Harvest

by Belva Plain

  The plants, all flourishing, for she had a way with them, were hers. A basket of ivy geraniums hung at the window where they sat. In the bathroom ferns were lavish, for, as she had explained, they throve in the moist, warm air of the shower. Books, which were everywhere on shelves, tables, and floor, were also hers. But the handsome cloisonné lamps were his gift, along with some rather fine watercolors, an old English silver fruit bowl, an antique, yellowed map of the Americas, and a collection, handsomely framed, of nineteenth-century photographs of New York: brownstone stoops on Washington Square, the brand-new Flatiron Building, and Fifth Avenue with cobblestones and scrubbed front yards.

  Paul’s thoughts now ran: Now that Marian’s gone, we shall have to make room for some of these things in my place. We’ll wait a decent interval, and when the year’s up, we’ll be married. Or maybe even by spring, before we get back from Israel.

  “How soon are we leaving?” Ilse asked.

  “How soon can you get ready?”

  “As fast as you can get plane tickets. You know me. I have someone to take over for me at the clinic.”

  Indeed, he knew her, and he needn’t have asked. Unlike Marian, so fussy and cautious, and unlike Leah, so conscious of fashion, both of whom would need days for deliberation—and for that matter unlike most women—Ilse would be ready in a moment. A good raincoat, some extra shoes, a few skirts and fresh blouses would suffice, all in one sturdy suitcase. She would look as well as, perhaps even better than, any other woman anywhere.

  “I’ll take care of it tomorrow,” he said. And with those words, already, he began to feel gloom fading.

  From the window of their room in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, Paul, with a sweep of his arm, pointed around the compass. Ilse, not the least tired after the long, tedious flight, was too exhilarated to unpack.

  “The city’s divided now from north to south. Over there’s Mt. Scopus with the Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, both idle.” He shook his head, aware of the indignation in his voice. “No one except an isolated Israeli police garrison can go there. Every two weeks a convoy sends supplies under the United Nations flag. And over there, that’s the Old City, in Arab hands now. They’ve destroyed almost all the Jewish quarter that had been there since Solomon’s time. Sixty synagogues they wrecked.” Now in his own voice Paul could hear the strains of wrath and sadness. “They tore out the tombstones in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives and paved the streets with them.” His words died away into silence.

  It was almost evening; hazy clouds were closing over the lavender sky. Then, thrilling the air, there came the nostalgic chime of church bells, almost under their window. From some far corner of the city the chimes were answered and answered again. Peaceful bells. I suppose, Paul thought, when you come down to it, that’s all there is to history, a cycle of violence and peace, over and over.

  “I want to see everything,” Ilse said. “You must show me everything.” And he understood that she was reminding him again how long she had waited to be here in this place.

  So began their days in Jerusalem. In the mornings they walked. No eager youngsters in from the countryside to see the sights could have covered more ground or done it with more excitement than they did. The huge stone blocks of the mausoleum, just a few blocks from the modern hotel, were the remains of King Herod’s family tomb, Paul explained. The great stone wall around the Old City had been built by the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, but its foundations, layer upon layer, had been laid by the Roman emperor Hadrian, and before him, and before …

  He took Ilse to Mt. Herzl, where the dreamer, and so one might say the original founder, of the state lay buried. Almost half a century after his death they had brought the body of Theodor Herzl from Vienna, where he had first had his dream of a Jewish state. He took her to the Hill of Remembrance, the memorial that contains the name of all the Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

  “Shall we …” Paul hesitated. “Do you want to look—”

  “For Mario? No,” said Ilse. “I don’t want to see my son’s name.”

  They turned away. He took her hand, and they walked down the hill.

  On some days they separated. Paul had consultations with the experts, bankers and politicians and civil servants, on the dispersal of funds from overseas. Ilse went to visit hospitals, well-baby clinics, and homes for the aged, sickly poor.

  “Such need!” she would cry to Paul when she rejoined him late in the day. “These are newcomers here from Arab countries, who don’t even know the simplest hygiene, not even how to use a toothbrush. And no matter how many doctors there are, and there are plenty, there seems to be need for more.”

