How to Fall (16 page)

“The street looks like Bombay,” Angelica remarked.

“Harlem,” said Toby.

“East Jerusalem,” said Helene.

They drifted to the breakfast table—mustached Toby, who brokered businesses in New York; languid Angelica, married to a moneyed Indian; and Helene, at seventy-three the only remnant of her generation.

 

She was head of the clan. The large apartment was the family seat. Every Tuesday a Moroccan woman pretended to clean it. The
other days Helene furtively scraped and scrubbed. On her knees!—this pampered youngest child of the proud Antwerp family who fled to Palestine, all six, just in time, with diamonds hastily sewn into their hems. Little Helene, dancing down the gangplank, smuggled one special gem in her rabbit muff.

Her brothers fought in the '48 war. Afterwards, for each in turn, Papa transformed a few diamonds into cash; then they went off to seek their fortunes in America, in France. Oh, how rich they got. Helene stayed with Mama and Papa in this very apartment in this very building, graced today with a mound of trash. Her parents, lean and erect as royalty, continued to mourn the cousins who had been left behind on the Keizerstraat, the friends who had flown into the arms of the Germans. What could you do.

Her parents were dead, her brothers also. And now the children of those dead brothers traveled to see her: men and women already in their fifties. They came: and
their
children came too—Toby and Angelica and a dozen others. Some of Papa's grandchildren even brought their own kiddies, not noticing the childless Helene's meagre enthusiasm. She was the Tante, wasn't she?—and so the fourth generation arrived to pay homage to her and to kiss the soil of Eretz Yisrael, avoiding of course the explosives, and the thugs, and the trash.

 

Toby poured coffee. Angelica arranged a plate of pastries. Toby put a little velvet pillow behind Helene's back. Angelica handed her yesterday's
Le Monde.
“You look ravishing,” the girl whispered in her ear. (The girl was thirty-one.)

“You like my dressing gown?” Its deep V revealed a cameo on a chain: a woman in profile. “The cameo? Pretty junk; I've had it
forever. I would lounge
en deshabille
all day if we weren't going to the airport. The cab comes at two.”

They were leaving Jerusalem for Istanbul; they were off on a cut-rate gambling weekend sponsored by the Turkish government—plane tickets and hotel rooms for next-to-nothing. The wily Turks figured they'd get their money back at the tables. Toby was looking forward to a cautious flutter. Angelica had never been to Istanbul. And Helene? “Roulette I can take or leave,” she said when the weekend was proposed. Who proposed it? Nobody remembered. “But it's another chance to visit Madame Guralnik. Maybe the last chance.”

The entire family knew of this lady: Mama's young confidante, who set out for Haifa, and ended up in Salonika, and after that Istanbul, which we still called Constantinople. “Regina Guralnik, the prettiest woman in Antwerp,” Helene often said. In fact, she hardly remembered Regina Guralnik in her heyday, but a photograph assisted memory or maybe replaced it. Madame Guralnik gazed tenderly into the wings of some photographer's studio; against the drapery her girlish profile glowed. A small, tiered hat leaned forward over the blonde bangs as if about to pitch itself onto the enchanting nose.

“Madame Guralnik must be a great age now,” said Angelica.

“Very old, very wise, all that stuff.”

 

“What does Madame live on these days?” asked Toby. It was two o'clock. They were waiting on the sidewalk for the cab.

“She deals in spices.”

“Commodities?”

“A little shop,
cheri
. In Antwerp her father sold tinned fish,” and
then the white van pulled up. They had to circle the trash to get to its door. Helene motioned to the young people to go first. She followed, clutching an alligator overnight case. She wore a long black silk coat; scarf, shoes, and gloves were black too. Black mascara. How brilliant this early spring, she thought, just before ducking her champagne head to enter the cab—the almond trees had recently puffed into blossom.

The trash,
their
trash, had acquired a basket of rotting vegetables.

