The Butcher's Theatre (26 page)

He’ got up out of the chair, turned off the phonograph, then walked two steps to the kitchen area and dumped the uneaten food into a cracked plastic wastebasket. Lifting a bottle of hundred-proof slivovitz from the counter, he carried it back with him.

Slipping slowly from the bottle, he let the liquor run down his gullet, feeling it burn a pathway straight to his stomach. Internal erosion. He imagined the damage to his tissue, enjoyed the pain.

As he grew progressively intoxicated, he began thinking of the butchered girl, her crazy eunuch of a brother. The punk they’d dug up on the olive grove, the maggots already holding a convention on his face. The case stunk. He knew it and he could tell that Dani knew it. Too clean, too cute.

That crazy, dickless eunuch. Pathetic. But who gave a shit—fucking Arabs slicing each other up over crazy pseudo-cultural nonsense. Lumpen proletariat. How many countries did they have—twenty? Twenty-five?—and they whined like shit-assed babies because they couldn’t have the few square kilometers that belonged to the Jews. All that Palestinian bullshit. Back when he was a kid, the Jews had been Palestinians too. He’d been a goddamned Palestinian. Now it was a fucking catch phrase.

If the government was smart it would use agents provocateurs to fuck all the Arab virgins, convince the families that Ahmed next door had done it, supply them all with big knives, and set off a wave of revenge killings. Let them wipe

themselves out—how long would it take? A month? Then we Zhids could finally have peace.

A laugh. With the Arabs gone, how long would it take for the Jews to chew each other up? What was the joke—a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected. We’re the princes of self-hatred, the standard-bearers of self-destruction; all you had to do was read the Torah—brothers fucking over brothers, raping their sisters, castrating their fathers. And murder, plenty of it, nasty stuff. Cain and Abel, Esau going after Jacob, Joseph’s brothers, Absalom. Sex crimes, too—Amnon raping Tamar, the Concubine of Gilead gang-banged to death by the boys from Ephraim, then cut into twelve pieces by her master and mailed to all the other tribes, the rest of them taking revenge on Ephraim, wiping out all the men, capturing the women for you-know-what, enslaving the kids.

Religion.

When you got down to it, that was human history. Murder, mayhem, bloodlust, one guy fucking over another, like monkeys in a cramped cage. Generation after generation of monkeys dressed in people-suits. Screeching and cackling and scratching their balls. Pausing just long enough to cut one another’s throats.

Which made him, he supposed, a fucking historian.

He raised the bottle to his lips and took a deep, incendiary swallow.

How he loathed humanity, the inevitable movement toward entropy. If there was a God, he was a fucking comedian. Sitting up there laughing as the monkey-men yammered and bit each other in the ass and jumped around in the shitpile.

Life was shit; misery the order of the day.

That’s the way it was. That’s definitely the way it was. He gave a boozy belch and felt a wave of acid pain rise in his esophagus.

Another belch, another wave. Suddenly he felt nauseated and weak. More pain—good, he deserved it for being such a weak, naive shmuck.

For understanding the way it was but being unable to accept it. Unable to throw out the pictures. Goddamned

fucking framed snapshots on the table next to his cot. He woke up each morning and saw them first thing.

Starting the day off right.

Pictures. Arik in uniform, leaning on his rifle. To Abba and Eema, With Love. The kid had never been original. Just good.

Leah at the Dead Sea, in a flowered bathing suit and matching cap, covered to her knees with black mud. Rounded belly, lumpy hips—looking at the picture he could feel them under his fingertips.

Tomorrow morning he’d throw out the pictures. Right now he was too tired to move.

Bullshit. He was a coward. Trying to hold on to something that didn’t exist anymore.

One year they were there; the next, gone, as if they’d never been real, only figments of his imagination.

A good year for death, 1974.

Eleven fucking years and he still couldn’t deal with it.

Not only that, but it was getting to him more, working on Gray Man, now this one, the cruelty. The fucking stupidity.

Monkeys.

Tough guy.

Shmuck.

He drank some more, disregarding the pain. Pushing himself toward the blackness that always came.

The kid had been bivouacked in the Sinai, reading a book in his tent—Hegel, no less, according to the military messenger. As if that made a fucking bit of difference. Picked off by some faceless Egyptian sniper. Next year, on the same spot, a bunch of assholes from Canada built a luxury hotel. A few years later, all of it was back in Egypt. Traded for Sadat’s signature. The word of a fucking Nazi collaborator.

