Evergreen (72 page)

Eric drew his breath in.

“I thought my mother would lose her mind.”

“Perhaps,” Eric said, “it wasn’t true? And the charge was false?”

Juliana shook her head slowly. “That’s what we hoped. But it was true. He didn’t try to deny it. He was proud of it. Proud of it, Eric! He believed in it all, the master race, the thousand-year Reich, all of it!”

Eric reached for her two hands and held them.

“Yes, I thought my mother would lose her mind. To have lived with—and, I suppose, even loved—a monster, who sent her own brothers to their death. To have lived with such a man and not known what he was.”

He stroked her hair. He had no words.

“And he was kind to my sisters and me. We always had things, toys, some candy—when the country had nothing. We went out into the country together. He loved us. And he sent those other children to die.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Eric said. It was all he could think of to say.

“‘Tell me,’ my mother used to ask me after it happened, ‘tell me, can you believe anyone, trust in anyone?’ I was fourteen …”

“She didn’t mean it that way,” Eric said gently.

“I suppose not. She’s doing well enough now. She has my sisters and me; she works, she lives. But still, if you
could live with someone and not know what he really was, why then—” Her voice faded away.

“So that’s it,” Eric murmured to himself.

“What? What did you say?”

“Nothing important.”

It began to grow dark and street lamps came on.

“I’m glad I told you,” Juliana said. “I feel better.”

“You can tell me anything,” he answered, meaning it.

Yet in a way he was sorry she had told him. For he had met the rival now and seen that it was fierce and would be hard to vanquish.

“There’s a child who troubles me,” Juliana told Eric a few weeks later. “Do you remember, I told you about the bus that was shot at last year? There were a few children who survived but their parents were killed.”

“I remember. You showed me the spot.”

“Well, this one child—perhaps you know Leo, who follows me around? He’s nine now, a little boy with glasses.”

Eric nodded. “I shouldn’t think he’d be any trouble.”

“He’s much too quiet. He never brothered anyone, even right after it happened. We had so much hysteria here. We were up all night with some of the children, and it went on for weeks, nightmares and crying. But never with Leo.”

“Maybe you’re too concerned. Have you talked to anyone about it?”

“Oh, yes! And people just say that he’s very mature and very brave. And that’s true, but still something brothers me.”

“I’ll talk to him if you like. I was a camp counselor. Maybe I still know how to talk to kids.”

“I hoped you’d say that,” Juliana said gratefully.

She brought Leo to him one afternoon while he was feeding the calves.

“You said you needed some help and I thought Leo might be able to help you. He’s strong and tall for his age.”

Leo said nothing, just stood there, neither scowling nor smiling.

“These calves,” Eric explained, when Juliana had gone, “have just been weaned. And I’m trying to get them to drink their milk out of a bucket. But the problem is that they don’t understand and they try to knock it over and—whoa, there—see what I mean? Now, if you could hold the bucket while I stick his head in so he can get a taste of the milk, why, we—”

There were five calves. When they had all been fed, Eric said, “That was kind of fun, wasn’t it?”

Leo shrugged.

“Would you like to do it again another day?”

“If you need the help, I’ll do it. People are supposed to help.”

“Never mind that. Do you
want
to?”

“I guess so.”

“I’m going down to the pasture to bring the cows in. They’re far out today.” This time Eric didn’t ask whether Leo wanted to go. He simply said, “Come with me.”

The boy obeyed. They picked their way down the path. The wind made a thin whistle as it passed and moved on through the grain fields.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Eric said. “You’re kind of lucky to live in such a beautiful place.”

“Yes.”

He tried again. All he could come up with was that trite question with which adults plague children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Whatever the country needs. A soldier, probably.”

The priggish answer puzzled Eric. “Leo, I wish you’d tell me what you really think, not what you believe I want to hear.”

The boy stopped on the path, opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it and went on ahead.

Pathetic shoulders! Skinny legs! Baby, boy and man! And out of some remote corner of time and memory another question came.

“Leo—you must think a whole lot about your father and mother, don’t you?”

A second time the child stopped. But now he looked at Eric sharply. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like that!”

