Occupied Territories

by Dan Sofaer

for Sacha Chernoff

Jack Wizinger was a Christian painter. By that I mean a young painter of Christian subjects, and also a Christian believer, affianced to an Israeli woman of great beauty and still in her prime. God knows what she saw in him! Jewish heritage on his mother’s side left open the technical possibility of return to his mother’s people, but Jack had never expressed any interest in this. He continued to insist that his love for Ruth existed independently of the laws of racial heritage (are there such laws?), culture, and creed. If you had met Ruth, you would understand. She brought out that human wildness in one. I’ve known several fellows…but let me try to stick to the subject. Some people said, “God knows what he saw in her!” but they were wrong. Painfully shy, yes, and member of a society that wished him no good, but most people got they were a special couple. They loved to be together, to go around casually to shows and cafés. An aura of timelessness, of suspension, hovered over them. I envied them, thought them the luckiest two people on earth. But then again…

Jack’s father was a pro-Israel diplomat of Roman Catholic origins. Jack had childhood memories of visiting Israeli dignitaries being given gin and tonics and reaching for bowls of Planters Mixed Nuts in his parents’ living room. If the subject of ‘the occupied territories’ came up, Jack’s father would say something reasonable, someone would say something unreasonable, and conversation would pass on to another subject.

The very act of waking up in the morning was significant to Jack. He associated it with prayer and the concept of a new dawn articulated by Thoreau, Nietzsche, and the Upanishads. Waking up in Ruth’s bedroom in Tel Aviv, with its large windows facing palm trees, was magical. Ruth had a great library, and Jack had a wild fantasy he would stay there for the rest of his life (or for an indefinite period of time) and read every book on her shelves, beginning on the top left corner and working his way across through books that ordinarily would have bored him.

Some people regarded Jack as a pretentious guy, for saying things like “In my opinion, the great significance of objects lies in their shadows. We have vastly overestimated the importance of light since the impressionists.” But he had read Tanizaki; he had lived in Paris for nearly a year; he really believed what he was saying about shadow and light, so maybe it shouldn’t be seen as pretension. Anyway, Jack liked to say this sort of thing; it could be expanded to include more general reflections on the Western Enlightenment and its limitations. But no one in Israel, at least no one he knew, liked to hear him talk this way, so he wound up talking to himself. (A great, if forgotten, poet, Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, once remarked when someone asked him how to write plays: “Do you ever try talking to yourself? How can you expect to write a play made up of people carrying on conversations, if you never carry on conversations with yourself?”)

That morning Jack spoke with a character in his head, an Israeli named Sharon. While he, Jack, was taking a shower, Sharon was taking a shower, as well, only his mother was yelling at him, telling him an unexpected thing: “Use as much water as you want, Sharon.”

Jack dried himself, dressed. and let himself out the front door. He made his way down the shadowy stone steps with their smell of detergent mixed with earth and flowers from the garden below.

The first thing he saw was the barber shop across the street. He disliked the barber; he always felt the man was staring at him. Who knows what his thoughts were, and when the attack began—the attack on Gaza—the barber put up an Israeli flag in his shop window. With Israel at war, the barber seemed to stare with an added question: It was not only “Who on earth are you?” but “Are you with us or against us?” But was a barber shop really the proper place to display a patriotic flag, or was he right in detecting a faint absurdity there?

He kept on up the hill to Dizengoff and the shop windows where wedding dresses are displayed.

Later that day, they were going to Ruth’s mother’s apartment for Friday night dinner. Part of Jack warmed to that occasion, to the prospect of drinking red wine and staring down at the Mediterranean and its surprisingly stormy shore from thirty floors up. But there was also a war going on, and what would people say about that?

He saw a newspaper stand and looked for a moment at the front-page photograph. A rocket descended diagonally through a clear blue sky with its trail of smoke perfectly in focus.

Life had gotten so very serious. Now, they hadn’t made peace at all, and there were wars all the time and even young people had hearts of steel. Who had time to dabble and speculate, as he had done this morning, taking apart a verse of the Bible for his own amusement?

The idea of the story started to come back to him. (Jack had often considered becoming a writer; he believed in ‘empathy,’ or getting inside people’s heads. Making up characters was supposed to help with that.) He went to a café and talked to some people with a dog but suddenly felt the need to be alone and asked for the check. He walked quickly down to the sea and strolled along with the surf booming around him.

