by Joshua Cohen
That was it, David realized, as he helped Yoav on the steps—as he helped Yoav leap between the steps—Jerusalem wasn’t a mall, its walls only contained a mall, because given all its gates and security checkpoints, it was more like another airport. A mystical airport. A ruined terminal connecting future and past. More than international, interstellar. And there lording it over the wide thronged plaza was the board. But instead of listing the Arrivals and Departures, the Kotel, the Western Wall, was cracked and brown and blank. Travelers kept glancing up at it, as if expecting the announcement of a delay. They scrambled to keep up with their groups: Japanese with the Japanese, Georgians and Russians with the Russians, Australians and Canadians with the British, everyone hustling toward their linguistically appropriate flags, which were held aloft by guides who shrieked through megaphones, distorting histories.
David helped himself from a trough of flimsy nylon yarmulkes, palmed one onto Yoav—“We boys will meet you here,” he said, and steered Yoav to the line to the left, to the men’s prayer area, and Dina shrugged, but instead of joining the line to the right, to the women’s, she stepped back from the corrals to make a phonecall.
The stones were beset by men swaying, jostling, shuckling, bowing from the waist, wrapped up in tallis and tefillin. It was all uniform, or all about the uniform, the heavy gabardines of the European ghettos interlayered with modern weatherproofed fatigues, and it was this semblance, this belonging, which inverted the usual fashion dynamic and made the secular civilian visitors seem suspicious, out of place: the religious were in charge here, and the soldiers were too, and everyone else was a tourist, garbed in tshirts, shorts, and shame, lotioned up, in visors.
David bowed his head. He inclined himself toward concentration, as if the lower his head, the better his chances of remembering, because memory was deep. His face up against the stones, he tried to summon psalms, but all that came to mind was whether his co-op would approve a dog, and if so, of what size. Ruth knew he wasn’t going to marry her, because of which, he knew, she wasn’t going to quit and he wasn’t going to fire her, which would mean getting hit for wrongful termination atop harassment. Maybe he’d adopt a feral tabby, maybe a passive aggressive Abyssinian bred by a colleague of Dina’s. Or else he’d just get an aquarium. Or like a greenhouse but for lizards. His brain wasn’t wired for prayer, just panic. He hadn’t spoken to his God since Bonnie had gone into labor with Tammy.
Bonnie, the Fordham Road Albanian Orthodox who’d dipped in the mikveh and stepped out dripping for him—so as to always have leverage on him—had been the one who’d gone to shul, while David had shown up begrudgingly only twice a year, thrice this past year if he counted Tammy’s bat mitzvah, to which he’d invited his office manager.
Bonnie had been livid—the goal was to cut down the guestlist, the affair was already getting out of control—but David had prevailed.
He was inviting his foremen, his facility chiefs—why not his office manager? Wasn’t Ruth the employee he worked the closest with?
She wouldn’t be allowed to bring a date, she’d be seated with Tammy’s old babysitters. Peace had to be maintained among the staff.
It was a week or two after that everything collapsed. Bonnie knew it all. He still didn’t know whether Bonnie had followed them herself or had paid to have them followed. Romantic Bayonne: sirloins at the Broadway Diner and noodles and Guinness at Thai O’Brien’s, because Ruth wasn’t the type you had to bring into the city.
David confessed, he had to, and what Bonnie blurted out would remain her grievance, or the only grievance she ever aired in front of Tammy: “You invited that bitch to the bat mitzvah, where you danced with her.”
She’d burned with incredulity: “That’s when I knew, when you danced with that Jew bitch, in front of all our friends and family.”
All this came back to David at the Wall, and he was crying, and a child’s hand squeezed his.
“What?” he said. “Everything’s OK.”
Yoav tugged—his face, upturned, had the anonymous expectancy of an entire audience in it, an entire congregation: wellwishing but impatient, under a thicket of curls and a dimpled yarmulke. David had invited his office manager to the bat mitzvah, but not his cousins.
“What’s going on, bud?”
Whatever Yoav was saying teemed with urgency. He was also grabbing his crotch.
“Bathroom—you have to go to the bathroom? Fuck. OK. Number one or number two?”
