The Pale of Settlement (7 page)

Since Haifa, though a city, is really a small town, assume that Lev is only visiting from the kibbutz up north where his ex-wife and three grown sons reside. Assume that the pension where he is staying, run by German Carmelite nuns, is small and out of the way, and that the nuns would have no cause to disbelieve him if he said that Lila was his wife. Assume he's come to Haifa to help organize the resettlement of illegal refugees, who continue to arrive by the thousands, boat by boat, despite the blockade, the deportations, the violence and disease. Remember that everyone is distracted by the approaching war. Remember that Josef is on the road all day and sometimes overnight, that Fritz has sailed for England, that her younger son is still in school. Make the case for opportunity; make the case for need. (Think of her lost parents, sister, baby, her departed son.) Picture the two of them at a café, a few weeks after the Irgun's famous prison raid. Hear her girlish laughter, see them reach across the table to touch hands. A tinny Russian melody is playing on a loudspeaker; hear Lev hum along, a little out of tune. Smell the salty breeze, the ersatz wartime coffee, the faint scent of pine. It is hot. Lev has leaned his motorbike against the wall, where it casts a long shadow on the dusty ground. His camera (a nice new Leica in a leather case) rests on the table by his hand. In a little while, they will get up and stroll a bit along the strand. She will lean against the rail. He will bend to kiss her,
then step back. Smile, he will say. I want you to see how beautiful you are.

When I was sixteen years old, my own grandmother—your great-great-grandmother—died. Like all young girls, I wasn't interested in my grandparents at all. I thought of my grandmother as a terribly old woman always dressed in black, and I ran out of the room as fast as I could whenever she came in. So the biggest effect her death had on me was that my mother, who was in mourning, could no longer accompany my sister and me to our weekly dancing lessons, so my aunt agreed to be our chaperone. Luckily for me, my aunt was always too busy chatting with the other adults to pay much attention to what I was up to. My sister was always well behaved, but I was a terrible flirt, always running off with the boys. This period after my grandmother died was one of the happiest times of my life.

My aunt's doctor friend takes me out for lunch to Isfiya, a Druze village in the hills. The road winds up, the vegetation growing sparse and dry as we leave the sea. The doctor is pale and on the pudgy side, although he speaks English well and is a lively enough companion. We stop at an outdoor restaurant and he orders for us both—falafel and hummus and baba ghanoush, little plates of pickles and olives, a stack of pita bread. Do you know Arabic food? he asks. Do you think I live on the moon? I don't say. Across from where we sit, an Arab villa is going up, with arched windows, a tiled roof, a satellite
dish. A Mercedes is parked in front of the piles of dirt. I don't tell him that I've been to Isfiya many times before. Would you ever come to live here? the doctor asks. Would you make aliyah? Israelis often ask me this question. Maybe, I say, although I know now the odds are slim. I doubt the doctor would move even as far away as Tel Aviv. We sit in the lengthening shade of a tree I don't know the name of, lunch almost done, sipping cups of sweet coffee fragrant with cardamom, or
hel
. It doesn't feel like home to me. Of course, I could say that about many places in the States as well.

After the doctor drops me back at the hotel, I go to take a swim. The only other person at the pool is an old woman in a rubber-flowered bathing cap swimming sinking breaststroke laps. I think of the summer I was sixteen when we spent three weeks at this hotel. I hung out by the pool for most of every day. A boy my age did back flips off the diving board while his older brother flirted with me. He was in the army, a paratrooper, he said; he was twenty-two. The edge of my hand brushed against his. He had a solid build, blunt features, greenish eyes like mine. He took me to the beach one afternoon in his orange VW Bug. When my mother found out later, she was irate. I rolled down my window as we drove along the winding mountain road and let the blue wind rush into my face. He rested his right hand on my bare thigh, lifting it only when he had to shift. He parked by the roadside and we walked through the sea grass to the sand. He handed his keys to a woman sitting by the shore. Hold these while I go in the water, he said to her. Don't steal my car, I'm coming back. I ran into him again a few years later, by chance. I was nineteen then and he would have been twenty-five. His skin looked thicker, his eyes smaller, receded into the flesh, as if something vital had been concealed. We snuck out onto the hotel roof and kissed, but it wasn't the same.

