Darkness fell. The days she had spent with Mark had blunted her fear of the night. Now she was alone again. Mark’s voice came to her and she heard: “A man is not an insect. Death isn’t as terrible as it seems.” Now these words were accompanied by the music of a military band. Like in her childhood, on the Day of Independence, when the army held parades and the bugles played. The military voice gave her back a kind of confidence.
Mark was late.
Now she felt that the domestic smells that had enveloped the place were fading away. Fresh, cold air blew in their place. It occurred to her that if she took the clothes out of the haversack and spread them around, the homely smells would come back to fill the air, and perhaps Mark would sense them. Immediately she took the haversack out of the bunker and spread the clothes on the ground. The brightly colored clothes, all damp and crumpled, gave off a confined, moldy smell.
He’s lost, he must be lost. She clung to this sentence like an anchor. She fell to her knees by the clothes. They were children’s clothes, small and shrunken with the damp, spotted with food stains and a little torn.
Afterward she turned aside to listen. Apart from an occasional rustle or murmur there was nothing to be heard. From the distant huts scattered between the swamps, isolated barks reached her ears.
After midnight a thin drizzle began to fall and she put the things back into the bunker. This small activity revived an old scene in her memory. She remembered the first days, before the bunker, when she had brought him the tobacco. The way he had rolled the shredded leaves in a piece of newspaper, the way he had recovered his looks, his smile, and the light on his face.
The rain stopped but the wind grew stronger, bending the trees with broad, sweeping movements. Tzili went into the bunker. It was warm and full of the smell of tobacco. She breathed in the smell.
She sat in the dark and for some reason she thought about Mark’s wife. Mark seldom spoke of her. Once she had even sensed a note of resentment against her. She imagined her as a tall, thin woman sheltering her children under her coat. Strange, she felt a kind of kinship with her.
22
THE NEXT DAY Mark still did not return. She stood on the edge of the plateau exposed to the wind. The downward slope drew her too. The slope was not steep and it glittered with puddles of water. Now she felt that something had been taken from her, something that belonged to her youth. She covered her face in shame.
For hours she sat and practiced the words, so that she would be ready for him when he came. “Where were you Mark? I was very worried. Here is some herb tea for you. You must be thirsty.” She did not prepare many words, and the few she did prepare, she repeated over and over again in a voice which had a formal ring in her ears. Repeating the words put her to sleep. She would wake up in alarm and go to the bunker. The walls of the bunker had collapsed, the flimsy roof had caved in, and the floor was covered by a spreading gray puddle. There was an alien spirit in it, but it was the only place she could go to. Everywhere else was even more alien.
The days dragged out long and heavy. Tzili did not stir. And once a voice burst out from within her: “Mark.” The voice slid down the mountainside, echoing as it went. No one answered.
Overnight the winds changed and the winter winds came, thin and sharp as knives. The fire burned but it did not warm her. Low, dark clouds covered the somber sky. She prayed often. This was the prayer which she repeated over and over: “God, bring Mark back. If you bring Mark back to me, I’ll go down to the plains and I won’t be lazy.”
How many days had Mark been gone? At first she kept track, but then she lost count. Sometimes she saw Mark struggling with the peasants and hurling pointed sticks at them, like the ones he had made for the walls of the bunker. Sometimes he looked tired and crushed. Like the first time she had seen him, pale and gray. Man is not an insect, she remembered and made an effort to get up and stand erect.
For days she had had nothing to eat. Here and there she still found a few withered wild apples, but for the most part she now lived off roots. The roots were sweet and juicy. “I’ll go on,” she said, but she didn’t move. For hours she sat and gazed at the mountainside sloping down to the plains, the two marshes, the shelter, and the haversack. Sometimes she took out the clothes and spread them on the ground, but Mark did not respond to her call.
The moment she decided to leave she would imagine that she heard footsteps approaching. A little longer, she would say to herself. Death is not as terrible as it seems.
Sometimes the cold would envelop her in sweetness. She would close her eyes and curl up tightly and wait for a hand to come and take her away. But none came. Winter winds tore across the hillside, cruel and cutting. “I’ll go on,” she said, and lifted the haversack onto her shoulders. The haversack was soaked through and heavy, with every step she felt that the burden was too heavy to bear.
“Did you see a man pass by?” she asked a peasant woman standing at the doorway of her hut.
“There’s no man here. They’ve all been conscripted. Who do you belong to?”
“Maria.”
“Which Maria?”
And when she did not reply the peasant woman understood which Maria she meant, snickered aloud, and said: “Be off with you, wretch! Get out of my sight.”
One by one Tzili gave the little garments away in exchange for bread. “If I meet Mark I’ll tell him that I was hungry. He won’t be angry.” The haversack on her back grew more burdensome from day to day but she didn’t take it off. The damp warmth stuck to her back. She went from tree to tree. She believed that next to one of the trees she would find him.
23
IT BEGAN TO SNOW and she was obliged to look for work. The long tramp had weakened her. Overnight she lost her freedom and became a serf.
At this time the Germans were on the retreat, but here it was the middle of winter and the snow fell without a break. The peasants drove her mercilessly. She cleaned the cow shed, milked the cows, peeled potatoes, washed dishes, brought firewood from the forest. At night the peasant’s wife would mutter: “You know who your mother is. You must pay for your sins. Your mother has corrupted whole villages. If you follow in her footsteps I’ll beat you black and blue.”
Sometimes she went out at night and lay down in the snow. For some reason the snow refused to absorb her. She would return to her sufferings, meek and submissive. One evening on her way back from the forest she heard a voice. “Tzili,” called the voice.
“I’m Tzili,” said Tzili. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mark,” said the voice. “Have you forgotten me?”
“No,” said Tzili, frightened. “I’m waiting for you. Where are you?”
“Not far,” said the voice, “but I can’t come out of hiding. Death is not as terrible as it seems. All you have to do is conquer your fear.”
She woke up. Her feet were frozen.
From then on Mark appeared often. He would surprise her at every turn, especially his voice. It seemed to her that he was hovering nearby, unchanged but thinner and unable to emerge from his hiding place. And once she heard quite clearly: “Don’t be afraid. The transition is easy in the end.” These apparitions filled her with a kind of warmth. And at night, when the stick or the rope fell on her back, she would say to herself, “Never mind. Mark will come to rescue you in the spring.”
And in the middle of the hard, grim winter she sensed that her belly had changed and was slightly swollen. At first it seemed an insignificant change. But it did not take long for her to understand: Mark was inside her. This discovery frightened her. She remembered the time when her sister Yetty fell in love with a young officer from Moravia, and everyone became angry with her. Not because she had fallen in love with a gentile but because the intimate relations between them were likely to get her into trouble. And indeed, in the end it came out that the officer was an immoral drunkard, and but for the fact that his regiment was transferred the affair would certainly have ended badly. It remained as a wound in her sister’s heart, and at home it came up among other unfortunate affairs in whispers, in veiled words. And Tzili, it transpired, although she was very young at the time, had known how to put the pieces together and make a picture, albeit incomplete.