For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  “One minute,” Devorah said, reaching back and removing a condom from a tiny pocket—no more than a slit in the smooth black fabric of her pants. Dov Binyamin knew what it was and waved it away.

  “Am I really your second?” she asked.

  Dov heard more in the question than was intended. He heard a flirtation; he heard a woman who treated the act of being second as if it were special. He was sad for her—wondering if she had ever been anyone’s first. He did not answer out loud, but instead nodded, affirming.

  Devorah pouted as she decided, the prophylactic held between two fingers like a quarter poised at the mouth of a jukebox. Dov switched off the light and took a half step toward the bed. He stroked at the darkness, moving forward until he found her hair, soft, alive, without any of the worked-over stiffness of Chava’s wigs.

  “My God,” he said, snatching back his hand as if he had been stung. It was too late, though. That he already knew. The hunger had flooded his whole self. His heart was swollen with it, pumping so loudly and with such strength that it overpowered whatever sense he might have had. For whom then, he wondered, was he putting on, in darkness, such a bashful show? He reached out again and stroked her hair, shaking but sure of his intent. With his other arm, the weaker arm, to which he bound every morning his tefillin, the arm closer to the violent force of his heart, he searched for her hand.

  Dov found it and took hold of it, first roughly, as if desperate. Then he held it lightly, delicately, as if it were made of blown glass—a goblet from which, with ceremony, he wished to drink. Bringing it toward his mouth, he began to speak.

  “It is a sin to spill seed in vain,” he said, and Devorah let the condom fall at the sound of his words.

  Dov Binyamin was at work on Monday and he was home as usual on Monday night. There was no desire to slip out of the apartment during the long hours when he could not sleep, no temptation, when making a delivery in Ramot, to turn the car in the direction of Tel Aviv. Dov Binyamin felt, along with a guilt that he could not shake, a sense of relief. He knew that he could never be with another woman again. And if it were possible to heap on himself all the sexual urges of the past months, if he could undo the single night with the prostitute to restore his unadulterated fidelity, he would have them tenfold. From that night of indulgence he found the strength to wait a lifetime for Chava’s attentions—if that need be.

  When Chava Bayla entered the dining room, Dov Binyamin would move into the kitchen. When she entered the bedroom, he would close his eyes and feign sleep. He would lie in the dark and silently love his wife. And, never coming to a conclusion, he would rethink the wisdom of the Rebbe’s advice. He would picture the hairy arm of the cabdriver as he slapped the hood of his taxi. And he would chide himself. Never, never would he accuse his wife of faking impurity, for was it not the greater sin for him to pretend to be pure?

  It was only a number of days from that Sunday night that Chava Bayla began to talk to her husband with affection. Soon after, she touched him on the shoulder while handing him a platter of kasha varnishkes. He placed it on the table and ate in silence. As she served dessert, levelesh, his favorite, Dov’s guilt took on a physical form. What else could it be? What else but guilt would strike a man so obviously?

  It began as a concentrated smoldering that flushed the whole of his body. Quickly intensifying, it left him almost feverish. He would excuse himself from meals and sneak out of bed. At work, frightened and in ever-increasing pain, he ran from customers to examine himself in the bathroom. Dov Binyamin knew he was suffering from something more than shame.

  But maybe it was a trial, a test of which the Rebbe had not warned him. For as his discomfort increased, so did Chava’s attentions. On her way out of the shower, she let her towel drop in front of him, stepping away from it as if she hadn’t noticed, like some Victorian woman waiting for a gentleman to return her hankie with a bow. She dressed slowly, self-consciously, omitting her undergarments and looking to Dov to remind her. He ignored it all, feeling the weight of his heart—no longer pumping as if to burst, but just as large—the blood stagnant and heavy. Chava began to linger in doorways so that he would be forced to brush against her as he passed. Her passion was torturous to Dov, forced to keep his own hidden inside. Once, without any of the protocol with which they tempered their lives, she came at the subject head-on. “Are you such a small man,” she said, “that you must for eternity exact revenge?” He made no answer. It was she who walked away, only to return sweeter and bolder. She became so daring, so desperate, that he wondered if he had ever known the true nature of his wife at all. But he refused, even after repeated advances, to respond to Chava Bayla in bed.

