The Pale of Settlement (12 page)

calling for her child to come in. So once his mother called to him, too—Avi Avi—

as dusk dropped over the bald hills. He remembers racing

up the three stone steps from the garden, slippery with pine needles,

the smells of thistles, goat dung, apricots rotting on the rocky ground.

There were still jackals in the wadi then, hyenas, too. It doesn't seem possible

that breathless boy in khaki shorts could really have been him.

He has never thought much of Freud's interest in archeology,

his likening of the tumbled ruins of the past to the unconscious mind,

as if memory were something you could excavate, analyze, piece together, solve,

instead of a story you invent in the shape of your desire.

Take his brother Zalman, that other phantom boy he hasn't seen in years.

Lately he's begun to confuse Zalman in his memory with their father.

He sees them both as bearded old men with cloudy eyes, bent like Polish rabbis

over Torah scrolls. Only his father was the religious one, not Zalman.

Zalman was a different kind of zealot. A patriot. A pioneer. He remembers

his father and Zalman arguing, hardheaded, at the kitchen table in the old flat

in Sanhedria, after Zalman told them he was joining the Irgun. Those terrorists?

their father yelled. The bread knife jumped. Or has he made this memory up, too?

Near the end, Zalman wondered how it was that he was still here, here in America, in this place he'd only intended to stay a year or two or five at most, until the situation back home, the flap over the Irgun, settled down. It was Shula who suggested it, who wrote to her cousin in the wonderful-sounding Champaign, Illinois. Just for a year or two, they said. Then we'll see. They took only three suitcases and left the cat behind, that odd gray cat with yellow eyes that vanished, they found out later, on the very day they decided to stay on in the States another year. Cats know things, Shula said. She was mystical about animals, though not about much else. He himself kept half-expecting that cat to turn up one day in Chicago, having followed them there the way pets sometimes did. He'd find himself peering behind the trashcans in the alley, listening for her cry at night. Eventually, they took in a stray instead, a blind old tabby with one torn ear. Now the cat and Shula both were gone, and here he was still. But never for a moment had he meant to stay
for good. Even now, whenever he said home, he still always meant there.

At 2:17 a.m. she opens her eyes, wide awake.

For a moment the bed tilts, the grainy darkness swirls.

The door and the window have changed places.

Then she remembers. Here she is. Here.

She remembers a night when she was eight or nine or ten,

lying awake in a hard unfamiliar darkness

her first night in a flat rented for the summer

with a strange stretched feeling at the back of her throat

like the memory of a yawn that wouldn't come.

She remembers running in a panic barefoot

across the cold floor to her parents' room,

and her mother soft and dozy in her loose nightgown

giving her a glass of milk and a quarter of a Darvon

to help her sleep. Here take this. Here.

She remembers once her brothers and cousins,

digging in the garden behind her grandparents' flat,

turned up beneath the stony dirt the skeleton

of a cat. Maggots had left the bones bright and clean.

There was a one-legged Russian, their grandmother said,

who lived next door and kept two dozen cats. At night they'd scream

like infants in pain. He fed them fish heads from a canvas bag,

stumping on his wooden peg. He died maybe ten years ago,

she said, and the cats ran off, thank G-d. Good riddance to them all.

The boys covered the bones with fresh dirt and said kaddish

for the cat. They said,
Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'meyh rabbah
.

There sits the box, heavy-gauge cardboard

labeled
CREMATED REMAINS
. Cremations are forbidden

here. The Orthodox say the body belongs to God alone,

that this spinning world is neither the beginning

nor the end of man. So what remains? Nothing.

She believes nothing, and yet here she is,

carrying out a dead man's will. Maybe the word

for it is just
nostalgia
.

She's starting to feel a little sleepy again. She turns

the pillow over to the cool side. Now sleep.

