The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  After dinner she gathered her cleaning supplies from the shed behind the kitchen, working by the light from a lamppost—a solitary bulb blazing over its patch of dirt. Roaches big as her thumbs ran past her sandals, their black shells glinting.

  When she entered the rear door of the kitchen to finish her cleanup duty, Dror was standing there alone, cradling his forearm against his chest. He looked distracted, as though he’d come to this temple of empty metal countertops and drying plastic containers to work something through, only to be stranded without a clear thought.

  Her sandals slapped the painted cement floor. She stooped to lift the bucket of dark water beside the sink, dumped it, and refilled it, the cold faucet flow ringing into the metal. She looked up to see Dror watching her as though shocked to find another breathing soul in his vicinity. Or perhaps he was merely vague with pain from the arm he petted absently like a child that might be soothed into silence. She’d never seen him unfocused—she was accustomed to seeing him stride sternly toward his purpose, and she was uncertain now how to behave.

  She kept her eyes on the mop, sank it into the cold water, wrung the heavy gray strands, and let their weight splay on the floor, erasing spatterings of blood. He watched with concentration, as though her actions were the key to something he needed to understand.

  When she neared his feet, she stopped and looked at him squarely.

  He said, with an expression of relief as though the words cleared his mind, “You have the most truthful face I’ve ever seen.”

  The next night his forearm was in a cast. The soldiers were smoking and playing music at the outdoor canteen. Helen sat to the side, sipping from a can of peach nectar. Within earshot of the canteen’s record player, a half dozen soldiers moved through the steps of a folk dance on the bare ground. Lagging a beat behind the soldiers, the American volunteers gamely swept their feet through the steps. The air smelled of dust and eucalyptus and the soldiers’ cigarettes. Someone put “Erev Ba” on the record player and there was a murmur of approval. More soldiers stood up from the shadowed benches and joined the dancers, the curved line of them moving together and apart with small caressing steps. The Americans moved aside to watch. Helen saw that Dror had squeezed his eyes shut. He stayed that way for a long moment. Then he rose from the bench where he had been smoking by himself, extinguished the cigarette under his boot, and, looking at no one, took a spot at the end of the line. The dancers in their khaki uniforms stepped and swayed in the dusk and Dror moved with them, soft on his feet—pivoting silently in the dark, his forearm in the white cast held gently before him, his palm raised toward his chest in a gesture of unexpected innocence.

  After, when it was dark, he sat at the end of Helen’s bench and peeled an orange with the point of a knife, working it in a circle with his good hand. A few dancers still moved in the dim light shed by the canteen. Dror passed sections to the two soldiers who sat between him and Helen; they passed a portion to her. A deep, stunning sweetness.

  When she turned, Dror was walking away.

  In the morning the volunteers were driven in a battered blue bus to five points of interest in the desert—this was the educational component the volunteer coordinator had made much of, sitting across a desk from Helen in London two months and a thousand years earlier. The volunteers would visit Masada, the Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, and the proposed site for a nature reserve at Hai Bar, ending with a tour of Ein Radian. Days’ worth of sightseeing, crammed into twelve hours; it turned out the kibbutz needed the bus for the rest of the week.

  They’d planned an early start. But the bus driver spent an hour on some unspecified repair, his legs sticking out from beneath the belly of the bus while Dror and the man from the kibbutz and an Israel Tourist Bureau guide sat cross-legged, alternately smoking and spitting sunflower-seed shells and occasionally passing the driver a tool. Helen sat in the dust among the others, waiting. One of the American women tried to make conversation with Dror about her impressions of Israel, before lapsing into that wounded silence the Americans fell into when they suspected an Israeli thought them trivial.

  The sun was high by the time they approached Masada through the rocky, lifeless desert—and the sight of the mountain through the bus windows extinguished all conversation. They filed out of the parked bus quietly, into a crushing heat.

