Louisa Page 26

  Levin asked, “Did you want to go to the clinic?”

  “I said I would be fine, Dov.”

  “You look like hell.”

  “Thank you. Why are you so protective of me? Do I remind you of your mother?”

  “Someone else,” said Levin. “Your hat’s on too tight.” He untied it, and as he fumbled with the string, his hands brushed up against my cheeks in a way that confused and alarmed me, and I might have pulled away if he hadn’t gone on talking. “My daughter, sometimes. She’s not as tough as she pretends to be.”

  “What do you think’s in the clinic?” I asked him. “The fountain of youth?”

  “It’s possible,” said Levin.

  I knew what else would be in the clinic and why he wanted me to go. I’d been avoiding Dr. Dori Csengery since we’d arrived. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t want to be young again.”

  Levin didn’t ask me what I wanted. He knew, from experience, that he couldn’t give it to me. On that slate verandah, I felt in my purse for another cigarette, but somehow the matches had gotten damp, and I struck and struck but was left with a nose full of sulfur and three bent strips of cardboard in my fist, and then I realized that I was crying.

  “What I want,” I said, “is just a welcome. What the hell was I thinking?” To my appalled surprise, I found I’d buried my head in Levin’s shoulder, and helpless sobs came of themselves out of my throat. His hand was in my hair, and then that old Pesti bureaucrat was kissing me. I pulled away. “How on earth—” I began.

  But he interrupted. “You want to put your hat back on?”

  “I can get it on myself, thank you,” I said. I took it from him and tied the knot only with some effort. My hands weren’t too steady.

  The road between the dining hall and the clinic was another sea of mud, which meant yet more planks and also meant that Levin had to take my arm again. This, I allowed. As we gingerly stepped across yet another mud bank, he said, “It was my teacher in gimnazium you make me think of. A thousand million years ago.”

  I asked him, “What did she teach?”

  “Hungarian History and Literature. She was an anti-Semite. Isn’t that funny? But I had a terrible crush on her,” said Levin. “She had a big bosom and the angrier she got, the bigger her bosom got and when she would call on me to recite, she’d always pick on me because I was a Jew. She had me in a state of complete erotic terror.”

  I’ll admit that this description almost made me lose my footing on the planks. I had to say, though, “You’ve got a wife. I think I’m wearing her hat. You never mention her.”

  “How do you know I’m not a widower or divorced?”

  I smiled. “Levin, you’ve got a wife.”

  “And you’ve got your cousin,” said Levin. Then he paused to ask someone directions to the clinic, and by the time we were alone again, I’d forgotten how I’d meant to answer him.

  The clinic was as new as the rest of Gan Leah. I think I had expected a shack, with Doctor Csengery stringing a stethoscope onto a nail in the wall. Instead, the doors opened into a busy waiting room with tan upholstered benches, framed paintings, and a receptionist. A little cowed, I whispered to Levin, “She’s probably not here.”

  “She invited you,” he said. “We’ve come this far. A few more steps, Norika.”

  His use of the diminutive astounded me. He pushed his way to the girl at the front desk and announced our arrival. There was an argument, I think, and he was clearly out of line; I enjoyed watching the scene he made on my account, I’ll admit. I also knew that when the girl disappeared to get Dori’s permission, she would agree to see me.

  She did. Levin walked me around the partition, and then he released my arm and said, “Here, I leave you for a while.”

  “Leave me?”

  “Little Echo, you’ll be fine. You knew I couldn’t stay for more than an hour or two. I’ve arranged for you to get a lift back with one of those young people we met at lunch. The girl knows you’re gone?”

  “She’s with her rabbi,” I said, “for Shavuot.” Levin made a face, and I asked him, “Why don’t you like her?”

  “I don’t have an opinion of her one way or the other,” Levin said.

  “I owe her my life,” I said.

  “You don’t owe anyone your life. Get that straight, first of all.”

  “And second of all?” I asked him, wondering where that question would lead. I knew he was probably going to have dinner with his family in Haifa, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to let him go.

