Monastery Read online

  Everything in the room looked filthy and run-down: the bathroom, the sheets, the muted carpet covered in mysterious stains, the olive green muslin curtains. Before going to bed, I unplugged the television, turned off the alarm on the bedside table, and covered every crack and strip of light (I always travel with a roll of masking tape). And still, lying next to my brother, I slept poorly. At some point in the night, I was awakened by shrieking or wailing, like a baby crying or a woman mid-orgasm. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from outside or from a neighboring room or if perhaps I had dreamed it. At noon, I finally bathed and dressed—my brother was sleeping soundly—and went down to the lobby for breakfast.

  The restaurant was empty. The elderly receptionist appeared, the same one who had been at the front desk at three in the morning and had put up with my neuroses and appeals for a silent room. He looked awful. More sleep-deprived than I. His wrinkled white shirt, dirty and half-tucked; his face, greenish and unshaven; his few remaining strands of black hair (fake black, excessive black, shoe polish black), spit-stuck to his balding pate. He told me in English that they only served breakfast until eleven. I simply stared at him, as though I hadn’t understood, and he sighed and told me to take a seat, that he’d try to find me something in the kitchen. His kindness surprised me, perhaps because he said everything gruffly and with a sour expression. I smiled at him. Coffee? he asked. Yes, thank you. How kind, thank you. Black, thank you. I took a seat at the table closest to the entrance.

  I was a bit disappointed to note that nothing in there looked like Israel. It could have been any restaurant, in any hotel. It had the same decorations and furniture and maybe even the same background music as any other cheap hotel. I don’t know why—maybe because I was still half-asleep, maybe because I’m an idiot—I’d been expecting a sandy floor and enormous walls made of biblical clay. The elderly receptionist returned. Without a word, he set down first a large tray holding pita bread, green olives, cubes of feta, slices of tomato and cucumber, and then a strange coffee cup. I wanted to ask him how the thing worked, what kind of magic I had to perform in order to drink from it, but he’d already shambled off, muttering under his breath. I studied the red plastic contraption and it slowly dawned on me that resting atop the cup was a individual filter—for lack of a better term—full of hot water and ground coffee, and that my individual filter was slowly draining and just-brewed coffee was dripping down into my cup. I waited patiently and possibly with a smile until the cup filled. I removed the plastic filter and set it on the tablecloth. Perhaps because it was so novel, perhaps because the engineer in me is still awed by this sort of device, that first cup of Israeli coffee tasted exquisite. I drank it slowly, experiencing a sense of well-being or optimism, and thinking of Tamara.

  IT OCCURRED TO ME that I should get out of the hotel and take a stroll, stretch my legs, maybe smoke a cigarette. As I walked through the lobby, the same elderly receptionist motioned to me. He handed me a yellow slip of paper. It was standard stationery, a stock memo, and contained a note written in my mother’s handwriting (all caps): They’d be out all day shopping and getting things ready for the wedding, and we’d all meet that night for dinner. I thought about calling up to the room to wake my brother up and tell him. But all I did was hand the note back to the elderly receptionist, thank him, and walk out of the hotel.

  The bright daylight hurt my eyes. Undecided, I spent some time staring at the traffic, at shop windows, at pedestrians rushing anxiously. I saw a taxi driver sitting in his taxi, reading the paper. I walked over and asked him in English if he could take me to the Jerusalem market—the first place that occurred to me. He put his paper aside and started the engine.

