SHE ARRIVED IN A truck with the orphans from Kiev, and like the rest of them, she spoke no Hebrew, and like the rest of them, she smelled like garbage from the freighter where they’d stowed away. The truck was a flatbed, and the thirty-some boys and girls on board looked like dumb animals, with faces so empty of curiosity that it was hard to remember what they’d risked to come to Palestine.
Bela helped unload them; it was hard to think of it as anything but unloading. Hoisting body after body from the bed of the truck, he had to steady himself against the wheel. After a while, he tried whispering a little encouragement in Russian, but it had no effect. How could they give them a welcome? It was too dark; the atmosphere was too tense. Since the land-purchase, relations with Taell al-Taji had deteriorated beyond hope, and it was probably a mistake to take in newcomers at all.
Lifting another human being down from the flatbed, Bela tried his Russian again. “You’ll get a hot shower soon.”
The answer came back in French. “Are you implying I stink?”
Bela almost dropped the girl, who shimmied out of his hands, grazing the front of his trousers with her breasts, and then she emerged and shook out her thick dark hair. Somehow, though there wasn’t much of a moon, Bela had never seen anything quite as clearly as that girl. He rubbed his chin for no particular reason, and then stepped backwards, though there was nowhere to go, and finally spoke French back. “Your accent is excellent.”
She rolled her eyes, which were shaped like almonds and fringed with thick lashes. “Yours is passable.”
Meanwhile, the last three orphans had gotten tired of waiting, and they climbed down on their own. One of the young men gave Bela a long look; he could have been that girl’s boyfriend or her brother, or maybe he was just sending a warning. They were herded to the clinic where Dori checked them for lice and then gave them leave to shower. As the boys and girls stripped separately, Bela stood by Dori’s side and remembered the early days of Tilulit when the men and women showered together. There had been no ideological reason for the shift in policy, though he did notice that it coincided with the arrival of that first group of Poles back in ’34.
Dori said to Bela, “They’ll be a lot of work. I don’t have a clue what they’re carrying from that boat, not to mention psychological trauma.”
“They’re excellent human material,” Bela said. “A little raw, but excellent.”
“I can’t tell when you’re joking anymore,” Dori said to him.
“No, I’m not joking really,” Bela said. “They’re young. How young are they, exactly?”
“The oldest is eighteen.”
“That’s the girl?”
“Which girl?” Dori asked him, though of course he’d only noticed one, and she knew it.
“The one with all that hair.”
“She’s got head-lice,” Dori said. “We’ll have to cut it off. She’s seventeen. Or that’s what it says on her papers. She’s probably younger.”
Bela helped Dori clean up, and they walked back to their room. They’d shared that room for three years now, and it had more of Bela in it than Dori; he’d hung up checkered curtains and photographs of his family, and there were his newspapers and dictionaries and the boxes of letters from Hungary piled in a corner. Dori contributed only her medical diploma mounted on cardboard, and a sewing kit arranged as precisely as surgical instruments on an end-table. Bela would occasionally borrow the scissors to cut an article out of a newspaper and forget to return them, or worse, he’d pass them on to someone else. She’d get no rest until they were back in place.
“How can you be so attached to a pair of scissors?” Bela would ask her.
“Well, what if I have the urge to burn all those letters from your girlfriends back in Budapest?” she asked him.
“Then there’d be a fire in the room,” said Bela.
Dori shook her head and said, again, “I can’t tell when you’re joking anymore. Really, you didn’t used to be this way.”
WHAT WAY HAD Bela been, exactly? He wasn’t sure. The week after the arrival of the orphans, he found himself identifying strongly with the youngest, a thick-necked boy with rough red hair and a marvelous vocabulary of Russian curses. He wasn’t popular with the others. He always pushed himself to the front of the line in the dining hall, and when he didn’t get his way he’d raise his fist and shake it like a character in a bad melodrama. Bela tried holding him back, and telling him he had to wait his turn, but he wrenched himself free, and shouted: “Fucking sister-fucker! Don’t you dare fucking lay your faggot hands on me again!”
Bela was grateful no one in his own circle understood Russian. He kept his voice low. “Look, there’s plenty of food for everyone here.”
“Plenty of shit!”
“Calm down,” Bela said, and he realized he ought to leave the boy alone to make his own enemies, but he found himself reaching for his arm again. This time he felt someone grip him at the elbow, and he looked down and saw the orphan girl.
She spoke French. “Don’t play favorites, just because he limps like you.”
Bela hadn’t noticed that the boy limped at all. He backed up and landed on the edge of the trestle table where he made some attempt to pretend he’d meant to sit there. Now that the girl’s hair had been cropped off, she looked older, much older, in fact, than seventeen. Someone had dressed her in standard-issue shirt and shorts, but they didn’t fit her well, and she looked as though she were in the process of climbing out of them.
She said, “I’m Lenore. As in the poem by E. A. Poe.” She didn’t extend her hand as she introduced herself, and she also showed no sign of joining the line for supper. Bela felt a sudden urge to fill a plate for her, and at the same time couldn’t imagine her eating.
