Authors: Anita Diamant
Shayndel sang quietly, under her breath.
As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart,
With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion,
Then our hope—the two-thousand-year-old hope—will not be lost:
To be a free people in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem
“You have a nice voice,” David said. “You should sing louder.”
“You must be tone deaf,” she said, looking at his kind blue eyes, his high, thoughtful
forehead.
“There’s a rumor going around that you fought with the Jewish partisans near Vilnius.
Maybe you knew my cousin,” he said.
“You seem to have many cousins.”
“Wolfe Landau?”
Shayndel stared at him. “Wolfe was your cousin?”
David nodded. “I know about Malka, too.”
“Malka,” she echoed. It had been a long time since she had heard or spoken either
of those names, though neither of them had left her thoughts for more than an hour
since she’d lost them.
“You were the third member of that troika, weren’t you,” he said. “I’m honored to
meet you. Why don’t people know who you are? What you did?”
“Why should they?” Shayndel snapped.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t say anything if you don’t want me to, though I don’t
understand why not. You should be proud.”
“I only did what I could,” she said. “They were the brave ones, the real leaders.
I was just the tail at the end of the kite.”
“Someday, we should fly a kite together.”
Shayndel frowned.
“Or we could just go for a walk,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I’m not a bad fellow.
Not as dashing as Wolfe, but you could do worse.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to sweep you off your feet,” he said. “I think you are—I don’t know the
Hebrew for it—adorable.”
“Ha!” Shayndel stepped back. “And I think you are exactly like all the rest of the
men in Atlit, which is hungry for a woman. Any woman.”
“I won’t deny that.” He grinned and waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, then pretended
to balance a cigar between his thumb and forefinger. Shayndel couldn’t keep from smiling,
but as she walked away from him, she was overcome with the same inexplicable sadness
she had felt on the day she arrived in Palestine.
Setting foot on the soil of Israel had been a terrible disappointment—nothing at all
like her dream of what the moment would be like. She might as well have arrived in
Australia, for all the emotion she felt. There had been a small crowd on the beach
that morning, waving and shouting, “Shalom.” Others had wept for joy and kissed the
ground. They had sung Zionist songs until they were hoarse, but Shayndel had been
silent. She wanted to be as happy and as grateful as they appeared to be, but the
only gratitude she felt at that moment was for having Leonie to care for.
And yet, this David had managed to touch her. He was funny and smart and his touch
had been electric. He had called Wolfe and Malka out of the grave, suddenly alive
and laughing. Not the bloody corpses she had fled from, running through the snow to
save her own life. By naming them, he made her remember them, sparring and joking,
always six paces ahead of her on their long legs, glancing back over their shoulders
and telling her hurry, Shayndel, hurry. She would have to ask David if he had known
Wolfe as a boy. She wondered
what else he knew about her and what she needed to know about him.
In the dining hall that evening, Shayndel waved at Leonie but walked past their usual
table to sit among the new arrivals and listen to the story of their journey and capture.
They had suffered a rough crossing, caught in one storm after another. Everyone was
bruised from the heaving and tossing, and one fellow had broken a wrist. There had
been three sleepless days and nights before they sighted the shores of Eretz Yisrael,
and then, after a British ship stopped them, they were forced to spend another day
on board, stewing in the sun. When the English sailors tried to climb aboard, those
who were able resisted with sticks and shovels until a canister of tear gas landed
on deck, and a dozen people had to be carried off on stretchers.
“They said they were taking them to the hospital,” said a young Lithuanian man with
thick, sand-colored curls. “Not that I believe that for a minute.”
Shayndel said, “It’s likely that they did go to the hospital, unless they were suspected
as spies.”
“Spies?” he said bitterly. “Two pregnant women and some cripples?”
“The Jewish Agency will look after them, then,” Shayndel said. “You seem to know a
lot about the people on your ship.”
“What if I do?”
“I’m just wondering about the girl they put in my barrack. She looked so thin and
wasted. She fell asleep and we couldn’t wake her to come to dinner. I hear she’s German.”
