Two She-Bears (28 page)

At first a head appeared, peeking cautiously from behind a rock on the ridge. Then a rifle barrel, then the rest of the figure. A young, slender man, armed with an M16 with a telescopic sight, darted down the slope and crouched behind a bush.

A few minutes later he stood and went down to the carob tree. He checked the surroundings and climbed straight toward the mastic tree beside the oak on the opposite slope. Eitan, hiding in the mastic, watched as the man drew closer. His easy step, so unlike the steps of the guy who had come in the morning to look for the cigarette lighter, was the walk of someone who feels at home in the outdoors. The man's choice of the mastic tree was as logical as Eitan's had been. It was clear that he meant to hide behind it and provide cover for whoever would soon arrive at the carob. Eitan sat in the hiding place he had made among the branches, the Mauser in his hand.

The sniper arrived, lay on his belly behind the mastic tree, very close to Eitan, who was motionless inside it. He aimed his rifle at the carob, and as he adjusted his position Eitan said, “Don't move, I'm aiming a rifle at your head.”

The man didn't move.

“Nod your head yes, that you understand.”

The man nodded.

“Throw the rifle to the side.”

The man did as he was told.

“Put your forehead on the ground and your hands behind your back.”

He emerged from his hideout and hit the man in the back of the neck with the butt of the Mauser, tied his wrists to his ankles behind his back, and pulled the rope tight. He sealed his mouth with the duct tape, sliced and removed his shirt, wrapped it around his head and eyes, and tied the sleeves around his neck. Then he lifted him up and put him behind the oak tree, and returned to his hiding place.

The man in the hat arrived fifteen minutes later. He sat down in the shade of the carob tree, removed his shoulder bag, drank water from a bottle, and looked around, trying to imagine where his adversary would come from and where his helper was hiding. Eitan looked at him for two minutes or so, climbed out of the mastic tree, and approached the man, pointing the Mauser at him.

The man didn't budge, just followed him with his eyes. When Eitan reached the carob, the man said, “Put down the gun. I have a sniper here. You're in his sights.”

“We already met,” said Eitan. “Your sniper and I.”

“Did you bring it?” asked the man.

“What?”

“What you found here.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“A gold lighter.”

Eitan took the lighter from his pocket. “Here it is.”

“What do you want?” asked the man.

Eitan said, “For the lighter or for your life?”

The man said, “Don't answer me with questions.”

“You're in no position to tell me what and what not to do,” said Eitan. “Now get up and put up your hands. I have to search you.”

The man hesitated for a moment, and rose. Eitan held the rifle in his right hand, one finger on the trigger guard, the others around the butt, with the end of the barrel at the man's throat, and his left hand frisking his body.

“Your pistol is in the bag?”

“What do you want,” said the man, “that I go around with a gun in my belt like an idiot?” And added: “This is ridiculous. You don't intend to shoot me. The shot will be heard all over the area.”

“This is not Tel Aviv,” said Eitan. “I already shot the guy you sent this morning and nobody came to check.”

“A second shot will attract more attention. Even here.”

“Okay,” said Eitan. “You convinced me. We'll do it quietly, with no second shots.”

He dropped the rifle, wrapped his outstretched arms around the man, and tightened his grip around his chest. The man responded with greater force and alacrity than his physique had suggested. He pummeled Eitan's back, kicked his legs, tried to head-butt his eyebrows, but Eitan increased the pressure, and the man realized that his grip was more dangerous than a standard wrestling move. He thrashed like a madman. From inside his body, a snapping sound. Two of his ribs, now broken. Eitan too felt the same snap and loosened his grip a little.

“You see,” he said, “all quiet. No shooting. No one hears a thing, and if someone sees us from afar, he will think I love you very much.”

The man inhaled a chestful of air. His broken ribs pierced his lungs and he wanted to scream, but Eitan grabbed him again, this time with his full strength.

“I'm letting you have a little air,” he said, “so you can hear a few important things before you die.”

The man's face reddened and his eyes bulged. He understood what was coming and was gripped by a deathly fear. Not a fear of losing blood or a fear of thirst and hunger, but the primal fear of strangulation.

“This is revenge,” Eitan told him, his mouth against the man's ear. “I am killing you because of the old man you killed here yesterday.”

Again he loosened the pressure. The man, twisted in agony, took a gulp of air and groaned. “Let's talk. Tell me what you want.”

