46 – Brooklin, Maine
“I feel better now that the boat is gone,” Levi said. He and Debra Reuben sat on the cottage’s porch, overlooking the water, watching the parade of boats, lobster boats, sailboats, motor yachts, sailing past, traveling from one end of Eggemoggin Reach to the other. “I feel even better that the Thing” - they still did not know how to refer to the nuclear device - “that the Thing is hidden.”
Exploring in the cottage’s basement, Levi noticed how the granite bedrock was blasted away to open up a hole for the house’s foundation. Exploring further, Levi saw a low wooden door in the concrete foundation wall. The door was locked. Levi snatched a three-foot steel crow bar from the workbench and set to work on the small door. Ten minutes of yanking and prodding resulted in the door lying open. Levi reached inside and, to his surprise, felt a light switch, which he flicked up.
An overhead light turned on, revealing a twenty-foot long chamber with walls, floor and ceiling of solid granite, a tunnel blasted into the bedrock. Lining the sides of this tunnel were wooden racks, from floor to ceiling. The racks held wine bottles, hundreds of them. The air inside the tunnel was moist and chilly. There must be twenty feet of granite above the far end of this tunnel, he thought.
Levi walked to the workbench where the nuclear device rested. It was only because he knew what it was that the device seemed so lethal, Levi thought. Then he reconsidered. No, he thought, it has an aura about it. It contains the souls of thousands of innocent people, available for the taking at any instant. It is an evil object. It deserves to be locked away in a cave.
And I know the cave in which to lock it, he thought.
Levi hesitated as he bent forward to lift the bomb to carry it into the wine cellar. Maybe I’ve been too casual with it, he thought. He looked around the basement and found a pair of thick gloves covered in hard rubber tossed into a plastic milk crate containing the mixings for epoxy resin. They were bright orange and came halfway to his elbow. The label identified them as Nitrale Chemical Gloves.
Just in case, Levi said to himself, donning the gloves before he lifted the bomb.
Later, sitting on the porch waiting for sunset, Levi sucked down his third Tanqueray and tonic so quickly that Reuben stared at him questioningly. “Something bothering you,” she asked. “Or just thirsty?” She was used to outpacing him, two drinks for each of his.
“Nothing special,” he answered, looking out at the water. “This place is so peaceful I sometimes forget why we’re here and what we left behind over there.” He pointed out at the water, at the horizon to the east.
“I know what you mean,” Reuben said. “I forget sometimes, too, but not for long, not when I turn on the television and see what is happening in Israel, I mean, I guess, in Palestine. Do we have to start calling it that?”
“Never,” Levi retorted quickly.
Reuben looked closely at the man sitting in the wooden rocking chair. I’ve hardly been out of his sight for two months, yet I know almost nothing about him, she thought. Nothing except that he carried me across the ocean and that I feel safe when I am with him.
“Tell me about what you left behind,” she said softly.
Levi turned toward her, startled. Despite all the weeks they’d been isolated with only one another for company, Levi had barely opened up about himself. Maybe he was just shy, she’d thought. Maybe, perhaps, when you’ve lost everything in life, it was too painful to think about, much less to talk about loss. Nonetheless, sitting on the porch overlooking the sunset, he began to speak, stopped, looked away, looked at the water for several minutes, then turned back to face her. He spoke softly, as if he were reading, flat, barely a hint of emotion.
“My Eema, my mother and my Aba, my father met on a kibbutz in the Gallilee. They were both orphans, all of their parents were killed in the 1948 war. They never talked about their childhoods, as I never talk about my parents. I used to wonder why they never spoke. Now I know why. The dead are dead, gone. Speaking about them won’t bring them back.”
“Are you sure they are dead?” Debra asked, desperate to keep him speaking.
“Sure? I don’t know. I had breakfast with them a week before the bomb, before I returned to duty. I saw a photograph in a news magazine in Spain. It was taken from an airplane. It showed the bomb crater in Tel Aviv. It showed the shore front miles away. It showed rubble where my parents’ hotel had been.”
"Do you have any brothers, sisters?” she whispered.
“My sister, Leah, was supposed to visit them that week, with her baby, with six-month-old Aaron.”
“Maybe they all survived,” Debra said, looking at Levi, looking to see if he himself held any hope.
“No. I know they are gone, all of them. I hope it was fast for my sister. She would not do well in a camp. She would not have done well being raped by Arabs, watching her son being slaughtered. I am all that is left of my family, and I am alone in a strange land.”
Debra had been so consumed by her own guilt over Damascus that until that moment she had not thought about Levi’s loss. He was so strong, so impenetrable. Suddenly, his loss put a face for her on what all Israel had lost. She shot from her chair and turned her back on him, then spun around to stand facing Levi.
“I get so fucking angry at America I can hardly control myself,” Reuben screamed. She turned her head from side to side then hurled her glass, which she first drained of the last of a Tanqueray and tonic, at the rocks on the water’s edge. “Look, this is where I was born, where I grew up. For as long as I’ve been alive America sent soldiers all over the world for the dumbest reasons imaginable. What the hell do we have to do to convince this goddamn government to do something to put Jewish people back in control of the only place on this entire planet where we can be absolutely certain we’re safe? One little tiny bit of real estate on the face of the whole planet is all we want. What the hell is wrong with those idiots in Washington?”
