The Legacy (46 page)

And then he walked onto the Temple Mount, facing the golden dome of the Mosque of Omar. The Mount was crowded with people, cheering, shouting, singing, soldiers embracing each other, other soldiers standing in silent prayer, their lips moving, women weeping, old bearded Jews swaying in prayer, children screaming. Sam stood in silence. After a while he realized that he was crying, the tears running freely over the caked blood on his face.

Sam walked from the Old City to his lodgings on Bezalel Street, passing through a city in tears and ecstasy, a city whose population flowed in the other direction, toward the Old City and the Temple Mount. For them it was a beginning; for him it was the end of a part of his life. In the years to come, he would live over the past forty-eight hours, in his dreams and in his waking moments; but now he was strangely quiet within himself, very much at peace with himself. The rooming house he lived in was deserted, a condition he welcomed. That meant the bathroom would be his. He stripped off his pants, shirt, socks, and sneakers, put on a robe, and stuffed the clothes into a paper bag and deposited them in the communal garbage can. Then, with a prayer that the boiler would be working, he filled the tub with hot water, scrubbed himself, saw the water turn rust color from the blood, let it out, filled the tub once more, and soaked himself again. He put on fresh clothes and set out for the Liebermans' home.

Mrs. Lieberman was in the apartment, minding the baby; someone had to stay with the baby; the others had gone to the Old City. How different everything looked today, the street, the house, the living room which was no longer a first aid station!

“Rachel too?” he asked.

“Yes, Rachel too. You're hungry, Shmuel? You'll have something to eat?”

“If you don't mind. I'm starved. I tried to buy some food, but all the shops are closed.”

She fried eggs for him and cut thick slices of bread. As he ate, she sat opposite him, the baby in her arms.

“So we've taken the whole city. Here the war is over, thank God.”

“Yes, the whole city.”

“You were on the Temple Mount?”

“Yes.”

“I'll go later, when they come back. It doesn't seem possible. It's like a dream. How was it? Did many of our boys die?”

“I don't know. I hope not.” Watching her, he thought of the stout Jewish woman on the plane when he was returning to San Francisco for his grandfather's funeral. He tried to remember her name, but he could not. How alike she was to this Mrs. Lieberman, whom he had met two nights ago, and who was now treating him like her own son!

“Did Rachel say where she was going?”

“I suppose to the Temple Mount. She was your sweetheart?”

“We're very fond of each other.”

“But now you're going away, back to America?”

“Yes.”

“It's not my business to ask, but how can you do that? How can you go away now? This is your place. Your Hebrew is better than mine. As hard as I try, I can't speak good Hebrew, but yours is like a Sabra's, and if that lovely girl is your sweetheart —” Embarrassed, she stopped suddenly. The baby in her arms began to cry.

Sam stood up. “I have to go now. Thank you for the lunch. It was very kind of you.”

“I shouldn't have said what I said. It's not my business.”

“You're very kind.” He walked over and kissed her cheek. “Thank you again.” Then he left.

Barbara did a great deal of thinking on her way to the airport to meet Sam. While the war — which would be known as the Six Day War — was still going on, Sam had managed to get through to her on the telephone, easing her worst fears, and then a call from New York told her that he had managed to catch his scheduled flight. She still had no inkling of what he had been through during the Battle of Jerusalem; he had simply told her that he was well and safe, and that the rest of it would have to wait until he returned to San Francisco. Meanwhile, during the first days of the war, when she had no news at all from her son, Barbara had lived through her own time of fear. She had faced the possibility that her son, her only child, might be killed, that the tiny state of Israel might be overrun and destroyed and that the Holocaust might once more repeat itself; and since she had suggested that he remain there to finish his premedical training, her guilts were painful. For all of her tolerance and compassion, Barbara was a white Protestant in the ethnic classification so deeply ingrained in American society. She had been raised in the shadow of Grace Cathedral, in the building of which her family had been deeply involved; and howsoever she struggled with herself, she had never been able to accept a Jew without some small voice within her reminding her that Jews were different. Even her first husband was not simply a man; he was a man who happened to be Jewish, and like so many American intellectuals, she lived and moved and worked in a world where there were a great many Jews. When she was provoked by a Christian, she was only annoyed; when she was provoked by Boyd Kimmelman, there was a small voice easing the word
Jew
into her mind. Years ago, when Sam Goldberg had been her father's lawyer, she had turned to him again and again in her moments of distress. He was a small, overweight man with a thin circlet of white hair around his bald head; he had comforted her and reassured her and helped her; but always, somewhere in her mind, he was classified separately as that lovely, dear little Jewish man.

