Raquela (52 page)

They drove in silence. Raquela could see the lights in the windows of the hospital rising up from the dark mountains.

“Let's turn around and go home,” she said after a while.

“Why?” he asked, disappointed.

“It's very late.”

He shifted gears and without another word turned the car around and brought her home.

The next morning Raquela found her car standing in front of the house. Why had Moshe not even rung her bell? Probably busy—the busiest man in the medical school.

Three days later he telephoned. “Raquela, I'm building a house in Ashkelon. The contractor is coming tomorrow. You've just built a house. You know so much more about this sort of thing than I do. Would you come along with me and talk to the contractor?”

“Why not?”

She sat beside him in the car, drinking in the Jerusalem air as they began the descent down the Hills of Judea. The once-barren stubbled hills with huge white boulders were now green, terraced with trees. Little settlements of Jews from Yemen, Cochin India, Afghanistan, from Europe and from Arab lands, peopled the biblical hills and valley.

Just before Latrun, the Arab-held salient that blocked the highway, they turned south.

Raquela looked around. How often she had driven this road with Arik on their way to Beersheba. She relaxed. At last she could think of Arik without a stab of pain.

They were in the northern Negev, approaching the land around biblical Gat. The poignant words of David, lamenting the death of Saul and Jonathan, sang in her head: “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice…”

The terrain, fertile and green, became bony with barebacked mountains. The Arab frontier closed in upon them everywhere. East of them, the Hebron Hills, in Jordan's hands, were a hotbed for the renewed Arab infiltration. Gaza, in Egypt's hands, lay south and west. The road itself was called the “Security Road,” though it was far from secure and there were constant military forays upon it from both Jordan and Egypt.

Moshe stopped for gas in Kiryat Gat, the administrative center for the whole Lachish area. Lachish was the focal point of the largest and most dramatic regional scheme in the country, a kind of human TVA project that stretched from the Gaza Strip to the Hebron Hills, two hundred thousand acres of desert inside the explosive borders between Egypt and Jordan.

“I wish we had time to drive around this village,” Moshe said, stretching his arm out of the car window. Kiryat Gat rose—starkly simple buildings filling up the sand dunes, as in a Dali landscape, against a gray endless hinterland of sand.

“This is where the people from the surrounding villages get together. They've got everything here—schools, factories, cotton gins, community centers. It's a fascinating experiment. Our sociologists and psychologists have worked out a new technique of absorption. We've discovered that the old pressure-cooker technique we used when the state was born—mixing all the newcomers, putting Poles and Iraqis, Romanians and Moroccans, in one village—didn't work. We've learned that even Moroccans from the big cities like Casablanca and Rabat don't mix well with Moroccans
who've
lived in the caves of the Atlas Mountains.”

“But it worked in Beersheba,” Raquela said. “We had new immigrants from one hundred countries living together.”

“It seems to work in bigger towns where you have plenty of jobs, plenty of housing, and good schools. It doesn't work in small villages, especially when you have unemployment. But the real integration will come with the children.”

Raquela looked out the car window at a new village. Little yellow wooden houses stood, in a security-planned arch, on the hills and yellow sand. She saw women in colorful striped robes and men in black pantaloons, planting vegetables in their backyards.

“They're from the island of Djerba, in Tunis,” Moshe said. “What we're doing now is keeping the people intact. Putting the people from one area together in single villages. Then the villages are like homogeneous satellites radiating around Kiryat Gat, which is the heterogeneous center.”

“These little villages look so vulnerable.” Raquela was seeing her own country as if it were a new landscape. “They look like little islands—so isolated.”

“They're not as isolated as they seem. They're part of our whole network of defense.”

They drove on. The sand had almost disappeared. From the main highway, Raquela saw desert land blooming. Desert land grown fertile. Rows and rows of lush vibrant cotton and corn marching like proud soldiers straight toward the horizon.

“One word made all of this possible,” Moshe said.

“Water!” She said it as if it were magic.

Moshe turned from the wheel to look at her. “Right. It's a sacred word. We nearly went to war over it this year.”

