by Evergreen
She worked in the nursery, since in Holland she had been trained as a kindergarten teacher. Every other night she had to sleep in the nursery, which, Eric was shocked to learn, lay underground. Actually it was a bomb shelter behind a pretty blue door. He was very moved. The world had no knowledge of how these people had to live! He wondered whether even his grandparents, who cared so much, knew what it was really like. "One fears for these children living under the guns," Juliana said. "Of course, it doesn't bother the little ones. But the older ones know. They understand very well."
Many of the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds had survived the concentration camps and wore, would always wear, the outrageous number stamped upon their arms. The boys wrestled and punched as boys did everywhere. The girls tied ribbons in their hair and practiced flirting, as girls did everywhere. But their eyes were anxious.
Juliana was good for them. She was young enough to know the current popular songs and to teach them how to use a lipstick with skill. She was just enough older to give them some of the mothering they had lost, most of them having lost it when they were still so young that they could barely remember it.
And while Eric watched her with these young people, while he walked beside her under the wind and in the sunlight, he thought: Was there ever, could there ever be, another woman like this one? With the other half of his mind he knew that every man who loves a woman thinks the same. Yet there was not and never could be another one like her.
Sweet, so sweet, with her hair bleaching and her skin turning to cafe au lait under this searing sun! She was healthy and sturdy, and almost as tall as he; she seemed never to be tired. He didn't admire 'delicate' women, nor ruffled fragility. It pleased him now
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to think that with a woman like Juliana a man could go anywhere in the world; nothing would be too daring or too new for her.
He hadn't followed her all this way with any thought of marriage. At twenty-one none of his friends was married and he'd had no wish to be, either. He'd had no wish to be committed to any place or any person with certitude enough to say: next year at such and such a time, in such and such a place I shall be doing this or that. Not at all. (And that, he had sometimes thought, was odd of him, because so often, talking philosophically with a friend, he'd heard himself saying that what he needed most was something that lasted.) But permanence had been for his future. He had simply wanted to follow Juliana because, of all the women he had known, she was the most enchanting.
Yet, as the summer wore on, he began to feel a sense of looming loss.
Two weddings were celebrated on the kibbutz within one day. Eric had naturally seen more than a few weddings in his time, but never so much emotion: so many tears and embraces, so much reckless dancing, so much wine. For a while he played his customary role as a wedding guest, observing with curiosity and feeling a human sympathy with their pleasure, but no kinship. And then all at once, standing among the crowd that waved the brides and grooms down the road on the way to their short seaside honeymoons—he could not have said what had been happening inside his head—but all at once the whole business seemed very, very lovely and quite inevitable. He began, in private, to think about it, and was surprised to find himself doing so. Also, he was a trifle pleased and proud. Then he began to edge toward the subject, to walk around the farthest reaches of it, testing the ground, not quite ready yet to walk straight through.
"Tell me," he asked Juliana one day, "do you plan to stay here very long?"
They were sitting on the ground, near the pool. Everyone else was in the water, but he had held her back, wanting to talk.
"Well, it does seem like home to me."
"Yes, but," Eric pressed, "do you plan to stay always?" •""That's a word I don't use. I've told you, I don't like to think that far ahead."
"I do. I want to find a place and people that are going to be right for me forever. There has to be something in the world that's forever."
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"Like what?"
"Well," he said, "a house, for one thing, that you won't have to leave. Where you can plant trees and stay to see them grow old."
"Tell me what else you dream of," Juliana ordered, gently outlining his nose and cheeks with a long blade of grass.
"I dream—" he hesitated. "I dream of writing a book, one that might be remembered after I'm dead. A really great book. And I'd like, to write it in a room in a house like the one I grew up in." He wanted to add, and was perhaps about to add, "And with you in the house with me," but she interrupted.
"I hope you do! Oh, I hope you get everything you ever want as long as you live!"
People usually say such things out of perfunctory kindness. So the anxious urgency in her voice startled Eric. "Do you?" he asked.
And she answered, "Yes. Because I love you, Eric. So of course I do."
Certainly this was not the first time either of them had told that to the other, but now he went further, wanting and also fearing to know. "Has there—was there ever anyone—"
Juliana looked away, beyond the noise and busy motion at the pool. "There was one, just one, but that was a long time ago and different from this."
He wasn't satisfied. "What happened?"
She looked back at him, blinking as if she were recalling herself from a distant place. "He wanted—he bothered me too much about getting married. So we quarreled and ended it. It was just as well."
