As the Lonely Fly

By Sara Dowse

‘It was Clara. My name is Chava now.’

‘Forgive me, Chava,’ said Gesia. ‘But you know, I would never have taken you for a Zionist. Such a staunch one, in any case, to want to give up your name.’

Three Russian-Jewish women are flung from their homes in the Ukraine and Bessarabia - t

• Language: English
• Publisher: For Pity Sake Publishing Pty Ltd
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994448583

Book preview

Chapter 1

Marion

October 1967

She hadn’t expected to find anyone else at the cemetery. She saw him standing near another grave not far from her and she took it as an intrusion, an invasion of her privacy. Even as she felt this she knew it to be unreasonable but there it was, all the same.

Jetlagged as she was she had come straight from the airport, catching the bus and leaving her bags at the reception desk and walking on wobbly landlegs to Leslie’s grave. The sun was a smear of pink to the west and there was a nip in the air and she wasn’t dressed for autumn. She still wore the lightweight linen suit that had seen her through the hottest days in Israel.

The old man, however, had the weather well in mind. He had a woollen scarf wrapped around his neck, and a heavy grey winter coat several sizes too big for him dragged from his narrow shoulders. And he wore a fedora. She hadn’t seen a hat like that since George Raft stopped getting leads in pictures. Waving plumes of snow-white hair stuck out from under the brim, and he stood there, arms akimbo, the coat bunched up below his elbows, gazing at the pink-lit Palisades on the Jersey side of the river. But for a glance, he hadn’t even acknowledged her presence. Still, she felt inhibited by his being there. She wanted to talk to Leslie. She hadn’t realised just how much she wanted to until she was on the plane flying that long flight home.

She took a few steps towards the grave, stooped to pull out weeds, and when she looked up the old man was gone.

Years before, when she was still in love with him, she had surprised him in their apartment with a man. The two of them, in their bed. She couldn’t have been more shocked if she had seen him murdering someone or stealing money or slipping an emerald necklace off some dowager’s crepy neck. Yes, he’d been drinking again and heavily, but this … this was out of her ken. She’d been working again but sporadically—commercials and daytime soaps, that sort of thing—and had come home in the middle of the day, tired and dispirited, imagining taking a drink herself, if drinking did what people said it did. But she walked into the bedroom instead.

That night he apologised, and explained it to her. ‘It only comes over me now and then.’ It was the booze, he said. ‘The booze will kill you,’ she said, and it had.

But she never forgot that strange afternoon, the way the orange light had glowed from the west, leaking through the drawn drapes, dancing on the walls as she dropped her coat on the bed, before she saw them and they became conscious of her, and how quickly they had flung themselves apart. How she wanted to run but couldn’t, and the shock and the hurt were unimaginable, but seconds later, it must have been seconds, she had walked out of the room and out of the apartment and crossed the avenue and sat for hours on a bench in the park.

He didn’t even know the guy’s name. (Small, greasy brown hair, smooth skin, low rectangular forehead.) Nor did she know if there were any others. She had opened a door and just as quickly slammed it. They were buddies before they were lovers and no matter what happened that is what counted. Even now, with him lying years cold in the grave, she had so much to tell him. There was no seat, and she couldn’t afford to ruin her skirt so she squatted next to the pale granite headstone and shed a few quiet tears for them both. There were flowers on some of the graves, hanging on till the weekend—asters, daisies, hothouse gladioli and roses—and the faintly putrescent scent of them tangled with the smell of the river and the sycamore leaves trodden into the grass. Crickets had started up singing. They called it the summer of flowers, and she’d missed it. And she had never once, in all those years, brought flowers to Leslie’s grave.

What she brought were words. Lines. Lines from the plays, from the blue books she kept of scenes from them: Shakespeare, Jonson, Congreve, Sheridan, and in the later ones, Shaw and Chekhov and O’Neill. Miller, Odets. If she felt he had missed something special, like the president’s assassination or the riots down in Alabama or Arthur Penn’s movies, she talked to him about them, there on the windy hill, and her voice would carry as it always did, so she wouldn’t do it with anyone else around. And she paused now and then, as if she were waiting for his thoughts on these things—how the theatre was being overshadowed by television and the movies, and radio had nothing much but music on it now, with incomprehensible lyrics. What would he say to The Twilight Zone’s folding, or Penn’s raw expressionism? And part of it, she wouldn’t kid herself here, was that she wanted to crawl right inside him, crossing that boundary, forcing herself to understand. The door had slammed shut but that didn’t stop the whiff of it, that part of him, from seeping through the cracks. It was what inspired her, wasn’t it, following the whiff of a character?

