The Waters
Isabel parked her car near Uri’s school. How was she going to work sentences into life, prune and bolster them, animate and subdue words? Her nerves were shot this morning. She had stopped by the construction site after dropping Uri off at school to say a quick hello to Zakhi who was in a full blown rage.
She walked into the cavernous house and heard Zakhi yelling. “If you’re not here by eleven, don’t bother coming back, you hear. You’re off the job.” Silence. “I’m going to fry that jerk.” Isabel watched Zakhi smack his hand against the wall. He turned and saw Isabel. “I’m going to fire his sorry ass.” He looked untethered. “I’ve lost all patience for truant contractors and their tales.” No smile, no morning peck on the cheek. He was too busy, too anxious. Isabel understood and felt bad for him, and knew there was nothing she could do. “Catch-22 of construction. At this stage where can I find another stone contractor with time available, exactly now when I need him most? And if I could find him, by the time he comes to take measurements, cuts and polishes the stone, by the time he completes the stairs, another month’ll pass. And then I’ll be screwed entirely. Sticking with Sucrat there’s a good chance, even with his bullshit and delays, that the ground floor’ll be completed within ten days.”
“Cut his check,” Isabel said. “That bombshell at the end is your ultimate comfort.”
Zakhi managed a smile. “Say the word and you have a job with me, Ms. Toledo.” They watched the tiling crew carry boxes of bathroom tile into the house. Nebulous clouds like floats in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade drifted overhead. Forecast was for light rain. Isabel wouldn’t tell Zakhi this. She knew that if the house was not buttoned up soon, all hell would break loose. Damage to materials, repairs, threats, and recriminations. Tempers pushed off the charts. And Zakhi couldn’t close the house until most of the stone was in. Oh Sucrat, you who knew nothing must at least know this.
Zakhi dialed Sucrat. “Where the hell are you now? On your way?” Zakhi screamed. He paced back and forth. “Your guys showed up with stone for the front door saddle. They’re so young they can barely carry it. I don’t care if it’s your son or your brother. You need to be here doing the work and supervising others. You know how many trades are on hold because of you?” Zakhi listened for a moment and closed the phone.
“Maybe we’ll get together tomorrow?” Isabel smiled mischievously.
Zakhi nodded. He was too furious to talk. Isabel walked to her car and waved a quick good-bye.
As she drove to Uri’s school Isabel wondered if something else, something not related to the site, was a trip wire for Zakhi. Sure, the rains were coming and, sure, Sucrat was infuriating, but she had seen Zakhi handle other hard situations with aplomb. There was something in his eyes. Or in the way he was both focused and distracted simultaneously. Thinking about their interaction she realized he hadn’t really looked directly at her. He was holding something back.
Isabel parked and crossed the school playground. She entered the gymnasium carrying her family’s four gas mask kits by their long plastic straps. Three adult size, one toddler. She wanted to crawl under a tree and cry. Simply cry. Give up the work, the pressure, and all her responsibilities. The time had come, the big let-down, she was sure of it. The something Zakhi wasn’t telling her was this. How foolish to have become so accustomed to him. How ridiculous to need him when needing was not part of the program. Inside the gymnasium, behind two long folding tables, stacks of rectangular boxes with gas masks were arranged according to age. The largest group was for adults, twelve and up. A smaller section was for children, three to twelve. An even smaller one was for toddlers. And at the very end of the hall were large plastic tents for infants. She had one of those when Uri was born.
Last week Isabel received notice to bring the family’s gas masks to this ad hoc army depot in exchange for new ones. The filters, syringes, and sarin gas antidote were approaching their expiration dates. A long line of people moved slowly. Isabel stood in the back. She knew this gym well. Uri’s class had their special musical performances and assemblies here. And their regular sports classes moved in here when it rained. The walls were covered with brightly colored posters of photographs from school events. A yellow satin banner wished all the children good health and good studies for the upcoming year. Right next to the stacks of military gear, a large papier-mâché sculpture of Spider Man looked ready to spring.
The line moved slowly. Two women in front of Isabel talked about Iraq using chemical warfare during their war with Iran. She turned away but their words were too close to ignore and besides in typical Israeli fashion they spoke loudly.
“They didn’t use it against us.”
“They better not even try.”
“Let’s not think about it.”
Yes, please let’s not think about it, Isabel thought because if she did . . . Her shoulders crumbled forward. It was getting harder to breathe. She felt faint, put the masks on the floor, and knelt down as if to tie her sneaker lace.
“You’re next.” The voice of the woman behind her crashed like a wave over her back.
Isabel stood gently, took up the box straps, and walked slowly as if contending with the resistance of waves in the sea.
She dumped the four boxes on the table.
“Identity card?” the soldier asked mechanically and used a scanner to read the barcode on each box.
Isabel fished the card out of her wallet. The soldier took it and consulted a laptop computer. Isabel looked around. A school hall filled with noisy people, columns of boxes, and soldiers standing around looking bored. The soldier behind the table opened the toddler gas mask box. She took out the large astronaut-like helmet, looked it over, and returned it to the box.
“Your child is seven. This is only good until three.” She stared accusatorily at Isabel.
“I only got notice now.”
“You don’t need a notice to exchange the toddler mask for a child’s. If something had happened he would have been without a mask,” she said snidely, frustrated with Isabel’s negligence. After what felt like a dramatic pause, she called out, “Three adult, one child three to twelve.” When the other soldier brought over the boxes, she scanned their barcodes and pushed them across the table to Isabel. “Don’t wait until he’s 15 to change the next one to adult. As soon as he’s 12 call the Home Front office and they’ll tell you where to go. And here.” She frowned and slid a brochure across the table as well.
“Thanks.”
Isabel turned away. Four cardboard boxes bumped against her body. She hurried through the gym and playground. She didn’t want Uri to see her. She hated when he asked about the gas. She would hide these boxes in their security room when she got home.
