Strangers with the Same Dream Page 8

  When Ida looked up she saw Ruth in the open doorway. The child was watching, her eyes wide.

  “Let’s go, metukah,” Ida said, moving toward her, but Ruth’s lower lip trembled and a large tear slid down her cheek.

  “What’s wrong?” Ida asked, moving the child back out into the bright sunlight. They both blinked, their eyes adjusting. Ruth pointed to her leg.

  A long cut slashed down the front of her left shin. Blood ran from it, shocking red against her tender skin.

  “Oh dear!” Ida exclaimed, and crouched down to get a closer look, but Ruth grabbed her and buried her face in Ida’s hip the way she had done with her father just an hour ago.

  For a moment, Ida pretended Ruth was hers.

  “Let me see,” she said, manoeuvring the girl back and peering at the cut. She used the edge of her sleeve to mop up the blood. It immediately soaked through, turning the material the darkest shade of crimson. Just like when Hannah had given her the blood-soaked rags, Ida thought of the laundry. These stains would never come out.

  She felt a sudden panic. Where was the girl’s father? But the face that came into her mind was not David’s, but Levi’s. Levi would know what to do.

  “What happened?” she asked. But Ruth only began to cry in earnest, deep, wracking sobs that Ida could see were one part pain and another part shock.

  “Oh metukah,” Ida said. And then, lying through her teeth, because children were nothing if not suggestible. “It’s only a scratch.”

  —

  It took her a long time to clean up the cut. Fatima offered a tin pail of water and Ida wiped out the gravel as best she could. There were a few bits too deeply embedded, and Ruth screamed when Ida tried to get at them, the other little children watching slack jawed. One had had the eye sickness, Ida saw, and her left pupil was clouded with a milky film. The mukhtar emerged from the house, the scar on his cheek more visible in the bright light of the afternoon. He gave Ida an anxious half-smile and knelt before Ruth, probing at the wound and then wrapping it in a scrap of cloth. Ruth let him work, and eventually her crying lessened, but Ida could see that the blood was still flowing beneath the bandage. There was nothing else that could be done, though, and Ida lifted Ruth, and they waved goodbye to the gathering.

  Fatima and the mukhtar both waved back, wishing Ida and Ruth well in words they couldn’t understand.

  As Ida walked, Ruth wrapped her legs around Ida’s waist and laid her head on her shoulder. She played with the tip of Ida’s braid, tickling her cheek with it like it was a paintbrush. She took off Ida’s glasses and put them on her own face and squealed at how they distorted her view. This seemed strange to Ida, as the girl had been sobbing just moments ago. The cut must not be as bad as it looked.

  “How does it feel now, yakira?” she asked, and felt Ruth shrug. The small body relaxed in her arms, and Ida smelled prepubescent sweat, so different from an adult’s.

  Ruth did not want to be put down. Ida continued walking, carrying both the child and the candlesticks in her arms; the metal dug into her ribs. Eventually the tents of the settlement came into view, that now familiar harbour full of sails. From this distance the halutzim looked like toy figurines in the fields. A silhouette with a shovel was bent over the vegetable garden plot. Ida saw it was David; Ruth saw this too.

  Her mouth was next to Ida’s ear; she whispered something.

  “What’s that, metukah?”

  “My Abba has a gun,” Ruth said.

  Ida rubbed her back. “The night watch gun,” she said.

  She said it in the same voice she had used earlier, narrating what they saw around them: the garden, the donkey, the thresher waiting patiently for the corn to grow.

  But Ruth shook her head against Ida’s shoulder and wrapped her legs more tightly around her waist. “No,” she whispered. “A different gun.”

  She must have felt a twinge in the poorly bandaged cut; she let out a whimper.

  “He killed someone,” Ruth said.

  —

  In the time they had been gone, evening had fallen. The nights were now starting to get cooler, and the sky was streaked with crimson. Cirrus clouds made ridges like the sand under shallow water. Ida heard birds, and the new tap squeaking in protest as someone turned it off.

