The Wedding of Anna F. (7 page)

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 nods, makes notes.

“We made it to Vienna. We were kept inside there for weeks. It was terrible. All I wanted to do was go out, take a walk, do the things that other, normal people did. At night I’d curl up on a pallet next to other women in a room that had been a child’s room, a nursery, with a window shaped like a slice of bread.”
How I’m longing—so longing—for everything…
“I can see it all so clearly again. I remember I tried to get up before the others in the mornings. To give myself a minute to stand at that window and look down into the street. Alone. A kind of freedom. A chance to see everything. Nothing stirring. The streetlamps still glowing. The houses and shops still standing behind their closed shutters, the stars falling against the roofs.” I shivered in my new socks, in my borrowed nightgown. At first I thought it was ash obscuring the stars. Then I realized it was only snow. The chimneys started to smoke. A cat curled around a wrought-iron gate. Late flowers in a window pot wilted in the cold. Like in Connecticut. In Connecticut the snow is different than in the city; it falls in flakes like pastry dough, or sometimes in soft balls. I might have married a man and lived in Connecticut.

“Finally we were given more false papers and train tickets and we were carried to Italy. Where the
Kostas
was waiting. From the Greek, meaning the stable, the steady.”

I find my hands fidgeting, feeling for my red scarf. I don’t like that I’ve had to remember this part. That boat. Waiting for days to board it. While narrow bunks were being built below decks, harder, narrower even than in the concentration camps. But I have to remember, to say everything. To prove myself. Prove who I am. To build my case. “In Italy we had
pastaciotti
,” I say to lighten the moment. “I used to have them on Grand Street with my adoptive parents, many years later, and never understood why I liked them so much, until now. In any case, we stayed in that safe house, an Italian villa, pink as a bow. It had two balconies supported by metal grates. At first all I wanted to do was stand and stare from that balcony. I could have hung there for hours, mooning at the Mediterranean.”

At night, the village harbor lit up in a half circle. The moon rose thin and sharp, like an envelope balanced on its edge, and the air turned sweet with night flowers and it didn’t seem like winter anymore, though it was. The waves in the dark sounded like an avalanche falling over and over again. In the dimly lit streets women carried woven shopping bags and men walked under black hats, and the children all looked healthy.

“And then one day, Mr. Bardawil, a girl with a baby arrived in the house. And her name was Hannah.”

He lifts his head to me. “Hannah?”

“Yes. It’s a common name among us. Of course, it’s also the name they found on me, on the false passport I was wearing around my neck when they discovered me on the beach at Haifa. I remember when Hannah came to the villa. The women were upstairs stitching a new flag together out of scraps and rags.” And they said about her:

Oh no. Look at that. All you have to do is look at the way she carries that child around.

Not good, not good.

There is definitely something there. A story. I’ll say.

Why won’t she speak?

Perhaps she’ll speak of it when she’s ready?

The group she came with on the train says she doesn’t speak. Who of us does, really?

Which hellmaker was she in?

Belsen.

No ovens there.

Because they didn’t need them.

That baby of hers is so young, so young. Almost a newborn.

Both so young.

But not both blond. No.

Oh no.

Only the baby blond.

“We became friends. Neither one of us liked gossips, you see. And I got to know Hannah very well, Mr. Bardawil. But such a terrible, hollow thing she was. No amount of cooked potatoes seemed to fill her out.” White dice for knees. Gray glass for teeth. Black shells under the eyes. “But then we all looked the same, that year. She usually ducked away from people, preferring to sit and rock with her baby on her cot on the women’s floor.” Not a gentle motion. An agitated rocking. After a while, she grew calmer. The rocking helped, the scraping over and over again at the same inch, feeling it wear away. Her body was so small it was hard to imagine a baby having come out of it. A baby who looked nothing like her. Blond. Fat. Piercing blue eyes. The women of the villa tried to say that babies sometimes started out with blue eyes and blond hair and then settled into something more…familiar. But they didn’t believe what they spoke. Sometimes Hannah would settle him in his basket and then forget all about him, leaving him to go off to stare from the balcony, looking down into the street at the people passing.

By then it was December and we had to put light sweaters on to walk in the village. Word had gotten around that our ship would be ready soon, even if it was terrible, a floating ghetto; but who cared whether, like a doctor, a ship was good-looking or not? All you cared about was what it could do for you.

The other women whispered excitedly, before they fell asleep in their cots, that the time was almost at hand, while Hannah rolled over the baby to quiet him, covering him with a soft sound, like doves wrestling.

*

“I THINK THE CATERERS have arrived!” I interrupt myself. “I can hear them coming in downstairs. Maia must be seeing to them.”

“Wait, don’t stop.” My interviewer frowns. “Go on, go on. You were telling me about Hannah. Hannah, yes? Not Anna?”