In fact, it was two weeks before he actually saw Lenore eat or drink. By then, he realized she was a little crazy, a case, as Dori would put it, of psychological trauma. All of the orphans had adjustment problems, and some took the form of nightmares or a perpetual stupor. A few, like the redheaded boy, had lost something deeper. It was as though they had forgotten how to live with other people. Reluctantly, Bela admitted that Lenore, too, was in this category. Nothing about her fit. She had no friends among the other orphans. She was incapable of ordinary conversation.
It was considered therapeutic for the orphans to be put to work at once. As they’d arrived during the rainy season, much of the work was in the dairy or the chicken coop. After a few weeks of classes, Bela had managed to teach the orphans enough Hebrew to follow basic instructions, and most of them seemed eager to learn. Left to themselves, they generally switched to Yiddish, but that was natural. Lenore never joined in.
There was a reason: Lenore spoke no Yiddish. Through one source or another, he pieced together part of her story. She’d been born in Moscow, and her father had been a professor of French Literature, and a translator of Symbolist poetry. He was arrested in ’38, and given the atmosphere in Moscow, her mother had thought it best to return to her own people in Kiev.
What did they find in Kiev? Bela didn’t know. It was considered bad form to bring up the past, and when Bela gave the orphans Hebrew lessons, he had to pretend not to understand the Yiddish conversations going on around him which would make reference, almost in passing, to outrageous things. Sometimes he would find his gaze lingering on Lenore, who sat in the left corner with her cropped hair and bare white arms, and who also seemed to be pretending not to understand.
Everything about the girl seemed studied, even her selfishness. When she’d manage to get cigarettes, she’d smoke them half-behind her hand, to make it clear that they were hers and no one else’s. Blowing the smoke through her fine nostrils, her expression would be unreadable, as though possession were a mystery, and she had no responsibility to help anyone understand what he couldn’t share.
ONCE, HE CAUGHT her leaving the dairy, with plastic gloves on her hands and her hair in a net; she smelled like sour milk and iodine. A few girls strayed behind, and when they saw Bela standing there, they giggled and called out to Lenore in Yiddish. Bela couldn’t quite make out what they’d said, and decided he didn’t want to.
He asked Lenore in French, “Do you understand them?”
She frowned, as though it were the strangest question in the world. “Of course I do.”
“So why do you speak French?”
“You said you liked my accent,” Lenore said. She pulled off her gloves, removed the hairnet, and shook out her furry half-grown hair.
“But don’t you get lonely?”
“You speak French,” said Lenore. “Don’t you have a cigarette?”
For some reason, Bela said, “I speak a lot of languages.” It felt as though he were bragging. The two of them had started walking together from the dairy to the orphans’ tents and as though to distance himself from her he mentally took note of the languages he spoke, and then he sorted them into Romance, Slavic, Germanic, and Finno-Ugric, and perhaps it was when they reached the threshold of her tent that he realized he didn’t know what to say to this girl in any of those languages.
He was so distracted that he only slowly realized Lenore had slipped a hand into the pocket of his trousers. In French, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Picking your pocket for a cigarette,” said Lenore.
“Lenore, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Yes I do,” she said. They were in the open, under a drizzling sky, but he had to admit that she probably did know what she was doing. She dug that hand a little deeper, and cupped it, as she leaned up towards his ear. “There’s a hole in your pocket.”
“You did that,” Bela said. He realized he was speaking Hungarian. It didn’t seem to matter. She pulled him around the side of a storage shed to a muddy bank, and somewhere in there she had stopped pulling, and he had started until he was struggling to get her muddy shorts and blouse off, and she was still fumbling with the buttons on his trousers from the inside, with no sense of urgency, and finally he had to free her hands and unbutton them himself.
Against the mudbank, Bela entered her, and she rose to meet him, face almost impassive. He felt he had to close his eyes, and the cool mud and warm body of this girl, the stench of sour milk and iodine, came over him and let him not think long enough to lose himself.
Afterwards, he rolled off Lenore. She looked half-squashed. There was mud in her hair, and all over her cheeks and breasts, and she retrieved her shirt and pulled it over her head. Her face emerged from the collar, and Bela tried to read it and couldn’t.
He said, “My God, this is terrible.”
“Bullshit,” said Lenore. She felt around for the shorts and panties and discovered they were still around her ankles. She stood up and pulled them back to her waist.
“I’m your father’s age,” said Bela.
“My father’s dead,” Lenore said. “Who says I want another one?”
Bela again was speechless. His private parts were still exposed. When he tried to rise to pull up the trousers, he put too much weight on his left leg and slipped, but Lenore caught him.
Out of breath, she gasped as she said, “Look at me.”
He did look at her. She still bore his weight. Her muddy neck was red with exertion and he had never seen her eyes so bright.
“See how happy it makes me,” she said, “to catch you when you fall?”
