by Nomi Eve
When they finished reading they stayed out on the ledge. They stood quietly, listening to the silent but somehow murmurous conversation being held by the statue apostles and the stones, and the metal maps and the height and the view and the white feathery wind that brushed their faces so softly.
Then they ascended up into the meditation room. It was a tiny, improbable, and charmed room with gold stars on the ceiling, kneelers against the wall, and a prayer encircling the dome ceiling in gilt calligraphy. Jeremy looked up at the dome and began to laugh. Then he took Nomi in his arms and they danced together for the first time. He held Nomi in a traditional dance position and then moved forward two steps and over another step. Then again, two steps and over another step quickly. At first Nomi was unsure of her feet. But Jeremy was a strong leader and slowly she realized that if she didn’t concentrate on her feet so much they seemed to know exactly where to go without her. Two back, one over, two back, one over, and then again and again. When they reached the end of the tiny room Jeremy turned both of their arms facing forward, like a joint arrow, and they went back the same way, two front, one to the side, two front, one to the side. While they were moving under the gaze of the gilt prayer, he whispered. He said, “This is the tango,” and he told her that when they danced like this she shouldn’t look at him, but she should look over his shoulder, “as if there were someone else, another man, catching your attention on the other side of the room.” He said, “The tango is a story. The story is that I, the man, am trying to get your attention, while you, the woman, are coyly playing very, very hard to get. Every time I turn you like this, or move you like that, in or out or over, I do it dramatically, because I am desperately trying to get you to look at me, to look at me no matter what. But you always look away, and so I try again.” His hand was pressing into her back, and when he moved, his hips, sexy and strong, carried them forward. Nomi felt his body close to hers, and his smell filled her consciousness like a more-than-memory, a time capsule of consciousness. He smelled spicy and manly and kind. Nomi hadn’t even known that they were tangoing, and as they continued to dance she couldn’t believe that her legs were cooperating. She couldn’t believe that she was dancing. She could feel where she was in space, and did not feel lost, not for a single second. She felt the precision of his steps inlay themselves in her soul like a precious gem. She couldn’t take her eyes off him even though she was supposed to be distracted by some other man making eyes at her over his shoulder. She told herself, “That is for some other time, when we care more about style and less about the old-new shock of this love.” She stared into Jeremy’s eyes, and he stared into hers, and even though there was no music but the soft tangoey melody he hummed for them, all the drama was there, in their locked gaze—a good story if she had ever heard one.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Boaz married Diana Berkowitz on December 17, 1990. They live in Brooklyn, where they own a kosher falafel restaurant.
Nomi married Jeremy Starr on May 24, 1995. I have recently learned that part of Jeremy’s family is from the same small village in the Ukraine as my mother—Noviye Mlini. I am currently researching his family lineage in an attempt to see if our families are distant cousins or otherwise related.
There, high above Jerusalem, they inscribed their story in Time. They wrapped their arms around each other. And as they stood hugging they felt themselves oddly excavated—as if the tower were magically concentric with some distant tomorrow, and as if at that very moment an archaeologist of the future were digging into the ruins of their today and finding them standing there embracing, or at least finding the precious shards of their love, like pieces of a clay pot that he would then devote his life to putting back together. Nomi kissed Jeremy’s chest, he kissed her forehead, her face. They were high above the city together. Nomi looked up at the blue dome with its gold stars. “Yes,” she thought, “this is an ancient place that we have settled, but there is a modern quirkiness to our every move and measure.” And they stood there embracing until she became the dome and he became the stars, or perhaps it was the opposite: he dome, she stars. But regardless of the configuration of their own private sky and shared constellation, she was sure there was fixity to their claim on this high-up bit of heaven.
They left the meditation room and went back down to the observation tower. They walked out onto the ledge overlooking the Old City. No other visitors came up the whole time. And they just stood there alone together, embracing, all the while writing a code on some crucial bit of consciousness that was inside of them, but was at the same time outside and far away on the circumspect horizon.
And they stayed out on the ledge, high above Jerusalem, kissing, while far away, in the orchard of another existence, two tired ghosts were happily relieved of the good burden of haunting this pair.
EPILOGUE
I TELL:
Jeremy, whenever I am in the orchard I see on the leaves infinite images. First comes a breeze, and then the branches shake but not for long. When the air becomes still again, the leaves are different. Painted with the people I have known. I stand in the middle of the trees surrounded by these little ghosts whose haunting seems part of the yearly growth. The cycle that turns sapling to strength, bud into bloom. I often wonder if I am the only one who sees these images. But since no one ever says anything about them, I have come to believe that while everyone sees them, the orchard is an arena for a story that has to be deciphered not through words but through expressions, not through sound but through a silence intricately scripted. I try to read the words out loud. But they read me instead, and I find myself mutely mouthing syllables of a story that will not let me drape its skeleton in ordinary sound. When this happens, I turn around. Around and around and around with my hands held out and my eyes closed and the sun is so high overhead and the heat grows overwhelming.
