An Independent Woman (33 page)

“Freddie wants to speak to you.”

“All right. Put him on.”

“Aunt Barbara—you're all right?”

“We're fine, Freddie.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Freddie, you know I will.”

“I sold ten cases of Zinfandel—you know, the stuff we still produce for the synagogue and church trade—to a dealer in Jerusalem. His name is Kurt Levinson. He's on Saladin Street. If you could ask him how it's taking?”

“Freddie!”

“All right. Don't get angry. I'm only asking.”

“Freddie, I love you. Good-bye.”

“What was that all about?”

“Freddie sold some wine to a dealer in Jerusalem. He wants to know whether it's selling.”

“Well, that's Freddie,” Philip said. “You shouldn't be annoyed.”

“Doesn't anything ever annoy you, Philip?”

“Yes, these cursed blisters on my head.”

At the hospital a Dr. Levinson, who had been at medical school in Israel with Barbara's son, Sam, removed the bandages and talked to Barbara about her son. When he heard that Sam was chief of surgery at Mercy Hospital, he complained enviously about living in a country with a surplus of physicians. “I'm going to put something on the blisters that will tend to dry them. Don't worry if some of them break… We have too many doctors here. We need laborers and farmworkers, not a doctor for every ten people.”

“Ten people?” Barbara exclaimed.

“Well, maybe every three hundred. Who counts? How is my English?”

“Very good. What shall I do if a blister breaks?”

“Just pat it gently with a clean tissue. I'll give you some codeine pills and a salve. But use the salve sparingly. I'll take you to a room, and I want you to wait there until I find the hospital barber, and I'll send him up.”

“You have a hospital barber?”

“He's a volunteer. He's very good.” The doctor, a fat, round-cheeked man, grinned. “Bet you don't have one at that Mercy Hospital of yours.”

“I never asked,” Barbara said.

The barber, a man in his late sixties, told them that his name was Cosmo Santina. “I was with the GIs in North Africa. I'm from Brooklyn. My pop was Italian, my mother was Jewish. That makes me a Jew by Israeli law. We got a furlough in Israel before they closed the gates. I went AWOL. I like it here. Tel Aviv was just a village then. I get out of one army and they put me in another— in 1948. So I been through it all, and I had the best barbershop in Tel Aviv. My pop taught me the trade. Don't worry,” he said to Philip. “Just sit down and relax. My son runs the shop now, but I'm better than he is. You won't feel a thing.”

“Thank you. That's very reassuring,” Philip said.

“I like that.” Santina nodded and said to Barbara, “Your husband's a gentleman. You live here in Tel Aviv, you appreciate a gentleman. Don't get me wrong. We Israelis are the best people in the world—but gentlemen, that's something else. Not you, Reverend—I hear that before you jumped into that bus, which was a very fine thing, believe me, you had a head of hair like the Brits, nice and full. I can't give that back to you, but I'll give you a nice short cut. And even under the blisters, it'll grow back. Meanwhile, I give you a yarmulke. We got plenty of yarmulkes here at the hospital.”

Back at the hotel Barbara studied Philip thoughtfully. “I kind of like it,” she decided. “You're almost bald. They say bald men are very passionate. It's true, it looks a bit like a boiled beet, but they assure me that will pass. Does it hurt very much?”

“No, not too much. With the yarmulke, I'm either Jewish or a cardinal. There's a man in our congregation at home who always wears a yarmulke.”

“You don't make him take it off, do you?”

“Heavens, no.”

“We had a call from Teddy Kollek's secretary. She says that an apartment has been reserved for us at the”—she pronounced it carefully—”Mishkenot Sha'ananim. We are welcome to stay as long as we please. As guests of the City of Jerusalem.”

Philip shook his head despairingly. “Barbara, I am so embarrassed I could just crawl away and hide. I did nothing that any decent human being wouldn't do, and if I had only been a bit quicker, that poor woman and her child wouldn't have died—and instead of blaming me for their deaths, the Israelis are making me a national celebrity. I am so ashamed.”

“Of what? Are you completely crazy, Philip? If you had gone back into that flaming bus, there would have been three dead. The bus driver is going to recover and so is the soldier, and there's no way in the world that you could have gone back into the bus. You struggled like a demon when we held you back. I feel so wonderful—why are you depressed?”

