Jerusalem Beach

by Iddo Gefen

  When did she tell him about the snow on the beach? He wasn’t sure. But it happened here, during one of their first encounters, when she arrived to buy challah at the bakery and then slipped away with him into the nearby alley. That was where she told him about her very first memory. About children playing in the snow, digging with bare hands in search of the sand that had disappeared. About older men and elegant women sitting on green beach chairs in thick robes, trying to tan in the unbearable chill; about seashells that poked out from the white snowflakes, and about mothers shouting at their children not to go barefoot lest they catch a cold. She also told him about herself, the only one who dared to go into the freezing water. She described slowly walking into the sea while chunks of ice floated around her. She told him how she closed her eyes and went deep into the water; she opened them only for a second and saw before her the purest blue she had ever seen in her life.

  To this day Sammy still regrets what he said to her back then. “It was probably just a dream,” he determined, and then added with some certainty, “There hasn’t been snow here in years, not to mention a beach.” Since then, she no longer shared the chronicles of her first memory. At first he believed it was only a matter of time before he convinced her to talk about the beach again, but over the years he learned how stubborn she could be. It made no difference how many times he apologized and begged, she persevered in her silence. Even after they came to know each other’s bodies, even after they married, and even decades later, when they moved into a retirement home on the other side of town, she claimed such a memory was too precious to place in the hands of another, even of a loved one.

  Then came the Alzheimer’s and ripped out her memories one by one. Their honeymoon in Rome; their evening at the Chinese restaurant; the traffic ticket she received on Highway 2; their son’s death, the taste of pistachio ice cream; Abbott and Costello; the first cigarette they smoked together; the war and the one that followed; her father’s voice; the dog they adopted for three days only to discover it belonged to the neighbors; the trip to David’s Stream in Ein Gedi and the moment she slipped and fell; their two years in Boston; the run-down bathrooms in the Hebrew University dorms; her fear of death; the very specific way she liked her coffee; the opening line of Anna Karenina; the day she met Sammy.

  * * *

  All her memories were swallowed into the void. All but the memory of the snowy beach in Jerusalem. The only one she wouldn’t let go of. She kept asking over and over when they would go back to visit, and hinted at its existence in muted ramblings that escaped her in her sleep. And still, whenever Sammy asked her to tell him again about her first memory or explain where exactly the beach was, she refused and withdrew into her silence. He reminded himself that it wasn’t a real memory, but it did little to alleviate his frustration. How painful was her refusal to share with him the last testament to the woman she had once been. Even now, as they stood in the market. Even when he asked her to simply hint at the direction—she remained silent.

  “Ask her,” Lilian said, and pointed at a vendor behind one of the stalls. Sammy approached the woman, and with a slight stutter asked if she knew where the Jerusalem beach was. The vendor looked down at him from the stool she was standing on, a contemptuous gaze; she didn’t even consider answering, merely continued to stack the sweet potatoes as if they were books on a shelf. “He asked you a question,” Lilian’s voice suddenly emerged from within her clouded soul to defend her husband’s honor. “He asked you a question, why aren’t you answering? He asked you, he asked.” She approached the stall, and the vendor leaped in panic, hiding behind a wall of zucchini and admitting in a whisper: “I really don’t know what to tell you.”

  Sammy rushed to apologize and dragged Lilian behind him. They stopped in one of the side alleys, and she continued to mumble for long moments, “Why didn’t she answer you? Why didn’t she answer?”

  He stroked her hair patiently with his thick fingers, once again straightening it out. He bought her Turkish delight with almonds and reminded her that he used to bring her such sweets every Friday. She silently nibbled on a piece. Then they passed through the stalls and Lilian handed some of her candy to a beggar they stumbled across. They walked out from the other side of the market, stepped onto the faded crosswalk, and slipped into the Nachlaot neighborhood, leaving the noise behind them. The narrow streets felt spacious compared to the market’s crowded alleyways. Sammy looked at the small houses. When he was young, he had felt they were perfectly suited to his size. He grabbed Lilian’s hand and guided her gently past a manhole and a gas tank, safeguarding her the way children protect their first pet. After a brief stroll, they stopped by their old synagogue. Four young Haredi men passed them by and entered the building. How he wished that someone would erect a monument in places like this. He would have even settled for a small wooden sign that said: “Here Lilian and Sammy passed notes during the Maariv service.”

  Lilian was tired. She bent her knees demonstratively, and Sammy quickly led her to the bench opposite the nearby playing field. Four large trees surrounded the field, serving as goalposts for a few boys and girls playing on the paved surface, padded with sand. Sammy sat Lilian on the bench; she gazed at the children and smiled, clapped her hands at them until they waved back. Removing an orange in a green plastic bag from his satchel, he sat down beside her, took the orange out of the bag, and peeled it with the kitchen knife he had brought. He then removed Lilian’s coat and scarf to keep them from getting dirty, and served her small orange segments one by one. Juice dripped from his fingers. “Thank you,” she said after receiving each piece. Perhaps with every bite she experienced the fruit’s taste for the first time, he thought, and almost found comfort in it.