Thank you very much.

Leah never recovered. It ate her like a cancer. She wanted to talk about it all the time, always asking why us, what did we do to deserve it, Nahum? As if he had an answer. As if an answer existed.

He had no patience for that kind of thing. Got to where he couldn’t stand the sight of her, the crying and the whining. He avoided her by burying himself in the double load, catching

assholes, growing peaches. He came home one day, ready to avoid her again, and found her laid out on the kitchen floor. Cold as slate, waxy gray. He didn’t need a fucking doctor to tell him what the story was.

Cerebral aneurysm. She’d probably been born with it. No way to know, tsk, tsk, sorry.

Thank you very much.

Fuck you very much.

Gene and Luanne wanted something authentic, so Daniel and Laura took them to The Magic Carpet, a Yemenite restaurant on Rehov Hillel, owned by the Caspi family. The dining room was long and low, bathed in dim, bluish light, the walls alternating panels of white plaster decorated with Yemenite baskets, and blown-up photographs of the ‘48 airlift after which the restaurant had been named. Swarms of robed and turbaned Yemenite Jews alighting from gravid prop planes. The Second Wave of emigration from San’a. The one everyone knew about. If you were Yemenite they assumed you’d come over on the Carpet, were genuinely shocked when they found out Daniel’s family had lived in Jerusalem for over a century. Which in most cases meant longer than theirs.

“You were right,” said Luanne. “This is very hot, almost like Mongolian food. I like it. Isn’t it good, honey?”

Gene nodded and continued spooning the soup into his mouth, hunched over the table, big black fingers holding the utensil tightly, as if it threatened to float away.

The four of them sat at a corner table shadowed by hanging plants as they feasted upon steaming bowls of marak basar and marak sha’uit—chili-rich meat soup and bean soup.

“It took me a while to get used to it,” said Laura. “We’d go over to Daniel’s father’s house and he’d make all these

wonderful-looking dishes. Then I’d try them and my mouth would catch fire.”

“I’ve toughened her up,“said Daniel. “Nowshe takes more spice than I do.”

“My taste buds are shot, sweetheart. Beyond all pain.” She put her arm around him, touched his smooth brown neck. He looked at her—blond hair down and combed out, wearing a little makeup, a clinging gray knit dress, and filigree earrings—and let his hand drop to her knee. Felt his feelings surface, the same feelings as when they’d first met. The mutual zap, she’d called it. Something to do with American comic books and magic powers …

The waitress, one of the six Caspi daughters—Daniel could never remember who was who—brought a bottle of Yarden Sauvignon and poured the wine into long-stemmed glasses,

“In your honor,” said Daniel, toasting. “May this be only the first of many visits.”

“Amen,” said Luanne.

They drank in silence.

“So you enjoyed the Galilee,” said Laura.

“Nothing’s like Jerusalem,” said Luanne. “The vitality— you can just feel the spirituality, from every stone. But Galilee was fantastic, just the same.”

She was a handsome woman, tall—almost as tall as Gene —with square, broad shoulders, graying hair marcelled into precise waves, and svrong African features. She wore a simple boat-necked dress of off-white silk striped diagonally in navy-blue, a strand of pearls, and pearl earrings. The dress and the jewelry set off her skin, which was the same color as Daniel’s.

“To be able to actually see everything you’ve read about in the Scriptures,” she said. “The Church of the Annunciation, realizing that you’re putting your feet down in the same spot where He walked—it’s unbelievable.”

“Did the guide take you to see the Church of Saint Joseph also?” asked Laura.

“Oh, yes. And the cave underneath—I could just visualize Joseph’s workshop, him working there on his carpentry, Mary upstairs, maybe cooking or thinking about when the baby was going to come. When I come back and tell my class about it,

it will inject a real sense of life into our lessons.” She turned to Gene: “Isn’t it just amazing, honey, seeing it like that?”

“Amazing,” said Gene, the word coming out slurred because he was chewing, the heavy jaws working, the big gray mustache revolving as if gear-driven. He broke off a piece of pita and put it in his mouth. Emptied his wineglass and mouthed thank you when Daniel refilled it for him.

“I’m keeping a log,” said Luanne. “Of all the holy spots we visit. For a project that I promised the children—a Holy Land sojourn map to hang up in the classroom.” She reached into her purse and took out a small note pad. Daniel recognized it as the type that Gene used, marked LAPD.

