Authors: Anita Diamant
Her clearest ideas about the landscape and life of Palestine came from Aliza’s descriptions
of Haifa. Leonie glanced over at her unlikely friend, who was reading an article about
a proposal for growing pineapples in the Jezreel Valley.
Aliza was older than Leonie by nearly thirty years. She wore thick-soled black shoes
and olive green socks with her white
uniform. A disaster of freckles covered her broad cheeks and wide nose, which had
no acquaintance with powder. She was a bighearted woman who loved to talk about herself.
Leonie could picture the steep streets that wound up the hill to where Aliza lived
with her husband, Sig, a bus driver, in an apartment with views of the sparkling sea.
Leonie knew the names of the Arab markets that had the best cheese, and which bakeries
sold the best bread, because the high point of Aliza’s week was the elaborate Saturday
luncheon she made for an ever-changing cast of cousins and nephews, uncles, aunts,
and nieces, served at a wrought iron table on a tiny balcony, filled with flowers.
“Who came to lunch last week?” Leonie asked. “Did Uncle Ofer pick another fight with
your brother-in-law?”
Aliza laughed. “They fight about everything.”
“Even pineapples?”
“Mostly they argue about politics,” Aliza said. “This time, Ofer was yelling about
the British and how it’s time to throw them out, once and for all. He calls them occupiers
now, and started banging on the table about how the Palmach has to stand up to them
for what’s going on up north. He’s furious at the English for shooting at the refugees
crossing the border over the mountains.”
“But isn’t Ofer the one who loves everything English? The one with the pipe and the
teapot?”
Aliza laughed. “I must talk about them too much.”
“I like hearing about your family,” Leonie said. “But tell me, the Palmach … is that
separate from Haganah?”
“Not separate. Palmach is part of the Haganah. In fact, the British trained the Palmach
unit to defend Palestine against the Germans,” said Aliza. “But now they fight for
the Yishuv—
the Jews of Palestine, all of whom are united in support of you. Oh, not just you,
Leonie. No need to blush.
“I mean all of you immigrants. You are real miracle-workers, believe me. In Eretz
Yisrael, where we disagree about everything—including pineapples—everyone agrees that
the Jews of Europe must be able to come here. There is no solution but to burn that
damned White Paper and make good on the promises of the Balfour Declaration.”
Aliza had never spoken with such passion about politics before. Leonie shrugged apologetically.
“I understand the words,” she said. “But what is the White Paper? Balfour? I’m sorry
to be so stupid, but I don’t know—”
Aliza interrupted. “Don’t apologize. You were just a baby when this was decided. Look
at you.” She shook her head. “You’re still a child. All you need to know is that in
1917, the English foreign secretary, Balfour, wrote a letter that promised the Jews
a homeland in Palestine. It was a promise that they went back on in 1939, when they
put handcuffs on Jewish immigration with a document called the White Paper.”
Aliza folded the newspaper and slipped it back into her pocket. “If they had kept
their word, we could have saved so many lives. It makes me sick just thinking about
it. There are a million survivors still in Germany. And I heard that the Allies are
starting to lock them up inside the death camps. This is beyond imagining.
“My uncle is right,” Aliza said. “Quotas and blockades will not stop us. And the truth
is, the English have always preferred the Arabs to the Jews. In fact, they are anti-Semites,
though there are exceptions, of course,” she said. “Like our little commandant here
in Atlit.
“But enough politics for today,” she said, getting to her feet.
“I’m going over to the kitchen and see if I can get a lemon or an orange so I can
show you how to give an injection.” She put her hand under Leonie’s chin and smiled.
“I suppose you’ll get married right away. But it’s always good to have a trade, just
in case.”
Leonie watched her go, overwhelmed by affection. Aliza seemed happiest when she was
taking care of others, or telling them what to do. She never complained and seemed
content with her life. Leonie wondered about the heavy gold earrings that she wore
every day—her only adornment. Maybe they were a gift from her husband, or perhaps
they had belonged to her mother. Aliza never mentioned children; Leonie wondered if
she couldn’t have any, or if she’d lost sons during the war.
Despite all the time they spent together, the two women knew almost nothing about
each other. Leonie was too shy to inquire, and there was an unspoken rule against
asking survivors about their experiences.
