I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  She’d been a photographer, known in a modest way for portraits of criminals in the documentary style of Robert Frank. In the city’s interrogation rooms, the police would set up a clock beside their suspects to serve as a time marker during their videotaped statements. Mona’s photographs showed these suspects, black or Hispanic usually, listless or defiant or in tears, always with that clock in the frame, its pointing hands.

  Metastasis—the liver, the lungs, even the brain. There was the wait while they hydrated her, the wait while they ran the bloodwork, the wait while they brought her to the chair and ran the chemo, the wait in the office. People magazine, Car and Driver, Highlights. The wait in the bedroom while she prepared herself to come back out after a bath, her hair gone, even her eyebrows, her face somehow naked, scalded. One time he’d asked her how she felt and she’d said, “I’m scared,” and it was like the only honest thing he’d ever heard. There was nothing that could prepare you for how it felt, the tubes in her bruised arm, the EKG, the paper gown, Mona so emaciated she seemed half her size, as if she wasn’t anyone in particular anymore, or as if the machines were there for the simple purpose of stealing her identity.

  He switched off the lamp and stood for a while in the living room. Hours would pass, he wouldn’t sleep, he knew it already. The furnace ticked erratically in the walls, then came on with a low muffled whoosh. The loss felt more like fear now. It came at him backwards. What he feared had already happened. When he turned off the light in the hallway, the darkness was a thickness, a presence in the air. He opened his eyes and it was no different from having them closed. The city was never dark in that way. It was a darkness you breathed.

  He switched the light back on and saw the bedroom down the hall where Gila was. His resolve rose and then waned in a way that was dizzying—he imagined it happening and then it happened. It had happened before. He went ahead and approached her door absently, his fingers resting for a moment on the glass knob. He paused as if about to knock, then thought about the noise and instead he slowly opened it, stepping forward like a wary child. She turned in bed with an intake of breath. She had fallen asleep with a magazine on the blanket beside her. The smell of her sleep filled the room. It was impossible to do this with any grace.

  “I still have a few things to learn,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes, then switched on the bedside lamp. “Like what?” she said.

  “Lots of things. How to live without scruples.”

  She turned away and he moved farther into the room, sitting in a little chair by the door in his overcoat.

  “I quit my job,” she said.

  “When?”

  “This afternoon. I can’t do it anymore. It was time.”

  She wanted to open a store—women’s clothes, evening wear. He had promised once he would help her. This was what she was really saying.

  “I was hoping Hannah would learn Hebrew,” he said, his eyes closed. “They teach her French in school—nice, fine—but what does it really have to do with anything, French?”

  “It’s a nice house you have. A nice life.”

  “This was the room she fussed over. The guest room. I never understood why. People coming to visit. Endless.”

  He brought his hand back to his shoulder and massaged it. She was looking at the magazine now, one of Mona’s, Aperture. The lamp, the window valances, the sleigh bed from the shop in East Hampton.

  “I thought we’d go on the boat tomorrow with the Kleins,” he said.

  “You go.”

  “You’ll stay here and read my wife’s magazines.”

  “I don’t like boats. I also don’t like playing games.”

  “Of course you do.”

  He stood up and finished the drink, the warmth filling his chest.

  “Just stay,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m being crazy.”

  “Not crazy.”

  “Crazy. I can see that.”

  The lamp threw its garish cone of light on her side of the room, exposing the tangled pattern of the Victorian wallpaper. Mona’s Aperture. That world she’d wanted to enter, its soundless black-and-white stillness. He watched his hand to steady it as he bent down to put his glass on the floor beside the chair. He tried to move more slowly. She reached her hand out toward him and let it rest on the blanket. He lay on the bed beside her with his coat still on, his shoes. A lot like Mona and nothing at all like Mona. He kissed her neck just below the ear and she rolled toward him and he felt her bare waist beneath the T-shirt, the warmth of her skin, the curve of her breasts.

