The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International) Read online

  The Family Orchard

  A NOVEL BY

  Nomi Eve

  Vintage International

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

  NEW YORK

  Contents

  TITLE

  FRONTISPIECE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  Part One

  Chapter 1 ESTHER AND YOCHANAN

  Chapter 2 GOLDA AND ELIEZER

  Chapter 3 AVRA THE THIEF AND SHIMON’S LOVE AND GRIEF

  Part Two

  Chapter 4 THE WATER DANCE

  Chapter 5 ZOHAR

  Chapter 6 ZOHAR AND MOSHE OR CHASIA / MARY

  Chapter 7 MIRIAM

  Part Three

  Chapter 8 ZOHAR AND MIRIAM

  Chapter 9 THE DOUBLE TREE

  Chapter 10 TO CONJURE THE TWIN

  Chapter 11 UNDER BENT BOUGHS

  Chapter 12 THE STONES

  Part Four

  Chapter 13 ELIEZER, BY THE MANGO TREE

  Chapter 14 “A HEAT WAVE, LIVING FRUIT”

  Chapter 15 THE CODE OF VILLAGE BOYHOOD

  Chapter 16 IN THE GOLEM’S GARDEN

  Part Five

  Chapter 17 REBECCA

  Chapter 18 REBECCA AND ELIEZER

  Chapter 19 ROUGH ENCLOSURE

  Chapter 20 THE PHOTOGRAPH

  Part Six

  Chapter 21 NOMI AND JEREMY

  EPILOGUE

  MANUAL OF ORCHARD TERMS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  To my mother, Rita, who gave me the space in which to create art

  To my father, Yehoshua, who gave me the material with which to fill it

  To my grandmother, Rivka, who gave me her stories and her blessings

  To my cousins, Burt and Joan, beloved friends, first readers

  And to my husband, Aleister Jeremy, prince of all my pages, with whom I love to dance

  This is a work of fiction. References to actual geographical terrain and historical records are intended to give the fiction a setting in historical reality. Names, characters, places, and incidents are entirely the products of the author’s imagination.

  The word legend comes from the Latin “legere,” which means “to read.” The word fiction comes from the Latin “fingere,” which means “to form.” From fingere we also get the word fingers. We form things with our fingers. The word history comes from the Greek “istor,” which means “to learn” or “to know.” I believe in original etymology. I believe that fiction is formed truth. I believe that history is a way of knowing all of this. I believe that legend is how we read between the lines.

  JEWISH FAMILY ON MOUNT ZION

  PROLOGUE

  I TELL:

  Jeremy, if I had to choose a beginning, I would tell you that there is no beginning and then I would tell you that there are many ends. But you would not be satisfied with this. So I would go back to work, and then I would return to you and tell you that the beginning is in the trees. All of them. In the double tree, half blood orange, half mandarin dancy. In Al Jud, charted only on the map of myth, anchored in the corpse of the Jewish spy. In the tool tree, mostly wood, but a good bit metal. Citrus graft, corpse root, abandoned tools that rust through to the rings. Yes, if I had to choose a beginning, I would tell you that these trees are where the story starts. At least that is where it starts for me.

  But then maybe you would look at me with doubt. You, who know the parameters of this story. Maybe you would put your arms around me and say, softly, “Is that all, my love?” And then I would look up at you and say, “No, that is not all, my love.” And later that night I would tell you that the beginning is in my father’s trees—his family forest, our own old and ongoing groves. Brother branches, citrus graft, corpse root, abandoned tools that rust through to the rings. Yes, that is all. If I had to choose a beginning, I would tell you about all of these trees.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  ESTHER AND YOCHANAN

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Rabbi Yochanan Schine, a student of the famous Chatam Sofer, was engaged to Esther Sophie Goldner Herschell, the granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire. Esther and Yochanan were my great-great-grandparents. They immigrated to Palestine and married in 1837 in Jerusalem.

  I WRITE:

  Esther was pious but in a peripheral way. She knew the mitzvot, she knew to make the Sabbath holy, but she felt that there was no real harm in putting her own creative interpretation on the old rules because certainly creativity was an essential and blessed quality of Man and it would be a sin not to use it.

  At first she did not like Jerusalem; she was from a long line of people who lacked sense of direction. The stony city, with all of its obscurant walls, twists and turns seemed to her a nasty place without any recognizable plan.

  Three months and two days after the young couple arrived, she ventured out alone for the first time. Quickly lost, but not frightened, Esther decided she would just wander. She knew that if she wanted to she could ask someone to show her the way back to their house, which was a half-grand, half-decrepit habitation on Rav Pinchas Street. It was located across from the Peace of Israel Synagogue in the center of town.

