Harvest

by Belva Plain

  Now where the pain had been lying, a chill crept over him, because there was only one answer he could give. “No,” he said. “First and always, I am American and I must live in America.”

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “Then are we up against a stone wall? Shall I beg you? I do beg you. With all my heart—” His voice broke. Catching her hands, he pressed them to that heavy heart. “Don’t do this to us, Ilse.”

  “It’s nothing I want to do,” she replied, in a voice equally broken. “Oh, don’t you understand that I don’t want to?”

  Once more, then, he summoned reason. “Come, let’s talk very, very sensibly. How do you expect to manage here? One doesn’t live on ideals alone.”

  “I can manage. I’ll get a job at a clinic. I don’t need much money, anyway. I never have.”

  “That’s true,” he said somewhat ruefully, and gave a short, bitter laugh. “You won’t have much use for this necklace, will you?” he asked, picking it up from the bed where he had laid it.

  “I guess not. Perhaps you’d better take it back to the shop.”

  The pain bit sharply again in his chest. He stroked the gold rope and smooth diamonds, as though they were animate and could feel rejection. “I’m not going to take it back, Ilse. You’ll keep it, and one day you’ll come to your senses and return to me.”

  “Darling, I have all my senses right now. If I didn’t have them, I wouldn’t be bleeding like this.”

  He took her in his arms then, and they stood, clinging to one another. They sat down again and they spoke again, going over and over the same terrible, hopeless argument.

  “Let’s not quarrel,” she implored at last. “Oh, please, Paul, don’t let’s make it harder for each other. Please.”

  The evening melted into a late night. After a while there were no words left for any more explanation, persuasion, or appeal. In hopeless silence they lay close on the bed, counting hours as the alarm clock ticked their time away.

  A chilly dawn came at last, and a white sun climbed up a white, cold sky. The suitcases, packed and fastened, were ready at the door. His flight was to leave at noon from the airport north of Tel Aviv.

  “Don’t see me off,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  “Nor could I.”

  He sat at the window craning down to see what he might never see again. The plane rose and circled. Small houses, square as a child’s blocks, clustered along the highway and scattered across the flat land among the orange groves. In the distance, behind the path of the plane, stood the rising towers of Tel Aviv with a fringe of hotels on the Mediterranean coast. To the left the surf made a thin scribble along the shore, and far to the right, dimly seen through his tears, lay the long, dusky line of the Judean hills.

  5

  All through that first long year, gradually and then a little more rapidly, Paul fell back into his routine. He had been hurt most grievously, so deeply that, when waking in the middle of the night or even when walking on his way to an appointment, he could be suddenly arrested by this incredible truth: Ilse has left me. A physical place had meant more than a person, a lover and trusted friend. It seemed to him at such moments that she was beyond any possible forgiveness. Yet there began to be other moments, random times when snow was melting in the park and the damp, cold air, regardless of gasoline fumes, began to smell of April coming, or perhaps when in his office the telephones were ringing and three different people at once were calling respectfully for his opinion, that he was able to understand the power of place; just as she had said she was “drawn” to Jerusalem, so was he “drawn” to this city and to this life. Why, he could no more leave here than go to colonize the moon!

  So in the end he was able to say to himself, not without pain, that to live was to win, to lose, and, perhaps, to win again. This was not the first time he had lost.… There had been life before Ilse, and there would have to be life after her. And he resolved not to let bitterness fill his soul; bitterness was wasteful and corrosive.

  This resolution was not easy to keep, especially on the day when he went to her apartment to arrange for the sale of her possessions, and found himself standing in the center of the room waiting for the bustling lady who was to manage the sale, the breaking of two lives. On that day he struggled hard against anger, regret, and disbelief, demanding again how she could have done this thing. And yet, knowing her strong will and strong beliefs and her rage against injustice, he could begin to understand it.

  As for himself, he wanted nothing now out of these pleasant rooms in which they had been happy, nothing except her photograph.

  So life continued with the resumption of long-lived friendships as well as his few family ties. Occasionally he drove down to Meg’s place, occasionally met Leah and Bill in the evening or, whenever he happened to be in the neighborhood of Leah’s shop, would meet her for lunch.

  They had always been perfectly frank with each other, and so it was to Leah that he spoke of Tim. But she turned out to be more interested in Ilse, and bluntly asked him whether the parting could have been in any way his fault, whether he might have discouraged Ilse with “any lingering old obsession.”

  “I swear not,” he replied with indignation. “My God, I begged her to come back with me! We were up all night in the hotel arguing the case.… You’re looking at me as if you don’t believe me.”

  “No, no, I know you’re truthful. I’m only wondering whether there could have been something in the back of her mind, something that she perhaps didn’t know was there.”

  “What the deuce are you talking about, Leah?”

  “Don’t be angry. I’m only saying—you went to that dinner and she may have some idea that you—”

  “Good Lord, Leah, I went to get a look at my daughter. And that was a couple of years ago, anyway.”

  Leah did not reply but, looking rather doubtful, merely stirred the milk into her coffee. Was Ilse really troubled about Paul’s situation? Was that the reason? No. No, it was Israel and all her past that had cried out to Ilse. That and nothing more.

