The Ascent of Eli Israel (12 page)

He got into the car and prayed, hoping the engine would start before anyone returned. And the car revved and pulled itself out of the ditch and back onto the road. The radio was blaring Presley's “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Eli turned the volume down and opened the glove compartment. He tossed in his pistol, and pulled out an old pair of Zev's mirrored sunglasses.

“God teaches you hard,” Eli thought, putting the glasses on. “These things happen on the road to redemption, on the road to Jerusalem. But God forgives you for what you do and I love Him.”

T
he week before, Avshalom Cohen and his aging mother, Miriam, sat drinking tea together in her Rehavia apartment. It was summer, and violin music played through the trees and gardens outside the open kitchen window. In the next building Mr. Herzog scratched out the music that had saved his life at Auschwitz with a deeper sadness than usual, his arthritic hands fumbling across the strings, the bow just missing the right note. Miriam Cohen told her son that Mr. Herzog had fallen on Azza Street on his way home from the
shuk
and had refused, as he had his whole life, to visit a doctor. He was finally ready to meet his wife again in the Great Beyond.

“Such nonsense,” Miriam said. “I know my Hershel is not waiting for me. He has gone to dust and there he will stay.”

“Momma,” Avshalom said for the thousandth time. “Of course Poppa is waiting for you.”

“That's why he has written my name across the stars,” she said bitterly. “He has forgotten me, left me behind. I will never forget. Never forget.”

Avshalom knew that another one of her crying fits was coming on — whenever she said she would never forget, she wept, tore at her hair, waved her tattooed left arm in her son's face, cursed at him.

“You were such a good boy, Avshi. As good, maybe, as your brother and sister. And then you left me, too, and moved to Mevaseret with the Sephardi school teacher.”

“It is only a twenty-minute drive,” he said, ignoring the jab at his wife.

“You never visit,” she said. “The only visitors I have are the gestapo and their black dogs gnashing their teeth when I try and sleep.”

“Momma, don't talk that way. Put it out of your mind.”

“Never!” she said. “I don't sleep anymore. They are in my room. I can hear them whispering. Last night, I woke up and could not breathe and I went to the kitchen and someone had snuck in and turned on the gas. I could have died. I couldn't breathe.”

“It was just bad dreams and your emphysema,” Avshalom said.

“I have no such thing. I can't even pronounce the word. I'm telling you, the Nazi Arabs came to my home. They move things when I am not looking so I can't find them.”

He placed his hand on her veined, shaking hand. “Momma, I'm going to leave now.”

“Leave!” she said. And then, all at once, Mr. Herzog's lugubrious playing came to an abrupt end.

Avshalom's telephone rang sometime after midnight. He was in bed with his wife, Shira. She picked up the phone.

“Avshi, your mother.”

“Hello, Momma,” he said, taking up the telephone.

Her voice was thin and scared on the other end of the phone. “Where were you when I called?”

“We were only in Eilat with the boys for a couple of days.”

“You must come over. The Nazis, they are here again.”

“But Momma,” he said.

“Did I give you the last milk of my breast?” she asked.

He hung up the phone and turned to Shira, softly kissing her cheek.

“Sad dreams?” Shira asked.

“Another one of her fits,” he said.

When he arrived at his mother's home, Avshalom found her standing in the door of her apartment brandishing a worn slipper in her hand.

“Hurry, Avshi, hurry!” she called as he got out of his car.

“How are you feeling, Momma?”

“The Nazis,” she cried. “They were here.”

He climbed the stairs slowly, his tiny mother waving her slipper to speed him up.

“You heard Mr. Herzog died,” she said.

“No,” Avshalom said, taking his mother's soft hand. She wore a brown cardigan sweater over her cotton nightgown. She squeezed his hand tightly.

“He died and stayed in his home for three days before someone found him.”

“He was a nice man,” Avshalom said.

“And look where that got him,” she said.

