Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

But the affectless voice is what she wants, isn’t it? His pretension of having confronted the trauma, the loss — just another kind of repression, Hava’s handlers would have told her. “It’s just another kind of repression,” Yoheved said to him in her steely voice, during one of their many fights about the documentary, “but it’s worse because it’s willful.”

As they searched the shoulders of the road for the injured child, a small crowd from the nearby village gathered. My wife’s brother, who spoke good Arabic, made the mistake of trying to explain. Men in the crowd began to shout and cry out about a child struck and killed, and the crowd grew.

She couldn’t think he would say this, not on camera, not even now, in Mendelbaum’s living room. By that point, Yoheved had turned their apartment into a jungle of her beloved houseplants, though. “Doing these interviews,” Gershon had screamed back, staring into the leaves and tendrils of green, though he had seen none of the footage yet and did not know what she was saying in it, “that’s what’s willful repression! Repression by force!”

Later, the official investigation, aided by informants, would discover that a good deal of the agitation was accomplished by a small core of men, which group had thrown the large rock at the passing car, creating the illusion of impact in the first place.

“My monument?” Gershon says now, out loud.

Hava’s face is changing, she looks confused. Mendelbaum is looking at her now.

Gershon could say it, if he wanted to.

People in the crowd, which was by now a mob, grabbed my wife’s brother. Then they grabbed my wife. Someone was shouting about them being Israeli spies, my wife’s brother managed to tell her, but then they were beating him. Spies? my wife shouted uselessly, in Hebrew. Spies? Spies? An unknown member of the band of men stepped forward as my wife’s brother was dragged out of sight.

“You haven’t told her, then?” Mendelbaum says to Gershon.

Gershon feels very tired. He sets down his drink. When Yoheved gave him the rough cut of the documentary to watch, she’d left the apartment to give him privacy. “I want to talk about it when I get back,” she said. “I’ll be home in two hours.” He’d watched the first few interviews, then digitally skipped ahead to the last one, the only one that really mattered. When she came back, he was gone.

“They beat my wife’s brother with their fists and feet, and then beat him to death with stones until his head caved in,” he says, looking at Hava. “Somebody stepped forward out of the crowd and threw a Molotov cocktail into the car. I don’t know whether they knew Shmuli was in there, strapped in his car seat. I don’t know if they saw him. He was burned alive in the car. While this was happening, they dragged my wife Yoheved away into a building where she was beaten and violently raped, repeatedly. Thirty-two hours later, when the IDF moved in, they found her there, barely alive. So I don’t have a monument here, I guess.”

Hava is sitting very still, her eyes unblinking. She looks ill.

“But then you knew all that,” Gershon says. “You’ve seen the documentary.”

There’s a pause.

“The foundation documentary,” she says quietly. “ Ad Astra Per Aspera . About the first settlers here.”

Mendelbaum rubs his eyes.

•

Outside the low-slung house, Gershon hurriedly resecures the crate of sweetbread to the cargo rack on the back of the vehicle. He has been spun into a stunned silence at his own mistake. He hops down and waves once more goodbye to Mendelbaum.

His friend is standing at the window of the house, watching Gershon get into the vehicle and prepare to leave. Gershon was undecided for weeks as to whether or not to come and speak to Mendelbaum about the tiny line item, the request for one more kind of seed in the customs and horticulture delivery invoice, which Gershon came across purely by accident.

But on this visit, before coming out to the car to leave, Gershon went through into the greenhouse, Mendelbaum explaining to teary Hava back in the living room that he and Gershon were going to pick out some of his synthetic produce to take back with them, it’d just be a few minutes.

Mendelbaum had found Gershon standing in front of the plant, its droopy flowers a brilliant, unbelievable purple.

“That color,” Gershon said, not looking at him. “That color is just. .”

Mendelbaum stepped around him and lightly touched a few of the petals.

“I didn’t think it would actually look like a monk’s hood,” Gershon said, his voice skating as he looked at his friend.

“This,” Mendelbaum said, holding one of the bulbs delicately between two fingers, “is only one tiny mutation away from being a tomatillo. Can you believe that?”

Neither man said anything, both looking at the plant. Gershon could stop this, they both knew, could stop Mendelbaum from harvesting the rare plant, from poisoning himself with it. But Gershon knew he wasn’t going to impede Mendelbaum, had always known the appalling mercy he was capable of, and now Mendelbaum knew it too.

“What a place we’ve come from,” Mendelbaum had said, quietly.

And now Mendelbaum’s figure in the darkened bay window recedes in the rear camera of the vehicle as Gershon drives into the desolate landscape, the town burning electrically in the distance. When they trace their way back to the canyon, on an impulse Gershon turns away from the road, and steers the vehicle up a steep crest.

“Where are we going now?” Hava says, the first time she’s spoken since the living room. She sounds exhausted. Gershon doesn’t answer, but speeds up.

Soon they’re on the old road, which curves before one last ridge. Nestled along the elbow of the path are a few dark, angled shapes huddling against one another, vacant sockets of shadow against the hill.

“Oh,” Hava says quietly. “There they are. The shacks.”

Gershon catches some movement out of the corner of his eye and is trying to process it when they both hear the bump and crunch, something changing, momentarily, about the vehicle. Gershon slows but doesn’t stop, though both he and Hava look around. Two very dirty children are sprinting out from the hollow behind one of the piles of wood that used to be a shack, oversized respirators slipping on their faces. The vehicle’s slowed progress has brought it to the top of the ridge above the ruins of the encampment. Gershon stops sharply.

They both look down at the stretch they’ve just come from, following the path of the two children — boys? — to their objective: the mangled crate of sweetbread that has come untethered from the vehicle’s cargo rack and crashed down into the dust of the road. The two kids struggle to drag the pallet back into their hidey-hole. It’s slow going but they’re getting it there, throwing wild glances at the stilled vehicle above them. Gershon exhales and looks forward again.

“There’s also this,” he says, nodding to the view out the windshield.

Hava gives a little gasp.

It is night now, and the sky is laid out before them in its penetrating blackness. Beneath it, revealed by the ridge’s elevation, is the great liquid sea, its darkened silver face waveless, vast and inconsolable before them.

And Gershon wants to tell her, wants to tell Hava about that final interview in the documentary it turns out she has not seen, wants to describe what it was like watching his wife sit there with the man — the boy, really; fidgety, nervous, scared to have been pulled out of his cell for these cameras, for this woman whose face he doesn’t remember — who lit the rag and flung the bottle of alcohol into the vehicle where Shmuli sat, strapped into his car seat, screaming in terror. What it was like watching her sit there with him and hear him out, hear him admit what he did. And then Gershon wants to tell Hava what it was to watch his wife lean forward and forgive him.