I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  I told Voss a story about an Arab cabdriver I’d had on my way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. On the way is a town called Abu Ghosh which is famous for its hummus. I asked the driver about why the hummus was so famous and he looked at me in silence. It turned out that he thought I was asking about Hamas, not hummus. Eventually we laughed. Voss laughed a little when I told him this story. We went back in the water and I thought everything between us was fine. He put his hands on my hips and I floated.

  In my room, I had drawn the sheer curtain which let some sunlight come in—the other choice was total darkness. I don’t talk about that. Why would you want to talk about it? The room was beige and clean and smelled like the salt water on our towels. Voss couldn’t concentrate. I tried to help him. It was when I moved down his stomach that it happened. It happened so quickly that I thought something had been shot through the window.

  I lay with my hand pressed to the side of my mouth, my lip and the inside of my cheek bleeding. My jaw rang. I don’t think Voss knew what he’d done. He turned on his side and grasped both my wrists in his hands. “Bad luck,” he said. “You can put this in the piece too.” He was holding my wrists very tightly, a blank anger in his eyes, which seemed unseeing. I don’t know why, but I thought of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. We had driven there, I and the tourists and the driver with the cell phone that played “Careless Whisper.” It was a dim place hung with censers and shabby brass lamps. I waited in line to see the manger, but the crowd was so thick that I hardly bothered to crouch down and peer into what was nothing more than a little shelf in the stone.

  He brought his hand to my face and wiped my lip and I didn’t know if he was going to hit me again or not. I could see that he didn’t know either.

  20) KILLING TIME

  I went for a long walk up Rothschild Boulevard the next morning, then I took a taxi back to Jerusalem. I had two days left before my flight home. The driver wondered why I had never been to Israel before. He asked if I’d been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and when I told him no he insisted that I should see it. Perhaps the reason I have never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew is that all roads seem to lead to the Holocaust memorial, as if it is the Holocaust that makes one a Jew. I knew I would not be seeing Voss here again. Perhaps that’s why I ended up going to Yad Vashem that day.

  Adolf Eichmann remembers: The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers.

  The tooth pliers bring it into focus. At Yad Vashem, what brought it into focus was a chart displaying locks of human hair. They illustrated the decadence in color gradations from Aryan gold to Semitic brown. I watched a video of Hitler giving a speech to a hall full of adulators. I watched a video of limp corpses being bulldozed into a trench. Black walls enclosed everything at harsh diagonals. I thought, this place has to exist but I don’t know what good it can possibly do. I went into a circular room with hundreds of black phone books full of names of the dead. A girl tourist walked around in a wet-eyed angry daze. I don’t cry very much. I cried when I saw her.

  21) ECSTASY

  There is a strange scene in the Bible when Saul, David’s predecessor as king, is pursuing David through the wilderness, trying to kill him. Saul learns that David is in a village called Naioth with the prophet Samuel. “And Saul sent messengers to take David, and they saw a band of prophets in ecstasy with Samuel standing poised over them, and the spirit of God came upon Saul’s messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy.” Saul dispatches more messengers, and they go into ecstasy. A third band is sent and they also go into ecstasy. It is unclear what it means to be “in ecstasy.” Finally Saul himself goes to Naioth and he “walked along speaking in ecstasy… and he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, went into ecstasy before Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night.”

  In one of Ivan Schwebel’s paintings, David is dancing on a railway platform where cars are being loaded for transport to Auschwitz. He is naked, dancing in ecstasy. I wish I could talk to Voss about this. I would have liked to tell him that I think one of the points of Bellen’s book is that David was Yehezkel Aslan and he was Tony Montana, but he was also “one who wrestles with God.” To be that alive is to consume everything, even Auschwitz, and it is also to send for Bathsheba, simply because you can. Three thousand years ago, David, according to the tradition, was the poet who wrote the Psalms. Even if you can’t believe that someone named David literally wrote the Psalms, the fact is that someone wrote them. I wonder if anyone in the world now is writing words of such resonance.

  22) NOT THAT KIND OF PIECE

  … by returning to that neighborhood, Bellen was offering himself up. He thought he could escape and be a prize-winning poet and this would somehow change things, but of course it didn’t. It didn’t change anything, so he came back in defeat. Drawn back to the place that never cared if he escaped or not. He arranges a deal—his letters and papers, worth more when he’s dead, sold through someone who could get their full worth, someone from his old neighborhood. Proceeds will go to the useless son. The son has no idea about any of this. Any number of scenarios after that. Maybe Bellen’s broker/collaborator is so disgusted by the idea of Bellen contemplating all this that he kills Bellen himself, just because he can. Maybe that was somehow implied in their conversation all along. Maybe Bellen killed himself. Maybe they drove him to Beit Sahour and let him blow his own brains out behind a construction site. Maybe they let him do it in Tel Aviv. The people I’m talking about can arrange these things anywhere. They hate the Arabs but they also work with the Arabs. Was it Bellen’s inspiration or theirs to dump the body in Beit Sahour?

