The Ascent of Eli Israel (10 page)

They stopped for a breath at the crest of a hill where Zev coughed and spat phlegm on the ground. From the next street over they could hear Israeli soldiers barking Hebrew orders into a megaphone. Blue siren lights strafed across the run-down buildings, as army patrol jeeps squealed around the corner from both directions and a half-dozen soldiers jumped out, shouting at them in Hebrew. Eli tried to run, flinging his gun to the ground, but a short Russian soldier with a bullet-shaped head in a red beret jammed his gun into Eli's chest and pushed him against a wall. Another soldier did the same to Zev. They spoke quickly in Hebrew. Eli didn't understand a word.

“Just show them your ID,” Zev said. “No big deal. You'll understand real fast that there are two laws in the wild West Bank: one for us and one for the Arabs.”

The tallest soldier addressed them in English. He wore oval-shaped glasses and Eli thought he looked like an arrogant prick. “You come to Israel because you are a Jew and you act like a maniac. Tell me, why is it that all of the scum of the world comes to Israel? You have a home in Brooklyn or Miami, no? You are a Zionist? Good. Go to Jeruzalem,” he said, pronouncing the “s” as a “z.” “We don't want to fight for Hevron.”

“We're just living on the land of the Jewish people,” Eli said. The short Russian pressed himself hard against Eli's chest. He had a gold front tooth.

“You don't have to tell these assholes anything,” Zev said, picking the .38 up off the ground and handing it to Eli.

“Where are you going with your girlfriend?” the soldier asked Zev.

“Can't a Jew walk down the street without being hassled?” Zev said.

“Trust me. The Messiah will not come any faster if you stay in Hevron,” the soldier said, smiling. He lit a cigarette and offered one to each of them. “Since you did not shoot anyone, you can go. But be quiet. There is a curfew. Go straight home. And put your guns away. Leave the killing to the army.”

The Russian soldier backhanded Eli in the face, bloodying his nose, before jumping into the jeep and driving off. The streets were quiet again. Zev spat onto the ground and whispered, “Fucking brownshirts.”

Eli patted Zev on the shoulder as if to say, “It's okay.” He still had the .38 in his hand. He aimed it down the empty street and cocked the trigger. The hammer fell and white fire burst from the barrel as the chamber emptied. It was as if Eli were underwater, the sound muffled by his earplugs. He fired his gun until it was empty, and then he and Zev hammered at windows, cars, and anything else in their path as they made their way back home.

Eli led his sheep down from the hills and into a dried-out wadi. He caught a glimpse at himself in the blade of his knife and he was wild-haired and dirty, and was ashamed in the presence of the gray wolf.

“I'm sorry,” he said to the wolf. “You are so beautiful. I know God is in you. How can I get more of God in me?”

The wolf was silent.

Eli clipped his fingernails and toenails, cut his itching hair to the scalp, wrapped a white sheet around his body, fraying the corners, and wound a dirty shirt around his head like a turban, all the time repeating: “I believe with complete faith that the Creator blessed is his name knows all the deeds and thoughts of human beings. I believe with complete faith the Creator blessed is his name rewards with goodness all those that observe his commandments and punishes those who violate his commandments. I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah and even though he may delay I anticipate every day that he will come.”

When Eli prayed, he was talking to God. When he meditated he listened. And after a while if he listened carefully, his head would tighten and God would say, “You are doing all right,” or “I will call for you when it is time.”

A shepherd can't sit still, Eli figured, especially when he is seeking the Almighty. And the soldiers may return, he thought. So he hefted his load onto his shoulders and wandered. With the sun rising in his face, he wandered to the east with his sheep, crossing the main highway south of Beit Lechem. His pack seemed to lighten as he zigzagged back and forth between the villages and settlements, never stopping for hospitality, prodding his flock onward. East of Tekoa on the edge of the Judean wilderness, the blue sky turned dark with hundreds of black storks flying overhead, their red stomachs winking between their flapping wings.

The desert rolled like women before him, naked and round, lounging in the sun. He saw spread legs, bare breasts, and long arched necks. He even saw the hurt face of his wife but pushed it from his mind. It was like the very landscape before him was a relief map of his past. He huddled close to his sheep for warmth.

One morning, he awoke to find that the wolf had taken one of his sheep and torn it apart, leaving the carcass for him to find, slashed apart upon a large flat stone. A sign, Eli thought.

He knew it was time now to atone for his sins. He laid his bag on the ground and dug in the earth with his hands, pulled up rocks and boulders, and carried them to the highest spot he could find. He prepared an altar of stone, bound the healthiest sheep he could find on the altar, and cried out to God that he would never sin again. He thought of the binding of Isaac, the ultimate act of faith, and thought: If I were Abraham, I would not have had the faith to bring my son to Mount Moriah, the way Abraham had been told to do with Isaac. He could not imagine tying up his son, prepared to slash his throat. What if God did not stop him?

I am not a good father, Eli thought, I am not a good father. And then he thought of his own weak father who had survived the Holocaust, gone to synagogue on the sly, and put up Christmas lights every winter. His father used to say, “the Jews are the chosen people, chosen to suffer.” He just didn't get it, Eli thought. His father hadn't understood what a gift it is to be a Jew.

Eli shouted out, “For the master race!” as he slashed the throat of the long-eared sheep. And it was so serene as he grabbed a handful of its beige coat in his fist and cut back across its throat with a penknife. He poured the blood on the altar and burned the flesh, and the smell was heavenly, like a divine barbecue. When the flesh was charred and hard, he ate it and felt closer to God, felt the burned offering become part of him.

Eli and Zev walked every night through the empty city during the curfew. The air was still cool and damp, and they splashed through puddles, laughing through the streets.

