A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  “Hi, Rachel!” came a voice, and suddenly Yoni was standing by the door, dropping his drenched knapsack on the scratchy welcome mat.

  “Hey, you! What are you doing here?”

  “I have an ear doctor’s appointment early tomorrow morning in Nahariya. My commander decided at the last minute to let me come home tonight so I’d get there on time.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t hear so good out of my left one. They always run out of earplugs at the shooting range.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” Rachel knew there was a lot he couldn’t tell her. “But you’re soaking wet—let me get you a towel. Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee is great. I just need to find a safe place to put this.” He swung off his rifle, folding it in two with a snap, and removed a metal piece from the bottom. “Can I hide the rifle under your mattress? And I’ll put the magazine on top of the refrigerator.”

  “I usually hang my rifle on the hook over there,” Rachel tried to joke, but he didn’t respond. She followed him into her bedroom, where he lifted the mattress and lay down the rifle. While he went into the bathroom to change out of his wet clothes, she boiled water and set a cup of coffee on the table. She was holding the milk and sugar when he reappeared in a pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt with PARATROOPERS written on it in white Hebrew letters.

  “Every time I’m back here, you’re studying Hebrew.” Yoni’s green eyes were reddened and bleary with fatigue.

  “My teacher’s too busy protecting the country to teach me.”

  “Are my lips still chapped?” he asked, kissing her.

  “I see you’ve been working on them.”

  “My new secret weapon.” He smiled. “ChapStick and my M16.” Then he pushed back her hair to kiss her neck, picked her up in his arms, and carried her through the kitchen. He had to turn sideways to slip through the narrow doorway of her bedroom and then he slammed the door shut with his foot.

  Rachel felt as if her heart was bursting afterward. They’d made love a few times before, but now they seemed even more connected. This was it, they were a couple. Rachel didn’t say that, though, the way she would have with Henry. Instead she asked, “You know the story of the princess and the pea?”

  “No.” Yoni stroked her hair. “Tell me.”

  “There’s a prince who wants to marry a princess, but he can’t find a true one,” Rachel began. “Then one night a girl comes to the castle in the rain and she says she’s a princess. The prince wants to make sure, so he puts a pea under twenty mattresses and she goes to sleep on top of them. In the morning, she says she couldn’t sleep at all because she felt something under her mattress. And that’s how he falls in love with her, because only a true princess would feel a pea.” For a moment, Rachel almost forgot why she was telling him this story, because it seemed so ridiculous and because she couldn’t concentrate while gazing into Yoni’s eyes. “Well, I did feel your M16 under the mattress.”

  “I’m sorry. You know, I wish I could stay here with you and never go back.”

  “I get so scared thinking about you in the army.”

  “Forget it.” He wrapped a few corkscrew curls of her hair around his hand. “Test my lips again.”

  A RINGING TELEPHONE, darkness. Rachel was alone, sleeping in an unfamiliar room. She was afraid, but then she felt a warm arm over her and realized it was Yoni, hitting the snooze button on his alarm.

  “Your hair smells so good.” He burrowed under the covers, his body hollowed around her. He kissed her hair, dozing off again. She wished the moment could elongate into infinity, but his alarm was ringing once more.

  “I’d do anything to come back to you right after my doctor’s appointment,” he whispered, his arm draped over her waist, his fingers linked in hers.

  His finger, my finger, his-mine-his-mine-his . . . Then she opened her eyes and the shapes in the room fleshed out: the dresser, the windowsill, the lamp on the night table, the leaning pinecone of Pisa. From outside the window, the Oshinskys’ horses neighed.

  “Now I can teach you some Hebrew,” Yoni said. “I’m shavooz.”

  “It sounds bad, whatever that is.”

  “It’s the really depressing feeling you get when you have to go back to the army. It means your penis is broken.”

  “I’d be more upset if that happened.”

  “So would I.” He held her close. “I should do what my friend Tom Mosseri did.”

  “What was that?” Rachel turned around to face Yoni, taking in the yellow flecks in his eyes and the outline of his full lips.

