The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  How could he explain to them that the world he grew up in was a metaphor for all that was lost—the simplicity, the good. The world he longed to return to but spent his entire artistic life destroying. Beginning with his scantily-masked memoirs, the ones that lampooned his hardworking parents as lowbrows and his brother Seth as a wimp. Women were strongboxes just waiting to be jimmied and robbed. But worse was Altholtz, a composite of his Hebrew schoolteachers, the neighborhood’s unscrupulous rabbi. More than any of his caricatures, his depiction of Altholtz got him branded an anti-Semite. Rosen the Self-hating Jew.

  In time, his judgements softened somewhat, the parents endowed with a humble heroism and his brother with pathos, the victim of a meaningless war. Women were not so much strongboxes anymore as safes with mysterious combinations. Only Altholtz remained unredeemed. He lied to his congregants, fornicated and stole, all the while feigning devotion. But Rosen’s readers no longer cared. On the contrary, they now embraced a rabbinical anti-hero as ardently as Rosen craved his old world. And the further away he moved from it, the more perfect it loomed.

  He passed through the downtown and into a residential area. Modest two-stories, each with a single-car driveway and carriage-house garage, a patch of diehard grass. Leafy trees—maples or elms—cooled the street. There were people around, Rosen could tell from the zing-zing of bicycle bells and the smack of a sandlot game. A Big Band scratched on a Victrola. Yet he seemed to be walking alone, and back.

  For this was not just any street, but his street, the scene of his boyhood. On its stone-dappled asphalt, reminiscences were rolled into dramas. Themes revolved, like push mower blades, ponderous yet sharp. Yet from here he dreamed of escaping, of writing and achieving fame. He couldn’t get fast enough away.

  And he couldn’t have soared more meteorically. A best-seller by twenty-five, a symbol of the sexuality and revolt of the age, and of appetites his audiences both recoiled from and fed. Mickey Rosen was a celebrity, feted on campuses and headlined in the gossip columns. His exploits—four marriages abandoned together with a child or two from each, rumors of domestic violence—became legend. But his novels were praised, as anticipated as the reports of his latest subpoena. Yet, whether pilloried or acclaimed, in court or his country estate, his thoughts always returned to this street. Here he regained—on the page, at least—his paradise.

  Already he could see his house. He caught the cinnamon whiffs of the lokshen kugel his mother baked on Fridays and heard the cheers of the baseball game his father religiously listened to, devoted to a team that later left him for the coast. Rosen quickened his pace. What would happen, he wondered, if he burst into their kitchen with its Aunt Jemima cookie jars and checkered linoleum floor and bellowed, “Hey, Ma, Pa, I’m home!”

  Before he could, though, a trio of girls marched past him on the sidewalk. Seventeen, maybe twenty years old—he’d lost the ability to distinguish—but uniformly pretty in their pleated dresses and saddle shoes, their long pearl necklaces and ponytails. Even he, a man in his eighties, felt aroused. Rosen stepped away, as one would back then, to let them pass, and caught their scent of lavender and mint. And something else, moldy.

  The girls strolled by, seemingly unaware of him, then one of them half-turned. He raised a hand in greeting, but the girl hacked up a throat-full of phlegm and unleashed what used to be called a loogie. It landed, dayglo green and quivering, at his feet. Swabbing a wrist across her mouth, smearing it red, the girl skipped back to her friends.

  And Rosen, startled, confused, faltered on to his house. His mother was just coming out the front. Less rectangular than he remembered, shapely even in her formless dress. Her hair, though netted, was not steely as he recollected it but copper. In her mitted hands, she carried a baking tray and bore it four houses away to what Rosen recalled was Mr. Friedlander’s. Childless, a widower, Mr. Friedlander had always been an object of pity in their home, and of curiosity, a recluse. No wonder his mother, a saint before he satirized her, brought him kugel.

  He followed her, keeping a safe distance, to Mr. Friedlander’s door which she entered without a key. Through the large bay windows, he saw her glide from the kitchen to the living room where Mr. Friedlander presumably waited on a sofa. His mother’s hands were no longer mitted but reaching up, first, to remove the hair net, and then behind, to unzipper her dress. She stood naked as Rosen had never seen her before but with the same smile once reserved for tucking him in.