  Helen had seen higher mountains, yet none so forbidding as this plateau of pale rock. Its rough cliffs, bare against the horizon, issued an overpowering silence.

  They climbed wearing shorts and hats, their sandals pale with dust. The Snake Path was narrow, and the morning grew still hotter as they hiked up the steep side of the flat-topped mountain. None of the volunteers had brought enough water for this hour of the day, and they made their way slowly, sweat drying to a salt scrim on their skin.

  At the top of the mesa, the sun pressing without mercy, the guide gathered them. Far below the plateau, the brown-gray desert seemed to vibrate in the heat. The Dead Sea was a faint purple line in the distance. Dabbing his forehead with his folded cloth hat, the guide began his recitation. In the first century, he said, after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem and killed or enslaved its Jews, a group of Jewish zealots had fled to this spot to make their last stand in one of Herod’s famously impenetrable and well-provided fortresses. Here on the mountaintop were storerooms, cisterns, living chambers, bathhouses; a few had been excavated and more archaeological work was planned, the guide said—for now they would need to imagine much of what he was describing.

  She felt Dror watching her. She met his eyes; his gaze flattened and moved elsewhere.

  The mighty Roman army—the guide intoned—which had vanquished all of Jerusalem in a matter of days, staged a siege for more than a year in this searing desert before it succeeded in bringing about the fall of this small community of Jews atop Masada. While the Romans suffered in the heat below, the Jews above drank the plentiful water from the cisterns and lived off food stores laid away by the notoriously paranoid Herod. The Roman camp called for reinforcements, brought in engineers, rationed water—all to defeat the last tiny gathering of Jews still daring to practice their own religion. And when the massive Roman division had at last completed an earthwork to breach the walls, and as the Roman soldiers prepared battering rams and lit fires around the mountaintop, the Jews finally knew their situation was hopeless. Their leader, Eliezer, gathered the men. It was time, Eliezer said, to deny the Romans the chance to murder or enslave them. “Let us at once choose death with honor,” the guide recited, “and do the kindest thing we can for ourselves, our wives, and our children, while it is still possible to show ourselves any kindness.” Each man, Eliezer urged, must kill his family. Then, in an order to be determined by lot, the men would slaughter one another. The final man standing would kill himself—but only after setting fire to the food stores so that the Romans would be denied that prize. Only one food storeroom and water cistern would be left intact, to mock the Romans with its bounty. Let the Romans find the food and the brimming cistern, and the bodies tenderly laid in a row. Let them know that the Jews had chosen death, rather than slavery to the Romans and their gods.

  Not long after, when the Romans broke through the walls expecting a pitched battle, they found themselves facing smoke and silence.

  The guide pushed himself off the stone wall he’d been leaning against. Today, he told them, Israeli soldiers are sworn in at dawn on this mountaintop to the motto “Masada shall not fall again.”

  On all sides, the plains below them wavered in the heat to the far horizon.

  “Still,” Avi, the short, stringy American, muttered to two of his fellow volunteers, “how can anyone kill someone they love?”

  The guide glanced up sharply.

  Avi, reddening—he hadn’t meant to be overheard—nonetheless continued. “I mean—what sort of man can do that?”

  Dror let out a small sound. He dropped his cigarette and ground his heel hard into the dirt. Pocketing the butt, he turned away from the A
merican.

  That guide said nothing for a moment. Then he spoke in a low, quick voice. “Have you ever had to contemplate letting loved ones die at the hand of someone who hates them?”

  The American, silenced, turned to the view.

  Checking his watch, the guide motioned with his head toward the Snake Path. The volunteers began the descent without another word. In single file, they picked their way toward the desert floor.

