Establishment (49 page)

“All of them,” said the doorman. “You take from the front of the line. I don't play favorites.”

The driver at the front of the line said, “My name's Sol Katz. Where to, lady?”

“Can I take you by the day?”

He looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded. “Twenty-five dollars, American.” He was about fifty, slope-shouldered, with heavy belly, purple growth on his shaven cheeks, heavy brows, and curly black hair. “Get in,” he said. “Where to?”

She told him.

He got into the driver's seat, twisted around to face her, and said, “You're sure that's where you want to go? Kiryat Anavim? It's just a kibbutz.”

“I'm sure.”

He pulled out into the traffic. “You got relatives there?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so. You don't look like nobody got relatives there.”

“I guess not. You're American, aren't you?” she asked him.

“If you call Bensonhurst America.”

“Where's Bensonhurst?”

“In Brooklyn, with everything else. Well, I been here since forty-eight. I came over to help out and I stayed. What are you, miss, newspaper lady?”

“Sort of.”

“You going to write about Israel?”

“I write about most places where I've been. I suppose I'll write about Israel.”

Barbara had no desire for conversation. She wanted to look at the countryside, to let it impinge on her, to feel what her husband might have felt about this place. It was like nothing she might have anticipated. In all her travels as a wartime correspondent, she had missed this tiny sliver of land. The very fact of her husband's commitment had caused her to erect her own wall against anything Israeli. It had been her rival, the single contender for the man she loved, and in the end it had won, and he who had been her man lay not in her bed but in the soil of this place. It was a place that for her had never had a real existence. Her religious upbringing had been perfunctory at best. Dan Lavette had been born a Roman Catholic and had put aside his religion to marry her mother. Sunday school classes in the proper Episcopal precincts of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill taught the mythology of a place called the holy land. That holy land was a place where a man who was a god walked on the waters of the Sea of Galilee, where He dragged a cross along the Via Dolorosa, where the dreams and hopes of mankind had been nailed to a wooden cross, and where Roman soldiers ruled a people who were shrouded in the uncertain mists of antiquity. None of it bore any relationship whatsoever to the teeming streets of Tel Aviv through which Sol Katz expertly steered his taxicab, leaning on his horn and shouting at other drivers in that strange, throaty language called Hebrew. The older, broken-down sections of Oakland made a more familiar equation.

Out of the city, they drove along a two-lane asphalt road past villages, junkyards, and factories; then there were the farms and the meadows. She sought for comparisons and recalled places in Ohio and Illinois that were not unlike this. It was a cool, lovely morning, the sky wonderfully blue, the air as sweet as honey.

They came to a place where the land swept away to the north in a great, beautiful unspoiled stretch of meadowland, like the rolling meadows she remembered from the south of England, and Sol Katz called back to her, “Miss, out there”—he pointed—“out there, that's where King Saul fought his big battle with the Philistines. They came up from the coast, around Tel Aviv, and he came down from the hill.”

So it was not lost entirely, the myth of Grace Cathedral, even with a cab driver from Bensonhurst. Her eyes were wet, and she fought against the tide of emotion taking hold of her.
It's an illusion
, she told herself.
This is simply a place, a part of the earth. We are people, and wherever we are is equally sacred, and if we can't learn that, then nothing is any use. And I will not give in to the dreams and battle cries that took Bernie away. I am going there because I am here already. I'll see it and get it over with.

They were climbing into the hills. Here, too, it was unlike any of her imaginings. The hills were covered with young green trees, cedar and pine and the air was sweet with pine fragrance. Now it evoked New England out of her memories.

“We planted them,” Sol Katz said.

“What?”

“The trees, miss. Every one of them. We planted them.”

“But there are thousands. The hills are covered with them.”

“That's right. Used to be nothing but bare rock and grass. That's something, ain't it?”

“It certainly is,” Barbara agreed.

“There's Kiryat Anavim,” he said, pointing to a cluster of white, red-roofed houses in the distance. The kibbutz lay in a little valley against a hillside, the buildings climbing the hill above orchards, fields, and cultivated terraces.

