Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “Lenore, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes I do,” she said. They were in the open, under a drizzling sky, but he had to admit that she probably did know what she was doing. She dug that hand a little deeper, and cupped it, as she leaned up towards his ear. “There’s a hole in your pocket.”

  “You did that,” Bela said. He realized he was speaking Hungarian. It didn’t seem to matter. She pulled him around the side of a storage shed to a muddy bank, and somewhere in there she had stopped pulling, and he had started until he was struggling to get her muddy shorts and blouse off, and she was still fumbling with the buttons on his trousers from the inside, with no sense of urgency, and finally he had to free her hands and unbutton them himself.

  Against the mudbank, Bela entered her, and she rose to meet him, face almost impassive. He felt he had to close his eyes, and the cool mud and warm body of this girl, the stench of sour milk and iodine, came over him and let him not think long enough to lose himself.

  Afterwards, he rolled off Lenore. She looked half-squashed. There was mud in her hair, and all over her cheeks and breasts, and she retrieved her shirt and pulled it over her head. Her face emerged from the collar, and Bela tried to read it and couldn’t.

  He said, “My God, this is terrible.”

  “Bullshit,” said Lenore. She felt around for the shorts and panties and discovered they were still around her ankles. She stood up and pulled them back to her waist.

  “I’m your father’s age,” said Bela.

  “My father’s dead,” Lenore said. “Who says I want another one?”

  Bela again was speechless. His private parts were still exposed. When he tried to rise to pull up the trousers, he put too much weight on his left leg and slipped, but Lenore caught him.

  Out of breath, she gasped as she said, “Look at me.”

  He did look at her. She still bore his weight. Her muddy neck was red with exertion and he had never seen her eyes so bright.

  “See how happy it makes me,” she said, “to catch you when you fall?”

  DURING THE NEXT year, Dori began to keep company with Yosef Ginzberg, a member of Beit Shemesh kibbutz, no stunner and no genius, but a man, Dori said, with a heart of gold. He courted her. She had never been courted before. He brought her coffee cakes he’d baked himself, and bottles of wine from the kibbutz vineyard. They’d eat the cake and drink the wine together in the room Dori was still theoretically sharing with Bela, safe in the knowledge that Bela wouldn’t come home. First Yosef stayed until the cake was gone and saved the rest of the wine for later. Then he stayed until the wine was gone. After a few months, he didn’t need any excuse to stay. He laughed a lot, and told her she was beautiful so often that she stopped thinking it was a joke.

  Of Bela, Yosef said, “He missed his chance. He had you for twenty years.”

  “Thirty,” Dori said. “We met in primary school.”

  “He’s that old, eh?”

  “That old,” said Dori. “Old as me. Can you believe it?”

  She could joke about it now, barely. Bela was that old. Lenore insisted she was twenty, and maybe she even looked it now that she’d learned how to button her shirt correctly, but the whole thing was still preposterous.

  Being Bela, he knew it was preposterous. He couldn’t shake off a lifetime of self-consciousness overnight. Dori couldn’t stay angry at him, especially after Yosef, but she was embarrassed for him, and their long friendship made her aware of his own embarrassment. There would be times at the dining hall when he’d be sitting beside that girl trying to get her to speak Hebrew, and she’d clearly be doing something nasty to him under the table, and suddenly, across the room, his eyes would meet Dori’s, and they’d both blush.

  When he decided to marry Lenore, he told Dori before anyone else, or at least that’s what he claimed. He stopped into their room unexpectedly, and unfortunately Yosef was somewhere else that night. He broke the news, and then said, “It’s the only way to get her out of that tent.”

  “Well,” Dori said, “she could leave the kibbutz.”

  “Lenore? Where on earth could she go?”

  Dori shrugged. She scooted herself back on their old bed, and hoisted up the first of his boxes of letters. “You’d better take these.”

  “Wouldn’t it be possible for me to leave them here?” Bela asked her. “Just for a while.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Dori. She tried to smile. She had to admit; he did look younger. That bitterness he had developed in the past four or five years had fallen away, and underneath was something she was almost afraid to touch. He leaned hard on his right leg and cocked his head in the other direction, and he looked sad and lost. He was half-crazy, just like the girl. She suddenly wanted to sit him down for one of the talks they always had. She asked, “Are you afraid she’ll read them?”

