The Pale of Settlement (25 page)

Susan never knows quite what to put on those doctor's forms that ask for your family history.
Cancer, check
. By the time they operated on Susan's grandmother, it was already too late. It had metastasized, spread everywhere.
Melanoma? Breast?
Back then no one knew how to read the warning signs.

Now Susan follows doctor's orders, inspects her skin for changes, taps her fingertips in concentric circles around her breasts. She, too, is already older than her grandmother was then.

Susan's father calls her on her cell phone. Her cousin Gavi, he says, was four cars behind the bus that blew up in Jerusalem today. He'd gone there for work and was heading back to Haifa when it happened, right in front of him. Too close, her father says, this time.

Susan thinks about calling Gavi but can't decide what she would say. She sends him an e-mail instead, but he does not reply. At a distance, it's hard to tell what's going on. Perhaps the language barrier is too great. Or perhaps he simply doesn't want to correspond.

She hasn't seen much of Gavi in the years since his breakdown and divorce, since Sharona got the flat and custody of their kid. He was living with his parents again, she'd heard. He'd been in and out of work and couldn't afford an apartment of his own. He'd left the “group,” her father said, but now he said he had no friends.

Susan has a fantasy in which she rescues Gavi from what she thinks of as his house arrest, restores him to his life. She flies to
Israel, sets him up in a new flat, restores him to happiness with her love. He's perfectly fine! she declares.

But what does she really know?

Here is what I see, James said. They were in bed together and it was late. They met at Susan's apartment in those last days, on James's periodic business trips to New York, or in out-of-town hotels. We're at your parents' place, out on the balcony. It's a lovely summer night, very dark and still. We're looking out at the Hudson, just like that time when you took me to—what was that place called?—the place where Toscanini lived. Yes. Wave Hill. So we're looking out at the Hudson in the dark and then I turn and lift you up and we start making love. Yes, right there. Of course you could! I lift up your skirt and you wrap your legs around my waist. Like that. Very slow. Only what you can't see, because you're turned the other way, is that your parents have come home. No, just listen. They see us but they don't turn on the light. They just stand there in the dark, watching us. It's not disgusting! They're happy. They're happy for your happiness. Why can't you accept that? Well, maybe that's what you want to believe. Maybe
you're
the one who can't let go of being their little girl.

He rescued me, Susan's mother said. She turned and smiled down at Susan, her hair swinging forward around her face. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, the mattress tilting slightly beneath her weight. Susan pressed her toes against her mother's back. By the time I married your father my parents were both dead. The first time we met, he stared at me and said, You are the girl I'm going to marry. What a line! I fell for it anyway.

Susan loved this story of her parents falling in love at first sight. It was the only happy one her mother told.

Even so, her mother went on, I kept hearing my father's voice inside my head. Does he come from a good family? Is there a history of mental illness or disease? My father had crazy, old-world ideas. They're not like us, I heard him say. Those assimilated German Jews are practically goys. I hadn't met your father's parents yet—in those days one didn't just zip around the world like we do now. How did I know he was really who he claimed to be? my roommate warned. He could be making it all up.

Susan's mother sighed and looked away, out of the bedroom, toward the hallway light. But he wasn't making it up, Susan said. No, her mother said. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't met him. He saved my life.

Still, Susan wasn't sure her parents ever really got along. You wouldn't have called them soul mates, anyway. All her life, Susan worried that one of them would leave, but, for whatever reason, neither one of them ever did.

I always knew I wouldn't die, James said. It was early in the morning and they had just finished having sex. The smell of their bodies rose from the rumpled sheets. James liked to start making love to her while she was still asleep. She would wake to his lips against her ear, his hands circling her breasts, his insistent hard-on against her thighs. Nicole won't let me touch her like that, James said resentfully. She has everything she wants. The kids, the house in Paddington, backrubs every night.

Through the window, Susan could see that the exhibitionist's blinds were drawn. His apartment seemed farther away in daylight
than lit up in the dark. Susan thought of that photograph of Nicole lying prone on windblown sand. The ridgeline of her pelvic bones, the round curve of her breasts. Now Nicole had an unfaithful husband, two small kids. Susan thought she understood that withholding was a form of power, too. She wouldn't trade places with Nicole. No.

James reached for the alarm clock, then swung his feet out of bed and ran his fingers through his hair. I have to go, he said, it's late. She looked up at the spray of freckles across his shoulders, the broad line of his back. He wasn't really her type at all. Probably that was what made them so well matched. Because she didn't try to keep him, he kept coming back.

She listened to the sound of the shower turning on. She waited for James to come back to the bedroom, freshly showered, his hair still wet, dressed in his suit and tie, for him to bend and kiss her on the forehead like a child while she pretended to have fallen back to sleep. You are very loved, he'd whisper, his lips against her ear, as if love were something that could envelop you like air, as if the one who loved her might be someone other than himself. She reached to the night table for her book, but she wasn't in the mood to read. She thought about how Hebrew had no word for
fiction
. A novel was simply a
sippur
, a story. A form of narrative. The closest term for
fiction
was
bidayon
, from the word
b'daya
, a falsehood or a lie. You never could tell which parts of stories people had made up, Susan knew. People told you what they needed to believe.

In this work of fiction, I have drawn on and transformed a range of factual materials in an effort to render the historical, political, and intellectual context of these stories as accurately as possible. For the history of the founding of the state of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, I relied on many sources, notably
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949
by Benny Morris and
Arab and Jew
by David Shipler. For information on biblical archeology, I depended on
The Bible Unearthed
by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman,
Hazor
by Yigael Yadin, articles about the Hazor excavations by Amnon Ben-Tor and Maria-Teresa Rubiato in the
Biblical Archaeology Review
, and the series of excavation reports on Hazor by Yigael Yadin, Amnon Ben-Tor, and others. Also essential was coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in
Ha'aretz, Commentary
, the
New York Times
, the
New York Daily News
, and elsewhere.

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