For a moment she thought he would lower himself to the edge of the bed where she sat and speak them back to her. But he stood, his face etched with a tension she didn’t understand. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Her voice snapped. “You’re wrong and you know it, Dror. You sound like a person at a podium. That”—she gestured toward the book, she spoke wildly—“that has nothing to do with love. That’s fear. You’re just afraid of”—her hand swept through the air at Dror, at herself—“of this.” Yet even as she spoke she wondered: Was she accusing him, or herself? Hadn’t she been relieved, just a bit, when a feeling she didn’t know how to contain had been pruned back by his anger, that day in Jaffa?
But a look of nausea crossed his face and she saw her words had hit home.
“Helen. What do you think life could bring that would frighten me now?”
Not a footstep disturbed the quiet of the barracks.
“Please,” he said.
He’d brought her dinner in his room, setting it on a tray beside her as she sat reading on his cot in her thin sundress. Carefully he arranged napkin and fork, then turned the room over to her with a tenderness that might have been comical under other circumstances.
She paged through the book resentfully, like a child forced to fulfill the terms of an unjust penance. Outside the single window of his room Dror was visible, leaning against a tree in his blue short-sleeved shirt, smoking one cigarette after another. He wanted her to embrace his history, she knew, or to flee him then and there—before they were so tightly knit together that no surgery could separate them without devastating both.
She scanned the opening, the words falling away from her senselessly. Dror wanted her to weigh every sentence? Fine. She forced herself to a second page, a third. Dror wanted a fair-minded inquiry. But for once in her life, Helen did not. She knew the ending she wanted for this story, and she was going to head for it regardless. She would read Dror’s history book, and she would tell him—no matter the horrid truths on these pages—that despite all evidence and logic they could still be together.
She tested a pen on the notepad he’d brought her, wrote her name in sharp, angry letters. After several minutes, she wrote a sloppy row of headings to keep track of the time periods she was reading about. Israelite Kingdom. Diaspora Beginnings. Greeks and Hellenization.
The story of Mattathias and the Judean martyrs caught her, and she read despite herself. In the isolation of their desert exile, the truth was evident: speaking their beliefs directly meant annihilation. She absorbed the words, and read on. Her anger faded. Whatever message she’d wanted to impose on the history dropped away—she’d recall it later. For now the stories themselves, set in a stark, familiar landscape, had all her attention. As she read, she wrote down names and dates, as though echoing harrowing facts with her pen would seal them into her memory and there make sense of them.
Outside Dror stamped cigarette butts into the dirt, and paced.
How soft she had been, then. Every breath she took—shifting on Dror’s thin mattress, reaching to turn a page—was still an exchange, a question, a hopeful sampling of the world.
When he came with two glasses of mint tea, she shut the book and folded her notes out of view. “This is pointless, Dror.”
He shook his head mutely and stirred her tea, raising a whorl of dark leaves from the bottom of the glass.
“Tell me about your sister,” she said, watching them settle. “That’s the Jewish history I want to know, Dror. Your history.”
With the deliberate motions of a man coaching himself not to smash the objects in his hands, he set the tea and spoon quietly on the tabletop. “We can talk about everything,” Dror said softly, “after you read.”
She read on in a fever of concentration, through afternoon and evening. She read into the night by his bedside light. He slept beside her, his body cupping hers, moving only to pull a pillow over his eyes when the light disturbed him. The fingertips of his hand rested, trusting, against the skin of her thigh: the first touch he had allowed since handing her the book.
She read until the starred black sky gave way to a deep predawn blue.
She finished and shut the book, and only then did the tears of frustration rise.
The single page on which she’d taken notes was filled on both sides. She had turned it, written on the back; filled in the margins; inverted the page and filled it again upside down, writing between the lines she’d already penned.
Dror, waking, rose and brought her breakfast: leben, pita, a sliced and salted cucumber, all laid out neatly on blue plastic dishes from the mess hall. He set her coffee before her with care.
“What did you learn?” he said softly.
She’d never before seen him afraid.
“Did you read about Dreyfus?” he said. “About the White Paper?”
She nodded.
“Did you see”—he was watching her carefully—“how things changed without change? How it only gets worse—how the trap closes harder each time? Helen, why do you want this in your life?”
She didn’t speak.
“Do you see?” he repeated.
“See what? That you want me to think loving you is a curse?”
“I need you to see the truth.”
“Which is that you’re trying to scare me away.” The words hurt her throat. “You don’t want to let go of”—she gestured, her fingers splayed—“a milligram of the horror.”
Her fingertips caught the edge of her coffee cup and it spilled—over her legs, over the handwritten page beside them, blurring the bright blue ink so long lines of her words bled to the margins and were wasted.
Then she was crying, and with a choked sound he pushed book and page and coffee cup from his cot, and when they made love his voice was like the hush of a rainstorm in her ears: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
One afternoon Muriel cornered her without warning beside the outhouse. She grabbed Helen’s arm, hard, and there was no pretense of goodwill. “Don’t you know he’s going to work in intelligence? Don’t you know they want him—after they saw what he could do as a commando? Did he tell you he starts in June, he’s going to spend half his life undercover in other countries if they ask him to? Or that his wife will never know what he really does? Have you even heard of the Mossad—or is England too pure to need that sort of thing? Then I’ll explain: these are the men who leave widows, and you’ll never see a memorial for them because their work doesn’t exist.”
Muriel’s grip had stopped the pulse in her arm. Helen tried to wrench away. But Muriel only gripped tighter as though in a trance of vindication—and Helen was aware, even then, that Muriel would regret her words after her wildness had subsided. “I supposed he wouldn’t have bothered to tell you that. But he told Uri before you ever arrived here on your precious noble vacation, he told Uri that he wants to devote his life to national security. To doing what our people need so this country doesn’t become another trap that closes on the Jews.”
At the echo of Dror’s words, Helen no longer noticed the pain in her arm.
“He’s ready to throw himself off a cliff for this country,” Muriel went on, “and he’ll do it the minute they ask him to. Probably they’ll start him doing intelligence in eastern Europe, maybe just for a few months, maybe a few years. Is that who you thought you were having your little fairy tale with? Or did he forget to tell you you’ll always come second? He’ll never love you the way he loves us.”
She left Muriel and ran, not caring who stared, to Dror’s room, where she found him on his cot, reading a newspaper. “You’re going to leave me. You’re going to run off and get killed for the country.”
Slowly he folded the newspaper and set it aside.
“Muriel told me. You’re planning for me to be a war widow, that’s what you’re preparing me for?”