Leonie stood up and went back inside the infirmary. It might be an hour before Aliza
returned; as much as the nurse disapproved of Tirzah’s affair with Colonel Bryce,
they seemed to have plenty to talk about. Leonie wandered between the cots, looking
for something to do. She had already cleaned up after the morning’s roster of ills:
a bad splinter, coughs, rashes, constipation, diarrhea, and chest pain that turned
out to be indigestion. Starvation and malnutrition followed by abundant fruits and
vegetables made for a lot of stomach trouble.
The little clinic was busiest when a group of new immigrants arrived. Doctors and
extra nurses would appear for a day of physical examinations, inoculations, and paperwork.
The seriously ill were taken to hospital immediately, leaving only cases of simple
dehydration, sunburn, cuts, and sprained ankles for
the regular nurses. Many days, Aliza and her colleagues did little more than bandage
scrapes, give enemas, and dose the children with vile-tasting fish oil.
Leonie was sweeping under the cots when Aliza rushed through the door, her arm around
a red-faced girl, clutching her belly. Three more women ran in behind them, all of
them talking at once.
“Leonie, lay out the rubber sheet behind the curtain there and bring some towels.
And the surgical kit,” Aliza ordered. “You girls, come and help me get her up on the
table.
“All right now, Elka,” she said, sternly, “how far along are you?”
“I was due last week,” she panted. “The women in my family carry small.”
“You should have told me as soon as you got here,” Aliza grumbled, as she draped a
sheet over Elka’s legs.
“I didn’t tell anyone. They wouldn’t have let me on the boat if they knew I was so
far along. But I didn’t care. I wanted my baby born in Palestine. No one was going
to stop me. No one.” She gasped as the next contraction grabbed her and her face turned
scarlet again.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Aliza. “You can make all the noise you want to.” Elka
obeyed immediately with a bellow that sent her friends into peals of laughter.
Tirzah arrived with a steaming kettle of water, and Aliza sent Leonie back to the
kitchen with her to fetch more. A crowd had already gathered outside, waiting for
news and pacing like an extended family—even though no one knew the mother’s name.
“How much longer, do you think?” someone asked Leonie as she rushed by.
“Who wants to bet it’s a boy?”
Tirzah lit the burner under a big pot of water, and chased Leonie out into the mess
hall to pace until it boiled. Fifteen impossibly long minutes later, she carried the
pot back through the waiting crowd, where no one was smiling.
“What’s going on?” someone asked her. “It got awfully quiet all of a sudden.”
Leonie rushed inside and felt as though she’d walked into a tomb. The stillness was
so profound, for a moment, she thought she was alone. But as her eyes adjusted from
the bright sunlight, Aliza materialized, leaning over a blood-streaked doll laid out
on a towel, massaging the tiny chest, then stooping to place her lips over the baby’s
nose and mouth. Elka’s eyes were squeezed shut, and though her friends held her, her
legs shook so violently that the table below her rattled. The room stank of blood
and shit.
The pot of hot water slipped out of Leonie’s hands and crashed to the floor. The women
around Elka jumped, but Aliza seemed not to have heard the noise as she whispered
into the baby’s ear between breaths. Elka started to whimper. The wall clock tapped
out a dry dirge, more terrible every second.
Until a faint, husky mew rose from beneath Aliza’s hands. “Good girl!” she said gently.
“Let me hear you.” She picked up the baby and laughed as the cries grew louder and
more human. “Ten fingers, ten toes. You have a beautiful daughter,” Aliza crowed,
as she swabbed the baby clean, wrapped her in a towel, and placed her in Elka’s arms.
“Mazel tov, little mother. Look what a pretty mouth she has. Have you picked a name?”
“Aliyah Zion.”
“Beautiful!” Aliza approved.
Leonie asked, “What does it mean exactly?”
“It means ‘coming up into the land of Israel,’” Elka said.
“And the family name?” asked Aliza, who had laid a fresh sheet over Elka’s legs and
was cleaning her up beneath it.
“The family name is Zion.”
“That is your husband’s surname?”
“Don’t speak of him,” Elka spat.
Aliza dropped her head, assuming he was dead. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry. He’s alive, though if I ever see him again, I may remedy that situation.”
“You don’t mean that,” said one of Elka’s friends.
