On an early morning at the end of September, the second grade children gathered in the stone courtyard of Yehuda HaNassi’s burial cave. It was the most famous grave in Bet She’arim. Dark green cypress trees framed the park’s manicured lawns. Limestone facades softened the harsh light of the Middle East. And along the road that twisted above the grounds, scattered stones from a synagogue, a few homes, an olive press, and a gate were all that remained of the community Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi, a prince from the line of King David, brought with him out of the cauldron of Jerusalem. 200 C.E.
Isabel Toledo stood at the edge of a large lawn. Yelling and laughing, children ran in all directions. Adults spoke in clusters. Three dogs chased one another, tumbling, barking, growling. Under a wide oak their people sat on a blanket drinking coffee from a silver thermos and watched.
“Ema,” Uri, Isabel’s seven year old son, tugged at her arm. “Do you have the book?”
Every September, a few weeks into the school year, the town held a ceremony presenting its children with their first copy of Genesis. Yehuda HaNassi’s cave was chosen for the occasion because, as head of the Sanhedrin during the Second Kingdom of Israel, he had set himself and his scholars to writing down those parts of the Bible which until that moment in history had been transmitted verbally from teacher to student, father to son. But spoken transmission relied on safety, continuity, face to face instruction. Conditions not guaranteed under Roman rule. So they scribed the oral tradition: insurance for an uncertain future.
“Ema, the book!” Uri pulled at her backpack.
“Yes, of course.” Isabel reached into the backpack and handed him the Genesis textbook. Clutching it tightly, Uri moved through the swarm of eager seven-year-olds to Idit, his teacher, and his book was added to the growing pile beside her.
Isabel’s eyes swept the landscape in what Alon, her ex, mockingly referred to as her preemptive surveillance. He didn’t understand that it was reflexive, that she couldn’t help it, even now at a community event, in this stunning natural venue, during a relatively quiet political period. Beyond the people, beyond the dogs and trees and lawns, Isabel found shadows on the hill, indications of caves and narrow paths in the rock face. She calculated it would take thirteen minutes total from her house to here. Three minutes to put Uri and Woody in the car. Another seven to reach the park. A final three to run from the car to the second tier of caves. Just enough time to slip past the round-up at the end of her street, the roadblocks, the house-to-house searches. Just enough time, barring hesitations and unpredictable delays, since every minute was critical to escape. Unnecessary movements could diminish their chances of survival.
Isabel forced herself to stop calculating. She pulled her eyes away from the hill and its shadows and walked towards Yehuda HaNassi’s burial cave. Parents and children flitted about the stone courtyard in a state of heightened expectation. Soon the ceremony would begin. Isabel spied a felled Doric column at the back and went and sat on it. The cold stone soothed her. Other adults began to gather round.
Isabel stared at the tall arches and low rectangular doors to the entrance of HaNassi’s cave. Soon after they became lovers Zakhi had brought her here. To the park. To the caves. He loved these limestone doors carved to resemble wooden slats, metal bolts, and hinges.
“The common construction material at the start of the Common Era,” Zakhi said. “Watch this.” He moved a heavy stone door back and forth. “Two thousand years later and the hinges are still operable. Impossible to replicate such craftsmanship today.” He grinned proudly as if he were the stonemason responsible for such beauty.
It took time for the assembly of children, parents, grandparents, and teachers to move into the courtyard and calm down. It took time for the ceremony to begin. Isabel sat on the cold stone pillar and realized she had no idea what to expect. Uri had come home the week before with a square of white linen and instructions from Idit: parents were to sew a cover for the Genesis textbook. Isabel had not been asked to do anything like this for her two older children. She flipped through the textbook’s pages. There seemed to be very few changes in the dozen plus years since Lia and Yael were in second grade. The colors seemed brighter, yes, and the reproductions sharper. But God was still God. Not a character exactly, not a myth, nor merely an historical personage. A simple given. Creator and Master of the Universe. The stories of Creation, of Babel, the Flood, of Abraham the first monotheist and his family, all presented matter-of-factly. Faith left off the page. A not unwise policy in their region of fundamentalism and violence.
When Lia, now twenty-three, and Yael, now nineteen, were in second grade, they lived on kibbutz. Jewish holidays were celebrated as agriculture festivals. The girls came home with their Genesis textbooks without fanfare or solemnity, just one of many textbooks to be worked through that year. But now they lived in town, and Uri went to the neighborhood school, and the novelty of this rite of passage—the invitation for seven-year-old children to join the conversation going on among Jews for thousands of years—was compounded for Isabel by not having an Israeli childhood of her own.
She had gone to P.S. 9 in New York. Every morning at nine o’clock sharp the school bell rang. The children rose from their wooden desks and faced the American flag in the corner of the classroom. Following cues piped in through the PA system, they placed their right hands over their hearts, pledged allegiance to the flag and to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Then, too, God wasn’t a subject but a given. And Isabel learned to tell her right hand from her left.
Of course Isabel did as Idit instructed. She sewed the square of white linen into a book jacket. In the middle she embroidered two tablets resembling the ones Moses brought down from the mountain. She chain stitched the numbers one to ten on them in gold thread. In the bottom left corner, she added a small silver candelabrum. And above it, in blue and silver thread, she stitched Uri’s name. All in all the book cover came out better than expected and Uri loved it.
Isabel leaned her head back and took in the thick autumn-blue sky. An early coolness flushed the air. Large clouds drifted overhead. She thought of Zakhi kissing her good-bye the day before. They had stood outside the Winkler house in the neighboring village. Leaning against his truck she saw a large bank of clouds. The first in many months.
