The next day, Leonie stayed away from the infirmary, lying in bed with a pillow pulled to her belly so that the others would think she was suffering from cramps.
“I don’t know how you stand going there day after day,” Shayndel said, sitting beside Leonie after the others had gone to breakfast. “The sight of blood alone does me in. Don’t you find it depressing being with sick people? The pain, the wounds, the scars, the smells. Ugh.”
Leonie shrugged. In fact, she envied the ones with wounds and scars and even, God help her, the ones with the numbers on their arms. No one asked those people why they were furious or miserable, why they refused to dance the hora, why they did not grab for the candy bars sent from America. Everything was permitted and forgiven them, at least as long as they dressed and took their meals and kept their stories to themselves.
Leonie’s skin was unblemished. She had not hidden in a Polish sewer or shivered in a Russian barn. She had not seen her parents shot. Atlit was her first experience of barracks and barbwire. She had survived the war without suffering hunger or thirst. There had been wine and hashish and a pink satin coverlet to muffle her terrors.
Near the end of December in 1942, at five in the evening it was already dark on the Paris streets. Leonie rounded the corner, holding the lapels on her coat so that no one could see the yellow star. She was on her way home, to the apartment she shared with her uncle and cousin in a run-down corner of a district where Jews were rare. Her uncle had bribed someone so they didn’t have to wear the badge at first, but after a change in the police department, they had been forced to register. Leonie hated the way people stared at her now, and when she felt an arm slip through the crook of her elbow, she nearly screamed, certain she was about to be arrested.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Madame Clos, the tobacconist’s wife. “The Germans have been to your apartment. They took your cousin and your uncle. I’ve been watching out for you. Come with me.”
Madame Clos was a tall woman and Leonie had to run to keep up with her. They hurried toward her building on the far end of the block. Leonie knew that she would never see her uncle or cousin again; after the brutal roundup of thirteen thousand at the Velodrome the previous summer, no one believed they were being “evacuated.” There was no “resettlement.” No “work camps.”
Leonie followed Madame up steep flights to the top floor, trying to muster a little pity for the only family she had. Even as a young boy, her cousin had been horrible to her. “You’re a little bastard,” he would smirk, echoing his father. “And your mother wasn’t even smart enough to get knocked up by a rich man.”
When she was seven years old, Auntie Renata—her mother’s sister—had walked out on Uncle Mannis, a pett
y criminal and a gambler. When Leonie started to grow breasts, her uncle leered and pinched. “It helps them grow,” he said with a smile that made her stomach drop. He opened the door to her room when she dressed in the morning, and laughed when she told him she kept a knife under her pillow. The week Leonie turned fifteen, she got a job in a candy factory and stayed at work as long and late as she could.
Breathless after the sixth set of steps, she waited as Madame Clos rummaged for her keys and unlocked an enormous wooden door. She dropped her bag in the foyer and led Leonie into a room crowded with furniture: large, dark sideboards, bookcases, and far too many chairs. Heavy red drapes covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, making the place feel like a theater. The silk flower arrangements added a funereal note. On the couch, three pale girls sat in a row, wearing crocheted shawls over short silk slips.
Madame Clos put her arm around Leonie. “Let me present my nieces, who have come to live with me in these dark days: Christine, Marie-France, and Simone.”
Simone, Leonie remembered, was a redhead.
Tirzah
The tap on the door was barely audible, but Tirzah had been keeping an eye on the time. At five minutes past midnight, the guards were settling in for the start of the second watch, but the Jewish holidays had disrupted schedules everywhere in Atlit, and it had been nearly a month since Bryce had slipped into her room.
He arrived, as always, trailing the scent of talc and Bay Rum. He had told her that it was the commonest cologne in the world, but it was new to her, which delighted him. Just as it pleased her to have given him a nickname, something he never had before. These were the gifts they gave each other, the only kind they could give.
The room was dark, except for a candle, but even in the shadows they were shy about looking directly at each other. Bryce took Tirzah’s hand and kissed a small crescent-shaped scar at the base of her right thumb, grateful for the knowledge of its provenance—a burn from a loaf of bread she had baked as a child in her grandmother’s kitchen.
Tirzah put both her hands on his freshly shaved face and imagined him at his mirror, preparing for her. He moved closer so she could feel the heat under his pressed shirt. Then it was up to her—it was always up to her—to lean toward him, to give him her mouth, to blow out the candle, to take off her robe and let him surprise her, as he always did, with his tongue and his fingers everywhere. They lost themselves on the narrow cot so quietly and so slowly, it was as if they were dreaming themselves inside one another’s skin. They did not so much kiss as inhale each other’s panted breath until they broke apart, spent and breathless.