At that moment, David walked over and put out his hand
to the boy Shayndel was quizzing. David had big, warm eyes, Shayndel thought, and
she saw that he was losing his hair even though they were probably the same age.
“I am David Gruen. And you are?”
“Hirsch Guttman, from Kovno.”
“Well, Hirsch Guttman from Kovno, don’t get any ideas about this girl: she’s mine.”
“She’s the one who approached me, brother,” said Hirsch.
David smiled at Shayndel. “No matter,” he said. “I trust her. I’ll see you later,
beloved.”
“What do you want to know about Hetty?” asked Hirsch.
“Hetty?”
“The German girl you were asking about. She’s a good egg. Luckier than most. She spent
the whole war in Berlin working as a maid for some rich family that had no idea she
was Jewish. She speaks perfect German, and she had some of the best false papers you’ve
ever seen. Even her Yiddish sounds like high German. On the boat, they gave her a
real grilling to prove she was a Jew. Can you imagine? But she recited all the Sabbath
blessings and she knew all the words from every Passover song anyone could come up
with.”
“So you think she’s all right?” Shayndel asked.
His eyes grew cold. “I know what this is all about,” he said. “On the boat she got
sick with a fever and was ranting in her sleep, in German, of course. One of those
thickheaded Poles started saying that she was a Nazi. What a schmuck. Is that why
you’re asking about her?”
“Goodness, no,” Shayndel said. “I was just wondering because, well, she looked so
tired. You’ll find out that Atlit is full of gossip. Don’t worry about Hetty.”
“All right,” he said, looking at Shayndel with new interest.
“So what’s the story with you and that Gruen fellow? Do I have a chance?”
“A chance at what?” Shayndel said, adding, “You moron,” in Hebrew, as she got up.
Back in her usual seat beside Leonie, she asked, “Are you feeling better?”
“I’m fine.”
“Did you talk to the nurse?”
“Yes,” Leonie said, relieved she did not have to lie to Shayndel about that, at least.
After breakfast, Leonie had waited to go to the latrine until she thought she might
have a few minutes alone there. The pain in her abdomen was getting worse, and she
was afraid that soon she wouldn’t be able to keep it to herself; she had nearly doubled
over at breakfast. Leonie sat with her head in her hands until she heard someone else
come in and left, determined to get some medicine.
The building that housed the infirmary had once been used for storage, but the Jewish
Agency had plastered the walls and put in a new wood floor, making the place seem
airy and modern by comparison with everything else in Atlit. Six hospital cots made
up with starched white linen stood at crisp attention along the right-hand wall; on
the left were a desk, a few cabinets, and an examining room partitioned off with an
old parachute hung from the rafters.
Leonie was greeted with a warm, “Good morning, sweetie,” from the regular weekday
nurse, Aliza Gilad. “I’m glad you’re here early; the children are coming in for inoculations.”
Within days of arriving in Atlit, Leonie had presented herself
as a volunteer at the clinic, claiming that she had always wanted to become a nurse.
Aliza made it clear that she had little confidence in someone as young—and pretty—as
Leonie and assigned her only menial tasks: mopping the floor, carrying out garbage,
and washing metal instruments in alcohol. But Leonie proved herself well-suited to
the work of the sick bay. She didn’t flinch at the sight of blood or vomit, and she
was good with crying children, calm and reassuring with their distraught mothers,
too. Aliza began trusting her with more responsibilities and came to treat Leonie
as a protégée.
Leonie was glad to have a way to fill the long days and for Aliza’s growing warmth
toward her. But she had been bitterly disappointed to find that all of the drugs—even
the aspirin—were kept under lock and key. There was no way she would ever “find” a
dose of penicillin.
“Is Dr. Gerson coming today?” Leonie asked as she put on her apron. After meeting
all of the physicians who made regular visits, she had decided to approach one of
the two female doctors—a reserved and closed-mouthed Swiss.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing her anymore,” Aliza said. “She’s got a big job in Tel
Aviv.”
“That’s nice for her, yes?” Leonie said, trying to hide her disappointment.
“Why did you want Dr. Gerson?” Aliza asked, as she readied a vaccine. “Do you need
something? Is there something I can do?”
