A Debt of Love
“The only reason to fight death, to avoid danger, and to prolong life is not in order to achieve something but rather because of a kind of responsibility. A debt of love to those who may benefit from the fact that I am alive.”
—Yael Dayan, My Father, His Daughter
On the eve of her departure, Ruth invited Raymonda to meet Yael at the Philadelphia restaurant, off Salah al-Din Street. In their long friendship, it was usually Raymonda who asked Ruth for a favor. Now it was Ruth’s turn.
An Israeli soldier, in a tank, had been killed in Lebanon, and Ruth wanted her help in getting the remains returned. Raymonda suddenly had political pull because her chosen place of exile was to be Paris, and her daughter Diana had married Ibrahim Souss. Dr. Souss had an open line to Arafat.
Another reason for the lunch was to introduce Yael to Raymonda. Yael had inherited a number of Moshe’s qualities, some good and some bad; what she didn’t pick up from him was greed for land and indifference to nuptial vows. Unlike Udi and Assi, she was a devoted partner and mother. And few people in Israel despised the gun-toting settlers fanning out across the West Bank as much as Yael, who was beginning to emerge from her father’s shadows, becoming his much-improved successor, his missing eye, by assiduously ignoring his swansong about the “sword within reach above your bed.”
What she lacked was real human contact with Palestinians—which Ruth set out to provide.
Raymonda, with the ethos of turn-the-other-cheek drilled into her by the convent sisters, wanted nothing more than to embrace Yael. Yael was far more reluctant, and Ruth had to drag her to the restaurant.
The three sat at a round table with a green tiled surface and clawed iron toes gripping the marble floor. Yael emptied a packet of sugar into her tea. Raymonda studied the clockwise movement of Yael’s writing hand, so strong, her skin perfectly smooth. At first she could hardly speak. There, the woman she had so admired since her early years in Jordanian captivity was dressed simply but elegantly, trim, sparkling with life, and smelling of Allure Sensuelle. Her eyebrows looked plucked in the style of a French fashion magazine, high and noble, and her almond-shaped eyes were bright and smart. It was the clenched jaw that communicated Yael’s ambivalence. Ruth sensed the lack of chemistry between them.
“So,” Yael began. “What should we talk about?”
Raymonda searched for words. “Whatever. You, perhaps.”
“Me?” She tossed back her head, her face looked suddenly as hard as granite. “I’d prefer to talk about you.”
What Yael came out with over a lunch of hummus and grilled lamb, with Ruth biting her nails, was the standard lines about how Arafat was a pathological liar. She was delivering these lines smoothly, without rancor, like a judge reading an indictment. She didn’t mention any specific atrocity, only that Arafat, as a kind of dark wizard, was at fault for driving their peoples into war after war.
Ruth remained silent, not wanting to intervene and unwilling to side with Raymonda against Yael even if that was what her conscience was telling her to do.
Yael’s hand was shaking enough for her sparkling water to spill over the side of the glass. Ruth handed her a cigarette. It wasn’t what Yael said that startled Raymonda most; she had heard it all before a thousand times. It was the unbridgeable chasm that seemed to separate them. It was as if their primordial loyalties and the inability to understand the other’s experiences closed the two off from one another.
At first, unsure how to respond, Raymonda stared into her face and pictured her as an infant with her father rocking her in his arms.
Trying her best to keep her voice calm, Raymonda finally said: “My family was expelled from our lands when I was a child. My father tried to return, and your soldiers nearly killed him because he wanted to go home. And today? We don’t have some ideology telling us we own Tel Aviv. Keep Tel Aviv. Take it.” Raymonda put down the fork and scribbled “Tel Aviv” on a napkin and handed it to her. “We just want the same freedoms you have. We want to be free.”
Yael listened, puffing nervously on her cigarette. “I’m sure I’d feel this way if I were you,” she finally said under her breath, without moving her lips.
Yael was relaxed, sipping arak with the voice of the Umm Kulthum singing in the background. She looked around the restaurant and made a comment about the open, mixed atmosphere of the place, with Arabs and Jews and foreigners sitting in the same place without one group lording over the other. Raymonda, turning to Ruth, asked if she remembered when Umm Kulthum performed at the Alhambra Cinema. The art deco building, the crown jewel of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Jaffa, seated over a thousand people, and no one cared who was Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. “Remember that? Before these idiotic wars turned our beautiful country into a hell.”
Raymonda reached over and held Yael’s hand. Raymonda met her now warm gaze and thought: It’s so easy. Peace takes no more than a human touch.