“I thought you went to that place with the initials.”
“You mean MIT? I did, for my doctorate, but I hadn’t received more than a master’s when I met your mother. My doctorate came later.”
“I guess Nono liked you ’cause you’re smart.”
“My romance with your mother seems to have been pushed by both your grandfather and my uncle.”
Meira laughed. “Mutual admiration society.”
“It seemed that way.” He grinned at her before turning back to Tony. “The night after I met your mother, I discovered Uncle Avram’s prejudice in her favor. I told my uncle about her, and when I mentioned your grandfather’s name, he grew quiet, puffing and slowly blowing out the smoke. Then he said, ‘Eban Barash?’ like I’d hit the jackpot.”
“’Cause he was in government?” Tony asked.
David nodded. “A powerful man, it seemed. My uncle’s pleasure got me wondering if my meeting your mother was anything like Isaac’s servant encountering Rebecca at the well.”
“Who’s Isaac?”
Meira raised her brows. “Our son needs some religious training.”
“No, I don’t,” Tony said, waving the idea away like a fly in front of his face.
“Every educated person should know the Bible stories,” David said, “whether you choose to believe them or not.”
Tony blew out a puff of air.
David ignored him. “Isaac was one of the patriarchs. The son of Abraham, to whom Adonai promised generations of sons to carry the message of the Holy One. We’ll tell you more about him later.”
“I know about Abraham. Ishmael was his first son. The Arabs came from him, and Allah loved him best.”
The influences that had been pummeling Tony with lies angered David, and yet he and Meira had given them access by positioning their son so he’d be vulnerable. And now they had to fix it—or at least try. “Who told you that?”
“Bahir’s tutor. Sometimes he went with us to the beach and told us stories.”
“Well, here’s the truth—”
Tony shot to his feet, his face reddening and his hands becoming fists at his sides. “Truth? Whose truth? Bahir never, ever lied to me.”
“Sit down, son.” David spoke quietly but with a coolness that demanded obedience.
Tony stared at the floor, his fingers stuck in his front pockets, his shoulders hunched. Finally, he fell back onto the couch.
Meira reached over to grab David’s hand. Her eyes reflected the sorrow he felt as she directed her words at their son. “Truth is an absolute. Just because we haven’t told it to you earlier—and you’ll better understand why as we continue the story—doesn’t change truth, certainly not the truth of Scripture. Abraham’s firstborn was indeed Ishmael, but Ishmael was the son of a concubine—a servant—not of his wife. Ishmael was born because Abraham and his wife Sarah stopped trusting in HaShem and His promises. He was born because of their unbelief.”
Tony didn’t look up, and he didn’t speak.
“That’s a conversation for another day,” David said. “Back to our tale. My Uncle Avram worked for the Ministry of Public Security and, as I said, knew your grandfather. Connections are crucial, no matter where you live, but especially in a small country like Israel. I figured my uncle would foster my relationship with your mother because of her father. Her father might do the same because of my uncle.”
“Tell him about your mother,” Meira said. “You know, the story she told me after we were married.”
David grinned. “He’s going to make us promise never to play matchmaker.”
That provoked a raised eyebrow when Tony looked at him. At least they’d gotten his attention. “Matchmaker?”
“My parents,” David continued, “especially my mom, wanted me to follow in my father’s footsteps and bring home a bride from Israel, but this was 1979, not the 1940s when my dad went to Jerusalem to study—and to marry. My mother wouldn’t let it alone. She was so determined I find a nice Israeli bride that she wrote to at least half the extended family. I ended up meeting girl friends of cousins, girls who were second, third, and fourth cousins, anyone who seemed remotely marriageable.”
“Yuck.”
“Yeah, well, that’s about how I felt,” David said. “Until I met your mother. At first, I thought she was only a chance-met woman, but it didn’t take me long to decide chance had nothing to do with it.”
Tony looked from one of them to the other. “Are you talking about luck or fortune-telling kind of stuff?”
“God kind of stuff.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I only had another week of vacation, and I lived 5900 miles away. Of course, I had no idea a madman would force my hand.”
“Force it?” Meira narrowed her eyes in a scowl.
Laughing, David drew her to him. The embrace wasn’t smoothly done, but he made his point and surprised a laugh from her. Normally, Tony would have grinned with them. He didn’t.
“Let’s say,” David said when she’d straightened again, “what happened next brought us to the point sooner rather than later.”
6
Meira
Tony let out an exasperated sigh. “Can we, you know, get off all the mush?”
“Fine, no more mush,” David said, draping his arm around Meira’s shoulders. “Back to the bad-guy stuff.”
She turned to press her back against her husband, needing his closeness. “My turn,” she said. “The day after the bombing, I went in to teach my classes as usual.”
“What about your leg?” Tony asked.
“The doctor stitched me up, and my mother insisted I use my grandfather’s cane if I wouldn’t stay home and in bed. I’d have loved to take the day off, but my students had a project due, so my father dropped me off at the school and said he’d come back for me at the end of the day.” Remembering her foolishness, her lack of forethought, she sighed. “I could have avoided all that came next if I’d used my brain. Instead, I made it simple for the bomber to identify me.”