It is cold, colder in the flat than outside, the tiled floor sending a dull ache up Lila's chilblained shins. They've been forced out of their flat by the British and this new one, on the French Carmel, is damp and unhealthy, facing onto the sea. Lila stays inside and bakes. Apfelstrudel and kugelhopf and a chocolate wafer cake that hardens in the fridge. Hazelnut cookies dredged in powdered sugar with a dot of strawberry jam. Today, kletzenbrot, a dense fruit bread. It will keep for a long while. She measures and sifts and recombines. Josef has managed to buy sugar beyond the ration on the black market and for this she is glad. She loves baking: the transformation of sugar into caramel, of flour into bread, the frothy exuberance of yeast. Once, years ago, she wanted to study chemistry—a teacher called her talented—but such professions were not possible for girls. Not girls like her, anyway.
La chimie
, chimera.

She really didn't think that the affair with Lev would go on forever, but now that it's over she feels betrayed. Now like the city, she feels hollowed out. The British are mostly gone; seventy thousand Haifa Arabs have fled. Jerusalem is under siege. She's heard that Lev's kibbutz has been attacked. When the war is over, things will no longer be the same. She will wear her knowledge of him like a pearl, a living thing, against her skin, where it will stay lustrous and complete. She feels like a sleeper waking from a dream, as if she's traveled to the outer reaches of the universe without really going anywhere at all. She opens the oven and feels the hot breath in her face, rippling like a wave. She smells the faint reek of gas. She kneels before the oven door, her kidneys, liver, heart, and spleen floating loose inside her body: flotsam, unmoored.

Near the end of the Mandate, we had to move out from our flat. The British requisitioned it for their troops. We found another one, not so nice as this, down on the French Carmel. You know that I was always crazy for dogs, and one day, my littlest one ran away. You cannot imagine how worried I was! We searched everywhere, calling, calling, but he did not come. Then the next day, there came a knock at the door. It was the landlord, who lived downstairs. Do you have a small white dog? he demanded. Yes, yes! I cried. Have you found him? The landlord said, He ran back to your old flat. The British have him now. You must go to fetch him there. I was afraid, but I had to get my dog back, so I went up to the old flat. The British had retreated to our street with their guns and barbed wire barricades and armored cars. People called these compounds Bevingrads. I was very frightened, but I spoke with the soldiers at the checkpoint and after some discussion they let me through. I went up the steps to our flat and knocked on my own door. An officer answered, holding my little dog in his arms. He was stroking its ears and head. Here you are, Madam, he said, handing the dog to me. I was afraid that he'd be angry with me, but he couldn't have been more kind. Not long afterward, after Independence, we got our own flat back again.

The married man once wrote me a note that said, Please love me even though you can't have all of me, love me with equanimity. We were in a hotel room, late at night; it was right before the end. I remember seeing my own dilated pupils reflected, huge and black,
in the bathroom's mirrored wall; I remember the way my heart felt, beating just a little bit too fast. It isn't true I didn't love him then. When I came back to bed, he took my hands in his and said, Don't believe that I'm the only one. He said, I'm here to show you that men like me exist. He held a mirror up to us and made me look. We were beautiful together, magnificent and grand. Of course, it was nothing but a dream. We made each other up.

My grandmother died a few weeks after that night in the hotel, in the fall, just before Yom Kippur. The Book of Life was open but there was a blank space where her name should have been. I couldn't get to Israel in time for the funeral, which in the Jewish tradition happened the next day. Now, on my last day in Haifa, my uncle takes me down to the cemetery with him. It's at the foot of the Carmel, near the railroad tracks that run along the sea, a dusty narrow space flanked with cypresses. My grandparents are buried beside each other near the end of a long row. I can hear the hum of traffic on the nearby highway to Tel Aviv, the clatter of a passing train, the faint thrum of the sea. Under my grandmother's flat headstone, among decomposing coffin boards and the shredded linen of a shroud, her bones remain. Only a pile of small stones adorns the grave. I bend and place a pebble on the heap to show that I was there.

