Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  “An Arab and a Zionist are friends? Palestine is a mad place.”

  “This is my brother’s wife. My sister-in-law.” First I said the word in English, then in Hebrew, even though it was a complete lie, because Anna wasn’t anything to me anymore. I’d try to write the word sometime. It was so important to them that I know how to read and write, but the words always decided to run away from me. I had a feeling it happened to them too, sometimes, but they just wouldn’t admit it. They said, “You are sanctified unto me,” and then, “You are divorced from me.” They wrote on the document, signed it—and in between, there was nothing.

  Anna took off her mask. Her hair tumbled down. Red sun glowed on her lips.

  The pilot inserted his forearm, covered with the stripes of his rank, through the wire lattice of the fence, avoiding the barbs.

  “A pleasure to meet you. My name is Charles Timothy Parker.”

  She answered him simply, “I am Anna.” Without mentioning her last name. She spoke English, and I was surprised to discover that, like me, she collected languages.

  “You’re new here,” the pilot said—he didn’t ask. Even though his voice sounded innocent enough, I suddenly realized that the ones on the other side of the fence were spying on us too. It was possible that they knew every one of us, and we’d never even noticed.

  “Where are you from?” the Englishman asked.

  “Poland.”

  “A lovely place. The heart of Europe. How did you become acquainted with your husband? I thought you Jews believe that matches are made in heaven.” I didn’t like the fact that he was questioning her. Even though Anna had admitted to me that she was a coward, she answered him easily.

  “He came to visit relatives in my town. Lutsk. Have you heard of it?”

  The Englishman shook his head.

  “Is it a godforsaken little place like this one?”

  Anna said, “He came to my parents’ house to give them a letter, and I knew right away.”

  It was incredible, the way she lied. The lies just rolled off her tongue. Maybe the Jewish Agency had ordered her to break all the Ten Commandments for the sake of the homeland. I convinced myself that I’d swiped the candlestick for the sake of the homeland too—and that is definitely not called stealing, I only did it so Imri would divorce her quickly and be free to fulfill his duty to marry four brides.

  “Why leave Europe?” the pilot asked. “And of all possible places, why do they insist on this one? A wretched desert, no water. Even the green here has the color of a tubercular patient. Look.” He pulled up a handful of grass from under the horse’s bridle and handed it to her as if it were a bouquet of flowers.

  “Do you know how to ride?”

  “No.” Anna didn’t touch his fake bouquet.

  The Englishman got onto his horse. He was wearing spurs. He looked down at her, still holding the handful of grass.

  “I miss having a civilized conversation with someone. I’ve been stuck in this place for three years. Go back to Europe. Believe me. Your homeland has no future. Take your husband, or whoever, back to your Lutsk, build yourselves a nice house with a red tiled roof. Sit down to drink tea with milk at five o’clock, look out at the soft snow and listen to a Chopin polonaise. Your Moses lost his way. How could you not have understood that. And some other lunatic led the Arabs astray. What the hell are you trying to fix? You fled this place two thousand years ago and scattered throughout the world, and now you’ve gone mad and insist on returning.”

  Darkness had fallen. We couldn’t really see him anymore. Only the silhouette of a man on a horse. I wanted Anna to answer him, to defend her Lutsk, or speak up for our village, but she only said, “Good night,” with perfect English politeness, and put on her beekeeper’s mask for no apparent reason. There was no danger lurking, because the bees don’t look for pollen in the dark.

  The English pilot approached the fence from his side, looking for a minute like a prisoner and, lowering his voice to a whisper, said, “I take off into the sky every day, and I’ve yet to see truly happy couples there. Sweet dreams, Annie. We shall meet again.”

  I was suddenly furious. At her, at the Englishman, at Imri who was devoted to the homeland and not to me, at Aunt Miriam, at my father who went and died without any warning, at my mother, who never answered when we talked to her in the air, and even at Johnny Weissmuller, who’d rather curl up at the feet of strangers.

