By then it was December and we had to put light sweaters on to walk in the village. Word had gotten around that our ship would be ready soon, even if it was terrible, a floating ghetto; but who cared whether, like a doctor, a ship was good-looking or not? All you cared about was what it could do for you.
The other women whispered excitedly, before they fell asleep in their cots, that the time was almost at hand, while Hannah rolled over the baby to quiet him, covering him with a soft sound, like doves wrestling.
*
“I THINK THE CATERERS have arrived!” I interrupt myself. “I can hear them coming in downstairs. Maia must be seeing to them.”
“Wait, don’t stop.” My interviewer frowns. “Go on, go on. You were telling me about Hannah. Hannah, yes? Not Anna?”
“Oh. Yes. Well. About Hannah.” I sit back, knowing that Maia can handle everything. “She finally opened up to me one day, you see, is what happened. And she told me that in the infirmary at Belsen a doctor had done…things to her, terrible things, before he ran away with the rest of the Germans once they were certain the Russians were coming… And the baby was born while she was in the Displaced Persons camp I told you about. Seven hours of labor, of torture. But then, a baby doesn’t know where it’s come from, or how much it hurts. Babies don’t know anything. They don’t belong to themselves.” When a baby is born it is slimed, like a handkerchief someone has already blown into.
“I don’t think the caterers will be too noisy.” I smile reassuringly. “I predict only a little clattering and distraction and muss. If it’s more, I’m sorry, Mr. Bardawil! We’ll just have to talk our way over and around this business. If it gets too bad, I’ll step out onto the stair landing and talk to Maia about it.” A stair landing. A stair landing. Another memory floods in. Of someone panting at the top of the villa’s stairs, out of breath from having run up from the courtyard.
We set sail in a matter of hours!
The time has come!
I can’t believe it!
Now, truly?
We must pack! We must go! Move!
I don’t think I can move quickly enough!
What about her?
She hasn’t moved for hours. She hasn’t spoken.
Come on, girl!
Come now, gelibte! This is no time for silence. For slowness. Get going! Show your son how happy you are! See how he watches you! He may already be making a memory of this moment. Show him what this historic moment means to you, to all of us! Who knows how young we are when we begin to remember our lives?
*
ABOARD THE SHIP NOW. So high over the water, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves at first. When it finally moved I didn’t know that it wouldn’t be just the ship that would unmoor, but the entire continent of Europe. I didn’t expect the world to fall backward and away from me, the fingers of the docks letting go, the bare white knuckles of those clean houses against the hills. Going. Going. Gone.
I tried not to sleep during the day but I had to stay up at night, because Hannah’s baby was always seasick. The bunks were so narrow and hard. During the day I moved around dazed, feet tangling, trying to keep my balance. I sat where I could find a place, and watched others pace up and down the deck, rubbing their heads, picking the peeling skin from their noses, nervous, smugglers being smuggled, who stopped each other and the sailors to ask the same questions over and over again: Do you think we’re making good time? How long do you think until we see the coast of Palestine? How will we get through the British blockade? Has there been any news about the British, or can we guess it’s bad? Could we outrun anything in this tub, can that young captain be trusted, do we really know how much experience he has?
I draped a wet sock over my neck and shoulder to keep the sun from baking me and the baby. The older women wore shawls and played cards and sang and prayed in corners. What few shady spots there were, everyone coveted. This one, for example, between the two compartments holding the life vests, next to the crates holding the munitions. We were not supposed to sit on the crates that held the guns and grenades, or smoke near them. But if you got up, another sweaty girl would take your place almost instantly.
“Do you think they’ll let us go to school?”
“I don’t know. We have no records. They won’t know what form to put us in.”
“Of course they will. They’ll have to.”
“I don’t even remember my maths.”
“Me either.”
“But I won’t let the war make me stupid. Dumb.”
“Me either.”
“Are you afraid?”
“A little. Yes.”
“I’m afraid of this awful ship. Have you seen all the wood and hammers they’ve been carrying down below? What are they repairing?”
“I don’t know. We break things, I suppose.”
“There are too many of us. Even though we are too few.”
“Let’s not think about it right now. Close your eyes. Everything goes faster when you close your eyes.”
“Good idea.”
The air so still one evening. The ragged trio of musicians came out, as they always did at night, and the music began. The crates were arranged in a half circle, as the men plucked and readied themselves, leaning their red ears into the wood. Over the ship’s rail, behind their heads, lightning snaked across the horizon, the puzzle of the clouds suddenly fusing together. I didn’t want to move, ever again. I wanted to stay suspended, somehow. Listening to the music. Rocking. Rocking calmly to the melody. But when the first raindrops hit the deck, the violinists hurried to case their instruments.
A sailor came up to me, slick haired, one of the American Jews, a volunteer all in black rubber ready for his watch, and he said to me:
“You two had better go down, Miss.”
