Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  She nodded, her anxiety temporarily allayed.

  He held her hand as they walked across the field. Several of the halutzim noticed, and smiled, and with this small dose of external approval his annoyance was relieved and replaced with pride.

  Ruth was his life’s greatest accomplishment. He saw the image of his own face in hers and felt an odd mixture of pleasure and repulsion, that nature was capable of something so profound and so entirely outside the realm of human control. The act of fucking produced and reproduced the means of labour, but not through a generic worker—no, in someone so specific, so particular, that the rest of the world saw who she belonged to, and therefore who was responsible for her. He held Ruth’s hand tighter and tickled the inside of her wrist. The little giggle sent pleasure through him entirely unmediated by the mind. It was almost sexual, he thought, for a moment—and wondered if Hannah was right about him. She said that his own body was so unfamiliar to him he needed sex as a way to get inside it. He thought about the intelligent design that made children resemble their fathers, the deep understanding of the male psyche that it implied, the knowledge that otherwise a man might wander away. Because, after all, why wouldn’t he?

  “I have to pee,” Ruth said, and he looked down at her, startled from his reverie. There was a smear of dirt across her cheek; she was still wearing her night dress.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I need help.”

  “Okay.”

  But he did not know what she meant by help. He remembered the first glimpse of her vagina, the tiny slit when she had slid out of her mother. The months when his relationship to her involved wiping shit out of it when he changed her cloth diaper. The repulsion and attraction he felt at what he knew it would grow into.

  When they had finished with the bathroom—she did not need help, it turned out, only supervision and approval—he took her under the armpits and lifted her onto his shoulders. She leaned down and repeatedly kissed the crown of his head, so grateful for his attention. It came to him suddenly that he had been ignoring her these past days—and worse, when her mother was gone and she needed him most. Shame overwhelmed him. “I’m sorry, ahuva,” he said, but she didn’t answer.

  —

  He took her to see Trotsky and Lenin. He took her to see the little shoots of the carrot tops poking out in the new garden. He took her to dangle her feet in the stream. It was 10:30 in the morning. He wanted to repent. But what was he supposed to do with a child for the next eight hours? The day was meant for working. Or better yet, thinking.

  He let his feet lead him. They found themselves outside Sarah’s tent. When he cleared his throat loudly, though, it was Ida who came out. Her glasses were sliding down her nose in the heat.

  “Shalom,” she said.

  He could see that she didn’t know what he could want from her. She was worried, perhaps, that it was something about their previous conversation about Yom Kippur.

  “I need to ask you a favour,” he said, without greeting her first, and with an urgency in his voice that surprised him when he heard it. “Would you watch Ruth for a few hours?”

  He had lifted the girl down off his shoulders; he felt her clamp onto his thigh. She dug her little fingers in and he grimaced. Did she not know that he was a person too, with a body that felt things?

  “Of course,” Ida said immediately. “I’d be happy to.”

  Her cheeks were pink as though she had been working, and when she raised her hands to her face he saw her knuckles were chapped and scabbed. She smiled, genuinely pleased.

  “I have a little sister,” she said, but this only made Ruth whimper. She had heard from her mother that she, too, might—one day—have a sister, and she wanted one desperately. David cursed Hannah silently; and he cursed Ida for bringing it up.

  Ida crouched down.

  “Shalom, Ruth.”

  The girl looked up. “Have you seen my doll?”

  “Oh no. Is she missing?” Ida asked.

  David winced but Ruth seemed happy to launch into an in-depth description of the doll’s headscarf, which you could tie around her head, and how her mother had added a button so it could also be transformed into a kippah. David sought to extract himself from the situation and took a step backward. He could smell the heat, like something burning far away. A hamsin was coming.

  “I have an idea,” Ida was saying to Ruth. “Would you like to go on a special adventure with me?” Ida slid a finger under her ribbon. With her other hand she pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose.

  Ruth lifted her lashes.

