A Remarkable Kindness (2 page)

T
he rusty Volvo swerved into a wide left turn, jolting Lauren awake. The car sputtered down a long road through cornfields, and for an instant, looking at the tall stalks and the pale tassels, Lauren forgot where she was. Cornfields were cornfields everywhere, and in her jet-lagged state, she was reassured. But then the cornfields ran out.

“What is that growing over there?” Lauren asked, her stomach clenched in knots.

“Cotton,” David said, sitting in the passenger seat next to his father, Yossi, who was driving. Lauren couldn't see David's almond-shaped brown eyes behind his sunglasses, but when he turned around, she knew they were on her full throttle, the way they always were when he looked her way. “For my new bride. I've ordered you a field of white cotton balls.”

“I guess I've given up snowballs for cotton balls.” Lauren
stared into the sky, streaked with clouds that reminded her of the stretch marks on her belly. In her head, she began making a list of the things she sensed she'd miss in Boston. Hot summer afternoons with thunderstorms that rolled in from Canada and brought cooling rain. The red and yellow leaves of fall: because no place on earth did autumn better than New England. And winter, with its snow circling her ankles and its glacial cold. Every square inch of her clothing was now sticking to the corresponding square inch of her body. Lauren was aware of all the inches.

“Is the baby kicking?” David asked. “Is it too warm for you in here?”

“No, everyone finds one-hundred-degree weather and high humidity refreshing,” Lauren said, and immediately regretted her sarcasm. She had promised herself to give it a chance.

David turned the air-conditioning knob higher and said something in Hebrew to Yossi.

“I'll just open the window.” Lauren pushed on the window lever, but that only caused hot air to rush in and prick her face.

“You see those watermelons?” David asked. “We'll go out one morning and I'll pick you the sweetest watermelon you've ever tasted.”

The watermelons lay facedown in the dirt, defeated. Behind them was a line of scraggly cypress trees. The car bumped over railroad tracks, passed a tiny wooden train platform.

“That looks like it belongs on
Petticoat Junction,
” Lauren said.

“Like what?” David asked.

“Just a silly old television show I used to watch.”

“When I was growing up, we only had two TV channels.”

“And now
ER
we get to you.” Lauren's new father-in-law spoke English so garbled it almost sounded as though he were speaking Romanian, his mother tongue. Yossi spoke seven languages, but Lauren thought you'd be hard pressed to understand him in any of them. In the rearview mirror, Yossi caught her eye and asked, “The hospital in Boston big?”

“Beth Israel is huge.” Lauren adored David, but it was rapidly sinking in that she'd just been pulled away from her job in the maternity ward, her family, and the places she loved best.

“Then how you meet if you was nurse in one place and David was—”

“I saw David at the elevator and he started talking to me.”

“You started talking to me.”

Lauren closed her eyes.

“Every bride gets nervous on her wedding day,” her mother had said as they walked through Brookline two weeks ago.

“But not every bride has to move halfway around the world! Mom, do you think I'm making a mistake?” Lauren glanced sideways at her mother; aware, with both relief and chagrin, that her face was a carbon copy of her mother's, only thirty years younger. The same high cheekbones, the same long, aristocratic nose, the same gray eyes.

“If you want to call it off, call it off.” Her mother held herself very still even while walking, her posture so straight that it seemed as if she were balancing an invisible dictionary on her head. “I don't want to sway you, persuade you, convince you, talk you in or out of—”

“I know, it's my decision—”

“But the wedding is tomorrow, so now is your last chance to
—
”

“Call off my wedding.”

But Lauren knew that the only child of Dr. Milton and Mrs. Ethel Uhlmann did not call off weddings. For even as her mother was giving Lauren a way out, she knew Ethel didn't believe she would voluntarily become a single mom and raise a baby on her own. Lauren had had tennis lessons, ski lessons, ballet lessons. She had not been raised to call off a wedding to a perfectly acceptable Jewish doctor the day before the ceremony. Instead, she got married.

“You're a brave young lady,” Yossi said now. “My wife, too, God bless her soul. She moved to Israel from India. Same thing.” His watery eyes held Lauren's in the rearview mirror. “You meet my son before one year and you soon have baby in Israel.”

“I still can't believe it, either.” The knots in her stomach cinched tighter. She reminded herself,
Keep breathing
. She reminded herself that moving here was going to be an exotic adventure, and she loved traveling. She'd already been to Israel once before, with her parents on a whirlwind trip that had included Italy and Greece, and she especially liked the carefree spirit and high energy of Tel Aviv, which was less than two hours away.

