Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  After the meeting, over more cake and coffee in a friend’s kitchen, Bela and his comrades speculated. Had they misjudged the gentleman? He had been in Palestine for so long that something of the land must have rubbed into him and made him a new man.

  Well, with some trepidation, at ten precisely, Bela went to call on Manuel Lorenz. Lorenz was staying at a spinster sister’s in a well-appointed flat on Josef Street. He appeared in his dressing gown and slippers, as though he hadn’t been expecting company. Bela was ill at ease, and kept his coat on, which wasn’t in his nature.

  Lorenz settled into the most comfortable chair in the room, offered Bela a cigar, and lit his own before rather abruptly beginning.

  “Young man, you realize, don’t you, that Hebrew is on its way to becoming the lingua franca of the Yishuv. What’s your opinion on the matter?”

  The question took Bela by surprise, and he answered it honestly. “It’s the language native to the land.”

  “You’re planning on settling Palestine, of course,” said Lorenz. “I’ve seen enough of these Pioneers. They all look like you. They’re not bad workers if they live through the first few years, but you can’t pay them the same as blacks, and in the end it just makes trouble. Take a look at this.” He passed Bela what looked like a handwritten broadside. “You know the language?”

  “Arabic,” Bela said, but at close range it didn’t look like Arabic at all, at least not the Arabic he’d read in grammars, dictionaries, and newspapers. In fact, it didn’t look like anything he’d seen before.

  “Who knows?” Lorenz said. “I’ll tell you the truth. None of the Arabs I know can make out more than half of it.”

  Bela beetled his forehead and spoke softly. “The script is beautiful.”

  “What they did understand was seditious.” Lorenz drew on his cigar. It looked queer and big in his sunken, soulless face. “Something about a strike. Now there had been some trouble, but I know the ringleaders can’t even write their names, let alone this.”

  Bela had less than half an ear for Lorenz as he struggled through the text. Will we not walk out together like Men?

  “You Pioneers, you think it’s Zion,” Lorenz said. “But it’s no different from any other backward hole. You have your land, and on that land you have your brute labor, and they’re not poets. They’re brutes.”

  Bela read on. What are these orange groves? Imported weeds! We will not fertilize them with our Blood. We will not Slave for another man’s Profit!

  “Not that I’m worried about a strike. The blacks can no more organize than jackals. In the end, it’s all about the tribe, the clan. If someone gives you trouble, send him back to his village. But I need a smart boy who understands Arabic.”

  “Can’t Arabs?” Bela asked him.

  Lorenz looked exasperated and said, “Look, son, you know how to ride a horse, don’t you? You can handle a rifle.”

  “Tell me,” said Bela, “why did you emigrate to Palestine?”

  The question couldn’t help but seem uncharitable. Lorenz didn’t answer at once. He sat back with the cigar burning down between his fingers. Then he said, “You want to know why I emigrated? Because it was impossible to live in the Ukraine. Impossible.”

  “But you didn’t go to Hungary. You didn’t go to America. You went to Eretz Yisrael,” Bela said. “What good is living in Zion if you act as though you were living anywhere else?”

  Lorenz stubbed out his cigar and decided there was no further purpose in the conversation. “When you get there,” he said to Bela, “come see me. We may find we have more to say to each other.”

  As Bela rose, he said, “You know, you can’t send him back to his village.”

  “Who?”

  “The Jew,” said Bela. “The one who wrote what you gave to me. The vocabulary lapses into Hebrew more than once.”

  After that, Bela was shown the door. He took the broadside, though he left his hat behind. He spent the whole of that night in translation: If we demand Wage Parity between Pioneer and Peasant and make common Cause against the Exploiters and Imperialists we can create here in Palestine a Worker’s Paradise. What can stand in our Way?

  The grammar was erratic, and entangled in the Arabic and Hebrew were a few stray words of Russian. As for the script, it was unpracticed but visually stunning, like stems, roots, wings, and bursts of water. The whole of the page he copied time and time again, and he sent one to Dori Csengery, who by that time was in medical school in Szeged. She told him that it smacked of Internationalist Infantile Romanticism. She must have been a pretty serious girl. To me it looked more like an artist’s rendering of birds stripping an orange grove.

