by Belva Plain
“This probably should have a few stitches.” She worried. “It can’t heal evenly over a puckered scar. It was never treated right in the first place. It should have been fixed up years ago. I’ve nagged you and nagged you.”
He was impatient. “Stop fussing with me. I’ll take care of it when I get home, okay? Will you look at these people instead?”
For a young boy was staggering across the road, grasping his left shoulder from which his arm dangled. Ilse ran at once.
“A tourniquet! Give me something.” She ran to the ambulance, rummaged, and came back. “I can’t find anything. Paul, give me your belt.”
She tightened a tourniquet around the boy’s arm, led him to one of the ambulances, and spoke to the driver.
“This one can’t wait, or he’ll lose his arm. He’s in shock. Take him quickly.”
At the side of the road a woman sat holding her wounded baby, its pink face cut diagonally from eye to chin. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, whispering, “I want to die. I want to die.” It was like a song, a crooning, a macabre lullaby. “My baby. My pretty baby.”
Paul walked around to the other side of the bus. As it keeled over, the luggage racks had spilled their contents through the windows, and these innocent contents lay scattered in the ditch: carrots in a string bag, new shoes in a box that had split open, a book of piano exercises.
“Bastards, bastards,” he said aloud, clenching his fists.
Someone standing near to him inquired in English, “You’re from the States?”
Paul nodded. His throat was too full for speech.
“Then you’re not used to seeing things like this. We see them all the time. Yes,” the man said, his voice rising, “all we want is to live, you know? They don’t want to let us live. That baby there—what has it done to deserve this? What have any of us done? God damn,” he said, and walked away.
And Paul just stood there, staring at the carrots in the string bag. A redheaded lizard, queer creature, scurried along the ditch. A small wind seized a page of piano exercises and blew it down the road.
Ilse came up in tears. “This is carnage. In all my years, in all the emergency rooms where I’ve worked, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“You were never in a war.”
“This is a war,” she said quietly.
For a moment there seemed nothing to add except to ask him how his shoulder felt.
“Stings a little, but it’s all right.” He turned to her and smiled. “I had a good doctor.”
She said glumly, “It will take more than any good doctor can do to patch up some of these people. I’ve seen two with broken backs. They’ll be paralyzed. One of them had three kids. The kids were screaming. They thought their mother was dead. She might just as well be, anyway.”
Now the police were clearing the road, and the ambulances were moving off.
“We’re blocking the way,” Paul said. “There’s nothing left for us to do, so we’d better get going.”
He was starting the car when a policeman approached. “We’re asking for lifts for some of these people. Can you take anybody?”
“Of course, as far as Jerusalem. There’s room for two.”
Two men climbed into the backseat. They were stained and disheveled, but unhurt except for a bruise that was already turning livid on the younger man’s jaw. Ilse asked him whether he was having pain.
“A little,” he was able to mumble.
“The best I have here is some aspirin. Take two for now. We’ll stop at a roadside place for water.”
“I think we could all use a hot drink,” Paul said. “It’s getting raw out.”
For a while no one spoke. It was as if they were all still absorbing the full impact of what two of them had endured and the other two had witnessed.
Finally, at a roadside shack, they sat down at a battered table, ordered coffees, and began to talk.
“Cold?” Paul asked Ilse. “Are you still so cold?” For she was warming both hands around the cup.
“Nerves. I always freeze.”
The old man spoke. “Can you let me off the other side of Beersheba if you’re going that way?”
“You’re not together?” Paul nodded toward the older man; the younger one was pressing his scarf to his jaw.
“No, we don’t know each other. I have a grocery store in a village. We’re almost there.” The man sighed, stirred his coffee, and sighed again as if he were about to say something. At last he said, “My grandfather came here in 1906 with Ben Gurion. It took two weeks on a tramp steamer from Russia.” He spoke in a monotone, as if he were talking to himself. “He worked as a laborer on a farm. The Arabs used to raid the farms, so they had to defend themselves. That’s how the Haganah began. The first defenders, they were. A good thing, too, because it was the Haganah that was ready when the Arabs attacked the state. We were only a few hours old, and sponsored by the United States, when they attacked. A couple of hours!”
