Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  All those long noon days sitting on the floor and picking at the grouts, which wouldn’t be picked at, because the tiles were just a print and the flooring was linoleum. All those longer nights his parents would be up arguing in the Yiddish of banged cabinets. This was the tacky tightwad pennycolored house his father went to work to get away from. Unlocking it meant bending the key, twisting so hard the key nearly broke and the vinylsiding above the doorway sloughed its trim. This was the home his mother had cleaned and Ruth was supposed to have cleaned and now David had to scrub all the grease off himself. He’d never even touched a vacuum at his own residence.

  Still, it wasn’t the worst: the Bengali Bangladeshis, whose lease he’d guiltily terminated, and whose possessions he’d moved, for gratis, to a new condo in Forest Hills he’d found for them, for gratis—rather his employees had done all that for him and even tendered his regrets—hadn’t left too many traces of their tenancy, just the lingering smell of an unplaceable spray or spice, something like a furniture polish of pepper and cinnamon. He examined the furniture, touched it for dust. It wasn’t anything like what his parents had owned, but all that lot had been sold, or else had just gotten lumped in with all the other lots, in whichever warehouse, in whichever units. He wouldn’t have recognized his parents’ stuff anyway. He only recognized that his parents and his shift supervisor, under the influence of different Europes, had developed different tastes. Different deficiencies. Or maybe Jon had chosen this stuff. Or maybe Leland. His parents’ modern would never be modern again. They’d gone for chrome, earth tones, rugs made of llamas. Not wood. Not such ponderous planking. Though something about the diningroom table was familiar. Its dimensions or aridity, its chairs. Too many chairs. He swabbed at the stovetop, buffed the oven. Without a sponge, just with his hands, his fingernails, snorting rails off the table, snorting off a spoon. He stocked the cutlery drawer, decided his cousin could stock the pantry himself. Or else they’d stop together on the way back from the airport. At Stop & Shop. Or ShopRite. He climbed the mousy stairs.

  It made sense that his parents’ bedroom had been furnished. The only bed had been put in the largest bedroom, about as large as a closet should be, a cell for two immigrants to spend a life in, loving, hating, grappling. Jammed up against the sleigh bed were twin nightstands and an overdrawered dresser overdressed in carvings, oak clusters. Antiques, but that wasn’t anything to recommend them. Dumpy, fusty, oppressively solid. Furnishings that prepared you for the coffin. Whoever had owned this stuff, whoever had stored and lost it, must be dead. David set his alarms, plugged in his phone, and went about laying the sheets, the fitted, the flat, the case for the pillow. “Fuck,” which he pronounced aloud like a prayer before sleep, though he wasn’t going to be able to sleep. That’s what he’d forgotten: “Fucking pillows.”

  Yoav, the dark kid, his cousin, his cousin’s kid: only in that darkness would David ever recognize the boy already had a father.

  The first time David met his cousin Yoav was 14 years before all this, when after 14 years of marriage his wife had caught him screwing, nailing, doing something industrious to an employee: doing some industry to Ruth.

  David and Bonnie King, who was about to again become Bonnie Dhimmaj—a former calendar girl for a sportscar importer/exporter that David had longhaul dealings with—had been living in Jersey at the time, in a trophy mcmansion big enough for him to mope, her to rage, and their daughter to mourn in, but still: Bonnie threw him out, threw a garmentbag of suits to the porch. Jersey had been her dream, specifically the Jersey suburbs, specifically the suburb of Summit, the summit of success for the cityborn, and Bonnie was from the Bronx, an Eastern Orthodox who’d converted. David was facing a summer laid out in front of him like a scorched brittle lawn. He was facing a divorce and an attempt to invalidate the prenup. Bonnie would claim that her signature had been coerced, or forged, and regardless, he’d misreported assets. She’d also claim that he’d abused her and tried to get Tammy, bat mitzvah aged then, to back her up.

  David moved into Manhattan but without his passport, considered breaking into the house to retrieve it on a day his accountant had told him that Bonnie was meeting with her own accountant, but then had reservations, took advice. He reported his passport as lost or stolen, applied to have a replacement expedited.

