Promised Land

by Martin Fletcher

  “What just happened?” Daniel said.

  “Come on,” Moshe said. “Quickly.” He explained as they hurried back to the vehicles. “Her husband is in the hospital, he was badly beaten, she says they’re lucky he wasn’t killed. It was a warning from Fatah not to help the Israelis. No cooperation. She said if he wasn’t old they would have killed him. She’s terrified.”

  “Should we find him in the hospital?” Carmel said. “She seemed a nice old lady.”

  “That would make it worse for him,” Moshe said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  The hostility and the poverty of the life they had stumbled upon smothered them. They drove home in silence, but for Tamara trying to get Arie to slow down. It was as if he couldn’t get away fast enough.

  At last he spoke. “Did she ask for money or did you offer it?”

  “I offered,” Moshe said. “She didn’t want anything.”

  “Did you ask her why she helped me?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know, most of all,” he sighed. “I’ll find a way, one day, to repay them.”

  Next to him, Peter nodded. “You’ll have plenty of time. We’ll be stuck in Gaza for years.”

  “You think so?” Moshe said. “Why? The government is split.”

  “Because giving it back is the only card we have to make peace with the Arabs. And they don’t want peace with us. So we’ll hang on to the card in case that changes. Which it won’t. So we’ll have to swallow another million Arabs and, mark my words, we’ll choke on their bones.”

  “For once we agree,” Moshe said. “Can I quote a senior intelligence official?”

  “No.”

  “When the Orthodox Jews get to pray in Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and Abraham’s Tomb in Hebron, they’ll never leave, even I know that,” Daniel said. “And Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem. Lots of tombs.”

  “At least we destroyed their armies, they can’t fight us again,” Carmel said.

  “They’ll rebuild,” Moshe said. “Russia will help them. We’ll never have peace. We won the battle, we’ll never win the war.”

  “Nor will they,” Peter said.

  The road slipped by, from one world to another. At the line that marked the border with Israel, as if by a miracle fallow fields became green, trees blossomed, and in Carmel’s mind, flies turned into butterflies. After a late lunch of grilled fish on the beach in Ashdod and dropping Moshe off, they arrived home, tired and not a little relieved.

  “I bet they haven’t even got a shower down there,” Daniel said as the van pulled up in their tree-lined driveway. “We’ve got five. I can’t wait to have one.”

  As the engine cut off, Ido appeared at the door. “There’s a lady to see you, Arie. She telephoned twice and then she came here two hours ago. I said you’d be late but she wouldn’t leave, she insists on seeing you.”

  “What? Who?” Arie said, taking his backpack from the trunk as everyone stretched and yawned.

  “I don’t know; she wouldn’t say.”

  “She won’t say who she is, but you let her stay two hours? What’s she doing?”

  “She’s very nice, elegant, she’s sitting at the bottom of the garden on the bench, waiting for the sunset. Her daughter is with her, they’re English, they’re talking with Alice. They had some tea.”

  “I’ll make some more,” Tamara said. “What a day. Peter, you’ll stay? You said you had to go on to Haifa.”

  “Mint tea? A glass, thanks, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  They delayed at the van until they were alone. Peter forced himself to ask the question that had tormented him all day. All month. “Tamara, did you decide? Enough of this, it isn’t fair to anyone. I have to know. My life is on hold. I’ll tell him if you like, but you have to say if you want me to.” He hesitated. “If you want me.” He breathed deeply, held Tamara’s gaze. “Just tell me.”

  She swallowed, and with two words decided her life. “I do. I do, Peter, I want you. But I’ll tell him. It’s better that way.”

  He moved toward her but thought better of taking her hand. There were too many people around. He felt relief but no joy. The good news brought much bad. The path forward would be hard, more than hard, with Arie, with the children, but it was time. “I don’t know. Maybe we should tell him together. I’m afraid for you, what he may do.”

  “No. The children are going out. I’ll tell him tonight. Come on, darling, let’s go inside.” As they walked into the house she slipped her arm inside his.

