The Girl From Over There

by Sharon Rechter

  I got up from the bench. Yael and Gili, my “entourage,” scraped their chairs along the floor, intending to join me, but I gestured with a finger that I wanted to be left alone. I walked over to the two boys.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” they replied.

  “Have you seen Dan?”

  “Don’t you mean, have we seen the new couple?” they said, mocking.

  I didn’t need any more than that to get the hint. Had things gone this far already? My heart was beating fast now. I imagined its pounding could be heard in the entire dining hall.

  The boys looked at me, gloating silently.

  I turned to look at the door again, hoping for a savior, and just then, it opened wide. Dan walked in, and Doron and Rami stared at him in surprise. He was with her, and she was dressed the same as the rest of us, the children of the kibbutz. I was stunned. She looked just like one of us now.

  Dan came up to me, while she, seeing me, lingered behind as if rooted to the floor. I expected Dan to say words of affection and apology, but instead he said, “Michal, I’m so glad I ran into you. Who are you waiting for? Are you done eating?” Without waiting for my answer, he added, “Would you mind letting Miriam join your table? It’s just, you know, I volunteered.” He shrugged helplessly.

  “Dan,” I said. “I want us to talk.”

  “Me, too,” he replied. “But I’m starving. Would you mind putting it off till later?”

  “Not at all,” I said. Under my breath, I added bitterly, “Nothing I would rather do, your royal highness….”

  Dan smiled gratefully and disappeared among his friends. I didn’t know if I was sad or relieved that he couldn’t see how I really felt.

  I pulled on Miriam’s arm until we were out of his sight, and then I let go of her and went back to my seat. I smiled. I knew exactly who would go get her. I slid my dessert toward Abigail and said, “Go get her.” This was all I had to say. Abigail got the hint. She rose heavily and, with obvious reluctance, walked over to Miriam. For every step Abigail took, Miriam took half a step backwards.

  At this point, Leah walked into the dining hall. She noticed Miriam looking anxious and approached her. She took her arm gently, exchanged a few words and smiles with her, and signaled Abigail to return to her seat. Leah sat Miriam down at the far corner of the long table. I took back the sweet dessert from Abigail, who hid her anger with a mischievous smile. I took pleasure in my dessert, and caught an occasional glimpse from afar of Dan, his friends, and Miriam, who’d once again attracted a crowd of a few grown-ups.

  The sight filled me with rage. I thought to myself, Enough already, Dan! I swallowed my pride and shot up from the bench, rushing to his table with wide, quick strides. But then, as if only to make me angry, someone beat me to it. It was Leah.

  “Dan,” she said. “Would you mind coming with me?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  And I was forced to leave with my tail between my legs. “What does she have to say that’s so important?” I grumbled. I returned to my seat in a foul mood. “What happened?” asked Yael, while all the other girls huddled around us.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” I yelled. “It’s my life, not yours!”

  I left the table and headed back to my room. On my way out, I noticed Dan and Leah sitting on the dining hall steps.

  I hid behind the door and listened in.

  Leah was speaking. “Dan, you are a brave boy, and I appreciate your behavior.”

  Dan seemed surprised. He thought to himself, All this because I didn’t dare admit this morning that I ripped apart the teddy bear?

  Leah saw the confusion on his face, and as if reading his thoughts, she laughed and said, “Oh, silly! I know you had nothing to do with it.”

  His blue eyes expressed bewilderment. The question mark on his face was easy to read. What does she know? he wondered to himself.

  “Miriam told me all about you, and how without your help she wouldn’t have been able to handle the other children. So, it makes absolutely no sense that it would have been you!”

  “Leah, do you know who it was?” Dan asked. Guilt, but also relief, filled his heart.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness.

  “You know, I actually like Miriam,” Dan said suddenly, as if trying to change the subject. “Is her brother having a hard time, too?”

  “Not as much,” she replied. Sadness mixed with joy in the smile on her lips, as if she was remembering something. “He’s made new friends already and has no resistance to the new clothes. You saw how hard it was to get Miriam to wear our clothes. You were the only one who could get her to do it.” After a moment she added, “There are hardly any differences between him and the other children. He’s doing his best to fit in with them.”

