Convene The Kingdom E-Book

Jerome Mandel

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Revisiting an old friend in Israel, Nona, Charyn, and their families confront the emotional poverty of their lives back in Ohio. With financially successful but dismissive husbands, the women recognize the need for change and the desire for something more.

Tragedy strikes when an apparent assassination attempt forces their friend David and his family back to the States. As they adjust to life in the suburbs, they are confronted with the stress and delights of life in America.

Amidst the chaos, a long-brewing love story emerges. Three friends who have loved each other for years must navigate entangling alliances and commitments to others, all while trying to create a better world for themselves. But redesigning their lives won't be easy, and they must remove impediments and make tough choices to achieve true happiness.

In Jerome Mandel's 'Convene The Kingdom', the characters learn that love and happiness are worth fighting for, even when it means challenging the status quo.

Leseprobe

CONVENE THE KINGDOM

An Amusing Murder Mystery Love Story

JEROME MANDEL

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2023 Jerome Mandel

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Tyler Colins

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

ChapterOne

Tel Aviv, Israel. 1978

“I know,” said David enthusiastically, “let’s go see the souk.” They sat beneath the pergola in the back garden of David’s rented house, the Mediterranean actually twinkling on the horizon.

David said everything enthusiastically. It was his job. As the Assistant Cultural Attaché to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, he had to generate enthusiasm for the most arcane and irrelevant native oddities to amuse the pampered wives and children of wandering American congressmen, governors, mayors, Fulbright scholars, and conventioneers. The American Association of Ombudsmen was winding up four days of intensive talks in Jerusalem and the Brotherhood of Firefighters was due in next week. They all wanted to know what their precious tax dollars were doing to spread the American way of life to the colorful people of the Middle East and to see as much as they could in the limited time allowed to them by the public organization that funded their trip.

David loved his job, though he was not uniformly successful with all the people he was supposed to amuse. The men brushed past him after a perfunctory handshake, preferring to speak to the Cultural Attaché herself rather than a junior or assistant anything. They knew where the power lay.

He was always more successful with women, who caught their breath in surprise to see such a darkly handsome man in such an unexpected place. At thirty-eight D[avid] O[rville] Degliorti was physically gorgeous – straight and slim with a crown of deep black hair and startling blue eyes, so intensely electric blue they seemed unearthly. Though he was sixth generation American, the Mediterranean sun had brought back the color of antique gold, of sultanas and rich white wine to his skin. He smelled of sea-wind and sun-lit beaches. He had the manners of a count. Women flustered. They blushed. They smiled from ear to ear. They were overwhelmed by his presence and delighted by his attention. They knew he was really a spy.

The older women with teased and lacquered hair, pink powdered faces, and the constant air of a fecund and overly fertilized flower garden, always referred to him as “that nice young man at the embassy” who took them here or took them there. They couldn’t tell their husbands exactly where they had been, but they had had a good time.

The sleek younger women, the gently cutthroat wives of aggressive, upwardly mobile, politically energetic husbands, always offered to shake his hand when introduced and held it slightly longer than necessary as if to say with the slip of skin over warm skin that they, too, knew where the power lay.

With the children of the Wandering Americans, he was invariably embarrassed. There had been a time, before he was thirty, when he still spoke their language, but now he realized that if they couldn’t pop it, drink it, smoke it, shoot it, or screw it, they weren’t interested. They approached museums with the enthusiasm of a sloth. They viewed the remnants of a Paleolithic village with the interest usually reserved for green cat puke. They began the day with polite indifference and ended with antagonistic surliness. The boys especially washed their hands of the entire hopelessly backward country when they realized that hardly anyone in Israel knew or cared that Dallas won the Super Bowl in February and the Yankees were on the road to the World Series. Again.

He was more comfortable with the younger children because he had a boy (Sean, 14) and a girl (Ingrid, 12) at home. They, too, were not interested in museums, churches, monuments, archeological digs, castles, grottos, caves, vistas, memorials, Bedouin camps, kibbutzim, crusader forts, or any of the detritus left by the ancient Hebrew, Phoenician, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian, Nabataean, Syrian, Hellenic, Roman, Moslem, Byzantine, Turkish, British, or modern Jewish cultures and civilization. Sean and Ingrid could be encouraged to go shopping for toys and records (but not for clothes or food) and they were mildly addicted to television and film. Otherwise, they were content to play on the beach with children of other embassy personnel and gripe about the weather and the beastly Jews (or wogs or slants or squints or slopes), in spite of the fact that living abroad, especially for Americans, was thought to be educational and to generate tolerance for inferior cultures.

