Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “I order you to take off those pajamas,” she said.

  Bela said, “It’s not loaded.”

  “How do you know?” Leah asked, poking the mouth of it below the upmost button of the pajama-top.

  Bela unbuttoned that top. The rifle eventually slipped from Leah’s hands, and as it cracked against the floor, Bela wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the thing go off.

  SHE WAS ONLY BACK for a visit. She had joined the Palmach, and had made contacts which would prove useful in the months to come. Bela listened with a jealousy that stunned him, a jealousy of her youth. Kiev had been liberated. She would not drop there in a parachute, but she could shape the excellent human material she was into whatever she chose. There were sea-routes and routes overland. Pockets of resistance took shape even as the Russians liberated Europe from one end, and the Americans and British from the other.

  In spite of himself, Bela said, “I’ve been miserable without you here, Lenore.”

  “Well, that’s because you haven’t been busy enough,” Leah said. “You’ve been brooding too much. And you’re too useful to brood.”

  “Useful?” Bela smirked. Lying there naked, with this beautiful strange girl beside him, he felt like a pornographic joke.

  “We need money,” Leah said. “We have to do more than smuggle out the Jews. We have to buy them. In American dollars, two hundred and fifty a head, maybe more. Or there’s been talk about a deal, an exchange—in Hungary. Trucks for Jews.”

  “But that would prolong the war,” Bela said. Leah put her hand over his mouth.

  “There’s been talk about saving a million Hungarian Jews. Listen, we need money. And we need all your old Zionist connections and your Hungarian connections too. In fact, we need you. Also,” Leah added, as though it were an afterthought, “I need you. So put on your clothes and have some supper with me and Amos”—that was the jeep’s driver—“and then argue all you want about prolonging the war. And about how useful you are. I love you, and you saved my life, and if that’s not enough for you, you can go to hell.”

  FROM THE WAY SHE’D talked, Bela expected Leah and Amos to drag him off to Tel Aviv that night, but in fact, Leah had counted on staying through the month and convinced Amos to help with the olive harvest. As ever, they were short-handed, and now, for the third year, hired laborers arrived from Taell al-Taji. As the kibbutz paid more than any other employer, the competition was fierce. Bela was startled to see so many men crowd the gate of the kibbutz. He didn’t know any of them, but they knew him.

  “Histaresh—!” one very dark boy called. “Min fadlak, min fadlak!”

  Bela smiled uncomfortably. Because he couldn’t help pick olives, he was supposed to guard the gate and choose no more than twenty workers. That day, because Leah and Amos had arrived, he could take in no more than eighteen men. He made this clear as soon as everyone had gathered. Then he chose the men and barred the gate after the eighteenth had passed. The rest kept standing.

  “Esmaehli, esmaehli,” someone called, and they parted to clear a path for the same gentleman who’d spoken such good Hebrew three years earlier at the meeting. Bela hadn’t been at that meeting, and neither man knew the other. He addressed Bela in Hebrew. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  Bela frowned, and said in Arabic, “Lahza min fadlak.” He didn’t like the idea of speaking a language the other men at the gate didn’t understand, and he didn’t like the man’s smooth, light tan face, or the weasel smile on that face, or the way the other men deferred to him though he was clearly not respected. He went on in Arabic. “We need only eighteen men. I’m sorry, but it will be that way for the rest of the harvest.”

  In Hebrew again, the man asked Bela, “No chance we can negotiate?”

  Bela realized what was going on, and deliberately called over the man’s head to the rest of the workers, in clear Arabic: “How much have you paid this agent? He’s robbing you. Deal with the kibbutz directly and you’ll get your full wages without lining his pockets!”

  He was surprised to hear his own words. Something had happened. Three years ago, he wouldn’t have cared. The words he’d spoken were the words of Bela Hesshel in 1923. He could feel real, warm blood rush to his head, and that head rang with the stupidity of what he’d done, and at the same time he wanted to run straight to the field, find Leah, and thank her from his heart for making him himself again.

