Dinner at the Centre of the Earth Read online

  Praise for

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

  ‘Brilliant . . . when he is (funny), he’s sublime’

  Hugo Rifkind, The Times

  ‘Englander has written a fine collection, as intricately patterned across its length as a novel’

  Robert MacFarlane, Sunday Times

  ‘Outstanding . . . Englander shows an unerring ear for dialogue’

  Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday

  ‘A remarkable collection, not least because of its courageous determination to push forward in the direction hinted at by that last story’ James Lasdun, Guardian

  ‘Offers something heftier and more challenging . . . Englander has a fine capacity for writing both unflinchingly and idiosyncratically about these difficult subjects’

  Thomas Marks, Literary Review

  ‘It’s great to see an author devoted to short stories in their own right – as potential gems worth polishing to perfection’

  Anthony Cummins, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘His finest work yet. He has a rare range: his clean writing feels fresh, but it vibrates with a charming old-world sensibility, much like his first acclaimed collection’ Economist

  ‘With its cool graphic cover and rapturous quotes from Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, this slim volume of stories promises to be a revelation – and it is’

  Clare Longrigg, Psychologies

  ‘There is never anything as clumsy as a twist in Englander’s stories – just a gradual, deft dismantling of what you thought you knew, or could rely on’

  Sophie Elmhirst, New Statesman

  ‘Englander combines a deft hand with a deceptively light touch’ Metro

  ‘A wonderful collection: entertaining, profound and gently powerful. It confirms Englander’s stature as a serious comic voice’ Alison Kelly, TLS

  ‘There is high literary talent here . . . enjoy Englander’s mastery of the simplest, and hardest, form of writing – storytelling’

  Herald

  ‘Englander’s prose is simply beautiful, whether in dialogue or third-person; precise and poised, able to introduce the grit of reality while preserving the balance of the sentence’

  Scotsman

  ‘Takes vignettes from Jewish life and explores them with a humane understanding of the human condition in all its painful absurdity, lending them a universal significance . . . a small masterpiece of tragic restraint’ Daily Mail

  ‘Mr Englander knows where to hold back, a particular gift when writing about and around the martyr of his title, the locked up and locked in . . . terrific collection’

  International Herald Tribune

  ‘It requires great control and confidence to operate with any consistency at the point where humour grates so excruciatingly against calamity. In the best of this collection, Englander proves he has both’ Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Will leave you open-mouthed’ Jewish Chronicle

  ‘Glorious . . . Like all genuinely comic writers, he is profoundly serious – and moral. Nevertheless, his dialogue-rich stories move with a zing’ Financial Times

  ‘It takes an exceptional combination of moral humility and moral assurance to integrate fine-grained comedy and large-scale tragedy as daringly as Nathan Englander does. His writing is liberal in every good sense of the word’

  Jonathan Franzen

  ‘Nathan Englander is a master of the short story, and one of the great voices of our time. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank showcases Englander’s comic genius and lacerating vision of human nature as never before, in stories that are audacious, expertly crafted, and often unforgettably beautiful. The best work yet from an American treasure’

  Gary Shteyngart

  ‘Nathan Englander’s new collection of stories tell the tangled truth of life, in prose that, as ever, surprises the reader with its gnarled beauty. One need look no further than ‘Free Fruit For Young Widows’ and ‘Sister Hills’ to find certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short story art’ Michael Chabon

  ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is Nathan Englander’s wisest, funniest, bravest and most beautiful book. It overflows with revelations and gems’

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  ‘Nathan Englander’s elegant, inquisitive, and hilarious fictions are a working definition of what the modern short story can do’ Jonathan Lethem

  ‘Nathan Englander is one of the most consistently brilliant, bold and funny writers – that part isn’t really in doubt – but the depth of his feeling is the thing that separates him from just about everyone. You can hear his heart thumping feverishly on every page. And his stories are perhaps the most ideal vessel for his gift’ Dave Eggers

  ‘This collection is a jolt of electricity through the heart, the head, the whole body nation. Here is a latitude of exquisitely wrought prose. Courageous and provocative. Edgy and timeless. In Englander’s hands, story-telling is a transformative act. Put him alongside Singer, Carver and Munro. Englander is, quite simply, one of the very best we have’ Colum McCann

  ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank vividly displays the humour, complexity and edge that we’ve come to expect from Nathan Englander’s fiction – always animated by a deep, vibrant core of historical resonance’ Jennifer Egan

  Nathan Englander

  For Nicole Aragi

  There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

  —JULIAN BARNES

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2002, Paris

  2014, Hospital (near Tel Aviv)

