A Remarkable Kindness (11 page)

“I'm just trying—”

“Rachel, I know what you're doing. And I know you're watching me.” Henry kept his eyes shut, and then he told her that was another shaman's skill he'd learned from his grandmother—an ability to see things with his eyes shut.

Rachel kept quiet. The moonlight was tumbling through the window, turning Henry's skin the color of maple syrup. She said good night and didn't see him slip out of her bed sometime before dawn. At first, she had given him a few days. A few days, she thought, because he needed time to drift across the plains like the wind. Then she'd learned that you had to let people go. Even the people you loved.

Rachel turned onto her belly now and stared at a thin pearly
curve of moon hanging over the pine trees. Lying there, thousands of miles away from Wyoming, she suddenly realized that Henry was truly gone from her life, and she no longer missed him. She thought of the sweet, chapped taste of Yoni's lips, and the way his eyes sparkled when he looked at her.

She didn't want to get her hopes up, though. Yoni was a soldier. He had to go back to the army on Sunday morning. She'd have to get used to the Sunday-to-Thursday work week. She'd have to get used to not seeing him for twenty-one days or even longer. She'd have to wait and count the days. Then he'd come home and she'd pretend that she hadn't been counting. She'd just say,
Hey, Yoni. Yo, Yoni. Hey, you
.

T
wo weeks after Aviva had seen Yoni on his last home leave from the army, she held up the Beatles'
Magical Mystery Tour
album and looked around, studying the faces of the thirty eleventh graders crowded in her classroom. Aviva had no illusion that more than one or two of the students were even looking at her, let alone paying attention. As always, most of them had retreated into their own world—not that she could blame them. Still, she refused to give up on her students. The quest to help them gave her a purpose. Something to beat back her raging loneliness.

“Yoo-hoo!” Aviva clapped her hands twice and then stamped her feet. “One-two-three, focus!”

The school was in a rundown neighborhood in Akko, long on desperation, hash, and vodka (one student's mother got drunk, waded into the sea, and drowned) and short on hope. When Aviva
tried to imagine the students' future, after they'd finished high school and served in the army, all she could see was a repeat of their parents' dismal lives.

Aviva turned to a girl named Noa, a dark-skinned girl with even white teeth whose family was part of the Bnei Menashe tribe from India, one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Aren't we all members of one lost tribe or another,
Aviva thought,
broken apart, waiting for redemption?

“Noa, help me out here. Take a guess—what is this?”

“It's old.” Noa crinkled her button nose.

“Old isn't so bad. This is a Beatles album.”

“Cool,” said a boy named Yotam, sitting in the last row, his narrow face full of indifference.

Kagan would have told Aviva, “Work around what is.” She knew she couldn't spend the rest of the class just standing there, wanting things to be different, so she forced herself to sing the first few lines of “All You Need Is Love.”

“You should be on ‘
Kochav Nolad'
,” said a buck-toothed kid named Natan.

“Really? On ‘A Star is Born'?” Aviva joked. “Until then, I want all of you to team up into groups of three or four. Pick a Beatles song and talk about what the words mean to you. Please—
obviously
—speak to each other in English.”

The students scraped their chairs around the floor and Aviva walked between the rows of desks. The classroom looked nothing like any of the classrooms at the school in Larchmont that her sister Jill's kids attended: these walls were cracking and badly in need of repair, the bulletin boards pockmarked, the blinds hanging
on a permanent slant against the windows. Aviva wandered from group to group, listening, and then said, “Natan, tell us what your group discussed.”

“We all said that we like newer music.”

“Ouch!” Aviva pretended to wince. “The Beatles are classic. What about my sixties look? This silver peace chain and bellbottoms are older than you are.”

Natan shrugged and traced his finger along the
FUCK
that was carved deep into his desk.

“My son Yoni bet me that I wouldn't dare to wear this to school.”

“I never wear that,” announced Helena, a girl with lavender streaks in her hair. The one whose mother had drowned.

“I
would
never wear that,” Aviva corrected. “But you never know. I bet this style will return one day. Fashions always come back.”

“I hope no.”

“We'll see. Anyway, I want you all to know that when I first heard the song ‘All You Need Is Love,' I loved it right away.”

“You need more than love,” argued Helena, who had cut off the collar of her school uniform (a cotton T-shirt, students' choice of color with the logo above the left breast) so that it slipped off her slender shoulder.

“What else do you need?”

“Money.”

“But money isn't the most important thing,” Aviva countered. “The Beatles inspired people to believe that the world could change. Do you know that when the Beatles first performed this
song on television, more than three hundred fifty million people watched them?”

“So what?” That was a pimply kid named Alex in the first row. “More people watch the World Cup.”

“And you're one of them, right?” Aviva walked across the room. “Lyrics in songs and words in poems are worldwide, too; they're feelings we all share, like love or happiness or sorrow. ‘There's nothing you can do that can't be done.'” She paused. “Doesn't that give you a sense of hope?”

“Not when I think about Israeli soccer teams,” Alex replied.

Moving to the last row, Aviva stopped by Yotam, who had fallen asleep, his head on his desk. She considered waking him, but on her way to school that morning she had seen him working at his father's bakery.

