A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  “Please.” Em-Hassan gestured toward the seats. “Please.”

  Aviva had been here so many times that she felt comfortable, but she was equally uneasy, though she tried not to be. It wasn’t because of the Arabic prayer on a wooden plaque or the photographs of Mecca and the mosque in Jerusalem. It was because of some kind of treatise hanging on the wall, with Arabic writing and crude drawings of an olive tree with spidery roots, a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh, and a hand dripping with blood. The images were clearly anti-Israel, Aviva knew, and they jarred her, reminding her of the conflict that had no end. She’d lost her son, dammit, and all she wanted was to be surrounded by beauty and some kind of hope, but the world could not offer her that.

  Aviva looked down at her hands lying lifelessly in her lap like a mourner’s hands. She quickly turned to Lauren, taking in her aquiline nose, her porcelain skin. Did Lauren mind being here in this harsh little room, so far away from everything she had ever known?

  “You’re the bride.” Em-Hassan stared hard at Emily. “Boaz is lucky he found you. I know his ex-wife. What normal woman leaves a good husband for another man she meets at folk dancing?”

  Emily giggled and Em-Hassan lit a cigarette and then went out of the room.

  “So, this is our outing to Elizabeth Arden,” Lauren joked.

  “It was your idea,” Emily pointed out.

  “I thought we could broaden our cultural horizons,” Lauren said. “And I asked Aviva.”

  “These are our neighbors and I want us to get along.” Aviva spoke in a lowered voice. “I like supporting women in business, and she does do a good job waxing legs.”

  “She seems nice enough,” Emily said.

  “Well, Em, you go first and then I’ll ask her to do my legs, too,” Lauren said.

  “Where did she disappear to?”

  They both turned to Aviva. “To get us something to drink,” she replied. “You’ll see—she always serves orange soda.”

  “Nothing worse than wasting calories on something that isn’t even good,” Emily griped. “Maybe if it were an iced frappe . . .”

  Em-Hassan soon reappeared with a big bottle of orange soda and plastic cups. Lauren, Emily, and Aviva sipped politely as Em-Hassan finished her cigarette. On the TV soap opera, the woman was now arguing with a man. Then Em-Hassan led them into another room, even smaller than the last, that had a couch, a cot, and three windows facing the street. In a cabinet against the wall were bottles of nail polish, lipsticks, face creams, scrubs, and a carefully folded stack of towels.

  “Yallah, Emily.” Em-Hassan bent over a container on a Bunsen burner, stirring wax with a Popsicle stick, and then switched to Hebrew as she patted the cot. “Come.”

  Emily took off her sandals and black tights and lay on the cot in her shirt and black bathing suit bottom. Lauren sat on the couch while Aviva stopped in front of a mirror hanging on the side wall, pulling back her hair. Her face had grown hollow, parched like the desert, and dark shadows hung under her eyes.

  “It’s a smart tradition to cover the mirrors during shiva,” Aviva said almost inaudibly. “I still can’t look at myself.”

  “Let me give you permanent tattoo eyeliner.” Em-Hassan turned toward her. “I’ll wax your eyebrows for free.”

  “I don’t want to look prettier,” Aviva said. “Who am I going to look prettier for?”

  “I only want to help you.”

  “I know.” Aviva moved past Em-Hassan, sinking down next to Lauren on the couch. Aviva knew she had to get a grip on herself and make sure she stayed on top of this pain. She could not allow herself to go under. She didn’t want to ruin Emily’s joy. And how would crying even help?

  “You like the food here,” Em-Hassan told Emily, lying on the cot.

  “I love it. Especially the mangoes, the papayas, persimmons—”

  “I can tell.” Em-Hassan gave Emily a pinch on her arm. “A man likes a little meat.”

  “Nothing like tact,” Lauren muttered to Aviva under her breath.

  “She thinks she’s just being honest,” Aviva observed as Em-Hassan lifted the bifocals hanging from a silver chain around her neck, balanced them on the bridge of her wide nose, and examined Emily’s legs.

  “But she shaves.” Em-Hassan glared at Lauren and Aviva.

  “Of course I shave,” Emily said. “I’ve been shaving since I was twelve.”

