When she stepped outside and saw the pomegranate tree, she remembered Ofir’s prediction that the fruit would be ripe by now. She picked one to bring to Ziva, though Ziva hadn’t eaten in two days. As she climbed the steppingstones, schoolchildren were coming down the main road wearing colorful backpacks and spotless new sneakers.
The main square was unusually crowded. Claudette walked around the people standing in pockets, speaking loudly, hands waving in exclamation. Rounding the white golf cart that still sat in front of Ziva’s place, she wondered what was going on. She knocked on Ziva’s door as if the old woman could answer it, waited a courteous second, and went inside.
Quiet dominated the apartment. Ziva rarely used the television Eyal had set up for her. Claudette walked toward the bedroom, hoping she would find the old woman coherent. For the first couple of weeks Ziva was confined to the bed, she mostly knew where she was and who was visiting her, but over the last week the confusion had worsened. She increasingly called Claudette Mutti and asked for her cookie recipe or to see her latest painting. Claudette ignored these requests. Often she had no choice because Ziva spoke to her in German.
“Look at them!” With her adjustable bed raised to its most upright position, Ziva pointed out the window. “They’ve just voted! I should be standing by that door, handing out pamphlets, answering questions. Not lying in this goddamn bed!”
So that’s what everyone was doing in the square. Claudette hadn’t realized today was the big vote. Of all the days for Ziva to be lucid. She walked over to the window and gazed out at the scene. A circle of people burst into laugher, their laughter loud enough to reach the sad bedroom.
“I’m sure they won’t vote to end the kibbutz, Ziva.”
Ziva clutched the waffle blanket, held it under two tight fists. “How can I just sit here?”
Not too long ago, Claudette believed, the old woman would have rolled off the bed and dragged herself across the square to intercept the voters. But after five weeks of withering and yellowing in the bed, even Ziva’s incomparable willpower could no longer overcome such a body. The doctors decided against treating the fractured hip of a dying woman, and they’d stopped pumping her stomach. All they offered now were painkillers.
Ziva tried to reach the Styrofoam cup on the nightstand. “This is the longest I’ve gone without working. How long have I been stuck in this bed, Claudette? Two weeks?”
Claudette hurried to get the cup for her. She couldn’t lie so she said nothing. What would be the point of informing her it had been twice that?
“I told you I didn’t want to die in bed. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“You won’t die in bed, Ziva.”
“Oh no? Then what am I doing right now?”
Ziva took a shaky sip of water, holding the cup in both hands, her index finger circled by a red scar where the tip had been sewn back on.
“I don’t know.” Claudette sat in the visitor’s chair. “You don’t know. You never know what the Lord has planned.”
“The Lord? Please, Claudette, you know I can’t stand that nonsense.”
Claudette returned Ziva’s cup to the nightstand. In the past she would have come to the Lord’s defense, but she was still waiting for His sign. All she had asked for was one small sign to prove that it hadn’t all been lies, and, so far, nothing.
Ziva rested her hand on the mountain her stomach made under the white blanket. “You know what the doctor claims, Claudette? She claims I took a turn for the worse because I messed up my pills. Took far too many. I told her that I may have lost control of my body, but not my mind. My mind, I told her, is as sharp as ever. Only . . . I can’t explain it. I have run out of all my pills ahead of schedule.”
Claudette opened her mouth, but she couldn’t get the words out.
“Tell me, Claudette, have I become feebleminded without realizing it?”
Claudette lowered her head, tried harder to push out the confession.
“Have I, Claudette? Have I shown signs of dementia?”
Claudette saw she wasn’t going to get away without answering Ziva’s question this time. She would either have to tell the truth or tell a lie. She shook her head. “No.”
“Oh, I want to believe you, I really do, but I can see you won’t look me in the eye, and there’s no denying the pills are gone. I can’t explain that away.”
“I took them.” She said it so quietly, she barely heard it herself.
“What’s that, Claudette? Speak up.”
“I took your pills, Ziva.”
