by Miryam Sivan
Zakhi managed a smile. “Say the word and you have a job with me, Ms. Toledo.” They watched the tiling crew carry boxes of bathroom tile into the house. Nebulous clouds like floats in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade drifted overhead. Forecast was for light rain. Isabel wouldn’t tell Zakhi this. She knew that if the house was not buttoned up soon, all hell would break loose. Damage to materials, repairs, threats, and recriminations. Tempers pushed off the charts. And Zakhi couldn’t close the house until most of the stone was in. Oh Sucrat, you who knew nothing must at least know this.
Zakhi dialed Sucrat. “Where the hell are you now? On your way?” Zakhi screamed. He paced back and forth. “Your guys showed up with stone for the front door saddle. They’re so young they can barely carry it. I don’t care if it’s your son or your brother. You need to be here doing the work and supervising others. You know how many trades are on hold because of you?” Zakhi listened for a moment and closed the phone.
“Maybe we’ll get together tomorrow?” Isabel smiled mischievously.
Zakhi nodded. He was too furious to talk. Isabel walked to her car and waved a quick good-bye.
As she drove to Uri’s school Isabel wondered if something else, something not related to the site, was a trip wire for Zakhi. Sure, the rains were coming and, sure, Sucrat was infuriating, but she had seen Zakhi handle other hard situations with aplomb. There was something in his eyes. Or in the way he was both focused and distracted simultaneously. Thinking about their interaction she realized he hadn’t really looked directly at her. He was holding something back.
Isabel parked and crossed the school playground. She entered the gymnasium carrying her family’s four gas mask kits by their long plastic straps. Three adult size, one toddler. She wanted to crawl under a tree and cry. Simply cry. Give up the work, the pressure, and all her responsibilities. The time had come, the big let-down, she was sure of it. The something Zakhi wasn’t telling her was this. How foolish to have become so accustomed to him. How ridiculous to need him when needing was not part of the program. Inside the gymnasium, behind two long folding tables, stacks of rectangular boxes with gas masks were arranged according to age. The largest group was for adults, twelve and up. A smaller section was for children, three to twelve. An even smaller one was for toddlers. And at the very end of the hall were large plastic tents for infants. She had one of those when Uri was born.
Last week Isabel received notice to bring the family’s gas masks to this ad hoc army depot in exchange for new ones. The filters, syringes, and sarin gas antidote were approaching their expiration dates. A long line of people moved slowly. Isabel stood in the back. She knew this gym well. Uri’s class had their special musical performances and assemblies here. And their regular sports classes moved in here when it rained. The walls were covered with brightly colored posters of photographs from school events. A yellow satin banner wished all the children good health and good studies for the upcoming year. Right next to the stacks of military gear, a large papier-mâché sculpture of Spider Man looked ready to spring.
The line moved slowly. Two women in front of Isabel talked about Iraq using chemical warfare during their war with Iran. She turned away but their words were too close to ignore and besides in typical Israeli fashion they spoke loudly.
“They didn’t use it against us.”
“They better not even try.”
“Let’s not think about it.”
Yes, please let’s not think about it, Isabel thought because if she did . . . Her shoulders crumbled forward. It was getting harder to breathe. She felt faint, put the masks on the floor, and knelt down as if to tie her sneaker lace.
“You’re next.” The voice of the woman behind her crashed like a wave over her back.
Isabel stood gently, took up the box straps, and walked slowly as if contending with the resistance of waves in the sea.
She dumped the four boxes on the table.
“Identity card?” the soldier asked mechanically and used a scanner to read the barcode on each box.
Isabel fished the card out of her wallet. The soldier took it and consulted a laptop computer. Isabel looked around. A school hall filled with noisy people, columns of boxes, and soldiers standing around looking bored. The soldier behind the table opened the toddler gas mask box. She took out the large astronaut-like helmet, looked it over, and returned it to the box.
