Part 9 (1/2)

”I haven't made one of these in a long time,” my father admitted.

”But you have bacon?” I said.

”Sometimes,” said my father, ”I fry eggs on it.”

”Aha.” I took in the thought of him, in all his father-being, developing his own habits, independent of my mother or myself, just kind of cast adrift into the world.

We spoke Russian. He told me his news. There wasn't much of it. The city works department had managed to burst a pipe under his lawn; the gra.s.s out front still wasn't growing. And yet he looked great, my father; he was getting younger, though in a Russian way-he had shaved the beard he'd worn as long as I'd been alive, it had grown too gray for him, and his features had become sharper, almost aquiline, though his large nose, his smile, his great eyebrows remained intact. My father.

He asked me how I was. I didn't tell him about Arielle; I felt he might still be obscurely loyal to Jillian. I told him a little about work, though not so much that we'd get into an argument.

I did tell him I'd been going to New York a lot.

”Your uncle Misha lives there now, you know,” he said suddenly.

I nodded. ”What's he doing?”

”Who knows. Your grandmother said he was working for one of the Russian papers, but I haven't seen his name in it, so.”

I was sitting and my father was both standing as he worked in the kitchen and sitting with me at the remarkable long wood table he and Jillian had once picked out, an ingenious table that connected the kitchenette to the large living room on the other side of it. Watching my father then, moving between the toaster and the dishes and the refrigerator, I thought of the men in New York and Was.h.i.+ngton who were his age, and had his looks and education: They ran television networks and glossy magazines and restaurants and congressional committees. They had everything he had except his accent. And as I thought of this, of my father's accent, my father's accent here among the old Maryland WASPs and retired naval officers from Annapolis, my optimistic father surrounded by people who thought they had something on him because of it-I became angry, with a white-hot anger, which blazed out in my mind and torched everything it found there, even Arielle, even Jillian.

”Meanwhile,” said my father, ”an incredible saga has recently unfolded in the Bay Courier. Bay Courier.”

Since moving out there, my father-perhaps in this he was like all fathers-had taken an inordinate interest in the local news. He had also, through some zoning issues on his land, run into trouble with the local conservation board. And now the head of the board, my father's nemesis, was embroiled in scandal.

As my father told it, the conservationist had learned that a well-preserved nineteenth-century farmhouse was slated for destruction on the other side of the bar. Appalled, the conservationist immediately bought the house and arranged for its transportation to his own property.

”But the house was big and heavy,” said my father, ”and the only way to transport it was by boat, and then along Ridge Street to his own property. Unfortunately”-my father raised his finger, his eyes twinkling-”the farmhouse was too big to be transported all at once. It had to be sawed in half. So then he floats it to a beach on our side of the bar.

”A few days later the residents of Ridge Street are driving home from work and notice that the large trees along the road have all been marked with orange paint. One of the guys on Ridge Street is a garbage collector, he calls someone at the works department and asks whether there is a project scheduled? His friend says, 'I don't know of any project.' So everyone is puzzled. They learn that the so-called conservationist has measured the width of Ridge and then the width of his farmhouse and seen that the street would need to get wider to let the house through-and without telling anyone, he has hired a construction crew to cut large branches off the trees. cut large branches off the trees.”

”Like Stalin in Moscow,” I said.

”Exactly,” said my father. ”So everyone is furious. They gather on the beach in front of the house. It's been sitting there for a week by this point.”

”Sawed in half,” I said.

”That's right. And it's illegal, by the way. You can't just put a house on the beach, you know.

”So in the end, after he's confronted by this mob, he's forced to cut the house in half again. again. Both halves! Then, finally, after paying all the fines for keeping it on the beach so long, he gets to take it home in four pieces to his property. Both halves! Then, finally, after paying all the fines for keeping it on the beach so long, he gets to take it home in four pieces to his property.

