A Remarkable Kindness (18 page)

R
achel was walking on the beach in a winter storm, trying to get Yoni out of her head. She thought about how she used to tell Jamie not to be like some of their other friends who had nothing else to talk about except their boyfriends, and there Rachel was, her hiking boots sinking deep into the sand, the waves smashing against the rocks, lightning flashing, the wind blasting her from every direction, the whole sky falling on top of her, and she couldn't think about or concentrate on anything but Yoni. Where was he? Was he safe? Was he in danger? Was he trying not to think of her the way she was trying not to think of him?

She picked up a seashell lined with iridescent pink and put it in her pocket, feeling the gritty sand between her fingers. She made her way past the locked surf shop, the boarded-up lifeguard station,
and the empty pull-up bars. No fishermen standing on the rocks, no boats on the water.

The cottage was empty. Julius was prowling through the music store in Nahariya, and Rouven was with Hila, his girlfriend. Rachel thought he was lucky because Hila had finished the army a few months ago and they could be together whenever they wanted.

Rachel turned on the electric radiator in the kitchen, hung her wet clothes on the clothesline over the bathtub, and sat down at the table with a cup of mint tea. She studied Hebrew verbs, occasionally looking around the simple room. The ceiling light buzzed restlessly. The damp wool scent of her ocher sweater rose, mixed with the smell of Esther's cats and the orange coils of the radiator.

Then Rachel heard a knock on the door. She called, “Come in!” the way she heard Aviva and everyone else do. Who would be out in this weather? It seemed unlikely that the village youth group would be collecting money for charity again, the way they'd done the other day.

“Hi, Rachel!” came a voice, and suddenly Yoni was standing by the door, dropping his drenched knapsack on the scratchy welcome mat.

“Hey, you! What are you doing here?”

“I have an ear doctor's appointment early tomorrow morning in Nahariya. My commander decided at the last minute to let me come home tonight so I'd get there on time.”

“What's the matter?”

“I don't hear so good out of my left one. They always run out of earplugs at the shooting range.”

“You didn't tell me.” Rachel knew there was a lot he couldn't
tell her. “But you're soaking wet—let me get you a towel. Do you want a cup of tea or coffee?”

“Coffee is great. I just need to find a safe place to put this.” He swung off his rifle, folding it in two with a snap, and removed a metal piece from the bottom. “Can I hide the rifle under your mattress? And I'll put the magazine on top of the refrigerator.”

“I usually hang my rifle on the hook over there,” Rachel tried to joke, but he didn't respond. She followed him into her bedroom, where he lifted the mattress and lay down the rifle. While he went into the bathroom to change out of his wet clothes, she boiled water and set a cup of coffee on the table. She was holding the milk and sugar when he reappeared in a pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt with
PARATROOPERS
written on it in white Hebrew letters.

“Every time I'm back here, you're studying Hebrew.” Yoni's green eyes were reddened and bleary with fatigue.

“My teacher's too busy protecting the country to teach me.”

“Are my lips still chapped?” he asked, kissing her.

“I see you've been working on them.”

“My new secret weapon.” He smiled. “ChapStick and my M16.” Then he pushed back her hair to kiss her neck, picked her up in his arms, and carried her through the kitchen. He had to turn sideways to slip through the narrow doorway of her bedroom and then he slammed the door shut with his foot.

Rachel felt as if her heart was bursting afterward. They'd made love a few times before, but now they seemed even more connected. This was it, they were a couple. Rachel didn't say that, though, the way she would have with Henry. Instead she asked, “You know the story of the princess and the pea?”

“No.” Yoni stroked her hair. “Tell me.”

“There's a prince who wants to marry a princess, but he can't find a true one,” Rachel began. “Then one night a girl comes to the castle in the rain and she says she's a princess. The prince wants to make sure, so he puts a pea under twenty mattresses and she goes to sleep on top of them. In the morning, she says she couldn't sleep at all because she felt something under her mattress. And that's how he falls in love with her, because only a true princess would feel a pea.” For a moment, Rachel almost forgot why she was telling him this story, because it seemed so ridiculous and because she couldn't concentrate while gazing into Yoni's eyes. “Well, I
did
feel your M16 under the mattress.”