Yoav picked at his zipper.
“Can you ask someone? I mean, where—I don’t know where—I’m sorry, I don’t know Hebrew. Lo speak ivrit, OK? I’ll find someone, and you’ll just ask them.”
It had to be down by the plaza’s edge: shitting and pissing were definitely prohibited in such close proximity to the most sacred.
They waited their turn—“You can do this on your own?”
Huddled in the stall, David was relieved that his cousin stood. When Yoav was finished, David kicked out a loafer and flushed the toilet with his foot—“Keeps your hands clean,” he said, and Yoav’s smile had understanding.
Coming back from the WC complex to the meetingpoint, Dina wasn’t there.
David surveyed the crowd and then circled around and checked the lines: for the women’s WCs, they were eternal.
“Let’s go up to the Mount,” he said. He took off his yarmulke, and then Yoav’s, crumpled them in a fist—“the Temple Mount, what do you say, bud?”
They had to pass through another checkpoint: Yoav slipped through, but David was made to stand to the side as a wand was waved over him, as if in a rite of purification.
The ascent was steep, up a sort of scaffolded gangway, a provisional span of juryrigged piping and plywood, to the platform above the Wall, and of which the Wall was but the western retainer—the Kotel being structural, loadbearing, which means the Muslims can never move it, all their mosques would fall.
David took Yoav around the mosques like they owned them, or were inspecting them, preparing estimates on properties they’d have to haul out—stripping the smaller dome of its leaded silver, stripping the bigger dome of its low karat gold, and then clearing them both of all the rugs and lanterns and loudspeakers inside, all the ewers and lavers and shoes removed by worshippers, and even that pocked lunar rock, where the altar of the temple used to be, where the ten commandments, the holy stone tablets, used to be: the ark of the covenant had been a box—should’ve been easy to port, easy to store, two Puerto Ricans could’ve handled it.
A man blocked the way—“No to visit”—and other men rose from their feetwashing in the vestibule and gathered behind him and David hugged Yoav close just as the man spit and the gob of phlegm landed on the cuff of David’s pants. Men massed toward them, beckoning, yelling, with only one of them coherent, “I am sorrow for all this,” he said, and though the others were only yelling at the one who’d spit, David didn’t notice, he just turned, lifted Yoav up in his arms and quickened his steps and as the Arabic faded another thing flew—not a rock, not even a pebble, just like a clod of fertilized dirt whizzed through the air between their heads, hit the ground ahead of them and scattered toward the scandalously baretrunked trees at platform’s ledge, as David shielded Yoav, and heaved them both toward the exit.
Yoav was in tears and David didn’t recognize the streets.
“Hey bud, hey, it’s alright.”
The street was lined with nuts and sesame seeds and vendors curious.
“It’s alright, calm down. Everything’s fine, bud.”
But Yoav wouldn’t hush until David had bought him the exact same metal knot from a different stand that sold the exact same things.
Coming around to the descent to the plaza again, they had to pass through the security checkpoint again, and the nails set off the detector, and as David was trying to explain to the guards what a puzzle was, Dina rushed up shaking admonishment with her phone—“To where you go?”
“We weren’t sure where you were.”
> Dina snapped at the guards, exited the wrong way and tossed herself onto her son. “I make the phonecall with the patient who have the parrot that do not talking.”
“We went up to the Temple Mount.”
Dina bit a lip and then asked Yoav, who confirmed for her in Hebrew, and then she said to David, “You can not.”
“We did.”
“You can not to go, it not safe. The warning he is there to say that, we forbidden.”
“We?”
But she, who was frantic, meant only Yoav—because with Americans, who cared? Did it ever matter what they violated?
“Anyway,” David said, “what causes a parrot to lose its speech? Does it forget what it regularly says or just lose its vocal ability completely?”
All the ride back Dina was silent and fuming.
They passed a sign for Ben Gurion—in Israel, it felt like you were always going to, or from, or merely passing the airport, and every sign told you how far you were from the airport, as if it were important to be constantly aware of the precise kilometer distance between this life and an escape.
At the Tel Aviv limits, they left Route 1 for Bat Yam.
