Evergreen (71 page)

People usually say such things out of perfunctory kindness. So the anxious urgency in her voice startled Eric. “Do you?” he asked.

And she answered, “Yes. Because I love you, Eric. So of course I do.”

Certainly this was not the first time either of them had told that to the other, but now he went further, wanting and also fearing to know. “Has there—was there ever anyone—”

Juliana looked away, beyond the noise and busy motion at the pool. “There was one, just one, but that was a long time ago and different from this.”

He wasn’t satisfied. “What happened?”

She looked back at him, blinking as if she were recalling herself from a distant place. “He wanted—he brothered me too much about getting married. So we quarreled and ended it. It was just as well.”

Even that did not satisfy him. “And that’s all?”

“All that’s worth talking about.”

“But tell me,” he persisted, “what would have been so terrible about getting married?” And added, trying for a light touch, “I thought that’s what little girls aim for, from the cradle on.”

“Yes,” she said, “they do. And such a pity. Poor women! Don’t you feel sorry for women?”

“No,” Eric said honestly. “Or rather, I never thought about it.”

“Well, think about it, then! The miserable marriages they make because they’re afraid of waiting too long and
being passed over! And the miserable marriages they stay in. And the miserable children—”

“How bleak you sound! As if there were no happy marriages. That’s not even sensible!”

She threw her hands up. “It’s sensible for me, and that’s all that counts. I like my life the way it is.”

His heart sank. A year or two from now would she be telling some other man about him: “Yes, there was a young American, but he brothered me about marriage and so we—”

“What about children?” he asked lamely. “You’re so wonderful with them. Surely you want children?”

“Right now it’s wonderful enough to take care of other people’s children.”

“But you can’t go on doing that,” he argued. “That’s only a substitute for the real thing.”

Juliana jumped up. “I’m boiling in this heat! Let’s swim!”

“Go ahead. I’ll come in a minute.”

What was it? Why? She was so free in loving when they lay in their “green cave,” so free with her thoughts, whether glad or sober, as long as they didn’t touch on any personal future. She baffled him. It would have been easy to understand and cope with, if there had been another man. Once he had had a girl he liked tremendously; then she had started to become involved with someone else, and Eric had come straight out before the two of them, demanding, “Who is it to be? He or I?” Funny thing! He smiled, remembering. She had chosen Eric, and then after that he hadn’t especially wanted her.

But that had been different. That girl hadn’t been Juliana. And the rival now wasn’t another man. What was it, then?

At summer’s end the young foreigners left to go back to the universities and back to jobs. Only a few would return; this had been an adventure, but next year they would try a different place, Nepal, perhaps, or Sweden.
“Aren’t you supposed to go back to the States?” Juliana inquired of Eric.

“I can take a while longer. I was promised a trip before I go to work, so this can be it,” he said.

Besides, he thought, the timing of all these departures was unfortunate. Everything was at the harvest, and just when more hands were needed for a few hectic weeks of twelve-hour days, suddenly there were fewer. If he were going to leave, this surely wouldn’t be the right time to do it.

The truth was, he knew he couldn’t leave her. Not yet.

When the harvest was finally in, holidays were taken. Eric had not seen Jerusalem. It occurred to him, since Juliana had told him how marvelous the city was, that she might like to go there with him for two or three days. So he arranged for a ride with some other people and told her, when they met at noon, what he had done.

She was indignant. “Now what gave you the right to plan my time for me?”

He thought at first that she was joking, but when he saw that she was not, he was astounded. “I should think you would thank me for having got us a lift, and saved you the trouble of scrounging for one.”

“What made you so sure I wanted to go with you?”

“Have you by any chance gone out of your mind?” he demanded.

“No. I just don’t like being taken for granted by a man!”

“Well, you needn’t worry about that anymore,” he said furiously. “I shan’t take you for granted again. I shan’t take you at all!” And he strode away.

He was sore with his anger all that afternoon. Women! “Sorry for women,” she had said. Capricious, moody, childish, ungrateful, stupid—He ran out of words.

Could there perhaps be someone else? Anything was possible, yet he couldn’t imagine who it might be. They’d been together so much, she hadn’t had time even to talk to anyone else! Still, anything was possible.

