Wings of Refuge

by Lynn Austin

  “It’s all right, Abby. I understand.” Hannah laid her canes on the floor and lowered herself into one of the patio chairs to read Ben’s note. She smiled slightly at his words even as her eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she said when she finished. “I’ll treasure this.” She gently folded the page, then wiped her eyes. “I guess I’m not the only one still grieving. This has been difficult for you, too, hasn’t it? I gather your life hasn’t been touched so closely by death before—especially a violent one.”

  “No. Have they . . . um . . . caught the person who . . . ?”

  “Not yet, but they will.” Hannah sighed. “Ben and I had many discussions—some would say arguments—about the risks he was taking. The Jewish and Palestinian leaders who are willing to work together and negotiate with each other are often considered traitors by their own people who don’t want to compromise with their enemies. Ben secretly worked as the middleman between the two sides. I know he was willing to give his life if he thought it would bring lasting peace, but it still doesn’t make what you witnessed any easier to forget.”

  “How are his wife and family doing?”

  “They’re grieving, but their faith is strong.” Hannah pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “Ben wasn’t always a spy, you know. His first love—his true love—was agriculture. It wasn’t until much later in his life that the Agency became his mistress.”

  “Why did he join?”

  Hannah sighed again, looking out at the view that must have appeared blurred through her tears. “Joining the Agency was his reaction to a crisis. Life here in Israel can be very difficult. In fact, it can overwhelm you at times. When it overwhelmed Ben, he felt he needed to do something more than grow plants. For years, making the desert bloom had been his way of fighting back. But that was no longer enough for him. He had to do more. No one in our family was happy with his decision.

  “There was a knock on Hannah’s door, and a moment later Ari let himself in. Abby resented his intrusion, but Hannah didn’t seem to mind.

  “I followed you over here,” he told Abby. “The airline just called to say they will deliver your suitcase tomorrow.”

  “Finally! I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”

  “And I have another email message for you.” He handed Abby the printout, then he and Hannah talked in Hebrew while Abby read her daughter’s letter.

  Dear Mom,

  I’m so glad you thought of sending each other email. It’s been great talking to you every day. Good news! The insurance company sent a check today to pay for the damage and to replace all the stolen things. Greg already bought a new CD player, but Dad says to wait and let you replace everything else.

  Mom, I know that you don’t want to talk to Dad or have anything to do with him, and I don’t blame you. What he did hurt all of us—you most of all. I didn’t want to see him either, but this robbery forced me to, and maybe that was why God allowed it to happen. Daddy and I have had time to really talk. We stayed up until two o’clock in the morning last night. He said that when he walked in the door and saw our house all trashed, and you were gone, and I was scared and alone, it was like seeing a portrayal of what he had done to all of us. He asked Greg and me to forgive him—and he cried, Mom. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Daddy cry before. . . .

  Emily had written more, but Abby needed to wait until she was alone to read the rest. The letter made her so angry she wanted to crumple it in her fist. He hasn’t cried nearly as much as I have, she fumed. She turned her attention back to Hannah and Ari, wanting to push Mark and her problems at home far from her thoughts. Wasn’t that one of the reasons she had traveled here—to forget?

  Ari leaned against the railing with his back to the lake. His voice had gradually grown louder, his scowling face and brusque gestures betraying his anger. There was a third chair on Hannah’s balcony, but Abby was relieved when Ari bid them a curt good-night and left the bungalow. She needed some quiet conversation alone with Hannah to diffuse the anger that Emily’s letter had aroused and to soothe the grief that Ben’s letter had evoked.

  “Is everything all right at home?” Hannah asked, gesturing to the letter.

  “Yes, you were right—my kids are coping with the whole incident pretty well. They don’t want me to come home.” She longed to blurt out her anger and her fear that Mark was taking advantage of her absence and the break-in to worm his way back into their children’s lives, but she knew she would sound childish. Instead she asked, “Did I do something to make Ari angry just now?”

