Paper Bride

by Nava Semel

  She moved in a circle of dancers, a large bee in the café, her dark dress spinning around her. But still, she kept her distance from him.

  In the meantime, the waiter came up to me, asked if the ice cream was good, and remarked, “What good-looking parents you have.”

  I thought of telling him they were two strangers who had kidnapped me at the beach because they found out I was hiding guns. I would have told him that even though I was only twelve, I knew how to shoot the newest model Radom pistol. But then I thought that a café wasn’t a place for playing pranks, and the waiter hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just trying to be friendly, or maybe the English pilot had really impressed him.

  They came back to the table. Charlie pulled out her chair for her. He was the politest man I’d ever met. I didn’t think I could ever pull out a chair for Zionka in the village committee house. And if we ever went to the movies, I wouldn’t have to pull out any chairs because they’re nailed down to the floor. My elbows were on the table. I knew I was breaking the rules of English etiquette, but I was raised here, not there.

  Charlie didn’t care that I heard every word. And maybe he wanted me to be a witness to the things he wanted to say to Anna.

  “Return to England with me, Annie. We’re both Europeans. You don’t belong in the Levant. You and I come from the same place. People born in snow cannot live in the desert.”

  Charlie took her hand very gently and spread her fingers.

  “Delicate hands like yours should not be stung by bees. In England, you’ll be a lady. London will bow down before you. I know your marriage was fictitious. Don’t ask me how. The little Zionist’s brother“—and he touched my head—”is your husband only on paper.”

  We both turned pale. I stopped eating. The ice cream had lost its taste. The vanilla, chocolate and strawberry had all run together in a disgusting mush. I pushed the silver spoon to the edge of the table. It was filthy.

  Charlie leaned over to her and promised he would never reveal the secret. Even though he was a British officer, and it was his duty to inform the government, he had chosen to be loyal only to Anna. From the moment he saw her near the fence, he knew that she was the woman he been dreaming of his whole life. I shoved the silver spoon again, and it fell to the floor with a sharp clang, but Major Parker didn’t stop talking. He had to get Anna away from here. Palestine was lost. Soon, it would drown in blood.

  * * *

  The waiter came over, disappointed that I hadn’t finished my ice cream.

  “You didn’t like it?” he asked, as he gathered the plates and bent to pick up the silver spoon.

  We were silent. My tongue was cold.

  “Your relatives were wise, and left in time,” said Major Parker.

  Anna whispered, “I saved my life. I fled Europe in time.”

  Then she looked down and began searching for something in her handbag. The English pilot had already taken out a clean, ironed handkerchief, when she came across the torn picture of the couple.

  He gave her the handkerchief and practically begged, “Let me protect you, Annie.”

  Miriam

  I fear the foreigner. His English ways are casting a spell on Anna. You must watch over her, my sister. We should not trust men who soar above us in flying machines. This foreigner might tempt her into leaving us. And the boy is attached to him too, his head full of nonsense, worthless ideas he takes from pictures, not from learned words. Soon he’ll be advocating free love, without the benefit of holy matrimony. I’m still searching for a cure for him, my sister, I haven’t given up.

  I remember gathering him in my arms, a day-old infant, his bottle in my trembling hand. He screamed to high heaven for hours. Imri locked himself in the toolshed, his hands over his ears.

  How could I have raised your children properly, sister, when I have no child of my own?

  Chapter 30

  Major Parker wanted to take us home in his jeep. I explained to him that it would be better for us, and probably for him too, not to be seen together. He immediately understood. Even though he was English, I liked him. And we had something in common. We both loved Johnny Weissmuller.

  Back in England, the major had five dogs. A Labrador, a German shepherd, an Alsatian, a terrier and a poodle. I asked who was taking care of them now that he was stationed in Palestine, and he said, embarrassed and blushing like Zionka, that he owned a huge castle and the servants were taking care of everything. He hoped that someday, when the English and the Jews were no longer enemies, we could visit him there.