Helene slammed the door; the cab sped down the street. In the overheated interior dozing passengers were awakened by Angelica's good looks. A father and son stared. Two middle-aged women sniffed; for a moment Helene saw Papa's older sisters, imperiously waving away claimants for their valuable hands. An old man in a skullcap withdrew into his coat; and where did he think he was going on Erev Shabbat—was plane travel all of a sudden permitted? He was hopping to Cyprus, maybe; he'd get there before sundown and pray for the safe conclusion of his business whatever it was; probably computers; these days the Orthodox were deserting diamonds for electronics. One chip, another chip, they all made money.

At the airport Toby paid the fares. “A good deal, this shared cab,” he commended with the thrift of a millionaire. Her father, his great-grandfather, would have agreed. “The greatest bargain, Helene, is the thing you
don't
buy,” Papa liked to say. He was too large for bargains, too large for haggling. He had a weakness for fancies, though—pink marquises, yellow brilliants. “I bought them. I hid them. They escaped with us. Powerful stones, Lenya.”

“Yes,” she'd said, obedient as always to the suffering in his
voice. Her own voice echoed in the stone vault of the Jerusalem bank. She was then eighteen.

“The green one, it's lucky. It rode in your muff.”

“On the ship . . . I thought we were taking a vacation,” she remembered wonderingly.

“Keep it always.”

“In this bank? As if it didn't exist?”

He shrugged. “Who exists?”

 

Airport security lasted an age; what else was new. Angelica, despite her French passport, was asked about India, and about Pakistan, too. Perhaps she had a bomb in that sac, documents in the lining of her cape . . .

Helene next. No fuss. “Good luck,” offered the security agent, her eyes already caressing Toby.

A crowd of Rumanians had commandeered the waiting area. The men's hair hung in greasy spirals, the women's wrists and fingers sparkled with colored glass. “God has a soft spot for the vulgar,” Papa had told her. The whole crowd was already drunk, and on the plane they fought over the space in the overhead rack: you'd think it was the Golan. Helene stowed her own case under the chair in front. Seated, she slowly unwound her scarf; then, as if in an afterthought, she pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, and dreamily placed them in the bottom of her handbag. She fingered the cameo under her blouse. She buckled up and closed her eyes. She heard the roar of take-off; the calm tones of the pilot; the tinkle of the bar cart; the Rumanians, arguing . . . She opened her eyes.

And met Toby's blue ones. “Monsieur Guralnik?” he inquired.

She blinked and swallowed. “Died in Salonika.”

“She is alone, then.”

“Not any more. For the second husband she took a Turk.”

“Adaptable,” said Toby.

“We Belgians,” sighed Helene.

 

They gambled that night, stretching modest investments into an hour of pleasure. Toby was the last to lose. Angelica and Helene stood behind him as the croupier raked away his final chip. Then the three left, smiling—handsome Toby, gorgeous Angelica, blackgloved Helene, each poorer now by a few dollars, rupees, shekels. The Turks would not recoup their investment in
this
threesome. But two Rumanians were sitting at the bar with their heads in their hands.

 

“Anything is better than the priests,” said their guide. She was a university student, poorly dressed. “Yes, I can tolerate the military; we suffered worse under God. Would you like to know about the Blue Mosque?”

They visited the Blue Mosque. They visited Topkapi Palace and the marketplace. The guide urged them into the premises of a rug merchant. They sipped mint tea while the merchant commanded his employees to unroll complicated carpets. The family next door in Antwerp had filled its apartment with such rugs, and Helene somersaulted on them with the little daughter, what was her name, she perished with the rest. . . This merchant failed to persuade. They left him growling at his lackeys.

A boat slid through liquid lapiz. The wind lifted Angelica's hair. The sun glittered on Toby's mustache. The tour guide nattered on, and then wound up her spiel; and the boat sailed back to the port
in silence, passing ruined villas. They disembarked, and Toby tipped the guide. They wandered through winding streets and found a garden café. “Shall we have tea here, Tante Helene?” asked Toby.

She lifted the sleeve of her glove to look at her watch.
“You
shall have tea here. The hour has come for Madame Guralnik.”

“We'll see her too?”

“Ah . . . no. She has scandals to tell me, old Antwerp gossip. The dead are alive to her. But in front of you . . . Regina Guralnik would fall silent.” She produced her best twinkle and left them, managing as much of a stride as a small woman could, her black coat swinging, her handbag swinging, her gloved hands in her pockets.

