by Judith Frank
IN THE BEDROOM, THE four parents perched uncomfortably at the edges of Joel and Ilana’s bed. Malka, whose feet didn’t quite reach the floor, smoothed down the bedspread on either side of her; Lydia had picked up a small framed picture of Joel and Ilana hiking up north before they got married, and was rubbing the dust off the glass with the hem of her blouse. Daniel was crouching at the side of the bed, his pulse racing, ready to get this over with. His mother and Malka kept insisting that he come on up and sit down. “I’m fine,” he said, and “There’s no room!” till his mother pressed closer to his father, bumping the line of bodies, which moved in a small series of sighs and grunts. Daniel sat, the mattress drooping under half his butt, his mother folding his hand in hers and rubbing it. He pulled it away. “I’m falling off!” he said, and stood.
Assaf stood awkwardly in front of them with a manila envelope in his hand. He twisted and looked behind him at the floor, as though contemplating sitting there, then turned back toward them and cleared his throat. “Is everybody . . . ?” he murmured. He read the opening language of the will, and explained to Daniel’s parents that it was just the everyday legal stuff about Joel and Ilana being the parents to Gal and Noam, and being of sound mind. Then Assaf peeked at them over the paper and cleared his throat again. “ ‘It is our wish,’ ” he read, “ ‘that our children’s uncle, Daniel Rosen, be designated the guardian of Gal and Noam, to live with them wherever he wishes.’ ” He read it once in Hebrew, and then translated it into English.
There was silence. Anxiety gaped in Daniel’s chest as he waited for the information to take. Yaakov’s face was reddening. Malka looked at him, bewildered, for an explanation. Then she looked at Daniel. “But you’ll live with them here, in this house.”
Daniel tried to look at her, but it was too hard to meet her stupefied gaze, her sagging mouth. “No, Malka,” he said, “I’m going to have to take them to my home, in the States.”
“Lama?” she asked. Why?
He began to speak, but his parents were staring at him, pulling his attention back. “Have you known this all along?” his mother asked, eyes blazing.
“For a while,” Daniel hedged.
“How could you not tell me?” she cried. “I feel like such a fool! I never anticipated this.” Her hand was gripping Sam’s sleeve hard, and he was murmuring, “Honey.”
“I must tell you something important,” the lawyer said, raising his voice over the clamor of distress and incomprehension. “In Israeli wills, the disposition of property is always upheld. But not necessarily the disposition of children.” He spoke in Hebrew.
Daniel saw understanding slowly dawn over Yaakov’s face, and a flash of hope. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“The government considers what is the good of the children, in family court.”
“What?” Daniel cried. “Their own parents wanted this for them. The court would go against the parents’ wishes?”
“I’m afraid so,” Assaf said gently. He stood with the papers dangling in his hand, and Daniel suddenly hated him, this hypocritical pose of gentle advocacy, his big sorrowful eyes blinking out of those ridiculous glasses. “If they thought it was for the good of the children.”
His mother had Daniel by the sleeve; there was the clamor for translation, and he shook it off, he was trying to think. “You can’t be serious,” he said to Assaf, and then whirled at his parents and spat out an irritated translation. “And I’m sure,” he said, his lips curled, “that living with two queers is exactly what the Israeli state thinks of as for the good of the children.”
“Daniel,” his father said.
“What are my chances?” Daniel demanded in Hebrew, ignoring his father, fixing Assaf with a cold look. He remembered something. “They’re American citizens; doesn’t that count for something?”
“Not necessarily, Daniel,” Assaf said. “You’ll still need a court order to take them out of the country.” He reached forward and clasped Daniel’s shoulder. “But don’t assume anything, either good or bad. There are many factors.”
His father gripped his elbow. “Don’t worry, son,” he said softly. “We’ll fight this.”
Daniel shook his arm free. “I don’t understand this,” he said. “The parents decided what was for the good of the children.” He felt he was about to cry and, mortified, covered his face with his hands. “Poor Joel and Ilana,” he moaned. “It’s what they wanted.”