  I can’t say for certain who sent me this e-mail, which came from a strange address, though of course I have a guess. I haven’t heard again from Voss in the eight months since my return to New York.

  23) THE CITY OF DAVID

  Just before I left for Israel last May, the New York Times ran a piece about the City of David, a joint effort between the Israeli government and a private group called Ir David to turn this section of Jerusalem into a tourist zone based on the premise that it is the “ancient ridge where King David is said to have conquered an existing stronghold and laid the foundations of Jewish Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.” The article reported that “garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views.” The piece also discussed the removal of Palestinians who live in the area, an impoverished district called Silwan, in order to create, in the words of a peace activist, “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” A picture emerged in the article of a project combining gentrification, tourism, and archaeology as a means of making it “harder than ever to divide Jerusalem as part of a two-state solution.”

  The site was partly open during my trip. There was a courtyard full of Israelis singing loud songs in Hebrew, a beautiful girl soldier with a machine gun. On the road that led to the ticket booth, a wall had been erected to screen out the ongoing construction in Silwan. Painted on the wall was a cheerful mural showing a father and son riding the two-wheeled motorized scooters called Segways, a view of the Old City behind them.

  You buy your ticket and walk down steep stairs through the archaeological excavation—cisterns and baths made of quarried stone. At the bottom is the entrance to Hezekiah’s Tunnel, an underground passage that leads to the biblical Pool of Siloam, the source of ancient Jerusalem’s water ever since the days of the Jebusites. Your admission fee buys you a tiny LED flashlight the size of a quarter. For whatever reason, I was the only one there that morning. The water at the mouth of the tunnel rushed so quickly over the slick stones that it seemed dangerous, even impassable, and I hesitated for a while b
efore wading in up to my knees and proceeding slowly forward into the entrance. The tunnel is 500 meters long but it feels much longer once you’re inside it. It makes a sharp left turn and then it’s absolutely pitch dark inside. In 700 BC, King Hezekiah’s engineers began digging at either side of the cavern and managed somehow to meet in the middle—with the aid of the flashlight you can still see the marks of their tools. Someone yodeled in the distance far behind me. I kept walking, the walls hardly much wider than the width of my body and the ceiling so low I had to crouch. I felt that if my flashlight went out or I dropped it, I would be lost there for a long time. The water rushed at my ankles and the way ahead got narrower and more jagged. In a tunnel that narrow, you can’t turn around because you can’t pass anyone coming the other way. You have to walk to the end. The yodeling was muffled and eerie. The darkness was so total that it made no difference if you closed your eyes or opened them. I turned off my flashlight for a moment and stood there taking it in.

  9

  Immigrants, Part 3

  1972/2010

  He didn’t know where he would live now, maybe Paraguay—some visas had been arranged there, though he knew almost nothing about the country and was afraid to think about it. It was November 5, 1972, two months after he’d lost his case before the Israeli supreme court, just five days before the expulsion order was to go into effect, and he sent some bags ahead with a friend, then traveled alone that night from Tel Aviv to Zurich, where the friend met him with boarding passes and transit visas to Asunción, Lansky’s documents under the name “Mr. Meyer.” Gray suit, dress shirt from Brooks Brothers, madras tie—he was already sticky under his clothes by the time the plane had left Lod. They made it across the Atlantic that night to Rio de Janeiro, then caught a connection to Buenos Aires a few hours later the same morning. Israel, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina. Soiled from the stuffy cabin air, waiting for the flight to Paraguay, he decided to get a shave in the airport barbershop. It was just hours later, when they landed in Asunción, that he realized the plan had failed. Two Paraguayans, then an American agent of some kind, came into the cabin and said in English that he was not permitted to disembark. It turned out that the flight to Asunción had further stops in La Paz, Lima, Panama City, and finally Miami. It turned out that all the FBI had to do, once he’d boarded in Buenos Aires, was to keep him on the plane all the way to its terminus. America. Thirty-six hours in transit, stops in seven countries. They met him at Miami International and drove him to the FBI office downtown, where his lawyer went out to get him a piece of bread and some milk for his ulcers.

  In her living room on Long Island, Gila read the letter another time, then folded it into thirds and put it into the envelope. She turned down the stereo and stood there with her eyes closed, waiting. She was going to mail it care of Hannah Groff’s editor but you didn’t have to do that anymore. It was 2010 and Hannah of course had her own website. Her address was right there on the website. She put the stamp on the letter and left it on the sideboard and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and took the morning’s dose of aprepitant, which helped with the nausea during her chemotherapy treatments. She ran some cool water over her face in the kitchen sink, pressing her fingertips to her eyes. It had been twenty-eight years since she’d seen Hannah. Maybe they could talk now. They could talk about some of the things Hannah didn’t know—they could talk about Meyer.

