Authors: Anita Diamant
Near the end of December in 1942, at five in the evening it was already dark on the
Paris streets. Leonie rounded the corner, holding the lapels on her coat so that no
one could see the yellow star. She was on her way home, to the apartment she shared
with her uncle and cousin in a run-down corner of a district where Jews were rare.
Her uncle had bribed someone so they didn’t have to wear the badge at first, but after
a change in the police department, they had been forced to register. Leonie hated
the way people stared at her now, and when she felt an arm slip through the crook
of her elbow, she nearly screamed, certain she was about to be arrested.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Madame Clos, the tobacconist’s wife. “The Germans have been
to your apartment. They took your cousin and your uncle. I’ve been watching out for
you. Come with me.”
Madame Clos was a tall woman and Leonie had to run to keep up with her. They hurried
toward her building on the far end of the block. Leonie knew that she would never
see her uncle or cousin again; after the brutal roundup of thirteen thousand at the
Velodrome the previous summer, no one believed they were being “evacuated.” There
was no “resettlement.” No “work camps.”
Leonie followed Madame up steep flights to the top floor, trying to muster a little
pity for the only family she had. Even as a
young boy, her cousin had been horrible to her. “You’re a little bastard,” he would
smirk, echoing his father. “And your mother wasn’t even smart enough to get knocked
up by a rich man.”
When she was seven years old, Auntie Renata—her mother’s sister—had walked out on
Uncle Mannis, a petty criminal and a gambler. When Leonie started to grow breasts,
her uncle leered and pinched. “It helps them grow,” he said with a smile that made
her stomach drop. He opened the door to her room when she dressed in the morning,
and laughed when she told him she kept a knife under her pillow. The week Leonie turned
fifteen, she got a job in a candy factory and stayed at work as long and late as she
could.
Breathless after the sixth set of steps, she waited as Madame Clos rummaged for her
keys and unlocked an enormous wooden door. She dropped her bag in the foyer and led
Leonie into a room crowded with furniture: large, dark sideboards, bookcases, and
far too many chairs. Heavy red drapes covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, making
the place feel like a theater. The silk flower arrangements added a funereal note.
On the couch, three pale girls sat in a row, wearing crocheted shawls over short silk
slips.
Madame Clos put her arm around Leonie. “Let me present my nieces, who have come to
live with me in these dark days: Christine, Marie-France, and Simone.”
Simone, Leonie remembered, was a redhead.
The tap on the door was barely audible, but Tirzah had been keeping an eye on the
time. At five minutes past midnight, the guards were settling in for the start of
the second watch, but the Jewish holidays had disrupted schedules everywhere in Atlit,
and it had been nearly a month since Bryce had slipped into her room.
He arrived, as always, trailing the scent of talc and Bay Rum. He had told her that
it was the commonest cologne in the world, but it was new to her, which delighted
him. Just as it pleased her to have given him a nickname, something he never had before.
These were the gifts they gave each other, the only kind they could give.
The room was dark, except for a candle, but even in the shadows they were shy about
looking directly at each other. Bryce took Tirzah’s hand and kissed a small crescent-shaped
scar at the base of her right thumb, grateful for the knowledge of its provenance—a
burn from a loaf of bread she had baked as a child in her grandmother’s kitchen.
Tirzah put both her hands on his freshly shaved face and imagined him at his mirror,
preparing for her. He moved closer so she could feel the heat under his pressed shirt.
Then it was up to her—it was always up to her—to lean toward him, to give him her
mouth, to blow out the candle, to take off her robe and let him surprise her, as he
always did, with his tongue and his fingers everywhere. They lost themselves on the
narrow cot so quietly and so slowly, it was as if they were dreaming themselves inside
one another’s skin. They did not so much kiss as inhale each other’s panted breath
until they broke apart, spent and breathless.
Usually she was the one to doze for a few moments after they made love, but this time
Bryce fell asleep. Tirzah tucked her arm under him and pulled closer, feeling the
bones of his spine against her belly and chest. She ran her tongue over her teeth
and tasted his toothpaste. She brushed her cheek against his thinning hair and savored
his Bay Rum.
