The Ascent of Eli Israel

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn

  That weekend Kravetz and Shawn got drunk at Haymakers and Shawn introduced Kravetz to Holly Jaundice, the singer of a local punk band.

  “Have fun,” Shawn called after them as they stumbled out of the bar.

  And now in Jerusalem, Shawn called down the street after the woman, mangling the ancient Hebrew as he shouted.

  “Shut up,” Kravetz said. “Will you just shut up.”

  Christmas Day, Kravetz decided he should have called Jana to wish her a “Merry Christmas.” Shawn had taken an Arab taxi to Bethlehem, hoping to catch some hysterical pilgrims in Manger Square. He still hadn’t returned. Kravetz had picked up the phone several times and even dialed Jana’s number, but always hung up before anyone answered. He thought that, somehow, thinking about her with the phone in his hand would be enough to make her pick up the phone and call him. He just wanted to hear her talk like old times, the way they used to. He wanted to apologize and to hear her say, “Me too.” Sometimes his hand slipped down and he began to stroke himself, but he couldn’t think of Jana. It just made him too sad, as if she were a ghost he couldn’t get his arms around.

  So You Should Never Forget

  New Year’s Eve, Kravetz and Shawn went to Elijah’s Cup for drinks. The bar was packed, and loud Israeli music boomed from the speakers. They found a table near the back of the bar and sat down. Kravetz could tell that Shawn had slept with at least two or three of the girls they had passed by the way they stiffened as he walked past.

  “To a new year,” Shawn said. “This one’s on me.”

  Kravetz noticed a graffito etched into the table — The sex life of the Egyptian Sphinx was lonely / reserved for Egyptian Kinx — and said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  “At least let me buy you a beer. You won’t even let me give you money for rent.”

  “That’s so I can throw you out whenever I want,” Kravetz said, laughing.

  Shawn did not laugh. “I’m buying you a beer.”

  They drank two or three beers, and Shawn hugged the waitress, saying, “Sylvester Tov!” Kravetz always felt good up until three beers, and looked around the room hopefully. It was only later that he began to feel gloomy.

  A large crowd had gathered across the bar at the table where the infamous Asher was sitting in his usual seat. People stood on chairs and climbed onto each other’s shoulders. They sang “Auld Lang Syne,” and swayed rhythmically.

  “What’s going on?” Shawn said, grabbing his camera before Kravetz could answer.

  Shawn pressed his head between a pair of thighs, and Kravetz could see that Asher had a skinny, blond Germanlooking guy pinned to the table. Now the crowd was chanting, “Go! Go! Go! Go!” as Asher dipped a needle into a bottle of India ink. His eyes looked washed out and distant, as gray as dirty ice. Kravetz had heard stories about Asher, but never believed them. He raised his tattooed arm in the air, and jabbed the needle into the German’s arm shouting, “Never forget! Never forget! Never forget!” The crowd roared with laughter, and Shawn burrowed his way through the crowd, onto the table. “I need light,” he called. “Move back!”

  But the crowd only moved closer, as Asher continued to jab away at the poor German’s arm. Kravetz could hear Shawn saying, “Perfect. Fucking perfect,” and imagined the title So You Should Never Forget appearing at the top of the postcard. And suddenly Asher was aware of his surroundings, and he reached up to grab Shawn by the neck with his cleaver-like hand.

  “You,” he said, pulling Shawn close. The German was still pinned to the table with his other massive hand. “Do you remember . . .”

  “What?” Shawn said, his nasal voice rising.

  “Do you remember?” Asher asked, pulling Shawn closer.

  Kravetz tumbled onto the table over the top of Shawn, landing on Asher’s arm. “Yes, he remembers! That’s what the camera is for,” Kravetz said.

  “All right, break it up!” a black bouncer from Chicago said, pulling bodies away. “Everybody back to your tables before I bust some heads!” He turned to Asher. “Let’s go,” and he led Asher out of the bar.

  “You saved me,” Shawn said, running his fingers through his hair. “Fuck. I hope there was enough light.”

  “We’re even, okay,” Kravetz said.

