Louisa Read online

  “Adam,” he said to the foreman the next day, “is there an absorption camp nearby?”

  Adam nodded. “We’ll be getting some of them working here whether we like it or not. You’ll have your hands full, believe me.”

  “Hungarians, any of them?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But blacks like me, mostly. All the Ashkanazim are too good to work with their hands. They want the Aretz to be New York City.”

  Jonah did not go to the absorption camp, but he found himself taking long walks through the business district after dark and searching the windows of cafés. Every time he saw a small, dark woman, he felt his throat contract. For some reason, he was certain that was how we would find each other, by chance, in line for the cinema or on a bus or under a beach umbrella. The half-hearted search went on for a few weeks, and one night, as he passed a sweet-shop, he turned to find a pale old man holding a strawberry ice-cream cone and staring at him.

  “Bela Hesshel?” he said. Then, in Hungarian, “Nem, sajnos fáradt vagyok. Az nem lehet.”

  “De lehet,” Jonah said carefully. “That was my name.”

  “Istenem, I knew your sister Adele. I’m Kalman Nagy. I met you maybe three times before you came here.” He didn’t seem to know what to do with his ice-cream cone, and he bent over and laid it on the cement before approaching Jonah tentatively to shake his hand.

  Because Jonah could not think of an adequate response, he said, “You’ve got a strong grip.”

  To Jonah’s horror, Kalman gave a high-pitched giggle and said, “That’s what comes of hard labor. I was in the copper mines in Serbia. I never thought I’d leave a desk. You want a cigarette, Bela?” He pulled out a greasy leather case, and when Jonah refused, he seemed so offended that in the end, Jonah accepted one and put it in his pocket.

  They sat in a café, talking for some time. Kalman hadn’t heard about Adele’s death, though it didn’t surprise him. That I was still alive did interest him though, and he asked whether Jonah knew if I was still married. I would be looking for a husband surely. Every woman wanted a husband now, and every man a wife. It was the most natural thing in the world. At the DP camps in Europe, they were going at it like rabbits, everywhere they could find a stable surface, and now that I was in Israel someone would have to make an honest woman of me.

  “Of course,” Kalman said, “she’ll probably have her sights on you.”

  Jonah rubbed his forehead as though someone had struck it, hard.

  Kalman’s giggle got the best of him again. “Well, you can’t marry her. After all, she’s your cousin.”

  “Excuse me,” said Jonah, pushing back his chair.

  Kalman looked stunned and horrified as though he were being left in mid-ocean, and he all but grabbed hold of Jonah’s trousers to keep him there, but it was no use; Jonah walked off at such a pace that he was conscious of the pressure he was putting on his knee, and the pain spread up his thigh to the hip. He could have doubled over easily, but he forced himself forward, finally pulling himself upstairs to his flat and falling onto his bed in a state of nervous exhaustion.

  The first telegram I’d sent was where he’d left it: I am en route to Palestine with my daughter-in-law. Please advise.

  He folded it three times, and then he found the second telegram which gave the date and folded that one too. Both, he stuffed into one of the discarded military envelopes, and then he threw them in the trash.

  He didn’t generate much trash, and it took a week for his little bin to fill with persimmon peels and wrappers from cheese, but eventually, he emptied it into a dumpsite. The stuff in the dumpsite would go where? To an incinerator? You couldn’t really get rid of trash, but if you kept your distance from trash for long enough, it would disappear. Same with the past, he thought. Same with what people wanted from you which you could never give them, and what people gave you, which turned to ashes in the end.

  SO THAT WAS THAT, and the harvest began, and Jonah had other things on his mind. The pickers were mostly Arabs, but a proportion were from the camp, and the two were often at each other’s throats. Adam considered the Europeans the worst, in every way inferior to the Arabs. Jonah occasionally wondered if he was too hard on them or if his standards were artificially high, but what it came down to was simple: The Arabs knew the work and the Jews didn’t. Worse, the Jews looked down on the Arabs, and they had reason, as their pay was higher, they ate cold chicken dinners provided by the state while the Arabs ate plain bread baked by their wives, and finally, they spoke European languages.

