Bashert Page 15

  “Too late. You’re too late. But for calling me, for that I am grateful. May our sons know more peace than we have. Salaam.”

  “Salaam.”

  He closed the phone, pulled himself erect, and shuffled, slowly and painfully, out of the warehouse. The long, hard drive ahead would now be doubly difficult, but he knew what needed to be done, and he would have to arrive in Frankfurt with plenty of time.

  Part Three: Shira

  30

  There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul. – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  1986 — Her name was Sharon. She was a distant cousin of Lev’s visiting Israel before returning to finish graduate school in England. Her father, Saul Markham, describing her as a bit of a wild pony, had asked Avram Novikov to look after her. He, in turn, had asked his son Lev to take her on one last outing before her flight back to London. Not wanting to be stuck alone trying to make conversation with some college kid, Lev invited Migdal along.

  Migdal and Lev had served in the army together but lost touch while Lev traveled abroad for a few years. When he returned to Israel and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps in intelligence work, there was Migdal. Under Avram’s tutelage they had risen together through the ranks of Mossad and become friends.

  They picked Sharon up at her hotel, a slightly rundown place that appealed to young people who had grown too old or too well-heeled for the youth hostels but couldn’t quite afford a really decent hotel. Sharon was petite, with curly, jet-black hair, and she fairly bounced out to meet them. She gave Lev a big hug, as if they had known each other since childhood.

  “That’s the American style Mum taught me,” she said. “My father preferred us to be less demonstrative.” She turned to Migdal, took his hand lightly, then kissed him on each cheek, continental style. She stepped back, looked him in the eye for a few seconds, and then hugged him, too. “I think Mum had the right idea, don’t you?

  “So, will this do for today?” she asked, stepping back and turning slowly. She was wearing jeans and a peasant blouse. “I wasn’t sure what was in the offing, but I for one hope it’s outside. I head back for jolly old you-know-where on Sunday, and this may be my last chance to see the sun in a fortnight.”

  “Well, then, little cousin,” Lev said to her, “what do you want to do? Where do you want to go?”

  “It’s your country. What would you want to be doing on an afternoon like this?”

  “Lying on the sand, swimming, doing nothing,” he answered.

  “Splendid! So, then, let’s do it. I’ve heard of a beach north of here that’s supposed to be beautiful. Ga’ash. I think that is what it’s called.”

  Lev and Migdal looked at each other, choking back sniggers.

  “What? Did I mispronounce it or something? Hebrew school was a long time ago, and I am still getting used to Israeli Hebrew, but certainly my accent can’t be all that bad.”

  “No, well…” Lev, clearly uncomfortable, studied his feet.

  Migdal jumped in to rescue him. “You see, it’s a nude beach. It’s way back from the road and shielded from view by these cliffs. It’s popular with, you know, that sort of crowd. I don’t think you want to go there.”

  “Oh, but I do. That’s perfect. They do have naturist beaches in England, but I’ve never been to one. Who wants to skinny-dip in ice water and then stand around shivering on a rocky shore under an overcast sky? Ga’ash sounds like it would be great fun on such a beautiful day. And I do so like getting off the well-trodden tourist path.”

  Migdal shook his head. “I really don’t think so. I don’t want to go myself. If you two want to, go ahead. I should duck into the office anyway.”

  “Father told you explicitly not to show your face at headquarters today. Come on, what’s the harm. You’re not embarrassed, are you? I’ve never known you to be shy about much of anything.”

  “I just don’t want to. I have my reasons. I don’t like the place.”

  “Come on, I don’t believe you’ve ever been there. How do you know you won’t like it? We can stay the afternoon and watch the sun set over the sea.”

  “I’ve been there. Once. That was enough.”

  Sharon grabbed his arm and started pulling him toward the car. “You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. Just tag along.” She smiled at him with such guileless enthusiasm that it was impossible to resist.

  They stopped on the way and bought sandwiches, which Lev put in a wicker basket that he produced from the trunk. “No, I didn’t plan this,” he said. “I just never clean out the car. It’s left from a picnic last month.”

