The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  One year, Grandfather Eliezer told the boys that he had learned that the poison, the “instrument of murder,” was “a noxious powder used in the production of phosphorous wicks.” This revelation was followed by a full-scale expedition to the local factory on the corner of Choulda the Prophetess and Amnon Streets where such wicks were still produced. At the factory they had a very serious conversation on the “nature of the toxic product itself” with the foreman, a small Bohemian immigrant who was sure that this curious old man and his blue-eyed grandsons were up to no good.

  Another year, Eliezer told the boys that Chasia had been the stepsister of a certain baker, “a Yemenite whose reputation for rolls and challah was unrivaled in the Jewish Quarter.” Supposedly, Eliezer confided in the boys, the baker had been friendly with “my own dear mama and papa” and it was through this “warm family connection” that old Herschell and young Chasia actually met. “I imagine,” Eliezer confided, “that Chasia was working in her stepbrother’s bake shop when Grandfather Herschell came with my mama one morning to pick an order up.”

  The next day, Eliezer and the twins spent the afternoon wandering around the Jewish quarter trying to locate the certain Yemenite bakery “whose family history,” Eliezer noted poignantly, “is with a mixture of mourning and love so intimately connected to our own.” They visited all of the bakeries. They searched, they sampled, they nibbled, they asked. But none of the bakers admitted to having a step-Chasia in his family tree. Eliezer was convinced that one of them was lying. But the boys just smiled at their grandfather. Eventually, each took one of his hands and gently directed him toward home. Zohar and Moshe were content with so many answers of sweets and cakes and rolls and bread.

  MONDAY

  While the boys were out with their grandfather, investigating a report that an “aged and sallow-looking” Anshel Silverman had been sighted in the section of the Jewish Quarter closest to the Roman wells, Avra and Shimon also went out for a walk. They walked down Rav Pinchas Street, through the split half arch. Slowly, they wound their way into the shouk.

  Avra breathed in deeply. Shimon noticed that his wife looked very beautiful. Her big brown eyes, dark hair, and white skin were browner, darker, and whiter than they seemed in Petach Tikvah. She looked like a precious etching. He reached out a hand for her. They walked deeper into the market past the carpet sellers, shoe merchants, bakers, and peddlers of spices; past stalls selling children’s toys, candies, camel halters, metal tools, undergarments, guidebooks, gentleman’s hats, and assorted tourist trinkets. They hadn’t been back to Jerusalem together for a substantial visit in a very long time. They walked on. Sometimes with their fingers touching, sometimes with their bodies several feet apart. Sometimes they had to separate to let a boy with a wheelbarrow pass or a woman with a huge basket on her head hurry through the center of the street yelling “yalla yalla yalla” in a high, loud voice.

  A STREET IN JERUSALEM

  Soon they turned down the “meat street,” the lane of kosher butchers where Shimon had worked while courting Avra. “It was here,” one part of Shimon told another part of Shimon, “that I learned the ritual intricacies of cutting up a cow.” His hands, whose memories of the feel of flesh had been long ago erased by the warm soil of Petach Tikvah, whispered to the rest of him that they did not believe this new information. Meat was hanging everywhere, innards and outerds, fleshy necks and ribs and spongy lungs and hearts slick and shiny and stomachs and coiling piles of blue and red kishka along with the occasional sheep head, cow brain, headless chicken, and live bleating baby lamb. Blood was on the stones, and the air was laced with it. Shimon shuddered and tried to walk quickly, but his wife was moving slowly. Shimon tried not to breathe through his nose. He had never taken to the sour smell, never reconciled himself to the weird intimacy that develops between a meat-man and his wares. “After all,” he used to think with the cleaver in his hand, “if I cut out my own poopik and told customers that it was the button from some kosher creature’s belly, wouldn’t they make a soup from it?”

