“I’m sorry to keep reminding you of such unpleasant things,” I said when she didn’t answer at first.
She looked at her fingers on the stem of her glass of wine. “It’s not all unpleasant,” she said. “They were people I loved. Both of them, very much. In any case, you don’t have to remind me of those unpleasant things. They’re always there.”
What made it difficult to talk about all this, she told me, was what she could only describe as an uncanny element to the rift between Bellen and Eliav. They’d been at odds from the very beginning, she told me, the rift so fundamental that it seemed predetermined, genetic. Eliav was quiet, inward, watchful. Bellen was not exactly loud but he could be exuberant, even when he didn’t want to be. It was a side of himself he sometimes struggled to suppress in his writing, his South Tel Aviv boisterousness, his coarseness, and this, Rachel thought, was the basis of the problem between him and Eliav, even from the very beginning. Before Eliav could possibly understand any of this, he picked up on his father’s mild shame, intuited it somehow in his father’s posture, his occasional evasiveness or furtiveness. Bellen’s exuberance, which was much stronger than this shame, perversely made Eliav even more silent, more watchful — his father’s irreverence and gaiety seemed to embarrass or disappoint Eliav, who became quieter as he grew more aware of his own scorn.
“He was ten when David left,” Rachel went on. “But of course he knew it was coming — we both knew that. David couldn’t help himself, it was the way he was made. There were a lot of women. I didn’t like it, I was furious with him, but I loved him. I couldn’t help but love him. But Eliav was always there too, in the background, and he would have to witness the tension between us, no matter how much we tried to conceal it from him. It made David begin to move farther and farther away, not only because of me and my anger but because Eliav was always there, watching it all.”
It was a warm enough afternoon even in December that we were sitting on the porch beside a wall of gold-colored Jerusalem stone, surrounded by succulent plants and cacti, protected from the sun’s glare by white panels slung like sails from black cords above our heads. When the waitress brought our food, she wore a starched apron and a man’s dark necktie. It was not unlike the restaurant at which Gila and I had had lunch in New York the previous year, I told Rachel. The menu’s graphics were like something from New York — like something from anywhere, I realized. Roasted eggplant with sriracha remoulade, summer rolls with duck breast and avocado, endive salad with Sainte-Maure cheese. All over the world now, everywhere you go, there’s a restaurant that will know how to make the most of whatever is charming about its faded neighborhood and will present it in some understated, idiosyncratic way.
“The affairs made him paranoid and extreme,” Rachel said, speaking again of Bellen. “In his personal life, of course, but also in the way he saw the whole world. Because the world is also like this: a glass of white wine on a nice day. Even in Israel, it’s like this. I don’t think he ever really accepted that. In his imagination there was never any room for forgiveness, no room for healing. It bored him, my forgiveness. It was worse than that — it disgusted him. So eventually I had to stop trying to forgive him.”
I thought of the Ivan Schwebel painting that Bellen refers to in his Lansky essay, the image of King David’s first wife, Michal, confronting him on the street at night as in a Hollywood movie, “her eyes moist and accusing in the way of a betrayed woman.” He has indeed betrayed her and he will betray her further and in the picture both he and his first wife seem to already know this, Bellen wrote. I’m not comfortable when people cry, particularly people I don’t know, in a public place in a foreign country. I guess no one is comfortable with it. Touch her hand, I told myself. Say you’re sorry. I did these things, and Rachel smirked as she kept sniffling, ashamed of herself.
“Eliav hardly inherited anything from David,” she said then. “But I think it upset him to take what little there was. It will sound simplistic, but I think taking that money was what led to his relapse, his overdose. It took a long time, almost three years, but I think that was the root of it.”
For everything man does has significance. An evil act will generally cause some disruption or negative reaction in the vast system of the Sefirot; and a good act, correct or raise things to a higher level. Each of the reactions extends out into all of the worlds and comes back into our own, back upon ourselves, in one form or another.
I thought, wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived. Except of course that everyone is all of those things. God says to David, And so now, the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore. The sword that comes from outside, in the form of enemies, but also the sword that comes from inside, the sword with which we bifurcate ourselves.
In this way, everyone is yored in the end.
At her house back in Talbiyeh, Rachel showed me some of Eliav’s belongings, which she had in boxes and flat files in her study. In particular, she showed me an oil painting made by Eliav when he was only seventeen, a portrait of his father, Bellen. The poet’s homely face was depicted as it was — craggy, eccentric, bespectacled — but with a willful ugliness that rendered it somehow beautiful. The cheekbones and the eye sockets were etched in thick jagged lines, blacks and reds and beiges, like some mask from a thousand years ago. It seemed to have been painted, like all the other work of Eliav’s that Rachel showed me that afternoon, out of a pure and purely unreflective talent. Eliav had been a prodigy, it turned out. That both the artist and his subject were dead now gave the painting of his father an uncanny sense of permanence. There was the watcher and the watched, forever fixed in that relationship.
There were sketchbooks from his high school years, along with photo albums of more elaborate pieces — paintings and also sculptures of clay, papier-mâché, and even cast bronze. It’s the sketchbooks, though, that I remember particularly well. In them, Eliav would spend five or six consecutive pages executing colored drawings in the styles of various modern masters: Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Kandinsky, Pollock, De Kooning. Five or six pages would be all it took for him not only to master the particular vocabulary of the artist he was imitating but to ingeniously explore it in different ways through his own inventions. There were no blank pages, no false starts or scratch-outs, no sheets removed. The sketchbook was like a primer on twentieth-century art, executed by a highly skilled draftsman who if anything was a little too skilled. The talent was a kind of shorthand, all technique. I wondered what someone would do with that kind of talent once they got old enough to learn that it was not the same as making “art,” that in fact “art” as it exists now has practically nothing to do with such technique.
There was another artifact from Eliav’s youth that I remember, though it was not impressive in the same way — it was, perhaps deliberately, unimpressive on the level of technique. It was a series of black-and-white photographs that Eliav had taken in the streets of Tel Aviv in the late 1980s and early ’90s — portraits of ordinary people, working people, men and women in dry cleaners, supermarkets, hair salons, bakeries, garages. The subjects were never looking into the camera. Instead the images had a random, even accidental quality — a quality of neutral surveillance, of ordinary people not realizing they were being looked at — that made them more haunting. I think Eliav understood that these photographs were haunting and perhaps he even understood why. I think this because of a quotation he thought to include on the last page of the album in which he’d arranged the photographs at the age of eighteen. The quotation, from Kafka, was in Hebrew, but Rachel paraphrased it for me (I have given it here as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir):