The Counterlife (14 page)

I was out of the cavern no more than a minute, taking a last look around the square at the minarets, the moon, the domes, the Wall, when someone was shouting at me, “It's you!”

Standing in my path was a tall young man with a thin, scraggly growth of beard who looked as though he had all he could do not to give me an enormous hug. He was panting hard, whether from excitement or from having run to catch me, I couldn't tell. And he was laughing, gusts of jubilant, euphoric laughter. I don't think I've ever before come across anyone so tickled to see me.

“It's really you! Here! Great! I've read all your books! You wrote about my family! The Lustigs of West Orange! In
Higher Education!
That's them! I'm your biggest admirer in the world!
Mixed Emotions
is your best book, better than
Carnovsky!
How come you're wearing a cardboard yarmulke? You should be wearing a beautiful, embroidered
kipa
like mine!”

He showed me the skullcap—held by a hair-clip to the top of his head—as though it had been designed for him by a Paris milliner. He was in his mid-twenties, a very tall, dark-haired, boyishly handsome young American in a gray cotton jogging suit, red running shoes, and the embroidered
kipa.
He danced in place even as he spoke, bouncing up on his toes, his arms jiggling like a boxer's before the bell to round one. I didn't know what to make of him.

“So you're a West Orange Lustig,” I said.

“I'm Jimmy Ben-Joseph, Nathan! You look great! Those pictures on your books don't do you justice! You're a good-looking guy! You just got married! You have a new wife! Numero four! Let's hope this time it works!”

I began laughing myself. “Why do you know all this?”

“I'm your greatest fan. I know everything about you. I write too. I wrote the Five Books of Jimmy!”

“Haven't read them.”

“They haven't been published yet. What are you doing here, Nathan?”

“Seeing the sights. What are
you
doing?”

“I was praying for you to come! I've been here at the Wailing Wall praying for you to come—and you came!”

“Okay, calm down, Jim.”

I still couldn't tell whether he was half-crazy or completely crazy or just seething with energy, a manicky kid far away from home clowning around and having a good time. But since I was beginning to suspect that he might be a little of all three, I started back toward the low stone barrier and the table where I'd picked up my yarmulke. Beyond a gate across the square I could see several taxis waiting. I'd catch one back to the hotel. Intriguing as people like Jimmy can sometimes be, you usually get the best of them in the first three minutes. I've attracted them before.

He didn't exactly walk
with
me as I started off but, springing on the toes of his running shoes, proceeded backwards away from the Wall a couple of steps in front of me. “I'm a student at the Diaspora Yeshivah,” he explained.

“Is there such a place?”

“You never heard of the Diaspora Yeshivah? It's over there on top of Mount Zion! On top of King David's mountain! You should come and visit! You should come and stay! The Diaspora Yeshivah is made for guys like you! You've been away from the Jewish people too long!”

“So they tell me. And how long do you plan to stay?”

“In Eretz Yisrael? The rest of my life!”

“And how long have you been here?”

“Twelve days!”

In the setting of his surprisingly small, delicately boned face, which was miniaturized further by a narrow frame of new whiskers, his eyes looked to be still in the throes of creation, precariously trembling bubbles at the tip of a fiery eruption.

“You're in quite a hyped-up state, Jimmy.”

“You bet! I'm high as a kite on Jewish commitment!”

“Jimmy the Luftyid, the High-Flying Jew.”

“And you? What are you, Nathan? Do you even know?”

“Me? From the look of things, a grounded Jew. Where'd you go to college, Jim?”

“Lafayette College. Easton, PA. Habitat of Larry Holmes. I studied acting and journalism. But now I'm back with the Jewish people! You shouldn't be estranged, Nathan! You'd make a great Jew!”

I was laughing again—so was he. “Tell me,” I said, “are you here alone or with a girlfriend?”

“No, no girlfriend—Rabbi Greenspan is going to find me a wife. I want eight kids. Only a girl here will understand. I want a religious girl. Multiply and be fruitful!”

“Well, you've got a new name, a start on a new beard, Rabbi Greenspan is out looking for the right girl—and you're even living on top of King David's mountain. Sounds like you've got it made.”

