by Alison Pick
“I prefer eggplant anyway,” Levi said. He pushed up his shirtsleeves and rested his elbows on his knees.
Ida cocked her head, weighing his statement.
“Not really?” she asked.
“Vegetarian,” he explained.
She lifted her eyebrows. “A real idealist,” she said.
“Is that a compliment?”
They both laughed.
“The biggest compliment I know,” she said.
Levi lifted his fork and looked at her, waiting for her to start first. As she ate, she soaked in the presence of his body beside her. He smelled of sweat, which in the old world made her think of stale old men, trudging through the snow to synagogue in their fur-lined coats and hats. Here it made her think of action. Levi was a good worker. An idealist. A vegetarian! They didn’t speak, but their eyes both fell on her plate—chicken! They smiled, and then Levi turned his gaze to the tiny blisters on the back of Ida’s hand from the laundry.
Levi put his fork down. He held his hand above hers in the air. Tentatively, as if he was about to touch something that might burn him too, he ran his finger over the raised bumps on her skin.
This felt both abstract, like something happening to some other girl, and extraordinarily sensitive, like he was touching her somewhere entirely different than her wrist. There was a heaviness between Ida’s hips; all of her body was opening under his touch. A mosquito buzzed by his leg and he did not lift his hand away from hers to dissuade it. Its needle went into his ankle and still he sat, giving it his blood, watching her face. She looked back at him, forcing herself to hold his eye. There were little flecks of yellow in the green of his irises; his lashes were long. He had a small scab from a bug bite on his right temple.
“You got bitten,” Ida said.
He smiled, and she saw his chipped tooth and wondered if it had happened when he was a child.
“This is brand new to me,” Levi said.
It was not clear to Ida whether he meant the workday ahead of them, or the touching of her wrist, or their mission to establish an entirely new country. His words encircled all the possibilities. And something else too.
She looked back at Levi; he covered her hand with his own.
She reciprocated.
He placed his other hand on top of hers.
She reciprocated again.
Four hands, piled one on top of the other.
“I’m on night watch,” he said.
“But it’s morning.”
He laughed. “This evening.”
Ida said, “Okay.”
Levi was quiet. Then he said, “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Keep me company tonight,” he said.
—
After, as she walked back to her tent, she replayed the conversation, word by word. She was considering the implications of the phrase “keep me company” as she came around the corner of the dining tent and almost stumbled over one of the German twins. She touched her glasses and squinted. He was alone. Just standing there. She noticed again the strange spots of pigment on his lips.
“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he asked her.
“None of your business,” Ida said, impulsively, and immediately regretted being rude. It would only draw attention to her.
The German—which one?—puckered his lips. It was a look of both disgust and disdain, as if she was at once repugnant and not worth his time.
“Enjoy yourself,” he said testily.
“Where are you off to?” Ida asked, because he was clearly going nowhere and they were meant to occupy all their waking hours being useful. But the German only waved his hand, as if dismissing a servant.
Sarah had told Ida that there was usually a way to distinguish identical twins—the voice, a birthmark or a scar—but if such a thing existed in this case they had not yet identified it. Why bother trying? Ida wondered. And later wished she had.
—
It seemed to take forever for evening to arrive. It felt to Ida as if she was hunched over the vat of boiling water for days, stirring the laundry like it was some kind of witch’s cauldron. Sweat coated her buttocks and the back of her neck. When the bell rang, signalling the end of the workday, she took off her leather sandals and lay on her back, too tired to move the twenty metres to the thin strip of shade by the clothesline. An hour passed. Her eyes closed. She smelled eggplant.
When Ida finally made her way back to the tent, Sarah was there. She was wearing a silk skirt and a blouse with crimson sleeves.
“Where did you get that?” Ida asked.
“I brought it from home,” Sarah said.
Ida had not seen anything like it pass through the laundry. There was a vee at the bust, offering just the barest hint of cleavage, the rose-coloured fabric falling in soft folds over the curves of Sarah’s figure. A few delicate, clear beads decorated the cuffs.
“What?” Sarah asked, in answer to Ida’s glance. “David said I could keep it.” She held her bottom lip in her teeth.
Ida pictured her own beautiful candlesticks. Had she given them up for nothing?
“Did he really?” she asked.
Sarah drew herself up. “He didn’t actually say it. But he didn’t tell me to turn it in either.”
Ida shrugged, drawing a breath and letting it out slowly. She scratched her cheek. “You look beautiful,” she conceded.
Sarah smiled. She looked down at the red blouse tenderly.
It was too hot to stay for long inside the stifling canvas, so together Ida and Sarah made their way outside and down to the river. They crossed the mud flats, wading in water up to their knees, holding their skirts bunched up in their fists, Ida’s bag-like, utilitarian, Sarah’s like a prim lady’s from the city. They stood for a long time watching the sky turn a deep shade of pink, and then purple, and then navy blue. Ida’s feet were deep in the muck, and it occurred to her there might be leeches but she could not bring herself to move. The mud felt cool on her hot, blistered feet.
