A group of yeshiva boys, almost bent double over the load of heavy books they clutched to their chests, walked four abreast down the road, their heads, covered by oversize large knitted skullcaps, bobbing up and down as they engaged in earnest discussion. Elaine smiled at the thought that a Talmudic question might have infiltrated their dreams and was now being clarified in the light of early morning. The boys were followed by a gaggle of laughing girls in the requisite orthodox uniform: long denim skirts and long-sleeved white blouses, brightly colored ribbons threaded through their hair. Drivers honked their horns impatiently or skirted around the groups of students; the occasional angry shout was greeted with indifferent laughter.
On the corner, bearded men waited for the buses that would carry them to offices in Jerusalem or along the Modiin-Tel Aviv corridor. Like Moshe, they wore long black frockcoats and snow-white shirts but unlike him they carried laptops and briefcases. Moshe’s own life was dedicated to Torah study and teaching at the yeshiva, although Sarah had assured Elaine that he helped her with the business when he could.
“I would hope so,” Elaine had replied dryly and immediately regretted her words. She had not come to Jerusalem to judge and criticize, she reminded herself. She had come to observe and understand, to decide if, in some as yet undetermined way, she might meld her own life with theirs.
She shifted position so that Yuval’s head rested on her shoulder. She thought of how different this busy street was from her own quiet suburban road where pedestrians were rarely seen and even traffic was sparse. Her neighbors’ children were ferried to school in carpools, their faces hidden behind tinted windows. Their mothers sprinted in and out of their SUVs, their pursuits solitary, their movements swift. There was no laughter beyond her windows, no voices raised in greeting when she entered and left her home. She lived in a sealed chrysalis of suburban silence. She had, now and again during the months after Neil’s death, stood outside the house after working for long hours in her studio. She yearned then for the sounds of life, for the assurance that the dense quietude that surrounded her was penetrable. Inevitably, she had retreated indoors, hugging the shadow of her aloneness and too swiftly turned on the television, filling the empty house with meaningless sound and movement. In contrast, Ramat Chessed pulsated with activity, a confluence of life and sound and color.
“Mom, is Yuval still sleeping? I’m almost finished,” Sarah called to her from the kitchen.
Sarah had been bent over her drawing board when Elaine awakened, Yuval perched on her knee. She did her best work in the morning, she explained, after Moshe had taken Ephraim and Leora to school and dropped Leah and Yuval at Ruth’s. She had begun work especially early that day because she wanted to complete a new fabric design before going into Jerusalem with her mother. Yuval had been a little cranky so she had kept him home.
Elaine had taken the baby from her and watched as Sarah’s pen moved swiftly across the sheet of white paper, creating a garden of fanciful flowers.
“Fabrics with flowers are very popular with my customers,” Sarah explained. “I’m forever looking through botany books in search of new ones.”
“This is where you always work?” Elaine asked. She thought of her own studio with its long-scrubbed worktable and carefully designed cabinets, the drawers for tools and pigments, the files and work sheets spread on easily accessible shelves.
“It’s not bad.” Sarah had shrugged. “The drawing board is collapsible and I simply store it under the kitchen table when I’m not working. And this box holds everything—colors, rulers, shears. We’re going to add another room now that Denis has transferred the money.” She had blushed and fallen silent. The money, of course, was the small inheritance Neil had left each of his children. It pained Sarah that her father’s death would make her new ease possible.
Elaine had wanted to reassure her that it was all right to speak of Neil’s legacy. It would have pleased him to know that it was being put to good use. She wanted to tell Sarah that she would be glad to make additional funds available, but she said nothing. This was, after all, her first day in Jerusalem. It was too soon to rush in with offers and suggestions that might not be welcome. She was a guest in her daughter’s world. She would have to tread carefully.
Sarah came out to the balcony and pressed her lips to Yuval’s forehead.
“He’s cool enough,” she said. “I thought he felt a little warm this morning. He catches cold so easily.”