Ziva regarded Claudette with suspicion. “I don’t understand.”
Claudette pressed her clasped hands against her face. “I wanted . . .”
“Claudette, are you making this up just to make me feel better?”
Claudette shook her head.
“Then why? Why would you take my pills?”
“I wanted to kill myself.”
Ziva knew the young woman suffered—she knew it ever since she saw the fear in her eyes that day in the laundry—but if people could survive Auschwitz without killing themselves, what excuse could anybody have? It demonstrated the worst weakness of character to throw away life. And yet, Ziva wasn’t entirely comfortable calling Claudette weak. Every day she cleaned the feces from her bedpan without a flinch, not even in the back of her eyes. She had watched for it.
Ziva straightened the hem of her blanket. “No matter. You didn’t do it in the end. Intention without action means nothing.”
Claudette closed her eyes. “I should have told you sooner, Ziva. I’m sorry.”
Ziva turned to the window in time to see Hanoch, the man who would sell his soul for a television, disappear through the dining hall door. His decrepit dog sat outside waiting for him.
“Never mind sorry. Like intentions, sorry is worthless. Learning, moving forward, that’s what counts. To tell you the truth, I’m thrilled to find out I haven’t lost my mind.”
Claudette nodded, feeling at once guilty and proud of her lie, of sparing Ziva the knowledge that part of her was already gone. What was right and wrong was no longer clear to her. She said, “I hope when I’m old, Ziva, I’ll be able to look back on my life, the way you can, and be happy with my choices. Of course, I could never expect to feel as proud as you do, I’ll never do anything half as grand, but I’d like to have no regrets.”
Yossi, the dishwasher, bicycled alongside the square, calling out to Larry the archivist and Chaim the lazy bum. Ziva couldn’t be sure what any of these people had voted. She smacked her mouth, already dry again.
“No regrets? That’s a bit much, Claudette. Few regrets, perhaps. But none? That’s probably impossible.”
Claudette was surprised to hear Ziva say such a thing. Over the last few weeks the old woman had told her so many stories from her life, full of perseverance, courage, anger, pride, but never regret. “Does that mean you have regrets, Ziva?”
Ziva turned to the younger woman. “I just told you that I think it’s impossible to get through life without them, so obviously I do. But I also told you—didn’t I?—that I don’t see the use in dwelling on things. What’s done is done.”
Claudette didn’t dare push it, and Ziva faced the window again. The women sat in silence. People left the dining hall; others arrived. Boisterous schoolchildren filed inside for their early lunch.
Without looking away from the square, Ziva said, “There’s one moment I would like to go back and do differently. I don’t want to go back and redo whole years. Just one moment. All of five or ten minutes.”
Claudette leaned forward in her chair, well aware that any of these stories might be Ziva’s last. “What happened?”
“I’ve never told anyone this. It was the day the United Nations voted on whether to partition Palestine. A very important day. The vote was broadcast live over the wireless, and all over the world Jews huddled around their radios.”
As Ziva described the people crowded around the wooden radio in the dining hall, she
doubted she could ever get this young Canadian, this Catholic girl, to understand what she and the others felt that night, listening to the tinny voices coming through the round speaker, no bigger than a dessert plate.
Afghanistan.
No.
Argentina.
Abstain.
To encourage communal listening, the kibbutz had only the one radio, and its reception was good on that unseasonably mild and cloudless November night, so good Ziva could close her eyes and imagine that she stood in the grand hall in Flushing Meadows, New York, that there weren’t ten thousand miles between Palestine and the strangers deciding its fate.
Only the one yes from the United States and the ten noes from the Muslim nations were certainties; every other country was a question mark. They needed two-thirds to vote yes for there to be a Jewish state, and that seemed impossible to the kibbutzniks and survivors clustered around the dining hall radio. They had long ago come to expect the rest of the human race to either turn their backs on them or actively seek their destruction.
Costa Rica.
Yes.
Cuba.
No.
