Day After Night (4 page)

The British counted the girls only once a day, inside their barracks in the evening.
But the boys had to show up every morning as well. The sergeant in charge that day
had sweated through his shirt even before the prisoners started filtering into the
dusty yard in front of the mess hall. He tapped his foot and shouted for them to hurry,
but they took even longer than usual as they arranged themselves in an intentionally
crooked row. From the way they were glancing at each other and whispering, Zorah guessed
that someone was missing: still in bed, or in the latrine, or perhaps even escaped
during the night—something that had happened at least once in the three weeks since
she’d been in Atlit.

The boys finally got themselves sorted, bellowing their names and saluting with exaggerated
flourishes. As soon as the officer took a few steps down the line, the first prisoners
took a step back and the others quickly closed ranks so the absence of one of the
boys would not be noticed. By the time the sergeant had reached the end of the line,
the first inmate, a cap pulled low on his forehead, gave another name and bowed from
the waist. The whole crew kept a straight face and stood perfectly still until they
were dismissed and strutted over to receive accolades from a group of female admirers.

Zorah watched the puffing of chests and the fluttering of eyelashes. Flirtations and
romances bubbled up and burst from day to day—sometimes even from hour to hour. Zorah
turned up her nose and headed for the shady side of Delousing, where the morning’s
Hebrew lessons were taught.

When she saw who was teaching that day, she tried to duck out. Nurit caught sight
of her first and pointed at a chair in the front row, but Zorah slipped in a seat
in the back as the teacher chatted up a few of the newcomers, speaking Hebrew with
a liberal smattering of Yiddish to make sure she would be understood.

“It’s only a matter of days, maybe a few weeks for some of you, but you’ll be out
of here soon,” Nurit was saying. She was about forty, thick around the waist, and
dyed her hair the peculiar shade of purple-red favored by the local women. Although
she was liked by the others because of the chalky little squares of chocolate she
handed out at the end of class, Zorah avoided Nurit’s sessions. Not only did the woman
love the sound of her own voice, she talked too much about luck—how lucky they were
to have survived Europe, lucky to have gotten past the British blockade, lucky to
be on the soil of Eretz Yisrael, where
so many devoted members of the local Jewish settlement were working on their behalf.

“Today, we are going to learn the names of the flowers and plants of the land,” Nurit
began. “We will start with the biblical flora and continue with the trees that our
people are planting, along with all the vegetables we have under cultivation. I myself
spent the weekend planting bougainvillea in my garden. Do you know bougainvillea,
my friends? I passed a whole day searching for just the right plant for my garden,
but it was worth it. I tell you, it is the most beautiful of all flowers.”

Zorah stood up abruptly and knocked over her chair. “What the hell do we care about
your garden?” she said as she stamped away.

“How do you say ‘pain in the ass’ in Hebrew?” someone muttered.

Laughter followed Zorah as she walked off. She thought she would pass the rest of
the morning trying to read the Hebrew newspaper she had “borrowed” from Nurit’s bag
last week. But it was too hot inside the barrack, so she wandered the grounds and
kept her face turned toward the fence so no one would be tempted to talk to her.

Eventually, Zorah found herself near the front gate where a small crowd was watching
the morning’s departures. Arrivals were unpredictable. If the British intercepted
an illegal vessel, a train or a convoy of buses would arrive and two or three barracks
would fill with refugees.

But people left the camp almost every day. It seemed to Zorah that most of them spent
no more than a week in Atlit. If you had the right credentials, the Jewish Agency
would present you to the authorities as “legal” under the infuriating quotas the British
had set for Jewish immigration to Palestine. But those
numbers were a moving target, and there appeared to be different rules for children,
who were released as soon as a relative came to claim them.

Zorah also noticed that whenever a private car pulled up to the camp, the “sister”
or “brother” it had been sent for would be carried away without acquiring the stamp
or seal or signature that kept others waiting. This was called
protectzia,
a word she learned not in any of her Hebrew classes, but from Goldberg, a gruff,
gray-haired Jewish guard who worked in Atlit in order to search for clues about his
mother’s extended family in Germany. Goldberg was known to give away cigarettes, which
made him one of the few people Zorah sought out.