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Limbo

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Jerusalem

  2014, Limbo

  2002, Paris

  2014, Limbo

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Limbo

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2002, Berlin

  2002, Paris

  2014, Jerusalem

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Hospital (near Tel Aviv)

  2002, Paris

  2014, Limbo

  2002, Paris

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Limbo

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2002, Berlin

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2002, Karlsruhe

  2002, Paris

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2002, Paris

  2002, Paris

  2002, Paris

  2014, Jerusalem

  2002, Capri

  2002, Tyrrhenian Sea

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2002, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2014, Lifta

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  2014, Gaza Border (Palestinian side)

  2014, Black Site (near Tel Aviv)

  2014, Limbo

  2014, Down Under and In Between

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Nathan Englander

  About the Author

  Copyright

  2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)

  It’s never about you. Neither attack, nor counterattack. Not the three boys kidnapped, surely dead, or the child murdered in the forest, burned alive.

  Sitting still in a chair outsi
de your rented cottage, you wait for the click of your tea water come to boil. You shift a foot, and, at sight of you, a lizard turns the color of the sand.

  Across the country, the soldiers scrabble through the South Hebron Hills. They crawl about, hunting the bodies, turning stones. And here, beyond the fences, the Gazans strip the markets bare; dutifully, they run their taps, filling bucket and bowl.

  It is light still, bright still. And you know, with the dark, the missiles will scream out from the olive groves and the rooftop blinds, from the hospital parking lots and the pickup-truck beds. The people along the coast will move into secure spaces in cities ever northward, mirroring the missiles’ reach.

  And you, you will stay in your chair, and sip your tea, and watch the arc of the fiery tails as they curl overhead. Then will come the sirens and the burst and spark of countermeasure when the batteries hit their mark. So close is your roost that your only worry is ineptitude, if the fighters on either side fire short. This rattle and boom is as of yet nothing but the sound of the two nations ramping up to the inevitable war.

  This time, as with every time, when the fighting starts it will be more terrible than the fight that came before. Always it is the worst, the most violent, the least restrained, a steady escalation. The singular rule.

  And once the invasion begins? There’s no knowing how and when, or even if, the bloodshed will ever end. Only that both sides will battle for justice, killing each other in the name of those freshly killed, honoring the men who died avenging those who, before them, died avenging.

  Because of all this, you understand that your own thoughts are unseemly. Your concerns outweighed and of no matter.

  Is it your boy gone missing? Is it your son burned alive? No. No, it’s not. And unless that’s your soldier son sleeping alongside his tank at the border, your masked fighter, outgunned and unprotected, manning the Qassams that whistle through the night, then we expect you will not wallow and will not mourn. You are to take your daily disappointments, your unmet expectations and private catastrophes, and know that they are worthy of shame.

  Of course, you do know this and have accepted it. At least, this is what you tell yourself, as a bird you cannot name swings low by your ear. It ends its glide and then pumps its wings.

  In the silence that the bird breaks, you hear the sound of feather moving against feather during flight—a wonder. You turn your head to follow its path, shielding your eyes from the sun.

  Sitting there by your tiny cottage, you squint and consider your own astonishing stupidity, your brutal obstinacy, your resistance to giving up your own unique and abiding want.

  As the water gives off its audible roil and the kettle makes its click, you get up, telling yourself: You do not matter. Let it—let him—finally go.

  But the imperative does not stick, and it seems that you will forge ahead with your truly hopeless undertaking. Until the right moment arises, until you get your lover’s secret signal, you will, in the face of the endless, menacing unknowns, hold fast.

  And to that inventory of silent surrender that this—that any—war demands, you’ve decided there is one loss for you, too large. A sacrifice you find yourself unwilling to make. It’s a personal privation you can’t stomach and will no longer accept. Let the soldiers soldier on and the civilians bear their burdens. But for you, you simply won’t have it. You will not brook your broken heart.

  2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)

  Though they both know every millimeter of the cell in which they sit, every scratch in the cinder block, every factory-mixed fleck in the tile, the guard points back over his shoulder at the camera mounted above the door, encased in its casino-style tamperproof opaque dome, fixed there looking as innocuous as a big glass marble.

  There is an identical camera on the opposite wall, above the head of the prisoner’s single bed. That one is aimed through the Plexiglas door to the toilet and shower and also covers the thin metal shelf, with its books and bubblegum and English-language magazines (too wide for it), a cache representing the very height of the privileges the prisoner has acquired from the guard over the years.

