A Remarkable Kindness (15 page)

“It's going to feel like you're inside a washing machine!” Aviva had shouted, trying to make it fun. She held on to Raz because he was younger and she let Benny go. The wave surged and sucked them into its void, spinning and spinning, and when it was all over, it spat them out and they finally came up for air. Aviva had joked, “That was
tohu v'bohu
!” The chaos and utter confusion before creation.

Raz said, “Mom, why did you hold on to me?”

And Benny said, “Mom, why did you let me go?”

“Aviva!” Guy called. “
At b'seder?
” Are you okay?

She was in the light again. She gasped for breath, her whole body shivering, bullied. “I—I thought the wave would never let me go,” she stammered, reeling in the surfboard still attached to her leg.

“You did great.” Guy smiled. “Do you want to go back out?”

“That crazy, I'm not.” She pushed her wet, tangled hair off her face. She felt dizzy, as though her head was still turning, and she could taste all that salt in her mouth.

“Next time, you'll do even better.”

Aviva took another gulp of air. “One time was enough, thank you very much.” She climbed back on the board. “How much do I owe you for the lesson?”

“You don't have to pay me for this.”

“But I want to give you something. How about dinner on a Friday night? When Yoni is home from the army, and Rachel will come, too, then you can tell them how you witnessed me standing on the surfboard.”

“
Sababa,
” Guy replied. “Whenever you want to invite me is great.”

Back on shore, powdery sea salt trailed down her arms and legs. “Sorry if I wasn't so good.” Aviva took off the leash and handed Guy the surfboard.

“You did better than a lot of people I've tried to teach.”

“Thanks again.” She reentered the brightness of the morning, taking large steps in the sand so that her feet landed in the footprints that Benny might have made as he left the sea early that Sunday morning. After he'd gone surfing, before he'd returned to the army.

That last time.

When he never came back.

S
vetlana,” Rachel said, scrubbing her last pot in the hotel kitchen on a lovely fall afternoon “this pot is so big I should probably climb in and scrub it.”

“A girl in my army unit did that.” Svetlana was standing at the stove, frying onions.

“No way.” Rachel wiped onion tears from her eyes.

“Yes
vay.
Naama was so little! She had a hard time cleaning the bottom of the pot, so she climbed in and washed it from the inside out.”

“In her army boots?”

“In her army boots.”

“That's funny.”

“Hysterical.” Svetlana's hair was no longer dyed platinum blond but was now jet black, reminding Rachel of Morticia on
The Addams Family
.

“I can't believe I've spent the whole day stirring chicken soup with a spoon as big as an oar. If there's a flood, I could find a canoe and use it to paddle us away.” Rachel pulled the spoon out of the pot and mimicked paddling through the air, trying to entertain Svetlana.

“Take us far away.” Svetlana wiped her damp face in the crook of her saggy arm.

“Who can even eat chicken soup in this heat?” Rachel squeezed the foamy sponge in her fist.

“Yoram says that he wants to give his guests a lot of food before they fast on Yom Kippur. So, we turn up the air conditioning and let them eat their soup.”

“I don't think they'd want chicken soup with feathers in it.”

“
Nu,
how many times do I have to tell you?” Svetlana said crankily. “I check all chickens and there are no feathers!”

“Just saying. Maybe I'll become a vegetarian like my parents, anyway.” Rachel placed the huge, clean pot on the aluminum dish rack. “I'm out of here.” She peeled off her latex gloves and tossed them into the garbage can. “Your shift is almost over. Cheer up, Svetlana!”

“
Do svidanya.
” Svetlana did not look up.

Rachel walked through the kitchen, but instead of going home, she went out the back door, where Ali Haddad was standing on the step, supervising several guys unloading boxes from a truck. Writing numbers on a yellow pad, he had his cell phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. “
Yallah,
Yoram, bye!”

She walked around to where Ali could see her. “Hi, Ali,” she
said in English. “I don't mean to bother you, but I can't work in the kitchen anymore.”

“What's the matter?” he asked, concerned.

“I can't get that chicken soup smell out of my nose.” Ali smiled but she said, “I'm serious! Ever since Rosh Hashanah, I smell it in my bedroom, in my shower, even in my perfume. I mentioned something to Emily and she told me that I should talk to you.”

“Oh, she did, did she?” Ali's eyes were as black as Svetlana's new hair.

“Emily told me you'd find me another job.”

“Why don't you ask Hannah? Isn't she in charge of the volunteers?”

“Yes, but Emily said that you know a lot of people and you'd try to help me.”

“Let me ask you something.” Ali studied Rachel. “Do you like nature?”

Rachel's grandmother in Milwaukee used to say she only liked climate-control, but Rachel loved being out in nature. It meant horseback riding, skiing, hiking. It meant being alive. “I love it.”

