“Okay, okay.” Her father paused and called to her mother, “Do you want to add anything, Syl, or shall I say good-bye? We have to meet the Fischmans at the restaurant.”
She heard her mother call, “Just tell her to be careful, Artie. I have to finish getting dressed.”
“Hear that, sweetheart? Your mother says to be careful. You’ll do that, okay?”
“Yes, Dad. Think about getting a ticket to visit me here, but if not, see you in June.”
“If you want to come back, we’ll foot the bill. And Noah too. Keep calling. It’s so good to hear your voice.”
She hung up, relieved that she had kept her temper. She hated that they assumed they still had complete jurisdiction over her life, even though she was twenty-six. Would that ever end? Her own mother had already given birth to her oldest brother, Joel, at twenty-six; did Grandma Essie treat her as a grown-up then, or assume she still needed help? She wanted them to treat her like an adult, whether she was married and had kids or not. They could say they wanted her to come home, but now that she was an adult, had a fellowship and the financial independence it brought her, they could not force her to come back. She would be able to do this project, with or without their support. This last thought was comforting to her as she got ready to go to sleep.
When Wendy got to the Har Hatzofim Library the next day and installed herself in her carrel, she opened her literature review file and tried to work on it. All she could think about was Noah and Sam. And was she even allowed to be mad at him for misleading her since Sam was now dead? Maybe they were just friends and Noah happened to be with him at the end? No reason to assume being friends with a gay man or woman makes you gay; that is just silly. But, what did he say last night? She racked her brain, and Noah’s voice floated into her consciousness. “I like you . . . it’s just hard for me to be with someone else now, to be in a relationship.” Why did he say that? Someone else? Was he trying to tell her there was something between him and Sam, that Sam had been a someone to him? Couldn’t be . . . Todd had to be wrong, not about Sam—sounds obvious what his proclivities were—but Noah . . . He seemed so interested and charming when they first met, that adorable gap-toothed smile and those lovely eyes. He definitely had eyes for her; no one in the room could have missed the heat generated when they met. They sat the whole time, speaking only to each other, at a table full of people. Noah was not gay, Wendy was certain, and he wouldn’t pretend to something he didn’t feel. Would he?
Oh, this was useless, sitting in the carrel, the grand view of all of Jerusalem from one of the pivotal elevations of the city, always important strategically, which the panorama made clear. She could see everything but her own work. Justifying her procrastination, something she seemed to be getting better and better at, Wendy decided that, sometimes, it was more valuable to let your mind drift off and go elsewhere so that when you returned to the task you could focus better. It was true, she knew; it wasn’t just an excuse. Anyway, until she knew more about the Noah/Sam thing she wasn’t going to be good for much else.
So she trudged over to the reference librarian’s desk and said that she wanted information on a pigua that took place over the summer in which an American student, Sam Handelman, was killed. After a solicitious question about whether Wendy had known him—as the librarian knew a number of students who had—she pointed out something that oblivious Wendy hadn’t noticed before, a column that appeared to be a book, in the corner. The librarian told her that the artist had donated it here; he specialized in public art and had made it in Sam’s memory, and knew the library where Sam had spent the most time in Israel would be the right place for it. One was going to be installed in his memory at Yale too, cast in bronze and placed outside the Beinecke Library. The column appeared to be a huge book, frayed edges, bindings jagged as the whole apparition twirled this way and that, looking unstable, though there was a metal rod at its center, securing it. The librarian explained that the title, Yad va’shem “a monument and a name,” had come to the artist while hearing the speech that Sam’s dissertation advisor gave at the airport send-off for his corpse. Wendy shuddered, and as they walked to the microfilms, the librarian said that the pages were printouts of the dissertation that had been handed in thus far, the uncompleted work cut off, as the ragged edges of the pages were never to be finished.
“Never to be finished,” echoed in Wendy’s mind as she followed the librarian.
