The crime scene, Beit Sahour, on the eastern edge of Bethlehem
4) TURF WAR
At first I found it frustrating that the politics of ancient Israel were confusing to me in exactly the same way as the politics of modern Israel, frustrating that I had such a poor grasp of either. At the time of David, the twelve tribes, themselves grouped into factions—Israel and Judah—were surrounded by enemies that included the Philistines, the Amalekites, the Ammonites, and the Phoenicians. It was hard for me to keep track of these names, hard because they didn’t concern me personally. It was hard for me to keep track of Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, etc. As a journalist, my job was to make all this transparent. Instead, I often felt less knowledgeable than the reader I was supposed to be informing.
11 Jerusalem Arab teens arrested yesterday for desecrating Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, I read in the Jerusalem Post on my second morning in Israel. I looked out at the cemetery from my hotel room in the German Colony south of Mount Zion. Still jet-lagged, I saw the Dome of the Rock shining bronze at dawn.
5) THE MYSTERY DEEPENS
The next day, I met with the journalist Oded Voss at a café across the street from the King David Hotel. Voss, a veteran of the First Lebanon War, is handsome, intelligent, with skeptical blue eyes and gray flecks in his neat beard and precisely cut hair. Over lunch, he recounted for me his efforts to cover the Bellen murder until the lack of new information—and the lack of public interest—caused him to stop. He said that the idea of Bellen leaving Tel Aviv on his own for an illegal nighttime journey to the West Bank made no sense to anyone. What did make sense was the killers leaving his body in the symbolic place that they did. “But the reason could be simple or complicated,” he went on. He started to elaborate, meeting my eyes, but seemed defeated by the effort.
“At least one of my fears has not materialized,” he said. “After six months, at least we don’t have a Palestinian sitting in jail for it.”
I asked why a Palestinian would want to murder someone like David Bellen. “In a sense, that’s right,” Voss said.
“Then what I’m asking is why the IDF would call it an act of terrorism.”
He looked at me before answering this. Later, I realized that during this moment he was parsing my naïveté, assessing its precise components.
“Jews are murdered here all the time,” he said. “The world doesn’t really like to remember that, but that might be why the IDF said what it said.”
He looked away as if scanning the traffic, his hands and forearms resting on the table. What I felt then was different from the mild shaming I’d felt from the El Al screeners at the airport. Until I got my bearings, I felt that I could not do this story, that I was not equipped for it, intellectually or otherwise. I went over the various scenarios. That Bellen had been murdered by extremist Jews who hated his book’s sacrilegious treatment of the David story. That he had been murdered by Palestinians, perhaps simply at random, perhaps because of his relative notoriety. Both scenarios seemed unlikely. There was another theory, only hinted at, that I’d found in an interview given by Bellen’s editor, Galit Levy. Levy declared that the murder could not be understood without answering the simple question of how someone could be run over by a truck as many as twelve times in a densely populated district like Beit Sahour without attracting any witnesses. I assumed she was implying the presence in Beit Sahour of a militia group or some type of organized crime.
“Those are some of the possibilities people come up with,” Voss said when I asked his opinion.
“But no one believes them.”
He shrugged one shoulder and let out a disgusted breath. “Believe. Not believe. What are the facts?”
6) NOT FUNNY
Around this time, I happened to watch the Pacino remake of Scarface. It’s not a good movie. It’s a bad movie, but it resonates—it resonates all across the globe. And I thought, why am I so bored with poetry? In the movie, once Tony Montana kills his way to the top, he has not even one second of happiness. A montage set to cheap music, then it’s coke addiction, bad sex, doom. I thought, that’s David, his whole rise and fall. That’s it.
—David Bellen, 2008
In America, Jewish writers are frequently, sometimes compulsively, funny. The writing of David Bellen started to make me think this was problematic. Kid Bethlehem is a cubist jumble of short numbered sections. In addition to poems, there are quotations, scraps of memoir, reportage, scripture, newspaper clippings. The book, particularly in light of Bellen’s violent death, has made the world look even more fragmented to me now, more disjointed, shattered by some profound if intangible trauma. I have found myself imitating its form and tone in this essay you’re reading now.