  “Second of all,” said Levin, “don’t smoke so many Lucky Strikes. Find a local brand. They’re cheaper.” Then he gave me another kiss before I could stop him, though I’ll confess it wasn’t unexpected. He gave me a little shove towards the door and walked away.

  DORI CSENGERY WAS not in an examining room but behind a desk. She got up when I entered and extended her hand. She said, “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

  She looked less daunting now, maybe because she wasn’t on the way to surgery. At the same time, she held less of a resemblance to the photograph. She’d pulled her hair back in a clip, and it made her look strained and exhausted. I gave her my hand to shake, and she held it so long that I wondered if she would ever give it back to me. Then she motioned for me to sit down, and I said, “You’re busy.”

  “Oh—all that fuss out there? That’s nothing for me. Nurses take care of them. I’ve become a desk clerk. Weren’t you a desk clerk at some school for rich girls?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “All the girls in that school wrote your cousin. It’s a good thing Leah couldn’t read Hungarian. You want a cup of something?” Dori asked me. “I have a hotplate here.”

  “Dori,” I said, “it’s true. I almost didn’t come here.”

  “No one here calls me Dori. My name is Arielle,” she said. “I married Yosef Ginzberg four years ago. Yosef ’s from Germany. He’s a good man. So was your cousin. But there’s one thing we learned and that was that he had his limitations.”

  “Of course he does,” I said, and in saying it I realized I was forcing the reference to Bela into the present tense.

  “You saw Nathan?” she asked me. I nodded and she said, “He’s an ass, isn’t he? Always was. But he’s still here. Almost all of the old circle are still here. Unrecognizable, mind you, but immovable. And we all went through what he went through. Europe is a big graveyard. Why didn’t you come in ’forty-four?”

  The question hardly took me by surprise. In that dim room, I couldn’t tell if she could read my face.

  “All told,” she said, “there were maybe fifty illegals he managed to get here. Five died on the way, and one of the ones who died was named Gabor, but it wasn’t the same Gabor, was it?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t. That’s not how he died.”

  “After Leah died, his family was all he had. He moved heaven and earth to save you,” Dori said. “He’d left us by then, but he’d still come here to make sure you all had a place to go, and after the Germans invaded and they started with the ghettos in Szeged, I thought he’d lose his mind worrying about his mother, but he just made sure we had beds ready for when you arrived. That’s the kind of faith he had in you.”

  Then she paused, as though what I said had just registered.

  “Your son isn’t here.”

  When I didn’t answer, she said it for me.

  “So he’s dead—Gabor.”

  Again, I wondered: Would she ask me how? Would I have to tell the story? But she only dug her hand into her hair, a gesture of anger or exhaustion. I said, “Dori, look, where is he?”

  She said, “I don’t know. I told you. I haven’t heard from him in two years. What makes you think he’d even want to see you now?”

  “I got a telegram from him,” I said, “with an address. I lost it.”

  I could tell she didn’t believe me. I began to wonder whether I believed myself. “What do you expect from him?” Dori asked
me.

  I answered honestly then. “I don’t know.”

  Afterwards, she paused, and I could see that she was searching my face for something and hadn’t found it. She leaned across the table and asked me, “Could I have a cigarette?”

  “Of course,” I said, and I shook one from the pack for her and lit it with my own.

  “I never used to smoke. Terrible habit but it steadies my nerves.” She took a drag before adding, “Leah smoked too.”

  So then of course I had to ask at last: “All right, I don’t know. Who’s Leah?”

  Dori said, “Leah was his wife.”

  2

  SHE ARRIVED IN A truck with the orphans from Kiev, and like the rest of them, she spoke no Hebrew, and like the rest of them, she smelled like garbage from the freighter where they’d stowed away. The truck was a flatbed, and the thirty-some boys and girls on board looked like dumb animals, with faces so empty of curiosity that it was hard to remember what they’d risked to come to Palestine.