It would begin in the shower. No, it would begin with Sharon in bed and his mother telling him to take a shower only if he wanted to. That is the way Israeli mothers are, he thought. They teach self-assertiveness more than self-sacrifice.

But first, he needed a summarizing sentence to grab the reader, to sound formal and Tolstoian. How about…

When Sharon returned to Tel Aviv, he tried to recover the strength and honesty in which he had been raised.

 “Nice. Then could come the stuff about the shower.”

“‘Turn on the hot water heater if you want a bath for yourself, Sharon. Never mind if I want after.’”

“Good. This was home and he need not ingratiate himself, which is so exhausting.”

It was a wonderful feeling, making things up. This Sharon person seemed to be living a realer life than his own, to be “in the truth,” as Flaubert once said. I’ll make him a dreamer like me, thought Jack, but a little more focused and less encumbered. Not a painter. Someone, who for years has worked a real job (in Silicon Valley?), instead of an idler like myself.

“But how to convey that lostness one feels on arrival?”

He couldn't find his address book and was pleased….

…Maybe he would drop off the face of the earth…

…The same old struggle for wholeness and against anxieties…

…The same old offering surprisingly out of small things.

He could go on.

The first few days were uneventful. He had a way of collapsing into the language and library, into the smell of cactus and eucalyptus and the prickly pear. It was New Year’s Eve, and they celebrated, after, in their own manner. He liked to have a few drinks on such an occasion even though Bethany didn’t drink.

Bethany was the name he gave Ruth. It was good for ‘atmosphere’ to have a vague female lurking in the background.

Then, he made Sharon go for a walk, just as he was going for a walk, and sit down at a café in a patch of sun just as he had done.

Sharon liked these casual encounters. Three people with a puppy on a leash at a café at 2 p.m. Sunny afternoon. Sharon asked if it was okay if he 'put' (Hebrew: efshar im asim) some food for the puppy. He fed it the egg from his omelette sandwich. Then, he checked to see whether the creature was a boy or a girl and saw his dark button of a penis. Some people always check the dogs, so they can ask whether it's a ‘he’ or ‘she.’ Sometimes, Sharon remembered.

For a moment, Jack put down his pen and thought, These primitive, simple perceptions are very Israeli. In the midst of a war and they’re thinking about dogs’ penises. I have to tell it like it is.

Careful of that. Jack knew he had a lot of hostility towards his character, which if expressed, would ruin the story. Fiction is based on empathy. (I believe D.H. Lawrence says so in one of his prefaces: ‘extend our range of sympathies’ [or something like that]. Was it the preface to Sons and Lovers or Women in Love? One of the two. Empathy—anyhow—at all costs. There’s a need for more of it in the world.)

“I’d like to give him a little dignity, as well. What about making him a scholar? There is, after all, the life of intellect, of inquiry? Aristotle says it’s the highest part of us. Is he reading the Book of Samuel, going through it with a fine-tooth comb, reveling in hapax legomena? He goes home for a nap and wakes up, reads a big History of the Jewish People from the very beginning. That one by Sachar, or Ben-Sasson. Has attention and a sense of wonder at that dull tome. But first, you have to lead up to it. Try this…”

Sharon’s first few days were uneventful. He had a way of collapsing when he first arrived in Israel. His mind felt blasted by the jetlag, the bright light, and all the research he’d been doing for the ballistics company in Silicon Valley. He felt he was beginning again, as though every book was open to him, and every word weighed heavily. It was time to inform himself. He would start on the left-hand side of Bethany’s top bookshelf and just keep reading. There were the complete essays of Montaigne, a new collection of Walter Benjamin, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, which Bethany’s stepfather had given her because he wanted her to be more practical, and there was a memoir by her mother’s spiritual guru about the meaning of diamonds, and there was an academic reprint of a History of Ancient Israel. He took that down first. First things first. He would read the History of his own Land.

It was an academic paperback, a reprint, apparently untouched. Worth quoting, as its dull objectivity oddly accorded, but pleasingly with his freshness of mood:

Introduction. The People and Its Land. The early history of the Israelites was not confined to the borders of Palestine alone but was connected by numerous strands to the ancient Near Eastern lands lying to the north, north-east, and south-west. (Quite a sentence.)