  Rosen gasped. He nearly screamed. Running, he retreated to his own house and up the driveway. A window there afforded a glimpse of the den where his father sat fast by the radio. Only he wasn’t listening. Rather, he was knotting a fat rubber band around his forearm and piercing it with a syringe. “No, Dad, don’t!” Rosen wanted to holler but his voice felt strangely detached. He saw his father’s face, an old man’s already, defeated. He watched him swoon as the drug surged through his veins.

  Back down the driveway Rosen teetered, but not without noticing another set of windows—the garage’s—and another unnerving view. This was of his brother, Seth, lifting weights. Bare-chested and benching hundreds of pounds, his muscles glistening, teeth bared. Barbells and medicine balls studded the floor. He grunted and huffed under the high-gloss gaze of pinups. Not just of starlets in swimsuits but of the heroes of the previous war, commanders of the army that would soon take him and send him off to a less-than-glorious death, crushed by an overturned truck, in Asia. It would be Seth’s twenty-fourth birthday, the age at which Rosen portrayed him as a cry-baby, at best, and at worst, a timorous martyr.

  He didn’t know how long he spied, but eventually Rosen found himself back on the street. The leaves, rustling, cackled at him. A Packard nearly ran him down. The musty smell he first detected on those teenaged girls grew heavier now, permeating the air, almost rancid. He wandered, and the sun sought him out through the foliage, again making it difficult to see. Rosen worried about his pills—had he forgotten them? —and the books he left in the hospice. Didn’t he tell them to pack them all before his discharge, his Kafka and his Proust? Did they really believe that the same Mickey Rosen who defied the critics, the disgruntled lovers and their entitled brats, the lawyers, and the holier-than-thous, would have so easily succumbed? Fools, just thinking about them made him chortle, and he did, all the way to the synagogue.

  The temple, they called it, the shul, or as Rosen preferred, the Altar to High Hypocrisy. That is where people came, most of them only once or twice a year, dressed in their most expensive duds, to mispronounce words they didn’t understand, and make a show of atonement. But the misdeeds only multiplied and nowhere more vilely than this so-called sanctuary with its electric memorial flames and faux-plush curtains, the ark concealing both scrolls and secrets. And Altholtz, the outwardly pious and Yiddish-inflected rabbi, sucking up to the rich and browbeating the frail, all for his unholy indulgence. Altholtz, whose real name Rosen forgot but not his unctuousness. In novel after novel, he appeared, a reminder that even an Eden has snakes.

  And there was Altholtz, his crooked frame shifting behind the stained glass. He was attending to people, no doubt squeezing them for money or filling them with self-serving ideas. Bending and straightening in a feigned calisthenic of prayer. After passively observing his family, Rosen was no longer willing to play the on-looker. Fuming, he strutted inside.

  “Ah,” was all that Altholtz said when Rosen confronted him in the chapel. “You certainly took your time.”

  The rabbi scarcely looked up from what he was doing, tending to the aged in wheelchairs, people visibly sick or mentally impaired, the homeless. Ladling out soup and kasha.

  Rosen, with an accusatory finger, barked, “Get your hands off them!”

  But Altholtz kept ladling, spoon-feeding a boy no older than ten but hairless. “Perhaps you would like to help,” he said, offering the utensil to Rosen.

  “Me?”

  “Why not?” the rabbi chimed while wiping a colorless chin. “It’s never too late. No
t even for you.”

  Rosen was speechless, perhaps for the first time ever, but the rabbi came to his aid. “You’re surprised, I know, after all those things you wrote.”

  “I never imagined. I’m sorry…” Rosen, muttering, felt his body shake.

  “Hey, it’s not me you need to apologize to. Of all your characters, mine was the most autobiographical.”

  With that, Altholtz straightened and stared. No hawk-nosed, fat-lipped stereotype but serenely handsome with a wispy beard and fine-tooled features. His eyes, celestially blue, peered straight through the author and beyond. “It’s not what we write about people that matters, Mickey, but how we treat them in life.” His yarmulke gleamed like a crown. “You remember that, don’t you? Life.”

  He did, suddenly, vaguely. His cries for more morphine, the fading light on the walls. The absence of any mourners. As he never had in all those years, not since his childhood, Rosen understood. That everyone has their paradises, and all of them ultimately lost. Trembling, he accepted the spoon.

