A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  “And walk around barefoot.”

  “My feet have so many calluses that even army boots can’t give me blisters.” Yoni stood up, poked a branch into the fire, and pulled out a potato for Rachel. “Wait a minute until it cools off.”

  “Thanks.” After a moment, she peeled back the tinfoil and took a bite. “Wow, this potato tastes almost sweet. A potato in Wyoming tastes only like a potato.”

  “You probably have a boyfriend waiting for you to come back home,” Yoni said tentatively.

  “I had,” Rachel said. “His name was Henry. Is Henry, I mean, he’s not dead or anything. He’s Native American. His Arapaho name is Touch-the-Clouds. But we broke up before I came here.” She hesitated, scooping up some cool sand, letting it sift through her fingers. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  Rachel turned so that he couldn’t see her smile. Two girls were doing cartwheels by the fire and Danielle gestured them away. Suddenly an older man with wild eyes bolted out of the darkness. He was twirling a broomstick. Yoni lurched up, leaped toward him, and grabbed the broomstick from his hands. The man yelled at Yoni and Yoni yelled back, the two of them circling each other until Yoni tossed the stick into the fire. The man kept shouting as he backed away, disappearing into the shadows, and then he was gone.

  “What was that all about?” Rachel asked after Yoni flopped himself down again by her side.

  “Every place has a crazy guy, right?” Yoni said. “Micha Zlotnik used to be a top scientist, but he got into a car accident. Now he walks around all day with a broomstick, swinging it at people. Yallah, let’s go.”

  Yoni stood again, holding out his hand, pulling her up. They walked away from the shore, their shadows swinging sideways and then sliding out in front of them. Following a narrow path, Rachel could still smell the sweet aroma of burning wood until they reached the pine trees by her cottage.

  “This is where I saw you for the first time,” Yoni told her. “My mother slammed on her brakes so I could meet you.”

  Rachel remembered how Aviva had stopped the car right next to her. Rachel was standing there holding a pinecone. She hadn’t felt so mortified since eleventh grade, when she’d left the bathroom and returned to chemistry class with a piece of toilet paper trailing from her yellow Converse sneaker.

  “I’m sure you thought I was one of those weird tree huggers. But it was the largest pinecone I’d ever seen.”

  “Did you keep it?”

  “I couldn’t resist,” she said, smiling.

  “Maybe I can come see it?”

  “How about for a few minutes?” Rachel said.

  Yoni followed her through the yard, its sandy dirt riding up to the front door. Rachel stepped into the kitchen, the ceiling light still on, and called, “Anybody home?”

  No answer.

  “Who’s supposed to be home?” Yoni asked.

  “Julius and Rouven. They’re from Germany, volunteering on the Cohens’ farms instead of going into the German army. Look, I painted the refrigerator myself. Periwinkle.”

  “I never saw a periwinkle refrigerator before.” Yoni turned to her. “About that pinecone.”

  “Right.” Rachel smiled nervously, expectantly, as he trailed after her into her room. On a wobbly dresser, in the middle of a ring of beach shells, was the pinecone, tilting precariously.

  “I call it the leaning pinecone of Pisa.” She noticed Yoni looking around the room. “Sorry, I still haven’t had time to fix things up in here.”

  “I’m in barracks with fifty other smelly guys, so this is really nice.” Yoni flopped down on the bed.

  She sat on a folding chair opposite him as he looked at her teddy bear, making her feel even sillier. But she’d had that teddy bear since she was a baby—it now had bald patches where the fuzz had rubbed off, and one torn arm that she’d repaired with black thread—and she didn’t want to part with it.

  “Who’s this?” Yoni asked.

  “That’s Skippy. He gives me good luck.”

  “Skippy’s Jewish?” Yoni pointed to the bear’s little Jewish star necklace.

  “It’s the necklace I wore in Wyoming. I don’t need it here.”

  “Cool.” Yoni smiled, leaned forward, jutted out his chin, and kissed her.

  It was the slowest, sweetest, most tentative, most deliberate kiss. “I’ve never kissed an Israeli soldier before.” Rachel stared into his eyes, as clear as mountain streams.