  Avra, it seemed, had no such thoughts. She was looking at everything with interest and admiration. Several strands of her hair had come loose from their knot and were wisping down on her neck and forehead. Reaching a hand up, she quickly moved them out of her eyes. So beautiful, Shimon mused, as she bent forward toward a butcher’s tray. So beautiful, he mused, as she stood back up. Stood back up?! Shimon was horrified. Had she really? Could she really have? “My God! Dear God of meats and markets,” he prayed. “Dear God, avert your eyes from this treif, this unkosher moment!” It was only after the organ had been secured on her person, he knew not where, he could not imagine where, for she had neither bag nor pockets, only after the organ was definitely gone from the tray, that Shimon acknowledged to himself that Avra had really come home.

  Put simply, she had stolen a cow’s tongue. A huge pink-white tongue that had been lying on that butcher’s tray next to ten or twelve others. Shimon said, “My wife,” and she winked at him and gave him a very sweet “my husband” and then “come, my dear, let’s walk on.” Fifteen minutes later she had modestly transferred the tongue to the Seventh Station Beauty Bazaar. A place she thought perfectly appropriate. It fit in nicely, even Shimon had to agree, on a purple-cloth-draped low wooden table spread with “imported and domestic lotions, potions and balms for the brain and body.”

  And while it would be an exaggeration to say that in that one afternoon Shimon had been converted to his wife’s frisky material religion, it is true that when he reflected upon the experience, he had to admit that he had enjoyed tagging along. Perhaps in the future, he thought, he would not be averse to praying to Avra’s gods of goods and chance should his fingers begin to itch like hers, and the city continue to conspire with the criminal he didn’t know he had in him. That night, when they climbed into bed, Shimon smiled as Avra nuzzled up close to him. She fell asleep with her arms around his chest, her head resting in the slight indentation between his belly and heart. Shimon did not fall asleep so quickly. A glowing moonlight infiltrated their bedroom from a crack in the shutters. His head was filled with the thin streak of strong light. It illuminated things he had learned here a long time ago but thought he had forgotten: a rule concerning sacrifice. When a Jew brought an animal to the Temple for ritual slaughter, he was required to lean into the creature as he cut its jugular. God had decreed that for the sacrifice to be holy, the man must actually feel the animal’s life flowing out of it. Shimon fell asleep imagining that he was walking through the market, Avra by his side, her laughing hands holding his own.

  The story of the murder affected the brothers differently. It was for Zohar a kind of maze. When he shut his eyes at night after his grandfather’s telling, he would walk its twisty walls, following a path straight toward Herschell, right into Chasia, sideways toward the motive, slantways toward the murder weapon and then, with a crash, he would bang right up against the fact that a grandson could kill his own grandfather, just like that. The maze was a monster. But it was also a mystery and a bastion of old magic because it held him in its spell year-round. He wanted to know what Chasia looked like. He wanted to know where she came from. He wanted to know what she smelled like. He wanted to know if she was a hummer or a whistler. He wanted to know if she was pious like his great-great-grandfather, or if she, like himself, had grave questions concerning soul and piety and the nature of God. Zohar would work the rows. Climbing under boughs, binding new grafts, checking on old ones. And by the time they would all break for lunch, the maze would have let Zohar into its secret chambers in which he would have seen at least seventeen different Chasias. This one humming and that one whistling, this one pious, that one proud, this one nimble, that one with a voice like an angel’s, this one with an adventurous spirit who longed to travel the world.

  Moshe was also amazed by the story. But he was less lost in it than his brother. Not that he was less captivated, just that he wasn’t particularly horrified by its monstrosity or i
nterested in its minutiae. Zohar could spend hours wondering what Anshel Silverman was wearing on the day of the murder. And he wanted to know the exact words that Anshel’s father had used to goad the boy on. But most of all, Zohar was forever contemplating what he called “the holes in that boy’s soul” and saying things like “surely only a soul in tatters could do that.” Moshe did not really care for such details or spiritual searching. He was mostly interested in one thing, or rather, one person. Like Zohar, he dreamed of Chasia. And like Zohar, he wanted to know what she looked like, smelled like. But if Zohar was the poet of this family story, then Moshe was the peeper. He wanted to know what Chasia looked like without her clothes on, and what she smelled like in her private places. In his daydreams, as he worked the groves, Moshe was forever lifting the curtains in the room of his mind that she inhabited.

