Kellerman, Jonathan - The Theatre

"Yes?"

"How about going for a drive?" Taking her hand.

"I don't know," she said, but coyly, clearly not meaning it. "I have to work tomorrow."

"Where do you live?"

"Bat Yam."

Deep south. Figured.

"I'll drive you home then." Her back was to the wall and Avi put his arm around her waist, leaned in and gave her another kiss, a short one. He felt her body go loose in his arms.

"Umm," she said.

"Would you like another drink?" Smile, smile, smile.

"I'm not really thirsty."

"A drive, then?"

"Uh… okay. Let me tell my friends."

Later, when she saw the BMW, she got really excited, couldn't wait to get in.

He switched off the alarm, held the door open for her, said, "Seat belt," and helped her fasten the harness, touching her breasts in the process, really feeling them, the nipples hard as pencil erasers. Giving her another kiss and then ending it abruptly.

Walking around to the driver's side, he got in, started up the engine, gave it gas so that it roared, slipped an Elvis Costello tape in the deck and drove away from Dizengoff Circle. He took Frischmann west to Hayarkon Street, then headed north on Hayarkon, parallel with the beach. Ibn Gvirol would have been a more direct route to the destination he had in mind, but the water-hearing the waves, smelling the salt-was more romantic.

Years ago Hayarkon had been Tel Aviv's red light district, actual scarlet bulbs glowing atop the entrances to sleazy sailor bars. Fat Romanian and Moroccan girls in hot pants and net stockings slouching in the doorways, the color of the light making them look like sunburnt circus clowns. Crooking their fingers and warbling bohena yeled! "Come here, little boy!" When he was in high school he'd gone there plenty, with his North Side friends, getting laid, smoking a little hash. Now Hayarkon was fast becoming respectable, the big hotels with their cocktail lounges and nightclubs, the cafes and bars that picked up the overflow crowd, and the hookers had moved on, farther north, to the dunes of Tel Baruch.

Avi shifted into fourth and drove quickly toward those dunes, Anat grooving to Costello, snapping her fingers and singing along with "Girl Talk," her hand resting casually on his knee, not even bothering to point out that Bat Yam was in the opposite direction.

He drove past the bathing beach, came to the entrance to the port, where Hayarkon ended. Speeding over the Ta'-Arukha Bridge, he crossed the Yarkon River and kept going until he reached a construction site just south of the dunes, but with a view of the cars parked in the sand.

Coming to a stop in the shadow of a crane, he turned off the engine and switched off the lights. From the dunes came the sound of music-drumbeats and guitars, the whores partying, sashaying in the sand, trying to create a mood for prospective customers. He visualized what was going on there, the action in each of the cars parked in the sand, and it turned him on.

He looked at Anat, took her hand in his, used the other to pull down the zipper of her jumpsuit, slide inside, and feel those amazing tits.

"What?" she asked. Which sounded silly, but he knew all about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

"Please," she said. Not making it clear if it was please go on or please stop.

It was all on the line now, time to go for it.

"I want you," he said, kissing each of her fingers. "I've got to have you." With just a touch of begging, the eagerness that he knew they all loved.

"Ohh," she sighed, as he began nuzzling her palm, licking, doing what he did best. What really made him feel important. Then sudden tension in that wonderful little body: "I don't know…"

"Anat, Anat." Slipping the jumpsuit off her shoulders, the vulnerability of sudden nakedness causing her to cling to him. "So beautiful," he said, taking a good look at the unfettered breasts, milky white in the night light. Not having to fake it.

He played with her, kissing each of the tiny, pebbly nipples, sucking on her tongue, and stroking her labia through the shiny black fabric. Taking her hand and guiding it to his erection.

When she didn't pull away he started to relax. When she began to wiggle and squirm, he smiled to himself. Mission accomplished.

Nahum Shmeltzer listened to scratchy Mozart and ate chickpeas from a can. On the arm of his easy chair was a plate containing slices of yellow cheese that had begun to stiffen, around the edges and a pool of unflavored yogurt. He'd mixed the instant coffee too weak, but it didn't matter. It was the heat he wanted-to hell with the taste.

