Elegy on Kinderklavier (20 page)

And Gershon thinks now, as he does consistently when his business in the New Jerusalem brings him to the square, that if he
had
rushed toward the real Ben Yehuda Square, if he had rushed into the abstracted concrete and savaged urban errata of the bombing, there is a good chance he would've seen or ran into the very widow whose apartment he is now standing in. Her, or any of the other mourners who live now above or beside the New Ben Yehuda Square—the recreated, reconstructed site where, all that distance away, their husband, or wife, or child, or whole family bled to death on the concrete, in the road. He doesn't want to explain this truth about the New Jerusalem settlement to Hava, though she must've been briefed. Let someone else tell her about the passenger ships full of those mourners, the way they made their lives as near to the simulacrum locations of their respective violences as possible. Gershon doesn't want to try to explain to Hava their strange, dissonant belief. This planet, this settlement, this doubled city, where entropy is stalled, reversed.

The women are quieting now, and Hava has started in on some kind of speech, something that sounds prepared. She will announce herself as Gershon's new wife, and the mourners will make of that what they will. They will understand what it means as well as Gershon does, he suspects, once they discover her lack of a tragic history.

He was initially chosen as the Government Administrator of the Northern Territories for a reason, everyone knows: he was emblematic of the population; he would understand them, would be suited to the diplomatic post; he was already alone. So what it means that they now want him here with a wife—a young wife, and (it is implied, eventually) children—is that the Israeli government is not satisfied with having only a mourners' colony any longer. The religious settlers (the Israeli Space Administration's first idea) had been unwilling to come, unwilling to turn away from their divinely mandated, illegal constructions in Gaza and the West Bank. The military could not justify the budget to establish even a minimal presence here. And the original, notional idea that this outpost was built up to be a final resort, a sort of final galactic keep of Jews in case of largest-scale catastrophe, while still popularly held in Israel, is ultimately not enough. What will come—what will soon already be arriving, Gershon knows from the shipment manifest schedules he receives—is business, commerce (and so jobs, money, and people: Israelis sick of Israel, or Olim for whom the land of Israel's promise has been dwarfed by the greater promise of a new frontier, a bigger adventure). The Giorgio's below the window where Gershon stands will within two years or so be open, be alive with customers, workers. But so what, he thinks. They reopened the real Giorgio's in real Ben Yehuda Square a month after the bombing, and there was a line around the block.

“And I'm just so glad and honored to be a part of this special community,” Hava is saying. She doesn't understand what the women really want to hear: which tragedy it is she will be the monument
of here. Why it is she's so suited for Gershon, ultimately. Gershon turns momentarily toward Hava where she stands now in the center of the room, the women sitting here and there around her, listening. She takes a breath. She has been coached.

“I myself have never experienced a loss such as any of yours, but I want to say that you all—that the people here—that you were never forgotten by me. I think the settlement is a wonderful opportunity for a new life, a new kind of life, and your interests, I can assure you, will always be at my and my husband's hearts.”

Gershon turns away. Below, in the square, he sees the band of dirty kids again. Two of them are sitting on the curb. The others are walking back and forth in front of the replicated shop windows, peering inside. They won't break the windows: the stores are not locked, and hold nothing of any use inside, and the kids must've explored all of them already anyway. The Administration's stance, as Gershon has been euphemistically instructed via memo, is basically to let them run out of supplies, at which point they will either die or turn themselves in for deportation back to their settlement, which amounts to the same thing. But Gershon thinks the Administration underestimates how apolitical, how apathetic to politics the Israeli population settled here is. The refugee kids' respirators, Gershon has noticed, are Israeli-issued, the backup sets that would be nearly impossible to steal. And they have to be getting food from somewhere. Mostly the people here, Gershon wants to say to Hava, to Ofer, to nobody, just want to be left alone.

•

Back in the car, Gershon loops around on the streets without really knowing why.

“We have to pick up something for the next visit,” he says, though Hava has not asked.