”Vot tak,” concluded my father, getting up with his plate and taking mine as well. So there you have it. ”Can you believe it? That's not even a house he's got anymore. That's a-misunderstanding.” My father shook his head in disbelief. That's what the conservationists get for trying to cla.s.s up. My father had never had any interest in cla.s.sing up. concluded my father, getting up with his plate and taking mine as well. So there you have it. ”Can you believe it? That's not even a house he's got anymore. That's a-misunderstanding.” My father shook his head in disbelief. That's what the conservationists get for trying to cla.s.s up. My father had never had any interest in cla.s.sing up.

He looked at me kindly. ”You probably want to sleep a little, yes?”

I did, very much, and I finally went downstairs. And I thought, on the way down to my room, and on the way down into sleep, of all the people in the world dragging themselves from old property to new property, along oceans and highways and Ridge Street, and arriving, in the end, sawed into pieces. I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house, and how he'd never make up with Misha, though they had both loved my mother. America was too large; America with its houses, its highways; it had broken them up, and me as well. No matter what happened with Arielle (and nothing, I may as well tell you now, happened with Arielle), I would never have Jillian back, could never have her back, did not even want her back, which was the whole trouble- because all the people I'd loved once, or even just knew once, were scattered, never to be seen again in one place. So that all the feelings one expended, received, that one felt at the core of one's being, had turned, in the course of things, to dust.

And outside already it was growing dark.

Jenin

And in Jenin, Sam waited for the tanks. On the streets and in the hookah shops and in the Internet cafes, he waited and waited.

Things in America-America itself-hadn't quite worked out for Sam. Perhaps it was just Boston, dreary expensive Boston, or perhaps it was just Sam, but in the weeks and months before his departure he'd been in the process of getting obliterated, broken in half, by the perplexing Katie Riesling, and now he'd run away. Not on a journey of self-discovery-Sam was too old for self-discovery-but on a journey for the discovery of certain facts. The facts on the ground. Was it lame and pathetic on Sam's part to have fled a romantic disaster so he could sort out his feelings about the Occupation? Was it lame and pathetic and even farcical? Maybe. Yeah.

Sam arrived in Tel Aviv and despite the beaches and suns.h.i.+ne immediately took a van from the airport to his cousin Witold's place in Jerusalem. It cost just forty shekels-ten dollars. Actually, thirteen dollars, but it was one of the oddities of human nature that while traveling in a country where the exchange rate was just above three, one always calculated it as being more like four, reducing prices. And Sam was in a hurry.

Cousin Witold lived in a thin-walled little concrete apartment house, in the old mini-socialist style, in a prestigious section of Jerusalem. Witold himself was not prestigious; he was still recently arrived from Poland, a member of the strange Polish branch of the Mitnick family. Seven years older than Sam, a little taller, more wiry, he had the kind of thin potato face you really see only in Polish films, flat nose and wide cheekbones and hair cropped close, a younger, thinner version of his brother Walech, who lived in New Jersey and built mathematical models of the stock exchange. ”You have to think of the stock exchange as an expanding sphere,” the older brother once told Sam. It sounded like a prelude to stock advice, so Sam's ears p.r.i.c.ked up, but he was unable to follow the parable that Walech then unspooled. Walech kept his stock advice to himself.

Witold was more open. Like Sam he had recently been through a bad breakup, with a girl of Yemenese descent, and he was so depressed, he told Sam, that he couldn't fulfill his army reserve duties. His commanding officer would call, Witold wouldn't answer the phone, his commanding officer would leave a message asking Witold to come to drills that weekend, and Witold wouldn't call him back for a week or two, pretending he'd been away.

”How long will this work?” Sam asked. They were drinking tea in Witold's miniature kitchen.

”I don't know,” admitted Witold.