At supper he sat purposely apart from her. But when it
was over and he had to go down to the barns for the evening checkup, she followed him.

“Eric. Eric, I’m sorry.” She laid her hand on his arm.

He didn’t answer.

“I get that way sometimes. I know it’s stupid and wrong. It wasn’t decent when you were being so nice.”

He melted. “Yes, but—what was it all about?”

“I just get a queer feeling sometimes about being owned. Independence is very precious to me. I get scared. I can’t explain it.”

“Well, all right then,” he said awkwardly, far from understanding.

“And you’re not going to stay angry with me? Please?”

“Well, all right,” he repeated. “You want to go on Sunday?”

“I want to. Very much.”

The minibus was filled. Half the passengers were children and young teen-agers. Their singing was shrill and deafening and gay. The road cut through brown fields already being plowed for winter sowing. It passed through new cement-block towns, bare, ugly and clean.

“It’s all they can afford,” Juliana explained when Eric made comment. “They’ve neither time nor money. Beauty can come later.”

For beauty had been in the past, and in Jerusalem was there still. The car stopped at the crest of a hill. Below lay the pale amber city, spreading to farther hills and up their sides.

“It isn’t gold,” Eric remarked wonderingly, “as in the song. It’s amber. Yes, that’s it.”

“There’s an old tradition,” the driver said. “One is supposed to walk into Jerusalem. Who wants to get out here?”

A few of the boys and girls got out. Juliana jumped out with them.

“I was hoping you would,” Eric said.

For three days they celebrated. He followed where he was led. They needed no guidebook, for Juliana knew the city well.

“It’s a great pity we can’t see more,” she told him. “East Jerusalem is all Arab; they don’t allow us to go in. And the old Jewish quarter that had been here for two thousand years was wrecked and captured when the Arabs attacked in 1948.”

Still there was more than eyes or feet could cover in three days. Museums and archeological digs. Crowded alleys of the Old City, foul to smell and vivid to look at. Arab women in black veils and Arab men in
kaffiyehs
. Narrow shops where men hammered brass and cut leather. They followed the Way of the Cross. They heard the
muezzin’s
eerie cry in the early morning, and heard it again at noon when they went to a mosque to watch men kneel at prayer, facing toward Mecca.

In rocky fields at the city’s edge goats climbed with bells jangling. A man led a string of shabby camels whose great eyes blinked patiently as they waited, tethered in the blinding sunlight. They listened to the melancholy twang of eastern music. At night they danced the hora. They wandered through dark, old shops.

“This is a street of Yemenites,” Juliana explained. “Most of them are jewelers, silver crafters.”

“I want to buy something for you,” Eric said.

“I didn’t mean that!” she protested. “I only wanted you to see because it’s interesting. They’ve come here from Yemen—”

“Buy one of these bracelets,” he commanded. “No, not that one, it’s not nice enough. Pick an important one.”

The shop’s owner held up a handsome bracelet, its silver filigree as fine as lace.

“That’s the one,” Eric said firmly. “That is, if the lady likes it.”

“Oh, yes,” Juliana said, “the lady does!”

When they were outside she asked, “Eric, are you so rich that you can spend money this way?”

He was touched. It hadn’t cost anything much at all.

“No,” he said, “I’m not, although people here might think I was.”

On their last day Juliana told him, “I’ve saved the best for now. I’m going to take you to a synagogue.”

“Oh,” he said, amused, “you forget! I’ve been in them many, many times before.”

“Not like this one, you haven’t. At least I don’t think you have.”

At the end of a long alley they stopped. “This looks like medieval Europe!” Eric exclaimed.

“Well, it is. It’s been transplanted. One can find everything in this city. Didn’t I tell you?”

In the box-shaped synagogue of ancient stone they separated, Juliana climbing two flights of stairs to the women’s balcony where hidden women read their prayer books behind the lattices. Squinting through a minute hole she could see the men at their prayer desks below, wrapped in their shawls, and chanting. Eric must be among them but she couldn’t see him.

They met again just outside the entrance.

“They all looked so old!” Eric said.

“It’s only the beards and the black clothes that make them seem so.”

“To think they’ve been praying this way for three thousand years!”

“Maybe longer.”

