"But it does, doesn't it?"
Then, just before Sergei shut off the light, Targov thought he caught a glimpse of a malignant grin.
"I want you to try and understand. We were victims of the apparatus. The men who ran it were evil. They hurt us both, and now we must hurt them back."
Sergei yawned.
"
You've already told me this."
"But I promise you, it will work. I'll be punished for the terrible thing I did, and you'll have the pleasure of wielding the punishing instrument. Then we'll both be free, you from all your bitterness, I from all my guilt. A private matter, strictly between the two of us. As for the rest of the world, they will see something else."
"Yes, of course, the famous émigré artist assassinated beside his sculpture in honor of refusnik Soviet Jews. Who else but the KGB would do such a wicked thing? They'll be hated by everyone. Ridiculed. Despised."
"So you
do
understand."
"Oh, I understand all right. And so what? Two days later no one'll give a shit. Aren't you ashamed, Aleksandr Nicholaivich, to come to me with such a deal? To ask me, of all people, to free you from your pain?"
Now he was confused. The meeting was not going well. He was the famous one, the strong one who'd come from halfway around the world with the startling, original, gorgeously conceived and balanced scheme. But things had gotten mixed up, he had misjudged his old friend's feelings, and now Sergei, nearly blind, had somehow gained the upper hand.
"Don't you wonder how it feels?"
"What?"
"To sit here now across from you."
"I---"
"You know only how
you
feel, Sasha. Don't you wonder what it must feel like to be
me?"
"Yes, of course," Targov said. "Please tell me. I would like to know."
Sergei nodded. "There's an old story by Komroff. A convict is released from prison after many years. As he leaves his guard asks him: 'How does it feel to be free?' The convict goes back into the
world but he doesn't fit in. He becomes eccentric, turns his little room into a jail cell, and begins to collect odd little pieces of wire which he imprisons by twisting them, then stuffing them into a bottle. One day, when the bottle is filled, he decides to break it open. But the pieces of wire don't spring back into shape. Rather they remain twisted, a mass in the shape of their old prison, the bottle, from which, in a certain sense, you could say they were 'released.' "
It was difficult to arrange. Rokovsky had to plead. The director of Mishkenot Sha'ananim had received many odd demands from exalted guests, but a private plane, to fly out over the Negev so that Targov could view an "earthwork" that no one on the staff had even heard about, a plane, moreover, that must actually be able to land on the sand beside the site—this one was quite incredible.
Still, Aleksandr Targov was a sculptor of international repute who had every right to view a piece of contemporary Israeli art no matter how obscure. So—okay. The director would do her best. "Here in Israel we have a motto: Nothing is impossible!"
"While I'm away," he told Rokovsky, "take Irina to him. Leave them alone together, wait outside for her in the car. But check your watch —I want to know how much time she spends."
It had
to mean something. There'd have been no point in creating it if it didn't. Sergei had pointed him toward it, had wanted him to see it. But why? And
what
did it mean?
He had the pilot fly over it several times. The work was huge, its sides a good five hundred meters long. An enormous trapezoid enclosing a circle near its center—it looked exactly as it had in the drawings and photographs, except now there were some craters near the circle.
New embellishments or damage created by the wind? In the latter case, Targov knew, the piece would never last. But perhaps that was the point: It wasn't meant to last, was meant to erode and thereby express the relentless forces of time.
Targov knew about time-dimensional sculpture, but he did not respect it. For him the whole point of a sculpture was that it outlast its maker; art was an act of striving against the certainty of death.
As the pilot made a final pass Targov wondered if the piece might be a kind of signature. Two forms opposed: the sharply angled trapezoid and the smooth-sided circle inside. Sergei's mark, his way of saying: "I lived and one day I was here."
It was hot on the sand. He felt dizzy, nauseous. His eyeballs, shielded by dark glasses, felt as though they were being scorched. The pilot loaned him a hat, handed him a canteen of water, then waited in the plane while he trudged the four outer walls of the enormous thing. It took him nearly thirty minutes to make the march, a tortuous and monotonous inspection that yielded him no new ideas.
Then just as he was about to turn toward the center to inspect the inner circle, he heard a noise, looked up, and saw a lone military jet racing toward him out of the oscillating air. An extraordinary sight because the plane was flying extremely low, perhaps no more than a hundred feet above the sand.
The noise was deafening. He pressed his palms against his ears and flung himself into the deep trench that lined the earthwork's outer wall. He turned onto his back. The plane was a fighter and it was screaming at him. Suddenly it soared up. He watched it, saw it pass directly overhead, plunge down again, then fly off into the haze from which it sent back a terrifying boom.
Ears ringing, Targov rushed back to his own small waiting aircraft.
"To Jerusalem," he yelled at the startled pilot. Then, when they flew over Sergei's earthwork, he looked down upon it a final time. He shook his head, furious with himself that having made such a perilous journey he still could not decipher it.
Irina wanted to fly back to California. That very night if Rokovsky could find her a seat.
"He's
awful,
Sasha. Twisted. A mean little man with nasty empty eyes and terrible stinking breath. To think how all these years I longed to see him. Now I never wish to see him again. Not ennobled either by his tragedy—in fact just the opposite, a deformed old
zek.
So maybe that's the lesson: that in the end we must wear the face of the monster, the one who lives inside."
"You sound more disgusted than heartbroken, Irina."
"I am disgusted. Now I want to go."
"Won't you at least stay for my unveiling?"