  And while he was definitely more prurient than Zohar, Moshe was also more personal. Zohar saw Chasia in the trees, but Moshe saw her in the real live girls of Petach Tikvah. She was in their house and on the street. She was next door, she was in the school yard. She even occasionally held Moshe’s hand and kissed him on the lips if he was lucky. Simcha Rabinowitch, a lanky beauty with skinny legs, was a lanky, serious Chasia who loved to talk about the poetry of Bialik and the plays of Chekhov and the evils of socialism, fascism, and war. Madeline Feldman, the petite blonde with big gorgeous breasts whose father was a Paris-trained shoemaker, was a shapely Chasia whose frisky incipient sensuality and gorgeously shod feet made Moshe half mad for a woman whose story he had only just begun to explore.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  On their visits, Grandfather Eliezer would tell my father and his brother all sorts of stories—stories about the murder of Rabbi Herschell, stories about the Old City, family stories from Europe, stories about his own life. One of their favorites had to do with the Dormition Abbey. According to Christian tradition, Mary never died, but fell asleep and was taken sleeping up to heaven. The Dormition Abbey was built on the supposed site of her ascension, which was on Mount Zion. Strangely, this site is just outside the walls of the Old City.

  Eliezer told the twins that the Dormition Abbey, which they called the Mary Church, was left out of the walls for a singular reason. When Süleyman the Magnificent built the walls, his purpose had been to enclose and protect all of the holy places in the Old City. But his two chief architects, in order to save money, had demanded that the monks of Mount Zion pay for their portion of the wall. In addition to the site of the Dormition, Mount Zion is also home to the room in which the Last Supper supposedly took place as well as the supposed burial place of King David. The monks refused to pay. And so the architects left Mount Zion out of the wall. When Süleyman found that his architects had betrayed his purpose, he was so enraged that he had them murdered and then buried side by side just inside of the Jaffa Gate. The graves are still there today, but they are unmarked, and although the story is commonly believed, there is no real proof that the architects once lay within them.

  I WRITE:

  TUESDAY EVENING

  Eliezer again gathered the boys to tell them what more he had uncovered, “this year, in the archaeology of our recent ancestors.” Grandfather Eliezer pursed his lips and paused for a second while he thought about what he was going to say. As he paused, the image of Chasia sitting in the carriage suddenly came back to him. There she was again. Chasia in the carriage. Then the woman in his head turned her head, and smiled at him before her carriage began to slowly move away.

  Eliezer began to speak quickly. He told the boys that he personally believed a rumor that the great Italian sculptor Giovanni Giovanni, who had been commissioned to create an effigy for the new Dormition Abbey, had modeled his sleeping Mary after Chasia, otherwise known in polite circles as “the widow Herschell.” “Supposedly,” old Eliezer said, looking directly into the very blue eyes of first one twin and then the other, “several decades after the abominable murder was committed, Giovanni Giovanni was on a sojourn in Jerusalem when he heard the story of the young widow and was captivated both by reports of her beauty and by the pathos of her tale. According to local lore, the sculptor interviewed old-timers as to what Chasia really looked like. And that is how,” Eliezer added with emphasis and a wagging finger, “the face of your grandpoppa’s poor murdered grandpoppa’s true love was fashioned into the face of the mournful Madonna who fell asleep but never died.”

  Eliezer took a deep breath. The twins wanted him to continue. He could see this. So he explained to them how he himself, a pious Jew, could of course never set foot in a church, even if it weren’t illegal, which it was. Consequently, he had never even considered seeing the sleeping woman. “But I hold a deep conviction,” he added, “that it is our Chasia lying there in the belly of that Church.” He nodded in its direction. “And contrary to what you may think, my boys, I view her presence there as an advantage and not a sacrilege. You see, she may be sleeping but she is also a sort of spy, and in times of trouble, it is not such a bad thing to have a member of the family in perfect position to watch and think and listen.”

