A Dove of the East (12 page)

I was in a good mood; it was my day in the month solely for the medical library, and there is no better work than to sit there and read. But on my way upstairs I wanted to stop in at X-ray, so I began walking down the corridor, where windows of bright blue are one wall and silver doors and yellow benches are the other. Outside the operating rooms was a young man of about twenty-five and his girl child. He was tall and slim, with dark hair and very dark skin. Not strangely—it was, after all, at Elisha above the sea and hills—he was wearing a bright and fine blue shirt. His daughter, a child like many I have seen, was tiny and beautiful. She had grown out of infancy, but one had to look twice to make certain. Like her father she had dark hair and dark skin. I judged that they had been at the beach in August, for she was almost a chocolate color, the whites of her eyes and the loose white gown in which she was enwrapped contrasting to make a luminescence.

I remembered this child. I had heard that she was very sick and did not have much chance to live. I had not given it thought. It would be too hard to give thought to such things all the time. She had received anesthesia and was busy losing consciousness, perhaps for the last time, while her father held her in his arms, rocked her, put her little head next to his face, and gathered in her legs. He was worried that perhaps the anesthesia was not working, and as I was passing he looked at me.

“She is falling asleep?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I can see that it won't be long.” I put my hands in my pockets and stood as if to talk, for there was no one else there and I was almost sure of the outcome. He held her very closely—I have never seen a man as tender with a child—until she was fast asleep and a gowned and masked operating-room nurse came through swinging doors to take the child and carry her within.

Nothing could be said, so I said, “You are a new immigrant?” since it was evident from his speech.

“Yes,” he said.

“From where?” although that was also evident.

“From Russia—Kiev,” he replied, a little more at ease. “I was to be a curator of arts at the museum, and then...” He raised his arms and smiled. “And then...”

“And what do you do here?”

“I work as an artist commercial, but soon I am going to study at the university, when my wife comes. She is still in Kiev.”

I was reluctant to leave him alone. At such times quiet institutions are murderous, but I had to do my reading. “Look,” I said, “these things can be difficult. If there is anything I can do to help, anything at all for whatever reason ... If you need something, or just to talk—you know? I will be in the library, upstairs,” and I pointed. I touched him on the shoulder and left quickly.

I spent that day in the library. Later in the evening when it was dark, I walked bleary-eyed past the empty yellow bench where he had been sitting. His lighter and cigarettes were there. I dared not learn the outcome. A warm light met the dark blue of the windows, then almost black, and I left Elisha Hospital, thinking of my wife and sons and how history had left me in peace. A dark September rain began to fall, as one seldom sees it fall in Haifa.

I
N
S
ICILY
one always finds precedent. The barber cuts hair according to precedent, flies land according to custom, a route is taken because it was taken before, and although a certain crop is unprofitable it may be cultivated for years on end simply because of tradition.

For example, in the town of Nuovo Fantasio, pronounced in the old way with the stress upon the “i,” there is a date orchard belonging to the family Della Mercedi. It is an old, high orchard with thick trees nearly seventy-five feet before the crown. It is a square with ninety trees to a side, but only eight thousand all together, because in the center is a luxurious shaded garden built at the sacrifice of one-hundred trees, intimate, for it is a Roman square of ten trees on each side, and enormous for the very fact that it displaces one-hundred massive trunks. This orchard was planted by a Caliph who genuinely believed Sicily to be an outcropping of North Africa. For a thousand years the trees grew, died, and left a stream of child trees providing an income of heavy dates for many families of Muslims, Spanish, Normans, and lastly the Della Mercedi, who followed their line somehow back to Spain but could not be sure.

The orchard was not fertile, and had not been for quite some time. At the tops of date palms are long sharp spears, modified leaves which have become weapons against the birds in a million generations of fighting and steadfastness while the swordlike greenery rolled itself into spikes. All good things come from a struggle, even the simple fruit of a date palm, from a struggle of planting, growing, and staying. A tree will only be fertile if much labor is expended in making it so, and for years there had not been enough labor in Sicily, at least not there. More than half the people had left for America, and after the war for northern Europe, where they worked in factories and sent home money to those who remained. The government built a textile mill and opened a new cut in the marble quarry, so that whatever laborers there were had much better work to do than climbing high ladders which came to narrow points so they could be positioned around the spikes, so that the fruit could be reached and regenerated.

Some of the fruit had by chance blackened into ripeness but most was red and unfertile, a terra-cotta color which seemed to satirically reflect the suns afternoon blazing. There were so many crows with no one to chase them away by day that the noise from their wings was like an express train or the Sirocco. The earth was sulfurous, or at least smelled so, and the mountains were a pale yellow and white.

When the sun set, a special patina of silver and green traced itself across the orchard, in between the tall thorn-tressed trees. The roof of the sky, having been white hot, cooled, enabling the crows to ride upward on rivers of yellowed and cold sea air.

Signora Della Mercedi, and her son Paolo, were the two Della Mercedi left to claim the land. Her husband had died long before, so that she had forgotten even what it was like to wear anything but black. A son, her best son, had been killed in the war. His name was Giorgio, the father's hope, for he was strong and manly even when a boy. There was one other son, Thomaso, a wretch, a gourmand who lived, or rather ate, in Rome. He spent, borrowed, gambled, and ate. He had control of the revenues from the land, what revenues there were, an unfortunate accident due to the fact that he was the eldest surviving son and his mother had never been taught to read. Paolo was confined to a wheelchair, and spent his time listening to a giant German short-wave set bequeathed to him by his father. At least he was not like his brother Thomaso, who, to his mother's complete incredulity, loved only men.

