“Of course,” the husband says, not knowing that he is consenting to the loss of his children.
That man was the Holy One Blessed Be He, the woman says. Our sons are gone. Then she pulls back the blanket to reveal to him the bodies. The moral is that all children, all life is on loan from heaven.
An unbearable story. Yael’s father is finding that all the familiar texts are haunted with a horror that did not quite communicate itself to him before, the way that certain features of a room announce themselves only in partial darkness. Stories of sages falling on their faces, sages clinging to the ruins of a destroyed ship, sages tortured to death, torn apart by Roman meat hooks, scalped. So much Torah learning, and this is the reward. For what?
Some died in prayer. Dying on the word “one” or the word “holy.” As if this was a comfort. How many died screaming for their mothers?
The afternoon is fading. Across the room, Yael’s window is open. He has left the window open, the window the Arab came through. He has left the window open, because what does he have to fear now?
At some point, he must have fallen asleep because he wakes in the partial light of early evening. His first thought: She’s here. She is here. Yael. In the bunk below. He can feel her subtle movement, her breathing. “Yael,” he says. Just once. He says her name only once, and please, heavenly father, let him die now, please, die with her still here.
His wife is crying. Not Yael. Of course not Yael. In the bunk below, his wife is crying. She must be lying on the wooden slats of Yael’s bunk, the mattress missing, the bloody mattress gone.
Two parents in separate bunks, separate agonies.
And yet.
He wants to tell her that he is sorry. What have I done? he wants to ask. What have I not done?
Without looking, he reaches over the edge of the bed so that his hand is outstretched to his wife in the bunk below. He waits. He waits for her to reach up and take it.
Strangers
It is Ido’s idea to pull over for the hitchhiker.
“Lama, Ido?” Emily asks. Why? Why now, why this? She wants to get back to the rental cottage to prepare dinner: rinse the wild rice, flash-marinate the mushrooms, get the proofed dough in the oven. Never mind the breast milk she’s eager to refrigerate and bring back home tomorrow.
“Because,” he says, as he checks the rearview mirror and backs up along the gravel shoulder toward the girl—all leggy in shorts, despite the winter chill. “She’s alone.”
This is remote area to hitch for a ride—a single road between far-flung northern kibbutzes. A damp, heavy wind rushes in as Ido lowers Emily’s window and the girl leans close to the window to say, “English?” in a German accent, or Norwegian, or Danish, one of those. Golden strands of the girl’s hair reach into the car, kissing Emily’s cheeks. What’s odd is how much this girl looks like her, like Emily—fair coloring, cute nose—only younger, so much younger. The radio is still on, playing a Hebrew pop song in the Arab-inflected Mizrahi style. My beloved, my beloved, my beloved, the man trills exotically.
Ido turns it off. “English, yes!” he says, leaning across Emily. She can smell his antidandruff shampoo. Unsure of where to look, Emily looks at her own sneakers, still muddy from when they stopped to hike earlier today. She nudges her toe against what must be a baby toy—soft plastic circle in a friendly orange. One of Mayan’s, surely, but why doesn’t Emily recognize it? “Where to?” Ido asks the hitchhiker. He’s straining against his seat belt.
“I have an address,” she says, thumbing around her phone. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyelashes long. When she smiles, faint lines appear around her eyes and mouth, smoothed away almost immediately by the elasticity of her young skin. In the late afternoon’s weak light, there’s something blurred about her face, almost photoshopped. Emily can tell by the way the girl smiles helplessly toward her that it’s her presence in the car—a woman in the passenger seat—that makes this safe. “It’s near here,” she says, “the kibbutz I look for.” She hesitates then butchers the name of the very kibbutz where Ido and Emily have rented a cottage for the night.
“That’s where we go!” Ido exclaims, and then just like that, he presses a button and the car doors unlock.
The girl glances at Emily again, then nods okay, and gets into the back, tipping in a large pack before her. She sits in the center seat. It’s the spot where, usually, Mayan’s car seat is.