“That's the hothouse I was telling you about.” David pointed out the window. The ring on his finger glinted, reminding Lauren of what she'd done. “The guy sold the most beautiful roses, but after he died his wife couldn't keep up the business.”

Lauren remembered hearing David's stories, but they had
sounded like fairy tales about some faraway village. She never thought she'd move here and those stories would come alive all around her.

“You are brave,” Yossi told her again.

His words double-knotted the knots in Lauren's stomach. She placed her hands on her belly where the baby seemed to be sleeping soundly, not yet hanging upside down but almost.

Through the window Lauren saw an old stone tower.

“That's where we had to guard day and night,” Yossi said.

“Because we had to protect ourselves from attacks,” David explained.

“A sniper killed a woman right there.” Yossi gestured toward a small house with a red-tiled roof. “He shot her when she was washing the dishes.”

“Oh, just another chapter in Peleg's fairy-tale book,” Lauren said.

“That was a long time ago, sweetie,” David told her. “We don't have to worry now. Look, there's the post office, the park where the village holds holiday celebrations, the
gan—
the day care center—and the synagogue.”

The synagogue looked more like an armory: a small square building made of stone, with a few shuttered windows and a bronze Jewish star welded to the wall like a crucifix.

“This is replica of a synagogue in Germany,” Yossi said. “Only this one is standing.”

The founders of Peleg had been horse traders and farmers in Germany's Black Forest, David told her again. They'd managed
to get out of Nazi Germany in 1937, before it was too late, and bought these empty, sandy fields from a Turkish landowner, building up Peleg on the rock-strewn Mediterranean shore.

Lauren stared at a tall palm tree without any leaves that stood like a naked pole against the sky. “What happened to that tree?”

“The sniper missed,” David said.

“Very funny.” Lauren laughed—David could always get her to do that, which was one of the things that had made Lauren fall in love with him in the first place. They passed some houses and a chicken coop at the end of a dirt lane scattered with straw, its wire fence stretching across a mass of feathery white.

“Here's a chicken farm,” David said. “We get farm-fresh eggs whenever we want. And the family over there has horses. We can take them out and go riding. I know you like that.”

“I think the horse will appreciate it more after I give birth and weigh thirty pounds less.”

“And smell that? It's eau de manure. The cows! And look! Jacob and Esther Troyerman's place. They run a kennel for dogs and cats.”

“It's amazing to me how you know everyone,” Lauren said.

“No,” said Yossi. “We now have more than eight hundred people in the village.”

“Wow, a real population explosion.”

“We have still more cows and chickens,” Yossi told her. “That's the Garden of Eden Hotel. And over there is the cemetery.”

The gravestones flashed in the sun, and a scaly lizard sat on a volcanic boulder. Well, Lauren told herself, she'd always wanted to have a pet iguana, but her mother wouldn't let her.

“That's our grocery store,” David said as the car rolled past a plain building. And then the road stopped, spilling into an unpaved parking lot. Yossi bumped over the dirt and turned off the engine. In front of them lay the silvery-blue sea.

David jumped out of the car, and Lauren watched his robust torso move swiftly around the vehicle.

“Lauren.” He opened her door. “‘The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things.'” She beamed because he'd managed to memorize some of her favorite childhood poem. “‘Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings . . .'”

“‘And why the sea is boiling hot,'” Lauren supplied. “And whether Israeli pigs have wings.”

He took her hand and held it tightly as she stepped into the scorching heat. With her other hand, she plucked her maternity pants from off the backs of her sticky thighs, aware that there was no ladylike way to go about it.

They walked to the edge of the shore. Lauren lifted her long chestnut-brown hair off her sweaty neck and shielded her face from the hot sun. “All I need is a few days here and I'm going to be one burnt mama marshmallow.”

“It will get a little cooler once the sun goes down,” David said. “And in the morning, the sea is flat like a turquoise-blue carpet. I just love this Mediterranean smell.”

Lauren nodded and took another deep breath, trying to ignore her own discomfort and appreciate the scenery. She knew how hard David was trying to make her feel at home.

“You'll be walking our baby to the beach in a few months,” he encouraged. “You'll make new friends—”

“They won't be as close as Emily—”

“Not right away,” David said. “But you'll really like Aviva. She's excited that you're a nurse and you might join the burial circle.”

“And I thought I was done with cadavers in nursing school.”

“But these are women from the village,” Yossi interjected. “You'll see.”

