“Misha Totmakov,” Heather said, tasting
my name as if sipping an undistinguished wine. She lay on her bunk
and ran her index finger up and down my arm, producing goose bumps
on my skin.
Heather was Nick’s girlfriend, or had been
before they came to Jerusalem. Things change once you get here. This
place is really different, it changes you. I wondered if I would
ever be able to leave this city and, if so, what it would be like
when I left. How would the rest of the world taste to me? I tried
to remember my prior life, but it blurred and seemed insignificant.
It was my parents’ idea to send me traveling
around the globe, having spent their lives in isolation from the
world, behind the Iron Curtain. All they knew about was a nation
of identical people carrying out identical tasks.
Once the Cold War was over, and the system collapsed from its own
monotony, my parents explored their secret dream of making money, a
dream they had been afraid to share with one another, even in the privacy
of their own bedroom. Make money. Get rich.
When Perestroika kicked in, they quit their identical jobs and opened
a co-op business, and slowly, surely, made their dream come true. By
the time I had reached my late teens and had graduated from a prestigious
high school in Ulyanovsk, they had a Swiss bank account with enough
in it to permit me to travel the globe. First class.
Our dacha was built of expensive red brick, two stories high, the
kind of property that could have belonged only to Party leaders barely
a few years before. My father sat in his lazy chair, sipping French
wine, having abandoned his traditional vodka for something more refined.
“Son, I want you to travel the world. Geography
has always been your favorite subject at school. I want you to become
cosmopolitan.”
That was his way of avoiding a conversation about his business, which
I eventually was supposed to take over. Something I resisted. So instead
of trying to persuade me, he decided to send me around the world.
My parents wanted me to travel in luxury. They
procured an international Visa card for me with a ridiculously high
credit limit. They abhorred discomfort, having endured far too much
of it during the Red years. They weren’t born into comfort, they earned it, with hard work,
with trickery, with looting, with stealing, with breaking every rule,
because only by breaking laws could one get comfort in the post-Perestroika
years. They wanted me to take comfort for granted, never to have to
earn it, because, in today’s Russia, that meant gaining it
by illegal means. So they gave me the card and a pile of travel
brochures. I could go either by land or by sea. I had choices,
another thing my parents experienced only later in life.
I chose to go to Israel first, the cradle of Western civilization,
my initial step in exploring the civilization which Russia had tried
in vain to imitate for a number of centuries.
My first step turned out also to be the last one.
I moved into the “Flying Pig” youth
hostel, located in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, an area considered
to be relatively secure, even after the beginning of the intifadeh. Naturally,
I gravitated towards the young American couple rather than any of the
other hostel inhabitants: having been born in an empire, even a failed
one, I deemed people of smaller nations to be inferior. I consciously
rejected that notion as invalid but, deep inside, it remained my fundamental
conviction. After all, like the Americans, I was a product of an arrogant,
stalwart society, which, for two generations, considered itself the
greatest, most glorious social experiment in human history.
I was enchanted with their Yankee self-assurance, their swagger,
their air of superiority. We hung out together, blaspheming everything
and everyone. There we were, bred to feel superior to everyone else,
estranged from our fellow men, abroad in a strange city.
With time, though, I became disillusioned, as the
eternal city’s
tangible antiquity wore away my sense of entitlement, stripped
it of meaning, gradually bringing me back to earth from the steep
heights of unbridled ideological pretensions. The longer I stayed
in that city, the more I became just what my parents had envisioned--a
universal man. My distinct identity, both national and personal ,
began to blend into the international crowd.
***
“Today, I tried to imagine you wearing the Communist Party
uniform,” Heather said dreamily. “An entire city dressed
in identical clothes. Identical people living in identical buildings,
doing identical work: toiling for the common good. It all sounds
so tedious.”
After a loud yawn, she inquired, “Do you have any bedtime reading
for me?” It was past one in the morning, and she, like Nick,
often felt uneasy and couldn’t fall asleep.
I smiled, put my hand in my pocket, and took out
a few prayer notes I’d extracted from the Western Wall. I began to read, “My
love is like a dove, it soars high, to the skies. My love is like
the ocean, it reaches the depths--”
“I want something more quirky,” Heather
interrupted.
