As he spoke he bore forward, drawing the others in his wake, until he reached his usual table, front and center. He noticed Vered sitting with Ilana and blew a kiss.
“You’re a bum,” said the waiter. “I don’t want you here.” He snatched away the chair that Caspi was about to sit on, but Caspi took another.
“You do me wrong,” he cried, hand on heart. “You have tried, convicted, and sentenced me to exile for a crime with which I have not even been charged. Is that fair, I ask you?” He appealed to the café at large. “What possible reason could I have for wishing Khalil harm?”
“Everyone knows you did it,” Sternholz said angrily.
“Everyone does me too much credit. Unhappily, I am innocent.” Caspi smirked. “Pure as a virgin, innocent as my sainted wife.”
“Let’s go,” Ilana murmured, but Vered sat on, still and heavy as stone.
“I’m actually sorry for the poor bugger,” said Caspi. “The guy’s got this inflated image; but he can’t write worth shit and he knows it. All he’s got is his fancy car, and then one fine night someone comes along and blows that to smithereens. I tell you I really pity the poor bastard; in fact,” he said, “I felt so sorry for him that at great trouble and expense I personally went out and bought him a present.”
“A present,” tittered his sycophantic chorus. “Generous Caspi, what did you get him?”
“A donkey,” he said triumphantly, “and I sent a note with it. ‘Dear Khalil, So sorry to hear of your most recent disappointment. Please accept this small gift as an accurate token of my esteem. I hope that it will enable you to return to the roots which nourish your work. Yours in brotherhood, Peter Caspi.’“
The silence that followed was broken only by the senseless giggling of Caspi’s girl, whose Hebrew was rudimentary. Two of Caspi’s satellites, a man and a girl, broke orbit and spun away to a table far from Caspi’s. Others turned away in shame. Sternholz sucked in his breath, saddened to the marrow of his bones; he was beyond indignation.
Ilana took her friend’s arm and led her out of Nevo.
A man sitting in the outer lobby of the King David Towers jumped to his feet as Ilana entered. The well-built young man in blue overalls was no one she knew, so Ilana smiled politely and walked by. As the doorman opened the inner door for her, he murmured, “That fellow’s been waiting for you.”
She looked again. The man stepped forward. “Don’t you know me, Ilana?”
She knew the voice, though it had deepened; it took her a moment longer to recognize his face. “Oh my God,” she cried, “Hezi!” She reached up to embrace her brother.
He sat upright on a love seat, knees together and elbows in, as if afraid of breaking something. When Ilana came in from the kitchen carrying a tray, he leapt up to take it from her. “You shouldn’t be carrying that,” he scolded.
Ilana sank into a chair. “You know.”
“I stopped by the house the day after you were there. Papa told me.” He twisted the cap off a beer and started to put it to his lips, then changed his mind and poured it into a glass.
“That was a month ago.”
He centered the glass on a coaster and looked up to meet her waiting eyes. “When you left home, Mama made us promise never to see you again. It wasn’t hard to keep my promise. Mama never stopped grieving, and I never forgave you.”
“Mama knew what she was doing, wanting sons,” Ilana muttered.
“You broke her heart.”
“Her heart was broken before I came along. But if that’s the way you feel, why did you come?”
“Because of what he told me. About the baby, and about the money, too.”
“What money?”
“The money you kept sending, even though no one ever acknowledged it or thanked you. The money that put Josh and Avi through college and got me started in my business. Ilana,” he said urgently, “we didn’t know. If anything, we thought that Mama must have accepted German reparation money, but no one liked to ask. If we’d known it was you, we’d either have refused the money or come to thank you, I’m not sure which, but we wouldn’t have taken it and kept away. I felt sick thinking what you must have thought of us all these years.”
“I knew she wouldn’t tell you. I was glad she accepted the money. It was no hardship for me, and it gave me at least the illusion of being still a part of your lives.” Ilana could not stop staring at his hands. When they were children, they used to press their palms together, to see whose hands were biggest. Hers still were when she left. Now one of his was large enough to encompass both of hers.
“Tell me about yourself, Hezi. What work do you do?”
“I’m a carpenter,” he said. “I’ve got my own shop in Haifa, and three workers. I do okay. Nothing like this, though.” He looked about in awe.
“What did you expect, a pink bordello?” She laughed when he blushed. “Are you married?”
“Yeah, two kids.” He handed her his wallet, open to the photo section. As she bent her head over the pictures, Hezi smiled at the golden head. A forgotten image of the past arose: he saw Ilana bent over a book, reading Treasure Island to the boys. They were so dark, and she so fair, they called her their Snow White.
She was still beautiful, but it was a different, uprooted beauty; she was a lily floating in a pond instead of the hardy wildflower she had been. Ilana looked permeated in money; she looked as if she had never been poor.
“They’re beautiful children. What are their names?”
“Maya and Dror. They’re twins, a real pair of rascals. Ruti, my wife, does a great job with them, but you know, children need a father, too.”
Her voice hardened, and he knew her again. “You’re not suggesting that I give my baby up?”
