A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  This was one subject they’d maintained a running argument about through all these years. “I still think things happen for a reason,” said Emily.

  “And I don’t.”

  Emily let that go. The sun was glistening off the silver silos of the chicken coops. A man with a floppy blue hat pulled out on a tractor in front of Lauren’s car, hauling a wagon loaded with logs, a black Labrador trotting behind him.

  “This is a perfect film set for a farming village,” Emily said.

  “Wait until we go to the Independence Day party and then the Shavuot celebration, when all the farmers bring their first fruits and newborn calves, and parents parade their new babies.” Lauren patted her belly. “It is the perfect little village . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Except for the wars.”

  They passed a small shop, its plate-glass window plastered with announcements. A petite woman with glimmering white hair pulled back into a bun was talking to a woman whom Emily’s mother would have called zaftig. Fat, in other words. Lauren waved and they waved back.

  “That heavy lady is your landlord, Leah Zado,” Lauren explained. “She has an opinion about everything.”

  “Just what I need.”

  “And the other woman is Sophie Zuckerman. She lives next door to David and me, and she’s incredibly sweet.”

  “Don’t tell me that is where you shop.”

  “Can you believe what my world has come down to?” Lauren laughed. “In a few days, I’ll take you to Aga’s for the real deal. Aga started selling watermelons just outside the Arab village of Maloul and now he has a big market. But the cement floor slants, so if you don’t chain your shopping cart to a hook at the cash register, it rolls away. And don’t forget to wash everything really carefully. I once bought lettuce in the market in Akko and found a frog in the leaves.”

  “No way! Now tell me what’s wrong with the cottage you found for me.”

  “Besides the fact that you have to live in Leah Zado’s backyard? The kitchen is tiny, but you have a microwave and a normal-size refrigerator, and you can actually hear the sea. Emily, are you listening to me?”

  “Of course I’m listening to you.” But on the car radio was Bob Marley singing “Waiting in Vain,” the very song that had been playing when she had walked into her kitchen in Boston to see her husband, Rob, a blue apron wrapped around his waist, stirring something at the stove. He gazed in her direction, his thin lips parted, with the same expression her father used to wear when he was about to deliver bad news.

  “I’m sorry, Emily,” he’d said. “I don’t know how to tell you this. The thing is . . .” He hesitated, as if thinking twice about what to say. “I’m really sorry but I’m—I’m leaving you for—well, I think it’s best you hear it from me before you hear it from someone else. For a dancer named Taylor.”

  “Do go on,” Emily had said, because it happened to be April Fool’s Day and because she always used to joke that she was one of the only Jewish girls in all America who’d never taken dance lessons.

  “I don’t want to hurt you. I know this is not what you’d ever want to hear . . . I don’t know what else to say.”

  Emily should have thrown a plate at Rob or said something, but she’d had no air left inside her. She couldn’t breathe. She burst into tears. And Rob did not move to comfort her. How could a man comfort a woman he was about to leave? Emily cried and tried to catch her breath as he moved efficiently around the kitchen, the guy with his own cooking show never breaking his stride.

  “I am very sorry,” Rob had told her. But it was after a long time. And it hadn’t sounded like he really meant it.

  Lauren drove into a gravel parking lot and got out of the car. Emily followed, slamming the door, and walked across the sand to the rocky shore. The tide had rolled in and sunlight splashed across the deep, choppy water.

  “I’m really trying to accept it, but I still can’t get it through my thick skull.” Emily knitted her eyebrows together. “I never suspected a thing! All of a sudden, Rob was really into going to see the Boston Ballet. And it was all because of this stick-thin, anorexic, twenty-three-year-old with legs as long as stilts. Really, I should donate my brain for scientific research.”

  “Join the club of people whose lives haven’t gone the way they thought they’d go,” Lauren said. “Look at me. I never thought I’d end up here with David. I was sure I’d end up with a preppie like Hunter.”

