A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  And now, Aviva stood in the cemetery yet again. Gusts scuttled over the gravestones.

  You lived because you had to live. Until it was time for you to go.

  She reached for the handle of the burial house door, pushed down, and stepped inside.

  11

  In the Burial Circle

  Emily

  Can you believe this wind?” Emily was standing in a dull spot of light by the burial house door in the clothes she’d worn to work—a three-quarter-sleeve violet shrug and a white blouse, with a patterned scarf creatively tied around her hair. Emily’s motto had always been, “You can never go wrong if you overdress,” but now she blushed as Aviva walked in, feeling too fashionable, too stylish.

  “I thought I was supposed to wear something nice,” Emily apologized.

  “Next time, it’s probably better if you wear something you don’t mind getting wet.” Aviva gestured to her drab skirt and shirt. “And I always wear these clothes because they’re like a uniform. Then I can take them off afterward and try to go on with my life.”

  “Never apologize for looking good.” Lauren gave Emily a solemn hug.

  Emily had put off joining the burial circle ever since she’d moved to Peleg. She hadn’t wanted to be near anyone dead; the idea made her too distraught. The image of standing with her mother and brother at her father’s grave kept coming back to her. That afternoon it had rained hard (“God’s crying, too,” Emily whispered) and Matt had held up an enormous black umbrella. It had been so difficult saying good-bye to her father that Emily had wanted nothing more to do with death.

  Aviva had inspired Emily to join the burial circle that day they’d met at the beach, but this was her first tahara. Emily turned to the long metal table where the shallow contours of a body lay under a blue hospital sheet. It was Sophie. Sophie, who had always been so kind, warm, and welcoming to Lauren, and then to her. Emily had wanted to give Sophie something in return. “I can’t believe that’s really Sophie under there,” whispered Lauren.

  “Never sick a day in her life.” Leah Zado crossed her arms over her shelflike breasts and pursed her lips. “If she’d only listened to me when I told her to go for a checkup then maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing,” Gila Salomon cut in, as wiry as a pole vaulter, wearing her usual baggy Bedouin pants. “Pancreatic cancer is pancreatic cancer.”

  “And at least she wasn’t sick for too long,” Lauren said.

  The wind blew hard. The door flew open. Rachel appeared in a ruffled denim skirt and a blue gingham shirt.

  “What?” Rachel looked at Aviva. “I came to help with the tahara.”

  “But you’re so young.” Emily felt disconcerted seeing Rachel at the burial house.

  The wind scraped through the room. No one spoke.

  Aviva cleared her throat. “Rachel, you remind me so much of myself at your age. I wanted to help, I wanted to do . . .” She paused. “I really don’t want to introduce you to death.”

  Rachel stayed right where she was, refusing to budge.

  “I know,” Aviva said, “you won’t give up until we agree to let you stay.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s a first for me, too.” Emily reached her hand toward Rachel. “If it gets to be too much, we can both leave.”

  The door to the burial house closed. Lauren handed Emily and Rachel disposable gloves and white hospital jackets to put over their clothes. They all moved around the table where Sophie lay.

  Stillness widened around them like ripples in a lake. This is death, Emily thought, her head bent. It is what isn’t, though she wasn’t even sure what that meant. But a sense of purpose was settling on her.

  Leah picked up a laminated prayer sheet and read:

  “Dear God, You commanded us to take care of the dead and to bury them with loving-kindness . . . Please strengthen us so that we may perform this task with reverence and with love . . .”

  “Sophie asked me to read the names of her sisters and mother,” Lauren said quietly. “As if they were part of the ceremony, too. Sophie never knew what happened to them.” She slowly unfolded a piece of paper. “Her mother’s name was Gita, and her sisters were Blooma, Menucha, and Feige.”

  Emily glanced sideways at Lauren. She looked, as always, steely and resolute. Emily felt full of admiration for her friend. And then for herself, too. She had joined the burial circle, something she’d never thought she’d be able to do. Never say never. And right then it seemed less like a commemoration of death and more like an homage to life. To Sophie’s life.

