All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

always happy.’ Why do they always have to turn the dead into grinning idiots? What if Aviva was really depressed, went around moping all the time? Would she deserve to be blown up? And here’s another one,” he said, warming to his theme as they all raised their heads in surprise. “A sixteen-year-old survivor of the shuk bombing, who’s going to have half a kilo of shrapnel remaining in her body. She says, ‘My hopes? Everybody wants to get married and have a family—I want to live like everybody else.’ Why do they always want to be like everybody else? Why is that the most complimentary thing you can say about someone in this goddamn country?”
    They were silent. Then Sam clucked, “They’re just traumatized kids, Dan.”
    Matt, meanwhile, was suppressing a grin, thinking, That’s my boy . He tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but Daniel pushed his chair back and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
    And there was Lydia looking at him with her big, probing brown eyes. Matt composed his face and cleared his throat. “You know, honey,” she said. “Daniel is going to need a lot of support.”
    Matt blinked at her, not knowing how to answer, the statement was so insultingly obvious. Support was an understatement: Did she know he was going to be a parent of her grandchildren? “I’m aware of that, Lydia,” he finally said.
    THE APARTMENT WAS PACKED all day with people who had come to sit shiva. They all recognized Matt from the newspaper. He was introduced over and over as Daniel’s “friend.” In their mouths, his name was pronounced “Mett.” He noted that Israelis seemed to favor the limp handshake over the muscular American one. He continued to find them beautiful, with their blend of Middle Eastern and European looks, the women with stylish hair with henna highlights, the men hunched forward to talk with their cell phones in their fists, sunglasses perched on top of their heads. Many people seemed to be avoiding him, though, and he couldn’t tell if they were shy, or rude, or uncomfortable speaking English, or homophobic. One guy, a friend of Ilana’s, had “closet case” written all over him. He had turned away just as Daniel introduced Matt, but he kept staring at Matt and looking away, and whenever Matt drifted in his direction, he scurried off under some invisible pretext. It could be amusing, Matt thought, to spend the entire shiva chasing after the poor guy. Instead, he stood against a counter, which was crowded with coffee cakes and casseroles, his palms resting on it, with the aim of looking as though he was in charge of something.
    A reporter was making his way around the room, nodding sympathetically to the people he was talking to and taking discreet notes on a little pad without looking down at it. Ilana’s parents were seated on the couch, and Matt watched them with a heavy heart. They were Holocaust survivors; their lives had pretty much sucked from beginning to end, he thought. He had heard a lot about Malka, things he wasn’t supposed to know. She was one of the few children to survive Auschwitz, and her mother had saved her by hiding her in a pile of corpses, where Malka had remained for several days. She suffered from bouts of severe depression; Ilana had once told Daniel that, in those moments, it seemed as if she was returning to the pile of bodies, pledging her loyalty to them by being dead herself. But she didn’t look like the wreck Matt had been led to expect she’d be. In fact, he found her kind of lovely. Her posture, bent forward in courtesy or deference or an inability to hear well, expressed a kind of polite earnestness. Her blue eyes were washed out to their faintest color, and reddish-silver hair hung down to her shoulders, one side held back with a barrette—a girlish effect on a woman in her seventies, but not in a weird Baby Jane kind of way.