From Fire into Fire
An Isaac House Novella
Normandie Fischer
Copyright © 2016 by Normandie Fischer
Published by Sleepy Creek Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover Design: Jenny at Seedlings Design Studio
From Fire into Fire/Normandie Fischer—1st ed.
ISBN: 978-0-9861416-5-2
1
Meira
“Allahu Akbar!”
The madman’s cry flashed into memory, and Meira saw again the knife-wielder who’d proclaimed his god greater than all others. He’d pounced, his face so close to hers that his spittle had dripped down her cheek. But he’d missed his mark, and she, though scarred, had lived.
What she and David planned to do today brought into full relief all that had happened sixteen years ago, along with the fear that hearing their truth would leave indelible scars on their son.
Here in rural New York, gulls screeched over the placid lake, and the sun angled its way into day. She pressed her bare feet against the porch floorboards to set her rocker in motion and tried to get her pencil working to sketch something, anything. Maybe the scratch of lead on paper, the rhythmic creak of the old boards, and the back and forth, back and forth, would erase memories of the men—and the woman—who’d brandished those words along with a knife, a gun, and a bomb. Or maybe, if the memory glued itself to her thoughts like sticky tape, she could use it to help with what was to come.
Behind her, the cottage waited, cool and welcoming, their safety net in the early years and the place that had allowed them to pretend to be normal once they’d begun their undercover life as Arabs. Would it cocoon them as well after the tale was told? She prayed so.
She and David knew the difference between the truth and a lie. Knew it intimately. Moral relativism, that posh term for a decadent point of view, didn’t fit either of them, and yet they lied for a living.
She stared out at the lake, where the light shimmered on the water, silhouetting David as he lowered himself to the dock next to their son. The sun, edging its way over the horizon, blurred images just as their lies had smeared the charcoal portrait of their life.
And now they were about to break into truth with the one who meant the world to them. It made her gut hurt, because Tony would hate them after this day’s work. He’d think their truths putrid because of what the years in Lebanon had taught him.
He turned and waved his rod, obviously wanting her to remember his promise of fish for tonight. “Today I’ll catch the big one, Mom. I can feel it. Today is my lucky day.”
Tears had welled at the words, but he’d merely glanced at his dad and grinned. Her men often shared that look, the one that meant women were incomprehensible to the male mind.
David and Tony baited their hooks and tossed lines off the dock’s edge. She couldn’t see the splash of the weight as it pulled the morsel down to fish level, but she could imagine it. Imagine the plop as it hit the water and her boy’s grin because they were out there again, with the promise of dinner waiting to be reeled in.
If only fishing were all they had to do today. If only.
2
Tony
Tony braced his fishing rod against the dock, steadying it with one hand as he examined the bucket of wiggling earthworms. “You think those are good enough as bait?”
His dad nodded. “Good enough.”
“That guy at the shop, he said he uses lures.”
“We have some if these don’t work, but the fish liked worms when I was a kid. Doubt they’ve changed preferences.”
Tony bent to stare at the floating cork, waiting for anything that looked like a bite on his line. They’d only been here a couple of days, and his dad seemed kind of tense. Mom said they’d come home from Lebanon for a vacation, and a vacation was supposed to relax you, wasn’t it? Maybe canoeing and catching fish would do the trick. Tony was determined to catch a good one before he left, bigger than legal, so maybe two feet. Wouldn’t that be trophy sized? He grinned at the thought of the letter he’d send back to Bahir. With a picture. And he’d promised himself he’d swim all the way to the diving platform this year. Get his dad to take a picture of that, too.
They’d probably take a bunch of photos of that stupid boarding school they were forcing him to go to instead of letting him go back to Lebanon with them. Only because some stupid jerks had beat up on him and Bahir. He was fine. Or almost. His black eye had turned yellow, so that meant it was almost good as new, and the rest of him didn’t hurt so bad anymore. He and Bahir’d just have to watch out and not go to the beach without other friends around. They could be careful.
But the school had said yes to taking him. So he guessed it was set—unless he could talk Mom and Dad out of it in the next couple of months.
He tugged at his shorts, which were kinda snug and kinda high up his leg. Maybe he was finally starting to grow. He sure didn’t want to go to some dumb new school if he still looked like a kid. No one would believe he’d be fourteen his next birthday. He looked ten.
The other guys back in Beirut, like Bahir, were growing or were already big. Some had muscles, really good ones. Tony’s arms still stuck out like sticks with lumps the size of lemons where he’d tried for biceps. His dad promised it wouldn’t be long before he grew, but what did Dad know about long? When you were the puny one in a group, “not long” seemed like forever.
Poor Bahir was mad because he couldn’t get rid of the kid pudge he’d carried for as long as Tony’d known him. It must be from his mother’s side, because Bahir’s dad was tall and real skinny. Or maybe Bahir just hadn’t got there yet. All Tony wanted was to start catching up with his dad. Then maybe his voice would change, and he wouldn’t feel like such a wimp. And no one would freak out when he and Bahir when alone to the beach. He liked Lebanon, especially with a best friend. The Mediterranean sure beat anything they had in New York.
