“Everything’s OK?”
Jacob was surprised by her forthrightness and reminded of his own restraint.
“Of course,” Tamir said. “Just some old obligations she couldn’t rearrange. Now: Jake mentioned you’d prepared some food?”
“Did he?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even think you were going to be back until later in the afternoon.”
“Don’t lie to your wife,” Tamir said, giving Jacob a wink that Jacob wasn’t positive Julia saw, so he told her, “He winked at me.”
“Let’s put some food together,” Julia said. “Head in. Max will show you where to put your things down, and we’ll catch up around the kitchen table.”
As Tamir entered the house, Julia took Jacob’s hand. “Can we talk for a second?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know.”
“They’re driving me crazy.”
“I need to tell you something.”
“Something else?”
“Yes.”
Years later, Jacob would remember this moment as a vast hinge.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“I know.”
“What?”
“Mark.”
“No,” Julia said, “not that. Not me.”
And then, with a great flush of relief, Jacob said, “Oh, right. We already heard.”
“What?”
“On the radio.”
“The radio?”
“Yeah, it sounds horrible. And really scary.”
“What does?”
“The earthquake.”
“Oh,” Julia said, at once clear and confused. “The earthquake. Yes.”
It was then that Jacob realized they were still holding hands.
“Wait, what were you talking about?”
“Jacob—”
“Mark.”
“No, not that.”
“I was thinking about it on the drive over. I was thinking about everything. After we got off the phone, I—”
“Stop. Please.”
He felt the blood rush to his face like a tide, then recede as quickly. He’d done something horrible, but he didn’t know what. It wasn’t the phone. There was nothing more to learn there. The money he’d taken out of ATMs over the years? For stupid, harmless things he was embarrassed to admit wanting? What? Had she somehow looked through his e-mails? Seen how he spoke about her to those who might understand or at least sympathize? Had he been stupid enough, or forced by his subconscious, to leave himself signed in on some device?
He put his hand on top of her hand on top of his hand: “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m so sorry, Julia.”
He was sorry, so sorry, but for what? There was so much to apologize for.
At his wedding, Jacob’s mother told a story that he had no memory of, and didn’t believe was true, and was hurt by, because even if it wasn’t true, it could have been, and it exposed him.
“You were probably expecting my husband,” Deborah began, eliciting a good laugh. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that he usually does the talking. And talking.”
More laughter.
“But this one I wanted. The wedding of my son, whom I grew in my body, and fed from my body, and gave everything of myself so that one day he would be able to let go of my hand and take the hand of another. To his credit, my husband didn’t argue or complain. He just gave me the silent treatment for three weeks.” More laughter, especially from Irv. “They were the happiest three weeks of my life.”
More laughter.
“Don’t forget our honeymoon!” Irv called.
“Did we go on a honeymoon?” Deborah asked.
More laughter.
“You might have noticed that Jews don’t exchange wedding vows. The covenant is said to be implicit in the ritual. Isn’t that wonderfully Jewish? To stand before one’s life partner, and before one’s god, at what is probably the most significant moment of your life, and to assume it goes without saying? It’s hard to think of anything else that a Jew would assume goes without saying.”
More laughter.
“I’ll never get over what a strange and easily explained people we are. But perhaps some of you are like me, and cannot help but hear the familiar vows: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ They might not be our words, but they are in our collective subconscious.
“There was a year in Jacob’s childhood—” She looked to Irv and said, “Maybe it was even more than a year? A year and a half?” Then she looked back to those gathered. “There was a period of time that felt like longer than it was”—laughter—“when Jacob would pretend he was disabled. It started with the announcement, one morning, that he was blind. ‘But you’re closing your eyes,’ I told him.”
More laughter.
“ ‘That’s only because there’s nothing to look at,’ he said, ‘so I’m resting them.’ Jacob was a stubborn child. He could keep up a resistance for days, and weeks. Irv, can you imagine from where he might have gotten that?”
A laugh.
Irv called back, “Nature from me, nurture from you!”
Another laugh.
Deborah continued: “He stuck with the blindness for three or four days—a long time for a child, or anyone, to keep his eyes closed—but then came to dinner one night batting lashes and once again adept with silverware. ‘I’m happy to see you’ve recovered,’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his ears. ‘What is it, love?’ He went to the cabinet, got a pen and paper, and wrote, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m deaf.’ Irv said, ‘You aren’t deaf.’ Jacob mouthed the words ‘I am deaf.’
“Maybe a month later, he limped into the living room with a pillow under the back of his shirt. He didn’t say anything, just limped to the shelf, took down a book, and limped back out. Irv called out, ‘Ciao, Quasimodo,’ and went back to his reading. He thought it was a phase among phases. I followed Jacob to his room, sat beside him on his bed, and asked, ‘Did you break your back?’ He nodded yes. ‘That must be incredibly painful.’ He nodded. I suggested we reset his spine by taping a broom to his back. He walked around like that for two days. He recovered.