  Despite his claim that he knew where he was going, Lev managed to go past the turn off from Highway 2. What should have been a twenty-minute drive turned into over an hour of wrong turns and conversations that meandered from topic to topic. By the time Lev finally found the right turnoff near Ga’ash Lighting, the three of them were talking like old friends.

  They drove a short way down a dirt track to where a cluster of cars were parked and from there followed a footpath to the beach. Although they were hardly alone, the narrow beach stretched so far that it seemed uncrowded.

  Sharon stripped and ran into the waves before either of the men could get their pants down. They followed her in and swam for a few minutes, but then returned to the pile of clothes and sat down to bask in the sun.

  “So, what is this thing you have about Ga’ash?” asked Lev. “How could you not like it here? What happened here?”

  Migdal smiled and stared out to sea. “It’s Mossad business.”

  “Then you can tell me. Remember, your office is just down the hall from mine. We work on the same cases.”

  “No,” Migdal said, pursing his lips. “This would be on a need-to-know basis. Besides, it happened a long time ago.”

  “Now you do have my attention. You can tell me. What is it?”

  “No. I can’t. It’s about Dimona. You understand. You know I can’t say more.”

  “Speaking of Dimona, I want you to start working with me on the Vanunu operation.” He spoke in a near whisper. “How’s your Italian?”

  “It isn’t. German, English, several Arabic dialects. And, of course, Hebrew. That’s it.”

  “Well, maybe we can use you in London, then. We’ll talk tomorrow. But remember, we didn’t have this conversation today. Okay?”

  “Don’t worry, little brother, I won’t tell Abba.” He winked. The elder Novikov was not only above them at Mossad but had become Abba, father, to Migdal ever since he and Lev had returned from military service.

  Lev, changing the subject, nodded toward where Sharon was splashing in the waves. “What do you think of my cousin?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. She seems like a nice enough kid.” His eyes followed her as she ran back and forth.

  “You like her.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s just a college girl. She was probably just born about the time I came to Israel.”

  “You do. You do like her, I can tell. You say no, but your anatomy says yes.” He nodded toward Migdal’s crotch.

  “Reflex, that’s all. She has a nice body. I may be of a certain age but I’m not so old that I can’t appreciate a young woman with a firm body. From a distance, anyway.”

  “Uh huh,” Lev said, looking down at Migdal again. “I see your scar has healed nicely. Why in hell did you do it?”

  “To convert, why else. I wanted to be a Jewish citizen of a Jewish country, not an unclean heathen who had wrangled some kind of deal.”

  “I would never do that.” He shuddered. “I would not convert. I would not slice off part of my johnson.”

  Migdal laughed. “Where did you get that old slang? And what are you talking about? You’re circumcised. What do you mean you’d never do it?”

  Lev was busy watching a young woman toweling off. “A gingy. Mmm. Very nice. There is something special about red hair. And you can tell h
ers didn’t come from a package.” He turned back to Migdal. ”But, we were talking about ritual mutilation, weren’t we. Look, I don’t remember my bris. Thank God. But I had no choice. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t do it. It’s an atavism. I’m not observant and neither is my father. I don’t know anyone in our family, outside of my aunt Sadie, who even believes in God. Yet we, we secular Jews, keep doing this to our sons. Covenant of the flesh.” He shook his head. “Strange.”

  “You know damn well it’s required for an Orthodox conversion, and that’s the only kind that really counts. Look, it’s just part of the initiation rites for entry into the club. That’s all. In the final analysis, I don’t believe any more than you do, and you know damn well I’m not a practicing Jew. But I am a Jew. I have the paper to prove it. And because I served in the IDF, I am no longer an American. What an irony. I have a real Israeli passport and a fake American one, courtesy of the Institute. One club boots me out and another takes me in.”

  “Well, then, welcome to our club.” He looked down at Migdal once more and shook his head. “God, I bet the first erection hurts like hell.” He turned left and right, looking for something. “Bugger all, I left the food in the car. You hungry? Me, too. Now I have to get dressed again and trudge all the way up and back.” He reached for his pants, pulled them on, and headed back toward the path.