Lauren turned to David's father, suddenly aware that his thin shadow had been next to her the whole time. She watched as he tugged a white handkerchief out of his back pocket and lifted his sunglasses to pat his face. He stood there, his head tilted. Beads of perspiration leaked out from the corners of his eyes. He gazed at Lauren, his face a sad tapestry woven with wrinkles of history, of time. She knew he wanted to reassure her, and she felt grateful for his soft, paternal ways, so different from her father's intellectual, challenging approach. Before she could even respond, Yossi told her, “I leave you two alone,” and headed back toward the car.

“My father's a member of the men's burial circle,” David said. “Maybe I'll help him with that, too. And he wants you to be happy here, almost as much as I do. Don't you think this is beautiful?”

Lauren looked at the blurred bluish line of the horizon, which seemed to keep the sky from falling into the sea. Waves of heat barreled toward her. “It is beautiful, but right now all I'm thinking is that my back hurts from the plane, you could cook a dozen eggs on my head, and I could really use a bathroom.”

“We'll get you right home.”

“Home?” Lauren fought back tears of sadness mixed with apprehension. It hit her hard: she truly was far away from home. She
had become pregnant by accident, then David had asked her to marry him, and now this was where she was going to live.

“You're going to like it here, I know you will.” David placed his hand under her chin. He lifted her head, looked into her eyes. “
Ani ohev otach
.” I love you.

Lauren squinted up at him. “
Ani gam ohevet otcha,
” she replied in the Hebrew she'd been studying hard. But her “I love you, too,” sounded like one of Yossi's mixed-up sentences, garbled and meaningless. She placed her palms under her belly, its weight pressing her down to this very spot. “I'm just not so sure I should have started talking to you at that elevator.” Lauren smiled halfway. “Maybe I should have listened to my mother. She always said, whenever you get the chance, get some exercise and take the stairs.”

A
viva had planned to get to Rafi's basketball game before it even started, but by the time she'd finished tutoring two seventh graders for their English test, she was already late. So she sped away from Peleg, out through freshly harvested fields with square bales of hay scattered randomly in the reddish dirt. She turned east, the sun behind her now, driving by a shepherd walking with his cows. The road swept her into a grove of olive trees, their shadows pale and gray, their branches twisted this way and that like the arms of mothers reaching out for children who were no longer there.

Aviva turned into a Druze village. In the dusk, the houses looked like pastel-colored boxes; pants and shirts and socks dangled on clotheslines against the flat walls. The street was narrow, more like an alley, and as a truck inched toward her, she stopped
and pushed in her side mirror to let it pass. Some children crossed the road, followed by a Druze woman in a long black robe with a white veil wrapped over her head and pulled tightly across her mouth. Ever since it began, the Druze religion has been a secret, and Aviva respected that.

She believed in secrets.

A
T THE BOTTOM
of a steep hill sat the village high school, and when Aviva opened the heavy door of the gym, she hesitated, waiting until her eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering in from the high windows. Rafi was talking to his basketball players on the sideline. She glanced at the scoreboard. The home team—Rafi's team—was winning, thirty-four to twenty-eight. The court was empty. It was halftime: she'd already missed the first part of the game.

From the ceiling hung heavy ropes, pulled back and hooked to the wall like braids, and on the far wall was a sign announcing that the gym had been built with lottery money. A few parents and spectators sat in the orange bleachers. Aviva climbed up the uneven stone steps to sit by herself, and then she saw him.

“Eli,” she said, her breath knocked out of her.

“Aviva!”

Eli Rothfeld stood right there, the way she'd always imagined he might one day appear before her. Aviva looked at him: not into his watchful eyes but at his stubborn jaw and chin and the naked skin around his mouth because he no longer had a mustache and a beard—he didn't need them anymore.

He pulled Aviva toward him, still wearing the same damn aftershave.
He held her for a moment too long and he let go of her all too soon.

“I can't believe it's you,” he said.

“I can't believe it's
you.
” Aviva tried to slow down her pounding heart.

“Do you live around here?”

“In Peleg. Don't tell me you live nearby.”

“I've been living in Selah the past fifteen years. And we never ran into each other until now?”

“So, you moved here after all,” Aviva whispered as much to herself as to him, her heart thrashing wildly.

“I tried the New York suburbs for a while.” Eli smiled his crooked smile. “It seemed kind of boring to me. But now boring seems good if you can get it.”

“So what are you doing here?” Aviva asked, still walloped and overwhelmed. Her time together with Eli, their shared history, their secrets—everything came rushing back to her.

“I came to watch my son Aviv play.”

Aviv.