But David did not rise to his present position in the Foreign Service to be easily daunted by children. He was, after all, a professional. He simply had to find the connection between the people he was dealing with and what they were looking at to make it interesting to them. A Dakota congressman once aggravated everyone with his boredom until David showed him the water-storage system and irrigation troughs the Nabataeans built at En Avdat to solve a water shortfall problem similar to what the congressman’s constituents endured in western Dakota. Then the congressman had to see every ancient and modern irrigation system in the country. David prided himself on making connections. And the same was true for the children. He had to find the connection.

“Look at this, Sean,” he said to his son.

“What is it?”

“It’s a Byzantine winepress.”

“Who cares?”

“Remember when you were three and we lived in Lima?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. We went to a little zoo on the outskirts of the city, a petting zoo, for children.”

“Is that where that goddamn llama stepped on my foot?” He was in what his Aunt Cindy called the “cute profane stage of adolescence”.

“That’s right.”

“God! I remember that. I was three?”

“Yes, now listen—”

“Goddamn big fucking hairy llama stepped right on my foot. I screamed.”

“You didn’t like it.”

“Was I only three?”

“Yes, now you see, you do remember Peru.”

“Goddamn. You would remember it too if you were only three and this big, hairy animal that smelled like garbage stepped its pointy goddamn hoof on your foot.”

“And do you remember the troughs that ran around the side of the petting zoo?”

“No.”

“Sure you do. You said they looked like ‘macaroni bited in half the long way’.”

“What are you talking about?” screamed Sean. “What does that have to do with a Byzantine winepress in Israel?” He was easily irritated.

“Look. Look at this. Here is where the grapes were placed and crushed and the wine ran down these hollow stone troughs— just like ‘macaroni bited in half the long way’—and fell into buckets here, which were then dumped into casks or vats over there. But see! The troughs are the same: blocks of stone with a hollow groove set end on end to make the trough. Just like the Inca in Peru,” he said triumphantly.

After such a victory, it was easy to feel proud, and while David did not always know what the wandering American children were interested in, he would cast about until he found some connection for them, too. If they wore earrings, chains, bracelets, brooches, pins, and seven rings, he took them to the Jewelry Museum. If they talked sports, he tried to find pick-up basketball or soccer games. If they were at that age when they discovered their bodies—length and curve and color and power—he unleashed them on the sea. And if they wanted to be doctors and lawyers when they grew up, he took them to the Numismatics Museum. The country, unlike most in which he had served, was so rich in possibilities that he was sure to find some connection for everyone somewhere.

* * *

David was having trouble finding that connection for the people sitting in the little garden outside his rented house in Herzliya Pituach, the leafy suburb of Tel Aviv favored by diplomatic personnel, not because they were quintessentially American, but because they were friends. He had known most of them for the past twenty-five years. Charyn Siemen (she was Charyn Hart before she married Walken) and Nona Semple (now Mrs. Nona Hunter) were friends of his sister, Cindy, from their junior high school days.

Charyn was a fixer, a saver of old, broken things—clocks and lamps and lawn mowers both manual and electric—someone who returned things to the way they were before. Anything that needed regluing, rewiring, repainting, taking apart and putting back together. The status quo ante. Along the same lines, she kept a record of the major events of the previous day as if to preserve the way things were. She saved all her memorabilia from childhood until she was fourteen, when her mother, just before being institutionalized, hauled everything into the backyard and set it afire.

Charyn began again and seemed to save every scrap of paper that came her way. At first, she did it for herself, to hold her own life together, give it definition and history: what she had done, where she had been, who she had been with. She was never bullied in high school for her obsession once it became known that she was a girl rich in older brothers, four of them, burly boys who worked in the family business. They taught her more than any young girl needed to know about how engines worked and cars ran. Hart Automotive Parts and Repairs had seven outlets scattered throughout northern Ohio.

And then, perhaps because of something David said about Proust’s mother, who had also been a saver, she saw that what she was doing was collecting the material for some future historian who would define the life of an American woman in the second half of the twentieth century. It seemed to give purpose and respectability to her obsession and justified hauling trunk loads of material to college, to the apartment she lived in afterwards, and finally to the old, stone, Siemen family home she now shared with Walken.

