Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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sun rose slowly before her. In Jerusalem she cooked meals with her friends and ate with them and celebrated and demonstrated and laughed and mourned and belonged.
But now she’s here in Toronto, supposedly back “home” — though home for her is still there — because her father, aged seventy-two, got sick. Her mother had been dead for nine years and there was no one else to take care of him. So, loving him, Judith has been doing this as well as she can for the past nine months. (Nine months — long enough to have a baby.) Nine months of watching her father gradually weaken, and get thinner, yellower, and bonier, the life leaking out of him till there was nothing left. Fortunately, he has had relatively little pain, and this is easily brought under control by morphine. His could be called A Very Easy Death, she thinks now, recalling the bitterly titled book by Simone de Beauvoir about the months leading up to the death of her mother. At least Judith’s father has remained lucid all the way through, and this has been a great blessing. Even as recently as yesterday he spoke to her and made perfect sense. Half-sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, he took her hand in his, and said, “Judith, dear, you must go back to school. You said last month that in Israel it takes forever to do a Master’s, but that here it’s just a one-year program. So stay here, Judith, for a year, and do it. I’m not a rich man — I can’t leave you provided for the way I would have liked to. You’re going to have to stand on your own two feet.” He didn’t say “when I’m gone,” but it hung in the air between them. And now he looked at her expectantly. She realized he was asking her a direct question — he wasn’t, as she’d thought, just making a suggestion. She looked back into his eyes. Dying eyes, she thought. But no, those eyes couldn’t be dying. His body maybe, but those eyes of his, so full of intelligence and warmth, would never die.
“Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll do my Master’s.”
There was an obstruction halfway down her throat when she said that. She’d held out a long time against this. She didn’t want to leave Israel, even for twelve months, and she didn’t want to do the same thing as everyone else, following the usual well-worn path. She wanted to be different. But yesterday, though that lump in her throat was still there when she spoke — a physical hurdle in her voice box that she had to leap over, like a horse over a fence in an obstacle course — it wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be. Maybe because of the relief, joy, and hopefulness that immediately suffused her father’s face. It filled her with astonishment — it had been so easy to make him happy. Then he turned his face away and instantly fell asleep. This conversation had cost him a great effort.
Now, just one day later, she is again sitting on this bed and holding his hand. This hand is warm. Though she knows it won’t be for long. In a couple of hours — or maybe even less than that — her father’s hand will turn cold and rigid. But this is not important. All that matters, all that’s real to her, is that for now it’s warm. It is still Daddy’s hand, the same as always. Tears stream down her face, but she doesn’t feel sad. Why should she? Daddy’s not dead. He can’t be dead; he’s her father. It is late afternoon, and she sits for a long time staring out the window at the slowly falling night, holding — as if this moment will last forever — her father’s unmoving, gradually stiffening hand.
Four days later she tells one of the women at the shiva, an old friend of her father’s, that she’s planning, at her father’s request, to go back to school here in Toronto. She asks this woman what she should study now — should she stay with social work, or try something new?
Flora laughs her big horsey laugh.
“You should study, of course, what you already know, my dear. It makes things so much easier.”
Two days later, on a hot June day, Flora returns to the shiva house, carrying a tub of pistachio ice cream and an application package for the only Master of Social Work program within driving distance that has not yet closed its admissions.
Judith frowns at the name on the envelope. “Wasn’t Dunhill in the papers a few months ago because of a student riot?”
“Yes,” says Flora. “A rally there got out of hand. But never mind about that. You don’t have to have anything to do with the Students’ Union. You just go to your classes and do your homework, and everything will be fine. Anyway, at this point you don’t have any choice. This is the only school still accepting applications — it’s the only game in town.”
The only game in town. Her father always said that. She thanks Flora and puts the big brown envelope on the kitchen shelf. A few days after the end of shiva, Flora phones and comes by again. From the shelf where she saw Judith place it, she takes down the unopened application package, and with Judith sitting dully next to her, dazed and paralyzed with grief, she painstakingly fills it out. Three weeks afterwards, Judith receives a letter saying she has been accepted into the M.S.W. program at Dunhill University.
— 2 —
A glorious sunny day in September, and after a one-hour drive, Judith arrives at the gates to the university in Dunhill, Ontario. She doesn’t want to be here, in exile; she wants to be home in Israel where she belongs. She resents being stuck here for the year because of the stupid promise she made to her father. She stomps around the campus for a half-hour looking for the School of Social Work. She’s here for Orientation, but she feels totally disoriented. The social work school is housed in a silo-like building, the Franklin Ardmore Rutherford Tower, which, for obvious reasons, the campus map does not refer to by its acronym, FART, but simply as FRANK. She climbs the front steps. Once inside, she waits for the elevator with two chatting women. One is a very plain redhead, the other pretty, dark-haired, and flamboyant. The three of them ride up to the eleventh floor. Room 1104 is a big square corner room with large picture windows on two sides, and through these windows Judith sees a big grey-stoned quadrangle eleven floors below her with students crossing it back and forth. The room itself is bright and cheerful, thanks to the large windows flooding it with sunlight, some of this refracted through orange woven curtains, giving everything a warm, fiery glow. It is full of talking, laughing people, mostly women, and Judith, not knowing anyone, mills around, nodding and smiling at whoever she passes, trying to look unobtrusive, un-lonely, and un-lost. She keeps walking as if she’s preoccupied with looking for a friend or has a destination — perhaps someone she knows on the other side of the room. After ten minutes of walking in circles and picking at the handouts and cookies on the long table at the back, she hears a loud thumping. A burly grey-haired man in a green cardigan is pounding on a table at the front of the room.
“Okay, everybody,” he calls out. “Take your seats so we can start.”
Almost all the gold or orange easy chairs are already taken. Within seconds nearly everyone is seated except Judith. She alone will be left standing, with everybody staring at her, like the loser in a game of musical chairs. Desperately she glances around.
“Here,” says a cheerful voice. A young blonde woman in a lime-green blazer is smiling at her and patting the chair on her left.
“Thanks,” Judith says, gratefully sitting.
“No problem,” says the woman, extending her hand. “I’m Cindy.”
The hand is dry and cool to the touch. “Judith,” says Judith, and is about to say more, but the burly man is rapping the table again and starting to speak.
“Good morning,” he says. “I’m Lawrence Weick, Director of the Dunhill School of Social Work, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here today. You’ve made an excellent choice in selecting this school for your graduate studies. As you’ll soon see for yourselves, we have an outstanding faculty, as well as a very select group of students. It may interest you to know that this year, for your one-year M.S.W. program, there were eighty-four applicants and only twenty-eight spots. In other words, for every one of you sitting here now, we turned away two others.”
A buzz, surprised and pleased, runs through the room. Judith and Cindy grin at each other. Cindy shrugs.
“So you should all feel very proud of yourselves,” Weick continues, “and we’re delighted to welcome you to the 2002–2003 academic year. As most of you already know, we at Dunhill take