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Outskirts of Beer Sheba, Palestine, October 1942
“Fine. Name your favorite Polish composer.” I waved my hand in front of my mouth as I spoke, having quickly learned that thirsty flies wasted no time in finding moisture, and would fly into an open mouth faster than even the briefest words could exit.
I looked at Bashir expectantly, raising my eyebrows. I’d finally decided to challenge him, following three days of listening to his boasting that he was—by culture, if not by birth—more Polish than me.
“Please. Paderewski, of course. Surprised? You weren’t expecting me to just spit out ‘Chopin,’ were you? Give me a little credit.” His scoffing smile bounced up and down with the rhythm of his camel, which loped along out of synch with the stride of my own. High above one of the crumbling canyon walls towering above us, a lone hawk appeared. It silently sliced the sky in two and disappeared over the opposite wall.
“All right. Favorite Polish food?” I turned away and lowered my eyes to avoid a wave of sand swept past us by the omnipresent wind. The canyon in which we’d been traveling for the past hours offered relief from the sun, which scratched mercilessly at any piece of exposed skin, but not from the afternoon wind.
“That’s an easy one. Bigos. Although I’m partial also to Pierogi, when we can get it.” Bashir clucked his tongue, urging his camel into a trot as the uniform tan in front of us turned suddenly, magically green.
My own camel, who I’d mentally dubbed Smelly for obvious reasons, perked up at the scent of water. It—I was as yet unclear as to the beast’s actual gender—picked up its pace voluntarily. We’d arrived at our camp for the evening: the spring of Ein Abda.
“We?” I said, knowing that he was likely referring to the true source of his Polish savoir faire. I guessed that his “we” included a Polish soldier—likely an officer, given the clear level of education and sophistication—stationed near Beer Sheva. The Polish garrison there was awaiting the arrival of Anders’ Army, which was working its way south from the Soviet Union and would be arriving within months, according to reports.
I had, of course, been asked to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East, also known as Anders’ Army after its commander, General Wladyslaw Anders. They’d asked, cajoled, pressured, guilted, and once nearly physically coerced me. Of course, this was before I parted company with a certain appendage that soldiers find handy—pardon the pun—for trivial tasks like pulling a trigger. In any case, Anders’ Army was months away from Palestine, and I’d not been willing to wait to see Danuta.
Danuta. I looked around the oasis, tasting her name through the dust on my lips, as I did every time it crossed them. Yet even with her constant letters—which I cherished, and which drove me forward throughout the impossible journey I’d undertaken—and even in the expectation of our impending reunion, I felt uneasy. I still heard her voice, could still feel her touch, yet she had become, in a sense, an ideal. The closer I came to her, the more she retreated from the world of the tangible into the realm of the possible. I tried to shake off the feeling, explaining it as an expression of my intense longing, coupled with my fears of her repulsion at my injury. But it persisted.
“We?” I asked Bashir again.
He gave a small smile that gently honored my right to interrogate him, while firmly asserting his own right to ignore my questions. He hopped deftly off his now-kneeling camel, threw off his thawb with abandon, and plunged his brown naked body into the green water of the oasis pool with a whoop that echoed again and again from the stratified rock of the cliffs above us.
I sat in the deep cliff shade, my back against a cool rock, reveling in the sudden absence of motion. Being on Smelly all day was like a never-ending ride on a merry-go-round that smelled like decomposing cow farts and snapped at you viciously if you dared to fidget. The shadow in which I sat lengthened with the coming dusk, and the oven-like temperature moderated, as if an unseen hand had lowered the dial from ‘broil’ to ‘bake.’
Bashir stopped splashing and whooping, and floated placidly on his back. Smelly and his colleagues sat regally, tails flicking flies, satiated after their long drink. And the silence of the desert, which I had come to love, settled over the oasis.
If I’d had a typewriter, I would have pecked out an essay about how desert silence was unlike any other. In the forest, I would have written, silence hides behind the trees’ wind-driven singing, graspable only in the brief breaks between songs. On the riverbank, silence is masked by the myriad burbles and gurgles of moving water. In the desert, silence is raw. Within it, you can feel the gentle thrum of Earth’s deepest inner machinations. Desert silence is silence unbound from time. Desert silence is silence from which you cannot hide. It rips the bandages from your deepest wounds, strips the emotional pretension from your darkest thoughts, and lays bare all for rational examination. Yet even as it exposes them, it soothes and dresses these wounds with its balm of reflection.
I had no typewriter, of course, nor two hands to operate one. And, as the sun’s last rays slipped down from the crevice of sky framed by the canyon’s walls and illuminated the trail of blood leading from the pool’s far side, neither could I revel in the luxury of desert silence for long.
I jumped up when I recognized the trail, engorged with jubilant flies yet still reflecting in the rapidly failing twilight, as congealed blood. This blood spatter had come not from a mere wound. It looked more like the remnants of a vibrant stream that would emanate, for example, from a slit throat. I checked my instinct to call out to Bashir, who now dozed under the spreading boughs of an Acacia tree. Instead, I stepped silently to his side, bent over, shook him, and held a finger to my lips when he opened his eyes.
