She bought the cake with chocolate mousse icing for Michal and held the white box carefully on the crowded bus that carried her back to Ramat Chessed.
Order had been restored to Sarah’s kitchen. Ephraim and Moshe sat together at the dining room table, Moshe patiently helping his son with his arithmetic homework. Leora played on the floor with Leah and Yuval, the baby, slept peacefully in his carriage. Sarah proudly showed her a pile of brightly patterned robes, newly pressed and ready to be delivered. Elaine smiled.
“Your work is beautiful,” she said softly and fingered first one garment and then another.
It was not, after all, such an improbable life that her daughter had chosen. There was peace and purpose in this home. Love canopied the family. Work and study were accomplished. She took Sarah’s hand and felt the loving pressure of her daughter’s fingers interlaced with her own. Wordlessly, they acknowledged that a line had been crossed, a new recognition achieved.
Michal’s farewell dinner was festive. Ruth had reclaimed her house and transformed it from a day-care center into a home, toys and play tables banished to the balconies, high chairs lined up in the garden. Pots of early blooming red anemones, still fresh with the dew of the Galilee, blazed on every table and the fragrance of lamb stew simmering in a marinade of thyme and wine mingled with the aroma of freshly baked pitta breads. Each new arrival brought a covered dish, each dish tasting of vanished kitchens in distant lands. Hungarian goulash, a tagine of steamed chicken and eggplant, chopped salads of tomato and cucumber blanketed with glittering sprigs of parsley.
Beautiful Michal, her rose-gold hair the color of the tendrils that escaped from Ruth’s ritual head covering floating about her shoulders, wore a linen dress of the palest blue. She drifted through the room trailed by her younger siblings, with handsome Gideon, proud and impressive in his officer’s uniform, never far from her side. Elaine had been introduced to his own kibbutznik parents and to his grandparents, a diminutive white-haired couple, their faces gaunt, their bodies stooped.
“They are holocaust survivors,” Sarah had whispered to her.
Elaine had thought of Ruth’s mother, the German woman who had married the English minister. Here then, in this Jerusalem living room, history had come full circle and, perhaps, recompense of a kind was realized. Could this be what Ruth had meant when she spoke of giving back? The question teased but she knew she would find no answer to it.
Elaine looked at Avi, carefully maneuvering his way from group to group, the affable host pausing at each table, smiling, always smiling, holding his cane too lightly, his unseeing eyes concealed by the dark glasses he always wore. She supposed that he, and perhaps Moshe and Sarah as well, would call it the hand of God. Neil would probably have thought of it as a kind of psycho-historical transference. She herself simply thought that Michal and Gideon were a wonderful young couple whose beauty and strength radiated throughout this room filled with friends and relatives who had gathered to wish them well.
“I love you, Michal,” small Leora said.
“I love you too, Leora,” Michal replied gravely. She had worked in her mother’s day-care center long enough to learn that the words of small children must be accepted with great seriousness.
Leora turned to Elaine.
“And I love you too, Savta. Will you stay with us forever and ever?”
Sarah, watching them, cradled Yuval with one arm and rested the other on the rise of her pregnancy. The child she carried, the child she would name for her father, kicked gently as she looked first at her daughter and then at her mother. Moshe touched her shoulder. They waited for Elaine’s answer to the question they themselves had not dared to ask.
“Forever is a very long time, Leora,” Elaine said at last. “But we’ll see.”
And then they all turned their attention to Avi and Ruth who stood together in the center of the room, their glasses held high.
“We wish our daughter, Michal, great happiness in this brave new adventure,” Avi said. “L’Chaim. To life.”
“L’Chaim,” Ruth repeated and the single word resonated throughout the room.
Elaine too lifted her glass to her lips. The wine was too sweet and too warm but she drank it with pleasure and then bent to kiss Leora’s forehead.
