Saving Grace (33 page)

“What about dinner?” she asked.

“I’ll bring sandwiches.”

She walked back to her room while he went to the kitchen. When they met a few minutes later, Grace had on blue work shorts and blouse and the hat Micha had bought for her in Jerusalem.

The trail rose steeply up the mountain behind the kibbutz, not long, but steep and rocky. Midway up the slope Gracie was panting, but her legs were steady, strengthened by weeks of working in the orchard. Several times she dislodged rocks, which crashed down the slope. She felt clumsy beside surefooted Micha, who moved with a grace akin to that of the ibex she’d glimpsed from afar. His sandaled feet seemed to mold themselves to the ground; he was at home in this place in a manner Grace had never known.

Just over the summit was a beautiful green glen, its centerpiece a sparkling pool surrounded by boulders and reeds, shaded by prickly acacia trees. Gracie headed for the pool like a sleepwalker. Micha waited, watching as she pulled off her blouse to reveal the yellow swimsuit underneath. Then he said, “Wait—there’s a better place farther on.”

They followed a trickle of water, a blue vein cut in the soft pale bone of the sandstone mountain. Except where the water flowed, the terrain was barren and stark, strewn with rock formations eroded into strange shapes by time and flood. They passed a cave, curtained by a waterfall and carpeted by moss. Great boulders balanced precariously at the edges of cliffs. Once Micha stopped and pointed wordlessly across a gulf: it took several moments for her eyes to discern three buff-colored ibex poised motionlessly against the rocks, not twenty meters away. Here and there were obstacles to be climbed over or sidled past. When he helped her, Micha made a point of touching her no more than was necessary.

They came upon a ledge with a sheer ten-foot drop. Micha leapt down and caught Grace as she lowered herself by her hands. She found herself in a small rock grotto surrounded on three sides by white stone walls; at their feet was a deep, still, sunken pool of indigo water (the precise color of Micha’s eyes), sparkling like an opal in a setting of bone.

“Are we really allowed to be here?” Gracie whispered.

Micha smiled. “Why not?” He took off his shirt and sandals and dived in. Gracie stripped down to her suit and followed.

The water was ice cold, a shock to the system. When she rose, gasping, to the surface, Micha splashed water in her face with the heel of his hand. She splashed him back, and for several minutes they played and yelled like the children they had never been together.

Later they lay side by side, a few feet apart on the hard rock floor of the grotto, warming themselves like seals in the waning rays of the sun. Micha was thinking about Marta, the first woman he had ever had. He had been sixteen and it had happened right here on this spot. She was a volunteer from Austria, three years older than he, but it was he who’d taken the initiative—he’d kissed her, pulled off her bathing suit, and made love to her right where Gracie lay now.

Since then there had been many. The little grotto had a well- deserved reputation on the kibbutz. Its elemental beauty and isolation, and the delightful mix of frigid mountain water and brilliant sun, evoked a natural eroticism. It was almost impossible to bring a girl up here and not make love to her. Unless, of course, she was your cousin.

Grace stretched and yawned like a cat, unselfconscious in his presence, unaware that he was not in hers. Without planning to, Micha reached out and cupped her head.

She drew back

Micha forced a smile. “Wound’s all healed.”

“It wasn’t much to begin with.”

“Have your feelings about the Palestinians changed since you were beaned by one?”

Gracie narrowed her eyes and sat up, hugging her knees. “I keep seeing that boy’s face, just before he threw the rock. He looked straight at me.”

“He aimed straight too, the little bastard.”

“I keep wondering why.”

“Feels different, doesn’t it, when the rocks are meant for you?”

“It feels different,” she said slowly, “but I don’t see that it
makes
any difference. Why did you search that woman’s home?”

Micha turned his face up to the sky. Overhead, a hawk circled watchfully.

“She was kind to us,” Gracie said.

“Yes.”

“Then why humiliate her? Just because she’s an Arab? Or is that just standard procedure for Israeli soldiers?—someone invites you into her home and you automatically search it.”