  With a breeze picking up, Migdal moved himself up the beach to a more sheltered position. Suddenly Sharon came scampering up from the water and planted herself in front of him, legs apart and arms thrown to the sky. “This is awesome, simply the greatest. I do love feeling this way. Free. Turned on.”

  With the sun directly behind her, she was outlined in brilliant, sparkling beads of water. Her pubic hair, matted and dripping with saltwater, was right at eyelevel. It was hard for Migdal to look any place else. He tipped his head back and shaded his eyes with his hand to look up and see her grinning down at him. Her eyes were on his growing erection.

  “Well, it would be a shame to waste that, wouldn’t it now,” she said. Before he could say anything, she straddled him and lowered herself into his lap, then wrapped her legs around behind him. She reached down and expertly guided him into her.

  Suddenly self-conscious, Migdal looked around, but there was no one in sight. They were nearly at the cliffs, and a slight outcropping hid them from the view of the others farther down the beach. She must have sensed his tension, because she whispered, “It’s all right, we’re alone. And, no, I have never done anything like this before. But, don’t worry, I’m on the pill.”

  They made love like that, that first time, sitting on the sand, in the open, with a slow gentle rhythm that matched the waves coming on shore. In the end, for the longest time, she just held onto him, saying nothing, not moving. Then suddenly she pulled herself off and stood, reaching down to take his hand. “Let’s swim,” she said, and tugged him toward the waves.

  They swam and dived and floated and splashed until the sun was just kissing the water and Lev finally returned from the car. They ran back down the beach toward him.

  “I see you two have been having fun,” he said, setting the basket on the sand.

  “We have,” she said, pushing tight ringlets of wet hair back from her face and sending a big grin Migdal’s way.

  “So it seems. I did come back earlier, but you must have been off somewhere, so I went back and listened to the radio. I just hope the battery is not too drained to start the car.” He scowled at Migdal. Migdal scowled back as he opened the basket and pulled out a wrapped sandwich.

  They ate their sandwiches in silence, lost in reverie, transfixed by the purples and pinks and oranges strewn across the slowly darkening sky.

  Sharon finished, wiped the crumbs from her stomach, and stood again. She pulled Migdal up after her. “Let’s go for a walk down the beach,” she said. “Is that okay, cousin?” Lev, his mouth still full, grunted and nodded.

  As they strolled down the long stretch of sand, she started telling Migdal about her life—about school and her studies in psychology, about her friends in Sheffield, and, lastly, about her secret passion, her art. She talked quickly, as if in a hurry to get it all in before dark, before they had to leave.

  On the way back up the beach, just before they reached Lev and the picnic basket, Migdal stopped and turned to her. “Look, I know where you are going with this, but …” He put his fist to his mouth. “Oh, boy, this is awkward. Look, it was … it was beautiful, but face it, this is not going to go anywhere. I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “No you’re not,” she protested. “You don’t know, but my father is much older than my mother. He was forty when I was born in 1963, already old. So, just how old are you, oh ancient one?”

  “Forty,” He said. She didn’t respond. “See. Like I said, I’m too old. And you’re too young. In a few days you’ll be back in England. You’ll tell all your friends about Ga’ash and how beautiful it was, but leaving out some of the details. That’s it.”

  “That’s it? Okay.” She abruptly turned and started up the path to the car. On the way back to the outskirts of Tel Aviv she talked only with Lev. Migdal felt terrible, but he didn’t know what to say and realized that whatever he said, it would probably only make things worse.

  After they dropped her off at her hotel, Lev drove in silence for several minutes, then finally spoke up. “You broke her heart, you middle-aged cad.”

  “Look, she initiated it. I didn’t take advantage of her.”

  “I didn’t say you did. I said you broke her heart. This is not what it may look like to you. You think it was a summer fling, an afternoon of last-minute acting out by a girl about to return home. But that girl, that young woman, is in love with you.”

  31

  The little stone house on the steeply winding street in Sheffield was too cold. It had always been too cold for Sharon, but now, after her summer in Israel, its thick walls seemed to suck the heat from her, as if pulling the very life force from deep within her. Her yellow woolen jumper was not enough against the chill, and she hugged her arms tightly around herself as she made her way down the narrow stairs from her room on the third floor. The lower she descended, the deeper the chill, until finally she opened the door into the sitting room with its cheery but barely effective fireplace.