  A castle? I suspected him of trying to impress Anna, but he described it with the longing of someone really talking about his home, and he sounded exactly like Anna when she talked about Lutsk.

  I also asked him if the dogs missed him when he was gone.

  Charlie said that Lady Mary Parker, his mother, had written to him that the dogs went out to the rose garden every morning and barked to the air.

  “Someday I’ll take you flying with me, little Zionist. We’ll climb to three thousand feet in the Nimrod Hawker and go wherever you want, even to the jungles of Africa.”

  The major insisted on going to the bus stop with us. A soft evening was falling on Tel Aviv, and the street lights were lit. So what if it wasn’t London. Tel Aviv was more “my” city than any other city in the world. It started to drizzle. Charlie took off his pilot’s hat and put it on my head to protect me from the drops. Anna laughed. The hat was big, and covered half my face.

  Major Parker said, “Do you remember, little Zionist, the first time I saw you wandering around near the fence? I thought you were a spy and Johnny Weissmuller was a code name.”

  Major Parker also had a story to tell. Maybe he heard it during one of his flights. An English king had a talking horse he could understand, except that they were always surrounded by mobs of servants, caretakers, toadies, and people seeking favors and charity. The horse never opened its mouth in the presence of other people, and waited for an opportunity to be alone with its master. One day, it took the king to a large, grassy knoll, and said to him, “You will lose your crown, and your kingdom will remain a small island, because you follow the people’s commands and not what is in your heart.” The king put his hands over his ears and whipped the horse. And on his way back to the castle, the horse threw him, and his crown fell from his head. Then he galloped off to find himself a new king and another kingdom.

  We saw the bus approaching, its lights piercing the darkness.

  Anna said, “Don’t be angry, Charlie. If I had met you first ...”

  He placed a gentle finger on her lips to keep her from going on.

  “I know. He’s not your husband, Annie, but you love him.”

  Sitting in the bus, crossing the dark fields, I remembered that the photograph had been left on the table in the café. I wasn’t sure it had been forgotten. I had a feeling Anna left it there on purpose.

  Anna dozed, holding her handbag on her lap. There was nobody else on the bus, except for the glazier, Pasechovitch, who was bringing panels of glass for his store in the village. The windows were wet with rain and the streaks rolling down them reminded me of Anna’s cheeks. I pressed my nose against the windows, which had become a kind of movie showcase. Major Charles Timothy Parker was reflected in the glass again, standing alone at the empty, wet bus stop. Large drops were falling from his pilot’s hat. Then he got into his jeep, started it, and drove off.

  If I put together the three stories about talking horses, I’d have a movie. A great movie. What part would Johnny Weissmuller play in it?

  Anna’s breathing was soft and warm. Sitting next to her, I was wide awake. The square window opposite me turned into a screen. Suppose I was watching my life, as if it were a movie. The pictures jumped around in the wrong order, because keeping to the right order wasn’t necessary, and I could skip the unimportant things. I ignored the day I took my first steps and the day I said my first word. It wasn’t “Mama.”

  The movie coul
d start with my first prank. I’m hiding in the toolshed behind my grandfather’s clay pots, and no one finds me. I hear them shouting my name at the top of their lungs, but I don’t come out. Until Imri comes and gets me. He was the age I am now. He carries me in his arms, but he isn’t angry.

  I can shorten things here and there, or move fast forward. For example, the times in school when they couldn’t teach me to read and sent me to the village doctor to check my eyes and then my head, saying that something must be wrong, they didn’t know exactly what. And there was a new teacher every year who was sure he’d be the one to teach me, and the kids in the village, except for Zionka, teased me, until they finally gave up and left me in peace.

