Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  But he forgot something important. I was stunned when the movie started. Everything was black and white. The things I was used to seeing in color, like the sky over the village and the leaves of the castor bush, or Zionka’s braids, were painted gray. At first, I was disappointed. I almost wanted to leave. I pulled Imri’s hand, and said angrily, “It doesn’t look the way things really are.”

  Imri asked if it was important for them to look the same, and he said that what we saw on the screen was a whole world that measured time differently and moved at a different pace than ours.

  From that time on, I woke up in the morning and remembered that the color had gone out of my dreams, and I dreamed in black and white. I asked Zionka how she dreamed, and she said her dreams had no color at all.

  * * *

  Johnny wouldn’t stop barking. I had to untie him. We went downstairs. Anna was standing at the window too, watching the flames and the smoke. She said she hated the smell and the sparks. “There’s no beauty in something that burns things into ashes,” Anna said.

  Even though the air was giving off waves of heat, her body was trembling.

  “What are they doing there now?” And I knew that Anna was thinking about her family in Poland.

  I asked, “What does it feel like to miss something?” Even though I whispered it in Hebrew, Anna understood. “It’s fire burning inside you. Do you sometimes miss ...?”

  “Who?”

  Anna was silent.

  I only miss Johnny Weissmuller. I don’t have the courage to miss the others. “Will you miss me, Uzik?”

  I didn’t promise things I couldn’t know in advance. You only missed things when they were gone for good, and I didn’t want to admit that anything of mine was lost forever.

  Aunt Miriam joined us. Now the three of us were standing in front of the window.

  Aunt Miriam said, “Tonka Greenbaum will back down in the end,” and I was surprised. Aunt Miriam was talking like someone who understood what a movie was and was already planning the end.

  All the residents of the village stayed awake that night. Only the chickens and the Zionist duck slept the sleep of the innocent, free of nightmares and smoke. I went to my room and shook the string that was stretched between my window and Zionka’s. Her mother had threatened to separate us and report me to the British, who would deport me from Palestine. They put dangerous people on a ship and sent them to Eritrea.

  That wouldn’t be so bad, Johnny. I once asked Zionka to show me Eritrea on the globe in our classroom. I put my finger on it, and saw that it was in East Africa. From there, the two of us could easily reach the jungle.

  The sky was red. You couldn’t see that in a movie. I whispered into the empty tin can everything that happened in Tarzan of the Apes, except for the scenes where Tarzan and Jane almost suck honey. Zionka was breathing on the other side of the string. She said she could see it all, and didn’t need to go to Tel Aviv to see the real movie. “Me Tarzan—you Jane.” Maybe that was enough. Zionka stopped me because she knew right away which scenes I was cutting, and she wanted me to put them back in immediately, or else the movie wouldn’t be the same.

  I can’t tell you everything, Zionka. When you see it, you’ll understand. You can squeeze all of time, which usually moves so slowly, into an hour and a half that goes by too quickly. I wanted to know the end right away. And you wanted to know what happened before the movie. Did Jane know in advance that she would meet Tarzan and that her whole life would change because of him?

  You also asked if there was any danger that after the movie, Jane would be sorry and want to go back to the life she had before.

  I didn’t know about the “before,” but I didn’t worry about the “after,” Zionka, because I knew for sure that there would be sequels. Besides, Major Charles Timothy Parker had promised me I could expect a lot more Tarzans, and I trusted him.

  I also told Zionka that even in a hundred years, when Johnny Weissmuller was old and could barely open his mouth, the roar would still be there in the movie, strong and shocking, giving everybody goosebumps.

  Listen, Zionka, I’m only a substitute for the real thing. Maybe everybody’s life should be turned into a movie just so it can be preserved somewhere. Shortened, not really the whole story, only certain things, some more important than others, but something would remain.

  Do you hear, Zionka, someone will be able to show me to my grandchildren, and say, “That was Uzik the troublemaker.” And they would show Anna the way she was in 1935.

