone.

  “Hello? Are you still there?” his mother says.

  “I am, Mother. And I’m doing everything I can to get home. You cannot know.”

  “What I know is that my only child isn’t here. And at a time like this! I told your father, we should have had a second. Back in the seventies, what family only had one? I told him, I told him when I was nice and fertile. What if the first is a rotten egg?”

  “Please calm down, Mother, I’m doing my best.”

  “Your best will have you showing up to put me in the ground. Your best will get you a welcoming kiss from your mother after her lips have turned blue.”

  “What are you saying? Are you really sick?”

  “Of course I am. I have cancer. I am dying, dying, dying. And you with your secrets. What kind of child have I raised?”

  Z starts to answer.

  “Don’t,” she says. “Spare me. I already know. It’s just as I told your father. We’ve got ourselves a rotten egg.”

  The waitress drives, with Z in the passenger seat sporting dark sunglasses (one of the few props he’d stuffed in his bag). Z keeps an eye on the side mirror and attempts his best impression of someone relaxed, well aware that he appears rigid, and miserable, and like he’s up to no good. He can’t shake the dispiriting exchange with his dying or not-dying mother.

  It’s she who always used to warn him, “Never steal anything. And, if you do, never get caught. You look like a murderer when you feel guilty. Even innocent, they’d hang you for that face.”

  He goes to share the memory with the waitress, but somehow it shames him, and he tells the waitress this instead: “When we were learning countersurveillance, we had this really brilliant instructor who was—no matter how well we did—disappointed in us. She’d always say, ‘The biggest challenge at a Jewish spy service is training everyone not to look so guilty. A less nervous nation might, as the anti-Semites believe, truly take over the world.’”

  They cruise along the highway, making progress, unimpeded. It’s beautiful, windows-rolled-down weather and once they’ve put a couple of hours between themselves and Paris, once Z manages to stop jumping at every siren and horn honk, to stop stiffening at the sight of every car switching into their lane, he begins, at least outwardly, to resemble a person calming down.

  They listen to the radio and sing to the eighties American classics and the “Ella, elle l’a” France Gall–style French hits in perpetual play.

  In those first four hours they stop to get waters and chocolate, to pee and gas up, and to buy a pack of cigarettes to smoke out of boredom along the way. As the kilometers roll by, and the road rolls on, and the day unfolds, they make good time.

  When they near the border, Z feels the muscles in his neck seize up, his whole body gone tight. The waitress reaches over and pats a knee. She coos at him, as one might at a child or a dog. Z takes a breath and holds it.

  Together, they drive into Italy as if there’s no border at all, passports in their pockets, her foot on the gas.

  2014, Jerusalem

  Ruthi has her lazy son drag up a rusted bathtub from among the weeds in the empty lot below. She makes him punch holes in the bottom for extra drainage and paint the outside a nice no-evil-eye blue. There is a perfect spot for it on the balcony, right by the door, that gets excellent light but nothing too harsh.

  She sends the guard to the garden shop to buy dirt and fertilizer and mulch. When the tub is loaded up, and a healthy bed made, she sends him back for young tomato plants and tells him to let the nice Iraqi boy who works there choose.

  Ruthi sinks a stake at each end of the tub and runs string in between for a trellis. She plants her seedlings, tamping the dirt down: she waters them and then spends the day in her housecoat watching them grow. By nightfall, she is sure they’re already taller. The Jerusalem air, it is miraculously healthy for all God’s creations.

  The guard notes that the window boxes hanging from the balcony’s rails have been pruned to perfection. The outdoor tiles gleam, and lining the wall of the house on the other side of the door from that tub is a row of tin cans potted with herbs that have hardly broken the soil. Alongside them, a trio of avocado pits, impaled on toothpicks and half submerged, wait to sprout their wild roots in glass jars.

  When the guard is ready for bed
, he goes out to smoke and finds his mother, still in her housecoat, standing in the moonlight and staring at that bathtub. She holds, in her hand, a glass of wine.

  The guard comes up behind her and, leaning down, rests his chin on her shoulder.

  “You know,” he says, “we live right by the market. You can buy tomatoes for a penny each. It’s stupid to grow them here.”

  “They taste better when they’re yours.”

