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

  Once again, he imagined the baker’s dark hands thrusting upward into Esther’s body, her mouth half open, lips wet. Yochanan imagined and imagined, and grew once again aroused while standing alone in the antechamber still dripping from the rain. But he didn’t touch himself this time. He was in his own house and the walls were lined with holy books. Yochanan could not bring such odd illicit flowers home with him. Rubbing his hands together, he put them once more through his beard. As if he could comb out the confusion. A servant walked into the antechamber.

  “Oh, sir, I didn’t hear you . . . come in, sit by the fire, take off your wet clothes and eat some fresh rolls just come from the baker. Esther, the lady, your wife, she has just brought them in through the kitchen courtyard door.”

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  In 1837 there was a horrible earthquake in the northern city of Sefat, home to devotees of the mystical branch of Judaism called Kabbalah. More than five thousand people were killed and those that escaped left the city and wandered throughout Palestine. Many half-mad old kabbalists made their way to Jerusalem. The streets were full of their ragged and deranged numbers. Yochanan and Esther, working with the British Consul, set up a charitable foundation to aid their cause. Amongst other projects, they raised money for an orphanage. Once the money was raised, Esther became its de facto director.

  I WRITE:

  While her husband had come in wet, Esther had arrived home soaking. She had gotten caught in the brunt of the squall. And although both her color and her spirits were still lifted from her doughy tryst, everything else about her dragged. Her hair had come loose under her hat and lay in sopping tendrils all about her face. And her long maroon cloak, drenched at the bottom, hung heavily around her feet.

  In the kitchen she threw off her floppy hat and stepped out of the cloak, gratefully peeling its wetness off of her body. The only dry thing about her were the rolls, which were curled into a cloth that she had stuffed under her cloak and which she had held tight into her chest as she made her way home. Suddenly laughing, she thrust the rolls away from her body and into the hands of the servant who laughed along with her for no reason at all. They continued laughing, Esther and the servant girl, as Esther unconsciously ran her hands up and down her bodice. Her nipples were cold and hard. And they stung a bit too. Esther dropped her hands and walked upstairs to change into dry clothes for dinner.

  When she saw Yochanan standing in the front vestibule she stopped, gave him a smile. His look was neither vacant of affection nor full of any familiar warmth. She didn’t know how to respond. Again, she tried to smile. And this time was successful. But the smile brought another shiver. As if there were a bit of cold contained in the subtle upturn of her own lips, which, with her smile, spilled out of her whole body. She hugged her arms about her. And she needed to speak. It was odd to stand there not speaking.

  “One of the Sefat men begged to be—let into our house, out of . . . ,” she began.

  “. . . And so you let him, it’s raining, of course you let him.”

  “I led him to our door but at the last second he . . .”

  “Ran away. Yes, they always run away.”

  “My husband. You look tired.”

  “My wife. You are very wet. Go dry yourself. And then we will eat. I smell the bread. It smells good.”

  Esther walked toward her husband and continued to speak. “But just as I opened the door, the man ran from me.” She stopped in front of her husband and held out her hand to touch his. Yochanan felt how cold she was. Esther spoke again.

  “The baker put in an extra roll. He is a good baker.”

  “My wife. Esther. You are very wet. Go upstairs, dry your—”

  “My husband, I am going.”

  Yochanan watched after her as she climbed the stairs and rounded the landing. And as Esther disappeared from his view he felt that he could hear his own heart and smell his own blood and even feel his skin encasing his face and fingers, his legs and feet, his toes too. He felt taut and uncomfortable inside of himself. As if he were more a creaky machine than man, more a sum of mismatched parts than any sort of ethereal spirit. Whereas usually he felt the opposite. So comfortable with the feel of his own soul. And so familiar with it.

