The Counterlife (16 page)

Still on the offense, he said, “And don't condescend to me.”

“Well, don't knock my wallowing heroes. Besides, I wouldn't say condescension has been my strong suit, not so far today. I myself wasn't even condescended to by that kid up in your class. I was mugged by the little prick in broad daylight.”

“Forthright is the style out here—take it or leave it. And no shit, please, about my name.”

“Relax. Anybody can call you anything you want, as far as I'm concerned.”

“You
still
don't get it. The hell with
me,
forget
me. Me
is somebody
I
have forgotten.
Me
no longer exists out here. There isn't time for
me,
there isn't need of
me
—here Judea counts, not
me!
”

His plan was to ride over to Arab Hebron for lunch, only a twenty-minute drive if we followed the shortcut through the hills. We could use Lippman's car. Mordecai and four other settlers had gone off by truck to Bethlehem early that morning. In the last several weeks, disturbances had erupted there between some local Arabs and the Jews of a little settlement newly erected on a hillside outside the city. Two days earlier rocks had been thrown through the windshield of a passing school bus carrying the Jewish settlement's children, and settlement members from all over Judea and Samaria, organized and led by Mordecai Lippman, had gone to distribute leaflets in the Bethlehem market. If I hadn't been visiting, Henry was to have skipped his class and gone with them.

“What do the leaflets say?” I asked.

“They say, ‘Why don't you people try living in peace with us, since we mean you no harm. Only a few among you are violent extremists. The rest are peace-loving people who believe, as we do, that Jew and Arab can live in harmony.' That's the general idea.”

“The general idea sounds benign enough. What's it supposed to mean to the Arabs?”

“What it says—we intend them no harm.”

Not me—we. That's where Henry's me had gone.

“We'll drive through the village—it's right down there. You'll see how the Arabs who want to can live in peace, side by side, only a couple of hundred yards away. They come up here and buy our eggs. The chickens that are too old to lay, we sell to them for pennies. This place could be a home for everybody. But if violence against Jewish schoolchildren continues, then steps will be taken to stop it. The army could move in there tomorrow, weed out the troublemakers, and the stone throwing would be over in five minutes. But they don't. They even throw stones at the soldiers. And when the soldier does nothing, you know what the Arabs think? They think you are a shmuck—and you
are
a shmuck. Any place else in the Middle East, you throw a stone at a soldier, and what does he do? He shoots you. But suddenly they discover in Bethlehem that you throw a stone at an Israeli soldier and he doesn't shoot you. He doesn't do anything. And that's where the trouble begins. Not because we are cruel, but because they have found out we are weak. There are things you have to do here that are not so nice. They don't respect niceness and they don't respect weakness. What the Arab respects is power.”

Not me but we, not niceness but power.

I waited by the battered Ford that was parked on the dirt street outside the Lippman house, one of the cinder-block structures that had looked from the entry road like pillboxes or bunkers. Up close you couldn't quite believe that life within was very far from the embryonic stage of human development. Everything, including the load of topsoil deposited in a corner of each of the dry, stony yards, proclaimed a world of bare beginnings. Two, maybe even three of these little settlement dwellings could have been stored without difficulty in the basement of the sprawling house of cedar and glass built by Henry some years back on a wooded hillside in South Orange.

When he came out of Lippman's, it was with car keys in one hand and a pistol in the other. He tossed the pistol into the glove compartment and started the engine.

“I'm trying,” I told him, “to take things in stride, but it's going to entail almost superhuman restraint not to make the sort of comment that's going to piss you off. Nonetheless, it's a little astonishing to be going off for a drive with you and a gun.”

“I know. It's not how we were raised. But a gun isn't a bad idea driving down to Hebron. If you run into a demonstration, if they surround the car and start heaving rocks, at least you have some bargaining power. Look, you're going to see a lot of things that are going to astonish you. They astonish me. You know what astonishes me even more than what I've learned to do in five months here? What I learned to do in forty years there. To do and to be. I shudder when I remember everything I was. I look back and I can't believe it. It fills me with revulsion. It makes me want to hide my head when I think how I wound up.”

“How was that?”

“You saw it, you were there. You
heard
it. What I risked my life for. What I had that operation for.
Who
I had it for. That skinny little kid in my office. That's what I was willing to die for. That's what I was
living
for.”

“No, it was a part of living. Why not? Losing your potency at thirty-nine isn't an ordinary little experience. Life came down very hard on you.”

“You don't understand. I'm talking about how
small
I was. I'm talking about my grotesque apology for a life.”

It was several hours on, after we'd been through the alleyways of the Hebron market and up to the ancient olive trees by the graves of Hebron's Jewish martyrs, and then on to the burial ground of the Patriarchs, that I got him to expand a little on that grotesque life he'd abandoned. We were eating lunch on the open terrace of a small restaurant on the main road out of Hebron. The Arab family who ran the place couldn't have been more welcoming; indeed, the owner, who took our order in English, called Henry “Doctor” with considerable esteem. It was late by then and aside from a young Arab couple and their small child eating at a corner table nearby, the place was empty.

Henry, to make himself comfortable, draped his field jacket over the back of his chair, the pistol still in one pocket. That's where he'd been carrying it during our tour of Hebron. Shepherding me through the crowded market, he pointed out the abundance of fruits, vegetables, chickens, sweets, even while my mind remained on his pistol, and on Chekhov's famous dictum that a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One must eventually go off in Act Three. I wondered what act we were in, not to mention which play—domestic tragedy, historical epic, or just straight farce? I wasn't sure whether the pistol was strictly necessary or whether he was simply displaying, as drastically as he could, the distance he'd traveled from the powerless nice Jew that he'd been in America, this pistol his astounding symbol of the whole complex of choices with which he was ridding himself of that shame. “Here are the Arabs,” he'd said in the marketplace, “and where is the yoke? Do you see a yoke across anyone's back? Do you see a soldier threatening anyone? You don't see a soldier here at all. No, just a thriving Oriental bazaar. And why is that? Because of the brutal military occupation?”

