Strangers with the Same Dream Page 24

  The fierce old Arab Habib knew what had happened to Sakina!

  David seemed the only one who had forgotten.

  He stood, his knees popping, and stretched his back. He tucked the gun into his satchel, along with his book.

  Ruth said, “Abba?”

  He looked at her; she passed him a stone.

  He went to put that into his satchel too, but she said, “No, here,” pointing to a little pile she had started of stones that held her interest.

  “Then why did you give it to me?” David asked.

  “Put it on the pile,” Ruth said.

  “You could have put it there yourself.”

  “I wanted you to have it.”

  “You want it on the pile.”

  “I want both,” Ruth said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” David said, much too harshly.

  Ruth shrugged, as though to say this was just the way it was. Don’t blame the messenger.

  Hannah looked at the pile of stones. It resembled a grave.

  “Saba is going to die,” Ruth said.

  David did not disagree. “Everyone dies,” he said, echoing Hannah’s earlier words. “Every one, and every thing.”

  But this was tiresome to Ruth.

  “Come on, Salam,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  CHAPTER 27

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON a wagon galloped into the yard. Hannah thought it would be a tourist come to witness Rosh Hashanah in Eretz Yisrael, but it was Yitzhak at the reins. The horses heeded him perfectly, stopping and looking around with their huge rolling eyes, like they were silently judging the new place and how much—or little—had been accomplished here.

  Yitzhak’s hairline had receded further in the time since she had been away. He looked heavier than she remembered, sturdier, and somewhere in the back of her mind she thought that perhaps David was right. Perhaps they really were starving here at the new place.

  When her old friend climbed down from the wagon and said, “Avraham has died,” it took Hannah several moments to understand what he meant. Later, she briefly wondered why he had used her father’s first name—but death belonged to the group along with everything else, and to identify the old man as Hannah’s father might privilege her grief. Still, she saw the intense compassion in Yitzhak’s eyes, and how he hated to be the one to tell her this news.

  “But I was planning to come soon,” Hannah said, thinking of her promise to her mother. “I am coming soon.”

  Yitzhak rubbed the corner of his eye with his knuckle.

  “I’m sorry, achoti,” he said.

  It was not the news itself but his expression of endearment that broke her. Hannah sunk to her knees, like she was a marionette and her handler was slowly putting down the strings. One by one her joints collapsed; onto her knees, onto her face, her hands stretch out in front of her head in the dirt. She tasted Eretz Yisrael. She whispered the blessing with her face pressed into the earth: “Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, dayan ha-emet.”

  Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, the Judge of Truth.

  Hannah had been nine when she first bled, older than Ruth was now, but still several years too young. The blood was her shame, and she did not tell her mother, but found some bleached rags in the cupboard under the sink. At the table, her mother drew the light from the Sabbath candles over her own face, her cheeks pink and warm, and Hannah saw the monster of flesh and need that she herself was growing into. But after the meal her father came to her. He was carrying a bouquet of wildflowers he had picked from the riverbank and the ditch by the dirt road. The purples and yellows and blues like splatters of paint. His white beard touched the flowers he held against his heavy black coat.

  “Mazel tov,” he said, and his smile was so warm and kind, her eyes filled with tears.

  “What for?” she asked, but she knew. And she knew, too, that he would not embarrass her by saying it. It was not proper. It was not of the world of men.

  “Like the flowers you grow,” he said instead, quoting from the Torah, and he handed them to her.

  He did not touch her cheek. But she could smell tobacco and the leather of his teffilim and she knew that if the rules permitted he would pull her close and hold her in pride and love. Her father. The man who had made her. To Hannah, there was no other God.

  She looked up, remembering where she was.

  Why was Yitzhak crying too?

  Seeing his tears sobered her; if they both cried it would allow this thing to have actually happened. A moment ago she hadn’t known; the horses, all morning, had been galloping toward her from Kinneret, carrying the news of her father’s death, but she had been innocent until it reached her.