  She called to him from the darkness.

  “Dovey, please, come out of there. Come lie by me and well talk. Just talk. Come Doveleh, join me in bed.”

  Dov Binyamin stood in the dark in the bathroom. There was some light from the street, enough to make out the toilet and the sink. He heard every word his wife said, and each one tore at him.

  He stood before the toilet, holding his penis lightly, mindful of halacha and the laws concerning proper conduct in the lavatory. Trying to relieve himself, to pass water, he suffered to no end.

  When he began to urinate, the burning worsened. He looked down in the half darkness and imagined he saw flames flickering from his penis.

  He recalled the words of the prostitute. For his wife’s sake, he thought, as the tears welled in his eyes. This couldn’t possibly be the solution the Rebbe intended. Dov was supposed to be in his wife’s embrace, enjoying her caresses, and instead he would get an examination table and a doctor’s probing hands.

  Dov Binyamin dropped to his knees. He rested his head against the coolness of the bowl. Whatever the trial, he couldn’t bear it much longer. He had by now earned, he was sure, Chava Bayla’s love.

  There was a noise; it startled him; it was Chava at the door trying to open it. Dov had locked himself in. The handle turned again, and then Chava spoke to him through the door’s frosted-glass window.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me: When did I lose my husband for good?”

  Every word a plague.

  Dov pressed the lever of the toilet, drowning out Chava Bayla’s voice. He let the tears run down his face and took his penis full in his hand.

  For Dov Binyamin was on fire inside.

  And yet he would not be consumed.

  In This Way We Are Wise

  Three blasts. Like birds. They come through the window, wild and lost. They are trapped under the high-domed ceiling of the café, darting round between us, striking walls and glass, knocking the dishes from the shelves. And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all to do.

  Plates in halves and triangles on the floor. A group of ceramic mugs, fat and split, like overripe fruit. The chandelier, a pendulum, still swings.

  The owner, the waitress, the other few customers, sit. I am up at the windows. I am watching the people pour around the corner, watching them run toward us, mouths unhinged, pulling at hair, scratching at faces. They collapse and puff up, hop about undirected.

  Like wild birds frightened.

  Like people possessed, tearing at their forms trying to set something free.

  Jerusalemites do not spook like horses. They do not fly like moths into the fire.

  They have come to abide their climate. Terror as second winter, as part of their weather. Something that comes and then is gone.

  Watching plumes of smoke, the low clouds of smoke that follow the people down the street, I suddenly need to be near the fire, to be where the ash still settles and café umbrellas burn.

  I make for the door and the waitress stops me. The owner puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “Calm down, Natan.”

  “Sit down, Natan.”

  “Have a coffee, Natan.” The waitress is already
on her way to the machine.

  I feel an urgency the others dismiss. I can run with a child to a braking ambulance. Can help the barefooted find their shoes. The time, 3:16, my girlfriend late to meet me. I should be turning over bodies searching for her face.

  In a chair drinking coffee holding the owner’s hand. “There is nothing to do outside. No one to rescue. Who is already there is who’s helping, Natan. If you are not in the eye when it happens, it’s already too late to put yourself in.”

  I trade a picture of my girlfriend dead for one of her badly wounded.

  Inbar with her face burned off, hands blown off, a leg severed near through. I will play the part of supportive one. I will bunch up and hold the sheet by her arm, smile and tell her how lucky she is to be alive and in a position where, having discussed it in a happy bed, in a lovers’ bed, we had both sworn we’d rather die.

  The phones are back. The streets secured. Soldiers everywhere, taking up posts and positions. Fingers curled by triggers.

  An Arab worker comes out of the kitchen with a broom.

