Evergreen (70 page)

So narrow is the northernmost tip of Israel that a giant of ancient legend would be able to straddle it with one foot in Lebanon and the other in Syria.

The river Jordan, mighty in the imagination of the Western world, was only a stream, Eric thought with surprise, and the falls at its source, which were held in awe by the natives, were only a faucet’s trickle when compared, not with Niagara, but with any modest waterfall at home.

Nevertheless, the land was lovely.

At the crest of a low hill stood the wooden buildings of the kibbutz: dormitories, dining hall, library, school. Barns and sheds ringed the slopes; below them stretched wide orchards, and beyond these lay a flowing sea of grain.

Reapers moved through that golden sea. Young men and women climbed the trees, picked and packed the fruit. Cattle stamped in the barns. Fresh-mown grass sweetened the air. From the dining hall one heard the sound of someone practicing on the piano; from the machine shop came the clang of iron against iron. In the big kitchen from morning to night meals were in preparation. Children splashed in the swimming pool: the second generation, building on the foundation of the pioneers, had added this touch of luxury. Out of rock and the neglect of barren centuries, vision and toil had made a way of life.

And all of it lay within gunshot of the Golan Heights.

“The Syrians have crack troops up there,” Juliana said,
pointing eastward to bluffs that rose like a wall. “Anything that moves in the fields or on the road is a target, whenever the notion takes them. Last year, just after I got here,” she said bitterly, “it was a bus going in to town. The driver was hit and of course it smashed. Eight killed, two of them children under five.”

They were walking through the yards between the buildings. Juliana was very serious. “Come, I’ll show you something else. On this side we’re only two miles from Lebanon.” They slid on slippery grass between lines of thin young pear trees. At the lower edge of the orchard she raised a screen of leafage and they looked into the ugly reptilian mouths of a row of guns.

“This is our second line of defense. The wire fences and the guards are at the border.”

“It’s rather sobering, to think we sleep with guns in our back yard.”

“It’s a safer feeling, I’ll tell you that! Still, now and then they slip through anyway. You must have read about the raid on the school? It was in the next town, only twenty minutes from here. Down there through that grove, that’s the border and the wire fence. If you walk straight down you’ll reach it.”

Eric thought, If I had gone with Chris I would have been on the other side of it. He wondered fleetingly what sort of lives were being lived on that other side, but in the short weeks he had been here he had become so much identified with these lives that he found it hard to imagine those others.

He slept in the dormitory for single men. On the wall opposite each bed hung each man’s gun. Pants and shoes lay on a chair alongside the bed. You could be dressed, downstairs and out of doors in sixty seconds.

He thought of stories that Gramp had told about their ancestors who had settled the wilderness of New York State. Energy and guts. Making something out of nothing. Perhaps that was the pull of this place for him—that, and Juliana.

“Do you really like it, Eric? Do you feel anything of what I told you about when we were in Holland?” she asked.

“I’m beginning to. And I do know what you meant.”

They sat down on a rock in the lowering sun. It was the Sabbath and a hush lay over everything. Work had stopped. There was deep quiet except for mild stampings and lowings from the barn.

“When I first came—I had wanted for years to come—it was because I felt an obligation. Lots of young Europeans do, Germans, too. Now I stay because I love it. But the obligation came first.”

“Tell me about it.”

Juliana shuddered. “Those years of the war when I was nine, ten, eleven, we saw such things—” She was silent for a minute or two, then resumed, “A neighbor of ours, a determined woman, with convictions—”

“Like you,” Eric interrupted, with a smile.

“She was a brave woman. She had a Jewish family hidden in her attic behind a camouflaged door. Just like Anne Frank. You’ve read the book?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was like that. Only a few people knew they were there. Whatever food we could spare, an extra apple, or some cereal at the bottom of the pot, my mother took next door. We children weren’t supposed to know but I heard my mother telling my father that there were two brothers and their wives, some children and a baby. They had to hold the baby under a blanket to muffle its cries.

“So, one day the Germans came and took them away. They went straight to the hidden door. And they took our good neighbor, too, in a truck filled with people on the way to the camps, most of them to the furnaces. The husbands were separated from the wives and children from their own mothers. We heard them all the way down the street as far as the corner, crying, crying—” Juliana covered her face with her hands. “Do you think, Eric, that I shall be able to forget things like that? I don’t think I will. One day the
Nazis took my two uncles, my mother’s younger brothers. We never heard from them again. They had been working in the underground, you see.”

“And someone reported them?”

“I guess so. We were so afraid all the time for my father. I wasn’t supposed to know that either, but you know how children always find out what’s going on in a house. So I knew that my father was also in the underground. And at night, whenever it was late and quiet and you heard the sound of a motor or footsteps pounding toward the house, I was sure they were coming to take him away, too.”

“Do any children anywhere have the kind of life children are supposed to have?” Eric burst out.

“I’m sure they do! They must or the world would be a total madhouse! Why, was your life so hard?”

Some other time, perhaps. Not now. “No,” he murmured, “actually it was warm and beautiful.” And it was true, in most ways, wasn’t it? No self-pity; self-pity stinks, he thought roughly, and repeated with firmness, “it was warm and beautiful.”

From the dining hall came music, a piano sonata played with fervent hands and spirit. Eric looked up questioningly.

“Shh!” Juliana motioned, and they waited in the violet dusk until the music had ended, waited even a moment longer until it had died away on the air.

