Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Hava nods.

“Who’s Mark Twain?” she says.

In the apartment, Gershon goes quickly to the kitchen, dragging out the heavy crate of sweetbread and grabbing a bottle of liquor. He is suddenly embarrassed, flustered to be here. He doesn’t know why he’s brought Hava here. It was a stupid idea.

He comes out into the living room and sees her standing at one of the tables along the wall, picking up the framed pictures and looking at them. Gershon has forgotten all about the living room, forgotten his own recreation of it — a weak moment during those desperate, lonely first months that he’s never gotten around to undoing. He doesn’t spend much time here anymore.

She sets down the picture of Shmuli, his face pushed close to the camera, filling the whole field of vision. His expression is almost one of wonder, though he knew what a camera was, of course. Silly.

“I’m not so totally stupid, you know,” Hava says now, turning to him. “I’ve seen the documentary.”

Gershon is stunned, and feels his face pounding with blood.

Back in the vehicle, Gershon thinks, Of course she’s seen the documentary. Of course. Of course. Most of the country has seen the documentary by now, Gershon would bet.

They gave him a tiny grave on the Mount of Olives, of all places, among the war heroes and ancients — a big, quiet show. The government. Gershon and Yoheved never would’ve been able to afford it. And so they’d buried him and gone to Italy. That was Yoheved’s idea and Gershon, standing in St. Mark’s Square, wondering at the uneasy huddle of so many pigeons, had thought it a good one. They were there, together. Yoheved had wanted to be there, together. He had no problem fleeing grief. He knew it would catch up with them, but why make it easier? Why not let its full force find them there, amidst all those delicate, unaging marble children?

And though Yoheved did not begin filming the famous interviews for the documentary until much later, well after they’d returned to their apartment in Jerusalem, Gershon knows it really began then, with that trip, knows he should’ve been able to see what was coming. And now the insult of her “healing process”—of the interviews and the documentary, and really of Yoheved herself, of what she’s become — has finally reached Gershon here. His suffering and his wife’s — ex-wife’s — simulacrum of their suffering have been brought into this world only so that the fragile, indignant mouth of a twenty-two-year-old girl may open in this pathetic recreation of his own living room, and her eyes may narrow, and she may summon her pith to say, I’ve seen the documentary .

Back in the car, continuing, changing the subject, she says, “I like the bits that talk about the nomenclature of this place.” She says the big word carefully, seems pleased with herself not to have tripped on it.

Gershon is driving swiftly out of the city. The buildings become more and more widely spaced, the verisimilitude falling apart as the construction project outpaced its budget and, back on earth, the opposition government gained power.

“It’s stupid, the nomenclature,” Gershon spits out, because it is. Officially, the city is called “Jerusalem North” (“New Jerusalem” finally too political for the offices that made these decisions), situated in the “Northern Territories.” The technical ridiculousness of this term, this wholly inaccurate nondimensional appendage— northern —is a perfect synecdoche of the basic failure of imagination of those back on earth. Where did their mourners live, if it could not be found on a compass? “Just idiotic,” Gershon says. “You get used to it, unfortunately. You call it what you want.”

He’s trying, and though they are now passing the final retaining wall of the city and the vehicle is shifting its suspension to suit the pale dirt of the unpaved road as it descends into the canyon that leads away from the settlement proper, he still can’t get past Hava having seen the documentary. Him standing there, back in the living room, his mouth hanging open like a fish. Blushing in — yes, he must say it — shame. Shame! To be caught unawares by this nothing of a girl!

Gershon guides the vehicle up a series of rough switchbacks and they begin to slowly rise up out of the canyon. When they crest the edge, and Gershon speeds the vehicle onto the flat, empty road, Hava turns in her seat to look back at the low gray line of the distant city, its ambient glow seeping into the darkening sky.

•

“We’re unprotected out here, officially,” Mendelbaum says, indulging Hava, once they’ve all settled into the den. “According to the Administration, it’s basically the city or nothing. But it’s not been so bad with old Gersh here in charge.” Mendelbaum smiles sadly. “He comes to see me every now and then — says it’s to share his sweetbread and whiskey, because he’s just too polite to admit he’s checking to see if I’m dead yet.”

“We?” Hava says. “ We’re unprotected? Who is we?”

Mendelbaum shrugs, gestures with his glass.

“There’s a few of us with homesteads out here. Every couple months we get a memo from the Administration, telling us about the terrorists from the Free Territories coming to cut our heads off.”

“Not me,” Gershon says from where he’s making the drinks, though he knows Mendelbaum knows. “I don’t write those things.”

“Who does?” Mendelbaum says, sighing and smiling kindly at Hava as Gershon steps around the kitchen island and reenters the room. “Some computer, probably. They always sound like a Mad Lib done by a very boring little boy.” He crosses his legs, shakes his head at Gershon’s offer of a refill. “But then, you probably didn’t have those, did you?” he says to Hava.

Though he’s made her one, Hava surprises Gershon by taking a drink off the proffered tray.

“We had those,” she says. “Or I did.”

“Mad Libs,” she says to herself.

Mendelbaum lets his eyebrows rise and fall, once.

“Nostalgic amusement,” he sighs. “What an industry.”

Gershon likes Mendelbaum, a gentle, intelligent man. He was an old professor at the University of Haifa, back in the world. Gershon actually met him once, there. His office had been on the very top floor of the university tower, on top of Mount Carmel. A spectacular view, suspended there over the city, the twirling skirts of roads and buildings decorating the mountain’s slope, and, of course, the sea, always the sea. During his first few years in the post here, Gershon often stood at his quarters’ window in the Government Tower and looked down and out past the city at the hazy, unclaimed desertscape extending to the horizon, where he knew somewhere was this low, flat house, Professor Mendelbaum in his den. It was like they’d switched places.

“You gave it all up?” Gershon had asked him back then, on one of his first visits in the territory.

“I gave it all up,” Mendelbaum said distantly, and gave a wan smile.

“Are you really in danger, though?” Hava asks him now, concerned.

Mendelbaum takes a drink, lets out a breath.

“My daughter would say so, I think,” he says. “She’s a professor as well, at the Technion.”

Gershon watches him. Hava senses something, but only looks down into her glass. She’s drinking from it using the ridiculous little straw which Gershon doesn’t have the heart to explain is really for stirring. She looks like a child. She actually looks a lot like Mendelbaum’s daughter, in the low light.

“Is a professor, was a professor,” Mendelbaum says into the quiet. “She’s dead, anyway,” he says flatly, not changing his posture. “So I guess that makes her emerita. They didn’t take the title away from her, at any rate.”