The View from Stalin's Head, page 17
There was the dirty word: “friends.” If one American knew another for five minutes, suddenly he was his “friend” and required to lay down his life for a stranger. Wait one minute more and they’d forget each other’s names.
“I’m tired,” Eli said and put his pillow over his head.
Michael tried to pull away the pillow. “What did you expect when I came here?”
And what did he expect? Eli thought. To fuck me in the house of my mother?
—
FOR ALL THEIR sunscreen and water bottles and guidebooks and maps, they were helpless. Michael almost brought his Palm Pilot, but Eli said, “You are addicted to this machine like drugs.”
Michael stared at the Palm Pilot and then tossed it on the bed.
The guidebooks irritated Eli especially. “What do you need me for?” he sulked. When the girl wanted to go to Mahaneh Yehuda market, he asked, “You need groceries?”
“We don’t have markets like yours in the States,” she replied, slinging her camera around her neck. “Or in Czech Republic.”
“Yes, you have. I was there.” He blushed as he thought of the Havelska market, where Michael had bought him a miniature clay bird with its wings folded over its eyes. “Looks just like you,” he’d teased, sneaking a kiss when no one was looking.
In the throng of shoppers at Mahaneh Yehuda, Becky aimed her camera in all directions, at an Orthodox woman pressing into a melon, then a pair of brawny young men in blood-soaked aprons at a butcher stall. She took shots of mounds of olives, wheels of cheese in glass cases, trays of smoked fish with their mouths gaping open, oranges as big as grapefruit and grapefruit the size of small melons. “Let me peel you an orange,” she said.
For a minute Eli didn’t understand, since he’d never heard the word “peel” in English before. In Hebrew, “peel” meant elephant.
“It’s okay,” he admitted as he chewed his slice.
“You’re smiling,” she said, and he grinned wider. “You have a beautiful smile! Why don’t Israelis smile? Whenever you walk into a store in America, everyone smiles.”
Eli turned to look for his cousin, who’d disappeared. It was Michael’s first day in Jerusalem and he didn’t remember Hebrew so well. Did he even have any shekels? Eli climbed on a wooden crate to get a better view, but it was all a blur of nuts and olives. An ultra-Orthodox fatso in a black bathrobe bumped into his hip. Eli spat on his black hat and looked around the market again. This was Becky’s fault, Becky and her stupid oranges.
But there Michael was, sulking next to a banana cart.
“Here, taste,” Eli said with a relieved smile and extended a slice of orange.
Michael bit into the orange slice, which sprayed juice all over his face and eyes. He glared as if Eli had planned it. “Let me help,” Eli said, digging in his empty pockets, but Michael had already taken out his travel-sized packet of Kleenex. How efficient of him.
Next, they wanted to drive out to Yad Vashem.
Across the valley from the museum, dark clouds sagged over the hills. Eli advised them to tour the gardens first in case of a downpour. Becky walked ahead, taking pictures. Michael paused in front of a bronze sculpture of a woman with her head buried in her hands. “I know how she feels,” he said.
Eli laughed. “You are speaking about this statue like it’s really some person.”
“I suppose that’s against the rules too.”
“No, it’s nice.” Eli patted his shoulder. “It makes me like you.”
“What else can I do to make you like me?” Michael asked, his eyes wet.
We shouldn’t talk about this here, Eli thought, not with all the Nazis and ghosts. “Let’s go on before it rains,” he said.
They passed through the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles, a grove of trees with dark coin-shaped leaves, then entered a maze of Jerusalem stone walls engraved with the names of all the towns in Europe where Nazis had killed Jews. Michael found LUNINEC—the shtetl in Poland where their great-grandparents had lived, had been killed.
And instead of continuing the line, we destroy it with our fucking.
“I never saw this before,” Eli said.
“Why not?” Michael asked.
“It’s the past. My mother’s uncle traveled to this town last year. He saw nothing.” Eli didn’t know how to say in English that their history had been erased, buried in a place with no marker. Now other people lived there. “It’s nothing. It’s nowhere.”
