Promised Land

by Martin Fletcher

  The cafés along Tel Aviv’s main shopping street were beginning to close, as families prepared at home for the Hanukah meal. Only Café Kassit was crowded with its usual bohemian crowd. The roads were all but empty of cars and buses. The few people he shared the streets with hurried along bearing plates of covered food, their contributions to family meals.

  Peter walked slowly, savoring the calm, shedding one skin and growing another, from secret agent to upright civilian.

  He looked left as he passed Keren Hakayemet Street, the boulevard where the prime minister lived when he wasn’t in Jerusalem, and thought: The Old Man knows I exist. Strange how much has happened, and how fast. A boy in Germany, and in America, a soldier in Europe, and now an agent of the secret service of the Jewish State of Israel, which didn’t even exist two years ago. How did that happen? Where did the time go? He was twenty-seven, and all he really wanted was to be in love.

  He thought of his mother, the last time he saw her, thirteen years earlier, tearful, yet beautiful. He couldn’t bear to think of her behind barbed wire, abandoned and filthy and terrified, starving and beaten. He had searched for her, and everyone else, among the diseased survivors of Dachau when his 45th Thunderbird Division had liberated the concentration camp, but he had found none of his family. Later he heard she had been murdered in Latvia, and his father in Riga. Three of his four grandparents were exterminated in Auschwitz, taken on the same transport from Lodz. His grandfather on his mother’s side had jumped from the train and was shot while fleeing. Renata and Ruth, his two younger sisters, were on no lists, they had simply disappeared, like millions more. His cousins, aunts, and uncles? Surely someone must have survived, besides his brother?

  The only thing he knew for certain was: Never again. Then there was nowhere to run to. Now, there is: Israel. And he would do all he could to defend the Jewish haven. He straightened as he walked.

  He reached the squat building at number 224. There were balconies with flowers. It must be an upscale building, he thought, otherwise the tenants would have turned the balconies into bedrooms. But of course Arie would only live in the best; his greatest fear was to be mediocre.

  And again he thought of the note: Us. Who is “Us”?

  He climbed the stairs and from each apartment heard voices, laughter, music, all the family sounds he craved. A baby cried and a dog barked. It made him feel even more alone. Through a thin door he heard a child’s shrill voice: “It’s mine, give it to me!”

  Peter reached apartment eight on the top floor and his heart beat faster. What would he find? He felt breathless, and it wasn’t from exertion, but anticipation. After all he had been through, now he was nervous? He cleared his head and rapped on the door, which seemed to be shaking.

  Immediately a little boy opened it and looked up at him, a ball at his feet.

  “Shalom,” Peter said.

  “Are you Peter?”

  Surprised, Peter nodded. “Yes. Yes, I am. How did you know?”

  “I am Ido,” the boy said and hugged Peter’s leg. Peter looked down and stroked his head.

  “We’ve been waiting for you. Every day. Did you bring me a present?”

  “Yes, I did,” and Peter gave him the present he had brought Arie. “Try not to open it yet, though. Can I come in?”

  Ido took him by the hand, through the living room, and to the balcony, where a dozen adults were gathered and children played on the floor. There was a tantalizing aroma of sizzling meat. Arie, with his back to Peter, was flipping steaks on the barbeque. But Peter wasn’t looking at him.

  He was numbed by the girl sitting between an older couple. She was as he remembered, beautiful, and sweet, he could feel the beating of his heart; the two hours that were still ticking in his breast. Tamara stood slowly, staring at Peter. Her breasts heaved as she said, quietly, “Arie.” She had put on weight, or more likely, Peter knew immediately, she was pregnant. He felt a shiver of dismay.

  There was a hiss of meat as Arie basted four chicken wings and Tamara said again, “Arie.” This time he heard and saw her staring and turned and saw his brother. His look went quickly back to Tamara, then settled on Peter. He stabbed the meat and left the fork in the heat, as a slow smile came to his lips that grew and took over his entire face.

  “Sof sof!” he said. At last!

  “Arie,” Peter said. “Barbeque? Can this be? For Hanukah?”

