The Covenant

by Ragen, Naomi

  She liked men, boys, but found few interesting enough to spend time with. The truth was, she picked up men as she did books, exploring them, understanding them, and then, when she had gotten the essential point, she itched to put them back on the shelf to make room for a shiny new one whose binding had not yet been creased.

  The longest any relationship had lasted was four weeks, and the only reason it took that long was because she was fifteen and he was twenty. It had taken her time to understand the lag of experience between them. But when, scarcely a month later (quite a bit of it spent in bed, catching up) she found herself on par, she knew he was soon to be history.

  What she needed, she realized early on, was a man of endless variety and mystery; part of a whole world that would take many years to explore. That is what every woman with a low boredom threshold needs. And Elizabeth Gold Miller had a very, very low boredom threshold. And such a man was not, by any means, easy to find. Sometimes such women never marry. Or they become the kind that marry so often it becomes a rather tacky joke. It isn’t fickleness. They have simply, and sincerely, got the story straight, and realize that there will never be any surprises, any improvements, any fundamental changes. It’s the boredom that sends them out on their next quest.

  Elizabeth feared that because of her looks, she was doomed to meet men with unreasonably high self-images and no depth, the kind that dogged movie actresses and models. Men who were superficial to begin with, and existentially boring in that which they sought, and thus ultimately unsatisfying and unworthy of respect or interest.

  Boethius had it right, she thought. Self-sufficiency.

  She had come to Berkeley to become self-sufficient. To understand herself and the world and to explore the limits of human culture and history; the “why” of why are we alive on this earth. Is there a God? What do we need to do to find happiness? What is freedom? And then, Whally had come along.

  He really was a mystery. He didn’t offer any information about himself, nor did he get involved in questioning her about her family and background. She found him enormously attractive and exotic: the dark hair, the olive skin, the powerful build. And she could see he was smitten with her.

  But somehow, the physical part of their relationship was held back in a tense abeyance while they explored each other’s minds.

  Each conversation ended with a suggestion that they meet again.

  And so it was, that year, her freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley. How is it that people who come from two different worlds, two radically different worldviews and backgrounds, learn to love each other? Is there not some automatic mechanism that turns on to thwart the drawing together of opposites? Or do human relationships mimic nature in that the magnetic forces most opposed are in an unstoppable journey toward union?

  She was a Jew, the grandchild of a woman arrested, tortured and marked for death by those who hated Jews. She was an American woman, taught that freedom to dress, feel, learn, work, think was her birthright, and the right of every human being. She took her unlimited freedom for granted, like the bathroom tiles, or the solid earth beneath her feet.

  His name was Whalid Ibn Saud. His family lived in Riyadh. He was from the Saudi Arabian royal family, who subscribed to the Wahabi sect of Islam, a sect that rejected the notion of freedom of religion, who had built a country in which being in possession of an Old or New Testament was a jailable crime. It was a country that denied entry to Jews, and outlawed the presence of Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Shi’a Muslims. He came from a patriarchy in which women were still veiled, forbidden to go out into the street alone without male permission, or drive or work. A place where women belonged to men and had no separate existence.

  How is it, then, that they fell in love? Because that is what happened. They didn’t mean to. But they haunted each other’s dreams, and each morning when they awoke, the desire to see each other, to hear the other’s voice, was almost unbearable. And so being together became almost as routine as showering, or going to classes. They simply couldn’t help themselves.

  They didn’t put a label on what they were doing, because had they described their relationship as a courtship, it would have been unthinkable to them both. So they didn’t think, they acted. On Sundays they drank coffee and ate delicious cakes from Just Desserts on College Avenue. On Saturdays they strolled down Hopkins Avenue, pausing to sit in open-air cafes. Friday nights were spent at Iceland, with the lights dimmed and the music playing, floating around the rink, the sound of scraping ice, the chill delicious against the warmth of their bodies in each other’s arms.

  She was eighteen and he was twenty. She was a freshman majoring in philosophy, and he a junior, majoring in Middle Eastern studies. They didn’t involve friends or family with what they had between them. Their friends wouldn’t have understood, gotten along. And getting their families together was impossible to even imagine, and so they avoided imagining it.

  Like balloons suddenly let loose from the hands of their creators, all the strings holding them down began to float, dangling in the open air. They rose together, looking down at the familiar earth, watching as everything they’d grown up with, everything they’d always understood and believed, grew small and disappeared.

  The view they shared now came from a different height, a perspective that was impossible to explain to those still down below. There, above the clouds, they made perfect sense as a couple. In fact, they were inevitable. The beauty of their bodies, their youth, their love of ideas, their sense of fun, their endless delight in the other . . . Why shouldn’t they be together? How could the rules of the world be right, if it denied them that simple, logical right?

  And then came the moment when they both realized that they were helpless to stop the rush of events, that gale force that had blown them both so far from familiar, safe shores. They never discussed their future. Instead, they escaped into long discussions about abstract ideas.

