Strangers with the Same Dream Page 17

  “Yes?”

  “It’s red, and hot. It’s getting worse.”

  From the direction of the tents came laughter. Someone began to sing a rousing rendition of “Eliyahu Ha Navi,” the Sabbath song calling for Elijah to appear, to make himself known.

  “I’m sure it will heal,” David said, his voice revealing the opposite of his words.

  The doctor took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “Why don’t you show me?” he said.

  He rolled up his sleeves. His work had begun.

  —

  David led Dr. Lowen and Elisabeth across the marshy flats to the hastily erected sick house. He lifted the flap of the tent as though it was the entrance to a circus, a freakish collection of ailments housed within, and with more than one of the patients gravely ill from his own negligence.

  He forced himself to enter. The doctor and the nurse followed behind him.

  Inside it was stifling hot, and it stank of iodine and feces. The number of kadachat patients had increased. David himself was surprised to see perhaps ten of them—some on backboards, some covered loosely in mosquito netting—in various stages of the illness. He watched the doctor’s face to gauge how they were doing, but Dr. Lowen remained impassive. He went from body to body, looking in his patients’ pupils and feeling their foreheads. Elisabeth circulated on her own; she was the first to see Dov.

  “What happened here?” she asked, and the men looked over to where she was crouched beside the boy, lifting his bandages gently and peering beneath them.

  “Accident,” David said.

  Elisabeth bobbed her head. “What kind of accident?” she asked.

  David didn’t answer, hoping she was too engaged in her exam to press the issue.

  But she looked at him from under her long lashes, and touched the hair gathered by her tortoise shell comb.

  “What kind of accident?” she repeated.

  “He got scalded.”

  Elisabeth exhaled and mercifully turned back to the patient, calling the doctor over. He, too, crouched by Dov, his face steady in response to the charred flesh, the oozing black wounds.

  The two of them conferred in quiet whispers. David saw their familiarity and envied it, the way they spoke without using words, the way they functioned as a team, two different arms on the same body. They had obviously been working together for a long time back in America. Shee-ka-go, they had told David. It took him a minute to understand: Chicago. How fortunate to not have to work at communicating; to have your inner thoughts known by someone as though they were her own. Was this not the desired thing? To not have to work for love.

  As though David had summoned Sarah, there was a rustle at the tent flap and her head poked in. She had piled her hair on top of her head like a model in a fashion magazine from Paris. She was so young she would surely live forever.

  When she saw he was there—that, he fantasized, she had finally found him after searching the whole kibbutz—a smile broke across her face. David thought that perhaps he had never been as happy to see someone in his entire life.

  “I came to—” she started, but she saw the doctor and nurse and closed her mouth.

  The others were occupied; they barely noticed someone new had arrived. David took advantage of this, and ushered Sarah in with his eyes. He was practising the familiarity he had seen between the doctor and the nurse, and Sarah took him up on it. She came in, and stood beside him, silent at his side. Their arms pressed against each other. Without exchanging a word, they were playing at being seen together in public, right here where Hannah could walk in at any moment. There was something subversive in this, something reckless. For a moment, David thought that Sarah’s own hunger was as big as his, maybe bigger. And this was why he wanted her.

  It was not love, it was appetite.

  He would have to be sure that she, too, did not confuse the two.

  Dr. Lowen chose that moment to look up from Dov. He saw Sarah and David standing together, and David knew he must think this woman was his wife.

  The doctor’s eyes flitted back to Elisabeth, who stood up from Dov’s bedside. The doctor now raised himself too, and lifted a hand and put it on the small of her back. He kept it there.

  David summoned his courage. He lifted his own hand, and put it on the small of Sarah’s back. As if they were a mirror, or a younger couple imitating what it was to be an older one.

  As though there was nobody else in the world, the doctor leaned over and kissed the nurse’s shoulder. But this was too much. David flushed at this intimacy. He removed his hand from Sarah’s back as though burned.

  A cry came from the corner of the room and David started. Ruth. Her body was so tiny compared to the other patients she might not have been there at all.

  “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts…” she cried.

  “This is your child?” the doctor asked.

  David nodded. “Yes.”

  Ruth was twisting under her mosquito net as though trying to rid herself of some kind of demon.

  “Metukah,” the doctor said, pleased, David could see, to know the Hebrew term of endearment and be able to use it.

  He crouched down beside Ruth, steadying himself with one hand. He lifted the mosquito netting carefully and touched her leg as gently as possible; still, Ruth’s crying grew louder.

  “What did she cut it on?” the doctor asked David.

  David weighed his options. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

  He waited for the doctor to say that Ruth must be ill with something else, that a cut alone could not lead to this kind of fever, but he did not.

  Ruth moaned. “Salam!” she cried out. Her black curls were stuck to her face with sweat.

  “Peace?” the doctor asked.

  “It’s also the name of her doll,” David said. And then to Ruth directly, “I’ll go find her.”

  “I gave her to Selig,” Ruth said, with a crazed and feverish look in her eye, and tried to say something else but her voice trailed off and she began to cry.

  David hushed her. His failures nested inside him like Russian dolls.

