By the time David returned from his swim, Lauren had showered and changed, and then she climbed behind him on his motorcycle. (The one, she noted to herself, he rarely got to use but never complained about.) Clasping her hands around his waist, she made a silent vow not to complain about anything, either, so that they’d have a pleasant afternoon.
They rode out of Peleg and turned north, passing the village of Maloul, then Aga’s Market and the graceful arches of the aqueduct.
When they reached Nahariya, Lauren pointed to the elderly woman handing out free food to soldiers in the “We Thank the IDF” kiosk by the traffic light. “That’s so sweet!”
“You have to admit this country feels like one big family!” But before the light had even changed to green, the car behind them honked, and David shouted, “Where the speed of sound is faster than the speed of light!”
On the edge of town the traffic thinned. The slipshod buildings fell away and the kibbutz fields began with their orange-tiled houses, banana groves, and wild cactus plants sprouting along the edge of the road. The motorcycle swung toward the shore. The pale yellow sun hung on a washed-out sky, and Lauren envisaged her parallel life happening at that very moment. The life she’d assumed she’d have. Maybe not with Hunter but with someone else. They’d be walking by the Charles River on a crisp autumn afternoon (a crew team would be rowing on the water, a coxswain calling) and then meander to Copley Square Farmers Market, and she’d come upon that fruit vendor she liked who sold Macoun apples, and as he handed her the change, he’d say in a thick Boston accent, “Thanks, sweetheaaaaht . . .”
Lauren had not understood how much she’d miss before she had moved here. She had not predicted the depth of her yearning. She thought it would be temporary. Not the rest of her life. Not her own unhappily ever after. Not this. Not riding through a cluster of eucalyptus trees, their mottled trunks shedding like snake skin. Not riding toward those white cliffs, the ones that she’d told Emily were the white cliffs of Dover. “Don’t think about it,” Lauren had said.
But Lauren did think about it. And about how Emily had blossomed in Peleg. Like an introduced tree—the avocado, for example—that took to Israel as if it had always been there, as if it weren’t an upstart, an émigré. Lauren cared so much for Emily. Lauren admired her friend’s spontaneity, her openness, her acceptance. She secretly envied Emily’s immediate connection to the land. Was it because Emily’s father had been a cantor and passed on a love for Israel? Or some daringness inside Emily? A courage that Lauren lacked? It had been so easy for Emily to switch from her old life in Boston to her new one in Peleg. For Lauren, it was sometimes still so hard.
David parked at the top of the hill. Lauren dismounted the motorcycle, took off her helmet, and shook out her hair. Walking up to the border fence, she looked up at the red-and-white tower with its satellite dishes and cameras and read out loud, “‘No trespassing! Keep out! Border!!’”
“But what about this other sign?” David urged. “‘Beirut, one hundred and twenty kilometers; Jerusalem, two hundred and five kilometers.’ We’re closer to Beirut than to Jerusalem.”
She stood and faced the sign, observing sadly, “So close and yet so far.”
“Let’s pretend that tower is the lighthouse in Chatham.” David clasped her hand. “Remember that great weekend there in Cape Cod?”
“How could I forget it?” They had made love early in the morning, still half-asleep, and David’s condom had somehow broken. Which was how she got pregnant. And ended up here.
“Look at this view.” David pulled her back to the present. They peered down the cliffs at the emerald-green lagoons linked in a daisy chain up and down the shore. “I’m now inviting you for a tour of the grottoes.” He grabbed her elbow and bought two tickets from a brooding man smoking a cigarette in the ticket booth.
“Remember how I wanted to bring my parents here but they refused to visit this place?” Lauren asked. “My mother called it a tourist attraction in a war zone.”
“Next time I’ll convince them,” David replied. “I’ll say it’s the Jewish version of Stratton Mountain.”
“Good luck.” Lauren didn’t want to think about skiing with her parents in Vermont and how much fun she used to have. It was the snow, always the snow, that she missed most. Crunchy, sparkling, icy snow that lay in a glittery carpet on the sides of the mountain and fit like mittens on the needles of the pine trees.