  That night, Bela said in closing, I missed my sleep. I need my nine hours or I am impossible, so off I go to make up for lost time. Adele and my mother send their love. Regards as ever to your mother, father, and wonderful uncle. Affectionately, Bela.

  By the time I finished Bela’s letter, a second cigarette was worn down to a nub. In the solitude of my room, I lulled back on my bed in my half-unbuttoned nightgown, and the letter fell from my hands as I stared at the ceiling, purely happy. Drawing the cigarette to my lips for a final drag, heedless that my mother would smell smoke, I’d think: How long before I write him back? A day? Two days? The waiting was a luxury, and I let it gather just long enough for my cigarette to burn my fingers. Then I pulled out my German dictionary:

  Cousin, I think you sleep too much. I would prefer to be impossible. Just now, it’s past two, and I have been planning our future. You will become a producer of orange marmalade and I will bottle it in Barnahely. Maybe then you would visit as you promised. I put that page in the shoe-box, started again: Cousin, sleep or no sleep, you are impossible. But that wouldn’t do either, because somewhere along the line I wasn’t sure what I meant by the word impossible.

  WHO COULDI depend on in life? You can’t get things back, not the things that matter. Laszlo got married. She was a girl he had been courting for a year, and the wedding took place just after the Great War was declared, a week before he was called up for the army. We were invited to the church ceremony but not the reception, and my mother was so insulted that we didn’t go at all. It couldn’t have mattered less. I sat in my room with my chin on the windowsill, figuring my life was over.

  At midnight, there was a rattling at the gate, and to general astonishment, there was Uncle Oszkar, almost too drunk to stand, holding a lumpy napkin. “Hello!” he shouted. “Gyorgy, open up!” My father shuffled out in his spectacles, nightshirt, and slippers, and Uncle Oszkar clapped him on the shoulder. “I brought some cake for Norika.”

  Of course, by then, I was in the front yard too, half-hidden by the flowering apricot tree, dazzled by the sight of Uncle Oszkar so entirely out of context, in a snug suit and tie. My father hesitantly opened the front door, and Oszkar stumbled inside and dumped himself on the velvet couch. He unwrapped the wedding cake, and we all had some.

  I remember that night well because it was so different from every other night in that house. Uncle Oszkar made my father pull out playing cards. They were Hungarian-style cards, the fine type you don’t see nowadays: the suits of bright, round bells, the spade-like leaves, the hearts and acorns. Then there are the face-cards of the seasons: Spring dipping her hand into a bouquet, Fall sipping from a wine-vat, Summer lazy, though he holds a scythe, craven Winter.

  We played a few hands, and my father asked Uncle Oszkar if he still told fortunes. He shook his head.

  “I’ve lost the touch,” he said. “But your daughter could try. Laszlo tells me she spends her free time with the gypsies.”

  I shot my uncle a look, feeling some superficial anger, though I’ll admit the thought of Laszlo actually mentioning my name made my blood sing. My mother said, “Nora runs wild. I’ve given up where that girl’s concerned.” She poured my uncle more tea, and my father, as oblivious as ever, set his cards down on the table so that everyone could see them. He would lose.

  “I can re
ad palms,” I said.

  I was used to saying things I didn’t mean; my parents never noticed. But that night, Uncle Oszkar was there, looking at me with both eyes. There was a moment of rich silence, as my mother took a sip of tepid tea and was about to change the subject. But then my uncle presented me with his palm.

  I held it with both hands as though it were an enormous slice of bread and lard. It was square, white, and unevenly callused. More than the palm itself, I was aware of him waiting and listening.

  “So tell me my fortune, Norika. Will my life be a long one? Will I find a buried treasure? Will I miss my little Laszlo? Will he visit me, now that he’s a grown man with a wife?”

  My voice seemed to come from a distance. “I don’t know. I can’t read palms, really.”

