Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “Is that an admission?”

  “That’s me being silly instead of upset. And, spy or no, I don’t believe you’re asking because of my keen eye.”

  “How about because you’re on the National Security team, advising? Every one of you in that group has the same hazy background in foreign service. You’re the most suspect lot at the table.”

  “And how did you start drawing up borders and negotiating boundaries? Did you get a degree from mapmaker school? Have you formed a lot of countries before this?” She presses her toes against his. “Everyone at these negotiations has a past.”

  “I am, and always have been, an advocate for my people. To get anything done for them invariably means first doing something for yours. That’s how I earned my seat. I’m good at wrangling Jews.”

  “Why did you want it—that seat?”

  “Because of my deep belief that if the Palestinians are talented enough to have built your country, we can probably manage to build our own.”

  “Trust me, I want to see you do it. It’s high time we had our country to ourselves.”

  “And so it begins!” he said, and started to fake tussle, which Shira was more than happy to do.

  They rolled about and settled, with her straddling him, her hands pressing his shoulders to the mattress.

  “So?” he said. “Are you a spy?”

  “Do you think if I were that I’d be here, having sex with you? Do you honestly think I’d do that as part of my job?”

  The mapmaker didn’t say a word.

  “Be honest,” she said. “Or don’t. Feel free to lie, because there is a right answer to give.”

  He stayed silent some more. It seemed a good way to be.

  “I’m about to get very insulted,” Shira said. “You really can’t guess?”

  She took a good grab of his carpet of chest hair and gave it an angry pull.

  The mapmaker didn’t say “That hurt,” as they both knew it was meant to. He just gave a little yowl.

  “I’d never,” she said, full of a fury, the size of which he couldn’t have begun to understand. Angry, and already loving him madly, she’d dropped back to his side and hugged her mapmaker tight. “Over my dead body,” she’d said, for special emphasis. “That’s not who I am.” But she knew, as much as what she said came from the heart and felt to her as true as any truth she’d ever shared, that the woman she’d become now, she’d become solely because of what she’d done then.

  If retribution was needed, on Prisoner Z’s part, he finally had it. For Shira knew she was at the start of something she’d never abandon, and she knew too the impossible challenges that she and the mapmaker would face. And if anyone was to blame for this unexpected and calamitous dose of good fortune, it was undoubtedly Prisoner Z. He had set her off on a course as inevitable as the one on which she’d sent him.

  She’d had more than a year to figure the mapmaker out from the time she’d first seen him, looking serious and staid, standing behind Abbas, dashing in a suit and tie. The Palestinian president was already seated along with his closest aides, when Shira had walked into the room.

  She must have been looking serious herself. It was the highest-level meeting she’d ever been privy to, and easily as secret as anything she’d ever done.

  There they were at Prime Minister Olmert’s residence in Jerusalem, making a true and final push for peace. It was the culmination of three dozen such meets, nothing left to discuss, only to initial by the Xs on the map and for Abbas to write his name down.

  She remembered how oddly tranquil it felt, stepping into that drawing room. How homey. There were cakes, and juices, sparkling water and flat. There was a bowl of clementines that she’d watched Olmert pick earlier in the day from the trees that run alongside the house.

  Catching Shira watching him, he had said that such tasks calmed him before encounters of this scale.

  Now she stood inside the door and observed as Olmert himself stepped forward with the map and, after a sort of half-bow, unrolled it on the table in front of Abbas.

  Olmert’s body man raced up, an instant’s delay, with four leather paperweights, setting one on each corner, to hold it in place.

  She’d looked at it, awed, and in disbelief. An independent Palestine, right there on the table. There was the end to this ancient, bloody quarrel. All Abbas needed to do was sign.