  Forty minutes sitting with her hands over her face, trying not to vomit. She took another shower and the lavender scent of the soap was mild enough to be soothing. The silk pajamas hurt her skin, so she put on some cotton ones. She looked at the letter on the sideboard, then she went back again to Hannah’s story about David Bellen.

  10

  Reunion

  NEW YORK, 2010

  1.

  I received Gila Konig’s first letter in the spring of 2010, about six months after my piece on David Bellen had first been published. Apart from the Bellen story, I hadn’t written any of the book you’re reading now—I didn’t know yet that the Bellen piece would become part of the larger story I would eventually, after some resistance, find myself telling. As I said before, when Gila told me about her past in Tel Aviv in 2010, I knew almost nothing about Meyer Lansky and wasn’t very interested in him.

  I saw her only one time after I was twelve, at a restaurant on 79th Street, just a few blocks from where my father had run his antiques business back in 1982, the last time we’d seen each other. It was a bright sunny afternoon and Gila wore a cream-colored hat made of soft straw to protect her skin from the sun. That May, at the age of seventy-one, she had undergone what would turn out to be her final round of radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Her hair beneath the hat had started to grow back in, gray and straight and close to the scalp. I had forgotten the delicateness of her cheekbones, her lips. We sat upstairs on the restaurant’s covered porch, fans hung from the ceiling, waiters moving by in white jackets, as in some old film whose setting was Capri. I smiled at Gila the way I sometimes cry at a movie that isn’t really sad. She had written me a few times now. I imagined her motives for seeking me out were bound up in her illness. Because I write for a living, people I don’t know or hardly know have frequently approached me on the slimmest of pretexts to set down their life stories. It just happens, more than I would have ever expected. Particularly in the face of illness or old age, they come to me with secrets that no longer seem important enough to be ashamed of. I listen to the crux of their lives and I tell them no, I’m sorry, I’m busy with other projects. What I can’t explain is that it’s not that their life story isn’t interesting, it’s that everyone’s life story is interesting.

  But Gila was of course someone I knew. A friend of hers, she’d told me, had seen my piece on Bellen and passed it on to her—the friend, Hugh, and his partner owned the apartment where Gila was staying that night as a guest. They had a summer house near where Gila lived now, in Sag Harbor, New York. It was a strange coincidence, I pointed out—my family, as she knew, had had a house in the next town over, Southampton. As she also knew, it was during a stay at that house that my father had first told me of their affair.

  Her clothes looked expensive—pearl-gray slacks, a simple white blouse, crisply pressed. The clothes seemed to assert that she had taste and also more money than I probably expected.

  “ ‘Strange,’ ” she said, echoing my word. “Everyone always says ‘strange.’ But life is strange. My life certainly has been strange.”

  She took a slow drink of water. When she put the glass down, she lightly wiped her hands, one atop the other, watching them. The cancer had been “strange,” she told me. It had started in her big toe—all her toenails turned a cloudy white—and two different doctors had assured her at first that it was nothing, until by the time anyone gave it any real thought it had metastasized all over her body.

  I said I was sorry. She looked at me then with something like forbearance, a kind of suppressed disappointment. In that look, I could see a regret for all the perfectly real things that separated us. But I could also see that, having read my piece, she thought we were somehow kindred spirits. She had expected something less trite from me than “strange” and “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t ask you here to talk about what happened with your father all that time ago,” she said then. “A lot of painful things. Obviously. And I didn’t ask you here to talk about my cancer. A lot of people get cancer. I wanted to show you something. That’s why I asked you here. This is something I thought you’d find interesting as a writer. Something that’s not just personal.”

  With some difficulty, she took an old photo album out of her purse. It contained a fading collection of 5 x 7 prints that dated back to the 1970s, their colors degrading into an acidic murk behind their plastic compartments. She showed me one series in particular—I wish I had the photographs with me now—first through the plastic, then, so I could get a better look, removing the pictures from the album. They were stark interior views of
an apartment, like realtor’s photos, except that these photos made no attempt to flatter the space they portrayed. The ceilings were low, the light depressingly dim. There was no furniture. The apartment was an empty shell with scuff marks on the walls where pictures might once have hung.

  “It’s the one I told you about in my last letter,” she said. “It’s on a nice street, it must be worth some money these days. As I told you, I could have been living there right now, living there all this time. That was the idea.”

  The apartment was a few miles from the hotel where she had worked for many years in Tel Aviv, the Dan. That was where she’d met Meyer Lansky, she said, bringing him coffee in the downstairs lobby.

  She introduced me to a Hebrew word then, yored. Its root means “to descend.” It’s what Israelis are called when they leave and go to another country. They have “descended.” They have gone down to the corrupt world outside, so to speak, abandoned the holy land that is their rightful home.