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In the Burial Circle           
   

                    Aviva  

Aviva had driven to the cemetery on the edge of the village of Peleg hundreds of times before, but the ride never felt as eerie as it did now. She crossed the empty road that led right up to the rocky Mediterranean shore, and drove down a narrow lane, passing deserted houses and abandoned fields that stared blankly up at the sun.

Almost everyone had fled south except for the farmers who had to tend their cows, horses and chickens. Lauren and Emily were staying in the bomb shelter. They wanted Aviva to sleep there, too, but she said, “I’m not going to worry about my own safety when my son is off fighting in the war.”

After parking her car by the graveyard, Aviva stepped out into the stillness. The odd, raw silence. The sea sounded hushed, as if holding its breath, and even the dogs in the nearby kennel kept quiet. She raised her eyes to the border, not more than ten miles away. Bombs were tearing from over the other side of the low hills, slashing the sheer curtain of sky. Something cracked above her and she flinched, but it was only a crow landing in the branches of a eucalyptus tree.

“Fly away, bird,” Aviva whispered. “You can get killed around here.”

She could still remember bird-watching with her parents and her older sister in Central Park years ago. “I sure like them birds,” her father used to say and then give her mother a wink. Her mother had been a court reporter, keen on grammar, who’d married late in life and had children almost as an after-thought, something she wasn’t sure she wanted to do. Aviva’s father had been an accountant in a large envelope company. (“I’ve never been licked,”he always said.) Her parents had led a good life in Forest Hills and if they hadn’t spoken about relatives who’d been decimated by Hitler, and if Aviva hadn’t stayed serious and solemn, then she might have walked down another path in life and the people she loved—of course, they would have been different people—would have been safe.

But it was too late for that kind of thinking now.

She was a widow. She had lost her eldest son, Benny, in a terrorist attack. (He’d been out on patrol with his Special Forces dog, Prince, when some suicide bomber had blown himself up, taking Benny and Prince along with him.) And now Aviva had come to the graveyard to meet Emily and Lauren and the other members of the burial circle to perform a tahara, a final burial rite, for a young woman killed in the war.

A wave of unstoppable grief and anger rose inside her and she turned into the gate, making her way through the cemetery, until she reached Benny’s resting place, right next to her husband, Rafi. At the top of their headstones were pebbles and stones, souvenirs that visitors left behind, reminders of the circular nature of life or, Aviva suspected, its stony indifference. Her heart thundered in her ears, her throat was parched, her eyes blurred in the heat. Her black cotton shirt and patchwork skirt—faded clothes that she kept in the back of her closet and wore only when she had to do a tahara—clung to her skin. She pulled her coppery brown hair from her face, lifted her sunglasses to wipe her eyes, and commanded herself not to cry. Not now. She had to hold herself back until the tahara was over. Until she saw the grieving family and said—what? The dangling leaves of the eucalyptus trees fluttered in the warm breeze, and in the distance, the sea shouldered on. Coming and going, without any words of consolation. Like the Kaddish prayer. Tooshbhata v’nehamata. Beyond any consolation.Damiran b’alma. That can be uttered in this world. V’eemroo amen. And let us say, Amen.

Then there was a loud explosion, followed immediately by the siren. She needed to find some kind of shelter. She didn’t care about herself but she still had her other sons, Yoni and Raz, to think about. She had to spare them any more grief. At least that.

She hurried to the burial house. The door was locked and she sat on the ground, leaning against the wall under the awning, clasping her arms around her knees. The burial house trembled. It felt as if the whole earth was trembling.

After a time, it grew quiet again but Aviva stayed right where she was until she saw a beige pick-up truck skid to a stop on the other side of the cemetery wall. Charlie Gilbert, the village mayor, jumped out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door. He was a heavy-shouldered man with curly brown hair and a fashionable goatee. Years ago, he’d been shipped off to Israel after being expelled from a posh boarding school in England and he’d never gone back. Now he looked unshaven and exhausted, as he plodded through the gate. Behind him came Lauren in her nurse’s shirt one shade paler than her pale, angular face, and then Emily, her full cheeks red and soaked with tears.

Charlie unlocked the door to the burial house and disappeared inside.

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Lauren said. “I just can’t believe it. One minute she’s here and the next minute…”

“Maybe God needed her right away,” Emily whispered, tears filling her amber eyes. “That’s what my father used to say. Maybe—”

“If God is needy,” Lauren cut in, “then who needs God?”

