Saving Grace (32 page)

“I don’t care,” the girl said, though she nearly recanted when she saw what was to be her room: a shack with three narrow iron beds, straw mattresses, a standing wardrobe, a couple of rickety chairs, and stacked orange crates for shelves. The floors were bare concrete, the walls as thin as rice paper. The room was uninsulated, hot as an oven in the daytime. In a room such as this her grandparents had lived when they first came to Israel. No wonder Clara ran away, Grace thought with dawning empathy. The charm of austerity, she was learning, lay in its being chosen, not coerced.

Like all the volunteers, Gracie worked from six a.m. till four p.m., a net of seven and a half hours. Three people worked each row of trees, each with a ladder and a burlap bag that slung around the shoulders. They picked from the bottom, working upward. The oranges had to be clipped near the branch, with the stem intact; without the stem, the fruit would rot before reaching market. When her burlap bag was full, or as heavy as she could bear, Gracie would climb down the ladder and pour the oranges into a large bin.

At seven-thirty the truck came to take them to breakfast; by eight-thirty they were back in the trees. Around ten o’clock there was a short break; the workers rested in the shade of a tree, ate oranges, and sipped water. The break for lunch, the main meal of the day, was from twelve-thirty till two; then they worked till four. Friday afternoons and Saturdays were free. Sunday was the start of the new work week.

The weather never varied. Harsh sunlight, unmediated by even the hope of rain, lay upon the earth like a heavy, relentless lover. Hawks and vultures circled in the sky. Once, before she learned the right way to walk, Gracie kicked over a rock and a yellow scorpion ran over her sandal. Luckily it didn’t sting her. Yellow scorpions were more poisonous than black ones, she’d been told. Their sting would make you sick for a week, but snakes were worse. There was no antidote to the venom of the black viper.

For the first three days of work, Gracie’s head, back, arms, and legs ached constantly. By the fourth day, her body had calibrated the necessary adjustments; by the fifth, the pain was gone. She learned by imitation to cope with the heat the way Israelis did, moving with long fluid strides and no extraneous motion.

Talking burned up precious energy, she told herself, but in fact she enjoyed her cocoon of silence. There was a rhythm to the work, and if you found it, the work went easier. Picking oranges provided a fine sense of closure. When she started, the tree was full of oranges; when she finished, it was bare. No ambiguity, no room for misinterpretation.

To amuse themselves, the pickers competed, team against team. Gracie progressed from a liability to an asset within two weeks. As she grew stronger, she discovered that more was expected of her. She began to measure herself against the kibbutzniks instead of the other volunteers.

Some of the volunteers were cordial, others, the veterans, aloof. Gracie made no friends. Occasionally she was invited to join a group going to swim in Nachal David, the wadi-oasis of pools and waterfalls that adjoined the kibbutz, and she went. But when she wasn’t swimming, she kept her nose buried in a book.

A steady stream of men, kibbutzniks and volunteers, came onto her. Their methods were distinct. The American and European men tried to befriend her, disguising their sexual interest. The Israelis were clear and hard-edged, their advances direct and physical; they were more aggressive than the Americans but less likely to take offense when turned down. On the whole, she preferred the Israeli approach, which seemed to spring naturally from a desert environment in which life was reduced to essentials: food, water, shelter, and sex.

But she was never tempted. It wasn’t the men, several of whom in her previous life she would have found acceptable; it was her. Grace had renounced men and fancied herself a sexless creature now, a kind of secular nun.

Being thus outside the fray, she was free to observe, and her observations were sharpened by loneliness. She saw clearly how the gulf between the kibbutzniks and the volunteers was bridged, and the hierarchy defined, by sex. The more attractive volunteers had affairs with Israelis, while the less attractive settled for their peers.

The kibbutzniks and volunteers sat at separate tables in the dining room; there was no rule of segregation—it was just the way things were done. Even the girls who were sleeping with kibbutzniks didn’t sit with them. Each volunteer was formally “adopted” by a kibbutz family, which meant that once a week, on Saturday afternoons, the volunteers put on clean clothes and crossed over to the kibbutzniks’ neighborhood to spend some time with their respective families. But as each of these families had “absorbed” countless transient volunteers over the years, the relationships remained carefully superficial.

