Cafe Nevo (12 page)

“Goodbye, darling.”

“Bye-bye, Grandma.”

Over the boy's head Jemima said, “Have Vered call me.” She touched Caspi's arm, an unusual gesture. Caspi felt the question in the touch, but he shrugged and left.

He placed the boy close beside him in the front seat. As the child's sleepy warmth huddled against his side, Caspi leaned over to lock the door and surreptitiously sniffed Daniel's hair. It smelled of baby shampoo, milk, and, faintly, Jemima's scent. Daniel looked up and said, “I want Mommy.”

Caspi snarled, “Shut up!” and gave the boy a shake. Then he regretted it, but what good did that do? Daniel had already pulled away and buried his head in his monkey's soft side.

Caspi, who loved his son, cursed the day he was conceived. He had tried every stratagem he could think of to prevent conception (save vasectomy, which he believed reduced men's potency). Even after Vered caught on and forced him to desist, he never really believed she would succeed, never believed that an egg of hers and a sperm of his could meet in anything but hand-to-hand combat.

His instinctive aversion to the idea of fatherhood had proved well founded. To have a child meant entering into a state of permanent pillage-and-rape. It meant choosing to live on the cliff-edge of the most intense and untutored love. Loving where one could not afford to hate, loving irrevocably, was a perilous fool's game, and Caspi could never understand who so many men chose willingly to play it.

It was different for women. Formed to nurture, they had defenses men could barely conceive of. Caspi's harshness with his boy was but a poor and makeshift cover for the truth, which was that Daniel had him by the balls. Was it his fault the boy didn't seem to grasp that?

“You know Daddy loves you,” Caspi said to the little bowed head. God help him but he could not keep the surliness from his tone. Daniel gave him a boldly dubious stare. Caspi pulled over and stopped the car.

“Daniel, would you like to go look at the sea with me?”

The child nodded, and Caspi carried him down to the water's edge. When he put him down, Daniel began scrabbling at the buttons of his shirt.

“What are you doing?”

He pointed. “I want to swim.”

“Not now, Daniko. It's nighttime. Let's just sit here for a while.”

Obediently, Daniel dropped cross-legged to the sand. Caspi lumbered down beside him.

“The sand is damp. Come sit on my lap. Look at the stars, Daniko. Do you know the constellations?”

Nestled in his father's arms, Daniel looked at the sky.

“There is Orion, the hunter. Orion loved the goddess Diana, but he died at her hand. Diana didn't mean to kill him, and in her anguish she plucked the living soul from his dying body and flung it heavenward. There he stands, bow drawn, arm flexed, quiver ‘round his waist: luminescent but eternally remote.” Daniel sighed, and his head fell back against Caspi's chest. Caspi stroked his soft hair and thought that in a world ruled by a jealous god, men never got what they wanted, for in the very moment of attainment the object of their desire was transformed. Certainly this was true of Caspi's women. Vered thought that his philandering was aimed at her, but she took credit where none was due. Caspi sought, truly and industriously, the mystery embodied in women's flesh, but he was questing for the grail. The moment he touched them the mystery was gone.

And it was so with his work. “You see a story,” he whispered to Daniel. “You see it shining like a star at the top of a mountain. You labor up the mountainside, sack concealed behind your back because they're cagey buggers and shy. You reach the star and stretch out your hand, you touch it, and for one searing moment you think it's yours—and then it's gone. Shriveled, and in its place a pile of molten ashes, fool's gold. You shovel the muck into your sack because what the hell, you don't want to go back empty-handed, and you trudge down the mountain. At its foot an eager throng awaits you. They raise you to their shoulders and hold up your pathetic loot for all to see and praise. You say: ‘That isn't what I meant. That isn't it at all!' But no one hears, Daniel. No one hears.”

 

They lay on the bed in a dingy hotel room, fully clothed. Khalil stroked her hair. “Don't be afraid,” he murmured.

“I'm not afraid,” she said, shivering.

He slipped the straps of her summer dress off her shoulders and pressed his lips to the hollow of her throat “We are closer than cousins. We are brother and sister. Abraham was our father, and our mother is the land, Palestina. You cast us off, but we returned. You cast us off again, and again we return. We will always return. You and I are bound forever. You will never be free of me, nor I of you. I sow my seed in you, my promised land.”

 

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

“We planted pistachios this year,” the father said. “Damn fool idea of Sasha's. From the water each of these trees drinks we could have had a field of avocados, and it'll take five years before we have a crop worth taking to market. Your mother's sick.”

Arik stared. “I know. You told me. That's why I came.”

“I didn't tell you everything.”

“So tell.”

Uri Eshel kicked a clod of earth with the toe of his sandal. He was as tall as his son but twice as broad, heavily muscled, with a bushy mustache and a full head of hair, grayer than the last time Arik saw him. He wore khaki shorts, and his trunk-like legs were foliated with wiry white hair.

Father and son left the young pistachio trees behind and crossed through a border of cypresses into the orange orchard. The grove was deserted except for some Arab workers eating lunch under a tree.

Uri picked up a newly pruned branch and stripped the leaves from it. “I took her to the clinic. We thought it was an intestinal flu, she kept throwing up. Doctor did some tests, did an x-ray and then more tests. A few days later he calls me in. She's sitting there, white as a ghost. ‘Your wife's got cancer,' he says.” Arik choked back a sound. His father rushed on. “I say where. He says the stomach. Pancreas. Maybe liver. I say, ‘Okay, so what do we do to lick this bastard?' He says, ‘Nothing.' I say, ‘What do you mean, nothing? Are you a doctor or a goddamn undertaker?' He says there's nothing to do except take care of the pain. I tell him he's an incompetent son of a bitch, and your mother starts crying. You ever see her cry?”