  “Good,” Altholtz pronounced and indicated a pot in which matzoh balls floated liked memories. “There’s a lot of work to do and a hell of a lot of time.”

  The Thirty-Year Rule

  Kew in the rain looks preserved in amber. That is the color of the bricks in the village’s gingerbread houses, the color of their hydrangeas and primrose, and even the saturated sidewalks. So preciously English, so cloyingly quaint.

  Leaving the Victorian rail station, I join a procession of backpacked students and academicians in tweed, all bowed under umbrellas and streaming toward a post-modern monstrosity. It rises, four stories of alabaster and glass reflected in a pond broken only by fountains and the inevitable swans. Ravens would be more appropriate.

  Or vultures, for these are the National Archives, the repository of Britain’s records going back centuries, and the researchers who pick over the bones. Here, the Elizabethan-minded can peruse the Earl of Essex’s love letters to his “Noble and dear lady,” or, if more sanguinary, Jack the Ripper’s notes to Scotland Yard, penned in his victims’ blood. Others hunt for a personal past—an ancestor lost in the Great War or exiled for life to Australia. But a few rummage for something more intimate. Bittersweet, half-recollected, old. Some come in search of themselves.

  I am one of the latter, or so I remind myself while filling out the visitors’ questionnaires and requesting the relevant file. As a long-time expat, I’d forgotten the British passion for procedure, our obsession with the just so. Yet even this properness has its rewards, and mine shortly appears in the form of a slender brown folder. This, presumably, contains a chapter of history, or at least history as we want it remembered.

  A lesson for the uninitiated: no statesman worth his wingtips ever writes the truth. On the contrary, those countless cables sent to and from the Foreign Office are designed as much to convey what didn’t happen as what did, while always portraying the author as right. Only a scholar would believe that real events can be reconstructed from telegrams. Footnotes are only for fools.

  Folder in hand, I assume my assigned seat at one of the reading room’s hexagonal tables. To my right sits a shapely blonde undergraduate, prim in a flannel suit and fishnet stockings, and next to her, a young South Asian man, his white shirt buttoned up to the collar, who one cannot imagine not whispering. A pensioner in a shiny suit trembles opposite me, leafing through what look like government pay stubs. And then, to my left, a pair of fops, Ph.D. students probably, pretty and dressed ever-so-conspicuously down. They earn my brief, wistful smile. I was like them once: cavalier, flirtatious. Now, though, I’m just a bald, portly auntie, in need not of love but of closure. Probing, while I still can, for peace.

  But is peace attainable here among the self-justifying telexes, the misleading memoranda, the lies? And what of memory, that other dispatcher of myths? Consider the deception they could pull off, those reports and recollections, combined.

  And consider it I do while staring at the folder, labelled FO 145/4871. The covers are bound with a silky ribbon, like an unopened Christmas gift. In line with most enlightened states, Britain observes the thirty-year rule. Three decades must pass before the government discloses its declassified files. Thirty years separate the sealing of FO 145/4871 and today, its disinterment. I am the first to pull on the ribbon’s end and unravel it. The first to behold its discolored contents and inhale the stale cold dust of time.

  The earliest entry is dated May 20, 1980 and addressed from the Ambassador to the Permanent Under-Secretary. The warmth has returned to the capital of Darja, it begins, and so, too, do the falsehoods.

  Situated several hundred nautical miles off the coast of Oman and Yemen, relieved neither by breezes nor a single merciful stream, Darja was never warm. It was, rather, molten. Mid-mornings and the sun already blasted its hardscrabble streets, melting its rubbish—tin cans, rotted vegetables, carcasses—into slag. And Darja had no capital, at least not one serrated with skyscrapers or even minarets. Think, rather, nameless alleys winding nowhere and hovels reverting into sand. Think vermin. Think stench. Think the most wretched conditions under which humans might squirm and then blacken your imagination ten-fold.

  The warmth has returned to the capital of Darja, the document continues, along with the zeal of our American friends and Soviet adversaries. Sir Nigel always had a weakness for hyperbole. “Zeal” scarcely described the interest, at best, shown by other nations in this miniscule island that remained, like a button that somebody popped and forgot, on the floor of the Indian Ocean. Even “interest” was overstated, as Darja appeared on virtually no maps and merited no international attention except for the fact that its bum-shaped coast contained, precisely at the crack, a deep-water port. This, the Royal Navy determined, would provide a handy coaling station for destroyers. But that was a hundred years earlier, when destroyers still steamed on coal.

