The shouting had stopped; the soldier made his way slowly between the tables and sat near the rear of the hall. But the dishwasher hadn’t finished; a moment later he leaned out over the counter, waited for enough heads to turn his way, then with a pointed gaze at the tank soldier silently tapped a finger to his temple: something’s broken in there.
Instantly the soldier sprang up, a metal pitcher like a blunt weapon in his hand, and Helen felt a slide in her gut as he ran past their table and vaulted the counter. The dishwasher swore and evaded the soldier, shutting the kitchen door against him. An enormous sound: the soldier slammed his empty pitcher into the door. Then, instead of entering the kitchen’s other door, which still hung open, he slammed the dented metal into the wall again, then again. Did he mean to frighten the dishwasher? To demolish the door, or himself? The pitcher’s metal bent, then tore jaggedly. Blood spattered—the tank soldier’s own. And then Dror was running and then he’d slid over the counter and was tackling him.
The two fell hard on the painted cement floor.
A moment later Dror stood, dusted his shirt painfully with one hand. With the barest gesture, as though not to shame the other man, Dror motioned for him to stand.
Helen expected the tank soldier to spit in Dror’s face, so contorted with rage had his expression been at the instant when Dror’s shoulders hit his waist and the two fell. But as he rose opposite Dror, his eyes cleared. He lowered his head, and raised it, and stood silent, as Dror slipped the mangled pitcher from his hands with a gesture of tender respect. Then Dror wrapped a kitchen towel around the tank soldier’s cut wrist and led him swiftly out the server’s door through the front entrance of the mess hall, toward the commander’s office.
After dinner she gathered her cleaning supplies from the shed behind the kitchen, working by the light from a lamppost—a solitary bulb blazing over its patch of dirt. Roaches big as her thumbs ran past her sandals, their black shells glinting.
When she entered the rear door of the kitchen to finish her cleanup duty, Dror was standing there alone, cradling his forearm against his chest. He looked distracted, as though he’d come to this temple of empty metal countertops and drying plastic containers to work something through, only to be stranded without a clear thought.
Her sandals slapped the painted cement floor. She stooped to lift the bucket of dark water beside the sink, dumped it, and refilled it, the cold faucet flow ringing into the metal. She looked up to see Dror watching her as though shocked to find another breathing soul in his vicinity. Or perhaps he was merely vague with pain from the arm he petted absently like a child that might be soothed into silence. She’d never seen him unfocused—she was accustomed to seeing him stride sternly toward his purpose, and she was uncertain now how to behave.
She kept her eyes on the mop, sank it into the cold water, wrung the heavy gray strands, and let their weight splay on the floor, erasing spatterings of blood. He watched with concentration, as though her actions were the key to something he needed to understand.
When she neared his feet, she stopped and looked at him squarely.
He said, with an expression of relief as though the words cleared his mind, “You have the most truthful face I’ve ever seen.”
The next night his forearm was in a cast. The soldiers were smoking and playing music at the outdoor canteen. Helen sat to the side, sipping from a can of peach nectar. Within earshot of the canteen’s record player, a half dozen soldiers moved through the steps of a folk dance on the bare ground. Lagging a beat behind the soldiers, the American volunteers gamely swept their feet through the steps. The air smelled of dust and eucalyptus and the soldiers’ cigarettes. Someone put “Erev Ba” on the record player and there was a murmur of approval. More soldiers stood up from the shadowed benches and joined the dancers, the curved line of them moving together and apart with small caressing steps. The Americans moved aside to watch. Helen saw that Dror had squeezed his eyes shut. He stayed that way for a long moment. Then he rose from the bench where he had been smoking by himself, extinguished the cigarette under his boot, and, looking at no one, took a spot at the end of the line. The dancers in their khaki uniforms stepped and swayed in the dusk and Dror moved with them, soft on his feet—pivoting silently in the dark, his forearm in the white cast held gently before him, his palm raised toward his chest in a gesture of unexpected innocence.
After, when it was dark, he sat at the end of Helen’s bench and peeled an orange with the point of a knife, working it in a circle with his good hand. A few dancers still moved in the dim light shed by the canteen. Dror passed sections to the two soldiers who sat between him and Helen; they passed a portion to her. A deep, stunning sweetness.
When she turned, Dror was walking away.
In the morning the volunteers were driven in a battered blue bus to five points of interest in the desert—this was the educational component the volunteer coordinator had made much of, sitting across a desk from Helen in London two months and a thousand years earlier. The volunteers would visit Masada, the Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, and the proposed site for a nature reserve at Hai Bar, ending with a tour of Ein Radian. Days’ worth of sightseeing, crammed into twelve hours; it turned out the kibbutz needed the bus for the rest of the week.
They’d planned an early start. But the bus driver spent an hour on some unspecified repair, his legs sticking out from beneath the belly of the bus while Dror and the man from the kibbutz and an Israel Tourist Bureau guide sat cross-legged, alternately smoking and spitting sunflower-seed shells and occasionally passing the driver a tool. Helen sat in the dust among the others, waiting. One of the American women tried to make conversation with Dror about her impressions of Israel, before lapsing into that wounded silence the Americans fell into when they suspected an Israeli thought them trivial.
The sun was high by the time they approached Masada through the rocky, lifeless desert—and the sight of the mountain through the bus windows extinguished all conversation. They filed out of the parked bus quietly, into a crushing heat.
Helen had seen higher mountains, yet none so forbidding as this plateau of pale rock. Its rough cliffs, bare against the horizon, issued an overpowering silence.
They climbed wearing shorts and hats, their sandals pale with dust. The Snake Path was narrow, and the morning grew still hotter as they hiked up the steep side of the flat-topped mountain. None of the volunteers had brought enough water for this hour of the day, and they made their way slowly, sweat drying to a salt scrim on their skin.
At the top of the mesa, the sun pressing without mercy, the guide gathered them. Far below the plateau, the brown-gray desert seemed to vibrate in the heat. The Dead Sea was a faint purple line in the distance. Dabbing his forehead with his folded cloth hat, the guide began his recitation. In the first century, he said, after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem and killed or enslaved its Jews, a group of Jewish zealots had fled to this spot to make their last stand in one of Herod’s famously impenetrable and well-provided fortresses. Here on the mountaintop were storerooms, cisterns, living chambers, bathhouses; a few had been excavated and more archaeological work was planned, the guide said—for now they would need to imagine much of what he was describing.