by Miryam Sivan
Isabel knew very little about Zakhi’s family. What he said was usually not good. He left home at fifteen and enrolled himself in boarding school. Then the army. When he turned his back on religion, his family turned their back on him.
Without thinking twice Isabel drove to Haifa, to the religious section in Hadar; the public death notices would guide her to the family’s apartment. Isabel struggled to keep her mind on the road. Here was the highway turn off to Haifa. She held her attention on the here and now for as long as she could and then her mind wandered, refusing to be reined in. She thought of Zakhi laying her down last winter in an ancient wine press in the woods. She remembered the beauty and pleasure she felt being half naked with him in a stone basin used thousands of years earlier to collect freshly pressed grape juice. She smiled to herself and then sunk into another memory of Zakhi’s arms around her. This one of the morning they met two years ago. A patina of loss settled on the images.
Isabel had been on her way to Metulla. Yael and her friend Mica had spent a couple of nights there with Mica’s grandparents. It was the beginning of June. By that point in their senior year of high school the kids worked exclusively on the end of year party and performance. They slept late at each other’s houses and did not go to school except to rehearse. All state wide exams were behind them. Teachers accepted that no real academic work was done after Passover. Molly and Isabel shared a theory that this was the last bit of coddling. A June graduation could lead to a July or August draft date. Six weeks of basic training, an eight week course, give or take some weeks, and by November or December these young people, especially the boys, could be under fire. In combat. Killed and killing. She dropped Uri off at kindergarten and called Yael en route to tell her the ETA.
“Mom, Mica’s uncle wants to take us ice skating at the Canada Center. Can you come in the afternoon?”
Isabel was already in the car and didn’t appreciate the last minute change of plans.
“Sure, no problem. Three o’clock okay?”
“Perfect. Love you. You’re the best.”
Of course she indulged them. It was Yael and Mica’s last few weeks of adolescence. Mica had a July draft date.
Isabel decided not to go home but to take herself on an outing since a brilliant sense of freedom wafted through her days. She hadn’t yet begun writing the new book about Wanda Farber’s life. With blue eyes and light brown straight hair, Wanda spent the war passing as Christian within two blocks of the Warsaw Ghetto. Every day she walked by the brick wall separating ghetto from Aryan side. Out of the corner of her eye she scoured the crowds for her mother, her father, her older sister, her younger brother. Once she thought she saw her mother and had to pinch herself hard in the thigh to not shout out. Wanda had seen it all. The overcrowding. The transports. The uprising. The decimation. Her scenes, her words, gestated in Isabel who was in the process of rereading the transcripts. It would take another week or so before she began to set down sentences.
Isabel decided to go to the Museum of Photography at Tel Hai. It was all the way north in the western Galilee and she hadn’t been there in years. At Yishai Junction a good looking man with a clean shaven head drove a black car next to her. They waited at the light to make a left. Isabel noticed him because she could actually feel him staring at her. She wasn’t sure why. Her hair in a messy pony tail was not particularly clean. She wore baggy house clothes. Even her sunglasses were old and scratched. Uri had stashed her new ones. He had a collection of sunglasses in some secret place and wore them around the house pretending to be a Hollywood starlet from the 1930s. The glorious androgyny of children.
The man’s smile was rapacious but sexy. He had large white straight teeth. Isabel did not smile back and pressed down hard on the gas when the light turned green. A road block after Hamovil Junction stopped the flow of traffic. Police searched for illegal weapons. Maybe even bombs. The cars inched forward. Isabel turned her head. The same man with the foxy grin drove alongside her and again he stared at her. This time a reluctant smile peeped out on her face. At Golani Junction his car abutted hers. He was still smiling. Always smiling. This time Isabel gave him a genuine smile. At their fourth stop together, his car next to hers, she laughed along with him. Then they played tag. First he overtook her car. Then she overtook his. At Goma Junction, he rolled down his window.
“Coffee?”
