Strangers with the Same Dream Page 27

  How sorry Hannah felt for the halutza with the red sleeves. Sarah. Whatever was coming for her would cause so much pain.

  “How was it at home?” David asked, turning back to Hannah.

  He ran a finger over the bridge of his nose.

  “It was fine.”

  “Did you sit shiva?”

  “No,” she said.

  In truth they had done what they had always done, since the first halutz had died from kadachat: the abridged version of shiva. But Hannah knew that David’s question was not really about her father’s passing. It was about his own legacy: Were they still doing things the way he had arranged them?

  “Liora says hello.”

  David nodded curtly. He adjusted the pencil behind his ear.

  “Why are the halutzim not in the field?” she asked.

  He looked over to where the others were lounging by the new water pipe. One of the boys was doing handstands. He would take a few steps on his palms, wobble, and then fall over to applause from the others. Someone else was juggling oranges.

  “It’s a circus,” Hannah said.

  David lined the heel of one foot up with the toe of his other foot, like he was walking a balance beam.

  “And what about the boy who got burned?” Hannah asked.

  David looked up.

  “You heard?”

  “Chaim.”

  A look of defiance crossed David’s face: this meant she was right in thinking the accident had something to do with him.

  “I don’t know,” David said.

  “What do you mean? Weren’t you here?”

  “Accidents happen,” he said.

  “And your daughter’s leg? What happened to her?”

  He shrugged.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He was like an insolent child with one non-answer to every question posed by an adult.

  Hannah laughed, a sharp, loud laugh. She thought how different this David was to the one he showed everyone else. How he had given up with her: he no longer tried to hide the selfishness at his core.

  Why was it, wondered Hannah, that to love someone was to show them your worst side? Love was like an anaesthetic that slowly wore off, leaving the throbbing pain and the bloody open wound. There was no preventing it. All love progressed on a downward trajectory from euphoria to resignation to disdain.

  She supposed this was how David saw her too. As something to be tolerated, even endured.

  “She has a huge cut that is oozing pus. She has a fever,” Hannah said. As she said the words, fury rose inside her. She had left for one week, because her father had died. And this is what had happened. “She won’t stop crying,” Hannah said. “She’s in so much pain.”

  “Who?” David asked.

  Hannah reached out and slapped him.

  He flinched, but only lightly, as though she had been helping him by removing a mosquito from his cheek.

  “It was Ida’s fault,” David said. He rubbed at the red mark on his face, but said nothing else about what she had done.

  “The girl from the laundry?”

  David nodded.

  “What was she doing with Ruth? What happened?” Hannah asked.

  David didn’t answer.

  Hannah tried again. “Did you even bother to clean the cut?”

  David’s black curls were dirty and there was mud on his right calf. She knew he thought having Eretz Yisrael on his body made him part of Eretz Yisrael himself.

  “Of course I did,” he said.

  “With soap?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s infected! You need to use soap,” Hannah said. They were silent, both thinking of Igor.

  David shrugged again. “This is different,” he said. “It’s only a scratch.”

  —

  Thin Rivka and the Angel Gabriel wanted to light the Hanukkah candles with Ruth and Hannah. It was something the children had all done with Liora, who had an uncanny knack for reinstating old Hebrew festivals that nobody knew had existed in the first place. She had plucked from the air the Israeli folk dances that had been lost to time, and taught them anew to the children. She had shown them how to celebrate Tu B’Shevat, a holiday nobody had even heard of. And she had found an old menorah that Rivka pulled out of her bag now, along with the tapered candles to fill it.

  The rains had come and the day was cold. Ruth had been moved to the infirmary, which Hannah saw afresh through Rivka’s eyes: a dirty tent with almost no medical supplies and a barrage of near-corpses struck down with malaria. And not nearly enough blankets to keep anyone warm. There was a man in the corner covered in terrible burns. Hannah realized with horror that this must be Dov.