  “Can I visit him?” Dan asked, pleading.

  Leah glanced at her watch. “You won’t have any time to eat.”

  “That’s okay, I can go one day without olives and cheese,” said Dan.

  “Your mother would disagree.”

  He nodded with a smile. “You’re like a friend,” he said to her.

  She smiled. They got up from the steps and walked over to the toddlers’ room.

  A small boy with a head of black curls ran across the room. “There he is,” said Leah. The boy sat down on the floor and started playing with building blocks with Sarah and David, Dan’s little twin brother and sister. The twins were surprised to see their older brother and squealed with joy. Dan picked them up in his arms. Then he remembered the reason for his visit, and asked Leah the little boy’s name, who was now clinging to her legs.

  “Over there his name was Moses, and here in Israel we’ll call him Moshe, of course.”

  “Poor little guy. He’ll grow up and won’t remember his parents,” Dan said sadly.

  “That’s true. But think about the advantage he has in being so young, Dan.”

  “What advantage?” he asked.

  “Miriam would feel hurt if her friends abandoned her in the middle of the game, but he, well, look at him— your brother and sister stopped playing with him, and he’s already found new friends. He has his whole life ahead of him, and soon he’ll forget the bad experiences.”

  Dan looked around, as if searching for something. He spotted a ball in the corner of the room and walked over to pick it up. Carefully, he tossed it to Moshe. The toddler caught the ball and tried to throw it back at Dan. Dan chuckled at the sight of the ball, which was now rolling in the opposite direction; he ran over to grab it. The two of them sat down on the mat and tossed the ball back and forth. Every time Moshe threw the ball, Dan was forced to get up and chase after it, while the little boy giggled with joy. His black eyes doubled in size from happiness over the attention Dan was giving him.

  Leah stood back and enjoyed the heartwarming sight.

  Finally, Dan glanced at his watch. “I have to go,” he said, partly to Moshe and partly to himself.

  Before he left, Leah said to him, “Nothing we tried, not candy or dolls or anything else, could get a smile out of that girl. It was only because of you that I saw her smile. Thank you.”

  Chapter 4

  During recess, after I had gone a few days of rarely seeing Dan in private (because he went everywhere with her), he turned to me and said, “Michal … come here for a second.” I rushed over to him and thought, Maybe….

  “Michal,” he said, repeating my name. His eyes deep and piercing, he asked, “Could you let Miriam in on your game too?”

  I was furious. I didn’t want to, but I was worried about losing Dan and my position in class; I was class queen and he was the king. I couldn’t give up his blue eyes, and this was an opportunity to renew our bond. And so I pulled Miriam after me.

  We brought her into our game of “Rag Tag,”5 and made room for her in the circle. It was my turn to drop the rag behind one of the girls sitting in the circle. I dropped it behind Abigail. She immediately leapt up and dropped the rag beh
ind Yael, who dropped the rag behind Miriam. Rina, who saw the rag behind Miriam, tried to explain the game to her with hand gestures. Miriam got up, and instead of running after Yael, she dropped the rag behind my back and held her spot. I jumped up and tried to catch her. She ran. I took after her, fueled by hate as much as the goal of the game. Eventually, she stopped running and I caught her.

  We sat her down in the middle of the circle, and we all sang the Rag Tag Song. We weren’t mocking her—this was part of the game. But there was ridicule hidden in our voices. Miriam didn’t understand the game. When she sat there, stuck in the middle like that with all of us singing at her, she must have felt embarrassed—like she was under attack. Overwhelmed, she shot up and ran off to the toddlers’ room. No one went after her.

  When she walked in, the small boy with a head of black curls ran up to her. She hugged him and said, in Polish, “Why did we come here? Are you happy? Or do you feel like I do?” She clutched him to her chest with all her might. Seeing his sister crying miserably, he stroked her hair and kissed her.

