Aviva tucked her knees in to her chest, her heart pumping and beating and thrumming its own tune, reminding her that she was still alive. Still alive, still alive. She could stay in the house the rest of the night with that lone chameleon on the ceiling for company, or she could get out, even for a few moments. She knew she’d be spending the rest of her eternity alone, anyway. “Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Okay.”
But by the time nine o’clock rolled around, Aviva was still lying there. The sun had set and the room was flooded with night. She hauled herself up because she couldn’t lie there forever and she’d promised Rachel. Aviva didn’t like breaking promises: life itself broke enough promises.
Aviva washed her face and changed into a salmon-pink Grecian-style dress that Emily had helped pick out, slipped into a pair of low-heeled sandals, and mindlessly put on some silver bangles. She glanced in the mirror only long enough to apply a thin coat of almost invisible lipstick. But she did not look into her own eyes. Could not look.
It was easier outside. Outside, some of her sorrow could seep away and dissolve into the darkness, into the soft night with a full moon hanging above, reminding her that the universe was still there and hadn’t entirely abandoned her. Aviva opened the gate and saw Rachel hurrying toward her.
“It’s past nine o’clock and I wanted to make sure you’d come.” Rachel’s smile lit up the darkness. “Aviva, you look great.”
“I tried my best only because I promised you.” Aviva gave her a hug. “Too bad Yoni can’t see you in that outfit. You look beautiful—though you’d look beautiful in a potato sack.”
“Emily and I picked it out.” Rachel twirled so that her white eyelet sundress flared around her.
Aviva and Rachel walked along the path, nearing the beach where tiny lights twinkled around Shuky’s Snack and Surf Shop. As they headed through the gate, the lights went out.
“Of all things—a blackout during a beach party.” Aviva stopped, waiting for her eyes to adjust. If the lights didn’t come back on soon, she could excuse herself to Rachel and go home. But then she heard shouts and the lights blazed back on and people were yelling, “Surprise!”
“Happy birthday, Mom!” shouted Yoni, running toward Aviva and hugging her hard. Aviva still wasn’t sure what was happening until she took in Lauren and Emily also crowding around her, and then neighbors and friends gathering and shouting, “Happy birthday!”
“I can’t believe this!” Aviva shook with astonishment, the first time in so long that she was trembling not out of loss but out of joy. She had been trying to forget it was her fiftieth birthday, but apparently Yoni and her friends hadn’t. Aviva turned to Rachel, thanking her, hugging her. Yoni waved in the direction of the jetty, where there came the sounds of drums, trumpets, and cymbals and a group of figures marched toward them.
“Yoni.” Aviva squinted into the distance. “I didn’t bring my glasses. What’s going on over there?”
“Take a guess.”
“Is that a marching band? What is a marching band doing here on the beach?”
“Mom, how many times have you told us that you love marching bands? And that there are no marching bands in Israel? Well, we found you one for your birthday. It’s your personal parade.”
The band moved across the beach playing “When the Saints Come Marching In” and other tunes Aviva recognized from all those long, exciting, sunny, rainy, windy days when she played clarinet and marched with her high school band. When the band finished “The Liberty Bell,” more friends joined, crowding around her. On the terrace were buffet tables with Aviva’s favorite salads; skewers of chicken and lamb; grilled eggplant, mushrooms, and zucchini; and mounds of rice with raisins and slivered almonds. She was wandering among the guests, holding a plate filled with food, nibbling and talking, when Yoni passed her his telephone.
“It’s Raz!”
“Happy birthday, Mom!” The phone line crackled. “Don’t think that just because I’m in Costa Rica I didn’t help plan the party. Seriously, it was all my idea.”
“Naturally it was all you.” Aviva pictured Raz’s warm face and curly dark hair, his hazel eyes beaming. Raz was the heart of her hearts: a calm, centered, slightly reserved middle child, and as much as she missed him, she was still pleased that he wasn’t living nearby on her behalf.