“Did she seem humiliated?” Micha asked, with an irritating air of patience.

“No.”

“That’s because she knows the game as well as I do. You’re the outsider.”

“Tell me what I’m missing.”

“She was too decent a woman to leave a young girl bleeding on her doorstep. That doesn’t tell you a thing about her politics, or more to the point, her husband’s and her sons’. For all we know, the boy who stoned you was one of hers.”

Gracie regarded him somberly. “It must be hard to live with so much suspicion and distrust.”

“It is what it is,” he said.
 

23

AFTER DINNER ON FRIDAY NIGHT, two kibbutz women, Rachel and Havatzellet, drew Tamar aside. “How is Gracie doing?” Rachel asked, with a frown of concern. “Is she really happy here, or do you think she’d be better off elsewhere?

Tamar, having lived most of her life on the kibbutz, knew these questions were not questions at all, but rather an ominous signal that, with that amorphous unanimity that is the kibbutz’s most quelling mechanism, Grace had been judged and found wanting. Tamar loved her kibbutz, but she suffered no illusions as to its nature. Like many an institution founded on the highest ideals, its judgments on individual matters tended toward the narrow and mean-spirited. In the name of equality, the gifted were sometimes penalized and expressions of individuality were perceived as threats to the integrity of the commune. Every kibbutz had its ghosts, the lingering spirits of members who didn’t fit in, children who were forced out. She was damned if Gracie would be one of them.

“Why do you ask?” she said. “Is something wrong with her work?”

“No, she’s a good worker.”

“Well, then?”

“She seems so unhappy,” Rachel said.

“She seems to
enjoy
her unhappiness,” Havatzellet added.

“If she’s unhappy, maybe she has cause to be. Leave her alone.”

“But she never joins in any of the activities,” Havatzellet said. “When she’s not working, she’s either in her room or wandering alone.”

“We wonder if she’s really comfortable here,” Rachel said.

Tamar fixed the two of them with a scalpel-edged look. “Listen to me, and pass it on. Gracie is my flesh and blood. She stays as long as she chooses to stay. I absolutely will not have her ostracized.”

The delegates took a step backward. “As if we would,” Havatzellet said in a wounded voice.

“You heard me. Let Gracie be.”

They seemed suitably cowed. Still, Tamar knew that feelings must have been running high for them to approach her at all. In any society of equals, some are more equal than others. Tamar, Yaacov, and Micha were a formidable triumvirate, not lightly to be crossed. If Gracie had been anyone but who she was, she would have been simply and efficiently expelled from the kibbutz, and the communal memory would have closed over her like the sea over a sunken ship. Her position was a protected one; nonetheless, Tamar worried. She had not forgotten what Micha told her, that Gracie had been forced to come to Israel.
 

The next morning, she invited the girl on a hike through Nachal Arugot.

They set out directly after breakfast. Arugot was a deep gorge bounded on the north by a sheer cliff that was the southern edge of the kibbutz, on the south by a slightly gentler slope, with ridges just wide enough for a hiking path. It was a steeper and longer trail than the one through Nachal David, with less protection from the sun. Tamar was pleased to find that Grace kept up without difficulty, or at least without complaint. Moreover, she moved intelligently, which to Tamar meant silently and efficiently.

After about an hour and a half, they came upon a rocky plateau. The main trail traversed the plateau, but another, barely discernible footpath led steeply downward at a right angle to the main trail. “Just down there, in the wadi, there’s a hidden waterfall and a deep pool,” Tamar said. “Quite a pretty place, but it’s a steep climb down and then back up. Do you want to go down?”

“Yes, please,” Gracie replied.

The path was not only steep but also covered with a layer of slippery pebbles. Gracie’s legs soon ached with the effort of keeping her balance and controlling the speed of her descent. But the way was not long; within fifteen minutes the two had reached the floor of the wadi, where a frigid stream ran among the boulders. They waded upstream. The gorge diminished to a narrow, winding passage, opening up in a deep blue pool that bubbled and hissed with the turbulence of the fifty-foot cataract crashing into its far side. Iridescent dragonflies darted over the water, and some came to investigate the intruders, hovering fearlessly about their heads.