  Bela helped unload them; it was hard to think of it as anything but unloading. Hoisting body after body from the bed of the truck, he had to steady himself against the wheel. After a while, he tried whispering a little encouragement in Russian, but it had no effect. How could they give them a welcome? It was too dark; the atmosphere was too tense. Since the land-purchase, relations with Taell al-Taji had deteriorated beyond hope, and it was probably a mistake to take in newcomers at all.

  Lifting another human being down from the flatbed, Bela tried his Russian again. “You’ll get a hot shower soon.”

  The answer came back in French. “Are you implying I stink?”

  Bela almost dropped the girl, who shimmied out of his hands, grazing the front of his trousers with her breasts, and then she emerged and shook out her thick dark hair. Somehow, though there wasn’t much of a moon, Bela had never seen anything quite as clearly as that girl. He rubbed his chin for no particular reason, and then stepped backwards, though there was nowhere to go, and finally spoke French back. “Your accent is excellent.”

  She rolled her eyes, which were shaped like almonds and fringed with thick lashes. “Yours is passable.”

  Meanwhile, the last three orphans had gotten tired of waiting, and they climbed down on their own. One of the young men gave Bela a long look; he could have been that girl’s boyfriend or her brother, or maybe he was just sending a warning. They were herded to the clinic where Dori checked them for lice and then gave them leave to shower. As the boys and girls stripped separately, Bela stood by Dori’s side and remembered the early days of Tilulit when the men and women showered together. There had been no ideological reason for the shift in policy, though he did notice that it coincided with the arrival of that first group of Poles back in ’34.

  Dori said to Bela, “They’ll be a lot of work. I don’t have a clue what they’re carrying from that boat, not to mention psychological trauma.”

  “They’re excellent human material,” Bela said. “A little raw, but excellent.”

  “I can’t tell when you’re joking anymore,” Dori said to him.

  “No, I’m not joking really,” Bela said. “They’re young. How young are they, exactly?”

  “The oldest is eighteen.”

  “That’s the girl?”

  “Which girl?” Dori asked him, though of course he’d only noticed one, and she knew it.

  “The one with all that hair.”

  “She’s got head-lice,” Dori said. “We’ll have to cut it off. She’s seventeen. Or that’s what it says on her papers. She’s probably younger.”

  Bela helped Dori clean up, and they walked back to their room. They’d shared that room for three years now, and it had more of Bela in it than Dori; he’d hung up checkered curtains and photographs of his family, and there were his newspapers and dictionaries and the boxes of letters from Hungary piled in a corner. Dori contributed only her medical diploma mounted on cardboard, and a sewing kit arranged as precisely as surgical instruments on an end-table. Bela would occasionally borrow the scissors to cut an article out of a newspaper and forget to return them, or worse, he’d pass them on to someone else. She’d get no rest until they were back in place.

  “How can you be so attached to a pair of scissors?” Bela would ask her.

  “Well, what if I have the urge to burn all those letters from your girlfriends back in Budapest?” she asked him.

  “Then there’d be a fire in the room,” said Bela.

  Dori shook her head and said, again, “I can’t tell when you’re joking anymore. Really, you didn’t used to be this way.”

  WHAT WAY HAD Bela been, exactly? He wasn’t sure. The week after the arrival of the orphans, he found himself identifying strongly with the youngest, a thick-necked boy with rough red hair and a marvelous vocabulary of Russian curses. He wasn’t popular with the others. He always pushed himself to the front of the line in the dining hall, and when he didn’t get his way he’d raise his fist and shake it like a character in a bad melodrama. Bela tried holding him back, and telling him he had to wait his turn, but he wrenched himself free, and shouted: “Fucking sister-fucker! Don’t you dare fucking lay your faggot hands on me again!”

  Bela was grateful no one in his own circle understood Russian. He kept his voice low. “Look, there’s plenty of food for everyone here.”

  “Plenty of shit!”

