Strangers with the Same Dream Page 26

  I could have answered then: It was not just merely possible, it was the very way they learned. They saw what was around them and they took it in. It grew. It changed. There was a kind of mutation. And then it came back out of them—in unimaginable time and form.

  CHAPTER 28

  HANNAH SAW RIGHT AWAY that Ruth had been injured.

  “What happened to your leg, bubala?” she asked when the girl jumped into her arms.

  “I hurt it.”

  “It looks sore!”

  The cut itself was very thin, as though a finely sharpened knife had split the skin open. On either side was a ridge of flaming red, puffed up and corrugated. At the top and bottom of the cut, yellow pus wormed its way out; it made Hannah think of the grubs that sometimes made their way into the almond trees. She pictured her father, who had taken to horticulture at Kinneret after all, carefully cutting a gash into the bark and extracting the culprit, the location of which he could somehow divine.

  “Capnodis,” he had said, while the cream-coloured worm withered on the end of his knife in the light. “This bug is the enemy of every fruit tree in Eretz Yisrael.”

  “How did it happen?” Hannah asked Ruth now.

  She touched the cut, tentative, and Ruth winced.

  “I missed you, Imma. Where did you go?”

  Ruth looked so much taller than she had when Hannah had left, as if in ten days she had grown into a different girl entirely.

  “I had to go back and say goodbye to Saba.”

  “Why goodbye?”

  “He died,” Hannah said, simply.

  Her directness was not because she wanted to take the moral high ground and be honest, but because the thought of lying exhausted her.

  She braced herself for crying, but Ruth had an empty look in her eye, as though she could not properly remember who it was they were talking about, who her grandfather had been.

  “I cut it with the candlesticks,” she said.

  “Pardon, bubala?”

  “In the yard with the marbles and the boy’s bare tuchus.”

  Hannah took her daughter’s chin, and gently moved her face so she could look her in the eyes.

  “Your Saba died,” she said. “He is buried in the earth now, back at Kinneret.”

  “Abba told me,” Ruth said. And then, “Did they hurt him?”

  “Who?”

  “Like Selig.”

  How had Hannah forgotten this endless parade of non-sequiturs? Returning to motherhood was like returning to a different world altogether.

  She sat down; she put her head in her hands. How she missed her father. There were suddenly a million things she wished she had asked him, about his ancestors, about his childhood, about his faith. Now he was gone. There was nobody left to ask. And there never again would be.

  Ruth rammed her head gently into Hannah’s ribs. She made some mooing noises. She said, “If I had a twin, there would be two me’s.”

  “Yes,” Hannah said.

  “Gabriel is here!” Ruth said, remembering.

  “You can play with him tomorrow. It’s time to get ready for bed,” Hannah said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “You have to sleep so your leg will heal.”

  Ruth looked down at her leg like she had forgotten it was there. “It stinks,” she said, and then, “I lost Salam!” Tears appeared in her eyes. “I can’t find her anywhere.”

  A wave of guilt hit Hannah. “I have Salam,” she said. “I’m sorry, bubala.”

  She fished again in her satchel and came out with the doll, arranging its headscarf neatly around its face. She tried not to think of Anisa’s stricken look. She expected rage from Ruth too, but there was pure joy in her voice when she sang out, “You have her? I thought she was gone!”

  Ruth grabbed the doll and pushed her face into it and inhaled deeply, like she was smelling a spring bouquet, and then held it at arm’s length and gazed at it with a look of such adoration that Hannah had to laugh. “You sure do love Salam,” she said.

  “Sakina loved her too,” Ruth said. “And now I’m her Imma instead.”

  Hannah shut her eyes.

  “Let’s go brush our teeth,” she said.

  “When Selig was in jail, did he get a cut on his leg?”

  “Teeth,” Hannah said.

  “Moo! Moo! Moo!” Ruth declared, meaning, I asked you a question. I want an answer.

  “I don’t know if he cut his leg,” Hannah said. She cleared her throat. “Maybe.”

