The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  This wasn’t the first time since they had started dating that he had become strange, hostile, angry at little things that made no sense. Once, when they were walking to the movies on Beacon Street, a fat man had bumped into Eliezer, and Eliezer had been pushed into the open door of the butcher’s shop. The fat man was immediately apologetic, but even as the man had extended his hand and offered an apology, Eliezer had had a look on his face that expressed both great pain and great fury that life should have so blatantly mistreated him. Eliezer’s intense anger had not lasted long, just a few seconds, but Rebecca had seen it and was nonetheless surprised by it.

  Now Rebecca concentrated on the bread: over, under, over, under, over, under. The dough on the bench made a thump-thumping sound, and the flour felt all grainy on her fingers. When Eliezer was done speaking, Rebecca told Eliezer that when she was little she would sit on this bench and her father would tell her stories of how her great-grandmother had been the bakery woman to the czar. Rebecca turned her back to the bench and spoke as if to the oven, telling Eliezer how she used to pretend that she herself had baked for the czar and the czarina when they were under house arrest in one of the eastern provinces. Eliezer listened, but he was annoyed by her story. He looked around at the flour sacks, and at the oven, and at the metal stacked rolling trays filled with fresh and sweet-smelling cookies. He was angry at Rebecca for ever having imagined such things. For ever having wanted to escape a landscape that seemed to him threatless and comforting. He wished she would be quiet, and before she could finish he interrupted her and began to tell her something about his first day of class, which would be the next day. Rebecca let him interrupt, and told herself that Eliezer was just nervous about starting school and that his temper was really not too bad, and that she too would be agitated if she had to start her life anew in a foreign country.

  That night, Rebecca drew Eliezer sitting on top of the sacks of flour. She drew his curls, and she drew his big brown English book on his lap, she drew his pretty eyes, and then she finished the true drawing abruptly, leaving the essence of the likeness out when she got to his hands and the fingers under her pencil threatened to curl into a fist and to smash something underneath the paper or on top of it. Instead, Rebecca drew Eliezer’s hands flaccid and gave his face a disinterested air as if he were staring at the wall opposite the flour sacks while contemplating a point of grammar. Rebecca drew him this way, even though Eliezer never contemplated grammar, he just suffered through it, and even though his face was never disinterested but, rather, always animated—with its emotional, exaggerated, elastic features. When she had finished, the Eliezer Rebecca had created was not at all familiar, but she pretended not to notice the difference between her paper suitor and the one with whom she had spent the last evening, the one with a spot of flour on his cheek who talked too loudly and obviously was in some sort of pain.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Rebecca and I got engaged in 1964. That summer, before our wedding, she first came with me to Israel. We planned to spend the summer with my parents in Shachar before returning to marry and live in Boston.

  I WRITE:

  They were in the city of Netanya; it was only the fourth day of their trip. Rebecca reached for a book with a dark green cover. Later she would tell people, “It all started with the tattooed woman.” But Eliezer, smiling, would disagree with her and say, “No, started with man with hair all over face. Tiny, tiny pieces cut hair belong other people. All over face.” The man was a barber, an old Syrian Jew with cataracts. He was half blind but he wielded a straight razor like a sword and told stories as he worked of his days cutting hair for British soldiers in Damascus. His face and smock and whole shop were covered with “other people hair, thousands of pieces, tiny, tiny.” There must have been a generation’s worth of hair in the shop. But to Eliezer, he seemed like an excellent barber. While Eliezer was getting his hair cut, Rebecca went to the antiquarian book shop next door.

  Rebecca was wearing a short yellow dress that hugged her buxom figure and matched, in a fun and fruity way, her long red hair. She reached for the book. Her hand closed on the dusty dark-green spine and she pulled it down from the shelf. When twenty minutes later Eliezer came into the bookstore, clean-shaven, his hair enthusiastically short, Rebecca held open the book to him and pointed to a picture labeled “Tattooed woman.” The woman in the portrait was exotically beautiful. She had long dark hair that was covered by a traditional kerchief and she was looking up from the page, her head pointed slightly to her right, with an expression of seductive restlessness. She had geometric markings on her face and hands and her loose, peasant-style blouse was opened in between the breasts to reveal three vertical dots holding court in the valley of her womanliness, like special sentries. And the way she was depicted, using an advanced etching technique, gave her the realism of a photograph combined with the exquisite artfulness of an original drawing.

