by Judith Frank
She turned and bestowed upon him the gentle, steady gaze he was coming to love. “Yes,” she said. “But for me, it’s the smell that is the worst.”
“Tell me about it,” Matt drawled, sniffing his arm and making a face.
“At home, when I call to say there has been a pigua, my husband turns on the boiler. But even after many long, long showers, the smell stays with me for about a week.”
“How do you keep on going?”
“We don’t work all the time. Each unit is on duty for only three months.”
He nodded. “How many social workers are there per unit?”
“It’s depend,” Shoshi said, making a translation error Matt was getting used to. They always went out in pairs, she told him, and had a support team checking in with them. The entire unit met at the very end to assess their performance and to talk through their feelings. “That night, I can’t sleep, but I go to work the next morning. I feel sick, weak, nauseated.”
She spoke with the openness of the social workers he knew, which to his ear, bordered on the burlesque; if she were American, she’d be mentioning “sharing” a lot. He imagined that there was probably an Israeli equivalent to that language that was a little blunter. He could tell that her frankness came partially, but not only, from her training—and the part that came from her personality felt immensely touching to him. He had been used to feeling outrage that suicide bombings in Israel were widely televised in the U.S. while the bombings upon Palestinian civilians never were. But her struggle to help grieving and traumatized people brought into relief everybody’s vulnerable humanity. It pressed upon his worldview and scrambled it a little.
He said gently, “Well, you’re very good at what you do. We’re lucky we got you.”
“Thank you,” she said gravely. “I must leave you today. Now it’s become the work of the social worker from Bituach Leumi.”
They struggled for a while over how to translate that—“national security”?—until Matt understood that it was something like the Israeli version of Social Security. He put his hand on his pained heart. Maybe he was romanticizing her, but she seemed to understand how much he felt like an outsider.
“Won’t you check up on us at all?” he asked. “We’ll need a lot of checking up on. We’re a big mess.”
She nodded without smiling. “Sure I will,” she said.
IN THE LIVING ROOM, Daniel was listening to talk of revenge. They just don’t want peace! They don’t understand peace. The same old words. Ilana’s father and the principal from Ilana’s school were huddled together, comparing the moments each had known that Arafat was not a viable bargaining partner. For Yaakov it was Camp David, where Arafat was offered a state on a silver platter and walked away from it—Daniel could have uttered the exact cliché before it came out of Yaakov’s mouth. But the principal, an overbearing and pompous man with a knitted kipa, whom Yaakov clearly deferred to, clucked and shook his head; naturally, he had known way before that point. Daniel heard from other conversations that the army was already engaged in a retaliation operation called Righteous Sword. It made him miserable.
He looked around for Matt and saw him out on the balcony, talking with the social worker. He knew how to make himself at home; Daniel never had to worry about that, which was a big bonus in a boyfriend. Matt would come home from parties where he’d known no one, and report things to Daniel about his friends that Daniel had no idea about. He watched him now, holding a cigarette away from himself so the smoke wouldn’t get into his hair, and nodding as Shoshi spoke earnestly to him. His hair was shaggy—they’d left just before he was due for a haircut—and somehow looked beautiful; he looked most beautiful when careless about his appearance.
The familiar sense of strange marvel that he was with a man like Matt came over him now. Daniel had always imagined himself with someone more like Jonathan, who was moderately good-looking and with whom he shared a love of George Eliot and John Donne, and who, when they left a movie together, always had a corroborating opinion of it. Matt’s judgments were very strong, but always a little weird. He judged the performances of the actors in movies, instead of the narrative or the images.
But for all of Matt’s love of crappy movies and reality TV and the same hunky movie stars every other gay man in America had a fetish for, he had excellent instincts about fairness and social justice. Unlike Daniel, he had grown up as a pretty queeny kid, unable to conceal his difference from the other boys, and that had forced him to hone his ability to sniff out piety and hypocrisy, and the violence underlying them. Matt was a political animal. He woke up and read the paper cover to cover; he read political memoirs and contemporary books about politics as avidly and indiscriminately as he did the memoirs of movie stars. His favorite person in the whole world was Bill Clinton, whom he called Shakespearean.
