The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  On this particular night, in this particular month, in this particular year, when the apricots had just turned from too-hard into perfectly delicious, the boys had elected Moti Peleg to steal the apricots from Mr. Salad’s tree. They had drawn lots, and Moti had drawn the short stick. When he drew the losing lot, he rose stoically from his seat and bit his protruding lower lip, and looked at each one of them as if they were personally responsible for his imminent execution. But he was a good sport, and he left the group silently, determined to perform his duties honestly, even if they were to be his last.

  Eliezer, Yoni, Micky, and Amos left just after him. They ran the other way, along the shore path, around the periphery of the village, and in the back way, up the hill, past the chicken coops, and straight to the prize tree in Smilansky’s orchard. They knew that Smilansky wasn’t there that night. This was their secret information. He was in Haifa, visiting his sick sister whom he loved even more than he loved his apricots. Eliezer pumped his arms up and down as he ran. They ran in a tiny clump, almost attached to each other, bumping into each other, their arms on each other’s elbows, shoulders, so that the speed of one carried the other and their heaving but muffled breaths, though seemingly taken from separate lungs, were all invigorated with the same air of excitement. Eliezer looked at Micky and smiled. Yoni let out a loud guffaw. And they all almost started laughing, but they swallowed their laughter and just kept running. “Happy times,” someone said. “Happy times,” they all echoed. It was true, they had rigged the lots. Moti had been doomed from the very moment they had congregated. Micky had actually done it. Though blessed with an honest smile, he was a natural-born master of deceit, a font of tricks, jokes, and schemes. The rest of them weren’t quite sure how he had done it. He told them that he had gotten his “ technique for making the straw seem different” out of a book of magic tricks he had received for his last birthday. But they weren’t so interested in his “technique” as in his skill. Could he actually do it? He could, and he did, and Moti picked the short straw and now the rest of the boys flew through the village over the beach. Ordinarily, they could easily outrun Moti, but since they had to go the back way, which was significantly longer, they had to run as fast as they could. When they got to the beautiful apricots they just stood there for a few seconds. The fruit was perfectly ripe and it dotted the dark green leaves like precious diamonds placed there just for them. Yoni reached up a hand to touch one, and he would have picked it, but they heard Moti clumsily coming through the grove, sticks snapping, his footsteps heavy, even though he was so light. Moti had taken extra long, not because he was afraid (even though he was) but because he had chosen to execute his mission scientifically, sneaking from tree to tree, and peeking out and then running to another clump and peeking out again, thus advancing on the target with supreme stealth. He had also taken a moment to camouflage himself. He had smeared his face and arms with mud, and had tied a rather large branch of a clementine tree to his back so its foliage stuck up over his head and made him look both suspicious and ridiculous. The other boys saw him coming and had to stifle their laughter in their hands. They were hiding in the surrounding trees and they were waiting for the perfect second. They meant to scare Moti before he had taken any fruit. But they weren’t quick enough—or Moti, whom they had always thought slow, was fast in this one stealthy moment. His white hand shot out through the dark night, and he quickly picked three perfect apricots from the perfect tree. And at that moment they jumped out at him, barking and howling and yelling like an entire zoo full of animals vicious and untamable.

  Moti shrieked, dropped the fruit, and started running. He ran in a zigzag fashion, in and out of the rows, down to the shore path, his white skin shining in the moonlight, his heavy steps echoing all over the valley, disturbing light sleepers, waking up curious and angry dogs. They stopped following him when he reached the sand. The clementine branch tied around his waist had come loose and was bobbing up and down with his strides, eventually falling in between his legs, but he didn’t even stop to free it. He ran over it, almost tripping on the branch until it just fell off.

  Moti never once turned back to see just who was behind him, he just kept running, zigzagging even on the shore. When he finally made it back to the hideout, he had peed his own pants, was drenched with sweat so the dirt on his face was melting in brown smeary rivulets over his eyes, and his chest was heaving. “Smilansky . . . with a gun . . . he had a gun . . . he was there waiting for me . . . and he chased me all the way to the ocean!” When they asked him how he had escaped, how he had avoided not only the big man’s huge hands, but also the gun, the gun, Moti told them about his strategy, about running in serpentine fashion. “That way, when he shot at me,” he explained, “and he did shoot at me, several times at least, the bullets didn’t know where I was. I was quick, he couldn’t find me, and then, when he got close, I threw myself into a duna, a dune, and I burrowed on the other side of the sand, where he couldn’t see me.” Moti stood up straight and smiled now as he was particularly proud of this accomplishment. All the boys listened with solemn faces while holding their noses because Moti smelled. And then they burst into laughter, and jumped up and ran in serpentine fashion around each other, and then they flung themselves into each other, calling each other a duna, their bodies crashing into each other like waves. Nobody had the heart to tell Moti Peleg that Smilansky wasn’t even in the village that night. But they couldn’t stop laughing. They laughed so hard that their eyes hurt and their lungs began to tingle. Moti laughed, too, even though he thought he would be out of breath forever.

