Ruthi, like the rest of Israel, had watched him from afar for nearly the whole of her life. In his last years among us, when he was actively ruling, and leading, still stomping about and warring, she had—more than most anyone—the privilege of serving at his side before that became the literal embodiment of her days.
Sitting by his bed, she never saw any quantifiable change to his warm, gray, seemingly empty self. But Ruthi could always tell when his soul was leaning back her way. There was no way to explain it. She could sense when his mind stirred and swam up, peering out from just below that shimmering surface. The body that held it quietly chugging away.
When the worrying sons asked, or the doctors, when the occasional reporter who still remembered tried to get her to shed some light, she would not use the image of water, or talk of his soul as if it were a kind of man lost in the woods. She would tell them that he suddenly fills up the room and then is gone just as quick. A consciousness rolling in, like a storm coming through.
When this did not suffice, which was always, she would simply revert to the stories she’d been raised on. She would recount the tale of King Saul’s visit to the Witch of Ein Dor, of Elijah appearing at the cave of Shimon bar Yochai. Her point was that spirits far more removed than his have long, in this land, returned to advise. That before Heaven and before Hell, before those newfangled Christian notions became all the rage, there was another place where souls rested after life was done. The good and bad penned up together without judgment, and always within reach for counsel. If that was possible, how much more likely was it that the General was somewhere alert and at the ready, especially when his body—a wonder—still hung on in our world?
“It is a time of grave danger for the nation,” Ruthi would say, when her telling inevitably turned to a plea, “and the Jews left rudderless at the helm.” Sounding desperate, she’d say, “Everyone’s moved on, and him, right here, ready to lead.”
The listeners would nod kindly, or nod politely, or nod with an understandable indifference. Often, that nod might hold a contempt that Ruthi was unafraid to address.
“The answers are in there,” she’d say. “In him. There has to be an expert somewhere who knows how to ask and get answered.”
She could see how they regarded her, a sad soul herself. They treated her as a ghost in the room.
It was a lesson in how power shifts. When the General was seated behind his desk in the prime minister’s office, his laughter billowing out through closed doors, the waiting heads of state would curry Ruthi’s favor, wooing and deferring, knowing that, more than the General’s generals, or his cabinet stooges, the woman who worried over his snacks and his ChapStick, who made sure his hotels had the right pillows and that his plane never, ever took off without the newest pictures of his grandchildren stowed aboard, that she was the one who could best get Israel’s obstinate, unyielding leader to hear the other side.
On the days when the medical staff listened to Ruthi politely, she would point them to the Bible she read daily by the General’s bed. This should be their only guide, she’d tell them.
They would prattle back at her in the language she’d become fluent in. They would talk of in vivo connectivity and corticothalamic function, reference the newest research and the unpublished studies that they always spoke of as being on the horizon, as if ideas rose up from behind the ocean every morning along with the sun.
Scientifically, what they held to be absolute and undisputable when it came to the inner life of the General was, even more than Ruthi’s religiosity, still a matter of faith.
That night, with Ruthi beside him, is not a peaceful one for the General. There is only the crack of the gun, the one shot, one son. A fever dream is what we’d call it, if we could still call it dreaming. A simple, horrible nightmare, if he were asleep.
But he is neither of those. He is living in the infinite, ever-present unendingness of that single shot. Of all his bullets fired, of all his endless wars, all of existence for the General is a bright sunny morning, reading the paper in the den, and then that crack rippling the calm. The one shot he did not fire is the one that now keeps firing, a ball set loose from a prize Ottoman gun.
“Lily!” he calls. But she does not come.
He had heard a shot. He had been hearing that shot, lifting his head from the paper, turning an eye toward the sound, while judging distance and caliber, playing the echoes off the hills and fields of his farm.
He is already calculating return fire, judging how a bullet aimed might bend and drop on the currents of air, his body lit by every susurration of October breeze.
He’s already mapped where his own weapons are, knows how much ammunition he has, and counted off those whose lives he might be responsible for in his midst. All of this takes place outside of language, and outside of thought, assembled in another kind of consciousness. And all this information is processed and acted upon within an instant, even less—a gift that, when coupled with a great amount of luck (or some kind of mythic national fate to which he was inextricably tied), has kept him alive, has gotten him through what he should not have survived, leaving him in the fall of 1967 in his den, with a newspaper, and a hot mint tea—already cooling.
And a bowl of salted almonds.
And a bowl of fat figs.
It is those bowls in front of him, the sight of those bowls beneath the edge of his newspaper, the stain of salted fingers smearing newsprint, that tells his mind where he is, tells him that he has heard a shot but does not need to dive for cover, does not need to scramble for his gun, does not need to defend or conquer, and so he begins to lift his head and calls, “Lily.” But Lily does not come.
It is the lifting of the head that seems to go on for centuries. This is the part that he cannot make sense of.
That shot—it never seems to go away.
2002, Berlin
It is ridiculous, Farid knows, to compare this perfect, placid lake to the ocean, or these tiny sailboats of mahogany and teak to the floating bucket he’d learned to fish on as a boy. But, still, sitting out on the dock in the evening, watching the sunset drawn out across the water, it reminds him of home—an idealized, dreamy version of his miserable, embattled home.
He sits on that dock, behind a mansion on Lake Wannsee. He is a member of a small yacht club, made up of the aforementioned fleet of classic, pristine boats.