He heard a plop out on the lake and looked down at his line, willing a fish to swim in this direction. “You think we should try one of those lures yet?” he asked.
“Give it time.” Dad lifted and lowered his rod so his cork bobbed.
Tony sighed and went back to worrying that he might take after his mom. She was little, but at least her dad and her brother weren’t. They lived in Israel. Tony didn’t get why they’d want to be there. Plus, his grandmother sure cried a lot. Dad said that was just the way some women did things. Got weepy over movies and saying goodbye.
Anyway, until he grew some, he didn’t think going away to school would work for him.
“This is great, isn’t it?” Dad said. “Just the two of us.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad we’re out here alone, because I need to talk to you.”
Tony shifted position. “Okay.”
Dad didn’t say any more. Guys did silence. Tony got that, but not when one of them said he wanted to talk and the other agreed to listen.
Finally, his father cleared his throat. “It’s about you, us, our family.” He pulled at his line again, tweaking it like he wanted to check for a bite. “You know how you’ve always b
een with Arabic children and speak their language as well as you do English?”
Tony flattened himself on his stomach to look over the edge of the dock. The dark water lapped against the pilings. Sometimes it sounded like a burp. “Sure,” he said.
“You remember that your grandfather’s father was Armenian and where Armenia is?”
“Sure.”
“What you may not know is that he was a Christian whose family fled genocide in 1917 and moved to Israel. He lived and traded with the Jews and the Arabs there. Then one day he fell in love with your great-grandmother.”
“We’ve got a picture of her. She was beautiful.”
“Yes, she was beautiful. And great-granddaddy Yerev loved her and wanted to marry her, but her father thought it was a terrible thing. Yerev’s family and friends weren’t any happier.”
Something in the way his father spoke made him sit up again. He didn’t like the look on his dad’s face, like right before Tony got in trouble. Only, this wasn’t the mad voice.
His father said, “Your great-grandmother was…” and swallowed a word. Then it came out whole. “Miriam was a Jew.”
Jew? Tony took a moment to make sure that’s what he’d heard. “Jew? No way.”
“Yes, she was.”
“You mean like the Israelis?”
“She was an Israeli Jew.” His dad put down his fishing rod.
Tony stared out over the water. He picked out one lonely cloud, like a rhino’s head with its horn. “How can my grandmother be a Jew and me be an Arab? Did she change?”
“Well, son, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I guess it boils down to you not being an Arab.”
Wait. That couldn’t be true. He was an Arab. They were all Arabs. They didn’t worship some Jewish God. Because Arabs didn’t.
“My grandfather Yerev figured the God of the Christian and the God of the Jew were the same, so it didn’t much matter that Miriam wanted to raise my father a Jew. Both of my parents were Americans, but they were born in Israel.”
Tony could barely squeak out his next question. “What about Mom?”
“Jewish.”
No. No way.
He swallowed back the saliva that started to fill his mouth. This didn’t make any sense at all. If what Dad said was true, that meant . . . they’d lied. His whole family was a bunch of liars.
“We wanted to tell you from the beginning, but for your safety we’ve let you think we were all Arab-Americans. If you had known the truth, it would have been dangerous for you.”
“But . . . why?”
“I think you know why.”
“You lied.” That was all that mattered. “All my life.” He scrambled to his feet, his fists brushing his sides.
“Son.”
“No. Just no.”
“We didn’t lie,” his father said as Tony turned toward the house. “We just didn’t tell you the whole truth.”
“And that’s not lying?” He spoke the words that came to him, the emotion that choked him. “I . . . I hate you.”
The build-up of saliva had become bile as his stomach knotted and threatened to punch his breakfast up and out, and he crouched, just in case.
3
Tony
He was going to puke right here, right in front of his now-silent father, the man he’d believed in, trusted. Until this moment. Until his dad had pronounced this . . . what was the word for it? This blasphemy. Bahir’s tutor had told them what shouldn’t be said or even imagined. What would anger Allah. How Allah hated Jews.
Dad’s words made him a Jew, too, didn’t they? But he couldn’t be one. His friends were Arabs. They used to spit the word Jew like a glob of gunk on the hard ground as the term took wing among them. He and Bahir and some of the other guys were going to be part of taking back Israel for the Palestinians. For Bahir’s family.
He’d been right there with them. Proud, like the others, with his still-skinny chest sticking out and his fists pumping the air—against Israel.
He dashed down the dock as fast as his shrimpy legs would carry him. Back to the cabin, straight past his mother, the other liar. He went to the bathroom, slammed the door, and threw up all his breakfast.
His mother finally pushed her way in. He was sitting on the tile floor, his knees up, his head resting on his folded arms.
“Tony, honey.”
He didn’t raise his head. “Don’t.”
