A Remarkable Kindness (23 page)

E
mily's hand was inches from Ali's, but she could still feel its trickle-charged intensity, its heat.

“You need to call the exterminator and get him to come back once and for all and get rid of all these—” Yoram suddenly stopped as he came out of his office.

“Thank you, Ali.” Emily took the car keys lying on the counter and whirled away from the reception desk. “I'll make sure to give these back to room 317.”

“Yoram,” Ali said, “I was just on my way to Aga's.”

“I told you not to buy from him.” Yoram's retort was unusually sharp. “They stole avocados from Eyal Troyerman. He happened to find about the same number of avocados at Aga's, five times cheaper than anywhere else.”

“You told me to get the cheapest—”

“Never mind what I said,” Yoram cut in. “
Nu,
just go already.”

Ali turned and moved across the lobby, not looking at Emily, not saying good-bye. She stared at the back of his black polo shirt, distinctly aware that his purposeful gait was already familiar to her now. She picked up a flyer for a new restaurant lying in the fax machine and pretended to study it, her head bent.

“What was Ali doing with those car keys?” Yoram asked.

“A guest asked him to check the oil or something.”

“So,
nu,
in addition to everything else, Ali's now a car mechanic?”

“You know how hotel guests are.” Emily didn't turn around. “They think that just because Ali works in a hotel he can repair anything.”

“All I know is that if something isn't broken, don't fix it.”

She let that go. “Anyway, I must have the flu or something.” She coughed loudly. “I almost didn't come to work today.”

“You can't get sick now with that wedding tomorrow and Orly on maternity leave.”

“It's not as if I can help it.” Emily crumpled the restaurant flyer and tossed it into the paper bin. She got to work on the computer, deliberately ignoring Yoram, who kept standing there, watching her like a policeman waiting for a criminal to make his move. He finally gave up and stepped back into his office.

Emily stared at the minute hand on the clock, but it refused to budge. She could not believe how slowly time moved. At one o'clock, Yoram went to eat lunch in the dining room and returned to the reception desk in a cloud of fried food and cigarette smoke.

“You can go to lunch now,” Yoram told Emily. “Svetlana made crispy schnitzel.”

“Lunch? I feel awful. I'm falling off my feet. I have to go home.”

“You sounded fine when you were talking to Ali earlier.”

Emily let that go by, too, coughing loudly. “I called Noga earlier and she told me she'd be here any minute. So instead of my lunch hour, I'm going home.” She reached for her pocketbook under the desk and before Yoram could say anything else, she shuffled away, dragging her black flats across the floor. She took her bicycle from the rack and wheeled it slowly past the hotel's picture windows, continuing until Yoram could no longer see her.

She cut around a frangipani tree and through the hotel's hedges, hiding her bicycle behind Amos and Natalie Sasson's garage because she'd heard Yoram say that they'd gone on vacation to France. (“Again!” Yoram had grumbled. “They go to Paris more than I go to Tel Aviv!”)

At the far end of the parking lot was Ali's car. Using his keys, Emily opened the door and climbed into the airless heat. She rolled down the windows, blasted the air conditioning, and lay in the backseat. Not moving, listening to the chirrups of the birds hidden in the banyan tree with Ali and David's names engraved on its trunk. Emily tried to picture Ali and David as boys, joking by the tree, daring each other to inscribe their names. That made Emily think of her father, who used to say that every year before Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed people in His Book of Life. Emily could hear her father reciting the Unetanah Tokef prayer,

            
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed

            
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed

            
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born

            
Who shall live and who shall die . . .

Tears stung her eyes, and her joints and bones and flesh shrank against the backseat. What would her father say if he saw her now, curled and hiding in Ali's car? Emily pushed the thought away. She intertwined her hands, clasping her fingers hard to stop her wild thoughts just as Ali got into the driver's seat and started up the car.

“You don't know how hard it was for me to do any work knowing that I'd get some time alone with you today.” Ali spoke without looking at Emily, still facing forward.

“Yoram knows about us.”

“So he knows.” Ali pulled out of the parking space. “Stay down until we're out of here.”

Emily heard the car crunch forward, turn right, pass the cemetery. She could picture the graves standing like a petrified forest in the sun. The people underneath the headstones, buried along with their dreams. Their shames and sorrows. Their secrets.

The car swung around and up the road that ran in a perpendicular line from the sea. One speed bump, another, and then the bumps of the railroad tracks. In the distance were Boaz's groves and Emily tried not to think of him, but she imagined him just the same: maybe right then he was standing on a ladder studying a branch that needed trimming, reaching for a pair of shears or a handsaw, or gazing at the clouds, knowing
that all the way until Sukkot, they were mere wisps of white, bringing no rain.

The car made another right onto the main road, and Emily knew they were passing the tree that Shoval and Tal had nicknamed the Dragon Tree, the one that Lauren's girls called the Dinosaur Tree, and then fields of chickpeas and cotton. Farther up was the Arab catering hall where Emily had gone with Boaz to the wedding of a daughter of Kareem, one of Moshe Zado's workers who sometimes helped Boaz in the groves. Thinking of Boaz, trying not to think of Boaz, thinking of him again. She pictured his sunburned ears, the hairs that curled over the collar of his T-shirt, his toughened hands.

“You're quiet,” Ali said.

“Just thinking.” Emily sat up, touching Ali right below his shirt, on the inside of his arm.

“Emily, if you keep doing that, I'll have to pull over.” Ali glanced at her in the rearview mirror.

“That was not the reason.”

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing. Everything. Where are we going?”

“For a walk near a village with Christians, Muslims, and Druze. The Druze are the ones with the fancy cars.”

“I know, you don't like them.” Emily sighed.

