by Bethany Ball
Today is Friday and Tomer is dressed casually. More casually than anyone else in the office would dare. Marc needs to speak to him. Tomer wears jeans in the odd style of the Israeli youth. Skintight, but sagging at the crotch, halfway to his knees. Marc will have to talk to him about the dress code, even if it is casual Friday. This is a financial firm, not Shenkin, Marc will say. Not Burning Man.
Marc doesn’t want to think about personnel problems or family problems. He goes back to his numbers. The numbers. Numbers are pure. Numbers are like diving in the navy. Watch the watch, watch the compass, watch the bubbles, watch the phosphorescence. Find the mark. Check the time. Count each kick of the leg. These things tell him the nature of reality but leave out this longing. This dissatisfaction with everyday life. Every day is a gamble indeed.
There is a knock on the door and a man enters. He’s not been invited, or announced by Marc’s secretary. The man is followed by another man and another. They are dressed in unfashionable denim and cheap leather shoes. These men fill his office. There are perhaps a dozen. A policeman enters last. LAPD. They speak English rapidly, too rapidly for Marc to catch what they are saying. The policeman is coming around Marc’s desk and he is taking hold of both Marc’s arms and pinning them behind him. The cuffs are cold around his wrists but the metal burns him and this is another thing Marc doesn’t understand and cannot make sense of.
In the West Bank, they used plastic cuffs for arrests.
He sits at his desk with his hands pinned behind his back. A man who is a detective sits on his desk in front of him. The detective is telling him that his house is being searched at this moment. He asks Marc what the detectives in his house will find. Will the detectives find drugs in his house? Are there guns in the house? Most important, the detective asks about money. As in, Where is the safe, Mr. Solomon? Where is the safe hidden?
Can I speak to my wife? Marc asks.
In a minute, yes. We’ll let you speak to your wife. As long as you cooperate.
What am I charged with?
You know what you are accused of.
Everyone in Marc’s office is ordered to turn over their laptops, tablets, and cell phones. Every employee’s bags are emptied. Computers are taken and passwords are written down. Finally, his secretary manages to secretly call his attorney, who hears the police questioning Marc Solomon. Within an hour his attorney is in the office demanding Marc be read his rights. He tells Marc not to say another word. The detectives tell him what he’s accused of. A large betting pool run through his office. It might be international. Is it international? they ask Marc. The more you tell us now, they say, the better it will be for you. Spreadsheets on his server. Money is missing. A large amount. What’s the password, Solomon? All the computers have been seized.
The detectives tell Marc that one of his employees, Tomer Skymatsky, has already explained everything to them.
But he was just here! Marc says. He is the brother of my best friend! Marc gets up to search for him. He was just here! You can ask him yourself.
Easy, guy, the cops say. They push him down in the chair. Nice office you got here, Solomon, they say. We were expecting something a little less sophisticated.
A detective hands Marc a cell phone. He can hear Carolyn’s flat voice. Marc? she says. She doesn’t sound desperate. Good, Carolyn, Marc thinks.
Marc says, It will be all right. Tell them everything. We’ve done nothing illegal and we have nothing to hide. It’s a mistake, Marc says. A misunderstanding. The lawyers will handle everything.
Don’t worry.
Chapter 7
Gabriel
In spite of Gabriel’s high SAT scores, he hadn’t bothered to apply to any colleges. He’d been scouted by UCLA and Stanford for soccer scholarships, but for Gabriel Strauss college was to be deferred three years so he could enlist in the IDF, like his father would have wanted. Then, if he liked Israel and his Hebrew improved, he could attend university there.
The army had not been so bad and then suddenly, it was unbearable. It was hellishly hot in the green army cotton and the black boots that laced up to his calves. The gun was hellishly heavy. If he could have mustered up some kind of moral outrage against the IDF as so many of his Israeli friends back home in California had, it would have been all right. We should just get the fuck out of the Middle East, they’d said, passing the vape. What right have we to be there? they’d said. But he couldn’t not go.