“Your child is seven. This is only good until three.” She stared accusatorily at Isabel.
“I only got notice now.”
“You don’t need a notice to exchange the toddler mask for a child’s. If something had happened he would have been without a mask,” she said snidely, frustrated with Isabel’s negligence. After what felt like a dramatic pause, she called out, “Three adult, one child three to twelve.” When the other soldier brought over the boxes, she scanned their barcodes and pushed them across the table to Isabel. “Don’t wait until he’s 15 to change the next one to adult. As soon as he’s 12 call the Home Front office and they’ll tell you where to go. And here.” She frowned and slid a brochure across the table as well.
“Thanks.”
Isabel turned away. Four cardboard boxes bumped against her body. She hurried through the gym and playground. She didn’t want Uri to see her. She hated when he asked about the gas. She would hide these boxes in their security room when she got home.
She threw the masks into the boot and looked at the brochure in her hand. Instructions for war. When coming under attack, bring everyone into the security room and close the doors and window, including the metal shutter. Turn on a battery operated radio. Make sure there’s water and a bucket in the security room at all times. The security room. She had had one since it became part of the country’s construction code after the First Gulf War. 1991. Thick concrete walls, metal shutters, a window and door with special seals designed to take an indirect rocket strike and supposedly able to delay seepage of gas or chemicals delivered by missile head.
During the First Gulf War, Alon and Isabel lived on kibbutz. No one had a security room then. Every time a siren sounded, every time a scud missile came crashing in from Iraq, they grabbed the girls and ran to the public bomb shelter a few lanes away. The scuds always came in the middle of the night. Maximizing terror. Saddam Hussein at play.
During the Second Gulf War, they lived in town. 2003. When the civil defense authorities told them to prepare the security rooms, they did. Water, canned goods, batteries, candles, matches, battery operated radio, blankets, buckets with covers, games, books, flashlight, television. And up-to-date gas masks.
Isabel returned home and for twenty minutes she played with the letters on the computer keyboard. Her mind dense like a brick. Nothing cogent appeared on the screen. She went to the kitchen and cooked pasta for Uri’s lunch. She leafed through an interior design magazine Suri sent from the States. Like Zakhi, Suri wanted Isabel to consider retooling and thought design an excellent direction. Isabel cut up a tomato and cucumber salad. She made fruit salad. She took Woody for a walk in the wadi.
They passed a herd of goats, their dogs, their shepherd. A rain drop landed on her shoulder. She looked up. An enormous grey rain cloud passed overhead. Zakhi on site was probably fit to be tied. Another drop landed. Then another. And then a downpour. Woody and Isabel ran through the trees back to the house. By the time they reached the front door they were totally wet. Then just as abruptly as it began the rain stopped and the sun appeared. In Israel rain came one cloud at a time.
2
Isabel sat on a large flat rock and tried to relax into the beauty of the greens dipping in the valley below. Olive, Jade, Nile. A series of large clouds drifted over the Carmel Mountains. This past week she had finally managed to write another chapter of Jaim Benjamin’s book and to celebrate she was taking Woody to Bet She’arim but first they stopped at the statue of Alexander Zaid. To take in the glorious view. The yoreh, the fir
st rain of the winter season, had fallen a week earlier. A collective sigh of relief could be heard throughout the Galilee. Rain. Farmers depended on it. The government counted on it. Religious Jews prayed for it. And the average individual simply welcomed the switch from summer to winter. But since that first downpour there had been nothing but sunshine and blue skies until this morning’s bank of steel-grey clouds. A greeting card from the rains to come. Fretfulness, a premonition of disaster, filled Isabel. Like the Winkler house, she was open and susceptible. Every day felt critical. The rains—not one cloud’s worth followed by sun, but cloud after cloud of precipitation—would soon be upon them. A sunny afternoon would evolve into a night of thunderstorms.
