All I Love and Know by Judith Frank

don’t think we’ll ruin them, do you?”
    Daniel looked at him wearily. “I think somebody has already done that for us.”
    THE FUNERAL WASN’T THE way Matt had feared it would be—not at all like the settler funerals he saw on television, armed and bearded civilians roaring with bombastic song. But dignitaries had arrived in long Mercedeses, and they and their bodyguards stood, their hands clasped before them, at the front of the crowd clustered under the strong lights set up to illuminate the cemetery. There were photographers, too: Matt couldn’t see them, but he heard the clicking of camera shutters. The mourners were gathered on an outcrop of rock on a mountainside, huddled in overcoats, hundreds of people crowded around them. The wind was strong and noisy, and the sound of weeping reached up and was taken by it, bobbing on the wind. Gal stood behind her Grampa Sam, wrapped around his leg, while Daniel held the baby, who was crying, joggling him and cupping his head. Headstones stretched out far ahead of them, and Matt could see that there were graves set into the rock wall as well. He had a sudden memory: Ilana at their house in Northampton, packing to go back home, sighing, calling Israel “that sad piece of rock.” Ilana hated Jerusalem, the city in which she’d grown up; she hated the religious people, the city’s fraught status as a symbol for three religions. She was a teacher, and her work took her close to abused and neglected and hungry children. She had named her daughter Gal, which meant “wave,” to evoke her beloved Tel Aviv, which was on the ocean.
    They had been taken to the cemetery in the van, and herded first into a large, crowded hall. When they entered, a hush fell over the crowd. Matt walked self-consciously behind the others to the front. He towered above most of the people there, and Daniel had taken a large yarmulke from a box at the door and pinned it to Matt’s hair, so he felt like a big beanpole in Jewish drag. The family held their heads high—asserting, he imagined, that they had dignity even though their destinies had turned them into every other person in the room’s worst nightmare, to be pitied and avoided, or maybe fetishized in some creepy way, from this point on. They reached the front and sat in seats that had been reserved for them. It was so clear, he thought, who were to be honored and supported here; he had a sudden and unexpected flash of sympathy for Kendrick’s loudmouthed partnering of Jay: he was trying to make himself count. Before them, the bodies were laid out, wrapped in white sheets draped with cloths with fringes and Stars of David on them.
    A man approached Daniel, bent, and murmured something in his ear. Daniel cleared his throat and rose, and removed the folded eulogy from his overcoat pocket. The coat was Joel’s; he’d taken it because he hadn’t brought a warm enough jacket, and in the van, he kept sniffing at the lapels and fighting back tears.
    The paper crackled under the microphone as Daniel smoothed it with shaking fingers. He cleared his throat and neared his face to the microphone and said, “Shalom.” He said, “I’m Daniel Rosen, Joel’s brother.” His voice was hoarse; he cleared his throat. “I have a big strawberry birthmark on my back,” he said. “I’ve always thought that Joel was in such a hurry to get out and take the world by storm, he shoved me aside, right there.” There was a wave of low laughter. “But I loved Joel more than anybody in the world.”
    Matt took in the complicated message and stored it for future rumination, when he was less exhausted and more mature. That was the last thing he understood, because Daniel delivered the rest of his eulogy in Hebrew. Daniel had learned Hebrew in Jewish summer camp and during the year he spent in Israel; he had learned it quickly—he had a facility for