A Remarkable Kindness (6 page)

Gila Salomon and her husband, Omri—beekeepers who made Garden of Eden Honey, pastries, and lotions—lived in the next house. Then came Sophie and Heinz Zuckerman's house.

“Shalom, Lauren,” Sophie called, rising carefully from where she had been kneeling in the dirt.

“Hi, Sophie!” Lauren got off her bicycle and leaned it against the hedge. She stepped through Sophie's gate and into her garden, planted to bloom at different times in an array of wild colors, its borders edged with bougainvillea bushes, their blossoms like butterfly wings, paper-thin and delicate magenta red.

“Can I get you something cold to drink?” Sophie wore a peach-colored shirt, brown pants, and flip-flops. She was more than eighty but she still worked in the garden almost every day, her iridescent white hair tied back, her wrinkled, pale face peeking out from under a floppy straw hat.

“No, thank you.” Lauren took off her helmet, brushing some stray hairs from her damp face. “I just came back from Nahariya and all I want to do is lie down. I would have thought the weather would be cooler by now.”

“We're in the Middle East, my dear,” Sophie said. “I always
think about how if the Nazis hadn't come to power, I'd probably be living in a fancy old house in Strasbourg, sitting around playing cards with friends.”

“And if David hadn't come to America . . .” Then Lauren stopped. If she hadn't broken up with Hunter, he might have asked her to marry him and she might be living in a fancy old house, maybe even in Beacon Hill. Why hadn't she stayed with Hunter? He
was
nice. Yet she'd wanted one last fling with an exotic somebody before she devoted the rest of her life to playing Scrabble and sailing with a bunch of Republicans.

Lauren remembered the precise moment she'd seen David at the elevator, leaning against the wall, huddled over some hospital charts, one leg bent up. With a pair of tortoiseshell glasses set on his boxy nose, he looked like a guy who could talk about books and still know how to fix things; and his olive skin and mop of black curls gave him a naturally mysterious appearance that all-American Hunter could never have. Lauren had suddenly veered from the stairwell despite her mother's admonishments and headed in his direction. One step to the left: that was all it would have taken. One extra step. Even Lauren's old ballet teacher, Madame Magar in Brookline, could have told her that.

“Life is full of surprises.” Sophie's voice was gentle.

“I know a thing or two about surprises.”

“Bad surprises, but also good ones.”

“I hope so.” Lauren wiped away a trickle of sweat from under her eye.

“It took me a lot of years to get used to the heat.”

“So by the time I'm eighty-five?”

“You're in luck.” Sophie smiled. “I'm only eighty-three. Speaking of which, I have to give you something for the burial circle, would you mind waiting?”

Lauren sat in the shade by some purple-and-yellow pansies, their fragile, silken faces turned up toward the autumn sun.

S
ophie and Aviva had invited Lauren to join the burial circle a few months after she'd given birth to Maya, and a few hours after the death of their neighbor, Ruth Rosen. They sat in Sophie's living room, surrounded by a half century's worth of books, photographs, paintings, knickknacks. Gila Salomon, who ran Garden of Eden Honey, was also there, along with Leah Zado.

“I tried to get some of the other villagers to join, but they all declined with one excuse or another.” Leah's dull brown hair hung like ear muffs.

I don't blame them,
Lauren thought. In nursing school, she had hated even dissecting a frog. The stink of formaldehyde made her want to gag. She held her breath during entire lab periods and didn't inhale deeply until she was safely out on the street, breathing in gargantuan gulps of smoggy Boston air.

“Most people don't have the—I don't know what—the inner strength—to be so close to death,” Leah continued, dressed in a white blouse and a black skirt, her clothes a study in extremes. White and black. Like life and death, Lauren thought. “Nobody pays the
hevra kadisha,
and the dead women can't give us anything in return.” Leah said the rite was a
hesed shel emet
. An act of remarkable kindness.

“What do you think?” Aviva looked at Lauren over her teacup.

“I'm not sure.” Lauren had been trying her hardest to get used to life in Peleg, but how could taking care of the dead help her with that?