  “After all, I couldn’t force her to stay, could I?” he said, and fell silent, thinking that the only two women in all his life who had rejected him were the only two he had really loved. The irony of this brought a faint smile to his lips.

  “What are you smiling at?” Leah asked.

  “Just thinking. Ilse was—is—a remarkable woman. A wonderful woman. I shall keep on missing her for the rest of my life.”

  “She writes to you?”

  “Of course. She even writes descriptions of her cases.”

  And again he had to smile, recalling their dinners here in New York over which Ilse had so often related the encounters of her day, the tragic or comical or extraordinary people she had met. She’d had a way of telling things that was never boring, but always succinct, like a dart to the very core.

  Her letters now reminded him of those conversations, so that he looked forward to finding the thick envelope on the hall table when he came home. Sometimes she sent snapshots of the apartment that she had somehow managed to wangle in a city so woefully short of space. It looked familiar, crowded as it was with books and plants. She sent a snapshot of herself in her white coat holding a pair of twin babies. “Rescued from disaster,” she wrote, “their father shot in Lebanon and their mother too sick to care for them.” She related funny stories about learning to cope with landlords and marketing in a new language. And sometimes, too, she wrote of her longing for him, of inner conflict and some regret, of love and memories and her persistent hope that he would change his mind and come to her.

  This last would fill him with a few minutes’ worth of resentment. “Never a thought about changing her mind!” he would grumble to himself.

  “Apparently,” he said now to Leah, who was waiting for him to say something, “she’s as busy as ever. She seems to have made a good many friends already.”

  “Naturally. Ilse would make friends anywhere.”

&nb
sp; “I know. The janitor’s wife or a cabinet member are the same to her, just people.”

  “She does seem to have made some important connections, though. In my last letter she mentioned intelligence people and army people, big shots. I wonder whether—oh, well, never mind.”

  “Go on, say it. What do you wonder?”

  Leah raised her eyebrows. “I was thinking about men. A man.”

  “She would tell me if there were,” Paul said quietly.

  Leah looked straight at him. “Yes, of course. Stupid of me. You were always honest with each other.”

  “She wants me to visit,” he said.

  “Will you?”

  “Maybe.… I don’t think so.”

  What? Get used to each other again, only to go through another parting? No, he and perhaps she, too, was too old for any more of such painful ups and downs.

  “No,” he repeated, “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, there’s time to decide,” Leah said. “Plenty of time.”

  She regarded him affectionately until they both laughed. Plenty of time? They both knew better than that. Time was speeding away.

  One weekend late in the second September after his return home, Paul was invited to a beach house on Long Island Sound. It was there, while on water skis one morning, that he injured his shoulder again, striking it on a ski as he twisted the line and fell.

  “It looks nasty,” said his host, stanching the blood with gauze. “I’m taking you in to town to the doctor,” he insisted over Paul’s objections.

  “It’s just a cut,” Paul said, feeling embarrassed by the fuss. “The same damn old shoulder every time, can you believe it? A bullet wound in France, a cut in Israel, and now this. It’s ridiculous.”

  Nevertheless, he was taken to the doctor, a general practitioner who gave first aid, sprinkled the wound with antibiotic powder, and advised him to see a plastic surgeon.

  “I don’t like to criticize, but that ugly welt shouldn’t have been left like that.”

  “There were far worse wounds in Paris that day. They needed more attention than I did.”

  “I’m sure. Still, it must have bothered you all these years.”

  “Now and then. Just if I happened to knock against something.”

  “All the same, it needs attending to. Do you want the name of a plastic surgeon in the city? A top-notch reconstruction man?”

  “Well, if you say so.”

  “I do say so. Here, I’ll give you a list of three or four good people. Take your choice.”

  Back home he put the matter off for a month or more. But after a while his clothes began to rub the wound again, and one night when he turned over, he felt the sticky ooze of blood. Then he knew he was being stubborn and stupid and must take care of it.

  “A top-notch reconstruction man,” the doctor had said. This shoulder was certainly no great reconstruction job. He might even be making a fool of himself, walking in with a little problem like this one. Still, the doctor had said he needed a competent plastic surgeon, hadn’t he?

  The word reconstruction rang in his head, and it was then while lying awake that the idea struck him. It’s an absurd idea, he told himself at once. Absurd and dangerous. Brinkmanship, playing with fire. That’s what Ilse would say.

  Still, a man could sometimes use a little fire, risk or danger in his life. Properly handled, though, what danger would there really be? He was tempted and tantalized. His daughter’s husband! If he were to pick up just two crumbs about her life, it would be worth it. A few casual words that a man might let drop, even in a professional relationship, would be worth it.

  The alarm clock ticked in the darkness. Yes, it said. Yes. No, said Ilse’s voice, chiding. Forget and stay away. But she isn’t here now to chide me, Paul thought ruefully. Wide awake now, he got up, turned on the light, and felt for the telephone book on the bedside table. Here it was: Dr. Theodor Stern. The New York office wasn’t far away, only a pleasant walk’s distance. As if that mattered! And he went back to bed to resume the argument with himself.