  “It will be a secret,” Ida said. “You can’t tell anyone.”

  Ruth’s eyes widened.

  David heard the sound of a halutz shouting something—not the actual words, but the command in his voice. A mosquito lazily circled David’s head.

  “You have to promise,” Ida said.

  Ruth nodded, agreeing. She was a malleable child, David thought, and happy to go wherever there was adult attention. And he was grateful to be relieved of the duty he had taken on twice, first at conception and again now with Hannah gone. Ida had freed him. He didn’t wonder what their adventure would be.

  It was only later, when Ruth was returned to David with a red line sliced cleanly through her calf, that he paused. Blood trickled down from a poorly wrapped bandage; a clot had crusted in the hollow between her toes. How had this happened in such a short time? He was momentarily alarmed, but then the thought of cleaning her up made him feel tired. This was women’s work. He was not meant to say it, but it was true; if he had been unsure before, the glob of blood in the child’s sandal rendered him certain.

  —

  It was Yitzhak who drove the wagon that brought Hannah home. Thin Rivka was beside David’s wife, holding her hand. The Angel Gabriel was beside them on the bench. A beautiful but silent child—the opposite of Ruth in disposition, David reflected, even though he was the father of both—looking around, bewildered.

  “Shalom,” David said, addressing Rivka directly, but she refused to look him in the eye or to acknowledge he had spoken.

  He patted Gabriel on the head roughly.

  Hannah stepped gingerly down from the wagon, as though returning from a long convalescence. She was thin; even her heavy bottom that he liked so much was now less substantial. When Ruth ran at her mother shouting “Imma! Imma! Imma!” she almost knocked her down.

  Hannah reached out a hand to steady herself, using Thin Rivka’s shoulder instead of David’s.

  If she noticed the cut on Ruth’s leg, she didn’t say.

  When David kissed her cheek he could smell death on her.

  “Hannahleh,” he said into her ear. But her look was filled with a sorrow that made him flinch and step away.

  Yitzhak and Thin Rivka unloaded the wagon. There were carpet bags and a satchel and three of the blue cargo trunks they had first brought from Russia.

  “Provisions?” David asked. And Yitzhak shook his head no.

  “We’re staying,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “For how long?”

  David took a deep breath and held it.

  “Indefinitely,” Yitzhak said. He cracked his big knuckles.

  Gabriel had climbed down from the wagon and found Ruth, who was still clinging to Hannah, and he clung on as well, all three of them attached to each other like souls on a ship going down.

  David wondered, briefly, if something else had happened when Hannah was away, some calamity even larger than Avraham’s demise that would merit Yitzhak staying. But then, from the irrigation ditches, he heard the ring of Sarah’s laughter, high and girlish, and his thoughts turned to which halutz was drawing this sound from her, like a string of pearls. The question of what had happened to his wife at the old place vanished from his mind.

  Yitzhak had heard the laughter too. He watched David. And David could see that he had recognized the look in his friend’s eyes. Already Yitzhak knew th
e whole story, without having been told a thing.

  Was this why Yitzhak had been sent? To keep an eye on David and the women? But when Yitzhak asked if he could see the infirmary, David suddenly knew otherwise. It was because of what had happened with Dov.

  Chaim the messenger must have carried the news throughout the land on his camel. Along with mail and telegrams and bolts of fabric from the market, he delivered gossip from kutsva to kutsva, farm to kibbutz. And soon David saw that the Agency had heard too; they had sent Yitzhak with bandages and creams, with his doctor’s patience and eye for detail.

  Yitzhak was here to heal Dov. They could not let David become a murderer a second time.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS NOT DAVID’S fault that the girl fell in love with him. He took her to the mountain and laid her on her back and hitched up her dress; he talked to her about the mechanics of building a water wheel by the river. Trotsky or Lenin could make the wheel turn; they didn’t even need an engine. And how much simpler than having some poor schmuck schlep the pails to the barrels and then the barrels to the kitchen, the laundry, the farthest fields.