At the table by the barrier, where there was nobody any longer collecting for the poor, if there ever had been, I placed my yarmulke on top of the others piled in the box. When I extended my hand Jimmy took it, not to shake but to hold affectionately between the two of his.

“But where are you going? I'll walk you. I'll show you Mount Zion, Nathan. You can meet Rabbi Greenspan.”

“I've already got my wife—numero four. I have to be off,” I said, breaking away from him. “Shalom.”

“But,” he called after me, having resumed that vigorous, athletic bounding about on his toes, “do you even understand why I love and respect you the way I do?”

“Not really.”

“Because of the way you write about baseball! Because of all you feel about baseball! That's the thing that's missing here. How can there be Jews without baseball? I ask Rabbi Greenspan but he don't comprendo. Not until there is baseball in Israel will Messiah come! Nathan, I want to play center field for the Jerusalem Giants!”

Waving goodbye—and thinking how relieved the Lustigs must be back in West Orange now that Jimmy is here in Eretz Yisrael and Rabbi Greenspan's to worry about—I called, “Go right ahead!”

“I will, I will if you say so, Nate!” and beneath the bright floodlights, he suddenly broke away and began to run—back-pedaling first, then turning to his right, and with his delicate, freshly bearded face cocked as though to follow the flight of a ball struck off a Louisville Slugger from somewhere up in the old Jewish quarter, he was racing back toward the Wailing Wall without any regard for who or what might be in his way. And in a piercing voice that must have made him something of a find for the Lafayette College Drama Society, he began to shout, “Ben-Joseph is going back, back—it could be gone, it may be gone, this could be curtains for Jerusalem!” Then, with no more than three feet between him and the stones of the Wall—and the worshippers at the Wall—Jimmy leaped, sailing recklessly into the air, his long left arm extended high across his body and far above his embroidered
kipa.
“Ben-Joseph catches it!” he screamed, as along the length of the Wall a few of the worshippers turned indignantly to see what the disturbance was. Most, however, were so rapt in prayer that they didn't even bother looking up. “Ben-Joseph catches it!” he cried again, holding the imaginary ball in the pocket of his imaginary glove and jumping up and down in the very spot where he had marvelously brought it in. “The game is over!” Jimmy was shouting. “The season is over! The Jerusalem Giants win the pennant! The Jerusalem Giants win the pennant! Messiah is on his way!”

*   *   *

Friday morning after breakfast a taxi took me out to Agor, a forty-five-minute trip through the rock-clogged white hills southeast of Jerusalem. The driver, a Yemenite Jew who understood hardly any English, listened to the radio while he drove. Some twenty minutes beyond the city we passed an army roadblock manned by a couple of soldiers with rifles; it consisted of no more than a wooden sawhorse, and the taxi simply swerved around it in order to continue on. The soldiers didn't appear to be interested in stopping anyone, not even the Arabs with West Bank plates. One shirtless soldier was lying on the ground at the shoulder of the road taking the sun, while the other shirtless soldier tapped his feet in time to a portable radio playing under his roadside chair. Thinking back to the soldiers lolling in the square by the Wailing Wall, I said, for no reason, really, other than to hear my voice, “Easygoing army you have here.”

The taxi driver nodded and took a billfold out of his back pocket. Fumbling with one hand, he found a picture to show me, a snapshot of a young soldier, kneeling and looking up at the camera, an intense-looking boy with large dark eyes and, from the evidence of his fresh and neatly pressed fatigues, the best-dressed member of the Israeli Defense Forces. He was holding his weapon like somebody who knew how to use it. “My son,” the driver said.

“Very nice,” I said.

“Dead.”

“Oh. I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Someone is shooting a bomb. He is no more there. No shoes, nothing.”

“How old?” I asked, handing back the picture. “How old a boy was he?”

“Killed,” he replied. “No good. I never see my son no more.”

Farther on, a hundred yards back from the winding road, there was a Bedouin encampment tucked into the valley between two rocky hills. The long, dark, brown tent, patched with black squares, looked from that distance less like a habitation than like the wash, like a collection of large old rags draped on poles to dry in the sun. Up ahead we had to stop to let a little man with a mustache and a stick guide his sheep across the road. He was a Bedouin herdsman wearing an old brown suit, and if he reminded me of Charlie Chaplin, it wasn't only because of his appearance but because of the seeming hopelessness of his pursuit—what his sheep would find to eat in those dry hills was a mystery to me.

