Not Me (24 page)

Everyone thought I was still at school, but I used to sneak back to see her all the time, almost every day. I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know why I didn’t tell my father and mother. I came early before they showed up. Or late after they went home.

“How’s it going?” I said.

Her lips curled into a fine note of sarcasm. “Nathan was by this morning. He was cheery, too. He brought me this.”

She pointed to a pile of vacation brochures for places like Barbados and Tuscany.

“He thinks I’ll be fine by summer. We’ll bicycle through Provence.”

“Mom would never let you go off to Europe with a guy. You’re not old enough.”

“Nor will I ever be. And thank you for not contradicting me. Do you have any cigarettes?”

I gave her one. In those days you could smoke anywhere.

“Thank God I don’t have lung cancer,” she said. “Can you imagine what a drag
that
would be?” She laughed, sucking a thick, fragrant plume up through her nostrils. “Mom and Dad aren’t around, are they?”

“Not that I know of. Dad’s at the store, I guess. I don’t know where she is.”

“Probably looking in the broom closet for The Cure. She’s certain they have one somewhere and for some reason they just won’t give it to me.”

“It’s hard on her,” I said.

“You would think she’s the one who’s dying,” she replied.

I did not know how to take these glib moods. She wanted me to be glib right back, but I suddenly felt I no longer knew how. Maybe it was just that she couldn’t see herself. She couldn’t see how thin she had grown, how green-gray and scabrous her face had become. She knew she’d lost a few teeth, but probably forgot about it as people do when they get used to something, and didn’t realize that when she smiled it radiated hopelessness rather than joy. She was once such a beautiful girl.

But she surprised me again.

“Mikey, I need to tell you something. I’ve been thinking of how to tell you for a few days now. We all know I am going to die; it’s not about that. I’m okay with that. No, I am. As much as I can be. But something else.” She took my hand. “I’m in a lot of pain, Michael. Look at me, please. Look at my face. They want to dope me up all the time, but I don’t let them. I don’t want to not
be here
. You know what I mean? And even when I let them dope me up, I hurt anyway, terribly, horribly, badly. So why should I be a zombie, too? It hurts like nothing I ever thought could hurt. I want to tear my insides out of me. It’s not just one place, like my side or my back. It’s everywhere. Everywhere hurts. They want to do more chemo, but I don’t want more chemo. It’s almost worse than the pain. You get so sick, you never dreamed you could get so sick, but you go through it because you think it’s worth it, because you think maybe they can fix you and you can go home. But it’s not going to work, Michael.”

“Sure it will.”

“So why should I? Why should I go through it?”

“But maybe it will work this time,” I said.

“Michael.”

I looked away.

“You have to help me,” she said.

“Sure!” I said. That was more like it. “Whatever you need.”

“I can’t do it by myself.”

“Do what?”

“Michael,” she said, “are you listening to me?”

“Of course I’m listening to you.”

She stopped for minute and took a deep, vexed breath, but then she looked up at me with bright, gay eyes; and with her mouth closed, I almost could believe she was the lovely girl I had grown up with—the urchin, the funny little troublemaker, the A student.

“I want to end it,” she said. “I want you to help me.”

“End what?”

As if I were the younger one she patted my hand and stroked my face. “Me,” she said. “End me. I want to die on my own terms. I want to die now, before it gets worse, and before I lose my mind. I want to die while I’m still me.”

I could not feel my legs, only a strange beating in my chest and stomach, as if a creature had materialized inside me and was thrashing to get out. I must have grown faint and wobbly because she ordered me to sit down, and then just laughed out loud—at me, I realized—and when she did, the gaps in her mouth—where once the snowy white teeth of perfect girlhood had been—poured black emptiness into the room, and decay and the aroma of gall, and her face sank beneath her bones.

“I just need a lot of morphine,” she said.