  The kindergarten children stared at them, but it didn’t bother her. Miriam had mixed feelings about the toddlers. She loved them all for taking her brother in without scorn, but she feared them, too, worrying that they might steal him away from her and leave her all alone. She was afraid he would grow up to become a child of the kibbutz—one of them, fundamentally different from her.

  The bell rang for the students to head to their classes, but Miriam, as if deaf to it, remained there, hugging her brother. “They won’t take me away from here,” she said in Polish, emotionally. “Never!”

  All the children of the kibbutz went to their classrooms, and so did I. When I walked in, I saw Dan. I was angry with him and wanted to make him jealous. So, I went over to him and said that because Esther was sick, and her seat was in the middle of the classroom, I’d take her spot, which “just happened” to be next to Joel.

  Dan wasn’t angry. All he said was, “Okay, if that’s what you want. But come back—we are friends after all.”

  “Friends,” I laughed bitterly to myself. “Real friends …”

  The class went much differently than I had expected. Dan didn’t look at me or at the empty chair by his side. He kept his eyes on the door, occasionally looking out the window. The only time he did otherwise was when the teacher called on him. He glanced at me for a moment, without much affection, then over at Abigail and Yael, and then he raised his hand. The teacher called his name and asked what he wanted.

  “May I be excused for a minute?” he asked.

  She allowed it. “Maybe it’ll help him concentrate,” she mumbled under her breath.

  Dan left the room, and I watched him through the window. He turned toward the houses before moving out of sight.

  Dan ran over to the toddlers’ room. From the doorway, he saw Miriam on the floor with her back to him. She and her brother had built an odd little house. Inside they’d placed a small wooden plank, and on it were four dolls. Dan lightly caressed her hair to make his presence known. She turned sharply and let out a sigh of relief, seeing it was him standing behind her. She smiled at him, and he returned the smile. Dan wanted to befriend her, so he joined their game of blocks. But she wouldn’t let him. Why, he didn’t know. She sensed his fierce desire to join in and tried to explain herself. “Ghetto,”6 she said, and pointed at the odd-looking building made out of blocks. When he still did not understand, she used what little Hebrew she knew to say, “No … you … house.” He understood her words, but still couldn’t quite grasp what she was trying to tell him—that she had built a ghetto.

  He tried to take her to class, but she wouldn’t budge no matter how hard he tried to convince her. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, she was willing to part with her little brother and go back to class—although Dan still wasn’t sure just what had changed her mind. Before they left, Dan also asked her to take apart the odd building-block ghetto. But she refused and protected it with her arms when he tried to help.

  As they headed for the classroom, an idea came to Dan. He picked up a stone from the main path, turned to Miriam and said, “Stone.” He repeated the word a few times, until Miriam picked up a stone of her own and said, “Stone.”

  Then, a mischievous glint came to his eye. He raised his hand, and with a sudden snap he threw the stone into the toddlers’ room, aiming it at the building-block house. Seeing the stone roll away in a different direction, he shrugged. Miriam smiled awkwardly, as if to say, The ghetto is stronger than us.

  They kept walking along the path to the classroom while Dan tried teaching her more words, and then a complete sentence in Hebrew: “I want to sit down and study.”

  He knocked on the classroom door. “Yes?” said the teacher. The two of them walked in and faced the class. Dan gestured to Miriam, and she said, “Teach-er, I want sit down and stu-dy.”

  “Very nice,” said the teacher. The rest of us chuckled, enjoying ourselves. “But say, to sit down.”

  “To sit down,” Miriam repeated happily after the teacher.

  “Excellent.” The teacher smiled at them, and scanned the classroom for an open seat. “Ah,” she said. “You can sit next to Dan, and he’ll help you with your schoolwork. And also …” The teacher blushed, and quickly resumed her lesson. I was so angry with her for doing this.

  Miriam was truly proud of the new words she learned every day, and she rehearsed them over and over. During recess one day, Miriam sat alone mumbling words to herself. She resolved to make more of an effort in her schoolwork from now on. She sat down on a rock and began to make plans.

