Strangers with the Same Dream Page 28

  “Two Hanukkah candles in a box,” Ruth said sleepily.

  “I’m a Mama Bear,” Hannah said.

  She ran her fingers through Ruth’s soft curls. The girl’s breath smelled like garbage.

  “No. Two things,” Ruth said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re a Mama Bear and I’m a goose.” She changed her mind. “You’re a lynx and I’m a goat.”

  “What would the baby say to the Mama?”

  “I. Want. My. Pudding.” Ruth giggled. “I. Want. To. Pee.”

  “Really?”

  Too late, Hannah felt the spread of the warm liquid over the mattress.

  “Oh, bubala,” she said.

  It was like Ruth was regressing in every way. Like the balloon that was her life was slowly deflating. Bit by bit her abilities were leaving: she couldn’t walk. She couldn’t eat. And now this.

  “I’m sorry, Imma,” Ruth said in a tiny voice, ashamed. Hannah’s heart ached, an actual, physical pain beneath her breastbone.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered into the small ear. “It’s only an accident.”

  Ruth rolled over on her side and held her head, as though she was trying to protect it from something too hot, or too loud. “I want to play with Gabriel,” she said. And then, “I want Salam.”

  Hannah said, “Let’s just get this wet sheet off,” but the child had fallen asleep. Her lips were parted, and her breaths were ragged and uneven.

  Hannah managed to remove the sheet by manoeuvring it around the limp body. When she had finished, she forced herself to look down at her daughter’s wound. Each time she had done this, she had thought that somehow, magically, Ruth would be healed, and each time she was shocked that the opposite was true. The site of the cut itself was now pale in comparison to the skin surrounding it, which was crimped and black and rotting. A section of the skin had turned hard, like the shell of a turtle. The smell of it was like the kibbutz latrine, but worse. A smell with death in it.

  “Imma,” Ruth said, stirring.

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Help me.”

  The child’s eyes opened momentarily, their clear gaze focused on Hannah’s. But Hannah couldn’t help. It was as though, without Hannah answering, Ruth could see this. A look passed over her face. It wasn’t disappointment in her mother, only sadness and perhaps surrender. Her eyes fell shut again. The rapid breathing resumed.

  —

  Yitzhak came to find Hannah in the middle of the morning. “I need to go talk to Habib,” he said.

  They both knew David had been making no progress on getting the Arabs to vacate their houses. Habib’s father had been born here, and his father’s father, all the way back, he claimed, to Ishmael in the Bible.

  Hannah was scouring Ruth’s bedpan with boiling water and a ball of steel wool.

  “I don’t want what happened to Igor to happen to her,” she said to Yitzhak, nodding at Ruth. They were both quiet, remembering the limb that had to be removed altogether at Kinneret.

  “No,” Yitzhak said, pensive, and then, “I think it would help if you come with me.” He cracked his knuckles loudly, one hand cupping the other fist like a ball in a mitt.

  “Come with you where?”

  “To speak with Habib.”

  Where David would have scowled at Hannah’s lack of focus, Yitzhak’s eyes were full of compassion.

  Hannah knew that Yitzhak had been acquainted with Habib from the early days, when he had ridden his horse up and down Eretz Yisrael, visiting every tent and souk, drinking zouhourat, or mint tea, and smoking harghileh with the Arab men.

  “You want a woman along,” Hannah said.

  Yitzhak nodded. “It would help.”

  “Where’s Rivka?”

  “She’s taken Gabriel to Tiberias to try and find quinine.”

  Hannah inhaled. “Do you need to go now?” she asked.

  “I think…” Yitzhak said. “I just have a feeling.”

  Hannah understood that Yitzhak felt the land like a current through his body. He could sense unrest like a cold coming on: if his instinct told him it was time to take action, then it was time to take action.

  I knew, of course, that because of this he would go down in history as one of the great founders of Eretz Yisrael.

  But Hannah hesitated. She did not want to leave, even for an hour. “Can we bring Ruth?”

  “Of course, achoti,” Yitzhak said gently. He paused. “But isn’t she too sick?”

