The Pale of Settlement (6 page)

Things were different by us, back home. We were Jewish but we were not religious, do you understand? We had many wonderful friends. In the winter, we went skiing—in those days, you climbed up and passed the night in a hut, then skied down the next day—and ice skating in the park. We went mushroom picking in the forest in the spring. When I first knew your grandfather, he took me on his motorbike. He told me that once he'd lost a girlfriend off the back—he found her later, of course, back at her parents' house, but as you can imagine she refused to speak to him. Later, he got a sidecar, and we used to say that when we had a baby we would put it
in the sidecar in a basket, tied on with a bow! Of course, we never did. By then we had a car.

The last time I saw my grandmother, just over a year ago, she was in a nursing home and my grandfather had been dead for nearly six years. I sat on the only chair and she sat on the single bed. She smoothed her knotty hands over her skirt, a girlish gesture. Her shoulders curved forward and the skin hung in wrinkled folds along her neck. But her faded gray-green eyes were clear. Do you ever wish you'd married him? she asked. We were talking about my ex-boyfriend. No, I said, although the truth was I wasn't sure. How could you be? He was married to someone else now and had a child. You don't have to get married, my grandmother said. I just wouldn't want you to end up old and all alone. Israelis marry young; at thirty-three, I know she thought that I was over the hill. Although it's possible, of course, that she was just thinking about herself. There was a sweater folded by her pillow, a gray V-neck that had been my grandfather's and that, she told me, still retained a faint trace of his smell. I speak with him every night, she said. By all accounts, my grandparents loved each other well. As long as I knew them, they called each other by the same pet name—
mükki, mükki
—as if they were reciprocals of one another, two parts of the same whole.

I didn't tell my grandmother about the man I was seeing at the time. The man was married, though I didn't think of what we were having as an affair. I never wanted him to leave his wife and kids for me. I wasn't really in love with him, although later, after it was over, I felt betrayed. He once told me that he knew we'd be close forever, and so I had pictured the two of us, mellow and gray, side
by side in rocking chairs on a weather-beaten porch, looking out at rolling hills. In reality, what we had together was sex. You are the ultimate mind fuck, he once said. I was needy enough, at the time, to take this comment as a compliment.

Lila sits at her dressing table, brushing her hair. She puts on lipstick, rolling the crimson tube so it tapers to a point. She rubs pencil across her brows, pats powder on her cheeks and nose. In the mirror, she considers her face. At thirty-seven, her hair is almost completely white, although she dyes it black leaving just one white streak in front. Her face is approaching that borderland between youth and age, her cheekbones and jawline more angular than they used to be, faint lines tracing her smile and her frown. Pressed beneath the glass of her dressing table, next to photographs of her parents and her sons, she keeps an edelweiss Josef gave her years ago for luck—an albino fallen star. She thinks back to those early days, before they were married, when she'd tell her parents she was going to see her best friend, Hanni, but would meet up with him instead. Their tongues touched with the urgency of disobedience and little lies. He wore a brown wool overcoat. He curved around her like a spiral shell. They walked slowly, arms wrapped around each other's waists, under leafy chestnuts and spreading firs, under a sky bleached white with scudding clouds. Later, she found that he would often walk ahead. He walked steadily, stubbornly, like the Great War officer he had been, never breaking pace to rest or run ahead, while she (taking off a sweater, putting it back on again) skipped along behind. But it was true that where the path got rough or steep, he would wait to take her hand. Now she
touches the edelweiss with one finger through the glass. Edelweiss doesn't grow here in the Holy Land. Here she has to search for other talismans—a night-blooming cereus, a hidden violet in the spring.

When I married, I was just a girl. I was twenty-four but I didn't know anything. Do you understand? Things were not then as they are now. It was the fashion at the time to go to Venice on one's honeymoon. I cried the whole way on the train. Such a silly child I was! I'd brought my dolls with me—my father was furious, saying that I was a married woman now, that I must leave such child's toys at home. But Josef just laughed and said, No, no, let her take what she wants. When we arrived at the hotel, I arranged the dolls by my pillow on the bed. Then I went into the bathroom, and I stayed there for a long time, preparing myself. When I came out at last, I was afraid your grandfather would be angry with me. But then I saw that he had taken my doll—she was beautiful, with dark hair and green glass eyes—and had pinned a diamond brooch onto her dress. Then I was very happy.