DURING THE NEXT year, Dori began to keep company with Yosef Ginzberg, a member of Beit Shemesh kibbutz, no stunner and no genius, but a man, Dori said, with a heart of gold. He courted her. She had never been courted before. He brought her coffee cakes he’d baked himself, and bottles of wine from the kibbutz vineyard. They’d eat the cake and drink the wine together in the room Dori was still theoretically sharing with Bela, safe in the knowledge that Bela wouldn’t come home. First Yosef stayed until the cake was gone and saved the rest of the wine for later. Then he stayed until the wine was gone. After a few months, he didn’t need any excuse to stay. He laughed a lot, and told her she was beautiful so often that she stopped thinking it was a joke.
Of Bela, Yosef said, “He missed his chance. He had you for twenty years.”
“Thirty,” Dori said. “We met in primary school.”
“He’s that old, eh?”
“That old,” said Dori. “Old as me. Can you believe it?”
She could joke about it now, barely. Bela was that old. Lenore insisted she was twenty, and maybe she even looked it now that she’d learned how to button her shirt correctly, but the whole thing was still preposterous.
Being Bela, he knew it was preposterous. He couldn’t shake off a lifetime of self-consciousness overnight. Dori couldn’t stay angry at him, especially after Yosef, but she was embarrassed for him, and their long friendship made her aware of his own embarrassment. There would be times at the dining hall when he’d be sitting beside that girl trying to get her to speak Hebrew, and she’d clearly be doing something nasty to him under the table, and suddenly, across the room, his eyes would meet Dori’s, and they’d both blush.
When he decided to marry Lenore, he told Dori before anyone else, or at least that’s what he claimed. He stopped into their room unexpectedly, and unfortunately Yosef was somewhere else that night. He broke the news, and then said, “It’s the only way to get her out of that tent.”
“Well,” Dori said, “she could leave the kibbutz.”
“Lenore? Where on earth could she go?”
Dori shrugged. She scooted herself back on their old bed, and hoisted up the first of his boxes of letters. “You’d better take these.”
“Wouldn’t it be possible for me to leave them here?” Bela asked her. “Just for a while.”
“I don’t think so,” said Dori. She tried to smile. She had to admit; he did look younger. That bitterness he had developed in the past four or five years had fallen away, and underneath was something she was almost afraid to touch. He leaned hard on his right leg and cocked his head in the other direction, and he looked sad and lost. He was half-crazy, just like the girl. She suddenly wanted to sit him down for one of the talks they always had. She asked, “Are you afraid she’ll read them?”
“She can’t read German,” Bela said. “Or Hungarian for that matter. I just think they’re safer here.”
Torn between love and self-respect, Dori wavered. Then she remembered Yosef, so she said, “I’m sorry. They can’t be safe anymore.”
BY THE TIME LENORE and Bela married, she was calling herself Leah, and spoke a poor but fearless Hebrew. The rabbi who married them was a stranger to Tilulit, and he said to Nathan Sobel, “It’s good to see two of those newcomers settling in.”
Nathan repeated the remark to Dori, who forced herself to laugh. “He’s picking up her accent,” she said.
“Well, maybe it’s for the best,” Nathan said. “He hasn’t done any real leadership work in months anyway, and he’s been restless. Leave him to his dictionaries and his wife and give some of the young people a chance. Maybe they’d be less likely to run off to some crusade in Europe.”
In fact, the demographics of Tilulit were alarming. Many of the young men had volunteered for the British army, and the kibbutz was often short-handed at harvest. For the first time, that year, they had brought in hired labor from Taell al-Taji. The decision hadn’t been easy, and Dori, for one, had opposed it strongly, though an Arab representative from the village argued, in good Hebrew, that it would be seen as a hand extended in friendship.
“It’s not friendship,” Dori said. “It’s an economic relationship. It’s inherently exploitative and it goes against bedrock ideology.” But she knew she was putting on what Bela had always called her “doctor voice,” and she was lost.
Bela would have agreed with her; she was sure of it. Ideologically, intellectually, they were almost always in complete accord. Even when they’d fought, at least he’d been there, with his chin in his hand and on his face that dubious and inquiring expression. She missed him.
AND WHERE WAS he? In the room he shared with his wife, a cluttered room far smaller than the one he’d shared with Dori, though possessing a hotplate, a wardrobe, and a little wash-basin. Leah accumulated things: She stole bowls from the dining hall and filled them with stones she liked; she picked wildflowers and dried them upside down over the window; she took other people’s laundry by mistake and then she washed it in the basin so they couldn’t get it back; she stubbed her cheap, strong cigarettes out everywhere. Amidst all this were Bela’s photographs, dictionaries, and boxes of letters.
One night, he came in and found her lying belly-down in bed, with her feet on the pillow and her head facing the door, smoking a Black Cat cigarette. There was a Hebrew-German dictionary open and a letter in her hand. She asked him, “Who’s Nora?”
Bela crouched and read the letter upside down. “That’s very old. Probably older than you.”
“Is she German?”
Bela said, “No, Lenore. She just wrote me in German. She was no more German than you are French.”
Though they spoke Hebrew in public, French remained their intimate language, and as Bela settled in beside her, it was in French that he addressed her, and in French he told her about my husband and my son, his mother and sister, and his father who had drowned in Lake Balaton. He showed her the photograph of Adele in the Arab gown.
“She’s beautiful,” Leah said. “You can tell she’s a saint. Where is she now?”
