Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  “Where is Noam?” Ruth asked.

  “He’s back at the old place.”

  “I know that,” Ruth said.

  “Shoes,” Hannah said.

  “Noam’s sister is me, and his other sister is Susan.”

  Hannah smiled, thinking how the children in the Baby House had assumed they were siblings. Ruth had been competitive with Susan in the way real sisters often were, although she did love saying her name, so unusual in their group. Leah had a relative in America who’d died, and when Leah gave birth she had given her daughter the English name.

  Ruth was repeating the names of her cohort from the Baby House so as to enshrine them in her memory.

  “Plus Gabriel,” Ruth said. “Our angel.”

  The only one, Hannah thought, who was actually related to Ruth.

  “Left foot first,” Hannah said.

  “The light of Zion is in the wild animals’ eyes.”

  Hannah said, “Put your heel in here.”

  She held Ruth’s foot in her hand, and it took up almost her entire palm. The shape and distribution of the toes were the same as when she’d been born six years ago, the second toe slightly longer than the big one. Hannah was sure she could pick those feet out of a lineup. Yes, if she was shown the bare feet of all the children in Eretz Yisrael, she would be able to choose the ones that belonged to her daughter.

  “I want to stay here,” Ruth said.

  Hannah lifted her head, smiling. “At the new place?”

  “In our tent.”

  The tents had just gone up; the young halutzim had spent all night erecting them. Their hope and their energy exhausted Hannah.

  “It’s time to go out and look for your Abba,” she said.

  Ruth jumped up and down on the spot vigorously, one sandal dangling from her ankle.

  “Where does Gabriel live? And Susan and Mikhol?”

  “At the old place. At Kinneret.”

  Ruth’s face fell. Each time they discussed this, it was like a recurring bad dream for the girl, the same scene replaying over and over. It still confused Ruth that the boundaries of Kinneret—the Sea of Galilee to the east, the Arab village where Anisa now lived, without her daughter Sakina, to the south—were not the boundaries of the entire world. Hannah watched Ruth struggle to arrange the places in her mind, locate where she was in relation to the children she thought of as her brothers and sisters.

  “Can we go back?”

  Hannah sighed heavily, and Ruth jumped in. “To visit.”

  “Not now, Ruthie.”

  They would visit, of course. Hannah thought of her father, sick with no one knew what. Old age, it seemed—only he was not so old. She would not forget the promise she had made to her mother. It was Hannah, after all, who had brought her parents from Russia to Eretz Yisrael. She had convinced them, and they had come.

  “Put your foot in,” Hannah said.

  Ruth flicked the sandal that was dangling from her ankle and it flew across the tent, hitting the canvas and landing on the floor. Ruth giggled. Hannah closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

  “What are you doing, Imma?”

  “I’m taking a moment.”

  “For planting you need just the right amount of mud.”

  Hannah was quiet.

  “Imma?”

  “Yes, bubala.”

  “Growing a baby is like growing a seed.”

  Hannah nodded. This was the line Ruth’s beloved Liora had taught them.

  “First you put the seed in the earth,” Hannah said, starting the story, but Ruth stomped her little foot and crossed her arms over her chest and puffed out her cheeks. “I want to see Liora!” she shouted.

  At Kinneret, babies had been raised collectively. Mothers, it was decided by the group, could not maintain the objectivity required, so other women were assigned to the Baby House. Women with the interest of the group at heart. Without the personal bias that biology seemed to engender.

  Hannah remembered—would never forget—the panic of handing Ruth over to Liora at the Baby House on the other side of the Kibbutz when she was three days old. A vote had been taken; only non-mothers would be accepted for the position of caretaker. Only childless women had the objectivity to see what was needed. The babies would be breastfed—that was only natural—but one lactating mother was as good as any other. The mothers were not meant to feed their own child. And yet, when baby Susan had fallen sick, Leah had wormed her way in through Liora. Hannah was sure she had fed Susan more than the others. Susan’s little legs were plump and dimpled, while Ruth was just a spindly pile of sticks. She could still remember hearing a baby cry across the kibbutz at night, knowing it was Ruth, not being able to go to her.

