The Ascent of Eli Israel (9 page)

“Every day, brother. Every day,” Zev said. “There is nowhere that a Jew can be alone, because wherever he goes, his God is with him.”

Eli pulled his pillow close to him, remembering the words, “You will walk in my light and follow my laws, and others will too. And I will be your God and their God.”

“Is God with me?” Eli said.

“You betcha.”

It began to dawn on him that maybe Zev was one of God's angels, sent to watch over him, to lead him in the right direction.

The next morning Zev began to speak to him of the miracles of Torah study as he fed Eli yogurt and hard-boiled eggs for breakfast.

“The words of the Torah, man, are like golden vessels,” Zev said, “and the more you scour them and polish them the more they shine and reflect the face of who looks at them.”

Zev brought Eli a new hardcover translation of the Torah, with Hebrew on one side of the page and English on the other. Eli began to read, slowly, bit by bit, of the creation of man, the sacrifice of Abraham, Jacob's blessing of Isaac, the darkness of Egypt, and the Exodus.

He lay propped up against two pillows and thought of his studies as a child for his bar mitzvah. “Are these the same words?” he wondered.

Later, as his mind wandered to the slick bodies of his past, his hand slid down to stroke himself underneath the blanket.

“You're gonna want to save that.”

Eli stopped.

The voice?

It was only Zev standing in the doorway. “You're not going to flush a nation down the toilet.”

Zev lit candles for Shabbat and taught Eli the prayer inviting the sabbath bride.

Eli's fever began to break near the end of Shabbat and Zev brought in a spice box for him to smell.

“How are you feeling?” Zev asked, taking a sniff from the silver spice box.

“Better,” Eli answered. “But awful.”

“You're back in the world, man,” Zev said, smiling. “Your eyes are starting to shine again. You know, Torah can do all sorts of miracles, fighting sickness and degradation, even the Angel of Death. Saved my life.”

The last time Eli had seen Zev before he came to Hebron, Zev was drinking heavily and eating from restaurant Dumpsters. He was in and out of jail. Then one night, under the glow of a big autumn moon, he said, “Going to see the rebbe,” and wandered off.

“Something inside me just told me it was time,” Zev said. “I went to Brooklyn, man. Met the Lubavitcher rebbe and started studying Torah.”

Eli learned that Hebron was the first Jewish city and that Abraham bought a field and a cave near Tel Romeida from Ephron the Hittite, and that later his wife and descendants down to Jacob were buried on that land. He learned there was a massacre in 1929 where Jews were torn to pieces by their Arab neighbors after living side by side with them for hundreds of years, and that the Israeli government did not want Jews to resettle and live in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs.

If Jews were told that they couldn't live in one of the five boroughs of New York, Eli thought, if they were told that it was being reserved for blacks and Puerto Ricans and Jews couldn't live there, people would call it anti-Semitism, racism. So, why shouldn't I live here, he thought?

When Eli was well enough, Zev took him to the
mikvah
and he immersed himself in the cleansing waters of the bath, feeling a new energy flowing through his body. He passed his days studying the words of the Lord and his prophets and began to realize the profound mistakes he had made in his past life. In the book of Hosea he learned that since he had forgotten God and married a Gentile, God would forget his child. He learned in Isaiah that he had been arrogant in his wealth, supplanting God with material gains, and that for punishment he would be “brought down to the netherworld, to the uttermost parts of the pit.” Eli remembered the darkest days after his wife threw him out and he thanked God for bringing him close to his breast. He sang psalms of praise with Zev and slept with the words of the Lord burned into his brain.

He wore his beard long and a
kippah
on his head, and prayed daily at the Tomb of Machpelah, the burial place for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. When he wasn't praying he walked the streets of Hebron. One day a man spat in his face, called him a “Zionist pig,” and cursed at him in Arabic. Eli ran after him, but lost the man in a crowd. He felt proud to be wearing a
kippah.
He wandered into the Casbah and the merchants would not sell him their wares. He saw a camel hanging upside down from a hook with its intestines spilling from its sides like extension cords and felt nauseated. Children laughed like monkeys and shouted at him as he passed. Eli wondered what God had in mind when he made the Arabs.

