by Tova Reich
Ishmael and Isaac, two traumatized sons of one God-obsessed father. No record exists that they ever had contact again with their faith-crazed old man until together they buried him in the Cave of the Machpelah. Arab and Jew, partners in the business of death, bleeding into each other, like Shahid metamorphosed into a Hasid, Leyla reflected, the boy who was once his father’s plumage, groomed for splendor and legend, swindled by the rabbis into trading in the material rewards of Islam in paradise for the material rewards of the Jews in the Garden of Eden, seventy-two perfumed houris with translucent skin and eternally renewable virginities forfeited in exchange for an old wife converted into a footstool reeking of overcooked wild ox and leviathan, a lousy deal in anyone’s book. Leyla’s eyes followed Shahid, freely infiltrating the innermost circles nearest to the museum with the buggy and the veiled sister at his side. Had he still resembled the lithe Arab boy with the checked kaffiyeh drawn across his face and the taut slingshot taking aim in the alleys of Ramallah that he once was in an earlier chapter, it would have been inconceivable for him to be admitted into those rarefied zones. Here was the best of all incognitos, Leyla saw, if only he could still be enticed and conscripted. Who would suspect a pious Jew? Under his fringed garment they would strap enough explosives to blow up the entire Israeli Knesset and all of its Jewish clowns one sunny day as the Arab delegation sucks in the fragrant smoke of their narghiles in their bright new cabanas on the beaches of Tel Aviv; in the creamy satin band inside his black Borsalino hat a dagger would be slipped with which to overcome the pilot in the cockpit and slam the jet with all of its passengers swaying in prayer into the sands of the Negev, straight into the nuclear reactor of Dimona, which doesn’t exist.
“Too Jew for you?” Tommy Messiah whispered into her ear, cohabiting her thoughts, his eye, like hers, on the Hasid while not for even one second divesting from pushing his dirt. “Checked out Shimshon lately? This is his ass.” He gave the donkey’s bridle an emphatic tug.
This was the jolt Leyla needed to propel herself forward. She began to make her way toward the ring of the movers and shakers nearest to the hijacked museum. Yes, she knew she had recognized this ass from somewhere, she realized as she approached the epicenter. She had seen Shimshon straddling its bare back, riding among the olive trees along the terraced hills of Samaria. This was only a short while after he had been released from Tel Mond prison, where he had been sent on drug-dealing charges, and where, until his spectacular penance and return to the original faith under the influence of fellow inmates serving time for conspiring to replace the golden Dome of the Rock with the Third Temple, he had sat in his cell all day composing his pathetic letters to her, expecting a reply merely because for once in his life this Zionist boor had done the gallant thing and taken the rap on himself rather than passing the buck, as usual, to the woman who made him do it, the woman who had beguiled him. Leyla had been behind the wheel of her silver Mercedes with the top down when she had spotted him on the ass. Her hair was bound up in her silk Hermes scarf, her eyes were protected from betraying her by her celebrity shades, and Abu Shahid was beside her in the passenger seat, smoking a foul-smelling Noblesse to which he had remained true from his bohemian days in Sheikh Jarrah and Abu Tor, flicking the ashes onto the road, when they were inconvenienced by being obliged to come to a complete halt to allow the procession of jokers to pass: Shimshon with full black Nazirite beard riding atop the ass in his Israelite turban and white biblical tunic with its blue fringes, strumming a Davidic harp; behind him a bride, arrayed in a golden crown delineating the walls of the old city of Jerusalem, being transported to her domed wedding canopy in a royal Solomonic litter carried on poles by four bearers, among whom Leyla immediately recognized the hallucinating twins Eldad and Medad, from the class trip to the Auschwitz death camp so many years before, adorned in wreaths of rosemary and myrrh. “I know that guy,” Leyla had said to Abu Shahid. “An ex-con. A dealer in Ecstasy.”