“It could be my hair. At heart, I'm very vain.”

“You're not vain. You're
meshuga.
That's a Jewish word for ‘crazy'.”

Their argument was interrupted by the telephone. The husband of the woman who had died in the bus was downstairs in the lobby, and the hotel manager asked if they would see him. “Yes, of course,” Barbara replied.

He entered the room slowly, a big, sunburnt man with heavy sloping shoulders that reminded Barbara of her first husband, Bernie Cohen. He held out his hand to Philip, who took it and winced under the crushing grip of the man. “My name—Enoch Shelek. I have not much English to say much—”

“Speak Hebrew slowly,” Philip said in Hebrew. “I have some Hebrew.”

He nodded, and speaking very slowly, he said, “You gave me the gift of life, two of my beautiful children. My wife perished, may she rest in peace, and this morning we buried her and my baby son. But you gave me two lives, my son's and my daughter's. God sent you from faraway to stop the hand of the Malakh Ha-Mavet. I don't know how to thank you. I'm a small farmer, but all that I have is yours.”

Barbara didn't know how much of what he said was understandable to Philip, but she saw tears welling up in Philip's eyes, and then he went to the man and embraced him—and for a long moment, both of them were locked in that embrace. Then Philip let go and wiped his eyes, wincing, for the lashes were gone and his lids still inflamed. Then Shelek offered his hand to Barbara and said something in Hebrew. And then he turned to the door and left.

Philip dropped into a chair and closed his eyes. For a few minutes he and Barbara remained silent.

Then Barbara asked, “Did you understand what he said?”

“Mostly, I think. Gratitude—and something about the Malakh Ha-Mayet, who is the Angel of Death in Jewish folklore, and the two children who were saved. Before he left, when he took your hand, he blessed you and all our children. I understood that, very biblical, and somewhat ironic. We have so much, Barbara, that I should not lament the fact that we have no children.”

“We have children,” Barbara said. “All the children in the family. Children don't belong to anyone.”

That evening they dined with the mayor of Tel Aviv, a tall, handsome man; his wife; and a professor, Zvi Harana by name, chairman of history at the local university; and his wife. The professor was a stout, bearded man, his wife a plump pudding of a woman who reminded Barbara of Eloise. The mayor's wife was a talkative, pretty woman who wore an elegant evening gown as companion to her husband's dinner jacket. This surprised Barbara, in a land where the necktie was almost unknown—the first dinner jacket and black tie she had encountered. They were all warm and congratulatory toward Philip and Barbara, and they all spoke English with facility; and then the talk turned to the Carters' stay in Israel and where they should go and what they should see. There were also numerous questions about Unitarianism, and the mayor's wife wondered how it was different from Judaism.

“Well,” Philip explained, “we have no given rituals or doctrines. We don't ask that anyone should accept any concept of God as against another. We read from the Old Testament and the New Testament, and we honor Jesus as a great prophet. We believe in the ineffable nature of God—”

“Please,” Mrs. Harana interrupted, “I don't know what that word means—
ineffable.
”

“Unknowable, Hannah,” her husband said. “But that is very Jewish, Dr. Carter. In fact, our Bible specifies the unknowability of God.”

“In fact,” the mayor put in, “in one of the most provoking verses in the Bible, I believe it's Exodus 3:14, Moses asks God for his name, and God replies, ‘I AM THAT I AM.' And again, in the next verse, God is the great I AM.”

Philip nodded. “In seminary, we discussed that for hours. I was a Catholic priest before I left that Church and became a Unitarian.”

“A Jesuit?” the Professor asked.

“Yes, a Jesuit. I fell in love with a nun, my first wife. We left the Church together. She died five years ago.”

“May I say that I believe such an act took singular spiritual courage?”

“Perhaps. I don't really know what ‘courage' means. Love, yes—but courage?”

“I won't argue the point,” the professor said.

“Do you have any Unitarian congregation here?” Philip asked.

