The Jerusalem Diamond (16 page)

“Major Michaelman,” she called. “Dov Michaelman!”

He heard. He looked at her and his smile solidified and then cracked to reveal an agony so intense it reached her with the economy of a bullet, so that she knew at once.

Hundreds were buried at the special heroes' ceremony in the I.D.F. Military Cemetery. Moshe Dayan and Israel's chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, delivered mass eulogies. She saw their mouths move but did not listen to their words. During the
shiva
week Yoel's parents came to sit shoeless and stunned, replying in monosyllables when spoken to, dragging each other away each sundown to return early the next morning. Her family came from Rosh Ha'ayin but by the third day
ya abba's
strength cracked and he began to drink. At the end of the mourning period when they all went home and did not return, she welcomed the silence.

The insurance check came quickly, ten thousand pounds. Everything concerning dead veterans was expedited by the government, including the letters of regret, from the chief chaplain, from the commander of the paratroop force, from General Elazar informing her that her husband of blessed memory had been awarded posthumous promotion and describing the circumstances of Major Strauss's death. She gave them to his father, who had them framed and hung them in the dark little furniture store over the desk where he checked his invoices and wrote out his bills of sale.

She deposited the insurance money and arranged for the bank to send fifty pounds a month to her family.

Everywhere she looked, she saw something that continued to exist although he did not. At any rate, the apartment was a needless extravagance for one person and the Strausses could use the money they had given Yoel to buy it. Before she could change her mind, she placed an advertisement. Good quarters were scarce, and it was sold almost at once.

A few days later she took Mr. Strauss to lunch. As they were leaving the restaurant, she explained quietly and tried to give him the check from the sale, but he stood with his mouth working and stared at her with wet eyes, his hands pushing against nothing.

He fled from her, a tired old man hurrying down Yaffa Road.

She understood, the blood money kept coming to them from new ghosts. But it was theirs. She went to the bank and opened an account in their name, mailing the passbook.

The new owners pressed her to move from the apartment as soon as possible, but Jerusalem was overcrowded and overpriced and it was difficult to find a suitable room. On her day off she set out to search but the faces in the streets were still tender with the love of survival and her depression deepened until she entered the Old City. She walked far down the Via Dolorosa and into a gift shop marked A
BDULLA
H
EIKAL
, L
TD.,
where an army of broken-necked Christs hung from half a thousand olivewood crosses. A water-stained roto Nasser, souvenir of an earlier war, flashed white teeth above two kaffiyeh-covered men who argued bitterly until one of them sighed and held up his palms. They smiled, a bargain struck, and the man who had surrendered nodded and hurried out.

“Something?”

Not unless, she said on impulse and in Arabic, he knew of a nice room for rent?

No, but here was a pouf, finest camelskin, a bargain?

She shook her head and his interest in her vanished as the older man returned, burdened under a carton full of women's handbags.

A few minutes later, as she retraced the Via Dolorosa, the older man caught up with her. “He said you seek a room?”

She stared at him doubtfully, already regretting her rashness.

“See it. Then decide.” He wrote in a notebook, tore off and gave her the page with the address. Ahmed Mohieddin. The Lane of the Well, off Aquabat esh-Sheikh Rihan.

Aquabat esh-Sheikh Rihan was narrower than Via Dolorosa, another mother of alleys. She asked four people before she found the Lane of the Well, a slit between plastered buildings. Ahmed Mohieddin's door was dreary, but Arab homes which are disasters from outside are liable to be something else within. A dark hallway took her to a sunny courtyard with plants set in tubs near the well that gave the street its name. Mohieddin's wife took her up stone stairs to a room with arched windows and a cross breeze. There was no running water, an outhouse instead of plumbing, but she paid the woman a month's rent in advance.

On her first night in the new room she lay in the fetal position, attempting to discontinue all moving and hearing and feeling.

He was dead. She was alive.

Nobody else thought it odd.

She was an amateur at all of the vices. Walking was easier. She took to wandering the Old City in the quiet night hours. When her nerves finally began to quiver for evidence that the earth was inhabited, she found a café by the Jaffa Gate, like a dimly lit cave full of Arab men smoking and gambling at cards and
shesh-besh
. Clearly it was male territory and she was content to sit at a small outside table and drink cup after cup of
hel
-rich coffee, listening to the amalgam of sounds—masculine voices and laughter, hubble-bubble of many
nargillahs
, click-click-click of
shesh-besh
tiles. She and a man in American-looking clothes were the only ones at the outside tables. He was young, perhaps a bit older than she, with a camera case on the chair next to him and a Leica hanging from around his neck. She looked away and fled to follow winding, stone-paved streets where the moon was the only light and her breathing and footsteps the only sounds.