  Hannah nodded sadly. Of course she was.

  Yitzhak went to put in an hour in the fields—Hannah knew he was trying to set a good example for the halutzim, even if the machines were broken—and then ate a bowl of kashi and polished the horses’ saddles. The sun was high when he and Hannah arrived at the Arab village. Yitzhak nodded to her, a gesture that told her he was going around back to look for Habib—he would know the sheik’s hut because it would be taller than the others.

  There was only one other woman about, and a gaggle of children. The woman approached Hannah and motioned her into a mud house. A wrought iron chair sat in the centre of the room, entirely covered in red-brown rust. Hannah smiled in grateful acknowledgement and sat. A serious little boy approached and jumped right up on her lap. He batted his long eyelashes at her and held her earlobes, looking intently into her eyes.

  “Salam,” Hannah said.

  The Arab mother smiled. Her eyes were a shocking green in her hijab. The women exchanged knowing glances. They both knew which man in the village this little one would grow up to be.

  “Fatima,” the woman said, and she held up a teapot she seemed to have magically produced from beneath her long robes. Hannah nodded; Fatima poured. It smelled like Anisa Tea.

  Another boy approached, six or maybe seven years of age, with skinny legs that showed the contours of his kneecaps and his ankles. Hannah could see that his right eye had once been infected with trachoma, and a skim of clouds was still visible across it.

  “I have a girl, Ruth, who is just about your age,” Hannah said, speaking in halting Arabic.

  The boy seemed to understand. “I know Ruth,” he said.

  Hannah drew herself up. She lifted the toddler off her lap and he scampered away.

  “Really?” she asked the older boy. And then, to check, “Who is Ruth?”

  Fatima was refilling the teapot at the counter, and she turned toward her son. “Abdul,” she said. Reproach in her voice, a slight warning.

  “She’s a girl who came here,” Abdul said, shrugging as if he was indifferent. But Hannah knew children, and she could see that Ruth had made an impression on him.

  Abdul leaned down and made a flicking motion beside his leg, like he was cutting the flesh open with a knife.

  Fatima looked up.

  “Ruth is my daughter,” Hannah said quickly; she wanted to prevent anyone from saying something they would regret in her presence.

  A look of pity crossed Fatima’s face; Hannah flinched away from it.

  “Ruth got cut when the children were playing,” she said quickly to Hannah.

  A pit of dread opened inside Hannah’s stomach. She had been repeating to herself, despite how sick Ruth was, that the wound had simply been a scratch. David’s words. But Fatima had seen the outcome in the genesis of the injury itself. Here was someone whose family had been living in these hills and marshes for centuries. She knew about jackal bites and hamsin and the eye sickness; she knew about kadachat and malnutrition and ringworm.

  Fatima had seen people die. Children.

  And of course, she would know what had happened to Sakina.

  “You didn’t see the cut happen?” Hannah asked.

  Fatima shook her head.

  “I was inside talking to Ida,” she said.

  For a moment, Hannah thought she must have misunderstood the other woman’s Arabic, but Fatima mimicked long braids at the sides of her head and little circles around her eyes for glasses. Had David been telling the truth about Ida being so
mehow involved? And then a look crossed Fatima’s face, as if she understood she had said something she should not have. She glanced across the dirt floor to the counter, as though looking for something specific. Her eyes darted to a large cupboard box, overflowing with a spice grater, a manual coffee grinder, a mortar and pestle. It was like she was trying to not look at something she did not want Hannah to see.

  If Hannah had not been so worried about Ruth she might have paused to wonder about this. Instead, she said, “It’s not just a scratch,” more to herself than to Fatima.

  Fatima asked, “Is the child okay?”

  Her question was tentative, like she did not really want to know the answer.

  Hannah shook her head slowly. She ran her tongue over her front teeth. “No,” she said. “She isn’t.”

  “You could try a clay poultice,” Fatima said, but Hannah knew this was an old witches’ remedy, as useless as the smelly dried herbs they used to try and cure the kadachat.

  “Thank you,” Hannah said. “I will.” But both of them knew a poultice would not help.