And it continued on for half a dozen or so, until he quoted Jeremiah: “A pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the host of nations” (3:19). That, he felt necessary to look up in the original, which turned out much more vivid because “a pleasant land” also means ‘an antelope.’ Then, he read the whole chapter of Jeremiah and wrote out the quoted part in his diary. Not as an endorsement or out of mystical expectations, but because he might as well start somewhere, and he had the exciting feeling of a slow beginning, that every detail would lead on to every other detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant (and the verse did seem very insignificant).

He seemed to be thinking outside of consequences, which is so very rare.

He also wrote down the seven products of the land, that seemed important, in English and made a note that Hebrew for the Nile is Shihor. He had forgotten that.

He decided it would be better to begin with these few words than with the vague knowledge of the Tanakh he had amassed over the years. That what was wonderful about even a single sentence: Every word could be looked up, and that would lead to more questions. Tz’vi ha aratzot. A prized thing, but also ‘a gazelle.’ How wonderful.

Jack looked up at the booming sea, quite pleased with himself. Inventing this character, Sharon, had allowed him to view the realia of his own sorry life in a fresh light. The name Sharon seemed especially, clever, as well. Americans would think it was pronounced like the girl’s name, Sharon, but those in the know would associate it with the heroic general, as well as the ‘lily’ or ‘Rose of Sharon’ from the Song of Songs, and the mountain range between Tel Aviv and Haifa to which that biblical verse referred.

It would be a good idea to go to the supermarket and get a few things to eat. Ruth never ate anything in the morning, but he liked to have a little something, at least a little bread and butter, perhaps even some jam.

The country was at war, but it was still permitted for idle people, like himself, to walk the street and go to the supermarket. In fact, sometimes they said that was the whole purpose of these border operations, so that people in the central cities could feel safe, above all Tel Aviv. The war had been going on for three or four days. He’d followed the death count on the internet—still in the hundreds—and found the quiet on the streets rather menacing: Was he imagining it, or could he hear the rumbling of attack helicopters and airplanes in the distance?

When he reached the checkout line, he wondered passively whether the cashier, who was pretty, would be willing to marry him. They could have kids and lead a simple life together. Then, he caught himself. A supermarket cashier. What are you thinking? But then again, why not? What difference does it make anyway once one has given up romantic notions. If everything in Israel is significant, what does it matter who you marry as long as you are with someone? They would settle down together to a life of quiet work. She was nice about making sure his grocery bag was properly packed and even looked him in the eye and smiled.

But, now, they were going over to Ruth’s mother’s apartment for Friday night dinner, and some relatives were going to be there. Jack remembered Friday night dinners with some of his parents’ Jewish friends back home. Solemn blessings dissolving into the clinking of crockery, joke-cracking, and laughter. Would this be like that? No. Life was so much less formal in Israel. People came and went as they pleased, and no one had any time. Ruth’s cousins got up to leave, after only a glass of wine, making their excuses. Jack asked one cousin, before she left, what she thought of the attack, and she answered (in that deep voice Israeli women sometimes have), “Higiya Hazman.” (“About time” would be the most obvious translation, only it fails to convey the force of the finite verb ‘higiya’). More literally, she said, “The time has come,” and Jack heard in it all the confident sting of prophecy.

“What do you think?” asked the cousin.

“I don’t see in it any solution.” Pitaron: the word connoted the solving of riddles.

“There is no solution,” replied the cousin in a tone implying only a sorry, soft fool would expect one.

The stunning confidence of the woman. If she was so confident of her opinion of a war that was killing hundreds of people, what other opinions might she have, for instance of Jack’s Christianity and his survival in Israel on a small private income? Did she blame him for not marrying Ruth already nor helping more aggressively to sort out her life for her, leading the way, somehow, to a successful and richly textured social and professional life? Probably. People had a way of implying such things without needing to say them. Even the way they stare at you is enough to show they think you are worthless. The woman exuded blonde confidence and was in the prime of life. Her physical bulk gave her a kind of authority denied to the thin.

Finally, the woman was gone, and they sat down to eat.