“How come?” Tony asked, suddenly more interested.
“Are you asking why I did it or how?”
“Both.”
“The why remains a mystery, even to me. The how? I didn’t connect the dots. I knew he’d seen my face, and he’d seen it within half a block of the school. All he had to do was hang around the area to see if he could spot me coming or going from a house or a business on that street. I should have assumed he’d try to find out who I was so he could silence me.”
Tony glanced from her to his father and back. “How come your dad didn’t make you stay home?”
Recounting this part still embarrassed her. “Because I hadn’t told him or anyone that I’d seen the man’s face.”
“That was dumb,” her son said with all the wisdom of his thirteen years.
“It was incredibly dumb.” And all the rest had come from that one stupid choice, hadn’t it? “When I went out to pick up lunch from the sandwich shop across the street, the bomber was leaning against a no-parking sign. He blended so well with my students in his jeans and t-shirt that I didn’t recognize him until I headed back toward the school and he turned in my direction. I almost tripped over my cane, I was so surprised.”
“Oh, man, you must have been scared to death.”
She had been. Her heart had raced, and sweat had pooled under her arms once she was on the other side of the school door. “I got into the building before he could do anything. When I looked out the window of the school office, I saw he had cornered a couple of my students.”
Tony beat a tattoo on his knees with his fingertips. “What did they tell him?”
She wanted to grab his hands to stop their fidgets, but instead she focused on his face. “He pretended to know me from university and got one of them to say my name.”
“Just like that? Sounds really stupid. I mean, if he wasn’t a Jew like them.”
“Not all my students were Jewish. Some were Arabs, although
most spoke Hebrew as well as Arabic and even English. They had no suspicion he was the bomber, so it would have been easy to involve them in conversation.”
“Like I said, dumb.”
“On my part,” she said, “not theirs. I called the police, gave them a sketch of the man’s face, and had my father pick me up in a taxi.”
“Was Nono mad?”
“At me? He was furious.”
1979
Her father waited to speak until he’d helped her into the house, set her carryall on the floor, and led her into his library. “Now. What is this all about?”
She leaned the walking stick against the wall and eased down onto one of his big chairs, cudgeling her brain for words that wouldn’t worry him. There weren’t any, not with a man who could extract truth with that unflinching stare of his faster than a dentist could yank out a tooth—and sometimes with equal pain. Aba had been winning contests of wills against her and Yaacov since they’d first tried to deny misbehavior. He always won. Always.
“The man who set the bomb knows my name.”
Aba began to pace. When she got to the end of her narrative, he looked down at her over his long nose, his bushy brows jutting over narrowed eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me he’d seen you? And near your school? I would have told you not to present yourself in that neighborhood for fear just such a thing would happen.”
The control in his voice sent a shiver through her. She’d have preferred a more visible anger, because suddenly the ramifications of her choices seemed more deadly than she’d imagined. She hadn’t thought, had she, and now she’d put them all in danger.
“I’m sorry, Aba.”
“I know you are.” He sighed, walked to the sideboard, and poured himself a finger of scotch. “Now we must decide what to do,” he said, taking a sip. “Let me think about it and discuss this with your mother. I will also speak with the police.”
Meira stood and headed for the door. He stopped her, saying, “I have invited that young man, David Rassadim, to dine with us tonight.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised, although she couldn’t help the jolt that hit her at his words. Her parents would naturally offer hospitality to someone who had helped a member of the family. She nodded and headed upstairs.
Her father’s disappointment kicked her worry into high gear. In trying to hang onto a semblance of freedom, she’d endangered everyone.
She turned on the bathroom faucet and waited for the water to warm. Her reflection stared back from the mirror above the sink, her normally smooth forehead riddled with worry lines. She imagined them deepening, turning her hag-like before she was thirty.
Just when she wanted to be beautiful.
Because he was coming. She splashed her face, wiped it dry, and hurried into her bedroom.
After rejecting one dress and then the next and the next, her fingers rested on the deep purple crepe that draped in layers to just below the knee. Ima didn’t approve of the American short skirts, but she wanted her daughter to be stylish. Most days, Meira ignored her mother’s wince at her choice of pants—a dress would not work in the studio—but tonight she needed to feel beautiful, and that meant a swirly dress, even if her poor battered leg wouldn’t be happy balancing in heels.
She pulled off her khakis and top and slid the silky dress over her head, smoothing it down over her hips and reaching behind to zip it up the back. Wiggling, she could almost reach the top of the zipper, but Ima would have to help with those last few inches to make her presentable for their guest.
She shouldn’t be thinking this way, not about a man when there was all that other hanging over her head, over her family’s head. But she didn’t want to wallow in guilt tonight. Or worry about anyone’s safety.
She wanted to see David again. Their guest. Who happened to be an American. She wanted to feel pretty and admired even if only for one evening.
The distance between here and America was a good thing. It meant he’d soon be gone, and she could forget about him.
That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? Just this evening. No involvement, and after that, her life as it had been.
