The Counterlife (12 page)

“And yet my little brother likes him.”

“Ask your little brother, then, ‘What are the consequences of this delightful man?' The destruction of the country! Who comes to this country now to settle and live? The intellectual Jew? The humane Jew? The beautiful Jew? No, not the Jew from Buenos Aires, or Rio, or Manhattan. The ones who come from America are either religious or crazy or both. This place has become the American-Jewish Australia. Now who we get is the Oriental Jew and the Russian Jew and the social misfits like your brother, roughnecks in yarmulkes from Brooklyn.”

“My brother's from suburban New Jersey. You couldn't possibly describe him as a misfit. The problem that brought him here may have been the opposite: he fit all too well into his comfortable existence.”

“So what did he come for? The pressure? The tensions? The problems? The danger? Then he's really meshugge. You're the only smart one—you, of all people, are the only normal Jew, living in London with an English Gentile wife and thinking you won't even bother to circumcise your son. You, who say, I live in this time, I live in this world, and out of that I form my life. This, you understand, was supposed to be the place where to become a normal Jew was the
goal.
Instead we have become the Jewish obsessional prison par excellence! Instead it has become the breeding ground for every brand of madness that Jewish genius can devise!”

It was dusk when we started back to the car. Waiting there with his wife and his little child was a darkish, strongly built man in his early thirties, crisply dressed in pale slacks and a white short-sleeve shirt. It seemed that Shuki, by angling the VW half onto the sidewalk, had inadvertently made it impossible for this other driver to back his car out of the space in front. At the sight of us approaching the VW, he started shouting and shaking his fist, and I wondered if he might not be an Israeli Arab. His fury was amazing. Shuki raised his voice to reply, but there wasn't really much fury in him, and while the angry man screamed away, menacing him up close with a clenched fist, Shuki unlocked the car and let me in.

I asked, once we were driving off, in what language the fellow had been berating him, Arabic or Hebrew.

“Hebrew.” Shuki laughed. “The man is like you, Nathan, a Jew. Hebrew, of course. He was telling me, ‘I can't believe it—another Ashkenazi donkey! Every Ashkenazi I meet is another donkey!'”

“Where's he from?”

“I don't know—Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca. Have you heard who is now coming to live here? Jews from Ethiopia. So desperate are these bastards like Begin to perpetuate the old mythology that they're beginning to drag
black
Jews here. Pleasant, affectionate, good-natured people, most of them peasants, they come here speaking the Ethiopian language. Some are so sick when they arrive they have to be taken by stretcher and rushed to the hospital. Most are unable to read or write. They have to be taught how to turn on the tap and turn off the tap and how to use a toilet and what stairs are. Technologically they live in the thirteenth century. But within a year, I assure you, they'll already be Israelis, shouting about their rights and staging sitdown strikes, and soon enough they will be calling me an Ashkenazi donkey because of how I park my car.”

At my hotel, Shuki apologized for being unable to have dinner with me, but he didn't like leaving his wife alone at night and she wasn't up to socializing. It was a bad time for her. Their eighteen-year-old son, who had emerged through competition as one of the outstanding young musicians in the country, had been drafted into the army for his three years of service and as a result would be unable to practice his piano regularly, if at all. Daniel Barenboim had listened to Mati play and offered to help arrange for him to study in America, but the boy had decided that he couldn't leave the country to pursue his own ambitions while his friends were doing their military service. Once he had finished his basic training, allowances were supposed to be made for him to practice several times a week, but Shuki doubted that even this would happen. “Maybe he doesn't need our approbation anymore, but he still needs theirs. Mati's not so obstinate out of the house. If they tell him to go and hose down the tanks at the hour reserved for his practice, Mati is not going to take his note out of his pocket and say, ‘Daniel Barenboim suggests I play the piano instead.'”

“Your wife wanted him to go to America.”

