All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 9

"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."

Witold began to talk about his tour of duty with the army; he was occasionally made to go into the territories. This was in the mid-1990s, after the Oslo Accords, before the a.s.sa.s.sination of Rabin-a golden age, in retrospect. "And still I have to tell you, it was unpleasant there," said Witold. Years earlier, when the First Intifada began with large Palestinian protests in the occupied territories, Israeli soldiers several times fired live ammunition at protesters, killing some. This was bad, internationally, for Israel, so Rabin, then the army's chief of staff, ordered the men to use nonlethal means on the protesters. "Break their bones" was the infamous phrase-and so Israeli soldiers began using their rifle b.u.t.ts and batons to crush people's arms and ribs.

"When I first entered the army," Witold told Sam, "I thought I would not be able to talk to them"-to the ones who broke people's bones. "But then I met them. And I understood: if you are out there, you have five, six men, and there are a thousand angry people-what are you going to do?"

"Leave the territories?" Sam suggested.

Witold sighed. His English was good but it was not good enough to detect when Sam was kidding, or half kidding, or maybe a quarter kidding, if at all-in fact very few people's English was that good, which may have indicated a problem less with their English than with Sam. In any case, Witold simply a.s.sumed that every time he spoke, Sam was serious. It was a masterly strategy for dealing with Sam. Now Witold said, of Sam's suggestion that the territories be unoccupied: "Someday." And then: "You will see for yourself."

The next morning Sam woke up, checked his e-mail, packed a duffel bag, checked his e-mail again, and walked to the Three Kings hostel near the walls of the Old City. It served, Sam knew from the Internet, as the unofficial hangout of the Global International Solidarity human rights and occasional human s.h.i.+elds group, infamous in the United States for its "breakfast with Arafat" during the Israeli siege of the old man's compound in Ramallah. During those days all Arafat had was his bulky satellite phone and these useful Swedish and American idiots, eating hummus and flat bread and showing up on the BBC.

On the way to the hostel Sam noticed a commotion outside a busy, gla.s.sed-in restaurant at the bottom of Cousin Witold's street. Sam stopped to watch on the other side of the street.

Directly in front of the restaurant was a stout middle-aged woman holding a large placard on which a blown-up photo showed a young man's handsome Jewish face. It was her son. The restaurant's two security guards-even the hole-in-the-wall best-falafel -in-West-Jerusalem had a guard, a sour-looking Russian guy-s.h.i.+fted from foot to foot silently before her, as if barring her way. Sam stood watching. There was some Hebrew writing on the sign that he couldn't read, and the glum faces of the men, the security guards, gave nothing away. And nonetheless he knew. The restaurant was just around the corner from Witold's house; a month before, a young Palestinian in a bomb belt had blown himself to pieces right outside the entrance. One of the people killed was this woman's son. And she wanted-what did she want? Now a sharply dressed young man emerged forcefully from the restaurant, presumably the maitre d' or the manager, and headed for the woman. He said something to her in a slightly pleading way; she said something aggressively back. He raised his hand as if about to start yelling at her and then stopped, and simply stood there with the two tall guards. The woman continued to hold her sign, the photo of her son, in front of the restaurant where he'd been killed, where people continued to eat breakfast or even, by now, an early lunch.

At the Three Kings half an hour later, strewn as it was with backpacks and Swedes, Sam found Roger, an American geographer who was heading out for Jenin, and joined him.

How easy it turned out to be, to get from here to there! (If you were from here. Not so much if you were from there.) They climbed into a minivan cab to reach, in ten minutes, the checkpoint just outside Ramallah, and from there a yellow Mercedes taxicab drove off with them for Jenin. Sam looked around, almost speechless. The West Bank! Here it was, that source of all the world's problems, here it was before his very eyes. As they wound past little hills he looked for tanks, he looked for violent settlers, he expected the earth to open its great maw and roar at all the trouble and the foolishness going on. Sam was so transfixed he forgot momentarily about Katie-her pouty lips, her dramatic gestures, her funny imitations of foreigners.

Roger, a bulky, effeminate WASP in wire-rim gla.s.ses, was a treasure chest of anti-Israeli information. Year-round he worked in Cairo for the U.N., examining the various effects of the Nile Delta on the Egyptian population. But in his spare time, he explained, he was preparing a "cartography of oppression."

