Establishment

by Howard Fast

  “I’m a journalist, but that’s not why I’m here.” Then, as best she could, Barbara explained what had brought her to Israel.

  “To see your husband’s grave?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. Or perhaps I simply had to come.”

  “But I don’t know why you should think your husband is buried in our cemetery. We have a small military cemetery, but it is only for the boys from the kibbutz who fell in the war. Your husband was never a part of this kibbutz, was he?”

  “No. But they told me—”

  “Wait, don’t be troubled,” Sarah Perez said kindly. “I have the register here.” She went to the filing cabinet and found a notebook and began to thumb through it. While she was doing this, a slender, white-haired man, pink-cheeked, in his seventies, with a small white beard and mustache, entered the room.

  “Ah, Shimon!” Sarah Perez said, adding to Barbara, “He will know. He remembers everything.”

  “Not everything. Even God, He doesn’t remember everything.”

  “Shimon,” she said, “this is Mrs. Cohen from the States. Her husband was killed near Megiddo in forty-eight. She was in the States. She was told that he was buried at our kibbutz.”

  The old man looked at Barbara, and then he said something to Sarah Perez in Hebrew.

  “He offers you compassion,” she said. “He says you are a good and beautiful woman.”

  “I suppose I am old enough to tell you myself. What was your husband’s name?”

  “Bernie—Bernie Cohen.”

  He stood for a moment with his eyes closed, and then he nodded. “Yes, I remember. There was some confusion because one of our boys named Cohen was in the north. Then the body was sent here, then his papers were sent here. He was American.” He shrugged. “Why not here? It’s a good place, a very ancient place. Are you unhappy for that?”

  Barbara shook her head.

  “You want the body exhumed and brought to your home?”

  “No. This is what he would have wanted. To lie here.”

  “Then you just want to look at his grave?” the old man asked her.

  “Yes.” It was senseless, to leave her child again and come all the distance for this. To look at a grave. Now, sitting here, in the bleak office of the kibbutz, facing the two strangers, she felt not only foolish but inwardly shattered, purposeless, as if overcome by a growing sense that prison had left her empty, her life meaningless.

  “If you wish, I take you to his grave,” Shimon said.

  “Yes, please.” She stood up. “Thank you,” she said unhappily to Sarah Perez.

  The old man led her out into the sunshine, along a narrow dirt road that led up the hillside. “The dead still guard us,” he said strangely, pointing up the mountainside. “Up there, just beyond the crest, is the border of old Judea, which the Jordanians still hold. It’s quiet now, but still we live on the edge of eternity. That is not an easy way to live, is it?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You are not Jewish, are you?”

  “No.”

  “And now you are here in this strange place with these strange people. It must be very hard.”

  “No, it’s not hard. I suppose I’m trying to understand why I came. Whatever lives of my husband is inside me, not here.”

  “Why not here?” the old man asked. “Ah, here is the cemetery. Not very big, only a few hundred graves, but from one small kibbutz, for us it was a terrible bloodletting. The flower of our children.”

  The graves ascended in steps up the hillside, and each was finished with loving care, each with a small headstone inscribed in Hebrew.

  “I can’t read this,” Barbara said plaintively.

  “I’ll find it.”

  A young man and a young woman, both in shorts and browned by the sun, were cutting and fitting stone, building an ornamental staircase to ascend the hillside between the graves.

  “You know,” Shimon said, “I grew up in Canada. We are most of us from somewhere else, and my memory of cemeteries is of cold, bleak places. Why should that be so? We thought this should be a different kind of a place. That golden stone they are cutting and shaping comes out of our own mountain. It is the same golden stone that old Jerusalem was built out of.”

  They were climbing higher and higher, and now, ahead of her, at the end of the path, Barbara saw a small stone building, like a crypt, perhaps eight feet square and windowless.

  Shimon touched her arm. “Here, Barbara.”

  She paused. He pointed to a grave alongside of where they stood. “That’s it. Your husband’s grave.”

  She looked at it. No different from the other graves, simply a grave with some Hebrew lettering on the headstone and below it, the dates: 1906–1948. She felt nothing, only empty, dry, dry as the dust. She stood that way for perhaps five minutes, pleading inwardly for something that was nameless and undefined and perhaps nonexistent.

