Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  Isabel started to cry. Poor Suri. She couldn’t take it. She wanted to kill each one of those motherfucking monsters. Twist their necks with her own hands. Gouge out their intestines.

  “Three little girls on their own. I was so afraid. So lonely. After Zizi and Lola slept, I cried myself to sleep every night. I wanted my mother so badly I was willing to cut off my arm for her. Even a leg. Just to have her with us again.

  “I felt she was alive. That kept me going. After the war, of course I looked for her in all the channels. All the offices and agencies. And then a neighbor from Kaments-Podolski found me in New York. He survived the death pits. He lay wounded under dead bodies for three days then crawled out and made his way east through the forests. He was eyewitness to Bella’s murder. Raizel and Sholem had already been killed on the walk to the pits. Each baby thrown up in the air and shot for target practice.”

  Isabel went and sat on her knees next to Suri’s chair. She wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist. Suri kissed Isabel’s head. Woody jumped off Suri’s lap and Isabel climbed into it. They held each other and wept. Her poor poor mother. Her sweetest Suri in the world. What did they do to her?

  “Shh,” Suri said and hugged Isabel tighter. “I love you Isabel. With all my heart. When you were born, I was reborn. You were everything to me. You still are. You and your children are proof that life’s still good. Please. Believe that. We can still live and love.”

  Isabel pressed into Suri and held her closer, closer, closer still. “I love you so much, mama.”

  The Lights

  1

  Suri, Lia, Uri, and Isabel spent the morning at Haifa’s Festival of Festivals. Red, white, and green blinking lights decorated metal camels and plastic reindeer on rooftops and balconies. Garlands of colored lights lined doorframes and storefronts. Silver and gold tassels adorned lampposts and window bars. Synthetic perennially green fir trees dressed up shop windows and street corners. “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “O Christmas Tree” in English, “Jraas Elieed” and “Lyelet Samt” in Arabic rang out of portable stereo systems. Oud solos of “Deck the Halls” and “Joy to the World” filled Wadi Nisnas. This year Christmas, Hanukah, and Mawlid fell literally in the same week. To celebrate music, plays, poetry, and art from around the country with the theme of Black Coffee transformed its alleyways and narrow cobbled streets into an outdoor stage and gallery.

  Uri ran from building-sized photographs to free-standing sculptures of coffee cups, from colorful murals to wall reliefs. When Isabel, Lia, and Suri caught up to him he pretended to be a museum docent.

  “Here,” he said in a high toned nasal voice, his arm akimbo, “we have a full size mural by Vafa’i Yassin,” he read the name on a white plaque. “It covers the whole wall. Notice the colors. Blue and green swirls. Not exactly like the coffee you and I like to drink.”

  The women burst out laughing as he paused, waiting for their reaction. Isabel needed some revelry and accomplices. Jaim Benjamin’s book was finally off her desk. Schine called from New York last night to congratulate her on a job well done. The manuscript was already being readied for printing. The cover art was being explored. A Purim publication indeed.

  Just like that, just like that, a snap of the fingers, a corner turned. The carpenter’s hidden cupboard, Suri’s story, a hyper clarity had come over Isabel: she no longer need to shore up cracks and tuck away the vulnerabilities of history. Suri didn’t need to revisit the killing grounds of her childhood. She didn’t need to be rescued. Isabel could tie the salvage dinghy up to the dock and move on. She was through with the war. No more ghosting. She chose life.

  Uri ran ahead and stopped next to an apartment building whose entire side was draped in white fabric. A haphazard coffee spill in its center. Under the enormous brownish blot, Osnat Bar-Or and Ofer Kahana included a date: October 2000.

  “The start of the second intifada,” Isabel said recalling the hostilities that erupted in Jerusalem’s Old City over that Rosh HaShanah weekend. Violence and fear accompanied its spread from Qalqilyah to the Coastal Highway, from Nablus to the Galilee hills, to her town, to the villages of her neighbors.

  “Coffee stains look like dry blood,” Lia commented.

