A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  She walked around to where Ali could see her. “Hi, Ali,” she said in English. “I don’t mean to bother you, but I can’t work in the kitchen anymore.”

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, concerned.

  “I can’t get that chicken soup smell out of my nose.” Ali smiled but she said, “I’m serious! Ever since Rosh Hashanah, I smell it in my bedroom, in my shower, even in my perfume. I mentioned something to Emily and she told me that I should talk to you.”

  “Oh, she did, did she?” Ali’s eyes were as black as Svetlana’s new hair.

  “Emily told me you’d find me another job.”

  “Why don’t you ask Hannah? Isn’t she in charge of the volunteers?”

  “Yes, but Emily said that you know a lot of people and you’d try to help me.”

  “Let me ask you something.” Ali studied Rachel. “Do you like nature?”

  Rachel’s grandmother in Milwaukee used to say she only liked climate-control, but Rachel loved being out in nature. It meant horseback riding, skiing, hiking. It meant being alive. “I love it.”

  “Good. You’ll have plenty of time to be stuck in a kitchen, anyway.” Ali dialed a number on his cell phone, and Rachel tried to follow his conversation but gave up after shalom. When he hung up, he turned to her. “I found you a new job. You’re going to work with Moshe Zado. You’ll like it there.”

  “Where?”

  “In his avocado groves. There’s no chicken soup in the avocado groves.”

  A FEW WEEKS later, Moshe Zado jerked around to Rachel from where he sat on top of a tractor. He had a wide red face, and his chin melted so quickly into his neck that his head appeared to sit right on top of his chest. “We were kicked out of Algeria!” he shouted.

  “You told me already!” Rachel walked behind his tractor, holding a black hose and spraying the weeds that grew in clumps around the young avocado trees.

  “Algeria is not Montana!”

  “Wyoming!”

  It was a clear, fair morning. A delicate breeze rustled over her skin, the sun was warm on her face and shoulders, and wispy clouds trailed along the sky like footprints. Rachel was trying not to let Moshe’s depressing history lecture (the same one she had heard yesterday and the day before that) prevent her from appreciating the beauty all around her.

  “I was born in Algeria, but they forced us out,” Moshe shouted over the sound of the idling engine. “The Arabs won’t tell you that. They never say that the Jews also lost their houses and their land. But Israel took us in. Why can’t they do the same for their people? Because they hate each other even more than they hate us!”

  “You told me all this already!” Rachel pushed her hat lower, almost as if it could mute out his voice. “You know Yoni Sereno, don’t you?”

  “I knew him before you were even born.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Nu?” Moshe gestured with his hand.

  “Well, he’s my boyfriend, and he’s in the army—”

  “You don’t think I know that?”

  “So it scares me to keep hearing about the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews when he’s a soldier. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “You don’t want to talk, we won’t talk.” He drove the tractor down the path again.

  Over the tops of the avocado trees, Rachel could see the fields and orchards, and then the undulating hills on the other side of the valley. Her sneakers padded over the soft dirt, and she listened to the leaves swish in the breeze. “Moshe?” she called. Then she thought about how his name in English was Moses, and that made her laugh out loud. “When you were little, did your friends ask your mother, ‘Can Moses come out to play now?’”

  “Mah? What play?” Moshe twisted around. “We got to this land and we had to work.”

  “But Moshe.” She swatted a fly circling her tanned leg. “How come the spray doesn’t hurt the avocado trees?”

  He peered back at Rachel, his eyes narrowing.

  “How can the spray kill the weeds but not the trees? Seriously. How does the spray know which is which?”

  “I don’t know how it knows! All I know is that the spray chokes the roots of the weeds and they don’t get vitamins and they can’t grow.”

  “Aren’t I supposed to wear a mask or something when I spray?”

  Moshe lifted his white cap, wiped the perspiration off his bald head, and continued in the tractor, ignoring her.

  “Doesn’t this spray have carcinogens?” Rachel asked loudly, undeterred.

  “Where do you think you are? This is not America!”

