Pale of Settlement

Deir Yassin

As Dawn Splits All the way from New York to Tel Aviv, she keeps the box beneath the seat in front of her. She slips off her sandals and touches it with her toes. A movie flickers overhead; the darkened shades are rimmed with static slits of light. The man next to her guffaws into his headphones. Thirty-six thousand feet up, she’s thinking about the many possibilities of return. In a Tibetan air burial, bodies are left naked on a rock for vultures to pick to bones. In India, pyres smolder along the Ganges, ashes and marigolds drifting with the stream. Maybe she’ll just leave the box at Ben Gurion, revolving like a planet on a baggage carousel. Maybe she’ll drop it inside the Damascus Gate, ticking like a bomb. Or maybe she’ll take it to a cafédeepinsidethesoukandstirtheashes,ateaspoonfulatatime, into a cup of Arabic coffee, boiled sweet. She’ll turn the cup over, twist it three times, read the prophecy etched into the grinds. As dawn splits over the Mediterranean, three men in black suits and Deir Yassin 85 86 ~ d e i r y a s s i n rumpled shirts shuffle past her and place themselves in the space between the galley and the lavatories, behind her seat. They wind phylacteriesaroundtheirarmsandforeheads,drapeprayershawls over their heads, and daven toward the streaks of light. She feels the chanted words bending, bobbing, against her neck. The words keep the hurtling plane miraculously aloft. Susan touches the box with her toes and listens to the praying men. She’s thinking that bodies, like words, dissolve, dry up, fly into the air. They fly away and are gone. Here Buried Avraham Bar-On wakes at dawn. As he buttons his shirt, he looks out the window at the Jerusalem pines and flat rooftops of Givat Shaul. The early light is flat and gray. He boils coffee at the stove, tosses yesterday’s bread to the pigeons waiting on the windowsill. He is thinking about the town where he was born, pigeons pecking at the cobbled square at dawn, the women setting up their market stalls, their heads wrapped in flowered scarves, squat burlap sacks filled with barley and corn and rye, or in summer, buckets of lilies and gladiolas from the fields. Avraham takes off his glasses, wipes them with a dishrag. He knows these images may not really be memories at all, but just the sediment of stories he’s been told, or photographs he’s seen in books. He was just a child when he left Poland, and he has never returned. He was Abie Borodsky then,anotherpersoninanotherworld.Here,too,beneathhisfeet, lie other lives, other worlds. Here buried under layers of broken stone and dirt and dust lie, perhaps, some potsherds, a Roman coin, a cistern, abandoned graves. Two thousand years from now, he thinks, everything will still be much the same. The indifferent d e i r y a s s i n ~ 87 sun will still appear each day, though little will remain to show that he was ever here—an aluminum can, a splinter of bone. Maybe it’s the news of his brother Zalman’s death that has done it—lately everythingaroundhimhasstartedtorecede ,asifhewereonabanking plane watching the green-brown squares of cultivated earth curve out and slip away. He thinks of his wife, Eva, strapped to her chair in the hospital ward, her memory gone, her mind as blank as air. Avraham doesn’t pick up the paper lying outside his door; he doesn’t listen to the morning news. He stands by the stove, sipping his coffee, bitter and black, as the light grows sharp over the stones. A Sky Blue Marble Susancarriestheboxcontainingtheashesofherdeaduncleoffthe plane,throughimmigration,pastthebaggagecarousels,andoutthe lane marked nothing to declare, into the light. People push and waveandshout,pressingagainstthebarricadesoutsidethesliding doors. No one is here to greet her. There’s the smell of too many bodies,offleshandsweat.SusanhasbeentoIsraelmanytimes,but thistimeeverythinglooksstrange,asifilluminatedbyatoo-bright light. She’s struck by the rising cadence of language she does not understand, by the Hebrew letters surrounding her on billboards, blockyandobscure.Shenoticesthesoldiers,m16sswingingattheir sides, the Mizrahi men with gold chains around their necks, Arab families tugging enormous suitcases on wheels, Haredim in black with side curls at their ears. Almost no tourists. Susan holds the box on her lap as the sherut winds up the road to Jerusalem. She rolls down her window and breathes...