Bashert

by Lior Samson

  So it was Shira who fell heir to her father’s longing for progeny. “Before we think too much about babies, Father, perhaps I should have a husband. Before that, I want to establish myself in my profession. And before that, I must learn. So you see, Father, it all fits together, and I shall soon be off to America to study art.”

  Soon, however, was not until the sullen winter had settled in over the Midlands and her father had ceased to speak to her save to ask for the salt or to read aloud some newspaper item about psychologists. And when confirmation finally arrived, he refused to see her off to the train for London to catch her plane. Thus it was her mother who gave her the small package from him.

  “‘Don’t open it until you’re on the plane,’ he said. Please understand. You know your father. Ah, yes, and here are some sandwiches for the train. Promise you will write often.”

  “I will. I love you both.” She slipped the packet from her father into the pocket of her coat and climbed aboard.

  It was not until the flight to New York was nearly over that she remembered and retrieved the packet from her coat in the overhead compartment. She sat down again and carefully opened the folded and creased butcher-paper wrapping. A tiny Star of David on a fine silver chain fell into her lap. She recognized it as one that had belonged to her grandmother. Father, you are such a sweet, stubborn man, she thought.

  At JFK airport in New York she wearily scanned the crowd as she emerged from the arrivals hall. She spotted a woman holding a hand-lettered sign with “Markham” written on it, and her heart sank. Regina Bosworth was not what she had expected and looked like no sculptor Shira had ever imagined. Her wild, gray-streaked hair erupted from beneath a drab blue headband. There were dark circles under her eyes and dirt under the fingernails of her big hands. A lumberjack of a woman right down to her plaid flannel shirt and scruffy, boot-cut jeans, she towered over Shira but spoke with the small, soft voice of a young mother crooning to a newborn.

  “You must be Shira Markham,” she said. “And you must be exhausted, poor thing! Let me carry those bags for you. My car’s in the parking garage, and we have a hike ahead of us. And a long drive.”

  On the drive up to Regina’s farm in rural Connecticut, Shira learned just what kind of a sculptor she had apprenticed herself to, a sculptor who welded steel girders and pipes into monuments to human folly that would grace a corporate headquarters in Michigan or break the monotony of a campus in Iowa, a sculptor who had found her audience in the moneyed enterprises of America. The turn onto the dirt drive that led up to her farmhouse was marked by a slender tower of rods and thick cables that stood with what seemed a brutish grace amidst the poplars lining the driveway.

  “I call it ‘Reach,’ and it’s only there because the damned high-tech company out in Santa Clara that commissioned it went belly up before I could deliver it. I thought of recycling the materials but decided to keep it around as a lesson in humility. However good you may be, Shira, whatever success you may obtain, no matter how many big commissions you might score, just remember not to become too full of yourself. An artist, a real one, is not a master but a servant, a servant of her art and of those who will love and appreciate her art. That is the first lesson and the last lesson. Now, let’s eat and then get to work.”

  Shira worked diligently that year and the next, to learn the lessons that Regina had to offer. Regina taught her to use an acetylene torch and a bending brake, to polish and to hammer, to work from sketches and to improvise. And, most of all, to love working with her hands, to love seeing physical form emerge from the void of invisible thought. But whenever she was not working with or for Regina, Shira would turn the same tools and techniques to art on a smaller scale, sculpting miniatures and replicas of Regina’s monuments, tiny wonders that charmed rather than awed the viewer. Regina, who had no agenda but to teach and to inspire, nurtured Shira’s more delicate talents with her generous appreciation, her honest and focused criticism, and with new tools that she acquired for no other purpose than to help Shira assemble a portfolio of intricate miniatures that would get her into the Rhode Island School of Design.

  As a going away present she handed Shira a small package done up in ribbon. Shira nearly dropped it.

  “What is in here? It feels like lead.”

  Regina smiled at her and said, “Silver. Not quite a small fortune, but let’s just say that much of my last commission is in there.”

  “I couldn’t, I …”

  “Yes, you could, and you will. This was what you were meant to do. Use it well, to make beautiful things. And write, damn it. More often than you write your folks back in England. I don’t know where you’re going, girl, but I expect more than a post card. Do you hear?”

  Shira loved it as a special student at the school, and learned to call it Risdee, as everyone did. Still, she quit after only three semesters. To her, time had begun to rush by, like the pages of a calendar in a 1940s movie blowing away in the wind. She took to jewelry as if she had been creating it all her life and used her work to get connections in Europe, then parlayed one deal into another until she could afford to start the studio in Haifa. Suddenly, time dragged, and she waited five agonizingly long months before calling her cousin and suggesting that they meet in Tel Aviv. She waited until she was there in person to ask about Migdal.

  For Shira it had been different because she had known, instantly, what it would take years for Migdal to learn. Within minutes of taking his hand and kissing him lightly on the cheek, she knew that Migdal Rozeyn was her bashert. She knew that she would have to run to catch up to him, but she would. Still, it was always in the back of her mind that she might catch up, only to find that it was too late.

  It was not.

