by Alison Pick
As Ida watched, the twin took David aside and whispered something in his ear. He must have spoken loudly enough to rouse little Ruth, for she lifted her head from her father’s shoulder and leaned in so she, too, could hear.
David’s eyebrows lifted and a smile pushed at the edges of his cheeks. He turned from the twin and faced the group. Their voices died down as they waited to hear what he would say.
“Selig has received some valuable candlesticks from home. We can sell them to repair the machines.”
In her father’s arms, Ruth straightened her torso, squaring her little shoulders. Into the bowl of silence, her voice rang out high and clear. “Those candlesticks are Ida’s!” she said.
Instinctively, Ida took a step backward, trying to conceal herself among the halutzim. She had clearly underestimated Ruth’s capacities on several different fronts. The twin—Selig—looked at Ruth in alarm too, as though his own fate hung in the balance. But David only put his hand on Ruth’s head and guided it back to his shoulder. She struggled for a moment, her determination evident, but a moment later she was quiet, her breathing heavy and her papery eyelids closed.
David boosted Ruth higher up on his hip and Ida remembered how heavy the child was. David turned again to Selig. “We are grateful to you,” he said, so everyone could hear. “This will help.” He hoisted the candlesticks like a prize. “I’ll take them to Tiberias and see what we can get.”
Selig nodded curtly. He turned away from David and scanned the group. Ida knew he was looking for her. When he caught her eye, he held it. His face like smoke.
Later, Ida saw David walking toward the tents with Ruth in his arms. The child was happily holding her doll. A look on her face of dreamy contentment. Ida smiled. This, at least, had worked itself out. The doll had been found.
From here, of course, I know better.
CHAPTER 8
TIME PASSED QUICKLY; soon Passover was coming. There would be more visitors, Jews from abroad who wanted to see the miracle being worked in Eretz Yisrael. David had been negotiating with the railway company to build a proper station for the kibbutz. The company required a commitment to a certain number of passengers. David had promised to deliver. He was confident; the railway company was skeptical. But as soon as the station was built the quota was surpassed, almost doubled. It was good news for them all.
The coming of Passover also gave the group the motivation to finally move to a permanent spot beyond the stream. The Arab tenant-farmers had left their homes after some negotiations with David that the other halutzim were not privy to. Ida realized she would no longer see Fatima. She found herself disproportionally sad, as if she was losing a sister, the only person who really understood her. Nobody knew about her relationship with Fatima—she recalled how she had tried to tell Levi that day she’d confessed, with disastrous results—and so she had no one to share her sadness with.
She might have tried to tell her tentmate Sarah, but Sarah’s own mood had been volatile. The crying had increased. Ida had tried to talk to her about it, but Sarah repeated that she was homesick, and how could Ida argue with that? She, too, thought about home constantly, wondering if her mother and Eva were okay.
The Arabs had left behind their mud houses and a handful of stone buildings that the halutzim argued over how to best make use of. Saul suggested a communal hall, but the building would be too small to house the wild dancing that would take place on rainy January evenings. Shoshanna wanted the largest one to be designated for the school.
“We have no children here,” Zeruvabel said.
“Other than you,” one of the twins answered.
“Just wait,” Shoshanna said.
The image came to Ida of the baby she and Levi could have had together. A boy with his father’s pure heart. He would have grown up in Eretz Yisrael, speaking Hebrew. A child who had nothing left to long for. But Levi had now withdrawn from her entirely.
New spots for the tents were chalked into the dust, like a ghost town. Nobody could imagine the settlement being there, until, all at once, it existed. One day, a handful of halutzim stayed back from the field to move the camp, and at sunset, when the others returned, the new world was ready: rows of dazzling white peaks had been raised. The halutzim were ecstatic. Finally their move was permanent. Only Ida did not want to go. Everything that had happened between her and Levi had happened in the old place. To let it go was to acknowledge their failure, to release the dream they had shared.
The mud house that had been Fatima’s stood vacant, deemed even less sturdy than the canvas tents. Ida could not look at it without nausea rising in her belly. In the end, the stone houses, too, were left empty, for the children who would surely soon be conceived. The grain was stacked, and now couples went to the gorens. They nestled into the mountains of hay as evening fell, like lovebirds into their nests. But Levi would not go, and so Ida would not go either.
—
The coming of Passover also meant that everything was cleaned. The air smelled of bleach and kerosene. Straw was taken out of the mattresses and changed. Ida saw the twins polishing their shoes.
Elisabeth came to Ida at the laundry and asked her to cut her hair.
“I heard you’re the barber,” she said.
“From who?” Ida asked.
“Everyone knows,” Elisabeth said, and she held up a pair of gleaming scissors.
“Where did you get those?”
“From the medical kit.”
“Of course.”
“Will you do the honours?”
Ida sat the girl down on one of the few folding chairs. Her hair fell almost to her behind, a dark chestnut colour, and the weight of it in Ida’s hand was heavy like rope. It smelled uncannily like she had just emerged from a bubble bath.