  Emily looked at Lauren’s chino pants, Bass Weejuns, and kelly-green sweater. Never in a million years would Emily have pictured Lauren with someone like David. In the beginning, Lauren had mentioned introducing David to Emily—he was Israeli and Emily’s father was a cantor and all that—but then Lauren had started to like him herself.

  Lauren was looking out at the water. “The village is like summer camp with its get-togethers, and I can ride my bicycle to the library and to the playground and to the gan.” She stopped. “But I’ve still got a jones for Beantown. I miss the little things like Maverick Square and riding the T, especially the part in Brookline when it goes aboveground, and meeting my mother at the café in the Giorgio Armani store.”

  “My kind of designer. If I could have afforded it.”

  “You have your own style.” Lauren turned to her. “And I like your hair cut short like that.”

  “After Rob left I went to Miro and told him, ‘Chop it all off.’” Emily fluffed her fingers through the blunt ends of her thick chocolate-brown hair, thinking of Taylor’s naturally blond locks tied up in a perfect dancer’s bun, accentuating her long neck. Emily knew she had to lose the pounds she’d gained eating pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream (as if, she had joked morosely) after Rob had left. She gazed down at her white button-down shirt—now wrinkled from the airplane ride—black-and-white-checkered pants, and black patent leather shoes, an outfit that suggested she was funky, fashionable, and free to do what she wanted with a vengeance.

  “You’ll do great here,” Lauren said. “We’ll find you a job. I like my work at the maternity ward, and I love Aviva. She’s the one who convinced me to join the burial circle.”

  “It amazes me how you take care of babies entering the world and you take care of dead women who are leaving it.”

  “I know, right? I get to experience such powerful moments of life. But the dead can never thank you. That’s why the rabbi here, Rabbi Lapid, says it’s the greatest mitzvah.”

  “I could never—”

  “Never say never. I’ve learned that from my own experience.”

  “Maybe I’ll join, but after my father and now with Rob, I feel so raw.” Slowly, Emily faced the sea, which tumbled on and on until it cascaded over the edge of the earth. And then all the emotions that she’d been holding back for so long crashed in violent waves over her, and she bawled.

  Lauren stepped in close, putting her arms around Emily.

  “Here, take, blow.” Lauren handed her a crumpled tissue from the depths of her enormous black leather pocketbook. “Now that I’m a mother, I have a license to carry partly used tissues.”

  “Oh my God, these remind me of my mother’s tissues, except hers had bits of Virginia Slims tobacco stuck to them.”

  Emily wiped her nose and then pitched a flat gray stone into the water, hoping it landed somewhere that meant good luck. She turned to the north, aware of the ridge of hills and huge white rocks hanging over the sea. “What are those?”

  “The white cliffs of Dover.” Lauren looked in the same direction. Then, after a moment, “Those hills form the border with Lebanon.”

  “How close are we?”

  “About ten miles.”

  “What the fuck?” Emily said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you look at a map before you booked your flight?”

  “It never even dawned on me that you were so—”

  “Don’t remind me,” Lauren said. “It’s like living near the San Andreas Fault. Just don’t think about it.”

  Emil
y stared hard at the border and took a deep breath. “At least the zigzag slash in the hills looks like the mark of Zorro.”

  “It’s the army patrol road,” Lauren said.

  A FEW WEEKS later, just as Emily entered the lobby of the Garden of Eden Hotel, the manager, Yoram Kluger, called out, “Boker tov, Emily!”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  “Emily!” Yoram looked at her from under his shock of white hair. “Meet Boaz Lichtenberg, one of the best farmers in the village. And Boaz, meet Emily Freulich, an artist from Boston.”

  “An artist is stretching it a bit.” Emily blushed. “I worked in an art gallery.”

  “I gave her the job at the reception desk only until she finds something else,” Yoram said decisively. “But even Chagall wouldn’t be able to find a job around here.”

  “I’m open to anything.” Emily turned to Boaz, who was wearing a black T-shirt with a thistle stuck to his left sleeve. His face was ruddy and broad, and his eyes were the color of the sea. Not the morning sea, when the water was turquoise laced with jade, but the late-afternoon sea, when the sun hung low and the water took on a wistful shade of blue.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Boaz said in hesitant English.