“Mom, I’m sorry I’m not there—”
“Who even needs you here? Right now I’m having instant fun. And you better have fun, too. Live it up.”
“I will,” Raz said. “I am. It’s so beautiful here. I really want you to come visit.”
“I’ll get there as soon as Yoni gets out of the army.”
“Great. I won’t keep you. Go party. I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too. Bye, Raz, adios.”
Aviva listened to the cutoff sound in her ear, steeling herself, overwhelmed with surprise. Then she thought: You can be happy for a few hours. Just because you’re happy for a few hours doesn’t mean you loved any less—
“Want to dance?” asked Rachel as the DJ, who turned out to be Julius, put on Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Rachel didn’t wait for an answer and pulled Aviva onto the dance floor. Then it was Fleetwood Mac’s “Monday Morning,” and Yoni appeared, whirling Rachel. Aviva left them to talk to some friends, watching David dance with Lauren, who wore a floor-length black dress, her long hair dotted with butterfly clips. Aviva danced to “Susie Q” with Boaz and Emily until “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” came on, and then Aviva noticed Boaz’s mouth twist to the side. Aviva knew that Emily and Boaz’s marriage was rocky, and she watched Boaz cut out from the dance floor. Emily followed him at a safe distance. She looked vibrant in a flowing teal dress and beaded necklace.
When Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” came on, Lauren grabbed Aviva’s hand, and they joined David, Rachel, and Yoni on the floor. Not much later, “Something” by the Beatles began, and Aviva heard someone say, “Hey, Yoni, can I cut in?”
Guy Sasson was standing there. For one of the few times in her life, Aviva was caught off guard. Prickly heat rose to her face.
“How can I say no to the guy who got my mom to surf?” Yoni said.
“If you’d blinked, you would have missed me,” Aviva managed.
“You still did it, Mom. Have fun. I’m going to rescue Rachel from Moshe Zado.”
Guy moved in and took Aviva’s hand. She wondered if people were looking at them. Then she thought of Eli telling her how he’d learned to act as if he were invisible: “I’ve been in rooms where nobody even saw me.” Besides, Aviva reasoned, almost everybody in Peleg was at the birthday party—so why would it be odd for Guy to dance with her?
“I’m sorry I haven’t stopped by.” Guy’s soft voice grew softer. “But I want you to know that what we had that night was really special and if—”
“Please don’t apologize. I understand. I know.”
“I know that you know.” He pulled her in. He danced with her. He held her firmly. As if he didn’t want to let her go? As if he knew he’d have to let her go? “Please don’t forget. You promised me you won’t give up.”
She was silent, catching her breath. The music played and the song made her feel so blue. “And you promised me you’re not going to be afraid.”
“Nothing to be afraid of. Happy birthday, Aviva.”
The song ended. He planted a solemn kiss on her cheek. Like his first kiss.
His last kiss.
He squeezed her hands forcefully and let them go.
Aviva stood there, rooted to the spot. Life was a gamble, and she’d lost far too much.
She turned so she wouldn’t have to see Guy walking off the dance floor. She steadied herself. Got her bearings as she watched the sea rolling and rolling into the darkness.
30
June 5, 2006
Emily
Emily’s hand was inches from Ali’s, but she could still feel its trickle-charged intensity, its heat.
“You need to call the exterminator and get him to come back once and for all and get rid of all these—” Yoram suddenly stopped as he came out of his office.
“Thank you, Ali.” Emily took the car keys lying on the counter and whirled away from the reception desk. “I’ll make sure to give these back to room 317.”
“Yoram,” Ali said, “I was just on my way to Aga’s.”
“I told you not to buy from him.” Yoram’s retort was unusually sharp. “They stole avocados from Eyal Troyerman. He happened to find about the same number of avocados at Aga’s, five times cheaper than anywhere else.”
“You told me to get the cheapest—”
“Never mind what I said,” Yoram cut in. “Nu, just go already.”