  Ruth had taken a turn in the night; her breathing was shallow and rapid. But when Rivka began to arrange the candles, she perked up and said, “Refill from the right, light from the left,” the mnemonic Liora had taught them.

  The Angel Gabriel said, “She’s right,” confirming Ruth’s words. He, too, remembered what Liora had taught them.

  “Pass it to me,” Ruth said, holding out her hand for the menorah.

  “I want to do it,” Gabriel said, sulking.

  “Gabriel,” Ruth said, imitating Liora’s voice when she wanted to be obeyed, and the boy did as told.

  Hannah smiled at the sight of the two children beside each other again, their heads bent over the menorah. From the back you could hardly tell them apart.

  Thin Rivka said, “New halutzim arrived in the night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Thirty of them!”

  “The big kibbutz,” Hannah said. “It’s what he wants.” And then, “It’s what the committee decided on.”

  “I heard there’s a doctor,” Rivka said.

  She gestured discreetly to Ruth’s leg. The child had fallen back on her mattress, her eyelids closed.

  “Really?”

  The Angel Gabriel was intoning the blessing, solemn, with reverence: Blessed are you, O Lord, who kindles the light of the Hanukkah candles.

  Why had David not told her there was a doctor?

  “Are you sure?”

  Rivka nodded.

  Hannah said, “I’ll go look as soon as we’re done lighting the candles.”

  —

  After, Rivka confirmed that Hannah had fallen asleep beside Ruthie. She and Gabriel had tiptoed out to let them rest. It had been such a long day—a long week, a long year. Hannah could have slept forever. But a red shadow on the back of her eyelids woke her, and a crackling sound. She was dreaming of a bonfire. The fiddle played, and the hora wheeled wildly while the sparks flew up into the night. When she opened her eyes, the straw mattress was on fire. The menorah had fallen over, both of the lit candles—the shamash and the candle for the first night of the festival—flaring out into a blaze. She leapt to her feet and stepped on a tinder and screamed. Ruth’s eyes flew open. The girl looked around her and saw the flames; she tried to stand but her leg wouldn’t take her weight and she, too, shouted, and then started to cry.

  There was a bucket of dirty water by the door. It had been placed there not in case of a fire, but so wet rags could be submerged and placed on the burned man’s body and on the fevered necks of the kadachat victims. Hannah lifted the bucket and threw it on the mattress. It didn’t put out the whole blaze—she used a stray sandal to stamp down the rest—but the fire was easily quelled after that. She stood, breathing hard, a hand on her chest. How had she fallen asleep? How quickly everything could go up in smoke. What if she hadn’t woken up in time?

  —

  The following afternoon, Ruth wormed her way over to her mother and clung onto her calf. She said, “I want Salam.”

  Hannah ran her tongue over her eye tooth.

  “You gave her to Selig. Remember?”

  “I want her back.”

  “Okay, bubala. I’ll go get her.”

  She took Ruth back to her own tent, and laid her on the mattress. The child closed her eyes and lift
ed her little fists over her head, the way she had done as a baby. She was asleep immediately. Hannah went to find Selig. He was exactly where he had been the day before, only now the pieces of the gun had been reassembled and he was holding it in his hand.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But could Ruth have her doll back?”

  But Selig’s mood had changed. If he had ignored her before, he now spoke with utter disdain.

  He said, “I gave it back.”

  “You did?” she asked.

  “To David.”

  —

  On her way to find her husband she kept an eye out for the doctor, asking the halutzim if anyone had seen him, but nobody had. She eventually located David by the partly built cow shed—a frame with no walls, so you could see right through it—watching Sarah. Hannah could almost see the fantasy that would be playing in his mind: a chalet in the Alps, stumbling across a young milkmaid. For a moment she was caught off guard, and the soft part of her emerged unexpectedly, like a child popping her head around the corner.

  Was she not good enough? How had this happened?

  “Ruth wants her doll,” she said to David.

  She didn’t say anything about the fire the previous day, that Ruth could have died, that the thing that pretended to be an infirmary was now filled with wet coals and soot.