  “I remember how Sophie always said that God is in the details,” Aviva remarked.

  “She taught me so much,” Lauren added.

  Leah opened the faucet, filled a bucket, and sprinkled water over Sophie, which fell like spring showers. Like autumn rains.

  Emily and Gila placed a dry sheet on top of Sophie, gently tugged out the wet one from underneath, and patted her dry. Lauren took a nail file from the shelf above the sink and held Sophie’s hand, gently smoothing the edges of her fingernails.

  “I bet this is her first manicure.” Lauren spoke to nobody in particular. “She was always telling me to spoil myself a bit, but she never did.”

  With Sophie’s face still covered, Emily brushed out Sophie’s white hair. “I’ll never forget that sparkling white color in the sun the first time I saw her in front of the grocery store. This is her very last time being beautiful.”

  “She is pure, she is pure, she is pure,” Leah chanted as Gila took the shroud bonnet and inched down the sheet, laying the bonnet over Sophie’s face.

  “Oh, we forgot the dirt for her eyes.” Gila turned to Rachel. “Would you mind going outside and scooping up just a little bit of dirt?”

  Rachel opened the door and wind swept into the room. The women waited silently, motionlessly. Then Rachel stepped inside again and poured the dirt into Gila’s cupped palms, and Gila sprinkled the powdery earth over Sophie’s eyes.

  “For dust you are and to dust you will return,” Leah recited.

  Aviva took the linen pants (they looked like Shoval and Tal’s footie pajamas, Emily couldn’t help thinking), bunched up the ends, and shimmied the pants over Sophie’s legs, bundling them around her hips. Emily took the shroud shirt to pull over Sophie’s arm, cold and stiff. Gila took the linen sashes and loosely wrapped one under Sophie’s chin, another around her waist, and the third around her feet.

  “We don’t make any knots so the soul can escape,” she explained.

  Emily and Lauren opened a large shroud sheet and shook it out. Unfurling, unrolling, the shroud drifted down over Sophie. The women gathered around the table again and Leah picked up the prayer sheet and the piece of paper with Sophie’s sisters’ and mother’s names.

  “Peace be upon you, Sophie. And Gita, Blooma, Menucha, and Feige.”

  Leah paused to compose herself.

  “Sophie, we ask forgiveness if we somehow hurt you. We did the best that we could . . .”

  Emily stepped outside the burial house. She breathed in slowly. She took in the gray-tinted sky, the wind weaving through the trees, the fallen leaves skittering across the gravestones. Life was finite and death was infinite. Ein sof. Emily remembered her father saying that was also a name for God: Endless. Beyond everything.

  “The first time always feels a little peculiar,” Charlie Gilbert, the village mayor, observed, turning to Emily and giving her an ironic smile. He was sitting on a bench by the door, smoking a cigarette. He took another drag and stamped it in the dirt.

  Emily followed Charlie back into the burial house.

  She helped him roll a black trolley next to the table. Gila and Lauren raised Sophie’s legs, Emily and Charlie held Sophie’s waist, and Rachel and Aviva tucked their hands under Sophie’s head and shoulders, laying her in the coffin.

  “She’s so small but she feels so heavy,” Rachel whispered.

  “The dead are always heavy,” Aviva said. “That’s because
the soul has gone, and it’s the soul that carries the body.”

  12

  June 7, 2005

  Aviva

  By the time Aviva met Eli Rothfeld for coffee later that evening, she was desperate to be pulled back into life. The night hung all around her, gloomy, windy, and dark, but the main plaza in Nahariya was lit up, a jumble of children running around, old men sitting on benches, families eating shwarma at outdoor restaurants, and stray cats prowling for scraps.

  “Don’t get up.” Aviva spotted Eli at a corner table in the Galilee Café, but he still stood and kissed her hello.

  “Aviva.”

  Aviva had hoped to look better for their meeting. After Sophie’s tahara, she’d taken a shower to get rid of the lingering presence of death. She’d washed her hair, and it hung loosely around her shoulders. She wore black corduroy pants, a sapphire-blue sweater (one of her own and not something borrowed from Rafi or the boys), and a pair of leather boots. Aviva still had her figure. At least, she thought ruefully, she still had that.

