Day After Night (15 page)

“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.”

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.

By the third day, the two of them had recovered enough to
sit up between meals. They kept very still, huddled together, but Zorah heard them
whispering in a Polish dialect she recognized from her Warsaw neighbors who had been
brought up in the country—people her father had called peasants, spitting out the
word like a curse.

The mother’s name was Esther Zalinksy. The little boy, Jacob, clung to her like an
infant, even though he was as big as a five-or six-year-old. He might have been older;
it was hard to tell with children stunted by hunger and fear.

Zorah watched them during meals. Jacob never looked in the direction of the other
children. Esther ran her hand through his brittle black hair. “You are my good boy,”
she murmured, “my own good boy.”

He gazed up at her with such naked adoration, Zorah began to suspect that he was slow,
the way her brother had been slow. But then she overheard him translate the Hebrew
for “bread” and “light” and “nurse,” but only into Polish, never Yiddish.

There were other refugees in Atlit who did not speak the Jewish mother tongue, but
they were from places like Holland and Italy, where Jewish communities were small
and more assimilated; or else they were French or Hungarian and from wealthy families
who had worked hard to distance themselves from their uncultured, Eastern European
past. But in Poland, Yiddish was the first language of every Jew, no matter how educated
or rich.

When Esther and Jacob finally ventured out of the barrack, Zorah muttered, “Good riddance,”
and opened her book. But she was too restless to concentrate, and started wondering
where they had gone.

She walked to the latrine and then circled Delousing, until she spotted Esther and
Jacob sitting on a bench in the sun. Zorah
took a place at the other end and turned her back toward them, pretending to be lost
in her book as she eavesdropped.

Esther worried and fussed over Jacob: Did the cheese agree with his stomach? Had he
moved his bowels that day? Was he too hot? Could she get him water? Where were his
shoes?

Esther returned again and again to the subject of Jacob’s bare feet. Even though many
of the other children in Atlit went shoeless, she fretted that he would hurt himself,
or that the other women would think her remiss for letting him run wild.

“I cannot wear them,” he said, as she tied his shoes again. “They are too small. Please,
Mama. They hurt me.”

“I must find a way to get you some proper shoes,” said Esther. “If only I wasn’t so
stupid with languages. You must ask for us.”

Zorah thought them an odd pair. Though Esther’s looks were faded, she had once been
a pretty girl, blue-eyed and fair, with a button of a nose and round cheeks. The boy
was dark-haired and sallow, with a narrow face and a long nose. His fingers were thin
and long while hers were like sausages.

He must favor his father in everything, thought Zorah. And then it occurred to her
that Esther might not be a Jew at all. She could have been the maid in a prosperous
Jewish home; liaisons like that were common enough. Sometimes they ended with a dismissal
and an envelope of cash. Sometimes, when there was real feeling, there was a rushed
trip to the
mikveh,
a secret wedding, and a blue-eyed baby.

Once this suspicion took root, Zorah kept a greater distance between herself and Esther.
She stayed inside with her books again, and when either Jacob or Esther took a chair
beside her in the dining hall, she moved to the other end of the table.

After witnessing this at lunch one day, Tedi followed her outside and asked, “Why
are you avoiding Esther?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“She keeps looking at you. She must want something, perhaps only to talk. But you
run away from her and the boy like they have measles or something.”

“I didn’t know that you could read minds,” Zorah said. “But I have no reason to avoid
her or to talk to her. I could care less.”

“Is it because she is not Jewish?” Tedi said.

“Did she tell you that?”

“All you have to do is look at her.”

“That is funny coming from you, who look like a—”

“I look like my grandmother,” said Tedi. “She was a good Dutch Lutheran. Even so,
I am a Jew.”

“And she is not?” Zorah asked.

Tedi shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“So why is she here?”

“For the boy, I imagine. But there is no reason to be unkind to her. Just because
she is not Jewish doesn’t mean she is stupid. And the child sees everything. They
need a friend in this place and you speak the language.”

“There are plenty of other people here who speak Polish,” said Zorah, putting an end
to the conversation. “Go ask one of them.”

That night, Zorah lay awake for hours listening to the high, thin whistle of Jacob’s
breath. He was lying on Esther’s bed, where he often slept, curled around her legs
like a puppy.

She did not understand why these two bothered her so much. Why should she be offended
by the irony of a Polish gentile trying to pass as a Jew? Maybe Esther had promised
the father that she would take the boy to Palestine, which Zorah supposed would make
her a Zionist hero.