You look away from me, and toward a nearby Jaffa tree. You seem to be examining the tree from a distance. Soon you say, “I think I know what you are talking about.” And you point to the tree and read our names off the boughs. You squint because it is very sunny and you say, “Nomi was a writer and Jeremy was a scientist.” I can hear the rest of the story in my head. I can feel our own chapter sliding into the eye. We work together, pressing the embryonic cells in place, and then I hold a higher branch back as you bind the wound and say the blessing. You say, “Nomi was pious in a peripheral way.” I say, “Jeremy was a lover in every way.” And the trees put in the punctuation. So many exclamation points, so many sentences that run into each other because our bodies are entwined, our souls constantly touching. And yet, we can read us. We continue to walk through the groves, all the way to the lower orchards. The sky is blue and the air is cool but not cold. I follow you, our feet making static rhythmic stomping sounds, and every so often one of us stops to pick a sticker off of our pants. Finally, you stop at a random lemon. And we stand by the tree listening to ourselves telling and being told to the landscape. You have the end of a branch in your hand and you are ever so gently tugging, so that the branch sways a tiny bit.
The tree is craggy, its trunk is elephant-skin-old, and its boughs are fragrantly bountiful. I tell you that lemons are the only trees that give fruit and flower and buds simultaneously. And then I point out that buds and flowers and fruit are all on the tree together. All three life-processes at once, an overlapping cycle. Around the base of the trunk are chazirim, pigs, thorns from the old root graft. We have to watch out for them. I can see you. You are walking around the tree. Scientist that you are, you are examining it. Your hands are reaching through the small dark-green leaves. You let an early dark-green lemon rest on your palm and you move your hand up and down a bit, as if you are weighing it. The sun is picking up the highlights in your beard and hair. I can see you, your blue eyes smiling. Here is our fruit, this very moment, here are our flowers, our love, here is our future, little green embryo lemons promising future harvest, and here are our thorns, our separate seconds, our years apart, wild and sticking
up at all angles from the ground. And here is our fruit again, this telling moment. You round the tree completely and we clasp hands.
My love, I have been in the orchard alone for a very long time. I watch you making your way toward me. I can hear your footsteps. I can see you ducking to avoid the scratch of branches. You are wearing a blue-and-white shirt and jeans. I am wearing a black shirt, also jeans. You stand in front of me. I reach for you. I lean my forehead against your chest. You breathe into my hair.
It is a story, like the others. A story told with buried stones. We dig into the family orchard and find the stones, the very ones. I hold them in my hands, flat on my palm, and I use the words she never taught me. “Here lived an ancient Babylonian clown, here lived a Phoenician princess, here lived a wheat thresher, and a soapmaker, a dye master whose fingers were all a different color.” I know these words not because my grandmother told them to me, because she didn’t. I know them because I, too, lived in that house. I was there long after the stones had risen up to the surface hiding their charms and horrors in plain sight. We dig. We go together out to the orchard and we dig down deep.
We are on our knees. I turn to you and take your hands in my own and I say, “Here lived one thousand generations of fruit and love and family dust.” I hold up the stone and I say nothing. When I speak again I know that I have left the realm of the stones and have fallen or perhaps risen into the realm where stories are not made of rock but of air, and to tell is to breathe. I gasp. I say, “This stone once offered itself into the hands of the man who worked in this garden.” I say, “It came up out of the ground and offered itself to him like a present.” You take my hands. The stone falls thumping to the ground. We look all around us sensing that we are far from alone; the orchard, though empty of other people, seems crowded.
We both know why we are here. Why I have returned and will keep returning to this little spot of land—this orchard, our library. We know that my speaking is really a reading and that we two together will press our bodies backward into the pages of the book that grows here, from the soil of this orchard.
We walk to the double tree. When we get close, we have to duck down low in order to avoid being scratched by its branches. You are so tall, you have to duck much more than I do. We smile at this. When we reached the twin trunks you put your hands in between them—in the thick V where they melt together. You are still crouching. I can stand up almost upright. The fruit isn’t ripe yet, and we are surrounded on all sides by so many small dark-green early oranges of the two varieties. It is fragrant, lushly dim, and so beautiful in here.
The quiet of the orchard is a quiet of rustling, a quiet of branches touching other branches, a quiet punctuated by the occasional piece of early fruit falling with a tiny crash to the ground. I tell you that the word history comes from the Greek root “istor,” which means “knowledge” or “knowing.” Then I tell you that my history isn’t true to its root because I know nothing. You hold out your arms and I come to you. I follow you, again crouching low in order to emerge from the boughs. I walk into your arms and we stand together in the middle of the orchard. You whisper, “So don’t tell me your history, but tell me what has taken its place. Tell me the story’s story. Tell me the lying root.”
I ask, “How do you tell a lying root when you are one of the living branches?”
We are quiet for what seems a very long time. Then I tell you that I do know something. I say, “I know many stories.” You smile. I keep talking, I say, “I know so many stories about them. I know the twin stories, the double tree, Avra the thief, my grandmother and the grenade, my grandfather on the motorcycle riding across the sands of Lebanon. I know about Esther and Yochanan and about the rabbi who was murdered in his parlor when he sat down for lunch.” I am flushed now and am talking loudly, waving my hands at you and at the trees. You say, “Tell me all the stories. Tell me them one by one.”
