The Jerusalem Diamond (27 page)

“Why not let it be a surprise?”

“No more camping.”

“It won't be camping … exactly.”

They stopped at a fruit store and she bought an enormous plastic sack of oranges, the kind Americans call Jaffas and Israelis call Washingtons. They took a
sheroot
to Tel Aviv. In front of a shabby hotel facing the Mediterranean, they joined a group of people waiting on the sidewalk.

He felt alarm. “I will not go on a tour,” he told her in a low voice.

She smiled.

Some of the people were middle-aged, and there were half a dozen college kids. He noted a proliferation of canteens.

“Are we at least going north, where it's cool?”

A man standing nearby heard the question and said something in Hebrew to his companion, who looked at Harry and grinned broadly.

An old bus that once had been painted blue rounded the corner and groaned to a stop in front of them. “Listen to the motor. Evil as a
dybbuk
,” muttered the man next to Harry. The vehicle's windows were opaque with wear and grime; its body hovered high over four of the largest balloon tires he had ever seen.

“How long will we have to stay on that?”

“Come along,” she said.

Inside, the air was hot and used. From early childhood he had not been able to ride on buses without becoming carsick. He opened the window after a struggle that cost him a skinned knuckle.

“Shimon, here are two seats. Over here,” a girl from the college group yelled shrilly across the aisle.

A man collected their money and announced that he was Oved the Guide. He introduced Avi the Driver, who slammed the doors as if springing a trap. There were half-hearted cheers as the bus sighed, lurched and started to roll. Next to him, Tamar took out a book on Etruscan art and began to read. Harry felt cheated. Instead of the interlude he had fantasied, he was right back where he had been with this woman, facing discomfort and a situation over which he had little control.

“Where the hell are we going?” he asked crossly.

Tamar turned a page. “The Sinai,” she said.

The countryside could have been, in succession, Florida, Kansas, California. They stopped at an army camp long enough to pick up a captain and three privates carrying Uzis, an armed guard Tamar said was necessary because they were traveling far from government protection. While Harry napped, Avi the Driver turned off the road; when he awoke and looked out, the fields had turned into trackless sand and rocks, flat. Far to the east, black buttes humped the horizon in a way that reminded him of Montana.

“Sinai?” he asked Tamar.

She shook her head. “Negev.”

They passed a black-robed man on a loping camel. The rider didn't waste more than a glance, although the American students shouted at
him and shot lots of film through the murky windows. Half an hour later they came to an oasis where a single Bedouin family operated a kind of desert comfort stop. Lunch was a ropelike hunk of sausage, greasy and highly spiced, and a bottle of almost hot orange soda that left a strong chemical aftertaste. The college group was vocal in its disapproval. Harry chewed and swallowed, aware he had been acting like an ugly American.

A boy who lived at the oasis asked if he could ride as far as a nearby village. On the bus, Tamar chatted with him easily in Arabic.

“His name is Moumad Yussif. He is fourteen years old. Next year he will be married and begin to father many children.”

“He's a kid himself.”

“His wife may be eleven or twelve. That's how it was, even among the Jews, where I was born.”

“You remember Yemen?”

“Not clearly. We lived in Sana'a. A city. It was hard for Jews there. Sometimes there were riots and we stayed in our little apartments until there was no more food, afraid to enter the streets. Around the corner was a minaret. Every morning the muezzin woke me like an alarm clock. ‘
Alaaaaaaaaa Akbar!
…'”

The boy at the front of the bus recognized the words. He grinned uncertainly and called out.

“He would like a smoke.”

A soldier standing next to the young Arab in the doorwell of the bus held out a pack. The boy took a nickel-plated pistol from his pocket and pointed it. He pulled the trigger and a tongue of flame flickered up from the muzzle, a cigarette lighter.

“Jesus Christ,” Harry breathed. The soldiers roared with laughter. The boy pulled the trigger again and again, lighting smokes for the armed guard. In a little while they came to the village and he said
Salaam Aleikhum
and got off the bus.