  “I almost fixed the tractor,” he said. And when she was silent, “I have the part.”

  “He said you have it.”

  “I do!”

  “The doll?”

  David scratched his forehead. “Who said so?”

  “Selig.”

  “Who?”

  “The twin.”

  David touched his nose, and then the pencil over his ear.

  “Did Selig give it to you?” Hannah asked.

  She could see that it was hard for David even to pretend to pay attention. He began to page through his notebook, looking for some unnamed item. “I don’t know.” Then his eyes focused, remembering. “Yes.”

  Hannah cleared her throat.

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Can I have it?” she asked.

  He looked around, as though it might materialize in front of him. Then he said, “I don’t know where it is.”

  The flames of rage rose in her again; she held her breath to try and keep them down.

  “Thin Rivka says there is a doctor who can help us,” she said. “With the kadachat?”

  “With our daughter.”

  “The doctor is sick,” David said.

  It was like he was telling some twisted joke. Was this possible? A doctor had arrived and already fallen ill?

  But I knew David was right, of course. And the doctor would not recover. He would join the ranks of the lost, rising past me, and away.

  “There’s a nurse,” David said. And from his voice Hannah could tell she was beautiful.

  “The doctor is too sick? How bad are the convulsions?”

  David said, “He’s from America,” like this explained everything.

  Hannah thought of Ruth back in the tent, alone without her mother, as she had been in the Baby House. Hannah carried around a longing for her own child, even when the girl was right there in front of her. There was nothing she could do in the face of this kind of love. The only recourse was to try to make her child happy.

  “Please find the doll,” she said.

  David ran his eyes over her, evaluating her mood, the seriousness of her request and the consequences if he ignored it. He bobbed his head. He saw that she meant it.

  CHAPTER 30

  THIN RIVKA CAME AND TOOK Hannah’s arm and tried to lead her out to the field where the pioneers were dancing.

  “But…Ruth,” Hannah said. “I need to find the doctor.” She remembered what David had told her, that the doctor had fallen ill. “The nurse,” she corrected herself.

  Rivka looked at her, all cheekbones and pointy chin. “We’ll find the nurse,” she said. “Come and dance first. You need this. Ruth will be fine for an hour.”

  Hannah let Rivka take her hand. They passed Samuel by the water tap, and said a brief hello.

  “Will you dance?” Hannah asked.

  “It is all one big dance,” the boy said.

  Hannah laughed. They kept walking and soon drew up to the spinning wheel. The redheaded boy was bent over his bow, sweat pouring off his face. The moon dripped down like nectar. The wild ring was like something at a carnival, with lights strung up and flasks of whiskey that had appeared out of nowhere circulating freely.

  She saw the girl that David loved—Sarah—in the beautiful red blouse he had allowed her to keep. She was in the centre of the circle, like the cherry on the top of a cake.

  “They’re all so young,” she said to Rivka, gesturing with her chin.

  Rivka laughed. “We were that young once. Not so long ago!”

  Hannah was only ten years older than these pioneers, but she felt like she had a hundred years on them. The wheel spun madly. These were the people who would make Eretz Yisrael? These children?

  She joined the dance and let it take her over. It was like falling into the arms of an old familiar lover, one who knew—had always known—exactly how to please her. The night was so hot, the Milky Way smeared across the sky. When she linked elbows she felt the heat and sweat of her neighbours, their pulses beating there, just under their skin. Her feet had always known these steps, the hora of her childhood, the hora that would be her old age. She was taking her rightful place in the circle of things. She danced and she danced.