  What about beauty, she’d ask him. Is that too a worthless thing?

  “Boethius would say that three days’ fever can make it disappear. And if you look deeply enough at any beautiful body, you will see beneath the surface, the guts and liver and kidneys—all very necessary, but very unbeautiful. To love human beauty is to love something whose very existence is doomed. Love should be based on permanence. On solid, secure things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Love of God. Love of good deeds. Love of country and family. Love of ideas.”

  “And physical love?”

  “To make physical love to the person with whom you share a permanent love of all these nontransient things would be the highest form of pleasure,” he would intone solemnly.

  “So, you are against getting into bed with a pretty girl and having a good time?”

  “It would be an inferior form of pleasure, one that sullies and makes more difficult the attainment of the deepest pleasure.”

  They did not sleep together.

  She wanted to. But he held back. She never knew why. Perhaps it was religious conviction. Perhaps fear, a sense that the act of intimacy would force them both into making decisions that were impossible to make, decisions that would burst the fragile fabric that enclosed the hot, moist gas that kept them aloft in their own stratosphere, unbuffeted by the weather and complications down on earth.

  But of course, after months of suspended reality, the moment of truth inevitably arrived. It was a Sunday afternoon. They’d gone to Tilden Regional Park, taken the steam train, ridden on the carousel. There were families with children all around them. A young couple sat on a park bench. A three-year-old girl in pink shorts with long dark hair snuggled in her young mother’s arms, while the handsome young father held a small baby against his shoulder, rocking it. As they watched, the two parents exchanged a smile as they looked at their children.

  That smile.

  Everything was in it. Pride, contentment, happiness, connection. Permanence. It was the perfect circle, completely
self-sufficient. It was the meaning of life. Nothing could take its place. They both suddenly understood that that was the only future worth having.

  There was nothing left to say, no more fantasies to shield them from the inevitable.

  “What is going to happen to us?” she asked him. “What is the future?”

  “I am going back to Riyadh. I’m going to work at some job. Practice my religion as best I can. Be a loyal son to my parents and family. I love my family and won’t shirk my obligations.”

  “Isn’t that terrible, that you have your whole life mapped out, filled with obligations?”

  “Don’t you feel any family obligations? Any ties of culture and religion and history?”

  The truth was, she didn’t really understand what he meant by obligations. She felt, and had always been made to feel, that freedom was her right, that anything that held her back or disturbed that right was wrong.

  She was an American, and she was guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She had had a Bat Mitzvah, an almost ludicrously elaborate affair on a cruise ship, in which each deck had had its own band and theme. On deck A, there had been a swing band and a forties theme; on deck B, a Hawaiian theme and hula dancers; and on deck C, waiters dressed as Egyptian slaves had borne her (dressed like a prepubescent Cleopatra) on a litter into a room filled with over a thousand guests, mostly her mother’s and grandmother’s business associates. She’d received an absolute roomful of gifts. Obligations? The weekly Sunday school sessions in her local reform synagogue that had preceded the shindig. But they hadn’t been burdensome. They’d been a pleasure. She had loved the teacher, a kindly young rabbinical student, who in his gentle way persuaded her that there was a God and that He was accessible—indeed quite an understanding and compassionate deity. The beauty of the prayers, the colorful stories of the Bible were like hearing a special kind of music for the first time. Not classic, not rock, something in between that made her soul hum along, even though she wasn’t sure she would ever learn the words right or how to play the instrument herself.

  But somehow, after the party was over, the presents unwrapped, other things had vied for her attention: junior proms, cheerleaders, debating clubs, school newspaper. Religion was like the good china that the family brought out and dusted off on special occasions: weddings, funerals, Rosh Hashanah and Passover. She had learned from her family to leave it respectfully on the shelf.

  When she met Whally, she made an effort to learn about Islam. She’d found its tenets, at least on the books, amazingly similar to Judaism’s. Both religions had one and only one God. He had no father, no son. And He was the father of all human beings. He was supreme and high, close to the pious who pray to Him, loving to those who love Him, and forgiving to those who asked forgiveness. He gave people peace, happiness, success, knowledge. Unlike the Jews, though, Muslims believed that all prophets were sent by God, and all religious texts were true: they believed in Jesus, Moses, Abraham and Mohammed, the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran. All are from the same source, and all ask the same thing: that men and women worship the one, true God, which Muslims call Allah. The point was that the individual submit his will to the will of God. To do good, not for God’s sake, because God was not in need of anything—the ultimate self-sufficient being—but for man’s sake. The purpose of life, therefore, was to worship God, not just by praying, but by living the kind of life God wants for the good of all mankind and for the good of the individual.

  The more she learned, the more Elizabeth wondered at the essential similarities between their two religions, except that Islam—on paper—seemed the more tolerant one, encompassing all prophets and all texts.