On Shabbat, we go down to the beach, my aunt and uncle and I, my cousins and their wives and kids. Only Gavi doesn't come along. He's moved into a new place downtown by the port. We've spoken briefly on the phone since I've been here, but so far haven't made plans to meet. Every time I think of him, I feel a twinge like wire twisting in my chest.

My aunt and uncle have five grandchildren now, ranging in age from six and a half to two. We walk along the concrete boardwalk at Hof Hacarmel Beach, find a sunny spot, sit down on the sand. It's still early spring and the beach isn't crowded; there's only a small group of old men, brown as cowhide, sunning themselves on folding chairs. The children run back and forth with buckets of water and yell and scream. My uncle says, It's a pity Mother isn't here. Even though the oldest kids already know enough English to communicate with me, the smaller ones are friendliest. The two-year-old charges back and forth between her mother and me, fistfuls of sand draining through her fingers as she runs.
Bevakasha!
she pants, unfurling her hand over my lap.
Todah
, I say. We do this again and again.

The married man had children, too; at the time we were involved, his first was not yet two. Sometimes he'd bring her along when we met, carrying her in a backpack; people who saw us assumed we were a family. He'd touch and kiss me as if the baby weren't there. I shouldn't have let him, but I did. I knew the baby understood. She fixed me with a steady open stare, as if to say, don't take what isn't yours. So later, when the man cried on my shoulder and said he didn't know if he could bear to leave his kids, I told him he should stay with them.

Although Josef has said he doesn't want another child, Lila gets pregnant not long after they come to Palestine. She isn't careless on purpose, but it isn't exactly an accident either. She waits for her period as her breasts grow full and tender as a bruise. Over dinner, Josef talks about starting a factory like the one he had before
the war, a knitwear business, manufacturing baby clothes. He will sell his stamp collection, Josef says, and with the money he got out before the war he should have enough to lease some space, buy machines. Once the war is over, he says. Once the situation with the British is resolved. It is a matter of time. The boys eat silently and fast; Josef lets them go. He cuts himself another wedge of cheese, tears off a piece of bread. Lila wraps her arms around her waist, takes little sips of wine. She imagines the outfits they'll design: one-piece suits in yellow and white, tiny booties with pompoms on the strings. Yellow jacquard sweaters with matching leggings and a cap. Overalls in red or blue velour with pocket appliqués of dogs. They will help build this country, Josef says. They will join the ranks of the
halutzniks
, the pioneers. Lila wonders if this time it will be a girl. She has hung her wooden angel to the side of the front door. It looks away from her now, out over her head, its cherub's face tipped up, a blank expression in its eyes.

I got pregnant after we came to Palestine, yes. But your grandfather did not want another child. It was different, he said, when we had a baby nurse and a nanny and all the family around. Now it would not be so easy to start again. Not so easy at all. And imagine, I was nearly forty at the time! I was crazy to think to have another child then. Crazy! Already we had two beautiful boys, almost fully grown. So I ended it. It was not difficult to arrange; the country was very modern for the time. There were plenty of good Jewish doctors without enough work who were willing to do such a thing. No, it would have been impossible to keep the child. Your grandfather was always right.

One of the few things I have kept from my time with the married man is a series of photographs of me in a swimming pool in Mexico. I am smiling up from the too-blue water, arms folded over the pool's blue tiled edge, my head tipped back, my hair short and wet. The look on my face could be vanity, or love. I look happy, although I don't remember feeling that way. The man had said, Give me your camera. I want you to see how beautiful you are. I wanted to see myself that way, too, of course. But it was strange, the things you saw or didn't see. Of all the people who later looked at those pictures from my trip to Cozumel, the trip I said I went on all alone, no one ever asked who had taken those photographs of me. It makes me wonder about that photograph of my grandmother with her back turned to the sea. I pick it up and hold it up to the bedside light, and what strikes me now is the faint shadow at her feet. If you look closely, you can just make out the jut of elbows, the curved outline of a head. It makes me wonder, what about that crooked smile, that slight crease between her brows, as she lifts a hand to brush the hair back from her face—as if she were trying to peer backward through the camera's lens to another eye? She wasn't necessarily looking at my grandfather when she smiled that way. Not necessarily, no.

