The Jerusalem Diamond (36 page)

“ ‘Because mine are so beautiful,' I said to him, but he laughed.”

Hazani shrugged. “I didn't like the machines and it was a long ride
by bus. I was happy to get the job at the kibbutz, close by. Their truck picks me up and takes me home.”

“Have you anything here that you've made?”

“Yes. I know where,” Shalom said. He left the room and came back with two pieces of his father-in-law's work, a copper pin and a gold earring.

Harry examined them. “Beautiful.”

“People don't know the difference.”

“Some still do. Some still are willing to pay for craftsmanship. Maybe I can help you find them.”

Behind her father, Tamar shook her head.

“I'll let you know if I hear of anyone,” Harry said.

Hazani nodded cynically.

“I can help sell his things. Why did you turn me off?” he asked her later, in the car.

“Leave him alone, please. He has come to terms with his life. He is healthy, he works in the outdoors. If he started to earn more money he would spend it on arak.”

“If he did the work he likes best, he would be happier.”

“More than his work makes him unhappy. I help.”

He touched her. “How do you make him unhappy?”

“Torah for women is folly.' He used to shout it. He forbade me to leave Rosh Ha'ayin. Once that would have settled it, a father's word was law. I defied him and went to the university. For two years he didn't talk to me.”

“Yes, but now? My God. A museum curator. He must be out of his skull with pride.”

She smiled. “He is well within his skull. In my second year of college he had brief hopes. The nephew of one of his old friends wanted to marry me. Benyamin Sharabi. He owned his own taxi, he was a catch. He used to come to the dormitory with gifts, cactus fruit, a few oranges, a millet roll with hilbeh. Always something to eat. But I drove him away. He married a rabbi's daughter and I thought my father would die. He hated Yoel on sight because he wasn't a Yemenite.”

“That's his problem,” Harry said. “It's not your responsibility to
assuage his prejudices.” He felt helpless. He wanted to comfort her. “Besides, he has two other children.”

“We have all betrayed him. He saw Yaffa stand under the marriage
chupeh
, smirking, with Habiba already inside her. In former times, that would have been her doom and ruin, unspeakable. Now it is already almost forgotten. And his only son? Ibrahim carries signs in protest parades on the
Shabbat
instead of going to the synagogue.” She shook her head. “He doesn't understand what has happened to his life.”

He pulled the car over and turned off the ignition. They were in an industrial outskirt of Tel Aviv, in front of a dingy factory.

“Why did you bring me?”

“I wanted you to see what I am besides a Curator of Acquisitions.”

“I could see what you are.” He looked through the car window at the factory, which seemed to be a plastics plant. He had chosen the wrong place to stop; it was as romantic as industrial New Jersey. “It can work.”

“What of your wife?”

“She won't like it,” he said levelly. “But it won't be a surprise.”

“I'm ready to be married again, Harry.”

“I know.”

“Yes. I'm frightened. I want you to promise that we are free to change our minds. If it happens, the other person must accept such a decision without a fuss. I can't take scenes.”

“God, Tamar … All right. I promise.”

“One other thing. My husband will never have to worry about me. You know. Not for a moment.”

“Neither will a woman who lives with me as my wife.”

She smiled. “May your lips be kissed,” she said, like
ya umma
.

“That's a hell of an idea,” he said.

22

THE GOLAN

That night he lay next to her, listening to her shallow breathing and thinking of his son.

He would have to find another house, he couldn't take her to the big Dutch colonial in Westchester. That was Della's home. Even though he lived in it and Della didn't, Della had chosen the furniture, the drapes. The table silver was her pattern. Even the servants were hers.

A smaller house might be nice.

Or they could travel.

He tossed, sleepless. On the dark ceiling he saw them floating down the Yellow River in a junk, walking the Great Wall, learning about a strange and ancient culture that was foreign to both of them, not just to one.

“Would you like to go to China?” he asked her the next morning.

“Of course.” Her eyes were dark and heavy, but not with passion. She hadn't slept well, either.

“I mean it. I'll take you there if you'll take me someplace cool today.”

They drove north. All the way the heat preceded them. The Golan was pretty but brown. They passed two army camps. Every now and then they met a vehicle, usually military.

It began to be cooler when they reached higher ground. Midway through the Golan, he stopped the car by a hilly field and they ate the picnic lunch she had prepared. It was very quiet except for the birds, and it seemed impossible that this place had known anything but peace. But before they had finished their sandwiches, they heard a shot.

“This road is supposed to be safe,” she said worriedly, but she made no move to gather up their things so neither did he. They sat and finished their meal.

Presently a man moved into their sight, carrying a battered bird gun. His rough shirt was crisscrossed with two belts to which dead partridge were fastened, and he wore a band of smaller birds at his waist. Harry recognized thrush and lark.

“A Druze,” she said. She called out in Arabic, asking the hunter if he wanted refreshment. He refused politely and walked out of sight.

Soon they heard another shot.

“I don't like them to kill the birds,” she said.

“No.”

“Do you know what I mean by quail?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “We have quail.”

“Each August, great flocks of tiny quail fly to the Sinai from Europe. They have always done so, it is described in the Bible. They beat their way across the entire Mediterranean, a long flight for birds of that size. When finally they reach the shore they are exhausted. Around el-Arish, the Arabs spread nets and gather them for slaughter and sale. The birds have fought so hard to survive the ocean, they can't fly from man.”

