Evergreen

  “Have you by any chance gone out of your mind?” he demanded.

  “No. I just don’t like being taken for granted by a man!”

  “Well, you needn’t worry about that anymore,” he said furiously. “I shan’t take you for granted again. I shan’t take you at all!” And he strode away.

  He was sore with his anger all that afternoon. Women! “Sorry for women,” she had said. Capricious, moody, childish, ungrateful, stupid—He ran out of words.

  Could there perhaps be someone else? Anything was possible, yet he couldn’t imagine who it might be. They’d been together so much, she hadn’t had time even to talk to anyone else! Still, anything was possible.

  At supper he sat purposely apart from her. But when it was over and he had to go down to the barns for the evening checkup, she followed him.

  “Eric. Eric, I’m sorry.” She laid her hand on his arm.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I get that way sometimes. I know it’s stupid and wrong. It wasn’t decent when you were being so nice.”

  He melted. “Yes, but—what was it all about?”

  “I just get a queer feeling sometimes about being owned. Independence is very precious to me. I get scared. I can’t explain it.”

  “Well, all right then,” he said awkwardly, far from understanding.

  “And you’re not going to stay angry with me? Please?”

  “Well, all right,” he repeated. “You want to go on Sunday?”

  “I want to. Very much.”

  The minibus was filled. Half the passengers were children and young teen-agers. Their singing was shrill and deafening and gay. The road cut through brown fields already being plowed for winter sowing. It passed through new cement-block towns, bare, ugly and clean.

  “It’s all they can afford,” Juliana explained when Eric made comment. “They’ve neither time nor money. Beauty can come later.”

  For beauty had been in the past, and in Jerusalem was there still. The car stopped at the crest of a hill. Below lay the pale amber city, spreading to farther hills and up their sides.

  “It isn’t gold,” Eric remarked wonderingly, “as in the song. It’s amber. Yes, that’s it.”

  “There’s an old tradition,” the driver said. “One is supposed to walk into Jerusalem. Who wants to get out here?”

  A few of the boys and girls got out. Juliana jumped out with them.

  “I was hoping you would,” Eric said.

  For three days they celebrated. He followed where he was led. They needed no guidebook, for Juliana knew the city well.

  “It’s a great pity we can’t see more,” she told him. “East Jerusalem is all Arab; they don’t allow us to go in. And the old Jewish quarter that had been here for two thousand years was wrecked and captured when the Arabs attacked in 1948.”

  Still there was more than eyes or feet could cover in three days. Museums and archeological digs. Crowded alleys of the Old City, foul to smell and vivid to look at. Arab women in black veils and Arab men in kaffiyehs. Narrow shops where men hammered brass and cut leather. They followed the Way of the Cross. They heard the muezzin’s eerie cry in the early morning, and heard it again at noon when they went to a mosque to watch men kneel at prayer, facing toward Mecca.

  In rocky fields at the city’s edge goats climbed with bells jangling. A man led a string of shabby camels whose great eyes blinked patiently as they waited, tethered in the blinding sunlight. They listened to the melancholy twang of eastern music. At night they danced the hora. They wandered through dark, old shops.

  “This is a street of Yemenites,” Juliana explained. “Most of them are jewelers, silver crafters.”

  “I want to buy something for you,” Eric said.

  “I didn’t mean that!” she protested. “I only wanted you to see because it’s interesting. They’ve come here from Yemen—”

  “Buy one of these bracelets,” he commanded. “No, not that one, it’s not nice enough. Pick an important one.”

  The shop’s owner held up a handsome bracelet, its silver filigree as fine as lace.

  “That’s the one,” Eric said firmly. “That is, if the lady likes it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Juliana said, “the lady does!”

  When they were outside she asked, “Eric, are you so rich that you can spend money this way?”

  He was touched. It hadn’t cost anything much at all.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not, although people here might think I was.”

  On their last day Juliana told him, “I’ve saved the best for now. I’m going to take you to a synagogue.”

  “Oh,” he said, amused, “you forget! I’ve been in them many, many times before.”

  “Not like this one, you haven’t. At least I don’t think you have.”

  At the end of a long alley they stopped. “This looks like medieval Europe!” Eric exclaimed.

  “Well, it is. It’s been transplanted. One can find everything in this city. Didn’t I tell you?”

  In the box-shaped synagogue of ancient stone they separated, Juliana climbing two flights of stairs to the women’s balcony where hidden women read their prayer books behind the lattices. Squinting through a minute hole she could see the men at their prayer desks below, wrapped in their shawls, and chanting. Eric must be among them but she couldn’t see him.

  They met again just outside the entrance.

  “They all looked so old!” Eric said.

  “It’s only the beards and the black clothes that make them seem so.”

  “To think they’ve been praying this way for three thousand years!”

  “Maybe longer.”

  “My grandfather went to a place like this on the lower East Side before he became ‘modern.’” Eric laughed. “You know, I’ve an idea he would still prefer it. But my grandmother wouldn’t.”

  “Do you realize, these people don’t care about politics or wars or anything that’s happening beyond their doors?”