Even that did not satisfy him. "And that's all?"
"All that's worth talking about."
"But tell me," he persisted, "what would have been so terrible about getting married?" And added, trying for a light touch, "I thought that's what little girls aim for, from the cradle on."
"Yes," she said, "they do. And such a pity. Poor women! Don't you feel sorry for women?"
"No," Eric said honestly. "Or rather, I never thought about if."
"Well, think about it, then! The miserable marriages they make because they're afraid of waiting too long and being passed over! And the miserable marriages they stay in. And the miserable children-"
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"How bleak you sound! As if there were no happy marriages. That's not even sensible!"
She threw her hands up. "It's sensible for me, and that's all that counts. I like my life the way it is."
His heart sank. A year or two from now would she be telling some other man about him: "Yes, there was a young American, but he bothered me about marriage and so we—"
"What about children?" he asked lamely. "You're so wonderful with them. Surely you want children?"
"Right now it's wonderful enough to take care of other people's children."
"But you can't go on doing that," he argued. "That's only a substitute for the real thing."
Juliana jumped up. "I'm boiling in this heat! Let's swim!"
"Go ahead. I'll come in a minute."
What was it? Why? She was so free in loving when they lay in their 'green cave,' so free with her thoughts, whether glad or sober, as long as they didn't touch on any personal future. She baffled him. It would have been easy to understand and cope with, if there had been another man. Once he had had a girl he liked tremendously; then she had started to become involved with someone else, and Eric had come straight out before the two of them, demanding, "Who is it to be? He or I?" Funny thing! He smiled, remembering. She had chosen Eric, and then after that he hadn't especially wanted her.
But that had been different. That girl hadn't been Juliana. And the rival now wasn't another man. What was it, then?
At summer's end the young foreigners left to go back to the universities and back to jobs. Only a few would return; this had been an adventure, but next year they would try a different place, Nepal, perhaps, or Sweden.
"Aren't you supposed to go back to the States?" Juliana inquired of Eric.
"I can take a while longer. I was promised a trip before I go to work, so this can be it," he said.
Besides, he thought, the timing of all the
se departures was unfortunate. Everything was at the harvest, and just when more hands were needed for a few hectic weeks of twelve-hour days, suddenly there were fewer. If he were going to leave, this surely wouldn't be the right time to do it.
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The truth was, he knew he couldn't leave her. Not yet. When the harvest was finally in, holidays were taken. Eric had not seen Jerusalem. It occurred to him, since Juliana had told him how marvelous the city was, that she might like to go there with him for two or three days. So he arranged for a ride with some other people and told her, when they met at noon, what he had done.
She was indignant. "Now what gave you the right to plan my time for me?"
He thought at first that she was joking, but when he saw that she was not, he was astounded. "I should think you would thank me for having got us a lift, and saved you the trouble of scrounging for one."
"What made you so sure I wanted to go with you?"
"Have you by any chance gone out of your mind?" he demanded.
"No. I just don't like being taken for granted by a man!"
"Well, you needn't worry about that anymore," he said furiously. "I shan't take you for granted again. I shan't take you at all!" And he strode away.
He was sore with his anger all that afternoon. Women! 'Sorry for women,' she had said. Capricious, moody, childish, ungrateful, stupid— He ran out of words.
Could there perhaps be someone else? Anything was possible, yet he couldn't imagine who it might be. They'd been together so much, she hadn't had time even to talk to anyone else! Still, anything was possible.
At supper he sat purposely apart from her. But when it was over and he had to go down to the barns for the evening checkup, she followed him.
"Eric. Eric, I'm sorry." She laid her hand on his arm.
He didn't answer.
"I get that way sometimes. I know it's stupid and wrong. It wasn't decent when you were being so nice."
He melted. "Yes, but-what was it all about?"
"I just get a queer feeling sometimes about being owned. Independence is very precious to me. I get scared. I can't explain it."
"Well, all right then," he said awkwardly, far from understanding.
"And you're not going to stay angry with me? Please?"
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"Well, all right," he repeated. "You want to go on Sunday?"
"I want to. Very much."
The minibus was filled. Half the passengers were children and young teen-agers. Their singing was shrill and deafening and gay. The road cut through brown fields already being plowed for winter sowing. It passed through new cement-block towns, bare, ugly and clean.
"It's all they can afford," Juliana explained when Eric made comment. "They've neither time nor money. Beauty can come later."
