A Remarkable Kindness (7 page)

“You've never been in a war, thank God, so you'll never understand,” David said protectively. The dusky light from the sun fell on half his face, turning it melancholy.

“But that's not fair. At least try me.”

“Israelis serve in the army because we have to.” David paused. “We don't think about it and question it because it's a necessary part of life. That's our reality.”

“I wish I didn't love you so much, because . . .”

“Because then you wouldn't have to stay.”

“What I meant was—”

“Lauren,” he said. “Don't bother.”

A
viva closed the front door of her house and didn't lock it. She walked down the path, turning once to look back at her house. It was a small, modest farm cottage that Aviva and Rafi had bought from a retired couple who'd moved to Haifa. When they'd bought the house, it had looked hopeful, full of pastoral promise (its rear windows backed onto the Cohens' fields) and another family's good fortune. Now it sat forlorn and empty.

The house was symmetrical, with a sloping red-tiled roof. The two windows on each side of the front door looked out on a garden that Rafi had kept immaculately landscaped. There were trees scattered around the small property: a loquat tree that was heavy with tear-shaped fruit in the spring, a tree full of lemons in winter, and a frangipani tree, scattered with sweet-scented white blossoms through the summer. But now the yard and the trees looked tattered, neglected.

Lauren and Emily were waiting by the gate in Lauren's car, the engine idling. Aviva opened the door, climbed in the backseat, and heard Emily's excited voice as she spoke on her phone.

“I know it's the last minute,” Emily was saying. “But I
do
want the baby's breath. I
know
I said that I didn't like it, but I really do. Thank you again and shalom!”

“Hi, Aviva.” Emily turned around. She wore long silver earrings dangling under her hair, which was now shoulder-length and streaked with blondish highlights, and a cotton leopard-print shirt that would have looked ridiculous on anybody else. “I want to make sure that this wedding is absolutely different from my first one, and I suddenly remembered that I didn't have baby's breath in my centerpieces with Rob—he liked everything so dramatic, you know—and now I want to have lots for Boaz and me.” She paused. “Oh, Lauren, I forgot to tell you, I gave your parents the honeymoon suite at the hotel.”

“Since when is there a honeymoon suite at the Garden of Eden?”

“Since yesterday,” Emily said. “It's the same room, totally boring, but I bought a new bedspread and sheets.”

“I don't think that will endear my parents to the place,” Lauren said.

“Aviva, my mom and brother and Lauren's parents are all resting now, but I can't wait for you to meet them—it will be so much fun.” Emily suddenly stopped, catching herself, her eyes filling with empathy, as if her look alone could soften all of life's sharp edges. “Oh, Aviva, I'm so sorry. Really I am. Please forgive me. I don't know what I was thinking.”

“It's really all right,” Aviva said in the miserable, awkward, silent moment that followed. “Don't mind me. Soak it all in. Soak in all this happiness. Don't feel guilty for a second.”

But Lauren's arm jerked up instinctively and she shut off the radio. Aviva sat and listened to the quiet, her chest constricting. Her eyes flooded with tears and the checkerboard squares of the fields flattened into one greenish brown blur.

It had begun as a quiet, peaceful Friday morning the previous May. Aviva had been sitting with Rafi as he knelt in the dirt, purposefully digging and planting vegetables, the way he did each spring. He had cordoned off a small plot of land on the side of his work shed where he planted the usual staples like verbena, basil, and cherry tomatoes and sometimes experimented with new plants, such as snow peas and squash. This year he was planting cucumbers.

“I promise I'll make you very good pickles,” Aviva had said. “How about some iced tea now? The thought of all that garlic is making me thirsty. Would you like that?”

“If that's what you want to make me,” Rafi replied in his easy, diffident manner.

“I want to make you happy.” Then Aviva remembered Benny and felt her heart smash inside her chest.

“You make me as happy as you and I can be,” Rafi told her, and then they shared the look that only two people who have lost a child can share.

In the kitchen, Aviva made iced tea with lemon slices and extra sugar and set two glasses on a tray with some cookies. She carried it outside humming a Sheryl Crow song (“Are you strong enough
to be my man? . . .”) and there was Rafi, lying in the dirt, his pitchfork with four rusty metal prongs lying next to him, his head hanging oddly off the side of his neck, his eyes open. Opened to what?

“Oh, Aviva,” Lauren whispered.

