The Teacher Page 11

  How could they think they would somehow get away with it, that the events would pass them by, that they would be saved, how did they dare believe they were protected, how did they refuse all that time to even consider leaving? In reality they never felt any urgency, she knew that was the plain truth, their desperate clinging to the place that was their home, a fierce, conclusive emotion that had nothing to do with beauty, not even with comfort, but with that certainty they each held, apparently, that that was the land on which they could continue to grow, whose language and landscapes they loved with the innocence of young love. Now she already allowed herself to feel abandoned, subjected to the daunting fear that she might forget them, that with each passing day, if she did not make the effort to conjure up their images, she would lose something of their voices, their gazes, that something prosaic might push them aside to a place that was only in her reach when it charged at her in her dreams. She envisioned her childhood room, which remained intact after she left home, the guest room in her and Eric’s apartment, the study in which she slept below shelves packed with books; she peered at clear images, specific moments etched more sharply than thousands of others, what she allowed herself to see as a girl, what she merely glanced at, what she had ignored, and all those sights she never fully took in with her eyes but stored in her body, and which spawned her sadness.

  In the bag she rushed to pack before they moved to the ghetto she had placed letters, notes, and two journals she saved from trips with her parents from the two consecutive summers after Jan’s departure, when, to ease the pain of his absence, they traveled together to the Low Countries and to Rome. She opened one of the journals and remembered awkwardly how she had written down elaborate descriptions of the view and reported on churches and museums, but without writing a single word about herself, a single word about them, a single word about their interaction, as if she were seeking to please someone, but who? With no one destined to read these journals, they remained a testimony without a witness, the pages leaving no trace of their author. She felt she was connected to her parents in some inconspicuous way, beyond their family ties, which at times she never even felt and at other times wished to escape—that she was realizing their fate through her body, that their destiny had yet to be determined. She knew they had been sent to their deaths, and it troubled her that she didn’t sense it the day they were deported, or perhaps she did, she was certain she did, but never really believed it, half-expecting to find them wherever she went, scanning her new surroundings, perhaps they were there, maybe despite everything they had still found a way to settle in a new country.

  Her lips remained sealed. To the extent she could, she avoided the company of others, reducing it to a bare minimum, left her room and entered the hallway cautiously, always choosing the stairs over the elevator, so as not to come into contact with the other passengers, who, while remaining physically close, had already grown distant; as if they already knew the relationship between them wouldn’t last, that what made it so fateful also rendered it fragile, a relationship that had to be sidestepped and somehow denied. She greeted people with a brief nod and hurried off, avoiding questions. Perhaps it was then that she developed the skill of being seen and disappearing at the same time, of navigating her way along the streets, slim figured—her hair had grown back and she had removed the headscarf—without anyone being able to say whether she had crossed their path. What she fended off was precisely what she could not contain. Clara had told her in one of their conversations in the camp that that was the source of her sanity, that she must guard it, not let anyone in, otherwise she’d go mad. She knew Clara was right, but what did that sanity leave her with?

  Representatives of the Jewish Agency started milling about outside, saying they had to wait patiently a few more months to obtain an immigration certificate to Israel. The war was not over yet, and since she wasn’t a member of any youth movement, and had not undergone training, it might take her more time than the others. They tried to tell her that Israel was something entirely different, far from the afflictions of Europe, untouched by decay and destruction, in order to instill in her a pioneering spirit, but she remained indifferent and skeptical, she didn’t believe there was a single place on the globe that wasn’t afflicted. She considered remaining in Switzerland, descending the mountain slope to some other place in the French canton, even though she knew it was a futile possibility that would never grant her peace, and maybe it was best she returned, maybe she indeed ought to go home, she didn’t even dare voice that idea, she didn’t have the strength to fight Jan, who had started pressuring her into coming; in the letter she received from him several weeks after her arrival in Caux he informed her of his efforts to expedite her certificate and implored her to immigrate, inviting her to stay in his apartment in Tel Aviv, with his wife, Hannah, and his little boy, Yoel, until she found a suitable place. Twenty years had gone by since he left the family home in Kolozsvár. She knew about some of his trials and tribulations, about his years at Kibbutz Ma’agan, where he initially settled, about the stifling disappointment in the communal lifestyle, about his decision to move to the city and study engineering at the Hebrew University, where he met his love, Hannah, who had completed her training as a Torah teacher at the David Yellin Seminar. It was only when they resumed their communication in Switzerland that she learned of his marriage during the war and of the birth of their son in its final days. Twenty years had passed since they last saw each other, and when she sat down to write him she felt an odd mix of longing and unease, as if she couldn’t truly remember him, as if she was actually considering—as if it was up to her at this stage—to choose one way or another. Had she seriously considered going elsewhere? Her longing for home was suppressed by her overwhelming sense of orphanhood. She vaguely knew she wouldn’t return. While she had gradually become determined to go to Palestine, her determination was not nourished by hope. She feared she would always feel like an immigrant, that she would carry that curse, that Palestine would be a land of exile and not a haven of promise, and she asked herself whether she would ever be able to find a way in, persevere with something or someone, or perhaps find a replacement for the major things, for which she was never built, they intimidated her, she sensed danger in their meaning; and it was possible that once again, as always, she had no choice but to back off and let external forces carve out some kind of course she couldn’t plan, that was out of her control. No one actually asked her if she wanted to immigrate. Why did she do it? To appease Jan? Because she was thinking of herself? Or not thinking of herself? There were moments during which she spoke to herself in second person, as if in disbelief—was that really how you felt? Was that what you knew? She asked herself whether something could happen in her life that would render it precious again.