  “Tom was going through a really rough time in the army, so he went to one of Gila and Omri’s beehives, picked up a bee with a pair of tweezers, and let it sting him on his knee. He did it with two more bees and his knee got really swollen and then he went to the army clinic and told them he hurt his knee playing soccer. They gave him shalosh-gimelim, a three-day pass from the army.”

  “Wasn’t he in pain?”

  “Yeah, but he got to stay home.” Yoni traced his hand from one shoulder, across her collarbone and the hollow of her neck to her other shoulder. “The next time, Tom knew he had to do something different because the doctors start recognizing you, so he chewed really hard on a piece of gum wrapped in plastic—you know, the kind of plastic you wrap sandwiches in—for about an hour, and then went to the clinic. The nurse started taking his temperature and when she turned away, he stuck the thermometer all the way in the back of his mouth where his jaw was really hot from chewing on the plastic, and the nurse said he had a high fever and sent him home again. But that time, he only got one gimel.”

  “How do you guys come up with these things?”

  “When you’re in the middle of nowhere by yourself, you have time to think. This other guy I know asked his friends to break his arm with a club.” He hauled himself out of bed, opened the window shutters, and peered out. “At least the rain’s stopped.”

  Rachel propped herself up on an elbow, gazing out at the sky. Layers of gray: granite, slate, pebble, stone. “Do you want some breakfast?”

  “No thanks. I want to go home and surprise my mom before she leaves for school.”

  “Oh, good, that will make her happy.”

  Yoni picked up his white T-shirt from the floor, pushed his arms through first, then pulled it over his head. “Don’t you have to get ready for work?”

  “In a minute. I want to lie here and watch you. I’ve never seen a soldier put on his uniform before.”

  He slowly buttoned the buttons of his army shirt. It had been soaked through last night and there were still damp patches, like puddles in the early-morning fields after a rain.

  He slid his wool beret under the shoulder lapel.

  “Would you say your beret is burgundy or crimson?” Rachel asked.

  “Who am I, Ralph Lauren? It’s some kind of red. Paratrooper berets are always red.”

  “Which soldiers’ berets are brown?”

  “Golani and some other units.”

  “And who’s green?”

  “Rachel, next time I see you, I’ll tell you who wears what.”

  He tucked his olive-green pants into his gray socks. The socks looked so itchy that Rachel thought she wouldn’t have been able to even put them on. He pushed his feet into his muddy boots. Then he bent over again, bowing his whole weight forward. He slid one end of his shoelace through the top hole of his boot, made a loop, and pulled hard so the lace stayed tight. He kept looping the lace, tugging and looping, almost like he was crocheting, until the shoelace became one long braid.

  “Look at this.” Yoni pulled the lace, unraveling it in one quick yank.

  “That’s cool.”

  He slouched over and started the process all over again. “I’m sorry to bother the princess.” He lifted part of Rachel’s mattress to extract his rifle.

  “It’s cold out,” she said.

  “I’ll close the window.”

  “No, I m
ean, try to stay warm.”

  He nodded, partly closing the shutters. The light snapped, breaking into bands.

  “I’ll call you.” He leaned over to kiss her, then walked into the kitchen. She heard him reaching for the other part of his rifle from the top of the refrigerator. The front door opened. Closed.

  Yoni stepped out of the house on his way to Aviva’s. Rachel knew that his surprise visit would cheer up Aviva, but Rachel secretly wished she could have more time with him. Then she felt ashamed for thinking that way. Aviva had so little to be happy for, and Rachel knew she had so much.

  “WHAT DID THE doctor say?” Rachel asked when Yoni called her later.

  “He didn’t say anything.” His voice was brusque. “Just gave me some drops. I’m about to get on the train to go back.”

  “When will you be home next?”

  “I don’t know. Everything’s shitty. The only thing I keep pushing is the rewind button. I’m playing back our entire night together.”

