“I thought we had bought ourselves at least two decades of peace,” he had muttered angrily after his last journey.
“Well, there is an arithmetic progression of sorts,” Rebecca had rejoined. “Eight years between the War for Independence and the Sinai Campaign, and now we’ve had almost ten years of relative peace. Nineteen fifty-six through nineteen sixty-six. An improvement.” She had laughed wryly, as all Israelis did when they discussed war and peace.
She searched Yehuda’s face for a good-humored response to her feeble attempt at humor. There had been a time when she could coax him into reluctant laughter, no matter how bitter his mood. Then, she would watch his lean, bronzed face crease into riant lines and his silken gray eyes flood with warmth; she would stir with pride at her own power over this man whose strength had thrilled her from the moment of their meeting. But that power had been eroded, and now he clenched his fists as he spoke to her so that the muscles of his sun-stained arms rippled with anger. She felt herself subdued by his fury and bitterness as once she had been subdued by his earnestness and his love.
The force of Yehuda’s conviction had always exerted a strange, inexplicable magnetism over her. She had soared on the whirling vortex of his fierce belief. He had enticed her into the wider world of his vision. She had become his accomplice in illegal immigration, his comrade in the war for Israel’s independence. He had dreamed of founding a new kibbutz in the Negev, and she had never doubted that his reverie would become their shared reality. His moods, febrile, incandescent, ignited her own. She reveled, then, in his power over history. Yehuda Arnon—her fiery lover, her tender husband—had fought wars, saved lives, and would reclaim a desert, yet his lips were gentle on her own, and she in turn could cause him to laugh and to weep. But now, suddenly, all that was altered.
“You can’t call this peace,” he had retorted harshly, and she had turned away in mute acknowledgment that great changes had overtaken them. Noam’s death had affected them both, and their moods were subject to the ebb and flow of their grief. Rebecca had willed herself to struggle against her sorrow. Determinedly, she had absorbed herself in her painting. She spent long hours in her studio, and she took long hikes, carrying her sketch pad and her pastels. The diurnal victories over grief and fear were obviated by the apprehension that overtook her in the stillness of the night. Planes flew overhead, and she reached for Yehuda. All their lives in this land were vulnerable. There was no certainty. She had expected to dance at Noam’s wedding; instead she had wept at his funeral.
It was then, when the nocturnal terrors consumed her, that she stole from her bed and visited the children’s house, where her sons slept.
“They will be all right,” she assured herself as she stared down at their dream-bound faces. And some nights she even believed that it would be so.
Yehuda’s moods were as erratic as her own. He had overcome his desperate sorrow, his fierce anger, but he could not subdue the tension that ruled his days, poisoned his nights. Sometimes it seemed to her that all humor had deserted him, even the bitter wit of his countrymen. Anxiety and uncertainty had fatigued him, etched deep lines in his face, shadowed his eyes. His earth-colored hair was dusted with gray now. Mortality stalked him, even as he had stalked danger in the forests of Europe, on the wild waves of an angry sea, on desert battlefields. He feared now that his luck would abandon him. He worried that peace would never come. His eldest son had been killed, and still he sat in the councils of his nation’s leaders and pondered new lines of defense, new methods of konenut, preparedness, and acknowledged that there would be new deaths. He woke in the night writhing with stomach cramps, his head swelled with aching. In dream he lurched from danger to danger. Once on a hot night, when a thunderbolt ripped across the desert sky in a swift electric storm, he screamed in his sleep. “Mia! Mia!”
Rebecca lay beside him, rigid, her mouth sour. His arms sought her, and he held her close in dream-bound embrace. Did he dream of Mia as he held her? Rebecca wondered, and she did not sleep until the pale light of dawn streaked the sky.
Since Noam’s death, Yehuda’s face darkened when he read the papers. Daily, the front page featured a smiling swarthy Nasser, greeting Soviet diplomats, acknowledging a new shipment of arms. Like small boys boasting of their toys, the Egyptians and Russians displayed their lethal playthings—antipersonnel mines, long-range cannons, sleek and shining missiles. Always the Russian was glum—the reluctant guest, the recalcitrant child who has been told that he must give, he must share, he must ingratiate himself. Always Nasser was the happy host accepting his gifts, greed glittering in his eyes, his lips moist, expectant. And daily, the Fatah increased its attacks on Israel’s northern borders. Mortar rained down from the Golan Heights. Rockets exploded in Kiryat Shmoneh, Nahariya, Metulla.