If Matt understood these conversations, he’d rip them apart with indignation and incisiveness. But, Daniel wondered, was that even what he needed? Even thinking about it made his hackles rise.
He looked around the living room at the sober conversations, checked on his parents to see whether they needed any translation help. They were sitting stiffly on the couch, ignored by the other mourners either because of the language barrier or because the guests couldn’t face talking to Joel’s mother. Lydia had her gracious, attentive social face on—her game face, Daniel thought, and it broke his heart. He went and perched on the edge of the sofa next to her, and she reached up and rubbed his arm. A small group of people from Joel’s work was gathered in the corner talking to the reporter, who seemed like a decent enough guy. He had asked Daniel about what Joel was like as a boy growing up, and Daniel had struggled to describe his brother without using cheesy clichés—the last thing he wanted was for Joel to come off as the all-American Jewish boy, likable and popular, a lover of sports and of his adopted country. But whenever he tried to get a little complicated, he found he risked sounding critical. The reporter was very interested in their being twins, and asked him if he felt a part of him was now gone. Daniel had stared at him and said, “Of course. But wouldn’t I feel that way if he was just a regular brother?”
Daniel rose when Gal’s best friend, Leora, came in with her parents, shyly, edged forward by them, her hair in immaculate braids. Gal came up and seized her hand, pulled her out of the room to her bedroom, and shut the door behind them. Daniel watched them go. He’d be taking Gal away from Leora. He knew and liked her parents; he hugged them, and they murmured in his ear. Leora’s mother, Gabrielle, was tearfully saying how much they loved Gal and how happy they’d be to take her anytime, when Daniel’s eye caught a man behind them, waiting to get in and looking at him expectantly. Was he supposed to know him? He thanked Gabrielle, and said in Hebrew, “Will you speak to my parents? They’re sitting alone.” All the while racking his brain to see if he remembered this man.
“I won’t stay long,” the man said hurriedly, in a confidential half whisper. He was a middle-aged man with disheveled, graying hair and a knitted kipa pinned askew on his head. “I just wanted you to have this.” He had taken Daniel’s hand and was placing something in it. Daniel looked down, and back at the man. It was the nut to a medium-sized bolt, a loosely woven gold chain threaded through it.
“Ma zeh?” he asked sternly. What is this?
“My daughter was killed in a pigua,” the man told him. “Sbarro.” He was referring to the pizza place in downtown Jerusalem, which had been destroyed a few years earlier. “The police told us that what ultimately killed her was a nut driven into her neck.”
Daniel took a step back, his heart quickening.
“At the funeral, all of her friends from her class wore nuts around their necks, as a tribute to her. And when I heard of your brother’s death, I thought you might want to share this tribute with us. To become part of our large family.”
“Thank you,” Daniel said automatically, his throat constricting.
“I brought some for his children too, in case they wanted to
remember their parents by something.” He was extending two additional, smaller necklaces.
“No,” Daniel said, backing away.
“I understand your feelings,” the man said with a look of eager compassion. “May I come in and talk for a moment?”
Just then Daniel felt a touch on his back. It was Matt, standing behind him, big and warm. “Do you need help getting rid of this guy?” he was murmuring.
Daniel turned toward him and nodded helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” Matt said to the man, not knowing whether he even understood English. “Family only.” He closed the door as the man took an uncertain step backward. “There!” he said brightly. “What did he want?”
Daniel held out the necklace. “His daughter was killed in the Sbarro bombing, apparently by one of these to the neck.”
“You’re kidding,” Matt said. “What a freak.”
Daniel gave a surprised huff of a laugh. “How did you know I needed rescuing?”
“You staggered backward and clutched your chest.”
“I did not.”
Matt looped a finger through the necklace. “Why don’t you give that to me.”
“No,” Daniel said, suddenly uncertain, pulling it back.