  And then, slowly, the impulse had faded out of her. Not the intense love, so sharp it could cripple her, could cut her in half with pleasure and pain. But the instinctive part of her that knew what to do with her child, without thinking. When to come close and when to give her daughter space; what to do to make her listen and especially what to do to make her stop crying.

  Ruth took the second sandal off her foot and threw it across the tent with the first. A puff of dust rose off the canvas into the air.

  “David made that accident,” Ruth said. She was not asking a question, but making a statement. “Sakina is dead now,” she concluded.

  “Go get your shoes,” Hannah said. She felt a scream rising up in her throat.

  Ruth shook her head no and looked to see what her mother would do. She saw Hannah’s exasperation and came over and hugged her hard. She pushed on Hannah’s breasts.

  “No milk,” she said. And then, “Imma, I love you so much I could die.”

  “What?”

  “Like Sakina.”

  “Sakina was far too young to die,” Hannah said. And then, “I love you too, Ruthie.” Tears had come into her eyes, of exhaustion and exasperation and frustration and loneliness. She wasn’t prepared for any of this.

  “Will I die?” Ruth asked her.

  Hannah pulled her daughter against her. “Not for a long, long time.”

  —

  At first they thought it was kadachat, except without convulsions. Hannah’s father was jaundiced, and losing weight.

  “I’m old,” he had said to her, as she was packing to leave Kinneret, and she had said, refusing, “You’re young!”

  His face stayed serious. He was a big man, tall with wide shoulders that filled his tallit, and only by knowing this could you see how he had deteriorated. In contrast to what he had been before.

  “I’m sorry I’m going,” she told him.

  She wanted to be absolved, but she wanted his honesty more. And when he said, “I’ll be fine, but you disrespect your mother’s wishes,” Hannah had closed her eyes against the pain.

  “They’re making me go,” she said, like she was a small child. “Because of what David did.”

  Her father softened, and motioned her over to his rusted metal bedframe. She passed him the water glass beside his bed, and he sat up awkwardly, braced against one elbow. He drank deeply and lowered himself back on the bed, wiping his mouth with his arm. “Thank you,” he said.

  He kept his hand resting on her hand; he would never have done this back in Russia, but Eretz Yisrael had softened him in this way as well.

  “Ah, bissela,” he said. “If only life were simple.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  He laughed. “You’re still your mother’s daughter.”

  With that, he seemed to have said what he wanted to say. Hannah didn’t understand the message, only that one had been delivered, and that delivering it to her had somehow made him feel better.

  “Go on,” he said, flicking his hands like he was getting rid of a fly. His eyes were smiling, though. “You have my blessing.”

  He did not mention David, which was better for them both.

  “I’ll come back to visit. With Ruthie,” Hannah said.

  “And your other new babies,” Avraham said. />
  “Soon,” Hannah said.

  Her father’s eyes were closed as she exited his tent. The ghost of her mother whispered in Hannah’s ear. “Don’t leave him. You promised.”

  If only I could have warned her then, too.

  CHAPTER 25

  “IWANT TO HAVE ANOTHER BABY,” Hannah said to her husband.

  “I’m aware,” he said.

  “Now,” Hannah said.

  David was bent over a tray of vegetable seeds, each type in its own cup; he looked up at her. There was a smear of something on his cheek, which she thought at first was dirt from the fields but on closer inspection was pencil lead. “We have nothing to eat,” he said.

  “I’m making dinner,” she said, although she knew this was not what he was referring to. Still, she had found some potato peels and thickened them with the last bit of flour and was up to her elbows in the dough for latkes. There was almost no oil so they would be dry. But at least it was food.

