Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (10 page)

 

The righteous Israel that I had come seeking existed, but elsewhere. I seemed only to find the deadbeat bohemian freaks and hard-core addicts of all kinds. The majority of Israelis, wholesome, stepped around us like a big puddle of dirty water. I couldn't find it within myself to connect with them, though I longed to. We had no common language. The average Israeli's conventionality scared me. In the shadow of perpetual war, they seemed so sickeningly content with life's simpler rewards: wanting only to wash the car in peace,
have a backyard barbecue with no threat of interruption by a war, or eat out without a suicide bomber blowing up the joint.

Essentially, Edna and I were supported by her rich father, who had high hopes that we'd make him a grandpa Zeder. Instead of grandchildren, though, we generated unpaid back rent and astronomical liquor tabs. Drug dealers slept on our floors, as well as Chilean refugees, radical leftists, neglected poets, South African exiles, out-of-work journalists, and hallucinating painters. Sometimes we all sat around with the political cartoonist Yaacov Kirschen of “Dry Bones” fame, and his partner, Sally Ariel, and got deliciously stoned, for though he was famously prone to paranoia—he had come to Israel as a young head from New York, convinced that he was under FBI surveillance—Kirschen liked his pot.

I perched on the sofa, with a stack of books on the floor and a bottle of Courvoisier VSOP on the table, along with an ashtray and several packs of Gitanes cigarettes. Often, in the months before mustering out of the service, I had stretched out here with Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
on the stereo, playing Russian roulette with my service revolver. When I mustered out, among the gear I returned was the gun, but the urge to kill myself remained, and grew and grew.

I could no longer pinpoint my reasons for wanting to die. It was simply there all the time, a part of me. Felt that there were no limitations, no rules or values in the free-for-all of the amoral world; that I could do anything, so nothing really mattered.

To some extent, I had always believed this, but I now realized that I was set on proving to myself as never before that anything goes. Once, Edna's sister, Ilana, came by, and while Edna lay blacked out on the bed, snoring, after a night bashing her wrists into broken glass strewn on the kitchen floor, I led her crying sister into an adjoining room, made to comfort her, but in no time we were tearing each other's clothes off. Another time, I balled
her close friend, Angie, a Chilean girl and the wife of an artist.

Then I met Anna, wife of Itamar, leader of a small but important art collective, and my journey took a turn into heights and depths that I'd never thought possible.

THE COLLECTIVE'S STUDIO WAS A PUBLIC MUNICIPAL bomb shelter leased to them for a pittance by the city of Jerusalem. Here they made art, held exhibitions, threw receptions. Anna and Itamar's storybook two-story gingerbread house in Nachlaot was a nerve center for Jerusalem's cultural elite, and in no time Edna and I fell in among them, became in fact the couple's best friends.

We practically lived in each other's living rooms. Sat around from morning to night, putting away unbelievable quantities of booze, smoking cigarettes till our throats ran raw. We talked endlessly about literature, art, politics, film, music. Once a month, at the prestigious Israel Museum, under my direction, we mounted an Israeli version of the
Paris Review
literary and arts magazine as a staged theatrical production. Wildly successful, it placed us center stage in Israeli culture.

The program idea had come to me in the army, and in the way of timely ideas, took on its own life, quickly gathering volunteer talent and institutional sponsorship. Massive audiences came to the
museum's newly built theater to see it. My influence was such that when the museum publicity department refused my request to print enormous posters to advertise the event all over town—claiming budgetary difficulties—it took me only a single phone conversation with Teddy Kolleck, then mayor of Jerusalem—a member of the museum's board and a vociferous champion of avant-garde culture—to have him pull up at the front gate the next morning in his chauffeured government vehicle, storm through the doors, hunt down the bureaucrats who had refused me, and send them flying in all directions, each outdoing the others to see who could get the posters printed and hung throughout Jerusalem first. We designed a logo depicting a female muse in blue robes, which soon became a familiar sight all over town.

The week when Yehuda Amichai, the country's greatest poet, won the coveted Israel Prize, he was scheduled to be interviewed on our stage by a prominent literary critic named Alex Zahavi.

