Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  When he finally looked up into the blue-black sky he saw Ida. She was maybe a hundred metres away, walking with her eyes fixed on the silhouette of the godforsaken hills. In the way she was so studiously not looking at them, David understood she had heard.

  Tears poured down Sarah’s cheeks.

  “How would I even get rid of it?” she spat. This was something he had not considered. How had Hannah done it? Salt? Quinine? No, she had gone to the Arabs. To Anisa. His mind moved to logistics, the reassuring question of what steps to take, but Sarah interrupted. “I want to keep it,” she said. “You have a child.”

  David steadied himself. “My daughter is dying,” he said.

  Only as he said this did he know it was true. The realization came over him, a warm tingling that began in his groin and rose through his belly and his chest until his whole torso was vibrating with heat.

  His daughter was dying, and it was the result of his negligence. He had left her alone with that Ida.

  It was her fault. Ida’s.

  She might as well have cut Ruth herself.

  But it had only been a scratch, his inner voice protested. Surely nobody could die from a scratch.

  He thought of Igor, how the halutz had fought when David held him down. He thought of the nuns in Tiberias who also would not be able to help. Rage came over him then, at the whole situation, at the heat and the scorpions and the land that had not yielded half of what he’d expected it to. The rage extended to Sarah, this woman in front of him made out of flesh and blood, with bodily needs, with a human heart, and who wanted something from him he could not give. Ruth was dying. What would he do with another baby?

  He had always taken refuge in his competence; it had protected him from himself. He could use it to get out of almost anything. But here, now, in this new place that was meant to absolve him, the unsolvable problems were piling up. He felt this in his body as the desire to fuck, but fucking only promised so much. This rage would have to be released through his hands. Sarah was waiting. Her face was so vulnerable. In its pure submission it was like she was asking for punishment.

  CHAPTER 22

  DAVID WALKED BACK to his tent. Sweat poured off him. Convulsions were coming on now like something trapped inside him clawing to get out. He saw the tip of Mount Gilboa seemed to be covered with snow, as if it was a mountain from his childhood home. Beams of light lengthened around it, then retracted, then lengthened, the sky itself a living, pulsing thing. It had turned a deep purple, the clouds outlined in black like a woman’s eyes painted with kohl. There was a young philosopher, an Austrian, who had just published a text called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Chaim had brought David a copy when he’d delivered the mail. David had enough German to understand the bare bones. That which we can’t speak of we must pass over in silence. But had God not conjured the world out of language? Tohu va’vohu. God had said, Let there be light.

  At the edge of the stream David saw two young halutzim. Their faces had become interchangeable, different features on one generic background, from Shoshanna the childless teacher to the motherless German twins to the insolent fiddler Zeruvabel. They were, he thought, simply different iterations of the idealism he had lost. Dov, whose enthusiasm had cost him his face. Leah, who genuinely thought the Jews and Arabs could coexist in peace.

  The dark sky had a pinkish crimp to it, and light leapt up like flames at the edge of the horizon. Finally his shivering eased and the faces settled. He saw Levi, the good son, and Ida, the negligent one who had let his daughter cut her leg. The good and the evil standing shoulder to shoulder—which was, he saw through his fever, the way the world was. The good did not exist on the back of the evil, at its expense, but was part of it. One and the same. They were inseparable.

  Ida had heard him speaking with Sarah.

  The full realization crashed over him; he bit down and his body shook.

  Sarah was pregnant, and Ida knew.

  She was, right now, telling Levi.

  He had to go and find Hannah. He had to tell her himself, before someone else did.

  The convulsions had become like visions. They came over him, wracking him with shudders, and he saw himself as a boy on the bimah, unable to make it through the Torah portion he had been called up to read, the one that would make him a man. His body heaved. He stopped beside the steel wash basins and braced himself and the wave crashed over him: “If you will it, then it need not remain but a dream.” Herzl. Why had he waited so long to take quinine? Had he not already been branded with the fire of Ha’aretz? Yes. But he would be branded again.

  When the convulsion ended he staggered upright. He forced himself forward, toward Hannah. In the distance, their tent flap was pulled back; light streamed from the slit. He could see his wife cradling his child in her arms, Ruth’s body limp like an infant’s. It struck him that there was something vaguely Christian about the pose, the Madonna and child, the easy way the mother was supporting the child’s soft head. There were other halutzim, whose names he could not say, gathered at the entrance of his tent as though at the door of the manger where a great miracle had taken place. A wolf howled in the night, and David felt the sound racing through his veins. The pounding in his temples increased. This was the blood that kept him alive, that had brought him here to his homeland, that was now tainted with a sickness he could not name. It was the sickness of capitalism. The sickness of desire. The sickness of personal failure. Kadachat did not come close to naming what gripped him.

  As he approached the tent, sounds trickled into the silence between his heartbeats. He heard a soft hush that might have been the wind, but turned out to be crying. It grew louder: sobbing. And then wailing.

  It was Hannah. There were others around her, bent over her, but she was the one making the noise.

  “Hannahleh,” he said to his wife’s feet. “I have to tell you something.”

