APOLLONIA, ISRAEL
March 1950
One afternoon the car wouldn’t start.
“You don’t know much about cars, do you?” Tamara said, as Arie kicked the tire for the third time.
“I know enough to know I should never have bought this shtuck dreck, this piece of garbage.… It’s something to do with the battery. Or the ignition. Or the carburetor. Or whatever. How should I know?”
“What’s shtuck dreck?”
“Yiddish. You don’t want to know. Let’s get a taxi.”
“Never mind, we don’t have to go.”
“No, you’ll like it. I really want to take you there.”
“But you haven’t said where. And what about the car?”
Arie liked his car. He had bought the 1945 Ford Prefect from a friend who had bought it from a British businessman who left when the British army pulled out in ’48. “It’s a 100E, four-stroke ignition, very fast acceleration,” the friend had told Arie. “Zero to eighty kilometers an hour in less than twenty-six seconds.” Arie loved to put his foot down and feel the thrust, and race other cars. Tamara would grip the sides of her seat and beg him to slow down.
“I’ll fix it later. Or sell it. Right now, I’ve got something much more important to do. Come on. It’s a surprise.” They walked to the phone box two streets away and called for a cab.
In the taxi Arie mused, as usual, about what he should do next. “Cars. That’s the future,” he said. “You know there’s only about thirteen hundred miles of road in all of Israel. We need to build more road and then there’ll be more of everything. More road construction, more cars, more spare parts, more gasoline, more gas stations, more garages, we’re growing so fast it doesn’t matter what you do, everything is growing, you just have to be on board, grow with it. You know what they say, a rising sea lifts all ships.”
“Unless it sinks them.”
He laughed, and almost shouted: “But it won’t. I could make a fortune just importing parts to fix my own car.”
Tamara had never met anybody with so much ambition, with so many ideas. He told her that a week earlier he had visited a poultry farm as workers slaughtered chickens. He watched as they plucked the feathers and threw them into bags. There were piles of them, and when he asked what happened to the feathers the farmer told him they were thrown into a garbage pit somewhere. That made him think of the feather beds he loved in Germany and another business idea was born. He would collect chicken feathers and manufacture luxury pillows and quilts.
And Arie told her that the reason he’d been at the chicken farm in the first place was to find out what the birds ate. He wanted to collect discarded food in towns and sell it as animal feed.
The taxi dropped them at the cliff just north of the Sidna Ali transit camp, or ma’abara, as it was also known. Rows of white tents crowded along hilly dirt paths.
“What are we doing here?” she said. “This is where I live.”
“You’ll see.”
It was a fine sunny day, a relief from the winter chill. She followed him as he picked his way down a ravine lined with bushes and thorns that led to the deserted beach. “I love it here,” he kept saying.
The water was almost as blue as the sky and gentle waves caressed the sand. They took off their shoes and walked along the narrow beach until the way was blocked by jagged sections of ancient brick walls that had crumbled into the sea.
“You know why I love it here so much?” he said.
“Why?”
He dragged his foot through the sand and watched the little gully fill with water. “Because not far from here is where I first set foot on the Holy Land. Four years ago. The boat anchored fifty yards offshore and we waded through the water at night so that the British wouldn’t see us. No lights. There was a British police post up there.” Arie gazed toward the hilltop and then pointed out to sea. “There were about three hundred of us, so-called illegal immigrants, on the tiniest, ricketiest boat you’ve ever seen, she made it all the way from Italy, and we were half-dead when they threw the anchor overboard. They told us not to waste a second and run for it or, rather, swim. The water was almost over my head. Half of us carried the other half. I was carrying an old man, and his suitcase. I didn’t have anything. Luckily, there were Jewish boys waiting to help us; I don’t know if I would have made it otherwise. When I made it to land I almost dropped the old man, I was in such a hurry to kiss the sand. And now this is where I come when I need to be alone.”
Tamara smiled. “But you’re not alone.”
Arie’s eyes shone. “Nor do I want to be. Not anymore.”
He took Tamara’s hand and helped her clamber over the rocks. On the other side he walked slowly, with care, eyes fixed to the ground, but after a minute it was Tamara who called out, “Look what I found.” On one knee she inspected an oblong object in a color she had never seen. It was a transparent sky blue, opaque in part yet smoky too, with delicate ivory streaks, the size of half her thumb and smooth as a ball. It sparkled as she held it up and turned it in the sunlight.
Arie laughed. “That’s what I wanted to find. There are lots of them here sometimes, after storms, and that’s a nice one. Do you know what it is?”
“A stone. It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Ah! Because it isn’t a stone. It’s a piece of glass. More than a thousand years old.” He told her its history: The rock and sections of smashed brick walls piled on the sand were remains of a Byzantine glass foundry that had fallen into the sea when the cliff collapsed a thousand years ago. It had produced glass for most of the Eastern Mediterranean. The foundry’s waste products were dumped into the sea and today, those ancient chunks of discarded glass, smoothed by centuries of currents and sand, polished by the constant battering of the water, lay hidden among the sand and pebbles of the ocean floor. A storm or high seas caused turbulence that freed the shards from the grip of the seabed and washed them to shore.
Arie took the glass gem from Tamara’s hand, wiped it on his shorts, put it to his mouth, and kissed it. “It’s the most beautiful piece of glass I’ve ever seen,” he said, “and it was found by the most beautiful person I’ve ever known. You’re so lucky to find it, but I’m even luckier.” He took Tamara’s hands in his. “Because I found you.”
Tamara lowered her gaze, unsure what to say. She felt the heat of her cheeks. Her bare feet and spread toes sank into the sand as waves sucked back into the sea.
“You know what I would like to do?” he said.
“Yes. Find lots of these, of all sizes and shapes, and make beautiful rings and necklaces and earrings, in settings of silver and gold, and sell them, and get rich quick.”
Arie roared with laughter. The sun glinted in his eyes. “That’s a great idea, maybe I will. Why didn’t I think of that! But, actually, I was thinking of something else.”
With the sheer cliff of Apollonia looming above them, birds hooting and swooping over the waves, Arie sank to one knee and said: “I’ll make it into an engagement ring. I know we haven’t known each other long and this is crazy, but, Tamara, I’m alone and you’re alone, I love you, will you marry me?”