  The world will look very different to the people living in the future. There’ll be a telephone, without wires, in every room, and Anna will able to talk to her family every day, and maybe they’ll be able to watch as many movies as they want whenever they want on a special screen that’s part of the wall. That was a thought that really made me jealous. I wish I could live in the future.

  We went to sleep when night had turned into a reddish, sooty morning. and Zionka’s yawns were still echoing in my ear. A cloud hovered over the village, and we breathed it into our black and white dreams, oblivious to the British soldiers breaking into our yard. Johnny Weissmuller barked wildly. I thought he was wounded again. I dreamed that we were both running alongside the fence, and the sentry shouted, “Little Zionist spy!” and aimed his rifle at me.

  In the dream, the blood pouring from my wound was black.

  Johnny’s barks were indignant. Like Tarzan, who understood the language of the jungle animals, I understood what Johnny was saying, “This is our house”— “This is our yard”— “This is our toolshed.”

  Then he bared his teeth, but didn’t manage to bite any of the Englishmen because they tied him with a chain to the side of the doghouse.

  “You won’t find the weapons you’re looking for,” Johnny Weissmuller roared. Uzik hid the Radom. Our troublemaker is the champion prankster of Palestine.

  Chapter 32

  The whole village gathered around our house. The rabbi came running from the synagogue, wearing his prayer shawl. He was carrying a feather and a candle, because he’d been in the middle of removing hametz, the leavened bread we were forbidden to eat during Passover.

  Aharonchik also appeared, the medal he’d gotten in the First World War pinned above the front pocket of his workers’ overall. He was sure the English would show him respect, but they pushed him back with their rifle butts and all he could do was shake his fist at them. “You promised us a national home! You are disgracing the honorable Lord Balfour,” he roared, his throat getting dry. “Your mandate in this country is only temporary. You will return it to its legal owners, you whiskey-sloshed imperialists!”

  His raging Yiddish roars had no effect on them. The British soldiers didn’t understand what he was saying, and continued their efficient and methodical search, overturning, breaking and destroying.

  The commander said, “You Jews take the law into your own hands. It is our job to prevent bloodshed. We are not a party in your struggle with the Arabs. We will disarm all of you.”

  Aunt Miriam pulled at the skirt of Anna’s dress. “Tell them you know... What’s the name of that English pilot who saved Johnny Weissmuller’s life?”

  All of a sudden, the dog had a name. Until then, she’d always called him just “the dog.”

  Anna refused. I thought it was because she didn’t want to get Charlie in trouble. The English officer in command of the soldiers repeated that they were only following orders, an expression of indifference on his pale, freckled face. The castor bush rustled. It was the only thing they didn’t damage. Its leaves were battered, but hadn’t been pulled off. The bush cast a shadow near the wrecked toolshed.

  They came into the house, overturned the beds, used knives to cut open the mattress Imri and Anna had slept on, and scattered the straw. They even looked under the bed in my room, took out my coiled Tarzan rope and confiscated it. They didn’t touch the candlestick or the fishing rod. The commander himself opened the closet door. There were all my moth
er’s clothes on hangers, and off to one side, Anna’s dresses. When they opened her dowry trunk, I started shaking. I didn’t think the movie would end this way.

  Johnny Weissmuller, take me with you into your movie. There, even the most frightening scenes have a happy end. Hold me tight and take me into the white screen. Together, we’ll leap from one tall tree to another in the jungle.

  The soldiers were flinging all of Anna’s belongings every which way. They tossed out her lace pillows and her underwear. They dug deeper into the trunk, and then the clock was on the floor along with the single remaining candlestick, and even the letters she’d received were examined and confiscated by the commander.

  One of the soldiers bent over, half his body inside the trunk. I knew that now, the fur coat with the newest model Radoms stuck in its sleeves would be discovered. The soldier straightened up.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said in disappointment, and kicked the trunk, which fell onto its side.

  As the soldiers were about to leave the house, the officer announced that Imri was not abroad. He’d been arrested when he got off the ship three days earlier.

  Anna froze. A shriek burst from Aunt Miriam’s lips and Zionka’s mother hugged and supported her. I didn’t know where Zionka was. I didn’t see her.

