The Jerusalem Diamond (35 page)

A young American friar let them sample the two kinds of wine, red and white, each dry and good. He was cool and humorous and from Spokane, and he and Harry talked American politics. The monks made a brick cheese, a little like muenster, but yellower. Harry bought four bottles of wine and a piece of cheese so large Tamar groaned.

“What's a nice young Democrat doing in a place like this?”

“I came looking for something.”

“Find it?”

“I think so,” the friar said.

“Lucky. You like it here?”

“All but the winter. Everybody has sore throats, red noses. I almost hung up a sign, Honk If You Love Jesus.”

“Why didn't you?”

“You don't know our prior. I'm not crazy, just a religious fanatic.”

He laughed all the way to the car.

“Where shall we go? Want to drive into the Galilee hills?”

“Harry, I don't think it would have a chance,” she said steadily.

He understood. “Last night you let yourself believe it had a chance.”

“I think I will take you to Rosh Ha'ayin.”

“What's that?”

“It's where my family lives,” she said.

“We can give them wine and cheese,” he said as they drove.

“No, my parents are kosher. If you would like, we can stop for lunch in Petah Tikva and buy them a piece of kosher cheese.”

“I can pick up a good bottle for your father. What does he like to drink?”

“Arak. But my father is an alcoholic,” she said.

When they reached Rosh Ha'ayin she directed him down unpaved streets, past shacky houses. “During World War II it was a British army camp,” she said. “Then it was a
ma'barah
, a temporary camp for Yemenite immigrants. A few years before we got here, the government made the temporary camp a permanent town.”

Harry slowed the car. A little girl, perhaps four years old, sat in the street, her fingers sifting the dust.

“Stop here,” Tamar said. She got out of the car. “Habiba, how are you, my darling?” she said in Hebrew. “Have you been a good girl, my sweet niece?”

The child's nose was running. This didn't bother Harry, but a fly crawled on her cheek toward her left eye. Tamar took a tissue from her purse and wiped her niece's nose, waving off the fly.

“I used to sit right here. I imagine I looked very much like her.”

“Then, Habiba, you're going to be some kind of woman. A lollapalooza,” he said. The child grinned uncertainly, aware he was speaking to her but not understanding the English. The fly came back, or perhaps it was another from the refuse pail of the nearest house.

Tamar took the child by the hand. They led him down the street to a stone house with a tin roof and a garden of peppers and herbs. A fat woman, placing wash on a line, dropped the wet garment she had been about to hang and greeted them with delight.

Tamar introduced her to him as
ya umma
, which was Arabic for “the mother.” He liked that, and her. She ushered them inside and plied them with honeyed millet cakes and sweet coffee, called
quishr
, made with the hulls instead of the beans. She spoke with Tamar in rapid Hebrew while she held the squirming Habiba between her knees and scrubbed at her face with a wet rag. She didn't look at him when they spoke, but he caught her casting quick, sharp glances of inspection when she thought he wasn't aware.

“You have a beautiful granddaughter.”

She thanked him shyly. “She is the child of my youngest child, Yaffa. I care for her while Yaffa works in Petah Tikva.” She glanced at her
daughter. “You will stay for the evening meal and see your father?”

Tamar nodded. “And we shall take Habiba for a walk, so that you may do your work.”

Her mother beamed. “May your lips be kissed.”

She took Harry to the nearby Yarkon River.

They sat on the bank and watched Habiba throwing stones into the turgid water, which was green. He didn't think it much of a river, but she was fond of it. “The second largest river in Israel,” she told him seriously. “Now it is badly polluted with sewage near Tel Aviv. They pipe so much of its water elsewhere, the poor old dear doesn't have enough even to flush itself into the sea. But I used to sit here and watch my brother and sister play. I would think of where the river would go, the people who would drink it, the fields it would irrigate.”

“Were you a happy little girl?”

She watched Habiba. “Yes. I didn't know that females lived differently, elsewhere.”

“Your mother seems happy.”

“No, that is just her manner. Her womb was removed when my sister was born and she is considered unfortunate, with only three children.”

Habiba was going too close to the water's edge to throw her stones. Her aunt called out a warning.