  “So, nu, what do you think?” He touched the side of her face.

  “Your lips are chapped, but nice.”

  “I’ve never kissed an American girl before.”

  “So, nu,” she echoed after a time, “what do you think?”

  “I could get used to it.” He tugged her toward him and then onto the bed. Their kisses deepened, lengthened, widened, turned her body into silk. He unbuttoned her plaid flannel shirt, and then he pulled off his gray sweatshirt. She could hear the sounds of the bonfire floating up from the shore as he unhooked her bra. His gaze traveled over Rachel’s breasts and belly, studying her the way she imagined soldiers studied terrain maps in the middle of the night.

  After a while, Rachel pulled away. “I’m sorry, Yoni, but do you have any . . . ?”

  “I don’t.” He looked flustered. “Do you?”

  “No.” She turned around, putting her bra and shirt back on. “We should probably stop now, anyway. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who should be sorry. But obviously not sorry for all this. I gotta go, anyway.” He kissed her again. “You’ll be around tomorrow?”

  “I’m working at the hotel kitchen until the afternoon.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find you.” Yoni stood and then knelt by the bed, his fingers winding themselves in and out of the corkscrew curls of her hair.

  “I’ve never touched hair like this before,” he whispered.

  “Weird, right?” She got her breath back. “My father has a Jewfro and my mother has blond hair like she’s from Scandinavia. She’s actually from Milwaukee.”

  “It’s really nice.” He reached for her again. Then he finally pulled himself up and slipped out of the room.

  Rachel listened as the front door opened and closed. A quiet looped back to her, interrupted now and then by music and voices coming from the beach. She looked around the room, thinking of her parents’ house in Cheyenne and her big bedroom that she’d painted indigo blue with her best friend, Jamie Almquist, whose grandparents were from Scandinavia.

  Whenever Rachel and Jamie did something fun, they called it exthrillerating. Taking off to ride horses, winning an important basketball game (they had played together on the high school team), or ice skating on the frozen pond by Jamie’s house was exthrillerating.

  “Moving to Israel is also exthrillerating,” Jamie had told Rachel, “even if you are doing it without me.”

  “Maybe you can come visit someday,” Rachel persisted, though she knew it was nearly impossible.

  “Yeah.” But the way Jamie spoke made the trip seem too far out of reach. Jamie was already living with her boyfriend and they had a two-year-old son. She worked as a waitress and planned to go to nursing school. “Someday.”

  Then Rachel thought of Henry. She had never gone to his house on the reservation (“definitely off-limits,” he had said whenever Rachel asked), but she imagined him in it. He would not have a pinecone or a teddy bear. He would have a few buds of Wyoming weed and an empty bottle of whiskey that he’d use as a candlestick. When Rachel had met Henry at the farmers market, he told her he was really a shaman in training, but he never went anywhere without a Trojan pressed like an exotic butterfly in his wallet, right between his real driver’s license and his fake one.

  “I’m tired of selling tawdry Native American trinkets at the flea market,” Henry had told Rachel the last night they were together.

  “Tawdry?” They were sitting in her studio apartment near the university. It was ironic: she was the one who’d gone to
college, but he used the SAT words.

  “Yet any other kind of escape,” Henry began, rolling a joint with his nimble fingers, “would be a futile attempt at bettering myself for no proven purpose.”

  “You can start selling your own wood furniture,” Rachel tried.

  “Don’t get all bug-eyed and Girl Scouty on me.” His face closed up and he blew a few smoke rings. She watched him, wrapping herself in his silence as if it were a poncho. Then he left the end of the joint in the ceramic ashtray she’d made for him, snuffed out the candle between his thumb and middle finger without using spit, and organized his braid on the pillow so it looked like a meandering river. (Once, when Henry had thought that Rachel wasn’t listening, he’d told his brother, “Money-back guarantee, bro, the braid gets the girls every time.”)

  “I’m just trying—”

  “Rachel, I know what you’re doing. And I know you’re watching me.” Henry kept his eyes shut, and then he told her that was another shaman’s skill he’d learned from his grandmother—an ability to see things with his eyes shut.

