Strangers with the Same Dream Page 29

  A long silence hung between them. They heard someone shouting, and another voice shouting in reply.

  “What do you think?” he asked finally.

  Hannah touched the play in her lap, the paper thin and smooth like the pages of a prayer book. “I think we should do it,” she said.

  She was forcing the words up and out. It was the right thing. But she could still feel Ruth’s body in her arms, could smell the stink from the gangrene and picture her daughter trying so hard to be brave, and she began to cry. She reached out to hold David’s hand.

  “Remember, with Igor…” she said, but could not finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. David had been there. He had been the one to hold Igor down while Meyer used the saw. “It saved his life,” David said.

  “He was never the same, though.”

  David nodded. “You’re right,” he said. And then, “I can’t do it.”

  Hannah thought of everything Ruth had already been through, the loneliness her girl had borne, and knew that she could not choose to inflict on her a single extra dose of pain.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For saying no,” she said.

  David squeezed her hand. She thought he might sit with her a while, and found that she wanted him to. But she could not stand the possibility of being rejected, so she didn’t ask. She got up and gave him back the play.

  “Enjoy your reading,” she said, and part of her even meant it. He had worked so hard and had such terrible luck.

  CHAPTER 33

  HANNAH LAY DOWN BESIDE HER GIRL. Ruth had removed her own clothes in her fever, and was naked. Hannah curled herself around the back of her, as though she could take her daughter’s body back inside her, where it would be safe.

  Hannah had not expected the ferocity of motherly love, how it felt like a pain she could never be rid of. She had been prepared to love her child but not to want to serve her; and she had not known that serving her child would be the most intense pleasure, that in serving the child she was also serving herself. And she had not known that this did not end with babyhood, that the gnawing only increased with time. It was a hunger that needed feeding. As the child grew older the hunger to be close to her strengthened, as did the regret over not having held her in the Baby House those early nights. The days of abandonment she could never get back.

  And now her child was regressing. Bit by bit, the milestones Ruth had conquered were being drawn back into the darkness.

  “Bubala,” Hannah whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Ruth.”

  “I love you too, Imma.”

  Hannah held her breath.

  “Where am I going?” Ruth asked.

  She wanted to pretend she did not know what the girl meant. But now was when Ruth needed her most. To tell the truth.

  “You’re going into the earth, bubala.” Hannah’s face was wet with tears.

  “Will it be dark there?”

  “No. It will be light.”

  “Will Saba be there?”

  “He will.”

  “And Savta?”

  “She will.”

  “And Sakina?”

  “Yes, my love. Yes.”

  But deep down, Hannah still masked the truth from herself. She entertained the idea that the terrible doctor who had dared to fall ill the moment he’d arrived would rally. He would rise from the dead like the Messiah the nuns in Tiberias believed in, and administer a miraculous cure. Somewhere even deeper inside, Hannah knew this wasn’t true but she also knew she could not live without her child. And the one truth eclipsed the other and did not let the first one exist.

  Ruth would get better.

  Ruth said something and Hannah rolled over to hear her.

  “I want Salam,” the girl cried weakly. “I want Salam. Please bring Salam.”

  Hannah had wedged a bedpan under Ruth and she now heard urine trickling into it. She smelt the feces, dark and loose like death, slipping from her daughter’s body.

  She wriggled back from Ruth and reached for a Tel Aviv newspaper she had cut into squares. She separated her daughter’s labia and wiped the small vulva and then separated the cheeks of Ruth’s anus and wiped the smears of feces away. As she wiped, more came out, a great flood of shit that contained strings of mucous and smears of darker oil that reeked of illness. Hannah’s hand was covered in diarrhea; she wiped it and went back to wiping her daughter’s behind. There was no decision to not be repulsed, only matter-of-factness. The feces might be Ruth’s or might be her own, there was no difference.

  Now Ruth’s body expelled a great flood, and she gave a little cry, and convulsed. Hannah remembered the convulsions of birth, her powerlessness against their pain, and knew that this was what Ruth was feeling. Her little body was being thrown onto the beach; it drifted out slowly with the tide until a great wave roused her and threw her again, with full force, back to the living. She was like a tiny mouse in the jaws of some great carnivore. It tossed her up in the air and caught her in its teeth. It tossed her again. Next her back would break. Next it would swallow her.

  There was something animal rising up in Hannah too. She changed Ruth’s clothes and wrapped her in a light linen sheet. It looked like a winding sheet for the dead—this did not escape her—but she was following some primitive instinct. She would turn everyone else away. What was happening was private; it was not of the human world. She had the urge to lick her baby’s body clean. She saw how humans had designed rituals to comfort themselves and how those rituals were empty when it came to the howl of the universe. She would dig a hole with her hands and lie down inside it and bring her daughter with her. She would make a womb in the belly of the earth and they would both return to it together.

  The smell from Ruth’s leg was beyond comprehension. Maybe she and David had been wrong about the amputation? She could tie Ruth down and use the axe while the child slept. If she had known what had been coming next she would have done it. But it still would have been too late.

  As though she had heard her mother’s thoughts, Ruth screamed out in protest. Hannah pulled her daughter’s tiny shoulders closer.

