The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  When enough time had passed, the phantom stopped appearing to Miriam, and Zohar no longer climbed on the Rudge and revved the engine, determined for brief seconds to rescue a boy who had once been his. Finally, the disappearance reached the shores of their souls where memory lives. Somehow, whether out of mercy or as a side effect of misery, or because this is what they had really intended all along, memory of this child almost completely eroded. They no longer held pictures in their heads of what life had been like in the years right after he was born. The pictures simply faded. Or rather, his image faded and everything else about that time, including the war, and Moshe’s death, and the birth of the State, and the wars that followed, took on starker colors. And when years had turned to decades, and decades had turned into the kind of time that needs no counting, they knew with the finality that comes at graveside that he was no longer among them, even though there was no dead to bury and mourn.

  But there was a grave. A grave that floated around the house, through the bedrooms, the salon, landing in the kitchen on time for meals. While Eliezer and Tomer tried as hard as they could to pretend they didn’t see it, Miriam and Zohar were wholly distracted by it. They saw themselves in the grave. Lying inside it, holding each other in a lovers’ embrace. The grave drifted through the house like a tiny boat on a river of air. Sometimes the boys, while growing up, gangly, moving this way and that, would collide with the grave and suffer bruises. Other times they would just watch it pass over their heads and pretend that such a thing was actually normal. Pretend that every house in the village had a kever, a grave trapped within its walls.

  The grave drifted through the house. And on the tombstone were inscribed the words neither Zohar nor Miriam ever said out loud, but yelled constantly, masking their words in other words, and those words in yet other words. No matter how they tried to disguise it, both knew the epitaph with which they were aching, “Here lie the Zohar and Miriam we might have been.” Curled in a lovers’ embrace. Suffering no affliction, no unspoken agony, no torment of conscience. “We might have been thus.” No, they murmured no kaddish and they kindled no yearly flame, but each made a lifelong prayer out of the unspoken promise, “Never will we take him back.”

  When company came, everything was different. When company came, there was no grave in the house, there was no silence, no brothers or sons dead or otherwise disappeared. The presence of other people in the house provided the right shield. Miriam would put her hands on her hips and begin to tell a story. Zohar would smile widely and play the perfect host. They would be charming. Everybody loved them. They had so many friends. Nobody could tell a story like Miriam and no one was a better friend than Zohar. He would ask after your mother, your brother, he would call you by your old nickname, he took you seriously, he laughed at your jokes, and when he stood up and held out his hands to take yours in his own you would feel that the spirit of the land itself was giving you its warmest greeting. Zohar would smile at Miriam.

  Food was more plentiful now. Miriam would serve coffee and apple cake. Noodle kugel and blintzes filled with potato or cheese puree. She served the confections, the coffee, the conversation. Zohar would smile at his wife, laugh lines radiating out from his eyes, then raise his head and look out over the orchard. In the distance he would spot the double tree, half blood orange, half mandarin dancy, and as he visualized its branches in his head, as he counted the small green fruit that were beginning to grow, he would feel for several seconds that he had tricked fate and found under the boughs of this blessed moment, sacred ground. But when the guests left the grave always floated in again.

  I TELL:

  Under the boughs of the double tree all is quiet and the air is crisply fresh and cool. I press my head back against the trunk and stretch out my neck. I bend down and dig my fingers into the moist earth, tracing the roots of the tree swirling just under the surface of the ground. They are thick and curvy and I know that if I were to follow them, I would find not the center of the earth, but a spot close by where something crucial is in the making. I am very tired. I shut my eyes and think, We are not made of words: flesh and blood are not pages. We do not have a story, or tell a story even, but a story has us and tells us.

  The word delete comes from the Latin “letum,” which means “death” and from which also comes the word lethal. The word revise comes from the Latin “revidere” which means “to see again.” I would like to believe that somewhere in the past, in the realm of visionaries, scribes, and priests, there is some kind ancient who could scribble out passages with the power to hurt us, add those with the power to heal. I bend lower to the ground and with my fingers write a familiar name in the earth. It’s not so much that I want to erase the past as that I want to create a present and a future different from all this. I want to delete our pain, revise our prose, until the story tells us all in a gentler manner.

  Chapter 12

  THE STONES

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Some of my favorite memories of life in Shachar are of my father and the pardess, the orchard. In the early days, we irrigated in open, small trenches. To see my father jumping from one row of trenches to another, diverting the water with his own legs in different directions, doing it in three rows at the same time— this was quite an experience. What a marvelous workhorse he was.

  Soon after we moved to Shachar in the late 1930s, my father found mosaic stones under the soil of his newest grove. It was illegal not to report archaeological finds to the authorities. But my parents never reported the stones. They were afraid that if they knew about them, the archaeologists would come and dig up their orchard. So they kept the stones a secret.