  “The chevra is preparing the body,” Yitzhak said now.

  What chevra? What body? But even as Hannah wondered, she knew that they would wrap her father in winding sheets and place him in a hole on the hillside with the others. The young halutz Gesher who had taken his own life. Several who had died from the kadachat. And the clot of blood that had been her first child was in that same earth, under a boulder.

  In his early adulthood, Hannah’s father had resigned himself to a life—noble but loveless—of Torah. And when the niece of his teacher came to town and he fell in love at the ripe age of thirty-one, he had never stopped being grateful for God’s intervention. He was grateful even when all the children were daughters—Shulamit, then Anna, then Hannahleh, the baby, whose eyes were an unlikely blue that reminded him of his own mother. He had let her play with the tassels on his prayer shawl; on Friday nights when he blessed her she felt him linger a little longer with his favourite.

  Would he have followed Shulamit or Anna here? For him, Eretz Yisrael was a concept, a symbol of Jews’ spiritual freedom more than an actual place. She still remembered the look on his face when she had told him what she was planning to do. Make Aliyah? His baby Hannahleh? And she wanted her Abba to come with?

  Now she forced herself to stand; her bones felt hollow, made of straw. Someone might blow her over at any moment.

  “I’ll take you when you’re ready,” Yitzhak said.

  “Are they digging the grave?” she heard herself ask.

  Yitzhak nodded, the smallest gesture he could afford that would answer her question.

  She saw that his shirt was torn. The halutzim did not believe in God, but there were still superstitions that nobody wanted to forsake.

  “I’ll tear my shirt too?”

  He shrugged, to say it was up to her, and then nodded his agreement.

  She looked down and saw she was wearing the shirt with the red embroidered sleeve. It had landed on her in its rotation through the laundry, as though she had been singled out, or marked. But not to be passed over. It was as if the vanity had marked her for pain.

  The cotton tore easily. In tearing it, Hannah was tearing her father out of this world. She felt that she had been the one to kill him.

  “I’ll go and pack my things,” she said. “It will just take me a moment.”

  And then: “How long will I be gone?”

  She felt like a young child who needed to be told what was happening.

  “Shiva lasts a week,” Yitzhak said. He rubbed at his elbow where the skin was chapped hard as a callous.

  It came back to Hannah that Kinneret had adopted an abbreviated shiva, a version that lasted two or three days, giving comfort to the bereaved but allowing everyone else to continue their work.

  “Who is digging the grave?” she asked.

  He said, “We’ll talk on the way.”

  Hannah returned to her tent. She took a shirt and the bonnet she had been sewing—for a baby—and she saw Ruth’s doll Salam that had once belonged to Sakina. Why was it here? Why had they not given it back to Anisa? She saw how any belonging of her father’s now held a weight she could never have imagined; how every shirt and tallit and teacup he had touched would be now immediately precious. Surely Anisa must feel the same about her child’s
belongings? She added Salam to her meagre pile of things and went back out into the yard.

  The tears had started down her cheeks again, and there was something in the depths of her stomach crawling up, up, trying to escape. Soon she would not be able to keep it down any longer.

  One of the young women, Sarah, was standing by the water pipe in a gorgeous red dress. Even in her grief, Hannah felt the shock of it—she had no right to be wearing such a dress. Hannah asked her to go and tell David she was leaving.

  The girl nodded dumbly.

  “I’m ready,” Hannah said, turning to Yitzhak.

  “Don’t you want to bring Ruth?” he asked, tentative.

  Hannah thought for a moment. She wanted to be alone with her father, to say a proper goodbye. She shook her head no.

  Hannah could almost not believe how established the old kibbutz was in comparison to the new one. It felt similar to when she’d first arrived in Jaffa, with the boats going in and out of the harbour, merchants with their spices, the souk smelling of fish and goat meat and salty cheese and bargains. Menachem was in the distance in the special protective netting they had ordered from America; the bees were producing enough honey to sell in Rosh Pina. The dining hall shone with a fresh coat of paint in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. Several new buildings had been built in her absence, and the sawdust was still fragrant in the air.