  The day it arrived he went out and bought six of the same velcrotic insulated coolerbags, stopped by Citibank and dragged his suitcase into a cab to JFK, where he was met by Paul Gall and Pete Simonyi. He bought three roundtrip tickets and charged through the manifold security checks, hoping they might irradiate and change him.

  The skin below his weddingband, where his weddingband had been, would tan.

  Paul Gall, shift supervisor, was the most experienced, most decorated staffmember at King’s Moving: back then, before the diabetes and arthritis, a big shambolic gorillalimbed guy with a widow’s peak, a former mover’s physique, and that egregious admiration for perceived Jewish business acumen so prevalent among the ex-Yugoslavs.

  Pete Simonyi was David’s lawyer: a small compact suit and tie guy with kinky hair and the solicitous airs of a minor advisor to a megalomaniacal regent.

  For the flight to Tel Aviv, they sat toward the back of the plane, three in a three row with David lapsed insomniac in the middle through ten and a half hours, eight Nicorette lozenges, six Chivas Regals, and the disastrous mistaking of two pills of Fastin (the amphetamined weightloss supplement) for the identically colored, identically shaped, slowmaking, sleepmaking Ambien (generic Ambien)—meaning that he was always getting up and so making Paul Gall or Pete Simonyi get up and then sitting down again frenetic and tapping or shuffling his feet atop their carryons, which he’d had them shove under the seatrow in front.

  He wouldn’t, and wouldn’t let anyone, stow them in the overheads.

  There was a spate of blurry spy movies that’d been edited for sex and airborne violence, but David’s English channel was broken, the dubbing was Hebrew, and the subtitles were Arabic, so he switched to a documentary about Israel.

  David had first visited the country in the 1960s, when his father, who’d never been on a plane before, had flown the family over to be reunited with his younger brother, who’d been given up for dead in Poland. David returned solo in the 1970s, to pick citrus on a commie polyamory kibbutz, and then had tried taking Bonnie, from Paris, on their honeymoon, 1988 or so, just after the first bloom of the Intifada, but she’d refused.

  “It wasn’t the bombings that had her skittish,” David said to his rowmates, “it was the hijackings, the planejackings.”

  He’d eaten the rolls off both neighboring trays and was now summoning a flightattendant for that transparent liquid she was pouring down the aisle: arak.

  “I was going to take Tammy for her bat mitzvah, but Bonnie put the kibosh.”

  The flightattendant poured the arak into a cup and then, from a pitcher, added a sip of another transparent liquid, water, and his cup clouded over.

  “There’s nothing I don’t regret.”

  El Al Flight 2 was expected to, but seldom did, arrive daily at Ben Gurion at 11:06 IDT. David sent his shift supervisor and lawyer to fetch his checked luggage, while he went to find a phone and find out how the phone worked and make a call.

  He’d scrawled the number on a receipt he’d folded into his passport—to call Israel from within Israel he had to jettison the +00972: “Hello?”

  A kid’s voice picked up, in Hebrew.

  “It’s David King, hello? English? I’m calling for my cousin Dina. Put your mom on.”

  The kid hung up, so David tried again. He liked the long beeps, the long sheepish beeps, the phones in Israel rang with.

  “It’s me,” he told Dina, once he got her. “Cousin David.”

  She said, “David,” but like it wasn’t Hebrew.

  “I’m in Tel Aviv and free tomorrow if you’re around.”

  The luggage was plunked in the trunk of the cab, but the carryons stayed on thei
r laps—three men sitting scrunched again holding the insulated coolerbags with their shoeprints shifty all over them and pricetags still attached.

  They rode through the insatiably bright Tel Aviv light that struck David like a divine obfuscation straight to the stark whitewashed cube that served as the international banking center of Bank Leumi.

  They left the suitcases by a rindcolored bench under the watch of a hefty receptionist and followed a young guy who was friends or just colleagues with another young guy David had met all of a month ago at a stockbroker bar down on Pearl Street, to the rear of the bank and behind a flimsy felt partition, where they dumped the contents of the carryons: six bags, $50,000 each, $300,000—the inaugural deposit of David’s new account.