  Eventually the boys dispersed. Each made his way to his parents’ house. Eliezer walked with Yoni to the corner of their road. And then Yoni turned left and Eliezer walked the rest of the way alone. When he got there, he didn’t go up the front walk, but scooted around the back, through the orchard, around the little room where the new tenant was sleeping. He meant to go up the back porch stairs and in through the kitchen but before he climbed the stairs he heard a noise. Eliezer heard something inside the house, footsteps maybe, or a particularly loud creaking of furniture—perhaps his parents rolling over in their bed? The noise scared him. He felt a familiar pang of terror. What if his father had woken up? Eliezer shut his eyes and saw the three perfect apricots orangy pink on the ground, their perfect flesh bruised. In the afternoon of the next day, Smilansky would return from visiting his sick sister in Haifa, he would find the apricots on the ground, and see their footprints in the earth, who knows, maybe he would even follow their prints to the ocean, and find the very dune behind which the scared ghost of Moti Peleg was probably still hiding. Yes, they would be caught, or at least suspected. Even though nothing had actually been taken, and even though he himself had not shaken the apricots down, Eliezer knew that he was in trouble. He sighed out loud. And he cracked his knuckles, folding his fingers backward against his own face.

  Eliezer looked toward his parents’ dark window. He knew that if he could just sit down with his father, not as a son but as a friend, that if he could sit down with him and tell him the story, tell him how Moti Peleg had thrown himself into a duna, how they had raced back in front of him, and how Moti had peed himself and how he had lied, telling them that Eitan Smilansky had pounced out of the trees with a gun, Zohar’s eyes would disappear and his cheeks would grow red and he would laugh so hard, because the story really was so very funny. Skinny Moti Peleg throwing himself into a dune. But Eliezer couldn’t just sit down with his father. There would be no laughter over this. Because Zohar’s anger didn’t make allowances for ordinary bouts of boyhood mischief. Because Zohar’s anger was an extreme anger, occupying not the visible or audible range of perception but the too-visible, the ultra-audible, the regions of sound and sight that burned the eyes’ lenses and popped the ears’ drums. Zohar had an anger that was terrifying because it was extreme. And perhaps it was terrifying also because on the other side of his soul lay a peace and a calm, a joy of life, an almost kingly kindn
ess and grandeur that made everyone love this man, and made his son love him too, love him so much that Eliezer saw the anger not as an organic part of his father’s personality, but as a kind of invader or a thief who stole the best moments of their lives.

  Now, Eliezer felt that he had to hide from his father. Zohar would immediately suspect that Eliezer had been out with the boys and that they had stolen something. Eliezer never stole anything. He was too scared. He didn’t even bother to draw lots with the other boys—and they didn’t make him because they were even more afraid of Zohar than he was. All of the boys liked Eliezer and none of them wanted to incur the wrath of this particular father. No, Eliezer couldn’t go back into the house. Even though he hadn’t really done anything. All he had done was to run wild and happy through a quiet night that had seemed to need some noise, some good waking up. Eliezer held his breath. Once again, a creaking noise came out of somewhere inside the house. He shut his eyes and saw the three apricots again, not on the ground, but in his own hands. Sour wrapped around sweet. Eliezer took one last look at his parents’ window before he turned around, and ran far into the fields to spend the night.

  Chapter 16

  IN THE GOLEM’S GARDEN

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  When I was eighteen, I began my service in the Israeli army. After my basic training I was assigned to Intelligence and served mostly in the north, near the Sea of Galilee. In the army, I worked primarily as a statistician. It was my job to help make tactical field operations safer and more efficient by providing a statistical analysis of battlefield strategies.

  I WRITE:

  It was strange to be home, not as the boy he had been just a few months ago, but as a soldier with sore muscles and an appetite he couldn’t sate. It was his first leave after being drafted into the army. He had been helping his mother in the kitchen when she had shooed him out of the house. She said, “You must rest. Go, go find your friends, or take a walk.” They both knew that all of his friends were away in the army. But still Eliezer appreciated his mother’s pampering. He gave her a kiss on her damp face, and walked out the back porch door. He walked down the steps and sat on a big rock at the edge of the sticker field and begin to throw little pebbles into the sand. In the army, for the past six weeks, he had felt different. During basic training, he would be doing push-ups, his face would be so close to the ground, and the dusty earth would seem to be just that—dusty earth under his sweaty face and palms. He would watch his own sweat drip down to the earth and he would think how strange it was that not long ago he had had thoughts about the golem conjuring him, conjuring his family—as if dusty earth could have such power. And he would work his muscles hard, harder, strangely enjoying the new pains in his body and the exhaustion he always felt at night that made sleep come easily and blotted out thoughts of anything else but the army and its demands on him.

