Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  Stepping outside her cottage into that blistering morning sun, Shira regrets every kiss that could have been a long one. She regrets every bit of intimacy shortchanged. The rules of that game could so easily have been altered. They could have named not the singular folk who’d changed history, but those individuals who’d forever changed them.

  If she were playing the game of her own life, she knows, it’s because of Prisoner Z that she found herself right where she was—living on this kibbutz under false pretense, waiting for her Palestinian love to send her a signal, ready to take an insane chance to see her mapmaker one more time.

  The paths of life, they are infinite in their weaving.

  She walks east that day, hitching a ride for most of the way, wanting to wander around the Shokeda Forest. The summer heat is as brutal as ever, and she already knew, on her way over, that she’d missed the flowing fields of red anemone by months.

  It’s a nice ramble anyway. There are some handsome pines growing in the park and a lot of eucalyptus and an ancient-looking tamarisk here and there.

  In the past, she’d driven down south at the far edge of winter, when everything in these parts blooms. Shira had once been lucky enough to be in the Negev after a good rain. She’d caught the desert in full blossom. All those flowers hiding in the sand.

  When the sirens sound, she decides they are coming from a distance. It is only as they scream on that Shira understands the noise isn’t reaching her from one of the big cities but coming from the kibbutzim and moshavim nearby.

  She understands she and those trees are quite possibly under fire. She lies down where she stands, and she puts her trusty daypack over her head for a bit of useless protection. She presses her face into the ground.

  She can feel it, the pressure, a salvo striking close, those drunken, screwy missiles headed her way.

  It would serve her right, this fate. She’s so far off course from what she’d imagined her life would be, it would make sense for her to be killed by a random missile meant to miss everything and everyone and bury itself in the dirt.

  It is incredibly forbidding, the strike and boom. Shira wonders if she will survive the assault as she waits for the last siren’s wail. She stays motionless, the bag atop her head, the earth gritty in her teeth. Even with her mouth closed it makes its way in. So great is the strength of impact.

  How often had they whispered on the phone, talking deep into the night, she, with her head buried under the pillows, feeling somehow swaddled, while wishing the mapmaker were actually at her side.

  She’d say things like “Could you come by boat?” “Can you paraglide?” “What about a scuba tank?” “What if I walked across the Sinai Desert?” “What if I stole a helicopter, like they do in the movies?” “What if I get the president of the United States involved?”

  To this game, the mapmaker never played along. If there were a way to get out, he’d have found it.

  Yet, despite all the challenges, their dual and exhausting obsessions with their peoples’ plights, and the endless pressures the distance put upon them, their devotion only grew. “And why shouldn’t it?” she’d ask him. Of all the outrageous things in which anyone had ever believed, the undoable dreams of oceans crossed, and mountains climbed, of men put on the moon, why couldn’t the triumph of their relationship be one?

  “Yes,” he’d say. “They’ve cloned sheep.”

  “And transplanted a human face!”

  “I saw a dog on the Internet that sounds like it’s saying ‘Hello.’ It’s very clear.”

  “Miracles abound,” she’d say. “Why can’t us together be another?”

  Then they’d tick through the great and legendary loves, separated by history and reunited against all odds.

  For so long it had gone on like that, the calls always closing with the mapmaker mum and Shira asking, “If you can’t get out, and I can’t get in, what do we do?”

  There was no answer to give. There was no more love to be claimed than the great love they shared, no more missing to privately suffer or, between them, to lament. Then one day, he called early while she sat reading at a café in Florentin. Before she’d uttered “Hello,” he’d said to her, “I would die to see you. I would.”

  “That’s romantic,” was her response.

  “I would literally die to see you, is what I mean.”

  “I would too,” she’d said.

  “Would you?”

  “I would,” she’d said.

  “I couldn’t handle that.”

  “It’s my right, as it is yours. If you respect me.”

  “Then ask me your question,” he’d said. “The same one as always.”