Aviva had been trying not to make any noise.

Lauren held a tissue over her shoulder. “Don't mind that it's crushed, it's clean,” she said as Aviva wiped her tears.

“You'd think that Lauren would have more sanitary tissues.” Emily tried to make a joke and reached for Aviva's hand.

“It's only dust,” Lauren protested.

Dust to dust,
Aviva thought.

Emily held her hand while Aviva looked out the window again. Her eyes refocused and now she could make out the sweep of the fields and beyond that, the sea murmuring, and then the dark green line that marked the start of Boaz's orange groves.

“They'll be your groves soon, Emily,” Aviva said. “It's not every day that I get to take a bride to have her legs waxed before her wedding.”

A
VIVA STAYED QUIET
as they turned into Maloul, passing a large billboard in Arabic, Hebrew, and in English,
ABU
-
SALIM POSTT OFFICE
, and then turning left where the post office stood with another sign in front in all three languages. This time,
ABU
-
SALIM POSST
.

The twisting street was filled with unfinished houses, loose wires, crisscrossed wooden pallets, large white burlap bags brimming with cement mix. A van idled in the fork of the road, its back
doors open, crates of vegetables piled within, the vendor hawking his produce through a megaphone. Lauren drove up a hill and as they turned a bend, the aqueduct appeared, its arches traveling from behind Aga's, across the wadi, and bumping into the village.

“Just look at this,” Emily said. “An archeological site that's filled with junk. You could film an antilitter advertisement here.”

“Or a really trashy movie.” Lauren parked the car.

Aviva got out, climbed up a flight of stone steps, and pushed open a green metal gate. Lauren and Emily knocked on Em-Hassan's door while Aviva walked into the garden and looked out over the fields and orchards. She could vaguely locate her lonely house before it was lost to the sky. Grief poured down upon her like the sun. Benny and Rafi were no longer with her, and even though her mother would have warned her not to use a double negative, and even though she told her students the same thing, Aviva knew that Benny and Rafi were never
not
with her.

She dried her eyes as Em-Hassan, a lumbering woman in her early sixties, stepped out through the door. She wore a fuzzy burgundy house robe that trailed over her flip-flops, and had her dark, oily hair pulled back, a few strands of gray curling by her temples. She shook Lauren's hand, then Emily's, and then turned to Aviva.

“I pray for you every day.” Em-Hassan stared at Aviva with eyes the color of tar. “How are your other sons?”

Aviva shrugged. “Yoni is back in school and Raz's back in the army.”

Em-Hassan clicked her tongue. “
Inshallah,
you should know no more sorrow. With Allah's help, no more sorrow.”

Aviva had known Em-Hassan ever since she gave English lessons
to the woman's son, Hassan, a serious student who wanted good grades to get accepted to medical school. Over the course of tutoring Hassan for three years, Aviva and Em-Hassan had become friends. Aviva had attended the weddings of three of Em-Hassan's daughters, and Em-Hassan had paid condolence calls when Aviva was sitting shiva for Benny and then Rafi. Em-Hassan was industrious, matter-of-fact, and self-absorbed, but she had a wry sense of humor that attracted Aviva. She also thought it was important—crucial and vital, really—for her to have a Muslim woman as a friend, despite the religious discord, the clashes, and strife of the Middle East.

She followed Em-Hassan into her house: past the living room packed like a furniture showroom with ornate couches and chairs; past a kitchen, spotless and still; past a room with three thin mattresses on the floor. Em-Hassan made a sharp turn into a small room that had a couch and chairs facing a television set. An Arabic soap opera was on—a woman was crying in some fancy living room—and Aviva knew Em-Hassan wouldn't bother to turn it off.

“Please.” Em-Hassan gestured toward the seats. “Please.”

Aviva had been here so many times that she felt comfortable, but she was equally uneasy, though she tried not to be. It wasn't because of the Arabic prayer on a wooden plaque or the photographs of Mecca and the mosque in Jerusalem. It was because of some kind of treatise hanging on the wall, with Arabic writing and crude drawings of an olive tree with spidery roots, a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh, and a hand dripping with blood. The images were clearly anti-Israel, Aviva knew, and
they jarred her, reminding her of the conflict that had no end. She'd lost her son, dammit, and all she wanted was to be surrounded by beauty and some kind of hope, but the world could not offer her that.