  It was threshing time and long rows of men—they seemed much older than the boys at the new place—were stepping and swinging in time. And in the garden, Liora, with the golden complexion she was named for, was doing what she had always done. The children were gathered around her; they were dipping apples in honey. How Ruth had loved that. Liora’s laugh rang out. The vegetable plot around her was in heavy bloom, the cucumbers long like phalluses, the tomatoes fat and pungent; you could almost taste the salad that she would be able to make. She would sprinkle it with the salty feta Anisa gave her.

  How could Sakina’s mother stand to share her food with the Jews after what had happened?

  Well, she had other children, Hannah thought. But no, that was ridiculous. That must only make her grief more difficult.

  Liora had seen Hannah. She smiled brightly, happily surprised, and waved. She and Hannah were friends; there was no reason for them not to be. David had taken it upon himself to ignore Liora after his indiscretion, which left Hannah in the role of friendly compatriot. And Liora loved Ruth as her own. Hannah knew that Liora wanted to run over and hug her, ask how she was, ask how Ruth was, say how much she missed her, but she would not leave little Susan and Noam and Gabriel in the middle of a lesson. Education was of utmost importance.

  “Shalom!” Liora called out, and the little ones waved too, momentarily curious to see if Ruth was with Hannah. Then they were pulled back, as children so easily could be, into what was happening directly in front of them.

  It was Rivka who came over while Yitzhak tied up the horses and Hannah stepped down from the wagon. Despite the constant press of shock and sorrow inside her, Hannah almost laughed—they didn’t call her Thin Rivka for nothing! And her new pregnancy somehow made the rest of her seem skinnier than ever, as though every ounce of fat had been given to the baby. Her arms were like sticks, her legs long and coltish, her cheekbones sharp. Nothing showed she was expecting a child, other than the protrusion itself, which looked like she had taken an enormous melon from the garden and stuffed it up her shirt.

  Another boy, Hannah thought, from the way she was carrying.

  She had looked the same when she was pregnant with Gabriel.

  “Shalom, chabibti,” Thin Rivka said, which was what they had all called each other in the early days, when they were as determined as possible to respect the Arab character of the land. “I’m so sorry.” She took Hannah’s palm and pressed it in her own. “May his memory be for a blessing.”

  Hannah knew she could ask Rivka about her father’s last days, but she didn’t want to, not yet. That would be for later.

  She felt with Rivka, as with Liora, that they were part of a sisterhood—and although neither other woman had ever given voice to this, it was understood between them. She imagined it was the fondness that wives of the same man—like the Arab wives?—might have. She and Rivka loved each other. And both were grateful to not be in the other’s position.

  They each had borne David’s child. When Rivka had become pregnant, Yitzhak had stepped in as the child’s father. And for some reason there had never been resentment between the two women. Perhaps, reflected Hannah, it was because she had been so occupied with baby Ruth at the time. The arrangement was odd, but it worked. There were so few women; they refused to let the men come between them.

  I can now say that this hurt me. Why was it was so different later, for me? And I admired Hannah so. If I could, I would have told her.

  I would have said just how sorry I was for what would happen.

  Hannah hugged Rivka, and stepped back to admire her protrusion.

  “B’sha’ah Tovah,” she said. All at a good time.

  Rivka said, “Come Shevat, inshallah, there will be a new child in the village.”

  Hannah had heard, via Chaim who delivered the mail on his camel, that Gaby from the kitchen was pregnant as well. And Malka had her cherub. The kibbutz had voted; there would be a whole new cohort.

  “Where’s Ruth?” Rivka asked, as though she was asking about her own child.

  “I left her with David,” Hannah said.

