Strangers with the Same Dream

  ALSO BY Alison Pick

  NOVELS

  The Sweet Edge (2005)

  Far to Go (2010)

  POETRY

  Question & Answer (2003)

  The Dream World (2008)

  MEMOIR

  Between Gods (2014)

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 Alison Pick

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pick, Alison, 1975–,

  Strangers with the same dream / Alison Pick.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345810458

  eBook ISBN 9780345810472

  I. Title.

  PS8581.I2563S77 2017  C813′.6  C2017-900802-1

  Book design by Five Seventeen

  Cover image: © Marta Orlowska / Arcangel Images

  v4.1

  a

  For Eric

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Alison Pick

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

   Chapter 6

   Chapter 7

   Chapter 8

   Chapter 9

  Part Two

   Chapter 10

   Chapter 11

   Chapter 12

   Chapter 13

   Chapter 14

   Chapter 15

   Chapter 16

   Chapter 17

   Chapter 18

   Chapter 19

   Chapter 20

   Chapter 21

   Chapter 22

   Chapter 23

  Part Three

   Chapter 24

   Chapter 25

   Chapter 26

   Chapter 27

   Chapter 28

   Chapter 29

   Chapter 30

   Chapter 31

   Chapter 32

   Chapter 33

   Chapter 34

   Chapter 35

   Chapter 36

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.

  —Genesis 9:5

  Spilled blood is not the roots of trees but it’s the closest thing to roots we have.

  —Yehuda Amichai

  This story begins with a lie.

  I killed myself. That’s what they said. They made me pay with that particular shame. When our descendants spoke of me, I was not named but instead called “the suicide,” or sometimes “the first suicide.” A cautionary tale.

  Committing suicide meant no burial, no mourning rites. No Kaddish, no winding sheets, no shiva. No final consolations, just as, for me, there had been no daughterhood or motherhood, no group of people who could stand in for the family I never had. Alone in death as I had been in life.

  Back then, to kill yourself was a sin. It brought great disgrace. Which, of course, is what they wanted. Well. Maybe I deserved it after all the damage I had done.

  We lived that whole year pushed up against death—illness, accident, things more sinister still. There was a gun, and we argued over it like the children that we were—who could touch it, who could hold it, who would be the first to discharge the verdict of its bullets. The first time I saw it I knew, somehow, that it would be the instrument of my death. I could not have guessed the story that would come first.

  Now I am dead and that story is all I know.

  I revisit it, questioning my judgment, my motivation. And mostly, I am graced now with compassion for myself I did not have in life. I understand why I did what I did, and why I sometimes kept silent. I can forgive my mistakes.

  Still, it is small consolation to be alone in forgiving oneself; I would like for you to understand me too.

  What does a ghost want? Redemption. To tell her story. And you are the ones I have chosen to tell. You are my own chosen people.

  Now that I have been snipped free from linear time I can drift back and forth as I wish. Far in the future lies the terrible bloom of what we planted. It is your bloom now. The future is a tangle I prefer not to visit.

  Instead, I go backward as ghosts love to do. I want to take you with me, to that first year when we were living only for each moment, and each moment contained the whole of time, a kind of perpetual present that we grew to take for granted. That first year, when the swamps were drained, when the land was readied and the fields were sewn, when the crops first faltered and then thrived. The year when, despite our failures, something bigger grew up all around us. How proud we were. How satisfied. How could we have known what was coming?

  When the story of the first year is told—and it is, in poems and songs and books—our descendants gloss over the sickness, the long months of near starvation, the mix of Jews and Arabs whose backs they stood upon. Is truth revealed over time? In your time? I wish I could say so. But nobody knows the full scope of what happened—to all of us. And to me. I wish it didn’t matter, but my honour is at stake.

  I would like my truth to stand so my name might be spoken, if not in the hushed tones of reverence given to the founding members, then at least with respect. I did my best. I came up short. Can any of you claim otherwise?

  CHAPTER 1

  WHEN IDA ARRIVED IN the new place and saw the hot sun broken over the mountain’s crust and the sky above it an impossible ravaged blue, she felt that she had been dead up until that moment. Her real life was about to begin.

  If she could have seen what was coming she might have felt differently. But only I could see it. And of course I couldn’t tell her.

  Ahead of her was a scraggly line of settlers, halutzim, winding its way toward the mountain.

  “Smotri,” someone said in Russian.

  “Was?” someone else asked in German.

  “Speak Hebrew!” a third halutz reminded them. This was the rule, along with equality, shared property, and communal living. It was 1921…5681, Ida corrected herself; she must force herself to use the Hebrew year, not the secular one. Theirs would be the first generation in two thousand years to raise children in the language pulled from the ashes of history. Still, when the halutz behind Ida muttered a curse, it was in Yiddish.

