Love in the Time of Terrorism (First Draft)

Fiction Piece #4

(Eugene Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824)

The Zionist Voice publishes fiction stories occasionally. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you like this work.

“The uglier the world gets, the more handsome I become.”

Javier could not help himself from thinking these thoughts as he scrubbed his face clean this morning.

Once upon a time, his newfound handsomeness would have brought him a sly sort of pride, the kind of pride that all men feel, knowing that they’re handsome, but the kind that would be almost perverse to let others see.

No, not perverse.

Perverse was not the word. Maybe there wasn’t a word for it. Maybe it was the sensation that, if Javier had let on that he knew he was handsome, his handsomeness would have evaporated.

To know that he was handsome would have made his handsomeness disappear, like silence, something that disappears as soon as it is named.

Javier lathered his face with shaving cream, the old way, with a mortar and brush, and set about pulling his beard off of his face with a razor.

“The uglier the world gets, the more handsome I become. So what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”

If he wasn’t shaving, he would have laughed.

In the days of his youth, he would have given anything to feel as handsome as he did now.

To feel like a fitting prize for a fitting beauty, a Paris for the Helens of the world.

But now?

Now that Javier had embarked on this great religious journey, a journey towards G-d and righteousness, towards goodness and faith, towards hope and healing, now that Javier was on this journey, what good did handsomeness do for him now?

It had been something like fifteen months since October 7th.

Fifteen months since the great beast of antisemitism had been reborn, midwifed into the world by the great defenders of human rights who wore their values on their sleeves and their hatred in their hearts.

Fifteen months since the brave feminists of the west watched masked men rape and kidnap hundreds of Jewish women, fifteen months since they stopped burning their bras and started wrapping their heads in the very same headscarves that the rapists wore.

Fifteen months since the world showed its true colors.

And now, now?

Now Javier was getting handsomer by the day, the world uglier by the minute, and somehow this whole thing felt like one big joke.

Javier shook the razor into the sink and let the hot water run over it. Steam billowed off the clean steel.

He patted his face dry with a towel and inspected the corners of his jaw for any straggling hairs.

None – his skin looked perfect.

He knew that, soon, he would have to give up the razor. Religious Jews could shave, but not with a razor.

He dabbed aftershave on his clean face and thought back to a time in high school when Jezebel Padilla stroked his jaw and begged him never to grow a beard.

“Never grow a beard, Javier. With a jawline like this, you just can’t. You just can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of us. Life is too hard, we deserve to see something like this.”

And she stroked his jaw one last time, tickling him ever so slightly with her perfectly pink nails.

It was one of those early memories in a man’s life, one of the first times he knew he at least had something going for him.

But that was back when the world wasn’t so ugly and the people weren’t so pretty.

Back when he was terrified that he was, in a word, hideous.

And his insecurity was so great that he could not take Jezebel’s compliment seriously. Somehow, he had managed to convince himself that she was lying to him, that this was some sort of game for her.

As he washed his hands and wiped down the countertop, he could not help but laugh. In this moment, he realized that Jezebel was flirting with him, that she was just manufacturing an excuse by which she could touch his chin, that she was clearly attracted to him.

How he missed this, he could not fathom.

Despite being a brilliant young teenager, he really was quite an idiot.

I suppose that is often the nature of brilliant men – to be, really and truly, stupid.

Stupid and blind.

And now, ten years later, Javier was getting handsomer by the day, and his interest in dating the women of the world was shrinking by the minute.

He left the bathroom, got dressed in the bedroom, and began wrapping Tefillin on his left arm.

After his morning prayers, Javier made his coffee.

“His morning prayers.”

It still sounded like something out of a Victorian novel.

And I suppose it was.

After all, Javier was becoming quite the Victorian man these days.

He had taken to wearing leather boots instead of the skater shoes of his youth. Not workman’s boots, not construction boots, not “Timberlands” as had become quite fashionable in the new age – he wore Chelsea boots, with nice laces, and he wore cuffed trousers above them.

Trousers.

He preferred the word trousers to pants, or slacks.

“Slacks” – disgusting.

What sort of man would be so base as to cover his legs in “slacks”?

Slack – slacking – the great demise of the 21st century man was how much he allowed himself to slack.

To let one half of his whole body be draped in slacks?

Unconscionable.

In addition to his Chelsea boots and stylish trousers, Javier wore cashmere sweaters and button down shirts, always beneath his thick suede leather jacket.

He wore a pin in its lapel, and he draped a blue silk cravat over the shoulders.

He might not have looked like a man of the latest fashion, but he certainly looked like a man of the highest style.

Fashion fades, but style is forever, as the great Yves Saint Laurent once said.

Javier thought of this as he left his flat and began walking down Brick Lane.

