All I Love and Know (52 page)

Shabbat passed and the new week began, along with the playing-hooky feeling they got when the bus stops crowded once again with people heading to work. He'd borrowed Malka and Yaakov's car, and ferried the children to their house, to Leora's, to Gal's friend Ruti's. One evening he took Gal's hand and led her into her parents' bedroom, which she'd been phobic about even looking into for the week they'd been there. “What are you afraid of?” he'd asked, and she'd said, “Everything.”

“It's mostly my stuff now,” he told her.

“But does it smell like them?” she asked, yanking her hand away when he reached for her.

“I don't think it does anymore,” he said. “Do you want me to go in and give it one more sniff?”

“I'm gonna hold my nose,” she said, and she held it the entire time they were in there—held it sitting at the edge of the bed, peeking into the bathroom, and turning the TV on and off.

“This is where you used to come late at night and early in the morning, right?” he said gently, standing at the door. He didn't want to press it, but he did want to acknowledge it. “And when you were sick or scared.”

“Yeah,” she said in a small, nasal voice.

“Gal, you're making me laugh sitting there holding your nose.”

“Don't!” she said reproachfully.

MALKA HAD TOLD HIM
that she wanted to take him somewhere; she wouldn't say where, but they'd arranged to go on Tuesday morning. It was all very hush-hush; when they left, leaving the kids with Yaakov, she didn't even tell Yaakov where they were going. Daniel drove her car on the honking, bleating, chaotic Jerusalem streets, buses barreling by them in the bus lane and snorting huge blasts of exhaust, obeying her directions and stealing the occasional glance at her face. “Right here,” she finally said.

“Har Herzl?” He slowed the car, looked at the gate, and pulled into visitor parking. They got out into the cool dry air and slammed the car doors shut.

“Come,” she said.

She led him out of the parking lot and into the cool, spacious rock tunnel that served as the entrance to the national military cemetery, and he felt the chill of flagstones untouched by sun. He remembered visiting this place during his junior year abroad, when the Jerusalem memorial sites had affected him deeply, conjuring images of young Jewish warriors, men like himself, only called by history to be more selfless and valiant, and forming, astonishingly, the best army in the world. He'd wonder how he would have fared as a soldier during the early days of the state, and feel privileged and soft, and decide that he really couldn't know, because as an Israeli soldier he just wouldn't have been the same person he was back then. Then he'd wonder if that was just the easy way out.

He didn't feel that way anymore. Now the old romance seemed just that, romance. For one, he'd been a gay man for years now, and he understood how that vague shame over being soft came uncomfortably close to shame about being gay. For another, well, there'd been a lot of water under the bridge in his relationship to the State of Israel, and its idealized self-image. He prepared himself for some kind of lesson from Malka in national sacrifice, or national pride. It was a nice day, and he didn't have anywhere else to be; he could indulge her, he thought, especially since she'd been easy and kind since they'd arrived.

They emerged into a large sunny plaza and stepped up to the cemetery map. The areas were coded by number, and by places or wars in which the soldiers were killed: “Road to Jerusalem,” “Yom Kippur,” “Mount Castel.” Then Malka led him into the cemetery. They walked among beautifully tended stone graves that resembled coffin-shaped raised gardens, with plaques on the headstones and small rocks placed by mourners here and there on the headstones or the edges of the grave. It was quiet here; through breaks in the pines along the edges of the hill, Jerusalem glinted, bright and dusty. Malka pointed toward a crane in the distance of the cemetery. “I wanted to show you this,” she said.

