She counted twenty-three people waiting to leave, bundles and suitcases piled around them. The children were the first to go, seven in all, walking stiffly beside people who were total strangers to them. Among them was Maxie, a ten-year-old who had been caught stealing shoelaces and matches. A grim-faced woman wearing an ugly black wig had her hand on the back of his neck and was pushing him along.
“Good riddance to that little shit,” said Lillian, touching her fingers to the corners of her crimson lips.
“Shame on you,” said a woman beside her. “Stealing probably kept him alive in Buchenwald.”
“Well, I don’t know what good it did him in here,” Lillian replied, with a bold stare that proclaimed that she, for one, would not be intimidated by the mere mention of a death camp.
“What on earth could he trade for in this place?” Lillian demanded, as she glared down at her black Oxfords, tied with twine. “He’ll be stealing wallets and purses and God knows what else as soon as he gets the chance. That poor woman has no idea what she’s taking in. Then again, did you see her? Like my great-great grandmother, from the shtetl. And that wig? Horsehair! I’m sure of it. What a horror.”
“Lillian,” Zora
h said. “You really should write a book of proverbs. I suggest you start with, ‘If you don’t have something spiteful to say about a person … why bother?’”
“And you are too clever for your own good,” Lillian said.
Zorah watched as six young men crowded around the cab of a dusty flatbed truck, arguing.
“He comes with us,” shouted a tall, skinny inmate, pointing at a boy with a heavy bandage on his ankle. “It’s nothing—a sprain. We do not leave without him. We will make a hunger strike and shame you in front of the Jews of the world. We will report you to the Jewish Agency! To the Palmach!”
The driver pointed at the British soldiers who were watching from the guardhouses that stood on ten-foot stilts around the perimeter of the camp. “You are giving these fucking British assholes reason to laugh at us,” he said. “If you don’t get in right now, and without that cripple, I will leave without any of you. And I am sure as hell not driving all the way back to get you, you big-mouth son of a …”
Zorah grinned at the barrage of curses and realized that she had understood every foul word in the tackata-tackata version of what her father used to call “the holy tongue.”
Papa had considered Zorah’s gift for languages a complete waste. The old man used to chase her away from the table while he tutored her brother, even though Herschel was never going to be able to understand the Talmud. At ten years old, the boy could barely tell one letter from the next while Zorah had been able to read Hebrew and Yiddish before she was seven, and spoke better Polish than either of her parents. In Auschwitz, she’d learned Romanian and German. She picked up some Italian on her way to Palestine and was learning French just by eavesdropping on two girls in her barrack.
A young Jewish guard named Meyer walked over to the truck and took the driver aside. After a few minutes of animated conversation, the guard helped the lame boy into the front seat and told his loud champion, “Watch your manners. In a country this small, you might end up sleeping in this fellow’s dormitory, or working in his brother’s unit. No need to get off on the wrong foot.”
The driver gunned the engine and then took off, forcing the others to chase after it. Their ringleader was the last to make it aboard, screaming and puffing until his companions pulled him on.
Zorah shook her head at the scene.
“You’re not Romanian, are you?” The question made Zorah jump. Meyer, the guard who had sent them off, was smiling at her through the fence. She would have turned on her heel except for the cigarette he held out through the wire—a Chesterfield, right out of the package.
She took it without meeting his eyes, stroked the fine white paper, and put it up to her nose. The guard held out a match.
Zorah thought about putting the cigarette away, to save it for later, but what was the point? Someone would start asking questions about where she’d managed to get such a treat; then again, she realized that half the camp would know all about this little exchange within minutes anyway.
“Fuck it,” she said, leaning forward to catch the flame. She inhaled deeply and glanced at him sideways.
He smiled. “Do you kiss your lover with that mouth?”
He might have been thirty years old, with wavy brown hair, a long face, strong jaw, and a pair of thick wire-rimmed glasses that had probably disqualified him from fighting in the war. Given what he’d just done for the stupid Romanians, she decided he wasn’t a British stool pigeon at all, a rumor based entirely on the amount of time he spent inside the fence with the prisoners. Zorah wondered if Meyer was his first name or his last.
“Aren’t you ashamed to wear such a stupid hat?” she said and walked away.
“You are most welcome,” said Meyer, and doffed the Turkish three-corner pillbox.
Zorah headed for the far side of the nearest building to escape his gaze. She took three quick, delicious drags on the cigarette, so different from the cut-rate, stale, military-issue stuff they sometimes got. She could have traded a pristine butt for a chocolate bar, or a half tube of Lillian’s lipstick, or the promise of getting a letter delivered to Tel Aviv or Haifa. But Zorah had no one to contact and no greater desire than tobacco.
She inhaled once more before tapping the cigarette out gently on the bottom of her shoe, then put the rest into her pocket to save until after dinner. The anticipation sweetened her whole day. Walking to and from the barrack, reading her newspaper, ignoring the fatuous conversation of the girls around her, she reached for it often, almost tasting it with her fingers. At dinner, even the bland eggplant and white cheese tasted sharper because of what was coming.
Zorah denied herself until the last minute and then slipped behind the latrine just before lights-out. She took her prize out of her pocket and massaged it gently back into shape. Before lighting it, she forced herself to pause for one final moment, watching as the last purple light of day faded to gray in the sky above the mountains.
She struck a match and inhaled deeply. The first puff, burned and sour, made her cough. But the next one was perfect and she held it in her lungs for as long as she could. She exhaled slowly, tasting the smoke as it left her. The third puff conjured a memory of her Uncle Moshe’s pipe mix, which in turn recalled the flavor of Aunt Faygie’s Rosh Hashanah baked apples. Zorah counted back; it had been four years since she’d eaten those apples; she had been fifteen years old.
Later, as she lay in the dark, Zorah noticed that her neck was not as tight as usual and wondered if nicotine was the cure for her insomnia. The woman on the cot beside her grunted in her sleep and rolled from her back to her side. Zorah savored the ten inches between them. On the boat from Europe to Haifa, and before that, in the DP center, in the forest, in the camp, in the boxcars, she had been piled, like a stick of wood, against other bodies that crawled with lice or burned with fever. Some had been clammy with sweat, and twice, rigid and cold. Zorah stretched out her arms, luxuriating in the space around her, the only thing in Atlit for which she was grateful.
Zorah tried to find the heavy satisfaction of the smoke in her lungs again, but the sensation was gone, like those argumentative Romanian boys who had, indirectly, been responsible for her American cigarette. Though she envied their escape, living on a kibbutz did not appeal to her. From what she had heard, it sounded a lot like Atlit: communal meals and bathrooms, order imposed by others.