 

The building she entered could have been found in the poor quarter of any European city—a lobby of chipped tiles, a stairway missing half its wrought iron, an elevator big enough for two thin persons. She noted the details as she had noted them on previous occasions: with severe distaste.

The elevator strained upwards. Its gates creaked open. She walked down a hall and knocked on a door: number Thirty-three.

He opened it.

He had aged a little in the past five years. But his lips were full in his dark face, and his suit was as grave as a diplomat's. He still had the air of a family solicitor. Well, he was a lawyer, wasn't he, whatever other trade he practiced . . . His voice had the deliberate gravity she remembered. She wondered what enterprise his sober firm washed money for these days—guns, girls, drugs, maybe all three.

They seated themselves on either side of a table. They observed a brief silence. Then: “Shall I show you?” she said.

“Please.”

She took off her scarf. She took off her gloves. She unzipped a pocket within her handbag and extracted a miniature knife. Laying the left glove flat on the table she picked at the almost invisible stitches attaching a piece of black leather to the palm. Soon only a few remained in place. She raised the glove. The flap she had released hung down. She shook the glove without impatience. Several small diamonds fell onto the table, followed by a large jewel.

It was square cut, and to an untrained eye it might have seemed an emerald, very pale. But these two knew it for the rare thing it was: Papa's green diamond.

It lay between them like a sweetmeat. After several moments the man put a loupe against his eye and picked up the gem and examined it. “Beautiful,” he sighed. “Carbon: always hard to believe when you see one like this.”

“Yes,” she said, resigned to the necessary palaver. “I was brought up on that lesson: the same molecules in our pencils and our fireplaces and the crown jewels. My father wanted us to understand what we were living on . . .”

She saw him again in the dark Antwerp office, her small self curled in his lap. The chartreuse nugget glowed on the mahogany desk. And thirteen years later, in the vault of that Jerusalem bank, the strong stone gleamed in the drawer, gleamed on his palm. “The exact color of your eyes,” he said.

The man examined the small diamonds.

“You are holding the remains of my inheritance,” she said. “This is my final visit to room Thirty-three.”

“You have kept the green beauty for a long time.”

She must let it go. The apartment must be maintained, the
wardrobe replenished, the arts patronized, the charities supported. The children's children would keep coming to Jerusalem; she could not allow them to find a straitened old woman. What could you do.

She picked up the jewel. Now
her
hand cradled its power, her skin reflected its lucky color. . . He named a price, greater than she had expected.

She nodded, briefly unable to speak. She tipped her hand like a ladle; the green ran out. Then: “Please deposit the money in the usual accounts.”

“Of course.”

Her fingers slid between the buttons of her blouse. She yanked at the cameo; its chain broke. “This goes with the lot,” she said, and dropped the thing onto the diamonds.

He glanced down. “Thank you,” he said politely.

She gripped the edge of the table, and stood. He stood too. They shook hands.

At the corner a taxi was idling. She curled her fingers to conceal the flapping palm of the glove and then raised her forefinger. The driver had the unwholesome face of the shammas in her girlhood shul, the one who had been caught fondling somebody's child . . . But he drove peaceably to the hotel. She crossed the lobby quickly; thank God no one was on the elevator to observe her streaked face.

At dinner Toby and Angelica asked for Madame Guralnik.

“She smells of cardamom. It's in every pore, every wrinkle.”

At the tables she bet on Thirty-three until her small stake was exhausted.

 

On the return flight the Rumanians didn't talk at all. They must have lost all the money they came with; they had probably bet their
silly earrings and lost them too.
She
had only cheated her country. Greased some syndicate. Disobeyed her father. Thrown away the last of the fortune.

In the cab Helene nestled between Angelica and Toby; beside Toby sat a bearded American. They sped along the highway. They entered Jerusalem. They dropped a passenger on a street off Boulevard Herzl, and Toby remarked that there was no rubbish to be seen. “The Mayor and Sanitation made a deal,” said a man in the back seat.