I perused my material and selected the last note in the collection.
“I was the one who killed Robert, but everyone thinks Norah
did it. They’ll send her to prison. Defame her. And no one will
ever know that she didn’t do it. God. My wish. What can I possibly
wish? Deep in my heart, I wish, I wish that they will find out that
I killed Robert. But the chances are they probably won’t. So
I don’t want to make it my prayer. Something else, perhaps. Like,
forgiveness. But can I ask for forgiveness? I have only one thing to
add: I’m innocent. I killed him, but You know that he deserved
it. But not Norah. I want to ask for forgiveness for what I’m
doing to Norah.”
Suddenly, Heather grabbed my wrist hard, as if
to prove to herself that I was real. “What are we doing here,
Misha? What are we all doing here?”
She believed that all Russians were hung up on
spirituality, all looking for the ineffable, be it beauty or be it
God. She had all the wrong books: Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Turgenev.
On her bookshelf sat my entire school literature program, translated
into English and sold in paperbacks. Heather had bought them all,
at seven dollars each. I wondered how much had been lost in translation.
Every time I tried to read those books in English, to imagine myself
in her place, I realized each time that most of the depth and meaning
had been lost.
“We don’t have anything better to do,” I answered. “This
place is just as good or bad as any other.”
I looked through the window at the wall of an ancient
house. How old was it, a thousand, two thousand years? Two blocks
away, still in good condition, stood the building in which Jesus
Christ had his Last Supper. Somehow, contemplating these houses was
much harder than, say, studying ancient trees, like sequoias. The
futility of one’s
existence was too undeniable when you lived, walked, and worked
within structures hundreds of generations old.
“I miss my home,” Heather complained, as she continued
to caress my hand. “Even the smallest things: the chirping of
the lawn sprinklers, the air-conditioned emptiness of a movie-theater
before the show, the drive between my friend Laura’s and my parents’:
eleven blocks, nine street lights, eight turns, three gas stations,
at one-twenty-nine-a-gallon. What do you miss at home, Misha?”
“My parents, and my friends.”
“Your girlfriend?”
“My ex-girlfriend.”
***
A couple of weeks before, Nick and I had been stranded
in the Old City, deliberately getting ourselves lost. It’s
not difficult to lose your way in the maze of snaking streets and
dead-end alleys. Not many tourists visited Jerusalem, not since the
TV news and papers scared potential ones off with stories of daily
suicide bombings. So it was mostly a local crowd that surrounded
us.
I registered our progress in the change of languages--Armenian gave
way to Arabic, Arabic to Russian, Russian to Hebrew. Nick was oblivious
to any linguistic distinctions. For him there were two languages in
the world: English and Foreign.
“I’m planning to get out of this city, “ Nick confided
as we walked along. “It’s getting on my nerves. Muslim
prayers on loudspeakers in the middle of the night. Fucking roosters
waking me up at five AM. Now tell me, where the hell do they keep roosters?
This is a city, right? Not a freakin’ farm.”
Nick fretted more than usual. He obviously had something on his mind.
“Spill it out,” I said.
“Obnoxious Arabs. They’re everywhere.”
That’s how Nick described the local population, Jews, Armenians,
and Orthodox Russians included: “Obnoxious Arabs.” Perhaps
he chose the right adjective; they all looked and behaved that
way most of the time.
“Heather wants to leave me, Mike,” he said abruptly. “I
shouldn’t have brought her here, to this city, to this country.
Should have listened to my government’s advice.”
“That’s right,” I mused silently, “blame
it all on Jerusalem.”
“Jesus, I was planning to marry her,” he
exclaimed, stopping in the middle of the street.
The stench of rotten fruit and vegetables filled the air. Obnoxious
Arabs rolled their dollies filled with merchandise, cursing Nick for
blocking their way. Shopkeepers shrieked and cajoled from their stalls,
beckoning prospective buyers to their shady dealings.
“Fuck this,” Nick cried out.
The crowd thickened around us; we were the only immobile living things
on the street. The area was filled with a flux of frenzied activity,
abuzz with clatter and clamor.
“Get me some drugs, Mike,” Nick pleaded. “You
seem to be on good terms with the natives.”