  No, if our allies and foes attached the faintest importance to Darja it was solely because it belonged to Britain. And that, too, was a fluke. Back in 1950, Sultan Abd al-Rahman Qaboos decided he needed a patron. His previous emir, some fattened Arabian sheikh, died or disappeared, leaving the island bankrupt. But then the sultan remembered us. Our empire was just then unravelling, but the poor bugger somehow missed the news. And London never let on. Instead, to much fanfare—an assemblage of goatherds and beggars—we raised the Union Jack and erected a colonial-style embassy. Darja gained the privilege of printing our sovereign’s head on all of its coins, should it ever mint any.

  Still, the mere prospect of palming the Queen’s face was a slap to that of the Soviets. Their diplomats had a Blue Water fleet to consider, a war in Afghanistan and, above all, the fear of being repatriated to Moscow. In Darja, their consulate resembled a car battery that powered three cylinders at most, but all of them churning up unrest. This proved difficult, however, as the bulk of the inhabitants spent much of the day napping. Yet a certain greengrocer and part-time brigand named Razi did hole up in a cave and, brandishing a Kalashnikov, proclaimed the island’s independence.

  In this direst of crises, the Americans were supposed to stand behind us, and they did. With a butcher’s knife. I have spoken with my U.S. colleague (Coulson), who pledged his country’s full cooperation with us in suppressing this Communist-backed revolt, Sir Nigel apprised. Did he remotely believe this, I wonder, or had he teletyped it chuckling out loud?

  In fact, William “Wild Bill” Coulson was a careerist who, much like his British counterpart, wanted nothing more than to quit Darja as soon as mortally possible. In contrast to Nigel Ringwald, though, a slope-shouldered, overwrought man who took to drink several years back when his wife took her life, Coulson was milkshake smooth, lanky in his tan suit and with a grin half-hidden by his moustache. A Tennessee plantation awaited his retirement back home where he would coddle his grandkids and tie flies for catfishing. That estate was built by slaves, but that did not prevent Washington’s envoy from lecturing Darjans about the glorie
s of Yankee-style freedom. If he had his “druthers”—Coulson’s favorite word—Razi the rebel would’ve traded in his rusty Kalashnikov for a spanking new M-16.

  Countering the Russians’ predilection for insurgency and the Americans’ (sadly outdated) perception of us imperialists are our primary missions in Darja. That, I thought, and stocking our larder with enough canned beans and gin to last each month. With this goal in mind, our able staff has labored tirelessly, meeting with local chieftains and educating the public about the benefits of British rule. I have assigned this delicate but crucial task to an individual of apparent stature and diverse talents, our Second Secretary (Crosthwaite).

  I peer around the hexagonal table in case someone heard me snort. The pensioner, though, is still fumbling through ancient affidavits. Miss Flannel Suit and Mr. Subcontinent scrutinize their documents while exchanging the occasional glance. And the dandy doctoral candidates—so I’ve dubbed them—are busy playing footsie. No one heard me chuckle, not even the ushers who hover over the researchers lest any of them pocket a Cromwellian request for reinforcements or Churchill’s shopping list for Scotch.

  I chortled because our able staff amounted to three local hires. An enervated janitor who pushed a Sisyphean broom, a gardener bitter over having to trim our single row of shrubbery and sporadic patches of grass, and a secretary who industriously pecked at her electric typewriter despite her semi-literacy. But the real kicker was the ambassador’s reference to the stature and talents of Second Secretary Crosthwaite. If not so woeful, it could’ve made me roar.

  The scion of a once-venerable Cumbrian family fallen on hard times and harder liquor, I had few prospects in life. The Crosthwaites had already generated enough scandals to drown Fleet Street in its own ink, my father always told me, and hardly needed another. In earlier times, the first of three sons inherited the estate, the second enlisted in the military, and the third took up the cloth. But we had long lost our lands as well as our faith, and my two older brothers fought only in pubs. And for a young man of my proclivities, who could not get buggered enough at school, not especially attractive or clever, there seemed only one sensible route—overseas, via the Foreign Office.