On the following evening when she arrived, he was already there and she returned his greeting politely. Presently he took up the Leica and began to focus it on her.

“Please don't.”

He nodded. Instead, he rose and ventured into the café to wander among the gamblers, taking many pictures.

“A good place,” he said when he came out. When she agreed he sat at her table and ordered fresh coffees. He was a fashion photographer from London, arrived a few days earlier than the models in order to scout backgrounds. “I've been watching you. So unhappy.”

When she started to rise he put out his hand. “I'm not trying to be a boor, really,” he said gently. “It's only that I'm constitutionally opposed to unhappiness.”

She stayed, sipping her coffee in silence. When he asked her to show him around she walked with him down some of the narrow streets, pointing out David's Tower, the Armenian Quarter, the reconstructed Jewish Quarter that had been razed by the Jordanians in 1948. He asked no personal questions and at the end of two hours all she knew
about him, in addition to his occupation, was his name, Peter. He was pleasant company. In an Arab restaurant on the Street of the Chain he bought her grape-leaf dolma and couscous, and asked if she wanted arak.

She shook her head.

“Scotch, then?”

“It makes me ill.”

“Ah. It does that to me, too.” He took a small enameled box from his pocket and opened it to reveal pills like plump red berries. “You must take two. One is no good.”

“What are they?”

“Happiness.”

She rebelled but he smiled and swallowed two with his coffee to show how easy it was.

When she had taken them she felt no change. Nor were there any effects after dinner had been finished and they were on the street once again. She was immune to happiness.

“What I now must find,” he said, “is an old Arab garden with a lovely fountain. You know of such a place?”

“No fountain. A garden with a well. Very pretty.”

By the time they reached Mohieddin's garden she was slightly happy.

She had no toes.

Lovely, lovely numbness around the mouth.

Special new appreciation of the way the moon silvered the stone and created shadows.

He whistled. “Wait till you see this draped with bony size eights in doubleknits. What's it like inside?”

“Happy?” someone asked as she led him up the stairs.

Who?

“Happy happy happy.”

Who had asked? Who had answered?

The air was jelling. She fell backwards through thick liquid to land on the bed.

Laughing!

And watched him swim through a ballet of clothes removal.

He looked larger than Yoel but had less hair, interesting: happiness
was total amnesia, no pain, no feeling at all, she observed as she watched the pale, unfamiliar face settling above her.

And beginning to bob.

Bobbing.

And presently floating up. He did his slow little undressing dance in reverse, scooped up his camera and swam out of her life.

Tamar lay on the bed and laughed until she slept.

In the morning, terrified, she asked everyone at the museum about another place to live, guiltily inventing a plague of roaches.

The gift-shop manager wrinkled her nose—
pfeh!
—but beamed: lucky, a room in her own daughter Hana Rath's apartment on beautiful Rashi Street. By nightfall Tamar was again a resident in the Jewish part of the city; even if the man returned to Mohieddin's with his happiness he would not find her.

But she hated the new room.

From its smallness and the malevolent decals on the wall, obviously it had been the nursery. Dvora, the dispossessed infant, was colicky and cried all night next to her parents' bed. Eli Rath was a sullen truckdriver who snored and rebelled against his marriage with a sick stomach. The Raths argued about his politics, about oral sex, about her cooking, their ugly words drifting through the tissue walls and driving Tamar into addiction to the rank local cigarettes.

Twenty-two days after meeting the man named Peter, she realized that her period, which should have been over, had not begun.

She waited four more days to be certain and then she went to a clinic in Tel Aviv and lay with her feet in stirrups for no more than five minutes while a noisy machine sucked away the son for whom she had prayed at the Wall. That night in the nursery on Rashi Street the bleeding was less than menstruation and there was little pain, but in the next room the child was crying thinly again and Hana Rath kept crooning to her, “Dvooorehlehhh … Dvooorehlehhh, my love …” Tamar lay on her back and smoked the strong cigarettes and studied the animal decals and cursed God.

The next day she was ready to go back to work, but instead she went to the glossy recruiting office a few buildings down Rashi Street from the Raths' apartment and volunteered for duty with the army.

She received training as a radio operator. Duty in line organizations was usually reserved for the youngest women, but she tactfully pointed out to her superiors that the few years difference in age did not make her infirm, and the circumstances of her enlistment were on her side. One day she received orders to report to Camp 247, in Arad.

The post was in the desert a few kilometers outside of the town, a large barbwire-enclosed square of neat brown barracks surrounding two internal compounds. The buildings were well kept and the grounds consisted of nurtured lawns and gardens that did credit to the Mogen David overhead. One of the inside compounds housed an engineering outfit, a company of sappers. In the other lived perhaps twenty men who wore civilian clothing.