  Instead of thinking about poison in the spray, Rachel focused instead on how happy she was to be outdoors, grateful not to be peeling potatoes or stirring chicken soup in the hotel kitchen. Rachel aimed the hose at the weeds again. The trees came up to her chest. Yoni would tower over them. She tried to imagine where he was. She took her cell phone out of her back pocket to see if he had sent her a message. Not that he could do that very often in the army, but just in case.

  “Rachel!” Moshe said suddenly. “What’s the name of these avocado trees? Don’t you remember?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Haas! The tastiest of them all!”

  “I was going to say Haas!”

  No message.

  Rachel returned the phone to her pocket.

  “Haas!” he repeated. “The last to ripen. The first to be ready is the Ettinger. Ettinger! It’s big! More water, more green! Next avocado looks like a pear. Fuerte! It means strong in Spanish! Fuerte is tasty. Some say it is sweet. But the Haas is dark—almost black. And it’s petite. We sell Haas to Europe. We sell Haas to Japan. It’s the best avocado in the world, it’s the—”

  “Crème de la crème!” Rachel filled in, because it was what Moshe always said.

  Muttering to himself, Moshe drove the tractor up the path. In the distance, Rachel could see a windmill, its wooden arms motionless. All of a sudden, Moshe shut down the motor and climbed off the tractor. The fields and the sky stopped rattling. A few hawks circled the silent sky.

  “Why did you stop?” Rachel asked.

  Moshe held out his watch. “Nine o’clock.”

  “Don’t you want to finish spraying? We’re almost done. It’s kind of hot today, so if we finish earl—”

  “This is hot? You think this is hot? Maybe for an Eskimo it’s hot! It’s early November. And it’s nine o’clock. Time for our break.”

  He walked away and Rachel had no choice but to follow him into the next grove, where the avocado trees were enormous, shadowy and cool, their gray trunks notched like riverbeds, the leaves in the highest branches touching, as if sewing themselves into a canopy of green.

  Moshe crushed twigs and fallen leaves beneath his heavy boots, then stopped to point out a hose by the trunk of a tree.

  “We use water from our toilets to irrigate,” he explained. “Recycled water. Gray water. Gray, almost ninety-nine percent clean.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Isn’t that brilliant?” Moshe caught up to her. “Sewage water! If we didn’t have to spend all our money to fight so many enemies, we’d be inventing thousands of things!”

  “That is really smart.”

  Then Moshe dropped down next to a small tree, clasping its trunk in his wide hands.

  “These two guys are trying to squeeze you out.” He glanced at the large trees on either side. “Don’t let them win!”

  Rachel stood there as Moshe patted the tree, revealing a compassionate side to him that she’d never suspected. He talked to the trees as if they were his children.

  “Grow big and strong like me,” he told the stumpy tree, almost pleading, and when he turned to Rachel, his face darkened. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “I read somewhere that trees grow better if you talk to them.”

  “At least they listen to me. Not like my wife, who doesn’t listen and doesn’t shut up.”

  He heaved himself up and they continued through the g
roves. Rachel saw white square beehives, like the cartons her father used to store his old legal papers. She’d helped him move some boxes and files up to the third floor of his office building before she’d left for Israel. They had climbed the rickety stairs up to the dim, dusty attic. “This smells like original, one-hundred-year-old Cheyenne dust,” Rachel had said.

  “You’re something special,” her father had told her as they set the boxes down on the creaky wooden floor. Then Rachel saw a look on his face, like water being poured into a glass, and she could feel his love rising from his heart up to his large brown eyes. “Going off on your own like this—”

  “You and Mom are special for encouraging me to go. But don’t worry about me.”

  He pressed his lips together and let out a faltering sigh. “Roots and wings,” he murmured to himself. “Roots and wings.”

  Now, Rachel made a detour around the hives. Bees buzzed through the air.

  “Gila and Omri Salomon distribute these beehives throughout the farmers’ fields and groves,” Moshe was saying. “Remember what I said? The bees—”

  “Transfer pollen grains from the male avocado to the female.”

  He scowled at Rachel. “I taught you too much!”

  The buzzing faded and they stepped into a clearing where Kareem and Jamal, Moshe’s farm workers, were leaning against an old wooden shed with a corrugated roof, smoking cigarettes and staring at Rachel in a way that made her feel very self-conscious in her gray ribbed shirt with spaghetti straps and denim shorts that stopped way above her knees.

