by Evergreen
"Like my parents, you were going to say."
"Well, yes, I was. However, it's hardly unusual for a person to be like his parents."
"Like which of them?" Eric persisted.
471
"Like both. Too idealistic for their own good, each one of them."
Chris took Eric's hand. "I'm always in a hurry these days, it seems. So let's just say, 'Good luck to us both.' And if you ever need me, Eric, you'll know where I am. Keep in touch, will you? All the best," he said. His face changed; a look of gravity and softness came over it, and for an instant Eric was back in the boat, bobbing behind a curtain of willows, and Chris was saying, "Your Gran is going to die." He shook off the illusion.
"Thanks, Chris, for everything," he said, and, releasing each other's hands, they parted among the hastening crowds on Forty-third Street.
Later that week Iris told him, "I'm not sure it was the right decision for your own self-interest. But it surely was generous, Eric."
He didn't answer. Now that he had made the decision he felt that it hadn't really been generous of him at all, that actually he had been and was—would always be?—too divided to be entirely content either with staying or with going.
"I think I'd like to wander around Europe for a couple of months this summer," he said suddenly, the idea having just come. "I've never been much of anywhere."
A small inheritance from Gramp was to be given to him at commencement time. It was a legacy, literally and figuratively, from an era when a young gentleman was expected to make a tour of Europe before he 'settled down.'
"I wish I could go with you," Iris said. "But Theo says Europe smells of decay. I'm hoping someday he'll change his mind."
"This wouldn't be your summer to go anyway, would it?" For Iris was pregnant again, at thirty-seven; he wondered how pleased she could be about it, and rather thought it must have been an 'accident.'
"The baby'll be here by the time you get back, I guess. It's due around the middle of October."
"I'll be back," Eric assured her.
In mid-June, after commencement, they helped him pack. His grandmother brought home a set of fine luggage, a traveling umbrella and a travel bathrobe, all highly impractical, and all a way of saying, 'have a wonderful time; we love you.' He had learned that much about them during his time in their house.
On the last night they went to Theo's and Iris' for dinner. The
472
two boys had pooled their allowances and bought film for his camera.
"I would like some pictures of Stonehenge," Steve told Eric solemnly. "I have a book about it. Nobody seems to know who built it, do they?"
Jimmy asked Eric to find out how you play rugby and how it was different from football. Laura had helped her mother make a package of fudge, "to eat on the plane for dessert." And Eric felt the poignancy of departure.
Anna cried a little. "I don't know why I'm crying! I'm so happy that you're going to have a marvelous summer. I don't know why I'm crying."
She cried so easily. Gran would never have done that. He thought that he had been cursed with ambivalence. In some ways he was closer in feeling and expression to this woman than he had ever been able to get to Gran, and yet Gran was a part of his fibre and his life as this other grandmother could never be. She had come too late. A part of him would always be withheld from her and awkward with her.
Suddenly it occurred to him that that was what she was feeling too, and that was why she cried.
In a little town near Bath one afternoon he bought a cheap notebook at a stationer's and began to write.
I think sometimes that what is bothering me is that I no longer believe in anything. Perhaps, coming from an urban, halfway educated American in this secular age, that sounds absurd. But there it is, all the same.
Perhaps if I believed in something I would know where I belong, or where I want to belong, and among what people. You may ask, what has belief, which is so absolutely personal, got to do with belonging to this, that or the other social group? Nothing, really.
I sat half the afternoon in a Saxon church in a Thomas Hardy village. Saxonl Imagine how old! It was cold behind those thick walls with a hot summer hush outdoors. I walked out to the churchyard. There was no one in sight except some cows chewing and drooling in the field next to the graves. Sound of bees. I read the names on the headstones where they weren't rubbed out by centuries of rain. The same names on plaques in the nave; the
473
.
same on doors in the village. Thomas Brearley and Sons, Cobblers since 1743. Live here all your life; work; sing hymns on Sunday. Same work, same words, over and over. Baptized in this church, cold water on the infant's forehead, squalling at the font. Die and be buried a few steps away. Must be some truth here? If all these generations, in grieving or rejoicing, felt there was Something here, must there not certainly be Something?
In the silence, in the old, old place so small and plain and human, I could see myself on the edge of believing.
At nine or ten, going to church with Gran and Gramp, it was different then. So much awe. Used to come home to big Sunday dinner, roast and pie, wearing my best suit, feeling everything in order. Wish I could feel it again. Wish I could feel like my grandfather and Aunt Iris in the synagogue. Not so sure about Nana; I think she's trying to be like them. Naturally, she wouldn't say, or maybe doesn't even know herself. Asked Uncle Theo once about himself: had he lost faith? I never had it, he said.
