The night Yitzhak flew out the window, Dalia had been having a beautiful dream. In the dream, she was in the home of her mother and father, in Haifa, looking out the window at the perfect Mediterranean blue of the sky. That was it—the whole dream. And yet while Dalia was dreaming it, she was suffused with an unutterable peace that was purer and bigger than anything she’d known before. And then her dream was shattered by a sudden, sickening cold. The whole room was filled with it: the desk, the chair, the bed. Her bones hurt, but she wasn’t achy or in pain. It was more like something inside her bones had gone bad, stale and unliving. Had she died? Was she dying? She had no reason to think so, not with all her senses working and she herself alert, the steady deep breathing of her husband beside her, the powerful heat coming off his body that nonetheless didn’t penetrate the sudden terrible chill.
She got up and looked out at the sleeping flatness of the yard. All was still, striped with inky shadows, the dog twitching in his sleep, the night insects beating their whining hymn. She hated this place.
“Amos.” She tried to wake her husband, to tell him that something was wrong, that she couldn’t warm up. But he remained deeply embedded in his heavy sleep. His broad dark face with its permanent black stubble merged into the pillow. His grunts of protest subsided into snores. The insistent mass of his body rolled over while his brain tumbled into the deep trough of unconsciousness that these days he preferred to almost everything: work, coffee, sex, books, his wife, his sons, friends, nature, history, God.
She climbed back into the bed. But rather than warmth, she was enveloped in heavier, and somehow wetter, cold, as if an immense plastic bag filled with snow was draped had replaced the lightweight quilt she’d recently bought at the Bed, Bath & Beyond. She struggled to remain calm while, beside her, Amos slept the sleep of the dead. She was a nurse: what could this sudden, terrible coldness mean? What illness did it foretell? From her pillow she looked at the things in the room: the outline of the lamp; the novel that she’d just gotten from the library lying on its side on her nightstand; a bottle of rubbing alcohol that she’d meant to return to the medicine cabinet. The ceiling fan, battling its endless circle through the sticky air. How stupid was its unceasing whirring. Amos shuddered hard, let out a gleeful little cry, rolled onto his right shoulder, and in English said “Cows.”
Once upon a time she’d found her husband’s night-time outbursts endearing, if not outright funny, and tried to remember what he’d said so she could tell him about it in the morning and laugh together over their morning coffee. But it had been years since their shared secrets entertained, let alone enchanted her, and now such secrets were mainly painful, reminders of all she’d hoped for, clung to, willing herself to be a good wife, a good mother, only to land here, in this freezing cold room in this dark night in this far-away place, far from everyone she’d ever loved—her mother and father, her sisters, her school mates and the friends she’d made in the army and the friends she’d made in university and then, as a young bride and mother, all the other friends she’d made as she followed her young and brilliant husband from one post to another: he was a mathematician, so brilliant that even his own colleagues could barely keep up with him, winning more and more renown, accolades, fellowships—and yet. And yet. He’d dragged her here—he’d dragged all of them—to a place so dreary and god-forsaken, so backwards, and so far from everything she knew and understood, and for what? For what? “To be in America is big reward,” he’d patiently explained as she’d patiently packed up their belongings as they prepared to move, once again. “Because it is America.” He said all this mostly in Hebrew, sometimes with various English-language expressions he’d picked up from watching television. “Right then.” “Brekky.”
She heard a batting of wings against the roof, a terrible squawking. Perhaps the poor bird had gotten its clawed foot stuck between the roofline and the chimney. Another terrified shriek and then, just as suddenly, it was gone and the room, heating up, drifted away on the far side of her slumber. It was March.
In the morning they woke to discover that their eldest son, Yitzhak, had swallowed what was left in the bottle of Tramadol that Amos’s doctor had prescribed after Amos’s knee replacement. Amos was a big man: his doctor had given him enough pills to get him through the entire first month, but after two or three days, Amos, complaining that the pills gave him hideous nightmares, switched to extra-strength Ibuprofen. For more than two years the bottle had remained in the back of the medicine cabinet: why throw it out?
Now the bottle lay by her dead son’s dead gray hand, and the person who had been Yitzhak lay face up and gray with staring empty eyes on the floor by his bed in the room he shared with his brother, Jonathan. But Jonathan wasn’t home: he was in Florida, with his high school baseball team. There was some kind of big competition there. Dalia had had to read and sign several forms to allow Jonathan to go, and though she hadn’t understood precisely what it was all about, she trusted this son, this sunny middle son who still had baby fat and who looked uncannily like his father, right down to his glossy black hair and dark skin. Though his own Hebrew was idiomatically fluent, Jonathan spoke almost entirely in English, explaining to his mother with the little shrug he’d picked up in America that the team would be staying at a hotel, four boys to a room, and several of the dads were going too, that he’d be in good hands, no worries, everything was cool.
