Where could they send her? She had nowhere to go, which was why she was going to Palestine.
After two weeks of worry and seasickness, Zorah was even thinner than she had been when she got out of the concentration camp. But from the day she arrived at Atlit, she realized that she had imagined a problem where none existed. She was just one more undocumented, inconvenient “illegal,” like thousands of others.
On the day she arrived, a white-haired man from the Jewish Agency at the table in front of Delousing told her, “Don’t worry. You might be stuck here a bit longer than most, but eventually it will all work out. You are one of the lucky ones. You are home.”
Zorah had been too tired to tell him that “home” was a cramped apartment on the top floor of a dilapidated tenement where, by now, a gang of murdering thieves was cooking pork in her mother’s kosher pots.
As she lay in bed, playing with the last flecks of tobacco on her tongue, Zorah wondered if Meyer could help her get out of Atlit. Perhaps he would return tomorrow and if he offered her another cigarette, she would ask if he had enough protectzia to send a big black car to fetch her to a little apartment of her own, or just a single room with whitewashed walls. That would be more than enough.
Zorah closed her eyes and extended the fingers of her right hand as though she were still holding a cigarette. She raised it to her lips, inhaled deeply, and waited, letting the phantom Chesterfield burn wantonly, as if she were a woman who always had a full pack of American cigarettes in her pocketbook and another in the nightstand. Zorah exhaled through pursed lips, deliberate as a film idol—though she doubted that there was, anywhere in the world, a movie star with numbers tattooed on her forearm.
She smiled at the idea. And then she slept.
Shayndel and Leonie
I think Zorah may have a crush on the guard with the thick glasses,” whispered Shayndel, as she slipped into Leonie’s cot. No one else in the barrack was awake yet, which meant it was their time to talk. “In the last week, she’s asked me three times if I’ve seen him. And last night at the party, she kept looking around as if she was waiting for someone.
“I can’t imagine what your toes must feel like,” Shayndel went on. “I saw you dancing with that oaf Otto. I don’t think he’s good enough for you, chérie. I don’t mind hairy men so much, but given the lack of girls around here, even I could probably do better.”
“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” said Leonie as she pushed a wisp of wiry hair behind her friend’s ear. “Lots of boys wanted to dance with you.”
The celebration had taken place in honor of the most improbable and romantic coincidence imaginable: a girl from a new group of detainees had recognized her childhood sweetheart through the fence, and when they opened the gate, the two of them fell into each other’s arms. Everyone was shouting and clapping, and even the English soldiers had tears in their eyes. Colonel Bryce, the camp commander, had given permission for a party. The cook had attempted a cake, and a bottle of schnapps had appeared; one of the newcomers had a violin and the dancing went on until midnight.
“They snuck the boyfriend into the girl’s barrack,” Shayndel said. “I’ll bet nobody slept the whole night over there. Even if they hung up blankets around them, everyone must have been listening, though it would have been worse in the boy’s barrack, don’t you think?” she continued, dropping her voice even lower. “You know what they would have been doing, don’t you?”
Leonie wrinkled her nose, which was Roman in profile and in perfect proportion to the rest of her features. Shayndel often thought the only reason that the great beauty of Atlit tolerated her attentions was the fact that she spoke French. Standing next to Leonie, Shayndel felt like a Polish peasant, with her coarse reddish mop of hair, skinny legs, and a body shaped like a potato.
“Are you a prude?” Shayndel teased, hoping she had gotten the idiom right. “I’m still set on finding us a couple of brothers when we get out of here. Brothers who want to live close by each other, you know. Nice, steady types. We’ll live on a kibbutz, but on Sunday afternoon we can go to Tel Aviv, where there are shops and cafés, and we can sit over our coffee cups and watch the crowds pass by.”
Leonie said nothing but squeezed Shayndel’s hand, a signal for her to continue with the story she had recited every day, like morning prayers, since they’d gotten on the boat to Palestine.
“We will eat ice cream and go shopping. You will teach me how to dress and I will show you how to make the best stuffed cabbage in the world. It will be a good life for us. I’ll find us the two brothers. We’ll each have two children.”
