Louisa Read online

  I slipped away to bury my own face in my hands. Convulsions of hunger, anger, and disgust passed over me, and buried in blankets stinking of myself, I thought: I am drowning, I am already dead, and she looks at me like that, wants something from me, and I want a cigarette, I want my son, I want my husband, everything at once, like light breaking.

  There was no light. Even the bomb-flares died now. Yet the aura of Louisa’s tenderness lingered, and I knew she was still gazing down, with those two fingers at her mouth, staring into the cellar as into a well which might show her a reflection. How much could I even hate that girl? I knew then: not enough. How much could I love her or anyone? I also knew: not enough.

  No one can love enough. We are all cowards who can’t look each other in the face or tell the truth. Then I thought of Bela and his beeswax candle burning, and I wept.

  6

  AS EVER, JONAH woke slowly, coming to himself a little at a time, first the crown of his head, and then his eyes and nose and chin, and as he turned his face into his arm, he stretched his legs to bring the rest to life. His feet hit something.

  “Mah zeh?” he whispered. He thought it was his neighbor’s dog. Propping himself on an elbow, he rubbed his eyes with his free hand, and the gray hair on his chest and shoulders filled with light. Then, he saw Louisa.

  She was curled at the foot of the bed, above the sheet, with her damp hair fanned across her shoulder and her hands tucked under her cheek. Jonah shifted his weight, and the mattress gave a lurch that woke her at once. She opened her eyes, stared up at him, and said nothing.

  It was Jonah who spoke. “How did you get in?”

  “It was unlocked,” said Louisa. Her voice shook. She was clearly afraid to move.

  “That was a mistake,” Jonah said. “There are supplies. They could have been stolen.”

  “I haven’t stolen anything,” Louisa said.

  “I know.” Jonah rose from bed, adjusted the waist of his pajama-bottoms, and looked down at her. She sat up at last, but she wrapped her arms around her knees and gripped them hard as though holding something tightly enough could keep her from being forced out the door. “Louisa, you can’t stay here. It isn’t right.”

  “I couldn’t go back last night. There were no buses.”

  Jonah believed her, though as usual, she didn’t sound convincing. Since the first day he had met Louisa and had heard her story, he’d been struck by her inconsistencies and also by her undeniable sincerity. She had a face like a doe lost in the woods. He asked her, “So do you want some orange juice?”

  “I want to work again.”

  That statement must have cost her something. She did not look at him. He walked to the cool place in the corner where he kept a pitcher of juice and some Arab bread. Mice sometimes got to the bread. Like most of what his life was now, he’d gotten used to it. He took his time about pouring the juice; he had a single stone mug and also a single piece of bread. Without considering the matter much, he gave those to Louisa, who accepted them. Her whole will obviously turned on what Jonah would say next.

  In fact, Jonah didn’t give an answer for a while. He sat a little away from his bed where Louisa ate his bread and drank his juice, and he considered what could be done for her. He’d hired her through the harvest and then managed to find odd jobs in the office, but at points it was so clear that he was creating work for her that he would have thought she’d be embarrassed. Now this. Why had he given her that bread and juice? Did it imply an obligation?

  “It’s Shavuot,” Jonah said. “It’s a holiday. No one works.”

  Louisa said, “I’m not a Jew. I can work.”

  She’d roused herself now, piping up in that soprano voice he’d noticed from the first, and looking at him more directly. She almost reminded him of Mouse. Her hair was in her eyes, and before he could stop himself, he’d leaned over and pushed it behind her ear. The gesture was intimate. She looked surprised, and so did he.

  HE DROVE HER IN HIS supply truck to the new site, only five kilometers from his room above the office. She’d already made him late. Officially, they were closed that day, but work still went on because most of the employees were Arabs. The foreman, Adam, knew how to handle them, but Jonah tried to make a habit of getting there before the first worker arrived and leaving after the last went home. Ever since he’d taken the job from Manuel Lorenz, the regular hours had made it easier for him to sleep at night. Before then, there had been a sense of perpetual unfinished business. Now a day began, and then it ended; workers were called for and were delivered; oranges grew and workers picked them; barley ripened, and it was harvested. Life could be simple if he let it be.