  Then she looked at what they must be looking at. Not only at the map, but at Olmert, their partner in peace. This man, the General’s post-stroke replacement, and, in Shira’s opinion, the least prime-ministerial person she’d ever seen. With his shadow of a comb-over, and his wiry, runner’s frame, and the exhausted, in-over-his-head, watery eyes. Yet, here. This map. This was truly brave. Even if the Palestinians were asking for more than Olmert was giving, he was ready to sort it out with them, and to clash with his own. There would be hell to pay on the Jewish side.

  It was, she knew, very close to what they were asking. The big solutions in place. The territories marked for swap were, more or less, equitable. There was a corridor to travel from Gaza to the West Bank, a futuristic tunnel to shuttle Palestinians underground.

  The tunnels, how could they then have known?

  It was history in the making, if Abbas would allow history to be made. It was what she’d dreamed of being part of, once her dreams had changed.

  It was then that Abbas, whispering away, pointing to this and to that, turned to glance back over his shoulder at that elegant, handsome man. It was her mapmaker, brought closer, to study the final borders that had been drawn.

  She could see on his face that—this deal—he wanted to do it. That he felt, as she did, the momentousness, and fleetingness, the impossible scarcity of this peace.

  He, like her, worked for those above. It was not for him to accept; it was for him to help Abbas see what he himself saw.

  The mapmaker made his case. The other aides took their turns, talking that map up and down.

  Abbas said he needed to think. To advise. He had to discuss it with the Jordanians. To take it to the Americans. His larger cabinet needed to be convened again before such a pact. It was more land than he was ready to lose.

  It was silent, what her man did. It was the way he held himself, the way the shape of his face openly yearned. He had not said anything after his first salvo, but he now radiated a singular message that she translated as hope. Let them be two peoples living toward the future, instead of the past.

  She knew this was likely her projecting, and romanticizing, and her own desperation to compromise. She wanted to take Olmert by the sleeve and announce, look at him, he is not long for power. As if Olmert knew this too, he reached into his jacket and proffered his own silver pen.

  “It’s only a deal if you accept it,” he’d said.

  Abbas looked up. Abbas did not take the pen. It was her mapmaker who reached and took it. Her mapmaker who uncapped it and held it out to his leader. He held it out for Abu Mazen, seated in front of the map of their nation. He offered it, with so much dignity, Shira thought, to the man who would not sign.

  And like that, the map was whisked away. And like that the meeting was done. And when Abbas stood from his chair to go, her mapmaker dropped down on it and took up a leaf of government stationery, where he sketched out, from memory, the country that was lost. This he folded and slipped into his pocket, returning the prime minister his pen as their delegation left.

  There would have to be a call in response, she was sure. There would be another round—this couldn’t be everyone’s bright future lost. She’d see her mapmaker again.

  But Abbas’s call never came, and then the invasion of Gaza was delivered instead. No one from their side wanted to talk after that war, with fourteen Israelis killed and eleven hundred Palestinians dead. After that Olmert was gone too.

  There was no progress on their lack of progress for more than a year. And then, with Bibi at the helm, talking out both sides of his mouth, there was suddenly a backroom meeting
in Geneva, led by the gray-haired American undersecretary whom Shira liked so much. She was a stern and clearheaded negotiator, all business, and also strong enough not to fear, in quiet intermissions, being kind.

  In that parley, Shira sat across the table from the mapmaker. And their secret summit devolved into a secret rendezvous.

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  It’s the land of Israel, physically, that Shira loves. It’s hard to explain to those who’ve never been, that, beyond all the flares and tracers, the pops and booms of the nightly news, it is one of the most beautiful and varied places on earth.

  The desert trails in that part of the country are wildly beautiful and surprising, the waterfalls and Nubian sandstone, the great dusty mountains and their spectacular views. Makhtesh Ramon, the giant crater, is a favorite, but that is a good, long drive from there. Where she is, well, there’s not so much in terms of wonder nearby. Checking the map on her phone, she’s found—about an hour’s walk down the road—what looks like a tiny copse of trees that the nature authority has designated as a forest. Whatever it is, it is farther from the border and outside the militarized bubble in which she currently lives. She just wants to feel alone instead of lonely, to lie down under some branches and look up through them at the sky.

