The Pale of Settlement (2 page)

She lay on her back, letting her arm roll outward to touch Gavi's. The stars didn't seem to be the same stars she remembered from New York. As she gazed upward, they fell toward her like fireflies.

Look how beautiful it is, Gavi said, not moving his arm away. These stars, this sky.

By the time Susan finished college, the pattern of annual summer visits to Israel with her parents and brothers had fallen off for good. Susan flew to Israel by herself to celebrate her grandfather's eighty-seventh birthday over her spring break from journalism school. She sat on the couch in her grandparents' living room, sipping champagne, and tried to memorize it all: the fraying Oriental carpet,
the tile floor, the discordant mingling of German and English and Hebrew speech, the humidity, the scent of pine.

Sharona, Gavi's girlfriend, sat down next to her on the couch. Sharona was a forthright girl with close-set eyes and plump, soft hands; she wore her hair in a spiky, blond-streaked shag. She spoke English fluently, much better than anyone in Susan's Israeli family. Susan didn't think she and Sharona were much alike at all.

So, when are you going to come to live in Israel, make aliyah? Sharona asked.

I don't know, one of these days, Susan said. She didn't imagine that her boyfriend, who favored preppy button-downs and Levi's cords, would move to Israel with her. What American would? Even her parents would not be pleased. Even they had left and not come back.

Susan's uncle came in carrying a reel-to-reel projector and several metal canisters of film. Movie time! he said. Susan's grandfather had shot the sixteen-millimeter film in the 1920s and '30s, before the war, before they came to Palestine. Susan squeezed closer to Sharona to make room for her grandparents on the couch, and Gavi dimmed the lights. Her grandmother perched upright on the arm of the couch, her knobby hands clasped in her lap. No one had seen the films in years. The light flickered on the wall and then there was her grandmother, a cloche tipped at an angle over her bobbed hair, posing by a motor car parked on a hairpin curve along a Swiss mountain road. There were her grandparents skiing in the Alps, in woolen knickers and jackets, with bamboo poles and wooden skis. There was a baby, all rolls of fat, crawling naked on the grass. Her grandfather said something in German and everybody laughed. What do you think of your Daddy? Susan's uncle translated. The baby pulled up on a chair and let out an arc of pee.
He was a terrible boy, her grandfather said, and again everybody laughed.

That's the garden of my parents' house, Susan's grandmother said, pressing a tissue to her eyes. It was very beautiful there.

The next day, Gavi invited Susan to go to the Galilee to see the wildflowers. They squeezed into the front seat of Gavi's truck, Sharona in the middle and Gavi and Susan on either side. It was a gusty March day; Susan had never been in Israel when there were clouds in the sky, when the light lacked the blunt white glare of heat. They hiked up Mount Tabor; in the hazy distance, Susan could see Nazareth, the green-brown hills of the West Bank. She tried to imagine the early Israelites Devorah and Barak standing on this spot three thousand years ago, preparing to launch their assault on Canaanite Hazor. Susan took out her camera and shot a roll of Gavi and Sharona kneeling among the anemones and irises in the blowing grass. She squinted at them through the Nikon's telephoto lens, at their close-up smiles and entwined hands, and felt envy rise within her like a blush.

Susan's flight back to New York was delayed for five hours due to an air-traffic controllers' strike in Paris. She found out when the taxi dropped her off at Ben Gurion at midnight, and there was nothing to do but wait. She sat on a plastic chair outside security and tried to read. A group of teenagers were curled like caterpillars in sleeping bags along the wall, and she fought the urge to lie down next to them and sleep. Behind her, male and female soldiers stood alongside tables, rummaging through suitcases, asking questions. Where in Israel have you been? Did you pack your bags yourself? Did anyone give you something to carry for them? A fair-haired girl, a kibbutz volunteer from Scandinavia or Germany, Susan guessed, was crying
as a soldier pulled clothes and underwear out of her backpack. No one ever searched Susan's bags.