  I’m the first to reach the phone, but I can’t remember numbers. One woman slams a portable against the table, as if this will release the satellite from the army’s grip.

  I dial nonsense and hang up, unable to recollect even the code to my machine.

  “Natan will be OK,” I promise before leaving. “Natan is a grown man. He can find his way home.”

  On the street I am all animal. I am all sense, all smell and taste and touch. I can read every stranger’s intentions from scent, from the flex of a muscle, the length of the passing of our eyes.

  I’m on the corner and can turn up the block, take a few strides into the closest of kill zones. I can tour the stretch of wounded weeping and dead unmoving, walk past the blackened and burned, still smoldering ghosts.

  The Hasidim will soon come to collect scattered bits, partial Christs. Parts of victims nailed up, screwed in, driven to stone and metal.

  Hand pierced with rusted nail and hung on the base of a tree.

  It is with true force, with the bit of higher thought I can muster, that I spare myself a lifetime of dreams.

  I follow a street around and then back on the trail to Inbar’s apartment.

  She is there. We kiss and hug. She holds me in the doorway while I pass through the whole of evolution. The millions of years of animal knowing, of understanding without thought, subside.

  We exchange stories of almosts, of near deaths, theories on fate and algorithm, probability and God. Inbar late, on a bus, distant thunder and then traffic. She got off with a few others and walked the rest of the way home.

  She makes tea and we sit and watch our world on television.

  There is the corner. There is a man reporting in front of my café. And then the long shot of the stretch I avoided. The street I walk on a dozen times a day. There is my cash machine, its awning shattered, its frame streaked with blood. There is the bazaar where I buy pens and pencils. The camera lingers over spilled notebooks, school supplies scattered, the implied contrast of death and a new school year. They will seek out distraught classmates, packs of crying girls, clutching girls, crawling-all-over-each-other-suckling-at-grief girls. They will get the boyfriends to talk, the parents to talk; they will have for us the complete drama, the house-to-house echo of all three blasts, before the week is through.

  We watch our life on every channel. We turn to CNN for a top-of-the-hour translation of our world. Maybe English will make it more real.

  It does not help. There is my café. There is my cash machine. There is the tree I wait by when there is waiting to be done.

  “Would you recognize your own bedroom,” I say, “if you saw it on TV?”

  Inbar makes phone calls, receives phone calls, while I sit and watch the news. A constant cycle of the same story, little bits added each time. The phone calls remind me of America. The news, of America. Like snow days. Hovering around the radio in the morning. A chain list of calls. “Good morning, Mrs. Gold. It’s Nathan speaking. Please tell Beth that school is closed because the buses can’t come.” The absurdity of the change. Years and miles. A different sort of weather. “Yes, hello Udi. It’s Inbar. Another attack. Natan and I are fine.”

  Inbar tells me Israeli things, shares maxims on fate and luck. “We cannot live in fear,” she says. “Of course you’re terrified, it’s terror after all.” She has nonsensical statistics as well. “Five times more likely to be run over. Ten times more likely to die in a car. But you still cross the street don’t you?”

  She rubs my neck. Slips a hand under my shirt and rubs my back.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t,” I say. A kiss on my ear. A switch of the channel. “Maybe it’s time the street crossing stopped.”

  A biblical Israel, crowded with warriors and prophets, fallen kings and common men conscripted to do God’s will. An American boy’s Israel. A child raised up on causality and symbol.

  Holocaust as wrath of God.

  Israel the Phoenix rising up from the ashes.

  The reporters trot out the odd survivors, the death defiers and nine lived. A girl with a small scratch on her cheek who stood two feet from the bomber, everyone around her dead. An old man with shrapnel buried in the hardcover book he was reading who survived the exact same way when the street blew up fifty years before. A clipping. He searches his wallet for a clipping he always takes with.

  They make themselves known after every tragedy. Serial survivors. People who find themselves on exploding buses but never seem to die.

