What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

by Nathan Englander

  The aura of this tale was strengthened by the facts on the ground. One would find it hard to believe that in barely fourteen years, exactly half the life of her youngest, the settlement had grown to such a degree.

  There were paved roads, and two schools, and a kolel, and a synagogue. And thanks to a Texas evangelist who had fallen in love with that place (before a greater love undid him), their settlement had been gifted with a sports center, complete with the only ice-skating rink in the West Bank as a whole.

  It was a city perfectly melded with the contours of the land, circle after circle of houses running down the sides of those hills, and echoing the foregone terraces. There was a perfect symmetry of red roofs and white walls reaching down to the valley floor and edging so close to that Arab village on the eastern side, they’d been forced to take over the village’s fields as a security buffer. This gleaming new city was made all the more beautiful by the contrast of those two green hilltops, one with an olive grove and the other bare. The two hilltops belonging to those two founding families looked nearly exactly as they had when those first families returned. All the cement and paved road, all the streetlamps and cobblestones, all the public benches and mailboxes and skinny evergreen trees, all of that came to a stop where the roads wound up to the tops of those hills and came to an end. It was—and the most pious among them couldn’t help but say it—like two green teats topping those mountains.

  But for the additions of running water and electricity, Rena’s shack stayed the same. The only discernible differences to her plot of land were the two-story pole on the southern end, on which sat the siren for announcing war, and, on the northern tip, the stone obelisk that rose from the top of that giant boulder, as if it had somehow forced its way up from within. It was the town’s andarta. On it were engraved the names of the men of the village who had died at war.

  Hanan was the first casualty of those sister hills, and how they’d all wished he’d remained the only name. By the time the intifada was tearing up the West Bank, the list on that stone was too long for a place so young. There was Rena’s oldest son, Yermiyahu, killed in Tripoli in ’83, as well as two of those pioneering seven boys who’d followed him home, only to die at his side in battle. And, just days before, on the back of a family already saddled with so much tragedy, Rena had lost her second son, her baby-faced Matityahu, now a grown man. He was nearing thirty, and finally engaged to be married that spring. Of course, Matityahu’s name had yet to be added to the other eight on that list.

  There had been rock-throwing in the Arab village below, and with a few green soldiers stuck in the wadi beyond and overwhelmed by this kind of close-quarters battle, the men of their town had run down into the fight. And somehow in this melee, Rena had lost a son. Her Mati, her warrior. It wasn’t even real warfare, only tear gas and rocks and rubber bullets. Rena still couldn’t believe it. A mighty son lost to boys throwing stones.

  She was still sitting shiva. And in contrast to when she’d lost her husband and sat three days alone in her doorway like Abraham himself, it was the populace of a small city that now passed through her home. The town had stayed close enough to its roots to revere its founder with something like faith.

  The visitor who’d traveled farthest to see her was her youngest, Tzuki, her last living son—though he was already his own kind of casualty to Rena. Tzuki had driven from Haifa, where he lived as a liberal, a secularist, and a gay. He shared an apartment with another boy he’d met at yeshiva. And Tzuki told his mother, with a flash in his eye, that from their balcony they looked upon the water.

  To look at her son, as much a founder of their settlement as she was, Rena could not believe how people transform in the span of one life. There he sat, receiving the town with a yarmulke perched on his head, like it was the first he’d ever worn. Where tzitzit would go, a black T-shirt showed through his button-down shirt. And on his arm, exposed for all the world to see, was a tattoo of a dolphin—like the ones that mark the trash who sit and drink beer on the beach in Tel Aviv.

  When he’d told her of his lifestyle, she’d sworn never to meet the boy he called his partner. And Tzuki had said that wouldn’t be a problem, as he’d sworn never again to cross the Green Line from Israel proper into the territories it held. When his last brother died, she did not think he’d come to see her. And yet, here he was at her side. For this, she put a hand to his hand, and from there they wove fingers. To her son, she said, “It’s nice of you to do this for Mati.”