  “Me, too.” Rachel remembered his tender, longing, smooth, chapped kisses, his arms and legs entwined in hers. “It was—”

  “It was too good,” Yoni shouted over the noise of the train. “I gotta go!”

  ON A FRIDAY evening three weeks later, chilly and overcast, Rachel was in the kitchen with Rouven and Julius, setting the table with mismatched plates and napkins made from paper towels torn in two. Julius, who had straggly shoulder-length hair pulled into a ponytail, John Lennon glasses, and an unkempt beard, stood at the stove cooking rice. Rouven, sort of chubby but still attractive because of his moony blue eyes and blond hair, was positioned in the middle of the room, opening a bottle of wine. “Scheisse!” He frowned. “The cork broke.”

  Rachel’s phone rang in her back pocket. “Hey, you!” Her heart leaped. She hurried out of the kitchen and stepped down into the sandy yard, where her breath came out in puffs of white. “I’m so happy to hear your voice.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “About to eat dinner. Rouven’s girlfriend, Hila, and her friend are coming over, and they don’t know what they’re getting into—Julius’ curry stew.”

  “Anything’s better than what we just ate. Three days in the desert with nothing but Loof.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “Kosher Spam. You try eating it. And last night they finally let us sleep for a few hours, but we had no tents or blankets so we dug out trenches to lie in. I felt like we were digging our own graves. I lay on my back in the sand and the guy next to me threw his legs over mine. I wished you were there.”

  “That’s nice”—Rachel smiled—“thinking about me.”

  “Thinking about you only made it worse because I didn’t want to be where I was. I just wanted to be there with you.”

  She chewed on the inside of her lower lip. “I wish you could be here, too.”

  “That doesn’t help me any.”

  Rachel had no idea what to say. Her words were useless, pings of raindrops falling on the sea. She listened to the static silence between them.

  “So, tell me what you’ve been doing,” Yoni finally said.

  “Well, tomorrow I’m going to help do the tahara for Hilda Mosseri.”

  “That’s Tom’s grandma,” Yoni said. “He called me earlier. She always used to run after us with a rolling pin because we’d steal her apple strudel.”

  “That’s funny.”

  Yoni was quiet.

  “I babysat for Maya and Yael last night. And I’m enjoying work at the gan. We’re getting ready to plant trees for Tu B’Shevat. How funny is that? I didn’t know there’s a Jewish holiday for trees.”

  Still quiet.

  She got no answer so she stumbled along. “My Hebrew is getting better. I’ve got down my future tense. You can test me when you get home.”

  “Whenever that is.”

  “Do you want to plan something fun for when you do get back?” Rachel was surprised by how much she sounded like her mother, who always told Rachel to think of something fun in the future if she was having a bad day. “We can go horseback riding at dawn.”

  “On my one day to sleep in?”

  “We can sleep afterward. You gotta get up in the dark if you want to see the sunrise.”

  He didn’t answer at first. Then, “I’ll think of something. That will give me something good to think about.”

  Rachel didn’t know if what she was about to say would make him feel better or worse, but she blurted out, “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. That’s the problem.”

  She hesitated, picturing him in his army uniform, the way the drab green color drained the sparkle from his eyes. “Take care of yourself, Yoni, okay? You’ll see, in no time at all, you’ll be home and we’ll be together again.”

  “I gotta go.”

  Yoni hung up and Rachel waited there in the cold. She was on one side of the dark night and Yoni was on the other. She imagined Yoni in the desert, digging as if he were digging his own grave in the sand. With the stars staring down. Doing nothing at all except flicker their lights, dim, helpless, and faraway.

  23

  In the Burial Circle

  Rachel

  When Rachel was fifteen, she had walked down a long corridor in a Milwaukee hospital and then stood with her mother by her grandmother Shirley’s bed. Without her teeth, and with her once dyed, coiffed hair hanging in limp white strands, Shirley looked like a frail and emaciated bird that had fallen out of its nest, eying Rachel with desperation.

  “Help me,” Shirley moaned faintly, lifting her arthritic hand toward Rachel as if trying to claw her way back to life.