  “His brother said they hurt him.” Ruth paused. “Imma?”

  “Yes, Ruthie.”

  “I want to give him Salam,” Ruth said.

  “Samuel?”

  “Selig.”

  “It was Samuel who was playing with you.” By this, Hannah meant, Samuel is the nice one.

  “I know,” Ruth said. “But Selig is sad.”

  “He is?”

  “Because they hurt him in jail.”

  Hannah looked down at her daughter. Ruth’s face was thinner, more angular, than it had been just last week. Her curls were knotty; it had been some time since anyone had combed them. Hannah put her hand on the top of Ruth’s head; she curved her fingers like she was about to play a scale on the piano and dug the tips of her fingers into the scalp, massaging.

  “Ah,” Ruth said in pleasure.

  “You’re a nice girl, bubala.”

  Ruth said, “My leg hurts.” A tear appeared at the corner of her eye. “It hurts so much!” she said, and suddenly she was wailing.

  Hannah hoisted her up onto her lap. Clearly, Ruth had been waiting for her mother to come home. The tent smelled vaguely of urine and Hannah wondered if Ruth had had an accident in her absence. Or maybe they just needed new hay in the mattresses. At Kinneret they had stuffed them with dried seaweed from the Sea of Galilee.

  Ruth cried, long, satisfied sobs, sobs she had been saving up for the safest person she knew who was not Liora. Hannah held her patiently. Ruth was full of pain and she was discharging it, the way the body would cough up a chicken bone lodged in the throat.

  “Tell me again what happened?” Hannah asked.

  “I cut it!” Ruth choked through her tears, angry that her mother was focused on the cause of her injury instead of the effect.

  Hannah sighed, and ran her hand along the neat row of vertebrae down her daughter’s back. Ruth felt warm. Hannah looked again at the wound on Ruth’s leg; the circle of red around it seemed to have grown wider in the few minutes they had been talking. It now encompassed most of her leg below the knee. “Let’s get you to bed, bubala.”

  But Ruth grabbed Salam, and hugged the doll fiercely to her chest, and kissed its filthy face, and breathed in its smell. She shouted, “I want to give Salam to Selig.”

  “In the morning.”

  “Now,” Ruth said.

  “Hush,” Hannah said.

  “You’re stupid!” Ruth screamed.

  Hannah raised her eyebrows. Ruth liked to whine, to wheedle and get her way, but she had not spoken to her mother like this before. She would not, in a million years, have spoken to Liora in this voice. But Hannah knew that she was paying the price for having left her daughter and for whatever casual negligence might have happened in her absence, and she braced herself, willing her voice to come out calmly.

  “In the morning,” she tried again, but Ruth caught a whiff of her lack of certainty, her surprise, and stamped her foot and started to scream more loudly, an undifferentiated stream of sound like an alarm.

  Young halutzim were walking past the open tent flap; Hannah saw them crane their necks toward the terrible sound. Ruth thrashed about looking for something to kick. She bared her teeth. She slammed her clenched fists into the straw mattress, and lunged for her mother’s face; Hannah pulled away just in time.

  Soon Hannah would wish for this rage, for this lashing out, for this embodiment of the life within her daughter. But now she was embarrassed, ashamed.

  The halutza Shoshanna st
uck her head in. “Can I help?” she asked.

  Hannah was so grateful she could almost have wept—but a child took up all the space for feeling. The mother was left with the task of making a container for the child’s emotion. Where was the mother to put her own emotion? Nowhere.

  “I’m okay,” Hannah said to Shoshanna. And then, “I’m sorry.”

  Later, Hannah would remember this, and reflect that if Shoshanna had been a mother herself she might have known to tell Hannah there was nothing to apologize for, that she wasn’t responsible for her child’s bad behaviour. But Shoshanna must have believed that Hannah could control what Ruth did. Turn it off or on, like the new water tap. And Ruth, feeling Shoshanna’s presence, increased her performance, relishing the larger audience. She held on to her leg and shouted, “It hurts, Imma. Make it stop!”

