I SMOKED MY FIRST cigarette when I was six years old. I found it on the kitchen windowsill, though the railway platform proved more reliable. The butts I gathered on that platform made terrible, gritty cigarettes, hardly worth re-rolling, yet to my mind, they’re all mixed up with where I smoked them, by the tracks. I loved the trains, window after window of Budapesti smokers who would carry cigarettes to theaters, lectures, and cafés. I’d do those things too. But later there would also be smokes passed, like gifts, between strangers in the dark.
Now where the hell can I get a cigarette? Everyone in Israel is a smoker, but nobody gets something for nothing, and what do I have to trade? Not that my head’s the clearest. We’re just off the boat, Louisa and I, and we expected my cousin, Bela, to meet us at the dock, but he wasn’t there. We went through customs, and there were so many of us piling in at once that we were backed up for hours. By the time they let us go, it was dark. Rain fell by the fistful. No Bela.
So we were forced onto a government truck parked by the gate, a flatbed full of Poles. Some young clods in wet leather jackets unfastened the tarp and hoisted us on board, and those Poles reluctantly made room between their trunks and carpetbags and feather mattresses. The rain slapped on the tarp and cut through a stream of aromatic Yiddish. It was hard to tell where the luggage ended and the humanity began. There is a kind of Jew who looks deep fried, a chinless sloucher. Here was a happy family of them.
Louisa whispered, “Ich verstehe kein Wort.”
The Poles fell silent. A woman to my right asked, in Yiddish, “What is she?”
“My daughter-in-law,” I said.
She asked, “What is she doing here?”
“The same as me.”
“She’s not the same as you.”
It was no use saying no, here in the truck skidding through mud that would take us to a transient camp where we would share close quarters. Could I begrudge them curiosity?
Ah, the trouble was, I could. I had no use for these people. I had no use for this country. If Bela had met us at the dock, I would have understood why I was here.
THE EASY ANSWER was: where else did I have to go? I’d lost my parents and my husband and my son. I had only Louisa. I owe her my life. It was Louisa who had kept me hidden during the German occupation. This was five years ago, in Budapest. Louisa stayed through a siege under a rain of bombs and steady gunfire, and she kept me in the cellar of her family house through the winter, in constant danger of discovery and death. The latticed vent under the piano of her music room was our lone gateway, and through it she passed water, rolls, canned meat, and cigarettes. Often, she would sing a composition by my son.
What is lost, what is lost
We can not have back again.
It is like a breath we’ve taken.
It is like good bread we’ve eaten.
We can not eat it again.
It is like a heart we’ve broken
Or our own heart, lost in vain.
Some days, I could hear nothing but a constant roar in my ears. It must have been the sound of my own blood which, my cousin Adele the nurse once told me, renews itself once every three weeks. In that case, in that cellar my blood was renewed four times. I don’t doubt it made a noise.
After the war I didn’t seek out Louisa, but she found me. I was at the border station on my way to Italy, and she grabbed hold of me and cried out, “Mutti, I’m going with you!”
She wore a rabbit-fur coat and she gripped me so hard that I could feel through the fluff straight to the skin. “What do you want from me?” I’d demanded then. “You’ve done enough. Let go.”
But she didn’t let go, even as the train pulled from the station, and though she didn’t have the proper papers, somehow we were rolling through the mountains of Slovenia and then to Trieste, where after some time we secured passage on a boat bound for Haifa to the Holy Land, and during our months on the road, not once did she let go.
WHY DID SHE cling to me? She said she loved me. “Dear,” I said, “that’s not a reason.”
“You’re all alone.”
“I’m going to my cousin.”
“I want to be where you are.”
“And what if they don’t want you?”
In fact, they all knew: Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, Greeks, even the British at Cyprus. Everything about Louisa told them she was German. They’d start with questions, and I’d answer, “I owe her my life.”
On the boat, she sought out a rabbi. It is Louisa’s way to look for things without hesitation or embarrassment. She wanted to convert before we reached the Holy Land, and she cornered anyone who looked like he might do. There were few contenders. The emigrants were young and sullen, and none of the men had beards. Sometimes, Louisa would catch a fellow with a hat on, who was staring at the sea with an expression that she chose to read as prayerful, and she would ask him to baptize her and make her a Jew.
One fierce girl gripped my arm and asked, “Does she know where the boat’s going?”
I couldn’t keep pace with her Yiddish, and again I only said, “I owe her my life.”
“You owe her something? Work it out with God. Don’t bring us such a burden. Don’t bring it to Israel. You know what she is?”
She pressed close, chin all but indenting mine, and her hot breath steamed all over my face so that I had to ask, mildly, “Do you have a cigarette?”
“She’s their daughter,” the woman said. “Even here we can’t escape them.”
So much for Yiddish. To me, it’s greasy black hats, the smell of fish, wet eiderdown, that truck. My own emerges a resentful mouthful at a time. I prefer German. In Budapest, our set spoke German, and it was in German that I wrote my letters to my cousin Bela. The telegram I sent Bela from Trieste was in German, and in German I received his answer. Das gibt’s doch nicht! Wann? Wo?