“Don’t I?” she said. “He should have been here. He could have gotten on the boat with
me, but his mother wanted to wait for a bigger ship. A better ship. And he decided
to stay with her instead of coming with me? He can go to hell. Surely there is someone
in Palestine who has a backbone. Someone who doesn’t have a goddamned mother!”
Her words hung in the air like a dark cloud, as the clock scolded,
tsk, tsk
.
Elka’s friends turned their faces away from her, and she began to wail, clutching
the baby’s face to her chest so tightly that Aliza rushed forward and pried the bundle
out of her arms.
“Gently, little mother,” she said. “Leonie, take the baby outside for a moment. Show
everyone that she is well, but don’t let anyone touch her. And for God’s sake, put
a smile on your face.”
The crowd pushed forward, surrounding her and praising the bow-shaped lips, the tiny
fingers, the thatch of golden brown hair. But Elka’s sobs were growing louder and
more desperate. “Mama!” she screamed suddenly. “Where is my mama? Why doesn’t she
come?”
Leonie brought the baby inside but Elka did not stop crying, and refused to hold her
child. Aliza tried to calm her with tea and then with brandy. She offered gentle reassurances
and then scolded her about her duty to the child. Nothing worked—not even her own
baby’s inconsolable howls. Finally, Aliza gave Elka a sedative and fed the baby a
bottle.
The following morning, Elka was unchanged. No matter what anyone said or did, no matter
how loud the baby cried, she would not even look in her direction.
On the second day, Leonie recognized the dull, unfocused gaze in Elka’s eyes as the
one she had seen on a girl who had pulled out her own hair by the handful, and on
the man who would not get out of bed. A few of the so-called crazy ones raged and
ranted, but most were listless and empty, like Elka.
Aliza lost patience with those cases quickly, certain that they were the victims of
their own weakness and not any real disease. She gave Elka the benefit of the doubt
for an extra day, but after seventy-two hours with a screaming baby and a completely
indifferent mother, she asked for “Dr. Nonsense,” which is what she called the psychiatrist.
Dr. Nonsense was Simone Hammermesch, an elegant Belgian woman with white hair, manicured
hands, and a half-dozen languages at her disposal. She pulled up a chair beside Elka’s
bed and took her hand, waiting quietly for an hour before saying a word. Then she
leaned close and murmured in soft, reassuring, motherly tones, until Elka seemed to
relax a little. Still she said nothing.
Leonie watched the doctor work but hoped that Elka would not succumb to her kind,
hypnotic voice; that she would get out of bed without letting slip the secret that
had laid her low.
Dr. Nonsense was persistent and patient, but after two long
sessions at the bedside, all she managed to get out of Elka was, “Leave me alone.”
She sighed, patted her snowy chignon, and got to her feet and called for Aliza. “Please
get the patient dressed and bring her to my car. I’ll call the maternity ward about
the baby.”
After they left, Aliza helped Leonie make up the cot with fresh sheets. “Don’t worry,”
she said. “After a little rest, Elka will be tip-top. Someday, you’ll run into her
on a street corner and you’ll go for a cup of coffee and laugh about this whole thing.
She might not even remember it happened. I’ve seen this before, many times.
“Now go get me a syringe, won’t you, dear?” she said, taking a small orange out of
her string bag. “I haven’t forgotten about showing you how to give a shot.”
The next day, Leonie stayed away from the infirmary, lying in bed with a pillow pulled
to her belly so that the others would think she was suffering from cramps.
“I don’t know how you stand going there day after day,” Shayndel said, sitting beside
Leonie after the others had gone to breakfast. “The sight of blood alone does me in.
Don’t you find it depressing being with sick people? The pain, the wounds, the scars,
the smells. Ugh.”
Leonie shrugged. In fact, she envied the ones with wounds and scars and even, God
help her, the ones with the numbers on their arms. No one asked those people why they
were furious or miserable, why they refused to dance the hora, why they did not grab
for the candy bars sent from America. Everything was permitted and forgiven them,
at least as long as they dressed and took their meals and kept their stories to themselves.
Leonie’s skin was unblemished. She had not hidden in a Polish sewer or shivered in
a Russian barn. She had not seen
her parents shot. Atlit was her first experience of barracks and barbwire. She had
survived the war without suffering hunger or thirst. There had been wine and hashish
and a pink satin coverlet to muffle her terrors.