“I hope Gabriel won’t come in here to show me his worn-out tongue.”
“Very funny.” Lauren smiled. “David, I admire your dedication, I really do. It’s just that when I see you with all these patients, and you hardly get paid, and in Boston you’d be—”
“I know what I’d be.” He stood up to tilt up the blinds tight against the sun. To obscure things, Lauren couldn’t help thinking. To hide—how could she put it diplomatically?—the aesthetically challenged landscape outside the window. “Nobody in America can even afford to get sick,” he added.
“I also believe in socialized medicine,” Lauren said earnestly. “I guess I believe in it more as a patient and less as a doctor’s wife . . . Anyway, what was wrong with that Ethiopian boy?”
“It was his mother who was sick. I sent her to the E.R. for tests. She doesn’t even know how old she is.”
“Beth Israel was bad, but this seems worse.”
“Because they’re our people.”
Lauren paused. She was a fourth-generation American. One of her great-grandfathers, Abraham Harding, had founded a temple in Boston that held services on Sunday instead of Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Lauren knew she was a Jew, she never pretended otherwise, but who were her people? Her funny, smart, easygoing Jewish friends at college who ate cheeseburgers, fasted until two o’clock on Yom Kippur, and made jokes throughout abridged Passover seders. Not the ragtag group of patients out in the waiting room.
“You’re still not giving it a chance,” David said. “Your mother spent her last visit here pointing out each man picking his nose at stoplights.”
“There were so many of them.”
Now it was David’s turn to hold the silence.
Lauren said, “My mother told me the other day that when a fund-raiser called her and asked for a donation to the UJA, she said she wasn’t going to donate any more money to Israel because she’d already donated a daughter.”
That didn’t bring the laugh she’d hoped for. “I’d love it if we could do something fun, just the two of us, for even an hour or two,” she tried.
“You know what we’ll do? As soon as I close the clinic, I’ll take you for a motorcycle ride. We haven’t done that for a long time.”
“That would be so nice,” Lauren said. When was the last time they’d taken off and done something impromptu like that? That was one reason why she’d fallen in love with David. When he was in Boston, he made everything seem new and exciting. “Let’s go to the North End and eat Italian. Let’s go to Secret Squantum Park. Let’s go . . .” Now they were so caught up in their daughters and their jobs that they rarely had time together—alone—anymore.
“Why don’t you go home and wait for me and I’ll be back as soon as I can.” David rose and walked around the desk. “Come here.” He pulled her off the chair and kissed her.
“Is this what you do with your other patients?”
“Lauren,” he whispered, his arms around her, “I just want you to be happy with me.”
“I am happy with you.”
“Here.”
“Here?” She glanced around the office and he gave her such a look of exasperation that she apologized.
“I didn’t mean right here in this room,” he said.
A FEW MINUTES after leaving David’s office, Lauren was back on her bicycle, riding on the old army patrol road that ran along the shore. She looked down and saw sea foam throw itself over a ledge of flat rocks, glittering sunlight on turquoise-blue water, and farther out, the line of the horizon dissolving between the sea and cloudless sky. The heat was solid against her skin. When she reached the hill at the edge of Peleg, she stopped for a moment to watch the surfers riding the waves. She’d never been tempted to surf—the thundering waves of Cape Cod always intimidated her—but she used to enjoy sailing, harnessing the energy of the wind. She and David had gone sailing a few times before they’d moved to Peleg, before their kids were born. Then she reminded herself not to keep thinking about her life as a swath of before cut short and an endless after.
She crossed the parking lot and turned down the road to her house. First came the matching farmhouses that belonged to Idan Cohen and his brother, Udi. They had identical orange-tiled roofs, identical signs (DON’T PANIC! IT’S ORGANIC!) and almost identical-looking wives, Ora and Efrat, the four of them like matching bookends.
Gila Salomon and her husband, Omri—beekeepers who made Garden of Eden Honey, pastries, and lotions—lived in the next house. Then came Sophie and Heinz Zuckerman’s house.
