Three Daughters: A Novel (11 page)

“I cannot give you this package. Any shipment from abroad must be cleared by special permit.”

“But I’ve picked up packages here a dozen times. There must be some mistake. I have no permit.”

“Now you must get a permit.” The postal official seemed to be enjoying his new power. “How do I know this isn’t contraband?”

Miriam didn’t know what contraband was. “It’s linens from France. We have a shop at the Grand Hotel. Feel free to open it.” She looked anxiously out the door where two men she had hired to transport the shipment were holding their pallet and waiting.

“I can’t open every package that passes through. We aren’t equipped to do so. But even if I saw the merchandise with my own eyes, I couldn’t let you have it without a permit.”

She sighed and went to dismiss the men with the pallet and give them a few coins for their trouble. She walked back to the hotel, frustrated and dejected. The government had new restrictions every few days and as soon as she had satisfied one, another was added. Each paper and permit had a fee, but worse than the fee were the suspicions visited on every citizen. The merchandise in the shipment would have brought in money that she needed to pay the rent on the shop and to give Zareefa for housing Hanna.

She was deep into the misery of having lost two hours of her precious time and didn’t see Max Broder approaching in the crowded street. “Why so glum, Mrs. Mishwe? Is something wrong?” Through the concern there was a teasing quality in his voice. Was it because he was so certain she misapprehended life and worried over nothing? She wasn’t in the mood to be treated lightly.

“I can’t get my merchandise out of the postal service.” She thrust her chin out as she spoke. She dared him to find the situation trivial.

“Perhaps I can help. If I tell them the linens are for hospital use, how can they refuse?”

“They might release this shipment, but there will be others and more complicated regulations will spring up.”

She was bouncing her fist against her chin in nervous frustration. He took her hand away from her face, uncurled the fingers, and placed it at her side. “Let’s worry about one thing at a time,” he said. “I might have a connection that can help.”

The following day he had a more promising plan. “I set a broken leg of a little Turkish boy today and, as luck would have it, his father is one of four in the Ministry of Justice. You’ll have no more difficulties with your shipments.”

“Thank you,” she said, but her voice was questioning. How easy it was for him to deal with the government. He had the power of his profession and, she was certain, of his nationality. Yet the native population was regarded with suspicion and treated without respect. This was her country, not his. The idea made her deeply resentful and her face showed it.

“You’re not pleased?” asked Max quizzically.

“I’m grateful to you,” she said, her face glum.

“If you were any happier, you’d be in tears. What is it? You did want your merchandise, didn’t you?”

“Of course. But it’s troubling to me that I am a citizen without power while . . .”

“A stranger is granted favors.”

“Dr. Broder, my husband is fighting their war and I am not granted the basic right of receiving mail without harassment.” She was repeating word for word what she had heard a man say to the postal clerk, only it had been his son who was in the army. Although she herself could never have expressed her thoughts so succinctly, the words had touched home with her. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Which makes you angry with me?”

His lips were parted and formed such a childlike configuration she smiled to see them. “No,” she said wearily. “I am worse than the government. I would do whatever you asked, too.” She had not meant to say that. What a statement to make! What must he think?

“I see.” The tone of his voice changed and there was a silence so intimate she felt blood rush to her face. “I shall keep that in mind.” He exhaled as he spoke so that the words were almost lost. Her hands trembled and she locked them together behind her. “I’ve been thinking,” he continued.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Ticho and I have been in touch with the local Ministry of Health and we’ve offered to canvass the surrounding villages to look for signs of infectious diseases. Trachoma is first on our list, of course. But there’ve been several cases of malaria reported and even more of influenza. We need to encourage these people to visit the clinic. Especially the children. If we send you and Isabel—she to identify the disease, you to interpret and convince patients to arrive here—perhaps we can have a healthier winter. We want to concentrate on the smaller villages for now. Not more than two or three miles on the outskirts. We can make a systematic visit of the houses to check the hygiene. We’ll know in two or three weeks if it proves worthwhile.”

“I could do it only in the afternoons.” If Dr. Max had his way, the line for the biweekly clinic would have extended all around Suleiman Street, around the municipality, all the way to the Russian compound. He would have liked every family to pass through at least once.