Paul responded quietly, “I know. I was there.”
“Did you know that when we captured Egyptian officers, they had swastikas on their jackets and copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic?”
“That I didn’t know.”
Ilse was shivering. Paul put his hand on the tabletop to cover hers.
“This is your wife?” the old man said.
“Yes,” Paul told him. “My wife.”
The other man now removed the cloth and in halting English added his remarks.
“They are preparing for war again. This thing today, this terror, is to soften us up. Farmers have to carry guns when they work in the fields. My cousin had a boy, fourteen. They shot him. He was walking down the road going home. That boy wrote a poem once about Israelis and Arabs, they should be friends. A poem.”
For a moment the young man looked as if he were about to weep. And Ilse said quickly, “We’d better start. You must see a doctor for your jaw the minute you get home.”
So they set forth again, and again no one spoke. The young man appeared to be sleeping, and the old man, whom Paul could see in the rearview mirror, was just gazing out at the dusty air, thinking perhaps about the grandfather who had come here with Ben Gurion. And one by one the two passengers arrived at their stops. The old man was the last.
“I wish you luck and better times,” Paul told him. “I wish for no more days like this one.”
The other raised his hand in farewell. “Thank you. But it will be worse before it gets better. In the meantime, courage. No choice, as we say in this country.”
The afternoon was dying. The low light fell on red roofs, terraced hills, and on the final peak where Jerusalem stood. Paul glanced over at Ilse, who was looking straight ahead toward the peak. And he saw that she, like himself, was mentally exhausted.
She asked abruptly, “Did you look at the young one? Did you see his eyes?”
“Not really.”
“You didn’t see? They were full of tears when he told about the boy and the poem. Such fine eyes, intelligent gray eyes. Mario would have looked like that if he had lived to be that old.”
Paul had nothing to say. They entered the suburbs, passed through the gardens and villas of Rehavia, and neared the hotel. He remembered then that this was the night they might hear from Tim, and he certainly hoped they would. Already he could see before him the lively face, the football shoulders, and the hearty smile. Charisma, Tim had. It was a word much overused and Paul disliked it, but for the moment he could think of no better one. Tim would give a happy turn to the conversation at the dinner table tonight, which, along with a glass or two of a good wine, was just what Ilse and he himself needed.
At the desk there was indeed a telephone message. Tim would meet them at the hotel for dinner at seven unless he heard to the contrary.
“Oh, great!” Paul said.
The desk clerk was staring at Paul’s torn sleeve and the stains on Ilse’s rumpled jacket, so Paul answered the unspoken question.
“We got mi
xed up in a terrible accident on the road. Terrorists. They shot a bus—”
The clerk, unsurprised, gave a sigh of profound resignation.
“Ah, yes, we heard it on the radio. It’s already the third time this winter. They sometimes mine the roads, blow up the whole bus.”
“When is this going to stop?” cried Ilse as if she were demanding an answer from this pale young man, who merely turned up the palms of his hands.
“God knows.”
They went upstairs to shower and dress.
“I’ll change your bandages in the morning,” Ilse said. “If it doesn’t hurt you, I’ll leave it alone for now.”
“It doesn’t hurt too much.”
She brushed his lips with her own. “Your wounds. Your poor wounds.”
“At least I was on the right side again. Anti-Nazi and anti-terrorist, each time.” He smiled. “Wear your red blouse, something bright. There’s no sense looking mournful. These people who live here all the time with this kind of thing aren’t mournful. Haven’t you noticed? They can’t be. They have to work and hear music and laugh and make love. Otherwise they’d go crazy, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re right, of course you are. The red blouse, then.”