  The Englishmen struck at the horse’s ribs. He was a good rider. The horse obeyed him. I saw how the Englishman bent over to whisper something in its ear, exactly the way Mohammed did. “Annie,” he had called her. As if he’d known her for years. As if she were already half his own bride.

  I shouted after him, “You just wait and see, Johnny Weissmuller’ll show all of you,” and I roared the famous roar.

  We dragged the heavy tools that were covered with honey. I didn’t even want to know how it tasted. I had a bitter taste in my mouth and my throat was dry from roaring.

  Anna stopped halfway. She took off her mask and gloves and dipped a long finger into the honey. She licked it, and her lips glowed in the darkness.

  She said, “Tarzan’s real name is Lord Greystock. He was English.”

  I ran, bursting wildly into the toolshed, and threw the tools on the shelves and on the floor, panting. The place was a mess again. Now I felt comfortable. The toolshed was mine and Mohammed’s, and I didn’t need anybody to reorganize it.

  I moved things, kicking at them. The old clay pots tilted over and fell. Suddenly, I saw a small door in the floor where they had stood. It had been hidden under the broken boards and hen house netting. I pulled the door, but it didn’t budge. I pulled it again with all my strength, roaring, and I didn’t care if Anna heard it and was scared. Finally, the little door opened, and I saw that our old hives had been squeezed into the black opening. I pulled one out. The hive was heavy, as if it were winter now and all the bees were gathered inside it to protect the queen from the invasion of strangers. Maybe this was where Aunt Miriam was hiding the pfuntim, the sterling she was saving up for my future.

  I pressed my ear to the opening. Silence inside. Using one of the forks, I pushed away the burlap sack. I wasn’t thinking about what would happen if the bees burst out all at once. I pushed my nose inside as far as it would go. I was hardly breathing. I smelled honey and wax and propolis mixed with something else, something like motor oil. I opened my eyes wide. On the bottom of the hive, under the slabs of wax, where the most dedicated workers live, I saw rows of guns lined up in perfect order.

  Chapter 10

  A hidden supply of guns at our place? Only watchmen and policemen who worked for the English were allowed to carry guns. That was the first secret I ever kept from Mohammed. My heart was heavy. I couldn’t fall asleep. As if there were two Uziks, one on each end of a string stretched inside me, arguing. I hear them talking to each other through empty tin cans.

  One Uzik said, shame on you. Mohammed is your best friend. He taught you everything you know. He always found time for you, and he never tried to put you off with excuses like, “I’m busy. Another time,” the way your brother did. He had the patience to teach you to read words in Arabic, even if you didn’t learn any of them, because Arabic letters are just as scared of you as the Hebrew ones. And don’t ever forget that Mohammed gave you Johnny Weissmuller as a present when he was a week-old puppy, saying that a boy without parents had a heart overflowing with love and needed to give it to someone.

  The second Uzik inside me was the real troublemaker. All the nasty names fit him. “Blockhead” and “brat”, “rascal” and “smart-aleck”, “paskundyak,” “shmendrik” and “momser”, “hooligan” and “wise guy” and “Aza’af”, in all the languages they spoke in our village. The last name, Aza’ar, in Arabic, was Mohammed’s, but he only said it with love. I secretly enjoyed the name-calling. It made me something special in the village, not just some pathetic little orphan who’d become a burden on his Aunt Miriam�
��s shoulders.

  The other Uzik argued that the secret was dangerous. What would happen if Mohammed unintentionally told someone in his village that we were hiding guns. There are plenty of Arabs looking for revenge, and they might come in the middle of the night and settle the score with us. And I had to think about the British too, who were spying on us from the other side of the fence, and if, heaven forbid, one of them should find out, God help Imri and the fellows from the van.

  That whole night, the soft words Mohammed whispered into his horse’s ear kept running through my mind. What should I do? Who could I ask for advice? I tossed and turned in bed. Anna’s a foreigner. And I mustn’t forget for a minute that the Englishman, Charles Timothy Parker, called her “Annie” and promised her, “We shall meet again.” And anyway, she wasn’t my sister-in-law anymore. She was just a Polish woman staying with us until she found her relatives, and then we wouldn’t hear from her anymore. And I wouldn’t dare ask Imri, even if he were home.

