BEFORE I LEFT FOR Budapest, I sent Bela a letter written in such a rush that I leapt straight into Hungarian: So now you’re in for it. So far as I can tell I’m entering a whirlwind, and if everything you led me to expect is true, my life is going to begin, which will include protecting you from cows, collecting your stray hats, and keeping you honest. I have both invented and applied for this job. Meet me at the station. I mailed that thing before I could think better of it and ran out the door of the post-office to double-check the schedule of the train.
I took the Szeged Express. The second-class compartment had brass ashtrays, wood paneling, and velvet cushions. I opened the window a crack. The fringes on the curtains fluttered. I had worn a traveling suit that matched the green upholstery. What did I have in mind? To become the car itself? Who knows? I could have closed my eyes and still named every village on the way: Lajosmizse, Orkeny, Dabas, westward to Cegled. Above me was a new brown cardboard suitcase with leather trim, at my feet a carpetbag. We picked up speed. I had a deep sensation of fitting into my life like a hand into a glove—that exact, that wonderful.
The feeling lasted until I got to Nyugati Station. Aunt Monika stood on the platform. “Nora, dear. You have so little luggage.”
I looked past her, but I think I already knew.
She gave me a kiss. “I’m so glad you’re here. You can have his room.”
Bela and his friends had left for Trieste the week before. The departure had been sudden and at first Aunt Moni was vague as to the circumstances, but later my cousin Adele told me that some members of the group were under investigation as Communists and had to leave the country in a hurry. I demanded to know why the idiotic boys and girls in question didn’t emigrate to Vienna like everyone else, why they had to drag the whole group off to Palestine, and who Bela thought he was to leave his widowed mother and little sister alone at a time like this.
“A time like what?” Adele asked, and she tactfully ignored the fact that my own mother had been widowed less than a year before. “Honestly, Nora, you’d think this was a surprise. He’s had his passage paid for since last January.”
I spent my first week in Budapest ignoring the electric lights, the avenues, even the trams. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if Bela had received that letter before he’d gone, and sitting on the couch that served as Bela’s bed with its yellow crocheted cover, I pulled down the blinds of the window and stared at the bookshelves, reconstructing line after line of that letter until there seemed no question it had driven him away.
Yet before a week had passed, I got a letter: Take the train to Lublijana or the express straight through. Either way, you can make the boat to Jaffa. Don’t worry about the ticket. Dori will throw something together.
I wrote: I don’t want Dori to throw something together. I put the pen down, knowing that I would have to write something, but no words came to me. For the first time since arriving, I raised the blind and looked out the window. The room that had been Bela’s had a view of the onion dome of the Great Synagogue. Of course I had the shoe-boxes, three of them now. If I pulled them out and poured their contents on that yellow cover, could I piece something together?
Adele came in just then and asked, “Are those Bela’s old letters? Can I see them?”
I pushed the boxes under the bed, probably rudely, and she looked a little shocked.
“Nora,” she said, “won’t you come out with me to the cinema? There are some people you should meet.”
“You Hesshels are always asking me to do things,” I said to her.
“That’s because we like you,” said Adele. She’d grown up into a conventional beauty, with soulful eyes and lush black curls, and she spoke so graciously that there was no way I was going to believe her.
In fact, Adele had plans for me. She’d always wanted a sister. There was a closet full of clothing we could share. In a stupor of misery, I allowed myself to be taken up, taken up, I must add, like a dress with a low hemline. Adele spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out the best way to do my hair. I sat on the edge of her bed, digging my nails into the chenille spread as the comb raked this way and that.
“You have a gamin quality,” said Adele when she’d finished. She’d combed everything forward, right over my eyes. “You ought to wear a raincoat with the collar turned.”
“Good,” I said. “Then no one will be able to see me.”
“Honestly, Nora, I’m so glad you’re here. We’re going to have so much fun this summer. We’ll cheer each other up.”
When she said that, I was forced to realize that she too missed Bela. Then all was lost. I had to do exactly as she said.
SO THAT WAS HOW I found myself rushing all over Budapest with a troop of mostly Jewish girls and boys. The girls were fashionable, talkative, and from good families. Many of them were Adele’s friends from nursing school. The boys were, for the most part, just a little too young to have fought in the Great War or to have taken an active role in the Commune. They were younger brothers and they couldn’t fight battles or have strong opinions. Worse yet, after the Commune fell, a law had been passed that made it almost impossible for a Jew to get into a university. These boys wandered around Pest like pimpled ghosts and attached themselves to fun so desperately that they made it look like hard work.
