“Sy!” she yelled down the hall. “The kids are here.”
Inside, the house had more of an aged than intimidating glamour, the sofas and armchairs faded by the sun, all the heavy mahogany furniture that had probably looked just right in their previous apartment on Central Park West a little stuffy and out of place in the Mediterranean climate, like seeing someone show up at a barbecue in a suit. The really outstanding thing was the art. It covered the walls from the ceiling all the way to the floor, with pieces he recognized — Picasso’s pencil sketches, Magritte’s bulky nudes — hanging right next to paintings that didn’t so much look like paintings but squiggles on playing cards and tablecloths and sugar sacks.
“That’s a Rubashkin,” Eva said, putting an arm around him. “They threw him in a psychiatric prison to ‘shape up ideologically,’” she said, making air quotes. “So he did a portrait of a guard he met there.” Eva pointed at what clearly depicted a man being birthed from an anus. She smelled of powder and peroxide, as if she’d just that second returned from the beauty parlor. While Boaz had never been a fan of assumed intimacy, he suddenly wanted to stay there a very long time, listening to stories about artists he’d never heard of, whose fates he’d never considered, as Eva led him from painting to painting, leaning in close as if sharing a secret.
“Eva!” her husband yelled, coming out of the study, the sounds of a soccer game drifting into the hall. He was heavy and balding and wearing a dress shirt and slacks so rumpled he reminded Boaz of an overstuffed drawer. “You’re gossiping,” he said, and Eva said, “It’s not gossip if it’s true,” and he smiled at Boaz, as if they’d had that exchange a million times and he knew when to concede, and then all four of them walked out to the terrace, where cups and saucers and a tower of little frosted cakes were laid out. Eva poured Boaz a cup of tea and said, in English, “Hebrew or English?” and when he said, “Either,” she said, in impeccable, unaccented Hebrew, “You’re the only boy this one’s ever brought by, so I know you’re better than the others. Tell me about yourself.”
“I’m a translator,” Boaz said. Sy’s arm was draped over Eva’s shoulder, her hand on his leg. They held each other with such effortlessness that Boaz was touched: there was clearly so much love between them, even after fifty-plus years of marriage. He felt as if he were getting a privileged view into the future, seeing how the girl he loved would look as an old woman, her own lined and papery hand clutching his knee. “Well,” Boaz corrected, believing he should only call himself a translator once his work was out in the world, “I’m studying to be one.”
“Oh please,” Eva said. “Say you’re one and act like one! I’m sure you’re brilliant. What are you working on?”
“A couple stories, from Hebrew to English. And Mira and I are taking a class on Ben Yehuda.”
“Ah,” Eva said. “You know he built a house forever ago near our old place on Ein Gedi Street, a big stone monstrosity, then died before he moved in.”
“Right,” Boaz said, shocked that Eva could be so blasé about the inventor of the modern Hebrew language — that to her, Ben Yehuda wasn’t a brilliant, revered linguist but some show-off who’d raised the property taxes in her neighborhood. Boaz was trying to take it all in without gawking: the house, the art, the view, which everyone at the table seemed immune to, as if it were perfectly natural to gaze out at the classic postcard shot of the Old City’s stone walls, the glittery gold dome and the hills beyond, the cars snaking up the Mount of Olives looking, from that vantage, as tiny and insignificant as toys. This was the first time Boaz had lived in Jerusalem, the first time he had lived outside the Negev, and he’d felt, when he first arrived at Hebrew University that fall, that all his years of working hard had paid off, that he’d gotten the translation scholarship he’d dreamed of, that it could lead so easily to a book, a career, a life — that, in his own private way, he had made it. He’d found that everything, even walking outside his dorm on Mount Scopus and buying a coffee and a roll in the morning, felt thrilling and significant, as if something inside him had caught fire.
But then he’d met Mira, who saw her year there as nothing but another planned rest stop on the map of her life, which had already included a junior year in Cairo and nearly every summer since childhood in Israel, the distance of traveling halfway around the world as trivial to her as the field trips Boaz had taken, as a boy, to the kibbutz water park. It was both exciting and unnerving being with someone like Mira, who talked about Jerusalem with the ease of a native he himself couldn’t fake, loving the architecture, the history, the bookshops and cafés near her apartment and the sweet old couple who ran the produce market on her block, but so sick of the traffic, the noise, the religious lady on the bus who yelled at her for wearing a tank top, wishing Tel Aviv University had as strong a translation program, wondering why Jerusalem couldn’t have one decent restaurant open on Shabbat — no, scratch that, one decent restaurant, period. Sitting out on the terrace, Boaz was aware his excitement at being there made him seem as eager and unsophisticated as a little boy, and so he sipped his tea and tried to act as though none of this were a big deal, though all of it was, in fact, a very big deal.
Then Eva shifted her attention to Mira, as if she were hosting a talk show and Boaz’s segment had ended. Mira set down her cup and began, to Boaz’s amazement, performing for her grandmother. Sy was between them, his arm still on Eva’s shoulder, piping in now and then, but the spotlight never moved, not even for a second, from Eva. There was Mira, perched on her chair, suddenly talking with her hands, her eyes, her feet jiggling nervously, all that confidence Boaz had assumed was as intrinsic as her breath and hair and freckles, magically evaporated around her grandmother: the one person, he realized, Mira felt she still needed to court. This was so different from the way he’d later learn she operated with her immediate family back in Boston, where she’d walk right through the front door and skulk into the kitchen, finally yelling hello to everyone only after she’d scrutinized the contents of the refrigerator and begun picking at a plate of leftover chicken with her bare hands.
But there, on Eva’s terrace, Boaz fell a little more in love with her, seeing, for the first time, that vulnerability. There she was, trying to charm Eva with stories, making their year out to be a little brighter, a little more exciting, than it had been so far, describing her apartment in Rehavia as louder and smaller than it actually was, her project with the Arab poet more dramatic than the reality, as if their meetings entailed some dangerous, illicit journey over the Green Line, rather than just across campus in the literature department, where the poet had been teaching for nearly fifteen years.
Then Eva stood up. She took Boaz’s arm and whispered that he was a keeper, and he was so warmed by those words, and by Eva herself, that as she led him through the living room and into the hall, he hadn’t even realized she was kicking them out until he and Mira were back on the street, clutching their coats, on the other side of the door.
IT WAS still dark outside when the red-eye descended into Israel and taxied along the runway. Boaz hadn’t slept a minute on the flight, had spent the entire ten hours with the foundation’s site visit materials unopened on his lap, watching terrible movie after terrible movie without even plugging in his headphones, and now, shoving his tiny, useless airplane pillow against the window, he tried to rest for the remaining minutes before the seat-belt sign went off. Only nobody would be quiet. The teenager beside him seemed to be calling everyone on her speed-dial to let them know she’d arrived, though Boaz couldn’t imagine who would welcome that call at five-thirty. Across the aisle, a religious man was having a conversation on his own cell while his children piled onto his wife’s lap, a toddler on one leg and a baby in her arms, the wife nodding yes, yes to a third child tugging her hand, though everything in her face seemed to be screaming no, no, no. That all used to comfort Boaz, being thrust back home before even walking through customs. But now it felt claustrophobic and overwhelming, and Boaz wondered if he was simply in a terrible mood or if he was beginning to crave space like a New Englander.