A Remarkable Kindness

A
viva had driven to the cemetery on the edge of the village of Peleg hundreds of times before, but the ride had never felt as eerie as it did now. She crossed the empty road that led right up to the rocky Mediterranean shore and drove down a narrow lane, passing deserted houses and abandoned fields that stared blankly up at the sun.

Almost everyone had fled south except for the farmers who had to tend their cows, horses, and chickens. Lauren and Emily were staying in the bomb shelter. They wanted Aviva to sleep there, too, but she said, “I'm not going to worry about my own safety when my son is off fighting in the war.”

After parking her car by the graveyard, Aviva stepped out into the stillness. The odd, raw silence. The sea sounded hushed, as if holding its breath, and even the dogs in the nearby kennel kept quiet. She raised her eyes toward the border, not more than ten
miles away. Bombs were tearing from over the other side of the low hills, slashing the sheer curtain of sky. Something cracked above her and she flinched, but it was only a crow landing in the branches of a eucalyptus tree.

“Fly away, bird,” Aviva whispered. “You can get killed around here.”

She could still remember bird-watching with her parents and her older sister in Central Park years ago. “I sure like them birds,” her father used to say, and then he'd give her mother a wink. Her mother had been a court reporter, keen on grammar, who'd married late in life and had children almost as an afterthought, something she wasn't sure she wanted to do. Aviva's father had been an accountant in a large envelope company. (“I've never been licked,” he always said.) Her parents had led a good life in Forest Hills, and if they hadn't spoken about relatives who'd been decimated by Hitler, and if Aviva hadn't stayed serious and solemn, then she might have walked down another path in life, and the people she loved—of course, they would have been different people—would have been safe.

But it was too late for that kind of thinking now.

She was a widow. She had lost her eldest son, Benny, in a terrorist attack. (He'd been out on patrol with his Special Forces dog, Prince, when some suicide bomber had blown himself up, taking Benny and Prince along with him.) And now Aviva had come to the graveyard to meet Emily and Lauren and the other members of the burial circle to perform a
tahara,
a final burial rite, for a young woman killed in the war.

A wave of unstoppable grief and anger rose inside her and she
turned in through the gate, making her way through the cemetery until she reached Benny's resting place, right next to her husband, Rafi. At the tops of their headstones were pebbles and stones, souvenirs that visitors left behind, reminders of the circular nature of life or, Aviva suspected, its stony indifference. Her heart thundered in her ears, her throat was parched, her eyes blurred in the heat. Her black cotton shirt and patchwork skirt—faded clothes that she kept in the back of her closet and wore only when she had to do a
tahara
—clung to her skin. She pulled her coppery-brown hair from her face, lifted her sunglasses to wipe her eyes, and commanded herself not to cry. Not now. She had to hold herself back until the
tahara
was over. Until she saw the grieving family and said—what? The dangling leaves of the eucalyptus trees fluttered in the warm breeze, and in the distance, the sea shouldered on. Coming and going, without any words of consolation. Like the Kaddish prayer.
Tush'b'chata v'nechemata
. Beyond any consolation.
Da'amiran b'alma.
That can be uttered in this world.
V'imroo amen.
And let us say Amen.

Then there was a loud explosion, followed immediately by the siren. She needed to find some kind of shelter. She didn't care about herself, but she still had her other sons, Yoni and Raz, to think about. She had to spare them any more grief. At least that.

She hurried to the burial house. The door was locked so she sat on the ground, leaning against the wall under the awning, clasping her arms around her knees. The burial house trembled. It felt as if the whole earth was trembling.

After a time, it grew quiet again, but Aviva stayed right where she was until she saw a beige pickup truck skid to a stop on the
other side of the cemetery wall. Charlie Gilbert, the mayor of Peleg, jumped out of the driver's seat and slammed the door. He was a heavy-shouldered man with curly brown hair and a fashionable goatee. Years ago, he'd been shipped off to Israel after being expelled from a posh boarding school in England and he'd never gone back. Now he looked unshaven and exhausted as he plodded through the gate. Behind him came Lauren in her nurse's shirt, one shade paler than her pale, angular face, and then Emily, her full cheeks red and soaked with tears.

Charlie unlocked the door to the burial house and disappeared inside.

“I can't believe she's gone,” Lauren said. “I just can't believe it. One minute she's here and the next minute . . .”

“Maybe God needed her right away,” Emily whispered, tears filling her amber eyes. “That's what my father used to say. Maybe—”

“If God is
needy,
” Lauren cut in, “then who needs God?”

Emily said nothing and glanced over her shoulder at the border hills, the prickly bushes blazing in the heat.

“It's better not to look.” Aviva followed her gaze. “And if you see it coming, it's already too late.”

Charlie came out of the burial house and patted down the pockets of his pants, then the front pocket of his T-shirt until he found a lighter and a pack of Camels. “I don't know what the bloody hell the army is doing there.” He lit a cigarette and blew out a smudge of gray smoke that washed into the hazy air. “I'm going to wait by my truck. I'm sure the ambulance driver is going to drop her off and do a fast U-turn back to the hospital.”

Aviva stood there, reluctant to go inside. She had been a member of Peleg's burial circle, the
hevra kadisha,
for years. She had never shied away from taking care of a dead woman on the very last stop before her final journey. It was a solemn, ancient, sacred ritual. Aviva and the other women washed the dead, dressed them in traditional burial shrouds, and recited the prayers. Aviva knew the women, and more often than not, they were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. Their lives unfurled behind them, one day after the other, like beads on a chain. But this time, she had to do a
tahara
for someone young enough to be her child.

“I guess we'd better go in.” Aviva entered the burial house, hushed like a tomb. Prayer books balanced in a lopsided stack on a chair, and a hairbrush rested on the narrow shelf above the sink. Rectangles of dull light spilled in through the glass slits of the windows, falling on a long metal table and an empty coffin.

Her heart plunged. She whirled around, stepping toward the cabinet against the back wall, pulling out burial shrouds rolled tightly in plain paper, cradling them close to her chest.

Faint thuds rolled through the room, rattling the windows.

“Let me do it.” Emily reached for the package of shrouds. She peeled open the thin brown paper, uncurling the colorless linen shirt, the pants, the sashes, and the head covering, and laid them gingerly, tenderly, in a line over the edge of the coffin.

“I can't take this anymore.” Lauren's gray eyes flashed. “I'm going outside.”

She opened the door and sunlight flooded the room, hot and white and blinding.

Aviva looked down into the coffin. “If only I'd taken her with me . . .” she mumbled, and now she was weeping, and she wouldn't be able to stop until there were no more tears left on the planet.

“It wasn't your fault.” Emily wrapped her soft, cushiony arms around Aviva tightly, as if to break a fall. “It wasn't your fault and it wasn't my fault. Please don't cry, Aviva. Please don't. Because when you cry, then I know it really is the end of the world.”