“The rains are coming,” she said.
Zakhi turned towards the house under construction. “An early rain’ll be disastrous. We’re far from closing up the house. Stone mason’s holding everything up.”
“Without the stone sills the blind frames can’t be fitted,” Isabel mimicked Zakhi. “Which holds up the plasterer who can’t seal the gaps between the frames and the walls, and then other trades, like dear Zakhi the electrician, can’t come in and finish his work.”
Zakhi laughed out loud.
“Construction’s a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle,” she delivered lines she’d heard him say over the last two years. “Each piece overlaid and built on the other. One contractor’s delinquency,” her voice dropped dramatically, “paralyzes all.”
“You’re good, Isabel Toledo.”
“Good enough to get a job?”
“Career change?”
“Maybe.”
“Jaim Benjamin’s book?”
“Killing me.”
“Softly.” Zakhi leaned into her and kissed her mouth. “Back to the mines.” He turned back to the Winkler house under construction.
And Isabel drove back to her house and her desk. To World War Two. To Jaim Benjamin’s life. To northern Greece. To Nazis. To her fifteenth ghostwrite in twenty years.
“You’re pale, Isabel. I’m worried about you.” Molly squeezed in next to Isabel on the cold Doric column.
“Huh?”
“You. Pale as a ghost. What’s going on?”
“I’m fine, really.”
Molly stared at her. She was Isabel’s best friend and a shrink and knew her as well as anyone. Maybe better. They met years ago through their children. Yael and Molly’s middle son, Yiftach, were in the same junior high and high school class. Now Uri was with Molly’s youngest son, Eden. Their second school cycle together as moms. Molly was originally from Dublin. These two English-speaking immigrants had found each other, to their mutual and great relief.
“Don’t believe you.” Molly continued to stare at her.
Isabel didn’t answer. She was in no mood to be chided. Eventually the second grade teachers gathered their pupils and sat them down in neat groups. Eventually the seven year olds and their families calmed themselves enough for the mayor of the town to address them. And it was his presence—standing before them in his crisp white shirt and maroon tie—that did the trick. Silence in the face of his ultimate authority. The mayor!
Uri kept turning around. Each time Isabel gave him huge smiles. Such a beautiful child. Silky auburn hair, grey almond shaped eyes, and a small upturned nose. Like Alon. With a face like that he could have survived the war. But his skin, pale in winter, tanned easily in summer, like Suri’s, Isabel’s Ukrainian-born mother. And like Lia, her eldest. These two fair children of hers didn’t resemble Isabel or her father’s Toledo clan at all. Only Yael, her middle child, looked like them. Olive skin. Heavy lidded dark eyes. Thick black lashes. A long face defined by high cheek bones and a narrow chin. Iconographic. Like a woman in an El Greco painting. A Jewish woman from Toledo itself. The Jerusalem of Spain.
It took some time for Isabel to understand that Uri kept looking back because he was searching for Alon. Isabel was suddenly self-conscious that she was the only one of their family there. Other children’s parents, grandparents, and siblings had come to celebrate with them. But Lia was in India and was due back in a week, days before her semester began. Yael was in the army, her request to leave base denied. Alon’s parents were dead. As was Dave, Isabel’s father. Suri, the only grandparent, lived in New York and wasn’t due to visit Israel until the following summer. And Alon? Mr. Segev was late as usual.
With every turn of Uri’s head Isabel’s heart stung. Every nod reeked of disappointment. Each held breath an acknowledgment that sometimes things didn’t work out. How to explain to Uri that families were created in good faith. That children were made to be loved, often within the framework of the family. But when the frame broke, and the family dispersed, the child remained there, somehow, still contained within the picture.
The mayor stood next to the cave’s open doors. He cleared his throat and smiled at the children. He caught the eyes of those closest to him. His smile, a straight lined toothy grin, was a cross between Mr. Rogers’s and Mr. Ed’s. American references Isabel would have to explain to her Israeli children and to Molly. All tittering stopped.
“I want to welcome here this morning, all the second grade children of our town, their parents and other family members, their teachers, and school principals. Every year when I come to this ceremony of presenting each child with his or her very first Bible, I am overcome with the power of our connection as a people to this book, to this language, to this land.”
Molly let out a small groan. Isabel put her hand on Molly’s knee. “No political commentary now,” she whispered.
“Everything here is politics. Everything.”
“Molly behave.”
She nodded. She would cooperate.
“We are gathered here today before the burial cave of one of the greatest Jewish minds that ever lived.” The mayor beamed, happy to have such esteemed company in his small town. “Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi. Judah the Prince. He wrote down the oral tradition, the Mishna, in Hebrew that is the model for the Hebrew we speak today. It is my privilege to be a part of this ongoing chain of transmission. And today, when you children receive your own Genesis, you will become part of this chain.
“Good luck in your studies. You are among the millions and billions of stars God promised to Abraham when he said, ‘Look now toward Heaven and count the stars, if you are able to, and He said to him, So shall thy seed be.’ You are children of the future about to embark on the journey of learning the book of our people. I wish you all a fruitful and enriching adventure.”
Tears welled up unexpectedly in Isabel’s eyes when the children filed past their teachers and reached up for their books nestled in white linen. The ancient and the present merged and Isabel remembered that this was one of the reasons she moved here. Isabel looked over at Molly. Despite herself her eyes were damp too. The children smiled widely, proud of their own achievement of reaching second grade, of their entrance into this larger world of the mythical and mighty Sanhedrin and of history. A hand fell on Isabel’s shoulder. Startled she turned and saw Alon. He too wiped tears from his cheeks.