  She had a ridge of flesh on the inside of her cheek where she had been trying to eat her own flesh in her sleep. She ran her tongue over the angry line.

  “It’s Rosh Hashanah,” David said.

  Hannah paused. For a moment, she had forgotten the time of year. At Kinneret you could tell by the crops, but there were no crops here yet by which to measure.

  “Today?” she asked.

  “On Tuesday.”

  “We will eat for a different holiday,” she said, referring to the latkes.

  “Eggplant?” he asked.

  “Chicken,” she said, playing her part. It was a silly joke, she thought, but David always found it funny. But his brief smile was weak, and his expression grew angry, and he gestured to a gathering place at the base of the mountain. The halutzim had formed a circle around a tall redhead who was serenading them with his fiddle. Every once in a while, a loud whoop rose up.

  “Don’t they see there’s work to do?”

  “Let them celebrate,” Hannah said. “They’ve made it to the homeland!”

  There was truth in this—and sarcasm. She remembered her own wild optimism from the early days, and longed for it back. Eretz Yisrael was still her dream—but dreams took so much work and she was so tired.

  “I suppose we’ll mark the New Year,” David said, his fingers buried in his black curls.

  Hannah nodded, too tired to form words. Whether, and how, to celebrate the Jewish holidays was a debate they had been through a thousand times. They agreed, without needing to discuss further, to mark them, but lightly, focusing on their agricultural significance.

  “I’ll choose some girls to help you cook,” David said.

  Hannah imagined, wearily, how he would look over the young women.

  “I want to have another baby,” she said again. She was thinking of her father’s words to her before she’d left him. She didn’t let herself think about the first baby she’d had taken from her, or about the other children who had been playmates for Ruth at Kinneret and had absolved her of the need to produce a sibling. Here, the air was filled with a ghostly silence, despite the halutzim who never stopped laughing and singing. It was a silence that ran under sound. A hungry silence.

  “Not yet,” David said.

  “We don’t have much time,” said Hannah.

  She and the other women had come to Palestine thinking they could make a new world. But now she saw that sexual equality made it easy for men, not women, to settle their urges. What women wanted—what she wanted—was deeper than a climax. It was something more elusive, something she found hard to name for herself, and if you could not name something, how could you claim it?

  A child was easier.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that David might say no a second time.

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

  “Starving is a little strong,” she said.

  “The moment isn’t right.”

  She could hardly believe he dared to say this to her again, but she forged ahead.

  “What about populating Eretz Yisrael with little Jews?”

  In the distance the halutzim had linked arms. The red-headed fiddler raised his bow and the dancers hummed with anticipation. Night was falling and the wheel began to spin and the fiddler poured himself into his instrument. The pioneers in their loose white shirts and khaki shorts bounced up and down and sang at the top of their lungs. They were surviving on instinct alone, as Hannah had once done too. In the first years at Kinneret they had eaten salty Arab goat cheese and drunk water and lost half their body weight and things had been fine.

  More than fine. Wonderful.

  “Ruth needs someone to play with,” Hannah said.

  David looked far into the distance, squinting. And then Hannah heard the sound, over the music, of someone calling his name, emphasizing both syllables: “Daaa-vid!”

  David got to his feet; dusk had fallen and no doubt he could no longer see the seeds he had been sorting.

  “I should go,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward where his name had been called.

  “I’m not done talking,” Hannah said.

  “Later,” he said, already leaving.

  “Fershtinkiner,” she said, loud enough for him to hear, but he didn’t turn around. He had the privilege of being only where he wanted to be in his mind. Whereas she was forced back into her body again and again.

  —

  Ruth grabbed Hannah and held on to her waist; she tried to use her mother to hold herself up, lifting her own feet off the ground and hanging there.

  “Ouch,” Hannah said.

  It was early morning, and already sweltering. Sun fingered its way under the fabric of the tent. The first tent erected had been for Ruth and Hannah; it was ostensibly David’s tent too, although he had not come to sleep with them last night, but had stayed awake until all hours of the night, dancing with the teenagers. Hannah had heard the sound of them singing “Hatikvah” as the sun finally rose.