I had no idea how to get morphine. I watched around the hospital for a while and carefully followed the nurses until I found the room where they kept the narcotics. The room itself was not locked, and there was a window in the door through which I could see the cabinet where the drugs were kept. Each nurse seemed to have her own key. They carefully logged every withdrawal on a clipboard that dangled from the side of the cabinet. I did not want to arouse suspicion, so I took Karen with me on these scouting expeditions, pushing her along in her wheelchair, her arm attached to a tube of some sort of solution, and lately, an oxygen mask in her hand, with which she could grab a little air when her lungs failed her. She was brave and happy on these jaunts, even though she had barely enough energy to speak. From time to time though, she perked up.

“You’re going to need to steal a key,” she said, “and sneak in in the middle of the night. You’ll have to have a white coat or something.”

“Can’t you just take a bottle of aspirin?” I said.

The plan was patently ridiculous, and I told her so. But it took on the form of a game for us.

“You could make love to…that one.” She pointed to a particularly unattractive nurse—pencil thin, knobby knees, screechy voice, no breasts, black wig, and old, too. “And while she’s in ecstasy, you slip the key off the ring.”

“While she’s in ecstasy?”

“Or you could wait till she goes into the bathroom, and then make a mold of the key with a bit of clay.”

We were two spies in a James Bond movie.

“We need some underworld connections,” she said once. “Do you know any drug dealers?”

As a matter of fact, I did. But I told her I didn’t.

“A drug dealer could get us anything we wanted,” she said.

It went on this way for two days or so, that’s all, really. In my memory, it seemed like it was an extended adventure, something we did for weeks and weeks, like a summer vacation about which you tell so many stories for years and years to come—but not at all. It was only two days. She was going. Not dying yet. But going. Her pain got worse and worse almost with each hour, and I knew she was terrified that her brain would go. I didn’t know which was worse. Because if her brain did go, she wouldn’t really be aware of the pain, except in an animal kind of way—but she would have lost everything and still have to suffer on. And sometimes even now she’d do funny things—talking about her shoes as if they were alive, recalling things that never happened, asking for an apple and then when she got it asking for an apple. But then I thought, if her brain does somehow remain whole enough, what then? She’d have herself, but what would she be? Just pain. Just a circle of pain closing her off from everything except the pain.

On the second day, in the evening, she said to me, “Hurry.”

Visiting hours, in those days, were pretty strictly enforced, and I had to sneak onto the floor, which I managed without too much trouble. The night nurses were at their station, chatting quietly, occasionally glancing up at the monitors. An orderly was napping in a chair near the bathroom, not far from the dispensary. The walls were heavy with many layers of paint—recently they decided pale green was more comforting and less frightening than white. But I was frightened anyway. The floors had been recently Lysoled and I heard my shoes squeak on the linoleum. I stopped in my tracks and hugged the wall. Nothing else moved. A radio was playing at the nurses’ station. “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees. I took a breath and crept along the wall towards the chamber. The orderly stirred in his chair and cracked one eye open. I froze. He yawned and stretched his arms wide, looked around and stopped when he faced my direction. But then miraculously he shut his eyes again and reclined into his chair emitting an easygoing sigh. Quickly, I darted into the drug room.

It was just a metal cabinet with a simple lock, like on a file drawer—not even a padlock. I had planned to jimmy it with my penknife. What I had not planned on was running into the skinny nurse with the black wig who was organizing bandages on a shelf and noting the inventory in a big black book.

She looked up at me slowly.

“May I help you?”

“Oh,” I said. “This is the wrong room! I got confused. I thought—”

“You can’t be in here,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Your sister’s room is in the opposite hall. Pass the nurses’ station, make a right, then proceed down that hall.”

“Oh,” I said.

She gestured toward the door.

“Everything looks the same on this floor,” I said. “It’s easy to get lost.”

