Jephte's Daughter (18 page)

He let out a long sigh. “Lucky man. Unlucky me.” He walked off along the beach and turned around and waved.

“Unlucky me,” she repeated. But she was having too good a time to let the incident worry her. For the next three days she swam and ate wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables, and tanned in the hot winter sun, her flesh growing rosy and healthy.

On her fourth day she rented diving equipment and arranged to take a lesson. She looked a little in terror at the dark waters, but the instructor held out his hand: “Don’t be afraid, I’ll be with you the whole time. Do you remember the signs?” He repeated the “okay” sign, thumb and forefinger meeting in a circle, his brows arched in almost absurd, questioning concern. She pulled the mask over her eyes and nose and took a deep breath through her mouth from the oxygen tanks that weighed down her back. Letting him lead her, she found herself slowly sinking deeper and deeper beneath the sparkling, light-filled surface of the sea, plunging into gray-green shadows. A terror gripped her for a moment, seeing all that water sealing her off from the safety of familiar earth and air. How will I breathe? she thought with panic, even as her mouth sucked in greedy doses of oxygen that easily filled her lungs. The bubbles caused by her exhaling reassured her with their rhythmic, tangible proof of her continued existence. But still a little of the panic stayed with her. She felt her body floating, led gently by the hand. And then, suddenly, confronted by the living mountains of coral, she forgot everything else. The instructor tapped her gently on the shoulder, pointing out a face in the sand, almost a child’s stickpoint tracing of eyes, a nose, and mouth, and shook his head no vigorously. She realized that it was a living thing, the poisonous stonefish, buried head-deep in the water. He pointed again, his hands expressive, reaching out to the living coral that throbbed and sent tentacles forward, retracting with a wondrous, quick motion, an open and close of lacy fingers. He took her reluctant hand and stretched it toward the lovely, amber-colored, flowerlike thing. She touched it hesitantly and almost laughed with joy as it snatched itself back, responding to her. It felt like long velvet ribbons.

Gradually she forgot to be afraid, taking in her breaths naturally. Every moment another unexpected wonder floated by: a school of gaudy bright purple-and-yellow fish; an eel, slithering wormlike; a spider crab walking imperiously sideways. The beautiful colors of the fish, the undulating, living coral, filled her with a foolish desire to cry. It was so beautiful. She had never imagined this whole, hidden world. Each fish with its own pattern, its own shades of color. We think we are creative, but what are we next to God? she thought. Her body was filled with a sweetness, a lightness of gratitude and discovery.

And when she emerged a thought had crystallized: This, just this, she thought, is what I thought my marriage would be. A man to guide you gently into beautiful hidden worlds; to take you by the hand and lead you past all the hidden dangers, pointing out all the hidden beauty and wonder. She thought of Isaac and their marriage and realized with a shock of real understanding its fundamental failure and the irreconcilable wrongness of her connection to him.

The next day, she signed up for a bus tour of the rest of the country. She didn’t want to think anymore. To make any more decisions. The rest of the country passed by her as if in a crowded dream. She did not feel the way the other tourists did. They looked and appreciated. But they were observers, foreigners. Already the country had become part of her the way Brooklyn and Los Angeles never were, never could be. Home. Drifting and homeless, she recognized the irony of it. It was all there, the things she had dreamt about and read about as a child: Safad, home of the mystics and artists, high in the hills, full of saintly graves; the harp-shaped Sea of Galilee; the bustling Jewish city of merchants, Tel Aviv; the kibbutzim full of Jewish farmers, and the breathtaking green lushness of their fields, redeemed with honest sweat and blood and love from the barrenness of centuries. The bus moved on relentlessly, the days passing with unbearable swiftness, to their last stop before starting back to Jerusalem. Haifa, port city. It let them off at a point overlooking the harbor, with its enormous ocean liners lined up like toy boats. They could take you anywhere. You could disappear in Sri Lanka or the Himalayas. You could wander the islands of Greece and the beaches of southern France. The men on the tour bus had sidled up to her slyly, behind their wives’ backs. She thought of the boy in the T-shirt and his flashing white teeth and easygoing smile. And the world was full of so many men. But then she turned her back to the port and looked up to the mountain of the Carmel. Green and fragrant. There were higher, greener mountains like this elsewhere. But there was no place else in the world where the mountain was hers in the way this was. Mountain of the Bible, of the prophets she had learned by heart her entire life. She felt its silent claim upon her. Still, a part of her longed to climb aboard the anonymous vessel and sail away without a backward look. She thought about this as the bus made the long, quiet ride back to Jerusalem. She dozed and dreamt of sailing in the white clouds, high above the earth.