  In early December she waited with the other guests in the lobby of the Esplanade Hotel. A few days earlier, they had been informed that the remaining train passengers had been released and were making their way to Switzerland. The agency representatives would drive them from the train station to the hotel, in order to prevent crowding, they stressed, and she of course preferred not to accompany them but to wait in the corner of the spacious entrance hall, almost in hiding. Anxiously, she glanced at the horde of people slowly cramming into the lobby. Her body trembled, and in vain she ordered it to calm down. Among the hundreds of people streaming into the hall with tired steps, she spotted his face. He walked toward her, very thin, disheveled, his hair longer and faded, his skin taut and lashed by the wind and rain. “Elsa,” he drew out her name, weighing every letter like a trader of precious stones in the presence of a diamond for the first time. “Elsa,” he repeated, inhaling the two syllables of her name and staring at her, mesmerized. It seemed to her that she might have stalled before replying. “Eric.” “I’m so happy,” he said. She smiled. “Eric,” she repeated his name. “So am I.” If their shattered lives had retained any of their former simplicity, it was in the names they uttered to each other. H
e reached out his hand to take her arm and pulled her body into his. She placed her head on his shoulder and silently sobbed. With his other hand he brushed aside her boyish, unruly cowlick. They stood completely still, and then she shook him off in a panic, people were approaching them and she wanted them to find a quiet place to speak. “Maybe we could go up to your room?” But the reading room was empty and she led him there and when they sat down she asked him to tell her about himself. So much time had passed. “My parents … You already know,” she told him. “How did you find out?” she asked. “Like everyone else.” She gathered her breath and blurted out the words she had planned to say to him, and suddenly wasn’t sure if she really meant them. “I had a lot of time to think.” “That was never good for you,” he replied. “You’re right.” She smiled. “I also thought about it a lot. I was hoping …” “I think there’s no hope for us. You deserve a relationship …” He shrugged in dismissal. “I saw how easily you—” she insisted. “It’s meaningless,” he interrupted her, “you’re all that matters.” She flinched. She knew he really meant it, as if he had prepared himself to fight her. He had never fought her before. He leaned into her in search of her lips, which parted for him. “It’s not sacrilegious to want it,” he said. “That’s not it.” “I think that for you it is.” He gathered her into his arms, pulled her up from the chair and paved their way to the corridor, told her to guide them to her room, entered, locked the door behind them and pressed her against him, propped her gaunt body against one of his knees, and starting ruffling her blouse. She removed his shirt and pinched the lean, sinewy flesh, as if rediscovering a body she had not remembered a thing about, tracing a finger across a scar that had formed a groove above his left eyebrow and lent a toughness to his boyish face, tried to fumble toward him cautiously, but her body was beyond her control and invited him inside her. They lay on the bed, floating on top of each other as if carrying the weightlessness of their youth again, light as a feather. He touched her lips with his finger and placed her small face in the palm of his hand. “You silly girl,” he said. Then his expression turned somber. “You can’t do it, Elsa.” One day you’ll thank me, she wanted to tell him but held back, it was arrogant, and she instantly felt overwhelmed with regret that her passion once again had overpowered her, fickle as it was, rendering her so vulnerable and so misleading; embarrassed, she turned to face the white wall and rubbed her back against his stomach for a long time, then retreated and curled up at the edge of the bed. When she turned back to face him again, he was already sitting up. She grew pale. “I’m so sorry, Eric,” she said. He rose, got dressed, turned his back to her and closed the door behind him. She got up to open the window. It was already late in the day. Over the next two days she did not go down to the lobby. On the third day, at the breakfast table, she learned that the groups designated for training had been relocated to a different hotel in Montreux.

