Saving Grace (9 page)

Of course it wasn’t fair. What was the good of being a doctor if you had to give away all you earned? Helping others was very nice, but first you got to help yourself. Okay, so the kibbutz put her through medical school, very nice, but was that a reason they should live off her the rest of her life?

It was a terrible thing to work and work and never see the good of it, terrible and unnatural. Clara knew. In Poland, her poor mama and papa had struggled from dawn to late at night just to survive; from year to year they never saved a penny. Here in America, if a person worked hard, he made money; and if he was smart and saved, he could have anything. A person was lazy, didn’t want to work, he stayed poor—that was his choice. That was the American way, and it was fair. Jonathan worked hard and he grew rich. Tamar, in Israel, worked just as hard, had even greater responsibility, and what did she own? Nothing. Not even her little house was hers; everything belonged to the kibbutz. Very nice, she had respect; but respect you can’t sell, you can’t eat.

Clara sighed. No point getting aggravated. Tamar wouldn’t listen, never had. She was as stubborn as her father.

“Everyone here is fine, thanks God. Gracie sees a young man, nice Jewish boy, runs a newspaper in the city. I don’t know if it’s serious. Jonathan don’t like him, and what’s not smart is he shows it. I told him, Lily too: you say black, she’s bound to say white. Gracie’s just like you and your papa, contrary to the bone. Don’t know what’s good for her. Lives in an empty room like a bedouin. Now she says she won’t go to college, even though Harvard and all those ivory schools want her. Says they’re ‘elitist.’ Just like your papa, him with his socialist
mishugas
. But that’s how it goes in families. One side gets the sense, the other gets the stubbornness. Same with Jonathan’s children—Paul with his feet on the ground, and Gracie with her head in the clouds.”

So the boyfriend wasn’t such a fine young man. So he didn’t run the newspaper. Where did it say she had to tell her daughter everything?

“Lily’s got some tsuris, but she don’t talk to me, really talk, I mean. Maybe she’s mad at Jonathan, but I don’t know what’s to be mad at. He works too hard, but he’s a good family man, a mensch. Maybe it’s the change of life, but then why don’t she tell me, I’m not a woman? It’s not like she has her own mother to talk to.”

Clara sat back and shook the cramp from her hand. Lily had called her “Mother” since the day she married Jonathan, but only from her mouth, not from her heart. Not because they didn’t love each other— they did—but because of a barrier erected by Lily, which Clara’s best efforts had failed to breach. Perhaps it was loyalty to her own mother, who had died so tragically, poor soul, or perhaps a simple disinclination toward intimacy: Clara had noticed that although Lily had many friends, she had no intimates.

“So, tochter. Give a kiss to Micha, and to the old man a good kick in the pants.

Mama”

* * *

On her way through the park, Lily was mugged from within. The pain had not gone after all, but merely lain in wait, biding its time. She was walking slowly down the path, a little distracted, wondering what had come over her and whether the grass stains in her beige silk would ever come out, when suddenly she had the sensation of something alive and alien trapped inside her skull, fighting desperately to escape. Her sight narrowed; she staggered to a bench and slumped onto it. After a while she became aware of a voice somewhere close behind her. The voice was a woman’s, singing in a German accent.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a vord, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.

There was a gathering stillness in the air, a warm anticipation, like the pause before a thunderstorm. Lily knew that voice, though it had been twenty-five years since she’d heard it. Who could forget her mother’s lullaby?

And if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass.

But that was impossible. Lily had buried her mother. Someone else must be singing that song. Someone with an accent like her mother’s. Someone with the same voice.

And if that looking glass gets broke, Mama’s gonna buy you a billy goat.

Greta never sang or spoke or read in German, nor could she abide to hear it spoken. She gave up her native language after the war. Lily was brought up on English nursery songs sung in a German accent.

Her eyes began to clear. The pain shrank to a single point, then vanished. In its wake came a sense of tremendous well-being.

And yet the singing continued. It was a mystery she had only turn her head to solve; yet Lily was oddly reluctant to do it. At last she made herself look around.

She saw no one. Lily stood, turned in a full circle.
 
People were walking past, but there was nobody standing close by and singing.

And if that bully goat von’t pull, Mama’s gonna buy you a cart und bull.

6

TAMAR KIMCHI INSERTED HER HAND in the hole and sifted the sandy earth. Decades of surgery had given her fingers eyes: as they palpated the hidden object, she saw the smooth curve beneath the encrusted surface. “Yes,” she murmured, “yes. Let’s expose it.”

“Drink first.” Micha held the canteen to his mother’s lips, then to his own. They set to work using trowels.
Go gently,
Tamar coached.
Where there is one piece there are more. See through your instrument.
But none of it she said aloud, for there was no need.

She and Micha had been on many such expeditions together, starting from the time he was five and had to trot on matchstick legs to keep up with the adults. Tireless and incapable of boredom, he would haul bucket after bucket of excavated dirt away from the dig, then sit for hours in a patch of shade, patiently sifting for small artifacts. The archaeologists treated him like a mascot, patiently submitting to interminable questioning: what is this and how was it made and who made it and what did they use it for—and always, interestingly: How do you know? The child took nothing on trust, not even Tamar, whose adoption of him had been incremental, a slow annexation of the little orphan boy taken in by the kibbutz. When he was eight, Tamar taught him to map finds on a site grid, and a few years later to excavate and photograph artifacts in situ. Micha had good hands, an eye for the land, and a boundless curiosity that Tamar thought would stand him in good stead as an archaeologist; but Micha chose instead to follow his adoptive father’s footsteps and make the army his career.