His red face had by now turned purple and his eyes popped some more, for Eitan's arms had again tightened around him.

“I want you to die with the knowledge that you deserve it, to die with the knowledge that you're an idiot.”

He again relaxed his arms a bit and the man moaned. “He fell and broke his head.”

Eitan tightened his grip again. “This is revenge,” he repeated. His chin pressed the man's throat, and his lips whispered in his ear, “You come here, scum like you, and think you know everything. But this place has its own logic and laws. A different kind of people live here and every stone has its side of darkness and side of light. And if idiots like you lay a stone upside down, the police might not notice, but we notice it right away.”

And tightened some more. With the full power that twelve years of hard labor had implanted in him.

The man tried to beg, to scream, but he couldn't breathe again or produce a sound in his throat. His face went almost black, blood dripped from his nose. His brain wondered one last thing: How had a man acquired so much loyalty and strength?

His lungs emptied of air. His hands were too weak to hit back. Urine drenched his trousers and his legs fluttered and twisted and then went limp and still. Eitan kept squeezing for a minute more, and carried him that way, pressed to his chest with his legs in the air, to the cave in the wadi. When he unlocked his arms the corpse plummeted into the pit, straight onto the dead goat that was flung there the day before.

He returned to the carob tree, took the man's hat and shoulder bag, went back to the cave, and climbed down into the pit. There he smashed his cell phone, scattered the fragments on the dead man, placed his hat and bag on his chest, and took his wallet. He covered him with stones, pulled out the goat and laid it on top, climbed the carob for an additional scan of the area, and then went up to the mastic tree on the slope.

The sniper jerked and twitched, trying to work free of the ropes and the shirt that covered his head.

Eitan told him, “Calm down. You're better off not seeing me. It would not be good for you.” He leaned over and tapped his shoulder. “Your boss is dead. I'm counting on you to get to the road somehow, and on the way you can think of a good story to tell whoever finds you.”

He went through the man's pockets, took his key ring, and removed the bolt assembly from the M16. Then he gathered his tools, checking off item after item on his written list. He removed the pieces of green duct tape from the branches and put them in his pack, wrapped the Mauser in the blanket and tied it, shouldered it, and headed for the pickup truck.

It stood where he had left it the night before, by the oak trees. He took off the tarp and put it in the rear, backed up the truck onto the dirt road, took the rake, erased tracks and footprints he couldn't see in last night's darkness, got behind the wheel, removed the sheepskins from his shoes, and drove across the main road, toward a garbage dump.

There he stopped, picked up a rag from the ground, and wiped the bolt assembly of the M16. He flung it and the keys into the distance, tossed the wallet and tarp and pieces of tape and sheepskin shoes onto a burning pile of trash, and carefully added a little diesel fuel from a reserve jerrican in the pickup. There were bloodstains on his shirt, and he stripped it off and burned it too. He put on a T-shirt he had in the pickup and drove off.

He went from the other side of the dump onto a road that led to the banana and avocado plantations of a nearby kibbutz. He drove slowly, not to attract attention or raise dust. He suddenly felt himself whistling. With difficulty at first, as he had not puckered his lips like that in twelve years, not for whistling or kissing or pronouncing certain syllables, but after a few minutes his whistling became more even and melodic. He drove along the fence of the plantations, then a few kilometers through the fields, and then got back on a paved road and accelerated.

He broke out in a smile. The third smile in the past twenty-four hours. Slightly distorted, the smile of lips that had forgotten this task too, but nevertheless a smile. He had done what he had to do. Maybe now it would be a little better.

The twelve years have passed and come to an end, and another day awaits him, the day of the burial of Grandpa Ze'ev. A day when he will say goodbye to his old and good friend whose blood he has just avenged. A day when for the first time he will enter the cemetery of the moshava and see the gravestone of his son.

One evening, a few months later, Dovik and Dalia and Eitan and I were sitting, eating Dalia's salad and Eitan's fried eggs and olives that Grandpa Ze'ev had pickled and bequeathed us—and Dalia, of all people, suddenly said, “Maybe now that he's dead, and it's clear he won't come back, maybe now we can finally tear down that old shed of his that's such an eyesore in the yard?”

“You're right,” I said to her, for the first time, I think, since I'd known her. And I said to Dovik too: “Your wife is right. It should have been torn down a long time ago.”