  And then Esther smelled the bread. She turned a corner, walked a few more steps. Soon she was standing outside an arched open door watching a bare-armed baker slide a tray of dough into a furnace. Esther stood and stared. The steam and sweat and dough and bare baker skin created in the room an atmosphere magnetic, carnally alluring. The baker was a young man, no more than twenty. Esther, married less than four months, was nineteen.

  Although she was not ordinarily a believer in astrology, and had absolutely no idea how sailors used the night sky to tell them where to go, she felt certain that crucial stars had descended into that tiny bakery room to make for her a perfect navigational tool. In short, she was inspired, and knew for once in her life exactly in which direction she was supposed to go.

  The baker stood before her—a destination slim and brown. He was lithe and beautiful in a coltish, boyish way. Small. Only a bit taller than she. Esther immediately took in his huge almondy eyes, and his hair—thick dark brown hair—gathered in a low braid at the back. He seemed to her like something carved out of precious wood; miniature, masculine, and muscular all at once.

  The bakery was only two rooms. One with a low, wooden baking table rutted and eternally floury from years of use, and the other with a brick furnace that had been hewn, by the baker’s grandfather, out of the limestone wall. It was behind what would later be the public pavilion but was then a rubbly clump of lower-class homes bordering the more prosperous center of town. When the baker saw the young woman with the full skirt, cinched at the waist, when he saw the big brown eyes of the woman, when he saw her white skin, full lips, and attractive face, he invited her in. He gave her a fresh roll and asked her, in nervous, clumsy Yiddish (which, like a mule, kicked and brayed itself off of his tongue; he was embarrassed at his language’s lack of manners) if she would like some sweet mint tea. This was the start of her nine-year love affair with the baker and her lifelong passionate entanglement with Jerusalem, the city whose twists, turns, bakers, and twin arcane whispers of piety and perversity ultimately spoke straight to her heart.

  Esther would make love with her husband at night “through her front door” and then, in the daytime, she carried out an affair with the baker, a third-generation Palestinian Jew. Their sexual game was ruled by the fact that the baker would only enter into her “rea
r door.” Both euphemism (which in the entire nine years they never breached) and position (which in the entire nine years they never varied except slightly in angle) suited them. Titillating not only the tenderest parts of their anatomies, but also the deeply humorous sense of sex that they found they shared.

  She came once a week, on Tuesdays, in the late afternoon when her husband would be busy participating in his civic meetings and the rest of the town, in classic Mediterranean style, would be indoors either scheming, studying, or sleeping. The baker, whose hands Esther always thought were strangely thin-fingered and uncallused for a baker, would lock the door to the back of the shop. And as he walked over to her, she would be laying a clean cloth down on the baking table. She loved lifting a finger to his lips, putting her fingers in his mouth and then tracing the graceful outline of his face, from mouth to nose, eyes and into ears.

  Always, when they were both ready, she would turn away from him and lean her body over the table. He pulled up her skirts, pulled down her undergarments and his own pants. Then he licked the fingers on his right hand and slowly, passionately, opened her up. Soon he slid right into her. She loved the feel of his body angling its way upward. She loved the feel of her heavy breasts hard pressing into the wooden table. He gripped her hips and thrust himself deep.

  They kissed and panted and hungered at and for each other’s skin—more, not less, fervently as the years went by. Theirs, they agreed, was an ancient elemental passion that must have existed, like sand, earth, and sky, long before either of them had been born. And despite the intense physicality of their togethering, both Esther and the baker always felt insubstantial, flimsy, oh so light in the presence of this passion. But this was not a bad feeling. When they made love, it was as if they were wrapping their bodies not only around each other but also, and more essentially, around something else that had before been naked. It was, they agreed, as if the passion were the real creature, and they, though temporarily deprived of the normal trappings of personhood, were lucky to have been chosen as its favorite clothes. They dressed the passion in carnal finery, and the passion wore them with secret frequency.

  My great-great-great-grandmother, Esther Sophie Goldner Schine, granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire, thought her husband’s coming in through her front door and her lover’s coming in through her back door was the perfect arrangement for a Jewish woman. The notion of separate facilities fit nicely into the ready framework of kashrut. Milk here, meat there, and as long as there was proper distance between things, everything stayed quietly kosher.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Yochanan came from a part of East Prussia called Sheinlanka, which means “pretty terraces.” Today it is part of Poland, not far from the town of Posnan. He came to Palestine under the following circumstances:

  In 1836, the chief rabbi of the British Empire, Rabbi Shlomo Berliner Herschell, sent out a messenger to search for a shidach for his granddaughter, Esther. A shidach is the Yiddish word for a marriage match. The marriage was to be bound by the condition that the young couple marry and reside in Jerusalem. This was before the existence of Zionism. Most Jews still believed that Israel should not and could not be established until the Messiah came to Zion. Rabbi Herschell disagreed with prevailing thought. He was among a group of radical European Orthodox Jews who believed that moving to Palestine was not in opposition to the messianic ideal.

