Her Masada

It all started with her deflowering on Masada. Yes, that Masada.

Charlotte was sixteen and visiting Israel with her family for her brother Morty’s bar mitzvah. It was a long way to go for a bar mitzvah, especially during the Yom Kippur War ceasefire, but her parents, Bee and Tilmon, saw a trip to Israel as a way to confront what it meant to be Jewish in the late twentieth century. While neither parent had ever expressed much passion about Israel and had occasionally even called themselves atheists, Bee kept insisting, “Our people need us. If not now, when?”

Charlotte and Morty were steadfast conspirators. Their businessman father was cold and hard, their raven-haired, aqua-eyed mother even more severe. When, at thirteen, Charlotte began to worry that she and her siblings were growing up feral, she happened to overhear an aunt remark, “They’re shockingly civilized kids.”

Morty still calls the trip to Israel the family’s last hurrah before the divorce the following spring.

They also had twin sisters three years older than Charlotte, who were not invited to the trip because they had run away to join a commune after one year in college. Charlotte and Morty agreed that if they’d been able, they’d have run away, too. They’d have driven to Japan.

The bar mitzvah was anticlimactic. It took an hour to locate a rabbi and a minyan to hold the service because most men were away on military duty. Morty, after a year of memorizing his Torah portion, had to skip to the end of his reading because of shelling in the near distance. Charlotte could hardly see the event because men and women prayed separately at the Western Wall, and she was a girl.

Jerusalem, oh Jerusalem. The name was like music. After green Connecticut, sandy, beige Israel felt otherworldly. Soldiers bravely stood guard on every rooftop. A sense of extreme urgency was pervasive. Everyone had to act now. As the family toured gates, tombs, temples, and tunnels, they learned about assimilation and resistance, defeat and conquest.

On the family’s third day in Jerusalem, Charlotte and Morty saw the Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, and the American newsman, Mike Wallace, huddled in intimate conversation in the hotel lobby. “It’s a small country,” someone remarked. “You’ll see many influential people.”

Her mother made Charlotte swipe food from the hotel breakfast buffet every morning for lunch. She ate enough hard-boiled eggs and oranges for the rest of her life.

With the bar mitzvah completed, the family relaxed. Charlotte fell for a brown-haired waiter at the hotel. After colliding near the ladies’ room, he apologized for taking her down. She said he could make up for it by taking her out. In Yiddish, that’s chutzpah; in English, ovaries. His name was Asher.

Asher asked where she was headed next. “Masada,” she said, “then Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem again, and finally Athens.” Asher loved Masada and offered to escort her if she wanted to see it twice. They hatched a plan.

Every day, Israel seeped into Charlotte’s heart. She could hardly wait to get back to Jerusalem to tell Asher about what she had seen of the country.

A week later, the family returned to Jerusalem. Charlotte, hoping to excuse herself from touring with the family for the day, announced that she had menstrual cramps. Her mother allowed her to rest the next day at the hotel.

Instead, she met Asher.

He stepped out of a small green car waiting at the sidewalk two blocks down from the hotel very early the next morning. He held open the passenger door. She slid in.

She asked why he wasn’t away serving the country. He said that he’d been injured and had come home to recover. What had he learned to do in the army? What would he do when his leave was up? Was he looking forward to going back? He said she asked a lot of questions. He explained that he was technically on convalescence and working at the hotel as a favor to his uncle, one of the managers, but since the work was like therapy, it served them both.

At Masada they parked and headed up the mountain in a cable car. It was so early that nobody was around. Charlotte asked how many times Asher had been to Masada.

“About as many times as you’ve eaten eggs and oranges since coming here, but I love every visit. Everyone who visits knows the story, but everybody leaves with a different understanding of the place. It becomes their Masada.”

In the caldarium, the tepidarium, and the frigidarium, he recited the same history she’d heard, but the repetition increased her wonder. Approaching a shallow crevasse, he reached for her hand. She felt a zap, like electricity, running from his body to hers. He kissed her.

She’d kissed a few boys by then, but it always surprised her. As her mother had said when Charlotte was a child, a beauty she was not. She had a strawberry mark over her left eye, one blue eye and one brown, and two left feet. Had she grown up in a sports-oriented family, she’d have been a disaster.

“So what do you think so far?” Asher asked, bringing her back to earth.

“Fantastic. I can’t get over the idea that we’re walking over the Zealots’ footsteps. But why’s the sand a funny color here?”

“Some people say the sand contains minerals like basalt that turned it grey. Others claim there was a crematorium on the site, and the cremated bones were married into the land. Only, cremated ash isn’t really this color, and Jewish law doesn’t allow cremation. So the crematorium theory is unlikely, unless it was done by the Romans. We continue to debate.”

Charlotte wondered if she seemed naive. Of course she was naive. She was sixteen. She didn’t even know how to value peace.

Asher reached out, grasped her shoulder, and poured light from his eyes into hers. “You’ve made me feel well again,” he said. They kissed longer. He soon unbuttoned her peacoat, while she unzipped his leather jacket. He smelled like leather and aftershave. When he kissed her, he used his tongue to explore her teeth and the top and bottom parts of her mouth. It was exciting.

She remembered a painting by René Magritte called The Lovers. Two people kissing had drapes over their heads, which she thought meant that the kiss was more important than the people. Or was it about a forbidden kiss? A drape could be about hiding. Charlotte didn’t know anyone in Israel, but having the image pop into her mind probably meant that she should think twice about engaging in a public act of private affection. But she felt so swoony over Asher she didn’t want to stop. It startled her when he swooshed her down to the ground, where she landed on top of him without a bump. They rubbed together until he sat up, removed his jacket, and spread it on the ground beside them.