She threw the masks into the boot and looked at the brochure in her hand. Instructions for war. When coming under attack, bring everyone into the security room and close the doors and window, including the metal shutter. Turn on a battery operated radio. Make sure there’s water and a bucket in the security room at all times. The security room. She had had one since it became part of the country’s construction code after the First Gulf War. 1991. Thick concrete walls, metal shutters, a window and door with special seals designed to take an indirect rocket strike and supposedly able to delay seepage of gas or chemicals delivered by missile head.
During the First Gulf War, Alon and Isabel lived on kibbutz. No one had a security room then. Every time a siren sounded, every time a scud missile came crashing in from Iraq, they grabbed the girls and ran to the public bomb shelter a few lanes away. The scuds always came in the middle of the night. Maximizing terror. Saddam Hussein at play.
During the Second Gulf War, they lived in town. 2003. When the civil defense authorities told them to prepare the security rooms, they did. Water, canned goods, batteries, candles, matches, battery operated radio, blankets, buckets with covers, games, books, flashlight, television. And up-to-date gas masks.
Isabel returned home and for twenty minutes she played with the letters on the computer keyboard. Her mind dense like a brick. Nothing cogent appeared on the screen. She went to the kitchen and cooked pasta for Uri’s lunch. She leafed through an interior design magazine Suri sent from the States. Like Zakhi, Suri wanted Isabel to consider retooling and thought design an excellent direction. Isabel cut up a tomato and cucumber salad. She made fruit salad. She took Woody for a walk in the wadi.
They passed a herd of goats, their dogs, their shepherd. A rain drop landed on her shoulder. She looked up. An enormous grey rain cloud passed overhead. Zakhi on site was probably fit to be tied. Another drop landed. Then another. And then a downpour. Woody and Isabel ran through the trees back to the house. By the time they reached the front door they were totally wet. Then just as abruptly as it began the rain stopped and the sun appeared. In Israel rain came one cloud at a time.
Isabel sat on a large flat rock and tried to relax into the beauty of the greens dipping in the valley below. Olive, Jade, Nile. A series of large clouds drifted over the Carmel Mountains. This past week she had finally managed to write another chapter of Jaim Benjamin’s book and to celebrate she was taking Woody to Bet She’arim but first they stopped at the statue of Alexander Zaid. To take in the glorious view. The yoreh, the first rain of the winter season, had fallen a week earlier. A collective sigh of relief could be heard throughout the Galilee. Rain. Farmers depended on it. The government counted on it. Religious Jews prayed for it. And the average individual simply welcomed the switch from summer to winter. But since that first downpour there had been nothing but sunshine and blue skies until this morning’s bank of steel-grey clouds. A greeting card from the rains to come. Fretfulness, a premonition of disaster, filled Isabel. Like the Winkler house, she was open and susceptible. Every day felt critical. The rains—not one cloud’s worth followed by sun, but cloud after cloud of precipitation—would soon be upon them. A sunny afternoon would evolve into a night of thunderstorms.
Isabel tried not to think of Schine’s pressure and stared at the natural finery laid out before her. She breathed deeply and reached for serenity. Another chapter done. But it wasn’t enough. Winter signaled Schine’s deadline. The bucolic landscape before her became quickly overlaid with a transparency of words: pages, Isabel, I need pages, pages.
Sitting cross-legged on the large flat rock, Isabel considered that no matter a calling to bring hidden stories into the light, that it just might not be worth it. Or not worth it anymore. Worth was not the right word anyway. She was not up to it anymore. Yes that was it. She was worn out and withered in the bright light of Schine’s unyielding rush. He called every few days to remind her that she had to deliver Jaim’s manuscript by the end of December. Five weeks away. Like she didn’t know.
Cattle grazed in the field below. A black and white border collie ran energetically around their legs, herding them back into the group. He barked at the more stubborn cows and made sure the calves didn’t wander far. He helped move the group east, where the herder, like Isabel, sat on a large flat rock under slowly drifting clouds.
In Bet She’arim, Woody cavorted with a large black Labrador. Round and round the dogs ran in circles on the lawn by the caves of the great rabbis and their families. Isabel sat on a bench some meters away and watched, relieved to be outdoors and not in front of her screen, happy to watch Woody at play, a constant source of entertainment and companionship.
She sighed deeply. On purpose. To calm herself. Jaim Benjamin’s was by no means the only difficult book. They had all been difficult, each in their own way. Hana Stern’s tale of being taken in, then sexually abused, by a group of Jewish Partisans. Zusya Feinstein who hid with his brother in a total of four haylofts for over three years. While the farm animals satisfied themselves with hay and slops, the boys sucked on straw and pulp from the pages of a book they had found in the woods when farmers thought it too dangerous to bring human food into the barns.
And Harry Roth’s, truly the hardest to date. Forty years after the war, Harry was as enraged at his brother Saul for being a Sonderkommando as if it had transpired the week before. Miraculously they both survived Treblinka, but never spoke again. Harry told her about Saul and then commanded her sonorously not to mention him in the book. When she told Harry that the men who did this awful work didn’t exactly volunteer, he thundered: “There’s always choice. That is what makes us human, even in hell.” And when she mentioned regret and forgiveness, he came back with, “People who were there don’t have that privilege.”
Woody and his new friend ran over to Isabel. She took doggie treats from her jacket pocket that they grabbed, swallowed, before rushing away to continue their tumble. Over the years Isabel constructed a space inside herself of attuned neutrality, a default empathy, from which she embarked on book after book. Roth’s hatred of his brother heaved a stone into that space, practically blocking access. It was a grave journey into his mind and Isabel almost cancelled the contract. The paragraphs and chapters of Roth’s life before the German army rolled into his small Polish town were assembled alongside the basso profundo of his final inexorable judgment. And even though he lost everyone in his family but Saul, Harry insisted on treating Saul like Amalek. “Yemach shemo,” Harry echoed God’s commandment to the Israelites to wipe out the memory of Amalek. So why did he told her about Saul in the first place?