“Hungary,” Bela said.
“Then she’s dead,” said Leah. She said this, smoking her cigarette and letting ashes fall all over the brown flax blanket. She spoke with no particular urgency. Bela would have asked her what she’d meant, but she at once turned over on her back, and her loose hair fell across that photograph, and he forgot what she’d said. After they made love, sometimes he would dream that she was floating away in a clear, bright ether, and then he’d try to run after her and he’d call “Nora!”
When he called that name, sometimes he’d wake up, stunned and terrified, and there would be his wife beside him, asleep, with the cover half-pushed off her naked shoulders and two fingers pressed to her mouth as though she were calling for silence, or perhaps silencing herself.
HE DIDN’T LIKE THIS business with the letters and the dictionaries. He also felt helpless to stop it. He did remove the Hebrew-German dictionary from his room and gave it to the library; then he felt ashamed. Once, she confronted him with something he barely recognized, a leaflet he had copied twenty-five years before, with Arabic characters that looked like raindrops, branches, birds in flight. Below was his cribbed translation into Hungarian.
Unite with us, brothers. Show them we are not dogs, but men. If we walk out together they can not set one against the other. Our common Enemy is the Class System. Our common goal is freedom from Imperialism and a National homeland for all peoples Native to this country.
“Awkward,” Bela admitted. “Those capital letters—I don’t know what I was trying to reproduce. And so old. Why are you asking about old things?”
Leah asked, “Did you have brothers?”
“No,” Bela said. “I didn’t write that. Someone else did. Some of the early Pioneers wanted to organize the Arab laborers.”
“Communists?” Leah asked.
“Some of them,” said Bela.
“My father was a Communist,” said Leah. “He translated Lenin’s works into French, and also Trotsky’s.”
It was the first time she’d said anything about her father other than acknowledging his death, but she spoke with such indifference that it was difficult to know if she was entering new territory. She did ask him to teach her to write Arabic. The request surprised him so much that he said, “You can barely write Hebrew.”
“Well, Arabic is more my style,” said Leah. She lazed backwards when she said that and at the same time reached for the last cigarette in the pack. “Light this for me. And say something to me in Arabic.”
Bela said, “Limaezae tadhak?”
“No,” said Leah. “Something dirty.”
Bela turned red and was speechless, and Leah loomed up with that cigarette between her teeth and her dark hair in her face, and she laughed.
“You mean you don’t know anything dirty in Arabic? You’ve never had an Arab girl? I don’t believe it. All your girlfriends, none of them Arab? You’re lying to me.”
“Lenore,” Bela said, “don’t tease me.”
“And why not?” She suddenly spat the cigarette out and buried her mouth in his ear. “Tell me about the Arab girl. Tell me about the girl and tell me everything you did to her and everything you made her do.”
Bela tore himself from her, and addressed her in Hebrew. “Leah, there’s no Arab girl.”
“Yes there is,” Leah said, a little breathless. “You took her like a German.”
“No,” Bela said. “I’m not a German. I’m a Jew. I’m your husband.”
Leah looked up, and her hair fell from her eyes. “Can’t you pretend you’re a German? If I want you to?”
Bela couldn’t answer.
Then she sat up against the wall with her legs tucked against her chest. Bela sat beside her, though he was afraid to touch her. Then, imperceptibly, her head lowered, until her forehead touched her knees, and then her shoulders began to rock.
He gave in to his first impulse, which was to reach out and take her head from between her knees and look at her face. She didn’t resist. His heart turned over, because it was the face of a child, unmistakably, with swollen features and round cheeks and a soft, vulnerable forehead.
She said, “I don’t know if I can pretend either. What if they’re not dead, my father and my mother. I never saw them die. I left them. What if they’re still alive there?”
“But you’re here,” Bela said to her.
“Nothing that happens here matters.”
Bela said, “You matter. Do you know how much you matter? Do you know what kind of a life I had before I met you?” Even as he spoke, he realized he hadn’t known, until that moment, what kind of life he’d had.
“If they’re alive,” Leah said, “then what I did can’t be forgiven. I have to find them. And not just them. You don’t know how many, or what I’ve seen, and to know I’ve left them and to live, how could I live?”
Bela was tempted to tell her that she was better off as she had been, taking them for dead. But how could he say that to her when her anger and remorse had filled the empty place he’d always sensed in her. She took shape, and before him was not some sleepwalker, some Lost Lenore but a woman he didn’t recognize.
She turned that new anger towards him, and said, “You don’t know what I’ve seen, and you don’t want to know. But I don’t have a choice. Will you help me?”
The confrontation was direct. She all but spit the words, and he felt her face harden between his hands. He had the sensation of stepping off a precipice as he answered, “Yes, I’ll help you.”
HE TRIED TO explain the promise to Dori, who gave him a complete physical examination, and said, “They’d have to be crazy to let you into any army.”
“And if I go to Europe independently?”
“Then you’re crazy,” said Dori. “Maybe you want to captain one of those ships leaving from Romania, the ones that fit maybe a dozen wretches and get turned back by the British. Maybe you’ll rot in a detention camp in Cyprus and she’ll be happy.”