“Like Noah’s ark,” said Leonie, on cue.
“Exactly.”
“Once upon a time.” Leonie sighed. Nearly everything about Palestine felt like make-believe to her. The bottomless baskets of soft bread and the bland white cheese seemed like food for angels or babies. Atlit itself felt like a fairy-tale dungeon, the prisoners waiting for someone to end the evil spell and release them to live in the happy land of the kibbutz.
Hebrew was the most fantastic thing of all to her: a dead language walking in the world, a holy tongue with slang for “bullet” and “penis” and the magical power to invent or change whatever it needed, abracadabra.
“We promised to talk only in Hebrew today,” said Shayndel. “Remember?”
“That’s easy for you. You’re the best one in class. I feel like an idiot when I don’t have the words.”
“You can fill in with French,” said Shayndel. “I’m not strict like Arik.”
“I don’t like his class,” Leonie said. “Nurit is much nicer.”
“Did you hear Lipstick Lillian last night?” Shayndel whispered, in Hebrew. “She was talking in her sleep again. I swear I heard her say mit schlag. I never heard anyone talk about food so much. Such a Viennese cliché.”
“‘Cliché’ is not Hebrew, is it?”
“Excuse me.” Shayndel grinned. “Lillian is already bursting out of her dress. Can’t you see her getting fat as a cow? Fat and stuck-up. Too bad.”
“What did you think?” said Leonie. “People will be people in Eretz Yisrael, too. Just because we’re in Palestine doesn’t mean it’s any different. There will be princes and criminals here, too.”
“Jewish criminals, eh?” said Shayndel. “I almost like the sound of that. It makes us seem normal. But our children will not be merely normal. They will be extraordinary—tall and handsome, like in all the Zionist posters. With big muscles and white teeth.”
Leonie winced.
“I’m sorry,” Shayndel said.
When they had arrived in Atlit, a dentist had determined that eight of Leonie’s back teeth were rotten and pulled them out. “No one notices,” Shayndel insisted, pulling Leonie’s hands away from her cheeks.
“Well, our four perfect children will have teeth like horses,” Leonie said, to let Shayndel know that she was forgiven. “We will feed them raw milk and honey.”
“And olives,” said Shayndel.
“I will never like olives,” said Leonie.
“You said that about the leben, too.”
“I suppose if one gets used to drinking sour milk, one can get used to anything.” Though Leonie did not know how she could bear another month of the heat, which she had heard someone say could last into October. There was only one tree big enough to give any shade in the whole camp, and the barrack often felt like an oven.
Just thinking about the word made Leonie feel sick. “Oven” used to conjure up images of cakes and roast chicken and warming bread. Now it meant only “gas chamber.” Except in Hebrew, where even “oven” managed to stay in the kitchen with the sink and the icebox. Their teacher said that soon they would all be dreaming in Hebrew, which made Leonie study even harder.
“Did you dream in Hebrew last night?” Shayndel asked, knowing how much Leonie liked that idea.
“No. For that I think you need to fall in love with a native speaker. When you’re in bed with a man
, when you’ve had a little wine, that’s the way to learn a language.”
“Oh-la-la,” Shayndel said. “Maybe you’re not such a prude after all. You’re getting a little … I don’t know the word in Hebrew—amorous? Randy?”
“Not at all,” said Leonie. “It’s just an expression.” She threw off the covers. “Let’s get out of here. I’m dying for a cup of coffee—even if it’s only tea.”
Leonie and Shayndel were early enough to get their favorite spot in the dining hall, at a table just to the right of the door, where they could watch people come and go. The other girls from their barrack joined them there and, as always, everyone ate a little too much bread a little too quickly. A steady parade of boys stopped to flirt with Leonie and to say a few comradely words to Shayndel. After breakfast was over and the men clattered outside for the morning lineup, the girls leaned on their elbows and talked about them.
“Do you think Reuven is handsome?” asked one of the girls.