  But then she took out a book on Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi form of Islam practiced by the Saudi Royal family was intolerant to a fantastical degree. But that didn’t stop the Saudis from building mosques in London, Rome, New York and Washington. And even though Wahabism forbade the consumption of alcohol and promiscuity, quite a few Saudi leaders were known as drunks and womanizers. As for pursuing peace, the family had initiated countless tribal wars and killed innumerable fellow Muslims.

  She confronted him with this.

  ”Every religion teaches peace and love. Yet, the church has killed millions in religious wars. And Jews are involved in endless wars against the Muslims.”

  “Which the Muslims start,” she replied furiously.

  “Palestine was Muslim until the Zionists came along.”

  “And Boston was full of Indians. And the British fought the French. Land is fought over and won and lost. It’s not a reason to kill people. Besides, my people were in Palestine thousands of years before yours. I thought Muslims accepted Moses as a prophet, and the Torah as true?”

  They glared at each other.

  This was the future. And it was impossible.

  They stopped going out together, crossing the street when they saw each other coming. And the day after their final exams, he left the country and she went home to Los Angeles. They didn’t call, or write. And with every day that passed, she felt she was experiencing those symptoms described by drug addicts suddenly going cold turkey: everything hurt, everything felt empty and gray. There was sometimes physical pain, like a stomach flu. There was a deep sense of loss, and confusion. A sense of mourning. All her old friends kept calling, and she kept avoiding them. Young men would come up to her at the country club, introduced by her mother or father as the successful sons of their doctors and lawyers and business partners. She was always polite, even allowing herself a momentary curiosity and attraction. But as they sat down next to her on the beach chair and pattered on about their plans to sail to Bermuda, or volunteer for Greenpeace, or begin a summer internship, she’d examine them. So tall and slender and smiling and reasonable and American, she’d think, finally admitting to herself that she’d lost her taste for white bread.

  She played sad songs and lay on her bed in a darkened room, staring at the ceiling, wondering when the ache in her heart was going to heal.

  And then, at the end of July, there was a knock on her door, and her mother came in and sat by her bedside. “There is someone to see you. He says he is a friend of yours from college.”

  “He says?”

  “Yes, a he. And he doesn’t look Jewish, Elizabeth,” her mother accused. “In fact, he doesn’t even look American.”

  She forgot to put on shoes, pulling her robe around her and threading her fingers through her bed-disheveled hair. She ran down the stairs. His back was toward her and then he slowly turned, his dark eyes brightening, his whole body straining toward her.

  She stopped halfway down the staircase, watching him, unable to get any closer.

  “Whally.”

  “Elizabeth.”

  He was thinner and paler, with a new mustache that emphasized his foreignness. He was so very different, so exotic, so very un-American, she realized now, and the idea struck her with full force as it never had before.

  “What is going to happen to us? What are you going to do with your life?” she asked him, oblivious to the staring servants, her mother watching the scene in horrified silence behind her back at the head of the stairs.

  “I won’t lie to you. I have family obligations, and I’m going to do exactly what is expected of me. Go back home to Riyadh. Work at some job. Be close to my family, and obedient in all things but one: I’m never going to marry anyone else but you.” He shrugged helplessly.

  “Don’t say that to me!” she shouted. “Don’t put that burden on me!”

  “Is that what it is, Elizabeth? A burden? Don’t you . . . can’t you . . . love me?”

  The question felt like an electric shock. She walked slowly down the steps, stopping only when one step more would have brought their bodies into contact. “Why did you leave me?”

  “For the same reason you let me go.”

  “And why have you come back? Nothing has changed.”

  “Everything has changed.” He reached
out and smoothed a curl off her forehead. “I was dead, all the time I was away from you. All the color had drained from the world. I saw nothing in the world worth living for. We have to make it work.”

  “But how?” She placed her hand on his chest. He enfolded it in his.

  “By living half in your world, and half in mine. Six months in Riyadh. Six months in California. When you are there, you will be a Muslim woman, and when I am here, I will do what I can to respect your family’s customs. I can’t be a Wahabi Muslim. But I can be a Muslim. And our religion tells us to accept Jesus and Mohammed and Moses and Abraham. I can do this, and be a good Muslim. My family will have to understand. And yours?”

  ”Absolutely not! Are you crazy?” Elizabeth’s mother shouted. “Elizabeth—Saudi Arabia?! They are primitive! They chop off the heads of wives who don’t behave! They cut people’s arms off for stealing! They don’t even let Jews in to visit!”

  “Mom . . .” she began, troubled. She felt the insistent warm pressure of his hand on hers, and she turned to face him. She couldn’t hear anymore. Slowly, she entrusted him with her other hand as well. They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Like Boethius, they were totally self-sufficient.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gynecology Ward

  Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem

  Tuesday, May 1 , 2002

  1:00 P.M.

  “LISTEN, EVERYONE IN the country is hysterical. We are like one big family. We are worried about Mrs. Margulies, that’s all. Think of me as her brother, her cousin,” a reporter from Yediot Aharonot, the biggest Israeli daily, wheedled the skeptical young nurse. “All we want is some information. Just let me in to speak to her for a few minutes. Have a heart!”