Free What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander Page B

require either party to intend to exercise its terms, or even for both parties to be mature enough to grasp them. And likewise a symbolic contract, like that of Passover, whose intent at signing is that it would never be put into use, is as valid as any other in the eyes of God. So all you’re really deciding in this case is if the money on the table before you was of any value at the time the deal was made. That is all the court is being asked. If you are religious men, following religious law, then there is nothing to say but that the girl belongs to me.”
    “The same as a slave, though,” Kiggel said, a finger raised. “That’s how it would be.”
    “Call it what you will, but the girl is mine.”
     
    · · ·
     
    Aheret stood in the dark on the western edge of the hill. Rosh Hashanah dinner had finished. And she’d come out to the edge of the grove to stare across to the hill opposite, where she could see that her mother had left a light burning in the window so Aheret would know that she was not forgotten.
    It was the second night since the verdict, and so different from those first days when she’d tended to this woman during her week of mourning. Aheret was hopeless, and—since suicide was forbidden, a grave sin—she could only wish and pray that the world, for her, would come to an end. Let me be left out of the Book of Life, she thought. Let my fate be decided this week. Let the sky up above come crashing down.
    And it was, right then, as if Aheret’s prayers were answered.
    Though it was not the sky that was falling, but the earth shaking as if it planned to swallow up the whole hill. There was nothing to see from the side of the summit on which Aheret stood. No dust rose up in the distance, as when Hananhad caught the armored corps rolling down toward the Yom Kippur War.
    It was from the other side of the little shack that the sound of great conflagration came, and anyone who hadn’t been raised on those hills might have thought they were already surrounded. It took a lifetime to learn how the specific echoes bounced off the range.
    Aheret hadn’t wanted to stand on that side of the house ever again. That’s where her fate had been sealed. Where her two mothers had stood silent before the rabbis, as stiff as the trees around them, as abiding as the sister hills themselves.
    What she saw when she rounded the house and passed the big tree and stood at the edge was a battle being raged inside Israel like none she had ever seen. The village below was practically afire, not with the force of Israeli aggression, but with the unleashing of a new kind of Palestinian rage. The bypass roads that had sprung up throughout her lifetime were blocked, tires burning at every edge. There was the sound of light arms, at first intermittent and then turning frequent as more Arabs than she ever knew existed streamed out to fight the Israeli soldiers who’d already arrived. In the sky, coming from Jerusalem, she could see the lights of the Black Hawks and Cobras as the helicopters raced their way. And then she saw nothing as the helicopters went dark so as to enter the fight in stealth. Of all the ends to this country she’d imagined, this was not one foreseen. She did not think, since the time of its founding, that it had ever known such violence to rise up within its borders.
    That is when she noticed Rena at her side, handing her an Uzi to match her own.
    “Do you think,” Aheret said, “the whole country is like this?”
    “It’s another intifada,” Rena said. “Look,” she added, pointingto a vehicle of the Palestinian Authority. “Which naïve Jew thought it was safe to give them guns? And on a holy day again they attack.” Rena turned toward the tree and looked down at the battle truly raging below. She said, “Tonight it comes down. We can never let ourselves be sneaked up on again.”
    Rena rushed back to the shack. And, wearing her festival dress, she returned with an ax in hand.
    “It is yom tov