“Since when do you fall for religious-nationalist speeches?” Isabel asked.
“We’re Diaspora. We’re excused.” Molly gave Alon a quick kiss on the cheek.
“But a son-of-a-kibbutz like you?” Isabel grinned.
“I guess you infected me.” Alon grinned back.
“Aba.” Uri ran to them and Alon picked the child up. He kissed his mouth and forehead, held him close. Old new versions of the same face. Uri shoved the book at Alon.
“Just beautiful. Ema sewed the cover?”
Uri nodded yes.
“Apparently not all schools are like the ones on kibbutz,” Isabel said.
Alon shrugged his shoulders. “Greek to me.”
“Did the pony arrive?” Uri asked Alon.
“Yes, a real beauty.”
“I want to see him,” Uri demanded. “You promised I could help train him.”
“Okay then. Let’s just clear it with the boss,” Alon said.
“Uri can go to kibbutz,” Isabel said. Hours of work waited at her desk. Better to have the child occupied. “But have him back by six, okay.” She glanced at her watch.
“No problem. Let’s do it.” Alon slid the boy to the ground.
Isabel bent down on one knee to kiss Uri. “Congratulations, my big boy. I’m very proud of you. Now you can teach me to read the Bible in Hebrew. Your sisters didn’t have the patience.”
“I will, Ema, I promise.” He hugged her tightly around the neck. Gave her a long serious kiss on the cheek.
“Thank you, love.” They walked towards the parking lot. The dogs rested in the shade. Their people sat on a blanket and ate sandwiches. Isabel thought of Jaim Benjamin trekking through the hills bordering Yugoslavia. 1943. The burning in his chest for his mother who sent him into the mountains sure that the people there would give him refuge. She put bread, olives, water, a few photographs, and her wedding ring into a large shawl and ordered him to walk and not look back. A few days later Florina’s few hundred Jews were sent to death camps in Poland.
Alon and Uri got into Alon’s truck. Isabel waved good-bye and waited by her car. Molly and Eden drove by.
“Going home?” Molly asked, slowing the car down.
“Sure.”
“You need a rest, darling.”
Isabel looked up at the sky. A cloud with a hole in its middle like an open eye drifted along the blue dome. Storks flew toward Africa in a rolling V. Isabel took a notepad from her bag. Do storks winter in Madagascar?
Isabel didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to be inside Jaim Benjamin’s life. She was tired of the war. The terror. The losses. The haunting. Weeks ago she admitted to Emanuel that a skulking trepidation had taken over her work days. Even some of her nights. She regretted her words as soon as she spoke.
“Time to stop, Izzie,” Emanuel said. He was a mathematician. And the official boyfriend. “I calculate you’ve been in this Holocaust business too long.”
“Yeah, but someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to push silence around.” Isabel fumed. Emanuel’s words reminded her of Alon who discouraged ghosting from the get go. And Alon’s words reminded her of Dave who throughout high school and college told her to leave the past alone. Look to the future Isabel, Dave would say to her whenever she tried to talk to him about European history, the past is a greedy storm.
Isabel knew that Emanuel was not Dave and that he truly had her best interests at heart. From the first time she met him at an exhibition opening in town four years earlier, she had sensed that here was a man strong enough to be kind. He had delicate handsome features and soft grey curls down to his neck. An academic with a bit of the bohemian about him. And she had said yes at the end of the evening when he asked if he could see her again. But lately he had begun pointing out things that were not part of the script of their relationship: that they should travel more for pleasure; that they should drink less wine; that they should move in together; that she should stop ghosting or at least take a break from it. It was alarming how often he returned to these last two points. Because even after four years of intimacy, Isabel didn’t want them to live together. And she didn’t want to stop ghosting, though she suspected Emanuel was not entirely wrong on this one. Twenty years of slipping into survivors’ lives, a warm body between cold sheets, was taking its toll on her. And that mortified her. How dare she complain of hardship? The dead and the survivors were owed too much.
Isabel looked around Bet She’arim and felt it was too beautiful a day to leave the park for the darkness of her desk. She had a sudden yen for Zakhi and a short reprieve before returning to German-occupied Greece. Zakhi had just come back from Thailand and Isabel couldn’t get enough of him. She had missed him and suddenly, out of nowhere, the fourteen-year age gap between them taunted her. Suddenly their relationship was all risk with no safety net. She never used to think about Zakhi and other, younger women. She just enjoyed their time together. But now she needed him more. He had become a ballast to her life on the seam of then and now. The dead and near dead. The living and the walking wounded. The loops of memory. He was also the playmate that helped her buck the staid safety of Emanuel.
Isabel stepped away from the parking lot and back across the large green lawn. She stopped by the playing dogs and called Zakhi.
“You free now?”
“Fortune shines upon us, Isabel Toledo,” Zakhi answered. “I’m leaving the building supply store in town and can be in the park in five.”
She waited on a wood bench by the Cave of the Coffins, next court over from Yehudah HaNassi’s, and debated whether to tell Zakhi about the gas station attendant the day before who ordered her to move to the right. In German. And when Isabel didn’t budge, he screamed at her, amplifying her terror and paralysis. Then suddenly his shouting was Hebrew and she drove the car to the adjacent aisle of pumps. She could share this with Zakhi because he would never tell her to stop ghosting. Zakhi understood her commitment. He was haunted too.