Ireland. Fearful damp and chattering teeth. Fog and rain in cold stone slums. I watch old women in black shawls doing the Stations of the Cross in roadside villages. My great-great—many greats ago—came from Ireland, Gran said. Like one of these women in the shawls? But first a girl, walking the roads. So poor. Decaying teeth. Eyes like turquoise. Superstitious. Clustering, dark legends: elves, gnomes of the woods.
I go into a church. Tawdry frescoes, calendar art in candy-box colors. Effeminate figure on the cross, insipid woman holding the infant. Think of high art: the Pieta, the Mother and dead Son. The accumulated agony of the centuries: above all, human.
That's all it is: human. Need to lean on something while we stumble through life. That's all it is, isn't it? Any thinking man knows that's all it is.
Father, I believe. Help Thou mine unbelief.
Gramp always wanted to come back here and couldn't. Now I see why he wanted to. Plane trees, hill towns, old olive orchards of Provence. Snapshot of my mother, sitting in front of a vineyard. Her eyes turned to this same light. Roman faces. They've been here since then. No, before then; the Greeks came first. Marseilles was Marsallia. Ruins of a Greek city at Glanum. All these flowing rivers of life. The Rue des Israelites in a medieval town; another flowing river, but of blood. The Judengasse in Salzburg; all over Europe, locked up, chains at the two ends of the street. A unique history among peoples, myself at the tail end. Fierce
474
beliefs. They died for them. I don't think they were worth dying for. I don't think any belief is worth dying for. Do I? Maybe I'll find one that is. Then it will be worth living for, too.
I pose myself a question, a cliche by now. Would I give my treasure, my small worldly treasure (large to me) for the lives of a thousand unknown yellow (or any other color) men on the far side of the globe? Another question: what is the value of my immortal soul (assuming that I have one) compared to the immortal soul of a squalid pimp in a New York alley? I don't know the answer to either question.
These things trouble me.
Weeks later
Juliana stands before red flowers in a window box. The house has a gable roof and a canal runs in front of it. She eats from a box of Dutch chocolates. I think I am falling in love with her.
I know I am falling in love with her. She has been working on a kibbutz in northern Galilee and is home for vacation. Why? I ask her. Why Israel? She says she wants to see the world. She says the Dutch have been good to the Jews (that I know); she says it is exciting there. Ideal
s in action, she tells me. A place for the young. A new country. She wants me to go back with her. Just to see what it's like, she says. I'm going. I would go anyway, even if it was to Timbuktu.
Oh, lovely Europe, your flowers and your wine, your bread, your music. We're flying southeast, over the ancient, warm and violet Mediterranean lands. I shall remember the sweetness and delight of Europe.
And I shall remember its concentration camps, Uncle Theo says.
41
So narrow is the northernmost tip of Israel that a giant of ancient legend would be able to straddle it with one foot in Lebanon and the other in Syria.
The river Jordan, mighty in the imagination of the Western
world, was only a stream, Eric thought with surprise, and the falls
at its source, which were held in awe by the natives, were only a
, faucet's trickle when compared, not with Niagara, but with any
modest waterfall at home.
Nevertheless, the land was lovely.
At the crest of a low hill stood the wooden buildings of the kibbutz: dormitories, dining hall, library, school. Barns and sheds ringed the slopes; below them stretched wide orchards, and beyond these lay a flowing sea of grain.
Reapers moved through that golden sea. Young men and women climbed the trees, picked and packed the fruit. Cattle stamped in the barns. Fresh-mown grass sweetened the air. From the dining hall one heard the sound of someone practicing on the piano; from the machine shop came the clang of iron against iron. In the big kitchen from morning to night meals were in preparation. Children splashed in the swimming pool: the second generation, building on the foundation of the pioneers, had added this touch of luxury. Out of rock and the neglect of barren centuries, vision and toil had made a way of life.
And all of it lay within gunshot of the Golan Heights.
"The Syrians have crack troops up there," Juliana said, pointing
476
477
II
eastward to bluffs that rose like a wall. "Anything that moves in the fields or on the road is a target, whenever the notion takes them. Last year, just after I got here," she said bitterly, "it was a bus going in to town. The driver was hit and of course it smashed. Eight killed, two of them children under five."
They were walking through the yards between the buildings. Juliana was very serious. "Come, I'll show you something else. On this side we're only two miles from Lebanon." They slid on slippery grass between lines of thin young pear trees. At the lower edge of the orchard she raised a screen of leafage and they looked into the ugly reptilian mouths of a row of guns.
"This is our second line of defense. The wire fences and the guards are at the border."
"It's rather sobering, to think we sleep with guns in our back yard."
"It's a safer feeling, I'll tell you that! Still, now and then they slip through anyway. You must have read about the raid on the school? It was in the next town, only twenty minutes from here. Down there through that grove, that's the border and the wire fence. If you walk straight down you'll reach it."
