It would be easy to say that it was because of the waitress or Sander, the Huguenot waiter or Farid. But he does not blame the spying or counter-spying, not the betraying of country, nor his taking part in an operation that killed so many kids. It wasn’t his training to which he traced it, nor to his recruitment at Hebrew University by a friend who had handed him a number and said, “Reach out, if you want to contribute in a special way.”
How it had come to this, Prisoner Z felt, had been set so very early. His Jerusalem, his Israel, his end. He’d been given it so long ago, back in suburbia, back in America, a birthright spoon-fed to him in his Jewish day school classroom, a little boy, with a heavy prayer book and a yarmulke, like a soup bowl turned over and resting atop his head.
It is second grade, and they are running—the children—with their arms outspread. They are flying. The desks are pushed together, the teacher’s orders, their lovely eighteen-year-old teacher, who would soon get pregnant and disappear.
They know enough, the boys and girls, to love this black-haired lady, whose even more black, more beautiful hair peeks out from under her wig as she pushes the big desk, the teacher’s desk, toward theirs. She dresses modestly, but there is no modest when you are a beautiful raven-haired eighteen-year-old second-grade teacher, flushed from trying to get pregnant in all your free time.
Their love for her was different from what they felt for the others. It was marrying-love, and wanting-to-be-her-love, and it was youthful energetic teacher love, and they would do anything for her—anything at all. So when, after morning prayer, after marching into the room with their big green siddurim and taking their seats, when she’d stood, and jutted out her bottom jaw and blown the hair from her eyes, when she’d said, “Up, up,” and raised her hands, raising the class so easily with them, Prisoner Z is no longer sure if she’d actually spoken the “Up, up” at all.
“We are going somewhere and we are late,” is what she says.
“Where are we going?” asks Batya, whose English name is Beth.
A smile from the teacher, a glimmer to the eye. “We are going, my little Yidelach, to Yerushalyim. We are flying, right now, to Israel. The Moshiach is coming and we need to get there. We need to help welcome him in.” And the hands again are waving, and we are all already following. “Now push! Push the desks together so we can get up into the sky.”
And when those desks are all together, a circle around the room, the teacher takes one of our tiny chairs, raising her skirt so we can see her ankle swathed in her scratchy gray tights. She places a foot on the seat of that chair and then climbs onto those child-sized desks. A teacher! A teacher standing on a desk! It is glorious.
She bends a bit at the knees and leans her head forward. The teacher then spreads her arms wide. She says, “I am on an airplane. I am an airplane. We are all flying to Israel together, to make aliyah. We are headed to Jerusalem. We must hurry, hurry, a long flight and the Messiah is already on his way.”
And she takes off like that, flying from desk to desk around the room. Tilting her beautiful, covered arms on the turns.
“Come,” she says. “Come. You do not want to be left in galus, forgotten in this Egypt, when the Messiah comes. Our country awaits.” And it is roly-poly Bentzi who is first up, and then Meir Aryeh follows, flashing his monkey grin, there are Devorah and Yocheved, Susan and Zev. And then I am on the chair—Prisoner Z feels himself rising. But with all those arms tilting, and everyone running and howling and flying, I’m too afraid to join. And suddenly I am grabbed and suddenly I am lifted, the teacher has got me, she is holding me, and she sets me down in motion—and that is love, and that is care.
She holds on until my feet are moving and my arms spreading, until I too, I feel it, until I am looking down at the classroom below, down at New York, at America, until it all looks like desert and all looks like wasteland, nothing but the emptiness that is the whole world outside what God gave us.
2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)
She and the mapmaker were like teenagers in their attachment. They had so many games they played on their furtive weekends away. One was a game she’d lifted from her parents, her Italian-Israeli father and her Moroccan-Israeli mother, a way to understand the different worldviews from which they came.
They would, she and her mapmaker, name the singular people who’d, in their belief, changed history. Not the Stalins and the Hitlers, but the regular actors who’d altered the course of the planet.
When they’d first played, she’d said, “Yigal Amir,” for having murdered Rabin and, in her opinion, single-handedly torpedoing the peace for which they fought.
He’d said, “Baruch Goldstein,” for his massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which, in the mapmaker’s opinion, had set off the wave of violence that landed them in this woebegone state.
She’d liked the game better when her parents had played it. She was upset, already, at the start.
“I’d argue that point,” she’d said.
“You argue every point.”
She’d sat up to better face him, prone, as they perpetually were, in a hotel’s king-size bed. He’d stared at her over his glasses as he closed, around his finger, the book she wouldn’t let him read.
“We can’t both pick Israelis, is what I mean,” she’d said. “It’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? It’s your game.”
“Pick someone else. I have a long list of Palestinians you can borrow.”
“No, no,” he’d said. “I’ll come up with a new one myself.” And he’d thought and he’d thought and he’d said, “Katherine Harris.”
Shira had absolutely no idea who that was.
“The American woman,” her mapmaker had said. “From the election in 2000. She was the one in Florida, where they were counting the holes in the papers. Or the half-holes not punched out. She is the one who decided to award that state to George Bush, even though she was tied to his campaign. Partisan. Political. Corrupted. From her, all the dominoes fall. Through Iraq. Through Syria. Toppling over Palestine, knocking it down. Who knows where the chain ends, maybe with the end of all that we know?”
Shira had to process that for a good long while.
“Wow,” she’d said. “That is a crazy pick and exactly how you play. You are the winner of round one. I admit defeat.”
He was proud, and they’d kissed, a peck on the lips—it was that kind of night—and each had rolled the other way. The mapmaker, dropping his book to the floor, clicked off the lights.
Stepping outside her cottage into that blistering morning sun, Shira regrets every kiss that could have been a long one. She regrets every bit of intimacy shortchanged. The rules of that game could so easily have been altered. They could have named not the singular folk who’d changed history, but those individuals who’d forever changed them.
If she were playing the game of her own life, she knows, it’s because of Prisoner Z that she found herself right where she was—living on this kibbutz under false pretense, waiting for her Palestinian love to send her a signal, ready to take an insane chance to see her mapmaker one more time.
The paths of life, they are infinite in their weaving.