Dina’s house formed one wall of a dusky courtyard: a clumpy sandbox litterbox, a swingset without swings, a slide without a ladder, and a seesaw jutting up from the weeds like an errant missile. The unit itself was groundfloor and underventilated, a lair of wetsplotched drywall and lumpy carpet, where Dina’s husband, Ilan Matzav—a stocky man with resentful muscles and sparse facial hair, a nativeborn Israeli who resembled Arafat—sat detached and spraddled macho atop a Genuine Leather Couch, whose ruff had a label that read Genuine Leather Couch, surrounded by hairball and shed and two cute aloof girls somewhere between Tammy’s age and Yoav’s: tawny cousins from the Matzav side, who resided in the opposite unit. There was a palsied dog in a cage that David assumed was named Shollie, but that turned out to be the breed, German shepherd/border collie, and its name instead was Simba. There were cats too, stippled mixes swingdooring in and out of the house, and a fuzzy Siberian without a tail that the girls passed between their laps and might’ve called Shirazi. Yoav was sitting crosslegged atop the maybe leather maybe not ottoman of his father’s maybe leather maybe not clubchair, which had been surrendered—in an unrecognized, at least unappreciated, surrender—to David. Yoav’s grandmother, Ilan’s mother, Safta Sara, whiskered in sniffing warily—it was like she’d just managed to sneak out of the kitchen alive and with this tray of bourekas she offered around, but wouldn’t let go of, she wouldn’t put it down, she wouldn’t sit down. Dina was in the kitchen, chopping salads, chopping—because David was in the midst of retelling what’d happened, but now lightly, as if he were telling a joke, because the anecdote had already become, like the round mosaic table, patterned, stylized. He kept prodding with his loafer at Yoav’s ottoman, prodding anxiously at the kid to agree, but Yoav was too transfixed by the spit dried on David’s pantscuff and Simba barked until brought to heel by Ilan with a green bone treat.
Ilan’s English was decent—or just familiar to his cousin by marriage—because though he was now a master welder responsible for the lines at the Ashdod refinery that attached to the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline, his previous jobs had taken him to rigs and platforms all over the world, whose guttural lingua franca was Fucking Shit: “Fucking Arabushim,” he said, and pointed at a chromeframed photo on the wall of who he said was his only brother Shachar who’d died in Lebanon, “Shit the brain Arabushim,” and Dina called out from the kitchen something in Hebrew as thick and gristly as her lamb tajine, gulped down with lukewarm Schweppes.
After, the whole family accompanied David to the door. Even Safta Sara who, each time she waved, put her hand to the mezuzah, then to her lips. The girl cousins rowdied around in the yard chasing beetles. Yoav tried to follow Dina and David to the car, but Ilan held him back, held him as he squirmed, and night beat its wing over his farewell: “Byegoodbye.”
A hypermarket, a pharmacy, a dun huttish structure topped with a blinking red neon star that didn’t mean synagogue but ambulance dispatch—Dina was wrenching the Renault around the roundabouts, taking grim turns at sharp angles.
A crumbling aggregate of residential buildings quaked up on rickety struts as if they were about to falter on prostheses. She parked beneath them and across two spaces, leaned her head against the wheel and said, “Infection of bacteria or fungus, but if she losing the feathers also then maybe parasite or herpes, or maybe only that a feed pellet she is eating is sticking. That is how the parrot she is losing the voice.”
“So it doesn’t have to do with memory?” David said.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “it more better to make the visit tomorrow. To make prepare for him.”
“But I fly back in the morning,” David insisted and Dina sighed and offed the engine.
“Thanks,” he said. “Todah rabah. Been meaning to say, that son of yours is a good smart kid. Didn’t want to forget that.”
A bell had to be pressed, and the door buzzed like locusts into a utilitarian lobby lined with padded railings, tacked agendas flapping blank and, toward the back, under the missing panels of the dropceiling, a librarianlike attendant in a smock, with hair and makeup seared the purple of a sweet Carmel wine, and on her chin a lesion shaped like Ukraine.
Dina, after pleasantries that weren’t returned, translated her gist for David almost triumphantly: “She say to me that we too late.”
The attendant, not to be shown up, reverted to that language: “It is no more the hours of visiting.”