  “Then why did you say you could?” Uncle Oszkar asked. “I think you can, but you don’t like what you see. It takes a hard heart to read fortunes. My heart’s too soft.” His voice broke then; it startled me, as though a plate had broken. “Nora,” he said, “I want to read your cards.”

  “We’re playing,” said my father.

  “Playing? You’ve already lost. Why waste our time? I need to think about somebody else’s troubles tonight,” Uncle Oszkar said, and with a few clumsy, disruptive gestures, he managed to gather the cards from my parents, shuffle them, and knock them straight against the table. He said to me: “Cut the deck.”

  Shamed, I would have sooner gone to bed. I took a long time figuring out where to cut until I was all turnip-faced like my father. Then I just did it without thinking. Uncle Oszkar turned the topmost card over. It was the card of Winter. The suit was acorn: Four bright nuts floated around the figure and her reversed reflection. She was a crone who walked through a pale blue landscape studded with broken trees. One hand reached across a shoulder to pull the strings of her shawl a little closer. The other held a walking stick.

  I didn’t want to ask him what it meant. Sobering a little, he said, “I can’t read cards, really, Nora.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said.

  “Well, I can then. And I promise you a long life.” Then he said something more surprising. “But not here.”

  “Of course not here,” I said, trying to sound offhand, though my heart was beating like mad.

  He shook his head. “I see a child, a grandchild, in another country.”

  Now this was past imagining. It was as though the walls melted away and outside flowed the world in all directions. I couldn’t pretend not to care, and I spoke with urgency. “What country? Can you tell me?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Uncle Oszkar said. And how could he, when that country was not yet invented?

  5

  NEVER IN MY LIFE did I imagine I would be living in Israel. Yet Bela’s kibbutz, I imagined. How couldn’t I imagine it? For years, I sent my letters to Kibbutz Tilulit and got my cousin’s letters in return. So steady was our correspondence that I could trace the progress of the kibbutz, month by month: the first harvest, the purchase of another hundred dunam from the Arab village of Taell al-Taji, Gezer born, the clinic open, and so on. Or rather, I could have traced it if I hadn’t lost his letters back in Budapest.

  During the winter when Louisa lived with us on Prater Street, she would spend most of the day on the old sofa with the bedding tucked around her. She wasn’t well. When I’d return from work, I’d fix her a pan of warm milk with a little sugar in it and watch her eyes fog over the brim. While I was gone, what did she do? She went through my papers. Once, she found my letters from Bela, and when I came home she thrust them forward like an accusation:

  “Mutti! You’re going to leave me!”

  I was still half-out of my coat and didn’t know what to make of this wobbling girl with my bedding draped around her shoulders and both hands stuffed with letters. My first impulse, frankly, was to give her a smack. But this I could not do. She was my daughter-in-law. I took a low breath, walked her to the couch, and with as much gentleness as I could manage, said, “These are very old letters. I haven’t heard from him in years. Besides, leaving now is out of the question.”

  She shook her head and drew my attention to the photograph he’d sent in ’25: Dori, Nathan, and Bela in front of the chicken coop. Their ease, their solidity, the way the whole scene swam in light yet was defined down to the tender specificity of Nathan’s bootlaces and the ribbon in Dori’s hair, all of this was not lost on Louisa. “You could be there now,” she said. “I wouldn’t be such a burden to you.”

  That was the sort of thing I couldn’t answer. During those months on Prater Street, I gained a talent for knowing when I didn’t need to speak. Louisa said all sorts of things when she was ill. She meant some of them. Others simply fell from her mouth like the frogs or the jewels of the princesses in fairy tales. She would ask questions and answer them herself. She would say something and take it back. I learned to let her be.

  WHY,” RABBI Shmuel Needleman asked Louisa, “did you follow your mother-in-law to Israel?”

  Louisa answered, “Because I love her.”

  Shmuel gave her a long look before asking, “Do you take anything in your tea?”

  Louisa hesitated. “Do you have cream?”