  “She shouldn’t shave,” Em-Hassan said brusquely. “It makes the leg hairs tough.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t—”

  “It’s going to be a lot of work to pull out all her hairs.” Em-Hassan spoke over Emily. “And I have a very bad back.” She placed her hands on the base of her spine and pushed out her pelvis. “Girls in the village don’t shave. They wait until the last night before their wedding and then they take off all their body hair.”

  “If I didn’t shave I don’t think I’d ever have gotten married,” Emily joked.

  “I can’t wax your legs,” Em-Hassan announced. “I’ll have to give you the sugar treatment.”

  “The sugar treatment?”

  “Yallah, I’ll be right back.” Em-Hassan left a fresh cigarette burning in a tin ashtray and walked out of the room.

  “What the fuck?” Emily sat up.

  “It’s like wax, only it’s made from sugar,” Aviva said.

  “Lauren,” Emily said, “you didn’t tell me.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise.” Lauren winked.

  Aviva said nothing. She used to like getting her legs waxed here as a special treat and then going home to Rafi afterward. He’d run his hands over her smooth skin, focusing like a basketball player dribbling a ball deliberately, carefully, up the court line during a drill. My Aviva, he’d say. My-my-my Aviva. Like the song. As if Aviva had always been his, had never not been his, and he would never not be—

  “Em-Hassan has six daughters, right?” Emily said. “She needs an awful lot of sugar and wax.”

  “After six daughters, she finally had a son, Hassan,” Lauren said. “That’s how she got her name, Em-Hassan. It means the mother of Hassan. When he was born, her husband was finally happy . . .”

  Lauren kept talking but Aviva was deep in thought. She could hear Rafi saying, “If I died right now, I would be happy.” It was after one of the last times they had made love. They were in their bedroom, the sound of the sea tumbling in through the window, a silver band of moonlight sifting like flour through the bottom of the window blinds. Rafi was on top of her, facing her, inside her . . . He was . . . He was.

  “Aviva,” Lauren was saying.

  Aviva tried to fortify herself.

  Lauren said, “I’m thrilled I have daughters. I’m going to call myself Em-Maya. Or does Em-Yael sound better?”

  Em-Hassan returned with a wooden cutting board, a glass of water, and a lump of shiny taupe paste. Emily lay back and Em-Hassan kneaded the paste, rolled it over Emily’s calves, tugged out hairs, and examined the putty.

  “Does it hurt?” Em-Hassan asked.

  Aviva thought, Yes.

  Emily said, “No.”

  “And how’s your husband, David?” Em-Hassan turned toward Lauren.

  “Busy, but fine.”

  Aviva vaguely remembered Lauren telling her that David had helped one of Em-Hassan’s daughters, but that was when she’d been in mourning and all the details of ordinary life had escaped her. “And David is also a good friend of Ali,” Em-Hassan said. “Ali Haddad.”

  “Yes,” Lauren said.

  “And you are good friends with his wife.”

  “I see Jasmine every now and then.”

  “So, nu, tell me, does Ali have a girlfriend?”

  “That, I don’t know,” Lauren replied. “But Emily works with him at the Garden of Eden Hotel.”

  “You work with Ali?” Em-Hassan glanced up from Emily’s leg to her face.

  “He’s in charge of hotel operations and I’m at the reception desk,” Emily replied. “But he stops by to talk
to me a lot. He used to live in Somerville, near where Lauren and I used to live, which is funny when you think about it. It’s such a small world, really—”

  “Every time I see Jasmine, I want to cry.” Em-Hassan clicked her tongue. “She only leaves her house to buy things from one of the trucks and then she goes back inside . . .”

  “She’s having a tough time,” Lauren said.

  “Why’s that again?” Emily asked.

  “Because Ali’s angry at her father—”

  “I’ll tell the story,” Em-Hassan said. “I know it better than anyone—Jasmine’s my cousin. Their family was always dirt poor. Not yom asal, yom basal, one day honey, one day onions—in their family, it was always onions. Jasmine’s father borrowed money from Ali to buy a plot of land. Ali gave it to him, and a few years later, her father sold the land and made a profit. But when he returned the money to Ali, he gave him back the exact same amount. No interest, not a shekel more. Jasmine thought that wasn’t so wrong because they’re all one big family, but Ali was furious! Jasmine felt torn. Who do you choose? Your husband or your father? Who?” Em-Hassan looked at Aviva, but she had neither father nor husband and couldn’t respond.