“Why don’t they come?” he would ask, mystified. “Is it apathy? Distrust? How can you ignore a sick child?”

Immediately she had a fantasy of bringing half the population of Judea to his doorstep and becoming so valuable to him that he could not do without her. Every encounter with him aroused these childish fantasies—how to impress him, how to become important in his life. But for what purpose? What did she suppose would occur between them? She would have preferred to take up nursing full-time and be done with the shop forever. She had no taste for dealing with the customers, many of whom took the opportunity to display their feelings of superiority. But losing the shop would crush Nadeem. His two letters had mentioned it with longing. How he loved the routine of managing his stock and keeping his neat ledgers and satisfying his customers. It was his identity and she must struggle to keep it for him at all costs.

9.

IF YOU WANT ME TO GO, JUST SAY SO.

S
o this was how it felt to wear a dress that outlined bones and flesh, that curved around her breasts and dipped at her waist. She touched her curves with interest a dozen times a day, deeply aware of her own body. And the cap on her head, why did it make her feel so capable? She marched through the corridors with purpose, lifting those dainty shoes as if her legs were weightless. Even so, she had been disappointed in Max Broder’s reaction to her new look.

“My God,” he had barked, as if she had intentionally set out to deceive him, “look at this! There’s so much less of you. And your hair . . . it wasn’t there before.” He never intimated that he liked her new look. In fact, he implied, almost with annoyance, that she had somehow betrayed her heritage. Didn’t he remember? The clothes had been his idea.

During her first week at the hospital she stayed away from him. She took her instructions from Isabel, who was delighted to have her help. Her room was a cubicle, not much more than a closet in back of the children’s ward. Yet each night, during those languid moments before sleep came, she transported herself to another bed in a buried wing beyond the surgery room. It never occurred to her that it was right or wrong. She knew only that she had never before had such depth of feeling. It made something completely different of her life.

After four years in Palestine, with fully half his patients from the Bedouin population, Max Broder could repair a knife wound with such fine stitches the scar was barely noticeable. Many of his patients were oblivious to his skill. Many others were only casually thankful that he had saved their lives, since their religion looked upon death as more enticing than earthly existence. They revered him because he was a doctor, a profession that in their eyes was next to being God. They would have revered a bad doctor just as much.

It was frustrating because Max was a very good doctor, and a dedicated one. He had come to Palestine four years before, filled with high-minded and—he now saw—egomaniacal expectations of bringing the modern techniques of surgery to a backward land that would then be forever grateful. It didn’t take him long to discover that a native-born doctor was as rare as rain in July. And native doctors tended to gravitate to Beirut, not Jaffa and Jerusalem. What’s more, Jerusalem was glutted with European doctors because every nationality that was represented had brought its own medics and erected hospitals and schools. The specialties that had made him feel so accomplished in Germany were not appropriate here. An eye specialist—for eye diseases were rampant—would have been more welcome.

Instead of teaching, he had learned. He had learned the most from Dr. Ticho, who had his eye clinic outside the walls on the corner of Ethiopia Street. This dedicated man had saved the sight of hundreds of peasants. When Miriam Mishwe met Max Broder in the late summer of 1911, he was in the process of retrenching. His ego was bruised but he wasn’t ready to return to the comfortable upper-class life he had left behind. He had come to love the land and developed a passion for Arabian horses. His one indulgence in a crushing work schedule was his ride through the hills of Judea at dawn. Now, suddenly, there was another indulgence.

It’s funny
, he mused one day, as he bent over a Bedouin’s punctured intestine,
what the human mind absorbs—thousands of details are being assimilated without our consent. Her mouth, for instance. I wasn’t aware I had memorized its exact configuration. And those eyes, at once so frank and yet so mysterious.

One afternoon he found her in a small room, rolling and stacking bandages on a scarred table. Her back was to him. The set of her shoulders—defiant yet accepting—and the childish slant of the apron’s bow at the small of her back touched him. As he watched, she reached above her head and one foot left the ground. He had an overwhelming desire to place his hands where the bow crossed so impudently and have those arms raised to embrace him. He moved silently to her side and turned her to face him. The look of desire on her face dissolved what was left of his will.