Tim was waiting when they came downstairs. With his height and blond beard he was conspicuous, a bright figure among neutrals. When he came toward them with both hands out, Paul grasped them.
“Good to see you. I was beginning to feel we might miss each other. We leave the day after tomorrow.”
“No, no, I’ve been looking forward to this too much. How are you both? You’re looking splendid.”
Paul doubted that. Fatigue was visible in spite of Ilse’s attempt to hide it with powder and lipstick, and he had no reason to believe he looked any better.
He had been about to say “We’ve had a horrendous day, we’re not at our best,” but deciding abruptly not to darken the evening with the subject, made welcome instead.
“Let’s go to the dining room. The food’s not bad here, and I hope you’re hungry.”
They chose a quiet corner. Paul ordered drinks and they sat back to survey each other.
“It’s so good to see you,” Paul repeated. “A face from home is a fine sight, especially since I haven’t seen you in a couple of years. You know, after a month away, I’m ready to go home.” As he spoke, he was aware that his flow of speech was inconsequential. Ah, well, it was nerves. “How’s your mother? I called up to say good-bye before we left, and she seemed fine then. Been putting on a new back porch, she said.”
“Oh, Mother is always busy and fine,” Tim said. “She’s really found her place in life with her house, her animals, her trees, and the right man to share them with.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Sounds good to me.”
“Oh, I don’t know. With so much going on in the world, I sometimes wonder how anyone can hole himself up like that. However, as long as she’s happy.…”
The comment surprised Paul, and he replied, “She deserves some happiness, if anybody does.” After all those years with your miserable father, a man as far removed from herself as Sweden is from Tibet, he thought, and went on. “So what have you been seeing since you got here?”
“Walking my feet off. Covered a lot of ground in a week, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Galilee. Everything. Saved Jerusalem for the last. Plan to spend all next week here before going home.”
“You’ll find plenty to fill the week, I promise you. Tell us what you think of this country.”
“Fascinating. I’ve been meeting and talking to all sorts of people. Interesting types, especially among the Arabs.”
“Oh, Arabs,” Ilse said. “We met, or almost met, some very interesting types this afternoon too.”
Paul, annoyed that she had introduced the subject, frowned slightly and corrected her. “We’re not sure. They might have been Egyptians.”
“Egyptians, then,” Ilse retorted. Her eyes flashed angrily. “Same result. What’s the difference?”
Tim looked from one to the other. “What happened? May I know?”
“Excuse us if we seem a little shaken up,” Paul said. “I wasn’t going to talk about it, so I’ll make a long story short.”
Reluctantly and as succinctly as possible, he related what they had seen on the road from Eilat. In the telling his heart began to hammer just as it had while the experience was being lived.
“I should have ordered whiskey, two or three stiff drinks, instead of wine. Well, too late,” he finished as the waiter refilled his glass. “At least this will make me sleep if I drink enough of it.”
Timothy shook his head in sympathy. “Needless suffering.… Terrible! But what do the politicians care? The lot of them, on either side.”
“On either side?” Paul asked. “But on the Israeli side all they’re asking for is peace. It’s not the Israelis who are shooting at buses and killing farmers at work in their fields.”
“Well, I suppose.… Of course, it’s too bad, the blood-shed you saw. But I mean, when people are desperate, one has to try to understand,” Tim concluded somewhat vaguely.
Desperate? Who? Survivors of the concentration camps? What did he mean? Paul wondered.
“After all,” Tim said, “they have been kicked out of their homes and—”
“Oh, but, Tim, that’s totally untrue! I know, I was here. It was the Arab leaders who told them to flee. The Israeli authorities were distributing leaflets, were actually going through the streets with loudspeakers assuring them that no harm would come and urging them not to leave, but to stay and live in peace.”
“I don’t know. People all say—”
“Who says? What people? With my own ears I heard the Arab leaders telling them to flee. In Haifa I saw them fleeing in boats.”
