A Remarkable Kindness

by Diana Bletter

  “I’m not buying any more lettuce from you. I will not forget your little frog.”

  “My little frog? You think I put it in there? This is the best lettuce in the souk.”

  “Oh, go ahead and take another chance,” Emily said.

  “Your friend here is buying it! You buy it, too, and I’ll give you a special deal.”

  Lauren hesitated. “Fine, fine.” She inspected the lettuce and picked one that she hoped was inhospitable to frogs. She bought red peppers for Maya, cherry tomatoes for Yael, and cauliflower for David. Lauren wasn’t sure what exactly to do with the cauliflower, but she bought it nonetheless. The seller placed the vegetables on one side of an old-fashioned scale that hung overhead and balanced a rusty weight on the other side. He weighed the vegetables, mumbling as he calculated the numbers, and announced, “Forty-nine shekels.”

  Emily handed him the fifty-shekel bill she was holding in her hand and he gave her back a shekel coin.

  “Guys at MIT can’t even do the numbers that fast,” Lauren said as they walked away. “I bet he just said forty-nine shekels because he saw your fifty-shekel bill. It’s arbitrary pricing.”

  “So why did you buy from him?”

  Because I’m trying to be a good person, Lauren thought. Because I’m trying to forget my disappointments. Or maybe because I’m trying to be more like you, Emily, unconstrained and ready to go after joy. But Lauren only shrugged. “I try to buy vegetables I don’t have to cook. Except for the cauliflower—what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Just grill it with some olive oil and salt.”

  “The whole head?”

  “You have to cut it up, silly.”

  “You never told me that,” Lauren said as they left the market.

  “Where are you schlepping me now?”

  “To the store to pick up the Torah mantle. Were you even paying attention when I told you on the phone?”

  “Do you want to test me? Your parents have taken it upon themselves to guarantee pluralism in Israel. They’re donating a Torah to the reform temple in Nahariya and you ordered a cover for it.”

  They walked down the street. The sun shone on a row of drab apartment buildings with stiff laundry hanging on clotheslines under the windows. Lauren suspected this landscape would have fit perfectly well in the Soviet Union. At least it was spring, she thought, the sky a cloudless blue, and purple blossoms dotted the jacaranda trees.

  “Where’s the shop?” Emily asked after they circled the block.

  “It should be somewhere around here,” Lauren muttered, walking by a Dumpster overflowing with garbage.

  “You, me, navigating Akko by ourselves? I don’t think so.”

  “I just don’t understand it,” Lauren said as they passed a shrunken, sickly woman struggling to push a disheveled man in a wheelchair. “How the hell can Jews be considered the smartest people on earth?”

  “We fool everybody.” Emily stopped for a moment by a store displaying mops, brooms, sponges, jugs of ammonia, and cleaning sprays.

  “And in the middle of all this mess, everyone’s cleaning their houses like crazy for Passover. It’s like this obsession with bad smells that Ja—” Lauren was about to say Jasmine, Ali’s ex-wife, but stopped herself. “This thing that Jumana, a nurse in the hospital, has. She says that even after she’s washed the dishes in the dishwasher, she washes her plates again using bleach to get rid of the zanacha smell!”

  Emily shrugged. “I don’t think Ali is worried about zanacha. I’m just waiting to eat my first matzoth with butter and salt.”

  “Does Ali like matzo, too?”

  Emily swiveled sideways and dropped her jaw. She’d had the same look the first day she’d arrived in Peleg, when they’d stood on the beach and she’d described how Rob had left her. It was the look of someone who’d been hurt, punched in the gut. Lauren felt ashamed of herself.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that—”

  “Look,” Emily said. “I married Rob because I thought he was a nice Jewish boy, the perfect Mr. Right, and he turned out wrong. Then I married Boaz because I thought he was Mr. Right, but look how unhappy I am. So what if Mr. Wrong really is Mr. Right?”

  “It’s not only the matzo. Think of all you’d be giving up. And this is a heretic talking.”

  “I am thinking of all I’m giving up. That is one thing you don’t have to tell me.”