“No, God, no. Why should you?” Hezi tugged at his hair, which was thick and curly like their father’s. “I’m making a mess of this,” he said. “Papa told me that you’re not planning to get married. Since the kid won’t have a father around, I thought that maybe the next best thing would be an uncle.”
“Hezi,” she said after a moment, “my baby will have a father, even though I don’t intend to marry him. I hope that doesn’t mean he can’t have an uncle, too.”
“I’ll be an uncle if you’ll be an aunt,” he said. “Ruti is dying to meet my glamorous sister. She wants you to come to dinner Sabbath eve. Will you?”
“I’d love to.”
Hezi reached out and shyly touched her hair with a calloused finger. “Snow White,” he said.
Ilana leaned forward, wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to his. He smelled of sweat and sawdust.
Thank you, Papa, she thought.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Daniel was going through a rebellious phase. Vered worried that his crankiness and hair-trigger aggression sprung from the tension at home, but their pediatrician blamed it on his age. Three and a half, she told Vered, was the adolescence of infancy; the baby stands on the threshold of childhood, and a painful transition it is. Vered’s desire to believe this was bolstered by the observation that as much as she and Caspi strove to protect the boy from their troubles, he protected himself more effectively. Whenever both his parents were home, Daniel would either coerce Vered into playing with him in his room or else run giddily, prattling like a baby, from one parent to the other. He never acted spontaneously with Caspi but, with a slyness that troubled her, did all the things expected of a child: sat on Caspi’s knee, pulled his beard, kissed him good night. Outright rebellion he saved for his mother. At least three times a day he told her, “I hate you!” following this with a frenzied leap into her arms, where he clung like a monkey.
This morning he had insisted on dressing himself and got hopelessly tangled up in his shirt. Vered’s attempts to release him met with shrieks of rage. Finally she left him to it.
Within minutes he was on the floor, kicking his heels and screaming for her. Vered rushed into his room. The shirt was wound around him like a straitjacket, pinning his
arms to his body. She ran over to help, but Daniel screamed and kicked at her.
Just then Vered caught sight of her face in the mirror above Daniel’s bed. Her mother’s face overlaid her own reflection, revealing a similarity less of feature than of expression. Jemima, Vered realized, had often looked at her with just that blend of pain and frustration, never more so than on the day Vered announced her intention of marrying Caspi. I have done things to my mother, she thought, that I pray God Daniel never does to me. She imagined having a child like her young self and shuddered. Daniel resembled her too much, with his slyness and reserve, so different from Caspi’s habitual acting out of every stray impulse. As a child she had been even worse than Daniel, hoarding secrets the way other children hoarded candy and treating her mother like a foreign spy.
This sudden attack of empathy knocked the breath out of Vered. She had always known that Jemima the mother was lacking in ways that Jemima the businesswoman was not, but now she said aloud in wonder, “I was a rotten kid.” Daniel was so shocked, he stopped screaming in mid-shriek and sat up.
She bribed him with a lollypop and planted him in front of the television. Then she called her mother.
They sat on Jemima’s patio overlooking the sea, while Daniel puttered about on the beach below, safely out of earshot. He was, not surprisingly, given his situation, the kind of child who likes to eavesdrop on adult conversations.
Ever since Vered had accused her of coveting Caspi, an accusation that had taken days to sink in fully, Jemima had been most uncharacteristically afraid of opening her mouth. As a consequence, she remained in the dark while rumors flew like bats around her head. When Vered called and asked if she was free, she said yes, then hung up and canceled her hairdresser and luncheon date.
Vered sipped her lemonade. Staring out to sea, she said, “I’m pregnant.”
“Mazel tov. Who’s the happy father?”
“Not Caspi.”
“Thank God,” said Jemima, before considering the alternative.
Vered looked at her in amazement. After some moments she said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“What are your options?”
“Abortion’s one, of course.”
“Do you want an abortion?”
“It’s the logical choice.”
“Do you want an abortion?”
“No,” she admitted. “Strangely enough, I don’t.”
“Then don’t have one,” Jemima said calmly.
The conversation was not going along the lines Vered had anticipated and rehearsed. Jemima seemed so businesslike: interested, certainly, and not unconcerned, but unmoved by her concern.
“Does Caspi know?” Jemima asked abruptly.
“No.”
“Are you sure? If he did, it would explain—”
“What he did to Khalil?”
Jemima nodded, clamping her lips together. Years of dealing with Vered had taught her to approach sensitive matters the way Alice negotiated the looking-glass garden: by moving away from her destination.
“The other day,” said Vered, “in Nevo, he read a letter he wrote to Khalil. The most vile, racist, stupid letter... And he sent him a donkey.”
“Caspi is a pig,” Jemima observed. Always was, she added to herself.
“The letter was even more malicious than the bomb. It was meant to humiliate Khalil as an Arab. Caspi always had a temper, but this is something else. He’s turned into a racist.”
“Has he admitted to planting the bomb?”
“He doesn’t trust me. But he knows that I know.”