What sort of comfort might now be derived from the recognition that, as Tommy Messiah had correctly insinuated, however extreme Shahid might appear in his Jewish emanation—and he was definitely a cultic case, Leyla kept her eye fastened upon him as she drew closer to where the Hasid and his nun with their carriage were navigating the labyrinth of eminences—next to a freak like Shimshon he looked more or less like one of the boys? But the real question was, Who in a million years would ever have imagined that she would run into Shimshon’s white ass again of all asses, right here on Fourteenth Street in Washington, D.C., in front of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, of all places, in the middle of a takeover crisis no less? And how could she be sure that this really was Shimshon’s ass, as Tommy Messiah maintained? Was she supposed to be able to tell one ass from another merely because she was from the Middle East? Wasn’t it possible, after all, that the livestock had simply strayed across the street from the Department of Agriculture? Above all, why in the world would Tommy Messiah have gone to all the trouble and expense of importing an ass for special effects all the way from the Holy Land when no doubt there were more than enough available right here in the land of plenty, in Christian America, where snow-white redemption asses were probably already being mass-produced just as red heifers were being bred, perfect and without a blemish, for purification rituals in the restored Temple? The answer was obvious, Leyla finally understood. Tommy Messiah was putting her on; he had invented this preposterous story of Shimshon’s ass either to test her or to make a fool of her—to test if she got the joke, to make an ass of her by pushing in her face the corrosive fact that she was the joke.
Stiffening to shake off her own female absurdity and fraudulence, Leyla now sought to position herself among the main players in the inner circle, where, she noted, not a single other woman was present. She took pains to keep as far away as possible from the representatives of alternative Holocausts who had materialized to stake their claim as word of the universalist occupation of the museum spread. It was not only critical to establish her position as the chief intermediary and public relations spokesman for United Holocausts, a coalition of serious prime-time Holocausts in every way at least as worthy as the Jewish Holocaust, but for Leyla personally, it was no less important to ensure that the Palestinian Holocaust, her own people’s naqba, be accorded its rightful place in the first tier of the pantheon of Holocausts. True, the credo of United Holocausts was to respect all Holocausts equally in all their multifarious diversity of suffering and victimization, but Leyla was exquisitely mindful to keep her distance publicly from the chicken holocaust lady, for example, who, even in that heat, was present to bear witness in her heavy feathered costume strung with heartbreaking photos of abused poultry rescued from the processing industry, pounding on her drum and chanting, “All broilers are my brothers, all fowl are my ‘family.’” The ferret holocaust, the mad cow holocaust, the experimental and research animals holocaust, the right-to-bear-arms holocaust, the Confederate flag holocaust, the Falun Gong holocaust, the witches and Wiccans holocaust, the aliens and extraterrestrials holocaust, and so on and so forth across a topography populated by seeming crackpots and cranks—each and every one of these lowercase holocausts without exception had to be shunned in the short run for the sake of the ultimate legitimization and triumph of their cause.
For this strategic reason, Leyla also pretended not to notice her old friend from the interfaith and feminist and human rights scene in Greater Israel or Greater Palestine, depending on which side of the line you squatted at, Ivriya Himmelhoch—because Ivriya’s deserted wives holocaust, and more specifically her Jewish deserted wives holocaust, her agunot’s holocaust of wives chained by the harshness of rabbinical decree to husbands who had vanished without a trace or a death certificate, was, while worthy, by no means a major-league Holocaust. Technically, it was a sub-subspecialty of the larger Women’s Holocaust—in some respects, though far less understandable and forgivable in cultural and human terms, like the murders by blood relatives of Muslim women accuse
d of dishonoring their families, another subcategory of the Women’s Holocaust that happened to be close to Leyla’s heart but that also regrettably had to be put for the moment on the back burner in the overriding interest of the greater joint effort.
Leyla had heard through the New Age and interfaith and vegan grapevine that Ivriya was in the States to advocate on behalf of the deserted wives of the World Trade Center in New York, which had been reduced to the dust from which it had risen. This was an added reason to try to avoid her, since of course there was the delicate issue that it had been Leyla’s own people, provoked beyond endurance by a justified hatred of that shitty little country Israel, the cause of all the trouble, and its best friend America, who had ignited the conflagration resulting in these deserted wives whom the legalistic rabbis now refused to release into widowhood, rejecting as proof of death in the absence of a body the fact that the missing husbands never returned after setting out to their regular jobs in the towers that morning in September and sending home e-mails of farewell from their offices in the fiery clouds. Perhaps that was the morning of all mornings that they had been inspired to wander off to the land where deserting husbands go, and as for e-mails, they can be beamed from anywhere in the universe, as even the most rigid and reactionary of the rabbis in their black satin caftans knew very well as they conducted their question-and-answer responsa exchanges regarding law and practice via high-tech Internet hookups—Is a golem (provided it’s not a female golem) acceptable as one of the ten worshippers required for a minyan? May a man lie in a woman’s bosom in the sunlight if she needs to check him for head lice? If your PalmPilot in which you have programmed holy texts containing God’s name falls to the ground, should you kiss it when you pick it up?