  She did. She knew just which question he meant.

  “If you can’t get out and I can’t get in?”

  And he’d answered.

  “We meet in the middle,” is what the mapmaker said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the tunnels. It means meeting underground. A rendezvous.”

  Shira stepped outside. She’d smiled and tossed back her hair, making the face she would make if he were sitting across from her, gazing.

  “Okay,” she says. “Sure.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “For one, that’s insane. And for two, the tunnels are closed. The tunnels to Egypt are done.”

  “I said, ‘meet in the middle.’ Egypt is not in between us. Egypt is on the other side.”

  “So what’s the middle?”

  “There are other tunnels.”

  “To where?”

  “Tunnels between Gaza and Israel. Military tunnels. Tunnels that run from your door to mine.”

  Shira remembered how she’d looked around then. She’d made a full spin, to see who might be near.

  “Are you serious?”

  “You prepare for the next war, as do we. You must know they are there.”

  “I don’t think we do.”

  “Let’s meet.”

  “In a tunnel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t I have to tell someone? They need to know.”

  “They do not need to know.”

  “People could die. They will die.”

  “Honestly, if something happens, whose people will be the ones dying? You think our tunnels will turn the tide? That they’ll open like a giant mouth and swallow Israel whole? What they’ll do is make martyrs to inspire new martyrs. Do you think Jerusalem will fall from a hole in the dirt?”

  “What if they grab another soldier? What if they make it to the nearest kibbutz?”

  “I didn’t ask you about what happens in war. I’m asking if you want to have dinner with me.”

  “In a tunnel? Underground?”

  “You don’t have to make it sound so dreary.”

  “What other way is there?”

  “Candlelight. A white tablecloth. For you, a bottle of wine.”

  “That does sound better.”

  “Yes, it does. Just picture it, the two of us in no-man’s-land, on the blurry line beneath neither country. Me and you, eating together between worlds. A dinner at the center of the earth.”

  2014, Gaza Border (Palestinian side)

  The mapmaker sits in an office that is not an office, but the living room of this very hulking man’s house. His host, bald-headed and jowled, looks to be strong as an ox, broad in the chest, big in the belly, with a forearm the size of the mapmaker’s leg.

  His host keeps excusing himself to step out into the alley, where he has coals heating up on the grill. When he comes back, he barely sits down before he’s off to the kitchen. Each time he goes he says, “Marinating,” in place of “Excuse me,” and then returns licking the same finger, which he must be using to test the taste of something good.

  A behemoth of a flat screen is mounted on the wall playing kids’ shows at a setting that the mapmaker finds to be distractingly loud. There are toys on the floor, but no children to be seen.

  A man introduced as �
�my idiot son,” who is probably thirty or thirty-five, leans against the wall opposite the TV, smoking a cigarette and staring at the mapmaker, suspect and cold.

  When his host finally settles in across the table, he tells that big, strong, suspect-of-the-mapmaker-looking son to go fan those coals.

  To the mapmaker, he says, “It’s an honor to have you in my home. I thank you for your service to our nation.”

  Modest, the mapmaker replies that the honor is his and then says, “They say you are the best.”

  “At what? At grilling? If so, that’s demonstrably true.”

  “It’s tunneling that I mean,” the mapmaker says, as frank as can be. “At engineering the routes, and smuggling things through them, they say you are without equal.”

  The man leans forward and points a threatening, fat finger. “You wouldn’t happen to be a stool pigeon, who’s going to get me killed by an Israeli drone if I accept the compliment?”

  “Would those who put us in touch have sent me, if so?”

  The man considers his guest and, after some contemplation, says, “In my heyday, I did it all. Things you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Yes,” the mapmaker says, “so they say.”

  “What did you hear, if you know already?”

  “They credit you with getting anything needed in, and anyone who needed, out. They say you brought enough cement for a skyscraper, enough steel for a bridge—or for a thousand thousand missiles to fight those who oppress us. They say you brought food for the hungry, and medicines for the sickly.”