She repeated the name to herself, stunned. Was it more than coincidence that he'd named his son Aviv? Aviva had too many questions to ask and didn't know where to begin. Her heart still throbbing, she turned to survey the players on the opposing team as they began to run down the court. She wanted to guess which was his son the way she used to guess where her subject would go in the middle of a Paris crowd on Bastille Day. “You like birds, don't you?” Kagan had said. “Pretend you're a falcon, circling. Zoom in on your prey
.
”

She told Eli now, “Number twenty-three, right? It isn't that he looks like you. It's the way he looks around like you do.”

“It must be genetic,” he joked. “So why are you here?”

Aviva lifted her chin toward Rafi. “My husband is the gym teacher here. He coaches the basketball team. He knows Arabic because his parents came from Egypt.”

She looked at Rafi, who was looking up at her with his kind eyes, his round face following her like the moon. He was very tan, very tall, and his right arm hung funny.

“Bad army accident,” she said softly. “Only eight fingers. But he still has ten toes.”

“Engineering Corps, right?” Eli said. “The famous three-finger salute. What does he know?”

“Nothing about you,” Aviva said. “He knows I worked as an English teacher in Paris. He knows I was involved with the Company. But you know, never volunteer information.”

“So he doesn't know how Kagan suddenly transferred me to Bucharest.”

“You could have called.”

“I
couldn't
have called.”

“Or written, or tried somehow. You could have done that.”

“You know I couldn't. You know I made a commitment.” Eli looked at her sideways, frowning. “Is that when you married him?”

Aviva didn't answer for a long time. She thought of Kagan, short Kagan, with his black rectangular glasses and frazzled hair that looked like it belonged to a scientist who kept forgetting not to put his finger in an electric socket. It was Kagan's idea for Aviva to come to Israel for a few days after her two-year stint in Paris was
up. “Get your bearings,” he'd said, as though she were a clock in need of adjustment.

Kagan had taken her to a small wedding of some friends on a kibbutz in the Arava Desert. As the band played, Aviva could feel a man watching her—her senses still on high alert—and when he walked by, he said, “I'll dance with you later.” He let the next few songs go as Aviva got her bearings—Kagan had intuited that—and then this man named Rafi was dancing with her. By then, Aviva's father had died, and her mother had dementia and was living in a nursing home. Looking up, Aviva saw the stars sprinkled across the sky, each one a resolute pinpoint belonging to a specific time and place in the cosmos.

The next day, Rafi had invited her for a hike through the desert. They stopped by an acacia tree and he pulled a small gas burner out of his backpack and made tea with fresh verbena leaves.

“How did you know which tea I'd like?” Aviva asked.

“I did my research.” The dimple under Rafi's left eye deepened.

Aviva had listened to the desert's silence, wide and deep and absolute, ancient lagoons swirling by their feet. Rafi explained that this had once been the floor of the Tethys Sea. “Don't worry,” he said, “I never heard about it, either.” Aviva gazed at the sky, thinking that the morning sky in Paris had never been this distilled, this blue. And all of a sudden, she knew that after what had happened with Eli and after her solitary exile in Paris, when Rafi asked her to marry him, she'd say yes. Because she wanted her spot on earth.

“I guess I married Rafi because I thought that you and I would
never get another chance,” Aviva told Eli now. “Like that story you told me.”

“I shouldn't have told you so much.”

“About the man you shot,” she continued, even though she knew she was taking him back to a place he didn't want to return to. “His bodyguard chased you down a side street. You never told me where you were. I'm guessing Tripoli. Maybe Istanbul?”

“Come on, Aviva.”

“Wherever. Anyway, the bodyguard caught up to you. He aimed to shoot you but his gun jammed and you shot first.”

“He didn't have a lucky day, but I did.”

Aviva looked at Eli's hands, elongated like a pianist's. They had touched her, leaving fingerprints, invisible and indelible, on her skin. His hands had moved deliberately up and down the curves of her body while he whispered her name.
Aviva, Aviva. Ah
. She had even thought—

She pushed away her useless regrets and turned to the game. The players dribbled and fouled and passed and shot, but she couldn't follow them. All she could follow was the rise and fall of Eli's chest beneath his white polo shirt. Aviva undid the clip in her shoulder-length hair and rearranged it, aware that the copper highlights had faded fast, aware that she had not put on any makeup before she'd left the house—not even a line of green kohl pencil under her hazel eyes—aware that she'd stopped wearing makeup.

“You look good,” Eli said.

Aviva shook her head. “You look like you've just stepped out of an air-conditioned sports car.”

He shrugged.

“How many wives have you had?”

“Why would you say something like that?”

