A Remarkable Kindness (8 page)

“I wanted it to be a surprise.” Lauren winked.

Aviva said nothing. She used to like getting her legs waxed here as a special treat and then going home to Rafi afterward. He'd run his hands over her smooth skin, focusing like a basketball player dribbling a ball deliberately, carefully, up the court line during a drill.
My Aviva,
he'd say.
My-my-my Aviva.
Like the song. As if Aviva had always been his, had never
not
been his, and he would never
not
be—

“Em-Hassan has six daughters, right?” Emily said. “She needs an awful lot of sugar and wax.”

“After six daughters, she finally had a son, Hassan,” Lauren said. “That's how she got her name, Em-Hassan. It means the mother of Hassan. When he was born, her husband was finally happy . . .”

Lauren kept talking but Aviva was deep in thought. She could hear Rafi saying, “If I died right now, I would be happy
.
” It was after one of the last times they had made love. They were in their bedroom, the sound of the sea tumbling in through the window, a silver band of moonlight sifting like flour through the bottom of the window blinds. Rafi was on top of her, facing her, inside her . . . He was . . . He
was
.

“Aviva,” Lauren was saying.

Aviva tried to fortify herself.

Lauren said, “I'm thrilled I have daughters. I'm going to call myself Em-Maya. Or does Em-Yael sound better?”

Em-Hassan returned with a wooden cutting board, a glass of water, and a lump of shiny taupe paste. Emily lay back and Em-Hassan kneaded the paste, rolled it over Emily's calves, tugged out hairs, and examined the putty.

“Does it hurt?” Em-Hassan asked.

Aviva thought,
Yes
.

Emily said, “No.”

“And how's your husband, David?” Em-Hassan turned toward Lauren.

“Busy, but fine.”

Aviva vaguely remembered Lauren telling her that David had helped one of Em-Hassan's daughters, but that was when she'd been in mourning and all the details of ordinary life had escaped her. “And David is also a good friend of Ali,” Em-Hassan said. “Ali Haddad.”

“Yes,” Lauren said.

“And you are good friends with his wife.”

“I see Jasmine every now and then.”

“So,
nu,
tell me, does Ali have a girlfriend?”

“That, I don't know,” Lauren replied. “But Emily works with him at the Garden of Eden Hotel.”

“You work with Ali?” Em-Hassan glanced up from Emily's leg to her face.

“He's in charge of hotel operations and I'm at the reception
desk,” Emily replied. “But he stops by to talk to me a lot. He used to live in Somerville, near where Lauren and I used to live, which is funny when you think about it. It's such a small world, really—”

“Every time I see Jasmine, I want to cry.” Em-Hassan clicked her tongue. “She only leaves her house to buy things from one of the trucks and then she goes back inside . . .”

“She's having a tough time,” Lauren said.

“Why's that again?” Emily asked.

“Because Ali's angry at her father—”

“I'll tell the story,” Em-Hassan said. “I know it better than anyone—Jasmine's my cousin. Their family was always dirt poor. Not
yom asal, yom basal,
one day honey, one day onions—in their family, it was always onions. Jasmine's father borrowed money from Ali to buy a plot of land. Ali gave it to him, and a few years later, her father sold the land and made a profit. But when he returned the money to Ali, he gave him back the exact same amount. No interest, not a shekel more. Jasmine thought that wasn't so wrong because they're all one big family, but Ali was furious! Jasmine felt torn. Who do you choose? Your husband or your father? Who?” Em-Hassan looked at Aviva, but she had neither father nor husband and couldn't respond.

“That is a tough question,” said Lauren diplomatically.

“Jasmine sided with her father because . . .” Em-Hassan stopped. “Well, maybe because Ali is doing well at the hotel and she thought her father needed the money more. That was the beginning of her troubles. Ali was so angry that he moved out.”

“There had to be other reasons,” Lauren said.

“I see Ali with his kids at the hotel sometimes,” Emily observed.