Emily said nothing and glanced over her shoulder at the border hills, the prickly bushes blazing in the heat.

“It’s better not to look.” Aviva followed her gaze. “And if you see it coming, it’s already too late.”

Charlie came out of the burial house and patted down the pockets of his pants, and then the front pocket of his T-shirt until he found a lighter and a pack of Camels. “I don’t know what the bloody hell the Army is doing there.” He lit a cigarette and blew out a smudge of gray smoke which washed into the hazy air. “I’m going to wait by my truck. I’m sure the ambulance driver is going to drop her off and do a fast U-turn back to the hospital.”

Aviva stood there, reluctant to go inside. She had been a member of Peleg’s burial circle, the hevra kadisha, for years. She had never shied away from taking care of a dead woman on the very last stop before her final journey. It was a solemn, ancient, sacred ritual. Aviva and the other women washed the dead, dressed them in traditional burial shrouds, and recited the prayers. Aviva knew the women, and more often than not, they were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. Their lives unfurled, one day after the other, like beads on a chain, behind them. But this time, she had to do a tahara for someone young enough to be her child.

“I guess we better go in.” Aviva entered the burial house, hushed like a tomb. Prayer books balanced in a lopsided stack on a chair, a hairbrush on the narrow shelf above the sink. Rectangles of dull light spilled in through the glass slits of the windows, falling on a long metal table and an empty coffin.

Her heart plunged. She whirled around, stepping toward the cabinet against the back wall, pulling out burial shrouds rolled tightly in plain paper, cradling them close to her chest.

Faint thuds rolled through the room, rattling the windows.

“Let me do it.” Emily reached for the package of shrouds. She peeled open the thin brown paper, uncurling the colorless linen shirt, the pants, the sashes and the head covering, and laid them gingerly, tenderly, in a line over the edge of the coffin.

“I can’t take this anymore.” Lauren’s gray eyes flashed. “I’m going outside.”

She opened the door and sunlight flooded the room, hot and white and blinding.

Aviva looked down into the coffin. “If only I’d taken her with me…” Aviva mumbled, and now she was weeping, and she wouldn’t be able to stop until there were no more tears left on the planet.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Emily wrapped her soft, cushiony arms around Aviva tightly, as if to break a fall. “It wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault. Please don’t cry, Aviva. Please don’t. Because when you cry, then I know it really is the end of the world.”

 

Chapter 1
August 28, 2000
 

   Lauren

The rusty Volvo swerved into a wide left turn, jolting Lauren awake. The car sputtered down a long road through cornfields and for an instant, looking at the tall stalks and the pale tassels, Lauren forgot where she was. Cornfields were cornfields everywhere and in her jet-lagged state, she was reassured. But then the cornfields ran out.

“What is that growing over there?” Lauren asked, her stomach clenched in knots.

“Cotton,” David said, sitting in the passenger seat next to his father, Yossi, who was driving. Lauren couldn’t see David’s almond-shaped brown eyes behind his sunglasses but when he turned around, she knew they were on her full throttle, the way they always were when he looked her way. “For my new bride, I’ve ordered you a field of white cotton balls.”

“I guess I’ve given up snowballs for cotton balls.” Lauren stared into the sky, streaked with clouds that reminded her of the stretch marks on her belly. In her head, she began making a list of the things she sensed she’d miss in Boston. Hot summer afternoons with thunderstorms that rolled in from Canada and brought cooling rain. The red and yellow leaves of fall: because no place on earth did autumn better than New England. And winter, with its snow circling her ankles and its glacial cold. Every square inch of her clothes was now sticking to every square inch of her body. Lauren was aware of all the inches.

“Is the baby kicking?” David asked. “Is it too warm for you in here?”

“No, everyone finds one-hundred-degree weather and high humidity refreshing,” Lauren said and immediately regretted her sarcasm. She had promised herself to give it a chance.

David turned the air conditioning knob higher and said something in Hebrew to Yossi.

“I’ll just open the window.” Lauren pushed on the window lever but that only caused hot air to rush in and prick her face.

“You see those watermelons?” David asked. “We’ll go out one morning and I’ll pick you the sweetest watermelon you’ve ever tasted.”

The watermelons lay face down in the dirt, defeated. Behind them was a line of scraggly cypress trees. They bumped over railroad tracks, passed a tiny wooden train platform.

“That looks like it belongs on ‘Petticoat Junction’,” Lauren said.