  Then, in a voice as dry and toneless as her inner feeling, she pointed to other headstones upon which small bits of fieldstone had been placed. “What do those small stones mean?”

  “It’s an old Jewish custom. When you visit a grave, you leave a stone on the headstone. Some say it’s an indication that you have been there, and you leave something to stay with the dead. That’s a sentimental notion, and I’m not sure it has any validity. It’s a very old custom, and I don’t think anyone knows exactly what it means.”

  “And there, in that little house?” Barbara asked. “Is it a crypt—for ashes?”

  “We don’t cremate people in our faith. No, it’s not a crypt.”

  “What then?” she asked, not really interested but not knowing what else to say.

  “Why don’t you step inside?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Perhaps it does.”

  Then, feeling petulant and put upon, Barbara strode over to the tiny stone house, flung open the door, and stepped inside.

  The stained glass of the roof let a blazing shower of light into the small room. On the walls to her left and right, from floor to ceiling, each in a Plexiglas, airtight frame, each about six inches square, were the photographs of the men who were buried in the military cemetery of Kiryat Anavim. Only they were not men. They were boys. They were children. They were laughing, delighted children. These were not posed photographs but snapshots lovingly gathered from parents and relatives.

  She found herself going from picture to picture, from laughing face to laughing face. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, “I am looking for Bernie.” But they would have no picture of him.

  Then the dry dam within her broke, and she collapsed on the floor, sobbing hysterically. She had wept in the past, but never had she let go of all emotional holds and barriers and let collapse the walls that surrounded her and protected her.

  The old man waited outside. He heard the sound of her grief as did the two young people who were cutting stone, but when they wanted to go inside to answer what they felt was a cry of agony, a plea for help, he pushed them away.

  “Leave her alone,” he said. “Leave her with the dead. This is her time for such things.”

  The dam broke, and after the first great surge, the water lessened. Gasping, Barbara found that she could breathe. The tears stopped finally, and she was able to open her purse and take out a handkerchief and wipe her face. She rose shakily, feeling not so much faint as lightheaded, and then she went outside.

  “Are you all right?” Shimon asked her.

  “Yes. I’m all right.”

  “Shall we go back?”

  “Yes.”

  But after a few steps Barbara said, “I forgot something.”

  Shimon watched as she walked back up to Bernie’s grave, took a small stone from the ground, and placed it on his headstone.

  ***

  The light breeze was j
ust enough for headway, just enough for the rudder to respond to the wheel as they ran north into San Pablo Bay. Jean, wearing old Levi’s and a big white sweater, sprawled on cushions in the cockpit and watched Dan.

  “Well, old girl,” he said to her, “how do you like it?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “Slow learners, both of us. Half a century to get you into a boat, half a century to civilize me.”

  “I don’t know about the civilizing process, but you’re forgetting that in the old days I made three trips to Europe.”

  “Ships, not boats. There’s a difference, my girl.”

  “Oh, Danny,” she said, “do you remember? The first time you came to our house, the big old pile on Nob Hill, and you had that argument with old Grant Whittier, and then you explained the difference between a ship and a boat. I thought you were so wonderful—”

  “Come on.”

  “I did. Even if you didn’t know what fork to use.”

  “My God,” he exclaimed, “you noticed that?”

  “Of course I did. You thought you were so clever. Whenever a dish was served, you didn’t touch the silver until someone else showed the way. You just sat there, watching the whole thing like a young hawk.”

  “Come on, Jean, that was over forty years ago.”

  “I’m not senile, old man. My memory still works.”

  “I’ll be damned if I know what you saw in me. I was just a young roughneck who had a taste of the world and wanted the rest of it.”

  “That’s what I saw in you.”

  “Take the wheel,” he said to her. “The wind’s going. I’m going to take in the sail and start the motor. We’ll head back. How about dinner at Gino’s? I been thinking about spaghetti all day.”

  “Ever the flatterer,” Jean said as she took the wheel. “Out on the bay with a pretty girl, and all you can think about is spaghetti. You’re getting fat.”

  “Well—maybe a little. I’ll work it off.”

  She watched him as he took in the sail, a big, white-haired man whose face was grooved with lines and wrinkles, his skin burned dark, his long-fingered hands strong and capable. He wore jeans and an old sweatshirt, and he was easy in those clothes; and she felt good watching him. That’s part of it, she told herself, to feel good and easy about a man and to have no doubts.