He pressed her against him, waiting helplessly for each part of her to find a corresponding groove in him. The moment he touched her lips a hunger arose in him that was all the more upsetting because he had not known it was there. It stopped him from doing what he urgently wanted to do, which was to bruise those lips with his own. To pry them open. He was surprised at how fragile she felt in his arms, yet her firm breasts resisted the pressure from his chest, arousing him further.

She broke away first and took a step back. The look on her face was one of awe. “I’m sorry,” he began.

She put a hand to his lips. “No.”

“Unfair of me to take advantage,” he mumbled, sinking his hands deep into his pockets. “Won’t happen again.” Before she could speak, he was almost running down the corridor.

Her heart was pounding so violently she felt she might have a medical emergency. He wanted her! She touched her lips tentatively. His desire had made them precious. She rushed to her room to stare at her face in the mirror. She was certain she would look different. How many times did she relive that moment when she’d first felt those skillful hands around her? She could feel them right now on her back. She had memorized the precise pressure they exerted. And his lips. And his legs and hips!

She didn’t see him again for four days and finally worked up to asking Isabel as to his whereabouts. “He’s on his first holiday in three years,” replied the nurse, “and not a day too soon. He was crabby and too critical before he left. Almost bit my head off because a bandage hadn’t been changed.”

“But he is coming back?” Miriam felt stricken. Suppose he decided to stay away for good? Suppose she never saw him again?

“Don’t look so frightened, my dear. Someone else will look after Khalil. But, yes, he’ll be back. Just needs a breathing spell.”

She had no hope that he would ever touch her again. No hope that he felt anything at all. But the memory of his touch was so alive to Miriam that it didn’t matter. She was in a new body, filled with feeling. She felt supremely alive. When she thought of Nadeem, it was as if he had happened in another lifetime. Instead of her going home to Tamleh for the weekend, Hanna took the carriage to Jerusalem and she took him and baby Esa to a show of trained animals that was passing through. The boys felt shy with their mother. “You look so pretty,” said Hanna. “Will Baba mind?”

“What a question!” said Miriam. “Will Baba mind what? How I look?”

“Your hair is different.” She had put on her traditional dress to see the boys but left off the headcloth.

“Well, I’m so used to putting it up for the nurse’s cap, I just did it without thinking.”

“Baba won’t recognize you,” said Hanna, and Miriam could see that he was deeply troubled by the difference in her. Had she changed so much?

“Perhaps I won’t recognize Baba,” she said impatiently.

When she had kissed the boys good-bye and returned to the hospital late Sunday night, she felt dejected. All the energy of her passion for Max had dissipated and she feared that he was ashamed of what had happened and that’s why he had left. Perhaps he expected her to go away before he returned. She agonized late into the night, first deciding to leave immediately and return to Father Alphonse and then feeling fiercely in need of seeing Max once more. She decided to brave the humiliation of having him tell her to leave. She was finally drifting off in a tortured sleep when she heard her door creak open. It was Max. “Shh.” He put his hand to her lips. “If you want me to go, just say so.”

“Go? Oh, no. I was thinking that you must want me to go away. That you were ashamed of what had happened between us.” She spoke rapidly, afraid he might disappear before she had bared her heart.

“Wait,” he whispered. He stood and removed all his clothes. She could see the outline of his body in the moonlight and for a breathless moment felt all the weight of tradition bearing down on her. This was forbidden. This was unthinkable. Right now she should run away. But she couldn’t. Her need to touch him bordered on panic. Suppose he went away now without touching her? She went and stood before him and he took her in his arms and parted her lips with his. This didn’t satisfy him and he turned her face several times, placing his mouth over hers again and again as if each new attempt would afford him the closeness he was seeking.

She couldn’t rid herself of the notion that she had lured him there with the intensity of her desire. It was sorcery. This encounter would have to last her forever. She wanted to remember how it felt to be engulfed by his body, a sensation so thrilling it blotted out conscience and duty. He was in need of her and yet another part of him fought against it. She could sense his turmoil in the small cries that accompanied his kisses.