  Shoshanna’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Is she okay?”

  Hannah was about to say yes, she was okay, but there was an edge to her daughter’s crying that made her panic. There was a performance happening, true, but the pain at the core of it also seemed real. She shrugged, admitting that she didn’t know.

  The screaming increased, seemed to peak—and Shoshanna covered her ears. Then it dissolved back into crying.

  “Does it really hurt that much?” Hannah asked, and Ruth looked at her with complete disdain.

  She said, “I want to give Salam to Selig.”

  Hannah had forgotten entirely that this had been the trigger for the outburst.

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  Ruth blinked. She rubbed her eyes and looked up to make sure she had understood correctly. “Can I?”

  “Yes.”

  Like that, the storm was over. Shoshanna quietly stepped away.

  “Let’s put your shoes on first,” Ruth said to her doll. “And brush your teeth.” She looked up through her drying tears, to make sure her mother got the joke.

  Hannah watched anxiously as Ruth stood. The child winced when she put weight on her leg and sat back down on her bottom. “Uppie me,” she said to Hannah, her expression for please pick me up.

  Hannah hefted the girl with effort and thought how she would not be able to do this for much longer. Her baby was now a child. She needed a new baby to replace the old. To replace what she had lost, and lost before.

  —

  Selig was cleaning the rifle. The parts were spread out in front of him on the ground, and several dirty rags, and a jerry can of oil. The bullets lay scattered, like the gun had just been repeatedly fired.

  “I brought you my doll,” Ruth said.

  Hannah braced herself, but Selig only smiled.

  “Salam,” he said.

  How did he know the doll’s name?

  Ruth nodded, solemn. “To make you not sad anymore.”

  Hannah set her daughter down on the ground.

  “Thank you,” Selig said, with no trace of surprise. It was as if this was the formal completion of something that had been envisioned earlier, by the two of them, the result of a long negotiation. Hannah felt like she was coming in halfway through a story. Something must have happened when she was away.

  Selig took the doll. He put it up on his shoulder like she was an infant he was about to burp. His palm entirely covering the doll’s back.

  “I’ll take good care of her,” he said.

  “And give her back,” Ruth said.

  Now Selig was the one to nod solemnly.

  “You have my word.”

  He was speaking only to Ruth; he had barely looked at Hannah to acknowledge her presence. He clearly had no feelings about her one way or another. But Ruth he treated as his equal.

  “I hurt my leg,” she said. As always with Ruth, saying it made it true, and she suddenly winced and lifted the weight off it and then sat down on the ground.

  Selig nodded. “I’m sorry to see that,” he said.

  There was a dark shadow across his jaw where a beard was growing in. In the distance they heard someone singing, in butchered French, “Allons, enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!” There was the tantalizing smell of frying onions in the air.

  “Did they hurt your leg in prison?” Ruth asked.

  Hannah was about to shush her, but neither Ruth nor Selig looked at her.

  “Yes,” he said. “But mostly they hurt my back.” He pursed his lips, and scrunched up his nose. “Would you like to see?”

  Ruth nodded.

  Selig put the doll down tenderly on an upended orange crate. He adjusted its headscarf, then turned around. He wriggled his suspenders to the side and lifted his loose linen shirt. Beneath it was a stretch of skin almost completely covered in scars.

  Gnarled, knotty ridges twisted like the branches of a tree. Hannah drew her breath in sharply.

  “They did hurt you,” Ruth said, pensive. She reached for her mother’s hand, to reassure herself of her presence, but she did not take her eyes off Selig.

  Selig pulled his shirt back down, tucked it in and rearranged his suspenders. He turned back to face Ruth.

  “They did,” he said. “But I got better.”

  They looked, together, at Ruth’s leg. The hot red oval with the black line through it, the crusted pus, the swollen ankle.

  “Will I get better too?” she asked.

  Selig didn’t answer.

  “I suppose I didn’t heal entirely,” he said instead.

  Ruthie stuck a finger up her nose and dug around with it.