From the lookout on Panorama Street, you can see the black plumes of smoke from the refineries that the Stern Gang sabotaged five days before. The smoke billows from the giant oil tanks and spreads out on the wind, an ink-black fog, smudging out the sun. You can
smell the burning oil everywhere. Lila stands at the railing with her dogs, looking down at the boulevards of the German Colony, the rooftops of the Hadar, the crooked arm of the northern coast, crosshatched in black. It is March and the hillside is flecked red and blue with flowering sage and flax. Everyone says war is very near. War again. The British have already evacuated their women and children and nonessential men; only police officers and soldiers remain. Her Fritz is sixteen now, and she holds her fingers crossed that he won't be called to fight. Of course he's dying to join the Palmach. Josef is trying to arrange to send him to textile school in England instead. Then her boy will be gone, but England is better than a prison cell in Acre, better than the fate of that poor Dov Gruner, who will almost certainly be hanged. The dogs are pulling at their leads, noses to the ground. She turns her head against the acrid wind and starts to walk.

I want to say that this is where it happens, right here on Panorama Street, under the rustling Carmel pines, in the shadow of what is now this hotel. He walks up and stands beside her, looking out at the conflagration by the shore. He has unruly hair and blazing eyes, a bony concave build. (In a photograph of sixteen early pioneers, he's the one you notice right away, there in the front row, kneeling with one elbow resting on a knobby knee, his deep-set eyes focused right on you.) I want to say that he's a socialist who left Odessa after the First World War, making him almost an old-timer here. I want to call him Lev. So rewind that last scene just a bit. Before the dogs grow impatient and she turns to leave. Instead, she turns and looks at him—he's leaning forward, gazing out at the black plume of
smoke, his forearms resting on the rail—and she says (in German, as if to herself), When will it end? And he says, End? (His German isn't bad. Perhaps he studied in Berlin before the war.) But this is just the beginning! She notices his broad forehead, his wild hair, his ropy hands, the intensity of his gaze. Their eyes connect. Maybe nothing happens then, but I want to believe it does. I want to believe that desire rises out of smoke and ruin, out of loneliness and loss. I want to believe that there are infinite cultivars of love.

Once, when your father was just a baby, your grandfather and I went for a fortnight's skiing holiday to Zürs. It was the first time I'd ever left him, and even though my parents came to stay with him, I was terribly upset. I can't go without my baby! I cried, but your grandfather insisted we leave him home. It will be good to get away, he said, and so we went. At the hotel where we stayed, there was a very nice man from Vienna who took a great liking to me. In the evenings, we played bridge and danced. On my last day, he came to the train station to say good-bye and brought for me an enormous bouquet of flowers. On the train, I held the flowers and I cried. I don't want to go home, I said. Your grandfather said, What? I thought you missed little Fritz so terribly! But the truth is I didn't want to go back at all.

My aunt and I are sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and picking at the remains of a honey cake. She's trying to talk me into
going out with a doctor she's convinced is my perfect match, but I don't want to be fixed up. In a few days, I'll be back home in New York anyway, and I don't like the fact that she is so concerned. He comes from an excellent family, she says, as if that could clinch the deal. She brushes a few crumbs off her chest and lights a cigarette. Look at you, she says, pushing the cake plate over my way. So thin, just like your grandmother. You eat. Of course, we both know what my grandmother was like. She went on a grapefruit diet if she gained a kilo, which must have been rare because as I recall she hardly ate. She never got into a pool without swimming twenty laps. She rose at five, took ice-cold showers long after a gas heater was installed in the flat, rarely sat still for long. She was of another generation, my aunt says. How do you imagine she and your grandfather got along so well? Did you ever hear her once complain? She did everything for
him
. My aunt shakes her head; she is not much of one for mortification of the flesh. She says, So your grandmother got migraine headaches. Sometimes for an entire day she had to stay in bed. For holding everything inside, she says, tapping her chest, there is a cost. But what I want to know is what my grandmother was like
before
—before our memory of her, before the compounded effects of age and time. There is in my pile one photograph of her as a girl of maybe ten or twelve, sitting with her cousin Hansi on a garden bench. For the occasion, they've changed places: she's wearing his leather sandals, his lederhosen, his Tyrolean cap with a feathered brim. He's got on her dirndl (a little tight across the chest), her puff-sleeved blouse, her lace-trimmed socks and low-heeled white shoes. He looks uncomfortable, his hands curled awkwardly in his lap, but she sits triumphant, cocky, round-cheeked, her feet swinging free. She looks as if she might fly up, like Peter Pan,
into the trees. Does this make her the kind of woman who would have an affair at forty-three? Really, I know nothing about her at all.