“Evidently, even that one place was not safe for us Jews,” Levi commented dryly. He turned when he heard a car on the dirt drive leading up to the cottage. He walked to the end of the porch and looked around.
“Sarah and Abram,” he said to a worried Reuben. Her face cleared. “I expect they’ll have some ideas about how to attract the attention of the President of the United States.”
In fact, the Goldberg-Goldhershes had much to say about plans and developments. They disagreed, however, about those plans.
“It is shaping up to be the biggest march on Washington since the Vietnam War,” Sarah bubbled. “We expect more than a million Jews to show up. After all, there isn’t a hell of a lot else we can be doing right now and everybody feels like they have to do something.
“Just about every congregation in the country will be sending people, some of them bus loads of people. You know, there are six million Jews in America. It’s beginning to seem like an awful lot of us are going to be in one place at one time. I can’t tell you how excited I am.”
“She’s excited because she’s been asked to speak, that’s why she’s excited,” Abram interrupted. “We’ve been having a, shall I call it a slight disagreement, dear, about what she is going to say, something of a husband and wife spat, maybe. I was hoping a little bit of time with a couple of people who saw what happened in Eretz with their own eyes will convince Little Miss Peace and Love to act like a soldier, not a flower child.”
He stopped speaking suddenly. “What’s that?” he asked, looking up.
THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA-THWACKA.
The sound of the helicopter passing overhead drew all four gazes toward the sky. The machine flew directly over the house at slow speed, barely more than a fast walk, heading along the shore toward Blue Hill, ten miles away. The sound faded as the helicopter disappeared from sight.
“I don’t like that,” Levi said. “There have been airplanes and helicopters like that one flying around the past few days. Something is happening.”
“It can’t concern us,” Abram said. “I don’t see how it could.”
“I don’t either,” Levi said. “But it is odd. Maybe I’m just imagining.”
They all sat in silence for a moment until Debra Reuben spoke up, excited.
“Sarah, tell me about this march on Washington,” she said. “When is it?”
“Actually, its next weekend,” Sarah answered. “Just five days from today. It was put together so quickly because there isn’t any time to waste. I can’t believe how quickly attitudes are forming against intervention. All these newspaper editorials, not the New York Times of course, but all these editorials calling for what they call ‘restraint’ on sending troops, or even relief workers. Let’s learn from the lesson of Iraq, they say. Quagmires, I’m so sick of hearing about quagmires. Don’t upset the Arabs, they say. Well, what about upsetting the Jews?
“The point of this march is to show how upset we Jews are.”
“Yeah, but not as upset as people will be when gas hits five dollars a gallon,” Abram said.
“That’s still cheaper than what we paid in Israel,” Levi said. “I don’t understand why the price of gasoline is such a big deal.”
“It’s such a big deal because Americans think they have as much right to cheap gasoline as they do to cheap water and free air,” Reuben said. “And because gas has never cost that much in this country, ever. I remember when it hit three dollars a gallon during the Iraq War and people were ready to sell their SUVs. There was a one-year waiting list to buy a little hybrid car.
“Gas hitting five dollars a gallon is more likely to set off rioting in the streets than anything I can think of. It sure will get more people upset than one more news story about one more Arab-Jew problem in the Middle East.”
“Americans are fed up with Arab-Jew problems,” Abram Goldhersh said dryly. “America was humiliated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan. The whole country is suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome over those two wars. Its just like after Vietnam. Worse. Double. Americans are sick of trying to solve other people’s problems by spending American blood and American tax dollars. It will only get worse if the damn Arabs start choking our oil supply.”
“The trouble is, people will blame these gas prices on guess who?” Sarah picked up from her husband like a tag team debater. “Us. Jews. Jews causing some problem with the Arabs and the Arabs holding back on oil because once again the U.S. is backing the Jews. That’s what people are going to say. That’s what I expect most people are thinking right now. It’s all because of the Jews pissing off the Arabs that I have to pay a hundred dollars to gas up my Ford Expedition every week.”
Sarah’s frustration brought tears to her eyes, which she unselfconsciously wiped with both hands.
“To tell you the truth, Chaim, I don’t know what Americans are going to do. I don’t expect American parents want their sons and daughters shipped to Israel to fight Arab armies. I don’t expect American tax payers will spend their money to bail out Israeli Jews, not when it will mean paying a hundred dollars every week to buy gas to take the kids to the mall. It might seem odd to you, but five-dollar gasoline is a big, big issue. And if it hits six dollars, God forbid, I know for sure which way an awful lot of Americans are going to go.”
“But gas has been $5 a gallon or something like that in England for years with no revolution,” Levi said, not comprehending.
“Well, England is England and America is America. I know that if $5 a gallon gasoline arrives, this country will turn its back on Israel without thinking twice.” Reuben stopped, then muttered, half to herself, “And of course the Arabs know that damn well, too.”