The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  The bee—a compact creature, its wings pressed back, helpless against the wind—clung to Dror’s palm, the last solid thing between it and the vast ocean.

  He stood carefully, cupping it. He walked against the wind toward the orange trees, sand clinging to his legs, carrying it to safety.

  He returned, studying his hand.

  “It stung you?”

  He nodded.

  “But it’ll die!” As soon as she spoke the words she heard their absurdity. As though the world owed its creatures fairness.

  He turned and jogged down to the water, entered, and stroked his way through the waves for several minutes before leaning back and letting the water carry him.

  A small distance from shore, a boy in a rowboat had pulled up to one of the Andromeda rocks and was handing a basket to the fisherman, who laid down his rod to receive his lunch, clasping the back of the boy’s neck in thanks. At the water’s edge, two girls with long braids walked hand in hand. Higher up on the shore, a middle-aged man with leathery skin trudged slowly beneath the orange trees, carrying a closed vendor’s tray—presumably on his way to an afternoon’s work in some neighborhood more likely to yield customers. Catching Helen’s eye, he brightened, then beckoned, sweeping open his tray against his ample belly, and began to address her in Arabic. Stepping closer, she saw that his tray contained an assortment of modest artifacts of tarnished metal, a few of them with embedded stones of a beautiful blue, a few with empty sockets where stones had once been.

  “Quite lovely,” she offered—but shaking his head at her attempts to address him in English or Hebrew, he smiled with stained teeth, and gestured enthusiastically toward the street where the restaurant was—then beyond, toward a narrow alley behind it. His cart: in his cart he had more, in his cart he surely had what she wanted.

  “Gveret, bvakasha,” he said, and repeated the words: Miss, please. It seemed to be the only Hebrew he knew.

  She let him lead her, repeating his two words, farther from the shore and then onto a side street—she wasn’t sure the man would have anything worth purchasing, but she thought all the same that she’d like to surprise Dror with a gift. In the man’s small wooden cart, as battered and stained as the objects he vended, there was a basket. After some fumbling, he opened its lid to reveal a jumble of larger objects: pitchers, metal cups, ornamented lockets. She spent a long while sorting his wares, the man breathing nervously behind her, before selecting a small silver-colored picture frame patterned with grapevines.

  She paid without bargaining—surely more than the thing was worth, but the sum was still low—and, with a wave to the satisfied vendor, returned to the beach.

  “Helen!” Dror, still wet from his swim, a towel over his shoulder, broke away from what seemed to be an urgent conversation with another man—the owner of the restaurant where they’d bought lunch. He ran to her. The expression on his face—incredulity and fury—tightened her body.

  “What?” Inadvertently she laughed.

  “What were you thinking?”

  She turned. Behind her the old Arab man had disappeared.

  “He had his wares in his cart.”

  “So you just followed a man you didn’t know down an alley?”

  “I didn’t just”—she looked at him. “Well. Everything’s fine, isn’t it?”

  “Do you have any understanding?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. She could make no sense of Dror’s fury. He’d gone from tenderness to tight-lipped rage in what seemed an instant.

  “A blond-haired English girl,” he pressed, “out for the day with an Israeli Jew. You’d be a perfect candidate for an attack.”

  “Dror—he was a wheezing old man.”

  “You can only say that for sure now, on the other side of it. If you want to ignore the dangers then you might as well—”

  “How is it any different from the man who sold us lunch?”

  “I’ve bought lunch from Ahmed a dozen times. Everyone knows him. He was about to help me search for you right before you showed up.”

  She didn’t know how to answer.

  “You need to think about what could have happened to you.”

  He spoke like an adult scolding a child. Yet he was twenty-four—only five years older than Helen.

  “I don’t see,” she said to him quietly, “why the thought of me being in danger should make you look at me as though you hate me.”