“We’re losing the balance,” Yehuda muttered. “We’ve had nothing substantial since Kennedy sold us the Hawk anti-aircraft missiles.” But Kennedy was three years dead, and a forest had been planted in his memory in the Jerusalem corridor, dominated by a great sculpture of a tree severed at the trunk before it could reach full growth. As Kennedy’s life had been severed. As Noam’s life had been severed, Rebecca had thought when she saw it. She planted a small rose garden in memory of Noam, near the kibbutz children’s house, but Yehuda planted a tree for his son in the Kennedy forest. He had noticed that many trees were planted in the Kennedy forest, for young soldiers. There was, he supposed, a fellowship of mourning for those who died before they reached the fullness of their years.
Yehuda’s lips pursed in bitter retort as he listened to the radio newscasts. De Gaulle could not be trusted. Harold Wilson was too damn ambivalent. Despite Suez, it would take a long time for Britain to forgive Israel for the Mandate years. The new American president, Lyndon Johnson, was obsessed by Vietnam and ignored the Soviet courtship of the Arabs. And that prince of bastards, U Thant, smiled obsequiously while Ahmed Shukairy held news conferences in Damascus boasting of an escalation of border raids.
“We will force Israel to retaliate,” the Palestinian leader promised. His new uniforms made him brave, and he waved a Palestinian flag and pointed to a map of Israel. Circles were drawn with grease pen around Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba. “When the Palestinians have an air force, no Jewish city will be safe,” he warned.
But currently Shukairy was content to launch attacks on settlements, singling out children’s houses for grenades lobbed through open windows. It was because of such an attack, on a moshav near Metulla, that Yehuda had traveled to Jerusalem.
“Another ineffectual conference,” he had told Rebecca as he drove off. “Eshkol thinks solutions can be found in committee meetings.”
Still, he had promised to be home early that day because of the wedding. The bridegroom was the son of an old friend. The bride’s mother had been Miriam’s classmate.
Everywhere, Rebecca thought, there were connections to Yehuda’s first wife, to the childhood that he and Miriam had shared even before their marriage. She chided herself for resenting these constant reminders of his past. She herself had so few relations in Israel. Her mother’s brother and his family lived on Beth ha-Cochav, a northern kibbutz, and a few distant cousins were scattered through the country. The lack of roots oppressed her. In all of Israel, there was no one who had known Rebecca Arnon as a child, no one who remembered her black ringlets, her childhood penchant for sweets, the small griefs and joys of her girlhood. No one in Israel ever said to her, in the dreamy voice of reminiscence, “Do you remember when…?” She had arrived in the country as a woman, and almost immediately she had been caught up in Yehuda’s life. Often, it seemed as though she had surrendered her past to him, and her American existence had been all illusion. Crazily, it occurred to her that perhaps she had never been Leah’s daughter, sister to Michael and Aaron. In Israel, she was as a driven leaf, weighted only by Yehuda and the life they had built together. Yet now, after all their years together, that anchor had slipped. She was oppressed by a sense of alo
neness. Yehuda called to another woman in the darkness as she lay rigidly beside him. They coped separately, divergently, with the loss they had suffered together.
She sighed and sank down into the canvas chair that Yehuda had so carefully placed in the square of shade cast by the dwarf palm tree. She took up her two letters and opened the cream-colored heavy envelope from the Ferguson Gallery first. Her mother’s teacher and devoted friend, Charles Ferguson, ran a prestigious Madison Avenue gallery, and through the years he had represented Rebecca, selling her work to major collectors. He wrote that he wanted to mount a retrospective. His patrons would lend him her earlier works for exhibit, and he would also hang her newer canvases. It would be a showcase for kibbutz painters as well, and he wondered if Rebecca could arrange to come to New York for the opening. Her presence would certainly enhance the show and give American critics a chance to meet her.