Once settled there, Charyn became a gardener, a preserver of things beautiful. She filled the windows with hanging plants, the side tables and corners with ferns, big leaf plants, and other greenery. She did it naturally, without thinking. In the colorful gardens beside and behind the house, Charyn was a ruthless gardener. She put salt on the slugs and stepped on the snails until she heard the shell snick. Rabbits and deer were disappointed.

She sat in the garden now at David’s house, in a chair on the gravel path so as not to crush the grass and held a baby spider plant whose stalk was split. The baby dangled at the end of the browning stalk, receiving no nourishment, slowly starving to death. She snipped it off with her thumbnail and would put it in a glass of water to root.

The most obvious thing about Nona, on the other hand, was that she was a theoretician, a careful, often elegant thinker. It was apparent in her schoolwork, of course, but even more so in her mania for games. She was adept at chess, quite superior even to David. Sometimes she attacked with surgical precision and elegant economy of move; sometimes she concentrated the attack in one area and, while he attempted to preserve the kingdom there, she would slip a piece away from the action and capture a piece he neglected to protect. She had no compunction about sacrificing anyone for position and advantage. She rarely lost. Because she liked to trade queens, he accused her of having no respect for women, but the ease with which she abandoned knights and bishops suggested her lack of involvement with any of the people in the game.

She was equally good at checkers, poker, dominoes, Monopoly, Clue. As she grew older, she mastered the more sophisticated adult games: tactics, strategy, power, manipulation. She was so much brighter than the men she dated. They all bored her until, at the proper time and perhaps because she was last to marry and had nothing better to do, she met Alex Hunter who insisted she marry him and then, since his money was newer than Walken’s, insisted she quit work.

When they were twelve, Nona and Charyn regularly came to Cindy’s house to do homework. David, drawn to the center of giggles, would drift into Cindy’s sweet room to help them with their confounding math (“Why do we have to know how to solve quadratic equations?”), teach them how to bisect an angle with a compass, or explain the connection between slavery, States’ rights, and the Civil War.

As they grew up, they grew more serious together. All the subtle problems of boy-girl relationships were played out, analyzed, discussed, probed, dissected. David’s authority and experience were a prime source of information, and the girls tapped it first to solve abstract and theoretical problems, later to solve more pressing problems of back-seat etiquette that they were constantly called upon to handle.

“Buttons down the front of a blouse or sweater are an invitation,” David said from his vast experience, “and buttons down the back offer easy access to important hooks and things.”

They were friends in other ways as well. They walked to school together. When David got his license, they drove to Baskin-Robbins in the evening. They went to basketball and football games together, especially to watch David play.

The first time they went to the quarry at night, Nona said, “What would it be like to go swimming in moonlight?”

“Let’s see,” said Charyn, stripping out of her clothes.

They laughed a lot. Other friends would drift in and out of their experience, but these were the stable, central figures in each other’s lives. They preferred to be with each other more than with anyone else, had pet names for each other, and familiar jokes. They were friends, buddies, pals through high school and the long, warm summer vacations from college.

David went to college first and two years later the girls followed, Cindy kicking and screaming because she didn’t want to always follow in her big brother’s footsteps, Nona and Charyn more complacently and, at that point in their lives, more expectantly. They both looked upon David as “theirs” in a splendid way that was neither possessive nor jealous. Each felt that he slightly favored the other, that if the boat were sinking, he would save the other first, and that that was all right.

But the David they found at college was not the David who left them in high school. He took his work seriously, and he took his play seriously, too. There were more than enough girls for him to date in college, and he seemed to date them all. In any event, Nona and Charyn were taboo. It would have been incest to date them the way he dated other girls and besides, one didn’t do that to friends. And they—no matter how high their hormone levels were at eighteen, no matter how much estrogen pumped through their systems, no matter how much adrenalin coursed through their bodies to flush their cheeks and shorten their breath and keep them warm in open coats on the coldest winter days—they found no release for their sexual energies in David. Still, there were more than enough college boys for them, and they seemed to date them all.

