Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  Asaf stood to greet Isabel when she entered the room. Fortunately she was accustomed to life’s strange byways and didn’t gasp. Though she was startled. Asaf certainly was beautiful. Lia was right, but her daughter did not detail his beauty. Asaf was tall, very tall. He was thin, very thin. He had large black eyes, a small straight nose, a long narrow face, full lips, and thick dark brown dreadlocks down to his waist. Down to his waist. He wore turquoise cotton pants and a knee-length white tunic. A tattoo running serpentine along his left arm was visible under the cloth. Earrings pierced both ears and a small ring nestled in an eyebrow. Lia’s love? He leaned down to kiss Isabel elegantly on both cheeks.

  “Great to meet you,” she managed to say and settled in beside him on the couch. Lia handed her a tall glass of mango and pineapple juice laced with arak. “Lia told me about your time together in India. Seems like it was quite the experience.”

  She hated how that sounded. The doltish adult interrogating the suitor. But she couldn’t help it. She looked at him. His size. His clothing. His hair. What kind of compatibility was there between these two? Lia so smart and sophisticated. And Asaf . . . she didn’t want her daughters to make the mistake she made when she married their father, Alon the farmer. Romantic for a few years, but when the charm of the different than me wore off and there wasn’t much to talk about . . . but who knew who Asaf was and what thoughts transversed his brain under those long thick dreadlocks. Who knew what he had done and planned to do in his life other than meet young women whistling on a country road in Dharmsala.

  “I started the fish already, Mom.” Lia passed behind the couch and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “We can come to the table.”

  “Thanks honey.” Isabel didn’t know whether to be happy that after three years Lia had finally allowed her heart to be roused again, or whether to be aghast that it was for this man. When she passed Emanuel with the salad bowl in hand, she bent down to kiss him hello fully, softly, on the lips. They smiled. He touched her discretely on the backside as she walked away. A promise of things to come.

  Some days Isabel felt guilty, but only slightly, about having sex with other men. She never lied to Emanuel because he never asked. If he did she would say that Zakhi was more than a friend. In fact he was even more than a lover. But Emanuel never asked, and truth be told she never asked him about other women either. Who knew where he was when he wasn’t at work or with her? And the idea of Emanuel with another woman calmed her conscience but it also startled her. She had become accustomed to thinking that the reins of their relationship were in her hands. Could she be mistaken? How would she react to Emanuel not wanting to be with her? Not possible, she shrugged off the thought and went to sit down at the head of the table.

  Emanuel took hold of the dinner conversation, playing the role of inquisitive parent. Through Asaf’s answers they learned that his family was from Tel Aviv. He had three brothers. One older, a neurologist, married with two children. Two younger. One studied medicine in Jerusalem. And the youngest an army paramedic. All the while Isabel tried to calculate his age. An older brother married, thirty-two? A younger studying medicine, twenty-five?

  “And what did you do in the army?” Emanuel asked.

  Aah. The ultimate question. Isabel stopped doing the math. How she hated this question. When she moved to Israel at twenty-two, she received an automatic exemption from the army because she and Alon married right away. And within a few months she was pregnant to boot. So she didn’t understand army ways and rejected army service as a cross-section profile of a person’s character since so many young people got stuck doing jobs they hated. But hers was a minority opinion in a country where the majority of young men and women served.

  “Oketz.” Asaf looked up from his plate.

  “Like Lia!” Isabel responded.

  This was what they had in common. The dogs. Love of animals. When Lia was in the K-9 unit, Isabel and the children would visit her and the dogs on their base up north. When Lia’s dog, Dido, a Belgian Malinois, died in a roadside bomb in the West Bank, Isabel attended her funeral at the canine military cemetery. It would have been someone’s son had the dog not gone ahead. And, yes, children of all ages, people of all religions, all sides of these provocative borders, were wounded and died every day in this bloody intractable conflict. Isabel suffered the pain of this status quo and raged against what felt too often like a deliberate stalemate. The contrived state of war. But maybe because of this contrivance, this god damn theater, it was easier to cry over the lost dogs. Shepherds, Ridgebacks, Canaanis, Malinois, Rottweilers, mixed-breeds alike. Poignantly, innocently, unquestioningly sacrificing their lives for the people they loved.

