All I Love and Know (50 page)

He heard the moan of the elevator door and a bustle and a knock. When he opened the door Gal burst in, excitedly spinning her noisemaker, which made a hideous noise indeed. “I saw a person throwing up on the sidewalk, and Savta said he was drunk!” she said. “And every time they said the word
Haman
, everybody made all this noise!”

“Awesome,” Daniel said mildly, smiling at Malka, who'd come in with her as Yaakov wrestled the stroller, with a sleeping Noam, out of the elevator.

Gal pirouetted on the point of her sneaker, and Malka shushed her as Daniel stooped to unbuckle Noam's straps, picked him up and put him on his shoulder, and took him to his crib, where he dumped him as gracefully as he could, then leaned over to take off his shoes with stealthy fingers. Malka came in and looked over his shoulder. “Did you change him?” Daniel whispered.

“Yes, right before we put him in the car.” She kissed her fingers and touched them softly to the baby's cheek.

They went back into the hallway, where Yaakov was standing with his hands in his pocket, watching Gal twirl. “Because that's what happens when you drink too much,” she was saying. “Does beer make you throw up? Does wine make you throw up? Does . . . whiskey make you throw up?”

“Everything can make you throw up if you drink too much of it,” Yaakov said.

“Even Coke?”

“No, no, just alcohol.”

“Oh.” She stopped moving and staggered over to her grandfather, collapsed against his legs. “Dizzy!” She laughed.

The three adults stood with indulgent smiles in the austere hallway, patches and holes here and there in the white walls where they'd taken down pictures to bring to Daniel's house or to the grandparents'. They were more relaxed on their home turf, Daniel thought, and Matt's absence probably helped as well.

Gal was still chirping when he helped her get into pajamas and brush her teeth. The women had had to sit separately from the men, she told him, but when you thought about it, on Purim, how would you even know? “Maybe a woman would dress up as a man so she could sit in the front of the
bet knesset
!” she said with a spray of toothpaste. “Maybe there was a man sitting back there with us, and we just couldn't tell! Wouldn't that be funny, Dani?”

“Funny,” he said. He hadn't seen her so cheerful and relaxed in ages.

She spat into the sink and studied the string of saliva and toothpaste with interest, then swiped her mouth hard with her pajama sleeve. What a little savage, Daniel thought. He could just see her whirling that noisemaker in shul, eyes bright and teeth bared.

DURING THE DAYS WHEN
the children were at their grandparents', Daniel spent the mornings working from home, corresponding with his staff via email. In the afternoons he took long walks, out from their neighborhood, past the playgrounds and the newer, smoother-hewn buildings of Yefe Nof. The almond trees were just starting to blossom, and from hillside lots he caught the scents of sage and rosemary just as they vanished. Above him, from apartment balconies, came the sounds of swishing mops and the thuds of women beating carpets. In the Jerusalem Forest, the paths were knobby and spongy from pine needles, and the treetops shifted against the swift-moving clouds.

He took Gal and Noam to dinner at Gabrielle and Moti's house, staying past the kids' bedtimes as they played Hearts, the adults sipping a sweet aperitif, Leora and Gal solemn with importance to be playing with the grown-ups, growling and slapping Moti away as he tried to coach them. He went to the
Israel Today
studio, where editors and soundpeople racing from one room to another with headphones on and clipboards in their hands lurched to a stop, clutched their hearts, and grasped his hand, asked him about the children before looking at their watches with alarm and rushing off. Rotem, Joel's old producer, ushered him into the new editing room with its state-of-the-art console, its plush, ergonomic chairs, and a small gleaming plaque on the door, dedicating it to Joel's memory. He was introduced to Joel's replacement, Mark Weitzman, a broad-faced, telegenic fellow who'd been a reporter for the
Hartford Courant
before making
aliyah
, who gripped Daniel's shoulder and said rather theatrically that he could only hope to live up to Joel's example as a journalist and as a human being.