Matt raised an eyebrow. “So it’s going to join those nails in your pocket?”
Daniel flashed him an angry, self-conscious look. They had pocked his palms and thighs with tiny bloody marks.
“Okay,” Matt said gently. “Sorry.”
They returned to the living room, and when Daniel noticed that Leora’s father was perched on the arm of the couch, talking to his parents, he went over to join them, still a little flushed. His mother had learned that Moti was a builder, and was telling him what a huge impression it always made on her to see an entire city built of stone the color of the hillsides. “Rising to Jerusalem,” she was saying, translating the Hebrew verb used to convey the word going, when applied to Jerusalem. “It’s as though you really are rising, being uplifted—it feels almost spiritual.”
“That’s the idea of Jerusalem stone,” Moti said with a faint smile. He was a big, wide-faced, genial guy; he and Joel had played racquetball together, and Daniel remembered something about his cooking a mean osso buco. “It’s supposed to convey a sense of earthiness, but also of holiness.” His voice was husky, and he stepped delicately over the English consonants. “The directive to build with Jerusalem stone goes back to the British Mandate. But after the ’67 war, when Israel annexed an enormous territory around Jerusalem, the first priority of the city planners was to prevent it from ever being repartitioned. So they used Jerusalem stone to make occupied territory look like an integral part of Jerusalem.” He shrugged with a self-deprecating grimace. “Please forgive the lecture. If Gabrielle heard me going on about this she’d be flashing me warning looks.”
“No, it’s fascinating,” Lydia said. “I had no idea.”
“The stone mostly comes from quarries in the West Bank now, because stone dust is an environmental hazard.”
Daniel had become alert, his sense of Moti shifting and complicating. “So Palestinians produce the stone that’s designed to make Jerusalem Jewish forever,” he said. “And get sick doing so.”
“Exactly.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” Lydia said, and they all laughed uncomfortably at the understatement.
“I’m surprised the supply lasts, there’s so much building,” Daniel said.
“Oh, they hardly ever use it as a construction material anymore,” Moti shrugged. “Now it’s usually just used as a facade.”
Daniel clutched his chest. “Are you going to destroy all our illusions?” he cried.
Lydia sighed and smoothed her dress over her knees, her rings gleaming off creased knuckles. “Of course, I don’t know when we’ll come back here—that’ll depend. Certainly, rising to Jerusalem will never feel the same.” She looked up and grimaced apologetically, and Moti took her hand.
WHEN JOEL AND ILANA’S lawyer called at about four thirty, Daniel suddenly felt seized with urgency to open the will. He could continue no longer in this suspended state, with people asking about the kids. His father had cornered him in the guest bedroom, where he’d gone to take a breather, and said, “Your mother is very concerned about the Grossmans. Apparently, Malka told her how glad she was that the children could spend some time with their American family before coming to live with them.”
So when Assaf called, Daniel asked him to come over in about an hour. There was a lull in the shiva. Gabrielle had asked if they wanted her to take the kids home with her family for dinner, and after some hesitation, looking at Gal’s hopeful face, and at Noam in Gabrielle’s arms playing with her necklace, Daniel had asked if she was sure she wanted to take the baby too, and she had said sure, Noam was her favorite cutie-pie.
Assaf Schwartz was a paunchy, middle-aged man with unfashionably large glasses. He shook hands with and offered grave condolences to the whole family, in both English and Hebrew. Daniel remembered that Joel and Ilana had told him about Assaf; they believed that he was a true mensch. Ilana had dealt with him in her work, seen him preside over the divorces and custody fights of her students’ parents.
Daniel began to herd them into the master bedroom. Matt headed that way and Daniel caught his arm. “Matt,” he said. “I think it’s better that you not come in. It’ll freak everyone out even more.” He lowered his voice. “If they imagine that the kids have been left only to me, instead of to us together, it might prevent a firestorm.”