  “Everybody still says, ‘It must be so hard for you,’” Aviva had told Jill on the phone a few days ago. “But then they say, ‘You look so thin.’”

  “I don’t suggest they try your dieting method,” Jill had remarked.

  “You’re holding up,” Eli said now.

  “That’s not saying much.” Aviva sat down across from him, and the surly Algerian waiter came to take her order. Eli already had his double espresso, straight up and black. Real spies, he’d always said, never drank milk.

  When the waiter returned with her cappuccino, Aviva held the sugar packet above her cup and poured the grains out slowly, waiting until the sugar sank into the foam. “I’m warning you, I might burst into tears at any minute.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “But I needed to see you again,” Aviva said. “It just couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’m a member of the burial circle in Peleg and we just finished doing the tahara for an old friend of mine.”

  “Why would you put yourself through that?”

  “People are squeamish around the dead, but it’s a part of life,” Aviva answered. “And when I touch a dead woman, and then put my hand on my own warm skin, it reminds me to jump feet first into life every morning, no matter what. So I guess it makes the other things seem less bad.”

  “But not better.”

  “But maybe more bearable.” Aviva fell silent. She didn’t know how to begin—or what she even wanted to say. She watched Eli straighten his car keys and center his spoon on his napkin.

  “I’m happy to see you here, Aviva, but I—”

  “Hope is the thing.” Something to hold on to when she woke up alone in the middle of the night, the sea raging black and blue outside her window. “I understand you’re married. Really, Eli. I just wanted to see you.”

  He nodded and said nothing, which was enough. He stared at Aviva with bottomless eyes and she stared back. His face was a map. In his eyes, she saw rue Soufflot and rue du Cherche-Midi and avenue de la Republique, where she’d taught English. Looking back, she knew those were the good places in her life. They were hard places, too, but not compared to what came next. And Eli was all the more valuable because he was the only one who knew, who had ever known those places and what living their kind of life was like.

  “As I told you at shiva, I’m sorry to hear about your husband. He seemed like a really good guy.”

  “He was.” Aviva nodded, and then it occurred to her what she needed to say. “I just wanted to thank you. Thank you for not agreeing to see me after that basketball game. You spared me from betraying Rafi. If you and I had done something together—anything, even meeting for coffee—I would never have forgiven myself.”

  Eli’s eyes were the same as they always were but wearier, scuffed like old shoes. He waited a few beats. “So, what are your plans?”

  “I’m waiting for Yoni to finish the army and then I’m hoping to take a sabbatical,” Aviva replied. “My middle son, Raz, is working in Costa Rica for a scuba diving outfit. He wanted to get away and clear his head.”

  “Sounds good. Not that I could have done something like that.”

  “It isn’t your personality to run away.”

  “No, I always want to be in the thick of things. You wouldn’t find me spending more than a day in Bali.”

  “I just don’t understand,” Aviva said. “Is this the purpose of life? All this pain?”

  “Aviva, I am sorry. I wish I had an answer for you.”

  Aviva didn’t speak. She didn’t expect an answer from Eli. Even the rabbi had no answer. Even God, if there was a God, had no answer.

  She drank her coffee, watching people strolling through the plaza and a boy doing a wheelie on his bicycle. She asked Eli about his work and his son, Aviv, and about his wife. They talked for a while about the wind, the weather, the situation in the Middle East, and what was happening in Europe and America, and then there was nothing left to say.

  Eli pushed away his coffee cup. “It is nice to—”

  “Please don’t say, ‘It’s nice to see you.’” Aviva didn’t know what she expected, but something more than that.

  “It was nice,” he insisted. “It is nice. And you know you’ll always have a big place in my heart.”

  Aviva closed her eyes.

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “I have to be. I don’t have much choice.”

  “You’re not a giver-upper.” Eli touched her arm.

  “No,” she agreed. “I’m not.”