Still, it was not a simple matter for Leyla to pretend that she had not noticed Ivriya Himmelhoch. In the solidity of her wheelchair, to which she had been confined years earlier when she was still a young woman after a fall from a horse, the price exacted from her for riding carefree and bare-breasted, the Lady Godiva of the Galilee, Ivriya was a focal point and axis in whichever setting she happened to be. If she was there, you noticed her, like a centerpiece on the table. You had to communicate over or around her. She was a manifest obstruction requiring the acknowledgment of a detour, and she recognized her power. Now, as Leyla followed the Hasid and the nun with their baby carriage to the heart of the action at the very front of the museum, Ivriya followed from behind. Leyla was wedged in by wheels, and Ivriya was calling her name.
In this way they made their passage through the tangle of men who mattered, piled up against each other in a killer sport huddle, the knots of their ties loosened, great craters of perspiration at their armpits, their jackets slung campaign-style over one shoulder, sweat pouring down from their temples, arriving at the frontline just as those two museum titans, Chief of Staff Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus and Council Member the Honorable Norman Messer Esquire son of the chairman, addressing a team of top officers in full battle gear from the highest ranks of the FBI’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special commando force, uttered in unison their immortal words, “I’m in charge here!”
With a seamless movement, Leyla Salmani and Ivriya Himmelhoch turned to each other. “Jinx,” they absurdly burst out in unison. Then, caught up together high on the wave of the ridiculous, taking care not to break the spell by uttering another word, they instantly linked pinkies to make a wish, inspired by the remembered stimulus from their childhood games—the astonishing and potentially incredibly auspicious coincidence of two people saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, even though technically, according to the rules for optimal wish-granting success, it was the two men, and not they, who had first spoken at once. Still, the women registered their wishes mutely, with fingers hooked. Then, still precisely together, they exploded, erupting into great honks and snorts of helpless laughter. It was impossible to hold back, even as all the important men turned to glare at them for their failure of seriousness and Norman, surreptitiously checking his fly, inquired, “Excuse me, ladies, is something funny?” and Monty took the liberty in this emergency of whispering into Leyla’s unplugged ear an offer to bring her a drink of water—or maybe, from that Balaam prophet-for-hire over there with his donkey, an ice cream cone to lick? They were doubled over, Leyla and Ivriya, choking, retching up convulsive shreds of laughter, charged with surging currents of laughter, their thoughts entwined as their fingers had been, the corroboration of words unnecessary between them—trembling as one lest the terrible laughter merge into terrible weeping and tears come streaming from their eyes and mortifying wetness from who knows where else as they shared their acute consciousness of the ridiculousness of these puny mortal men puffed up with their affairs and strutting about like cocks under the indifferent eye of the sun.
A moment or two later, however, again almost exactly in concert, the two women recovered, startling themselves back to propriety and business. They turned from each other without a word, as from a mutual embarrassment, which, in order to be expunged, demanded mutual denial and rejection. To Ivriya it was evident that she would not acquire Holocaust certification for her deserted wives through Leyla. Adroitly maneuvering her wheelchair through the power clot, she made her way to the fringes where the celebrity columnist Crusher Casey was dictating into a phone his seven-hundred-and-fifty-word featured commentary for his appearance on the prime-time news that evening, to be recycled as the print version in the next morning’s newspapers. Ivriya was well aware that Casey, in his bow tie and spats and three-piece pinstripe suit, even in that heat, was a conservative ideologue and therefore not prone to be correctly solicitous of a woman in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down whose cause, moreover, challenged traditional male establishment religious authority. Even so, she was sufficiently politically savvy to appreciate that Casey had an unmatched forum and following, Casey’s columns were published and broadcast worldwide, he was disproportionately powerful and influential; if by a stroke of good luck—a breakthrough for her cause was what she had secretly wished for, after all—he inclined himself favorably toward her and her flock of agunot twisting their tissues in desolate unresolved abandonment, the benefits in terms of public awareness and raised consciousness could be stupendous. In the face of this potential outcome, what did her own personal dignity or self-respect matter? Ivriya was prepared to demean herself, she would assume the posture of a supplicant, hover at the edge of the great man’s overrefined orbit while he went on dictating, wheezing through his rhetorical flourishes in consequence of a full frontal assault by the allergens to which he was so exquisitely sensitive in that hot pendulous air, loath nevertheless to sully the finely spun twin-peaked silk handkerchief poking up from his breast pocket, wheezing and dictating relentlessly while rigidly ignoring Ivriya at his periphery except for the instances when he automatically lowered his hand in her direction without actually glancing her way to receive another Kleenex after the taken-for-granted appearance of the first, claiming one after another, which she dutifully placed in his palm from the traveling box she kept among her essential supplies in an easily accessible case in her wheelchair, tucked against the arm.
