She kept it secret. She knew he would want her to. The way his voice still lightened with surprise when she greeted him, as though in the interval since their last meeting she might have forgotten his name or vanished; the way he scooped her toward him from the small of her back; the quiet, delighted pitch of his laugh when she teased him for his stern behavior with the volunteers; the way he seemed to be laughing not only at her words, but at laughter itself . . . all of this was to be kept between them. He didn’t have to tell her this. Even had she wished to speak of it, with what words could she have explained that she’d changed—that her body had changed—that every molecule in her was alive, aligned, iron filings to a magnet? She chopped vegetables every day and doled leben into buckets and picked spent bullet casings in the pressing heat, but everything around her had been redrawn. The world was a geography of hidden places, the spaces where they could meet unseen punctuating the endless barren stretches where she pretended not to notice his low conversation with the other officers as he entered the dining hall, or the way he raised his head silently at a jeep moving on the horizon.
She spent her days weighing the distance to the next time and place they’d be alone, and it seemed to her when she set down her knife and looked at the desert beyond the kitchen window that everything was waiting to give way—to buckle and rise transformed into something else, something yet unseen, some new way of being in the world—some new incarnation of rock and sky and cypress tree and fuel tank that would reconcile everything. There was the light shearing off the kitchen’s long window, and the fine shimmer of heat across the jeep’s windshield, and the thin cold juice of pear nectar at the canteen at dusk, and softness at the core of everything.
In Jaffa they stepped off the bus into sleepy afternoon heat. It was the first time their days off had coincided. All the way from Be’er Sheva they sat side by side, their legs brushing. He’d teased about her inability to pronounce the r’s of his name properly; she’d rebutted by imitating his pronunciation of hers—Helen Vatt—as he unwrapped the pitas and salted cucumbers he’d packed for their bus ride. Once far enough from Be’er Sheva that they no longer chanced running into someone from the base, he took her hand and held it. As they watched the landscape change from desert to rocky farmland to coastline, he sang to her under his breath—something in Hebrew, then something in Polish that made him tap a rhythm gently on his knee and then stop singing.
At the sight of him in civilian clothing—a short-sleeved cotton shirt, his arm pale where the cast had been removed, a rolled beach towel tucked beside him on the cracked vinyl seat—she felt a tenderness she masked by calling him Frankie Laine and refusing to explain herself. As she laughed at his puzzlement, words she’d been forced to memorize as a schoolgirl came to her. How beauteous mankind is.
He knew his way to the shore and led them toward it, stopping at a dim storefront restaurant near the clock tower to buy lunch, which they ate on a low rock wall overlooking an orange grove and, beyond it, the sea. On a whim she added a dark green harif sauce to her falafel—Dror, staying her hand, said, “Are you sure?”—but she’d spooned it on all the same, determined to dispel any notion he might still hold of her as an English flower. At her first bite, the harif burned so badly, her eyes watered. “Holy God,” she coughed, and Dror, laughing at first but then attentive, had plied her with water from his bottle until the burning subsided. With his thumb, carefully, he wiped the sauce from her upper lip, and when her mouth still stung from the spice he went back to the owners of the restaurant for a cup of ice.
Just off the coast, solitary Arab fishermen stood with rod and line on the Andromeda rocks, each man deposited on his own perch amid the surf to collect the day’s catch, until his friends or family retrieved him in a rowboat. Under their gaze, Dror led her down to the sliding waves.
She’d swum in an ocean before but was unprepared for the swiftness with which the warm waves lifted them, now holding them in the palm of the sea, now slipping them down, farther than she expected. She grabbed Dror’s hand, and he pulled her to a sandbar and cradled her there as the waves lifted and sank—and something wild settled in her.
After a long while he said in her ear, “I can rest with you.”
Later he lay beside her on the narrow towel, drying in the sun: a man who could have preened, had he chosen to. Spare and muscular from his training, nothing wasted, his features like something carved. She rested her head on his chest. With the pads of her fingers, she tapped his heartbeat back to him. He clasped her hand to his chest, stopping her.
The wind shifted, bending the branches of the orange trees, gusting out toward the water. Without warning a honeybee lit on the heel of Dror’s hand and crawled into the tender gap between their two palms. Instinctively she bucked back, pulling their hands apart.
The bee—a compact creature, its wings pressed back, helpless against the wind—clung to Dror’s palm, the last solid thing between it and the vast ocean.
He stood carefully, cupping it. He walked against the wind toward the orange trees, sand clinging to his legs, carrying it to safety.
He returned, studying his hand.
“It stung you?”
He nodded.
“But it’ll die!” As soon as she spoke the words she heard their absurdity. As though the world owed its creatures fairness.
He turned and jogged down to the water, entered, and stroked his way through the waves for several minutes before leaning back and letting the water carry him.
A small distance from shore, a boy in a rowboat had pulled up to one of the Andromeda rocks and was handing a basket to the fisherman, who laid down his rod to receive his lunch, clasping the back of the boy’s neck in thanks. At the water’s edge, two girls with long braids walked hand in hand. Higher up on the shore, a middle-aged man with leathery skin trudged slowly beneath the orange trees, carrying a closed vendor’s tray—presumably on his way to an afternoon’s work in some neighborhood more likely to yield customers. Catching Helen’s eye, he brightened, then beckoned, sweeping open his tray against his ample belly, and began to address her in Arabic. Stepping closer, she saw that his tray contained an assortment of modest artifacts of tarnished metal, a few of them with embedded stones of a beautiful blue, a few with empty sockets where stones had once been.
“Quite lovely,” she offered—but shaking his head at her attempts to address him in English or Hebrew, he smiled with stained teeth, and gestured enthusiastically toward the street where the restaurant was—then beyond, toward a narrow alley behind it. His cart: in his cart he had more, in his cart he surely had what she wanted.
“Gveret, bvakasha,” he said, and repeated the words: Miss, please. It seemed to be the only Hebrew he knew.
She let him lead her, repeating his two words, farther from the shore and then onto a side street—she wasn’t sure the man would have anything worth purchasing, but she thought all the same that she’d like to surprise Dror with a gift. In the man’s small wooden cart, as battered and stained as the objects he vended, there was a basket. After some fumbling, he opened its lid to reveal a jumble of larger objects: pitchers, metal cups, ornamented lockets. She spent a long while sorting his wares, the man breathing nervously behind her, before selecting a small silver-colored picture frame patterned with grapevines.