Tirzah put both her hands on his freshly shaved face and imagined him at his mirror, preparing for her. He moved closer so she could feel the heat under his pressed shirt. Then it was up to her—it was always up to her—to lean toward him, to give him her mouth, to blow out the candle, to take off her robe and let him surprise her, as he always did, with his tongue and his fingers everywhere. They lost themselves on the narrow cot so quietly and so slowly, it was as if they were dreaming themselves inside one another’s skin. They did not so much kiss as inhale each other’s panted breath until they broke apart, spent and breathless.
Usually she was the one to doze for a few moments after they made love, but this time Bryce fell asleep. Tirzah tucked her arm under him and pulled closer, feeling the bones of his spine against her belly and chest. She ran her tongue over her teeth and tasted his toothpaste. She brushed her cheek against his thinning hair and savored his Bay Rum.
Everyone in Atlit knew about their affair. The other officers winked at her, managing to be both lewd and respectful at the same time. The nurses and teachers had made it abundantly clear how distasteful they found her “sacrifice.” Tirzah despised her countrymen’s hypocrisy about sex. Virginity was not quite the all-important prize it had once been—especially not among the young Socialists of the Yishuv. In Palestine, it was considered patriotic to open your legs for young men of fighting age; yet, if an unmarried girl had the bad luck to get pregnant, she could be demoted or even fired from a job. And if a woman was unofficially “encouraged” to seduce an enemy officer who could provide important information in the struggle for the home-land, well, the sooner that sort of thing was over and hushed up the better.
The real secret about Tirzah’s affair with the colonel was wrapped in the cotton wool of expediency. Sleeping with the enemy was an odious but justifiable means to a Zionist end, but falling in love with such a man verged on the treasonous.
Tirzah had been completely unprepared for that possibility and was still a little shocked whenever she caught sight of Bryce during the day. He was far too short and fair for her, an entirely different species from the men she’d been attracted to in the past. Watching him walk across the compound, she had to stop herself from laughing at the idea that the great love of her life had turned out to be a middle-aged, ginger-haired bantam from a place with a name that sounded like a sneeze or a brand of whiskey. Cardiff.
No one would suspect the passion hidden behind his formality, or his talents as a lover, or his belief in the justice of the Jewish claim in Palestine. Tirzah’s superiors pretended that every last Brit was a closet Nazi, which made it easier to do anything and everything to chase them out of the country and claim it as their own. But that story had nothing to do with her Johnny.
Eight months earlier, when the Palmach sent her to spy in Atlit, she had thought him the image of a narrow-minded, buttoned-down Englishman. But then he opened his mouth and addressed her in complete and grammatical Hebrew sentences. When he pronounced her name properly, she had blushed. That caused him to stare and stammer. And so it began.
Mostly, they spoke Hebrew, but he told her in English that he loved her. She had no reason to doubt him. Everything else he had ever said to her had been true. Bryce would let her know when a new group of refugees was due to arrive, whether by train or by bus. When trains pulled in at night, he neglected to assign enough men to guard the inmates as they made their way from the end of the tracks, around the fence, and to the gate. Helpers and spies embedded in the transports managed to spirit away dozens of “black” immigrants—ones without papers—hiding them in the fields before they could be counted. She had kept count, and Bryce had been responsible for the escape of at least seventy-five refugees.
He had once tried to translate an American turn of phrase about the British strategy on Jewish immigration; “closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.” Tirzah had laughed at the expression, which sounded absurd in Hebrew. The image stayed with her, though. She imagined herself as a lone horse trotting off into the distance, wondering where to go.
She wondered if Bryce knew about her disastrous marriage. He knew a lot about her, mostly because he asked. Where did she grow up? Did she play with dolls as a little girl or did she climb trees? Did she like to read? Which of her schoolteachers did she remember? When she answered—whispering as though relating state secrets—he kept perfectly still, memorizing every word. He probably knew a good deal more about her from her dossier, too. It wouldn’t be hard to connect her to the Palmach; indeed, most of what she knew about Bryce came from their files: A career officer, he was well liked by his men but lacked the sort of ambition that would have avoided a dead-end posting like Atlit. The woman in the photograph on his desk was his wife, though Tirzah had yet to discover her name. Their sons, however, she knew were George and Peter, both of whom had enlisted in the RAF. George had been killed early in the war, flying a mission over Germany.
At unpredictable moments in her day—writing lists, peeling vegetables, washing a countertop—Tirzah would recall the insistent gentleness of his hands on her sex, the firmness of his mouth on her breast, the fondness in his voice when he spoke about her son, Danny. These furtive attacks of joy took her breath away, and for the first time in her life she uttered the prayer that thanks God for small blessings. And in the next breath, she cursed the God who would let happiness bloom on such a doomed stalk.
Bryce woke up and turned over. “Sorry,” he said, and put his finger to her lips. “What is the Hebrew word for ‘bittersweet’?”
“Ha,” Tirzah said. “Our first cliché.”
He flinched. Had the bed been any larger he would have pulled away from her, but there was nowhere to go, so he kept still. It would be another hour before the next change of the guards, when he could leave without being seen. After a long pause he asked, “Danny is coming tomorrow, isn’t he?”
Tirzah heard the forgiveness in his voice and wondered if his feelings for Danny had anything to do with the loss of his son.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ve gotten some of that toffee he likes. I’ll bring it to the kitchen.”
Bryce would stay away from her room until the boy left, but he didn’t mind these brief separations. When Danny was in camp, Tirzah’s eyes seemed to absorb the light, and the lines around her mouth grew softer. He wished he could do more than bring candy to her son, something more for her, too. He daydreamed about getting her an apartment in Tel Aviv like some of the other officers had done for their girls. They could be together for more than three hours at a time; they could share a meal and watch the sun set.
