And it was so with his work. “You see a story,” he whispered to Daniel. “You see it shining like a star at the top of a mountain. You labor up the mountainside, sack concealed behind your back because they’re cagey buggers and shy. You reach the star and stretch out your hand, you touch it, and for one searing moment you think it’s yours—and then it’s gone. Shriveled, and in its place a pile of molten ashes, fool’s gold. You shovel the muck into your sack because what the hell, you don’t want to go back empty-handed, and you trudge down the mountain. At its foot an eager throng awaits you. They raise you to their shoulders and hold up your pathetic loot for all to see and praise. You say: ‘That isn’t what I meant. That isn’t it at all!’ But no one hears, Daniel. No one hears.”
They lay on the bed in a dingy hotel room, fully clothed. Khalil stroked her hair. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, shivering.
He slipped the straps of her summer dress off her shoulders and pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat “We are closer than cousins. We are brother and sister. Abraham was our father, and our mother is the land, Palestina. You cast us off, but we returned. You cast us off again, and again we return. We will always return. You and I are bound forever. You will never be free of me, nor I of you. I sow my seed in you, my promised land.”
Chapter Eight
“We planted pistachios this year,” the father said. “Damn fool idea of Sasha’s. From the water each of these trees drinks we could have had a field of avocados, and it’ll take five years before we have a crop worth taking to market. Your mother’s sick.”
Arik stared. “I know. You told me. That’s why I came.”
“I didn’t tell you everything.”
“So tell.”
Uri Eshel kicked a clod of earth with the toe of his sandal. He was as tall as his son but twice as broad, heavily muscled, with a bushy mustache and a full head of hair, grayer than the last time Arik saw him. He wore khaki shorts, and his trunk-like legs were foliated with wiry white hair.
Father and son left the young pistachio trees behind and crossed through a border of cypresses into the orange orchard. The grove was deserted except for some Arab workers eating lunch under a tree.
Uri picked up a newly pruned branch and stripped the leaves from it. “I took her to the clinic. We thought it was an intestinal flu, she kept throwing up. Doctor did some tests, did an x-ray and then more tests. A few days later he calls me in. She’s sitting there, white as a ghost. ‘Your wife’s got cancer,’ he says.” Arik choked back a sound. His father rushed on. “I say where. He says the stomach. Pancreas. Maybe liver. I say, ‘Okay, so what do we do to lick this bastard?’ He says, ‘Nothing.’ I say, ‘What do you mean, nothing? Are you a doctor or a goddamn undertaker?’ He says there’s nothing to do except take care of the pain. I tell him he’s an incompetent son of a bitch, and your mother starts crying. You ever see her cry?”
“No,” said Arik.
“I did, once. When you left the kibbutz.”
“What are you saying?”
Uri Eshel shook his head, a confused look in his brown eyes. “I took her to Hadassah. They did all the tests over again, and more. Professor Geller calls me in and says, ‘Your wife’s got cancer.’ I say, ‘So cut it out of her.’ He says, ‘Can’t.’ I say, ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ He says, ‘Take her home. Take care of her.’ I say, ‘No, what am I supposed to do?’ He says, ‘Nothing you can do.’“ Uri Eshel was reliving his rage. His deep voice expanded with it, filling the orchard, bending the trees. He looked down at his large brown hands, calloused and ink-stained both. Twisting the green switch he said fiercely, “She’s fifty-six years old, and they’re telling me to sit back and let her die.”
Arik turned back toward the kibbutz, but Uri caught his arm in an iron grip. “Where are you going?”
“To see her.”
“Not yet.” Nose to nose they glared at one another. Uri Eshel said, “Let me ask you something, Son. What cause did she have to get so sick?”
“What cause? What kind of question is that? No cause. You think it’s her fault?”
“Not hers,” said Uri.
Arik Eshel laughed in disbelief. “My fault? I did this to my mother? Are you crazy, old man, or evil?”
Again the brown eyes showed confusion, and the deep voice said truculently, ‘‘You broke your mother’s heart when you left the kibbutz, and mine when you quit the army. If I could I would tear that fucking cancer out of her body with my bare hands—but I can’t. The only way I can help is to get you back for her.”
“Don’t lay this on me, Abba. I did not give my mother cancer.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I don’t have any alternative,” Uri shouted. “Because if you’re not the cause, then you’re not the cure either—and then what the hell am I supposed to do?”
He climbed the water tower and gazed out over the kibbutz. Beneath him were the dining room and community center, cement buildings built low to the ground, functional but not graceless. Beyond them were clusters of homes, linked by flowering paths. To the left, the swimming pool glistened in the afternoon sun; to the right were the cowsheds, chicken coops, and stable. All around, in every direction and for as far as his eye could see, lay the fields and orchards of the kibbutz, green and fecund, flourishing. A humming sound arose, a blend of machinery, tractors, murmuring men, and lowing cows. When he closed his eyes, the earthsmell wafted up to him, the smell that, more than any other sensation, meant home to him. It was the moist odor of the land in spring, long parched but now sated by the winter rains, drunk with joy, splurging its precious reserves on the profligate lawns and flower gardens of the kibbutz. He felt a thousand miles removed from Tel Aviv, and though sorrow for his mother and pity for his father roiled inside him, they were momentarily subsumed by the sluggish peace that this sight of his home always aroused in him.
