Convene The Kingdom - Jerome Mandel

Convene The Kingdom by Jerome Mandel

Book excerpt

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 Da-vid’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 Associa-tion 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 organ-ization that funded their trip.

David loved his job, though he was not uniformly success-ful 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 gen-eration 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 de-lighted by his attention. They knew he was really a spy.

The older women with teased and lacquered hair, pink pow-dered faces, and the constant air of a fecund and overly fer-tilized 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 in-variably embarrassed. There had been a time, before he was thirty, when he still spoke their language, but now he real-ized that if they couldn’t pop it, drink it, smoke it, shoot it, or screw it, they weren’t interested. They approached mu-seums 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 indiffer-ence and ended with antagonistic surliness. The boys especial-ly washed their hands of the entire hopelessly backward coun-try when they realized that hardly anyone in Israel knew or cared that Dallas won the Super Bowl in February and the Yan-kees 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, ar-cheological digs, castles, grottos, caves, vistas, memorials, Bedouin camps, kibbutzim, crusader forts, or any of the detri-tus left by the ancient Hebrew, Phoenician, Hittite, Sumerian, Egyptian, Nabataean, Syrian, Hellenic, Roman, Moslem, Byzan-tine, Turkish, British, or modern Jewish cultures and civili-zation. 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 cul-tures.

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 aggra-vated everyone with his boredom until David showed him the wa-ter-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 connec-tions. 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.