Nearly went to war
. Raquela shuddered.

Israel had just finished the great National Water Carrier. Giant hydraulic engines lifted the Jordan River's water from the Sea of Galilee; pipelines conducted it over steep mountains; open sluiceways sped it down valleys. In the center of the country it linked with the huge sixty-six-inch Yarkon-Negev pipeline, which brought the water from Tel Aviv's Yarkon River to Lachish.

The north, blessed with water, was now irrigating the south; the once-barren desert was a harvest of crops and flowers.

The Arabs, watching across the borders, were outraged. Water was politics. Water was life. Water must
not
be allowed to make the Israeli desert bloom.

Syria corralled the Arab states, demanding they declare war on Israel.

But the Arab states were not yet ready to go to war, fearing a third defeat. In an Arab summit conference in January 1964 they decided, instead of war, to try to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River that ran through Syria.

War had failed to destroy Israel; diverting life-giving water might succeed.

Israel regarded her right to the Jordan running through her land as inalienable, as vital to her existence as the waterways of the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba.

There were now constant clashes on both sides of the biblical Jordan River.

Would they go to war over water?
Raquela wondered.
Would Amnon and Rafi grow up—to be alive?

But war seemed remote. The Syrians had thus far failed to divert the headwaters. The clashes had temporarily ended. Peace seemed in the air as they drove along the highway, smelling the fresh salt air of the Mediterranean.

Moshe drove into Ashdod. Like the empty desert Israel was now irrigating, so ten years ago Ashdod, on the sea, had been nothing but sand dunes and biblical history. Now it was Israel's second largest port, a completely man-made deep-water harbor. Raquela had driven through it with Arik when it was started—a raw frontier town with tin shacks and wooden houses. Now there were sunny garden apartments, ships flying flags of all nations in the harbor, and a pipeline bringing crude oil from Eilat.

Fifteen miles down the coast, they entered Ashkelon. One of the five great Philistine cities, it lay just six miles north of the Gaza Strip. The broad avenue was lined with date palms, flower beds, and ancient marble pillars.

“Read this.” Moshe stopped the car. They walked to a historical marker to read the dedication to the prophet Zephania:

AND THE COAST SHALL BE FOR THE REMNANT OF THE HOUSE OF JUDAH; THEY SHALL FEED THEREUPON; IN THE HOUSES OF ASHKELON SHALL THEY LIE DOWN IN THE EVENING; FOR JEHOVAH THEIR GOD WILL VISIT THEM AND BRING BACK THEIR CAPTIVITY.

“‘Bring back their captivity,'” she repeated. “Look at all the people who've returned from their captivity and discovered Ashkelon.”

The streets were filled with newcomers. Raquela watched them as Moshe drove down the main square, with its “Afridar” (South African) cultural center, its handsome clock tower scraping the blue sky. Hundreds of tourists ambled along; Israel had become an important tourist center. Americans, Germans, French, Swiss, Africans, Asians, and Englishmen wandered through the country, now flourishing with agriculture and industry. Ashkelon, charming and rich with biblical history, lay on the tourist route.

Moshe turned toward the beach and drove past small hotels until he reached his unfinished cottage. The contractor and his men were inside, plastering the walls.

Raquela took over. Moshe stood aside, smiling, while she examined the
balatas
, the Israeli tiles, pointed out that the floor was uneven, discussed the way the doors should be installed and where to put the outlets for the stove and sink and refrigerator. The contractor began with an argument and ended with total, if reluctant, capitulation.

They left the cottage to lunch on the side of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. This was Samson country, and the restaurant was named “Delilah.”

They ordered a fish dinner. The breeze from the Mediterranean swept the restaurant. Through the window, Raquela could see the sand stretching for miles, bleached white against the turquoise Mediterranean.

Her lips curled with pleasure. She felt good. Everything was good. The beautiful day. Ashkelon. The sea. Even the discussion with the contractor.

The waiter brought the broiled sea bass, and the fish—like everything else—was good.

But Moshe looked glum.

