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Samuel: Outskirts of Tel Aviv, October 23, 1942
Smelly complained with a bitter grunt, but finally came to a halt. Like a long-married couple whose intimacy fostered an equal mixture of tolerance and revulsion, we’d come to a tacit understanding. I knew that if I tugged long enough on the reins, he—Bashir had clarified that Smelly was indeed male—would eventually respond. He knew that I would not stop interrupting his profound camel contemplation with my tugging until he did so.
I started tugging Smelly to a stop just as the minarets of Abu Kabir loped into view. By the time he actually stopped, the square tower of St. Peter’s church in Old Jaffa—just a few kilometers south of Tel Aviv—had popped onto the horizon, too.
I gazed so long and so intensely that my eyes began to burn. At first, they burned with hope and longing. Thereafter, as Smelly moved forward again, they burned with the glare of the blue Mediterranean, which threw hot daggers of late afternoon sun into them. The sea, it seemed, was attempting to wrench me from the desert, yet the desert was reluctant to yield.
“Kropla do kropli i bedzie morze,” Bashir murmured, as he gazed at the deep blue. Drop after drop, there will be a sea.
I rolled my eyes in exasperation as if to an agreeable, yet invisible, companion. I considered explaining to Bashir the actual meaning of the adage, but decided against it. As we’d drawn closer to Tel Aviv, I’d grown increasingly less patient with the boy. His vast repository of proverbs and overenthusiastic affinity for all things Polish had morphed from novelty to tedium. He’d been a pleasant and fair companion, however, and I’d kept my end of our bargain. As Smelly swayed over countless kilometers of sand, scrub trees, and rocky canyons, we discussed what I recalled from my university philosophy studies. I’d spoken to him, as he’d requested, exclusively in Polish. I’d corrected his grammar and vocabulary gently but consistently.
One night, as the stars smiled down on our smoky cook fire and a pita charred slowly on the domed saj, I told him about Danuta.
He reciprocated by confirming my suspicions about his clandestine love of a Polish officer named Amadei, who was to be attached to Anders Army and encamped outside Beer Sheva. Once he realized my indifference to what most still considered unspeakable perversion, he spoke openly.
I explained that I’d once been close to someone like him, and he nodded gravely. As with Smelly, Bashir and I had reached a level of mutual understanding and appreciation, but could simply go no further owing to our own inherent limitations.
Smelly cleared a rise, and I gained a clear view northwest. I looked over the sandstone walls of Abu Kabir, past the red roofs of the Neve Zedek neighborhood, and into the heart of Tel Aviv, wherein she waited.
She. Tel Aviv.
Surely, now I could say it out loud. Surely, now I could finally say the word I’d barely allowed myself to speak since Chelyabinsk. Now I could say aloud this word that carried such power, promise, and passion—without being afraid that it would curse the shrinking distance. For this word had propelled me from the frozen wasteland of the Pechora River, over 5,000 kilometers of rail, road, track, ice, blood and sea. This word had pursued me down every moon path, tickled my mind, and blown gently into my ears every time I closed my eyes. This word possessed a wizardry that made my right hand seem present, my empty tummy seem full, and my heart seem whole. Indeed, now it came—unbidden and drawn from deep within, dripping like sweet saliva from my slightly parted lips.
“Danuta.”
***
Aron: Helwan, Egypt, October 23, 1942
I learned the depth of Sadness. It didn’t hide deep, lurking just two meters below the crust of the Egyptian desert, awaiting the blade of my shovel. Nightly, I reached it, and nightly it kissed my burning, blistered hands. It soothed the dusty furrows from my brow and explained patiently that desperation was not, as I’d always believed, shameful.
“It is simply dark to hope’s light,” Sadness said. “It too can be embraced. It too can be treasured. It too can be loved.”
I listened to Sadness, and—on its recommendation—embraced Desperation.
We had a rare afternoon off, and I sat in the corner of what passed for a pub just outside of Helwan, nursing my third or fourth pint. It was comfortingly warm in the rough-walled mud brick structure, a welcome respite from the late fall chill, in which we worked and slept nightly. The thick fog of alcohol clouding my mind, combined with the clouds of pungent cigarette smoke, caused the room to thrum pleasantly.
I watched the voices and motions of life—which seemed to have continued despite my own absence from it—remotely, with reminiscence but without remorse. On the piano in the corner, someone banged out an off-key rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. From near the bar, a good-natured cheer arose when someone’s glass shattered, having been nudged to the floor by an itinerant elbow. I raised my hand to the waitress and ordered another pint.
