Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  There had been, in the early days, a chaver named Meyer. If he had come later, they might have understood he had some kind of illness. An obsessive need to control things, to line up the calves and their corresponding pails of milk, and to go back and check that he had done it correctly. He remembered entire pages of Herzl and could recite them verbatim. There was no nuance to his thinking. He had grown up in an ultra-Orthodox home, and although he had abandoned his observance he brought with him a rigid adherence to rules, rules that did not necessarily make sense but were God-given and therefore irrefutable. A person’s job, a man’s job, was to follow them to the letter. And Meyer’s God was now Zionism.

  It was Meyer who suggested the voting be blind. That for the halutzim to have Hannah watching as they cast their ballots would influence them too heavily.

  “And should they not be influenced?” Yitzhak had asked, his big hands loose in his lap. “By the feelings of their comrade? The one who is actually carrying the baby?”

  A silence fell at the word “baby.” The halutzim had somehow managed to forget it was a human, and not livestock, they were discussing.

  “Are we not here to make a better world?” Yitzhak had asked.

  Even Meyer was quiet in the face of that. But eventually he said, with the slightest hesitation in his voice, “Indeed. We are. And the issue is whether this better world includes children now, or in another year.”

  Hannah could have left. She could have gone to Mother Lobinsky’s, or to the Jaffa Port and sold her body, or to the big city of Yerushaly’im that she had not yet seen despite having crossed the ocean for Zion. But what would she have done alone with a child in the walls of the old city? And she had her parents to think about. She had brought them here, despite their aging bodies, despite the fact that their dream of Eretz Yisrael was so divorced from the thing itself as to be something else entirely. She couldn’t just leave them with the young and impulsive halutzim. Nor could she drag them away from the little comfort they had finally established.

  Unless David had insisted. Unless he had agreed to go with her. But he did not agree.

  He did not agree.

  In the time it took them to debate Hannah’s pregnancy, the cow had given birth to two calves. Both had survived, and were now producing more milk than the kibbutz was capable of using.

  Liora had had to make preserves out of the abundance of field berries. And what did a baby need besides milk and fruit and love? Hannah had wanted to say that, but the panic making its way through her body would have meant her words coming out shrill and tinny—womanly—and the kibbutz was about calm logic and rationality.

  The discussion lasted longer than any had before. Longer than the debate about buying the American thresher instead of the chicken incubator, which had ended in Reuven throwing a glass storm lantern that had shattered against the wall. They were not able to come to a consensus. They talked all night, and worked all day, and talked the entire following night. Then they slept. But there was barley in the fields that needed to be cut. They could not—not even these pioneers who liked nothing more than to debate—continue any longer. They had agreed, as Meyer reminded them. In the absence of a consensus, they would vote.

  —

  Meyer had set up a macabre kind of polling station, and had them enter one at a time. Thin Rivka sat with him to ensure fair play. Hannah could surmise, from the way the debate had gone—which she had observed, silently, like a person waiting for the gallows—who had been on her side. Thin Rivka, of course. Yitzhak, of course. Reuven had gone back and forth, but in the end he had come down on waiting another year until the dairy herd was more robust. He must have voted no. Rachel had voted no. Yonatan had voted no. Meyer, obviously, had voted no.

  They had, at the last minute, allowed her parents a say—after a long side-debate about the importance of each voice being equally valued. It was clear how they would lean, but it was agreed eventually that their life experience could not be discounted.

  Hannah’s parents had entered Meyer’s booth, a corner of the chicken barn, with such sorrow and resignation Hannah could not bear to think of it. Her father wearing his tallit, like he was entering synagogue; her mother’s hands gnarled and wrinkled, as if she had become an old woman overnight. Their daughter was pregnant, and they would vote on whether to abort the baby. For this they had left their homes? For this?