She frowned, acknowledging both her pleasure and her fear at his suggestion. She folded the letter carefully and set it aside. Her fingers shook as she opened Mindell’s letter, but as she read, a smile lit her face.
“Wonderful,” she murmured aloud. “Wonderful.”
Yehuda Arnon, hurrying across the lawn, paused when he saw her. It had been months since he had seen Rebecca smile, heard her laugh. How beautiful she was, he thought. The sun stole through the palm fronds and splayed her face with leaves of gold; her green eyes shone with a mysterious, wondrous warmth. She had a joyous secret, he knew, and he wanted to share it. They seemed to share little enough these days. His fault, perhaps, but he was so preoccupied, so harried by the constant meetings and briefings. Still, she had known about his work when they married, had even shared in it during the days of illegal immigration and the War for Independence. He wondered, sometimes, if she wanted to recant the bargain she had made so many years ago, and he cursed himself for his curtness, his fatigue, for the terrible fear that had weighted him since Noam’s death. He had been unfair to her, his darling Rivka, his wonderful wife. Yet he himself needed time alone now—time to sort out his grief and his memories, time to overcome his despair. And Rebecca, too, he knew, sought an evasive solitude. He saw it in her eyes, sensed it in her recent work, her sketch of the shadow cast by a dwarfed olive tree on a deserted road, her pen-and-ink drawing of a lone hawk soaring darkly through a cloudless summer sky. How talented she was, his Rebecca, his wonderful Rebecca. He wanted desperately to be fair to her. He spoke her name in the soft, tender voice of an uncertain lover. She turned to him and smiled.
“Such good news, Yehuda. A letter from Mindell. She’s pregnant.”
“Wonderful,” he said, but he did not reach for the letter, and she did not offer it to him. She wanted to reread the paragraph in which Mindell asked her, with strange and restive urgency, to come to the States for the birth if she possibly could. A double summons then, doubling also her longing and her uncertainty.
“Am I too late for the wedding?” Yehuda asked.
“No. They’re just coming now,” Rebecca said. “Look.”
She pointed across the lawn, and he saw the small crowd surging joyously forward, heard the singing voices of the kibbutz children and the vibrant strains of Mordechai Meiri’s accordion.
The children, all dressed in white, danced their way across the lawn. Garlands of flowers were looped about their necks: blood-red desert anemones, pale blue cactus flowers, fragile-petaled roses of Sharon, newly plucked from the bushes that Rebecca had planted in Noam’s memory—shoshanot Noam, Noam’s roses, the kibbutz children called them, and Rebecca smiled sadly when she heard them. The children pulled the kibbutz tractor, which was gaily decorated with flowers, laced with branches and vines. The very young bride sat on the driver’s seat beneath a flowered canopy. She smiled shyly and clutched her bouquet of pink and white meadow saffron threaded with clusters of the delicate pale star-of-Bethlehem. Her name was Ronit, and she had, from childhood, been a plain girl who wore her light brown hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, always moving awkwardly in heavy, earth-caked boots. But today she claimed her bridal legacy and radiated a fragile, luminous beauty. She had added a blue satin sash to the simple white dress, traditionally worn by all the kibbutz brides. Her hair was brushed into silken folds and crowned with a coronet of pale blue cornflowers.
Oren, her bridegroom, stood proudly beside her, wearing the newly pressed khaki dress uniform of the paratrooper. His recently earned insignia gleamed on his epaulets. A white skullcap was balanced uneasily on his bright red curls, and he raised a freckled hand from time to time, to make certain that it was still in place. Friends from his brigade danced behind him in a vigorous line hora, their arms linked, their khaki shirts blotted with sweat. Buoyantly, with irreverent joy, they sang the ancient wedding hymn, the biblical nuptial choruses.
“Joy to the bride, happiness to the groom…. Rejoice, O Jerusalem, in the joy of their hearts!”
One soldier danced alone, his rifle held in both hands stretched before him, an obedient metallic partner. Sweat beaded his brow, trickled down his face.
