All around me, people sat clustered together, clinking glasses and leaning close in conversation. I wondered how I looked to them: an aging man dressed so obviously like an American, wearing spanking white sneakers and a baseball cap. How had I let myself become just another sad old man at a table for one?
My drink came and I gulped it like water. Outside the window, the sun was going down, spreading over the city as evenly as butter. I ordered another and watched people stroll arm in arm through the streets. Watching them disappear around corners in the shadowy light — it was beautiful, and for a moment it comforted me to cradle my drink as the city faded and grayed.
But then the sky got dark and the streets went quiet and the group beside me paid and walked out. Soon, I knew, the restaurant would close and I would have to leave. But when I thought about returning to the hotel and listening to a crying Sveta apologize again and again as I wheeled my suitcase down to the lobby, when I thought about the long flight home and the freezing taxi line at Kennedy and the silent apartment that awaited me, the helplessness that rushed at me was so real I felt it move through my fingers and hair.
So I tried the only thing I could think of. I put down my head and prayed. It felt like the fakest thing in the world and at first I didn’t know what to say, or even who to say it to, but then I closed my eyes and tried. I prayed for calm in the world and for joy, I prayed for Beth and Ya’akov and the baby, for Sveta and even for Gail, but inside I knew I was praying mostly for myself. I was praying for a way out of this sadness. And when that didn’t work, when the waiter cleared my glass away and the restaurant emptied, I prayed for that safety net of people to appear. They would be just as Beth described, reverent and serene, and as they sang in unison about God’s grandeur and His pity, they would move closer together until their shoulders were touching and stretch their arms open wide, ready to take me in.
Minor Heroics
It wasn’t even noon, and already the heat was so strong that the other moshavniks were tarping the vines and escaping inside. I wished I could head home and take the afternoon off before I returned to the base and began another week as Lieutenant HaLevi’s personal driver: possibly the least essential job in the Israel Defense Forces.
But there were dozens of tomato plants left to prune, and I didn’t want my mother, the production manager, stuck doing it alone. So I knelt in the dirt, the sun burning my shoulders right through my t-shirt, while in the distance my older brother and his girlfriend lazed in the pomelo groves. My mother would have called me a schlub if I’d skipped a day of work, but she was too relieved Asaaf was home from Hebron to care what he did. Last Sunday he was discharged, and all week it’s been, Let Asaaf sleep in, Give Asaaf the remote control. And I’ve been nice about it. But watching him now, his head in Yael’s lap, her fingers running through his hair, already beginning to grow out of its buzz cut — seeing him with her got to me even more than usual, and I yelled, “Could you get off your ass?”
He flipped me off and turned back to Yael. But after a second he hopped onto the tractor and I thought, One point, me. And the truth was that we really did need his help. If the temperatures continued to climb through summer we’d have to worry about calcium deficiencies and blossom end rot eating away at the tomatoes, making them unsellable; I could already see the vines beginning to wilt as Asaaf rode past me and down to the squash field. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his shoulders, revealing his bulky brown arms, and I wondered why, even when he wasn’t, my brother always seemed to be showing off. Behind him stretched dunams of farmland, marked by stucco clusters of other kibbutzim and moshavim that rose out of the valley, then dropped away just as quickly. The day was so quiet all I could hear was the hum of the tractor and the chickens squabbling in their coop, and I was suddenly reminded of how pretty it was out here. My brother plowed through the fields and down to the sunflowers, and then I lost sight of him as he cut behind the dairy. When he reappeared he was chugging down a hill, and then he must have hit a root, or a rock, because the tractor tipped. Just a little at first, and I waited for it to steady out. But it teetered some more and I watched Asaaf, small as an action figure, fly right off and tumble down the grass. From that distance, the landing seemed so soft that I waited for him to pop up and take an exaggerated bow. But he didn’t, and that’s when the tractor started to roll, over and over, until it stopped at the bottom of the hill, right on top of him.
I started running. By the time I made it over, my mother and Yael were already trying to pull him out. His eyes were closed, his face was scrunched and I wondered if the pain was knocking the breath out of him. There was blood on the tractor, on the grass, on my brother. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother murmured, to Asaaf, or to herself.
But he wasn’t moving. The wheels were still spinning, spitting out dirt and weeds. I looked out at the empty hills and screamed for help. But I knew no one could hear me, so I ran to the work truck parked outside the dairy, keys dangling from the ignition as always, and started it up. I grabbed a chain from the back of the truck and hitched one side to the bumper and the other to the tractor’s chassis, inching forward until my mother and Yael dragged Asaaf out and wrapped a work shirt around his leg. His right one looked okay but the left one was destroyed — his jeans were ripped off and the skin of his calf was slashed wide open, all the way down to the muscle and bone.
“Call an ambulance, Oren,” my mother yelled, and when I didn’t move she yelled it again. But I knew it would take the paramedics at least twenty minutes to wind up the mountain — and anyway, why had the army made me memorize every shortcut in this country, every side street and alley, if not for a moment like this, so I grabbed Asaaf under his arms. I must have looked more determined than crazy, because my mother and Yael helped me lay him across the seat of the truck. I slid into the driver’s side and they climbed into the flatbed among the chains and spades and tarps, and then I was speeding down the dirt road, past the vines and rows of sunflowers, out the moshav gates and down the hill into town.
Asaaf’s head was in my lap, and I kept one hand on the wheel and the other on his waist to keep him from sliding off. His yells were starting to sound like sobs, and he was shaking, and the blood was soaking through the shirt so quickly that at the first stoplight I reached for a towel on the floor to cover it. But I thought about the dirt and gasoline and who knew what else was on that towel so I threw it off, then wondered how I could possibly be waiting for the light to change now anyway. When I looked through the rearview, my mother was mouthing for me to go, go, and I knew how terrified she must be that I’d blank under pressure: the whole reason I’d wound up with such a crappy army assignment in the first place.
But then something happened, and it’s like a map overtook my vision and I knew I could speed through that light without getting hit. I knew to gun the engine, weaving past a delivery truck, then back into my lane before the light changed. I’d done practice drives like this on the base, but never when it mattered — and here I was, with only one free hand to steer, zipping down Dekel Boulevard and making a left onto Sapir Street without ever slowing down. I knew to avoid the highway, bottlenecked with Haifa commuters even this early in the day. I knew to zigzag past the bus depot, where traffic always clogged, and onto Arlozorov Road. Then down a side street, and another. Past the open-air market on Hanassi where people threw up their hands as I sped through a crosswalk, and down an alley to the back of the ER, where the two medics outside took one look at my brother and wheeled him straight into the operating room.