The night before the Passover seder Sarah’s home was at last in readiness. The windows sparkled, the ceramic floors were spotless, every surface had been cleared and dusted. Moshe had emptied his large library and had shaken every book to dislodge any lurking crumbs and handed them one by one to Leora and Ephraim who carefully wiped each volume before returning it to newly polished shelves. Elaine had helped Sarah carry the carpets and draperies outside where they were beaten and spread out to air in the sharp cleansing light of the Judean sun. All that week the balconies of Ramat Chessed had been a riot of color as bedspreads fluttered in the gentle breeze and brightly colored pillows, newly washed and still damp, formed small islands on lawns of tender young grass. The Passover silverware had been polished, the holiday dishes placed on the shelves, and the food and groceries neatly stacked in cabinet and refrigerator.
Once, during that week, Elaine had escaped the frenetic activity of the household and taken the bus into Jerusalem. Seated in the crowded café of the Anna Ticho Museum, nursing a cup of coffee which she really did not want, she was approached by a well-dressed American woman who asked diffidently if she might share the table. She had nodded her assent. The woman set her tray down and removed her designer sunglasses. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face very pale. She was from Oregon, she told Elaine, on a visit to her son and daughter-in-law who lived on Har Nof, an extremely orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood. She had planned to spend Passover with them but she had decided to leave before the holiday.
“I can’t bear their life,” she had said. “I don’t speak their language. I hate their narrowness. My son is a stranger to me. How did my Joey, the boy whose field hockey uniform I washed and ironed, whose college applications I drove to the post office at midnight become a bearded man who calls himself Yosef, who mumbles prayers when he washes his hands, when he eats a piece of bread, when he sips a glass of wine? He went to Brown, my Joey. He played the guitar. He got into Harvard Law and now he sits all day and studies in a yeshiva. I feel, God help me, as though I have buried my only child. My husband was right not to come with me.”
Tears had streaked her face. She clenched her fists, her well-manicured nails cutting into the soft flesh of her palms.
“Perhaps if you tried to understand him, if you tried to understand the life he has chosen it would be easier for you,” Elaine had said gently as she rose to leave.
She had no words to assuage the woman’s grief, to compensate her for a loss that was, after all, real and enduring. She had wondered, as she traveled back to Ramat Chessed on the bus, why she had not told the mother whose son Joey had become Yosef, about her daughter Sandy who now called herself Sarah. She thrust the thought from her mind and stopped at Ruth’s house to pick up Leah and Yuval. Sarah was busy enough.
As the holiday drew nearer the women of the community rushed from household tasks to food markets, their faces flushed, their arms always laden, often juggling a string bag overflowing with fruits and vegetables and a sleeping infant. The men sped away in their cars and returned with cases of eggs and cartons bloodied by meat and chicken which were swiftly carried into kitchens and emptied into refrigerators that had been scrubbed clean, each shelf newly lined. Schoolchildren raced importantly up and down the streets in earnest pursuit of forgotten ingredients for a cake, an elusive spice for a soup. They popped in and out of Sarah’s kitchen. “My mother wants to know if you have nutmeg.” “Sage.” “Dill.” And Sarah had turned away from her worktable to rummage in her cabinets and sent the small messengers home clutching the fragrant packets.
The seamstresses had dashed in to deliver the completed robes and they waited shyly as Sarah examined each one before handing them the money due them. Their faces brighte
ned with relief as they counted the notes. Their earnings, Elaine knew, would be spent on new holiday clothing and shoes for their children. Sarah’s enterprise sustained many families besides her own.
Moshe and Sarah placed the completed robes, each one wrapped in tissue paper, in a large carton which he would deliver the next day to waiting customers in the north. The widow in Cfar Saba had called several times and Sarah had repeatedly calmed her and assured her that the robes would arrive early in the afternoon on the day of the seder. She did not remind her that she had only accepted the last-minute order as a favor.
“Why make her feel bad?” she had asked her mother.
