Elegy on Kinderklavier

by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

  “I myself have never experienced a loss such as any of yours, but I want to say that you all—that the people here—that you were never forgotten by me. I think the settlement is a wonderful opportunity for a new life, a new kind of life, and your interests, I can assure you, will always be at my and my husband’s hearts.”

  Gershon turns away. Below, in the square, he sees the band of dirty kids again. Two of them are sitting on the curb. The others are walking back and forth in front of the replicated shop windows, peering inside. They won’t break the windows: the stores are not locked, and hold nothing of any use inside, and the kids must’ve explored all of them already anyway. The Administration’s stance, as Gershon has been euphemistically instructed via memo, is basically to let them run out of supplies, at which point they will either die or turn themselves in for deportation back to their settlement, which amounts to the same thing. But Gershon thinks the Administration underestimates how apolitical, how apathetic to politics the Israeli population settled here is. The refugee kids’ respirators, Gershon has noticed, are Israeli-issued, the backup sets that would be nearly impossible to steal. And they have to be getting food from somewhere. Mostly the people here, Gershon wants to say to Hava, to Ofer, to nobody, just want to be left alone.

  •

  Back in the car, Gershon loops around on the streets without really knowing why.

  “We have to pick up something for the next visit,” he says, though Hava has not asked.

  The silence in the vehicle is suddenly oppressive. Gershon flips on the streaming stereo console. It begins where he left off listening in his study, how long ago—days? weeks?—picking up in the middle of “Mars, Bringer of War.”

  Hava gives an abrupt laugh.

  “Holst!” she says, surprising him. He feels himself color.

  “Yeah, well,” he says.

  She laughs again.

  “Very apropos, I mean, you listening to The Planets. It’s just funny,” she says, losing heart at his empty face, trailing off, “I guess.”

  It wasn’t the first thing he’d listened to. After his first year in the post, he’d decided to sacrifice each subsequent term to a different composer. By the time it came to this year, there were only two composers left in the giant box set of vintage vinyl he’d brought with him, stubbornly refusing to download anything. He didn’t think he could bear Mahler. He is saving Mahler for the end of something. And so it is Holst this year.

  He feels self-conscious now, as they listen to the music in the vehicle’s cocoon of quiet, about just how much there is to dislike about Holst, and particularly this movement—the insistent cheesiness, the way it telegraphs its effect, etcetera, etcetera—and for a moment Gershon wants to explain to Hava why it is he loves it. Which is, mostly, its time. The recalcitrant 5/4 time signature that one is meant to be unsettled by, that one is meant to recognize on some plane of consciousness as otherworldly: violent, but an odd, stumbling sort of violence. Gershon loves the shifting character of it too—giving the section that is now filling the silence between him and Hava its limping, reeling motion. It builds to a climax that never comes, that is instead interrupted by the piece’s own blunt, martial, off-kilter theme. He especially likes the contrapositive effect that occurs when listening to it while driving through the city, its insistent tones set against the nothing-scape, the empty buildings. How long, if ever, will it take Hava to understand?

  The movement ends, the piece’s final crisp blasts giving way to the quiet thrum of the vehicle’s electric engine, which declension of silence rushes back in around them. They round a corner and pass along one of the small bus depots, four stops in a row. Hava turns almost sideways in her seat. Gershon slows the vehicle, then stops, though he’s not been planning to.

  This is the scene of the first of the new bombings, of which there have so far been three. The sites of the bus bombings are always more pointed, Gershon thinks, because they are on exactly the right scale: the mangled industrial metal and shattered plastic of the small shelters and stubs of benches clearly imply the size of the absent human figures; the bus (which is not there, which will never, in fact, arrive) easily present in the imagination. And afterward, back in the real Jerusalem, when things are quickly cleaned up, when the bus shelters are immediately and officiously rebuilt, there is no sight that so clearly demonstrates the aggression of the quotidian, the way the world just goes on with its commute, urban regeneration swallowing memory whole. What is left—what has always been left for Gershon, even before everything happened with Yoheved and Shmuli—is a residual sense of the city’s sadness: nonspecific, drifting at the margins of a beautiful, light-filled mid-afternoon in the square in front of the Jerusalem Ballet, for instance. This is a quality that is absent from the New Jerusalem, where even an actual event such as this new bombing is only re-creation, recreated history, as if anyone needs further proof of terror’s lack of imagination. The real city’s sadness is comforting, in a way, is also what he means to say. But he can see Hava doesn’t recognize the location.