“But never with Jasmine.” Em-Hassan kneaded the paste around Emily's knee. “It hurts more here, doesn't it?”

Aviva closed her eyes, her heart aching, and let her head fall back on the sofa cushion. Lauren took her hand. Lauren had been like Aviva's younger sister since she'd moved to Peleg a few years ago. When Lauren said she felt at times like this wasn't where she was supposed to be, Aviva told her that she hoped Lauren wouldn't keep wishing she were somewhere else because one day she'd turn to her reflection in the mirror and see a woman, aged and bitter, who'd let her whole life slip by.

“I know, I know,” Lauren had told Aviva. “When life gives you lemons . . . But occasional kvetching doesn't hurt anybody, does it?”

“As long as it's only occasional and you spare David.”

“Okay,” Lauren had agreed, “I'll try to zip the lip.”

“What happened to your first husband?” Aviva heard Em-Hassan ask Emily.

“He was like Ali,” Emily said. “He got up and left me.”

“I don't understand men,” Em-Hassan said.

“And if they're famous chefs, forget about it,” Lauren said with a snort.

Aviva opened her eyes.

“That's not funny,” Em-Hassan scolded. “It's terrible when a man leaves his wife. Did he fight with you about money? Was it another woman? It's usually another woman.”

“Another
skinny
woman,” Emily blurted out.

“When I was a young girl,” Em-Hassan told her, “I loved a boy. He also cared for me, but his parents wanted him to marry his rich cousin. I cried for days, and then a cousin of my mother's came and asked my father for my hand. My father thought it was a good match. I had to agree. I was already eighteen, and in my day, if you weren't married by eighteen, you were an old maid.”

“But did you love him?” Emily asked.

Yes,
Aviva thought,
I loved Rafi
.
I grew to love him even more than I ever thought I would. He was caring and gentle and loyal. He was always
—

“Never,” Em-Hassan said firmly. “He blamed me. He hit me. He never picked up any of our kids; he rarely picked up our son.” Her voice dropped. “I would have left him if I could have, but my parents were both dead and I had no place to go.”

“Why couldn't you live on your own?”

“Arab women don't live alone.”

“But you're not alone if you're with your children.”

“Without a man you're alone,” Em-Hassan explained. “A lot of men beat their wives, but the women are too scared to talk about it, too scared to leave. They hide their husbands' belts. They pray to Allah for help. Every woman suffers. Look at us all.”

Em-Hassan started to cry. Her fingers were sticky with the sugar paste, so she dabbed at her eyes with her wrist. Aviva watched for a moment and then stood, reaching for a towel in the wall cabinet to pat Em-Hassan's face. Seeing tears roll down Em-Hassan's cheeks made Aviva cry, too, and she sank into Em-Hassan's fleshy, warm embrace.

Aviva would allow herself to cry. Just for now. For a few moments.

Because tears were liquid prayers.

But then she thought about the treatise on Em-Hassan's wall. In her heart of hearts, did Em-Hassan hate the Jews? Or had somebody given it to her and she felt obligated, pressured to hang it up? Aviva went rigid, utterly distraught. She wanted to ignore Em-Hassan's true feelings. She wanted their relationship to transcend history and wars and diametrically opposed loyalties. What did it matter, anyway, when they were just two women, each with her own private anguish and sorrow? Then she thought about Benny. Killed in the fight between Muslims and Jews. The desolation that clamped down on Aviva was so heavy she could no longer stand up. She moved away from Em-Hassan and slumped on the couch. Lauren's arm curved around Aviva and the room grew quiet. Em-Hassan made a sad clicking sound with her tongue.

“Aviva, you okay?” Lauren leaned toward her.

Aviva nodded. She heard Em-Hassan say, “I haven't cried like this since Jasmine's father's funeral.”

“Talk about irony,” Lauren commented. “Soon after Ali left Jasmine, her father died anyway.”

