The Pale of Settlement (11 page)

Susan carries the box containing the ashes of her dead uncle off the plane, through immigration, past the baggage carousels, and out the lane marked
NOTHING TO DECLARE
, into the light. People push and wave and shout, pressing against the barricades outside the sliding doors. No one is here to greet her. There's the smell of too many bodies, of flesh and sweat. Susan has been to Israel many times, but this time everything looks strange, as if illuminated by a too-bright light. She's struck by the rising cadence of language she does not understand, by the Hebrew letters surrounding her on billboards, blocky and obscure. She notices the soldiers,
M
16s swinging at their sides, the Mizrahi men with gold chains around their necks, Arab families tugging enormous suitcases on wheels, Haredim in black with side curls at their ears. Almost no tourists.

Susan holds the box on her lap as the
sherut
winds up the road to Jerusalem. She rolls down her window and breathes the hot dry air that smells of diesel exhaust and pine: familiar, foreign
smells. A burned-out armored van tilts on the verge, a relic of the first war. New trees line the hillsides, rows of saplings orderly as military graves. She is the last passenger to be dropped off. The driver does not want to take her to East Jerusalem. He lectures her in a Russian-inflected Hebrew, waving his hands and glaring at her in the rearview mirror, from which an amulet swings, a sky blue marble against the evil eye. She makes out the word
intifada
, the words
Aravim
and
Yehudim
, Arabs and Jews. The American Colony Hotel, once a pasha's palace, is a favorite of journalists and diplomats who don't mind its location in the Arab part of town. The lobby is cool and dim, with vaulted arches and floors of time-worn stone. In these troubled times, it is quiet as a tomb. Past the lobby, Susan can see the empty tables in the courtyard café, the Turkish fountain burbling beneath an orange tree. Susan does not give the box to the bellboy who leads her to her room. She carries it before her like a gift, feeling the rasp of sediment shifting inside.

On the morning before the day he died, Zalman Bar-On lay awake behind hazy slats of light and tried to remember his dream. A pigeon had flown in through the bedroom window—although it was not this bedroom, but another one that reminded him of their first apartment in Chicago, the one with the smell of gas in the hallway and a rust-rimmed sink. The pigeon flew in through the window and his ex-wife, Shula, carried the bird out to the fire escape and let it go. It flapped up into the yellow sky and was gone. Then Zalman was alone and he was holding the pigeon on his finger, its knotty talons piercing his skin. The bird led him through the rutted
streets of a village both familiar and strange, with old stone houses and olive trees trembling in the rain. The dream annoyed him. He shook it off with the sheets and got out of bed. The floor felt cold underfoot. The water ran cold in the bathroom sink.

In the flat on Amram Gaon Street the second hand

of Avraham Bar-On's kitchen clock is stuck

between the three and the four. It quivers

and gives out a low hum like a moan

before springing reluctantly ahead.

Avraham has washed his cup and plate

and is trying to decide what to do next.

In the old days, he'd be at the university by now,

his work spread out like a fan inside his head.

But these days, time keeps getting stuck

like this clock, whose batteries

probably need to be replaced.

Susan's room looks out over a too-blue swimming pool, where one lone hotel guest reclines oily in the sun. She sets the box on the table next to the complimentary basket of fruit and stack of glossy tourist magazines, and sits down on the bed. It is her first trip to Jerusalem in years. Now her grandparents are dead; this time it is the other side of the family she has come to see: her mother's oldest brother, Avraham Bar-On, a man she hardly knows. She has brought him the box.

Susan often feels related only to her father. People always say she looks just like her mother, with her thick-lashed eyes and long dark hair, but Susan's good sense of direction, her reporter's desire for the story, her crooked little toe, are all his. Susan's mother has always promoted the myth of Susan's lack of relation to her own family, whose women (she said) were prone to nervous disorders, hypertension, leaky heart valves, and untimely death. Susan's mother had tried to evade her legacy the old-fashioned way, trading one patrimony for another in marriage, but who was to say what she'd passed along to her daughter, this lone girl among brothers and cousins, uncles and sons, and sometimes Susan wondered what weakness lay on her X chromosomes, like a point of metal fatigue on the wing of a plane.

