Louisa Read online

  I took my hands out of the laundry basin and wiped them dry before lighting a cigarette. Adele asked, “Where’s Janos?”

  “He must have heard you were coming,” I said. “You’re not serious, Adele. You actually came to see Janos?”

  “Well, I wanted to catch both of you,” she said. “We’re going to a lecture.”

  I laughed. That was a new one. “I can’t leave looking like this,” I said, thinking that got me well out of it.

  But Adele was surprisingly emphatic. She opened the wardrobe and managed to dislodge a decent dress, and even a pair of shoes I had forgotten I owned, and she bullied me into changing, even going so far as to buckle the first shoe before I thought to ask her:

  “Are you kidnapping me?”

  “That’s not such a bad idea,” said Adele. By now, she had my other shoe on and seemed to be deciding if I would need my coat.

  Helpless, and admittedly curious, I asked, “So what’s the topic of this mysterious lecture?”

  Adele said, “The Idea of Zion.”

  MY FIRST SURPRISE was this: The lecture took place in the auditorium of the Katona Jozsef School. Many of the girls I knew were in attendance, not in their school pinafores but in bright, crisp party-dresses. They called to each other across the auditorium so cheerfully that they might as well have been in the courtyard of a block of flats. Every seat was taken, and Adele and I were forced to stand in the back. I couldn’t have felt older or more out of place.

  “You rushed me out of there so fast that I forgot my cigarettes,” I said to Adele.

  She ignored my tone, in fact, suppressed a smile. “Good,” she said. Then, everyone started shouting and clapping, and onto the stage of the auditorium walked Bela.

  My stomach dropped to my toes. I had not seen my cousin in eleven years. He was a grown man now, in a badly fitting sack-suit, but unmistakably it was Bela, with that mop of hair, those outsized hands and feet, the way that even at the podium he took a moment to cup his chin in his hand and stare out at the crowd of girls, too bewildered to acknowledge their applause.

  Adele tugged my arm and whispered: “So?”

  I brushed her off and strained up to get a better look. Bela was trying to calm down the crowd, particularly the girls in the front row who seemed about to storm the stage. It was then I remembered that he used to teach at that school years before; he must have retained a following. He blushed and grinned as he recognized face after face, and then he managed to quiet them down enough to address them.

  “I see my old students are here. Now what did I teach you? Hebrew or German?”

  “Lashon Galut!” one bold girl called. It must have been Hebrew.

  Bela said, “I feel ridiculous. I’ve given this speech in five cities in eight days and this is the first time I’ve been put in my place. How old are you now, Rozsa? Sixteen? Want me to speak Persian?”

  “Chatul!” she called.

  Adele whispered, “That’s cat.” I had forgotten she knew Hebrew. I thought: Bela sounds different when he speaks than when he writes, more like a boy, or maybe it’s because the last time I heard Bela speak at all, he’d been fifteen years old. And he’s here, here now. How can he be here now?

  In fact, Bela himself rubbed his face as though to make sure he really did exist. Then he said, “All right. I won’t talk about Tilulit. Or about Nathan or Dori. They send their love. You should know Bernadette and Tibor’s baby Gezer just said his first word. And it was in Hebrew.”

  That got them whooping again, and that got him blushing again, but there was something studied in his embarrassment, I thought. He’d acquired a firm jaw, and his suntan made his teeth look too white. I didn’t think I liked it, nor did I like the way he was playing the crowd. I would give him hell afterwards. Then I went cold. I would see him afterwards. What would I say?

  He went on. “The man we are going to hear today is less advanced than Gezer. He will be speaking German.” When no one laughed, he quickly added, “No, to be honest, let me tell you a story. Recently my kibbutz built some bookshelves and turned part of the dining hall into a library. We had an argument. Should every book in the library be in Hebrew? In the end, we reached a compromise. We would allow one book in German. That book is called Ich und Du and it is by the man I’m introducing tonight. Comrades, girls, ladies, gentlemen, friends,” he said, “I present to you Doctor Martin Buber.”

