Authors: Anita Diamant
A hundred other refugees were already there. The two nervous Italians in charge of
the landing could offer nothing but whispered reassurances, which they repeated with
less and less confidence as the night wore on. Zorah crouched and wrapped her arms
around her knees, sick with worry; her rucksack had disappeared somewhere between
the train and the truck, and with it her identity card.
The faint sound of an engine offshore brought everyone
to the water’s edge, where they lined up like a flock of ragged birds and stared into
the darkness as a rowboat splashed into view. Four muscular men wearing blue sweaters
and tight-fitting caps jumped onto the sand and exchanged a few words with the Italians,
who kissed their cheeks and beamed with relief.
At dawn, an involuntary gasp went up as the refugees got their first look at the ship
that was supposed to carry them across the Mediterranean—a worn-out ferry of the sort
used to shuttle commuters across a river or vacationers across a lake. Zorah shook
her head: God had a twisted sense of humor to let her survive the efficient Germans
only to drown at the hands of a bunch of bumbling Jews.
A steep gangplank was quickly assembled and the men from the boat started taking names,
checking them against those on a smudged piece of paper. Zorah was surprised that
this slapdash escape had actually been planned down to the detail of a ship’s manifest.
She hung back until she was the last one on the beach, knowing her name was not on
their list.
The man holding the papers frowned at her and looked at the paper. “Levi, Jean-Claude.”
When Zorah didn’t move, he pointed at her and said, “You.”
Did he know that Jean-Claude was a man?
“That’s you,” he insisted. “Levi.”
The Italians ran up to them and pointed at a cloud of dust moving toward them. Zorah
climbed the narrow, swaying ramp on her hands and knees.
She knew that she was not cheating Levi out of his rightful place. Nine times out
of ten, a missing Jew in 1945 was a dead Jew. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about
him. What would happen to her if Levi did turn out to be that one in ten?
What if he had already reached Palestine? Would the British arrest her? Throw her
in jail? Send her back?
Where could they send her? She had nowhere to go, which was why she was going to Palestine.
After two weeks of worry and seasickness, Zorah was even thinner than she had been
when she got out of the concentration camp. But from the day she arrived at Atlit,
she realized that she had imagined a problem where none existed. She was just one
more undocumented, inconvenient “illegal,” like thousands of others.
On the day she arrived, a white-haired man from the Jewish Agency at the table in
front of Delousing told her, “Don’t worry. You might be stuck here a bit longer than
most, but eventually it will all work out. You are one of the lucky ones. You are
home.”
Zorah had been too tired to tell him that “home” was a cramped apartment on the top
floor of a dilapidated tenement where, by now, a gang of murdering thieves was cooking
pork in her mother’s kosher pots.
As she lay in bed, playing with the last flecks of tobacco on her tongue, Zorah wondered
if Meyer could help her get out of Atlit. Perhaps he would return tomorrow and if
he offered her another cigarette, she would ask if he had enough
protectzia
to send a big black car to fetch her to a little apartment of her own, or just a
single room with whitewashed walls. That would be more than enough.
Zorah closed her eyes and extended the fingers of her right hand as though she were
still holding a cigarette. She raised it to her lips, inhaled deeply, and waited,
letting the phantom Chesterfield burn wantonly, as if she were a woman who always
had a full pack of American cigarettes in her pocketbook and
another in the nightstand. Zorah exhaled through pursed lips, deliberate as a film
idol—though she doubted that there was, anywhere in the world, a movie star with numbers
tattooed on her forearm.
She smiled at the idea. And then she slept.
I think Zorah may have a crush on the guard with the thick glasses,” whispered Shayndel,
as she slipped into Leonie’s cot. No one else in the barrack was awake yet, which
meant it was their time to talk. “In the last week, she’s asked me three times if
I’ve seen him. And last night at the party, she kept looking around as if she was
waiting for someone.
“I can’t imagine what your toes must feel like,” Shayndel went on. “I saw you dancing
with that oaf Otto. I don’t think he’s good enough for you,
chérie
. I don’t mind hairy men so much, but given the lack of girls around here, even I
could probably do better.”
“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” said Leonie as she pushed a wisp of wiry hair
behind her friend’s ear. “Lots of boys wanted to dance with you.”