Unlike his brother, Yitzhak’s skin was of a mottled pinkish-blue and his eyes too were blue, blue and overlarge hung with large, freckled eyelids, with the large expressive hands of a musician or a chef, his fingers sprouting like seaweed. He was twenty-two and well over six feet tall, but oddly child-like, content to remain in his own room and inside his own company, where he played online video games and wrote in his journal. Or rather, he had been. Now he looked like an oversized, stretched out, and mildly imbecilic facsimile. A misconceived mannequin of odd proportion.
She knew she had to do something: call 911, perform CPR. Instead she threw up into the trashcan. When she looked up, she saw that Amos had become so still it was as if he’d turned into rock. It was on her then. Of course it was. “Amos!” she sobbed, but Amos remained as he was, solid as stone, deaf, mute. She threw herself on him, desperate for warmth, but he pushed her away.
After she’d vomited a second time, she called 911, clearly stating her name and her address, then taking the time to explain that the house was tucked behind another, older house with pediments and arches, that the EMS would have to go down a long driveway before they came to the clearing where their own, more modern, house had been built in the style of the Australian outback, with a tin roof and capacious veranda.
Dalia had never wanted to come to America, let alone to this small city in the deep South where the Jews prayed in English, and no one had so much as heard of Amos Oz or Rahel Bluwstein. What they did know of Israel was: Golda Meir. Moshe Dayan. Gal Gadot. Maybe also Itzhak Perlman. But maybe not. What interested them was American football, politics, the weather, and cars. Only she was being unfair. They weren’t that callous, that bovine. Most weren’t, anyway. It didn’t matter. In the wake of Yitzhak’s suicide, his terrible self-murder, nothing did.
He’d been a student at the local university, the same university that Amos had insisted was worth the move from one side of the globe to the other, because, he insisted, it was in America. If only they’d stayed where they were, she kept thinking. Or if he’d taken that other job, the one he’d been offered some years earlier, teaching in Hong Kong.
If America itself was not to blame for the frightful sight before her, there was no answer, no culprit, no cause or reason to be found. As it turned out, he’d left journals—copious amounts of cribbed and impossibly small notes in a combination of English and Hebrew scripts, none of which, to Dalia’s way of thinking, made any sense at all. The green drip of the smokey afterwards. Was it supposed to be poetry? My mind is a maze, confusion, pink and then black and then purple. Had he been using drugs? It was unlikely. Yitzhak was unlike boys of his age. Quiet, gentle, always too tall for his age, diffident, anxious, shy, reclusive, and with those enormous, elongated feet. Sports didn’t interest him. Nor did girls. Nor chess, games of skill, puzzles, toy trucks: most things, in fact, didn’t interest him. What he liked was Shadow, their current dog, the one they’d gotten when they couldn’t bring their former dog, Picasso, to America. He’d also liked Picasso, and before Picasso, he’d had a little stuffed dog that he’d named Beseder who came everywhere with him.
“We didn’t catch it, we should have stopped him, we should have known,” Amos said as they took their places near the gaping, empty hole where Yitzhak was to be consigned. Even as funerals go, even as funerals for young people and suicides go, Yitzhak’s was a sad affair, in the too-bright too-hot sun and among the weeds and brambles that sprouted so heartily that even the pesticides and herbicides that were weekly dumped on the cemetery grounds couldn’t keep them at bay. And the rabbi, a kind man by the look of things, and thoughtful, too, not that she’d heard a word he’d said. It was afterwards, when people from the synagogue came to visit or bring food or just to sit with them, in a kind of shiva-after-shiva, who told her: “The rabbi couldn’t have spoken more beautifully.” As if it mattered. He could have spoken more beautifully than all the Prophets put together and it wouldn’t have mattered. It was all gibberish to her: as if words might correct things. As if rhetoric could put things back.