  David was entrusting this money to Bank Leumi Israel with the explicit if unwritten understanding that if he’d ever have to access it, he’d just have to take a loan from Bank Leumi USA, essentially a sham loan to be collateralized in secret by the sum—by the tidy bundles of rubberbanded $100s—abiding innocently in Tel Aviv.

  This arrangement—which was illegal and recommended by his lawyer—would allow David to deduct the interest paid on any loans as a legitimate business expense in the States, while his full intact sum earned taxfree interest abroad. Above all, though, this arrangement would allow him to keep considerable cash assets hidden from his wife, who was bent on taking him for everything, he was sure of it.

  It was tough not to appreciate: the illegitimacy, the sleight, borrowing your own money, borrowing from yourself and never reporting it—David’s future of meeting Israeli bankers in banyas and massageparlors in Manhattan to review the paperwork every quarter, because no statements would ever be sent through the mails.

  The banker took the threesome out to lunch at a seaside fish restaurant and once the plates were all bones and the napkins wadded, he put in a call for a cab to take Pete Simonyi and Paul Gall back to Ben Gurion for the next return flight, whose duration would be just about equal to the amount of time they’d spent in Israel.

  The lawyer had a trial and the shift supervisor had work too or was just daunted.

  David’s cab dropped the banker off at the bank (bank), and continued on through the citycenter (mercaz ha’ir) to the Dan Hotel (malon Dan), to an upgrade suite roughly the size and swankness of his new bachelorized apartment—but with a broad balconied view over the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean beats Central Park South.

  This was David just daring himself, powering through, prodigalizing for confidence. He’d had enough of husbandly restraint. He was giving room to his native acquisitiveness. Four rooms with two full baths—everything here would validate his voracity.

  The next morning, the second day—the day that God divided the sky from the waters below and so created the conditions for jetlag—David’s cousins were waiting in the lobby: Dina and Yoav Matzav. There they were, standing—as if they didn’t have the permission to do anything but stand—amid that zoo of Bauhausy loungery.

  Dina Matzav was a nervous and yet, when she had to be, demonstratively hard woman, heavy at bottom, light in the waist and birdy above, and so she gave the impression of being both grounded and vulnerable, with that eggshell face still flawless but the hair even blacker than he’d remembered. She was the type who’d never dye her hair anything except the color it’d been when she was young, used makeup only to swear that she didn’t, and moisturized furiously. She kept her clear manicure on her son’s shoulders. Yoav was a skinny darkskinned kid like Aladdin from the Disney cartoon, six or seven years younger than Tammy, but scrawnier, taller, with that Maghrebi Jewish swarthiness, its stature and stretch. Between his mother and David, he stuck out, or was being stuck out, prodded into the heat of David’s hug, which he accepted unwillingly and gawky, and David kissed his mother’s cheek over his head. David had packed a moneybag with all the kidfriendly contents of his suite’s minibar and welcomebasket—chocolate, pistachios, dried apricots and dates—and he presented it now like a gift for every belated occasion, and Yoav humped it out to the lot around the ficus and traffic bollards.

  Along the way, Dina asked—she tried to ask—what brought David to Israel.

  He said, “I figured we’d visit Jerusalem.”

  Dina’s was a beaten red Renault and David was uncomfortable, both with how shoddy it was and how she was driving it. He sat up front and tried not to yank at the wheel. Yoav, in the clawed crumbstrewn rear, had gotten into the chocolate and was now bouncing a sticky smeared ball up against David’s seatback and catching it, and then up against the back of David’s headrest and catching it—until Dina yelled in Hebrew.

  To David that defined Hebrew: the speech of the beleaguered, the last exasperation before a spanking.

  She apologized—most of Dina’s English was apology, mostly for her English, or for Yoav’s behavior. The rest was all veterinary terminology and guidebook phrases that she’d repeat as if stalling, keeping her mouth limber until her mind had compromised between what she meant and an available expression.