  Then Anna walked towards the soldiers. I thought she was going to spit at the Englishman. That’s what I would’ve done if I had the courage. “Cowards, have you no shame?”

  The freckle-faced officer towered above her. He was taller than she was. “I warn you, miss. You too can be arrested.”

  Johnny Weissmuller had broken his chain. He stood at Anna’s side, growling menacingly, and she put a calming hand on his fur.

  “Stop for a minute, sir and look at all the damage you’ve done. Can you live with it?”

  It was hard to believe this was the same woman who had danced with an Englishman last night in the café in Tel Aviv.

  The officer turned around and ordered his men to leave.

  Anna did not back down.

  “You can break everything here, but look around you. All of us—including you—are made of spirit. Empty air. We breathe it. It fills us, and air, sir, cannot be broken.”

  I was sitting in the toolshed as I had the night Imri went away for the first time. Everything was destroyed. They had even managed to dent the tin shed with their rifle butts. My grandfather’s clay pots were shattered to bits. They’d torn my father’s suits. One of the soldiers had really enjoyed his work. The old beehives and the tools we used to extract the honey were twisted and broken. The cover of the cache was open and the shillings I’d saved for the next Tarzan movie were covered with dirt. They hadn’t touched the silver. I closed my eyes, but the picture would not change.

  The Passover seder night, and everything here had turned into chaos.

  I thought about Imri sitting in a dark cell being interrogated, maybe beaten by the English, who demanded to know what he was really doing for the homeland. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t shed a single tear.

  I asked myself how Tarzan felt after Harry the Hunter shot him. That might be the only problem about the movies. When you watch one, you don’t know what the heroes are feeling, so you have to guess. Did Tarzan hate the strange white creatures who spoiled the peace and quiet of his Africa? Foreign soldiers broke into my house, searched my most private possessions, and I couldn’t do a thing about it, except stand there helpless and humiliated.

  I forced myself to remember that there was an Englishman like Charlie, and it made me a little less furious knowing that they didn’t find the guns in the end. I had no idea where they had disappeared to.

  Tell me, Johnny, you went through this in one movie, and they’re already filming the sequel—how do you live with a beehive that’s always filling up with the wax of hate? The bees have to keep on making poison, or else they don’t have a chance. I feel the poison now. It’s been in my body since that day, years ago, when I was stung by a whole swarm. Mohammed explained to me that some bees go back to being wild, see enemies everywhere and sting immediately. The picture I’m trying to cut refuses to go away. A beehive surrounded by circles of dead bees, and near them, jars of honey with labels Zionka is pasting on them, “The first Hebrew poison after two thousand years. Made in Palestine.”

  Of all the pictures I’d seen in my mind, this was the one in which I was able to read.

  I didn’t have the strength to stand up and straighten the mess. They broke the crystal ball, too. Now I couldn’t give it to Zionka. The water had spilled out, and it had a moldy smell. The snow, I discovered, wasn’t soft flakes, but just little grains of some sharp, prickly stuff.

  Imri was in jail, crouching in the dark, like me. What was he asking himself? Was the homeland worth everything we did for it? And the whole time, like an empty tin can, Anna’s words echoed in my ears. About the orders that people, not color-blind bees, obey. Not only the Germans would follow the Fuehrer. The fascists in Italy, the Poles and the Austrians, the Ukrainians and the Lithuanians, the Hungarians and the Romanians, and maybe even Aharonchik’s communists. Anna’s Europe would go up in smoke.

  I don’t want those pictures. I refuse to see that movie.

  What will happen to Anna’s family? I don’t want to think about it. The thing I’m most afraid of is myself. Of what I’m capable of doing.

  Maybe someday, I don’t know when, I’ll try to forgive. It will take another twelve Tarzan movies for me to even decide to try, but I will never, ever forget.

  Chapter 33

  “Not to the air! Absolutely not to the air!” I yelled at Aunt Miriam.