Kid Bethlehem
Trouble from the minute he left his sheep
and that rocky place
threatened by the lion and the bear
to soothe King Saul with his harp,
then kill Goliath with a small hard stone
A stone killer—
it was all the women talked about, so Saul
needed him hit
The war advanced on all fronts
Who knows
why any of this had to happen?
Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz, Babi Yar,
Murder Inc., Beirut
The rockets arcing toward Tel Aviv
As in days of old
before
the coming of
the King David Hotel
They said God was dead, but God is not
God is the small hard stone
in the boy’s sling
7) THE VALLEY OF ELAH
After our lunch that day, Voss went with me on what I thought might be a fool’s errand: one of my guidebooks indicated that somewhere near the junction of Route 38 and Route 383 was a hill, or tel, called Azeka, which looked down on the Valley of Elah, where David had killed Goliath.
We drove once again along the separation wall—Jewish settlements on one hillside, Arab settlements on the opposite ones, just as three thousand years ago it had been Israelites and Philistines. It was such an obvious parallel that I was embarrassed even to be thinking about it, sitting next to Voss in the Mercedes taxi. He wore a dark blue shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a black suit. While we drove, he solemnly checked his BlackBerry and made a few phone calls in Hebrew, a language I can read phonetically but I don’t speak.
Far outside Jerusalem, we entered a region of large farms and pine-covered mountains. The clouds thickened until the hillsides, with their undulating smooth stones and sparse bushes, looked uncannily biblical. We were lost. The driver pulled over and he and Voss had a conversation in Hebrew while they looked at the driver’s enormous folding map. I finally suggested that we ask the boy who was waiting at a rural bus stop just up the road. We drove there. The boy turned out to be a recent immigrant from Manchester, England. He wore surfer’s shorts and a white button-down shirt and a skullcap of multicolored yarn. I explained in English what we were trying to find, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. He leaned in the window and gave Voss and the driver precise directions in Hebrew.
“Lots of Brits coming into this area,” Voss grunted. “More true believers. Another wave.”
The road dead-ended at the top of the hill, so Voss and I got out of the car and continued up on foot. It was a steep rocky path and when I slipped a little, looking down at my camera, Voss caught me lightly by the arm. He did this out of simple instinct, but he was a little ceremonious about making sure I’d regained my balance. He was handsome and everything about his movements was imbued with the habits of handsomeness.
“A beautiful view,” he said at the top of the hill. “I guess you’ll expense the ride.”
“Not likely. Not for a story about a dead Israeli poet.”
The dry grass and weeds below us—gold, gray, brown, mustard—began to blaze up in their colors as the sun emerged through th
e clouds. I pictured the boy David running out in sandals, arms stabbing the air, a slingshot in his hand.
“It could have been a suicide,” Voss said. “Bellen’s death. That’s what I sometimes think.”
8) CITADEL
My first glimpse of the Old City of Jerusalem came after a picturesque climb up the western slope on a dirt path through pines and flowering shrubs. I took a chance right turn into the fortified wall and found myself in a silent alley of stone—stone steps, stone walls, all of it swelling with a gold light unlike anything I’d ever seen. The sky above it was cloudless and thickly blue. Because there were no people there—because it happened to be empty—the alley appeared timeless, the stairway a mystical symbol. I walked up the alley to the Zion Gate into an exotic place far more beautiful and seductive than I had expected. I had to come to terms with the powerful fact that Israel is physically beautiful. The name is beautiful—not just the sound, which is sonorous, but the meaning: “one who wrestles with God.” The idea of a people naming themselves that way is beautiful. I had to try hard not to be seduced. The stairs and the fortified walls were replicas of stairs and fortified walls from hundreds of years ago. The city itself was thousands of years older than those earlier stairs and fortified walls. When David first conquered Jerusalem and established his capital there, it had belonged to a forgotten people called the Jebusites, about whom we know nothing. I had to remember that the people who lived there now were as distant from the people who had built the original city as I was.