  In Caux, she received the news that the war had ended. But what did that mean, the war had ended? Caux was not an occupied territory, and in the days following the announcement more and more refugee convoys rolled into the village. She experienced no sense of elation. She remained sprawled on the bed, tossing and turning, too many unreadable routes etched on her body. She assumed they would easily arrange a divorce that would free both her and Eric. She thought of other men she had met during all those months, but the thought evoked no appeal or eagerness, even when she heard that someone she had once been interested in had gotten married. For a few fleeting moments, she felt jealous. But jealous of what? Not of the fact that someone else had taken her place, a place that was never meant for her. She didn’t want what others allegedly had and was withheld from her. She didn’t want a companion for this life, didn’t want any further burdens. Perhaps she envied the ability of others to accept the assets civilized life offered them, a life from which she had exiled herself. She recognized this with complete clarity in the resort town, faced with the masses of refugees that flooded the mountains, knew that she too was a refugee in the active sense of the word, a self-exiled refugee, that she did not want to, or could not, and now did not have to keep up appearances or pretend; she wished for nothing at all. She realized that in fact she had stopped feeling, as if the lust she had known had left her, that she no longer desired to sink her teeth into a beloved dish, or a beloved person, or to hold onto a body or anything else out of devotion. She was free and entirely on her own. No one was waiting for her; she wasn’t tethered to a single soul. She would not allow herself a family, another family.

  26

  But she had a family. And in those long months that passed from the time the war had ended and until her documents were arranged, months during which she remained in Caux and began giving private English lessons to the local children, Jan had not only taken care of the certificates, but also ensured she wouldn’t have to stay in the detainee camp at Atlit upon her arrival in Palestine, as she had a family to host her and take care of her. “I hope I won’t be a burden. I’ll start looking for an apartment as quickly as possible,” she wrote him in one of her brief letters. “It’s not a problem, Elinka, you know that, we’re happy to have you.”

  The extended period during which she stayed with Jan, Hannah, and Yoel before renting a one-room apartment nearby on Ben Yehuda Street was almost entirely erased from her memory. Her concerns grew heavier as she made the convoluted journey from Switzerland to the bottom of the Italian boot and finally to the ship, concerns that were accompanied by a troubling bewilderment about herself. She didn’t understand what was happening to her, where everyone left inside her had gone; they couldn’t have simply faded and disappeared; this untraversable distance pained her and hollowed out her heart. At the Atlit harbor she was approached by a silver-haired man with a tanned, pockmarked face, taller than Father and of a lighter complexion; he hugged her and kissed her and bawled, shook her body relentlessly, repeating over and over, “My little sister, I can’t believe it,” and then, “Hannah and Yoel are waiting at home.” He took both her suitcases and led her to a scalding hot Ford Tudor. “You’ll get used to it, thirty degrees in the shade, but there is no shade,” he said, smiling as he rolled down the windows. “It’ll take us about an hour and a half or two to get home.” And then, as if to alleviate the silence that suddenly stretched between them, he pointed out places along the way, Mount Carmel and Zikhron Ya’akov and Binyamina and Netanya and Herzliya, offering a detailed description of the characteristics of each type of settlement and why they had decided, in spite of everything, he and Hannah, who was born in Jerusalem, to set up camp in Tel Aviv. “I think you’ll like Tel Aviv,” he said, injecting his voice with enthusiasm. “This is where it all happens,” he said, now referring to the steadily increasing traffic. “There are cafes and theaters and concerts; of all the cities in Israel it’s the most similar to Europe.” He added: “And the beach, Elinka, you can swim. You like swimming, right?”

