Zorah stroked his cheek gently. Now she knew that she wasn’t going mad after
all; she was mourning what she was about to lose.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Leonie, rushing toward them. “Would you please come to the infirmary, Zorah?” she asked slowly, in her best Hebrew. “They need a translation.”
“I’ll be right there,” Zorah said.
“How many languages do you know?” Jacob asked, taking her hand again as they walked toward the clinic.
“Four,” she said, not counting the three she understood but had never spoken out loud. “Not so many.”
“I think it’s so many,” he said, with such an emphatic shake of his head, Zorah couldn’t help but pull him close and hug his bony shoulder against her hip. “Go find your mama, now.”
She was met at the door by a skinny young man wearing a white coat. Volunteers cycled through Atlit so often, Zorah wasn’t surprised that she had never seen this doctor before, but when he extended a hand that was calloused and not entirely clean, she looked into his pale green eyes with suspicion.
“You are Zorah, yes?” he said. “I am Avi Schechter. We have two men inside babbling to each other in some prehistoric jargon, pretending not to understand me or anyone else. I’m told you’re a wonder with Polish dialects, so I’d like you to go in and find out what you can about them. They got off a boat last week and we already know they’re not Jews; we need to find out how they got here and what they’re up to and what they did during the war.”
He talked like someone who was used to giving orders, and gave her no time to think or choose not to do what he wanted. He opened the door and pointed at two thickset men, clearly brothers, sitting together on a cot. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Zorah heard one man tell the other to say nothing. “Can I get you some water?” she said, stumbling only a little over the Mazur dialect.
Their faces registered surprise and then suspicion. The older of the two asked, “You are from Danzig?”
“No, but I had cousins there,” she said. “They lived on Mirchaer Street.”
“By the synagogue,” he said. “I know the neighborhood.”
“Did you live nearby?”
He rubbed his hands over the dark stubble on his round face and asked, without hope or rancor, “So are they going to send us back or will they put us in prison?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I told you it was a stupid idea,” said the other man, who looked even more like a bear than his brother. He turned to Zorah and pleaded, “Tell them we didn’t hurt anybody. We didn’t even turn anyone in to the police, and we didn’t fight. We were cowards, my brother and I. We went to Denmark and waited it out,” he said.
“Why did you come here, then?” she asked.
“There was no work in Danzig. There were a couple of Mossad guys in town after the armistice; we found out that they needed ironworkers here, shipbuilders. That’s what we used to do. We had the documents, so I figured—”
“Where did you get Jewish papers?” But Zorah was unable to keep the edge out of her voice and the older brother said, “Forget it. No one’s going to believe a word we say.”
“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,” she said, but they shook their heads and turned away.
Outside, the man in the white coat had changed into a worn leather jacket. “What did you find out?”
“Not much,” said Zorah. “They’re from Danzig. They say they were shipbuilders and ran away during the war. They are not going to tell me anything else. Not terribly bright, those two. I don’t think they have any idea what they’re doing here, actually. What happens to them now?”
“If it was up to me, I’d take them to the border and point them north and good riddance,” he said. “The Yishuv may put them on a boat. I could care less.”
“But tell me something,” Zorah said. “Why are these guys in the clinic? They aren’t sick. If you’re rounding up Christians, why don’t you bring over that Russian girl in A barrack who is more than happy to tell everyone that she’s not a Jew?”
“And then there’s the one in your barrack,” he said.
“Who are you talking about?”
“That German creature, of course. Unbelievable story. A war criminal in Eretz Yisrael. You didn’t know?” he said.
Zorah tried to look bewildered instead of relieved; he didn’t seem to know about Esther.