All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

  “Okay,” Daniel said. His gray face shifted into something like its usual life as an idea came over it. “Actually, I think the visitors bring the food—the mourners aren’t supposed to have to cook. And are we even sure the shiva’s going to be at Joel and Ilana’s? Maybe the Grossmans will want to have it.”

  Lydia blinked. “That’s out of the question.”

  “Why?” Daniel asked. “Wouldn’t it be better for the kids to have a place to come home to where there aren’t a million people sitting around?” Gal and Noam were with their sabba and savta, Ilana’s parents, now, but the plan was to bring them to their own house when their uncles and other grandparents arrived.

  Matt could see the struggle break out on Lydia’s face, and the stubbornness. “Don’t you think the people who loved Joel and Ilana will want to gather one more time at their home?”

  Daniel shrugged, and Lydia’s eyes welled up. “And don’t you think I’m thinking about those children?” she hissed. “I think of nothing else!”

  “What are bourekas?” Matt asked.

  Lydia looked down at him incredulously, and Matt was sorry for the silly question. In front of Lydia, he was a chronic blurter, and he knew that she didn’t like him very much. Apparently she’d loved Daniel’s first boyfriend, Jonathan. Matt—much younger than Daniel, eye candy, a goy, a lover of television rather than art or opera—was clearly the inferior and less appropriate partner.

  “They’re small triangular pastries in filo dough,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “They’re savory, not sweet. They’re filled with cheese or spinach. They’re a very popular finger food in Israel.”

  “I see,” Matt said.

  “Mom,” Daniel said, “why don’t we wait till we get there, and maybe this shiva thing will just work itself out.” He closed his eyes.

  Lydia nodded, drew herself up, and said to Matt with a strange pride, “The place down the street from Joel’s house has some of the best bourekas in the city.”

  When she headed back to the front of the airplane, Matt said, “Well, that was a surreal little exchange.”

  Daniel’s eyes were still closed. “She’s trying not to have to imagine how much of her son’s body has been blown to bits.”

  Matt bit his lip, scalded.

  Daniel opened his eyes and looked at him with a weak appeal, laid a hand on top of his. “Forgive me if I’m an asshole, okay?”

  “Okay,” Matt whispered, squeezing Daniel’s cold fingers, unspeakably grateful for the gaze that seemed to recognize him for the first time since the news had come.

  “Do we have a piece of paper and a pen?”

  “Sure, baby.”

  Matt fished them out of his travel bag, and Daniel sighed, then bent over the paper and began writing in Hebrew. Matt looked at the round strong veins on Daniel’s working hand, which passed rapidly from right to left. “What are you writing?” he asked.

  “A eulogy for my brother.”

  Daniel covered the page and then stopped and gave Matt a stricken look. He set the pen down, took off his glasses, and started to cry. Matt gripped his hand. He had never seen Daniel cry until last night, and he was a little scared he’d cry like that now, in public. He’d seen him well up once or twice, and that was shattering enough to witness. But not really crying, and certainly not crying like that, writhing, screaming his brother’s name, his teeth bared and his face sealed off and unseeing so that he seemed like one of those creatures, like otters or monkeys, whose faces lie on the disconcerting boundary between human and animal. Now Daniel was quiet, tears streaming down his face. Oh, Matt’s heart clamored, what should I do? How could he be a comfort to this man who had been such a comfort to him? And those kids! Noam was only a baby! He wasn’t up to it, he knew it. He would blow it again, the way he had with Jay, with all of the bad-mouthing and posturing, and his boycotting the memorial service, and the crushing fear that he had failed to be there for his best friend in the right way.

  Oh poor poor Joel, Matt thought, and Ilana’s face too flashed into his mind, big and raucous, and her sloppy ponytail, and tears rushed, hot and brutal, into his eyes.