There was one named Kalman Nagy, a tall, white-haired boy who always buttoned his collar to his chin and had a way of ending every sentence with a nervous giggle. I think he’d tried his luck with every girl in the circle before I had arrived, and he latched on to me almost at once, offering cigarettes from an oily-looking leather case and trying to take my arm when I got out of the tram. He took to calling for me at the Hesshel apartment every afternoon until I took a course in advanced shorthand just to avoid him. Even Adele admitted Kalman was a bit much. But, of course, she always had to open the door for him and offer him coffee.
“You can’t just write somebody off,” she’d say to me. “I met David because I was nice to his brother, and his brother is honestly the most unbearable person I ever met.”
David was Adele’s steady beau, a medical student. He was older, serious, dazzlingly handsome in a wavy-haired matinee idol way, clearly of a different class than the rest of the boys. Yet I never remembered a word David said. As for the unbearable brother, he tagged along one afternoon when we went to the cinema and proved his unbearableness by actually walking out of the film because he didn’t like it. Until that point, he hadn’t struck me one way or another, but afterwards I felt a stir of interest and asked Adele his name.
Adele’s face lit up. “Do you want me to arrange something?” All interest vanished on the spot.
“Look,” I said to Adele more than once, “I’m a lost cause. I’m not a social animal.”
“You really are a scream, Nora,” Adele said. “You should have known Bela’s circle from the Youth Group. They said the most horrible things about themselves but they all had egos big as houses. David went to school with Dori Csengery. You know she dresses like a man? Would you like me to arrange something?” she asked again.
“I can’t marry Dori Csengery,” I said to Adele. “Bela has to marry Dori Csengery.”
“Oh, everyone’s in love with Bela,” Adele said. She tossed the sentence off, and afterwards, I sat in that room that used to be his, stretching my legs out on his bed, and wondering if she had been fair. How could he help it if everyone was in love with him? At least he asked them all to join him in Palestine. Or he asked me.
Throughout the years, Bela would continue to write as though he assumed I would take the next boat to Palestine. Even when I met and married Janos, his opinion didn’t waver. When I had Gabor, he wrote about how much my son would like life at Tilulit.
Although I had no intention of leaving Budapest, I let him go on trying. I was flattered. After all, the boys and girls of Tilulit were remarkable by anybody’s standards—intelligent, brave, original, good-natured, witty, and, on the whole, good-looking. After their arrival, Ami Chai Jezreel helped them find an adobe house on the outskirts of town, and they got jobs on a road crew, working through the blazing heat with wet handkerchiefs draped over their heads. They shared rough Arab bread and handfuls of olives and drank a lot of coffee. Eleazar developed a taste for British cigarettes, but the group couldn’t afford them, so he settled for loose tobacco and rolling paper. But after a day of picking stones, his hands were so cramped that most of the tobacco fell on the floor.
We are completely unprepared, Bela wrote me. The months with the cow and the wheelbarrows were a joke. There are Pioneers here who have spent two years in training camps, and I won’t even mention the Arab workers who get paid a fraction of what we do and have families to support.
Then there was the afternoon he ran into Manuel Lorenz. Bela had gone to the office of the Jewish National Fund only to find that their request for land had, again, been denied, and when he stepped outside, the sunshine and heat had fallen on him like a mallet so that he had to sit down on what proved to be the stoop of a little restaurant with a verandah. The voice that called down in German was half-familiar:
“It’s the linguist! And brown as a nut! Well, don’t be shy, young man, unless you think you’re too good to have a cold drink with me.”
Bela looked up and could barely see the figure under the canopy, but recognized first the mustache and then the narrow jaw and small, bright eyes. “Well, sir, I can’t—”
“No money? I have money. Come on, young man. It’s only lemonade, not cognac. I won’t compromise your principles.”
Bela stood on shaky legs and managed to make his way onto the verandah. At once, he regretted his decision. Lorenz was not alone. He shared a table with a gentleman Bela recognized as the manager of the road crew and an Arab in a robe and headdress who raised his cup of Turkish coffee in greeting.
Lorenz did not bother to introduce the two men, but said to them of Bela: “See? He calls me sir. That’s very typical of his type. They call each other Comrade, but put them before their elders and the Prussian manners surface. Well, young man,” he said to Bela, “do have a seat. There’s a real Arab here. Won’t you address him in Arabic? Or perhaps you’d like to write him a seditious leaflet.”