For beauty had been in the past, and in Jerusalem was there still. The car stopped at the crest of a hill. Below lay the pale amber city, spreading to farther hills and up their sides.
"It isn't gold," Eric remarked wonderingly, "as in the song. It's amber. Yes, that's it."
"There's an old tradition," the driver said. "One is supposed to walk into Jerusalem. Who wants to get out here?"
A few of the boys and girls got out. Juliana jumped out with them.
"I was hoping you would," Eric said.
For three days they celebrated. He followed where he was led. They needed no guidebook, for Juliana knew the city well.
"It's a great pity we can't see more," she told him. "East Jerusalem is all Arab; they don't allow us to go in. And the old Jewish quarter that had been here for two thousand years was wrecked and captured when the Arabs attacked in 1948."
Still, there was more than eyes or feet could cover in three days. Museums and archeological digs. Crowded alleys of the Old City, foul to smell and vivid to look at. Arab women in black veils and Arab men in kaffiyehs. Narrow shops where men hammered brass and cut leather. They followed the Way of the Cross. They heard the muezzin's eerie cry in the early morning, and heard it again at noon when they went to a mosque to watch men kneel at prayer, facing toward Mecca.
In rocky fields at the city's edge goats climbed with bells jangling. A man led a string of shabby camels whose great eyes blinked patiently as they waited, tethered in the blinding sunlight. They listened to the melancholy twang of eastern music. At night they danced the hora. They wandered through dark, old shops.
"This is a street of Yemenites," Juliana explained. "Most of them are jewelers, silver crafters."
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"I want to buy something for you," Eric said.
"I didn't mean that!" she protested. "I only wanted you to see because it's interesting. They've come here from Yemen—"
"Buy one of these bracelets," he commanded. "No, not that one, it's not nice enough. Pick an important one."
The shop's owner held up a handsome bracelet, its silver filigree as fine as lace.
"That's the one," Eric said firmly. "That is, if the lady likes it."
"Oh, yes," Juliana said, "the lady does!"
When they were outside she asked, "Eric, are you so rich that you can spend money this way?"
He was touched. It hadn't cost anything much at all.
"No," he said, "I'm not, although people here might think I was."
On their last day Juliana told him, "I've saved the best for now. I'm going to take you to a synagogue."
"Oh," he said, amused, "you forget! I've been in them many, many times before."
"Not like this one, you haven't. At least I don't think you have."
At the end of a long alley they stopped. "This looks like medieval Europe!" Eric exclaimed.
"Well, it is. It's been transplanted. One can find everything in this city. Didn't I tell you?"
In the box-shaped synagogue of ancient stone they separated, Juliana climbing two flights of stairs to the women's balcony where hidden women read their prayer books behind the lattices. Squinting through a minute hole she could see the men at their prayer desks below, wrapped in their shawls, and chanting. Eric must be among them but she couldn't see him.
They met again just outside the entrance.
"They all looked so old!" Eric said.
"It's only the beards and the black clothes that make them seem so."
"To think they've been praying this way for three thousand years!"
"Maybe longer."
"My grandfather went to a place like this on the lower East Side before he became 'modern.'" Eric laughed. "You know, I've an idea he would still prefer it. But my grandmother wouldn't."
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"Do you realize, these people don't care about politics or wars or anything that's happening beyond their doors?"
"They're waiting for the Messiah, who'll set the world to rights."
Juliana shook her head. "They'll go on praying like this through raids and wars, and heaven forbid, even through defeat."
"That's faith. They believe. I wish I did," Eric said.
She looked at him curiously. "Don't you believe in anything?"
"Do you?" he countered.
"Yes. Freedom and individual dignity."
"Well, if that's all, why, I'll buy that."
"Maybe that's all the belief a person needs. Worth living for and dying for."
"Yes. Only, I don't want to die right now!"
"Nor I, of course not!"
"Ask me what I do want," Eric commanded.
"What do you want?"
"To live where you are. To be near you forever."
"Nothing is forever," Juliana said darkly.
"Do you really think that? I don't like to hear it."
"I know you don't."
"I want to marry you, Juliana. You must know I do."
"Ah, you're very young for your age, Eric!"
He stopped in the middle of the street. "That's a rotten thing to say!"
"Don't be annoyed with me. I only meant—I'm older than you. I'm twenty-four."
"Don't you
think I figured that out? And what difference does it make, anyway?"
"None, I guess. But I also meant—you're too trusting. You scarcely know me and still you want to offer me your life on a silver platter."
