Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  Z feels himself turning pale.

  “What?” her father says, missing nothing.

  The waitress, who is busy rubbing her father’s sunscreen into her arms, pipes in, “He’s a terrible sailor. And part of it is why he’s in the mess he’s in. I think it’s trauma.”

  Her father picks up his sunglasses from the table and puts them on, apparently so he can immediately remove them to strengthen his look of surprise.

  “I’m not asking him to captain, Porcospino. I’m asking him not to fall off the side.” To Z, he says, “There’ll be excellent food and excellent service. And I’ve made a reservation at my favorite restaurant in the world for tonight. The only way to get there is by the water.”

  He then takes out his wallet and hands a credit card to Z.

  “Why don’t you both run down and get some bathing suits and whatever else you need. My daughter says you’re traveling a bit light.”

  Z takes the credit card and stares at it. He tries to smile, and it comes out a sort of pained smirk.

  “What?” her father says. “I took it for granted that you were a natural at signing other people’s names. Please,” he says, leaning in, “do it for me. Let’s put the intrigue aside and have a lovely day.”

  “It’s just the calls,” Z says, trying not to plead. “If something comes through. Shouldn’t we stay here where we can better be reached?”

  The waitress’s father reaches down and pulls a coral-colored sweater off a daypack sitting by his feet. With no shortage of fanfare, he fishes out a very impressive-looking satellite phone. “If we lose cell service, Sputnik will find us. I never ski without a beacon, and I never sail without one of these. You, James Bond, might as well relax.”

  “He hates those kinds of jokes,” says the waitress, rubbing lotion into the tops of her ears.

  “So you told me. But I don’t care. It’s a father’s prerogative. I get to torture any boy you bring home.”

  They sail the day away on a massive schooner. They eat and drink at a long wooden table. It’s truly a decadent lunch. They swim off an island Rudolf Nureyev used to own, and the waitress’s father, looking drunk, yells orders up at the crew from the water with a sort of happy gusto. For Z, he sometimes switches to English, as he does when they set sail again, to say things like, “I’ve told them to show us what this boat can really do.”

  The crew listens, for they pick up quite a bit of speed, and quite a bit of wind, and the waitress drags Z away from her father and over to a mattress on the bow, where she hugs him, under a blanket, while the boat bucks.

  Z’s bare feet turn cold, sticking out from under, while the rest of him feels snug, curled against the waitress, his face buried in her hair.

  As if following the pace of the day, they slow as the sun dips, changing course—the waitress’s father explains—for the restaurant. “You’ll go wild for it,” he says, standing over them, with yet another whiskey in his hand. “It’s a private cove, with a private beach. It’s the only thing there.”

  “It’s too shallow for a boat like this,” the waitress says. “We moor ourselves, and they send out a skiff to fetch us.”

  “Before you even have your napkins in your lap, they bring out plates of sea urchins, still squirming from the lemon juice in their shells.”

  “It’s Prince Charles’s favorite,” the waitress says.

  “It is,” her father confirms. “But who knows if he has any taste at all.”

  It’s good to be rich, is what Z thinks. And good to be powerful. And, without liking her father even a whit more, he is beginning to think that a man this confident and horrible can indeed get him that one seat on that one private plane, where scrutiny will come second to comfort.

  This is what he is mulling, when he breaks free of the waitress’s loving arms and heads over to the port side, to try to spot the restaurant.

  Z can already hear the engine of the boat coming for them. He can see its light shining, and beyond it, only darkness. The restaurant and its cove seem very far away.

  Her father sidles up, and Z says, “It looks like a long ride to dinner. I can’t see the shore from here.”

  “That’s why it’s a cove,” her father says. “It’s tucked into the coast. You’ll see it when we get around the bend. Also, sailor, you must know it’s not easy to see straight across water. If you want to see far, look up. The moon, I promise, is distant from here.” As he says this, his face is lit by the light of the approaching craft, and Z sees that he holds the satphone in his hand. “Go get your girlfriend,” he says. “Our lift is here.”

  One of the crew turns up with a huge flashlight, which he aims out into the night. Z can see the black tubes of the gunwale gliding their way.

  A line is thrown, and the ladder is lowered.

  As ordered, Z goes over to the waitress, who is wearing jeans over her bathing suit and, in her bikini top, has that blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the chill.

  They stand together, his arm slipped under the blanket and pressed to her bare back, as they watch her father reach down a hand to help pull up the man sent to shuttle them.

  It is strange, Z observes, for this man to board when they should be climbing down to join him. It is stranger still how much that very large man, in his windbreaker, looks like the waiter from the restaurant in Paris. As if every burly employee in the service industry had one single face.

  As Z makes terrible sense of what he’s seeing, he feels he wants to say something to the waitress, who stands beside him, the blanket already dropped to the deck.

  Before he speaks, he sees that she is holding a wet-looking burlap sack, itchy and worn. He wonders where she suddenly got it from and imagines it might have been right there the whole trip, tucked under a coil of rope.

  He looks toward the giant Huguenot, who is speaking to the waitress’s father in Hebrew and gripping a fistful of zip ties.

