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?”
Aliza laughed. “They fight about everything.”
“Even pineapples?”
“Mostly they argue about politics,” Aliza said. “This time, Ofer was yelling about the British and how it’s time to throw them out, once and for all. He calls them occupiers now, and started banging on the table about how the Palmach has to stand up to them for what’s going on up north. He’s furious at the English for shooting at the refugees crossing the border over the mountains.”
“But isn’t Ofer the one who loves everything English? The one with the pipe and the teapot?”
Aliza laughed. “I must talk about them too much.”
“I like hearing about your family,” Leonie said. “But tell me, the Palmach … is that separate from Haganah?”
“Not separate. Palmach is part of the Haganah. In fact, the British trained the Palmach unit to defend Palestine against the Germans,” said Aliza. “But now they fight for the Yishuv—the Jews of Palestine, all of whom are united in support of you. Oh, not just you, Leonie. No need to blush.
“I mean all of you immigrants. You are real miracle-workers, believe me. In Eretz Yisrael, where we disagree about everything—including pineapples—everyone agrees that the Jews of Europe must be able to come here. There is no solution but to burn that damned White Paper and make good on the promises of the Balfour Declaration.”
Aliza had never spoken with such passion about politics before. Leonie shrugged apologetically. “I understand the words,” she said. “But what is the White Paper? Balfour? I’m sorry to be so stupid, but I don’t know—”
Aliza interrupted. “Don’t apologize. You were just a baby when this was decided. Look at you.” She shook her head. “You’re still a child. All you need to know is that in 1917, the English foreign secretary, Balfour, wrote a letter that promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. It was a promise that they went back on in 1939, when they put handcuffs on Jewish immigration with a document called the White Paper.”
Aliza folded the newspaper and slipped it back into her pocket. “If they had kept their word, we could have saved so many lives. It makes me sick just thinking about it. There are a million survivors still in Germany. And I heard that the Allies are starting to lock them up inside the death camps. This is beyond imagining.
“My uncle is right,” Aliza said. “Quotas and blockades will not stop us. And the truth is, the English have always preferred the Arabs to the Jews. In fact, they are anti-Semites, though there are exceptions, of course,” she said. “Like our little commandant here in Atlit.
“But enough politics for today,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’m going over to the kitchen and see if I can get a lemon or an orange so I can show you how to give an injection.” She put her hand under Leonie’s chin and smiled. “I suppose you’ll get married right away. But it’s always good to have a trade, just in case.”
Leonie watched her go, overwhelmed by affection. Aliza seemed happiest when she was taking care of others, or telling them what to do. She never complained and seemed content with her life. Leonie wondered about the heavy gold earrings that she wore every day—her only adornment. Maybe they were a gift from her husband, or perhaps they had belonged to her mother. Aliza never mentioned children; Leonie wondered if she couldn’t have any, or if she’d lost sons during the war.
Despite all the time they spent together, the two women knew almost nothing about each other. Leonie was too shy to inquire, and there was an unspoken rule against asking survivors about their experiences.
Leonie stood up and went back inside the infirmary. It might be an hour before Aliza returned; as much as the nurse disapproved of Tirzah’s affair with Colonel Bryce, they seemed to have plenty to talk about. Leonie wandered between the cots, looking for something to do. She had already cleaned up after the morning’s roster of ills: a bad splinter, coughs, rashes, constipation, diarrhea, and chest pain that turned out to be indigestion. Starvation and malnutrition followed by abundant fruits and vegetables made for a lot of stomach trouble.
The little clinic was busiest when a group of new immigrants arrived. Doctors and extra nurses would appear for a day of physical examinations, inoculations, and paperwork. The seriously ill were taken to hospital immediately, leaving only cases of simple dehydration, sunburn, cuts, and sprained ankles for the regular nurses. Many days, Aliza and her colleagues did little more than bandage scrapes, give enemas, and dose the children with vile-tasting fish oil.
Leonie was sweeping under the cots when Aliza rushed through the door, her arm around a red-faced girl, clutching her belly. Three more women ran in behind them, all of them talking at once.
“Leonie, lay out the rubber sheet behind the curtain there and bring some towels. And the surgical kit,” Aliza ordered. “You girls, come and help me get her up on the table.
“All right now, Elka,” she said, sternly, “how far along are you?”
“I was due last week,” she panted. “The women in my family carry small.”
“You should have told me as soon as you got here,” Aliza grumbled, as she draped a sheet over Elka’s legs.
“I didn’t tell anyone. They wouldn’t have let me on the boat if they knew I was so far along. But I didn’t care. I wanted my baby born in Palestine. No one was going to stop me. No one.” She gasped as the next contraction grabbed her and her face turned scarlet again.
“Don’t hold your breath,” said Aliza. “You can make all the noise you want to.” Elka obeyed immediately with a bellow that sent her friends into peals of laughter.