Meanwhile, the television was squawking. They ate some nourishing form of wheat soaked in olive oil, and Jack drank wine.

“I’m actually writing a story,” said Jack. “I started it today- though who knows whether I’ll ever finish it—about someone who’s a lot like me, only he’s Israeli. His name’s Sharon. It’s an exercise in empathy. He goes about his life, does some reading. What do I know? Not much yet, but it’s something to be doing.”

G’veret Samson, Ruth’s mother, replied, “We thought you were doing a painting, but instead you are writing a story, and soon you will be composing a symphony; we want to support you in all your creative endeavors. Someone we know wrote a story about the son or grandson of survivors. Many Israelis are.”

“Was he the son of a capo?” asked Jack. “I’ve heard that in the years after the war, if someone recognized a capo on the street, he or she would start kicking and screaming, “Capo! Capo!” until a crowd gathered round. And everyone would start cursing him and threatening to report him. maybe even start beating him.”

“No, he was not the son of a capo,” said G’veret Samson, and then she asked, “How is your father doing?” Ruth’s mother asked more and more about his father as the years went by, thinking that, as a distinguished diplomat, he held some key to Jack’s future and failure. Jack was never able to answer such questions simply with a “He’s doing fine.” He insisted on launching into lengthy anecdotes about his father’s life. This time, he decided to speak of his father’s early manhood. The wine was going to his head.

“You know, when my father was a young man, he was seeking wisdom, even in the darkness of night clubs and pleasure dens. God knows what happened to him since then. Maybe he has found it. He searched in various religions and cults and investigated strange documents. Finally, he found it in his own religion, as who can wonder? So he went, I think, to the Catholic priest—as radical a priest as there was in those days—and told him he wanted to do some good in the world because of what he had read in the Old and New Testaments. Are you with me? You have to understand, Catholicisms are not all alike. That particular priest had sympathy with my father, whose name was also John. They were both called John, and so am I, but I prefer to be called Jack as it sounds less Christian. So, they developed this wonderful relationship, about which you can read as their letters were recently published, privately, in a limited edition of 150 copies, as what can the vulgar understand of such things.”

(What a windbag he was, too, once he got onto the subject of his father!) He would have talked down the sun, and then up again, had he not been interrupted.

“Your father is a very busy man, an accomplished man,” said G’veret Samson.

“Do you mean a distinguished man?”

“It is the same.”

“Yes,” said Jack. “My father doesn’t have a lot of time. I have a lot of time. I like to wake up slowly and dream my way into the day. (Here, he looked at Ruth, as the person who knew most about this gradual waking of his.) The way I see it, every day is a new lifetime. In the morning, the world remains undefiled. One hasn’t yet encountered idiots; one’s mind is pure as new-fallen snow.”

(What a windbag he was!) He continued, a propos of nothing.

“Recently I was reading an article in the New York Review of Books about the growth of mega slums all over the world. It seems we’re going through it all again, deracination, people migrating to cities to make a better life for themselves, cities becoming overcrowded, generations of the lost. One scientist, Freeman Dyson, has the idea we should equip people to get educated about the natural world around them without coming into the cities, using the internet and the incredible diversity of plants all around them. They can then put their newfound knowledge immediately to use right in their own back yards. I regard this man as a visionary.”

Jack paused for a larger sip of wine. It was the good red stuff and had loosened his tongue.

While Jack spoke of these things, G’veret Samson thought to herself instead of listening: Jack’s idealism is destroying my daughter. His spiritual Christian vision quest, his refusal to take even what was coming to him out of the good things of life. Let alone the extra prizes most people strive for in this dog-eat-dog world of Israel and America New Year’s 2009. Finally, she interrupted him.

“You remind me of my bruder. He could never help himself to the good things of life, and now he is fity-five years old and still relying upon his family for support. We love him. Even what the government offer him. he refuse, only wanting to be somewhere with a woman on his motorcycle, and you call him artist. Artist must stay home or in studio creating great works, but he is more of what you would call a ‘drifter,’ and his family still support him.”