“I know.” And Eli knew that Michael really did know.
“Why don’t I take a shot of the two of you by the name?” Becky said. When they bent over to touch the engraving, their hands met.
—
ELI WANTED TO start all over again in the bamboo bed, but first they had to drive in the rain and find a place to park, and then where to have dinner on Ben Yehuda Street, the Israel with no relation to Eli or anyone he knew. His father was right: any time of day, you could walk there and see not one Israeli. Instead there were religious fanatics from Brooklyn, tour groups in search of T-shirts, French fries, and frozen yogurt.
Back in the apartment, the Americans washed and brushed, skin, teeth, and hair. Michael took an extra shower, “for the glory of having a hot shower.” Eli removed the African sculpture from over the bed and hid it in a closet.
“What?” Michael asked when he came back to their room. He smelled like the seaweed shampoo he’d borrowed from Becky. “Did I do something wrong again?”
Eli pinned him against the door and gnawed on his neck.
“I don’t get it. What’s happening?”
He kissed Michael on the mouth to shut him up.
They dropped to their knees. Eli tugged at his cousin’s towel and kissed the rough points of bone on his narrow shoulders. His tongue trailed down to a pink nipple island in a shallow sea of black hair. He sucked gently, then looked up with his eyebrows raised. Neither of them smiled. Eli stretched his T-shirt over his head and then pulled off his pants and underwear. He dragged Michael to the bed and balanced himself on his cousin’s body. The tips of his fingers and ears tingled, like he was angry. Eli grunted and rubbed harder.
“Good, good. Take it out on me.” Michael’s cool fingers tickled under Eli’s balls and then plunged into his anus, which Eli clenched shut. “Relax,” Michael whispered. “I’m gentle.” So Eli let his cousin pry in there, pull where the skin was wet and sensitive.
“Ay, ay,” he breathed, almost crying.
“Shh,” Michael whispered, smoothing Eli’s face and hair with his free hand. He said in Hebrew, “You’re safe with me, right? You’re safe.”
And then Eli streamed white curls over Michael’s stomach.
—
THEY STOOD NAKED at the window together and watched the gray sunrise with regret. Michael said, “You’re okay with this? The gay part, the cousin part, all of it?”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Eli kissed Michael’s neck three times. “I need you with me.” Here was love, everything he wanted. He couldn’t imagine anything else.
“What about your parents?” Michael said.
Eli shuddered. “My father must never know about these things.”
“I guess even if they knew you were gay, it wouldn’t do us any good.”
“I like your body.” He stroked his cousin’s chest. “Why are you not fat like so many American tourists, like, how do you say . . . ‘peel’?” Eli blew up his cheeks, hung his arm from his nose, and made a noise like a trumpet.
“Elephant,” Michael laughed.
“Yes, elephant.”
“Come here, elephant,” Michael whispered and kissed him. “You’re not tired?”
“I don’t want to sleep,” Eli said. “I can sleep any other time.”
3.
HER LAST EVENING IN ISRAEL, Becky sat on the couch in Sarah’s living room and studied a cooking magazine. She didn’t cook, but she might someday in that house in the suburbs she and Michael always joked about sharing. Alain, sunk into his brown leather easy chair, watched TV in Hebrew.
The two lovebirds had abandoned her as soon as they’d returned to Tel Aviv that morning. In Jerusalem, they’d become intolerable, inseparable. They wanted to linger all day under the lime-green awning of the café at the top of the street and babble together in Hebrew, their secret language, which Michael suddenly remembered. She tried to persuade the couple, if that’s what they were now, to go with her to the Old City, so she could take pictures in the suk for friends.
“Friends,” Eli sneered. “Americans, always with your friends.”
Like she was some flirt, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Though men often asked her out, she rarely went on dates anymore, maybe because she was too picky. The men she met were too awkward or else too smooth, too pretty or too dirty, too ambitious or too dreamy, and she wasn’t going to settle for anything less than what she had already with Michael.