Isabel looked up at the hillside. Thirteen minutes from her house to the caves. God did the same when he instructed Israel to destroy the memory of the Amalek nation. But he sealed their longevity with this command since the memory of the Amalekites would survive as long as the Bible was read. But Harry would have none of it. Not a word. Not a name. As if Saul never existed except in his memory and now in Isabel’s as well. Yemach shemo.
Jaim Benjamin’s book was weighing in as the most difficult since then. Not because she had to imagine existence in the grey zone of moral choices. Or reconstruct scenes of sexual abuse in a Ukrainian forest and then blank the screen. Or describe hunger that gnawed at the bones of boys. No, this story was hard to move inside of because Jaim reminded her of Dave. And Dave refused to speak to Isabel after she moved to Israel. Yemach shema.
“May I sit?” a young woman about Lia’s age stood next to the bench.
“Of course.”
The young woman smiled, pushed her long hair back from her face, and took out a Hebrew primer. Woody came bounding over. Someone new to charm!
“Don’t be afraid,” Isabel said. “He’s harmless.”
“He’s adorable.” The young woman pet Woody’s head and laughed when he jumped up on the bench to sit beside her.
“You’re from Spain?” Isabel heard her accent.
“Yes, Barcelona.”
“Welcome.”
“Thank you. And you, from here?”
“Yes and no. Originally from New York.”
“New York. I have family there.”
“It’s a big place.” Suddenly Isabel didn’t feel like talking. Or not about anything deeper than the weather.
“I’m learning Hebrew at Haifa University.”
Woody bounded off the bench in the direction of the caves. His Golden friend had gone in and Isabel watched him hesitate by the entrance. Woody never went into a cave by himself. He didn’t even like going in with her. Would he now? Woody paused, raised his head to sniff the air, and ran from the cave, across the lawn in search of new friends.
Isabel turned and smiled at her. She had to get a hold of herself.
“Hebrew’s not an easy language,” the young woman said.
“No, it’s not.”
“Do you know Spanish?”
Isabel definitely didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. She was going to get up and find herself another bench.
“A little.”
“So many Spanish speakers in New York, I thought you might have learned.”
“I’ve picked up some words.”
“And do you know Ladino?” the young woman asked.
Shit. No. Isabel shifted on the bench. She wanted to bound off like Woody but was stuck. She was human. Socialized to be polite.
“Also a little. Some words here and there.”
“But that’s not spoken in New York, right? Maybe by the older people in the Sephardi community?”
“Yeah, they speak it, I think.”
“In Jerusalem I am learning Ladino with a special teacher. I love it. Spanish and Hebrew as one.” She paused. “Both identities come together.”
Oh fuck. Here it was. Hounded by the cosmos. Why?
“I am Jewish,” the young woman said proudly. “I just found out two years ago. My uncle told us. Conversos. For hundreds of years.”
“The Jews of Barcelona.”
“Yes. A large community. The great Ramban lived there. But in 1391 Jews were accused of spreading plague. Those who weren’t killed, converted. Like my family.”
“Fascinating. Wow, I’ve really got to go.” Isabel stood up shakily. “Lots of luck in your studies.”
And she literally ran away. Rude and frantic.
Isabel called Zakhi after a sequestered week in the house. The result was good writing days. But she missed him. Texting back and forth was not enough. He didn’t answer. She called throughout lunch with Uri and while she worked through a pile of ironing. How many times did she call all together? Six? Seven? It was not like him not to call back. Or to text to say he couldn’t talk.
Later in the afternoon Isabel drove Uri to a friend and convinced herself that either Zakhi was with another woman or had a work accident. Jealousy coupled with fear. She sat at the main intersection of town, listening to his phone ring, ring, ring. She pressed redial again and again and again. Anxiety swelled as she drove to the Winkler site blind to the trees and rich blue of the sky. Her head stuffed with gauze she steeled herself to see Zakhi cold to the touch, electrocuted. Or maybe another woman there with him, walking through the rooms, impressed with his knowledge, his skills, his infectious charm. But only Moshe and two of his men were at the house, plastering the northern façade in a lovely shade of yellow. Isabel stood back and admired it and managed to talk normally.
“It’s beautiful, Moshe.”
“Yeah.”
“Zakhi around?”
“No.”
“Was he earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“And now?”
“Don’t know. He left early.”
“You know why?”
Moshe hesitated. One of the workers said, “He got a phone call from his sister.”
“Sister?”
“Yeah.” Moshe gave the guy a look. “His brother died in the middle of the night.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Why was Moshe being so stubborn? He knew Zakhi and she were friends. “Funeral’s today?”
“Guess so.”
“Was already,” the worker said.
She tried to smile at him, to thank him, but was too flustered. Moshe gave her a ‘don’t ask any more questions’ look. He threw a large gob of yellow plaster against the wall and spread it flat with a metal float.
Isabel knew very little about Zakhi’s family. What he said was usually not good. He left home at fifteen and enrolled himself in boarding school. Then the army. When he turned his back on religion, his family turned their back on him.
Without thinking twice Isabel drove to Haifa, to the religious section in Hadar; the public death notices would guide her to the family’s apartment. Isabel struggled to keep her mind on the road. Here was the highway turn off to Haifa. She held her attention on the here and now for as long as she could and then her mind wandered, refusing to be reined in. She thought of Zakhi laying her down last winter in an ancient wine press in the woods. She remembered the beauty and pleasure she felt being half naked with him in a stone basin used thousands of years earlier to collect freshly pressed grape juice. She smiled to herself and then sunk into another memory of Zakhi’s arms around her. This one of the morning they met two years ago. A patina of loss settled on the images.