  “She can’t read German,” Bela said. “Or Hungarian for that matter. I just think they’re safer here.”

  Torn between love and self-respect, Dori wavered. Then she remembered Yosef, so she said, “I’m sorry. They can’t be safe anymore.”

  BY THE TIME LENORE and Bela married, she was calling herself Leah, and spoke a poor but fearless Hebrew. The rabbi who married them was a stranger to Tilulit, and he said to Nathan Sobel, “It’s good to see two of those newcomers settling in.”

  Nathan repeated the remark to Dori, who forced herself to laugh. “He’s picking up her accent,” she said.

  “Well, maybe it’s for the best,” Nathan said. “He hasn’t done any real leadership work in months anyway, and he’s been restless. Leave him to his dictionaries and his wife and give some of the young people a chance. Maybe they’d be less likely to run off to some crusade in Europe.”

  In fact, the demographics of Tilulit were alarming. Many of the young men had volunteered for the British army, and the kibbutz was often short-handed at harvest. For the first time, that year, they had brought in hired labor from Taell al-Taji. The decision hadn’t been easy, and Dori, for one, had opposed it strongly, though an Arab representative from the village argued, in good Hebrew, that it would be seen as a hand extended in friendship.

  “It’s not friendship,” Dori said. “It’s an economic relationship. It’s inherently exploitative and it goes against bedrock ideology.” But she knew she was putting on what Bela had always called her “doctor voice,” and she was lost.

  Bela would have agreed with her; she was sure of it. Ideologically, intellectually, they were almost always in complete accord. Even when they’d fought, at least he’d been there, with his chin in his hand and on his face that dubious and inquiring expression. She missed him.

  AND WHERE WAS he? In the room he shared with his wife, a cluttered room far smaller than the one he’d shared with Dori, though possessing a hotplate, a wardrobe, and a little wash-basin. Leah accumulated things: She stole bowls from the dining hall and filled them with stones she liked; she picked wildflowers and dried them upside down over the window; she took other people’s laundry by mistake and then she washed it in the basin so they couldn’t get it back; she stubbed her cheap, strong cigarettes out everywhere. Amidst all this were Bela’s photographs, dictionaries, and boxes of letters.

  One night, he came in and found her lying belly-down in bed, with her feet on the pillow and her head facing the door, smoking a Black Cat cigarette. There was a Hebrew-German dictionary open and a letter in her hand. She asked him, “Who’s Nora?”

  Bela crouched and read the letter upside down. “That’s very old. Probably older than you.”

  “Is she German?”

  Bela said, “No, Lenore. She just wrote me in German. She was no more German than you are French.”

  Though they spoke Hebrew in public, French remained their intimate language, and as Bela settled in beside her, it was in French that he addressed her, and in French he told her about my husband and my son, his mother and sister, and his father who had drowned in Lake Balaton. He showed her the photogr
aph of Adele in the Arab gown.

  “She’s beautiful,” Leah said. “You can tell she’s a saint. Where is she now?”

  “Hungary,” Bela said.

  “Then she’s dead,” said Leah. She said this, smoking her cigarette and letting ashes fall all over the brown flax blanket. She spoke with no particular urgency. Bela would have asked her what she’d meant, but she at once turned over on her back, and her loose hair fell across that photograph, and he forgot what she’d said. After they made love, sometimes he would dream that she was floating away in a clear, bright ether, and then he’d try to run after her and he’d call “Nora!”

  When he called that name, sometimes he’d wake up, stunned and terrified, and there would be his wife beside him, asleep, with the cover half-pushed off her naked shoulders and two fingers pressed to her mouth as though she were calling for silence, or perhaps silencing herself.

  HE DIDN’T LIKE THIS business with the letters and the dictionaries. He also felt helpless to stop it. He did remove the Hebrew-German dictionary from his room and gave it to the library; then he felt ashamed. Once, she confronted him with something he barely recognized, a leaflet he had copied twenty-five years before, with Arabic characters that looked like raindrops, branches, birds in flight. Below was his cribbed translation into Hungarian.