She waited for me to turn around and leave, which I did, my heart not only pounding in my chest, but breaking. What was I going to do? What was I going to do? How could I help her, my sister? For I had made up my mind to do it, and it was a terrible decision. But I was only going to go this far anyway—get her the morphine. I would never have administered it. Never would I have done that, and I didn’t believe for a minute that Karen would either. It was part of some fantasy we had, that’s all. I walked casually past the nurses’ station. Oddly, they did not question me. I now know if you act with authority you seldom are questioned, but on that day everything was a surprise to me. I opened Karen’s door. She had a private, and in the dark I could make out her bed and her slight, almost cloudlike figure upon it. On tiptoe I edged closer to her. A bit of streetlamp knifed through the window, and delineated the now terribly sharp features of her face in the half light of a studio portrait. Her flesh was patchy and almost liquid, her lips blue like fountain pen ink, her few long strands of hair sticking out of her bare head like electrical wire, now gray, now white.

Suddenly she unbolted her eyes—shockingly, like a blast. I jumped back.

And then a broad and half-crazy, delirious smile. “You got it! You got it!” She was mad with joy. She grasped my wrist and shook it with glee. “Tonight!” she said. “Tonight!”

“Karen—”

“Tonight! Promise me!”

I held her hand too.

“I will always be grateful to you, Michael,” she whispered. “You will always, always be my prince, my savior.”

I looked at her for a long time.

“When you’re asleep,” I said.

She took a fine, deep breath and, delicately, smiled at me. “Thank you,” she said. Tears formed in her little eyes, like honey dripping sweetly off the edge of the jar, and with my finger I lapped them up and brought them to my lips.

I waited a long time, until I knew she was asleep.

Then I took the pillow and sent her to her rest.

My father’s arms had released their hold on me as he sank back into his sad, empty slumber, and now I sat in my little chair keeping watch the way people do when death is near, by not looking. Instead, I listened to the heartbeat of the floor and ceiling, the pulse of the nurses’ shoes as they padded down the hallway, the breathing of the clock and the monitor and the air itself as it settled around my father’s deathbed. Beneath all this life, my father’s own breath grew thinner and more wooden with every heartbeat. Nothing stirred in the long night, but morning came at last, on strands of pretty, amber light filtering through the Levolors.

What a strange, strange time, I thought. My father finally was allowed to forget, while I was forced to remember. As if there were not enough room in this world for both of us to carry that burden.

As always, in the breast pocket of my linen jacket I had a volume of his journals. This was the last one. #24. I caressed the flaky, soft leather in my hand as if it were an old dog I’d grown to love, and smelled the must rising from its pages as if it were steam from my mother’s soup, fragrant and tempting, ripe with anticipation. I looked over at my father. He was still sleeping peacefully.

From this point on, the chaos of battle overwhelmed him, and yet never in his life had he felt so free. He had run back to his post to find his men
—
Dovid, Ari, Pinchas, Lev
—
firing wildly at anything that moved. He cautioned them to conserve their ammunition and shoot only when they had a clear shot. The first wave came through the burned-out alfalfa, just as he had predicted
—
three tanks covering an infantry assault that moved slowly and relentlessly toward the perimeter. Some of his mines exploded, killing or maiming a few foot soldiers, but the tanks advanced steadily, firing directly at them, shredding their pathetic concrete bunker and leaving them exposed. Yet he experienced an almost divine sense of calm and a clarity of vision and mind such as he had only had in dreams. He could see every corner of the battlefield as if it were a painting he might be studying in a museum, noting every highlight and brushstroke. He felt no fear. Instantly he understood the battle was desperate, but his men could not have known he thought so. His leadership was easy and precise, and his demeanor tranquil and confident.

As the tanks progressed, Dovid cried out over the din of cannon and rifle fire, “Where’s the goddamned PIAT?”

They stuck their heads up and saw Moskovitz crawling toward the barbed wire, pushing the PIAT before her. They immediately began to give her cover. Heshel yearned to be there with her, but he kept his post, firing with precision on anything that looked like it might endanger her. Finally, she set the rocket launcher on her shoulder and fired. She missed, cursing, pounding the earth with her fist.

“She needs help,” he said.