  And Rachel, who used to love spending every chance she got with Shirley in her eighteenth-floor apartment in a fancy condominium, shrank back.

  Rachel’s mother quickly said, “Rachie, why don’t you go out and wait in the cafeteria for me?” and Rachel nodded and turned. She walked away swiftly, gratefully, relieved to be young and absolved from witnessing someone she loved dissolve into death. She didn’t look back. Rachel had never told anyone this, but joining the burial circle was a way to make amends to her grandmother.

  Rachel had participated in her first tahara for Sophie, and then another for Edna. Now she came for Hilda Mosseri, feeling less queasy and more at ease. As Aviva slipped her hand into the sleeve of the shroud, Rachel no longer hung back, and she helped Aviva tug Hilda’s arm through the sleeve. Hilda’s skin was not cold, Rachel thought. It was frigid. It was unresponsive flesh. Rachel bit into her lower lip. She forced herself to breathe, unable to bear the smell. But she stood there, for she had made a vow to herself. She would not shrink from death.

  And she would not shrink from life.

  24

  February 27, 2006

  Emily

  With her eyes closed, Emily counted in Arabic as Ali’s fingers traveled down each notch of her spine.

  “Ali,” Emily whispered when she got to asara, ten. “That was so nice.” She could feel her body reawakening, as though it had been asleep. She let out a lengthy sigh. A few hours earlier, she had met Ali in a bed and breakfast about twenty miles from Peleg, somewhere up in the hills. The late-afternoon sky was saturated with dusky purple light. A wintry fog was rolling in, hiding the hills, sloshing over the lawn, wrapping around the trunks of the trees.

  “I finally get to enjoy all of you.” Ali’s hand slid over her behind, lingering between her inner thighs. “It just took so long to get you to agree to come here with me—and how long did it take you to get undressed? My ex-wife could have peeled ten oranges in the time it took you to peel off that one pair of jeans.”

  “She’s a lot thinner than me. And her skin is the color of wet sand by the sea. And my skin is the dry hot sand you burn your feet on.”

  “You remembered I told you that,” Ali said. “But tell me something else. Tell me the very first time you felt something for me.”

  “I think it was that time you came to the reception desk to talk to
me about Svetlana the cook.” Emily looked at Ali’s smooth coppery skin, his sharp-angled nose. “You said she was stealing food and hiding it in her pocketbook to take home to her husband and you decided to give her the food to carry home in a shopping bag so she wouldn’t feel like a thief. And what about you?”

  “The first time I met you. The very first time. I remember when I walked toward you at the desk, thinking that you were a person I wanted to get to know. You had just started to work at the hotel. You hadn’t met Boaz yet, and you had a lost look in your eyes.”

  “Do I still have that look?”

  “No. You look content, like one of those cats with golden eyes that just got a free meal at the hotel.” He smiled, patted her hip, and then opened the window, leaning his body over the sill. “This is the smoking section.”

  “You like breaking rules, don’t you?”

  “I don’t care what the neighbors think, if that’s what you mean.”

  But even being with Ali, Emily knew she loved rules. When she was growing up, her father’s rules gave order and meaning and sense to life. It was her mother who enjoyed forays into lawlessness, like the time she took Emily to lunch in Charleston and ordered a shrimp cocktail for them to share. Emily had never tasted shrimp before, and her mother confessed that she’d been eating it every time she got a chance.

  “Mom, I can’t believe you!”

  “Emily, don’t tell your Daddy!”

  “What are you thinking?” Ali asked.

  “I dread going back to Peleg and seeing Boaz.”

  “What’s the point of continuing your marriage if you’re so unhappy?”

  “It’s complicated.” Right then, Emily thought of Boaz with a deep jab of remorse. She remembered the time she had watched through the kitchen window as he hoisted a bale of hay on his broad back and carried it toward the cowshed, the muscles straining in his neck, the meandering vein on the side of his forehead swelling like a flooded river. She knew how hard he worked to provide for the boys—and for her.