The mayor shrugged. “I really don't know. We have total freedom of religion and at least a few of every sect I have ever heard of—but Unitarians…”

Barbara listened with a degree of awe. Their conversation was of matters she had never given any thought to, and later that evening, back at the hotel, she mentioned to Philip that it was odd to hear a group of highly educated people discuss God as a matter of reality.

“They are Israelis,” Philip said. “After all, the Old Testament was written in their language.”

“But I always thought that most Israelis were irreligious.”

“Perhaps, but not in the sense of your use of the term. Jews, I have learned, are very complicated. Even when they become Unitarians, and we have a good many of them, they remain Jewish. As for the Israelis—well, I haven't met enough of them to dare to generalize, but with them, the Bible is not simply a religious tome. It's their history.”

“I never thought of it that way,” Barbara said. “I haven't opened a Bible since Sunday school. Shall I read it, Philip?”

“You might try it. But remember I made a promise to you, and to myself, for that matter, never to try to convert you to anything.”

“You're against conversion, aren't you?”

“Somewhat. I think people should find their own way.”

The next day was Saturday, the day they had decided to check out of the Samuel for the trip to Jerusalem, but when Barbara presented herself at the desk to pay their bill, the woman she spoke to said that there was no bill. “The manager's instructions,” she said; and when Barbara went into the manager's office, indignant and determined to pay her bill, the manager was equally indignant. “How could I face any of my employees if word got around that we had charged you?”

“But that is one thing and what my husband did is another.”

“You are going to stay at the Mishkenot in Jerusalem. Do you think Teddy Kollek will charge you? You're our guest. Please say no more about it.”

Barbara nodded. “Thank you.”

“No, thank
you.
”

Barbara had an understandable aversion to buses, and she wondered whether cabs would be available on the Sabbath. They were, a line of them outside the hotel, and she and Philip seated themselves in a large four-door Mercedes driven by a man who introduced himself as Ezra Cohen. His English was heavily accented but adequate. “Jerusalem?” he said. “Where in Jerusalem?”

“The Mishkenot Sha'ananim,” Philip said.

“Seventy kilometers.” Then he turned from his driver's seat and studied them carefully. “You're the man,” he said to Philip. “You went into the bus for the kids, right?”

Philip sighed, and Barbara replied, “Yes, Mr. Cohen. I'm his wife.”

“For anyone else, it's fifty dollars. You, I don't charge.”

“Of course you will charge us.”

“Three reasons I shouldn't, Mrs. Carter. First reason, I wasn't going to work today. It's Shabbat. My wife says to me, ‘All of a sudden you're religious? You don't go to shul, even on Rosh Hashanah. You smoke on Shabbat. So don't tell me you will lie in bed all day.'” And turning to Philip, “You don't mind I take a cigarette?”

“No, I don't mind.”

“Second reason,” Mr. Cohen continued, starting to drive, “I got my sister in Jerusalem, I haven't seen her in months. Third reason, I tell my wife I met Mr. and Mrs. Carter, she's so impressed she don't make me crazy for maybe two days.”

Barbara relaxed and whispered to Philip, “You can't win an argument with them. They love to argue.”

“And they're like family. Everyone knows everyone else, or so it seems. I think it's wonderful. I never really had family, it was only Agatha and myself. That's why Highgate is so pleasant for me.”

“I think the church was your family, Philip.”

“Yes and no.”

A few miles from Tel Aviv, they saw on their left a wide green meadow, planted in wheat, that stretched away to the north. Years and years ago, more years than she cared to remember, Barbara had seen that meadow; and recalling it, she said to Philip, “That's where King Saul fought the Philistines—right there in that meadow.”

“And beat them,” the driver put in. “Gave them a licking they never forgot.”

“I'm sure,” Philip agreed, staring, fascinated. “You can't imagine what this means to me.”

“I think I can,” Barbara said.

The road wound on, curving through terraced hillsides covered with forests of evergreen. “I read,” Philip remarked, “that when the Jews first declared independence, all these hills were bare. They planted all these trees since then.”

“Millions,” the driver agreed, “millions of trees. The terraces were built in the time of the Maccabees, but the tree planting—each day more.” The air was clean and saturated with the sweet smell of the pines, and as they drove on toward Jerusalem, the climate changed, becoming brisk and cool.