  By morning, however, he had resolved the argument and made an appointment to see Dr. Stern.

  “It was a Nazi sniper in Paris,” Paul explained, “almost twenty years ago.”

  Back in the consulting room after the examination he now faced Dr. Stern across the desk. And it was he upon whom Paul concentrated; the shoulder was secondary. Dignified, he was thinking. Really impressive. You can tell first-rate people at a glance, no matter what their field. Friendly without being effusive. Thoughtful but also positive.

  “And you’ve lived with this since then? I have to tell you, it was a very untidy job.”

  “You’re the second doctor who’s said so. Well, they were in a hurry, on their way to Germany.”

  The doctor seemed interested. “Excuse me, but were you young enough to be in the army?”

  “No, but I had been appointed to a presidential fact-finding commission. We followed right behind the first Channel crossing, the invasion, and the fighting all the way to Paris. I was supposed to follow to Germany too.”

  Paul spoke almost by rote. He was concentrating now on the surroundings, on the well-furnished office with its burled walnut, oxblood leather, and pale linen curtains. It had an atmosphere of quiet prosperity. Discreetly, his eyes absorbed all of these things and came to rest on the large photograph behind Stern’s head: Iris, in an informal pose, was standing with three sons and a little girl in front of a bank of flowering shrubs. Azaleas, he thought. There was an aura of light around the little girl’s head. She must have inherited Anna’s hair, for Stern, like Iris, was dark. Paul’s eyes wanted to linger, to focus on the young mother’s bright expression. She wore a sweater with a white collar; she had one arm around the smallest boy.

  “I suppose, then, you never got to Germany,” Stern was saying.

  “I was ready to go, I wanted to go, but they sent me home on account of the shoulder. Damn shoulder!” he cried, suddenly afraid that his roving, curious glances had perhaps made him seem queer.

  “I went across with the British army,” Stern said. “I, too, wanted to get to Germany to kill Nazis, and I did.”

  There was a silence. A common horror had entered the room.

  “Well, it was a terrible time,” Paul said, and wanting to expel the ghost of that horror, he added, “It’s amazing how Europe has recovered. The Marshall Plan, and the simple, human will to rebuild, to endure. Amazing.”

  “I have never gone back,” Stern said. “Especially not to Germany or Austria. I don’t ever want to be reminded of them. I don’t speak German anymore, although it was my mother tongue. I’ve tried to make myself forget it. I can’t bear the sound of it.”

  The wife, Paul thought. Hadn’t that old man in Jerusalem said something about the wife, “a pretty blonde,” and a baby? And he thought, too, of Ilse, who had once made the same declaration about speaking German. “If my son hadn’t died in a concentration camp,” she had said, “maybe I would be able to remember that German is also the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

  “I understand,” Paul said now.

  Stern recalled himself to the present. “Well, this will not be too difficult, Mr. Werner. We’ll have you in and out of the hospital in a couple of days. I assume you want a New York hospital. I do operate in Westchester, too, where I live.”

  “New York, please.”

  “Fine. My nurse will schedule you for about two weeks from now.” Stern looked as if he had just noticed something about Paul. “By the way, haven’t I met you somewhere before? I can’t remember, but I feel as if I must have.”

  Paul smiled. “You have. It was a few years back, at a banquet for the Home for the Aged, of which I am a trustee, or was at the time. My term’s over.”

  “Of course. Now I remember. You’re the banker and we spoke of investments, about which I’ve still never done anything. And didn’t my wife know you too? Or had she met you someplace when she was a child or something?”


  “Years ago. I was acquainted with her mother.”

  “Really? But surely you haven’t come to me because you saw me once at a banquet.”

  “No, no. Your reputation, Doctor!” And Paul, keeping the encounter as normal, as natural, as possible, made the usual inquiry. “Will you give me an idea of your fee?” He was surprised when Stern named it. “That’s very modest. Not that I’m complaining,” he added, since a touch of jocularity seemed also natural and normal.

  Stern’s response was entirely serious. “I didn’t go into medicine to become rich.”

  “That’s a refreshing thing to hear these days.”

  But this office cost plenty. There was an excellent Ispahan rug under Paul’s feet that he had not noticed until now. If the man hadn’t gone into practice to become rich, then, unless he had inherited a fortune, which seemed doubtful in the circumstances, he must be living up to the last penny.

  Nevertheless, Paul liked the sound of the remark. For some reason it had not sounded sanctimonious, as it might have done. It sounded believable.

  He rose to go. “Tell me, will I be playing tennis again soon? It’s my love, you know.”

  “Really? Mine too. Oh, give yourself a few weeks before you go back to it.”

  “That’s good news,” Paul said.

  Walking away down the street, he felt a blend of strange feelings, a rapid palpitation, and burning curiosity, as if he had read only one chapter of a book that had then been taken away or had come in for the last act of an absorbing play. That photo of Iris and her children! His grandchildren! This was simply the excitement of touching the forbidden; he knew it as well as if Ilse or Leah had been there telling him that he should not have done what he had done. He knew it, but it was too late. He was in for it, and that was that.