Is this number five or six? I paused to reflect on that. Does it matter?
“Here’s to deception,” I slurred to the waitress, who’d brought my beer. Pleased with myself, I repeated the phrase with greater volume and lesser diction. “Here’s to deshepsun... uh, despeshun... ah fuck, deception!” My hoarse yell momentarily rose above the din in the room. Heads turned in my direction. Embarrassed, I lowered my own head back to my new beer.
Nature called, and though reluctant to relinquish my cozy corner perch, I rose and stumbled through the crowd, out into the gathering dusk of evening. The cool air flowed over me, but couldn’t penetrate my beer-fueled inner warmth. By the last light of the sun, I found a handy palm tree. Halfway through a piss of epic proportions, I heard a familiar voice call my name.
I turned so quickly that I almost urinated on his shoes. I looked into his face, and then turned back to my tree. In my drunkenness, I reasoned that six pints had been enough to make me see Rommel himself singing a duet with Judy Garland. I chuckled. Clearly, the beer had caused me to imagine that Sean was standing behind me. He couldn’t possibly actually be there, so I finished my business, buttoned my fly, and turned back.
He was still there.
***
Samuel: Tel Aviv, October 23, 1942
“Danuta.”
Now it seemed that her name could not leave my lips frequently enough. It had become a wellspring newly tapped in my soul, gushing uncontrolled. “Danuta,” I said as I dismounted Smelly for the final time. “Danuta,” I said while gathering my meager possessions into a corner-knotted, dusty cloth. “Danuta,” I said prior to my farewell to Bashir, who promised to come find me later, having heard me repeat the street address—8 Buki Ben Yagli Street, Tel Aviv—like a Rosary, over and over to myself during our days and nights together.
Her name, it seemed, was an entire dialect that everyone could understand. It was the dream of Esperanto realized, the universal language of love corporealized. I said her name to the driver of the first bus I boarded, which took me—to my horror—in the opposite direction, away from Tel Aviv. I said it to the second bus driver, who returned me northward. I told it to the man in the newspaper stand, who pointed with curiously vague hand motions towards what I hoped was Buki Ben Yagli Street. I spoke it again to the woman in the kiosk on King George Street, who smiled kindly in understanding and motioned me to go up one more block, turn left, then turn left again.
Now, I inhaled and exhaled her name like oxygen, as I ran around the corner onto Bugrashov Street. “Da-nu-ta,” I breathed with each footfall. “Da-nu-ta,” I said, metering my steps with her perfume in my nostrils until I stood below the street sign that proclaimed joyously in Hebrew and English: Buki Ben Yagli Street.
“Danuta,” I said reverently as I ticked off the house numbers on the left side of the street—number 2, number 4, number 6. Then I stopped and looked up at the rounded façade of number 8, dumbstruck, like a pilgrim to Mecca when he first glimpses the Kaabah. I had a sudden urge to prostrate myself. Yet from somewhere, my mother’s voice found me, and I drew on a hidden reserve of Polish filial dignity. I stopped, caught my breath, smoothed my hair, and tucked in my shirttail.
Then—as Danuta had instructed me so long ago on our wooden bench in Vilnius, where the Neris and Vilnia rivers joined to become stronger together than they could ever dream of being apart—I found my words. I found and spoke the words I’d so long withheld from the world.
“I’m here, my love.”
***
Aron: Helwan, Egypt, October 23, 1942
I’d experienced much in my twenty-nine years on Earth—some good, much very bad, and more even worse. I’d responded emotionally, as anyone would—sometimes with powerful emotions difficult to surmount. Yet in my adult life, I’d always controlled these feelings, just as my father had taught me so many years before. I responded with the socially acceptable responses of a rational man facing daunting challenges. Even when Josef Warszawski brutally rejected my advances in Mishmar HaSharon; even when I learned of my parents’ death; even on the cold rock of the Jerusalem solitary confinement cell; even with the blood of the British soldier still wet on my hands—I’d retained the veneer of control that I understood to be essential. I’d done it not only because society expected it of me, I reasoned, but because I expected it of myself.