His mother's usually immaculate apartment was a mess: plates were piled in the sink; papers lay everywhere, on the floor, the table, the sofa; the curtains were pulled closed; the room smelled stale; even his father's study, a model of German order, was a testament to chaos — his large leather-bound books had been pulled from their shelves and strewn about; his ashtray that had lain full for the last eight years since his death had been turned over on his desk; his banker's lamp lay smashed and broken.

She had always been neat in the German tradition. She once joked with Avshalom as a child that if he went out to play after dinner without brushing his teeth and
has v'chalila
he died in an attack, she promised to pry open his coffin with her stirring ladle to clean his teeth for the journey.

“What happened, Momma?” Avshalom said, surveying the damage.

She threw the slipper at him, missing his head by a few feet. “I told you, the Nazis came and took things.”

He pulled his mother close to him and held her in his arms, an embrace so warm he hoped it would chase away every phantasm until Judgment Day. She, too, carried an odd smell about her, a smell of age and neglect that he had never noticed before. She pulled herself violently from his arms.

“I made a prayer for him.”

“Who?” Avshalom asked.

“Good-bye, Mr. Herzog. Good-bye.”

“Momma. What happened?”

“Like
Kristallnacht,
” she said. “They even took my mezuzah from the front doorpost.”

She began to cry, quiet at first, her lip trembling, then from the depths of her body she burst out weeping. “My beautiful mezuzah!” She swung her arms and struck out at her son. “I will never forget.”

Why would somebody steal his mother's mezuzah? Avshalom wondered. He went to the door and could see the outline, slanting inward at the top of the doorpost, where the mezuzah had been for more than forty years. It had been pried off, that much he could tell. And it was a beautiful piece, crafted in Weimar Germany, a time when Jews enjoyed a brief renaissance before the yellow stars and cattle cars.

Two portions of the Torah from Deuteronomy inside the silver case, gone. “Hear O Israel: The Lord Our God. The Lord Is One,” he repeated to himself in Hebrew, running his fingers over the bare space on the door. “You shall write these words on the doorposts of your house.” Why would someone steal an old woman's mezuzah? He remembered as a child being too short to reach it, kissing his fingertips and touching them to the doorpost beneath the shining silver. And later, when he had grown, he could finally see the intricate carving: flowers blooming at the top and the bottom, a jeweled crown, and tiny silver doors like a miniature ark, revealing on its parchment when opened the holy name
Shaddai.
What a mystical thrill he had felt, repeating that name as a youth, an all-powerful name that was older than any tree or building or person he knew.

“I know who took it,” his mother said.

“Who?” Avshalom said, closing the door and leading his mother back into the living room.

“The man who plants the flowers and fixes the garden. He is a Nazi Arab. I have seen him. He took my mezuzah. The Nazi took it.”

“Dudu took your mezuzah?”

“Yes. Yes. Dudu took it.”

“Dudu is Jewish,” Avshalom said. “Why would he take it?”

“No, no,” she cried. “He is not Jewish. I have seen him riding his donkey and goose-stepping on the street. He is the one. He took it.”

“Sit down, Momma.”

“It hurts my bones to sit. I will stand.”

“Sit down, Momma,” he said, clearing a space on the couch.

She sat, and slid the sleeves of her brown cardigan up her arm, revealing the blue numbers burned into her skin.

“Momma, I am sure Dudu did not take the mezuzah.”

“Oh, you are sure,” she said. “The laborer from Mevaseret has all the answers now. Tell me, Rashi: Why is the grass blue? Why is the moon made of Limburger cheese?”

“Stop it, Momma.”

“You are lucky you were not at the camps. You would not have survived like your father and I. You are too believing. Poor Avshi, if the Nazis had told you to go to the showers, you would have run there smiling with a towel and shampoo in your hands.”

They sat in silence. Avshalom seethed. For a moment, he wanted to strike his mother, dash her broken to the floor like a rag doll.