“In any event,” Leah said, “we need to use an extra-large shroud tomorrow”—she pursed her lips smugly because Ruth Rosen was even more overweight than she was—“and we should try to find smocks to wear over our clothes.”

“I might be able to get some jackets from the hospital.” Lauren jumped in before she'd even had a chance to think.

“So that means you want to join.” Aviva smiled. “Thank you.”

What had she gotten herself into, Lauren wondered. “How did the burial circle even start?”

“Jewish communities have always had burial circles to take care of their dead,” Aviva replied. “It's an ancient tradition.”

“Since the start of the village, we've always buried our own. There was nobody else to do it for us.” That was Sophie's matter-of-fact voice. “The men took care of the men; the women took care of the women, obviously, for modesty's sake. I'm getting old . . .” Sophie paused, but her blue eyes twinkled, indicating that she
wasn't the least concerned. “I'd love to teach someone in the next generation.”

“I know next to nothing about Jewish laws.” Lauren drank some tea. “I've never even heard of this.”

“You've heard of the shroud of Turin, right?” Gila said. She had limp, graying hair parted down the middle and pale gray eyes with no lashes, and wore the clear-framed, octagonal glasses of a lab technician—or a beekeeper. “That was similar to the kind of shrouds we use today. They're sewn by hand. Simple linen. The most basic clothes you can find.” That struck Lauren as funny since Gila was wearing plain black Bedouin pants and a loose beige T-shirt with the Garden of Eden Honey logo.

“The shrouds have no buttons or zippers.” Leah Zado reached for a piece of lemon cake. “Because there's nothing you can take with you.”

“And the pants' feet are closed, like very loose pajamas,” Gila added.

Lauren listened, curious but polite, thinking of her father. “Your death and your salary,” he used to say, “two topics that are not up for conversation.”

“The dead are holy.” Sophie leaned her slender body toward Lauren and spoke almost in a whisper. “We are closing the circle of life for them. Just think— we're the very last people to be with them before they're buried underground.”

Lauren reluctantly agreed, and the next afternoon, she was surprised during her first
tahara
in the burial house. Taking care
of Ruth Rosen was infinitely easier than trying to take care of a suffering, dying patient.

Ruth's body lay covered on the long metal table in the center of the room, her feet facing the door. Gila removed her bandages and hospital tags. Sophie filled a bucket and poured water over Ruth's head and neck, her right shoulder, arm, hip, leg, foot. Then, another bucket, and water cascaded over Ruth's left side. Aviva helped Gila and Leah roll Ruth to the side and Sophie poured water down her back.

It was like a sacred dance, an ancient, hallowed, healing rite. It seemed to Lauren that all of Ruth's sins were being washed away. All her mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities. All the minutes and hours of her life washed away in a few sweeps of water. Even the acrid smell of the dead was washed away.

(Like a kosher baptism, Lauren would tell David later, for want of a better description. A consecration, before life returned to the foreverness of death.)

“We make sure to keep the woman modestly covered at all times.” Sophie stood next to Lauren, guiding her through the ritual. “We want to give her the dignity she deserves. We don't even pass things over her body. It's still her space.”

Lauren was fascinated, awestruck, and humbled all at the same time. Helping a woman give birth was so noisy, filled with moans and screams and commotion. But death was quiet. So calm and unruffled. It was almost as if the mystery of life could be found within that silence. It was something Lauren had never experienced before. A holy stillness.
Grace,
she thought.
Grace.

N
ow Sophie reappeared in the garden, the twinkle still in her blue eyes. Could it be, Lauren thought, that being around death all these years had enhanced and deepened Sophie's joy of life? Sophie stopped in front of Lauren. “When something happens to me—”

“
If
something—”

“No, Lauren.” Sophie bent down to deadhead a dry geranium. “When something happens to me, and you're doing my
tahara—
”

“Don't talk like that,” Lauren pleaded.