A chill passed through her. Was that all he was, a character? As if there remained some shard of ice inside her. Cold? Some had said so. But she never could talk to them, dead or alive. Had never even tried. Maybe because they really scarcely knew her, and poor, suave, mysterious Leslie did.

In gratitude then. A performance. She might start with that kibbutz, its pompous secretary. ‘Would you believe, a secretary?’ And the sexy guy who served them—‘Uzi, like the machine gun…’

There were ripples on the river, ruffling the cliff’s reflection, the sky all mauve now, tinging on violet, streaks of lemon yellow. The ground beneath the trees spongy in parts with mulching leaves; the wind chased the dry ones about. In the far distance, the bridge and the city.

But most of all, the estimable Zipporah. ‘Forbidding’—with the untouched grey and no-nonsense stride. But over the month she had warmed to her. ‘I’m not sure you’d like her, though. You’d find her very opinionated and she didn’t have anything good to say about the British. You’d expect that, of course, from someone who had happily risked her life smuggling in refugees.’

So how would she play it? ‘A couple of middle-aged broads schlepping across the country, from Dan to Beersheba, as the good book would have it. A tremendous achievement—you have to hand it to them.’ Israel, that brave new country, feisty. But how would she convey her feelings? The warmth of history enveloping her, warm as Leslie’s all too perfidious arms. She had heard it once said that a good actress was able to convey a range of emotions, a great one only one. That would put her in the first camp, indubitably. The problem of ambiguity.

‘Yes, and Clara was everywhere. Clara, with her wit and her seriousness and impossible hair. Who chopped it all off and refashioned herself. Clara. Chava. There she was, on the side of the road from Haifa to Tiberias, in the shade of the olive trees at Ramat Rahel. On those bare rocky hills, I saw her. Even without Zipporah nudging me I would have felt her. And heard what she’d been trying to say to me. But that’s just the point, my darling one. That is the point, exactly.’

For years before that, nearly a quarter of a century before, in the sticky late summer of 1922, when the limp leaves on Hamburg’s plane trees held the tang of coming autumn and middle-aged Marion was thirteen-year-old Miriam Tsedeska, she went to the poste restante and picked up the letter waiting for her. Scratched on uneven sizes of various thicknesses of paper, with margins crammed with the overflow, it was difficult to read but she read it hungrily, gulping the words, scarcely stopping to wonder how they had managed to reach her.

My dearest Manyichka, So much to write—sailing wasn’t the half of it. From Constanza it was painful, a rusty old war relic spewing fumes from the boiler and sleep impossible except on the upper deck. After three rough days we arrived in Constantinople (Istanbul now: important, that) and met up with more chalutzim (pioneers now, to you). Then we boarded a second boat, not much better than the first, stuffed to the gunnels with luftmenschen, dreamers male and female, chanting like Maenads and dancing the Hatikva, down through the Bosphorus and into Homer’s sea. Imagine, maybe two hundred chalutzim in the Battalion already, one gigantic collective of ragged pioneers massed in the north of Palestine, and the fifty of us speeding to join them with not so much as a hammer between us. A more improbable bunch would be hard to conjure up but has it ever been different?

Which brings me to the question: Why am I doing this? Why indeed go to Palestine instead of with you to America. The rational me might put it this way. That this is an experiment. There is the American path, the capitalist’s path, and for Mammeh and Tateh in their declining years definitely an easier one than the one that would face them here. But long ago I decided that the land of the robber barons was not the place for me. I would have stayed with the Revolution if I had stayed in Odessa but that was not to be. So here I am in Eretz Yisrael, the last resort perhaps, this Land of Israel. As I said, an experiment. But this is the rational part of me. The rest can’t be so easily pinned down. It has something to do with needing to explore what is possible in myself, what you might say is my best self, whatever in this wide wide world that could be. And—how should I put it?—a feeling that now is the time. For all their horror, the wars we’ve been through have rearranged things, maybe truly for the better, and I want to chance my arm and belong to that. Give myself up to it entirely.