That answer met my expectations—joyous, tender, and inquisitive. It was printed in blue type so faint it might have floated, and only after I’d replied with the details of our arrival did I notice the unfamiliar Haifa address on the bottom of the page. So had Bela left Kibbutz Tilulit? That seemed impossible.
Bela had founded Tilulit. I imagine it the way it was in a photograph he sent me in ’25, a photograph I lost: himself and two comrades in front of the kibbutz chicken coop. Dori sat on a spool of wire, legs stuffed into shorts, elbows on thighs, blond hair blown back. Bela and Nathan knelt on either side. They were substantial people, muscular and happy. They had just finished building the coop that day. Sunlight or overexposure filled their hair and glanced off bare knees into the camera. Bela would be grizzled now, and his hair would have gone gray, but he would whip open the tarp over the truck full of Poles with that same happy, frank expression, as though it were the gate of a chicken coop he’d built with his own hands.
IF I HAD sent the date of our arrival to the wrong address, it stood to reason that Bela would not have received it in time to meet our boat. It would be futile to try to contact him that night, but until I saw him, everything around me would feel impermanent, the camp, mud underfoot, Poles, Yiddish. Also Louisa. She jumped off the truck, pulling both myself and our luggage with her.
“Mutti,” she said, “we must thank God we have arrived.” She bowed her head.
“We’ll be trampled,” I said to Louisa, for by now there was a push for bedding and ration-books. Such were our numbers that the camp administrators made no attempt to keep records, but they sprinkled us with disinfectant powder and handed out papers no one had the equilibrium to read. What with the rain, the ink of the documents was running.
No one paid attention to bed assignments, and by the time we reached our block, Louisa and I had to make do with a single cot under a window that didn’t quite close. Around us, the Poles emptied carpetbags and fought over the space around the fizzling electric heater. The barracks were a shell. When the British left Palestine in ’48, they’d stripped them down to a few walls of corrugated tin that more or less held up a roof. On that roof, rain slapped and the light hummed like a mosquito, and between those high and low notes ran the Yiddish, a tongue no cultured person speaks. The Poles were all old friends. They had been liberated by the same battalion, and at the same American DP camp in Belsen they had attended the same Labor-Zionist meetings and would probably settle into the same apartment block in Tel Aviv and turn it into Warsaw.
Louisa made up our bed matter-of-factly, as though all of this were just as she’d imagined. She opened our little suitcase and pulled out our dressing gowns, modestly climbing into her own under the sheet, and kissing me before laying her head down and at once falling asleep. She curled there, with the bedding tucked around her and a crescent of disinfectant powder clinging to her cheek. Her hair fanned her arm, and the softness of that arm, the fairness of that hair, stirred as she breathed. Her breathing put me in mind of her singing voice, which is moving and a little uncanny and implies an intelligence you can’t see in her face. I watched her for a while, and then I heard a voice close to my ear.
“Csodálatos! Excellent human material.”
Hungarian. I turned, and inches away on a neighboring cot sat a Pole in a leather jacket. He addressed me, but his eyes were on Louisa.
“They’ll never let her stay in Israel. Who knows how she got this far.” He introduced himself. “Yossel Berkowitz. A man of business.”
“You’re not Hungarian,” I said. “How do you—”
“What don’t I know, Nagymama? There are businessmen in Hungary, in Italy, in Greece, in all the mighty nations. Now Hebrew, that’s another matter. All Zionists must learn Hebrew.”
I took him in: dull eyes under a fur cap, broken nose, stained teeth. I said, “You don’t look like a Zionist.”
Amused, he said, “Nagymama, do you look like a Zionist? We’re all Zionists now.”
I had to laugh, in spite of the foul air, my lack of sleep, perhaps even because of them; they’re both narcotic. Maybe hearing my mother-tongue disarmed me, because for the first time in who knows how long, I put more than four words together. “In this room, then, I’d say there are more Zionists than there were in all of Hungary before the war, and what a likely bunch of recruits, God help us. Do you include my daughter-in-law?”
“Give me your daughter-in-law,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I only stared.
“You want to be rid of her. Of course you do. How can she sleep?”
Then I could only say, “I owe her my life.”
Berkowitz laughed or coughed. A light blazed, and with a brief, dismissive gesture, he placed a burning cigarette in my hand. “You break my heart with your gratitude. So she saved your life. She gave you yours, and you give me hers. A fair exchange.”
I inhaled. It was my first smoke in a week, and confusion peeled away, allowing me a clarity impossible without a cigarette. My circumstances arranged themselves. I was in a cold room with a lot of strangers. Why should it concern me? In the morning I would find Bela at the new address he’d sent me. One night. I had passed worse nights, and with Louisa. I touched the place in my stocking where I had put Bela’s telegram, and a shot went through my bones. It was gone.
Berkowitz broke through the silence. “There’s something you’re not telling.”
Forcing some equilibrium, I managed to ask him, “Why do you want Louisa?”
He smiled and replied, “Do you realize how much people would pay to fuck a German?”