LITMIR.BIZ

       1

       Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002

      Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”

      Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.

      “They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.

      “Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”

      The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.

      Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”

      “Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”

      “Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”

      The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.

      “As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Abe Peretz said. He grinned again. He grinned a lot, his way of saying that nothing he said was quite serious, or at least not quite as it sounded.

      “As you were saying,” Bea Peretz erupted, “it’s time I started cooking if we’re ever going to eat.” She got up and gestured toward Rose. “Come help me.” She was a big woman, getting a little heavy, but she had beautiful eyes and still-black hair that lay tight against her skull and then cascaded down her back. “You guys tell each other war stories so we don’t have to listen over dinner.”

      Alan Craik smiled at his wife, who had as many war stories as either of the men—chopper pilot, ex-squadron CO, currently deputy naval attaché, Bahrain—and who now gave a little shrug and let herself be led away.

      That was the day that the latest fragile truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians had self-destructed when a Palestinian militant was killed by a car bomb in the West Bank. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade declared that the cease-fire was finished. Before the day was over, two soldiers had been killed at a settlement, and the Martyrs Brigade took credit.

      That was also the last day of a man named Salem Qatib, who, like the cease-fire, was a victim of both sides: first the Palestinians tortured him, and then the Israelis tortured him, and then he died.

      “Bea’s kind of bossy,” Abe said. He looked at the fingertips of one hand, sniffed them—an old habit. “We talk too much about being Jewish, don’t we.”

      Embarrassed, Craik mumbled something vague.

      “No, we do. Since we moved here, Bea and the girls have got like the Republican Party—a steady move to the right.” He gave a snort, certainly meant to show disgust. “Bea has a new bosom buddy named Esther Himmelfarb. I mean, it’s good that she’s found a friend; Bea doesn’t usually get close to people. And the woman helps her a lot—she knows where everything is, knows who to see, what to say, but—” He waved a hand. “We keep kosher—that’s new. The girls want to go live on a kibbutz, even though the kibbutzes are all turning into corporations and the days of boys-and-girls-togethertaming-the-desert are long gone. It’s a romance. All three of them have fallen in love.” He sniffed his fingers.

      “You don’t like it here?”

      “I’m not enchanted by living on land that the former owners gave up because they had a gun at their head. And now they’re sitting out there in refugee camps, watching me eat their dinner.”

      “The Palestinians don’t exactly have the cleanest hands in the world.”

      “They’re absolute shits. Just like a lot of Israelis. But

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