What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (5 page)

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When Rena opened her eyes, she found herself in the chair, the gun in her lap, the psalms at her side, and her front door already open, letting in the morning. She went outside and discovered Yehudit sitting under a tree at the western edge of the hill, rocking the baby in her arms, a small machine pistol at her feet. Yehudit turned at Rena’s step and smiled up at her friend, and Rena knew from this that the baby had improved in the night.

“Look” is all Yehudit said, pointing out past her own shack on the opposite hill and down into the valley beyond. There, appearing and disappearing, as he blended into the terrain, an Israeli soldier in fatigues made his way toward them, flashing brightest when he unfurled his map and caught the sun.

“A miracle,” Rena said.

“A miracle,” Yehudit said. Rena first picked up her friend’s
gun, then thought better about firing off a shot. She went back to the shack and returned with a flare, pulling off its cap, and then jumping and screaming and calling to the soldier. She waved that flare around, throwing it high off the edge of the hill. And he waved.

When the soldier, running double-time, reached the top off the hill, he put his hands to his knees to catch his breath, and then stood, wiping the sweat from his head with an arm.

“A miracle that you should stumble by us,” Rena said. “We have a sick baby, and a lady who needs to get to a clinic. Do you have a jeep? She cannot travel this way by foot.”

“About a kilometer in from the road. That’s as far as I could go before the rise turned too steep.”

“Take her,” Rena said, giving him a shove. “Hurry down. Who knows how much time is left?”

“I’ll take her,” the soldier said, tucking his shirt in his pants and his pants in his boots before snapping to attention. “But first,” he said, “which one of you is Rena Barak?”

Rena touched the soldier a second time, steadying herself against him. “Then I guess,” she said, as Yehudit hurried over to help support her, “that this is no miracle for me.”

Rena accepted the news of her husband’s death and said, “Thank you, brave soldier. Now find my boys and tell them to bury their father. Their mother waits at home.” And here she motioned for Yehudit to start down into the valley, so as not to slow them any further on their way.

“There will be a funeral,” the soldier said. “There is room in the jeep for all three.”

“Look around you,” she said. “Our great settlement is two houses and two families. For both mothers to leave would be to lose everything we’ve started building. Our neighbors from down the hill will be back up in an instant. And a more unforgivable sin than never having reclaimed this land would be letting
land that is Jewish fall back into Arab hands. Up here, we fight no less of a battle than the one that took my husband. Now tell me, young soldier,” Rena said, “how do we fare in this war?”

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There was no mirror in the shack for Rena to cover. The collar of her shirt was already torn. There was hardly a way to harshen her life as an appropriate sign of mourning, and so she sat on the crate that held their books, and she grieved. She spent the next two days perched in the door of their shack, waiting for any traveler who might pass and acknowledge her loss.

On the third day of mourning, Rena was comforted to see her three sons crest the hill. They came carrying supplies on their backs, and with a group of boys in tow.

The sons wept with their mother and then moved aside, so that each of the new boys could approach and welcome Rena into the mourners of Zion.

It was her oldest son, Yermiyahu, who explained things. “These are boys from our yeshiva. They’ve come to help us make a minyan, so that we can say Kaddish for our father at home.”

And it was her second son, Matityahu, who said, baby-faced and trying to appear stoic, “They have taken an oath in honor of our father and his memory.”

And the tallest of those boys, momentarily emboldened by the report of his pledge, said, “We make this our home, too. And we will not so much as step off this hill until there are ten for each one of us. Until our seven are seventy.”

Her littlest, Tzuki, just past bar mitzvah, came up and hugged her. “Look, Mother, at how our settlement grows.”

“Yes, my boy,” Rena said, slipping into that space where
every house of mourning for a moment turns happy. “And only weeks ago,” she said, tickling at the down of his upper lip, “did we go from having three men to four.” All laughed, and then all turned serious as the sons took seats around their mother on the floor. The seven who were not grieving went right to clearing rocks, pulling weeds, and planting their tents on the hill.

II: 1987

It was this day that was talked about for years to come. How sister hills became a city. And so moved were the people who heard the story, they forgot even to ask whatever had happened to the baby girl, and where Hanan was buried, and whether Rena had remarried, and if the Arab boy had ever come back about that tree. They were simply taken with the legend of this sacrifice and the
halutz
-like pioneering commitment of this woman, as well as that of the seven boys who followed her sons back to settle.

The aura of this tale was strengthened by the facts on the ground. One would find it hard to believe that in barely fourteen years, exactly half the life of her youngest, the settlement had grown to such a degree.

There were paved roads, and two schools, and a
kolel
, and a synagogue. And thanks to a Texas evangelist who had fallen in love with that place (before a greater love undid him), their settlement had been gifted with a sports center, complete with the only ice-skating rink in the West Bank as a whole.

It was a city perfectly melded with the contours of the land, circle after circle of houses running down the sides of those hills, and echoing the foregone terraces. There was a perfect symmetry of red roofs and white walls reaching down to the valley floor and edging so close to that Arab village on
the eastern side, they’d been forced to take over the village’s fields as a security buffer. This gleaming new city was made all the more beautiful by the contrast of those two green hilltops, one with an olive grove and the other bare. The two hilltops belonging to those two founding families looked nearly exactly as they had when those first families returned. All the cement and paved road, all the streetlamps and cobblestones, all the public benches and mailboxes and skinny evergreen trees, all of that came to a stop where the roads wound up to the tops of those hills and came to an end. It was—and the most pious among them couldn’t help but say it—like two green teats topping those mountains.

