The Hope

  “What the hell? Now why are you unhappy?”

  “My God, that’s how much you know. I’m trying not to expire with joy.”

  His throat tightening, Zev Barak said, “Next time we meet, if we do, you’ll probably be married with two kids, like Nakhama, and just as happy.”

  “I very much doubt that, but if I am, it won’t make the slightest difference.” She put a tissue to her eyes. “Talk about fantasies! Wow! Was the speech that awful, really? The taxi guy at the airport took francs. Will they take them here?”

  “I’ll put you in a cab.”

  “Oh, right, you’re fresh from the bank, you’re flush. Thanks.”

  As they walked down the staircase she said, “I broke off with André. No doubt that amazes you! Ha! You knew I would, the instant you laid eyes on him. God knows why my parents carried on so. Poor André! And I won’t finish my master’s in Paris, since you ask. I’m going home. I’ll finish it there, maybe at Georgetown.”

  “You want to teach?”

  “Yes. In a girl’s school. There are several around Washington, out in the country. I love girls. They’re realistic and tough. Boys are nearly all vain soft slobs.”

  “You’re reversing the sexes, aren’t you?”

  “No, that’s the truth, the reverse is a trashy cliché.” She took his arm. They were about to enter the lobby. “Listen to me. If I could be your dog, just your dog, I’d find a way to live in Jerusalem. It’s hopeless, that’s very plain. So put me in the cab and say goodbye until we meet again.”

  He forced a light manner. “You’ll use your occult powers, I suppose, to make sure we do.”

  “I won’t have to.” She suddenly smiled, a different, loving smile. She had beautiful white teeth and wide red lips that curled oddly at the corners. “Hiroshima in a trench coat! How coarse, how brutish. But that did it, in a way.”

  He put the bag into the cab, at her feet. “I love you,” she said.

  “I believe you think so. Wait till you meet him. The man you’ll marry. Then you’ll know what love is.” He held the door open, despite himself not wanting to see the last of Emily Cunningham.

  “I know exactly what love is, and it’s everything. I know you and Nakhama love each other and are perfectly happy. She’s spectacularly beautiful and sweet, and I daresay smart. We couldn’t make contact at all. Well, close that door, and say goodbye. No help for it.”

  “I guess you are crazy. Or maybe just yotzet dofan.”

  The cabdriver, a swarthy man in a conical wool cap, looked around at the words.

  “And what’s that, yotzet dofan?”

  “‘Emerging from the side.’ In English, cesarean birth. In Hebrew that too, but it’s also come to mean ‘out of the ordinary.’”

  The satiric smile again. She held out her hand, and gripped his with slender fingers. “You bet, kiddo,” she said. “As it happens, I actually was born by cesarean section. ‘From my mother’s womb untimely ripped.’”

  Her dramatic reading made him laugh. “‘Lay on, Macduff’?” he said. “Doesn’t that come next? ‘And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”’”

  “Nope! Nice try, but it’s ‘Accursed be the tongue that tells me so.’ You have to brush up your Shakespeare, old scout. Maybe I can help someday.” Her eyes brilliantly flashed at him. “Bye-bye for now, Wolf Lightning.”

  ***

  That law of issur yikhud was very much on Shayna Matisdorf’s mind, as she sat outside the closed bedroom door of her cousin Faiga right after the wedding ceremony.

  From the parlor the joyful tumult of the nuptial festivities—singing, joking, laughing, dancing, arguing, and the clamorous klezmer music of two saxophones and a bass fiddle—went on full blast, while she, another girl, and two yeshiva youths stood in the hallway, to bear witness that Faiga was alone inside with her bridegroom Fyvel long enough for the thing to happen, theoretically. This brief yikhud of newlyweds was a pure formality, but so strictly observed in Shayna’s milieu that she took it for granted and saw nothing in the least odd or colorful about it. Faiga and Fyvel would spend the prescribed eight or ten minutes in there, drinking tea and eating cake—with huge appetite, because they had fasted all day—and they would of course emerge as virginal, both of them, as they had gone in. Knowing how shy Fyvel was, Shayna thought Faiga might not even get kissed behind that door. Nevertheless this act of yikhud was a true seal of the marriage, as much as the ceremony under the canopy and the breaking of the glass.

