“Lots of Brits coming into this area,” Voss grunted. “More true believers. Another wave.”
The road dead-ended at the top of the hill, so Voss and I got out of the car and continued up on foot. It was a steep rocky path and when I slipped a little, looking down at my camera, Voss caught me lightly by the arm. He did this out of simple instinct, but he was a little ceremonious about making sure I’d regained my balance. He was handsome and everything about his movements was imbued with the habits of handsomeness.
“A beautiful view,” he said at the top of the hill. “I guess you’ll expense the ride.”
“Not likely. Not for a story about a dead Israeli poet.”
The dry grass and weeds below us — gold, gray, brown, mustard — began to blaze up in their colors as the sun emerged through the clouds. I pictured the boy David running out in sandals, arms stabbing the air, a slingshot in his hand.
“It could have been a suicide,” Voss said. “Bellen’s death. That’s what I sometimes think.”
8) CITADEL
My first glimpse of the Old City of Jerusalem came after a picturesque climb up the western slope on a dirt path through pines and flowering shrubs. I took a chance right turn into the fortified wall and found myself in a silent alley of stone — stone steps, stone walls, all of it swelling with a gold light unlike anything I’d ever seen. The sky above it was cloudless and thickly blue. Because there were no people there — because it happened to be empty — the alley appeared timeless, the stairway a mystical symbol. I walked up the alley to the Zion Gate into an exotic place far more beautiful and seductive than I had expected. I had to come to terms with the powerful fact that Israel is physically beautiful. The name is beautiful — not just the sound, which is sonorous, but the meaning: “one who wrestles with God.” The idea of a people naming themselves that way is beautiful. I had to try hard not to be seduced. The stairs and the fortified walls were replicas of stairs and fortified walls from hundreds of years ago. The city itself was thousands of years older than those earlier stairs and fortified walls. When David first conquered Jerusalem and established his capital there, it had belonged to a forgotten people called the Jebusites, about whom we know nothing. I had to remember that the people who lived there now were as distant from the people who had built the original city as I was.
9) THE VIEW FROM THE HILL
A suicide. I tried to think my way through this statement as we stood there on top of Tel Azeka. The more I thought about it the more it seemed that Voss was making some kind of absurdist joke. We were walking down the other side of the hill now toward the dry creek bed near the highway, the creek bed where three thousand years ago David had chosen the stone for his slingshot. Everything below was green and beige — the farm fields in the valley, the pines and the cedars — but the landscape was fixed in the present by the road and the industrial-style planting of the crops. Voss began to elaborate, after I prodded him. Imagine you were sixty-five years old, he said, with a history of depression and your life’s work once again about to reveal itself as virtually irrelevant. The cease-fire with Hamas had just ended, the Gaza War was imminent, your most recent book of poems — a prize-winning book you had spent five years writing — had sold just a thousand copies, received a mixture of respectful and hostile reviews, and within a few months was all but forgotten except by some fanatics who hadn’t actually read it. He said that he himself had experienced severe depressions in the past, periods of weeks or even months when the pointlessness of his work, or a guilty memory, or the sense that the world was winding down — all these forms of despair that sound so frivolous when you’re on the other side of them — became constant and fixed. He would see very clearly how little difference it made if he lived or died. In that disturbed state of mind, the only thing that kept Voss from killing himself, he said, was the thought of his family and friends, and how much it would sadden them. He said that if he’d been able to imagine a way to disguise the suicide as an accident or a murder, we might not be taking this walk right now.
Creek bed, Valley of Elah
He was squinting a little in the sunlight — it struck me as notable somehow that he wasn’t wearing sunglasses. He walked with his hands held near his chest, slowly massaging the knuckles of one hand with the fingertips of the other, elegant in his dark suit. I pictured the truck driving Bellen into Bethlehem, the man at the wheel not a terrorist or a fanatic but a strange kind of accomplice. Voss had gone silent and now he watched his feet on the uneven ground, then looked up as if to survey the landscape with fresh eyes. “I never knew this place was actually here,” he said, amused. We were almost all the way down the hillside. Between the rocks jutted thorny weeds with flowers like yellow explosions. The creek bed was choked with dead grass and thistle almost chest high. There was a culvert made of concrete and steel. Voss kicked aside some litter, a potato chip bag, then picked up a stone. You couldn’t go into that dry creek bed and not pick up a stone.
“If you want to go to Tel Aviv, I’ll explain more,” he said.
“I thought you were the one who cared only about the facts.”
“That’s not the kind of piece you’re interested in.”
“How do you know?”
He gestured at the empty landscape and let the stone fall. “Look where we are. Not exactly an essential stop.”
10) JET LAG
Around eight o’clock that night, we woke up in my hotel room — or rather, I woke up — Voss was already sitting in the chair by the window, reading. Still jet-lagged, feeling drugged by it, I could have slept much longer. I had dreamed of violent attacks on villages in the desert, men on camels setting tents on fire, hacking at people with machetes. The shades were drawn, and in the faint ring of yellow light from a single lamp, Voss looked like some otherworldly functionary scanning the newspaper in his suit and large black shoes. We’d had a drink in the bar — a club soda for Voss, who doesn’t drink liquor — and I said that I needed a shower, and he’d simply nodded, holding his ground. I’d seen this coming since that moment I’d slipped on the path at Tel Azeka and he’d caught my arm. He reached his hand out now to pay for the drinks and I stopped him, putting my hand on top of his. His hair had been tousled outside and it gave him a preoccupied, middle-aged look, especially with his suit, which was still remarkably clean. In the elevator upstairs we didn’t look at each other, much less touch, nor did we talk. It was as we stepped into the room that he reached for me. I was wet before he reached for me. He shut the door and we kissed, Voss pulling my face to his. Either you’ll trust me for telling you even this, or you’ll distrust me for telling you even this. It had something to do with the way he carried himself, his wariness. He seemed to be always signaling that he was a corrupt person, that he had degraded himself. He knew this was attractive but that didn’t mean it was an act. There are men who think about their own body in addition to yours. Voss wasn’t one of them. He came at me thinking about only one thing.
“You’re still here,” I said now. “I thought you would have left.”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ll put this moment in the piece too,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it happened. Because it sheds light on everything else.”
The room was a tranquilizing blend of contemporary patterns and Levantine colors — black and red and gold. I had a Hebrew name, Voss said — why had I never been to Israel? It was a long story, I answered. He asked if I had been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and I told him no, I had no real interest in it. He said I should see it. We made plans to go see it together after we finished the story.