  “Not at all,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry if our discussions get a bit loud. Ari always has been a very . . . intense person.”

  “To tell you the truth, I can’t figure him out,” Abby said. “He can be so thoughtful one minute—offering to let me send email, loaning me his wife’s clothes—yet he’ll barely speak to me the next.”

  “Please don’t take Ari’s behavior personally. Like you, he has also had his private struggles. I have known Ari for a long time. He was my first student assistant at the Institute, in fact.”

  “How long have you been an archaeologist?”

  “Let’s see . . . more than thirty years, I guess.”

  “I can tell that you still love it, Hannah. You still get excited with each new find.”

  “Yes. So does Ari. He just has a different way of showing it.”

  “What made you decide to study archaeology?”

  “That’s a very long story,” she said, smiling. “Are you sure you’re not too tired to hear it after a long week of digging?”

  “I’m not tired at all—and we can sleep late tomorrow, right?”

  “That’s true. We won’t leave for our tour of Jerusalem until nine o’clock.”

  “Nine o’clock!” Abby said. “That’s going to feel like noon after waking up at four all week. Besides, I’m too unsettled to sleep. I keep thinking about Leah, wondering about her life, trying to imagine how she would have learned to write her name.”

  Hannah smiled. “I do the same thing—give flesh and blood to the people whose lives I unearth. I always have, ever since I found my first artifact.”

  “Were you born in Israel?”

  “No, my family immigrated here in 1951 when I was ten years old. I was born in Iraq, fifty-eight years ago. . . .”

  THE NEGEV ISRAEL—1951

  Sunlight radiated off the tin walls of the shack, intensifying the desert’s suffocating heat. Perspiration mingled with Hannah’s tears as she wept in her father’s arms on the front step. “I want to go home! Please, Abba, please take me home!”

  “We can’t go back, Hannah. We can never go back.” Sorrow thickened his voice. He patted her head uselessly, offering her no comfort. Every day for the entire two weeks she had lived in Israel, Hannah had pleaded with him to take her back to Iraq. Every day Abba’s answer remained the same. “Iraq is no longer our home. We aren’t welcome there anymore.”

  “But I want to go home!”

  “We are home. Israel is our home now.”

  Dirt smudged Abba’s handsome face, fatigue etched it with deep furrows. His thick black hair, once glossy and clean, now wore a layer of gray dust. He had always dressed in fine clothes, hand-tailored shirts, and jackets of silk and linen, but now he didn’t even smell like Hannah’s father. Instead of that wonderful combination of Turkish coffee, expensive tobacco, and lemony cologne, he reeked of sweat, like a common servant.

  “I hate it here! I hate Israel!” Hannah clenched her swollen eyes shut, remembering their clean, spacious villa in Baghdad, the servants who took such luxurious good care of them, the juicy lamb and luscious fruit that seemed to overflow from their table. Hannah had lived a pampered life in Iraq, stuffed as plump as a melon with pastries and sweets. After her mother died, she and Abba shared the villa with Uncle Mor-decai, Aunt Shoshanna, and their three sons. Now she couldn’t understand why they had left it all behind to live in squalor in a crude shack in the melting heat of the desert
. And she was much too numb with her own grief to notice by the slump of Abba’s shoulders, the quiet despair in his voice, that he longed to return to their old way of life in Iraq as much as Hannah did.

  “Why can’t we go home?” she sobbed.

  “Enough. I give up,” Abba said suddenly. “It is useless to try to console you. You don’t hear a word I say. I have work to do.” He didn’t sound angry—Abba never spoke angrily to Hannah—simply weary of plowing the same old ground. Hannah slid from his lap as he stood. He pulled his shirt off over his head and tossed it through the open door of the shack. “Benjamin,” he called to his nephew, “see if you can do something with your cousin, please.” Ben emerged from the neighboring hut and shuffled over to take Abba’s place, while Abba took over Ben’s job of helping Uncle Mordecai mix cement for a new floor.

  “Whew! It’s hot, isn’t it?” Ben said, wiping his face with his shirttail. Hannah wept in reply. “Want to play a game or something, Hannah?”