And here’s an amusing bit. The biggest dreamer among us, apart from yours truly, has taken a fancy to me. His name? Dmitri Shmuelevitch Ivanov, but for our purpose he is henceforth Dov Bezaleel. Dov, the Hebrew for bear, the Bezaleel from the man who built the tabernacle, the artisan. He hails from Kharkov, my artisan, a bona fide Social Democrat, one-time comrade of no less than Leon Trotsky, Bronshtein to us, but he broke with him when Trotsky went over to the Bolsheviks and things got rough for the Mensheviks, even for ones like Dov who ended up fighting in Trotsky’s Red Army.

We took to pacing the deck together, sidling through the dancers and singers, and sitting together in what passed for the mess. Now we have landed, things have progressed. Suffice it to say that he’s shaped like a barrel, speaks with a pleasant baritone that could pass for an actor’s, and sports a scruffy red beard a shade or two deeper than his amber-coloured eyes. A tough nut, I think. So what will become of it? I can no more tell you that than anything else the future has in store for us.

After the boats, it was the horse with ten toes. The trains are good but so much of the stock was damaged in the war they only go so far. We have mules, but the mules are for supplies and we’re all fit enough to walk or we wouldn’t have come in the first place. The land is terribly bumpy, marked by ridges and declensions, and stumbling towards the interior I felt like some struggling ant making my way over a bolt of corduroy. Find yourself a map of Palestine and you’ll see what I mean. All those rugged passes that cross the mountainous spine between the sea and the river, with the Jordan’s valley running down the centre of it, the rift that cleaves the land in two. We are settled for the time being in a valley to the east of this, the Emek Jezre’el, with Mount Gilboa and the highlands of Samaria in the south and Mount Tabor in the north towards Lebanon, the mountains more like humps than true peaks, the rivers dry affairs, at times merely trickles, but I think to myself how anything old can be young again, like the rivers. Mountains wear down but rivers keep running anew.

We speak of little else but the brand new socialist future ahead of us but at this point it’s hardly more than an abstraction. We share everything, of course, but there’s not that much to share. Not that we mind. Possessions are a burden, you know, though we could use a bit more to eat. And the heat takes getting used to. Just now we’re clearing a swamp and take our precautions against trachoma and malaria.

And the future for you, my Manyichka? You must learn what you can about America and write to me about everything. At least you’ve had a good start with your English. But don’t forget, America has a bloody enough history of its own.

Give Mammeh and Tateh big hugs for me and answer as soon as you can. A thousand kisses and hugs to you.

Your loving big sister Clara, genuine chalutz, bronzed pioneer of the Jezre’el,

Chava Tsedek.

She was all of thirteen years old. All she held in her head was that they had been forced to flee and had fled in different directions. Clara to the east, and she would be sailing the ocean to America. She was Miriam Tsedeska on her papers but was Manya to most and Manyichka to those who loved her. In America she would have another name again. How could she have dreamed, standing on the pavement outside the poste restante, what that would come to mean? She knew it as an adventure and had her youth to protect her.

An adventure, then. Not an exile forced by a mob of crazed Cossacks who burned down her father’s barn and would have certainly raped her if Clara hadn’t hidden her and covered her mouth to stifle her cries as the horsemen stampeded by. She skipped up the gangplank with a Gladstone in one hand and clutching Clara’s letter in the other. Not a skerrick of sadness would she allow.

Chapter 2

The Valley

1922

The road was not a road at all, only a rough dirt trail that circled the largest boulders and followed without resistance the rugged, wayward contours of the hills. It seemed as if they had wandered through several different climates since leaving the sandy coast and taking the ancient pass that led to the temperate plain and then dipping down again through thick spiny vegetation that tore at their clothes and Chava’s pack until down in the rocky cleft between the mountains they reached the semi-tropics. They splashed in dark-watered pools there, smacking mosquitoes, drinking their fill. Then the arduous climbing began again until they came to another ridge, then another, and another, until from the top of the last she could see the valley with its river. The river ran through the valley like a shy maiden, unseemly perhaps in a stream of such antiquity; hiding here, flashing a smile there, frolicking into small dams and over miniature cairns before vanishing again, as if this was what it took to preserve herself through time.