“When we came here,” Tamar said, “there weren't six thousand people. There has been almost no Yemenite immigration since then. Each year a lot of people, men and women, leave this place as I did. Yet there is now a population of nearly thirteen thousand, because each family has so many children.”

“Your sister lives here?”

She nodded. “She and her husband, Shalom, live one street away from my parents. They work at the same sweater factory.”

“And your brother?”

“Ibrahim lives in Dimona. He drives a truck for the Oron phosphate mines.” She hesitated. “You have heard of the Black Panther movement?”

He nodded.

“Ibrahim is a Black Panther. He is probably less happy than all of us.”

“And your father?”

“
Ya abba
?” She smiled and held her warm palm to his cheek. “You will see.”

The father was a Yemenite Gunga Din. His slight body was skinny, with hard-looking little cords of muscle in a dark hide burnt darker by the sun. “I am Yussef Hazani. Welcome to my house in God's name,” he said, probing with his eyes and accepting Harry's outstretched hand as if it had been dipped in an exotic Western poison. He asked Tamar something in rapid Arabic. The only word Harry recognized was
Nasrani
, which he knew meant “Christian.”

“No, he is a Jew,” she said in irritated Hebrew. “From the United States.”

He turned to Harry. “So you too are a Jew.”

“Yes.”

“Then why don't you live here?”

“Because I live there.”

Ya abba
nodded in disgust and went into the next room. They sat and waited while he washed noisily, splashing and blowing.

The arrival of Yaffa and Shalom was a welcome diversion. Yaffa's scream of delight echoed her mother's earlier greeting. As she embraced Tamar, Harry saw that she had about a four-or-five-month belly in a body that was good but ample; the Hazani females ran to sumptuousness. She had fingernails that were two-tone acrylic, red and silver, and a husband with a nervous smile.

Hazani emerged and said the blessing over the bread, signifying the start of the meal, a good one. Harry suspected they were eating the
Shabbat
chicken a few days early, stewed in a sauce he found good but, predictably, too spicy. There was fresh pita and a salad of ripe tomatoes, lettuce and one of his particular weaknesses, avocado in great and plentiful chunks. When he commented on the salad, Hazani nodded.

“From Kibbutz Einat, where I work. I take what we can eat. All we need to grow here in Rosh Ha'ayin are our hot peppers and herbs, things the kibbutz doesn't raise.”

“What do you do at Kibbutz Einat?”

“Whatever needs to be done.”

“The other men say
ya abba
is the best farm worker in Israel,” Yaffa said.

“I didn't know
kibbutzim
hired.”

“Once they did not,” Hazani said. “Today, not enough young people join, so they must pay wages to a few like me.” He held up his fists. “Yooh! I work the soil of the
Eretz!
”

Harry nodded. “That must give you pleasure.”

Hazani smiled scornfully. “Here, we are all Jews. The Arabs would like to kill us, but if they come, Jew will fight alongside Jew. In Teman, when they ran in the streets and killed Jews we sat in our apartment with nothing to eat, shivering behind a barred door. That is what we remember.”

“My father had similar memories.”

Hazani paused. “What country?”

“Germany.”

“Yooh. Another
yecheh
.” He and his elder daughter exchanged cool glances. He turned back to Harry. “Did he fly to America?”

“He took a boat.”

“Hah. We took a boat from Hodeida to Aden. Remember, old woman?”

Ya umma
nodded, smiling.

“We left Sana'a with a camel train bringing coffee to Hodeida. My wife and I walked, carrying our son Ibrahim, who was then a babe. This one,” he said, indicating Yaffa, “was not yet born, she is our sabra. We sat Tamar on a camel's back, where she rode atop a bag of coffee beans that made dents in her little
takhat
.”

The family smiled at one another, obviously hearing a well-worn story. Harry was fascinated. “How long did you walk?”

“One day only. We had trouble. The first time they stopped to pray toward Mecca it was noticed that we didn't kneel. There was much whispering and I was certain we would be killed and robbed. When we came to a town, I bought an armload of
kat
and the drovers fell upon the weed and chewed themselves stupid. Then a truck came along and I paid the driver a
riyal
to take us to Hodeida.”