  “Augurs,” I say. “Harbingers of doom. They are demons. Dybbuks. We should march to their houses. Drag them to the squares and burn them in front of cheering crowds.”

  “You are stupid with nerves,” Inbar says. “They are the unluckiest lucky people in the world. These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea.”

  I’m swollen with heroism. The sad fact of it. Curled up on the bathroom floor woozy with the makings for a bold rescue, overdosed on my own life-or-death acumen. My body exorcises its charger of burning buildings, its icy-waters diver. The unused hero driven out while I wait patiently inside.

  The chandelier, like a pendulum; the day, like a pendulum, swings.

  Inbar will turn the corner in her apartment and find her American boyfriend pinned to the floor, immobile, sweating a malarial sweat.

  She will discover him suffering the bystander’s disease. She’ll want to wrap him in a blanket, put him in a cab, and take him to the hospital where all the uninjured victims, the unhurt, uninvolved victims, trickle in for the empty beds, to be placed on the cots in the halls.

  I do not want the hospital. Do not want treatment for having sat down after, for having sipped coffee after, and held on to the owner’s hand.

  A call home. Inbar dials the moment she thinks I can pull off a passable calm. My mother’s secretary answers. Rita, who never says more than hello and “I’ll get your mother.” My phone calls precious because of the distance. As if I’m calling from the moon.

  Today she is talking. Today Rita has something to share.

  “Your mother is in her office crying. She don’t say nothing to you, but that woman is miserable with you out in a war. Think about where you live, child. Think about your mom.”

  There is an element of struggle. Sex that night a matter of life and death. There is much scrambling for leverage and footing. Displays of body language that I’ve never known. We cling and dig in, as if striving for permanence, laboring for a union that won’t come undone.

  We laugh after. We cackle and roll around, reviewing technique and execution. Hysterical. Absurd. Perfect in its desperation. We make jokes at the expense of ourselves.

  “No sex like near-death sex.”

  We light up a cigarette, naked, twisted up in the sheets. Again we would not recognize ourselves on TV.

  Inbar has gone to work and invited Lynn over to make sure that I stay out o
f bed, that I go into town for coffee and sit at my café. Same time, same table, same cup, if I can manage it.

  Nothing can be allowed to interrupt routine.

  “Part of life here,” Lynn says.

  This is why Inbar invited her. She respects Lynn as an American with Israeli sensibilities. The hard-news photographer, moving in after every tragedy to shoot up what’s left.

  The peeper’s peep, we call her. The voyeur’s eye. Our Lynn, feeding the grumbling image-hungry bellies of America’s commuter trains and breakfast nooks.

  “A ghost,” Lynn says. She is gloomy, but with a sportsman’s muted excitement. “Peak invisibility. People moving right through me. I think I even went weightless at some point, pulled off impossible angles. Floated above the pack. My stuff is all over the wire this morning.” She pops the top on a used film canister, tips its contents into her palm. “You’ve got to come out with me one day just for the experience. You can stand in the middle of a goddamn riot, people going down left and right. Arab kids tossing rocks, Molotov cocktails, Israelis firing back tear gas and rubber bullets. Chaos. And you move, you just slide right through it all like a fucking ghost, snatching up souls, freezing time. A boy in the air, his body arched, his face to the sky. He’s lobbing back a gas canister, the smoke caught in a long snaking trail. Poetry. Yesterday, though. Yesterday was bad.”

  “I’m not made for this,” I tell her. “I grew up in the suburbs. I own a hot-air popcorn popper. A selection of Mylec Air-Flo street-hockey sticks.”

  “Two of these,” she says, and drops two orange capsules in my tea. “Drink up.” And I do. “Two before I shoot and two right after I dump the film. An image comes back to haunt me, I take another. The trapdoor in my system. If it gets to be too much, I’ll just stay asleep. So to show my utter thankfulness upon waking, I make a pass of the Old City the next day. I stop in every quarter, pray at every place of worship I find. That’s my secret, a flittingness. I favor no gods. Establish again and again my lack of allegiance.