Three months later, Renate and Gunard agreed on a divorce and the young Swede was able to devote himself to Cécile. But Switzerland, and in particular Zurich, was hostile territory. There were unexploded bombs beneath those sidewalks and squares and they contained too many disturbing memories. Where to go? Gunard would go to the ends of the earth in order not to be separated for a single moment from the woman he loved. Cécile, whose family had emigrated to Switzerland during the Nazi era, had never seen it as her country, the fact that she had been born in Zurich was purely fortuitous. What she dreamed of was a thin strip of land in the Middle East, a fragile space of which she had heard thousands of stories and to whose defense she always sprang with passion: Israel, the land of the Jews. That was the place Cécile suggested, and Gunard, who was not himself Jewish, said, all right, we’ll go where you say, the best thing is to get away from this city, and the shadow of these clouds and these mountains, and that was what they did. They sent their belongings by sea and flew to Tel Aviv and then to Haifa, the city of the gardens of Bahaullah, and settled in an apartment with a view of the port and of Acre, and there they began a new life, she as a rich immigrant receiving visits from a multitude of relatives and friends, and he devoted to chess, sitting on the balcony, breathing in the air of the Mediterranean and bathed in the golden reflections of the sun, because it was still September.
One afternoon when Cécile was out and he was contemplating the vague outline of Acre and the bay from his table, he felt something very deep, as if inside him a little goblin had opened a door and switched on the light of a grotto where antique objects and old masks lay, dusty and twisted but still there, intact. He went into the bedroom and opened Cécile’s closet. Twenty minutes later, he was wearing a purple dress and a pair of nylon stockings. He made up his eyes and lips and put a pin in his hair, which gave it a strangely volcanic effect, and sat down on the balcony in that costume to observe the swell of the sea, the slow movements of the boats and the clear air that appeared to shine on the water. He felt a disturbing happiness, a hurricane that was born in his chest and was struggling to come out, and so he gripped the iron bars of the balcony and cried out loudly, until the veins rose in his neck, and he cried not a word but a brazen lament, a song that was to split his life in two, this side, the side of the balcony in Haifa and Cécile and the view of Acre, being the part where he planned to stay for the rest of his life, leaving everything else behind. He was conscious that there were people he loved, like little Ebenezer, but that’s life, at times it can be cruel and incomprehensible.
Imbued in these thoughts, he continued observing the landscape, and a moment later what he saw had stopped being the horizon of the Middle East or the profile of Acre or the gardens of Bahaullah. His imagination had taken him to Orplid, the distant city of stalactites, but as he walked along one of its avenues, there came a tremor, and the air filled with smoke and dust, and when he looked at the ground he discovered that it was covered in rubble and the remains of corpses, with mutilated arms and legs and faces frozen by death in a desperate attitude, the infinite solitude of a corpse, and then, as he walked up the main street, lined with demolished palaces, he realized that he was not alone, that behind him a group of shadows was beginning to climb. He was at the head of a silent retinue of people dressed in cloaks and hoods, carrying long sticks and advancing with difficulty, and he continued his march, seeing the highest hills in the middle of the city, where a dome still glittered in spite of the fires. With great effort, he led the group and began the last ascent up a blackened staircase that crossed the remains of a garden of charred birches and a layer of ash where there should have been grass and flowers. As he reached the top and sighted the palace, and the group caught their breath before entering the temple to register its destruction, a deafening bust of gunfire coming from the darkest part of the night decimated them, and Gunard, faced with such sorrow, fell to his knees and raised his arms and looked down at his own body now torn to pieces, destroyed by shrapnel, and then heard a voice saying, what are you doing? why are you kneeling?
Cécile covered her face with one hand, hiding an expression of surprise. Her eyes filled with tears, she let out a fierce laugh, and said, what the hell are you doing with my clothes? Gunard was still recovering from his terrible daydream and could only reply, I’m sorry, it’s the way I have of getting close to certain things, ideas or premonitions, it’s the only way I can unravel them, and she said, you look very pretty, come help me make dinner, my God, the wind is starting to get cooler, don’t you feel cold? Cécile did not make any kind of scene on learning of his clandestine enthusiasm. It seemed not to bother her, in fact she found it amusing, so they continued their life in Haifa, she devoted to her visits and he joining a local chess club, starting to play again and, much to his surprise, winning tournaments, because the general level was lower than his.
He began to feel again that in order to enjoy life he did not need to go far, to be a Grand Master or gain prizes or anything like that. In the little chess club in the harbor area of Haifa he learned that, apart from Cécile, the one really important thing was to have time for his whims, a comfortable space in which to live quietly and privately, and a clean environment where he could breathe freely. Greatness, as it was traditionally understood, seemed to him a prison. So he devoted himself to simple things, which is another way of saying that he led a happy life.
Four years later, he applied for Israeli nationality, in order to join his destiny to that of this strip of land and to be even closer to Cécile. One condition, though, was that he undergo military training, which he accepted immediately. A year and eight months later, he was another man, weathered by the sun, with well-toned muscles, a strong man always to be seen on the beaches of Haifa or in the restaurants of the harbor area. He started to play in tournaments in Tel Aviv as an Israeli, because it gave him pleasure to think that he was sharing the life of six million people who had come from the four corners of the earth with the idea of a country of their own, such as he had found in Cécile and they both had in Haifa.
But happiness rarely lasts forever, as Gunard was to discover in the most brutal manner. In a fairly succinct e-mail, Renate informed him that little Ebenezer had died of meningitis. When she got home that evening, Cécile found him sitting in front of his Mac, as motionless as if a distant sniper had planted a bullet between his eyebrows. When she touched him she noted that he was freezing cold. In the emergency department of Beth Israel hospital, they said he had had a nervous shock, and when he recovered his first words were, my little Ebenezer is gone, I’ve been punished for leaving him alone.
They flew to Zurich and attended the funeral. Renate was cordial enough, although she looked at him with accusing eyes. She had been living for some time now with the Norwegian Edvard, which was only logical, and was devoting herself to non-figurative art and artistic happenings, in the style of Paul Hayse and Miriam Cunningham. She announced that she was planning to operate on herself, in order to create a work of sculpture out of her own body, as a way of expressing her grief over Ebenezer’s death in a permanent form.