Isabel nodded yes. It was ten in the morning. She had nowhere to be until three. He was attractive, young, playful and no longer seemed predatory. She followed him to a gas station café. They drank coffee. Shared a plate of humus. He told her he was an electrician going to upgrade the electricity on his friend’s farm near Kiryat Shmona. He learned that she ghostwrote for a living, had three children, and was going to pick up one of them in Metulla.
He leaned in towards her. “The Banias are not far from here. Lots of water this year. Beautiful. I’ll show you, if you have time.”
Of course she had time. She left her car at the gas station and they drove in his through fields and orchards. He parked in a small clearing in a grove of enormous eucalyptus and birch trees. This spot was not an obvious path to anywhere, but Zakhi seemed to know where to go. Which didn’t surprise her. Lots of Israelis did. Lia and Yael knew of such places from years of school trips and youth movement hikes. And many men during their army service navigated great parts of the country on foot. It would be an exaggeration to say they knew it like the back of their hands, but considering the pint sized country and amount of outdoor activity, they knew it very well.
As they walked down a steep incline, Zakhi took her hand. The sound of moving water was nearby.
“Heavy winter rains and all that snow on the Golan Heights,” he said. “I told you. Lots of water this year.”
“Swelling Israel’s miniature system of rivers and streams.” Her words were clunky. “People come from all over the country to see the water.” She felt so self-conscious. What was she doing with this strange man?
Zakhi didn’t respond. They walked further into the growth. He held back thorny bushes for her to pass safely. The closer they walked to the stream, the more their shoes sunk into soft moist earth. And then they were there.
It didn’t matter that she’d been raised with the large blue reservoirs of New York State. The sight of water in Israel, the fleeting plenitude it brought forth, always moved her. A precious commodity. A force in history. Abraham took his wife Sarah down into the exile of Egypt for the Nile guaranteed a year round supply of water. In the land promised to Abraham by his god there was drought. Three generations later Jacob’s sons went down into Egypt again in search of water and food. And after twenty generations, or four hundred years of slavery, it took the strong hand of their god to create the exodus and bring them out. Jacob’s descendants eventually wandered north to the Promised Land and its unreliable water supply.
One day she would write about this. Not historically. Poetically. The messianic line traced to water. Elchanan and Naomi leaving Bethlehem for Moab also because of local drought. When Naomi returned home ten years later with neither husband nor sons, but with Ruth, her Moabite daughter-in-law, she could because the water had also returned. And it was during the barley harvest made possible by strong winter rains that Ruth and Naomi’s kinsman Boaz made merry. One fertility begat another and when they married, Naomi’s status as a surrogate mother of sons was restored. For Ruth and Boaz begat Obed and Obed and his unnamed wife begat Jesse. And Jesse and his unnamed wife begat David. How Isabel loved all these unnamed women and their wombs. And then David became the second king of Israel. It was written that the messiah would come from David whose ancestor was a convert to the tribe. All because of the water.
“It’s dry here.” Zakhi pointed to a hospitable canopy of shade under a poplar. The mid-morning sun was already hot upon them.
Isabel sat and watched the water move quickly in wide and narrow flutes. The current was s
trong. Sporadic patches of sunlight sprinkled the surface with light blue and clean hope. A turtle slid off a low hanging tree branch into the bank’s dark shadows.
“It’s so lovely.” She turned to Zakhi.
“Uhuh,” he leaned over, covering her mouth with his. This was the time for lips, for tongues, for hands, for ears. For music: trees as rustling snares, birds as winds and chimes, water as bass. Zakhi’s tongue left her mouth and trailed the cleft between her breasts. He worked his cool hands into the front of her shirt then unbuttoned it for more skin. He pulled her bra down to the sides pushing breasts and nipples up toward his mouth. He licked and sucked, then kissed her mouth some more. Her hands found his pants and opened them. Like a compass his penis pointed up at her and within seconds they were completely naked beneath the trees. He inside of her, moving slowly in circles, she holding tight to his smooth large body. He was gorgeous.