“You were out of trouble?”

Hazani smiled. “No, no. But at least we were no longer alone, it seemed as if every
Yehudi
in Teman was in Hodeida. The Jewish Agency had said that if we could reach Aden on our own, they would get us to
ha-aretz
. So a number of families pooled their money and we
hired a man with a dhow to sail us down the coast of the Red Sea.”

“Ai,”
ya umma
said. “So many people, such a small boat. The sea made us vomit. We saw sharks. It took fifty-three hours and we ran out of millet gruel. Mothers who had milk in their breasts gave suck to strange children until they were dry. And when we finally got to Aden?” She shook her head. “
Ya fakri fakra
, alas and alack, what a time that was.”

Ya abba
slurped his coffee. “The Jewish Agency people took us in trucks to a big field. There sat a silver monster in the shape of a bird! Who had ever heard of such a thing? They opened a hole in its side and they ordered us to enter. They said it would carry us to the
Land. Fly us!
We almost died of fright.”

“But you got in?” Harry said, by now thoroughly enjoying himself.

“Woe to my eyes, are you mad? I was the most fearful man there. The Jewish Agency people kept urging us to enter. They said Egypt wouldn't allow
Yehudi
on the Suez Canal. If we didn't let the thing fly us, we could never reach
Yisrael
.

“With us was a well-known
mori
, as we Temani call our rabbis. His name was Shmuel and he was a rabbi here for years afterward, dead now, God rest his soul. ‘
Mori
,' we said, ‘what shall we do?' He pulled his beard.” Hazani pulled his own beard, demonstrating.

“ ‘I shall reach
Eretz Yisrael
,' the rabbi said, ‘in the manner which my grandfather, may he rest, often described to me. I shall arrive there in the company of all the
Yehudim
of the world, dancing behind a white ass on which the Messiah rides.'

“Picture it. We stood there in the hot sun, like dolts. Then a man said—an insignificant fellow, a goat dealer, I don't know what became of him—he said, ‘By my name and fame, I shall not be kept from
Eretz Yisrael
by grandfather's tales or by grandmother's. I shall enter this flying thing, by the living Torah. For is it not written that the Holy
Shekhinah
told Mosheh,
Ye have seen what I did unto Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you unto myself
?' And this goat dealer took his weeping, trembling wife and children, and they entered.

“ ‘It is so written,'
ya mori
whispered. And he entered, also.

“Then we all hastened inside, each afraid lest he and his family should be left behind alone. The Jewish Agency people strapped us into
our chairs until all were prisoners. There was a noise such as the Nameless One would make should He choose to roar. The great bowel of the flying thing shook and strained as though, having allowed ourselves to be swallowed, now we were being digested and soon would be shat, together with our howls and our prayers, onto the sunbaked field. The thing moved. It rushed forward. It sprang into the air!

“What can I tell you? In one hour we were looking down on Hodeida, from which it had taken us more than two days to sail. Soon, amidst all manner of crackling sounds, a voice as huge as an angel's told us we were flying over the Wilderness through which our forefathers struggled more than three thousand years ago. Before we could swallow our bile, we had been carried to the Land on the wings of an eagle.”

The faces around the table were content.

Harry looked at Tamar. “What a wonderful way for you to come to Israel.”

Hazani leaned forward. “Let me tell you something, American. Any way is a wonderful way to come to Israel.”

While the women cleared the table, her father lit a
nargillah
. He offered the water pipe to Harry, who shook his head, wondering if the refusal made him a boor. To his relief, Shalom also refused the pipe.

“So what do
you
do?” his host asked.

“I sell jewels.”

“Ah, a salesman. In a store?”

“Sometimes,” he said, amused.

“In Teman, I fashioned jewelry. It is what my family has always done.”

“Why don't you do that now?”

Hazani made a face. “When I came here, the Jewish Agency got me a job. A place in Tel Aviv that makes copper filigrees. Most of the workers there are women. They operate small machines that quickly turn out imitations of Temani jewelry. I told the boss I could make the real thing by hand. He asked why he should pay me to make it the slow way, when the American tourists will buy the poorly made things for good money.