Strangers with the Same Dream Page 14

  “Chicken,” she said.

  It was a silly joke, he thought, but Hannah always found it funny.

  She laughed and said, “Something from nothing,” but he could hear the edge creeping back into her voice. She did not like to cook, and David knew it. At Kinneret, she had worked with the livestock.

  “Good thing we are somewhere where we have the freedom to celebrate our holiday,” David said.

  But Hannah snapped back, “Don’t lecture me. I’m not a child.”

  At her feet, by the water tap, Ruth was pulling out small sprouts that the chaverim had painstakingly planted for herbs. Her dark curls were bent over her work.

  “Ahuva,” David said. “Stop that.”

  “What else would you like her to do?”

  “She could plant rather than uproot,” David said.

  He glanced at his precious seedlings. He lifted the pencil tucked behind his ear and gestured with it as though it was a conductor’s baton.

  Ruth held up the dirty brown pillow she called her doll. To David’s eye, it was a glorified pincushion. Sakina had also had a little clay pot you could pretend to balance on the top of the doll’s head, but Ruth had broken this almost immediately. She held the doll up now to the uprooted shoots, ramming them against the face where a mouth would have been and making chomping noises.

  “I’m full!” the doll said in a high, squeaky voice.

  Ruth made noises like gas emissions from her pursed lips.

  Back at Kinneret she would have been occupied with Liora, memorizing a Bialik poem or practising a traditional folk dance for performance at the Sabbath meal.

  “We need to ensure there is culture on this new kibbutz,” David said. He lifted his eyes skyward, picturing lectures, art exhibitions. Maybe one day an orchestra.

  “She just needs a playmate,” Hannah said.

  David lowered his eyes to his wife’s small, apple-shaped breasts.

  How he longed to clasp his palms around two full handfuls of milky, lusty abundance. A girl took shape in his mind’s eye, dressed in a dirndl and blonde braids. She was a hybrid between someone who milked cows and someone who produced the milk herself.

  “There will be other children,” he said.

  “She needs a sibling,” Hannah said. And then, “I want to have another baby.”

  David squeezed his eyes shut. He should have known this was where the conversation was heading. He was making so much effort to not relegate women to biological determinism; to treat them like workers, equal and competent. He wished Hannah would reward him for this effort. Instead, she let her womanly urges eclipse the communal good. Surely she could see they were in no position to have another baby.

  “Look around you, Hannahleh,” he said. “We’re starving. What would we do with another child?”

  “Starving is a little strong,” she said.

  Her stomach growled audibly; they both laughed.

  It was me trying to reach down and add a drop of levity, hoping it might spread between them like a drop of blood through water. This was how it used to be all the time. At Kinneret. Before Kinneret. When they had fallen in love, as children.

  I was trying to repent, to create the conditions in which something better would happen. Something redemptive, with its root in love. But no matter how I tried I could never change what would come. The horror would happen, regardless.

  “The halutzim will have children,” David said to Hannah.

  “They are children.”

  “That won’t stop them.”

  “What about populating Eretz Yisrael with little Jews?” she asked, but David was tired now, and frustrated. He rubbed his fists into his eyes. The desire to end the talk and leave came over him like a fever; he leaned his head in toward Hannah and whispered, “I’ll be back.”

  He tried to imply that they would resume the conversation later, or that in place of the conversation would be another kind of more physical intimacy. Perhaps the kind of intimacy that would lead to more children. But his resentment showed through and his words came out sounding like a threat.

  His wife heard this: she took a step back and placed a hand protectively on her daughter’s dark curls.

  “Come here, Ruthie,” she said.

  Ruth had abandoned her performance and was putting her doll to bed under a blanket of grass she had ripped up from the newly planted pasture. Now she came to her mother and clung to her tightly, desperately, as though to a life raft. The child never came to him in this way.

  David turned his back on both of them and walked away toward the tents, a purpose in his step that implied he had something urgent to attend to.

  —

  If there was a woman standing beside her tent, alone and beautiful in the late afternoon light, it was not his fault. It was not his fault if her breasts were full, and if, in her dark curls, in the shadow of her cleavage barely visible beneath her shift, the vision of the milkmaid he had just conceived sprung to life. It was not his fault that his body responded, every part of him rising to attention.

  It was the halutza he had noticed on the first day; the Jewess who could single-handedly make enough babies for all of Eretz Yisrael. The one named Sarah. Had he imagined he’d escape her?

  She said, “I need help unzipping my dress.”

  He blinked, then blinked again. He ran a finger over a hangnail on his thumb.

  She turned her back to him and lifted her dark curls to reveal a zipper that had snagged on the fabric.

  What was she doing wearing a dress with a zipper? A dress with crimson sleeves and a skirt that looked to be made out of silk?

  “It was my mother’s,” she said, looking back at him over her shoulder apologetically.

  And then: “It’s two pieces, actually. A skirt and a blouse.”

  He waved this away like a fly.

  She did not acknowledge that she was supposed to have relinquished it. She said, “All I need are red slippers to match,” and gestured to her heavy workboots and laughed. But David did not dwell on her dress because beneath her dress was her back.