“Which song did you choose?” Aviva asked in Helena's direction.

“I no have time.” Helena cracked her chewing gum.

“First of all, we don't chew gum in class. And second, you have to do your classwork. And it's, ‘I didn't have time.'”

Helena shrugged.

“I want you to write about the song ‘Blackbird.' Please read the first few lines to the rest of the class.”

“I no want.”

“There are a lot of things we don't want to do, but we still have to do them.”

Helena groaned and pulled out her song sheet. “‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night.'” She read almost inaudibly, in slow motion, expressionlessly, like a metronome that cared nothing for
music. The school bell rang. Helena crumpled the handout sheet, shoved it into her book bag, and moved quickly through the rows of desks.

Aviva wanted to rush after Helena, filled with a maternal impulse to throw her arms around her and give her some words of reassurance, however meager. But Helena was too fast, and when she reached the doorway, she glared back at Aviva over her bare shoulder, her sullen face triumphant.

N
OT MUCH LATER
, Aviva stood at the cemetery gate watching a small gray bird—perhaps a crested lark—attempt to lift off a grave.

The afternoon had turned windy. An impermeable sheet of gray hung across the sky. The crested lark (a hapless thing) beat its wings, going nowhere, until a sudden draft blew it sideways like a stray piece of paper, and off it went.

Aviva stopped at the fountain. She picked up the cup and poured three splashes of water on her left hand, three splashes on her right. A ritual washing. Then she stood by the burial house door, listening to the muffled voices coming from the other side. Why had she joined the burial circle in the first place? It took so much out of her. But Sophie had asked her to join a year after she'd moved to Peleg.

“Think of your mother's funeral,” Sophie had told Aviva one evening as they sat in Aviva's living room.

Aviva remembered. She remembered how her mother had died of a sudden brain aneurysm, and how Aviva had immediately flown to New York. Her mother, stubbornly proud to be a Jew,
was just as proud to be exceedingly secular and irreverent, viewing traditional Jewish rites as folksy superstitions. She'd written in her will years earlier that she wanted a tasteful, unsentimental funeral, hoping to spare Aviva and Jill from too much pain.

Aviva couldn't forget going with Jill to the funeral parlor to make the arrangements. The funeral director, an ashen, lugubrious man with a trim goatee, had walked the two sisters through the casket showroom, pointing out white caskets, mahogany caskets, and black caskets with brass hardware, as polished and gleaming as new cars. Her mother was somewhere in the funeral parlor, hidden out of sight.

Who had touched her last, Aviva wondered? Had they been kind? Gentle? Respectful? Aviva never knew. Looking back, she thought the whole procedure seemed too commercialized and sanitized, treating death the way you'd spray a disinfectant at a grimy surface. Aviva realized what had been missing: the authenticity, the immediacy, the undisguised reality of death.

Yes, Aviva had told Sophie, she'd join the burial circle because of all that her mother had missed. She wanted to take care of the dead women in the village as a personal tribute, something the funeral director, who hadn't known her mother (and was a man, besides) could not have done.

And now, Aviva stood in the cemetery yet again. Gusts scuttled over the gravestones.

You lived because you had to live. Until it was time for you to go.

She reached for the handle of the burial house door, pushed down, and stepped inside.

C
an you believe this wind?” Emily was standing in a dull spot of light by the burial house door in the clothes she'd worn to work—a three-quarter-sleeve violet shrug and a white blouse, with a patterned scarf creatively tied around her hair. Emily's motto had always been, “You can never go wrong if you overdress,” but now she blushed as Aviva walked in, feeling too fashionable, too stylish.

“I thought I was supposed to wear something nice,” Emily apologized.

“Next time, it's probably better if you wear something you don't mind getting wet.” Aviva gestured to her drab skirt and shirt. “And I always wear these clothes because they're like a uniform. Then I can take them off afterward and try to go on with my life.”

“Never apologize for looking good.” Lauren gave Emily a solemn hug.

Emily had put off joining the burial circle ever since she'd moved to Peleg. She hadn't wanted to be near anyone dead; the idea made her too distraught. The image of standing with her mother and brother at her father's grave kept coming back to her. That afternoon it had rained hard (“God's crying, too,” Emily whispered) and Matt had held up an enormous black umbrella. It had been so difficult saying good-bye to her father that Emily had wanted nothing more to do with death.

Aviva had inspired Emily to join the burial circle that day they'd met at the beach, but this was her first
tahara
. Emily turned to the long metal table where the shallow contours of a body lay under a blue hospital sheet. It was Sophie. Sophie, who had always been so kind, warm, and welcoming to Lauren, and then to her. Emily had wanted to give Sophie something in return. “I can't believe that's really Sophie under there,” whispered Lauren.

“Never sick a day in her life.” Leah Zado crossed her arms over her shelflike breasts and pursed her lips. “If she'd only listened to me when I told her to go for a checkup then maybe—”

“Maybe nothing,” Gila Salomon cut in, as wiry as a pole vaulter, wearing her usual baggy Bedouin pants. “Pancreatic cancer is pancreatic cancer.”

