The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  That shy soldier in whose callused hand she’d placed a few coins would be a grandfather now, or dead. Years of that quantity had passed. And here she sat. Still facing down the mountain’s silhouette from across her desk.

  Aaron was studying the sketch up close, his cropped curls now blocking her view. There was something softer about him today, she was sure of it. As though he were angling toward some question he wanted to ask, despite himself. “I mean,” he said slowly, “I know it’s a dramatic landscape.”

  Her voice was sharp. “Why do you ask?”

  Aaron turned to her, and she was startled by the hesitation on his face. “I have a friend there,” he said. “Well, farther north. She’s staying on a kibbutz, actually.”

  She didn’t believe for a moment that it was a friend. Aaron wasn’t the sort to have female friends. He was the sort to have girlfriends or bitter exes.

  Something was troubling him, some topic he could neither mention nor walk away from. It was as though he were trying to motion her to pick up some conversational lead.

  “I was a tourist there,” she said. The lie stiffened her shoulders, and she felt a twinge of regret.

  He gave her an odd look, as though he disbelieved that she’d ever been a tourist: a person who did a thing merely for pleasure.

  She gestured at the papers on her desktop. “You can go now,” she said.

  He hesitated, then left, closing the door behind him.

  She picked up a pen, set its point gently on the desktop, and with the slightest pressure of one finger held it vertical. It stood, then gave way as a small, invisible tremor passed through her.

  Why not tell him?

  It was a crazy question, but she followed it ruthlessly. She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one’s soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one’s own soul, tenaciously and without mercy. So she’d done at every significant turn in her life—and so she would now once again be her own pitiless interrogator, even if it meant mocking herself in terms that did violence to the few tender feelings she still had.

  Why not tell him, indeed, if only to ensure that some piece of it lived on—some spark of who Helen Watt had once been? Or did she fear resurrecting a time in her life when she’d made a decision she dared not question—for if she did, and found herself wrong after all these years, what was there to do?

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been tempted to speak of it. The story that had once singed and flared in her had long since receded, as her habit of silence turned, over the decades, into law. Did she mean to take it to the grave with her, then? Plainly, that was what she was going to do. She was going to take it to the grave. And it would end there.

  Dust.

  How many times had each cell in her body changed over since those days? It made no difference. She could still feel it: the dry press of the heat on the concrete roofs of the army base, the jeeps, the dusty khaki uniforms. The too-blunt knives that slipped off the furrowed skin of cucumbers and the bickering between the cooks in the kitchen and the endless work dicing tomatoes that stung every nick on Helen’s clumsy hands, and the leben, the leben, the fledgling Jewish state was afflicted with leben, the same menu over and again until a tank driver stood on a chair in the dining hall and recited a poem about flatulence, and one cook flung a soapy dishrag at his head and the other stormed out in tears, and Gevatron on the radio singing “Finjan” again and people crying out in the night—eleven years after liberation and the end of the war, they still cried out from their bunkbeds on the army base for gassed brothers, mothers shot and piled in a pit; a single such cry would leave Helen staring for hours at the dark ceiling long after the girl with the black eyes and eternally tight jaw from the intelligence detail exploded from her bunk with a ragged “Quiet already!” And the bunks subsided gradually into snores. Only Helen rising to stare out the windows, or step out the door under the sentry’s silent gaze to walk the perimeter of the base under thick, brilliant stars.

  But when the sun blared across the desert rubble and hid the stars, the night’s solitary cries were drowned in the din of we. We building the Jewish nation. We making the desert bloom. We was the strongest, most death-defying word, the feats of we were stunning and true and brimmed with love. And the Arabs who walked alongside the dusty roads averted their eyes or stared hard into the dirt their own feet trod, while her own fair English complexion burned in the sun and the smells of the desert filled her nose, and she witnessed all that strove and sang and clashed around her and she counseled herself against seduction.