“Why not? What’s wrong?”

“Because I heard the doctor say and the nurse say, they have to get our minds off what happened. And that’s what I try all the time to do, and now you come and ask me a question like that!”

“Come here,” Eric said, “sit down a minute.” He perched on a large rock at the edge of the path. “You’re supposed to get your mind off it, is that what they say? But you haven’t been able to do that, have you?”

“Most of the time I do,” Leo persisted. “I’m not a baby, you know.”

“I know you’re not,” Eric said gently. “But I’m not either, am I?”

Leo was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I lost my father and mother the same way you did, or almost the same way. In an automobile. And I still think about them, and I know I always shall.”

Leo was silent, watching Eric.

Eric went on, “Yes, and often when I was younger, I cried. I thought how unfair it was that I, of all the boys I knew, had such a thing happen to me. I cried.”

“It’s not brave to cry,” Leo said. A quiver ran over his face.

“I think it is. I think it’s quite brave to be honest about the way you feel.”

“Do you? Do you ever cry, now that you’re old?”

“Look at me,” Eric said. His eyes were filled with tears.

The child stood staring at him in wonder. And suddenly he dropped onto Eric’s lap, shaking and digging his wet face into Eric’s shoulder.

For a long time Eric held him. Pictures, pictures, flashing in his head … Gran. Chris. Nana.…

Then he thought, They’ll be wondering why the cows are so late. But he didn’t move.

At last Leo raised his head. “You won’t tell anybody?”

“No.”

“Not even her?”

“Who? Juliana? No, not even her. I promise.”

Leo stood up and wiped his nose and eyes.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me, Leo?”

“Yes.”

Eric bent down and Leo whispered, “I’d like a big toy sailboat for the pond.”

“I’ll make one for you. I’m pretty good at that sort of thing. Now hurry. We’re late with the cows.”

Arieh, who slept in the bed next to Eric’s, remarked, “I notice something about you. You don’t talk much lately of home. Of the country house where you grew up, or anything else.”

“I guess that’s so,” Eric admitted.

Arieh was a sabra, born on the kibbutz. He was a country man, with a country man’s slight roughness and silences.

“Everybody likes you here,” he said abruptly.

“Do they?” Eric felt the flush rising on his neck. These people had few flowery social graces. You had to earn a compliment and even then, he had noticed, you often didn’t get it.

“I’m glad,” he answered, “because I like people here too.”

“Juliana says you’ve done a wonderful thing with the boy.”

“He’s a fine child.”

“Nobody else knew what to do with him. How did you know?”

“I don’t think I really
knew
anything,” Eric said slowly. “It was just something that came to me.”

Arieh nodded. “That’s good enough.” He reached for the light. “Mind if I turn it out? It’s been a long day.”

Lying there in the quiet dark he thought about these simple days of his new life. Nourishing days they were, like
mild and good bread eaten under a tree at noon, or perhaps in a kitchen on a winter’s night, such frozen country winter as he remembered from his childhood.

He labored and with each week the labor became easier, his body leaner and faster. Sometimes, passing back and forth from fields to barn, he caught a glimpse of Juliana outside with children, or on some errand alone, walking with strong rapid stride, her fine long hair lifting from her shoulders. And then the day would linger interminably while he waited for the night.

“A sound mind in a sound body.” He felt that his mind was also very strong, that there was nothing he couldn’t cope with. It wasn’t that he had made any stupendous decisions about himself; he was putting them off, and he knew he was. But when the time came for decisions he would be able to make them.

Then he scoffed at himself for this euphoria. “Because you’re living a ‘natural’ life,” he scoffed, “because you feel healthy, you think you can solve everything.” If only she would marry him! But he knew he mustn’t ask her again, knew that he would have to wait for the fear that was in her to ebb away, whenever and if ever that might be.

So the warm fall passed. Winter is sharp in Galilee; it came to Eric that shortly there would be no more evenings in their “green cave.”

Their need for one another was so strong by now that there was seldom any preliminary talk between them. He would meet her where they had arranged, outside of her door, and walk down the hill, through the orchards.