  He could not look at what was in her arms, or even at her face, which was bright red with bodily fluid, contorted with an emotion that did not fit into the shape of any word. The wailing eclipsed all other sounds. It was like he was speaking only to himself when he said, “I’m having another child.”

  He saw no recognition in Hannah’s face that he had spoken; she had not heard, or if she had heard she had not understood, or if she had understood she did not care. Her body was crumpled over little Ruth. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, like she was trying to shake something vital back into her child. The sounds that came out of her were like nothing David could describe, and so he lifted his hands and covered his ears.

  The following day, he thought, they would put Ruth in the ground. They would wind her in Tachrichim, white linen sheets, and bury her in Eretz Yisrael itself, as though she was the sacrifice it had exacted. The great hollow of the earth would swallow her whole.

  Hannah wailed.

  Must she cry so? Ruth had come from Eretz Yisrael, and to Eretz Yisrael she would return. And now there was another child on the way. But when David’s mouth opened to tell Hannah this—had he not already told her?—it was another sound that came from deep within his body, and his legs buckled beneath him. He shook, and his eyes lost focus, the yellow appearing in the whites. Saliva foamed around his mouth. And from the depth of the seizure, he felt the gun in his pocket. He could not move to touch it, but his mind rested on the fact of it. It gave him a clear place of respite, somewhere to aim.

  Later, when he woke up, he remembered nothing.

  CHAPTER 23

  FROM MY PLACE OUTSIDE TIME I can tell you something true: God exists, but not as people conceive of Him, a vengeful Adonai who dispenses merciless judgment. He is here, the God of the Jews, the One God, in everything—the thickets, the dense acacia bushes, the vast swampy marshlands. In the land of barley and vines and fig trees, of olive oil and honey. And He wants to stay animated in each of us. We are His effort. No more than the flowers and the river stones, the Arab taboons, but no less either.

  I look back a
t David stumbling out into the field alone. The moon was torn in ragged shreds on the tips of the barbed wire fence. But he saw at last what I can now see: there is no keeping anything in, and there is no keeping anything out. The attempt to do so is an attempt to order a universe that is, at its heart, pure chaos. It is an attempt to control something the halutzim refused to call God, but that could equally be called nothingness. It could be called time, or eternity; it has the same wide emptiness at its core.

  By early morning there was a second body. Mine.

  David was the first to kneel over my bed, to touch the curls spread out around my head, to touch with his fingers the place where the bullet entered. He did it mechanically, like a child in a science class, examining the skin of a frog held open by pins in front of him, each organ neatly labelled. This was the kind of teaching Yitzhak would do later, with the children, when there were new children. But Ruth would not be among them.

  David saw my blood and stood up and walked quickly out of my tent. He was bracing himself against an onslaught of feeling he didn’t know if he would survive. He got as far as the fence before the wave overtook him, forcing him to his knees, forcing his mouth open, drawing from him a substance neither animal nor emotional nor spiritual but all of these in every combination. The wordless thing that had made him human was pulled from his mouth like a string of knotted scarves. He retched, retched again. It was only when this terrible tangle had been pulled clear of the trap of his body that the crying started.

  Only then did he understand, in some far-off place deep inside himself, that his daughter was gone. He had planted the seed of life in this earth, and what had grown up had belonged to the land, and also to him. As sure as the almond trees belonged to the desert and the wind to the empty mountainside, the girl with the black curls had come from his thought and his longing. He had held her to his chest the moment she was born, when she smelled of blood and yeast and her only instinct was for the nipple. She had turned her head toward his chest and he had nothing to give her.

  He had passed the baby to her mother, where she belonged, but the sadness and frustration of that moment had never entirely left him. Nothing he could provide had filled his hunger to be needed. Later, he found other ways to love Ruth. He had taken her to the barn when the cow was in labour, one half of the calf emerged from the protrusion and the cow, seemingly unaware, chewing grass. He had helped Ruth gently pull the young animal into the light. He had waded with her into the high wheat that came almost over her head, and showed her how to strip a stalk, rubbing it between her small palms so the chaff came free. He had walked with her on the hillside in Zichron, waving to the Arab girls, only slightly older than she was, who bent in their colourful dresses to cut the vines. He had picked, from a lone tree, a sweet pod of carob for her to suck on. And high in the hills, he had shown her a tumbled-down stone door, the crumbled rock still holding a handle. It was old almost beyond comprehension. Before the time of Isaac and Rachel and even Abraham. From earlier even than the Canaanites.

  Ruth had been unmoved. Perhaps she was too young to appreciate it. Perhaps if she had been a boy. But David had a boy, a son, and was helpless to exert his influence on him either.

  Ruth took in everything he showed her with wide open eyes. She loved him. But at the end of the day she returned to her mother.

  In death I understand what I did not in life: David’s refusal of my pregnancy did not reflect on me. He had always had a resistance against anything feminine, a fear of being eclipsed and surrounded. And under that, a hatred of the female in himself. Everything he had ever done had been an attempt to clear a space between him and his mother. The motherland, Russia, and the land that was his, Eretz Yisrael. His flesh and blood mother, and the mothers of his children. All of us.