  He was wearing a khaki cap, a fisherman’s cap. His radio was on too loud, tuned to the news or maybe a debate in Hebrew, and as he drove, he kept stealing glances at me in the rearview mirror. Suddenly he shouted in acceptable English, asking where I was from. Guatemala, I told him. I don’t know if he didn’t hear or didn’t understand or didn’t care. But Jewish? he shouted, almost insolently. I smiled and said: Sometimes. What do you mean, sometimes? his eyes squinting, his question abusive, his voice abrasive and obstructed, as though he were talking with a mouthful of grapes. I didn’t feel like explaining such a bad joke. I just asked if I could smoke a cigarette. Yes, good, cigarette, he said, still inspecting me in the rearview mirror. I had only one Guatemalan cigarette left. Arab? he asked, and I said no. Bad people, Arabs, he proclaimed in his deficient English over the shouting on the news and the sound of the wind rushing in from the window. I stared at the back of his neck: fat, sweaty, crimson. I was going to tell him that my grandfather had been an Arab Jew from Beirut, and my grandmother an Arab Jew from Alexandria, and my other grandmother an Arab Jew from Aleppo, and so that made me a little Arab too—three parts Arab, in fact, one part Polish—but instead I sat staring at the back of his sun-scorched neck and toying with my last cigarette but not lighting it. Bad people, Arabs, he said again. Very bad. We have to kill them, he said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. He slammed on the brakes for a red light. Look at that, the taxi driver said. Stepping out in front of us, amid a group of people crossing the street, was a woman in a black burka leading a girl of five or six by the hand. Filthy people, he said. We must kill the Arabs, he shouted again into the rearview mirror. You don’t think? he asked, observing me, perhaps challenging me. His eyes in the mirror suddenly looked black, empty, lifeless, like fake doll eyes. You’re right, I said into his black eyes, we have to kill them all. His black eyes finally smiled a bit. But how should we do it? I inquired. Eh? he grunted, his eyes flitting in the rearview mirror. What method do you propose we use to kill them? I asked bluntly, and the man fell silent, perplexed or perhaps aggravated, and I swallowed bile.

  My derisive reaction surprised me. I was more upset with myself than with the man and his ignorance and his stupid homily of hatred for the Arabs. I wondered how many Israelis thought like he did. I wondered how many Jews thought like he did. I decided it was best not to know.

  The taxi driver sped up and careered through the narrow streets of Jerusalem—a word, I recalled bitterly, that meant city of peace.

  It took me a while to notice that the cigarette was crumpled in my fist.

  Let me out here, I told him, although I had no idea where we were. The man spat something back at me in Hebrew, and I simply repeated, unrelenting: Let me out here. He braked violently, pulling over to one side of the street. I tossed my cigarette debris onto the floor of his taxi and handed him a few dollars and left him there talking to himself, perhaps insulting me, perhaps offering me my change.

  THE WIND BLEW SOFT AND HUMID. It was hot. I walked all over, half-lost, among people who seemed to be on the same slow pilgrimage. I couldn’t get rid of a metallic taste in my mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about the taxi driver, his black eyes, his fat sweaty neck, his contemptuous words. I couldn’t stop thinking about my Arab grandparents, my three parts Arab.

  THINKING ABOUT MY maternal grandmother. Her Syrian parents fled Aleppo and made it to America and, thanks to an itinerant life of card playing (my great-grandfather, a compulsive gambler, had squandered all the family’s money on poker and bets), their children were born in Mexico, in Panama, in Cuba, in Guatemala. My grandmother often told me that her Syrian father allowed his children only to kiss his hand. That’s it. Just his hand. As though he were a mighty sheik, bedecked, bejeweled, smoking a golden hookah. My father died, she once told me, and I never once got to hug him.

  THINKING ABOUT MY paternal grandfather. From Lebanon. He and his seven brothers and sisters had fled Beirut at the turn of the twentieth century (my great-grandmother died during their escape and was buried in some Jewish cemetery in Corsica). Curiously, employing what might have been some commercial survival strategy, they decided that each brother and sister would settle in a different city: in Paris, in Guatemala City, in Mexico City, in Cali, in Lima, in Havana, in Manhattan, in Miami (the great-uncle I remember
best—handsome, an opera singer, friend or member of Miami’s Italian Mafia—served time in a Florida jail for being a gigolo). My Lebanese grandfather, after spending a few years in Paris, was the one who then saved his brother in Guatemala from bankruptcy. That was where he met my grandmother. That was where he opened a store in El Portal del Comercio. That was where he built his palace.

  THINKING ABOUT MY paternal grandmother. Born in Alexandria, Egypt. With her parents and sisters, she set sail from Egypt at the age of seven. The ship, after several months on the high seas, finally docked at the first port in Central America, and according to family legend, my great-grandfather thought they’d arrived in Panama, where one of his distant cousins lived. There they disembarked. And there they stayed. In Guatemala. By accident.