He contacted Debra Frankel and she invited him over to her Gilo apartment for coffee. Her study was lined with titles in English, Hebrew, and Arabic; policy papers were heaped and scattered chaotically across her desk. She gave him thick Turkish coffee with cardamom whose grounds he tongued off his palate, and they were interrupted several times by excitable, brown-skinned sons wearing soccer clothes. Debra worked for a nonprofit that worked on fair labor rights for the large migrant population that had come to Israel in recent years. When Daniel told her he worked as the editor of a college alumni magazine, she said, “Huh!” And then: “You know, I always imagined you'd do something bigger than that. You were such a good writer. Remember
Rags and Bones
?” That had been the name of a campus literary magazine, not the official one, but the more edgy one he and some of his friends had launched. “I always went straight to your stories first. Remember the one where the grandfather is buying a boy his first expensive violin?” Debra was smiling and musing, coffee glass suspended in her hand. “They're all on display in cases in this shop where you have to have an appointment to get in, and the boy is trying them out. Your description of the differences in tone quality was so amazing. I've never looked at violins the same way since. And I remember thinking I'd kill to be able to write like that.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, remembering that story, remembering how in the fiction-writing workshop he was taking, the professor had loved that part too, but pressed him to create a stronger conflict. She'd told the class that being conflict-averse might be a workable life strategy for some of them, but that it would not help them in fiction; and he'd sat there for the rest of the class wondering if he was conflict-averse. He was shocked and flattered that Debra remembered the story all these years later. And at the same time, a little irritated: Who was she to comment on his life?

As he was leaving, Debra said, “If you wanted to come work for us, I could probably make that happen.” The editor of their newsletter and promotional materials had just left for another job. He thought about that on the bus ride home as he wedged past women with babushkas and men with briefcases and soldiers with traces of acne, whose weapons were propped against their thighs, and dropped hard into a seat in the back. When a pregnant woman approached, the handles of her straining shopping bag digging into white, puffy fingers, he stood to offer her his seat and leaned against a pole. He didn't know whether the job offer was serious, or just impulsive: he thought their Oberlin connection might have made Debra assume she knew more about him than she really did, and want to help him more than she was actually able. Surely there were people who worked in the nonprofit world who were more qualified than he was.

One chilly afternoon, when the sun started to glint through after a rainy morning, he walked into town to see the Peace Train Café. He'd been putting it off for days, but had decided by this point that he'd regret not going more than he dreaded going. It was rebuilt now, a slender Ethiopian guard with a rifle and a yellow vest at the door, the memorial plaque screwed into the stone facing. He stepped around a man in a white oxford,
tzitziot
dangling from his pants and a cell phone plastered to his ear, and suddenly remembered a moment with Joel from his last visit before Joel died: They'd gone to the hospital to visit a friend of Joel's who'd just had a baby, and because it was after hours—Joel had had to work late—they exited through the emergency room. There they saw a man, bloodied, clothes shredded, being rushed into the ER on a stretcher by the EMTs, one trotting alongside him holding his wrapped arm and an IV bag, another leaning over him pumping his chest, the doors sliding open with pneumatic alacrity, the ambulance light whirling in the dark. And the patient was talking on his cell phone. They'd marched out into the parking lot, turned toward each other, and died laughing.

He approached the plaque, found Joel's and Ilana's names on the white, dappled marble, ran his fingers over the elegant etched Hebrew letters. He didn't go inside; he didn't want to see the reconstructed, bustling space, the shiny state-of-the-art espresso machines. Instead he walked over to the café he'd gone to with Matt the time they visited the bombed-out site a year ago. He ordered a cappuccino and took it outside onto the flagstone terrace, wiped the wetness off an iron chair with a fistful of napkins, and sat in that viny, cultivated space, chilly and a little weepy and thinking the whole time that he ought to go sit inside. The coffee's warm foam brushed his lips, and he thought about how they'd sat at that table over there, Matt gazing moistly into his face. He remembered the clench in his stomach and shoulders, the cramp in his very soul. For some reason, it was so much easier to
feel
now. This whole crappy, horrific year, his insides had felt like a carnival, all garish lights and noise, whirling, grotesquery, nausea. Now the carnival had left town, the sawdust had been wetted and raked, and the wind blew clean and sharp through the abandoned stables and arenas.

It made him wonder whether he should just take the kids and move to Israel. He was surprised at how much he felt okay about being here, around Joel's friends and even Ilana's parents. The sheer beauty of the city was a source of constant pleasure. Matt had been the major impediment before now. A flood of memory came rushing at him—the two of them sitting on the floor, Matt convincing him to go back to the States to honor Ilana's wishes. The rawness of his eyes and nostrils from crying, the chasm that had broken open in him at the prospect of leaving Joel behind, Matt's panicky face and his fingers brushing Daniel's cheek, their hands clutching. It had seemed at that moment that he was being forced to choose between Joel and Matt.

