A Dove of the East (21 page)

And the days passed as they hid behind islands and kept off the sea lanes until one late afternoon as the sun lit the East they found themselves, gasping as if at a stage play, face to face with land on which waves broke hard. A hot sweet wind came off the beaches and mountains. They could see trees ashore. They were face to face with the cliffs of Rosh HaNikra, and the British awaited them with trucks and lights while doglike patrol boats made wakes in lariats and loops and figure eights across their bows and off their stern. They were to be detained. But some decided to take to the water.

Leon was the first. As part of his training in England before he was sent into France he had to swim a mile every day. After many months of delays he became an excellent swimmer—much more so than he had been, and he had been good. He decided to swim around the British cordon. Although loudspeakers said he would drown, and some unfortunates did, he knew it was just a question of a few hours in the water. He tied his shoes around his neck and jumped into the sea. A second later he felt a splash beside him and from a froth of white emerged a girls head. She said in Italian, since that was the language of the ship, “To swim beyond, no?” and he just began. They started straight north, parallel to the shore. She kept on wanting to go in, but he insisted that they clear the cordon and land where the cliffs came down to the sea. “That's dangerous,” said the girl swimmer, who was about twenty. “Exactly,” he replied, “there will be no police dogs there.”

The waves were crashing against the rock as if in a great storm, and some of them flowed into caves where their breaking was trumpeted to the sea. It was getting dim when they made for a large cave, thinking to hide in it for the night and then swim out the next day. The entrance was narrow and surrounded with sharp rocks. They centered themselves as best they could and were swept inwards, almost crashing on a wall of rock. They swam for a while until they reached the back of the grotto and a ledge to which the water reached out and then receded gently. They climbed out and found themselves in a roaring mist. The air was wetter than the sea, the rock salty and moist. In the remaining light he looked at his companion and discovered a beautifully proportioned, darkly tanned half-naked girl. They were exhausted; the waves, noise, and depth of the cave were counters to inhibition. They had after all accomplished a great feat and they were landed. They stared at one another, both of them trembling from the hours of swimming, and she slowly wrung out her shirt. It was in fact a dream situation, but he rapidly found himself feeling nothing. His greater loyalties surfaced as if from the sea. He just stared at her, his heart contained by an open question. All was cold, and dead, and over. He would not marry ever again, or make love, or fall in love. Such would ruin his chances. He simply could not take certain breaths, for fear of toppling Ann into hopelessness. What had she apart from his faith? So he stared dully at this girl who truly was able to impart deliriousness, and the night passed miserably. If he had felt temptation, and if he had felt longing for Ann, they had mixed to become as clean, smooth, and monotonous as the moist green stone which had been ground down by the waves.

 

B
EFORE DAWN
broke he had passed through many an ecstasy and sustained many a second wind. But with the coming of the light he felt drained and quiet, breathing hard and slowly like the dove. He feared that it had been chilled when the fire burned down, and overheated when he built it up again. It looked so much, in its expression, like a human invalid, that he found himself sometimes imagining that he was by the bed of a sick child. But he glanced at its Oriental luminescence, the warmest of colors, reminding him that it was indeed a dove and that he had chosen to remain by its side waiting despite the consequences.

He had sometimes exercised his wants despite consequences and tugged at the patience of friends, if they could be called that. Unbelievably, he shirked guard duty for a decade or more, being allowed to do so because of his reputation as an intense eccentric. It was not that he wished to avoid work, for work was the only thing left to him, but rather that he genuinely feared to stand watch. He thought the crucial seconds between his sentry's challenge and a response would be wasted and that he might be killed. This was because he knew he would not shoot a shadow moving toward him on a moon or star lit night, thinking it might be Ann, come to find him.

She had long ago assumed these proportions, of a shadow or a shade, a walker on the floor of the valley without touching it, a descender from the deep sky, pale and sad, a ghost, a weeping gossamer, as white as powder and as quiet. This was unavoidable, a debt to pay, for in his stronger imaginings she was red as all life, moving, bursting into laughter, singing, fighting him, loving him—and imaginations pendulum had to sway.

When he had first come to the Bet Shan Valley he had found, as if in coordination with everything else, that the climate was unbearable and the land an infested swamp. But he worked hard to clear it where it was not already cleared. For him it was as if the more beautiful the valley became the more likely that she would suddenly arrive. There was always the faintest hope, like one star on a black night, which sometimes in his dreams became a wall of white light blinding him with happiness as if the next day he would see her, for one never knew. These, while they lasted, were his best times, although extraordinarily bitter afterwards.

And yet his dreams did not run in place. He knew that everything moves forward, and he had grown and developed despite himself over the years. A film which in 1950 or 1960 had seemed to him to be richer and fuller than life itself, and certainly as real, was upon re-showing no more authoritative as to the depth of things than a fast-moving montage of African and Asian postage stamps—colorful and interesting, but with the flow and humanity of a cogwheel. Things moved forward, and although most of his life had been the history of solitude, a long unbroken color, and although his wisdom had served only to heighten the quality of his sadness, he continued to think that perhaps there would be a day when his unraveled life would again be whole.

The practice of years on the land made him look up. On a distant hill he saw horses and riders in the heat of middle morning, raising threads of dust. They would soon be upon him. He looked at the dove, its eyes three-quarters closed, and surmised that despite its gentleness it was willed to die.

And what would the horsemen say, seeing him beside a dove dying rapidly on a palm branch he had cut? These young men would not understand. They did not know what he thought and felt. He was beyond their concern and that was in his view quite right. For they had to grow up and pass their scores of years and enter into history. They too would be old, touched by events younger ones could not understand. They too would go to their graves alone, obsessed with remembrances of a life which in its incredible variation had pushed them out beyond the society of men into quiet places where they could only reflect. Starting on the surface of a sphere, crowded and touching, each man moved outwards so that the longer his life the greater the loneliness around him. Nothing can be done, and there is no comfort in it. There is no comfort in dying, no comfort in growing old. In the end there is no solace even in history. But a young man and an old man are moved before they die to finish the task of their life. And this, Leon, far from Paris and far from his love, could do.

A pair of horsemen came down a near hill, raising dust in the white morning sun. They were approaching the grove of trees. Leon looked at the motionless dove, and then at the horses and men galloping toward him.

 

The gentleness of a dove is something we cannot understand. Sometimes a fighter, it is not all of one color. But most of all it is moved by quiet love and a wish for simple life among the trees. And when it dies it breaks us apart, for it never thinks of itself. But God protect it if it should die alone, and God protect its poor family.