“Why didn't you tell me all this?” Emily asked.

“I did, but you were too busy with Boaz and the wedding to remember.”

“What was the funeral like?”

“Hundreds of women sitting in Jasmine's family's courtyard,” Lauren said. “Jasmine was sitting in the middle, next to her father,
who was laid out on a wooden plank with a blanket covering his body up to his chin. His face was exposed. Jasmine kept kissing him, stroking his face, crying and reciting prayers. But nobody said anything. We just sat there and she kept crying. After a while, her brothers arrived and they pushed their way through all the women and lifted their father on the plank and carried him out of the courtyard.”

The day of Rafi's funeral, hot winds blew in from the desert, the sky full of yellow dust. And at Benny's funeral, the sky was blue. The sun still shone and the birds still sang. Life went on. How did it dare?

“Women aren't allowed to go to the cemetery on the day of the funeral,” Lauren said. “So when Jasmine's brothers carried their father down the street, she ran after them. She was crying and wailing so much that the women in the village had to hold her back. She was shouting, ‘Good-bye, Father, good-bye!' I made my way through the crowd and reached her and she grabbed me and yelled, ‘I lost my father! I lost my husband! I have nothing to live for now!'”

“I don't know how I'm going to survive all this,” Aviva had told Eli after Rafi had died. She'd called him—she hadn't deleted his phone number—and then he'd come to her house to pay a shiva call.

“You have your two other sons.” Eli had sat with Aviva in the living room while Raz and Yoni were with their friends in the backyard.

“I want to crumple up and die.”

“You are strong. I know you're strong. You have to be strong.”

“And how do I do that?”

“You have to lift your chin,” Eli had told her in no uncertain terms. “You have to stand so that at least you cast a shadow.”

“Lauren!” Em-Hassan said suddenly. “You're Jasmine's good friend. And David's friends with Ali. You and David should talk to him. You can make him change his mind so he goes back to his wife.”

“What can we say to make him go back to her?”

“I have an idea,” Em-Hassan said. “
Emily
should talk to Ali when she sees him at the hotel.”

“Me?” Emily lifted herself up on her elbows. “I hardly know him. All I know is that you can't stop anyone from doing what he wants to do.”

“That's true,” Em-Hassan said. “That's life. That's the will of Allah.”

Kagan would have instructed Aviva:
Keep things in separate compartments!
Aviva tried to focus on Em-Hassan's soft robe and the way she had held her. Yet Aviva could also see the bloodied hand in the drawing in the other room, and she could imagine the terrorist who came to kill Benny, and her only consolation was thinking that he hadn't suffered. It had happened so fast, Benny wouldn't have had time to suffer. Prince might have let out one bark, a solitary desperate bark, before the terrorist shouted
Allahu Akbar
and then ignited a fiery, hideous, bloody, senseless, abysmal explosion. And there was Em-Hassan saying it was the will of God?

“No!” Aviva despaired. “No!”

Em-Hassan turned, her face flushed and uncomprehending.

“How can it be the will of God?” Aviva asked. “Why would God take my son and then my husband? Don't you ever say that, Em-Hassan, I don't want to hear that!”

“All I'm saying is that we have to accept our fate . . .”

But Aviva was no longer listening. She couldn't bear it anymore. She didn't know what to do with herself, and she rose as if in a dream and looked out the window, where a frail woman in a long black robe was slowly making her way up the street. The woman was carrying a big bundle, balancing it on her head.

E
mily looked at Boaz sitting in the chair opposite her hospital bed, his body curved like a sickle. Behind his wide back, a blotch of gray morning filled the window. Rain was falling, unusually hard rain, ticking in slanted sheets against the glass and puddling in the hospital courtyard down below.