  “We also have the Technion in common.” Lia looked at Emanuel who taught mathematics there.

  “Another coincidence!” Isabel felt herself warming to this strangely coifed and dressed young man.

  “Degree in?” Emanuel asked.

  “Chemical Engineering,” Asaf answered.

  “He has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering,” Lia boasted.

  Their eyes opened wide. This Rasta Hindu-like figure a Doctor of Chemical Engineering?

  “So you’re all doctors in your family,” Isabel managed to say.

  “Guess so.” Asaf moved more salad onto his plate. He hadn’t touched the fish. Probably vegan. “My mother and my older brother, medical. My younger brother too, soon. And Ori who’s in the army is on track as a paramedic. My father’s a retired physicist.”

  “He finished all his degrees in five years. Bachelor’s to Ph.D. Asaf’s brilliant.” Lia smiled at her beau.

  “And you’re working . . . ?” How did a doctor of chemical engineering spend so much time in India?

  “I’m not working in my field. Found I didn’t really like it.”

  “Oh.”

  “In India . . . ?” Emanuel asked.

  “I planned on staying in Kerala through the winter but came back to Israel because of Lia. Now that I’m here I guess I’ll scout around for something. Maybe teach at one of the colleges.” He leaned toward Uri. “Challenge you to a game of backgammon. Lia tells me you’re formidable.”

  “You’re on.” Uri paused. “What’s formidable?” He stumbled over the long word.

  “Awesome,” Asaf said and the two boys pushed back their chairs and left the table. Uri ran to get the board.

  Lia cleared the plates. Emanuel and Isabel remained seated.

  “What to make of it all,” she asked Emanuel. They smiled.

  “Who’s to say one has to use a degree to further a career?” Emanuel asked back.

  “Who’s to say one has to have a career?” she added, went into the kitchen, and put her arms around Lia. “I really like him.”

  “I know your reservations, Mom. I know the way you think.” Lia stacked plates in the dishwasher. “He’s freelancing through life, etc. etc. But don’t worry. Look at the family he comes from.”

  “We’ll see.” She rinsed out bowls. “Just enjoy it for now. The future will present itself. But he’s very interesting. And attractive. But what do you do with all that hair in bed?”

  Lia punched Isabel in the arm playfully. Isabel recalled Jaim Benjamin’s unexpected comment during their last interview. A decade earlier his wife of forty years had left the house without much notice or ado and no room for negotiation. She wanted something else. Something to make her happier. Jaim Benjamin said: “Women come into marriages thinking they can change their men. And men come into marriages expecting their wives never to change.” A closing comment on a life endured more by sticking to the shadows than by venturing into the light of unkind day.

  ✶

  “This afternoon I looked up and wondered how the blue sky looks from inside a camp’s barbed wire fence.” Isabel sat next to Emanuel on the couch after finishing up in the kitchen. Lia and Asaf had read to Uri and tucked him in. Now they we
re on their way to camp out with friends by the Sea of Galilee. Isabel held Emanuel’s hand. He pressed her fingers and didn’t speak.

  “Sometimes I’m so busy I forget to eat. That happen to you?” she slumped against him. “And when I’m practically faint from hunger, I tell myself to stop complaining. I should be grateful I’m not living on starvation rations of watery soup and moldy bread.” She closed her eyes. “Jaim Benjamin’s book is just hard. Feels like iron chains are attached to the sentences.” She opened her eyes to look at Emanuel. Yes, he was listening carefully. “I have a rough outline of events. The journey to the mountains. It was dangerous. Germans knew Jews would try to use this route to escape. His two years moving from family to family. He occasionally helped another Jew who slipped across the border from Yugoslavia. And after the war. Returning to Florina. But filling in these broad lines . . . I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  “You do know,” Emanuel said and brought her hand to his mouth. “It’s really really and I mean really time to take a break. Think of it as a sabbatical.”