These thoughts went through her mind as she drove to the airport. She was Barbara Lavette and her son was Samuel Cohen. Had this always been a wedge driven between them? When her house burned down, she had the feeling that she stood naked and utterly bereft in a world that never made much sense. She had been filled with self-pity, telling herself that she lost her son, lost her home, lost the manuscript on which she had labored so tediously. She was a woman of fifty-three years who had nothing, who had lived a life of romantic illusions, who had bloodied herself battering against the walls of prejudice and inhumanity. Seeing herself this way, she had to fight an urge to return to Dr. Albright, yet when Dr. Albright telephoned her to ask what she could do to help, Barbara said flatly, “We need money for our organization. Otherwise, I am fine.” A check arrived a few days later. She had leaped that hurdle, and from that moment, things within herself improved. And in the time of silence during the Six Day War, when there was no news and she had no way of knowing whether her son was alive or dead, she managed once again to come to terms with herself. Even if she never saw her son again, she would go on living; but if she did see him, she would make a new attempt to understand him.

“I suppose,” she told herself on this day, “that I share with most of the human race the need to be of some importance and the suspicion that I am absolutely of no importance. I wanted desperately to be of great importance to one person at least — I suppose because he is of such importance to me. But all that really matters is that he is of importance to me. The rest of it he'll either work out or not.” While this conclusion was not terribly profound, it comforted her.

And then, at long last, she was at the gate and he came off the plane and she saw him. She had not remembered him as being so tall. He was wearing blue jeans, a blue work shirt, and a corduroy jacket, with his bag slung over his shoulder. He was burned brown, his sandy hair bleached by the sun, and Barbara thought to herself, “How beautiful he is, how absolutely beautiful!” Then she was in his arms, and he was telling her that he was all right, that she should not cry, and that he was back to stay.

She didn't confront him with questions. The important things are not easily revealed. All in due time. And he was pleased and delighted with everything he saw, the bay, the dry hills on the way into town, the sailboats scudding before the breeze, the traffic on the highway. He had changed. Something had crumbled his protective walls, and he opened himself to her. At first, it was nothing of consequence. On the plane he had been sitting next to a French girl who spoke no English. “So I began with the French you had taught me when I was a little kid, baby French. It made a great hit with her. No,” in answer to her expression, “I didn't try to date her. I'm taking you to dinner tonight — if I can get into my old city clothes.”

“Sam, your clothes went in the fire.”

“They wouldn't fit me anyway. Then we'll go to Gino's. He'll feed me no matter how I'm dressed.”

“Of course.”

“And you rebuilt the house?”

“Every bit of it. I drove the contractor out of his mind because I insisted that it had to be the same funny Victorian house that had burned down. Sam,” she said, “I am dying to ask you a hundred questions. I don't know where to begin.”

“Then let me begin and we'll get to everything. How's Granny Jean?”

“Seventy-seven, and she's simply beautiful. I don't know how she does it.”

“She's a classy lady. It tells.”

“It broke her heart that I wouldn't let her come to the airport. I wanted you to myself.”

“Absolutely. And you, mom?”

“Up and down. Today's great.”

“You look wonderful.”

“Thank you.” If he had only known that she had spent most of the morning changing clothes, out of one thing and into another, pleading with Jean, “Tell me what to wear. I want to look my best.”

“By the way, where are we staying? Can we sleep in the new house?”

“Darling, the furniture hasn't been delivered. We're staying with mother.”

“In the mansion? Good. I can stand a few days of posh living.”

“I think the house on Green Street was quite posh.”

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “What do you hear from the Napa folk? How's Freddie?”