  “I got hold of two plump chickens. Too good not to eat. Fresh. And don’t worry. We’ll have latkes too. With apple sauce. Just like Mama made. Sour cream too. Well, no cream, but still…” Arie spread his arms and shouted to all, “Peter, it’s my brother Peter, at last he’s come home.” All heads turned, and the couple at Tamara’s side, who he now realized must be her parents, jumped up, beaming. The father grabbed his hand and pumped it in welcome. Everybody was talking at once, Ido began to unwrap his present while his bigger sister, Estie, shouted, “What about me, what about me, where’s my present!”

  Arie pulled Peter into his arms while Peter felt a stab of pain.

  So. “Us” is Tamara. Of course it is.

  “You’re married, then?” Peter said, holding Arie away, looking at him as if he must have changed.

  “Oh yes, to the most beautiful girl in the world. And soon to be a father. Three months to go, inshallah.” If Allah wills it. He beamed at Tamara and she smiled back shyly, her hands resting on her belly. “You’ll be an uncle,” he said.

  “But I’m the older brother, I’m supposed to do everything first.”

  “Well, too bad, if you stayed in one place long enough, maybe you would. We married very soon after you left. Can you imagine? Crazy.” He smiled at Tamara. “Crazy, but the best thing I have ever done.”

  Peter felt like vomiting. “How many months?” Peter asked, patting his stomach.

  “Six. It’s going to be a big one, that’s for sure.”

  Peter nodded, looking at Tamara, who looked away.

  Arie lowered his voice, as if speaking to a conspirator. “How did it go this time?”

  “Good. All good.”

  “But half a year? That’s crazy. And no problems? Can you say anything?”

  “No, to both. How about you?”

  “You can see,” Arie said with a grin. “You do remember Tamara, of course.”

  “How could I forget?” He felt his blood rising. Was he blushing? He hoped not. Should he go to her? Kiss her on the cheek? Congratulate her? After a nodded greeting, he tried not to glance over again and failed. He just caught Tamara’s eye as she tried to avoid his. He felt faint. They had made love and never would again.

  “What is it?” Ido shouted, pulling at Peter’s trouser leg. He was waving the present, a little silver hand on a chain.

  “It’s a hamsa,” Peter said, gathering himself. “It’s for good luck. See, it’s an open hand, five fingers, hamsa means five in Arabic. It’s against the evil eye, it means that God protects you.”

  Arie pulled him by the arm. “Let me introduce you to everyone.”

  There was Tamara’s father, Moshe, a professor of Arabic literature and philosophy, who pointed out sadly that such subjects didn’t yet figure highly in the Jewish state’s needs.

  “If Moshe is my father-in-law and we’re brothers, that must make him yours too, is that right?” Arie said. “Or uncle-in-law. Is there such a thing?”

  “Probably not, but I’ll take it,” Peter said. “Any family is better than none.”

  He accepted a glass of orange juice from someone, and asked, “So, are you teaching now?”

  Moshe laughed. “No, I work for a new company that makes feather pillows and bedcovers. We hope to export heavy feather bedcovers to the Arab world, where ten months of the year they die from the heat. Next we’ll sell them sand.” He hooted with laughter. “Arie is nothing if not a dreamer.”

  Peter liked the old man, who he guessed to be around fifty. He complimented him on his Hebrew, while Arie broke in, “You’ll see, we’ll export to Europe
and America. We have to create jobs. And with the export subsidies the government is offering, we can’t lose. They’re paying me to work, they’re desperate for foreign exchange.”

  He took Peter by the elbow and they leaned over Rachel, Tamara’s mother, who was sitting on the sofa next to Tamara. Rachel spoke passable Hebrew, but she hadn’t found a job and didn’t particularly want one, although they could use the money. She said she was busy at home with her two smaller children, Ido and Estie, who loved school. She took Peter’s hand and covered it with her other and said she knew a nice young girl for him.

  “What about me?” Arie said with a guffaw.

  Rachel ignored him. “But first, eat,“she said to Peter. “We hardly get by on rations, while here, Arie always has a full fridge. We don’t even have a fridge. Eat while you can.”