“Momma?”

“Son of mine,” she answered.

“What's wrong?”

“And to think you were the smart one. I told you, the Nazis took my mezuzah.”

“Did you go to Mr. Herzog's funeral?”

“Achh!” she said. “Funerals. I have been to too many. After your father, I never went to another. What good is it?”

“To pay your respects.”

“To the dead? You don't understand anything, do you? When your father died, I had to take everything from his life and carry it with me. Right here.” She tapped her right temple with her forefinger. “And when Moses Solomon died, and when Esti Hertz died, all of them. Now I have to remember for Mr. Herzog, too.”

“You miss Mr. Herzog.”

“Never!” she said. “He scraped at that violin all day like a cat scratching on a pole. Miss him? No. But we are one less now. You don't understand. You live in Mevaseret with your family and you build things with your hands. You will forget me when I'm gone. Soon, there will be none of us left. Next door there are students living, and they play rock and roll music, bang, bang, bang, all the time. What do they know of anything? I am tired, Avshi. My mezuzah is gone. Your father's study is ruined.”

“Momma, go to sleep.”

“For what?”

“Let me tell you a story I remember from school.”

“A story about car engines and grease monkeys I do not want to hear.”

“There are two ships sailing on the seas.”

“Ha! What do you know of that, you only know the Kinneret and the
Yam Ha Melach.
”

“The ship that comes into the port is seen by the wise man as more of an object of joy than the ship about to leave the harbor.”

“Not if the ship is going into Cyprus,” she said. “I have been to Cyprus, you know . . .”

“Momma, listen, just because a ship is leaving the port does not mean you should be sad or afraid. Because, soon that ship will reach another harbor, a glorious harbor . . .”

“My smart boy,” she said. “My smart, smart boy. You are speaking Greek.” She let out a long loud yawn. “But you have found success. I will sleep now.”

Avshalom stood up and helped his mother to her feet. He took her arm and led her to the bedroom. She sat on the bed and removed her brown cardigan and handed it to her son, and she got into bed.

“Do you remember what I said to you as a child when I put you to bed?”

“You said, ‘goodnight.' ”

“Oh, Avshi. Turn out the light. I will clean up the apartment tomorrow.”

He clicked off the light, leaned over, and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. He walked out of the room with her sweater over his arm.

“Schlaf gut, mein Kind,”
she called after him sarcastically.

Alone in his mother's living room, Avshalom began to tidy up, gathering loose papers in his arms. He still had his mother's brown sweater draped over his left arm. He hung it over a chair and then noticed a weight, something in the pocket. He reached inside and found shining in his palm his mother's Weimar mezuzah. She must have taken it down to clean it, polished it to a fine shine, and then placed it in her pocket and forgotten it.

She had turned over pillows on the sofa, pulled chairs out from the living room table, emptied her china cabinet, breaking two plates. She had entered her husband's study, ransacked the bookshelves, torn papers from his drawers, then she had gone to the kitchen — and that is where Avshalom found the soup spoon, bent and twisted from the effort of prying, on the floor beneath the kitchen table. And in the bathroom, beside the sink among tubes and pills, he found a small jar of silver polish, her toothbrush lying on the floor, its bristles tarnished and black.

He held the mezuzah tight in his hand and thought of his wife and what she would say to him: “You want your impossible mother to live with us?”

Avshalom slowed his car at the edge of the city and pulled over at the top of a valley. He stepped out of his car and walked to the edge of a steep cliff. The abandoned village of Lifta lay below. Somewhere in the darkness, a solitary horse neighed. He pulled the mezuzah from his pocket, cradled it in his two hands, and shivered against a wind. He would never tell his mother about the mezuzah. He would let her think that her mind was a steel trap and would let her live with the mystery until she stepped off the planet to meet her husband. He would give the mezuzah to his twelve-year-old, David, and he would fasten it to his door when he had a home of his own.