  I thought I’d go crazy. I couldn’t let her talk that way to Imri. If she wanted to tell him something, then she should write him letters, like Anna.

  I was trying to find a way to get them to the English prison.

  Imad, Mohammed and Fahtma’s cousin, knew a janitor who worked in the prison. Mohammed and his cousin sent him presents, jars of honey and bottles of olive oil, and herbs from Fahtma’s garden, and he promised to smuggle the letters to Imri.

  Aunt Miriam objected. She was afraid Mohammed would inform on us. I said to her, “I would cut off my arm for Mohammed, and he would do the same for me. If you say one more bad word about him, I’ll run away from home.”

  When Aunt Miriam saw I might carry out my threat, she turned Charlie into a suspect. “That English pilot used Johnny Weissmuller’s injury to snoop around here,” she said. “He didn’t bring the dog home out of humanism,” Aunt Miriam said sarcastically.

  “Something like communism,” I commented, making her even madder.

  I would ask Anna what the difference was. She’d know.

  Aharonchik proposed a daring rescue operation. In the middle of the night, the proletarian masses would scale the prison walls and break inside. He stood on an orange crate, the First World War medal still pinned on his chest, and proclaimed, “We’ll show the British imperialists—and the whole world—that a new race of Jews is flourishing in Eretz Israel! No more meek bourgeoisie, but valiant Samsons who will lead the revolution. Their courage will be a model for the generations to come!”

  Only Johnny Weissmuller and I were listening to him. Aharonchik enumerated a list of names, “All of them Jews, Mujik, do you hear,” who had taken part in the October Revolution, the one that ended the tyrannical rule of the czars in Russia. “Leon Trotsky is the commissar of the Red Army, and Zinoviev is secretary of the Third International, and Maksim Litvinov is the commissar for foreign affairs. Remember their names well. Without them, the world wouldn’t be what it is. Once, in the middle of an important meeting, Zinoviev remembered that it was the anniversary, the yahrzeit, of his parents’ death, and he apologized to the members of the Supreme Soviet, ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, even though I am an atheist, I must say Kaddish.’ Litvinov stopped him at the door and said, ‘You don’t have to go. There are ten Jews, a minyan, in this room, enough to say the prayer.’ Why aren’t you laug
hing, Mujik? Maybe you don’t understand the joke?”

  Johnny Weissmuller had left us. Now it was only me stuck with Aharonchik. He also knew which Englishmen were Jewish, and he cursed High Commissioner Samuel, who “was betraying his heritage.”

  I couldn’t decide whether to tell him that Johnny Weissmuller could be added to his list of great Jewish people.

  Aharonchik’s break-in plan kept running through my mind, and I started playing around with ideas. If I could pull Johnny Weissmuller out of the movie and give him my rope and Mohammed’s dagger, he would drop down into the jail from the roof, roar “Imri,” and rescue him in a flash, the way he rescued Jane and her father, the Colonel. Only one thing spoiled my plan. The English soldiers had confiscated my rope.

  The rabbi had a plan too. The commandment that said prisoners should be ransomed was one of the most important ones in the Torah, that’s what he announced in the synagogue. A Jew could not be a slave, and it was our duty to ransom him at any price. The rabbi was even prepared to sell the Holy Ark of the synagogue, one of the most ancient arks in Palestine, in order to fulfill this commandment. He asked all the people in the village to pray to the Almighty, may His name be blessed, for the release of prisoners, and every night, there was a minyan to offer a special prayer for the well-being of Imri the captive.

  Even though I didn’t know how to read a prayer book and always had to guess what prayers were being said by reading the lips of the people praying, I was ready to join them. But I wasn’t old enough to take part in a minyan because I still had a few months to go before my bar mitzvah.

  Now Aunt Miriam was talking to the air at night too. Her conversations with my mother weren’t enough for her anymore, so she was also holding long conversations with my father, giving both my parents instructions about how they could help from where they were. I also heard her talking to other dead people I didn’t know. She’d gone all the way back to the first pioneers, the ones who had founded the village sixty years ago, when there were only swamps and malaria here.