Ilse touched Paul’s arm. It came to his mind that it was she who was usually the emotional one and he who gave the signal for calm. And he subsided, saying quietly, “I stood among the crowds outside of the museum on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed. The United Nations had voted for the partition of Palestine, Jordan to the Arabs and this land to the Jews. And I was so proud, proud of America my country, which had brought this about.”
Timothy shrugged, implying that he found the subject at best uninteresting and at worst unpleasant.
Something forced Paul to explain, to convert. “So you see, it was all entirely legal,” he said. “Legal before all the world.”
“What’s legal isn’t always just,” Timothy answered.
It was as if the two men were challenging each other, each with a plate of almost untouched food before him. What was to have been a happy meeting was turning into a forum. And Paul looked down at the white cloth, on which a red stain had drawn a circle. It looked like blood.
“Justice,” he said bitterly. “Was it justice or law when the British sent back from here to the displaced persons’ camps—in Germany, of all places—the pitiful survivors of the death camps? A pretty sight it was when they were herded onto the ships, I can tell you.”
“I understand your emotions,” Timothy said.
The tone was cool and condescending. Or in the whirl of a sudden exhaustion, was Paul imagining all this?
But he wasn’t imagining the woman who had held her wounded infant today, nor the woman’s cry: “Oh, my baby, my pretty baby, I want to die!” No, nor the bag of schoolbooks, and the carrots, the harmless carrots in the string bag.
“Of course you’re upset over what you saw today,” Tim added. “It’s unfortunate in these situations that the innocent sometimes have to suffer with the guilty, the good with the bad. But that’s nothing new. It’s always been so.”
There was a throbbing in Paul’s head. Years before, he had confronted this young man’s father across another dinner table, in New York. He could still see it all, the crystal, the massed flowers, Leah’s diamonds, and the horrified faces.
“The good,” Tim’s father had sai
d, dismissing them with a shrug of well-tailored shoulders, “the good have to suffer with the bad.”
Thus he dismissed the slaughter in the concentration camps with the same words that his son, so different from him, was using now. It was uncanny. This son had despised his father and his father’s wealth; this son was an intellectual, charming and sunny. It wasn’t making any sense.
And Paul said aloud, “This isn’t making sense.”
“Most talk doesn’t, when you think about it. You don’t change people’s minds when emotions are involved, especially when you’re dealing with explosive subjects like racism.”
Tim buttered a roll. The calm movement of his fingers and the ordinary act of biting the crisp crust affected Paul as if, in their very ordinariness, they were mocking his feelings. And Paul paused to refill his wineglass. This was more than he ever drank, and it was beginning to muddle his head, but he didn’t care.
“Racism?” he repeated. “How does that enter here?”
“Well, Zionism. Surely it’s a form of racism, isn’t it? Don’t you have to admit that it is?”
Ilse gasped. In fury she reached across the table as if she would meet Timothy hand to hand.
“We admit nothing of the sort! It’s preposterous! Are you hearing this, Paul? Are you?”
“Timothy, I don’t understand,” Paul said, controlling himself. “Ilse herself, and all these people”—he waved toward the windows as if to include the whole city—“know better than anyone else what racism does. And you yourself—perhaps you don’t know it—but there were cousins on your mother’s side, people I knew, who perished because of it. So how is it possible for you to say such a thing?”
Ilse had risen. “Stop, Paul! There’s no point in this! You’re talking to the wrong person. We went through enough today.” She was trembling and weeping. “I’m going upstairs. Excuse me.”
Paul also rose from the table. “It’s all right. But she’s not feeling well. You have to excuse us. I can’t let her go up alone like this. The dinner will go on my bill.” And repeating in some confusion, “I’m sorry, excuse us,” he followed Ilse out of the dining room.
In their room she drew the curtains back. He stood with his arms around her, and they stared out into the nighttime sky where clouds were roiling, and out across the Kidion Valley, where lights made gold polka dots in the blackness.