David stayed on to do a master’s degree in International Relations, so they all graduated together. The only remnant of their former intimacy was the Sunday mornings in David’s graduate school apartment with The New York Times. No matter how late they had been up the night before, no matter how dissolute their behavior, they always gathered with religious devotion at 10:30, washed, clean, combed, crisply dressed for breakfast which began at the coffee table and spread to the floor. It was their quiet time together. They were happy. Sometimes Cindy came, but no one else was welcome. Years later, their happiest memories of college were those long languid Sunday mornings, coffee pot steaming in the slanted sunlight, warm rolls, apples dipped in honey, curling on the couch, dozing under the afghan. They never talked about their lives outside. They didn’t talk much about politics or the other chronicled horrors of the world. They stored up words from the week behind and gathered strength from their silence together for the week to come.

Cindy married first, the day after graduation. David married Sylvia three years later in San Francisco to the surprise of everyone and then, a few months after that, in what seemed to be a chain reaction, Charyn married Walken Siemen and Nona married Alex Hunter.

Though David was posted to Peru, Pakistan, and New Guinea before arriving at the prestigious post in Israel, he always kept in touch, sent presents at Christmas and on their children’s birthdays, and spent his leave time and vacations in the same Midwestern town where they all grew up. They were the only best friends they had.

The Hunters and the Siemens were rich enough in their middle and late thirties to do what they wanted to do. While their children were young, they took two weeks in the winter at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach and two weeks in the summer in Aspen. Now that their children were almost teenagers, they decided to visit David in his natural habitat, something they had not done since he had been posted out of their comfort zone. They had exhausted the beauties and native attractions of Israel in less than a week and spent the rest of the time longing for the more familiar amusements of home.

And now, with only two days left, they were dead-tired, exhausted, washed out, limp. Israel had more to give, but they did not. The sun punished them. It beat upon them mercilessly. It whitened the world. It made them squint. The hot wind dried their skin, and the sun showed the truth: every delicate trace of crow’s foot at the corner of the eye, the edge of the mouth, the upper lip, every blemish, every freckle.

Nonetheless, David surprised himself that he took such delight in finding more and more to amuse them. He especially wanted to discomfit the men who had married his best friends. Perhaps it was a matter of pride. They were so self-assured in their bright, wash-and-wear acrylic clothes, their comfortable American opinions, and their money. But David, approaching forty and having been exposed to the world, suspected that there was more to life than that. He wanted to show them.

And that’s why he said with his infectious enthusiasm, “I know. Let’s go see the souk.”

“Who’s he?” said Alex Hunter.

“It’s not a ‘he’, it’s a place—the great central market in downtown Tel Aviv. You really should see it before you go. It’s wonderful. You’ll love it.”

“A supermarket?”

“It’s what markets used to be before refrigeration or supermarkets. And not just here but everywhere in the world.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Walken Siemen. “Let’s go to the hotel and drink.”

“Would you like another drink?” asked Sylvia with the slurred and casual generosity she used when dispensing liquor and soft drugs to David’s guests or sex to her husband. She liked people to have a good time. She wanted, to the extent that she wanted anything very firmly, everyone to be happy.

“No, that’s alright,” said Walken, who desperately wanted a drink in the plush air-conditioned comfort of the hotel bar with busty, short-skirted waitresses to serve him and darkness around him. Even in the shadow of the pergola behind David’s house, the sun was too brutal, and the children roaring through the garden annoyed him.

“Oh, go ahead Walken. Have another drink,” Nona Hunter said with barely disguised gaiety.

“Shut up, Nona.” Alex was irritated. Perhaps the sun. Perhaps the children.

“I just said he should have a drink if he wants one.”

Alex twisted away in disgust.

“I think David’s had a wonderful idea,” said Charyn, standing with energy and determination. “Let’s all go see this souk-market, whatever it is. And you can have your drink at the hotel on the way back.” She knew his weakness.

“What’ll we do with the children?”

“They can stay here with me,” said Sylvia.

“Won’t you come?” inquired Walken, always anxious that everyone be together, have a good time, drink.

“No, thank you. I’ve done my shopping.” She laughed at her own joke. They all knew David left the car for her on Thursdays. “I’ll stay here with the kids.” She preferred their company to that of their parents anyway. They were less threatening.

Somewhere in the sky, they heard the crump of an Israeli jet breaking the sound barrier, something they had been surprised by more than once on this trip. Scan the sky as they would, they never saw the plane. They had become accustomed to the sound and no longer looked.

“Actually, they’ll be no trouble,” said David. “Sylvia won’t mind,” he added from years of embassy parties where Sylvia, shining in her green dress, preferred to amuse the ambassador’s children instead of the ambassador. He knew why he was still an Assistant Cultural Attaché.