She counted twenty-three people waiting to leave, bundles and suitcases piled around
them. The children were the first to go, seven in all, walking stiffly beside people
who were total strangers to them. Among them was Maxie, a ten-year-old who had been
caught stealing shoelaces and matches. A grim-faced woman wearing an ugly black wig
had her hand on the back of his neck and was pushing him along.

“Good riddance to that little shit,” said Lillian, touching her fingers to the corners
of her crimson lips.

“Shame on you,” said a woman beside her. “Stealing probably kept him alive in Buchenwald.”

“Well, I don’t know what good it did him in here,” Lillian replied, with a bold stare
that proclaimed that she, for one, would not be intimidated by the mere mention of
a death camp.

“What on earth could he trade for in this place?” Lillian demanded, as she glared
down at her black Oxfords, tied with twine. “He’ll be stealing wallets and purses
and God knows what else as soon as he gets the chance. That poor woman has no idea
what she’s taking in. Then again, did you see her? Like
my great-great grandmother, from the shtetl. And that wig? Horsehair! I’m sure of
it. What a horror.”

“Lillian,” Zorah said. “You really should write a book of proverbs. I suggest you
start with, ‘If you don’t have something spiteful to say about a person … why bother?’”

“And you are too clever for your own good,” Lillian said.

Zorah watched as six young men crowded around the cab of a dusty flatbed truck, arguing.

“He comes with us,” shouted a tall, skinny inmate, pointing at a boy with a heavy
bandage on his ankle. “It’s nothing—a sprain. We do not leave without him. We will
make a hunger strike and shame you in front of the Jews of the world. We will report
you to the Jewish Agency! To the Palmach!”

The driver pointed at the British soldiers who were watching from the guardhouses
that stood on ten-foot stilts around the perimeter of the camp. “You are giving these
fucking British assholes reason to laugh at us,” he said. “If you don’t get in right
now, and without that cripple, I will leave without any of you. And I am sure as hell
not driving all the way back to get you, you big-mouth son of a …”

Zorah grinned at the barrage of curses and realized that she had understood every
foul word in the tackata-tackata version of what her father used to call “the holy
tongue.”

Papa had considered Zorah’s gift for languages a complete waste. The old man used
to chase her away from the table while he tutored her brother, even though Herschel
was never going to be able to understand the Talmud. At ten years old, the boy could
barely tell one letter from the next while Zorah had been able to read Hebrew and
Yiddish before she was seven, and spoke better Polish than either of her parents.
In Auschwitz, she’d learned Romanian and German. She picked up some Italian
on her way to Palestine and was learning French just by eavesdropping on two girls
in her barrack.

A young Jewish guard named Meyer walked over to the truck and took the driver aside.
After a few minutes of animated conversation, the guard helped the lame boy into the
front seat and told his loud champion, “Watch your manners. In a country this small,
you might end up sleeping in this fellow’s dormitory, or working in his brother’s
unit. No need to get off on the wrong foot.”

The driver gunned the engine and then took off, forcing the others to chase after
it. Their ringleader was the last to make it aboard, screaming and puffing until his
companions pulled him on.

Zorah shook her head at the scene.

“You’re not Romanian, are you?” The question made Zorah jump. Meyer, the guard who
had sent them off, was smiling at her through the fence. She would have turned on
her heel except for the cigarette he held out through the wire—a Chesterfield, right
out of the package.

She took it without meeting his eyes, stroked the fine white paper, and put it up
to her nose. The guard held out a match.

Zorah thought about putting the cigarette away, to save it for later, but what was
the point? Someone would start asking questions about where she’d managed to get such
a treat; then again, she realized that half the camp would know all about this little
exchange within minutes anyway.

“Fuck it,” she said, leaning forward to catch the flame. She inhaled deeply and glanced
at him sideways.

He smiled. “Do you kiss your lover with that mouth?”

He might have been thirty years old, with wavy brown hair, a long face, strong jaw,
and a pair of thick wire-rimmed
glasses that had probably disqualified him from fighting in the war. Given what he’d
just done for the stupid Romanians, she decided he wasn’t a British stool pigeon at
all, a rumor based entirely on the amount of time he spent inside the fence with the
prisoners. Zorah wondered if Meyer was his first name or his last.