“I’ve read that children in day care seem to catch colds from each other,” Elaine said and immediately regretted her words.
Sarah’s color rose.
“Mom. Please.”
Elaine recognized the edge in her daughter’s voice. Lisa, of course, would have been less restrained.
“Sorry.”
She smiled apologetically and Sarah put her hand on her shoulder in forgiveness.
Elaine and Sarah went into the city that afternoon, leaving Yuval at Ruth’s. Sarah was relieved to note that her mother approved of plump, florid-faced Ruth, whose bright head kerchief was always askew and who spoke in gentle, musical tones, cuddling first one child and then another as she moved briskly from one miniature play station to another. Her garden was littered with battered playground equipment, and the children scurried up and down the faded red plastic slides and dashed in and out of a frog-shaped sandbox. Leah waved happily to them but did not leave the small table where she was concentrating on a puzzle, and Yuval gurgled happily when Michal, Ruth’s eldest daughter, carried him into the house for lunch.
“Leah’s small motor skills are definitely improving. Look at how well she’s doing with that puzzle,” Ruth said and her cultivated British accent surprised Elaine. “Where are you and your mum off to?”
“I want her to see Machane Yehuda. Mom’s a gourmet cook and I wanted her to pick out the fruits and vegetables. She makes the most terrific soups.”
“I hope you’ll come for dinner and taste them,” Elaine said.
It occurred to her that she had not cooked a soup since before Neil had died. Recipes flooded her mind. Potato and leek. Zucchini and pepper. Too sophisticated for Sarah’s children? Perhaps just a simple vegetable and noodle soup to begin with. Newly invigorated, she smiled at Ruth.
“I even know how to make a trifle,” she said and Ruth laughed and bent to comfort a crying toddler.
“I’ll be delighted to sample your soup and your trifle,” she said.
“Was Ruth born in England?” Elaine asked Sarah as they boarded the intercity bus, automatically taking seats near the rear exit. It was safest, Sarah had explained casually, as she paid their fare and Elaine had asked no questions. Suicide bombings on buses had grown rarer but they had not ceased.
“Born and raised in England. Her father’s an Anglican minister in the Midlands. You don’t get more English than that. Her mother, I think, was born in Germany. Ruth—actually she was called Juliet then, Ruth is the name that’s often given to a convert—came to Israel on a jaunt when she finished her doctorate in early childhood education in Bristol and just never went back,” Sarah replied.
“I suppose some well-meaning Hasidic man approached her at the Western Wall, invited her home for a Sabbath meal and sealed her fate,” Elaine said dryly.
“Actually it was Ruth who became interested in Judaism on her own,” Sarah replied, struggling to keep her irritation under control. “She volunteered to work on a religious kibbutz. She told me once that she felt that because she was part German, she had an obligation to do something for the Jewish people. But, of course, it went beyond that. She was impressed by the orthodox lifestyle. She began to read on her own and then she took some courses. Eventually, she came to Jerusalem and enrolled in a seminar.”
“And then she met a handsome religious man and decided to convert,” Elaine guessed. She stared out the bus window, moved anew by the gentle hills of Jerusalem, the olive trees that crouched low to the ground and the cypresses that arched skyward. She felt her own sp
irit soar and understood her daughter’s love for the beautiful city she called home.
“No.” Sarah smiled, oddly pleased that Elaine had guessed wrongly. “Ruth decided to convert before she ever met Avi. The rabbis actually tried to dissuade her. They refused her request three times. That’s in accordance with tradition. The rabbis want to be assured of the potential convert’s conviction and so they reject the petition again and again. Ruth was able to give them that assurance and she passed every test they gave her. I think she knows more about Judaism than I do. In any case she met Avi two years after her conversion—she organized an educational program for children with cancer at Hadassah Hospital and Avi, who had been wounded in Lebanon, was doing rehab there and they met in the cafeteria. He wasn’t even religious but that changed when he met Ruth. Anyway, they’ve been married for years, they have a great family and our community is lucky to have them. I can’t imagine my life without Ruth’s day-care center.”