  I WRITE:

  Zohar was watering the clementines. He stood in the trenches for several minutes, diverting the water with his legs. And then, just when he was going to jump to the mandarins, a single stone rose up from out of the soil. Bending down, he let it come to him. He let it rest on his palm and then he curled his fingers around it. Its cool cubic hardness told itself to his skin in a way that he knew was much older than the trees, much older than the water even. Shouting to the man at the end of the row to shut the berez, the spigot, Zohar put the stone in his pocket and told the man that they were done for the day. “The trees have had enough,” he said, even though they really hadn’t.

  Later, that night, he came back out. He took the mosaic with him. The mosaic and a spade. He dug down to the roots of the tree. Soon he found it. A piece of ancient floor. The slender roots of the clementine tree were growing around the edges. He rubbed his fingers over the floor, counting the stones. Seventeen. He kept digging, careful not to cut any roots. On the other side of the tree, he found another piece. A little farther to the left he found a bit of a wall. And to the right, what seemed like a corner of a room. He stopped. The half-moon was high overhead. He wondered about the nature of permanent things. And he wondered if the fruit from the trees that grew atop the mosaics would take on the hard quality of stone—would their oranges be inedible? Or would they take on the secret sweetness of his find and prove more tasty than any regular harvest? Zohar reburied the stones except the single one that had led him to the others. This he put in his shirt pocket, and then went back into the house, to Miriam. That night they began what would be a lifelong game. A game they played at night in bed. Miriam would curl up close to her husband. She would wrap her arms around his middle, letting her breasts press into the hollow crook of his arm. She would start. She would hold the mosaic up in front of their faces and say, “Ancient Phoenicians lived here. A bustling community of homes and shops. Where our bed is, where we are lying, was maybe a bakery, or a spice stall.”

  Miriam would start again. She would say, “A Judean princess lived here. She had skin the color of golden wheat. This mosaic was part of the floor of her inner chamber. It was decorated with colorful images of beasts and birds with her beautiful face in the center, like a jewel. And the stones were scented with myrrh. Yes, myrrh, you can still smell it.” She pas
sed him the stone and Zohar sniffed. He would add his own sentences. He usually peopled his city with farmers and laborers. Canaanite farmers with bare feet and pouchy cheeks. Greek farmers in loose gray tunics and olive-leaf wreaths around their heads. Jewish farmers with familiar faces, no matter what century they hailed from.

  They played the game. They told each other that their land had been lived on by the twelve tribes of Israel, and by some Eskimos even, who had lost their way. They told each other that Ezekiel had used the stones as a parking spot for his chariot once, when all the clouds were filled up. They played the game and they lived their lives. Zohar tended the trees, and Miriam tended the family. And the country around them was birthed, and the earth around them bled, and they, too, bled. Bled so badly that at times they played their lives while they lived the game, hungry all day for the hush of night, when stone became story and story became better plot than the one daylight offered.

  Zohar remembered those nights by the stories. And the seasons not by the changes in weather or politics or war, but by the words they exchanged. Words that defied curfew. Curfew: when the evenings were lonely and long, they got into bed early. Miriam held the stone; she was half sitting up, leaning against a light-blue pillow.

  “Here lived a group of pioneers,” she said. “They called their village Shachar, sunrise. This mosaic belonged to the floor of their bathhouse. They lived here for a long time. But besides this stone, they left no trace.” Zohar reached out his hand and put it on Miriam’s thigh. Squeezing softly, he nodded, and she continued. She said, “They called their village Shachar, which means dawn because the settling of the land was the dawn of their new day and they wanted to mark it. Shachar like a tide and like a today and like a tomorrow. They lived in a place named for a time of day and the longer they lived there, it seemed that time itself, whether out of gratitude or simple good nature, took on reciprocal qualities. Every second was a place they could plant in. And plant they did, until their original fifty dunam bore the fruit of double the distance. Their young trees took good root. And their oranges and lemons when they came tasted deliciously of some eras long gone and others yet to be, only imagined.”

  Miriam kept talking; as she spoke she looked out of the window, half smiling. She said, “They tried to explain this phenomenon. Some said that when the sun rose in Shachar its rays carried the special grace of continuous creation. Others subscribed to a more terrestrial magic, believing that the roots of their trees were watered from an underground spring whose source was yesterday’s yesterday, and whose headwaters churned in a delta of a good tomorrow.”

  Zohar fell asleep wondering if it really could be like she said— as if by clearing away the rocks and draining the swampy malarial water one could actually find a way to alter time so that the history of the hills and valleys and the future, too, somehow expanded. Yes, they told their stories in bed at night. And during the day they planted their trees and their orchards bloomed. And when the oranges came in winter they climbed ladders and picked the fruit with care, always twisting the little stems, never pulling so as not to tear the skin. Then they would pack the harvest, cradling each orange like a baby, like bullion—the true bricks their country was being built on. Sometimes, though, the regular order of things seemed to reverse, and their country would begin crumbling back into the dust from which it was emerging, and their stories, the ones they only whispered, would begin telling them in loud voices.