  “Didn’t you ever see the bus station during the third intifada?” Gerhson says now, sharply.

  “No,” Hava says, not looking at him. “My parents lived in the suburbs. We didn’t go into the city for maybe two whole years, during the worst of it. Or I didn’t, anyway.”

  The reference to the suburbs throws Gerhson off for some reason. Unbidden, a memory: only a few months after immigrating, Gershon walking for hours and hours through the suburbs to get to the Israel Museum in order to see the Dead Sea Scrolls; mid-morning, the city absolutely deserted, Gershon strolling through the stillness, not having any idea why there was no one around until the woman at the ticket office reminded him it was Tisha B’Av. Gershon leans forward a little to see around Hava, to see exactly what she’s looking at, and is distracted instead by the crumbled concrete curb at the epicenter of the explosion.

  Who was doing it, bombing the New Old City? When it began, Gershon simply assumed it was one or several of the packs of Palestinian kids, rigging oxygen tanks to explode, which had seemed poetic in that they needed the oxygen tanks as much as the Israeli settlers did. But after the second, and the third—the bombings always in the old places, the corresponding places where, back in the real city, there’d been real bombings—Gershon is not so sure. It seems unlikely that those Palestinian kids (unorganized, wild, mostly diffident) would even be able to come by the oxygen tanks and whatever else was needed to manufacture and set off a single such bomb, let alone three. Who then? Briefly, Gershon has entertained paranoiac visions of secret (subterranean?) bands of adult Palestinians, having made it across the gaping gulf between the settlements, surfacing to plant the explosives. But no, the unblinking eyes of the government satellites, with their heat-imaging and Gershon can’t imagine what all else, would never miss them. And there is the fact that there was never—or hasn’t been so far—a single casualty, a single person even injured. Who then? Who did that leave?

  But to be honest, Gershon doesn’t really care. He visits the bombing sites, writes his reports back to the diplomatic corps, and follows the slight change in the cityscape with a detached kind of interest. Sometimes, as now, he thinks about what the New Jerusalem will look like in ten years, in twenty, with the bombings continuing; if, at some point, the New Jerusalem will resemble exactly what the actual, amnesiac Jerusalem really should look like.

  Gershon sighs and realizes with a start that Hava is watching him. He has been staring off into space for he doesn’t know how long. He gives a little cough and puts the vehicle in gear.

  “Some tour guide,” Hava says flatly, and Gershon can hear her steely anger.

  •

  Hava follows Gershon up the steps in the empty building just inside New Jaffa Gate. Catty-corner across the street, the Tower of David’s brutal features emphasize the heavy quiet, never stranger than when one is actually standing inside the abandoned, the never-occupied New Old City.

  To get to the new
old apartment, they have to follow the wide staircase of decrepit marble up two flights, passing through the lobby of a dank, empty hostel with vaulted ceilings. One floor above, Yoheved and Gershon eventually got used to foreign backpackers and American college kids trudging up the stairs which passed through the real apartment’s wide dining room on their way to the cheapest sleeping mats on the roof. Shmuli used to look up from his food during dinner and wave to them, beaming.

  Now, as Hava and Gershon climb up through the hostel lobby, Gershon says, “Mark Twain once stayed here. Well, not here, but, you know. There’s a picture of him in some book standing right there by the desk.”

  Hava nods.

  “Who’s Mark Twain?” she says.

  In the apartment, Gershon goes quickly to the kitchen, dragging out the heavy crate of sweetbread and grabbing a bottle of liquor. He is suddenly embarrassed, flustered to be here. He doesn’t know why he’s brought Hava here. It was a stupid idea.