  A lot of the art in the Festival showed the country’s pain, its fragile seams. And even though Isabel wouldn’t ask Suri any more questions, walking through the alleys of the Wadi and seeing art respond to trauma, Isabel knew, from deep inside, that in the long run, expression as a form of protest, as a way to tell the story, was a more powerful antidote to injustice and sorrow than silence. Isabel wondered if Suri saw it too. Isabel sighed and Lia linked her arms through her mother’s and grandmother’s.

  They walked on. Outside a barber shop a quartet of old men played backgammon. The owner, the barber himself Isabel assumed from his light blue smock, gestured for her to come inside for a drink. She helped myself to water from the tall cooler and smiled at the subtle bite of anise. The barber had spiked the water with arak. He smiled mischievously. “Take some more.”

  “One glass is enough before noon.” Isabel smiled back.

  “But it’s the holidays. More is permitted.”

  “No thanks,” she laughed. “I’ll ask my mother if she wants some.”

  “Certainly. Welcome.”

  Neither Suri nor Lia wanted arak spiked water but thanked the barber and gave him big smiles. They watched the men and their moves on the backgammon board. Someone produced a candy for Uri. Someone else asked him what play to make next. The child leaned against the man with the candy, studied the board, and gave advice as if these men were familiar beloved uncles. Only the promise of a ride on Lia’s back pried him away.

  “Before religious madness polluted the environment, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism prospered together in Spain, and most especially in Toledo. There was equilibrium, and harmony if only for a short but meaningful time. The Convivencia, Golden Age of Iberia,” Isabel said as they walked away. Lia knew this already. Uri wasn’t listening. Suri seemed resigned to her daughter’s interests. No more writing. No more questions for her. But history would remain her passion.

  They wandered away from the men and into an indoor gallery exhibiting the more delicate works of art. In two pieces, one featuring Bruce Lee in a montage of photo and paint, and the other, an inked drawing of a little girl, coffee and blood spills were once again indistinguishable. The cup in the little girl’s hand exploded into invisibility leaving only a large hole in her abdomen with black coffee/blood spurting like a fountain in a city park on a hot summer day. They moved on to a painting showing used coffee grinds at the bottom of a cup waiting to be read.

  “Like Rorschach,” Suri said.

  Isabel nodded in agreement. In between the dark grinds, in the light of untouched surfaces, amidst nooks, crannies, rivulets, and the moon-like shell of the demitasse, a message waited for those able to read it. In the Middle East those who could decipher this language were frequently consulted. Even revered. And hanging heavy and sharp like a sword over everyone’s head, the question of what the future would bring remained fraught with endless hope and dread.

  ✶

  Early the next morning while the children and Suri slept, Isabel left the house to meet Zakhi at the Winklers. He had called to tell her that all trades were off site except for the painter.

  “The project’s nearly finished and the key to the front door’s burning in my pocket. House lights ritual time. When can you come?”

  “Now,” Isabel didn’t miss a beat. “Get ready.”

  Isabel pulled up next to Zakhi’s truck on the just laid stone driveway. Where one day grass would grow in between the flat stones, mud now sprouted dark, rich, and wet. Winter was upon them fast and furious. And though Christmas wasn’t white in south-west Asia, neither was it warm and sunny. A grey sky anchored in thick clouds showed that the rains had most certainly arrived.
/>   Isabel entered the Winkler house and paused to look around. The space reverberated with the beauty and the promise of the newly built. She waltzed into the kitchen. Zakhi was screwing light bulbs into fixtures. There were overhead ceiling spots, under cabinet spots, and interior cabinet spots behind glass doors. She leaned against the door jamb and watched him work. How she loved to watch this man work. When he was done with the fixtures, he took a light bulb attached to a short electric cord and plug and moved towards the cabinets. He pushed the plug into a countertop socket and the light bulb at the end lit up.

  “ויהי אור—let there be light,” Isabel pronounced solemnly.

  Zakhi turned around to smile at her.

  “Good morning, sweetheart.”

  “Excellent morning,” she responded.