Here Gracie’s situation differed somewhat from the others’. Hers was not an assigned adoptive family, but her own flesh and blood, her grandfather and aunt. To her embarrassment, Yaacov distinguished her from the other volunteers. He brought her extra food from the kitchen and liniment for her aching muscles. Like Clara, he complained she was too thin, and if she skipped a meal he would lumber down to the volunteers’ houses, which they called the slave quarters, to find out why.

He was a tall man with a limp, who should have used a cane but wouldn’t. Volunteers who worked in the kitchen feared his tongue; but they liked him anyway because he never locked the larder, even though he knew they raided it. Once, rumor had it, a member had had the temerity to criticize him in a kibbutz meeting for letting the volunteers steal food. “Idiot!” he’d thundered. “What do you think they do with the food, sell it to the Arabs? These youngsters work for nothing, and you would begrudge them even a full belly!”

Gracie visited his two-room house and was shocked by its bareness: no pictures on the wall, no carpets, no ornaments of any kind except two framed photographs on top of the dresser. One was of Tamar and a man with a shrewd, kind face—her husband. Between them, and towering above them both, stood a teenage Micha. The other photo was a portrait of her family, taken at a wedding: a handsome group, she thought with an odd sense of detachment.

It was hard to imagine Clara married to Yaacov. Both were so strong, yet so different, so set in their disparate ways. Though he rarely mentioned her, she felt Yaacov’s attention sharpen when Clara’s name came up; but whether this represented animosity or some strange remnant of love, she could not have said. Of his son, Yaacov was inordinately proud, and he had the habit of effacing their long estrangement, as if the bond that he imagined actually linked them both. Grace did not disillusion him, did not tell him that Jonathan rarely mentioned his name, and then only in the context of his absence.

If her grandfather showed an unexpected and somewhat alarming tendency to engulf, Tamar was quite different. She was, of course, much busier than Yaacov—head of the oncology department at Arad Hospital and this year also acting chief of staff, replacing the regular chief, who was away on sabbatical. Yet it was to Tamar’s house, not Yaacov’s, that Gracie gravitated every Saturday afternoon; it was to Tamar’s intensely focused gaze, which brought to bear all the concentrated intelligence that in another sphere sufficed to run a hospital, that she was drawn. Her aunt was always welcoming, even when fatigue lay like dust in the lines of her face; yet she was restrained in a manner that, even to one who barely knew her, seemed uncharacteristic. Tamar never spoke of Gracie’s family, and if Yaacov did, she changed the subject.

Gracie spent hours in the orchard wondering about Tamar’s reticence. Sometimes she thought it stemmed from disgust; she had not forgotten her aunt’s ill-concealed dismay at the way they lived, the time she visited them in New York. Other times she attributed her attitude to forbearance and respect for Gracie’s privacy.

She had no way of knowing the true cause of Tamar’s silence, and Tamar couldn’t enlighten her, for she’d been strictly forbidden to tell about Lily’s illness, the tests she was undergoing, the speculations she herself refused to countenance. That was Lily’s decision, and these days, Jonathan would oppose her in nothing. Tamar had argued; she warned them, “Gracie won’t thank you for keeping her in the dark.” In the end, though, she had to accept Lily’s injunction.

Since she couldn’t speak honestly, Tamar preferred not to speak at all. For the most part, they talked instead about the desert, its ecology and archaeology. Gracie’s gratifying interest owed more, at least initially, to the teacher than to the subject. Tamar’s intuitions of the past were as real to her as the imaginings of a child; and when she brought out her treasured collection of artifacts to show Gracie, her face shone with a shy, childlike enthusiasm. She handled them with love; to her they were tactile evidence of continuity, of a time frame so vast it dwarfed the daily tribulations of her life.

They took long walks together. “In this place,” Tamar told Gracie as they wandered among the waterfalls and pools of Nachal David, “there has always been water, as far back as recorded history goes. Therefore, there have always been men. David hid from Saul in the caves of Ein Gedi, and even then those caves were ancient. When you walk through this wadi, you walk in his footsteps.”