Ali turned and moved across the lobby, not looking at Emily, not saying good-bye. She stared at the back of his black polo shirt, distinctly aware that his purposeful gait was already familiar to her now. She picked up a flyer for a new restaurant lying in the fax machine and pretended to study it, her head bent.
“What was Ali doing with those car keys?” Yoram asked.
“A guest asked him to check the oil or something.”
“So, nu, in addition to everything else, Ali’s now a car mechanic?”
“You know how hotel guests are.” Emily didn’t turn around. “They think that just because Ali works in a hotel he can repair anything.”
“All I know is that if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
She let that go. “Anyway, I must have the flu or something.” She coughed loudly. “I almost didn’t come to work today.”
“You can’t get sick now with that wedding tomorrow and Orly on maternity leave.”
“It’s not as if I can help it.” Emily crumpled the restaurant flyer and tossed it into the paper bin. She got to work on the computer, deliberately ignoring Yoram, who kept standing there, watching her like a policeman waiting for a criminal to make his move. He finally gave up and stepped back into his office.
Emily stared at the minute hand on the clock, but it refused to budge. She could not believe how slowly time moved. At one o’clock, Yoram went to eat lunch in the dining room and returned to the reception desk in a cloud of fried food and cigarette smoke.
“You can go to lunch now,” Yoram told Emily. “Svetlana made crispy schnitzel.”
“Lunch? I feel awful. I’m falling off my feet. I have to go home.”
“You sounded fine when you were talking to Ali earlier.”
Emily let that go by, too, coughing loudly. “I called Noga earlier and she told me she’d be here any minute. So instead of my lunch hour, I’m going home.” She reached for her pocketbook under the desk and before Yoram could say anything else, she shuffled away, dragging her black flats across the floor. She took her bicycle from the rack and wheeled it slowly past the hotel’s picture windows, continuing until Yoram could no longer see her.
She cut around a frangipani tree and through the hotel’s hedges, hiding her bicycle behind Amos and Natalie Sasson’s garage because she’d heard Yoram say that they’d gone on vacation to France. (“Again!” Yoram had grumbled. “They go to Paris more than I go to Tel Aviv!”)
At the far end of the parking lot was Ali’s car. Using his keys, Emily opened the door and climbed into the airless heat. She rolled down the windows, blasted the air conditioning, and lay in the backseat. Not moving, listening to the chirrups of the birds hidden in the banyan tree with Ali and David’s names engraved on its trunk. Emily tried to picture Ali and David as boys, joking by the tree, daring each other to inscribe their names. That made Emily think of her father, who used to say that every year before Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed people in His Book of Life. Emily could hear her father reciting the Unetanah Tokef prayer,
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born
Who shall live and who shall die . . .
Tears stung her eyes, and her joints and bones and flesh shrank against the backseat. What would her father say if he saw her now, curled and hiding in Ali’s car? Emily pushed the thought away. She intertwined her hands, clasping her fingers hard to stop her wild thoughts just as Ali got into the driver’s seat and started up the car.
“You don’t know how hard it was for me to do any work knowing that I’d get some time alone with you today.” Ali spoke without looking at Emily, still facing forward.
“Yoram knows about us.”
“So he knows.” Ali pulled out of the parking space. “Stay down until we’re out of here.”
Emily heard the car crunch forward, turn right, pass the cemetery. She could picture the graves standing like a petrified forest in the sun. The people underneath the headstones, buried along with their dreams. Their shames and sorrows. Their secrets.
The car swung around and up the road that ran in a perpendicular line from the sea. One speed bump, another, and then the bumps of the railroad tracks. In the distance were Boaz’s groves and Emily tried not to think of him, but she imagined him just the same: maybe right then he was standing on a ladder studying a branch that needed trimming, reaching for a pair of shears or a handsaw, or gazing at the clouds, knowing that all the way until Sukkot, they were mere wisps of white, bringing no rain.