  She thought of the games she and Ben used to play in the shady courtyard of their villa and wailed, “I want to go home!”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Ben said, yanking her to her feet. He dragged her by the arm like a stubborn puppy on a chain, down the road in front of the long row of shacks and across an empty field. As soon as they were out of earshot of their fathers, Ben grabbed Hannah by the shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled. “Stop bawling! We’re all sick of it! You’re not a baby!”

  No one had ever treated Hannah like that before. Stunned, she wiggled out of his grasp and fled to the shade of a spindly broom tree, one of the few that managed to grow in their desolate immigrant camp. Ben followed right behind her, his face red from his anger and the heat. Afraid he would shake her again, Hannah finally took control of her tears.

  “Go away and leave me alone!” she yelled. Instead, Ben flopped down beside her.

  “I’m not supposed to leave you alone, Hannah. I’m supposed to teach you stuff so you can start school as soon as it’s built.”

  A belated sob shuddered through her. “What . . . kind of . . . stuff?”

  “The Hebrew alphabet, for one thing. I already learned it when I studied for my bar mitzvah in Iraq.”

  “I don’t want to go to school.” Hannah crossed her plump arms, content to remain illiterate.

  “Well, you don’t have a choice,” he said. “It’s the law here in Israel. . . . And don’t start bawling again about how much you hate it here. Everyone for miles around already knows.” They sat in silence for a moment, watching their fathers mix another bucket of cement and haul it inside. They looked as small as ants from this distance, performing a wavering dance in the heat. “They sure could use some help,” Ben muttered.

  Hannah knew without asking that he was thinking of his two older brothers who had been inducted into the army shortly after arriving. “Do you miss them?” she asked.

  He lifted his shoulders slightly in resignation. “No use thinking about it.”

  Hannah stared at the shacks, the vertical lines in the corrugated tin shimmering in the heat until the houses appeared to be melting before her eyes. She wished that they would melt. It would be unbearable inside tonight as she and Abba tried to sleep.

  “Why can’t we have a nice house?” she asked. “I saw nice ones when we first arrived in Israel. Why did they send us here where it’s so hot that even grass can’t grow?”

  “Because we’re Sephardic.” He spat out the word as if it made a bitter taste in his mouth.

  “What does that mean?”

  “There are two kinds of Jews—Ashkenazi and Sephardic. Ashkenazis are lighter skinned and come from European countries. They hold all the power in Israel and make all the important decisions. Sephardis like us are darker skinned and have no power at all. We’re descendants of the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Inquisition? One of the many bad ideas the Gentiles have come up with to kill our people.”

  “Kill us? Why?”

  Ben took a breath, about to speak, then shook his head. “Don’t ask. Anyway, our ancestors left Spain and settled in Iraq. But we really belong here, in Israel. This is the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants.”

  Hannah had heard the name Abraham mentioned at the synagogue and knew he was an important man. “Is Abraham Ash-whatever or like us?” Her question amused Ben. His eyes filled with warmth and laughter. They reminded Hannah of the dark, sweet candies that had been her favorites in Iraq.

  “Neither one. Abraham was just plain Jewish.”

  “How do you know so much?” she asked, grateful that Ben had taken her mind off home for a few minutes. He grinned and tousled her hair.

  “Because I go to school. And now that you’ll be going to school, too, you’ll be as smart as me someday.”

  “I don’t want to go to school,” she repeated. Ben sighed.

  “Don’t be such a baby.”

  In the distance, Aunt Shoshanna straightened from the tub of laundry she was bending over and rubbed her aching back. When she finished washing their clothes, she would hang them out to dry on the rope that stretched between their two huts. It looked to Hannah like an endless job. With a house full of servants in Baghdad, Ben’s mother had never scrubbed laundry or cooked a meal in her life. Now that she was forced to do servants’ work, she appeared exhausted by dinnertime as she laid their daily fare of fish and steamed vegetables on the table. Hannah had seen her aunt crying several times since they’d left Iraq, but unlike Hannah, Aunt Shoshanna shed her tears in silence.