  What do you do if you have to be loyal to two people at the same time, Imri? I didn’t want to choose. You had to, because that’s what being grown-up meant, but I didn’t want to. Both Uziks tortured me. I didn’t even feel like playing Tarzan and sliding down from my window on my rope. That wouldn’t make me feel better either.

  I tried to talk to my mother in the air, and I even called to my father. But there was no answer. I had no idea how Aunt Miriam did that. In the morning, I whispered the secret into Johnny Weissmuller’s ear, because what good is a secret if you can never tell it to anybody? But Johnny Weissmuller—a hairy creature who had no words, only barks—couldn’t give me any advice either.

  * * *

  In the morning, Anna was writing letters.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, her hand racing across the paper, making line after line of beautiful round letters appear, like a magician. I was never jealous of people who knew how to read and write, but now, a kind of arrow passed through me and was gone in a flash. Maybe one of the Uziks that was running around inside me secretly wanted to be an excellent pupil like Zionka.

  Anna wrote one letter after the other. I examined her from every angle. Her bent head, her hair gathered into a bun on her neck, and the special gesture she made unconsciously, pressing her fingers to the center of her forehead, as if collecting her thoughts, to keep them from escaping. Then I saw her face, lit by a strip of light. Every time I moved, I saw a different Anna. She was so immersed in her writing that she didn’t notice me standing in front of her, blocking the light, on my way to school.

  Who was she writing so much to? Since Imri had gone, she’d been spending hours over those pages, practically drowning in them, more than our teacher in school. How much more of an effort could I make to read and write? No matter how hard I tried, they told me it wasn’t enough. Deep down, I was sorry I didn’t know how to read. But only when I thought about what would happen if Zionka decided to send me a letter and I didn’t understand it. And if I had something very important to tell Zionka and she was far away, how would I write to her? Maybe, by that time every house would have a magical device, and then no one would ever have to learn how to read and write, except the ones who really wanted to.

  Every day, Anna waited for the mailman. She left the house and waited for him at the end of the street. And she looked disappointed when no letter arrived for her.

  I watched her hand as it added line after line to the white paper until it was all black. Every time I tried to read, my head hurt, and I started hearing words that weren’t written on the page. The letters were busy dancing their complicated dance, and I put my hand on them, tried to catch them, but couldn’t. I thought it was strange that written words had so much power. That they could change your mood in an instant.

  When Anna got a letter, her face glowed and she read it as she walked, gliding along the street to our house, completely unaware of what was going on around her. Once, Zusia the wagon driver almost ran her over, and it wasn’t till he shouted a curse in Russian at her that she moved aside and kept on reading. I even saw her reading in the hen house, and she didn’t even notice the chicks pecking away at the hem of her dress.

  Anna said that when you read, everything comes alive, and I felt hopeless. I asked myself if I would ever be able to write a word to my mother in the air. Maybe then, I would feel that she’s just in a far-off country, like Poland.

  Anna didn’t raise her head. I’d already discovered that she could write in the dark too, because she even wrote letters at night. She licked the envelopes and the letters piled up next to her. She probably had a bigger family than Mohammed.

  I couldn’t control myself any longer.

  “Who are you writing to?” I asked her.

  “To my mother and father, and my older brothers, who have their own families, and to my sisters-in-law and my girlfriends who are still in Poland, and to my little sister. She’s exactly your age, only she’s not a ‘zfauRK like you.

  I clenched and unclenched my fists. “Is that another nasty name?”

  “It’s Polish for ‘mischievous’,” Anna said. Not everything that sounds insulting is really meant that way. “Zhulik is said affectionately.” I immediately thought of the name Mohammed called me, “Aza’ar,” and I waited for her to ruffle my hair, the way he did when he called me that.

  Uzik Zhulik—it even rhymed.