Everyone in Atlit knew about their affair. The other officers winked at her, managing
to be both lewd and respectful at the same time. The nurses and teachers had made
it abundantly clear how distasteful they found her “sacrifice.” Tirzah despised her
countrymen’s hypocrisy about sex. Virginity was not quite the all-important prize
it had once been—especially not among the young Socialists of the Yishuv. In Palestine,
it was considered patriotic to open your legs for young men of fighting age; yet,
if an unmarried girl had the bad luck to get pregnant, she could be demoted or even
fired from a job. And if a woman was unofficially “encouraged” to seduce an enemy
officer who could
provide important information in the struggle for the home-land, well, the sooner
that sort of thing was over and hushed up the better.
The real secret about Tirzah’s affair with the colonel was wrapped in the cotton wool
of expediency. Sleeping with the enemy was an odious but justifiable means to a Zionist
end, but falling in love with such a man verged on the treasonous.
Tirzah had been completely unprepared for that possibility and was still a little
shocked whenever she caught sight of Bryce during the day. He was far too short and
fair for her, an entirely different species from the men she’d been attracted to in
the past. Watching him walk across the compound, she had to stop herself from laughing
at the idea that the great love of her life had turned out to be a middle-aged, ginger-haired
bantam from a place with a name that sounded like a sneeze or a brand of whiskey.
Cardiff.
No one would suspect the passion hidden behind his formality, or his talents as a
lover, or his belief in the justice of the Jewish claim in Palestine. Tirzah’s superiors
pretended that every last Brit was a closet Nazi, which made it easier to do anything
and everything to chase them out of the country and claim it as their own. But that
story had nothing to do with her Johnny.
Eight months earlier, when the Palmach sent her to spy in Atlit, she had thought him
the image of a narrow-minded, buttoned-down Englishman. But then he opened his mouth
and addressed her in complete and grammatical Hebrew sentences. When he pronounced
her name properly, she had blushed. That caused him to stare and stammer. And so it
began.
Mostly, they spoke Hebrew, but he told her in English that he loved her. She had no
reason to doubt him. Everything else
he had ever said to her had been true. Bryce would let her know when a new group of
refugees was due to arrive, whether by train or by bus. When trains pulled in at night,
he neglected to assign enough men to guard the inmates as they made their way from
the end of the tracks, around the fence, and to the gate. Helpers and spies embedded
in the transports managed to spirit away dozens of “black” immigrants—ones without
papers—hiding them in the fields before they could be counted. She had kept count,
and Bryce had been responsible for the escape of at least seventy-five refugees.
He had once tried to translate an American turn of phrase about the British strategy
on Jewish immigration; “closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.” Tirzah
had laughed at the expression, which sounded absurd in Hebrew. The image stayed with
her, though. She imagined herself as a lone horse trotting off into the distance,
wondering where to go.
She wondered if Bryce knew about her disastrous marriage. He knew a lot about her,
mostly because he asked. Where did she grow up? Did she play with dolls as a little
girl or did she climb trees? Did she like to read? Which of her schoolteachers did
she remember? When she answered—whispering as though relating state secrets—he kept
perfectly still, memorizing every word. He probably knew a good deal more about her
from her dossier, too. It wouldn’t be hard to connect her to the Palmach; indeed,
most of what she knew about Bryce came from their files: A career officer, he was
well liked by his men but lacked the sort of ambition that would have avoided a dead-end
posting like Atlit. The woman in the photograph on his desk was his wife, though Tirzah
had yet to discover her name. Their sons, however, she knew were George and Peter,
both of whom had enlisted in the RAF. George had been killed early in the war, flying
a mission over Germany.
At unpredictable moments in her day—writing lists, peeling vegetables, washing a countertop—Tirzah
would recall the insistent gentleness of his hands on her sex, the firmness of his
mouth on her breast, the fondness in his voice when he spoke about her son, Danny.