“Good. You'll have plenty of time to be stuck in a kitchen, anyway.” Ali dialed a number on his cell phone, and Rachel tried to follow his conversation but gave up after
shalom
. When he hung up, he turned to her. “I found you a new job. You're going to work with Moshe Zado. You'll like it there.”

“Where?”

“In his avocado groves. There's no chicken soup in the avocado groves.”

A
FEW WEEKS
later, Moshe Zado jerked around to Rachel from where he sat on top of a tractor. He had a wide red face, and his chin melted so quickly into his neck that his head appeared to sit right on top of his chest. “We were kicked out of Algeria!” he shouted.

“You told me already!” Rachel walked behind his tractor, holding a black hose and spraying the weeds that grew in clumps around the young avocado trees.

“Algeria is not Montana!”

“Wyoming!”

It was a clear, fair morning. A delicate breeze rustled over her skin, the sun was warm on her face and shoulders, and wispy clouds trailed along the sky like footprints. Rachel was trying not to let Moshe's depressing history lecture (the same one she had heard yesterday and the day before that) prevent her from appreciating the beauty all around her.

“I was born in Algeria, but they forced us out,” Moshe shouted over the sound of the idling engine. “The Arabs won't tell you that. They never say that the Jews also lost their houses and their land. But Israel took us in. Why can't they do the same for their people? Because they hate each other even more than they hate us!”

“You told me all this already!” Rachel pushed her hat lower, almost as if it could mute out his voice. “You know Yoni Sereno, don't you?”

“I knew him before you were even born.”

“Well . . .”

“
Nu?
” Moshe gestured with his hand.

“Well, he's my boyfriend, and he's in the army—”

“You don't think I know that?”

“So it scares me to keep hearing about the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews when he's a soldier. Can't we talk about something else?”

“You don't want to talk, we won't talk.” He drove the tractor down the path again.

Over the tops of the avocado trees, Rachel could see the fields and orchards, and then the undulating hills on the other side of the valley. Her sneakers padded over the soft dirt, and she listened to the leaves swish in the breeze. “Moshe?” she called. Then she thought about how his name in English was Moses, and that made her laugh out loud. “When you were little, did your friends ask your mother, ‘Can Moses come out to play now?'”

“
Mah?
What play?” Moshe twisted around. “We got to this land and we had to work.”

“But Moshe.” She swatted a fly circling her tanned leg. “How come the spray doesn't hurt the avocado trees?”

He peered back at Rachel, his eyes narrowing.

“How can the spray kill the weeds but not the trees? Seriously. How does the spray know which is which?”

“I don't know how it knows! All I know is that the spray chokes the roots of the weeds and they don't get vitamins and they can't grow.”

“Aren't I supposed to wear a mask or something when I spray?”

Moshe lifted his white cap, wiped the perspiration off his bald head, and continued in the tractor, ignoring her.

“Doesn't this spray have carcinogens?” Rachel asked loudly, undeterred.

“Where do you think you are? This is not America!”

Instead of thinking about poison in the spray, Rachel focused instead on how happy she was to be outdoors, grateful not to be peeling potatoes or stirring chicken soup in the hotel kitchen. Rachel aimed the hose at the weeds again. The trees came up to her chest. Yoni would tower over them. She tried to imagine where he was. She took her cell phone out of her back pocket to see if he had sent her a message. Not that he could do that very often in the army, but just in case.

“Rachel!” Moshe said suddenly. “What's the name of these avocado trees? Don't you remember?” He didn't wait for her answer. “Haas! The tastiest of them all!”

“I was going to say Haas!”

No message.

Rachel returned the phone to her pocket.

“Haas!” he repeated. “The last to ripen. The first to be ready is the Ettinger. Ettinger! It's big! More water, more green! Next avocado looks like a pear. Fuerte! It means
strong
in Spanish! Fuerte is tasty. Some say it is sweet. But the Haas is dark—almost black. And it's petite. We sell Haas to Europe. We sell Haas to Japan. It's the best avocado in the world, it's the—”

“Crème de la crème!” Rachel filled in, because it was what Moshe always said.

Muttering to himself, Moshe drove the tractor up the path. In the distance, Rachel could see a windmill, its wooden arms motionless. All of a sudden, Moshe shut down the motor and
climbed off the tractor. The fields and the sky stopped rattling. A few hawks circled the silent sky.

“Why did you stop?” Rachel asked.

Moshe held out his watch. “Nine o'clock.”

“Don't you want to finish spraying? We're almost done. It's kind of hot today, so if we finish earl—”

“This is hot? You think this is hot? Maybe for an Eskimo it's hot! It's early November. And it's nine o'clock. Time for our break.”