Zakhi’s truck pulled into the parking lot. From the bench, Isabel watched him step out. He glanced at his cell phone, slid it into the back pocket of his low riding jeans, and turned towards the lawn. Long strides in heavy boots. He also looked up at the hill. Like her. He watched the dogs chase each other among the oak trees. His gait was purposeful. His hips pumped forward. The man exuded sex.
He found her easily enough. The park had emptied since the ceremony. They didn’t talk. Not even hello. When he held out his large calloused hand she took it and he pulled her to her feet and hugged her tightly.
“I missed you,” he said.
It had only been twenty-four hours. Isabel smiled and took a deep breath of the smell of his neck. Holding hands they walked to the Cave of Coffins and bent low to pass through the short narrow door. The bright September morning did not give way easily to the cool dimness inside and it took their eyes a few moments to adjust. Silently they continued down the cave’s long-spined corridor and passed shadowed niches filled with stone sarcophagi. At the corridor’s end they entered a large tall space and stood close, shoulders touching. Isabel finally spoke.
“I love those chisel scores.” She raised her chin towards the pockmarked walls and looked up at the high ceiling.
“All carved out by hand.” Zakhi walked around the large alcove, taking in details and dimensions. “Somebody important was buried here.”
Isabel leaned against the damp wall. She could literally spend days watching this man move.
“Function follows form,” he said. “The builders simply and ingeniously enlarged the natural limestone bays.”
“When you were in Thailand, I came here a lot. It’s cool . . . relief from the heat . . . from my work.” She stopped herself but wanted to tell him so badly. Zakhi wouldn’t judge her like Emanuel and Suri. Even Lia gave her odd looks when they Skyped. All the way from India.
But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, talk now. What if Thailand had made Zakhi change his mind about the war, about her ghosting, about her? People went through changes when they travelled. They had insights. New perspectives. She wouldn’t say a word. She couldn’t afford to hear Emanuel’s-Alon’s-Dave’s words come out of Zakhi’s mouth.
“You came with Woody I assume.” He stopped near her and then walked round the cave again. “We’re really deep inside the hill, right?” Zakhi stopped and stared at her. “You know how much I like being deep inside,” and flashed her a mischievous sexy grin. Isabel laughed greedily, adoring his foreplay. He went and stood next to an ancient seven-branched bas relief candelabrum carved on the back wall, sizing it up.
“Looks like a modern interpretation of primitive art, no?”
“Yes,” Isabel said, paying closer attention to the plain blocky candelabrum. It stood out as different among the highly ornamented sarcophagi. Yet here it was. A man-size marker indicating that the bones buried in this hillside belonged to the children of Israel.
“Impressive.” Zakhi made his way back to her, coursing casually in and out of a loud pool of Spanish tourists that suddenly filled the space. “Wonder what their overrun costs were?”
Isabel laughed again and took Zakhi’s hand. They walked back down the corridor and through each one of the many ante chambers. At seventy-five meters square, the Cave of the Coffins was by far the largest in the necropolis.
“This coffin belongs to Kyra Mega, wife of Rabbi Joshua, son of Levi Shalom.” Isabel used her cellphone flashlight to read the inscription. “And that one, Yudan, son of Rabbi Hillel. Look here, the goddess Nike,” she flashed the light on a winged female creature carved on a large coffin in the corner.
“Victory is at hand.” Zakhi drew her into a large dark niche with haphazardly stacked coffins.
“The archaeologists haven’t made order in here yet,” Isabel said.
“Perfect.”
Zakhi led her towards the back. A small rectangle cut high into the wall let in a thin cone of natural light.
“All these bas reliefs—bulls, lions, crocodiles, cows, eagles, even Aphrodite there, proof, look.” Isabel pointed here and there. “Jews have always been transnational.”
Zakhi pulled her to him. Kissed and licked her lips. She had missed this, missed him. Two months without his touch, without his eyes, without his laughter, and his smile. He moved them deeper into the hollow, screening them behind the last row of coffins and lifted her legs around his waist. When he slid his hands under her dress, he let out a long low whistle.
“Ready for action.” His lips pressed against hers and ran his hands over her naked buttocks. “Just how I like it,” he whispered into her mouth.
Like a cat going up a tree Isabel’s legs wrapped around Zakhi. He undid his jeans, took hold of some of her weight, and when he entered her, her moan reverberated against the many surfaces of stone. She moved her hands from Zakhi’s neck and pushed back against the cool stone of the coffin. Along the cover’s decorative edge her fingers read aleph—א—chet—ח. Zakhi pitched into her and she stopped reaching for script. His physical power, his gentility and wildness, lured her to stillness. His tradesman hands that jack hammered concrete block walls, laid cable, spliced wires, and worked with live current unseamed her. Zakhi moved back and forth watching her buckle and whimper. When they were done, they held on to each other quietly. Isabel’s fingers read the stone again. Aleph, chet, yod, nuun, ayin, mem. אחינעם. The resting place of Achinoam.
Zakhi kissed Isabel long and hard on her open lips. With one hand he held her spent body. With the other he stroked her calves, thighs, calling her skin to life.
“I really missed you,” he said. “Under the palm trees, in hammocks, over cocktails, my dear, I thought of Isabel hunched over her keyboard day after day.”
She smiled. Pulled him closer.
“But maybe it’s time to stop.”
Her heart dropped to her stomach. Here it was. Finally. The break-up that was written into the script from the first time they met.
“Seriously. A few months in Thailand, a rest from work, would do you a world of good.”
She was relieved but also annoyed. Why did everyone want her to stop writing? “When Uri’s done with the army, I’ll be free. For now I’m here.”
Zakhi slackened his hold and slowly her legs slipped to the ground. He slapped her backside lightly. Her dress fell back into place. He sat down on the coffin.