“I'm sorry. You know, I wish I could stay here with you and never go back.”

“I get so scared thinking about you in the army.”

“Forget it.” He wrapped a few corkscrew curls of her hair around his hand. “Test my lips again.”

A
RINGING TELEPHONE
, darkness. Rachel was alone, sleeping in an unfamiliar room. She was afraid, but then she felt a warm arm over her and realized it was Yoni, hitting the snooze button on his alarm.

“Your hair smells so good.” He burrowed under the covers, his body hollowed around her. He kissed her hair, dozing off again. She wished the moment could elongate into infinity, but his alarm was ringing once more.

“I'd do anything to come back to you right after my doctor's
appointment,” he whispered, his arm draped over her waist, his fingers linked in hers.

His finger, my finger, his-mine-his-mine-his . . .
Then she opened her eyes and the shapes in the room fleshed out: the dresser, the windowsill, the lamp on the night table, the leaning pinecone of Pisa. From outside the window, the Oshinskys' horses neighed.

“Now I can teach you some Hebrew,” Yoni said. “I'm
shavooz
.”

“It sounds bad, whatever that is.”

“It's the really depressing feeling you get when you have to go back to the army. It means your penis is broken.”

“I'd be more upset if that happened.”

“So would I.” He held her close. “I should do what my friend Tom Mosseri did.”

“What was that?” Rachel turned around to face Yoni, taking in the yellow flecks in his eyes and the outline of his full lips.

“Tom was going through a really rough time in the army, so he went to one of Gila and Omri's beehives, picked up a bee with a pair of tweezers, and let it sting him on his knee. He did it with two more bees and his knee got really swollen and then he went to the army clinic and told them he hurt his knee playing soccer. They gave him
shalosh-gimelim,
a three-day pass from the army.”

“Wasn't he in pain?”

“Yeah, but he got to stay home.” Yoni traced his hand from one shoulder, across her collarbone and the hollow of her neck to her other shoulder. “The next time, Tom knew he had to do something different because the doctors start recognizing you, so he chewed really hard on a piece of gum wrapped in plastic—you
know, the kind of plastic you wrap sandwiches in—for about an hour, and then went to the clinic. The nurse started taking his temperature and when she turned away, he stuck the thermometer all the way in the back of his mouth where his jaw was really hot from chewing on the plastic, and the nurse said he had a high fever and sent him home again. But that time, he only got one
gimel
.”

“How do you guys come up with these things?”

“When you're in the middle of nowhere by yourself, you have time to think. This other guy I know asked his friends to break his arm with a club.” He hauled himself out of bed, opened the window shutters, and peered out. “At least the rain's stopped.”

Rachel propped herself up on an elbow, gazing out at the sky. Layers of gray: granite, slate, pebble, stone. “Do you want some breakfast?”

“No thanks. I want to go home and surprise my mom before she leaves for school.”

“Oh, good, that will make her happy.”

Yoni picked up his white T-shirt from the floor, pushed his arms through first, then pulled it over his head. “Don't you have to get ready for work?”

“In a minute. I want to lie here and watch you. I've never seen a soldier put on his uniform before.”

He slowly buttoned the buttons of his army shirt. It had been soaked through last night and there were still damp patches, like puddles in the early-morning fields after a rain.

He slid his wool beret under the shoulder lapel.

“Would you say your beret is burgundy or crimson?” Rachel asked.

“Who am I, Ralph Lauren? It's some kind of red. Paratrooper berets are always red.”

“Which soldiers' berets are brown?”

“Golani and some other units.”

“And who's green?”

“Rachel, next time I see you, I'll tell you who wears what.”

He tucked his olive-green pants into his gray socks. The socks looked so itchy that Rachel thought she wouldn't have been able to even put them on. He pushed his feet into his muddy boots. Then he bent over again, bowing his whole weight forward. He slid one end of his shoelace through the top hole of his boot, made a loop, and pulled hard so the lace stayed tight. He kept looping the lace, tugging and looping, almost like he was crocheting, until the shoelace became one long braid.