  Kareem turned to Moshe and yelled, “Zeh tesha?” This is nine?

  Rachel glanced at the watch her parents had given her as a going-away gift. It was 9:15. She listened as Moshe and the men argued. Now and then, one or another glanced at Rachel, and she wished they wouldn’t do that. Wished she understood what they were saying. Finally, Moshe pulled a chain heavy with keys from his pants pocket and unlocked the door to the shed.

  Inside, dozens of photographs of women in bathing suits were pinned to the splintery walls. There were hoses, pruning shears, shovels, sprays, canisters, leaf blowers. The air was full of mildew and gasoline. Two crisscrossed windows let in boxes of grimy light.

  Rachel turned to Kareem, who had a mustache as wide as a harmonica. “What were you arguing about?” she asked, speaking English as slowly as humanly possible.

  “Moshe says, ‘Come at nine o’clock! Not Arab nine o’clock, but normal nine o’clock,” Kareem replied in his halting English. “We are here and where he is?”

  “Because I was teaching you about farming,” Moshe told Rachel. “You came here to learn, you should learn!”

  Rachel stayed silent, sitting at a wooden table scratched and stained with burns. Jamal, who always had a vacant expression on his square-jawed face, blank like a piece of paper, positioned himself on the chair next to Rachel, spread a newspaper on the table, and then arranged pita bread, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and salami slices.

  Rachel unzipped her knapsack and took out her pita sandwich. They all ate silently. Or, Rachel thought, she ate silently. The three men ground their teeth as they chewed, burped, and wiped their mouths on their sleeves. And all too often, she’d find one of them staring at her. They stared and stared and their stares felt like ooze poured all over her.

  “What are you eating?” Moshe asked her.

  “Olive oil and zaatar.”

  “I bet you didn’t know that zaatar is hyssop.” Moshe conquered half his baguette sandwich with one bite. “Yes, hyssop.” He wedged his food in the side of his cheek. “If you look it up in your Bible, you’ll find it. They used hyssop to clean the leper’s house. They used it to purify the Temple in Jerusalem. It’s one of the oldest spices in the world.”

  Perhaps she was just being too hard on Moshe and the two others. They were your typical Mediterranean guys, she thought, no different from Italian or Greek jerks who leered at women as if it were their prerogative. Perhaps she was being overly sensitive. She’d maintain her distance, not be too friendly to avoid giving them the wrong message, and continue her work in the groves rather than return to the steamy drudge of the hotel kitchen.

  She remarked, “I never tasted zaatar before I got here. Yoni introduced it to me.”

  “The Arab women still pick wild spices in the fields,” Moshe said. “Some things don’t change. But no more days when soldiers came by sheep.”

  “By sheep?”

  “No, by jeep.”

  “By jeep?”

  “No! Not by sheep, not by jeep, by ship!”

  “Oh, by ship!” Rachel repeated.

  “Oh, by ship,” Moshe squealed in a high-pitched voice, setting off a round of raucous laughter. The three men guffawed until Moshe asked, “Whose turn is it to make coffee?”

  Kareem moved to the sink attached to the back wall. He ran water into a small metal pot with a curved spout and heated it on a Bunsen burner in the middle of the table. He opened a bag of coffee, releasing an exotic aroma, and dipped a teaspoon deep inside the bag, adding three heaping spoonfuls to the water.

  “Do you like two spoons of sugar, the way Kareem takes his coffee?” Moshe smirked, winking at her from under one of his shaggy eyebrows. “Or three spoons of sugar like me?”

  “Both are fine.” Rachel lowered her eyes.

  “Do you think twenty stirs are good, like Jamal?” he pressed on. “Or thirty stirs, like Kareem?”

  The three of them stared at her again.

  Rachel’s face burned. She refused to look up or speak, hoping that her silence conveyed the message that she didn’t like the way they were treating her. She listened to the spoon clink against the metal coffeepot. She’d brought this upon herself, she knew, by asking to work outdoors.

  Outdoors had never felt more stifling and claustrophobic.