This stint in London, little more than a week, had done something to him. Something that would forever change the man.

Something that would make Javier Levine into Javier Levine.

Something that would transform him.

He didn’t know it yet, but he was forever transformed by these 8 days in London.

Javier walked into a coffee shop and ordered a cappuccino.

He looked around at all of the beautifully dressed men and women, and he thought about how positively lacking in style the people of L.A. had become.

“Surely people in Los Angeles dress well,” his friend Joan said.

Joan, a true Catalonian, a man who spoke 6 languages fluently but always preferred his native Catalan, was what one might call a true European.

A man of culture, a man of class, a man who loved nothing more than spending his money on good wine, good food, and good company.

His family named him after the painter, the great Catalonian genius, Joan Miró.

“Sadly not,” Javier explained, “everyone in L.A. just dresses in athleisure. There is no high fashion in L.A., just swimsuit models and people trying to look like swimsuit models, and people trying to wear winter clothes that show that they could be swimsuit models. It’s positively tragic.”

Positively tragic.

Javier had allowed the British mannerisms to influence his diction.

He quite liked the sound of British English.

Quite.

But Javier was an American, through and through, and he would never deign to affect a British accent, no matter how much his voice exposed him.

Despite all appearances, Javier was the kind of American who stayed up till 4 A.M. to watch the NFL playoff games.

The kind of American who loved a cappuccino but hated that he couldn’t get a real cup of coffee in this country.

The kind of American who would have been more than happy to don a headdress and dump a boatload of tea into the ocean, just because.

But Javier wasn’t an American anymore.

Or, perhaps more accurately, America wasn’t America anymore, but Javier was still Javier.

Like his ancestors who fled from Europe to the Americas to escape the great beast of antisemitism, Javier was now fleeing from the Americas.

The country that had once been a refuge for Jews from the old world had become a heartbreak.

If his grandparents could have seen what their beloved country had become, they would be rolling their graves.

The only thing he took solace in was knowing that they did not have to see what had become of their beloved country.

They did not have to see how the Statue of Liberty had been bent over and raped while her sons and daughters turned a blind eye.

How the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free had been beaten into silence by the perverse ideologies of their new oppressors.

Had Javier been wiser, he might have known the cause of this great national degradation.

But he wasn’t – he was only 26, with about as much wisdom as a street cat.

He could smell the smoke, he could feel the burning, but he could not discern the source of the fire.

As Javier sipped his cappuccino in this coffeeshop on the east end of London, he thought of the great fire of 1666.

He thought about the English interregnum, the period between the execution of King Charles I and the Restoration of King Charles II.

He thought of the irony that England should now, after 300 years, have a new King Charles, King Charles III.

He thought of Oliver Cromwell and Praisegod Barebones, two of the Puritanical leaders during the interregnum.

He thought of how they were from a group of political thinkers called “The Millenarians,” people who thought that the world would end and the Messiah would come in the “Millenium plus the number of the beast,” or in the year (1000 + 666).

He thought about how many Londoners might have thought they were right in 1666, watching the city burn to the ground.

He thought of many things in that coffee shop on the East End of London.

But mostly, he thought of Naama Levy, the beautiful 19 year old violinist who had been kidnapped some fifteen months ago.

He felt a strange sort of guilt because of how often he thought of her. He felt that strange guilt because, in truth, he loved her. He had fallen in love with her from the very first moment he saw her face, the very first moment he saw the video of her, bound at the hands and bleeding from her ankles, being taken out of a jeep and paraded through the streets of Gaza to a sea of jeering fans.

He had told no one of his love for he did not quite understand it himself.

He had no way to express it other than to pray every night that G-d might let her feel the warm embrace of his spiritual arms around her.

That she might hear the soft sounds of his voice comforting her as she spent her nights in hell.

He knew that this was not a real love, not the kind of love a man felt for one woman, but, rather, the kind of love a man could feel for all women, for all children, for all of his people.

His love was platonic, somewhere between that of a father and a brother, but it was no less passionate and painful than the love of romance.

Javier took the last sips of his cappuccino and looked around the coffeeshop.

Several pairs of eyes, female eyes, had been staring at him.

They quickly darted this way and that, trying to pretend that he was not the object of their stares.

But whose eyes were these?

Were these the eyes of brave and beautiful women like Naama?

Or were these the eyes of craven and cowardly women who had stayed silent these fifteen months that Naama had been held hostage?

Javier smiled and played with his empty mug.

A pox on both your houses, he thought, apropos of nothing.

He took his empty mug up to the counter and thanked the barista.

He walked back out into the brisk London afternoon thinking, “the uglier the world gets, the more handsome I become.”

Three days later, Javier left London, unsure if he would ever return.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai