Claudette rang the Tel Aviv number Eyal had scrawled next to the phone. The hotel clerk informed her that Eyal had checked out very early, which meant he could be back on the kibbutz. She dialed his home and the office, but all she got were the answering machines. She went to look for him in the dining hall.
The hall was noisy with breakfasters: factory workers in green jumpsuits stood in the food line, women chatted by the coffee urns, children raced to their chairs. Claudette walked down the centermost aisle, scanning the long tables for Eyal. All the faces were familiar to her now. She raised her hand at Dana from the laundry house, but she didn’t wave back, even though her gaze followed her.
More and more eyes seemed to fix on her, tables hushing as she passed. Was that in her head? It had to be. A layover from years of believing people should regard her with revulsion. But why get that sensation now, so powerfully? Was it from sneaking Ziva’s dead body across the kibbutz? No one was staring, she told herself. It isn’t true. It isn’t true.
After a few more steps, she had to acknowledge that it was true. The dining hall had silenced, and everyone’s focus was on her. Claudette stopped and turned around in confusion.
“You pervert! You sick piece of shit!”
An obese woman marched toward her, the silver roots of her long, thin hair gradating to dark brown tips.
“He’s just a boy!” She stood before Claudette, lips quivering, eyes glossy. “Who cannot see. Or hear. And you . . . you come from wherever it is you come from and take advantage of him? A boy wounded in a terrorist attack!”
Claudette understood this was Ofir’s mother. And she felt sorry for her. The woman had so many reasons to be angry at the world, but Claudette didn’t believe she should be one of them.
“I didn’t take advantage of your son. We love each other.”
“Love each other?” The woman raised her hands as if to strangle Claudette and held them there, face turning an alarming red. “You’re a thirty-something-year-old woman! He’s a seventeen-year-old boy!”
The diners gawked, forks hovering over their oatmeal and eggs. Were any of them watching in terror, knowing it could be them standing where she was, being publicly shamed for something in their private lives? It didn’t matter. Even if everybody were gaping at her with pure disgust, she no longer believed she was a monster.
“Yes, love.”
Ofir’s mother pointed at the back door, where Claudette had stood listening to Ofir playing the piano. “Go! Go pack your bags. Before I kill you!”
No one rose to object, not Dana or the ponytailed cook or the cashier from the store. With everyone’s eyes on her, Claudette walked toward the door. As she pulled it open, the dining hall filled again with chatter and the clinking of utensils against plates.
Back in her room, Claudette stepped over Ulya’s T-shirts to reach her bed, where she pulled out her backpack. Unzipping the bag, she worried that she wasn’t going to get to say goodbye to Ofir. Could she go to his room? She had almost no possessions to pack, just some clothes and the white sundress. Before packing Tropical Sunrise, she considered the tube in her hand, thinking how strange it would be the next time she saw it, in Montreal. After zipping the bag closed, she began taking off the kibbutz work clothes.
Dressed again in the knee-length brown skirt and white button-down she wore the day she arrived on the kibbutz, she lifted Christina the Astonishing off the dresser. What should she do with the necklace? She wasn’t angry with the patron saint of the mentally ill; she just didn’t think she was her saint. She stowed the necklace in her skirt pocket.
“I’m coming with you.”
She turned and saw Ofir in the factory worker’s green jumpsuit. She had forgotten that he was starting work today. He followed her eyes and looked down at his overalls. “Exactly! I don’t want to work in the fucking factory. I’m going to leave the kibbutz some day, so it might as well be now. With you.”
Having only met at night, they’d never seen each other in bright daylight, at least not alone and not this close. At most they had glimpsed one another across the lawn or dining hall. The daylight brightened Ofir’s gray eyes, accentuating the misshapen pupil, and highlighted the red shave bumps riddling his boyish skin. Did she appear as old in the sunshine as he did young?
“How can you come with me? I don’t even know where I’m going.”
“I’ll go to Tel Aviv right now and get a visa to Canada.”
“Do you have money for a plane ticket?”
He didn’t. And Ofir knew he had no way of getting it today. He couldn’t ask his mother or the kibbutz. In a year, when they divided up the kibbutz’s assets, he would have some private money, enough to get by for a while in Montreal. He strode forward and grabbed Claudette’s hands. “Maybe I can’t go with you today, but I’ll come as soon as I can. Will you wait for me?”
Claudette lowered her head, stared down at his work boots.
He squeezed her hands. “One year. I know it sounds like a long time, but will you?”
A year didn’t sound like a long time to her. She could easily wait. But in a year, Ofir would be almost nineteen years old and wouldn’t—shouldn’t—want to move into a small apartment with a woman entering her middle years. For him, a year was a long time, long enough to fall in love with someone else. Or maybe find a passion to replace music. By the spring he could be dreaming again of great universities in London and New York. She wanted that for him.
“Please. Say you’ll wait.”
Claudette raised her head and met his pleading eyes. “I don’t think you’re going to come in a year. And I don’t want to pretend that I do. We need to say a proper goodbye.”
“Why? What’s so crazy about me coming in a year?”
“Please, Ofir, I need you to hear me. I need you to know this time with you . . . it will stay with me for the rest of my life. I’ve never been happier. I may never be that happy again.”
Ofir blinked back the tears. He didn’t want to accept that they would never be together again. Even though he knew that she was right, had always known, on some level, that they couldn’t be together for long.
He took a deep breath and nodded, reluctantly. “I don’t know what would have happened to me after the bombing if you hadn’t been here.”
Claudette picked up the backpack, and Ofir, wiping the tears from his cheeks, took it from her. They walked outside, where the dawn had fulfilled its promise to turn into a pretty autumn day. Under the ripe red fruits of the pomegranate tree, Golda lay in the grass, licking her paws. Claudette wondered where Adam was and hoped he was all right. She took Ofir’s hand, and they walked in silence up the steppingstones onto the main road.
When they reached the gate, she said, “Let’s separate here.”
The guard on duty, a young woman somewhere between their two ages, held up the hardcover she was reading as if to give them privacy.
Ofir leaned in and kissed Claudette for the last time. It wasn’t a peck, nor a drawn-out kiss. Their lips already felt unfamiliar to one another, as if they both knew this wasn’t their real last kiss, that their real last kiss had been the one they didn’t know was their last.
Claudette pulled away and, taking in Ofir’s young, serious face for the last time, fought a powerful urge to do something to keep him safe: kiss him three more times to make it an even number, walk to the bus stop without stepping on a crack, say “Ofir” ten times. It isn’t true, it isn’t true. She couldn’t do anything about the rest of his life. She could only hope that God would watch over him.
Claudette started down the road. After a few steps, she looked back. Ofir still stood under the rusted wrought-iron sign that arched over the entrance. Fields of Splendor. He raised a hand. She did the same and continued on.
Four and half months ago, when she made her way from the bus stop to the kibbutz gate, she saw nothing. She had walked up the hill with her head down, making sure not to step on the cracks in the asphalt, going over and over why she had awoke
n on the plane with her thigh pressed against the man beside her. Now she noticed the horses swishing their majestic tails, heard the shouts of children in a nearby schoolyard, smelled the resinous eucalyptuses lining the side of the road. A motorcycle zipped past, sun glinting on its handlebars.
She remembered how she had panicked in the Sea of Galilee while Ofir’s “You Are Here” cigarette tip glowed on the dark shore, how much she dreaded the moment passing. Now she saw God’s hand more clearly. Impermanence was painful, almost unbearable, but that was how He made everything precious.
She glanced behind her once more and found Ofir still standing by the gate in his factory overalls, only she was too far away to make out his face anymore. Beside him the sun shone through the banner flapping against the chain-wire fence: A STRONG PEOPLE MAKES PEACE.
As she neared the end of the road, she spotted legs sticking out of the willow herbs. Recognizing the blue high-top sneakers, she jogged to where Adam lay on the ground, cheek pressed against the yellow grass, eyes slits in a swollen face, hand clutching the neck of a beer bottle.
She shook his shoulder. “Adam, Adam.”
Adam half opened his eyes and saw Claudette’s face looking down at him, her oak-brown eyes, the willow herbs blurry behind her. He was disappointed to still be able to see. He hadn’t drunk enough.
He slurred, “Leave me on the tracks.”
Claudette felt a swell of sadness for Adam. She feared he would never find the peace she had found this summer. She pulled the necklace from her pocket and draped it over his head.
At the bus stop, Claudette sat inside the cement shelter, surrounded by graffiti—declarations of undying love, lewd sketches, anarchy signs, peace signs, four-letter words, racist slurs, and the simple pronouncements that so-and-so was here in such-and-such a year. She looked up the hill, but she could no longer see the kibbutz gate.
New York City, 2014
Metal scaffolding shaded the engagement rings in the window of Weisberg’s Gold and Diamonds. Inside the store, Isaac scrolled through Facebook on his iPad, though he knew he should be avoiding his newsfeed now more than ever with the war in Gaza. And yet, whenever he was about to polish the watches or revisit the Q2 spreadsheet, there he’d be again, scouring his newsfeed the way the OTB shickers would scan their inky booklets for that lucky horse. Only what did he have to win?
He paused on an Instagram of blueberry pancakes dusted with confectioner’s sugar, a yellowing filter meant to give the still unconsumed pancakes the magic of nostalgia. The photo was posted by a woman he went on one date with three years ago when he was still dating, a recent divorcée, a failed actress of about forty, who cracked him up with her impersonation of her squeaky-voiced therapist. When he sent her an e-mail the following day, inviting her to see an off-Broadway play, she had said no, thank you, she didn’t think they had that je ne sais quoi, and then immediately sent him a Facebook friend request. Why he had paid witness to everything this woman had eaten for the last three years was a mystery. She had stopped posting pictures of herself, and he wondered if she no longer believed she was much to look at. Above the pancakes was written: Best. Dinner. Ever. Life is good!
The door chimed, and Isaac shut off his iPad and jumped to his feet, but it was only the owner of the store next door.
“Oh, hi, Patni.”
“You look sad to see me, Weisberg.” Patni smiled, well aware no one was ever sad to see him. He had that bonhomie that made people want to be around him, even when he was driving a hard bargain, which he always did.
“I thought you were my first customer of the day.”
Patni, the first Indian to open a store on the block, was now one of a handful. No doubt they were going the way of Antwerp. When Isaac took over the store after his father’s “accident,” as his mother and sisters called it (though what was accidental about getting pistol-whipped in the head, he didn’t know), the gemstone industry was run by Jews, as it had been for a millennium. But in the twenty years since, that reign had come to an end. Seventy-five percent of the diamond traders in Antwerp’s Square Mile, the diamond capital of the world, were now Indian. Cafeterias served kosher curries, and Indians sealed deals with the traditional handshake and Yiddish benediction mazel und broche—luck and blessing. His father wouldn’t have believed it.
Patni rested his hand on the glass counter, a thick gold ring on his pinky finger.
“Our Internet is down. I was hoping we could jump on your Wi-Fi. Only for an hour or so. Just until those Verizon bastards get here.”
“Of course. No problem.”
Isaac jotted the password—iwouldprefernotto—onto a scrap of paper, one of the scraps kept on the counter for writing out calculations for the customer: the price if he knocked off fifteen percent, what would happen if they bought two, this was his final offer. He handed it to Patni.
“This is a strange password, Weisberg. But very good. Thank you.”
Patni headed out, a bloom of sweat on the back of his white shirt. He paused at the door. “You are coming to my daughter’s wedding?”
“Of course.”
“You need to remarry, Weisberg. You are not too old. Find a young pretty thing; that will wake you up.”
Thing, Isaac thought as Patni walked into the sunshine. Calling a woman a “thing” was so far from what he would have heard from his colleagues at the community college. How he missed that tatty office and the conversations they would have in it, the heated debates about Tolstoy’s moralism while eating Thai delivery, though in the end he had found intellectual coercion there too. Sure, it was nowhere near as restrictive as what he’d grown up with, but there were still party lines to walk or risk being ostracized, a conformity that was surprisingly scary to buck. At least his yeshiva had never claimed to be a bastion of free thought.
He returned to Facebook. Someone he hadn’t seen in thirty years wanted to play FarmVille. ISIS takes over Christian village in Iraq. This cute dog has a chicken for a best friend. His father never sat around reading a newspaper. He couldn’t; someone was constantly coming through the door. Who would have thought people would ever buy engagement rings on the Internet? Everything happened out of sight now, the trading, the cutting. Instead of old Jews he’d known his whole life cutting the gems right here on the block, demanding up to $300 a carat for their artistry, now most stones were cut for five bucks a carat in Gujarat. Patni had offered to find him a good factory there, but Isaac couldn’t do it. How could he trust rubies and diamonds to people he’d never met on the other side of the world? In this business, it’s trust, trust, trust: that was his father’s mantra. No deals with anyone you don’t know and can’t trust. Ironic, considering how well he knew that junkie. “A drug addict you could smell a mile away,” was how his mother described him.
His pocket buzzed. He pulled out the phone and saw a blue text bubble from his daughter Sam: R u coming this wknd.
Yes, he typed, worried that she secretly hoped he wasn’t coming. She was twelve, budding breasts, teeth no longer too big for her face, maybe she didn’t want her old man taking up her free time. What could he add that was playful? Prepare for some fun.
Wow, that was lame. He watched the ellipsis, the promise that she was writing back.
Ok but I’m going to the mall and a bday party on Sat.
So he’d been right. She wasn’t looking forward to seeing him. Now what? Should he take a three-hour train out to western New Jersey and sleep in a hotel all for a breakfast on Sunday at the Country Griddle? His older daughter, Clara, now in college, must have withdrawn at this age, but he never noticed, probably because he still lived with them and was too busy fighting with their mother. And because he still had baby Sam, who seemed so far away from growing up.
All right, but Dave Sunday . . . Oh, farkakte spell-check! He hurried to erase Dave. Now his response was taking too long, making his words seem less casual and cool with it all. All right, but save Sunday for me, ok? Seeing how that could sound a little angry, he t
acked on a smiley face.
When no ellipsis appeared, he looked from the iPhone to the shop, where he had been forced at Sam’s age to spend the little free time he had between studying and more studying helping his father. The shop looked much the same then, only instead of a mirror covering the opposite wall, there had been fake wood paneling. His sisters never had to help out, never had to learn the ropes; the store obviously wasn’t going to them one day. While he would arrange the rings in the window display, on the other side of the glass, boys no older than him would walk by in bell-bottoms and trucker hats, chewing gum and laughing, heading off to who knew what adventure. Maybe the Ziegfeld. That became his dream, to visit the palatial cinema only a few blocks away. He could still picture all the movie posters from those days pasted on the subway station walls: Mean Streets, The Exorcist, American Graffiti. It would be years before he dared to sneak into a movie, but he soon started checking out books from the library and hiding them behind his bedroom dresser. After that first book—Lord of the Flies, recommended by an amused librarian—he knew he could never live without trayf books again.
“Binghamton? What is this Binghamton?” his father said when he finally told him he was leaving it all. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his evening snack, always one poppy-seed rugelach and a cup of decaf. He had to have been fifty-three years old at the time, exactly the age Isaac was today, the short payess tucked behind his ears more salt than pepper.
“It’s a college upstate, Papa. Not far from the city.”
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