Isabel had been on her way to Metulla. Yael and her friend Mica had spent a couple of nights there with Mica’s grandparents. It was the beginning of June. By that point in their senior year of high school the kids worked exclusively on the end of year party and performance. They slept late at each other’s houses and did not go to school except to rehearse. All state wide exams were behind them. Teachers accepted that no real academic work was done after Passover. Molly and Isabel shared a theory that this was the last bit of coddling. A June graduation could lead to a July or August draft date. Six weeks of basic training, an eight week course, give or take some weeks, and by November or December these young people, especially the boys, could be under fire. In combat. Killed and killing. She dropped Uri off at kindergarten and called Yael en route to tell her the ETA.
“Mom, Mica’s uncle wants to take us ice skating at the Canada Center. Can you come in the afternoon?”
Isabel was already in the car and didn’t appreciate the last minute change of plans.
“Sure, no problem. Three o’clock okay?”
“Perfect. Love you. You’re the best.”
Of course she indulged them. It was Yael and Mica’s last few weeks of adolescence. Mica had a July draft date.
Isabel decided not to go home but to take herself on an outing since a brilliant sense of freedom wafted through her days. She hadn’t yet begun writing the new book about Wanda Farber’s life. With blue eyes and light brown straight hair, Wanda spent the war passing as Christian within two blocks of the Warsaw Ghetto. Every day she walked by the brick wall separating ghetto from Aryan side. Out of the corner of her eye she scoured the crowds for her mother, her father, her older sister, her younger brother. Once she thought she saw her mother and had to pinch herself hard in the thigh to not shout out. Wanda had seen it all. The overcrowding. The transports. The uprising. The decimation. Her scenes, her words, gestated in Isabel who was in the process of rereading the transcripts. It would take another week or so before she began to set down sentences.
Isabel decided to go to the Museum of Photography at Tel Hai. It was all the way north in the western Galilee and she hadn’t been there in years. At Yishai Junction a good looking man with a clean shaven head drove a black car next to her. They waited at the light to make a left. Isabel noticed him because she could actually feel him staring at her. She wasn’t sure why. Her hair in a messy pony tail was not particularly clean. She wore baggy house clothes. Even her sunglasses were old and scratched. Uri had stashed her new ones. He had a collection of sunglasses in some secret place and wore them around the house pretending to be a Hollywood starlet from the 1930s. The glorious androgyny of children.
The man’s smile was rapacious but sexy. He had large white straight teeth. Isabel did not smile back and pressed down hard on the gas when the light turned green. A road block after Hamovil Junction stopped the flow of traffic. Police searched for illegal weapons. Maybe even bombs. The cars inched forward. Isabel turned her head. The same man with the foxy grin drove alongside her and again he stared at her. This time a reluctant smile peeped out on her face. At Golani Junction his car abutted hers. He was still smiling. Always smiling. This time Isabel gave him a genuine smile. At their fourth stop together, his car next to hers, she laughed along with him. Then they played tag. First he overtook her car. Then she overtook his. At Goma Junction, he rolled down his window.
“Coffee?”
Isabel nodded yes. It was ten in the morning. She had nowhere to be until three. He was attractive, young, playful and no longer seemed predatory. She followed him to a gas station café. They drank coffee. Shared a plate of humus. He told her he was an electrician going to upgrade the electricity on his friend’s farm near Kiryat Shmona. He learned that she ghostwrote for a living, had three children, and was going to pick up one of them in Metulla.
He leaned in towards her. “The Banias are not far from here. Lots of water this year. Beautiful. I’ll show you, if you have time.”
Of course she had time. She left her car at the gas station and they drove in his through fields and orchards. He parked in a small clearing in a grove of enormous eucalyptus and birch trees. This spot was not an obvious path to anywhere, but Zakhi seemed to know where to go. Which didn’t surprise her. Lots of Israelis did. Lia and Yael knew of such places from years of school trips and youth movement hikes. And many men during their army service navigated great parts of the country on foot. It would be an exaggeration to say they knew it like the back of their hands, but considering the pint sized country and amount of outdoor activity, they knew it very well.
As they walked down a steep incline, Zakhi took her hand. The sound of moving water was nearby.
“Heavy winter rains and all that snow on the Golan Heights,” he said. “I told you. Lots of water this year.”
“Swelling Israel’s miniature system of rivers and streams.” Her words were clunky. “People come from all over the country to see the water.” She felt so self-conscious. What was she doing with this strange man?
Zakhi didn’t respond. They walked further into the growth. He held back thorny bushes for her to pass safely. The closer they walked to the stream, the more their shoes sunk into soft moist earth. And then they were there.
It didn’t matter that she’d been raised with the large blue reservoirs of New York State. The sight of water in Israel, the fleeting plenitude it brought forth, always moved her. A precious commodity. A force in history. Abraham took his wife Sarah down into the exile of Egypt for the Nile guaranteed a year round supply of water. In the land promised to Abraham by his god there was drought. Three generations later Jacob’s sons went down into Egypt again in search of water and food. And after twenty generations, or four hundred years of slavery, it took the strong hand of their god to create the exodus and bring them out. Jacob’s descendants eventually wandered north to the Promised Land and its unreliable water supply.
One day she would write about this. Not historically. Poetically. The messianic line traced to water. Elchanan and Naomi leaving Bethlehem for Moab also because of local drought. When Naomi returned home ten years later with neither husband nor sons, but with Ruth, her Moabite daughter-in-law, she could because the water had also returned. And it was during the barley harvest made possible by strong winter rains that Ruth and Naomi’s kinsman Boaz made merry. One fertility begat another and when they married, Naomi’s status as a surrogate mother of sons was restored. For Ruth and Boaz begat Obed and Obed and his unnamed wife begat Jesse. And Jesse and his unnamed wife begat David. How Isabel loved all these unnamed women and their wombs. And then David became the second king of Israel. It was written that the messiah would come from David whose ancestor was a convert to the tribe. All because of the water.