They walked single file with the patient slack-rumped mules down the steep entrance to the valley, stalking the shy river. The birds kept up their indefatigable singing. That was her first, overpowering impression—the wondrous, varying, multitudinous register of birdsong, a high-pitched insistence on the continuance of life at the moment she felt her own was only just beginning. ‘Kadima!’ Dov tossed up his cap and shouted. Forward, full steam ahead. Dmitri and Clara. Only now he was Dov, a bear. And she was Chava, a breath. They had discussed this at length on the steamer, his voice not much lower than he was using now. ‘Chava, I like it. Our very first woman.’ And she’d laughed, but was glad to have chosen it. Eva, Eve, Chava, traversing the languages in her head.

The final descent seemed the longest. He gave her his calico handkerchief to tie back her hair. The green land shimmered in the heat haze, the silvery flashes of the river beckoned like a mirage. At last they came to the flat floor of the valley and she saw the grass up close, and the phalanx of white tents straddling the iridescent patches of mud.

A gangly, tousled-haired man who introduced himself as Comrade Rudnitsky led her through the maze of tents. It was late in the morning. The birds had stopped singing while the strains of an instrument grew louder with every step. Without a peep from the birds, the low, plangent notes had the stage to themselves. ‘A viola?’ The gangly man nodded. ‘Galila played professionally. In Lvov.’ Chava took a final glance around her. The green of the swamp seemed all the more astounding, the fierce morning light on the rise a blinding yellow. From where she stood the river was invisible.

The viola skidded to a halt as the gangly man took his leave. A young woman, bending, emerged from the tent, the bow still dangling from her fingers. ‘Shalom! Shalom! I’m Galila. They said you’d be coming. It’s so good that you’re here. You wouldn’t know. You see, I’ve tidied up a bit,’ she said, extending her arm to make a wide arc with the bow.

She had arranged the tent so that Chava would have the best position, next to a small folding table with a paraffin lamp that she could use for writing, and lying on her stretcher, reading at night. There were two other stretchers, though only one besides hers had a roll. Mosquito nets, bunched up on frames, hung at the head of each.

‘The other woman, it didn’t suit her. She left for Tiberias only last week,’ Galila explained, with an air of apology as though she had been the cause.

Chava heaved her pack onto the stretcher and sank down beside it. Had they introduced themselves? She was too exhausted to be sure. ‘It’s lovely. Thank you.’

A film of damp crept along the canvas walls, with faint patterns of mould springing from the seams. A piece of tin nailed to the centre pole served as a mirror. The viola was propped on the seat of the one canvas chair.

‘No, no. You mustn’t thank me. It’s been so lonely since she left.’ Galila set the viola on the ground and pulled up the canvas chair. ‘Especially at night. I haven’t relished being alone here. You know about the scorpions? And the jackals? And what did you make of Yossel Rudnitsky? We call him The Stork. Don’t you think he looks like one?’ She giggled then, a quiet, conspiratorial laugh that brightened her pale blue eyes.

Chava managed a smile, taking it in, adding it to the slowly accumulating store of impressions about her new surroundings and the solicitous young woman she would be sharing them with. Galila, with the surname Ticho. A long, rather pale face—paler than she imagined could be maintained in such a climate. Thin, sandy hair pulled back from a high, faintly freckled forehead. Long, spatulate fingers that held the bow loosely. And at odds with this somewhat patrician appearance, the giggle—a nervous tic, Chava supposed.

‘I’m going to give you a chance to rest,’ Galila announced, jumping up from the chair and packing the viola in its case, which she slipped in its place under her stretcher. ‘We’ll see you later perhaps. In the dining hut.’