The celebration had taken place in honor of the most
improbable and romantic coincidence imaginable: a girl from a new group of detainees
had recognized her childhood sweetheart through the fence, and when they opened the
gate, the two of them fell into each other’s arms. Everyone was shouting and clapping,
and even the English soldiers had tears in their eyes. Colonel Bryce, the camp commander,
had given permission for a party. The cook had attempted a cake, and a bottle of schnapps
had appeared; one of the newcomers had a violin and the dancing went on until midnight.
“They snuck the boyfriend into the girl’s barrack,” Shayndel said. “I’ll bet nobody
slept the whole night over there. Even if they hung up blankets around them, everyone
must have been listening, though it would have been worse in the boy’s barrack, don’t
you think?” she continued, dropping her voice even lower. “You know what they would
have been doing, don’t you?”
Leonie wrinkled her nose, which was Roman in profile and in perfect proportion to
the rest of her features. Shayndel often thought the only reason that the great beauty
of Atlit tolerated her attentions was the fact that she spoke French. Standing next
to Leonie, Shayndel felt like a Polish peasant, with her coarse reddish mop of hair,
skinny legs, and a body shaped like a potato.
“Are you a prude?” Shayndel teased, hoping she had gotten the idiom right. “I’m still
set on finding us a couple of brothers when we get out of here. Brothers who want
to live close by each other, you know. Nice, steady types. We’ll live on a kibbutz,
but on Sunday afternoon we can go to Tel Aviv, where there are shops and cafés, and
we can sit over our coffee cups and watch the crowds pass by.”
Leonie said nothing but squeezed Shayndel’s hand, a signal for her to continue with
the story she had recited every day, like morning prayers, since they’d gotten on
the boat to Palestine.
“We will eat ice cream and go shopping. You will teach me how to dress and I will
show you how to make the best stuffed cabbage in the world. It will be a good life
for us. I’ll find us the two brothers. We’ll each have two children.”
“Like Noah’s ark,” said Leonie, on cue.
“Exactly.”
“Once upon a time.” Leonie sighed. Nearly everything about Palestine felt like make-believe
to her. The bottomless baskets of soft bread and the bland white cheese seemed like
food for angels or babies. Atlit itself felt like a fairy-tale dungeon, the prisoners
waiting for someone to end the evil spell and release them to live in the happy land
of the kibbutz.
Hebrew was the most fantastic thing of all to her: a dead language walking in the
world, a holy tongue with slang for “bullet” and “penis” and the magical power to
invent or change whatever it needed, abracadabra.
“We promised to talk only in Hebrew today,” said Shayndel. “Remember?”
“That’s easy for you. You’re the best one in class. I feel like an idiot when I don’t
have the words.”
“You can fill in with French,” said Shayndel. “I’m not strict like Arik.”
“I don’t like his class,” Leonie said. “Nurit is much nicer.”
“Did you hear Lipstick Lillian last night?” Shayndel whispered, in Hebrew. “She was
talking in her sleep again. I swear I heard her say
mit schlag.
I never heard anyone talk about food so much. Such a Viennese cliché.”
“‘Cliché’ is not Hebrew, is it?”
“Excuse me.” Shayndel grinned. “Lillian is already bursting out of her dress. Can’t
you see her getting fat as a cow? Fat and stuck-up. Too bad.”
“What did you think?” said Leonie. “People will be people in Eretz Yisrael, too. Just
because we’re in Palestine doesn’t mean it’s any different. There will be princes
and criminals here, too.”
“Jewish criminals, eh?” said Shayndel. “I almost like the sound of that. It makes
us seem normal. But our children will not be merely normal. They will be extraordinary—tall
and handsome, like in all the Zionist posters. With big muscles and white teeth.”
Leonie winced.
“I’m sorry,” Shayndel said.
When they had arrived in Atlit, a dentist had determined that eight of Leonie’s back
teeth were rotten and pulled them out. “No one notices,” Shayndel insisted, pulling
Leonie’s hands away from her cheeks.
“Well, our four perfect children will have teeth like horses,” Leonie said, to let
Shayndel know that she was forgiven. “We will feed them raw milk and honey.”
“And olives,” said Shayndel.
“I will never like olives,” said Leonie.
“You said that about the
leben,
too.”
“I suppose if one gets used to drinking sour milk, one can get used to anything.”
