There’s really no need to beat it out of him (at least from his perspective). Z would flip on his own. “I was trying to avoid a calamity on Israeli soil,” he’d say. “It was the ticking bomb that justifies so much of the misery we unleash.” Of course, this would not satisfy, as his bomb has blown. So he might also explain that he was trying to even the score. Unfortunately, the score he was trying to even out was the Palestinians’. He was trying to make amends for his sins. He knows that second part wouldn’t go over. Recompense for one’s enemies, well, that wasn’t the point of spy craft at all.
Anyway, his abduction, transfer, and torture in Israel is the last of the options he thinks they’ll choose. Z figures what they’re really fighting over is the pleasure of being the one whom Z would see coming, of getting to witness the very real dread he would feel as he recognized the person sent to murder him with great brutality, or maybe just to render him useless—lobotomizing him with an ice pick or awl and leaving him to be discovered, a trickle of blood running from a nostril, his eyes differently lit, as he roamed vacant around Parc des Buttes Chaumont.
What scares him more than facing that moment of knowing are all the operatives skulking about that he wouldn’t see at all. The cloaked killers. And, supporting them, the army of sayanim, the sympathetic-to-the-cause Parisians, who play their scaled-down roles. The locals ready to lend a spare room, or leave the keys to a car, the volunteers who, when tapped, are happy to act as another pair of eyes. Wherever he goes, every extra step in that city, he is exposing himself to these unidentifiable strangers who are surely already on the lookout for Z.
Failing to picture any viable solution, any permutation of a future that includes rescue or escape, he becomes so upset that he fetches a bottle of cheap supermarket champagne from the kitchen and, standing by the front window in his underwear and keeping watch on Rue Domat, he pours himself glass after glass, throwing them back until he’s done.
Trying to take advantage of even a quick alcohol-fueled, nightmare-sodden sleep, Z crawls back in bed. He still can’t stop the terror tapes from spinning and only calms himself by picturing that blessedly callipygous waitress bending over the hummus, scooping a heaping plate.
He had loved her, even before she turned around and approached his table. He had loved her coloring, and her eyes, and her big behind, and again that faint mustache that she didn’t care to wax off.
Z flips over on the bed and buries his face in a pillow. He imagines an impossible new life, the pair of them forgetting everything that came before, and together looking only toward a bright new after. He’d recover all the money he’d stashed away for just such an emergency, maybe moving with the waitress to some flat up a hundred flights of stairs. Z can see her in their living room, the skylight open, the rain blowing in. Eyes closed, straining his mind, Z can see it, and Z can hear it. There is the waitress, her belly pregnant, her little chest turned huge. Then comes the sound of their fat, smelly pug, asleep on the couch at her side, and snarfling through its flattened nose.
2014, Hospital (near Tel Aviv)
Let us first listen to the sounds of the fat man endlessly dying. The beep and whirr, the hiss, pump, hiss of it. An adjustment is made, a suctioning and clearing, and then we are back to the endless electrical rhythm of the machines.
Ruthi smooths at his blanket, tucking a corner, when the night nurse arrives.
“I don’t like it,” Ruthi says. “I don’t like the way he looks.”
The way he looks? The night nurse raises an eyebrow, stepping back to consider him—this big bear of a man in his big mechanical hospital bed. She cannot see a lick of difference from the way he looked last night, or the night before that, or in the weeks or months or years that preceded.
She tries her best to appear deferential to Ruthi, who is neither doctor nor nurse, not even a relative, but some sort of functionary who’d become indispensable to the man during the height of his powers and, at low ebb, is still the one whispering into his now stroke-deaf ears.
Both women are private hires of the General’s sons, who insisted—even in this fine institution—that their father live, at every moment, with someone by his side.
The nurse, under Ruthi’s gaze, closes her eyes for a moment and considers the cadence of the General’s steady machine-fed breathing. Then, touching his cheek with the back of her hand, she takes his temperature in the way only one who truly knows could. No change to him. This she lets Ruthi know with a glance.
“Well?” Ruthi says, waiting for some kind of diagnosis.
What can the nurse say for the nine thousandth time, when nothing at all is amiss, when the great general lies there on his bed, waxed and rouged like a Red Delicious, looking like a fat Lenin on display. Their dear departed murderous leader, whose family will not let him die.
What can she say to appease this unrelenting worrier, who—the nurse is convinced—has kept the General alive, year after year, solely through the power of her constant declarations that he was about to be dead?
“Has the doctor been by?” the nurse asks, hoping only to engage and calm Ruthi and then usher her from the room.
“Of course the doctor has been by,” Ruthi says. “It was Brodie today, and what does that old fool ever see? He runs an intensive care like he’s getting kickbacks from the morgue.”
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“You think I listen when that walking death sentence talks?”
Ruthi glowers and takes up a towel, which she uses to wipe at the edges of the General’s mouth. She checks all his tubes and feeds, the ins and outs of them; she drums with a fingernail at all the digital vitals flashing on their tiny screens, as if to increase their accuracy with a tap.
The night nurse, God help her, would have pulled the plug on this whole operation long ago. She is sure there are plenty of folks waiting for the General down below. Scores to be settled in the afterlife, long-dead enemies sharpening swords.
Still not satisfied, Ruthi leans over the bed’s railing and presses her lips to the General’s forehead. “I’m telling you, he feels hot to me.”
“Maybe it’s you that’s a little cold. The room tonight—”
“The room is fine. It’s him that’s not right. Anyway, it’s not your concern, because you know I’m not leaving.”
“My shift—”
“You can forget your shift. Head home.”
“Now, Ruthi,” the nurse says. “Any longer and you’ll miss your bus to Jerusalem. You can sleep with your phone under the pillow. I’ll text you if an eyelid so much as flutters. Eight years in that bed. Without a word. Without moving.”
“The eyes, though, when they’re open . . . and the first finger, when his son talks, or when I read—”
“Yes, yes. He’s ready for the Tel Aviv Marathon. I’ll sign him up.”
Ruthi scowls, full of affront. “Something changes and no one sees. The doctors are blind to it, you are blind to it.”
It’s clear on the nurse’s face that she marks no difference. “You look tired, is what I see.”
“I’m not tired,” Ruthi says, now trying for tenderness. “Honestly. You go. Sleep an extra night for once. Anyway, tomorrow is my day off—easy for me to see the week through.”
Ruthi takes a step forward and gives a friendly pat to the back of the nurse’s hand. In that touch, it is the nurse—who indeed notices everything—who thinks, yes, it is Ruthi running cold.