The View from Stalin's Head, page 16
“Yummy oranges! I feel like I’ve never eaten an orange before!” Becky exclaimed later at the breakfast table, her hunter-green camera pack between her ankles. Michael looked on gloomily as she did her best to fill in the silences between Sarah’s frantic cell phone calls. Each one sounded more anxious than the one before, but Sarah said, “It’s my friend. She wants to meet for lunch and she can’t decide where to go. She is a donkey.”
Sarah asked Michael something in Hebrew that he didn’t understand, so she repeated herself in English. “You don’t want to call your mother to tell her you’re safe?”
“No thanks,” he said, stirring his yogurt absently. “I’ll call her when I’m back.”
“Okay. Do it your way,” she said. “I would never allow Eli to live so far. He wanted to go for university in Haifa at the Technion, but I said go to Tel Aviv. Why should he live far away and eat falafel? Here I can cook for him. He’s sensitive, special.”
“He’s special to me too,” Michael said and caught Becky smirking.
“I was happy last summer when he stayed with you instead of going with his friends to Vienna and Berlin and all these terrible places.” She wiped her eyes under her glasses. “So what exactly are you doing there?”
“We work as consultants,” he said, brightening a little. “Like doctors for sick companies. We come in, see what’s wrong, and give advice.”
“How are you qualified to make such a diagnosis? Do you have training?”
Michael swallowed. “It’s complicated. See, people in the company might know the actual business, but we know more about process. For example, Becky just led a very well-received seminar on developing website content.” Sarah threw her napkin on the table and pushed her chair back. “It’s a good living,” he added. “I could take care of someone I loved on what I make.”
“I don’t understand.” She grabbed a broom resting against the screen door and began sweeping sand off the concrete porch. “Eat, eat. You’ll be hungry later. You want some different kind of tea, maybe? Jasmine? Earl Grey?”
“You don’t have mint by any chance?” he asked. “If it’s no trouble.”
“You want mint? Why didn’t you tell me?” Sarah bent over one of the plants in the yard, her expert fingers picking through the leaves until she found the sprig she wanted. She washed it off with a sharp blast of her garden hose, then plunked the fresh mint into Michael’s mug. “There’s your mint tea.”
—
THE SUN GRILLED the back of Michael’s neck and made his eyes water as he waited with Becky for the bus to Tel Aviv. Even the shadows of the trees, shifting in the gusts of hot air that blew down the street, sparkled with yellow-gray light.
“Where does this sand keep coming from?” Becky asked. She held onto his shoulder and shook out her sandal. “We should have rented a car.”
“Sarah said to take the bus,” he said in a dead voice. He needed sleep.
“Michael, you’re almost thirty years old. I think you can rent a car if you want to.”
“But Sarah said . . .”
“Sarah thinks we’re children. She asked me if we wanted her to pack us a bag lunch.” Becky slipped her sandal back on and checked down the road for the bus. “Nothing,” she said. “You know, she told me she was twenty when she had her first kid. I’m waiting until thirty-five. If I’m not married by then, I’ll have one on my own. You can be the father.” He hoped Becky would change the subject, but she said, “I mean it.”
“Why? Because I’m the last guy you’ve gone on a date with?”
“I was paying you a compliment, jerk.” She punched his shoulder. “My parents still think we’re getting married. My father says, ‘It’s no one’s business what the two of you do in your bedroom.’ ”
“There’s no one else I’d rather pretend to be married to,” he said. “How’s that?”
“I think you’d better try again,” she said, and the bus pulled up.
They sat next to a fat woman with dyed blond hair. She was reading aloud to herself from a Russian newspaper.
“I need to send a fax when we get downtown,” he said to steady himself. Becky launched into a story about a friend’s wedding back in New York that Michael wasn’t listening to. He was thinking of what a boor he’d been to put his hand down Eli’s pants on their very first night together after all this time like, like some child molester, and then the bewildered look on the poor kid’s face. He blurted out, “I made a mistake!” and the Russian woman looked up from her newspaper. “Sorry,” Michael said, wiping his eyes with the backs of his knuckles. “Eli visited me last night,” he told Becky in a softer voice.