9) THE VIEW FROM THE HILL
A suicide. I tried to think my way through this statement as we stood there on top of Tel Azeka. The more I thought about it the more it seemed that Voss was making some kind of absurdist joke. We were walking down the other side of the hill now toward the dry creek bed near the highway, the creek bed where three thousand years ago David had chosen the stone for his slingshot. Everything below was green and beige—the farm fields in the valley, the pines and the cedars—but the landscape was fixed in the present by the road and the industrial-style planting of the crops. Voss began to elaborate, after I prodded him. Imagine you were sixty-five years old, he said, with a history of depression and your life’s work once again about to reveal itself as virtually irrelevant. The cease-fire with Hamas had just ended, the Gaza War was imminent, your most recent book of poems—a prize-winning book you had spent five years writing—had sold just a thousand copies, received a mixture of respectful and hostile reviews, and within a few months was all but forgotten except by some fanatics who hadn’t actually read it. He said that he himself had experienced severe depressions in the past, periods of weeks or even months when the pointlessness of his work, or a guilty memory, or the sense that the world was winding down—all these forms of despair that sound so frivolous when you’re on the other side of them—became constant and fixed. He would see very clearly how little difference it made if he lived or died. In that disturbed state of mind, the only thing that kept Voss from killing himself, he said, was the thought of his family and friends, and how much it would sadden them. He said that if he’d been able to imagine a way to disguise the suicide as an accident or a murder, we might not be taking this walk right now.
Creek bed, Valley of Elah
He was squinting a little in the sunlight—it struck me as notable somehow that he wasn’t wearing sunglasses. He walked with his hands held near his chest, slowly massaging the knuckles of one hand with the fingertips of the other, elegant in his dark suit. I pictured the truck driving Bellen into Bethlehem, the man at the wheel not a terrorist or a fanatic but a strange kind of accomplice. Voss had gone silent and now he watched his feet on the uneven ground, then looked up as if to survey the landscape with fresh eyes. “I never knew this place was actually here,” he said, amused. We were almost all the way down the hillside. Between the rocks jutted thorny weeds with flowers like yellow explosions. The creek bed was choked with dead grass and thistle almost chest high. There was a culvert made of concrete and steel. Voss kicked aside some litter, a potato chip bag, then picked up a stone. You couldn’t go into that dry creek bed and not pick up a stone.
“If you want to go to Tel Aviv, I’ll explain more,” he said.
“I thought you were the one who cared only about the facts.”
“That’s not the kind of piece you’re interested in.”
“How do you know?”
He gestured at the empty landscape and let the stone fall. “Look where we are. Not exactly an essential stop.”
10) JET LAG
Around eight o’clock that night, we woke up in my hotel room—or rather, I woke up—Voss was already sitting in the chair by the window, reading. Still jet-lagged, feeling drugged by it, I could have slept much longer. I had dreamed of violent attacks on villages in the desert, men on camels setting tents on fire, hacking at people with machetes. The shades were drawn, and in the faint ring of yellow light from a single lamp, Voss looked like some otherworldly functionary scanning the newspaper in his suit and large black shoes. We’d had a drink in the bar—a club soda for Voss, who doesn’t drink liquor—and I said that I needed a shower, and he’d simply nodded, holding his ground. I’d seen this coming since that moment I’d slipped on the path at Tel Azeka and he’d caught my arm. He reached his hand out now to pay for the drinks and I stopped him, putting my hand on top of his. His hair had been tousled outside and it gave him a preoccupied, middle-aged look, especially with his suit, which was still remarkably clean. In the elevator upstairs we didn’t look at each other, much less touch, nor did we talk. It was as we stepped into the room that he reached for me. I was wet before he reached for me. He shut the door and we kissed, Voss pulling my face to his. Either you’ll trust me for telling you even this, or you’ll distrust me for telling you even this. It had something to do with the way he carried himself, his wariness. He seemed to be always signaling that he was a corrupt person, that he had degraded himself. He knew this was attractive but that didn’t mean it was an act. There are men who think about their own body in addition to yours. Voss wasn’t one of them. He came at me thinking about only one thing.