  After the first week, Adam was in a rare bad temper. “Boss,” he said, “I’ll tell you, it’s no wonder that Hitler tried to gas them all.”

  Jonah, exhausted from a day of simultaneous translation, could barely move his body into the cab of the truck. “Look,” he said to Adam. “He would have gassed you too.”

  Adam shook his head. “I wouldn’t have walked into the ovens.”

  Jonah said, “Sometimes you can’t know what you’ll do with what life gives you. Sometimes, it’s better not to think about it.”

  Adam agreed, and he told his boss not to worry, that he had everything under control, and that Jonah ought to get some rest because he hadn’t wanted to say anything, but he hadn’t looked so good lately. “You know what you need?” he said to Jonah. “You need a little female company.”

  “So find me some, Adam,” Jonah replied, too tired to even know what he was saying. The next morning, Adam brought Louisa.

  WHAT HE ACTUALLY did was approach Jonah, who was sitting in the orchard gate-house with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. He said to him, “Boss, there was someone at the camp who says she knows you.”

  Jonah lowered his paper. “At the camp?”

  “A lady,” Adam said.

  He put down the paper. “Hungarian?”

  “I’d say not. A real lady. Probably doesn’t know a bushel from a diamond bracelet. So is it a go?”

  “Is what a go?” Jonah asked, a little annoyed now.

  “Can I make an introduction?”

  Jonah raised no objection, though he had the sense that he was doing something dangerous, and there at the door stood a blonde girl he had never seen before in his life. She looked a little sun-struck and a little lost, and Jonah was surprised to find himself rising to offer her his chair.

  “Danke,” she said, and then she put her hand over her mouth and said in Hebrew, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re German?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I’m almost a Jew now.”

  “There are German Jews,” said Jonah, in German.

  Of course, she knew that. To be in the middle of this bewildering conversation reminded him of something that he couldn’t quite place. He turned over an empty bushel and sat, taking a better look at her. She was a little puffy around the eyes, and her hair was actually not blonde but light brown. He wasn’t mistaken. He had never seen this girl before.

  He wasn’t sure if he should address her in Hebrew or German, and he finally settled on Hebrew, though it felt artificial. “This is a work site.”

  She said, “I want to work. I came here to work.”

  “But this is heavy, hard work. You’re not dressed for it.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. Then, she gave him a strange look. “You’re not like the photograph.”

  Jonah gave her one more, swift glance which told him nothing. To cover his uneasiness, he asked her, “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Do you have cream?” she asked him.

  “No,” Jonah said. “Just milk. I can’t find work for you here. My foreman was wrong to bring you. Try the labor-pool. Maybe they could place you at one of the textile mills.”

  “But you’re the one who’ll help us,” the girl said. “Why would anyone help a stranger? My Mutter—” she said the word in German, “—she saved my life.”

  What was it about this girl that made her seem so full of a story the way a tin is full of milk? Jonah knew th
at with a gentle push, what was inside of her would spill out; he felt his hand shake a little as he raised the pot to pour some coffee.

  “My Mutter saved my life. I owe my life to her. I’m here,” the girl said, “because our lives are worth nothing to anyone but you.”

  Jonah added milk to her coffee and handed the cup to her. “You’re talking to the wrong man,” he said. “There’s some mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake,” she said. “I’m here for her sake and mine. I’m here in her place. I’m Louisa.”

  Then she began. She told him that while her whole world had passed away, she’d clung to me, that I was the only home she knew, that my people were her people, that my refuge was her refuge, and that if she were parted from me she would die. Jonah listened to what Louisa made of our story, with his chin in the palm of his hand, and once, mid-sentence, she stopped and asked him:

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Flustered, Jonah asked her, “Like what?”

  “Like that? Right at me?”

