Skillfully he veered off on a small fork of road lined with acacia trees swaying gently in the breeze that breathed against their faces like slow gusts of air thrusting forth from an open oven.
Just beyond them a row of neatly whitewashed bungalows gleamed whitely against air that shimmered with the golden light of the low-hanging midday sun. Small plots of grass bordered each house and flame-colored flowers nestled in the soft patches of shadow at the brightly painted doorways. A family shared an army blanket spread on a lawn of coarse desert grass, its greenery parched and yellowed. The father, a tall young man with a long blond beard and thick blond hair, read aloud to a small girl while the mother, a tiny Yemenite woman, diapered a kicking baby who writhed upward and chortled loudly. A boy and a girl, hands linked, rode down the path on battered bicycles and veered off to opposite sides of the road to allow the Goldfeders’ taxi to pass.
“Shalom!” they called and waved.
“Shalom,” David replied from the open window and Aaron smiled and waved.
In the distance they saw the gentle slopes of the ocher-colored Edomite mountains and they knew that farther south the blue waters of the Gulf of Aqabah licked the shores of the desert kingdom that was Israel’s southland. David felt a new pride in his daughter and her family who had carved a home for themselves in this harsh and beautiful place, who had set down grass amid swirling sands and built small homes with bravely painted doors, and coaxed life and nurture from a land abandoned to death.
The taxi stopped in front of a large white building bordered by a porch built beneath a concrete awning. A group of young people sat around a radio and listened in concentrated silence to a news broadcast.
“Ah, they are waiting to hear whether the fedayeen who made the attack on the jeep near Dimona have been caught,” Danni said. “The stupid bastards, those fedayeen. What does it do for them? They provoke, we retaliate, they provoke again. Ach!” He spat into his hands and wiped them on his large handkerchief. “Well, we are arrived at the dining hall of Shaarei HaNegev and just in time, too. This is the hour of real heat and I am going to try this swimming pool the kibbutz boasts so much about.”
They emerged from the taxi and felt the full impact of the desert day. Here the air was tumid with the golden stillness of a thick, impenetrable heat. The sand on which they stood burned against the soles of their shoes and they moved swiftly, almost fearfully, into the sweetness of the shaded porch.
“Who here is Yehuda Arnon?” Danni called. “I have brought with me his wife’s American family.”
“Ah yes. For the brith,” a girl who had been passing out the glasses of lemonade said, and David recognized the impeccable Oxford accent although the girl was barefoot and her blue work pants and halter were streaked with paint. “Yehuda!” she called. “Your Rivka’s family is here.”
The door opened and Rebecca’s husband, the father of their grandchild, came out. Leah and David smiled at the tall young man who looked exactly as Rebecca had described him. Silver hair flecked his temples, his narrow features were sharply chiseled, and his gray eyes, so light and silken-smooth, were startling against his bronzed skin.
He was like the swift and gentle gazelle, Leah thought, and moved toward him, her arms outstretched.
“Yehuda,” she said. “Thank you for making me a grandmother.”
“And I thank you for giving me my wife,” he replied and his strong arms encircled her, his lips dryly brushed her cheek. He shook hands gravely with David and Aaron and they were all pleasantly conscious of the fact that they had liked each other at once without awkwardness or embarrassment.
“I will take you now to Rivka and the baby,” he said and Leah felt a tremor of nervousness.
It had been six years since they waved good-bye to Rebecca as she sailed for Italy. Six years in Rebecca’s life and the life of their family. Children had been born and loved ones had died. Mollie. Sarah Ellenberg. The tiny fragile Schreibers. They had danced at weddings and wept at funerals. Michael had grown to manhood and Aaron had suffered loss. Rebecca had fought a war, become a wife and mother. So much had happened, perhaps too much. They had become unraveled, had lost the thread of each other’s lives.
She followed Yehuda too slowly as he led the way to a small white house, but suddenly the stillness of the air was pierced by an infant’s wail and all doubt was banished. Leah rushed forward and thrust open the door to the room where Becca sat, the sunlight splayed across her thick black hair, an infant held to her breast. It was their Becca of the laughing mouth, with a new softness in her large dark eyes that filled with tears as her parents moved toward her.