  “For my brother and for you,” he said. Then he stood and joined the men in the grove who’d gathered together to hear him recite the prayer for the dead.

  III: 2000

  How things change, you wouldn’t believe. Another thirteen years pass and those sister hills now cap a metropolis. With the aid of a small bridge of new land, the settlement had merged with a younger community to the west and now looked, on the army maps, like a barbell. And this was exactly the nickname the battalions of Israeli soldiers sent to defend it now used. Along with the new territory came a small religious college that gave out, in handfuls, endless degrees in law. There was a mall with a food court, and a multiplex within it that showed all the American films. There was a boutique hotel and a historical museum and a clinic that could do anything short of transplanting a heart. And along both edges of the connecting roadway between old and new city, there were dunam after dunam of hydroponic tomatoes set in greenhouses. An operation watered by robot, tended by Thai worker, and whose plants somehow grew with their roots at the top and fat fruit hanging down.

  A core group of idealists still remained in that expansive settlement. There were the families of those first seven boys, and the seventy that followed. There were Rav Kook stalwarts, and old-school Messianists, and religious Zionists of every stripe. But this didn’t stop the colony’s transformation into the bedroom community it had become. Behind the bougainvillea-covered balconies lived professors who drove to Be’er Sheva to teach at the big university, and start-up types who commuted every day to the technical park in Jerusalem, as well as venture capitalists who used Ben Gurion Airport as if it were the Central Bus Station, flying to Europe for a lunch and making it back late the same night. And there was a subset among those new neighbors that the founding residents, the farmers and fighters, could hardly understand: the healthy grown men, pale and soft in the middle, who lived on Japanese and Indian and American clocks, making trades or writing code, supporting large families without ever stepping out into the light.

  They came for the tax breaks. They came for the space. They came for the vistas and the fresh air, and because the tomatoes—growing backward, and also without ever seeing sun—still tasted better than anything they’d had in their fancy Orna & Ella salads back on Sheinkin Street.

  · · ·

  Though Aheret was a pious girl who wore a skirt to the floor and a shirt that reached to her wrists, she had a worldly allure that belied the choices she’d made. She’d studied at the girls’ school on the hill, and done her national service helping the elderly of their town. When the eldest of her younger sisters went off to board in Jerusalem, and when her father was sent by the settler movement to travel across the United States for long stretches to do outreach (his calling) and send home money (a necessity), she’d stayed in the house to help her mother with the littlest of her eight siblings and run their home, a strange maze of additions and tacked-on rooms, that, on the holidays, when all were together, still burst at the seams. These humble choices found Aheret unmarried at twenty-seven, which, in their community, left her seen as an old maid.

  When Aheret stepped into the house with a laundry basket full of clean clothes still stiff from the lines, she saw someone darting around in the back rooms of the house. She at first assumed they were being robbed, until her eyes adjusted to the inside and she made out a silhouette that fit every older woman of their town. “Gveret!” she called, not wholly impolitely. “Missus, can I help you? What are you doing in our house?” At that
, the woman’s ears perked up, and all her nervous energy flooded out toward Aheret, with the woman, riding it like a wave, right behind.

  “Your mother,” the woman called. “Where’s your mother?” she said.

  “Hanging what’s wet,” Aheret said, and pointed through the wall to the lines.

  “Come, come,” the woman said, grabbing Aheret’s arm, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as they both rushed around the house.

  With a clothespin in her mouth and a wet sock in her hand, Yehudit looked at the pair hurrying toward her and tilted her head to the side.

  “Is this the one I bought?” Rena yelled, pulling Aheret. “Is this the one that’s mine?”

  And Aheret, who had never been told the story of her near death, was more surprised by her mother’s answer than by the question of the lady who pulled her. For Yehudit dropped the sock into the basket and pulled the clothespin from her lips and said, “Yes, yes. This is the one that’s yours.”