“They're as loyal as the wind. In Syria, they're pro-Syrian, and in Israel, they side with the Jews. They only care about themselves.”

“Really, Ali? This is what you want to talk about now? The biggest thing that separates us?”

“I'm sorry.” He looked at her again in the rearview mirror, his eyes like pools of black ink. “Did I ever tell you about Majd? He was a really special Druze guy who taught David and me to ride motorcycles and who was killed in a motorcycle accident. We went to his family's house to pay our respects. His wife was pregnant and she told us, ‘Something must die for something else to be born.' That's one of their religious beliefs.”

“That could be true,” Emily agreed. “My father used to say that even Moses, the greatest Jewish prophet, couldn't understand life's mysteries.”

“If he couldn't understand it, then we don't have a chance.” Ali drove by a billboard for Swiss yogurt, turned into a village crowded with concrete houses perched on giant legs, and parked opposite a beige house with a black Mercedes sitting underneath it. Emily got out of Ali's car and looked up at the house, its plain windows like square eyes. Watching her and warning her about what was forbidden?

She walked silently with Ali along a path that sloped downhill and into a dried-out riverbed strewn with stones that snaked through a cluster of trees. At the bottom, the trees closed behind them, and that was when Ali stopped and reached for her the way—well, thought Emily, the way that only Ali had ever reached for her.

“Emily, it's so hard for me to see you for a few minutes and then let you go back. I can't stand knowing he has the chance to hold you whenever he wants.”

“He doesn't hold me. That's the problem. He hardly talks to me.”

“Then why stay with him?”

“I don't want to break up my family.”

Ali's lips tightened and he stepped back.

“And how can I just pick up and leave him?” Emily asked. “You and I don't even know how we'll be together when everyone else is driving us apart. Even about the Druze. There's so much that divides us.”

“But those are little things. We can disagree on some things, can't we?”

“It's all too complicated. You said so yourself.”

“We'll find a way to make it work.” Ali put his arm around her and they walked ahead.

“Oak trees.” Emily bent down to pick up an acorn. “It looks like a Druze man wearing a skullcap. They'd think it's terribly wrong that I'm here with you.”

“Most of them are living the way they've lived for hundreds of years. Some of the men won't even let their wives drive cars. They say it's against their religion.”

“Still, what we're doing is wrong.”

“I don't care what they think. David always says that God gave us two ears. One for things to go in, and one for things to go out.”

The path ended at a clearing with huge boulders rising like prehistoric creatures out of the ground. Emily slipped off her shoes and climbed up the side of the closest rock. On the top, she could see the crisscrossed fields. Bright green wheat fields running north to south, bare fields running east to west. Maybe Jesus walked here. Maybe Moses or Mohammed. This tiny spot of earth where three of the world's religions were born. This tiny
spot where people were still fighting over every inch. Every soul. Ali scrambled up and stood next to her.

“It's impossible not to love you,” he said.

“But it's impossible to love you.”

“We could live together.”

“With my sons?” Emily turned to him.

“Why not? I like your sons. They like me, too.”

“Lauren told me that no Arab man would ever agree to raise another man's children. Especially not a Jewish man's children.”

“I'm not every other Arab man.”

“You're ready for two nonstop little boys?” Emily sat down and dangled her legs over the side of the rock. “It's like seeing everything double.”

“If they're with you, then I'll be with them, too.”

“But you'll never be Abu-Shoval or Abu-Tal.”

“No. I'm already Abu-Omar.” Ali joined her on the edge of the rock. “He's already fifteen. I know he understands why I did what I did. He knows Jasmine and I are as different as night and day.” He paused. “You could leave your kids with Boaz.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“I see Omar and Marwa a few times each week, but I no longer live with them.”

“A father is different.”

“That doesn't sound like something an American woman should say.”

“Maybe not,” Emily said. “But a mother almost never gives up her children. That's instinct.”

“That's being a Jewish mother.”

“You're funny—did David also say that?” Emily paused. “What do you think he'd say if he found out about us?”

“I'd like to think he wants me to be happy. But sometimes you have to choose sides.”

“And which side would he choose?” Emily felt edgy and anxious. Then numb—or was that because she felt too much?

“The side of his people.”

“And you, Ali?”

“I don't care anymore. Can't you see how draining it all is? I've had enough of the Jews and the Muslims and the Druze and—”

“Unfortunately, that's reality—”

“You want to stay with Boaz, stay then. But if you think you can be happy with him, then what are you doing here with me?”

“I don't know,” Emily said. “I mean, I do know why I'm with you. But I can't imagine giving up everything and taking such a big risk. Maybe I should wait and give Boaz a chance.”

“I'm tired of waiting. I gave up my dream and moved back to Maloul thinking it would make Jasmine happy. I'm not going to keep waiting, because if I wait and wait, one day it will be too late.”

Emily didn't speak, considering his words.

He pressed his hand into the small of her back and tugged her toward him. A serious look clung to his eyes, passion mixed with fierce longing. “Let's leave and go to America. Do you think anyone there would care that I'm a Muslim and you're a Jew?”

“Yes, my mother. But thank goodness she lives in Charleston, and there'll be a snowman in hell before we move there.”

“I'll find a way to win her over.”

“I'm sure you would.”

“I bet I could walk into any synagogue in America,” Ali said. “I'd read the Hebrew prayers with a perfect Israeli accent and nobody would even know I'm an Arab and not a Jew.”

“That's a Hollywood movie right there. Ali, I don't want to have this conversation if it won't get us anywhere.”

“But that's where you're wrong. I knew nothing about running a hotel before I started working there. Nothing about catering. But Yoram said, ‘Can you put together a wedding for five hundred people?' and I did. I try to make things happen.”

“So you really want to move to Somerville?”

“It's a great place to start. My cousin's just waiting for me to open a hummus place.”