Without a second thought, Dovid was over the side and running toward her. Heshel watched as Dovid slid down beside her, calming her with some witty remark. She laughed, in fact. Dovid! he thought, the happiest man on Earth! His heart pounded as the two of them now edged dangerously close to the forward-most tank. Dovid steadied the PIAT on Moskovitz’s shoulder. Again she fired. This time there was a huge explosion and the tank erupted in flame. The terrified crew leapt out, screaming, their shirts blazing, their skin scorched black upon their arms and neck, with hairless scalps that continued to blister white and green as they ran. Dovid turned and waved triumphantly at Heshel, but Moskovitz covered her face in horror. In any case, their victory was short-lived. The tanks continued their lumbering, deadly advance, and behind them the Bren carriers rolled forward, spewing a relentless barrage of fire. Moments later the Arabs had cut through the barbed wire. Soon after that another threesome of tanks broke through from the north, and were headed straight into the center of the kibbutz. Post 7 had fallen. Post 6 had fallen as well. Heshel watched the blood-soaked survivors running, helter-skelter, towards the ruins of the Bet Am, falling over dead bodies, or being hit themselves and collapsing in a pile of their own exploded organs.

Suddenly, Ari was pulling at his sleeve. A runner had come up from the rear.

“The retreat has been ordered,” he cried. “We’ve got to move back.”

Heshel signaled wildly to Moskovitz and Dovid. Their joyful expressions gone, they were now desperately trying to adjust the firing mechanism
—
the PIAT had jammed. Dovid was beating it with his pistol, and Moskovitz, tears flowing in rage, was frantically pressing the spring back into its track. Heshel pulled himself out of the foxhole and rushed over to them.

“You two…get back. Retreat.”

“But the tanks!” she cried.

“Don’t worry,” he told her, “we’ll set up another perimeter.”

He calmly handed Dovid one of his two German grenades, and told him to throw it at anything that came near them.

“As soon as you get to the trench line, I’ll follow,” he said.

He took her hand, to give her courage. Then he turned from them, and began firing at the Arab line.

But he was not really interested in killing anyone. He did not want to hurt the poor foot soldiers of the great Egyptian army or even blow up their tanks. He did not hate them, or even blame them for what they were doing. He knew they were filled with ideas that were not their own and that they were convinced of the rightness of a cause which had nothing to do with them. He knew that when they were victorious they would feel happy and powerful for once in their lives, pleased that they had followed orders so well and stood firm in the face of death. He knew this because he had been one of them and now he was no longer one of them. In the blindness and smoke of war, he could finally see for himself what mattered and what did not matter. They
—
the advancing armies with their bloodcurdling battle cries and their deafening cannon
—
were not in the slightest important to him. His drama was being played out on some other field, and now, at long last, he had had a glimpse of it.

From the back of his head he saw his beloved Fradl and Dovid disappear behind some rubble close to the trench. They would be safe. He reached for the remaining grenade on his belt. He did not want to waste it.

Running forward a few yards, priming it as he ran, he bent one knee, arched his back, and with a great circular motion, tossed the grenade at the nearest tank. It hit with a clunk, and didn’t explode. He fell flat on his face, laughing. It was wonderfully, wonderfully poetic. Even in smallest detail, German technology had but one ambition: to kill Jews.

Then he got up and ran for his life.

They rallied in a fortified trench near the ruins of the Bet Am. There were now only thirty-odd people, plus several dozen wounded. They had lost almost two-thirds of their number.

In a panic, Heshel realized that Moskovitz and Dovid were not there. No one had seen them. Well maybe someone had. There were some wounded down in the trenches, and maybe they were helping them. Someone else said no, they weren’t there. Everyone was out of the trenches. All the wounded were here. Anyone who was not here was…he didn’t need to finish the sentence.