The cable car stopped, its hydraulic doors yawning open, and Lauren and David got on behind a religious family, the father and three sons in dark pants and white button-down shirts, the mother and her daughter wearing sneakers under their dowdy ankle-length denim skirts. Lauren could tell they were American, and she gave the woman a smile to signify, We’re in this together, two chosen women in the chosen land, but the woman stared her down.
“Is it my jeans she doesn’t like?” Lauren whispered to David as the cable car descended. “My shirt? My boots?”
“Motek,” he said. “Sweetie, it’s the whole package.”
“In this version of Stratton, the cable car goes down.”
“With our own Frau Farbissina.” David looped his arm around her.
That made Lauren laugh again, and when the cable car stopped, she waited patiently as the family got off first, all backpacks, cameras, water bottles, and shouts about who last punched whom. Lauren and David walked behind, and as soon as they stepped into the grottoes, David kissed her.
“Don’t stop,” Lauren whispered. “Please don’t ever stop.”
“I won’t.”
Then one of the boys yelled, “Hey, guys, wait up!”
“Just our luck,” David said.
Lauren pulled away and peered into the warm, cavernous, echoing darkness, listening to the water trickle down the grotto walls. “I don’t remember if they’re stalagmites or stalactites.”
“I can’t know.”
“Not ‘I can’t know.’ It’s ‘I don’t know.’”
“Lauren . . .”
She felt bad that she’d corrected him and took his hand. “You’re right, David, some things you can never know.” They walked through the dimly lit passages and reached a cove where the reckless sea flung itself against the rocks. “The sea sounds happy.”
“The way I want you to always be.” David was about to kiss her again but the boys darted by, playing tag. Lauren wanted to find someplace private and she tugged at David’s sleeve, backing up, until suddenly she was out of the grottoes and in the sunlight.
“We’ll have to pick up where we left off later tonight.” David took her hand.
“No matter how tired we both are.” She smiled coyly at him.
They walked along a path. The sun had moved a few notches lower in the sky, as though inching down a ladder, following a path that had been predetermined. By whom? Lauren wondered.
“Trains used to come from Jerusalem through this tunnel on their way to Istanbul,” David said when they reached a fenced-in tunnel. “Maybe one day there’ll be peace and we’ll be able to take a train to Turkey.”
“All aboard to Constantinople! That was Istanbul’s old name, you know.”
“I see you’ve learned more in high school than the Boston Tea Party.” He leaned against the rocks, opened his legs, slid her between them.
“I could give you a whole private history lesson.”
He smiled again but then patted the rocks behind him, his expression darkening. “It’s strange to think that on the other side of this hill is Lebanon.”
“You never talk about being there.”
“There’s nothing I want to talk about.”
“You know I still want to know.”
“Well, you know that I served in the security zone.” He spoke with the same stiff, formal tone he used when explaining things to Lauren’s parents. “We were stopping Hezbollah from attacking civilians here in northern Israel. They shot at us instead. I was a medic.”
“And?”
“And
nothing. There. I’ve already told you all this.”
“David—”
“It’s very beautiful,” he said. “Soldiers used to say, ‘If heaven exists, this is what it would look like. And if hell exists, this is what it would feel like.’”
“I’m still trying to understand all that you’ve been through.” Lauren kissed the hidden, smooth skin of his sturdy neck under his chin. She breathed in the musky scent of soap from his shower, his apple-scented shampoo, and underneath that, some long-ago scent that still lingered, carrying memories of places he’d been and things he’d seen that he rarely shared with her. Lauren thought of the Shoah that had claimed Sophie’s mother and sisters, and the list Sophie had pressed into Lauren’s hand. She felt an urgency to know even more about David, as if it would enable her to move past her own reluctance and commit herself totally to him and to her new life. She wanted, really wanted, to fathom what he’d experienced before he’d met her, now that she lived here and the events and places he’d spoken of were tangibly real.