  In the temple, on the walls of the hallway leading back to the classrooms, Mr. Stone had erected a kind of shrine: black-and-white photographs of decimated men in rags, shaven-headed men naked in piles, dead bodies in the open pit—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen—he would intone the names in the mournful lilt of prayer. The ones who weren’t naked wore clownish striped suits and caps, the teeth falling out of their skulls. Mr. Stone wanted you not to understand but to feel complicit. He wanted you to be answerable for a catastrophe so distant you could only resent him for presenting it to you, those withered people behind the barbed-wire fence.

  That first night Gila had come to the apartment, she’d hardly spoken to Hannah, even though they’d seen each other all those days at Hebrew school. Gila had had her hair not tied back but down, and she wore a black T-shirt and jeans—it occurred to Hannah for the first time that Gila had a private life she knew nothing about. Her clothes, her loose hair cut straight just above her shoulders, not tied back or pinned, faint lines at the edges of her green eyes, but her clothes the clothes of a young person—the shock of the way she looked, that and her coldness, her silence. She read a fashion magazine while Hannah watched TV. Maybe Hannah had fallen a little in love with her over the course of those nights. Maybe that was why she’d told Mr. Stone her story of the camps.

  It was sunny the next morning and she and her father went to the nature preserve on Noyac Road, a place they always went. They could see cardinals in the thicket as they walked toward the bay. He was telling her that Gila had quit her job at the temple. It was something she’d wanted to do for a long time.

  “We’re fond of each other,” he said then. “Maybe you already know that. I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you. I don’t expect you to be happy about it or to understand it, but I wanted to tell you. I tell you everything. That’s the rule.”

  The leaves shone against the clear blue sky, a preposterous display—tupelo, oak—the colors throbbing faintly, they were so bright. She knew the names of the trees because her mother had taught them to her. Her mother had bought her the coat she was wearing, dark olive, the waxed cotton shiny like oilcloth, the kind of preppy jacket all the girls wore except the kind of girl she wanted to be now.

  “I’m sorry,” her father said. “I’m sorry if this makes it worse. It was already the worst.”

  It was when he touched her arm that she fully understood. It was like he was holding his hands over her face. She found herself clenching in spasm. All these things at once now: the embarrassment of her crying, the violence of it, the nausea quivering down her throat. Far ahead of them, a girl stood near the bushes, extending her hand, trying to get birds to eat seeds out of her open palm. The bushes were called catbrier. Catbrier, tupelo, oak. She didn’t know why she was crying. She scratched at her face but she didn’t feel anything but the sun glare. She pushed her father away and started running, as if there were anyplace to run.

  She watched from the car as he carried Gila’s bag and they went into her building through the glass door. It was a squat red box, dwarfed by the white-brick complex that filled up the rest of the block all the way to York. There was a sign that said H. KOTZ MEDICAL SUPPLIES and beside it SYLVIE’S EUROPEAN ALTERATIONS, the signs so old they looked not like advertisements but commemorations. It was just blocks from where she lived, but the street was like a remnant of another world. It was the world of the temple, the world of Mr. Stone.

&nbs
p; There would be Hebrew school next week, but Gila would not be there to teach it. Perhaps she would be here, in the squat red box, drinking tea in the dim rooms. To imagine this lonely picture was somehow to feel it as Hannah’s own fault, though it hadn’t even happened. She had run off into the woods crying like any other twelve-year-old girl.

  The sun was hitting everything at a twilight slant when she finally got out of the car. She looked up at the building’s windows—she didn’t know which one was Gila’s—and at the empty black lattice of the fire escape. Some men were unloading furniture from an orange truck, black men in wool caps and sweatshirts and gloves, even though it wasn’t cold. Then she saw some movement behind the inner door of Gila’s building and she came closer. It was an old woman looking fiercely out, a bandage behind one lens of her glasses. She started shouting inaudibly through the door. Perhaps she was mistaking Hannah for someone else.