  Still, the tally did not add up. Hannah went over it after, tears rolling down her face, blubbering incoherently. She made columns and put check marks in them and sobbed with her head in her hands. She was three moons gone. A boy, she knew. Would that convince them? It would not.

  David sat watching her, not trying to soothe her because there was no soothing her.

  “How does this add up?” she asked. “Did Lenka lie to me? Did Gaby?”

  She had her hand pressed against her belly. It was too early to feel the baby move but she imagined a half-formed heart beating its protest.

  “Who?” she asked desperately. “Who?”

  When she looked up at her husband, she saw the answer. It made her catch her breath.

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  David was silent. He knew better than to answer.

  Hannah blinked in the light as though seeing a new world.

  Somewhere out over the vast land of Palestine a high note of mourning had started its sound.

  —

  She ate the Rosh Hashanah meal with Yitzhak and Rivka in the old dining hall. It felt so good to be surrounded by people she knew, people who knew her, like family. The special holiday challah was fat and round and gleaming like the wheel of life. There was a pilaf with raisins and almonds, and Gaby’s famous cucumber salad. Several chickens had been killed and roasted. Hannah knew the pain this caused the children, for whom the chickens were playmates—after school every day they went straight to the barn, the boys lunging at them to make them shoot upward into the air in a display of squawking feathers, the girls clutching them tight on their laps and stroking their heads like they were kittens. But Susan and Noam and Gabriel sat quietly with the meat on their plates; they understood that Ruth’s Saba had died. He was the old man in their village. He had been, in a way, a Saba to them all, with their own grandparents back in Minsk and Berlin and, in Susan’s case, Philadelphia.

  Thin Rivka held Hannah’s hand through the meal. Hannah barely ate. After, she passed mechanically through the orderly line with her plate: a bucket of soap, one of water, one of bleach. Rivka brought her to an empty tent that was used, on occasion, to sleep visitors to the kibbutz, but Hannah hesitated at the sight of the bare pallet, the lamp with no oil and nothing to light it besides.

  “Would you rather sleep with us?” Rivka asked, meaning with her and Yitzhak. Gabriel slept in the Baby House with the other children.

  Hannah shook her head. “I’m fine,” she said. “But I’ll go for a walk first.”

  “Would you like company?”

  “No thank you.”

  But she was glad that Rivka knew where she was going without her having to say it: down to the Sea of Galilee, past the tall reeds and Lenka’s long-suffering flock of geese, along the path by the water to the Arab village.

  There, she found Anisa in her yard, as though she had been waiting for Hannah.

  “Salam,” Hannah said.

  Anisa had aged, observed Hannah. It was as though, in a single year, ten years of life had ripped through her body. Her black hair was now streaked with grey and the circles around her eyes had a purplish hue. Behind her, at a distance, four men sat around a card table smoking their pipes.

  “Would you like to come in?” she said, in Arabic, although Hannah knew she could have asked the same thing in Hebrew.

  “Just for a minute,” Hannah said. “I have something to give you.”

  Anisa looked surprised, but she turned and led Hannah into the mud house. To say that Anisa had been Hannah’s friend would have been overstating things, but they had been amica
ble with each other, balancing their menfolk’s virulent distrust. In the early days Anisa had sent her brother Youssef down to show the halutzim how to build a taboon. The Arab’s mud oven was more suited to the land than the open fires the pioneers had been using. Later, she had shown Rivka and Hannah how to make strong mint tea—it was still called Anisa Tea in the kibbutz, and, Hannah supposed, it always would be.

  And when Hannah had needed help ending her pregnancy, Anisa had shown her how.

  “How are you?” Hannah asked now.

  Anisa nodded, but didn’t answer. It was not a snub, it was her way. Hannah could read so much in her silence. Anisa turned to get some kindling so she could boil some water, and Hannah saw she was pregnant again. She was not surprised; to her eyes, the Arab women seemed always to be pregnant, and in this Hannah envied them. There was no haggling over who would plough the field and who would fix the threshing machine (although of course, they did not have a threshing machine) and who would raise the babies. They did not have long meetings into the night to discuss the politics of childcare or the division of labour. The mothers would raise their babies. How complicated did it need to be?

