The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  I WRITE:

  Many, many years after that night, Zohar found the book in a store owned by a South African man who had lived with the Bedouin for a year and made him a cup of sweet black mud coffee as he leaned against a bookshelf and read. When he opened the book he saw it immediately. The photograph was toward the middle of the book. Its caption read: MAY 1947: TWO BRITISH SOLDIERS HANGING IN AN ORCHARD NEAR NETANYA. Zohar saw a half-moon in the upper-right quadrant of the sky. Ashen light. There was no fruit on the trees. Closer. Little black lines webbed through silver-gray bark. Wet, waxen leaves like so many green tongues. Closer. The head of the soldier on the right slumped sideways, his toes pointed down, hands bound behind his back, hips thrust leftward in a pose that reminded Zohar of the Christian messiah. The other soldier hung like a plumb line straight down from the tree. He had a mustache. His square chin was tucked into his neck, and his hands were tied primly in front of his crotch.

  GRAFTING AND INARCHING

  He turned to speak to the proprietor. But the man was busy with another customer, so Zohar looked down at the book. He wanted to say, “The hanging took place not in our village, but in one quite nearby.” He wanted to say, “The night after the night of the hanging, Dina Yisraeli and my identical twin, Moshe, got married.”

  Now he remembered everything. How he and his brother had stood next to each other. Moshe by the double tree, Zohar just several trees over. They had spent the hours telling the stories of all the different times in their lives they were mistaken for each other. Moshe started, “When you and Miriam first moved to Shachar and I came looking for you—when I got off the bus and asked for your house your neighbors thought”—Zohar interrupted—“that I had gone crazy, lost my mind. ‘Imagine,’ they said, ‘the new neighbor is asking for his own address!’ ”

  “Or the time I kissed Dvorah Ofek,” said Moshe. Zohar smiled: “The time she kissed me back!” They kept this up for a while, before lapsing into silence broken only by the occasional kind words of the women coming toward them with smiles on their faces and heaping plates of wedding food.

  Zohar had walked in circles around the grapefruit tree he was guarding. Then he had stopped and looked up at the sky. In the dark of the night the sergeants had seemed achingly anonymous to him but he had wanted to know: Which one was born on a dairy farm outside Oxford? Which one loved the taste of mangoes but hated how the roof of his mouth stung after he ate them? Which one had a mother who could speak four languages including Czech? Which one had a brother? Which one had a twin? Which one had a son? Which one, like Miriam and him, had borne an afflicted child? Fashioning his own details, Zohar had darned their blankness into something fiercely hard and personal.

  Zohar knew all of his trees by heart. He had scratched the back of his neck and for the thousandth time that night, he surveyed the trees: the ones he could see, and the ones that were hidden. As he pictured each one, he had mouthed the names of the grafts, rosh, head, temech, support, ayin, eye. He saw which trees were the best bearers, which needed the most pampering, which shunned all but the slimmest attention, which were the oldest, the youngest, the sourest, the sweetest. And when he had finished the last tree, he found himself staring into the wounds of grafts he wished would not take. But the wish was in vain. The grafts too well executed. And as the sun began to rise over the valley, he knew that no matter where their bodies would eventually be found, the two British men had been grafted onto their trees forever.

  I TELL:

  There are stories we tell ourselves over and over, all of our lives. These stories, verbal vertebra, spine our minds— help us stand, if not straight, then at least only a little bit crooked. I know that war breeds mutant beasts. That night, a frightened, two-headed dog had tried to bite itself in one of its own necks. But it failed. Shachar wasn’t burned. I also know that my grandparents once stood in the sweetest of human walls. Sometimes, in my dreams I lean against this wall, brush my fingers into its bodies, and read like braille the story of Dina Yisraeli and Moshe Sepher standing in the uneven rooty earth by the double tree. Dina wears her imported lavender dress and the lilies are still in her hair. She stands in the uneaven rooty earth by the double tree and feeds her new husband a cold potato knish. He eats the doughy pocket, gently licks her fingers, and then reaches out and rubs her left nipple, just below the pearl brooch. She puts her right hand in between his legs and squeezes lightly. For several seconds they stand there, like this, the plate of knishes balanced in her open palm, far below his right shoulder. For several minutes they think of leaving the ring of their neighbors, of lying together, giving lust its first night due. But soon Dina is moving on, feeding the next man in line, asking him if he is cold, if she can bring him a sweater.