  Rachel kept quiet. The moonlight was tumbling through the window, turning Henry’s skin the color of maple syrup. She said good night and didn’t see him slip out of her bed sometime before dawn. At first, she had given him a few days. A few days, she thought, because he needed time to drift across the plains like the wind. Then she’d learned that you had to let people go. Even the people you loved.

  Rachel turned onto her belly now and stared at a thin pearly curve of moon hanging over the pine trees. Lying there, thousands of miles away from Wyoming, she suddenly realized that Henry was truly gone from her life, and she no longer missed him. She thought of the sweet, chapped taste of Yoni’s lips, and the way his eyes sparkled when he looked at her.

  She didn’t want to get her hopes up, though. Yoni was a soldier. He had to go back to the army on Sunday morning. She’d have to get used to the Sunday-to-Thursday work week. She’d have to get used to not seeing him for twenty-one days or even longer. She’d have to wait and count the days. Then he’d come home and she’d pretend that she hadn’t been counting. She’d just say, Hey, Yoni. Yo, Yoni. Hey, you.

  10

  June 7, 2005

  Aviva

  Two weeks after Aviva had seen Yoni on his last home leave from the army, she held up the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album and looked around, studying the faces of the thirty eleventh graders crowded in her classroom. Aviva had no illusion that more than one or two of the students were even looking at her, let alone paying attention. As always, most of them had retreated into their own world—not that she could blame them. Still, she refused to give up on her students. The quest to help them gave her a purpose. Something to beat back her raging loneliness.

  “Yoo-hoo!” Aviva clapped her hands twice and then stamped her feet. “One-two-three, focus!”

  The school was in a rundown neighborhood in Akko, long on desperation, hash, and vodka (one student’s mother got drunk, waded into the sea, and drowned) and short on hope. When Aviva tried to imagine the students’ future, after they’d finished high school and served in the army, all she could see was a repeat of their parents’ dismal lives.

  Aviva turned to a girl named Noa, a dark-skinned girl with even white teeth whose family was part of the Bnei Menashe tribe from India, one of the lost tribes of Israel. Aren’t we all members of one lost tribe or another, Aviva thought, broken apart, waiting for redemption?

  “Noa, help me out here. Take a guess—what is this?”

  “It’s old.” Noa crinkled her button nose.

  “Old isn’t so bad. This is a Beatles album.”

  “Cool,” said a boy named Yotam, sitting in the last row, his narrow face full of indifference.

  Kagan would have told Aviva, “Work around what is.” She knew she couldn’t spend the rest of the class just standing there, wanting things to be different, so she forced herself to sing the first few lines of “All You Need Is Love.”

  “You should be on ‘Kochav Nolad’,” said a buck-toothed kid named Natan.

  “Really? On ‘A Star is Born’?” Aviva joked. “Until then, I want all of you to team up into groups of three or four. Pick a Beatles song and talk about what the words mean to you. Please—obviously—speak to each other in English.”

  The students scraped their chairs around the floor and Aviva walked between the rows of desks. The classroom looked nothing like any of the classrooms at the school in Larchmont that her sister Jill’s kids attended: these walls were cracking and badly in need of repair, the bulletin boards pockmarked, the blinds hanging on a permanent slant against the windows. Aviva wandered from group to group, listening, and then said, “Natan, tell us what your group discussed.”

  “We all said that we like newer music.”

  “Ouch!” Aviva pretended to wince. “The Beatles are classic. What about my sixties look? This silver peace chain and bellbottoms are older than you are.”

  Natan shrugged and traced his finger along the FUCK that was carved deep into his desk.

  “My son Yoni bet me that I wouldn’t dare to wear this to school.”

  “I never wear that,” announced Helena, a girl with lavender streaks in her hair. The one whose mother had drowned.

  “I would never wear that,” Aviva corrected. “But you never know. I bet this style will return one day. Fashions always come back.”

  “I hope no.”

  “We’ll see. Anyway, I want you all to know that when I first heard the song ‘All You Need Is Love,’ I loved it right away.”

