The Covenant (4 page)

“liana! What are you doing!?” Elise shouted, cradling herself protectively, her voice shaking. She pushed liana off the bed.

The child stared, her eyes widening, her mouth trembling in a doomed attempt to hold back the sobs, which finally culminated in a terrible wail of insult and injustice.

“Uh-oh, everything all right in here?” Ruth enquired, sticking her head into the room.

“Fine—go on, liana. Can’t you see Ruth’s waiting?” Elise said, mortified and miserable. liana went limp as Ruth bent down to pick her up. The child laid her head on the neighbor’s shoulder, sucking her thumb as she stared at her mother in wordless disappointment.

Elise stared back, helplessly. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that child… It’s all my fault. I’m so totally useless. Jon won’t let me do anything…”

“Don’t blame yourself! Just enjoy it while you can, Elise. When the baby comes, you can forget about lying in bed at all hours… Remember what I say.” She grinned.

“Don’t I know it? Is it seven-thirty yet?”

Ruth checked her watch. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“Put on the radio, will you?”

“Do you really want to start your day with the bad news?”

“Why bad?”

“What other kind is there these days?” Ruth murmured, fiddling with the dials until the familiar beep-beep-beep that heralded the news suddenly went on and both women fell into a tense silence.

For the last two years, news broadcasts had brought horrors into their
lives that neither could have ever imagined. Suicide bombers detonating themselves in children’s playgrounds, sending baby carriages flying, killing grandchildren and their grandmothers. Sniper fire into the foreheads of ten-month-old babies in their carriages. The bloody murder of two fourteen-year-old boys, playing hooky to gather firewood for the Lag B’Omer bonfires, their beautiful young faces found crushed beyond recognition in a nearby cave. Crimes that belied the humanity of those who had committed them. Today the news opened with the funerals of two sixteen-year-old yeshiva students killed by a terrorist who walked into their dorms and opened fire; and the Israeli army attack on the car of a wanted terrorist, in which a nine-year-old girl was killed as well.

“Why are your eyes wet,
Ima?”
liana asked.

“Are they?” Elise smiled, wiping her eyes and reaching out to tickle liana’s tummy. Ruth had dressed her in the red T-shirt that said: “I’m pretty enough to eat,” and a pair of blue shorts and brown sandals. She looked adorable.

Iliana giggled, twisting away, trying to tickle Elise back.

Ruth caught the child’s hand: “Say shalom to
Ima
, liana.”

“Don’t want to. Want to stay home,” she whimpered, squeezing her mother’s elbow with her small fingers.

Elise studied the child’s bright eyes, her solid, perfect little body with its protruding tummy still covered with tender baby fat. She thought of the road into Jerusalem, the long, winding road past Arab villages and dark-leafed olive trees that camouflaged roadside dangers. That’s what terror does, Elise thought. Unlike the healthy sense of mortality most people came to terms with—the idea that you would have your eighty years or so and then die—here you were being asked to accept a minute-by-minute uncertainty, so that even kissing a child good-bye and sending her off to school seemed like a tragic, final scene.

It was unbearable. Yet, they kept bearing it.

But what else could they do? Stay locked up in their homes and never go out? Life had to go on. At least, this is what they kept telling themselves, and each other, pretending to feel a courage and certainty they didn’t have.

Slowly, she pried her child’s small fingers loose. She felt her vision blur. “I brought you sugar cookies for your lunch bag,” Ruth wheedled, picking liana up.

The child’s face remained impassive. She was impossible to bribe, and she didn’t particularly like sweets. But Ruth’s sugar cookies were an exception. Slowly, she relented. “With sprinkles?”

“With sprinkles.”

And then the two of them were gone.

The house filled with the lonely sound of the front door clicking shut. Elise turned off the radio, her forehead glistening. Oh, this was no good for her, she knew, no good, she thought, cradling her swollen belly. I’ll keep you safe, baby. I’ll keep you safe, she thought, rocking. Until the world becomes a sane and decent place again, until the bad guys are vanquished, the murderers imprisoned, the demagogues hung by their ankles in the town square. Until the world is safe, familiar, predictable and good again.

She reached over and took out her box of beads. Not a bribe, she told herself. Just a sorry-I-couldn’t-be-there gift. Something sparkly and pretty with lots of pink—liana’s latest love. As she began to string the beads she thought about how wonderful it would be if the world was like a beaded necklace. When it didn’t come out right, you could just take the whole thing apart and start all over again, learning from your mistakes…

Chapter Three

Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem
Monday, May 6, 2002
9:00
A.M.

D
R. JONATHAN MARGULIES
opened his office door. She was there, as usual, pretending to be busy dusting off something which had long since surrendered every particle to her whacking ministrations.

“Fatima. What a surprise.”

“As salaam aleikum
, Doctor Jon,” the woman said with the greatest respect, her weathered face breaking into a huge smile of strong white teeth. “I’m just finishing. I’m in your way?”

Jon smiled and shook his head. “Never. I’m lucky to have you.”

He’d known her through medical school and residency. She was almost a fixture in the department. A few times a month, she even came to the house to help Elise with the cleaning. liana adored her.

Before the Intifada forced the army to put up roadblocks, she used to travel in to work each morning from one of the little villages just outside of Hebron. Now she stayed with relatives in East Jerusalem. Weighing two hundred pounds, she had raised eleven children, and could lift up his desk with one hand. He had no idea how old she was. The shapeless traditional caftan that covered her ample frame from neck to ankle and the voluminous scarf that hid the color of her hair gave him few clues. Her face showed great character and an abundance of living. She could have been forty—or sixty—he often thought with admiration.

Life for her had not been easy. Her husband was a construction worker who off and on had spent time working in Saudi Arabia along with several
of her sons. For long stretches, he knew, she was in charge of a household that she ran single-handedly. He sat down at his desk and turned on his computer.

