“What I’m saying,” Eliav went on, “is that my father identified the boy as a kind of fanatic just by looking at him. He was a magnet for that kind of thing.”
“Even in America,” I said.
“My father was attuned to the violence inside people.”
13) THE CYCLE
The child David conceives with Bathsheba dies. As he’s mourning the loss, one of his sons, Amnon, seduces and rapes one of David’s daughters, Tamar. “And Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, for greater was the hatred with which he hated her than the love with which he loved her.” Amnon sends Tamar away and she “put ashes on her head, and the ornamented tunic that she had on she tore, and she put her hand on her head and walked away screaming.” David does nothing about this violation. It’s as if he recognizes his own sin against Uriah in his son Amnon’s sin. It is left to another of his sons, Absalom, to avenge Tamar. “And there was no man so highly praised for beauty as Absalom in all Israel — from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him.”
Before long, the beautiful Absalom will be leading a popular uprising against his father, who no longer looks like the boy with the slingshot but more like the monster Goliath.
14) LILIENBLUM ST.
I saw a little of Tel Aviv over the next few days. I was alone, because Voss had to work in Jerusalem. He had barely been able to contain his loathing for Eliav Bellen, and when I asked him why, he told me that practically everything Eliav had said during the interview was a lie. He said that he’d interviewed a few of David Bellen’s friends — Bellen did not have many, Voss said — and by all accounts the poet was something of a recluse. It had been years since he’d made a habit of going for a drink on Rothschild Boulevard or Lilienblum Street. He was more likely to stay in his apartment, where he hoarded newspapers, books, records, and DVDs. His decades-long work with a peace group that had brought together Jewish and Arab writers was over. The Arab writers had left the group in protest of the Gaza blockade. Eliav was a junkie, a thief, a heartbreak — they had been more or less estranged ever since his son’s late twenties. If they’d patched things up in recent years, none of Bellen’s friends had heard of it.
Heavy curtains blacked out the sun. We were in Caesarea after seeing Eliav, at the branch of the Dan Hotel there, a few hours’ drive from Tsfat. When I came back out of the shower, Voss was watching the news in bed, the sheet pulled up to his waist. There was a fight at the Knesset — he hardly looked at me. I sat reading in the lobby that night. It could have been 1972. There were ashtrays by the elevator with clean white gravel inside, an abandoned bar in gloomy shadow, a bright foyer leading to an empty health club and pool.
In Tel Aviv, I thought about Voss more than I wanted to. He was my guide and my interpreter, and I was waiting for him. On my second day, I went down to the hotel lobby to check my e-mail and again there was nothing from him. He had not left any messages at the front desk. I did a search on “Oded Voss.” I brought up images of his face and I clicked through some of his articles. I looked up “oded voss first lebanon war” and retrieved an article called “Ten Years After, IDF Veterans Remember” in which he was quoted: “We kept living. We even started to enjoy ourselves. I used to wonder, was it the same as forgiving myself? Now I wonder if it matters. I think, to whom could it matter?”
I didn’t call or e-mail him. In my hotel room, I looked down at the sunbathers and watched generic VH1-style Israeli pop. Tel Aviv was New York, Miami, anywhere. It made me nostalgic for Jerusalem and its impassioned historical people who wanted to kill each other.
On that second night, I went out in the dark and walked up Frishman Street to Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, then over to Allenby. Beyond the glass towers along the beach, the buildings seemed to erode beneath graffiti and Xeroxed ads for nightclubs. It took me a long time, but I walked all the way to Lilienblum, a street in a quiet neighborhood with a few discreet bars, some without signs, the kind of places journalists and writers tend to gather — chintz couches, dim lighting, music just abrasive enough to conjure youth. I asked some customers if they knew anything about David Bellen. I asked the bartenders. I showed them Bellen’s picture — the glasses, the stark bald head — and none of them remembered seeing him anywhere but in the newspapers or on TV. On my way back home, a drunk came out of nowhere and started shouting that I was a whore.
You had to like modern Tel Aviv better than Jerusalem with its ancient strife. Either that, or you had to stop thinking about it.
15) VOSS
We met for lunch the next day. He said there were reasons he hadn’t called but he didn’t want to get into them now. He apologized for disappearing — it was inconsiderate, but perhaps I understood, perhaps in the past I’d been inconsiderate to someone myself. I assumed he meant he’d been with another woman. We ate at a café up the beach from the Dan Hotel, rows of tables and wicker chairs, oil lamps in glass boxes. He wore black jeans and an olive-colored leather jacket over a black T-shirt. He was watching me eat, sitting back a little from the table, smoking. He said he’d had to think a long time about whether he should show me the part of the city he was going to show me. He said that the reason he was going to show me was his belief in my respect for David Bellen.
“I respect him, but I don’t like that word,” I said. “It has a pious ring.”
“It’s actually very simple.”
“Respect for the dead.”
“Simpler than that.”
“I don’t know how you get any simpler than that.”
He looked out at the beach. When the bill came, he put his fingers down over the leather folder and said something to the waiter in Hebrew.
16) GANGSTERS
Like a Legend from My Youth
How the mighty have fallen
in the midst of battle!
Call the old steakhouse on
Etzel Street
and tell them
Aslan the King is dead
Tell the widow
and the Alperon gang
the Three Clans
and the Mayor of Tel Aviv
Tell the orphan and the starlet that
Aslan the King is dead
In what distant deeps or skies
burnt the fire of thine eyes?
Ze’ev Rosenstein,
the Wolf with Seven Lives,
you hit the King
who nine bullets before had survived
Aslan the King is dead
17) ORIGINS