“This is crazy,” Lydia was saying, looking to Sam for corroboration.
The lawyer crouched and tried to take them all in with his gaze. “Everybody, please be calm,” he said, first in English, then in Hebrew. “Look. We are shocked by these terrible deaths. When we recover a little bit, I know that we’ll all do our best to make sure that Gal and Noam have lives that are as safe and normal as possible.”
Normal? Daniel burst into tears.
Malka was clutching at Yaakov and asking him how Ilana could do this to them, and he was urging her, with increasing impatience, to calm down, to try to understand that the court would surely be on their side.
CHAPTER 4
HE COULDN’T FIND Matt anywhere. Their bedroom was empty, the sofa bed made up, with the bed pillows, in worn pillowcases, stacked upon it. The window was open and the curtain billowing. He checked the bathroom and the balcony, and went back into their room and sat down on the sofa. He unbuttoned the top buttons of his shirt and stared at the desk till his vision blurred. There was a knock on the door frame; Yaakov stood there with his jacket on. “Malka doesn’t feel well,” he said. “I must take her home.”
Daniel nodded numbly.
Yaakov turned away, and Daniel’s parents came to the door of his room. His mother’s face was tight; she was demanding, “How long have you known about this?”
His father leaned heavily on the desk.
Where the hell was Matt? The thought of not bringing the children home made Daniel sick; the prospect of caring for them was the only thing that had kept him from going off the deep end. He buried his head in his hands.
“Daniel, I want to know how long you’ve known about this,” Lydia said.
“Not long, Mom,” he lied, his voice muffled through his fingers, “just for about a month.”
“It was Ilana’s idea, wasn’t it.” She had a difficult relationship with Ilana, whom she perceived as constantly policing the boundaries between them; she’d been furious when Ilana had asked her to wait a month before visiting, after Gal was born. They all spent a lot of energy denying that this was true, but Daniel knew that it was. Still, leaving him the kids hadn’t been Ilana’s idea, not hers alone.
“No,” Daniel said firmly, looking up. “It was both of them. We had a conversation about it.”
There was silence. Finally, Lydia said, “I have trouble believing that.”
“Why?” he demanded. “I find that offensive. You think Joel wouldn’t trust me to raise his children?”
“Daniel,” his father said. “Please don’t escalate this any more than necessary.”
Lydia began to cry. “I feel so betrayed,” she said. “It’s as though Joel were killed all over again.”
“Oh, please!” Daniel said. “His having a desire of his own means he was killed all over again?”
“Daniel,” his father barked.
“I can’t help the way I feel,” his mother said. “Do not tell me how I can and cannot feel.”
Daniel’s hands were sweating on the knees of his pants. This new legal hitch made him feel desperately undermined, as though his bid to be an adult had failed right in front of them. He knew that, to his father, he’d always been the perplexing twin, given every opportunity but lacking in the kind of ambition Sam understood. He’d always suspected that Sam thought of his homosexuality itself as a form of sloth, something that put him in the disappointing category of people without a work ethic. And now—any cachet he’d had, any way he’d been ennobled by the prospect of rescuing the children, had vanished.
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br /> His father closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he said, “At least in Massachusetts the kids would be closer to us.”
Lydia looked at him sharply, and he shrugged. “Look,” he said, “we might have to be realistic about this.” He looked steadily at her as her eyes widened with incredulity and outrage, her mascara thickened with tears. “Honey, we’re in third place,” he said. “For whatever reason, Joel and Ilana clearly wanted Daniel to take the kids, and the state is going to lean toward keeping them here, with their other grandparents.”
“That’s out of the question,” Lydia said. “Malka is mentally disturbed, she can’t even keep her house clean. And how old are they? They must be in their seventies!”
Sam shrugged again and gestured toward Daniel, as if to suggest that he was a better option, and Lydia’s face, rigid with shock and rage, crumpled. “It’s as though he were killed all over again,” she cried.