  Later, of course, he’d get a talking-to. Where had he been, these three years? Didn’t he know the circumstances? It wasn’t as if this was something they had just discovered, after all, or something the men in the village didn’t know. Yet all the while, through Dori’s tongue-lashing, and Nathan’s, Bela did not let go of what he’d felt when he’d turned on the man and addressed those laborers. He didn’t let go of it until that night.

  FOR THAT WAS THE night of the worst raid they had seen in years, not so much a raid as an outright attack. A strong force rushed the gate and knocked it down, and Tilulit mobilized its own defense so swiftly that one moment, they were in bed and the next, rifles found their way into everybody’s hands, including Bela’s, and Leah took up her own. The clinic caught on fire that night, and so did the dining hall. Children hid in the root-cellar, sleepy and confused; Bernadette watched over the entrance of that cellar with a pistol.

  Nathan Sobel radioed for help from Beit Shemesh, and Yosef was among those who came with fresh ammunition. Dori, paralyzed by the loss of the clinic, felt as though she herself were in flames. She stood as the wounded were brought to her, among them Gezer, Bernadette’s son, a grown man now but still a boy to her, and she wanted to slap herself over and over, come to her senses, and at the same time she wished she could cross over into such a state that nothing would be expected of her.

  But of course, Dori did come to her senses, and once that happened any grief she felt was lost in work. She gave orders to anyone close by; she flagged down any jeep to take the worst of the wounded to Beit Shemesh; she worked so hard that her consciousness fluttered above her like a hummingbird and she thought: If Bela and I had had a child, that child would have been fighting like Gezer; that child would be dead.

  Just before dawn, they found three bodies in the gully. Two were Arabs, a young stranger with the beginnings of a mustache and an older fellow with a square jaw whom everyone at once recognized as Kamil, the son of one of the most prominent men in Taell al-Taji. The third was one of the newcomers from Kiev, Dmitri, a bright, sardonic, industrious boy who’d taken the name Ezra.

  They knew they would bury Ezra in a graveyard they’d begun ten years before when Tibor had died of food poisoning. It had five graves in it now. There was some talk about what to do with the bodies of the Arabs, and they were laid out by the gully-bank. Before they could come to a decision, a truck appeared, and in the passenger seat was the agent. He got out, ran a handkerchief across his forehead, and took a few steps towards the dead men. He stood with his hands behind his back.

  “A disaster,” he said.

  Somehow, it was assumed that the agent would take the bodies, but the back of the truck swayed a little on its tires, and from its depths came a pounding and a steady hum. Then everyone knew at once that it held eighteen men, that he’d come, as ever, with his quota for the harvest. As that sank in, a cry came out: “Open the truck!”

  It had come from Boaz, once Boris, whose brown hair had turned blond, but who had regressed into ram-rod anxiety. He pushed his way towards the agent, shoved him against the back of the truck, and cracked his head against the door.

  “Let those men out! You’ll turn on the gas and they’ll all die and we won’t know where to bury them! Let them out!”

  They pulled Boaz off, and he stumbled back a few steps, caught his balance, and mumbled an apology. The agent kept his head low as he got back into the truck and drove away.

  THAT WAS THE END of using hired labor. To get the harvest in, they had to work half-through the night, and sometimes they pitched tents on the field, as in the f
irst days of Tilulit. Bela held Leah close under the blanket, and sometimes she’d laugh and say that he was suffocating her, but he could not let go. He’d had such a strong premonition that he’d lose her the night of the battle that he had to keep his hands on her chin, her breasts, her hips, her bottom, and she would slip her own hands between his thighs and say, “I’m here.”

  Because they were so short-handed, Bela had to work beside them, and though it was hard for him to take the bending and to hold too much weight, he soon discovered that he had some skill as a foreman. He realized how much he’d missed getting dirt all over his face and under his fingernails, the rhythm of the olives hitting the buckets, the sheets of canvas on the floor. Leah combed leaves and twigs from her hair at night, and one day she said something astounding.

