How did she go along with such a thing? What is Gershon talking about, go along with—she came up with it in the first place. It was her own literally incredible idea. Like it would be hard to find some young, unknown documentary filmmaker ready to eat the story up, to do exactly what she said. For a while, Gershon was convinced it was the idea of her therapist, whom he’d always mistrusted, but watching the actual documentary, watching interview after interview, his wife moving closer and closer to the epicenter of the trauma, unflinching, her manner in the interviews so assured it was almost self-satisfied, he knew, finally, that it was all her doing. First the military commander, then the soldier who’d called the disturbance in, then the Palestinian mother who’d excitedly sent her son to join the fray. On and on and on, the interviews. No, only Yoheved herself could realize such horrible will.
“So where’s your monument here,” Hava says to Mendelbaum, meaning to ask, Gershon guesses, where it is his daughter died, back in the world.
For the first time, Mendelbaum looks away.
“Well, you know, a park in Haifa. It could’ve been anywhere, really.”
Hava nods thoughtfully, leaning forward. She cups her hands around her empty glass. She looks up and regards Gershon, her face empty.
“And where’s yours, then?” she says.
What does she want him to say? There is no analog really, no simulacrum. That, or they drove through it to get here. But she knows that. I’ve seen the documentary. Mendelbaum is looking at Gershon quizzically.
Her face is even, patient. The quiet aggression of the question takes him aback. What does she want him to say?
My wife was visiting her brother in Ma’ale Adumim, in the West Bank, she wants him to say. Yoheved wanted him to say this for the documentary, for the camera. My wife’s brother was driving with her to a nearby settlement for a wedding. Our son Shmuli was in the back seat. He was two years old.
Hava must think this is some exercise; maybe they’ve briefed her for this, for the recovery into new marriage of a man in grief. But she doesn’t understand. He could say what she wants, but she wouldn’t understand the flatness in his voice. He has no trouble saying it.
Midway between the two settlements, in the darkness, they heard something hit the car, or the car hit something, and though they’d been warned not to, they stopped. Apparently my wife Yoheved made her brother stop the car. She believed, in error, that they’d somehow hit a child walking in the dark.
But the affectless voice is what she wants, isn’t it? His pretension of having confronted the trauma, the loss — just another kind of repression, Hava’s handlers would have told her. “It’s just another kind of repression,” Yoheved said to him in her steely voice, during one of their many fights about the documentary, “but it’s worse because it’s willful.”
As they searched the shoulders of the road for the injured child, a small crowd from the nearby village gathered. My wife’s brother, who spoke good Arabic, made the mistake of trying to explain. Men in the crowd began to shout and cry out about a child struck and killed, and the crowd grew.
She couldn’t think he would say this, not on camera, not even now, in Mendelbaum’s living room. By that point, Yoheved had turned their apartment into a jungle of her beloved houseplants, though. “Doing these interviews,” Gershon had screamed back, staring into the leaves and tendrils of green, though he had seen none of the footage yet and did not know what she was saying in it, “that’s what’s willful repression! Repression by force!”
Later, the official investigation, aided by informants, would discover that a good deal of the agitation was accomplished by a small core of men, which group had thrown the large rock at the passing car, creating the illusion of impact in the first place.
“My monument?” Gershon says now, out loud.
Hava’s face is changing, she looks confused. Mendelbaum is looking at her now.
Gershon could say it, if he wanted to.
People in the crowd, which was by now a mob, grabbed my wife’s brother. Then they grabbed my wife. Someone was shouting about them being Israeli spies, my wife’s brother managed to tell her, but then they were beating him. Spies? my wife shouted uselessly, in Hebrew. Spies? Spies? An unknown member of the band of men stepped forward as my wife’s brother was dragged out of sight.
“You haven’t told her, then?” Mendelbaum says to Gershon.
Gershon feels very tired. He sets down his drink. When Yoheved gave him the rough cut of the documentary to watch, she’d left the apartment to give him privacy. “I want to talk about it when I get back,” she said. “I’ll be home in two hours.” He’d watched the first few interviews, then digitally skipped ahead to the last one, the only one that really mattered. When she came back, he was gone.
“They beat my wife’s brother with their fists and feet, and then beat him to death with stones until his head caved in,” he says, looking at Hava. “Somebody stepped forward out of the crowd and threw a Molotov cocktail into the car. I don’t know whether they knew Shmuli was in there, strapped in his car seat. I don’t know if they saw him. He was burned alive in the car. While this was happening, they dragged my wife Yoheved away into a building where she was beaten and violently raped, repeatedly. Thirty-two hours later, when the IDF moved in, they found her there, barely alive. So I don’t have a monument here, I guess.”
Hava is sitting very still, her eyes unblinking. She looks ill.
“But then you knew all that,” Gershon says. “You’ve seen the documentary.”
There’s a pause.
“The foundation documentary,” she says quietly. “Ad Astra Per Aspera. About the first settlers here.”
Mendelbaum rubs his eyes.
•
Outside the low-slung house, Gershon hurriedly resecures the crate of sweetbread to the cargo rack on the back of the vehicle. He has been spun into a stunned silence at his own mistake. He hops down and waves once more goodbye to Mendelbaum.
His friend is standing at the window of the house, watching Gershon get into the vehicle and prepare to leave. Gershon was undecided for weeks as to whether or not to come and speak to Mendelbaum about the tiny line item, the request for one more kind of seed in the customs and horticulture delivery invoice, which Gershon came across purely by accident.
But on this visit, before coming out to the car to leave, Gershon went through into the greenhouse, Mendelbaum explaining to teary Hava back in the living room that he and Gershon were going to pick out some of his synthetic produce to take back with them, it’d just be a few minutes.
Mendelbaum had found Gershon standing in front of the plant, its droopy flowers a brilliant, unbelievable purple.
“That color,” Gershon said, not looking at him. “That color is just. .”
Mendelbaum stepped around him and lightly touched a few of the petals.
“I didn’t think it would actually look like a monk’s hood,” Gershon said, his voice skating as he looked at his friend.
“This,” Mendelbaum said, holding one of the bulbs delicately between two fingers, “is only one tiny mutation away from being a tomatillo. Can you believe that?”
Neither man said anything, both looking at the plant. Gershon could stop this, they both knew, could stop Mendelbaum from harvesting the rare plant, from poisoning himself with it. But Gershon knew he wasn’t going to impede Mendelbaum, had always known the appalling mercy he was capable of, and now Mendelbaum knew it too.