“I was reading to him in bed a couple of weeks later—his head propped on the pillow that had been the hump on his back—and he pulled up the sleeve of his pajama top and said, ‘Look what happened.’ I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing, only that I was supposed to be seeing it, so I said, ‘That’s looks horrible.’ He nodded. ‘I got a very bad burn,’ he said. ‘So I see,’ I said, very gently touching it. ‘Hold on, I have some ointment in the medicine cabinet.’ I came back with moisturizer. ‘For use on extreme burns,’ I said, pretending to read the directions on the back. ‘Apply liberally across burn. Rub into skin as if massaging. Full recovery expected by morning.’ I rubbed his arm for half an hour, a massage that went through seasons of being pleasurable, and meditative, and intimate, and, apparently, sedating. When he came into our bed the next morning, he showed me his arm and said, ‘It worked.’ I said, ‘A miracle.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘just medicine.’ ”
More laughter.
“Just medicine. I still think about that all the time. No miracle, just medicine.
“The disabilities and injuries continued to come—a cracked rib, loss of feeling in his left leg, broken fingers—but with less and less frequency. Then, one morning, maybe a year after he’d gone blind, Jacob didn’t come down for breakfast. He often overslept, especially after nights when he and his father stayed up to watch the Orioles. I tapped on his door. No answer. I opened it, and he was perfectly still on his bed, arms and legs straight, with a note balanced in the well of his sternum: ‘I am feeling extremely sick, and think I might die tonight. If you are now looking at me, and I’m not moving, it is because I am dead.’ If it were a game, he’d have won it. But it wasn’t a game. I could rub cream into a burn, I could set a broken back, but there is n
othing to be done for the dead. I had loved the intimacy of our secret understanding, but I no longer understood. I looked at him lying there, my stoic child, so still. I started crying. Just as I’m about to do now. I got on my knees beside Jacob’s body, and I cried and cried and cried.”
Irv went to the dance floor and put his arm around Deborah. He whispered something into her ear. She nodded, and whispered something back. He whispered something back.
She collected herself and said, “I cried a lot. I put my head on his chest and made little rivers in the channels between his ribs. You were so skinny, Jacob. No matter how much you ate, you were just bones. Just bones,” she sighed.
“You let me go on for a long time, then coughed, and jerked your legs, and coughed again, and slowly came back to life. I was never more angry than when you put yourself in danger. When you didn’t look both ways, when you ran with scissors—I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so careless with the thing I most loved?
“But I wasn’t angry then. Only devastated. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ I told you. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ Still flat on your back, you turned your head to face me—do you remember this?—and you said, ‘But I have to.’ ”
Deborah started crying again, and handed Irv the page from which she’d been reading.
“In sickness and in health,” he said. “Jacob and Julia, my son and daughter, there is only ever sickness. Some people go blind, some go deaf. Some people break their backs, some get badly burned. But you were right, Jacob: you would have to do it again. Not as a game, or rehearsal, or tortuous effort to communicate something, but for real and forever.”
Irv looked up from the page, turned to Deborah, and said, “Jesus, Deborah, this is depressing.”
More laughter, but now from trembling throats. Deborah laughed, too, and took Irv’s hand.
He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”
After having made love for the first time as husband and wife, Jacob and Julia lay side by side. Side by side, they looked at the ceiling.
Jacob said, “My mom’s speech was great.”
“It was,” Julia said.
Jacob took her hand and said, “But only the deafness part was true. None of the rest.”
Sixteen years later, alone with the mother of his three children, on the stoop of their home and under only the infinite ceiling, Jacob knew that everything his mother had said was true. Even if he couldn’t remember it, even if it hadn’t happened. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking for him.
But then Julia pressed his hand. Not hard. Just enough pressure to communicate love. He felt love. Spousal, co-parental, romantic, friendly, forgiving, devoted, resigned, stubbornly hopeful—the kind didn’t matter. He had spent so much of his life standing at thresholds, parsing love, withholding comfort, forcing happiness. She applied more pressure to her still-husband’s hand, and held his eyes in the fingers of her eyes, and told him, “Your grandfather died.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, words that originated in his spine.
“Sorry?”
“Wait, what? I didn’t hear you.”
“Your grandfather. Isaac. He’s dead.”
“What?”
IV
FIFTEEN DAYS OF FIVE THOUSAND YEARS
DAY 2
Asked to estimate how many are trapped in the rubble, the chief of Israel’s recovery effort says, “One is ten thousand too many.” The journalist follows up: “Are you suggesting ten thousand?”
DAY 3
Statement from the Israeli interior minister’s office: “This is not a time for petty squabbling. If the Islamists want control, they can have control. If they want their holy sites preserved, they can have that. But they cannot have both.”
To which the waqf responds: “The Zionists have a history of underestimating Arabs, and of keeping what it borrows.”
To which the interior minister himself responds: “Israel never estimates, and Israel never borrows.”
DAY 4
New York Times public editor: “Many readers have responded to the use of the word ‘disproportionate’ in yesterday’s front-page projection of casualties in the Middle East.”