The taxi driver pointed to a settlement on the next hilltop. It was Agor, Henry's home. Though there was a high wire fence topped with curling barbed wire fronting the road, the gate was wide open and the guard booth empty. The taxi turned sharply in and drove up a dirt incline to a low corrugated-metal shed. A man with a blowtorch was working at a long table in the open air and from inside the shed I heard a hammer pounding.

I got out of the car. “I'm looking for Henry Zuckerman.”

He waited to hear more.

“Henry Zuckerman,” I repeated. “The American dentist.”

“Hanoch?”

“Henry,” I said. Then, “Sure—Hanoch.”

I thought, “Hanoch Zuckerman, Maria Zuckerman—the world is suddenly full of brand-new Zuckermans.”

He pointed farther up the dirt road to a row of small, block-like concrete buildings. That was all there was up there—a raw, dry, dusty hill with nothing growing anywhere. The only person to be seen about was this man with a blowtorch, a short muscular fellow wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a little knitted skullcap pinned to his crew cut. “There,” he said brusquely. “School is there.”

A stout young woman in a pair of overalls and wearing a large brown beret came bounding out of the shed. “Hi,” she called, smiling at me. “I'm Daphna. Who you looking for?”

She spoke with a New York accent and reminded me of the hearty girls I used to see dancing to Hebrew folk songs at the Hillel House when I was a freshman new to Chicago and went around there at night, during the first lonely weeks, trying to get laid. That was as close as I ever came to Zionism and constituted the whole of my “Jewish commitment” at college. As for Henry, his commitment consisted of playing basketball at Cornell for his Jewish fraternity.

“Hanoch Zuckerman,” I said to her.

“Hanoch is at the ulpan. The Hebrew school.”

“Are you American?”

The question affronted her. “I'm Jewish,” she replied.

“I understand. I was just guessing from your speech that you were born in New York.”

“I'm Jewish by
birth,
” she said and, clearly having had her fill of me, went back into the shed, where I heard the pounding of the hammer resume.

Henry/Hanoch was one of fifteen students gathered in a half-circle around their teacher's chair. The students were either seated or sprawled on the grassless ground and, like Henry, most of them were writing in exercise books while the teacher spoke in Hebrew. Henry was the oldest by at least fifteen years—probably a few years older even than his teacher. Except for him it looked like any collection of summer-school kids enjoying their lesson in the warm sun. The boys, half of whom were growing beards, were all in old jeans; most of the girls wore jeans too, except for two or three in cotton skirts and sleeveless blouses that showed how tan they were and that they'd stopped shaving under their arms. The minaret of an Arab village was clearly visible at the foot of the hill, yet Agor's ulpan in December could as easily have been Middlebury or Yale, a college language center in July.

Where the topmost buttons of Henry's work shirt were undone I could see the scar from his bypass surgery neatly dividing his strong chest. After nearly five months in the hot desert hills he looked not unlike the dead soldier son of my Yemenite taxi driver—more like that boy's brother now than mine. Seeing him so fit and darkly tanned and wearing shorts and sandals, I found myself recalling our boyhood summers at the rented cottage on the Jersey Shore, and how he used to follow after me, down to the beach, along the boardwalk at night—wherever I went with my friends, Henry would come tagging along as our adoring mascot. Strange to find the second-born son, whose sustaining passion was always to be the equal of those already grown up, back in school at the age of forty. Even stranger to come upon his classroom atop a hill from which you could see off to the Dead Sea, and beyond that to the creviced mountains of a desert kingdom.

I thought, “His daughter Ruthie's right—he's here to learn something and it isn't just Hebrew. I
have
done similar things, but he hasn't. Never before, and this is his chance. His first and maybe his last. Don't be his older brother—don't pick on him where he's vulnerable and where he'll always be vulnerable.” “I admire him,” Ruth had said, and right then so did I—in part because it all did seem a little bizarre, just as childish, probably, as Carol thought it was. Looking at him sitting, in his short pants, with all those kids and writing in his exercise book, I thought I really ought to turn around and go home. Ruthie was right about everything: he was giving up an awful lot to become this
tabula rasa.
Let him.