Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  Later, much later, they walked back together through the darkness. Their hands swung loosely at their sides, an invisible line between them, palpable and alive.

  “How did your work go today?” he asked.

  Ida smiled. It was like he was asking his wife what had happened in the hours they had been apart. Like he wanted to know every part of her life.

  “The clothesline fell down.”

  Levi laughed. “How?”

  “It collapsed. Under the weight of wet clothes.”

  He laughed again at this. “What else?” he asked.

  “The shirts are covered in stains that will never come out.”

  “Probably from Yashka!” Levi said. They all ate like wolves, but Yashka was notorious for how he slopped his food, pieces falling everywhere as with a toddler.

  “Who can tell?” Ida said, thinking of how she laundered them, pinned them up to dry, and assigned them randomly the following morning. Yet again she admired the elegance of the system: no individual more important than anyone else. Nobody owning anything that could help someone else. But then, unbidden, came the memory of the candlesticks and she swallowed hard and held her breath. She turned toward Levi and blurted out, “I don’t belong to you.”

  This was the exact opposite of how she felt.

  Levi stopped and looked at her. His face was pained and solemn. He, too, appreciated the dictates of the shared life. He wanted her to see that he agreed, that he believed this fiercely and would give his whole being for the collective. But something else crossed his face, some words whose weight he was measuring, and finally he spoke. “But I wish you did.”

  “You wish what?” she asked, wanting to be sure.

  “I wish you were my wife,” Levi said.

  In the tall grass the crickets were singing. The bullfrogs in the mud flats added their own symphony, and suddenly Ida saw that the entire world had a kind of existential harmony. That everything was animated with that sacred God-given spark, and all of it was trying to give birth to love. Her father might be gone, but he was here; she felt his presence as though he was in the next room. The feeling was so strong and consuming she imagined that nothing could change it.

  If I could go back and warn her, I would. But I cannot.

  —

  As Ida approached her tent she heard crying. She hesitated outside. She wanted to give Sarah her privacy. On the other hand, she thought quickly, wasn’t privacy bourgeois? And where else would she sleep? It was late.

  She drew herself up and entered the tent.

  Looking around, she saw the kerosene lamp had been lit, and had been left burning for some time. The wick was low, only a trace of oil remaining in the bottom. Still, it was enough to throw long shadows on the sloped walls, the dirt floor, the straw pallets. But Sarah wasn’t there.

  There was a pair of scissors lying on the floor, as if someone had trimmed the wick and then been startled into dropping them. Ida picked up the scissors and put them in her pocket.

  —

  Levi came to the laundry the following morning and said to her, “The light in the east is Zion in your hair.”

  She passed the tin cup she was holding, half filled with murky water, from her right hand to her left.

  “Thank you,” she guessed.

  She saw his Adam’s apple working, swallowing and swallowing again.

  “The Tree of Life begets the Compost of Death,” he said.

  Ida squatted and put the cup down. She stood and held his face in her hands.

  “Are your eyes okay?” she asked.

  She peered more closely at him; his sockets were protruding slightly, and there were bruises beneath them as though he had been in a fight. The whites were tinged yellow.

  “I’m fine,” he said. And not quite meeting her gaze, “I’m happy. I had a wonderful time with you last night.”

  He tugged at his shirt as though to create some space between it and his chest. His face, she saw, was damp with sweat. What she had taken as ardour now seemed to be simple bodily heat.

  “You have a fever,” she said. “Your eyes are yellow.”

  “Like the lemons we will soon be growing!” He laughed.

  Ida said, “Grapefruits.”

  Levi said, “Soon we will be like the wealthy pardessanim. But instead of keeping our profit we will turn it back into the earth like fertilizer.”

  “Bananas?” she asked.

  “Why not?” Levi agreed.

  They both knew that while citrus groves might one day be possible, the dark earth of the Emek was not suited to fruit from the jungle. Still, they laughed together, imagining it.

  Ida turned and saw David bisecting the yard, a book in his hand, his face down, reading while he walked. It occurred to Ida that his wife, Hannah, had not returned; Ida pictured the wagon galloping from the yard. Where had it taken Hannah? Was she coming back?

  As though David had felt Ida’s eyes on him, he lifted his head. She motioned to him; he walked toward them, looking slightly disgruntled to be summoned.

  “Shalom,” Ida said when he reached them, but David didn’t answer. Now he, too, was peering at Levi. He closed his book and put it in his back pocket.

  “Kadachat,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  Levi blinked.

  “Malaria,” David said.

  Levi said, “I’m fine!” but David was already taking him by the elbow and leading him like a child, looking for somewhere to help him lie down. Ida followed a few metres behind them, unsure of her role but unwilling to let Levi out of her sight. Some sound inside her had begun to ring, a low alarm, increasing in volume.

  “This is why we need to plant more eucalyptus,” David was saying, but more to himself than to Levi or Ida. He stopped, took the pencil from his ear, and extracted his book again. He made a note in the margin. “We’ll need more quinine.”

  Levi swayed on his feet.