  Zakhi moved from outlet to outlet. Each time the light bulb flashed on Isabel said let there be light. She moved in to the kitchen, closing the gap between her and Zakhi.

  “Have you decided to do the Grunwald renovation?”

  “In town? Yeah, sure.”

  “Did you tell Harvey about the hideout?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Nope. Going to bury it between sheetrock walls.”

  Zakhi was so cool she could burst. “In hundreds of years archaeologists will wonder what 21st-century Jews in the Holy Land were up to.”

  “Exactly.” Zakhi gathered his equipment.

  “Think they’ll read Europe’s footprint here in the Middle East?” Isabel followed him into the dining room. “Jaim Benjamin told me even today Crypto-Jews in Mexico and New Mexico are afraid to come out.”

  “Wow, that’s sad.” Zakhi played with a switch of a ceiling fixture. A standard white plastic lead and weak bulb hung crookedly from the ceiling. He left the light on and moved to the future television corner.

  “I’ve got some news for you,” Zakhi spoke casually and grinned that sexy, rapacious, playful grin of his. “I have a girlfriend.”

  Isabel’s smile contained a tsunami of anxiety which crested with the stifled questions: was it over between them? Who was this woman? Had he been seeing her for months? Isabel knew she had no right to ask or to know. She had no right to rights period. Her smile wouldn’t tone down. Good thing. It kept the tears away.

  “Wonderful.” Isabel trailed after him. Her stomach bottomed out. Objects all around her smudged into undifferentiated images. She held her spine especially straight. She would not collapse inside. “Tell me about her.”

  Zakhi acted as if he hadn’t heard. This deliberate casualness—telling Isabel in between switches and sockets—meant he was protecting her. Isabel stopped following and pressed herself against a wall. She waited for him to answer while the wall held her up.

  “Zakhi, why are you telling me about a girlfriend as if she were a traffic report?”

  He continued not to answer and didn’t look at her either. He walked to the far side of the big room and tested another set of outlets.

  “I’m happy for you. I want you to be loved and to love and to have it all.” Isabel walked over to him while managing not to cry. He stared out the large plate glass window. The mountain range framed the valley’s lime green and teal patches. Isabel put her hand on Zakhi’s broad arm. “You haven’t even told me her name.”

  “Keren.” He turned to her. “She’s great, you’ll really like her. I know it.”

  “I’m sure of it. She good to you?”

  Zakhi laughed. “Of course.” He hugged her, put his face in her neck, and took a deep breath of her.

  Isabel would always be grateful that Zakhi had come in to her life. That he taught her to play traffic tag at intersections. That he took her down to a place by the river and gave her back exuberance and joy, rebelliousness and licentiousness, all in one tumble. Zakhi had helped her contain the pain and had gracefully ignored the tyranny of time and numbers. Until now. Now it caught up with them. The tears broke out, unwelcome, unnerving, revealing.

  “Shh.” He held her close.

  “I’m sorry. I guess, I just . . .”

  “Shh.” He kissed her hair and stroked her back.

  A wrenching nausea in her stomach reminded her how the obsolescence of their relationship has been shadowing them all along.

  “Come on.” Zakhi disengaged from their tight hug. “We’ve got lots of rooms to check before getting down to business. It’s been some time, Isabel Toledo, since I’ve seen you naked.”

  “What?”

  “House lights ritual? You started it.”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “Not what? Don’t you remember, all lights tested and on, the last time the empty house is our playpen . . .”

  “But . . . if you’re in love, then I don’t see how . . .”

  “I didn’t say I was in love. I said I had a girlfriend. Like you have a boyfriend.”

  “That’s different.” She was irritated. “Emanuel and I aren’t going to have children together. There’s no need to make a solid plan. We can continue to be together and still remain apart. But to really be with someone, married, I don’t see how it fits. And anyway, Emanuel and I . . .”

  “You’ve already married me off. Thanks, but no thanks.” Zakhi laughed. “And about Emanuel . . . don’t expect him to hang around forever under your conditions. You are one tough lady, Isabel Toledo. Don’t know if I could handle your terms.”