Though gratified by this unexpected flow of confidence, Jemima was wary of responding too eagerly. A single wrong word could dam it. She wanted so badly to ask, “Why are you still with him?” that she dared not speak at all.
Vered took pity on her mother. “I won’t go on living with him. That’s not an option anymore.”
Jemima closed her eyes in silent thanksgiving. “If you’ve made up your mind,” she said carefully, “why delay?”
Vered did not answer.
“Do you still buy his bluff about the boy?”
“It’s not a bluff,” she said almost dreamily. “He’d sooner die than give him up.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
She shrugged.
“And what will he do when he finds out about the baby, if you do go through with it?”
Again Vered sighed and made no answer.
Her vagary troubled Jemima; so, too, the quality of her silences. Vered had never been a communicative child, but she had always, no matter how obliquely or misguidedly, been a fighter. Her silence now, however, seemed not of thought but of exhaustion, and there was nothing combative in this miserable woman who sat slumped in her chair as if she hadn’t a bone in her body. Jemima guessed that Vered feared Caspi, but could not see why this fear should leave her so paralyzed that two weeks after Caspi’s terrorist outburst she was still sharing his home, if not his bed.
That Vered still cared for Caspi never even occurred to her; nor did her daughter think to enlighten her. Though Vered had come fully intending to speak frankly, she could not break the habit of a lifetime in a single day. She still feared her mother’s scorn, which would surely be hers in full measure if she admitted to pitying Caspi. And why not? She despised herself. She was living not even in the past but in a world of could-have-beens, of dreams beyond redemption.
Jemima said in a brisk voice, “Where do you intend to go?” assuming without question that Caspi would not leave.
“I don’t know. I thought,” Vered said tentatively, “of coming to you.”
Daniel had found a friend, a little girl. They were digging a hole together. When it was deep enough, the girl got inside, and Daniel started burying her. Like father, like son, thought Jemima. After some moments she said, “Where else did you think of going?”
“Are you saying I’m not welcome here?”
“I said nothing of the kind. You and Daniel are always welcome in my home, and you know it. I doubt, however, that it’s the ideal solution. You tried it once, remember.”
“I was young and stupid,” Vered said quickly, “and I realize now how much pain I must have caused you. I know myself better now. I would never go back to him.”
“I should bloody well hope not,” Jemima blurted.
“I’ve thought of renting an apartment, but if I do have the baby, I’d have to hire a full-time baby-sitter, and that plus the rent—”
“But, darling, you must know I’d help. You and Daniel are my only family; could you really believe I’d hoard my money while you were in need?”
Vered began to say reflexively that she wanted no help but stopped. What she wanted was no longer the issue.
“There’s another possibility,” she said. “Ilana Maimon has invited me to move in with her, at least for the time being and maybe for a longer period.” Then, having secured Ilana’s permission, she told her mother about Ilana’s pregnancy. To Vered’s surprise, Jemima seemed taken by the idea.
“I’ve always liked that girl. She’s one smart cookie, and she’s got guts. Does she plan to go on, ah, working?”
“No,” said Vered with a hint of anger.
“It would be practical,” Jemima mused. “You could hire one woman to help with all three children... but does she really have room?”
“She says she does. Mother, do you really like this idea?”
“Why, what’s wrong with it? She seems an intelligent woman, and the two of you obviously get along.”
“We do, though we’re very different types. You know what people will say, though.”
“What?” asked Jemima, who knew perfectly well.
Vered blushed. “That we’re lesbians.”
“So what? People will say anything. Is she?”
“No!”
“So who cares what the fools say?”
“Then you think I ought to do it?”
“Did I say that?” Jemima said sharply.
“I’ve given you no advice.”
“But I want you to. What should I do?”
“Don’t you lay that on me,” Jemima said in sudden wrath. “Don’t put that responsibility on me. You’ve got a decision to make, and for once in your life you’re going to make it without reference to either me or Caspi.” Vered reached out for her, but Jemima pulled away. “No. You must decide what’s right for yourself, and then do it. If you want, you are welcome to come here. You can go to Ilana or rent your own place. You can have an abortion or a baby. You can even, God help you, stay with Caspi. The one thing you cannot do, Vered, is drift.”
Vered said with difficulty, “I feel some responsibility for what Caspi has done.”
“Really? Did you help him plant that bomb?”
“Mother! If I hadn’t had the affair, or if I’d chosen anyone but an Arab colleague and rival of his—”
“Very naughty of you. But do you deserve a life sentence? Does Daniel?”
“What about Caspi? Do you know what my leaving will do to him?”
Jemima clucked impatiently. “Daniel is your responsibility, not Caspi.”
“Even so, he’s in bad shape.”
“Yes he is. And so are you. Are you going to let him drag you down with him?”
Vered shook her head with resolution, which soon gave way to another fear. “I’m afraid he’ll come after me.”
“Of course he will. So what? At this point there are risks in any course you take. I may not be the most perceptive mother, Vered, but I do know that it’s not your nature to be ruled by fear.”
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