  In my movie, I could change whatever I wanted. Aunt Miriam, for example, would be a happy person who didn’t talk to the air. She’d dance with the rabbi, who’d be the champion tango dancer, not only of the village, but of all the Hebrew villages, and he’d also invite Zionka’s mother and Mali Perlmutter to a ball in the committee house, and make peace between them. And there’d be no boring speeches made by our great leaders about the socialist vision of the future, and there’d be no Hitler and no screaming Nazis and no laws discriminating against the Jews, the “inferior race.” And if I wanted to show Poland in my movie, I could use the crystal ball Imri gave me as a present and photograph a close-up of the wolf and the snow. Anyone seeing it would know immediately that it wasn’t Palestine.

  When I wanted it to be nighttime in my movie, I’d close the shutters and make it “fictitiously” dark, and when I wanted to show a jungle, I’d fill the picture with the castor bush that grew behind the toolshed. Anything was possible. I could even show Zionka in another ten years, tall and beautiful, her lips rich with nectar. I still hadn’t decided whether there’d be any honey- sucking in my movie.

  I’d move Aharonchik’s bakery to the other side of the village, past the water tower, so he’d stop pestering everyone who came in for a loaf of bread with that Stalin of his. And I’d put a carved iron gate into the fence between our beehives and the British base, and add a climbing jasmine bush from Fahtma’s garden so Johnny Weissmuller could go in and out whenever he wanted without risking his dog’s life under the nose of the British military police.

  At the beginning, I would show him as a little puppy, and then in the next picture, he’d already be a grown-up dog. That was the wonderful thing about movies. You didn’t have to wait so long for something to change.

  In my movie, bees wouldn’t die after they sting, and the male would stay alive after it mates with the queen, and Imri would be free to marry whoever he wanted to. I wouldn’t even put Tonka Greenbaum in the movie. And the shabab would also be cut out. I would be the one who decides.

  Zionka’s duck would stay a Zionist, and I’d let him peck away at as many pictures of Herzl he wanted to. After all, they printed more of them every year. And in my movie, Anna would also be just the way she was. I didn’t want her to change.

  Now, you can see feet. It’s still not clear whose feet they are. Then the screen is filled with a closed book, and in the next picture, there are letters that turn into bees that start dancing the tail dance. Then a hand grabs the book and throws it at the Jewish National Fund box hanging on the door. You don’t even have to see the boy’s face to know who he is.

  My mother and father could be in my movie too. And it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember what my mother looked like, because I could show a woman Imri’s height, who’s wearing a ring and has her hair pulled back in a bun. I could say that was her and everyone would believe it. And my father’s heart would stop beating, but at the last minute, he’d jump up onto his feet, burst out laughing and say, “What a prank I played on you, and you believed it, you dopes.”

  I’d get a camera. Zionka would help me. I’d make a movie.

  I only had one problem. There was no part for Johnny Weissmuller. Imri said that, walking in the street, he was just an ordinary person, like him, or me. The thought that Johnny Weissmuller might resemble me in something was ridiculous. Imri said that he and Tarzan were completely different, and in real life, he had a wife who wasn’t Jane, but I refused to believe that. Nobody could take away from him those five gold medals and six world records in swimming. That’s what I would tell Imri when he came back.

  And the end of the movie? What would the end be?

  Wait just a minute. What I was seeing now wasn’t part of the movie. The driver was shouting. Pasachovitch the glazier straightened up and his glass panels slipped down and almost broke. Anna woke up in a fright.

  A fire was blazing. Smoke was billowing up from our village into the black sky, people were racing back and forth, everything was in an uproar. The bus drove quickly around the bend in the road, parallel to the British base. I saw a Hawker burst into flames, like a wounded sun that could not set. Against the background of the wailing sirens of the British military police, someone was yelling, “Fire!!!”

  Aunt Miriam was waiting for us at the bus stop. “I thought I lost you,” she cried, and I didn’t want the end of my movie to be like this, because I hate sad endings.

  Chapter 31

  It was Charlie’s airplane that was going up in flames. A huge, ancient castle would stand empty, and his mother, Lady Mary Parker would curse the bloody Palestine that had stolen her son.

  Anna said, “Anyone who wants to return, returns. Nothing can stop him.”