Cocking her chin perkily upward, fixing her eyes upon the media star with the adoration she calculated might soften him, passing the tissues up as needed to the powdery hand dangling blindly above her from time to time to receive them, Ivriya dedicated herself to earning her petitioner’s chits as Casey held forth and expatiated—opening with a witty account of the naked grab for power in the museum leadership vacuum created by the takeover, the leap into the breach of those two pushy little poo-bahs, Pincus the wife beater, whom Casey had once sensationally profiled when he still wore his reporter’s hat (and by the way, in all due modesty, Casey parenthesized, he was firmly convinced that thanks to that rigorous bit of investigative work, he deserved full credit for keeping this cowboy out of the director’s saddle of this sui generis museum), and Messer junior, that pompous little
weasel and jerk; these two pitiful climbers, Casey intoned, had certainly come off way too Al open quote “I’m-In-Charge-Here” close quote Haig—the memorable words uttered by the clueless general slash secretary of state following the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, a gaffe he would drag along behind him as his main piece of baggage directly into his New York Times obituary. From there Casey moved on to an arch and entertaining laundry list of the sundry assortment of Holocaust pretenders who had precipitated this crisis, including—would you believe?—an ambassador from the so-called Fur Holocaust, insisting on a moral equivalency with the Jewish Holocaust, the entire vile usurpation spearheaded by an African-American for whom even the benefits personally accrued from affirmative action were not regarded as reparation enough; as far as Casey was concerned, and here, before ending this section with a quotation from Machiavelli concerning the fundamental beastlike nature of humankind, he repeated his policy proposal, which he had articulated several times before, namely, that every Negro male and female in America who is a proven descendant of slaves should be handed a onetime lump-sum payment of restitution on condition they sign an agreement to shut up once and for all about lowered self-esteem and being dissed and any and all other useless gripes and grievances—enough is enough, final payment, case closed. The concluding and most crucial section of Casey’s commentary commenced with a forceful reiteration of his unyielding guiding principle—No Negotiating With Terrorists, Period. This principle, he asserted, overrides all hostage considerations, all moral and ethical scruples and niceties, and, it goes without saying, all potential consequences to the museum infrastructure and collections, which essentially contained very few unique artifacts in any case or objects of value; an international fund-raising campaign of the sort the museum’s contributors and creators were legendary at mounting would do the trick of replacing every item and then some in no time at all. Whatever it takes to get the job done, that’s what we have to do, Casey asserted, segueing directly from there to the laying out of his battle plan: A lightning strike, that was the crux of it, blitz the buggers to kingdom come, all kinds of sexy stuff, swoop and poop—for God’s sake, what’s needed here is a little adult supervision! The M.O. would be a limited friendly-fire air war to storm the complex—first, by the insertion of an entry device into the roof through which deluge hoses would be trained on the targets to scare the living you-know-what out of them; then, an infusion of tear gas to smoke them out of their holes; last, if resistance persists, the delivery of a small compact bomb, neatly pinpointed and targeted for minimum collateral damage and maximum percussive and explosive effect. “Nice is nice,” Crusher Casey hurtled triumphantly to the finish with his familiar epigrammatic sign-off as Ivriya Himmelhoch cleared her throat huskily and gesticulated desperately for his attention, “but Right is right!” Satisfied that he had the handle on the situation, that there was nothing new here that he had not already seen and heard and known before, as usual, and mindful of the need to ration his public appearances as a major media figure to maintain their market value, Casey clicked off his phone, slipped it into its designated compartment inside his jacket pocket, and strode off briskly, executing, in passing, a satisfying dunk shot with his wadded-up ball of used tissues into the receptacle conveniently presented by the lap that was Ivriya.