  SEVEN HOURS LATER THEY stood at the airport curb, huddled around a small, curly-haired woman—Yemenite, Daniel would later tell him—holding a walkie-talkie and wearing a neon-green vest marked with bold Hebrew lettering. Her name was Shoshi, and she was the social worker sent by the city of Jerusalem. The Middle Eastern morning sun was bright and penetrating, and they had taken off coats and jackets and put on sunglasses. Around them, cars jostled and honked, and trunks slammed shut. Taxi drivers in open-necked shirts and Ray-Bans jingled keys in their hands as they approached exiting travelers. While Shoshi and Daniel spoke in Hebrew, nodding rapidly, Matt bent over and pulled down his right sock, his heart still thrumming with excitement and indignation at the lunatics in baggage claim. People had bumped into him and shouldered in front of him, and an elderly man on a fanatical push to the conveyor belt had jammed his luggage cart into Matt’s heel, knocking his shoe clear off. Matt had wrestled it back on, surprised by the rage surging up his throat, and the rude old prick hadn’t even apologized. Now Matt gripped the handle of his own cart with renewed, glowering concentration. He heard a lot of English spoken in American accents with strange glottal emphases. Their language sounded self-important and bullying to him, as though they were talking to children or foreign servants, and thinking that many of them were probably settlers, he felt a strong antipathy for them. Daniel loathed them. Each time they saw one of them interviewed on television, he would shout, “What’s the matter, the U.S. isn’t fundamentalist enough for you?!”

  Matt’s heel was chafed, but not bleeding, and he pulled up his sock and straightened. The sun was warming him to the bone, and there was the smell of something sharp in the air, like citrus or guava, mixed with exhaust fumes. This country seemed to him to be a different earthly element than his own, and he found that both exciting and a little frightening. He wasn’t well traveled; his only trip outside the U.S. had been to Amsterdam with Jay years ago, right out of college. Here, under a cloudless sky, people were smoking and gesticulating; everyone had a cell phone attached to his or her ear, even the children. Although Matt was shocked by the open display of assault rifles, and officially disapproved of the soldiers in uniform, he found them beautiful. They were short and brown-skinned and very young.

  He began to notice that passersby were casting curious and compassionate glances at Daniel’s family. He stepped closer to Daniel, laying his hand on the small of his back, and bowed his head into the conversation. The social worker had switched to English, and was telling Daniel’s parents that a van would arrive shortly to take them to the morgue. She touched their elbows as she spoke. She projected an aura of gentle authority, and looked into their faces in a way that was somehow both searching and undemanding. Matt had a powerful impulse to sidle up and confide in her. I’m the gay boyfriend! I’m the goyfriend! I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language!

  At that moment Sam frowned and pointed into the distance, where a small group of photographers were snapping pictures of them with zoom lenses. “What are they doing?” Shoshi’s face darkened and she took off toward them with her arms outstretched; when she got near them, she wagged her finger in their faces, barking commands. They gave her a short argument, and then walked away, one of them turning to utter a final deprecation.

  The family had instinctively turned their faces away, and when Shoshi returned, panting and apologizing, they moved their bodies to gather her within the pack. A white van pulled up to the curb, and a driver wearing a yarmulke got out and put their luggage in the back as they climbed inside, Daniel helping Lydia into the front seat. Daniel sat with the social worker in the middle seat, leaving Matt and Sam in the back. They settled into the air-conditioning, wound up by the unexpected fracas with them at its center.

  “What was that all about?” Sam asked.

  “Joel w
as a minor celebrity,” Daniel reminded them; he’d been the host of an English-language television interview show.

  There was a pause. “How did they know we were . . . ?” Sam trailed off as Shoshi pointed to Daniel’s face. “And my emergency gear,” she added.

  As the van pulled through the guard stations at the airport exit, Shoshi twisted to sit sideways and told them that the ride to Abu Kabir would take about twenty minutes. Her English was proficient but heavily accented, and from time to time she hesitated and said a word in Hebrew to Daniel, who translated it for his family. She told them that Ilana, Joel’s wife, had been identified by her parents, but the other body had been held so that, if it was Joel, he could be identified by his immediate family. She pronounced Joel “Yo-el,” its Hebrew version.

  “If it is Joel?” Lydia asked sharply.

  “If it is,” Shoshi said, giving her a steady look.

  “Why do you say if ?” Lydia’s voice was rising.

  “Mom,” Daniel murmured.