  It was a long time before her father came back downstairs. He wore a beige wool overcoat, the strands of his white hair slicked back and revealing the bald skin beneath. There was that moment before he noticed her watching, a moment of such self-containment and strength that she never wanted him to turn—she wanted to disappear, if that’s what was required. Then he turned and looked at her without sympathy, as if they had suddenly become equals now. You told my story to Robby Karsh. I thought you understood why I told you that story. It was the last time they saw Gila together.

  Part Two

  In the Presence of My Enemies

  7

  TO ISRAEL, 2009

  What we need is a memoir without a self.

  A memoir about someone other than “me.”

  Of course I can’t know what Gila and my father said or what they meant to each other almost thirty years ago, only what they came to mean to me as I imagined these scenes. While I imagined these scenes, what Gila and my father meant to each other meant more to me than I would have ever suspected. Twenty-eight years after it happened, I got a letter from Gila, who’d seen an essay I’d written about a murder in Israel, a Mafia-style murder. She wanted to tell me some things about her life in Tel Aviv, she said. It had been a long time—long enough, she hoped, that we could talk.

  Benjamin Siegel

  Meyer Lansky

  A woman goes on a journey—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, then back to New York. I thought I was covering the murder of an Israeli poet named David Bellen, investigating a fairly straightforward crime story. But it became a story that led elsewhere, a story that led everywhere, a story I would have had no interest in if I hadn’t accidentally found myself inside it. I remember standing that first night in the narcotic gray light of the terminal at JFK, its vast glowing dome momentous and boring at the same time, like some disappointing portal to an afterlife of crowds. The women in their African robes, the men in soccer jerseys, the women from Jamaica with their bright suitcases—everyone seemed suspended in that gray light. Your name is Hannah, the El Al screeners said, a Hebrew name. They asked, more than once, “Why have you never been to Israel?”

  8

  Kid Bethlehem:

  An Investigation into the Murder of David Bellen

  by Hannah Groff

  “We don’t choose our obsessions—our obsessions, invariably against our deepest wishes, choose us. Against our deepest wishes, we become suddenly, inexplicably committed to a path we had avoided, a line of thought we’d had no interest in.”

  —David Bellen, 2008

  1) GANGSTER STYLE

  They found the poet David Bellen’s body on the morning of December 23, 2008, in a village called Beit Sahour, just outside Bethlehem, six miles from Jerusalem, about thirty-seven miles from Bellen’s home in Tel Aviv. As unlikely as it seemed, it was not a random place to find his body. Like other parts of the West Bank, Bethlehem has faced a growing and strategic expansion of Jewish settlements in recent years—provocation in a region rife with provocation. The city is also the setting for some of the poems in Bellen’s 2008 book, Kid Bethlehem, which is in many ways a critique of current Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.

  A preliminary statement by the Israeli Defense Forces described the murder as most likely an act of terrorism. As it happened, they were preoccupied at the time with larger matters—Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, on the other side of Israel from the West Bank, had just terminated a cease-fire agreement five days before. The day after Bellen’s murder, Hamas launched a series of mortar and rocket attacks on Israeli cities which set the stage for Israel’s retaliatory air strikes of December 27. Another war had begun, code-named Operation Cast Lead—the Gaza War. In the ensuing onslaught—F-16 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache helicopters, the white and gray plumes of smoke rising like ghostly fireworks over demolished buildings—Israel and the world at large almost inevitably lost sight of the story of David Bellen’s murder. As of this writing, the IDF says they are still looking for suspects. But even a basic question such as how someone like Bellen could have gotten from Tel Aviv to the Palestinian city of Bethlehem—how and why he could have possibly made such a journey, dead or alive—remains unanswered.1

  2) OUR OBSESSIONS CHOOSE US

  Rock stars, serial killers, drug addicts, sexual “deviants”—these are some of the obsessives that have come to obsess me in my career as a journalist. I’m not a political writer—whatever politics I’ve engaged in has always been far beneath the surface. I’m a crime writer with a fractured style. I pitched this story as a crime story.