“Oh, Tony. Oh, my darling.” His mother sat on the cold floor beside him. He stiffened, because no way was she going to get all lovey-dovey with him now he knew the truth.
He kept his head down. “All my life. You’ve lied to me. All. My. Life.”
“I’m so . . . so sorry, so very sorry.” Tears messed up her words until they came out on a sniffle. “We never wanted to leave you out of things, but it was the only way to keep you safe. We love you so much, my darling boy.” She smoothed his hair.
He jerked away. Her hand felt wrong. It wasn’t his real mother’s hand.
“Why?” He sounded like a weakling. He cleared his throat. He would not be weak. “Why’d you do it? Pretend all these years?”
His father pushed the door the rest of the way open, his sandaled feet stopping close enough for Tony to see the hairs sticking out the top of his toes.
“Come out here, both of you,” Dad said, “and we’ll try to explain.” He helped Mom up.
Tony took a minute more. He didn’t want to follow. He didn’t want to do anything they said, ever again, but he needed answers. In the living room, he flung himself down on the big leather couch, but then Mom sat in the middle, and he had to scoot over more. He should have picked a chair instead, because now they were lined up like one happy family.
“Just listen and try not to judge until you’ve heard it all. Can you do that?” Dad angled so he faced them both.
Maybe they figured they’d sit next to each other so they could gang up against him. Tony stared at the floor. He’d have to answer sooner or later. If he didn’t, his dad would wait forever, just to make him squirm. So, he nodded.
“Your grandfather’s full name was Anthony Rassadim. I was born David Rassadim. You were named after my father.”
Tony groaned.
“You said you’d listen.”
He started chewing the inside of his cheek. It was that or run.
“Our family can trace its lineage for hundreds and hundreds of years,” Dad said, “and God has been with us all through that time.”
Mom took Dad’s hand. Solidarity, that’s what they were after. Well, that was obviously nothing new. Leaving him out meant they’d been solidly against him from the beginning.
“Your other grandmother, the one you know,” Dad continued, “lost all her family in Hitler’s Germany, in gas chambers during the Holocaust.”
Maybe that’s why she cried so much. Or maybe she cried because she lied, too. “Some of the guys say the Holocaust didn’t happen, that it’s only a lie the Jews tell.”
“It was very real to my mother,” Mom said, “and to the six million who died at Hitler’s hand. Ima knew what it meant to suffer and fear, to go hungry and watch people die, to wonder always if there would ever be a place where a Jew would be welcome. And then there was Israel.”
He opened his mouth to speak again, but his father stopped him. “Don’t say anything yet. Listen to what we tell you. Then you may speak.”
He couldn’t look at them, so he stared down at his hands. He expected to see claws or something awful now he knew these were Jewish hands.
4
Meira
She’d known this would be hard, but nothing could have prepared her for the reality of it. Her boy, so wounded, sitting there with slumped shoulders. So distant.
Thirteen was a vulnerable age, half boy and half man. Maybe they should have done this sooner. Or quit their undercover life before it became an issue.
Or never agreed to do it at all.
They’d sheltered him from the brutality of
militant terrorist warfare. All he’d known were the angry words, not the senseless slaughter or the suicide bombers—except perhaps in the abstract. Never in terms of innocents dying.
She leaned toward him slightly, longing to bridge a gap that seemed much wider than the mere twelve inches separating them. The couch seemed bigger suddenly, the leather colder with an invisible barrier lowered between them, blocking touch. All she had were words.
And so she used them. “I met your father in 1979, in Jerusalem. I can still picture the scene as if it were yesterday. I’d just left the art school at the end of the day. The school secretary, Rachel, called a goodbye, and I turned to answer. I’d gone about a hundred yards toward Ben Yehuda Street and the intersection where I could catch a bus when a black hajib caught my attention.”
Tony stirred and asked, “A hajib? Is that one of those veil things some of the women wear in Beirut?”
“I know the names are confusing, but you’re thinking of the niqab, which hides all but a woman’s eyes. The hajib is tied around the head to hide the hair but to accentuate the face.” She smiled, but his expression sobered her immediately. She struggled to form the next words. “So . . . anyway, this Arab’s scarf hung differently from the way it’s designed to be tied. It draped low over the forehead, hiding her face as she focused her attention on the sidewalk. I wondered if she were worried about stepping in camel dung or dog droppings as she climbed from the car.”
“As if there’d been camels anywhere near the streets of Jerusalem for decades,” David said, trying to add a dose of humor.
She appreciated his effort. “Yes, well, the thing was, this woman wasn’t actually a woman, but a man trying to hide in women’s garb. I got a look at her—I mean his—face after he dropped a package in the rubbish bin. He turned in my direction, keeping his head low until he was almost in front of me and then he looked up, right into my eyes. I suppose he didn’t stop to deal with me because he wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and that trash bin, but he saw me—and I saw him. That’s when the trouble began.”
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