“And her father, the reverend…the minister, and her mother, they accepted her decision?” Elaine asked.
“No. They were hurt, angry. They’re still hurt and angry. But they’re honest about it. They don’t pretend that they approve.” Sarah spoke slowly, softly, but she stared straight ahead, evading her mother’s eyes.
“How fortunate for Ruth,” Elaine said bitterly.
“This is our stop.” Sarah rose and touched her mother’s arm, a mute gesture of apology. The words she had spoken were sour in her mouth.
The bus lumbered to a halt on a narrow street lined with shops and outside stalls. Sarah and Elaine made their way into the market and joined the throng of shoppers who hurried from stand to stand, filling their string bags with shimmering produce. Young mothers wheeled overflowing shopping carts with one hand and balanced strollers with the other as they called to each other in a mélange of languages and gestured warningly to their laughing children. Bareheaded university students examined fruits and vegetables and stuffed their purchases into backpacks already laden with books. Small boys, earlocks curling about thin pale faces, trailed after their parents; men in the heavy black caftans reminiscent of medieval Polish aristocracy, broad-brimmed Borsalinos perched on their heads, hurried past. Bewigged women whose long skirts fell to their ankles haggled with vendors, ignoring young women in miniskirts. Girls dashed past them, clutching the hands of smaller brothers and sisters, hugging plastic sacks of milk and bundles of sesame-encrusted rolls wrapped in white paper. Twin girls, dressed alike in long-sleeved gingham dresses and white stockings, their dark curly hair held in place with white plastic headbands, linked hands and trailed their very pregnant mother who wore a dress fashioned from the very same gingham.
Elaine was reminded of Sarah and Lisa as small girls. She had, on principle, never dressed them alike but she remembered that they had both fallen in love with the same pink sweater although Lisa had chosen to wear it with a pleated navy skirt and Sarah had worn it only with jeans, her luxuriant chestnut-colored ponytail caught up in a matching pink ribbon. She wondered if Sarah ever thought of the girl she had been, if she remembered that pink sweater, if she ever yearned for the life that might have been hers. But Sarah, walking with the graceful gait unique to pregnant women, smiled as she waved to one friend and then another. She lifted her face to the sun’s brightness and delicately inhaled the scent of the thyme that blossomed on the hillsides of Judea and permeated the cool air.
She’s happy, Elaine thought in wonderment and her heart soared.
She watched the antics of a group of high school youngsters, happily munching pittot stuffed with felafel, who incurred the wrath of stall keepers as they plucked olives and pickles from tall barrels and then ran away. Jolted from her mood and newly energized, she paused to study the mounds of produce, the pyramids of lemons and oranges, the snow-white cauliflowers and the varicolored mushrooms in huge straw baskets.
The colors delighted her.
“I wish I had thought to bring my sketch pad,” she told Sarah who immediately plunged into her oversize burlap purse and handed her a drawing pencil and a pad.
“I always get ideas for fabric designs here,” she said and they smiled at each other in mutual recognition.
They shared the artist’s eye, the appreciation of shape and color, the urge to capture elusive impressions on paper and canvas, on clay and tile. Sarah remembered suddenly that the happiest hours of her girlhood had been spent in Elaine’s studio when she had created her designs with quiet absorption as her mother shaped her ceramics and mixed her glazes. Those were times of precious togetherness, of an intimacy that excluded the rest of the family. She had felt then that a special bond had been forged between them and she wondered wistfully if that sadly frayed bond could be fortified during her mother’s visit to Jerusalem.
She glanced down at the stiff white page of her sketch pad which Elaine had so swiftly covered and was pleased to see a dancing pattern of small ovoid eggplants interspersed with long thin stalks of celery.
Smiling, she filled a plastic bag with the gleaming purple and pale-white eggplants and added two bunches of celery, selecting those of the brightest green and the thickest crowns of leaves.