Susan could spot an Israeli anywhere. Among the tourists in the Thamel Backpacker's Café—the familiar crowd of Germans and Australians, rangy kids and rugged types who looked ready to head up Everest at a sprint—he stood out right away: the ropy muscles, the jiggling knee, the ashtray full of cigarettes smoked down to the filter or stubbed out half-done. He had broad sideburns, an Adam's apple as sharp as a stone. He was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and baggy Bedouin pants. He was writing in a notebook. Not left to right.

Two tables over, he looked up. His left eye twitched, then widened—a tic, not a wink. She could walk over and say Shalom, but then she'd be stuck explaining that she didn't really speak Hebrew after all. She could ask him for a cigarette, but she didn't smoke. She could say, My parents are Israeli, too.

From here in the center of town, you couldn't see the mountains,
just the white disk of the sun burning through the morning haze. There was a musky scent of incense and donkey dung, a chaos of passing motorbikes and rickshaws, bicycles and beat-up cars, bells and horns and shouts. Across the road, a little girl peeked around the doorway of a child-sized shrine. A dog lay panting in the shade of a stand stacked with bins of mangoes, persimmons, apples, packages of crackers, chocolate bars, wooden flutes, garlands of orange marigolds, bright pink sweets. An old woman squatted by the shop, spat on the dusty ground.

Susan touched the face of her grandmother's watch and counted back. It was nine hours and forty-five minutes earlier back home— still the day before: October 19, 1998. The extra fifteen minutes off New Delhi time were Nepal's little hat-tip of independence from its big neighbors to the north and south—an interval intended, Susan supposed, solely to annoy, or to make you stop and think. She fingered the watch's gold bracelet, its delicate safety chain. She should have left it at home.

In Gaza, the Arabs lined up at dawn. They waited at the checkpoint in taxis, crammed four across the back, in cars and trucks. The heat swirled in a yellow haze. Everywhere, there was sand. The soldiers—Dubi, Ofer, Sergei, Assaf, and the rest of the unit—stood by the concrete barriers and sandbags and razor wire and checked identity cards and waved a metal detector wand. The Arabs were laborers, field hands, merchants, factory workers, students, fishermen. They were on their way to Khan Yunis or Gaza City or across the border to Israel. They carried their belongings in plastic sacks. The women wore loose dresses, scarves wrapped around their heads. They smelled of sweat and cigarettes; their speech tumbled
from their throats—glottal ayins, rolling
r
s. The sea was less than half a mile away. At night, you could hear it breathe.

Go take a hike, Susan's brothers used to say. After a while, her mother started saying it, too, although coming from her, like many English idioms, it never sounded right. She had a way of making everything seem literal. Go take a hike, she'd say, as if she really expected you to jump up, grab your rucksack and alpenstock and march down eight flights of stairs, out into Van Cortlandt Park and across the Bronx.

Susan's grandparents had been the hikers, the lovers of Alpine forests, wildflower glades. Her own parents preferred the beach. What Susan remembered, though, about their summers in Haifa or at the Jersey shore, was that the beach was the place her parents fought. They fought at night, after Susan and her brothers were in bed. They argued in Hebrew, an escalation of harsh whispers breaking through to shouts. Then the screen door would rasp and slam, and Susan would lie awake, anxiety fluttering in her chest, waiting for whoever had gone out to return, but all she ever heard, before she fell asleep, was the hissing of the waves along the shore.

In the morning, of course, she'd find her mother in the kitchen making breakfast as usual, a kibbutznik's bucket cap atop her head, her father drinking his coffee, rustling the newspaper, as he always did, as if nothing at all had happened between them the night before.

It's good to have a short memory, her mother always said, flicking her hands.

But Susan didn't have a short memory. She had a fickle, sticky memory, an inability to let go. She accumulated arguments, misunderstandings, fallings-out and fights, storing them away like
the stacks of old letters and photographs she kept in shoe boxes underneath her bed, like her closets full of poorly fitting clothes. Her mother couldn't understand why Susan wouldn't throw things out. Leah was always shedding her own belongings, passing them along—
here, take this Suzi, this is for you
. As a result, nothing got thrown away at all, but piled up at Susan's place instead.