  “Not just the food,” the man says. “The beasts the food comes from. I’ve brought goats and chickens, and more cows than I can count.”

  “That must be something to see, underground.”

  From the doorway, the son, who has reappeared, says, “It’s not the craziest by far.”

  “What’s the craziest, by far, then?” the mapmaker asks, ingratiating himself.

  Idiot or no, the father looks to his son, before deciding whether to talk. Then he says, “A rich customer wanted a classic car. A Mercedes 300SL, with the gull-wing doors,” and, as if by reflex, both father’s and son’s arms float up, to illustrate. “But it’s too wide for the widest tunnel. There’s no way to get it through. I try and figure for weeks, how to dig wider, and keep it from caving. Then it hits me. A show I saw once, about the Empire State Building, in New York. To make publicity for the Ford Motor Company, they wanted to put a Mustang on the roof as a stunt. But how to get it a hundred stories high? You can’t drive it up the stairs.”

  “Okay,” the mapmaker says.

  “What they did is, they cut it into pieces, and brought it in the elevators, and reassembled it on top. And I thought, what’s the difference, straight up or straight across? If it will fit through the tunnel in pieces, why not?” He sits back then and crosses his arms on his chest, as if to be admired. “We got it through with centimeters to spare.”

  “I bet you got rich off it too.”

  The man coughs a cough that sounds to be a mix of pneumonia and laughter.

  “I barely broke even. But, like the Ford people, one cannot put a price on good publicity. Even black marketeers need to spread the word.”

  “Well, it worked. I’ve brought my very special request to you.”

  “And I’d have loved to hear it, but the Egyptians have destroyed everything. We’d just finished a new route too. It had automated tracks, little flatbeds running off of motorcycle engines, zipping along.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the mapmaker says, as if there’d been a death in the family.

  “Yes. Like all Gaza’s tunnel millionaires, I’ve been forcibly retired.”

  “We’ve only just met,” the mapmaker says, “but you don’t seem the type to give up and just sit around.”

  His host taps at his temple, squinting an eye. “I’m busy here, working on the next wave. Whether it’s another five years or ten before they ease up, I’ll be ready when there’s opportunity below. I’m designing a micro-tunnel, using PVC pipe. Invisible to sonar, unbombable. And the trick? We pressurize it. You know? We make it pneumatic and shoot capsules back and forth. Small stuff. Money. Pharmaceuticals. We’ll whip things back and forth, faster than running to the store.”

  “Ingenious.”

  “Not my invention. I’ve been following the Mexicans, online. They do amazing things beneath the United States borders. My job is not to innovate, it is to evolve.”

  The mapmaker clears his throat. “If it’s evolution you’re after, I’ve come to ask for something never done before.”

  “If only I could help,” he says, offering a compassionate frown. His jowls make an impressive drop.

  “Is it all right if I choose not to believe you?” the mapmaker says.

  “Believe what you want. Everyone does these days.” He shrugs. “Tell me, though, if I were still in business, what might you want me to move?”

  “A woman,” the mapmaker says.

  “That’s why you come to me, full of drama? You want to get some cousin into Egypt. Why didn’t you say? If she isn’t on the lists, if her record is clean, we still do some medical tourism.”

  “Bribery and forgery aren’t technically smuggling,” the son says. “For us, medical tourism, it’s kind of a sideline.”

  The father turns to his son, his mood changing in a flash. “How are you still here? What color are my coals?”

  The son disappears into the kitchen and then outside with a tray of meat. When the door closes behind him, the mapmaker says, “The woman, she’s not my relative. And I said I needed help smuggling, but it’s not out that I’m after.”

  “Either direction, it’s the same issue. The routes are shut. The tunnels flooded and caved in.”

  “That I know,” the mapmaker says. “But it’s from Israel that I mean. It’s those tunnels that I’m after.”