Yehuda held the baby as Leah and Rebecca clung to each other. He smiled as Aaron and David joined them, entangling each other in a knot of embraces, laughing and crying, asking questions but never waiting for answers.
That night they sat about the gas heater in Rebecca and Yehuda’s small bungalow and talked softly of the years that had passed. The desert night had turned swiftly and startlingly cold, and they huddled over the blue flame that danced erratically in the grate and bathed their faces in its fiery glow. Rebecca laughed when they told her how orthodox Seymour Hart had become. Since Mollie’s death he had reverted to the customs of his youth, went to synagogue twice a day and argued vociferously with his son about closing the business on Saturdays. She was pleased when they told her that Eleanor Greenstein had married a Bennington professor, and she looked admiringly at a sample table napkin on which Leah’s bright floral patterns would be embossed under Joshua Ellenberg’s imprint later that year. Had they heard, she asked, that Joe Stevenson had had a successful show in Paris, that he had married a ceramicist who had lived only miles from his California home?
Mindell and Danielle sat quietly on the floor, listening wide-eyed to tales of people they had never seen, stories of places with names they found difficult to pronounce. The English was difficult for them to follow but they listened attentively, an avid audience at a rare performance, fearful of missing a nuance, a cadence. They were children for whom personal history was a luxury and they clung to each name and incident, ferreting away the stories that belonged to Rebecca’s girlhood, seizing them as an adoptive legacy.
In a corner of the room Aaron and Yehuda’s son, Noam, fashioned paper planes out of old copies of the Jerusalem Post. Aaron read the headlines as he made intricate folds.
“It’s hard to think of our Josh as a corporate magnate,” Rebecca said after Leah had described Joshua’s office high above the East River, the factories all over the country that were his subsidiaries. “But then that’s what he always wanted.”
“Yes. Ellenberg Industries are much bigger than S. Hart ever was. But they share the same history. Both of them were launched by your mother’s designs,” David said and smiled proudly at Leah.
“We were lucky. Very lucky,” Leah said, fingers finding David’s.
But a stillness followed her words. Not all of them had been lucky. They did not look at Aaron who bent to his work, showing Noam a new way of folding the tail wing. He paused, as Noam tried, and read an item in the half-crumbled newspaper.
“It says here there was an ambush at Mitzpeh Rimon. That’s where we stopped today, not far from here. Have you had any difficulty with the fedayeen?”
“There isn’t a settlement in the south that hasn’t had some difficulty,” Yehuda answered, and they noticed for the first time the rifle that rested in a corner of the room. “These are unsettled times. The Arabs aren’t ready for a war. They’ve had only six years to figure out what happened in the War for Independence. But they don’t want us to feel that we’re free to live in peace in what they still consider their lands. So they resort to these border raids. The fedayeen dash across, kill some livestock, set fire to a few buildings. If they can, they kill a settler, a soldier, a child. It is a war of nerves. But we are ready for them.”
He walked across the room and took the rifle, flipping open the cartridge case, running his hand across
its carefully cleaned and oiled butt.
The room in which they sat was lined with bookshelves. Rebecca’s paintings, celebrating the varied colors of the Negev, the miracle of young grass, a single sheath of wheat trembling in the wind, hung in simple frames against the whitewashed walls. Bright woven pillows were tossed on the couch and the children’s games stood on a low wicker table with an FM radio from which soft music flowed. It was a room designed for a family who delighted in life, in the joy of words, in the richness of color and the gentle sound of music. Yet within it, a man stood and checked his rifle while through the window they saw the roving beam of a searchlight, penetrating the secrets of the night, warning them that danger hovered close, that they could not, must not, assume security.
Leah shivered suddenly and took the sweater Rebecca handed her.
“Well, it’s an advantage at least to struggle against danger that you can see,” Aaron said and they did not know if he was thinking of his own distant war in the mountain country of Africa, when the enemy was concealed in jungle foliage and lurched forward from the cover of caves, or his more recent combat with the ghosts that had haunted and finally killed poor Katie.
