P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“In your humble American opinion.”

He laughed. “Yes, in my humble American opinion.”

“A waste.”

“Yeah, a waste.” He tripped over a rock trying to keep up with her and nearly went sprawling. She turned to face him.

“Is that what you did, Mr. Hall? When your Adrian did her disappearing act? Did you jump right back into life? Did you go find another woman? To avoid the waste ?”

Again her vehemence startled him. “It’s not quite the same,” he began, somewhat defensively. He couldn’t see her face in the shadow of sunset, but her voice was trembling.

“You said it was. We were in the same boat, you said.”

“Well, I guess we’re not, are we? I kept hoping, believing when no one else did that she was coming back. That she would call. E-mail. Something. When I finally realized she’d dumped me, I finally accepted it.”

“And then?”

“And then, I did nothing, for a while. Then my friends started to invite me to parties or outings where there was always an unattached woman. I went through the motions, but…”

“Me, too,” she said, surprising him. “Same thing. But…”

“Well, it’s not like I haven’t seen other women since then. I just haven’t met the right one to marry, that’s all. At least I’m looking. I finally recognized that you have to do something to make something happen.”

She gave a snort of derision. “That’s what it is about you Americans, I think,” she said. “You think that every situation can be, I don’t know, what’s the English— fixed ? Fixed as long as you do something. You people go all over the world fixing things, doing things, whether or not you should, whether or not the people involved even want them fixed. Iraq. Afghanistan. Who’s next, I wonder.”

“Ah,” he said. He turned back toward the hostelry and started walking again, forcing her to catch up with him this time. He had to acknowledge, though: Her life right now might be precisely what she wanted.

“Ah?” she echoed. “What does this mean, this ‘ah’?”

“Never mind, Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “I guess I’m just another ugly American. You were right: I’ve been making assumptions. Please forgive me.”

That silenced her, and she remained silent as they picked their way through the reeking patches of solidified alkaline wastes back toward the road. He got to the road first and waited for her. The tour buses were all gone, and the security floodlights up at the tourist center pointed hot white eyes at them. Her face was a white blur in the darkness along the empty road. He turned to head up toward the hostel.

“Please go on,” she said. “What assumptions?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“Yes!” A moment. “No. Please.”

“It’s the romantic in me, I guess,” he said, trying to keep it light. “I assumed you were looking for love.”

“What do you mean by love, Mr. Hall?”

He smiled in frustration. Damned woman. Now she did want to talk. “Well, the older I get, the more I feel that love is an accommodation more than a pursuit. Two people who meet and like each other. As friends first, and then as lovers in the physical sense. Who grow to care for each other. Who can give each other affection. Who have enough similar interests that they can enjoy doing things together, but don’t get upset over being apart occasionally. Who’ve outgrown all those unreasonable expectations we had when we were starting out. Grown-up love.”

She didn’t reply for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “That sounds like love to me. Except perhaps for the being apart bit.”

“Well, if you live entirely alone, dwelling on or in the past, you are by definition being apart.” He paused and then said, “The folks I’ve known who kept themselves apart from life usually ended up on the bottle, or drugs, or in frequent contemplation of a premature exit.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath as she stopped in her tracks and then turned to face outward toward the sea. He mentally kicked himself. He had touched a nerve. He stopped behind her, close enough to reach out and touch her shoulders, but kept his hands to himself. He looked out over the purpling waters. He could just detect the scent of her hair on the evening breeze. What are you doing? a warning voice in his head asked.

“You have to be out there for love to happen, Judith Ressner. Memories are simply not enough to sustain life, not until you get very old.”

She didn’t reply for a minute, and when she did it was in a very soft voice. “They are very good memories.”

“Want to tell the ugly American about them?”

Surprisingly, she did. She sat down on a flat-topped boulder, and he did likewise, startled by the residual warmth in the stone. He noticed that, sitting together, they were the same height.

She told him about her short life with Dov Ressner: the way they were so evenly matched intellectually, he the physicist, she the linguistics historian, not having to protect each other from the sharp edges of their own intelligence; their casual, almost bohemian existence after he finished his schooling and went to work for the government, while she worked to achieve the Ph.D. She described their mutual love of the outdoors and diving, their expeditions to Eilat and Caesarea, and the many recreational dives they shared along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine and in the Red Sea.

Then she talked of how, as time passed, he had become disillusioned about what was really going on at Dimona, struggling to live up to his promises of keeping the government’s secrets but making it clear that he felt he was being used to facilitate something truly awful.

“I probably should not be speaking about that,” she said.

David knew a great deal more about Dimona than he was willing to let on. “Well, you’re right about Dimona,” he said casually. “I mean, that’s hardly a secret anymore. Everyone assumes Israel has a nuclear weapons capability, which is the whole point of the exercise. Nuclear weapons are basically useless except as a deterrent. If people don’t think you have them, then having them is pointless.”

“Yes, but there is a difference between your assuming it and a government scientist coming right out and stating it as a fact.”

“Your husband did that?”

“Not… precisely, but he did take part in an anti-nuclear-weapons demonstration once. That caused a lot of trouble, for both of us. We even argued about it before he did it — and after. The site management took it as a major security breach. We had to spend some time with some very unpleasant officials. I thought we were going to lose everything, and I had not finished my Ph.D. yet. Our income, our apartment, everything depended on his job. Yet…”

“For him, it was a matter of principle?”

“Yes, exactly, and one of the most appealing things about Dov was that he was a principled man.”

“How did you fix it?” he asked.

“Fix it. That word again.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“No, actually, ‘fix it’ is an Israeli concept, too. Dov had a friend in the LaBaG who became something of a mentor, really.” She looked sideways at him. “Your interlocutor, Professor Ellerstein? He emigrated from America. He is a mathematician. He actually worked at Dimona for a while. He was sympathetic to LaBaG’s cause, but the fact that he was a member of LaBaG was a secret. I think that’s why he left Dimona, finally.”

David’s brain was churning. He knew some of this, courtesy of Ellerstein, but didn’t want her to know that he knew.

“Anyway, he ‘fixed’ it. Dov had to make amends, had to do some publicity work to restore the peaceful image of Dimona. Still, for several months, it remained very difficult for us, both at work and at home. Dov kept telling me that the program out there had gotten out of hand. That they were reaching for something they did not need. In the end, though, they needed him, so they kept him on.”