  While Peter went off to use one of the other five showers, Arie came out of his bathroom and stood behind Tamara, gazing at the lady and her daughter through the kitchen window. Beyond them, the cooling sun hung low over the horizon in a clear blue sky. “It’s going to be a glorious sunset,” Tamara said. They watched Alice talking with great animation. “But who is the woman? Look at Alice, she’s probably telling them about her work in the hospital. What a brave girl. She grew up. She won’t be the same girl when she goes home.”

  “If she goes home,” Arie said. “Ido said she wants to stay, and he wants her to.”

  “She’s only seventeen.”

  “Have you seen them together? Believe me. Either she stays or Ido goes with her to America.”

  Tamara filled the kettle and lit the gas. “You should go and see what that lady wants. She looks quite elegant. Beautiful wide hat. Straw?”

  Her heart ached as she watched Arie walk to the end of the garden. What an image, she thought, Arie walking off into the sunset. She couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him, but she would have to tell him tonight. Who knows, he may even be relieved. His anger was more about possession than love; he’s afraid of being alone. And he knows that she loves Peter, it scares him. It scared her too, but she needed to think about herself at last, and Peter, and not always about Arie. With all her soul she prayed the brothers would stay close. Maybe with time.

  She saw Arie approach the woman, who rose slowly, with her hand to her mouth. They exchanged words, then stood in silence. Tamara leaned on the sink, peering through the window, shielding her eyes from the setting sun. Suddenly she heard Arie shout and fall into the woman’s arms. All the way from the kitchen she could see her husband’s shoulders shaking. Now Alice and the daughter were embracing too.

  She hurried out. Was Arie crying? She had never seen that. He was made of stone or, less charitably, didn’t have a heart. What’s going on? Had he lost the Peugeot contract?

  She rushed to them, put her hand on Arie’s shoulder. “Are you all right, Arie? What’s going on?”

  “Tamara,” he said, between gasps. “Tamara, I can’t believe this, oh my God, this is Renata. Renata, my sister.”

  Tamara’s hand flew to her mouth. Renata? Dead Renata? Renata and Ruth, the little sisters? Who’d vanished in the concentration camps? Renata was still hugging Arie, tears streaming down her cheeks. She freed one arm and held it wide for Tamara to join their embrace.

  Now Peter was walking toward them, looking puzzled. They were all crying, surely Tamara hadn’t told Arie yet. And who was the lady and the girl?

  “I can’t believe it,” Arie kept saying, “I can’t believe it. And now I have a surprise for you.” He turned his sister toward Peter. “Do you know who this is?”

  The lady stood with her mouth open. Her chest was heaving, her eyes wet but unmoving, fixed on Peter’s face.

  “No, I don’t believe we’ve met,” Peter said, putting out his hand to shake hers.

  She took his hand and held it. “We have. It’s been a long time. Peter, I am your sister. Renata.”

  Peter went cold, the blood drained from his face, he felt his knees buckle. “Renata?” She threw her arms around him, kissing his cheeks, his neck, as the hands of time wound back, to two little girls crying on the step, and a boy in short trousers climbing into a big black car, waving through the window to his sobbing mother and his little sisters. Now Peter began to weep. When he could, he
whispered, “Ruth?”

  “Dead.”

  “Mama and Pappi?”

  “All dead.”

  The sun sank quickly, the air chilled. Peter stared at his father’s watch, as if it had stopped.

  * * *

  “I’ve got an ending for your story on me!” Arie shouted to Moshe on the phone. “Get over here right now.”

  “Now? I’m dead tired. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

  “Trust me, Moshe, it can’t wait. You’ll thank me. Get over here right now and bring Rachel. We’re waiting. And on the way, go to Peter’s place and pick up Noah and Ezra, I spoke to them already, they’ll be waiting at the door.”

  * * *

  “I can’t believe I have a new niece,” Ido was saying. “With an English name like Susie. And she’s older than me.”

  “No I’m not, I’m thirteen,” Susie said. “You’re much older.” They all roared with laughter. “And I have such lovely new cousins, twins even,” Susie continued, smiling at Carmel and Alon. “And more twins, nobody will believe me. And so handsome.” Noah and Ezra punched each other. What is it with girls, Peter thought, they make boys look like infants.