  “We’re lost.” Lauren studied the block of dreary stores. Then she noticed the number twelve above a door a few shops down. “There it is!” She headed past the streaked plate-glass window and opened the door; a bell jangled, and she inched her way through a warren of Hebrew books with embossed gold letters, placemats, children’s games, yarmulkes, key chains, mezuzahs, amulets. At the back of the dusty store stood a man with a black beard that hung like a great bib down his chest.

  “Hello!” Lauren carefully tucked in her egg tray and plastic bags so they wouldn’t bump into anything. “I’m the one who spoke to you on the phone two weeks ago. You said that you’d order me a mantle for the Torah and I came today to pick it up.”

  “A mantle.” The man glowered, his black eyes set close to his bumpy nose.

  “That’s what my father called it. I’m not sure what you’d call it in Hebrew. Do you remember that I spoke to you?”

  “A mantle,” he repeated as though Lauren had just invented the word.

  “You said you ordered me one.”

  “I can’t order something that doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course it exists! It’s the decorative cover for the Torah scroll. Sometimes it’s blue, sometimes it’s white—”

  “Who are you getting this mantle for?”

  “I’m getting it for my father.”

  “You can’t come in here without him.”

  “My father is in America! He’s donating a Torah to a synagogue in Nahariya.”

  “You call that a synagogue?”

  “You don’t even know which one I’m talking about.”

  “I know which one would send you to buy a mantle. Why didn’t you tell me? I would never do business with that place.”

  “Why not? It has people from Argentina and Russia and South Africa who’ve never gone to a synagogue in their lives and now they’re coming to services and my father is donating the Torah and all I want to do is buy—”

  “That place is for goyim, not for Jews. You don’t even know the laws.”

  “I didn’t come here for a lecture. I came here for my mantle.”

  The man clicked his tongue, hidden behind his swampy beard.

  “Are you kidding me?” Lauren asked in disbelief. “You ordered it for me!”

  He stared at her. He stared through her.

  “Lauren, let’s just go,” Emily urged.

  Lauren swung around, stomped back through the tightly jammed aisle, and accidentally knocked over some cassette tapes. She did not pick them up. Emily held the door open and let it slam shut behind them.

  “I went out of my way to come to his shop, thinking I was doing him a favor, wanting to give him some business because it’s clear to me that nobody has shopped there since Golda Meir was prime minister, and look how he treated me!” Lauren plunked down her vegetables and eggs on the sidewalk. She dug her cell phone out from her pocketbook and dialed David’s number.

  “Hi, sweetie, what’s up?” His voice was always soothing, comforting.

  “David! The guy won’t let me buy the mantle!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s for the reform temple, that’s why! You’d think after all we’ve been through, Jews would be kind to each other. You’d think we’d want to help each other. But look what’s happening here. David, I can’t take this anymore.”

  “Lauren, we’ll talk when we get home—”

  “No.” Lauren turned away from Emily so she couldn’t hear her. “I’ve had enough. This isn’t my home. I want to go back to Boston. I want to go home.”

  28

&n
bsp; April 25, 2006

  Rachel

  On a sun-drenched Tuesday morning, Rachel was helping Lauren’s daughter Maya do a puzzle in the gan when Hannah from the village office walked in, her red eyeglasses hanging crooked on a chain against her ample breasts. Rachel smiled but Hannah only nodded, crossing her arms, and then said something to Iris, the gan teacher. Iris, who had black hair and always wore silvery-pink lipstick, winced and clasped her hands to her mouth. They both turned to Rachel and the thought occurred to her that she was about to get fired. Rachel knew the kids liked her and she was good with them, but maybe Moshe or Svetlana complained about the way Rachel quit her last jobs. Maybe she’d have to go work somewhere else.

  “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?” Hannah asked, approaching her.

  “Okay.” Rachel stood up warily.

  “Don’t go, Rachel!” Maya gave her the same piercing look that Lauren did, with the same intense gray eyes.

  “Don’t worry, Maya, I’ll be right back,” Rachel reassured her, although she was not really sure.