  In the evenings after dinner they often heard a concert, for the city had superb music; the world’s artists flocked here to perform. Sometimes, though, they just liked to wander through the streets, watching the people: Arabs, Christian pilgrims, French nuns in white sailboat hats, Greek patriarchs with their heavy, swinging crosses, old bearded men in the broad velvet hats and black coats of the ultra-Orthodox, and always, tourists from everywhere, wielding their cameras.

  It was the first time they had ever been away together in a new environment. Before now they had had only brief excursions whenever Marian was in Florida, escaping the cold. So these days were totally new, exhilarating, adventuresome, and totally free. When he looked at her as she strolled along in her rubber-soled shoes, with her hair tied up against the wintry drizzle in a red bandanna, or smiling on the other side of a table with a glass of wine in her hand, he seemed to feel renewal, as if he had only just met her, and he felt—he felt young! What an extraordinary companion, so filled with curiosity, with knowledge, sympathy, and humor! He couldn’t believe his own age or hers; he couldn’t believe how eagerly he awaited the night and the bed together.

  In the middle of the second week they began to travel out of the city.

  “Only three days more,” Paul said. “Tomorrow we’re going south through the desert to Eilat. It’s four hours each way, too long a trip in a bus, I think. So I’ll rent a car, and we’ll start while it’s still dark.”

  Their route ran southward to Beersheba and through the Negev toward the Gulf of Aqaba. At dawn Beersheba was a dusty, ramshackle, pioneer town out of the American Old West.

  “If the young men were on horseback instead of pickup trucks, it would look like a Wild West movie,” remarked Ilse.

  And he reminded her that there had been a town here as long ago as Abraham’s time.

  The land was a thorny brown waste without shade. Here and there a line of tamarisks and acacias marked a settlement, an Arab village clustered about a sandy, rubble-strewn marketplace where camels, sheep, and goats were traded for coffee, sugar, and cloth. Of the men in their kaffiyehs and the black-veiled women, Ilse said that they were figures in a surreal landscape. In empty stretches between villages, there could now and then be seen an Arab family living in a black, goat’s-hair tent pitched on a stony field. Once they passed a little boy standing at the side of the road with a tethered camel; the child stared and waved. Ilse was entranced.

  The sky, even now in December, began to burn like a blue flame. In the distance the rimming mountains were purple.

  “Solomon’s mines are only a few miles from here,” Paul said. “See those rocks ahead? Guess what? Those are the Pillars of Solomon.”

  “This is what Mario always wanted to see,” Ilse replied.

  It was the first time she had spoken of him since they had gone away. Paul thought, Perhaps after all we shouldn’t have come to Israel, regardless of what she wanted. I should have taken her on a trip through Spain or the Greek islands, or anywhere. But he only remarked cheerfully that they would be in Eilat in time for lunch.

  “If I remember correctly, they get the best fish in the world out of the Gulf. I’m starved too.”

  The wind in Eilat had died down to an agreeable breeze, just enough to sway the palms along the shore. Pa
ul hired a glass-bottomed boat and they went out over the coral reefs, where Ilse recognized queer specimens of marine life that Paul had never even heard of.

  “Don’t forget how many years I had to study biology,” she reminded him.

  “Now I’ll have to boast about the years I studied history. Do you know that Solomon probably shipped copper from this very harbor? And probably brought back gold from Africa.”

  “This place,” Ilse murmured, “it’s strange—it’s all new to me so that every time I turn a corner I’m amazed all over again—yet it also seems that I’ve known it all before, that everything I see and hear, I recognize. As if I had been here long ago. I don’t know how to explain it,” she said and, stopping, looked far off to where the sun drew a glittering stripe across the water. And in her eyes, Paul saw, tears glittered too.

  At midaftemoon, leaving the Gulf behind, they started back along the barren way. There was very little traffic on the road, just some dusty trucks, some tired-looking buses, and a few neat new rented cars like theirs. The motor hummed nicely.