  They drank orange juice and beer and ate sandwiches, wandering the garden, enjoying the orange-streaked sky, until Tamara asked everyone to gather together. They pulled all the chairs into a circle on the veranda. “This is the largest family gathering we have ever had, from Arie’s side,” she said.

  “That’s not hard,” Peter put in.

  Renata related how she had found Arie. “I looked for years, but I was looking for Peter, I thought you had died along with everyone else, Aren. I mean Arie. I knew Peter had gone to America, but that’s all I knew. I was only seven when you left, and Ruth was nine. I didn’t have any papers or information. Can you all follow my English?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, of course I had a bad war. And when I finally made it to London so many years had passed and I was struggling so much, I didn’t know where to start. I asked a few organizations, but nobody had your name. I went through telephone directories at the American embassy but you weren’t in any of them.” She smiled sadly at Peter and took his hand. They waited while she had to collect herself.

  “And then yesterday, I was in London, reading The Jewish Chronicle, and they had your story in it, Aren. Arie. The photo rang a bell, there was something familiar about the face, and then I read the story and there it was—Aren Berg.” She burst into tears, she couldn’t continue. Susie took over. “Mummy couldn’t wait, we flew here this morning, found your new name, Nesher, in the phone book and telephoned from the hotel, but you weren’t home. If you know my mother, you know she can’t sit still, sometimes she’s a nervous wreck…” Renata objected with an exaggerated shake of her head, and everybody chuckled. “… so we took a taxi here. Luckily Ido and Alice were home, because otherwise Mummy would have sat on the steps all night if necessary.”

  They ate, they drank, Susie spat out a green olive: “Ah, disgusting!” Renata told them about her early life alone in London, how she had studied and became a translator. She’d married a salesman in the fur trade and gave birth to Susie, but her husband, sadly, passed away four years earlier from pneumonia. “To be honest, our marriage was as good as over long before that, though.” She sighed. “I may not be very easy to live with.”

  “Ha!” Susie said. “Let me tell you about when Mummy…”

  “That won’t be necessary, my dear,” her mother said, restraining her with a hand on her arm. Everybody laughed.

  In a lull, as the family savored a silent moment, content with the light sea breeze that cooled the muggy summer night, and Arie had stopped saying, “I can’t believe it,” Peter took his sister’s hand.

  “Renata, please, can you tell us what happened? How you survived? The war.”

  All eyes turned to Renata. She sighed, taking Susie’s hand. “I’ll try. It is so very hard.”

  Susie looked sharply at her mother. “Mummy never talks about it,” she said. “Never. Not a word.”

  “Because I didn’t want to hurt you, my dear. But it’s time. This may be hard for you, darling. But you should know.” Susie stared at her mother, her eyes tearing.

  Alice trembled in Ido’s lap. With her dread for him in the war, the distress of comforting the wounded, and now this, she felt untied, adrift. She could scarcely relate to who she had been only weeks earlier, to her life in Taos, New Mexico, where all she had truly cared about was Gadi Bronson, the boy opposite, and the ski conditions in the mountains. Her gaze wandered from face to anguished face and she saw her own bland, smug family back home: We take everything for granted, she thought, while these Jews have to fight so hard just to survive. How easy it is for us. How hard it is for them.

  Ido wiped a tear from her cheek and brought her hand to his lips.

  “When you left, Peter,” Renata began, fighting to compose herself, “the house became a silent place. It got worse and worse for the Jews. But I won’t give you a history lesson, you know all that, and anyway, Aren, I mean Arie, must have told you.” They both shrugged.

  Renata and the rest of the family had continued living in their home for two years into the war, until finally the Nazis had come for them. “I was separated right away,” Arie put in.

  “Yes,” Renata said. “We thought they killed you. All Mama and Pappi could think of was saving Ruth and me, that’s all that kept them going, they kept saying, ‘One day you’ll go to America and live with Peter.’ Anyway, so this is our story.”