“Isn't your sea bass good? Mine's delicious. Here, try a bite.”

“It's not the fish,” he snapped. “It's you.”

Her mouth dropped. “What have I done?”

“If you want to know the truth, I'm hurt. You seem to be more interested in those
balatas
than you are in me.”

Raquela suppressed a laugh. “You brought me here to talk to your contractor about the
balatas
. Now you're complaining.”

“You didn't have to enjoy it so much.”

“You'd never have seen how crookedly he was laying those
balatas
if I hadn't come along.”

A few nights later they were guests at a dinner party given by Arik's successor as chief of gynecology, Dr. Ze'ev Polishuk. He had taken an apartment in the building next to Moshe's, on Balfour Street.

When the party had ended, Moshe led Raquela down the stairs.

“Raquela,” he whispered. “Leave your car here tonight. Let's start walking around the block so nobody will see us. I'll drive you home in my car.”

“Okay.” Her eyes crinkled. She had heard rumors floating around the hospital and the university linking her with Moshe. She had brushed them off. Ridiculous gossip.

She looked up the staircase. Sonya, one of the women guests, was calling her. She waited. Sonya, tall, raven hair braided around her head, hurried down, took her arm, and walked with her toward her car. “I forgot to ask you how your boys are, Raquela.”

“They're fine.”

“They must be big. Let's see—the older one must be almost ready for Gadna.”

Gadna was pre-military training for fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds.

“Amnon's in Gadna right now,” Raquela said evenly. “In fact”—she offered more information; maybe Sonya was really interested—“he's near Eilat with his whole Gadna unit; they're in Beer Ora planting hydroponic vegetables. Well, here's my car.”

She shook hands, said good-bye, opened the car door, drove a few yards away and stopped. She watched Sonya walk toward Moshe's apartment house on Balfour Street. Moshe was standing in front of the building, looking at the silver-blue sky, enjoying the serenity and beauty of the Jerusalem night, waiting to join Raquela.

Sonya chatted awhile with Moshe; Raquela watched her shake his hand and saw Moshe disappear inside the gate. Sonya walked away.

A few minutes later, Moshe knocked on Raquela's car window. She opened the door and slid over. He took the driver's seat, parked her car behind his, returned her keys, and helped her into his car.

“We're like a couple of teenagers,” Raquela said, giggling.

Moshe steered the car down the Jerusalem mountains. “Here we are—the beautiful young widow with two kids, the eligible widower also with two kids—fooling a gossipy neighbor. God only knows what orgies she's picturing we're up to…”

“But she's such a good friend—to both of us. She was so kind to me when Arik died.”

Soon they were on the road to Tel Aviv. Moshe was humming a tune—maybe something from Poland, she thought.

She tried to look at her watch. Surely it was past midnight. Tomorrow was a working day. She had to be up at six to give Rafi his breakfast, get him off to school, and get to her office before eight. She had a full day of meetings with nurses to discuss their findings. She had promised Dr. Davies a statistical report. She had never thought statistics could be so fascinating.

Each day the study seemed to grow more meaningful. Dr. Davies was planning a book on toxemia in pregnancy, and Moshe was to be its editor.

“We'd better turn back,” she said.

Moshe stopped humming, screeched his brakes, made a desperate U-turn, stepped on the gas, and sped back to Jerusalem. He neither hummed nor spoke.

Probably tired
, Raquela thought.
Or he's got a million things on his mind
. She was silent.
Better not to break his concentration
.

At her door, he let her out of the car. “Have your brother Itzhak pick up your car tomorrow morning. I'm going to be busy.”

He drove away.

She unlocked the door, tiptoed to Rafi's bedroom, assured herself he was sleeping peacefully, and hurried to her room.
I won't get much sleep for tomorrow—that's for sure
, she told herself. Yet she undressed slowly and stood for a long time in front of the mirror, putting cold cream on her face.
Wonder what's bothering Moshe? He's been a widower for only two months. Grief makes people act in strange ways. Maybe this is the only way he's able to cope with Isa's death
.