  Unite with us, brothers. Show them we are not dogs, but men. If we walk out together they can not set one against the other. Our common Enemy is the Class System. Our common goal is freedom from Imperialism and a National homeland for all peoples Native to this country.

  “Awkward,” Bela admitted. “Those capital letters—I don’t know what I was trying to reproduce. And so old. Why are you asking about old things?”

  Leah asked, “Did you have brothers?”

  “No,” Bela said. “I didn’t write that. Someone else did. Some of the early Pioneers wanted to organize the Arab laborers.”

  “Communists?” Leah asked.

  “Some of them,” said Bela.

  “My father was a Communist,” said Leah. “He translated Lenin’s works into French, and also Trotsky’s.”

  It was the first time she’d said anything about her father other than acknowledging his death, but she spoke with such indifference that it was difficult to know if she was entering new territory. She did ask him to teach her to write Arabic. The request surprised him so much that he said, “You can barely write Hebrew.”

  “Well, Arabic is more my style,” said Leah. She lazed backwards when she said that and at the same time reached for the last cigarette in the pack. “Light this for me. And say something to me in Arabic.”

  Bela said, “Limaezae tadhak?”

  “No,” said Leah. “Something dirty.”

  Bela turned red and was speechless, and Leah loomed up with that cigarette between her teeth and her dark hair in her face, and she laughed.

  “You mean you don’t know anything dirty in Arabic? You’ve never had an Arab girl? I don’t believe it. All your girlfriends, none of them Arab? You’re lying to me.”

  “Lenore,” Bela said, “don’t tease me.”

  “And why not?” She suddenly spat the cigarette out and buried her mouth in his ear. “Tell me about the Arab girl. Tell me about the girl and tell me everything you did to her and everything you made her do.”

  Bela tore himself from her, and addressed her in Hebrew. “Leah, there’s no Arab girl.”

  “Yes there is,” Leah said, a little breathless. “You took her like a German.”

  “No,” Bela said. “I’m not a German. I’m a Jew. I’m your husband.”

  Leah looked up, and her hair fell from her eyes. “Can’t you pretend you’re a German? If I want you to?”

  Bela couldn’t answer.

  Then she sat up against the wall with her legs tucked against her chest. Bela sat beside her, though he was afraid to touch her. Then, imperceptibly, her head lowered, until her forehead touched her knees, and then her shoulders began to rock.

  He gave in to his first impulse, which was to reach out and take her head from between her knees and look at her face. She didn’t resist. His heart turned over, because it was the face of a child, unmistakably, with swollen features and round cheeks and a soft, vulnerable forehead.

  She said, “I don’t know if I can pretend either. What if they’re not dead, my father and my mother. I never saw them die. I left them. What if they’re still alive there?”

  “But you’re here,” Bela said to her.

  “Nothing that happens here matters.”

  Bela said, “You matter. Do you know how much you matter? Do you know what kind of a life I had before I met you?” Even as he spoke, he realized he hadn’t known, until that moment, what kind of life he’d had.

  “If they’re alive,” Leah said, “then what I did can’t be forgiven. I have to find them. And not just them. You don’t know how many, or what I’ve seen, and to know I’ve left them and to live, how could I live?”

  Bela was tempted to tell her that she was better off as she had been, taking them for dead. But how could he say that to her when her anger and remorse had filled the empty place he’d always sensed in her. She took shape, and before him was not some sleepwalker, some Lost Lenore but a woman he didn’t recognize.

  She turned that new anger towards him, and said, “You don’t know what I’ve seen, and you don’t want to know. But I don’t have a choice. Will you help me?”

  The confrontation was direct. She all but spit the words, and he felt her face harden between his hands. He had the sensation of stepping off a precipice as he answered, “Yes, I’ll help you.”

  HE TRIED TO explain the promise to Dori, who gave him a complete physical examination, and said, “They’d have to be crazy to let you into any army.”

  “And if I go to Europe independently?”

