Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  “I’m always generous.”

  “You’re always flattering yourself.”

  “You know what I just realized? That I wouldn’t recognize my own cousin if I ran him over.”

  David spurned the turns for Terminals 1, 2, and 3 again, rode the inside rim of the wheeling road until the turn again for 4. Men lugged boxed flatscreens wrapped with twine taped into handles. They weren’t quite Jews, too buoyant. Women on the medians were tracking with their phones, trying to disambiguate all the black Lincoln Town Cars.

  “By now he must be grown.”

  “Don’t try, Ruthie. You never met him.”

  “I’m just saying, don’t have expectations. You’re not picking up who you remember—you’re not picking up a child.”

  “They’re going to send me around for another loop.”

  “Make sure you feed him.”

  “I’m getting off—something’s up here.”

  Port Authority cruisers sirened up ahead, dervish lights only, no wailing. Troopers wielding rifles. Humvees cordoned lanes. Traffic stopped.

  The revolvingdoors revolved perpetually for no one. Then a pigeon waddled in, got trapped, flapped against the glass and, as it was turned around again, went free.

  “Go, go.”

  Rabbis came through holding their black hats despite the breezelessness—David always automatically thought of them as rabbis though he knew that only a few of them were and that most were into realestate and ladies’ hosiery and on welfare.

  Then it was bootyshorts, bellytees. Acidwashed jeans and wifebeaters, sixpointed stars on chains.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  A man, or boy, emerged plane-sweaty, rumpled in a sleeveless white vneck with way too severe of a v and a pair of collegiate gray sweatpants that hung only to the calves, canvas sneaks. He had a buzzcut. He had his mother’s nose, crushed flat but spanning his face. He stopped at the gumsmacked curb, straddled his wheeled duffle and adjusted his balls.

  David leaned across the opposite seat as he lowered the opposite window and yelled, “Yoav.”

  His cousin was darker, taller, leaner, and insensible to him. If David had been a sniper his cousin would already be dead.

  “Yo Yoav, blue van, smack in front of you.”

  Honk.

  To Whom It May Concern At The Bank: My name is Maria Jesula Franklin and I am the Widow of a Husband Who died last year in a work related accident and the Single Mother of a 6 and a half year old Son Who lived with Me at 315 Broad Street, #B, Staten Island. This was the Home (apartment) My Husband owned under His own name and for which His salary paid because I am Disabled (physically) and cannot work, the Home I was going to pay off after He died with the workers comp settlement and insurance but the settlement “stalled” and the policy “lapsed”—And so this was the Home You came to seize in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping in bed with My Son. He was scared and scared Me by messing His pjs and screaming. He did not understand how You could just enter Our House like it was Yours in the night and start packing everything, start taking everything. I told Issa (My Son) to run to the Duffys (the Neighbors) and just wait for Me there. I should not have hit Him to get Him out of there, I should not have let Him get away from Me, but I was trying to gather the things. I gathered the document things and Our clothes but You did not give Me time for the Watch. You just threw me out to the hall. And I fell and You threw Me to the stairs, though I have a bubble in My head that makes it troublous to balance. The Duffys would not even let Me in their lobby, They just tossed Issa to Me and shouted, go tell it to the shelter. The shelter was a sin. I know that I did not make the mortgage and so that everything must be taken from Me, I know that I deserve this and that I have brought this on Myself, but I ask You for mercy on the Watch. The rest is Yours, I just ask for this Watch, which is not worth a chirp except to Me, with a family value. This Watch was My Husbands and His Fathers before and was kept in the back of the bottom drawer of the chest in the bedroom behind the socks. I want to give It to Issa one day, to wear on His wrist the face of His Father. Please tell Me You have It and I will come to Your branch on Bay Street to reach an arrangement. I need this Watch, because the other day My headbubbles popped and so My Son was taken away by NY Child Services. And I know, I just know, that if I get the Watch back then I will get Him back too, Issa, For every One that asketh receiveth and He that seeketh findeth and to Him that knocketh It shall be opened.