Isabel tried not to think of Schine’s pressure and stared at the natural finery laid out before her. She breathed deeply and reached for serenity. Another chapter done. But it wasn’t enough. Winter signaled Schine’s deadline. The bucolic landscape before her became quickly overlaid with a transparency of words: pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages.
Sitting cross-legged on the large flat rock, Isabel considered that no matter a calling to bring hidden stories into the light, that it just might not be worth it. Or not worth it anymore. Worth was not the right word anyway. She was not up to it anymore. Yes that was it. She was worn out and withered in the bright light of Schine’s unyielding rush. He called every few days to remind her that she had to deliver Jaim’s manuscript by the end of December. Five weeks away. Like she didn’t know.
Cattle grazed in the field below. A black and white border collie ran energetically around their legs, herding them back into the group. He barked at the more stubborn cows and made sure the calves didn’t wander far. He helped move the group east, where the herder, like Isabel, sat on a large flat rock under slowly drifting clouds.
✶
In Bet She’arim, Woody cavorted with a large black Labrador. Round and round the dogs ran in circles on the lawn by the caves of the great rabbis and their families. Isabel sat on a bench some meters away and watched, relieved to be outdoors and not in front of her screen, happy to watch Woody at play, a constant source of entertainment and companionship.
She sighed deeply. On purpose. To calm herself. Jaim Benjamin’s was by no means the only difficult book. They had all been difficult, each in their own way. Hana Stern’s tale of being taken in, then sexually abused, by a group of Jewish Partisans. Zusya Feinstein who hid with his brother in a total of four haylofts for over three years. While the farm animals satisfied themselves with hay and slops, the boys sucked on straw and pulp from the pages of a book they had found in the woods when farmers thought it too dangerous to bring human food into the barns.
And Harry Roth’s, truly the hardest to date. Forty years after the war, Harry was as enraged at his brother Saul for being a Sonderkommando as if it had transpired the week before. Miraculously they both survived Treblinka, but never spoke again. Harry told her about Saul and then commanded her sonorously not to mention him in the book. When she told Harry that the men who did this awful work didn’t exactly volunteer, he thundered: “There’s always choice. That is what makes us human, even in hell.” And when she mentioned regret and forgiveness, he came back with, “People who were there don’t have that privilege.”
Woody and his new friend ran over to Isabel. She took doggie treats from her jacket pocket that they grabbed, swallowed, before rushing away to continue their tumble. Over the years Isabel constructed a space inside herself of attuned neutrality, a default empathy, from which she embarked on book after book. Roth’s hatred of his brother heaved a stone into that space, practically blocking access. It was a grave journey into his mind and Isabel almost cancelled the contract. The paragraphs and chapters of Roth’s life before the German army rolled into his small Polish town were assembled alongside the basso profundo of his final inexorable judgment. And even though he lost everyone in his family but Saul, Harry insisted on treating Saul like Amalek. “Yemach shemo,” Harry echoed God’s commandment to the Israelites to wipe out the memory of Amalek. So why did he told her about Saul in the first place?
Isabel looked up at the hillside. Thirteen minutes from her house to the caves. God did the same when he instructed Israel to destroy the memory of the Amalek nation. But he sealed their longevity with this command since the memory of the Amalekites would survive as long as the Bible was read. But Harry would have none of it. Not a word. Not a name. As if Saul never existed except in his memory and now in Isabel’s as well. Yemach shemo.
Jaim Benjamin’s book was weighing in as the most difficult since then. Not because she had to imagine existence in the grey zone of moral choices. Or reconstruct scenes of sexual abuse in a Ukrainian forest and then blank the screen. Or describe hunger that gnawed at the bones of boys. No, this story was hard to move inside of because Jaim reminded her of Dave. And Dave refused to speak to Isabel after she moved to Israel. Yemach shema.
✶
“May I sit?” a young woman about Lia’s age stood next to the bench.
“Of course.”
The young woman smiled, pushed her long hair back from her face, and took out a Hebrew primer. Woody came bounding over. Someone new to charm!