“Aren’t you ashamed to wear such a stupid hat?” she said and walked away.

“You are most welcome,” said Meyer, and doffed the Turkish three-corner pillbox.

Zorah headed for the far side of the nearest building to escape his gaze. She took
three quick, delicious drags on the cigarette, so different from the cut-rate, stale,
military-issue stuff they sometimes got. She could have traded a pristine butt for
a chocolate bar, or a half tube of Lillian’s lipstick, or the promise of getting a
letter delivered to Tel Aviv or Haifa. But Zorah had no one to contact and no greater
desire than tobacco.

She inhaled once more before tapping the cigarette out gently on the bottom of her
shoe, then put the rest into her pocket to save until after dinner. The anticipation
sweetened her whole day. Walking to and from the barrack, reading her newspaper, ignoring
the fatuous conversation of the girls around her, she reached for it often, almost
tasting it with her fingers. At dinner, even the bland eggplant and white cheese tasted
sharper because of what was coming.

Zorah denied herself until the last minute and then slipped behind the latrine just
before lights-out. She took her prize out of her pocket and massaged it gently back
into shape. Before lighting it, she forced herself to pause for one final moment,
watching as the last purple light of day faded to gray in the sky above the mountains.

She struck a match and inhaled deeply. The first puff, burned and sour, made her cough.
But the next one was perfect and she held it in her lungs for as long as she could.
She exhaled slowly, tasting the smoke as it left her. The third puff conjured a memory
of her Uncle Moshe’s pipe mix, which in turn recalled the flavor of Aunt Faygie’s
Rosh Hashanah baked apples. Zorah counted back; it had been four years since she’d
eaten those apples; she had been fifteen years old.

Later, as she lay in the dark, Zorah noticed that her neck was not as tight as usual
and wondered if nicotine was the cure for her insomnia. The woman on the cot beside
her grunted in her sleep and rolled from her back to her side. Zorah savored the ten
inches between them. On the boat from Europe to Haifa, and before that, in the DP
center, in the forest, in the camp, in the boxcars, she had been piled, like a stick
of wood, against other bodies that crawled with lice or burned with fever. Some had
been clammy with sweat, and twice, rigid and cold. Zorah stretched out her arms, luxuriating
in the space around her, the only thing in Atlit for which she was grateful.

Zorah tried to find the heavy satisfaction of the smoke in her lungs again, but the
sensation was gone, like those argumentative Romanian boys who had, indirectly, been
responsible for her American cigarette. Though she envied their escape, living on
a kibbutz did not appeal to her. From what she had heard, it sounded a lot like Atlit:
communal meals and bathrooms, order imposed by others.

Zorah wanted her own room and no one telling her when to go to bed at night or get
up in the morning, or what kind of work to do. She knew these were extravagant wishes
in a poor country, and she had no idea whether she would be able to make such a life
for herself in a place where it seemed everyone
was made to obey orders if only they were delivered by other Jews.

Not that she expected to leave anytime soon. She had no relatives in Palestine nor
anyone willing to pose as family. She had never attended a Zionist youth meeting in
Poland, nor had she ingratiated herself to the giddy new pioneers who were hatching
all around her. But the biggest problem of all was that she had no papers. Officially,
she did not exist.

She had walked out of the concentration camp so dazed and weak, she had been unable
to think about what lay ahead. But when the Red Cross workers asked if she wanted
a ticket back to Warsaw, she shook her head. She had been the only one in her family
to make it through the first selection; there was no one and nothing to go back to.

In the DP camp, there were boys and girls who talked endlessly about Palestine as
both home and hope, and since Zorah had neither she threw in her lot with them, joining
with a small, well-organized group of Young Guards—the biggest of the Socialist Zionist
youth movements. They boarded a train to Marseille, where they were met by a chain-smoking
envoy from Palestine who led them to a flatbed truck, which jolted and bruised them
for a day and a night until they reached a stretch of stony beach near a town called
Savona.