Acts of Faith (22 page)

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Deborah answered tartly. “Why does everybody always want to marry me off?”

“Why ‘off’?” Avi asked. “I’d think people would just plain want to marry you. Anyway, why doesn’t a
frum
girl like you have a husband already?”

Discomfited, Deborah retreated into scouring the huge pots.

“Did I touch a sore spot?” he asked sympathetically.

Deborah looked up, said, “Very,” and went back to her scrubbing.

“Can I give you a hand?”

“Be my guest,” she answered, handing him an extra scouring brush. “Now tell me what a pilot does all day.”

“It’s pretty boring actually,” he said ingenuously. “I pull a few levers, I go up in the air. I push a few more levers, and suddenly my sonic boom is breaking people’s windows.”

“What’s so boring about that?” Deborah asked.

“Well, you don’t exactly get to see much of the world. At Mach Two you can go from one end of Israel to the other in about three minutes.”

“That fast?” said Deborah, genuinely impressed.

“No,” he answered wryly, “Israel’s that small.”

They were suddenly interrupted by an angry voice.

“Deborah—is this what you call work?”

It was the gargantuan Shauli, head cook and absolute monarch of the kitchen.

Deborah blushed.

Avi leaped to her defense. “I shouldn’t have been talking to her.”

“You,” Shauli bellowed. “You aren’t even
allowed
in here.”

“Yes, sir,” Avi responded with a salute. “May I just be permitted to ask
Chavera
Deborah a single question?”

“Only if it’s short,” the cook replied.

Avi quickly asked, “Have you any plans for after dinner—I mean after you wash up and everything?”

“No,” Deborah answered, off balance, “not really.”

“Why don’t I get some wheels from the kibbutz car pool? The Aviv in Tiberias is showing
Butch Cassidy
—which is so great I’ve seen it four times.”

“You mean a movie?” Deborah asked uneasily. How could she tell him that she still felt guilty watching television newscasts and had even avoided the Friday night films at the kibbutz.

But Avi quickly sensed the problem. “Listen, if you’ve got religious scruples, you could keep your eyes closed all the time.”

He laughed. And she laughed.

And, as Avi bounded off, Deborah felt somehow unsettled. Simultaneously happy and curiously apprehensive.

I think I like him.

Deborah was not morally shaken after having seen the film. Indeed, she had found the advertisements that preceded it—especially those for bathing suits—far more risqué.

They had coffee and cake in a restaurant on the Tayellet, a seaside promenade making a heroic effort to resemble the Riviera. When they climbed back into the car, Avi boasted, “I once made it from here to the kibbutz gate in seven minutes and thirteen seconds. Shall we try to break that record tonight?”

Recalling the many curves on the road, Deborah suggested, “Why don’t we try to beat the record in slowness?”

Avi cast her a meaningful look.

“Fine.” His eyes twinkled. “We’ll go as slow as you like.”

Twenty minutes later, he brought the car to a halt in a quiet corner near the orchards of Kfar Ha-Sharon. Below
them the Sea of Galilee was a vast, pearl gray reflection of the moon.

He turned toward Deborah and touched her gently on the shoulder.

“Are you nervous?” he whispered.

“Why should I be?” she asked, trying to be nonchalant.

“A rabbi’s daughter must have led a very sheltered life.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then conceded, “You’re right. I feel sort of … uncomfortable with you. Besides, didn’t you yourself say that kibbutzniks are like brothers and sisters?”

“Yes, that’s true,” he said softly. “But I didn’t grow up with you. To me, you’re attractive as a woman.”

Though Avi was unaware of their significance, his words struck her like lightning. In the nearly twenty years of her lifetime she had been variously referred to as a girl, a
shayne maidel
, and a sweet young thing—but never as a
woman.
And what was more astonishing, she felt like one.

She welcomed Avi’s arm around her shoulder and tried to enjoy his kiss, but she was worried that he might try to go too far.

Yet it was his
questions
that became too intimate.

“Why did your parents send you to Israel?”

She hesitated, then replied unconvincingly, “The usual reasons.”