  He started the motor. “Bring her about nice and gentle,” he said. “Head for the point. Do you mind staying with it?”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  He stood holding on to the mast, watching her. “You are a damn beautiful woman,” he said with appreciation.

  “I’ll be sixty-four next week.”

  “Either that means something profound or you’re worried I’ll forget your birthday.”

  “It means I celebrate your flattery but doubt your veracity and your eyesight.”

  “Nothing wrong with my eyesight. The thing about Gino’s,” he said, “is that we don’t have to change. We can tie up the boat and walk there.”

  “You can’t get your mind off spaghetti.”

  “Mind, hell. It’s my stomach, woman. I am starved.”

  Two hours later, Jean eased the boat into the mooring, and Dan made the lines fast. With his arm around her waist, they strolled over to Gino’s Italian restaurant. It was onto twilight, with the fog beginning to settle on the bay.

  Dan paused suddenly and turned her toward him.

  “If you’re thinking of pawing me,” Jean said, smiling, “you should have done it on the boat.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t think of it. Do you know, we never made love on the boat? That makes no sense at all.”

  “You are incredible, mister.”

  “Yeah. But all I want to do right now is kiss you.”

  “Here?”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her, oblivious to the glances of people passing by.

  “I suppose it’s our age that makes them nervous,” Jean said, “and we’re dressed like a couple of bums. Ardor is supposed to cool.”

  In the restaurant, after they had eaten and were finishing a bottle of red wine, Dan said, “You know, I used to come here a lot with May Ling.”

  “I know that.”

  “Did you ever love another man, Jean? During the bad years? I don’t mean going to bed—I mean really love another man?”

  “No. Not even for a day, Danny.”

  “Funny. I loved May Ling. But she always knew that you were there, inside of a part of me. I’ve had a strange, crazy life, Jeanie, and how I ever came out of it on top of the heap, I’ll never know. But I want to tell you this. I think I love you as much as a man can love a woman—well, as much as I can. And I want to thank you with all my heart. That’s all.”

  Jean filled their glasses. “To us, Danny.”

  ***

  On the day Sam went back to school, Barbara put on an old sweater and a comfortable pair of shoes and walked down Powell Street to the Embarcadero; and then, turning right, she set out toward Market Street and the old ferry building. It was a fine, cool morning, and as she walked she was filled with a sense of being home in this place, which had its beginning with her family’s beginning. No other place she had ever been gave her the same feeling of security, of tightness. It didn’t matter that so much was wrong with the city, the state, and the country; enough was right to fill her with a feeling of well-being.

  Walking for miles was essential to her work. Only when she walked was her mind completely clear, and then she could evoke the images, the memories and the impressions so necessary to a writer. Life is the fact of being, and this moment in the life of Barbara Lavette Cohen was full of a sense of being. It was nothing explicit, certainly nothing more explicit than the salty tang of the sea air, the wind blowing out of the Pacific, out of China and Japan and the Spice Islands.

  She was alive and home and free. And she was hungry. She had reached Battery Street, and now she swung around to walk back to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was past eleven o’clock, a proper time for hunger. Barbara bought a loaf of the good San Francisco sourdough bread at the bake stand on Jefferson Street, and walked out onto the Hyde Street Pier to sit on a stanchion and eat the bread and throw bits of it to the gulls. She remembered sitting here with Bernie twelve years before, when they met for the first time after the war, but there was no pain in the memory. Ahead of her was the dancing, whitecapped surface of the bay, flowing with the tide through the Golden Gate and out into the endless sweep of the ocean. Behind her, piled up on its lilting hills, the strange, wonderful city that had been built by the Seldons and the Lavettes and the Levys and the longshoremen and the bricklayers and the carpenters and the steelworkers and a million others.

  And here was a wide-winged gull to snatch a crust of sourdough bread.

  She took a last bite of the bread, savoring its taste, threw the rest to the gulls, rose, and breathed deeply.

  It’s all right, she told herself. It’s just as it should be. She saw them turning the cable car, ran for it, and swung onto it just as it began to move. She stood on the running board as the car climbed Russian Hill, feeling the cool wind on her face and smiling slightly. If there was any thought in her mind at that moment, it was simply an acknowledgment. She was there, with herself, and all was well.