“If you like giraffes,” said Lillian. “What a neck!”
“He has such beautiful eyes,” said a young woman with a baby in her lap. “His children would be lucky.”
“Speaking of children,” Lillian said, “have you given a name to that son of yours? He’s already a month old.”
“Yes, I have.”
“So what is it?” the girls said, all at once.
“He is Ben-Ami.”
“Did you say Benjamin?” asked Shayndel.
“No. Ben-Ami,” said the new mother, whose name was Rosa. “It is a new name for the new state. It means ‘son of my people.’ From now on, I want you to call me Vered. It means rose, too, but in the language of the Jews. We must throw off the old names with the old ways.”
Lillian rolled her eyes. “That is exactly what Arik said in class. You’re like a parrot. Don’t you have a thought of your own?”
“You should change your name to Shoshana,” Rosa-Vered said.
“Lillian was my oma’s name,” she said. “And her oma’s name before that. Shoshana sounds like someone with a lisp. And if you ask me, Vered sounds like a name for a car, not a woman.”
“And yet, no one asked you,” said Leonie, but so sweetly that it took them a minute to realize that she’d just told Lillian to shut up. Before Lillian had a chance to protest, Tedi and Zorah flew through the door, uncombed and untucked, racing toward the nearly empty samovar.
Everyone at the table smiled. Tedi and Zorah did this nearly every morning, prompting a game in which the girls would come up with pairs of opposites: night and day, vinegar and wine, sweet and sour, hot and cold, meat and milk.
“Here come the sun and the moon,” said Shayndel.
“Laurel and Hardy,” said Leonie.
“Alpha and omega,” offered Vered-Rosa, up on her feet, bouncing the baby to keep him from crying.
“What does that mean?” Shayndel asked.
“It appears that Rosa went to university,” sniffed Lillian.
Leonie and Shayndel grinned at each other, knowing these same girls sometimes called them “peas in a pod” and “the Siamese twins” even though they were a pair of contrasts, too. Olive-skinned Leonie had turned brown on the boat while a single day under the Mediterranean sky had broiled Shayndel’s fair skin to a blister and swollen her eyes to slits. After that, she never ventured outdoors without an oversized man’s hat that made her look like a child playing dress-up, even though, at twenty, she was older than Leonie by nearly three years.
They had been inseparable since first meeting on a crowded railroad platform south of Paris, on their way to Palestine. Shayndel was eager to practice her schoolgirl French on Leonie, who wanted to know if there were any big cities in the land of Israel. Their friendship deepened over the course of the journey as they nursed each other through seasickness and held each other close when the British commandeered their boat.
As they got up to leave the mess hall, Leonie said, “I’ll catch up with you later. I have to go to the latrine.”
Shayndel frowned. “Again? I think you should talk to one of the doctors.”
“It’s nothing. I’ve always had a delicate stomach.”
“All right,” Shayndel said, “I’ll see you at lunch. We’ll make up a little Hebrew conversation circle with some of the others.”
As soon as they parted, Shayndel heard someone call her name. Hannah took her arm and said, “Walk with me.”
She leaned close, as if she were about to share a girlish confidence, and said, “There’s a woman coming to Atlit today. A German. She will be assigned to your bunk and I want you to keep an eye on her. Now smile and nod at me, like I just told you that Miloz, the handsome one, has been asking about you.”
Shayndel grinned and nodded like a fool, less because of Hannah’s instruction than her attentions. She had watched the affable and increasingly pregnant busybody, suspecting that Hannah’s pushy friendliness had an ulterior motive.
“Nicely done,” said Hannah, as they walked past a pair of guards. “We have been told that this person was a collaborator—a capo—in one of the camps. We’d like you to find out if it’s true.”
“We?” Shayndel asked.
“Come now,” said Hannah. “You of all people must have guessed that the Palmach has eyes and ears in Atlit.”
“Me of all people?”