Usually she was the one to doze for a few moments after they made love, but this time Bryce fell asleep. Tirzah tucked her arm under him and pulled closer, feeling the bones of his spine against her belly and chest. She ran her tongue over her teeth and tasted his toothpaste. She brushed her cheek against his thinning hair and savored his Bay Rum.
Everyone in Atlit knew about their affair. The other officers winked at her, managing to be both lewd and respectful at the same time. The nurses and teachers had made it abundantly clear how distasteful they found her “sacrifice.” Tirzah despised her countrymen’s hypocrisy about sex. Virginity was not quite the all-important prize it had once been—especially not among the young Socialists of the Yishuv. In Palestine, it was considered patriotic to open your legs for young men of fighting age; yet, if an unmarried girl had the bad luck to get pregnant, she could be demoted or even fired from a job. And if a woman was unofficially “encouraged” to seduce an enemy officer who could provide important information in the struggle for the home-land, well, the sooner that sort of thing was over and hushed up the better.
The real secret about Tirzah’s affair with the colonel was wrapped in the cotton wool of expediency. Sleeping with the enemy was an odious but justifiable means to a Zionist end, but falling in love with such a man verged on the treasonous.
Tirzah had been completely unprepared for that possibility and was still a little shocked whenever she caught sight of Bryce during the day. He was far too short and fair for her, an entirely different species from the men she’d been attracted to in the past. Watching him walk across the compound, she had to stop herself from laughing at the idea that the great love of her life had turned out to be a middle-aged, ginger-haired bantam from a place with a name that sounded like a sneeze or a brand of whiskey. Cardiff.
No one would suspect the passion hidden behind his formality, or his talents as a lover, or his belief in the justice of the Jewish claim in Palestine. Tirzah’s superiors pretended that every last Brit was a closet Nazi, which made it easier to do anything and everything to chase them out of the country and claim it as their own. But that story had nothing to do with her Johnny.
Eight months earlier, when the Palmach sent her to spy in Atlit, she had thought him the image of a narrow-minded, buttoned-down Englishman. But then he opened his mouth and addressed her in complete and grammatical Hebrew sentences. When he pronounced her name properly, she had blushed. That caused him to stare and stammer. And so it began.
Mostly, they spoke Hebrew, but he told her in English that he loved her. She had no reason to doubt him. Everything else he had ever said to her had been true. Bryce would let her know when a new group of refugees was due to arrive, whether by train or by bus. When trains pulled in at night, he neglected to assign enough men to guard the inmates as they made their way from the end of the tracks, around the fence, and to the gate. Helpers and spies embedded in the transports managed to spirit away dozens of “black” immigrants—ones without papers—hiding them in the fields before they could be counted. She had kept count, and Bryce had been responsible for the escape of at least seventy-five refugees.
He had once tried to translate an American turn of phrase about the British strategy on Jewish immigration; “closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.” Tirzah had laughed at the expression, which sounded absurd in Hebrew. The image stayed with her, though. She imagined herself as a lone horse trotting off into the distance, wondering where to go.
She wondered if Bryce knew about her disastrous marriage. He knew a lot about her, mostly because he asked. Where did she grow up? Did she play with dolls as a little girl or did she climb trees? Did she like to read? Which of her schoolteachers did she remember? When she answered—whispering as though relating state secrets—he kept perfectly still, memorizing every word. He probably knew a good deal more about her from her dossier, too. It wouldn’t be hard to connect her to the Palmach; indeed, most of what she knew about Bryce came from their files: A career officer, he was well liked by his men but lacked the sort of ambition that would have avoided a dead-end posting like Atlit. The woman in the photograph on his desk was his wife, though Tirzah had yet to discover her name. Their sons, however, she knew were George and Peter, both of whom had enlisted in the RAF. George had been killed early in the war, flying a mission over Germany.
At unpredictable moments in her day—writing lists, peeling vegetables, washing a countertop—Tirzah would recall the insistent gentleness of his hands on her sex, the firmness of his mouth on her breast, the fondness in his voice when he spoke about her son, Danny. These furtive attacks of joy took her breath away, and for the first time in her life she uttered the prayer that thanks God for small blessings. And in the next breath, she cursed the God who would let happiness bloom on such a doomed stalk.
Bryce woke up and turned over. “Sorry,” he said, and put his finger to her lips. “What is the Hebrew word for ‘bittersweet’?”
“Ha,” Tirzah said. “Our first cliché.”