  The mapmaker’s host turns bright red. He jumps up, grabbing the remote, and shuts off the TV. His son pokes his head in and he bellows at him, telling him to keep by the grill and keep that door closed.

  Turning back to the mapmaker, he says, full of fury, “What are you talking about? No such tunnels exist.”

  “I want to bring a woman in. A Jew. From Israel.”

  “A death sentence! For you, for her, and for me, probably just for discussing it.”

  “I told her the same,” the mapmaker says, fully agreeing. “Which is why I don’t want to bring her all the way in. I just want to meet her, underneath.”

  “What do you mean—meet her underneath?”

  “For a date. In whatever passage you can arrange.”

  “This is all about a date? You want to fuck someone in a tunnel?”

  “Careful,” the mapmaker says. “But, yes, it is a date. Think of it like a rental. I want to rent out a tunnel to Israel for an evening.”

  The man goes over to a side table and hunts around in a drawer. He comes up with a pack of cigarettes, the matches tucked in it. He lights one for himself and manically puffs away.

  When the nicotine hits and he can speak again, he says, “True madness.” And then he says, “Why in the world do you think there’s a tunnel to Israel?”

  “For the next war. The one that will surely come. I know that they’re there. And I know you’re the one who puts them there.”

  The man goes to the door. He locks it and leans his back against it.

  “Let us pretend,” he says, “that instead of a cigarette, it’s a gun that I dug out of that drawer.” Aiming the cigarette at the mapmaker’s face, he says, “Let’s act as if it’s a nine-millimeter pistol that I am pointing between your eyes.”

  “All right,” the mapmaker says.

  “Do you feel it?”

  The mapmaker responds with a look, not daring to nod.

  “Good,” he says. “Now, tell me. Is this some fake, double-cross-type fuckery that you bring us? Because I’ve let you into my home, and told you my business, and am now going to
feed you the food I have so passionately prepared.”

  The mapmaker, careful not to panic, and also careful not to insult by looking too calm, says, “This is a real and honest request.”

  “Because the kind of thing you’re asking touches on some heavy, ordered from the top, paid for by Iran type of shit. These tunnels that don’t exist are as serious as things get.”

  “What I ask is personal and private. I’m not trying to sneak out myself, or embark on a suicide mission. I am trying to see the woman I adore.”

  “Don’t you know she must be a spy who wants to find the tunnel entrance and maybe kill you inside it?”

  The mapmaker says, “I promise she isn’t,” which is far simpler, in the moment, than adding, “not anymore.”

  “And you’re not ratting us out like Sheikh Yousef’s boy?” Here he spits on the floor, a curse on that turncoat.

  “No,” the mapmaker says.

  “To bring a Jew into the tunnels—a woman—it is the worst of their bogeyman fears.”

  “Again, I’m not taking her anywhere. She, as much as me, wants to meet. We’d like to have dinner. To be in the same place, to touch.” It is as critical an instant as any he’d faced. How to say it, how to tell him, that she was the one for whom he hadn’t known he was waiting. That providence had made the least likely person the one he couldn’t live without. The mapmaker says, “I am a man trapped. And in love.”

  His host, the mapmaker can see, can neither believe what he’s hearing nor what he is considering himself. For he shakes his head, and circles the room, he coughs again, and laughs again, and stops to size up the mapmaker more than once. He puffs at that cigarette and jabs a finger the mapmaker’s way.

  “Okay,” he says. “Yes, all right. I’ll do it.”

  “Okay? For real?”

  He gives another giant, broad-bodied shrug.

  “Who can fight love?”

  2014, Black Site (near Tel Aviv)

  The guard brings the prisoner his favorites, a falafel in a lafa, a bottle of Eagle Malt, and—an American treat—a bag of ice. He is hoping his prisoner will eat. The guard takes a second bottle from his backpack, this one vodka that he’d frozen. It pours like syrup into the paper cups.