The car made another right onto the main road, and Emily knew they were passing the tree that Shoval and Tal had nicknamed the Dragon Tree, the one that Lauren’s girls called the Dinosaur Tree, and then fields of chickpeas and cotton. Farther up was the Arab catering hall where Emily had gone with Boaz to the wedding of a daughter of Kareem, one of Moshe Zado’s workers who sometimes helped Boaz in the groves. Thinking of Boaz, trying not to think of Boaz, thinking of him again. She pictured his sunburned ears, the hairs that curled over the collar of his T-shirt, his toughened hands.
“You’re quiet,” Ali said.
“Just thinking.” Emily sat up, touching Ali right below his shirt, on the inside of his arm.
“Emily, if you keep doing that, I’ll have to pull over.” Ali glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“That was not the reason.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Everything. Where are we going?”
“For a walk near a village with Christians, Muslims, and Druze. The Druze are the ones with the fancy cars.”
“I know, you don’t like them.” Emily sighed.
“They’re as loyal as the wind. In Syria, they’re pro-Syrian, and in Israel, they side with the Jews. They only care about themselves.”
“Really, Ali? This is what you want to talk about now? The biggest thing that separates us?”
“I’m sorry.” He looked at her again in the rearview mirror, his eyes like pools of black ink. “Did I ever tell you about Majd? He was a really special Druze guy who taught David and me to ride motorcycles and who was killed in a motorcycle accident. We went to his family’s house to pay our respects. His wife was pregnant and she told us, ‘Something must die for something else to be born.’ That’s one of their religious beliefs.”
“That could be true,” Emily agreed. “My father used to say that even Moses, the greatest Jewish prophet, couldn’t understand life’s mysteries.”
“If he couldn’t understand it, then we don’t have a chance.” Ali drove by a billboard for Swiss yogurt, turned into a village crowded with concrete houses perched on giant legs, and parked opposite a beige house with a black Mercedes sitting underneath it. Emily got out of Ali’s car and looked up at the house, its plain windows like square eyes. Watching her and warning her about what was forbidden?
She walked silently with Ali along a path that sloped downhill and into a dried-out riverbed strewn with stones that snaked through a cluster of trees. At the bottom, the trees closed behind them, and that was when Ali stopped and reached for her the way—well, thought Emily, the way that only Ali had ever reached for her.
“Emily, it’s s
o hard for me to see you for a few minutes and then let you go back. I can’t stand knowing he has the chance to hold you whenever he wants.”
“He doesn’t hold me. That’s the problem. He hardly talks to me.”
“Then why stay with him?”
“I don’t want to break up my family.”
Ali’s lips tightened and he stepped back.
“And how can I just pick up and leave him?” Emily asked. “You and I don’t even know how we’ll be together when everyone else is driving us apart. Even about the Druze. There’s so much that divides us.”
“But those are little things. We can disagree on some things, can’t we?”
“It’s all too complicated. You said so yourself.”
“We’ll find a way to make it work.” Ali put his arm around her and they walked ahead.
“Oak trees.” Emily bent down to pick up an acorn. “It looks like a Druze man wearing a skullcap. They’d think it’s terribly wrong that I’m here with you.”
“Most of them are living the way they’ve lived for hundreds of years. Some of the men won’t even let their wives drive cars. They say it’s against their religion.”
“Still, what we’re doing is wrong.”
“I don’t care what they think. David always says that God gave us two ears. One for things to go in, and one for things to go out.”
The path ended at a clearing with huge boulders rising like prehistoric creatures out of the ground. Emily slipped off her shoes and climbed up the side of the closest rock. On the top, she could see the crisscrossed fields. Bright green wheat fields running north to south, bare fields running east to west. Maybe Jesus walked here. Maybe Moses or Mohammed. This tiny spot of earth where three of the world’s religions were born. This tiny spot where people were still fighting over every inch. Every soul. Ali scrambled up and stood next to her.
“It’s impossible not to love you,” he said.
“But it’s impossible to love you.”
“We could live together.”
A Remarkable Kindness Page 23