Free Two She-Bears by Meir Shalev Page A

digs the ground, she comes to watch.”
    He resumed his digging. And the rabbi, more emotionally than he intended, gave the woman his blessing.
    She did not answer. It was clear to him that she recognized and remembered him and knew why he had come before and why now, but she gave him one short, vague look and then turned back to the ditch and the pile of earth beside it. She paid no further attention to him nor to the farmer who was digging, but only to the shovel unearthing layer after layer of soil, and to the cry that she alone heard, crying out to her from the ground.
    6
    The next day another vehicle arrived at the moshava, carrying members of the Sephardic burial society from Jerusalem. The chairman and secretary of the committee accompanied them to the cemetery and showed them the grave of Nahum Natan. The bereaved father had not come with them, unwilling and unable to see the bones of his son and certainly not the skull blown apart by a bullet from a rifle, nor did anyone else from the moshava come either.
    The men dug, uncovered, gathered, wrapped, and raised the bones of Nahum and brought them to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where he is buried to this day beside his mother, grandmother, uncle, and grandfather. His father, the eminent rabbi Eliyahu Natan, stood during the burial and looked at the small plot that awaited him too, not knowing that he would not be buried there. And it came to pass that a few years later he relocated from Istanbul to Cairo, and two decades thereafter, in fullness of years and memories, he died. In his last will and testament he again invoked the biblical Joseph and quoted his request: “You shall carry up my bones from here”—from Egypt to the Land of Israel, to the family plot in Jerusalem.
    But the State of Israel had been established by then, and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives was outside its border. Rabbi Eliyahu Natan was therefore buried in Cairo, and many years later, when it was possible to bring him to the Mount of Olives, there was no one who remembered his request or anyone who would assume the expenses entailed in fulfilling it.
    And his son, Nahum, is also forgotten. No one visits his grave on the Mount of Olives, and his house and land at the moshava changed hands at higher and higher prices, until it was purchased several years ago by Haim Maslina, the grandson of Yitzhak Maslina who gave false testimony and received a pair of excellent work boots and an excellent Dutch cow, pregnant by an excellent Dutch bull.

SEVEN
    Here you are. We said four o’clock and Varda shows up at four on the dot. To see the nakedness of the moshava, to investigate and excavate. How are you? Are you hungry? Thirsty? You missed me? Just kidding. Please sit. I have an hour and a half, and then, if you like, you can come with me to a parents’ meeting and see me in action. We may begin. First question.
    What was the family name before Tavori?
    Before Tavori we were Tversky. I’m told this is a prestigious name, but my great-grandfather wanted a Land of Israel name to replace the name of exile and changed it to Tavori. It sounds a bit like Tversky, and Mount Tavor was in the neighborhood. I love them both, the mountain and its name. The mountain is uniquely beautiful, like a breast full of milk, like a belly in the seventh month. And Tavor is a unique name, predating the Hebrew language that adopted it.
    Grandpa Ze’ev, who was born and grew up nearby, told his grandchildren, Dovik and me, that for many years after he left the Galilee and came here, he missed that view of the Tavor. He’d look upward and was surprised every time—Where is it? Where’d it disappear to? I didn’t grow up near the Tavor. I was born in Tel Aviv and grew up here in the moshava, but some of that stuck to me too. I kept the name Tavori even after Eitan and I got married. I hadn’t told you his name? Sorry. Eitan is my husband. My first husband and also my second husband.
    Interesting that they both