It was a strange fact, it was one of those natural puns that fate occasionally indulges in, that many of the high points of Arik’s youthful existence had taken place on that tower. It was always his refuge. Whenever parents or peers weighed heavily on him, he would take to the water tower and spend an hour or two aloft, far above his problems.
The tower served another purpose as well: since no one could approach it unseen, it provided the only secure privacy on the kibbutz. Arik had his first girl up there, on a blanket, under the stars.
Eventually he came down. He met a dozen members on the path to his parents’ house, who greeted him casually and slowed to talk, but Arik did not pause. He knew them all so painfully well that even if they said no more than “How’s it going, Arik?” he could not help hearing their thoughts: why did you quit the army, and drag the kibbutz’s name into the scandal? What’s the matter between you and Uri? Why don’t you come home? Do you know about your mother?
No doubt but that they knew. There were no secrets on the kibbutz, and precious little privacy.
Rina was sitting on the porch, dressed in work clothes, when he reached the house. He held back a little from approaching her, as if the cancer were a party to their meeting. She gave him a cool, hard look and said, “You don’t look so bad.”
He smiled. “Neither do you, Mama.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, a written invitation? It’s not contagious.”
He crossed the porch and bent down, enfolding her in his arms. She hugged him briefly, started to release him, but then tightened her arms, her Angers digging into his back as if they, not she, would not let go.
“Mama,” he said, “I’ve decided to come back.”
“What’s the matter, you can’t find work?”
“It’s not that. I want to. It’s time.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then said, “This is my home.”
Rina tossed her head and sent her hair, long, black, and glossy, tumbling over her shoulders. To th
e glory of her son and husband, she had never given in to the kibbutz custom of short hair for women. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “You quit the kibbutz. You’d have to apply for re- admission and be voted on, like any other candidate.”
“You think there’s a problem?”
“A lot of the members were bothered by the loud way you quit the army. They think you set a bad example for the kids. I know one member who’d vote against you for sure.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
“Why?” he cried. “I thought you understood why I did it. You said you supported me.”
“I did. I still do. That’s not the issue.”
“Then what is?”
“You don’t want to come back,” Rina said. ‘Tour father’s been getting at you. I knew he would.”
Arik didn’t know how to lie to her. She’d always seen through him, as she saw through everyone. People in politics called her “Eshel’s lie detector,” and they feared her. She was tougher than Uri, and she’d never spared her son. If she said she’d vote against him, he knew she would.
He brought over a chair and sat beside her, and though they’d never been a touching family, he took her hand and held it.
“He told me about the cancer. Is that ‘getting at me’? It’s my right to know, and to do what I want to about it.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“I don’t believe you. He told me you cried when I quit.”
“So what? I cried when you were born, too; that doesn’t mean I didn’t want you.” She stood, and in the slow movement of her slender body and the reaching of her hand toward the rail, he saw the first sign of her disease. She gazed over the kibbutz, her back to him. “It did hurt when you said you were never coming back to live,” she said. “But not because you were wrong. Because you were right.”
“You think I don’t fit in?” he cried, stung, for there are no more bitter words than these, spoken to a kibbutznik.
Rina beckoned, and he came to stand beside her at the porch’s edge. “When your father and I first came to this place, it was nothing but barren earth, so full of rocks you couldn’t get a plow to look at it. Now just look at the gardens, the lawns, the fields, the fat animals and fatter children. We have color television in every house, we vacation abroad every year, and every child, like it or not, goes to the university. We’re so comfortable.” She said it with such bitterness that Arik laughed. So, after a moment, did she.
“We Eshels are happier struggling than having. You can’t live here, Arik. You need to fight your own battles, carve out your own place from the rock. And what’s more, you know it. So don’t talk to me about ‘coming home.’
“Besides,” she said, “you think I want you standing over me, watch in hand, waiting for me to die so you can get on with your own life?”
“Don’t say that, Mama. You’re not going to die.”
“Did I raise a fool for a son?” Rina snapped. “Everybody dies.” She waved to some passing friends and went back to her seat on the porch. “Getting sick with cancer has its interesting points,” she said. “When people find out, they’re either frightened and shrink away, or they embrace you. I’ve had people I barely know coming up to me and saying that they love me or that they want to thank me for something I once did for them and forgot all about. The kibbutz members wanted to send me to the States when the doctors here said I was inoperable; it would have cost a fortune.”
“Who cares what it costs? If there’s a chance—”
“There’s nothing they can do in America that the doctors here can’t do. They’re being decent, trying to spare me useless trauma. An operation wouldn’t improve my odds with this kind of cancer—so why go through it?”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’ve taken an interest,” she said drily.