“You hear rumors about what’s going on in Europe,” Bela said. What rumors he referred to weren’t clear. He ran his hand backwards through his hair, and it stuck up, in comic contrast to his face. He was naked with the exception of a sheet which covered his private parts, and Dori saw that since they’d shared a bed, the hair on his chest had turned gray.
“Look,” Dori said to him, “if we thought about that stuff we would go absolutely crazy. We’ve got our work to do here. Powerful people in the movement are doing everything they can—”
“Like what?” Bela asked her.
“Like the illegals.”
“A handful.”
“Your wife was part of that handful,” said Dori. “The Yishuv saved her life.”
“We can’t go on with a few dozen at a time.”
“What do you want us to do? Get into our Jewish airplanes and bomb Berlin? We don’t have Jewish airplanes. We don’t have an army. We don’t have a state. And that’s why we’re here—not to save Jews but to build a state where we can be Jews.”
Bela shook his head. There was a finality to that refusal which Dori didn’t recognize. How could it be the end of the argument?
“What does she expect of you?” Dori asked, as Bela put on his trousers. “Does she want you to declare a personal war on Germany?”
Bela turned as he pulled the trousers up, and his bare back felt like a rebuke, as did his hesitation. It was only after he had buttoned up those trousers and reached for his shirt that he said to Dori, “It comes to what I expect of myself. Finally, that. We both have family in Hungary. I haven’t sent mine a letter in years. And Mouse, you know what I realized? I’d written them off.”
Dori said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was the spring of 1943.
“I’d written them off,” Bela said again. “I can’t now. Neither can Leah. She’s trying to volunteer to go there, maybe to contact the resistance. And me, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe go back to Hungary.”
“You’re crazy,” Dori said again, and now she was terrified because she realized, as certain as she saw that man buttoning his shirt in front of her, that if he went to Hungary, he’d be dead.
Then she found herself asking questions. What was the life of one man worth? What if, as a consequence of his death, lives were saved? Or what if, as a consequence of the deaths of five comrades, they gained a few kilometers of land? Or what, Dori asked me that day in her office in the clinic in Gan Leah, if as a consequence of six million deaths, we Jews got our state? These thoughts, Dori could admit to me years later, but then she could only see Bela, whom she loved, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him.
Bela said, “I’m not crazy. I only know I can’t keep living here at Tilulit, not like this. I can’t accept the terms.”
Dori, helpless, could only say, “Don’t leave.”
“I’ll try not to,” said Bela. And he did try.
LEAH, ALONG WITH two hundred others, volunteered to join the paratroopers who would be dropped all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The British chose thirty, three of them women. One of the women was Hungarian. Her name was Hannah Szenes. She was a poet who had come to Palestine, like Leah, not long before, and almost immediately after she landed in Budapest, she was captured. She died under torture. I’d never even heard her name until Dori said it to me that day in Gan Leah. Though Leah herself was not chosen to join the paratroopers, she returned months later, greatly changed. She arrived at the gate in an army jeep, and gave the driver a kiss before she leapt out, wearing a khaki jumpsuit and calling: “Where’s my husband?”
The first thing Dori noticed was that her Hebrew had lost the French accent, and the second thing she noticed was that she’d taken out a pack of Black Cat cigarettes and at once offered one to Dori, who was so surprised she took it.
Leah swung her way down towards their room, and there was a rifle slung across her shoulder, which somehow seemed to fit the rest of her. She laughed as she knocked on the door, as though the act of knocking on the door was, of itself, amusing. “Old man!” she called. “Don’t tell me you’ve got some other woman in there!” Bela had been napping, and when he opened the door, Leah pulled him back into bed, still laughing, and her sun-bleached hair came loose from her ponytail. When Bela gestured towards the rifle, she thought that was even funnier, and she pointed it at him.
“I order you to take off those pajamas,” she said.
Bela said, “It’s not loaded.”
“How do you know?” Leah asked, poking the mouth of it below the upmost button of the pajama-top.
Bela unbuttoned that top. The rifle eventually slipped from Leah’s hands, and as it cracked against the floor, Bela wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the thing go off.
SHE WAS ONLY BACK for a visit. She had joined the Palmach, and had made contacts which would prove useful in the months to come. Bela listened with a jealousy that stunned him, a jealousy of her youth. Kiev had been liberated. She would not drop there in a parachute, but she could shape the excellent human material she was into whatever she chose. There were sea-routes and routes overland. Pockets of resistance took shape even as the Russians liberated Europe from one end, and the Americans and British from the other.
In spite of himself, Bela said, “I’ve been miserable without you here, Lenore.”
“Well, that’s because you haven’t been busy enough,” Leah said. “You’ve been brooding too much. And you’re too useful to brood.”
“Useful?” Bela smirked. Lying there naked, with this beautiful strange girl beside him, he felt like a pornographic joke.
“We need money,” Leah said. “We have to do more than smuggle out the Jews. We have to buy them. In American dollars, two hundred and fifty a head, maybe more. Or there’s been talk about a deal, an exchange—in Hungary. Trucks for Jews.”