“But he’s her father,” David said. “He’s my father’s brother and in the morning I fly.”
The attendant opened her crossword book, but turned away. David, like he was marking her page, laid down the rest of his shekels.
Dina summoned the elevator. The moon of wired plexiglas lit.
The topfloor hall reeked of bleach. All toilets handicapped, a rollingcart slavered with babywipes, rummikub tiles, and novels in Hebrew, English, the Cyrillics, and what was either Arabic or Persian. A scrum of IV stanchions. A gurney.
Namecards marked the doors, and theirs was at the end. Dina knocked, but it was unlocked, it didn’t have a lock, and she entered knocking, into a room the size of a cell in solitary. A cubby held folded tracksuits, a pill slicer, pills. Some device, which might’ve served some pulmonary function, was off, and so now was just the expensive medical pedestal for a boombox. The man appeared to be nude, besides the artbook covering his sex splayed wide to a doublepage spread that reproduced another nude, lusher and Flemish, and the immense headphones clamped to his bulbous baldness that leaked a string music, soaring, jarring, Viennese. He sat on a backless aluminum stool, his scabbed shins straddling a quadcane wrapped with electrical tape like a sticky black mummy. His skin was sheetwhite, his gut untucked and stitched with scars and parchmentcolored patches. And there, on his forearm, was his camp number, its zeroes smudged.
Dina brought her face close to her father’s and touched his temples, and the man startled up, but timidly, and she lifted the headphones off and removed the book, under which he was wearing just a faded figleaf of diaper.
David said, “Shalom, Uncle Shoyl—it’s Yudy’s son, David,” but the man just sat there and Dina stood smug. “It may be for him that he is not now knowing English,” she said to David and then, “Aba, Aba, English, Anglit—yes no hello?”
Still the man didn’t stir and Dina shrugged, “The way it is from time to time.”
“Yudy, your brother? He was my father, my tate. I’m David, you understand—you farshteyn? The last I visited you I was young—a hippie, a schlep. I’d come to Israel running away from the business. Running away from Dad.”
The man seemed to be clearing a nest from his throat and David turned to Dina, who raised her palms, “He forget also Yiddish, I thinking. You tell me.”
David tried again, “From Vrbau, you remember?”
Vrbau, or Verbó, or Vrbové, was the town
in Austro-Hungary, then later in Czechoslovakia, where it all began: the nativity of David’s father Yudy and his younger brother, Shoyl, who now cocked his head at David and said, “This is the BBC.”
“Who?”
“This is London calling.”
Yudy and Shoyl were the only members of the Klinger family to survive the Hlinka Guard and the Nazi SS. In summer 1942 they were deported to the Sered transit and labor camp, in summer 1944 Yudy was sent to Theresienstadt and then, because he’d become a skilled mason, to Buchenwald, while Shoyl, who was underweight and tubercular, was sent to Auschwitz. After Liberation, Yudy married a woman from the DP pens and went to meet the remnant of her family, who’d made it to the States. In New York, he Americanized his name to Jay King and worked as a driver for a freight agency, until he’d saved up enough to buy his own truck, to fix it up, then a legion of trucks, bought marshland and threw up a garage, established a moving concern.
His brother, Shoyl, the man sitting there while David fed him his memories, staggered around Europe until he reached Trieste, from which he smuggled himself by boat to Corfu, and then to Jaffa in what was Palestine, Hebraicized his name to Sha’ul Ben Kinor, joined the Palmach, distinguished himself fighting both the British and Arabs, and sometime after the founding of Israel married a Polish survivor whose family was setting up a grocery. The brothers got back in touch in the 60s, through a Vrbové newsletter.
Sha’ul, David’s uncle, would only say: “Yudy—Yehudah—he went to America,” and though David encouraged him, all the man would say after was, “He is working as mechanic, with oil on his hands, because he is not educated,” which referred, it seemed, because Dina was grumbling, to Dina’s husband, Ilan.
Sha’ul said, “Mizrahi. This means Sephardi, Arab Jew, but he is more like Arab, not Jew. If Mizrahim are being religious they stupid and if not being religious more stupid. Because the religion is all they have.”