  Later, they were dancing at The Shelter, which was decorated like a 1950s fallout shelter. It was a new year, and Kravetz was drunk, as bodies spun all around him. He saw Shawn jumping around to the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” and felt his own blood pumping through him. Shawn appeared a few moments later, sweating, with a girl on his arm. “Stuart!” he shouted, “this is Amy!”

  “Hi!” she said, extending her hand. She wore her blonde hair in a long ponytail, red lipstick, and a short skirt. The strobe light made her face look sunken and sickly. “Wanna dance?” She pulled Kravetz into the swaying mass of bodies, where soldiers’ M-16s slapped against their arching backs as they danced. Two girls wearing gas masks and bikinis bounced past them.

  Shawn called out, “You owe me, buddy!”

  She put her arms around him and he smelled her beery breath. He thought of Amichai’s lines again: “People use each other / as healing for their pain. They put each other / on their existential wounds, / on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand. / They hold each other hard and won’t let go.” And he thought of taking her up his dark, noisy elevator, sliding his hand in her pants as he fumbled for the keys to his apartment. But it wasn’t Jana, and she wouldn’t say, “Thanks for fingering me,” and she wouldn’t say, “I really love you,” after he fucked her. He turned to look in Amy’s face but she was looking away toward a group of her friends dancing on the bar.

  A few minutes later, Kravetz pulled Shawn outside into the cool damp air. His heart thumped so hard he thought he might throw up. Shawn lit a cigarette and mopped his face with the corner of his shirt. “What’s going on?”

  “I think I’m going to call Jana.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t you having fun?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Kravetz said. “It’s just, having my arms around that girl made me think of her. You know what I mean?”

  “Bullshit,” Shawn said as an army jeep drove past, its blue light flashing. He pulled his Polaroid out of his jacket pocket. He aimed the camera at Kravetz and snapped a shot.

  “I’m going to call her,” Kravetz said, ignoring the picture. He walked away from The Shelter.

  “Do you want her to think you’re weak?” Shawn called after him.

  “I just want her to think of me.”

  “Come back here and look at this picture,” Shawn called. “I don’t want you to ever forget what the face of defeat looks like.”

  “I’m calling her,” Kravetz said weakly, though he realized now that Shawn was right — he couldn’t call her.

  Dead Souls

  It was a day before the Palestinian elections, and a cold January rain was falling from the gray sky. Jews both supporting and opposed to the Oslo peace plan took to the streets in full force. With Palestinians voting in their contested half of Jerusalem something was bound to happen, and Shawn planned to catch it on film. Shawn made Kravetz a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, and cucumbers. He wore no shirt when he served it to Kravetz. He had a Star of David that he had gotten five summers earlier at the port of Haifa tattooed on his right shoulder, a Misfits skull on his left. The tattoos looked strange to Kravetz now, though he had said they were cool when he first saw them, and had once wanted a local band’s name tattooed on his arm.

  “Do you have to smell everything before you eat it?” Shawn said.

  Shawn smoked a cigarette as Kravetz ate.

  “Do you mind if I come with you today?” Kravetz said, ignoring the question.

  “Oh, now you want to be my assistant. You look like a groupie wearing that ‘Peace Now’ T-shirt.”

  “It’s just I don’t have classes today,” Kravetz said.

  The phone rang in the hallway, and Kravetz dropped his spoon into his yogurt. “Yo
u get it,” he said to Shawn.

  Shawn reappeared a few minutes later.

  “Who was it?” Kravetz asked.

  “Nobody.”

  “What do you mean, nobody? It had to be somebody.”

  “Shut up and eat,” Shawn said.

  “No, I want to know who it was. I pay the phone bill. Who was it?”

  “Fine,” Shawn said, lighting a cigarette and taking a slow drag. “It was Jana.”

  “What?” Kravetz shouted. “Why didn’t you give me the phone?”

  “She called for me,” Shawn said.

  “Bullshit,” Kravetz croaked.

  “It’s true.”

  “She hates you,” Kravetz said, his voice breaking. “She thinks you’re arrogant and manipulative. She hates you.” Kravetz covered his mouth with his hand, and then buried his head in the other hand. “You think you’re fucking Sid Vicious.”

  “Ouch,” Shawn said. “Are you coming, man?”