He recognized the urgency in my face, and rose quickly. When I showed him the trail, his eyes widened and he reached for the dagger that hung loosely from his belt.
The last rays of sunlight dissipated. Our sandals crunched gently on the rocks of the streambed as I followed Bashir. The only other noise violating the desert silence was the buzzing of the flies, who ignored the fall of dusk in their feeding frenzy. We traced the gory path step-by-step toward its apparent origin on the opposite side of the canyon.
I’d followed such a trail once before, in the apartment in Vilnius, in February of 1940. That trail had meandered from our bed to the washroom, yet drew no flies in the midst of the coldest winter ever recorded in the city. With temperatures below -30 degrees Celsius, and with heating rationed owing to the city’s burgeoning population and dwindling energy and water supplies, this blood trail had been nearly frozen by the time I woke and discovered it.
I’d rolled over, deep under the immense pile of blankets, sheets, towels, and even a children’s-sized down duvet, under which Danuta and I had slept in a vain attempt to keep warm. I reached for her as I did a dozen times a night, and found her side of the bed cool. I’d poked my head from the pile of bedclothes and called her name, my breath fogging thickly in the crisp air. When she didn’t answer, I rose, puzzled when the liquid soaked through my socks. A burst pipe, I’d assumed at first, but then I looked down and saw that the bottoms of my socks were black.
My stomach had dropped, and Danuta’s name flew from my lips in a vapor cloud of increasing urgency. Ariana had poked her head out of her room, woken by my calls, and together we followed that trail.
Just as Bashir and I now followed the trail in Ein Abda.
The woman, who’d not been dead long, lay at the base of the cliff with her knees curled up to her stomach. A bag of small green melons lay near her, and the back of her filthy thawb was clotted with dark blood from the waist down. Bashir shook her shoulder, and her head lolled back, revealing a pretty, young, and unblemished face. Barely visible in the twilight’s last rays, her expression seemed one of peace, as if she’d realized her goal and, in doing so, could rest soundly.
Bashir knelt and surveyed the scene, shifting his gaze to the bag of melons, then back to the woman’s bloody posterior. “Baby,” he pronounced. “She didn’t want a baby. That’s what the handhal was for. Come, we need to bury her.”
By the time the moon had fully risen, we’d dug the shallow grave. As we worked, digging with hands and a stick liberated from the Acacia tree, Bashir explained to me about the desert melon they called handhal. Among its other medicinal uses, some women used them to end pregnancy when taken in large doses. Unfortunately, it could also cause massive bleeding, which is what had happened to this poor woman. She came by herself from a nearby tribe or village, either to avoid the shame of a child born out of wedlock, or to rid herself of an unwanted, yet legitimate, pregnancy. Either way, it had not ended well. Or... perhaps... from her perspective, it had.
Together, we piled rocks on top of the grave to keep out scavenging animals.
Bashir sat to rest, but I turned to methodically cover the trail of blood. The flies had left it alone for the night, but I could not bear the thought of their inevitable return in the morning. The trail caught the moonlight and shimmered—a ghoulish crimson moon path leading away from life, not toward it. I scraped sand over the trail, erasing the sanguine moon and seeing in my mind’s eye the trail down the hallway in Vilnius. It too had reflected the pale moonlight, yet it had led me to a very different place.
***
“The babka said there might be some bleeding.” Danuta gasped as Ariana and I reached her. “But I’m feeling a bit better now.” She lay sprawled on the floor in the washroom, her back against the tub, looking anything but better. Her usually ruddy face was pale and sunken, like a balloon with a pinprick hole. Blood had pooled beneath her. She lifted one hand, which had been resting in the puddle, and pushed the hair back from her eyes in a weak attempt at making herself more presentable. The gesture left her with a thick dark red streak across her forehead, which ran in sinister rivulets like tears down either cheek.
Ariana sent me to bring the doctor who lived, thankfully, just two floors below.
The doctor came quickly following my urgent banging on his door. He shooed me unceremoniously from the washroom as he and Ariana stripped Danuta. Her moans followed me through the door while I changed our bloody bed linens, and persisted when I began on the floor, chipping and then scrubbing the remnants of the trail of frozen blood. They subsided as I washed away the last traces of what had been, I realized then, my son or daughter. The doctor and Ariana had Danuta cleaned up and back in bed by the time I’d finished.
The doctor took several minutes to berate me for risking a back alley abortion with the dabki—the Russian word for midwife abortionists.
I remained silent in the face of his onslaught, eyes downcast, as if ashamed of my actions. In fact, any shame I felt arose from my utter ignorance of the pregnancy and its termination.
Danuta slept for three days, and I slept in snatches sitting next to her, ever expecting her to awaken and call for me. She never did. Finally, her eyes opened, cleared, and met mine. She gave a faint smile that belied no guilt or apology, and before drifting off again, she said simply and weakly, “This is no world for children, my love.”
With the memory of my child’s blood still lingering under my fingernails, I could only hold her hand and nod in agreement.
***
After covering the desert trail, I walked to the side of the canyon and curled up on the straw mat to sleep.
Is the world ready for children now, my love?
I dreamt relentlessly of Danuta and babies—those who had never come to be, and those yet unborn.