“You’ve never been in a war, thank God, so you’ll never understand,” David said protectively. The dusky light from the sun fell on half his face, turning it melancholy.
“But that’s not fair. At least try me.”
“Israelis serve in the army because we have to.” David paused. “We don’t think about it and question it because it’s a necessary part of life. That’s our reality.”
“I wish I didn’t love you so much, because . . .”
“Because then you wouldn’t have to stay.”
“What I meant was—”
“Lauren,” he said. “Don’t bother.”
7
November 20, 2002
Aviva
Aviva closed the front door of her house and didn’t lock it. She walked down the path, turning once to look back at her house. It was a small, modest farm cottage that Aviva and Rafi had bought from a retired couple who’d moved to Haifa. When they’d bought the house, it had looked hopeful, full of pastoral promise (its rear windows backed onto the Cohens’ fields) and another family’s good fortune. Now it sat forlorn and empty.
The house was symmetrical, with a sloping red-tiled roof. The two windows on each side of the front door looked out on a garden that Rafi had kept immaculately landscaped. There were trees scattered around the small property: a loquat tree that was heavy with tear-shaped fruit in the spring, a tree full of lemons in winter, and a frangipani tree, scattered with sweet-scented white blossoms through the summer. But now the yard and the trees looked tattered, neglected.
Lauren and Emily were waiting by the gate in Lauren’s car, the engine idling. Aviva opened the door, climbed in the backseat, and heard Emily’s excited voice as she spoke on her phone.
“I know it’s the last minute,” Emily was saying. “But I do want the baby’s breath. I know I said that I didn’t like it, but I really do. Thank you again and shalom!”
“Hi, Aviva.” Emily turned around. She wore long silver earrings dangling under her hair, which was now shoulder-length and streaked with blondish highlights, and a cotton leopard-print shirt that would have looked ridiculous on anybody else. “I want to make sure that this wedding is absolutely different from my first one, and I suddenly remembered that I didn’t have baby’s breath in my centerpieces with Rob—he liked everything so dramatic, you know—and now I want to have lots for Boaz and me.” She paused. “Oh, Lauren, I forgot to tell you, I gave your parents the honeymoon suite at the hotel.”
“Since when is there a honeymoon suite at the Garden of Eden?”
“Since yesterday,” Emily said. “It’s the same room, totally boring, but I bought a new bedspread and sheets.”
“I don’t think that will endear my parents to the place,” Lauren said.
“Aviva, my mom and brother and Lauren’s parents are all resting now, but I can’t wait for you to meet them—it will be so much fun.” Emily suddenly stopped, catching herself, her eyes filling with empathy, as if her look alone could soften all of life’s sharp edges. “Oh, Aviva, I’m so sorry. Really I am. Please forgive me. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“It’s really all right,” Aviva said in the miserable, awkward, silent moment that followed. “Don’t mind me. Soak it all in. Soak in all this happiness. Don’t feel guilty for a second.”
But Lauren’s arm jerked up instinctively and she shut off the radio. Aviva sat and listened to the quiet, her chest constricting. Her eyes flooded with tears and the checkerboard squares of the fields flattened into one greenish brown blur.
It had begun as a quiet, peaceful Friday morning the previous May. Aviva had been sitting with Rafi as he knelt in the dirt, purposefully digging and planting vegetables, the way he did each spring. He had cordoned off a small plot of land on the side of his work shed where he planted the usual staples like verbena, basil, and cherry tomatoes and sometimes experimented with new plants, such as snow peas and squash. This year he was planting cucumbers.
“I promise I’ll make you very good pickles,” Aviva had said. “How about some iced tea now? The thought of all that garlic is making me thirsty. Would you like that?”
“If that’s what you want to make me,” Rafi replied in his easy, diffident manner.
“I want to make you happy.” Then Aviva remembered Benny and felt her heart smash inside her chest.
“You make me as happy as you and I can be,” Rafi told her, and then they shared the look that only two people who have lost a child can share.