  “We have cream,” the rabbi said. “We have lemon, we have honey, we even have white sugar. We are completely civilized.” He smiled enough to soften the last remark, and walked off to the staff canteen, where he spent too long trying to find two clean cups and compensated with a plate of cookies filled with jam.

  Louisa picked up a cookie and put it down again in a manner that could have been read as arrogant had her hand not been shaking. The little barracks office where they met was unheated, and a broken window had been repaired with masking tape that rattled. She sunk deep into her sweater and pulled towards her the milky cup of tea. The rabbi was surprised to see she wasn’t even pretty. She looked like a washed-out bit of nothing.

  The young Israeli who’d referred her had made much of her resilience. She’d had some trouble with the Poles in the camp. There was one lady who’d thrown her in the mud outside the shower, shouting some rubbish about how she’d been a guard at a women’s barrack at Treblinka. Louisa had stepped out from that mud-puddle and taken her place at the end of the line for her shower with a straight back and high head, the young man had said, like an angel. She made that mud look like gold.

  All of this high drama had led the rabbi to expect a beauty. The Book of Ruth was foremost in his mind; how could it not be? Here she was, the daughter of a cursed nation, far from home, clinging to her mother-in-law and taking on her people and her God. But this Ruth was more a Leah, a defeated girl with weak eyes and a forgettable face.

  “Frau Gratz,” he said, “why do you want to be a Jew?”

  Louisa said, “It’s because of my mother.”

  “Your mother? She was a Jew?”

  “My husband’s mother.”

  The rabbi suppressed a sigh. “You must say things right out. Your parents, I take it, are not Jews. And your husband?”

  “My husband,” said Louisa, “is dead.”

  Shmuel poured himself some more tea and ate a cookie he didn’t want, all the while knowing that he was making himself look more ponderous than he wanted to be. “Which brings us,” he said, “back to the question at hand. Given what you know, given the past ten years on your continent, why on earth would you want to be a Jew?”

  Again, Louisa said, “It’s because of my mother—mother-in-law.”

  “What about her, then? When you married her son, did she want you to convert?”

  “No,” Louisa said. The question clearly left her puzzled.

  “She wants you to convert now?”

  “I can’t be separated from her.”

  There was a note in this girl’s voice that moved Shmuel, but moved him like a piece of furniture, by force, in a manner he didn’t trust. He said to Louisa, “Your loyalty is commendable. It’s a good deed, a blessed thing, what you’ve done. But it’s not
a reason.”

  Louisa took this in without a word. She didn’t look surprised and didn’t argue. The cup of tea lay centered on her knees, and above it her symmetrical face hovered, framed by lank hair.

  “There is only one reason to be a Jew,” said Shmuel. “Because you are born a Jew. If you have felt yourself to be one, acted and lived as one, then you must convert. Otherwise, you are commendable, but your application will be rejected.”

  Softly, Louisa spoke at last. “How can I know a thing like that?”

  “A good question,” said Shmuel. He felt relieved to be able to give frank advice. “Two ways. First, study our history and our laws. Learn kashrut, learn about family purity, learn about the Sabbath. If you’re accepted, you will keep those laws for the rest of your days. Second, review your own life. You’ve been drawn to Jews. You married one. You followed one to Eretz Yisrael.”

  Throughout this speech, Louisa stared down into her teacup as though she expected something to float to the top. After he had finished, she asked, “What happens after?”

  “What do you mean, after?”

  “After I learn the laws and review my life,” she said.

  “You’re called before a council of Rabbis, the Bet Din,” said Shmuel. “They examine you. And if you’re accepted, you’re immersed in the ritual bath.”

  “And I stay here?”

  “Do you want Israeli citizenship, or do you want to be a Jew? Do you know,” Shmuel said, “the Bet Din has received a record number of applications since the state was established last year? They’ve rejected half.”

  That made her sit up. So she thought it would be easy? Or was there something else in that abrupt attention, a note of panic? “Would they deport me?”

  “You would go home,” said Shmuel. “To Germany. That still is your home. This is our home. Two years ago, we didn’t have a home. Would you have wanted to be a Jew if you had nowhere to go, Frau Gratz?”