  Ilse stretched and yawned. “It’s all that sunshine making me sleepy.”

  “Take a nap,” Paul said.

  It had been a long day, a fine day to remember as the trip wound down toward its end. All in all, he reflected, this had been a wonderful time in spite of his moment of misgiving earlier that afternoon. Of all the gifts he had ever given to Ilse, this trip was probably the best, because it was something she had really wanted. She really wanted so little, he thought. The smallest things delighted her. The angora kitten he had seen in a pet-shop window had become her close companion. The dependable watch on an inexpensive leather strap had been her own choice. To give such pleasure to most of the women he had known, the gift would have had to be something small and dazzling in a velvet box.

  Yes, this had been a wonderful time together.

  But he was quite ready now, he was even feeling an eagerness to leave. There was a rhythm about traveling, first the anticipation, then a peak of excitement on arrival, a plateau of enjoyment, and finally an abrupt dropping off from the plateau, with thoughts of home.

  Remembering something, he started to say “I suppose we’ll have a message from Tim at the hotel desk,” and had just gotten the first words out when he rounded a curve in the road and brought the car to such a screeching, jolting halt that Ilse sat up with a little scream; and seeing then what Paul was seeing, screamed again.

  “Oh, God! Oh, my God!”

  In a narrow, shallow ravine alongside the road a large bus lay smashed, turned over with its complicated, grimy undercarriage exposed and its great wheels slowly spinning. Around it glittered an enormous spread of broken glass. A car and a small truck had also apparently just come upon the scene, for the occupants of both were still in their seats staring in shock at the bus, which loomed like a cliff above them all.

  Then at the same moment, everyone leapt out of his car and stood in eerie silence staring at the horror.

  “What? What?” someone whispered.

  Terrible cries, wailing, shrieking, and groaning came from the bus, and Paul’s memory flashed in a second to sounds of the battlefield, where the wounded lay beyond the trenches in the no-man’s-land of that old, old war of his youth. Another flash: What to do? What to do? In those first seconds the little group of passersby stood paralyzed.

  Then came pandemonium.

  Where the windshield had been there was only an open hole framed by jagged glass, wicked as carving knives. A man was now trying to crawl out through it.

  “Go back, go back!” the truck driver shouted. “Let me cut the glass away first. Sam,” he called to the boy with him, “get the stuff out of the toolbox. Hurry!”

  Paul was jarred into motion. Open the safety door at the rear of the bus.… Makes sense.… Open it. Then he saw in an instant that it was crushed. He tugged at the handle, but it wouldn’t move. No use, no use, only an acetylene torch would do it. He ran back to the front of the bus.

  In the meantime the truck driver, burly and panting, had managed to mount the slippery hood, from which, in precarious balance, he was attempting to reach the handle of the side door.

  “You can’t reach it,” someone shouted. “And anyway, for God’s sake, it’s locked from the inside.”

  “Isn’t there anyone in there who can open it?”

  The truck driver called the question through the windshield and shouted back the answer. “It’s jammed. The front seat’s blocking it. Sam, where the hell are you?”

  “Here, here,” called the boy.

  He carried thick gloves and, Paul saw, some sort of cutting tool. Agile and young, he took the driver’s place on the slippery hood and began carefully to cut away the lethal shards, which he handed down with equal care to his partner and to Paul on the ground.

  This positive action suddenly galvanized everyone else into motion. Ilse got out the traveler’s first-aid kit and ran to the bus. A man ran to flag down approaching cars, while Paul ran then in the other direction, from which any speeder coming around the curve could quickly pile disaster on disaster.

  “Go on, go on!” he cried to the first car that approached. “Drive ahead, get help. Ambulance and police. Hurry! Hurry!”

  Now came the first passenger from the bus, crawling through the space where the windshield had been. He was a workman in overalls, gasping and sobbing, but apparently unhurt.

  “I was an extra, sitting on the floor beside the driver. He was shot, and I grabbed the emergency brake. It saved me from smashing into the side when we keeled over. Oh, my God! But there are people in there, on the other side where the window’s broken! Oh, my God, what’s in there!”