“Some day there may be no birds left to gather.”

“That has happened already to some species. In Sinai there used to be plenty of ibex—you know, mountain goat? Now they are almost gone, along with the gazelles and the antelopes, they have been hunted out. But in the Negev, where they are protected by Israeli laws, the animal herds are growing.”

“How do you know so much about wildlife?”

“Ze'ev hunts,” she said. She looked at him calmly.

It had always been his curse to be attracted to honest women.

Mount Hermon came into view far away, a white spot on the sky. It grew, until eventually they were near enough to see that the massif had a series of peaks, only one of them still covered with white.

“Let's go to that one, the one with the snow.”

“We can't. It is in Syria,” she said.

At the mountain's base, there were truck-crop fields and orchards, and several villages of Druze and Alaouites. She directed him past them far up the slope, to a
moshav shitufi
, or partnership settlement, called Neve Ativ.

“In the winter there is skiing here,” she told him.

In August it was almost deserted; they were alone in the restaurant where they had coffee and looked out over the rock-strewn mountainside. It was warm, but a breeze with a cold bite came through the open window. “Let's stay the night,” he suggested.

“All right.”

The man who had served the coffee was seated at a table, repairing ski bindings. Harry rented a room from him and took the key, but said they would see it later. “First, we'll walk.”

“Where?” she said, outside.

“Straight up. I want to find snow.”

“It is too late in the summer.”

“Israelis don't know about snow. If you think snow, you get snow.”

They walked up beneath the ski lift. The mountainside had been cleared of rocks for the skiing, and the walking was easy. When they got above the skiing area, it became harder.

The higher they climbed, the stronger the wind blew. There were no trees. Here and there, tiny pockets of soil held a plant or a flower; the rest was bare rock, the mountain's bones with the flesh blown away. In a while they came to a good road and the walking became easy again.

But two soldiers came roaring down to them in a jeep.

“
L'ahn atem holcheem
? Where are you going?” said the man next to the driver.

“To the top,” Harry said.

“That is not allowed, sir. It is a secure military area. Off limits to civilians.”

“Is there snow up there?”

“Only in the sinkholes, where the sun can't melt it.”

“Is there a sinkhole near here, where we are allowed?”

“Over that way.”

“
Todah
”.

The soldier glanced at his companion and grinned. They sat in their jeep and watched the crazy American as he and Tamar walked away.

“What won't they let us see?” Harry asked her.

“Electronic surveillance equipment, I think, but they are protecting us, also. Lebanon and Syria have troops on this mountain. Moslems and Christians are fighting only a few miles away.”

They came to a sinkhole. There was no snow, but near the damp bottom grew a poppy, a single blue flower. He climbed down and picked it for her.

She scarcely looked at it. “I won't leave Israel.”

They started to walk back to Neve Ativ. “I think you'd love America.”

“You know what we call Israelis who leave?
Yordim
. The word means those who make a spiritual descent. That's what it would be for me.”

“We wouldn't have to live in New York. We could travel for a while and work out some plans. We could go to China, as I mentioned this morning.”

“You mentioned it?” She stared at him, mystified.

He told her about the Palace Museum in Peking, the Imperial gem collections. “You could study Chinese art and write about it.”

She shook her head. “You don't know me, I don't want to write anything. We've been like two children who are in love for the first time. We haven't bothered to consider whether we can live together.”

He grasped for victory in defeat. “You're really in love with me?”

She didn't answer. The wind had begun to blow again and was whipping their clothes. He put his arms around her.

“I do love you,” she said shakily. She held on to him. “I love you, Harry!” He heard a terrible gladness in her voice, and a kind of surprise.

If they couldn't go up the mountain, they drove down, to a village called Majdal Shams. They stopped at a farm owned by the most handsome old man Harry had ever seen, a blue-eyed Druze with a straight-nosed, chiseled face; he had thick white hair on which he wore a red fez, and a handlebar mustache.

There was an orchard with two kinds of apples, one red and the other yellow, and a vineyard and pistachio trees. The apples were unfamiliar, rounder and softer than the Macouns and MacIntosh and Delicious that grew on the Westchester place. He tasted one and found it of fair quality. It was too early in the season for excellent apples.

“What are these called?”

“
Hmer
.”

“And these?”

“
Sfer
.”

Tamar smiled. “
Hmer
means red,” she said quietly. “And
sfer
—”

“Yellow?”

“Yes.”

Nailed to the apple house was a tin circle on which an apple of exceptional beauty had been painted as if by Modigliani, exceedingly tall and narrow, butter-yellow with a crimson blush.

“
Turkiyyi
,” the farmer said.

He led them to the rear of his orchard where three trees of the Turkish apples grew, heavy with fruit, a month away from ripeness but already distinctively long in shape. Harry broke off one of the immature apples, hard as green porcelain. He bought a basket of the other apples,
hmer
as well as
sfer
, and a large bunch of grapes, of which the Druze grew yellow only.

They carried the basket back up the mountain to Neve Ativ. Their room in the ski lodge turned out to be clean but unadorned, the walls and floors still giving off the faint smell of new lumber. He put the green Turkish apple and the red Levi stone next to one another on the
window sill, a pleasing composition. Soon they lay on the bed and enjoyed the still life.

“Could you live here?” she said.

“I don't know.”

She lifted her narrow left foot, and he put his right foot under it. “What are you doing?” she asked.