At the microfiches, she rolled the Jerusalem Post to the date in the summer that the pigua had occurred. They found the front page article, “Beautiful life of scholarship and friendship shattered by bus bomb,” about the death of Samuel Handelman, twenty-five, of Scarsdale, summa cum laude graduate of Yale, who had studied at the Sorbonne his junior year and was writing his dissertation in Kabbalah at Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at NYU. The librarian left Wendy, telling her to be sure to ask again if she wanted anything else, and Wendy read hungrily. She read what the professor at Hebrew U. who was supervising Sam’s work had said about him. Avishai Or, Wendy knew from the Fulbrighters who were working with him, had a reputation for being an impossible hard-ass, nothing ever good enough for his absurdly high standards. The newspaper article actually mentioned that Or was “putting so much emotion on such open display when he was normally so carefully regulated, grief seemed to tear Professor Or out of being the person he usually was,” as he spoke of Sam’s work. He told the crowd, according to the article, about “the phenomenon of death by divine kiss in his dissertation, ‘Dreaming of Kisses: Ecstasy and Death in the Mystic Tradition.’” Or’s explanation was that “the kiss provides the occasion for the entrance into continuing ecstasy that medievals predicted was the fate of the martyr.” The reporter added, “The professor’s tear-stained face looking out at the crowd, he continued, ‘This is a terrible reversal. Usually, a student gives a hesped for the teacher. I wish it could be so. We’ve lost a brilliant young man. This loss of Sam’s ideas and work is a tragedy for the scholarly community, for the universities he studied at here and in the US, and for am Yisrael, the people Israel. It is my plea to all of you to remember Shmuel Handelman. With our zichronot, memories, Shmuel will be given, as the prophet Isaiah says in chapter 56, a yad vashem tov mibanim umibanot, a monument and a name superior to sons and daughters, shem olam etain lo asher lo yikaret, an eternal name I will give them that will never’—Professor Or began to sob as he said—‘be cut off,’ and left the podium racked with sobs.” Wendy too found tears in her eyes reading about the death of someone that could just as easily have been herself, an ordinary person taking a bus in Israel.
Then, her eyes moved to the photo below. It was of two men, one stretched out on the ground, obviously injured, the other leaning over him with a look of concentrated devotion in his eyes. The devoted one leaning over—Wendy couldn’t explain it, but there was something almost otherworldly about his look, like the lighting in a photo by a master photographer, Atget or Steiglitz maybe, an artist who knew how to control the light streaming over a face. Noah’s face looked so given over to what he was observing, like he had never seen anything else in the world and nothing else was worthy of his gaze. The stricken man was Sam, and there was nothing else Wendy needed, to know that Noah had feelings for the person in the photo. Still that look could be from the anguish of seeing his friend suffer; it didn’t have to be what Todd suspected. There was something primal about the scene, a man leaning over his fallen comrade, a battleground trope. What was the story of the robber and the rabbi, the beautiful rabbi that the robber leaped towards in desire. Noah was the robber leaping, wanting the beauty of Sam, the rabbi. Or was he? It didn’t quite square. Wendy, agitated, clicked the microfilm machine off sharply—too sharply—and drew stares from the other library patrons near her. She walked quickly back to her carrel, determined to forget about all this by throwing herself into her work. She did that successfully until she looked up to see a darkening city as night was falling on her panoramic view, and she ga
thered her things to get the Nine bus, the same bus Noah and Sam were on that day last summer.
SEVEN
Accompanying the Coffin
There is evil, I do not deny it, and I will not conceal it with fruitless casuistry. I am, however, interested in it from a halakhic point of view; and as a person who wants to know what action to take. I ask a single question: What should the sufferer do to live with his suffering?
—RABBI JOSEPH SOLOVEITCHIK, Kol Dodi Dofek (Listen—My Beloved Knocks)
That same afternoon, hours after Benjamin Margolis’s death, there was a ceremony at the airport to send the coffin back to the States. Wendy looked around at the crowd. Since Benj had been a student at Wisdom of the Heart a few years ago, the yeshiva had canceled classes and chartered buses to bring the students and faculty for this ceremony.