But it was well into the morning the following day that Chava opened her eyes. She hadn’t the faintest notion where she was. Every inch of her ached, but a white cloud, strangely anaesthetic, hung about her like ether. The tent came slowly into focus. She was in the Jezre’el Valley, and someone had bound up her stretcher in netting. Apart from her boots, she was fully clothed.

Gingerly, she pulled herself up and when the features of the tent had righted themselves, found a way to untie the net. She slipped off her clothes and washed in a basin left for her on the table. (Galila, she recalled. The violist.) Finding nothing else at hand, though, she loosened her hair and rubbed herself dry with Dov’s handkerchief before tying it back again with it, then opened her pack for a change of clothes. In it she found the spare muslin shift and drawers, an ankle-length brown serge skirt, and a floral tunic of the same loose style as the one she had just removed, and laid these out on the stretcher with a mix of amusement and dismay. They seemed to bear no relation to what she had come here to do.

Their first job was to clear the swamp, beginning with the tough, blade-like reeds and brilliant softer grasses. She waded with the rest in a watery loam the same gritty brown as coffee, the ground Turkish kind they drank. The uprooted plants were tossed in great mounds to dry and then used for fires on which they cooked their meals and boiled the water for drinking and for washing. All at midday, when the tiny anopheles mosquito queen retreated for her siesta. Chava swallowed her quinine and threw armfuls of grass and reeds onto the piles. The fires were lit and clouds of sharp smoke poured through the valley, supplanting the morning mists, and when the space was cleared, they started planting eucalypts. Eucalypt. She repeated the word in a series of clicks at the back of her tongue. Odd sort of tree that they brought in from the south to suck up the water and hold the soil in place. Chava helped unstrap them and was taken by their fragility; the flimsy trunks and limbs scarcely more substantial than the reeds they would replace, and knelt next to Galila in a line of women, digging the holes with their hands and sliding the young trees in, patting the sodden soil around them.

It took them a day to dig out the holes and insert the trees, and the next day there were more. They planted them along the shy river. When the sun slipped towards the sea they lit another fire. Stunned by fatigue, Chava stared mutely at the heat shimmering above the flames, everything at the fire’s periphery seeming to lose anchorage and shape. Gradually she registered the voices and gradually, as the volume of them grew someone began singing, and others joined in, and then they got up and danced. A second wave of energy took hold of her and she was at Dov’s side then, laughing at herself as they whirled around the fire and laughing still as the circle broke, bent almost double as she struggled to regain her breath. She straightened up, a smile still hovering on her face, but the look on his was serious, as though suddenly all his mirth was spent. She was conscious of his breath, and his smell—conscious as well of her own. They stood like that for several seconds, he with his quiet breathing, she with the half-smile illuminating her face, now less a phantom of her laugh than an expression of mild disbelief.

She was surprised, pleased but surprised, though she wasn’t at all sure that she was ready. He placed his hand on the soft part of her arm and they walked together towards one of the great grassy mounds beyond the fire. And as they walked her mind raced ahead of them, never stopped racing, though her breath had mercifully steadied. And it happened quickly, there on the giant bed of rushes, without a word, other than the ones that were racing inside her head because that was the kind of head hers was. Even at the peak of her pleasure, which was briefer than his, less urgent, less strong, she took note all the while of the particularity of him, the way he moved, the shape of his head in her hands, the rough wiry tickle of his beard. Nor could she decide whether it was because her mind was separate from her body that she could detach herself so, as if she were recording what was happening rather than actually experiencing it, or if it was because her mind was such a part of her that it was indeed part of the experience, her thinking as she was feeling, as she was being flooded with sensation, and all of it was one.

Away from the fire the night was very black. She picked out its noises: the skittering of lizards, scorpions, voles; the hoarse gulps of the frogs in the marsh; the distant wails of jackals; the voices of other lovers murmuring in the trembling dark. And in her mind she relived the moments, reviewing them yes, but somehow by doing so making them more vivid still. And she realised then that this had been what she feared, that by this reliving she would be wanting him, wanting what she had never remotely imagined she would want again so keenly.