  He comes out into the living room and sees her standing at one of the tables along the wall, picking up the framed pictures and looking at them. Gershon has forgotten all about the living room, forgotten his own recreation of it—a weak moment during those desperate, lonely first months that he’s never gotten around to undoing. He doesn’t spend much time here anymore.

  She sets down the picture of Shmuli, his face pushed close to the camera, filling the whole field of vision. His expression is almost one of wonder, though he knew what a camera was, of course. Silly.

  “I’m not so totally stupid, you know,” Hava says now, turning to him. “I’ve seen the documentary.”

  Gershon is stunned, and feels his face pounding with blood.

  Back in the vehicle, Gershon thinks, Of course she’s seen the documentary. Of course. Of course. Most of the country has seen the documentary by now, Gershon would bet.

  They gave him a tiny grave on the Mount of Olives, of all places, among the war heroes and ancients—a big, quiet show. The government. Gershon and Yoheved never would’ve been able to afford it. And so they’d buried him and gone to Italy. That was Yoheved’s idea and Gershon, standing in St. Mark’s Square, wondering at the uneasy huddle of so many pigeons, had thought it a good one. They were there, together. Yoheved had wanted to be there, together. He had no problem fleeing grief. He knew it would catch up with them, but why make it easier? Why not let its full force find them there, amidst all those delicate, unaging marble children?

  And though Yoheved did not begin filming the famous interviews for the documentary until much later, well after they’d returned to their apartment in Jerusalem, Gershon knows it really began then, with that trip, knows he should’ve been able to see what was coming. And now the insult of her “healing process”—of the interviews and the documentary, and really of Yoheved herself, of what she’s become—has finally reached Gershon here. His suffering and his wife’s—ex-wife’s—simulacrum of their suffering have been brought into this world only so that the fragile, indignant mouth of a twenty-two-year-old girl may open in this pathetic recreation of his own living room, and her eyes may narrow, and she may summon her pith to say, I’ve seen the documentary.

  Back in the car, continuing, changing the subject, she says, “I like the bits that talk about the nomenclature of this place.” She says the big word carefully, seems pleased with herself not to have tripped on it.

  Gershon is driving swiftly out of the city. The buildings become more and more widely spaced, the verisimilitude falling apart as the construction project outpaced its budget and, back on earth, the opposition government gained power.

  “It’s stupid, the nomenclature,” Gershon spits out, because it is. Officially, the city is called “Jerusalem North” (“New Jerusalem” finally too political for the offices that made these decisions), situated in the “Northern Territories.” The technical ridiculousness of this term, this wholly inaccurate nondimensional appendage—northern—is a perfect synecdoche of the basic failure of imagination of those back on earth. Where did their mourners live, if it could not be found on a compass? “Just idiotic,” Gershon says. “You get used to it, unfortunately. You call it what you want.”

  He’s trying, and though they are now passing the final retaining wall of the city and the vehicle is shifting its suspension to suit the pale dirt of the unpaved road as it descends into the canyon that leads away from the settlement proper, he still can’t get past Hava having seen the documentary. Him standing there, back in the living room, his mouth hanging open like a fish. Blushing in—yes, he must say it—shame. Shame! To be caught unawares by this nothing of a girl!

  Gershon guides the vehicle up a series of rough switchbacks and they begin to slowly rise up out of the canyon. When they crest the edge, and Gershon speeds the vehicle onto the flat, empty road, Hava turns in her seat to look back at the low gray line of the distant city, its ambient glow seeping into the darkening sky.

  •

  “We’re unprotected out here, officially,” Mendelbaum says, indulging Hava, once they’ve all settled into the den. “According to the Administration, it’s basically the city or nothing. But it’s not been so bad with old Gersh here in charge.” Mendelbaum smiles sadly. “He comes to see me every now and then—says it’s to share his sweetbread and whiskey, because he’s just too polite to admit he’s checking to see if I’m dead yet.”