  Elisabeth turned to David. There was a look on her face that said the child’s rotting leg was too much even for her, a nurse, to bear; she needed a break, a brief distraction.

  “How long have you been in Eretz Yisrael?” she asked, like she was making small talk at a cocktail party back in Shee-ka-go.

  “A long time,” David said; he watched Elisabeth’s pretty face. But the doctor had summoned Sarah over and was speaking to her; David tried with to listen to the other conversation with one ear.

  “The leg is…” He heard the doctor say. Then something undecipherable. Then something that sounded like the word “mould.”

  “I have wanted to make Aliyah since I was a child,” Elisabeth was saying. “I grew up with stories of…”

  David nodded, but he continued straining to listen to the doctor.

  “You could always try…unproven…unclear results…” he heard.

  But Ruth cried out again, begging relief, and David, too, felt the irresistible urge to unhook himself from what was taking place. He could not stand to see Ruth in pain, to hear the pleading for help in her cry. The mould vanished from his awareness. His mind fled to Sarah like a swallow glides across the back of the wind. All he could think was how he wanted to take her somewhere away from here and fuck her senseless.

  Later, when he did just that, Sarah began to cry, asking bothersome questions about Hannah. He tried to reassure her as best he could—the marriage was sexless, and it was a bourgeois institution anyway—but Sarah only cried harder and eventually David had to leave her. He said he had duties to attend to.

  —

  I go back over those moments. I watch them replay. Yes, I could have acted differently. But I had not understood the magnitude of what I’d been told.

  Why not?

  Now I know: Because the doctor himself did not understand.

  CHAPTER 17

 
THAT NIGHT THERE WAS a dance. Someone had thought to light torches around the perimeter of the field, creating the shape of the room where no room existed. David felt, as he crossed the tall grass, that he was approaching a country wedding, with dazzling little lights suspended in the blackness.

  So many grooms, and only a handful of brides. He was surprised to see Hannah, his real bride of all these years, among the younger women. Why was she not back by Ruth’s side? Instead, she was talking to one of the young pioneers. David squinted; it was Samuel. She was chatting as though she had known him for a long time; as though they were sharing in some great ambition together—which, of course, they were. But it irked David to see the way Hannah’s face was tipped up in pleasure, with a look he himself never drew from her anymore. It shamed him—so subtly that he was almost unaware of it—to see her displaying her fellow-feeling for another man in public.

  He took the image of her laughing with Samuel into his heart and stored it for when he might need it.

  Hannah felt his gaze and looked up. For a moment he held her eye. She looked so gaunt, and so old. But Hannah was not suspicious. There was not a suspicious bone in Hannah’s body. She was goodness embodied.

  This had once been enough to hold him.

  The pioneers were dancing, the wheel of the entire company spinning, and at the centre of the wheel was a smaller wheel where three women had giddily inserted themselves. They were the shimmering jewel on the ring. There was Ida and Shoshanna. There was Sarah. Her hair fell over her face as she danced, and her cheeks were pink with exertion, and her eyes were bright. It was as if light sparked off her in every direction.

  David had not planned on dancing. He had danced, all those years ago, when he and Hannah had arrived at Kinneret and were filled with the same wild optimism of these new halutzim. But the music was surprisingly compelling. The young halutz Zeruvabel was talented. And David could not forsake a chance to be close to his Sarah.

  He approached, unexpected shyness asserting itself in his body. He had authority, but he did not know if he was liked on his own merit or for his position. But when he wedged himself into the wider circle, nobody seemed to notice. The boys, too, were watching Sarah—Ida and Shoshanna might as well not even have been there—and something clenched in his gut, a longing that was almost intolerable, a rage at his impotence to make her his own. She was his, he reminded himself. She belonged to all of them. And he was hers. But there was a hollowness to this idea that infuriated him, reminding him of all the ways his beloved theory had failed when put into practice. He gave himself over to the dance, to the wild frantic energy of the circle itself. His feet spun beneath him, back and forth and back and forth, moving him rapidly nowhere. His right knee ached as he landed on it. He was thirty! But the circle kept spinning, the same thing over and over, like the closed circuit of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

  When she came to him it was like a miracle. He had thought he would have to wait all evening, until the dance, like a spinning Hanukkah dreidel, had wound itself down and toppled over. But as the inner circle rotated Sarah passed in front of him and held his eye briefly, a light of happy surprise registering on her face. She had not expected to see him there. She unlinked her left arm from Ida, her right arm from Shoshanna. The two lesser women looked disoriented, abandoned by the brightest light on their string. They were not confident enough to hold the centre themselves, David thought. But they had no choice, and they let Sarah go like a bubble floating out over the darkness. She walked until her shadow fell outside the square of light from the lanterns. David looked across the circle; Hannah had not noticed. She was occupied with the dance. Her mind would not wander elsewhere.