Avraham, having fallen asleep in his chair on the terrace, wakes at exactly 2:17 a.m. according to the kitchen clock (which might or might not still be stopped or running slow) and stumbles in to bed. The breeze has died and the air is still and dense as sand. He switches off the light and as he lies back he tries to imagine what it would be like to be buried alive, the weight on his chest, the pressure in his lungs, the smothering blackness the same with your eyes open or closed. He opens and closes his eyes now and, perceiving no difference, wonders if he's suddenly gone blind. But slowly the outline of the wardrobe floats toward him, then the faint stripes of the blinds. He thinks of Zalman. Fifty years he's been away and now he wants his ashes scattered here. His ashes! Leave it to Zalman to desire such an outrageous thing. It is fitting, he supposes, that he, Avraham, who has spent his life digging dead things out of the ground, should now be the one to add another
body to this necropolis Jerusalem. But where? In the parklands of Hinnom, where the Canaanites sacrificed their children to the gods? On Ha-Ofel, by the Jebusite graves or the false tomb of Absalom? Or right here in the cemetery in Givat Shaul? Avraham feels a certain chill at the thought of Zalman's ashes mingling with the nearby dead of Deir Yassin. I told that boy not to join those bandits the Irgun, their father had said when the telephone call came to say that Zalman had been shot. Bloody terrorists, he said, spitting over his shoulder,
pthew, pthew
, when they heard that open carts of Arab prisoners from the village had been paraded down King George V Street before a cheering crowd. Later, they heard other stories, too, that the Arabs were taken to a quarry behind the village and shot—a hundred or two hundred or even more. They tried to bury the story, but there were those who remembered still. Those who saw. Their frozen eyes. Their blood-stained clothes.

Khamsin
is the Arabic word for fifty:

the fifty days of hot wind from the east

blowing dust and grit through a yellow sky

like a last exhalation of exhaust

out of the throat of the Sahara sphinx.

The old men say that when the khamsin blows

for five days straight it can drive a man to kill,

as if such hot murders should be excused.

In Hebrew, the word for “wind,”
ruach
, is the same

as the word for “soul.” But in Arabic there are more

than fifty different words for “wind,” just as

in the Koran alone there are more than one hundred and fifty

different ways of saying

“God.”

In the morning when the sun is slant, she walks along the Nablus Road, through the Damascus Gate, toward the place the Jews call the Temple Mount and the Arabs call Haram esh-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. In the Old City, she strides through the Muslim Quarter along El-Wad, her Nikon swinging against her ribs. Already it is very hot and the air is ripe with smells of dust and dung. A jet traces a chalk line across the sky, the far end blown to haze. It is good to shoot the Old City in this yellow light. The shutter clicks, clicks: a Cyclops's eye. She shoots buttresses arching across an alleyway, a wooden door braced with rusting iron stays, a grimy-faced child crouching like a cat, curls of red graffiti along a concrete wall, an old man in a kaffiyeh setting out tourist wares, a translucent sickle moon. It is not easy to get past the clichés. She is not far now from the Wailing Wall, from the crowds of swaying men in black, davening to the stones. She could go there now—she would have to cover her bare head and arms, of course, with the blue rectangle of cloth the guard would hand her at the barricade—and write a prayer on a shred of paper, press it into a crack between the Herodian foundation stones. Weeds take root in those spaces, transforming prayers into leaves, into oxygen, into breath. But Susan has no prayers now. She puts the lens cap back on her camera and turns away.

Avraham waits in the courtyard of the hotel at a table in the thin shade of a palm. He waves the waiter away, checks his watch: the girl is late. He hopes she's had the sense not to go wandering about the Old City alone. He can't imagine why she would have wanted to stay in East Jerusalem; even he's not comfortable here. He fingers a ridge of bristles along his jaw that he must have missed shaving. Lately he's been having an argument in his head with Udi Azrieli, the schlepper who took over the biblical job when he retired. He can see Udi now, sitting across the table from him, fat and smug, his shirt half-untucked, his
kippa
bobby-pinned to a tuft of hair. They've been arguing over a book that's just come out, blowing up the old Zionist myths about '48, arguing that the Palestinians didn't simply flee at the urging of the Arab League but were terrorized by the Jews and driven off their land, that Ben Gurion gave up the best hopes for peace right at the start. What remains when a myth explodes? Avraham should know better than to argue with Udi, but he can't help himself. He says occupation; Udi says liberation. He says apartheid; Udi says return. Udi smirks, picking his ear with a matchstick. He says, We've been waiting for this for two thousand years. Avraham can't remember what he was going to say. The vision vanishes. At this very moment, the real Udi is probably sitting at Avraham's old desk, in his old office on Mount Scopus, looking out at his old beautiful view. Avraham checks his watch again. The girl is more than fifteen minutes late. He's about to get up and call her room when suddenly he looks up and she is there. He hasn't seen her in he doesn't know how many years but there can be no mistaking Leah's daughter. In fact, it could be Leah herself—the way the girl walks, the way she holds her head and narrows her eyes in a
kind of squint. And before he can stand she is holding out her hand, American style, and saying, Hey, I'm Susan, and he is clasping her slim fingers in his and he is glad that she is here.