“Why tear it down?” asked Dovik, who had prematurely become as stingy as a stuffy old farmer and begun to resemble people whom he ridiculed in his youth. “What's wrong with it?”

“Everything's wrong with it,” I said, “it's moldy and damp, has no floor, water leaks into it, and memories leak out of it. We should throw out everything in it. Tear it down, pour a concrete floor instead of the wooden one that disintegrated, and put up a new shed. Today there are plastic ones, which do the job and also look very good.”

“How symbolic,” said Dalia. And for the second time since we met I told her she was right.

“You finally found symbolism where it actually exists.”

“I meant, how symbolic to go from a wooden shed to a plastic shed,” said Dalia.

“Of course,” I said, “I apologize for briefly suspecting you of a different symbolism.”

“But why throw out what's in there?” insisted Dovik.

“I give you permission to inspect it and take what you want before we throw things out.”

“Okay,” said Dovik. “I'll bring a worker from Chinatown.”

“Chinatown” is what people here call a small building at the periphery of the apartment blocks in the moshava. About a dozen Chinese workers live there, raising ducks and growing vegetables in the yard, and apart from their regular construction work, they hire themselves out to whoever needs them for whatever job. All-seeing but invisible, they go about in our streets, and though they've learned a few words of Hebrew, they talk to no one. But the owner of our mini-market spotted them wandering among the shelves of his store and began stocking the noodles they needed and various black and red sauces and strange canned goods and cheap strong beer. It was he who helped them find daywork, and whoever needs a worker asks him.

“Chinese or not Chinese, a worker is not a good idea,” said Dalia. “Someone has to supervise him. Who knows what your amazing Grandpa hid there—documents, hand grenades, gold coins.”

“All right,” said Eitan, “I'll supervise him.”

He phoned a friend who owned a building-supply business—another synapse in their network—and ordered iron webbing and wire, sacks of cement, limestone, sand, and gravel.

The next day he got up early and put a pot on the fire, and Dovik drove to Chinatown and brought back a short, thin worker with the hands of a much-bigger man, and together they emptied the shed of its contents: old paint cans, rags, rusty iron bars, and wires.

On the same day I began teaching at eleven, and instead of grading papers and exams I found myself in the yard, observing the clearing out and demolition from up close. Eitan poked around and found a folding shovel, apparently from the British army, which they resurrected with rust remover and steel wool. And Dovik found and took a hammer and a big wooden chest that to his great disappointment did not contain either hand grenades or gold coins but only a very dusty pillow. He beat it against a tree and a suffocating cloud arose. The pillow blossomed with embroidery: all kinds of flowers and birds, buttons and buds.

“You want this pillow, Ruta?”

“I really don't. Thanks.”

“That's it,” said Eitan, “there's nothing else here. He can work without supervision.”

Tearing down the shed was very easy. From the moment the worker ripped out the doorposts, its pieces no longer supported one another and crumbled with a few light blows and kicks. It seemed like the shed was happy to come apart, disgusted by what it contained and what had happened within it.

I went into the house to get ready to leave for school. When I looked out the window I saw that Eitan was using stakes and string to mark the perimeter of the hole that would be dug and the cement floor that would be poured for the new shed. After he was done he gave the worker a hoe and shovel and a wooden board about twenty centimeters wide to mark the depth of the digging. Honking its horn, a fancy car entered the yard, towing a large load. The building-supply friend brought everything Eitan had ordered and included a soil compactor and a small cement mixer.

He got out of his car, sniffed the air, sat down under the mulberry tree, and waited for the
poikeh
to be uncovered. Dovik and Eitan joined him, sat with him by the fire. I watched them through the window—who am I and what's my name? Jezebel? Michal? Sisera's mother?—and I saw my man, my first husband, talking and smiling, his hands gesticulating, moving coals and logs in the firepit.

He showed his friend the old military shovel that he found, and the three of them, happy as puppies, opened and closed its blade and took turns sticking it in the ground. After they ate they unloaded the machinery from the trailer; the friend explained a few things about their use and drove off.

Dovik and Eitan went about their business in the nursery, the Chinese worker kept on working, and I, instead of hurrying to school, kept on watching him. He had the crisp, efficient movements of an experienced laborer, pleasing to the eye, but I sensed that I was staring at the shovel, sticking into the soft ground, collecting and tossing clumps of earth.