She said softly, “That’s Emmy Eisen. You know, the woman who helps me in the nursery sometimes? She was a piano teacher in Munich and hid there all through the war. She’s so blond, they thought she was an Aryan, you see. And she had good friends, Catholic people who said she was a relative and got false papers for her. She was one of the lucky ones; she didn’t get caught. But her husband did and her two sons. That’s why she doesn’t talk very much. I don’t know whether you noticed.”

“Ah, yes,” Eric said.

“It’s a pity she can’t have a good piano for herself. The kids wreck this one. Eric, you haven’t been thinking about a word I’ve said!”

“No,” Eric said.

“Well, what have you been thinking, then?”

“I have been thinking, if you really want to know, that I love your lovely mouth and your round arms.”

Farther down the hill was a hollow; tall grass and a curtain of heavy shrubbery made a small green cave, entirely hidden. Besides, it was almost dark.

“Come,” he said.

She rose and followed. The soft green curtain swayed shut behind them as they passed through.

He had chosen to work in the barns. He learned to operate the milking machines; he cleaned stalls and hauled feed twice a day. This labor too reminded him of Brewerstown and of his people’s past. Other than that there was little in this motley world to remind Eric of any other place.

When they were gathered at supper in the dining hall he could observe the people in all their variety. First there were the old ones, who had come here from the cities of Russian Poland and had taught themselves to work the land. Then there were their children, the sabras, blond, husky women and men: earnest people for all that they could dance and jubilate. A determined and tenacious people! Last, there were the visitors, mostly students from everywhere: a Christian girl from Australia who had come out of curiosity and for a summer’s adventure; boys from Brooklyn, English Jews and German Gentiles, come for a month or two. Few intended to stay, as Juliana did.

She worked in the nursery, since in Holland she had been trained as a kindergarten teacher. Every other night she had to sleep in the nursery, which, Eric was shocked to learn, lay underground. Actually it was a bomb shelter behind a pretty blue door. He was very moved. The world had no knowledge of how these people had to live! He wondered whether even his grandparents, who cared so much, knew what it was really like. “One fears for these children living under the guns,” Juliana said. “Of course, it
doesn’t brother the little ones. But the older ones know. They understand very well.”

Many of the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds had survived the concentration camps and wore, would always wear, the outrageous number stamped upon their arms. The boys wrestled and punched as boys did everywhere. The girls tied ribbons in their hair and practiced flirting, as girls did everywhere. But their eyes were anxious.

Juliana was good for them. She was young enough to know the current popular songs and to teach them how to use a lipstick with skill. She was just enough older to give them some of the mothering they had lost, most of them having lost it when they were still so young that they could barely remember it.

And while Eric watched her with these young people, while he walked beside her under the wind and in the sunlight, he thought: Was there ever, could there ever be, another woman like this one? With the other half of his mind he knew that every man who loves a woman thinks the same. Yet there was not and never could be another one like her.

Sweet, so sweet, with her hair bleaching and her skin turning to café au lait under this searing sun! She was healthy and sturdy, and almost as tall as he; she seemed never to be tired. He didn’t admire “delicate” women, nor ruffled fragility. It pleased him now to think that with a woman like Juliana a man could go anywhere in the world; nothing would be too daring or too new for her.

He hadn’t followed her all this way with any thought of marriage. At twenty-one none of his friends was married and he’d had no wish to be, either. He’d had no wish to be committed to any place or any person with certitude enough to say: next year at such and such a time, in such and such a place I shall be doing this or that. Not at all. (And that, he had sometimes thought, was odd of him, because so often, talking philosophically with a friend, he’d heard himself saying that what he needed most was something that lasted.) But permanence had been for his future.
He had simply wanted to follow Juliana because, of all the women he had known, she was the most enchanting.

Yet, as the summer wore on, he began to feel a sense of looming loss.

Two weddings were celebrated on the kibbutz within one day. Eric had naturally seen more than a few weddings in his time, but never so much emotion: so many tears and embraces, so much reckless dancing, so much wine. For a while he played his customary role as a wedding guest, observing with curiosity and feeling a human sympathy with their pleasure, but no kinship. And then all at once, standing among the crowd that waved the brides and grooms down the road on the way to their short seaside honeymoons—he could not have said what had been happening inside his head—but all at once the whole business seemed very, very lovely and quite inevitable. He began, in private, to think about it, and was surprised to find himself doing so. Also, he was a trifle pleased and proud. Then he began to edge toward the subject, to walk around the farthest reaches of it, testing the ground, not quite ready yet to walk straight through.

“Tell me,” he asked Juliana one day, “do you plan to stay here very long?”

They were sitting on the ground, near the pool. Everyone else was in the water, but he had held her back, wanting to talk.

“Well, it does seem like home to me.”

“Yes, but,” Eric pressed, “do you plan to stay always?”

“That’s a word I don’t use. I’ve told you, I don’t like to think that far ahead.”

“I do. I want to find a place and people that are going to be right for me forever. There has to be something in the world that’s forever.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” he said, “a house, for one thing, that you won’t have to leave. Where you can plant trees and stay to see them grow old.”

“Tell me what else you dream of,” Juliana ordered, gently
outlining his nose and cheeks with a long blade of grass.

“I dream—” he hesitated. “I dream of writing a book, one that might be remembered after I’m dead. A really great book. And I’d like to write it in a room in a house like the one I grew up in.” He wanted to add, and was perhaps about to add, “And with you in the house with me,” but she interrupted.

“I hope you do! Oh, I hope you get everything you ever want as long as you live!”