if he’s a just soul. The truth is only what happened. There is no turning back from it. The truth is an unchanging future, made in the past.
*
I FOUND MY WAY into a German field, and there, at dusk, I dug myself into a haystack, out of the cold. I pulled my weight in after me, closing the hay behind me, but also leaving it partly open so I could breathe and look out, if I needed to, to see the first, glistening stars. The color of the sky was the color of an iris fading…
No wind or breeze. Not even a cricket stirred. The haystack seemed fresh, but after a while, it stank. Just like our hayfields here upstate.
I was tired, so very tired, and so I started to sleep, in spite of the smell. My shoes sinking like coffins at the ends of my legs. My arms pricked by needles.
A vivid dream. I still have it sometimes. Of people sitting around a dinner table, laughing. And I know every face. I know and could have crawled inside each one and looked out through their eyes. What’s to be done about her? they ask, as I turn my good ear away from them. The table is set, there is plenty of food, the pots are all big and hot. I make a well in the middle of my potatoes and kale, to hold my gravy. The arguing still going on. Almost whispered now. What’s to be done about her? What’s to be done about Anna? The gravy is dark with bits of meat in it. The potatoes are reedy with cabbage. A clock ticks. A cat winds its tail around my legs. I need to get up and use the WC, but I’m too comfortable. Moonlight spoons in from a window, and I’m being lifted out into an armful of light.
Now a new smell: a burning cigarette. What should we do about her? A torch, a flashlight, is burning through my eyelashes. A flashlight is shining in my eyes bright enough so that I turn the inside of my arm, my forearm, over my face, showing my number. Hay falling from under my armpit. Then I hear, in Hebrew:
“She’s one of us. Put that gun down.”
* * *
“MEMBERS OF THE MOSSAD. Former resistance fighters. Tough looking, armed, and very serious. The Berihah.” I pull my sleeve down over my wrist, so that Bardawil will not go on looking at it. “The beam of light fell and turned into a circle shining on a soldier’s boot. I saw cigarette tips moving and glowing in the night, and eyes shimmering like leaves. And shoulders hunched, because they were all carrying heavy military packs. Like the soldiers who found me later on the beach. There were about ten of them who came to sleep that night in that field. They picked up more refugees, like me, as they went on. Men and women. Old and young. But mostly young.” So cold it was, some mornings. Waking in a field. Like getting up inside an unlit stove. I remember that so clearly now. All of us carrying weight.
“So you are saying you traveled out of Germany with the Berihah movement.”
“Exactly. If a group grew too large, they broke up into smaller groups. I was assigned, that first week, to a group of six. No one was allowed to move without papers or organization, and the role of the Berihah was to obtain false papers, to smuggle us around, even though the borders were closed. There were passports waiting for us at key places, false names for us, given up by legal immigrants to Palestine who were already across the sea, who had sent them.”
I look at him, anxiously.
“I can’t help,” my young biographer leans forward across my desk, “but notice something as you speak, Hannah.”
“Anna. Please.”
“I can’t help but notice that at a crucial moment in your adolescence you were forced to develop a false identity. That must have been very difficult for you, during what was already a very traumatic time.”
I tap my fingernail on the wood of my desk. “Look at that thing, Mr. Bardawil.” I point to his phone. “So small. Just a sliver. You don’t see how it can hold everything inside it. And yet, of course, it was designed to, so it does. It does. It manages. Do you see?”
He
*
I FOUND MY WAY into a German field, and there, at dusk, I dug myself into a haystack, out of the cold. I pulled my weight in after me, closing the hay behind me, but also leaving it partly open so I could breathe and look out, if I needed to, to see the first, glistening stars. The color of the sky was the color of an iris fading…
No wind or breeze. Not even a cricket stirred. The haystack seemed fresh, but after a while, it stank. Just like our hayfields here upstate.
I was tired, so very tired, and so I started to sleep, in spite of the smell. My shoes sinking like coffins at the ends of my legs. My arms pricked by needles.
A vivid dream. I still have it sometimes. Of people sitting around a dinner table, laughing. And I know every face. I know and could have crawled inside each one and looked out through their eyes. What’s to be done about her? they ask, as I turn my good ear away from them. The table is set, there is plenty of food, the pots are all big and hot. I make a well in the middle of my potatoes and kale, to hold my gravy. The arguing still going on. Almost whispered now. What’s to be done about her? What’s to be done about Anna? The gravy is dark with bits of meat in it. The potatoes are reedy with cabbage. A clock ticks. A cat winds its tail around my legs. I need to get up and use the WC, but I’m too comfortable. Moonlight spoons in from a window, and I’m being lifted out into an armful of light.
Now a new smell: a burning cigarette. What should we do about her? A torch, a flashlight, is burning through my eyelashes. A flashlight is shining in my eyes bright enough so that I turn the inside of my arm, my forearm, over my face, showing my number. Hay falling from under my armpit. Then I hear, in Hebrew:
“She’s one of us. Put that gun down.”
* * *
“MEMBERS OF THE MOSSAD. Former resistance fighters. Tough looking, armed, and very serious. The Berihah.” I pull my sleeve down over my wrist, so that Bardawil will not go on looking at it. “The beam of light fell and turned into a circle shining on a soldier’s boot. I saw cigarette tips moving and glowing in the night, and eyes shimmering like leaves. And shoulders hunched, because they were all carrying heavy military packs. Like the soldiers who found me later on the beach. There were about ten of them who came to sleep that night in that field. They picked up more refugees, like me, as they went on. Men and women. Old and young. But mostly young.” So cold it was, some mornings. Waking in a field. Like getting up inside an unlit stove. I remember that so clearly now. All of us carrying weight.
“So you are saying you traveled out of Germany with the Berihah movement.”
“Exactly. If a group grew too large, they broke up into smaller groups. I was assigned, that first week, to a group of six. No one was allowed to move without papers or organization, and the role of the Berihah was to obtain false papers, to smuggle us around, even though the borders were closed. There were passports waiting for us at key places, false names for us, given up by legal immigrants to Palestine who were already across the sea, who had sent them.”
I look at him, anxiously.
“I can’t help,” my young biographer leans forward across my desk, “but notice something as you speak, Hannah.”
“Anna. Please.”
“I can’t help but notice that at a crucial moment in your adolescence you were forced to develop a false identity. That must have been very difficult for you, during what was already a very traumatic time.”
I tap my fingernail on the wood of my desk. “Look at that thing, Mr. Bardawil.” I point to his phone. “So small. Just a sliver. You don’t see how it can hold everything inside it. And yet, of course, it was designed to, so it does. It does. It manages. Do you see?”
He
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