“Mah atah oseh, Ido?” Emily asks softly, assuming the tourist doesn’t speak Hebrew. This is to be their first night alone since Mayan was born. It’s not quite four p.m., but they’ll both be exhausted by nine. Ido is squandering their last hours alone before they go back home tomorrow.
Ido winks at her as he pulls the car back onto the road. The wink says, Don’t worry, I got this. Emily breathes in slowly to the count of eight, holds, and releases to the count of ten. A calming technique.
Glancing in the rearview mirror as he drives, Ido asks the German girl where she came from. A city in the south, she says, not far from Switzerland. Ido is laughing. “No, no,” he says, “I mean, how did you get here?” She says she took the train from Tel Aviv. “You are visiting to be a kibbutznikit?” Ido asks.
The girl, not quite understanding the question, says, “Yes, it is a beautiful country.”
He wants to know how long she’s been in Israel (“not too long,” a kind of cagey answer, it seems to Emily); where she has gone already (Tel Aviv, of course, yes, and Jerusalem too, but she prefers Tel Aviv). “Ahh, come on!” Ido is smiling goofily. “We love living in Jerusalem.” He names a bar they haven’t been to in years. “Did you go there?” he asks in the rearview mirror. The girl thinks she did; she’s not sure. Her voice has the cheerful competence that seems to come with a German accent.
Emily nursed Mayan this morning before they began the drive north. It was a whole production: arriving the night before to Ido’s parents’ place, stacking the fridge with too many glass, BPA-free canning jars (four ounces) of expressed breast milk, all so they could wake up early this morning and get up north in time. Really, this should be a two-night trip, but they’ve condensed it into one—one night is all they are willing to spend away from their baby.
Ido is talking to the German about land mines. He’s talking about the Second Lebanon War without naming it, because nobody outside of Israel—well, and Lebanon, presumably—noticed it happening. He says a phrase that Emily recognizes because he has said it to her. “Boredom punctuated by tragedy.” That’s how Ido describes combat.
She presses her forehead against the cold, damp glass of her window. What is Mayan doing right now? Are you sleeping, my little life? Mayan’s hair is dark, like Ido’s, but flossy soft. Emily could spend the rest of her life staring at her eyelids, near-translucent and fluttering. Shock of blue eyes, panicked and searching, then closing again, drifting back into . . . what? What do you dream without language? Dream of me, Emily thinks. Please, of me.
All day a mist has lingered. Through it, she can see the summit of the modest mountain they hiked, just a few miles away. We were there, she almost whispers. Near the summit, her hand rested on Ido’s shoulder as she balanced on an uneven rock, looking out over fields. All around them were quiet monuments to the war dead. Names of dead boys, engraved in plaques and mounted on boulders, on trees. Up there, everything was green and gray, windswept and dolorous. Emily didn’t take any photos.
“And are you a soldier still?” the girl asks.
“Well, in Israel we are always soldiers.” He glances at Emily, but she pretends not to notice. Emily’s role, if you can call it that, is to express displeasure at Ido’s decision to keep serving with his reserve unit. They’ve cast these parts for each other. Her part requires that she use phrases like “casual dehumanization” when discussing the most recent atrocity—for example, what happened to the Palestinian boy in the mall parking lot. Ido’s part is to answer back, “And what about Yael Salomon? What about the terrorist who casual dehumanized that girl in h
er bedroom?”
Ido continues, “But at my age, I am a soldier only a few times a year. Mostly, I am an animator.”
“Oh my gosh!” The girl leans forward so her head is between the two of them. “Like cartoons? You make cartoons?”
Oh, come on, Emily thinks. Grow up.
Ido smiles back at the girl. “Yes, I make cartoons.”
He names a cartoon that, yes, it’s true, he worked on, but didn’t create or write or even storyboard, just provided labor for. It’s a cartoon with a sardonic unicorn that hangs out in dive bars and takes large, rainbow-colored bowel movements. The German girl knows this cartoon. “It is amazing!” she says. She says it a few more times.