“Isn’t it sacrilegious to have sex in a graveyard? Here’s a righteous perfumer. And there, rabbis, their families, their virgin daughters and nieces.”
Isabel scanned Zakhi’s face. A refugee from a religious family, were the teachings of his fathers’ peeking through? Was he mocking them or paying homage? Zakhi lived like a heathen but cited Scripture like other men cite sports.
“First, Zakhi Kandel, dearest.” Isabel’s finger traced the sharp outline of his handsome sun browned face, “no one’s buried here right now. No righteous perfumers. No virgin daughters. Them bones been removed hundreds of years ago. Second, I like sex in graveyards. Peaceful in a compressed kind of way. And third, in case any souls are hovering around, then we’re providing a bit of entertainment. Think of it as a mitzvah.”
She inclined toward Zakhi—her friend and lover—found his mouth, pulled him up from sitting towards her. She pressed herself full length against him. “Again,” she murmured and stroked his smooth shaven head. She wanted to lose herself. “Again,” she hummed knowing she should be working. The book’s deadline’s fast upon her. But she sought sanctuary in the park. In Zakhi’s strong hands. In the wide chest she had missed. In the gravelly voice that told her about construction projects, books, and the latest government insanity.
While he was away, she had suffered his absence silently. Afraid to admit to herself how much and not able to share it with Molly who didn’t want to hear about Zakhi. Molly wanted Isabel to grow up, was how she so tactfully put it, and move in with Emanuel. On those rare occasions when Isabel did mention Zakhi, Molly reminded her that fourteen years separated them. Nearly one life cycle apart. Isabel was forty-seven with three children. Zakhi was thirty-three and had it all ahead of him: falling in love, building a life with a chosen mate, making all the usual mistakes one makes in marriage, and gaining all the usual miracles associated with children and—unless or until it fell apart—domestic peace. As if Isabel didn’t know all this. As if she weren’t terrified of this attachment.
Isabel lifted Zakhi’s loose cotton shirt and ran her fingertips lightly over his mocha-soft skin. She adored his skin. The first time they lay naked together, two years ago, she couldn’t stop stroking him. She asked if he were Yemenite or Sephardi, like the Toledos. But he said no. His family were Dark Russians from the Pale of Settlement.
“Again,” Isabel hummed a third time. A little louder, just a little more, just a little longer. In the cave’s dimness, in the screened recess behind the coffins, she placed his hands on her breasts. Their recreation a balm to her turbulence. Zakhi lifted Isabel up against the coffin. She wrapped her legs around him, again, closed her eyes, and whispered, “Help me drive away the ghosts.”
Isabel drove quickly from Bet She’arim to her house on the other side of town. Foot hard on the gas even on the narrow turns. Now that the school ceremony was over, now that she had been with Zakhi, she had no excuse not to get back to work. Joseph Schine’s deadline heckled her: Pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages.
Fields of sunflowers spiked up on one side of the winding road. Dancing cypresses on the other. This landscape of soft hills, modest groves of oak and olive trees, a passing goat herd and shepherd, looked like Provence. Same colors, same textures. Yet when suddenly the earth and skies reverberated with lightening grey metal, the mechanical thunder of F-16s and low flying helicopters ferrying wounded soldiers to Haifa, then one knew, despite the silver greens of trees, the blue brilliant sky sheltering Jewish and Bedouin villages, the goats, shepherds, the teenagers on horses, the short hills running toward the Carmel mountain range and on to the sea, that this was not Provence but the State of Israel going to battle once again.
Isabel pulled into her driveway and dashed into the house. She gave Woody a quick pat on the belly and beelined straight to the desk without looking right or left. If she paused for one second, she might never make it. Pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages. Schine’s refrain towed her to the computer. Owner, chief editor, art coordinator, public relations manager, and sole distributor of Schine Publishing, a publication house dedicated to Holocaust testimonials, Schine squeezed her like a constrictor. His thick Polish accent, like Suri’s, like her aunts Zizi and Lola, jammed the New York-Galilee line, book after book, year after year. He insisted she comply with his draconian production schedule. Six to eight months from survivor interview to completed manuscript. No flexibility or frills. And she complied. Laid herself down on Schine’s conveyor belt.
“Why?” Emanuel asked.
“Why?” Lia asked.
“I think it’s perfectly awful,” Suri the survivor weighed in time and again. Suri had been against this work from the very beginning. “Live life, Isabel. Use your imagination to create new worlds, ones with beauty and love and adventure.”
Luckily Dave was already dead when she began ghosting or she was sure to have been subject to the usual speech: “Why European history? The past is a greedy storm Isabel.” He would frown as he spoke, intent on displaying disappointment. “Why not computers? Be part of the cutting edge, part of the future.” He would bob his head as if to push towards the future.
“Let the dead rest. Let the pain settle.” Suri’s mouth tightened and turned away when Isabel talked about her books. Through her silence she said again and again that her own life story would not be shared nor written down.
But Isabel had no rest. Once she wrote Rosa Levi’s life she was hooked. She and Alon and the girls lived on kibbutz then and Rosa talked to her. About the war. About the Jews. About her life. Finally someone willing to talk and, like a restorative torrent, her words became the powerful antidote to Suri’s stifling muteness. Finally answers to questions. Finally details, descriptions, tears. After that there was no stopping her.