  32

  1990 — Lev leaned against the door jamb, hands in the pockets of his blue jeans, and waited for Migdal to look up from the case file he was working on.

  “What?” Migdal said as he kept typing, his eyes still fixed on the computer screen.

  “Nothing. Shira’s in town, down from Haifa for the weekend. She asked about you.”

  Migdal finally looked over toward him. “Who?”

  “Shira. That Shira. I know it’s been a few years, but surely you remember Ga’ash beach.”

  Migdal still looked puzzled. “I have vivid memories of Ga’ash, all right, but I don’t remember any Shira.”

  “The English girl you boinked in broad daylight. Now do you remember?”

  Migdal nodded and smiled. “Now that I remember. That was, what, 1986? Just before we pulled in Vanunu. My God, where do the years go? You know my friend, we are getting old, too old for this business.”

  “Don’t let Abba hear you talk that way. He wants us to be here until we drop. Anyway, that one, that one on the beach, you must have known her as Sharon, my distant cousin Sharon Markham. Well, now she uses her Hebrew name, Shira, and she asked about you. She asked a lot about you. She must have asked me four times whether you were married or not. I warned you. Remember that, when you are sending out wedding invitations. Remember that I warned you.”

  Migdal did not have to remember for long. He and Shira slipped into each other’s lives as if the conversation started on the beach five years earlier had been interrupted by a short phone call or a quick trip to the loo. Something odd had happened in the interim. In a strange way, it seemed to Migdal as if she had caught up with him, as if he, already grown up, had stayed in a chronological holding pattern, while Sharon—Shira—had matured. There was no longer a chasm of years between them. It was the same number but not the same size. In defiance of fact, they had become contemporaries, and when they were together, Migdal could not imagine that he had ever miscalculated so badly. How could he have ever thought that he was too old for her?

  Of course, it had been different for Shira.

  33

  1999 — The first years of marriage to Migdal were the fulfillment of a dream, a plan Shira had formed and shaped on the drive back from Ga’ash and on which she
had been working for years. For Migdal, a middle-aged bachelor who had always lived alone and never expected otherwise, their life together was a wind from an unexpected quarter, and those early years mixed trial with pleasure.

  Aside from casual sleeping-bag snuggles, which had been an all but compulsory part of training back when he was in the army, Migdal had not been with a woman until that afternoon in Ga’ash with Shira, not since that one furtive time with Deborah on the Delft.

  He had not known what to make of it then, and he still did not know. He had just been relieved from the helm by Jef, who, much to their surprise, had volunteered to stand watch on the very last leg of the voyage. Deb had stopped Mitch on the way to his bedroom and dragged him into the nearest room. It was over almost too fast for him to decide whether it was good or not. As she left him lying there, sprawled out atop the yellow bedspread, she had said, incongruously, “You know, Jef’s not such a bad guy after all, Mitch. Remember that.” It was the day before they reached Israel, so he never had a chance to question her about what she meant.

  With Shira, from the very beginning on the beach, there had never been much ambiguity about sex, although every so often she would suddenly turn cold, and he would find himself sleeping alone for weeks or months before being invited back into their bed. Most times, she would eventually open up and tell him what it had been about, but there were times that he never learned what the issue had been. After Binyamin was born, she no longer kicked him out of the bedroom, but just turned her face to the door before turning out the light. Migdal, who would have preferred the sofa in the living room to the silence in the bedroom, was invariably patient or stoic, although even he didn’t always know the difference. Eventually, Shira would some night turn back and draw him into her in that same artless way she had on the sand at Ga’ash.

  As the years piled up, Migdal began to believe that he, too, had known from the beginning that they were meant for each other. Things that had never made sense before seemed to come together for him in a cohesive narrative that gave order and meaning to his life.

  At first, after the wedding, they both kept their apartments, and Migdal commuted between Haifa and Tel Aviv. On the strength of her artistry, Shira’s studio had been an almost instant success in Haifa, and they both concluded that it would be ill-advised to risk trying to relocate to Tel Aviv. But Mossad was based there, in its big, faceless building. When he had been a katsa, doing field work, Migdal hardly cared where his apartment was, but once he was doing analysis, it began to matter. At the same time, he was starting to lose faith in the mission of Mossad, beginning to doubt that his country was doing what was right. Ironically, it had started with Lev.

  Lev had just returned from overseas and came into Migdal’s office with a solemn face. He threw a stapled folder down on Migdal’s desk and said, “Fuck!”

  “What’s this? Oh, the ‘Italian Job.’” It was the code name for a preemptive strike against a family of bomb-making experts that served as indiscriminate consultants and suppliers to anyone willing to attack Israel. It had taken years of shoe-leather and analysis to put all the pieces together. A bit of casual name-dropping by an informant who was known to work both sides had finally allowed Mossad to begin tracking the bomb-maker’s movements and to plan an attack.

  “This is great,” Migdal said as he flipped through the first pages. “It looks like a textbook operation that went off like clockwork. And the press and everyone else thinks it was sectarian rivals who set off the bomb in the Cooper Mini. Even the collateral damage was acceptable; the street was virtually deserted. I’d say you have cause to celebrate.”