But it would never be that again. Not after the mess she’d made by forgetting she had brains—or by forgetting to use them.
She sat in front of her dressing-table mirror and brushed her hair until the table light gleamed in its auburn strands. The action of drawing the brush down and through was automatic, drilled into her by her mother—one hundred strokes (but who counted) to bring out the shine. As a child, she’d watched her mother’s nightly ritual and thought how beautiful her mother’s curls were when they bounced as the brush loosed them. Her sweet Ima, whose life Meira might have endangered by her recklessness today.
She checked the time. An hour yet to wait with nothing to do. Bina wouldn’t want her in the kitchen. Ima was probably closeted with Aba, talking about her and the afternoon’s disaster.
She moved to her small bookcase and took out one of her reference books. She’d be teaching a class on the Impressionists next term. Perhaps she should use this time to study up on the period.
She flipped through a few pages, unable to focus on art, but she did her best, flipping and staring for a good quarter hour. Her watch showed she still had thirty-three minutes to go.
Fine. Maybe she’d go down early, get her mother to pull up her zipper all the way. She mustn’t forget the zipper.
Wouldn’t that be embarrassing, the top of her dress folded down on itself, her back gaping for all to see? She grabbed her tube of lip gloss and dabbed some on, checking the color. It worked. Her cheeks had pink that flamed too easily—and they’d add even more if she grew tongue-tied talking to the man.
David.
Tony’s groan yanked her from the memory. Poor thing had his head in his hands.
“Take a deep breath, son. She’s not giving you any details, so you can relax,” David said. “But we’ll move on. Your mom stayed home over the next few days while plans to keep everyone safe were in the works. Finally, using Mom’s sketches, the police arrested a suspect. We thought that was the end of it. She’d identify the guy. He’d go to prison. Thinking it was over, we grew complacent.”
They hadn’t, she thought. She had. “Much too complacent.”
Tony’s knee started to bounce.
“Just a little more, and we’ll take a break.”
He stopped the bouncing. “I don’t need a break. Just tell me what happened.”
“Fine,” she said, because agreeing was easier. She’d call a halt soon, whether he wanted one or not. “I relaxed when I shouldn’t have and didn’t think beyond the moment, assuming an arrest meant we were all safe.”
“Why didn’t it?” The bouncing started again, this time with the other leg.
She ignored it. “They had the wrong man. My father’s plan was to pick me up at the school so I could identify the suspect once the police said they were ready for me. My morning class went as usual, and I decided to enjoy the warm weather and loosen some of the kinks in my muscles by taking a short walk. The secretary would tell my father where I was if he called.”
“By the time I got there to check on you, your father had already left to get you,” David said. “I couldn’t believe you’d actually gone back to the school.”
“I saw no reason not to. No bomber, no danger.” She shrugged. “Going outside, though, was reckless. I admit it. For one thing, I’d been injured. For another, I had no idea if the bomber had worked alone. Common sense and I had parted company, and I didn’t think beyond how bright the sun was that day and how much I needed to move, injury or not. You know how much I love to walk. I couldn’t resist pulling on my sweater and hobbling around the block.”
“At least you had the sweater and the cane.” David’s gentle squeeze felt comforting.
“If it hadn’t been for those and for my father driving up at that exact moment . . .”
“What?” Tony asked. “What would have happened?”
&n
bsp; “Your mother would have been killed.”
“Kill-ed?” His boy’s voice cracked into a soprano, and his legs stilled. “Re-ally?”
She nodded. “I had just turned toward your grandfather’s car when a man came at me with a knife. I guess the cane in my hand and the fact that I was in the middle of my turn gave me an advantage and deflected that nasty blade, so I ended up with a slashed arm and an unraveled sweater instead of a pierced stomach and, if the knife had continued upward, a hole in my heart.” The memory of the attacker’s words also stuck. “He cried ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he slashed at me, and I recognized him. It was the bomber.”
“Whoa. Is that where you got that scar on your arm? You said it was ’cause of an accident.”
“Now you know.” She smoothed back his hair. “You could say it was an accident that the knife only sliced my arm, because he’d certainly intended worse.”
Tony ducked away from her hand. “Yeah, right. So, did they get him? The guy with the knife?”
“No. There was too much confusion at the scene. I lost my balance and fell to the sidewalk, bleeding and awkward. People rushed forward to help. I don’t think anyone knew immediately what had happened, or who’d done it, so the attacker got away.”
“Then who was the guy in jail?”
“A look-alike cousin,” she said. “Another would-be freedom fighter.”
David snorted. “You mean terrorist. Let’s not honor them with a name they don’t deserve. They weren’t fighting for freedom. They lived in freedom.”
“Which allowed them access to me and the others,” Meira said.
Tony frowned and said, “But those guys were Palestinians?”
“They were Arab Israelis.”
“Who’d lost their homeland.” Back was his mulish look.
“No,” she said, “they hadn’t. The bomber and his cousin lived in family homes in and around Nazareth. They were Israeli citizens.”
“Second-class citizens,” he said, with all the fierceness of a budding rebel.
From Fire Into Fire Page 3