When Ido and Emily are alone, he only brings up his job to complain about his “bullshit paint-by-numbers” projects, his unappreciative bosses, and the terrible pay. He frets, he dismisses alternatives, as if this is the only way it could be, because (Emily senses this rather than it ever being said aloud) of Emily and the baby. It’s because of them that Ido must shelve his dream of being an independent artist. Who cares? she wants to say. Who cares about that job? They could take money from his parents. They could better monetize Emily’s already-considerable social media presence. She knows the formula for a marketable, stylized calm set to a background of mix-and-match textiles: a single orange, Mayan’s tiny hand clutching a sprig of lavender. But Ido is protective of his dignity, and in a way, Emily is too—scared that he might not be someone who can take care of her, scared that he might be a loser.
At the gates to the kibbutz, Ido waves at the guard booth, where an old husk of a kibbutznik is drinking a paper cup of what must be black coffee, leaning back to accommodate quite the gut. He doesn’t bother to open the sliding glass window so that Ido can call out, Hey, we’ve rented a cottage, just nods and presses a button that opens the tinny gates. How is he explaining the arrangement of figures to himself? Does he wonder about the girl in the back seat? Emily looks too young to be the German girl’s mother, she hopes. The girl might seem like Emily’s much younger sister. Or a younger friend. Or a sex worker they solicited on Craigslist.
The girl is reading directions off her phone. The directions are in German—she met the guy whose place she is crashing at in Berlin, of course, because all Israelis end up in Berlin eventually—so she translates out loud on the spot, slowly yielding words in English. Strange how Emily is the only one in the car speaking in her first language. Strange how vulnerable that makes her feel, like she’s the only one who has the burden to tell the truth, the real truth, not just the approximation of the truth you hazard in your non-native tongue.
They drive slowly through a fog that parts for them, the car bumping and dipping with the smoothed stones. They drive slowly because dogs and children abound on a kibbutz. They pass squat, one-story houses built close to the road. From their uniform simplicity, you can tell they belong to the early days of the kibbutz—back when the egalitarian dream was still alive.
“Do you have what to eat?” Emily asks. She talks like this now—her English inflected by Hebrew syntax. Where you from? This is the first question anyone asks when they hear her speak Hebrew. She doesn’t know what to say. I am from a series of Midwestern American suburbs, and none of them told me anything about myself.
The girl says, “I’m not too worried about food. I have this onion I brought.”
Seriously? But Ido’s face lights up, and Emily knows what he’s thinking: How pure the unencumbered youth, how unfussy, how unlike Emily, with the complicated food she packed into baskets and coolers: crushed garlic, sliced mushrooms, temperamental bread dough. The list goes on. The quinoa salad heaped with diced peppers, the dressing left on the side so it won’t grow soggy. All this packed alongside the accoutrements that sex would require, if they hazarded it—a staggering array of organic, fragrance-free lubes that Ido ordered for her at tremendous cost, because since giving birth, sex has remained difficult. The stitches inside Emily have melted, yes, but all these months later and she still needs to be careful, so careful. Now their sex doesn’t follow a narrative arc as it once did—one that starts many ways but always, always ends in penetration.
The mist is rising. Out of it, and quite suddenly, appears a man walking the dirt road. All Emily can see of him is his leather shepherd hat. When he looks over his shoulder at them, Emily sees that he’s older than her father, snow-bearded. He raises his hand in greeting as they pass, rumbling over the uneven, rocky way. He’s from another time, another era, and even though she knows it is rude, Emily takes a quick photo of him with her phone.
The fog closes like a palm and opens to reveal a kibbutz dog, mangy and enormous, asleep in the middle of the road. Emily touches Ido’s arm to make sure he sees it. He slows. He honks. The dog stirs and slowly rises—a heavy-titted bitch with low-hanging dusty nipples and a torn ear. According to the instructions Emily received by email, the cottage they rented should be around here. The German girl says, “I think it is this one on the left.”
“Actually,” Ido says—Don’t do it, Emily thinks, please don’t tell her—“our place is next door.”
“Well, bye!” Emily says, trying to sound unbothered.
“You should come by for dinner,” Ido continues, and Emily closes her eyes.
“Thank you,” the German girl says, opening the car door. “That is so nice.”
“Hey,” Ido says, and the girl pauses. “What’s your name?”