“I know about you,” Hannah said. “You were in the youth movement since childhood; the Young Guard, right? I also know that you fought bravely against the Germans in the forests outside of Vilnius. You’re a hero, for goodness’ sake, and anyone with eyes can see that you’re not like most of the other girls, bourgeois brats or sad cases like that little French friend of yours, who seems like her insides are made of broken glass. Besides, you know all the songs and you carry yourself like a soldier.”
“I think you might be making a mistake,” Shayndel stammered.
“I have no time to play games,” Hannah said firmly. “They aren’t going to let me stay here much longer. The pregnancy is going to show any minute. Have the others noticed yet?”
Shayndel tried not to smile. “There’s been some talk.”
“I’ll bet there has. And you can tell everyone that I am not married but I will be before the baby is born. In fact, I may be out of here by tonight, so you will be reporting to Tirzah Friedman,” Hannah said.
“The kitchen director? I wondered about her.”
“Of course you did! Which is why you are the right girl for the job,” Hannah said. “You will act as extra eyes and ears for her. Tell her anything you discover about the German woman. After that, keep a lookout for changes among the guards, their schedules, everything about them, in fact. If you have suspicions about anyone else in camp, tell Tirzah that as well; anything that you sniff out.”
“Eyes, ears, and nose, eh?”
“You’re a comedienne, too? Fine. Tirzah will be asking for a helper in the kitchen in the next few days. Make sure to volunteer so she can select you.” At that, Hannah squeezed her hand and walked off.
Shayndel was flattered to have been singled out by Hannah, who seemed the perfect pioneer woman: strong, blunt, cheerful, and confident. It made perfect sense that she would be working with the Jewish military forces. Hannah was exactly the kind of girl Shayndel had dreamed of becoming since she had followed her brother, Noah, to one of his secret meetings. She had probably been no more than twelve years old, but she still remembered the opening words of the speaker that night, an earnest young man who had actually been to Palestine. “To all of my brothers and sisters in HaShomer HaTza’ir, my comrades in the Young Guard, I bring greetings from the land of Israel.”
The applause that followed his remarks lifted her out of her seat and changed her completely. She was no longer just a girl from a small town in west-central Poland; she was a Zionist, heart and soul, and her only desire was to go to the Young Guard summer camp so she could learn Hebrew, wear pants, and work in the fields. Shayndel got her wish the following year and
became famous in that little world, not only for her command of the map of Palestine, but also for the way she forced the boys to let her march in their formations, carrying a broom on her shoulder, and for her enthusiastic, if slightly off-key, singing of folk songs. Shayndel loved every minute of camp, even when it was her turn to chop onions for her comrades’ dinner.
Of course, the ultimate dream and the purpose of the movement was to settle in Eretz Yisrael, to drain the swamps and grow oranges, to reinvent everyday life in the kibbutz—the collective farm that would do away with greed, unfairness, and even jealousy. Like her brother, Shayndel adopted Zionism as her religion.
When Noah was seventeen, he had declared himself an atheist and stopped going to synagogue with their father. Shayndel found it hard to deny her mother’s pleas to accompany her on major holidays, but on the Yom Kippur before her fifteenth birthday, the two of them slipped out of the house before their parents were out of bed. They spent most of the day walking with friends in the countryside, talking about the German threat and debating whether they should join the resistance or try to get to Palestine immediately, and how that might be done.
When their parents came home from the synagogue for a midafternoon nap, they found Shayndel and Noah in the kitchen, drinking tea and eating cold potatoes from the previous night’s dinner. Mama hurried to the window and drew the curtains. “Everyone was asking for you at shul,” she said.
“I don’t care.” Shayndel shrugged. “Don’t try to make me feel bad about it, and for heaven’s sake don’t start crying. Religion isn’t what we need now. Praying to God isn’t going to solve anything. The only true redemption of the Jews will take place in our own homeland.”
Noah smiled at her. “You sound like a pamphlet.”
“Do you disagree with me?”
“Of course not,” he said, reaching for an apple.
“You are no better than an animal,” said Papa bitterly. “Why can’t you fast like everyone else for a single day? You don’t get anywhere in life without discipline. And piety.”