He had done well—his fond mother thought he would have done well in any field—but lately she had sensed his dissatisfaction. The army was not what it had been in her day, when it had faced the massed might of five Arab nations and prevailed, like David over Goliath. Nowadays
they
were Goliath. Their soldiers fought schoolboys and women in a hopeless struggle; if they won, they lost. But Micha had not yet spoken, and it was not her way to force a confidence.

“Try now,” Micha said, when they had dug all around the hidden object. Tamar gently wriggled it back and forth, gauging the ease of motion before slowly lifting it out of the hole and laying it on a ground cloth. Despite its encrustation, they could see at once that it was an intact earthen pitcher. While Micha dusted off the superficial dirt with a brush, Tamar used a dental pick to chip sediment from the space between the curved handle and the body of the pitcher. When it was clean they put it back in the hole and Micha photographed it.

“Assyrian?” he asked when he was done.

Tamar picked up the pitcher and closed her eyes, sighing a little in perplexity. “It’s at least that old, but it’s not the right shape. Look.” She handed it to him.

“Maccabean?”
 

“Possibly.” She marked the pitcher’s location on a grid of the test ditch, then numbered and logged the artifact.

Micha squinted at the sun, though he wore a watch. “Getting close to dinner.”
 

His mother laughed. “Ah, well, I know better than to stand between you and a meal.” She packed the little pitcher carefully in a cloth bag and stowed it in her backpack. They shouldered their equipment and set off on foot.

They were inside Nachal Arugot, a wadi whose spring-fed waters cut a swath of green bounty from deep within the Judean wilderness downward to the Dead Sea, where it ran parallel to Ein Gedi, the Spring of the Wild Goat: ancient even in biblical times, the oasis in which David hid from the wrath of King Saul.

Tamar was a surgeon by vocation, an archaeologist by avocation. Convinced that there had been significant early habitation beside the spring’s source, deep in the heart of the Judean desert, she had tried for years to persuade the archaeologists of Ben-Gurion University to mount a serious expedition. Her conviction was based not on hard evidence, for all she had amounted to little more than a few potsherds that might have come from anywhere, but rather on her instinct for the past harbors of desert dwellers.

Some people reach enlightenment through visions, some through music, some through meditation; but the lowly instruments of Tamar’s enlightenment had always been her feet, which were to her like the deep roots of the acacia that suck the sap of the earth. The stones underfoot were known to Tamar, and the hidden pools, and the generations of ibex that browsed among the prickly acacia trees. Like the worm that burrows into flesh and makes its way to the heart, so did the ancient memories of the earth wend upward to lodge in the marrow of her bones. Though little was known about the prehistoric Judean desert dwellers, Tamar saw traces of their passage in the worn bone of the ancient path that rose from and descended to the wadi floor, and heard the desiccated echo of their voices in the desert wind that preserves all it touches: for even as the desert’s light is a transparent meld of brilliant color, so is its silence a vast, mute repository of ancient sounds.

But her instinctive certainty did not convince the professionals, nor could she blame them, scientist that she also was. Funds were scarce, not to be allocated on speculation alone. When Tamar offered to carry out a preliminary probe of her own, the archaeologists agreed. It was no skin off their backs if she failed, their glory if she succeeded.

The initial soil analysis had been promising but inconclusive. Tamar waited for Micha to come home on leave to begin digging a test pit. Two days ago he had returned for a week’s furlough. Tamar was able to arrange a few days off from the hospital in Arad, where she was chief of surgery. She and Micha drove to the entrance to Nachal Arugot, then hiked four miles to the site she had chosen. On the second day of digging, they had found the pitcher.

Veteran desert rats, they did not waste breath by talking as they walked. When they reached the jeep, Micha said, “This ought to convince them to start a real dig.”

“No, it’s not nearly enough. We’ve got to get down deep enough to see the stratification; then maybe we’ll have something.”

Micha took the wheel for the short drive to Kibbutz Ein Gedi. On the way, Tamar said, “I got a letter from your grandmother today.”

“What does she say?”

“You should quit the army and get a serious job. I should quit the kibbutz and the hospital and come get rich in America.”

He laughed. “Anything besides the usual?”

She was slow to answer, and he glanced at her. “Something’s wrong,” she shouted over the rattling of the jeep.

“With her?”

“No. With your cousin, Gracie.”

Micha glanced warily at his mother, whose wide-brimmed straw hat sheltered a face as brown as parchment, with sensible blue eyes and a weathered look. “What about her?”

“She’s seeing someone Jonathan disapproves of.”

He downshifted for the long, twisting climb up to the kibbutz. “So? What is she, nineteen, twenty?”

“Eighteen.”

“Still in school?”

“Just graduated.”

“What’s it got to do with you, Dr. Mom?” Micha said in a warning voice. His mother had a tendency to pick up strays that he, as number-one stray, found threatening. On several occasions she’d brought home children who for one reason or another had been abandoned in her hospital. The kibbutzniks in charge of the children’s houses complained behind her back, but no one dared say a word to Tamar’s face.

“She’s an interesting child. Intense.”

“Uh-oh,” he groaned. He pulled into the parking lot beside the dining room and they got out of the jeep.

“She’s refused to go to college. Jonathan’s angry, and something’s wrong with Lily. I don’t know. I think this might be the time.”

“The time for what?” He raised a hand. “Stop. Go back to question one. What’s it got to do with you?”

“I liked the girl,” Tamar said. “She was unhappy, but it was a robust kind of unhappiness. I looked at her in that Stepford family and I thought, There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

“And you’ve been biding your time all these years, waiting to get your hands on her.”

She grinned and ducked her head, like a kid caught red-handed.