It was hot all the time. The sweat dripped down his forehead. His forehead had broken out in vicious acne. He hated to wake up early. He was spoiled. All right, he admitted it: He was far more spoiled than the young Israeli men around him. They all seemed grown-up compared to him. He was soft, just as his brothers had said, but how was that his fault exactly? His father had brought them to California, and then he’d died.
Then the showers. Always the best part of the day. He’d stood there as long as he could get away with. The guys around him, all mostly too tired even to speak. He couldn’t say he was even thinking of anything at the time. Maybe he’d thought of Sophia Allen, Sophia Allen and her sister, or a female officer he’d developed a crush on. He really couldn’t say. But there he’d stood. His cock rose. He got a fucking erection in the fucking showers in the fucking barracks of the IDF. You going to bugger us in the shower? Eli Rabin had called out. Eli Rabin who reminded Gabriel of the oldest and most sadistic of his three brothers.
Gabriel had been mortified. Perhaps he should have covered himself and run off somewhere, instead of what he’d done, which was to stand there bathed in shame until the hot water turned cold and everyone had finished and left.
Never too popular with the other young soldiers, who were real Israelis, Gabriel was teased mercilessly.
One night, a few weeks after the shower incident, just before weekend leave, the commanding officer sent word that Gabriel was to meet him in his office.
The office ceiling was low. Fluorescent tubes hung over them. They buzzed and flickered. It was humid. The concrete walls sweated the salty moisture of the sea. The desk was metal and the commanding officer sat behind it, leaning back in his chair, with his boots on the desk. His hands clasped the back of his head in a studied, casual alpha pose. He fired off some words in rapid Hebrew but Gabriel was nervous and didn’t immediately understand. Ma?
Is this how you speak to your commanding officer?
Lo, Ha’mefaked!
Listen, Strauss. I’m going to tell you a funny story since I know who your father was. There was once a Moroccan boy, you know, Sephardi, who came home from school. He said, Ima, I knew the answers to fifteen math questions. The other kids knew only ten. Is this because I’m smarter than them? The mother said, No, that’s not the reason. The next day the boy came home from school. Ima, today I knew twenty vocabulary words and the other kids knew only fifteen. Is it because I’m smarter than them? No, his mother said. That’s not the reason. The next day the boy came home from school. Ima, my zayin—you know that word, yes? Penis!—is twice as big as the other boys’. What is the reason for this? She said, it is because you are twelve and the other boys are eight.
Gabriel’s throat dried and he coughed.
What? the mefaked said. You are Ashkenazi, yes, Strauss? Are you offended? People don’t joke around in America? Where is your mother from?
My mother is from Fez, sir. But— It’s very funny, sir, Gabriel said.
Do you know why I have called you here tonight?
Lo, Ha’mefaked!
That’s right, you don’t know. I’ve heard about your shower incident. The mefaked smiled a small, greedy smile. Nu! You will have your weekend leave and on Sunday morning, you will report to duty first thing. You have an interesting new assignment that will suit you very well. You will go to Yitzhar to the settlements. Of course, you will have to protect yourself from them as well. They are no less than domestic terrorists. Many of th
em are Americans like you. Last week they slashed the tires of our jeep. The children throw stones at the soldiers. The Jewish children. But as an American, I think this assignment is very suitable. Yes, he said, tapping his fingers together in front of his temples. This is a suitable assignment for you.
The mefaked leaned back just a little more in the chair, as if to stretch his small barrel-like chest, and then, before Gabriel’s eyes, the mefaked toppled backward.
He cried out like an animal. Gabriel stood and staggered a few steps toward the door. The mefaked shouted to him in English, Come here, you motherfucker!
And Gabriel was running, shouting, Lo, Ha’mefaked! I’m sorry! Slicha! behind him as he ran to his barracks and to his bed.
He lay awake all night wondering what would happen, wondering if he would be punished. He was supposed to go on weekend leave to his aunt’s house in Yemin Moshe for Shabbat. But they were religious and that meant twenty-four hours with no television, computers, or cell phones. They were Ashkenazi which meant the food would be bad. He missed his mother’s cooking. The Moroccan fish and cholent cooking all night in the oven for Shabbat. Ima, he thought, sadly.