  She was so lost in thought that when I walked by and stuck out my tongue at her, it was like I didn’t exist. Just then, the teacher called the students back to class. Miriam took her seat and tried to listen, but it was all so different from the daydream she’d spun for herself during recess. In the dream, the new language was clear and comprehensible, whereas now it seemed dense and dark. The teacher’s words, those odd syllables in that funny-sounding language, whizzed right by her ears until, once again, she found herself staring out the window.

  She wasn’t the only one. Everyone was either dozing off or doodling on their papers, while the teacher droned on and on about how to solve a certain math problem.

  The teacher, who’d finally paused to take a quick breath, noticed this widespread inattention and said, “Well, I’ve lectured you all for …” she glanced at her watch … “about half an hour. Now that everything is clear, I’m sure you won’t mind being quizzed on it.”

  Everybody sat up in their seats.

  “Quiz … quiz!” The word rippled through the class.

  The teacher continued calmly, “Yes, I’m sure you can all be quizzed on it. The quiz will be very simple. Everybody take out a sheet of paper, please.”

  “Teacher, don’t you think that would be a waste of paper?” said one student, while another tried, “We worked hard in the barn all day.” But it was no use. The teacher would not give in.

  We didn’t like her. Usually we had classes with our homeroom teacher, but for math, “Wicked Rivka” would come over from the neighboring kibbutz and torture us with all kinds of dirty teachers’ tricks—like this quiz.

  “Hurry up.” The teacher raised her voice. “I haven’t got all day. Take out your papers and pens.” She wrote an odd math problem on the blackboard, and we copied it down and tried to solve it.

  Everybody whispered, “Do you know anything?”

  “Do you?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Quiet!” Wicked Rivka said loudly.

  We all fell silent. Everybody sat there, staring back and forth from the teacher to the blank page.

  Just one girl in the back of the class worked hard at the problem—the same girl I hated so deeply. She knew how to solve it. The children who sat on either side of Miriam sucked up to her and asked her to explain the solution. What an outrage! Sucking up for some silly quiz! But deep insi
de, I thought to myself, You have to solve this problem. You just have to. But it was no use. The answer to this horrible math problem refused to pop into my head. Miriam walked up to the teacher first and handed in her quiz. Then she walked back to her seat and prayed that her answer was correct.

  “All pages up front.” Wicked Rivka raised her mean voice. She seemed pleased with the first quiz that had been handed in. The rest of us were forced to hand over blank pieces of paper. Even Dan, who had earned the nickname “The Good Boy” ever since he befriended Miriam, failed the quiz.

  After all the quizzes had been collected, the teacher began to scold us. “There are fourteen of you here in this class,” she said.

  “Thirteen,” a student quickly corrected her.

  “Thirteen of you here in this class,” she said. “And only one girl solved the problem correctly. This tells me that you kids are simply not listening!”

  Rivka’s boring speech nearly put me to sleep. And then she said, “I’ll repeat the lesson one more time, and then you’ll be quizzed on it again. Any student who fails the second quiz …” She stopped there, but everyone knew exactly what she meant and listened closely.

  “Miriam, come,” said the teacher. “Solve the problem on the blackboard for us.” Miriam didn’t understand what the teacher was saying, so Dan pointed toward the blackboard and tried to explain what the teacher wanted her to do. She got up, hesitant at first, and then quickly solved the complicated problem on the board. When she was done, she returned to her seat. Dan looked at her with admiration. “We’ll continue this tomorrow,” said Wicked Rivka, just as we were saved by the bell.

  During recess, the students huddled together in groups and complained. One boy grumbled, “That teacher and all those grown-ups … they always like the new ones better than they like us. They’re nicer to the ones who come from over there.” We all stared at Miriam.

  Chapter 5

  The kibbutz had been humming since morning; everyone was hard at work. The dining room was tidied and decorated. We were expecting newcomers yet again. Amar and Saul, Dan and Yael’s fathers, mowed the big lawn, while my mother and Abigail’s mother fixed up the rooms for another group of incoming immigrants.