“I’ll tell you what,” said David kindly. “It’s almost two. The kids can stay here. We can get into town, see the souk, stop to have a drink, and still get back in time to gather Sylvia and the kids for dinner.”

“Maybe we’ll go down to the beach,” said Sylvia. “Or stay here. I don’t know. See what the kids feel like.”

“We’ll find you,” David smiled.

“If they make as much noise at the beach as they make here, we’ll be sure to find them,” said Alex.

The Hunters had only one child, a pale silent boy named Cliff who at twelve admired Sean Degliorti. Under Sean’s care and the Mediterranean sun and lax vacation rules, he had become browner, darker, and much noisier than his father could endure. He seemed to dart everywhere—about to break every bone in his body, every museum exhibit, every plate, every glass window he came near. But the Hunters had to be as liberal as the others on vacation. When they got him home again, Alex would make sure that Nona restored him to the child he had been before and return his own life to normal. In the meantime, Cliff was as noisy as the rest.

As they organized themselves to go, Alex turned to Sylvia and said, “If you get the chance, you might drown Cliff.”

Sylvia didn’t know what he was talking about and thought she was missing a joke. Older people often confused her.

* * *

Driving into town, David kept up a cheerful patter. “There! See those poles?”

“With pots on them?” Charyn was interested in flowers.

“Yes.”

”Pots on the poles,” said Alex, twisting his neck around, jostling Walken awake.

“A few months ago, some terrorists came ashore in rubber boats at a nature reserve farther up the coast. They killed a girl there, a nature photographer named Gail Rubin, a nice woman, an American. Doesn’t happen very often. You’re more likely to be killed in DC or Chicago than here.”

“Wait a minute. They killed an American? And what did you do?” asked Alex. The “you” was directed at David but was meant to include the concentrated power of the Sixth Fleet, the Third Army, and the United States Government.

“What could we do? We recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

Alex was outraged. “You did nothing? An American was killed right here in your jurisdiction and you did nothing?”

“Anyway,” said David, going on, trying to return to normalcy in the presence of his friends’ limited perception of the possibilities of diplomacy.

“Anyway, they commandeered a bus and drove down this very road, shooting at all the cars.”

Walken looked immediately at a passing bus to see if it had been commandeered by terrorists who would start shooting at him.

“I remember,” said Nona. “They killed a musician, someone from the symphony.”

“They killed his son, a friend of Sean’s actually. He studied clarinet with Sean’s teacher. The father took a bullet in the wrist.”

“Oh-hh, too bad,” said Walken, commiserating as he always and automatically did whenever he heard about the death of any friend’s pet.

“Remember, Charyn?” asked Nona. “The boy’s aunt wrote an article for The New York Times in which she said that clarinets are more powerful than guns, and that the sound of music is more important and triumphant and enduring than the sound of guns and bombs. I showed it to you. Remember, Alex?”

“No,” said Alex.

“Well, just where those poles and potted plants were,” said David, “is where the bus was stopped. It’s a memorial for the thirty-six people killed in the shootout.”

“Not much of a memorial,” said Alex, who noticed that it was neither large nor costly.

“And there to the left, behind those apartment buildings, is the university. There’s a marvelous museum there. Maybe we’ll have a chance to see it before you go. And straight on is the national museum, a bunch of little specialist museums, coins and glass, and old typewriters and such.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Walken. “Couldn’t the Jews get their museum act together?”

David laughed politely and turned west toward the sea. The ride into downtown Tel Aviv was surprisingly short. David knew how road connected to road, way led on to way. After a quick drive down the murderous north-south highway, the Haifa Road, he cut sharply away through sand dunes, past the Reading Power Plant, across a small bridge over a smaller river, and suddenly they were in North Tel Aviv, sweeping past the impressive American hotels until, at the Sheraton, they suddenly dropped down to the sea. Ten minutes. David cut left, turned in to a lot, and parked. They opened the doors into blazing heat and turned toward the market.

“Oh, excuse me,” said Charyn gently as she daintily stepped out of the way of a semi-naked, muscular, brown young man with curly black hair and a wicked smile who was wheeling a burlap bag stuffed with filthy chicken feathers to a yellow dumpster near the car. Something about the way he moved, the stomach muscles working under skin, the sun shining along his body, reminded Charyn and Nona of other muscular young men they had known years ago before they chained themselves to more corpulent flesh. But the pungent presence, the unwashed hair, the stained and twisted teeth, and the overt sexuality of this young man (he was wearing a pair of dirty shorts with the button undone and the zipper halfway down) cancelled the memory almost as quickly as it came.