  The football struck Lilian just as she was about to bite into the last piece. It collided with her face and knocked the orange segment to the ground. Lilian shrieked, closed her eyes, and rushed to shield her head with her frail hands. Sammy wrapped her in the coat, as if it possessed the power to protect her from all evils of the world. One of the girls, in a jean skirt and blue school shirt, approached them hesitantly, while the rest of the children formed a crooked line behind her. “Sorry, can I have the ball back?” she asked, and Sammy didn’t know if the “sorry” was an apology or the only word she could think to address him with.

  “Have you gone completely mad?” he yelled, and the girl retreated a few steps. “What’s wrong with you? You’re crazy, you almost murdered a person.” The girl folded her hands behind her back and remained silent, which only vexed him more. “Don’t you have eyes? Do you know how dangerous that was?” he lashed out at her, unleashing his rage.

  “Sorry,” the girl said again. “If we could just get the ball back.”

  The football was lodged between him and Lilian, a white and sooty patchwork of pentagons and hexagons. He picked up the ball in his trembling hands and intended to return it to the girl, but then looked at Lilian’s face again, more fearful and frozen than he had ever seen it before. Without thinking twice, he took the knife and, with what little strength he had left in him, punctured the ball.

  It slowly deflated, fell, and rolled on the ground, stopping at the girl’s feet. She covered her eyes with her hands, but spread her fingers wide enough to peek at the disaster. She began sobbing and a few moments later, turned and ran along the path that surrounded the synagogue. One of the boys yelled, “He’s a murderer!” and then ran away with the rest of the frightened children.

  The playing field had emptied. Sammy looked at Lilian. The small bald patch was exposed again. Once more he tried to rearrange her hair, but Lilian refused to lower her hands from her head. She remained folded inside herself, and he no longer had the energy to fight her. They sat like that for some time, until the sun disappeared behind the synagogue. Hugging his satchel in both arms again, he tried to count the leaves on the tree and failed. He took out his camera, gently lifted Lilian’s left hand, and photographed her tired face, telling himself that these
moments should be documented too. He then slowly bent down, lifted the fallen orange segment from the ground, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and started wiping off the grains of sand that clung to the fruit.

  “Tomorrow they’ll come take you,” he said.

  “To the beach?”

  “There are people who can take care of you better than I can.”

  “Where’s the snow, Sammy?”

  “I’ll come visit every day.”

  She leaned forward. Her eyes remained closed.

  “I can smell the sea, can you?”

  Sammy reached out to her with both hands, pressed his head against hers, and gently stroked the lines on her face. Then he whispered to her, “What’s left for you there?” without expecting an answer. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine the two of them alone on her beach. Standing naked and wrinkled on the shoreline, she with her saggy brown breasts, he with his hunched back and pallid face. He imagined the horrible cold, and her convincing him to go into the water even though he wouldn’t want to. Stepping in slowly and feeling the cold sand between his toes. And after they were already in up to their waist, he imagined Lilian turning to face the beach, resting on the waves. He would rush to grab her, while she floated on the cold water.

  He opened his eyes, saw the synagogue in front of him, and looked at the small sandy field again. He quickly rose from the bench and helped Lilian up.

  “Are we going home?” she asked; he didn’t reply. He guided her slowly across the field, kicking the small pebbles out of their way.

  “Where are we?” she wondered, and he stopped in the middle of the field, bent slightly, and kissed her left hand. Then he pulled away from her and heavily knelt on one knee. He remained in the same position for a few minutes, trying to catch his breath. With enormous effort, he bent his other knee and finally lay on his back on the thin sand. He remained still for several moments and then reached his hand up to her. She took it, placed her other hand on the ground, and leaned back. They lay side by side, panting. Only a small distance separated them. Sammy gazed at the darkening sky.

  “It’s the beach,” he announced. “This is Jerusalem’s beach.”

  She didn’t say a word. Sammy stretched his arms and started moving them clumsily up and down.

  “Soon the snow will be here,” he said. “We need to practice.”

  She didn’t understand, but immediately joined him, moving her arms back and forth.

  “Now your legs too,” he said, once she caught the hang of it, and she complied. She spread her legs and immediately pulled them back together, over and over again, with wider and gentler strokes than Sammy’s.

  Worshippers exiting the synagogue stared at them in confusion, but they kept at it—Lilian maintaining a steady rhythm with her arms and Sammy listening to her breaths. They didn’t smile or look at each other; they simply moved their arms and legs slowly across the sand, fashioning elderly angels on the snow of Jerusalem’s beach.

  Neptune

  1.

  SHE ARRIVED A few days before the blood seeped into the sand. Three hundred, maybe four hundred meters stood between the outpost and the bus station with the white chalk graffiti announcing You’ve reached the end of the world, and by the time she had covered the distance, the rumor about the mysterious soldier was already whistling throughout the outpost like a bullet.