  “You need more than love,” argued Helena, who had cut off the collar of her school uniform (a cotton T-shirt, students’ choice of color with the logo above the left breast) so that it slipped off her slender shoulder.

  “What else do you need?”

  “Money.”

  “But money isn’t the most important thing,” Aviva countered. “The Beatles inspired people to believe that the world could change. Do you know that when the Beatles first performed this song on television, more than three hundred fifty million people watched them?”

  “So what?” That was a pimply kid named Alex in the first row. “More people watch the World Cup.”

  “And you’re one of them, right?” Aviva walked across the room. “Lyrics in songs and words in poems are worldwide, too; they’re feelings we all share, like love or happiness or sorrow. ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.’” She paused. “Doesn’t that give you a sense of hope?”

  “Not when I think about Israeli soccer teams,” Alex replied.

  Moving to the last row, Aviva stopped by Yotam, who had fallen asleep, his head on his desk. She considered waking him, but on her way to school that morning she had seen him working at his father’s bakery.

  “Which song did you choose?” Aviva asked in Helena’s direction.

  “I no have time.” Helena cracked her chewing gum.

  “First of all, we don’t chew gum in class. And second, you have to do your classwork. And it’s, ‘I didn’t have time.’”

  Helena shrugged.

  “I want you to write about the song ‘Blackbird.’ Please read the first few lines to the rest of the class.”

  “I no want.”

  “There are a lot of things we don’t want to do, but we still have to do them.”

  Helena groaned and pulled out her song sheet. “‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night.’” She read almost inaudibly, in slow motion, expressionlessly, like a metronome that cared nothing for music. The school bell rang. Helena crumpled the handout sheet, shoved it into her book bag, and moved quickly through the rows of desks.

  Aviva wanted to rush after Helena, filled with a maternal impulse to throw her arms around her and give her some words of reassurance, however meager. But Helena was too fast, and when she reached the doorway, she glared back at Aviva over her bare shoulder, her sullen face triumphant.

  NOT MUCH LATER, Aviva stood at the ce
metery gate watching a small gray bird—perhaps a crested lark—attempt to lift off a grave.

  The afternoon had turned windy. An impermeable sheet of gray hung across the sky. The crested lark (a hapless thing) beat its wings, going nowhere, until a sudden draft blew it sideways like a stray piece of paper, and off it went.

  Aviva stopped at the fountain. She picked up the cup and poured three splashes of water on her left hand, three splashes on her right. A ritual washing. Then she stood by the burial house door, listening to the muffled voices coming from the other side. Why had she joined the burial circle in the first place? It took so much out of her. But Sophie had asked her to join a year after she’d moved to Peleg.

  “Think of your mother’s funeral,” Sophie had told Aviva one evening as they sat in Aviva’s living room.

  Aviva remembered. She remembered how her mother had died of a sudden brain aneurysm, and how Aviva had immediately flown to New York. Her mother, stubbornly proud to be a Jew, was just as proud to be exceedingly secular and irreverent, viewing traditional Jewish rites as folksy superstitions. She’d written in her will years earlier that she wanted a tasteful, unsentimental funeral, hoping to spare Aviva and Jill from too much pain.

  Aviva couldn’t forget going with Jill to the funeral parlor to make the arrangements. The funeral director, an ashen, lugubrious man with a trim goatee, had walked the two sisters through the casket showroom, pointing out white caskets, mahogany caskets, and black caskets with brass hardware, as polished and gleaming as new cars. Her mother was somewhere in the funeral parlor, hidden out of sight.

  Who had touched her last, Aviva wondered? Had they been kind? Gentle? Respectful? Aviva never knew. Looking back, she thought the whole procedure seemed too commercialized and sanitized, treating death the way you’d spray a disinfectant at a grimy surface. Aviva realized what had been missing: the authenticity, the immediacy, the undisguised reality of death.

  Yes, Aviva had told Sophie, she’d join the burial circle because of all that her mother had missed. She wanted to take care of the dead women in the village as a personal tribute, something the funeral director, who hadn’t known her mother (and was a man, besides) could not have done.