“Shalom, Lauren,” Sophie called, rising carefully from where she had been kneeling in the dirt.
“Hi, Sophie!” Lauren got off her bicycle and leaned it against the hedge. She stepped through Sophie’s gate and into her garden, planted to bloom at different times in an array of wild colors, its borders edged with bougainvillea bushes, their blossoms like butterfly wings, paper-thin and delicate magenta red.
“Can I get you something cold to drink?” Sophie wore a peach-colored shirt, brown pants, and flip-flops. She was more than eighty but she still worked in the garden almost every day, her iridescent white hair tied back, her wrinkled, pale face peeking out from under a floppy straw hat.
“No, thank you.” Lauren took off her helmet, brushing some stray hairs from her damp face. “I just came back from Nahariya and all I want to do is lie down. I would have thought the weather would be cooler by now.”
“We’re in the Middle East, my dear,” Sophie said. “I always think about how if the Nazis hadn’t come to power, I’d probably be living in a fancy old house in Strasbourg, sitting around playing cards with friends.”
“And if David hadn’t come to America . . .” Then Lauren stopped. If she hadn’t broken up with Hunter, he might have asked her to marry him and she might be living in a fancy old house, maybe even in Beacon Hill. Why hadn’t she stayed with Hunter? He was nice. Yet she’d wanted one last fling with an exotic somebody before she devoted the rest of her life to playing Scrabble and sailing with a bunch of Republicans.
Lauren remembered the precise moment she’d seen David at the elevator, leaning against the wall, huddled over some hospital charts, one leg bent up. With a pair of tortoiseshell glasses set on his boxy nose, he looked like a guy who could talk about books and still know how to fix things; and his olive skin and mop of black curls gave him a naturally mysterious appearance that all-American Hunter could never have. Lauren had suddenly veered from the stairwell despite her mother’s admonishments and headed in his direction. One step to the left: that was all it would have taken. One extra step. Even Lauren’s old ballet teacher, Madame Magar in Brookline, could have told her that.
“Life is full of surprises.” Sophie’s voice was gentle.
“I know a thing or two about surprises.”
“Bad surprises, but also good ones.”
“I hope so.” Lauren wiped away a trickle of sweat from under her eye.
“It took me a lot of years to get used to the heat.”
“So by the time I’m eighty-five?”
“You’re in luck.” Sophie smiled. “I’m only eighty-three. Speaking of which, I have to give you something for the burial circle, would you mind waiting?”
Lauren sat in the shade by some purple-and-yellow pansies, their fragile, silken faces turned up toward the autumn sun.
5
In the Burial Circle
Lauren
Sophie and Aviva had invited Lauren to join the burial circle a few months after she’d given birth to Maya, and a few hours after the death of their neighbor, Ruth Rosen. They sat in Sophie’s living room, surrounded by a half century’s worth of books, photographs, paintings, knickknacks. Gila Salomon, who ran Garden of Eden Honey, was also there, along with Leah Zado.
“I tried to get some of the other villagers to join, but they all declined with one excuse or another.” Leah’s dull brown hair hung like ear muffs.
I don’t blame them, Lauren thought. In nursing
school, she had hated even dissecting a frog. The stink of formaldehyde made her want to gag. She held her breath during entire lab periods and didn’t inhale deeply until she was safely out on the street, breathing in gargantuan gulps of smoggy Boston air.
“Most people don’t have the—I don’t know what—the inner strength—to be so close to death,” Leah continued, dressed in a white blouse and a black skirt, her clothes a study in extremes. White and black. Like life and death, Lauren thought. “Nobody pays the hevra kadisha, and the dead women can’t give us anything in return.” Leah said the rite was a hesed shel emet. An act of remarkable kindness.
“What do you think?” Aviva looked at Lauren over her teacup.
“I’m not sure.” Lauren had been trying her hardest to get used to life in Peleg, but how could taking care of the dead help her with that?
“In any event,” Leah said, “we need to use an extra-large shroud tomorrow”—she pursed her lips smugly because Ruth Rosen was even more overweight than she was—“and we should try to find smocks to wear over our clothes.”