  Kravetz didn’t say anything.

  “Fine. I’ll see you later.”

  After Shawn left, Kravetz dialed Jana’s number and it rang and rang, but nobody answered. It was the middle of the night in New York. He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling, as the morning sun shined into his eyes, and he convinced himself that Jana must have called Shawn to speak about her and Stuart. They’d been together almost four years. You don’t just love somebody and then never speak to them again.

  Shawn stayed out all day taking pictures. Kravetz wandered into Shawn’s dark room. He kept the iron shutters closed so the room smelled like an ashtray. Both carpets were rolled up in the corner, exposing the cracked, tiled floor. Half-finished incense sticks and yahrtzeit candles in small tin cups with the prime minister’s face pasted on the front were strewn about the room. Shit, he even fucks to the light of memorial candles, Kravetz thought. He saw photos taped to the walls, and piled on his desk; a naked girl on a camel, another with some sheep, one with huge breasts and her arms outstretched as if she were waiting to be crucified. It’s all crap, Kravetz thought.

  Kravetz phoned Jana every night for three weeks, but nobody ever answered. When he heard her low voice on the machine he was reminded of conversations they had had. The first time she had said, “You have a beautiful prick,” or the time she had innocently asked, “Do love and loathe mean the same thing?” He remembered the time she had cried to him about how she missed her grandfather in Riga, and how her voice had cracked, and how he had heard her accent seep in.

  Some nights he heard girlish laughter from the next room and Shawn imitating their accents in his high nasal voice. One night Shawn knocked on Stuart’s door and announced, as he swayed under the weight of alcohol, “You can now call me Doctor Professor Moses Kink. Here are my ten commandments of kink. . . .”

  He had slathered gel in his hair so it stood up in devil-locks at the front like two horns.

  “Shut the fucking door,” Kravetz said. “What is it? A German or a Swede this time?”

  “All by my lonesome tonight,” Shawn said.

  “Tell me,” Kravetz said, sitting up in bed. “How many?”

  “What?” Shawn said, smiling. “How many what?”

  “Good night,” Kravetz said, turning away from Shawn.

  “All right, my son,” Shawn said. He was never able to resist talking about himself. “The Doctor Professor Kink has had say, seventy-five, give or take. . . .”

  “Give or take what?”

  “Do you want to see the Polaroids?” Shawn said, twisting the horns on his head. He disappeared into his room for a moment. “I’ve got them all.” He returned with a small shoe box cradled in his arms. He began flinging the photos at Kravetz. “Here. This one cried because she was too tight. This one bit. This one, this was the fat one.” He kept firing the Polaroids at Kravetz. “This one was married, this one . . .”

  “Shit,” Kravetz said. He had only slept with one woman before Jana and one while he was with her.

  Shawn’s back stiffened and he became serious. “What? Since I was thirteen, that’s less than ten a year. About point seven one two six five four women per month. Do the math. It’s not that much. Seriously.”

  “That’s crazy,” Kravetz said.

  “They meant nothing. They’re dead. They’re photos in a box.”

  “When are you going to leave?” Kravetz asked, surprising himself.

  “What? ’Cause you’re not getting fucked? That’s weak. Take them all, then,” Shawn said, throwing the entire box at Kravetz. He slammed his door and then opened it again. “When I’ve got enough for a show. That’s when I’ll leave.”

  Kravetz was shaking and couldn’t sleep, so he went for a walk. He didn’t even bother to pick up the Polaroids before he tiptoed out the door. He wore only a light T-shirt and shivered as he moved down the street in his checked slippers. A taxi passed and someone shouted out the window at him. He passed a lotto booth and for a moment wanted to smash the annoying face on the lotto ad. He knew that walking kept him from crying, so he walked as far as Rehavia Park and the Monastery of the Cross. Kravetz reached a clearing and lay on the damp ground beneath the stars. It seemed that the sky was lower than he’d ever seen it before, tilting dangerously close to the tops of trees and buildings, or maybe Jerusalem itself was rising into the heavens. Looking up into the blinking sky, he thought of Jana and how she had said that each star represents someone’s soul and how she had once reached out toward the sky, grabbed at the darkness, and swallowed his soul in one gulp. And now he thought of Gogol and his trip to Jerusalem, and how after Gogol’s return to Russia he had destroyed the second part of his masterpiece, Dead Souls, and then killed himself. Lying there in the grass, with the stars seemingly just out of reach, Kravetz never wanted to go home again.