They reached a dark alley at the edge of town, then plunged down a slope into an Arab vineyard. Eli followed close behind Zev, heard his feet stick and unstick in the mud, his gun swaying as he moved.

“Rabbi Kahane goes to Heaven and meets God who invites him to dinner,” Zev said, chopping his arm up and down for emphasis. “God introduces the rabbi to the other guests, ‘This is Jesus Christ, this is Moses, this is Buddha.' Kahane shakes their hands and sits down.”

Eli caught up to Zev, laughing. He had told this exact same joke to some yeshiva students the day before. “The soup comes and there's no spoon. ‘God,' says the rabbi, ‘I don't have a spoon.' God looks over his shoulder, snaps his fingers and calls . . .”

“Muhammad,” Eli burst in, “you forgot the spoons!”

They reached the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, which was known throughout Israel as being a hotbed for Jewish extremism. But to Eli and Zev, it was just a suburb of Hebron, a bedroom community with neat rows of whitewashed villas, TV antennas, solar panels, and clean, quiet streets.

Zev worked part-time in the falafel stand by the city's entrance and knew the guard by name. “Shalom,” Zev called to the guard.

“Zevic!
Ma nish ma?
”

“
Yala!
Open up, Yossi. There's Arabs out here.”

The guard was one of those big-bellied Yemenite men one might see at soccer games, shouting and waving their thick arms. His
tzitzis
hung sloppily from his pants and his blue knitted
kippah
almost covered his bald spot. He tossed newspapers into an oil-drum bonfire as he spoke about the curfew in a slow guttural English.

“Vis-à-vis the closure. It is our only tactic,” Yossi said. “When they kill Jews, people on the street, what can you do? We are in a militantic struggle with the Arabs.” Yossi paused while he closed the gate. “But Jews don't antagonate. Everything here is only about security.”

“Baruch Hashem,”
Eli said. “Security. Then peace.”

“This peace,” Zev added, “is a peace of shit.”

“You're here to see Doctor Goldstein?” Yossi asked.

Zev had been friends with Goldstein and had been his next-door neighbor for more than a year. Now he continued to visit him twice a week. Eli had been in a bar in the East Village when he heard about the massacre on the news: twenty-nine Palestinians killed during prayer at the Cave of the Patriarchs, almost two hundred injured. He had seen the sprawled bodies and hysterical widows and mothers on his television, but he didn't understand at the time that Baruch Goldstein was a hero, like Judah Maccabee, or Samson.

His resting place lay in a municipal park at the entrance of the city, not a mile away from where he was murdered by the angry mob. They walked in silence along the stone promenade until they reached the grave. Eli had not gone to his own father's funeral or visited the grave. And every time Eli made the stroll along the stone promenade, he could feel the blood slowing in his veins, his mouth dry, his head pulsing, as if a wire had been tightened around his skull.

They reached a giant block of polished stone engraved in Hebrew. There were benches on either side, a cabinet full of prayer books, and a sink for hand washing. Zev blew some smoke into the air with a deep breath, grabbed a prayer book, and began to sway in silent worship. Eli walked over to the cabinet and pulled out a leather-bound book. Just beyond, he could see the outlines of rough boulders and twisted weeds and plants, and farther beyond, the blue flashing light of an army patrol jeep driving along the Hebron Road.

A cold wind swirled around them out there on the edge of town unprotected by trees or buildings. Eli could barely hear Zev's prayer above the wind, which he was sure was God's breathing. But he joined in, repeating the words he had said so many times since he had come to Hebron:

Zev was wailing, crying out to the sky, sobbing, as he shook his fist at the starry sky.

“What's the matter?” Eli asked.

Tears poured down Zev's face into his beard.

Zev sniffled above his prayer book. “You know, man, we have these places everywhere where someone died, these little, like, shrines.” He paused and closed his prayer book. “Do you know why I came to Israel?”

“Because you're a Jew,” Eli said.

“Jerusalem,” he said. “
Ye-ru-sha-lay-im.
City of Peace. Believe it or not, I thought that was so beautiful. I was into peace and I just got on a plane one day with my rucksack. But you can't be into peace here, people look at you like they want to put you away, they say ‘what do you mean, “peace”?' Reality poisons you, you just look around and everywhere there is violence and hatred and brutality. On the buses, on the street, people will kill you if you take their parking spot. Forget about the Arabs, there's nowhere else in the world where Jews are hated so much by other Jews. Everybody's fighting here. Everybody's at war.”

“Zev,” Eli said. “Let's go home.”

He took Zev's arm in his, but instead of him straightening up, Zev threw his arms around Eli and continued to sob. His hot breath tickled Eli's ear, the way his boy's breath had the last time he saw him.

I'm not strong enough for this, Eli thought. And he began to cry, too. His throat felt thick and his body trembled as he grabbed tighter hold of Zev.

“He was my friend,” Zev said.

“I'm your friend, too,” Eli said.

“I know, man. You don't have to cry.”

“I can't help it,” Eli said. “I was just thinking.”

“It's okay,” Zev said. “He's in a better place now.”

Eli pulled away from Zev. The tears in his eyes made everything seem double. “I'm not crying about a killer.”

“He wasn't a killer,” Zev said, stiffening. “He was a doctor, a fine doctor. He didn't just go down there and say, ‘It's time to kill Arabs.' ”

“I'm sorry,” Eli said. “I shouldn't have . . .”

“He saved people's lives, man.” Zev paused, and shook his head in disgust. “I remember the day of the massacre, when I heard about the massacre at the Cave of Machpelah, I was so thankful that it wasn't Jews who were killed.”