  That was all Bela had to say. He fell back, and the girls deflated with an audible sigh as a soft-eyed gentleman with an enormous beard rose up to take his place. Doctor Buber’s cultivated German rose and fell, liturgical. He probably said a lot of wise things. He probably would have made a Zionist out of me. But my eyes rested on Bela, who had managed to free up a seat somewhere at the end of the first row and who seemed almost as unconcerned with the lecture as I did. Frankly, he looked exhausted.

  Doctor Buber spoke for two hours. He managed to wear down the girls, who not only stopped whispering to each other, but seemed to stop breathing altogether. After it was over, there was a rush for the reception hall, and I lost sight of Bela. Adele said, “Come on. There’s cakes and coffee.”

  “I’d sooner not socialize with schoolgirls,” I said.

  “But don’t you want to meet Doctor Buber?”

  “Do you think he’ll have any cigarettes on him?”

  Adele rolled her eyes. “You don’t have an ounce of patience. Bela knows we’re here. He’ll find us.”

  Then I had a stroke of luck; a stream of schoolgirls pushed Adele against a wall and I used the excuse to break out on my own. I knew a shortcut out of the auditorium through the boiler room, a way familiar to any teacher who wanted to escape a crowd. I slipped behind the stage, opened the door that said FORBIDDEN, and as I suspected, there was Bela.

  It was a startling moment. Up close, he looked completely different than he had on stage, browner, taller, broader, and he took a step backwards and said: “What’s this?”

  “What do you think it is, Borzas? My God, you’re enormous!” I said, having no idea what was coming out of my mouth and only aware that I’d gone pink all over.

  Bela crushed me up against him and didn’t quite release me before he said, “And you’re no bigger than a girl.”

  I felt like crying. Any attempts at cleverness melted off with the forceful heat of those big boilers. “I’m married,” I said, foolishly. Of course he knew I was married. We managed to disentangle ourselves and to pry open the basement exit and head out into the afternoon sun.

  Bela stretched, taking in the sunshine and open air as though he’d just emerged from a cave. “Those girls. I never know what they expect of me.”

  “You do so know,” I said.

  “I don’t,” said Bela. We started towards Andrassy Street for no particular reason. Leaves crunched underfoot, and I realized for the first time that it was autumn. “I don’t know what they expect,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “You know what they expect,” I said, “and you give it to them. Face it. You like little girls.”

  I regretted what I said. It broke the mood, made Bela a little thoughtful. We turned north, towards Vidam Park, and Bela stared off into the middle distance in a way that let me know there was another question coming. But I wouldn’t have been able to guess its nature.

  Bela asked, “Would you call yourself a little girl?”

  I kind of lost my footing. Then I said, “You still don’t smoke, do you?”

  Bela smiled like an idiot. “It’s so good to see you. After these weeks, just to have some time to myself.”

  We managed to find a bakery and bought a few rolls with jam inside. Bela ate one in three bites and started another, and I saved mine, as though the bread were something from a fairy story and as long as I didn’t finish it, the afternoon would not be over.

  Bela asked, “So where’s Janos? I wanted to meet him.”

  “He’s not around much,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it, as it seemed to imply problems
that didn’t exist. Of course he wasn’t around much: On top of the teaching, he worked twice as hard as students half his age, and as a consequence, he’d gained a reputation at the Polytechnic and might be permitted to complete his course-work a year ahead of schedule. I’d meant to say these things to Bela, but somehow, I didn’t.

  Bela said, “So, what’s it like, being married?”

  By now, we had settled on a bench somewhere deep in the park, and I curled my legs up under me. I took my time about replying. “It’s all right,” I said. “You ought to try it, you and Dori.”

  “Dori?” Bela smiled in a way I couldn’t read. Then he took another big bite of that roll, swallowed, and said, “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, I’m not going to marry Dori. People in kibbutzim don’t marry. Sometimes they share a room.”

