The Pale of Settlement (3 page)

Would you ever come to live here? one of Gavi's friends had asked.

Here.
Ha'aretz
. The land.

Sure, maybe, someday, Susan said. She'd envied their purposefulness, the sense of meaning she felt their lives must have. Looking back, she wondered how she could have been so naive.

You have to be crazy to live here, one of them had said, tapping his finger on his temple. Meshuga! I'm getting the hell out of this nuthouse as soon as I can.

They'd all laughed, except Gavi.

I could never live anyplace else, he said.

When Susan went to Israel the next spring, her grandmother was alone. They sat together on the couch in the living room, sipping coffee and looking out onto the hazy vista of the bay. There were no helicopters today, only the long gray battleships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Susan had brought a tape recorder along, hoping to capture some of the stories of her grandparents' lives before it was too late, but now that she was there she wasn't sure she had the courage to take the machine out of her bag. It seemed, somehow, too much of an admission that her grandmother, too, would soon be dead. She studied the photographs lined up along the mantelpiece, portraits of her parents as newlyweds, of her grandfather in his officer's uniform from World War I, of herself and Gavi as babies playing at Khayat Beach, round and naked on the sand.

Her grandmother was telling her about the Iraqi
SCUDS
. One night, when the alarm sounded, she said, I was at your aunt and uncle's flat. We had to go into the bathroom, which was their sealed room. Imagine! There we were, sitting together on the edge of the bathtub, drinking champagne.

Champagne? Susan said. Weren't you supposed to have your gas masks on?

Yes, well, her grandmother said. There didn't seem much point.

Gavi came to visit their grandmother nearly every day. He pushed open the front door without bothering to ring the bell. He had filled out a bit since Susan had seen him last, and he'd let his hair grow out from its army buzz cut, but otherwise he seemed unchanged. Oh, my wonderful boy, their grandmother said, reaching her bent, arthritic arms around his neck and kissing him repeatedly on the cheek.

Gavi took Susan out for lunch to an overly bright health food restaurant with white plastic chairs and tables and bushy potted ferns. She didn't even try to speak Hebrew anymore, and his English was rusty from disuse. She watched him struggle to find the words and tried to keep her own vocabulary simple, her enunciation clear. He told her about the construction company he was working for, about a recent trip to Eilat. She told him about the series of stories she was writing about the homeless in New York and joked about the bad blind dates she'd recently been on. He didn't mention anything about his “group,” and although she wondered if he was still involved with it, she didn't ask.

They were back in the car when Gavi turned to her and said, Would you come someplace with me?

It was a breezy day, too cool for the beach, the sky hung with banks of blurred gray clouds. Susan had nothing else to do, so she said, Sure.

Gavi drove to a neighborhood Susan had never been to before, down on the Hadar, near the Arab part of town. He parked in front of a concrete building Susan took at first to be a block of flats. Then she saw the sign and realized that it was a hotel. She tried to speak, but Gavi had already stepped around the car and was opening her door. She followed him into the building, and across the empty lobby, and then she watched as he exchanged some words with the clerk at the front desk and took his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out several bills. The clerk unhooked a key from a pegboard on the wall and pointed to the elevator. Susan followed Gavi into the narrow space, fixed her eyes on the numbers lighting up overhead. The unsaid words dropped inside her as the elevator rose.

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and ammonia; it was dim and cold but clean. Gavi went to open the blinds and Susan sat on the edge of the bed and wondered who had been there before them, in this room rented out to men like Gavi by the hour or the day. And what kind of woman was she? There was a black telephone on the bedside table and a blinking digital clock. Here she was. Gavi sat down next to her. He laced his fingers together, examining his palms. Then he looked up and said, There's always been a special connection between us, don't you think?

Yes, Susan whispered, the word snagging in her throat. She thought of that evening on the beach in Gaza, the belated light of stars.