"What's it look like?" Sam asked.

"Look around," said Roger proudly, as if he himself had charted it.

Sam did as he was told. He looked at the stingy desert hills, covered with little green and brown scrub gra.s.s, barely elevated, rolling and rolling on into the horizon.

"Barely even any hills," he said.

"That's exactly right," Roger looked pleased. "These are minor dominating heights. minor dominating heights. It's almost impossible to hide in them-good for a regular army, but suicide for a bunch of dudes with Kalashnikovs and homemade bombs." It's almost impossible to hide in them-good for a regular army, but suicide for a bunch of dudes with Kalashnikovs and homemade bombs."

"What's that?" Sam said. Atop one hill a neat group of twenty houses stood, with neat orange gable roofs.

"That would be a settlement," Roger said. "See the roofs? The Palestinians keep theirs flat."

Twenty minutes on there appeared, in the middle of the desert, a traffic jam. Or a toll. Three Israeli soldiers stood lazily around, casting cursory glances at doc.u.ments. They took their time. They really took their time. After a soldier had taken the doc.u.ments from the first car in line and brought them over to their little post, and then stood chatting with his buddies, obviously not looking at any of the doc.u.ments, Sam demanded to know of Roger what they were doing.

"Checking them against lists," Roger said. "And looking for weapons."

"I don't see him looking for any weapons."

"Of course not. It's a taxi. It's not carrying weapons. But this-this is geography. You stop people just so they know whose road it is. It fits into their psychic map. The map that's in their heads."

Now a blue Audi flew past them, waved to the guards, and kept going.

"Who was that?" asked Sam, growing increasingly upset.

"That would be a settler."

"Motherf.u.c.ker," said Sam.

"Yes."

"In Cambridge we have permit parking," said Sam. "It's really hard to park if you don't have a resident permit and sometimes you have to drive around for an hour."

"With the difference that if you actually live in Cambridge, as the Palestinians live here, you get a permit."

"If you can afford the insurance! If you can't, you register somewhere else and then waste your life looking for parking. Just like now I'm wasting my life in this taxi while that guy cruises over to his settlement!"

"That's about right," said Roger. He seemed extraordinarily pleased now.

At Akhmed's father's house, in a small village outside Jenin, Sam waited for the tanks.

Akhmed taught English in the village of Birqin, when school was in session. Whether it was out of session now because it was July or because tanks were always coming into town, Sam didn't know. In the meantime Akhmed had befriended the Global International Solidarity Swedes, and it was thought he'd enjoy Sam's genuine American English, and so Sam was asked to stay at Akhmed's.

Arriving there, Sam found that Akhmed was his age exactly, with a droopy mustache and a slow, deliberate way of framing his sentences. Sweet-tempered, shy, he immediately reminded Sam of the soft-spoken social-democrats he'd seen now and again in Cambridge, quietly urging their resistance to the upcoming war with Iraq. He greeted Roger and Sam with some ceremony, kissed them on both cheeks (four cheeks), sat them down in a garden behind his father's house while his two younger brothers, Bashar and Mohammed, brought out hummus and pita and grapes. Sam was clearly going to get chubby in Jenin; on the other hand, look at fat Roger. Roger was asking Akhmed about his father. His father was very upset, Akhmed answered. Four young men had been arrested in the next village over, and six had been arrested in Jenin, and two houses had been blown up at night by the Israelis. Izrah-ilis Izrah-ilis is how even the best-spoken Palestinians p.r.o.nounced it. Finally, said Akhmed, his brother Mohammed "is not very smart. He was almost killed. This close." is how even the best-spoken Palestinians p.r.o.nounced it. Finally, said Akhmed, his brother Mohammed "is not very smart. He was almost killed. This close."

Mohammed, who did not speak English, perked up at the sound of his name. "Idiot," Akhmed said to him, or so it seemed to Sam, by the sound of it in Arabic, and Mohammed grinned. His brothers, unlike Akhmed, were athletic and boisterous, and Mohammed wore a white polyester s.h.i.+rt under which you could see his bandaged chest.

"Why did they shoot at him?" Sam asked.