They’d tried dating in college a few times until Becky told him she was looking for her knight on a white horse and he wasn’t it. They became reacquainted in New York, after he’d come out and become polished. Sunday afternoons he’d tell her about his love life over brunch and then they’d relax in his apartment. She took photos from his terrace, which overlooked the Hudson. The doorman knew her name. (She wanted a doorman! Sometimes she pretended Igor was her doorman.) Michael escorted her to weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, seders. The extended family didn’t know the truth; telling them would have been like exposing a rash. Anyway, the truth was more like a lie since she was the closest thing Michael had to a better half, the way he went through men.
When he went to Europe, she called him and cried about the drudgery of her job at the Joint Distribution Committee. He arranged for his firm to bring her over. Her mother baked brownies, which Becky brought across the ocean in her overnight bag. She sent his mom postcards from the Jewish Quarter, and when Michael was too busy to send his own postcards, he signed his name next to hers.
Every few weeks, he fell in love and forgot she existed, which was all that Jerusalem was. All gay men were like that until they got dumped. Then they came crawling back and cried on your shoulder.
She’d insisted they visit the Western Wall at least, but by the time they showered and had a bite to eat, it was almost dark. Black birds swirled overhead as the falling sun sizzled against the Dome of the Rock, then lit the Wall orange. Dried weeds grew out of the cracks near the top where smaller stones were jammed in together like bad teeth. Below, worshippers in black had crowded up against the base. How strange to pray to a wall, Becky thought. She wished she’d brought color film.
The boys sat on a stone bench while she finished up with her pictures. They held hands under the shelter of Michael’s day pack and Becky wanted to scream, Your kids will have six toes! But of course she couldn’t, since they wouldn’t.
Alain suddenly leaned forward in his chair and asked, “Do you like Israel?”
“What? Oh, beautiful,” she said. “I’m surprised how many Russians there are.” She was going to add that in New York she’d raised money to aid in resettling them.
“They are all robbers,” he said. With his accent, Becky thought for a second he’d said “rubbers.” “They steal mezuzot from our doors to sell on the black market.”
“Maybe,” she said, the way she would have to a child.
“Sorry my English is kacha-kacha.” From his gesture, she knew he meant “so-so.”
“It’s fine. You’re doing very well.”
The rush of color in his brown cheeks was not unattractive. “You are always welcome here,” he said. “Beautiful girls are always welcome in my house.”
“Merci, monsieur,” she laughed. Just then she could believe he’d been handsome as a young man, like his son.
Eli and Michael came in with P’ninah, who looked skinny enough to be a model in her hot-pink bikini top. Looking at her made Becky feel bloated, often on the verge of exploding. Sarah came downstairs and sent Eli and P’ninah back out to buy pita. Michael stretched out on the couch next to Becky and yawned. Eli had shaved Michael’s head, and she thought he looked like a shorn sheep.
“What’ll they say at the office?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” Michael giggled. He seemed awfully chipper for a guy who was leaving his “true love” behind the very next morning. But then he was always in “love.” What a cheap word, she thought. No one was in love.
“You are packed for your trip home?” Sarah called out on her way to the kitchen.
“Almost.” Michael scratched his fuzzy skull. “It’s all laundry anyway.”
“You have laundry? Where is it? Give it to me. You too.” She pointed at Becky.
They each brought a heap of clothes, which Sarah insisted on separating into colors and whites even though they said they never did. “I separate them,” she said.
Becky felt relieved at the sight of the washing machine. People were supposed to live with washing machines in their homes instead of dropping their clothes off at some harshly lit laundromat manned by bitter Czech grandmothers. She noticed a framed sepia-toned photo above the dryer: a handsome soldier and an elegant woman with thin, delicate hands, also in a uniform. “Is that you and Alain?”
Sarah, about to slam down the lid of the washing machine, smiled. “Yes. It’s us.”
“How did you meet?” Becky asked.
“We worked in the army together,” she said quietly and shut the lid.