  Was she asking him to touch it?

  “So I should just…”

  “It’s stuck,” the girl said.

  “I’m David.”

  She laughed. “I know.”

  She had a dimple. It was almost too much.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said.

  He nodded. There was so much at stake here, in every moment; he knew from Kinneret how quickly things could go wrong and how, once tipped, the boat of social convention was difficult to right.

  He lowered his eyes from the beautiful face to her shoes, caked in mud like everyone else’s.

  “Working makes us individually stronger,” he said. “And in this way, we will grow infinitely strong as a group.”

  But Sarah’s eyes laughed, telling him that she knew exactly what she was doing, trying to diffuse the sexual tension. It was not by coincidence that she had chosen him to unclothe her.

  “My body is yours,” she said, and he flinched at the directness.

  “Every body belongs to the collective?” he stammered, wanting to be sure, to clarify what she meant.

  She nodded, her eyes amused.

  “Eventually the Arabs will see it too,” he said. “If we set our example, they, too, will eventually free themselves from the medieval clutches of the effendi and…”

  Sarah was laughing outright now. She saw through his inability to surrender to the situation, the way he was using theory as a shield against unruly human desire, the sort of desire the collective was trying to normalize.

  “Monogamy isn’t natural,” he said, in a high voice that he recognized, although surely it did not belong to him. “It’s a kind of bourgeois property owning.”

  He was like a record, the needle skipping back and forth between tracks, trying frantically to land on something that would diffuse what was happening. The zipper, too, would not come unstuck. Its little teeth dug into the fabric just as he wis
hed to dig his own teeth into Sarah’s flesh. He could smell her sweat, the heat from the fields, mixed with a tang he imagined coming from the triangle of her groin. He wanted to bury his face there.

  When the zipper came unstuck, there was a hiccup of sorrow within him, and then a sharp pain of longing as it opened to reveal her back, pale as milk.

  She turned toward him; for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she only smiled and said, “I couldn’t have done that on my own.”

  As though he was just some man who had helped with a stuck zipper. As though she had not wanted him especially at all.

  CHAPTER 13

  ON THE AFTERNOON of Erev Rosh Hashanah two horses galloped into the yard. They pulled a wagon; in it sat Yitzhak with his hands clutching the reigns, Thin Rivka at his side, and the Angel Gabriel wedged between them. They had come to fetch Hannah. Her father, old Avraham, had died.

  Hannah, David thought, was strangely calm in the face of this news. But when he looked more closely he saw that her reaction was really a kind of frozen terror. She stood by Yitzhak’s horse, who recognized Hannah and whinnied happily, with her hand buried in the rough mane and her eyes wide.

  “I should have gone earlier,” she whispered, her lips barely moving. “I should have taken Ruthie.”

  But when David asked if she would be taking Ruth now she told him in a furious whisper that she was unable to deal with a single additional thing. She wanted to see her father’s body alone. And so she packed a small bag and mounted the wagon. Thin Rivka hugged Hannah and helped her get settled in her seat; she did not even look at David. David nodded at Yitzhak like they were concluding a business deal, and Yitzhak nodded in return.

  “How long will you be?” David asked his wife, who had started to sob violently when she reached the safety of Yitzhak and Rivka. She ignored him, and then the wagon was gone from the yard.

  Ruth began to sob, too, when he told her. Her Saba had died from loneliness without her, she cried. She had known he would die and nobody had listened to her. Ruth’s sobs deepened when she learned her mother had left and she would have to stay here with the adults. With her father. Why could she not return and visit her beloved Liora, and kiss her grandfather goodbye one last time? Silently, David agreed—it would have made the most sense. But Hannah was already gone.

  The girl was stuck beside him throughout the Rosh Hashanah meal. She wasn’t eating and then he saw she needed him to cut her food, which, David had to admit, did not taste as good because Hannah had left her post in the kitchen. He stood at the front and addressed the group and Ruth refused to let go of his hand. He recited prayers he knew by heart but did not believe or even really hear. After, he and Ruth stayed to help clean up. He was not on the kitchen crew but he wanted to set a good example. He scraped the tin plates, which had already been licked clean by the hungry halutzim, and submerged the cutlery in the vat of soapy bleach. One of the stray cats had drunk from it recently and died, its body stiff and maggoty the following morning. He thought about rolling the boulders they had used as chairs back out to the field but it would be a waste of his energy, and the stones could still be used as seats until the Agency came through with more chairs. Ruth said, “I’m tired. Where is Imma?”

  “She’ll be back soon.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She hung on him and dug her little fingers into his arm.

  “Ouch!” David said.

  “Happy New Year,” Samuel nodded to them as they were leaving.

  “Happy New Year,” David said. And then, “I have to put my daughter to bed.”

  He felt the need to explain his departure. And he told himself to remember that Samuel had seen him leaving.

  At the communal bathroom he helped Ruth brush her teeth with baking soda and spit in the trench that had been dug for this purpose. It gave him satisfaction to see this; the utility of it.