  Isabel leaned into him more heavily. “Jaim Benjamin came to New York under the Greek quota.”

  Emanuel kissed her on the brow. Then on the cheek. Then on the lips. She slipped into his warm mouth and let herself go in his strong arms.

  “Let it rest awhile, Issie.”

  “Maybe,” she whispered.

  “Definitely.” He tugged her to her feet, up the stairs, and to bed.

  The Dogs

  1

  A few weeks later they lost Woody. It was an early Saturday morning and as they loaded the car before the three-hour drive to Yael’s army base in the desert, no one could recall when he was last seen. Uri claimed the dog slept with him and pointed to an indentation on the pillow. Lia said he greeted her at the front door at three a.m. Emanuel last remembered him at dinner. And Isabel just couldn’t recall though she usually tucked in the house and did an animal check, a door and window check, a child check, before sinking into bed with a book and cup of tea.

  But she wasn’t sure she did one the night before. She was drunk from the bottle of Pinot Grigio she had finished off, the bottle Emanuel always bought for her at duty-free when he visited his daughters in Sweden. Uri had brushed his teeth and changed into pajamas. He went under the covers and Isabel followed, too exhausted from the long work day and wine to worry about Lia on the roads meeting friends at a local kibbutz pub. Did Isabel sneak a house inventory in there somewhere, before she fell into bed and the covers followed?

  In the morning, after a long espresso and two aspirin, Isabel loaded the car with magazines, pears, barbecue potato chips, chewing gum, cookies, and English avocado soap (another duty-free coup). When she threw the collapsible water bowl into the back seat she noticed that Woody was not hovering around the car. He who always sensed a road trip usually threw his little body up and down in ecstatic somersaults when Isabel tossed the water bowl into the mix. That dog was born for the road.

  How could Isabel have forgotten to check for him? Where could he have gotten himself off to? Yael often teased Isabel that she loved Woody more than her children and Isabel would say that wasn’t true, she loved all her children the same. Woody was just one of them. And Lia teased that after Isabel got the Holocaust out of her system, she should write an Israeli Travels with Voodie. A travelogue with a dark side, filled with anecdotes of people who feared and hated dogs, and were perfectly comfortable being cruel to them. This cruelty was Lia’s pet peeve. For a high school research project she investigated the prejudices against the so-called unclean canine rampant in Judaism and Islam in the Middle East. The spike in the number of dogs tossed out of households before Ramadan had veterinary services all across the region calling for education and reform. The malice towards ‘unkosher’ dogs in many Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel elicited similar cries and pleas.

  Once on a Jerusalem street Lia used karate to protect a dog. The girls were in high school, Uri was still in a pram. As far as Isabel knew it was the only time in Lia’s life that she actually used these hard-won skills of hers. They had walked by a man jabbing a small dog with a long pole. Scattered garbage messed the sidewalk.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Lia stepped towards the man.

  Isabel kept her eyes on the pole. This simple question set in motion a confrontation that began with words and ended in blows. At first the man turned his face away. By his black pants and jacket, white shirt and black hat, he was self-identified as ultra-Orthodox. A Haredi Jew. One of god’s fearful. Maybe he was uncomfortable talking to a woman from outside his world. Maybe he was unhappy being challenged.

  Lia asked again. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He turned to face the young woman, a girl really, who had the nerve to meddle in his business.

  “Yu talkin’ to me?” he asked like DeNiro in a Yiddish-washed Hebrew. If Isabel weren’t nervous she would have burst out laughing and maybe he sensed her amusement because his upper lip curled and the hand not holding the pole clenched into a fist. As if in a movie he raised his arm and brought the pole down in slow motion over Lia’s head. Isabel watched and saw the pole freeze in mid-air. Lia had caught the top end and held fast.

  “Rashi taught that because dogs kept silent during the Exodus they would be rewarded. Treated kindly, not cruelly.”