Aviva still felt stirred up, disquieted. “I'm sorry. I really am. I'm not one to stay bitter.”

“I didn't think you were,” he said. “I'm on my second marriage and I'm reasonably happy. But I have to tell you something. When my wife was pregnant, I told her I wanted to name our son Aviv.”

Aviva joked uncomfortably, “Because he was also born in the spring?” She'd already guessed the answer.

“Not only that.”

His words clicked inside her like a key in a tumbler.

“Aviv,” he said quietly. “Aviva.”

Aviva lowered her head, totally flustered, and watched the boys sprinting across the gym floor.

“How many kids do you have?” he asked.

She never answered that question without thinking twice. Sometimes she said, “Two,” with strangers she knew she wouldn't see again. It was easier that way: it spared people from their own discomfort. The basketball thudded against the wooden floor as Aviva spoke in a whisper. “I have three.” Her voice came up slow, as if from underwater. “But one of them, Benny, was killed in December. He was in Oketz, out on patrol with his dog, when a suicide bomber . . .”

“I remember the story. I had no idea he was yours.”

“He—he was mine,” Aviva stammered, turning to Eli. Her eyes seared with tears and she hoped he wouldn't ask too many
questions or say something futile, but she knew him better than that. He said nothing, his silence cradling her.

“I'm so sorry.” He touched her arm.

Aviva closed her eyes, building up a wall of sandbags inside her, attempting to hold back the grief. She relied on Kagan's instructions: “When there's something you can't bear thinking about, push it into the back compartment of your brain and lock the door. Do not open the door
.
” She locked the door. She wanted to keep it locked, but grief always sifted out from under the doorway, or came barreling toward her like a gust of wind. She managed to formulate a question. “What are you up to?”

“Logistics for a shipping company. What about you?”

“I'm an English teacher in a pretty hopeless high school in Akko,” Aviva said. “I just fell into it after teaching in Paris. I feel like it's my contribution, however small, to the kids in this country. And I give private English lessons, which is why I was late. And you know how much I hate being late.”

“The one thing Kagan was right about,” Eli said.

“Still, I would have liked to have been there for his funeral.”

“Me, too. But at the time I couldn't get out.”

Aviva sighed. It was Joelle from Kagan's office who had approached Aviva at a demonstration for Israel when she was getting her teaching degree at New York University. Her mother had already drummed it into her head and heart. “Everybody in the world hates us,” she'd say, glancing up from the court transcript she was typing in her off hours, her eyebrows arching ironically, “but we'll outlast them all.”

Joelle had talked to Aviva about jobs and what she thought
she'd do and where she'd go once she got her degree—she had no clue. When Joelle invited her to the office, Aviva thought it was an employment agency. Joelle never said what she wanted until several meetings later, when she introduced Aviva to Kagan and he offered her a job working as an English teacher in Paris. “Just keep your eyes open for the Company and pick up information here and there,” he told her.

Aviva didn't know whether to take the job. She went to consult her older sister, Jill, who by then lived in a huge house in Larchmont, going
ca-razy,
as she put it, with three little kids. Jill said there was nothing she enjoyed more than
this,
holding out her business card:
JILL MOSKOWITZ
,
SUBURBAN HOUSEWIFE
. Aviva stared down at the words, holding the weightless card in her hand, and decided then and there to accept Kagan's offer.

“When did we see each other last?” Eli asked.

“I'm forty-four,” Aviva said with a sigh. “It was more than twenty years ago.” She couldn't admit to him how often she wondered where he was and if they might meet again someday. Whose fault was it that they didn't try to find each other? Was it circumstance, timing, fate, giving up? Or giving in to life's unavoidable losses?

“I still remember leaving you that morning and walking through Orly airport,” Eli said. “I hate airports, but that one is really bad. I hate traveling. I'd burn my passport, but I'll have to go back one of these days for my mother's funeral.”

“Is she still in Riverdale?”

“You remember.”

“And your father ran guns for Palestine.”

“You remember a lot.” Eli smiled sadly.

Which was why Aviva could still remember that last night, and being in that small hotel on rue Soufflot with the long windows and long white drapes as thin as veils. The drapes blew in and out with every breath of damp air. It was January and drizzling and though it was cool outside, they were inside, in the secret warmth of their bodies. Yet Aviva knew in the blotchy gray light that they were compromising themselves. It wouldn't last, it couldn't last, and she wasn't surprised when the desk clerk delivered a message from Kagan in the morning: “There are rules you're both well aware of against fraternization. Eli, report immediately to Bucharest.”