“Well,” said Jack, “as I said, even an accomplished man like my father had to find his way to the good things in life, as you call them. He read about all the different religions of the world when he was young. He read Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces and was partial to Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. Incidentally, he found Judaism to be the best of them all. That was when he came to have a great appreciation for the Mishnah and Talmud, even though he chose to remain a Christian. And that is why he is such a strong supporter of Israel to this day.”

He is a strong supporter of Israel, but you are not. If only you were more like your fader, thought G’veret Samson but said nothing.

“My father has nothing against the Orthodox, by the way. Especially, of course, the Modern Orthodox! The Modern Orthodox are really very different from the haredim. Some of them are very good people. Modern orthodoxy evolved in the U.S. in the early twentieth century in response to modernity and democracy. It allows women to work and have careers and drive cars and have their own hair, I think, instead of those wigs.”

“I didn’t know that,” said G’veret Samson. As Israelis, they were uninterested in fine distinctions between various denominations of Judaism. Israelis were either secular or religious. That was all.

“There’s a great chapter in the book Jew vs. Jew, which explains the exact differences between the modern orthodox and the ultra-orthodox. It won the Jewish Book Award a few years back. I recommend you read it.”

(It is not generally recognized just how desultory most dinner table conversations are. Written down, they take on a look of absurdity. Jack was particularly voluble that night, and I can only record a part of what he said. G’veret Samson was his main interlocutor and the other two just sat there listening. From time to time, Ruth would get up to smoke on the balcony. Arik, G’veret Samson’s lover, only spoke when the subject of war came up.)

Jack blurted out at some point. “I just can’t get used to the idea that people are being killed 50 kilometers away.”

“What does it matter whether it is 50, 500, or 5000 kilometers?”

“It matters to me. I only live from day to day,” he continued. “Every night, I resolve to call Swiss Air and book a new flight home. But, somehow, I then rally, get up, make coffee, start a new painting, begin another day…”

“The darkest hour is before the dawn,” said Arik, and was pleased with his remark.

Ruth had gone out on the balcony for a smoke. When she came back, G’veret Samson saw that this was her final chance. The dinner was winding down. Stomachs were getting full, and Jack had drunk more than enough wine to listen with tolerance. She decided to launch the great speech she had been meaning to make for many years now, the emotional appeal of a mother to Jack and Ruth to get married. She had tried to get others to speak on her behalf but in vain: They knew it was useless. In fact, it could only do harm. But she was not to be deterred. Right is right, whether you like it or not. The right thing is for her daughter and the Christian visionary painter Jack to live together all the time, to be part of the community, to settle down and support each other. The basic arguments she had prepared were threefold: 1) obvious love: everyone sees you are in love; therefore, do what everyone says, be together. 2) comparison with herself: I am happy being with Arik all the time; therefore, you should be more like me and be together all the time. 3) fear of abandonment: be careful, not being together may cause damage to one or the other of you that you don’t even feel. Every time you leave each other to go somewhere else, you risk fear of abandonment. She sensed the latter was the strongest piece of her argument, so she planned to save it for last.

Her daughter sat down, and she spoke.

“My darling dears, everything I have done for you I have done for you, always, and now you decide how best to be good to each other. Being in relationship means commitment to stand by each other always. In good times and bad times, just as Arik stand by me. You have to decide whether you want to live. You look so happy together, making each other happy. Everyone sees. Everyone sees I see Arik sees how happy you are together, but not staying together brings fear of abandonment and is not healthy for either of you.”

That was all she could manage. It wasn’t much, it was much less than she had prepared, but it was enough to ruin everything for Jack. It spelled the end of mystery. Now, everything had been talked out, now they were exposed to ridicule, now it was no use.

Now, it was too late.

Ruth was right to not take such things seriously. She had an amazing knack of not paying attention to her mother, which implied, somehow, not disrespect but respect for a higher (or at least better) self her mother was temporarily deviating from. If necessary, she would go out for another smoke. It was impossible to hear such speeches from the balcony. If only Jack could be more like Ruth.

Eventually, they stumbled into a taxi and found their way home, and in the morning, Jack rang up the airline.

BIO: Daniel Sofaer is a poet and fiction writer based in Brooklyn, who grew up mainly in Washington D.C. His interests include folk and blues music, cooking, and hiking. “Occupied Territories” is a short story that reflects some of his own experiences visiting Israel during the first major attack on Gaza in 2008.