Then Gavi turned and put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She felt him release his breath, his body slackening against
hers. He stayed there, holding her, his head against her shoulder, her cheek against his shirt, her hands resting on the broad slope of his back. He smelled unfamiliar in this sudden proximity, a strange sweet smell like apricots. His lips moved against her neck. The blood was rushing in her ears. He slid his hands beneath her shirt, tentatively touched her breasts. The image came to her, unbidden, of Sharona and her plump white hands, so different from her own. She let him pull her shirt off over her head, lifting her arms like a child, and waited while he unbuttoned his. He pushed her backward onto the bed, pressing his lips and tongue to hers, urgent, awkward, her nipples hard against his chest, his weight pressing her down. It was only after he had unzipped her jeans and was pushing his fingers inside that she grasped his arm and said, Gavi, no.

He rolled off her onto his back, covering his eyes with his arm.

I'm sorry, she said.

She sat up and swung her feet to the floor, her upper body bare and cold, her jeans flapped open at the waist. She wanted to say something, but there were no words. She felt his need radiating toward her like a star. She reached back and rested her hand on his thigh. He turned his head and gave her a glancing look like a stone skipping across water and shifted his leg away.

I'm so sorry, she said again.

He said, It's okay.

They pulled their shirts back on in silence, the afternoon light watery and gray behind the blinds. He went into the bathroom and she heard the pull-chain toilet flush, water running in the sink. Their grandmother would be waiting. How much time had passed?

When he came out, she said, We'd better go.

Out on the street, it had begun to rain, a spring rain that splattered in plump drops onto the sidewalk, leaving round wet stains. The air was sweet with the smell of ozone.

Susan told herself, Eleanor Roosevelt married her cousin. Even first cousins got married all the time. No one was talking about marriage anyhow.

The fact was nothing happened. Still, she was left with a wretched, guilty aftertaste and a shattered feeling inside, like the aftermath of an explosion.

She didn't tell anyone about it, and she and Gavi didn't speak of it again. But the secret fact of it hovered between them like an aura. From time to time, she thought of the two of them as children, mugging for the camera. Once she'd told him that she was a witch and that if they crossed their eyes and held sticks between their teeth the picture wouldn't come out. But, of course, it did.

It was just a few months later that Susan's mother called her with the news. Susan took the call in the newsroom from her desk, pressing a finger against one ear.

He's been sleeping outside in the garden, her mother said. He won't eat anything Sharona cooks. He hasn't gone in to work for weeks.

Susan pressed her arm against the space beneath her ribs. She should have known.

It's taken everybody by surprise, her mother said. What do you think? Did anything ever seem strange to you?

Susan said, Not really, no.

Your uncle says Gavi won't acknowledge that anything is wrong, her mother said, and that isn't a good sign. Apparently, he's gone
back to this “group” of his, but won't talk about it at all. Sharona has moved out. Who can blame her? It's a terrible thing.

Susan logged on to the computer and found an article that described a group whose followers believed in the mystical meaning of numbers and colors, in the connection between all things. They believed in astrology, astral travel, tarot, reincarnation. They didn't live in communes, but held secret meetings in which they meditated to cleanse their auras. They thought the world was evil and bound to destroy itself. They believed there was no such thing as coincidence or chance.

They believed that everything had meaning. Every shape, number, word. The phenomenal world was no more or less than a vast labyrinth of messages waiting to be decoded, understood. The idea was not unfamiliar to Susan; didn't the Kabbalist mystics think in this same way? A teacup might denote nurturing or creation, containment—or emptiness, if you considered the “zero” of its rim. And what about the handle, so like a human ear?

There was a certain paranoia, surely, to viewing the world as a network of signification encoded in cryptic signs.

Susan found the photograph of Gavi with strange eyes taken on the night of their coincidental encounter at the airport six years before and pinned it to the bulletin board above her desk. Susan's parents reported that Sharona had filed for divorce. Gavi had moved back into his parents' flat. All he does is sit on the couch all day and watch
TV
, Susan's father said.