“My grandfather went to a place like this on the lower East Side before he became ‘modern.’” Eric laughed. “You know, I’ve an idea he would still prefer it. But my grandmother wouldn’t.”

“Do you realize, these people don’t care about politics or wars or anything that’s happening beyond their doors?”

“They’re waiting for the Messiah, who’ll set the world to rights.”

Juliana shook her head. “They’ll go on praying like this through raids and wars, and heaven forbid, even through defeat.”

“That’s faith. They believe. I wish I did,” Eric said.

She looked at him curiously. “Don’t you believe in anything?”

“Do you?” he countered.

“Yes. Freedom and individual dignity.”

“Well, if that’s all, why, I’ll buy that.”

“Maybe that’s all the belief a person needs. Worth living for and dying for.”

“Yes. Only, I don’t want to die right now!”

“Nor I, of course not!”

“Ask me what I do want,” Eric commanded.

“What do you want?”

“To live where you are. To be near you forever.”

“Nothing is forever,” Juliana said darkly.

“Do you really think that? I don’t like to hear it.”

“I know you don’t.”

“I want to marry you, Juliana. You must know I do.”

“Ah, you’re very young for your age, Eric!”

He stopped in the middle of the street. “That’s a rotten thing to say!”

“Don’t be annoyed with me. I only meant—I’m older than you. I’m twenty-four.”

“Don’t you think I figured that out? And what difference does it make, anyway?”

“None, I guess. But I also meant—you’re too trusting. You scarcely know me and still you want to offer me your life on a silver platter.”

“It’s my life,” he muttered. “I can offer it where I like.”

“Ah, don’t be annoyed!” she repeated. She leaned over to kiss him. “Let’s buy some ice cream. My feet are tired and I’m hungry. We can sit in the park over there and eat it.”

They sat on a bench in the park, eating ice cream out of the container. Children went chattering home from school, their bookbags slung over their shoulders. Tourist buses passed. In a yard across the street a family was decorating a succah for the Feast of Tabernacles; gourds, squash and wisps of grain were hung from or piled on the rafters. Eric followed Juliana’s gaze.

“It’s the harvest festival,” she explained. “They take their meals outdoors in the little booth.”

“A pretty custom. All people have their pretty customs.”

“Of course.”

Two old men passed, looking in a book together. Their beards and their hands waved in earnest discussion.

“My grandfather would love to see all this,” Eric said. “I was thinking, if he had a beard and a broad black hat he’d look just like these old men. You see the same face here, over and over.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Is anything the matter?” Eric asked. She had laid down the ice cream spoon and was sitting with her hands in her lap.

“No.… Yes.… I have to tell you something.”

He waited, but she didn’t begin.

“I don’t want to tell you.”

He saw her agitation. “Don’t, if you don’t want to.”

“No,” she contradicted, “I do want to tell you. That is, I want to tell someone. I’ve always wanted to tell someone and I never have. And I can’t stand it anymore! Do you know what it is to have something burning inside you, something you want to talk about and can’t, that you’re so sick of, so ashamed of—”

He couldn’t imagine what she might have done and he was frightened.

“Do you know what that’s like?” she demanded again.

“No. No. I don’t.”

“Do you remember that I told you about my family, how they helped those poor Jews in the attic, and how my uncles were taken by the Nazis?”

“Yes, you told me about your parents, and—”

She interrupted. “Not about my parents. About my mother.” She turned her face away, addressing the air. “My mother and her brothers.” She stopped and Eric waited.

A fire engine went clanging by. A police car followed with screeching sirens. For a few moments it was impossible to be heard. Then quiet returned to the little park; deep quiet: crooning pigeons pecking at crumbs, a woman calling
once across the street. But Juliana didn’t begin again.

He waited and was about to say, “Go on,” when he saw that her eyes were pressed tightly shut and her fists were clenched in her lap. He didn’t know what he ought to do.

Presently she said, steadying her voice, “My father … when the war ended the Dutch authorities came for my father. He had been a counterspy for the Germans. One of the leaders. An important man.” She opened her eyes and looked at Eric. “An important man! It was he who had turned in my uncles and the neighbors and our minister and all those others who worked in the underground. Can you believe that? My father!”