Establishment (48 page)

“Why now?” Jean asked her. “Oh, I know you must be restless after those hideous months in prison. But haven't you been separated from Sam long enough?”

“It would only be ten days at the most.”

“Why?”

“I don't know why. Maybe to lay a flower on Bernie's grave. Maybe to see what my husband died for.”

Or to find an answer when she didn't know the question. In New York, at Idlewild Airport between planes, she was ready to cancel her passage to Europe and return to California. But she talked herself out of that, and instead she telephoned San Francisco and spoke to Sam. “Am I going to live with granny always?” Sam asked plaintively.

“No, no, no, darling. I'll be back next week.”

“But you promised me you wouldn't go away again. You promised. You know you did.”

At that moment she almost decided to take the next plane home. But she did not, and the following morning she was in London. Just before noon, she took off in an El Al plane on the final leg of her flight to Tel Aviv.

The man sitting next to Barbara struck up a conversation with her. An Israeli, he was in his seventies, urbane, spoke excellent English, and he introduced himself as Aaron Cohen. He informed her that he owned a bookstore in Tel Aviv, and when she told him that she was Barbara Lavette, he responded with recognition and pleasure. “Of course. I should have recognized you from your picture. I sold a good many of your books.”

“In Hebrew? I wasn't translated into Hebrew.”

“Oh, no, in English. We sell a great many English books. But there's no reason why you shouldn't be translated into Hebrew, and I can do something about that. But what brings you to Israel? Curiosity? Or are you working on a book about us? You're not Jewish, are you?”

“No. My husband was. His name was the same as yours.”

“It's a common Jewish name. Is this your first trip to Israel?”

“Yes.”

“You say ‘my husband
was
.' Are you divorced? Or a widow?”

Barbara told him what had prompted her trip, insomuch as she knew what had prompted it. Cohen listened thoughtfully, then nodded.

“I think I understand,” he said.

“Do you, Mr. Cohen? I'm not sure I do.”

“Well, it's not a very pleasant thing to say, but death is a finality. Or it should be. Life must go on. You're a prisoner of your husband's death. I think you must free yourself.”

“That's a strange thing to say.”

“Have I hurt your feelings?”

“I'm not sure. I'm not sure of very much at all, and the truth is I'm not really sure what brought me here. Every step of the way I was on the edge of changing my mind.”

“Where is your husband buried?” Cohen asked.

She opened her purse and took out her notebook. She remembered the name; it was the pronunciation she was unsure of. “It's called Kiryat Anavim.”

“Oh? Yes, I know the place. It's a kibbutz on the road to Jerusalem—that is, on the Tel Aviv road to Jerusalem. You do know what a kibbutz is?”

“A sort of commune?”

“Yes. This one, Kiryat Anavim, is rather old and large, and I think they do have their own military cemetery, but you know, that would be only for their own people—I mean for the boys of the kibbutz who were killed during the war. You say your husband was killed somewhere to the east of Haifa?”

“On the road to Megiddo? I'm not sure.”

“In forty-eight?”

“Yes.”

“Well, things were very confused then. I've never seen the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, but it can't be very large. It's a pleasant place. But then, I'm biased. I feel that the Judean Hills are the most wonderful place on earth.”

“How will I get there?” Barbara asked him.

“It's very simple. We're a tiny country. Just take a taxi outside your hotel. Where are you staying, by the way?”

“I have reservations at the Dan Hotel.”

“Yes, very nice. On the shore. There will be taxis outside of the hotel. From the hotel to the kibbutz, it's about an hour and a half. If you don't plan to stay too long, the driver will wait.”

Like most people, Barbara had her preconceived notions of Israel. Knowing that Tel Aviv had been founded by a handful of Jews on the sand dunes of the Mediterranean shore less than half a century before, she was more prepared to see a tentative, frontier sort of place than the enormous, throbbing, modern city that greeted her.