  “Your family’s still alive.”

  Bela wasn’t sure what to do with what she’d said. He picked up a few twigs that had fallen from her hair, and rolled them around his hands before he asked, “How do you know?”

  “Your sister’s husband lost his factory, and she’s not working at the hospital, but so far there haven’t been deportations in Szeged. That will change,” said Leah.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Bela asked her, and at once regretted the question because it couldn’t help but come out as an accusation.

  “Because there’s another side to it. I found out more. My mother’s dead. She died three years ago. There were witnesses. She was shot and thrown into a mass grave outside of Kiev, maybe a month after I ran away. And my father—” She paused, and pulled that comb through her hair with a hand that suddenly shook. “Father died just six months ago, after the Ukraine was liberated.”

  She broke off then and let the comb fall, not crying but not able to go on. Bela pushed in next to her and brushed her hair out of her eyes.

  She said, “As far as he was concerned there was never even a war. He was still a prisoner in some logging camp and he came down with a fever and that’s how he died.” She leaned her head on Bela’s shoulder, and said, “Look, soon the war will be over, but there are some things that just go on and go on. My father wasn’t a Jew, even if he was born a Jew. He was a Communist,” she said, and the past tense forced itself through a thickness in her throat. “And maybe he died a Communist. He was arrested when I was so young that I couldn’t help but be ashamed. What did I know? They told me he was a spy, and I thought about all the people from France and Spain in our apartment. I wanted to change my name to something very Russian, something unmistakable. I called myself Grushenka for years. Until I met you.”

  Bela said, “And now you’re Leah?”

  “Now I’m Leah,” Leah said. “And this is what Leah will do. Amos and I are going to take some of the olives to the cooperative in Tiberious tomorrow, and I’ll talk to some people I know. You’ve got contacts in Budapest?”

  Bela nodded. “Old friends. Most of them stopped writing years ago, but they won’t be so hard to trace. My God, Leah, all of those girls who wrote me letters, they must all have husbands and children by now.”

  Almost casually, Leah asked, “What about Nora?”

  Bela looked at his wife’s face and was stunned to see a ghost of her old impassivity. He said, “Yes, Nora too.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Leah and Amos loaded the truck with bins of olives and drove off to the cooperative. It was not Tilulit’s best harvest; they felt the labor shortage. During those weeks, other parts of the kibbutz had suffered; the chicken coops needed a cleaning, one of the milking machines broke, and the children, who’d been recruited for the fields, had a hard time getting used to the inside of a schoolroom again.

  Bela was teaching Arabic to five restless, handsome boys and girls, not quite old enough to join the British army, but the right age for the Palmach. They had all taken part in the defense of Tilulit the month before, and one of them, Gezer, had only recently removed the splint from his arm. His hand was still bandaged. He couldn’t write.

  “I don’t care if I can’t copy it down,” he said to Bela. “You promised us the alphabet.”

  “My own strength is spoken Arabic,” said Bela. “To be honest, you probably won’t be writing much Arabic in your life.”

  Gezer said, “You always accuse us of being too practical, and when we want to learn something for its own sake you discourage us.”

  What did that boy think he would do with written Arabic? Forge military documents? Bela gave in and covered a chalk-board with Arabic characters, and as he watched these serious young people try to reproduce the curls and dashes, he suddenly found himself turning them into altogether different figures, the half-Hebrew of that old seditious leaflet, conscious that he was engaging in a kind of sabotage, or a private joke. He’d covered half the board when someone ran in with the news.

  The truck had been waylaid four kilometers west of Tilulit. They found it with its windshield smashed, and two vats of olives spilled out on the road. Amos was dead behind the wheel with a clot of fresh blood still on his temple. Of Leah, there was no sign.