These furtive attacks of joy took her breath away, and for the first time in her life
she uttered the prayer that thanks God for small blessings. And in the next breath,
she cursed the God who would let happiness bloom on such a doomed stalk.
Bryce woke up and turned over. “Sorry,” he said, and put his finger to her lips. “What
is the Hebrew word for ‘bittersweet’?”
“Ha,” Tirzah said. “Our first cliché.”
He flinched. Had the bed been any larger he would have pulled away from her, but there
was nowhere to go, so he kept still. It would be another hour before the next change
of the guards, when he could leave without being seen. After a long pause he asked,
“Danny is coming tomorrow, isn’t he?”
Tirzah heard the forgiveness in his voice and wondered if his feelings for Danny had
anything to do with the loss of his son.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ve gotten some of that toffee he likes. I’ll bring it to the kitchen.”
Bryce would stay away from her room until the boy left, but he didn’t mind these brief
separations. When Danny was in camp, Tirzah’s eyes seemed to absorb the light, and
the lines around her mouth grew softer. He wished he could do more than bring candy
to her son, something more for her, too. He daydreamed about getting her an apartment
in Tel Aviv like some of the other officers had done for their girls. They could be
together for more than three hours at a time; they could share a meal and watch the
sun set.
But even as he imagined the scene, he knew it would never happen. Tirzah was not that
kind of woman, and he wasn’t sure what would happen between them if he asked for anything
more than what they shared in her airless little room. Perhaps the facade of her affection
would crack. As much as he wanted to believe that she cared for him, as much as he
thought he could feel it in her mouth and see it on her face, he would never be completely
certain of her feelings.
They were long past pretending about their part in the drama that was unfolding in
Palestine. She asked bald-faced questions about camp operations, down to the assignment
of sentries and patrols. He answered her in detail, a willing coconspirator.
Bryce hated his assignment in Atlit. He thought it was outrageous to keep these people
locked up like criminals, especially having read some of the classified reports about
the liberation of the death camps. He had seen photographs considered too ghastly
for public release, but even more troubling to him were rumors that the Allies had
known about the concentration camps and the railroad lines that served them for months
or even years. The idea that the RAF might have stopped the killing was even more
horrible to him than the images of dried-up bodies stacked like cordwood. He felt
implicated in a secret crime and ashamed of his uniform.
He fantasized about marrying Tirzah and training Jewish regiments to fight the Arabs,
who were gearing up for war against the Jewish settlement. But he knew those were
pipe dreams. He had watched men “go native” in India. It was an occupational hazard
and in the end, it was always the woman who paid the price. He would never put Tirzah
in that position.
He also knew that eventually his superiors would take note of his laxness or uncover
his complicity. They would demobilize him and send him home, where he would take up
fishing, like his father. He would drink too much, also like his father. He would
read all the newspaper accounts about Palestine and wonder what happened to Tirzah
and her little boy. He would imagine writing to her—long, honest letters—but never
put pen to paper.
The sound of footsteps hurried them out of bed. Tirzah wrapped herself in the sheet
and watched him dress. She hoped that things between them would come to an end before
Danny learned that he was supposed to hate the colonel who took such an interest in
his mother.
“Tirzah,” Bryce said. “Things are heating up in the north.”
“I know,” she said. The newspapers were full of stories about tensions at the borders
with Lebanon and Syria, where refugees from all over the region were making their
way over the mountains on foot. Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world had grown
during the war years, making life increasingly perilous for Jews there; restrictions,
harassment, and riots had become common even in places like Baghdad, where the Jewish
community had flourished for so long. The “Zionist threat” was now a rallying cry,
uniting the Arab world against Jewish plans for a homeland, and against British interests
and their handling of the mandate in Palestine.
Hoping to pacify the Arabs, the British commanders were ordering the surrender of
Jewish immigrants on the northern frontiers—a directive that was flagrantly defied
by the kibbutzniks at the border. It was rumored that the Palmach had sent reinforcements
to help the refugees—nearly all men of fighting age—to negotiate the rough terrain.