“I didn’t know that I had given birth to a saint,” Elaine had retorted and, seeing the color rise in Sarah’s cheeks she had immediately regretted her words. “But isn’t Moshe cutting it rather close—driving north to make the deliveries and then rushing back to be in time for the seder?” she asked, her concern an apology of sorts.
“No. I’ll leave before dawn,” Moshe said. “I’ll be in Cfar Saba by lunch and home well before evening. That’s one of the advantages of living in a small country.”
“You’ll be careful, Moshe?” Sarah’s voice trembled.
There had been a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv café days earlier and a drive-by shooting only hours later.
“I’ll be careful. I’ll take the tunnel road. And Ruth asked me to pick up Michal and Gideon. Michal’s base is just kilometers away from Cfar Saba and she has leave for the holiday. So I’ll be well protected by two soldiers of Israel.”
He laughed and Sarah smiled. It was odd to think that Michal, whom she had known from babyhood, whose hair she had plaited, was now a soldier who carried a rifle as casually as she herself had once carried a book bag.
“All right. I’ll get the children and we’ll do the search for chametz.”
Elaine and Neil, who had always hosted a seder, even using special dishes and cutlery, had never observed the prescribed ritual of searching for any remaining crumb of leavened bread but Sarah and Moshe, of course, would not ignore it. Elaine had watched Moshe conceal a crust of bread in a bit of newspaper and place it behind counters and into corners. She watched now as Leora and Ephraim followed their father while Leah toddled after them on her chubby little legs. Sarah carried Yuval, resting him on the shelf of her pregnant abdomen. She was pale with exhaustion and yet her eyes were soft and when Moshe lit a candle her face glowed in its gentle radiance. Holding a feather and a wooden spoon, he made his way through the house, brushing the feather into corners and across surfaces and feigning surprise at the discovery of crumbs. He brushed them onto his spoon and, chanting the ancient Aramaic prayer, he used the candle to set them aflame, then tossed the scorched remnants from the kitchen balcony into the cool night air. Smiling, he turned to his family.
“We are blessed,” he said. “Our home is now holy and ready for the holiday, Baruch HaShem, blessed be God.”
“Baruch HaShem,” they responded solemnly.
Elaine remained silent. Suffused with an inexplicable melancholy she took Leora’s hand in her own.
“Shall I read to you before you go to sleep, Leora?” she asked and the child nodded sleepily.
“A busy day tomorrow,” Sarah warned. “Still a lot of cooking to be done.”
“Yes,” Elaine said. “I know.”
She knew, too, as she lay awake that night, that the web of silken sadness in which she was suddenly entangled was woven of loss and denial. It had been beautiful to watch the children trail after their father, enchanted by the glow of his candle, the devotion of his prayer, but she herself had been a spectator, rather than a participant. She had felt herself at an emotional remove. She acknowledged the beauty of Sarah’s world but she could not lay claim to it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Perhaps. The word lingered, its very uncertainty encouraging. Possibilities abounded. Smiling, she fell asleep.
Moshe was already gone when she awakened. He had left hours earlier, Sarah told her, crawling out of bed before dawn and driving northward into the darkness. She herself had already begun the cooking for the festive seder meal and Elaine rushed to help her. Together they cut up vegetables to be plunged into the huge pot of boiling water where a chicken was already simmering. Sarah whipped egg whites and Elaine shaped matzoh balls, sculpting them as carefully as she shaped the damp clumps of clay in her studio. Leora dashed in and begged to be allowed to help. Sarah showed her how to chop the walnuts and apples for the seder plate. Elaine looked at her daughter and granddaughter, their faces flushed, their brows damp. She herself hurried to the oven, removed a golden potato pudding, thrust in a squash casserole. All sadness left her. This was a gift, she thought. Three generations cooking together in a kitchen flooded with sunlight.
This could be my world, she thought exultingly. I could make it my world. There was a range of possibilities. Her nocturnal thoughts asserted themselves in the radiant light of day.
The phone rang. Lisa calling to wish them a happy holiday.
