Some of the boys started singing the last words, oseh shalom, picking up the tempo and transforming it into a folk song. They kicked away the chairs, grabbed one another and started dancing in a tight circle, arms around each other’s shoulders and moving so fast that the smallest boys were lifted off their feet and carried along, shrieking.
After a while, they started singing a new song, a modern Hebrew hymn extolling the bricklayers who build a new state. Zorah joined in, willing to praise miracles made with human hands.
“I never heard you sing before,” said a familiar voice at her ear.
Zorah did not turn around. Meyer moved closer and asked, “Did you miss me?”
“Only when I was dying for a smoke,” she said.
“I thought about you all the time,” said Meyer.
“I assumed you were with your family—your wife and children.”
“I am not married, Zorah. I had to go home to make arrangements for my sister. My mother died last year and my father can’t take care of Nili, or he won’t be bothered. She is Mongoloid. Do you know what that means? She is twenty but with the mind of a little child. I cannot care for her so I took her to a place for women like her in Jerusalem. It was clean and pleasant, but I know that my poor mother is turning in her grave. What else could I do?
“I’m here only to see you,” he said, close enough for Zorah to feel the heat of his body and smell the sour breath of his Yom Kippur fast. “I won’t be coming to Atlit anymore, but I am going to write to you. I don’t expect you to answer, and even if you want to, I’m not sure I’ll be able to receive letters. This way, you don’t have to pretend you’re indifferent to me, and I can pretend that you are not.”
The singing had stopped and the crowd was moving quickly toward the dining hall.
“I wish I could send you cigarettes,” Meyer said, slipping a packet into her hand. “But they would only get stolen. Still, whenever you get a letter, you should know that I was thinking about sending a whole carton of Chesterfields. I am a romantic, right?”
Zorah fought the urge to face him, to wish him well, to say good-bye.
“Pray a little for my safety, will you, Zorah?” said Meyer. “I will kiss you good night wherever I am.”
Zorah heard him walk away and counted to thirty before she turned. He had reached the gate. Without turning or looking back, he raised his hand to wave. As though he knew she would be watching.
The Clinic
It was late in the afternoon, and the infirmary was so quiet that Leonie and Aliza had dragged their chairs outside. “Soon the days will be much cooler,” said Aliza, handing a cigarette to Leonie. “It isn’t even two weeks until October.”
“October,” Leonie echoed. The cloudless skies and wilting heat had erased her sense of time. In Atlit, new faces appeared almost every day, like leaves in spring, and then scattered, sometimes within a matter of hours. The days dragged, yet somehow the weeks flew. Two months had passed since her arrival, and soon she would witness a change of season.
Leonie could no longer remember all of the women who had passed through her barrack. Some of the recent arrivals had included the weakest and sickest she had seen; they landed within days of a convoy of strapping girls who had spent the war in England. Healthy or ill, it seemed that everyone was in transit—nearly everyone.
Whenever she saw another truckload of refugees leaving Atlit, waving and singing, Leonie felt like a leper in quarantine. Sometimes, she wondered if she was under suspicion. Had someone discovered how she spent those last two years in Paris? Would they send a policeman to shave her head and drag her back to France?
But that fear did not keep Leonie awake at night. She assumed that her situation was simply a matter of fate. Life was unplanned, purely random. That was the only logical explanation for why Shayndel was stranded in Atlit. In a rational universe, Shayndel, the partisan heroine, would have been released immediately and given a medal for her cou
rage during the war. Tedi, the tall, well-liked blonde, should have been settled on a blooming kibbutz weeks ago. As for Zorah, she was no worse than dozens of bitter survivors who had come and gone. Leonie knew that there was nothing sinister or sacred about their predicament—it was just bad luck.
She looked up from the yellow dust on her shoes to the brittle thorns in the fields outside the fence. Atlit was dull and dimly frightening, but unlike everyone else, she was not desperate to leave. As long as she was here, she did not have to make decisions and was free from disasters of her own creation. Besides, she knew it was only a momentary respite and that soon, without warning, she would lose Shayndel and Aliza, the only people in the world who cared what happened to her.
Leonie handed the cigarette back to Aliza and asked, “Did you bring the newspaper?” The nurse nodded and unfolded the broadsheet she had in her pocket. She had to smuggle the papers into camp; the British preferred to keep the immigrants ignorant of the conflicts swirling around them, though of course, the news seeped in daily in spite of regulations.
Aliza ran her eyes up and down the front page, searching for a story to read aloud. She stuck to pieces about milk production, or reviews of plays and concerts, or heartwarming accounts of holiday festivities; nothing she thought might cause Leonie to frown or, God forbid, weep.
Leonie no longer had to ask Aliza to slow down as she read. As long as people didn’t mumble or speak too fast, she understood what they said. The written word was another story; on the page, she could barely puzzle out “pioneer,” which had been one of the first Hebrew words she learned in the DP camp. Two eager young men from Palestine had pursued her and spoken with breathless passion about how she could take part in building a homeland. She was enchanted by the promise of a fresh start and by the idea that she was needed.
But from the moment Leonie had gotten on the boat, she knew that she had added a new fraud to her portfolio. She was surrounded by people who knew the lyrics to countless Zionist songs and seemed to have the map of Palestine committed to memory. After two months, Leonie was still confused about the geography of the country. Was Jerusalem on the other side of the mountains in the east? Was it cold in the north of the country? Could it possibly be any hotter in the south? She was too ashamed to ask anyone.
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?”