Eric thought, If I had gone with Chris I would have been on the other side of it. He wondered fleetingly what sort of lives were being lived on that other side, but in the short weeks he had been here he had become so much identified with these lives that he found it hard to imagine those others.
He slept in the dormitory for single men. On the wall opposite each bed hung each man's gun. Pants and shoes lay on a chair alongside the bed. You could be dressed, downstairs and out of doors in sixty seconds.
He thought of stories that Gramp had told about their ancestors who had settled the wilderness of New York State. Energy and guts. Making something out of nothing. Perhaps that was the pull of this place for him—that, and Juliana.
"Do you really like it, Eric? Do you feel anything of what I told you about when we were in Holland?" she asked.
"I'm beginning to. And I do know what you meant."
They sat down on a rock in the lowering sun. It was the Sabbath and a hush lay over everything. Work had stopped. There was deep quiet except for mild stampings and lowings from the barn.
"When I first came—I had wanted for years to come—it was be-
cause I felt an obligation. Lots of young Europeans do, Germans, too. Now I stay because I love it. But the obligation came first."
"Tell me about it."
Juliana shuddered. "Those years of the war when I was nine, ten, eleven, we saw such things—" She was silent for a minute or two, then resumed, "A neighbor of ours, a determined woman, with convictions—" /'Like you," Eric interrupted, with a smile.
"She was a brave woman. She had a Jewish family hidden in her attic behind a camouflaged door. Just like Anne Frank. You've read the book?"
"Yes."
"Well, it was like that. Only a few people knew they were there. Whatever food we could spare, an extra apple, or some cereal at the bottom of the pot, my mother took next door. We children weren't supposed to know but I heard my mother telling my father that there were two brothers and their wives, some children and a baby. They had to hold the baby under a blanket to muffle its cries.
"So, one day the Germans came and took them away. They went straight to the hidden door. And they took our good neighbor, too, in a truck filled with people on the way to the camps, most of them to the furnaces. The husbands were separated from the wives and children from their own mothers. We heard them all the way down the street as far as the corner, crying, crying—" Juliana covered her face with her hands. "Do you think, Eric, that I shall be able to forget things like that? I don't think I will. One day the Nazis took my two uncles, my mother's younger brothers. We never heard from them again. They had been working in the underground, you see."
"And someone reported them?"
"I guess so. We were so afraid all the time for my father. I wasn't supposed to know that either, but you know how children always find out what's going on in a house. So I knew that my father was also in the underground. And at night, whenever it was late and quiet and you heard the sound of a motor or footsteps pounding toward the house, I was sure they were coming to take him away, too."
"Do any children anywhere have the kind of life children are supposed to have?" Eric burst out.
478
"I'm sure they do! They must or the world would be a total madhouse! Why, was your life so hard?"
Some other time, perhaps. Not now. "No," he murmured, "actually it was warm and beautiful." And it was true, in most ways, wasn't it? No self-pity; self-pity stinks, he thought roughly, and repeated with firmness, "it was warm and beautiful."
From the dining hall came music, a piano sonata played with fervent hands and spirit. Eric looked up questioningly.
"Shh!" Juliana motioned, and they waited in the violet dusk until the music had ended, waited even a moment longer until it had died away on the air.
She said softly, "That's Emmy Eisen. You know, the woman who helps me in the nursery sometimes? She was a piano teacher in Munich and hid there all through the war. She's so blond, they thought she was an Aryan, you see. And she had good friends, Catholic people who said she was a relative and got false papers for her. She was one of the lucky ones; she didn't get caught. But her husband did and her two sons. That's why she doesn't talk very much. I don't know whether you noticed."
"Ah, yes," Eric said.
"It's a pity she can't have a good piano for herself. The kids wreck this one. Eric, you haven't been thinking about a word I've said!"
"No," Eric said.
"Well, what have you been thinking, then?"
"I have been thinking, if you really want to know, that I love your lovely mouth and your round arms."
Farther down the hill was a hollow; tall grass and a curtain of heavy shrubbery made a small green cave, entirely hidden. Besides, it was almost dark.
"Come," he said.
She rose and followed. The soft green curtain swayed shut behind them as they
passed through.
He had chosen to work in the barns. He learned to operate the milking machines; he cleaned stalls and hauled feed twice a day. This labor too reminded him of Brewerstown and of his people's past. Other than that there was little in this motley world to remind Eric of any other place.
When they were gathered at supper in the dining hall he could observe the people in all their variety. First there were the old
479
ones, who had come here from the cities of Russian Poland and had taught themselves to work the land. Then there were their children, the sabras, blond, husky women and men: earnest people for all that they could dance and jubilate. A determined and tenacious people! Last, there were the visitors, mostly students from everywhere: a Christian girl from Australia who had come out of curiosity and for a summer's adventure; boys from Brooklyn, English Jews and German Gentiles, come for a month or two. Few intended to stay, as Juliana did.