That didn’t keep him from removing her nightdress and carrying her to the bed. With a desperate groan he signaled that the battle was lost. He became subdued and gentle, smoothing and massaging and exploring her with grave patience. Her nervousness dissolved. “Don’t be frightened,” he said. She wasn’t frightened. She felt beautiful. She could feel her own pulse jumping out of her skin. Tension. That’s what it was. A thrilling tension that stopped all reason.
Max!

“I want you,” he whispered. This admission brought such a thrill to her heart that she began to cry. When he felt her tears, he stopped. “What have I done to you!”

“Shh. They’re tears of happiness.” She held his face and kissed it. She kissed his chest and rubbed her cheeks and lips in the soft mat of hair. She was possessed, surely, but there was no way to stop. Her body began a devilish rhythm that made him groan. “I can’t wait.” He parted her legs and trailed a thumb along each thigh from groin to knee.
Oh!
An agonizing sweet sensation.
Please!

He got up and went to rummage through his clothes. Had she done something shameful? Was he leaving? “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got to protect you from pregnancy.” She had no idea what he was talking about but was relieved to have him back and parted her legs willingly. He embraced her so tightly she could feel his pulse inside her. Her last thoughts were:
I’ve given him something. I’ve made him happy.

She awoke alone with a momentous shaft of sunlight streaking her comforter at the spot where her thighs lay beneath. Had it happened or was it a dream? But if it had happened, where was the remorse? She had betrayed everything—her husband, her children. There was no forgiveness in her tradition for this. None at all. Still, her heart was bursting with happiness. Without saying it, Max had admitted a need that she was chosen to fill. And she wanted to fill it with all her heart. But what if someone had walked in and found them? It didn’t matter. No risk or humiliation could force her to choose against him.

That afternoon, as dusk was creeping through the corridors with that special light, he came quietly to stand next to her. “I’ve made arrangements to rent a small house so we can be together without embarrassment. I don’t want to jeopardize your standing here.” He spoke in a regretful way. As if he were an unwilling prisoner of his emotions.

“I’ve thought of you almost every moment,” she admitted with resignation.

“And I of you.” He had lost control of his life.

“It doesn’t please you?” she asked anxiously.

“All day,” he began gruffly, “while I should have concentrated on the needs of my patients, my mind was on you. I had to sew a man up twice. Come.” He led her away.

The light coming in the window of his apartment was almost purple. He closed the door and took her in his arms more gently than before. Slowly he undid the buttons at the back of her uniform, untied the apron, slipped his hand inside and moved it across her bare skin. “If you don’t wish it, say so,” he urged her.

“I wish it,” she answered simply and he continued to undress her, sitting her on the bed like a child to undo her shoes. He undressed himself and they moved across his bed silently. Their skin glowed in the unreal light. Her hair, long and abundant, spread extravagantly around her. “You look like a beautiful painting.” His voice was full of emotion.

“The first day I saw you,” she said softly, “you examined a woman in the waiting room because she was frightened to go inside the hospital. You bent over her and touched her face and I wished myself in her place. Since that moment there is nothing I’ve wanted more than you.”

“And if there are reprisals? I will get off free but you will suffer.”

Without his severe collar and tie he looked boyish, especially with his hair spilling over his forehead. But she had only to place her cheek against his chest to feel his strength.

“I will suffer if you turn away from me. That would be the only unbearable thing.” She couldn’t remember another moment when she had examined her life and come to such drastic conclusions, yet the words rushed out. She felt possessed but it was thrilling.

Lovemaking was all the more poignant in the waning light. She could see his eyes, the beautiful texture of his skin, the gently muscled forearms. She exhaled deeply, letting go of a life that was no more than a pale constricted dream. She was a woman now. She was suffused with her sense of femaleness. She had a need to open herself and give and nurture. There was no shock and no holding back feeling. She emitted cries of pleasure without thinking, without remorse. At that moment he moved up on her and thrust himself in with such strength that she felt a surprising stab of pain. “Oh God,” he groaned. “It’s too much.”