  “They’re waiting for the Messiah, who’ll set the world to rights.”

  Juliana shook her head. “They’ll go on praying like this through raids and wars, and heaven forbid, even through defeat.”

  “That’s faith. They believe. I wish I did,” Eric said.

  She looked at him curiously. “Don’t you believe in anything?”

  “Do you?” he countered.

  “Yes. Freedom and individual dignity.”

  “Well, if that’s all, why, I’ll buy that.”

  “Maybe that’s all the belief a person needs. Worth living for and dying for.”

  “Yes. Only, I don’t want to die right now!”

  “Nor I, of course not!”

  “Ask me what I do want,” Eric commanded.

  “What do you want?”

  “To live where you are. To be near you forever.”

  “Nothing is forever,” Juliana said darkly.

  “Do you really think that? I don’t like to hear it.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “I want to marry you, Juliana. You must know I do.”

  “Ah, you’re very young for your age, Eric!”

  He stopped in the middle of the street. “That’s a rotten thing to say!”

  “Don’t be annoyed with me. I only meant—I’m older than you. I’m twenty-four.”

  “Don’t you think I figured that out? And what difference does it make, anyway?”

  “None, I guess. But I also meant—you’re too trusting. You scarcely know me and still you want to offer me your life on a silver platter.”

  “It’s my life,” he muttered. “I can offer it where I like.”

  “Ah, don’t be annoyed!” she repeated. She leaned over to kiss him. “Let’s buy some ice cream. My feet are tired and I’m hungry. We can sit in the park over there and eat it.”

  They sat on a bench in the park, eating ice cream out of the container. Children went chattering home from school, their bookbags slung over their shoulders. Tourist buses pas
sed. In a yard across the street a family was decorating a succah for the Feast of Tabernacles; gourds, squash and wisps of grain were hung from or piled on the rafters. Eric followed Juliana’s gaze.

  “It’s the harvest festival,” she explained. “They take their meals outdoors in the little booth.”

  “A pretty custom. All people have their pretty customs.”

  “Of course.”

  Two old men passed, looking in a book together. Their beards and their hands waved in earnest discussion.

  “My grandfather would love to see all this,” Eric said. “I was thinking, if he had a beard and a broad black hat he’d look just like these old men. You see the same face here, over and over.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Is anything the matter?” Eric asked. She had laid down the ice cream spoon and was sitting with her hands in her lap.

  “No.… Yes.… I have to tell you something.”

  He waited, but she didn’t begin.

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  He saw her agitation. “Don’t, if you don’t want to.”

  “No,” she contradicted, “I do want to tell you. That is, I want to tell someone. I’ve always wanted to tell someone and I never have. And I can’t stand it anymore! Do you know what it is to have something burning inside you, something you want to talk about and can’t, that you’re so sick of, so ashamed of—”

  He couldn’t imagine what she might have done and he was frightened.

  “Do you know what that’s like?” she demanded again.

  “No. No. I don’t.”

  “Do you remember that I told you about my family, how they helped those poor Jews in the attic, and how my uncles were taken by the Nazis?”

  “Yes, you told me about your parents, and—”

  She interrupted. “Not about my parents. About my mother.” She turned her face away, addressing the air. “My mother and her brothers.” She stopped and Eric waited.

  A fire engine went clanging by. A police car followed with screeching sirens. For a few moments it was impossible to be heard. Then quiet returned to the little park; deep quiet: crooning pigeons pecking at crumbs, a woman calling once across the street. But Juliana didn’t begin again.

  He waited and was about to say, “Go on,” when he saw that her eyes were pressed tightly shut and her fists were clenched in her lap. He didn’t know what he ought to do.

  Presently she said, steadying her voice, “My father … when the war ended the Dutch authorities came for my father. He had been a counterspy for the Germans. One of the leaders. An important man.” She opened her eyes and looked at Eric. “An important man! It was he who had turned in my uncles and the neighbors and our minister and all those others who worked in the underground. Can you believe that? My father!”

  Eric drew his breath in.

  “I thought my mother would lose her mind.”

  “Perhaps,” Eric said, “it wasn’t true? And the charge was false?”

  Juliana shook her head slowly. “That’s what we hoped. But it was true. He didn’t try to deny it. He was proud of it. Proud of it, Eric! He believed in it all, the master race, the thousand-year Reich, all of it!”

  Eric reached for her two hands and held them.

  “Yes, I thought my mother would lose her mind. To have lived with—and, I suppose, even loved—a monster, who sent her own brothers to their death. To have lived with such a man and not known what he was.”

  He stroked her hair. He had no words.

  “And he was kind to my sisters and me. We always had things, toys, some candy—when the country had nothing. We went out into the country together. He loved us. And he sent those other children to die.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Eric said. It was all he could think of to say.

  “‘Tell me,’ my mother used to ask me after it happened, ‘tell me, can you believe anyone, trust in anyone?’ I was fourteen …”

  “She didn’t mean it that way,” Eric said gently.

  “I suppose not. She’s doing well enough now. She has my sisters and me; she works, she lives. But still, if you could live with someone and not know what he really was, why then—” Her voice faded away.