  Rebecca and Eliezer stood silently for a little while, both of them half holding their breath. Eventually Rebecca began flipping through other pages, stopping at other faces just as real and just as beautiful as the first. After a few minutes she flipped back to the “Tattooed woman” and pointed to her face, saying, “I love the way the illustrations are all made up of little lines. We walk the world feeling so solid,” she said, looking not at Eliezer but down at the book. “So solid, but really, we are all just a pile of little lines, thread-thin sticks. Just like her.” As she spoke, her finger was pointing to the tattooed woman, who was looking up at both of them, her dark eyes so curious and piercing. Rebecca turned her head. Then she rubbed her own right hand up and down the skin of her arm slowly, as if to confirm that she were made up of “lines” too and that somewhere, in some artist’s studio, was the original plate on which her own image had been carved out, inked, and then printed. Eliezer looked down at his own hands. He wanted to tell Rebecca that she was wrong. “We are solid, can’t you see? Not lines, but living creatures.” But he didn’t say this. He didn’t say anything. And he wondered if solidity, actual physical presence, was just a whim his soul longed to believe in, because the notion of “little lines” scared him and made him feel flimsy, found out, understood.

  TATTOOED WOMAN

  Eliezer ran his fingers through his new-cut hair and thought of the Syrian barber—of the way he had flicked the straight razor expertly against a white towel on his own forearm to clean it in between strokes. And he thought about the sound that the razor had made, a ffft, ffft, ffft sound it was. “Little lines,” said Rebecca, and then had she reached out a hand to feel the smoothness of Eliezer’s cheek. Later she would tell people, “We bought that book. The Land and the Book by Reverend W. M. Thomson, written in 1881. And that was the start of my collection.”

  The images in that first book were vivid, elegant, delicate, and concrete all at once. Rebecca flipped through the pages. She said the names of entries out loud, hoping to get the models’ attention. “Water jugs and bottles,” “Dancing girls,” “Musical instruments,” “Syrian gentleman in full dress,” “Amulets,” “Artisans,” “Cluster of dates.” She would sit in her favorite spot in Shachar—on the wooden swing in back of Miriam and Zohar’s house, paging through the book while sipping iced coffee. The swing was old, and it creaked as she swung. It was a hot humid day in the middle of the summer. Eliezer was in the orchard with Zohar, Miriam was lying down for a nap, and Rebecca was grateful to the people in the book for keeping her company.

  PUBLIC GARDEN, DAMASCUS

  Perhaps because she was an artist herself, or maybe it was the heat that made her mind fuzzy, but soon Rebecca was half dreaming, half knowing who these people were. The “Tattooed woman” was a second cousin of the artist whose skin smelled like peppermint, with whom the artist was obviously in love. The “Water bearers” were a family from whom the artist rented a room. The little boy in the background of the “Dancer” picture had just recovered from a horrible illness, maybe typhoid. The principal woman dancer had a beautiful
voice but she rarely sang. And the “Syrian gentleman” on page 67 never went to bed before two a.m. and was crazy for green bananas. The swing kept creaking, and Rebecca rolled her neck around, stretching it out. Somewhere behind her, a solitary cricket began to sing, even though it wasn’t evening. She ran her hands over her sweaty forehead before continuing to turn the pages. Rebecca rarely read the text, but concentrated wholly on the pictures.

  That first summer, Zohar and Miriam had thrown a party for “the happy young couple.” Rebecca had worn a white dress with black polka dots. Miriam had given her a turquoise pendant, which she wore, even though she didn’t think it was pretty. Miriam had suggested that the turquoise looked good with her red coloring, and Rebecca had pretended to believe her. There was a band, and much food, and many people, most of whom Rebecca was meeting for the first time. Tomer was there, dancing with his South African girlfriend, Sheila.