They had spoken so little of their pasts. ‘Dmitri Ivanov,’ he had said, extending his hand. ‘From Kharkov.’ He had to shout, to make himself heard above the engine. They were up on the steamer’s deck looking down on the waters of the Bosphorus winkle past the beamy stern, as the boat chugged into the Mediterranean. The city’s skyline receded, dusk was blurring its outlines. He wiped his brow with a broad, rough calico handkerchief before cramming it back in his pocket. ‘And you?’

‘Bessarabia,’ she said. And gave her name as Chava, but it sounded strange to her still and, shouting, she corrected herself. ‘Clara. Clara Tsedeska.’

‘You’re serious? It’s the Wild West out there.’ He laughed. She could see that he was a man who laughed easily and she liked that. He turned to get a closer look at her, and began to stroke his beard, a rich deep auburn, not unlike the hair on her head. A nice head, he noted. A face with prominent cheekbones and sparkly green eyes. A poet might call it a feline face, but there was more to it than that, and he’d never claimed to be a poet.

‘Perhaps the Romanians can tame it,’ she said, after they’d strolled further from the engine. ‘The Russians never could.’

‘So you couldn’t risk staying.’

He was teasing, but she could match him.

‘Not while it’s Romania,’ she said, adding: ‘And you would have stayed in Kharkhov?’

When he laughed the whole of his torso shook, and his waistcoat strained against his belly.

‘We may have had a Revolution, but it hasn’t been kind to us Mensheviks.’

‘Kind enough to some.’

‘Maybe,’ he’d said, and cast his eye then to Constantinople—Istanbul—receding.

So Dmitri was Dov, and Clara was Chava. A couple? Well, that was past too. No wooing, no lasting pairs. Nothing, least of all people, should be hoarded to oneself. And though she could not stop a certain quickening, a wetness in her private self whenever he was near, she fought it, and fought as well against hoping he would be in the circle beside her, and would take her by the hand or that vulnerable place just above her elbow and lead her to the bed of drying grass. She had not reached the point where she could think of taking his hand, though this too, in theory, could be changed. Nor did the theories take account of one large biological fact: the reason the woman left for Tiberias, for instance. ‘She was unlucky,’ said Galila. ‘And you tell me how you’d raise a kid in this!’

It was understood. No children. No ties. They would be free to move from one part of the land to another, wherever there was need for them, wherever there was backbreaking work. Though each night she waited for Dov to come to her, back to the place beside her in the circle, and sometimes he did and other times he didn’t.

They were together in the mornings. He was the first to occupy the long timber trestle closest to the entrance to the dining hut, his nose in the pages of an outdated Times, sipping from his mug of coffee and calling out as she passed. When Chava returned with hers and her bread, he had folded the paper and left it for her on the trestle.

‘Page fifteen has a piece on Trotsky.’

She took a bite of the bread and opened the paper, but her English was still halting and woefully old-fashioned and before she could finish Yossel Rudnitsky had slid on the bench beside her and was reading over her shoulder. ‘Trotsky? What do the English have to say? They don’t understand a thing about what’s going on in Russia.’

‘It’s water under the bridge, Yossel,’ Chava said. ‘What happens there.’

Inching away from him she broke off another piece of bread. He was just like a stork, this Rudnitsky, as Galila said, if nowhere near as good-natured.

‘You really think that?’

What was the point of arguing about Trotsky? But with Dov right there she somehow felt obliged to defend him. ‘Well,’ she said, pointing to the article, ‘he has won the Civil War—even the Times concedes that. He took workers and peasants and made soldiers of them, when all the old generals couldn’t do it.’

Galila came and Dov moved over to make room for her. ‘Yossel here thinks the Brits have it wrong,’ he told her.

‘I am being grossly maligned. What I said was they don’t understand what’s happening.’

‘Does anyone?’ asked Galila, looking first at Dov and then back at Yossel.

Chava said then: ‘We were talking about this article, which as far as I can tell is about another article, in another paper, by a foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow. An Englishman, as it happens. The main point, Yossel, is that Trotsky’s built a first-class army. And how did he do it? By treating the men like human beings.’

‘Ach, if Bronshtein was such a mensch, he would be here, with us.’