  The settlement had not yet established a real infirmary, so David led them to Levi’s tent and helped him lie down on his own pallet. Almost as soon as Levi was prone, his infirmity emerged fully formed, as if it had been waiting inside him for the correct context to assert itself. What had appeared to be a yellowish tinge to his skin now became a more pronounced jaundice, and the beads of sweat on his forehead erupted into rivulets of moisture. He moaned.

  “Let it move through you,” David said, but again it was as if he was speaking to himself, or to some former version of himself that had once been in Levi’s position. “The more you resist the worse it will become. It is the land of Yisrael entering into you. Accept it.”

  Ida wondered briefly if David might be sick too.

  “We must have some quinine somewhere,” he said, and he looked at Ida as though she could somehow provide this.

  On the straw pallet, Levi’s body was clenching. They were small convulsions at first, and Ida crouched down beside him, holding his hand until the spasms increased in intensity and his whole body was thrashing as if he was possessed by a demon. Foam rose in his mouth as the panic rose in Ida.

  “Where do we get the quinine?” she asked David desperately.

  From the ground, they both heard Levi say, “We need to work!”

  For a minute Ida thought David was going to agree with him. But then he said, “I’ll go for it.”

  Levi was struggling to sit up, but before Ida could stop him he was overtaken by another fit of shaking. She groped around for a shmata to wipe his face with. It seemed absurd—not twenty minutes ago he had been talking about lemon groves.

  “Where?” Ida asked.

  “I’ll saddle the donkeys and go to Tiberias,” David said.

  Ida didn’t know how far the journey would be and didn’t want to ask.

  “Or I’ll send someone,” David said, reconsidering.

  There was a sound at the tent flap: Levi’s tentmate Dov returning from his work clearing the field. He ducked down to enter through the low opening. It was now late morning but it d
id not occur to Ida or David to ask what he was doing back so early.

  “You’ll have to move your things,” David said. “From now on we’ll be using this tent as an infirmary.”

  Ida waited for Dov to ask what Levi was sick with, but Dov only turned away and began cramming his belongings—a blanket, a pen knife, a small framed photograph of a woman in a bonnet—into an orange crate he had been using as a dresser.

  “It’s kadachat,” Ida offered, not translating.

  “I see that,” Dov said, his face impassive.

  He straightened his back, both his knees popping loudly. “Your turn next,” he said to Ida.

  She reached for her braid and inserted the tip of one finger under the ribbon. “That’s a very strange thing to say.”

  “Look around you,” Dov said. “Is there anything here that isn’t strange?”

  Dov left, and soon after David did too, reassuring Ida he would find quinine. Ida was alone with Levi. She perched on the edge of his mattress and held his hand through another round of the terrible shaking.

  “I’m here,” she reassured him, but if Levi could hear her he could certainly not respond.

  When the worst had passed, she lay down beside him. His sweat smelled sour. He made a noise, and for a moment she thought he was talking. She drew him close and said, eagerly, “What?”

  His eyelids opened for a moment, and she knew he had seen her. But almost immediately they closed again. His body softened; his breaths lengthened and deepened. She stayed with him then, like she was carrying him somewhere in her arms. She felt the little ticks, like an engine cooling, of his muscles twitching as he fell back to unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 4

  LEVI’S CONDITION GAVE THE GROUP extra motivation to drain the swamps. The mosquitoes were dangerous and needed to be tamed. Another team of workers was formed.

  “This will be tiring work,” David explained the next morning after breakfast—as though any of the work here was not tiring, Ida thought—but a cheer rose up from the halutzim. Work! Tiring work! Work in the service of Eretz Yisrael!

  “If not now, then when?” David asked the group. And Ida saw how David was using Levi’s sickness to motivate them to do something that needed to be done regardless. But the halutzim were not deterred, and they answered back Hillel’s famous words, “Im lo achshav, ayma-tay!”

  The few pairs of rubber boots they owned were distributed; the rest would have to make do without. Groups were sent to different areas, some to the base of the spring, some to the main road from Jenin where the swamps extended for miles. They began by digging ditches to drain the muck. The ditches had to be deep—Zeruvabel the fiddler, who also happened to be very tall, was used as a gauge. When the team thought their ditch was deep enough they summoned him over, and he came gladly, like a child being called into a game.

  He folded his long limbs and lowered himself down into the hollow.

  “Not deep enough!” he declared, if he could still see over the edge of the hole in the earth. Or “You’re done!” if he could not see over the top, at which point a collective cheer went up. The halutzim were sickly and hungry but they took any excuse to cheer.

  A separate team, including the Germans, was working on the drains themselves, building a primitive system using gravel and clay pipes.

  Ida was grateful for her position in the laundry. She knew the halutzim’s clothes would now be even filthier with mud from the ditches, but her work gave her long hours in which to be alone, to sneak away and check on Levi. She was surprised by the strength of the protective instinct that rose up in her, as if from nowhere; she felt compelled to take care of Levi, and to do so in a way that succoured to his manhood. She went through the day as though her whole body was alight. She went over their night together, piece by piece, like a child who takes her treasures out of a box and lays them out on her bedspread to account for them. The contours of his biceps. The smooth, dark circles of his nipples. The trail of wiry hair that led down to the part of him that had split her open, revealing the genie of her new self.