  History tight-ropes toward family and I walk the strange soul space in between. Jeremy, you ask me, “How far apart do people have to stand to keep dead bodies out?” I say, “I don’t know. Four or five meters maybe, maybe more, maybe less.”

  Chapter 10

  TO CONJURE THE TWIN

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  In 1948, on the seventeenth of Tamuz, during the Israeli War of Independence, we lost Moshe. He died while fighting Iraqi soldiers on a hill marked by the grave of a sheik. The hill was on the outskirts of Petach Tikvah in a small place called Migdal HaEmek, which means “Tower of the Valley.” When he was killed, Moshe had been married for less than a year. Dina, his wife, his widow, was far away—in Haifa, visiting her sister, and was informed only later. My father felt the bullet enter his twin’s back. I was just a little boy, but I remember that day too well. My father had been out in the orchard when he came inside, hunched over, with my mother, complaining of a terrible pain. He knew that something had happened to his brother.

  I WRITE:

  Zohar could feel it. His skin was neither broken nor bleeding, but the wound was definitely there. Reaching his right hand up over his left shoulder, he tried to press out the hurt. As if maybe it were just a kink in the muscle or a momentary misalignment of the bone. But the wound would not go away; rather, as he pressed, it worsened, until it stabbed and burned and blasted all through him. Falling to his knees, Zohar let his hand come back around and slide onto the ground by his hip. Then he began to sob. Because the wound in his shoulder had neither logical source nor palpable manifestation.

  After lying on the ground for several minutes, Zohar sat up, got to his feet and moved toward the house. He advanced in a lopsided shuffle, his right arm flung once more over his left shoulder, the palm of his hand pressing into the epicenter of the pain. “Moshe has been shot,” he yelled to Miriam, as he emerged from the trees. Miriam, who was behind the house at the washstand, said nothing in response, but led her husband up the back porch stairs and into the little bedroom and then ran for the doctor. The doctor did not find anything wrong with the shoulder. He told Zohar, with calm voice and caring eyes, that no man can feel another’s pain.

  Miriam, sitting by the bed, stared at the floor. She did not see the doctor out. And when, just an hour later, Lazzie Friedman walked up the front path and into the house with the news of Moshe’s death, she found herself listening not to the man in front of her, but to the messenger she could not see. That invisible invader who had been sent by some mad god or all-too-sane devil to hold horrible conversation with the muscular curve in the left side of her husband’s back. Miriam reached out and held Zohar’s head into her waist, her hands on his shoulders.

  Lazzie told them that Moshe had died immediately. And that the bullet that killed him had entered just under the left clavicle. And that his body was safe in the bunker. And that he was a hero whom they all had loved. Lazzie cried as he spoke. Holding Zohar’s sob-wracked body, Miriam wailed too.

  When Lazzie Friedman left the house, Zohar got out of bed. He ran through the house, and out into the orchard where he retched onto a patch of knotty ground. His heaves were empty and painful. When the nausea passed, he looked up into the boughs and then back toward the house and thoug
ht, This is one death that will not be easily buried.

  And Zohar was right. Moshe’s funeral would be held the following day in the city of Petach Tikvah, the city whose name means the Opening of Hope. But the twin’s death would not suffer earth to be laid upon it. A kind of phantom twinship remained adamantly above ground in Zohar’s keeping for over fifty years. Moshe’s death was like some queer fruit that neither ripened nor fell but remained pendant in stagnant unnatural grace on the tree.