“How are you doing, Mom?” Lisa asked.
“Fine. Great.” Elaine calculated the time difference. It was the middle of the night in Philadelphia but Lisa’s voice was determinedly upbeat. She and David were going to friends for the seder. She had planned to spend the holiday with Peter and his family in California but Lauren had seemed hesitant and Lisa herself was wildly busy overseeing a new clinic.
“What do you mean—Lauren seemed hesitant?” Elaine asked.
“I can’t say exactly. You know how she is. Her moods.”
“Yes. I know how she is, her moods.”
They were all uneasy with Lauren, the cool distant girl to whom Peter had become engaged during his senior year at UCLA. Elaine and Neil had thought him too young to make such a decision. They had found Lauren difficult to talk to, too status-conscious, too particular about the labels in her clothing, the size of her engagement ring. Elaine had crafted a pendant for her as a gift but Lauren had returned it.
“It’s not my style,” she had said and her words had wounded.
Neil had spoken to Peter about postponing the wedding.
“Neither of you have really lived yet,” he had said calmly, reasonably. “You’re both very young.”
But Peter would not be dissuaded and in the end Elaine and Neil had simply accepted the marriage, repeating to each other the familiar mantra—their children’s lives were their own. Peter was an adult and free to make his own decision.
They saw Peter and Lauren infrequently, visiting California when their grandchildren were born and now and again to celebrate a birthday. Peter’s own visits east were hasty and Lauren seldom accompanied him.
Disconcerted by Lisa’s call, Elaine called Peter later that day at his office. He was busy, he said. Lots of deals going down. Everything was fine. But when was she coming home from Israel?
“You have a couple of other kids, you know,” he said teasingly but she discerned an unfamiliar edge in his voice.
“Have you spoken to Peter?” she asked Denis who called just before sundown as Sarah put the finishing touches to the beautifully set seder table, arranging a bowl of yellow roses at either end.
“He’s fine,” Denis said and hesitated. “Really fine,” he added. “But I get the feeling that he’s a little tense, too much going on. The business. The kids. Lauren. You know.”
She did not know but there was no time to ask questions. Denis had to rush home. He and Andrew were hosting a seder, he explained. She did not ask him who their guests would be.
“Have a good holiday,” she said and hung up, although she kept her hand on the receiver.
The optimism she had felt earlier had evaporated, leaving her vaguely dispirited. The conversations with her children in America exhausted and disconcerted her. Wearily, she braided Leora’s hair, tied Ephraim’s shoelaces. Sarah, dressed for the seder in a pale blue, wide-sleeved dress that flowed in graceful folds over the rise of her pregnancy, her hair covered with a
matching kerchief, wandered out to the balcony and peered down the street.
“Moshe should have been home by now,” she said worriedly.
She tried his cell phone. There was no answer. She went to another window and again looked out at the road. It was all but empty of traffic at the preholiday hour. The purr of a single car could be heard in the distance but it faded into silence. Elaine shivered, picked Yuval up as though the warmth of the toddler’s body might vanquish the chill of her sudden fear.
“Wait for Abba outside,” Sarah told Leora and Ephraim who scurried out the door.
“I’ll see him first.”
“No, I’ll see him first.”
Sarah shook her head at their amiable bickering and turned the radio on. The program of Passover music was interrupted by the sonorous voice of the newscaster. Elaine did not understand the Hebrew but she recognized the sorrow in his voice and she held Yuval even closer. Sarah stood very still, all color drained from her face, her hands clasped.
“What is he saying?” Elaine asked.
“There’s been a terrorist attack on the tunnel road,” Sarah said, the words falling heavily from her lips.
“That’s the road…” Elaine did not complete the sentence but Sarah nodded.
“Yes. That’s the road that Moshe would be traveling on.”
“Oh, Sarah.”
Elaine moved toward her daughter but Sarah shook her head. She stood very straight, her hands resting on her abdomen, as though the life she carried offered protection against the incursion of death.
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