Daniel followed her, his gaze lingering on the details of this grave and that, skipping over the Hebrew dates to find the dates he could recognize, reading the names of men who were born in South Africa, Poland, Germany, and died in battles he'd never heard of. Walking quietly with Malka, who wore slacks and a sweater and sneakers he'd brought her from the U.S., and large sunglasses that gave her the look of an aging incognito movie star, he felt more comfortable with her than he ever had before. After a few minutes he heard the ping of chisel on stone, multiple pings, then hollow hammering, and soon they came to a large space surrounded by a crane, a flatbed truck, several vans, and men at work. On a white stone wall was written, in iron Hebrew letters,
Monument to the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism
. There was a large rectangular stone sculpture standing on its end, with a hole with wavy sides carved into it; a flight of stairs led down to a plaza surrounded by stone walls on which bronze plaques with engraved names had begun to be mounted.

“Wow,” he said. He studied the rectangle, and said, “So that's supposed to be a wall with a hole blown into it?”

“Ah,” she said. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“You know, stylized.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think we can go down inside?”

Malka looked around at the workers. “I don't think so,” she said. “It's not supposed to open for a few weeks, on Memorial Day.”

He was quiet, then it occurred to him to ask, “Are Joel's and Ilana's names on one of those plaques?”

She nodded, and told him that she'd gone onto a website through which the National Insurance Institute was tracking names, and corroborated their information.

Men were calling out to one another, and two of them were consulting a map laid out on the bed of a truck. Daniel went up to a few of the plaques that were already hung and peered at them, but they were all dated much earlier. He looked around for a place to sit, and finally just stepped up alongside Malka and put his arm gently around her shoulders. They stood there for a few moments, and then she stepped out of his arm and gave his hand a squeeze before letting it go. “There's been a lot of controversy about this memorial,” she said.

“Really?” Daniel said. “Why?”

“This is a military cemetery,” she said. “The victims of terrorist attacks are civilians, not heroes. So the families of young men killed in war believe that it's unfair. The victims of terror are also going to be honored on Memorial Day from now on, and they don't like that either.”

Daniel thought about that. “I guess I can see that,” he said. “Their sons and brothers died fighting, while ours were—”

“Sitting in cafeterias and coffee shops,” Malka said.

They turned to walk back. “How do
you
feel about it?” Daniel asked.

She shrugged. “I'm used to it. It reminds me of survivors of the Holocaust.”

He tried to make the link in his mind.

“We are everything they don't want to be,” she said, her face weary and bitter. “Victims. Weaklings. Everything this country does is supposed to be in our name, but really, they despise us.”

He'd always wondered about that, but he was shocked that Malka thought it. “Do you think they despise victims of terrorism?” he asked.

She was quiet, then she gestured toward the military graves they were passing. “The message of this cemetery is: This is what we did to protect you. The message of the new memorial is: We can't protect you. How is anybody supposed to tolerate that?”

Whoa,
he thought.

She sighed. “
Ain ma la'asot,
” she said, “there's nothing to do about it.”

He glanced at her. Her mouth had tightened; she'd reverted back into banality, drawn back that tantalizingly sharp and trenchant part of herself. They turned back to the parking lot; she was no longer looking at him, and he thrust his hands in his pockets. He wondered if he'd ever see that part of her again.

JOEL'S PRODUCER, ROTEM, HAD
wanted to have lunch with him, but her schedule didn't open up till the day before the memorial. She was a middle-aged woman with fancy glasses and sleek black hair that fell to her shoulders; she came from a famous military family, and projected an aura of cool authority. Joel—who called her
ha-mefakedet
, Commander—had told Daniel more than once that he would have looked like a total clown on camera without her supervision. Now, at a small, crowded café nestled among boutiques in a square near the TV station, Daniel watched her drench her salad with the dressing she'd asked for on the side, and this little war between discipline and appetite made him remember her husband, whom he'd met once at a dinner party at Joel's. What was his name again? He remembered that he was voluble and balding with ginger tufts of hair that sprang out from above his ears, and had a ready laugh that gobbled into a snort.

When Rotem had put down the small dressing cup, she leaned on her elbows and looked warmly into his face. “So,” she said.

“So,” he smiled, looking her over, assessing her as a possible friend.

“I was wondering if you'd like to be on our show.”