  The door opened and out came the happy pair, the pallid groom in his white kittel and Faiga a-swirl in the creamy veils and lace of her bridal dress. She was scarlet-faced and laughing, and the wispy-bearded Fyvel had an unfocussed bemused look, as though from a hard blow on the head, so Shayna surmised that there had been a kiss after all. Good sign, and unquestionably Faiga’s doing. Faiga was all right.

  In that short vigil outside the bedroom door Shayna reached a momentous decision, and riding home on the bus she kept reviewing it. She left the wedding immediately after the yikhud, though the merrymaking would go on for hours; because Yossi’s battalion was being rotated back from Sinai after six long weeks there, punctuated by rare weekend leaves. He had just missed the wedding, alas, but she was counting on a call from him, possibly tonight. Shayna had suffered agonies during the brief war, and now knew beyond doubt that she was lovesick, maddened with love for the paratrooper they called Don Kishote; and that it was time, more than time, to do something about it.

  Shayna had managed their confrontation at the Falafel King as well as she could, though wretched with a cold and torn by jealousy and suspicion. Inexperienced as she was in such involvements, she was easily smart enough to realize that being casual and pleasant, while finding out all she could about the Gay Paree episode, was her best course after the way she had botched it. Yossi had not reassured her much with his stumblebum answers to her questions. She would never know, probably, what had gone on, but one thing she did know; she loathed Yael Luria, and had to regard her henceforth as a menace. The talk about Yael and Pasternak had never reached Shayna; the army and her little clique hardly intersected. All she knew was that Yael was beautiful, strong-willed, and liberated, and—unless instinct was grossly misleading her—a worrisome rival.

  Perhaps in her secret heart Shayna had loved Kishote since she had met him as a little girl, when she had baited and snubbed him. She remembered her first laughable sight of him in split trousers; she remembered beating him with her fists when he showered himself with her pail of water, and feeling even then some inchoate attraction to him. She dated her conscious falling in love to the talk he had given at the university when he had spoken with such reticent emotion about Gulliver, and about the empty seats in the bus carrying the raiding party back to camp. That skinny immigrant boy of the Jerusalem siege had grown into a tall well-built soldier, the papers had carried the story of his exploit in the Mitla Pass, and he was her Yossi and nobody else’s. Certainly not that Yael Luria’s! In a word, Shayna wanted to get married.

  There was something of a snag in that Don Kishote had not proposed. He had simply been seeing a lot of her. She had made it clear—perhaps a bit too clear, she now thought—that she wasn’t ready for marriage, and anyway had her doubts about him because she was religious and meant to remain so, and he was a wild one; knowledgeable about the religion, but far from observant. In her fashion, actually, Shayna had herself always held to issur yikhud, with other young men as a matter of course, and with Kishote by laying down the law from the start. “B’seder, issur yikhud, no problem,” he said, and what endearments she accepted occurred on evening walks or in his jeep, and relatively innocuous at that, though to Shayna all this had been new and deliciously shocking. To her religious set Shayna was a bold borderline trifler with the rules, but her own mind and conscience were clear. Love allowed for certain sweet freedoms, but issur yikhud was the uncrossable red line.

  It therefore occurred to Shayna, as she mulled the matter
over during the long ride home on the bus, that if she allowed herself to be alone with Yossi in a closed room, it would be the boldest of hints that she wanted him to propose. Really, it was the most a modest religious girl could do. Of course nothing would happen, any more than it had with Faiga and Fyvel, but he would surely get the idea. For Shayna decision meant action. When the telephone rang she sprang at it. He was calling from the apartment on Karl Netter Street, and after some greetings and sweet talk she said she wanted to come to see him there.

  “Here? Why here?” he inquired, astonished. She had never yet visited his den of iniquity. “I’ll come to Jerusalem.”

  “No, you must be exhausted, and you haven’t got much time. I’ll be there about seven o’clock. Don’t argue, I’m going now to the sherut station.”

  Yossi hung up and said to his two paratrooper roommates, Shmuel and Amir, “Well, this is a new one. Shayna’s coming here.”

  Shmuel, a very big Turkish Jew with a heavy black beard, was entangled at the moment on their broken-down sofa with his light of love, a hefty signal corps sergeant named Miriam. Amir was frying salami and eggs in the small kitchen, causing much smoke and pleasant smells. “Well, what do we do,” said Amir, “make ourselves scarce?”