  In their tent, his notebook was open on the bed to a page with a sketch of an open-air oven called a taboon they had built at Kinneret in the early days. The Arabs had come down and spent an afternoon showing them how—Youssef, who David still admired, and several of his sons. They had helped the halutzim adapt to the new land in other ways as well, showing them which herbs were edible and which worked as a salve for mosquito bites. Teaching them how to predict the volatile weather. David closed the book. The gun was wedged beneath their straw mattress. He took it out and turned it over in his hand, admiring its heft and shine.

  “Abba?” Ruth said.

  He looked up. Then he put the gun back in its place carefully and tucked her in.

  “I’m still in my clothes,” she giggled.

  He said, “It’s okay.”

  “Where’s Salam?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Salam. From Sakina.”

  His heart started to pound at the sound of the girl’s name but after a moment he remembered. “Your doll,” he said.

  She nodded. “I need her to fall asleep.”

  David looked around the tent; Hannah had made a mess of things in her haste to leave. He lifted shirts and the wool cover and something that looked like a half-sewn receiving blanket for an infant.

  “I can’t find the doll, ahuva,” David said.

  He looked over, expecting a fuss, but Ruth had grasped on to her mother’s only pair of stockings instead—David knew Hannah would not like it but he let the girl wind them around her hand and then stick her thumb in her mouth and start to suck. The little eyelids fluttered. She fell asleep quickly, and he watched her chest rise and the darkness descend on her body.

  He began to recite the Sh’ma, but it was not to God that he spoke. It was to silence. It was to existence, or eternity; to the big open nothing out of which each moment was born.

  He remembered the sense of possibility from childhood, when he would lie in his bed on a dusky summer evening and hear his Bubbe moving around in the kitchen below him, feeling safe and loved and exquisitely cared for. In those sunset hours, the sound of the milk horses and clinking glass in the street below, a girl calling out to her mother, he had felt that the world outside was entirely up for the taking. That the safe containment he felt was the launching ground for something bigger. Adulthood was ahead of him like some unimaginable play. How would he act? Who would he be? Ruth’s breathing deepened and he watched her turn over beneath the mosquito netting. He reached beneath his own bed and found the gun again. He pulled it out, shifted it in his hand, and gently touched the trigger. Like a boy in a game of Cowboys and Indians. “Bang bang,” he whispered to himself.

  He knew what he was doing without letting himself know. Ruth was asleep; if she woke she would find the tent empty and dark, but that didn’t stop him. His feet moved across the perimeter like they were in charge. When he passed Levi he followed his impulse to speak.

  “I’m on night guard,” he said. “I need you to take my shift.”

  The air around them was cooling almost imperceptibly. The sound of laughter floated out over the dusk.

  Levi said, “Of course.” He rubbed at his left eyebrow with his right hand. He inserted a forefinger under a string looped around his wrist.

  David turned the revolver over. He held it out like an omen.

  “But isn’t…” Levi started.

  “Take it,” David said. And the boy didn’t question him, didn’t make explicit the thought so obviously in his mind: the rule was that only David would have the gun.

  Truthfully David was not entirely sure why he was passing it along, but a long-buried instinct had chosen this moment to assert itself, and he knew enough to obey.

  Levi said, “Shall I go?”

  David looked up and blinked.

  “Go where?”

  “To stand guard.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes.”

  —

  At Sarah’s tent he scratched lightly on the canvas. The stars were coming out and the shadow of the mountain was black and co
ol like the inside of someone’s mouth. There was a cleanness in it, David thought, like a soul scrubbed pure of imperfections. David did not let himself think about what he was doing. He did not think about his wedding vows, about the chuppah on the banks of the Sea of Galilee when Hannah was pregnant with Ruth, about the veil over her face or the ribbons braided into her hair. About Liora before this, or Rivka.

  Sarah’s head poked out from the slit in the tent, her curls wild around her face. She said, “I was waiting for you.”

  “You were…?”

  “My zipper is stuck again!” And she laughed uproariously, like she had told him the best joke ever.

  David said, “I can just…” He lifted his hands and mimed the gentle pulling of fabric from the teeth of the zipper.

  “No,” she said. “I was kidding.”

  He flushed the deep scarlet of his Bubbe’s borscht; his hand rose automatically to his cheek, its evening stubble.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll just…”

  He swallowed several times; he touched his Adam’s apple with his pointer finger.

  “It isn’t like you to seem nervous,” Sarah said.

  “Do I seem nervous?”

  He took a step backward.

  Sarah’s eyes were on him. The beautiful Jewishness of her face. He knew there were halutzim—Yitzhak for one—who would object to this characterization, but to David she was gorgeous, and she was an Israelite, and the two were braided together like dough in the Sabbath challah. She said, “What I need help with is actually untangling some wire.”

  Untangling wire was a job for one person. And woman’s strength must be respected. But what if she truly couldn’t accomplish this on her own? Was it a test?

  He tilted his head.

  “It’s over behind Gilboa,” she said. She turned her gaze toward the mountain, the pool of shade it cast in the twilight. The sky now almost as dark as the mountain itself, but not quite.

  His eyes followed hers and they both saw the place where the field levelled out under the plane of stars, beside the river, the place where nobody would see them.

  He looked at her again, to be sure. She raised her eyebrows.