The following day he was free on leave. He agonized a moment. If he stayed on base, he could travel into the city and see a movie, perhaps walk around the nearby kanyon, the mall, to try and meet a girl or buy a T-shirt. He could perhaps go see the boy and his mother. He could not bear to go to his aunt’s house. Almost like an army base in its austerity. He left his aunt a message. Something came up, he told the voice mail, relieved he didn’t have to talk to her. He had to stay on base for the weekend.
He took a bus to the Jerusalem mall in the neighborhood of Malha.
It was Thursday night, the start of the weekend, and the streets were filled with kids, families, and soldiers. Everyone in everyone’s face. Jews and Arabs. He ate a falafel sandwich and walked an hour until he’d reached the Moshava Germanit neighborhood, where he found Shira and Joseph’s apartment building.
He’d known where she lived, his father’s ex-girlfriend Shira. The one Gabriel’s father had right before he’d moved the family to Los Angeles so he could sit in a studio office and write his screenplays. Gabriel had found her address, on a package she’d sent to his office full of the Turkish coffee he loved so much. On a couple of Gabriel’s weekend leaves, he’d sat on a bench outside her apartment sipping espressos he’d bought from a kiosk. It was a pleasant neighborhood. Israeli girls raced by on Rollerblades with their tan skin and sharp elbows. There were dogs and children everywhere. People were more relaxed here than in America. It was difficult to explain. It was cool and restful beneath the trees on the fashionable streets of Jerusalem.
He knew what they both looked like, Shira Solomon and her son, Joseph. The two of them had recently been in the newspaper for participating in various protests. The boy was pictured holding up signs at rallies. Gabriel had found another photo of the two of them participating in a Tel Aviv sit-in protesting Palestinian prisoners. The boy looked so much like his mother it was hard to know who his father might be.
Making his way through the streets, Gabriel decided he was not going back to the army. He was not going to continue to protect settlements and live in misery. No. He was going back to Los Angeles. His brothers, his mother, and his commanders, the other soldiers and even his dead father, Baruch Hashem, could go fuck themselves.
Chapter 8
Gan Eden
Long ago when the kibbutzim were thriving, children could choose either sandals or tennis shoes twice yearly. Along with their new shoes, they could choose between one new pair of sweatpants or jeans made in a nearby kibbutz that were ill-fitting and stiff. Most chose sweatpants. The children lived in a children’s house, separated from their parents from the age of three months. The house was called Gan Eden, the Garden of Eden.
On Friday, just before Shabbat began, each child in Gan Eden received a small bar of Elite chocolate. Marc was careful to hide his under his cot where he kept his tachtonim and socks. If another child found it, they would eat it. A terrible betrayal. The metapelet had no sympathy for him or anyone.
In the children’s house, he was a weeper. In every children’s house there was a child who cried all night, and for two years, Marc was that child. He missed his mother, and he knew his mother missed him. But Shira, who was one year older, liked the metapelet better than their mother, or pretended to, and she made every effort to let her mother know it. Later Shira would realize the metapelet didn’t care about anyone at all, except maybe her husband, Omri, the moreh who taught English and was the most handsome man in the kibbutz. Marc would let no one comfort him and the metapelet spent the evenings next door in the lul with her hand rolled cigarettes, ignoring the intercom. Mornings the metapelet was rank with chicken shit. Or so the children said. The older children joked that she must have been fucking the head of the lul—her husband’s best friend—right on top of the chicken feed, that she used the plumpest chicken to prop up her hips while they did it.
Marc Solomon was popular and well-liked. Eventually, he learned to repress his tears when insulted or afraid at night. He was good at sports, reasonably okay in class work. Class work was never as important to a kibbutznik as the ability to work hard.
