11 Jerusalem Arab teens arrested yesterday for desecrating Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, I read in the Jerusalem Post on my second morning in Israel. I looked out at the cemetery from my hotel room in the German Colony south of Mount Zion. Still jet-lagged, I saw the Dome of the Rock shining bronze at dawn.
5) THE MYSTERY DEEPENS
The next day, I met with the journalist Oded Voss at a café across the street from the King David Hotel. Voss, a veteran of the First Lebanon War, is handsome, intelligent, with skeptical blue eyes and gray flecks in his neat beard and precisely cut hair. Over lunch, he recounted for me his efforts to cover the Bellen murder until the lack of new information — and the lack of public interest — caused him to stop. He said that the idea of Bellen leaving Tel Aviv on his own for an illegal nighttime journey to the West Bank made no sense to anyone. What did make sense was the killers leaving his body in the symbolic place that they did. “But the reason could be simple or complicated,” he went on. He started to elaborate, meeting my eyes, but seemed defeated by the effort.
“At least one of my fears has not materialized,” he said. “After six months, at least we don’t have a Palestinian sitting in jail for it.”
I asked why a Palestinian would want to murder someone like David Bellen. “In a sense, that’s right,” Voss said.
“Then what I’m asking is why the IDF would call it an act of terrorism.”
He looked at me before answering this. Later, I realized that during this moment he was parsing my naïveté, assessing its precise components.
“Jews are murdered here all the time,” he said. “The world doesn’t really like to remember that, but that might be why the IDF said what it said.”
He looked away as if scanning the traffic, his hands and forearms resting on the table. What I felt then was different from the mild shaming I’d felt from the El Al screeners at the airport. Until I got my bearings, I felt that I could not do this story, that I was not equipped for it, intellectually or otherwise. I went over the various scenarios. That Bellen had been murdered by extremist Jews who hated his book’s sacrilegious treatment of the David story. That he had been murdered by Palestinians, perhaps simply at random, perhaps because of his relative notoriety. Both scenarios seemed unlikely. There was another theory, only hinted at, that I’d found in an interview given by Bellen’s editor, Galit Levy. Levy declared that the murder could not be understood without answering the simple question of how someone could be run over by a truck as many as twelve times in a densely populated district like Beit Sahour without attracting any witnesses. I assumed she was implying the presence in Beit Sahour of a militia group or some type of organized crime.
“Those are some of the possibilities people come up with,” Voss said when I asked his opinion.
“But no one believes them.”
He shrugged one shoulder and let out a disgusted breath. “Believe. Not believe. What are the facts?”
6) NOT FUNNY
Around this time, I happened to watch the Pacino remake of Scarface. It’s not a good movie. It’s a bad movie, but it resonates — it resonates all across the globe. And I thought, why am I so bored with poetry? In the movie, once Tony Montana kills his way to the top, he has not even one second of happiness. A montage set to cheap music, then it’s coke addiction, bad sex, doom. I thought, that’s David, his whole rise and fall. That’s it.
— David Bellen, 2008
In America, Jewish writers are frequently, sometimes compulsively, funny. The writing of David Bellen started to make me think this was problematic. Kid Bethlehem is a cubist jumble of short numbered sections. In addition to poems, there are quotations, scraps of memoir, reportage, scripture, newspaper clippings. The book, particularly in light of Bellen’s violent death, has made the world look even more fragmented to me now, more disjointed, shattered by some profound if intangible trauma. I have found myself imitating its form and tone in this essay you’re reading now.
Kid Bethlehem
Trouble from the minute he left his sheep
and that rocky place
threatened by the lion and the bear
to soothe King Saul with his harp,
then kill Goliath with a small hard stone
A stone killer—
it was all the women talked about, so Saul
needed him hit
The war advanced on all fronts
Who knows
why any of this had to happen?
Warsaw, Lodz, Auschwitz, Babi Yar,
Murder Inc., Beirut
The rockets arcing toward Tel Aviv
As in days of old
before
the coming of
the King David Hotel
They said God was dead, but God is not
God is the small hard stone
in the boy’s sling
7) THE VALLEY OF ELAH
After our lunch that day, Voss went with me on what I thought might be a fool’s errand: one of my guidebooks indicated that somewhere near the junction of Route 38 and Route 383 was a hill, or tel, called Azeka, which looked down on the Valley of Elah, where David had killed Goliath.
We drove once again along the separation wall — Jewish settlements on one hillside, Arab settlements on the opposite ones, just as three thousand years ago it had been Israelites and Philistines. It was such an obvious parallel that I was embarrassed even to be thinking about it, sitting next to Voss in the Mercedes taxi. He wore a dark blue shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a black suit. While we drove, he solemnly checked his BlackBerry and made a few phone calls in Hebrew, a language I can read phonetically but I don’t speak.
Far outside Jerusalem, we entered a region of large farms and pine-covered mountains. The clouds thickened until the hillsides, with their undulating smooth stones and sparse bushes, looked uncannily biblical. We were lost. The driver pulled over and he and Voss had a conversation in Hebrew while they looked at the driver’s enormous folding map. I finally suggested that we ask the boy who was waiting at a rural bus stop just up the road. We drove there. The boy turned out to be a recent immigrant from Manchester, England. He wore surfer’s shorts and a white button-down shirt and a skullcap of multicolored yarn. I explained in English what we were trying to find, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. He leaned in the window and gave Voss and the driver precise directions in Hebrew.