  “Emily, you want to improve your Hebrew, and Boaz, you want to improve your English!” Yoram walked away. “Perfect for both of you!”

  Emily stepped behind the reception desk and hung her pocketbook on a metal hook by the office door. She sat down and studied the expected arrival times of the guests, unaware that Boaz was still standing there until he asked in English, “Do you like working here?”

  Emily looked up. “Well, it’s not at all like the kind of job I had in America, but meeting tourists is interesting.” Since she’d come to Peleg, she’d kept to herself, except for hanging out with Lauren and David. But Boaz seemed harmless enough, so Emily added, “I’d only hope the original Garden of Eden had nicer rooms.”

  “The breakfast is great.”

  “It’s like a wedding buffet with all the cheeses and breads and salads.” Emily dropped her voice. “To tell you the truth, I’m not so wild about the hot lunch.”

  “It’s that goulash—Yoram’s mother’s recipe.” Boaz smiled at her, as though letting her in on a secret. “Have you gone to see the banyan tree on the side lawn?”

  Emily was about to reply that she hadn’t when the telephone rang.

  “Garden of Eden Hotel, shalom!” Emily made a point of saying that last word clearly, breaking its two syllables right down the middle, the way Rob used to take hold of a Granny Smith apple, breathe in deeply like a yogi, and split it in two. Emily felt pathetic, still obsessing over someone who had betrayed her, discarded her, and no longer wanted her. She pushed him out of her brain with an image of her mother walking through temple saying, “Shalom, y’all!” Emily smiled even as the woman on the phone said something in rapid-fire Hebrew.

  “Do you speak English?” Emily asked.

  “I said pil-lows. Room 212 wants more pillows.”

  “Room 212.” Emily jotted it down. “We’ll bring some right up to you.”

  “So, nu, do you want to practice Hebrew with me?” Boaz asked in English after Emily hung up.

  “Lamah?” Emily replied. “Why? You don’t think Hebrew School in West Virginia taught me enough?”

  “What about what I learned in Western Galilee High School?” He smiled. “I can come here tomorrow evening after you finish work and we can practice.”

  “You already want to start tomorrow?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-four. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m forty and I have less time.”

  Emily’s eyes followed his hefty, decisive frame moving through the lobby and out the door.

  When Emily’s shift finally ended, she cut across the hotel lawn as light trawled over the dusky grass, headed for the banyan tree Boaz had mentioned. It took her breath away. It was feral-looking, with silvery rope-like roots rising up out of the earth—or were they diving down into it? Birds sang out at the top of their lungs within its glossy leaves. Emily stepped in close, spotting graffiti carved into one of the huge trunks. Underneath a geometric design she knew was Arabic writing were three Hebrew letters: an alef, a lamed, and the final yud that looked like an accidental scratch, and at the bottom was the name Ali, written in English.

  EMILY GLANCED UP from behind the reception desk one night the following month as Boaz walked in, whistling and freshly shaved. He wore a blue-and-white-plaid shirt with lapels that were way too wide, his sleeves rolled up just above the elbows.

  “Very dressed up, you,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Tonight is our tenth lesson,” he said. “Instead of staying here, can I take you out to dinner?”

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d ask me that since our fifth lesson.” Emily thought of how she’d come to look forward to their lessons and the ease with which they spoke to each other in a mixture of English and Hebrew, what she called Engbrew. After being in a marriage that revolved around Rob and his constantly changing schedule—and how she felt he squeezed her into it—she liked looking up from the reception desk to see Boaz patiently waiting for her to finish her shift, proving that for her, he had all the time in the world. She liked his sunburned neck, his hairy forearms, his worn-in work shirts, his reticence. She liked how he patiently answered her questions about life in the village. She also liked imagining how it would be to sink into his bearish frame, and the comforting way she thought he’d hold her.