There were so many problems now for Signora Della Mercedi as she approached her old age. Government people came from Palermo to demand taxes which had not been paid. The house was in terrible disrepair. Servants (there were two, always changing) would go to the town with enough money for some meat, some cheese, and bread, and come back with bread, which became that night's dinner. She was silent, for she did not really care what she ate. The problems were like crows, cowardly and unimportant when alone, but bold and terrible in their thousands.

Once her husband had taken her into the date orchard in the evening. They were young, their children still infants, and the trees producing like factories. He was a big man who ate mainly meat, whiskey, and pastry, and he was a rich man who liked to gamble and have expensive things like German radios and a Bugatti motor car. He screamed suddenly with great power, “Zapata!”, and the noise of ten thousand wings rose skyward from the thick dark palms, making her leap into his arms for she was truly frightened.

He was an aristocrat, a baron of lands which had been his whole life and his father's life too. When he was a small child he had looked up at the tall trees and seen men high in the air working at the fertilization. There were no more real titles, and there would not have been for the Della Mercedi anyway, but there could still be men like her husband, men with a singularity of purpose refined as in a fire. She thought that there must be always true aristocrats in fact and privilege, so that everyone might
enjoy
the pretense—for everyone does. The baron had been a kind man, expert in plant genetics, fond of Cezanne (having several reproductions), and above all, committed to staying in Sicily even though all his brothers and so many others had left. Why? He didn't know, but to stay against all odds was dramatic and noble, the real source of his nobility, his fight.

Things went on in Rome about which she had heard and not even vaguely comprehended. She could see from the shrine on top of the mountain where she went in summer in July on the Feast of St. Ann tremendous long ships which passed into and out of sight within minutes. She knew the world was changing, but all of its motion was just beyond the horizon, something to be seen with a sideways glance. And therefore she had decided to stay on her lands, though they might be impoverished and dry, though the government might appropriate them year by year decree by decree as was done when taxes went unpaid, though her sons did not have and would not have sons of their own.

Without fail, she went every evening at dusk to the Roman Garden, which had become choked with weeds and grass, where her husband had yelled “Zapata!” forty years before. She would bring with her a stick. After coming up the small hill she stood breathless in the half light, unafraid and alone, and thought of her husband and his wish not to leave the land. She had no grandsons, and that was bitter fruit, but as if to ward off the crows circling above she said, “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art Thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

And then she banged the thick trunk of a palm, yelling “Zapata! Zapata!,” with her eyes fiercely staring at the black cloud of birds fleeing upwards.

I
N BEGINNING
autumn there is a wind which comes on high clear days and grips the trees, drawing them out and shaking them beyond several of their breaths, while their leaves rattle like a wind in themselves and seem like jewels or green water. These winds are chainwinds, never ceasing, and on those days they scourge all the land and water with peace and clarity and sun and coolness. In Atlanta they had come only in the late fall and sometimes in the summer when the heat broke and the clearness seemed to be shimmering in itself. But here south of San Francisco, in mountains where there are redwoods and low high altitudes and abandoned cabins abandoned only recently but never so, and always with damp dark floorboards and a mattress wet on its springs when you enter into the darkness from the dark black stream and its numb moving waters, and the brown pine needles and black pieces of earth that stick on the feet when you step carefully on the porch—here that jeweled chain of air moved way up in the tops of trees, far above the gloom of rays and roots and fallen trees. And when she looked up at the blue through the red wood she saw the clouds moving like ghosts and their horses, making the upper branches shudder and hiss. She often wandered here, and to the south in the valley, and evening found her driving back into San Francisco, ruddy and sad but not sad enough to be unhappy.

She was Mary from Atlanta, who thought in wide circles about porches and the past and small towns in summer—facts and memories of detail which transfixed her at the wheel of her open car and made her arms shake and her back cold, although these things were not remarkable, and neither was her life. Neither was her life, a life of love although she did not know for what, unless it was for small pictures which occurred to her or which she saw in quiet moments alone staring at the whiteness of the castled city or across the Bay to reddened mountains and leonine hills with yellowed brush tumbling from their sides.

The phone was green, the windows wide, the floor waxed and yellowed wood, her dress a print by Marimekko, liquor on a glass cart, cuttingboards in the kitchen, twelve bottles of wine, much Lucite such as blocks with photographs embedded and an end table, a bed high enough off the floor to kill, an old dresser, high rent, magazines and a bookshelf full of women novels which cannot ever be read again because they are gossip, dependent on plot and sequence rather than the static truth, many memories of men, in the beginning at least, who had stayed but none to let her in. All seemed too eager or too serious, too capable, or too hard. Perhaps it was because she herself put them off by speaking hard and being skeptical, as if she assumed they had no memories and could think and act only like modern furniture. And then the liquor would start to flow. Liquor is magic for furniture, but afterwards she could think only of getting them out and jumping into the bath. One morning an especially timid one tiptoed into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice over ice. While reading her copy of that months
Vogue
he was startled so by ice shifting in the glass that he jumped back, knocking himself unconscious against a wall. Once there was one so large and dumb that he drew himself a tub of water, stepped in, and displaced it. One was an accountant, one a lobster executive, and one an actor who stood naked.

But furniture, no matter how droll, was furniture, if she could be carried at a mite's breath to a childhood carnival, the American Legion, hardened women at shooting galleries, soldiers and their wives with angular eyes and almond glasses, late night heat and flashing lights at the gray cotton sky, and the screen door during a carried half sleep shutting until another day and mirages on the sand-colored roads.

Now she was large—not fat, but big-boned with an upturned nose and pores that could be seen too well in the magnifying mirror. She looked like her mother, whom she had never thought pretty, but it seemed unnecessary for her mother to be that way when the little girl Mary had a face which was small and smooth as a chestnut and could be clasped in her father's hand in riotous fun.