404
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Quite, quite," Mr. Hans says.
What Mr. and Mrs. Hans, securely enclosed in their guest–
dam, don't know is everything of importance.
What I have to go on are the words my father likes, words like
tough, clout,
and
order.
Just to think of the word
clout
makes me laugh;
it sounds so much like what it's trying to be - a fist pounding on the
table, a voice hollering, "Listen here, you." Although it is clear to me
even when I am very young that my father has swallowed this word,
like the whale swallowed Jonah, and that it now resides inside of
him, I am not sure how
clout
works. For instance, do you need only
to want it to have it?
• • •
I am twelve years old, my tanned feet poking out from a brand–
new pair of Nimrod sandals - no more than a few crisscrossed straps
of brown leather- and my hair swept off my face with a headband. I
am in the midst of imagining that I look very Israeli, that I have
grown up on a kibbutz and am not afraid of anything, when my
father, fueled by some mechanism that I can't see, decides not to
wait on the long, straggly checkout line in the lobby of our hotel in
Jerusalem.
"Wait a minute," he says to me.
"Where are you going?"
"I'll be right back," he says, giving me his
Jerusalem Post
to hold.
"Keep an eye out for your mother. She said she'll be down soon."
He strides forward, coming down hard on the outer side of his
heels, his knees locking into the joints. He goes past groups of heavy–
waisted women holding plastic flight bags that say
TWA
and
EL AL
and
PERFECT TRAVEL,
past silver-haired men in sunglasses wearing
peaked sailor caps and bright, well-pressed clothes, as though the
sandy, volatile Middle Eastern country they have come to see exists
only as an image to be played with in their minds, a toy yacht.
"There's a line, sir. We're all waiting."
The woman who says this as my father walks by has a hairdo
that looks as if it has been sprayed into immobility, and he heeds her
reproach not at all. As I pretend to be caught up in the line of my
Nimrod sandals, I take in the fact that my father is now signaling to
someone behind the front desk and that the woman with the hairdo
is agitating further.