  Another night. It was Zohar’s turn. He took the stone from the little table by the bed. As he closed his hands around it, he had the oddest feeling. All the things he and Miriam said to each other in bed, all the stories, he suddenly believed them. He opened his hands, and he looked at the stone. It was white and tan and mostly square, with tiny pits in one side and rough gray residue of mortar on the other. He began, “Here lived a winegrower. This mosaic belonged to the decorative wall of his best press.” He smiled, he was happy with that one. Then, he continued, “Here lived an encampment of itinerant Macedonian soldiers. And here”—he dramatically placed the cool stone on his wife’s naked belly—“here lived a troupe of ancient Babylonian clowns.” Miriam laughed and shimmied backward, away from his hands. The stone slid off her body. Zohar retrieved it from beside her right hip and then kissed her neck, her ears, her eyes. And the nights rose and the days set. And while they told and they touched, sometimes—out of grief, despair, and especially anger—with the stone as their witness and stories as their weapons, they tortured each other too.

  Another night. Miriam began, “Here lived a child whose only story was a vacant stare. This mosaic was part of the room he was kept in.” She looked over at Zohar and nodded, as if urging him to continue. But he refused. He turned on his side, away from her, as she went on. That night, Miriam talked for a very long time. She told her husband a story he already knew. He didn’t know how he knew it, he just did. It was his as much as it was hers. Some stories are your flowers. Others are your meat and bread. This story was neither flowers nor meat nor bread. It was extra, and it was impossible. It was their shared cursed inheritance. As Miriam told on, Zohar wondered when the people she spoke of had lived there. Then, just before she finished speaking, he realized that they were living there now. Their existence was concurrent with Zohar and Miriam’s own. A shadow family in a shadow grove with a shadow mosaic that floored all of their lives and forced them all together. Zohar looked at the stone in his wife’s hand and wondered if the other people’s trees, shadow or not, had had enough water.

  There were centuries in the soil and there were soldiers in their branches, and there were brothers missing and there were babies in all of their arms. Always Zohar was the brother, and sometimes Zohar and Miriam were both the warriors, and sometimes they were the parents, and sometimes they would look at each other and scream. Scream, loving the sunrise. Scream, hating the dawn. Once Zohar found himself by the clementine tree. He was trying to rebury the stones—not so that no one else would find the mosaics, but so that the stones would stop finding the two of them. The stones found them too often. Once Zohar dug down under the double tree, he dug down so deep. He did not know if he wanted to find stones, or if he wanted the earth there to be empty. The earth on which he had stood when his life became empty and the architecture of his every day was blasted to bits for good.

  Another night. Miriam passed the stone to Zohar, and he told her not about the people who lived on their plot before them, but about the trees living there now, with them. “This one is very serious,” he said. “That one, the new grapefruit, has a sense of humor. This pummelo is proud. That shamouti, by the corner of the grove closest to the house, is very sweet and has a generous nature.” When he finished Miriam looked at her husband and tried to giggle. But the laugh stuck in her throat, and as they lay there they heard each other tell another story. He heard her tell it. She heard him tell it. It went like this: “Here lived Zohar and Miriam, and their sons.” That was all they said, all that could be said out loud.

  They held the stone together, his hands over her hands, their hands over a bit of history so hard it defied the softness of their fingertips. They held the stone together in silence, thinking that in seventeen centuries someone digging into the earth of all this would find the remnants of their sorrows surely turned to stone, or if not stone then some other element just as hard and as perfectly resistant to the passage of time. And with these thoughts they climbed toward each other. Or maybe it was away. Far away.

  The stone was in Zohar’s dreams. In one dream the stone was in his hand, in between his thumb and fingers. He held it up in front of his eyes and looked into it. Its surface metamorphosed, swirled, became so shiny, so bright that it blinded him, giving him an excuse, at least temporarily, not to see. When he opened his eyes it had changed again, and was no longer shiny but was instead a radical shade of different. A different color, a different composition of matter that seemed less like stone and more like memory. He looked into it and saw its many faces. He saw the
Judean princess reclining in her myrrh-scented chambers. He saw the Phoenicians and the farmers, the grape-growers, the clowns. He kept looking. Soon he saw the child of whom Miriam had spoken. Zohar saw the child’s silence and suffering. He saw that the child was indeed in need of great strength, of great help, of great healing.

  Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, Zohar would lie awake imagining that he was getting out of bed and walking out into the lower grove. He would crouch among the trees and begin digging a deep hole. In this hole he would lay his own stones, thus building their own century, their own seconds, endowing each tessera with a different tale and then burying them all. He would shut his eyes in the darkness and imagine that the stone he and Miriam traded back and forth in bed at night had originally been laid down like this. Not for shelter, no. But as the carrier of the histories of the people who had lived on their land before them. In the morning when Zohar woke up, he would wonder if he had really gone out into the orchard. Or if the soil under his nails and on the knees of his work pants was just the residue of a real day’s dreams.