“You’re still here,” I said now. “I thought you would have left.”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll put this moment in the piece too,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it happened. Because it sheds light on everything else.”
The room was a tranquilizing blend of contemporary patterns and Levantine colors—black and red and gold. I had a Hebrew name, Voss said—why had I never been to Israel? It was a long story, I answered. He asked if I had been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and I told him no, I had no real interest in it. He said I should see it. We made plans to go see it together after we finished the story.
11) BATHSHEBA
Ivan Schwebel paints the episode many different ways, but my favorite paintings are not of Bathsheba but of her wronged husband, Uriah. Almost the first thing David does as king in his new capital, Jerusalem, is to betray one of the very men who had helped him in his rise: he sees the naked Bathsheba and he sends his men for her. Jerusalem and all it might mean—shelter, peace, a unified state, his own glory or God’s—is something he seems compelled to throw away. Uriah “lay at the entrance to the king’s house with all the servants of his master,” loyally guarding the palace. Inside, David is sleeping with Bathsheba. She becomes pregnant. When that happens, David has to try very hard to get Uriah to sleep with her too, to hide his own paternity, but Uriah refuses to leave his post. “The Ark and Israel and Judah are sitting in huts,” he says, “and my master Joab and my master’s servants are encamped in the open field, and shall I then come to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? By your life, by your very life, I will not do this thing.”
David gets him drunk. In one of Schwebel’s renderings, Uriah is a smiling young IDF private dressed in green fatigues and cap, still unshaven from the battlefront. He’s seated at a ta
ble before a glass of wine, and the David who coaxes him toward drunkenness, hand on Uriah’s shoulder, is a gray-haired man in the open-necked sport shirt and white slacks of a corrupt city councilman or an aging mobster. Even drunk, Uriah refuses to leave his post. The solution David comes up with is to write a letter to his commanding general, Joab: “Put Uriah in the face of the fiercest battling and draw back, so that he will be struck down and die.” Uriah is killed by the Philistines. This is to say that he dies from multiple contusions, bludgeoned or stabbed, perhaps trampled on the ground by horses. The IDF has never released photographs of David Bellen’s mutilated corpse. They identified it by the cards in his wallet. Bald and stocky, Bellen lamented, caustically, the frequently unbridgeable distance between himself and the beautiful young women he would see on the beach in Tel Aviv. He wrote that they liked “gold rope, barbed wire tattoo / the high sheen of / the Kid with his shirt off.” In his poems, Bellen never condemns David, even for ordering the murder of Uriah. If anything, Bellen seems to admire David for his ruthless vitality. It’s not hard to see how this very admiration, expressed without piety or reverence, might have gotten Bellen killed.
12) THE SON
I went with Voss to visit Bellen’s son, Eliav, in his shop in the mountain town of Tsfat, near the Golan Heights and the border with Lebanon. Tsfat, an odd mix of Hasidim and New Age hippies, has been a center of Jewish mysticism since the fifteenth century, a place where revered kabbalists founded small synagogues that are still there today. Eliav’s shop, like many in the town, deals in Jewish-themed art in a kitsch style loosely derived from Chagall. On either side of the entrance hung multicolored amulets called hamsas in the shape of disembodied hands meant to ward off the evil eye. As Bellen’s only child, Eliav had come into possession of his father’s effects after he died. On our drive up from Jerusalem, Voss had told me that Eliav’s sale of much of this inheritance, after years of personal problems, including long struggles with drug addiction, had financed the shop in Tsfat.
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