“No,” Leonie said. “I was just thinking about, well, studying pediatrics. I wanted
to see what she thought of that.”
Aliza lowered her voice and asked, “Are you pregnant?”
“No.”
“A venereal disease, then.”
Leonie flinched.
“Don’t worry,” said Aliza. “And don’t think you’re the only
one. You’d never guess who I’ve dosed in this place, including some of the girls you
know. Even staff.” She put a hand on Leonie’s arm and added, “Not that I would ever
tell.”
The door flew open and a flock of children marched in, shepherded by three teenage
volunteers from a nearby kibbutz. The girls were trying to get the little ones to
sing the alphabet in Hebrew, though some were barely old enough to walk.
Aliza melted at the sight of them. “Delicious,” she crooned. “Sweet as honey. I could
eat you all up. Look at those cheeks. Like apples. Like plums.”
Leonie thought it was a good thing that the children didn’t know enough Hebrew to
understand what she was saying, otherwise, they might have thought that the plump
woman with the odd bun and the yellow teeth wanted to devour them, like the witch
in Hansel and Gretel.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Aliza, as she readied the hypodermics. “We’ll take care of
your little problem after we finish with the babies.”
Leonie was relieved and mortified. As much as she hated for Aliza to know about her
problem, at least she would be cured before Shayndel grew more suspicious.
The first little girl to get a shot burst into shrill tears, which set the entire
group to wailing. Their cries grew louder and more inconsolable, and nothing, not
even the promise of candy, could make them stop. Each child struggled and shrieked
more than the one before and Leonie began to feel like a monster, pinning arms back
as Aliza came at them with the needle. Finally, the last one was inoculated and the
children were led out, tears drying on their cheeks as they sucked on lollipops from
America.
“I saved two red ones for us,” said Aliza, putting one into her mouth as she offered
the other to Leonie. They tidied the
room in silence, white paper sticks between their lips. Leonie glanced at the nurse,
hoping she would return to the conversation about her problem, when a half dozen sweaty
boys barged in, all shouting at the same time—a shrill mishmash of Yiddish, Hebrew,
Polish, and Romanian.
At the center of the racket was a pale, slender child whose face was covered in blood.
“He fell making the goal,” said one of the older boys. “I told them he was too small
to play with us, but he whined and begged until we let him. And then he fell and he
hit his head.”
“Where is he?” came a woman’s voice from outside. “Danny? Are you all right?”
Leonie didn’t recognize her at first. Tirzah must have been washing her hair, which
was still damp and hung halfway down her back, brown with golden streaks. In the kitchen,
it was all bundled into a thick black net, which made her look older and more severe
than the beautiful, distraught woman reaching for her son.
“I will not have this madness in my clinic,” said Aliza, at the top of her lungs.
“Leonie, get rid of these wild animals right now.”
Leonie grabbed the box of lollipops and waved it over the boys’ heads. “Outside for
a treat,” she announced, and they followed, as eager and as docile as the toddlers.
When she returned, Danny was lying on a cot with Tirzah beside him, her hand on a
large white compress covering most of his forehead.
“It was just a little cut,” Aliza said to Leonie. “It only looked bad because it was
on the scalp, which always bleeds like crazy.”
Tirzah frowned, dubious about the nurse’s breezy diagnosis. Then again, she frowned
about almost everything.
The inmates were glad when Tirzah’s son visited from a
kibbutz somewhere in the south. Danny’s monthly trips meant there would be a cake
at least once during his stay. His presence also spiced up conversations at meals,
as newcomers engaged in ever-more-outlandish speculations about the chilly woman who
ran the kitchen for the Jewish Agency. She wore no wedding ring; did that mean Danny
was a bastard? Perhaps she was a widow. Or maybe her husband divorced her for the
way she oversalted her soup—or for fooling around with another man.
Danny was a sweet kid, a skinny seven-year-old who had his run of the camp and spent
his days playing with whatever children happened to be there. When they were very
young, he organized games of jacks or tag, but when there was a group of boys his
age or older, he pushed himself into their races and matches.