  “Bubala?” she asked.

  But there was no answer.

  The infection had spread through Ruth’s blood. Hannah knew this without knowing how.

  At some point after this—Hannah could no longer tell when—Thin Rivka came to be with her; the beautiful nurse Esther would be of no help. Ruth fell into unconsciousness, her forehead burning like a coal. Putrid black liquid trickled from her anus. Hannah got a bucket and filled it from the river and placed compress after compress on her small forehead. At midnight, Rivka made Hannah sleep. Hannah did not remember closing her eyes, or the few hours that passed until she woke. The moon was spilling around them from the open slash in the tent. Hannah got up. Her joints were stiff and when she straightened her knees she felt like a very old woman. The woman she would shortly become.

  There was a sound from Ruth’s cot, a sound that delivered the news that would change the rest of her life. It was a sound that someone alive makes, but in it was the seed of the unliving. Its existence contained its opposite. The act of crossing the dirt floor to Ruth’s body contained the same dichotomy, the going and the not going, the desire to see and the desperate need to not see. Equal parts propulsion and repulsion. Hannah knew that she was crossing a line between life and death, after which her own being alive would never be the same. She did not want to cross that line; she had to cross it. It was like seeing something mangled and furry in the tractor blades. Like the contractions that had led to Ruth’s birth: the magnitude of the agony that came and came, but to deny it was the same as denying life. Only going through the pain would take you through the pain.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE LOCUSTS HAD COME, just as in the Bible. “The Lord brought an east wind on the land all that day, and all that nigh
t; and when it was morning…” They came in a dark cloud, filling a corner of the sky over Kinneret as the sun rose. By breakfast, the entire sky was black. The halutzim had been told this would happen—it was Allah’s way, Youssef had said, to build and destroy and rebuild again—but at Kinneret they had not believed it. They thought they were invincible.

  David and Yitzhak and Menachem and Reuven had run into the fields with pots, empty kerosene cans, wooden spoons from the kitchen, banging and screaming and trying to scare off the locusts. They had landed on the crops, on each vegetable in the garden, on every surface of living land. The air was filled with the high buzz of their chewing. Hannah, alongside Rivka and Lenka and Gaby, had raced into the arbour. The women slapped their skirts against the trunks of trees as though they were on fire. Every once in a while the sheet of locusts that covered the ground lifted at the corner, like the edge of a paper being pulled back, but then it settled again and the insects recommenced their gnawing. The halutzim, in the end, could do nothing but watch as their whole year was devoured in the sideways jaws.

  After, a silence lay on the land. There was not a blade of grass or a kernel of wheat to be seen. In the weeks that followed the halutzim grew hungry, quickly depleting their reserves, for despite knowing this day would come they had not properly prepared. The famine spread quickly, to the cities as well, and soon merchants from the markets came on horseback to beg for whatever scraps the pioneers might sell.

  The Arab fields had been equally decimated. After all the arguing over the land, its destruction was without borders.

  It was into this wasteland that Sakina had stumbled. The child had been looking for food. It was an unusual thing for any Arab to do—they were proud, and did not want to be dependent on the Jews in any way. But Anisa had another child who was sick with the kadachat. The little boy needed nourishment or he would die. Sakina had been sent to ask, an ambassador of peace.

  Ruth had seen the girl and run out to greet her. The Jewish children did not often play with the Arab children, but these two knew each other and had always had something of a friendship. For Ruth, there was something compelling about another little girl. She spent her days with the Angel Gabriel, and Mikhal and Noam, and did not especially enjoy Susan.

  “Salaam,” Ruth knew to say to Sakina, and Sakina knew to say back, “Shalom.”

  The girl had brought her doll. Ruth’s eyes widened. She was in love already.

  Hannah saw that Sakina had also been sent with a jar of Anisa’s cold mint tea. She knew that resources were scarce, and that this gift meant something would be requested in return. But she wanted to delay the transaction for a moment. She wanted to give the girls some time to play.

  “Are you thirsty, chabibti?” Hannah had asked Sakina, and the girl’s impossibly long, dark eyelashes lifted, and the eyes brightened. Sakina said yes.

  There was a pail of dirty water by the barn, for the livestock. Specks of pollen and dust floated in it, and it had a greenish tinge. Sakina looked at the pail.

  “From there?” she asked.

  Hannah saw the child had been taught not to presume, had been taught to know her place.

  “Oh no!” Hannah told her. “That’s for the animals. Let’s all have some of your mother’s cool tea.”

  Hannah took the jar from the girl and went to get glasses so they could all have a drink. She would look for some cookies too. She would make a little picnic.

  Later, after the drink, came the part Hannah could not understand. The two girls must have gone into the barn. David said he had stumbled on Sakina hiding behind the stacks of grain. He had thought someone was stealing their food.

  Hadn’t he seen Ruth? Hannah asked.

  David nodded yes, but then he quickly changed his story. He had been defending himself. He had thought it was Youssef hiding in the haystack, waiting to get his revenge.

  “Revenge for what?” Hannah had asked. Was there another crime she did not know about? Youssef had only ever been kind to them.

