“Please, friend, what are you saying? I, honestly, don’t understand.”
“How much better would this day be if I also afforded you the excuse to shoot me dead on your front lawn?”
“No one wants to shoot you, Farid.”
“Still, for this, for what you have done, we will have our revenge. Already, the streets of Gaza are filled with mourners. Already the people march. Turn on your TV. Find the news. You will see. A river of people five kilometers long.”
“But I had nothing to do with it.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself any further. This is a courtesy call from your enemy. I just wanted to let you know, the economy of terror only strengthens. For the children you have just taken, we will take from yours. That’s what I wanted to tell you, Joshua. There is a price to be paid. You have, tonight, just murdered your own.”
“Now wait, Farid,” Joshua says. “Don’t say such a terrible thing.”
“What is terrible to a Canadian? What does a sailor from Toronto care about Jews and Arabs around the world.”
“Of course I care,” Joshua says. “Children are children. Whatever you’re saying, whatever you’re threatening—”
“No one is threatening,” Farid says. “This is not about what we want to do, this is not about a plan to be made. I am calling so that you understand, what has already been put into motion did not have to happen. What already cannot be stopped was started because of this, because of you.”
Joshua, who knows he should say nothing, who has been trained not to say a word, feels a deviant sort of urge to reply. It’s as if he’s somehow ended up on the wrong side of all the bulwarks and firewalls and partitions put in place to keep him from feeling, for Farid, an actual, human emotion.
He makes a split-second decision. He says, “We didn’t start this fight.”
“But you did.”
“Whatever you’re going to do, I beg you, please—a sensible man. Let’s talk this out.”
“Whatever I am going to do is already done.”
2014, Limbo
Hauling himself from the chair, the General folds the newspaper along its creases and places it, along with the bowls from his lap, on the tray, next to his tea. The sound of the shot, it pulls him. But he resists running toward it. Instead the General drives himself back to that mirror, where he tears off the sheet.
What he finds for a reflection is his prime-ministerial self, and his mighty-warrior self, and his wounded-soldier bleeding-out self, licking his lips and dying of thirst. There in that mirror is his smiling, purple-smeared, grape-faced, short-pantsed self, whom the General is tickled to be.
This iteration, built of iterations, fascinates the General more than it unsettles. He calls excitedly to his wife in the kitchen. He wants to catalog for her all these odd ruptures and twists in time.
The General calls to Lily. But Lily does not come.
He has never been without responsibility, never moved without purpose, and knows to this task too he must now urgently attend. He coolly and methodically tries to make sense.
He thinks it absurd to posit that he is in Heaven, simply because he ends up in his beloved chair, on his beloved farm, time and time again.
Equally illogical is to assume that he is in Hell, solely because of the sound of that shot and what he knows, racing toward it, he will find.
Where is he then, he wonders, where time leaks the way it does, crossing and uncrossing, where a moment plays in an endless loop? He knows he is not dead, but this cannot be a life.
And then he wonders, could it be some in-between place? A threshold from which to wait. A kind of Sheol, a limbo space, from where he could not, without his own approval, move on. There is precedent, of course. There have been, haunting this realm, other Israeli kings.
The General laughs at that, an uproarious belly laugh. He has always said it—as a sign of confidence; to intimidate and threaten and cow—and maybe it has finally come to pass. Maybe it is all over, but nothing can kill him until he lets it. The General, stronger than death.
Considering this last option, he lowers his newspaper and raises up his head from where he sits, relaxing. He has an article he’s been meaning to finish and his tea to drink. He could stay here forever. If not for the shot, he might contentedly sit in that chair for all time.
“Come, come,” the General tells himself. For him, a man of action, to sit static for eternity. No, it is not a proper everlasting for a man of change.
But how to remedy it? The tactician, yet again, finds himself fully taxed.
The General looks to the empty brackets on the wall, the rifle gone. And he thinks, for such a job, of the curved Caucasian dagger in its sheath that sits in a shadow box atop his desk. It was a bar mitzvah gift from his father. A gift and also a responsibility. A bestowal at maturity, meant to signal what direction his life was expected to take. The others got fountain pens, and for him—smart boy, well-behaved boy, newly minted man—from his father he is given a weapon of war.
He does not move to go get it. He cannot slit his own throat, he is aware. Not because of cowardice, of which he truly has none. It is because the General, though never a religious man, lives by Jewish principles. It is against all he has ever believed to take his own life.
It would follow, then, that moving on from this place must defy physical action. The change, he hypothesizes, must come through an effort of mind.
What if it were no more of an effort than waking oneself from a dream? The same quick, messy struggle, but with an opposite exertion, wrestling his way toward a deeper, darker sleep.
And here it comes again, the laughter! Who would have thought that it would be with laughter that the General goes? To him it is funny to have to try so hard. How many had given their all to be the one to kill him? How many times had he given everything he had, simply to hold on?
The General takes a last, deep breath. He shoulders that ancient and legendary drive, forcing what he knew as himself the other way. He settles back into his chair, and hears the shot, and runs to the road. He flies through the air with his radioman by his side and plants his feet atop the Temple Mount—a colossus. It is deafening now as the multitudes cheer him on, chanting “General, General, King of Israel!” He basks in the adulation. And from somewhere over it, he can just make out, in Arabic, the sound of that plaintive song.
Ruthi stands over him, though he cannot see it. It is night, the broader family gone from the room, the mothers home tucking in children, the two sons standing outside the building in the always-perfect weather discussing what is to come. The night nurse, who was sound asleep in the corner, jarred by Ruthi, is already mumbling herself awake.