  “Then you’re crazy,” said Dori. “Maybe you want to captain one of those ships leaving from Romania, the ones that fit maybe a dozen wretches and get turned back by the British. Maybe you’ll rot in a detention camp in Cyprus and she’ll be happy.”

  “You hear rumors about what’s going on in Europe,” Bela said. What rumors he referred to weren’t clear. He ran his hand backwards through his hair, and it stuck up, in comic contrast to his face. He was naked with the exception of a sheet which covered his private parts, and Dori saw that since they’d shared a bed, the hair on his chest had turned gray.

  “Look,” Dori said to him, “if we thought about that stuff we would go absolutely crazy. We’ve got our work to do here. Powerful people in the movement are doing everything they can—”

  “Like what?” Bela asked her.

  “Like the illegals.”

  “A handful.”

  “Your wife was part of that handful,” said Dori. “The Yishuv saved her life.”

  “We can’t go on with a few dozen at a time.”

  “What do you want us to do? Get into our Jewish airplanes and bomb Berlin? We don’t have Jewish airplanes. We don’t have an army. We don’t have a state. And that’s why we’re here—not to save Jews but to build a state where we can be Jews.”

  Bela shook his head. There was a finality to that refusal which Dori didn’t recognize. How could it be the end of the argument?

  “What does she expect of you?” Dori asked, as Bela put on his trousers. “Does she want you to declare a personal war on Germany?”

  Bela turned as he pulled the trousers up, and his bare back felt like a rebuke, as did his hesitation. It was only after he had buttoned up those trousers and reached for his shirt that he said to Dori, “It comes to what I expect of myself. Finally, that. We both have family in Hungary. I haven’t sent mine a letter in years. And Mouse, you know what I realized? I’d written them off.”

  Dori said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was the spring of 1943.

  “I’d written them off,” Bela said again. “I can’t now. Neither can Leah. She’s trying to volunteer to go there
, maybe to contact the resistance. And me, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe go back to Hungary.”

  “You’re crazy,” Dori said again, and now she was terrified because she realized, as certain as she saw that man buttoning his shirt in front of her, that if he went to Hungary, he’d be dead.

  Then she found herself asking questions. What was the life of one man worth? What if, as a consequence of his death, lives were saved? Or what if, as a consequence of the deaths of five comrades, they gained a few kilometers of land? Or what, Dori asked me that day in her office in the clinic in Gan Leah, if as a consequence of six million deaths, we Jews got our state? These thoughts, Dori could admit to me years later, but then she could only see Bela, whom she loved, and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him.

  Bela said, “I’m not crazy. I only know I can’t keep living here at Tilulit, not like this. I can’t accept the terms.”

  Dori, helpless, could only say, “Don’t leave.”

  “I’ll try not to,” said Bela. And he did try.

  LEAH, ALONG WITH two hundred others, volunteered to join the paratroopers who would be dropped all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The British chose thirty, three of them women. One of the women was Hungarian. Her name was Hannah Szenes. She was a poet who had come to Palestine, like Leah, not long before, and almost immediately after she landed in Budapest, she was captured. She died under torture. I’d never even heard her name until Dori said it to me that day in Gan Leah. Though Leah herself was not chosen to join the paratroopers, she returned months later, greatly changed. She arrived at the gate in an army jeep, and gave the driver a kiss before she leapt out, wearing a khaki jumpsuit and calling: “Where’s my husband?”

  The first thing Dori noticed was that her Hebrew had lost the French accent, and the second thing she noticed was that she’d taken out a pack of Black Cat cigarettes and at once offered one to Dori, who was so surprised she took it.

  Leah swung her way down towards their room, and there was a rifle slung across her shoulder, which somehow seemed to fit the rest of her. She laughed as she knocked on the door, as though the act of knocking on the door was, of itself, amusing. “Old man!” she called. “Don’t tell me you’ve got some other woman in there!” Bela had been napping, and when he opened the door, Leah pulled him back into bed, still laughing, and her sun-bleached hair came loose from her ponytail. When Bela gestured towards the rifle, she thought that was even funnier, and she pointed it at him.