Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

As the ship carrying his new wife crests the wavering horizon of the gaseous sea, Gershon again checks the foyer mirror, and rubs his hands vigorously over his face. He is standing in the consular unit, the “penthouse quarters” as Ofer, his supervisor at the diplomatic corps back in Jerusalem, once called the apartment. And while it is true that these rooms do preside at great height over the stone buildings and roadways in the settlement below (as might befit the Government Administrator of the Northern Territories), the effect is not really one of luxury. Instead, the wide glass windows with their panning views and the smooth modern surfaces of the rooms’ décor only emphasize, to Gershon anyway, the solitude of the post — a kind of experiment in bright monasticism. He does not think about it much, usually, but the prospect of the new woman’s arrival has forced him to cast his gaze anew.

Gershon stands at the edge of the foyer, stands in front of the bay doors, which will at any moment slide open to reveal his new wife, the one they’ve sent. He wonders briefly if this woman will look like Yoheved, and, if so, if this will seem more cruel, amusing, or sad. “Well, you know,” Ofer said on the video-link when they told him about the new woman, “they’re starting to use the word rehabilitation a lot in these meetings about the new territory.” Then, after a pause, “It was that or reassignment down here. Which, you know…” And Gershon had nodded, understanding. In the window beside the bay doors, the Earth burns with its color high above the territory, a steady blue moon.

•

“Did you sleep?” Gershon says, the next morning.

He’s found her standing in front of the widest window, the one in the sparsely furnished living room, looking down, or out. She turns to him slowly.

“You should sleep, if you haven’t,” he says. “I know it can be hard. People have trouble, because of the sky.”

The sky: clear, cloudless, a piercing black at night while at day only ripening to a lightless cobalt, insinuated with vaguely amethyst underhues at dawn and dusk. The impression, especially upon new arrivals, is of limitless depth, or height, and sometimes the new settlers experience a kind of vertigo. But he’s talking too much.

She turns to him, is facing him now, silently, her eyes wide, though not with fear. Instead, it is a sharp look, one of alert appraisal, and somehow this in conjunction with her delicate attractiveness feeds Gershon’s anger.

“I’m ready, if we need to do something in the city,” she says softly. “They told me we’d probably need to do something in the city.”

Gershon nods, his jaw tight and aching, and tries to keep from speaking again.

•

Gershon has always been surprised when he’s come across a very attractive Orthodox girl, though they are not so entirely rare. Stepping off a creaking Egged bus back in the real Jerusalem, he’d catch a glimpse of an upturned face in the line waiting to get on: smooth skin, perfectly symmetrical features — a kind of sloe-eyed beauty that passed briefly through his day like a ghost. These fractions of visions became even more disconcerting after he and Yoheved had Shmuli, and moved to the apartment above the hostel just inside Jaffa Gate. Gershon, out walking in the Jewish Quarter with Shmuli in his arms, would see one of these belles filles hurrying along the narrow, cramped Old City market streets, three or four small children wheeling through the crowd before her. It always seemed impossible to Gershon, for a moment anyway, that such an attractive woman — a girl really — could have so many children, though the kids themselves also usually seemed beautiful in that crystalline, epicene way of small children.

“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it, with those women,” Yoheved once said when Gershon tried to describe it. “All that obscuring: the wrist-length blouses, the wigs and scarves, the denim dresses they’re always tripping over. Men are so predictable. Let them see only your face and they’ll see a fucking Vermeer. Men. It’s because you’re an immigrant, really. It’s because you didn’t grow up here that you can even see it.” And Gershon wonders now, glancing every few minutes at his new wife in the seat beside him as he navigates the terrain vehicle away from the Government Tower, what Yoheved would make of this girl, this woman, this Hava. What did Yoheved see before her when the two women met to sign the rabbinical agreement allowing the new marriage? Though that must have been four years ago, Gershon supposes, just before the beginning of the girl’s long trip. What would he have done if they’d told him in real time, if he would’ve had four years to prepare himself for her, instead of just the six months? Still, the meeting, the document between the two silent women, feels to Gershon tenderly recent, as it must not to Hava herself.

Gershon glances at her in the passenger seat again and forces himself to see her; he can resist it no longer. Her jaw and high, delicate cheekbones make her face angular, Hava benefitting from Ashkenazically emphasized eyes and balance of features while escaping somehow the elongated face. Against such clarity, the head covering she wears seems particularly ugly. The few tendrils of her hair he can make out (real, it looks like) are a deep and rich brown.

Yoheved was never as attractive as this Hava, Gershon can admit that, not even when she was that age, which was some time ago. Gershon met Yoheved a couple years after immigrating, when he’d wandered accidentally into a near riot between protesters on the campus of their university, so he knew well what face it was that ended up gently ruined by time and motherhood: the strong jaw, the shrewd eyes, the defiant, almost martial cheekbones, the dirty-blond hair. Yoheved was plenty attractive in her unconventional way back then, but never in this mode of fully realized features, never with that small, tight body, apparent even beneath the modest layers of Hava’s clothing. Yoheved must have hated her, Gershon thinks, hated the insult of her youth. But her internal flinch of disgust would’ve been balanced by the knowledge of the fate she was signing this girl off to, and besides nobody stayed beautiful out here; not with the dry air, the silence, the empty city sucking one’s mien — especially with women — of its marrow. Let her see what comes of beauty, Yoheved would’ve thought, and Gershon’s anger dilates now to take in Yoheved herself, along with Ofer, and even the family of this Hava, for whatever monetary or social disgrace resigned her to him.

They are traveling to the first mourner’s tea of the day, which is in an apartment on New Ben Yehuda Square, and Gershon is driving their exterior terrain vehicle with unnecessary, aggressive speed. Despite this, Hava looks around carefully, her respirator, which she’d tried to put on inside the vehicle before Gershon explained she only needed it outside, forgotten in her lap.

“It’s really eerie, isn’t it,” she says, as if to some absent third person. “I mean, of course they prepare you, but it’s. . it’s completely imaginable, I guess, which is what makes it so odd to actually see, if that makes sense. It’s just so accurate. I mean, it’s real. The same thing. Stone by stone, almost.”

She is talking about the settlers’ city, which Gershon forces himself to see again now, slowing down. Here, in the outskirts which they have been traveling through, the doubling is less noticeable, just as in the real Jerusalem the modern buildings are less distinct, fading in one’s mind to a gaunt blend of cityscape. But they are approaching now the environs of the Old City, or the New Old City, which is what has moved her to speak. Because wasn’t it something to see for the first time this simulacrum of familiar buildings, streets, the pale Jerusalem stone — in the distance the Old City walls so real — and to realize it is not actually a simulacrum but a doubling, an impossible physical recurrence, just unpeopled. It is the first appearance of any inhabitant at all that emphasizes the larger emptiness of the city. As Gershon slows to park on a deserted side street, a little band of four small, dark Palestinian kids rushes around the corner. They begin dancing around the vehicle, goofing off. The youngest one presses his face, shielded by the stolen respirator’s plastic, against the driver’s side window.