“Your drawing is perfect for the new line of aprons I’m planning,” she told her mother. “We can work on the colors and then turn the vegetables into a ratatouille. We’ll be creative and economical. And gastronomical, too. Is there such a word?”
Elaine’s responsive laughter was sweet and full-throated. It was, she realized, the first time she had laughed since Neil’s death. She stood very still, her pencil poised in midair, her heart newly lightened.
“Gastronomical will be our word,” she told Sarah as they walked on, wandering from stand to stand. They filled their string bags with ruby-red tomatoes, shimmering orange-and-yellow peppers, bright green cucumbers and tender spinach leaves that floated through their fingers like the wings of butterflies as they scooped them out of the huge crates still damp with morning dew.
At last they exited the market and turned onto Jaffa Road where they settled into a small café for a quick lunch.
“I like your market,” Elaine said.
“I love shopping there,” Sarah agreed. “There’s so much excitement, so much color. I love picking up an orange that still has a leaf clinging to the stem, or a clump of beets with soil on the roots. It’s as though everything I touch connects me to the land.” And to God, she thought but did not utter the words.
“As opposed to the sterile supermarkets of Westchester,” Elaine said. “I apologize for your deprived childhood.”
“Mom, I wasn’t making comparisons,” Sarah protested.
“Of course, I know that. I suppose I’m just trying to understand, Sarah.”
“Understand what?” Sarah added honey to her mint tea and stared moodily into the cup.
“Understand the way you live, the way you think.”
“And the way I believe.”
“That, too,” Elaine said and she reached across the table and touched her daughter’s hand as the sounds of a flute played by a street musician trilled through the small café. She reached into her purse and dropped a few coins into the cup he held out to her.
Sarah smiled and added coins of her own.
“Our beliefs aren’t that different, Mom,” she said. “We both believe in acts of loving kindness.”
“Loving kindness.” Elaine spoke the words softly, suffused with a new calm, a new contentment.
seven
Elaine’s days in Jerusalem fell into a set routine. She cooked. She made soups and casseroles. She created stews and taught seven-year-old Leora how to shape the dough for the mini rolls Sarah loved. Quiet Leora, with her large dark eyes and the thick curling chestnut-colored hair that she had inherited from her mother, delighted her. She asked about Elaine’s work and laughed when Elaine shaped the dough as she might shape a malleable chunk of clay. In charmingly accented English, Leora peppered her grandmother with questions about life in
the States, about Sarah’s childhood, about the grandfather she had hardly known. She would lay claim to her mother’s past.
“Tell me about Aunt Lisa. Ima was so lucky to have a twin. There are two girls in my class who are twins—Noga and Nurit. I wish I had a twin.”
“Was Saba Neil handsome? I think my abba is handsome.”
“Tell me about Uncle Peter and Uncle Denis. Did they tease their sisters the way Ephraim teases me?”
Elaine found herself making up stories, charming Leora with tales of trips that had never been taken, a tree house that had never been built, melding them effortlessly with actual memories of the family’s life in their sprawling Westchester home. She chided herself for those untruths, for those fanciful embellishments, but it pleased her that she was pleasing Leora.
Yes, she told her granddaughter, Neil had been handsome but more important than that he had been good. Memories of his goodness, of the goodness of their vanished life together, choked her and she turned away so that Leora would not be frightened by her gathering tears.
She was swept up in the frenetic activity of Sarah’s home. Women dashed in and out to deliver completed garments, to pick up additional fabric, to borrow a cup of sugar, to deliver a freshly baked cake or return a saucepan. Small children were left for an hour, two hours, sometimes for an afternoon that stretched into evening because of some emergency. The phone rang with news of births and deaths, weddings and funerals. Sarah prepared meals for families in mourning, desserts for engagement celebrations, dashing from stove to drawing board, stirring a soup while taking an order on the phone.
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