  Helen’s fellow volunteers—one Englishman, one Canadian, five Americans, and one Italian—were all Jews. All had signed up for work on a kibbutz—yet they never passed the kibbutz gate. For forty minutes they sat in the sweltering bus in the southern desert, gazing at a distant palm orchard rising from chalk-bright earth while laughter and cigarette smoke rose from a shifting cluster of sandaled Israelis outside the bus. Finally an English-speaking kibbutz member mounted the bus steps to announce their new destination. A mistake had been made—the kibbutz currently had a glut of volunteers and no beds. But someone knew of an army base nearby that was short-handed, and the kibbutz had taken a quick vote and decided to volunteer their volunteers. Scattered applause. “Put us wherever we can do the most good,” a tall Canadian named Walter intoned, as the bus rumbled back onto the main road in the noon glare.

  Dror, the officer tasked with managing the volunteers’ adaptation to the army base, was displeased. At a hastily arranged meeting that night, held on the rock-strewn ground as the sunset glowed orange and pink above them, he paced in his dusty khaki uniform, his own carriage taut though he’d commanded them to stand at ease. “Look around you,” he said. He addressed them in accented English, then repeated the instruction in Hebrew.

  Dutifully the volunteers turned, taking in their surroundings: a few dozen low buildings, a radio tower and a water tower, a row of tanks parked beyond.

  Dror pointed to the east, into the dusky hills. In a low voice, switching languages and scanning their faces to make sure he was understood, he continued. “Over there, that line of dark rock: Jordan.” He swiveled, pointing south, then west. “There, Saudi Arabia. There, Egypt. Drive a half day to the north: Lebanon, Syria.” He turned back, surveying the group. “There’s been war on this spot where you’re standing. There will be more.”

  With his tight black curls, high forehead, and handsome, angular face, he looked to Helen like something out of an illustrated Old Testament—noble and severe.

  “We’re a small base,” he said, “but everything is on our shoulders. If you spend your six months here, you’ll understand what that means. If you came for a vacation, go home. In the places you’re from, they care about rank and dignity. Here the work you’ll be asked to do might insult you. If it’s going to insult you, leave now. Someone has to clean the toilets. Someone has to do laundry. In the places you’re from, they’ve forgotten one person can make a difference. But here you’ll find everything you do matters. Every single thing is handmade. Every building you paint or walkway you pave is pulling the yoke.” The kibbutz member who had accompanied them to the base stepped forward and addressed them in English. “I’ll be back at the kibbutz, but don’t worry. We’ll make sure the educational outings you were promised by the volunteer office will still take place. And despite how fierce Dror sounds, he’ll let me talk him into letting you off duty.” He clapped Dror on the shoulder. “You can join our outings as our security detail, my friend—we’ll be your vacation.”

  Dror replied with a disapproving shake of his head; then a swift, relenting smile. He seized his friend in a mock headlock that ended with the two men’s arms slung over each other’s shoulders. Helen watched them turn for the mess hall, brothers.

  In the base’s kitchen Helen diced tomatoes and w
ashed crate after crate of peaches trucked down from a northern kibbutz, and the thick white fuzz of the fruit made her skin bloom into a red prickly rash, from her hands to her upper arms. Dror, making rounds of the new volunteers, took one glance at her miserable attempts to avoid the fuzz-laden spray as she worked the nozzle over the peaches.

  “Nurit,” he called.

  Nurit, the cook, set down a pot of steaming beets. At a motion of Dror’s head, she moved Helen to cucumbers, steering her by the shoulders to the counter and placing the handle of a knife into Helen’s fist with an expression of forbearance, as though Helen were yet another new appliance found to be unfit for real labor.

  “Our English flower,” Dror laughed, as with his boot he slid a mop bucket to a corner where no one would trip on it, then exited the kitchen.

  Pressing her lips tight, Helen sliced with slow, wretched care.