  But now was not a time for soul. Actually, he couldn’t feel his soul at all. Only his bones, and his body and all the blood running through it. Looking up the stairs again, he saw only emptiness. Then the green spot at the top of the hall snared his eyes; it was the picture, a landscape that his father had sent them, a present from Sheinlanka. Sent with the messenger whose eyes rolled this way and that, and in whom Esther had recognized a distant cousin’s husband’s younger brother or at least the form of someone remote and inconsequential whom she had once known.

  “Well, maybe not you,” she had said when the messenger protested, “but definitely someone like you or, at least, like your face.” Then all three, Yochanan, Esther, and the messenger had laughed at her rather silly if not poetic persistence.

  “At least, like your face.” Now Yochanan mouthed his wife’s words to himself, “At least, like your face.” The words didn’t mean anything, but he felt an odd and pressing need to repeat them. As if this one fragment of nonsense could save him. Yochanan knew that he would not mention what he had seen to his wife but that she knew that he knew and that this was to be their secret. And he also knew that the secret would become over time a mistress to both of them, a silence that they would share and take into their bed and ultimately believe in. For what is a secret, he mused painfully, but a kind of religion that leads the silent to constantly pray.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Yochanan’s father, the chief assistant of the Chatam Sofer, was the blind rabbi Mordechai Schine. A legend has been passed down that his students never knew he was blind. According to the legend, Rabbi Mordechai Schine tricked his students into thinking that he could see by listening for the turning of pages as they studied the Talmud and following the text in his head. He must have known the entire Talmud by heart.

  I WRITE:

  Esther changed quickly out of her wet clothes and came down for dinner. They ate in relative silence, whereas usually both chatted comfortably about their days. Then right after they had finished eating, the couple went up to their room and got into bed. It was much earlier than usual, but neither knew what else to do.

  Esther was pious in her own way. She knew how to keep the Sabbath holy but in private she often broke the rules. Yochanan was pious but in a serious way. He knew the mitzvot and he always kept the Sabbath holy. To him, creativity could come only as a consequence of prayer and piety, not as a shaper of it. Esther and Yochanan lay in their beds, side by side, barely any space between them. As it was not her time of the month, the beds were pushed together. On the days when she was bleeding they would be pulled far apart. Esther fidgeted and couldn’t lie still. She sat halfway up and flipped her pillow over, fluffed it up and then lay down again, resting her face in the cool linen. She watched Yochanan’s back. He was turned away from her, facing the window that looked out over the Mary Church. As he gazed at the church, his thoughts traveled in the opposite direction to the garden the Christians call Gethsemane after the olive trees that grow there crooked and squat.

  Esther sat up again and turned the pillow another time. But the linen on the underside wasn’t cool yet and this made her fidget some more. She did not know what or how or how much he knew, but she knew that Yochanan knew something. And Esther wondered how this something fit into his prayers. He was a most prayerful man, her husband, from a long line of rabbis reaching all the way back to Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator.

  Shutting her eyes, Esther tried to sleep but she could not. She kept seeing images and having odd thoughts and memories. She felt filled with them. Her whole body dreaming, remembering, thinking. One image would not leave her alone. It was of Yochanan’s father. She could not stop visualizing and thinking of Yochanan’s father, a man whom she had never met but w
hose story fascinated her. Esther had a picture in her head of an old man sitting at a table in the House of Study. He was surrounded by many students and many books.

  The image dissipated, leaving her alone with Yochanan in the almost-dark. Esther closed her eyes and listened to her husband breathing. Heavy and deep were his inhalations, and every couple of breaths a restless comma of a cough inserted itself into his repose. Sighing, Esther feared that he had caught cold in the rain. She rubbed her eyes and took a finger up to her right nipple, which was still tender. The baker had taken her nipples into his mouth and sucked them until she felt like screaming in pleasure but she hadn’t screamed; instead she turned the yell inward as she had taught herself to do, inviting it into an inner cavern where voices were always echoing and the trick was never to try to contain them but just to let them joyously be. She moved her hand away from her breast and traveled it down in between her legs, but only for a second. Not for pleasure, but for the feeling of comfort and warmth. And then she curled over on her side and shut her eyes.

  THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE

  She pretended that every time Yochanan inhaled was the turning of a page and every time he exhaled was the ending of a chapter. In this way, she read the Talmud of their togetherness. It was a big book. A book that contained all that had already passed between them as well as all that would ever pass between them. Past and present and future all were written there. She read for a long time, so many shared stories, some intimate, some silly, others dark and uncomfortable, some so beloved that she almost cried from them.

  The night passed heavily. No, thought Esther, Jerusalem is not a place for regular sleep. Only for a kind of restless burrowing inward that leaves a soul dreamily awake all day long. Yochanan slept deeply; his breath was a parchment of air that she read from for a long time. And then, as the sky lightened, Esther moved toward her husband and roused him gently. Yochanan wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled his lips into her forehead. She pressed her body into his, and together they slept, adding another page there.

  Chapter 2

  GOLDA AND ELIEZER

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  The 1850s were very hard times for our family in Jerusalem. In 1851, Esther’s father, who had immigrated to Jerusalem after she did, was murdered. I will discuss this mysterious tragedy in detail in a later chapter of this family history. In 1854 Esther died in childbirth when she was thirty-four years old. The child, my great-grandfather Eliezer (after whom I am named), lived. He was their only offspring.

  Many years after Esther’s death, Yochanan remarried a widow named Ruchama who had a daughter Eliezer’s age. Ruchama and her daughter were immigrants from Prague. The daughter’s name was Golda. When Yochanan married Ruchama, Eliezer and Golda were both fifteen years old.

  Yochanan and Ruchama had three children, and one of their great-grandchildren was the Ramat Kal, the commanding general of the Israeli Army.

  I WRITE:

  The year they both turned seventeen, Golda came to Eliezer’s bed for the first time. For most of that first night, Eliezer lay wide awake in bed, stunned by her closeness, paralyzed by his desire for her, terrified of who they really were and what he really wanted them to be. He kept going over it in his head. How the night was unusually cold. How her fire had gone out, how she had come to his door, knocked gently, explained how she was freezing and then how she had asked him if she could climb into his bed. He noticed that her night voice was softer and higher than her day voice. Her blond hair was loose, she wore a blue wool nightgown buttoned up to her neck. Eliezer had put his arm around his sister, and tried to warm her up. She was so cold. Her teeth chattered. But when she fell quickly asleep he moved away from her, and inched as close as he could to the opposite side of the bed. Golda slept on her belly, her right leg bent, her behind slightly up in the air.

  Eliezer stared at the ceiling but then he felt as if the ceiling were staring at him, at both of them. He inched even closer to the edge, hanging a whole leg over—which was very uncomfortable so he pulled it back up and tried to make himself into a skinny little line. He looked over at his sister. He did not know if they were sinning by sleeping together in the same bed, but it felt as if they were. And yet, he told himself, one had a moral as well as religious obligation to relieve the suffering of others, and wasn’t cold a kind of suffering? And didn’t cold lead to illness? And didn’t illness lead to death? And aren’t all Jews commanded to break almost all of the commandments if it is in the service of saving a life? Again, he looked over at his sister, and tried to convince himself that her lips were blue, even though he knew they weren’t and tried to tell himself that she looked feverish even though she didn’t and then he stopped trying to tell himself anything and concentrated instead on the startling evidence of life in his own pajama pants. Eliezer spent the next agonizing hour trying to figure out how to relieve his own suffering without breaking any more commandments or God Forbid waking his sister with an unseemly creaking of the bed.

  But he did not wake her up, and somehow Eliezer did manage to fall asleep, and in the morning when he woke up, she was gone. At breakfast, Golda did not mention anything, she didn’t say anything in front of their parents—Yochanan with his long beard and tired eyes, Ruchama clearing away the dishes. Only later, when they were both walking out of the house together to go to school did Golda look at Eliezer and smile and say “Thank you” in her day voice, which, he noticed, was much deeper than her voice of the night.