That afternoon, travel began to take its toll. The college kids hunched low in their seats and played a game, inventing Americanized companies that would make their fortunes in Israel.

“
Rav-Aluf
Motors. ‘What's good for
Rav-Aluf
Motors is good for the country.'”

“Kissen Tel Excavations, Ltd.”

“Avdat General Supplies. ‘Just ask for it, we Avdat.'” There were groans.

“Afula Brush Company,” Harry said, surprising even himself.

The girl in the seat across the aisle from Tamar looked at him, pleased. “Not bad. Want to be Afula Brush man?”

“I have a job, I travel with her. She's Tamar. I'm Harry.”

“I'm Ruthie, he's Shimon. He's Israeli. She your wife?”

“She's my lady. He your husband?”

The girl grinned, accepting the unspoken reprimand. “He's my passing fancy,” she said, kissing her companion on the cheek.

The bus entered a series of canyons where rocks threw lengthening shadows. By the time they emerged from the canyons in Eilat, darkness had hidden the Red Sea, but they could hear the surf as the bus followed the road around a half-moon harbor. It passed a brightly lighted modern hotel without slowing, then Avi the Driver finally pulled it to a halt by a small seaside motel where accommodations were furnished as part of the tour.

The evening meal was schnitzel and barley soup. They ate without pleasure, too hungry to complain about the cooking. But their rooms turned out to be dank little cells, sheets soiled with grime and the stains of previous use.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where?”

“We'll go to that big hotel we passed. We can come back in the morning before the bus leaves.”

“I don't want to go to another hotel.”

“Shit,” he said crankily. He sat on the bed and looked at her. “I'll ride the silly bus and I'll eat the lousy food. But why shouldn't we sleep in a decent bed tonight?”

She turned and went outside, closing the door behind her.

At first he believed he would go without her. But when he followed her out, he didn't take his things. The beach was just across the road. He found her sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, and he sat next
to her. The tide was high, and they stared out across the breakers at the bright lights of the other hotel.

“What's the matter with that place, Tamar?”

“It's a nice hotel. I spent my honeymoon there.”

In a while he went to the motel office and tipped the desk clerk heavily in return for clean blankets and a jug of white wine. She was sitting in the same place when he got back, and he spread the blankets and opened the bottle. The wine wasn't bad. They drank while the moon came out from behind clouds and enabled them to see the foam made by the waves hissing onto the beach.

“Do you want me to do anything?” she asked presently, into his shoulder.

He shook his head. “You?”

She kissed his hand. “Just be with me.”

They lay on the blanket and put their arms around one another.

“I could love you,” he said during the night. The words came of their own volition; their sound terrified him. She didn't say anything. Perhaps she was asleep.

It wasn't as bad as sleeping on Masada, but in the morning he was a little stiff. They ate the decent breakfast even the poorest Israeli restaurant offers—olives, sliced tomatoes, eggs and tea—and then got back on the bus. A wide, smooth highway took them south. In a couple of hours they were allowed off the bus at Sharm'e Sheikh to stretch their legs and seek out the latrines.

The Israel Defense Forces furnished them with lunch, a salad. The young
Tsahal
soldiers were polite and friendly, but there were too many weapons naked in the sun; Harry was glad when the authorities approved their route and the bus made its way out of the armed camp. They passed a place where camels had gotten through the barbed wire and into a mine field, a scattering of white bones. Oved the Guide distributed salt tablets and warned them to go easy on their canteens. The young Americans began to sing their songs about snow and cold weather and open fires. They graduated to Christmas carols, informing the heat-shimmering desert that Christ the Savior was born.

An elderly Israeli woman, sitting alone at the front of the bus, turned and stared at the singers.

“I should like to see snow,” Tamar said.

“You've never?”

“Twice. But when it finally snows in Jerusalem …” She shrugged. “A miser's pittance, and it's gone in a flash. I should like to see it deep and … you know.”

Homesickness grabbed at him the way it seldom did. “You'd like it. I know you would.” He watched her sink a beautiful thumb through the skin of an orange.

“I thought they are Jews, these young people.”

“I think they are.”