  Among her phrases were: “From time to time,” “So nice,” “That’s incredible,” and “The way it is.” “From time to time” answered David’s questions about how often she visited her father (whose name was Shoyl), and how often they used their air raid shelter because of rocket attacks (they lived in Bat Yam). “So nice” answered David’s questions about how she liked living in Bat Yam and how Shoyl liked living in the senior home. “That’s incredible” was Dina’s response to David telling her about expanding his business into commuter Connecticut. “The way it is” was Dina’s response to David telling her about his recent separation from his wife. David had said, “My shikse wife,” despite Bonnie’s conversion, and kept calling Dina’s father by his Yiddish name, Shoyl, even while Dina stuck with the Hebrew, Sha’ul.

  David talked through the hills, picking pet fur from his pants and twiddling the vents. As rubbleshouldered Route 1 rose into eyesquint and earpop, Dina had, or asked, just a single question: “We make the dinner after with Ilan?”

  “Who’s Ilan?”

  “The husband of me. My husband.”

  Jerusalem, God’s dwelling, overcharged for parking.

  Dina huffed them up a ramp and through a ramparted gate into the Old City, only to slack and slow as if disoriented: she hadn’t planned on anything beyond this point, she hadn’t planned on having to do anything, beyond just picking up her cousin and bringing him here—that’d absorbed enough of her energies.

  She’d just turned around and David had already bought Yoav a popsicle.

  Anyway, it’s not like there was anything to do but pray and shop. The Old City was just one continuous shop—a mall, but a stone mall, whose concourses were bound by stone and corrugated sheetmetal that kept the sun off.

  “What you want to do?”

  David wanted to sleep. To work. To have his daughter not turned against him. To buy a hamsa keychain as a charm against death.

  Yoav handed the popsicle to his mother and tarried by a table of souvenir shofars and icons and olivewood camels. He picked up a metal knot, two nails bent around each other.

  David took it from him and solved the puzzle—aligning the nails and disentangling them: you had to bring them together to take them apart.

  He put the pieces in Yoav’s palm, and Yoav held his gaze with awe.

  Yoav was trying to tangle them up again, but Dina took the pieces away and left them on the table.

  David was down the street, trying to find that café he’d once liked. Where he’d gotten drunk on slivovitz with those Dutch blonde girls with whom he’d harvested oranges. Where he’d gotten silly high with those Dutch blonde girls as firm and smooth as oranges. He was trying to remember that one café that’d spiked its hookahs with opium.

  “Remember the winter I was here?” he asked. “76 or 77?”

  Dina handed him the popsicle. “Not very.”

  She’d been too much a child then, too related to him to be interested.<
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  The younger David would’ve climbed the citadel of David, but the ticketbooth was closed now and he was older and worried about lacking the lungs for it.

  “What year was King David?” he asked. “What century? He was before zero, I know. Before Jesus.”

  Dina replied what she replied: “So nice,” “That’s incredible.”

  That’s how it went: with David putting questions to Dina about the sites—about the Sepulchre church atop where Jesus was buried? or atop where Jesus was crucified? which was built during which of the Crusades? and how many Crusades were there, anyway? Not that he was asking for a tour, not that he’d ever admit he was asking, but only because he enjoyed his cousin’s bewilderment, he enjoyed—the few times she ventured to answer—cutting her off and correcting: “There definitely weren’t seven Crusades, I’m thinking the number’s like five.”

  An order of nuns was crossing the Via Dolorosa and, while David went elbowing through, Dina stepped into an alley, tugging Yoav by the collar and muttering a remark that her son picked up like a shiny shekel from the gutter. He laughed. He wouldn’t stop repeating it. A rough translation would be: “There were seven Crusades, you rabid asshole”—and a scraggly Armenian priest streaking by stiffened and winced and the Palestinians outside their shops leaning against their flipflop racks grinned.

  The stones now increased in size, until the individual blocks seemed to outgrow their cuts and became pure stone itself, the surfaced substance of the earth through which the narrowing corridors had been quarried. Yoav quieted. He walked by David’s side, then walked slower, behind him, with Dina coming last. They were being pressured, singlefiled, lined.

  The Hasid just ahead of them put his book into a bin, which he nudged down the conveyor to get xrayed, but the French just ahead of the Hasid kept setting off the metal detectors and so were returned again through the gantries to remove their belts. A Scandinavian woman plumped by middleage and with hair like a wilted palmtree was trying to banish the ecstasy from her face while being patted down.