  SYRIAN GENTLEMAN IN FULL DRESS

  In the middle of the evening, Zohar had walked over to Rebecca and asked her with a wide smile and outstretched arms if she would like to dance with him. Rebecca was not a dancer. She hated to dance, and preferred to sit by the side, or to stand and talk. It’s not that Rebecca wasn’t social, it’s just that she didn’t have any sense of rhythm, and always felt that when she danced her body was out of control and her balance so bad that she might fall down. She had been sitting by the side of the dance floor, and when Zohar approached her she smiled, and in elementary Hebrew with crossed gender and a noun that should have been a verb, she said, “Lo todah.” No, thank you. “Ani lo ohev rikud.” I (masc.) don’t like dance. She could never have expected her future father-in-law to take such offense as he did. Zohar became almost instantly angry. His face, so handsome, grew distorted, so that his beauty became almost grotesque—one blue eye opened so wide, the other half closed and his hands were gesticulating, even though he wasn’t speaking. When he spoke, his hands grew still. He leaned closer and asked her again in broken English, “Will you with me to dance?” And when she again declined, she saw in his open eye sarcasm, in his half-closed eye scorn, and in the wrinkles on his forehead a regiment of prideful disappointment. Rebecca tried to explain but couldn’t. In Hebrew she said again, “Lo todah.” And then she said in English, “I just don’t like to dance.” She looked up at him and held up her empty hands. Eliezer, who had been on the other side of the yard, came to Rebecca’s side and said, “Nu, just a dance little,” but the more they asked, the more they insisted, the less control Rebecca felt, not only of her legs and sense of balance but also of the “little lines” that made up her body—so that when she finally did stand up, it was not to dance but to disappear into the house in tearful shame.

  For several minutes she sat alone in the salon wondering why she had ever come here so far from the bakery, from Brookline, from her own parents. But then Eliezer came to her, and she buried her face in his chest and he soothed her with his kisses and wrapped his arms around her. She looked up at him. He was not out of place here, and yet she wished that he were. Like she was. And as they stood there in silence she tried to pretend that he was a foreigner here, too, and that when they left this house, this village, this country, Eliezer’s accent would fade away and they would speak the same language, and the colorful idioms of their lives would never tell stories such as this. Eliezer kissed Rebecca’s lips and told her how much he loved her and how sorry he was that his father was so angry over nothing at all.

  Rebecca kissed him back. She was growing used to Eliezer’s own occasional outbursts of sharp anger, but nothing could have prepared her for the way Zohar’s voice had risen in public, the way his eyes had bulged, the way he sneered at her, the way he seemed to be saying, even though she couldn’t fully understand, that she was a snob, and that his opinion of Americans was ruined by her singular refusal to come out on the dance floor and waltz with him right now. This was craziness, she knew, and yet Eliezer, Miriam, the other guests had not seemed disturbed by Zohar’s behavior. Rather, they seemed either used to it, or used to ignoring it. Inside the salon, the “happy couple” sat and watched the party through a window.

  Yes, this was strange territory. Eliezer kissed her again. And he tried to get her to look at him, but she looked away, down at her own lap. The music was loud and joyous. Eventually Rebecca and Eliezer went back outside. They held hands tightly, and everyone, including Zohar, pretended that nothing had happened.

  Often, when Zohar and Miriam were fighting, Rebecca and Eliezer would escape to the little room downstairs. They would lie there on one of the beds, on the old gray cotton bedspread, so threadbare and musty they joked, “It must be from the time of Hamandat Habriti,” the British Mandate. They would lie there talking or cuddling, or turning the old pages of The Land and the Book, and they would make up stories to go with the people in the pictures. But sometimes when they looked at the book Eliezer ended up feeling nervous. The longer they stayed in Shachar, and the closer the time came for their marriage, the more nervous he got. It was July. They were to be married in Boston in February. Eliezer tried to love the illustrations as much as Rebecca did. Rebecca’s red hair fell on the pages; Eliezer reached out a hand and tenderly pulled it back. But he could not love the pictures, and instead found himself adding up the images like numbers, erasing all of the art into dry equations, which then lay on his soul like yesterday’s dust.