Yet seeing Sean here, with my belly full of beer and months of desperation seeping from my very pores, stripped away any remaining obligations my psyche felt to the social contract. I was, at first, mute. Then, incapable of enunciating discernible words, I simply opened the floodgates. I let the rage flow out of me like an unchecked orgasm. I released the incoherent, full-throated scream that had been building in me for the past months. I lashed out in murderous flailing that—owing to my inebriation—caused harm neither to Sean nor to myself.
My tantrum drew patrons out of the bar, excited at the prospect of a fight, but they quickly drifted away when my voice and strength gave out. After all, a drunk soldier sobbing face-down, saliva mixing with sand to create a paste that coated cheek and lips, was not worthy of rubber-necking.
After what seemed like hours, I looked up.
Sean was still there.
“You left,” I slurred hoarsely. “You never wrote. You left.”
His voice wavered, lacking the determination I’d once so admired. “I had to. I had no choice. They made me.”
My strength, along with my anger, rallied, yet my voice remained scratchy and soft. “They made you? This is what you have to say to me? How old are you? No one ‘made’ you. You made a choice, and it wasn’t me. And what the hell are you doing here, anyhow?”
“Half the British army is here, you idiot. I was transferred here from Malta to help prepare for what’s going to start.” He checked his watch self-importantly. “In about an hour, in fact.”
I was unimpressed. I didn’t care what Montgomery and Rommel did any longer. I didn’t care what would start or end in an hour. I didn’t care about Operation Bertram, or the war, or Masada on the Carmel. I didn’t care if the Zionists would win their state, or if the Nazis would break through, overrun Palestine, and ship its Jews off to God-knows-where. I didn’t care that Sean was here. I didn’t even care whether Samuel made it to Tel Aviv, or ever realized what I’d done for him, or perhaps to him. Most of all, I sincerely, truly, and genuinely no longer cared what happened to me.
I looked up at the eyes I’d gazed into when they first opened on so many mornings, and found that they were no longer familiar. My fury, I found, had shifted. It no longer had use for Sean. Instead, it chose a more proximate, familiar, and infinitely more vulnerable target: myself.
Still on my knees, with snot running from my nose and sand caked on one cheek, I shifted my jaw, and grit crunched between my teeth. It was not Sean at fault, my fury reasoned. Who would want to stay with me?
Forget him, a familiar internal voice said. You’re not worthy of him, anyhow. No one has ever wanted you. Not Josef Warszawski, not any of the countless men you met in London Square, not your brother, not even your parents. They didn’t want you because there’s nothing to want. You’ve always been translucent, and now you’re fading ever faster towards invisibility. Who will notice when your clothes, unsupported by a body that’s been reabsorbed into the Nothing from which it came, drop empty to the sand? Who will care?
“You had a choice,” I spat in Sean’s direction as the tears came hard and thick. “You had a choice.” Then, I rose to my feet, wiped at my face, spat sand from my mouth, and ran.
***
Samuel: Tel Aviv, October 23, 1942
I bounded up the stairs, found the door labeled ‘Katz,’ and forced myself to knock reservedly on the door, as if simply visiting a friend. I waited, listened, then knocked again and called out her name softly. I repeated this cycle several more times, ignoring the logical conclusion that she wasn’t in. Each time, my level of urgency grew, until the intensity of my pounding and shouting drew the neighbor, an elderly man, from his own flat.
He pushed his glasses onto his grey-topped head, and looked at me suspiciously. Then, he nodded with understanding and said something in Hebrew. When I shrugged to show I didn’t understand, he switched to pidgin English. “You Aron brother,” he said. “You look him... uh, you look like him. He not here, left key. I bring.” He shuffled back into his flat, and the rustling noises of his search continued for what seemed like hours.
I mentally urged him to hurry, despite the fact that my logical brain had reactivated itself. Clearly, Danuta was not at home, so I had no cause to hurry. It was Friday, late morning, and she would be at work at Kofer HaYishuv in Ramat Gan, in her small office, at the wooden desk with the squeaky chair and the electric fan, all of which she’d described in a previous letter. She’d be back after work, and I would surprise her. In the meantime, I would revel in her absence. I would smell her smell. I would touch her things. I would lay my head on the pillow where she’d laid hers just hours previously. I would breathe in her very essence.
Finally, the neighbor brought the key.
I thanked him, and with trembling hands let myself into the flat, filled with the anticipation of reunion.
***
Aron: Helwan, Egypt, October 23, 1942
I ran for no reason, as if I could outrun myself.