  Along the way, one of the old men, familiar already from the kibbutz, passes her as she trudges off on her outing, backpack slung over a shoulder, a scarf tied around her hair. He tells her, these are dangerous times to be so far from shelter.

  She tells him she wants to stretch her legs and get some fresh air. He tells her right back that they have fresh air at the kibbutz, and, if she wants exercise, why not swim some laps in the pool?

  Shira, unsure of why she’s explaining herself, tells him she is a hiker more than a swimmer. And also, he is clearly coming back from a walk himself.

  “I am old,” he says. “If I die, it’s sad. If you die, it’s tragic.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” she says. “If a missile will find me, a missile will find me. I’d rather get blown up in nature than hiding under the bed.”

  He sniffles at that and takes on a wizened, salt-of-the-earth tone. “Brave talk always sounds sound,” he says, “but the logic doesn’t generally hold. You could also step into one of our nice fortified rooms at the sound of the sirens and not have a missile find you at all.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  “It is safer inside the gates than out. We worry over our guests.”

  “All right,” she says. “Thanks.”

  Shira plugs in her earbuds and puts on the old Israeli hip-hop of the 1990s, her preferred soundtrack, a fact over which she is endlessly teased. She will concede that it’s an acquired taste.

  When she reaches that sad little forest, she chooses herself a lovely spot of ground, nestled between a pair of the taller trees. She takes out a water bottle, and, careful not to squish her sandwiches, she uses her backpack as a pillow, hoping to sleep for a bit. She thinks of a biblical Jacob, piling together stones. She cannot help it. Entertaining these allusions in the Holy Land, it’s a condition that infects them all. She could not not-think such things if she tried.

  Making her way back, feeling renewed, Shira is hardly through the front gates when she sees the man from her walk standing by the kibbutz store. She throws up her arms, as if to present herself to him, still alive—do you see, I did not get myself killed. She is proud.

  But he has lost his happy demeanor. Shira, as with everyone who grew up in that country, is familiar with the look on his face.

  “It is the General,” he tells her, as soon as she approaches. “He’s finally passed.”

  It shocks Shira to hear it. As much for the fact that the General was finally dead as that he was, until then, somehow still alive. Could it be that in all those years, she’d not already received that same news? Had he been with them the whole time?

  She was going to say, a reflex, “I knew him personally.” But it is Israel, and such claims are taken for granted. She will say that, and this venerable frontiersman will tell her that he fought in a hundred wars at the General’s side. That they are brothers, or cousins, that he has given or received a kidney, that the two are childhood best friends.

  She excuses herself and stumbles off from him, literally missing a step and righting herself on her way. She looks over her shoulder and, again, raises up those arms.

  Is this what the world wants from her? Shira thinks. To buckle at the knees? To keen and wail?

  If she does, it will be misread as grief for the General, for whom she does not mourn. She heads toward her cottage, fighting off what has already hit her, the wave and the crash, the disoriented tumbling, as Shira is awash again in Prisoner Z.

  She is stronger than this, she tells herself. She is different from other people. Let everyone judge her—as those who know her often do—but she, she will not be broken by him any more than she’d already been.

  She’d seen to it that Prisoner Z was brought back on the General’s orders, a traitor. What she had not seen, nor heard, was what happened to him when he’d arrived.

  If the General had hung on all these years, what about the prisoner?

  She had often prayed, actually prayed, that he was no longer living. For he’d never made it into the papers or surfaced on the nightly news. There was no talk in intelligence circles. There was no file that she could find, no name attached to him, no number. Her own inquiries had gone unanswered, until it was made clear she should not press anymore. And still she pressed, until it had put her on the other side of everyone’s good graces. Pushed until she felt the institution pushing back, pushing her out.