“So far,” she said, “I’ve got eighteen churches listed—some of them we haven’t actually gone into but we’ve passed them close by, so I consider it legal to include them. Then there are the natural landmarks: This morning we saw a stream in Tiberias that fed Mary’s well, and yesterday we visited the Gethsemane garden and the hill of Golgotha—it really does look like a skull, doesn’t it?—though Gene couldn’t see it.” To her husband: “I certainly saw it, Gene.”

“Eye of the beholder,” said Gene. “Are you eating all of your soup?”

“Take it, honey. All the walking we did, you need your nutrition.”

“Thanks.”

The waitress brought a plate of appetizers: stuffed peppers and marrows, chopped oxtail, kirshe, pickled vegetables, slices of grilled kidney, coin-sized barbecued chicken hearts.

“What’s this?” asked Gene, tasting some of the kirshe.

“It’s a traditional Yemenite dish called kirshe,” said Laura. “The meat is chopped pieces of cow’s intestine, boiled, then fried with onion, tomatoes, garlic, and spices.”

“Chitlins,” said Gene. Turning to his wife: “Excuse me, chitterlings.” He took some more, nodded approvingly. Picking up the menu, he put on a pair of half-glasses and scanned it.

“Got a lot of organ meats here,“he said. “Poor folks’food.”

“Gene,” said Luanne.

“What’s the matter?” asked her husband innocently. “It’s true. Poor folks eat organs ‘cause it’s an efficient way of

getting protein and rich folks throw it away. Rich folk eat sirloin steaks and get all the cholesterol and clogged arteries. Now you tell me who’s smarter?”

“Liver is an organ meat and liver is loaded with cholesterol,” said Luanne. “Which is why the doctor took you off it.”

“Liver doesn’t count. I’m talking hearts, lungs, glands—”

“All right, dear.”

“Those people,” said Gene, pointing to pictures on the walls. “Every one of them is skinny. They all look in great shape, even the old ones. From eating organs.” He speared several chicken hearts with his fork and swallowed them.

“It’s true,” said Laura. “When the Yemenites first arrived, they had less heart disease than anyone. Then they started assimilating and eating like the Europeans and developed the same health problems as everyone else.”

“There you go,” said Gene, looking at the menu again. “What’s this expensive stuff—‘geed’?”

Daniel and Laura looked at each other. Laura burst out laughing.

“Geed means penis,” explained Daniel, struggling to remain straight-faced. “It’s prepared like kirshe—sliced and fried with vegetables and onions.”

“Ouch,” said Gene.

“Some of the old people order it,” said Laura, “but it’s pretty obsolete. They put it on the menu but I doubt they have it.”

“Penis shortage, huh?” said Gene.

“Honey!”

The black man grinned.

“Get the recipe, Lu. We get back home you can cook it for Reverend Chambers.”

“Oh, Gene,” said Luanne, but she was stifling a giggle herself.

“Can’t you just see it, Lu? We’re sitting around at the church supper, with all your tight-girdled bridge buddies jabbering on and tearing people down, and I turn to them and say, ‘Now, girls, stop gossiping and eat your penis!’ What kind of animal they use?”

“Ram, or bull,” said Daniel.

“For the church supper, we’d definitely need bull.”

“I think,” said Luanne, “that I’d like to go powder my nose.”

“I’ll join you,” said Laura.

“Ever notice that?” said Gene, after the women had left. “Put two females together and they have this instinctive urge to go to the bathroom at the same time. Just let two fellows do that and people start to figure there’s something funny about them.”

Daniel laughed. “Maybe it’s hormones,” he said.

“Gotta be, Danny Boy.”

“How are you enjoying your visit?”

Gene rolled his eyes and picked a crumb out of his mustache. He leaned closer, pressing his palms together prayerfully.

“Rescue me, Danny Boy. I love that woman to death, but she’s got this religious thing—always has. At home I don’t mind it because she raises Gloria and Andrea straight and narrow—she certainly gets the credit for what they are. But what I’m fast finding out is that Israel’s one big religious candy store—everywhere you go there’s some sort of church or shrine or Jesus Slept Here whoozis. And Lu can’t bear to miss one of them. I’m a profane person, start seeing double after a while.”

“There’s a lot more to Israel than shrines,” said Daniel. “We’ve got the same problems as anyone else.”