  “Also, when you make a blessing before eating them, they’re ten times as sweet.”

  “You mock,” she says, “but that’s true too.”

  “Don’t become a crazy woman, Ruthi, that’s all I’m asking.” He calls her by her first name, as he does whenever he’s being fresh.

  The guard straightens up and lights his joint.

  “And don’t wait around for another prime minister to end up in a coma. That job is a hard one to get twice.”

  “What should I do then to keep busy?”

  “Volunteer. Go back to school. Start a new career. Challenge yourself, Ima. Keeping watch on tomatoes is not so hard.”

  “Who would hire me at this point, at this age? What am I good at but caring for dying men who take forever to let go?”

  “You and me, both,” he says. “The family business.”

  She studies him and sips her wine, her grown-up son, who never bloomed. Maybe the air here didn’t do everything she thought.

  Ruthi reaches up and pinches his cheek, hard enough that he pulls her hand away.

  “And you? Don’t you hang your whole life on one person. Hero or villain, when they’re gone, you are left without any personal meaning of your own.”

  “Don’t say that, Ima. Not about yourself. You were hired by the General, but you were working always for Jerusalem. Why not go back down into it? Walk around. See how the city you’ve slaved for has changed.”

  Wise boy, she thinks. Wise boy. Maybe he has matured more than she knows.

  2002, Capri

  They sleep in the car near Molo Beverello and wake to get the early ferry from port. As soon as that hydrofoil lifts itself above the water, Z dares to unbend. He is thrilled to watch Naples turn small behind them.

  When they disembark at Capri, Z and the waitress take a canopied taxi up the winding drive to the top of the island and the edge of the main square.

  The waitress leads Z through it, and then down the charming laneways, where she stops at all the boutique windows—they’ll both need to come back for proper clothes.

  They take a cliff-top path that dead-ends at the hotel’s overlook. It’s just as she’d promised, hanging above the Faraglioni and the wide-open sea.

  It has been some time since Z has been breathless from anything but fear.

  “You grew up doing this?” he says to her.

  “I grew up doing this, yes. The Crillon in Paris. The Punta Tragara in Capri. In every place there is one hotel, considered to be ‘the hotel,’ and that is where we stay.”

  “But you still felt the need to do the fake-modest, honest-work, too-many-roommates thing.”

  “It’s a rite of passage wealthy parents insist upon so their children don’t become beasts. Or, at least, so we learn how to pretend we are thankful.”

  Z walks to the guardrail at the edge of the piazza. The waitress tells him to stay put and commune with nature while she checks them in.

  He takes in the majesty in every direction, settling his gaze on the bay below, and all those humongous yachts—ten times bigger than the ones in Berlin. He finds that he misses sailing with Farid. This confuses, for Farid is, however distant from the acts, a killer. And further confusing is accepting that, however distant from that one-ton bomb, Z is a killer himself.

  Z is pulled from this wretched reverie by a loving yank. The waitress, hooking a finger through one of his belt loops, draws him close.

  She’s returned with a room key on a giant brass knob. This she hangs off the first finger of her non-jeans-tugging hand.

  He puts an arm around her—feeling cared for—and pulls the waitress back his way. It feels so sweetly couple-like. It feels, to Z, what life could be on the other side of this hellacious ordeal.

  “Let’s go get you some burrata,” she says, “and a bowl of vodka. We’ll fuck and take a nap, and then I’m going to stick you on this metal ledge in one of the pools. It has a million tiny holes in it, and each one of those holes is a tiny jet. You can lie there like a sausage cooking red under the sun, while all those little bubbles take your worries away.”

  “Shouldn’t we say hi to your parents first? Or, at least, tell them you’ve brought along a spy on the run? It’s a pretty big surprise.”

  “You really don’t understand the rich, do you?”

  Z, evidently, does not. No more than he understood Italy and its media moguls, before.

  “If you have all the money in the world, it’s boring just to get more money. The only things left that hold any interest are sex and power.”

  “And how does that break down in my case?”

  “For me, sex. For my father, a wonderful, international game of power.”

  The hotel room is a chichi duplex, with an open staircase to a lofted bedroom and, off the living room, a wraparound balcony hanging out into infinity. Z did not think it possible, but it’s even fancier than their Parisian suite.

