“I’m just a journalist,” Voss says. “I’m not, what, a belletrist like you.”
“I don’t know what I am,” I say.
“You’re a voyeur. Like me. So what? There are worse things.”
His face is fixed on the screen again, then the screen goes gray, an entirely textureless blank. His disembodied voice tells me then that he’s considering coming to New York in a few months. It’s something we’ve talked about before. When we’ve talked about it, I’ve always realized that it would mean him staying for at least a week, probably closer to two. A round-trip ticket between Ben-Gurion and JFK is about fourteen hundred dollars with tax, a lot of money.
“We hardly know each other,” I say, still unable to see him clearly.
“I’d say we know each other in some ways,” his voice says.
“In some ways maybe.”
“I’m asking if you want me to come or not.”
His image reappears, moving once more in that stuttering way. I see his beard, the pupils of his eyes, the ring at the end of the zipper of his sweater. His face pulses in and out of clarity — stark, shadowed, volatile. There seems to be no answer in that moment other than to say yes. I tell him okay. His face is there and then not there, the light shifting as if I’m seeing him through flames.
Part Five Epilogue
13 The End TEL AVIV, 2008
One of the boys was tugging on the sleeve of Eliav’s jacket now, a different boy this time, his hair grown out in black curls that were almost like stubby dreadlocks. The standing water on the floor rose above the tops of their shoes. In front of them, a rectangle of yellowish light shone weakly on the far wall, cast there by a humming carousel slide projector that sat on a long card table at the room’s rear corner. It was dark except for that rectangle of light and the center of the room, where two floodlamps clipped to the ceiling pipes lit up a listless body seated in a chair, the bare bulbs burning a fierce white inside the opened corollas of their housings.
The body in the chair was Eliav’s father, Bellen. They had stripped him to his undershirt, his broken glasses strapped around his head with what appeared to be shoelaces. The sides of his father’s head were smeared dark with blood. Eliav had heard the screams from outside, a gun at his back, his face against the concrete fence. Seeing his father now, he found it impossible to stop looking. His father sat in the chair beneath the floodlights with an almost childlike inattention, the lenses of his broken glasses glinting in the bright light. They’d given Eliav the pistol by then, a Jericho 941, its dark grip textured in a grid pattern that had no temperature. He felt it in his hand, the smooth-rough surface of the metal. There was a thinness to his breathing, which caught in his throat like a little boy’s.
“I don’t know what he thought, that we were going to make it easy for him?” said the one in the denim jacket who was standing between Eliav and his father. He sniffed and shook his head, scratching his neck, the torn cuff of the jacket hanging from his forearm. He held a bandanna with which he’d been dabbing his sweat, and he let the rag drop now with a slow splash into the standing water.
“All those ideas of his, that’s why you’re here now. You’re here because he was asking for this — not this exactly, but you know what I mean. He wanted to be some kind of martyr. A martyr for what? Or maybe he just wanted to die. I don’t really know.”
He turned to Bellen then. “Look who’s here,” he said. “Does it make it easier to know that he’s here? That your son will remember all this, just like in the old prayers?”
His father looked scalded and pale beneath the bright lights, his hair glistening like a baby’s hair, his eyebrows almost transparent.
The boy looked back at Eliav then, fierce, his jacket twisted off his shoulder, boots splashing in the water. “Show some mercy, you piece of shit,” he said. “Don’t you think he’s a little ready for it to be over with?”
The water smelled like dead fish and gasoline. It was cold on Eliav’s feet, saturating his shoes. His father raised his chin just enough for the lenses of his glasses to stop reflecting the light of the floodlamps. It was impossible to see any movement or color in those eyes.
He felt the way his hand conformed to the pistol’s grip, the easy way his fingers fit around its contours. He felt the heft of the gun and the tension behind the trigger and the pressure of the metal against his skin. The boy in the denim jacket was still talking. He was looking down at the water, moving the heel of his boot gently over its surface. Eliav felt a sudden connection across the dark room, an intimate physical charge between himself and his father. He felt it as a tingling in his throat and his chest and he started sobbing.
Was the boy talking anymore? Were his father’s eyes even open?
There was a boom and then a silence. A tight connection across all that space and then a snapping of that connection. A boom and then a body slumped over in a chair. Something heavy slung from bones.
He felt the explosion through the barrel, the double action in the chamber, the grip jerking upward. He felt it resonate in his hand, the ringing soreness in his shoulder.
There was a dark smear on his father’s undershirt, an oblong stain partly covered by his head. There was the stillness of his father’s hands. There were the shoelaces tied to his glasses, cutting a swath through the nearly bald skin at the back of his head.
For two thousand years, the Jews were not a race but a scattering, a dispersion. A multinational culture. It’s what has always made us hated and feared, the perversity of having a culture without a land. No land that embodies the culture and is something to fight for, to die for. Only a weak, clever people could have devised such a culture. That was the way we were thought of for two thousand years.
— Reb Zvi Netanel, 2008
Fanatics, extremists. The kind of people Eliav had himself accused when I’d talked to him back in 2009. On the evening of December 22, 2008, two groups of young men abducted first Bellen and then Eliav, Bellen outside his apartment building on Levinsky Street, Eliav outside a 24-hour restaurant on the south side of Tel Aviv. They drove them separately to an abandoned storage facility in Bat Yam, where they tortured Bellen for three hours, then brought in Eliav. On July 27, 2012, the Judea and Samaria Division of the Israeli National Police arrested a twenty-two-year-old man named Sami Orlov, who was suspected of conspiring to explode a mosque in East Jerusalem. During his interrogation, Orlov confessed to his role in the Bellen murder three and a half years earlier. Sami Orlov is a follower of a rabbi named Zvi Netanel, who lives on an illegal outpost in the West Bank near Hebron. Netanel denies any connection to Sami Orlov or to Bellen’s murder. But the goal of Netanel’s movement, according to Netanel himself, is the restoration of a Jewish monarchy throughout the territory of the ancient one, a new Kingdom of David.
It was Voss who told me the story. When he told me, I reminded him of Bellen’s poem “Kid Bethlehem”: God is the small hard stone / in the boy’s sling.