"Why?" said Akhmed. "No why. He was standing. They shot."

"For no reason?" Sam asked again.

"It just slipped him," Akhmed said. "Is this right? Slipped?"

"Grazed," Roger said. "It grazed him."

"Ah," said Akhmed. "Grazed."

"For no reason?" Sam repeated.

But the conversation had moved on, and no one heard him.

Thus began Sam's life in Jenin. In the evenings he would sit with Akhmed and his brothers, sometimes other young men from the town would come by to talk about the Occupation and have a look at Sam-young healthy American Sam turned out to be something of a curiosity around the village of Birqin-sometimes Roger and the Swedes would drop in. At night he slept on a cot on the roof; the Palestinian houses with their flat roofs grew too hot during the day to be slept in at night, and in the mornings he would walk over to Jenin and begin his daylong vigil for the tanks. He wandered around, past the flimsy concrete structures, and only a few streets' worth, not even a city, not really, with dust everywhere; the heat of the sun, the humidity, was awful. In the tropics people would start drinking at twilight so they could fall asleep by nighttime. It was less hot in Jenin, maybe, but on the other hand there was much less alcohol. In fact, there was no alcohol at all.

Sober, the men in the doorways bided their time, the kids in the street ran this way and that, a kind of freelance summer boot camp for when the tanks came and they could throw rocks. Because surely the tanks would come? The shops shuttered with the same metal shutters as anywhere else, Boston or New York, the awnings still hanging humbly, collecting dust on their Arabic script: FURNITURE, they must have said, and HOUSEHOLD GOODS, PHARMACY, 99 CENT STORE. And then at visible points, under all the awnings, at corners, on street lamps where you could see the bullet holes still, everywhere the cheap xeroxed photos of "martyrs"-holding Kalashnikovs, some of them, with their faces covered in the romantic Hamas style, a kerchief, and a splash of Hamas green when they could afford it-but mostly it was just their ID photos. Martyr, martyr, martyr, said the door shutters and walls and broken street lamps of Jenin.

Really, really, really? said Sam. They were just standing around? And the tanks just shot? It was one thing to read about this in the Nation; Nation; it was one thing to read about it on the it was one thing to read about it on the Ha'aretz Ha'aretz Web site, sitting in Cambridge, in between checking your e-mail. But here in Jenin-come on. Look at Cousin Witold, in his goofy green shorts-true, just now he was avoiding the draft, but there were many like him, in green shorts equally goofy, and Cousin Witold wouldn't just shoot you. He'd shoot you, that is, very accurately, but only, Sam thought, if you'd done something bad. Web site, sitting in Cambridge, in between checking your e-mail. But here in Jenin-come on. Look at Cousin Witold, in his goofy green shorts-true, just now he was avoiding the draft, but there were many like him, in green shorts equally goofy, and Cousin Witold wouldn't just shoot you. He'd shoot you, that is, very accurately, but only, Sam thought, if you'd done something bad.

He checked his e-mail. Katie had been reading up on the machine-gun rounds currently being employed by the Israeli Merkava tanks, and she was very concerned. "The biggest trouble now is the incommensurability of advanced firepower with the still pretty unadvanced state of human skin and bone," she wrote. "A round can go through six or seven people. I think you should stay out of the way. Or put eight or nine people at least between you and the tank. More than that if the people are skinny." Sam smiled at the computer screen-she was so tender now that he was so far away. The oldest paradox. But still. An appointment just then-he had to meet Roger and his sidekick Lukas at the hookah joint-kept him from responding, and anyway it wouldn't do to seem too eager.

In the hookah joint, on the second floor, in a wood-paneled bar that served no alcohol, they ate ice cream and smoked apple tobacco from the water pipe and gazed out over the quiet main intersection of Jenin. Roger explained the symbolic difference between an actual crossroads and a T formation, as here: the head of the T, where they sat, necessarily became a military target. On his way into the bar, Sam had noted the main traffic light leaning against the building in which they now sat, holes from large-caliber rounds all through its long trunk. Cars occasionally pa.s.sed by below, slowing down momentarily out of respect for the traffic signal that once was, then moving on again.

"Now, Gaza," Roger said, filling his lungs expertly from the pipe. "Gaza is much worse."