The punk they'd dug up on the olive grove, the maggots already holding a convention on his face. The case stunk. He knew it and he could tell that Dani knew it. Too clean, too cute.
That crazy, dickless eunuch. Pathetic. But who gave a shit-fucking Arabs slicing each other up over crazy pseudo-cultural nonsense. Lumpen proletariat. How many countries did they have-twenty? Twenty-five?-and they whined like shit-assed babies because they couldn't have the few square kilometers that belonged to the Jews. All that Palestinian bullshit. Back when he was a kid, the Jews had been Palestinians too. He'd been a goddamned Palestinian. Now it was a fucking catch phrase.
If the government was smart it would use agents provocateurs to fuck all the Arab virgins, convince the families that Ahmed next door had done it, supply them all with big knives, and set off a wave of revenge killings. Let them wipe themselves out-how long would it take? A month? Then we Zhids could finally have peace.
A laugh. With the Arabs gone, how long would it take for the Jews to chew each other up? What was the joke-a Jew had to have two synagogues. One that he went to, one that he rejected. We're the princes of self- hatred, the standard-bearers of self-destruction; all you had to do was read the Torah-brothers fucking over brothers, raping their sisters, castrating their fathers. And murder, plenty of it, nasty stuff. Cain and Abel, Esau going after Jacob, Joseph's brothers, Absalom. Sex crimes, too-Amnon raping Tamar, the Concubine of Gilead gang-banged to death by the boys from Ephraim, then cut into twelve pieces by her master and mailed to all the other tribes, the rest of them taking revenge on Ephraim, wiping out all the men, capturing the women for you- know-what, enslaving the kids.
Religion.
When you got down to it, that was human history. Murder, mayhem, bloodlust, one guy fucking over another, like monkeys in a cramped cage. Generation after generation of monkeys dressed in people-suits. Screeching and cackling and scratching their balls. Pausing just long enough to cut one another's throats.
Which made him, he supposed, a fucking historian.
He raised the bottle to his lips and took a deep, incendiary swallow.
How he loathed humanity, the inevitable movement toward entropy. If there was a God, he was a fucking comedian. Sitting up there laughing as the monkey-men yammered and bit each other in the ass and jumped around in the shitpile.
Life was shit; misery the order of the day.
That's the way it was. That's definitely the way it was. He gave a boozy belch and felt a wave of acid pain rise in his esophagus.
Another belch, another wave. Suddenly he felt nauseated and weak. More pain-good, he deserved it for being such a weak, naive shmuck.
For understanding the way it was but being unable to accept it. Unable to throw out the pictures. Goddamned fucking framed snapshots on the table next to his cot. He woke up each morning and saw them first thing.
Starting the day off right.
Pictures. Arik in uniform, leaning on his rifle. To Abba and Eema, With Love. The kid had never been original. Just good.
Leah at the Dead Sea, in a flowered bathing suit and matching cap, covered to her knees with black mud. Rounded belly, lumpy hips-looking at the picture he could feel them under his fingertips.
Tomorrow morning he'd throw out the pictures. Right now he was too tired to move.
Bullshit. He was a coward. Trying to hold on to something that didn't exist anymore.
One year they were there; the next, gone, as if they'd never been real, only figments of his imagination.
A good year for death, 1974.
Eleven fucking years and he still couldn't deal with it.
Not only that, but it was getting to him more, working on Gray Man, now this one, the cruelty. The fucking stupidity.
Monkeys.
Tough guy.
Shmuck.
He drank some more, disregarding the pain. Pushing himself toward the blackness that always came.
The kid had been bivouacked in the Sinai, reading a book in his tent-Hegel, no less, according to the military messenger. As if that made a fucking bit of difference. Picked off by some faceless Egyptian sniper. Next year, on the same spot, a bunch of assholes from Canada built a luxury hotel. A few years later, all of it was back in Egypt. Traded for Sadat's signature. The word of a fucking Nazi collaborator.
Thank you very much.
Leah never recovered. It ate her like a cancer. She wanted to talk about it all the time, always asking why us, what did we do to deserve it, Nahum? As if he had an answer. As if an answer existed.
He had no patience for that kind of thing. Got to where he couldn't stand the sight of her, the crying and the whining. He avoided her by burying himself in the double load, catching assholes, growing peaches. He came home one day, ready to avoid her again, and found her laid out on the kitchen floor. Cold as slate, waxy gray. He didn't need a fucking doctor to tell him what the story was.
Cerebral aneurysm. She'd probably been born with it. No way to know, tsk, tsk, sorry.
Thank you very much.
Fuck you very much.
Gene and Luanne wanted something authentic, so Daniel and Laura took them to The Magic Carpet, a Yemenite restaurant on Rehov Hillel, owned by the Caspi family. The dining room was long and low, bathed in dim,