When she next looked up from her book, Gavi was standing right there, in a group of people waiting to check in to a flight to Greece, no more than a few yards away. He was staring out above her head, or right through her, and she began to wave to him, but there was something so strange about his expression that she felt a sudden stab of uncertainty and lowered her arm again. Was it Gavi? They'd had dinner together not six hours before, kissed each other good-bye—he'd said nothing about a trip. Could there be some mistake? But it was Gavi—it had to be.

She put down her book and stood up, walked over to where he stood. She was almost in front of him before he let his eyes meet hers, raising one hand in a gesture that didn't quite mean surrender, but wasn't exactly a wave. He was wearing glasses and his eyes looked tired and red.

Gavi? she said.

Please, he said. Don't tell anyone you've seen me.

What are you doing here?

I'm just going on a trip to Crete, together with some friends, only for two days. It's the, how do you say, not the solstice—

The equinox?

Yes—it's very nice. We make some music together, talk, look at the sky. You know. But the parents, Sharona, they don't understand—please.

Susan felt a hollow space behind her ribs. Of course I won't say anything, she said. You know you can trust me.

Gavi glanced back at two men who were watching him from their place in line. They had army buzz cuts just like Gavi's, tidy clothes—clean-cut types. Gavi nodded to them, picked up his bag.

I have to go, he said. This time he didn't kiss her, just gave a little wave good-bye.

Bye, she said.

And what could be so bad about a stargazing trip to Crete? But the whole flight home, she sat with an anxious feeling creeping about inside her chest, as if somehow she'd become an accomplice to a crime.

Susan said nothing to anyone about Gavi's trip to Greece, but by the time she got home to her apartment in New York, the light on her answering machine was already blinking with the news.

Susan called her parents back. Out the window, the afternoon sun glinted off a helicopter flying south along the Hudson's New Jersey shore.

It's a terrible thing, her father said. I don't know what meshugas has got into that boy's head.

Just because he's going to Crete for a couple of days, he's crazy? Susan said.

Everyone is terribly upset! her father said. Sharona has given him an ultimatum—the group or her, he has to choose. He promised her he wouldn't go, and then he sneaks away behind everybody's back.

What group? Susan said, wondering why Gavi hadn't told her anything about this. She pictured waves folding over on Aegean sand, the sound of a guitar, a black sky cupped with stars.

When we were young, her father said, things were different in Israel. Life had meaning then. It's not the same anymore.

It's the pressure, Susan's mother said, joining in from an extension in the other room. It's too much, really, for anyone to bear.

Her father made the tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. He said, The boy's got his head stuck in the clouds.

A few days later, when Susan got her film developed from the trip, she found the photograph her uncle had taken of the whole family, that last evening after dinner, before she left for the airport. She was sitting on her grandparents' couch, leaning in toward Sharona and her younger cousins, smiling wide. Gavi was standing next to her, his hands pushed into the pockets of his jeans. What she noticed now was his eyes, which were puffy and a little blurred, as if you were looking up at them through the bottom of a glass.

A few weeks later, Susan got a call from an Israeli named Tal who was living in New York. He said Gavi had given him her phone number, and he asked her out. Gavi hadn't mentioned anyone named Tal to her, and Susan wondered why Gavi, who knew she had a serious boyfriend, would want to fix her up with someone else. Perhaps her aunt had put him up to it. Her aunt was determined to find her a suitable Jewish man. Susan didn't tell her boyfriend, but called Tal back and said, Okay.

Tal picked her up in his car, a rusty convertible lacking seatbelts and inside door handles, and took her to an Ethiopian restaurant up on 121st and Amsterdam, a part of the city Susan considered to be unsafe. They were the only white people in the place. Susan perched at the drumlike table, feeling tense and ill at ease, as Tal instructed her to touch her food only with her right hand and kept her glass filled with the cheap red wine he'd brought along in a paper bag. He had a thick ponytail and pale blue eyes like a husky's. He asked her constant questions as he mopped up the unidentifiable food, one-handed, with bits of spongy bread. How could she stand living
in New York? Why wasn't she religious—didn't she consider herself a Jew? How could she want to be a journalist when they were all such parasites? Didn't she ever do anything sinful, just for fun?

This is what she didn't like about Israelis, Susan thought. She was not one of them at all. Her boyfriend would never antagonize her this way. She pictured the furrow that would appear between his eyes if he knew she was on a date with someone else and wished she hadn't come.