“Who is in charge of a place like that?” Barbara asked after a moment.

“Miss—say, what's your name, lady? We're spending a day together, I should call you something beside miss.”

“Barbara Cohen.”

“All right, Miss Cohen—”

“Mrs. Cohen,” Barbara said.

“All right, Mrs. Cohen. A kibbutz, it's usually run by a committee. There's a secretary or a president or someone like that.”

“Will they speak English?”

“Someone will. You got to remember, Mrs. Cohen, we were occupied by the English for a long time.”

Then they were at the kibbutz. There was an asphalt parking place that held a collection of old cars, trucks, and two tractors. Beyond it, an open shed of a machine shop, where men, stripped to the waist, were working on a third tractor. The road from the parking lot wound up the hillside to a stone and stucco building. The place clung to the mountainside and climbed it, and along with the stone walls and buildings, blazing red ramblers climbed and tumbled everywhere. The morning sun was hot, the air still. Honeybees buzzed over the flowers, and a huge black and yellow butterfly paused for a moment on Barbara's shoulder. A young woman in shorts came down the road, glanced at her curiously, then got into one of the trucks and drove off. A mongrel dog came up to her and licked her shoe.

Sol Katz walked around his car, observing the tires. “Nice place,” he said. “You don't know anyone here?”

“No one, I'm afraid.”

He called out in Hebrew to the men working in the machine shop, and they shouted back at him. He got the information he desired, and he said to Barbara, “I'll take you to the office. The secretary's name is Sarah Perez. They say she's there now. How long do you think you'll be here?”

“No more than an hour.”

“All right. I'll be by the car. If you want to, we can drive up to Jerusalem. It's only a few miles from here.”

“I'll see.”

Barbara followed him up the road to the long stone building. “In there,” Katz said. “They tell me she talks English, so you won't have no trouble.”

He left her and went back to his car. She had a feeling that it made him nervous to be away from his taxicab. Evidently it was the central focus of his life. She opened the door and went inside to find a hallway with doors opening off it and all the signs in Hebrew. She knocked at the first door to her right, and when a woman's voice responded in Hebrew, she opened the door and went in. The room was furnished with a plain wooden table, several wooden chairs, and some filing cabinets. Behind the table sat a thin, dark woman of about forty. A ledger was open in front of her.

“I'm looking for Sarah Perez,” Barbara said.

“Myself, yes. What can I do for you?”

“I'm an American. My name is Barbara Cohen.”

“Please, sit down.” She pointed to a chair. “You're a journalist?”

“No.”

“I thought you were because you know my name. Sometimes they send journalists here to write about a kibbutz.”

“I'm a journalist, but that's not why I'm here.” Then, as best she could, Barbara explained what had brought her to Israel.

“To see your husband's grave?”

“I don't know. Perhaps. Or perhaps I simply had to come.”

“But I don't know why you should think your husband is buried in our cemetery. We have a small military cemetery, but it is only for the boys from the kibbutz who fell in the war. Your husband was never a part of this kibbutz, was he?”

“No. But they told me—”

“Wait, don't be troubled,” Sarah Perez said kindly. “I have the register here.” She went to the filing cabinet and found a notebook and began to thumb through it. While she was doing this, a slender, white-haired man, pink-cheeked, in his seventies, with a small white beard and mustache, entered the room.

“Ah, Shimon!” Sarah Perez said, adding to Barbara, “He will know. He remembers everything.”

“Not everything. Even God, He doesn't remember everything.”

“Shimon,” she said, “this is Mrs. Cohen from the States. Her husband was killed near Megiddo in forty-eight. She was in the States. She was told that he was buried at our kibbutz.”

The old man looked at Barbara, and then he said something to Sarah Perez in Hebrew.

“He offers you compassion,” she said. “He says you are a good and beautiful woman.”

“I suppose I am old enough to tell you myself. What was your husband's name?”

“Bernie—Bernie Cohen.”