“Like what?” David asked.

“Just a silly old television show I used to watch.”

“When I was growing up, we only had two TV channels.”

“And now ‘E.R.’ we get to you.’” Lauren’s new father-in-law spoke English which was so garbled it almost sounded as though he were speaking Romanian, his mother tongue. Yossi spoke seven languages but Lauren thought you’d be hard-pressed to understand him in any of them. In the rearview mirror, Yossi caught her eye and asked, “The hospital in Boston big?”

“Beth Israel is huge.” Lauren adored David but it was rapidly sinking in that she’d just been pulled away from her job in the maternity ward, her family, and the places she loved best.

“Then how you meet if you was nurse in one place and David was—”

“—I saw David at the elevator and he started talking to me.”

“You started talking to me.”

Lauren closed her eyes. “Every bride gets nervous on her wedding day,” her mother had said as they walked through Brookline two weeks ago.

“But not every bride has to move halfway around the world! Mom, do you think I’m making a mistake?” Lauren glanced sideways at her mother; aware, with both relief and chagrin, that her face was a carbon copy of her mother’s, only 30 years younger. The same high cheekbones, the same long, aristocratic nose, the same gray eyes.

“If you want to call it off, call it off.” Her mother held herself very still even while walking, her posture so straight that it seemed as if she was balancing an invisible dictionary on her head. “I don’t want to sway you, persuade you, convince you, talk you in or out of—”

“I know, it’s my decision—”

“But the wedding is tomorrow so now is your last chance to—”

“—Call off my wedding.”

But Lauren knew that the only child of Dr. Milton and Ethel Uhlmann did not call off weddings. For even as her mother was giving Lauren a way out, she knew her mother didn’t believe she would voluntarily become a single mom and raise a baby on her own. Lauren had had tennis lessons, ski lessons, ballet lessons. She had not been raised to call off a wedding to a perfectly acceptable Jewish doctor the day before the ceremony. Instead, she got married.

“You’re a brave young lady,” Yossi said now. “My wife, too, God bless her soul. She moved to Israel from India. Same thing.” His watery eyes held Lauren’s in the rearview mirror. “You meet my son before one year and you soon have baby in Israel.”

“I still can’t believe it, either.” The knots in her stomach cinched tighter. She reminded herself, keep breathing. She reminded herself that moving here was going to be an exotic adventure, and she loved travelling. She’d already been to Israel once before with her parents on a whirlwind trip which included Italy and Greece, and she especially liked the carefree spirit and high energy of Tel Aviv, which was less than two hours away.

“That’s the hothouse I was telling you about.” David pointed out the window. The ring on his finger glinted, reminding Lauren of what she’d done. “The guy sold the most beautiful roses, but after he died his wife couldn’t keep up the business.”

Lauren remembered hearing David’s stories but they had sounded like fairy tales about some faraway village named Peleg. She never thought she’d move here and his stories would come alive all around her.

“You are brave,” Yossi told her again.

His words double-knotted the knots in Lauren’s stomach in every place where the baby was not. The baby slept soundly, not yet hanging upside down but almost. Through the window Lauren saw an old stone tower.

“That’s where we had to guard day and night,” Yossi said.

“Because we had to protect ourselves from attacks,” David explained.

 “A sniper killed a woman right there.” Yossi gestured toward a small house with a red-tiled roof. “He shot her when she was washing the dishes.”

“Oh, just another chapter in Peleg’s fairy tale book,” Lauren said.

“That was a long time ago, sweetie,” David told her. “We don’t have to worry now. Look, there’s the post office, the park where the village holds holiday celebrations, the gan—the day care center—and the synagogue.”

The synagogue looked more like an armory: a small square building made of stone, a few shuttered windows, a bronze Jewish star welded to the wall like a crucifix.

“This is replica of a synagogue in Germany,” Yossi said. “Only this one is standing.”

The founders of Peleg had been horse traders and farmers in Germany’s Black Forest, David told her again. They’d managed to get out of Nazi Germany in 1937, before it was too late, and bought these empty, sandy fields from a Turkish landowner, building up Peleg on the rock-strewn Mediterranean shore.

Lauren stared at a palm tree shooting into the sky. “What happened to that tree’s fronds?”

“The sniper missed,” David said.

“Very funny.” Lauren laughed—David could always get her to do that—which was one of the things that had made Lauren fall in love with him in the first place.  They passed some houses and a chicken coop at the end of a dirt lane scattered with straw, its wire fence stretching across a mass of feathery white.