  Abdul had taken his chance and fled, followed by his little brother, into the yard. Hannah saw, in the corner of the room, a charm hanging on a string; a blue bead with concentric circles to indicate an iris. It was meant to prevent the evil eye. Perhaps Fatima would lend it to her. Here, she considered, the Arabs were right. The halutzim were so against anything that suggested the universe was bigger than themselves. Bigger than what they could control. And yet, Hannah understood, it was.

  —

  Yitzhak was successful in his negotiation with Habib. Hannah did not need to hear the details to know how it had been done: graciously. With diplomacy. Not by making empty promises that could not be kept, but by drawing on the Arab sense of honour, their commitment to their word. This was, ironically, the same system out of which came the blood feud. A righteous sense of justice. An eye for an eye.

  Hannah watched Yitzhak and Habib come out of the mud hut where they had been talking and she knew it was done. Habib looked not so much defeated as old. He had grown up here. His father had grown up here, and his grandfather. He had known which nettle was poisonous, how to remove the venom from a snake bite, the ratio of mud to straw to build the sturdiest walls. He knew the caves where the old prophets had lived, the mountain where Ishmael had spoken to his people. But now the Hebrews had come and his people were forced to accept the money they so desperately needed. Hannah saw the scar on Habib’s cheek and knew it was from another time, an era to which he must want desperately to return. A time when he had had power, and was to be feared. Habib, Hannah also saw, was a kind man. He touched Fatima’s shoulder, gently, giving some signal only the two of them understood. Perhaps he was telling her what he had done. For at his touch, Fatima stood, and gave Hannah a half-bow, like she, too, was surrendering.

  Habib saw Hannah and Yitzhak out to the yard. In raising his hand he was saying goodbye to more than his visitors; he was saying goodbye to the land itself. Hannah thought that Habib deserved to be furious, that fury would not even begin to describe what was happening in his heart, and she marvelled at his grace. Was he bluffing? Hannah herself could not have pretended. For her, surrender came with rage.

  CHAPTER 32

  PASSOVER WAS CELEBRATED IN the new place, which Hannah could not help but think of, still, as Fatima’s. Where had the Arabs gone? Hannah both wanted and did not want to know.

  Passover, Hannah reminded Ruth—although of course the child already knew—was the celebration of the emancipation of the Jews from slavery. God sent ten plagues on their enemies, the Egyptians, then formed a nation of the Jews.

  “We were slaves in Egypt,” Hannah said, and pointed south, and Ruth lifted her head weakly, following her mother’s gesture as though she might see Pharaoh himself emerging from the hills.

  Hannah was determined to bring her child to participate in the Seder; she would at least witness what her parents had accomplished in the revival of a dream that had come so close to being lost. On their way into the new dining hall they passed Ida, and Hannah heard her say to Levi, “I saw you at the river earlier.”

  A look passed between the two so laden with import it could only mean one thing.

  “Will you sit with me?” Hannah heard Ida ask then, and she also heard the gladness in Levi’s single-word answer, “Okay.” What she would have given for a conversation so sweet and simple.

  She held Ruth in her lap at the table, the child’s body hot and limp. She rested her chin on Ruth’s head, and watched David, who stood at the front like a small boy preparing to recite a lesson. She saw he was nervous, and her heart softened, and she felt proud. She gave him an encouraging smile. The holiday was, as David told them all, an agricultural marking of the first harvesting of the barley. There was no faith involved whatsoever. But to Hannah it seemed like an act of faith to have laid out the Haggadot, and to have sent red-haired Zeruvabel to Tiberias for the wine and the horseradish. The young halutza Shoshanna had decided to make the matzah herself, over an open fire, the way the Jews would have done so many years ago. Perhaps, reflected Hannah, matzah was supposed to be the bread of affliction, but it was as delicious as anything they had eaten since arriving. The halutzim devoured every last bit.

  Ruth was the only one who had no appetite. How long had it been since the child had eaten anything at all? Her body felt like a pile of sticks, the same as when she had been a newborn. Partway through the meal she lifted her head to look around. She saw the tin candlesticks and said, “Ida’s were more beautiful.”