  David said, “Revenge for being here,” and Hannah saw that her husband would never really trust anyone. And that deep down he also could not trust himself.

  She vividly recalled how a bulls’ eye of blood widened on Sakina’s dress. David had exactly hit his mark. Hannah was surprised there hadn’t been more blood, but Sakina had been a tidy girl, and she had behaved in death as she had in life. It was Ruth who was a mess, crying over the body of her friend with a ferocity Hannah could barely stand to recall, and then falling into a numb kind of stupor, after which she seemed to forget she had been there at all. She asked Hannah about the event over and over at first, as though to make it something unknown, to grant herself an innocence that should have been hers all along.

  But soon the only thing she could remember was the doll, and she went around calling its name plaintively, “Salam, Salam, Salam.”

  —

  And so it was that Sakina was released, like the rest who followed her. Like Old Avraham and Dr. Lowen, both of whom died of loneliness and broken hearts, and like Dov, whose burns also got infected, and who succumbed to his wounds almost without protest.

  David would never have admitted relief, but his secret—one of them—had gone with Dov to the grave. One mistake, at least, he would not be held to account for.

  CHAPTER 35

  HANNAH HELD RUTH. There was still sweat on the child’s brow. Time was not real. It was flexible, malleable. Hannah needed only to reverse the current, to travel upstream for thirty seconds. Flowing in two directions was the least of time’s tricks—something to which I could have attested. But Ruth, in her arms, didn’t move. There was a sound high in the corner of the tent. Hannah spotted the dot, almost imperceptible against the darkness, spiralling its way down. A housefly. It landed on Ruth’s leg and started to feed.

  Something split Hannah open: a swift slash that sliced her wide. She held Ruth’s body and rocked back and forth.

  “Bubala, bubala, bubala,” she said.

  At a certain point she looked up and found the halutzim around her. She realized she would never know their names. David was there too. He was shivering, yellow-eyed, and she saw he had again refused to take the quinine. One day he would die of the fever.

  He said something; she didn’t hear.

  He said something again.

  But Hannah’s head was bent over Ruth, sounds coming from her mouth, and silence rising off Ruth like the blackest eternity.

  David was repeating himself. “Stop it,” he was saying.

  Hannah looked up at him. His cheeks were sunken, his cheekbones sharp like two exclamation marks.

  “Stop it,” he said again.

  “Leave me alone,” Hannah said.

  “I have something to tell you,” David said. “I’m having another child.”

  The words passed through Hannah like air through an open door. Ruth’s skin was cooler now. The little wings of her shoulder blades were rigid, frozen in place.

  “What do you mean?” Hannah asked.

  “We are here to make a new world,” David said.

  She looked at him, uncomprehending.

  “A new world is coming,” David said. “Sarah is pregnant.”

  Hannah blinked, looking around like a newborn. The moon leaked its milk. David’s news attached itself to the small body she was holding; it was news she could stand the pain of, whereas the first pain was clearly going to kill her. Someone was sliding a thin blade under her fingernails. In some frozen Siberian prison, she heard the clank of the metal door being closed.

  “Pardon?” she said.

  “Sarah. A new child will be born.”

  Hannah knew at once this child would be a girl.

  A kind of insanity came over her then, a high, frantic rage made of terror and longing and resentment.

  Sarah? The pretty milkmaid. The one with the red sleeves.

  Did they think this new girl would replace Ruth?

  A lone violin note spread out over the hills. A
cross the field, the fiddler Zeruvabel chose to raise his bow to his instrument and play.

  —

  It was Esther who finally led Hannah away from the body. Thin Rivka had tried and Yitzhak had tried but the Angel Gabriel was still on this earth and Hannah could not bear to be touched by a parent. Rivka and Yitzhak were the only two in this new place who could understand the potential of this grief, and she knew that if she went close to them, she herself would be forced to understand too. She kicked at them; she hit them. Rivka with the bump above her waist for everyone to see.

  Hannah needed a stranger, and Esther, the nurse, stepped in. The girl took Hannah by the elbow; hours had passed and the corpse was cold, but Hannah still clung to it, refusing. The first wave of hysteria had moved through her; there was a moment of respite. She could feel the next one, rising behind her, casting its long shadow.

  “I’m so sorry,” Esther said. “Zekher tzadik livrakha.”

  Hannah barely heard her.

  “The doctor’s suggestion didn’t work,” Esther said. She was stating a fact, not asking a question, but the words struck Hannah as if she were a tuning fork. She lifted her head.

  “What suggestion?” she asked.

  These were her first words in several hours, and when she spoke she tasted blood from biting her own tongue.

  Esther looked at her, and Hannah saw the girl’s pixie cut short around her ears. She looked like a child herself.

  “Oh,” Esther said. “Nothing.”

  But something in the statement made Hannah persist.

  “What suggestion?” she asked again.

  Esther kept her eyes forward, and her arm linked tightly through Hannah’s.

  “Nothing,” she said, again.

  “Esther,” Hannah sobbed, putting force behind the name.

  “Okay,” the girl said. “It was early research. Dr. Lowen’s. Didn’t he tell you?”