The worker finished digging and removing the dirt and began to smooth the bottom of the hole with the hoe to prepare for laying the foundation. I remember: The phone suddenly rang, presumably the school secretary, but I didn't answer. I looked at the blade of the hoe, smoothing and leveling the bottom of the hole, and I suddenly heard a strange sound: a cry from the top of the mulberry tree, the cry of a baby.

The worker stood up, looked curiously at the treetop, then turned and looked at the ficus in the street, for a similar cry had come from there too, and then another from the neighbor's pecan tree. He didn't know, of course, that he was seeing and hearing the first jaybirds to return to the moshava after many years of exile. And it's doubtful that he knew that they were jaybirds, because the jays in China are very different from here. A few days later I looked it up and found that their tails are long and their bodies are black and white and the Chinese call them “the happy bird,” whereas our jaybirds have a crest and a blue spot on the wing and are not happy but quarrelsome and insolent. But both of them, the jays of China and the jays of Israel, are good mimics, and the crying of babies is similar in both countries.

The worker shrugged his shoulders, took hold of the hoe, and continued his work, but then came more shrieks and cries from the jaybirds, who by now filled all the trees on the street, each one producing the piercing, soul-searing sounds that only the throat of a baby can make.

I opened the window and leaned outside. Now the jaybirds were visible, flying from tree to tree and filling the air with blue flashes and shrieks. The worker looked at them again with trepidation and curiosity, and went back to his work. The blade of the hoe slid along the bottom of the hole, and more shrieks were heard; he raked a thin layer of dirt, and more jaybirds arrived, congregating from faraway orchards, from the oak forest, from the hills and wadis, perching in the trees of our pretty, quiet street and joining the choir.

Dovik shouted from the nursery, “Ruta, what's going on? What do those goddamn birds want?” But I paid no attention to them or to him but rather to the workman, who suddenly dropped his hoe, knelt on the ground, got on all fours in the hole he had dug, and inspected something closely.

He turned and looked at me, standing in the window looking at him. I hurried outside, bent over, and saw that he was examining something, like a piece of a tiny dome, that stuck out of the ground.

I knelt down and had a closer look. The jaybirds shrieked like madmen; my body understood and froze even before my mind caught on.

“What's going on there?” Dovik shouted again. “Why doesn't Eitan shoot them?”

The workman scraped with his strong fingers, brushed away and gently blew off the dirt. The piece he discovered seemed to be a fragment of pottery, maybe a bowl, but when he dug deeper, two big round holes appeared, which looked at me and at him.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted in English. But the workman kept digging carefully until the tiny skull was completely exposed. He picked it up. The eyeholes gazed at him with a penetrating human gaze, and when he put it down it rolled over and the holes disappeared and reappeared like the eyes of a doll that open and close. Here I am, the dead baby girl of Nahum Natan and Grandma Ruth. Here you are, the baby girl that her mother searched for everywhere else—in ditches and furrows, foundation pits and planting holes—but not in the shed where she was killed, on our land, near us.

“Dovik!” I screamed. “Dovik!”

“What happened?” he shouted from the nursery office.

“Come here! Quick!”

The workman, quiet and focused, kept at it. He scraped and burrowed and exposed a few more small, delicate bones. Were it not for the skull and the story, one might have mistaken them for the bones of a bird. He spread out a sack on the ground and arranged them one by one, and since the mind always looks for patterns, and wants and seeks and finds meaning, the pieces turned into a little arm and hip and chest and tiny hands. A jaw whose teeth had not yet grown joined the skull and the eyes and together became a face. Here you are. The dead baby girl of Nahum Natan and Grandma Ruth. Is this what Neta looks like too, after twelve and a half years in the ground?

Dovik came, looked, understood at once. “He buried her inside the shed, then went out and got on the horse with a sack and the shovel we found here.” That's what he said, with quiet logic, and then raised his voice a bit: “He put on a show for everyone, as if he were going to bury her someplace else.”

And suddenly he began stamping his feet and screaming horrible screams: “What you did wasn't enough for you? You also wanted to see Grandma searching for her all her life? Searching and not finding, searching without knowing she was here in the shed, right by us, two meters away from her mother!”