After she had unpacked her single small bag, bathed, and changed clothes, she left the hotel to walk. It was still only noontime, and it struck her that she could hire one of the taxis in front of the hotel and complete her mission before the day was over. But now that she was here in Israel, her mission appeared to her to be meaningless and she could make no sense out of the fact that she had come eight thousand miles to look at her husband's grave.

Walking down Frishman Street from the Dan, she came to Dizengoff, turned left, and walked along the broad avenue with the whole world meandering along around her, boys and girls and young soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders, old men and old women, black people and white people, Jews, Arabs, Christians—every face mankind had ever made for itself, short, tall, fat, thin, everything that was human—an easygoing, unhurried mixture not quite like anything she had ever seen anywhere else.

She bought a frankfurter in a roll and a bottle of Israeli beer and sat down at a small wrought-iron table in one of the many cafes that line dizengoff. The beer was good, and suddenly ravenously hungry, she ate a second frankfurter.

Better now, her hunger gone, Barbara sat there on Dizengoff and tried to have a sense of this place, a feeling of this place. Like so many white Protestant Americans, she granted Jews and being Jewish a peculiar position in her thinking. The thinking was always prefaced by a denial: “I am totally indifferent to whether someone is Jewish or not.” Only it was never just someone. A Pole or a Russian or a Hungarian or even an Englishman could have been someone. Jews were specific. Jews were the reality of what she had experienced in Nazi Germany. A Jew was the man who had shared her bed and who became her wedded husband. A Jew was her father's partner. Jake Levy had been Jewish. Sally was part Jewish. If she saw her life as a fabric, it would be woven through and through with Jewish threads. Barbara's mother had conquered her own anti-Semitism by ceasing to refer to anyone as Jewish. She simply Christianized a whole people and left it there; sitting in Tel Aviv, Barbara began to giggle at the realization. Jean was wonderful. Why couldn't she be like her mother?
But suppose
, she asked herself,
Jean was here, recognizing that this was a Jewish country?
Ah, well, Jean would solve it. Jean solved things. Tom solved things. Even Sally and Joe came to a working arrangement. That left Barbara. Barbara solved nothing, finished nothing, concluded nothing. Was her father the same way? she wondered. Did the two of them sit on the edge of the world looking at it, the way she now sat at a table on Dizengoff?

For the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth time, Barbara asked herself why she had come and what she was doing here. Surely she was in no need of an emotional bath, and the picture that arose in her mind's eye, the picture of herself kneeling by Bernie's grave and placing flowers on it, was so sentimental and fraudulent that she turned away from it in anger and exasperation. She got up, paid her bill, and walked with long strides back to the Dan Hotel. She was now self-confessed, she felt, and whatever scales had clouded her eyes had fallen off. She was entirely occupied by a fine liberal rage at all of those who fracture the world and mankind into nations and races and religions. She herself would not stoop to it. She had seen enough of war and death and suffering to abhor this whole business of Jew and Gentile. She had married a man. He was a man, a member of the human family, a tall, easygoing, capable human being. In some way she could not entirely comprehend, he had understood her and had been able to give her some moments of great happiness. Now he was dead. That too was a part of existence. She was not the only widow in the world. But in his case, the mythology, as she saw it now, of this place, this Israel, was the force that had killed him. Well, whatever it was, she would not indulge it. She had made a mistake in coming here; she would not add to the mistake by performing the sentimental journey to the cemetery. She would return to the hotel, pack her things, and go back to America where she belonged. And without guilt. She had done her share to make this snake pit men called civilization a little more tolerable. She would not succumb to guilt.

She was back in her room at the hotel, packing her suitcase, when the door opened and the chambermaid entered with fresh towels. She was a small, wizened woman who smiled tentatively at Barbara and said, “Are you leaving? But you just came.” Her English was heavily accented, and it occurred to Barbara that it was a French accent rather than Israeli. Looking at her more closely, Barbara noticed the number tattooed on her forearm.

“Yes, I'm leaving,” Barbara replied.

“You just come—this morning.”