  “Calm down,” Bela said, and he realized he ought to leave the boy alone to make his own enemies, but he found himself reaching for his arm again. This time he felt someone grip him at the elbow, and he looked down and saw the orphan girl.

  She spoke French. “Don’t play favorites, just because he limps like you.”

  Bela hadn’t noticed that the boy limped at all. He backed up and landed on the edge of the trestle table where he made some attempt to pretend he’d meant to sit there. Now that the girl’s hair had been cropped off, she looked older, much older, in fact, than seventeen. Someone had dressed her in standard-issue shirt and shorts, but they didn’t fit her well, and she looked as though she were in the process of climbing out of them.

  She said, “I’m Lenore. As in the poem by E. A. Poe.” She didn’t extend her hand as she introduced herself, and she also showed no sign of joining the line for supper. Bela felt a sudden urge to fill a plate for her, and at the same time couldn’t imagine her eating.

  In fact, it was two weeks before he actually saw Lenore eat or drink. By then, he realized she was a little crazy, a case, as Dori would put it, of psychological trauma. All of the orphans had adjustment problems, and some took the form of nightmares or a perpetual stupor. A few, like the redheaded boy, had lost something deeper. It was as though they had forgotten how to live with other people. Reluctantly, Bela admitted that Lenore, too, was in this category. Nothing about her fit. She had no friends among the other orphans. She was incapable of ordinary conversation.

  It was considered therapeutic for the orphans to be put to work at once. As they’d arrived during the rainy season, much of the work was in the dairy or the chicken coop. After a few weeks of classes, Bela had managed to teach the orphans enough Hebrew to follow basic instructions, and most of them seemed eager to learn. Left to themselves, they generally switched to Yiddish, but that was natural. Lenore never joined in.

  There was a reason: Lenore spoke no Yiddish. Through one source or another, he pieced together part of her story. She’d been born in Moscow, and her father had been a professor of French Literature, and a translator of Symbolist poetry. He was arrested in ’38, and given the atmosphere in Moscow, her mother had thought it best to return to her own people in Kiev.

  What did they find in Kiev? Bela didn’t know. It was considered bad form to bring up the past, and when Bela gave the orphans Hebrew lessons, he had to pretend not to understand the Yiddish conversations going on around him which would make reference, almost in passing, to outrageous things. Sometimes he would find his gaze lingering on Lenore, who sat in the left corner wit
h her cropped hair and bare white arms, and who also seemed to be pretending not to understand.

  Everything about the girl seemed studied, even her selfishness. When she’d manage to get cigarettes, she’d smoke them half-behind her hand, to make it clear that they were hers and no one else’s. Blowing the smoke through her fine nostrils, her expression would be unreadable, as though possession were a mystery, and she had no responsibility to help anyone understand what he couldn’t share.

  ONCE, HE CAUGHT her leaving the dairy, with plastic gloves on her hands and her hair in a net; she smelled like sour milk and iodine. A few girls strayed behind, and when they saw Bela standing there, they giggled and called out to Lenore in Yiddish. Bela couldn’t quite make out what they’d said, and decided he didn’t want to.

  He asked Lenore in French, “Do you understand them?”

  She frowned, as though it were the strangest question in the world. “Of course I do.”

  “So why do you speak French?”

  “You said you liked my accent,” Lenore said. She pulled off her gloves, removed the hairnet, and shook out her furry half-grown hair.

  “But don’t you get lonely?”

  “You speak French,” said Lenore. “Don’t you have a cigarette?”

  For some reason, Bela said, “I speak a lot of languages.” It felt as though he were bragging. The two of them had started walking together from the dairy to the orphans’ tents and as though to distance himself from her he mentally took note of the languages he spoke, and then he sorted them into Romance, Slavic, Germanic, and Finno-Ugric, and perhaps it was when they reached the threshold of her tent that he realized he didn’t know what to say to this girl in any of those languages.

  He was so distracted that he only slowly realized Lenore had slipped a hand into the pocket of his trousers. In French, he asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Picking your pocket for a cigarette,” said Lenore.