  With the egg sandwich Rachel pressed on him in one hand, Peter now found himself before Tamara, who was looking up at him, and in embarrassment he offered her the sandwich. She declined, so he took a bite and chewed. When he could speak, he congratulated her: on the marriage, on the baby to come, on her new home, this lovely apartment; in fact, he was thinking, all the things I’d love to have. With you. Oh, why didn’t you wait? He put his lips to her cheek, and inhaled the sweet fragrance of lavender. Did he smell of egg?

  Sitting to the side, bemused by the tumult, was an American couple with one child who had moved to Israel but were finding it too tough and said they may give up and go back to Cleveland. He was in car spare parts but there weren’t enough cars, there wasn’t enough volume to make a decent living. Arie called out, “Anyone who leaves America to make a decent living in Israel should have their head examined.”

  Next to them was Arie’s friend, Natanel Ben-Tsion, the former Sammy Schnitzler from Frankfurt, who, usefully for Arie, worked in the Herzliya city hall. His position of trust there was helpful for Arie’s local business ventures. Ben-Tsion didn’t have any family and wanted to celebrate Hanukah with nice people. He added, after a dramatic pause, “So I don’t know why I came here.” They laughed and moved on.

  Arie said, “I saved the best for last. Apart from Tamara, that is.”

  Peter had noticed the young man staring at him but had been distracted by meeting his new family-in-law. Arie beckoned to the man, who approached with a bottle of beer and a broad smile. He had an expectant look, and he raised his eyebrows as if waiting to be recognized.

  “So,” Arie said. “Peter, do you know who this is?”

  Peter smiled back, looking from the young man to Arie and back again. “Should I?”

  “From München. We used to play together in the garden,” the man said, and waited. He was a couple of years younger than Peter, twenty-four or -five.

  Peter crinkled his eyes, made a show of struggling with his memory, and finally shook his head. “I’m sorry, klum, nothing.” And then, “Wait. Wait.”

  Something was falling into place … children. Playing in their large garden when the Nazis banned Jews from parks and pools. A tree, a branch, falling. Shouting. His mother running to see if he was hurt. A child crying. The boy. Peter put his arm on the man’s shoulder, his mouth opened, his eyes widened, and he stretched out the name: “Wolfie?”

  The man nodded, swigging the beer.

  Peter said, “The branch broke and I fell on you? Everyone was shouting at the same time. Oh no! It’s you, Wolfie. I mean, oh yes!”

  Wolfie and Arie hooted with laughter. Everyone was looking. Peter fell into Wolfie’s arms.

  His old neighbor. “But what happened to you? How did you survive? When did you come here? How did you find Aren? Sorry, Arie? What about your family? Your parents? And what is your brother’s name again…?”

  “Was. Was my brother’s name,” Wolfie said.

  Arie said, “Slow down, another time, lots to hear, Peter. The main thing is he’s here with us. Let’s light the candles. Celebrate the miracle. Miracles. Tamara, to you goes the honor of the first blessing.”

  Moshe said, “The first candle of the first Hanukah of the first year of marriage. And the first baby soon. Inshallah. Many more, inshallah.”

  “You mean, ‘Bezrat Hashem,’” Tamara said, “this is Israel,” and everyone laughed.

  As they gathered around the silver hanukiah on the windowsill facing the street, as was the custom, Tamara lit the first candle of Hanukah. As she did this she recited the same prayer her ancestors did on the same day for thousands of years, and her voice was soft and firm:

  Baruch Atah Adonai Ehloheinu Mehlech Haolam Shehasa Neesim Laavoteinoo Bayamim Hahem Beez’man Hazeh.

  Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.

  Didn’t enable enough of us though, Peter thought, looking from Arie to Wolfie, who were chanting the prayer with closed eyes. He could barely summon the faces of his mother and father, or Renata and Ruth. Not a day passed that he didn’t think of them, if for only an instant, but as shadows, they glided past like silent birds, and they were gone. Still, who would have thought it? The family was all but wiped out. When he left he had just a brother. Now he came back to a brother, a sister-in-law and her parents, her brother and sister, plus a niece or nephew on the way. And even an old neighbor. Lonely no more. Or, more alone? His stomach clenched.