  “We were all spoiled in Iraq,” Ben said, as if reading Hannah’s thoughts. “But the truth is, it has always been hard for our people. One of the Torah passages I had to learn for my bar mitzvah said that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, but when they cried out to the Lord, He brought them to this land flowing with milk and honey—”

  “Milk and honey! This place?” Hannah gestured to the dry, barren landscape all around them, the row upon row of ugly tin shacks. “Our home in Baghdad was paradise! Israel is Sheol!”

  Ben shook his head. “That’s just what our ancestors said after God delivered them from slavery. ‘That was Paradise,’” he said, mimicking her whiny voice. “‘Why did you bring us here to die?’ But Iraq wasn’t our home, Hannah. We were hated there. And ever since the Iraqis lost the war three years ago, they’ve hated our people even more. Why do you think we’re so poor now? They let us leave the country, but only if we left all our valuables behind.”

  Tears welled in Hannah’s eyes as she remembered the confusion and fear she’d felt the night the Israeli government airlifted her family out of Iraq. Along with 120,000 other Iraqi Jews, they had left with only one suitcase apiece and the clothes on their backs, city clothes that proved to be ridiculously inappropriate for the rugged desert life they now faced in Israel.

  “So quit blubbering about Baghdad,” Ben finished. “Israel is our true home. We belong here. And now that we have our own country, no one can ever persecute us again.”

  “Well, if you ask me, they’re persecuting us here in Israel,” she said, unconvinced by Ben’s speech. “Why were we sent to the desert? They have cities in Israel. I saw them.”

  “It’s not a desert. It’s called the Negev. And I already told you why. Besides, this is where most of Israel’s unsettled land is.”

  Hannah scooped up a handful of hot dry dirt and flung it into the wind. “How is Abba supposed to grow food out here? We’ll all starve!”

  “Oh, we’ll grow food here all right,” Ben said, gazing into the distance. “You wait and see. The prophets said that one day the desert would blossom like a rose. It has to happen, Hannah. And I’m going to make it happen!”

  * * *

  The first week after school opened, Hannah ran away from it at least twice a day. It was easy to do; her classroom had no walls, only a roof made of discarded packing boxes to shade students from the sun. She sat
on a bench made from a board and two rocks, sharing all her textbooks with a seatmate named Dara. Hannah hated her. Dara hogged all the nice books with the colored pictures, holding them on her lap instead of in the middle, and she poked Hannah in the ribs with her bony elbows every time she flipped a page. Whenever the teacher turned his back, Hannah bolted.

  Her favorite place to hide was in the “lost city,” a pile of tumbled stones on a hill behind the immigrant settlement. Abba said it had once been a town. It was nothing but a jumble of rocks and broken pillars now, but Hannah had discovered enough intricately carved fragments among the ruins to see that it had once been beautiful—like her home in Iraq had been. Now both places were lost forever. After fleeing from school again this day, she sat down on a short flight of stairs shaded by a section of wall that hadn’t fallen and dreamed of home.

  “You can’t keep running away from school!” Ben yelled when he found her. He was breathless from the search and angry that he’d been sent to fetch her again. “What’s your excuse this time?”

  “That stupid Dara who sits beside me won’t stop wiggling. I got tired of trying to keep my balance on that dumb board.”

  “Oh, that’s just great!” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “I’m missing class again because you were uncomfortable!”

  “I hate school, and I hate—”

  “Save your breath. I’ve heard it all before.” He flopped down on the step below Hannah’s and leaned his back against the wall.

  “Well, I’m not going back to school—ever!” she said.

  “Fine. You don’t have to go back.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Nope. Not if you don’t want to.”

  Although this sounded like good news to Hannah, there was a look in Ben’s eye that put her on guard. He was plotting something, she could tell. She wiggled closer to the wall to get away from him, waiting.

  “Come back to the house with me,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”