Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  Tears came down Hannah’s face and she brushed them away.

  “He doesn’t have faith in himself,” Esther said. “But the study was good. The results were good.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hannah said.

  “The mould.”

  Esther ran her hand through her short hair; it stood on end. Hannah could see she was trying to remember. “He told me that he told David’s wife. With the brown curly hair, and the red sleeves.”

  Hannah thought of the red roses embroidered by Shoshanna on the shirt that had seemed to come to her again and again from Ida in the laundry. She thought of the red dress that David had let Sarah keep.

  The doctor had meant Sarah. The doctor thought Sarah was David’s wife.

  “What does the mould do?” Hannah asked, slowly.

  “We don’t know.”

  Hannah let out a sob of desperation. “What? Tell me.”

  Hadassah’s face crumpled. “The wound. The infection. The mould might…there is some evidence suggesting…”

  She didn’t need to finish her sentence.

  Ruth was dead. Hannah would kill herself too.

  No. It was someone else who was to die.

  From where I am now, I can see the randomness of the universe, the billion variables winging their way through the cosmos in an infinite number of combinations. Sometimes a mystery is momentarily pulled back, only to be swallowed up again in oblivion. As far back as the Ancient Greeks, mould had been used to treat infection. In 1920, two Belgians had observed that bacterial growth was inhibited by a fungal contamination in a staphylococcus culture. They published a paper that was largely ignored. Penicillium wasn’t understood until much later.

  Dr. Lowen was on to something. But the conditions weren’t ready yet. It is unlikely what he thought he knew would have saved Ruth. And yes, he’d tried to tell me, but only half-heartedly, and I had tried to tell David. We were both unable to understand the importance of what he knew. And soon the doctor would die. It would take another decade and countless deaths before this truth was again revealed.

  —

  After a while, Hannah returned to her tent. Esther had been instructed to stay with Hannah, but she was overcome by exhaustion and emotion, and wanted the refuge of Shoshanna’s arms. When Hannah said she needed to go back just for a moment, to be alone, Esther agreed.

  Ruth’s body had been taken away. The tent was like a vacated stage, the actors gone home, a few props scattered around. Hannah threw herself on Ruth’s pallet. It still smelled like her daughter, sweat and urine and milk and rot. She cried for a very long time. Then she got up. She knew exactly where to look. Her body told her where. She felt around under David’s mattress and found something right away. Her hand grasped the object. But it wasn’t the gun. It was softer. Looser. She pulled it out tentatively. It was Salam.

  If Hannah had stayed with the grief that overtook her then she would surely have died. The pull to action saved her. She felt her body moving, walking briskly out into the night, the doll clutched to her side. The stars were stab wounds on the soft underbelly of sky. The doctor had told two people about something that could have saved Ruth. David, and Sarah. She would kill one of them. Whoever she reached first.

  —

  David was gone, it didn’t matter where. But I was in my tent, alone, with the gun that Hannah had been looking for. I had taken it, thinking it might protect me. Maybe I should have taken Salam instead.

  What I would have given for a doll like that when I was a girl.

  What I would have given for a mother who loved me like Hannah loved Ruth.

  Hannah’s curls were tousled, like she had been in a fight. Her eyes were wild.

  “Ruth is dead,” she said to me. As though I didn’t already know.

  For a moment I thought she was coming to me for comfort; I opened my arms. I would hold her.

  This was, after all, the thing I actually wanted.

  But Hannah’s eyes went to my stomach and I knew, at once, that she knew. “You’re pregnant,” Hannah said.

  “David told me,” she said, in case there was any question.

  A chill washed over me. In that moment, I wanted to rip the child from my womb, to give it to her if that would have helped. I could see the pain I had caused her, and remorse came over me. It was like nothing I had experienced before. How had I been unable to see?

  “Did you think your child would replace my lost children?” Hannah asked.

  I did not understand what she meant by children; she’d only had one child. Ruth.

  Then something else crossed her face: terrible anger.

  “You knew about the mould but you didn’t tell me. You wanted her to die.”

  “The mould?” I said. What did she mean? Those half-mad ramblings of the doctor?

  Hannah’s teeth were clenched, her fists clenched, her cheeks bright red.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, for her rage was monumental, even if I did not understand it.

  “My Ruthie,” she said. “My baby…”

  And she started to cry again, wracking sobs that bent her over with her hands on her knees, gasping like she had run a very long race.

  “The mould,” she said again. “What if it had worked?” She looked up at me, beseeching. “Why didn’t you tell?”

  It dawned on me that I had made a terrible mistake. Not one terrible mistake, but two. I had become pregnant. And I had failed to see what was important.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but this was only half true. And then I saw that I shouldn’t have said it. I saw her eyes land on the gun. I dove for it, but she was faster. She held it in the air in front of her, pointed not at my heart or my brain but at my belly.

  “I’m pregnant,” I reminded her. And again I’d made the wrong gamble.

  “There won’t be any babies,” she said. “To replace my Ruth.”

  The last thing I saw was the pleasure this gave her. I was glad for her. In my small way.

  CHAPTER 36

  WHEN RUTH WAS A BABY she had fallen ill with croup. The wet, barking cough kept the other children up; Liora had sent her with Hannah and David to sleep between them in their bed, in their own tent. The child had suffered, and it had been the happiest two nights of Hannah’s life. To have the little body wedged between them, the heat off her like an ember. Hannah had been assigned baby Mikhol to nurse, and she loved him, in a way, but when her own child turned her small mouth toward Hannah’s breast it was something else that cleaved open within her. The tiny mouth latched on and sucked and sucked and the milk poured out of her like the milk of the gods. The place where Hannah had torn giving birth had almost healed, but she felt the wound open again and the blood begin to come, like all the fluids of motherhood were releasing themselves at once. She knew how to do this. Nobody had to show her. She had held the small rump of her baby in one hand, lying on her side, and had looked up and seen David watching them both with a kind of love she had not known before.