  They rode the bus into the desert. The heat of the afternoon pressed on the metal roof; she angled her head closer to the window, which she’d slid open as far as it would go. When they’d traveled most of the distance to Be’er Sheva, Dror lifted a hand and laid it atop hers—but it was a heavy, dutiful gesture. After a moment, she slipped her hand away.

  Arriving at last at the base, she thought they’d part ways—but he led her instead to the empty barracks on the deserted northern side of the base where they’d spent stolen hours these past weeks.

  Just inside the door she balked.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, “if it’s torture for you.” She meant to sound wry, like a woman in a movie, but her voice wavered.

  He broke away from her and pushed through the thin metal door. A blare of sunlight—then it banged shut behind him, leaving her in the dark.

  She found him smoking outside, glaring at the empty stage of the desert. He didn’t turn at her step. “I need you to understand,” he said. Of course, she thought. Staring at him, she tried to imagine what his mother and sister would have looked like—those same dark eyes and curls on softer features.

  “I’m sorry, Dror, I—”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He dropped his cigarette to the dirt, ground it under his sandal. “When I kiss you,” he said, “I’m just one man. I’m not carrying all of them with me.” He paused, waiting for her to understand. “This week I hardly thought about my family.”

  She’d no answer for the simple grief in his statement.

  A long moment passed. She heard her voice. “Are you lonely with me?” she said. “Because I’m not a Jew?”

  He didn’t answer, and to her own surprise when she spoke again her voice wasn’t gentle, but accusatory. “Can’t you trust me?”

  “It’s not a question of trust. It’s”—he breathed. “I don’t know, Helen, whether you understand all that you’re touching when you touch me.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. The Nazis made your world a horror, and now after everything you went through, you’ve decided that world is where you’ll stay? Do you want to live in a world where no one can cross any lines or—or touch each other, Dror?”

  He spun to face her, then stopped, his face lit with fury.

  She said, “You think I’m heartless.”

  He inhaled slowly through his nostrils. “Yes.”

  She was shaking, but her words came steady, as though they cost her nothing. “I’m not. And I didn’t think you’d be one of those who confuse truthfulness with heartlessness.”

  A cluster of goats picked its way across the plain beyond the barbed-wire fence. A slight boy in a white headdress followed them, a stick dangling unused at his side. Nothing else moved on the horizon.

  “You’re right,” Dror said. He watched her. After a moment he said, “When you see what makes no sense to you, you say something.” He paused. “Don’t stop doing that.”

  His handsome face had softened. She felt his grief rest gingerly in her hands.

  She wanted to apologize—tell him how wrong she’d been, ask him please to tell her more, tell her all of it until she could feel what he felt.

  He held himself apart another moment. Then reached, blindly, for her face.

  That night she lay down with him on the rough blanket, with the feeling of sliding from a great height. He met her there with a solemn welcome, his hands on her body indelible.

  Then one evening later that week, their secret was no longer a secret. At the canteen there was whispering on the bench: Nurit from the kitchen si
tting with flirtatious Dov from the bomb unit; both shaking heads at something Avi the American volunteer was saying. Seated beside the trio, Muriel listened long, with arms wrapped round her torso, before issuing a vehement verdict.

  From where Helen sat, alone on the end of her own bench as though adrift at sea, only one word of Muriel’s speech was audible: Dror. The name a rasp of betrayal.

  For a hypnotic instant Muriel’s eyes fastened on Helen’s.

  Dror sat alert amid the gathering at a distance from Helen, his untouched soda in his hand. She saw that he’d felt the change as well. She watched a wary hope on his face dissolve to something dull, before re-emerging, a moment later, as anger.

  Then Avi turned to Muriel and, loud enough to still the activity at the cashier’s table behind them, said, “Well, it’s not as though non-Jewish volunteers are part of our effort.”

  Dror tapped his soda bottle with his fingertips. He tapped again. Then he stood, and the words he spoke were addressed to Avi and to all of them, the two dozen soldiers in uniform, their young faces turned to Dror in trust and dread, as to an admired elder brother.