  He talked to her about the mysterious ways of history: Chaim Weizmann had moved to Manchester not to further the Zionist agenda but because chemical dyes, his specialty as a research chemist, were critical to the weaving industry there. But while in Manchester he had spoken publicly about Eretz Yisrael and the Jews, and several prominent Englishmen had caught his enthusiasm. Who exactly? The Secretary of State, one Lord Balfour. And Winston Churchill himself.

  David told Sarah the thoughts in his head, his theories and predictions, his hopes. But he might as well have been saying, My beshert, my destiny, it is you and only you. For you I will leave my family; my wife, my child. For you I will do anything.

  He had given Sarah the new red slippers, to match her red sleeves.

  It had been so long since Hannah had clung to him like she needed him; so long since he’d felt a woman’s desire for him to fill her with his heart and his mind. Hannah wanted his semen for reproductive purposes. The more she wanted it, the more he withheld, pulling out at the last minute and ejaculating like a teenager on the clammy white skin of her belly. Her stretch marks from the earlier pregnancies were still visible, like scars. Hannah’s need was perfunctory. But Sarah wanted the essence of him, as much as she could get, the essence that was spread throughout him like a thousand stars in a brilliant night sky.

  David did not think, in the deepest part of him, that what he was doing was wrong. The Hebrew patriarch Jacob, after all, had taken two sisters for wives, Rachel and Leah, and their descendants had become the Jews of Eretz Yisrael today. And this was nothing compared to how some of the Arabs lived. But Hannah would see it differently. Now that Hannah was back, he had to be more careful.

  —

  Just before Hanukkah a group of new halutzim arrived. Their ranks had been changing, as those who couldn’t handle the harsh conditions slipped away in the night. These new young Zionists arrived to take their place. Some were focused on populating Palestine with young revolutionaries so the sickness of imperialism and capitalism would not take hold here as well. Through the simple act of working with one’s hands, the whole world could be shown how to live a life of justice. So it was written in Prophets; and so the idealists in Hapoel Hatzair—The Young Worker—who followed A.D. Gordon would do.

  David was wary of this idealism. It embodied a naïveté that he had learned could only hurt their cause. He thought of the boy, Levi, who had gone so far as to refuse to eat the only thing—meat—that would heal him from his sickness.

  A chicken had been bought at the market and the boy had turned his face from it, as though it insulted him.

  “You don’t like roast chicken?” David had asked, feigning ignorance.

  “Ida needs it more,” the boy had said, but David refused to let him get away with this.

  “You’re a vegetarian!” he said, the word in his mouth like sour milk.

  Still the boy had pushed the plate away, and with that gesture David felt a disdain that bordered on rage. He might have been dealing with a belligerent son. It made him feel that he himself had failed to accomplish some critical task, failed to impart the crucial knowledge of how precarious their situation here really was.

  He felt the same frustration when the new group of pioneers arrived on foot, lugging their belongings through December’s thick mud. Every fifteen metres or so the carts got stuck and Trotsky and Lenin had to pull them out. David, despite months of trying, still had not been able to convince the railway company to build a new station for the kibbutz. He took his failure as a judgment against himself. He promised himself the next group—the third group—would arrive by train.

  As he stood in front of the new and old faces that evening, David let the image he had seen earlier in the day inform his words.

  “You have come here as wandering Jews, carrying your belongings through the mud,” he said. “For centuries you have wandered, homeless in the wilderness. But now you are here. In your own place. In your homeland.”

  He looked out at the group. It was as if they were gathered on some old railway platform in Europe with their heavy cargo trunks and their valises, wearing clothes all wrong for the season. He had an image of the boats some of them must have arrived on, the long journeys from whatever Cossacks or pogroms they were fleeing. He felt the burden of their untried ideas about what the Jews could become. He saw the kibbutz as a kind of net, wide enough to draw them all in, strong enough to hold them, flexible enough that what they would grow here would push its way through the empty spaces.