Backstage in a dressing room, Amichai, a mistress cradled on his lap and surrounded by a retinue of mildly amused rough-looking literary cohorts, sat smoking, drinking, and in no great hurry to face his audience.

When finally he emerged, the crowd had been waiting for an hour. Amichai, bored, sank into his chair and sat there looking like an insolent truant forced to remain after school.

Zahavi asked him how he felt to have just received Israel's most prestigious accolade. Amichai shrugged. Lit up a cigarette, blew smoke into Zahavi's face. Whereupon Zahavi clutched his chest, tore at his shirt, struggling to breathe, and slid from his seat onto the stage, where he lay gasping for air. He seemed to be having a heart attack.

Amichai, the closest to him, looked away, bored.

Zahavi's wife leaped up in her seat and began to scream: “Yehuda, help him! It's Alex's heart!” but for whatever reason Amichai did
nothing, seized by a spell of Amichaian torpor, an existential sluggishness. Or maybe he had caught a good verse line in his head and didn't want to lose it. With the aid of an assistant, I got a nitroglycerine tablet under Zahavi's tongue and kept him comfortable until the ambulance arrived. Amichai, with bigger fish to fry, left.

Weeks later, in a Jerusalem bar, at a table with Ivan Schwebel, the painter, and the poets Natan Zach and Dennis Silk, we waited for Amichai to show, but he called the bar, said he couldn't make it. Schwebel, American born, was Amichai's favorite painter; one of his works adorns the cover of Amichai's selected poems. Schwebel boasted to Zach that I was a Bronx football player from the toughest high school in New York and could do more push-ups than anyone present. To prove it, Schwebel and some others hit the ground for fifty, their limit, and dared me to exceed it.

With lifted eyebrows, Zach, a portly man with a Faustian goatee, looked at me as if to say: So?

I jumped down, did sixty. Eyelids lowered, Zach nodded and smiled. To celebrate my victory we got good and smashed.

At Anna and Itamar's I held court, so to speak, said little, the mysterious, unapproachable, behind-the-scenes kingpin. But inside, I wallowed in a warm self-pity bath. Had an awful crush on Anna, could barely stand to look at Edna anymore. Though I planned, designed, and directed every aspect of every program singlehandedly, didn't really feel a part of it. There was me over here, the creative power and financial source, and them, the artists, over there, poor, disheveled, but in love, proud, working together. They were all so grateful. But what about me, I wondered bitterly.

As our gatherings grew to include more of Jerusalem's bohemian set, I sank deeper into a despair that I could not share with anyone, a surfacing undercurrent of frustration over the undeniable fact that I had fallen completely and hopelessly in love with Anna.

I LOVED HER SO MUCH THAT I DARED NOT EVEN sit close to her in the same room. Wherever she happened to be always found me at the farthest point opposite. Our group often went out dancing and drinking to little late-night gangster cafés along Agrippa Street, where everyone sat around in the yellowish electric light, smoking endless cigarettes, leaning against each other, drunk, looping limp arms around each other to stumble-dance, but Anna and I sat apart, exchanging terse pleasantries with others too drunk to stand, and always ignoring each other from opposite ends of the table.

I never for a moment fooled myself into believing that she loved me or harbored any reciprocal feeling except as colleague and familiar.

She seemed to be closest to Edna. They were together constantly, a commiserating female triumvirate of Anna, Edna, Debbie, always off somewhere, to the Turkish baths to steam up and put henna in each other's hair, or to lunch in workers' cafés and after, shop for
clothes and personal care items in the cheap stalls of the Yehuda market. They were the kind of trio who turned heads, and when I saw them together, laughing with arms locked like mischievous sisters as they hoofed down the street, I felt even more hopelessly in love with her.

In the planning sessions for the museum shows, over which I presided with a firm but encouraging hand, I was all business—the entrepreneurial visionary who had roughed out each show's basic design, the go-to decision maker who marshaled resources from thin air, the miracle worker who made it possible for the creators to create.

At these meetings Anna was a consummate professional who stayed on point with her assignments and addressed only matters of concept, or if the conversation went deeper it was to better understand what I was attempting to stage in a particular show.