But even as he imagined the scene, he knew it would never happen. Tirzah was not that kind of woman, and he wasn’t sure what would happen between them if he asked for anything more than what they shared in her airless little room. Perhaps the facade of her affection would crack. As much as he wanted to believe that she cared for him, as much as he thought he could feel it in her mouth and see it on her face, he would never be completely certain of her feelings.
They were long past pretending about their part in the drama that was unfolding in Palestine. She asked bald-faced questions about camp operations, down to the assignment of sentries and patrols. He answered her in detail, a willing coconspirator.
Bryce hated his assignment in Atlit. He thought it was outrageous to keep these people locked up like criminals, especially having read some of the classified reports about the liberation of the death camps. He had seen photographs considered too ghastly for public release, but even more troubling to him were rumors that the Allies had known about the concentration camps and the railroad lines that served them for months or even years. The idea that the RAF might have stopped the killing was even more horrible to him than the images of dried-up bodies stacked like cordwood. He felt implicated in a secret crime and ashamed of his uniform.
He fantasized about marrying Tirzah and training Jewish regiments to fight the Arabs, who were gearing up
for war against the Jewish settlement. But he knew those were pipe dreams. He had watched men “go native” in India. It was an occupational hazard and in the end, it was always the woman who paid the price. He would never put Tirzah in that position.
He also knew that eventually his superiors would take note of his laxness or uncover his complicity. They would demobilize him and send him home, where he would take up fishing, like his father. He would drink too much, also like his father. He would read all the newspaper accounts about Palestine and wonder what happened to Tirzah and her little boy. He would imagine writing to her—long, honest letters—but never put pen to paper.
The sound of footsteps hurried them out of bed. Tirzah wrapped herself in the sheet and watched him dress. She hoped that things between them would come to an end before Danny learned that he was supposed to hate the colonel who took such an interest in his mother.
“Tirzah,” Bryce said. “Things are heating up in the north.”
“I know,” she said. The newspapers were full of stories about tensions at the borders with Lebanon and Syria, where refugees from all over the region were making their way over the mountains on foot. Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world had grown during the war years, making life increasingly perilous for Jews there; restrictions, harassment, and riots had become common even in places like Baghdad, where the Jewish community had flourished for so long. The “Zionist threat” was now a rallying cry, uniting the Arab world against Jewish plans for a homeland, and against British interests and their handling of the mandate in Palestine.
Hoping to pacify the Arabs, the British commanders were ordering the surrender of Jewish immigrants on the northern frontiers—a directive that was flagrantly defied by the kibbutzniks at the border. It was rumored that the Palmach had sent reinforcements to help the refugees—nearly all men of fighting age—to negotiate the rough terrain.
“There’s talk of our chaps moving another division up there, to make the point,” Bryce said. “They want to seal that border, and things are coming to a boil. You should know.”
“All right then. Yes,” said Tirzah, feeling as though she had been paid for her services.
“I wish I could spend a whole night with you,” he said, ignoring the tension in her voice and succumbing to his own longings. “Just once, you know?”
Tirzah pictured them in a room overlooking the sea. She would make them coffee in the morning.
As he moved toward the door, she got out of bed and hugged him from behind. “Johnny,” she whispered.
At first, she had called him Johnny as a strategy, to make him seem less powerful and to keep herself from feeling like a whore. Then it became a way to make her feelings for him seem casual. Now, no matter how much she tried to make it sound cool or ironic, it was an endearment.
“Laila tov, Johnny,” she said. “Sleep well.”
Esther
Zorah had made it so clear that she preferred her own company, a whole day could go by without anyone saying a word to her. For the most part, this suited her fine, but it meant she was among the last to learn about the books. A large donation had been delivered in the morning, but by the time she found out about the boxes, there wasn’t much left.
All of the novels and histories were gone, as was everything printed in Yiddish, German, Polish, and French. She made do with a Hebrew grammar with the covers torn off and a pristine collection of biblical fables written in English, and spent the next three days in the barrack, stripped to her underwear in the heat, absorbed by the challenges on the page.
Language was Zorah’s favorite game and her greatest talent. She gave herself over to the puzzle of ancient cases and unused tenses inside the crumbling Hebrew volume that had once belonged to Saul Glieberman. He had left his spidery signature on the inside cover and placed check marks beside what Zorah agreed were the most difficult declensions.
The book of fables was a greater challenge since her English vocabulary was limited to words gleaned from movie posters in Warsaw and picked up from the British soldiers in Atlit. She would read a sentence over and over until a cognate would emerge—“night” revealed itself thanks to nacht in German and Yiddish; the similarities to noc in Polish and nuit in French were like an added bonus.
A single word could make a whole phrase come clear, which then created context for the next. After wrestling an entire paragraph into focus, Zorah would look up from a page red-eyed and physically hungry to tell someone—anyone—what she’d understood. After a frustrating afternoon stuck on the meaning of “blanch,” she sought out Arik, who had served with the British army’s Palestine brigade in Italy. But “blanch” was not a word he knew, so Zorah dragged him over to ask one of the English guards, who laughed when he read the sentence about an enormous mythical bird that could cause eagles and vultures to turn white.
The books devoured Zorah’s days and left her so tired that she fell asleep without much trouble and woke up early, eager to get back to work in the solitude of the barrack. But after breakfast on the sixth day of her studies, she returned to find two new arrivals asleep on the cots beside hers—a mother and her young son.
For that day and the next, they did nothing but sleep. From breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner, they were so quiet and motionless that Zorah could forget they were there.
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.”