  “The non-Jews are here by choice,” Dror said. “We talk all the time about heroism. How many of you would have chosen to give up safety?”

  There was no answer, but the faces around the canteen rebuked him.

  Dror turned and left the canteen.

  Helen didn’t move from her bench until every one of them had left, none offering more than a quick glance in her direction. Even to her ears, Dror’s argument felt thin. The Jewish volunteers had chosen to give up safety too. Walter from Canada and Maria from Italy, and Avi who had been Abe and his fellow Americans, and of course David from London: all had left places where they could have had comfortable lives, and all planned to stay in Israel. For them, this volunteer stint was a way to launch their new lives as Israelis, tossing them headlong into a society where everyone had to be willing to pitch in because the coming of war was inevitable. They’d come here because, as she’d heard Avi say grimly to one of the other American volunteers, safety no longer had meaning for him once he knew how easily Jews could be murdered. They weren’t here, as Helen was, for a few months, a year, a rebellion en route to adulthood.

  A week passed before it began. A week when Dror’s voice whispered her out of sleep in the hot, quiet barracks and he buttoned the blouse of her uniform with absurd care. A week of averted eyes even from the girls who had once been friendly to Helen; of silence when she carelessly splashed mop water onto the kitchen floor—the cook’s reprimands muted out of some uneasy respect for Dror. A week of tensions blanched invisible by the bright light of Dror—his smile upon seeing her, his touch like the courtship of something precious. She lay in the barracks beside him, the pulse visible in the skin of his neck, and her fear evaporated. Here she was at the center of things. Here she was, at last, where it was possible to lie naked and at rest, to look into the dark eyes of the man beside her and know they’d pledged each other the gift of truth. For the first time since childhood, she realized, she didn’t dread living in the world. She said it aloud in the still air of the barracks and listened to the two Hebrew words drop peacefully from her, like twin stones into the quiet desert: “I’m alive.”

  She woke to Dror watching her. Instinctively she sat, pulling the rough blanket over her breasts.

  “Do you know how many of us died?”

  At first she thought she’d misheard.

  “One out of three.” He spoke quietly but with an intensity she instantly feared. “One out of every three Jews in the world. In my country, in Poland, nine out of every ten of us died.”

  She waited. He was watching her with an emotion she couldn’t identify. “Including your mother,” she said quietly. “And Nessa.”

  He blinked. “Do you know how many of us died here just after that, in the war of independence? When we were attacked from five fronts?”

  “Dror,” she said. “You sound like you’re making a speech.”

  Dror stood, and she saw that he’d dressed while she slept. Slowly he paced before her, as though interrogating a suspect. Then he stopped. “I want you to know what you’re stepping into.”

  She watched him.

  Don’t forget I’ve lived through war too, she wanted to say, then was ashamed. She remembered little of the Blitz: her mother’s arm pulling a heavy curtain to shut out the blaring, wailing world; a confusion of green sliding past the train window; the smooth handle of her tagged suitcase and a kitten that lived in a garden shed and a large silent woman who’d already taken in three other children. The embarrassment of forgetting how to tie her shoe; the older girl who showed her how.

  “What I’m talking about,” he began as though reading her thoughts, “isn’t just a war that begins and ends, Helen—and it’s something England can’t have prepared you for. You name a country, and I’ll tell you about a time it became obsessed with killing Jews. Do you know, in Russia the Nazis recruited local farmers to help drown Jews, before they settled on more efficient means. Thirty thousand in two days at Babi Yar.” He paused. “Drowning,” he said.

  “Dror,” she said. “Stop.”

  “I want you to try to imagine it.”

  She stared at him.

  “I imagine it,” he went on. “Drowning has to be done individually. Can you imagine what it takes to hold a child down by the hair, a woman, a man? And not for just a second, not the sort of thing you can do with a moment’s adrenaline before you have time to think about it. With drowning you have to hold”—his voice cracked. “You have to do it until the struggle for life has stopped.”