  She was not mocking the man but instructing him. He grimaced dangerously. A cornered animal. Isabel prepared to step in. The man grabbed the stick with both hands and tried to pull it from Lia’s grip but she was too fast for him. With a twist she wrenched the pole out of his hands, flipped it and wedged it under his chin. She pushed him against a tall garbage container, the pole held tight against his windpipe.

  “Do you like that?” Lia brought her face close to his. She pushed down harder on the pole.

  The man’s eyes rolled back in their sockets. Even though his hands held fast to the pole, he became meek. Isabel went and put her hand on Lia’s shoulder. It was enough. Lia backed away and threw the pole into the street. She bundled the little dog up in her arms.

  As they walked away the man yelled, “Satan’s children. Monkeys. Garbage.”

  “I can go back and kick that guy’s ass.” Yael stopped to scowl at him. At fourteen she was already taller than Isabel, taller even than Lia. A black belt in karate. A formidable fighter. They burst out laughing and after a moment’s hesitation kept walking.

  On a bench on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, they waited for the right people to adopt the little dog. This didn’t take long. A young couple, recently engaged, stopped to play with him and fell in love. Lia had ready a list of instructions, including an immediate visit to the veterinarian, then they sent them on their way. The holy family.

  Woodrow, an integral part of the Toledo-Segev family, always accompanied them on excursions. He was a rich source of anecdote. A magnet for adventure. Where could he be?

  “I’ll check the neighbors’ yards. Uri, check all the closets in the house. Maybe he’s locked in somewhere.” Isabel ran next door.

  “I’ll go to the wadi.” Lia headed to the woods in the back of the house.

  “I’ll stay here.” Emanuel leaned against the car. “In case he shows up.”

  But he didn’t. After fifteen minutes of searching, they congregated back by the car.

  “He’s probably with a female.” Emanuel tried to cheer them up. “You know how males are, especially the real dogs. He’ll be here when we get back, wondering what took us so long. Demanding supper.”

  “But he never disappears like this.” Isabel stared into space. She was tipping at the edge of panic. Woody. Her little one. Her constant companion.

  “We can’t go without him. Yael really wants to see him.” Lia was firm.

  “Maybe one of the men from Thailand ate him,” Uri whispered.

  “Uri,” Lia said sternly.
“Mom, how can you let him say things like that?”

  “Uri, don’t say things like that. Thai people don’t eat dogs. A terrible stereotype.” The words spilled out mechanically. The weight of Woody’s absence grew. Worry tore through her. He must be found.

  “But I saw it on the children’s news last week. Some Thai men caught dogs in wooden traps in the Golan and cooked them for supper.”

  “Ugh, I can’t believe it.” Lia paced the length of the driveway.

  “Culturally relative, Lia.” Emanuel shrugged his shoulders. “Cows off limits in India and here nothing’s better than a fat juicy steak.”

  “But why show this stuff to children? Next they’ll be saying that some other ethnic group grabs little children and boils them in kettles with potatoes and carrots.”

  “Hansel and Gretel!” Uri shouted proudly.

  “Okay, and the blood libel is alive in well in some parts of the Arab world.” Emanuel checked his watch.

  “Exactly my point,” Lia said hotly. “You put it on TV . . .”

  “Best at Ramadan . . .” Emanuel went for irony.

  “. . . and people believe it.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “Shit.” Isabel looked at the dashboard clock. They had to get going. “What are we going to do? Woodrow, Woody,” she called out and ran up the block. If the children weren’t there, she would have collapsed into a full fit-to-be-tied attack of nerves. Her adored Woody. Since Prague she had more or less managed to keep the golems, ghosts, and ghouls at bay. Now they tightened around her. Drawn out like wood’s grain. Limb by limb. Hollow by hollow as minutes passed without a sighting of her beloved dog. She worried the amber beads around her neck and ran back to the car.

  Uri slid into the back seat of the car. He whimpered. “They’ve eaten him, I know it. He’s never not here.”

  “Shh, shh.” Lia slipped in beside him. “Woody’s too smart to be caught by anyone. And besides, why go after his puny body when there are so many fat Golden Retrievers around?”