  The line slowed; something was happening up ahead. Ida stopped, and someone bumped into her back. She turned, and the man blushed. He looked like he had stepped directly out of a Zionist recruitment poster. The peaked worker’s cap. The loose white singlet. He was already tanned, as though he had spent many hours labouring under Eretz Yisrael’s relentless sun.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was dreaming.”

  Ida shrugged.

  The man considered her, a half-smile on his smooth face. “All the deeds of men are dreams at first, and become dreams at the end.”

  “Quotin
g Herzl,” Ida said, and laughed. “I feel like I know you already.”

  “Levi,” he said. “You do.”

  She touched her ear.

  “Shabbat Shalom,” he said.

  “Is it Friday?” she asked.

  “Saturday,” he said.

  And at this, Ida knew that she and Levi came from the same kind of homes: religious fathers with beards and tefillim. Cholent on the stove so their mothers would not have to cook—to work—on the Sabbath. But Ida was also thinking of Levi’s bravery at admitting his religious observance. The new kibbutz would be secular. Another rule.

  Levi took his cap off and stuffed it in his back pocket, revealing straight chocolate-brown hair, a cropped cut that was growing out and stood up from his head at all angles. Without his hat, she saw he was not a man but a boy. Eighteen or nineteen. Not twenty. His eyes were green. He peered at her, as though looking for something.

  “Your eyes are green,” he said.

  Nobody ever mentioned her eyes, so hidden behind her glasses. Ida laughed again.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I was noticing the same about you.”

  Levi’s face split into a grin; she saw his front tooth was chipped.

  “We have something in common,” he said.

  “We have several things in common,” Ida said, and returned his smile. Here they were, she thought, in this remote land of Palestine, far from their homes and families. They had left their lives as they knew them to turn the Balfour Declaration, and the idea of a homeland for the Jews, into truth. They were strangers with the same dream. Ida was a mild girl who had never felt strongly about an idea in her life. But this was the thing: Zionism was not just an idea. It was something that was happening, now and now and now. It was something she could make happen.

  And after what had been done to her father, she had no other choice.

  Somebody sneezed; somebody blessed them. A single tuft of cloud changed shape against the wide blue sky. The arid land went on forever, with only an occasional scrabbly shrub or struggling tuft of grass. The air smelled of baked mud and sweat and a dense kind of emptiness. The mosquitoes clotted in clouds, and beside her Levi swatted the air in front of his face.

  “There must be a word for this many bugs,” she said.

  “A plague?”

  “Next the cows will die.”

  They laughed; there were no cows—not yet—only the two spindly donkeys the Agency had given them.

  “And the firstborn sons.”

  “There are so many men…” Ida gestured at the line ahead of them. Then she wished she hadn’t said this.

  “Four for every woman.”

  But Levi, too, looked like he had said the wrong thing.

  “I don’t know anyone,” he added, gesturing at the halutzim in hobnail boots and kerchiefs.

  “You know me,” she said. And she reached over and touched his shoulder.

  She was astonished by her response to this boy. He was pulling something out of her she had not known existed.

  The sun beat down like a lunatic.

  “It’s so hot,” Ida said. Sweat on her forehead, on her cheeks under her glasses, trickling down between her breasts. Levi fumbled in his canvas pack, then came out with a battered canteen.

  “Here,” he said, holding it out to her, a circle of hammered metal with a nozzle attached to the top. She looked at it in his hand. It had taken on, magically, the properties of something more than a water container, of something of great symbolic weight.

  She froze, her hands against her shoulders beneath the straps of her own pack, so Levi was forced to ask, “Would you like a drink?”

  A flush rose up his face. Ida knew he was asking if he could give her something, and he was also asking if he could take something. The answer came from some unknown depth inside her, rising like a bubble.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He repeated the word, as if to underline it. “Yes.”

  Several long moments passed. Then he smiled, and the small chip in his front tooth extracted a tenderness from her that made her gut wrench. She wanted to get closer to him.

  Levi was still holding out the bottle; she reached for it. The hammered tin was not cool, but it was cooler than the air. Their hands didn’t touch, but they both rested on the canteen, scarcely any space between their fingertips.

  When Ida drank, the water tasted sharp, metallic.

  Later, she would think back to this moment. She hadn’t longed for him unrequited. She hadn’t wished for him, and then had her wish granted. Instead, he had arrived fully formed, filling a hole inside her she had been entirely unaware of. At the same time that her desire had arisen, its fulfillment was provided.

  Later, it was her own blissful ignorance she would grieve for. She didn’t yet know what damage love could wreak.

  —

  “Stop!” a voice shouted in Russian, the language most of them spoke despite the Hebrew they were rapidly trying to learn.

  “Says who?” someone shouted back.

  “Danger up ahead,” said someone else.