He noticed that the sweat had dried on his back, and that he was shivering. He drained his coffee and brought the cup inside, and when he went back onto the street, he felt too tired to walk home and hailed a cab instead.

That night, the kids sleeping and the house quiet, he lay in bed, warm under the covers, his nose cold from the night air coming through the cracked-open window. He heard a car door shut and an engine sputter to life. The idea of moving the kids back to Israel was taking root in him. He thought of Noam, drowsy on Gabrielle's shoulder as she absently brushed her cheek against his hair. He was picking up some Hebrew—
sheli
, mine;
od pa'am
, again. Was it Daniel's imagination that he was learning it more quickly than English? And he thought about Gal hopping up and down with plans and ideas like a regular kid. Why couldn't he just stay here, where they clearly thrived, and where he could magically make an elderly couple happy? If four people—four devastated people—could be made happier by his moving to Israel, wasn't it his obligation to do so?

He wasn't forgetting Ilana's wish that they be taken away from Israel. But maybe, he thought, his thoughts moving gently and clearly, Ilana hadn't made the best decision; maybe her background had made her more punitive toward her parents than wise about her kids' futures. And he didn't have control over the whole geopolitical nightmare here. He didn't. What he had control over was one small piece of the world, four people, and he could make their lives better. That seemed incontrovertible.

He should stay: the thought jolted him awake, and he remained awake for much of the night, thinking. They would return to the U.S. so he could quit his job and discharge his obligations there, and put his house on the market. His mind spun around a thousand details: the furniture, much of which was Matt's, what his boss and colleagues would say, Gal's school. His parents: he was scared to tell them. He wished he had someone besides Debra to talk to about it all. He didn't want to raise hopes when the prospect of moving was so daunting, or to be persuaded out of it, which he thought he might be if he talked to Derrick. He would miss Derrick! The thought came with a stab.

He rose the next morning exhausted, and over the next few days he went about his business imagining that he lived in this city, in this apartment. He went to the offices of Debra Frankel's nonprofit and applied for a job, and over coffee they talked about the politics of migrant labor in a country with many thousands of unemployed and immobilized Palestinians. He asked her if she didn't think the migrants were like scab labor. Her position was: perhaps, but they're here, and if they're here, I can help protect their basic rights. And that felt right to him, or right enough.

THE AIR COOLED GAL'S
clammy hand as Daniel released it to open his backpack for the soldier at the entrance to the Machane Yehuda market. It was an early Friday afternoon, three hours or so before the start of Shabbat, and a fog of bad mood, of sadness churning into anger, hung over her. Daniel had just picked her up at Leora's house. The soldier returned Daniel's backpack and Daniel zipped it up and slung it over his shoulder.

As they stepped into the market, the sun was abruptly cut off and they were engulfed by a wave of color and noise. She used to come there with Abba on Friday afternoons, and before coming back, she hadn't been able to remember those trips anymore. She just knew they'd taken them, because the story was told so often, and because she'd been quizzed on it.
What did he buy you there, Gal-Gal, do you remember?
Half a falafel. And we'd split a can of Coke.
But now, taking in the market smell of cigarette smoke and citrus and roasted nuts and spices, she remembered again. Ahead of her, legs shuffled impatiently behind other legs and swinging plastic shopping baskets; to the sides were stalls with colorful and bountiful displays of fruits and vegetables, nuts, candy, presided over by brusque brown-skinned men who threw bags of produce onto scales and held out their fingers, cupped and upside down, waiting to drop change into customers' hands. She remembered holding her father's hand as he steered them through the crowd, as she held Daniel's now; she felt the combative jostle of shoppers and the small dirty boys on errands running against the tide; the taste of grapes came to her lips, and she remembered taking them out of the bag in Abba's shopping basket—one, two, three off the stems without him noticing—and feeling the dry, dusty unwashed outsides with her tongue and then the sweet spurt of juice. For a moment she was back in her old life, with her father. She always looked forward to going, but the feeling of being overwhelmed and a little scared when she was actually there was familiar to her, too. There were times when they didn't go to the
shuk
at all, because the Arabs put bombs there that killed people.