The Arab twinkled at Bela, who remained tongue-tied and did not sit down.
“My dear boy,” Lorenz said, “I did offer you a cold drink. Did you just come up here to stretch your legs?”
Bela spoke deliberately in Hebrew. “Ha shemesh chazak.”
Lorenz smiled. “Well, so it is, very hot. Stay under this nice cool awning for as long as you like. Would you care for a cigar?”
“He’s too pure for cigars,” said the owner of the road crew. “He’d want to divide it into fifty pieces and share it with his comrades.”
“This is really fascinating,” said the Arab in excellent German. “He doesn’t have that stunned look you see in most of them. I’m familiar with the Russian type. From before the war. Worked alongside the coolies and fell into a dead faint half the time. We buried at least a dozen of them.”
“At your own expense?”
“Naturally. What money did they have?”
“There’s a patron for you, young man,” said Lorenz. “As good as Rothschild. It certainly is one way to get yourself some land.”
Bela put up with this for a moment longer before taking his leave. Lorenz did make a final attempt to make him stay for lemonade, and in fact, a fat, sweaty glass pitcher sat at the center of the table, clinking with ice. Bela shook his head.
“Are you always planning on acting against your own best interest?” Lorenz asked him as he turned to go.
Bela said his last words in German to be certain he was understood. “No, sir. But you won’t be the one to determine my best interest.”
“That’s too bad,” said Lorenz, but he turned back to his drink and conversation and let Bela leave the restaurant in peace.
IT WAS Nathan Sobel who eventually returned with the news that the Jewish National Fund had granted them a thousand dunam of land in the Galilee. He’d run to the office during lunch and returned with the documents raised up in his fist in a gesture of victory. They dropped their shovels and let out a whoop that made the other laborers drop their own tools and walk over to find out what had happened.
One young Arab said, “I know that part of the Galilee. The soil’s no good.”
By then, most of the comrades understood a little Arabic, but Bela had to translate Nathan’s response. “Soil can be fertilized.”
“Well, what will you plant there?” the man asked.
Sobel answered, “Whatever we choose to plant, we’ll plant. We’re not afraid to work.”
Bela found the simultaneous translation tiring, and eventually he took the man off to the side to ask him about the region, what his own village planted, how they fertilized, what water sources they found and how that water was transported, and he pressed a little too hard. The worker stopped him with an upraised hand.
“Listen, you think that if that land gave anything back, I’d be here clearing stones?”
Bela shrugged and said, “Aesef sadiq.” He felt a brief, quick sinking of the heart but made himself speak again and asked him, “Momkid taeqolli aeynae . . .” Midstream, he pulled an old map from his pocket and shook out its folds. The young man squinted, and his finger climbed along the ridges to a point just south of Safed.
“Taell al-Taji,” he said.
Taell meant hill. As they debated names that night, it was Bela who pushed for a Hebrew variation: Tilulit.
They gathered all their old and new friends in their favorite ice-cream shop—a dilapidated storefront with its screen door half-off the hinges—and they overtook the place, polishing off whole tubs of strawberry, lemon, and tutti-frutti. Sandor climbed on a stool and turned an empty tub into a drum, and Tibor took up his mouth organ and played. Completely drunk on cream and sugar, they pushed back the flimsy tables and danced, gripping each other’s shoulders, knocking over chairs, rattling the walls.
“I want you to call me Arielle!” Dori screamed in Bela’s ear. “I want to be a daughter of Zion!”
Bela gave her a squeeze. “You’re still a mouse.”
“Mice are vermin! They’re Galut!”
Eleazar grabbed her then and spun her at the center of the circle. The owner despaired, announced he was going to bed, and let them close the shop themselves at dawn, when they fell asleep in a fragrant and slightly sticky heap in that adobe house they would soon leave forever.
THIS HISTORY OF Tilulit came to me by way of Bela’s letters, hardly the most reliable of sources. Bela doesn’t lie, but Bela tends to overlook divisions, petty squabbles, and everyday annoyances—a quality which, at points, drove me mad. The first years couldn’t have been easy. Yet Bela wrote about the first working shower, the Hebrew poetry Tibor set to melodies he’d heard in the Arab village, the village itself, Taell al-Taji, which lay just over a gully, white and silent.