“Here’s a chicken farm,” David said. “We get farm-fresh eggs whenever we want. And the family over there has horses. We can take them out and go riding. I know you like that.”

“I think the horse will appreciate it more after I give birth and weigh thirty pounds less.”

“And smell that? It’s eau de manure. The cows! And look! Jacob and Esther Troyerman’s place. They run a kennel for dogs and cats.”

“It’s amazing to me how you know everyone,” Lauren said.

“No,” said Yossi. “We now have more than 800 people in the village.”

“Wow, a real population explosion.”

 “We have still more cows and chickens,” Yossi told her. “That’s the Garden of Eden Hotel. And over there is the cemetery.”

The gravestones flashed in the sun, and a scaly lizard sat on a volcanic boulder. Well, Lauren told herself, she always wanted to have a pet iguana but her mother wouldn’t let her.

“That’s our grocery store,” David said, as the car rolled past a plain building. And then the road stopped, spilling into an unpaved parking lot. Yossi bumped over the dirt, and turned off the engine. In front of them lay the silvery blue sea.

David jumped out of the car and Lauren watched his robust torso move swiftly around the vehicle.

“Lauren.” He opened her door. “‘The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things.’” She beamed because he’d managed to memorize some of her favorite childhood poem. “…Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings…”

“And why the sea is boiling hot,” Lauren supplied. “And whether Israeli pigs have wings.”

He took her hand and held it tightly as she stepped into the scorching heat. With her other hand, she plucked her maternity pants from off the backs of her sticky thighs, aware there was no lady-like way to go about it.

They walked to the edge of the shore. Lauren lifted her long chestnut brown hair from off her sweaty neck and shielded her face from the hot sun. “All I need is a few days here and I’m going to be one burnt Mama marshmallow.”

“It will get a little cooler once the sun goes down,” David said. “And in the morning, the sea is flat like a turquoise blue carpet. I just love this Mediterranean smell.”

Lauren nodded and took another deep breath, trying to ignore her own discomfort and appreciate the scenery. She knew how hard David was trying to make her feel at home.

“You’ll be walking our baby to the beach in a few months,” he encouraged. “You’ll make new friends—”

“—They won’t be as close as Emily—”

“Not right away,” David said. “But you’ll really like Aviva. She’s excited that you’re a nurse and you might join the burial circle.”

“Ugh, I thought I was done with cadavers in nursing school.”

“But these are women from the village,” Yossi interjected. “You’ll see.”

Lauren turned to David’s father, suddenly aware that his thin shadow had been next to her the whole time. She watched as he tugged a white handkerchief out of his back pocket and lifted his sunglasses to pat his face. He stood there, his head tilted. Beads of perspiration leaked out from the corners of his eyes. He gazed at Lauren, his face a sad tapestry woven with wrinkles of history, of time. She knew he wanted to reassure her and she felt grateful for his soft, paternal ways, so different from her father’s intellectual, challenging approach. Before she could even respond, Yossi told her, “I leave you two alone,” and headed back toward the car.

“My father’s a member of the men’s burial circle,” David said. “Maybe I’ll help him with that, too. And he wants you to be happy here, almost as much as I do. Don’t you think this is beautiful?”

Lauren looked at the blurred bluish line of the horizon which seemed to keep the sky from falling into the sea. Waves of heat barreled toward her. “It is beautiful but right now all I’m thinking is that my back hurts from the plane, you could cook a dozen eggs on my head, and I could really use a bathroom.”

“We’ll get you right home.”

“Home?” Lauren fought back tears of sadness mixed with apprehension. It hit her hard: she truly was far away from home. She had become pregnant by accident, then David had asked her to marry him, and now this was where she was going to live.

“You’re going to like it here, I know you will.” David placed his hand under her chin. He lifted her head, looked into her eyes. “Ahnee ohev otach.”  I love you.

Lauren squinted up at him. “Ahnee gam ohevet otcha,” she replied in the Hebrew she’d been studying hard. But her “I love you, too,” sounded like one of Yossi’s mixed-up sentences, garbled and meaningless. She placed her palms under her belly, its weight pressing her down to this very spot. “I’m just not so sure I should have started talking to you at that elevator.” Lauren smiled halfway. “Maybe I should have listened to my mother. She always said, whenever you get the chance, get some exercise and take the stairs.”

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