  It was a hot sunny afternoon when Eliezer and Rebecca walked out to see the mosaics in the lower orchard. He had told her about them in America, and before they got to Shachar she had specifically told Eliezer that she wanted to “hold those old stones” in her hands. As they walked, Eliezer told Rebecca about the different trees, “on our left shamouti,” he said, pointing, “also called Jaffa orange, and on our right fruit pummelo.” But she looked at him strangely at the mention of this name because she had never heard of this fruit before. “No,” she said, “I don’t think they sell it in America.” Eliezer explained that a pummelo was a “fruit enormous” with a “skin thick” and a “flavor sour sweet.” He pulled a branch down and was pointing at something invisible because it was summer and there was no fruit on the trees. But he pointed so emphatically that Rebecca thought that she could see it, her first pummelo. Eliezer let the branch snap back and continued to walk toward the lower orchard.

  They walked farther down the sloping orchard away from the house. And Eliezer kept talking, and talking, and talking. But although his mouth was filled with words, histories of each tree, interesting anecdotes about different varieties, and the challenges one faces with their plantings, he was panicked by the only thing he really needed to tell Rebecca about this place. He turned around and glanced at her following after him, and then he turned back, and kept walking toward a decoy destination. The mosaic stones had floated to the surface long long ago, but the ones in his mind had only just risen. He clenched his fists. The panic in Eliezer’s face and belly was becoming unbearable.

  Eliezer and Rebecca had been dating for almost a year, and in all that time he had never thought about Gabi. He really hadn’t. But now, as he was preparing to marry, suddenly the memory had revealed itself. That morning, walking with Rebecca through the village, Eliezer had suddenly seen Gabi. He had reached up a hand and rubbed his eyes, but this didn’t help. Gabi was there, a kind of appliqué on his own eyes, marring the peace of regular vision. Gabi was on the sandy road and Gabi was under the ficus tree and Gabi was by the post office, and Gabi was next to the bomb shelter and Gabi was in his own arms, as he, Eliezer, walked next to his future wife through his family’s village. And although he had no idea how his brother had suddenly appeared, or if Rebecca could see him too, he did know that Gabi was tiny, light as a feather, still five years old as when Eliezer had last seen him, and that his hair was matted against his forehead, and that he smelled slightly of urine, and that most of his fingers were missing and that his toes were too, and that he, Eliezer, was carefully cradling him, oh so careful not to let this child d
rop.

  Eliezer turned toward Rebecca, and then he looked away. He bent down to lift up a broken branch from the ground and then he broke it in half, and then in half again, snapping the dry wood easily and almost angrily. Now, he wanted to tell her not everything, but the crucial essence of things. Rebecca knew part of the family history—she knew that Zohar’s identical twin, Moshe, had been killed in the War for Independence, but she didn’t know that Gabi had even existed, or existed still. How to tell Rebecca the thing Eliezer had taught himself never to tell anybody? He hadn’t told anybody in years and years. How to tell his future wife that Gabi and Moshe, the two tragedies, had collided in their house, and that the explosive nature of this collision had singed and burned his soul for inner expanses unaccountable in meters or miles. How to tell her that were he to shut his eyes, everywhere he looked would be char and ashes? Eliezer was not a rabbi like his great-grandfathers were. He did not think much about the mystical nature of his soul, but some ancestral voice whispered out from inside of him, telling him that he would never be whole until he could somehow make visible the char, the ashes. Yet he had not the words to do so.

  Eliezer opened his mouth but still did not speak. Rebecca, sensing that he had something to tell her, said, “Honey, it’s okay.” And when he did speak, all he could tell her was that those things had happened here, happened to his family, happened in their house. He told her the bare minimum. As he spoke Eliezer looked away from Rebecca, and he talked about the events with a remote air, as if he was describing the plot to a play someone else had written—a play that they had decided that they might see, but probably wouldn’t. He was detached, and though obviously nervous, he seemed to convey a sense that these horrible things did not affect him, were simply a part of his past.