  A third camera is screwed in over the prisoner’s sliver of an archer’s window, watching—from a different vantage—the two other cameras that watch it in return. The window-wall faces the one the bed is pushed up against, the only one without its own source of surveillance. The guard always felt that maybe that wall was left blank because a fourth feed would constitute overkill to the overkill, as the window-wall camera alone, with its bird’s-eye view shot through a fisheye lens, has every angle of that cell covered. With the other two units, every movement of the prisoner’s life is recorded in triplicate—except for when he’s in the bathroom, which, unseen by the camera over the door, its single blind spot, is recorded but twice.

  Recorded and time-stamped and dated, marked with the camera number and the nickname for the cell, “The Peach Pit”—which the guard chose for no good reason other than he was home smoking a joint and reading the Hebrew subtitles of a Beverly Hills 90210 rerun with the sound turned off when he got the call for the job.

  Pointing up at that camera, the guard explains to the prisoner what it looks like to the guard when the cell is pitch dark, when the prisoner wishes he could feel that he was alone with his thoughts, when he wishes it could be for him pure, true night.

  It is a shock for the prisoner, since, in the dozen years since they’d been hitched, the cameras, and the guard’s view behind them, are the one thing, in all their searching, probing, absolutely endless conversations, that they never, ever discussed.

  In response, the prisoner cocks his head and looks back at his guard most quizzically, for he knows his keeper would not be breaking his teeth over this for nothing. And the guard knows some things too. He knows that he himself is not as educated as his fancy fucking charge, and that his gift for metaphors is maybe not the strongest, though he’s really been trying to use one as a way to soften things up, as a way to maybe take stock of their time together and then use it as a bridge to some very upsetting news—upsetting even to a disappeared, nameless American confined to a cell that doesn’t, on any written record, exist.

  That is, it is bad news with some bite.

  In sharing the terrible news—a revelation for which the guard is in no way at fault—the guard will also be forced to share what he would call some fashlot, and what the prisoner would call “mitigating factors,” that would color the story and reflect poorly on the guard, the prisoner’s trusted—and only—friend. It might rightly jeopardize a relationship they’ve both treasured, in what they both understood to be a very Stockholm-syndrome kind of way, a relationship Prisoner Z liked to call “Patty Hearstish,” a reference the guard had been compelled to look up.

  In his own defense, as relates to the complication he hasn’t yet copped to, the guard has only been trying to protect Prisoner Z this whole time. It was the very literal definition of his job; his title was the action itself. He’s been guarding Prisoner Z in more ways than the prisoner could understand.

  How, oh how, had it come to this! The guard recalls the first time he sat down in front of his three plastic-shelled deep-backed monitors—glowing; his own little triptych set up in front of him, with which to observe his secret ward. The screens were set up with one dead center, the other two touching and tilted in toward him a hair, each offering a different singular monochromatic perspective from which to watch the exact same nothingness going on in the cell. The way those monitors were angled, and feeling his own face lit in that blue-gray light, it reminded him of the way his mother used to hold a silver cardboard reflector under her chin to catch the sun by the sea, his mother, who would plop down in a beach chair and roll up her sleeves but still wore her modest skirt and her sandals buckled tight around her stockings.

  It was she who had, way back in 2002, done him the favor of trapping him in this miserable bind. He’d screened her calls to his mobile and only answered the house phone—that is,
her phone, the one his mother paid for—when she’d kept on yelling over the answering machine that she’d refused to abandon, though he’d begged her to switch to voice mail like everyone else.

  It wasn’t during a 90210 rerun that she’d rung him, but right in the middle of a show he couldn’t bear to have interrupted. He was busy playing along at home with the British version of The Weakest Link, at which he was quite excellent, only ever stumped by the super-easy throwaway questions, distinctly British in nature, making him feel bitterly that—in the unfairness of geography and the misfortune of having been born into the armpit of the Levant—he was inevitably doomed to fail.

  He felt this same dumb luck during his other favorite show, the British version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Not a million shekels either, but a million British pounds—a windfall with which a person could really live a life. How was one supposed to study the things passively absorbed from being? Those simple offhand questions weren’t about knowledge at all. They were freebies tossed in, gifts for those blessed to be born in a certain place at a certain time. And still, he made an effort to study up.

  He had spent a lot of time in the army reading, trying to better himself and find a way to claw his way up in the broader world. His plan had been to get himself far away from Israel as soon as he could. You know what they used to say to each other back then? “Last one out, remember to turn off the lights.” The guard had dreamed of ending up in London or Manchester, and, even if it was Birmingham, he’d make do. Then he’d get on one of those shows, where they’d tease him about his accent, and then he’d surprise them all by winning himself enough for a nice little nest egg to cushion his brand-new British life.

  When his mother got him on the phone that morning, she wouldn’t stop talking, even while the guard begged her to hold on, please, until they’d fucked up the chain of answers. He’d be happy to talk to her while they voted someone off.