  Adam was a very good foreman. He’d emigrated from Iraq with his wife and five children in ’47, and there was no nonsense about him. If a worker fell ill and missed a few days, he would be replaced. If anyone slacked, he was given a single warning before being told to find work somewhere else. Before coming to Israel, Adam had lived in a Baghdad slum and had never learned to read or write, but he knew how to handle men. He had the gift of consistency. Even now, Jonah was a little afraid of him.

  It had been Manuel Lorenz who’d brought them together. When Jonah first saw a job posting in Arabic with the Lorenz name, he’d assumed the orchard must have belonged to the gentleman’s son, and he was stunned to see the man himself appear in the office, dapper in a sports coat and light trousers and still smelling of cigars. He had seemed old in 1917, when they’d first met. He had probably been the same age then that Jonah was now.

  “Good Lord! The linguist!” Lorenz said, paralyzed at the sight of him. “What on earth are you doing here? This is the den of the enemy!”

  “I can’t believe you actually remember me,” said Jonah as he shook his hand.

  “I can’t either. But I do. Young man, you can’t actually think we’d hire you to pick oranges.”

  “Because I’m seditious?” Jonah asked.

  Lorenz gave a slight smile under his mustache. “Because, young man, you’re too old.”

  It took little for Manuel Lorenz to convince Jonah to join him for lunch at a café down the road. During the time he’d spent in the military, Jonah had developed stomach problems, and somehow he hadn’t managed to get back to eating properly. The white rolls, mushroom omelet, and ice-water seemed to all be part of being recognized by another human being, something that hadn’t happened to Jonah for months. Lorenz was careful with him. He didn’t ask too many questions. Still, the old man—he must have been over seventy—had an agenda. After making small-talk about egg rations and the gray in Jonah’s hair, Lorenz abruptly asked a question.

  “Look here. How many languages do you know, exactly?”

  Jonah found himself with a fragment of bread and butter in his throat, and he swallowed before saying, “Depends. You mean fluently?”

  “Won’t need to be too fluent,” said Lorenz. “But if you have more than Hebrew and Arabic, you have no business picking oranges. I’ve got a regular Tower of Babel in the office these days, with those sabonim from the camps and the blacks from Morocco and who-knows-where. If you’re not planning on joining the diplomatic corps, I can offer you a job and a room.”

  Jonah took the job without thinking twice. He had been living at a boardinghouse so filthy that squashed bedbugs made a pattern on the plaster wall. His days had become completely shapeless. After his lunch with Lorenz, he was introduced to Adam, and the young man gave his hand a forceful shake. Jonah felt Adam’s vigor and his force like a distant bass note, a call from afar.

  “Boss,” Adam said to Jonah, “it’s about time the old man found someone to take things in hand.”

  Lorenz clucked his tongue like an old lady arranging a match. “Ah, he won’t want to be called boss. He’s a Labor Zionist, a Founder. Lived in a Communist kibbutz for twenty years.”

  “I like to show respect,” said Adam. “Now, boss, first of all, we need to get the ground rules in as many languages as you can manage. Arabic, German
, Jewish, Hungaryish, French. You know them?” When Jonah nodded, Adam gave a low whistle. “You’re sent from God.”

  Jonah couldn’t help but remember what they’d believed at Tilulit about work being therapeutic. He’d spent the whole afternoon copying out a monotonous, awkwardly phrased Hebrew list into seven languages, and then he went back and smoothed out the original Hebrew until it could not be willfully misunderstood: the starting time, the oranges per bushel, the pay per kilo, the consequences of damage, the penalty for sabotage, the penalty for theft, the penalty for speaking with unauthorized personnel who might be saboteurs or trouble-makers.

  Adam disappeared after the introduction, and by the time he came back, the sun had set, and Jonah was still working. Adam switched on the electric light. “Don’t go blind on me, boss,” he said.

  Jonah replied, “Your eyes adjust.”