  Rachel followed Hannah into the playground, where they stopped by a tractor tire filled with sand. There was a dump truck, a plastic rake, a rubber ball.

  Hannah opened her hands, palms up.

  “If it’s about my working somewhere else because I took two days off last month,” Rachel said, “I don’t think it’s fair because—”

  “It isn’t that.” Hannah touched her shoulder. “It’s about Jacob Troyerman. Esther wanted me to tell you . . . he’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t come in for breakfast this morning and his son Eyal went to look for him and found him in the groves.”

  “I don’t understand.” Rachel felt as though time had opened up like a crevasse and she’d fallen in.

  “Jacob shot himself.”

  “Oh no.” Rachel gasped, a cry strangling her throat.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Rachel shook her head. She wanted to say that it was not worth saying sorry; it was not worth saying anything. Yoni was right. Silence was the best thing, the only thing.

  Then a loud siren went off.

  Hannah glanced at her watch. It was ten o’clock: the ten o’clock siren on Holocaust Memorial Day.

  Rachel straightened and stood erect. Through the window of the gan, she could see Iris motioning at them to stand up. She brought her finger to her lips. Stand straight. No talking. Rachel remembered hearing the siren last year in Nahariya. As soon as it had sounded, everyone on the street stood as still as statues, as if they were all playing a giant game of Freeze. Even taxi drivers got out of their cabs and stood in the middle of the street, their car doors flung open.

  Rachel closed her eyes, listening to the siren wail at a deaf world. Why on this night? Rachel thought. Because on all other nights—

  She tried to imagine Jacob the previous night, a constellation of darkness around the cowshed where he lay on his cot with the dogs. Had he looked at his watch? Had he chosen a certain time? A certain hour when he decided he would cease to be? Maybe he had said good night to the dogs before he left the kennel. Maybe he said, Shhh, be quiet, good night, to Pete and Sputnik and Coco and Happy and Max and Scrappy and Freddie, the basset hound with the somber eyes.

  Then Jacob headed into the groves. He walked and walked through the silent shadows.

  You’ll always know where to find me, he’d said. In the shade of that tree at the end of the road.

  Sobs racked Rachel’s body. She hadn’t found the right words to say to Jacob, so she had said nothing. Offered him nothing. Yoni was wrong. Silence was not the only thing.

  It was the worst thing.

  LATER THAT DAY, Rachel stood with Aviva, Lauren, and Emily in the back of the crowd of mourners at the cemetery. Rachel knew that an hour earlier, David, Heinz Zuckerman, and the other members of the men’s burial circle had carefully attended to Jacob in the burial house—awash in that permanent gray silence—and then placed him in his coffin.

  Rabbi Lapid stood next to Jacob’s casket, which lay on the black trolley in front of the burial house. The rabbi rocked back and forth, reciting psalms, his grainy voice floating up through the eucalyptus trees and into the beyond. The afternoon was warm and still. Birds flew in a V formation above the cemetery, breaking loose and scattering, reuniting into another V, and flying away.

  Rachel spotted Boaz, in a John Deere cap, streaks of grease on the sleeves of his blue shirt. Heinz Zuckerman wore a gray suit and a gray felt hat, and Omri Salomon, the beekeeper, had a black-and-yellow yarmulke resting on his bald spot. If Rachel hadn’t felt so despondent, she would have laughed to herself that the yarmulke was a bald-spot cover.

  But she couldn’t laugh, not when she saw Esther sitting on a bench near the coffin, her delicate face looking baleful, bereft. When Rachel had first arrived at the graveyard, she’d waited with the other villagers to give Esther a hug. Rachel had rehearsed the traditional Hebrew greeting said to a mourner, “I share in your grief,” and managed to say it without any mistakes, but her words had never sounded quite so hollow. “I’m so sorry,” she added, to which Esther nodded; her rueful face looking like a city after a war, left in ruins.

  Rachel gazed at Esther’s son, Eyal, standing behind her, his hands resting on her narrow shoulders; Esther’s two daughters on either side of her. Rachel worried what would become of Esther once the week of shiva ended and her children returned to their routines and their lives.