“What kind do you want?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Hash. I don’t
want anything too strong, too addictive, just something to dull the
pain, take the edge off.”
I nodded. “Shall we go?”
“Where to?” he asked.
“To the Western Wall. I have a job interview.”
My curious announcement made no impression. Nick
was riding his wave of despair. “Get me some hash today, will
you?”
With my eyes shut against the blowing dust, I gave
him some advice. “You
need to back off of the hash, man. It gets you depressed, I can
see that.”
“You should know a lot about depression. You’re depressed
all the time. How do you call it, your ‘Russian melancholy?’ I
bet you think I should be happy-go-lucky nonstop. But I want to
feel depressed, man. Depression can be enjoyable, too, you know.”
For Nick, everything was connected to enjoyment, at some point.
“Okay, I’ll get it for you. Sure.”
I saw a public telephone nearby, and went to call
my parents. My mother, at home in their dacha, picked up the phone,
and said, “Allo.” I
found myself having to re-tune my mind to speak in Russian again.
My first words felt awkward on my tongue, with poorly constructed
phrases and warped grammar. But after a while, it all came back to
me.
“Where are you, Sinochek?” my
mother asked. She almost never called me by name. Instead she called
me Sin --meaning, “Son,”--or
the diminutive, Sinochek--”Little Son.”
“ Venice,” I said. Last time it was
Paris. Before that Prague. Or Berlin. Or was it Bucharest?
“Is it true that it was built on water, like
St. Petersburg?”
“Yes.” I cupped the receiver with my hand, so she wouldn’t
hear the megaphone-amplified evening prayer coming from the mosque. “It’s
so beautiful here, Mama. The palaces. The canals The gondolas.” What
else do they have in Venice? I tried to recall my geography lessons,
but my real travels had apparently obliterated them.
“I wish I were with you, Son.”
Too busy with their co-op business to travel themselves,
my parents had projected their wish to see the world onto their only
son, “the
dreamer.” And after I broke the news to them that I wanted
to become a writer, it only confirmed their opinion about my ephemeral
nature.
My parents knew my future had been preordained,
and they knew I had given my mute consent. I would be a businessman,
good or bad, it mattered little. I would have a good life, and would
be provided for. They sent me traveling around the world for a year,
so that I would return a universal man, a cosmopolitan man, a man
who belonged to the world, but who knew his place in it, and knew
his motherland, Russia. Their bet was that I’d get homesick,
and return to follow my destiny.
“Where are you going next, my Little Son?”
“ Madrid.” I said the name of the first
city that came to my mind.
“It is in Spain, right?”
“Yes. It’s the capital of Spain.”
We finished our talk with a few clumsy good-byes.
Then Nick and I went on to the Western Wall, where a crowd of Orthodox
Jews dressed in black stood praying to the giant white boulders.
I had seen an ad for the job of “Prayer-cleaner” in the
Jerusalem Post. It used to be done by Palestinians, but with the
current intifadeh,
those in charge figured it would be too risky, since they feared an
angry Muslim might plant a bomb between the boulders.
The ad had made it clear that you had to be a Gentile
to apply for the job. So I showed them my foreign passport, but they
said it wasn’t
enough proof. It seemed funny that I needed to prove to them that I
wasn’t a Jew. No one ever told me that I looked at all like
a Jew. But the interviewers were adamant. I had the crazy idea
of flashing my uncircumcised penis as proof positive that I was
not one of the Chosen People. In the end they believed me and gave
me the job: it must have been my blond hair that decided them.
***
Back at the hostel, a few days later, our international crowd sat
on the floor next to the fake hearth, in the Travel Room, and tossed
the prayer notes around, everyone ending up with those written in their
mother tongue. My boss, a retired Israeli tank driver, had told me
to burn all of the prayer notes. I was supposed to take a bus outside
the city and incinerate them in the desert. Instead, I brought them
to the hostel as local entertainment for the young foreigners.
Eventually, everything got translated into broken
English. We transcribed out the most interesting ones, creating an
electronic database. That was Nick’s idea. He planned to write a bestseller, “Prayer
Notes from the Western Wall.” It had to be illegal, or, at
the very least, immoral, but who cared? The rest of us did it for
fun, to kill time. They were all killing time here, students from
various countries, traveling around the world, carefully following
the beaten track, with Jerusalem merely a way station. Only three
travelers remained permanent residents in the hostel: Heather,
Nick and me.