We embrace by the old mango tree. I wonder, Jeremy, what part of our lives is the fiction today—the part that we will either simply forget or refuse to remember? Will it be my arms that reach up to clasp behind your neck, your shoulders? Or will it be your eyes that survey the sky now catching a glimpse of a very large bird heading out over the orchard and toward the water? I wonder, what part of our lives is the fiction today? What part will our children or our children’s children have to make up when trying to know who we were and weren’t? Will they have to make up the way you are looking at me now, your head slightly tilted down to the right, your eyes flirty and piercing, your soft lips upturned and parted? Will they have to make up the way you are pressing your lips into the top of my head, kissing me in code? Will they have to make up our stance, our story, our passion, our bodies planted in this place, embracing in the early evening wind? Will they have to make up the stories we are standing on? I dig my toes into the ground. The stories buried beneath our feet? Or will they have to weave nets to catch the ones floating above our heads, the stories that tell our souls, our souls riding the clouds, swooping toward the horizon like doves unencumbered? I wonder. And I also wonder, what part of our lives is the truth today? Is the truth these words that I put down now? Is it the words I whisper into your chest as we embrace? Or is it the words still stuck on the back of my tongue—all that I may never write, never whisper, never utter?
MANUAL OF ORCHARD TERMS
MY FATHER TELLS ME:
Pardesanim, the Orchard Workers
The city where my father grew up, Petach Tikvah, was the citrus-growing center of Palestine. Almost all the men in the town and many of the women worked in the orchards. My grandfather, Shimon, was a real pardesan, a real “orchard man.” Shimon was a citrus grower and a manager of citrus groves. He took my father and uncle out into the orchards with him the day they started to walk. For many years the financial situation of the family was desperate. When the twins finished six years of school, their father gave them shovels and hoes (turia) and sent them to work full-time in the groves. But long before that they were helping in the orchard. The turia, the grafting knife, and the saw were an integral part of my father’s life. He called the turia a “fiddle” and taught me, my brother, and many others to “play.”
My mother also worked in the orchards. She was an expert packer. When she and my father were first married, the settlement depended very heavily on citrus exports for revenue. Each orange was precious, like gold. In those days it was a real skill to pack the fruit in the wooden crates. They were packed fresh from the tree in the orchard in such a way that the fruit would not be bruised on the way to market. My mother was quite an expert and my father would brag about how she was always the fastest and most careful packer.
When Shachar was founded in 1932 the villagers planted limeta rootstock (sweet lime). A year later, when the roots had matured and were ready for grafting, the villagers sent to Petach Tikvah for expert grafters. So who came to graft in Shachar? My father! Not knowing it, he actually grafted his own future orchard. This was an incredible coincidence. Of course, he and my mother eventually moved to Shachar, and for the rest of his life my father worked those same groves.
Shorishim, Roots
The first thing you do, no matter which graft you are going to use, is to plant the rootstock. Rootstock is a citrus variety whose fruit is not good for eating—too bitter, too many seeds, hard to peel, etc., but whose roots are very hardy. Some rootstocks are more suitable for a specific citrus variety than others—for example, clementine do better, give more fruit, if grafted onto limeta rootstock.
Examples of rootstocks are: Limeta (a kind of sweet lemon) and choushchash. Limeta is good for light sandy soil. Typically the annual yield of a variety grafted onto limeta is quite stable from year to year, but its life span is relatively short. Choushchash is better for heavy soil that does not drain water very well. Its life span is very long, but its yield fluctuates dramatically.
After the rootstock grows about two feet in height, you cut the top so that it will branch out. When it bran
ches out you keep about three or four of these branches—cut the rest. When they are about one inch thick, you can graft on each a different variety. From the day you planted the seedling until you can graft will take about one year.
Klei Avodah, Tools
A grafting knife is really like a pen knife, but the other side is flat so that you can use it to slide open the lips of the bark without damaging it. The flat part, which we called the spoon, used to be made of bone, but now is made of plastic. I have a grafting knife at home—I actually have my father’s too, his last one.
A turia is handled like a pickaxe. It is swung forward from over the shoulder to dig a hole in the ground. It has a short handle, and a rather large metal shovel/spoon head. Using a turia is literally backbreaking work. It requires that the worker bend down constantly. But with the turia you can accomplish a great deal. Your work goes faster than if you use the longer-handled maadar. The shorter handle on the turia gives much more leverage and power than a regular shovel or a maadar. You use a turia to dig holes around a tree for irrigation purposes or to uproot big weeds. You can also use it for scraping jobs or for digging any hole for any of the various jobs involved in planting. While it is very difficult to get in the United States, a turia is one of the most common orchard tools in Israel. A friend suggested to me that Americans don’t like turias because the bending down is reminiscent of slave work. Perhaps this is so.