The smell of green, the sound of water, the damp spray, the feel of a stranger, put Isabel over. She moved her legs from his hips to his shoulders and ground herself against him. Being naked outdoors, the press of another’s skin, the slip of sweat, the taste of mouth, the canopy of leaves, the calm offhand eye of the sky, all a fabulous correction to the compression of her days. She succumbed to it all.
“I . . .” became a moan swallowing words. The beautiful man, his hands, his mouth, his teeth. The sun streaming through thin skeins of weed. To be naked outdoors. The water, the buzzing bugs. “I . . . aaee,” Isabel cried, “a bee . . .” and jerked herself to one side to avoid being stung in her privates.
Zakhi laughed. He turned her around and swatted at the bee. “I’m on watch now.” He entered again and knocked her inside over and over and over. Anyone home, oh yes there certainly was. Zakhi picked up speed and velocity. When they finished, first her and then him, they lay among the reeds on the bank of the swelled river. He pressed his body against hers, tucked her into his arms, and she stroked his olive skin.
“Are you Yemenite or Sephardi?” she asked.
“Ashkenazi. Dark Russian. Sometimes called Black Poles.”
“Stubborn traces of ancient Israel.”
“Yes.”
They lay quietly. Birds sang high in the tree tops. Turtles swam from bank to bank. Dragonflies hovered over the water’s surface. Isabel looked up at the cloudless sky.
“The emancipation of woman is only an invention of the Jewish intellect.”
Zakhi turned to look at her.
“Hitler said that in one of his speeches.” Isabel paused. “It’s that only that’s so interesting.”
“Sex and the Holocaust. I like it,” Zakhi stared at her and laughed. “I get it. I’m over there half the time too. But when I’m here, I find this much more interesting.” He put her hand on him.
“Much better.” She laughed, happy to be distracted, happy to be taken out of her mind. She stroked the soft dark skin of his belly.
Their tumbling resumed. Round and around. First her on top. Then him. Then her again. She evaporated. Became part of the clouds. All molecules one. She brothered the wind. Brothered the sky. Brothered the birds, the leaves, the branches. Brothered the man.
✶
Isabel hands clutched the wheel. She was immersed in the pleasures of Zakhi’s body, in the memory of meeting him, and forgot she was driving until a passing truck’s growl woke her. She turned on to Geulah Street. It was already evening and cooler. Sidewalks filled with children and adults. Many of the men wore black suits and hats. Some wore long black frocks. Married women wore scarves or wigs and young girls wore long braids down their backs. The number of baby carriages was staggering. Not for them population explosion warnings and planetary sustainability.
Isabel drove up the street and saw a black-bordered bereavement notice posted on a tree. She slowed down and read: Amos Kandel. Died that night. Funeral at noon. Shiva at his parents’ home. A car horn blared behind her. She stared at the notice and kept driving. She really had no business being here.
“I ran away from their black and white world,” Zakhi had said to her many times. “There’s little room for color. What’s new or different is unkosher and forbidden.”
And what was unclear was also feared. And demonized. His parents named him Zakhariah because God promised to remember and redeem Israel after great peril. They named him Zakhariah to remember those who didn’t make it out of Europe. She pulled over to stare at another death notice. That was part of the bond that she and he shared. And despite the slyly encroaching dependence on him, Isabel knew she didn’t belong with or to Zakhi. Just as he didn’t belong with or to her. She pulled her eyes from the black printed words and pulled out into traffic and out of this neighborhood filled with people who were her people and yet were not. A mistake to have come.
Isabel drove straight home. She missed Zakhi but at least he was alive and well. And not with another woman. This week she would share him with his family as they sat shiva.
4
“I don’t want to take the job,” Isabel said to Emanuel when they cleared the dinner dishes. Isabel had received a phone call earlier that day from Yehudit Klein, who had read Itka’s book in the Czech translation and liked it very much. Would Isabel be willing to ghostwrite her life? “I told her I wouldn’t be free for a while. She said she wasn’t in a rush. The story’s waited sixty years it can wait a few more months.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Emanuel asked when she came back downstairs after putting Uri to sleep. “Aren’t you tired of atrocity, Isabel?”