  “Shalom,” Ida said to David.

  Ruth didn’t look at her father, her face now buried in Ida’s shoulder.

  “What are you holding?” David asked Ida, closing his notebook reluctantly and propping the pencil back on its perch behind his ear.

  She thought to say, “Your daughter,” and then realized he was gesturing to her right arm, where she held the bundled candlesticks.

  “Nothing,” she said, and then, before he noticed himself, “Ruth got a scratch.”

  She shifted the child in her arms, and then set her on her feet so they could inspect it properly. All three of them looked down together. The muslin cloth was soaked in blood. A rivulet had run out from under the bandage, crusting on Ruth’s skin in the heat.

  “It hurts, Abba,” Ruth said, her voice small.

  David’s face was blank.

  “I can take her to the infirmary,” Ida said, worried by the length of the gash and the amount of blood leaking from such a small body. But David said, “Not to worry, I’ll deal with it.”

  He seemed oddly distracted, his eyes rapidly scanning the horizon for some unidentified enemy or something else only he was aware of.

  “Are you sure? I could just…”

  “There is always blood,” he said. And then, to himself, something in fast Hebrew Ida did not understand.

  She took her cue and left, but not without giving Ruth a hug goodbye. For a moment, she clung to the girl tightly, burying her face in her hair, as though she was the one being comforted, and not the other way around.

  —

  Ida walked quickly to the German’s tent, before she could change her mind. He was fiddling with the knob on his kerosene lamp, raising and lowering the wick inside the glass. An old leather saddle was heaped in the corner by one of the beds. He turned and saw her and a small sound of pleasure escaped his throat. Glee, or gloating. She saw he knew he should hide it, but he could not resist.

  “You came,” he said.

  Ida set her package on a crate he was using as a bookshelf. She undid Fatima’s neat knot and unfolded the kerchief, peeling back the layers of fabric, and selected one of the candlesticks. She did not make eye contact as she passed it over. The image flashing through her mind this time was of the Cossack’s boots as they manoeuvred her mother backward into the shadows. Her mother’s own shoes a sensible black, with a button. The German took the candlestick without comment and put it beneath his own mattress. They didn’t speak.

  His pale skin made her think of the belly of a fish floating upside down in the river.

  There was nothing left to say so Ida turned and left. She went toward her own tent, cradling the remaining candlestick against her body. It was now the only thing she had left from her old life at home.

  She stood at the flap and heard Sarah crying again. Even through the muffle of the canvas and whatever soft pillow Sarah was using to bury her face, Ida heard the full force of despair. She was about to go in and comfort her friend when she felt someone come up behind her. She stood still without turning. There was a tap on her shoulder. It was the German again, his face sickly and impassive.

  “What do you want?” she asked bluntly.

  “My candlestick,” he said.

  Up close she saw dirt at the edge of his hairline, and the skin peeling from his sunburned nose. He picked at it, and then brought his thumb down to examine the skin that had flaked off.

  “I already gave you one,” she said.

  The German looked casually down at his hand, rubbing the dead skin between his thumb and forefinger like he was asking for money. He looked back up at her, shaking his head slowly.

  “You gave one to my brother,” he said.

  Ida he
ld on to the tip of her braid. She dug her forefinger under the ribbon and held it there; she could feel it turning red and filling with blood.

  “Well?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  But the words of his brother came back to her. One for each of us.

  How had she been so stupid? What stake did he have in her wellbeing? He knew she wouldn’t tell. Ida was the one who had lied to the group, who had kept something back that could have helped the others.

  The Germans would not let her keep a thing. One candlestick was for Samuel, and one was for Selig.