  “We cannot say for sure until he is identified.”

  “Are mistakes ever made?” Lydia insisted. She had twisted around in her seat, and was trying to pin Shoshi to the wall with a single flashing look.

  Shoshi was quiet.

  “My wife is asking you a question,” Sam said sharply from the back. Matt started. He had never heard Sam talk like that; his authority was normally genial. Watching Shoshi’s sad and patient look, Matt surmised that they did in fact know it was Joel, but that she wasn’t allowed to say so until his body was officially identified.

  Finally, Shoshi said, “It is very rare.”

  Lydia’s mouth quivered, and she turned stonily toward the front. Matt looked out the window at long fields, a flat and hazy stretch to the horizon, where he imagined the ocean to be. Irrigation pipes sent up a fine glinting spray. Until that moment, as they’d moved busily through passport control and baggage claim and customs, there had been a faint sense of reprieve. There was the unreality of being in a foreign country, the disorientation of a different time zone. And then the weird and unexpected excitement of being the targets of paparazzi. But now, a crushing silence fell over them. Sam exhaled next to Matt, giving off a smell of alcohol, morning breath, dry cleaning.

  No one spoke until the van pulled off the highway onto a smaller road and Shoshi turned again. They were there; a sludge of anxiety seeped through Matt and turned him cold. “I want to tell you a little bit about what will happen inside,” Shoshi said. “You will be brought into a room where police will ask you questions about Joel’s body. I will come with you.” She paused, trying, Matt imagined, to give them time to comprehend these barbaric sentences. “They will ask you questions about his body from his toes to the tips of his hair. Then you will be brought into another room to wait. And finally, you will be taken to what is called the separation room, to identify the body there.”

  The van stopped, and an electric gate was opened. Matt read the English part of the sign, Institute of Forensic Medicine, saw photographers bunched outside the gate, getting shots of the van with zoom lenses. They pulled in and parked in a small lot beside another van, and the driver turned off the engine, leaving them sitting there in silence. “I can’t move,” Lydia whispered. Matt knew the feeling; his legs were numb, and it felt as though the force of energy required to lurch into movement would require a strength way beyond him. It was Daniel who pressed down the latch on the door; it slid open with a roar. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  THERE WAS A BRICK path leading to an unobtrusive entrance. There was a hall with white chairs. Around them, people babbled and wailed. The smell was awful—a combination of what? Formaldehyde, for sure, and burnt hair, but other smells too, hideous ones for which Matt had no olfactory memory or vocabulary. They were urged to wash their faces, and to drink some water. Before Matt knew it, Daniel was stuffed in a chair between his parents, his hands thrust helplessly between his knees. Matt slunk around like the loser in musical chairs. Finally, Lydia snapped, “Sit already, would you?” A horrible wave of righteous indignation rose in his throat. But he sat in a chair beside Sam and stuffed it down, his throat cramping with the effort.

  He ran his hands over his face. The sound of crying roared in his ears, and his mind worked at the sound until it smoothed out, became an abstract pattern.

  They didn’t have to wait long to be ushered into the office with the police; Matt learned later that, except for Joel and an Arab dishwasher, the other fourteen victims had been identified already, and that the remaining mourners in the hall were identifying the bodies of victims of a massive pileup that had occurred the previous night, outside of Tel Aviv. He touched the social worker’s sleeve. “Should I go with them?” he asked.

  Her look was kind, but doubtful. “The room is quite small,” she said.

  “Oh, okay then,” he said in a quick, anxious display of cooperation that he immediately regretted when the door closed behind them.

  He thought he could safely leave the building for a little while and be back by the time they emerged, so he wandered outside. He stepped out of the sun into the shadow of pine trees, gravel crunching beneath his shoes, grateful for air that didn’t stink of mayhem. His dress pants were damp at the seat and thighs. An old man was sweeping pine needles off the paths that ran between the stuccoed buildings, a lit cigarette in his mouth, and Matt wondered if he dared ask him for one. He felt shy; he didn’t know if this dark-skinned fellow was Jewish or Palestinian, and didn’t in any case know either language. He slowly walked toward him, and when he met the man’s eye, he mimed smoking a cigarette, his eyebrows raised inquiringly. The old man rested the broom handle against his armpit and fished out a rumpled pack from his breast pocket, extended it toward Matt, and Matt drew one out. With a leathery hand, the man gave him his own stub of a lit cigarette to light it with. Matt inhaled deeply and blew two thin streams from his nostrils.