“Mother, would you stop saying that?”
“How are you going to raise these children!” she demanded. “And with whom? With Matt?” She gave an ugly laugh.
And then, when Daniel couldn’t stand it for one more moment, Matt walked into the room, red-cheeked, bringing in with him the bracing chill of the night wind. “How’s it going?” he asked.
Daniel looked up. Matt looked like a miracle, handsome and tousled. Daniel wanted to fling himself into his arms. But instead, he found himself saying accusingly, “We’re not going to get the kids.”
“What?”
His parents’ eyes swiveled heavily toward Matt, and Daniel saw for the first time just how much Lydia disliked him. Sam explained what had happened, with Daniel interrupting to gloss the situation in the bleakest light. “The good of the child,” he snapped. “Since when has a religious state considered it the good of the child to be placed in the care of queers?”
His father made an admonishing sound, and Lydia winced. “Don’t say that,” she said. “I hate that word.”
“It’s what we are, Mother,” he said. “No matter how respectable we are, how well-behaved, to them we’re just queers.”
Matt sat next to him on the couch and put a hand on his arm. Lydia rose frostily and took Sam’s hand, and said, “I’m not going to listen to this. We’ll let you calm down.”
When they’d left, Matt slid the door shut.
“It’s true,” Daniel insisted.
“You’re preaching to the choir, honey,” Matt said. He tried to take him into his arms, but Daniel shook him off.
“Where were you? I looked all over for you.” His face was exhausted and ashy, crusted with layers of dried tears, and Matt’s heart went out to his poor, tired spirit.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said gently. “I left the house for a little while and went for a walk.” He was proud of himself for not mentioning that Daniel himself had sent him away.
“A little while?! I’m sitting here getting tortured by my parents, who can’t believe I’m capable of raising a child, and on top of that facing losing the kids . . . Have you been drinking?” He paused, letting out a shaky sigh. “It’s just that I have to know if I’m going to be able to depend on you.”
Matt’s face contorted with disbelief. “What are you talking about?” he cried. “That’s so unfair!”
“It isn’t about fair or not fair, Matt,” Daniel said. “It’s about being there to help.”
Matt’s hand was gripped over his heart, wrinkling his shirt. “Hey, I’m a nice, helpful guy, but I’m not a magician,” he protested. “I can’t be sent away and be there for you at the same time.” There was no reply. “You’ve hardly let me near you in the past couple of days. You’ve hardly even acknowledged me! Ilana’s father asks who I am every time he lays eyes on me. And you know what? This is my life, too; you’re not the only one who’s going to be raising those kids.” He was thinking, If we even get them—and he had no idea how he felt about the prospect of not getting them. He remembered Daniel’s return from Israel last year, and how, as he unpacked, his hands paused over the opened suitcase on his bed and his face took on a solemnity that Matt had never seen before, and which was so much the cartoon essence of solemnity—his eyes shining and his face drawn long—that Matt thought at first that he was about to joke about something. When Daniel told him that Joel and Ilana wanted their kids to live with them if something happened to them, Matt’s heart had tumbled all over itself to join him in the sense that a wonderful honor had been bestowed upon them. And he had felt that all along, on Daniel’s behalf, but also on his own. It seemed a sign of tremendous trust and love, and he had a sense of how subversive it was too, how deeply it went against the grain of the Israeli ideology of populating the land with Jewish children. He had never imagined that it would come to fruition; and when it did, he veered madly between excited pride and dread.
“It’s my name in the will,” Daniel countered, “and I’m the one who will have to go to court.”
“And no doubt you’ll keep me as far away from those proceedings as possible,” Matt said.
Daniel stood and smacked his pants to smooth them. “You know what?” he said, drawing himself up. “I’m not having this conversation.”
“Come on, Dan,” Matt pleaded, standing between Daniel and the door. In the tiny room he could hear the labored breathing of his partner, could feel stress and sweat radiating off his body. “I don’t want to fight.”