  · · ·

  Despite the fact that the hilltops were forever facing, the difference between the two families’ lives and the two families’ fates had put far more distance than the geography in between. To anyone who still knew she was up there, Rena was simply the old woman in the olive grove, while Yehudit, with her brood, took advantage of the settlement’s great blooming and lived a vibrant life.

  Yehudit had not forgotten her sister founder, who, despite her great sacrifice, had been dealt a harsh life. She’d gone over every few months to check on Rena, and Yehudit always acted surprised to discover that she carried with her a cake or a cooked chicken in the bag in her hand. As loyal as she was to Rena, she could tell that all her troubles had turned the woman hard. And though Yehudit took her children to visit other lonely souls, it had been a very long time since she’d taken any of them up to visit Rena in the grove. Because of this, Rena hadn’t set eyes on Yehudit’s daughter in years, and the same went for Aheret in relation to the woman she knew from her mother as Mrs. Barak.

  Rena had let go of Aheret’s arm to pull a little Nokia phone from the pocket of her skirt. It was a phone no different from the other million phones the supermarkets had given away when the cell towers went up. She held this out to Yehudit and her daughter, as if looking at it alone would let them read the calls inside.

  “Tzuki,” she said. “My last boy has been killed.”

  Yehudit and Aheret, like every citizen of that country, were up-to-date on the national news of the day. There’d been nothing in Lebanon or Gaza, no terrorist attack listed on the radio at the top of the hour. It was a quiet September morning.

  But it wasn’t any outside force, not politics, or religion, that did Tzuki in. It was Israel’s own internal plague that had taken him, the one that took more children of Israel than all the bloodshed and hatred of all their long wars combined. “Hit,” Rena said. “The coastal highway. Run off the road by a boy driving one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour.”

  “Baruch dayan emet,” Aheret said. And then: “Mercy upon you, a terrible loss.”

  “Sit, sit,” Yehudit said, overturning the basket of clean laundry and helping Rena to sit down. “Another tragedy,” she said. “How many can fall on one home?” As she said this, she stepped over to the eaves and began tearing wildly at a little mint plant, one among many at the side of the house. She held these leaves out to Aheret, letting them fall in wet clumps into her daughter’s hands. “Go,” she said, “make Rena a hot cup of tea.”

  Before Aheret ran off, Rena had ahold of her skirt. “No need for tea,” she said to Yehudit. “We’re not staying long.”

  And here, Aheret, who did not know the story of her childhood sickness, who did not know of the deal that had been struck, reflected on this statement along with the exchange she’d heard earlier.

  Growing up, Aheret would lie with her head in her mother’s lap and beg her to run her fingers through her hair, and to tell the stories that came before remembering. The one Yehudit always told with great pride was that once upon a time, there were in this place two empty mountains that God had long ago given Israel but that Israel had long forgotten. And one day, two brave families had come to settle those mountains. The first had three young boys, and the other came up that hill alone and bore a baby girl who was, for the future of their settlement, as great a gift as Adam’s finding Eve.

  Aheret now stared at her mother, and knew from her face that there was another story she’d not been told.

  “Look this way,” Rena said, pulling at that skirt, drawing Aheret’s eyes to her. “Look to me, at this face. Here is where your questions now go.”

  Rena then pulled hard at the skirt, not to draw Aheret down, but to pull herself up. Standing, staring at Aheret, she said, “Come along.”

  “Please,” Yehudit said. “You can’t really want it this way? Today—despite your sadness—is not really any different. Tzuki, before this accident, was already, to you, long gone.”

  “A child distant,” Rena said, “a child rebellious, a child cut off in head and heart, it is not the same as no child at all. You have always been a smart woman,” Rena said. “And what takes place here is not remotely equal. But in a moment, you’ll have the first tiny inkling of how I three times over feel.”