  Emily stopped her reverie to study the hotel list. There was a wedding scheduled for the following night, which meant ten wake-up calls for five thirty A.M., three for six thirty, dry cleaning pickup for rooms 114 and 122, and extra vases for the newlyweds’ room. “There’s a wedding for eight hundred people tomorrow,” she told Boaz.

  “Who knows eight hundred people? Who even likes eight hundred people?”

  Driving along the main road in his burgundy pickup truck, Boaz pointed out the sights. A stone aqueduct from Ottoman times—“They were smarter than we are because they figured out how to build the aqueduct at just the right angle to bring water down from the hills”—towering eucalyptus trees—“The early Jews planted them to drain the swamps”—and the Bahá’i Gardens—“The founder is buried right in there. Don’t ask me why everyone calls this place the Holy Land.”

  “But it could be.” Emily thought of her father.

  “Holy as in holes.” Boaz frowned. “Have you been to Akko before?”

  “With my parents and my brother, Matt,” she said. “But I won’t tell you how many years ago that was.”

  “You don’t must to.”

  “Have to.”

  “Have to what?”

  “Must and have to are tricky.” Emily spoke patiently, the same way she used to explain English grammar rules to her father. “You don’t need to with must. You could have said, ‘You don’t have to.’”

  “I don’t have to what?”

  “It’s really not important!” Emily was exhausted, and by that time they’d reached Akko, anyway. Boaz parked the truck. They got out and stood by a rampart wall as thick as a fortress, overlooking the inky black Mediterranean. Behind them, the city looked ancient and mysterious, layers upon layers of stone buildings huddled together on the precipice of a peninsula that jutted out over the sea. Centuries of salty air and rains and desert winds had faded the structures to weather-beaten tattered gray, left them pocked with holes and almost crumbling. But still standing.

  “They built this city thousands of years ago.” Boaz patted the impenetrable wall in front of them. “Even Napoleon couldn’t conquer this place.”

  “I can see why.” Emily breathed in the salty, damp air, encircled with time like the rings on a tree. Then she and Boaz made a sharp left turn and then a sharp right, walking deeper and deeper into the warren of dimly lit alleyways. The faint sounds of televisions and voices
drifted out of apartments ensconced deep within the serpentine passages.

  Emily wore a black satin Chinese jacket decorated with gold dragons and a black wrap-around skirt, and she could hear her high-heeled pumps click against the weathered cobblestones. The dense stones rose on both sides of them like a cave, trapping the briny air, as if the same darkness had lurked there for millennia.

  “It’s like an eerie maze,” Emily whispered, leaning into Boaz.

  As they passed shuttered shops nestled in arched alcoves, Boaz said, “In the daytime, the souk is packed.”

  “Yes, I remember it.” Emily could picture the noisy, lively market crowded with shops selling long robes and glittery belly dancer costumes, water pipes, kitchenware, incense, exotic spices and weird tchotchkes (her brother, Matt, had bought real birds’ eyes and a tortoise shell that the salesman said would bring good luck). No matter where they were in Israel, her father served as their impromptu tour guide, pointing out in his slow, careful English things that Emily, Matt, and their mother might have missed. She could hear her father saying, “If you don’t look at the Bruce Lee videotapes, you can imagine how this place looked long ago. Remember, it’s not our time, it’s God’s—”

  “I don’t care whose time it is,” her mother would have interrupted, “I’m hungry as all heck.”

  “Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all lived here over the years and built synagogues, churches, and mosques to leave their mark,” Boaz said softly, as though not wishing to disturb the quiet.

  “And now?”

  “It’s still a mixed city.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  Boaz navigated them down one dark alley, then another. He told a story about how, when workers were repairing the septic system a few years ago, they accidentally dug into a passage dating from Crusader times.

  Emily and Boaz crossed a stone plaza surrounded by curved arches, and then he held open the door to a restaurant for her. They followed the maître d’ out to a glass-enclosed terrace decorated with candles on the tables and little white bulbs strung across the ceiling. Emily sat across from Boaz at a table by the window, overlooking the harbor. The air smelled of grilled fish, cigarette smoke, and the salty sea air, and the lights were soft on the water.