Could the Jews soon have a country that could vote like this? Ziva hunched, holding her ear as close to the speaker as she could without blocking it. Dov stood behind her, hand on her shoulder, grip tightening every time a country announced its decision. When a delegate said yes, they all looked to one another in excitement; when the answer was no or abstain, Ziva didn’t know what the others did, because she remained still, head bowed, waiting for the next vote. It was all happening in a matter of minutes, but to Ziva it felt as if they’d had their ears pressed against that speaker for two thousand years.
France—
Only when France announced yes did a hubbub sweep through the UN assembly and the kibbutz dining hall. France had Arab colonies, and they still voted yes. Next Greece voted no, and everyone quieted down again and remained quiet until it was announced: The resolution of the partition for Palestine is adopted by thirty-three votes, thirteen against, ten abstentions.
The dining hall burst into chaos. People rushed into one another’s arms, jumped, shouted, sobbed, climbed on top of the tables, broke into song. Some stood, too shocked to move, hands in front of their mouths or pressed against their chests. Friends clasped arms, saying, I can’t believe it! Can you believe it? If only my father were alive to see this! My wife, my sister, my little boy.
Ziva and Dov hugged each other, tightly, as if to squeeze out the disbelief. Beside them a survivor, a former yeshiva bocher, read aloud from the Bible: In that day . . . the LORD shall set his hand . . . recover the remnant of his people . . . the outcasts of Israel . . . from the four corners of the earth . . .
Ziva gazed up at Dov. “God had nothing to do with this.”
Dov took her face into his hands. “I know. It was all us.”
Ziva smiled. “And maybe a few others.”
Dov lifted her, and she laughed as he spun them around. When he returned her to the ground, they joined the others singing and marching out of the dining hall. Ziva sang as loud as she could: Our hope is not yet lost. To be a free people in our own land.
Ziva glanced around for Franz. American Danny grabbed her hand and pulled her into the dancing. The hora drew her along, and she sang and smiled and returned hurrahs while scanning for her secret lover of the last two years. Where could he be? The more she searched for Franz, the angrier she became, not at him so much as at herself. Here she was in the middle of a historical moment, the climax to one of humanity’s most epic stories, a story of literally biblical dimensions, and what was she doing? Being distracted by her own sordid little side story.
It would be two hours before she spied Franz leaning against the new medical clinic, hands in his trouser pockets. When he caught sight of her pushing through the crowd toward him, he didn’t wave, didn’t move, only watched her with a despondent face.
Panting, she said, “Where have you been?”
He shrugged, still leaning on the wall, hands in his pockets.
“Franz! What’s the matter with you? Where have you been?”
He smiled, sadly, then nodded his head as if agreeing with one of his own thoughts. “I’ve been so stupid. I actually thought maybe my yearning, my little personal yearning, could compete with this.”
“Franz, I don’t understand you. The world could be bursting into flames, and you sing and dance like Fred Astaire, and now here we have the first good news of the century, maybe the first good news our people have had in two thousand years, and you stand there with a long face.”
“Exactly. Two thousand years of yearning. It’s stupendous. Truly.”
“Why are you being sarcastic?”
“Because, Dagmar, now I have no chance.”
“No chance of what?”
He looked off to the side. “No chance of having you come to America with me.”
Why did this have to happen now? On what should be the happiest day of her life? She had always known, of course, that their affair would have to end someday, that it couldn’t go on forever, but then she had also begun to wonder why not. Everyone knew about them. It wasn’t referred to aloud, but they knew. She and Franz never kissed in public, but neither did she and Dov. Dov had never mentioned Franz, never asked her to stop seeing him. And she knew that he never would, because Dov believed no one should be owned. She didn’t even know if the affair hurt him; if it did, he couldn’t let on, because then she would have stopped, and that would have been a form of control. She should have known from the beginning that it would be Franz who forced its end. He had never hidden his want to own things, and the healthier he got, the more he wanted—his own home, his own clothes, his own wife.
Ziva looked to the dancers, where she should be. “Can’t we please talk about this tomorrow?”