The silence in the vehicle is suddenly oppressive. Gershon flips on the streaming stereo console. It begins where he left off listening in his study, how long ago—days? weeks?—picking up in the middle of “Mars, Bringer of War.”

Hava gives an abrupt laugh.

“Holst!” she says, surprising him. He feels himself color.

“Yeah, well,” he says.

She laughs again.

“Very apropos, I mean, you listening to
The Planets
. It's just funny,” she says, losing heart at his empty face, trailing off, “I guess.”

It wasn't the first thing he'd listened to. After his first year in the post, he'd decided to sacrifice each subsequent term to a different composer. By the time it came to this year, there were only two composers left in the giant box set of vintage vinyl he'd brought with him, stubbornly refusing to download anything. He didn't think he could bear Mahler. He is saving Mahler for the end of something. And so it is Holst this year.

He feels self-conscious now, as they listen to the music in the vehicle's cocoon of quiet, about just how much there is to dislike about Holst, and particularly this movement—the insistent cheesiness, the way it telegraphs its effect, etcetera, etcetera—and for a moment Gershon wants to explain to Hava why it is he loves it. Which is, mostly, its time. The recalcitrant 5/4 time signature that one is
meant
to be unsettled by, that one is meant to recognize on some plane of consciousness as otherworldly: violent, but an odd, stumbling sort of violence. Gershon loves the shifting character of it too—giving the section that is now filling the silence between him and Hava its limping, reeling motion. It builds to a climax that never comes, that is instead interrupted by the piece's own blunt, martial,
off-kilter theme. He especially likes the contrapositive effect that occurs when listening to it while driving through the city, its insistent tones set against the nothing-scape, the empty buildings. How long, if ever, will it take Hava to understand?

The movement ends, the piece's final crisp blasts giving way to the quiet thrum of the vehicle's electric engine, which declension of silence rushes back in around them. They round a corner and pass along one of the small bus depots, four stops in a row. Hava turns almost sideways in her seat. Gershon slows the vehicle, then stops, though he's not been planning to.

This is the scene of the first of the new bombings, of which there have so far been three. The sites of the bus bombings are always more pointed, Gershon thinks, because they are on exactly the right scale: the mangled industrial metal and shattered plastic of the small shelters and stubs of benches clearly imply the size of the absent human figures; the bus (which is not there, which will never, in fact, arrive) easily present in the imagination. And afterward, back in the real Jerusalem, when things are quickly cleaned up, when the bus shelters are immediately and officiously rebuilt, there is no sight that so clearly demonstrates the aggression of the quotidian, the way the world just goes on with its commute, urban regeneration swallowing memory whole. What is left—what has always been left for Gershon, even before everything happened with Yoheved and Shmuli—is a residual sense of the city's sadness: nonspecific, drifting at the margins of a beautiful, light-filled mid-afternoon in the square in front of the Jerusalem Ballet, for instance. This is a quality that is absent from the New Jerusalem, where even an actual event such as this new bombing is only re-creation, recreated history, as if anyone needs further proof of terror's lack of imagination. The real city's sadness is comforting, in a way, is also what he means to say. But he can see Hava doesn't recognize the location.

“Didn't you ever see the bus station during the third intifada?” Gerhson says now, sharply.

“No,” Hava says, not looking at him. “My parents lived in the suburbs. We didn't go into the city for maybe two whole years, during the worst of it. Or I didn't, anyway.”

The reference to the suburbs throws Gerhson off for some reason. Unbidden, a memory: only a few months after immigrating, Gershon walking for hours and hours through the suburbs to get to the Israel Museum in order to see the Dead Sea Scrolls; mid-morning, the city absolutely deserted, Gershon strolling through the stillness, not having any idea why there was no one around until the woman at the ticket office reminded him it was Tisha B'Av. Gershon leans forward a little to see around Hava, to see exactly what she's looking at, and is distracted instead by the crumbled concrete curb at the epicenter of the explosion.