She was making a neat little pile of peels in her lap. “Why do they sing of Jesus?”

“This is an intimidating environment. Maybe they're trying for something familiar.”

“Christian songs are familiar?” She dismembered the orange and gave him half.

“Of course. Mmm … Good.” The oranges were smaller than he had seen in New York but sweeter; perhaps they had ripened on the tree instead of in the packing case. “Most kids learn carols in school. America is a Christian country.”

She nodded. “When you are startled you say, ‘Jesus Christ!' Do you realize that?”

He smiled. “I guess I do. Can we have another orange?”

This time she let him peel. “Just as my father still calls God ‘Allah.' And several times I have seen superstitious Western Jews knock on wood for luck.”

“So?”

“It is a Christian thing to do. Early Christians touched wood and asked God's blessing, because the cross of crucifixion was wooden.”

He split the second orange more clumsily than she had divided the first. The juice ran and dripped and he had nothing with which to wipe his sticky hands. “We don't choose our customs and language. We inherit 'em.”

“One British and American expression I cannot abide,” Tamar said. “ ‘Fuck you.'”

Harry ate his orange carefully. The students no longer were singing.

“In this part of the world we have words for making love, of course.
But neither in Arabic nor in Hebrew is there an expression that says to a person when we are angry, ‘I hate you, go and make love.' It should be a benediction, not a curse. ‘May God touch you and allow you to make love.' When I am happiest I should like to say to everyone on earth, ‘Fuck you, everybody! Fuck you, world!'”

He thought the students would never stop cheering.

About an hour after he had become completely bored with mile after mile of endless beautiful beach, the bus stopped at a villa. Oved the Guide told them they could enjoy the water for two hours. The main floor of the house was locked tight and off limits, but in the basement there were two dressing rooms and a bathroom with plumbing. He reached the beach before Tamar; when he ran in and dove, fatigue and irritation vanished along with the stickiness. He swam straight out, happy to stretch his muscles, then turned to tread water and see a fish's-eye view of the villa, square and white, with a roof of tile. Except for the armed guard it would have blended nicely into any Florida suburb. It wasn't the size or the architecture that made it impressive, but the fact that it was all alone; whoever owned it had a vast and exclusive kingdom of desert and ocean. Two of the Israeli soldiers, holding their weapons, stood on a stone patio overlooking the water. They were shouting and beckoning him in, like lifeguards whistling a teenager out of deep water.

He swam back slowly, relishing the wetness. The tour group was a study in contrasts. The college kids showed firm young meat in bikinis, and they splashed a lot. The old Israeli woman wore a faded oversized housedress and a kapok explorer's helmet. She squatted neck-deep in the water and bobbed dreamily, the way Harry remembered seeing old women do at Coney Island.

Tamar, in a black one-piece bathing suit, was stretched on her back in the surf. He lay near her and put his head on her sleek brown thigh. The sun beat down and the warm water creamed around them. “This trip is almost beginning to make sense.”

“But not quite?”

“Not quite.”

Oved the Guide, hairy as a bear, waded to them, spoiling everything. “This is good, no?”

“Very good. Who owns this place?”

“Once it was Farouk's. When he ran off, their government took it, then
we
took it during the Six Days. It gets very little use now, except for the tours.”

Harry gazed up at the villa through eyes slitted against the sun; no matter where he went, he was being followed by a dead king. He wondered if Farouk ever had brought the Inquisition Diamond here. “Why the sentries? Are we in danger of attack?”

Oved smiled. “A shark watch, this water is full of them. It is, after all, the Red Sea.”

He put all thought of another swim from his mind. The students were collecting shells, some of them handsome, but the prize was snatched from the surf by the old woman without breaking her squat, a glistening piece of brain coral the size of a grapefruit. The only souvenir Harry carried back to the bus was a sunburn. Tamar spread lotion on his shoulders with light, fleshy fingertips that made him horny. The smell of the salve fought the scent of the orange peels as Avi the Driver turned into a rocky side road and the ride became jolting. He was hot and tired, in pain from the sunburn, and marvelously alive.