  “No, no, on the contrary, you have to stay here. All of you.”

  He briefly explained issur yikhud. Shmuel had heard of it in his religious boyhood in Turkey, but to Amir, a Mapam kibbutznik, it was complete news, of a piece with all religious nonsense. Miriam said she was glad to know of it, and would have to remember it. When some of those fresh officers tried to take advantage of her, she would plead issur yikhud. She was sorry she had to get back to her barracks, because she would like to meet a girl who was that scrupulous. In Haifa, the free-thinking town where she grew up and where the busses ran on Saturdays, there was no way of finding out such things. Issur yikhud as a dodge certainly beat pleading the time of the month. It was less embarrassing.

  Shmuel said, as he gave her a farewell hug and kiss, “Just so you don’t try that issur yikhud on me.”

  “On you? What would work on you? A kitchen knife didn’t.”

  “Well, that time I knew you were just being coy.”

  “A Turk is a Turk,” said Miriam, and she left.

  So when Shayna arrived at Karl Netter Street she found in the flat of sin not only her bespectacled hero but two other uniformed paratroopers, red boots and all, with whom he shared the place. Here was another snag. They both seemed strangely obtuse, sitting side by side on a decrepit sofa, making no move to leave and give her a chance to proceed with the scenario fixed in her mind: to wit yikhud, leading to some passionate but limited carrying on, and then down to serious business. She was annoyed with Yossi. Couldn’t he have arranged privacy for this first rendezvous of theirs in his flat? He had greeted her with a decorous kiss, and now he too was just sitting in an armchair, looking browned and glorious, but oddly stupid.

  The talk was halting and constrained. The huge black-bearded fellow asked if she had ever been to Turkey.

  “No, I’ve never been outside Israel.”

  “I’m from Turkey. Beautiful country, Turkey. No place for a Jew, though.”

  Shayna knew that soldiers back from the front disliked to talk about the fighting, so that was no topic to start. Anyway, she had no desire to make conversation. She sat mum, looking around at the small dingy flat of evil usage, waiting for them to go away. What was the matter with them? They knew she was Yossi’s girl!

  “Would you like some salami and eggs?” Amir inquired.

  She declined.

  “I guess I’ll make myself a salami sandwich,” said Yossi, jumping up. He was baffled by Shayna’s coming here, and yearned to take the lovely slender figure in his arms, but was at a loss how to proceed. When he was in the kitchen, Shayna, who had had quite enough of this, made an unmistakable gesture at the two paratroopers to clear out. The big blackbeard, who was only a foot or so from her chair, hissed softly, “What about issur yikhud?”

  Staggered, Shayna hissed back, “In Turkey you observe it?”

  “Well, some of us,” hissed Shmuel.

  “It’s all superstition,” said Amir in a natural tone.

  “What’s all superstition?” called Kishote from the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” said Shmuel, as Shayna repeated her emphatic thumb gesture of dismissal. He pulled up Amir by an elbow. “We’re just leaving.”

  “Why?” Yossi put his head out of the kitchen. “Stick around! Please!”

  But they were going through the door and closing it behind them. Thereupon Shayna went to him, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him one hell of a kiss; thinking even as she did it that Faiga could not have kissed Fyvel like this. But Fyvel was not Don Kishote, and she was not Faiga. For his part, Yossi reacted with battlefield quickness to the new state of things, ill though he understood it. When Yael had thrown herself at him in the Georges Cinq, that had been a surprise, but nothing too novel except that she was a colonel’s girlfriend. But this was Shayna, all different, infinitely sweeter, and altogether a glimpse of a promised heaven. Before long Shayna strong-armed him off in a loving way. “All right, enough! Do you know I almost died worrying about you? I’m so proud of you! You look so handsome, so wonderful. You came home safe! The Holy One, blessed be He, answered my prayers.”

  This may have struck the wrong note. Yossi inquired, “Shall I open the door?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Yossi! Give me a salami sandwich. I want to talk to you. Seriously.”

  ***

  Walking into the gate of the Ramle air base, Shmuel and Amir met Yael Luria coming out. “Hello there!” she said. “So, your battalion’s back? Where’s Don Kishote?”