“Oh. Yes. Well. About Hannah.” I sit back, knowing that Maia can handle everything. “She finally opened up to me one day, you see, is what happened. And she told me that in the infirmary at Belsen a doctor had done…things to her, terrible things, before he ran away with the rest of the Germans once they were certain the Russians were coming… And the baby was born while she was in the Displaced Persons camp I told you about. Seven hours of labor, of torture. But then, a baby doesn’t know where it’s come from, or how much it hurts. Babies don’t know anything. They don’t belong to themselves.” When a baby is born it is slimed, like a handkerchief someone has already blown into.

“I don’t think the caterers will be too noisy.” I smile reassuringly. “I predict only a little clattering and distraction and muss. If it’s more, I’m sorry, Mr. Bardawil! We’ll just have to talk our way over and around this business. If it gets too bad, I’ll step out onto the stair landing and talk to Maia about it.” A stair landing. A stair landing. Another memory floods in. Of someone panting at the top of the villa’s stairs, out of breath from having run up from the courtyard.

We set sail in a matter of hours!

The time has come!

I can’t believe it!

Now, truly?

We must pack! We must go! Move!

I don’t think I can move quickly enough!

What about her?

She hasn’t moved for hours. She hasn’t spoken.

Come on, girl!

Come now, gelibte! This is no time for silence. For slowness. Get going! Show your son how happy you are! See how he watches you! He may already be making a memory of this moment. Show him what this historic moment means to you, to all of us! Who knows how young we are when we begin to remember our lives?

*

ABOARD THE SHIP NOW. So high over the water, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves at first. When it finally moved I didn’t know that it wouldn’t be just the ship that would unmoor, but the entire continent of Europe. I didn’t expect the world to fall backward and away from me, the fingers of the docks letting go, the bare white knuckles of those clean houses against the hills. Going. Going. Gone.

I tried not to sleep during the day but I had to stay up at night, because Hannah’s baby was always seasick. The bunks were so narrow and hard. During the day I moved around dazed, feet tangling, trying to keep my balance. I sat where I could find a place, and watched others pace up and down the deck, rubbing their heads, picking the peeling skin from their noses, nervous, smugglers being smuggled, who stopped each other and the sailors to ask the same questions over and over again:
Do you think we’re making good time? How long do you think until we see the coast of Palestine? How will we get through the British blockade? Has there been any news about the British, or can we guess it’s bad? Could we outrun anything in this tub, can that young captain be trusted, do we really know how much experience he has?

I draped a wet sock over my neck and shoulder to keep the sun from baking me and the baby. The older women wore shawls and played cards and sang and prayed in corners. What few shady spots there were, everyone coveted. This one, for example, between the two compartments holding the life vests, next to the crates holding the munitions. We were not supposed to sit on the crates that held the guns and grenades, or smoke near them. But if you got up, another sweaty girl would take your place almost instantly.

“Do you think they’ll let us go to school?”

“I don’t know. We have no records. They won’t know what form to put us in.”

“Of course they will. They’ll have to.”

“I don’t even remember my maths.”

“Me either.”

“But I won’t let the war make me stupid. Dumb.”

“Me either.”

“Are you afraid?”

“A little. Yes.”

“I’m afraid of this awful ship. Have you seen all the wood and hammers they’ve been carrying down below? What are they repairing?”

“I don’t know. We break things, I suppose.”

“There are too many of us. Even though we are too few.”

“Let’s not think about it right now. Close your eyes. Everything goes faster when you close your eyes.”

“Good idea.”

The air so still one evening. The ragged trio of musicians came out, as they always did at night, and the music began. The crates were arranged in a half circle, as the men plucked and readied themselves, leaning their red ears into the wood. Over the ship’s rail, behind their heads, lightning snaked across the horizon, the puzzle of the clouds suddenly fusing together. I didn’t want to move, ever again. I wanted to stay suspended, somehow. Listening to the music. Rocking. Rocking calmly to the melody. But when the first raindrops hit the deck, the violinists hurried to case their instruments.

A sailor came up to me, slick haired, one of the American Jews, a volunteer all in black rubber ready for his watch, and he said to me:

“You two had better go down, Miss.”

But I wanted to be up here where I could breathe. I didn’t want to go down into the staleness and narrowness. And so, in spite of the calls from the sailors that it was time to move and from the women that we would catch our deaths, we stayed, we delayed. Just a moment longer, please. In that cool, electric air. I was hunching my back to shield Hannah’s baby from the thickening drops when I heard what sounded like a lightning bolt—only it wasn’t. It was too close. I felt my left cheek strike the wooden deck, heat filling my ear, and I felt something break underneath me. I struggled to my knees and cried out and saw a bloody thing that looked freshly born, slimed again, and I didn’t know what to do with it. The slick-haired American fell down beside me, screaming, his arm missing. The rain sizzled as it hit the deck and the ship leaned and made a shrieking sound, as if it were stretching to hold a note it couldn’t keep. I tried to find something to grab onto with my hands. But there was nothing. I couldn’t hold anything with one hand. I had to toss the slimed thing overboard. A hiss. Another explosion.