  She could not help but feel that the halutzim giving the first tent to Ruth had been a way to both provide shelter for the child, and also to remove her from view.

  “Imma?” Ruth asked.

  “Yes, Ruthie.”

  “Shalom!”

  “Shalom bubala.”

  “Can I swim?” Ruth asked, and then flopped down on the mattress and began to pull at the white thread that had come loose from the edge of her bed sheet.

  “Don’t do that love.”

  “Don’t do that love,” Ruth said back.

  Hannah cocked her head to the side.

  “Ruthie,” she said, cautioning.

  “Ruthie,” the little girl repeated.

  “Not now, Ruth,” Hannah said.

  “Not now, Ruth.”

  Hannah turned her back and began to straighten their things. There was a corrugated washboard and she put it outside the tent, and she took the thread Ruth had pulled and bit it off with her teeth. “It’s too early to swim,” she said. “Let’s go find someone for you to play with.”

  There was nobody for Ruth to play with. And when her daughter repeated, “Let’s go find someone for you to play with,” a kind of quiet desperation came over Hannah that she had not felt before. Was this really the plan? To have a child here, alone, in the company of adults? A lone girl in the wilderness of Palestine, stubborn and powerful enough to drive her mother insane?

  She had not wanted to leave the old place and the resentment drew up again inside her body, filling her like smoke. She was so worried about her father. She was disappointed in herself for breaking her promise to her mother, and afraid, and she did not know what to do. The Agency had said they needed her and David to establish the new place, the new idea: the first big kibbutz after the small ones. It was an honour to set the stage for the new Zionism that would eventually cover the whole land. But everyone knew the real reason David had been asked was because of the blood feud. His face could not be seen around the old parts. />
  Ruth had found another thread and was pulling at it like she’d done with the first.

  “I said stop, bubala.” And before Ruth could echo her she said, “What would Liora think?”

  But it was an empty threat. Hannah knew Ruth would have been delighted to be back in Liora’s sphere, the woman who had shepherded her from infancy into toddlerhood and then childhood, the one who had been her mother in everything but name. Ruth would have been grateful to receive even Liora’s reprimand. And she seemed to sense Hannah’s impotence and rage, because when Hannah exited the tent, shoving the canvas aside and nearly toppling the whole structure, Ruth followed on her heels, grabbing at her waist again.

  “Ani ohevet otach, Imma,” she said. She hung onto Hannah, as though for dear life.

  Hannah softened as she looked down. Ruth had picked up her doll Salam and was carrying it tucked under her arm, where it fit perfectly.

  They walked together into the sweltering morning. A group of halutzim was trying to work the old wooden plough. It swerved, refusing guidance, the line behind it bending wildly back and forth. Laughter rose from the halutzim.

  Someone called out, in Arabic, “Inshallah.” If God wills it.

  Someone else had been assigned the task of ordering the storeroom, and there was a stretch of muddy earth where supplies had been laid out like at a rummage sale—halters for the horses and frayed leather reins. Big iron wash basins, a fiddle bow, a large metal box containing glass lanterns with spare wicks. Trowels, hobnail boots, a pair of valuable binoculars that should have been in a case. In the middle of the chaos stood a pair of identical twins with bowl cuts and suspenders. Ruth looked from one to the other and back to the first, and then up to her mother for explanation. But Hannah felt too tired. She was surprised when Ruth marched up to the men and said, emboldening herself, “You look the same. Are you twins?”

  Ruth had learned about twins from Yitzhak when the old workhorse Shira had given birth to two foals. She must have extrapolated from this to human twins, and Hannah could not help but feel a rush of pride.

  She quickly reminded herself, as she had been reminded so many times over the years, that she was no more responsible for Ruth’s achievements than anyone—and certainly less responsible than Liora.