“But that would prolong the war,” Bela said. Leah put her hand over his mouth.
“There’s been talk about saving a million Hungarian Jews. Listen, we need money. And we need all your old Zionist connections and your Hungarian connections too. In fact, we need you. Also,” Leah added, as though it were an afterthought, “I need you. So put on your clothes and have some supper with me and Amos”—that was the jeep’s driver—“and then argue all you want about prolonging the war. And about how useful you are. I love you, and you saved my life, and if that’s not enough for you, you can go to hell.”
FROM THE WAY SHE’D talked, Bela expected Leah and Amos to drag him off to Tel Aviv that night, but in fact, Leah had counted on staying through the month and convinced Amos to help with the olive harvest. As ever, they were short-handed, and now, for the third year, hired laborers arrived from Taell al-Taji. As the kibbutz paid more than any other employer, the competition was fierce. Bela was startled to see so many men crowd the gate of the kibbutz. He didn’t know any of them, but they knew him.
“Histaresh—!” one very dark boy called. “Min fadlak, min fadlak!”
Bela smiled uncomfortably. Because he couldn’t help pick olives, he was supposed to guard the gate and choose no more than twenty workers. That day, because Leah and Amos had arrived, he could take in no more than eighteen men. He made this clear as soon as everyone had gathered. Then he chose the men and barred the gate after the eighteenth had passed. The rest kept standing.
“Esmaehli, esmaehli,” someone called, and they parted to clear a path for the same gentleman who’d spoken such good Hebrew three years earlier at the meeting. Bela hadn’t been at that meeting, and neither man knew the other. He addressed Bela in Hebrew. “Is there a problem, sir?”
Bela frowned, and said in Arabic, “Lahza min fadlak.” He didn’t like the idea of speaking a language the other men at the gate didn’t understand, and he didn’t like the man’s smooth, light tan face, or the weasel smile on that face, or the way the other men deferred to him though he was clearly not respected. He went on in Arabic. “We need only eighteen men. I’m sorry, but it will be that way for the rest of the harvest.”
In Hebrew again, the man asked Bela, “No chance we can negotiate?”
Bela realized what was going on, and deliberately called over the man’s head to the rest of the workers, in clear Arabic: “How much have you paid this agent? He’s robbing you. Deal with the kibbutz directly and you’ll get your full wages without lining his pockets!”
He was surprised to hear his own words. Something had happened. Three years ago, he wouldn’t have cared. The words he’d spoken were the words of Bela Hesshel in 1923. He could feel real, warm blood rush to his head, and that head rang with the stupidity of what he’d done, and at the same time he wanted to run straight to the field, find Leah, and thank her from his heart for making him himself again.
Later, of course, he’d get a talking-to. Where had he been, these three years? Didn’t he know the circumstances? It wasn’t as if this was something they had just discovered, after all, or something the men in the village didn’t know. Yet all the while, through Dori’s tongue-lashing, and Nathan’s, Bela did not let go of what he’d felt when he’d turned on the man and addressed those laborers. He didn’t let go of it until that night.
FOR THAT WAS THE night of the worst raid they had seen in years, not so much a raid as an outright attack. A strong force rushed the gate and knocked it down, and Tilulit mobilized its own defense so swiftly that one moment, they were in bed and the next, rifles found their way into everybody’s hands, including Bela’s, and Leah took up her own. The clinic caught on fire that night, and so did the dining hall. Children hid in the root-cellar, sleepy and confused; Bernadette watched over the entrance of that cellar with a pistol.
Nathan Sobel radioed for help from Beit Shemesh, and Yosef was among those who came with fresh ammunition. Dori, paralyzed by the loss of the clinic, felt as though she herself were in flames. She stood as the wounded were brought to her, among them Gezer, Bernadette’s son, a grown man now but still a boy to her, and she wanted to slap herself over and over, come to her senses, and at the same time she wished she could cross over into such a state that nothing would be expected of her.
But of course, Dori did come to her senses, and once that happened any grief she felt was lost in work. She gave orders to anyone close by; she flagged down any jeep to take the worst of the wounded to Beit Shemesh; she worked so hard that her consciousness fluttered above her like a hummingbird and she thought: If Bela and I had had a child, that child would have been fighting like Gezer; that child would be dead.
Just before dawn, they found three bodies in the gully. Two were Arabs, a young stranger with the beginnings of a mustache and an older fellow with a square jaw whom everyone at once recognized as Kamil, the son of one of the most prominent men in Taell al-Taji. The third was one of the newcomers from Kiev, Dmitri, a bright, sardonic, industrious boy who’d taken the name Ezra.
They knew they would bury Ezra in a graveyard they’d begun ten years before when Tibor had died of food poisoning. It had five graves in it now. There was some talk about what to do with the bodies of the Arabs, and they were laid out by the gully-bank. Before they could come to a decision, a truck appeared, and in the passenger seat was the agent. He got out, ran a handkerchief across his forehead, and took a few steps towards the dead men. He stood with his hands behind his back.
“A disaster,” he said.