  Renata’s voice became slow and heavy, as if the words themselves hurt. “At the end of November 1941, they put us in transports to Riga, where we lived in the ghetto. There were twenty thousand Jews and the only food we had was what the Latvians didn’t want. People starved to death in the streets. At one point they started rounding people up and caught Pappi. He was taken away, to the Rumbula forest, and was shot. Next there was a typhoid epidemic. The Nazis refused to give us medicine and Ruth died. There was nowhere to bury her, so they took her away in a cart piled with bodies. Then Mama and I were taken to a concentration camp nearby; Kaiserwald.” She paused, swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about what happened there. You can guess.” She glanced at her daughter. After a moment she was able to continue. “You know, you have read of these things. What those brown brutes did to us. To the women. I was thirteen, fourteen then, just a child. But that didn’t stop them.” She had to pause. The only sound was from a buzzing mosquito and the whirl of the fans, until Renata collected herself and continued in her flat voice.

  “Then, after about a year, the Germans began to lose the war and they panicked, they wanted to hide the evidence, the horrors they had committed. They made us dig up the mass graves in the forest and burn the bodies. They were half-skeletons in rags. I was like a zombie, I worked with eyes closed in case I dug up Pappi. We worked for a week, and then they killed us with machine guns. But not me. I fell into the pit, and covered myself with bodies. During the night, when the Nazis were gone, and before they burned us too, I dug myself out. I couldn’t see anything, there was no moon, and all I could hear was groaning, the earth shifting, there must have been more survivors. I ran into the forest until I collapsed. I fell asleep, I ran farther, slept again, and the partisans found me.”

  She looked at her family. Their mouths were open. Nobody said a word.

  “We lived in the forest, collecting berries and hunting rabbits, and at last we heard that the war had ended two weeks earlier. Nobody celebrated, we just sank to the ground and gazed at the sky, the puffs of clouds, the green trees, the beautiful birds, we saw freedom and life, and we all had the same thought, in our stinking rags, skin and bones, sick: We made it. We survived.

  “But I was too weak to go anywhere, and when I finally found work on a nearby farm, I just stayed there, I had no way to get back to Germany, and, anyway, the Russians wouldn’t let anyone leave. I was stuck behind the Iron Curtain. Only in 195
2 was I able to make it to freedom. That’s another story. I had no desire to return to Germany, and I was able to go to London, where I got a visa to study.”

  She turned to Susie and took her hands. “Don’t cry, my little darling. It’s all over.” She tried a smile. “But you’ll forgive me if I’m a little nervous sometimes.”

  Susie nodded, speechless.

  Arie clapped a mosquito. “Got it!”

  The smack hung in the air like a gunshot, until Renata turned to Arie with a sigh. “And Aren. Arie. What about you. Tell me—how did you survive?”

  “Oh no. Not me. Another time.”

  An owl hooted, birds rose from the cliff with fluttering wings.

  Renata tried to fill the silence. “Every survivor has an unbelievable story. Otherwise they wouldn’t have survived.”

  She took Arie’s hand, and Peter’s, and held them in her own, studying them, and looked up to contemplate their faces. She saw little Peter climbing into the car, heard Aren crying after him, felt herself clinging to Ruth.

  “So Susie and I have a family at last,” she said in a tone of wonder, smiling at the gathering of stunned faces. “And so beautiful and such a happy family. This has always been my dream.”

  They were struck mute. Ido and Alice gripped each other, Moshe and Rachel did the same, the two sets of twins were numbed. Arie, Peter, and Tamara exchanged glances and stared at the ground.

  Each had their story, but what could they say?

  Glossary

  aize bardak (Hebrew)–what a mess

  Ashkenazi–Jew from Central and Eastern Europe

  bezrat Hashem (Hebrew)–with the help of God

  Botz–Israeli thick black coffee

  boychik (Yiddish)–little boy

  budke (Yiddish)–kiosk

  bupkes (Yiddish)–very little; not worth much

  boureka–Middle Eastern fluffy pastry, often filled with cheese, potato, or spinach

  causus belli (Latin)–justification for conflict

  chutzpah (Yiddish)–cheek, audacity

  dunam–measure of land equivalent to about 900 square meters. About four dunams to the acre