“And at least she wasn't sick for too long,” Lauren said.

The wind blew hard. The door flew open. Rachel appeared in a ruffled denim skirt and a blue gingham shirt.

“What?” Rachel looked at Aviva. “I came to help with the
tahara
.”

“But you're so young.” Emily felt disconcerted seeing Rachel at the burial house.

The wind scraped through the room. No one spoke.

Aviva cleared her throat. “Rachel, you remind me so much of myself at your age. I wanted to help, I wanted to do . . .” She paused. “I really don't want to introduce you to death.”

Rachel stayed right where she was, refusing to budge.

“I know,” Aviva said, “you won't give up until we agree to let you stay.”

“That's right.”

“It's a first for me, too.” Emily reached her hand toward Rachel. “If it gets to be too much, we can both leave.”

The door to the burial house closed. Lauren handed Emily and Rachel disposable gloves and white hospital jackets to put over their clothes. They all moved around the table where Sophie lay.

Stillness widened around them like ripples in a lake.
This is death,
Emily thought, her head bent.
It is what isn't,
though she wasn't even sure what that meant. But a sense of purpose was settling on her.

Leah picked up a laminated prayer sheet and read:

“Dear God, You commanded us to take care of the dead and to bury them with loving-kindness . . . Please strengthen us so that we may perform this task with reverence and with love . . .”

“Sophie asked me to read the names of her sisters and mother,” Lauren said quietly. “As if they were part of the ceremony, too. Sophie never knew what happened to them.” She slowly unfolded a piece of paper. “Her mother's name was Gita, and her sisters were Blooma, Menucha, and Feige.”

Emily glanced sideways at Lauren. She looked, as always, steely and resolute. Emily felt full of admiration for her friend. And then for herself, too. She had joined the burial circle, something she'd never thought she'd be able to do.
Never say never
. And right then it seemed less like a commemoration of death and more like an homage to life. To Sophie's life.

“I remember how Sophie always said that God is in the details,” Aviva remarked.

“She taught me so much,” Lauren added.

Leah opened the faucet, filled a bucket, and sprinkled water over Sophie, which fell like spring showers. Like autumn rains.

Emily and Gila placed a dry sheet on top of Sophie, gently tugged out the wet one from underneath, and patted her dry. Lauren took a nail file from the shelf above the sink and held Sophie's hand, gently smoothing the edges of her fingernails.

“I bet this is her first manicure.” Lauren spoke to nobody in particular. “She was always telling me to spoil myself a bit, but she never did.”

With Sophie's face still covered, Emily brushed out Sophie's white hair. “I'll never forget that sparkling white color in the sun the first time I saw her in front of the grocery store. This is her very last time being beautiful.”

“
She is pure, she is pure, she is pure,
” Leah chanted as Gila took the shroud bonnet and inched down the sheet, laying the bonnet over Sophie's face.

“Oh, we forgot the dirt for her eyes.” Gila turned to Rachel. “Would you mind going outside and scooping up just a little bit of dirt?”

Rachel opened the door and wind swept into the room. The women waited silently, motionlessly. Then Rachel stepped inside again and poured the dirt into Gila's cupped palms, and Gila sprinkled the powdery earth over Sophie's eyes.

“
For dust you are and to dust you will return
,” Leah recited.

Aviva took the linen pants (they looked like Shoval and Tal's footie pajamas, Emily couldn't help thinking), bunched up the ends, and shimmied the pants over Sophie's legs, bundling them around her hips. Emily took the shroud shirt to pull over Sophie's arm, cold and stiff. Gila took the linen sashes and loosely wrapped one under Sophie's chin, another around her waist, and the third around her feet.

“We don't make any knots so the soul can escape,” she explained.

Emily and Lauren opened a large shroud sheet and shook it out. Unfurling, unrolling, the shroud drifted down over Sophie. The women gathered around the table again and Leah picked up the prayer sheet and the piece of paper with Sophie's sisters' and mother's names.

“Peace be upon you, Sophie. And Gita, Blooma, Menucha, and Feige.”

Leah paused to compose herself.

“Sophie, we ask forgiveness if we somehow hurt you. We did the best that we could . . .”

Emily stepped outside the burial house. She breathed in slowly. She took in the gray-tinted sky, the wind weaving through the trees, the fallen leaves skittering across the gravestones. Life was finite and death was infinite.
Ein sof
. Emily remembered her
father saying that was also a name for God: Endless. Beyond everything.

“The first time always feels a little peculiar,” Charlie Gilbert, the village mayor, observed, turning to Emily and giving her an ironic smile. He was sitting on a bench by the door, smoking a cigarette. He took another drag and stamped it in the dirt.

Emily followed Charlie back into the burial house.

She helped him roll a black trolley next to the table. Gila and Lauren raised Sophie's legs, Emily and Charlie held Sophie's waist, and Rachel and Aviva tucked their hands under Sophie's head and shoulders, laying her in the coffin.

“She's so small but she feels so heavy,” Rachel whispered.

“The dead are always heavy,” Aviva said. “That's because the soul has gone, and it's the soul that carries the body.”