  The messenger traveled for almost an entire year. Finally, he arrived at the city of Pressburg, at the house of study of the famous Prussian rabbi, the Chatam Sofer. Yochanan had long been a student there. Like the chief rabbi, the Chatam Sofer also disagreed with prevailing thought—that is, he believed in Israel as a realistic homeland, not just a spiritual one. In response to the rabbi’s messenger, the Chatam Sofer promptly sent his prized student, Yochanan. Yochanan and Esther met in London and became engaged almost immediately.

  I WRITE:

  On the third Tuesday of Chesh-van, four months after they arrived in Jerusalem, Yochanan finished early with his civic meeting and decided to make for home. He was just about to walk past the Glory of Israel Synagogue when he saw Esther step out of the front door of their house and turn to walk the other way. It was late fall, and chilly. She was wearing her long maroon coat and the wide-brimmed black hat that tipped down over her right eye and made her vision, she always explained, “a bit drunk feeling, you know, only half there and wobbly, but not too bad, I find my way after all.” Yochanan loved his wife’s way of speaking. Her sentences were curvy and full of original character.

  JERUSALEM STREET

  Yochanan called out to Esther but he was too far for her to hear and so he walked on and meant to call again, but then he found himself walking quietly, stealthily after his wife around a corner, and again, another corner, and then down the street and into an alley. He stopped at the mouth of the alley and watched his wife walk through the bakery’s back door. Her maroon coat wafted behind her for several seconds and then too, disappeared into the warm realm of dough and yeast.

  Pulling back and into a doorway on which was graffitied the word sky in sloppy Aramaic, he looked up at the real sky, which was darkening with the foredream of a storm. He watched as the baker poked his head out and then shut the front door of his shop. Hidden, but only ten feet away, Yochanan didn’t say a word. Then he walked to the closed bakery door and put his ear to the old wood of it. Soon he could hear his wife groaning. He stepped away from the door and looked up and down the street. No one was in the alley, nor walking toward it. He walked back and listened some more.

  He became aroused almost immediately, and soon was picturing the baker holding Esther’s naked breasts, petting them gently and then lifting up the nipples to his mouth. First one and then the other. And the baker’s hand, Yochanan imagined the baker’s left hand reaching in between Esther’s legs, which she pressed together tightly. Soon, in his mind, they were pressing their naked bodies together and moving, back and forth, toward and away, with the tempestuous ease of a storm just brewing. The storm outside began to blow. Yochanan huddled into his coat, raised his collar, and ducked deeper into the doorway. Shutting his eyes, he leaned into the images as if they were the real door, open and welcoming, while the wooden one, closed and cold against his body, kept him out of all this. Now he heard the baker groaning. Esther let out a small passionate yelp. And as the two lovers inside reached satiety, the one outside reached down and touched himself, pressed there, pressed and pulled himself to solitary, intense pleasure. Only then did he leave.

  Yochanan put his hands over his hat and ran through the rain. His feet swish-swished into puddles already forming in the narrow, stony streets. As he ran, he heard himself reciting an angry litany like an opposite prayer.

  The baker has a face of moldy clay.

  The baker has hands of heavy stinking wood.

  The baker is a deformed gentile in disguise.

  The baker is an eater of clams.

  A descendant of Amalek.

  The devil of devils.

  The baker is . . . the baker is . . . the baker is shtupping my wife!

  The rain hit him harder now, pelting from every angle and also straight up from the ground. He felt slowed by it, slowed and assaulted, as if each raindrop were a separate obstacle. Reaching home, he went inside, took off his great coat and hat, and set them upon the fine wooden rack that they had brought with them from London. Shaking out his beard and hair, he ran his fingers through them. Then he held his hands up to his mouth and breathed into his open palms. The warm air hovered there, but only for a second, and soon his skin was cold again. He breathed again, felt warm for several seconds and then cold again, warm and then cold. Cold. He dropped his hands down to his sides, thrust them into his pockets, and sighed deeply. But then everything changed. His mood rocked and swayed, and Yochanan felt a smile flutter to his lips.

  Laughing out loud, he turned and looked at his image in the gilt hall mirror. My, how shaggy! Wet! How disheveled! B
ut happy! Happy! He found himself possessed of an excited and yet cautious confusion.

  He had taken great pleasure outside the baker’s door and yet there were so many sins and so much shame growing on the fields where this kind of pleasure bloomed. Where was his anger? He could not feel it now. Where was his litany, his sour prayer? Yochanan loved his wife and trusted her too. Strangely, he still trusted her. The image of Esther in the baker’s arms was an excruciatingly beautiful flower. Vicarious, criminal, devastating, and yet thrillful. He ached with every petal, leaf, and fresh-cut stem of it.