11) BATHSHEBA
Ivan Schwebel paints the episode many different ways, but my favorite paintings are not of Bathsheba but of her wronged husband, Uriah. Almost the first thing David does as king in his new capital, Jerusalem, is to betray one of the very men who had helped him in his rise: he sees the naked Bathsheba and he sends his men for her. Jerusalem and all it might mean — shelter, peace, a unified state, his own glory or God’s — is something he seems compelled to throw away. Uriah “lay at the entrance to the king’s house with all the servants of his master,” loyally guarding the palace. Inside, David is sleeping with Bathsheba. She becomes pregnant. When that happens, David has to try very hard to get Uriah to sleep with her too, to hide his own paternity, but Uriah refuses to leave his post. “The Ark and Israel and Judah are sitting in huts,” he says, “and my master Joab and my master’s servants are encamped in the open field, and shall I then come to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? By your life, by your very life, I will not do this thing.”
David gets him drunk. In one of Schwebel’s renderings, Uriah is a smiling young IDF private dressed in green fatigues and cap, still unshaven from the battlefront. He’s seated at a table before a glass of wine, and the David who coaxes him toward drunkenness, hand on Uriah’s shoulder, is a gray-haired man in the open-necked sport shirt and white slacks of a corrupt city councilman or an aging mobster. Even drunk, Uriah refuses to leave his post. The solution David comes up with is to write a letter to his commanding general, Joab: “Put Uriah in the face of the fiercest battling and draw back, so that he will be struck down and die.” Uriah is killed by the Philistines. This is to say that he dies from multiple contusions, bludgeoned or stabbed, perhaps trampled on the ground by horses. The IDF has never released photographs of David Bellen’s mutilated corpse. They identified it by the cards in his wallet. Bald and stocky, Bellen lamented, caustically, the frequently unbridgeable distance between himself and the beautiful young women he would see on the beach in Tel Aviv. He wrote that they liked “gold rope, barbed wire tattoo / the high sheen of / the Kid with his shirt off.” In his poems, Bellen never condemns David, even for ordering the murder of Uriah. If anything, Bellen seems to admire David for his ruthless vitality. It’s not hard to see how this very admiration, expressed without piety or reverence, might have gotten Bellen killed.
12) THE SON
I went with Voss to visit Bellen’s son, Eliav, in his shop in the mountain town of Tsfat, near the Golan Heights and the border with Lebanon. Tsfat, an odd mix of Hasidim and New Age hippies, has been a center of Jewish mysticism since the fifteenth century, a place where revered kabbalists founded small synagogues that are still there today. Eliav’s shop, like many in the town, deals in Jewish-themed art in a kitsch style loosely derived from Chagall. On either side of the entrance hung multicolored amulets called hamsas in the shape of disembodied hands meant to ward off the evil eye. As Bellen’s only child, Eliav had come into possession of his father’s effects after he died. On our drive up from Jerusalem, Voss had told me that Eliav’s sale of much of this inheritance, after years of personal problems, including long struggles with drug addiction, had financed the shop in Tsfat.
Eliav Bellen is tall and thin, and because his hair is shaved down to stubble he looks somewhat spectral, even in the brightly colored Pop Art T-shirt he wore that day. I thanked him for meeting with us and he neither smiled nor spoke but gruffly nodded at me as if my gratitude was understood. Perhaps he thought it was also understood that I would share his belief that his father’s murder was the work of militant right-wing Jews. He showed me some of the letters and e-mails his father had received in the nine months between the publication of Kid Bethlehem and his murder, most of the correspondence in Hebrew but a fair amount of it in English. The ignorance, stated in blunt, ungrammatical fragments, conjured in me the same impression of madness as certain photographs of ultra-Orthodox Jews in skullcaps and side curls shouting at Palestinians whose fields they have just burned to the ground.
I looked at Voss, whose face was blank. Eliav began a roll call of Jewish terrorists, starting with Yigal Amir, the fanatic who had murdered the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. He mentioned Baruch Goldstein, the right-wing zealot who had killed twenty-nine praying Muslims in a mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs. He mentioned a left-leaning political scientist and professor named Zeev Sternhell who had been injured the year before by a pipe bomb delivered to his home. (In the months since my return from Israel, an American-born Jewish terrorist named Yaakov Teitel was arrested for this incident, as well as a string of attacks against “Arab, gay, and leftist targets.”)
“The last time I spoke to my father was about three days before the murder,” Eliav said. “It was sometime in the afternoon. He was cooking at home, then going to a bar he liked, probably on Lilienblum Street.”
He said that two or three times a month his father would take a woman to a restaurant or a bar in his neighborhood or farther north, on Rothschild Boulevard or Lilienblum Street, meeting these women either at the university where he taught or on a website on which Bellen made no effort to conceal anything about himself. Eliav said he thought the women might even have had something do with inciting the murder. He speculated that there was usually an element of sexual frustration in terrorism—“didn’t I think so?” Terrorism was sexual frustration blown up to a messianic scale. It was a puritanical impulse. To a person like this, Eliav said, maybe nothing could be uglier than a sixty-five-year-old man having a drink in a bar with an attractive young woman.
Voss was staring down at his knee toward the end of this. He seemed impatient to say something, but was restraining himself.
“He had habits, he was known in places, he wasn’t secretive,” I said. “Easy for someone to know where he’d be.”
Eliav raised his eyebrow and sighed. “Tel Aviv is sleazy, it’s modern, it’s not picturesque like Jerusalem,” he said. “But it’s secular. You should spend more time in Tel Aviv. If there’s a future for Israel, it’s Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.”
“And do you think your father thought that?”
“No, my father would say that’s wistful. My father thought everything was doomed.”
“And you? Why did you leave Tel Aviv? Why did you come to Tsfat?”
He looked at the paintings on the walls and extended his hands. “I’m just a peddler,” he said. “I’m not peddler enough for Tel Aviv.”
Whether or not Eliav had fully given up drugs, I couldn’t know. Like Tsfat itself, I found him oppressive. When I asked him about the paintings, he went on to tell me that he believed in God — though the God he believed in was a figure of fear. In God’s eyes, he said, we were always a disappointment. We were disappointing because He had made us in His own image. He said that when intelligent people scoffed at the idea of God they were really only scoffing at a harmless cliché. Voss had gone outside for a cigarette. I could see his arm and the sole of his shoe, which he rested, his knee bent, on the edge of the open doorframe. The last thing Eliav told me was about an appearance his father had made on the campus of the University of Michigan when Eliav was a student there. At the back of the audience, there was a young man who started making strange sexual noises as soon as Bellen began his reading. The noises started out as a low hum or whine, then grew louder and louder until a few people turned around to locate their source. Suddenly, chairs were scattered at the back of the hall. A scrum of men stood above the boy, who was struggling on the floor, barking and screaming. It took eight people to subdue him, though he was only a bookish nineteen-year-old. In the midst of a psychotic break, the boy bit their hands, scratched their faces, kicked out in powerful bursts using both legs at the same time. Bellen had seen the boy at a tea beforehand, and, noticing his peculiar affect, he’d told Eliav that he had a feeling that something would go wrong once he began his reading.