“No, Deborah,” he said firmly. “I’ve lived on this kibbutz long enough to tell a volunteer from an exile. Were you involved with someone?”

She lowered her head.

“And they didn’t like him?”

This time, she nodded in the affirmative.

“Did it work?” Avi asked quietly.

“What?”

“Did the separation cure you?”

“I wasn’t sick,” she answered pointedly.

Avi was silent for a moment and then asked, “And are you still involved with him? I mean, in your heart?”

Her feelings had been pent up for so long that she wanted to shout: He’s the only person in the world who’s loved me for myself.

Yet the voice that answered Avi was barely audible. “I think so … yes.”

His questions followed with a delicate persistence. “Do you write to each other?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have his address.”

“Does he have yours?”

Again, she shook her head.

A look of hope—or was it relief?—crossed Avi’s face.

“Then it’s just a question of time,” he murmured. “Sooner or later, when you’ve mourned enough, you’ll be free.”

She shrugged. “I suppose so.”

He held her by the shoulders, whispering, “And when you are, I hope I’ll be right there.”

Then, trying to raise her mood, he said jauntily, “I’d better get you home. I’m due back at the base by six.”

As the motor revved, he shifted the gears and drove back to the road and into the parking lot.

“How are you going to get there?” she asked, as they walked to her new
srif.

“I’ll hitchhike, how else?”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“No,” he joked. “Thumbing a ride here is perfectly safe. It’s only when you get
in
with an Israeli driver that you risk your life.”

He squeezed her hand, kissed her on the cheek, turned, and headed down the gravel road, finally vanishing into the shadows.

Deborah stood there and watched him, suddenly having seen through his bravado and discovered the sensitivity it tried to camouflage—the constant fear of living a mere sixty-second scramble from mortality.

She only wished with all her heart that she could like him enough to forget Timothy.

T
im’s plane landed in the early morning at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, where a bus was waiting to transport the five seminarians through the ocher hills of Umbria to Perugia.

As they entered the city, Father Devlin expounded on the remnants of numerous cultures standing side by side—Etruscan, Roman, Carolingian, Early and Late Renaissance—reminding them that though civilizations rise and fall, the Faith abides forever.

“And perhaps most significant of all,” Father Devlin waxed floridly, “Perugia is the home of the only sensual delight that isn’t a mortal sin. I mean, of course, their chocolate.”

The bus pulled up at the Ospizio San Cristoforo—only blocks from the eighteenth-century Palazzo Gallenga, the Italian University for Foreigners.

During their first few days in Perugia, Tim began to wonder if their group was not being deliberately subjected to an ordeal, some trial to measure their resistance to temptation.

Although the university arranged for special classes that included only seminarians, and half a dozen full-fledged priests who were being transferred to the Vatican
from other countries, outside the classroom there was no way of concealing other students from the celibates’ view.

Perugia in summer was a lodestone for American college girls, all vying for the maximum of masculine attention by wearing the minimum of clothing. They were there learning Italian, not as a foreign language, but as a
Romance
language.

“I can’t believe it,” remarked Patrick Grady, a member of Tim’s group, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I’ve never seen girls like this in my life. I could never be a priest in
this
diocese.”

They were walking back to the Ospizio for lunch, stifling in their cassocks, as a pair of Texan nymphs in the flimsiest of summer attire wafted across their path.

Grady’s eyes bulged.

“Stay loose, Pat,” Timothy remarked. “The strain will be over in a few more weeks.”

“Do you mean you’re actually impervious to all this, Hogan? How do you do it?”

Tim pretended not to understand, but Grady persisted.

“Look, we’re normal men. In my hometown, most of the guys our age are already married—and just about all of them have lost their virginity in the back seat of a car. You can’t make me believe that you don’t at least—you know—sometimes … relieve your tensions.”

Tim merely shrugged. How could he tell a fellow seminarian that he had thoughts far more passionate than his and hence was indifferent to the local temptations?

At mealtimes, each of them took turns saying grace and vied with one another in the sophistication and length of their prayers.

