“I didn’t expect all this,” I said.
His face was just above mine, his lips not far from my ear. “You know my story now. The war story.”
“You never thought about living somewhere else after a story like that?”
“That story’s the reason I have to live here.”
“Then I guess I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to understand. I’m just explaining why.”
My flight left a little before midnight the next night. Voss put my luggage in the trunk and then he sat in the driver’s seat, his face dim in the angled glow of the streetlight, his beard harsh against his cheek. His little black car had a combination lock that made loud shrill beeps when he punched in the code in the dark. I touched the sleeve of his coat and he held my hand for a second or two, then put the car into gear. We drove onto the highway toward the airport, listening to the radio, the commentator reporting the news in Hebrew in a voice somehow urgent but reassuring at the same time. I couldn’t understand anything he was saying, but I took in the general ambience. It was as if his reporting of the events in such a sane tone could render those events harmless, rational rather than emotional, almost theoretical. I asked Voss once again about the investigation into Bellen’s death and he told me, as he’d told me many times, that investigations like that seldom yield results, that cases like Bellen’s are almost never solved. I realized that knowing who actually killed Bellen no longer mattered as much to me as it once had. I realized that it would only lead to the greater mystery of why anyone kills anyone — why violence persists and why we continue believing or hoping that someday it will stop. That was the question Bellen explored in his work, the reason he wrote Kid Bethlehem and the reason he wrote “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” It was not in the hope of finding an answer, I thought, but in the hope of creating a space in which to think through the question. He was thinking about it in the days before he died, I knew now, walking to the apartment at 4 Be’eri Street where he and Gila and Lansky had all found a few moments of respite in a country that, perhaps more than any other, foregrounds the transience of our lives.
At the airport, I gave Voss a kiss and looked into his eyes. You want to close your eyes, but if you leave them open and look it’s a way of holding on to them. There in the drop-off lane I kept my face close to his for a long moment. The fatigue made everything light, slow, increasingly deliberate. I was thinking of my father — that old cliché about the allure of unavailable men. But as that other old cliché goes, clichés are always truer than we’d like to believe. Perhaps I was just more simplistic than I liked to believe. More simplistic and more adrift.
“I’ll see you,” I said.
“I hope so.”
“You will. You’ll come to New York.”
We said goodbye and he watched me as I walked my suitcase through the terminal’s sliding doors and headed for the check-in line. I didn’t turn around. I should say that I imagine he was watching me as I walked through the doors.
That May, they started jury selection in my father’s trial. I thought, I should call him. He should call me. But I was in the middle of writing this book and we both knew that in some ways this book, like most of my writing, is a commentary on us, on our past. My father knew that I was including him here not only because of what he has told me but because of what he hasn’t told me. Because of what I suspect, not only about his current predicament but about his life. You’re my daughter, he’d said when I told him I was going ahead with this project. Even then, I don’t think it was just the story of his affair with Gila that troubled him. I think it was the larger story and the fact that I was going to place him inside it. I had never thought I had the kind of family it was possible to “dishonor”—my family wasn’t given to such old-fashioned notions — but that’s one way I found myself interpreting his silence now. The more I thought about it, the more I understood this book as a kind of betrayal. I don’t have any children of my own. I have never wanted children and I no longer know what that says about me. I know and have known for a long time now that my alienation is just alienation, not a sign of any deeper spiritual insight. I know that, but I don’t know what to do with the alienation itself. There’s a condition called Jerusalem Syndrome in which visitors to the city fall into religious-tinged delusions or even psychosis, as if the very atmosphere there is permeated with madness. The affected people tend to recover shortly after they return home. Almost all of them do.
A King David psalm:
… I am poured out like water,
And all my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It is melted within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd;
And my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
And you lay me in the dust of death.
I went to see Gila’s friend Hugh that spring. I told him I’d found the building in Tel Aviv but that I’d never know for sure if Gila’s story was true or not. He showed me some more photographs — Gila at the beach, Gila at her house in Sag Harbor, Gila at a party for her birthday in a simple black dress and two strands of pearls. Her smile as she posed between Hugh and his partner, their heads brought close together to fit in the frame, was more vivacious than I would have imagined possible. An image began to emerge of Gila remade as an American, practically assimilated — more or less ordinary, more or less happy. I remembered something Rachel Kessler had told me in Jerusalem. Because the world is also like this: a glass of white wine on a nice day. Even for someone like Gila, even for someone like me. As a kind of parting gift, Hugh gave me something he’d taken as a keepsake from her house. It was a framed poster from the thirties, a black-and-white photo of the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, her name at the bottom, and at the top, in pink letters, the single word Shocking!
“Don’t take it if you don’t want it,” he said.
But of course I did take it. Like everything else, I included it in this book. I have it here now in the alcove in my apartment. Procrastinating, checking e-mail, I get a note from Voss that says, Skype me. Here for another hour. It’s one o’clock in the morning where he is, in his office in Jerusalem. We chat on our respective screens, his facial gestures split up somewhat like the panels in a comic strip, the picture frozen, then in motion again, then frozen. I sometimes wish I didn’t write about these subjects. I have told myself many times that I write about violence to understand it, not just out of morbid curiosity, but it can often seem like a fine distinction. It can seem like a distinction without a difference. I tell this to Voss and he says that the world we live in is more perverse than people like to think. He tells me about a recent murder in Ramat Gan in which the killers shot their victim in his own garage. He barked like a dog when they shot him, the killers said, and they were being literal. The victim’s wife, who was inside the house, came out to the garage because she’d heard a dog barking and she thought it was strange that there would be a dog in the garage because they didn’t own a dog.