  The volunteers were housed with the soldiers. In the bunk above Helen slept Muriel, who’d survived the war as a child in hiding in Romania and refused to undress in front of the other girl soldiers for a reason no one asked. Muriel’s face had the compact vividness Helen had seen only in central Europeans—a piercing intensity, as though life must be kept burning against endless odds. Most of the female soldiers had responded with indifference to the information that Helen wasn’t Jewish; some even nodded appreciation. Only Muriel had looked as though the fact were a violation, and upon learning Helen was her bunkmate, swore audibly. Seated on her mattress, Muriel spilled water from her canteen, swinging her legs in silence as drops rained down onto Helen’s bed below. She cut her own hair sitting on Helen’s bunk and refused to clean the leavings. At night the sharp ends, scattered on Helen’s pillow and sheets, pricked Helen’s skin like an accusation—as if Muriel could somehow see the cream-colored bedroom with the cream-colored bedcover beneath which Helen had slept for nineteen years . . . or hear Helen’s mother’s exclamation, breaking the hush of a breakfast of marmalade toast, “This isn’t about Notting Hill again, is it?” Helen’s decision to go to Israel had been about the riots, of course—just as it had been about singing the last resonating notes of “Blessed Are Those That Be Undefiled” in the lush wooden chapel at her school’s winter concert, the echoes of the words silenced by polite applause. It had been about the girlhood friend who broke up with Helen, accusing her—“When you have a feeling you just act on it”—simply because Helen departed abruptly from a party she found dull; it had been about hiding an airline ticket and Hebrew dictionary in her bureau and knowing neither parent would commit the loving impropriety of snooping; it had been about a thousand other things Helen reviled even if she couldn’t name them.

  Mornings, while the girls waited for Muriel to finish changing her clothing in the bathroom stall, Helen looked at her own wan reflection in the dented metal mirror above the trough sink and tried to imagine it purged of something irredeemably English: the part of her that, despite her unflinching intentions, knew to applaud politely and stay above the fray.

  Weeks passed; she was rotated from kitchen duty to collect spent shell casings on the firing range. Next she was sent to clear a field where a landing strip was to be built, joining others in gathering rocks and pitching them onto the bed of a slowly rolling pickup truck. Through the sun-shot days she listened to the other girls chatter and daily understood more of their Hebrew, though she didn’t attempt to intrude on their sharp, hopeful talk. At the firing range she took instruction from Dror alongside the other volunteers. The kick of the Mauser was surprising, but she was a good shot, as she knew she’d be: she hit the man-shaped target in the chest and then the head, and Dror noted it with a nod and turned away from her to coach the others.

  A half kilometer from the base, she and a few of the other girl soldiers hand-mixed and poured the concrete floor of a shed in the middle of the desert, for what purpose they weren’t told. They laid the floor and were sent on to other tasks; weeks passed. Only Dror seemed frustrated by the supply officer’s lack of haste in providing materials for walls and roof. After a third week Dror instructed the girls to paint the floor. They were dropped off once more with brushes and paint and water and one gun for their protection. A floor in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing but rocks and a single dusty track. The girls painted half of the floor white and then sat on the shadeless earth. The sun was high and Helen sweated in her uniform and cap. Mid-morning Dror arrived with a pale green melon, which he sectioned with a knife on the hood of his jeep. It dripped and the girls ate the slices with their hands. Dror spoke to no one. He sat on the fender and smoked while they ate, then collected the rinds in a plastic bag.

  “Drink,” he commanded them, seeing the still-full bladder of water beside the half-painted floor.

  Dutifully, Helen and a few of the others filled their canteens.

  “That water tastes like camel piss,” Muriel said.

  Dror laughed despite himself, as at a saucy younger sister. “Drink the camel piss, then.”

  Muriel lifted her chin in a way that made the other girls fall silent. “It’s bad for our gorgeous complexions.”

  He tossed the bag of rinds into the jeep. “So is going thirsty in the desert.”

  “We’ll drink if we’re thirsty,” retorted Muriel.

  “Drink,” Dror repeated, his tone weary and firm, like a father ending an argument.

