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.
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?”