  “I’m listening to you,” Jonah said, and the answer obviously didn’t satisfy her, but she went on talking until there was no more coffee left in the pot. Afterwards, he arranged for her to do some light work through the harvest. Adam looked conspiratorial, but he also didn’t seem surprised that he sent Louisa back to the camp.

  “Frankly,” he said, “she’s a little young for you, boss. She must be my daughter’s age.”

  “She’s twenty-two,” Jonah said, “and she’s the daughter-in-law of my last living relative from Hungary.”

  Adam nodded and looked a little tired. “So some Hungarians. All right. Look, if she’s going to work here, she’ll need to be on the books. What about the relative? You want him too?”

  Jonah hesitated, and Adam took the opportunity to clap him on the shoulder.

  “Boss,” he said, “we’ve got enough Hungarians as it is, no offense intended. If you want a family reunion, that’s terrific. Have it in a café. I’ll bring some whiskey.”

  “I’m not sure,” Jonah said. Somehow it was safer to leave it at that. He arranged for Louisa to be taken to the orchard every day and took no steps to meet with me.

  He came close once. The harvest had ended, and now Louisa did light work in the office, filing and addressing envelopes. She had gotten into the habit of taking her lunch with Jonah. He knew it was inappropriate but also couldn’t help himself. As he drank his yogurt, she would tell him more and more of our story, about how she had met Gabor that day and left her Schubert behind, about his lost song, treated lightly, and his new song, written for her sake, and about how he looked right through her sometimes as though he were angry but wouldn’t say why. At points, she repeated herself or contradicted what she’d said a few moments before, yet two things never changed: I had saved her life, and only Jonah cared now whether she and I lived or died.

  Jonah sometimes let those lunch-hours stretch, and as the heat grew more intense, Louisa’s story took on a momentum that astounded him. There seemed to be no end to how much she had to say. On the crest of that story, his own past was like a little driftwood, not worth mentioning. Yet now he was a part of that story. He was a new episode, the cousin who was their final destination, a figure he could not believe himself to be. He wondered when she’d find him out.

  It happened a month after her first appearance when she said to him, “I never sang for you.”

  “No,” Jonah said. “You shouldn’t, though. It’s too hot.”

  “But Gabor wrote the song. It’s all I have left of him,” Louisa said. Then, she rose from the stool, clearing a little space around herself, and silence, as ever, rose around her in an oval; her lungs, those round, strong fuses, emitted light. She began:

  What is lost, what is lost

  We can not have back again.

  It is like a breath we’ve taken.

  We can not breathe it again.

  It is like good bread we’ve eaten.

  We can not eat it again.

  It is like a heart we’ve broken

  Or our own heart, lost in vain.

  After she’d finished, she looked expectantly at the man who sat on the overturned bushel. She might have wanted praise or a kind look. What she got was a face like a mask. Helpless, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Jonah got up and said, “Don’t come here anymore, Louisa.”

  “But I have to work—”

  “Work, then!” Jonah said, and he hadn’t realized that he was shouting until his unfamiliar voice rattled at him from the walls. “Sing in a night club. Scrub floors. I’m not up to charity cases. What the hell do you expect of me?”

  Louisa shrank back with her hand drawn to her mouth, and a strange hum came up from her throat as though she’d turned into a tuning fork. He wanted not to care that he’d hurt her. He could change his name, his home, even his nature, and he could tell himself a thousand times that he had been right not to take me to Palestine that night, that it would have been a false promise, that those letters had not addressed him but some stranger, that he had not run away, nor had he left his family to their death. He could even tell himself that I was capable of knowing all of this. But there were some things he could not face.

  Before she left, he gave Louisa an orange. He pressed it into her hand before she left him and said, “Give this to your mother-in-law. Tell her it’s a real orange, from Israel. Tell her it’s all I have to give her.”