“No,” said Arik.

“I did, once. When you left the kibbutz.”

“What are you saying?”

Uri Eshel shook his head, a confused look in his brown eyes. “I took her to Hadassah. They did all the tests over again, and more. Professor Geller calls me in and says, ‘Your wife's got cancer.' I say, ‘So cut it out of her.' He says, ‘Can't.' I say, ‘So what am I supposed to do?' He says, ‘Take her home. Take care of her.' I say, ‘No, what am I supposed to
do?'
He says, ‘Nothing you
can
do.'“ Uri Eshel was reliving his rage. His deep voice expanded with it, filling the orchard, bending the trees. He looked down at his large brown hands, calloused and ink-stained both. Twisting the green switch he said fiercely, “She's fifty-six years old, and they're telling me to sit back and let her die.”

Arik turned back toward the kibbutz, but Uri caught his arm in an iron grip. “Where are you going?”

“To see her.”

“Not yet.” Nose to nose they glared at one another. Uri Eshel said, “Let me ask you something, Son. What cause did she have to get so sick?”

“What cause? What kind of question is that? No
cause.
You think it's her fault?”

“Not hers,” said Uri.

Arik Eshel laughed in disbelief. “My fault? I did this to my mother? Are you crazy, old man, or evil?”

Again the brown eyes showed confusion, and the deep voice said truculently, ‘‘You broke your mother's heart when you left the kibbutz, and mine when you quit the army. If I could I would tear that fucking cancer out of her body with my bare hands—but I can't. The only way I can help is to get you back for her.”

“Don't lay this on me, Abba. I did not give my mother cancer.”

“I didn't say you did.”

“You're thinking it.”

“I don't have any alternative,” Uri shouted. “Because if you're not the cause, then you're not the cure either—and then what the hell am I supposed to do?”

 

He climbed the water tower and gazed out over the kibbutz. Beneath him were the dining room and community center, cement buildings built low to the ground, functional but not graceless. Beyond them were clusters of homes, linked by flowering paths. To the left, the swimming pool glistened in the afternoon sun; to the right were the cowsheds, chicken coops, and stable. All around, in every direction and for as far as his eye could see, lay the fields and orchards of the kibbutz, green and fecund, flourishing. A humming sound arose, a blend of machinery, tractors, murmuring men, and lowing cows. When he closed his eyes, the earthsmell wafted up to him, the smell that, more than any other sensation, meant home to him. It was the moist odor of the land in spring, long parched but now sated by the winter rains, drunk with joy, splurging its precious reserves on the profligate lawns and flower gardens of the kibbutz. He felt a thousand miles removed from Tel Aviv, and though sorrow for his mother and pity for his father roiled inside him, they were momentarily subsumed by the sluggish peace that this sight of his home always aroused in him.

It was a strange fact, it was one of those natural puns that fate occasionally indulges in, that many of the high points of Arik's youthful existence had taken place on that tower. It was always his refuge. Whenever parents or peers weighed heavily on him, he would take to the water tower and spend an hour or two aloft, far above his problems.

The tower served another purpose as well: since no one could approach it unseen, it provided the only secure privacy on the kibbutz. Arik had his first girl up there, on a blanket, under the stars.

 

Eventually he came down. He met a dozen members on the path to his parents' house, who greeted him casually and slowed to talk, but Arik did not pause. He knew them all so painfully well that even if they said no more than “How's it going, Arik?” he could not help hearing their thoughts: why did you quit the army, and drag the kibbutz's name into the scandal? What's the matter between you and Uri? Why don't you come home? Do you know about your mother?

No doubt but that
they
knew. There were no secrets on the kibbutz, and precious little privacy.

 

Rina was sitting on the porch, dressed in work clothes, when he reached the house. He held back a little from approaching her, as if the cancer were a party to their meeting. She gave him a cool, hard look and said, “You don't look so bad.”

He smiled. “Neither do you, Mama.”

“Well, what are you waiting for, a written invitation? It's not contagious.”

He crossed the porch and bent down, enfolding her in his arms. She hugged him briefly, started to release him, but then tightened her arms, her Angers digging into his back as if they, not she, would not let go.

“Mama,” he said, “I've decided to come back.”

“What's the matter, you can't find work?”

“It's not that. I want to. It's time.”

“Why?”

He hesitated, then said, “This is my home.”

Rina tossed her head and sent her hair, long, black, and glossy, tumbling over her shoulders. To the glory of her son and husband, she had never given in to the kibbutz custom of short hair for women. “It's not that simple,” she said. “You quit the kibbutz. You'd have to apply for re- admission and be voted on, like any other candidate.”

“You think there's a problem?”

“A lot of the members were bothered by the loud way you quit the army. They think you set a bad example for the kids. I know one member who'd vote against you for sure.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“Why?” he cried. “I thought you understood why I did it. You said you supported me.”

“I did. I still do. That's not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

“You don't want to come back,” Rina said. ‘Tour father's been getting at you. I knew he would.”

Arik didn't know how to lie to her. She'd always seen through him, as she saw through everyone. People in politics called her “Eshel's lie detector,” and they feared her. She was tougher than Uri, and she'd never spared her son. If she said she'd vote against him, he knew she would.

He brought over a chair and sat beside her, and though they'd never been a touching family, he took her hand and held it.

“He told me about the cancer. Is that ‘getting at me'? It's my right to know, and to do what I want to about it.”

“I don't want you here.”

“I don't believe you. He told me you cried when I quit.”