After the first crush of meaningless days that dripped one after the next into the other, the Jews, who’d been coming in droves with offerings of casseroles and cookies, sweet and savory pies, bagels and challah and heaping bowls of fruit salad mainly stopped coming. Shiva was officially over: they’d gotten through it, God knows how. Then came shloshim and Amos let his beard and hair grow out and on occasion the rabbi or one of the men from the Hebrew Men’s Club came over: would Amos like to study with them, as is the custom at a time of mourning? No, he would not like to study with them. He would like to drown himself in the words of his dead son’s scribbled and despairing non-ideas. He would like to eat. He would like to be on his computer. The internet interested him more than the outpouring of concern from the Jews. Then again, the internet interested him more than Dalia did, or either of their living sons—Jonathan, who threw himself into baseball as if his future depended on it, and Joel, who had started hiding wherever he could: under the coffee table; jammed up between the back of the sofa and the wall; in the laundry cabinet. He was seven and could squeeze himself into the most unlikely of spaces.
Of her three children, Joel alone resembled his mother, with her doe-like head, her green eyes and slim elegance. Yitzhak hadn’t looked like either parent in particular but rather seemed to have inherited his father’s bulky, loose frame, on top of which he grew his own long-limbed and desperately clumsy apparatus: the too long arms and legs, the too-big feet, the face like the face of a horse. Jonathan was big all over, with a shock of dark hair over his round black eyes. But Joel was lovely and even now in his tender boyhood you could see the handsome man he would become. Dalia supposes that she herself was at one time quite pretty: this she sees when she looks at the photo albums she’s hauled from one stop to another, as if those visual reminders of who she once was—who the two and then the three, four, five of them once were—might restore something like hope. Her perfect figure in a black, two-piece bathing suit on the beach in Tel Aviv. Her delighted smile as she beamed into the camera wearing the green fatigues and heavy boots of the IDF, where she’d served at Ovda Airfield in the far south, near Eilat. It had been fun to go with the other girls to the port city, where they’d drink beer and sun themselves on the flat white sand. Amos had hated the army though. He’d been in Givati, and because of his height and strength, was chosen to serve as his team’s machine gunner. He still complained about the back trouble that hauling that heavy gun around gave him. To this day, she doesn’t understand why he put himself through all the trouble, all the testing and training and misery, when he might easily have served in intelligence, spent his three years behind a computer.
Five weeks after the shiva, one of the women from the synagogue came over with her son for a tentative play date between the boys. It was a Sunday, abnormally hot for spring, and as the two women sat together on the veranda, the boys ran around the broad yard, picking up sticks to use as swords. After a while the woman’s son—his name was Max–came running over, his nose bloodied and his eyes streaming tears, saying that Joel had hit him on purpose, and that he wanted to go home. Dalia led them both inside, where the mother cleaned him up at the kitchen sink and sent him back outside to play with Joel. But by then Joel had disappeared. Dalia called for him, but he didn’t answer. It wasn’t a small property, but it wasn’t large either and with the long side of the yard fenced in, there weren’t any obvious places to hide. Feeling panic rise in her throat, Dalia turned to the woman and said: “He does this sometimes. He hides. Ever since—”
She didn’t have to complete the sentence. The woman from the synagogue nodded, then turned to Dalia and without asking, wrapped her in a fierce hug. It was such an unexpected gesture that Dalia didn’t know how to absorb it, and when it was over, found that she was slightly short of breath.
“I better go find him,” she said.
She didn’t think that Joel was capable of so much as thinking about finding a bottle of pills to swallow, but as she ran up the stairs to the bedrooms, an image of a dead Joel lying on the road, crushed by a passing SUV or pickup truck, appeared in her mind’s eye, sickening her, hastening her steps and rising in her throat. “Joel!” she called. “Joel! Joel!”
And there he was, sitting at his dead brother’s desk playing Minecraft, while his older brother, Jonathan, stretched himself out on the bed playing with his phone.
“Joel,” she said. “You need to come down and say you’re sorry to Max.”
“I hate Max,” Joel said. “He’s gay.”
“He’s what?” said Dalia. “What did you say?”
“He’s a pussy and a faggot.”
“Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“Jonathan.”
“Jonathan?” Dalia said, turning to her older son. “This is true? You teach your brother this terrible things?”
“These things, Mom,” Jonathan said.
“You hit him with a stick,” Dalia said, turning back to Joel. “Why you do that?”
But Joel was already running back down the stairs, flying like a bird into the bright green sunlit day. Most of his friends were Black, boys he’d met at the public school where on the whole the black kids and the white kids didn’t play together, and, as often as not, were shuttled into different classrooms. “Gifted and talented.” That’s what they called the school: a school not for all children but for the cut above, the bright and brighter, with futures larger and more ebullient than a life of drug dealing or petty, grinding misery on the wrong side of town, up the river near the petrochemical plants, where vast gray plumes of smoke poured into the sky continuously. Perhaps that was the problem, then. That Max, like Joel’s own family, was Jewish, with the wrong color skin, the wrong accent, the wrong God.