  If one didn’t know that everything was coming down around him, one would reckon, from his lakeside mansion in Berlin all the way to this extravagant space with this extraordinary woman, that Z must be doing something right.

  They eat and drink, they have sex and take a nap, repeating the cycle throughout the day until they finally spread out naked on the lounge chairs on their balcony to watch the sun set.

  When the room phone rings, the waitress takes her time getting it. When she says, “Pronto,” into the receiver, Z thinks he may die of love.

  She listens, and covers the mouthpiece, and whispers too loudly, “Get in the shower. Clean up as best you can.” When she hangs up she says, “We really should have run back down to the shops for some decent clothes.”

  They wait at a candlelit table down the stairs from the lower pool. They are perched on the edge of a private strip of hotel terrace, overlooking the black water and the endless, immeasurable world.

  The waitress’s father, who is strapping and gray-templed and younger and stronger than Z might have imagined, takes a moment to shake Z’s hand, before disappearing back into an extended round of hugging and laughing and talking to his daughter in Italian at great speed. Z cannot imagine how young her mother must be, as her father looks like he had her when he was ten years old.

  At some point, which Z thinks is a long time after his arrival, the waitress says to her father, in English, “We’re being rude.”

  Taking their seats, she says to Z, “Typical mother,” and shakes her head. And her father, in silver suit to match his hair, and white shirt open a button too far, says, “My wife will join us in a couple of days. Evidently, there’s still something left in Milan that she hasn’t yet bought.”

  “She’s selfish,” the waitress adds, as explanation.

  “Now, Porcospino, that’s not nice,” her father says.

  Then he slaps Z on the back, with some force. “Do you know why she’s upset, your girlfriend?”

  “No, sir,” Z says, feeling like he’s ten years old himself.

  “Your girlfriend is upset because, without her mother here to keep me distracted, you two are stuck with me. We are all on a lavish three-person date.”

  “It’s a nightmare!” the waitress says, sounding serious, while her father beams at her with a proud smile.

  It’s not until all the dinner plates have returned to the kitchen that the waitress, in a very politic manner, utters the truth about Z.

  Her father, studying his guest like a pinned butterfly, says, quite loudly, “A spy?”

  “He is,” the waitress says.

  As the desserts are marched out a
nd placed on the table, the waitress’s father takes hold of the server’s arm.

  To Z, he says, “This calls for some whiskeys.” And from the waiter he’s restrained, her father orders a round.

  While they poke at their sweets, a global version of Z’s problems is shared.

  The waitress’s father nods knowingly, turning to his daughter to assess her, and then to Z to do the same. “That’s quite a story,” he says, markedly unruffled.

  “You’re taking it well,” Z says. “Me being in trouble, and all. And needing such serious help. It’s really kind.”

  “Believe it or not,” her father says, clamping a hand down on Z’s wrist, “this girl, she is a monster,” and here he releases Z to press the back of that hand, most delicately, against his daughter’s cheek. “She’s nicer than her mother. But, still, a terrible headache. These? Your problems? They are not so bad. You are—even as a fugitive spy—not yet close to the worst boyfriend she’s ever had.”

  2002, Tyrrhenian Sea

  At breakfast, the waitress’s father says, “One seat on a private flight, where they don’t so much as peek at who is aboard. Is that all you’re after?”

  Z offers a diffident nod.

  “And you have a passport?”

  “A couple,” he says, with a sad laugh. “But, yes, I have one with me.”

  “So this is your big disaster? You need someone with blurry eyesight to put a stamp on a page, or maybe have Customs check the cabin while you’re locked in the bathroom taking a piss?”

  “Yes, sir,” Z says. “That would be a dream.”

  “I thought this was a big favor? You didn’t need to come to me for this, you could merely have come to Naples. Do you know how many metric tons of contraband have already, this morning, moved through? One nice Jewish boy would easily disappear into the mix.”

  “Should I take the ferry back? If there’s someone who can really make that happen—”

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” her father says, patting Z on the hand. “I have a couple of calls out. But you, my son, are in Italy on a Sunday. You should have chosen a country less Catholic if you wanted to accomplish something today. Also, if you’re expecting my help you should keep your own commitment. I’ve rented us a beautiful yacht for a sail, and you two promised to be my date.”