“It’s dry here.” Zakhi pointed to a hospitable canopy of shade under a poplar. The mid-morning sun was already hot upon them.
Isabel sat and watched the water move quickly in wide and narrow flutes. The current was strong. Sporadic patches of sunlight sprinkled the surface with light blue and clean hope. A turtle slid off a low hanging tree branch into the bank’s dark shadows.
“It’s so lovely.” She turned to Zakhi.
“Uhuh,” he leaned over, covering her mouth with his. This was the time for lips, for tongues, for hands, for ears. For music: trees as rustling snares, birds as winds and chimes, water as bass. Zakhi’s tongue left her mouth and trailed the cleft between her breasts. He worked his cool hands into the front of her shirt then unbuttoned it for more skin. He pulled her bra down to the sides pushing breasts and nipples up toward his mouth. He licked and sucked, then kissed her mouth some more. Her hands found his pants and opened them. Like a compass his penis pointed up at her and within seconds they were completely naked beneath the trees. He inside of her, moving slowly in circles, she holding tight to his smooth large body. He was gorgeous.
The smell of green, the sound of water, the damp spray, the feel of a stranger, put Isabel over. She moved her legs from his hips to his shoulders and ground herself against him. Being naked outdoors, the press of another’s skin, the slip of sweat, the taste of mouth, the canopy of leaves, the calm offhand eye of the sky, all a fabulous correction to the compression of her days. She succumbed to it all.
“I . . .” became a moan swallowing words. The beautiful man, his hands, his mouth, his teeth. The sun streaming through thin skeins of weed. To be naked outdoors. The water, the buzzing bugs. “I . . . aaee,” Isabel cried, “a bee . . .” and jerked herself to one side to avoid being stung in her privates.
Zakhi laughed. He turned her around and swatted at the bee. “I’m on watch now.” He entered again and knocked her inside over and over and over. Anyone home, oh yes there certainly was. Zakhi picked up speed and velocity. When they finished, first her and then him, they lay among the reeds on the bank of the swelled river. He pressed his body against hers, tucked her into his arms, and she stroked his olive skin.
“Are you Yemenite or Sephardi?” she asked.
“Ashkenazi. Dark Russian. Sometimes called Black Poles.”
“Stubborn traces of ancient Israel.”
“Yes.”
They lay quietly. Birds sang high in the tree tops. Turtles swam from bank to bank. Dragonflies hovered over the water’s surface. Isabel looked up at the cloudless sky.
“The emancipation of woman is only an invention of the Jewish intellect.”
Zakhi turned to look at her.
“Hitler said that in one of his speeches.” Isabel paused. “It’s that only that’s so interesting.”
“Sex and the Holocaust. I like it,” Zakhi stared at her and laughed. “I get it. I’m over there half the time too. But when I’m here, I find this much more interesting.” He put her hand on him.
“Much better.” She laughed, happy to be distracted, happy to be taken out of her mind. She stroked the soft dark skin of his belly.
Their tumbling resumed. Round and around. First her on top. Then him. Then her again. She evaporated. Became part of the clouds. All molecules one. She brothered the wind. Brothered the sky. Brothered the birds, the leaves, the branches. Brothered the man.
Isabel hands clutched the wheel. She was immersed in the pleasures of Zakhi’s body, in the memory of meeting him, and forgot she was driving until a passing truck’s growl woke her. She turned on to Geulah Street. It was already evening and cooler. Sidewalks filled with children and adults. Many of the men wore black suits and hats. Some wore long black frocks. Married women wore scarves or wigs and young girls wore long braids down their backs. The number of baby carriages was staggering. Not for them population explosion warnings and planetary sustainability.
Isabel drove up the street and saw a black-bordered bereavement notice posted on a tree. She slowed down and read: Amos Kandel. Died that night. Funeral at noon. Shiva at his parents’ home. A car horn blared behind her. She stared at the notice and kept driving. She really had no business being here.
“I ran away from their black and white world,” Zakhi had said to her many times. “There’s little room for color. What’s new or different is unkosher and forbidden.”
And what was unclear was also feared. And demonized. His parents named him Zakhariah because God promised to remember and redeem Israel after great peril. They named him Zakhariah to remember those who didn’t make it out of Europe. She pulled over to stare at another death notice. That was part of the bond that she and he shared. And despite the slyly encroaching dependence on him, Isabel knew she didn’t belong with or to Zakhi. Just as he didn’t belong with or to her. She pulled her eyes from the black printed words and pulled out into traffic and out of this neighborhood filled with people who were her people and yet were not. A mistake to have come.
Isabel drove straight home. She missed Zakhi but at least he was alive and well. And not with another woman. This week she would share him with his family as they sat shiva.
“I don’t want to take the job,” Isabel said to Emanuel when they cleared the dinner dishes. Isabel had received a phone call earlier that day from Yehudit Klein, who had read Itka’s book in the Czech translation and liked it very much. Would Isabel be willing to ghostwrite her life? “I told her I wouldn’t be free for a while. She said she wasn’t in a rush. The story’s waited sixty years it can wait a few more months.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Emanuel asked when she came back downstairs after putting Uri to sleep. “Aren’t you tired of atrocity, Isabel?”
“In fact I am.”
And when they went into bed, Emanuel continued, sensing her sudden openness to the discussion and maybe even to real change. “There’s so many other kinds of books you can write, Issie. Or some other field entirely. The time has come. It’s over. Look to the future.”
It’s over. Look to the future. Dave used those exact words to hammer down her interests and ambitions. Isabel’s default rebel kicked in.
“It’s not over for the people who lived it and whose stories deserve to be told,” she pounced. This for Emanuel in real time and for Suri and Dave in her mind. “It’s not over for any citizen of the world who still wants to know and understand what and how and when. It’s not over for the living victims and perpetrators of genocide.”
Isabel turned her back to Emanuel and went to sleep.