  They looked at each other, and simultaneously Shmuel said, “I haven’t the faintest idea,” and Amir said, “We just left him in Karl Netter Street.”

  Yael looked at them with a twisted smile, quite used to the self-protective conspiracy of men. “Karl Netter Street, eh? Is he coming back to base tonight?”

  Neither one answered. In the gloom of the gate, lit only by the sentry’s lamp, Amir had received a nasty elbow dig from the Turk, who had no notion what Yael wanted of Kishote, but never told the truth to a woman about another man or indeed about anything, as a matter of Ottoman wisdom absorbed by osmosis.

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “Your battalion did wonders. All honor to you.” She turned and went back to headquarters. More than two months had now passed, and Yael definitely had to have a word with Yossi. The creaky telephone system of Tel Aviv was overloaded with postwar calls of returning soldiers, and it was half an hour or so before she got past the busy signal of the whole area to a ring of the Karl Netter number.

  “Hello, Yossi? It’s Yael. Welcome back! Congratulations! Here at headquarters they say you performed wonders on the battlefield.”

  “Oh, hello there,” said Yossi in a neutral tone, since Shayna was sitting near the telephone with an inquisitive look on her face. “Nice to hear from you.”

  “Yossi, I have to see you. We have to talk. It’s rather urgent.”

  No doubt Yossi was being dense, but the probable reason for this call did not cross his mind. Yael was Colonel Pasternak’s ladylove, as nearly everyone knew; a freakish, impulsive person, and for all he could guess she wanted to bask a bit in the glory of his battlefield wonders, or flirt with him, or who could say what?

  “Why sure. I’ll be in touch with you one of these days.”

  “Who is that?” inquired Shayna, who clearly heard feminine timbre in the receiver sounds.

  “One of these days, nothing!” exclaimed Yael, and the receiver sang with the womanly resonance. “Tomorrow morning! Here at the base, or in your flat?”

  “I said, who is that?”

  Shayna’s yikhud with Yossi had gone according to plan. She had really disarmed and won him. They weren’t exactly engaged, because she said she wanted first to get the approval of her parents an
d Reb Shmuel; but she was already feeling proprietary, and losing no time in asserting it. As for Yossi, he was deeply smitten with her, knew there was no way to bed down with her except in marriage, and powerfully desired her—certainly at the moment! Also, he was beginning to wish for kids. So, let it be Shayna. She was by far the best ever, and she had yielded him all of her virtue she was going to yield before a wedding, that was as sure as sunrise. He put his hand over the receiver. “Oh, you know, just one of those girls. Sorry about this.”

  Shayna’s response was a fierce frown and a stern head shake.

  “Yossi, are you there? Have you hung up on me? Don’t you dare!”

  “I’m here, I’m here. Sorry. I’m going back to the base tonight.”

  “Then I’ll see you at the Falafel King at seven in the morning. You hear? Be there.”

  Shayna said, “What on earth is that shmata [rag] going on and on about? Just hang up. You’re finished with all that.”

  “Okay,” said Yossi, which served as a response to both of them, and he did hang up. Shayna turned loving again, and some time passed before she declared she had to go home. He walked with her through the crooked streets of old downtown Tel Aviv, both of them vibrant with the afterglow of advanced intimacy. At the sherut station they kissed before she got into the jitney.

  “No more shmatas,” was her whispered final word. “I’m yours and you’re mine, and that’s that.”

  “No more shmatas,” said Don Kishote, and he walked back to Karl Netter Street in a fog of excited happiness. He had never experienced such adoration for a girl as had flooded him upon modest Shayna’s yielding; well, semi-yielding. Life was just beginning. Victory, perhaps a decoration, and Shayna!

  21

  The Shmata

  The coffee in the Falafel King’s open café was not bad, but the cakes tended to be old and not wholly free of Ramle’s ever-floating dust. Yossi was there on the stroke of seven, the military habit in his bones, and he ate two of these while waiting, warmed by a strong morning sun, for Yael to show up. That she was late did not surprise him; a woman officer, and a spoiled one at that, the colonel’s pet. Planes practicing landings roared into the base and roared off, trucks full of soldiers came and went through the sentry gate, and the small café became crowded while Kishote sat washing down dusty cake with coffee and thinking not about Yael at all, but about Shayna.