“I want you to have this list of the names of my mother and three sisters,” Sophie said calmly. “I want you to say their names, too, during my
tahara,
because they were all killed and never—”

“Oh, Sophie . . .”

“I told Heinz to engrave their names on my gravestone, too. So
at least they'll have some kind of marker.” She handed Lauren a piece of paper, folded so many times it almost looked like origami, and escorted her back through the garden. “You promise?”

“I promise.” Lauren closed the gate behind her.

T
HERE WAS DARKNESS
inside Lauren's house, and slightly cooler air. She closed the wooden door behind her, aware of the creak that David didn't want to fix because he said he wanted to hear if someone was sneaking in. “Who might that be?” Lauren had asked. Then David told her how terrorists had snuck ashore from the sea and attacked a building in Nahariya some years ago. A woman hid in a crawl space with her baby daughter. She tried to soothe her and keep her quiet, muffling her cries, and accidentally suffocated her to death.

Lauren stepped into the living room. There was a couch with worn burgundy fabric, an armchair with claw feet, and a porcelain lamp with a pleated shade. Against the back wall was a mahogany breakfront displaying antique dishes, its drawers filled with sterling silver napkin rings, cloth napkins, and the special holiday tablecloth that David's mother, Miriam, had embroidered. Cross-stitches, double stitches, tiny pom-pom flowers made with twirls of silver and blue. Miriam had died when David was sixteen and he and his father had kept the room pretty much the way she'd left it.

Lauren placed Sophie's piece of paper in the bottom drawer, wandered over to the wall of photographs, and stared at a grainy black-and-white picture of Miriam when she was a little girl in India.

“I didn't know there were Jews in Calcutta,” Lauren had told David when he'd spoken about his family on their first date.

“There were Jews all along the Spice Route,” he said. “India, Pakistan, Afghanistan . . . My father said they were traders. Salt, spices, tea, opium. Whatever they could sell, they sold.”

Lauren stopped at the next picture, of Miriam as a bride in Israel with her dark hair swept back, wearing a beautiful, modest white chiffon dress, and a later one, when she was a young mother holding David in her arms. Miriam had a long neck, a narrow, thoughtful face, and David's almond-shaped dark brown eyes. Those eyes stared now at Lauren.

“We both picked up and moved somewhere else,” Lauren whispered to Miriam's photograph. “And we both love your son. I am trying, but how come my life just doesn't seem right?” She studied Miriam's face underneath her own reflection in the glass. “It's sometimes so hard for me here.” Lauren's lips quivered and tears formed in her eyes. She walked away as if to keep one step ahead of herself, first down the hallway and then into the kitchen, where she stayed by the sink, splashing water on her face.

Breathe,
Lauren told herself
. Don't forget to breathe.
She looked through the window at their
sukkah
with its white cloth walls, its ceiling of palm fronds, and its colored lights, still blinking. Lauren had turned them on for Maya before they left for the
gan,
and she'd forgotten to turn them off. There were the olive tree and the oleander bushes with pinkish-white blossoms. If she stood at the kitchen sink in her parents' house, she'd look out on elm, oak, and birch trees. Wide-spanned, august trees under skies that never failed to be blue and sharp, or soft and gray. Lauren had assumed
that she'd always be surrounded by familiar sights. As if she belonged to them as much as they belonged to her. How could she stop herself from missing the things she loved?

She let the blinds fall with a snap, returned to the living room, took off her sneakers, and lay down on the couch, hearing the quiet, then the sea, and the sound of the muezzin calling worshippers to prayer from Maloul. His mournful voice. His fervent prayers.

“Want to come for a swim in the sea?”

Lauren wondered why the muezzin would ask her for a swim.

David was standing over Lauren, his hand on her shoulder.

“Oh, I thought you were . . .”

“Do you want to come for a swim with me?”

“That means I have to get up, squeeze into my bathing suit that still doesn't fit, get a towel, and walk across all that sand and wade into the water . . . Sounds wonderful.”
Lauren,
she told herself, imitating her mother's scolding tone
. Sarcasm in Greek means tearing the flesh.
“I'm sorry, David, it does sound nice. I'm just so sleepy.”