  “Have you seen the room? It’s not bad,” said Adam. “Used to live there myself before I brought my family over. Plain, but clean. There’s even hot water.”

  Jonah almost asked: Are you implying I stink? He realized that when he’d left Tilulit, he’d left, among other things, the only people in the world who understood his private jokes. He rose and said, “Do me a favor, Adam. Don’t let me hole myself up in this office. I want to be out in the orchard too. Don’t worry. I won’t pretend I’m nineteen years old. Maybe I could make myself useful somehow, do some translating if someone doesn’t understand directions.”

  Adam didn’t answer for a moment. He looked Jonah up and down, his gaze lingering on his left leg. Then he said, “You won’t faint on me, will you, boss?”

  “No,” said Jonah. “I won’t faint.”

  HE HAD BEEN HIRED when the orange trees were still in blossom. There wasn’t much for him to do except watch the seasoned workers trim back branches, stake bent seedlings, or drink Turkish coffees in the shade. Lorenz had other enterprises: a construction firm, a textile mill, and wheat and barley fields. Adam passed Jonah bylaws, contracts, and business letters for translation, but he also kept his promise and made sure he got a little work outdoors.

  “You can take the Pioneer out of the kibbutz,” Adam said, “but you can’t take the kibbutz out of the Pioneer, eh boss?”

  Jonah shrugged. He wondered sometimes why he’d made that request. The sight of the orange trees in blossom caused him physical pain. One afternoon, he was applying pesticide to the roots, and a wind tossed a storm of those blossoms into his hair. He showered that night, and the rut of the stall was white with petals. He couldn’t get the perfume off him, and though now there were no bed bugs, he turned and pressed his face into his pillow and still couldn’t sleep. His knee throbbed. At three in the morning, he finally gave in, pulled up a chair, and propped the leg onto the windowsill. Something fell to the floor.

  It was a military envelope. Jonah’s first thought was that he was being called up again, though that seemed unlikely. He reached out to turn on his desk lamp and opened the envelope. Inside was a folded telegram addressed to a place that no longer existed: Tilulit. But who did he know in Bulgaria?

  Out loud, he said, “It isn’t possible.”

  Electric anxiety made his fingers unable to open the telegram without tearing it. He moved his chair closer to the bed and pulled the flexible head of the lamp towards him, and by the time he’d arranged things, he was able to carefully separate the page. The words were in German. Bela: I am en route to Palestine with my daughter-in-law. Please advise. Nora Gratz c/o Central Postal Station, Athens.

  He read it again. Sweat from his hands stained the paper. Nora? He knew his mother and his sister were dead; he’d found that out a year before. He could only have assumed I was dead too.

  How long had it taken the thing to get forwarded? I might already be here, might be walking down a street with that eternal cigarette in my hand and my sour little face observing everything with amused detachment. A wave of longing overcame him, and he read again: I am en route to Palestine with my daughter-in-law. So someone else had lived; life had gone on. When he’d last heard from me, Gabor had been fifteen. Could anyone possibly have married during those years?

  He knew he should answer at once, even wondered if a post-office would be open that time of night. He pulled on a shirt and trousers and went out. It felt good to walk; it was something to do with all the stuff that filled him at the prospect of seeing me again.

  He hadn’t gone five blocks before he found himself sitting on a stoop with the telegram crumpled and his chin in his hand. My God, what was he supposed to do? Please advise, it said. What sort of advice could he give? The terror he’d felt when he first saw that telegram from Europe returned, and he ran his hand through his hair and thought: She’ll want to live on the kibbutz and they won’t have her. Not after what happened in ’44. The people at Gan Leah wanted someone to blame. And would he be expected to go back, serve as a translator? He didn’t plan to return again.

  HE’D BEEN THERE only once since ’44. That hadn’t been by choice. It was by order of the Haganah during the War of Independence, when he had taken part in several actions called Operation Broom. He had been stationed in the Galilee, and that afternoon, he’d been commanded to evacuate five hundred and thirty Arabs from Taell al-Taji.