He walked away and Rachel had no choice but to follow him into the next grove, where the avocado trees were enormous, shadowy and cool, their gray trunks notched like riverbeds, the leaves in the highest branches touching, as if sewing themselves into a canopy of green.

Moshe crushed twigs and fallen leaves beneath his heavy boots, then stopped to point out a hose by the trunk of a tree.

“We use water from our toilets to irrigate,” he explained. “Recycled water. Gray water. Gray, almost ninety-nine percent clean.”

“I know, I know.”

“Isn't that brilliant?” Moshe caught up to her. “Sewage water! If we didn't have to spend all our money to fight so many enemies, we'd be inventing thousands of things!”

“That is really smart.”

Then Moshe dropped down next to a small tree, clasping its trunk in his wide hands.

“These two guys are trying to squeeze you out.” He glanced at the large trees on either side. “Don't let them win!”

Rachel stood there as Moshe patted the tree, revealing a compassionate side to him that she'd never suspected. He talked to the trees as if they were his children.

“Grow big and strong like me,” he told the stumpy tree, almost pleading, and when he turned to Rachel, his face darkened. “You think I'm crazy, don't you?”

“I read somewhere that trees grow better if you talk to them.”

“At least
they
listen to me. Not like my wife, who doesn't listen and doesn't shut up.”

He heaved himself up and they continued through the groves. Rachel saw white square beehives, like the cartons her father used to store his old legal papers. She'd helped him move some boxes and files up to the third floor of his office building before she'd left for Israel. They had climbed the rickety stairs up to the dim, dusty attic. “This smells like original, one-hundred-year-old Cheyenne dust,” Rachel had said.

“You're something special,” her father had told her as they set the boxes down on the creaky wooden floor. Then Rachel saw a look on his face, like water being poured into a glass, and she could feel his love rising from his heart up to his large brown eyes. “Going off on your own like this—”

“You and Mom are special for encouraging me to go. But don't worry about me.”

He pressed his lips together and let out a faltering sigh. “Roots and wings,” he murmured to himself. “Roots and wings.”

Now, Rachel made a detour around the hives. Bees buzzed through the air.

“Gila and Omri Salomon distribute these beehives throughout the farmers' fields and groves,” Moshe was saying. “Remember what I said? The bees—”

“Transfer pollen grains from the male avocado to the female.”

He scowled at Rachel. “I taught you too much!”

The buzzing faded and they stepped into a clearing where Kareem and Jamal, Moshe's farm workers, were leaning against an old wooden shed with a corrugated roof, smoking cigarettes and staring at Rachel in a way that made her feel very self-conscious in her gray ribbed shirt with spaghetti straps and denim shorts that stopped way above her knees.

Kareem turned to Moshe and yelled, “
Zeh tesha?
” This is nine?

Rachel glanced at the watch her parents had given her as a going-away gift. It was 9:15. She listened as Moshe and the men argued. Now and then, one or another glanced at Rachel, and she wished they wouldn't do that. Wished she understood what they were saying. Finally, Moshe pulled a chain heavy with keys from his pants pocket and unlocked the door to the shed.

Inside, dozens of photographs of women in bathing suits were pinned to the splintery walls. There were hoses, pruning shears, shovels, sprays, canisters, leaf blowers. The air was full of mildew and gasoline. Two crisscrossed windows let in boxes of grimy light.

Rachel turned to Kareem, who had a mustache as wide as a harmonica. “What were you arguing about?” she asked, speaking English as slowly as humanly possible.

“Moshe says, ‘Come at nine o'clock! Not Arab nine o'clock, but normal nine o'clock,” Kareem replied in his halting English. “We are here and where he is?”

“Because I was teaching you about farming,” Moshe told Rachel. “You came here to learn, you should learn!”

Rachel stayed silent, sitting at a wooden table scratched and stained with burns. Jamal, who always had a vacant expression on his square-jawed face, blank like a piece of paper, positioned himself on the chair next to Rachel, spread a newspaper on the table, and then arranged pita bread, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and salami slices.

Rachel unzipped her knapsack and took out her pita sandwich. They all ate silently. Or, Rachel thought, she ate silently. The three men ground their teeth as they chewed, burped, and wiped their mouths on their sleeves. And all too often, she'd find one of them staring at her. They stared and stared and their stares felt like ooze poured all over her.

“What are you eating?” Moshe asked her.

“Olive oil and
zaatar.
”

“I bet you didn't know that
zaatar
is hyssop.” Moshe conquered half his baguette sandwich with one bite. “Yes, hyssop.” He wedged his food in the side of his cheek. “If you look it up in your Bible, you'll find it. They used hyssop to clean the leper's house. They used it to purify the Temple in Jerusalem. It's one of the oldest spices in the world.”