In the morning, she took Uri to school and stopped at the vegetable market on her way home. Of course Emanuel’s words had merit. Atrocity was not a paradigm for living. But still, the past could not be willed away. It did not simply disappear because one decided not to think about it.
Right now, force of habit and an overwhelming sense of responsibility made her consider saying yes to Yehudit Klein. Though she hadn’t committed yet and could breathe easy for a while. She filled her shopping cart with fruits and vegetables and paid absentmindedly. On the drive home she felt bad about her coldness with Emanuel the night before. Even this morning she got out of bed and left the house without kissing him good morning, making him coffee, or leaving a note. Three of her usual morning activities. Of course he was looking out for her best interests and he was right a lot of the time. But he wasn’t right all of the time. And she wouldn’t agree to live with him.
When she got home she stomped up the stairs to the second floor. She needed the book on Greek landscape that she left on her night stand. Emanuel sat on the bed.
“Oh. I thought you’d left for work,” she said surprised.
He was dressed in black jeans, a black buttoned down shirt, black western boots, and held a riding crop in his hand. Isabel remained at the door waiting for some cue or clue. Why was he still here? Since when did he go riding on a weekday? And why did he look so stern? Not a word passed between them. It took another moment for Isabel to realize Emanuel was in character. She took a step back from the doorway. She was in no mood to be part of anyone’s fantasy, sexual or otherwise. She had too much work to do that morning. But she couldn’t keep saying no to Emanuel, especially since it seemed he was trying to feed her sexual appetite. Shit. Was this part of his campaign to procure her yes?
Isabel waited for his next move. Emanuel stood. She watched the boots and hips approach. She saw a red armband then a black swastika inside a white circle. She swallowed hard, slid down the wall, and closed her eyes. No, not the Nazi and the Jew. Sexploitation films, pulp fiction, pornographic web sites where Jews fuck Nazis in the ass and Nazis rape Jews, males and females alike, were abhorrent to her. Molly said that in the 1950s and 60s soft porn Stalag books were wildly popular among Israeli teenagers. Two taboos combined: the Holocaust and sex. Probably Emanuel devoured them too. But this was not a winning combination for Isabel. She didn’t need to mime out the nightmares via sex. They were real enough in her mind.
Emanuel pulled her up by the hand and gently positioned her on the bed. He straddled her body, trailed the riding crop along her neck, and his tongue followed suit. Isabel moaned and tried to roll away, a dream from the night before suddenly upon her.
She was a teenager. Some younger children were in her charge. They crouched low in a dark corner of a shed in a peasant family’s apple grove as German soldiers marched through the property searching for hidden Jews. The children huddled against her. She put her hands over their mouths even though they were terrified and quiet, so quiet that they held their breath as much as they could. Cacophonous orders to open the doors passed through the shed’s thin wooden walls like bullets. Türen öffnen! Isabel woke up shaking.
Emanuel held her tightly between his knees and used the crop to lift her shirt. With a sudden radical movement, Isabel brought one knee up against his hip, let out a deep grunt, and thrust her pelvis skywards. She snapped her body over throwing Emanuel off of her. He lay on his back stunned. Isabel jumped off the bed.
“What the . . .” Emanuel asked startled. “That was pretty impressive, Issie.”
“No, Emanuel.” Isabel walked to the window and held back tears. Thin horizontal sun bands penetrated the shutters. Slits of light in Birkenau’s huts. Slivers of dawn in a shed’s wooden walls. “I can’t, I . . .”
“Shh, shh.” He came over and hugged her from behind. She let him lead her back to bed. She let him undress her. She knew he was trying to be more exciting for her. To surprise her. But that’s not what she needed from him. She loved his steadiness, his dependability. She needed him to always love her while sparing her the roller coaster ride of his own emotions. For she knew he had them. She saw the love in his eyes towards her, towards his daughters, towards her children, and even towards Woody. And she knew he muted his lows. Molly said Emanuel was a prime example of a mature man. Even when he was buffeted to distant shores by passing emotion he held steady. He was anchored. Like his mathematics. He sought simplicity and elegance and most of all solutions. And, Molly would add, he was offering Isabel the chance to ride with him on this steady sea. Molly was right. She should climb on board. She should but didn’t know if she could make it last.
With a quick yank, Emanuel pulled her pants off. He was smiling broadly and watching her face. He wanted to please her. He wanted to be her playmate, her soulmate, her go-to-man. And she loved this man. She could not deny this but she didn’t want only him. She stared into his eyes. They were frisky. She could see how much he wanted to get into a role he thought would turn her on. Poor Emanuel, trying so hard and still managing to get it wrong. But she loved him and wanted him. Inside. She wanted the comfort of his strong body. Fuck Schine’s deadlines. Fuck the man instead.
Isabel wrapped her legs around Emanuel’s black pants. He let the Nazi armband fall to the floor and lowered himself to her. The pants’ rough material chafed her inner thighs. Emanuel moved slowly. Back and forth. Isabel gave way to his rhythm. He watched, waited for her to shift from first to second to the third gear of pleasure. Then he picked up the pace and repositioned her legs on his upper back and touched the place precisely where her orgasm began. He pushed and rubbed against it. When her wave launched he beat against her shore with sharp jabs. Rolling hips. Delight spread from her epicenter and rose to claim her entire body and clear her mind. A string connected the tip of Emanuel’s penis to the tip of her vagina. Love passed through the small space of air between their hovering lips. Isabel abandoned herself to joy and began to cry.
Emanuel always made sure she orgasmed first. Zakhi and Jiri did that, too. Sign of a man who appreciated a woman’s body and sexuality, Zakhi said. Isabel didn’t have a theory. She just knew that men who tended to their partner’s gratification first were irresistible. Men who came “wham bam thank you ma’am or maybe just wham bam,” as Martha Gellhorn described sex with Hemingway, were useless to women. No, worse, they were toxic.