  But Muriel’s face tightened, and Helen saw that she resented Dror and was in love with him. And Helen could see, in the slow way he settled into his driver’s seat, that Dror chose not to know this.

  “Drink,” he said. He started the jeep. “By the time your body feels thirst you’re already dehydrated. This is the desert. Don’t be a fool. In the desert, fools die.” The notion of fools dying seemed to anger him and he did not speak gently. He started away, turning in a tight arc to head back toward the base.

  “Heil Hitler!” Muriel called as he gained speed.

  For an instant the jeep’s pace faltered. Then, his face inscrutable, Dror lurched past.

  “You live two years under enemy guns,” Muriel screamed after the receding jeep. “Then I’ll listen to your opinion.”

  The pale dust of Dror’s passage hung on the horizon.

  “What’s your problem?” the girl beside Muriel said quietly. “He lost his mother and sister.”

  Muriel’s face showed that she hadn’t known. But she gave a hard laugh. Taking her neighbor’s canteen, she slowly drizzled a dark pattern of water on the rocky ground.

  Helen watched the water evaporate.

  When it was gone, the other girl reclaimed her canteen and capped it with a relenting shrug. “He’s so good looking. It’s too bad he’s a prick.”

  That night Muriel cried softly in the bunk above Helen’s.

  Her father wrote a letter. Your mother tells me that you have not yet set a definitive date for your return. This adventure of yours has lasted long enough and it’s time you ended it. There’s a path in life, and one cannot step off it for long without consequences. Your mother and I ask you to book return passage now and we look forward to your arrival.

  One evening in the mess hall, when she’d been on the base two months, shouts rose over the clang of metal trays. A tank soldier was leaning over a counter to argue with a red-haired dishwasher: something about a stack of trays slipping, hot soup. The dishwasher looked unimpressed, even when the tank soldier’s voice rose to a bellow.

  Helen filled her plate with diced cucumbers and tomatoes and proceeded to the volunteers’ table. “What’s the trouble?” she ventured as she sat.

  The Jewish student from Italy with the thick black-rimmed glasses shrugged knowledgeably. “That one”—he pointed at the soldier—“was a kid in one of the camps. They didn’t survive if they didn’t scrap over everything.” With a glance at Helen, he added, “What do you expect?”

  Would there be some final bar she might one day clear, proving that she too could understand? She watched the Jewish volunteers eat their f
ood.

  The shouting had stopped; the soldier made his way slowly between the tables and sat near the rear of the hall. But the dishwasher hadn’t finished; a moment later he leaned out over the counter, waited for enough heads to turn his way, then with a pointed gaze at the tank soldier silently tapped a finger to his temple: something’s broken in there.

  Instantly the soldier sprang up, a metal pitcher like a blunt weapon in his hand, and Helen felt a slide in her gut as he ran past their table and vaulted the counter. The dishwasher swore and evaded the soldier, shutting the kitchen door against him. An enormous sound: the soldier slammed his empty pitcher into the door. Then, instead of entering the kitchen’s other door, which still hung open, he slammed the dented metal into the wall again, then again. Did he mean to frighten the dishwasher? To demolish the door, or himself? The pitcher’s metal bent, then tore jaggedly. Blood spattered—the tank soldier’s own. And then Dror was running and then he’d slid over the counter and was tackling him.

  The two fell hard on the painted cement floor.

  A moment later Dror stood, dusted his shirt painfully with one hand. With the barest gesture, as though not to shame the other man, Dror motioned for him to stand.

  Helen expected the tank soldier to spit in Dror’s face, so contorted with rage had his expression been at the instant when Dror’s shoulders hit his waist and the two fell. But as he rose opposite Dror, his eyes cleared. He lowered his head, and raised it, and stood silent, as Dror slipped the mangled pitcher from his hands with a gesture of tender respect. Then Dror wrapped a kitchen towel around the tank soldier’s cut wrist and led him swiftly out the server’s door through the front entrance of the mess hall, toward the commander’s office.