“In fact I am.”
And when they went into bed, Emanuel continued, sensing her sudden openness to the discussion and maybe even to real change. “There’s so many other kinds of books you can write, Issie. Or some other field entirely. The time has come. It’s over. Look to the future.”
It’s over. Look to the future. Dave used those exact words to hammer down her interests and ambitions. Isabel’s default rebel kicked in.
“It’s not over for the people who lived it and whose stories deserve to be told,” she pounced. This for Emanuel in real time and for Suri and Dave in her mind. “It’s not over for any citizen of the world who still wants to know and understand what and how and when. It’s not over for the living victims and perpetrators of genocide.”
Isabel turned her back to Emanuel and went to sleep.
In the morning, she took Uri to school and stopped at the vegetable market on her way home. Of course Emanuel’s words had merit. Atrocity was not a paradigm for living. But still, the past could not be willed away. It did not simply disappear because one decided not to think about it.
Right now, force of habit and an overwhelming sense of responsibility made her consider saying yes to Yehudit Klein. Though she hadn’t committed yet and could breathe easy for a while. She filled her shopping cart with fruits and vegetables and paid absentmindedly. On the drive home she felt bad about her coldness with Emanuel the night before. Even this morning she got out of bed and left the house without kissing him good morning, making him coffee, or leaving a note. Three of her usual morning activities. Of course he was looking out for her best interests and he was right a lot of the time. But he wasn’t right all of the time. And she wouldn’t agree to live with him.
When she got home she stomped up the stairs to the second floor. She needed the book on Greek landscape that she left on her night stand. Emanuel sat on the bed.
“Oh. I thought you’d left for work,” she said surprised.
He was dressed in black jeans, a black buttoned down shirt, black western boots, and held a riding crop in his hand. Isabel remained at the door waiting for some cue or clue. Why was he still here? Since when did he go riding on a weekday? And why did he look so stern? Not a word passed between them. It took another moment for Isabel to realize Emanuel was in character. She took a step back from the doorway. She was in no mood to be part of anyon
e’s fantasy, sexual or otherwise. She had too much work to do that morning. But she couldn’t keep saying no to Emanuel, especially since it seemed he was trying to feed her sexual appetite. Shit. Was this part of his campaign to procure her yes?
Isabel waited for his next move. Emanuel stood. She watched the boots and hips approach. She saw a red armband then a black swastika inside a white circle. She swallowed hard, slid down the wall, and closed her eyes. No, not the Nazi and the Jew. Sexploitation films, pulp fiction, pornographic web sites where Jews fuck Nazis in the ass and Nazis rape Jews, males and females alike, were abhorrent to her. Molly said that in the 1950s and 60s soft porn Stalag books were wildly popular among Israeli teenagers. Two taboos combined: the Holocaust and sex. Probably Emanuel devoured them too. But this was not a winning combination for Isabel. She didn’t need to mime out the nightmares via sex. They were real enough in her mind.
Emanuel pulled her up by the hand and gently positioned her on the bed. He straddled her body, trailed the riding crop along her neck, and his tongue followed suit. Isabel moaned and tried to roll away, a dream from the night before suddenly upon her.
She was a teenager. Some younger children were in her charge. They crouched low in a dark corner of a shed in a peasant family’s apple grove as German soldiers marched through the property searching for hidden Jews. The children huddled against her. She put her hands over their mouths even though they were terrified and quiet, so quiet that they held their breath as much as they could. Cacophonous orders to open the doors passed through the shed’s thin wooden walls like bullets. Türen öffnen! Isabel woke up shaking.
Emanuel held her tightly between his knees and used the crop to lift her shirt. With a sudden radical movement, Isabel brought one knee up against his hip, let out a deep grunt, and thrust her pelvis skywards. She snapped her body over throwing Emanuel off of her. He lay on his back stunned. Isabel jumped off the bed.