  Hovering over my own body, I look back at David. The sweat had congealed on his body as a kind of carapace, coating all of him. The breeze rose against his bare skin and he shivered. Another convulsion was coming on. The tremor started at the nape of his neck, the place where a wolf held her cub in its teeth, and travelled down his back, his arms, so that all of him was shaking uncontrollably. He was freezing cold; he wanted to stand next to a fire. An image came to him of a hand raising a match, of Habib’s torch. The Arabs, too, were looking for light in the darkness. He had done wrong by them. The burning of the world was needed in the same way death was needed before life. As the flame in the back of his mind rose, a wind rose up as well. It was a ghostly wind, of things gone by. And of everything still left to come.

  CHAPTER 24

  I GO BACK AND SEE BLOOD. The group’s, and my own. Hannah’s, getting heavier each month. She squatted over the hole in the ground and contracted her uterus and the clots eased out, slick black cutlets that reminded her of afterbirth, and before that, of the abortion. They smelled of iron and winter and stained the ground scarlet.

  She knew that periods like this meant her time of childbearing was coming to an end. She was still young. But it had been like this for her mother too. A little window in which to birth her world and then the doors sliding shut.

  She also knew what it meant to be without her mother. It was as if a part of her own self no longer existed in the world: a map of contact points, of context. Her mother’s hazel eyes; Hannah’s hazel eyes. Her mother’s rugelach; Hannah’s love of the smell of dough rising that seemed to both surround her mother and be her. As though Hannah could swallow her mother and hold her inside the way she herself had risen inside her mother. A reversal.

  Hannah remembered her mother’s watery eyes on the day before her heart gave out and she slumped over by the stream where they’d built the tannery.

  “Promise me something, Hannahleh,” she had said, in Russian.

  There was something in her mother’s voice that made Hannah pay attention.

  “Don’t leave your father here without me.”

  Hannah laughed. “Are you going somewhere?”

  Her mother’s face was stern, and Hannah saw what she meant. “Mamochka,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous.”

  Her mother’s eyes smiled in return, but her mouth did not.

  “Anyway, why would I ever do that?” Hannah asked. “There’s nowhere else to go.” She gestured around Kinneret, to the Baby House, the fulsome fields, the water. “This is my home.”

  But her mother had seen something that Hannah had not, and she insisted.

  “Okay, okay!” Hannah said, laughing. “I promise.”

  Her mother nodded, but Hannah could see she was still not entirely sure.

  “Your father will need you,” she said.

  —

  Hannah took the bloody rags to the girl, Ida, who had been assigned to the laundry. It was high noon, the sun directly above them, not a spot of shade or reprieve anywhere. Ida held one of her braids in her own hand, like she was anchoring herself to the land with a rope. She held her other hand out for the bundle of rags, but Hannah did not yet pass it over. She saw the horror and disgust on the girl’s face; she felt a desire to protect her and a competing desire not to hide. Defiance in the face of Ida’s revulsion.

  “I need you to wash these,” she said.

  “Of course,” Ida said. Her nose bunched up.

  Hannah stood there biting her tongue, the apology for her own blood trying hard to escape her, fighting its trap like an animal.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  But it took her another moment to relinquish the bundle, tied together in a knot of clean fabric, it, too, now soaked in blood. This halutza, Ida, with her long braids and her glasses, still had the innocence of a child about her. And in the passing of the bloody rags Hannah absolved her of it. Somehow, her innocence would be taken.

  —

  When Hannah returned from the laundry, Ruth looked up at her from the corner of the tent.

  “Why did Sakina die?” she asked her mother.

  “People die,” Hannah said. How many times had she answered this? A hundred? A thousand? “Th
ey get old or they get sick.”

  “Sakina wasn’t old or sick,” Ruth pointed out.

  “Sometimes there’s an accident.”

  “But?”

  “Savta was old.”

  “Come here, Ruthie.”

  “Did Sakina have an accident?”

  “I wasn’t there when she died,” Hannah said.

  It was Ruth who had been there, but perhaps she had instinctively looked away, or perhaps she had truly forgotten—or been unable to hold the memory in her young mind.

  “Did Abba make the accident?” Ruth asked, like she could tell what Hannah was thinking. “David?” she translated, just to be certain.

  David should have been the one to deal with this. If there was anything he should have taken on, it was this. “What’s Salam doing?” Hannah asked, trying to distract her daughter.

  Ruth reached for her doll, and bounced her up and down on the tent’s dirt floor for a moment, as though she was dancing. She undid the round button on the top of the doll’s head that Hannah had sewn on for a kippah. Poor Ruth had no toys and here in the new place she had no playmates either; the least Hannah could do was give her a way to change the doll’s appearance. Ruth loved to transform the doll from Arab to Jew and back to Arab again; she smoothed the headscarf down the doll’s back.

  “Salam is planting eucalyptus,” Ruth said. The girl’s fingers were thin, bony, her baby fat almost all gone now, although it was hard to know whether it was because she was growing or because she was starving. Her eyes were huge and behind them unfolded the scene on the riverbank back at Kinneret, the children helping Yitzhak and Liora dig the small holes and deposit the saplings into the muddy banks.

  “Come and put your shoes on,” Hannah said.