  On the day that he was killed, Moshe had been planning to leave his unit for an hour and have lunch with his parents in Petach Tikvah. After he was informed of Moshe’s death, Zohar immediately got out of bed and went to his parents’ house to tell them the awful news. When Zohar arrived at Avra and Shimon’s house, he walked up the front steps. Avra, who was waiting for Moshe to come to lunch, saw Zohar through the screen door. She thought that he was Moshe. When she called Moshe’s name, Zohar fainted.

  Avra opened the door and fell on top of her son who had fallen. When she landed, she found her face pressing into her son’s chest and her knees twisted to the left of his hip. Her hands, which she had thrown out to break her fall, were firmly palming either side of his head. All in all it was not an awful fall. Just a strange one. The strangest thing about the fall, was, of course, that her son, whom she thought Moshe, had fallen in the first place.

  “Moshe,” she said nervously. “Moshe wake up.” But he didn’t wake up. Avra repeated, this time, yelling, “Moshe, wake up!” That was when she saw the subtle indentations on the side of Zohar’s head. The indentations, tiny, almost unnoticeable, were really just flat spots no bigger than if a pinky finger had pressed there and left a mark. Zohar, the first twin born, had not emerged easily out of the womb. The doctor had pulled him out of her with a pair of forceps. Avra, a new young mother, had first cursed and cried over those marring spots, but then, rather quickly, she grew to appreciate them, for the mechanical markings (which were really so small that no one but a mother would notice them) provided her with a sure tool of telling which boy was which. For while her boys were always tricking the rest of the world, all she ever had to do was look on the side of their heads. Moshe, the second twin born, had slid easily out of her body after his brother, and so his brow had stayed smooth.

  Avra did not move. And Zohar’s chest pounded up and down underneath her. His was no faint of delicate repose, but seemed a kind of eyes-closed struggle. It was a hot day and sweat covered both of their bodies. The mother reached her hands to the side of the son’s head and touched lightly the spots that made him different from the one whom she had expected.

  When Shimon came out of the orchard and round to the front of the house and saw his wife lying almost astride their son, he did not know what to think. He started to yell, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” It was such an odd disturbing sight. He started to run toward them, but was not in time to stop Avra from pressing hard on the sides of Zohar’s head. She was pressing not to cause her son pain, but to make those tiny forceps spots disappear. No, of course this didn’t make sense. One cannot just press and poke and refashion a skull. And if one could, to press would only make the spots deeper. But Avra was not thinking of all this. Her logic consisted of the desperate panicked need to conjure the twin named Moshe out of the twin named Zohar between her palms. For she may have been a clumsy woman, but she was also a very smart one. She had easily deciphered the code: the forceps spots coupled with the faint, and with the fact that Moshe was a commander in a war written like all wars, with the blood-ink of so many beloved dead and wounded, equaled the death of Moshe and the announcing presence of the unconscious Zohar in his place.

  Of course her pressing caused pain. And the son awoke with it, just as his father reached the front door, and bent down to push Avra’s hands off Zohar’s forehead.

  All three huddled together on the front path, screaming and thrashing and sick with grief.

  Chapter 11

  UNDER BENT BOUGHS

  I WRITE:

  When Gavriel was five years old, they sent him to live among strangers. Doctors pointed to Tomer and then to Gabi and said, “What? You have one like this at home and one like that? Quickly, you must send the afflicted child away. Having Gabi at home will stunt the growth of your other children.” Social workers said, “You must hold tight onto what is good in your lives. For the good of the older boys.” Rabbis said, “Lo Hametim Yehalelucha Ya.” God, the dead cannot praise you. And even though they knew that Gabi was not dead but only trapped in a death-in-life, Miriam and Zohar listened to the doctors, and they listened to the social workers, and they listened to the rabbis. They sent Gabi far away. For the good of the other boys.

  They tried to forget him. They pretended he did not exist. In time, he became buried. Buried like the roots of the trees, for, like roots, he pressed up into their lives unprovoked. And with their roots all tangled up, and under bent boughs, they sank into a theology of namelessness. They called their child nothing. They never again called on God. And they knew not what to call themselves anymore.

