The Pale of Settlement (16 page)

For three thousand years, this goddess face has waited, buried deep beneath the ash. But her blank eyes are blind. Her lips are parted, but she cannot speak.

Avraham sat outside on the terrace, his feet propped on a chair, trying to read in the dim light. It was a windy evening, the air salty, almost sulfurous, blowing in off the Dead Sea. The eucalyptus trees rustled in the dark. There were eucalyptus trees in the garden in Sanhedria, too, shedding their long leaves and curling seedpods over the stony ground. Other trees, as well. There was one low-branched mulberry he used to climb with Zalman, pretending they were in the Palmach, spying on British troops—or trying to catch a glimpse of the fat lady undressing in the house next door. He remembered Leah running to their father to tell on them. He'd decapitated one of her dolls in revenge.

It wasn't surprising, he supposed, that he'd had no idea that Leah was in love—it wasn't as if they'd ever been particularly close.
I've totally lost my appetite; I can hardly eat a thing
. When did her cheeks begin to lose their plumpness, her body to take on a woman's form? It must have been apparent, only not to him.
I was sitting outside, having a coffee with Shlomit, when he walked right by and smiled at me! Shlomit asked me what was wrong, and then she teased that I must be in love. So it must be true! I don't think it was obvious or anything, but I think (hope?) that it adds up.... Oh, what am I going to do?!
Even Leah was lost in the calculus of signs.

Avraham ran his finger along the inside seam of the diary, touching ragged bits of paper where a page or pages had been torn out.
Were all diaries written in the consciousness that they might someday be found? He tilted the book up to the light.
We were eating lunch when suddenly the doorbell rang and my stomach dropped. Abba stopped chewing and asked me if I had a “date”—as if I'd let anyone call on me here! Then Avi came back with a rather bewildered look, carrying a single long-stemmed rose that the florist's boy had delivered to the door. There was a note attached to it, with my name on the envelope, but I couldn't immediately decipher what it said, as it was written in some kind of code
. So he was there after all, holding the telltale rose. Bewildered, indeed. Avraham thought back to his own first dates with Eva, which would have been right around that same time. He certainly never sent her a rose! But he vividly remembered trembling as he waited in the stairwell for her father to answer the door. He had to smile at the thought of his own awkward, youthful self.

Here was “experience,” then, breaking over Leah like a wave.
I can't even believe that certain things that are happening are happening and have happened and are going to happen
. But whatever did happen—those
certain things
—were lost now with the torn-out page; only a trace remained.
It all happened so naturally, gently, beautifully, just as I'd imagined that it would. I felt absolutely at ease, not at all guilty or embarrassed, like before. It didn't matter anymore what anybody else thought
. It was still the fifties, Avraham reminded himself. She would have had to sneak out late, after Abba was asleep, through the back gate to the next street. He'd have borrowed a car or army truck, taken her to some out-of-the-way place—a coffeehouse or social club, in the new suburbs to the west. A dim and smoky place with wooden chairs, a Shoshana Damari ballad playing on the phonograph. They'd have stepped outside, out of the light, looked up at the stars.
Oh, his curly black hair, his eyes, his hands, his smooth dark skin!
He would have leaned close to light her cigarette, closer to kiss
her lips. She feels herself dissolving, growing blurry with desire.
He put his arms around me and lifted me up then and said, Is it really you?
Later, she sits in bed, too overwhelmed to sleep, the diary propped on her knees, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes.
Even as I write this, it becomes more and more unreal, flat and featureless as a slide. Is it really
me
here? Was it really
me
there?
The eastern rim of sky is already growing light. Like everything else she longs for, like memory, it shimmers beyond her reach.

Avraham closed the diary, raised himself from his chair, pressing his palms against his lower back. It was very late. All the windows in the neighboring apartment blocks were dark. The stars were out, faint perforations in an orange-tinted sky. The same stars Leah had gazed up at on that different, vanished night.