Or maybe she disliked Esther just because she was a Pole.
The Poles had been just as monstrous as the Germans. The Nazis did not require her
neighbors to spit on her family the day they were taken away. They had spit again
when she returned, after the war, to see if anyone else had survived.

Her father had been right on this point: the Polish people were blockheaded boors
who hated Jews from the soles of their feet. I do not have to be nice to Poles, Zorah
decided. Not even a Pole with a half-Jewish child in Palestine.

A low groan rose from the bed beside her. Esther was sitting straight up on her bed,
panting and clutching at her stomach. Grabbing her dress, she rushed to the door.

Zorah realized she would not get much sleep that night, which meant she would be too
tired to finish the story she was working through: an ancient fable woven around the
first chapters of Genesis, recounting an argument between the sun and the moon about
which was to be more powerful.

She glanced over at Jacob and saw that he was lying facedown on Esther’s pillow, clutching
the sides of the bed as though it were a life raft. Zorah watched his shoulders heave
as he sobbed without making a sound.

He is afraid his mother has left him, she thought, and counted to sixty, waiting for
someone to do something for the boy. He might even think she has been killed.

Zorah counted to sixty twice more before she got up and sat beside him.

“Your mother will return soon,” she whispered.

His body went rigid.

“She went to the toilet. She will come back.”

He turned his head. Tears glittered in his lashes.

Zorah ran her hand back and forth across his back, slowly
and evenly, not stopping until he turned his face to the other cheek and she felt
her hand rise and fall over a sigh that released him into sleep.

She let her hand rest where it lay, his heart keeping time beneath her fingers.

Anger burned at the back of Zorah’s throat. She wanted nothing to do with this. Nothing
at all.

She had kept herself alive through wretched days and worse nights by holding fast
to a single thought:
If I forget thee, my slaughtered companions and my murdered kin, may my hands wither
and my tongue lose the power of speech.

She had seen evidence, cruel and sad, that the world was an instrument of destruction.
Bearing witness to that simple truth had kept her from madness. Nothing else was required.

But Jacob’s beating heart had something else to say. Through the tips of her fingers
it insisted,
Come, let us go up to the mountain and sing the song of the child who sleeps and
trusts.

The pulse under her hand was the irrefutable proof that destruction had an opposite
number whose name was … Zorah could not think what to call it, but her mouth flooded
with the memory of a white peach she had eaten as a little girl, sliced by her mother,
shared with her brother. The sky was clear and blue after a summer rain. They were
sitting at the window looking out at the sturdy brick building across the street where
her friend Anya lived. The building had been bombed to dust with many of the souls
inside, but the memory of the peach and the light on the bricks and Anya’s gap-toothed
grin remained with her, still beautiful.

Zorah looked at the number on her forearm, which rose and fell, slowly and gently,
with Jacob’s sleeping breath, and the word came to her.

The opposite of destruction is creation.

A gray, foggy light had begun to filter into the barrack by the time Esther returned.
When she saw Zorah sitting on her bed, staring at Jacob as though he might disappear
at any moment, she gasped.

“He is fine,” Zorah whispered in Polish. “He woke up and I told him that you would
be back.”

“Thank you,” said Esther. “You are very kind.”

Zorah shook her head. “I am not kind.”

Later in the morning, Esther took Jacob to the children’s Hebrew class, which was
taught by an earnest young woman with a toothy smile and a withered arm. The students,
fascinated by the strange combination of cheerfulness and deformity, were quiet and
obedient in her presence and soaked up her lessons effortlessly. But instead of staying
to watch as she usually did, Esther left him there.

She found Zorah sitting on her cot with a book and said, “I wished to tell you that
I am sorry for last night. The food here does not sit well with me.”

“None of us is used to this food,” said Zorah, without looking up. “Especially in
the beginning.”

“It is not only the food that bothers me, miss. I am worried about a subject, that
is to say …” Esther stammered. “There is something I need to know, which keeps me
from being able to … I’m sorry to bother you, but if I could have just a moment of
your time. There is a question. I mean to say, I have a question of great concern.”

“I can’t tell you anything about getting out of this place,” Zorah said. “I’ve been
stuck here longer than anyone.”

“It is not that,” said Esther. “I heard them say that you are learned in the religion.”

“You wish to speak to a rabbi,” said Zorah.

“No,” Esther said quickly. “I would not dare. Besides, there is the language … so
please, miss …”