Tirzah arrived with a steaming kettle of water, and Aliza sent Leonie back to the kitchen with her to fetch more. A crowd had already gathered outside, waiting for news and pacing like an extended family—even though no one knew the mother’s name.
“How much longer, do you think?” someone asked Leonie as she rushed by.
“Who wants to bet it’s a boy?”
Tirzah lit the burner under a big pot of water, and chased Leonie out into the mess hall to pace until it boiled. Fifteen impossibly long minutes later, she carried the pot back through the waiting crowd, where no one was smiling.
“What’s going on?” someone asked her. “It got awfully quiet all of a sudden.”
Leonie rushed inside and felt as though she’d walked into a tomb. The stillness was so profound, for a moment, she thought she was alone. But as her eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight
, Aliza materialized, leaning over a blood-streaked doll laid out on a towel, massaging the tiny chest, then stooping to place her lips over the baby’s nose and mouth. Elka’s eyes were squeezed shut, and though her friends held her, her legs shook so violently that the table below her rattled. The room stank of blood and shit.
The pot of hot water slipped out of Leonie’s hands and crashed to the floor. The women around Elka jumped, but Aliza seemed not to have heard the noise as she whispered into the baby’s ear between breaths. Elka started to whimper. The wall clock tapped out a dry dirge, more terrible every second.
Until a faint, husky mew rose from beneath Aliza’s hands. “Good girl!” she said gently. “Let me hear you.” She picked up the baby and laughed as the cries grew louder and more human. “Ten fingers, ten toes. You have a beautiful daughter,” Aliza crowed, as she swabbed the baby clean, wrapped her in a towel, and placed her in Elka’s arms.
“Mazel tov, little mother. Look what a pretty mouth she has. Have you picked a name?”
“Aliyah Zion.”
“Beautiful!” Aliza approved.
Leonie asked, “What does it mean exactly?”
“It means ‘coming up into the land of Israel,’” Elka said.
“And the family name?” asked Aliza, who had laid a fresh sheet over Elka’s legs and was cleaning her up beneath it.
“The family name is Zion.”
“That is your husband’s surname?”
“Don’t speak of him,” Elka spat.
Aliza dropped her head, assuming he was dead. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be sorry. He’s alive, though if I ever see him again, I may remedy that situation.”
“You don’t mean that,” said one of Elka’s friends.
“Don’t I?” she said. “He should have been here. He could have gotten on the boat with me, but his mother wanted to wait for a bigger ship. A better ship. And he decided to stay with her instead of coming with me? He can go to hell. Surely there is someone in Palestine who has a backbone. Someone who doesn’t have a goddamned mother!”
Her words hung in the air like a dark cloud, as the clock scolded, tsk, tsk.
Elka’s friends turned their faces away from her, and she began to wail, clutching the baby’s face to her chest so tightly that Aliza rushed forward and pried the bundle out of her arms.
“Gently, little mother,” she said. “Leonie, take the baby outside for a moment. Show everyone that she is well, but don’t let anyone touch her. And for God’s sake, put a smile on your face.”
The crowd pushed forward, surrounding her and praising the bow-shaped lips, the tiny fingers, the thatch of golden brown hair. But Elka’s sobs were growing louder and more desperate. “Mama!” she screamed suddenly. “Where is my mama? Why doesn’t she come?”
Leonie brought the baby inside but Elka did not stop crying, and refused to hold her child. Aliza tried to calm her with tea and then with brandy. She offered gentle reassurances and then scolded her about her duty to the child. Nothing worked—not even her own baby’s inconsolable howls. Finally, Aliza gave Elka a sedative and fed the baby a bottle.
The following morning, Elka was unchanged. No matter what anyone said or did, no matter how loud the baby cried, she would not even look in her direction.
On the second day, Leonie recognized the dull, unfocused gaze in Elka’s eyes as the one she had seen on a girl who had pulled out her own hair by the handful, and on the man who would not get out of bed. A few of the so-called crazy ones raged and ranted, but most were listless and empty, like Elka.
Aliza lost patience with those cases quickly, certain that they were the victims of their own weakness and not any real disease. She gave Elka the benefit of the doubt for an extra day, but after seventy-two hours with a screaming baby and a completely indifferent mother, she asked for “Dr. Nonsense,” which is what she called the psychiatrist.
Dr. Nonsense was Simone Hammermesch, an elegant Belgian woman with white hair, manicured hands, and a half-dozen languages at her disposal. She pulled up a chair beside Elka’s bed and took her hand, waiting quietly for an hour before saying a word. Then she leaned close and murmured in soft, reassuring, motherly tones, until Elka seemed to relax a little. Still she said nothing.
Leonie watched the doctor work but hoped that Elka would not succumb to her kind, hypnotic voice; that she would get out of bed without letting slip the secret that had laid her low.