He'd been about to take a bite out of a fancy little sandwich with prosciutto and goat cheese and esoteric greens, but now he lowered it to his plate. “For the year anniversary,” Rotem explained. “We're planning a short retrospective, showing clips from some of the more famous shows Joel did. And we thought it might be interesting, and touching, to follow that up with an interview with you in the studio.”

Daniel rubbed his chin with his hand. “I don't think so, Rotem,” he said. “I just—I honestly don't know how I'd talk about my life.” His relation to the terrorist attack, he said, was clearly unbelievable or repugnant to most people. And after some hesitation, knowing that Joel had probably already told her, he told her that he was gay, with that old familiar feeling of making a big deal out of nothing.

Rotem looked at him shrewdly, the journalist in her sizing him up. “So you think nobody's ever reacted to the death of a family member from terror the way you have? That your life is beyond the pale of what Israelis can hear, because you're gay and left-wing?”

“No,” he said, feeling heat rise into his face, hearing in her questions the implication that he was emotionally fragile, self-congratulatory in his politics. Or else—the thought moved swiftly through him—she was just Israeli, and would be totally shocked to hear that her straightforward questions had given offense. “But look, I was already burned once for an interview I did in the U.S., and that was for a teeny local paper in Northampton.” He told her about what he'd said in the interview, and the hate mail that ensued. “The
nicest
comment I got was that I was a self-hating Jew,” he said. “But it was more like I was a faggot who wanted to be fucked by terrorists.” He spat the word
faggot
in English, because Hebrew didn't have, as far as he was aware, a slur quite as juicy and potent.

“Idiots,” Rotem said with a grimace. “Idiots. I'm sorry.”

He sat back, mostly mollified, and picked up his sandwich, bit into the crunchy end of the baguette. He realized that with Rotem he was speaking in his straight register, his hands still, his voice compressed into a shorter range of notes; and as soon as he realized that, he realized that he'd been speaking like that since arriving in Israel, and that a strange fatigue was coming over him. Rotem was stabbing lettuce, peppers, chickpeas onto her fork with quick precision.

“Did you know,” Daniel said, “that Ilana wanted the kids taken out of the country if anything happened to her and Joel? She was a daughter of Holocaust survivors.” Rotem nodded. “She told me, if anything happens to us, get them out of here. I can't imagine an interview where I wasn't asked why I was raising them in the U.S. How could I explain that on Israeli TV?”

“That's a thought-provoking feature story,” Rotem said.

“But I don't want to provide a thought-provoking feature story,” he said heatedly. “If I did the interview, it would be to honor them, not to make people scrutinize their choices.”

He saw that that displeased and disappointed her, and they were quiet for a few minutes, eating. The waiter came by to ask if everything was satisfactory. Daniel wondered how much he needed, or wanted, to tell Rotem, whom he was experiencing as something of a shark—“a thought-provoking feature story!”—and strangely, as something of a confessor. She'd been close to his brother, and that meant something to him. Finally, he ventured, “And I've broken up with my partner. So now the kids are being raised by a single parent on top of everything else.”

She looked up from her food with interest, clearly lifted out of her brooding about the show. “So what, you're worried about looking like a failure on Israeli TV?”

“Yes,” he said. “When gay people break up, it just goes to show that their relationships aren't lasting and legitimate.”

“But marriages break up after a family member dies in a terrorist incident all the time,” she said. “It's very common.”

He sat back in his chair with a rush of feeling. It made total sense, but it stunned him, too, stunned and moved him to think that after the attack, he and Matt had been fighting against the odds. Why, he wondered, hadn't anybody told him that before? It might have helped!

“What's his name?” she asked.

“Matt,” Daniel said. “Matthew Greene. He's younger than I am. He's handsome—I don't know why I said that, it doesn't really matter—and funny, and he took on the kids with enthusiasm, against every expectation I had.”

“So what was the problem?”

His eyes fluttered closed and he shook his head. What
was
the problem? “He did something that broke my trust,” he told Rotem, and the words sounded grandiose and unconvincing.