  “You’re with child,” Hannah said.

  Anisa nodded. “Come March, inshallah, there will be a new child in the village.”

  Had not Thin Rivka just said the same thing? Surely, this was what everyone wanted—for new life to take the place of the old.

  Anisa did not say to Hannah that she hoped for a girl, that the new child would replace her Sakina, but she didn’t have to.

  Hannah felt a sudden terrible longing to put a hand on Ruth’s forehead, to lean in and smell the back of her daughter’s neck—warm and damp like yeast.

  She fished in her satchel and came out with Salam. She held the doll out to Anisa.

  “Ruthie still had this,” Hannah said. “I thought you might want it back.”

  Anisa leaned over to see what Hannah held; she was only a few feet from Hannah when she saw her dead daughter’s doll. She inhaled sharply, as though she had been slapped.

  “Oh!” Hannah said. “I’m so sorry! I just thought…”

  She looked down at the doll, the upside down crescent eyes that made its face look like it was perpetually crying. “I know Sakina must have loved her,” Hannah said.

  Anisa was busy rearranging her features, burying the grief as quickly as it had ambushed her.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t want it.”

  She was carefully, studiously keeping her eyes away from the doll.

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah repeated.

  “Ruth can keep it,” Anisa said. But she couldn’t help herself, and when she did glance at the doll she flinched again. Then she paused. “What’s that?”

  She pointed at Salam’s head. The headscarf was pinned up with the button, so the doll was wearing her kippah.

  “That’s nothing,” Hannah said. “It’s just a button I added for Ruth to play with.”

  But Anisa had seen that Salam had been made into a Jew.

  Once, at the beginning, the halutzim had sent their children to the Arab village during the rainy season while they tried out a new drainage system. The Arab children’s eyes were often clouded with trachoma, but the kadachat did not affect them in the same numbers. Anisa’s mother had said the Arab women would take care of the Jewish children. And they had. It was not so long ago, really, that this had happened. But now a line had been crossed. Hannah had come, hoping to reconcile, to absolve herself of her husband David’s sins, but now she saw it was not to be. She had known Anisa a long time—ten years, even more. Youssef had always treated the settlers kindly. There had been a measure of good will between these particular groups of Arabs and Jews. They had traded recipes and medicines for their children and tips on where to pick the wild herbs.

  “My father just died,” Hannah said, thinking of this long history. But Anisa looked up in disbelief a second time. Was it grief for old Avraham that Hannah could see on Anisa’s face? No. Anisa thought Hannah was looking for pity. She thought Hannah was trying to liken the death of a grandfather from old age to the death of a six-year-old by revolver.

  The bonds between them were now broken. A grown man had murdered a child.

  Hannah had hoped her and David’s exile would be enough. That by leaving Kinneret—by David leaving—there might still be room for something to grow back up through the cracks. But in Anisa’s expression lay something larger, dark and without contours, without shape. A kind of stain that was spreading now and wouldn’t be stopped. Could Hannah blame Anisa? She could not.

  She, too, knew what it was like to lose a child.

  “I think of Sakina,” she said. The words were like sandpaper in her throat. But it was worse, to pretend nothing had happened.

  How she longed to hear her own lost baby named out loud. She would have called him Avraham, after her father. Avramchick. Little Avraham.

  Anisa nodded. “Thank you,” she said. And then, “Please go.”

  Tears sprang into Hannah’s eyes; she blinked them back. “Of course,” she said.

  As she turned to leave a little boy ran to Anisa and tried to climb on her lap; her pregnancy prevented him from making it all the way up.

  “Yallah, Mahmoud,” Anisa said.

  She stood up wincingly, one hand on her lower back. But she waited for Hannah to leave first.

