by Alison Pick
“Some of you have valuables,” she was saying. “Let’s collect these so they can best serve us all.”
Her language suggested this thought had just occurred to her now, or that it had occurred to them collectively and she was simply the mouthpiece for the group. Hannah looked into the crowd spread out cross-legged on the earth. “You,” she said, pointing to a peevish-looking man wearing lederhosen.
Lederhosen! thought Ida. In the heat!
“And you,” she said, pointing to someone Ida could not see through the jumble of backs and heads.
“Could you please be responsible for the gathering of people’s valuables?” Hannah asked.
But then a look crossed Hannah’s face; she was reconsidering. “Perhaps it’s more efficient to have everyone deliver the items themselves,” she said, less decisively.
Hannah, Ida could see, did not want to appear to be an authority figure. To set the correct tone, the belongings needed to be surrendered willingly, enthusiastic offerings to the enterprise they were building together. She did not want strangers circulating like policemen to take each other’s belongings. Especially not after what so many of them had been through in Czarist Russia.
Hannah was, Ida thought, the perfect replacement mother for all the real mothers they had left back home. How old was she? Maybe twenty-eight. But she would gather them all up in her wide lap; she would rub their backs and sing them to sleep.
“Before noon tomorrow,” Hannah said, “please bring your valuables up to the wagon.”
She smiled out at her husband, who held their little daughter in his lap. The perfect family—and Ida thought: maybe I can have that too. Maybe it’s really within reach.
A slip of a moon was making itself visible in the east. The promise of night was like silk, or cool water. It made Ida want to lie down. She wanted to rest in someone’s arms, to have someone—Levi?—push the hair from her face and kiss the line of her collarbones all the way to the base of her throat. She was overcome with melancholy and this hurt and pleased her in equal measure; she longed for something she had never had, and could not properly imagine, and yet a space inside her was calling out for it plaintively.
She saw again the railing of the ship pushing off from the dock in Russia; she saw her old life retreating not just symbolically but literally. Yes. It was gone.
“I have a pair of dirty socks,” Sarah said beside her.
Ida turned, blank.
“I have nothing valuable from home,” Sarah clarified.
“Oh. Neither do I,” Ida said absently. But as she leaned back into her satchel she felt one of her mother’s candlesticks dig into her low back.
She swallowed.
Surely candlesticks did not count. What good could they be to the group?
What good indeed. They could be sold.
The stars began to show their faces.
“Does someone tell us where we sleep?” Sarah asked.
But Ida didn’t register that the question was directed at her. The full complexity of her dilemma was slowing dawning on her.
“Should we find a tent?” Sarah asked more pointedly.
“Oh! Yes,” Ida answered. She pushed the candlesticks from her mind. Sarah wanted to be her friend.
Hannah’s speech was over, and so they hoisted their things onto their backs and went out into the field to stake their ground. While Ida and Sarah and their group had been clearing stones, a second contingent of workers had raised the tents. These were simply designed, a pole in the centre, each sheet of white canvas raised into a single peak. Their crisp triangles looked like sailboats spread across a vast sea.
The girls chose one near the outside of the circumference of the rough circle. “For privacy,” Ida said.
Sarah laughed. “You’re in the wrong place.”
Inside, two straw mats had been laid down along with two rough wool blankets from the Agency. One had been eaten through by moths. Ida took the holey one and gave Sarah the other. They set to work unpacking their few belongings. It was extraordinarily hot inside the canvas tent. Still, Ida felt pleasure in the making of a home.
“It’s like playing house,” she said. She was thinking of her family preparing for the evening meal.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a child?” Sarah asked.
Ida nodded. “I miss my mother,” she said, tentatively, testing whether she could trust Sarah with her feelings.
The other girl was examining a fingernail. She looked up. “I never had a mother,” she said.
“Everyone had a mother,” Ida answered, too quickly.
“Mine died,” Sarah said. “Giving birth to me.”
Ida could not think what to say, so she ventured, “My father died. In a pogrom.”
Sarah gave her a sympathetic look, but said only, “Here, give me a hand.”
They tied back the heavy tent flap to let some air in.
—
Later, after they had hung the lamp and lit it, Sarah wandered out into the evening. From where I am now I watch her go. There is something she is drawn to, something unnamed that she cannot resist. She doesn’t know what it is. But I know; oh, I know. And I wish it were otherwise.
—
Sarah left and Ida was alone. The silence felt alive, animated. Her inner world was palpable again, like a spotlight illuminating a dark corner. She had been surrounded by people every moment for days now, and had forgotten herself.
The life of the group, she saw, was not designed for introspection.
She lowered herself gingerly onto her straw mat, wincing, her thighs and buttocks sore after the long hike to the mountain and the first day’s labour. She felt around in the bottom of her bag where she had left her candlesticks. She drew them out, ran her fingers over the elaborate carving, the Hebrew inscription of the blessing. The dried wax from her last Shabbos at home was still crusted in rivulets. She pictured her mother, gathering the light around her head, and reciting the bracha. She knew, without having to ask, that the prayer—that any prayer—had no place here on the new kibbutz. But she heard again Levi’s Sabbath greeting, his refusal to forsake his own truth. She saw, in her mind’s eye, her father’s body in a pile on the perfectly polished floor.