  We sat beneath full boughs, and even with a meter of bench between us I could feel warmth radiate from Bela, and mingled smells, the damp wool from his sack-suit, the yeast and honey of that broken roll. I did not know what time it was, and didn’t care. A few leaves fell on me. I said, “Borzas, I need a cigarette.”

  “Here,” Bela said. Without rising from his place on the bench, he shifted his weight to dig into his pocket and drew out a rather crushed cigarette.

  I propped myself up on one arm and leaned towards him to get a better look. “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “They always offer them, you know, during receptions. And what am I supposed to do? Turn them down?”

  I managed somehow to get the thing lit, and I took a long drag before I said, “I think it’s mean of you to take them all and let them accumulate.”

  “From now on,” Bela said, “I’ll pass them to you.”

  He would stay only for a week. He had arrived two days before and had barely slept, which explained the way he seemed to be nodding off now. I took off my shoes and lay back with my head on the bench and my feet on his lap.

  “So, do you like being married?”

  “You asked me that already,” I said.

  “You didn’t answer, really.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. I could have said more, too, but I didn’t. “Do you have another cigarette?”

  “Maybe half of one,” said Bela.

  “I’ll take it. Listen,” I said, as the afternoon turned dark and green, “how are you going to pass them all on to me if you go back to Palestine?”

  “Because you’ll come with me,” Bela said.

  We stayed on the bench until twilight, and by then I had long finished that half-cigarette. I knew I could talk or not talk, that it didn’t matter, and I stretched all the way back and tilted my head upside-down until the blood rushed to my ears. I wanted a physical sensation to mark the moment when I was so happy.

  PART

  TWO

  1

  NO KIBBUTZ tilulit on current lists,” said Dov Levin. “It might have dissolved or merged with another kibbutz. Those names you gave me didn’t help. You must realize, Nora, nobody keeps a Galut name unless it’s a matter of principle, and these people’s principles are along different lines.”

  I asked, “What about Kibbutz Gan Dahlia?”

  “What about it? Send them a wire or call them. But to be frank, Gan Dahlia is enormous and they’ve just taken in a busload of newcomers. They may not be up to doing you any favors.”

  “Ami Chai Jezreel?”

  “That,” said Levin, “was the one name on your list I recognized. He moved to America in ’thirty-six. Last I heard, he was in New York, driving a taxi.”

  The air in Levin’s office was like sour cream. He presented me with a big cup of sweetened coffee. I felt thick-headed and sullen. “What about Taell al-Taji? That’s not a European name.”

  “It’s also not on a standard map. You know how many Arabs fled the Galilee during the war last year? By now, that’s probably a Jewish village. You could live there.”

  The thought gave me no joy. I asked, “Don’t they have files on these things somewhere? In German?”

  “Learn Hebrew,” said Levin. “Your daughter-in-law is making excellent progress, I hear.”

  I said, “She’s got a good ear.”

  “That’s right,” said Levin. “She was a singer, wasn’t she? Lieder. This is a very strange place for a singer of Lieder.”

  Something in his tone made me ask him, “How did you know she sang?”

  Levin hesitated. Then he said, “Something else they’ve all been saying. A little more consistent than the other rumors. I take it, this one’s true.”

  I didn’t want the subject to linger on Louisa, so I raised my coffee cup and said to Levin, “You know, in Budapest after the war we drank boiled chestnuts that weren’t much worse than this stuff. Do you have a cigarette?”

  “No, Nora,” said Levin.

  “Then what good are you?”

  “I can’t answer that,” he said. He smiled, and that smile was far more wry and melancholy than anything Bela would have managed. For all his years in this country, Levin was still a European; Israel hadn’t knocked that out of him. But what was the good of irony? How far had it gotten my son? Maybe if Gabor had been pure and selfless he would have gone to Palestine like Bela and would have been alive today.

  I was alive, of course, but that had nothing to do with me. I was alive because of Louisa.

  NOW LOUISA WAS part of the labor pool. Early in the morning, she would wait at the camp gate with the North Africans. It was ludicrous. Europeans simply didn’t do that sort of work, at least not the Europeans in the camp. None of the Poles would have been caught dead fighting for a place in one of those plantation trucks.