Isabel held on to Emanuel. She drifted under his caresses in a cocoon of quiet. He kissed her collarbone and shoulders. She held tighter. Why not say yes to Emanuel, to this? After a few minutes Emanuel moved out of the embrace. Isabel watched him undress. He took off each item of clothing and folded it neatly on the back of the chair and walked back to the bed. Isabel didn’t notice until he stood before her that the riding crop remained in his hand. He held it out. Level with his keen penis.
“Take the crop.”
Isabel didn’t want to. She would touch his body instead.
“Please,” he said quietly.
She took it reluctantly. Emanuel lay down on his stomach.
“I’m not going to hit you with this thing.”
He laughed. Turned on his back to face her. “Put the black shirt on now. And the boots.” Isabel didn’t move. “Now,” he commanded.
Maybe Emanuel wanted this scene also for himself. He was not a child of a survivor but a nephew of many. His maternal grandparents were Zionists and left Poland in the mid-30s with their three youngest. All the other children remained in Europe. Emanuel’s mother lost five siblings and ten nieces and nephews. For her the war was an open wound. And if for the mother, then for the child as well.
The black shirt hung down past Isabel’s thighs. The boots came up past her knees. Walking was difficult. Only a thin belt of naked leg showed. She stood over Emanuel menacingly. If he wanted a spectacle, he would get one. She tapped his hip lightly with the crop. “Let’s see your cock’s reaction to the beating you’re about to get.”
A small smile opened on Emanuel’s face. Thwack. Isabel brought the riding crop down hard by his head. He jumped. “I forgot you’re trained in martial arts, my dear. Try not to leave marks.”
“Quiet Jew.” She brought the crop down again, centimeters from his thigh. Emanuel flinched involuntarily. She trailed the crop along his body, from his Adam’s apple down the middle of his chest past his navel. There it rested. Then down through his pubic hair to his penis. She caressed his penis with the crop. Up one side, down another, and laid it horizontally at the base of the shaft above his balls. Pressing down lightly on his scrotum she took him into her mouth. Emanuel moaned. She pressed the crop down a little harder. It was uncomfortable and wonderful for him at the same time. He moaned louder. Abruptly she pulled away. “Stop making noise. Jude.” Isabel brought the crop down by his head.
“Oh,” he groaned with interrupted pleasure, fear, and delight.
She bent low towards the floor, picked up the arm band, and put it on. Her arm with a Nazi swastika went up and down, up and down. Three four times and the riding crop cracking against the bed. Not that close to Emanuel. Not so far away either. Her arm mesmerized her. Disembodied. Homeless. Possessed of power. Liable to abuse. A perpetrator. After so many years living inside victims’ voices, she was a perpetrator. Seeing the situation from the other half of the universe.
And suddenly, like a thunderclap in a cartoon, eureka, a totally intuitive moment, Isabel understood Molly’s antipathy to Mati. Limbs abusing power. Sex used as a weapon. What Emanuel was teasing her with now. What she was teasing back. What they felt titillated by, but what she really couldn’t do. For them it was just play. A few bed whacks and shudders.
But Molly. Molly was touched against her will. Isabel didn’t know how she knew but she was certain she was right and felt sick. She started to move away from the bed, stricken by the thought of Molly being hurt, but Emanuel took her arms and pulled her down to the bed. He held her arms flat against his chest, her face right on his groin. Isabel suppressed a wave of nausea but she knew the script and had to do right by the Jew. She took Emanuel’s delirious cock in her mouth, pressed her tongue around the head that pushed up and orgasmed. She swallowed his thin semen. Faint, Isabel wriggled out of Emanuel’s hold. In the bathroom she rinsed her face and chest and drank large gulps of water. Her body shook with grief. Emanuel found her sobbing over the sink.
“Come here.” He held out his arms and hugged her. Kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I just thought . . .”
“I know. It’s okay,” Isabel muffled into his chest, “According to Hitler, anti-Semitism was a legal form of pornography. Even he admitted anti-Semitism was a kind of perversion.”
“Shh, Isabel, shh.”
“An allowance for fetish.”
“Shh.” Emanuel stroked her back. Ran his hands along her buttocks. Held her closer and brought her under the hot water of the shower. He soaped her body carefully from crown to toes. The water washed over her. Amniotic. Hypnotic. A balm for a fretful soul.
“I love you.” Emanuel paused at the front door and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Time for good-bye. For work. He to teach at the university, she to bully sentences at her desk.
Alone by her computer Isabel stared out the window. A patch of migrating birds passed. She wondered about pornography. Was crawling into the skins of other people a form of pornography? Was this what Suri objected to? Was her experiencing the Holocaust from the inside a kind of degeneracy? Was her attachment to Zakhi and Jiri and who knows who else might pop up on the horizon also perverse or maybe just self-destructive? Isabel loved Emanuel but she didn’t want to live with him. It felt burdensome. Treacherous even. Alone was better. Alone was reliable. Safe. Fast moving. Untethered. It was not lonely nor wanting. Alone was one small bag, her child and dog, and she was off.
Isabel opened Jaim Benjamin’s file on her desktop and read sentences from the day before. Immediately she knew she would have a hard time penetrating the story. She couldn’t think clearly. Her mind was like a spin art flinging thoughts everywhere. She called Molly.
“I’m coming over.”
They sat together on a porch swing under Molly’s birch tree.
“I want to ask you a question. You don’t need to answer.”
“Okay.”
“Your reaction to Mati. Why so strong?”
“Mati of the illegal immoral probing fingers?”
“Yes.”
Above them silver leaves rustled in the wind like cards being shuffled.
“Your relationship to your body, to sex is different than mine,” Molly said as they pushed back and forth on the swing.
“But why so judgmental?”
She didn’t answer.
“Molly, something happened, right?” Isabel stopped pushing at the ground. She looked at her best friend, wondering about the therapist who wouldn’t disclose trauma. The shoemaker going barefoot again.