  KIVSA Brigade, Akavish Battalion, Tziraah Company, Platoon Bet, Squad Bet—the Death Alley Ewes, the Heroes of Shujaiyeh, the Martyrs of Salah al-Din Road—wasn’t a special unit, just a specialish unit, not elite, but elite enough. Nothing about them made sense. Take, for instance, their name, which they’d regarded as a joke—that they were referred to as ewes, or frail female lambs—until they went into combat and the joke, like sheep’s milk, went sour. They were infantry, after all, so it was difficult not to feel like sacrificial bleaters, fleecy soldiers who’d been sent off to slaughter.

  Kivsa, Akavish, Tziraah.

  Ewe, Spider, Wasp.

  The source of this, their full unit designation, was to be found in Torah and in other venerably tedious books that were like Torah, whose legends had been introduced to them by an old—but a 40 something year old—veteran on the very first day of their training. It’s strange, how your only religious training can come from the army…how your only religion can be the army…

  Once there was a young shepherd boy who, because he understood everything, had been chosen by God to become the next king of Israel. This boy understood everything except why God had created the spider and why God had created the wasp. The spider weaved webs for itself but nothing for man. The wasp was not a bee and so didn’t even make honey.

  God counseled the boy to have patience.

  And so one day this young shepherd who would be king found himself pursued by the army of the king before him. Desperate to elude capture, he ran into a cave, and just as the army approached, God sent a spider to spin its silks over the mouth of the cave, to conceal him, and so the shepherd was spared.

  Later, the shepherd retaliated by raiding the enemy camp, only to be apprehended and dragged to the tent of the general. But just as he was about to be executed, God sent a wasp to sting the general, who hopped around and shrieked like a woman, and so the shepherd who would be king ran away.

  To serve in a unit that bore the name of the ewes of the shepherd king, and of his spider and wasp, was supposed to be inspirational.

  But the only lesson they ever took from their naming was this: they were creatures created for a single purpose, a woolly clumsy freakish creature with an excess of bristly limbs and just one measly stinger going dull through overuse.

  They were useless until they were necessary.

  Their unit’s insignia, their official patch, was a shepherd’s staff, or crook, as if to symbolize how they’d been herded together out of a number of totally unrelated and disorganized flocks. Their unofficial song was Dimona Party by DJ Skazka, featuring Avram Kaplansky. Their motto was: Thou art the men. Though they never used that and instead came up with their own: Useless until necessary.

  Or, until they were discharged. Until they were redeployed, or had redeployed themselves, but as civilians.

  Because this was what they did, what most of them did: they left. The moment their stints were up, they left the land they’d defended—the land they’d been conscripted by, and so it was never much of a choice, their defense.

  After having served the State of Israel for 36 months, or 154 weeks, or 1,080 days, they exchanged their drabs for denims, beat their munitions into passports, and shipped beyond the sea to find their fortunes. To find themselves, or the selves they’d been, and to forget the commands that bound them.

  Historically, of course, that had always been the function of exile, or diaspora. Wandering was just an emergency measure: the Jews would dwell in a country until that country expelled them, or tried to destroy them
, and then they’d have to flee.

  But the soldiers of Kivsa/Akavish/Tziraah/Bet/Bet weren’t Jewish, or weren’t exclusively Jewish—they were also, primarily, Israeli, which meant they just served their compulsory tours in their nation’s armed forces until they were at liberty to book tickets abroad. All the fit, tanned, 21-year-old vets who could afford it, or whose families could afford it, would mark the conclusion of their military service by going on a holiday that ever since First Lebanon—their parents’ last war—had come to feel as compulsory as that service itself, as if vacationing were merely war’s covert continuation, an undercover mission camouflaged in sportsgear.

  And though backpacking between the better hostels of East Asia will never be as dangerous as bulldozing hovels in the West Bank, there was still the chance of not coming back, or not coming back alive.

  —

  They were in Kathmandu and drunk on rice, stumbling through the earthquake rubble.