  David waited as long as he could manage—maybe two minutes—and then detached himself from the circle as well. He had to make several attempts at it, as the bodies on either side of him interpreted his movement as enthusiasm, and clutched him even harder with their own sweaty elbows and quickened the pace. Yitzhak was across the circle, watching David’s efforts, his face impassive. Finally David succeeded in unhooking himself and leapt out backward so as not to get trampled. There was a slight waver in the circle, the dancers unbalanced, and for a moment it seemed that the whole thing might come undone. But the hole mended itself, the two boys who had been on either side of him found each other’s arms, and the spinning continued.

  David stood on the perimeter, panting heavily, his hands on his knees. When he caught his breath, he righted himself. He took a large step backward. He took a second large step backward. Then he turned and ran.

  Sarah was standing by the edge of the river where the mountain loomed high like a dream. She was waiting for him. She did not try to hide it, or to pretend she wanted to speak with him for some reason to do with livestock or threshing.

  “Ya seyyed David,” she whispered, her voice husky and almost inaudible. “Oh Sir David.”

  He stood close to her, glimpsed her face in shadows. She smelled like lavender and hay.

  He leaned in and took her bottom lip between his teeth and held it there. Their bodies were still not touching, but the tips of their tongues brushed, like feathers. They closed their lips together as gently as possible. He ran a hand along her lower back, along her right hip, but he still did not pull her against him. The warmth between them built like black clouds, dense and loaded with rain; he drew back from the kiss even more, so their lips were barely touching, just their breath, the low heat. The tip of his cock was pressing against his trousers. He felt like he might ejaculate without even touching her.

  He thought of the first time he had lifted her skirt and entered her against the side of the wagon, with the sun falling in tassels all around her. The look on her face, part pleasure, part rapture, and something else he could not quite name, but recognized, a kind of escape or absolution of the self. And then he saw, over Sarah’s shoulder, a blur. An outline. Someone had come around the corner and seen them. David’s eyes met Levi’s.

  The following afternoon, he took the boy aside.

  “May I speak with you?” he asked.

  Levi nodded and followed him obediently. But there was a confidence to Levi’s step that unnerved David. He was so young, so genuinely humble, and yet so sure of himself.

  David led Levi to a private clearing near the base of the mountain. He ushered the boy in as though welcoming him into his study, as though he were a great Rabbi. “I’m sorry I don’t have any babka to offer you,” he joked.

  Levi smiled, but it was a smile that indicated he wanted to move on to the real matter at hand.

  David had decided the best recourse was honesty.

  “I want to acknowledge what you saw yesterday,” he said.

  He thought for a moment that Levi was going to make him spell it out, but after a pause the boy nodded, and didn’t say a word.

  Later, David wished he had left it at that. But as he often did, he felt compelled to fill in the silence. It was like the words were prepackaged inside him, prepared by his brain for a time when they might be relevant, and the correct context called them forth. Sometimes he felt that the content of his speeches was less important than his ability to deliver them convincingly.

  “You know that here on the kibbutz we believe in equality. Women are equal to men. In all ways.”

  Levi nodded.

  David said, “There are institutions that preclude this equality. Marriage is one of them.” He clasped his hands in front of him and shifted from his right foot to his left. There came the protesting squeal from the new Agency tap as someone tried to turn it on.

  “Monogamy hinders a woman’s freedom,” he said. “It relegates her to the sphere of the domestic. Marriage is not about love between two people, as has been spoon-fed to us as children, but about distracting women from their deepest longing for creative, meaningful work.”

  An unspoken question hung in the air: If David was so against marriage, why had he gotten married himself? The answer was, of course, that he had been too youn
g and unschooled to know any better. If he had known then what he knew now…but to acknowledge this aloud would shine a light on his own ineptitude. He reached to his back molar with his tongue and tried to dislodge a piece of leftover eggplant. He looked at Levi’s face; the boy was alert, attentive. David was encouraged.

  “Here on the kibbutz we not only support a woman, but demand that she partake of the full breadth of her inheritance, her right to be a worker. And with that right comes the fulfillment of her potential not just as a woman, but as a person.”

  There was a small splash in the river, some frog or fish. He looked at the bulrushes, tall and turgid, their cock-like heads gone to seed.

  “Women have sexual urges too,” he said. “For too long we men have seen women as our property. As something to fill our own needs with little acknowledgement of their own. I’ll tell you, Levi”—he was on a roll now—“I’ll tell you. One of the things I am most excited to see here on the kibbutz is the fruits of a new, modern paradigm.”

  He scratched his nose.

  “Do you see?” he asked, but the question was rhetorical. He talked until he almost forgot what it was he was trying to say. He was trying to get out of the conversation without naming what the boy had actually seen—David kissing a woman who wasn’t his wife. He said, keeping his voice neutral, like a professor presenting a summary of his lesson, “I hope you understand.”

  “I do,” the boy said.

  But hearing the boy’s voice brought David back out of his head, out of the pleasure of speaking and into his fear.

  “Please don’t tell Hannah,” David said, and regretted the words immediately.

  By explicitly stating what he did not want, he had put the idea into Levi’s mind. He saw that the boy had not considered doing so, but now that he had been warned against it, the idea was planted.

  “I won’t,” Levi said. The chip in his front tooth made him look so young. He rubbed the back of his hand down a rash of mosquito bites on his neck.