  “You see?” Z says to the waitress, and now Z is speaking in Hebrew too, for he knows his beloved must speak particularly well. “I told you. I’m a professional. I spotted that one right off. Even with your father—I thought, he looks too young, and the way he stares at you. This guy, something is off. I don’t miss a thing.”

  “But you missed me,” the waitress says.

  “Maybe I wanted to miss you.”

  “That’s sweet. Very romantic. But still, a fashla of fashlot. In the end, you fucked up good.”

  “Don’t I get any credit for picking this one out in Paris?” he says, pointing with his chin.

  “Don’t you think you were maybe supposed to?”

  The waitress gives Z time to consider. The Huguenot, looking over, points to his watch, and the man who is not her father says, “Nu, Shira!” hurrying the waitress along.

  Shira nods and points Z to a chair that, like a magic trick, has suddenly appeared. He sits atop it, wondering what would happen if he dared move, how far he would get. He tries to picture what it would look like to flip that chair and dive over the side with a splash.

  “Even if I give you Paris,” the waitress says, “even if making the waiter that first time was a good catch. What about missing everything else that got you to here?”

  “Unfortunately, with espionage, there’s a lot of gut feel to it,” he says. “It is, of all things, an inexact science.”

  The waitress seems to accept that, and Z, though he’d like to talk more about it, says, “And the restaurant on the beach?”

  “Oh, it’s there. It’s honestly excellent. A gem.”

  “And Prince Charles?”

  “He really favors it. It’s true.”

  Z looks at the men, who are looking at him, and he looks to the waitress, who has slipped behind him, and then out at the water behind her. “The Mediterranean,” he says, “it’s beautiful even like this.”

  “This part,” she says, “is called the Tyrrhenian Sea.”

  Z takes a long, deep breath of that open-water air and turns to face forward. He loo
ks up at the useless sliver of moon lighting nothing, and out into the night, which one would generally call pitch-black. But, of course, that kind of gloom is nothing. Nothing compared to what it’s like as his beloved lowers that sack, nothing like the darkness as the hood comes down.

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  In the mornings Shira walks the kibbutz. Out past the cafeteria and the infirmary and the laundry, to the greenhouses where the Thai workers toil. She strolls by a graveyard for giant tires and old tractor parts and hurries past the plastics factory spitting out the packing foam and bubble wrap that keep this farming collective afloat.

  Circling back toward her rented cottage, she admires a sturdy desert rosebush climbing the side of a sun-dulled house. Across from it is the kindergarten, and Shira lingers outside, enamored by the perfect incompatible-compatibility of the place. It’s a reinforced, bunker-like, cement building, ready to take a direct hit. Its doors are wide open, and inside a pair of teachers lead the little ones through a song.

  Many of the families with relatives up north have gone north. She knows that these children who remain belong to the stalwarts and stubborn, to those whose jobs—skilled and unskilled—demand that they stay, and also to those with no other options from which to choose.

  Shira also knows that one or two or three of these beautiful moppets belong to parents who are simply and amazingly unaware. Parents who suffer from an advanced sort of Israeliness. No matter the seriousness of a threat, they are constitutionally incapable of processing menace. Their lives, every day, continue as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

  Her thought is interrupted by the ring of a bicycle’s bell. Shira is blocking the path.

  She steps aside, and no sooner has the young woman riding gone past than she brakes and hops from her seat. A trailer, with what looks like hot pepper plants, is hitched to the bicycle’s frame.

  Shira already knows what’s coming. It is the thanks she will be offered for coming down to stay, when so many from there had understandably left.

  “We appreciate your coming to support us,” the woman says.

  Then she rolls a pedal to the top of its arc, ready to push on.

  “How about you? You’re still here.” Shira speaks with a kind of urgency, trying to trap this woman in conversation. She can hear a tone of great loneliness in her own voice.

  “This is my home. I can’t very well be showing support for myself.”

  “Still, it seems brave to me, your cruising around with those peppers—are they peppers?—with all this going on.” Shira makes a motion meant to include the missiles whistling, and the Israeli boys who are missing, and the war that is brewing, the tanks parked in the fields along the border. But, as she signals the overall atmosphere with a wave of her hand, embraced in it are the children at play, and the house with the roses, and this striking and welcoming girl on a bicycle conversing with her in the dry morning breeze.

  The girl is all warmth, and infers what she likes, and answers the more direct of the questions posed. “Chilcostles,” she says, of her chilies. “They’re not native to here, but they grow very well.”

  The girl pulls at the arms of her T-shirt, making more room for her muscles. She dials the pedal back around, a full rotation, preparing her getaway once more.

  She is, Shira thinks, in a great rush to raise those peppers up.

  “It doesn’t scare you, what’s coming?” Shira says. “Not an invasion? Not the rockets that already fall?”

  “What’s to be scared of? It’s a gorgeous day. We have the best army in the world, right here to protect us. And there is also God’s will.”

  “It’s a lot to ask of the army . . . and of God. You could ask a lot less from farther away.”

  “If this kibbutz wasn’t here, there’d be another barrier, closer in, and someone else’s home would be on the line. It’s a duty and a privilege to live here—”

  “At the front?” Shira says.