  All that day as he bent over his books and pretended to study, Eliezer felt himself trying to shrink, trying to make himself very small, but instead of becoming a little line on the edge of a bed (or on the edge of a creamy yellow page of Talmud) he felt his life force expanding, and even though she was not there with him, he could feel Golda’s life force expanding too, so that by the time the day was over and they met to walk home from school through the windy streets and alleys of the Jewish Quarter, no bed or book or room or alley was big enough to contain either of them, and the world itself was filled with their blushing forms.

  Soon after, she began coming every night, after their parents were asleep. Night after night they slept all curled up, his big arms around her little ones, her face on his chest. Eliezer thought that it was as if their nights together existed in a parallel universe, a place just above or below their parents’ house. When he was younger, long before Golda and her mother came to them, he would run up and down the stairs and into all of the musty rooms where he would knock on walls trying to find a secret passage. As a little boy, he had been sure that one of the walls in the house on Rav Pinchas Street was hollow and that if he could only find it, and knock in exactly the right spot, the wall would swing open and the house that he had been born in would be revealed to him as a hollow shell with secret hallways leading into magical rooms filled with golden treasure. Sometimes he even imagined that his poor dead mother whom he had never known was the treasure, that she was alive with pink cheeks and sparkling eyes, just waiting for him to find her.

  Now, lying next to Golda night after night, Eliezer often thought of himself as a little boy knocking on so many walls: how he used to rap with his knuckles and then press his ear to the cold stone, and then move a bit and rap again, and again, all the way through the house. Golda made a smooth umming sound as she turned over. Eliezer watched her hair fall over her eyes. He wondered if time perhaps had folded over on itself because he felt as if a wall had indeed swung away, and he was staring at himself on the other side of all the dark and rubble. He saw himself lying in the middle of a room full of riches, his arms wrapped around Golda, her arms wrapped around him. And as he finally fell asleep, Eliezer saw the two of them walking down the secret passageway that he had always known existed. They walked behind and above and below the walls of their parents’ house. They held hands as they walked. They did not know where they were going. Golda held a candle to light the way.

  The first time he touched her he felt as if he were crossing an ocean.
They had been lying awake for hours. Usually she fell asleep quickly, but on this night she didn’t, and instead whispered to him in her high night voice, charming his earlobe with her cool breath, her fragrant syllables. She told him stories of where she and her mother had lived before coming to Jerusalem. She said, “It was a city of one thousand golden spires.” She said, “When the sunlight hit the spires I believed that we were living in the realm of enchanted castles.” She said, “The fairy tales my mother told me seemed real there. Princesses, dragons, magic spells.” His hands were on her cheek, and then down on her shoulders, and then his hands were exploring distant territory on the other side of the ocean where there was more oxygen, and the ground was more fertile, and as his hands pressed into her bare skin, he knew he was home even though it was the first time he had ever been there. She kissed him back, she put her tongue in his ear and swirled it around, she nuzzled into his chest. And he breathed deeply and put his hands on her breasts, which were small and firm and beautiful. With his fingers, he played with her nipples, making them rise, and then he leaned over her and took one in his mouth, tickling the tip with his tongue and then biting just hard enough and licking, suckling again. And even though they were both silent, he heard her high voice in his head saying, “Princesses, dragons, magic spells.” He knew that there was a never-going-backness to what they were doing. They would never again be able to pretend that they were just sister and brother. Every one of those first kisses, his tongue in her mouth, on her teeth, her fingers on his chest, her lips on his neck, and then lower, made every previous second of their lives different. And the future was in the quickness of their breath, and the future was in the brightness of their eyes as they stared stunned and enraptured at each other, and the future was in their sighs as they pulled each other close.