  I’D BEEN WANDERING for a couple of hours through who knows what heaving streets and alleyways. The walking, or the sweat, or the nostalgia, or simply the time elapsed, calmed me down a bit. I exchanged dollars for shekels at a kiosk. I needed cigarettes. I was thirsty. I walked into a corner bazaar, dark and dingy, a sort of general store. An Israeli teenager, a girl of maybe seventeen or eighteen, sold me a pack of cigarettes and a very cold beer, and I took a long swallow right there at the counter, standing before her. She had beautiful, marked features—large dark eyes, thick brows, very black hair, prominent nose, taut young skin with a soft olive tone. She had a round greenish tattoo on her shoulder. All of a sudden, she moved her right hand just above the bulb of a small rustic lamp on the counter and starting making animal shadows on the ceiling. Each time she made a new shadow, she whispered a word in Hebrew. The name of each animal, I supposed. She might have made a dog, and a swan, and a horse, and a crocodile. I finished my beer in silence, watching her small hand play in the amber light of the bulb. Then I thanked her in Hebrew and said good-bye in Hebrew and she mocked my Hebrew pronunciation with a pretty smile, while up on the ceiling the shadow of her hand said good-bye. Sometimes it’s easy to confuse youth for beauty.

  I WALKED ON. Down narrow dusty streets, down wide commercial avenues, past fig and date sellers and shawarma sellers and falafel sellers, past too many shops selling too much crap for too many tourists. After a while I came to some steps leading down to an enormous bustling plaza, full of people all congregated in one corner. I recognized the Wailing Wall. The Kotel, in Hebrew. I felt a touch of vertigo and sat on a step to contemplate the swarming plaza.

  I lit a cigarette. As I smoked, I tried to remember the story of that remnant of wall, so solemn and biblical, that final vestige of the Temple of the Jews, of my ancestors. But all I could remember was the song by the Cure.

  Standing there, still humming the tune of Robert Smith’s flute, I stubbed out my cigarette on the clay step and made my way down.

  Instantly, I was besieged by Orthodox Jews in long black robes and black suits and black skullcaps. Rabbis maybe. They grabbed my arm and tugged on me and offered me who knows what in Hebrew and in English. One after the other. Stalking me. Circling me, like the buzzards in the song. I passed a guy on his knees. I passed another guy who seemed to be shouting at the entire city, with rage, and maybe even tears, and in Baptist-sounding English, with a thick Southern accent. Widow, he shouted at Jerusalem. Slave, he shouted at her. Tributary, he shouted at her. You lie there alone amid so many people, he shouted at her with ever more rage but now eyeing me, as though I were the one to blame for his anguish, and so I hurried through the rabbis and preachers and tourists and soldiers and finally I reached the wall. I saw people praying aloud, or in silence, or as they swayed, or hidden beneath huge white shawls (tallit, in Hebrew), with small black boxes on their foreheads and black straps wound around their forearms (tefillin, in Hebrew). I saw people taking pictures of the wall, and people kissing it, and people tucking little folded-up slips of paper into its cracks and crevices. I saw vegetation sprouting all along the wall: dry, scrawny, miserable. It struck me, taking it all in, that never had a wall’s name been more fitting.

  I approached. I reached out inconspicuously, cautiously, as though I were doing something forbidden, and I touched it. I wanted to feel something, anything. All I felt was stone.

  ON A DIFFERENT TRIP, to a different city, bundled up in a woman’s pink coat, I had also touched the last remnants of what had once been the wall of the Warsaw ghetto. One last redbrick wall between two buildings in Warsaw, between Sienna Street and Zlota Street. It was perhaps six or seven feet tall and thirty feet long. I touched it several times, from several angles, at both ends, with both hands. And I didn’t feel anything there either. Or maybe I refused to feel anything. But then suddenly, when I got even closer, I saw that many of the bricks had something engraved in their red clay, like a bas-relief. The same engraving in bas-relief: a sort of small circle with two numbers—a 10 and a 1—separated by a diagonal slash. It occurred to me, stroking it with my finger, that it might be the emblem of the brick company, that it might be the logo of the company that had been contracted to manufacture all the bricks for the wall of the ghetto, to manufacture thousands and thousands of bricks that would imprison an entire people for years, until they’d been eliminated from the city, until they’d been starved to death. I kept stroking the logo with my finger. I imagined factory workers unknowingly producing brick after brick with that same logo in bas-relief, tattooing it in bas-relief: their broad backs, their burly arms, their faces filthy and sweaty, their hands stained forever red.

