A convoy of prisoners was led past in chains. From time to time a soldier fired a shot into the air and the prisoners all bent their heads at once. No one looked at them. The survivors were sunk into themselves.
A man came up to Tzili and asked: “Where are you from?” It wasn’t the man himself who asked the question, but something inside him, as in a nightmare.
Tzili felt as if her eyes had been opened. She heard words which she had not heard for years, and they lapped against her ears with their whispers. “If I meet my mother, what will I say to her?” She did not know what everyone else already knew: apart from this handful of survivors, there were no Jews left.
The sun opened out. The people unbuttoned their damp clothes and sprawled on the riverbank and slept. The long, damp years of the war steamed out of their moldy bodies. Even at night the smell did not disappear. Only Tzili did not sleep. The way the people slept filled her with wonder. A warm breeze touched them gently in their deep sleep. Are they happy? Tzili asked herself. They slept in a heap, defenseless bodies suddenly abandoned by danger.
The next day too no one woke up. “What do they do in their sleep?” she asked without knowing what she was asking. “I’ll go on,” she said. “No one will notice my absence. I’ll work for the peasants like I did before. If I work hard they’ll give me bread. What more do I need?” Her thoughts flowed as of their own accord. All the years of the war, in the forest and on the roads, even when she and Mark were together, she had not thought. Now the thoughts seemed to come floating up to the surface of her mind.
For a moment she thought of getting up and leaving the sleeping people and returning to the mountain where she had first met Mark. The mountain itself had disappeared from view, but she could still see the swamps below it. They shone like two polished mirrors. Her longings were deep and charged with heavy feelings. They drew her like a magnet, but as soon as she rose to her feet she felt that her body had lost its lightness. Not only her belly was swollen but also her legs. The light, strong columns which had borne her like the wind were no longer what they had been.
Now she knew that she would never go back to that enchanted mountain; everything that had happened there would remain buried inside her. She would wander far and wide, but she would never see the mountain again. Her fate would be the fate of these refugees sleeping beside her.
She wanted to weep but the tears remained locked inside her. She sat without moving and felt the sleep of the refugees invading her body. And soon she too was deep in sleep.
26
THEIR SLEEP LASTED a number of days. From time to time one of them opened his eyes and stretched his arms as if he were trying to wake up. All in vain. He too, like everyone else, was stuck to the ground.
Tzili opened the haversack and spread the clothes out to dry. Two long dresses, a petticoat, children’s trousers, the kitchen knife which Mark had used to make the bunker, and two books — this is what was left.
From the size of the garments Tzili understood that Mark’s wife was a tall, slender woman and the children were about five years old, thin like their mother. And she noticed too that the dresses buttoned up to the neck, which meant that Mark’s wife was from a traditional family. The petticoat was plain, without any flowers. There were two yellow stains on it, apparently from the damp.
She sat looking at the inanimate objects as if she were trying to make them speak. From time to time she stroked them. The silence all around, as in the wake of every war, was profound.
Whenever she felt hunger gnawing at her stomach she would take a garment from the haversack and offer it in exchange for food. At first she had asked Mark to forgive her, although then too, she had not given the matter too much thought. Later she had stopped asking. She was often hungry and she bartered one garment after the other. The haversack had emptied fast, and now this was all that was left.
These things I won’t sell, she said to herself, although she knew that the first time she felt hungry she would have to sell them. She would often feel a voracious greed for food, a greed she could not overcome. Mark will understand, she said to herself, it’s not my fault.
She sat and listened to the pulsing of the embryo inside her. It floated quietly in her womb, and from time to time it kicked. It’s alive, she told herself, and she was glad.
The next day spring burst forth in a profusion of flowers. And the sleepers awoke. It was not an easy awakening. For hours they went on lying, stuck to the ground. Not as many as they had seemed at first — about thirty people all told.
In the afternoon, as the heat of the sun increased, a few of them rose to their feet. In the light of the sun they looked thin and somewhat transparent. Someone approached her and said: “Where are you from?” He spoke in German Jewish. He looked like Mark, only taller and younger.
“From here,” said Tzili.
“I don’t understand,” said the man. “You weren’t born here, were you?”
“Yes,” said Tzili.
“And what did you speak at home?”
“We tried to speak German.”
“That’s funny, so did we,” said the stranger, opening his eyes wide. “My grandmother and grandfather still spoke Yiddish. I liked the way they talked.”
Tzili had never seen her grandfather. This grandfather, her father’s father, a rabbi in a remote village in the Carpathian mountains, had lived to a ripe old age and had never forgiven his son for abandoning the faith of his fathers. His name was never mentioned at home. Her mother’s parents had died young.
“Where are we going?” the man asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I have to get there soon. My engineering studies were interrupted in the middle. I’ve missed enough already. If I don’t arrive in time I may be too late to register. A person starts a course of study and all of a sudden a war comes and messes everything up.”
“Where were you during the war?” asked Tzili.
“Why do you ask? With everyone else, of course. Can’t you see?” he said and stretched out his arm. There was a number there, tattooed in dark blue on his skin. “But I don’t want to talk about it. If I start talking about it, I’ll never stop. I’ve made up my mind that from now on I’m starting my life again. And for me that means studying. Completing my studies, to be precise.”
This logic astounded Tzili. Now she saw: the man spoke quietly enough, but his right hand waved jerkily as he spoke and fell abruptly to his side, as if it had been cut off in midair.
He added: “I’ve always been an outstanding student. My average was ninety. And that’s no joke. Of course, it made the others jealous. But what of it? I was only doing what I was supposed to do. I like engineering. I’ve always liked it.”
Tzili was enchanted by his eloquence. It was a long time since she had heard such an uninterrupted flow of words. It was the way Blanca and Yetty and her brothers used to talk. Exams, exams always around the corner. Now the words momentarily warmed her frozen memory.
After a pause he said: “There were two exams I didn’t take, through no fault of my own. I won’t let them get away with it. It wasn’t my fault.”
“Never mind,” said Tzili, for some reason.
“I won’t let them get away with it. It wasn’t my fault.”
And for a moment it seemed that they were sitting, not in an open field in the spring after the war, but in a salon where coffee and cheesecake were being served. The hostess asks: “Who else wants coffee?” A student on vacation speaks of his achievements. Tzili now remembered her own home, her sister Blanca, sulkily hunching her shoulder, her books piled on the table.