Bellen had remembered it thirty-five years later, the run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. As for Gila, she had almost certainly forgotten about Bellen by the time she told me her story. It was not Bellen but Lansky she wanted to tell me about, Lansky who made her story matter. I thought about all three of them having entered this nondescript building where I now stood. To stare in through the glass of its door was to understand insignificance not as a desert or a sea or a night sky but as nothing at all, as a silence.
Every once in a while she went back to the apartment to see that it was still there, still waiting for her. Three empty rooms with marks on the bare white walls from where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung. Broken slats in the closet door. The water in the kitchen sink would sputter out brown until it ran clear. Such a strange, unwanted gift, as if he were finally telling her something crucial.
I had started writing this book already, before I’d actually seen the building. Standing there outside it, I heard in my head how the first section should end.
The next evening I walked into the lobby of the Dan Hotel to finally meet Voss. I had made a point of arriving late, not wanting to have to sit there waiting for him, not sure I even wanted to see him again, but there he was, sitting in the far corner in one of the gray armchairs in the faint light reading a newspaper. The windows’ tinted glass, even with the Mediterranean glare behind it, created a muted stillness, as if time had stopped and no one else would ever enter that room, or try to leave it — dark brown walls, brushed steel tables, black and gray chairs arranged in precise geometrical groups. Voss didn’t stand when he saw me coming, even though the room is vast in a way that would have caused most people to stand or at least shift in their seat. He wore a charcoal suit with a white dress shirt that had thin gold panes. He was a little more heavyset than I remembered, or perhaps it was just that his beard had grown in more thickly than before — that beard and the tousled graying hair were so tirelessly deployed, all the more effective for being so. As I walked toward him, he put two fingers to the bone behind his ear and let his elbow rest on the arm of his chair, looking at me, not trying to pretend otherwise.
“I’m sorry about Eliav,” he said, after we said hello. “He meant something to you. I should have been more aware of that.”
I tilted my head, dismissing what now seemed like a tired sentiment. I’d been angry the last time we’d spoken, over Skype, the little box with Voss’s face in it pixilated and badly lit, as if he were sitting in a cell, speaking against his will. If he’d told me about Eliav earlier, I’d insisted, I could have gone to the funeral, but we both knew I wouldn’t have flown all that way for the funeral, that I’d barely known Eliav. I was angry for other reasons. Angry for who knew what reasons.
“He was a little tragic,” I said. “But you were right about him. He was poisonous.”
“It must be hard having a father like that and not having any talent of your own.”
“He did have talent. But he was also poisonous.” I put my purse on the glass tabletop and sat down, looking abstractedly for the waiter. “Everyone’s family is poisonous. Isn’t yours?”
“My parents are Holocaust survivors.” He folded his newspaper with a firm crease and left it resting on the table. “Small, gentle people who came through it all and loved everything my brother and I did. That’s another kind of problem.”
We ordered drinks — a red wine for me, a club soda for Voss. I told him then that I’d read his book when it came out in English last year. It was about his combat duty in the First Lebanon War, a memoir written in the voice of Voss’s nineteen-year-old self, a boy sarcastically eager for the very trauma that would soon diminish him. Near the end, Voss accidentally shoots a civilian on the outskirts of Beirut, a sixteen-year-old girl he sees running between two houses. When he comes to clear the area, having panicked and fired on her, he finds that she’s not quite dead. A bubble of blood and saliva pulses from her lips, her breathing shallow and rapid, her eyes open but fixed. He is standing right above her where she lies on the ground but he is incapable of putting her suffering to an end. He shoots once at her head and misses to the left, then shoots again and misses to the right. The sounds the girl makes are almost sexual — he recognizes it from the movies, not from experience — little moans each time he fires and misses. I told him now how sad I thought the book was, how sad for all its cynicism.
“I think about you sometimes,” he said then.
“I wouldn’t have expected you to think about me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess, what, I’m insecure.”
“I’m sorry things worked out the way they did the last time. I read your Bellen piece. There were other things that happened between us too. Better things. You didn’t write about those things quite as much.”
The drinks came, and then after a silence he finally sighed and said he couldn’t stay long, he had work the next day. He looked down at his hand on the table — impatience, contempt, I wasn’t sure what he was feeling at that moment. I was surprised by the solemn cast to his face. I saw how easy it would be to touch his hand, to run my fingers down the cuff of his jacket to his wrist — I wanted to touch him and I didn’t really understand why. The last time I’d touched him, more than two years ago, he had hit me.
“I sometimes thought about you too,” I said then, sipping my wine. “But then I thought about how you live here and I live there and what a waste of time it would be to keep thinking about you.”
He reached across the table and put his hand on my bare arm. I thought he might even try to kiss me, but he just looked at his hand there. It was a physical sensation, I told myself, only that. It was mostly just a consequence of doing this story, almost a coincidence in that way.
I told him the story of Gila then, sitting there in the mostly empty lobby of the Dan Hotel, showing him the pictures I’d taken on Be’eri Street, and the picture of Gila and me at lunch. Gila and Lansky. Gila and Bellen. Gila and my father. I could somehow sense that Voss didn’t believe all or even most of what I was saying, that he was even more incredulous than I might have expected, but I could also sense that incredulity for Voss was a common enough feeling — he’d heard a lot of stories he didn’t believe. If he was surprised to find me purveying another such story, then he was also forbearing. It was as if he thought it could happen to anyone, not deliberately lying but believing and then recounting a story that could never be verified.
Later, he parked on the street across from my hotel — I couldn’t afford to stay at the Dan — and we walked past the African guard into the drab lobby with its glass tables and Judaica. There were people sleeping on the couches with their luggage, waiting for check-in time the next morning. It was the last night of Hanukkah and there were menorahs out with eight candles burning in each, as well as a large electric menorah with waxy plastic arms, all of them lit up orange. Something about the plastic menorah made me wonder if I was going to be able to sustain whatever impulse had led me this far with Voss. There was a crowd in the elevator, Orthodox Jews speaking French. They didn’t look at us.
My clothes were scattered all over my tiny room. It was a glimpse into my life, like opening a diary. He reached for me — not hard but just testing it, touching my arm, above the elbow. He was a head taller than me, and I had to tilt my face up when he pushed his fingers into the hair at the base of my skull and leaned over me. His mouth tasted like cigarettes, but I wanted him and so the staleness just tasted like Voss, his old indifferent self. The room was too dark when I switched off the lights, so I left the one on in the bathroom. It cast a faint reflection on the glass of the framed painting opposite the bed. It doesn’t happen often, the slide into a vagueness that you didn’t instigate or even try to shape. The feeling takes in the shadows of the room, the orange glow behind the window, the clock radio and the phone on the night table. His BlackBerry buzzed from the pocket of his pants on the floor, the ringer turned off. It would buzz for a while, then stop, then buzz once more when someone left a message.