  The twins were not exactly sure what Eliezer wanted Chasia / Mary to be listening or watching for. Zohar, peering out of the window toward the Mary Church later that night, envisioned its great circular hall filled with renegade priests doing all sorts of secret calisthenics. Moshe lay in bed with his eyes closed. He had inherited his great-grandmother Esther’s sexual sense of humor and was imagining that the Chasia / Mary statue busied itself peeking under the robes of the faithful as they knelt by her side to pray. “Isn’t a statue made of stone?” Zohar whispered to Moshe. But Moshe didn’t answer. He was already dreaming of a beautiful woman lying so close to their house, with a body not made of stone, but of skin and breasts and lips and breath.

  The next afternoon, Zohar and Moshe ran the walls alone. They ran longer than usual. It was a hot day and both boys grew instantly sweaty. Their hearts were beating hard. But they kept running, arms pumping, lips pursed. Only when they came to the edge of Mount Zion did they stop. They leaned over the wall and stared at the Dormition Abbey for several minutes. Moshe had hoisted himself up and was sitting on the edge of the wall. Zohar was leaning against him. Though they hadn’t exchanged a word, both knew what the other was thinking.

  “Served the architects right,” said Moshe.

  “Yep,” said Zohar, and both boys stood there for several minutes, silently thanking Süleyman for what they saw as just retribution.

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  The boys wanted to hear more about Chasia / Mary, but Eliezer refused to be swayed. Instead, he sat the boys down and talked to them at great length about Herschell’s will, a document that both boys had read several times and which held for them little fascination. Eliezer spent an hour explaining how “if a certain key sentence of the will had been punctuated differently, then the entire document would have had different meaning. This,” he explained, “would have meant dramatically different monetary consequences for Chasia, and of course for our family.” The boys couldn’t help shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. Moshe coughed a lot though he didn’t have a cold. Zohar pulled at a thread on the already threadbare chair on which he was sitting. Finally, Eliezer sat back. He took a sip of water, cracked his knuckles. He was quiet for several seconds before smiling slyly and saying, as if in the middle of a different conversation, “According to my good friend Bartok (who has big ears and hears all sorts of things), directly above our Chasia/Mary’s sleeping statue-body is an inscription from Shir Hashirim that says, ‘Arise my love, my dove, my beautiful one and come.’ ” He winked at the boys, “Perhaps our Chasia, she is only sleeping too! Eh?”

  Zohar turned away from his grandfather, blushing. He felt his face weirdly from the inside out, as if his skin had disappeared and his soul had been left suddenly unprotected. He reached up a hand and patted his cheeks, pressing down on his sinuses, his lips, his eyebrows, his eyes. Sometimes, in his dreams, Chasia was sleeping. She was lying
in his bed. He was watching her. Watching her breasts rise and fall with a breath that rosed her cheeks and made her eyelids flutter. Whenever he had this dream Zohar would wake up in the morning with a deep sense of grateful pleasure and would then find himself flirting throughout the day with the earth, the air, even the sunshine. And when he would lie in bed again at night, he would float off to sleep pleasantly aware that somehow he had grown attracted to a natural phenomenon. Moshe glanced at his queasy-looking brother and gave him a knowing, reassuring smile. He was also taken aback. But not to the extent that Zohar was. “Arise my love,” he mouthed the words and then bit his lips. “Arise my dove.” He was somewhat scared. He was completely enraptured. And he was sweating even though it wasn’t very hot in the room. Quickly, the twins kissed their grandfather goodnight. Then they crossed the parlor and kissed their parents too. Avra and Shimon retired soon after their sons. Eliezer was left alone in the parlor.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT (THURSDAY MORNING), VERY LATE