Bela was the go-between. He must have been a spectacle, appearing in that village in his worn gray trousers with the cuffs rolled up and a half-buttoned white shirt, one hand steadying his bicycle. Palestine hadn’t cured him of his fear of bridges, and he had to ride that bicycle kilometers out of his way to find a land-crossing. In Taell al-Taji, he paused by an open doorway where two old men crouched. They offered him coffee which he drank down at once; it had been a long, dusty ride.
The older of the two had a jaw like a nutcracker and only a few teeth in his head; his Arabic almost eluded Bela. “A very beautiful machine you have. The British make beautiful things.”
“It’s German,” Bela said, and he felt foolish; what difference did it make?
The younger man broke in. “There are how many of you Muskovites in those tents?”
Bela accepted the name. It was better than what the Arabs commonly called the Jews: the Children of Death. He said, “There are seventeen of us.”
The man was silent for a moment, running his finger along his mustache and letting it linger at the edge of his mouth. “You plan to do what?”
“We plan to farm,” said Bela.
The man waved his hand dismissively. “Farming won’t make you rich. You should keep bees.”
Bela crouched beside the bicycle and set his chin in his hand, settling in to listen as the man unraveled the mysteries of bee-keeping, of hives, honey, beeswax, and also of the intricate and fascinating lives of the bees themselves. This, Bela outlined in a letter that reached me not so long after I married Janos. The bee-keeper, Ahmad, invited Bela to see his own hives. Remarkably, Ahmad wore no net, and as Bela watched from a respectful distance, he allowed his front and forearms to grow fuzzy and yellow and alive with bees.
Honey from the honey-comb, Bela wrote, is nothing you can get off a shelf. I brought it back to where I knew it would be treasured. Vera made a honey-cake but most of it we just ate with our fingers. We had a long meeting about something afterwards—some of those meetings last all night—and Mouse took notes and kept the honey-pot next to her. The pages got all stuck together.
Ahmad agreed to train some of the boys in bee-keeping. He came at first on foot and then took pleasure in the kibbutz gift of the bicycle. He became a fixture near the foundation of what would become the dining hall, sitting on a blue three-legged stool surrounded by David, Sandor, Eleazar, and a few more wondering, adolescent boys, speaking Arabic Bela would translate. He helped them build hives and allowed those hives to be painted yellow, though that seemed, to him, ridiculous. He saw them through their first harvest and admitted that the honey was acceptable. His motivations seemed, to me, obscure. Why would he want competition? Bela attributed to him an altruism which seemed ridiculous. He’s a neighbor, Bela wrote, and knows what a neighbor is.
I wrote: He must like bossing Muskovites.
But Bela replied, You’re thinking like a Galut Jew. He’s at home in his life. Can you imagine?
That line must have been the only hurtful thing Bela ever wrote to me, implying that I was not at all at home. I started a few letters back, some sharp, some simply base justification. Finally, I wrote: No, I can’t imagine. I have a poor imagination. Send me physical evidence or I won’t believe you.
In a package that contained a beeswax candle and a letter twelve pages long, Bela described the first anniversary of the founding of Kibbutz Tilulit. They still lived in tents, but they had built a cowshed and a dining hall, and there was talk of a generator, which would mean hot water for the shower and eventually electricity. Soon they would start a nursery. Bernadette and Tibor were expecting a child. Eleazar’s school fellows were on their way, twenty of them by all accounts, maybe more.
WHEN I RECEIVED the candle, Janos had just started his first semester at the Polytechnic. Those were the best days of our marriage. He came home straight from his class to study in our tiny dormitory room. Wintertime, we moved his desk right up against the gas heater, and as he read me bits of his engineering textbook, I would keep my stocking feet on his lap and he would rub them absentmindedly. Once in a while, he would dislodge the bag of lenses I had received from Laszlo, and he would tell me how glass fractured light.
One day, he turned one of the lenses towards the window and sent a beam of light straight at the candle.
“But your papers,” I said. The room was overflowing with things that could catch on fire.
Janos was in an unusual mood, almost playful, and he said, “Do you think you married a pyromaniac.” I held my breath, but the beam was exact: the wick smoked, sizzled, and took.
The candle had a steady flame and it smelled good. Janos stretched back his neck and frowned. Then he took out his measuring tape. There was a lot of afternoon sun in that room and he made a careful calculation of the angle of the shadows, the height of the flame. All the while, the wax dripped down. I was afraid he would set the room on fire, so I leaned over and blew the candle out.