  “What if nationhood is a thing of the past?” he heard a halutz say, thinking surely of Leon Trotsky, and someone else answered simply—and correctly—“It isn’t.”

  The old group was spread among the newcomers—Shoshanna with her armpit hair poking from her sleeves, Ida fiddling with her braids, Yashka and Zeruvabel and Selig running their eyes through the gathering to see if there were new women they wished to talk to. And there was Levi, who had recovered despite his refusal of meat.

  Yitzhak stood alone, slightly off from the others. At Kinneret he would have addressed the newcomers. But here, he hung back, his arms folded across his chest, watching David, evaluating him, as though he was some old Rabbi on a Beit Din.

  David had read about an ancient sage, Gamzu, who was known to reply to every event, even a calamity, with the words “Gam zu l’tovah”—this, too, is for the good. David tried to remember this, tried even to believe it, but with the arrival of Yitzhak his own authority was compromised. He and Yitzhak had fought, years ago, over the issue of a German plough. Yitzhak had said it would cut twice as deep into the earth and produce twice the yield. The Arab plough, David had said, was suited to the rocky earth, but Yitzhak, friend of every Arab in the land, had insisted on the German one. And hadn’t he been right?

  The harvest the following year had proven his point.

  This was the kind of thing David was now determined to avoid. He heard a boy he didn’t recognize—a newcomer—say something about dialectics and historical imperative. The workers had only to correctly turn the wheel of time to bring about the objective of true justice.

  At the word “justice” David thought of Sakina; then he pushed her small brown face from his mind.

  —

  Among the newcomers was an American doctor. He was chubby and short, with a calm born of entitlement, and carried a field kit with a cross on its side. David was immediately suspicious of him. No doubt he would get a taste of the harsh conditions and return straight home to New York or Boston or wherever he had come from. Still, the kadachat was ravaging their ranks and they desperately needed medical help.

  After David had addressed the group he went out to shake the doctor’s hand. The man’s fingers were smooth, like a desk worker’s.

  “Shalom,” David said.

  The doctor spoke a long sentence in English that David could not unde
rstand.

  David raised his eyebrows. The doctor spoke again in a butchered Hebrew, saying something about how grateful he was for everything the Jews in Eretz Yisrael were doing for Jews in the diaspora.

  There was a woman beside him; David tried not to look at her, but the more he tried the more his eyes moved toward her.

  “This is Elisabeth,” the doctor finally said.

  David rubbed his nose.

  “My nurse,” Dr. Lowen said. He touched the girl’s shoulder. Her dark hair hung all the way down her back, landing just above her behind.

  “Shalom,” David said.

  He reminded himself to shake Elisabeth’s hand the same way he would a man’s. But she was so feminine, with ridiculously long eyelashes and a tortoise shell comb above her ear.

  Perhaps they could sell it.

  Elisabeth said, “Where do we start?

  David blinked at her. Maybe she knew what she was getting into after all. But he didn’t feel right giving her directions—she was at once too assertive and too delicate. Without acknowledging she had spoken, he turned back to Dr. Lowen. “We have many cases of kadachat,” David said.

  The doctor nodded. He tugged at his beard. “Of course,” he said in his slow and laboured Hebrew. “The quinine from the tree in Palestine is different from…”

  But his gaze was unfocused and drifted away from David.

  “My spectacles were broken on the trip,” he said, mostly to himself.

  The doctor was looking in the direction of the infirmary, and it came to David that there was someone who needed medical attention more urgently than the malaria victims.

  “My daughter was also…”

  Dr. Lowen cocked his head to the side.

  “Your daughter?”

  “She’s six.”

  “Is she ill?”

  The doctor placed his palm over his bald spot as he listened.

  “She got scratched,” David said.

  The doctor’s forehead furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “More like…cut.”

  He waited for the doctor to ask him how, and was grateful when he did not. David continued, emboldened. “It seems…”