We drove to Bellen’s childhood neighborhood, a working-class district called Hatikvah on the other side of Tel Aviv’s main highway where the streets get narrower and closer together. Low rectangular buildings of gray concrete led into empty lanes. Shop fronts, faded awnings, dumpsters, trees like thin misplaced weeds. In Hatikvah, Voss told me, Bellen’s father had sold produce in the market stalls, a Galician refugee in a district largely populated by dark-skinned Jews from Arab countries, Mizrahim. More to the point, Voss explained, Hatikvah was a center of organized crime, as it still is. I was relieved to learn that this was what Voss had been afraid to show me, why he had disappeared. Israel has already had its share of bad press. He was trusting me not to senselessly add to the noise.
We parked off Etzel Street, the setting of Bellen’s poem about the famous gangster Yehezkel Aslan, the one “who nine bullets before had survived.” Two old men sat outside at a plastic table with coffee and cigarettes as if they’d been sitting there all morning and would sit there tomorrow and every day thereafter. One was toothless and wore a stocking cap. The other was robust, potbellied, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a white undershirt beneath. They looked like figures in an Ivan Schwebel painting, except they had dark skin — I thought they were Arabs but Voss made it clear to me that they were Jews. He did this by translating some graffiti on a phone booth nearby. There will be peace when the last Arab is dead.
We met a man whose name I can’t give. What I can say is that he was in his midsixties, a white-haired man with thick eyebrows and dark skin, an Iraqi Jew, like the famous Aslan. It struck me that, like Bellen’s son, Eliav, this man had an affection for the hand-shaped amulets called hamsas. They were all over the walls of his office, along with portraits of a Sephardic holy man with a narrow wizened face, a gray beard, a scarf covering his head like a shawl — a man whose beatific strangeness reminded me of a Sufi mystic or a fundamentalist mullah. Voss introduced me as the American journalist writing about David Bellen. The man nodded his understanding. We sat down and a boy in a green Adidas tracksuit served us pastries and black coffee. He stood in the corner of the room and watched me mostly, his hands balled in front of his waist, a gold rope chain around his neck. Moroccan-sounding music played from a radio. The room was hot and flies alighted on the sticky plastic tablecloth. The coffee came in tiny gilt-edged cups rich with Arabic-looking ornament. I understood that whatever I thought of as a “Jew” was now so broad a concept as to be meaningless.
“He and Bellen were boyhood friends,” Voss explained to me. “Friends until they were about nine or ten, then there was a drifting apart.”
The man told an odd story about a birthday party Bellen’s parents had given for their son when the man and Bellen were growing up. It wouldn’t have been much, the man said — maybe a small cake, maybe just some watermelon. It wouldn’t have been much, but for the man’s parents it was “like they were inviting me to a brothel.” I couldn’t quite understand what this meant — it had something to do with his parents’ indigence, their pride in the face of what they perceived as the Bellens’ softness. The man left school to sell laundry soap in the market. He made his money now as a loan shark.
“When was the last time you saw Bellen?” I asked.
Voss translated and the man shook his head briefly and didn’t answer. I asked him if he had read Bellen’s poetry and instead of answering the man spat on the floor. It was not easy as a woman or an American to press him further and I began to resent Voss a little, for though he was helping me he was also inevitably policing the conversation.
“I felt very bad about what happened to him,” the man said. “He was like a child — even as a sixty-five-year-old man he was like a child. To go as far away from this place as he did and then to write that book. Writing nonsense about this world he knew nothing about. Only a child would do something like that.”
18) THE FIRST LEBANON WAR
After this meeting, I asked Voss a question I shouldn’t have asked, a question that emerged spontaneously in a larger conversation about the history of violence that seemed to surround us everywhere. We were at a restaurant on Etzel Street, the famous steakhouse that had been owned by Yehezkel Aslan, the “King” in Bellen’s poems. On the walls were signed photographs of Israeli actors and politicians, athletes, journalists. Yehezkel Aslan had run an international gambling empire worth millions of dollars, financed by loan sharking and heroin. In 1993, he was murdered outside the Pisces restaurant after surviving nine bullets to the face some years earlier. A thousand people came to his funeral. He was a folk hero, a supporter of youth athletic teams and the builder of a drug rehab center for the very addicts he had helped supply. A figure out of mythology, like King David or Tony Montana, only real.
I asked the question I shouldn’t have asked, and Voss said yes, he had killed someone, he had been in a war. When I asked him to tell me the circumstances, he shook his head.
“I don’t talk about that,” he said. “Why would you want to talk about it?”
“Eliav Bellen said that his father thought everything was doomed. I wonder what you think about that.”
“Eliav was talking about himself. Not his father.”
“I’m asking about you.”
“David Bellen didn’t write poems because he thought everything was doomed.”
“And what about you?”
“I live here. I don’t think everything is doomed either.”
We asked our waiter if he had ever heard of David Bellen. The waiter told us yes, David Bellen had eaten here every few weeks right up to his death.
“He liked to have lunch here and then he would walk around the neighborhood, the market,” he said. “Most people didn’t know who he was. He was very quiet, almost invisible. He didn’t want us to put his picture on the wall.”
19) A SUICIDE
Voss had brought a small suitcase this time with a few changes of clothes. We went swimming in the Mediterranean and then sat beneath an orange umbrella on rented chairs and I drank a Gold Star beer and Voss drank a club soda with a certain amount of rue. He told me about an Arab friend he’d had during his twenties when he’d lived here in Tel Aviv. It was after the war, and he and the friend had shared a bright cynicism toward anything more serious than what we saw before us now — people swimming, people laughing and smoking and having picnics on the sand. Lots of drinking, lots of drugs, lots of girls. The friend owned horses now, which he kept stabled in the Galilee. He drove a cab and had a wife and three kids, and he and his brother bred Arabian stallions for the track. He and Voss both lived in Jerusalem now, but they never saw each other. They hadn’t spoken in years. It was not because of politics, but because “Ali is still married and I’m not.”
I told Voss a story about an Arab cabdriver I’d had on my way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. On the way is a town called Abu Ghosh which is famous for its hummus. I asked the driver about why the hummus was so famous and he looked at me in silence. It turned out that he thought I was asking about Hamas, not hummus. Eventually we laughed. Voss laughed a little when I told him this story. We went back in the water and I thought everything between us was fine. He put his hands on my hips and I floated.
In my room, I had drawn the sheer curtain which let some sunlight come in — the other choice was total darkness. I don’t talk about that. Why would you want to talk about it? The room was beige and clean and smelled like the salt water on our towels. Voss couldn’t concentrate. I tried to help him. It was when I moved down his stomach that it happened. It happened so quickly that I thought something had been shot through the window.