“She tells him his responsibility is to music and not to the stupid infantry. In his nice loud voice, he says, ‘Israel has given me plenty! I've had a good time here! I have to do my duty!' and she goes completely crazy. I try to intervene but I am as effective as one of the fathers in your books. I even thought about you while it was happening. I thought it really didn't require all the agonies of creating a Jewish state where our people could shed their ghetto behavior, for me to wind up like a helpless father out of a Zuckerman novel, a real old-fashioned Jewish father who's either kissing the children or shouting at them. Another powerless Jewish father against whom the poor Jewish son has nevertheless to stage his ridiculous rebellion.”

“Goodbye, Shuki,” I said, taking his hand.

“Goodbye, Nathan. And don't forget to come again in another twenty years. I'm sure if Begin is still in power I'll have even more good news.”

*   *   *

I decided, after Shuki left, that rather than stay in Tel Aviv that evening, I'd have the front desk phone ahead to Jerusalem to arrange a room for the night. From there I'd get in touch with Henry and try to get him to meet me for dinner. If Shuki hadn't exaggerated, and Lippman was anything like the
shlayger
he'd described, then it was possible that Henry was as much captive as disciple, and, in fact, something like what might have been in Carol's mind when she'd indicated that dealing with a suburban husband who'd turned himself into a born-again Jew was like having a child become a Moonie. How could she go ahead, she asked, and institute separation proceedings leading to a divorce if the man had really lost his mind? When she'd phoned me in London it was because she'd begun to feel as though she might be losing her mind herself—and because she didn't know whom else to turn to.

“I don't want to match his irrationality with my own, I don't want to act prematurely, but he couldn't have gone any farther from me if he
had
died in surgery. If he's cast me off for good,
and
the practice,
and
everything else, I
have
to act, I can't wait here like an idiot for him to come to his senses. But I'm paralyzed—I cannot grasp it—I don't understand what has happened
at all.
Do you? You've known him all his life. In a way brothers probably know each other better than they ever know anyone else.”

“How they know each other, in my experience, is as a kind of deformation of themselves.”

“Nathan, he can't put you off the way he can me. Before I do anything that's going to destroy it for good, I have to know if he's completely flipped out.”

I thought I ought to know too. The relationship to Henry was the most elemental connection I had left, and however vexing its surface had become after the long years of our estrangement, what was evoked in me by Carol's call was the need to be responsible not so much to the disapproving brother with whom I'd already come to blows but to the little boy in the flannel pajamas who was known to sleepwalk when he was overexcited.

Not that it was filial duty alone that was goading me on. I was also deeply curious about this swift and simple conversion of a kind that isn't readily allowed to writers unless they wish to commit the professional blunder of being uninquiring. Henry's life was no longer coming true in its most pedestrian form, and I had to ask if it all
had
been as mindlessly gained as Carol meant by suggesting he'd “flipped out.” Wasn't there possibly more genius than madness in this escape? However unprecedented in the annals of suffocating domesticity, wasn't this escape somehow incontestable in a way that it never would have been had he run off with an alluring patient? Certainly the rebellious script that he had tried following ten years back could hardly touch this one for originality.

Within half an hour I'd settled my bill, and my bag was beside me in the taxi heading away from the sea. The industrial outskirts of Tel Aviv were already disappearing in the winter darkness when we turned onto the thruway and eastward across the citrus groves to the Jerusalem hills. As soon as I had a room at the hotel, I called Agor. The woman who answered seemed at first to be quite convinced that nobody named Henry Zuckerman lived at Agor. “The American,” I said loudly, “the American—the dentist from New Jersey!” Here she disappeared and I didn't know quite what was up.