She lay quietly in her bed, thinking about what to name their newborn twin sons. Before that, she had been thinking about their wedding ceremony a year earlier, held in the village community center overlooking the beach at sunset. A rough autumn sea, disheveled and wild, had churned behind Emily and Boaz as they stood under the chuppah, a wine-colored wedding canopy that had been used by the villagers for the past fifty years. Udi and Idan Cohen, David, and Emily's brother, Matt, held up the canopy over Rabbi Lapid, Boaz, Emily, and Emily's mother.

“From Rob the cooking-show yenta to Boaz,” Emily's mother,
Phyllis, had said to her as they talked in Phyllis's hotel room the night before the wedding. “Bless his heart . . . Boaz seems sweet, but he's as quiet and slow as a herd of turtles.”

“Ma! Mother-daughter time doesn't mean—”

“I'm sorry, hon, but it's true.”

“He's just shy until you get to know him.”

“I've only got a few days.”

Another one of her stinging remarks. Emily fumed to herself and then glanced at the other bed, on which her father would have slept. He would have liked Boaz, she knew. A kindred spirit, her father would have said.

“Well,” her mother finally drawled. “I reckon as long as he's nice to you. And I know you want someone who won't do to you what Rob did.”

Standing under the wedding canopy, looking at Boaz in his plain white button-down shirt and dark blue trousers, Emily felt a pang remembering her mother's words. But what was wrong with sweet, quiet, and slow? She gazed at him with grateful affection for having saved her from life as a forlorn divorcée, something akin in her mind to an unwanted secondhand dress.

Rabbi Lapid stood in front of them. He was a somber, measured middle-aged man whose salt-and-pepper beard climbed like ivy up to his half-lidded eyes. But once he got going reciting the Sheva Brachot, the seven traditional wedding blessings, he belted out the prayers in an unabashed, wholehearted, off-key voice. Boaz slipped a gold wedding band on her finger and stepped on the glass and all the guests shouted, “
Mazel tov!
” and then he kissed her.

The party began immediately afterward with food and drinks—and centerpieces with lots of baby's breath, as Emily had requested—and soon the DJ was playing lively music. Boaz and Emily danced and danced, and then some of the villagers lifted Boaz and Emily up high on chairs, the way they did at every wedding. Emily looked at Boaz's sweat-drenched face and then glanced away, wishing her mother had never said anything about Boaz because Emily couldn't help noticing the bead of saliva stuck in each corner of his wide lips. She glanced at her mother, who was whispering something to Lauren's mother. Emily didn't want to know what.

Emily sighed now. “So, Boaz, what do you want to name the boys?”

“Emily, you choose the names.”

“Seriously?” She picked up her head from the pillow. “These past nine months, you told me we'd talk about it when it was time. I understand you didn't want to jinx anything before, but they're here and they're healthy. You weren't even with me in the delivery room. So please help me pick out the names.”

Emily looked down at their tiny dark-haired sons cradled in her arms. Their squished faces, red cheeks, dark eyelashes. She looked back at Boaz. He had made it out of all those battles to create new life, yet she had a terrible apprehension that the inner core of Boaz had disappeared.

“Lauren was with you in the delivery room.” Boaz had the surprised look of a sea turtle washed ashore. “I've seen enough cows and dogs give birth—I didn't need to watch you go through the same thing.” He stopped talking for a moment. “The names you
choose are fine with me.” Then he pressed his weight forward, balancing his arms on his knees, staring under the hospital bed. “
Mah zeh?
”

“What's what?”

“That bag under there.”

“Oh, nothing. Lauren brought me a book of baby names and some clothes and stuff, and I was so exhausted that I dropped it there and haven't had time to put it away.”

“Don't ever pick up a stray piece of litter or garbage,” Boaz warned. “It could be an explosive device.”

“I know.”

“You don't know. You're naïve about life here, so don't.”

“I won't. Come on, Boaz, please. Let's talk about our boys. What fun we'll have on the beach. You can take them kayaking and bicycling. What are we going to call them? Do you like the name Zohar?”

“There was a Zohar in my army unit,” Boaz said. “He was blinded, but he does marathons. He has a guide running next to him.”