“Vera,” the girl says. “My name is Vera.”
The car feels empty without Vera. It takes all of Emily’s restraint to stop herself from asking Ido, Does she look like me? Her body, her hair? Like me, but younger? They pull into the driveway of their cottage, which, indeed, is next door.
Emily is the first to shower, washing off the grime of the day. After, in the steam of the little white bathroom, over a sink lined with bottles of creams and serums she’s not interested in, assuming they have all kinds of artificial fragrances added, Emily wipes away the clouds from the mirror. Of course, she has gained weight, but she looks good, she thinks. The yoga studio she goes to doesn’t have mirrors, but the Pilates place does. From certain angles, she admires herself. Other angles she avoids.
She cups her breasts, their denseness still startling. So tender. After dinner, she’ll milk herself—strap suction cups affixed to her breasts for the acheful release that has, already, become so familiar.
The first month after Mayan came home, it was what people say it is. Sweet and exhausting—the sweetness somehow deepened by the exhaustion. Nobody slept in Mayan’s house, and so the moments when her tiny fist gripped a handful of your hair, for example, could push you over the edge of your delirious exhaustion into something like joy. They tracked all the milestones: Mayan following objects with her eyes, her limbs becoming less jerky in their movements. Recently Mayan has been blessed in sleep. Ten hours a day, fifteen hours! She rolls from her belly to her back, from her back to her belly, and sometimes—this is new!—her voice bubbles and pops in a way that suggests real words might come soon. Slow down, Emily begs silently. Please slow down. She knew it would happen fast, but secretly held herself as an exception, always an exception. During her pregnancy, she had worried that she would not be a good mother, that she lacked some critical giving gene, that she would withhold a love she felt jealous of. Now she sees that this was another way to feel exceptional, the idea that she could resist what her body was designed to do. That first morning in the hospital—early morning after an endless night, when the doula put the slippery, screaming wrinkle of Mayan in her arms—Emily knew that nobody had ever loved like this. All her history and all of human history, its ravages—all of it had been leading to Emily and her baby.
She hesitates before leaving the warmth of the bathroom, then steps out into the chill, wrapped in two towels, one around her body and another for her hair. Ido is squatting over a black box on the floor, presumably the router. “Mami, the Wi-Fi isn’t working.” It started as
a kind of joke, him calling her “mami,” which is a thing that Mizrahi couples do. It’s a little trashy, but calling it trashy is a little classist. Or racist? Anyway, it’s something they do now, unironically, as far as Emily can tell.
“Just a minute,” she says, her feet cold on the tile floor. She goes into the bedroom to dress in her loose, drapey clothing—soft blue-greens.
When she comes out of the bedroom, he’s sitting on the couch, fiddling around on his phone, clucking to himself. She sits next to him. Lets herself be pulled into the gravitational field that used to keep her trapped in bed for days, used to make her sleepy the moment he started to touch her, so complete was she. She breathes in the woody smell of his old sweater. The cold water from her hair drips onto her shoulders, dampening her shawl. She kisses his shoulder; he kisses the top of her head, never taking his eyes off his phone. She pulls away and heads to the open kitchen to get the food started.
He calls from the couch, “Let’s make a little extra in case Vera comes by.”
Flickers of happiness, lit and extinguished, again and again. Is that the story of a marriage? On the hike this morning, Emily tabulated injustices, and knew that Ido was doing the same. Him not waiting for her at the steepest part of the trail, just before the lookout over the sweep of the Galilee to the south. Her finishing the last of the Turkish apricots and raw walnuts before he had a chance to eat any. A quiet war. But then again, he had waited until she caught up, had helped her over those uneven rocks. And she had saved a granola bar for him (a single bite taken—“Tax,” she explained, sticking out her tongue as Ido pretended to be outraged).
Emily takes the glass containers out of the fridge, preheats the oven to ready it for the bread, begins stacking things on other things, looking for the right dishes, the right this and that. Futzing. And, yes, fine—she’ll put on some extra mushrooms for the girl—for Vera—just in case.
City of a Thousand Gates Page 9