“You’re kidding. And?”
“And nothing. I think I was just a phase.”
Her fingers crawled between his. They felt clammy, like women’s hands felt. “It was a long shot,” she said. “The whole kissing cousins angle, the ten-year age gap . . .”
“Seven and a half,” he interrupted her. “I trusted him. You don’t know what the men out there are like.”
“That’s right, I’m pathetic. I never meet men.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he tried to explain. “I meant my kind of men.”
“Forget it.” She pinched his cheek, forcing a smile. “Forget him. Hey, I’m here, remember? We’re here in Israel, our Jewish homeland. Don’t you feel homey?”
“And to top it off, Sarah hates me,” he said, laughing in spite of himself.
“Let’s rent a car and take off. We could go to Jerusalem, stay in a hostel like a couple of backpackers, meet Americans. They have Ben and Jerry’s in Jerusalem.”
“I don’t know.” He was thinking of summer.
—
SIX MONTHS BEFORE, Deloitte & Touche had sent Michael to Prague to consult for CzOL, a Czech service provider modeled on America Online. His mother passed his phone number to Eli, then traveling through Europe after his stint in the army.
Except in pictures, they hadn’t seen each other since Michael turned thirteen. Then, in a fit of teenage rebellion, he announced he would no longer accompany his parents on their annual summer visits to the Holy Land. As an adult, he continued to avoid Israel out of a kind of habit that seemed like principle. Politically, he considered himself pro-Israel the same way he considered himself for capital-gains tax cuts. The only difference was that a warm feeling welled up in his heart whenever he thought of capital-gains tax cuts.
Before Eli’s arrival, Michael practiced his speech in front of the rented antique mirror above his desk: “I’m as much of a stranger here as you are and I don’t have time to show you around.” That was before he met the embarrassed kid shuffling his feet in the doorway.
“A place to sleep, it’s all I ask,” Eli said in a meek voice beside the air mattress Michael had borrowed for him. He unpacked the meager contents of his duffel bag, lining them up against the wall: a couple of T-shirts, black and red bikini underwear, a folding tin utensil kit, a car magazine, a stash of envelopes pre-addressed by his mother.
Their first night together, Eli curled up on his air mattress and grasped his thin blanket in his long, careful fingers. His head was a black dot above the blanket. Michael, tired of reading report summaries, got up and turned out the light in the living room. He stood in the doorway a few seconds with his hand glued to the light switch. “Feel free if you want to go out later.”
“No,” was the muffled reply. “It’s lonely to go places without friends.”
“So why did you leave them?”
“Because they wanted to go to Berlin and my mother said I should see you.”
“Aha.” Michael snapped the lights back on. “You feel like taking a walk?”
They wandered through Mala Strana. Michael led Eli down a crooked street below the Castle, where crystal animals glittered in the dark souvenir shop windows, and pigeons roosted on black iron railings twisted into vines and flowers. Eli stopped to check his reflection in the side mirror of a Skoda. “I have black circles around my eyes,” he said.
“So in the army,” Michael said, “did you ever see . . . Did you ever kill anyone?”
“I was in reconnaissance, not the regular army. We went out with a team to look for terrorists, and then we called for help if we found them. Mostly we didn’t fight.”
“How did you know if someone was a terrorist?” he asked. They sat on a cement ledge outside a closed pub. The air smelled like piss and beer.
“In Lebanon, anyone who goes outside after curfew is a terrorist.”
“Everyone? What if there’s an emergency or something?”
“Okay, not everyone. I didn’t do personal interviews like on the American television, excuse me, Mr. Arab, are you a terrorist? But you can see them moving in lines across the fields. One night, they shot a missile at our tank. It went over our heads and we hit them back. Four were dead. The others ran away.”
They stopped talking as a tram rumbled by.
“I guess you have to grow up fast where you live,” Michael said.
“First you are afraid, but then it’s okay. You are like a machine, to save yourself.”
“Is that why you’re so quiet?”