  To my mind, her effort was doomed. No matter how eager she looked, no matter how much she would insist that she had picked fruit before, who would believe her? And though she used her Hebrew, as soon as she opened her mouth she might as well have said Güten Morgen.

  “Dear,” I said, “I don’t see the sense of it. You’ll only faint and then some poor North African will have to carry you back.”

  “I must work so you don’t have to, Mutti,” she said. At that point, the prospect of work was theoretical. By breakfast time, she would return to study one of those books on Jewish family purity.

  I overheard one Romanian say to her friend in Yiddish, “Sure she’s willing to do black work. The girl’s done worse.” They were sitting by the primus stove, prattling together as though they were in some café, although Louisa sat no more than a meter away with her nose buried in that book.

  “A lovely voice though,” said the woman’s friend. “Like a nightingale.” She turned to me, who stood at the foot of the bed where Louisa studied. “Nightingales sing best in the dark, I hear.” She gave a low-pitched laugh then.

  Louisa looked up, and her eyes flicked across the room, and back to the book again. She turned a shade paler, and moved her lips as she read, as though to force concentration. There are times when it made little difference if she understood Yiddish. She heard enough. I thought: No wonder she wants to work among North Africans, where she would be spared all of this. Yet she could have spared herself completely had she not clung to me. She had come to a country where she was cursed. No matter how many books she read, or how many rabbis she visited, or how many young Israeli men she charmed, the curse would remain.

  THEN, ONE DAY, they let her onto the plantation truck. She returned just before supper in a pair of baggy shorts and a blue blouse. Her hair was tucked into a round, white cap. She’d pulled that cap down as far as it would go, and her ears stuck out below the brim; I’d never known they were so big. I asked her, “Have you joined the army?”

  “Es gefällt mir. It’s an orange grove. And they’re harvesting,” she explained. “They were shorthanded.”

  “And they dressed you like a little boy?”

  “They all wear this,” Louisa said.

  “Who are they, dear?”

  “Meine Freunde, the others, the ones who w
ork with me.”

  She was vague about those others and about the work she did, though when I pressed her, she admitted that she was not a picker but a sorter, and she spent her time not on a ladder but in a warehouse, separating bruised and perfect fruit. The other workers were North Africans who spoke neither Hebrew nor German and classed her as a European who had somehow fallen to their lot in life. By all accounts, those workers treated her with respect, and maybe a little fear. I cannot speak for the management.

  So, during the day, Louisa left me, and three nights a week, she studied with the rabbi. She would slip into our cot late at night. Even after a shower, she still smelled of oranges, and the juice clung to her hair.

  RABBI NEEDLEMAN asked his wife, “Why did Ruth follow Naomi?”

  Sharon said, “You could still withdraw the offer.”

  Shmuel shook his head. “Who else would take her on? She’s not among friends here, after all.”

  They spoke in Yiddish in the kitchen. The children were asleep. This was their quiet hour together, kept, traditionally, since the first years of their marriage. Though early on, Shmuel had hoped to spend the time teaching his wife Hebrew and a little German, eventually it lapsed into conversations about the budget or the children. During the past few years, after Sharon had their fourth child and Shmuel took on duties at the camp for new arrivals, the hour was often the only time they’d have to themselves, and the talks took on the feel of reports from the front lines.

  He’d married Sharon not long after he had escaped from Germany to Palestine, in 1937. Her father had initially turned down the match, as Shmuel had a secular as well as a religious education, and seemed to him tainted by the outside world, but his grandfather and great-grandfather were well-known scholars, and in the end, Sharon herself put her foot down. She was not a girl to be crossed.

  Shmuel himself was initially in awe of Sharon’s family, who had lived in Palestine since the 1870s. Yet in the course of his work with new immigrants, Shmuel grew less tolerant. The members of the Old Yishuv went on with their lives as though there were no state of Israel. They believed Hebrew to be a language meant for prayer, and they conversed exclusively in Yiddish. It was as though they were the newcomers, isolated in a foreign country.