Finally Sarah spoke. “I sometimes get the feeling…” she said. But her voice trailed off.
“You get the feeling?” Ida prompted. She reached over and touched the sleeve of her friend’s blouse absently, rubbing the red fabric between her fingers like a vendor in the Old City market sizing up its worth.
Sarah pressed her fingertips together, steepling her hands in front of her face. She’s been acting oddly, Ida thought. They’d known each other only a short time, but Ida could tell that Sarah’s long stretches of moody quiet were out of character. As was the muffled crying late at night. Once, when Ida had woken very early in the morning, Sarah had been gone.
“You were saying something?” Ida asked, more directly. Voices drifted through the dusk from the cooking tent: a peal of wild laughter. A single shout. Sarah looked up, surprised. As though she had forgotten the conversation entirely.
“I’m not sure,” she answered at last. “Do you ever feel like there’s an unwelcome presence here?”
“You mean the Arabs?”
Ida felt fondly about Fatima but could not think what else Sarah might be referring to.
But Sarah said, “No. I mean ghosts.”
Ida smiled, and then removed the smile carefully from her face, unsure if this was meant to be a joke. She splashed at the surface of the water with her foot.
“Not really,” she said. It was a nonsense notion, like Ayin Ha-Ra, the passage from Berakhot in the Talmud about how to ward off the evil eye by claiming yourself a descendant of Joseph.
“No?” Sarah asked.
Ida reconsidered.
“No,” she said.
Sarah said, “I do.”
“What kind of ghosts?”
“The kind with sheets over their heads and holes cut out for eyes.”
Eva had worn this exact costume for Purim last year; Ida felt a pang of homesickness and closed her eyes against it. A night bird cried out.
“Not ghosts,” Sarah qualified. “N
ot exactly. It’s more like…I feel haunted.”
“Haunted by?”
“A ghost.”
They both giggled, and then laughed more intensely. It was a ridiculous conversation. Ida imagined someone overhearing it, and Sarah joined in. “The pioneers of tomorrow in deep discussion,” Sarah narrated, as though she was reading aloud from a headline in a newspaper, perhaps the brand-new Ha’aretz from Tel Aviv.
A dragonfly floated above them, wings aloft, a bright emerald blue. Sarah pinched her earlobe between her thumb and her forefinger. “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”
Above them I drifted. Had you forgotten I was here?
Sarah said, “It’s like I’m haunting myself.”
CHAPTER 3
IDA WALKED ACROSS THE FIELD with Levi holding her hand for everyone to see. They passed Dov, one foot balanced on a wagon axle, reading Bialik’s Hebrew translation of Don Quixote. The thought came to Ida that her life was not dissimilar to a translated work: a story taken from Russian, lifted up and placed in a Hebrew context.
Dov waved his hand in front of his face absently, his eyes still on the book. The cloud of mosquitoes around him rose briefly into the air and then descended a moment later.
Levi led Ida not toward the newly installed water tap that the Agency had magically produced as though in apology for all the other supplies that were somehow stalled in Jaffa, but in the opposite direction, toward the Arab settlement. She followed without asking where they were going. From somewhere behind them came the sound of a motor turning over. A few high, clear notes as Zeruvabel played his violin.
When they passed the farthest edge of the field—a row of boulders had been placed there to mark a barrier—Ida asked, “Aren’t you on night guard?”
Levi turned and smiled at her. “It’s taken care of,” he said. Ida hesitated. But he squeezed her hand and her trust returned, flooding through her body like golden liquid.
They kept walking further from the tents in search of some privacy, although neither of them said so. They followed the Arab donkey path as it wound around the base of the mountain. The slopes here had long been picked clean by Bedouin goats. The air was heavy and close, and hot as an oven. A hamsin was coming. They passed the dry well with the rusted bucket sticking out of the sand. Fatima’s house loomed behind them, the flowers outside withered in their boxes. It would be nearly impossible to keep them alive in this kind of heat. Ida recalled the bundled candlesticks passed between their hands like a baby. A flutter rose in her chest, a mild nausea of guilt and uncertainty. For a moment she thought of telling Levi what she had done. How good it would feel to have someone to share her secret with, to have him know this part of her too. But Levi was a good halutz. He thought always of the group. She wanted to unburden herself, but the need was not equal to the risk of confessing.
They came, finally, to a bend in the creek that was sheltered by an outcrop of the mountain. There were bulrushes and mud flats and the river smelled like sweet mint and clover. A night bird sang the first four notes of the Marseillaise, and then sang them over again.
Levi squeezed her hand.
Ida had once held hands with a boy before. Shlomo’s hand had been smooth, and the same size as hers, whereas Levi’s was calloused from work, and engulfed hers entirely.
“I’m sorry I’m so sweaty,” he said, and she felt the moisture between their palms. “Should I let go?”
“No,” she said.
And then added, sweetly, “Please don’t.”