  She retorted. “Choice is his. Or any man’s.”

  “Not so easy if he loves you. And I think Emanuel does.”

  Isabel followed Zakhi upstairs to the second floor. “People choose their destinies in relationships.”

  “And I choose to play with you.” Zakhi flipped on all the lights in the master bedroom. The ceiling fixture. The bedside sconces. “I want you now.” He turned on the spots in the bathroom and walked in and out of all the other bedrooms, bathrooms, and walk-in closets on the second floor, turning on every single light in the house. Isabel followed closely.

  “Zakhi . . .”

  “Aren’t you the one who says domesticity kills relationships?”

  “I do.”

  “So let’s just keep going our way. It works for us.”

  On this rainy grey day at the end of December, inside a spanking new house burning bright for all those in the valley to see, Zakhi Kandel took Isabel Toledo into the back bedroom. He laid his jacket down on the floor where one day a king sized bed would stand and pulled her down beside him. She resisted.

  “It’s all right, come on, baby. Let me feel you.” He brought her close and Isabel melted against him. It wasn’t her job to protect the newly minted relationship of Zakhi and Keren. So much was uncertain and she and Zakhi had their ways, their traditions, their favorite things. And launching one of Zakhi’s newly built houses with the act of love was one of them. Their house lights ritual. After their bodies sung with bliss, they rested quietly in one another’s arms. Zakhi opened an eye and looked at her.

  “On this Hanukah, we not only remember the re-consecration of the Holy Temple in Holy Jerusalem, but christen the Winkler house in the once German village of Waldheim.” Zakhi’s mock German accent was his way of making light of her brooding which orgasm had only temporarily lifted.

  “The Templars were Nazi sympathizers,” Isabel mumbled. “The British surrounded the entire village with barbed wire. Students from the Technion guarded them.”

  “I thought you were off the Nazis.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  “Let’s take your mind off those nasty people then.” Zakhi put two fingers inside of her and she arched her back. He put his mouth on hers, waited for her to moan and move to his satisfaction. Then he entered her again.

  “Missionary style,” he whispered, his lips hovered over hers, “in honor of the religious Templars.” Air fi
lled the small crevices between them and they stared at one another, eyes wide, pleased, joyful, mournful. She came again. Zakhi followed. They lay spent and entwined. Toes. Thighs. Arms. Hands. Cheeks. Chests. All in a job well done.

  2

  On the eighth day of Hanukah Isabel’s true loves gave her and Emanuel a three-day holiday at a luxury hotel on the shores of the Dead Sea. The perfect gift for an exhausted writer, lover, daughter, mother facing big decisions. But before the balm and magic of the surreal Dead Sea landscape, Isabel needed to organize the house. She was hosting the Hanukah party for Uri’s second grade class. The sun set early in late December and Hanukah candles were lit soon after. Festivities were scheduled for five-thirty and she had been cleaning since noon. Suri helped but she mostly kept Uri entertained and out of Isabel’s way. Public spaces were orderly. Check. Disposable dishes and cutlery were set out. Check. Delicate items stowed. Check. Borrowed chairs scattered throughout. Check.

  The head of the parents’ committee was bringing jelly donuts. Other parents the drinks. Isabel provided the space. Check. Uri had been flying around the house for days. His teacher Idit, one of the significant female lights in his firmament, was coming to his house. Check.

  Yael, on a day’s leave, slept. Because of all the holidays, there was a modicum of quiet in the region and her unit enjoyed a temporary reprieve. No doubt this would be followed by fierce conflict, as if to make up for the few weeks of good will. It was dangerous to let people and troops become accustomed to calm and predictability and thoughtfulness. Aggression around these parts was turned on and off like light switches for political and military gain, but also for social management. This had become very clear to Isabel.

  Home at nine a.m., Yael ate an enormous breakfast, went to the toilet, and then to bed. Eat, shit, sleep. Babies in fatigues. Isabel barely talked to her. No doubt after the party she would go out with friends. Then would come home late and wake early to be at the bus at six. She had leave from base only until eight a.m.