Amos became obsessed with Yitzhak’s cribbed and terrible writings, those spiral bound notebooks he kept. When he wasn’t at work, he sat in the living with Yitzhak’s notebooks open on his lap, slowly deciphering, slowly jotting down in a separate notebook what their boy had written. The second notebook—the one that Amos made—was color coded, allowing Amos to group certain themes or phrases together. Nothing cohered, though. Nothing made sense. Yitzak’s thoughts were unfiltered, uncontained, meaningless. There was no secret to be discovered, no clue. He was dead because he was dead. Because he’d flown out the window, but before escaping entirely, had stopped, hesitating, above his mother’s sleeping form. And the terrible searing pain of knowing that it was too late, that even his mother couldn’t restore him to his human form, to his earthy, unhappy here-I-am-ness. Too late! Too late! She begged Amos to stop looking for answers but he only became m more obsessed with finding a reason for their son’s suicide. In Hebrew the word was התאבדות The self-loss of self.
“Why he do this thing?” he cried at night.
“I don’t know.”
“The whole world is filled with hate.”
And perhaps it was. But in the meantime, Dalia had work to do—the hospital where she worked had given her five weeks but it was past time she returned—the family needed to eat, and Joel needed to be shuttled back and forth to school, back and forth to play dates. Most of his friends lived in one-story brick houses set back on slabs of flat grass. Their mothers were invariably kind. They looked at her with meltingly large brown eyes that made her want to fall into their arms.
One day she drove Joel to play with a new friend, a boy named Andy whom she’d never met before. When she dropped Joel off at his house, Andy’s mother came to the door and told Dalia not to worry, that she watched her kids like a hawk. Andy’s mother—and, presumably, Andy himself—was not Black, though, but either Indian or Pakistani, or perhaps even from Nepal or Afghanistan. Dalia couldn’t tell. The slim gold bangles on her wrist. Her beautiful, tawny skin and liquid eyes. She was dressed in tennis whites that showed off perfect, sculpted arms and legs. In her presence, Dalia felt herself shrink.
Andy’s mother said that since coming to the United States when Andy was an infant, she had learned a lot about all the different kinds of Americans, how they thought of themselves. “At first of course my husband and I didn’t think it was a good idea to send Andy to public schools, we were going to send him to a church or a private school, where there would be a better class of people. But then we realized that at those places he’d be the subject of suspicion and ignorance. Are you a terrorist? This kind of nonsense.”
“I see,” said Dalia, though she didn’t. Andy’s mother spoke a clipped, precise English, and had a faint moustache.
“People are so stupid, so ignorant,” she said. “This I knew before we came here, because as you can imagine in Pakistan things are terrible, all kinds of violence, it never stops, and this is because it is easy to hate.”
“Perhaps.”
“So you see, this is why I would never call you a Jew.”
“Excuse me?”
“I would say, she is Jewish. But I would never say, she is a Jew. Because it is a racist thing to say.”
“But I am a Jew,” Dalia said.
The woman looked at her as if Dalia had just slapped her, said once again told Dalia not to worry, and that if the boys were hungry, she’d give them applesauce. “Andy loves applesauce,” she said. “An American invention, of course, but a good one.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” her husband raged, only now he not only raged during the day but at night too, suddenly popping up out of his heavy sleep to scream and shout, to accuse, to denounce. Paranoia overtook him: what if it was a cabal of secret antisemites at the university who had gotten to their son, whispering evil things to him, making him believe that death was the only way out? Worse, as time went on, he began to believe that his colleagues in the math department had it out for him, blaming him for cuts to their budget and whispering about him behind his back. “Because they hate the Jews, that’s why!” he would say when he came back from teaching his classes. “They are saying that I had something to do with Yitzhak’s death, and that is why I am being denied Distinguished Professor status.”
Dalia doubted it, but she did not speak to him about it. What use was it, especially when it was becoming more and more obvious that if indeed her husband had been denied the higher salary that came with a higher rung on the academic ladder, it was because he was acting like a crazy man.
The rabbi came over, tried to talk some sense into him. The last time Amos had seen the rabbi was during the seven days of shiva. After that, he refused to so much as think about him. Dalia understood: she was no great fan of the rabbi, either. He was a young man, with young children. What could such a man, no matter how good his heart, say that might help, that might cut through the misery that was clouding her husband’s mind? Oh, and once upon a time—when she and he were young and in love, running on the beaches in Israel, splashing in the sea—he’d been everything and all that her heart had ever yearned for. Smart and strong and full of conviction and passion, and how he’d adored her, how in his joy he’d kissed all ten of her fingers and all ten of her toes.