Did Abba know? He must have, or he wouldn't have packed Leah off to study in the States. Avraham remembered Leah shouting that she wouldn't go, Abba shouting how she didn't know how lucky she was, the envelopes with U.S. stamps stacked beside the phone. He'd never understood why their father had been so adamant, but now, maybe, it made sense. Abba would never have tolerated her carrying on with an older, married man. Avraham picked up the diary and went inside, switching off the terrace light. So Abba knew. Or did he? There was no way to tell. There were no facts, just hypotheses and explanations with relative degrees of plausibility. Who was to say that a diary contained any greater truth than any other artifact? No text could escape the distortions of its own mythology. The truth erased itself as you wrote it down—even Leah knew that.
I have no perspective now—I just wish I could find the words to anchor a corner of this slippery memory that is all I have left
. Avraham turned the key to lock the terrace door, switched off the outside light.

In the kitchen, the Frigidaire shifted gears like a laboring truck. Avraham paused as he passed Eitan's old room, the curve of his desk chair and computer momentarily taking on human form, as if his own ghost were sitting there. Avraham wiped his glasses on his shirt. His eyelids burned—he never should have stayed up so late.

Avraham got into bed but, even as he closed his eyes, Leah's words continued to tumble through his head.
His curly black hair, his eyes, his hands, his smooth dark skin!
Breezy as it had been outside, no air moved through the bedroom windows. It was too hot to sleep.
I think that I'm in love with him! Of all people. Shit
. He turned the pillow over to the cool side, kicked back the sheets.
I'd better not let anyone find out. Oh, what am I going to do?!
What was she so worried about? That he was an officer? A married man? Maybe, but still, something didn't fit.
A single long-stemmed rose
. Sending roses wasn't the style of the officers he knew—not back in those macho pioneering days. The guys he knew just took their girls by the hand and led them straight to bed. (The image came to him of a particular field assistant—what
was
her name, anyway, Shoshana? Shulamith?—who'd come at night to his own kibbutz bed during those first few summers at Hazor.) A single rose, a note in code. Was this Y just a romantic, or did he have something to hide?

He sat up and switched on the lamp again, picked up the diary. The evidence was what mattered. What were the facts? She met him on the bus. He walked by as she was sitting in a coffeehouse downtown. She did not actually say he was an officer. Or a Jew. Avraham had just... presumed.
His curly black hair... his smooth dark skin
. There were other possibilities as well.

Y
stood for Yusuf, too.

It was impossible, but still. Avraham found himself thinking back
to the Israeli Arab students he'd had over the years—their politeness, their rather old-fashioned courtly ways, so different from the brash Israeli style. It was impossible, but now that the thought had entered his head, Avraham couldn't get it out again. He could hear the throaty ayins, the rolling
r
s, as he lifted her off the ground, his eyes locked on hers.

Is it really you?

Of all people. Shit
.

By 1959, Leah was in New York. She left the apartment blocks of Sanhedria, the crumbling stone walls and dusty lots littered with curls of rusted wire and weeds, for the steel and glass of Manhattan, the unbounded energy of the States. She stood on the tarmac at Idlewild and felt her lungs expand. She wasn't of the generation who had longed from exile for a mythic land of olive trees and Bedouins roaming with their flocks, for the desert wind, the sound of camel bells. She hadn't realized just how confining Israel was until she got away.

Still, she longed for him.
Last night I dreamed that I was at the beach, singing songs to a guitar. Y. was there and then he began to play and I started to cry. Why am I still thinking so much of him after all this time? I wonder—is he thinking of me, too?
She crosses Washington Square Park in the half-light of a November afternoon, dead leaves swirling before her on the path. She looks up at the brick town-houses with their imposing stoops, the windblown sky. She's fixed up her dorm room with a new bedspread and a potted cyclamen, tacked a travel poster to the wall—
for the first time, I have a room that looks like my own!
—but even so there is something loose inside her, sliding around like broken glass. She clings to the edge of independence,
too frightened to look down.
At moments I almost enjoy New York, being here on my own and free. But then there are so many nights like this, when I just feel lonely and self-pitying and sad
. She tries to fill her emptiness with pain, holding Y inside her like an open wound, hating herself for her weakness, welcoming it as evidence that what she felt was real. But already she is having trouble conjuring up the image of his face. It is cracking like old paint.