On the other hand, he carried a gun, a Glock from Austria, and knew how to use it. He tucked it into these hideous green shorts he wore everywhere, not that he and Sam went very far from Witold's kitchen-which was, when Sam studied it a bit more carefully, filled to capacity with whole grains and herbs and grainy spices, the diet of a survivalist, which was what Witold was. When Sam had declared, upon emerging from the shower not long after emerging from his airport taxi, that they should get dinner at a fancy restaurant, at Sam's expense, because it was Sam's first night in the Holy Land, Witold had demurred, saying that a fancy restaurant just around the corner had been blown up by a suicide bomber a few weeks earlier. ”All right,” said Sam. ”Can we at least get a falafel? It's my first night in Israel.”

”OK,” Witold relented. ”I know the best falafel in West Jerusalem.”

”And the best falafel in all of Jerusalem?” Sam asked.

”That would be in East Jerusalem,” said Witold. ”We'd have to shoot our way out.”

On the plane, and in the van, and on the thin mattress Witold put down on the floor for him in his tiny apartment, Sam thought of Katie. He rewound their meetings in his mind. Their first date and his disgraceful behavior-how he'd underestimated her then! They'd run into each other a while later, and she'd managed to forgive him somehow without ever quite forgiving him. And suddenly Sam had seen depths to her that he hadn't known were there, and his whole att.i.tude changed overnight. He was in love. She was the one for him. She'd scored what you might call a dialectical reversal: he was under her thumb. He would see her walking down Cambridge Street, loping really, her head traveling great distances up and down as she walked, leaning forward, a lopy carnivorous walk-and his heart would stop. Then it would soar, and think it all over, and soar again.

She'd been suspicious of his trip. ”You're not really going to Israel,” she said.

”What do you mean?”

”You live here in Cambridge. We get dinner.”

”But we don't sleep together!” he burst out. This was the major difficulty. Perhaps it was an expression of other difficulties, but if so it was occluding them. It certainly seemed, as they wrestled like teenagers in her apartment, ending up, somehow, every time, furious with each other, like the main difficulty.

”That's why you're going to Israel?”

”It's as good a reason as any!” he yelled. He always lost his cool, talking to her. He always felt outsmarted, then humiliated. ”Plus there's the Occupation.”

”You're weird,” she said.

Sam clutched Witold's little mattress, crus.h.i.+ng it. She was infuriating. And he was a grown man. You can't call a grown man weird. You can call him chubby-Sam was growing chubby-and you can call him bald, or balding, which in Sam's case was debatable and controversial, no one could say for sure, and you can call him callous, distant, clumsy, overbearing-but not weird. weird. You just can't. After falafel he'd returned to find an e-mail from her imploring him to be careful. It was a nice e-mail. For a few minutes Sam felt the old feelings again, unreservedly; then he started remembering the conversations; he clutched his mattress now in the dark. You just can't. After falafel he'd returned to find an e-mail from her imploring him to be careful. It was a nice e-mail. For a few minutes Sam felt the old feelings again, unreservedly; then he started remembering the conversations; he clutched his mattress now in the dark.

In the morning Witold took Sam on a tour of the city. It was an old city but not a particularly big one-no city really is, deep down, all that big-and they covered the whole thing in less than two hours. Witold told Sam the story of his life in Israel: he had had to work on a kibbutz, carrying fifty-pound bushels of bananas, for eight months before he earned enough money and social benefits to move to Jerusalem. Then he'd served in the army. Now he fixed computers. Witold did not have to tell Sam the story of his life before Israel-of his mother's and grandmother's life during the war, his grandfather's death-they were the only ones from the Mitnick clan to survive the war inside Poland. (Sam's own grandmother had escaped to Russia.) After all that, the children had left Poland as soon as they could, for Jerusalem and New Jersey, where they could feel safe.

Witold did not approve of Sam's plan to head for the territories. ”We could go to the Negev,” he said. They were sitting outdoors near the main market, eating another falafel. ”We could go to Sfat.”

”I'm not a tourist,” Sam said, slightly affronted.

”Yes you are.”