  Zohar could not stop thinking about what they had done. Abandoning the child to the questionable care of strangers. Dozens of times he would climb on the Rudge and kick the engine into roaring, only to sit on the cycle and go nowhere because the road that led to Gabi was too winding, too treacherous, too far. “And anyway,” he reasoned, “I am a stranger now too.” Twinless and aching, he did not go to bring home his son. He just sat there on the roaring cycle, gripping the vibrating handlebars till his knuckles turned white. And he bit his own lips until almost drawing blood. Then he caught a glimpse in the chrome over the front wheel and panicked at the visage of his own distorted double. Dismounting the Rudge, Zohar was horrified for the millionth time since Moshe’s death that a person could simply disappear. He felt queasy in his soul. And as he put the bike away, he cursed appearance and disappearance, he cursed strangers, and he cursed friends. And he did not go to rescue his son.

  Miriam, too, was haunted by what they had done. She would turn her head and imagine, no, not imagine, but actually see her youngest son sitting in his hunched-over, rocking way on the floor of the bedroom. There was spittle on his fingers; he had a habit of licking his fingers and then shaking them in the air. He would do this over and over. Licking his fingers, shaking them. Sometimes he would hold a wet finger up to his eyes, not touching his eyes but getting the wet finger as close as he could, as if he could see something in the sticky little bead of water. Miriam would be ironing or darning, or putting something away in the drawers and would turn her head and see him thus, as she had seen him so many times before. She would wonder as she had wondered from the first time she had ever seen him do it, what it was that Gabi saw in the glob of his own spit. She would wonder if there was any meaning to the motion, or if it was just a spasm, a tick, a habit that meant nothing and was not a sign that her son was looking for something more. And she would go to him, her hands held out, but when she reached the spot where he had been sitting, there would be no Gabi on the floor and she would reel backward as if punched in the belly not only by his absence but by his persistent presence in her heart.

  As the years went by they did what they could to help him disappear. First they took his photographs out of the family albums, hiding some of the pictures, tearing most of them up. Then they began to hide or throw out the documents that seemed to insist— despite the evidence—that such a person existed, had been born into their own house—the doctors’ reports, the medical information, the copies of letters to this specialist and from that one. Then they began to mechanically take him out of their speech, inserting a pause where his name would have been. Over time, mechanics yielded to the fluency that comes with knowing something by heart. The pause disappeared and all that was left of Gabi was a shadow on their tongues.

  And Miriam would continue to practice. She would stand on the back porch, plant her legs, and raise her arm. When she would throw, her aim would be sl
ightly off, her strength not what it used to be. But she would keep throwing year after year, when no one was watching. She would throw placebos, mock grenades, soft rotten oranges, bright-green young lemons, hard as rocks. She would throw and throw, her arm coming up, fingers gripping something hard or mushy or invisible. Fingers gripping emissaries of recent aches and ancient grievances. And then letting them fly, one by one into the trees. Even though the British had long left. Even though the rest of the mothers had long since stopped gathering by the tool tree, and even though the babies they used for cover weren’t babies anymore, but girls and boys who could grip their own stones and hold court over their own explosions. Miriam would throw, and occasionally hit her mark. Wiping her hands on her apron, she would walk inside the house to finish fixing dinner or washing the floors.

  As Eliezer and Tomer grew up they learned how to fill up the space where the other one once had been. They would stand up extra straight or puff out their chests to take up more room when they heard the emptiness in the house begin to roar. They became the best joke-tellers in the village, the best song-singers, storytellers, they were constantly trying to be amusing, to attract all attention so that attention would fall on nothing else. And so they grew up trying, with the clumsy grace of infant angels, to make the world smooth for the adults whom they loved, and for whom the roughness of everyday existence was obviously excruciating. When people asked, “How many sons have Zohar and Miriam?” it became easy, as the years passed, for people to look at the two boys or to think of them and answer with conviction “two.” Easy, that is, except for sometimes when the sun shone over the valley at a certain unpredictable angle, and the outline of the third child suddenly appeared pale and queer-looking behind the body of his older brothers. But usually Gabi stayed hidden.