Somehow, it was assumed that the agent would take the bodies, but the back of the truck swayed a little on its tires, and from its depths came a pounding and a steady hum. Then everyone knew at once that it held eighteen men, that he’d come, as ever, with his quota for the harvest. As that sank in, a cry came out: “Open the truck!”
It had come from Boaz, once Boris, whose brown hair had turned blond, but who had regressed into ram-rod anxiety. He pushed his way towards the agent, shoved him against the back of the truck, and cracked his head against the door.
“Let those men out! You’ll turn on the gas and they’ll all die and we won’t know where to bury them! Let them out!”
They pulled Boaz off, and he stumbled back a few steps, caught his balance, and mumbled an apology. The agent kept his head low as he got back into the truck and drove away.
THAT WAS THE END of using hired labor. To get the harvest in, they had to work half-through the night, and sometimes they pitched tents on the field, as in the first days of Tilulit. Bela held Leah close under the blanket, and sometimes she’d laugh and say that he was suffocating her, but he could not let go. He’d had such a strong premonition that he’d lose her the night of the battle that he had to keep his hands on her chin, her breasts, her hips, her bottom, and she would slip her own hands between his thighs and say, “I’m here.”
Because they were so short-handed, Bela had to work beside them, and though it was hard for him to take the bending and to hold too much weight, he soon discovered that he had some skill as a foreman. He realized how much he’d missed getting dirt all over his face and under his fingernails, the rhythm of the olives hitting the buckets, the sheets of canvas on the floor. Leah combed leaves and twigs from her hair at night, and one day she said something astounding.
“Your family’s still alive.”
Bela wasn’t sure what to do with what she’d said. He picked up a few twigs that had fallen from her hair, and rolled them around his hands before he asked, “How do you know?”
“Your sister’s husband lost his factory, and she’s not working at the hospital, but so far there haven’t been deportations in Szeged. That will change,” said Leah.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Bela asked her, and at once regretted the question because it couldn’t help but come out as an accusation.
“Because there’s another side to it. I found out more. My mother’s dead. She died three years ago. There were witnesses. She was shot and thrown into a mass grave outside of Kiev, maybe a month after I ran away. And my father—” She paused, and pulled that comb through her hair with a hand that suddenly shook. “Father died just six months ago, after the Ukraine was liberated.”
She broke off then and let the comb fall, not crying but not able to go on. Bela pushed in next to her and brushed her hair out of her eyes.
She said, “As far as he was concerned there was never even a war. He was still a prisoner in some logging camp and he came down with a fever and that’s how he died.” She leaned her head on Bela’s shoulder, and said, “Look, soon the war will be over, but there are some things that just go on and go on. My father wasn’t a Jew, even if he was born a Jew. He was a Communist,” she said, and the past tense forced itself through a thickness in her throat. “And maybe he died a Communist. He was arrested when I was so young that I couldn’t help but be ashamed. What did I know? They told me he was a spy, and I thought about all the people from France and Spain in our apartment. I wanted to change my name to something very Russian, something unmistakable. I called myself Grushenka for years. Until I met you.”
Bela said, “And now you’re Leah?”
“Now I’m Leah,” Leah said. “And this is what Leah will do. Amos and I are going to take some of the olives to the cooperative in Tiberious tomorrow, and I’ll talk to some people I know. You’ve got contacts in Budapest?”
Bela nodded. “Old friends. Most of them stopped writing years ago, but they won’t be so hard to trace. My God, Leah, all of those girls who wrote me letters, they must all have husbands and children by now.”
Almost casually, Leah asked, “What about Nora?”
Bela looked at his wife’s face and was stunned to see a ghost of her old impassivity. He said, “Yes, Nora too.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Leah and Amos loaded the truck with bins of olives and drove off to the cooperative. It was not Tilulit’s best harvest; they felt the labor shortage. During those weeks, other parts of the kibbutz had suffered; the chicken coops needed a cleaning, one of the milking machines broke, and the children, who’d been recruited for the fields, had a hard time getting used to the inside of a schoolroom again.
Bela was teaching Arabic to five restless, handsome boys and girls, not quite old enough to join the British army, but the right age for the Palmach. They had all taken part in the defense of Tilulit the month before, and one of them, Gezer, had only recently removed the splint from his arm. His hand was still bandaged. He couldn’t write.
“I don’t care if I can’t copy it down,” he said to Bela. “You promised us the alphabet.”
“My own strength is spoken Arabic,” said Bela. “To be honest, you probably won’t be writing much Arabic in your life.”
Gezer said, “You always accuse us of being too practical, and when we want to learn something for its own sake you discourage us.”
What did that boy think he would do with written Arabic? Forge military documents? Bela gave in and covered a chalk-board with Arabic characters, and as he watched these serious young people try to reproduce the curls and dashes, he suddenly found himself turning them into altogether different figures, the half-Hebrew of that old seditious leaflet, conscious that he was engaging in a kind of sabotage, or a private joke. He’d covered half the board when someone ran in with the news.
The truck had been waylaid four kilometers west of Tilulit. They found it with its windshield smashed, and two vats of olives spilled out on the road. Amos was dead behind the wheel with a clot of fresh blood still on his temple. Of Leah, there was no sign.