  By the time they left the café, most of the restaurants had closed and the lights in the stores were turned off. Eli walked Aviva to her car and they stood for a few moments without saying a word. It was the way they would have stood on Memorial Day, when the siren blew for two minutes and everyone on the street simply stopped in place, right where they were. Aviva said good-bye quickly, drove to her house, and climbed into her empty bed. She listened to the gusts of wind rattle the trees and push back the waves. She couldn’t tell if it was her heart or the sea that lay knocked down, splayed and whimpering under the starless sky.

  13

  July 21, 2005

  Rachel

  Rachel listened to Cat Stevens singing “Wild World” on the Israeli Army radio station. She was surprised they would play Cat Stevens—he went radical Muslim and all—but there he was, crooning “Ooh baby,” followed by U2, Ehud Banai, and the Rolling Stones. At four o’clock, an ominous beep-beep-beep came on and then the hourly news update.

  Rachel leaned in, listening to the announcer. With her elementary Hebrew, she picked out a few words here and there. Then she yanked off her rubber gloves and made a corner shot, sinking the gloves right into the large green garbage can by the door.

  “Basket, three points, my shift’s over, Svetlana! I’m out of here.”

  Svetlana Shapiro lifted her head from the cutting board where she was chopping onions. Svetlana was a big, plump, flat-faced woman, about fifty, the same age as Rachel’s mother, but while Rachel’s mother let her hair go gray (Rachel joked that Ariel the mermaid would look just like her mother in middle age), Svetlana’s hair was dyed platinum blond.

  “You should not be cleaning dishes,” Svetlana scolded, oil sizzling in a pan on the nearby stove. “You should be serious about continuing your education.”

  “But working here is also an education.” Rachel untied her apron strings. “And I was an anthropology major. I’m studying people here in the school of life.”

  “Some school.”

  “Well, Svetlana, don’t work too hard and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Do svidanya.” Svetlana lowered her head and returned to her chopping.

  Rachel walked past the eight-burner stovetop, the refrigerators and ovens, the cabinets for pots and pans marked MEAT or DAIRY, the shelves with cartons of potatoes, onions, and garlic. She dropped her apron in the laundry basket and left the hotel, walking until she turned down a road marked wit
h a wooden sign carved in the shape of a dog.

  The afternoon was hot and hazy, the sky languid and blue. Now and then a bird flew overhead. Rachel followed the dirt lane lined with avocado trees and reached a house with a pitched roof. She knocked on the front door and a modest older woman opened it. Her tiny lips, round face, black eyes, and fine black hair made her look like a doll. Rachel knew she was Esther Troyerman.

  “You speak English, don’t you?” Rachel asked.

  Esther nodded.

  “Aviva told me about you and your husband, so I came to meet you and see your kennels.”

  “I’m sorry, we don’t do tours.”

  “I don’t want a tour,” Rachel explained. “I’m a volunteer here from America. I love animals. I have a horse and a dog and a cat we adopted from a shelter.”

  Esther stayed quiet, fiddling with the top button of her yellow blouse, looking back at Rachel.

  “I thought maybe I could help.” Rachel paused. “Aviva speaks so highly of you.” And then Rachel waited, the way she had waited near her horse, Oreo, when her parents brought him home. Oreo had clopped his hooves nervously in the dirt, moving away whenever Rachel came close. Rachel didn’t give up—day after day, she stood looking at his jet-black eyes, holding out apples and carrots until she won him over.

  “Shalom,” Esther finally said. “I’m Esther Troyerman.”

  “I’m Rachel Schoenberger, I’m happy to meet you.” Rachel extended her hand and Esther took it, her touch no more than a breeze.

  “My husband, Jacob, doesn’t like anyone coming to the kennels.” Esther spoke in an apologetic tone. “He doesn’t even like our son, Eyal, to help him. I don’t let in visitors, but since Aviva told you to come, I’ll make an exception for a few minutes. I was just going out to the cat kennel now.”

  “Thank you.” Rachel fell into step beside Esther. The lawn smelled like it had just been mown. The dogs in the kennel were barking. “What are those fruit trees over there?”