By the third day, the two of them had recovered enough to sit up between meals. They kept very still, huddled together, but Zorah heard them whispering in a Polish dialect she recognized from her Warsaw neighbors who had been brought up in the country—people her father had called peasants, spitting out the word like a curse.
The mother’s name was Esther Zalinksy. The little boy, Jacob, clung to her like an infant, even though he was as big as a five-or six-year-old. He might have been older; it was hard to tell with children stunted by hunger and fear.
Zorah watched them during meals. Jacob never looked in the direction of the other children. Esther ran her hand through his brittle black hair. “You are my good boy,” she murmured, “my own good boy.”
He gazed up at her with such naked adoration, Zorah began to suspect that he was slow, the way her brother had been slow. But then she overheard him translate the Hebrew for “bread” and “light” and “nurse,” but only into Polish, never Yiddish.
There were other refugees in Atlit who did not speak the Jewish mother tongue, but they were from places like Holland and Italy, where Jewish communities were small and more assimilated; or else they were French or Hungarian and from wealthy families who had worked hard to distance themselves from their uncultured, Eastern European past. But in Poland, Yiddish was the first language of every Jew, no matter how educated or rich.
When Esther and Jacob finally ventured out of the barrack, Zorah muttered, “Good riddance,” and opened her book. But she was too restless to concentrate, and started wondering where they had gone.
She walked to the latrine and then circled Delousing, until she spotted Esther and Jacob sitting on a bench in the sun. Zorah took a place at the other end and turned her back toward them, pretending to be lost in her book as she eavesdropped.
Esther worried and fussed over Jacob: Did the cheese agree with his stomach? Had he moved his bowels that day? Was he too hot? Could she get him water? Where were his shoes?
Esther returned again and again to the subject of Jacob’s bare feet. Even though many of the other children in Atlit went shoeless, she fretted that he would hurt himself, or that the other women would think her remiss for letting him run wild.
“I cannot wear them,” he said, as she tied his shoes again. “They are too small. Please, Mama. They hurt me.”
“I must find a way to get you some proper shoes,” said Esther. “If only I wasn’t so stupid with languages. You must ask for us.”
Zorah thought them an odd pair. Though Esther’s looks were faded, she had once been a pretty girl, blue-eyed and fair, with a button of a nose and round cheeks. The boy was dark-haired and sallow, with a narro
w face and a long nose. His fingers were thin and long while hers were like sausages.
He must favor his father in everything, thought Zorah. And then it occurred to her that Esther might not be a Jew at all. She could have been the maid in a prosperous Jewish home; liaisons like that were common enough. Sometimes they ended with a dismissal and an envelope of cash. Sometimes, when there was real feeling, there was a rushed trip to the mikveh, a secret wedding, and a blue-eyed baby.
Once this suspicion took root, Zorah kept a greater distance between herself and Esther. She stayed inside with her books again, and when either Jacob or Esther took a chair beside her in the dining hall, she moved to the other end of the table.
After witnessing this at lunch one day, Tedi followed her outside and asked, “Why are you avoiding Esther?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“She keeps looking at you. She must want something, perhaps only to talk. But you run away from her and the boy like they have measles or something.”
“I didn’t know that you could read minds,” Zorah said. “But I have no reason to avoid her or to talk to her. I could care less.”
“Is it because she is not Jewish?” Tedi said.
“Did she tell you that?”
“All you have to do is look at her.”
“That is funny coming from you, who look like a—”
“I look like my grandmother,” said Tedi. “She was a good Dutch Lutheran. Even so, I am a Jew.”
“And she is not?” Zorah asked.
Tedi shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“So why is she here?”
“For the boy, I imagine. But there is no reason to be unkind to her. Just because she is not Jewish doesn’t mean she is stupid. And the child sees everything. They need a friend in this place and you speak the language.”
“There are plenty of other people here who speak Polish,” said Zorah, putting an end to the conversation. “Go ask one of them.”
That night, Zorah lay awake for hours listening to the high, thin whistle of Jacob’s breath. He was lying on Esther’s bed, where he often slept, curled around her legs like a puppy.