I tried to remember how long we had been here. Three months? Half
a year? Perhaps a year? Time is so different in the old City of Jerusalem.
Sometimes it runs, gulping down whole days and weeks like a ravenous
beast. And sometimes it stands still, especially during the sleepless
nights, refusing to let the minutes and hours move forward.
A Swedish girl with the whitest hair read her note
in a heavy accent, “I
wish for my brother to come back from the world of the dead. My
mommy and daddy say he would never come back. But I want to ask you
this favor, dear God. Please make my baby brother come back. Please.
Please. Please.”
There is a thoughtful silence, punctured and shattered and pulverized
by the ticking of the clock and the electronic imitation crackle of
fire. Life goes on.
My fellow Slav--here I stopped to guess from which
country: Poland? Bulgaria? The Czech Republic? Perhaps Slovenia?--cleared
his throat and spoke, employing his pitiful idea of an American accent. “I
wish for Karol Ghetto to love me. God, please make Karol Ghetto fall
in love with me.” He smiled with satisfaction. “That
is the first note I have found in Romanian.”
A Japanese girl, barely old enough to attend college,
read , “I
wish to pass the admission tests. If I fail them, I will kill myself.
God, do this one thing for me, please, and I promise I won’t
ask you for anything again.”
“It’s all so damn boring,” Nick exclaimed. He was
lying on the carpet, his head in Heather’s lap, browsing the
English language notes. He fished one out at random and read from it: “My
wish is to become a writer.” He tossed it at me, “Here,
this one must be yours, Mike.”
“My name is not Mike,” I replied ,
irritated for the zillionth time.
“Whatever.”
***
When night fell, I got my six-foot pole with its
iron hook on the tip from under my bunk, and headed for the Western
Wall. This time Nick wasn’t coming with me. I assumed he had
wearied of watching my routine. He wanted to participate in the final
stage only, the part he considered entertaining.
The American youth was slumbering on the upper bunk, curled up in
fetal position, his hands tucked under his head, as if preparing himself
to be reborn upon awakening.
“To hell with him,” I thought, grabbing
the empty bucket from the corner as I left.
The pole was well polished from the many hands that had used it over
the years. I held it in my right hand, carrying it like a lance in
battle, the empty bucket in my left hand. I trudged across the cobblestones,
the click of my shoes echoing along the nefarious corridors as I passed.
I followed the labyrinthine streets of the Old City, by the shuttered
gates of Arab businesses, and soon arrived at the Western Wall.
The square that led to it was deserted, except for a guard in the
booth, who raised his hand in greeting when he saw me coming. He must
have been a new guy, a just-out-of-the-army Ashkenazi Israeli, if his
appearance could be trusted. He wore a knit yarmulke, and at the moment
was fighting not to fall asleep. I flashed my work permit. The guard
held out a plain black yarmulke to me.
“If you’re a Jew, you need to wear
this.”
“He is new to the job,” I thought with
certainty. No Jew was permitted to do this work.
“Sorry, but I happen to be a goy.”
The Wall stood about seven meters high and was twenty meters long.
It was built of massive white boulders, smoothed by the continuous
rubbing from human hands throughout the centuries. It was divided in
the middle by a fence that separated men from women when they came
to pray. Now that prayers were over, my secular time had come.
I raised the pole and slipped its hook into a crevice
between the boulders. I pulled at the tightly compressed scraps of
paper and they fell to the ground. I stuck the hook back into the
crack and pulled again. More paper slips plummeted. I didn’t plan to touch the
notes until I’d extracted all of them. The reading would
come later, after I had wrested the notes from their hiding places.
. I was nearly finished with the male section of the Wall, when
I heard footsteps. I turned around, brandishing the pole with both
hands, like a weapon. It was just Nick.
“How’s it going?” he asked in his annoying American
accent, aiming a yawn at the moon. “I woke up and couldn’t
fall back to sleep. Sometimes this city gives me the creeps.”