She and Noah came on the bus Hebrew University had chartered. For Wendy, looking out at the crowd was surreal. The entire graduate student population of the third floor of the library, Wendy’s hangout spot, had emptied itself onto the bus. She didn’t know all of them, nor had they all known Benj, but there was a sense of fear, framed by the grim knowledge that it could have been any one of us.
Every young American she knew either by name or by face was here. People from the Hebrew University library, American and Israeli, whom she didn’t know by name, but knew things about, like who smoked because she saw them outside the library taking a smoking break, or which library carrels they favored. Of the huge collection of people, Wendy guessed that most of these people did not know Benj personally, but were gathered in solidarity.
Wendy, clutching Noah’s arm as an Israeli government official spoke in Hebrew, was astounded to see how many people had dropped everything to be at the airport in the middle of the day.
The terrifying randomness of the unplanned was socking each of them, pummeling them, demanding that they do something for the deceased, at least accompany the coffin to the airport. Wendy wanted to scream, We shouldn’t be here. We should be assembled for an award ceremony, or bent over our laptops in a library carrel. Not accompanying a body to a funeral. She kept silent, red-eyed, and pressed herself next to Noah by her side.
The American ambassador spoke first and presented an American flag to be draped over the coffin. The funereal container itself was a hulk on the dais where the speakers were, a visual reminder of the life that was missing. The odd thing was that there was no name for this event, no formal ritual. There were hordes of people, and speeches, but it wasn’t a funeral as the body was being sent off for burial abroad, not being buried here. There were cameras from all the Israeli and foreign news media. She hoped her parents and their friends would not see her in the crowd. They would be anxious anyway; they didn’t need to see her on CNN. If this were a movie, she could imagine a camera panning over the crowd. She hadn’t spoken to her parents again since Benj passed away, but she speculated they might attend the funeral in New York since her aunt was a friend of Benj’s mother. She decided her mother would go, if only to tell Wendy that she had, to try to make her come home.
On the chartered bus back to Jerusalem there was mostly silence. Seeing one of their peers, who had done nothing more exotic and dangerous than ride on a city bus, being sent back to the States in a coffin, did not create a jovial mood in any of the riders. Glum silence reigned.
Wendy, sitting on the aisle, wanted to whisper something to Noah at her side looking out the bus window, oblivious to her presence. Wendy wished she could say something profound and connecting, like, I want to appreciate what I have, or I feel lucky to be alive. Trying out phrases in her mind, they were all too tinged with banality. She would have read a book were she alone, but even that distraction didn’t seem proper now. It would remove the somberness of the moment to partake of anything ordinary. She sat and tried to look out the window with Noah at the overcast sky.
Noah turned to her and suddenly kissed her passionately on the lips, saying nothing. His lips massaged hers, testing, probing how she felt. Reflexively, she kissed him back, but being caught off guard, her emotions weren’t in tune with the physical sensation. Maybe that was best—the awkwardness of the first kiss gotten over with, later there would be a more private one, to savor and delight in? This kiss, though it augered more and deeper in its contours and sensations, still lacked the spark of Donny’s hungry and desirous kiss. Wendy had wanted Noah to kiss her. Before their date last night, her head was full only of when and how and what, and what her feelings in response would be, and how far she would go with him now. She hadn’t anticipated their first kiss would be on a bus, a public and impersonal space, with everyone they knew from the library.
Wendy didn’t know what to say to the kiss, or what Noah was thinking. The stillness in the bus didn’t invite any kind of communication, since anything she said would be overheard completely in the reigning silence. Noah looked at her with those beautiful gray-blue eyes and smiled. She smiled back. She took his hand and held it, looking into his eyes. They continued to look at each other until she put her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her and stroked her hair. It was comfortable, sitting like that. Feeling his hands on her hair, she contemplated whether Sam’s death would be a good thing for their relationship, speeding things up because they felt a sense of urgency, of necessity to live life, be alive, say what you feel without hesitating to be sure. Would Noah have kissed her less ardently before Benj’s death?