The tanks had now broken in on all flanks and were rapidly advancing toward them. Some of the Jews still fired back. They tossed Molotov cocktails, threw stones, anything to keep the tanks at bay. In the meantime, Tuli, the Haganah commander, quickly laid it out for them. The only avenue of escape was through the Arab village, which did not seem possible. They could, on the other hand, make a last stand on a hill above the village
—
in the old, abandoned house that commanded the road below
—
but, he said, they could never get the wounded up there.

“But we can’t leave the wounded alone,” someone said.

Silence fell among them.

“No,” someone else finally said, “we can’t leave the wounded alone.”

But it wasn’t really a question of making it to the abandoned house with or without the wounded. They were already surrounded. The injured desperately needed the attention of a doctor
—
the kibbutz doctor had been killed in the early morning. Ammunition was down to a few rounds per person. There were no grenades, no PIAT. The Bren had been knocked out hours ago. No one had had a sip of water since daybreak.

“The Egyptians fight well,” someone remarked quietly, meaning, or at least hoping, that there might be no massacre if they surrendered.

Tuli called for a vote. Some wanted to make a run for it, take their chances among the villagers, or skirt the village somehow, through the wadi that ran along the eastern edge of the town, but no one had a plan that gave any hope of breaking through the enemy lines. A few others thought they might be able to fight on a little longer, but no one could say what the point of that would be. There had been no contact with headquarters for hours. There would be no reinforcements, no salvation. Someone suggested suicide. Kill the wounded, then kill themselves.

But suddenly the Egyptian guns fell silent. The tanks stopped grinding their way up the hill, and the soldiers ceased their incessant battle cry. A voice, in thickly accented English, called out through a bullhorn: “He that walks in peace is blessèd of Allah! Put down your arms! Surrender and live!”

Light as air, made of nothing but sound, it pierced their hearts. Even the strongest, Avigdor, the sabra, began to weep. Without speaking, one of the women fashioned a white flag from a bloodied bedsheet and tied it to a wooden spoon.

Heshel Rosenheim stood up and peered over the sandbags.

The desolate land was stretched out before him, the broken buildings, the burned-out fields, the smoldering trees, the bodies of men and women scattered like grim confetti in colors of red, brown, and gray on the hardened, merciless sand. One of those could be his Moskovitz, he thought, another his Dovid. He suddenly understood how much time had passed, for the sun had moved far across the fine blue sky
—
why, it was late afternoon! He had flown through this day almost as if it had never happened
—
and it was the one day in which everything had happened. He saw that there was movement among the corpses
—
some were alive! Moskovitz could be alive. She was smart, she was swift. Perhaps she was hiding beneath some rock or slab of concrete or in some hole, or had escaped through the runoff canal down into the wadi, skirted the village, made her way to the next outpost, or was lying right in front of him, flat on her stomach, only pretending to be dead, waiting for him to come and get her, drag her back to safety, so that they could slip like earthworms through the enemy lines in the black of night, and make their way up the coastal highway to the fortified Tel Aviv, or she had dug a little tunnel for herself and made it all the way to the orange grove where she refreshed herself with fruit, then snaked her way from tree to tree, stump to stump, and out onto the dunes that led to the sea, where perhaps she had disguised herself as an Arab woman
—
she was dark, was she not? dark eyes, dark hair
—
and so perhaps she walked among the Egyptians exchanging pleasant glances, until she walked right through them and found a little village where they might feed and bathe her, comb her hair, take her silence for shock or infirmity, keep her safe until one night she might escape and find her way home. She could have done that, any of that, she could be lying under a dead cow, or under the boards of the fallen watchtower, she could be holding Dovid in her arms, soothing him, pressing his wounds closed with her strong hands, whispering to him, Courage! Courage! and he would be smiling back, saying, No, I am the happiest man on Earth!

“I see them out there,” he suddenly said. “Moskovitz! I see you! Dovid! I see you! There they are. I can’t leave them there, can I? What would we be,” he cried, “if we left them there?”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tuli rushing up to restrain him, but he cocked his gun and ran out into the face of the Egyptian army.