  Something was bothering her. Something she’d wanted to ask for a long time, but hadn’t dared.

  “Why does your aunt always talk to herself?”

  I burst out laughing. “She’s not talking to herself. She’s talking to dead people.”

  Anna was shocked. Right then and there, she had something to write to her family in Poland. Palestine really is a crazy country.

  I wanted to reassure her.

  “Don’t be afraid, Anna, it isn’t just any old dead people. It’s my mother.” But she didn’t look reassured. Anna didn’t know that my mother died on the day I was born, and I didn’t plan to tell her.

  I said, “If your little sister came here, she could be Zionka’s friend.”

  “And yours too?”

  My eyes avoided her gaze. I tightened my school bag on my back as if I were in a hurry. “What do you write to her?”

  Anna said that she wrote to her about life in Palestine, how different everything was here. The people reading those letters in Poland thought she had a vivid imagination.

  No one wears a fur coat here, because it never snows. There are always leaves on the trees, because they don’t fall off in autumn, and they’re dusty, as if someone forgot to air them out in time. And she still hadn’t seen a river like the one that flows near Lutsk. And the honey had a special taste that sticks to your tongue for a long time, and Anna also said that we eat with our hands and talk too loudly and push when we’re waiting in line and our jokes are hard to understand.

  And she wrote about Aunt Miriam too, and about Johnny Weissmuller and about ... “About me?”

  For a minute, I was scared she might’ve discovered the guns.

  Anna smiled, as if she were hiding a sweet secret, not a dangerous one, like mine.

  “It’s too bad you can’t talk to your little sister with the magical device.”

  Anna said, “Telephone.”

  I’d already heard that word, but I’d forgotten it.

  She said they had one on the desk in the English Consulate in Warsaw. It was black and had a dial that spun around and numbers. The English clerk had picked up the receiver. Anna and Imri had heard every word that was said on the other end.

  “Who answered him from the other room?”

  Anna said, “It was much further away. He talked to someone in Palestine.”

  I said, “If your little sister wants to immigrate to Palestine, she’ll have to find a boy here who’ll agree to marry her so she can get a certificate.” I thought Anna would laugh, but a thin blanket seemed to suddenly cover her face.

  “They don’t want to co
me. They’re angry at me for leaving. They think I made a terrible mistake and that one day, I’ll pay a heavy price for it.”

  And I had been sure that all the Jews in the world were waiting in line to join us here.

  Anna licked the last envelope and gently pressed down the triangle on the back. “They say this country has no future. Despite all the promises, the Jews will not have a country of their own.”

  Then I understood why they took their time answering her letters, and I felt a little sorry for her. Maybe when Anna writes, she feels the way I do when I try to talk to my mother in the air.

  I said, “Tell them that we’re fine here. You can even lie to them. You know, you can do that for the sake of the homeland.”

  Anna said a homeland is not sacred. I asked myself if she would dare say such a thing to Imri, but I’m not him. My teacher would also have been shocked to hear her. And then she said that she was worried about her loved ones who were there, in Poland. They didn’t understand that a savage storm was brewing.

  As she gathered up all the letters, one fell. It landed, like a white butterfly, under the table. I wanted to bend down, but Anna beat me to it. She knelt, and the bun of hair lying on her neck came undone. For a minute, I was taller than she was. Her whisper rose towards me. “A terrible disaster is going to happen there.”

  Mohammed

  He will forget you twice a year. For a short while, you will no longer be his master, he will devote himself to another, a female master. Don’t be jealous, Aza’ar, Allah has decreed it. This is the season that is conceived inside the body of the female, repeated in the spring and the fall, the way the sun goes down behind the olive trees and rises again tomorrow. The dog will pursue her throughout the entire land, will lie in wait for her, will crouch beside her lair day and night, until she responds to him. And you, his friend, whom he has loved since the dawn of his childhood, are as far from him now as if you had climbed up to the sky. With the special sense of smell that dogs have, the lucky one will find his mate, will follow her far beyond this river or that.