I lay with my hand pressed to the side of my mouth, my lip and the inside of my cheek bleeding. My jaw rang. I don’t think Voss knew what he’d done. He turned on his side and grasped both my wrists in his hands. “Bad luck,” he said. “You can put this in the piece too.” He was holding my wrists very tightly, a blank anger in his eyes, which seemed unseeing. I don’t know why, but I thought of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. We had driven there, I and the tourists and the driver with the cell phone that played “Careless Whisper.” It was a dim place hung with censers and shabby brass lamps. I waited in line to see the manger, but the crowd was so thick that I hardly bothered to crouch down and peer into what was nothing more than a little shelf in the stone.
He brought his hand to my face and wiped my lip and I didn’t know if he was going to hit me again or not. I could see that he didn’t know either.
20) KILLING TIME
I went for a long walk up Rothschild Boulevard the next morning, then I took a taxi back to Jerusalem. I had two days left before my flight home. The driver wondered why I had never been to Israel before. He asked if I’d been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, and when I told him no he insisted that I should see it. Perhaps the reason I have never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew is that all roads seem to lead to the Holocaust memorial, as if it is the Holocaust that makes one a Jew. I knew I would not be seeing Voss here again. Perhaps that’s why I ended up going to Yad Vashem that day.
Adolf Eichmann remembers: The truck was making for an open ditch, the doors were opened, and the corpses were thrown out, as though they were still alive, so smooth were their limbs. They were hurled into the ditch, and I can still see a civilian extracting the teeth with tooth pliers.
The tooth pliers bring it into focus. At Yad Vashem, what brought it into focus was a chart displaying locks of human hair. They illustrated the decadence in color gradations from Aryan gold to Semitic brown. I watched a video of Hitler giving a speech to a hall full of adulators. I watched a video of limp corpses being bulldozed into a trench. Black walls enclosed everything at harsh diagonals. I thought, this place has to exist but I don’t know what good it can possibly do. I went into a circular room with hundreds of black phone books full of names of the dead. A girl tourist walked around in a wet-eyed angry daze. I don’t cry very much. I cried when I saw her.
21) ECSTASY
There is a strange scene in the Bible when Saul, David’s predecessor as king, is pursuing David through the wilderness, trying to kill him. Saul learns that David is in a village called Naioth with the prophet Samuel. “And Saul sent messengers to take David, and they saw a band of prophets in ecstasy with Samuel standing poised over them, and the spirit of God came upon Saul’s messengers and they, too, went into ecstasy.” Saul dispatches more messengers, and they go into ecstasy. A third band is sent and they also go into ecstasy. It is unclear what it means to be “in ecstasy.” Finally Saul himself goes to Naioth and he “walked along speaking in ecstasy… and he, too, stripped off his clothes, and he, too, went into ecstasy before Samuel and lay naked all that day and all that night.”
In one of Ivan Schwebel’s paintings, David is dancing on a railway platform where cars are being loaded for transport to Auschwitz. He is naked, dancing in ecstasy. I wish I could talk to Voss about this. I would have liked to tell him that I think one of the points of Bellen’s book is that David was Yehezkel Aslan and he was Tony Montana, but he was also “one who wrestles with God.” To be that alive is to consume everything, even Auschwitz, and it is also to send for Bathsheba, simply because you can. Three thousand years ago, David, according to the tradition, was the poet who wrote the Psalms. Even if you can’t believe that someone named David literally wrote the Psalms, the fact is that someone wrote them. I wonder if anyone in the world now is writing words of such resonance.
22) NOT THAT KIND OF PIECE
… by returning to that neighborhood, Bellen was offering himself up. He thought he could escape and be a prize-winning poet and this would somehow change things, but of course it didn’t. It didn’t change anything, so he came back in defeat. Drawn back to the place that never cared if he escaped or not. He arranges a deal — his letters and papers, worth more when he’s dead, sold through someone who could get their full worth, someone from his old neighborhood. Proceeds will go to the useless son. The son has no idea about any of this. Any number of scenarios after that. Maybe Bellen’s broker/collaborator is so disgusted by the idea of Bellen contemplating all this that he kills Bellen himself, just because he can. Maybe that was somehow implied in their conversation all along. Maybe Bellen killed himself. Maybe they drove him to Beit Sahour and let him blow his own brains out behind a construction site. Maybe they let him do it in Tel Aviv. The people I’m talking about can arrange these things anywhere. They hate the Arabs but they also work with the Arabs. Was it Bellen’s inspiration or theirs to dump the body in Beit Sahour?
I can’t say for certain who sent me this e-mail, which came from a strange address, though of course I have a guess. I haven’t heard again from Voss in the eight months since my return to New York.
23) THE CITY OF DAVID
Just before I left for Israel last May, the New York Times ran a piece about the City of David, a joint effort between the Israeli government and a private group called Ir David to turn this section of Jerusalem into a tourist zone based on the premise that it is the “ancient ridge where King David is said to have conquered an existing stronghold and laid the foundations of Jewish Jerusalem 3,000 years ago.” The article reported that “garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views.” The piece also discussed the removal of Palestinians who live in the area, an impoverished district called Silwan, in order to create, in the words of a peace activist, “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” A picture emerged in the article of a project combining gentrification, tourism, and archaeology as a means of making it “harder than ever to divide Jerusalem as part of a two-state solution.”
The site was partly open during my trip. There was a courtyard full of Israelis singing loud songs in Hebrew, a beautiful girl soldier with a machine gun. On the road that led to the ticket booth, a wall had been erected to screen out the ongoing construction in Silwan. Painted on the wall was a cheerful mural showing a father and son riding the two-wheeled motorized scooters called Segways, a view of the Old City behind them.
You buy your ticket and walk down steep stairs through the archaeological excavation — cisterns and baths made of quarried stone. At the bottom is the entrance to Hezekiah’s Tunnel, an underground passage that leads to the biblical Pool of Siloam, the source of ancient Jerusalem’s water ever since the days of the Jebusites. Your admission fee buys you a tiny LED flashlight the size of a quarter. For whatever reason, I was the only one there that morning. The water at the mouth of the tunnel rushed so quickly over the slick stones that it seemed dangerous, even impassable, and I hesitated for a while before wading in up to my knees and proceeding slowly forward into the entrance. The tunnel is 500 meters long but it feels much longer once you’re inside it. It makes a sharp left turn and then it’s absolutely pitch dark inside. In 700 BC, King Hezekiah’s engineers began digging at either side of the cavern and managed somehow to meet in the middle — with the aid of the flashlight you can still see the marks of their tools. Someone yodeled in the distance far behind me. I kept walking, the walls hardly much wider than the width of my body and the ceiling so low I had to crouch. I felt that if my flashlight went out or I dropped it, I would be lost there for a long time. The water rushed at my ankles and the way ahead got narrower and more jagged. In a tunnel that narrow, you can’t turn around because you can’t pass anyone coming the other way. You have to walk to the end. The yodeling was muffled and eerie. The darkness was so total that it made no difference if you closed your eyes or opened them. I turned off my flashlight for a moment and stood there taking it in.