  They were in Patan, where they bought this stinky local leaf that didn’t fuck them up, the way they’d been promised it would fuck them up, and when they brought what was left of it back to the old man noncombatant who’d sold it to them, he put up his hands and showed with a smack of his toothless mouth: don’t smoke, chew.

  They were in Pokhara, where they bumped into a bivouac of guys from Border Patrol, who despite being Border Patrol knew their way around, and took them to visit whores, who despite being stumpy native whores knew how to say all the nasty shit that can’t be said in Hebrew, and how to do all the nasty shit that can’t be done by Jews, and two of the guys—not their guys, the other guys—told the girls that they were virgins, but the truth was that four of them were virgins, and for an extra 5,000 rupees, roughly 180 shekels, condoms weren’t required.

  The girls had a misguided trust in the circumcised.

  They were up in the Himalayas and marching, they were hiking, and the flatness steepened, and the steepness flattened, and they settled into a count. Everything had been planned like it used to be, except that now they’d planned it for themselves: they’d mapped everything out, set their own mealtimes and resttimes, the kilometers to cover, decided the alternate routes, deferring to one another by specialty and rank, but then the elevation and landscape changed so that no specialties applied and the ranks fell away like a boulder. The mountains seemed no closer. The mountains seemed cut out of the sky. They went ahead in formation, singlefile in the narrows, becoming partnered again as the ways went wide, vigilant for the slightest disturbance, a hostile blur or rustle. Thorong La would be theirs by Shabbat, the Annapurna massif would be in their hands, and they’d plant their flag at the peak of the pass, claiming everything unto the Tibetan plateau in the name of Pvt. Shlomo “Shlo” Regev, who’d been hit in the face by a mortar near the Erez border crossing—in Gaza.

  After their discharge some of Kivsa/Akavish/Tziraah/Bet/Bet stuck together, some struck out on their own:

  Avi went to Mexico, to export electronics. Binyamin went to Canada, to import electronics. Yaniv was trekking the Amazon. Chaim was living with a paddleboard in Thailand, or with a sailboard in Cambodia, or dwelling homeless and shoeless like a monk in Vietnam, weaving baskets out of bamboo just for the therapy—he was like a loose reed himself, blown along the coast between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh.

  And Micki’s conquering Paris, Amir’s laying siege to Berlin. Moti and Dani are storming Warsaw, having left Cracow in smoldering ruins.

  Eli…

  was bumming around India, the beaches. Full moon parties, new moon parties. Each phase got its own rave in Goa. Not that Eli was noticing the phases. MDMA was keeping the sun in his eyes and turning his ears into conches. At a club in Karwar, an Irish guy had called him a dirty Arab, and after Eli had said he was a dirty Israeli, the guy called him a kike, and Eli took a swing at the guy, and then the rest of the guy’s Irish stag group materialized and Eli had to leave, to leave the state. He went to Kerala, to Kochi, and followed the tides. He still stayed in excellent shape. And stayed very active online, sharing updates on wave conditions, and posting about how to keep fit on the go, @ imshi-eli94.jutube.co.il.

  Sami…

  who’d made aliyah at two years old from Soviet Russia, traveled back to the new Russia, only to realize his parents hadn’t lied: Moscow was disgusting, St. Petersburg was snobbish, and the language he’d spoken at home in Petah Tikva wouldn’t be enough to get by—it was a two year old’s. Waitresses, shopclerks, anyone left who recalled his parents, all laughed at him, resented him—they refused to pity the lucky yid, who’d escaped. He’d been the squad’s best marksman, and its only soldier to wear a yarmulke, knitted black and the size of a bulletwound from a Galatz SR-99. Soon he was going around bareheaded, sitting at cafés, filling out applications and remediating for the entrance exams to the Technion (no chance), University of Haifa (no chance), Afeka College of Engineering (maybe), Holon Institute of Technology (maybe), smoking cigarettes, drinking cognacs, ordering ham pirozhki and getting fat, and developing this suspicion that he was balding too, and with each turned page of his trigonometry textbook he was rubbing his skull, wondering what if anything was missing.