“Too often we cannot see the dangers,” Yehuda replied. “I had a friend, a man named Amos who lived on Kibbutz Yotvata, right near Eilat. It was his turn to serve as night watchman and he was making his rounds when he heard an animal bleating, as though in pain. It is a hard thing for a farmer to ignore the moans of an animal and so he followed the sounds. A young camel, its leg broken, lay just outside the settlement gate. The watchman forgot for a minute that he was a soldier as well as a farmer. He went out the gate and set his rifle down while his fingers probed the poor thing’s broken bone. Within that minute he was shot in the back and his head was severed to be carried back and displayed in a camp of the fedayeen. They found his headless corpse in the morning, covered with desert maggots. He was a good man. I fought with him in Jerusalem and later in Beersheba. Once Rebecca and I went to Yotvata because he gave a small recital. He was a cellist. He never saw his enemy and later it was learned that the young camel’s leg had been shattered by a bullet. So now when Amos’s four year-old son grows to be bar mitzvah, he will say Kaddish for his father who was too good a farmer to be a cautious soldier.”
They were silent and David looked at the children, at Mindell and Danielle and Noam, who had listened without shock and horror to their father’s story. His colleagues at learned conferences would protest that such tales traumatized, created anxious fears, nocturnal terrors. But his son-in-law, heir to a new wisdom, knew that his children must be prepared, educated into vigilance, trained to strength. He was relieved that Rebecca’s husband was not afraid to confront the truth.
“But don’t you think that the Triparate Declaration will stop the fedayeen raids?” Aaron asked.
He referred to an agreement signed by France, Britain, and the United States, guaranteeing that the borders of Israel and its neighbors be secure and warning that punitive action would follow any infringement.
Yehuda shrugged.
“The Triparate Declaration’s been in effect for four years now and for four years the fedayeen have ignored it and France, Britain, and the United States have ignored the fedayeen. Perhaps when Britain sees the dangers to Suez, it will make a move, but no one will move forward to protect Jewish lives. We must wait until the Canal or oil move the big powers to action. Meanwhile we must look to our own protection because the worst is not behind us. It is ahead of us. This Nasser makes us look back at Farouk as though he were a saint.” His voice was grave but not frightened, and Danielle and Noam moved toward him like young tropistic plants, seeking the warmth of his outstretched arm, the shelter of his firm, lean body.
“Enough. No more talk of war. Tomorrow we have a celebration. Yaakov’s circumcision and three kibbutz weddings,” Rebecca said.
“I hope Michael will be here in time.”
Leah looked worriedly out the window. Sheaves of stars were stretched across the vast desert skies but she saw only its impenetrable blackness and heard the keenings of a distant jackal, the slash of a sudden wind against the date-palm leaves. The stories had unnerved her, had quickened forgotten fears. She wanted to be done with danger, free of the fear of violence, but outside this bright room where her family gathered, chilly winds blew and unknown strangers moved stealthily across the shifting sands.
“Oh, Michael will probably drive down with the lorry from Beth HaCochav,” Yehuda said. “That was his plan. They must have left the Galilee this morning and probably they stopped over in Beersheva. They’ll reach here at midday, about the same time we expect the rabbi to arrive.”
“The rabbi’s going to be pretty busy,” Noam said. “Chana’s had the kitchen ovens going since early this morning. Cakes and cookies and puddings.”
“I’m not worried about having enough to eat, but where will everyone sleep?” Rebecca wondered.
“That will take care of itself,” Yehuda assured her. “You know when we were teen-agers we hitchhiked through the country. There were fewer houses then, fewer settlements. Yet wherever we went, beds were found. We slept on porches and balconies, and sometimes people would insist that we take their bedrooms and they themselves would sleep outside on sleeping bags.”
There was a wistfulness in his voice for those long-lost nights of his youth, and Leah saw Rebecca turn away, her eyes bright with pain. It was with his first wife, Miriam, that the silken-eyed Yehudah had shared the sleeping bags and beds in unknown rooms and beneath star-studded skies. Old loves encroached on new ones; pain and pleasure, anguish and ardor commingled. Rebecca would have to learn how to assimilate the old and the new, to pluck the pain from loss and to treasure moments in muted memory—just as Leah had.