Dancers, singers, poets, authors, filmmakers, actors whirled around me, cyclonic. A wave of my hand could conjure a postmodern opera. The show mounted from astonishment to astonishment as I introduced innovations like computerized audiovisual stage sets and tightened presentations so they increasingly resembled actual holograms of a literary arts publication. At the program's height—and at the lowest depths of my inexpressible longing for Anna—audience and cast members alike had the eerie experience of watching the pages of an immense journal turn with each new presentation, and feeling that they were turning with it.

At show's end, a glut of Jerusalem hoi polloi and culturati poured from the theater and stood around to talk excitedly in the corridors, balustrades, lobby, and out in front of the giant institution. But if their eyes sought for me, I was nowhere around. Skulked alone in some backstage area, disconnecting cables and tossing soda cups into trash bins—anything to avoid the unbearable sight of her. For on
such nights she wore her finest clothes, looked stunning. At the sight of her my throat would catch, I couldn't speak. This had happened to me after more than one program, to my mortification.

I would find a way to angle in slowly on the group, but really, on her. Knew they were out there waiting for me to go party, celebrate. I would come around from a dark side door exiting onto the surrounding park, and for a time stand at a remove, in the shadows of trees, looking, smiling, tearful, shaking my head in wonder, hurting inside, and so dazzled—how could anyone be so beautiful? Then I thought, maybe some astronomer who has loved a certain planet or star since earliest memory feels that mingled pain and pleasure to see it through a telescope, and knows the same anguished wonder. Whereupon, drawing a deep breath, I'd come upon them, unsmiling, my usual no-nonsense self, and say something inane, like “Well. That was all right, huh?” and get hugged and backslapped and hand-pumped, and they probably would have carried me on their shoulders too were it not so plainly evident that I disliked any sort of appreciative horseplay.

We'd go out, to the music places, where liquor flowed. The hugging couples drifted over the dance floor or flailed around and spun and screeched with hilarity as the pounding music accelerated our pulses, and we drank, endlessly, while inside my head I watched, in a bubble, my anguish-frozen insides, unutterably alone, hopelessly solitary, like some freak fallen from space, green fluids dripping from eyes and noxious mouth agape, forming words in a language no one spoke.

Sat smoking cigarettes, polished off bottles of Rishon LeZion brandy. Sometimes wandered off unnoticed, or with some mumbled promise to return, and did not, slept it off in the streets.

Come morning, I'd stumble to my feet, let myself into the flat, knowing that Edna, drunk, had spent the night at Anna and Itamar's.
In a strange sense, I had become the hub of everyone's world, yet was nowhere to be found, and could not locate myself anywhere in it. And so had it been for most of my life, which seemed to have been lived in my absence.

THEN, THE WAR.

In response to ceaseless incoming rocket attacks from terrorist bases in Lebanon, the Israeli Air Force bombed Beirut. Then ground troops excursioned inland toward the Litani River, where, it was reported, they would establish a defense perimeter to hold as a preventive buffer against further cross-border shellings and raids.

Instead, under the direction of Defense Minister Arik Sharon, the army kept going into all-out full-scale surprise war.

But while the army went north, my unit went south, into the Gaza Strip, to conduct operations against groups infiltrating from Gaza and Egypt.

It was later called “the Secret War,” small units holding down vast spans of territory, performing tasks that required ten times our numbers and that we were, by and large, completely unsuited for. And so while the big war raged northward our dirty little mission went unnoted in the south.

I know soldiers who during several tours in Lebanon were not
fired upon once, but every night; on the border of Egypt, we were shot at by tired, disgruntled Egyptian soldiers, or else Muslim fanatics, or even Bedouin tribesmen. If patrolling in the West Bank, we were fired upon. This was supposed to be a “quiet” service, a “good” time. Our good time consisted of night operations in rank-smelling close-quarter market places where every door or alley concealed a possible assailant. Our “good” time involved leveling the homes of terrorists who had blown up Israeli buses or stalking wanted gunmen through labyrinthine housing complexes or making sudden, lightning raids on communities where we overturned the contents of bedrooms and living rooms, searching for Molotovs, and which, afterward, made us feel inhuman, dirty, morally bankrupt, despite whatever we might unearth.