  The search began at once: Gezer took part, and Boaz, and the red-haired bully who’d lost his limp and become a good strong farmer, and Bela himself was there, of course, though he hung back with Dori because no one wanted him to be the one who’d find her.

  Dori held Bela’s hand. The afternoon gave way to evening and the hills darkened and disappeared. Dori felt Bela’s terror flow up through his hand, and she knew that she could not say anything to comfort him. She held a flashlight, but she didn’t turn it on as they walked some distance from the road. Occasionally, someone would send up a flare, and then Bela would give a cry that was like a knot in her gut, a cry of complete helplessness.

  It wasn’t until morning that they found her, only a kilometer away from the kibbutz, well off the road. Bela at first thought they were mistaken, and he whispered, “It isn’t her. Look in the water. She drowned there, I know she drowned.”

  The others examined the body. Leah had put up a fight; that was clear. The trousers bunched around her ankles had been pulled down by force and between her legs was a mass of dry black blood. There was a fragment of wood with a nail in it still clenched in her fist.

  While they gathered around the corpse and tried to piece together its story, Bela looked at the fragment of wood. He ran his hand across the exposed nail, and then looked at that hand as though it had a message for him. Dori did not know if she ought to take him home or let him be. Yosef arrived, and she didn’t even know he was there until he put his arm around her, and she took in his familiar smell of wine and coffee cake. His appearance and disconnection from the situation made her realize how much she loved him.

  Yosef said, “You’re shivering. Come back to the room. I’ll make us some coffee.”

  “He was afraid of bridges,” Dori said. “That always seemed funny to me, psychologically. After all, he was always the one who was our diplomat. He was always the one opening lines of communication.”

  “Don’t say was. He’s still alive, Arielle,” Yosef said.

  “I know, I know,” said Dori. He pulled her closer, this fleshy materialist who wanted more from her than eternal friendship. Everything about the man felt moist and fertile, and when they got into the bed she’d shared for so long with Bela and they made love, she thought of pillows and of beer, of lying on the beach beside Lake Balaton, of playing with her dog Nikki as a girl in Budapest, of riding a bike with Bela through Margit Island, and then she thought of Bela staring at the palm of his own hand.

  HE NEVER TOLD them he’d be leaving the kibbutz, yet they all knew. First, he stopped teaching classes. Then he began to miss his shifts in the dining hall and laundry. Sometimes they’d find him talking on the telephone in a voice they didn’t recognize: strident, ringing, a politician’s voice. The calls would last for well over an hour, unheard of at Tilulit. Sometimes they’d discover him in the library surrounded by books they hadn’t realized they owned, texts on the connection between Hun
garian and the Semitic languages, and he would tell anyone who asked that he had been wrong to leave the seminary, that his work there was the most important thing in the world, and that he was going back to Hungary as soon as this business was over.

  Perhaps two weeks passed this way, and then he caught a ride to Tel Aviv, taking only a change of clothing and a notebook. He left them with an enormous telephone bill, and it was perhaps characteristic of Tilulit that when they talked about Bela after he left, they talked about the telephone bill, and also about the state of his room, which took three days to clean.

  A few days before he left, he was approached by two of the group they’d once called the orphans: a girl named Rivka and her boyfriend, Menachem. They were bashful and studious, and they had just turned seventeen. They’d observed the transformation of their Comrade and her heroic death, and now they felt drawn to the widower, the same big, friendly man who’d once hoisted them down from the flatbed truck. They found him in his room.

  The air was stale and still smelled like Black Cat cigarettes. Most of the dried wildflowers had fallen from the windowsill and had turned into a purple dust that lined the floor. When Leah had returned, she’d scrupulously sorted out the clothes she’d hoarded, but somehow she hadn’t gotten around to bringing them back to the laundry. As for the letters, they were spread on the bed, and Menachem caught Bela in the act of copying down address after address into a notebook.

  Menachem spoke first. “We’ve been thinking about a memorial,” he said. “Perhaps a plaque, even a statue.”