  King of the Pigs

  It was a little after ten o’clock the next night when Kravetz entered Elijah’s Cup. He and Shawn had made a silent peace, with the understanding that after Shawn had enough photos and a title shot that would burn into people’s memories, he would return to New York. It was a Monday and Kravetz had studied all morning at the library on Mount Scopus then had gone straight to work at the cafe. He was damp with sweat and his shirt clung to his skin though it was only February. Shawn sat at a table in the corner with Shmuelik and a slim bearded man who wore a knitted kippah on his head. Elijah’s Cup was silent, profoundly silent; Kravetz could hear the bearded man’s New York accent and his laughter before the twanging thump and hand claps of Hebrew mizrachi music filled the room. The New Yorker was speaking loudly.

  “. . . you have them voting in East Jerusalem, next thing you know — ”

  The bearded man was cut off by Shmuelik. “Amalek as your next-door neighbor.”

  “Stuart, you know Shmuelik,” Shawn said, offering Kravetz a seat at the table. “This is Mr. Berger.”

  Mr. Berger shook Kravetz’s hand and popped an olive in his mouth. His beard was close cropped and he wore an expensive gold watch on his wrist. “I’ve still got to drive to Efrat tonight. I’d better be going.” He stood up and Kravetz could see a pistol in his belt.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kravetz said.

  Shmuelik, too, stood up and walked Mr. Berger to the door.

  “So, what do you think?” Shawn said, sipping his beer.

  “What do I think of what?” Kravetz said.

  “Do you know where I can get a pig?” Shawn asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Kravetz could see Shmuelik and the bearded man embracing as they parted ways.

  “A pig,” Shawn said. “You can’t get a fucking pig in Israel. Isn’t it illegal or something to breed them?”

  “It’s illegal to breed them on the land,” Kravetz said. “But I know some kibbutzim in the north who have them on platforms, you know, above the land.”

  “Fuckin’ A. Russians I bet.”

  “What do you need a pig for?”

  “Business,” Shawn said, hoisting his drink.

 
“Hey, Shawn? I was thinking . . . ”

  “Don’t talk about her. Tonight we’re celebrating.”

  The next morning Shawn was gone by the time Kravetz woke up. He didn’t return for a few days, and when he finally burst through the apartment door whooping, “My masterpiece!” Kravetz was not surprised. He knew Shawn was up to something.

  “That was the easiest ten grand I ever made. Come on, you want to help me put them up?”

  Kravetz didn’t raise his eyes from his book.

  “Put that book down,” Shawn said. “Look!”

  He held a glossy full-color poster in his hand with a pig wearing an Arab headdress, propped up on his hind legs. There was Arabic writing across the top of the poster, and the words “Muhammad, King of the Pigs” written in English along the bottom.

  “Holy shit!” Kravetz said. “What the hell is that?”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Shawn said, smiling. “Two days work. And bacon, too.”

  From the look in the pig’s eyes, Kravetz wondered if Shawn had drugged it.

  “Mr. Berger?” Kravetz asked.

  “Yeah,” Shawn said. “The Security Council of Judea and Samaria. They’ve got deep pockets. If you help me poster, there will be something for you, too.”

  “Poster?”

  “Yeah, man. I’ve got five hundred to put up around the city by tomorrow morning.”

  “Give me that,” Kravetz said, lunging at the poster.

  “Why, you want to help?” Shawn said, extending the poster. Kravetz reached for it. “Psych!” Shawn said, and ran down the hall. “Are you going to help or aren’t you?”

  Suddenly, Kravetz felt old, like he was Shawn’s father. Maybe he was making too big a deal about things. He had become so serious since Jana had left him, and spent too much time with his nose buried in books. He carried Amichai’s poetry with him everywhere he went, as if it were a bible of heartbreak. “Good luck,” Kravetz said, flopping back onto his bed.

  “Shukran, habib,” Shawn called in Arabic. “Thanks, pal.”