She shook her head. "I know you don't want me there. Better to wait for you at home. Our life together could be different now, Sasha. We could change it if we tried. You could give up your girls and I my bitterness. We could forgive each other. If we could do that then maybe some good will have come out of all our pain."
There was
something
about that earthwork, he decided: something tormenting, something not right. It was the one thing about which Sergei had boasted, swinging the bare bulb, then grinning furtively, maliciously, as he'd suddenly switched off the light. He was concealing, or at least pretending to, and, like a damn fool, Targov thought, I was suckered in. I flew out there, thinking I'd discover its meaning at the site, then nearly got mowed down by that hotshot Israeli pilot doing bumpety-bumps in his ear-splitting jet.
But it
did
mean something. Why else would Sergei have designed it? And there was something strange about that too—digging those trenches, creating those walls must have cost a fortune. Who was the sponsor? Who had assigned him such a grand commission? And since when does a trinket carver such as Sergei Sokolov arrive out of the Soviet camps to find Israeli bulldozers ready to execute his "conceptual art"?
It was a task for Rokovsky. Let Tola track the sponsor down. Meantime, now that Irina had left, he would watch Sokolov himself. His old friend, nearly blind, wouldn't even notice that he was there.
"You see, here's where they pried off the lock."
David and Dr. Herman Blumenthal were standing just inside the garage behind Blumenthal's house on Abravanel. David nodded. He could see the chisel marks in the wooden door, could smell a musty odor too, the aroma of old papers, files packed loosely in cartons which, stacked together, filled nearly half the interior space.
"Surely these don't all belong to my father?"
Dr. Blumenthal shook his head. "Some are mine, and some belong to colleagues. Our names are on the cartons. Since I don't own a car and I have this space, it's become a depository for a whole generation of psychoanalysts."
David had always liked Dr. Blumenthal, his father's mentor and oldest friend. With his dancing eyes, kindly features, and wild white curly hair, he looked a little like Albert Einstein without a mustache.
"You weren't here when it happened?"
"Friede and I were visiting our grandchildren in New York. After we came back it was a couple of days before I noticed the hasp had been chiseled loose. The padlock, you see, was still intact. I was in the process of unlocking it when the assembly fell out of the door. Then, when I looked inside—a terrible mess, papers scattered everywhere. I called all concerned. We spent a weekend sorting things out. None of us could find anything missing so I didn't bother to report it. That's why I was so surprised when you told me what your father said."
"Surely you've noticed how strange he's become?"
"Yes, of course. Everybody has. But the change in his interests may not be as bizarre as people think. Kabbalah, after all, is based on the belief that one can attain great illumination about the nature of God by exploring deeply within. I wonder if the process is so different, really, than exploring the unconscious through free associations and dreams."
"Still...."
"I know. In the year and a half since Gideon died.... But you say it was Gideon's file that was taken?" Dr. Blumenthal shook his head, perplexed. "I had my own file on him. I wonder...." He moved toward a stack of cartons, removed one, and began prowling through the one beneath.
"You
had a file on Gideon?"
The doctor nodded. "For a while he came to me professionally." He glanced up at David. "Nothing strange in that. One never treats one's own child. If one of our children needed help we'd send him to a colleague. A great honor to the person, a gift of trust. I sent my own daughter to Avraham. And he... but I'd have thought...."
"No," David said, "I was never sent to anyone."
"
Ah, here it is." The doctor extracted an old-fashioned marbled cardboard folder tied together with string. "But now, David, you must tell me what this is all about. Otherwise, even though he's dead, I can't...."
"Yes, I understand."
As they walked back to the house, the old man put his hand on David's arm. "You were upset back there. I noticed. Perhaps for a moment even a little depressed. But you shouldn't have been. If your father didn't send
you
to one
of us
for treatment that only means he didn't think you needed it. To feel badly about that would be the same as feeling jealous because your brother got extra attention when he had the misfortune to break his leg."
The interior of the house was dark, furnished with heavy
German pieces from the 1930s. After David explained why he was so curious about Gideon—his father's cryptic comments and the strange fact that the psychological portions in Gideon's medical folder were now missing from the central files of the IDF—Dr. Blumenthal agreed to speak freely of what he knew.
"I didn't see him often. Perhaps two dozen times over the years. In no sense was he in treatment; we would just meet occasionally to talk." He untied the dossier, quickly reviewed the papers inside. "Most of these visits were during his adolescence. He had the typical troubles of a boy that age—self-image, sexual identity, some special problems having to do with your mother, and also a rather well-defined self-destructive streak. Later in his twenties he came to see me four times. He feared that he was homosexual. He found himself attracted to other men, but he resisted these feelings and wanted to be cured. We discussed his undergoing regular therapy, but he said this wasn't feasible. If the Air Force found out he'd be finished as a pilot, and he loved flying; he couldn't bear to give it up. I tried hard to reassure him. He was, you see, attracted to women too. But because of his great physical beauty men approached him frequently, and when they did their longing for him had the effect of arousing him as well. That, I think, was his problem. We're all bisexual to a certain degree. But his very attractiveness, which you probably envied as an advantage, became a kind of curse. Every time someone made an advance it only emphasized his ambiguity. Had he been less beautiful he would have been left alone, and thus better able to combat the sexual feelings he despised."
Dr. Blumenthal consulted his dossier again. "The last time he came to me was a few months before he crashed. I remember he was very troubled. In 1981 he had flown an important mission. Perhaps you didn't know this—he was one of the sixteen pilots who flew Operation Babylon."
David was surprised. The brilliantly executed surgical strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor ranked with the most daring exploits of the Israeli Air Force.