His home was a single room on the street level of a building in Romema. A sorry structure that had been built during the Mandate and remained unmodified since that time. The landlords were rich Americans who lived in Chicago and hadn't been to Jerusalem in ten years. He mailed his rent check to an agency on Ben Yehuda each month and expected nothing in return but basics.

Once upon a time, he'd owned a farm. Five dunams in a quiet moshav not far from Lod. Peaches and apricots and grapes and a plot for vegetables. A tired old plow horse for Arik to ride, a flower greenhouse for Leah. A chicken coop that yielded enough eggs for the entire moshav. Fresh omelettes and dewy cucumbers and tomatoes each morning. Back when taste had been important.

The road to Jerusalem had been lousy back then, nothing like the highway you had today. But he hadn't minded the daily drive to the Russian Compound. Nor the double load-working the streets all day, coming home to break his ass farming. The work was its own reward, the good feeling that came when you sent into bed each night, aching and ready to drop, knowing you'd given it your best. That you were making a difference.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI the Nazis had put on the signs they hung in the death camps. Work creates freedom. Those fucking assholes had meant something different, but there was truth in it. Or so he'd believed then.

Now everything was all fucked up, the boundaries gone- the borders between sane and insane, worthwhile and worthless… He caught himself, stopped. Philosophizing again. Must mean he was constipated.

The record, stopped.

He' got up out of the chair, turned off the phonograph, then walked two steps to the kitchen area and dumped the uneaten food into a cracked plastic wastebasket. Lifting a bottle of hundred-proof slivovitz from the counter, he carried it back with him.

Slipping slowly from the bottle, he let the liquor run down his gullet, feeling it burn a pathway straight to his stomach. Internal erosion. He imagined the damage to his tissue, enjoyed the pain.

As he grew progressively intoxicated, he began thinking of the butchered girl, her crazy eunuch of a brother. The punk they'd dug up on the olive grove, the maggots already holding a convention on his face. The case stunk. He knew it and he could tell that Dani knew it. Too clean, too cute.

That crazy, dickless eunuch. Pathetic. But who gave a shit-fucking Arabs slicing each other up over crazy pseudo-cultural nonsense. Lumpen proletariat. How many countries did they have-twenty? Twenty-five?-and they whined like shit-assed babies because they couldn't have the few square kilometers that belonged to the Jews. All that Palestinian bullshit. Back when he was a kid, the Jews had been Palestinians too. He'd been a goddamned Palestinian. Now it was a fucking catch phrase.

If the government was smart it would use agents provocateurs to fuck all the Arab virgins, convince the families that Ahmed next door had done it, supply them all with big knives, and set off a wave of revenge killings. Let them wipe themselves out-how long would it take? A month? Then we Zhids could finally have peace.

A laugh. With the Arabs gone, how long would it take for the Jews to chew each other up? What was the joke-a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected. We're the princes of self-hatred, the standard-bearers of self-destruction; all you had to do was read the Torah-brothers fucking over brothers, raping their sisters, castrating their fathers. And murder, plenty of it, nasty stuff. Cain and Abel, Esau going after Jacob, Joseph's brothers, Absalom. Sex crimes, too-Amnon raping Tamar, the Concubine of Gilead gang-banged to death by the boys from Ephraim, then cut into twelve pieces by her master and mailed to all the other tribes, the rest of them taking revenge on Ephraim, wiping out all the men, capturing the women for you-know-what, enslaving the kids.

Religion.

When you got down to it, that was human history. Murder, mayhem, bloodlust, one guy fucking over another, like monkeys in a cramped cage. Generation after generation of monkeys dressed in people-suits. Screeching and cackling and scratching their balls. Pausing just long enough to cut one another's throats.

Which made him, he supposed, a fucking historian.

He raised the bottle to his lips and took a deep, incendiary swallow.

How he loathed humanity, the inevitable movement toward entropy. If there was a God, he was a fucking comedian. Sitting up there laughing as the monkey-men yammered and bit each other in the ass and jumped around in the shitpile.

Life was shit; misery the order of the day.

That's the way it was. That's definitely the way it was. He gave a boozy belch and felt a wave of acid pain rise in his esophagus.

