The Covenant Read Online Free Page A

squirmed.
    Reluctantly, Elise released her. It was going to be such a long day for her; even longer than usual. She hated having liana in day care. She missed her terribly, and knew the child was confused and upset by her exile from home and from her mother. But there was nothing to be done. “I’m sorry I won’t be at the recital, liana. But Aba will tell me all about it…”
    “But you won’t see me, Ima! I can do it for you now!” She started dancing, hands on hips. Then all at once, she leapt across the room, landing smack in the middle of the bed.
    “liana! What are you doing!?” Elise shouted, cradling herself protectively, her voice shaking. She pushed liana off the bed.
    The child stared, her eyes widening, her mouth trembling in a doomed attempt to hold back the sobs, which finally culminated in a terrible wail of insult and injustice.
    “Uh-oh, everything all right in here?” Ruth enquired, sticking her head into the room.
    “Fine—go on, liana. Can’t you see Ruth’s waiting?” Elise said, mortified and miserable. liana went limp as Ruth bent down to pick her up. The child laid her head on the neighbor’s shoulder, sucking her thumb as she stared at her mother in wordless disappointment.
    Elise stared back, helplessly. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that child… It’s all my fault. I’m so totally useless. Jon won’t let me do anything…”
    “Don’t blame yourself! Just enjoy it while you can, Elise. When the baby comes, you can forget about lying in bed at all hours… Remember what I say.” She grinned.
    “Don’t I know it? Is it seven-thirty yet?”
    Ruth checked her watch. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”
    “Put on the radio, will you?”
    “Do you really want to start your day with the bad news?”
    “Why bad?”
    “What other kind is there these days?” Ruth murmured, fiddling with the dials until the familiar beep-beep-beep that heralded the news suddenly went on and both women fell into a tense silence.
    For the last two years, news broadcasts had brought horrors into theirlives that neither could have ever imagined. Suicide bombers detonating themselves in children’s playgrounds, sending baby carriages flying, killing grandchildren and their grandmothers. Sniper fire into the foreheads of ten-month-old babies in their carriages. The bloody murder of two fourteen-year-old boys, playing hooky to gather firewood for the Lag B’Omer bonfires, their beautiful young faces found crushed beyond recognition in a nearby cave. Crimes that belied the humanity of those who had committed them. Today the news opened with the funerals of two sixteen-year-old yeshiva students killed by a terrorist who walked into their dorms and opened fire; and the Israeli army attack on the car of a wanted terrorist, in which a nine-year-old girl was killed as well.
    “Why are your eyes wet, Ima?” liana asked.
    “Are they?” Elise smiled, wiping her eyes and reaching out to tickle liana’s tummy. Ruth had dressed her in the red T-shirt that said: “I’m pretty enough to eat,” and a pair of blue shorts and brown sandals. She looked adorable.
    Iliana giggled, twisting away, trying to tickle Elise back.
    Ruth caught the child’s hand: “Say shalom to Ima , liana.”
    “Don’t want to. Want to stay home,” she whimpered, squeezing her mother’s elbow with her small fingers.
    Elise studied the child’s bright eyes, her solid, perfect little body with its protruding tummy still covered with tender baby fat. She thought of the road into Jerusalem, the long, winding road past Arab villages and dark-leafed olive trees that camouflaged roadside dangers. That’s what terror does, Elise thought. Unlike the healthy sense of mortality most people came to terms with—the idea that you would have your eighty years or so and then die—here you were being asked to accept a minute-by-minute uncertainty, so that even kissing a child good-bye and sending her off to school seemed like a tragic,