“Here,” he said, now steering so that he was on top. He loosened her shirt and the snap and zipper on her jeans and paused. “Stop?” he asked. He shot bright sunlight into her eyes again and another strong electrical zap. “I don’t want to pressure you. If I like you enough to make love with you, I want to protect you.”

“Don’t stop. Except, well, I’m having my period. That’s kind of gross.”

“Actually, it means it’s safer unless you’re at the end. Still, if you’d rather not?”

She shook her head. “It’s the beginning. I want to.”

Holding her gaze, he squatted between her knees, pulled down her jeans and his, and asked if she was ready. She nodded. She tried not to see his naked body because she wanted to keep their eyes locked. He put his penis inside her very gently. She had the feeling that a new muscle had been introduced into her body. She felt they were both kind of defenseless. She matched his movements, and they rocked in a synchronized way. She didn’t know the first thing about what she was doing. It was her first time having sex, and while it wasn’t perfect and kind of hurt, she was very intrigued. Just when she was wondering how long it would last, he reached a climax and relaxed onto her for a moment before flipping them both over so that he was on the bottom again. She felt something spurt out of her and worried about his jacket lining. He said he didn’t care.

She felt like a different person. It was just a little tear in a membrane hidden inside, but she felt that she’d absorbed Asher deep into her cells. She felt changed.

“You’re lucky to live in Israel.”

“I’d rather live in the United States.”

“You want to leave while I’d love to stay.”

“You wouldn’t love it if you did. The earth is flat here. Living so close to the edge means falling over the side. And you fall far.” He moved away, distancing himself. “Don’t fall for this place. War is horrifying.”

Approaching voices signaled that they were no longer alone. They pulled themselves together. It was strange to have an intimate moment and then have to cover up quickly the next. Asher swept her braids to the front of her shoulders. Then he took her hand to lead the way out of the -ariums. He asked, “You okay?”

She nodded. “Wait,” she said. “I want to remember this moment. I want some sand as a memento. Would that be terrible?”

“There’s not a single thing you could do that would be terrible. Only, how will you carry it?”

“The plastic bag from my egg and orange! At home, a test tube with a cork. Now I’ll have a precious bit of Israel to keep always. Maybe it will help me come back.”

“Here. My handful is bigger than yours,” he said, scooping sand into the bag. “You can decide how much to keep later.”

It was just ten-thirty when they arrived at the base of the mountain. They drove to Asher’s home, a modern apartment on Jerusalem’s outskirts. His parents were working, so they were alone. They sat on the sofa and necked until Asher stood up and said, “Listen, I don’t want to take advantage. You’ll go home, and that will be that.”

“But we’ll keep going,” Charlotte said.

“No. You live in another world. Our lives couldn’t be more different. I may never see you again.”

She said, “You never know what the future holds. I would love to move here someday. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, so why not consider it a possibility?”

“Okay, then let’s talk about today. We could go into town to visit my aunt’s gallery.”

They visited the gallery and a tea place where they sat on the floor. When he drove her back to the hotel, he parked two blocks away.

“Today was great, Asher. I won’t ever forget it.”

“You say that like you’re never going to see me again,” he said and laughed.

“We’ll see each other, all right,” she said in a singsong way. “You’ll write?”

“If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. You don’t know that about me yet, but it’s true.”

She kissed him on the cheek, ran back to the hotel, and dove into bed.

The next day, she learned from another waiter that Asher had gone to Eilat to visit family. She would not see him before her departure.

In Athens, still reeling from a November coup, Greek soldiers surveilled on every corner and rooftop. In 1973, peace was hard won.

It didn’t take long for Asher to correspond: six letters over four months. When Charlotte didn’t hear back after her last letter, she wrote Asher next about school and a weekend in New York with her grandparents. She didn’t tell him that her parents were divorcing. Writing would make it too real.

She wrote a third time to ask if he’d rather not correspond anymore. Maybe he’d met someone. Two weeks later, she received a letter from Asher’s mother explaining that Asher had died. She wrote that she hoped to make peace with his suicide eventually, but in that moment it made absolutely no sense.

Charlotte felt sick. She could hardly get up in the morning or fall asleep at night. Life was a complete blur. She felt as though she had a hole in her chest. Skating, her school sport that term, doubled her dizziness and nausea. Eating made it worse.

After two weeks, she decided that while Asher and she had been intimate friends, it was self-indulgent to let his death paralyze her when his mom and dad were the real victims. She wrote back to his mother to tell her what she’d admired in Asher and to express sympathy for her unspeakable loss. She felt selfish though, because she secretly hoped to hear from his mom again. She never did.

Ten years later, when she made her next trip to Israel, she looked up Asher’s family’s address and walked in his old neighborhood. She could not however bring herself to ring the apartment bell. What would she say? That she’d known Asher as a teenager? It would have been an unkind reminder of his terrible passing. Instead, she spent the remainder of her time in Israel with a reopened gash in her heart. She was now in her twenties and wondered if she would always feel small, self-indulgent, and naive.

Charlotte would always keep her test tube of sand. Asher had walked over that sand. Before that, the Zealots had walked over it and spilled blood and basalt or ashes into it. She wondered if anyone would ever walk over her footsteps and remember that she too had once been here.