“Your loss, I know, must still be unbearable,” is how the rabbi, sitting on an old chair facing Amos and Dalia, began. “Please tell me. Is there anything I might do to ease the burden?”
No, of course there wasn’t, thank you very much, but there is nothing to do. That’s what Dalia would have said. Amos said:
“Can you bring our boy back? Can you tell the anti-\Semites to stop hating us? Can you reverse the tides or retrieve the moon? You cannot? Then leave.”
“But—” said the rabbi.
“But you admit you know nothing, this is a fact. In the army, I had double pneumonia, I said I do not feel so good, my commander he said I was pretending, that I am lazy and bad. So. I get more sick. A year later it is the war again and my friend got killed by a bullet through his neck, right in front of me he is dead. Then I am told that it is all right, he was killed serving the people of Israel. I don’t think it is all right. Then this, then that. I work hard. They tell me I am a Jew and have no place in this country, in this world. To go back to Israel, maybe? To go back where again there will be war, there will be more and more dead boys in Mt. Herzl?”
The rabbi got nowhere. It was wishful thinking on Dalia’s part to hope that he might. But the visit wasn’t entirely useless, because during it, Amos had inadvertently pointed to something that was almost more unbearable than everything that had preceded it. In Israel, the dead were buried under cedars, or on a mountain with views stretching nearly as far as the Jordan. In this terrible hot city, Yitzhak’s body was turning to bone under weeds and the refuse that people tossed from their cars: plastic cups, tin cans, cigarettes. A terrible place, the Jewish cemetery. A place crawling with snakes and frogs and lying endlessly under that terrible hot Southern sun.
Almost nine months had passed before she went back there again, and when she did, it wasn’t to lay flowers at the grave or even say a prayer, but rather, an attempt to force her husband to come to grips. The headstone wasn’t up yet: though Dalia had finally ordered one, it wouldn’t be for another month or two. And there was no particular time frame to mark. It was December, with a soft gray chill in the air, and Dalia was dressed in jeans and a pullover sweater. She was there with Amos and both boys, none of whom had wanted to come with her and had only agreed to after she told them that if they didn’t come she would move back to Israel without them. Though it was an empty threat, at the time that the words issued from her mouth she’d meant them. Because: why not go back to Israel? If Amos didn’t want to come, she’d take the boys with her. If they didn’t want to come, she’d go by herself. Until she found her own place, she could live with one of her sisters.
Neither of her sisters had understood what she’d seen in Amos, not when Dalia was a young woman, madly in love with her strong, dark, handsome soldier, nor later, when she’d followed him first, to Singapore, and then, briefly, to the Philippines. Where it was also very hot: hot and sticky, the air so heavy with unshed rain that you felt like you were inside someone’s mouth. But she’d been mad about him, thrilled to be pregnant with his children, ecstatic when each of them arrived, their faces squished and with wisps of black hair slicked to their scalps as if with hair tonic. Each of them she’d nursed; each of them she’d walked back and forth, across the floor or the apartment or the lawn, back and forth until they settled down. She’d do it again if she had to. She’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Only now of course the first of those babies was lying under what rain and time had turned into a barely perceptible bump in the earth, nestled between a drainage ditch and a patch of the cemetery where four members of the same family lay under headstones long since turned rust-colored, long since unloved. “You see,” she said, standing over where she thought his head would be. “This is what is left of Yitzhak. Only even here, there is nothing left. This is not our son. This is not a person. This is not a resting place. He isn’t resting. He is dead.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Amos. “I do not understand.”
He had a point. Even now, as he stared at the patch of ground where his eldest’s body lay, Amos was stubborn in his refusal, stubborn in his animal sense of having been wronged, injured, cheated out of his essential and hard-won happiness. She could see it in the way he let his shoulders slump, in the slow batting of his eyes. He would never know what she knew, that Yitzhak, who had been so desperately loved, hadn’t loved them back, perhaps never had.
He was a simile of himself, a bundle of disjointed ideas flying around inside a skein of skin. Dalia could no longer bear being alone in her loneliness. She threw herself against her husband’s broad chest and with both fists began to beat him.
“What are you doing? Have you gone crazy?”
And maybe she had. And maybe she always had been. She was only aware that as she hit her husband, she felt hands on both her arms, and as her boys pulled her away, she could hear the squawking of what sounded to be a large bird.