Zev and Eli went for lunch with a rabbi and his wife who lived over at Shilo. The rabbi had planted a bomb that had blown the legs off of an Arab mayor in the eighties and had served thirty months in prison.

Eli could not imagine spending thirty minutes in prison. The walls would close in on him and he would be alone inside his head. Eli would never go to prison. Never.

“I don't want to be a fascist, but I have no choice,” the rabbi had said. “God gave this land to Abraham and the Jewish people, forever.”

“Forever,” Zev added, popping an olive in his mouth.

“Listen,” the rabbi said, turning to Eli, “as long as we have this secular system, we are going to have chaos. The waters of Babylon are rising.”

“This is the Holy Land, man,” Zev said. “Put it back in God's hands and give him the respect. If you want to be secular, go to America.”

“I'm done with that,” Eli said. “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“You said it, brother,” Zev said. “Hey, today's leaders, they haven't even gone to any kind of leadership school. They're just buying their way into politics and government.”

“Amen,” Eli said.

“Amen,” the rabbi said, standing up from the table.

About a month before the prime minister was assassinated Eli and Zev went to a rally in Jerusalem where thousands of people crowded forward, fists raised in the air, as a man shouted from a podium before a placard that said:
DANGER! ALL HANDS TO THE DEFENSE OF JERUSALEM!
Their voices all raised as one, cheering at intervals. Their cries rising and falling like waves. Eli smelled something burning and saw gray smoke snaking into the sky.

“They're saying the prime minister is the son of an Arab and a Nazi,” Zev said to Eli, a cigarette burning between his lips. “You can't trade land that God gave Abraham for a piece of paper.”

The smoke carried a terrible odor over the crowd and smelled like something rotten and foul.

The crowd let up a roar and Eli felt waves rolling throughout his body. They were burning the prime minister in effigy and the crowd rushed forward, smashing at the body with sticks until it was beaten to the ground.

Eli had never felt this connected to anything in his life before, even when the Yankees won the World Series in 1977. He raised his fist in the air and shouted out, “Rabin the traitor, Rabin the traitor.”

During the curfew, Eli and Zev walked alone through the streets, sloping down to the Beit Hadassah compound where other Jews lived. Zev's Uzi submachine gun bounced against his back as he walked.

“Enjoy this,” Zev said, “this quiet won't last. If you listen carefully, you can hear the violence sizzling in the air.”

He felt proud, walking through the streets with Zev. This was not the Judaism he remembered.

Eli thought of the schoolyard in eighth grade when Connor Peters hit him in the head with a roll of pennies and pushed him to the ground shouting, “Pick 'em up, Jew,” as a group of fifth and sixth graders laughed at him.
Is this what a Jew is?
Eli had thought. He picked up a stone, pulled himself off the ground, and slammed the stone into Connor's face. Eli remembered that the laughing stopped.

When his father came to get him from the principal's office, he saw the two boys; Connor holding a bloody rag to his face, and Eli sitting quietly on the bench. His father looked at Eli with his frozen blue eyes, crossed his arms to cover his tattoo, and said in his thick accent, “Apolochize.”

At that moment, Eli hated his father. He felt his father had failed a mighty test and had revealed the true nature of the mystery of what it meant to be a Jew.

On al-Shuhada Street, “the street of the martyrs,” Eli and Zev passed shuttered storefronts spray-painted with Stars of David, some had fists painted inside them. A donkey poked his head out over a low wire fence and brayed. They passed more graffiti in red: “Rabin is an Arab!” “Kahane lives!” “Deport, Kill Arabs!” and then sloppily written and partially crossed out, “With blood and fire, Jews out.”