“What I am really worried about,” Yehuda continued, keeping his voice low because Danielle had fallen asleep, her head resting on his shoulder, “is security. If the fedayeen know there is a celebration here they will consider it a great triumph, a victory, to launch a raid.”
“But how would they ever know?” Mindell asked.
“Maybe by smelling Chana’s cooking,” Noam offered.
“Now we are being silly. It must be time to go to bed.”
They rose and said good night. Yehuda, still holding the sleeping Danielle whom he would carry back to the children’s house, bent to kiss Leah, the mother-in-law whom he had met that morning and recognized at once. David held Rebecca close and felt with joy the full maternal body, smelling faintly of milk, of the woman who had grown from his small laughing daughter, his American princess, to mother the motherless and capture beauty across stretches of canvas. He was proud of her and proud too of his tall sons. They would struggle, his gentle, thoughtful boys, but they would triumph.
Aaron stood across the room and David glimpsed a new softness in his son’s eyes. Aaron would sleep well that night, he knew, and he wondered if he himself would find sleep, already conscious of the familiar pain which inched across his chest and shot with deadly accuracy into his arms. But Syd Adler had been right. The pains came more infrequently now and frightened him less. And the pills were immediately efficacious. He hurried toward them and Leah complained, as they crossed from Rebecca’s bungalow to their own, that he walked too quickly across the unfamiliar terrain.
*
The rabbi, a plump young man whose short bronze beard curled gently and whose embroidered skullcap wobbled uneasily on his thick hair, arrived just before midday, driving a yellow Studebaker caked with desert dust and overflowing with pomegranates and melons, baskets of new spring tomatoes, tiny cucumbers with prickly spines. The various kibbutzim he had visited on his swing through the aravah, the southernmost part of the Negev, sent gifts to their neighbors, and he distributed them with a shy smile and replaced a bushel of northern oranges with a basket of bright-green scallions. A rifle was slung across the crates and his blue-velvet prayer-shawl bag rested on it. He wore khaki shorts and a work shirt, but
he changed into baggy gray slacks to perform the first of the marriages on the soft parched grass of the lawn.
The wedding canopy was a prayer shawl stretched on poles of fresh-cut palm wood and fringed with streamers of braided flowers. The brides wore simple dresses of thin white fabric and carried small bouquets of hardy desert flowers—the pale-white bud of the tamarisk, the pink-and-white meadow saffron, fragile spears of lavender, and rich purple wild irises that grow between moon-colored mounds of sand. The kibbutz children had collected the bridal bouquets and Leah had met Mindell and Danielle in the pale opal light of morning, their arms laden with flowers. She smiled at her adopted granddaughters’ bright faces and sniffed their burdens of sweetness. The fears of the previous night vanished and she walked between them into the communal dining hall and ate an enormous breakfast of salad, cheeses, and herring, feeling hungrier than she had felt for months.
The second bridegroom shattered a white wrapped glass beneath his foot and the shouts of “Mazal tov!—Good luck!” rang out as the lorry from Beth HaCochav drove up. The visitors from the north poured out, adding their shouted good wishes to those that already filled the air.
Leah watched her brother Moshe stride toward her and felt again the shock of recognition she had experienced when he and Henia met their boat at Haifa harbor. More than three decades had passed since she said good-bye to her brother at the Odessa port. Newly widowed, newly wedded, she had watched him begin his journey, dry-eyed because those were the years during which she refused to surrender to tears. Now at another dock-side they had greeted each other and the years dropped as easily as petals fall from a fragile flower. With her hair and his both graying, he a grandfather and she a grandmother, both of them orphaned by the flames of hell that had consumed the town of their birth, their only sister buried, the children grown, she allowed herself the luxury of sorrow and wept against the breast of her brother, distant but always close. The familiar rapport rushed back and their words flowed as easily and swiftly as their tears.
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