  In anticipation of her arrival they had divided their enclosed balcony, which faced a small, quiet street near Ben Yehuda, erecting a screen to create a private area for her and furnishing it with a bed, desk, and dresser. Hannah gave her a warm welcome; “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, and took her on a tour of the apartment to show her where everything was so she could make herself at home; and when she noticed Elsa wiping the beads of sweat off her forehead, she explained that the humidity seeped through the walls, and suggested she keep the balcony window open during the night for the breeze to flow in, but to make sure to close the blinds from the early sunrise, which might wake her up. “You’ll have to get used to it. The air is drier in Jerusalem, the humidity here is awful,” Hannah said. Their eyes met for a moment and Elsa said, “Nice apartment,” and Hannah felt uncomfortable with the compliment. “Small apartment,” she rushed to reply, “but sufficient for our needs, until Yoel grows up,” and immediately suggested they sit down for a small meal. “An Israeli dinner. This is what we eat here in the evening,” she said apologe
tically, arranging a display of finely-chopped salad, white cheese, sliced bread, and hard-boiled eggs on the Formica kitchen table. “I’m taking Yoel to his nursery school in the morning and from there going to my school. You’ll have time to settle in and get to know Tel Aviv a little. I understand we’re in the same profession. You’re a French teacher, right?” she tried again. “They might ask you to undergo further training,” she cautiously suggested. “Elsa must be very tired, it’s too soon to talk practicalities,” Jan said. Hannah persisted: “Yoel was so looking forward to finally meeting his aunt from his father’s side, say hello to Aunt Elsa, Yoeli,” she said, her voice a pitch higher. That phrase, “Aunt Elsa,” grated in her ear for some reason; she squinted, remaining glued to her chair and without picking up the toddler, who now braved a questioning stare. He was a skinny boy who apparently took after Hannah’s side of the family more than theirs; he had inherited Jan’s bright eyes and the smile that shone in his dimples, in stark contrast to the sorrow that poured from his gaze. She smiled at Hannah awkwardly. “I’m not good with babies,” she said with a certain impatience. “Actually, I’m not so great with adults either.” She folded her arms and pressed them against her waist. “It’s an adjustment period,” Hannah quickly offered. “After everything you’ve gone through …” she added, and looked at Jan with concern. “You have to think ahead,” Jan said. “Jan always thought ahead,” Elsa said to Hannah. “Even as a boy he was already thinking long-term.” She wondered where those words had come from, and instantly fell silent. “It’s his nature, always planning,” Hannah went along with her. “Even when we met in Jerusalem, he was already talking about where we would live, what we would do and how much—” “Elsa is very tired, she doesn’t want to hear anecdotes about our life,” Jan interrupted her. “It’s fine,” Elsa said, rushing to her aid, “I’d love to hear about you two.” They looked at Yoel, who was now sitting on the bare floor strewn with white paper, doodling with a pencil. “He’s a quiet boy. He can keep himself busy for hours,” Hannah said, “even though sometimes he gets bored. He needs a sibling.” “I remember how long I waited for Elsa,” Jan said. “When you came into the world I was almost ten; I was so happy.” Elsa picked at the food on her plate, stabbing a piece of cucumber and chewing it slowly. “You’re not hungry?” “The boat ride made me nauseous,” she replied. “You’re so thin, my sister.” She remembered that when he left home she had weighed more, and started combing her hand through her hair, asking herself again what was wrong with her, if it was obvious she was angry about something, not that she knew what that something was, it wasn’t as though he held it against her for having been right all along; he never said I told you so, not even in the letters he sent her in Switzerland, he never said anything even remotely along those lines, and at any rate that wasn’t what she was angry about, his sobriety, the sobriety that never rubbed off on her; and how could she possibly explain that she had never thought, not for a moment, that they were being uprooted for good, even when they moved to the ghetto and had to leave everything behind, even then she hadn’t quite grasped it. It appeared she was blaming him for something neither of them could define, perhaps for withdrawing from their company too soon and leaving her alone with the two of them. And maybe it wasn’t anger she was feeling, but a form of distance that might exist only between two people who used to be very close. “I don’t judge anyone who didn’t think like me,” he suddenly barged into her thoughts, as if resurrecting an old argument, and then fell silent. Hannah rose from her chair and began to collect the dishes. “I didn’t think about them for the first few years,” he continued. “I was entirely immersed in the present, in life on the kibbutz, in my work. Later, when I left, that changed.” “Before the war began?” she asked. “Yes, before.” “I have to put the little one to bed. It’s already late,” Hannah said. She helped Yoel gather the drawings from the floor and took him to his room. “I’ll find an apartment as soon as I’m back on my feet,” she told Jan once they were alone. “There’s no rush, Elinka. Take your time.” “Strange,” she finally said. “What’s strange?” “Sitting together after all these years.” “Yes. I always dreamt about it, my little sister,” he said again, and she could see how he looked at her with wonder, as if struggling to find the girl he knew in the serious, solemn woman sitting before him; and she asked herself whether he had truly dreamt about it, or whether he already regretted rushing to invite her into his home. “Everything will be okay,” he said. “You’ll see. People who came here after the war are building themselves a new life.”