“You think I am quiet?”
Michael nodded and dared to squeeze him by the shoulder.
“Maybe I am.” Eli’s look, alert, mocking, vulnerable in the corners of his trembling flat lips, was an unmistakable invitation. Michael kissed his cheek and then laughed at himself. “I’ve heard men kiss a lot in your culture,” he tried to explain.
Eli hesitated, then kissed him back, on the lips. “I like listening to you,” he whispered.
That dizzy night, they kissed against the concrete wall of the Wallenstein Garden and inhaled the perfume of cut grass. A month later, they were crying at the train station.
—
ELI CAME LATE to dinner with his girlfriend, P’ninah, who wore a low-cut fluorescent yellow bikini top, cutoffs, and platform sandals. She had a rose tattoo on her left breast.
“She’s gorgeous,” Becky marveled.
“Sort of,” Michael admitted, wondering if P’ninah really was only a cover like Becky. “But in a kind of up-front frank way, like a porn star.”
Sarah kissed P’ninah on both cheeks and seated her next to Eli.
Michael’s uncle, Alain (he’d been born in Morocco), presided over the table, his thick forearms folded over his belly. The Israelis pronounced his name “Élan.” He was short and squat, with a face like a bullfrog and thick lips drawn into a pout as if he was continually about to spit. Occasionally he reached over to pat Eli on the back of his head.
P’ninah startled Michael with her American accent. She’d spent a year in a high school in Iowa and hated it. “Do you like the yogurt in Israel?” she asked. “It’s much better than American yogurt, right?” She kissed Eli on the cheek.
Michael shoved a forkful of rice into his mouth and tried not to look at her.
“Why are you eating so much?” Sarah asked him. “Didn’t you eat in Tel Aviv?”
Eli excused himself to the bathroom, upstairs. Michael went too and waited outside the door until his cousin came out.
“What?” Eli asked, trying to get by. “We can’t talk in here!”
Michael buried his nose in Eli’s neck. “I have to touch you,” he breathed.
“So is that what you want? To fuck with me now?”
“I just want to be with you, you idiot. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I am no idiot.” Eli pushed him off. “Wait one minute before you come after me.”
When Michael returned to the table, Becky was trying out a joke about American English teachers in Prague on a bewildered-looking P’ninah.
“We’re driving to Jerusalem tonight,” Michael announced and sat down.
Eli’s head jerked up from a dish of cantaloupe his mother had cut into bites, the way he liked. Everyone stopped talking. Becky smiled triumphantly.
“It’s Shabbat,” Sarah said. “Everything is closed. How will you find your way?”
“Hotels are always open,” he replied. “They gave us maps with our rental car.”
“So what’s in Jerusalem? Why do you want to go to Jerusalem?”
“Who’s going to Jerusalem?”
“They’re going to Jerusalem. Tonight!”
“It’s Shabbat. They can’t go to Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem? What do they want in Jerusalem? With all those crazy Jews?”
“There is nothing in Jerusalem,” Alain concluded and they all fell silent. “If you want to see this famous wall I can drive you there and back in one afternoon.”
“That’s very kind, but we want more time there,” Michael said. “I’m sorry.”
Alain threw up his hands. One of the hands landed on Eli’s neck.
2.
ELI HAD BEEN HIDING in the fingerlike shadows of the vines that crept up the trellis of his mother’s house. A garden hose curled up at his feet as if asleep. Moths flitted against the wildflowers that grew between the cracks in the cement path, which threatened to split open. Upstairs, behind the purple windows, Michael was waiting for him. A miracle.
Eli suddenly resented his cousin for transforming his own mother’s house into a place as foreign and dangerous as a field in Lebanon.
Still, he enjoyed the climb up the trellis, his sandals scraping the stucco walls, silvery in the moonlight. His mother had caught him at it once and warned him never again. He might hurt himself. She wasn’t someone you wanted to argue with.
But tonight he was an explorer, an astronaut heaving thin air. One of his mother’s flowers brushed his face, and he choked on its perfume.