  Hannah drew the girl into her chest and shushed her.

  The halutzim chanted the names of the plagues with relish, dipping their baby fingers in the wine and spilling a drop for each on their plates: frogs, lice, locusts, blood, darkness. The killing of the firstborn sons was the tenth and final plague; the Jews had marked their doorposts with blood so God would know to pass them over.

  Yes, God had saved the firstborn Jewish boys. But Ruth was a girl. Did she count?

  Hannah thought, too, of the binding of Isaac. God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn son. Abraham had taken his boy to the mountain, the son sweetly asking who would be sacrificed? It will become clear, Abraham told Isaac. When they arrived, he bound his own son to the altar, and raised his knife. Only then was the ram in the bushes revealed.

  In the Arab’s Quran, Hannah knew, it was Ishmael who was to be sacrificed.

  Hannah had sacrificed her first child. She had waited for God to intercede, but He did not. Her version of the altar had been a tent in Anisa’s village with an old woman who knew which herbs to use. The bleeding had lasted forty days and forty nights, like Noah’s flood when the world was being cleansed.

  She thought of little Sakina, the Arab girl who also had not been saved.

  Was this what Eretz Yisrael was for? The casualties piled up as though part of some predestined plan; as though the land itself was not able to abide peace.

  Hannah carried Ruth out after the Seder. Gabriel had wandered over and was kicking a stone around the driest part of the yard. “Come play Ruthie-Ruth,” he said, but the girl was too tired to even raise her head.

  Shoshanna was in the garden, beside someone Hannah didn’t recognize. An androgynous-looking girl, her features fine and chiseled.

  “Shalom,” said the girl, and smiled sweetly.

  Hannah looked again. It was the pretty nurse, Elisabeth.

  “You cut your hair!”

  “I did.”

  “You look so…different.”

  Hannah tried to put her finger on what was changed about the girl. It was cosmetic, but there was also something deeper, something more essential. Hannah shifted Ruth in her arms and peered at Elisabeth, unashamed, trying to make it make sense.

  “Elisabeth,” she said, the answer coming to her suddenly. “You’re in love.”

  Elisabeth smiled. “Call me Esther,” she said.

  Romantic love was all around her, b
ut Hannah could not, for the life of her, remember how it felt. She thought again of the boy Levi, putting Ida’s glasses on his own nose to see her point of view. And of Rivka, who had loved Yitzhak for so many years now, and who was beloved in return.

  “You’re happy,” she said, to Elisabeth. Esther.

  The girl laughed. “I am.”

  “A man can make you happy?”

  Esther laughed again. “I didn’t say a man.”

  They were both silent at the wonder of it. The nurse had transformed herself entirely. Hannah was awestruck. How incredible—how truly empowering—to take up a new life when you were called to.

  Ruth moved and moaned in Hannah’s arms. She was trying to say something but her words came out in a string of gibberish. Hannah walked with her daughter, out into the silky purple night. Ruth pressed her mouth to Hannah’s ear, and one word came, and the word was “Salam.”

  Hannah went to the new tent and laid her love down. She arranged the mosquito netting perfectly around her, like she was arranging a bouquet of wildflowers. Then she went to find David. He was standing beside a red jerry can, his brow covered in beads of sweat, his black curls plastered to his forehead.

  “Did you remember to find Salam?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  But his glassy eyes were focused over her shoulder, watching that young halutza Sarah. Hannah did not care who he fucked. But she cared that he could not concentrate on Ruth.

  “You did? Where?” Hannah asked.

  David looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. “What?”

  “Salam? The doll?”

  “Oh,” he said, deflated. “I don’t know.”

  It was some other lost peace he was remembering.

  —

  Later, though, he came to Hannah where she was arranging the garden tools, a job that had been waiting since they’d arrived at the new place but which all the halutzim had found reason to ignore. He was carrying a play by David Pinsky, and she found herself choking with frustration that somehow, with everything that was unfolding around them, he was finding time to read. He sat down and patted the earth beside him; she sat. He passed her the book. She held it in her lap. “I was just with Ruth,” he said.