Though Leonie did not know how she could bear another month of the heat, which she
had heard someone say could last into October. There was only one tree big enough
to give any shade in the whole camp, and the barrack often felt like an oven.
Just thinking about the word made Leonie feel sick. “Oven” used to conjure up images
of cakes and roast chicken and warming bread. Now it meant only “gas chamber.” Except
in Hebrew, where even “oven” managed to stay in the kitchen with the sink and the
icebox. Their teacher said that soon they would all be dreaming in Hebrew, which made
Leonie study even harder.
“Did you dream in Hebrew last night?” Shayndel asked, knowing how much Leonie liked
that idea.
“No. For that I think you need to fall in love with a native speaker. When you’re
in bed with a man, when you’ve had a little wine, that’s the way to learn a language.”
“Oh-la-la,” Shayndel said. “Maybe you’re not such a prude after all. You’re getting
a little … I don’t know the word in Hebrew—amorous? Randy?”
“Not at all,” said Leonie. “It’s just an expression.” She threw off the covers. “Let’s
get out of here. I’m dying for a cup of coffee—even if it’s only tea.”
Leonie and Shayndel were early enough to get their favorite spot in the dining hall,
at a table just to the right of the door, where they could watch people come and go.
The other girls from their barrack joined them there and, as always, everyone ate
a little too much bread a little too quickly. A steady parade of boys stopped to flirt
with Leonie and to say a few comradely words to Shayndel. After breakfast was over
and the men clattered outside for the morning lineup, the girls leaned on their elbows
and talked about them.
“Do you think Reuven is handsome?” asked one of the girls.
“If you like giraffes,” said Lillian. “What a neck!”
“He has such beautiful eyes,” said a young woman with a baby in her lap. “His children
would be lucky.”
“Speaking of children,” Lillian said, “have you given a name to that son of yours?
He’s already a month old.”
“Yes, I have.”
“So what is it?” the girls said, all at once.
“He is Ben-Ami.”
“Did you say Benjamin?” asked Shayndel.
“No. Ben-Ami,” said the new mother, whose name was Rosa. “It is a new name for the
new state. It means ‘son of my people.’ From now on, I want you to call me Vered.
It means rose, too, but in the language of the Jews. We must throw off the old names
with the old ways.”
Lillian rolled her eyes. “That is exactly what Arik said in class. You’re like a parrot.
Don’t you have a thought of your own?”
“You should change your name to Shoshana,” Rosa-Vered said.
“Lillian was my
oma
’s name,” she said. “And her
oma
’s name before that. Shoshana sounds like someone with a lisp. And if you ask me,
Vered sounds like a name for a car, not a woman.”
“And yet, no one asked you,” said Leonie, but so sweetly that it took them a minute
to realize that she’d just told Lillian to shut up. Before Lillian had a chance to
protest, Tedi and Zorah flew through the door, uncombed and untucked, racing toward
the nearly empty samovar.
Everyone at the table smiled. Tedi and Zorah did this nearly every morning, prompting
a game in which the girls would come up with pairs of opposites: night and day, vinegar
and wine, sweet and sour, hot and cold, meat and milk.
“Here come the sun and the moon,” said Shayndel.
“Laurel and Hardy,” said Leonie.
“Alpha and omega,” offered Vered-Rosa, up on her feet, bouncing the baby to keep him
from crying.
“What does that mean?” Shayndel asked.
“It appears that Rosa went to university,” sniffed Lillian.
Leonie and Shayndel grinned at each other, knowing these
same girls sometimes called them “peas in a pod” and “the Siamese twins” even though
they were a pair of contrasts, too. Olive-skinned Leonie had turned brown on the boat
while a single day under the Mediterranean sky had broiled Shayndel’s fair skin to
a blister and swollen her eyes to slits. After that, she never ventured outdoors without
an oversized man’s hat that made her look like a child playing dress-up, even though,
at twenty, she was older than Leonie by nearly three years.
They had been inseparable since first meeting on a crowded railroad platform south
of Paris, on their way to Palestine. Shayndel was eager to practice her schoolgirl
French on Leonie, who wanted to know if there were any big cities in the land of Israel.
Their friendship deepened over the course of the journey as they nursed each other
through seasickness and held each other close when the British commandeered their
boat.