The kibbutz was small. There was nothing to do for entertainment but talk about one another and Shira was frequently talked about. From Marc’s earliest memories Shira either sang too loudly, talked too loudly, or shouted. It seemed that there was nothing she wouldn’t do for attention. By the time she was twelve years old, she was already wearing her shirts hanging off her narrow shoulders, and stealing her mother’s lipstick. She had long, expressive legs. She was going to be a famous dancer when she grew up. Or an actor. Or a rock star. Or a painter. She was talented enough to do all those things. She hung around older boys and smoked cigarettes. She tore up the kibbutz jeans and had Vivienne alter them so they were tight around her skinny legs. Marc found her excruciating to look at—even more terrible was that he wanted to look at her.
In the kibbutz to be self-effacing was regarded highly. It was even better to be invisible if you could manage it. Shira could not manage it. When she was not calling attention to herself, she was breaking objects. She broke dozens of cups in the dining room, and plates seemed to rain down at her feet. Mazel tov! the kibbutz would call out, Mazel tov! as another glass shattered on the white-tiled floor of the dining room.
Her presence in the kibbutz was always felt.
Marc, on the other hand, was capable of doing only what he was told to do. He was the good boy. The best. He did everything right, everything with care. He put his head down and tried not to notice Shira. He tried not to notice the diary in her bag on their annual Pesach trip to the Red Sea. He wasn’t going to read it, he wasn’t going to. He was a good boy.
Back then, Marc wore his hair long and bushy. Shira took an iron to her black, curly hair and wore it straight, like Cher.
Their father, Yakov, liked to say Shira’s mouth ran in front of her legs. But her mouth and her legs were only the half of it. There was also her tachat and tzitzim, her tits and ass. Once Shira hit puberty, these were always where they were not supposed to be.
After her bat mitzvah, Shira graduated from the children’s house to the apartments. She was no longer obligated to spend the daily three hours with her parents, and so she didn’t. She never saw them at all. Unless Yakov had come home from a trip abroad, bearing gifts of Levi’s and Lacoste shirts.
She received her first kibbutz job and went to work with the younger children at the ganon, the preschool. They would cry for their mothers at nap time. Shira would soothe them and sometimes sing to them, their soulful, sad eyes gazing back at her in mute misery. When she left for her own apartment at night, they clung to her. She would bring them glasses of cold fresh milk and smooth their foreheads. But sometimes she would get angry at them. Buck up, she’d whisper.
Many children chose to go to school barefoot eight months out of the year. School was not required, after a certain age, but merely a suggestion on the kibbutz. They were free to leave school if they liked, and work. Kibbutzniks were born to work hard. They would grow up to be the WASPs of Israel: Wellborn, Ashkenazi, Special Forces, Paratroopers. The children worked in the fields for one month of every summer. They helped with harvesting the apples, dates, and pomegranates. They spent their lives outside. Their children’s books were translated Russian picture books from the thirties that showed healthy, strong blond children milking cows, collecting chicken eggs, shucking corn, hauling bales of hay. The kibbutzniks were the new Jews placed in the north and around the perimeters as a buffer between Syria and Lebanon and the rest of Israel, and they belonged to no God, but only the collective and the land that was historically theirs.
Later, Omri was Shira’s favorite teacher. She fell in love with him when he cast her in a school production of the English play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw. Omri’s hair stuck out like steel wool around his narrow face. His chin ended in a black arrowhead of a beard. His eyes were blue and he moved like a big cat. Like his wife, the metapelet, he seemed not to care about anyone or anything. He liked to hang out in the cowshed, where he would smoke his hash pipe each morning and the cows came wading through the shit and mud to greet him. The only tenderness he displayed was for the baby calves in their cages, crying for their mothers. He would sit on the cement floor of the cowshed and bottle-feed them.
Marc could see Shira liked the moreh, the teacher. Shira who could never do the normal thing and like a boy from her class, or maybe two classes above. They said she lost her virginity to Omri behind the lul. Marc’s friend Baruch said they had done it in a pile of chicken shit. But probably only because Baruch was jealous. He’d always had a crush on Marc’s sister.