  “So that’s it,” Eric murmured to himself.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Nothing important.”

  It began to grow dark and street lamps came on.

  “I’m glad I told you,” Juliana said. “I feel better.”

  “You can tell me anything,” he answered, meaning it.

  Yet in a way he was sorry she had told him. For he had met the rival now and seen that it was fierce and would be hard to vanquish.

  “There’s a child who troubles me,” Juliana told Eric a few weeks later. “Do you remember, I told you about the bus that was shot at last year? There were a few children who survived but their parents were killed.”

  “I remember. You showed me the spot.”

  “Well, this one child—perhaps you know Leo, who follows me around? He’s nine now, a little boy with glasses.”

  Eric nodded. “I shouldn’t think he’d be any trouble.”

  “He’s much too quiet. He never brothered anyone, even right after it happened. We had so much hysteria here. We were up all night with some of the children, and it went on for weeks, nightmares and crying. But never with Leo.”

  “Maybe you’re too concerned. Have you talked to anyone about it?”

  “Oh, yes! And people just say that he’s very mature and very brave. And that’s true, but still something brothers me.”

  “I’ll talk to him if you like. I was a camp counselor. Maybe I still know how to talk to kids.”

  “I hoped you’d say that,” Juliana said gratefully.

  She brought Leo to him one afternoon while he was feeding the calves.

  “You said you needed some help and I thought Leo might be able to help you. He’s strong and tall for his age.”

  Leo said nothing, just stood there, neither scowling nor smiling.

  “These calves,” Eric explained, when Juliana had gone, “have just been weaned. And I’m trying to get them to drink their milk out of a bucket. But the problem is that they don’t understand and they try to knock it over and—whoa, there—see what I mean? Now, if you could hold the bucket while I stick his head in so he can get a taste of the milk, why, we—”

  There were five calves. When they had all been fed, Eric said, “That was kind of fun, wasn’t it?”

  Leo shrugged.

  “Would you like to do it again another day?”

  “If you need the help, I’ll do it. People are supposed to help.”

  “Never mind that. Do you want to?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’m going down to the pasture to bring the cows in. They’re far out today.” This time Eric didn’t ask whether Leo wanted to go. He simply said, “Come with me.”

  The boy obeyed. They picked their way down the path. The wind made a thin whistle as it passed and moved on through the grain fields.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Eric said. “You’re kind of lucky to live in such a beautiful place.”

  “Yes.”

  He tried again. All he could come up with was that trite question with which adults plague children: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Whatever the country needs. A soldier, probably.”

  The priggish answer puzzled Eric. “Leo, I wish you’d tell me what you really think, not what you believe I want to hear.”

  The boy stopped on the path, opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it and went on ahead.

  Pathetic shoulders! Skinny legs! Baby, boy and man! And out of some remote corner of time and memory another question came.

  “Leo—you must think a whole lot about your father and mother, don’t you?”

  A second time the child stopped. But now he looked at Eric sharply. “You’re not supposed to talk to me like that!”


  “Why not? What’s wrong?”

  “Because I heard the doctor say and the nurse say, they have to get our minds off what happened. And that’s what I try all the time to do, and now you come and ask me a question like that!”

  “Come here,” Eric said, “sit down a minute.” He perched on a large rock at the edge of the path. “You’re supposed to get your mind off it, is that what they say? But you haven’t been able to do that, have you?”

  “Most of the time I do,” Leo persisted. “I’m not a baby, you know.”

  “I know you’re not,” Eric said gently. “But I’m not either, am I?”

  Leo was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I lost my father and mother the same way you did, or almost the same way. In an automobile. And I still think about them, and I know I always shall.”

  Leo was silent, watching Eric.

  Eric went on, “Yes, and often when I was younger, I cried. I thought how unfair it was that I, of all the boys I knew, had such a thing happen to me. I cried.”

  “It’s not brave to cry,” Leo said. A quiver ran over his face.

  “I think it is. I think it’s quite brave to be honest about the way you feel.”

  “Do you? Do you ever cry, now that you’re old?”

  “Look at me,” Eric said. His eyes were filled with tears.

  The child stood staring at him in wonder. And suddenly he dropped onto Eric’s lap, shaking and digging his wet face into Eric’s shoulder.

  For a long time Eric held him. Pictures, pictures, flashing in his head … Gran. Chris. Nana.…

  Then he thought, They’ll be wondering why the cows are so late. But he didn’t move.

  At last Leo raised his head. “You won’t tell anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Not even her?”

  “Who? Juliana? No, not even her. I promise.”

  Leo stood up and wiped his nose and eyes.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me, Leo?”

  “Yes.”

  Eric bent down and Leo whispered, “I’d like a big toy sailboat for the pond.”

  “I’ll make one for you. I’m pretty good at that sort of thing. Now hurry. We’re late with the cows.”

  Arieh, who slept in the bed next to Eric’s, remarked, “I notice something about you. You don’t talk much lately of home. Of the country house where you grew up, or anything else.”