Isabel opened the computer. She was behind schedule, which was totally unusual for her. All of the previous books she had written for Schine were produced and delivered on time. But not this one. Not this time. Which is why she hadn’t answered Schine’s badgering calls all week. Years ago she gave up telling him to stop calling her all the time, that his anxiety and pressure didn’t help the process. He had to trust she’d meet the deadline. And she had for fourteen books over the past twenty years. But the word relax was not in Schine’s vocabulary. He treated every manuscript like it was the last boat out of Europe.
Isabel had sat with Jaim in April in New York. Now it was the beginning of October. Seventy-five percent should have been done by now but only the first third was. She told Schine two weeks ago that she was winding up the second third. She lied. No choice. She scrolled down through the pages. Scanned the sentences. Jaim Benjamin on a scrubby hill walked a herd of twenty goats back down to the village. The sun was setting. The goats moved slowly. Bellies full. Ready to lie down for the night. The pen was enclosed with wood slats. It was covered in tin. Large dogs slept with them. Wolves and raptors hunted at night.
Jaim washed his face, arms, and chest from a large bucket near the well. Inside the small house, the Ivanovs, the elderly couple whose family has known his for generations, waited for him. The Jews of Florina came from Spain following the Expulsion in 1492. They lived peacefully and well among their Christian neighbors. They sold fabrics and charuji shoes. Jaim Benjamin and Isabel laughed how from Spain to Florina to Lodz to New York, Jews were forever in the garment business.
Olives, hard cheese, flat bread waited on the table. A noise startled the animals in the hutch. The dogs growled. Jaim rose from his chair to see what or who might be disturbing them. The old man gestured for him to stay and went out by himself. Nazi beasts, men and dogs, patrolled the hamlets at night. It was too risky for Jaim to talk to them. He looked like a mountain peasant after six months of hard labor and simple living but didn’t sound like one.
When Jaim recalled this moment, Isabel told him that she too lived near goats and passed them on her nightly walk with Woody. To her they looked like old Jewish men.
“The old Jewish men you have in mind are from Eastern European shtetls. Old Jewish men from Greece look different. We are Sephardi, you know. Darker, broader, in face and body. We look like you look, Isabel, like your father and grandfather probably looked. It’s a shame you know so little about our history.” Jaim Benjamin dared her to venture into this other dimension of her past. To venture into her father’s story. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. And she basically didn’t want to. Dave Toledo was and would remain on the margins on her life.
And remembering this chat, Isabel pushed away from the desk and went into the kitchen to start cooking. Yael would be home in two days. The fridge needed to be stocked. Isabel knew they fed the soldiers on base, but watching Yael eat, you’d think they didn’t. She put up a pot of basmati rice. She roasted red peppers and eggplants. She sifted through orange lentils for a soup. She soaked cannellini and kidney beans in water. On Friday she would put them in a slow cooker with onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, and bulgur. A vegetarian hamin, or cholent as Suri called it, for Saturday’s lunch. She felt better and decided to call Lia in India. It had been a week since they spoke and she missed her terribly. When they tried to reach her the night before—Uri wanted to talk to her before the Genesis ceremony—the call didn’t go through. Not unusual. Plenty of places in the world didn’t have good reception. And now again Lia’s phone rang and rang and rang.
Isabel made herself a cold coffee and went to sit on the porch swing. Tomorrow morning she would make up for today’s delinquency by waking up extra early and planting herself by the desk. She was behind, true, but she would catch up. She needed a good run of typing to make the deadline. It wasn’t clear to her why after so many books it was this one, Jaim’s life in Greece during the war, with no actual scenes of ghettos, aktions, transports, or camps, that was hardest for her. Maybe she was just tired. Too many lives. Too much atrocity. Maybe it was the shared Spanish heritage or the link Jaim Benjamin made between the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Emanuel said Jaim Benjamin’s book was going slowly because of Dave.
“And you don’t want to go there.”
“You’re a mathematician, not a shrink,” Isabel countered when Emanuel offered this interpretation.
“Still, it all adds up,” he said gently but with conviction.
Emanuel might be right. But Isabel didn’t want to admit it. Dave was long gone. So was the pain of his bitter absence from her childhood and from Suri’s life. When it came to Dave Isabel agreed with Suri. Gone was gone. Let the dead rest.
Isabel drank some coffee and opened the tablet to read the news. When she read and then reread the headline all wind was sucked out of her. Bomb found on tracks in Himachal Pradesh. She read out loud to understand better. Mountain Railways of India. En route to Chandigarh. One bomb went off before train crossed. Second bomb detonated by Bomb Disposal Squad. Her guts ran cold and she continued reading: It is not yet known how many injured from sudden halt in service.
She started heaving. Her heart hurt. Lia was there. She said she wanted to see Le Corbusier’s urban design. That explained the unanswered phone. Maybe there were hostages. It was just a matter of time before Jews were separated from the others. Then the Israelis from the Jews. Terrorists would negotiate for their lives. Or kill them off one by one after rape and mutilation to send the world a message. Isabel clutched her stomach. She staggered to the lawn.
“No,” she cried to the tall trees in the yard. “No, not Lia.” She rushed from one end of the property to another. An alarmed Woody stayed close to her heels. How could this be happening?
“No, no, no!” she wailed out loud. “I told her to stay home and rest. She works so hard. What is she looking for in India?” Isabel screamed at the yawning blue sky. It was so beautiful she hated it. She wouldn’t live if something happened to one of her children. Dread rippled through her and she collapsed near the pomegranate tree.
The phone rang. Isabel pulled it out from her pocket. And listened.
“Isabel?” Suri asked. “Isabel is that you?”
“What?”
“Honey, are you crying?”
“What?”
“What what? What’s going on?”
“Lia!”
“Lia?”
