She paid without bargaining—surely more than the thing was worth, but the sum was still low—and, with a wave to the satisfied vendor, returned to the beach.
“Helen!” Dror, still wet from his swim, a towel over his shoulder, broke away from what seemed to be an urgent conversation with another man—the owner of the restaurant where they’d bought lunch. He ran to her. The expression on his face—incredulity and fury—tightened her body.
“What?” Inadvertently she laughed.
“What were you thinking?”
She turned. Behind her the old Arab man had disappeared.
“He had his wares in his cart.”
“So you just followed a man you didn’t know down an alley?”
“I didn’t just”—she looked at him. “Well. Everything’s fine, isn’t it?”
“Do you have any understanding?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. She could make no sense of Dror’s fury. He’d gone from tenderness to tight-lipped rage in what seemed an instant.
“A blond-haired English girl,” he pressed, “out for the day with an Israeli Jew. You’d be a perfect candidate for an attack.”
“Dror—he was a wheezing old man.”
“You can only say that for sure now, on the other side of it. If you want to ignore the dangers then you might as well—”
“How is it any different from the man who sold us lunch?”
“I’ve bought lunch from Ahmed a dozen times. Everyone knows him. He was about to help me search for you right before you showed up.”
She didn’t know how to answer.
“You need to think about what could have happened to you.”
He spoke like an adult scolding a child. Yet he was twenty-four—only five years older than Helen.
“I don’t see,” she said to him quietly, “why the thought of me being in danger should make you look at me as though you hate me.”
They rode the bus into the desert. The heat of the afternoon pressed on the metal roof; she angled her head closer to the window, which she’d slid open as far as it would go. When they’d traveled most of the distance to Be’er Sheva, Dror lifted a hand and laid it atop hers—but it was a heavy, dutiful gesture. After a moment, she slipped her hand away.
Arriving at last at the base, she thought they’d part ways—but he led her instead to the empty barracks on the deserted northern side of the base where they’d spent stolen hours these past weeks.
Just inside the door she balked.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, “if it’s torture for you.” She meant to sound wry, like a woman in a movie, but her voice wavered.
He broke away from her and pushed through the thin metal door. A blare of sunlight—then it banged shut behind him, leaving her in the dark.
She found him smoking outside, glaring at the empty stage of the desert. He didn’t turn at her step. “I need you to understand,” he said. Of course, she thought. Staring at him, she tried to imagine what his mother and sister would have looked like—those same dark eyes and curls on softer features.
“I’m sorry, Dror, I—”
“Don’t be sorry.” He dropped his cigarette to the dirt, ground it under his sandal. “When I kiss you,” he said, “I’m just one man. I’m not carrying all of them with me.” He paused, waiting for her to understand. “This week I hardly thought about my family.”
She’d no answer for the simple grief in his statement.
A long moment passed. She heard her voice. “Are you lonely with me?” she said. “Because I’m not a Jew?”
He didn’t answer, and to her own surprise when she spoke again her voice wasn’t gentle, but accusatory. “Can’t you trust me?”
“It’s not a question of trust. It’s”—he breathed. “I don’t know, Helen, whether you understand all that you’re touching when you touch me.”
“You’re right. I don’t. The Nazis made your world a horror, and now after everything you went through, you’ve decided that world is where you’ll stay? Do you want to live in a world where no one can cross any lines or—or touch each other, Dror?”
He spun to face her, then stopped, his face lit with fury.
She said, “You think I’m heartless.”
He inhaled slowly through his nostrils. “Yes.”
She was shaking, but her words came steady, as though they cost her nothing. “I’m not. And I didn’t think you’d be one of those who confuse truthfulness with heartlessness.”
A cluster of goats picked its way across the plain beyond the barbed-wire fence. A slight boy in a white headdress followed them, a stick dangling unused at his side. Nothing else moved on the horizon.
“You’re right,” Dror said. He watched her. After a moment he said, “When you see what makes no sense to you, you say something.” He paused. “Don’t stop doing that.”
His handsome face had softened. She felt his grief rest gingerly in her hands.
She wanted to apologize—tell him how wrong she’d been, ask him please to tell her more, tell her all of it until she could feel what he felt.
He held himself apart another moment. Then reached, blindly, for her face.
That night she lay down with him on the rough blanket, with the feeling of sliding from a great height. He met her there with a solemn welcome, his hands on her body indelible.
Then one evening later that week, their secret was no longer a secret. At the canteen there was whispering on the bench: Nurit from the kitchen sitting with flirtatious Dov from the bomb unit; both shaking heads at something Avi the American volunteer was saying. Seated beside the trio, Muriel listened long, with arms wrapped round her torso, before issuing a vehement verdict.
From where Helen sat, alone on the end of her own bench as though adrift at sea, only one word of Muriel’s speech was audible: Dror. The name a rasp of betrayal.
For a hypnotic instant Muriel’s eyes fastened on Helen’s.
Dror sat alert amid the gathering at a distance from Helen, his untouched soda in his hand. She saw that he’d felt the change as well. She watched a wary hope on his face dissolve to something dull, before re-emerging, a moment later, as anger.
Then Avi turned to Muriel and, loud enough to still the activity at the cashier’s table behind them, said, “Well, it’s not as though non-Jewish volunteers are part of our effort.”
Dror tapped his soda bottle with his fingertips. He tapped again. Then he stood, and the words he spoke were addressed to Avi and to all of them, the two dozen soldiers in uniform, their young faces turned to Dror in trust and dread, as to an admired elder brother.
“The non-Jews are here by choice,” Dror said. “We talk all the time about heroism. How many of you would have chosen to give up safety?”
There was no answer, but the faces around the canteen rebuked him.
Dror turned and left the canteen.