  Several other voices began to sing “Hatikvah,” but the song petered out after the first two or three lines. Ida pushed her glasses up on her nose, straining to see what was happening. They were passing the homes of the Arab tenant farmers, a village of perhaps twenty families. The Arabs had come out of their houses and were gaping at the line of halutzim inching through the valley. Soon, the line stopped and two figures stepped forward. The first, the village mukhtar, wore his white jalabiya with the traditional black and white checked keffiyeh on his head. David, the halutzim’s leader, was dressed in a simple settler’s costume of a loose white shirt and short pants. The two men faced each other like kings on a chessboard.

  The day was perfectly still, and Ida and Levi, near the back of the procession, could hear every word the others said.

  “Salam!” David raised his hand. “The Hebrew tribe is here to settle this valley.”

  There was a long moment, and the old Arab nodded. It could have been acceptance, or a challenge: We’ll see about that.

  A hawk cried out from Mount Gilboa. The light changed, and Ida saw a scar bisecting the old man’s cheek. The kind of scar that only a knife could have inflicted.

  Behind him, his people had gathered. Ida spotted a young mother about her own age, maybe eighteen, with a gaggle of children clinging to her. Ida was toward the rear of her own group, but the woman stood on her tiptoes, as though looking for Ida specifically; as though she had been waiting for her. Her eyes, now locked on Ida’s, were bright green in her hijab. The same colour as Levi’s, and close to Ida’s own. Something passed between the two women, a shiver of energy. Ida felt a tingling at the base of her spine, a cool breath against the back of her neck.

  Ida briefly thought to point the woman out to Levi, but something made her change her mind. At the front of the line, the two leaders had lowered their voices, bending toward each other like wrestlers squaring off. Their negotiation went on for some time. After a while the halutzim around Ida lost interest and talked among themselves.

  “You can’t trust an Arab,” one said.

  “We’re all sons of Abraham,” came the answer.

  “I myself am a daughter of Rebecca,” a girl’s voice said, indignant.

  “Didn’t you hear about the Nebi Musa attacks?” the first speaker asked. But they had all heard about the killings.

  “No different from the Cossacks,” someone said.

  “Arabs were killed too,” Levi said to the group, but this was ignored.

  Ida did not want to think about murders—she had come here to get away from that—and she began to step away from the conversation. But just as she did there was movement, an uptake of dust. The line began to straggle forward again, followed by the wagons loaded with gardening supplies, canvas, barbed wire, water barrels. Ida glanced back at the provisions. Where was the food? It was high noon. She was hot and thirsty. They were all hot and th
irsty. She thought about the clandestine meetings in the back of the bakery at home, all the fundraising, the scheming to get here to Eretz Yisrael. Had anyone addressed the question of what they would eat?

  Still, she was here, and she did not take it for granted. She had been living out of her trunk in the port of Jaffa this past month, in Mother Lobinsky’s boarding house. Longing for her mother, for little Eva, to be able to tell them she had arrived and would do her father justice. She had the feeling that she was experiencing something monumental, but having nobody to share it diminished it. Now here was Levi. The person she could talk to.

  Ida opened her mouth to tell him this, and with a sharp intake of breath she swallowed a mosquito. She covered her mouth, trying not to draw attention to herself. The more she tried to stifle the coughing, the louder the sounds that came out of her.

  “Are you okay? Do you want me to hit your back?” Levi asked.

  Ida shook her head no. She stepped out of line and bent over, trying to clear her throat. The bug seemed to be blocking her airway entirely. She had the sudden thought that she might choke to death; that all the toil and hardship to get herself to Eretz Yisrael, all the long Youth Movement meetings, the raising of kopeks, the departure from Eva and her mother at their time of greatest need, would only result in her limp body, lifeless on the earth. But finally she expelled the bug; the coughing slowly ceased. She straightened and wiped tears from the corners of her eyes. Then she rejoined the procession beside Levi, as though she belonged there.

  Mount Gilboa loomed ahead of them. They could see the northern side of the spring where they were headed. A single quinine tree, the sun blazing behind it, casting a shallow pool of shade. How could she have known then that quinine would come to mean the line between life and death, between birth and not existing at all?

  —

  The Jewish community should have known after the Kishinev pogroms in 1903, when they were accused of killing a Christian child and using his blood to bake matzah. The blood libel meant hundreds of Jews were killed or wounded in retaliation. They should have known, Ida’s mother had said, after Bialystok in 1906, when first marauders and then the Czarist army itself filled their bodies with bullets and ruined their homes. But there is a moment when an idea becomes more than itself, when the balance tips away from the theoretical and toward lived experience, and this must happen in its own time. Ida had grown up feeling passionate about Zionism the way one feels passionate about an unreachable goal. Precisely because of its unattainability, you long for it, never expecting it to be fulfilled. And then the pogrom in her own town happened, in Kiev, and Eretz Yisrael turned from an idea into a necessity. Something they must do if they were to survive as a people. As Herzl had long been saying, the Jews would not be safe until they had somewhere to live in peace.