“Expected?” said Judith Roth numbly. It all seemed part of the weary phantasmagoria of the whole journey with its mad air of desperate improvisation, its changes of scene. The firelight made her feel drowsy. She felt the cold node of the stethoscope on her back. Once or twice she winced as the cool deft hands touched her, and the doctor returned to the tender spot to reassure herself that nothing more serious than a bruise was the cause of the pain. “Well,” she said at last, “so far, so good.”
Judith Roth lifted her head and said slowly: “There’s nothing broken, Doctor. But I haven’t had my period for months now, and I have got some skin infection — probably syphilis, or something as disagreeable.”
She turned on her back and pointed at her throat.
The doctor lowered her dark head for a moment to examine the red rash at close quarters. She smiled. “Nothing of the kind. You simply have the traditional scabies of the camps. It will wash away in a fortnight. I have something for that, you’ll see.”
She was called away by the two old witch-like women, for the prophet had now been washed and dressed anew in a baggy suit of clothes. He had begun to snore. Deftly, the doctor gave him an injection. Smoothly, they decanted him onto the stretcher and bore it away through the door. Judith sat watching them with a dull and uncomprehending eye.
The door opened again and the doctor returned with the two old women. “Now for your bath,” she said. “Lie back and enjoy it.” Obediently, Judith Roth lay back and closed her eyes. It was a luxury to feel the warm steam rise around her. The loaded sponges crushed the warmth into her body, the water drained onto the earth floor of the barn. The women took up their slow meditative crooning again. How rich and sweet was the smell of the warm soap-lather! She felt their hands sliding over her, sliding over her breasts and flanks. While they worked, the doctor sat down and took up pen and paper. “Well, I shall be able to report your safe arrival at any rate,” she said, “but I must fill in the data for them. It’s a bore, I know. Age?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Last address?” At this Judith gave a harsh laugh. It would have sounded vainglorious to have given the name of the camp where she had spent the last months. Her laughter ended with a sob.
“I mean home address,” said the doctor quietly; “you never know when it will be of use, for example, if you have other family.”
“I haven’t,” said Judith. “Our house is now a Headquarters for the Hitler Youth. My whole family is dead. Luckily my father died before all this… started. He used to say he was proud to be a German. He could still afford to be in those days.”
“Gently,” said the doctor. “I did not want to upset you.”
“Then why don’t you leave me alone? Have I come all this way to fill in forms?” Her eyes glared from the mask of soap. The old women made soothing noises.
The doctor took a turn up and down the room with her hands behind her back. She drew a breath and said mildly: “You see, I know nothing about you except your name. I was asked to report on what physical shape you were in. This I propose to do. But as for the rest of the questions, we can leave them — though I can see their point in asking them. Occupation, for example. I see they have put you down for Ras Shamir in the north. I happen to be the doctor of Ras Shamir myself, so we shall meet again. But it would be a help to know if you had any special skills which might be of use to the kibbutz. It’s a farming community, living a hard life.”
“As far as occupation is concerned,” said Judith Roth incoherently, “I have spent six months digging up corpses with a spade and breaking them up into smaller and more convenient pieces. Frozen corpses.” But then she suddenly groaned and turned her head from side to side. “I am so sorry, doctor,” she said. “It was stupid of me. Please forgive me!” and she extended a soapy hand to touch the doctor’s.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“But there is. I am being unpardonable. Forgive me.”
The two old women had turned her now onto her front and she was able to raise her head and smile at the doctor, her eyes full of tears. “I used to be a mathematician before the university sacked me. You see, doctor, I was sent to a camp first of all by mistake, I think. Then I was released because they hoped I would lead them to some information they wanted. Some papers of my father’s. Well… the Agency kidnapped me. Otherwise I imagine I should be back by now in… I won’t mention the name, and now I’m here in a strange place where I don’t know a soul. It’s confusing. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, Rebecca Peterson appears to know you, or something about you.”
“I have never heard the name before.”
“She’s our camp secretary. It was she who asked for you at Ras Shamir. I saw her signature.”
“She asked for me?”
“By name.”
“Rebecca Peterson,” said Judith Roth, and, after deeply considering, shook her head with certainty. “It means nothing to me.”
“Well, as I said, I saw her signature.”
But she was dry now and able to consult the fragment of mirror tacked to the wall of the barn with a grimace of disgust. She dismissed the name from her consciousness — sent it to join the hundred other mysteries of this long journey into the unknown. All she knew now was that she was hideously ugly with her hair cropped in this fashion; she borrowed a comb from the doctor and swept it back furiously. “Can you lend me a scarf?” was all she said, and the doctor smilingly handed her one, reflecting that when a woman can still think about her looks she is definitely off the danger list.
“You are going to hate the clothes I brought,” said the doctor, “but they were all I could find. Mostly they all wear blue shorts and white tops, the land-workers. But it is at least a dress.”
“What is more important,” said Judith Roth soberly, “is that it is clean.”
The women had been clearing up the trestles and stacking them. The doctor took Judith to a small whitewashed cubicle with a truckle-bed in it. “Now, my dear,” she said, “you are going to sleep. I can’t do anything about you until tomorrow evening when I am driving back to Ras Shamir. We need some papers prepared for you. Manya has orders to feed you, but you must lie low. This place is near the road, and if the British suspected we were using it they would certainly make a police raid. If that should happen while I’m away, hide in the orange grove until they leave. As for the old man, he’s going to another place and arrangements have been made to fetch him, so don’t bother your head about him, understand?”
“I understand.”
The doctor yawned suddenly, exposing small white teeth. “I am going to sleep for a couple of hours before I leave. I shall come for you at five tomorrow… no this evening. Good-night, Judith.”
“Good-night.”
She lay for a long time with open eyes, watching the white light of dawn increase in strength as it shone through the skylight. Then she dozed, and the whole kaleidoscope of her memory began to throw up its bewildering and fragmented patterns. The children were dancing about, pelting her with snowballs, crying “Jew, Jew, Judith, Jew… Somewhere very far away, and belonging to a world so distant that it seemed to glow with the memory of a paradise now lost, she heard her father’s voice talking to her, rapidly and confidently, about the glories of being German.
Her sleep was a shallow and troubled one, hampered, curiously enough, by her new sense of cleanliness. The hot water had alleviated her fatigue quite sensibly. She muttered her way in and out of remembered laboratories and classrooms, in and out of the calculus and the bewildering tangle of magnetic fields where once she had been quite at home.