But I wanted to be up here where I could breathe. I didn’t want to go down into the staleness and narrowness. And so, in spite of the calls from the sailors that it was time to move and from the women that we would catch our deaths, we stayed, we delayed. Just a moment longer, please. In that cool, electric air. I was hunching my back to shield Hannah’s baby from the thickening drops when I heard what sounded like a lightning bolt—only it wasn’t. It was too close. I felt my left cheek strike the wooden deck, heat filling my ear, and I felt something break underneath me. I struggled to my knees and cried out and saw a bloody thing that looked freshly born, slimed again, and I didn’t know what to do with it. The slick-haired American fell down beside me, screaming, his arm missing. The rain sizzled as it hit the deck and the ship leaned and made a shrieking sound, as if it were stretching to hold a note it couldn’t keep. I tried to find something to grab onto with my hands. But there was nothing. I couldn’t hold anything with one hand. I had to toss the slimed thing overboard. A hiss. Another explosion.
All sound drew out of the world, like water down a drain.
* * *
I WAS IN THE WATER. My feet were bare and half my clothes were torn from me. My scalp felt loose and something warm leaked into my eyes. The rain, the heat pounded. I knew somehow to swim away from the metal landing all around me, away from the screaming, smoking, sinking ship. Hannah and her baby had vanished. All the sailors. The gossips. The musicians. My heart swam, lost; there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even understand how or why I had been blown clear. A long streak of lightning cut across the sky. I saw the tattered sail of a small boat a few meters away and screamed at it. I saw two silhouetted figures frantically hurling buckets of water over its side—another flash and I saw a small, terrified Bedouin boy holding up a lantern over me. The boat’s sail, full of holes, had been hit. I screamed to him for help. The two men didn’t see me rising and falling in the swells; they were too busy shouting at each other while they bailed the water from their tiny boat. They screamed in a language I didn’t understand and the boy held the lantern higher and then with his free hand hurtled something over the side, flinging something toward me, then again he hurtled, fresh fish
hitting me in the face and leaping away.
Shater! Shater!
Still the men didn’t see, though I screamed, and the boy, his white cap glued to his head, kept throwing fishing baskets over the side. I was able to grab just one as a bolt lit up its woven stays, and the boat plunged and heaved away. The rain came so fast then I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I could only drop my head, clutching, riding the hard hump of that overturned basket, like a turtle’s back. I floated for what seemed like a long time, forever toward a pale crescent in the darkness. Eventually, foot by foot, I heard the sea stomping underneath me, kicking me onto an empty beach.
*
WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, the soldiers were lifting the basket from where it lay covering me, and dropping to their knees. One took his shirt off and wrapped it around my naked shoulders. I was wearing only my underwear and the rubber pouch around my neck with the passport, the false, borrowed name on it. I could remember nothing of what had happened. All was a great darkness, terrifying, soundless, like a bell shoved to the bottom of the sea.
*
ONE OF THE SOLDIERS opened a medical box and pressed something white and cool across my scalp. I closed my eyes.
“We have to move her, quickly.”
“I smell an ambush if we stay.”
“Bring the truck.”
“How is she?”
“In bad shape.”
“Can she hear us?”
“I think so.”
“We have to get moving.”
“Let me finish dressing her head.”
“I don’t like sitting here in the open like this. We could be picked off.”
“The Bedouin have nowhere to take a good position. Be calm.”
“A date leaf gives them position! Can’t you hurry?”
“We have to keep this scalp wound clean.”
“We’ll be cut off if we don’t move.”
“Almost done. Oh God. Oh my God.”
The medic began to cry. He picked me up in his arms. Tears rolled down into his beard.
“We have to be careful with her. She must speak, she must speak for all the others. She is a miracle. A miracle child. She is precious.”
Through the gauze draping over my eye, I saw nothing.
*
I AM ANNA FRANK, who rode a basket, as in a fairytale, to safety.
“This is your story then,” he says quietly. No longer writing.
“Yes. It is.”
“I noticed that you said Anna Frank. Not Anne. Why?”
“Because that’s the correct pronunciation, the Dutch one,” I assure him. I know.
“Not because it’s so close to Hannah?”
“No.”
“And the name on the passport around your neck was…?”
“Hannah, of course.”
“And who is—was—Hannah, then?” He watches me.
“That poor survivor of Belsen. She died. With the baby a so-called doctor left her with. When the ship exploded. I told you. Along with all of them. All of them gone, to the bottom of the sea.” And me left behind. Me confused. Wandering around the kibbutz with a bucket on my head.
“And was it ever discovered what caused the explosion and the sinking?”
“No. That was never determined. You can read about it in the history books. Some think the Kostas went down after lightning hit the munitions being smuggled to Palestine. Some believe it was the British. Some the Bedouin. But I have no suspicions of the Bedouin. Because of that Arab boy who saved me.”
I beam, suddenly, at Mr. Bardawil. I had no idea, when the day began, it would end so well, so perfectly.
But my interviewer is looking puzzled, fatigued. I suppose it’s understandable. I’ve given him so much to take in, to transcribe, this day, haven’t I?
“So you think that Palestinian boy was trying to help you?”
“He threw the fishing basket toward me.”