By the time David returned from his swim, Lauren had showered and changed, and then she climbed behind him on his motorcycle. (The one, she noted to herself, he rarely got to use but never complained about.) Clasping her hands around his waist, she made a silent vow not to complain about anything, either, so that they'd have a pleasant afternoon.

They rode out of Peleg and turned north, passing the village of Maloul, then Aga's Market and the graceful arches of the aqueduct.

When they reached Nahariya, Lauren pointed to the elderly woman handing out free food to soldiers in the “We Thank the IDF” kiosk by the traffic light. “That's so sweet!”

“You have to admit this country feels like one big family!” But before the light had even changed to green, the car behind them honked, and David shouted, “Where the speed of sound is faster than the speed of light!”

On the edge of town the traffic thinned. The slipshod buildings fell away and the kibbutz fields began with their orange-tiled houses, banana groves, and wild cactus plants sprouting along the edge of the road. The motorcycle swung toward the shore. The pale yellow sun hung on a washed-out sky, and Lauren envisaged her parallel life happening at that very moment. The life she'd assumed she'd have. Maybe not with Hunter but with someone else. They'd be walking by the Charles River on a crisp autumn afternoon (a crew team would be rowing on the water, a coxswain calling) and then meander to Copley Square Farmers Market, and she'd come upon that fruit vendor she liked who sold Macoun apples, and as he handed her the change, he'd say in a thick Boston accent, “Thanks, sweetheaaaaht . . .”

Lauren had not understood how much she'd miss before she had moved here. She had not predicted the depth of her yearning. She thought it would be temporary. Not the rest of her life. Not her own unhappily ever after. Not this. Not riding through a cluster of eucalyptus trees, their mottled trunks shedding like snake skin. Not riding toward those white cliffs, the ones that she'd told Emily were the white cliffs of Dover. “Don't think about it,” Lauren had said.

But Lauren did think about it. And about how Emily had blossomed in Peleg. Like an introduced tree—the avocado, for example—that took to Israel as if it had always been there, as if it weren't an upstart, an émigré. Lauren cared so much for Emily. Lauren admired her friend's spontaneity, her openness, her acceptance. She secretly envied Emily's immediate connection to the land. Was it because Emily's father had been a cantor and passed on a love for Israel? Or some daringness inside Emily? A courage that Lauren lacked? It had been so easy for Emily to switch from her old life in Boston to her new one in Peleg. For Lauren, it was sometimes still so hard.

David parked at the top of the hill. Lauren dismounted the motorcycle, took off her helmet, and shook out her hair. Walking up to the border fence, she looked up at the red-and-white tower with its satellite dishes and cameras and read out loud, “‘No trespassing! Keep out! Border!!'”

“But what about this other sign?” David urged. “‘Beirut, one hundred and twenty kilometers; Jerusalem, two hundred and five kilometers.' We're closer to Beirut than to Jerusalem.”

She stood and faced the sign, observing sadly, “So close and yet so far.”

“Let's pretend that tower is the lighthouse in Chatham.” David clasped her hand. “Remember that great weekend there in Cape Cod?”

“How could I forget it?” They had made love early in the morning, still half-asleep, and David's condom had somehow broken. Which was how she got pregnant. And ended up here.

“Look at this view.” David pulled her back to the present. They
peered down the cliffs at the emerald-green lagoons linked in a daisy chain up and down the shore. “I'm now inviting you for a tour of the grottoes.” He grabbed her elbow and bought two tickets from a brooding man smoking a cigarette in the ticket booth.

“Remember how I wanted to bring my parents here but they refused to visit this place?” Lauren asked. “My mother called it a tourist attraction in a war zone.”

“Next time I'll convince them,” David replied. “I'll say it's the Jewish version of Stratton Mountain.”