Angry with herself, with the whole world, provoked at herself for succumbing to a sentimental notion that took her away from her son after being separated from him for six long months, Barbara found herself resenting the intrusiveness of the chambermaid. They were like that, aggressive, pushy; and where else in the whole world would a chambermaid pry into the business of a guest she did not know? And then the thought itself sickened her. How, how could she think in such terms? What was wrong with her? All this little woman had done was to reach out to another human being with a question, and in her mind Barbara had rejected her, condemned her in terms of the most vulgar racism. It did not matter to her that she had not spoken the words. The thought was sufficient to make her feel that she should beg the chambermaid's forgiveness; yet if she did that, it would only make matters worse.

The chambermaid put the towels in the bathroom. She was turning to leave.

“Please don't go. Stay a moment,” Barbara said. “Can you?”

The chambermaid paused and stared at her.

“Are you all right, miss?”

Barbara dropped down onto the bed and clenched her hands. “Yes—yes, I'm all right.”

“I bring something—maybe a cup tea.”

“You're French,” Barbara said.

“Yes. How you know?”

“Your accent.” And in French, Barbara said, “Can we talk in French? It's so long since I've spoken to anyone in French.”

The wrinkled face broke into a smile. “How nice,” the chambermaid said, speaking in French. “How very nice to see a Frenchwoman here. We don't get many French guests in the hotel.”

“I'm not French. I'm American,” Barbara said.

“But your French is perfect.”

“No, hardly. I lived in France for years. But I'm rusty now. Can you stay a moment or two? I want so much to talk to someone, and that's the worst of it when you travel alone. There's no one to talk to. Can you stay a few minutes?”

“Yes. Surely.”

“Please sit down,” Barbara said. “My name is Barbara Cohen.”

The chambermaid nodded eagerly and seated herself on the edge of a chair, sitting very straight, as if to take the edge off the intimacy of sitting down. “I'm glad. My name is Annette Tilman. I mean I'm glad you're Jewish. Or American. I don't feel warmly toward the French.”

“I'm not Jewish. My husband was Jewish.”

“Oh.”

“You don't like the French?” Barbara asked. “But you're French.”

“I'm Jewish. Now I'm Israeli.”

Barbara didn't know what to say to that, and for a moment or two they sat in silence. Then, suddenly, the chambermaid said, “How old do you think I am?”

The question was a trap. Barbara felt defensive and bewildered. Why was she sitting here talking to a chambermaid? Why wasn't she arranging for her passage on the first plane out? She felt that she was being ensnared, and there was a touch of something woeful in her face as she stared at the chambermaid. How old was this woman? The face was seamed, and next to the chin was a row of welts, scars. Had she ever been a beautiful woman? The face was battered and broken and as wrinkled as old leather. Only the pale blue eyes staring out of it made it something else than ugly.

“I don't know, really—I can't guess ages,” Barbara said, thinking that the woman was at least sixty, but at the end of sixty years of suffering.

“Yes, you have a heart, Madame Cohen. You are very young and beautiful. I'm not envious. I am alive. My health is not bad. I live here in the land of Israel. I enjoy my work, and each day my Hebrew improves. I shall tell you how old I am. Twenty-nine years. You don't believe me? Credit the Gestapo. I don't speak about these things, ever, but you appeared so upset, so astonished because I said that I do not feel warmly toward the French. We lived in Rouen. I had a husband, two children, a mother, a father, three sisters, and a brother. I also had two nephews and a niece and a very old grandmother.” She held up her hand and began to count on her fingers. “We count. Myself, but I am alive. We count with my husband, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. All dead, turned in by our good French neighbors to the Gestapo. So I hate the French with all my heart. But that is stupid, isn't it? I don't understand people, even myself, because all I can think about right now is how pleasant it is to sit here and talk to a nice lady like you in my own language. And meanwhile, who does my work?” She leaped to her feet. “I do my work. Who else?”

She smiled apologetically and left the room. Barbara sat on the bed, staring at the door. Then she unpacked for the second time, and went downstairs and had some dinner.

At eight o'clock the following morning, dressed in an old gray flannel skirt, a sweater, and comfortable shoes, Barbara asked the doorman of the hotel which of the cabs had a driver who spoke English.