“Lia’s on the train with the bomb . . . Suri . . . I can’t . . .”
“Isabel, Isabel, listen to me.” Suri was stern. “Stop all this right now. Lia’s in an ashram. Not on a train.”
Isabel fought to breathe evenly. Really?
“Honey, Lia’s in an ashram in Kerala.” Suri repeated herself slowly. Softly.
“How do you know?”
“Because I spoke to her a few days ago. She called to wish me a happy birthday. She knew she wouldn’t be able to call me from the ashram on my birthday. Such a thoughtful person.”
“Lia’s in an ashram?”
“Yes, in Kerala.”
“In an ashram in Kerala? You sure?” Isabel started to laugh and cry at the same time. “I can’t believe . . .”
“Isabel, sweetheart, you don’t sound well. And not just now. Lately. I don’t want to talk about your work, you know my thoughts about that, but you need a vacation. When Lia comes back from India, you and Emanuel should go away. Just the two of you. To rest. To sightsee. To spoil one another. Like your father and I used to.”
Isabel wiped her eyes and nose on her arm. Yes, she thought, just like that bi-annual charade of closeness. That was exactly the kind of relationship she wished for herself.
“Lia’s in an ashram in Kerala?” she cried with joy. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. Yes. Are you better now?”
“I don’t know what came over me.” Isabel stood and pulled her shoulders back. “You’re right. Lia told me she was going to Kerala, but I forgot. I can’t keep track of her plans. I can’t believe I worried so much.”
“Shh. I love you. Is Uri there?”
“He’s with Alon . . . wait, here he is, coming through the front door.”
And as Uri chatted on the phone with his grandmother in New York, Isabel washed her face and straightened out her clothing. She made a quick salad for supper. After hearing all about the pony, she put Uri in the bath, then bed, then joined him under the covers to read his favorite new chapter book. He had made the blanket into a tent and held the book in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She opened the book to where they had left off the night before.
“We’re in a cave, Ema. Like Bet She’arim.” Uri turned the flashlight to his face when he spoke. Then turned it on her abruptly as if it were a microphone and this an interview. Her turn to talk.
“A cave?”
“Yes.” He turned the light on his face. “And we’re hiding from the enemy.”
“Uri, let’s read the book.” Terror rekindled in her. She was in a cave with a child or two or even three. Protecting them. Praying they’d be quiet. Patrols outside. Dogs sniffing them out. She felt suffocated.
“Ema?” he shined the flashlight on her face again and stared at her.
“I don’t feel well.” Isabel pulled the blanket off and breathed deeply into the dark room. “I need a minute.” She left the bed and went into the bathroom to drink.
When she returned Uri lay on his side, facing the wall, spooning with Woody, the blanket pulled up to his neck. She had ruined it for him. She lay down behind him and stretched her arm over him and the dog. “Do you want me to tell you a story from when I was little?”
He shook his head yes.
“There’s a place in the middle of New York called Rockefeller Center. And in the winter, my father, your grandfather Dave, liked to go ice skating there. I liked it too, though Grandma Suri didn’t. She said she couldn’t get the hang of the skates and waited for us in a restaurant nearby, or sometimes she didn’t come at all. Special time for me and my father. Do you remember we went there last summer?”
Uri nodded slightly.
“Well, I had an ice skating outfit. A jacket and short skirt made from black velvet and custom white boots. I think Dave thought I’d be some fancy figure skater or something. But I fell all the time and made holes in my stockings.” She laughed softly. Pulled in tighter to Uri and Woody. “Do you remember there’s an enormous gold statue there, against one of the walls? Prometheus bringing fire to . . .”
She didn’t know how long her phone rang, but suddenly she heard it, tumbled out of bed and staggered to her bedroom to answer.
“I’m outside,” Emanuel said. Judging by his tone he had been there awhile.
“Sorry, I fell asleep.” Isabel shuffled to the door. “I’m really sorry, it’s been a rough day . . .” She opened it for him.
Emanuel also looked tired but smiled. “If I had a key I wouldn’t need to wake you up, Issie. I’d just join you in bed.”
“Please don’t start now.”
“Fine.”
The year they built their house in town Isabel and Alon’s marriage fell apart but Isabel was too busy falling in love with concrete to notice. On pour days she waited anxiously for the mixers to arrive and Alon acted like a jilted lover. He didn’t know why she spent so much time on the construction site and complained she neglected the family. He didn’t understand why she refused to change her last name from Toledo to Segev. All the other women he knew took their husbands’ names. He claimed this was another sign she never really cared for him. Isabel waved his complaints away. Alon had stopped understanding her. She had explained to him many times why a woman would choose not to give up her birth family’s name and become subsumed in her husband’s tribe. Then he complained bitterly about the ghosting. But when she discovered the magic of construction, he lost all hope of ever being a dominant player in her life again.
And funnily enough it was this unexpected passion that cemented her relationship with Zakhi. He understood her love of concrete and always invited her to witness pour days on his construction sites. A week after the Genesis ceremony, Isabel dropped Uri off at school and drove to the Winkler site. It was a pour day. She turned into the village. The Winkler plot, on a hillock at the end of a lane of new homes, had a dramatic view of shifting grades of field and mountain. Isabel drove into the pastoral beauty when suddenly dogs exploded on either side of her car. They barked frantically. They bared their teeth. They dared her to touch them. “When you get to the gate you’ll have to run . . .” Every time Isabel entered the village she knew it was coming and every time the dogs took her by surprise. And terrified her. “And the furies kept on screaming, Schneller! Schneller!” Isabel pressed down on the gas and horn simultaneously. Nonplussed, the dogs flanked her tires and bumpers. When the car squealed to a halt on the gravel of the Winkler property, they stopped too, high from the chase. Not even waiting for her to cut the engine, they made sharp U-turns and were back in their driveways, panting, sated, waiting for the next car.