The tall and bony American cousin sat up on the bed, his rolled-up shirts and underwear spilling all across the carpet, his backpack in the middle of the floor. Couldn’t Michael put away his clothes like a person? But how elegant he looked, perched like a stork on the edge of the bed. He wore an expensive shirt the color of a plum and shiny black shoes, like for a meeting.
“Shalom,” Michael said. “I remember when you were five. Can I have a kiss?”
This was the mythical boy whose mother sent his old clothes for Eli to wear: T-shirts and sweaters with American words, and faded jeans.
“So are you going to give me that flower or stand there holding it all night?”
The muscles in Eli’s neck went lax under Michael’s awkward icy fingers massaging his skin, deliberate and greedy with lust. Eli wished he could speak more English. He wished they could stay in a hotel by the beach and touch for hours with the door locked. Who would have found them? No, it was impossible because they deserved to get caught.
Eli kissed Michael’s forearm. Unlike his own, it tasted plain, with no tang of salt.
“You are glad I’m here, right? I mean, I know you are, but, well, are you?”
“Please, we must stay quiet.” Eli had never understood why Michael needed to talk so much. He and his American friends all traded intimacies like poker chips: “This scar’s from when my stepmother hit me with a brush . . . He fucked me up the ass four months before I told him it hurt . . . No, the third time I was hospitalized for depression . . .”
“Does your girlfriend know?” Michael asked. “How do you know she knows?”
His head throbbed remembering it all, especially with his parents in the next room.
“We’ll see each other,” said Eli, desperate to sneak back down the trellis, away.
—
WHEN ELI TOLD his parents he was going to Jerusalem too, his mother kissed his forehead and said she was proud of him. That was what family was for.
That’s just what’s wrong, Eli thought. This is not what family is for.
Still, it was what he wanted, and during the drive on Highway 1, he didn’t resist when Michael rested his hand on his thigh, centimeters from his penis. In back, Becky prattled on about an ice cream shop. At last, five minutes from the city, she fell asleep, and Eli felt free to guide Michael’s hand toward his zipper. The hand crawled into Eli’s underwear and rocked gently. They rounded a curve and hit the blinking lights and purple hills of the capital. A white banner suspended over the road declared that Peugeot welcomed them to Jerusalem. Becky woke up with a start: “We’re here!”
The hotels Michael had phoned were full, so they stayed in the apartment of a friend of Eli’s, whose parents had gone to Austria on vacation. It was a small place, with a slender hallway that connected three tight rooms stuffed with pressed-wood shelves and a collection of African masks and sculptures. Becky got the children’s room. Eli had never slept in such a big bed as the one he and Michael shared (with a bamboo frame and canvas sheets), like the one his parents had. A wooden figure with a banana-shaped nose and webbed fingers leered over them. He stared up at it as Michael climbed into bed.
“What?” Michael asked as Eli crawled away from him. “Don’t you want to?”
“I want,” he said, his penis sliding against a wet spot in his underwear, “but I don’t want. I came with you here but not for sex.”
Michael frowned. “So you are fucking your girlfriend.”
“I don’t fuck with her!” he insisted. “I tell her I am traditional. I lie to her because of you. Because of you, I’m lying to my parents too, all of the time. I never did that before. And I must think, why am I lying? Why am I so much ashamed?”
“If it wasn’t me, you’d be lying to them about some other guy.”
“Who? I don’t go to these places.” He couldn’t say “gay places.” “Anyway, you are my cousin. We should not do it, like you should not do it with your brother.”
Michael began pacing next to the bed. “If you’d asked me before I met you, is this a good thing, I’d say no. But now I have to look at it differently because . . . Because I can’t stop thinking about you, because you have the power to make me miserable, because I need you. And to me it comes down to who am I hurting?”
“If you say it’s okay for us, then why not okay for a mother and son?”
“I don’t know . . . Forget that. You can’t explain why this is wrong. What’s wrong with us, with you and me?” Michael offered his hand, but Eli flinched. “That’s great. Thanks a lot. So now what? Do you want to be friends?”