Susan didn't call Gavi, even though she wanted to. She was afraid there wasn't anything to say. She looked up at the photograph instead. She didn't think he was crazy, but it was impossible to tell. People had breakdowns, didn't they? She wondered when she'd see
him again. Her grandmother was moving to a nursing home on the
merkaz
; the flat would soon be sold. Before long, her grandmother, too, would probably be dead. What reason would she have to go to Israel then?

In her memory, Susan is standing at the Panorama Street railing, looking down the Carmel onto the golden dome of the Baha'i Temple, the elaborate sloping gardens lined with cypresses, the red roofs of the German Colony, the cluster of tall buildings on the Hadar. The long arc of Haifa bay curves north past the oil refineries and white storage drums, up to the faint gleam of the chalk cliffs at Rosh Hanikra, the border of southern Lebanon. The sea is blue and flat as glass. She misses it, and without her realizing it the longing has shattered inside her, leaving small invisible cuts like thorns. It is spring. Jays chatter in the pines above her head. Anemones push through the swaying grass. Far off, there is the murmur of a radio, the clink of cutlery, a barking dog.

The Berlin Wall came down the year that they broke up. Her ex-boyfriend sent her photographs, a whole roll of film, close-ups of the graffiti, swirls and curves and curlicues, like strange ideograms.

He sent pictures of his new apartment, too, a soaring empty space with bare floors and windows set at odd angles on white walls. He was paring down to essentials. From the bedroom, he wrote, he could see Kaiser Wilhelm's Gedächtniskirche, the bombed-out church against a fractured sky.

Susan tried to imagine herself in that space, hollow and symbolic, against the walls left standing, the walls torn down. She'd moved into a boxy one bedroom on the thirtieth floor of a postwar high-rise on the Upper West Side, and from where she sat, all you could see was air.

When she turned the letter over, she saw that he'd signed it
Auf wiedersehen
.

German was her father's mother tongue, but after the war, in Palestine, he changed his name from Fritz to Ezra and forgot most of his German, though he kept his accent. Susan was so used to it that she hardly noticed, but sometimes, when friends of hers who didn't know him spoke to him on the phone, they'd say, Where's he from?

Susan's grandparents lived in Israel, but spoke German to each other and English to Susan and her brothers, switching to German when they didn't want them to understand. They all avoided complex topics as a result, sticking to a simple vocabulary, enunciating with care and much waving of hands.

Although Susan's mother urged her to take French (the language of culture, she said), Susan signed up for German her freshman year in college. The instructor was a buxom woman, with thick forearms and a mole on her left eyelid. You have a natural accent! she told Susan, complimenting her on her name:
Stern
, she told the class, pronouncing the first consonant with a
sh
sound, means “star.”

After a week or two, Susan decided her mother was right. She dropped the class and took French instead.

Susan's ex-boyfriend called, long distance, from Berlin. He was upset. He said that the woman he'd been dating was pregnant. Things hadn't been serious between them at all, he told Susan, but now the woman wanted him to marry her.

This is not the way it was supposed to be, he said. This changes everything.

Susan carried the phone over to the window and looked down at the flowing Hudson as the late afternoon sky turned the color of a bruise. She tried to picture him sitting at his glass table, surrounded
by those high white walls. She thought: not such an empty apartment. Not just the essentials, after all.

Look, she said, this is your kid we're talking about. This could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Her voice sounded calm and wise in her ears, as if it belonged to someone else. She'd always thought that if she got pregnant unexpectedly she'd have an abortion, but as she spoke she realized that she probably wouldn't, after all.

I miss you, Susan, her ex-boyfriend said. You always know the right thing to say.

Back in journalism school, when Susan and her ex-boyfriend were first in love, the world had seemed to be a fixed and fathomable place, as predictable as a map. Back then, the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and Star Wars a defense initiative. They laughed at Wolfgang, a Poly Sci Ph.D. candidate from Düsseldorf who was writing a dissertation on the reunification of Germany. They sat around on sagging couches with their feet up on plank-and-milk-crate coffee tables and shook their heads, laughing, over bottles of imported beer.