  “We?” Hava says. “We’re unprotected? Who is we?”

  Mendelbaum shrugs, gestures with his glass.

  “There’s a few of us with homesteads out here. Every couple months we get a memo from the Administration, telling us about the terrorists from the Free Territories coming to cut our heads off.”

  “Not me,” Gershon says from where he’s making the drinks, though he knows Mendelbaum knows. “I don’t write those things.”

  “Who does?” Mendelbaum says, sighing and smiling kindly at Hava as Gershon steps around the kitchen island and reenters the room. “Some computer, probably. They always sound like a Mad Lib done by a very boring little boy.” He crosses his legs, shakes his head at Gershon’s offer of a refill. “But then, you probably didn’t have those, did you?” he says to Hava.

  Though he’s made her one, Hava surprises Gershon by taking a drink off the proffered tray.

  “We had those,” she says. “Or I did.”

  “Mad Libs,” she says to herself.

  Mendelbaum lets his eyebrows rise and fall, once.

  “Nostalgic amusement,” he sighs. “What an industry.”

  Gershon likes Mendelbaum, a gentle, intelligent man. He was an old professor at the University of Haifa, back in the world. Gershon actually met him once, there. His office had been on the very top floor of the university tower, on top of Mount Carmel. A spectacular view, suspended there over the city, the twirling skirts of roads and buildings decorating the mountain’s slope, and, of course, the sea, always the sea. During his first few years in the post here, Gershon often stood at his quarters’ window in the Government Tower and looked down and out past the city at the hazy, unclaimed desertscape extending to the horizon, where he knew somewhere was this low, flat house, Professor Mendelbaum in his den. It was like they’d switched places.

  “You gave it all up?” Gershon had asked him back then, on one of his first visits in the territory.

  “I gave it all up,” Mendelbaum said distantly, and gave a wan smile.

  “Are you really in danger, though?” Hava asks him now, concerned.

  Mendelbaum takes a drink, lets out a breath.

  “My daughter would say so, I think,” he says. “She’s a professor as well, at the Technion.”

  Gershon watches him. Hava senses something, but only looks down into her glass. She’s drinking from it using the ridiculous little straw which Gershon doesn’t have the heart to explain is really for stirring. She looks like a child. She actually looks a lot like Mendelbaum’s daughter, in the low light.

  “Is a professor, was a professor,” Mendelbaum says int
o the quiet. “She’s dead, anyway,” he says flatly, not changing his posture. “So I guess that makes her emerita. They didn’t take the title away from her, at any rate.”

  Gershon used to be chilled by Mendelbaum’s odd, blunt way, by his hauntingly affectless statements, but now it is vaguely comforting somehow. Gershon stands up, begins walking around the den. Hava continues to drink her drink incorrectly. Gershon wonders if she’s ever even had alcohol before.

  Mendelbaum settles for a while into his old professorial voice and answers Hava’s questions, tells her a little about the brief period of “New Wave” settlers who refused the city. She keeps circling back to the issue of whether or not he’s in danger, living out here.

  “So, I mean, are you, though?” she says now. “Would you agree with your daughter?”

  Mendelbaum glances up at Gershon, who is sitting on the edge of the wide bay window, eyes unfocused, face trained on the carpet between Mendelbaum’s couch and Hava’s.

  “I take it our friend didn’t bring you here the scenic way,” Mendelbaum says dryly.

  “No?” Hava says, and Gershon can feel her looking to him.

  “Well, there’s some tumble-down shacks along the route—some of the first people to make it across from the Free Territories site threw them up. They used to live there. There was a time when the other settlers out here were very afraid, probably justly.”

  Hava is looking at him, her eyes wide. Gershon can see her face is flushed, and he realizes, with a paroxysm of anger, that she is drunk. He finishes his own drink in one swallow and crosses the room to make another.

  “But they don’t live there now,” Hava says. “The Free Territory people.”

  “No,” Mendelbaum says.

  “What happened to them?”

  Mendelbaum finishes his own drink. He motions to Gershon for another.