  —

  When the circle finally wound down, Hannah walked back toward her tent; two halutzim, a boy and a girl, were standing by the river. The girl was Ida, who had washed Hannah’s bloody menstrual rags so discreetly. A sweet girl, all innocence. Had David tried to blame her for Ruth’s leg? Hannah scoffed to herself. She tried to remember the name of Ida’s chaver. He was a boy David had told her about, an exceptional worker, a true heir to the Zionist project. This boy led Ida by the arm out to the fence at the edge of the field. Even at a distance, Hannah could see their cheeks were flushed from the dancing. The girl’s skirt was still swaying around her knees. As Hannah watched, the boy took Ida’s glasses off her face and put them on his own. The intimacy of it was almost more than Hannah could bear. It was, she thought, as though Ida’s body was an extension of his own; as though he needed to see something clearly and she would be the one to help him do it.

  Levi. The boy’s name was Levi.

  Had Hannah ever loved a man like this? She had. But her memory of it was in her mind; she could not remember that particular bodily joy. Was she capable of a love that pure now? Romance was done for her. But a baby might tell her about other forms of love.

  When Hannah reached her tent she saw a girl walking unsteadily toward her.

  “Elisabeth,” the girl said, and extended her hand. She looked at Hannah expectantly, as though her name should mean something, but Hannah looked back blankly. There were so many new people arriving every day now.

  “Elisabeth,” the woman said again. She giggled. “The nurse.”

  Everything in Hannah stood at attention. “Oh” she said, “a nurse!”

  Elisabeth just laughed again. “I hear you have a sick daughter,” she said, more seriously.

  Tears sprang into Hannah’s eyes.

  “Would you like me to come and look?” the young woman asked.

  She had long, smooth hair almost down to her bottom and Hannah had the impulse to reach out and stroke it. “But it’s night,” she said.

  Elisabeth’s eyes softened. She swayed on her feet and let out a quiet belch that she covered with the back of her hand. Hannah suddenly saw the girl was drunk.

  “Why don’t you come in the morning?” she said.

  Elisabeth nodded. She hiccupped and swayed again. By the time Hannah left, the girl was on her knees in the ditch, vomiting.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE NEXT MORNING THE HALUTZIM
were up at dawn, and back to work. It amazed Hannah, their ability to exist on no sleep—to thrive even. She felt there was not enough sleep in the world to sate her.

  Of course, it was a mother’s tiredness. But there was also a deeper exhaustion, one that was existential. Did everyone feel so tired from just being alive?

  She went to the infirmary and found Elisabeth waiting as promised, repentant from her night of drunkenness, her cheeks a greyish hue. They crouched beside Ruth together. The girl was on her back with her fists in a tight ball on her belly and her cheeks flushed. Her dark curls were plastered to the sides of her face with sweat. Sometimes she still made nursing faces in her sleep, trying to extract milk from the long-lost nipple. There was a doctor in Vienna who was writing about this, a doctor David had spoken of, but Hannah could not remember his name.

  Elisabeth looked in the girl’s throat and in her eyes and her ears, perhaps steeling herself before getting to the leg.

  “It should have been cleaned right away,” she said, matter-of-factly, when she pulled back the linen—a bandage would no longer contain the swelling. She got a warm salt solution and dabbed it gently on the wound; Hannah averted her eyes.

  “The salt is just beading off the skin,” Elisabeth said, catching Hannah’s gaze. Her eyes held an odd mixture of sorrow and acceptance. How she wished she could help.

  Elisabeth left, saying she was going to look for a new bandage, her long hair swinging behind her like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. Hannah had a violent urge to remove Ruth from this place. It was too dirty, too filled with decay. She didn’t want to wait for the nurse to return. She managed to get an arm under Ruth’s shoulders and another under her knees, and to stagger to her feet. She tried to heft Ruth up onto her shoulder, expecting her daughter to conform to her shape, rest her head maybe, but the child’s body was limp.

  “Bubala,” she whispered into Ruth’s ear.

  She wanted her daughter to rest and heal, and she also wanted her to wake up, to look at her mother with love and recognition. But Ruth didn’t stir.

  Back at the tent Hannah almost tripped trying to lower Ruth to the mattress. She got her down finally and took off her own shoes and lay beside her. She curled her body around her girl’s. They woke up several hours later in exactly the same position.