Yoheved was never as attractive as this Hava, Gershon can admit that, not even when she was that age, which was some time ago. Gershon met Yoheved a couple years after immigrating, when he’d wandered accidentally into a near riot between protesters on the campus of their university, so he knew well what face it was that ended up gently ruined by time and motherhood: the strong jaw, the shrewd eyes, the defiant, almost martial cheekbones, the dirty-blond hair. Yoheved was plenty attractive in her unconventional way back then, but never in this mode of fully realized features, never with that small, tight body, apparent even beneath the modest layers of Hava’s clothing. Yoheved must have hated her, Gershon thinks, hated the insult of her youth. But her internal flinch of disgust would’ve been balanced by the knowledge of the fate she was signing this girl off to, and besides nobody stayed beautiful out here; not with the dry air, the silence, the empty city sucking one’s mien — especially with women — of its marrow. Let her see what comes of beauty, Yoheved would’ve thought, and Gershon’s anger dilates now to take in Yoheved herself, along with Ofer, and even the family of this Hava, for whatever monetary or social disgrace resigned her to him.
They are traveling to the first mourner’s tea of the day, which is in an apartment on New Ben Yehuda Square, and Gershon is driving their exterior terrain vehicle with unnecessary, aggressive speed. Despite this, Hava looks around carefully, her respirator, which she’d tried to put on inside the vehicle before Gershon explained she only needed it outside, forgotten in her lap.
“It’s really eerie, isn’t it,” she says, as if to some absent third person. “I mean, of course they prepare you, but it’s. . it’s completely imaginable, I guess, which is what makes it so odd to actually see, if that makes sense. It’s just so accurate. I mean, it’s real. The same thing. Stone by stone, almost.”
She is talking about the settlers’ city, which Gershon forces himself to see again now, slowing down. Here, in the outskirts which they have been traveling through, the doubling is less noticeable, just as in the real Jerusalem the modern buildings are less distinct, fading in one’s mind to a gaunt blend of cityscape. But they are approaching now the environs of the Old City, or the New Old City, which is what has moved her to speak. Because wasn’t it something to see for the first time this simulacrum of familiar buildings, streets, the pale Jerusalem stone — in the distance the Old City walls so real — and to realize it is not actually a simulacrum but a doubling, an impossible physical recurrence, just unpeopled. It is the first appearance of any inhabitant at all that emphasizes the larger emptiness of the city. As Gershon slows to park on a deserted side street, a little band of four small, dark Palestinian kids rushes around the corner. They begin dancing around the vehicle, goofing off. The youngest one presses his face, shielded by the stolen respirator’s plastic, against the driver’s side window.
They’ve been having this problem lately. The distant Free Territories Settlement was launched two years ago when a vessel financed by Saudi, Arab League, and Red Crescent monies more or less crash-landed in the unoccupied plain out in the unassigned, unclaimed quadrant over the horizon. According to the briefs Gershon received in his office, their supplies, which had been inferior in the first place, were now running out, and this was inspiring many of them to attempt the long trek over to the Israeli settlement. Though it seemed for some reason only the children were making it across.
Gershon looks at the boy’s face, the small hands cupped around the respirator’s shield, trying to see in, and can feel Hava looking too. Everything but the dancing boys is still. Then the boy draws his head away and takes half a step back, turning his face to say something to his friends, and Gershon seizes the opportunity to open the door quickly, thunking the boy’s head hard against its metal. As Gershon gets out and adjusts the rubber rim of his own respirator, the boy staggers into the street, shaking his head like a dazed animal, then disappears around the corner where his friends have already fled. Gershon turns to where Hava is sitting in the vehicle, and waits.
•
In the widow’s apartment, Hava is speaking to the group of women in the living room, suffering their oblique interrogation. Gershon isn’t listening. He’s standing at the window, looking down at New Ben Yehuda Square: deserted, the replica store windows dark, the signs unlit. The most prominent storefront, stretching on two sides of a corner, is Giorgio’s, the famous chain pizza place, its big plate-glass windows smoky at this angle. The tall, old-fashioned stools along its counter, where people back in the real Jerusalem are even now sitting and eating, are made into solemn, shadowy figures.
Gershon was there, maybe a block away, when the Giorgio’s bombing happened, on a dull assignment babysitting a group of American diplomats’ wives and children, showing them the real city. They’d all wanted to eat at the Hard Rock Café: Jerusalem, and Gershon had only just shepherded them out of the restaurant after the meal — they were headed to the market on Ben Yehuda, actually — when there was the concussion of air, the tremendous sundering skirl that seemed to emanate from the very buildings themselves, then the unearthly moments of silence. The first thing Gershon heard: the querulous wail of one of the American kids, a little blond girl, crying, or gearing up to cry. Her mouth was upturned cartoonishly, without thought or understanding, in a way that made Gershon’s sternum ache. Within ten minutes the American security detail for the diplomats’ families had whisked them all away to the safety of the embassy, and Gershon was left there, on the curb, alone. He did not run toward the carnage, as most of the other men on the street did. Instead, he turned and walked all the way home, to his and Yoheved’s apartment at the Jaffa Gate, where Yoheved had locked Shmuli in the bathroom, of all places, for safety.
And Gershon thinks now, as he does consistently when his business in the New Jerusalem brings him to the square, that if he had rushed toward the real Ben Yehuda Square, if he had rushed into the abstracted concrete and savaged urban errata of the bombing, there is a good chance he would’ve seen or ran into the very widow whose apartment he is now standing in. Her, or any of the other mourners who live now above or beside the New Ben Yehuda Square — the recreated, reconstructed site where, all that distance away, their husband, or wife, or child, or whole family bled to death on the concrete, in the road. He doesn’t want to explain this truth about the New Jerusalem settlement to Hava, though she must’ve been briefed. Let someone else tell her about the passenger ships full of those mourners, the way they made their lives as near to the simulacrum locations of their respective violences as possible. Gershon doesn’t want to try to explain to Hava their strange, dissonant belief. This planet, this settlement, this doubled city, where entropy is stalled, reversed.
The women are quieting now, and Hava has started in on some kind of speech, something that sounds prepared. She will announce herself as Gershon’s new wife, and the mourners will make of that what they will. They will understand what it means as well as Gershon does, he suspects, once they discover her lack of a tragic history.
He was initially chosen as the Government Administrator of the Northern Territories for a reason, everyone knows: he was emblematic of the population; he would understand them, would be suited to the diplomatic post; he was already alone. So what it means that they now want him here with a wife — a young wife, and (it is implied, eventually) children — is that the Israeli government is not satisfied with having only a mourners’ colony any longer. The religious settlers (the Israeli Space Administration’s first idea) had been unwilling to come, unwilling to turn away from their divinely mandated, illegal constructions in Gaza and the West Bank. The military could not justify the budget to establish even a minimal presence here. And the original, notional idea that this outpost was built up to be a final resort, a sort of final galactic keep of Jews in case of largest-scale catastrophe, while still popularly held in Israel, is ultimately not enough. What will come — what will soon already be arriving, Gershon knows from the shipment manifest schedules he receives — is business, commerce (and so jobs, money, and people: Israelis sick of Israel, or Olim for whom the land of Israel’s promise has been dwarfed by the greater promise of a new frontier, a bigger adventure). The Giorgio’s below the window where Gershon stands will within two years or so be open, be alive with customers, workers. But so what, he thinks. They reopened the real Giorgio’s in real Ben Yehuda Square a month after the bombing, and there was a line around the block.