  CHAPTER 6

  IDA HANDED OVER the second candlestick and went straight to Levi. She found him prone, on his back, with his arms arranged neatly at his sides. His skin a clammy grey, his eyelids closed. He moaned in his sleep as though in greeting. Ida took the shmata from the pail beside his bed and wiped the sweat from his forehead and the back of his neck. Then she lay down beside him on his pallet and let her tears fall. She curled onto her side around him, her face and nose pressed into his neck, his bony hip joint digging into her pelvis. She tried not to think about what she had just given up. She lay there a long time in the shadows of the tent, the other patients like corpses all around them. Many more were falling ill with the kadachat. Necks and ankles and foreheads were covered in bites; the pioneers’ eyes grew glassy and their collarbones protruded at their shoulders. Ida lifted her head and looked around: someone had been strapped to a backboard to be restrained during the convulsions. And there was Dov, his face was crusted over in black, like he was a monster in the Brothers Grimm or a golem living under a bridge in Prague. Suddenly Ida had a premonition that soon Ruth would be here too—the bandage had been so completely soaked in blood. She laid her head back down.

  Was this Eretz Yisrael? She had been promised—had believed so fervently—that they were making something new, but instead everything was falling to pieces.

  She moved her face against Levi’s face. His stubble would soon be a beard.

  “Wake up,” she whispered. “I need you.”

  But he didn’t respond, his body frozen against her like he was dead.

  —

  The following afternoon, though, Ida came around the corner to the dining hall and found Levi repairing a broken garden hose.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, because she couldn’t think what else to say, and he straightened. He made a sound like he was somewhere far away but trying to answer her back. The sound was, “Mere.”

  Ida ran the short distance to him and stood right in his face. His eyes were clear. The whites were white again; whereas before his view had been turned inward, a battle raging inside him, now he could see the person in front of him.

  “I’m here,” he said again, his speech clearing too, like fog off a pane of glass.

  He put his arms around her waist. Yesterday she had been lying beside a dead man. Now she could feel his pulse where her face was pressed into the base of his throat. It was like the Christians’ strange Yeshu’a, come back to life after three days.

  “You’re through it,” she said.

  “Eretz Yisrael is in me now,” Levi said. “Branded on my soul.”

  He was repeating David’s words, and Ida understood what he meant, but she understood, too, that Eretz Yisrael had always been in Levi’s soul. It was he, and he it. More than any of them. More even than David himself.

  Levi squeezed her against him, his grip deliciously tight around her ribcage. She could feel him smiling against her head.

  An image of the German came into her mind, and along with it what she had done, forsaking both her family in Russia and her new family here in a single betrayal. She squeezed Levi back. “Don’t leave me again,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  But he trembled slightly and lowered himself beside the severed garden hose on the ground.

  David must have known that the weaknesses would take time to recover from, because that night at dinner there was chicken. It had been purchased, and—pure extravagance—slaughtered. David himself set the meal before Levi at dinner with the pomp of a king.

  Levi said, “Thank you.”

  He nudged the plate away. David waited to watch him eat. But Levi passed his plate to Ida—her mouth already filled with an embarrassing amount of saliva.

  “You don’t like chicken?” David asked, genuinely confused.

  Levi pressed the pads of his fingers against the protruding bones under his eyes.

  “Ida needs it more,” he said.

  David’s gaze fell on her; she could see him evaluating, weighing Levi’s words.

  “You have to regain your strength,” David said finally. “We need you in the fields.

  Levi said, softly, “I don’t eat meat.”

  “Oh?” David took a step back.

  “I’m a vegetarian.”

  Ida could see the admiration in David’s eyes, and she felt proud.

  —

  The next day, Hannah returned, along with the old man Yitzhak, the emaciated woman whose name was Rivka, and their son, a boy called Gabriel. He had black curly hair, and knobby knees, and wore short pants held up with a bib. He looked, Ida noticed, very much like Ruth. And now Ruth would have someone to play with.

  Ida had heard a rumour that these people had been at Kinneret with David and Hannah in the old days—ten years ago!—when everything had started. Perhaps things had gone badly for them there and they were taking refuge here in the new place. People used the kibbutz for all kinds of reasons—many ideological, but some because they had nowhere else to go.

  Ten days later, at Hanukkah, another large group of halutzim arrived. And like that, they were divided into two. The first group and the newcomers. Later, Ida would marvel at how they’d arrived mere months apart, but this distinction would remain in their minds, and in the minds of their children, for years.