There was a scratching at the tent flap. Someone wanted to enter, and Ida thought for a moment it must be Levi. He had heard her longing; he was coming for her. But when she looked up she saw someone else. He didn’t wait to be invited, but entered the tent as though it was his own. Which, in a way, she supposed it was.
She recognized this man from earlier: the black hair, the lederhosen. She thought again how unbearable they must be in this heat.
“I’m Ida,” she said, and her guest answered back German. “Grüsse.”
He didn’t offer his own name. In the lengthening shadows of the paraffin lamp, Ida saw that his skin was pale as milk. He had strange spots of pigment on his lips, as if God had marked him for some blasphemy he had let slip from his mouth. His eyes fell on the candlesticks that rested on top of her mattress. A long moment of silence passed between them.
“I was charged with collecting valuables,” the German said at last, sweeping his eyes up to meet her own.
They were to turn in their belongings themselves; Ida, along with everyone else, had heard Hannah say so. But there was something in this man’s tone that made Ida afraid to not comply.
“Thank you,” she said. “I was just finishing in here.”
She hoped this implied she would turn the candlesticks in later.
The German looked at her. “Those are beautiful pamotim,” he said, now using the Hebrew word. A mosquito buzzed around his head but he made no move to swat it away. “Valuable,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” she said, lying instinctively. But the German made a scoffing noise. For a long moment they held eyes.
“I know worth when I see it,” he said.
Something turned over in her stomach. The hairs on the back of her arms stood on end. She
searched for something to say that would make him leave.
“Where are you off to next?” she asked finally.
He lifted his eyebrows.
“The future,” he said.
It was a strange answer, but Ida found she understood.
“Good evening, comrade,” he said, speaking again in German, and turned to leave. Ida watched his retreating back—he was tallish, his shoulders narrow. One of his blue suspenders was twisted. There was something vulnerable about it. Or rather, on someone else it would appear vulnerable, like a child who had attempted to dress himself, but on the German it appeared vaguely threatening—the elastic with its tight cinch.
—
Ida lay on her pallet for an hour trying to sleep. The rough Agency blanket chafed at her skin. Eventually she kicked it off, got up and went outside. The sky was full of stars, exquisitely sharp and covering every bit of the blackness. They did nothing to alleviate the heat. She walked slowly, winding her way between the tents. Here and there the young pioneers were laughing, stretching their sore muscles, lying on their backs looking up at the astral spectacle. A woman with a long braid was massaging a boy’s shoulder. Despite the temperature, someone had lit a bonfire to keep the mosquitoes away and a circle had gathered loosely around it, someone with a flute, someone else with another stringed instrument Ida could not identify. The fiddler had bright red hair and orange freckles.
The words of Rabbi Hillel floated up with the smoke, words turned into song:
Im ayn ani li, mi li?
If I am not for me, who will be?
And if not now, then when, then when!
Ay ma-tay!
Ida wove her way to the edge of the river. Several boys were dangling their feet in the cool mud at the edge of the water. One was eating a lemon, sucking the bitter juice straight from the rind; where had he found it? Her stomach growled. She bent to remove her shoes, thinking she would wade into the river, immerse herself entirely. An image came to her: her father going to the mikveh before synagogue. This river would be as sacred as any ritual bath. She wondered if Levi would see it this way as well.
But as she began to undo her buckles, she glimpsed the German out of the corner of her eye. He must have come here directly from her tent. He was a few metres away, where the mudflats extended into rushes. Ida smiled at him, raising her hand to the side of her face, but the German gazed beyond her toward the shadow of the mountain. His face remained impassive, as if he had never seen her before.
Ida squinted. She took off her glasses and rubbed the dirty lenses with her sleeve and put them back on. She recalled the sight of his back as he’d left her tent. His white shirt, the twist in his suspenders. The suspenders he had been wearing minutes before were blue, but these ones were red.
—
The next morning, work started early, before the sun rose. The blister on Ida’s foot had popped. She covered it in medical tape and heel-walked beside Sarah out to the field where they resumed the removal of boulders. They bent and lifted, bent and lifted. Time became immeasurable; there was no way to mark its passage beyond the bell that rang for their noonday meal, and Ida could not gauge whether an hour had passed, or three.
By mid-morning her right hand had begun to take on the claw-shaped grip of the handle of her shovel.
At last the bell rang and a food-wagon came around, pulled by the donkeys someone had dubbed Trotsky and Lenin. The redheaded fiddler Zeruvabel drove them; a moon-faced halutza named Shoshanna, with dark eyebrows and bushy armpit hair, doled out tin plates of eggplant and pita from the back of the wagon. A group beside the river had the thought to make a shelter from the sun using a big roll of corrugated metal they would eventually use for irrigation ditches. The pioneers crammed in together, setting up picnic style in whatever portion of shade they could get.