“I watched you listening to the radio. I was in the room, and you didn’t even notice. Your face when they announced the results . . .” He shook his head. “I’ve never made you that happy. And it was grandiose—ridiculous—of me to think I ever could. I’ve been living in a world of wishful thinking, Dagmar. I was always going to America alone.”
Ziva stared at Franz leaning against the white wall, his glistening black eyes looking anywhere but at her, his face unshaven for once. She couldn’t bear the idea of never seeing him again. It was wrong of him to do this to her right now. She deserved to be happy today, and he knew that. If he had been fooling himself for two years, what was one day more?
She crossed her arms. “Maybe I’m more likely to go to America with you now. Now that I’ve done my duty. Now that I’m not needed as much.”
Franz dropped his head. “It’s not like you to say things you don’t mean, Dagmar. I’m in enough pain as it is.”
He was in pain. She saw a glimpse of the fragility he had that day he arrived in his oversized beige suit.
“I think what I’m saying makes sense.” She didn’t say it was true, only that it made sense.
Franz lifted his head. “Dagmar, what exactly are you saying?”
Not the truth. Obviously she would never leave the new Jewish state. She would never go off with him to do whatever it was people without a mission did with their days. She should tell him that if she did go to America to hang off his arm and love him the way he yearned to be loved, she would cease being the Dagmar he loved. But she didn’t say that. She stood, thinking, please, not tonight.
Seeming to take courage from her silence, he pushed off the wall. “I just can’t be a part of all this. Singing anthems together. I can’t even go to sports games; it makes me so uncomfortable to be a part of a cheering crowd. I know it’s not the same for you, but I still thought . . . Well, like I said, it was stupid, but in my stupid daydreaming, I thought in America, we could just be Franz and Dagmar, whoever they are when they’re allowed to just be, to just live. Aren’t you curious who you would be without all these . . . distractions? It never ends. Do you really think a hundre
d million Arabs are going to sit back while you set up your little Jewish country? You could be fighting Arabs for the next five or ten years. Aren’t you sick of it? Aren’t you sick of fighting every day just to stay alive? I know I am. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t stay here.”
Ziva didn’t know where to begin, didn’t see how she could respond without ending everything right here. And she had already decided that she couldn’t say goodbye to him now. She couldn’t ruin this night. Tomorrow, all right, but not tonight.
“Franz, I don’t need to hear anymore. I told you, I want to be with you.”
Ziva cringed at her voice, her words. I want to be with you. It was the dialogue of a silly girl in a romance novel. So cliché. Bourgeois.
“Am I hearing you right, Dagmar? Are you saying you love me, want me, more than—” He gestured at the people singing and dancing the hora, the small white houses Ziva had helped build with her own hands, the dark fields beyond the houses, the silhouette of Mount Carmel. Boys and girls lit gunpowder, filling the air with the crackle and smell of battle and celebration.
She could take it back. She could still answer his question honestly, snuff the hope in his eyes. For the first and last time in her life, Ziva lied to spare someone’s feelings. And they weren’t Franz’s. “I’ll go with you.”
Franz didn’t speak immediately. He allowed the words to sink in. Then, eyes brimming, he dug into his trouser pocket and pulled out the brooch.
This wasn’t the first time Ziva was seeing it. He had shown it to her one Saturday afternoon while they lolled by the river under the twisted branches of an old juniper tree. When he claimed the brooch had been in his family since the Black Plague, she had teased him for proof, but she stopped teasing him when he choked up, saying his biggest regret was not listening to his mother when she told him the history, especially the story about the yellow butterflies.
“I promised my mother that I wouldn’t let it end up in the wrong hands, that I would only give it to a worthy woman, someone special. And you, Dagmar, are special.” The brooch sat in his hand, glinting up at her with accusation—gaudy accusation. “According to Jewish law, if a man hands an object to the woman he wants to marry, and she accepts it, that’s it, they’re betrothed. The truth is you and Dov were never legally married, not by a rabbi or a state. We can still be man and wife.”
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