But for the additions of running water and electricity, Rena’s shack stayed the same. The only discernible differences to her plot of land were the two-story pole on the southern end, on which sat the siren for announcing war, and, on the northern tip, the stone obelisk that rose from the top of that giant boulder, as if it had somehow forced its way up from within. It was the town’s
andarta
. On it were engraved the names of the men of the village who had died at war.

Hanan was the first casualty of those sister hills, and how they’d all wished he’d remained the only name. By the time the intifada was tearing up the West Bank, the list on that stone was too long for a place so young. There was Rena’s oldest son, Yermiyahu, killed in Tripoli in ’83, as well as two of those pioneering seven boys who’d followed him home, only to die at his side in battle. And, just days before, on the back of a family already saddled with so much tragedy, Rena had lost her second son, her baby-faced Matityahu, now a grown man. He was nearing thirty, and finally engaged to be married that spring. Of course, Matityahu’s name had yet to be added to the other eight on that list.

There had been rock-throwing in the Arab village below,
and with a few green soldiers stuck in the wadi beyond and overwhelmed by this kind of close-quarters battle, the men of their town had run down into the fight. And somehow in this melee, Rena had lost a son. Her Mati, her warrior. It wasn’t even real warfare, only tear gas and rocks and rubber bullets. Rena still couldn’t believe it. A mighty son lost to boys throwing stones.

She was still sitting shiva. And in contrast to when she’d lost her husband and sat three days alone in her doorway like Abraham himself, it was the populace of a small city that now passed through her home. The town had stayed close enough to its roots to revere its founder with something like faith.

The visitor who’d traveled farthest to see her was her youngest, Tzuki, her last living son—though he was already his own kind of casualty to Rena. Tzuki had driven from Haifa, where he lived as a liberal, a secularist, and a gay. He shared an apartment with another boy he’d met at yeshiva. And Tzuki told his mother, with a flash in his eye, that from their balcony they looked upon the water.

To look at her son, as much a founder of their settlement as she was, Rena could not believe how people transform in the span of one life. There he sat, receiving the town with a yarmulke perched on his head, like it was the first he’d ever worn. Where tzitzit would go, a black T-shirt showed through his button-down shirt. And on his arm, exposed for all the world to see, was a tattoo of a dolphin—like the ones that mark the trash who sit and drink beer on the beach in Tel Aviv.

When he’d told her of his lifestyle, she’d sworn never to meet the boy he called his partner. And Tzuki had said that wouldn’t be a problem, as he’d sworn never again to cross the Green Line from Israel proper into the territories it held. When his last brother died, she did not think he’d come to see her. And yet, here he was at her side. For this, she put a hand to his
hand, and from there they wove fingers. To her son, she said, “It’s nice of you to do this for Mati.”

“For my brother and for you,” he said. Then he stood and joined the men in the grove who’d gathered together to hear him recite the prayer for the dead.

III: 2000

How things change, you wouldn’t believe. Another thirteen years pass and those sister hills now cap a metropolis. With the aid of a small bridge of new land, the settlement had merged with a younger community to the west and now looked, on the army maps, like a barbell. And this was exactly the nickname the battalions of Israeli soldiers sent to defend it now used. Along with the new territory came a small religious college that gave out, in handfuls, endless degrees in law. There was a mall with a food court, and a multiplex within it that showed all the American films. There was a boutique hotel and a historical museum and a clinic that could do anything short of transplanting a heart. And along both edges of the connecting roadway between old and new city, there were
dunam
after
dunam
of hydroponic tomatoes set in greenhouses. An operation watered by robot, tended by Thai worker, and whose plants somehow grew with their roots at the top and fat fruit hanging down.

A core group of idealists still remained in that expansive settlement. There were the families of those first seven boys, and the seventy that followed. There were Rav Kook stalwarts, and old-school Messianists, and religious Zionists of every stripe. But this didn’t stop the colony’s transformation into the bedroom community it had become. Behind the bougainvillea-covered balconies lived professors who drove to Be’er Sheva to
teach at the big university, and start-up types who commuted every day to the technical park in Jerusalem, as well as venture capitalists who used Ben Gurion Airport as if it were the Central Bus Station, flying to Europe for a lunch and making it back late the same night. And there was a subset among those new neighbors that the founding residents, the farmers and fighters, could hardly understand: the healthy grown men, pale and soft in the middle, who lived on Japanese and Indian and American clocks, making trades or writing code, supporting large families without ever stepping out into the light.

They came for the tax breaks. They came for the space. They came for the vistas and the fresh air, and because the tomatoes—growing backward, and also without ever seeing sun—still tasted better than anything they’d had in their fancy Orna & Ella salads back on Sheinkin Street.

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Though Aheret was a pious girl who wore a skirt to the floor and a shirt that reached to her wrists, she had a worldly allure that belied the choices she’d made. She’d studied at the girls’ school on the hill, and done her national service helping the elderly of their town. When the eldest of her younger sisters went off to board in Jerusalem, and when her father was sent by the settler movement to travel across the United States for long stretches to do outreach (his calling) and send home money (a necessity), she’d stayed in the house to help her mother with the littlest of her eight siblings and run their home, a strange maze of additions and tacked-on rooms, that, on the holidays, when all were together, still burst at the seams. These humble choices found Aheret unmarried at twenty-seven, which, in their community, left her seen as an old maid.

When Aheret stepped into the house with a laundry basket
full of clean clothes still stiff from the lines, she saw someone darting around in the back rooms of the house. She at first assumed they were being robbed, until her eyes adjusted to the inside and she made out a silhouette that fit every older woman of their town. “
Gveret
!” she called, not wholly impolitely. “Missus, can I help you? What are you doing in our house?” At that, the woman’s ears perked up, and all her nervous energy flooded out toward Aheret, with the woman, riding it like a wave, right behind.