“Good luck.” Lauren didn't want to think about skiing with her parents in Vermont and how much fun she used to have. It was the snow, always the snow, that she missed most. Crunchy, sparkling, icy snow that lay in a glittery carpet on the sides of the mountain and fit like mittens on the needles of the pine trees.

The cable car stopped, its hydraulic doors yawning open, and Lauren and David got on behind a religious family, the father and three sons in dark pants and white button-down shirts, the mother and her daughter wearing sneakers under their dowdy ankle-length denim skirts. Lauren could tell they were American, and she gave the woman a smile to signify,
We're in this together, two chosen women in the chosen land,
but the woman stared her down.

“Is it my jeans she doesn't like?” Lauren whispered to David as the cable car descended. “My shirt? My boots?”

“
Motek,
” he said. “Sweetie, it's the whole package.”

“In this version of Stratton, the cable car goes
down.
”

“With our own Frau Farbissina
.
” David looped his arm around her.

That made Lauren laugh again, and when the cable car stopped, she waited patiently as the family got off first, all backpacks, cameras, water bottles, and shouts about who last punched whom. Lauren and David walked behind, and as soon as they stepped into the grottoes, David kissed her.

“Don't stop,” Lauren whispered. “Please don't ever stop.”

“I won't.”

Then one of the boys yelled, “Hey, guys, wait up!”

“Just our luck,” David said.

Lauren pulled away and peered into the warm, cavernous, echoing darkness, listening to the water trickle down the grotto walls. “I don't remember if they're stalagmites or stalactites.”

“I can't know.”

“Not ‘I can't know.' It's ‘I
don't
know.'”

“Lauren . . .”

She felt bad that she'd corrected him and took his hand. “You're right, David, some things you can never know.” They walked through the dimly lit passages and reached a cove where the reckless sea flung itself against the rocks. “The sea sounds happy.”

“The way I want you to always be.” David was about to kiss her again but the boys darted by, playing tag. Lauren wanted to find someplace private and she tugged at David's sleeve, backing up, until suddenly she was out of the grottoes and in the sunlight.

“We'll have to pick up where we left off later tonight.” David took her hand.

“No matter how tired we both are.” She smiled coyly at him.

They walked along a path. The sun had moved a few notches
lower in the sky, as though inching down a ladder, following a path that had been predetermined. By whom? Lauren wondered.

“Trains used to come from Jerusalem through this tunnel on their way to Istanbul,” David said when they reached a fenced-in tunnel. “Maybe one day there'll be peace and we'll be able to take a train to Turkey.”

“All aboard to Constantinople! That was Istanbul's old name, you know.”

“I see you've learned more in high school than the Boston Tea Party.” He leaned against the rocks, opened his legs, slid her between them.

“I could give you a whole private history lesson.”

He smiled again but then patted the rocks behind him, his expression darkening. “It's strange to think that on the other side of this hill is Lebanon.”

“You never talk about being there.”

“There's nothing I want to talk about.”

“You know I still want to know.”

“Well, you know that I served in the security zone.” He spoke with the same stiff, formal tone he used when explaining things to Lauren's parents. “We were stopping Hezbollah from attacking civilians here in northern Israel. They shot at us instead. I was a medic.”

“And?”

“And nothing. There. I've already told you all this.”

“David—”

“It's very beautiful,” he said. “Soldiers used to say, ‘If heaven
exists, this is what it would look like. And if hell exists, this is what it would feel like.'”

“I'm still trying to understand all that you've been through.” Lauren kissed the hidden, smooth skin of his sturdy neck under his chin. She breathed in the musky scent of soap from his shower, his apple-scented shampoo, and underneath that, some long-ago scent that still lingered, carrying memories of places he'd been and things he'd seen that he rarely shared with her. Lauren thought of the Shoah that had claimed Sophie's mother and sisters, and the list Sophie had pressed into Lauren's hand. She felt an urgency to know even more about David, as if it would enable her to move past her own reluctance and commit herself totally to him and to her new life. She wanted, really wanted, to fathom what he'd experienced before he'd met her, now that she lived here and the events and places he'd spoken of were tangibly real.