Susan narrows her eyes and considers the box. She tries to imagine the rush of heat—the yellow roar—the residue of bone and ash. She tries to imagine her own body, shadowed behind a screen of flames. She imagines herself as weightless as air, the whisper of release.

Avraham takes his cap and cane and walks south along Amram Gaon Street before turning onto Kanfei Nesharim in the direction of Har Nof. To avoid tripping, he walks in the road, preferring the idea of sudden death beneath a car's wheels to the lingering decline of broken bones. A driver swears out his window, leaning on his horn. Avraham passes a clutch of religious boys from the yeshiva, shouting at each other and scuffing their black shoes in the dust. He passes two small children squatting beneath the broad boughs of a pine, cracking open
snobarim
with a chalky stone. The sun presses
white and hot like the palm of a hand. Halfway up the hill, Avraham pauses to rest in the thin shade of a eucalyptus tree. The pavement shimmers in the heat. Just beyond the crest, Avraham knows, is the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a cluster of stone buildings surrounded by a barbed wire fence, an olive grove, pine and almond trees, and heaps of cracked concrete and tumbled stone. Before the battles of 1948, it was an Arab village. Even now, Palestinians still call it Deir Yassin, although it isn't marked on any map. After the war, they built a mental hospital there to care for Holocaust survivors gone mad; now it's where they bring people afflicted with the Jerusalem Syndrome—tourists, usually, found ranting or dressed in robes, claiming to be Elijah or Christ and shouting warnings of the apocalypse. Sometimes, close by the gate, you could hear the false prophets shouting or crying—it was impossible to tell. Avraham himself prefers to look to the past, not the future: his stories run like memory, from back to front, the answers written at the beginning, not the end.

What Zalman remembered many years later was

a thin disk of sun burning through the ashen sky

the wind out of the Judean hills hissing through the pines

the metallic taste of fear like blood in his mouth

a woman pouring coffee in the cold static time before

the fighting began, talking about the Jews murdered

at Gush Etzion, the thirty-five martyrs of the Lamed-Heh.

The woman said, You give those Arabs something

they'll remember this time.

Zalman remembered the loudspeaker truck

sent to warn the villagers, stuck in a rut

blaring like Cassandra into the flat blank dawn

Evacuate! Evacuate!

but nobody heard.

He remembered low stone houses chickens children Arabs dust

machine gun fire an exploding grenade the boom

of the two-inch mortar sent by the Palmach when the fighting turned bad

the smell of burning the shouting the screams

a boy of no more than nine or ten hurling a homemade bomb

an old man cowering, knock-kneed, dressed in a woman's clothes.

Later, witnesses said the Jewish fighters' eyes were glazed as if in ecstasy,

but Zalman doesn't remember any ecstasy but fear.

Pain, of course, was the one thing that evaded memory—

he remembered only the sensation of falling and later great thirst.

The bullet nicked the femur of his left leg

but missed the artery; they gave it to him afterward

in a paper bag. A trophy or a souvenir.

The only thing that still remained

was the scar on the outside of his left thigh,

a pink shiny patch like a small, exploded star.