How young they were, Rebecca thought—they were Noam’s generation, in their late teens, early twenties. Many of them, she knew, would also marry in the next few months. Always, in Israel, apprehension of war brought an increase in marriages, just as the aftermath of war brought an increase in pregnancies and births. Danger beckoned love, the seizing of the day; death encouraged life, survival.
Tears filled her eyes. She did not want her sons to marry because they feared death. It was zest for life and love that had brought her and Yehuda together. They had plunged into their marriage, into the miracle of their lives together with eagerness and joy. The war was behind them. The time of danger and desolation was over. They had stood quietly on a Galilean hillside bathed in the golden warmth of a new peace. She could not bear to believe that they had been deceived, that new wars, new dangers and desolation had eroded the foundation of that hopeful love, that daring commitment. She had loved Yehuda then. Then.
Yehuda’s hand rested on her shoulder. He sensed her mood, she knew, and she prayed that he had not perceived her fear.
“Let’s watch the wedding, Rebecca,” he said softly.
Together they walked to the grassy area in front of the dining room.
The bridal couple stood beneath a blue velvet wedding canopy that matched the desert sky. It was held up by four pitchforks at each corner, tightly clutched by kibbutz youngsters. Yaakov Arnon, who held one of the pitchforks, noticed his parents’ entry, smiled, and concentrated again on his task. It was a kibbutz legend, repeated often in the children’s house, that a boy had once dropped a pitchfork and the marriage had ended in divorce. But Yaakov’s grasp was firm. He had inherited Yehuda’s power of concentration, his dedication to the task at hand.
The guests sat on the benches that had been carried out of the dining hall. Later they would move the benches to the tables that had been set up across the lawn and spread with bright linen cloths. Rebecca and Yehuda found a place in the rear and listened as Oren made his pledge to Ronit.
“Behold you are consecrated unto me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and of Israel.”
Yehuda’s finger moved across Rebecca’s narrow gold wedding band, worn thin over the years. The paratrooper’s booted foot shattered the wineglass and shouts of “Mazal tov!” filled the air.
“Bridegrooms shouldn’t be married in uniform,” Rebecca said suddenly. Uniforms were symbolic of war; they did not belong beneath the tabernacle of love.
“But I was married in a uniform,” Yehuda recalled absently.
“No.” She withdrew her hand from his, inched away from him imperceptibly. At their wedding he had worn an open-necked white shirt and khaki trousers. It was his marriage to Miriam that he had so carelessly recalled; Rebecca had seen that wedding photo with Yehuda in his Haganah uniform, Miriam in a simple white dress not unlike Ronit’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“It’s all ri
ght,” she replied, but her voice was muted.
“Is it?” he asked.
“No,” she said in a flat, dead tone.
Yet even her bitter reply encouraged him. It was, at least, an improvement on the silence that sometimes stretched so tautly between them.
“What else did Mindell say?” he asked.
“She sounded a little frightened. She asked if I could come to New York for the birth.”
“And I noticed another letter.”
“Yes. From Charles Ferguson. He’s mounting an exhibit of my work. A retrospective.”
“And does he also want you to come to New York?”
“Yes. But it’s impossible, of course.”
“Why impossible?” he asked. His tone was light, and its casualness wounded her. She had anticipated fierce protest; he had responded with an almost indifferent query. She turned away and did not see how his gray eyes darkened or how he clenched his thin lips, as though willing himself to silence.
He wants me to go, she thought, with sudden frightening clarity. He wants me to leave him. Everything is changed between us. It’s not only Noam’s death, the tension in the country. It’s everything. She almost spoke the words aloud, as though articulation would challenge their credibility, but instead they ricocheted through her mind and hurtled against her heart. She remained seated as the other guests hurried toward the tables, laden now with cold meats and salads, with bowls of fruit and pitchers of wine.
“Come on, Ima,” Amnon called, pulling her up. “We’re hungry. We want to eat.”
She followed him to the table where Danielle sat beside Yair, and watched Yaakov as he clowned for his friends, wearing a maroon beret borrowed from a paratrooper. Sara Meiri, Rebecca’s closest friend, stared at Yaakov. Her eldest son had also worn the paratrooper’s beret. He had been killed during the Sinai Campaign. Her face was wreathed in sadness, and Rebecca’s heart turned.
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