  THE MORNING Louisa appeared at Jonah’s feet, he could have turned her out. Even as they drove to the barley field together, he wondered why he’d told her he would find something for her to do. She had caught him asleep, off-guard, and then there was the business with the mug of juice and the bread, simple things to give her. Somehow, the rest had followed.

  But life wasn’t simple. As they parked the truck, he noticed that there was a strange group at work that day, young Europeans chattering together in Hebrew and pointing to parts of the field as though they were preparing for a battle. Adam walked to meet them and said, “Pioneers. Jewish Agency sent them, God help us all.”

  Jonah frowned. “What are they doing working on Shavuot?”

  Adam shrugged. “They’ll get us in hot water is all I know. But they won’t leave.”

  Jonah could already see what would happen. They would disregard all instructions, refuse to work with Arabs or make trouble over working conditions, and make life completely impossible. In spite of himself, he said, out loud, “Where do they think they are?”

  He’d almost forgotten that Louisa was there, and she said, “Eretz Yisrael.”

  Jonah found his hands forming fists. “They’ll pitch tents and plant things and eat what they plant, and they’ll think it makes them new men, but in the end, they’ll live in ugly cement houses with their radios on.”

  “They’ve lived in worse places,” Louisa said, and it was then he took a closer look at those young men and women in their short-sleeved tops and saw the tattooed numbers.

  Yet he persisted, speaking directly to Louisa now. “What kind of ending is that?”

  Louisa looked up at him and asked, “Why is it an ending?”

  HE FOUND HER A fresh set of work clothes and a sun hat, and he settled in to record-keeping, looking out at her too often. She was no good. The heat exhausted her. Barley grains caught in her hair and flax got in her eyes, and she stumbled over a pile of canvas sacks and landed, face-first, in the dirt. Watching her pull herself up and persist, Jonah fought the urge to intervene. Yet why sit there, passively watching her suffer? It was as though he wanted something in her to break down. Then she would know that he wasn’t anybody’s salvation, that he had no wings, just arms and legs and a gut and a heart. He was a man. She’d climbed into his bed as though he’d been a eunuch. If he had proved otherwise and had taken her that morning, how would that fit into her beautiful story?

  She approached him at the end of the day, and he poured her some water and made her sit down. He
said, “You should go home.”

  Louisa held her cup of water in both hands and looked at him over the rim. “You mean I can’t come back here?”

  “No,” Jonah said. “Home. Germany.”

  He thought she’d take the words hard, but she only gave a little shrug. “I can’t.”

  “Your mother-in-law can take care of herself. I know you won’t believe it, but it’s true. She’s been taking care of herself for most of her life, Louisa. If you let her alone, she’ll be fine.”

  “Go home to Germany,” Louisa said, as though she hadn’t heard him. “They always ask me, why don’t I go home to Germany.”

  “It’s a good question,” Jonah said.

  Louisa blushed and said, “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that. Like you think I’m lying.”

  Jonah turned red himself. He reached out and touched Louisa’s arm. She flinched, and he felt a rush of confusion as he went on. “You’re lying to yourself. You expect too much from this country.”

  Louisa said, “No. You expect things.” She swallowed, hard, and looked down at her hands. “I can’t go back.”

  “You have a mother and a father,” Jonah said.

  Then, Louisa’s mouth turned up a little. “No. I don’t. They think I’m dead.”

  Jonah said, “You’re joking.”

  “No. They think I died in Buda. Bombs hit the house and they never tried—” She dipped her head low now, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I was ruined. I was better off dead.” Her shoulders began to shake a little until she gave a hiccup so abrupt, it threw Jonah off guard.

  He whispered, “Louisa, hush. You can’t be right. They would have looked for you. They’re looking for you now.”

  “No. They don’t look for me. They don’t want me. I’m better off dead to them. How could they want me back? They should have put me on one of those trains. I was ruined. Nobody wanted me.” She paused to catch her breath. “And everywhere—all over Budapest—it snowed.”

  “Louisa, hush. It’s all right.”