Dr. Nonsense was persistent and patient, but after two long sessions at the bedside, all she managed to get out of Elka was, “Leave me alone.”
She sighed, patted her snowy chignon, and got to her feet and called for Aliza. “Please get the patient dressed and bring her to my car. I’ll call the maternity ward about the baby.”
After they left, Aliza helped Leonie make up the cot with fresh sheets. “Don’t worry,” she said. “After a little rest, Elka will be tip-top. Someday, you’ll run into her on a street corner and you’ll go for a cup of coffee and laugh about this whole thing. She might not even remember it happened. I’ve seen this before, many times.
“Now go get me a syringe, won’t you, dear?” she said, taking a small orange out of her string bag. “I haven’t forgotten about showing you how to give a shot.”
The next day, Leonie stayed away from the infirmary, lying in bed with a pillow pulled to her belly so that the others would think she was suffering from cramps.
“I don’t know how you stand going there day after day,” Shayndel said, sitting beside Leonie after the others had gone to breakfast. “The sight of blood alone does me in. Don’t you find it depressing being with sick people? The pain, the wounds, the scars, the smells. Ugh.”
Leonie shrugged. In fact, she envied the ones with wounds and scars and even, God help her, the ones with the numbers on their arms. No one asked those people why they were furious or miserable, why they refused to dance the hora, why they did not grab for the candy bars sent from America. Everything was permitted and forgiven them, at least as long as they dressed and took their meals and kept their stories to themselves.
Leonie’s skin was unblemished. She had not hidden in a Polish sewer or shivered in a Russian barn. She had not seen her parents shot. Atlit was her first experience of barracks and barbwire. She had survived the war without suffering hunger or thirst. There had been wine and hashish and a pink satin coverlet to muffle her terrors.
Near the end of December in 1942, at five in the evening it was already dark on the Paris streets. Leonie rounded the corner, holding the lapels on her coat so that no one could see the yellow star. She was on her way home, to the apartment she shared with her uncle and cousin in a run-down corner of a district where Jews were rare. Her uncle had bribed someone so they didn’t have to wear the badge at first, but after a change in the police department, they had been forced to register. Leonie hated the way people stared at her now, and when she felt an arm slip through the crook of her elbow, she nearly screamed, certain she was about to be arrested.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Madame Clos, the tobacconist’s wife. “The Germans have been to your apartment. They took your cousin and your uncle. I’ve been watching out for you. Come with me.”
Madame Clos was a tall woman and Leonie had to run to keep up with her. They hurried toward her building on the far end of the block. Leonie knew that she would never see her uncle or cousin again; after the brutal roundup of thirteen thousand at the Velodrome the previous summer, no one believed they were being “evacuated.” There was no “resettlement.” No “work camps.”
Leonie followed Madame up steep flights to the top floor, trying to muster a little pity for the only family she had. Even as a young boy, her cousin had been horrible to her. “You’re a little bastard,” he would smirk, echoing his father. “And your mother wasn’t even smart enough to get knocked up by a rich man.”
When she was seven years old, Auntie Renata—her mother’s sister—had walked out on Uncle Mannis, a pett
y criminal and a gambler. When Leonie started to grow breasts, her uncle leered and pinched. “It helps them grow,” he said with a smile that made her stomach drop. He opened the door to her room when she dressed in the morning, and laughed when she told him she kept a knife under her pillow. The week Leonie turned fifteen, she got a job in a candy factory and stayed at work as long and late as she could.
Breathless after the sixth set of steps, she waited as Madame Clos rummaged for her keys and unlocked an enormous wooden door. She dropped her bag in the foyer and led Leonie into a room crowded with furniture: large, dark sideboards, bookcases, and far too many chairs. Heavy red drapes covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, making the place feel like a theater. The silk flower arrangements added a funereal note. On the couch, three pale girls sat in a row, wearing crocheted shawls over short silk slips.
Madame Clos put her arm around Leonie. “Let me present my nieces, who have come to live with me in these dark days: Christine, Marie-France, and Simone.”
Simone, Leonie remembered, was a redhead.
Tirzah
The tap on the door was barely audible, but Tirzah had been keeping an eye on the time. At five minutes past midnight, the guards were settling in for the start of the second watch, but the Jewish holidays had disrupted schedules everywhere in Atlit, and it had been nearly a month since Bryce had slipped into her room.
He arrived, as always, trailing the scent of talc and Bay Rum. He had told her that it was the commonest cologne in the world, but it was new to her, which delighted him. Just as it pleased her to have given him a nickname, something he never had before. These were the gifts they gave each other, the only kind they could give.
The room was dark, except for a candle, but even in the shadows they were shy about looking directly at each other. Bryce took Tirzah’s hand and kissed a small crescent-shaped scar at the base of her right thumb, grateful for the knowledge of its provenance—a burn from a loaf of bread she had baked as a child in her grandmother’s kitchen.