Dovik simply fell apart. He either knelt down or fell, crouched on all fours over the remains of the skeleton, shouted more than Eitan had at Neta's funeral, cried like I didn't dare cry then: “How could you raise us, you piece of shit, in this house? How could we all walk on this land, with Grandma's baby under our feet?”

He kicked the wheelbarrow and knocked it over. “Look at these seeds and plants and flowers of his! Look at what he really sowed and planted here!”

I never saw him in such a state. For a moment I was glad Grandpa was dead, because if he were alive Dovik would have attacked and beaten him.

People gathered near the fence. They did not see the bones, but they did hear the screams. The Tavori family, as usual, raised a ruckus, and the moshava, as usual, heard and hushed.

“Get out of here!” shouted Dovik. Spittle sprayed from his mouth. He leaned over, looking for a stone, a piece of wood, something to throw at them. “Get out of here, this isn't a theater!”

The confused workman moved aside, and I bent over and snatched the tiny figure he'd arranged on the sack, to turn it back from a week-old baby into a small random pile of unidentified pieces. Eitan, for his part, said nothing. He bent over beside me, gathered them up, and put them in a small cardboard box, set it aside, and immediately started up the compactor and noisily packed the dirt, grabbed the hoe, quickly spread and smoothed the pulverized limestone, and packed it down too.

He was fast and efficient, the way only my first husband could be. Compacted the dirt. Spread nylon sheets. Laid down some stones and over them the webbing. Switched on the mixer, put in cement, added water from the hose, and when it was ready began pouring the concrete.

“Faster!” he ordered the workman. “Faster!” And the man took the hoe and spread and smoothed the concrete with long broad strokes.

Only a few minutes had passed and a new floor was in place that would soon harden and dry, a new floor of a new shed, where no one would be able to starve or bury or find another baby. The workman smoothed the concrete with a few more strokes of the hoe and finished it with another tool, whose name I don't know, a kind of wooden plank with a handle.

“That's it,” said Eitan. “Now we just have to wait.” And he paid the workman his wages and sent him home.

The sun went down, and a few hours later, when total darkness had fallen, Eitan and Dovik and I took the little cardboard box and a plastic bag containing four large bulbs of white squill and walked to the cemetery. Dalia didn't come along. She said, “I'm not ready to be part of this thing,” adding: “Just be happy I'm not going to the police, which should have been done in this family a long time ago.”

We were unafraid. The Tavori family is not afraid of phenomena like Dovik's Dalia. Dovik, who by now had calmed down, smiled as he told her, “We overcame him, we'll overcome you too.”

We arrived at the cemetery. Eitan dug a narrow trench in the small space between the graves of Neta and Grandma Ruth, to bury the bones there.

He dug quietly, with his small pickax and the shovel he found in the shed before it was destroyed, and when he got to a depth of about sixty centimeters he set down the box, added a layer of earth, then two of the squill bulbs, and covered them. On the other side of Neta's grave he planted the other two bulbs, all of them sprouting the first green leaves of autumn—in case someone might see signs of digging and wonder why.

Dovik watered them and we went home. When we arrived Eitan said he had to check on the new floor, to see if it had started to harden. He looked and touched and said that if anyone wanted to leave their handprint, this was the last chance. Dovik called Dalia, and that's what we did: Dovik set down his hand, Dalia hurried over, imprinted her hand so their pinkies were touching, then Eitan and I, our hands identical and close.

“Nice floor, Eitan,” I said. “You just poured it, and I already forgot that terrible shed that stood here.”

“It's for you,” he said. “To please you.”

“You have.”

“I'll give it a little water,” said Dovik, now completely calm, “so the concrete won't crack.”

“No need,” said Eitan. “I just felt a raindrop on my head.”

“So did I,” I said.

A raindrop, and then another, and all of a sudden the clouds opened and the first rain of the season came down on schedule. Pounding rain, as ever at our moshava.

The windows of heaven opened—like in the Bible—fat drops struck, lightning slashed the darkness, distant thunder rumbled and roared, the skies became a cage filled with animals.

Dovik and Dalia fled home; Eitan and I went to our house. We stood together in the window and looked outside. Eitan put his hand on my hippy, rested his head on my shoulder. The rain grew stronger, arousing memories and seeds, digging new channels, destroying evidence.

Eitan said, “It's funny, Ruta. Somebody had to come all the way from China to find that poor baby.”

I said, “It's not funny, but it's very true.”