“Come,” he would say. She would spread her shawl on the tall grass and they would lie down in the shrubbery behind the great guns.

One soft night while lying there, they heard the sound of Emmy’s piano carried down the hill by the wind. It rose and fell, sang and died. Music, Eric thought, drawing the word out in his mind’s ear, how clearly it speaks to us! With a hundred voices it speaks: of hope and courage, of old sorrow and new joy, telling without words of how man
loves the earth, of his fear of dying, and of his awe beneath the stars.

Something caught in his throat, a little gasp, and Juliana turned to him.

“When will you marry me?” he asked her, entirely forgetting his resolution.

And to his absolute, incredulous astonishment, she answered, “As soon as you like.”

“Oh,” he said. “Tomorrow?”

In the faint light from the sky he could see her smile. “Would you wait until my mother can get here? It shouldn’t take more than a few days.”

He felt, as when pain has abruptly been relieved, or as when the flesh is warmed after searing cold, a deep, deep comfort. For a little while, in complete tranquillity, they slept. When they awoke the moon was up. Hand in hand, as they so often walked, they went quietly back together, up the hill.

A burst of fire and thunder tore a hole into the sleeping night. The men were out of their beds and instantly awake, as though they had been expecting Armageddon.

“It’s the gas pumps!” Arieh cried. “They’ve hit the pumps!”

No question who “they” were.…

The tanks caught, lifting the earth in clods, raising a tower of fire. A carpet of flame fell over the roof of the cattle barn, then the garages and the stables. By then the men were into their pants and shoes, and with rifles and grenades were halfway down the stairs.

“Where to?” Eric whispered. “Follow you?”

“Yes,” cried Allon. “Head down!”

There was a crack and a ping! Then another ping! and a snapping of splintered wood as bullets slammed the walls.

“Out the side door,” Allon ordered. “Then around by the back way to the dining hall! Quiet, heads down, on the double!”

Eric understood. From the hall they would command the
quadrangle, nerve center of the community. Anyone who tried to cross there would be in their range.

They slid along the rear wall. From the stables came the human shrieking of the horses.

“Can’t we—oh, Christ—can’t we get them out?” Eric whispered.

“Are you crazy? Quiet!”

With side vision he saw the frame of the cattle barn outlined for an instant only in a square of fire. Then it collapsed: the hay had caught. The cows! Dumb creatures. Their mild eyes.

Guns were cracking and ripping all around them now as they ran. But whose guns, theirs or ours? A man ran out somewhere ahead and was struck down screaming, spinning like a top. There was unearthly howling from every building. Where were they, the attackers? The muffling darkness protected the enemy as well as themselves.

They reached the dining hall and felt for the door, which was opened from the inside, where others had already gathered. Crouching, they crept in single file: Ezra, Arieh, Allon, Eric, all of them.

And will I come through this? And will I know how to fight?

The huddled leaders whispered. The room was quiet. Outside the guns still crackled and snapped. Where? Where were the attackers? Was there no plan to counter them? But there had to be.… Eric’s lungs burned. They had raced all the way uphill to the hall. His head itched; it was soaked with sweat.

“You,” Allon said, “I want one of you at each window. Zack’s men are holding the south dormitory, so they can’t help here. There are twenty-nine of us altogether, but we don’t know how many those devils have. So we’ve got to send to town for help. They’ve cut the phone wires.… Ezra, can you get to the truck and roll it down hill without making a sound? When you’re on the road you can start the motor and then go like hell.”

“I’ll do it. Where’s the dog? Get him out of the kitchen for me.”

“He’ll make noise!”

“Who, Rufus? I want him with me. He can tear a man’s throat out.”

Ezra and the dog slipped out through the kitchen door.

Diagonally across the quadrangle lay the nursery, with a cluster of firs beside its blue door. Juliana would be frantic in there, hearing all this without seeing or knowing—

Terror almost took Eric’s voice away. “And the children? The nursery?”

“Dan’s men are supposed to be there.”

“I don’t see them.” Eric strained into the darkness, lit now to a smoky yellow by the dreadful light of the fires.