The only sign of the military I'd seen was a small installation about a hundred yards down from the market, where Henry had left the car. Inside the gates some Israeli soldiers were kicking a soccer ball around an open area where their trucks were parked, but as Henry said, there was no military presence within the market, only Arab stallkeepers, Arab shoppers, scores of small Arab children, some very unamicable-looking Arab adolescents, lots of dust, several mules, some beggars, and Dr. Victor Zuckerman's two sons, Nathan and Hanoch, the latter packing a gun whose implications had begun obsessively to engage the former. What if who he shoots is me? What if that was to be Act Three's awful surprise, the Zuckerman differences ending in blood, as though our family were Agamemnon's?

At lunch I began with what couldn't be taken right off as a remonstrance or a challenge, given his enthusiasm about the antiquity of a wall that he'd wanted me to see at the Cave of Machpelah. How holy, I asked, was that wall to him? “Suppose it's all as you tell me,” I said. “In Hebron Abraham pitched his tent. In the cave of Machpelah he and Sarah were buried, and after them Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. It's here that King David reigned before he entered Jerusalem. What's any of it got to do with you?”

“That's where the claim rests,” he said. “That's
it.
It's no accident, you know, that we're called Jews and this place is called Judea—there may even be some relation between those two things. We are Jews, this is Judea, and the heart of Judea is Abraham's city, Hebron.”

“That still leaves unexplained the riddle of Henry Zuckerman's identification with Abraham's city.”

“You don't get it—this is where the Jews
began,
not in Tel Aviv but here. If anything is territorialism, if anything is colonialism, it's Tel Aviv, it's Haifa.
This
is Judaism,
this
is Zionism,
right here
where we are eating our lunch!”

“In other words, it didn't all begin up that outside flight of wooden stairs where Grandma and Grandpa lived on Hunterdon Street. It didn't begin with Grandma on her knees washing the floors and Grandpa stinking of old cigars. Jews didn't begin in Newark, after all.”

“The famous gift for reductive satire.”

“Is it? It might be that what you've developed over the last five months is something of a gift for exaggeration.”

“I don't think that the part that the Jewish Bible has played in the history of the world owes much to me and my illusions.”

“I was thinking more about the part you seem to have assigned yourself in the tribal epic. Do you pray too?”

“The subject's not under discussion.”

“You do pray then.”

Riled by my insistence, he asked, “What's wrong with prayer, is there something wrong with prayer?”

“When do you pray?”

“Before I go to sleep.”

“What do you say?”

“What Jews have said for thousands of years. I say the Shema Yisrael.”

“And in the morning you lay tefillin?”

“Maybe one day. I don't yet.”

“And you observe the Sabbath.”

“Look, I understand that this is all outside your element. I understand that hearing all this you feel nothing but the disdainful amusement of the fashionably ‘objective,' postassimilated Jew. I realize that you're too ‘enlightened' for God and that to you it's clearly all a joke.”

“Don't be so sure what to me is a joke. If I happen to have questions I wouldn't mind answered, it's because six months ago I had a different brother.”

“Living the life of Riley in New Jersey.”

“Come on, Henry—there's no such thing as the life of Riley, in New Jersey or anywhere else. America is also a place where people die, where people fail, where life is interesting and tense, and hardly without conflict.”

“But Riley's life was still whose mine was. In America the massacre of your brother's Judaism couldn't have been more complete.”

“‘Massacre'? Where'd you pick up
that
word? You lived like everybody you knew. You accepted the social arrangement that existed.”

“Only the arrangement that existed was completely abnormal.”

Normal and abnormal—twenty-four hours in Israel and there was that distinction again.

“How did I even get that disease?” he asked me. “Five occluded coronary arteries in a man not even forty years old. What sort of stress do you think caused it? The stresses of a ‘normal' life?”

“Carol for a wife, dentistry for a livelihood, South Orange for a home, well-behaved kids in good private schools—even the girlfriend on the side. If that's not normalcy, what is?”

“Only all for the goyim. Camouflaging behind goyish respectability every last Jewish marking. All of it from them, for them.”

“Henry, I walk in Hebron and I see
them
—them with a vengeance. All I remember seeing around your place were other prosperous Jews like you, and none of them packing a gun.”

“You bet: prosperous, comfortable, Hellenized Jews—galut Jews, bereft of any sort of context in which actually to be Jewish.”

“And you think this is what made you sick? ‘Hellenization'? It didn't seem to ruin Aristotle's life. What the hell does it even
mean?
”

“Hellenized—hedonized—egomaniazed. My whole
existence
was the sickness. I got off easy with just my heart. Diseased with self-distortion, self-contortion, diseased with self-disguise—up to my eyeballs in meaninglessness.”

First it was the life of Riley, now it was nothing but a disease. “You felt all that?”

“Me? I was so conventionalized I never felt anything. Wendy. Perfect. Shtupping the dental assistant. My office blow job, the great overwhelming passion of a completely superficial life. Before that, even better—Basel. Classic. The Jewish male's idolatry—worship of the shiksa; dreaming of Switzerland with the beloved shiksa. The original Jewish dream of escape.”

And as he spoke I was thinking,
the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
Back in Jersey, he ascribes the stress that he was convinced had culminated in the coronary artery disease to the humiliating failure of nerve that had
prevented
him from leaving South Orange for Basel; in Judea his diagnosis is just the opposite—here he attributes the disease to the insidious strain of Diaspora abnormality manifested most blatantly by “the original Jewish dream of escape … Switzerland with the beloved shiksa.”