The search began at once: Gezer took part, and Boaz, and the red-haired bully who’d lost his limp and become a good strong farmer, and Bela himself was there, of course, though he hung back with Dori because no one wanted him to be the one who’d find her.
Dori held Bela’s hand. The afternoon gave way to evening and the hills darkened and disappeared. Dori felt Bela’s terror flow up through his hand, and she knew that she could not say anything to comfort him. She held a flashlight, but she didn’t turn it on as they walked some distance from the road. Occasionally, someone would send up a flare, and then Bela would give a cry that was like a knot in her gut, a cry of complete helplessness.
It wasn’t until morning that they found her, only a kilometer away from the kibbutz, well off the road. Bela at first thought they were mistaken, and he whispered, “It isn’t her. Look in the water. She drowned there, I know she drowned.”
The others examined the body. Leah had put up a fight; that was clear. The trousers bunched around her ankles had been pulled down by force and between her legs was a mass of dry black blood. There was a fragment of wood with a nail in it still clenched in her fist.
While they gathered around the corpse and tried to piece together its story, Bela looked at the fragment of wood. He ran his hand across the exposed nail, and then looked at that hand as though it had a message for him. Dori did not know if she ought to take him home or let him be. Yosef arrived, and she didn’t even know he was there until he put his arm around her, and she took in his familiar smell of wine and coffee cake. His appearance and disconnection from the situation made her realize how much she loved him.
Yosef said, “You’re shivering. Come back to the room. I’ll make us some coffee.”
“He was afraid of bridges,” Dori said. “That always seemed funny to me, psychologically. After all, he was always the one who was our diplomat. He was always the one opening lines of communication.”
“Don’t say was. He’s still alive, Arielle,” Yosef said.
“I know, I know,” said Dori. He pulled her closer, this fleshy materialist who wanted more from her than eternal friendship. Everything about the man felt moist and fertile, and when they got into the bed she’d shared for so long with Bela and they made love, she thought of pillows and of beer, of lying on the beach beside Lake Balaton, of playing with her dog Nikki as a girl in Budapest, of riding a bike with Bela through Margit Island, and then she thought of Bela staring at the palm of his own hand.
HE NEVER TOLD them he’d be leaving the kibbutz, yet they all knew. First, he stopped teaching classes. Then he began to miss his shifts in the dining hall and laundry. Sometimes they’d find him talking on the telephone in a voice they didn’t recognize: strident, ringing, a politician’s voice. The calls would last for well over an hour, unheard of at Tilulit. Sometimes they’d discover him in the library surrounded by books they hadn’t realized they owned, texts on the connection between Hungarian and the Semitic languages, and he would tell anyone who asked that he had been wrong to leave the seminary, that his work there was the most important thing in the world, and that he was going back to Hungary as soon as this business was over.
Perhaps two weeks passed this way, and then he caught a ride to Tel Aviv, taking only a change of clothing and a notebook. He left them with an enormous telephone bill, and it was perhaps characteristic of Tilulit that when they talked about Bela after he left, they talked about the telephone bill, and also about the state of his room, which took three days to clean.
A few days before he left, he was approached by two of the group they’d once called the orphans: a girl named Rivka and her boyfriend, Menachem. They were bashful and studious, and they had just turned seventeen. They’d observed the transformation of their Comrade and her heroic death, and now they felt drawn to the widower, the same big, friendly man who’d once hoisted them down from the flatbed truck. They found him in his room.
The air was stale and still smelled like Black Cat cigarettes. Most of the dried wildflowers had fallen from the windowsill and had turned into a purple dust that lined the floor. When Leah had returned, she’d scrupulously sorted out the clothes she’d hoarded, but somehow she hadn’t gotten around to bringing them back to the laundry. As for the letters, they were spread on the bed, and Menachem caught Bela in the act of copying down address after address into a notebook.
Menachem spoke first. “We’ve been thinking about a memorial,” he said. “Perhaps a plaque, even a statue.”
Bela didn’t look up from his work, and Menachem and Rivka looked at the letters from all over the world, with their tattered envelopes and beautiful stamps, and felt all their courage drain away in the face of the important work this old man must be doing. Rivka gestured towards the photographs: a thick, cracked tintype of a bride clinging to the arm of an enormous groom, a more recent picture of a dark-haired girl in an Arab gown with a mischievous smile on her face. Then there was the photograph of a woman holding a baby boy.
In spite of herself, Rivka said, “Oh, please, if we could only have a photograph of Leah!”
Looking up then, Bela set the pen down. “Get the fuck,” he said, “out of my room.”
Faced with this response, how could they help but obey, and they ran back to the dining hall where they told the other young people that Bela was a man of great feeling, emotionally honest, an authentic individual. Menachem and Rivka had never felt so small and foolish. What did the others think? They talked through supper, and then afterwards they had some juice and then some coffee, and then they took a brisk walk. They talked and talked, and then the redheaded boy took out his guitar and they sang until their voices gave out, and then they talked some more. They talked the way Bela and Dori had once talked instead of making love. Or did some of them make love? It’s possible.