“I might be able to get some jackets from the hospital.” Lauren jumped in before she’d even had a chance to think.
“So that means you want to join.” Aviva smiled. “Thank you.”
What had she gotten herself into, Lauren wondered. “How did the burial circle even start?”
“Jewish communities have always had burial circles to take care of their dead,” Aviva replied. “It’s an ancient tradition.”
“Since the start of the village, we’ve always buried our own. There was nobody else to do it for us.” That was Sophie’s matter-of-fact voice. “The men took care of the men; the women took care of the women, obviously, for modesty’s sake. I’m getting old . . .” Sophie paused, but her blue eyes twinkled, indicating that she wasn’t the least concerned. “I’d love to teach someone in the next generation.”
“I know next to nothing about Jewish laws.” Lauren drank some tea. “I’ve never even heard of this.”
“You’ve heard of the shroud of Turin, right?” Gila said. She had limp, graying hair parted down the middle and pale gray eyes with no lashes, and wore the clear-framed, octagonal glasses of a lab technician—or a beekeeper. “That was similar to the kind of shrouds we use today. They’re sewn by hand. Simple linen. The most basic clothes you can find.” That struck Lauren as funny since Gila was wearing plain black Bedouin pants and a loose beige T-shirt with the Garden of Eden Honey logo.
“The shrouds have no buttons or zippers.” Leah Zado reached for a piece of lemon cake. “Because there’s nothing you can take with you.”
“And the pants’ feet are closed, like very loose pajamas,” Gila added.
Lauren listened, curious but polite, thinking of her father. “Your death and your salary,” he used to say, “two topics that are not up for conversation.”
“The dead are holy.” Sophie leaned her slender body toward Lauren and spoke almost in a whisper. “We are closing the circle of life for them. Just think— we’re the very last people to be with them before they’re buried underground.”
Lauren reluctantly agreed, and the next afternoon, she was surprised during her first tahara in the burial house. Taking care of Ruth Rosen was infinitely easier than trying to take care of a suffering, dying patient.
Ruth’s body lay covered on the long metal table in the center of the room, her feet facing the door. Gila removed her bandages and hospital tags. Sophie filled a bucket and poured water over Ruth’s head and neck, her right shoulder, arm, hip, leg, foot. Then, another bucket, and water cascaded over Ruth’s left side. Aviva helped Gila and Leah roll Ruth to the side and Sophie poured water down her back.
It was like a sacred dance, an ancient, hallowed, healing rite. It seemed to Lauren that all of Ruth’s sins were being washed away. All her mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities. All the minutes and hours of her life washed away in a few sweeps of water. Even the acrid smell of the dead was washed away.
(Like a kosher baptism, Lauren would tell David later, for want of a better description. A consecration, before life returned to the foreverness of death.)
“We make sure to keep the woman modestly covered at all times.” Sophie stood next to Lauren, guiding her through the ritual. “We want to give her the dignity she deserves. We don’t even pass things over her body. It’s still her space.”
Lauren was fascinated, awestruck, and humbled all at the same time. Helping a woman give birth was so noisy, filled with moans and screams and commotion. But death was quiet. So calm and unruffled. It was almost as if the mystery of life could be found within that silence. It was something Lauren had never experienced before. A holy stillness. Grace, she thought. Grace.
6
October 23, 2002
Lauren
Now Sophie reappeared in the garden, the twinkle still in her blue eyes. Could it be, Lauren thought, that being around death all these years had enhanced and deepened Sophie’s joy of life? Sophie stopped in front of Lauren. “When something happens to me—”
“If something—”
“No, Lauren.” Sophie bent down to deadhead a dry geranium. “When something happens to me, and you’re doing my tahara—”
“Don’t talk like that,” Lauren pleaded.
“I want you to have this list of the names of my mother and three sisters,” Sophie said calmly. “I want you to say their names, too, during my tahara, because they were all killed and never—”
“Oh, Sophie . . .”