  “It was a joke,” Yehudit said, panicked and referring back to their deal. “The whole thing a silly superstition. You said yourself—almost thirty years ago, and I remember like yesterday—you said it was just old-country mumbo jumbo, a worried mother’s game.”

  “A deal is a deal,” Rena said to Yehudit. And to Aheret, she said, “Daughter, come along.”

  · · ·

  The woman had just buried her last son. The woman gone mad. And Yehudit, who had been through it all with her, who had built this giant city at her side, thought it would not hurt to send her daughter to walk the woman back, to help her into her mourning, to stay and offer comfort and maybe cook for her a meal. Think about it. A husband killed at the start of her new life. Two sons cut down as heroes and a third, already lost to her, run off the side of the road. And here was Yehudit, blessed with nine, all healthy and happy, and with a husband she loved who was often far from her side but who sent back Jew after Jew in his stead. Benevolent, Yehudit sent Aheret with her. And Aheret, only half filled in on the story and half comprehending, was a dutiful daughter and understood the strange favors that sometimes fell to a neighbor when someone was in pain.

  As the pair started to walk down the hill, Aheret turned back toward her mother, hoping for a signal, trying to communicate while maintaining respect under this watchful woman’s eye. And Rena said, “I can see the question you are trying to ask, daughter. The answer is simple. You were sold to me as a child. And, for all intents and purposes, you are mine.”

  “Mother!” Aheret called to Yehudit, unable to contain herself.

  But it was Rena, again holding her skirt, who gave the girl a yank and said, “What?”

  · · ·

  “It is the madness of grief,” the rabbi said as Yehudit trailed after him in the supermarket. She’d tracked him down, first by calling the shul, and then the kolel, and then the school, where his secretary said he’d run out to the supermarket for supplies. That’s where Yehudit found him, pushing a cart tumbled full with cartons of ice cream, a treat to the students for some charitable act. He’d said, “We do the right thing because it is right—that doesn’t mean a child can’t be rewarded just the same.” As for the story he was hearing, he said, “When the shiva is over, I can promise you, bli neder, that Mrs. Barak won’t want to treat such a trivial pledge as a binding contract at all.”

  Yehudit stood there in the freezer aisle and looked as if she was going to weep. The rabbi nodded in the way thoughtful rabbis do. He was a tall man, and slim, and even into his later years his beard had stayed black. He looked twenty years younger than he was, and so when he smiled at her kindly, there was a separate sort of calm that Yehudit felt, a husbandly calm, which was very fulfilling i
n the moment, with her own husband so far away.

  “I know you don’t want to say it,” the rabbi said, “but it is not lashon hara to point out between us that you’re afraid Rena’s heart has hardened over all these lonely years.”

  “That is what I fear,” Yehudit said.

  “Then let me pose for you a scenario of a different sort. Even if she takes you to rabbinical court, and you face the beit din over this case, can you imagine such a thing holding up?” When she did not answer, he said it again. “Well, can you imagine me taking her side?”

  “No,” Yehudit said.

  “So let us remember that without that woman, as much as without you, the great miracle that is our lives in this place would not be. And even if she’d contributed nothing to its founding, even if—God forbid—she had only taken, and done harm, still, can we not pity her in this time of grief? Especially a woman who has known sadness so much more than joy?”

  “Yes,” Yehudit said. Though the question was not wiped from her face.

  “Go on,” he said, “what is it?”

  “Can you tell me, Rebbe—and I understand the word—but what, with my daughter taken, does pity mean?”

  “It means would it hurt Aheret to stay by this woman’s side through to the end of the period of mourning?”

  Yehudit went to answer, and the rabbi raised a silencing hand. “After their ice cream, I will send up the boys to pray. I will send up some girls to help. Your daughter will not be left alone. And if harboring such a fantasy allows Rena to survive this week, how bad is it to indulge for a little while?”

  “And what if she doesn’t give it up?”