Elegy on Kinderklavier (21 page)

And though Yoheved did not begin filming the famous interviews for the documentary until much later, well after they'd returned to their apartment in Jerusalem, Gershon knows it really began then, with that trip, knows he should've been able to see what was coming. And now the insult of her “healing process”—of the interviews and the documentary, and really of Yoheved herself, of what she's become—has finally reached Gershon here. His suffering and his wife's—ex-wife's—simulacrum of their suffering have been brought into this world only so that the fragile, indignant mouth of a twenty-two-year-old girl may open in this pathetic recreation of his own living room, and her eyes may narrow, and she may summon her pith to say,
I've seen the documentary
.

Back in the car, continuing, changing the subject, she says, “I like the bits that talk about the nomenclature of this place.” She says the big word carefully, seems pleased with herself not to have tripped on it.

Gershon is driving swiftly out of the city. The buildings become more and more widely spaced, the verisimilitude falling apart as the construction project outpaced its budget and, back on earth, the opposition government gained power.

“It's stupid, the nomenclature,” Gershon spits out, because it is. Officially, the city is called “Jerusalem North” (“New Jerusalem” finally too political for the offices that made these decisions), situated in the “Northern Territories.” The technical ridiculousness of this term, this wholly inaccurate nondimensional appendage—
northern
—is a perfect synecdoche of the basic failure of imagination of those back on earth. Where did their mourners live, if it could not be
found on a compass? “Just idiotic,” Gershon says. “You get used to it, unfortunately. You call it what you want.”

He's trying, and though they are now passing the final retaining wall of the city and the vehicle is shifting its suspension to suit the pale dirt of the unpaved road as it descends into the canyon that leads away from the settlement proper, he still can't get past Hava having seen the documentary. Him standing there, back in the living room, his mouth hanging open like a fish. Blushing in—yes, he must say it—shame. Shame! To be caught unawares by this nothing of a girl!

Gershon guides the vehicle up a series of rough switchbacks and they begin to slowly rise up out of the canyon. When they crest the edge, and Gershon speeds the vehicle onto the flat, empty road, Hava turns in her seat to look back at the low gray line of the distant city, its ambient glow seeping into the darkening sky.

•

“We're unprotected out here, officially,” Mendelbaum says, indulging Hava, once they've all settled into the den. “According to the Administration, it's basically the city or nothing. But it's not been so bad with old Gersh here in charge.” Mendelbaum smiles sadly. “He comes to see me every now and then—says it's to share his sweetbread and whiskey, because he's just too polite to admit he's checking to see if I'm dead yet.”

“We?” Hava says. “
We're
unprotected? Who is we?”

Mendelbaum shrugs, gestures with his glass.

“There's a few of us with homesteads out here. Every couple months we get a memo from the Administration, telling us about the terrorists from the Free Territories coming to cut our heads off.”

“Not me,” Gershon says from where he's making the drinks, though he knows Mendelbaum knows. “I don't write those things.”

“Who does?” Mendelbaum says, sighing and smiling kindly at Hava as Gershon steps around the kitchen island and reenters the room. “Some computer, probably. They always sound like a Mad Lib done by a very boring little boy.” He crosses his legs, shakes his head at Gershon's offer of a refill. “But then, you probably didn't have those, did you?” he says to Hava.

Though he's made her one, Hava surprises Gershon by taking a drink off the proffered tray.

“We had those,” she says. “Or I did.”

“Mad Libs,” she says to herself.

Mendelbaum lets his eyebrows rise and fall, once.

“Nostalgic amusement,” he sighs. “What an industry.”

Gershon likes Mendelbaum, a gentle, intelligent man. He was an old professor at the University of Haifa, back in the world. Gershon actually met him once, there. His office had been on the very top floor of the university tower, on top of Mount Carmel. A spectacular view, suspended there over the city, the twirling skirts of roads and buildings decorating the mountain's slope, and, of course, the sea, always the sea. During his first few years in the post here, Gershon often stood at his quarters' window in the Government Tower and looked down and out past the city at the hazy, unclaimed desertscape extending to the horizon, where he knew somewhere was this low, flat house, Professor Mendelbaum in his den. It was like they'd switched places.

“You gave it all up?” Gershon had asked him back then, on one of his first visits in the territory.

“I gave it all up,” Mendelbaum said distantly, and gave a wan smile.

“Are you really in danger, though?” Hava asks him now, concerned.

Mendelbaum takes a drink, lets out a breath.

“My daughter would say so, I think,” he says. “She's a professor as well, at the Technion.”

Gershon watches him. Hava senses something, but only looks down into her glass. She's drinking from it using the ridiculous little straw which Gershon doesn't have the heart to explain is really for stirring. She looks like a child. She actually looks a lot like Mendelbaum's daughter, in the low light.

“Is a professor, was a professor,” Mendelbaum says into the quiet. “She's dead, anyway,” he says flatly, not changing his posture. “So I guess that makes her emerita. They didn't take the title away from her, at any rate.”

Gershon used to be chilled by Mendelbaum's odd, blunt way, by his hauntingly affectless statements, but now it is vaguely comforting somehow. Gershon stands up, begins walking around the den. Hava continues to drink her drink incorrectly. Gershon wonders if she's ever even had alcohol before.

Mendelbaum settles for a while into his old professorial voice and answers Hava's questions, tells her a little about the brief period of “New Wave” settlers who refused the city. She keeps circling back to the issue of whether or not he's in danger, living out here.

“So, I mean, are you, though?” she says now. “Would you agree with your daughter?”

Mendelbaum glances up at Gershon, who is sitting on the edge of the wide bay window, eyes unfocused, face trained on the carpet between Mendelbaum's couch and Hava's.