  I WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE the Wailing Wall, when I saw on the ground, under my foot, a dirty white slip of folded paper. I crouched down, picked it up, brushed it off, and unfolded it. It was in Hebrew. It was a single sentence, short, black, written in Hebrew letters. I recognized two or three. I remembered how pointless my Hebrew classes had been as a boy—just memorizing the sounds of vowels and consonants—before I turned thirteen. It occurred to me that it was probably someone’s prayer, and that it had also probably fallen from a crack in the wall. I folded it back up. And I don’t know why, but moving quickly, almost fleeing, almost running away from something or someone, I slipped it into my pants pocket.

  OF THE BIRDS YOU SHALL HAVE in abomination, and shall not be eaten, are the following.

  My sister’s fiancé, in black jacket and white shirt, paused.

  I put down the huge menu. I watched him, his forehead aimed upward as if posing, or as if concentrating, or as if searching there for the words from the Torah he was reciting from memory. I thought his little black skullcap was about to fall to the floor.

  Brooklyn. That’s where he told us he was from, as soon as he sat down. Born and raised in Brooklyn. His father, he told us, was a driver in Brooklyn. Limo driver, he told us. His mother worked in a beauty salon in Brooklyn. They were divorced. Didn’t speak to each other. Weren’t even Orthodox. Never went to temple. It had been years since he’d heard a word from his only sister. He said he was in Alcoholics Anonymous, that he liked to tell people that up front, from the outset, right off the bat. No reason to hide it. That’s who he was. No one in his family, he told us, would be attending the wedding.

  The eagle, the vulture, the osprey, he commenced in slow enumeration.

  He paused again. He was still gazing upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. His little black skullcap was holding tight. It was fastened to his straight brown hair with a metal bobby pin.

  The kite, he went on, the falcon according to its kind, every raven according to its kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the seagull, the hawk according to its kind, the owl, the cormorant, the ibis, the water hen, the pelican, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron according to its kind, the hoopoe, and the bat.

  He finally looked down. Smiled at me. As he was taking a sip of water, proud of himself and his verbatim memorization of the Torah, I informed him that the bat wasn’t a bird. I heard him swallow, hard. That is how it is written, he scolded me, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. The bat is a mammal, I told him. That is how it is written in Leviticus, he repeated, ignoring me, bar
ricading himself behind the ever-literal interpretation of zealots. It flies, I told him. It looks like a bird, but it’s not a bird. It says in Leviticus, he told me, that those are the birds you shall have in abomination, and shall not be eaten. Silence. Now, in the Mishnah, he went on, it says that birds of prey are not kosher, because to be kosher a bird must possess three characteristics. There is one species of bat, I interrupted his exegesis before he could enumerate the three characteristics, that hibernates for six months in coitus. In what? asked my mother. In coitus, six months, I declared, picking the huge menu back up (my own barricade). That’s not right, my brother corrected. What it is, he explained, is that this particular species of bat reproduces only while hibernating, a state that lasts six months and in which the males mate with several other hibernating bats, half-asleep, who don’t even know what’s going on. He smiled. Some of which, he said smiling wider, are also males. Thirty-five percent of them are males, I chimed in. That’s right—he winked—thirty-five percent of the males mate with other males. More silence.

  We’d watched a documentary on bats when I got back to the hotel room that evening, sitting on the narrow balcony and sharing a cigarette my brother had expertly rolled, and which my father, who came to pick us up and show us his new baseball cap (FATHER OF THE BRIDE, in gold letters), had thought was a joint.

  Right, I said to my brother, just to keep it going, but I prefer to believe that a single act of coitus can last six months. What are you talking about? asked my father, as though he’d just awakened, his new cap still on, still stiff. Myotis lucifugus, I said. Long acts of coitus, I said. Bisexual bats, my brother said. We both smiled. What on earth are you talking about? my mother asked impatiently, near exasperation. I knew it was marijuana, my father said, half-joking and half-gullible. I was surprised that my sister, beneath her wig and hat (her own barricade), sat judging us only with her eyes, not saying a word. My sister’s fiancé raised a hand, requesting the floor once more. At any rate, according to law, you are allowed to eat duck, he granted me, his tone pious, his hand held out priestlike. I was about to thank him for his gracious consent. Fortunately, the waiter arrived.