  “Thank you,” he said, nodding, in this act of bumming a smoke, without social class or nationality, a man among men.

  He strolled back to the building, holding the cigarette in graceful fingers. He leaned against the stucco wall, closed his eyes, and rested. Instantly, his peace was shattered by the vision of Joel’s body being torn apart, and he opened them again, found himself laboring to breathe. Inside, they were talking about every inch of Joel’s body. Matt felt an overwhelming tenderness toward it. Joel looked a lot like Daniel, but with the slight beefiness of the straight man. Matt and Daniel had been together for a year before Matt met him, and he’d refused to believe that Joel was straight. When Daniel said, “He’s married,” Matt asked, “To a woman?” He quizzed him suspiciously. Had Joel gone to Israel to try to be straight? Did he think a macho culture would straighten him up? Was Daniel sure they were identical twins? Then one summer, Joel came to visit them in Northampton and brought his wife, Ilana, and Matt took one look at the butch with the booming voice and bruising handshake and shot Daniel a look: Why didn’t you tell me?

  Joel was all ta-da!—he had a strong sense of entitlement, but mostly in a nice way. He was a child who had madly flourished under the praise he received when he brought home his accomplishments. He acted as though he believed he was handsome, and that made him handsome, although in fact, Daniel was much more so. He was the best dancer Matt had ever seen in a straight man. He flirted with Matt, as though Daniel’s gayness gave him a delicious permission; he was even a little inappropriate sometimes, maybe coming on too strong as the cool and gay-affirmative straight twin. He pretended that he was dominated by his giant wife.

  Matt crushed the cigarette under his shoe, suddenly sickened by it, and went back inside.

  Two big, loutish sons were muttering in Russian, bent over their keening mother, who wore a shapeless housedress and a scarf on her head. The sounds she made seemed to come from some hideous marshy place inside her, and the men winced and muttered, patting her shoulder with stiff paws. Matt took a seat and closed his eyes. An hour pas
sed. He opened his eyes to see Daniel’s ghastly face; the Rosens had returned. He patted the seat next to him, and when Daniel sat, he took his arm, but Daniel moved it away. Matt looked around at the hall: For Christ’s sake, who was capable of crawling out of their own misery to notice they were queers? He told himself: Daniel can do anything he wants right now, don’t get mad.

  They waited. They were taken outside to a different white house, and led into another office, where they waited some more. “Why must we wait so long?” Lydia moaned, and then her eyes fluttered and she fainted. “Hello!” they called, and there was noise, and shuffling, and curt instructions. Daniel and Matt knelt, cradling her head; Shoshi ran out and came back with a wet paper towel, with which she patted Lydia’s forehead. They brought her staggering to her feet, her dark hair limp around her face, and pressed a water bottle to her lips. Sam paced around her, swatting at the fabric of her suit where it had become dusty from the fall. The door opened, and Shoshi said, “Now we will go into the separation room, to see the body. I’m sorry to say that the body must not be touched, since it has been prepared for Jewish burial.”

  They stared at her dumbly. Matt felt goose bumps shiver along his forearms. They heaved themselves to their feet and followed the social worker down a hallway. Matt stopped at the door. When it opened, he could see into the bare room where a man in a lab coat stood beside a covered body on a pallet. He had a sudden passionate urge to say good-bye to Joel. Could he go in? But Daniel and his parents glided toward the pallet without looking back, the door swung closed in front of him and Shoshi, and he felt that without an explicit invitation, he couldn’t.

  His eyes were dry and itchy, red-rimmed; he rubbed them furiously with his fists. He’d been kept from Jay, too. That officious little prick Kendrick had neglected to inform him that Jay was on a respirator, and the following afternoon Matt had heard from a different friend altogether that Jay had died that morning.