  “Amen,” they said, and as he gazed at Tamara, over the dancing flames, it occurred to Peter: Light and life returns, that’s the miracle of nature. And so a nation is rebuilt, family by family. But for all the gains he saw around him, he felt only a sickening sense of his own loss.

  Tamara and Arie kissed in the flickering of the hanukiah, and Peter had to look away.

  ARIE

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  November 1952

  Arie’s appointment with the legendary Pinhas Sapir was for 3:00 P.M. in his office just off Jerusalem’s busy Jaffa Road, half a mile from the ancient wall that divided Jewish Jerusalem from the Jordanian Old City. He arrived half an hour early and killed time by eating a cheese boureka in the corner café, but then missed the unmarked finance ministry among the buildings along the lane; by the time he found it he was breathless and anxious. He was surprised by the modesty of the building, and even more surprised that the director-general of the ministry, a solid man with a bald head and thick glasses, received him in his underpants.

  “Sit down,” Sapir said, pulling on his trousers, “Lovewy day.” Arie had been warned not to laugh at the lisp, although Sapir himself did, but he should laugh as much as he liked at Sapir’s Yiddish zingers, which he sprinkled throughout his conversation to create a bond of Jewishness with rich Israel donors from America.

  But Arie didn’t want to give money, he wanted to get it. So he had boned up on Yiddish phrases for exactly the same reason Sapir used them.

  “I’m no tokhis leker,” Arie began, when Sapir bluntly asked what he wanted. “I’m no ass licker, but I’ve come with a proposal that I think would benefit Israel’s economy and which I think would qualify for government support.” He paused, unsure whether he should continue while Sapir buttoned up his pants.

  “Nu,” Sapir said roughly, “mach schnell,” which was so close to the German that Arie understood the Yiddish immediately: Hurry up. Arie was beginning to regret using his brother’s sway to meet the finance ministry’s number two. He should have gone through the regular channels, the officials he already knew. But everyone knew the quickest way to a government loan guarantee, and often the only way, was through Sapir himself. Two of his new Yiddish phrases came to mind: the “alte kacker” doesn’t like the “pisher”—the old fart doesn’t like the little bed wetter. But this was Arie’s chance so he plowed on. He already understood he had better not waste a word with this crude yet critical figure who all but ran Israel’s economy. It was some comfort to know the tough Zionist Sapir, meaning sapphire, was born Koslowski.

  Arie launched into his spiel, his words speeding up as he strove to delive
r his message. “My company wants to bring work to the people, not people to distant empty places where there is no work. The government policy of moving immigrants to border areas to secure the borders while providing homes is important, but without work and schools they cannot stay there.” Slow down, he told himself, he was almost breathless, rattled by Sapir’s intense gaze. “What I want to do is something complementary. I want to turn wasteland near towns into productive land.” He thanked his partner Natanel for that word; it sounded specific and constructive but was vague enough. “It will guarantee pleasant green areas as towns grow, and families could even have their own allotments of land where they can grow their own produce, teach their children to farm. Our claim to the land will be all the stronger as we cultivate it rather than allow it to lie fallow.”

  Arie had been practicing all these Zionist talking points: education, land, people, jobs, and he smiled. He’d hit them all. Except one, he suddenly realized, the most important. Security. “And it will make the cities safer. And that isn’t bupkes.” He loved the sound of that Yiddish word, which meant “nothing” or “trivial.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “Um…” Arie recovered from the blunt question. “I need a government guarantee for a bank loan to help buy the land; it wouldn’t even be expensive, it’s wasteland. And I need help with the Israel Land Authority.” He breathed deeply before continuing, for now came the true pitch. “I have found the perfect location, a large tract of neglected state land on the western edge of Herzliya, near the sea, a forty-five-minute drive from Tel Aviv. Preferably I’d like a loan to buy. Or to lease it. The government is doing nothing with the land.”

  He squirmed as his armpits dampened. There was no way to know how Sapir was reacting. “I also am a Mapainik,” he said, trying to smile, trying to ingratiate himself as a supporter of the leading political party, Mapai. “We need government investment, not government management.”