“I heard they took all the Iraqis straight to Yagur,” said Shayndel. “By now, they’re probably scattered around the country, where no one can find them.” The others nodded.
They ate a quiet lunch and returned to the bench, moving closer together as the afternoon wore on. Esther and Jacob came by again, but Jacob could not sit still and Esther promised to return. Shayndel took Tedi’s hand. Leonie put her head on Tedi’s shoulder.
Tedi was grateful for the silence, sure she would break into pieces if anyone asked her a question.
At three o’clock, another woman from Atlit joined them on the bench. She was carrying a one-year-old baby and a basket full of pink and white clothes, gifts from the kibbutz nursery. “I hear it’s hot in Negba,” said the young mother. “But it’s close to the seashore. That will be nice, don’t you think?”
It was nearly five when the jeep pulled up to the gate. The moment she saw it, Tedi jumped to her feet. “Does anyone have a camera?” she demanded. “I want a picture of us together—Shayndel, Leonie, Zorah, and me.”
The woman with the baby got into the jeep, but Tedi refused to budge. “I cannot go without a photograph,” she said, her voice suddenly high and shrill. “Surely someone has a camera.”
Seligman walked over. “You lot again? What’s the problem now?”
“All I want in the world is a photograph,” said Tedi. She showed him the small paper bag that held all of her worldly possessions, but it was her brimming blue eyes that undid him.
He offered her his handkerchief and said, “There’s an old Brownie in the office.”
The driver honked his horn. Leonie went over to ask him for a little patience, and Seligman returned with the boxy black camera.
“Get ready,” he called as he ran toward them.
The girls stood in line as he peered through the lens. “Everyone smile. One-two-three. That’s it. Good. Good luck. Goodbye. ”
Tedi hugged him. “Promise you’ll send it to me: Tedi Pastore, Kibbutz Negba. Write it dow
n.”
He chucked her under the chin. “How could I forget anyone as pretty as you?”
“No, no,” she insisted. “You must write it down. I will not go if you don’t.” She grabbed his pen and clipboard and scribbled her name and the kibbutz on a piece of paper, and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.
Her friends surrounded her. The four of them held each other, weeping and whispering salty oaths.
“See you again,” said Zorah. “This is not good-bye.”
The driver leaned on the horn and gunned the ignition.
Tedi sobbed as she ran through the gate. She kneeled on the seat as the jeep pulled away and shouted, “Write to me! Shayndel, Leonie, Zorah! Remember: Kibbutz Negba. Tell Esther good-bye. Give Jacob a kiss. We will see one another again.”
Epilogue
The Photograph
Seligman forgot to empty his shirt pocket that night and Tedi’s address went into the laundry, where the ink washed away and the paper melted to lint.
It was a full year before the roll of film was developed and returned to the kibbutz. The pictures were laid out on a table in the dining hall, but no one recognized the four young women standing by the gate. Seligman had left Beit Oren and even if he had been there, he would have been hard-pressed to remember the name of the girl who had begged him to take the picture, much less where she had been sent.
The other pictures in that batch were group shots of one sort or another. There were weddings and holiday meals, parties and dances. The snapshots were all meant to go into a kibbutz archive, but they had a habit of disappearing. Wedding photos were taken almost immediately, purloined by brides for family albums. The photos of birthday parties vanished over time, claimed, far too often, by young widows who had no other pictures to show their fatherless sons and daughters.
Because no one could identify Tedi or her friends, their picture was consigned to an envelope with blurred images of crowded Seder tables and out-of-focus horas. Over the years, the leftover photos were moved into a cardboard folder, which yellowed as it was transferred from desk drawer to filing cabinet.
From time to time, one of the more enterprising Beit Oren children would discover the cache of old pictures and use them for projects about early kibbutz life, until finally there was barely anything left from the 1940s.
In 1987, the Beit Oren kibbutz went bankrupt, ceased being a collective, and reorganized as a spa and mountain hotel for tourists. Some of the old-timers stayed on as part-owners, but only a handful of them remembered what it had been like in the days before statehood.
For now, the Kibbutz Beit Oren archive—a few letters and some first-person accounts, as well as a handful of orphaned pictures—resides in a battered gunmetal gray cabinet inside a tiny, damp, cinder-block building within sight of the swimming pool.
The visitor from America walked through the chill of an overcast March morning, up the winding pathway surrounded by enormous hosta plants, sheltered by graceful pines. She had taken a tour of Atlit, now an education center at the site of the old internment camp—a museum surrounded by a barbwire fence. The story of the heroic rescue and the perilous climb up the mountains had moved her to learn more.