  “If only I had something better than this first-aid kit,” Ilse cried.

  Must get them out now. Help is miles, minutes away. And again Paul saw that flash: only yesterday in 1917, somewhere south of Armentières, only yesterday.… He began to climb up on the hood.

  “Give me a leg up on the wheel,” he commanded Ilse. “Then I can grab the side mirror.”

  “Paul, you can’t! You’re not a boy, come down!”

  “Damn it, Ilse, hold my foot up, I said.”

  He hoisted himself, thinking, Not easy, but not too hard either. Shows what keeping in shape will do.

  The boy Sam had already crawled inside the bus. Now his face appeared at the window in front of Paul.

  “It’s hell. They’re lying in heaps on the bottom. I think some of them are dead. It’s hell.”

  “Can you get anybody out? Some children? If you can, I’ll take them and hand them down to the ground.”

  “Josh, hey, Josh! Stand there. We’re going to try to hand some down.”

  “Wait, Sam. I’ll come up too. Wait,” Josh called back.

  “You’re too fat, and there’s no room. This guy here can do it.”

  “I’m Paul. Shall I crawl in there too?”

  “No, stay. There’s no space in here. You’d be standing on top of somebody.”

  Now, abruptly, the first terrible cries had stopped and given way to a prolonged, low moaning, more ominous, more fearful even than the first hysteria had been. In the open space appeared a young girl from whose forehead blood streamed over one eye and cheek.

  “My mother’s in there. I think something’s broken. I think she’s fainted, I don’t know,” she whimpered.

  Paul helped her climb through and held her while he fumbled in his pocket for a clean handkerchief to cleanse her eye. Her body shook in his arms.

  “We were being followed. There was this car full of men, fedayeen from Egypt, they were. I’ve seen them before. They kept playing with us, speeding up to pass us, then falling back and going so slowly that we had to pass them. Oh, we were all so scared, we knew something was going to happen, we knew it. And then—then—they shot the driver, and we—then my mother—”

  “Yes, yes. We’ll get help. They’ll be here,” Paul murmured.

  Damn them to hell and back
. Damn the bastards.

  Sam’s face appeared again. “Can you put that one down? I’ve a few more here, a mother and a kid.”

  “You’ll have to slide,” Paul told the girl. “I’ll hold your hands, I won’t let you fall. Josh, here she comes, grab her feet.”

  So, one by one, they began a slow removal of those few who were still conscious and able to move. It must have taken half an hour, Paul estimated later as he relived events, before help arrived. Given the distances, it was a miracle that anyone got there so fast. But arrive they did, police and ambulances and wreckers with torches. Traffic was blocked where a small crowd was collecting; some were mere curiosity seekers, but most pitched in to help. They lifted and comforted, offered blankets and handkerchiefs, water or whiskey. Several were doctors, unmistakably tourists, some of whom spoke neither English nor Hebrew; but comfort, Paul thought, can be given without speech. And outrage, too, needed no common vocabulary. It was on every grim face, in every shouted command, every sob and every curse.

  Once the rear of the bus had been cut away, Paul climbed inside. Chaos was there, the unhurt climbing over the ruined seats, over the injured, and perhaps the dead, in their haste to escape. They were treading on the side, on the broken windows. From the opposite row of windows above their heads, an occasional shard of glass was jarred loose.

  Somebody handed a child to Paul just at the moment when a jagged piece of glass fell and caught him on the shoulder. When he emerged with the child, he was bleeding.

  “You’ve cut yourself!” cried Ilse, who took the child and set it on the ground. “Take off your shirt. Oh, it’s deep, straight across your old wound!”

  “Over my scar,” he corrected. “Don’t get excited, it’s nothing.”

  And it really was nothing compared with the pain of the original wound, which a Nazi sniper’s bullet had given him on the day the Americans marched into Paris back in 1945. He felt a small, foolish laugh rising. He seemed to attract wars.

  Ilse had gotten an antibiotic from the ambulance and was now carefully and competently tending the cut.