Tim was no match for the articulate Martin O’Connor, whose benedictions were often so long, it took several coughs from Father Devlin to remind him that the tagliatelle were growing cold.

Since there were no afternoon classes till the language labs at four, most of them had adopted the local practice of taking a postprandial siesta.

While the others slept, Tim would sit in a shady corner of the cortile, diligently memorizing the Italian irregular verbs.

One torrid July afternoon, as he was mastering the principal parts of
rispóndere
, out of the corner of his eye Tim noticed George Cavanagh walking furtively through the portico toward their rooms, a look of anxiety on his face.

“Are you all right, George?” Tim called out.

Cavanagh pulled up short, and then immediately demanded, “What makes you think anything’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Tim answered ingenuously. “You seem distracted. Maybe it’s just the heat.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cavanagh allowed, walking toward him. “It’s like a broiler out there.”

He sat down, withdrew a cigarette, lit up, and inhaled deeply.

Tim sensed that Cavanagh wanted to confide in someone.

“Want to talk about it, George?” he offered.

After another moment’s hesitation, Cavanagh said softly, “I don’t know how I’m even going to be able to confess this.”

“Come on,” Tim reassured him. “Whatever it is will be forgiven.”

“Yeah, but not forgotten,” George murmured in pain. He looked at Tim with a pleading glance. “You promise you won’t tell a soul?”

“Yeah, I swear.”

Cavanagh blurted out—albeit still in a whisper—“I’ve been with a woman, a prostitute.”

“What?”

“I’ve had sexual intercourse. Now do you see why I can’t confess?”

“Look,” Tim said, “you’re not the first to give in to temptation. Think of St. Augustine. I know you’ll find the courage—”

“But that’s just it,” Cavanagh agonized. “I’ll never find the strength to keep away.”

He put his head in his hands and rubbed his forehead in despair. “I guess you despise me for this, huh?”

“I don’t make moral judgments,” Tim responded. “Just don’t surrender, George. Have a talk with your Spiritual Director and work out your feelings.”

The anguished seminarian looked up into the innocent eyes of his classmate and muttered, “Thanks.”

“Carissimi studenti, il nostro corso è finito. Spero che abbiate imparato non solo a parlare l’italiano ma anche ad asaporare la musicalità di nostra lingua.”

The course had ended. Tim and his classmates rose to affirm, with their applause, that they had learned not only to speak Italian but also, as their professor had put it, to savor its music.

That afternoon as four of the five seminarians hauled their luggage to the back of the minibus, Father Devlin congratulated them effusively.

George Cavanagh was not there. For reasons he had confided only to Father Devlin, he was spending the weekend in nearby Assisi.

When apprised of this conspicuous display of devoutness, Martin O’Connor muttered audibly, “Showoff.”

In Rome, they were in for a surprise.

The special summer courses at the North American College still had three weeks to run. And, since they could not yet be properly housed, the members of Tim’s elite American group were offered the option of either spending the time on retreat in a monastery in the Dolomites, or—for the more adventurous—joining a group of young seminarians from Germany and Switzerland on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

The group was led by Father Johannes Bauer, a pious old man with a slight stammer and a complete ignorance of any language but German and Latin—which sounded identical when he spoke them.

Once again, Tim saw divine intervention in this undreamed-of opportunity. He quickly signed up for the
tour, regretting only that George Cavanagh and Patrick Grady elected to do likewise. Ever since their intimate conversation in the Ospizio courtyard earlier that summer, George had been discernibly cool to him.

Tim had hoped that during these three weeks at least he would have been able to escape the saturnine glances of his classmate.

The moment George learned the group would be divided into pairs for lodging, he teamed up with Patrick, leaving Tim cast adrift on an untranslatable sea of German with a red-cheeked Bavarian named Christoph.

Yet in their very first half hour together on the plane, Tim and Christoph discovered that they could indeed communicate. Timothy had not forgotten his Brooklyn Yiddish, a language largely derived from medieval High German. When he suggested that their ability to converse would make the tour a
gryse fargenign
, Christoph smiled.

“Ja, ein sehr grosses Vergnügen.”
In either language, a mutually comprehensible pleasure.