  She did not want to imagine and couldn’t help it. She felt the tendons of her neck constrict. Near panic, she raised her palms to repel the horror—to repel him?

  He sat down opposite her, so quietly he barely made a sound. “I need you to understand,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?” she said.

  He closed his eyes.

  She sat opposite him, the blanket to her throat. For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether she might be luring him into something wrong. Suddenly the softness of her own breasts, the warmth of her skin, seemed untrustworthy, as though they might lead him astray in a world that required hardness.

  Pushing the thought away, she reached for him, and let the confusion bleed out of her. She thought, With this touch, and this and this. I lead you to me.

  The following night, they crossed the endless open distance from the canteen to his quarters with his hand firmly holding hers. It was the first night they spent together in his room and they let themselves be seen entering the officers’ building together. Their lovemaking that night was slow and deliberate, a declaration. When they’d finished, she didn’t sleep. Outside, the black sky towered above the desert, the stars compounding to infinity. She watched Dror blink at the ceiling, his dark eyes bright.

  On the firing range that week she dropped bullet casings into a sack, each making its muffled clink under the beating sun—her sweat trickling down her back and breastbone, the desert horizon with her always. There was no escaping the horizon. No softening it, or clouding what was real. This was why she was here—she’d struck the flint of it. This was why she’d had to leave England. She’d come here in order to be in a place where polite lies weren’t possible. And here was the reward—here was what she’d craved—a love synonymous with honesty. Hadn’t Dror brought the harshest truths and laid them before her? As spent casings slipped her fingers, she conjured his image on the empty plain: a man unbending, his heart somehow still willing. The promise she made to him was sewn like a sinew into her body: I will never lie to you.

  When he handed her the dusty volume at the end of that week, she turned it away. “There’s no need for that, Dror,” she said.

  They were in his room on the base. Another day off for both of them; she’d thought the timing a coincidence until Muriel shot a comment through the dark over Helen’s bunk about
Dror the high and mighty who was rigging the volunteers’ schedule for his own pleasures. None of the other girls had answered. Other than Muriel, the soldiers avoided any mention of the situation, choosing to navigate around Helen during the daytime as though she were invisible. If they met her gaze at all it was with absolute neutrality. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some unspecified signal that would tell them the crisis had passed.

  Now, in his room, dressed in his civilian clothing, Dror pressed the book into her hands. “I found it in Be’er Sheva,” he said. “I’ve been trying to explain in my own way, Helen, but—” He drew a long breath. “You’ve told me you love books. Maybe this is how you’ll understand.”

  She stared at the title. The History of the Jewish People. She laughed aloud, deliberately, to show him she didn’t take his sober mood to heart. But when she glanced up his face was stern. He looked, for an instant, like the officer who’d given the grim welcome upon the volunteers’ arrival at the base.

  She lifted a hand and saluted him.

  He didn’t laugh. “This is important. I need you to know what you’re walking into.”

  The book was used: its cover worn, the lettering of the title faded. “Do you understand how absurd this is, Dror?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You want me to read Jewish history so I can decide whether to love you. But I already know,” she said, “I already know everything I need to know about that.”

  He was silent. She’d known she would need to speak the words first.

  For a moment she thought he would lower himself to the edge of the bed where she sat and speak them back to her. But he stood, his face etched with a tension she didn’t understand. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Her voice snapped. “You’re wrong and you know it, Dror. You sound like a person at a podium. That”—she gestured toward the book, she spoke wildly—“that has nothing to do with love. That’s fear. You’re just afraid of”—her hand swept through the air at Dror, at herself—“of this.” Yet even as she spoke she wondered: Was she accusing him, or herself? Hadn’t she been relieved, just a bit, when a feeling she didn’t know how to contain had been pruned back by his anger, that day in Jaffa?