Holding her sons for the first time, Emily had felt joy: so much joy, pure joy, unadulterated joy like a primary color on a blank, fresh canvas. But now the scar where her skin had been cut for her cesarean stretched tight. Lauren said it would ache when Emily laughed, but she hadn't warned that it would ache more when Emily cried. She looked down at the boys. “Maybe by the time our sons grow up, there will be peace and they won't have to go to war.”

“That will never happen.” Boaz glanced at the curtain that separated
Emily's bed from that of her roommate, an Arab woman who'd given birth to a daughter the day before. It was only nine in the morning and already there were a dozen relatives crowded around the woman's bed. Boaz lowered his voice and said in English, “They hated us the moment we got here, and no matter how good they have it here, they always will.”

A cleaning woman swished a wet rag past the doorway. Emily smelled ammonia. She took off the boys' little cloth caps and breathed in the delicate tops of their heads, which smelled of intoxicatingly new, fresh life.

“I'd better get back to the groves.” Boaz stood in his green thermal shirt, the sleeves pushed up past his scaly elbows, his cargo pants' pockets sagging. “There's been a lot of damage to the trees from last night's rain. And one of the cows is sick.”

“Aren't you happy at least about our sons?”

“I am happy.”

“Don't you want to hold them?”

“They're so tiny.” He glanced at his hands. His rough-edged fingernails were lined with dirt, and there was a new scar on the outer side of his thumb. “I'll hold them later, when I come back and I get cleaned up, okay?”

“Okay,” Emily said, although she didn't believe it.

After Boaz left, a Russian nurse with green eyes and an upturned nose came to take the twins back to the nursery room. Emily lay in bed too jittery to sleep. She reached for the book of baby names under her bed. She wanted to give them modern Israeli names because she had cast in her lot with Boaz and this was where they were living, where she wanted to stay. She flipped
through the pages of the book and decided that wherever it opened, she'd find the names that her sons were meant to have. The first time, she landed on the letter
shin
. A soothing, soft sound, tender as satin.
Shhh,
like putting a baby to sleep. She closed her eyes again and pointed to the name Shoval.

“Shoval: pronounced
Show-vaal.
Meaning: the tail of a boat or a comet.” A comet's tail: something that might exist for only a fleeting moment but is so full of light. Then, something else came to Emily: her father's name had been Shimon. Shoval was the perfect name in her father's memory. She closed the book and opened it again, this time on the letter
tet
. And then her finger landed on another name. Not random but preordained: “Tal: pronounced
Taal
. Meaning: the morning dew.”

“What about Shoval and Tal?” Emily asked when Lauren stopped by to visit in the afternoon. “I like the way they rhyme.”

“Those are perfectly good Israeli names.” Lauren always had a no-nonsense, reassuring way about her. She was in her nurse's uniform, her hair pulled back, small diamonds flashing in her ears, sitting in the chair where Boaz had been a while ago. “But I have to warn you that your mother will probably call them Shovel and Tall.”

“She'll say, ‘I got me two new grandsons named
Shuh-vel
and
Taw-aall,
'” Emily mimicked. “She'll stretch Tal into at least five syllables. And then she'll tell her friends, ‘I know she's
my
daughter, but I don't know what the heck she was thinking!'”

Lauren laughed and then asked, “How are you feeling otherwise?”

“I'm okay. But Boaz is so out of it. He doesn't even seem happy about the babies. Like he's lost in his own world . . .”

“He's got scratches.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never heard that Hebrew expression? Post-traumatic stress disorder. Scratches in the head.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Emily asked, but before Lauren could even respond, Emily continued, “Oh, what the fuck. You didn't have to tell me. I should have figured it out myself.” Through the window, dense, gray clouds cobbled across the sky. She
did
know about Boaz, but she hadn't wanted to admit it. She had known it since that first night in the restaurant on the water, when he was there but not totally there. She had sensed it, yet she hadn't wanted to see it. His quiet had seemed peaceful and encouraging compared to the way Rob talked her ear off. And Emily knew he'd be loyal. Someone who would never leave her.