  “That is a tough question,” said Lauren diplomatically.

  “Jasmine sided with her father because . . .” Em-Hassan stopped. “Well, maybe because Ali is doing well at the hotel and she thought her father needed the money more. That was the beginning of her troubles. Ali was so angry that he moved out.”

  “There had to be other reasons,” Lauren said.

  “I see Ali with his kids at the hotel sometimes,” Emily observed.

  “But never with Jasmine.” Em-Hassan kneaded the paste around Emily’s knee. “It hurts more here, doesn’t it?”

  Aviva closed her eyes, her heart aching, and let her head fall back on the sofa cushion. Lauren took her hand. Lauren had been like Aviva’s younger sister since she’d moved to Peleg a few years ago. When Lauren said she felt at times like this wasn’t where she was supposed to be, Aviva told her that she hoped Lauren wouldn’t keep wishing she were somewhere else because one day she’d turn to her reflection in the mirror and see a woman, aged and bitter, who’d let her whole life slip by.

  “I know, I know,” Lauren had told Aviva. “When life gives you lemons . . . But occasional kvetching doesn’t hurt anybody, does it?”

  “As long as it’s only occasional and you spare David.”

  “Okay,” Lauren had agreed, “I’ll try to zip the lip.”

  “What happened to your first husband?” Aviva heard Em-Hassan ask Emily.

  “He was like Ali,” Emily said. “He got up and left me.”

  “I don’t understand men,” Em-Hassan said.

  “And if they’re famous chefs, forget about it,” Lauren said with a snort.

  Aviva opened her eyes.

  “That’s not funny,” Em-Hassan scolded. “It’s terrible when a man leaves his wife. Did he fight with you about money? Was it another woman? It’s usually another woman.”

  “Another skinny woman,” Emily blurted out.

  “When I was a young girl,” Em-Hassan told her, “I loved a boy. He also cared for me, but his parents wanted him to marry his rich cousin. I cried for days, and then a cousin of my mother’s came and asked my father for my hand. My father thought it was a good match. I had to agree. I was already eighteen, and in my day, if you weren’t married by eighteen, you were an old maid.”

  “But did you love him?” Emily asked.

  Yes, Aviva thought, I loved Rafi. I grew to love him even more than I ever thought I would. He was caring and gentle and loyal. He was always—

  “Never,” Em-Hassan said firmly. “He blamed me. He hit me. He never picked up any of our kids; he rarely picked up our son.” Her voice dropped. “I would have left him if I could have, but my parents were both dead and I had no place to go.”

  “Why couldn’t you live on your own?”

  “Arab women don’t live alone.”

  “But you’re not alone if you’re with your children.”

  “Without a man you’re alone,” Em-Hassan explained. “A lot of men beat their wives, but the women are too scared to talk about it, too scared to leave. They hide their husbands’ belts. They pray to Allah for help. Every woman suffers. Look at us all.”

  Em-Hassan started to cry. Her fingers were sticky with the sugar paste, so she dabbed at her eyes with her wrist. Aviva watched for a moment and then stood, reaching for a towel in the wall cabinet to pat Em-Hassan’s face. Seeing tears roll down Em-Hassan’s cheeks made Aviva cry, too, and she sank into Em-Hassan’s fleshy, warm embrace.

  Aviva would allow herself to cry. Just for now. For a few moments.

  Because tears were liquid prayers.

  But then she thought about the treatise on Em-Hassan’s wall. In her heart of hearts, did Em-Hassan hate the Jews? Or had somebody given it to her and she felt obligated, pressured to hang it up? Aviva went rigid, utterly distraught. She wanted to ignore Em-Hassan’s true feelings. She wanted their relationship to transcend history and wars and diametrically opposed loyalties. What did it matter, anyway, when they were just two women, each with her own private anguish and sorrow? Then she thought about Benny. Killed in the fight between Muslims and Jews. The desolation that clamped down on Aviva was so heavy she could no longer stand up. She moved away from Em-Hassan and slumped on the couch. Lauren’s arm curved around Aviva and the room grew quiet. Em-Hassan made a sad clicking sound with her tongue.

  “Aviva, you okay?” Lauren leaned toward her.

  Aviva nodded. She heard Em-Hassan say, “I haven’t cried like this since Jasmine’s father’s funeral.”

