Why not tell him, indeed, if only to ensure that some piece of it lived on—some spark of who Helen Watt had once been? Or did she fear resurrecting a time in her life when she’d made a decision she dared not question—for if she did, and found herself wrong after all these years, what was there to do?
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been tempted to speak of it. The story that had once singed and flared in her had long since receded, as her habit of silence turned, over the decades, into law. Did she mean to take it to the grave with her, then? Plainly, that was what she was going to do. She was going to take it to the grave. And it would end there.
Dust.
How many times had each cell in her body changed over since those days? It made no difference. She could still feel it: the dry press of the heat on the concrete roofs of the army base, the jeeps, the dusty khaki uniforms. The too-blunt knives that slipped off the furrowed skin of cucumbers and the bickering between the cooks in the kitchen and the endless work dicing tomatoes that stung every nick on Helen’s clumsy hands, and the leben, the leben, the fledgling Jewish state was afflicted with leben, the same menu over and again until a tank driver stood on a chair in the dining hall and recited a poem about flatulence, and one cook flung a soapy dishrag at his head and the other stormed out in tears, and Gevatron on the radio singing “Finjan” again and people crying out in the night—eleven years after liberation and the end of the war, they still cried out from their bunkbeds on the army base for gassed brothers, mothers shot and piled in a pit; a single such cry would leave Helen staring for hours at the dark ceiling long after the girl with the black eyes and eternally tight jaw from the intelligence detail exploded from her bunk with a ragged “Quiet already!” And the bunks subsided gradually into snores. Only Helen rising to stare out the windows, or step out the door under the sentry’s silent gaze to walk the perimeter of the base under thick, brilliant stars.
But when the sun blared across the desert rubble and hid the stars, the night’s solitary cries were drowned in the din of we. We building the Jewish nation. We making the desert bloom. We was the strongest, most death-defying word, the feats of we were stunning and true and brimmed with love. And the Arabs who walked alongside the dusty roads averted their eyes or stared hard into the dirt their own feet trod, while her own fair English complexion burned in the sun and the smells of the desert filled her nose, and she witnessed all that strove and sang and clashed around her and she counseled herself against seduction.
Helen’s fellow volunteers—one Englishman, one Canadian, five Americans, and one Italian—were all Jews. All had signed up for work on a kibbutz—yet they never passed the kibbutz gate. For forty minutes they sat in the sweltering bus in the southern desert, gazing at a distant palm orchard rising from chalk-bright earth while laughter and cigarette smoke rose from a shifting cluster of sandaled Israelis outside the bus. Finally an English-speaking kibbutz member mounted the bus steps to announce their new destination. A mistake had been made—the kibbutz currently had a glut of volunteers and no beds. But someone knew of an army base nearby that was short-handed, and the kibbutz had taken a quick vote and decided to volunteer their volunteers. Scattered applause. “Put us wherever we can do the most good,” a tall Canadian named Walter intoned, as the bus rumbled back onto the main road in the noon glare.
Dror, the officer tasked with managing the volunteers’ adaptation to the army base, was displeased. At a hastily arranged meeting that night, held on the rock-strewn ground as the sunset glowed orange and pink above them, he paced in his dusty khaki uniform, his own carriage taut though he’d commanded them to stand at ease. “Look around you,” he said. He addressed them in accented English, then repeated the instruction in Hebrew.
Dutifully the volunteers turned, taking in their surroundings: a few dozen low buildings, a radio tower and a water tower, a row of tanks parked beyond.
Dror pointed to the east, into the dusky hills. In a low voice, switching languages and scanning their faces to make sure he was understood, he continued. “Over there, that line of dark rock: Jordan.” He swiveled, pointing south, then west. “There, Saudi Arabia. There, Egypt. Drive a half day to the north: Lebanon, Syria.” He turned back, surveying the group. “There’s been war on this spot where you’re standing. There will be more.”
With his tight black curls, high forehead, and handsome, angular face, he looked to Helen like something out of an illustrated Old Testament—noble and severe.
“We’re a small base,” he said, “but everything is on our shoulders. If you spend your six months here, you’ll understand what that means. If you came for a vacation, go home. In the places you’re from, they care about rank and dignity. Here the work you’ll be asked to do might insult you. If it’s going to insult you, leave now. Someone has to clean the toilets. Someone has to do laundry. In the places you’re from, they’ve forgotten one person can make a difference. But here you’ll find everything you do matters. Every single thing is handmade. Every building you paint or walkway you pave is pulling the yoke.” The kibbutz member who had accompanied them to the base stepped forward and addressed them in English. “I’ll be back at the kibbutz, but don’t worry. We’ll make sure the educational outings you were promised by the volunteer office will still take place. And despite how fierce Dror sounds, he’ll let me talk him into letting you off duty.” He clapped Dror on the shoulder. “You can join our outings as our security detail, my friend—we’ll be your vacation.”
Dror replied with a disapproving shake of his head; then a swift, relenting smile. He seized his friend in a mock headlock that ended with the two men’s arms slung over each other’s shoulders. Helen watched them turn for the mess hall, brothers.
In the base’s kitchen Helen diced tomatoes and washed crate after crate of peaches trucked down from a northern kibbutz, and the thick white fuzz of the fruit made her skin bloom into a red prickly rash, from her hands to her upper arms. Dror, making rounds of the new volunteers, took one glance at her miserable attempts to avoid the fuzz-laden spray as she worked the nozzle over the peaches.
“Nurit,” he called.
Nurit, the cook, set down a pot of steaming beets. At a motion of Dror’s head, she moved Helen to cucumbers, steering her by the shoulders to the counter and placing the handle of a knife into Helen’s fist with an expression of forbearance, as though Helen were yet another new appliance found to be unfit for real labor.
“Our English flower,” Dror laughed, as with his boot he slid a mop bucket to a corner where no one would trip on it, then exited the kitchen.