To their right, beyond a run-down cemetery, tiny lights flickered inside the bare-faced concrete pillboxes of Arab homes stacked up into the Hebron hills. The March air was cool and damp and Eli pulled his parka closed. He wondered if the inside of their homes looked as much like prisons as the outside.

They walked into the depths of the Arab casbah, their footsteps echoing on the empty streets. Vegetables rotted on their wagons and the air smelled foul. Eli leaped behind one of the wooden carts and began to bark out prices like one of the Arab merchants. “Special price,” he laughed. “Special price for Jew,” and he spat into a pile of rotting tomatoes.

Zev didn't laugh but kept on walking and lit a cigarette. A puff of smoke rose above his head. “Over fifty people killed on their way to work. Real holy,” he said.

The curfew had been in place for more than a week now, since the two buses had been blown up in Jerusalem. A muezzin began to wail
“Ull-aaaaaaw-hoo-Ak-bar! Ull-aaaaaaw-hoo-Ak-bar!”

It seemed that the volume on the minaret speakers had been turned up again.

“These kids are being brainwashed,” Zev shouted. “Do you know what kind of gutter religion we are talking about? Do you know what they are being told? That their reward for killing Jews will be seventy-two virgins waiting for them in heaven.”

“I didn't know there were any virgins left,” Eli said, and they both laughed.

He thought of Josh back on Long Island and the time he had set fire to a pile of old newspapers in the garage. Eli had grounded him and taken away his allowance for a month, but he was on the streets playing again in a week.

“Listen up, and listen good, brother,” Zev said. “Nobody ever screwed in heaven. It's all lies. Bubbe meysehs!”

Eli was far away now, even as they reached an army checkpoint and the high walls of the Tomb of Machpelah. Josh would be thirteen this week, and Eli didn't even know where he was.

“You've got to take away their keys to heaven,” Zev continued, “you've got to get them while they're still in bed, or while they're preparing for their deaths.”

He should have his bar mitzvah soon, Eli thought.

“You should bury the bombers inside pig skins,” Zev continued. “Then they'll think twice about the glories of heaven.”

Eli was silent for a moment and then said, “This doesn't sound like the ‘undercover peace-and-lover' some of us used to know.”

“Nah,” Zev said, looking straight ahead. “This is realpolitik. Hardcore.”

The muezzin had stopped praying. They couldn't even hear the soldiers laughing at their checkpoints.

“Listen to the quiet,” Zev said. “It's nuclear quiet. Real spooky. Take this,” he said, reaching into his belt and pulling out a .38 Special.

“No way,” Eli said. “I don't need this.” Zev had offered Eli the gun before, but he had always been afraid to take it.

“You do,” Zev said. “I mean you really need something with a cartridge out here. This is the OK Corral, man. Injun country.”

Eli handed it back to Zev. The last time he had held a gun was the night
Spy, Berliner
was canceled. He was drunk and had taken it from the set and brought it home. He wore the long-nosed opera mask on his face and fired blanks at his wife as she ran screaming out the back door.

Zev pressed the .38 back into Eli's hands and slung his Uzi around into his own hands. He smiled. “God created the universe and this is the instrument of his will. Do you have earplugs?”

“No,” Eli said. “I'm not taking this.”

“Always carry earplugs, boychick,” Zev said, ignoring Eli, brushing back his sidecurls, his graying peyot, as he slipped the plugs into his ears. He gave a pair to Eli, who did the same. “This is target practice,” he said. “Do you see the water tanks on top of the houses?” He marched ahead up a steep potholed street as he cocked his gun. Water tanks, solar heaters, and TV antennas rose out of the rooftops in a chaotic mess. The air was just cold enough that Eli could see his breath moving ahead of him in the dark. He knew now that he would follow Zev anywhere.

Zev gave him the thumbs-up sign and said, “Let's kick out the jams.”

And then pop, Pop, POP, from Zev's gun, as he ran, firing at rooftops and whooping like an Indian. Eli held the gun at his side and ran to keep up with Zev, who continued shooting at the tanks, the odd shot answered with a metallic ping.