“Mind helping me a little?” I pointed at the bucket. “Put
all the prayer notes I’ve extracted into the bucket over
there.”
“You love this job, don’t you?” he taunted, hesitant
to begin the work. “I only like the reading part, but you seem
to enjoy the process of getting them out of there. It’s like
you’re in a race to beat God to them. Does this remind you
of your old Soviet tricks?”
“You don’t know what your talking about,” I
said gravely, as I dipped the pole in again and coaxed out more prayer
notes.
“Of course, of course, Comrade,” he
intoned, imitating my accent, with its ringing vowels and deep patriarchal
consonants.
I finished my job in about an hour. Nick collected
all the slips and put them into the bucket. It was a weekday, so
there weren’t
really that many. Still, Nick had to bear down on the paper mass
to shove them all in.
We walked back to the hostel, me with the pole,
and Nick carrying the bucket. We passed an old Arab who was bent
low, tapping his cane on the cobblestones. He examined us from beneath
his ugly hunchback, but didn’t say anything. Here, like anywhere
else, tourists were part of the scenery, flora rather than fauna.
It was late when we got to the hostel, climbed the stairs and went
back to our room.
***
A few days passed, and we were back sitting in the Travel Room, rummaging
through prayer notes again. It was siesta time, nothing much to do.
During siesta, the prime entertainment is cable television that transmits
American movies and reality shows.
The hostel’s guests were divided into groups according to language,
then subdivided by the country of origin, like pieces of a puzzle that
fit here and there, but don’t come together as a whole. They
were like islands that, from a distance, might be seen as an archipelago,
but never truly connected. The Romans were right when they said
that unity is plural. Here sat a broad sampling of humanity, all
present at the same time in the same room, divided by attitudes
and customs, with physical proximity the only grounds for their
sense of kinship.
There was no one there who spoke Russian, except
me. So I didn’t
have a group, or a subgroup of my own. I felt homesick. Already. I
felt the urge to use a phone, to call my friends, to call my ex-girlfriend
in Russia. I thought, I’ll call my mom, tell her that I’m
in Mexico City, or Buenos Aires, and add that I’d given up
the idea of becoming a writer. That I wanted to come home.
A South Asian girl read aloud, “Let there
be peace in my country. I wish the war to stop, for once and for
all.”
A black Brazilian guy sitting beside her read his
note next. “God,
let me do well at that job interview. This job is the most important
thing in my life.”
Nick held a prayer note in his hands, a piece torn
out of a scrapbook. “Dear
Mr. God, I want to ask you to make my mommy and daddy be together again.
Gabe Levi.” He scowled and threw the note on the floor.
I took a stray note from the pile. It was in English,
too, as most of them were. “I want John Rappoport dead.”
Nick laughed at that one. Then he said , “Life wishes and death
wishes. What about --” He read from a note that occupied a page
from a yellow legal tablet, “God, please make me rich. I want
millions. I want to be filthy rich. I know I shouldn’t be asking
you for money, but that’s what I really, really, really want.
Guiltmeyer.”
I grabbed another note, but it was written in Japanese.
I tossed it aside and scooped up another one at random. Some Scandinavian
language, I thought, so I threw it into the “ask the neighbors” pile.
We had folks from nearly every country in the hostel, and they
loved to translate for us.
Meanwhile, Nick found another note in English. “Please let
Roger get well. He has cancer and he is dying. But don’t let
him die, God. Please don’t let him die. I’m sending
you this wish, because I know that only You can make him healthy
again. Please answer my wish. He is a great guy. He is the best
guy in the world. I love him. Rachel Borch from Brooklyn.”
Nick looked at me, and I knew what he was going
to say: “How
pitiful our species is.” But he’d already picked up
another note which he tossed to me.
“It’s in Russian, I assume.” It was a scrap of
paper torn from a travel brochure. I could read the small Cyrillic
print at the bottom. The prayer was written in blue permanent marker,
and still smelled like gasoline. It said : “Let there be peace
and happiness for everyone in the world.” For some reason,
the wish prompted me to laugh hysterically.
“What does it say?” Nick asked, his
face aglow with intense curiosity.