  David was alone in the tent when Hannah returned there now. “Where’s Ruth?” she asked, as if she might now awake from the nightmare.

  “They took her body,” he said. There were tears streaming from his eyes.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  “Didn’t what? Let them take her?”

  Hannah herself didn’t know what she was referring to. She looked down at her hands, half expecting to see them clutching Salam. Instead, she saw the gun.

  She saw David seeing it too.

  “You didn’t,” he said.

  Hannah smiled.

  “You underestimate me,” she said.

  —

  In the beginning there was light. God parted the waters and honey poured forth. The plants and the animals rose, one by one, as if God was touching Her wand upon the emptiness. Here, and here, and here. She was the God of blood and semen, the God of tears. All the prickly shr
ubs and all the flamboyant birds and beasts appeared at Her command.

  The look on David’s face when he understood was like drapes briefly parted; then they fell back and he again looked impassive and cool. In that exact moment the kadachat left him. The fever was gone, and the jaundice, and the insanity that had accompanied them.

  Something outside their tent summoned David and Hannah. They walked out into the gloaming. There was a strange light at edge of the horizon; as they watched, it arranged itself into the shape of flames.

  “The Arabs,” David said. But it was not the Arabs, or the Jews. It was me.

  I would not die so easily.

  “The crops,” David said. But he didn’t move.

  “You killed Sarah,” he said then to his wife, not looking at her, his eyes ahead.

  “And you killed our daughter,” Hannah replied.

  “Now they’ll send us away,” David said.

  But they both knew there was nowhere else to be sent. They were here, children of Eretz Yisrael, killers both.

  “Maybe…” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “How will they know?” he asked.

  He, too, did not want to be exiled again, and forced to wander in the desert for the rest of his days.

  Hannah nodded, her eyes forward. An uneasy truce came over them. They were silent in its shadow.

  Who would they say had killed me?

  They would say I killed myself.

  —

  Now I’ve told you my story; you are the ones who know the truth. I wait to be released, to go where the others went. To be released, though, will not change my past. I can see that from here.

  When I was a child my mother was ill. Nobody told me this, but I knew. I understood, too, that this was her excuse not to touch me. She lay in bed like a skeleton and did not invite me to crawl in beside her. What I would have given to breathe her in close up, even if it was the sour smell of old milk, of apples gone to turpentine. But even in death she would not have me. I still don’t know why. To be a mother is its own kind of madness.

  After Hannah killed me, I rose up into the mountains. I could see the fire burning at the edge of the wheat, and behind it, far below, Levi and Ida. They came out, the first to help, unshakeable in their belief in themselves and their purpose. There was a line between them, unseen to the human eye, but to me it was vibrating palpably. The flames had risen to make a murky half-day, a glow in which lies and truth were obscured. But Levi and Ida were happy. They had been through so many different deaths, and new life was coming to find them. I was so glad for my old friend.

  Levi was running, a pail of water in his hands, but he could have run faster; he was letting Ida keep up and run by his side.

  Soon, Ida would be pregnant. Her baby would be the first born to the new pioneers. She would be wrapped in Esther’s intricate lace shawl, as Shoshanna had foreseen. And everywhere she toddled she would carry with her the doll called Salam.

  Levi turned to Ida; he said something in her ear. From a hundred metres away, where she was standing with David, Hannah saw the girl smile.

  Who can say what sets us each alight?

  Ida and Levi moved forward together, united in purpose. But Hannah and David stayed where they were. The fire was necessary. They stood apart from each other, not touching, letting it burn.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  What a great privilege it is to be able to thank the following:

  My beloved editor Lynn Henry.

  My agent Martha Webb, my publicist Sharon Klein, and everyone at Penguin Random House in Toronto. Mary-Anne Harrington and everyone at Headline in London.

  Degan Davis, my first and best reader. Ayelet Tsabari and Danila Botha for astute and constructive feedback from an Israeli perspective.

  The Chalmers Arts Fellowship for sending me to Israel.

  The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for funding that allowed me to write. The MacDowell Colony for the most productive residency I have ever experienced.

  Ilana Bernstein, the wonderful archivist at Kibbutz Ein Harod, and Dr Judy Henn for translating archival material and reading an early draft. Tsafrira Shahan for sharing her academic research on women and mothering in the early kibbutz movement. Sonya Teece for transcription assistance.

  The novels of the late Meyer Levin—Yehuda and The Settlers in particular—for informing this book on many levels. Gideon’s Spring by Zerubavel Gilead and Dorothea Krook. My Promised Land by Ari Shavit.

  My parents and sister.

  My tribe of incredibly powerful and sustaining women friends.

  Ayala, my bubala.

  Eric. CWFTF.

  ALISON PICK was the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award winner for the most promising young writer in Canada. She has published two acclaimed volumes of poetry, and her first novel, The Sweet Edge (2005), was a Globe and Mail “Best Book.” Her second novel, the bestselling Far to Go (2010), was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, won the Canadian Jewish Award for Fiction, and was named a “Top Ten of 2010” book by the Toronto Star and NOW Magazine. It was also published internationally to acclaim. Her memoir, Between Gods, was also published internationally, was a finalist for the BC National Award for Non-Fiction, and was a Globe and Mail “Best Book” of 2014.