Another belch, another wave. Suddenly he felt nauseated and weak. More pain-good, he deserved it for being such a weak, naive shmuck.

For understanding the way it was but being unable to accept it. Unable to throw out the pictures. Goddamned fucking framed snapshots on the table next to his cot. He woke up each morning and saw them first thing.

Starting the day off right.

Pictures. Arik in uniform, leaning on his rifle. To Abba and Eema, With Love. The kid had never been original. Just good.

Leah at the Dead Sea, in a flowered bathing suit and matching cap, covered to her knees with black mud. Rounded belly, lumpy hips-looking at the picture he could feel them under his fingertips.

Tomorrow morning he'd throw out the pictures. Right now he was too tired to move.

Bullshit. He was a coward. Trying to hold on to something that didn't exist anymore.

One year they were there; the next, gone, as if they'd never been real, only figments of his imagination.

A good year for death, 1974.

Eleven fucking years and he still couldn't deal with it.

Not only that, but it was getting to him more, working on Gray Man, now this one, the cruelty. The fucking stupidity.

Monkeys.

Tough guy.

Shmuck.

He drank some more, disregarding the pain. Pushing himself toward the blackness that always came.

The kid had been bivouacked in the Sinai, reading a book in his tent-Hegel, no less, according to the military messenger. As if that made a fucking bit of difference. Picked off by some faceless Egyptian sniper. Next year, on the same spot, a bunch of assholes from Canada built a luxury hotel. A few years later, all of it was back in Egypt. Traded for Sadat's signature. The word of a fucking Nazi collaborator.

Thank you very much.

Leah never recovered. It ate her like a cancer. She wanted to talk about it all the time, always asking why us, what did we do to deserve it, Nahum? As if he had an answer. As if an answer existed.

He had no patience for that kind of thing. Got to where he couldn't stand the sight of her, the crying and the whining. He avoided her by burying himself in the double load, catching assholes, growing peaches. He came home one day, ready to avoid her again, and found her laid out on the kitchen floor. Cold as slate, waxy gray. He didn't need a fucking doctor to tell him what the story was.

Cerebral aneurysm. She'd probably been born with it. No way to know, tsk, tsk, sorry.

Thank you very much.

Fuck you very much.

Gene and Luanne wanted something authentic, so Daniel and Laura took them to The Magic Carpet, a Yemenite restaurant on Rehov Hillel, owned by the Caspi family. The dining room was long and low, bathed in dim, bluish light, the walls alternating panels of white plaster decorated with Yemenite baskets, and blown-up photographs of the '48 airlift after which the restaurant had been named. Swarms of robed and turbaned Yemenite Jews alighting from gravid prop planes. The Second Wave of emigration from San'a. The one everyone knew about. If you were Yemenite they assumed you'd come over on the Carpet, were genuinely shocked when they found out Daniel's family had lived in Jerusalem for over a century. Which in most cases meant longer than theirs.

"You were right," said Luanne. "This is very hot, almost like Mongolian food. I like it. Isn't it good, honey?"

Gene nodded and continued spooning the soup into his mouth, hunched over the table, big black fingers holding the utensil tightly, as if it threatened to float away.

The four of them sat at a corner table shadowed by hanging plants as they feasted upon steaming bowls of marak basar and marak sha'uit-chili-rich meat soup and bean soup.

"It took me a while to get used to it," said Laura. "We'd go over to Daniel's father's house and he'd make all these wonderful-looking dishes. Then I'd try them and my mouth would catch fire."

"I've toughened her up,"said Daniel. "Nowshe takes more spice than I do."

"My taste buds are shot, sweetheart. Beyond all pain." She put her arm around him, touched his smooth brown neck. He looked at her-blond hair down and combed out, wearing a little makeup, a clinging gray knit dress, and filigree earrings-and let his hand drop to her knee. Felt his feelings surface, the same feelings as when they'd first met. The mutual zap, she'd called it. Something to do with American comic books and magic powers

The waitress, one of the six Caspi daughters-Daniel could never remember who was who-brought a bottle of Yarden Sauvignon and poured the wine into long-stemmed glasses,