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
I ran, blinded by tears and pursued by—I thought—only my father’s words. I ran to escape this body, this sorely limited mind, the ethos I’d finally stretched to a breaking point. I ran to escape a life that had trapped me in a cage not of my own making, a cage that had contained me, yet never fit me. I ran until I felt my lungs had burst into flame, and I ignored the increasing urgency of the voices faintly audible behind me.
Nothing. No one. No reason. Nothing. No one. No reason.
The voice inside my head chanted to the rhythm of my pumping legs until I fell, exhausted. The voices behind me grew ever more urgent, but came no closer.
What do they want? Why can’t they leave me alone?
I raised my head to look around me in the gathering darkness. It had been dusk when I’d first seen Sean. Now, the moon hung low on the horizon, and the stars shone fully visible. I sat up and took in the expanse of flat sand surrounding me, bordered on all sides by embankments.
Voices floated from just beyond these berms. “Don’t move, mate!” they said, but I didn’t understand what they meant.
Then, one voice rose above the others with a confidence and command that I recognized instantly. Sean yelled, “You’re in the middle of a minefield, you dolt. Don’t move, and I’ll get the sap—”
***
Samuel: Tel Aviv, October 23, 1942
The lock clicked open, and I swung the door inwards. I took it all in: the hook on which she hung her coat, and the kitchen in which she cooked her—and possibly Aron’s—meals. To my right sat the table at which she’d drunk her ersatz coffee this very morning. To my left lay the bedroom in which she slept. And here... here stood the desk where she’d written her letters to me—the letters I’d kept even to this day, in the waterproof pouch tied around my waist.
I smiled as I passed through the darkened doorway into her bedroom. I thought I could even smell her perfume, but then I paused. The bed was neatly made, and no clothes lay piled haphazardly on the chair in the corner. Danuta was a notorious slob, something we’d laughed about frequently as we’d gotten to know each other’s more intimate habits in Vilnius. I’d espoused the theory that she actually suffered from rare Dirt Blindness, and was simply incapable of seeing the detritus she left. Yet here... there was no mess. There were not even clothes in the wardrobe.
Puzzled, yet not concerned, I turned back to the main living area and saw that a layer of dust coated the kitchen table. Dishes sat, forlorn and unused, in their rack by the dry sink.
Maybe she moved back to her old flat. Maybe she changed her mind about living with Aron.
Then I took a closer look at the desk, a lovely roll-top, with numerous small drawers and shelves that gracefully embraced all that written correspondence demanded. Someone had left the roll top open, and a letter in Danuta’s handwriting lay there, lightly covered in dust. I’d never seen this letter, for I knew each one of her missives by heart. Next to the letter, a practice book lay open. In it, someone had painstakingly copied each word of Danuta’s letter, multiple times.
I flipped through this book, confused, for with each iteration, the handwriting looked more and more similar to the original. That’s when I spotted the envelope, propped against the back of the desk.
On it, in handwriting that was unmistakably Aron’s, was written: My Dearest Samuel.
***
Aron: Helwan, Egypt, October 23, 1942
Sean’s urgent shout had been cut off mid-word, as the gates of hell opened. I later learned that Operation Lightfoot had begun. It was the great British push that Operation Bertram had been conceived and planned—successfully, it turned out—to conceal.
All I knew then, though, was the sound of artillery, but not the deep and distant earth-thrum I’d heard so many times, with one ear pressed to the floor of my foxhole, or in the trench in which I worked at night. This brain-jarring earthquake lasted for twenty minutes. The sand danced next to me with the concussion from what I later learned were 1000 field guns firing simultaneously. The muzzles flashed in the now-full darkness. Frame-by-frame, as if in slow motion, I watched the sand jump off the toes of my boots, as if brushed by an unseen hand. At the far end of the minefield, close enough that I could see and feel it but far enough to be harmless, a mine detonated from the shockwaves. A piece of hot shrapnel landed next to my leg, and another mine went off next to the first, possibly triggered by the shock of the proximate explosion. Then, a third exploded at the other end of the field.
I twisted my head wildly and looked around. In all directions, dark blobs took shape, shaken free of their sandy camouflage by the incessant rumbling. I watched with horror as the anti-tank mines, the triggers for which were notoriously sensitive, according to the cursory training we’d received before they turned us loose with our shovels, emerged from the sand. They revealed themselves, as all secrets must, with a cold malevolence that threatened redemption, rather than nurturing it.
