He flinched. Had the bed been any larger he would have pulled away from her, but there was nowhere to go, so he kept still. It would be another hour before the next change of the guards, when he could leave without being seen. After a long pause he asked, “Danny is coming tomorrow, isn’t he?”
Tirzah heard the forgiveness in his voice and wondered if his feelings for Danny had anything to do with the loss of his son.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ve gotten some of that toffee he likes. I’ll bring it to the kitchen.”
Bryce would stay away from her room until the boy left, but he didn’t mind these brief separations. When Danny was in camp, Tirzah’s eyes seemed to absorb the light, and the lines around her mouth grew softer. He wished he could do more than bring candy to her son, something more for her, too. He daydreamed about getting her an apartment in Tel Aviv like some of the other officers had done for their girls. They could be together for more than three hours at a time; they could share a meal and watch the sun set.
But even as he imagined the scene, he knew it would never happen. Tirzah was not that kind of woman, and he wasn’t sure what would happen between them if he asked for anything more than what they shared in her airless little room. Perhaps the facade of her affection would crack. As much as he wanted to believe that she cared for him, as much as he thought he could feel it in her mouth and see it on her face, he would never be completely certain of her feelings.
They were long past pretending about their part in the drama that was unfolding in Palestine. She asked bald-faced questions about camp operations, down to the assignment of sentries and patrols. He answered her in detail, a willing coconspirator.
Bryce hated his assignment in Atlit. He thought it was outrageous to keep these people locked up like criminals, especially having read some of the classified reports about the liberation of the death camps. He had seen photographs considered too ghastly for public release, but even more troubling to him were rumors that the Allies had known about the concentration camps and the railroad lines that served them for months or even years. The idea that the RAF might have stopped the killing was even more horrible to him than the images of dried-up bodies stacked like cordwood. He felt implicated in a secret crime and ashamed of his uniform.
He fantasized about marrying Tirzah and training Jewish regiments to fight the Arabs, who were gearing up
for war against the Jewish settlement. But he knew those were pipe dreams. He had watched men “go native” in India. It was an occupational hazard and in the end, it was always the woman who paid the price. He would never put Tirzah in that position.
He also knew that eventually his superiors would take note of his laxness or uncover his complicity. They would demobilize him and send him home, where he would take up fishing, like his father. He would drink too much, also like his father. He would read all the newspaper accounts about Palestine and wonder what happened to Tirzah and her little boy. He would imagine writing to her—long, honest letters—but never put pen to paper.
The sound of footsteps hurried them out of bed. Tirzah wrapped herself in the sheet and watched him dress. She hoped that things between them would come to an end before Danny learned that he was supposed to hate the colonel who took such an interest in his mother.
“Tirzah,” Bryce said. “Things are heating up in the north.”
“I know,” she said. The newspapers were full of stories about tensions at the borders with Lebanon and Syria, where refugees from all over the region were making their way over the mountains on foot. Anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world had grown during the war years, making life increasingly perilous for Jews there; restrictions, harassment, and riots had become common even in places like Baghdad, where the Jewish community had flourished for so long. The “Zionist threat” was now a rallying cry, uniting the Arab world against Jewish plans for a homeland, and against British interests and their handling of the mandate in Palestine.
Hoping to pacify the Arabs, the British commanders were ordering the surrender of Jewish immigrants on the northern frontiers—a directive that was flagrantly defied by the kibbutzniks at the border. It was rumored that the Palmach had sent reinforcements to help the refugees—nearly all men of fighting age—to negotiate the rough terrain.
“There’s talk of our chaps moving another division up there, to make the point,” Bryce said. “They want to seal that border, and things are coming to a boil. You should know.”
“All right then. Yes,” said Tirzah, feeling as though she had been paid for her services.
“I wish I could spend a whole night with you,” he said, ignoring the tension in her voice and succumbing to his own longings. “Just once, you know?”
Tirzah pictured them in a room overlooking the sea. She would make them coffee in the morning.
As he moved toward the door, she got out of bed and hugged him from behind. “Johnny,” she whispered.
At first, she had called him Johnny as a strategy, to make him seem less powerful and to keep herself from feeling like a whore. Then it became a way to make her feelings for him seem casual. Now, no matter how much she tried to make it sound cool or ironic, it was an endearment.
“Laila tov, Johnny,” she said. “Sleep well.”
Esther
Zorah had made it so clear that she preferred her own company, a whole day could go by without anyone saying a word to her. For the most part, this suited her fine, but it meant she was among the last to learn about the books. A large donation had been delivered in the morning, but by the time she found out about the boxes, there wasn’t much left.
All of the novels and histories were gone, as was everything printed in Yiddish, German, Polish, and French. She made do with a Hebrew grammar with the covers torn off and a pristine collection of biblical fables written in English, and spent the next three days in the barrack, stripped to her underwear in the heat, absorbed by the challenges on the page.
Language was Zorah’s favorite game and her greatest talent. She gave herself over to the puzzle of ancient cases and unused tenses inside the crumbling Hebrew volume that had once belonged to Saul Glieberman. He had left his spidery signature on the inside cover and placed check marks beside what Zorah agreed were the most difficult declensions.
The book of fables was a greater challenge since her English vocabulary was limited to words gleaned from movie posters in Warsaw and picked up from the British soldiers in Atlit. She would read a sentence over and over until a cognate would emerge—“night” revealed itself thanks to nacht in German and Yiddish; the similarities to noc in Polish and nuit in French were like an added bonus.
A single word could make a whole phrase come clear, which then created context for the next. After wrestling an entire paragraph into focus, Zorah would look up from a page red-eyed and physically hungry to tell someone—anyone—what she’d understood. After a frustrating afternoon stuck on the meaning of “blanch,” she sought out Arik, who had served with the British army’s Palestine brigade in Italy. But “blanch” was not a word he knew, so Zorah dragged him over to ask one of the English guards, who laughed when he read the sentence about an enormous mythical bird that could cause eagles and vultures to turn white.
The books devoured Zorah’s days and left her so tired that she fell asleep without much trouble and woke up early, eager to get back to work in the solitude of the barrack. But after breakfast on the sixth day of her studies, she returned to find two new arrivals asleep on the cots beside hers—a mother and her young son.
For that day and the next, they did nothing but sleep. From breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner, they were so quiet and motionless that Zorah could forget they were there.