The Sea Beach Line. Ben Nadler
kept my finger off the trigger and away from the hammer. It was heavy, and I kept thinking it would go off or even explode in my hand.
My most instructive interaction with guns came on a trip to Israel I’d taken with my synagogue youth group the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I kept a precise mental log of everything I saw on that trip, so I could talk to my father about it when I saw him again. We spent a day and a half on an IDF base, a desert outpost in the south, where we got to shoot Galils with the soldiers. The unfired shells were as long as my middle finger. So much power erupted from the barrel, and yet I barely felt any kickback against my shoulder.
My father had served in the IDF in the pre-Galil era. He once told me that the first rifle he was issued wasn’t an M16, but a twenty-year-old Czech Mauser. These guns had been built for the Germans, but remained undelivered at the end of World War II, and the fledging Israeli army had bought them from the Czechoslovakian government wholesale. The outline of a swastika was still visible in the stain of his gun’s butt, he told me, underneath the riveted-on IDF insignia.
They tried to sell us on joining the IDF as overseas enlistees after high school, and I considered it, but not seriously enough. Instead I enrolled in Oberlin on Bernie’s dime and observed the world from a smug distance. I attended a couple meetings of the campus chapter of Jews Against the Occupation, read Edward Said’s Orientalism in class, and dated a Lebanese girl, Mariam. She was from a Christian family. I think her dad had been in one of the militias. She liked to talk about her Arab American identity and denounce the murderous Zionist state, because it made her feel less guilty about the fact that her father had probably murdered Palestinians himself.
We broke up after three months, not because of religion or politics, but because I would always get anxious halfway through sex and lose my hard-on. I came maybe six times during those three months I was with her, and only two of those times when I was actually inside her. I was already smoking a lot of weed and messing around heavily with drugs, especially pills, but I don’t think that had much to do with it. I think I just wasn’t that good at sex. After I broke up with Mariam, I started doing a lot more hallucinogens. I didn’t have any other girlfriends after her.
I pulled open the bolt of Al’s sawed-off. An unfired round ejected, and another one popped up at an angle, ready to be slammed forward into the chamber. I’d never been alone with a loaded gun before, and wasn’t entirely comfortable with the feeling, so I started to eject the rounds one by one. There had to be a simpler way to do this, by removing the entire magazine from the bottom, but I didn’t know how to do that. And as much as I didn’t want to leave a loaded gun around, the feeling of loading each round into the chamber before I ejected it was satisfying. For a moment, I let my finger rest on the trigger. If I wanted to, I could shoot a round off into the concrete floor. Taking my finger off the trigger, I ejected the round. Then I loaded and ejected until there were eleven shells on the floor and none in the gun.
I collected the shells, and lined them up in the grooves of the plastic crate, next to the lantern. Leaving the bolt open, I placed the gun down on a pile of books. It looked wrong—too casual—so I picked it back up and leaned it against the metal wall, next to a gallon jug half full of water, which I then drank from. Water ran down my cheeks, and I flinched from the cold. My father had drunk this same water. It probably tasted less stale then. He wouldn’t have minded the coldness, though. Three or four pint bottles of Mr. Boston blackberry brandy were piled on the floor. Nothing was cleaned out. It was like he’d just stepped out, and would be coming back any minute. One of the brandy bottles had a little left in it, so I finished it off.
So many books were packed into the small space; it was hard to see them as anything but one oozing mass. As I became acquainted with the unit, I figured out the vague order to the piles. Paperbacks. Hardcovers. Fiction. Nonfiction. One pile of books caught my eye as being altogether different from the others. They were sketchbooks, not published books, and they had color newspaper photos of what appeared to be bombing scenes, maybe in Iraq or Pakistan, scotch-taped to the fake leather covers. A mosque burned in full color. A market lay in ruins.
The same type of images, only hand drawn, filled the inside of the book. Smoke. Flames. Smaller flames bursting from the barrels of guns. The crying faces of children with Middle Eastern features. Their bodies writhed and burned. Details of Israeli insignia appeared through the smoke. Guns were rendered in full detail, while bodies faded away into abstraction.
Alojzy had drawn with multiple thicknesses of black pen. Faces were sketched with long, mournful strokes from felt-tipped pens, while guns and insignia were drawn in minute detail with thinner ballpoints. Smoke and flames were made with thick streaks of Sharpie, which poured over everything else. There was not always white space, or even clear delineation, between one scene and the next. Bodies tumbled into one another. The living shared space with the dead.
I flipped through the pages quickly, afraid if I dwelled too long on any one page I’d be sucked into its horror. A third of the way through the sketchbook, the horror ebbed, and the foreign faces gave way to faces I recognized. My mother and my sister. Me. There were neighbors I remembered from our old building on East Ninety-Second Street. The olive trees were replaced with the foliage of Central Park. My mother was so beautiful. I hoped Becca and I had really once been as small and sweet as my father portrayed us.
By and by, these few happy scenes faded into smoke themselves. New York burned slowly. Our Upper East Side sidewalk smoldered. The destruction carried into the next sketchbook, which began with smoke. But then the curves straightened, the lines became thicker and darker, and began to bound controlled hash marks. There was a narrower street, and ragged, blocky buildings. One—a cross between a birthday cake and a prison—loomed above the rest. Another page showed a close-up of the interior of a streetcar. The picture seemed to focus on one tired, middle-aged couple who sat close together, looking out the window. All the severely Slavic faces seemed to be staring at them. Their faces were drawn in more detail than the others. The man had an unmistakably Jewish nose, wore a cap low over his eyes, and looked sort of like my father—as did the little boy sitting beside them. Was the boy my father? Was the older couple my grandparents?
I picked up the next book. There were sketches of Goldov at his easel, and sketches of the Galuth Museum. For some reason, in a couple sketches Hasidim were lighting candles in the gallery. There were studies of some of the Galuth paintings, including the one where the girl was thrown from the train. There were detail studies of the people’s faces, including the falling woman. Goldov and his museum were apparently important in my father’s life, though the man himself made me nervous. I didn’t like the bitter way he talked about my father, nor how he had tried to weasel my mother for money. He had probably just sent me to Mendy to get me out of his hair; if he knew Alojzy had this full storage space, he would have come to Mendy himself and tried to get the key, so he could loot anything of value.
Alojzy’s drawings were nothing like Goldov’s paintings. While Goldov’s work was pure artifice and contained no meaning, Alojzy’s drawings were packed full of emotion and information. If anything, they were closer to Galuth’s paintings. They seemed to depict the same world, in some ways, though Al’s drawings were more brutal, less full of hope. But then, black ink is a harsher medium than oil paint.
A significant portion of this book was devoted to sketches of West Fourth Street, clearly made from behind Alojzy’s table. There were the book tables, Mendy and the other booksellers, and all the pretty girls passing by. Then West Fourth Street became Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, and the book tables were replaced with the stalls of the shuk. Then the shuk was in ruins, as bombs exploded and left body parts on the street. Then the explosions were in the desert, and the bodies wore helmets. An Arab girl lay dead in the sand. Then a beautiful woman with long dark hair lay naked—but very much alive—on a couch in an apartment. There were pages and pages of sketches of her.
In the next book, there were more soldiers, and men in suits carrying the same guns as the soldiers. One dead soldier’s face appeared over and over. He had appeared sporadically in the previous books, but filled up nearly half of this one. He was in his thirties or forties, with a narrow face, a sharp nose, tight black curls, and, in some pictures, a thin mustache. Because he wore an IDF uniform in many of the pictures, I