“I haven't seen him lately, but he had a long article on wine-making in the Sunday
Chronicle.
Very erudite.”

“I can imagine. Freddie's heavy with erudition. We went into a winery in Israel, and Freddie began to lecture them on what they were doing wrong and why their wine was too sweet. I thought they'd throw him out of the place, but Freddie's such an ultimate, self-confident character that they just listened and agreed. Can you imagine?”

“I'm trying to.”

“And May Ling? Has she gotten over Ruby's death?”

“I think so. She practically runs our Mothers for Peace. You know, her mother and father separated.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes. I suppose it's a part of our times. They may get together again, but I haven't much hope.”

They went on talking, and Barbara was amazed at how easily it flowed, but it was not until later that evening, sitting in front of the fire in his grandfather's study in the house on Russian Hill, that Sam told them what had happened during the battle. He left nothing out, but related it simply and directly in what appeared to Barbara to be a sort of catharsis. They didn't interrupt him. Both Barbara and Jean sat transfixed, watching the firelight play over Sam as he told them the story of the forty-eight hours. When he had finished, they sat in silence for a while, and then Jean asked him whether he had been afraid.

“Only once, I think, when this Brazilian kid, who was a student too, was killed.”

“How awful!”

“No — well, yes and no. I had always heard that if you save someone's life, you go into a kind of a high. One of the regular army medics told me it was like the feeling a doper has with a shot of heroin. Maybe yes, maybe no, and I don't really know how many lives I saved. If I saved any. I hope I did, but I don't know for sure. But I do know one thing, that suddenly it all came together. I was right. I had never been right before, not this way, but that night I had the feeling that I knew why I had been put on earth, in all that madness and hate and killing, I still knew that it was right for me, and that night — God, how I loved those people who were working around me, because it made no difference who the man was, a Jordanian or an Israeli, it made no difference in the way we cared for them.”

“And the girl, Rachel?” Jean asked him.

“When I went back to the Liebermans', I was hoping she'd be there. But she had gone. The next day I went to her kibbutz. It was only about fifteen miles from Jerusalem. The funny thing is, I don't really know why I went there. Nothing could have changed. But I felt that I couldn't leave without saying goodby. Well, it was no good. There were only women and children and old men left at the kibbutz. All the others had gone off into the army, and I felt very strange being there. She was kind of cold and aloof, and I could understand that. We didn't even kiss. We shook hands, passed a few words, and then I left. Afterwards, I wondered whether it would have made any difference if I were all Jewish, instead of something that isn't a Jew or a Christian. But that's all right. There has to be an end someday to this dividing the world up into races and religions and nations, all of them with a license to murder anyone who is different, and I guess that I'm sort of thankful that I'm caught somewhere in the middle.”

Fighting to keep back her tears, Barbara said, “It's very late, and you've had a long day, so I think we all ought to go to bed, and tomorrow we can get you some clothes.”

“I'm broke, mom. Dead broke.”

“Do you suppose you could let me worry about that?”

He went to her and kissed her. “All right — for the time being.”

Sally came back to Napa late one afternoon, carrying a small Gucci suitcase and wearing a suit of fawn-colored natural silk. She looked marvelous; indeed, she looked like a movie star. When a movie star enters a room or an airplane or a drugstore, people's attention is focused, possibly because on television the face has been so widely seen, but also because stars walk and move in a way that distinguishes them from everyone else, that tells the watcher that this is a member of the only royalty we have. The star can be stupid, egotistical, frightened, arrogant, schizophrenic, alcoholic, idiotic, even decently bewildered by the fate that has befallen him or her; the star will still have that unique way and manner. Sally had this quality, in spite of the years that had passed since she had been a star. When she walked onto the shuttle plane in Los Angeles that took her to San Francisco, the stewardess recognized it, even though she did not know who Sally was, and gave her the front seat on the right. People pointed to her and whispered. Sally was forty-one, but with stars the passage of years comes easier than with mortal folk. At the Hertz agency, they presumed that she would want a Thunderbird, and while Sally knew exactly how the game was played, she never interfered with it.