Daniel refused to meet his eyes. They stood like that for a minute, and then Matt spoke. “This is awful,” he said. “This is the most awful time in our entire lives. So let’s be friends, okay? Otherwise, we’re not going to survive this.”
Daniel looked quickly at him, thinking, We? He took a shaky breath. “It’s just that . . . I looked all over for you,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.
Matt leveled him with a stare, knowing he should put his arms around him, even if he got pushed away again and again. But how much could you get blamed for not being there before you decided to just stop being there?
Daniel sat back down and covered his face with his hands. “I just wish I could talk to you,” he said. “I come to bed wanting to curl up and talk to you. But I can’t. You just don’t get it.”
Matt sat back down. “What don’t I get?” he asked softly.
“The whole thing,” Daniel said, waving a hand helplessly.
Matt shut his mind down, like a computer on sleep mode, and waited a few beats, willing himself to be patient. “What whole thing?”
Daniel looked at him. “I know how you feel about Israel, and about Joel and Ilana living here.”
“And?” Matt asked, knowing that Daniel was referring to arguments they’d sometimes had, in which Matt had argued that Joel and Ilana should leave the country as long as it was an occupying power. He’d written his senior thesis on South Africa during apartheid, under a South African professor he admired who had gone into exile; and even though Daniel insisted over and over that the comparison didn’t hold, South Africa was Matt’s model for what the Israelis were doing. “In exile!” Daniel would exclaim. “I’m sorry, but who are you to tell people where to live?” It was the biggest bone of contention between them, and Matt thought it was stupid and a waste, since he and Daniel actually felt pretty much the same way about Israel, and because, when it came down to it, why should he be that invested in it anyway?
“I know you don’t really feel this,” Daniel said now, “but sometimes I think you might feel they deserved what they got.”
Matt inhaled sharply. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”
“I know it’s not really true,” Daniel said.
“You know it’s not really true, but you think it may be a little true? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Well, is it?” Daniel asked, looking up with a sudden challenge.
“Stop projecting, dude,” Matt said, giving him a cool look. “Stop taking out your fucked-up feelings about this country on me.”
Dan
iel flushed and sank onto the couch. He shot Matt a look of mingled anger and confusion. “I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be feeling. I mean, I know what I’m supposed to be feeling. Righteous indignation at the terrorists for killing innocent people, and all of that.” He looked quickly at Matt, then down again. Aha, thought Matt, that’s what he’s mad about. If you believed that the Occupation was itself a form of constant terrorism—because what else could you call humiliating Palestinian civilians, subjecting them to a thousand petty and infuriating regulations, stealing their land, depriving them of their livelihood, blowing up their homes? If you believed that, what the hell were you supposed to feel at this moment?
But it wasn’t fair to take out his anger on him! Matt called it pulling the goy card. Because Matt wasn’t Jewish, Daniel always claimed that he couldn’t understand the depth of Daniel’s misery over it, over the historical irony that his people had overcome oppression by becoming an occupying force. Once, a few years ago, he had made Matt read Leon Uris’s Exodus. “Every Jewish kid of my generation read it,” he’d told Matt. He wanted him to get a sense of Israel’s prehistory, however distorted it was by the novel: how it came into being in the wake of the Holocaust, and how Jewish warriors smuggled into Palestine the refugees no other nation would save. He also wanted Matt to feel the romance of Israel, which Daniel had learned to feel in Jewish camp as a teenager, and which he thought the book would evoke in a passionate gay man. The Jewish soldiers were so manly and self-reliant, and there were many scenes of beautiful Jewish teenage warriors dancing the hora around campfires, eyes flashing. Matt gulped the book down, and reported that it gave him a total boner. “But do you get what I mean about what Jews love about Israel?” Daniel insisted as Matt nibbled his neck, whispering, “You be the handsome, emotionally damaged underground fighter, and I’ll be the haughty girl in charge of the refugee camp in Cyprus.” And then, when Daniel, laughing, pushed him, “Yes, I get it, I get it!”