  “I’m not as kind as I used to be,” Selig said, like he was speaking of somebody else.

  “What do you mean?” Ruth asked.

  Selig tilted his head. “People bother me,” he said. Then added, “Only adults,” so Ruth would know she was excepted.

  “Are you mean to them?” she asked.

  A slow smile crept over Selig’s face. “I do like to play tricks,” he said.

  Ruth bent her wounded leg and jumped up and down on her good one. “I like tricks!” she said, and hooted like an owl.

  “It’s easy to play tricks when you’re a twin,” he said. He looked at Ruth, weighing her trustworthiness. “Would you like to hear a trick I played on Ida?”

  Now Hannah felt that she was genuinely intruding, that she was overhearing something private. She took several steps away and turned her back. But not before seeing first the look of wariness on Ruth’s face. “I love Ida,” the girl said.

  Selig said, “Do you?” In his tone, Hannah could hear that he was truly interested.

  Ruth must have nodded, because Selig said, “You’re right. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I made her think I was my brother. She gave me two gifts, one for each of us. But I didn’t tell Samuel. I kept them both for myself,” Selig said.

  There was silence from Ruth, but when she spoke her voice was conciliatory. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said—a direct quote from Liora. “You should just say you’re sorry.”

  “I suppose,” Selig said, but Hannah could hear his doubt. “No,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”

  CHAPTER 29

  RUTH AND GABRIEL PLAYED together all the next morning. Ruth sat with her leg propped up and Gabriel pretended to be the doctor and then he pretended to be her mother and then he pretended to be Liora. Ruth endured this with a happiness that bordered on ecstasy. Hannah was certain that if her leg had not been so sore she would have stood up and danced.

  After a while, Hannah left them and walked down to the fields. The harvest was going so slowly. The project of the new Work Brigade Camp, which had sprung up with such vigour, had now slowed almost to a standstill. Arriving back, she could see the enterprise through Yitzhak’s eyes, and also the questions: Was David capable of spearheading this new kibbutz? How had they trusted him with it in the first place?

  Something had happened to one of the machines when she was gone—she did not care to ask for the details—and now there were halutzim making flower
crowns while the ripe wheat and barley went to seed all around them. Her desire for a new baby rose up in her again, a vine climbing a trellis, and then, when she tried to ignore it, a vine wrapping around her throat and strangling her. Being home had revived it in her—seeing the young girls pregnant, the sense of purpose Liora had as she presided over the next generation. And the halutza Malka walking around with the little cherub on her hip. His pink cheeks and fat hands; his eyes following everything with alert intensity.

  At the same time, Hannah’s father was in a hole in the ground. He would never again fill the bowl of his pipe with tobacco, or don his prayer shawl and walk down to the river to bathe before the Sabbath. He would not call her bubala as she now called Ruth. He would never again press his long beard against Ruth’s cheek and make her howl with laughter.

  Saba, Ruth had called him. Using the new Hebrew word. But Hannah knew her father wanted to be called Zaidy.

  Were there any of her father’s wishes she had not sacrificed for the new land?

  David was by the machines, fiddling with the back of the gas tank on the tractor, his face creased as though he was trying to solve a puzzle. He straightened when he saw her.

  “I’m sorry about your father, Hannahleh,” he said.

  David had known her father for almost twenty years; and her father had loved him, if not exactly like a beloved son, then like an estranged one. But now when David tried to draw her into his arms, she bristled involuntarily.

  He looked up, over her shoulder, and she knew without turning that someone was walking behind her; she knew it would be the halutza with the long curls and the bright red embroidered shirt, the one with the flowers on it.

  Hannah remembered what it was like to be the object of David’s affection. He was what the grandmothers called chedevnik; something in him shone in a way it did not in other men. It was understood he was not a safe choice. It was understood he was a heartbreaker. But a woman would have to have an incredible amount of resolve to say no to him. He was the kind of man that, if you were so lucky as to be chosen by him, you went to. Willingly. With the feeling that the world was showering you with flowers and they would rain down around your head forever.