When she woke up, the bus was already in front of the King David. Her father and mother, Isaac, and her mother-in-law were waiting for her in the lobby.

“Aba, Ima,” she said, her throat choking back unwept tears. She did not even look at Isaac. Her mother fell on her neck, weeping. She was so little, Ima, Batsheva thought, stroking her heaving shoulder. Little and growing old. She felt the tears sting her eyes, but stopped them. I will never cry in front of Isaac Meyer again. I would rather die, she thought. Really.

“Ima, I’m all right.” She noticed her father had moved closer. He stood, straight-backed, unmoving, his face a mask. He made no move to touch her. “I am sorry if I worried you, Aba,” Batsheva said weakly, feeling the heavy emanation of disapproval that seemed to sear her chest like ultraviolet rays. It took her breath away to be in the same room with Isaac and her father. She clung to her mother.

Her father turned, and she became conscious of the small, curious crowd of onlookers who had gathered to stare at this scene. Tourists and bellboys. She became conscious of her new, clingy dress and her long, bare, tanned legs and arms. She had nothing at all on her head and her hair hung down her back. Mortified, she nevertheless tossed her head defiantly and walked to the reservation desk.

“My key please.”

The clerk, with a pained expression, leaned forward and whispered, “I’m so sorry. But your room has been canceled. Your things are in the lobby.”

“But, why, how dare…”

He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head toward her father. “I’m sorry. It was handled through the manager. There was nothing I could do,” he apologized uncomfortably.

So they wanted a scene. All right then, they would get one. She turned and faced her father: “I’m not going back home with the husband you picked out for me, Aba,” she said loudly, pointing at Isaac. Everyone turned to look, and she noted with pleasure the blush that crept up her husband’s throat and around his eyes. She saw her father take one step toward her, and she pressed her lips together firmly, readying herself.

“Batsheva,” he said in anguish, just before he clutched his chest and collapsed to the floor.

Hadassah Hospital is located at the end of a long and winding road through the mountains. It is the largest and some would say the most advanced medical center in the Middle East. Patients come from all over Israel and many Arabs sneak in from as far away as Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia. During visiting hours, its halls teem with the extended families of Sephardic Jews and Arabs. Dozens of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and even good neighbors, crowd the elevators and waiting rooms, bearing aromatically spiced homemade couscous and pungent meats that are strictly forbidden to be brought into the rooms. They bring food in anyway, of course, pleading and cajoling with the easygoing Sephardic guards who turn a sympathetic blind eye. They fill the rooms, feed their loved ones, and envelop the patients with warmth and nourishment and sympathy.

Batsheva looked at them enviously as she went into her father’s almost empty, silent room. She was all he had and she brought no food, and little comfort. She opened the door quietly and wanted to weep with despair. Her tall, impeccable father laid out weakly in wrinkled, striped hospital-issue pajamas. His powerful hands white and subdued, helplessly straddling his sides. When had this happened to him? She remembered how he had seemed suddenly older at the airport after the wedding. But this frailty, this gray, aged weakness? How silently it had stolen up on them all. He had not had a heart attack, the doctors said. But the twenty-hour trip, the wait at the airport, the worry, the anxiety, the confusion. Why, even a younger man would have collapsed from exhaustion, they said with meaningful glances at Batsheva. Your family must make sure you live a more subdued, relaxed existence from now on, they warned, or they could not promise it wouldn’t lead to a heart attack the next time.

“Aba.” She knelt at his bedside and took his hand, so suddenly frail, in her own. “How do you feel?”

“How should he feel, after all you’ve put him through!” her mother burst out reproachfully.

“You don’t understand what happened, Ima. Isaac is…a cruel man. I can’t go on with this.”

“Batsheva.” Her father tried to sit up.