As she stepped out of the way, she skidded on a piece of fallen cucumber, and David caught her.

“Careful,” he said.

“If you fall here,” said Alex, “you’ll never get clean again.”

“This is the back, isn’t it?” asked Walken.

“This is the souk,” said David.

They were in a shambles of narrow streets, claustrophobic with the sea-swell of humanity, old women dragging wheeled carts behind them, boys and girls in shorts and sandals. Stalls had neither doors nor windows and seemed to be merely storerooms for the fruits and vegetables mounded on slabs of plywood or tin under corrugated asbestos overhangs that shielded the merchants from the punishing sun. The sellers sat in the shadows, a rusty metal can of money before them, next to a set of ancient scales without numbers where food was weighed against stones, bits of metal, chunks of glass, and an occasional official weight chipped or scratched or dented from years of weighing approximately the same.

“There’s an idea,” said Walken, the businessman.

The merchants cast translucent plastic bags like squid cast ink—a sudden slim dart, an explosion of color, and the reaching hands caught only a thin plastic membrane to fill with vegetables. And such vegetables! Humps and hills and mounds of produce that suffused the air with color and smell as the customers called and cried out, and the merchants sang the cost of a kilo of corn, knobby yellow and half unzipped from the green shuck, sleek peppers green and red, bananas hanging like chandeliers on tapering stalks, gritty potatoes, smooth tomatoes, red apples, green apples, yellow apples, and Chinese apples an unearthly orange, beans green as grass and green as willow, huge squash chopped in segments pale green without and pumpkin within, deep-tanned onions, crinkled spinach, eggplant black as an Ethiope’s ear, kohlrabi and rutabaga, grapes and grapefruit, tangerines, oranges, black dates lying like perfect little turds, hundred-weight burlap bags with tops unlaced and rolled back to show nuts and seeds, the wealth of nations, buckets of olives small and large, green, yellow, black, smooth skinned, wrinkled, soaked in wine, pickled in brine, smoked fish dripping oil in the sun, and underfoot the husks and shucks and shells and stalks of things, broken peppers turning black in the sun, bruised fruit.

“Wow,” said Nona. “What a wonderful—”

“Very hygienic, I’m sure,” Alex cut her off. “Have to wash everything in antiseptic.”

“But the color, the bustle, the life,” she said.

They turned against the surge of folk on the main street and down a cross alley no less noisy or busy, toward the narrow lane of the butchers and slaughterers where turkeys were hung through the nose hole in the beak and chickens were hung through the throat or laid out on tables like the mounds of hallowed dead at Majdanek.

“Gross,” declared Alex. “Enough to make anyone a vegetarian. I may never eat meat again.”

“Hasn’t harmed you so far,” said David.

“You shop here?”

“Couple times a month. The prices are half what they are in the local super.”

“And the germs are free,” said Walken.

There were mounds of dismembered chicken and turkey parts, bent hairy wings, legs with the bare bone-locks gleaming white among the meat, yellow horny feet with untrimmed toenails, necks and slimy gizzard, mounds of rich brown liver, bare white chicken breast stripped of skin, naked red turkey breast like human muscle with the quivering gone, shreds dripping from the hung and slaughtered meat, guts, tripe, stomach, bones for sale. Underfoot were feathers black with slime, wings ripped from the body, blood in quiet pools. Lovely pink water flushed out of stores and ran slowly in a trough down the center of the cobbled street, clogged with chickens in green plastic crates politely waiting for death.

“Why are we here?” Walken asked.

“To see the other side,” David answered.

A fluted, green garbage can almost full of periwinkle blue and pink chicken intestines stood under the corner of a display table to collect the dripping blood. A tiny old woman wearing many ragged clothes in the summer heat stooped over the garbage can, knees bent. She rolled back the sleeves of sweaters and dress over a faded blue tattoo on her arm: the letter “A” and five numbers. She thrust her arm in up to the elbow and slowly stirred among the gleaming guts for a shred of liver or gizzard thrown out by mistake, which her shiny arm pulled from the slick mess and slipped into her bag among the black-edged pepper parts and dented tomatoes she had earlier picked from beneath the stalls.

“Cheap way to shop,” said Alex.

“Beats standing in line,” said Walken.

“Not all Jews are wealthy,” David replied.