He stood for a moment with his eyes closed, and then he nodded. “Yes, I remember. There was some confusion because one of our boys named Cohen was in the north. Then the body was sent here, then his papers were sent here. He was American.” He shrugged. “Why not here? It's a good place, a very ancient place. Are you unhappy for that?”

Barbara shook her head.

“You want the body exhumed and brought to your home?”

“No. This is what he would have wanted. To lie here.”

“Then you just want to look at his grave?” the old man asked her.

“Yes.” It was senseless, to leave her child again and come all the distance for this. To look at a grave. Now, sitting here, in the bleak office of the kibbutz, facing the two strangers, she felt not only foolish but inwardly shattered, purposeless, as if overcome by a growing sense that prison had left her empty, her life meaningless.

“If you wish, I take you to his grave,” Shimon said.

“Yes, please.” She stood up. “Thank you,” she said unhappily to Sarah Perez.

The old man led her out into the sunshine, along a narrow dirt road that led up the hillside. “The dead still guard us,” he said strangely, pointing up the mountainside. “Up there, just beyond the crest, is the border of old Judea, which the Jordanians still hold. It's quiet now, but still we live on the edge of eternity. That is not an easy way to live, is it?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“You are not Jewish, are you?”

“No.”

“And now you are here in this strange place with these strange people. It must be very hard.”

“No, it's not hard. I suppose I'm trying to understand why I came. Whatever lives of my husband is inside me, not here.”

“Why not here?” the old man asked. “Ah, here is the cemetery. Not very big, only a few hundred graves, but from one small kibbutz, for us it was a terrible bloodletting. The flower of our children.”

The graves ascended in steps up the hillside, and each was finished with loving care, each with a small headstone inscribed in Hebrew.

“I can't read this,” Barbara said plaintively.

“I'll find it.”

A young man and a young woman, both in shorts and browned by the sun, were cutting and fitting stone, building an ornamental staircase to ascend the hillside between the graves.

“You know,” Shimon said, “I grew up in Canada. We are most of us from somewhere else, and my memory of cemeteries is of cold, bleak places. Why should that be so? We thought this should be a different kind of a place. That golden stone they are cutting and shaping comes out of our own mountain. It is the same golden stone that old Jerusalem was built out of.”

They were climbing higher and higher, and now, ahead of her, at the end of the path, Barbara saw a small stone building, like a crypt, perhaps eight feet square and windowless.

Shimon touched her arm. “Here, Barbara.”

She paused. He pointed to a grave alongside of where they stood. “That's it. Your husband's grave.”

She looked at it. No different from the other graves, simply a grave with some Hebrew lettering on the headstone and below it, the dates: 1906–1948. She felt nothing, only empty, dry, dry as the dust. She stood that way for perhaps five minutes, pleading inwardly for something that was nameless and undefined and perhaps nonexistent.

Then, in a voice as dry and toneless as her inner feeling, she pointed to other headstones upon which small bits of fieldstone had been placed. “What do those small stones mean?”

“It's an old Jewish custom. When you visit a grave, you leave a stone on the headstone. Some say it's an indication that you have been there, and you leave something to stay with the dead. That's a sentimental notion, and I'm not sure it has any validity. It's a very old custom, and I don't think anyone knows exactly what it means.”

“And there, in that little house?” Barbara asked. “Is it a crypt—for ashes?”

“We don't cremate people in our faith. No, it's not a crypt.”

“What then?” she asked, not really interested but not knowing what else to say.

“Why don't you step inside?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Perhaps it does.”

Then, feeling petulant and put upon, Barbara strode over to the tiny stone house, flung open the door, and stepped inside.

The stained glass of the roof let a blazing shower of light into the small room. On the walls to her left and right, from floor to ceiling, each in a Plexiglas, airtight frame, each about six inches square, were the photographs of the men who were buried in the military cemetery of Kiryat Anavim. Only they were not men. They were boys. They were children. They were laughing, delighted children. These were not posed photographs but snapshots lovingly gathered from parents and relatives.