He wanted to ask, Mama, what does it feel like? Does it hurt? Are you frightened? But nothing in his kibbutz training or army service had taught him to express such thoughts; besides, there was a part of him that didn’t want to know. For if she said yes, it hurts, and yes, I am afraid, then what could he do about it?
“There are two things I want,” Rina said, and Arik blurted, “Yes? What, Mama?”
She laughed. “That’s the other benefit of cancer. It’s like getting a magic gift of wishes. I have only to say, ‘I want—’ and the whole world jumps to attention. ‘Yes, please, tell us, what can we do for you?’“
Arik smiled painfully. He could admire, but not begin to emulate, her cool acceptance of this thing.
“I want you to come see us more often. Spend time with your father. For too long you’ve been communicating through me; now you’ve got to learn to talk together.” She looked him in the eye. “I want that badly.”
Remembering their conversation in the orchard, Arik doubted it could be done, but he said, “Yes. And what’s the other thing?”
Flushing, she said, “I’m not the interfering type of mother, am I?”
He smiled. “Not even close.”
“I wish,” she said, looking at her hands, “that you would find yourself a woman. I know you’ve had plenty of girls, but I wish you would find someone you’d be proud for us to meet. Men are so helpless without women.”
He thought, he could not help it, of Sarita. It was ridiculous; he’d never even spoken to the girl; for all he knew she was stupid, though somehow he didn’t think so. But she came into his mind, and of course his mother saw it. She smiled.
Chapter Nine
Sarita Blume walked into Nevo, empty-handed, and looked around expectantly.
“What are you waiting for, the maitre d’?” growled Sternholz, who was very pleased to see her.
“Do you know a man named Simcha Noy? Is he here?”
“Hell, no,” the waiter said with a sniff.
“I guess I’m early.” Sarita sat at her usual table, beside the bar and under the waiter’s protection. Sternholz brought her coffee and sat down opposite her with the groan of a man beginning an unpleasant but necessary job of work.
“So what are you meeting that bum for?”
“He’s interviewing me about my work for Ma’ariv.”
“Noy? He doesn’t know art from his tuches.”
“Why don’t you like him?” Sarita asked. Though nervous about the interview, she found talking to Sternholz remarkably comfortable—he was like someone she’d known all her life and didn’t need to think about. Sternholz, for his part, treated her with crusty gentleness and watched over her. He had begun to anticipate her visits.
“He’s an arrogant pup.” The old man humphed. “I like his nerve, setting up dates in my café.”
“I did it,” Sarita said. “It didn’t occur to me that you’d mind. I didn’t want a stranger in my home, and Nevo seemed public and sort of safe... you know.”
Absurdly pleased, Sternholz muttered darkly, “Better here than elsewhere.”
As he spoke these words, a youngish man with a languid manner, carrying a lizard-skin, initialed briefcase, entered Nevo’s inner sanctum. Removing his shades, he looked about and immediately spotted Sarita. Gingerly, as if picking his way through a minefield, he made his way toward her, smiling fulsomely. “You must be Sarita Blume,” he said.
Looking around at the old men in the room, she agreed, “I must be.”
“Simcha Noy,” he said. He held onto her hand a few seconds too long, then sat down close to Sternholz, displacing the old man, who rose crankily.
“He’s married,” Sternholz said dourly.
Noy flicked a look his way. “Bring me a beer,” he said. “Maccabi.”
“Please.”
“Please!” Then he turned to Sarita, a smile brightening his petulant features. “Shall we begin?” He removed a miniature tape recorder from his case and placed it on the table between them. “Tell me,” he said, pushing a button, “about your mother.”
“My mother?” Sarita flushed. “I thought the article was going to
be about my work.”
“No, dear. I’m not an art critic. My story is about the woman behind the work. The very beautiful woman.” He bowed, without removing his eyes from her face. “Didn’t Moriah brief you?”
“No.”
“Do you remember your mother?”
“Of course. I was seven when they died.”
“What do you remember about her?”
Sarita twisted a lock of chestnut hair around her finger. “Look,” she muttered, “I don’t really...”
“Listen, sweetheart, it’s great publicity, and that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“No. I mean, I don’t want to offend you, Mr. Noy”— “Please, call me Simcha!”—”Simcha, but my personal life is... personal.”
“Aren’t you proud of your mother, Sarita?”
“Of course, I’m proud of both my parents, but—”
“Did you ever see your mother act?”
Sarita stiffened and said carefully, “Twice. I saw her as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts and in The Watchmen.”
“The Watchmen—wasn’t that done in the forties? Surely your mother—”
“It was a revival,” said Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz. He slapped Noy’s beer down in front of him, pulled up a chair, and joined them. “Hannah Rovina played in the original, and Yael Blume in the revival. After the premiere there were fistfights outside the theater between Hannah’s fans and Yael’s. But there was no doubt in my mind who was the better actress.”
“Who?” asked Sarita, eagerly.
“Rovina was a great actress, but Yael Blume was sublime. No one could compare to her.”
“She was better-looking, that’s for sure,” said the reporter. “Like mother, like daughter.”
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