While waiting for someone to come back on the phone, I recalled in detail the message I'd got from Henry's thirteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, during dinner in London the evening before. It was a collect person-to-person call, placed in New Jersey after school from the house of a friend. Her mother had told her that I was going down to see her father, and though she wasn't sure she was right even to be phoning me—for a week now she'd been putting it off from one day to the next—she wondered if she could ask me to tell him something “confidentially,” something she herself was not able to say on Sundays what with her older brother, Leslie, and her younger sister, Ellen, and sometimes even her mother hovering over the phone. But first she wanted me to know that she didn't happen to agree with her mother that her father was behaving “childishly.” “She keeps saying,” Ruthie told me, “that he's not reliable anymore, that she doesn't trust his motives, and that if he wants to see us it's going to have to be here. We were supposed to fly over for the school holiday and travel with him around the country, but now I'm not really sure she's going to let us. She's very down on him right now—very. She's hurting terribly and I can sympathize. But what I would like you to tell my dad for me is that I think I understand better than Leslie and Ellen. Leave out Leslie and Ellen—just tell him that I understand.” “You understand what?” “He's out there to learn something—he's trying to find something out. I don't say I understand
everything,
but I do think he's not too old to learn—and I think he has the right.” “I'll tell him that,” I said. “Don't you think it's so?' she asked. “What do
you
think about all this, Uncle Nathan? Do you mind my asking?” “Well,” I said, “I don't know if it's where I'd go, but I suppose I've done similar things myself.” “Have you really?” “Things that look childish to other people? I have. And perhaps for the reason you suggest—trying to find something out.” “In a way,” said Ruth, “I even admire him. It's awfully brave to go so far—isn't it? I mean he's giving up an awful lot.” “It looks that way. Are you afraid that he's given you up?” “No, Ellen is, I'm not. Ellen's the one who's in a bad way. She's a mess right now, though don't tell him—he shouldn't have to worry about that too.” “And your brother?” “He's just bossier than ever—he's now the man around here, you see.” “You sound okay, Ruth.” “Well, I'm not great, frankly. I miss him. I'm confused without my father.” “Do you want me to tell him that too, that you're confused without him?” “If you think it's a good idea, I guess so.”

Henry must have been at the other end of the settlement—maybe, I thought, attending evening prayers—because it was a full ten minutes before they found him and he finally came to the phone. I wondered if he was wearing his prayer shawl. I really didn't know what to expect.

“It's me,” I announced, “Cain to your Abel, Esau to your Jacob, here in the Land of Canaan. I'm calling from the King David Hotel. I just arrived from London.”

“My, my.” Sardonic words, just two of them, and then the long pause. “Here for Chanukah?” he finally asked.

“Chanukah first and to see you second.”

A longer pause. “Where's Carol?”

“I'm alone.”

“What do you want?”

“I thought you might come in to have dinner with me in Jerusalem. They could probably find a bed for you here in the hotel if you wanted to stay over.”

As he was now an even longer time replying, I figured he was about to hang up. “I have a class tonight,” he eventually said.

“How about tomorrow? I'll drive out to you.”

“You do have to admit it's a little bizarre that you're the one Carol deputized to fly in to remind me of my family obligations.”

“I didn't come down here to bring you back alive.”

“You couldn't,” he snapped, “if you wanted to. I know what I'm doing and there's nothing to say—the decision's irrevocable.”

“Then what harm can I do? I'd like to see Agor.”

“This is rich,” he said. “You in Jerusalem.”

“Well, neither of us was renowned in New Jersey for his pious devotion.”

“What
do
you want, Nathan?”

“To visit you. To find out how you're doing.”

“And Carol's not with you?”

“I don't play those games. Neither Carol nor the cops. I flew from London by myself.”

“On the spur of the moment.”

“Why not?”

“And what if I tell you to go back to London on the spur of the moment?”

“Why should you?”

“Because I don't need anyone to come out here and decide if I'm deranged. Because I've made the appropriate explanations already. Because—”

Once Henry got going like that I knew he'd have to see me.

*   *   *

When I'd visited Israel back in 1960, the Old City was still on the other side of the border. Across the narrow valley opening out behind this same hotel, I'd been able to watch the armed Jordanian soldiers posted as guards atop the Wall but of course I'd never got to visit the Temple remnant known as the Western or Wailing Wall. I was curious now to see if anything like what had happened to my brother in Mea She'arim would surprise and overtake me while standing at this, the most hallowed of all Jewish places. When I asked at the desk, the hotel clerk had assured me that I wouldn't find myself alone there, not at any hour. “Every Jew should go at night,” he told me, “you'll remember it for the rest of your life.” With nothing to do until I left the next morning for Agor, I got a cab to drive me over.