  Ahead of Helen, Dror jogged down the twisting footpath. Next in line behind him, she followed heedlessly, matching his punishing pace regardless of the sliding of her feet on the steep pitch, the sun pounding her head. Twice someone called her name from the slow-moving line behind her, but she didn’t turn. With each jarring step she slipped free of the first century and martyrdom, the grisly story sliding off her hot skin as she let gravity carry her down the mountain. Dror met each turn of the path as though he’d been born to this—his birthright to run down a mountain without breaking his neck. She knew she was unsafe at this pace, but she didn’t slow. She didn’t care if she broke a bone. She wanted to break a bone. She wanted to wing down this mountain and stumble through all this stark parched bright impossibly romantic desert air to break herself on those stones. So he’d have to stop at last and speak to her.

  The mountain was running out on her, her legs pounding, the flat plain approaching with fearsome speed. She didn’t know what she would do if she caught up to Dror, only that it was urgent that she do so.

  He disappeared into the bus.

  She stopped in the lot, her breath loud in the silence. Slowly the heat claimed her, as if some essential boundary between her body and the desert had been erased. She stood, heart beating steadily, as the footsteps of the rest of the group became audible on the rocky path.

  Halfway to Ein Gedi, she rose from her seat and made her way to the front, where the guide was tracing a route on the map with his nicotine-stained thumbnail and conferring with the driver. When the guide looked up at her, she wasted no time on pleasantries. “If all the Jews died,” she demanded, “how do you know what happened up there?”

  The man tapped his worn map and sighed. Atop Masada, he’d been solemn. Now his grave demeanor had spent itself. Brusquely he said, “The historian recorded it. Josephus Flavius. And Josephus knew because two Jewish women, one old and one young, hid in a cave with some children during the killing. In their cowardice they were caught and made slaves by the Romans, and the women told their story to Josephus.” As the bus rounded a shuddering curve the guide squinted at the roadside, drew on his cigarette, and exhaled meditatively past Helen’s face. “They were traitors. But they did at least the good of keeping the story alive.”

  Someone in the back of the bus was complaining about a stuck window. Someone else began to sing and was silenced by a volunteer who said she had a headache.

  “Why?” Helen said.

  “Why what?” The guide, who had turned to speak with the driver, glanced back at Helen.

  “Why were those women traitors?”

  From the corner of her eye she saw Dror look up sharply from his seat across the way, but she didn’t turn to him. “Why was it cowardly to want to live?” she charged.

  The guide gave her a weary look. With a slow shake of his head, he returned to his conversation with the driver.

  On the lurching walk back to her seat she passed Dror, who paid her no mind.

  That night on the base she felt a wild disappointment. For the first time she considered leaving. The desert that she’d imagined speaking to her in fact spoke a language she didn’t understand at all, a foreign tongue of whispers and implications.

  She left her bunk. The night breathed traces of desert plants whose names she’d never know. The single bright bulb outside the dining hall lit the eyes of a jackal on the far side of the fence and she turned from it. The silence of the base had deepened to its midnight pitch. A man appeared from the far side of the dining hall, a uniformed figure. He approached her with a hesitant step, the cast on his arm catching the dim light. An impulse took her—to run from the sight of him.

  But she hesitated, and he was in front of her. He stood perfectly motionless, as though to compensate for having fled down a mountain to escape her.

  She lifted her chin like a soldier standing at attention—she meant to mock him. The air between them was alive. She could feel him through it.

  A question passed over his face. Then he stepped forward and kissed her.

  The night sky shone beyond the horizon of his tight, dark curls. Her hand, rising, found only the plaster encasing his arm, cool and smooth as though he were made of stone or weathered bone.

  A breeze. A lone cypress bent, occluding the stars.

  Then, with a hushing sound, the cypress swept back over the sky’s thick stars and she found the living skin of his inner arm, then his warm body reaching, and something gave way.