  Rivka’s silence contained a mild kind of reproach—David still had a soft spot for Thin Rivka, but it wasn’t reciprocated. “I hope he takes care of her,” Rivka said. “I hope he pays attention.”

  “I do too.”

  “I miss her,” Rivka said. And Hannah was thankful for those words. A child, after all, belonged to them all.

  Hannah had become pregnant too early. The Agency had sent the new rubber sheaths but the halutzim were young and sex oozed from their pores and the supply was gone barely one week later. After all, they had made their way to Eretz Yisrael. There was a whole field heavy with wheat; they had planted it themselves. They had cleared the rocks and ploughed the earth and sewed it with the seed of their new hope. Now they would reap. Nothing could stop them.

  David’s idealism had been pure in those days, and his belief in complete equality had been unfettered by any real experience. Hannah knew that his desire to take her pregnancy to the collective was not, to his credit, because of unkindness. It was based on a kind of clear logic that Hannah had begun to feel was somehow above her. There was no space between his theory and his practice.

  “We need to tell the group,” he’d said, when she came to him shyly with the news that for two moons she hadn’t bled. But it was not the lack of menstruation that had made her realize what was happening. She had felt the conception. There had been a little hook, like a needle making a stitch. A tiny, surprisingly painful tug. The men said that kadachat was Eretz Yisrael branding itself on them. But for Hannah, this sharp pinch was what tied her to the land.

  She was here. Her child would be born here.

  “I’d like to keep it between us for a while,” she’d answered, bashful—when she thought back to it now, her naïveté made her cringe. How little she had understood about so many things.

  David had taken in a long breath through his nose and held it. Then he exhaled.

  “We agreed in the meeting that we wouldn’t start having children until after Yom Kippur,” he said.

  The Day of Atonement was still eleven months away, and Hannah was already three months gone. Their child would have almost a year of experience the other children did not.

  “Does that matter?” she’d asked. She was being rhetorical.

  But David took her literally. “We don’t have the resources yet. Remember what the group discussed? And we can’t give up the labour. We need every hand in the fields.”

  A chill had come over Hannah as she’d remembered—how could she have forgotten?—the seriousness of
that particular debate. Those were the days of ridiculously long meetings; the issue of pregnancies had been discussed as though they were discussing the breeding of poultry or the cross-pollination of the olive and almond trees. Finally, after a week of discussing pros and cons, of some people remaining rational and others losing their cool, of one person even storming out and eventually leaving the kibbutz, they had decided there would be no babies for another year.

  The couples—she and David, Liora and Yonatan, Lenka and her chaver Reuven who later left her, and Eretz Yisrael, entirely—had been left to their own devices to prevent it from happening.

  Part of the reason for stalling was the hope of finding a chavera for Yitzhak, so he, too, could be among the first generation of parents. Everyone was equal, but it went without saying that Yitzhak’s fine genes and political experience were especially desirable. For there to be, among the first children, a son or daughter of Yitzhak Cohen would be a boon for the kibbutz, and for history.

  There was the sense, in everything they did, that history was something they were writing, that their version of history remained to be told.

  “We will need to take it to the group,” David said.

  “And ask them what?” Hannah had said.

  “Whether we should have the child.”

  She looked at him; his dark eyes were on her, and there was tenderness in them, a look of concern that told her he loved her and that the baby, after all, was his too. But there was something else underneath that. Something that had been there all along, but that Hannah was recognizing for the first time.

  Her heart began to pound. David continued to talk, but she was counting. She was adding up, in her head, the way the voting would go. They would try for a consensus, but if they could not reach one they would take it to a vote. Reuven would vote no. Yonatan would vote no. The women, surely, would vote with her. But perhaps not Rachel, who had fought in the Russian Revolution alongside the men and who had arrived with a pistol in her knitting bag.

  And her parents? They were like mascots—old people, granted a place of honour for having crossed eternity to get here, but their wisdom and experience was discounted when it came to anything meaningful. They would not be given a vote.