In the flat on Amram Gaon Street, Susan sits at the kitchen table as Avraham chops cucumbers and tomatoes and onions for a salad. Fanta? he asks. It takes a minute before she understands that he's talking about orange soda. No, no, she says, just water please. The knife
thwaks
against the cutting board. She admires the tiny cubes of vegetables he flicks into the bowl. All Israelis seemed to know how to chop at a prodigious rate of speed. Yellow-handled utensils hang from suction cups along the tiled wall above the sink—a sieve, a whisk, a slotted spoon. A woman's touch. Susan only vaguely remembers Avraham's wife, Eva, a small soft woman with a puff of white hair and the swish of a Hungarian accent. The clock on the wall appears to have stopped at 2:17. Perhaps that's what happens, Susan thinks, when you get older: you get stuck in time. Her own closets are filled with artifacts from the past—her old violin in its battered case, a bracelet from an ex-boyfriend, her mother's linen tablecloths. She never uses any of these things, but she can't bear to get rid of them, either. She thinks of her grandmother's gold watch, lost in Kathmandu, with a painful twinge. She remembers reading once about a man who put all of his possessions—furniture,
CDS
, socks, everything—up for auction on eBay. She could see how it would be a relief. Avraham sets out on the dining table the salad, bread, a plate of cheese, and two foil-topped containers of
leben
, and they move into the next room. The flat is less depressing than Susan had imagined, and not too hot even on this stifling
day. The dislocated feeling she had at the bar the night before is gone. Behind Avraham, on the sideboard, she studies the array of photographs—Eitan's children, Susan guesses, in Purim costumes and swaddling wraps and naked in the bath. She notices another photograph, too, tucked into the edge of the frame of a larger one: a black-and-white of three children posed in the old-fashioned way, a taller boy standing with one hand on the shoulder of a smaller boy, and beside them, propped on a chair, a baby with a bow tied around its hairless head. It comes to Susan that the boys must be her uncles, the baby her mother, Leah. She points, and Avraham says, Yes, it was taken not long after we came to Palestine. Susan stands to look closer and now she can see clearly in the boys' youthful faces her uncles' determined lips and intense round eyes. But the baby, her mother, she does not recognize. It is a baby as boneless and unblinking as any other who holds her in its gaze.

Now Avraham has gone to lie down for his midday nap—he has brought the newspaper in with him but it rests folded across his chest, rustling with his breath. No air moves through the open
trissim
. It is hot, hot, hot. In the next room, he can hear the girl moving about—the rasp of a drawer, the screech of a chair—and he thinks how long it's been since he's heard the sounds of another person, a woman, in this house. Then he realizes that what he's hearing is not the girl but the sound of a pickax striking stone and he is standing at the brink of a staircase cut deep into the limestone like the one they uncovered at Hazor, leading to a system of water tunnels underground. Yadin is there, a surgical mask strapped over his mouth against the choking dust—or is it a gas mask?—but then Avraham
sees that it isn't dust at all but ash from when the Israelites burned the Canaanite city to the ground in the late Bronze Age. And then Avraham feels himself falling, falling without weight or gravity, and when he comes to a stop he is curled like a dead infant inside a burial jug, tipped sideways underground. He reaches out and his fingertips touch an arrowhead, a bead, a sharp fragment of bone. Then he opens his eyes and once again he is on his bed, the newspaper open on his chest, fluttering softly above his heart.