“You told me you knew he seemed a little troubled,” Lauren said after a time. “But he's still a good husband, isn't he? Nice to you? Hardworking? A good provider? He's not going to go off to be with—”

“He's not Rob, if that's what you're getting at,” Emily agreed grouchily. She understood that even if Lauren had tried to warn her, she still would have gone through with the marriage. Because it had seemed like it was meant to be; as her father was fond of saying, “Nothing happens by mistake—it's all part of God's secret plan.”

“I'm sorry,” Lauren soothed.

“I'm sorry, too.” Tears leaked from Emily's eyes.

“This is a very intense time.” Lauren handed her a small box of tissues from the cabinet next to the bed. “After you give birth, one minute you're laughing and the next minute you're crying. Life suddenly becomes
extreme
.”

“At least
these
tissues are clean.” Emily blew her nose, falling back upon the pillow. “Tell me I'll be okay,” she pleaded. “Tell me, what am I supposed to do? How do I live with someone who has one foot in reality and one foot God knows where?”

Lauren paused. “You just do the best you can, like me. You know I'm not always thrilled being here . . .”

“Doesn't David know?”

“Of course he knows,” Lauren said. “I try not to be
too
obvious about it—but if I were such a good actress, I'd get an Academy Award. And sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting to go back.”

“You'd really leave him?”

“That's the problem.” Lauren shrugged. “Boston or David? I'd still take David. I love him.”

And Emily saw it written all over Lauren's face, the way she had seen it when they had talked in Lauren's parents' living room in their enormous Georgian house in Brookline, a fire blazing in the fireplace, antique furniture, original artwork on the walls. Lauren had told Emily about an Israeli doctor she'd met, and Emily knew it was not the fire causing Lauren's cheeks to flame red. Emily could probably count on the fingers of her left hand the number of times that Lauren let herself reveal too much, and this had been one of them. It was before Lauren got pregnant,
before fate had brought her to Peleg (even if she did not believe in fate), and before Emily had moved, too. Their lives unfolding, following an unseen course. Or would Lauren say they had unraveled?

“I'd better get back to work.” Lauren stood. “There's a woman about to go into labor. When she's done, I'll come check on you again.”

Emily lay in the bed, watching the rain. She thought of her father, who'd never get to meet his grandsons, and at that exact same moment, she felt him walking into the hospital room. She imagined him saying, “
Mabruk,
” to her Arab roommate and all her visitors, charming everyone with that one Arabic word for congratulations. “Where are you?” Emily asked her father out loud, but no answer came back to her.

“B
OAZ,
WHERE ARE
you?” Emily asked into the phone by her bed.

“In the orange groves.”

“What's it like?”

“The wind's stopped and the rain's coming straight down. The trees love it. It's a perfect rain.”

“And a perfect day,” Emily agreed. “What do you think of the names Shoval and Tal?”

“Shoval and Tal,” he repeated. “They're fine.”

“If you could have chosen the names, would you have chosen those?” Emily asked slowly, enunciating each word carefully, as if they were practicing an “if-then” statement in English together.

“If you choose the names, then they are the names that I want.”

Emily listened, and though she waited for him to say something
else, he did not. Through the phone, she could hear the rain falling, splattering against the earth.

She hung up. She knew Boaz had always been quiet, but she had refused to see the breadth of his silence. And they'd always done things that were fun, activities that didn't entail much talking—bicycle riding through the fields or kayaking.

One afternoon, they had gone out on the sea, and Boaz had paddled close to Emily, holding a black velvet box. “I know you have to renew your lease next month.” He had looked at her from under the brim of his cotton hat, its long, floppy flap hanging over the back of his neck. “You don't want to live forever at Leah Zado's, do you?”