So do you know anything about this “group” that Gavi's joined? she asked Tal. What is it, some kind of a cult?

Already you have a negative attitude! he said. Do you think there is some difference between what you call “religion” and a cult?

Are you in it, too?

Tal took a swallow of wine and shrugged dismissively. He said, There are many things in this universe of ours that we cannot rationally understand.

After dinner, driving back downtown, Tal slowed and turned abruptly off the Harlem River Drive. He switched off the headlights and drove slowly, in darkness, along the riverfront path.

You do realize this is totally illegal, Susan said. Her heart was thumping high inside her throat. What was she doing here? What if Tal was, in fact, insane?

You worry too much, he said. Relax.

He stopped the car near the abutment of the George Washington Bridge, then came around to open her door. I'm going to show you something special, he said, peering in at her, as if she were the visitor in his city, not the other way around. He held out his hand and said, Come on.

Susan stepped out of the car and looked over the metal rail. The Hudson flowed below them black as asphalt in the dark. And then
she saw it: the little lighthouse, perched on the stony embankment underneath the bridge, just like in the storybook she'd read as a child. She'd always known it was there but had never seen it up this close before. High above, the lights along the bridge span blinked like stars.

You can see it only from here, Tal said. Then he turned to Susan and pulled her to him. He pressed his tongue, warm and insistent, against hers. After a moment, she put her arms around his neck and wrapped her fingers in his thick rope of hair.

Looking back, Susan wondered how she could have missed the signs. Still, on the surface at least, everything seemed fine. She continued to take a week's vacation, most years, to visit her grandparents, who—there was no denying it—were slowly beginning to fail. Despite the flap over the trip to Crete, Gavi married Sharona, and Susan's younger cousins quickly followed suit. But rather than marrying her boyfriend, Susan broke up with him. Her grandparents sighed and gave their wedding rings to Gavi and Sharona instead. Her aunt redoubled her efforts to fix Susan up.

When Susan's grandfather died, one month after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Susan could not get off work in time to go to his funeral. Her parents phoned from Haifa afterward. Susan sat on her bed and watched the helicopters buzzing low along the Hudson as her parents described how the trees were already wrapped with death notices when they arrived, the Hebrew letters of her grandfather's name in black and white against the trunks of the Carmel pines. Then they told her how Sharona was there in the hospital as well, on the floor above the one Susan's grandfather was on, in labor with her first child. The baby was born within the hour of her grandfather's death. His eyes were a deep and radiant
blue, just like his great-grandfather's. Everyone was saying that Susan's grandfather's soul had flown out of his body and into the baby boy's.

Then her parents began complaining, as they always did, about how much things had changed. There were Russians playing violins on every street corner; even supermarket signs were in Cyrillic now. There were three new high-rises on the
merkaz
; the view of the bay from Panorama Street was ruined. Everyone still smoked like chimneys. They drove like maniacs as well. There were more deaths from traffic accidents every year than in all the wars combined. Things can't go on like this, they said, the way they always did.

Susan turned on the news and watched the reports on Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, the experts' speculation about the likelihood of war. It didn't seem possible that so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and perestroika there should be such a threat to peace. This was nothing like the 1982 invasion of Lebanon; this time the Iraqi
SCUDS
were aimed directly at Haifa and Tel Aviv. She thought back to the Peace Now rally she'd gone to in a Tel Aviv park that summer of the Lebanon campaign, eight years before. The grounds were filled with tanks and mortars and other armaments captured from the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Those are the guns they want to kill us with, Gavi said as they wandered around the grim display, but none of it felt real. What she remembered best was afterward, sitting in an open-air café by the sea in Jaffa with Gavi and his friends—the balmy darkness, the chalky stone, the sound of the waves lapping at the shore. In the dark, she couldn't see Andromeda's rock, to which, according to the myth, the girl was lashed and left to drown. They'd smoked cigarettes and sipped
small cups of Arabic coffee laced with cardamom and talked about the shelling of the Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, about Ariel Sharon, the Hezbollah, a friend who'd nearly lost an eye, the confusion of it all.