It was about nine months later, a few months after Eliav’s birth, that the waitress took me to an apartment in a part of the city that I seldom went to. We walked there all the way from the Dan Hotel. She led me into the foyer of a small gray building and we took the tiny elevator up to the third floor — no one around, no sounds of life, the apartment whose door she opened completely empty — no furniture, not even a single chair, just the bare, scuffed floors. I didn’t want to ask for explanations. I guessed that whatever explanation she might have given me would not have been the truth. She ran some water from the tap until it finally ran clear, then she filled a glass that had been left on the counter. The glass could have sat there for years. I watched her slender back beneath her blue dress as she drank. It would have been a few months before the Yom Kippur War, a war which had yet to start but that everybody knew was coming. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.
The apartment was on Be’eri Street, I remember. More precisely, it was at 4 Be’eri Street, the address my research now tells me was where Meyer Lansky had lived when he wasn’t living at the Dan. I’ve been back to look at the building a few times — I went just yesterday to look at it again. Of course I hadn’t seen the apartment yet when I came home that night from Jerusalem, having watched Lansky from afar as he stood outside the Palace of Justice. I closed the door behind me and stood inside the hall and called out Rachel’s name, but she didn’t answer. I sensed even then that there was a reason she wasn’t answering. It was almost midnight and she stood there at the stove with her back to me, wearing her old shapeless robe. She would have been six months pregnant with Eliav. When she finally turned, I had an unmistakable glimpse of my own irrelevance.
Yours,
David Bellen
It was in the business center of a Hampton Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina, that I first read this e-mail. I sat there piecing together its significance beneath the fluorescent light, wondering what I was going to say in three weeks to Bellen’s ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, in Jerusalem. Of course Bellen never mentions the waitress’s name in his e-mail. I supposed it was possible that she wasn’t Gila. I supposed it was possible that there was another waitress at the Dan Hotel who also happened to have an empty apartment in Tel Aviv, or, more plausibly perhaps, that the waitress, whoever it was, had borrowed the apartment from someone else. Perhaps it was at someone else’s apartment, and not the one in Gila’s photographs, that the waitress had slept with David Bellen in 1973. But perhaps not.
He would have been still in his twenties, Gila, a little older, thirty-four. He comes into the hotel bar and orders coffee, and when he introduces himself the name David Bellen means nothing to her, nothing to anyone at that point. He tells her where he’s been — he’s been covering the Lansky trial — and she’s silent for a moment, but not long enough for him to notice. Everyone in Israel has been following the case. She doesn’t react to the name with interest or humor or excitement. Perhaps the young journalist doesn’t even tell her his full name. Perhaps he’s just David, like so many other Israeli men.
I’ve been back to look at the building a few times — I went just yesterday to look at it again.
I read that sentence a few times before I referred back to the date of the e-mail’s composition. “Yesterday,” I realized, was only two days before Bellen had died.
I flew to Ben-Gurion International Airport for the second time in December of 2011, about seven weeks after Eliav’s death. I had saved to my cell phone the photograph Gila had taken of us together after our lunch the previous year in New York, that uncomfortable picture in which I seemed to be willing myself into invisibility or ghostliness. “Strange,” Gila had said that afternoon. Everyone says that word, “strange.” Of course the photograph I really wished I had on that second trip to Israel was one of the 5×7 prints Gila had shown me of the empty apartment, the apartment I now suspected was at 4 Be’eri Street. I had called Gila’s friend Hugh to see if by any chance he’d found those prints among Gila’s belongings. I hadn’t known until then how naïve a question that was. There are of course services that handle such things, professionals who clean out the houses of deceased people who leave behind no relatives or friends, or whose friends are too busy to sort through the remnants themselves. The 5×7 prints, like so much else that Gila had left behind, had been thrown away.
Rachel Kessler was more imposing than I expected — brown, almond-shaped eyes, short dark hair that spoke not just of practicality but of something more like renunciation. She’d been a dancer in her youth and had by all accounts been very beautiful, and you could still see this in the straight, somewhat clerical way she stood, the simple ease of her long oatmeal-colored sweater and her black soft-sided boots. It was the way my mother might have dressed if she were still alive, the way some women artists dress who are Rachel’s age. I knew by now that Rachel had grown up not in Israel but in Silver Spring, Maryland, that she had fallen in love with Israel and the idea of Israel on a college semester abroad in 1968. She was twenty-four when she married Bellen, twenty-five when they had Eliav, Rachel still a newcomer, an idealistic young woman who’d left behind a family and a stable life in the U.S. for an unfamiliar country in a state of permanent war. You can take an English-language tour now with Rachel Kessler through the various neighborhoods of Jerusalem, as well as tours of Masada, the Knesset, the Israel Museum, Yad Vashem. On my second day there, I went with her on a tour of Center City, including her own neighborhood, Talbiyeh, where she explained to her group that the Palestinian mansion we saw before us had been abandoned by its original owner only to fall into the care of a Jewish refugee, who’d painstakingly catalogued and stored the house’s contents in preparation for the owner’s return, though that owner had never returned, and so what could be done? I have seen the contents of such mansions for sale in the flea markets of Tel Aviv — even now you can buy the furniture and china and jewelry of Palestinians who fled in 1948—but I found myself unable to say anything contradictory to Rachel in front of that audience, unable because of the losses she herself has endured. It’s an interesting story, she’d said when I’d told her the long, complicated tale of Gila and me. Nowadays someone like Gila would be a businessperson. She’d be middle class. Maybe a real estate broker. That’s where the money is now, of course. She’d said this and I’d felt that my story, compared to the story of her and Bellen and Eliav, could only make her feel that I wasn’t a serious writer, that I was something else, perhaps something more like a member of the paparazzi.
On the afternoon after I followed her tour, we sat at a restaurant near my hotel and talked about Gila, Bellen, Eliav, Lansky, the odd connections between their disparate stories. We had discussed via e-mail the Hebrew word Gila had introduced me to, yored, its sense “of going down, of descending, of being corrupt.” I reminded Rachel now of the epigraph to Bellen’s essay “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” in which the scholar Alan Fried writes of seeing the world through “the gangster’s eye,” the eye that views the world as divided into contrary groups of “wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived.” I gathered that Bellen saw himself and Eliav through that lens while writing the piece and I wondered what Rachel thought about this.