  —

  In the afternoon Ida went to see him. She crouched down beside him and felt the heat of his breath. He was resting peacefully, his chest rising and falling, but no matter how much she stared at him he did not wake up.

  She took the scissors from her pocket. “I can cut your hair now,” she said.

  Nothing.

  Hesitating, she angled herself closer, sat down cross-legged beside him. She lifted the weight of his skull with one hand. It was surprisingly heavy. With her other hand, she angled the flat side of the blade against his forehead. She took a piece of the soft, dark hair and she cut.

  The lock that fell onto her hand was fine like a child’s.

  It took her only a few minutes to make her way around his entire head. She held his skull, shifting its weight as she circled his nape, the hair over his ears, his shaggy bangs. When she was finished, his face was covered with a fine fuzz, and he sneezed in his sleep but still he did not wake up. She blew on him gently, and then brushed the few stray hairs to clear his olive skin.

  “Just like I said I would,” she whispered.

  When she laid his head down he looked like a different boy. Like someone she had never seen in her life.

  —

  When Ida got back to the laundry, Sarah was there. Her wild curls stuck out from the edges of her kerchief, and there was a smear of crusted blood from a mosquito bite next to her collarbone. She saw Ida coming and hefted a log from the woodpile in her dress, holding the hem up to form a hammock. When she tossed the log on the fire a cloud of white smoke billowed up; Ida squeezed her eyes shut, tears on her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said to Sarah.

  The smoke changed direction and she squeezed her eyes shut against it for a second time.

  “My pleasure,” Sarah said. And then, “The tractor broke.”

  Ida understood she was bringing news from the far edge of the kibbutz where a few dunams of land had been drained and cleared, and were ready for planting.

  “How do you know?” Ida asked. She wiped at her eyes with her fists.

  “There was an accident,” Sarah said.

  Ida blinked hard.

  “Someone forgot to change the radiator water in the tractor. When Dov unscrewed the cap he got scalded.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Sarah winced, like she was the one being burned. “I wouldn’t say so.” She tilted her head to her shoulder, as though listening. “I wouldn’t say so,” she repeated.

  “Pass another log?” Ida said. But Sarah ignored this.

  “His face is covered in blisters,” she said. “He can’t speak. He can’t move.”

  “What—”

  “He might die.”

  Ida thought that Sarah seemed both concerned about Dov and pleased to be the one to tell the news. She paused, letting the gravity of the situation sink in. It occurred to her that Sarah had left out a crucial part of the story. If there had been negligence, someone must be responsible.

  “Who forgot to change the water?”

  Sarah shrugged. “David,” she said.

  —

  It was David who assembled them—for the second time that day—before the evening meal. He waited until the shovels had been cleaned and returned to the cage of barbed wire they would use until there was time to build a storage shed. It seemed silly to Ida to clean shovels that were just going to be dirtied again the following morning, but David insisted. He had learned this, he said, from a chaver named Meyer back at Kinneret.

  David was solemn as he waited for them to gather. His black curls were growing, and they bobbed around his jaw like a girl’s. He stood still, his hands hanging in fists, waiting for the halutzim to quiet. Ida could have sworn that even the songbirds in the meadow paused to hear what he would say.

  “We are in a difficult situation,” he began. “But we will be faced with many difficult situations this year.”

  There was a very long
pause. David had a habit of clearing his throat when he spoke, as though to underline the important points with his voice. “And in all the years to follow,” he finished.

  Ida took the ribbon off her braid, undid it and rebraided it again.

  David said, “The tractor is broken.”

  A murmur rippled through the crowd. Ida knew they all understood the implication of this, how a broken tractor would halt the wheel that made their whole collective turn.

  “We need to repair it,” David said.

  He paused like a professor who has asked his students to solve an algebra equation, something abstract that had no consequence in the tangible world. It seemed to Ida that he was testing them, that they were all part of some great social experiment that David was conducting. “Who has an idea?” he asked.

  There was a brief pause and then many voices started to shout at once.

  “We could take the Arabs’!” someone called out.

  There was general laughter. The Arabs did not have a tractor.

  “Levi can repair it!” someone else suggested.

  It was understood that Levi was exceptionally skilled; he had quietly emerged as the lead worker, and although this could not be made explicit, in the future he would be the one people turned to when something needed welding or a pipe had burst.

  Ida felt a rush of pride, followed closely by an awful panic.

  Shoshanna said what Ida could not. “Have you forgotten the kadachat?”

  The man who had spoken up demurred, muttering his condolences.

  “At the kutsva where I was before,” he said sadly, “ten halutzim died from the kadachat.”

  Ida sat up straighter, and looked around for someone to disprove this statement, but nobody did. Died? From malaria? Ten people?

  She stood up. Her heart was pounding. She had to go to Levi in the infirmary. But David looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and she sat back down.

  “I can try repairing the tractor,” a chaver called Saul suggested; but Saul had been a literature student in his former life, and his fingers were smooth and sausage-like, and the silence that responded was answer enough.

  “Unfortunately,” David said, “we weren’t able to repair it. We tried.”