They stood on the lip of the pool and Grace looked about in wonder. “This is Eden.”

Tamar laughed. “Don’t eat any apples.” She left her sneakers and backpack on the pool’s rocky margin and dived in wearing her shorts and blouse. Gracie jumped in after her. The shock of icy water on her burning body made her gasp. She turned to find Tamar waving at her from underneath the waterfall, where she dog-paddled against the current. Gracie swam to her side. Water streamed over her head and shoulders, reviving her weary, aching muscles. Water in the desert, the essence and origin of baptism. You don’t have to be a Christian, Gracie thought, to feel born anew.

Later they sat on the rocky ledge peeling oranges and waiting for the sun to dry their clothes. Tamar said, “This is such a magical place. I often wish I could bring patients here.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Too strenuous for most of them.”

The sun was high overhead, framed by the canyon walls. Gracie scratched her back lazily against a rock. “I wish I could stay here forever.”

“Here in Ein Gedi, or here in this spot?”

“Here in this spot.”

“And the kibbutz? Are you happy there?”

“I’m okay.” Gracie looked at Tamar and narrowed her eyes. “Why? Have they said something to you?”

“You know kibbutzniks. Well, maybe you don’t. We have a hard time keeping our noses out of other people’s business.”

“What do they say about me?”

“That you seem sad.”

When Gracie’s eyebrows came together in a frown, Tamar could see Jonathan in her face. “How I feel is nobody’s business,” the girl said. “I carry my weight. Or did they criticize my work, too?”

“They say you’re a very good worker.”
 
Tamar peeled another orange and handed half to Gracie.

“Am I supposed to pretend?” Gracie said. “Put on a happy face, sing songs around the campfire?”

It would help if she did, Tamar thought. The kibbutz didn’t care how she felt, only how she acted. But this girl was a wounded animal; she needed solitude, a safe place to lie up while she healed. There was little enough Tamar could do for Grace, but at least she could provide privacy, protection, and time. “You are welcome here for as long as you want. But you don’t have to stay if you don’t like it.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Micha told me you didn’t want to visit. He said your parents made you come.”

“That was chatty of him. I’ve never heard him string more than five words together.”

Tamar smiled but was not distracted. “Is it true?”

“Yes. But now that I’m here, I figure I might as well stay for a while.”

Tamar nodded. After a while she said, “Why did they send you?”

“I was in the way.”

“They couldn’t have said that.”

Gracie looked at the older woman pityingly. “Of course they didn’t say it. They never
say
anything.”

“Why were you in the way?”

“Because I have a big mouth.”

“You?” Tamar said, laughing. “You hardly talk.”

“I’ve learned to control it.”

With mixed success. Tamar smiled as she thought of her son, who came out of every encounter with Grace like a dog with a noseful of porcupine quills. “But what did your parents say?”

“They said it was to protect me. But that wasn’t the real reason.”

“What was?”

“A failure of imagination on my part. I couldn’t see my father the way he wanted to be seen.”

“What do
 
you mean?”

Grace didn’t answer.

Tamar felt a sinking sensation. There was only one interpretation of her silence. “You think he’s guilty.”

Gracie scowled at the ground, looking as if she wanted to cry but had forgotten how. When Tamar reached out to her, she flinched. Pain and anger: Tamar knew them well, met with them every working day. Some patients had the pain without the anger. Years of observation had taught her that “easy” patients, who followed doctors’ orders unquestioningly and made few demands on nurses, usually adopted a similarly passive approach to their diseases. On the other end of the spectrum were the ones the nurses called patients from hell, habitual scrappers whose aggression, properly focused, was a valuable weapon. These were the patients who would grab a disease by the collar and go eyeball to eyeball.