“Do you think Reuven is handsome?” asked one of the girls.
“If you like giraffes,” said Lillian. “What a neck!”
“He has such beautiful eyes,” said a young woman with a baby in her lap. “His children would be lucky.”
“Speaking of children,” Lillian said, “have you given a name to that son of yours? He’s already a month old.”
“Yes, I have.”
“So what is it?” the girls said, all at once.
“He is Ben-Ami.”
“Did you say Benjamin?” asked Shayndel.
“No. Ben-Ami,” said the new mother, whose name was Rosa. “It is a new name for the new state. It means ‘son of my people.’ From now on, I want you to call me Vered. It means rose, too, but in the language of the Jews. We must throw off the old names with the old ways.”
Lillian rolled her eyes. “That is exactly what Arik said in class. You’re like a parrot. Don’t you have a thought of your own?”
“You should change your name to Shoshana,” Rosa-Vered said.
“Lillian was my oma’s name,” she said. “And her oma’s name before that. Shoshana sounds like someone with a lisp. And if you ask me, Vered sounds like a name for a car, not a woman.”
“And yet, no one asked you,” said Leonie, but so sweetly that it took them a minute to realize that she’d just told Lillian to shut up. Before Lillian had a chance to protest, Tedi and Zorah flew through the door, uncombed and untucked, racing toward the nearly empty samovar.
Everyone at the table smiled. Tedi and Zorah did this nearly every morning, prompting a game in which the girls would come up with pairs of opposites: night and day, vinegar and wine, sweet and sour, hot and cold, meat and milk.
“Here come the sun and the moon,” said Shayndel.
“Laurel and Hardy,” said Leonie.
“Alpha and omega,” offered Vered-Rosa, up on her feet, bouncing the baby to keep him from crying.
“What does that mean?” Shayndel asked.
“It appears that Rosa went to university,” sniffed Lillian.
Leonie and Shayndel grinned at each other, knowing these same girls sometimes called them “peas in a pod” and “the Siamese twins” even though they were a pair of contrasts, too. Olive-skinned Leonie had turned brown on the boat while a single day under the Mediterranean sky had broiled Shayndel’s fair skin to a blister and swollen her eyes to slits. After that, she never ventured outdoors without an oversized man’s hat that made her look like a child playing dress-up, even though, at twenty, she was older than Leonie by nearly three years.
They had been inseparable since first meeting on a crowded railroad platform south of Paris, on their way to Palestine. Shayndel was eager to practice her schoolgirl French on Leonie, who wanted to know if there were any big cities in the land of Israel. Their friendship deepened over the course of the journey as they nursed each other through seasickness and held each other close when the British commandeered their boat.
As they got up to leave the mess hall, Leonie said, “I’ll catch up with you later. I have to go to the latrine.”
Shayndel frowned. “Again? I think you should talk to one of the doctors.”
“It’s nothing. I’ve always had a delicate stomach.”
“All right,” Shayndel said, “I’ll see you at lunch. We’ll make up a little Hebrew conversation circle with some of the others.”
As soon as they parted, Shayndel heard someone call her name. Hannah took her arm and said, “Walk with me.”
She leaned close, as if she were about to share a girlish confidence, and said, “There’s a woman coming to Atlit today. A German. She will be assigned to your bunk and I want you to keep an eye on her. Now smile and nod at me, like I just told you that Miloz, the handsome one, has been asking about you.”
Shayndel grinned and nodded like a fool, less because of Hannah’s instruction than her attentions. She had watched the affable and increasingly pregnant busybody, suspecting that Hannah’s pushy friendliness had an ulterior motive.
“Nicely done,” said Hannah, as they walked past a pair of guards. “We have been told that this person was a collaborator—a capo—in one of the camps. We’d like you to find out if it’s true.”
“We?” Shayndel asked.