He did let go, though, and lifted his arms and took off his loose cotton shirt. He spread it out on a stretch of patchy grass, cracked earth showing between the tufts like a baby’s first hair. Ida thought briefly how dirty it would be when it reached the laundry. Then Levi took off his trousers, as though it was the most natural thing to do, and laid them flat as well.
His underclothes had once been white but now were almost grey with wear. She could see the bulge of his testicles beneath them. And a hint of the cut that was evidence of God’s covenant with Abraham, that marked him as a Jew.
Levi had taken a revolver out of his pocket and casually laid it in the grass.
Ida looked at it. An object entirely unrelated to the scene around it. It seemed innocent, irrelevant, like it was carved out of soap or wood.
“I thought the gun was David’s,” she said.
“It is.”
“But I thought…” she paused, assembling her words. “I thought only David…”
“Samuel is on night guard,” Levi said, meaning that one of the Germans had replaced him. But this only confused Ida more. She raised her eyebrows and squinted, asking for more clarification, but Levi waved his hand, like the topic was written on a chalkboard in front of them and he was erasing it.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He patted the earth beside him.
She hesitated a moment, everything hanging in the balance, and then submitted. It was strange that he had the gun, but something more important was happening.
Ida followed Levi’s lead and took off her dress.
“Help?” She knelt forward, and Levi undid the back button. He pulled the zipper down slowly.
She folded her glasses carefully and laid them in the grass.
If her mother could have seen her.
But Ida quickly dismissed the thought. She did not judge herself for her own willingness. If her father had been alive back home there would have been a matchmaker, and hushed negotiations between him and the father of some boy she might barely have met who was deemed suitable because his family attended synagogue. But her father was not alive, and the old world was dead. She would have no part of the chuppah, the superstitious circling of the bride by her groom. No part of the furtive fumbling beneath the sheets. If her father was alive he might have been shamed, but on some level she knew her mother would understand.
Ida slipped out of the dress and stood in her sandals and her brassiere, which she would have to abandon entirely soon—Shoshanna was on a tirade about how bras were demeaning to women, a physical manifestation of the impulse to keep them socially constrained. Easy for Shoshanna to say—she didn’t have any breasts to speak of. Whereas Ida’s were full.
When she released the clasp, though, she did feel relief in being free. Her breasts, she saw, and saw Levi seeing as well, were a shocking white in contrast to the deep tan on her face and arms.
Surely, nobody had ever felt before what she was feeling now.
Levi looked up at her face. He, too, wore an expression that was almost like pain. She saw the chip on his tooth and felt an impulse to bring her hand to his mouth and touch it.
He wiggled over so that his back was on the scratchy mud and the shirt was available for her more delicate skin. He again patted the fabric. “Come here.”
Before she’d left Russia, Ida had said a prayer. She wanted to build Eretz Yisrael, yes. She wanted to do it in her beloved Abba’s memory. And also, she had wanted things to happen to her. To become a new person suited to this new place and time. But she could hardly believe the ease with which this was happening, as though God had heard her and given her even more than she had thought to ask for. As though He had seen her crippling loss and was now trying to shower her with gain. If Ida needed proof that He existed, here it was. She was used to moving through her days with an unrequited longing in her belly—for a boy, for adulthood, for something more ephemeral she couldn’t name. She had grown so accustomed to the longing that she had not conceived of the fact that it could be sated. That instead of the interminable waiting, action could be taken, events could occur.
A man who wanted to give himself to her had appeared. Her prayer had been answered before she had known what she was asking.
Ida lay down beside Levi, and he took her in his arms.
It was as if they were an old married couple in their bedroom on a Shabbos afternoon, endless years of tenderness and arguments and reconciliations already between t
hem, laying down beside each other to let their bodies have the animal pleasure of speaking without the burden of thought.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said, turning her face to him. She wanted him to know in case this changed his mind.
“Do you want to know the truth?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Neither have I.”
This astonished her, and made her tender toward him, like a mother toward a child. She knew his inexperience was partly because of his religious observance, and this, too, engendered in her a feeling of recognition, like they were seeing each other at the most profound level. Some of the halutzim saw God and Zionism as incompatible, but within Levi the two were braided together inseparably. How could Hashem object? Unlike the strange and sin-laden world of the Christians, in Judaism it was a mitzvah to make love with the one you loved.
All her fear was suddenly gone. His arm was around her shoulders, and she curled onto her side and put her head on his chest. She felt the soft fuzz of hair against her cheek. It was like the act was already finished, like they were holding each other in the wide wake of a great thing already completed. His hair had grown shaggy in the short time they had been there.
“I could cut your hair,” she said.
He laughed. “Like Delilah?”
“I would never betray you,” she said, breathing him in. Sweat, and hay, and oil from the plow.
“We’d need scissors,” he said.
She nodded. It would have to wait.
“Your hair is long too,” he said. He rolled toward her and undid the ribbon at the bottom of first one braid and then the other. It took him some time to loosen the braids until her hair was free. He ran in his fingers through it, like he had never seen a woman’s hair before. Their faces were nearly touching. He looked in her eyes. He did not look away.
—