  She tried to steady her breaths, but the rough-hewn walls around her kept shrinking. A hand as big as a paw appeared in front of her, setting a small, chipped ceramic cup down on the table. She could feel Kareem’s presence behind her.

  “Thank you,” Rachel mumbled.

  “Shukran,” Kareem said, remaining there. “That’s thank you in Arabic.”

  “Shukran.”

  “Very smart!”

  “She’s as smart as she is pretty,” Moshe said, and for one unbearable moment her throat constricted as the three men remained in a knot around her, making her feel like a small elk about to be pounced on by mountain lions. She tried to reassure herself that they would never do anything to her.

  But what if they did? Who would hear her shouts? And wouldn’t people say it was her fault, she was just asking for trouble? Her heart pounded, and there was no more air left in her lungs.

  Then Kareem hooted, “And Moshe, you’re as majnoon as ever,” pouring him his coffee.

  “I’m not crazy.” Moshe snickered. “You’re meshuggeh. You and everyone in your entire family.”

  Rachel sat motionless, trying to get her breath back. Ordinary objects are weapons, she repeated to herself, a phrase she remembered from her college self-defense course. She reached for her cup with an inch of hot coffee within it. She clutched it with a shaking hand. She waited. When Kareem served the two other men and sat down again, she took a sip of the coffee, momentarily relieved. Another sip. Then the very last super-sweet sip, almost tasting the muddy grounds at the bottom of the cup. She stood up. She’d wash the cup and wait for Moshe outside. As she walked around the table, she could feel six eyes glued to her legs, her breasts, her butt. At the sink, she washed the cup, thinking she had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  “You’re not going to perform surgery with that cup!” Moshe barked. “Americans waste money and water. Just give it a little vish!”

  Kareem and Jamal snorted with laughter.

  “L’atzor!” Rachel shouted in Hebrew. But she knew that the way she pronounced stop and the way the word should sound were two different things.

  �
�L’atzor!” Jamal mimicked, the first time she’d heard him speak.

  Whirling around to reach for her knapsack, Rachel accidentally knocked over her chair, causing the men to laugh even harder. “That’s it!” she yelled in English, and stomped to the door. She stepped outside, into the fresh, open air. The sun was higher in the sky, and the light was dazzling.

  “What’s wrong?” Moshe asked, coming after her, his squat, clunky body like a round peg trying to fit through a rectangular doorway.

  “You know what’s wrong.”

  “We were just having fun.”

  “It’s not polite to stare!”

  “Says who? And what’s wrong with guys having a little fun?”

  “Does your fun always have to make me feel so uncomfortable?” Rachel squinted at him.

  “Az mah? So what? What do you want from me?” Moshe wiped some hummus smeared on the side of his mouth. “What do you want from us? You’re the first girl to come to work in the groves. And if a woman will work here, she is covered from head to foot. You’re walking around in a teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy shirt and shorts!” He took a couple of mincing steps in the doorway, teasing her.

  “What is this, the Taliban? I can wear what I want and still get respect!”

  “I can’t stop men from looking—”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  “What do you want me to do? You give a little shukran in your little voice and you expect guys not to react?”

  “Then I quit!”

  “Fine, nu, go be someone else’s headache! Ali said you quit the hotel because it wasn’t good enough for you, and now this isn’t good enough. You want everything. Why did you come here if all you do is complain about how we are? Go back to America!”

  “I’m here because I want to help change things!”

  Moshe slapped his hands against the side of his head and opened his mouth as if to speak, but just glared at her, stepped inside the work shed, and slammed the door.

  Rachel walked away. She felt like one naïve, angry, foolish dumbo for moving to this faraway place and thinking she could make a difference. She walked carefully around the hives, the air resonating with bees, and then stepped out of the groves. The sunlit day was now hot. She’d never quit anything in her life before. She hadn’t quit the varsity basketball team even when she and Jamie had Mr. Hughes, whom they called the coach from hell. She’d been able to laugh with Jamie, but now she felt only frustrated and upset. She bit into her bottom lip. Would she ever find a place where she fit in? The sun pressed down on her head, and beads of sweat dripped below her hairline.