  It took a while. The soldiers tried to keep the crowd moving, and Jonah’s job was to prevent a bottleneck on the bridge across the gully. The commander soon realized he should have parked the trucks in the village proper, but he had counted on the cooperation of the kibbutz where villagers could wait until the last of them could be transported.

  The evacuation had been Gezer’s responsibility, and he had asked for Jonah because he was supposed to have an intimate knowledge of the village. But that had been years ago. Now Jonah stood at the far end of that bridge as families piled their belongings onto the flatbeds, and he was amazed at how few faces he knew. He’d lost all sense of who was who. He didn’t even know the young man Gezer addressed, a sad, dark, lean fellow who smoked a cigarette.

  “Hael taefhaem,” Gezer said in the Arabic Jonah had taught him. “It’s for the best. You’re all in danger here.”

  The man had already placed his two carpetbags in the truck, and now he stood in the sun, smoking his hand-rolled cigarette and shaking his head. “I can’t promise they’ll keep quiet. Because they know what you’re doing. Do you know what you’re doing, Comrade?”

  Gezer whispered to Jonah in Hebrew. “He’s a Communist. It’s important that we get his cooperation. He’s well-respected.”

  The bridge lurched under the weight of too many people with too many trunks and sacks and mattresses. Yet they would only be gone for a few weeks until the danger had passed; they didn’t need to bring so many things. They would be moved to another village well out of the way, where housing would be arranged for them. When the war was over, they would return.

  Jonah knew it was his responsibility to tell them all these things in plain Arabic and then to cross over and check the houses to make sure no one remained. Ahmad, dead for ten years, was buried in that village. His wife was still alive, but she had moved to Jordan, taking her children and grandchildren with her. And who was this man who kept his eyes inexplicably on Jonah now?

  He said, “You know what you’re doing? You’re creating a ghetto.” Through his fine nostrils, he blew smoke, and the look he gave Jonah was at once defiant and resigned.

  JONAH SAT WITH MY telegram for five hours, until well after sunrise. First, the street-cleaners appeared and washed off the stones near his feet. Then, a few bicycles with bells passed by, and a small fountain fed from an electric pump began to spill its contents into a marble bowl. The cool air softened enough to make his trousers stick to his legs, and he knew Adam would wonder where he was.

  The post-office had opened an hour before, and a line had formed already. Briefly, he considered finding some way to get to Athens to meet me, but at the same time he had trouble phrasing even his three-line reply. He had too many questio
ns, and to begin to ask them would mean never sending the telegram at all. The woman who typed out the message had a friendly face, and Jonah said to her, “My cousin has come back from the dead.”

  “Mazel tov,” said the postal worker. “She’s coming here? I’ve got people living with me now I never even knew existed. I wish you luck.”

  Her flippancy made Jonah all the more firm in his belief that he was happy I was on my way. Yet for some reason, she was the only soul he told. If Adam noticed a change in his behavior after that night, he didn’t mention it. As weeks passed, and the oranges ripened on the trees, there was plenty of work for him in the orchard, and his life began to settle into the pattern he had hoped for: clear goals, clear head. Every day, he expected the information about the arrival. Every day, he made an effort to look around the block for an empty room where I could live. He wondered if I’d managed to learn Hebrew. Perhaps I could do some typing and book-keeping for Lorenz. It wouldn’t be so hard, finding a place for me in his life, so long as I didn’t expect that life to be anything special.

  The second telegram was forwarded through the military again. Jonah tore open the outer envelope, perplexed. Again, the telegram had been sent to Tilulit. Hadn’t I received his new address? Or, he thought, sinking into his bed, had I received it and not believed it could be true? He felt a flash of something deeper than annoyance. Then, he opened the telegram, read the arrival date, and buried his head in his hands.

  “My God,” he said. “That was a month ago.” He felt a stew of conflicting emotions, relief, remorse, anger, and an edgy knowledge that I did have his new address, that even if I hadn’t used it yet I could at any moment appear at his door. There was, in him, an urge to flee and also to find me at all costs.