“Oh,” Matt said. “Okay.” That sounded reasonably strategic to him for all of two seconds, and by the time his outrage surfaced, they were all inside, the door closed behind them. He’d come all this way, he thought, only to have door after door closed in his face. He stood there, his chest heaving. Where could he go? His mind cast around for options. He didn’t know where he was, and there wasn’t an English-language map in the house as far as he knew, and he didn’t know where the car keys were. If he could take the car, he’d just drive and drive along the winding narrow streets till he was good and lost. Or find himself a bar—were there bars in Jerusalem? There must be—and get good and hammered. And pick up some dark-skinned soldier with peach fuzz and traces of acne, and blow him silly.
But he didn’t even know what the address was here, to find his way back. He pondered that, his own severe infantilization.
The living room had emptied out, at least for now. He went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets, trying to find a liquor stash. He finally found a bottle of scotch among the vinegar and soy sauce bottles, and poured himself an enormous shot into a coffee mug. He downed it, shuddering. Then he slipped out the front door and stumbled out into the street, squinting from the low, cutting western sun. He walked down the street, stray cats scattering before him. To his left was a narrow flight of stone stairs, leading up; he began to climb them, walking past little gardens, profusions of flowers falling over stone walls, and shadowed doorways into apartment buildings, some with old, creaky iron gates. At the top, a bus roared by on a wide and busy street. He ran across and turned up another flight of stairs, where again he felt sheltered from the warm and busy city. He could smell some type of wild plant. The loveliness of the neighborhood made him want to cry, and the alcohol hit him then and made him stagger. He found a small raggedy playground where a lone grandma, a scarf on her head, sat near a stroller as a toddler played in the sand. He sat down on a bench and closed his eyes, feeling his head spiral. He would sit there till it got dark. If Daniel needed him, he wouldn’t be there.
The conversations he’d had at the shiva bubbled in his mind. What were the names of that couple he’d been stuck in a corner with? The guy was the son of Yaakov and Malka’s best friends. Natan Fink, that was his name. And his haughty, elegant wife, whose name Matt couldn’t dredge up. Natan had apparently played with Ilana as a kid. When the conversation with Matt faltered, he’d gestured toward the baby gate that normally blo
cked off the kitchen and now leaned unused against a cabinet, as if to say that he’d just noticed it. “When we were young, they didn’t have childproofing, and shmildproofing; they didn’t believe that a kid would die if he ate a peanut. Do you understand? These people had survived the biggest catastrophe that could happen, they were trying to begin a new life, they didn’t waste their time with nonsense. So we kids ran wild; we played on construction sites, in wadis, we rode bikes—without helmets!” He made a shocked face. “All over Jerusalem, into the Arab parts, where the Arabs all knew us and liked us and gave us rolls with zatar.” He stopped and laughed. “Not that we weren’t a little messed up! If you ever hurt yourself, or felt bad, you looked into your parents’ eyes and felt ashamed to think of that as suffering.” He looked at his wife and said complacently, “But I turned out okay, right?”
His wife patted his arm. “Sure, sweetie,” she said.
Natan’s eyes moved over the living room and then rested fondly on Yaakov. “They all helped each other. If one lost a job, the others pitched in. If one had, God forbid, to be hospitalized, or had a nervous breakdown, the others were there to help. And Malka and Yaakov! Well. To this day, my parents say that they wouldn’t have made it without them. They got on the same boat to Palestine as Malka. None of them were married yet, of course. They’d all lost their parents, brothers, sisters. So they had to be a family to each other.”
They were silent for a while, then Natan heaved a mighty sigh. “He’s a hero, Yaakov. A true hero. And now—ach.”
Sitting on the park bench, Matt wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed. The sun had lowered behind a building and it was suddenly cold. He thought about how he’d tell Daniel this story, about this obnoxious man who worshipped Yaakov. He was sure that by now he knew more about some of these people than Daniel did. Anger rose sullenly in him again. He knew Daniel was grieving, but didn’t he, Matt, deserve a little recognition, deserve to be seen as part of the family? As a participant in this drama?