Soon there's Herb or Richard, Len or Bill, flirting in the college library, taking her out to parties or Greenwich Village clubs. To them, she's an exotic, with that alluring accent and her long dark hair.
Had a fun time being bubbly, losing my voice over all the music and the noise! But I'm afraid I've been
too
free.... Before I knew it he had his arms around me and all I could think was, oh no no no you can't, even though for the first time in forever, I actually felt alive
. These American Jewish boys are nothing like the men back home—with their ties and blazers, their rosy cheeks and slouchy ways, they seem barely formed. They are like newborn rabbits, blinking in the light. What do they know of the world? She lies awake at four a.m., cold and restless, listening to the clicking of the radiator, a distant siren's scream. She has not been back to Israel in more than two long years. In the grainy dark, she tries to picture home. She tries to remember the smell of the kerosene heater in winter, the feeling of the stone floor underneath her feet, the crackly call of a muezzin from a distant minaret. She thinks of her mother, knitting in the rocking chair in the alcove outside her room. If there is another woman there now with Abba, she doesn't want to know. She pulls out her memories of Y, replays them like a tape. She listens for that soft choked sound deep in his throat as he touches her face and whispers,
Is it really you?

Figurine ~
This time, they would have known the end was near. Word would have traveled of the capture of Damascus, the destruction along the Mediterranean coast, the fall of Ijon, Abel-beth-maacah, Janoah, Kedesh, Gilead, ever closer to Hazor. They broke down their old houses and reused the stone to shore up the defensive walls. They built a tower on the northwestern point, an ashlar bastion with a hidden gate, an enormous storage silo lined with stone. But none of it was any use. The conflagration raged for days, just as it had in the days of King Jabin, five hundred years before. It blackened the foundation stones, left charred beams and plaster strewn across the ground. The ash fell one meter deep and black.

Even now, you will find evidence of the Omrides' decadence and sin, buried in the ash. Here is a woman's ivory cosmetic jar, carved with a cherub and a human figure kneeling beneath a “tree of life.” A stone palette with a concave depression in the center for grinding kohl. An incense ladle. A clay figurine of Astarte, the fertility goddess of the cult of Ba'al, her hands raised to her naked breasts. The skeleton of a pig.

The prophet Isaiah shook a finger at the Israelites, now banished from their land.
See what happens when you disregard the ways of God
.

The telephone rang while Avraham was still asleep, penetrating only slowly the fog of a complicated dream. An air raid siren was going off, a burglar alarm, a field telephone. His phone. He fumbled for the receiver, knocking over his clock, squinting in the daylight streaming through the blinds.

Professor Avraham Bar-On?

It took him a few moments to understand that it was a reporter
calling, looking for a comment about Feigelman's appearance on
TV
. The reporter spoke a halting Hebrew with an American accent; when she switched to English, she sounded just like his niece.

Did he believe the Bible contained no historical facts—that the biblical stories were only myths?

It is not a simple topic, he heard himself say, raising himself onto an elbow and trying to clear the roughness from his throat. You can't throw out the entire Bible because some facts don't line up. But you must also understand that with the Bible there is no such thing as objective history, even if some stories contain a core of historical fact.

Would he agree then with the statement that the Patriarchs did not exist?

I don't know, he said. It is certainly possible that they did. But it is also possible that the stories came out of ancient folklore instead. The fact is that the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron wasn't built until Roman times. From an archeological perspective, there's no positive evidence to prove either view.

But couldn't the Palestinians now claim a greater right than the Jewish people to the land?

Avraham coughed. Will anti-Semites make use of these ideas? Sure, yes. But look, here are the facts. At some point the Israelites emerged as a distinct group; about this, there is no dispute. Did it happen in the thirteenth or the tenth or the seventh century
BCE
? Any way you look at it, we've been here a long, long time. And if we were all Canaanites first, then nobody has a claim over the other at all, right?