  She kept it secret. She knew he would want her to. The way his voice still lightened with surprise when she greeted him, as though in the interval since their last meeting she might have forgotten his name or vanished; the way he scooped her toward him from the small of her back; the quiet, delighted pitch of his laugh when she teased him for his stern behavior with the volunteers; the way he seemed to be laughing not only at her words, but at laughter itself . . . all of this was to be kept between them. He didn’t have to tell her this. Even had she wished to speak of it, with what words could she have explained that she’d changed—that her body had changed—that every molecule in her was alive, aligned, iron filings to a magnet? She chopped vegetables every day and doled leben into buckets and picked spent bullet casings in the pressing heat, but everything around her had been redrawn. The world was a geography of hidden places, the spaces where they could meet unseen punctuating the endless barren stretches where she pretended not to notice his low conversation with the other officers as he entered the dining hall, or the way he raised his head silently at a jeep moving on the horizon.

  She spent her days weighing the distance to the next time and place they’d be alone, and it seemed to her when she set down her knife and looked at the desert beyond the kitchen window that everything was waiting to give way—to buckle and rise transformed into something else, something yet unseen, some new way of being in the world—some new incarnation of rock and sky and cypress tree and fuel tank that would reconcile everything. There was the light shearing off the kitchen’s long window, and the fine shimmer of heat across the jeep’s windshield, and the thin cold juice of pear nectar at the canteen at dusk, and softness at the core of everything.

  In Jaffa they stepped off the bus into sleepy afternoon heat. It was the first time their days off had coincided. All the way from Be’er Sheva they sat side by side, their legs brushing. He’d teased about her inability to pronounce the r’s of his name properly; she’d rebutted by imitating his pronunciation of hers—Helen Vatt—as he unwrapped the pitas and salted cucumbers he’d packed for their bus ride. Once far enough from Be’er Sheva that they no longer chanced running into someone from the base, he took her hand and held it. As they watched the landscape change from desert to rocky farmland to coastline, he sang to her under his breath—something in Hebrew, then something in Polish that made him tap a rhythm gently on his knee and then stop singing.

  At the sight of him in civilian clothing—a short-sleeved cotton shirt, his arm pale where the cast had been removed, a rolled beach towel tucked beside him on the cracked vinyl seat—she felt a tenderness she masked by calling him Frankie Laine and refusing to explain herself. As she laughed at his puzzlement, words she’d been forced to memorize as a schoolgirl came to her. How beauteous mankind is.

  He knew his way to the shore and led them toward it, stopping at a dim storefront restaurant near the clock tower to buy lunch, which they ate on a low rock wall overlooking an orange grove and, beyond it, the sea. On a whim she added a dark green harif sauce to her falafel—Dror, staying her hand, said, “Are you s
ure?”—but she’d spooned it on all the same, determined to dispel any notion he might still hold of her as an English flower. At her first bite, the harif burned so badly, her eyes watered. “Holy God,” she coughed, and Dror, laughing at first but then attentive, had plied her with water from his bottle until the burning subsided. With his thumb, carefully, he wiped the sauce from her upper lip, and when her mouth still stung from the spice he went back to the owners of the restaurant for a cup of ice.

  Just off the coast, solitary Arab fishermen stood with rod and line on the Andromeda rocks, each man deposited on his own perch amid the surf to collect the day’s catch, until his friends or family retrieved him in a rowboat. Under their gaze, Dror led her down to the sliding waves.

  She’d swum in an ocean before but was unprepared for the swiftness with which the warm waves lifted them, now holding them in the palm of the sea, now slipping them down, farther than she expected. She grabbed Dror’s hand, and he pulled her to a sandbar and cradled her there as the waves lifted and sank—and something wild settled in her.

  After a long while he said in her ear, “I can rest with you.”

  Later he lay beside her on the narrow towel, drying in the sun: a man who could have preened, had he chosen to. Spare and muscular from his training, nothing wasted, his features like something carved. She rested her head on his chest. With the pads of her fingers, she tapped his heartbeat back to him. He clasped her hand to his chest, stopping her.

  The wind shifted, bending the branches of the orange trees, gusting out toward the water. Without warning a honeybee lit on the heel of Dror’s hand and crawled into the tender gap between their two palms. Instinctively she bucked back, pulling their hands apart.