“Another pathetic wish,” I said. “Worthy of our
species.” But I’m not in a laughing mood, anymore. I had
an urge to be left alone. But Nick wouldn’t quit. He was
having too much fun.
Eventually, the hostel inhabitants got tired of
reading other people’s
prayer notes. Perhaps it was time for me to make a change, I began
to think, like changing jobs, or countries.
I was contemplating that possibility when I noticed
Heather had moved closer. I looked around: Nick wasn’t in the room. “Come
with me,” she whispered.
And so I followed her down the hall, while she threw furtive glances
in every direction, as if expecting her boyfriend to spring out of
a corner at any moment, scaring her to death. I wondered if she had
a ready explanation for our trip down the hall together. She stopped
at the bathroom cubicle. Its door was open and there was no one around.
She stepped in and lowered herself onto the toilet seat. I entered
the cubicle and latched the door behind us.
I’d always fantasized that we would have
sex just like this, in a totally abrupt, unexpected, claustrophobic
way. It had been coming. Now it was happening. I placed my hands
on my belt, pulled the end out of the loop and released it.
When I looked back at Heather, she was holding a scrap of paper in
her hands, a prayer note from the Western Wall. She read quietly,
“‘Take the street blocks asunder
For the ineffable to uncover
In the moment of a profound revelation
You are the one whom I discover.
God, please let our love live forever!’”
“Beautiful,” I said , unzipping my
jeans and letting them drop to the floor. I made a bewildered step
forward and almost tripped and fell.
Heather read listlessly from another note, “This is stupid,
asking you for a favor, asking you to make my wish come true. I don’t
even believe in you, God. But here I am asking you, nonetheless.
My wish is for Heather to stay with me. Truly yours, Nick.”
I stopped short and asked, “Where did you find that?” I
was certain the note was not the reason why she had lured me to
the bathroom cubicle. She could have read it to me in a less risky
place.
“Under Nick’s pillow,” she said, giggling nervously. “I
think he forgot about it.”
“You want me to leave? I’ll leave,” I
said bluffing indifference.
“This note doesn’t change anything. Nick and I are over.
And he knows it. Maybe that’s why he never stuck this into
the Wall.”
She drew me to her and we merged in a kiss. When
we pried our lips apart to take a quick break before proceeding,
she asked , “Would
you consider relocating?”
“What do you mean?”
“Coming to the United States.”
“Maybe,” I said, meaning “never,” of
course.
And then she attacked me, she threw herself at me, she grabbed me,
making me lose my head. We made love there, in the bathroom, while
Nick was outside wandering around the hostel, searching for his girlfriend,
his friend, and his God, finding none of them.
***
My last day on the job, Nick didn’t come
along. It was Heather who accompanied me, clutching the empty bucket
in her hand. We walked through the deserted Old City, our footsteps
reverberating through the silence of the night.
The full moon had coaxed the Wall out of the darkness, its lunar
glow reflecting off the hand-polished boulders. The guard nodded at
us, and went on bobbing his head to the rhythm of the song on his Discman.
We approached the Wall and I put the pole down.
“I want you to place my prayer note as high as possible,” Heather
told me, “so the guy who takes your job tomorrow, no matter how
tall he is, will never reach it. I don’t want anyone to read
my wish.”
She handed it to me, her prayer note. I wrapped it around the hook
at the tip of the pole and raised it all the way up, as high as I could
reach--on my tiptoes--and pushed it into a crevice between the sixth
and seventh rows of boulders. I knew she wanted it to remain there
for a decade or two, long enough for the wish to come true. I began
to wonder, why must we make something as ethereal as wish-making into
a concrete ritual?
When I asked Heather about her wish, she simply
smiled. “You
know what they say, that if you tell your wish, then it won’t
come true? And I really do want it to come true.”
I thought about her wish, about all those wishes that we had stolen
and read, and wondered whether they would come true. Then my mind shifted
to consider my own. My wish. I rolled my prayer note around the pole
hook and raised it up. The note slipped and fell. Heather reached out
to grab it. But I was ahead of her. I snatched it up and, on the spur
of the moment, started tearing it to pieces.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed
in horror, as if I had committed a sacrilegious act.
I laughed. “I know it will come true. My
wish will come true, anyway.”