  “Talk about irony,” Lauren commented. “Soon after Ali left Jasmine, her father died anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this?” Emily asked.

  “I did, but you were too busy with Boaz and the wedding to remember.”

  “What was the funeral like?”

  “Hundreds of women sitting in Jasmine’s family’s courtyard,” Lauren said. “Jasmine was sitting in the middle, next to her father, who was laid out on a wooden plank with a blanket covering his body up to his chin. His face was exposed. Jasmine kept kissing him, stroking his face, crying and reciting prayers. But nobody said anything. We just sat there and she kept crying. After a while, her brothers arrived and they pushed their way through all the women and lifted their father on the plank and carried him out of the courtyard.”

  The day of Rafi’s funeral, hot winds blew in from the desert, the sky full of yellow dust. And at Benny’s funeral, the sky was blue. The sun still shone and the birds still sang. Life went on. How did it dare?

  “Women aren’t allowed to go to the cemetery on the day of the funeral,” Lauren said. “So when Jasmine’s brothers carried their father down the street, she ran after them. She was crying and wailing so much that the women in the village had to hold her back. She was shouting, ‘Good-bye, Father, good-bye!’ I made my way through the crowd and reached her and she grabbed me and yelled, ‘I lost my father! I lost my husband! I have nothing to live for now!’”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to survive all this,” Aviva had told Eli after Rafi had died. She’d called him—she hadn’t deleted his phone number—and then he’d come to her house to pay a shiva call.

  “You have your two other sons.” Eli had sat with Aviva in the living room while Raz and Yoni were with their friends in the backyard.

  “I want to crumple up and die.”

  “You are strong. I know you’re strong. You have to be strong.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “You have to lift your chin,” Eli had told her in no uncertain terms. “You have to stand so that at least you cast a shadow.”

  “Lauren!” Em-Hassan said suddenly. “You’re Jasmine’s good friend. And David’s friends with Ali. You and David should talk to him. You can make him change his mind so he goes back to his wife.”
r />   “What can we say to make him go back to her?”

  “I have an idea,” Em-Hassan said. “Emily should talk to Ali when she sees him at the hotel.”

  “Me?” Emily lifted herself up on her elbows. “I hardly know him. All I know is that you can’t stop anyone from doing what he wants to do.”

  “That’s true,” Em-Hassan said. “That’s life. That’s the will of Allah.”

  Kagan would have instructed Aviva: Keep things in separate compartments! Aviva tried to focus on Em-Hassan’s soft robe and the way she had held her. Yet Aviva could also see the bloodied hand in the drawing in the other room, and she could imagine the terrorist who came to kill Benny, and her only consolation was thinking that he hadn’t suffered. It had happened so fast, Benny wouldn’t have had time to suffer. Prince might have let out one bark, a solitary desperate bark, before the terrorist shouted Allahu Akbar and then ignited a fiery, hideous, bloody, senseless, abysmal explosion. And there was Em-Hassan saying it was the will of God?

  “No!” Aviva despaired. “No!”

  Em-Hassan turned, her face flushed and uncomprehending.

  “How can it be the will of God?” Aviva asked. “Why would God take my son and then my husband? Don’t you ever say that, Em-Hassan, I don’t want to hear that!”

  “All I’m saying is that we have to accept our fate . . .”

  But Aviva was no longer listening. She couldn’t bear it anymore. She didn’t know what to do with herself, and she rose as if in a dream and looked out the window, where a frail woman in a long black robe was slowly making her way up the street. The woman was carrying a big bundle, balancing it on her head.

  8

  November 14, 2003

  Emily

  Emily looked at Boaz sitting in the chair opposite her hospital bed, his body curved like a sickle. Behind his wide back, a blotch of gray morning filled the window. Rain was falling, unusually hard rain, ticking in slanted sheets against the glass and puddling in the hospital courtyard down below.

  She lay quietly in her bed, thinking about what to name their newborn twin sons. Before that, she had been thinking about their wedding ceremony a year earlier, held in the village community center overlooking the beach at sunset. A rough autumn sea, disheveled and wild, had churned behind Emily and Boaz as they stood under the chuppah, a wine-colored wedding canopy that had been used by the villagers for the past fifty years. Udi and Idan Cohen, David, and Emily’s brother, Matt, held up the canopy over Rabbi Lapid, Boaz, Emily, and Emily’s mother.