“I told Heinz to engrave their names on my gravestone, too. So at least they’ll have some kind of marker.” She handed Lauren a piece of paper, folded so many times it almost looked like origami, and escorted her back through the garden. “You promise?”
“I promise.” Lauren closed the gate behind her.
THERE WAS DARKNESS inside Lauren’s house, and slightly cooler air. She closed the wooden door behind her, aware of the creak that David didn’t want to fix because he said he wanted to hear if someone was sneaking in. “Who might that be?” Lauren had asked. Then David told her how terrorists had snuck ashore from the sea and attacked a building in Nahariya some years ago. A woman hid in a crawl space with her baby daughter. She tried to soothe her and keep her quiet, muffling her cries, and accidentally suffocated her to death.
Lauren stepped into the living room. There was a couch with worn burgundy fabric, an armchair with claw feet, and a porcelain lamp with a pleated shade. Against the back wall was a mahogany breakfront displaying antique dishes, its drawers filled with sterling silver napkin rings, cloth napkins, and the special holiday tablecloth that David’s mother, Miriam, had embroidered. Cross-stitches, double stitches, tiny pom-pom flowers made with twirls of silver and blue. Miriam had died when David was sixteen and he and his father had kept the room pretty much the way she’d left it.
Lauren placed Sophie’s piece of paper in the bottom drawer, wandered over to the wall of photographs, and stared at a grainy black-and-white picture of Miriam when she was a little girl in India.
“I didn’t know there were Jews in Calcutta,” Lauren had told David when he’d spoken about his family on their first date.
“There were Jews all along the Spice Route,” he said. “India, Pakistan, Afghanistan . . . My father said they were traders. Salt, spices, tea, opium. Whatever they could sell, they sold.”
Lauren stopped at the next picture, of Miriam as a bride in Israel with her dark hair swept back, wearing a beautiful, modest white chiffon dress, and a later one, when she was a young mother holding David in her arms. Miriam had a long neck, a narrow, thoughtful face, and David’s almond-shaped dark brown eyes. Those eyes stared now at Lauren.
“We both picked up and moved somewhere else,” Lauren whispered to Miriam’s photograph. “And we both love your son. I am trying, but how come my life just doesn’t seem right?” She studied Miriam’s face underneath her own reflection in the glass. “It’s somet
imes so hard for me here.” Lauren’s lips quivered and tears formed in her eyes. She walked away as if to keep one step ahead of herself, first down the hallway and then into the kitchen, where she stayed by the sink, splashing water on her face.
Breathe, Lauren told herself. Don’t forget to breathe. She looked through the window at their sukkah with its white cloth walls, its ceiling of palm fronds, and its colored lights, still blinking. Lauren had turned them on for Maya before they left for the gan, and she’d forgotten to turn them off. There were the olive tree and the oleander bushes with pinkish-white blossoms. If she stood at the kitchen sink in her parents’ house, she’d look out on elm, oak, and birch trees. Wide-spanned, august trees under skies that never failed to be blue and sharp, or soft and gray. Lauren had assumed that she’d always be surrounded by familiar sights. As if she belonged to them as much as they belonged to her. How could she stop herself from missing the things she loved?
She let the blinds fall with a snap, returned to the living room, took off her sneakers, and lay down on the couch, hearing the quiet, then the sea, and the sound of the muezzin calling worshippers to prayer from Maloul. His mournful voice. His fervent prayers.
“Want to come for a swim in the sea?”
Lauren wondered why the muezzin would ask her for a swim.
David was standing over Lauren, his hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, I thought you were . . .”
“Do you want to come for a swim with me?”
“That means I have to get up, squeeze into my bathing suit that still doesn’t fit, get a towel, and walk across all that sand and wade into the water . . . Sounds wonderful.” Lauren, she told herself, imitating her mother’s scolding tone. Sarcasm in Greek means tearing the flesh. “I’m sorry, David, it does sound nice. I’m just so sleepy.”
A Remarkable Kindness Page 6