Ida twisted the hair around her wrist, gathered the ends together to be trimmed. It was satisfying to cut through the resistance. When she had finished removing the dead ends, she patted Elisabeth’s shoulder. The girl twisted around in her chair.
“What?”
“I’m done.”
Elisabeth laughed. She said, “You haven’t begun.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want it all off.”
Ida tilted her head. “Your hair is so beautiful,” she said. Surely Elisabeth must know this, but the girl just looked at her, staring her down.
Ida asked, “Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything.”
Who was Ida to disagree? She lifted the scissors.
—
The tractor was fixed using the money from Ida’s family candlesticks. David himself went to Tiberias and sold them. Four, five, maybe more generations of memories lost to a godforsaken stranger. Ida was alone with her grief; the others only knew that everything would now be easier because the machine was repaired. The whole enterprise was a giant interwoven mosaic. Back home this had been only theory, but here the truth of it was plain for anyone to see. If someone made a mistake in the morning and added too much salt to the gruel, then the workers went into the fields with resentment rather than joy. The fields felt their dejection. The weeding was slower. The threshing was incomplete. And this, in turn, affected the gruel they would be eating—or not eating—the following winter.
There had been a fevered debate as to whether or not to hold a Seder, but Zeruvabel, whose father was a famed Torah scholar in Minsk, assured them Passover had originally been a celebration for the cutting of the winter barley. Observing it could be seen as the renewal of a long lost agricultural festival. It didn’t have to be religious.
Unspoken relief rippled through the halutzim. Godless as most of them professed to be, they had been raised with Pesach their whole lives, and although nobody would have admitted it aloud, they would have felt bereft without it. They took care to make it an event of great celebration. In the dining hall that still smelled of sawdust, cloths were placed over the roughly hewn tables. Wheat sheaves, barley sheaves and olive branches were
used for decoration. To Ida’s mind this made the celebration look more like Sukkot than Passover; the scythe made out of wheat—similar to the sickle and hammer of the Communist Revolution—would have been entirely out of place at any traditional Seder. Wheat—and anything leavened—was forbidden on the holiday. But perhaps that was the point?
A Seder plate had been placed in the middle of each table; that much, at least, was traditional. They had no lambs to slaughter but each plate was adorned with a chicken bone. These had come from Tiberias—Shoshanna had tried to raise chicks, but without an incubator most of them had died. The smell of soup from the vats on the propane stove made Ida’s mouth water, but lately her stomach was refusing food. She had no appetite—only panic when she woke in the early mornings, and a crippling kind of heart-sickness that she could hardly stand. Sarah was gone from the tent as often as not and Ida was alone with her heart hammering as the great weight of consciousness flowed back into her body.
Although Levi had not explicitly judged her, her sin stained their every interaction. It was as though the love that had been so abundant one moment had the next been baked dry in the stifling sun.
Levi was distributing Haggadot when she came into the dining hall for the Passover Seder. He, too, had polished his shoes. His hair was partly neatly at the side, and combed. He was wearing a kippah. The sight of all this made Ida almost physically ill with longing.
He reached over to pass her a Haggadah, and they both looked at it in his hand, as though once it was exchanged something more would be officially concluded.
Ida remembered that first day they’d met, when he had passed her his canteen.
“The Haggadah,” he said, as if to reassure her that was all he was giving her.
“I saw you by the river earlier,” she said.
She did not say “at our place in the river,” but Levi flushed and pressed his lips together. In her mind’s eye she replayed the sight: the contours of his bare muscled back, him pausing on the bank, his eyes closed. He had been purifying himself for Pesach, using the river as his mikveh. Later, he had wrapped a prayer shawl around his shoulders, rocking back and forth as he davened.
“Will you sit with me?” she asked. The tables were filling up.
“Okay,” he said. But then he hesitated. “I’d better keep passing these out.”
They both looked down at the Haggadah on the top of the pile he was holding. The glue at the binding was coming apart. It, like Ida’s candlesticks, was somebody’s family heirloom. The story of Passover brought back to the place where it had originally happened.
“Haroset,” she said, looking over his shoulder at the Seder plate.
“Yes.”
“Strange that something symbolizing mortar and bricks, the slavery of—” She broke off.
“Ida,” Levi said.
“And maror!” she said, trying desperately to keep her voice light. She gripped her braid.
“Ida,” he said again.
If she refused to listen, she would not have to hear what he was saying. “I hate horseradish,” she said.
“Ida?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” Levi said.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Ida understood. He was sorry for the death of what they had dreamed. He was sorry they would never have a child. He was sorry for his idealism that made him unable to forgive her.
His heart had closed, but he, too, wished it had not. He saw its closing as his own shortcoming. But that didn’t mean he could change it.