“I . . .” Molly looked down at the grass. Her spine curled. Her face crumbled.
“Forget it, you don’t have to tell me anything. I’m sorry for being so nosy. You know how I like to have answers . . .”
“’Cause Suri never talks . . .”
“Yes, but it’s fine, really. Let’s drop it.” Isabel took Molly’s hand. She couldn’t stand hurting her. Why press her to speak when she preferred to remain cloistered. Isabel’s default mode, the one learned early on with Suri, kicked in. Her desire to know easily eclipsed by the need to protect.
“Everyone has their battles,” Molly said. “And I think you have battle fatigue. I am truly concerned about you.”
“I’m not fighting. I’m scribing.”
“Fighting your own demons.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Yes. You’re right.” Molly got off the swing and stood with her back against the wide white trunk of the tree. She looked at Isabel. “One evening, in Dublin, it was still early, still light, I was on my way home from visiting a friend.” She stretched her arms up toward the canopy of leaves. “I love this tree.” She looked up at it and looked back down at Isabel. “I was grabbed from behind and dragged to a construction site. A young man, about my age I guess, raped and beat me with a piece of wood. He hit me so much and so hard I thought I was going to die.” Her voice tapered off.
“Oh Molly.” Isabel left the swing and stood next to her. She took Molly’s hand.
“At the hospital I had to have a tetanus shot. So many nails in the wood.” Molly placed her hand on top of Isabel’s who placed hers on top of Molly’s. A stack of hands. A rujumb. “I was seventeen years old and virgin.”
“Who have you told?”
“Only Noam. And my mother.”
“Thirty years and only your husband and mother know?”
“And now you.”
“And now me.”
Isabel didn’t tell Molly that she had this intuitive flash after her strange sex with Emanuel. The Nazi costume brought it out. Molly would laugh at Isabel’s assumption of associative serendipitous insight, having no tolerance for mysticism or for anything that smacked of the recent vogue in spiritualism. She worked strictly from her brain. From reason. An Irish Litvak.
“It took years of love and patience, but Noam helped me feel good about my body and sex. Lots of love and patience. Sorry for being so mean about Mati. Guess I’m still a bit queasy.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Isabel’s stomach wound up in knots.
“Are you going to ask Suri?”
“I’ve been asking Suri for decades.”
“Yes, but specifically.”
“Specifically?”
“About being raped.”
“You think?” How had Isabel had never considered that?
“May explain her silence. Her stubbornness. Who knows what she had to do to keep her little sisters alive in Siberia.”
The shame. The guilt. The angst of sexual trauma. Of course.
“When I’m in New York I’ll ask.”
“Ask without expectations.”
“It will be good for her to talk about it.”
“Don’t decide what’s good for her. Open the door. Don’t force her through.” Molly looked down at her watch. “My two o’clock’s about to arrive.” They peeled one layer of hand off the other and hugged each other tightly. “Flow with Suri, Isabel. Words in a stream encourage more.”
Isabel called Zakhi when she got home. He was still not taking calls. Three days earlier he sent her a text message that he was in mourning and said he’d call when the seven days of shiva were up. At her desk Isabel went straight to Jaim Benjamin’s manuscript. Hard to believe but there were only twenty or so pages to go. Close enough to feel the end. Smell it. Surf her way into it. She dialed Zakhi again. The seven days were over and he hadn’t called. But she needed to talk to him. Knowing he might be only minutes away drove her crazy.
“Enough.” Isabel leaped up and kicked at a pile of papers. Woody looked up at her, thinking ‘What now?’ she assumed. She took out her phone as if it were a gun with a loaded cylinder. She pressed Zakhi’s number again and listened to the ring ring ring ring ring. “I said enough,” she yelled into the room. “Enough.” She cried. She missed Zakhi. She missed Suri. She wanted Yael to be home. She wished Lia were here to comfort her. She even missed Alon. And then she realized that she wanted Emanuel. He was the one who held her the best, the most consistently, the hug with the most promise of all. The one who always took care of her. Isabel scooped up Woody in her arms and cried some more. He was accustomed to his mother’s crazy ways and waited for it to be over. She kissed Woody on the head and set him back down on the floor.
“Thank you, boy.”
He laid down again. This time he faced her, to keep an eye on her. No more surprises. She laughed to herself and faced the screen. Moved the mouse. Text showed up.
When the war was declared over, Jaim Benjamin came down from the mountains. He returned to Florina. Just one of two Jews who did. Jaim’s neighbors welcomed him with food, with clothing, but they were wary. Strangers had moved into the Benjamin house. Jaim went into his bedroom and slept for days. On Sunday morning, when the entire village went to church, including the family that occupied his home, he went into the yard. Under a particular olive tree his father had buried some money, his tefillin, and jewelry. By the time the family returned for lunch, Jaim was gone.
Isabel’s phone rang.
“Zakhi.”
“Told you I’d resurrect after seven days.”
“I’m so sorry about your brother.”
“Yeah, it’s rough. Luckily he only has three children. They had fertility issues. Imagine if he left a wife and twelve behind.”
“Zakhi.”
“What’s up?”
“Finally getting some serious mileage on these pages. End’s in sight.”
“You should sound happier than you do.”
She recounted her conversation with Molly.
He sighed. “The Baal Shem Tov said that light—אור—and secret—רז—each add up to 207.”
“A secret revealed brings light into the world?” she asked.
“Exactly.”
They were quiet.
“Any free time today?”
“Winkler house in ten?” Isabel closed Jaim Benjamin’s file and stepped away from the desk.
“I’m already here. Make it five.”
“I’m on it.”
Isabel drove and thought of Zakhi’s revealed secret. The world of the ultra-Orthodox that spawned, rejected, and re-embraced him in mourning. She drove quickly for she didn’t have much time before Uri came home from school.