  “Yeah, lets chant Shehechiyanu. Everything went precisely according to plan. Perfect. We just hit the wrong house. We were just too cocky, too full of certainty, too full of ourselves. Fourteen innocent people, including nine children, died in the explosion and fire. None of them had anything to do with bombs or radical Islam. They just were in the wrong house, so we blew them away.

  “God, I hate this kind of thing. Whatever happened to tikkun olam? We Jews are supposed to heal the world, not blow it up.”

  Migdal fiddled with his pencil but could think of nothing to say at the time.

  It was not, of course, the only such mistake. Ever since his landing at Ga’ash, Migdal was particularly keenly aware that small missteps could carry immense consequences, that the price of misjudgment was often paid by the innocent. But with the debacle of the “Italian Job,” Migdal’s doubts grew deeper. It began to seem to him that the time-honored responsibility of Jews to set a moral example for the world was becoming lost amidst the hysteria over terrorism. Then Binyamin was born, and his world changed utterly. Being away for four or five days at a time was out of the question, so he quit Mossad, and moved to Haifa.

  Avram, who felt personally betrayed, was furious with him. “You don’t just walk away from us, from me, not like this. You don’t quit The Institute, you retire after a long and distinguished career. You leave quietly when you are no longer of use to Israel, when the secrets you know no longer matter because they are no longer secrets or because they are in the distant past and are no longer of consequence.”

  Migdal started to object, but Avram went on. “Yes, there have been others, of course. People leave. But you are not like those others who work for a while and quietly go on to new things. You have a history that makes you both special and suspect. That history may have been forgotten by some because of the work you have done, but it will be remembered the moment you go out the door. Surely you know that you would be watched for the rest of your life. Your every move would be scrutinized. People who have quit under the wrong circumstances or who have misbehaved after leaving have disappeared. No, I am not being melodramatic. You know too much. Dimona, for instance, and that is just one of many instances. Outside the Institute you become a potential threat to Israel just by walking around. Leave the country and you become a ticking bomb.”

  “I am threatening nothing,” Migdal said. “I am simply quitting.”

  “We are not even having this conversation. You are like a son to me, Migdal, you and Lev went through the IDF together. I trained you both. You called me Abba. Abba. Do not put me in such a terrible position.”

  Migdal took a deep breath. “Lev already said all that to me last night. I know the risks. I simply can’t be part of this anymore.”

  “Are you judging me? Are you judging us? Are you saying what we do or how we do it is wrong?”

  “No. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong, except for me. All I do know is that I want to heal rather than rend. I want to build something that when Binyamin is older I can point to with pride and say to him that I built that.”

  “What about all this?” Avram gestured around himself.

  “I didn’t build this. It’s just a building, anyway, filled with computers and files and papers. I wrote some of those papers. I created some of those files. But what are they? Nothing, ciphers, meaningless.”

  “You have done some brilliant work. You, you and Lev, were responsible for taking down that cell in Germany. You helped us get Vanunu. You…”

  Migdal stopped him. “Yes, I killed people and put others in jail. I ferreted out lies and liars, then I spread my own lies to cover other lies. Maybe it was right. I just don’t want to do it anymore.” He stood. “You do what you have to, Abba. I’ll do what I have to.”

  Of course, neither of the Novikovs were ready when, shortly after the move, he started Trade Now with some of the friendly Palestinian contacts he had made while still with Mossad. To him there was no such thing as justified terrorism, and he harbored no illusions about Palestinian “freedom fighters” as the good guys—the Israelis did not strap explosives around the waists of their children and send them into a crowd to become martyrs—but he truly believed that helping to lift the ordinary Palestinian out of cycles of poverty and ignorance and violence, that building bridges of mutual interdependence, was the best way he could serve the i
nterests of his son and his people.

  Lev and Avram were both livid, and their superiors were beside themselves. Surveillance stepped up and Migdal began thinking that he might be the target for more than just surveillance. But gradually things settled into a kind of détente, just as Migdal had planned, just as Migdal knew they would.

  He had two factors working in his favor. The first was the openness and visibility with which he conducted himself and carried out the mission of Trade Now. He was keenly aware of the irony. For the first time in his life, after years of living within layers of deception, he was doing business openly. He knew that the more public he was, the more the books of the association were wide open, the safer he would be. The second factor was the very brilliance and skill of his colleagues back at Mossad. He, of all people, knew well what they could do and what they could not. He knew precisely the bounds of their abilities, and he planned to stay, from then on, within those bounds. He knew they would find out about whatever he did, be watching every move, reviewing every deal. All he had to do was be completely above board and scrupulously honest about everything, and they would know it. The longer they trailed him, the more they would learn that he was no threat. He wanted them to be taping him when he met with a Palestinian businessman in the West Bank. He wanted them to be photographing his contacts in Germany and tracking his phone calls. He wanted them to be shuffling and sorting and correlating the data. What he did not want was for their imaginations to take over.