Then she wanted to know: How had being with Sam in the hospital changed Noah?
Sitting on the bus, looking out the window, she decided she liked feeling in sync with Noah, his body next to hers, his hands reassuring. They would get through this together, she thought as she leaned happily in towards him for the last portion of the hour-long trip.
At Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, the bus released the first group of passengers, before it continued back to the university campus on Mount Scopus. As Wendy and Noah started to file off, the rain, which had threatened earlier, began. The sky disgorged its moisture in a fury, quick and fast. Wendy and Noah ran the twenty feet from where the bus had stopped, to the shelter for the buses that would take them to their respective apartments. When they got to the shelter, they were both sopping wet.
“Noah, I promised my parents that I wouldn’t take public buses from now on. If you want to share a cab, that would be great.” She wanted to ask him if he was hungry and wanted to get a bite to eat, felafel or pizza, but it seemed profane to have eating on the mind after returning from sending a coffin off.
“Refusing to take buses gives terrorists a victory. I’m taking the bus.”
Wendy was surprised by the vehemence of his response. “I don’t want to go down in history as a girl who would be alive if only she’d listened to her parents about the bus.” Wendy shuddered, both from being cold and wet and being scared. “I’m going to hail a cab.”
Noah looked at her beseechingly, with his mouth open as though he were a baby bird waiting for his mother to fill it. He put his hand on Wendy’s arm and squeezed, appealingly. “Let’s not fight. I’m tired. I don’t want to be alone. Come back to my apartment? Please?”
“Okay.” Wendy didn’t need to think to respond. Still, she wasn’t quite sure of the nature of this invitation. Was it Come back to my apartment to continue what we started on the bus, or Come back to my apartment to talk and keep me company. Either one was fine; she realized that she would feel odd alone in her apartment now also. Not going home meant she could prolong seeing whether her parents had left a rant on her phone machine about the necessity of her instantaneous return to the States. “I’ll hail the cab.”
Noah shivered and nodded his head as Wendy trudged outside the meager space of the shelter to get even more fully drenched in the attempt to get the attentions of a taxi driver.
After a number of occupied cabs passed by, one stopped. Wendy gestured toward Noah with her arms and he dashed over quickly. He told the cab driver, “Rehov Mesilat Ye
sharim 15.” The cab driver nodded and was silent, navigating the roads at the usual ultra-rapid Israeli cab driver pace, despite his limited visibility from the pounding rain. Noah and Wendy huddled next to each other, too wet to want to put their arms around each other or hold hands, but bunching up at each other’s side in the back of the cab.
Wendy paid the driver and they walked up the stairs to his studio apartment on the fourth floor. Noah unlocked the door and pushed Wendy gently to indicate that she should enter ahead of him. She went in and stood in the middle of the apartment’s one room. There was a bed and a dresser in front of her, and a small kitchen nook. The other furniture was a desk and chair in the corner and a small bookcase, filled and topped with piles of books, most of them bearing small white tabs with call numbers from the Hebrew University library. No couches or comfortable chairs, and no dining table shared his dwelling. It was a place to sleep and to work; there were no other functions this room could perform. There was something sad to Wendy about the sparseness of the place. At the same time, she found it enticing because it was Noah’s. She was curious about the revelations his dwelling would furnish.
She and Noah both kicked off their wet shoes, reflexively. She wanted to look at his books, to see what fascinated him and try to connect what it was that drew him to the subjects he was studying. Wendy was always fascinated by the personal aspect of scholarship; her favorite parts of scholarly books were their prefaces, the places where there was a listing of the ideas, experiences, and motivations that impelled their authors to devote time to the study of a particular topic. Wendy was always looking for what it was that could draw her in, whether to a person or a topic. With Noah too, she realized, looking around for a place to put her coat, she was waiting to see if he would pull her in, make her want him. She found him attractive, but didn’t like the way the kiss on the bus seemed . . . not about her somehow? The lack of communication before or after, or an attempt to ask how she felt about it? She didn’t feel . . . desired. That was what she wanted.
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