If they could see him in the apartment in Miami Beach — Teddy’s bed, his bed, the matching nightstands, the wax fruit, the kitchenette. A building of old Jews, waiting with the blinds drawn. After two months of silence, the ministry had responded with another form letter telling him no. He understood by then how much they needed him to be their monster, how secure it made them feel in their righteousness.
I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do.
ANNE
She came to him in a dream as he was sleeping. She perched on his bed and reached down and felt the side of his hip, the angle of the bone, the lip of fat where his waist met his belly. He knew who it was from the smell of her hair, rich with oil, an almost burnt smell. She lay on top of him in her homemade dress, lips pressed shut, breath coming in stabs through her nose.
ANCIENT OF DAYS
The first pass was with torches, the light rising purplish over the red clay ground, cook fires smoldering from the night before. The Israelites came on stolen horses, riding low and at a rearward slouch, braying and screaming, coming out of the hills with the flames in their wide-spread hands. The Philistine camp was tents and houses more like stables, made of stone and mud, crooked tree limbs holding up the thatched roofs. They used dry thatch screens to block the desert sunlight, and all you had to do was brush them once and the structure collapsed in flames.
The shrieking of women, children, goats, mules. The Philistines begging on their knees. The boys rode through them, trampling and then encircling the ruins so no one escaped. Some dismounted their horses and set about hacking at the villagers with their swords. Those still mounted rounded them up and then the boys on foot slashed backhanded, like harvesters, while the horses reared before them. The farm animals brayed behind the wattle and sticks of their corral. The sun burned more brightly. You could see the pale yellow grass growing up over the red clay. One of the boys could not stop hacking at the head of a corpse, the cheekbone shattered, dark blood running from the nose and eyes. He attacked it with a personal rage until someone finally pulled him away.
PSALM
David saw the green hillside, the distant sheep, the clouds low in the sky casting their giant, slow-moving shadows.
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not be in want
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters,
He restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
Even though I walk
Through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil,
For You are with me;
Your rod and your staff,
They comfort me.
You prepare a table for me
In the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
All the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.
WISDOM
It’s 2005—a temporary cease-fire — the Intifada going into its fifth year. We meet at my ex-wife’s house in Jerusalem, lantana growing around the iron gates that lead inside. There is chicken shawarma, my son Eliav’s childhood favorite, but he doesn’t eat much. He’s clean and cleanly shaven, and dressed in new jeans and a T-shirt and a gray linen sport coat that is unstructured, as if made of paper. His close-cropped hair gives him a look of intelligent severity. He says it’s over for real this time, though as we know now it never really ends. Hamas will launch rockets out of Gaza. Soon, there will be another suicide bomber in Netanya. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. We already know the cease-fire will not last long.
My son’s treatment has persuaded him that his addiction has no meaning. It makes no sense to look for causes — to look for causes is to overlook the real cause, which is the addiction itself, and this is to invite relapse. “Don’t look for some romance,” he tells me. He means don’t look for a story, a narrative, a sense of coherence. If this view is what’s helpful to him, then it’s unhelpful for me to keep probing for more. Even to blame myself, according to this logic, is simply egotistical. But this outlook, so useful in terms of my son’s health, is perversely a reinforcement of what for so long has seemed his essential emptiness. When I touch him, he doesn’t shrink away or flinch and sometimes he even hugs me back, but he does it consciously — conscientiously — without feeling.
INTERVENTION
By this time, the greater problem was Buddy Lansky’s paralysis, which had grown almost total. Buddy had to be fed by someone else, like a baby, and his father found this embarrassing. When there were family gatherings — Meyer’s own July Fourth birthday, Buddy’s fiftieth birthday in 1980, or a rare visit from Paul — Meyer told his crippled son to arrive early so the feeding could be dealt with before the other guests arrived….
In an attempt to correct his physical decline, Buddy underwent an operation in the early 1980s to realign his neck and the top of his spinal cord. A metal ring was fixed, halolike, around his skull, and the halo was then attached to a back brace, temporarily immobilizing his head. The halo itself was secured to Buddy’s skull by metal screws that were wound tightly into the flesh. When Meyer went to visit his son in the hospital, he just could not look at the device.
— Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and
the Gangster Life
HALO
In the Bible, Absalom — more “highly praised for beauty” than any man in Israel — rises up against his father, David, who has grown decadent and corrupt. Absalom acquires a chariot with horses and fifty men to go running before him. His luxuriant hair, which he cuts only once a year, weighs “twenty shekels by the royal weight.” He positions himself as a sympathetic alternative to the king, a man of fairness and integrity, but he is also self-righteous and scheming, a demagogue who steals “the hearts of Israel.” Twenty thousand of his charmed followers die in the battle he wages against his father in the forest of Ephraim. As he flees David’s troops, Absalom’s mule passes beneath a terebinth tree, and his hair catches in the branches and “he dangled between heaven and earth while the mule which was beneath him passed on.” He hangs suspended there in agony from this halo, until David’s general, Joab, “took three sticks in his palm and he thrust them into Absalom’s heart.”
Isaac Babel writes, Stop brawling at your writing-desk and stuttering in the presence of others. Imagine for a moment that you do your brawling on the squares and your stuttering on paper. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied with you. You are twenty-five years old. If heaven and earth had rings attached to them, you would seize hold of those rings and pull heaven down to earth.
David calls to his son Absalom, My son! My son! Would that I had died in your stead!