“Don’t be afraid,” Isabel said. “He’s harmless.”
“He’s adorable.” The young woman pet Woody’s head and laughed when he jumped up on the bench to sit beside her.
“You’re from Spain?” Isabel heard her accent.
“Yes, Barcelona.”
“Welcome.”
“Thank you. And you, from here?”
“Yes and no. Originally from New York.”
“New York. I have family there.”
“It’s a big place.” Suddenly Isabel didn’t feel like talking. Or not about anything deeper than the weather.
“I’m learning Hebrew at Haifa University.”
Woody bounded off the bench in the direction of the caves. His Golden friend had gone in and Isabel watched him hesitate by the entrance. Woody never went into a cave by himself. He didn’t even like going in with her. Would he now? Woody paused, raised his head to sniff the air, and ran from the cave, across the lawn in search of new friends.
Isabel turned and smiled at her. She had to get a hold of herself.
“Hebrew’s not an easy language,” the young woman said.
“No, it’s not.”
“Do you know Spanish?”
Isabel definitely didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. She was going to get up and find herself another bench.
“A little.”
“So many Spanish speakers in New York, I thought you might have learned.”
“I’ve picked up some words.”
“And do you know Ladino?” the young woman asked.
Shit. No. Isabel shifted on the bench. She wanted to bound off like Woody but was stuck. She was human. Socialized to be polite.
“Also a little. Some words here and there.”
“But that’s not spoken in New York, right? Maybe by the older people in the Sephardi community?”
“Yeah, they speak it, I think.”
“In Jerusalem I am learning Ladino with a special teacher. I love it. Spanish and Hebrew as one.” She paused. “Both identities come together.”
Oh fuck. Here it was. Hounded by the cosmos. Why?
“I am Jewish,” the young woman said proudly. “I just found out two years ago. My uncle told us. Conversos. For hundreds of years.”
“The Jews of Barcelona.”
“Yes. A large community. The great Ramban lived there. But in 1391 Jews were accused of spreading plague. Those who weren’t killed, converted. Like my family.”
“Fascinating. Wow, I’ve really got to go.” Isabel stood up shakily. “Lots of luck in your studies.”
And she literally ran away. Rude and frantic.
3
Isabel called Zakhi after a sequestered week in the house. The result was good writing days. But she missed him. Texting back and forth was not enough. He didn’t answer. She called throughout lunch with Uri and while she worked through a pile of ironing. How many times did she call all together? Six? Seven? It was not like him not to call back. Or to text to say he couldn’t talk.
Later in the afternoon Isabel drove Uri to a friend and convinced herself that either Zakhi was with another woman or had a work accident. Jealousy coupled with fear. She sat at the main intersection of town, listening to his phone ring, ring, ring. She pressed redial again and again and again. Anxiety swelled as she drove to the Winkler site blind to the trees and rich blue of the sky. Her head stuffed with gauze she steeled herself to see Zakhi cold to the touch, electrocuted. Or maybe another woman there with him, walking through the rooms, impressed with his knowledge, his skills, his infectious charm. But only Moshe and two of his men were at the house, plastering the northern façade in a lovely shade of yellow. Isabel stood back and admired it and managed to talk normally.
“It’s beautiful, Moshe.”
“Yeah.”
“Zakhi around?”
“No.”
“Was he earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“And now?”
“Don’t know. He left early.”
“You know why?”
Moshe hesitated. One of the workers said, “He got a phone call from his sister.”
“Sister?”
“Yeah.” Moshe gave the guy a look. “His brother died in the middle of the night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Why was Moshe being so stubborn? He knew Zakhi and she were friends. “Funeral’s today?”
“Guess so.”
“Was already,” the worker said.
She tried to smile at him, to thank him, but was too flustered. Moshe gave her a ‘don’t ask any more questions’ look. He threw a large gob of yellow plaster against the wall and spread it flat with a metal float.