Who was doing it, bombing the New Old City? When it began, Gershon simply assumed it was one or several of the packs of Palestinian kids, rigging oxygen tanks to explode, which had seemed poetic in that they needed the oxygen tanks as much as the Israeli settlers did. But after the second, and the third—the bombings always in the old places, the corresponding places where, back in the real city, there'd been real bombings—Gershon is not so sure. It seems unlikely that those Palestinian kids (unorganized, wild, mostly diffident) would even be able to come by the oxygen tanks and whatever else was needed to manufacture and set off a single such bomb, let alone three. Who then? Briefly, Gershon has entertained paranoiac visions of secret (subterranean?) bands of adult Palestinians, having made it across the gaping gulf between the settlements, surfacing to plant the explosives. But no, the unblinking eyes of the government satellites, with their heat-imaging and Gershon can't imagine what all else, would never miss them. And there is the fact that there was never—or
hasn't been so far—a single casualty, a single person even injured. Who then? Who did that leave?

But to be honest, Gershon doesn't really care. He visits the bombing sites, writes his reports back to the diplomatic corps, and follows the slight change in the cityscape with a detached kind of interest. Sometimes, as now, he thinks about what the New Jerusalem will look like in ten years, in twenty, with the bombings continuing; if, at some point, the New Jerusalem will resemble exactly what the actual, amnesiac Jerusalem really should look like.

Gershon sighs and realizes with a start that Hava is watching him. He has been staring off into space for he doesn't know how long. He gives a little cough and puts the vehicle in gear.

“Some tour guide,” Hava says flatly, and Gershon can hear her steely anger.

•

Hava follows Gershon up the steps in the empty building just inside New Jaffa Gate. Catty-corner across the street, the Tower of David's brutal features emphasize the heavy quiet, never stranger than when one is actually standing inside the abandoned, the never-occupied New Old City.

To get to the new old apartment, they have to follow the wide staircase of decrepit marble up two flights, passing through the lobby of a dank, empty hostel with vaulted ceilings. One floor above, Yoheved and Gershon eventually got used to foreign backpackers and American college kids trudging up the stairs which passed through the real apartment's wide dining room on their way to the cheapest sleeping mats on the roof. Shmuli used to look up from his food during dinner and wave to them, beaming.

Now, as Hava and Gershon climb up through the hostel lobby, Gershon says, “Mark Twain once stayed here. Well, not
here
, but, you know. There's a picture of him in some book standing right there by the desk.”

Hava nods.

“Who's Mark Twain?” she says.

In the apartment, Gershon goes quickly to the kitchen, dragging out the heavy crate of sweetbread and grabbing a bottle of liquor. He is suddenly embarrassed, flustered to be here. He doesn't know why he's brought Hava here. It was a stupid idea.

He comes out into the living room and sees her standing at one of the tables along the wall, picking up the framed pictures and looking at them. Gershon has forgotten all about the living room, forgotten his own recreation of it—a weak moment during those desperate, lonely first months that he's never gotten around to undoing. He doesn't spend much time here anymore.

She sets down the picture of Shmuli, his face pushed close to the camera, filling the whole field of vision. His expression is almost one of wonder, though he knew what a camera was, of course. Silly.

“I'm not so totally stupid, you know,” Hava says now, turning to him. “I've seen the documentary.”

Gershon is stunned, and feels his face pounding with blood.

Back in the vehicle, Gershon thinks, Of course she's seen the documentary. Of course. Of course. Most of the country has seen the documentary by now, Gershon would bet.

They gave him a tiny grave on the Mount of Olives, of all places, among the war heroes and ancients—a big, quiet show. The government. Gershon and Yoheved never would've been able to afford it. And so they'd buried him and gone to Italy. That was Yoheved's idea and Gershon, standing in St. Mark's Square, wondering at the uneasy huddle of so many pigeons, had thought it a good one. They
were there, together. Yoheved had wanted to be there, together. He had no problem fleeing grief. He knew it would catch up with them, but why make it easier? Why not let its full force find them there, amidst all those delicate, unaging marble children?