  The new group comprised maybe thirty people. Among them was an American doctor, short, with a bald patch on the back of his head the exact size and shape of a yarmulke. The lenses of his eyeglasses were also perfect circles, and the delicate wire hooks looped over his ears. He said his name was Dr. Lowen, and he was inspired by what he had heard about the young pioneers rebuilding the land of the forefathers. Other American Jews showed their support by sending money, but he wanted to see for himself. And what did Eretz Yisrael need but Jewish hands? He wanted to contribute.

  He had brought with him a pretty young nurse, Elisabeth. She wore dark eye makeup, like the kohl the Arab women sometimes used.

  “Do you think they’re lovers?” Sarah asked Ida.

  “I don’t know,” Ida said.

  “I saw them kiss,” Sarah said.

  She stood on her tiptoes, then fell back on her heels. “America,” she said, dreamily. “It’s like a love story. Like Natasha and Pierre in War and Peace.”

  Obviously, Ida thought, she had forgotten how that story ended.

  Ida took the ribbon from one of her braids and began rebraiding the hair. She tied the bow tightly. She was thinking of Levi.

  “David saw it too,” Sarah said.

  “Saw what?”

  “The kiss.”

  Sarah’s tone implied that if David had seen it, the event had a different kind of weight.

  The nurse Elisabeth was tall and willowy. She had almost no breasts but enormous brown eyes and creamy skin. When the newcomers arrived they were swarmed by the first group, who were eager to see what personal items would now become part of the communal pot. Elisabeth was disarmed of a beautiful hand-hooked lace shawl. It had been, she said, the blanket she was wrapped in as a newborn. Her mother had crocheted it. Ida watched Elisabeth’s face as the blanket was taken from her, but she did not flinch. Either Elisabeth was a true believer in the collective or she was a very good actress.

  Shoshanna held Elisabeth’s shoulders, reassuring, and declared, “We will wrap the first baby born on the kibbutz in your shawl. I promise.”


  “What baby?” Ida asked.

  But Shoshanna only said, “Soon there will be children,” as though she could see something that the rest of them couldn’t.

  And of course there was Ruth. Sweet, quiet Ruth.

  To Ida’s dismay, the girl’s cut had not healed. Her lower leg was now red and puffy, and the heat from the wound had spread up her body in a dark stain and caused a fever.

  The following day, David came to the laundry to ask Ida about it. “What exactly happened to Ruthie’s leg that day?” he said.

  He was sweating, Ida noticed, and the small bump on the bridge of his nose was glazed with perspiration. His cheeks were pale and his forehead looked clammy. It occurred to Ida that he had been sent by someone else; by Hannah, perhaps.

  Ida paused, choosing her words. Had Ruth mentioned their visit to Fatima?

  “She scratched it,” Ida said, tentative, like she was dipping a toe in very cold water. She pushed her glasses higher up her nose with the tip of her forefinger.

  She expected this would elicit more questions, but David only gave her a puzzled look and said, “She has also lost her doll again.”

  It took Ida a moment to catch up to the change in topic. “Oh,” she said.

  “Her mother had it at Kinneret. If you can believe it.”

  Ida scratched her nose.

  David said, “Hannah took the doll to Kinneret without telling Ruth. She brought it back. But now Ruth has lost it a second time.”

  “Where did she last have it?” Ida asked.

  But David looked blank—she could see how hard it was for him to focus on the mundane—so she asked instead, “Can I help?”

  David shrugged. “You could find it,” he said.

  Ida went to the infirmary to see Ruth. The child’s straw pallet was the size of an infant’s crib and had been covered in a canopy of white mosquito netting. The new little boy, Gabriel, sat cross-legged beside her, silent, like he was holding a vigil.

  “I want Ruthie to play with me,” he said to Ida right away.

  “I think she’s too weak,” Ida said, and the boy nodded. He had seen this himself, but needed an adult to make it real. Ida lifted the mosquito net. She crouched down beside the children.