  But when I left for Israel, I felt as though it were the 1980s and I was telling friends I wanted to visit South Africa. What I would say now, having gone, is that if Israel were to disappear, my friends might be the very people who would erect a sentimental cult in its memory. I had never cared much about Israel—my lack of interest was so long-standing that perhaps I should have wondered more about it. On a deeper level, I might have realized, I had never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew. Your name is Hannah, the El Al people kept pointing out to me in the security line, a Hebrew name—why had I never been to Israel? They were smiling as they said it, but it was precisely this kind of righteous shaming that I have always taken pains to avoid.

  My favorite picture of David Bellen, who disliked having his photograph taken, is badly focused and in black-and-white. He has a squat bald head and wears metal-rimmed, Soviet-looking glasses. He looks like a wry pugilist, used to taking blows to the face. Inspired by the paintings of an Israeli artist named Ivan Schwebel, he wrote his last book, Kid Bethlehem, in his midsixties, in the years leading up to the Gaza War—years of disillusionment, cynicism, terror, and other wars, in which Israel became more than ever in the world’s eyes an oppressor, a kind of gangster state. The poems in Bellen’s book, like Schwebel’s paintings, are a peculiar retelling of the story of King David—his rise, his triumph, his decadence, his tragedy, his death. As in Schwebel’s paintings, Bellen’s David appears in modern guise—particularly, in Bellen’s poems, in the counterpersona of the real-life Israeli gangster Yehezkel Aslan, who died in 1993. Because of the book’s controversial nature, it can’t help but be looked at as a clue to Bellen’s murder.

  3) THE ROUTE

  You could take one fork of the Hebron Road all the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, my driver explained, but it would mean going through the main checkpoint, which could add as much as an hour to the tiny six-mile trip, so instead we went the circuitous way along Route 60 to the West Bank town of Beit Jala. It was the first time I’d seen the separation wall, high barriers made of wood or maybe some bulletproof polymer that looked like wood. We passed through a tunnel that seemed like any other tunnel until we emerged from it and there it was—vast, brutal, brown—lining the road on one side like an endless fan whose blades had been bent in half, the top half casting a shadow. Spread over the valley beyond were houses of white stone and pink tile, cypress trees, grass. On one hillside was a dilapidated Arab settlement. On the opposite hillside was a shiny Jewish
one. My driver had a tired air, as if he saw himself as a kind of character. He shrugged and pointed out the large gaps in the wall that anyone who wanted to could walk right through. Thousands of shooting incidents until they built the wall between Gilo and Beit Jala, he said. Sometimes the Arabs would open fire on the highway traffic, sometimes they would shoot across the valley at the Jewish settlements, sometimes the Jews would shoot back. I mentioned nothing about David Bellen. I think the reason I didn’t was that I was afraid the driver would not have heard of him.

  We parked in front of a convenience store in Beit Jala and I waited to change to a Palestinian driver. Dust, construction, a checkpoint with a single black-and-white car with the flag of the Palestinian Authority. The storekeeper offered me a bottle of water, and then a group of tourists came in an SUV and we all got into the new driver’s van. When his cell phone rang, it played “Careless Whisper.” As we drove on toward Bethlehem, he said, “I will tell you this little story and at the end you will be amused.”

  He pulled over on the embankment in Beit Sahour as I’d requested and pointed out the site I’d asked to see, the Shepherds’ Field, the place where the biblical David is said to have grazed his sheep. The hillsides were covered with the concrete slabs of half-built houses, cypress trees, rocks. I took a few photographs. We weren’t allowed to go down any closer, the driver said, because it was dangerous. He meant it was always dangerous. He wasn’t saying that this was the place, six months before, where the IDF had found David Bellen’s mutilated body in a vacant lot among the building sites. I tried to picture it there—I knew the body had been run over by a truck several times, most likely to make it harder to determine the precise cause of death. It was as if the battered corpse was left there as a message: Not there, but here. Not in Tel Aviv, but in Bethlehem. Not in the modern city, but in the birthplace of the ancient king.