Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

They’ve been having this problem lately. The distant Free Territories Settlement was launched two years ago when a vessel financed by Saudi, Arab League, and Red Crescent monies more or less crash-landed in the unoccupied plain out in the unassigned, unclaimed quadrant over the horizon. According to the briefs Gershon received in his office, their supplies, which had been inferior in the first place, were now running out, and this was inspiring many of them to attempt the long trek over to the Israeli settlement. Though it seemed for some reason only the children were making it across.

Gershon looks at the boy’s face, the small hands cupped around the respirator’s shield, trying to see in, and can feel Hava looking too. Everything but the dancing boys is still. Then the boy draws his head away and takes half a step back, turning his face to say something to his friends, and Gershon seizes the opportunity to open the door quickly, thunking the boy’s head hard against its metal. As Gershon gets out and adjusts the rubber rim of his own respirator, the boy staggers into the street, shaking his head like a dazed animal, then disappears around the corner where his friends have already fled. Gershon turns to where Hava is sitting in the vehicle, and waits.

•

In the widow’s apartment, Hava is speaking to the group of women in the living room, suffering their oblique interrogation. Gershon isn’t listening. He’s standing at the window, looking down at New Ben Yehuda Square: deserted, the replica store windows dark, the signs unlit. The most prominent storefront, stretching on two sides of a corner, is Giorgio’s, the famous chain pizza place, its big plate-glass windows smoky at this angle. The tall, old-fashioned stools along its counter, where people back in the real Jerusalem are even now sitting and eating, are made into solemn, shadowy figures.

Gershon was there, maybe a block away, when the Giorgio’s bombing happened, on a dull assignment babysitting a group of American diplomats’ wives and children, showing them the real city. They’d all wanted to eat at the Hard Rock Café: Jerusalem, and Gershon had only just shepherded them out of the restaurant after the meal — they were headed to the market on Ben Yehuda, actually — when there was the concussion of air, the tremendous sundering skirl that seemed to emanate from the very buildings themselves, then the unearthly moments of silence. The first thing Gershon heard: the querulous wail of one of the American kids, a little blond girl, crying, or gearing up to cry. Her mouth was upturned cartoonishly, without thought or understanding, in a way that made Gershon’s sternum ache. Within ten minutes the American security detail for the diplomats’ families had whisked them all away to the safety of the embassy, and Gershon was left there, on the curb, alone. He did not run toward the carnage, as most of the other men on the street did. Instead, he turned and walked all the way home, to his and Yoheved’s apartment at the Jaffa Gate, where Yoheved had locked Shmuli in the bathroom, of all places, for safety.

And Gershon thinks now, as he does consistently when his business in the New Jerusalem brings him to the square, that if he had rushed toward the real Ben Yehuda Square, if he had rushed into the abstracted concrete and savaged urban errata of the bombing, there is a good chance he would’ve seen or ran into the very widow whose apartment he is now standing in. Her, or any of the other mourners who live now above or beside the New Ben Yehuda Square — the recreated, reconstructed site where, all that distance away, their husband, or wife, or child, or whole family bled to death on the concrete, in the road. He doesn’t want to explain this truth about the New Jerusalem settlement to Hava, though she must’ve been briefed. Let someone else tell her about the passenger ships full of those mourners, the way they made their lives as near to the simulacrum locations of their respective violences as possible. Gershon doesn’t want to try to explain to Hava their strange, dissonant belief. This planet, this settlement, this doubled city, where entropy is stalled, reversed.

The women are quieting now, and Hava has started in on some kind of speech, something that sounds prepared. She will announce herself as Gershon’s new wife, and the mourners will make of that what they will. They will understand what it means as well as Gershon does, he suspects, once they discover her lack of a tragic history.

He was initially chosen as the Government Administrator of the Northern Territories for a reason, everyone knows: he was emblematic of the population; he would understand them, would be suited to the diplomatic post; he was already alone. So what it means that they now want him here with a wife — a young wife, and (it is implied, eventually) children — is that the Israeli government is not satisfied with having only a mourners’ colony any longer. The religious settlers (the Israeli Space Administration’s first idea) had been unwilling to come, unwilling to turn away from their divinely mandated, illegal constructions in Gaza and the West Bank. The military could not justify the budget to establish even a minimal presence here. And the original, notional idea that this outpost was built up to be a final resort, a sort of final galactic keep of Jews in case of largest-scale catastrophe, while still popularly held in Israel, is ultimately not enough. What will come — what will soon already be arriving, Gershon knows from the shipment manifest schedules he receives — is business, commerce (and so jobs, money, and people: Israelis sick of Israel, or Olim for whom the land of Israel’s promise has been dwarfed by the greater promise of a new frontier, a bigger adventure). The Giorgio’s below the window where Gershon stands will within two years or so be open, be alive with customers, workers. But so what, he thinks. They reopened the real Giorgio’s in real Ben Yehuda Square a month after the bombing, and there was a line around the block.

“And I’m just so glad and honored to be a part of this special community,” Hava is saying. She doesn’t understand what the women really want to hear: which tragedy it is she will be the monument of here. Why it is she’s so suited for Gershon, ultimately. Gershon turns momentarily toward Hava where she stands now in the center of the room, the women sitting here and there around her, listening. She takes a breath. She has been coached.

“I myself have never experienced a loss such as any of yours, but I want to say that you all — that the people here — that you were never forgotten by me. I think the settlement is a wonderful opportunity for a new life, a new kind of life, and your interests, I can assure you, will always be at my and my husband’s hearts.”

Gershon turns away. Below, in the square, he sees the band of dirty kids again. Two of them are sitting on the curb. The others are walking back and forth in front of the replicated shop windows, peering inside. They won’t break the windows: the stores are not locked, and hold nothing of any use inside, and the kids must’ve explored all of them already anyway. The Administration’s stance, as Gershon has been euphemistically instructed via memo, is basically to let them run out of supplies, at which point they will either die or turn themselves in for deportation back to their settlement, which amounts to the same thing. But Gershon thinks the Administration underestimates how apolitical, how apathetic to politics the Israeli population settled here is. The refugee kids’ respirators, Gershon has noticed, are Israeli-issued, the backup sets that would be nearly impossible to steal. And they have to be getting food from somewhere. Mostly the people here, Gershon wants to say to Hava, to Ofer, to nobody, just want to be left alone.