In the early evening, Susan phones Avraham from her room. She sits on the edge of the bed, listening to the clicks as the call goes
through. Six rings before he picks up.
Hallo?
he hollers, as if she must be very far away. It's Leah's daughter, Susan, she says, from the States.
Mi zeh?
he yells. More slowly, she repeats:
Ha bat shel Leah
. Leah's daughter. (How do you say “your niece”? She isn't sure.) Ah yes, he says in English. Of course. A gritty voice, a European not Israeli accent, with a British tinge. In the distance, Susan hears the evening bells: Armenian, Anglican, Latin, Abyssinian, Russian, Greek. The sound radiates like ripples in a pool. You are at a hotel? her uncle says. This I cannot allow. Tomorrow you will come to me. I will fetch you in the morning. No, no, it is impossible. With the situation as it is now.
Ha matzav
. Susan looks out the window. The city is cooling from white to golden-pink in the slanting sun. She has no desire to leave this beautiful hotel. The old man's flat is in that religious neighborhood, Givat Shaul, and almost certainly has no air-conditioning and a cold-water shower or the kind of water heater you have to ignite with a match. It's probably filled with piles of paper, or potsherds—he was an archeologist—and she recalls that his wife has Alzheimer's and is in a home. She thinks of the last time she saw her dead uncle Zalman's apartment in Chicago, with the smell of cooking in the halls, the soot that seeped in at the edges of the window frames. He would offer her hard candies from a bowl, the plastic wrappers glued to peppermints gummy with age. Take, take, he'd insist. And when the woman hadn't come to clean there would be scabs of food on the forks, for he never wore his glasses when he washed the dishes. Now Avraham is going on about how one no longer goes to King George Street or the Jaffa Road. One must not walk alone at night. Do not take the yellow Arab cabs. His warnings annoy her, though they make her wonder how much things really have changed since she last was here, before the Al-Aqsa
intifada began. Even her parents said she was crazy to come. Still. She will hand over the box and be done.

Because her Hebrew is not good, in Israel Susan's always a tourist,

or if not exactly a tourist, someone who can't exactly pass

for a sabra, even though this is the place her family is from,

or if not exactly from, the closest thing to it

(closer anyway than New York or Berlin or Vienna or Lwów).

Everyone speaks English here in any case, and even if not, Susan can usually get by

in her limping Hebrew restricted to a few dozen nouns and the present tense.

It's a troublesome language that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda resurrected

from biblical ossification with its absence of vowels and no verb “to be.”

The sequence of consonants
gimel, lamed
, and
shin
, Susan knows, can be read as

golesh
(to overflow like hot frothy milk or streaming wet hair),

or as its opposite,
gelesh
(baldness),

or even as
le-haglish
(to publish, in the sense of words flowing to light, like the skin on a newly bald scalp).

The root
gimel-lamed-shin
also forms the words
maglesha, miglasha, miglashayim, gilshon, gelisha
:

a slide, a sled, a pair of skis, a surfer, a hang glider, an avalanche.

The way letters slip around it's not surprising that the Kabbalists tried to shake loose

the letters of God's very name from their usual signification,

as if meaning itself could overflow and slip away

like a pot boiling over, wet hair fanning out in a pool, a sparkler's shower of light.

Now she's sitting in the cellar bar twisting the stem of her wine glass between her forefinger and thumb, feeling that strange way you feel sometimes when you travel alone—an echoing inside your head as if the words in there have no place to go but just bump around like a bluebottle fly on a windowpane. Two fair-haired men are sitting at a table in the corner, speaking some lilting language, Swedish perhaps, eating roasted peanuts out of their palms. The bartender is a young fellow with jutting elbows and eyebrows that meet in an arc at the bridge of his nose and skin pockmarked like orange rind. He refills her glass, not quite looking at her but not quite looking away, and when she thanks him, he says: Please. He could be an Israeli Arab or a Mizrahi Jew or a Druze: he has features she can't read. Susan herself is the kind of person to whom people sometimes say, But you don't look Jewish! She has long, straight hair, amber-flecked eyes, a nose that tapers to a bump. The truth is that inside, where her blood jangles and her breath beats against her ears, she doesn't exactly feel Jewish either. She feels hollow, like a knotty gourd.

Avraham sits on the terrace and listens to the night sounds in the dark—

engines revving at the stoplight, a cat wailing like a colicky child,

the drone of the nine o'clock news on someone's
TV
.

The economic outlook's even worse. Tomorrow, hot, khamsin.

But right now it's cool—he's wrapped himself in a shawl like an old woman

and is listening to the cicadas' creak. Someone is shouting—Avi Avi—a mother