Zachary Lazar - I Pity the Poor Immigrant

That afternoon, I went back to my hotel near the beach. I sat at the bar off the sunlit lobby and looked at the picture on my cell phone of Gila and me, more and more perturbed by the expressionless look on my face, the quality of numb detachment, even immateriality. I remembered that lunch we’d had, the sense I’d gotten then that Gila, in her illness and isolation, somehow thought of us as kindred spirits. I felt that kinship myself now, sitting at the hotel bar, imagining Gila as a waitress thirty years ago, keeping her back straight as she bent down with a balanced tray of drinks. I suppose the kinship I really felt was not so much with Gila as with her absence, or with whatever faint traces I imagined still remained of her in Tel Aviv. I had learned from the manager at the Dan Hotel that a Gila Konig had been an employee there from 1969 to 1977. No one who worked there now of course had ever met her. I couldn’t find any information about what she’d done between 1977 and 1980, the year she finally came to New York. It occurred to me that I was probably the last person in Israel who still knew her name.

When I finished my drink, I walked up Frishman Street, past Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, the sudden open spaces of what is now called Rabin Square — pigeons and litter, discount stores fronted by cafés with white tables. I had been walking all day and I kept walking now, into a neighborhood of modern apartment buildings, flowering trees, benches in the shade, the streets named for artists and musicians. At 4 Be’eri Street, I found the building — the ordinary building that Lansky’s biographer Robert Lacey describes as a “run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv.” Through the window of one of the apartments I could see simple birch furniture, a lamp on the ceiling in the reds and blacks of a Calder mobile. There was no one else out on the street and so I came closer, following the sidewalk to a pair of clipped hedges that led to the entryway. Nine buzzers on a metal doorjamb. The kind of building that in my childhood in New York would have contained the office of a podiatrist or an orthodontist. I looked through the glass door and saw the dim foyer with its low ceiling, the beige linoleum on the walls and floor — looking through that glass was like looking at a photograph from 1972, a black-and-white photograph of a crime scene. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.

Bellen had remembered it thirty-five years later, the run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. As for Gila, she had almost certainly forgotten about Bellen by the time she told me her story. It was not Bellen but Lansky she wanted to tell me about, Lansky who made her story matter. I thought about all three of them having entered this nondescript building where I now stood. To stare in through the glass of its door was to understand insignificance not as a desert or a sea or a night sky but as nothing at all, as a silence.

Every once in a while she went back to the apartment to see that it was still there, still waiting for her. Three empty rooms with marks on the bare white walls from where the furniture had stood, where the pictures had hung. Broken slats in the closet door. The water in the kitchen sink would sputter out brown until it ran clear. Such a strange, unwanted gift, as if he were finally telling her something crucial.

I had started writing this book already, before I’d actually seen the building. Standing there outside it, I heard in my head how the first section should end.

The next evening I walked into the lobby of the Dan Hotel to finally meet Voss. I had made a point of arriving late, not wanting to have to sit there waiting for him, not sure I even wanted to see him again, but there he was, sitting in the far corner in one of the gray armchairs in the faint light reading a newspaper. The windows’ tinted glass, even with the Mediterranean glare behind it, created a muted stillness, as if time had stopped and no one else would ever enter that room, or try to leave it — dark brown walls, brushed steel tables, black and gray chairs arranged in precise geometrical groups. Voss didn’t stand when he saw me coming, even though the room is vast in a way that would have caused most people to stand or at least shift in their seat. He wore a charcoal suit with a white dress shirt that had thin gold panes. He was a little more heavyset than I remembered, or perhaps it was just that his beard had grown in more thickly than before — that beard and the tousled graying hair were so tirelessly deployed, all the more effective for being so. As I walked toward him, he put two fingers to the bone behind his ear and let his elbow rest on the arm of his chair, looking at me, not trying to pretend otherwise.

“I’m sorry about Eliav,” he said, after we said hello. “He meant something to you. I should have been more aware of that.”

I tilted my head, dismissing what now seemed like a tired sentiment. I’d been angry the last time we’d spoken, over Skype, the little box with Voss’s face in it pixilated and badly lit, as if he were sitting in a cell, speaking against his will. If he’d told me about Eliav earlier, I’d insisted, I could have gone to the funeral, but we both knew I wouldn’t have flown all that way for the funeral, that I’d barely known Eliav. I was angry for other reasons. Angry for who knew what reasons.

“He was a little tragic,” I said. “But you were right about him. He was poisonous.”

“It must be hard having a father like that and not having any talent of your own.”

“He did have talent. But he was also poisonous.” I put my purse on the glass tabletop and sat down, looking abstractedly for the waiter. “Everyone’s family is poisonous. Isn’t yours?”

“My parents are Holocaust survivors.” He folded his newspaper with a firm crease and left it resting on the table. “Small, gentle people who came through it all and loved everything my brother and I did. That’s another kind of problem.”

We ordered drinks — a red wine for me, a club soda for Voss. I told him then that I’d read his book when it came out in English last year. It was about his combat duty in the First Lebanon War, a memoir written in the voice of Voss’s nineteen-year-old self, a boy sarcastically eager for the very trauma that would soon diminish him. Near the end, Voss accidentally shoots a civilian on the outskirts of Beirut, a sixteen-year-old girl he sees running between two houses. When he comes to clear the area, having panicked and fired on her, he finds that she’s not quite dead. A bubble of blood and saliva pulses from her lips, her breathing shallow and rapid, her eyes open but fixed. He is standing right above her where she lies on the ground but he is incapable of putting her suffering to an end. He shoots once at her head and misses to the left, then shoots again and misses to the right. The sounds the girl makes are almost sexual — he recognizes it from the movies, not from experience — little moans each time he fires and misses. I told him now how sad I thought the book was, how sad for all its cynicism.

“I think about you sometimes,” he said then.

“I wouldn’t have expected you to think about me.”