  I didn’t want to argue with her. Sometimes, when I listened to her, I thought she was really trying to convince herself. One thing that bothered me was that Charlie’s dogs would keep on barking to the air.

  The village was in an uproar. Fire trucks drove through our street, and the firemen connected their hoses to the water tower and flooded the main street. Aharonchik was standing in the doorway of the bakery, cursing the “damned whiskey drinkers, may their castles fall on their heads some day!”

  I said to him, “Aharonchik, what will you do if you suddenly find one likeable Englishman?”

  Aharonchik said he would have a serious problem. Like falling in love with a bourgeois woman, and his smile bent into a frown when he told me that after Anna and I had left for Tel Aviv, Tonka Greenbaum had arrived in the village. He’d volunteered to escort her to our house, and he even closed the bakery in her honor, something he does only on May First, Yom Kippur and the days everything closed down in protest against the British. They went to talk to Aunt Miriam, and Tonka Greenbaum demanded to see Imri. I don’t know what Aunt Miriam said to her, but she somehow managed to send the second wife back to Jerusalem.

  Johnny’s happiness at seeing us again quickly turned into agitation. The raging fire scared him. He refused to curl up in my bed, went out into the yard and crouched there, watching the British base, and every shout of the firemen made him jump with fright. I thought he was worried about Charlie, who had saved his life. I pulled him into the house. We heard somebody shout that someone had broken into the base and tried to steal weapons from one of the arsenals. The intruder had accidentally dropped a kerosene lamp near one of the Hawkers, and the plane burst into flames. Its engine exploded and the fire spread. I remembered the guys from the van. There were things I wouldn’t do for anyone’s sake, even my own. I tried hard to calm Johnny down.

  Smoke drifted through the cracks in the shutters. Zionka’s mother told her daughter to close the window tightly, and Zionka sobbed, because she was afraid of the dark. I didn’t know how a bad movie made you feel, because Tarzan of the Apes was the only movie I ever saw, and I thought it was wonderful, but Imri said that lots of movies flop. The audience hated them and didn’t believe what they saw on the screen. During the intermission, Imri went out for a breath of air, but I didn’t move from my seat. Later, I decided that a bad movie is one whose story doesn’t develop the way you’d like it to. Maybe if I’d seen a movie like that, I would’ve left in the middle too.

  Tarzan is a perfect movie. I will explain to Imri when he finally comes back fr
om his “bride travels”. What I saw in the movie was mine. If Tonka Greenbaum was looking for Imri at our house, Johnny, that means he isn’t with her in the Bristol Garden guest house in Jerusalem. What a relief. I don’t know what kind of husband he is now, Johnny. Maybe a husband in the air. Why does my laughter sound hollow?

  Imri said that even if the beginning and the middle were bad, that still didn’t mean the movie couldn’t improve, and a bad beginning didn’t always mean a bad end. Imri wasn’t like Anna. If she saw gloom everywhere, then he saw light everywhere, and that was why I didn’t know if they were right for each other. What they did have in common was that they both read a lot of books. People always pointed at me and asked Imri unbelievingly, “Is that really your brother? You had the same father and mother?”

  Listen, Johnny, there’s no other man in the world who would’ve promised in advance to marry four brides when it’s definitely enough to marry two for the sake of the homeland, maybe even one. I wouldn’t have agreed to any bride, unless they promised me in advance it would be Anna.

  Before the curtain opened, I didn’t know what to expect. Imri sat straight up in his seat. He seemed to be excited too. I felt so inexperienced when he said it was impossible to describe what a movie was. I pestered him with questions. Then I was sorry. I asked whether you could reach out and touch what you see on the screen, or whether Johnny Weissmuller was completely flat.

  The seats squeaked. I squirmed in anticipation, looking around at the others who’d come into the theater. I didn’t know any of them, and only after I asked over and over again what to expect, and the lights started to dim, Imri whispered, “It’s like talking to the air, and somebody suddenly answers.”