  Cleaning duty was immediately suspended.

  One after the other we let go of our brooms, garbage bags, and plastic bottles filled with sand and cigarette butts, and stared as she approached us in black boots, a camera hanging around her neck and white sunglasses that gleamed in the distance.

  Even Yanai, who was on guard duty, rushed out of the security booth at the gate. He looked in the cracked mirror hanging outside the door, straightened his tactical vest, and ran his hand over his buzz cut. Then he winked at us and said, “This one. This one’s going to be my wife.”

  * * *

  By the time she made it to the security gate, half the platoon was waiting for her. We stood elbow to elbow while Yanai opened the iron gate that screeched nervously. She slid up her white sunglasses, wiped the sweat off her face, and revealed a strange pair of eyes. One blue, one brown.

  “Finest girl who’s ever stepped foot in the outpost,” someone whispered, and we nodded.

  “Welcome to Neptune,” Yanai greeted her.

  “Why Neptune?” she asked, as he was probably planning all along.

  “Rumor has it that this outpost is as far from planet Earth as Neptune, if not farther,” he replied, and she started laughing a split second before he completed the sentence, as if she was used to these kinds of jokes. Then she said that she served in the military newspaper unit, which we hadn’t even known existed until that moment. She said her job was to travel to outposts all over the country and find soldiers with interesting stories.

  “And why are you here, princess?” Yanai asked.

  “For you, prince,” she sneered, and said she had traveled here all the way from a kibbutz in the Golan Heights, which was covered in snow these days. She had heard there was a soldier in our platoon who graduated with a law degree from the most prestigious university in England and had left everything behind to enlist in the IDF. She explained that was a story people would want to hear, and then looked to her left, at us, and asked if anyone knew where she could find him. I noticed a ladybug tattoo on her neck.

  We all knew who she was looking for, but no one was in a rush to answer; maybe because we feared that if we told her, she’d vanish as quickly as she had appeared.

  “I’m not sure who you’re talking about,” Yanai eventually said, the very guy who took every opportunity to remind us that he scored a 96 on his Hebrew finals without ever learning the meaning of the expression “to give up.” He shifted the sling of his gun behind his back and took a few steps closer to her. “You’ll have to put out a bit more if you want help. More details, I mean. Name, rank, hobbies.”

  She smiled, embarrassed. I was hoping that someone braver than me would tell him to cut the crap, but other than someone’s feeble “Come on, Yanai, stop it,” none of us protested.

  “Sit with us for a bit, we’ll sort you out, don’t worry.” Yanai reached out to touch her hair. She jerked her head and took two steps back. Her black bag was pressed up against the fence. Her right sleeve caught on the wire, leaving a small tear. A single drop of blood dripped onto the sand. I think I was the only one who noticed.

  “Don’t get your panties all in a bunch, sweetheart,” Yanai called out and drew closer to her, standing right in her face. “I don’t bite.”

  Her face turned red. She looked away from him, at us, but we didn’t say a word.

  * * *

  For years I blamed Yanai for everything that happened afterward, his vanity, his inability to restrain himself, the ridiculous thought that it was only a matter of seconds until she fell for his charms. But today I know that it wasn’t Yanai, it was something about the outpost itself.

  * * *

  They say it was a soldier from the November ’02 draft who started the whole thing. That he was the one who carved the question proudly displayed above the broken urinal in the grunts’ latrines: “If a tree falls in Neptune, does it make a sound?”

  This heralded other bursts of creativity: “If a soldier shouts ‘No more!!’ in Neptune, is he really shouting?”

  “If a soldier goes batshit in Neptune, will he ever see the headshrinker?”

  “If Waxman the CO shoots a camel in Neptune, does he finally get to join the recon battalion?”

  Slowly but surely these jokes turned into serious philosophical debates that went on for hours. We found ourselves arguing heatedly about whether the “Neptune tree” phenomenon existed only within the confines of the outpost or also along the road that led to the bus station. Whether it had existed here since time immemorial or was born only when the outpost was built. And so, without expecting it, we started to get the creeping feeling t
hat the things that happened in Neptune had eluded the space-time continuum. We had reached an unspoken agreement that it was okay to pull a cat’s tail because they didn’t really exist, or to cheat on your girlfriend, if you could just find someone to do it with.

  2.

  SAKAL WAS THE one who finally put a stop to it. He had been serving in the company longer than any of us, with only a month and a pre-discharge talk with the regiment commander standing between him and the beaches of Thailand. Sakal was the company sergeant major, a role that had turned him into a broken and tired soldier, but also a higher authority on all matters of seniority, rank promotion, and ETS. He had been two years ahead of me in high school. We were both music majors, but he studied classical and I jazz. And while he was strict about not speaking to us younger soldiers, I knew he was fond of me. Sometimes, when I was standing in line in the mess hall, he’d pat me on my back, and I’m also pretty sure he was the one who left the Pink Floyd CD under my bed, maybe as a reminder that there had been life before this wasteland and there would be life after it.