“What’s that supposed to mean?”
My own version of the Israeli shrug: “What?
“Don’t do anything stupid, Jen.” He cuts a fork into a hardened blini, me down to fourteen. “This is disgusting... Hey!” He barks a few words of Russian at the waiter, lights a cigarette, and we’re eye to eye.
“I’m not sure I’m going to do this for you,” I say.
“Then you might as well drive a stake through my heart.”
Gila returns as the waiter sets down another set of plates: blinis, chicken, salmon, chilled shots of vodka. “More food?”
“I take care of my people,” says my father, stubbing out his cigarette, then piling his plate. We eat together, talking of a gentrifying Tel Aviv, how to smoke a fish... through much of it, her toe tickling my ankle.
On the way home, Gila and I go shopping. We park off Allenby and walk to the shuk, but there’s nothing to buy. I wanted metal stalls with Oriental rugs, hookahs, kaffiyehs — years ago I’d bought one like Arafat’s in solidarity with the opposition. But now it’s just jellied sandals, cheap jeans, underwear, plastic sunglasses. Global capitalism run amok. Sensing my disenchantment, Gila takes me down a block to a bustling street fair. We stop and listen to a woman with eyes like caverns busk a Hebrew folk song, the refrain a desperate Anee rotzah, Anee rotzah (I want, I want)...
After my mother left, my father stayed late at the office. He’d fall asleep on his couch, then take long walks through the Fulton fish market, bargaining in the coldest hours for the catch of the day. Mornings we’d find men in thermal sweatshirts with grizzled faces and thick leathery fingers being served soft boiled eggs in tiny silver cups, strips of bacon, thick slices of toast dripping with butter, and my father, upon noticing Marc and me shyly hovering in our pajamas, beamed, “See how they taste it, it’s like they’ve never eaten an egg!” I have inherited his romance of the working class, a propensity for self-aggrandizing acts of tenderness.
Gila raises the corner of her mouth at the singer. “So horrible,” she says. I agree but toss a few coins in her sack, and we move silently, flanked by artists in canvas tents hawking jewelry, ceramic pots, stained-glass icons. A mime tries to engage us in faceplay, but we break away, walking toward the sea.
“You put that Trojan horse on my computer,” I say finally.
“Not that one... Mine is much better,” she says proud-ly.
“How long have you been spying on me?”
“For a little while only. We had to make sure you would come.”
“And here I am,” I smile. This time she holds it but has to go. Before dropping me off she tells me to keep my computer on.
Three. The ballad of the Trojan horse
Myth has it the Greeks won the Trojan War by sneaking their army into a giant hollow horse and rolling it into the city of Troy for the grand pillage. Gila stuffed her soldiers into “conference” files I’d blithely downloaded but swears there is no danger, my data is safe with her. It’s not the data I’m worried about. After midnight, my hotel room dark but for the computer screen, we talk through tiny windows:
— are you in love with him?
— interested, sure... but love?
— you have to understand, young men are filled up with themselves, they have nothing to say but who they are
— he’s more than twice your age
— this means nothing to me, if you saw him in action you’d understand
— that’s twisted and disgusting
— in business... you have a dirty mind
— better than dirty money
— he said you wouldn’t understand, you were too serious and wouldn’t respect who I am in this world, and for some reason I want to show you you are all wrong
— i’m waiting
— it’s more complicated than you think
I’m typing a response when the phone rings, then
— pick it up
Static on the other end, what sounds like a recorded message: “Go to the window and undress, then turn on the TV loud enough to be heard. Put on your clothes in the bathroom and crawl low to the door...”
I do as I’m told, slipping out the back stairway that empties onto the beach. Gila Zyskun is downstairs in a Fiat with black windows.
We drive over a bridge out toward the desert. She can’t promise we’re not being followed but has a friend in real estate. Development is rampant on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, technology still booming. Here they move systems to market faster and cheaper, there’s no time to waste. She tells me my father cycled some of his dirty money into backend machinery for electronics, computers, smart bombs. Gila drives quickly, every so often sipping from a bottle of clear liquid, then handing it to me. It tastes like licorice and motor oil, and I’m drinking again, better than not-drinking. Yemenite disco on the CD player, we drive through poorly lit highways, long past the Bauhaus curves into a half-baked lot with multiple excavations, two cranes dipped like gazelles. She pulls up in front of a trailer, shuts off the car. I reach for her. She stops me, says she must go in first, five minutes later, me. Five excruciating minutes in a hot, dark car, lights in the distance tingling like space saucers, half expecting my father to beam in beside me, defiance fanning desire. You have to want the thing before you can steal it, and I want, I want! Ten exhale... nine exhale... a bang, loud click... the trigger? I scream. But it’s just the car door, Gila’s return. She covers my mouth and drags me into the trailer. Locking the door behind her, she clicks on a portable lantern, and we’re in musty shadows.
“You lost count or something?”
I steady myself against the faux-wood paneling, then burst out laughing.
Ma? What? You don’t believe me, but you don’t know how many people are after him. This is no joke.”
“Gila—”
“You think you know—”
“Shut up.” I step forward and grab her by the shirt. It tears. She closes her eyes. I push her against the cardboard wall. Her lungs floating up and down, I run my hand along her ribs under the holster. “Take this off,” I say, ordering the way I like, sensing it’s what he does. She unbuckles the leather strap, gun bouncing against the flat carpet, then rips off her shirt. I step back to look — gold ring through her belly button, compact breasts, neck like an expensive vase, all hot issue — then open onto her, my tongue flicking her nipple as my hand slips under her skirt, fast and cheap.
“We have only two hours,” she confirms, clamping down on me, and for two hours we dive in and out of blissful waves of fucking.
Two. Drinking from my father’s cup
The next morning I call the emergency number my father’d given me. Okay, I’ll do this thing for you, Dad, I tell him, but then we’re even, you can’t ask me for anything else. I hear him talking to someone on the other end... her?
“I had a feeling you’d come through,” he says, holding a beat, “for me.”
A few hours later he arrives at my hotel room with two men in heavy cologne, tight gelled hair, black T-shirts, and perfectly creased jeans, so obviously bodyguards. Used to be brown leather jackets tapered at the waist, accentuating how puffed-up they were in all the right places. I kissed one once to see if his lips were as robotic as the rest of him: They were. A few weeks later he was gone.