  Rabbi Lapid stopped chanting. The sounds of the sea rushed in.

  “It is against Jewish law to kill yourself,” he said, and a surprised murmur passed through the crowd. “But we all know how much Jacob suffered. And because he suffered so much, he cannot be held accountable for what he did. Jacob didn’t kill himself. The Nazis killed him long ago.”

  Tears filled Rachel’s eyes, and Lauren handed her a crinkled tissue. Eyal moved to Jacob’s coffin. He had a lean build and Jacob’s hooked nose that sliced the air, dueling with the world.

  “Abba . . .” Eyal stared down at the coffin. “Abba, after losing your six brothers and sisters and your parents, you somehow managed to survive the Shoah. You and Eema walked from Hungary all the way to Italy, and then you sailed in a tiny, crowded fishing boat to Palestine. The British caught the boat and sent all of you to a detention camp in Cyprus, where you stayed because you had no place else to go. When you finally arrived here, you had to fight in the first war, then the next one and the ones after that. You never complained and you never gave up until now . . .

  “I’m sure you prepared for your death for a long time, but none of us knew and none of us guessed. You even made one last pot of rice for the dogs.”

  There was a pause.

  “Abba, I want you to know that everything you taught me, everything you told me, everything you made sure to pass on to me, will always stay with me. I hope you’ll be proud of the way I take care of your dogs and your groves. And now the time has come to lay you down in the land you loved so much.”

  Then Eyal, David, Boaz, and Charlie Gilbert lifted Jacob’s coffin and carried it to the easternmost row of the graveyard, the spot nearest to his kennel.

  Aviva put her arm around Rachel. “Jacob went the way he wanted to go. He wasn’t able to fight against the Nazis, but now he decided when he would die. It was his choice. He died with dignity. He died a soldier, not a victim.”

  “I wish I believed that. All I know is that I was with him and I couldn’t find the right thing to say and if only—”

  “Rachel, those are two of the most useless words there are. Jacob had already shut the door on life. He could no longer bear being alive.”

  Rachel and Aviva stood together for another moment in silence. The dogs in the kennel barked.

  29

  May 25, 2006

  Aviva

  Although Aviva tried not to lie on the living room couch too often, she found herself sprawled there once again, staring up at the ceiling. With he
r feet turned out and her arms heavy, she thought, So this is what it will be like when I’m dead.

  Aviva held herself still as stone and drifted off to sleep—another kind of death—dreaming that the women in the burial circle were gathered around her, speaking about her in the past tense. The book of her life had slapped shut.

  Then the phone rang. “Where have you been?” Rachel asked.

  “I took the day off to get a root canal on my tooth. But the dentist told me he couldn’t save it and pulled it out instead.”

  “Oh, you can’t trust dentists.” Rachel laughed. “Still, you have to come to the beach party tonight.”

  “You’re sweet to me, Rachel. I’m sorry. I’m in no mood for a beach party.”

  “But you said—”

  I said I’d do a lot of things, Aviva wanted to say. After Benny was killed, she had burned her “Things I Want to Do” list because she knew she’d never take him to a Yankees game or meet him to hike in New Zealand—the first place he wanted to visit once he got out of the army. She’d never make pancakes for Rafi again on a rainy Saturday morning while listening to Bach or—

  “What about your rule?” Rachel asked.

  “Which one?” Aviva looked up at a chameleon that had snuck into the house and was hanging upside down on the ceiling.

  “Better for a teacher to have a wild student with a lot of passion in her class than a dull kid who always does his homework. You said you can calm down a wild kid, but you can never give someone that spirit for living. And Aviva, you have such an amazing spirit.”

  “Oh, that. My spirit.”

  “And you were the one who sent me that Edith Sitwell quote: ‘I am not eccentric; it’s just that I am more alive than most people.’”

  “I don’t feel so alive right now.” Aviva curled up on her side, wanting to squish the grief right out of her. We are all eighty percent water, anyway, she thought. That’s all we are, really, a river of tears in sausage casing. “Rachel, I really appreciate your calling me, but I think I’ll pass on this one.”

  “How about just for a few minutes?”