  “Happy New Year,” she said.

  And Hannah said, “Thank you.”

  —

  They washed her father’s body, carefully removing anything extra from his skin, but his beard they left as it had been. They immersed his corpse in the swirling pool at the edge of the river used for a mikveh. Then her father’s body was wrapped in tachrichim. The sash was tied around him in the shape of the letter Shin. The hole was deeper than it needed to be, but nobody wanted to risk jackals, and they all remembered what had happened at the beginning, before they had learned this lesson.

  Like the others, Hannah believed death was an extension of life. The land of Israel needed Jews to nourish it, with their work and their sweat and then with their flesh. Avraham would grow again in the barley harvest and the reaping. It was a kind of pagan confidence that would have horrified the religious Jews back home, but she belonged to the young halutzim who saw how the land worked. They had succeeded in removing themselves from the money lending and the textile mills and the diamond trade. They were connected with the life cycle in a way that gave them confidence to say what was plainly true: God was not only in the synagogues. He was here in the wild purple wind and the dark clouds and the cold sky in the winter as the sun went down. And this, all around her, was the heaven where her father would now reside.

  This much, Hannah was right about. I wish I could have told her.

  Hannah watched the burial, unblinking, refusing to look away. She remembered how her father had let her play with his tallit when she was a child, using it as a tent under which all the little Israelites gathered. Bubala, he had called her. And sometimes bissela. His little bit. And now he was dead. It seemed absurd.

  She stayed at Kinneret until the following Sabbath. On the last night, she dreamed her father came to her and stood in the open tent flap and told her another child was coming. The birth would be hard and she must give herself to it fully. When she woke with her heart in her mouth she knew she had been dreaming in Hebrew. After ten years, it had eclipsed Russian as the language of her deepest self.

  She slowly opened her eyes. Yitzhak was at the tent’s door. Dust motes danced in the shaft of sunlight behind him. He came in, like a brother, and sat on the edge of her pallet.

  “It’s morning,” he said.

  She was still half asleep; she nodded. She ran her tongue over her fuzzy teeth.

  “We’d like to come back with you,” he said.

  She rolled over to face him.

  “Where?”

  “To the new place.”

  “Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes for a
long moment. Then opened them again.

  “Why?”

  Yitzhak hesitated. “You seem very lonely.”

  She looked at his face and saw there was another reason. “Yitzhak,” she said.

  “There was an accident,” he said.

  Hannah sat up. “Ruth?” she asked, as the quicksand seeped into her limbs.

  But Yitzhak shook his head, reassuring her. “Someone else,” he said. “Some young halutz.”

  “Samuel?” she asked. “A twin?”

  Yitzhak thought. “No. Dov?”

  Hannah strained to bring a face into focus, but there were so many pioneers.

  “There are always accidents,” she said.

  Yitzhak nodded. “Apparently it had something to do with David.”

  Hannah lay back down. She shielded her eyes with the back of her arm like she was a sunbather on a beach.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Chaim,” Yitzhak said.

  News travelled faster by the postman’s donkey than by any telegram back in Russia. Hannah had heard that in Jerusalem, on the desk of the head of the Agency, sat a telephone. She supposed this would be faster still, but it was as hard to imagine the telephone as it was to imagine Moses actually parting the Red Sea.

  Hannah put the pieces of Yitzhak’s words together in her head. David had done something wrong. It would be some act of bad judgment, some harsh acting out. Yitzhak and Rivka had heard, and they wanted to come and supervise him. The Jews could not afford David making another mistake.

  She knew how David would feel, that he would want her to object. But she didn’t have it in her. How good it would be to have Yitzhak and Rivka at the new place, people she knew and loved.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Yitzhak nodded.

  “And Gabriel,” he said.

  “Of course. Ruth will be happy to see him.”

  Hannah wondered for the thousandth time if the children understood their relationship. Was it possible for children to know things without ever being told?