  Natan…

  who’d been the squad’s commander, a Sergeant FC, and a recipient of the Medal of Distinguished Service, had resettled himself in London. He’d enrolled in some degree program offered by some online university that, once he’d finished it, would entitle him to a promotion, though not to a promotion with raise, from the job he’d been working since arriving at Heathrow—from security guard to security supervisor, for El Al. The new title would register impressively on a resume, especially on a bilingual resume printed out on thick heavy offwhite paper, though all it’ll mean is that instead of screening the luggage he’ll be screening the guards who screen the luggage. Eventually, he’ll be moved up to a desk. Next, he might even be transferred to an office of his own, and maybe not even at Heathrow, maybe at El Al HQ in London proper, in Bloomsbury. For a while, though, he’ll still be four credits shy, and then, for a while, two credits. He’ll be nervous, because he won’t be able to afford the credits, but then his employer will pay for the class. He’ll start screwing a classmate, a sturdy pretty Brit with brown hair, round face, big freckled tits, and a big pale ass, and he’ll send the rest of the squad photos of her, and videos of them together, some taken with her consent, some definitely taken without, and others that it’ll be hard to judge just which.

  —

  And then there was him: Yoav Matzav. Present and accounted for.

  It’d been about four months since the army had dismissed him and whichever of the others had survived, and about two since he’d forsaken the State of Israel for the States. Or, according to the cablebox’s coordinates, which he’d crossreference with the TV’s, he’d already been out of Israel for one month, two weeks, three days, four hours, say—he was never any good at calculating the seven hour time difference.

  He’d spent that time on the couch, which was big, with big smelly flowers on it, wilted in the frame, lumpy in the cushions, ugly.

  Still, Yoav slept there, not up in the bed. Or, he’d been trying to sleep.

  The first moving he did—the first night of his stay, before he was put to work, and so this was just a simulation or practice moving—was to move this couch to the center of the room and remove its plastic slipcover, which he used as a blanket and napkin. To have established so central a redoubt—no longer up against any walls, no longer flush with any other furniture—was to be exposed but also exposing.

  He understood and accepted the risks: you had to make yourself vulnerable to make out your perimeters, to protect your flanks, 360° all around.

  It was the only place he felt at home, in all the house around him.

  It’s where he did everything, where he woke.

  He’d go to the bathroom, and come back to the couch. He’d go to the kitchen for a beer, and come back to the couch. He’d go to the kitchen again for a light from th
e stove, and come back to the couch and smoke. Even if he got up from the couch to go to the bathroom and was finished with the beer now sloshing with ash and had to bring it back to the kitchen to trash it out, he wouldn’t take it, he’d just leave it, only so that he had to come back to the couch after the bathroom and relax, just relax, before he got up again and went to the kitchen and laid the ashy can of Bud atop the trash, which he never bothered to empty, he never even put in a bag.

  He sat with his computer and tried reading the news in English, but always returned to the Hebrew sites, and sat on the phone with his mother, who’d just woken up too, trying to tell her how to chat him—“Add me to Contacts, achla,” “Click my name to add me to Contacts, sababa”—telling her to get his father to show her.

  “I just want to hear you and see you, the both at once,” she kept saying, “is that from America too much to ask?”

  He was using a neighbor’s signal, which was unreliable—all of his neighbors’ signals were either unreliable or protected by password, and many times, especially in the mornings, but Israel’s mornings, his mother’s voice would crackle and her image, midgrimace, would freeze.

  He’d be cut off like just another unplugged appliance in this house of so many appliances, so much drawerandcabinetstuff, all crammed.

  In the kitchen there were enough placesettings for a family, as if Cousin David were telling him through crockery what his parents—what his mother, not his father—had always told him verbally, that one day he’d have to start a family of his own. There were three coffeemakers, two teakettles, and an unlidded pot that didn’t immediately advertise its use. He was confused by it, by the bouquet of skewers sticking out of it, though it was only a pot for fondue. He thought the letters along its scoured metal side might be forming a word, he thought the word was just the name of the manufacturer of…whatever it was, but it was just the monogram of its former owner…