Isabel closed her eyes. She placed her forehead against the steering wheel. It wasn’t just the dogs’ fierceness that troubled her. But her own. Every time she ran the gauntlet she craved hitting back. A small leg caught under a heavy tire. A rump clipped by the front fender. She controlled herself but also hated herself for wanting to hurt them.
She sat in her car a moment longer to compose herself. Zakhi’s truck was there. So was Moshe’s, the plasterer. Since Isabel had been visiting Zakhi on sites for two years she knew some of the contractors he worked with regularly. She got out of her car and walked to the western and southern facades of the house. The scaffolding was in place and the naked concrete block walls were being dressed in their grey petticoat. From color samples on the wall, Isabel could see that after the grey a soft yellow exterior plaster would be applied. The dress. Slowly she walked back towards a large opening that would eventually be the front door but stopped when he heard Zakhi shouting.
“I don’t care who’s dying this week. Nothing’s completed. Nothing. What’s installed needs going over. I haven’t approved one piece of stone you’ve laid.” Silence. Obviously Sucrat the stone mason was defending himself.
Zakhi walked out of the house holding his phone. His scowl became a smile when he saw Isabel. He came towards her and together they looked towards the road, waiting for the concrete mixers. Isabel was nervous. And excited. Zakhi got a call and walked away to take it. He was a gentleman and never yelled at his contractors near her. When he came back he handed her a cell phone. “Call the concrete company for me, dear. Let’s make sure they show up today. If not, I’m going to totally lose it.”
Isabel took the phone and dialed the number. The phone rang on the other end. She never remembered seeing Zakhi so unnerved. Maybe it was because he was not only the electrician but project manager, supervising construction from excavation to carpentry. Maybe it was too much for him. He was so easy going when he was only responsible for the electrical work. Or maybe another woman was playing with his heart.
The ringing continued. Isabel closed the line and pressed redial with more force than was necessary. Zakhi’s antagonism was contagious. In the momentary quiet between each ring, indignation snapped through her. She closed the line again. Pressed redial. How could a concrete company’s office not answer at eight in the morning? Day light hours were critical. Morning hours even more so. It was not summer but the days were still warm. Dehydration compromised concrete’s strength. Zakhi would be watering the newly poured surfaces at regular intervals over the next few days, slowing the curing process.
Isabel closed the phone line. Each time she pressed redial, her nerves surged. She wanted nothing more than to throw the phone to the ground. To stomp on it. And then she saw them. Large and serene like elephants, two concrete mixers rolled noisily down the narrow village lane. The ground rumbled under their weight. Their fat elliptical drums turned round and round, keeping the aggregate mixed and moist. They were so large and so imposing that even the dogs knew better than to give chase. They stood in their driveways to stake out their territory, but were rooted in place. Zakhi came to stand by her. Isabel purred with excitement. The masonry crew stepped forward to meet the mixers.
After twenty minutes of prep, concrete began to flow from the drums. A metal pipe held high by a brontosaurus-like crane swallowed it and channeled it to a thick rubber hose. Isabel rocked with anticipation. The head of the crew seized the hose and used all the weight and force of his body to control the heavy surge of grey lava that rushed out of the bucking black hose.
“A beast,” Isabel said, awed yet again by the power and rush of the concrete.
The workers used long metal rakes to spread the concrete evenly throughout the wooden forms on the ground. These were the outdoor walkways circumventing the house. The second concrete mixer pulled up. The crew filled vertical columns and horizontal slabs for a small cottage at the edge of the yard. The concrete would harden in a few hours. Enough to step on within twenty-four.
“Tohu vivohu,” Isabel said rapturously to a distracted Zakhi. What was he thinking about so intently? “The primordial matter of Genesis. Swirling chaos. Fast flowing matter dividing into form.”
Zakhi smiled at her, not moved at this moment by the poetry or her passion. His phone rang. He moved out of earshot.
When Lia and Yael studied the Book of Exodus in third grade, Isabel read along with them in an English translation. They learned that Bezalel was commanded to build the portable tabernacle for the Ten Commandments. All the strict building specifications were laid out—from exterior walls to interior partitions, from floors to roof, from lighting fixtures to sacrificial ornaments and vessels—straight from the Lord’s mouth. No room for change orders, ornery or delinquent contractors. Bezalel was in charge of it all. Bezalel the artisan. Bezalel the artist. Bezalel the project manager. Bezalel son of Uri.
The crew finished with the concrete slabs and wooden forms. Meantime Moshe and his team mixed lime, cement, and sand for the plaster and worked on the western facade. The concrete mixers with their emptied drums turned away. The dogs watched them rumble towards the gate, still daunted by their mass.
“Is something wrong with me?” Zakhi walked back to her. “Is it so wrong to expect people to show up for work, and once here to work?” They watched Sucrat’s young assistants get into their truck and drive away. “He has the nerve to say that the kid with the blue shirt is his son and has wonderful hands. That I should give him a chance.” Zakhi looked as if he were about to cry.
“I’m sorry.” Isabel kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Can we meet tomorrow? Maybe I can cheer you up?” She smiled playfully.
Zakhi nodded and dialed Sucrat again. She heard the phone not being picked up and walked to her car. She did not have energy for the dogs and drove slowly in the opposite direction, taking the long route all around the village.