Aviva looked down at her hands lying lifelessly in her lap like a mourner's hands. She quickly turned to Lauren, taking in her aquiline nose, her porcelain skin. Did Lauren mind being here in this harsh little room, so far away from everything she had ever known?

“You're the bride.” Em-Hassan stared hard at Emily. “Boaz is lucky he found you. I know his ex-wife. What normal woman leaves a good husband for another man she meets at folk dancing?”

Emily giggled and Em-Hassan lit a cigarette and then went out of the room.

“So, this is our outing to Elizabeth Arden,” Lauren joked.

“It
was
your idea,” Emily pointed out.

“I thought we could broaden our cultural horizons,” Lauren said. “And I asked Aviva.”

“These are our neighbors and I want us to get along.” Aviva spoke in a lowered voice. “I like supporting women in business, and she does do a good job waxing legs.”

“She seems nice enough,” Emily said.

“Well, Em, you go first and then I'll ask her to do my legs, too,” Lauren said.

“Where did she disappear to?”

They both turned to Aviva. “To get us something to drink,” she replied. “You'll see—she always serves orange soda.”

“Nothing worse than wasting calories on something that isn't even good,” Emily griped. “Maybe if it were an iced frappe . . .”

Em-Hassan soon reappeared with a big bottle of orange soda and plastic cups. Lauren, Emily, and Aviva sipped politely as Em-Hassan finished her cigarette. On the TV soap opera, the woman was now arguing with a man. Then Em-Hassan led them into another room, even smaller than the last, that had a couch, a cot, and three windows facing the street. In a cabinet against the wall were bottles of nail polish, lipsticks, face creams, scrubs, and a carefully folded stack of towels.

“
Yallah,
Emily.” Em-Hassan bent over a container on a Bunsen burner, stirring wax with a Popsicle stick, and then switched to Hebrew as she patted the cot. “Come.”

Emily took off her sandals and black tights and lay on the cot in her shirt and black bathing suit bottom. Lauren sat on the couch while Aviva stopped in front of a mirror hanging on the side wall, pulling back her hair. Her face had grown hollow, parched like the desert, and dark shadows hung under her eyes.

“It's a smart tradition to cover the mirrors during shiva,” Aviva said almost inaudibly. “I still can't look at myself.”

“Let me give you permanent tattoo eyeliner.” Em-Hassan turned toward her. “I'll wax your eyebrows for free.”

“I don't want to look
prettier,
” Aviva said. “Who am I going to look prettier
for
?”

“I only want to help you.”

“I know.” Aviva moved past Em-Hassan, sinking down next to Lauren on the couch. Aviva knew she had to get a grip on herself
and make sure she stayed on top of this pain. She could not allow herself to go under. She didn't want to ruin Emily's joy. And how would crying even help?

“You like the food here,” Em-Hassan told Emily, lying on the cot.

“I love it. Especially the mangoes, the papayas, persimmons—”

“I can tell.” Em-Hassan gave Emily a pinch on her arm. “A man likes a little meat.”

“Nothing like tact,” Lauren muttered to Aviva under her breath.

“She thinks she's just being honest,” Aviva observed as Em-Hassan lifted the bifocals hanging from a silver chain around her neck, balanced them on the bridge of her wide nose, and examined Emily's legs.

“But she shaves.” Em-Hassan glared at Lauren and Aviva.

“Of course I shave,” Emily said. “I've been shaving since I was twelve.”

“She shouldn't shave,” Em-Hassan said brusquely. “It makes the leg hairs tough.”

“I'm sorry! I didn't—”

“It's going to be a lot of work to pull out all her hairs.” Em-Hassan spoke over Emily. “And I have a very bad back.” She placed her hands on the base of her spine and pushed out her pelvis. “Girls in the village don't shave. They wait until the last night before their wedding and then they take off all their body hair.”

“If I didn't shave I don't think I'd ever have gotten married,” Emily joked.

“I can't wax your legs,” Em-Hassan announced. “I'll have to give you the sugar treatment.”

“The sugar treatment?”

“
Yallah,
I'll be right back.” Em-Hassan left a fresh cigarette burning in a tin ashtray and walked out of the room.

“What the fuck?” Emily sat up.

“It's like wax, only it's made from sugar,” Aviva said.

“Lauren,” Emily said, “you didn't tell me.”