  She walks toward her cottage, doing the math. Twelve years. God help him. He couldn’t be in limbo for so long.

  And here, on the kibbutz, with the mapmaker in her heart, her diplomatic lover, who’d gotten himself trapped in Gaza for making an undiplomatic choice, she returns to her mantra for the one she’d betrayed.

  Here are the things she prayed for in the weeks and months after she and the waiter zipped off in their Sea-Rider, leaving Prisoner Z sailing off toward his fate. She prayed for an accident early in the questioning. She prayed for the overzealous interrogator, and Prisoner Z’s broken neck. She hoped he’d been drowned in a bucket, or that his heart had given out from the stress. She wished upon wishing that Prisoner Z had attempted escape, tasting some dream of false freedom, never feeling the bullet to the back of the head.

  2014, Lifta

  Change. It fixes Ruthi with a mix of wonder and dread. She has taken her son’s advice—a first. She’d watered her plants and put on her comfortable shoes. She’d headed down into her neighborhood, not to shop or run errands, but, simply, to be.

  The old city is what she misses, on her walk. Not the one of Turkish rampart and holy site, of Wailing Wall and golden dome. She means the old-new Jerusalem, the plain, dusty, wonderful hamlet of her childhood, where a person could live simply. Dignified and poor.

  Everywhere she goes, she passes towering new buildings, and Ruthi knows when she happens on a gap and the vistas open up, she’ll see hilltop after hilltop covered with houses where once there were terraces, the thin-trunked forests of the valleys filled with villas and ribbons of newly paved road. All covering the places Ruthi and her friends used to hike when she was a girl. They’d go off hunting treasure that, on rare days, they’d actually find. Ancient coins and bits of pearled glass, picked like seashells from between the flagstones of Roman byways. Often, they’d tumble down the path into Lifta, and, if no boys were lurking, they’d jump into the spring in their underwear and then dry out in the sun. They’d play hide-and-seek in the abandoned houses in that husk of an Arab village at the city’s mouth.

  Why not? is what Ruthi thinks. How long has it been?

  Ruthi turns herself toward the entrance to the city. She walks slowly, twisting down toward the trampiada where the soldiers point fingers to the ground hitchhiking rides, a
nd the Hassidim do the same, each in the uniform of his tribe.

  Feeling naughty, and girlish again, she steps off the road and follows that same steep path into the gorge, escaping back to a time she sorely missed.

  It is as it was. The Arab houses still stand. And she pictures—a flash of memory—the speed with which the gazelles raced off when she and her friends would arrive. Religious girls, they used to pretend—hardly a reach—that this green spring-fed place was the Garden of Eden, and that they were the first ever to walk the world, the houses erased from their view.

  The General, always with her when he was living, had not moved far since he’d gone. She stands at the foot of the pool in which she’d swum, and she remembers one of the numberless late nights at the General’s official residence, all but her, and his bodyguards, sent home.

  He had come in from the patio to find her in his office, closing things up for the day. “There is a visitor coming,” he’d said. “It’s very last-minute, I know, but I don’t want to wake anyone to cook.”

  She had scolded him, saying, “If you are asking me something, please ask it.”

  “Could you put something together—as a favor to me? Something simple for a guest.”

  “It will have to be,” she’d said, frustrated, as she knew the pantry was as empty as it ever got, a big order coming the next day.

  She’d gone through the kitchen, and there were eggs and peppers and some vegetables in cans. There were fruits and a watermelon, and some cheeses and a good loaf of bread. There was a tub of hummus. And she knew she could make do.

  She started on a shakshuka, and warmed day-old burrekas, and began chopping cucumbers for a nice Israeli salad, only sorry she had no parsley or mint to put on top.

  She’d set out pickles and olives, and if the meal were to have a theme, she’d call it a late-night breakfast spread.

  While she was still cooking, in came the General, and with him, she could not believe it, was Arafat at his side.