  Her father looked up from his reading. “Aren’t you supposed to start classes this week? Mustn’t dawdle.”

  “No. Classes began last week, but I have withdrawn from university. Now I am awaiting word about going to America. Has the post arrived?”

  “Surely you cannot be serious,” her father said, looking over the top of his glasses. “You simply cannot withdraw now. You have but this one last year and then your clinical internship and then you start practicing, and …”

  “And then I crawl slowly, ever so slowly, into the coffin of my chosen profession—chosen, I must add, not by me but for me, not by me but by my teachers and parents and mentors. There I will molder until someday they nail the lid down and give me a right and proper burial. No Father, I am going to America.”

  “Always the thespian, eh? And what, may I ask, is in America? Did you meet someone in Israel? Is that what this is all about?” He turned his head a precise few degrees to the left toward his wife sitting quietly in the identical wingback chair next to his. They could have been mistaken for brother and sister, they had grown to look so much alike, with the same slate-gray eyes, the same wavy white hair. “Or is this your influence, Rachel?” he continued. “You Americans are always so impulsive, always taking off in some new direction on little more than a whim or a change in the wind.”

  “We Americans,” she said quietly without looking up, “are no such thing and do no such things. I will remind you ever so gently that it was my handsome Brit who proposed to me mere hours after we met and that this particular American has remained steadfastly at his side for nearly thirty years now.”

  “That is not the point at all, Rachel. Our daughter i
s talking about throwing away a career, discarding the investment of years to go … to go to America.” He said the last word as if it were an epithet.

  “Father,” she said, just that word. He was always Father to her, never Dad or Daddy.

  He looked at her with his head still turned slightly aside. “It is the art thing, isn’t it,” he announced, a softness mingling with the disappointment in his voice. “You want to be a sculptress. Still. How is that possible? With such a late start, it is hardly reasonable. I had thought you finally had your head about you. Well then, how do you propose to go about it? Knowing you, you have a plan. Although you do your planning without great foresight. Tell me now, Sharon, what precisely that plan would be.”

  “Shira. Please call me Shira, Father. It is my name, after all. And yes, I have a plan. I have contacted a sculptor in America who has offered to apprentice me. I want to make beautiful things, Father. That’s all I have ever wanted to do. I have played the good girl and gone to school and earned the marks to make you proud, but now I am a grown woman. I don’t have to earn marks or pass exams for you anymore. It is time I made my own life, and this is the life I choose—to bring beauty into the world.”

  “And so, then, when in all your travels abroad and your apprenticeships and your changing careers willy-nilly do you think you shall find the time to bring the beauty of a grandchild into the world? Do you think I shall live forever? Do you think you shall be an attractive young woman forever. I want to live to kiss my first grandchild.”

  Aloud she said, “Father, please. Bashert iz bashert.” To herself, Shira thought that if he had been so keen to have grandchildren, perhaps he should not have had a gay son as his firstborn.

  Of course, she loved her older brother dearly, and had always accepted his oddities, even when, as children, he would borrow dresses from her to wear during the meetings they held in their secret clubhouse behind the garden shed. She would always remember the look of horror and fury in her mother’s face when they were discovered one afternoon. “I won’t tell your father,” her mother said, once she recovered her voice. “It would kill him. But don’t let me ever catch you wearing a dress again in this house. Or in this garden. I will kill you, Barry Markham, if you do. I will.” Barry, of course, knew she would do no such thing. His mother adored him, and showered him with unquenchable love. Still, Barry promised her and kept his end of the bargain, making certain that he was over the line into the thicket of the neighbor’s garden whenever again he slipped on a purloined pair of panties or tied a ribbon in his hair. As an adult, he never cross-dressed, at least as far as Shira knew, but there was never any doubt when he was with any of his many boyfriends who took which part in the relationship. The whole family also wondered when he might tire of moving from one all-consuming affair to another to settle down with one partner.