Pressing her lips tight, Helen sliced with slow, wretched care.
The volunteers were housed with the soldiers. In the bunk above Helen slept Muriel, who’d survived the war as a child in hiding in Romania and refused to undress in front of the other girl soldiers for a reason no one asked. Muriel’s face had the compact vividness Helen had seen only in central Europeans—a piercing intensity, as though life must be kept burning against endless odds. Most of the female soldiers had responded with indifference to the information that Helen wasn’t Jewish; some even nodded appreciation. Only Muriel had looked as though the fact were a violation, and upon learning Helen was her bunkmate, swore audibly. Seated on her mattress, Muriel spilled water from her canteen, swinging her legs in silence as drops rained down onto Helen’s bed below. She cut her own hair sitting on Helen’s bunk and refused to clean the leavings. At night the sharp ends, scattered on Helen’s pillow and sheets, pricked Helen’s skin like an accusation—as if Muriel could somehow see the cream-colored bedroom with the cream-colored bedcover beneath which Helen had slept for nineteen years . . . or hear Helen’s mother’s exclamation, breaking the hush of a breakfast of marmalade toast, “This isn’t about Notting Hill again, is it?” Helen’s decision to go to Israel had been about the riots, of course—just as it had been about singing the last resonating notes of “Blessed Are Those That Be Undefiled” in the lush wooden chapel at her school’s winter concert, the echoes of the words silenced by polite applause. It had been about the girlhood friend who broke up with Helen, accusing her—“When you have a feeling you just act on it”—simply because Helen departed abruptly from a party she found dull; it had been about hiding an airline ticket and Hebrew dictionary in her bureau and knowing neither parent would commit the loving impropriety of snooping; it had been about a thousand other things Helen reviled even if she couldn’t name them.
Mornings, while the girls waited for Muriel to finish changing her clothing in the bathroom stall, Helen looked at her own wan reflection in the dented metal mirror above the trough sink and tried to imagine it purged of something irredeemably English: the part of her that, despite her unflinching intentions, knew to applaud politely and stay above the fray.
Weeks passed; she was rotated from kitchen duty to collect spent shell casings on the firing range. Next she was sent to clear a field where a landing strip was to be built, joining others in gathering rocks and pitching them onto the bed of a slowly rolling pickup truck. Through the sun-shot days she listened to the other girls chatter and daily understood more of their Hebrew, though she didn’t attempt to intrude on their sharp, hopeful talk. At the firing range she took instruction from Dror alongside the other volunteers. The kick of the Mauser was surprising, but she was a good shot, as she knew she’d be: she hit the man-shaped target in the chest and then the head, and Dror noted it with a nod and turned away from her to coach the others.
A half kilometer from the base, she and a few of the other girl soldiers hand-mixed and poured the concrete floor of a shed in the middle of the desert, for what purpose they weren’t told. They laid the floor and were sent on to other tasks; weeks passed. Only Dror seemed frustrated by the supply officer’s lack of haste in providing materials for walls and roof. After a third week Dror instructed the girls to paint the floor. They were dropped off once more with brushes and paint and water and one gun for their protection. A floor in the middle of the desert, surrounded by nothing but rocks and a single dusty track. The girls painted half of the floor white and then sat on the shadeless earth. The sun was high and Helen sweated in her uniform and cap. Mid-morning Dror arrived with a pale green melon, which he sectioned with a knife on the hood of his jeep. It dripped and the girls ate the slices with their hands. Dror spoke to no one. He sat on the fender and smoked while they ate, then collected the rinds in a plastic bag.
“Drink,” he commanded them, seeing the still-full bladder of water beside the half-painted floor.
Dutifully, Helen and a few of the others filled their canteens.
“That water tastes like camel piss,” Muriel said.
Dror laughed despite himself, as at a saucy younger sister. “Drink the camel piss, then.”
Muriel lifted her chin in a way that made the other girls fall silent. “It’s bad for our gorgeous complexions.”
He tossed the bag of rinds into the jeep. “So is going thirsty in the desert.”
“We’ll drink if we’re thirsty,” retorted Muriel.
“Drink,” Dror repeated, his tone weary and firm, like a father ending an argument.
But Muriel’s face tightened, and Helen saw that she resented Dror and was in love with him. And Helen could see, in the slow way he settled into his driver’s seat, that Dror chose not to know this.
“Drink,” he said. He started the jeep. “By the time your body feels thirst you’re already dehydrated. This is the desert. Don’t be a fool. In the desert, fools die.” The notion of fools dying seemed to anger him and he did not speak gently. He started away, turning in a tight arc to head back toward the base.
“Heil Hitler!” Muriel called as he gained speed.
For an instant the jeep’s pace faltered. Then, his face inscrutable, Dror lurched past.
“You live two years under enemy guns,” Muriel screamed after the receding jeep. “Then I’ll listen to your opinion.”
The pale dust of Dror’s passage hung on the horizon.
“What’s your problem?” the girl beside Muriel said quietly. “He lost his mother and sister.”
Muriel’s face showed that she hadn’t known. But she gave a hard laugh. Taking her neighbor’s canteen, she slowly drizzled a dark pattern of water on the rocky ground.
Helen watched the water evaporate.
When it was gone, the other girl reclaimed her canteen and capped it with a relenting shrug. “He’s so good looking. It’s too bad he’s a prick.”
That night Muriel cried softly in the bunk above Helen’s.
Her father wrote a letter. Your mother tells me that you have not yet set a definitive date for your return. This adventure of yours has lasted long enough and it’s time you ended it. There’s a path in life, and one cannot step off it for long without consequences. Your mother and I ask you to book return passage now and we look forward to your arrival.
One evening in the mess hall, when she’d been on the base two months, shouts rose over the clang of metal trays. A tank soldier was leaning over a counter to argue with a red-haired dishwasher: something about a stack of trays slipping, hot soup. The dishwasher looked unimpressed, even when the tank soldier’s voice rose to a bellow.
Helen filled her plate with diced cucumbers and tomatoes and proceeded to the volunteers’ table. “What’s the trouble?” she ventured as she sat.
The Jewish student from Italy with the thick black-rimmed glasses shrugged knowledgeably. “That one”—he pointed at the soldier—“was a kid in one of the camps. They didn’t survive if they didn’t scrap over everything.” With a glance at Helen, he added, “What do you expect?”
Would there be some final bar she might one day clear, proving that she too could understand? She watched the Jewish volunteers eat their food.