Ida looked across to the wagon and saw two men deep in conversation: the German with his lederhosen and beard; and someone—she looked a second time to make sure it wasn’t some trick of the shimmering heat—someone who looked exactly like him.
She nudged Sarah, who raised her head from the plate she was scraping with the side of her finger.
“Look,” Ida said.
“What?”
She pointed to the men.
“Oh, that,” Sarah said, turning back to her plate. “Do you think there are seconds?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m so hungry.”
“Are they…” Ida started.
Sarah laughed. “Haven’t you seen identical twins before?”
Ida considered. Cohen and Saul Janovitch from synagogue were twins, but they didn’t even look as if they were related, whereas these twins were truly identical. Despite herself, she felt a visceral fear of them—akin to the fear of the contortionist she had seen when the circus came to Kiev, or the tightrope walker with no pigment in her skin. She knew it was a natural occurrence, that the human body was far more versatile than had once been understood. But understanding and feeling were two different things, and she shivered.
Sarah brought her plate to her face and licked it.
“You really were hungry,” Ida said, instead of commenting on the bad table manners.
Sarah made a face that said I told you so; she wiped her face with her sleeve and looked out at the field of boulders. To the east of them the pioneers had resumed working after their meal. “The men have cleared more than we have,” she said.
“We’ll show them,” Ida said.
“Will we?” Sarah asked.
They laughed, and Ida followed Sarah’s gaze, taking in the rockscape before them. It was best to focus on the small square of earth right in front of you, she decided—two metres by two metres, say. To raise your eyes was to see boulders all the way to the horizon, and the accompanying labour this implied.
Sarah was wiggling at the earth with her toe. She had dislodged a rock and was peering beneath it.
“Come here,” she said to Ida.
Ida leaned over; there was a worm, fat and ridged, close to a foot long. It was wriggling madly, in some kind of frenzy. Flipping its tail the way a snake would.
Ida shuddered.
“How long do you think it is?” Sarah asked.
“Leave it alone.”
But Sarah had drawn the worm up by its tip—its tail? its head?—and laid it on top of the boulder. “If you cut a worm in half it turns into two worms,” she said. A look crossed her face. She gestured to the wagon where the Germans were now saddling Trotsky. “Same concept,” Sarah said. “One egg, divided. It shouldn’t work. But look how they thrive.”
“Creepy.”
“The worm?”
“The Germans,” Ida said.
Her face must have shown a feeling that Sarah misinterpreted.
“You don’t believe me?” Sarah asked.
She held a hand out for the shovel. Ida passed it to her. Sarah lifted the serrated edge and cut the worm neatly into two.
There was no blood. But neither did either piece resume the terrible writhing. The severed halves lay limp on the rock.
“It’s dead,” Ida said, matter-of-factly.
Sarah laughed. “I guess I was wrong.”
Across the field someone shouted, “Kol hakavod!”
Ida looked over to the wagon; the Germans had disappeared.
—
The rest of the week was spent establishing protocols. A meeting was convened to develop a system for night watch. David, who had been at Kinneret, had an idea about how the system should work. The idea was that he would keep their one gun.
Dov, a blank-faced boy who had volunteered for the first shift, had a different idea. What if the Arabs came? Wasn’t that the point of a night guard?
“The Arabs mean us no harm,” a girl named Leah said.
“Are you joking?” someone asked.
“You can’t really blame them,” someone else said. “I’d hate us too.”
“You will have a whistle to blow,” David said
to Dov.
Dov’s face did not change. But he muttered, “I’ll kill them with my whistle.”
It was no surprise to Ida who won the argument.
The next morning, at breakfast, Dov reported that the Arabs had indeed appeared. Five of them, or perhaps more; the moon had been obscured by the clouds. The Arabs stood on horseback in a row at the edge of the encampment, their posture erect, not speaking, but not taking their eyes off Dov either. As if to say, there are more of us. We will be back.
CHAPTER 2
SOON, NEW TASKS WERE assigned on the basis of gender. This was not stated explicitly, but what else could explain Leah, Sarah and Hannah being assigned kitchen duty while the men continued clearing the fields.
“I came here to work the land!” a halutza named Yana complained.
“Women’s work is women’s work wherever you go,” said Sarah.
The Agency sent twenty bolts of white cotton. The girl named Shoshanna with the bushy eyebrows and armpit hair set about making shirts in various sizes. These were simple, with open necks and billowing sleeves to protect the wearer’s arms from the broiling sun. At first, Shoshanna would add a flourish on each cuff, a bluebell or a Mogen David in needlepoint, once even a whole pattern of red roses on a sleeve. She was talented, Ida thought, her handiwork meticulous. But David came across her doing this and put a stop to it.
Perhaps because her sewing had been halted, Shoshanna initiated a group meeting about the principles behind the assignment of tasks. But the men were not interested in this discussion, on balance, or if they were they did not speak up, and the talk morphed quickly into a debate about how—and if—they would celebrate the High Holy Days that were coming so quickly.
“Are we not Jews?” Dov asked. His voice was tight, but his face stayed blunt, like a block of wood that had been set down in the middle of the proceedings.