“Again you do this to him!” her mother shrieked. “Now leave us, selfish child!” She ran to her husband and gently pressured him back down.

Batsheva felt the hot knot grow again in her throat, and she turned to leave. But her father squeezed her hand.

“No, don’t go, Batsheva. I must talk to you. I have to tell—”

“Not now, my dear. You must rest now,” her mother interrupted.

“Do not interfere. Leave us,” Abraham Ha-Levi said suddenly, with a flash of his old, commanding authority.

Surprised, and perhaps relieved, her mother shrank back into her accustomed shadowy role. “Yes, dearest. I will go.” She glanced at Batsheva, raising her brows in warning. She walked out quietly, closing the door behind her.

“Aba, I must tell you the truth about Isaac,” she pleaded.

“Yes, yes. You must of course. But first I must tell you something that will make you understand that it doesn’t matter.” He took her hand in his and patted it—the touch of a loving father to a beloved child. “We are so much alike, my dearest child, that is the problem.” He sighed and ran his fingers softly along the ridge of her pale cheek. “I, too, ran away. I didn’t want anything to do with my parents’ destiny. I felt they had no right to choose for me…But—God felt otherwise.” He smiled, a sad, ironic smile. “Like Jonah and the whale, my fate has pursued me, as it will pursue you.” He took a deep, painful breath, pausing for a moment to reflect upon what he was about to reveal to his daughter, pained that he could not prevent it.

“When I came to America after the war, I had nothing. I also wanted nothing—but to be left alone to lead my own life. So I told no one where I came from, who my family was. Then I married your mother—I was nothing but a common bricklayer, a laborer, and your mother a beautiful woman, a storekeeper’s daughter—I was shocked she even agreed to meet me. When I married, my life changed. I wanted so much to have a family…Oh, how can you, how can anyone, understand what it’s like to have no one of your own? To have lost every remnant of your own flesh and blood? Your eyes become the only eyes in the world, your face the only face. It…was like being dead and without connection to anyone. With your mother, I wanted to start fresh…How I prayed for a child! Seven years…” He looked up at her with a small flash of remembered anguish. “Seven long years we waited. Your mother miscarried once, and then your brother was born.”

“Aba!”

His eyes closed. “His name was Yerachmiel Ha-Levi.” He nodded, in incredible pain. “And I felt I had gone through enough. That, finally, I had been forgiven for my lapses, forgiven for running away.” He turned to her, searching her shocked face for understanding. “I was in the synagogue on Yom Kippur. It was a hot day and I remember being on my feet, praying, wiping the sweat that ran down my face. Big beads of sweat. It was very hot, you see. That is why I let him…It wasn’t my fault. Your brother was three years old. ‘Can I go outside?’ He was tugging at my prayer shawl. I could see he was hot and bored, but I was in the middle of praying, it was forbidden for me to move or speak. So I just nodded to him and he ran outside the way children always do on Yom Kippur, to play on the synagogue steps. And then, he must have…he just fell. No one could tell me how or why. He just fell.” He opened his hand and stared at it, drawing a long, imaginary line across the palm. “It was a very clean break, just at the back of his neck. He died instantly.”

“Aba, please, don’t.” She wiped the silent tears that streamed down his old cheeks. But suddenly his crying ceased and he forced himself up in bed and took both her hands in his. “I sat
shiva
in the house. I put a rag over my head and would not look at anyone. I sat in darkness for seven days and seven nights, do you understand? But on the seventh day I understood. God had dealt with me measure for measure.” He nodded slowly, with full conviction. “Measure for measure. I had robbed my parents of their continuation, I had broken the chain. And so God had taken my son from me. And when I understood the reason, the justice behind it, I also understood that I couldn’t run away anymore. And so I took the rag off my face and looked again into the light. I went to the synagogue and prayed. I vowed that if God would grant me another child, that child would be the Ha-Levis’ new beginning. I made your mother swear never to tell you about your brother, to give you a new, fresh start. Do you understand, my dear? I promised on the souls of my dead father, mother, and brothers that their work would be continued. If I fail to keep that vow, their souls, my soul, will drift forever in the darkness, cursed, cursing me, deprived of rest.” He lifted his head urgently from the pillow, his tortured, obsessed eyes seeking hers.