“What you said was—something was being thrown ‘toward’ you. And fish”—he looks at his notes—“were ‘hitting you in the face.’”
“Because they were.” It’s only if you look at a thing for too long that it blurs. As I did, three weeks ago, during Shavuot, when I learned that my old Irish lover had died, because one of his children sent me a message, and so I lit a candle in his honor, in one of the pair of silver candlesticks he’d given me so long ago. But I looked at it for too long and lost the flame and saw only the terrible hole at its center, a place so close to the wick, to the source of the burning, that it becomes nothingness, invisible. I cried out, and in my breathlessness I caused the flame to stretch and in a single glimpse finally saw everything, all at once, and how it must have been, and who I was, who only ever wanted to be good, the one who said the wonderful words, In spite of everything, I still believe, because it must always be possible to believe, to believe in a human being, and to be forgiven, and if so, then I could not be the emptiness next to the wick, could I…could I?
“You don’t think the Palestinian boy was trying to drown you.”
Why so fixated on this? When we were so close, so close. “No!”
He studies me with his tired calm. And now I wonder: Maybe it isn’t always possible to know whether one person means to cause harm to another person or not. To help them out…or not.
The air goes very quiet in my study. I hear a churning of wheels as a car leaves the farm road, finds my drive.
I stand, uncertainly.
“I think the first of my birthday guests are arriving, Mr. Bardawil.”
He nods and reaches for his phone. “Our time is up then.”
“No! I mean—it doesn’t have to be. I was still hoping…”
He tilts his head at me and he stays where he is, waiting for me to say something more.
“I wanted to invite you to stay, Mr. Bardawil. For my party. To help me. Perhaps help me explain to my guests, my, my situation…as I’m sure you’re going to do, as I of course want you to do, to the whole world, in your book, in your thesis…”
“I’m sorry?”
“Please, Mr. Bardawil. Let’s be honest. Haven’t I been helpful to you? Don’t you have a great deal of material now? Astounding, attention-getting material?”
He flushes at that. For an instant.
“I hope, Hannah, we’ve both tried to be honest with each other today. I told you I’m collecting stories of people who believe they have been other people.”
“But I am her. As I’ve explained to you. So that you can understand. My name is Frank. It means honest.” I lean my hand onto my desk as I come around it, putting all of my weight on it, for support. “A name matters, in the end. A good name matters. What does Bardawil mean?”
“My family name? It comes from a lake in Egypt. A lake in the desert.”
Water in the desert. Water cut off from the sea. I fidget with my skirt, suddenly nervous. So many wheels turning, so many car doors slamming. So many people, more than I remembered. “If we could just…I don’t know, how should we do this? Perhaps I should introduce you? Or maybe you should announce, introduce me?”
He starts up, a concerned look on his face. “You’ve been so helpful today, Hannah. I’m really grateful, but I really think I shouldn’t take any more of your—”
I touch his arm, impulsively, putting him on my good side.
“Can’t we just go down together now?” Because it’s time. I can hear Maia welcoming my old friends below, none of whom have ever really known me. But this person has. My interviewer. My reporter. My new, old friend. “I feel a bit weak-kneed, all of a sudden. But then again, who wouldn’t, at a moment like this?” I try a laugh.
He hesitates, and looks away. Considering, as today’s young do, their endless, marvelous options.
“Okay. Let me get you down the stairs.”
He picks up his satchel and holds out his elbow to me and allows me to hook my arm around it.
“Thank you!”
It does feel so good to lean into a man again. Li
nked, we go through the door, like a happy couple, he in his dark jeans, me in my silk and my bright red scarf.
My escort takes hold of the banister firmly, and I hold onto him, with no distance between us at all, and we begin taking the steps carefully, one by one. At the second landing we pause and peer down and I see that almost all of my guests have arrived and that Maia has taken their wrapped gifts away from them and put them on the hall table and handed them flutes of champagne—such a clever, thoughtful girl she is. How lucky am I, childless all my life, to have such fine young people to help me, here at this late date. We begin moving down the stairs again. Smiles of surprise are lifted, along with the glasses—no, they hadn’t expected such a grand entrance from such an old girl—and I can only press my lips together, thinking of what else they do not yet suspect. The wonder, the amazement in store for all of us. The hope.
I adjust my scarf and pat my helmet of hair hiding the scar at my scalp. He balances me at the bottom, waiting for some cue, some hint of what to do. I turn to see his profile in time to notice, up close, for the first time, the boyish pores stippled with late afternoon whiskers, the downy hair dressing his earlobe, the brow gouged with a tiny scar at the outer corner, like an anchor, a sickle…I’ve never been close enough to see this before… He’s so young, so much younger than that other reporter, whose freckled skin I stroked in the bathwater. I see him take a breath and frown, slightly, seriously, his lips parting, and I know that he is about to speak, to say something—and my heart seizes. From a great distance, hidden, in my closed ear, I hear a girlish voice:
“Wat zegt de visser?” What says the fisherman?
But I must not be afraid, I must not be, though I feel nothing but lightness, my body arcing through the air.
The Wedding of Anna F. Page 6