She waited.

“Is there something you need, Fatima?”

“Doctor Jon, I don’t like to trouble you, but perhaps I could ask you a question?” she said in broken Hebrew.

From long experience, Jonathan knew that whatever response he might make, she would ask her question, and she wouldn’t leave without an answer.

He shut off the computer. He didn’t mind, except that giving medical advice without actually examining any of the various relatives and friends Fatima was determined to cure wasn’t particularly good medicine. “Of course. But you know, whoever it is, they really need to see a doctor and get a good examination.”

“Yes, Doctor Jon. But this time, this time it is about myself.”

He looked at her, surprised, concerned. She never asked about herself. “Are you sick?”

She took a deep breath. “Doctor Jon, the water. It comes out red.”

“Water? Do you mean urine? The water you make when you go to the bathroom?”

“Yes. That water.”

“And do you have any pain, or tenderness anywhere?”

She shook her head. “No. But I know it is very bad. My sister had this. Very, very bad.”

He thought for a moment. “How long have you had this, Fatima?”

“Just now it started. This morning.”

“Fatima, what did you eat last night for dinner?”

“Humous, and cousbara salad, and beet salad…”

“Beet salad! That’s it. Fatima, you are probably fine. Beets will do that, make the water red. It’s harmless.”

He could see the relief flood her face. “You really should get used to going to your own doctor, Fatima. You need a good examination at least once or twice a year…”

“No. I don’t like doctors. I mean, I don’t like to go to doctors, to take off my clothes.”

”Fatima…”

“Thank you, Doctor, I’ll go now…”

“Fatima. Don’t eat any beets for the rest of the week. If it comes back, you tell me right away, okay? And then I’ll get Dr. Rosen to examine you.”

“Shukran.”

“Bevakasha
”, he replied. She didn’t move.

“Doctor Jon…”

“Fatima. It isn’t necessary…” he implored without a shred of hope. She ignored him, as usual, heaving the enormous straw basket she often carried on her head onto his desk. It was filled with fresh red grapes from her own vines. They smelled of sweetness and musky undergrowth and the hot, Mediterranean sun. She must have gone back to her village for the weekend, he thought, feeling sorry for what must have been endless waits to get through security checks, endless walks down long dusty roads to avoid roadblocks… He thought of his fig tree, understanding why she’d made the effort.

“Give some to liana.” She smiled, gesturing toward the smiling, framed picture of the child he kept on his desk as she emptied the basket into a large plastic bag. “She loves my grapes.”

“This is true.” (That had been his fatal error, years before, revealing to Fatima how much his daughter loved her grapes, thereby ensuring himself what was turning out to be a lifetime supply.) “But Fatima, why so many? You could sell them and make a nice little profit.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “I work for money. Grapes are a gift from Allah. They are for family, for friends.”

He broke off a bunch, popping them into his mouth, letting the tangy, red juice bathe his tongue. It was delicious.
“Shukran
, Fatima.”

She balanced the empty basket carefully on her head, her posture beautiful, her face acknowledging his thanks with quiet pleasure. She closed the door silently behind her.

He put on his white coat and began his morning rounds.

The beautiful Moroccan grandmother was reacting badly to the increase in her chemotherapy dosage. She never complained, but he could see it in the white pallor on her olive complexion, her lack of appetite, her silence. What to do? he wondered. The drug was working at this dosage, the tests showed that. Perhaps an antiemetic to help control the nausea? That too
might have side effects. He would have to check her more often, he made a note to himself, try out some other drugs to help with the side effects. And if that didn’t work… Maybe a different drug?

In contrast, his twelve-year-old hell-raiser was in fine spirits. A little too fine. He smiled, listening to the complaints of the nurses on the boy’s latest practical joke—something involving a syringe and a bedpan—he didn’t want details. “If you don’t behave, you’ll just have to get well and go home!” He shook his finger at the boy, who took off his baseball cap and grinned.

“Want to check your face in the mirror?” the boy asked, bending his shiny bald head forward.

Jon rubbed it with his knuckles, laughing.

Next was the kindly eighty-year-old. Jon carefully checked the condition of the small wound on the bottom of his foot. Because of his diabetes, it had to be carefully monitored, he reminded his interns and the nurse. It was healing, he saw, relieved. A good sign.

Before he could get to the next room, he was accosted by the hell-raiser’s anxious mother, who never seemed to sleep.

“Excuse me, but the doctor is on rounds. This will just have to wait for office hours,” the nurse told the woman curtly, trying to run interference.

Jon saw the mother’s face fall. The boy was her youngest. Her baby.

“It’s all right, nurse. I’ll just be a moment. Thanks.”

The nurse shook her head and shrugged.

Jon knew the nurses thought he was too soft, that he let everyone take advantage of him. And the truth was, he had nothing new to say to the boy’s mother. But he also knew that she wasn’t really asking a question. All she wanted was her daily dose of reassurance that her son was healing, the medicine working. She, of course, wouldn’t let him go, would want to ask the same question, again and again: When will he be well, doctor? When will he come home? And he’d put his hand on her arm in a way he hoped was comforting and say: Soon, God-willing, Mrs. Gottleib. Soon.”

His interns and nurses had learned to wait patiently.

Nouara’s room was near the end of the long hall. By the time he got to it, he had heard fifty stories, some of them tragic and unbearably heartbreaking, and some wonderfully uplifting. Cancer wasn’t a death sentence anymore. At least, it didn’t need to be. It was a clever adversary, though, biding its time, regrouping and waiting—sometimes for years—to break
through the defenses. Often he felt as if he was playing a game of chess with the Angel of Death, where he could never achieve a checkmate, only prolong the game. But that too was important.