In the kitchen, Aviva made iced tea with lemon slices and extra sugar and set two glasses on a tray with some cookies. She carried it outside humming a Sheryl Crow song (“Are you strong enough to be my man? . . .”) and there was Rafi, lying in the dirt, his pitchfork with four rusty metal prongs lying next to him, his head hanging oddly off the side of his neck, his eyes open. Opened to what?
“Oh, Aviva,” Lauren whispered.
Aviva had been trying not to make any noise.
Lauren held a tissue over her shoulder. “Don’t mind that it’s crushed, it’s clean,” she said as Aviva wiped her tears.
“You’d think that Lauren would have more sanitary tissues.” Emily tried to make a joke and reached for Aviva’s hand.
“It’s only dust,” Lauren protested.
Dust to dust, Aviva thought.
Emily held her hand while Aviva looked out the window again. Her eyes refocused and now she could make out the sweep of the fields and beyond that, the sea murmuring, and then the dark green line that marked the start of Boaz’s orange groves.
“They’ll be your groves soon, Emily,” Aviva said. “It’s not every day that I get to take a bride to have her legs waxed before her wedding.”
AVIVA STAYED QUIET as they turned into Maloul, passing a large billboard in Arabic, Hebrew, and in English, ABU-SALIM POSTT OFFICE, and then turning left where the post office stood with another sign in front in all three languages. This time, ABU-SALIM POSST.
The twisting street was filled with unfinished houses, loose wires, crisscrossed wooden pallets, large white burlap bags brimming with cement mix. A van idled in the fork of the road, its back doors open, crates of vegetables piled within, the vendor hawking his produce through a megaphone. Lauren drove up a hill and as they turned a bend, the aqueduct appeared, its arches traveling from behind Aga’s, across the wadi, and bumping into the village.
“Just look at this,” Emily said. “An archeological site that’s filled with junk. You could film an antilitter advertisement here.”
“Or a really trashy movie.” Lauren parked the car.
Aviva got out, climbed up a flight of stone steps, and pushed open a green metal gate. Lauren and Emily knocked on Em-Hassan’s door while Aviva walked into the garden and looked out over the fields and orchards. She could vaguely locate her lonely house before it was lost to the sky. Grief poured down upon her like the sun. Benny and Rafi were no longer with her, and even though her mother would have warned he
r not to use a double negative, and even though she told her students the same thing, Aviva knew that Benny and Rafi were never not with her.
She dried her eyes as Em-Hassan, a lumbering woman in her early sixties, stepped out through the door. She wore a fuzzy burgundy house robe that trailed over her flip-flops, and had her dark, oily hair pulled back, a few strands of gray curling by her temples. She shook Lauren’s hand, then Emily’s, and then turned to Aviva.
“I pray for you every day.” Em-Hassan stared at Aviva with eyes the color of tar. “How are your other sons?”
Aviva shrugged. “Yoni is back in school and Raz’s back in the army.”
Em-Hassan clicked her tongue. “Inshallah, you should know no more sorrow. With Allah’s help, no more sorrow.”
Aviva had known Em-Hassan ever since she gave English lessons to the woman’s son, Hassan, a serious student who wanted good grades to get accepted to medical school. Over the course of tutoring Hassan for three years, Aviva and Em-Hassan had become friends. Aviva had attended the weddings of three of Em-Hassan’s daughters, and Em-Hassan had paid condolence calls when Aviva was sitting shiva for Benny and then Rafi. Em-Hassan was industrious, matter-of-fact, and self-absorbed, but she had a wry sense of humor that attracted Aviva. She also thought it was important—crucial and vital, really—for her to have a Muslim woman as a friend, despite the religious discord, the clashes, and strife of the Middle East.
She followed Em-Hassan into her house: past the living room packed like a furniture showroom with ornate couches and chairs; past a kitchen, spotless and still; past a room with three thin mattresses on the floor. Em-Hassan made a sharp turn into a small room that had a couch and chairs facing a television set. An Arabic soap opera was on—a woman was crying in some fancy living room—and Aviva knew Em-Hassan wouldn’t bother to turn it off.
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