This was seductive stuff, but Grace was determined never to be seduced again. She had been sent here as punishment, and she would do her time and do it well, as a matter of self-respect; but she would not demean herself by loving her prison or embracing her guards.

And yet...
 
Tamar’s wonderment was hard to resist. There was in her a connectedness to place that Gracie, who had grown up in a world of interchangeable suburbs, had never encountered. And once her eyes were opened by Tamar, the land worked its greater magic on her, answering a need she had not known she possessed and could not even name. One night after supper, she walked down to the Dead Sea and lay on the pebbled beach, head pillowed on a boulder. The sky, stretched between mountain and sea, blazed with dense clusters of stars. When Gracie closed her eyes, the starlight burned through her lids. She floated on the salt-laden breeze.

Sometimes Tamar and Gracie hiked through the more formidable wadi of Nachal Arugot or along the barren salt-licked shore of the Dead Sea. This was not the intimidating, grandiose splendor of the Alps or the Rockies, both of which Grace had toured with her family, but beauty in a more intimate mode; not a landscape, but a land, full of nooks and crannies that invited exploration.

Tamar was a serious walker, no Sunday mall-stroller. She didn’t talk while she walked, and Grace emulated her. But when they stopped to eat or swim in one of the hidden pools among the rocks, their conversation would resume from wherever they had left it, an hour or a week ago. They talked of many things, but never about Gracie’s family, and never about Micha, who had not been seen in Ein Gedi in the three weeks since he deposited Gracie on his mother’s doorstep.

Then, late one afternoon, as Grace sat beside the deserted kibbutz swimming pool, soaking her feet in the cold water and reading a tattered copy of
Mansfield Park,
a shadow fell upon her; and she looked up with a start to find her cousin towering over her. No doubt, she thought, he was used to sneaking up on people.

She’d forgotten how good-looking he was. The female volunteers rated Micha a major catch, a great big slippery trout whose allure was enhanced by legend: he was said to have been often hooked, never landed. Grace regarded him with no welcoming eye.

He hunkered down beside her. “Still here?”

“Looks like it.”

“How’s the head?”

She tapped it. “Solid as a rock, thanks.”

“I hear they put you in the orchards.”

“Yep.”

“They say you’re not a bad worker.”

“I’m bucking for parole.”

He laughed. When she turned back to her book, Micha looked her over carefully, in the direct manner of Mediterranean men. His eyes lingered thoughtfully on her body, slender but full-breasted, in a simple yellow tank suit. Her skin had tanned to a deep almond color, much darker than when he’d seen her last. Long hair as black as his curled damply around her shoulders. He wondered if any of his brethren had had her yet. If not, it wouldn’t be for want of trying.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. He’d dipped into the volunteer pot often enough himself. The kibbutz women disapproved, though they weren’t above the odd raid themselves. It wasn’t nice, and you wouldn’t put it into a recruitment brochure, but everyone knew the volunteers served a dual function in the kibbutz ecology: as a source of cheap labor and as the sexual equivalent of a stocked pond, constantly renewed by the annual tide. As far as Micha was concerned, as long as you kept it honest, there was no harm done. All the same, he didn’t like the idea of his cousin being treated like a piece of prime meat.

She looked up from her book and caught him staring. “What?”

“Come for a walk.”
 

That was how most of the kibbutzniks prefaced their moves. “You’re not planning to jump me, are you? We are cousins.”

Micha laughed. It was a nice laugh, warm and deep and masculine, and despite her intentions, Grace found herself liking him a little. He was different out of uniform. Then he said, “Don’t flatter yourself,” and she went back to hating him.

He pointed up the mountain at whose foot the kibbutz nestled. “Have you been up there yet? Ma’ayan David is there, the Spring of David. It’s the source of the Nachal David water.”

Gracie had heard about the spring from other volunteers, and had proposed a hike to Tamar; but her aunt had said no. “Too hot, too steep—go with someone younger.” No doubt she’d sent Micha down for that purpose. Gracie squinted up at the stark white cliffs, then at her cousin, weighing the advantage of a guide against the disadvantage of its being him.