“Look at this.” Yoni pulled the lace, unraveling it in one quick yank.

“That's cool.”

He slouched over and started the process all over again. “I'm sorry to bother the princess.” He lifted part of Rachel's mattress to extract his rifle.

“It's cold out,” she said.

“I'll close the window.”

“No, I mean, try to stay warm.”

He nodded, partly closing the shutters. The light snapped, breaking into bands.

“I'll call you.” He leaned over to kiss her, then walked into the kitchen. She heard him reaching for the other part of his rifle from the top of the refrigerator. The front door opened. Closed.

Yoni stepped out of the house on his way to Aviva's. Rachel knew that his surprise visit would cheer up Aviva, but Rachel secretly wished she could have more time with him. Then she felt ashamed for thinking that way. Aviva had so little to be happy for, and Rachel knew she had so much.

“W
HAT DID THE
doctor say?” Rachel asked when Yoni called her later.

“He didn't say anything.” His voice was brusque. “Just gave me some drops. I'm about to get on the train to go back.”

“When will you be home next?”

“I don't know. Everything's shitty. The only thing I keep pushing is the rewind button. I'm playing back our entire night together.”

“Me, too.” Rachel remembered his tender, longing, smooth, chapped kisses, his arms and legs entwined in hers. “It was—”

“It was too good,” Yoni shouted over the noise of the train. “I gotta go!”

O
N A
F
RIDAY
evening three weeks later, chilly and overcast, Rachel was in the kitchen with Rouven and Julius, setting the table with mismatched plates and napkins made from paper towels torn in two. Julius, who had straggly shoulder-length hair pulled into a ponytail, John Lennon glasses, and an unkempt beard, stood at the stove cooking rice. Rouven, sort of chubby but still attractive because of his moony blue eyes and blond hair, was positioned in the middle of the room, opening a bottle of wine. “
Scheisse!
” He frowned. “The cork broke.”

Rachel's phone rang in her back pocket. “Hey, you!” Her heart leaped. She hurried out of the kitchen and stepped down into the sandy yard, where her breath came out in puffs of white. “I'm so happy to hear your voice.”

“What are you doing?”

“About to eat dinner. Rouven's girlfriend, Hila, and her friend are coming over, and they don't know what they're getting into—Julius' curry stew.”

“Anything's better than what we just ate. Three days in the desert with nothing but Loof.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Kosher Spam. You try eating it. And last night they finally let us sleep for a few hours, but we had no tents or blankets so we dug out trenches to lie in. I felt like we were digging our own graves. I lay on my back in the sand and the guy next to me threw his legs over mine. I wished you were there.”

“That's nice”—Rachel smiled—“thinking about me.”

“Thinking about you only made it worse because I didn't want to be where I was. I just wanted to be there with you.”

She chewed on the inside of her lower lip. “I wish you could be here, too.”

“That doesn't help me any.”

Rachel had no idea what to say. Her words were useless, pings of raindrops falling on the sea. She listened to the static silence between them.

“So, tell me what you've been doing,” Yoni finally said.

“Well, tomorrow I'm going to help do the
tahara
for Hilda Mosseri.”

“That's Tom's grandma,” Yoni said. “He called me earlier. She always used to run after us with a rolling pin because we'd steal her apple strudel.”

“That's funny.”

Yoni was quiet.

“I babysat for Maya and Yael last night. And I'm enjoying work at the
gan.
We're getting ready to plant trees for Tu B'Shevat. How funny is that? I didn't know there's a Jewish holiday for
trees
.”

Still quiet.

She got no answer so she stumbled along. “My Hebrew is getting better. I've got down my future tense. You can test me when you get home.”

“Whenever that is.”

“Do you want to plan something fun for when you do get back?” Rachel was surprised by how much she sounded like her mother, who always told Rachel to think of something fun in the future if she was having a bad day. “We can go horseback riding at dawn.”