Zorah wanted her own room and no one telling her when to go to bed at night or get up in the morning, or what kind of work to do. She knew these were extravagant wishes in a poor country, and she had no idea whether she would be able to make such a life for herself in a place where it seemed everyone was made to obey orders if only they were delivered by other Jews.
Not that she expected to leave anytime soon. She had no relatives in Palestine nor anyone willing to pose as family. She had never attended a Zionist youth meeting in Poland, nor had she ingratiated herself to the giddy new pioneers who were hatching all around her. But the biggest problem of all was that she had no papers. Officially, she did not exist.
She had walked out of the concentration camp so dazed and weak, she had been unable to think about what lay ahead. But when the Red Cross workers asked if she wanted a ticket back to Warsaw, she shook her head. She had been the only one in her family to make it through the first selection; there was no one and nothing to go back to.
In the DP camp, there were boys and girls who talked endlessly about Palestine as both home and hope, and since Zorah had neither she threw in her lot with them, joining with a small, well-organized group of Young Guards—the biggest of the Socialist Zionist youth movements. They boarded a train to Marseille, where they were met by a chain-smoking envoy from Palestine who led them to a flatbed truck, which jolted and bruised them for a day and a night until they reached a stretch of stony beach near a town called Savona.
A hundred other refugees were already there. The two nervous Italians in charge of the landing could offer nothing but whispered reassurances, which they repeated with less and less confiden
ce as the night wore on. Zorah crouched and wrapped her arms around her knees, sick with worry; her rucksack had disappeared somewhere between the train and the truck, and with it her identity card.
The faint sound of an engine offshore brought everyone to the water’s edge, where they lined up like a flock of ragged birds and stared into the darkness as a rowboat splashed into view. Four muscular men wearing blue sweaters and tight-fitting caps jumped onto the sand and exchanged a few words with the Italians, who kissed their cheeks and beamed with relief.
At dawn, an involuntary gasp went up as the refugees got their first look at the ship that was supposed to carry them across the Mediterranean—a worn-out ferry of the sort used to shuttle commuters across a river or vacationers across a lake. Zorah shook her head: God had a twisted sense of humor to let her survive the efficient Germans only to drown at the hands of a bunch of bumbling Jews.
A steep gangplank was quickly assembled and the men from the boat started taking names, checking them against those on a smudged piece of paper. Zorah was surprised that this slapdash escape had actually been planned down to the detail of a ship’s manifest. She hung back until she was the last one on the beach, knowing her name was not on their list.
The man holding the papers frowned at her and looked at the paper. “Levi, Jean-Claude.”
When Zorah didn’t move, he pointed at her and said, “You.”
Did he know that Jean-Claude was a man?
“That’s you,” he insisted. “Levi.”
The Italians ran up to them and pointed at a cloud of dust moving toward them. Zorah climbed the narrow, swaying ramp on her hands and knees.
She knew that she was not cheating Levi out of his rightful place. Nine times out of ten, a missing Jew in 1945 was a dead Jew. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about him. What would happen to her if Levi did turn out to be that one in ten? What if he had already reached Palestine? Would the British arrest her? Throw her in jail? Send her back?
Where could they send her? She had nowhere to go, which was why she was going to Palestine.
After two weeks of worry and seasickness, Zorah was even thinner than she had been when she got out of the concentration camp. But from the day she arrived at Atlit, she realized that she had imagined a problem where none existed. She was just one more undocumented, inconvenient “illegal,” like thousands of others.
On the day she arrived, a white-haired man from the Jewish Agency at the table in front of Delousing told her, “Don’t worry. You might be stuck here a bit longer than most, but eventually it will all work out. You are one of the lucky ones. You are home.”
Zorah had been too tired to tell him that “home” was a cramped apartment on the top floor of a dilapidated tenement where, by now, a gang of murdering thieves was cooking pork in her mother’s kosher pots.
As she lay in bed, playing with the last flecks of tobacco on her tongue, Zorah wondered if Meyer could help her get out of Atlit. Perhaps he would return tomorrow and if he offered her another cigarette, she would ask if he had enough protectzia to send a big black car to fetch her to a little apartment of her own, or just a single room with whitewashed walls. That would be more than enough.
Zorah closed her eyes and extended the fingers of her right hand as though she were still holding a cigarette. She raised it to her lips, inhaled deeply, and waited, letting the phantom Chesterfield burn wantonly, as if she were a woman who always had a full pack of American cigarettes in her pocketbook and another in the nightstand. Zorah exhaled through pursed lips, deliberate as a film idol—though she doubted that there was, anywhere in the world, a movie star with numbers tattooed on her forearm.
She smiled at the idea. And then she slept.
Shayndel and Leonie
I think Zorah may have a crush on the guard with the thick glasses,” whispered Shayndel, as she slipped into Leonie’s cot. No one else in the barrack was awake yet, which meant it was their time to talk. “In the last week, she’s asked me three times if I’ve seen him. And last night at the party, she kept looking around as if she was waiting for someone.
“I can’t imagine what your toes must feel like,” Shayndel went on. “I saw you dancing with that oaf Otto. I don’t think he’s good enough for you, chérie. I don’t mind hairy men so much, but given the lack of girls around here, even I could probably do better.”
“Don’t talk about yourself like that,” said Leonie as she pushed a wisp of wiry hair behind her friend’s ear. “Lots of boys wanted to dance with you.”
The celebration had taken place in honor of the most improbable and romantic coincidence imaginable: a girl from a new group of detainees had recognized her childhood sweetheart through the fence, and when they opened the gate, the two of them fell into each other’s arms. Everyone was shouting and clapping, and even the English soldiers had tears in their eyes. Colonel Bryce, the camp commander, had given permission for a party. The cook had attempted a cake, and a bottle of schnapps had appeared; one of the newcomers had a violin and the dancing went on until midnight.
“They snuck the boyfriend into the girl’s barrack,” Shayndel said. “I’ll bet nobody slept the whole night over there. Even if they hung up blankets around them, everyone must have been listening, though it would have been worse in the boy’s barrack, don’t you think?” she continued, dropping her voice even lower. “You know what they would have been doing, don’t you?”
Leonie wrinkled her nose, which was Roman in profile and in perfect proportion to the rest of her features. Shayndel often thought the only reason that the great beauty of Atlit tolerated her attentions was the fact that she spoke French. Standing next to Leonie, Shayndel felt like a Polish peasant, with her coarse reddish mop of hair, skinny legs, and a body shaped like a potato.
“Are you a prude?” Shayndel teased, hoping she had gotten the idiom right. “I’m still set on finding us a couple of brothers when we get out of here. Brothers who want to live close by each other, you know. Nice, steady types. We’ll live on a kibbutz, but on Sunday afternoon we can go to Tel Aviv, where there are shops and cafés, and we can sit over our coffee cups and watch the crowds pass by.”