“There’s much more to it,” Michael said after Sarah went downstairs to make dinner. “She’s Ashkenazi, from Eastern Europe, and Alain’s Sephardi. Back then, that was like a black and a white person getting married. They were Romeo and Juliet.”
“I bet Juliet didn’t keep Romeo’s picture above her washing machine.”
“I don’t know,” he said seriously. “Maybe sometimes you need reminding.” From the tone of his voice, she guessed it hadn’t worked with Eli, as with all the others. Of course she was glad Michael had found himself, but was he really happy this way?
—
SARAH SERVED A heavy dinner: potatoes fried until they were hard and yellow, green peppers stuffed with ground beef. Becky pointed her pepper away from her face, afraid the hot breath of the meat would make her acne flare up. Alain kept smiling at her. He asked if she wanted hummus and laughed when she pronounced it to rhyme with “pumice.”
“CHOO-moos!” He refused to pass the bowl until she pronounced it correctly.
Michael’s skin was a feverish shade of orange from too much sun. He wore a red shirt printed with flowers and leaves that Eli had bought from an Arab tailor in the Old City because Michael had said, on a whim, that he liked it. Eli picked at pita and olives. He said nothing except to answer ken or lo when his mother asked if he wanted anything.
P’ninah asked if Becky wouldn’t miss the oranges of Israel.
“We have oranges at home,” she retorted. You’re just a cover like me, she thought. Don’t put on airs.
After dinner, they all drank tea and nibbled on Michael’s crumbled tea cookies. Meanwhile, Michael couldn’t stop babbling about the wonderful food of Israel, Sarah’s beautiful home and gorgeous garden, the sights, smells, tastes of Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem is absolutely a fascinating city, though it surprised me that it wasn’t exactly beautiful, not in a strictly aesthetic way, not in the same way as say, Paris.”
Alain slammed his fist on the table and pointed at Michael. “You are a beatnik!”
“Why am I a beatnik?”
“Because you speak of beauty and you wear flowers. Do you know how many men have sacrificed their lives for Jerusalem, the most unique, special, beautiful city in all the world?”
“Then I guess I’m a beatnik.” Michael winked at Becky and put his arm around the back of Eli’s chair.
—
THEY FOUND THEIR laundry on their beds, folded into piles and decorated with plastic bags of kosher candies tied with red, white, and blue ribbons.
“Amazing,” Michael marveled, sampling a hard lemon candy. “She’s . . .”
Becky closed his door. “I want to talk. I’m mad at you.”
“Okay.” He sat down on Eli’s bed. “What’s up?”
“To be honest, I’m a bit tired of playing the supporting character in your boy-toy-of-the-week mini-dramas. You dragged me here, and now we’re leaving . . .”
Michael interrupted. “Becky, you should know. I’m moving to Israel.”
“Are you crazy?” she yelled out, then lowered her voice. “He’s your cousin!”
“Well, it’s not like we’re going to have kids,” he said.
But we might have, she thought.
“I found out, I can just show up, prove I’m Jewish, and boom, I’m on the government dole for six months. It’s the Law of Return. Eli and I asked about it in town today.” Michael touched her arm, but she shuddered and stepped back from him. “I’m realistic. I’m sure it’s headed for disaster. Eventually. But now . . . we’re right together.”
She snorted.
“Maybe you’re cold enough to abandon him, but I can’t. If I leave him here, he’d be lost. I’m the only gay guy his parents would let near him. Anyway, I’ve always wanted to move to Israel. The army ought to do wonders for my abs.”
“Bull-fucking-shit! You hate Israel! We hate Israel.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You’re living in a romance novel. What about your job? You love your job.”
“You’re not listening,” he said. “Maybe you don’t know me so well, not really.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve listened to your crap for ten years, but I don’t know you.”
“Maybe you don’t,” he said. “It’s not like there’s anything tying me down. I mean, if I’m so eager to drop my job and everything to do this, then maybe that whole life meant nothing. Maybe this isn’t crazy. Or maybe it’s just crazy enough to work. I don’t know.” He scratched behind his ear. “All I know is my head itches from this haircut.”