In Lebanon, the leader of Hezbollah gives a TV address that contains the sentence “The earthquake was not a work of nature, and it was not an earthquake.”
CBS Evening News anchor: “And finally, tonight, a glimmer of hope amid the rubble. Here is the story of young Adia, the three-year-old Palestinian girl who lost her parents and three sisters in Nablus. Wandering amid the ruins, without even a last name, she took the hand of the American photojournalist John Tirr, and refused to release it.”
DAY 5
The Israeli ambassador’s response: “Perhaps we should ask the thirty-six Japanese citizens we ‘unilaterally, clumsily, and brutally’ rescued, at the expense of our own blood, if they would prefer to be airlifted back onto the Temple Mount.”
Military analyst on Fox News, on the subject of Turkey’s uncoordinated use of Israeli airspace for supply transport: “Israel’s nonreaction is either an unprecedented gesture of cooperation or a sign of the unprecedented weakness of the Israeli Air Force.”
A twenty-two-year-old Arab Israeli citizen with four missing siblings explains: “The glass bottle is useless as a weapon, so it is deadly as a symbol.” The rioting, no longer spontaneous, is known as the “tdamar,” the resentment.
The Syrian president: “Taking effect immediately, the truce and strategic alliance will include the eleven largest rebel groups.”
DAY 6
In Rome, the Pope announces: “The Vatican will fund and oversee the restoration of the Holy Sepulcher.”
Response from the synod of the Greek Orthodox Church: “The Vatican will do no such thing.”
Response from the catholicos of the Armenian Church: “The ruins shall not be altered.”
The British Parliament passes a resolution “to condition the shipment of British aid to be delivered directly to the intended recipients, rather than through Israeli channels.”
Junior (and Jewish) senator from California: “No doubt Israel is doing everything in her power to oversee the broadest, most effective recovery effort. Clearly, Israel cannot hold territories and renounce responsibility for the population.”
The German chancellor: “As Israel’s closest friend in Europe, we counsel her to use this tragedy as an opportunity to reach out to her Arab neighbors.”
Secret communiqué from the king of Jordan to the prime minister of Israel: “Our need for aid has become so extreme and urgent, we are no longer in a position to question its source.”
Response: “Is that a request, or a threat?”
Response: “It is a statement.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee announces the creation of two lists of public officials: “Defenders of Israel” and “Betrayers of Israel.” The first posting identifies 512 Defenders and 123 Betrayers.
Poster in Amman: STOP CHOLERA.
DAY 7
The Egyptian foreign minister’s response: “With regard to the March of a Million, we cannot prevent free people from demonstrating their brotherhood with the suffering victims of the earthquake.”
The Turkish ambassador to the UN claims: “Israel has halved the number of aid ships allowed to enter Israeli waters.”
Al Jazeera claims: “Medical supplies intended for the West Bank are being held at Israeli-controlled border crossings.”
The American secretary of state claims: “Israel is fully cooperating with all good-faith partners.”
Syria claims: “We have moved ground forces to our southern border for the purpose of self-defense.”
/> World Health Organization statement: “Epidemic cholera, which has now been confirmed in more than a dozen cities in the Palestinian Territories and Jordan, poses an even greater risk than either aftershocks or war.”
In a phone call to the Israeli prime minister, the American president reaffirms his country’s commitment to help secure Israel “with whatever is required, without limitations,” but adds: “This horrible disaster must inspire a fundamental change in the Middle East axioms.”
CNN anchor, forefinger to earpiece: “I’m sorry to interrupt. We’re getting reports that just before seven p.m., local time, another dramatic earthquake struck the Middle East, magnitude 7.3.”
DAY 8
From the head of Israeli civil engineering’s report, delivered by secure videoconference to the homes of Knesset members: “Among the critical structures damaged beyond use: the Defense Ministry headquarters; the Geophysical Institute in Lod; Ben Gurion International Airport; Tel Nof and Hatzor Air Force Bases. All highways have at least partial obstructions. North–south access was blocked for ninety minutes. Railways are inoperative. Ports are minimally functioning. As for the Kotel, the portions that collapsed have not compromised the integrity of the Temple Mount, but further geological events will likely lead to catastrophic failure.”
In the wake of the aftershock, Saudi Arabia and Jordan sign an agreement of “temporary unification.” Asked why Saudi Arabia’s unprecedentedly large supply line of aid also includes ground troops, the Saudi king replies: “To assist in the recovery.” Asked why it includes two hundred combat aircraft, he replies: “It doesn’t.”
Israel refuses to recognize “Transarabia,” thereby naming it.
Iran promises, “Jordan will know no greater ally than Iran,” thereby refusing to recognize Transarabia.
The UN Human Rights Council passes a resolution condemning “the catastrophic crisis created by Israel’s unilateral, unannounced, and complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.” No member states abstain. No member states vote against the resolution.
Asked by what means Egypt is abrogating its treaties with Israel, the Egyptian Army chief responds: “All agreements and understandings were created within a set of conditions that no longer exist.” Asked if Egypt would continue to recognize the State of Israel: “This is semantics.”