  But now that he was back home, it was all there again. The feeling that they were indeed creatures conjured by someone or something else. He started to pitch the pebbles farther, toward the wall of the house. Some fell on a pipe and made pinging sounds. There were ants around the base of the rock. He put his finger down and let one climb over it. Then he shifted on the rock and stretched out his legs and he wondered, If your family is just a phantom that some other phantom conjured, what does that make you? The figment of a figment? Am I real? He wondered, Am I a ghost? Am I really here at all? He held up his hands, and squinted. For a second, when the setting sun wrapped its rays around his fingers, he thought he could see right through his skin and his bones, see right through to the branches and leaves and to the silvery-gray trunks of the trees at the edge of the orchard. This convinced him of something that he had long suspected—that he was as insubstantial as smoke, as empty as air. They all were. Now that he was back in Shachar he had no trouble believing that even as his family went about their regular business, some cosmic force was straying through the soil of their lives and calling out to them, in a name familiar but unpronounceable.

  LAKE OF TIBERIAS, OR SEA OF GALILEE

  Miriam had finished in the kitchen and had gone into the salon to do some sewing. Eliezer knew this because she had called out to him from the kitchen window, asking him where he had put the pair of pants that needed darning. Zohar was in the front yard, talking local politics with a neighbor. Tomer was next door—he had fallen in love with the neighbor’s niece, a freckled clarinet-playing brunette recently emigrated from South Africa. Tomer had taken up the trumpet and the two of them would play duets. Their music floated all over the village, and everyone in Shachar was glad that Tomer Sepher was playing music and making love to a girl, instead of playing tricks and making mischief—for his antics had only grown more mischievous as he had grown up.

  Eliezer listened to the music coming from next door. He envisioned his brother whose eyes were dim and who no longer lived in their house. And he could feel the mystic form being drawn around them all—as they were sitting in the salon, as they were standing in the front yard, as they were next door, playing duets with a freckled girl, as they were lying, staring at absolutely nothing, as they were sitting on a big rock in the backyard, throwing pebbles in the sand. It was the figure not of a single human being, but of a family. This scared him very much. He had not meant for this to happen. He tried to wish it all away. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not erase the image of all of them from the ground, nor could he pry his own figure away from their collective shadows. They were indelible, stuck permanently on the citrus soil. Even though they were all walking around, flesh and blood, even though they had been obviously conjured, the outline still remained in the earth, their figures huddled close together—all one, two, three, four, five of them. Later, when he was back at his base, he would often think back to this. And no matter how far Eliezer was from the orchard, from Shachar, from Israel, he would know in the silent part of his soul that they were all still there, etched into the orchard earth that had known them when their family was young and their family’s tragedies were even younger. They were a tattoo the soil wore not for decoration but for memory, and no matter how hard they themselves would try to forget what they wanted to forget, the trees would remind them that this was who they had once been, who they still were.

  An ant was climbing on his sandal. Now on his toes. It tickled, and he flicked it off with a finger. Eliezer shivered. He looked around—into the trees, and then above the trees, and then to the left by the wash basin, to the right by the shed, and behind him, he stared into the windows of the house. He knew that if he weren’t careful, that is, if he didn’t follow the rules, he would be quickly turned back into a clump of earth and be cast back down onto the dark floor of the world. The rules, or rather, the rule was simple. “Yes,” he said out loud. “A golem is a mute creature. Gavriel,” he said out loud. The rules, or rather, the rule was simple. Eliezer arched his back and repositioned himself on the rock. He stretched his arms up into the air and twisted them so that his elbows cracked. He heard his parents yelling in the house. He envisioned his father with his right eye open so wide, and the other one half-squinting, his brow fiercely wrinkled and lopsided. Zohar’s angry face was always so uneven and strange. Eliezer knew his mother would be standing with her feet planted a good distance apart, her hands on her hips, her face looking away from her husband, toward a vacant spot on the floor or wall. The rules. Never to utter and never to know, never to draw the fifth figure in the earth, never to acknowledge that Gabi had ever existed.

  Eliezer did not believe in a distant God. God was near, in his own hands even, and in his brother’s hands, which though mostly missing, were still hands enough to hold God close. Eliezer listened to his parents. They had come into the kitchen and now he could hear they were fighting about nothing in particular. Something about a woman whose name she had forgotten and a man who fixed cars and shouldn’t have been invited to a party they shouldn’t have thrown. Eliezer listened as everything they said and didn’t say infiltrated not o
nly his soul, but the entire valley with a tale not meant for a God of Here but for a God of There. A distant deity for whom the prayers of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters are as arrows that regularly miss the mark.

  They came outside and walked down the back porch stairs and into the sticker field, by the wash basin. Miriam’s mouth was open; she was holding a blanket that she obviously wanted to shake out. Zohar was not helping her. Zohar had a turia in his hand; he was gripping it tightly and he was wearing a gray work shirt and pants. They fought on. Eliezer watched until the trees behind them seemed to reach out and pull the couple closer into the grove. He watched how as they continued to argue, their voices took on the quality of breaking branches, and their faces began to blend fiercely with the blooms. And still, Eliezer watched his parents fighting in the trees. “No,” he said to himself, “it doesn’t add up.” For even though he knew the reasons, the why’s and how’s and horrible when’s that had made them into parents who fight instead of parents who love, the equation was still impossible. It belonged to a world where numbers stood not for set values, but for myriad tragedies, and the lives of men and women were the tortured figures in a queer math, a currency of devils, an algebra of angry ghosts.