  “In paradise.”

  The girl then heaves her weight down on the pedal and rides off.

  Shira watches her go and knows she’d forgotten to add this type of person to her list. The vibrant young altruist happily putting her body in harm’s way.

  She thinks about this as she walks in the direction the girl and her bicycle have gone. The path leads her out to the western edge of the kibbutz, and Shira follows it right up to the security fence. She stares through to its twin, across a dirt track, and beyond that into Gaza.

  Between those fences—between her and her mapmaker—an Israeli army jeep rumbles along, driving the perimeter road. Caged in as they are, the soldiers look to Shira more like prisoners than border patrol.

  The boys in the back wave as they tick by, or more, Shira thinks, they lift up, in a friendly manner, the guns in their grips. Shira waves in return, wishing she could tell them what a fine job they’re doing. She wishes too that she could whisper a secret in their ears. She wants to tell them they’re missing the point.

  They tool around, tough, vigilant, keeping careful eye on both sides of their dusty route.

  And underneath them, Shira knows, run the tunnels.

  2002, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  It was after his capture, and transport. After being shipped across the Mediterranean, like the human cargo that he was. After days chained standing until he’d have given his life just to sit, and then days forced into seated positions that made him yearn for the chains. After being interrogated until he took credit for what he’d done, and further interrogated until he took credit for things of which he’d never dreamed, Prisoner Z was allowed to sleep for a stretch. Then he was moved once more.

  It was quiet in that new cell. He’d sat there, hands tied behind his back, suffocating blind in his sack. He’d tried to control his breathing, deafening as it had become. He’d struggled to pick up any ambient sound.

  Time went by. Great swaths of it, he was fairly sure. He’d decided that, whatever came next, he must have, at least, reached some sort of end. This is when he’d meet his lawyer. This is when he’d get to call his worrying mom. He’d face his public shame. Then the clock would start on the gigantical debt to society that they’d deem he owed.

  When nothing changed. When he thought he might die of thirst, or starve to death. When he thought, maybe it was not a cell he was in, and that—an alternate, cruel judgment already passed—he’d been buried alive, that’s when he heard a door open. That’s when the guard first came in.

  This memory, Prisoner Z accepts, may be fully colored by his disordered retrospect, but he believes deeply that he immediately knew. Just from the sound of those heavy shoes on the floor, from the way that cell gave off its first echo, from the pace of the man, and the lag between entrance and action. There was something about it that already contained all the hopelessness of Prisoner Z’s plight.

  He had understood that what he’d imagined as some sort of finish was only the beginning, the unfading start.

  He could feel the guard standing there. He could feel it exactly as if the guard were standing over him right now. There was no talking. No touching. Not even a good, loving kick to the ribs.

  Then, like that, came a sudden, simple shift in realities. The falconer reaching down and pulling the hood from his hawk’s head.

  Prisoner Z cannot shake that agonizing image. That first moment in the cell when he shifted from one darkness to the next.

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  Oh, how she misses him on the other side of that fence. Somewhere there, trapped among the two million, is her mapmaker, the unanticipated love of her life. If Shira knew when she first saw him what that waiting would be like, she’d not have let herself dream of seeing him again.

  Then she laughs. Fuck that first sighting, Shira thinks, remembering instead their first fucking. And she knows that it’s not true.

  She still can’t believe it. Adventure had always been her thing, but spontaneity, that was a different animal.
Yet there she’d found herself, wooed and wooing, wrestling with her sexy adversary in a hotel bed.

  They’d taken a shower after and ended up having sex again, steaming up the bathroom until they thought the wallpaper might come loose. She’d sent him back to the bedroom and came out to meet him, a towel wrapped around her hair. Her mapmaker was atop the sheets, grinning ear to ear.

  “This is why those who don’t want peace don’t want it,” he’d said, in his perfect Hebrew. “The minute we get to know each other—”

  He didn’t get to finish as Shira lay down on top of him and bit the end of his nose.

  “Yes,” she said. “Let us loose and the mutually assured ravishing begins.”

  She tossed the towel to the floor and rested her head on his chest, her wet curls cold, she could tell, from his shiver. He closed his arms around her, and together they stared up at the complicated glass fixture on their ceiling, fit for a museum. He had not skimped on their rendezvous room.

  Cuddled up like that, the mapmaker stated, with a getting-to-know-you tone, “I’m assuming,” he said, “that you are a spy.”

  She reached up to grab, and then hit him with, a pillow.

  “You waited until after the sex to say that?”

  “Just because I believe in peace with the Jews doesn’t mean I’m a total fool.”

  “Is it because I’m with the Israeli delegation and sleep with the enemy? You’re aware that you’re sleeping with me too?”

  “That’s not an answer,” the mapmaker said, taking her hand and giving an affectionate squeeze.

  “You didn’t ask a question. It was phrased as an accusation.”

  “I’m sure you can repeat it verbatim. I bet you could also recite the license plates of every car parked outside.”

  “The trick is finding the cars that stand out,” she said. “It’s too much to keep straight if you don’t narrow them down.”