They both turned at the sound of someone’s hobnailed boots clomping across the new floor. Ida seized the moment to take the Haggadah from Levi’s hand and push past him. She saw Hannah sitting at the front with her daughter, Ruth, in her lap; the girl looked pale as a ghost, as though she weighed almost nothing. Ida kept her eyes averted from the child’s leg. Ruth made a small noise in her throat when Ida passed them, but Ida kept going. She found a place beside Elisabeth, who had announced at breakfast that she would now be called by her Hebrew name, Esther.
The candlesticks on the table in front of them were the same cheap tin ones they had used at Rosh Hashanah. David reclined at the head of the table as was customary and led them through the Seder.
“This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in Egypt,” he read from the Haggadah, and Ida felt the affliction as if her flesh was burning.
I go back and listen from above as they say the prayers, but I can hear that these are prayers to themselves, praises of their own ingenuity. They forget that there are forces bigger than their own, forces that have been leading them all along.
CHAPTER 9
AS THOUGH TO MAKE UP for the ambivalence about Passover, the halutzim celebrated May Day with wild abandon. The Day of the Worker was something they could all get behind, and they danced and danced, stamping their wild hora into the night. In darkness the work was forgotten, the terrible back-breaking, never-ending work. There was only the realization of an ideal, like something conjured through sorcery, or through pure desire alone. Ida heard the song of Zeruvabel’s fiddle while the stars spread out above like a bridal veil. But she would be nobody’s wife.
She was young enough that she could not project herself into the future. She could not imagine that something else would happen, and then something else, and another thing. That life would keep on changing.
Ida felt keenly that there was only the present moment. A blessed state of affairs. And a cursed one.
She could not stand to see Levi dancing; could not tolerate his elbows linked with Yitzhak on one side and Leah—a woman!—on the other. She extracted herself and slipped away into the darkness, the full moon above like a lamp. The new settlement had the semblance of a street running through the middle, with the stone Arab houses on either side and the tents in the far distance. Beside the stable Ida saw two silhouettes, their heads bent together; it was Sarah and David. Sarah was in her red-sleeved blouse. Ida thought how the landscape around them took everything, but the blouse was something Sarah had been allowed to keep.
Ida did not want to talk to these two. She wanted to be alone. She carved a wide circle around them, but the moon was so bright she could see the stitching on Sarah’s sleeves, and her friend’s gaunt cheeks, as if she’d survived some ancient famine. The night was still, and despite the music from the dance in the distance, Ida could hear their conversation as if they were beside her.
“I’ll bring it to the group,” David said.
“But you know it isn’t like that.”
There was an edge to Sarah’s voice, a shrillness.
“It is like that,” David said. “Everything here is like that.”
Ida slipped past them. She went beyond the old encampment, the ghosts of everything that had happened there invisible and more alive because of it. It astonished her to see the physical place where their tents had first been erected, where they had arrived that first day, the bend in the river where they had taken refuge from the heat they could never get used to. It was as though, if she looked hard enough, she could see the outline of her former self, sitting on the bank with her feet in the water and Levi’s arm around her shoulder. That self was only a little behind her in time. She wished for a door to step back through.
She walked until she could no longer see any part of the kibbutz at all. She followed the donkey path by the base of the mountain, its shadows falling on her like water. She felt entirely alone, now, under the canopy of stars. She thought, with a terrible pang, of poor, sweet Ruth, so sick in her mother’s arms, and of the day they had gone together to give her candlesticks to Fatima. She thought of little Eva back home, and of her own mother. How good it would be to have her mother stroke her forehead, push her hair back from her face. Her mother would have been able to fix this, to ask the matchmaker about a boy for Ida. A nice Orthodox boy whose Zionism was an idea, not an everyday reality, and who would have given her lots of babies. Bu
t it was too late for that.
—
Later, much later, Ida returned to the tents. From half a mile away she could see that the door to the infirmary was open, a bright rectangle of light standing out against the darkness. Somebody screamed, and someone screamed back. Someone else shouted, “Esther!” Then, “Hurry!”
Now Ida heard crying. Voices overlapped, excited, agitated. They made everything bigger than it was, thought Ida. Bigger than it needed to be. The debates, the fights. The wild dancing late into the night. Things were so exaggerated here, as though there was some great silence at the heart of their enterprise and they were frantically trying to cover it over with sound.
Ida didn’t stop to investigate. She walked straight to her tent.
When she lifted the flap, Levi was there.
The light from the kerosene lamp fell on his face, bisecting it perfectly. Half of him illuminated, the other half in darkness.
“What are you…” she started to ask, and then she saw Sarah crouched on the straw mattress with tears running down her cheeks.
“Oh!” Ida said. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”
Her mind flashed to the scene of Sarah being lectured by David, so intently, at the edge of the field. But that must have been hours ago.
“Are you okay?” she asked, even as she knew it was a ridiculous question. She pushed her glasses up on her nose. She felt Levi’s presence as if he were a giant light beaming down on her. Every part of her vulnerable, exposed.
She remembered the heat of him inside her. His smell of salt and sweat and something else that belonged only to him. But he had given it to her. After that, it had belonged to them both.