“I take it our friend didn't bring you here the scenic way,” Mendelbaum says dryly.

“No?” Hava says, and Gershon can feel her looking to him.

“Well, there's some tumble-down shacks along the route—some of the first people to make it across from the Free Territories
site threw them up. They used to live there. There was a time when the other settlers out here were very afraid, probably justly.”

Hava is looking at him, her eyes wide. Gershon can see her face is flushed, and he realizes, with a paroxysm of anger, that she is drunk. He finishes his own drink in one swallow and crosses the room to make another.

“But they don't live there now,” Hava says. “The Free Territory people.”

“No,” Mendelbaum says.

“What happened to them?”

Mendelbaum finishes his own drink. He motions to Gershon for another.

“Well, you know, I tried to help,” he says. “Every year, when the backup respirators came, I signed for them, took them right out down the road and gave them to the first few kids I saw. It was the only way I could figure to do it fairly—no system, just random, just give it to them. Sometimes I'd give them food. I'd leave it out there and in the morning it'd be gone.”

Gershon, as he works the gimlet into the synthetic lime from Mendelbaum's greenhouse, thinks of Mendelbaum back in Haifa beginning his nightly stroll down from his office to his apartment, seeing halfway there the rush of ambulances and military vehicles, then having to walk the rest of the way home, a good half hour, in silence. His daughter the professor was killed by a suicide bomber (also female, also a professor, at Palestine Polytechnic, also the daughter of a professor) who'd convinced her to meet up at an intercultural music festival being held that night at a local park. Eighteen others had been killed as well. It was a famous incident in Israel, for its symmetry.

“Well, that was kind of you,” Hava says.

“You think so?” Mendelbaum says. “It didn't help much, in the end.”

“You mean, what?” Hava says.

“They all died. From that wave of crossers, anyway. Except a few of the kids, who, sensibly, moved on. Maybe you've seen them in the city. Maybe they're not the same ones. Who knows.”

Gershon finishes making the new drinks, comes back in, and sits down on the other end of Mendelbaum's couch.

“Let's have some of this sweetbread,” Mendelbaum says, leaning forward to the coffee table. “Did Gershon tell you he designed it? It's like a multivitamin, it's so good for you. You can live off it for weeks, no kidding. Never goes bad, either.”

Hava smiles in surprise, looking at Gershon, who wishes she wouldn't. He takes half of his new drink in one swallow. Hava and Mendelbaum natter on good-naturedly about the wonder of food engineering.

I've seen the documentary.
Her voice defiant, defensive. The shame of his surprise.

In the footage that makes up the documentary, Yoheved looks like herself, but her voice is different—no thin wire of grief in it, no vulnerable undercurrent of querulous tone. His choice when he saw the footage was to either interpret this, her interview voice, as a performance—the performance of bravery, of poise—or to interpret the voice he knew, the Yoheved voice, the voice of his wife, as a performance—the performance of grief.

They're talking about documentaries now, Mendelbaum and Hava are, about Jerusalem North's portrayal in the media, which is changing, Hava says. Gershon can feel himself bloat with anger, his face puffy with liquor.

First, Yoheved began with the Israeli military commander of the settler area in the West Bank, the man who had held his soldiers back, mistakenly believing that the disturbance was a village matter, though why he would think a village matter would be occurring in
the middle of the road running only between the protected knots of religious settlements is unknown. Yoheved did not ask him this. In the video, Yoheved does not ask what he could've done, or what he did not do. She asks him what happened that night, from his perspective, and she listens patiently, leaning forward, her hands steepled beneath her chin, her eyes clear and calm. Then, as will become the pattern, she forgives him, three times repeated, and there is a long shot of them sitting together in that complicated silence after her voice has stopped. Then it cuts to the next interview.

How did she go along with such a thing? What is Gershon talking about,
go along with
—she came up with it in the first place. It was her own literally incredible idea. Like it would be hard to find some young, unknown documentary filmmaker ready to eat the story up, to do exactly what she said. For a while, Gershon was convinced it was the idea of her therapist, whom he'd always mistrusted, but watching the actual documentary, watching interview after interview, his wife moving closer and closer to the epicenter of the trauma, unflinching, her manner in the interviews so assured it was almost self-satisfied, he knew, finally, that it was all her doing. First the military commander, then the soldier who'd called the disturbance in, then the Palestinian mother who'd excitedly sent her son to join the fray. On and on and on, the interviews. No, only Yoheved herself could realize such horrible will.

“So where's your monument here,” Hava says to Mendelbaum, meaning to ask, Gershon guesses, where it is his daughter died, back in the world.

For the first time, Mendelbaum looks away.

“Well, you know, a park in Haifa. It could've been anywhere, really.”

Hava nods thoughtfully, leaning forward. She cups her hands around her empty glass. She looks up and regards Gershon, her face empty.

“And where's yours, then?” she says.

What does she want him to say? There is no analog really, no simulacrum. That, or they drove through it to get here. But she knows that.
I've seen the documentary
. Mendelbaum is looking at Gershon quizzically.

Her face is even, patient. The quiet aggression of the question takes him aback. What does she want him to say?

My wife was visiting her brother in Ma'ale Adumim, in the West Bank,
she wants him to say. Yoheved wanted him to say this for the documentary, for the camera.
My wife's brother was driving with her to a nearby settlement for a wedding. Our son Shmuli was in the back seat. He was two years old.

Hava must think this is some exercise; maybe they've briefed her for this, for the recovery into new marriage of a man in grief. But she doesn't understand. He could say what she wants, but she wouldn't understand the flatness in his voice. He has no trouble saying it.