‘Trotsky’s Lenin’s baby now,’ Dov said. And they might have left it there, but then Yossel explained to Galila that Bronshtein was a Jew who didn’t like being a Jew and so was the worst of their enemies.

‘Enemy?’ countered Dov. ‘It’s a meaningless word. An enemy is a friend if the occasion requires it.’ He looked at Chava closely then, studying her reaction.

Out in the open air she thought about it more. Trotsky, Lenin. It was harder than she’d imagined, leaving all that behind. Dov was right, of course, about enemies. It was realpolitik, and she was not so naïve to think that it wouldn’t affect them, even here.

It was soon after this that Chava became a rider. She developed a liking for the delicate sway of donkeys. They suited the peaks, the rugged declines, the stony stretches of scrub. The Battalion had good ones, as well as their horses. With the horses they had built a rough sort of cavalry, but the donkeys and mules were their mainstay, the donkeys especially. As a young girl she had driven her father’s cart on the rutted roads around Kamenka, a bumpy ride along the river and through the birches, pulled by a sullen grey one, but the donkeys here were a different breed and more amenable. Her favourite was a jenny they called Afarsayk because of her coat, which was yellowish like a peach, and her girth, which was plump. She rode her to the towns to pick up supplies, tethering her to a post as she straggled through the souks, wandering off and haggling with the traders. She saved her old skirt for those occasions, but on all others rejoiced in the freedom of a pair of cast-off army britches. In the heat of the day her thighs were soon wet gripping the jenny’s sides and the donkey’s own sweat would seep through the khaki, and as they picked their way through the stony terrain and in and out of the wadis she felt at one with the creature.

As soon as she started riding the donkey regularly they gave her a gun. She had never used one, neither in the country around Vinnitsa where her uncle shot ducks and hares nor in Odessa when many of the cadres carried arms. She had helped smuggle them into the city and hide them down in the catacombs but she could never bring herself to point one, let alone pull a trigger. She could see the necessity: Where was there revolution without arms? She told herself that revolutions were violent, with some defending their power and others determined to break it, but the fact was that she recoiled from bloodshed, the actual proposition of bringing about another’s death, and that in the end was what guns were for. She had seen enough of what bullets could do, only one was enough to shatter a skull and send the brains flying, several could rip open a body like a piece of ripe fruit. When Dov handed her the rifle a treeful of cheeky children flashed in her mind, one by one suddenly stilled, dropping to the ground from their perch in the leafy branches.

She was glad there were to be no children in the Battalion.

He led her out into the scrub some way from the camp. An old tea caddy balanced on a rock was the target. She had to keep herself from shaking. She stared at the thick mat of hairs on his arms as he threw them around her and took her through the paces. Butt to the shoulder, snuggled well in, cheek against butt, focus the sights, pull back the bolt for the bullet to rise to the breech, push the bolt in and lock it.

Then, placing his hand over hers on the trigger, he squeezed.

A bullet went skidding through the dust. A nervy, brittle sound echoed through the scrub. Could it be that she was laughing? She had gone so wide of the mark! But at the same time a terrible tension had lifted. She was grateful to have laughed, grateful to hear Dov laugh as well. ‘You’ve frightened some lizard out of his wits. Never mind, you’ll soon get the hang of it.’

She would not let him see what she felt. It was a privilege to be given a gun at all. She took it from him and tried again on her own.

She pulled the trigger too hard and the bullet went wide and the butt slammed into her shoulder. She didn’t flinch and lifted the rifle into position again.

Day after day she practised and after a while became as competent as was required. What was required was standing watch. They took turns with this, everything was supposed to be equal, the women did men’s work, the men, less frequently, the women’s.

The watch began at dawn and went through the night, a twenty-four hour vigil in spite of the good relations they had sought with the village on the hill. On her assigned nights she paced up and down outside the barbed wire they had put up to keep out the Bedouins’ animals, and her ears would burn with the songs of the singers inside and the footsteps and whispers of lovers slipping away from campfire. And Dov, yes, he would be among them, and she would force herself to picture him, with Pesia, or Rivka, or Michal, or, alas, Galila. She would grit her teeth imagining but the more she did the quicker her torment would pass and soon it would be nothing, no more than a twinge. It was the way, she had learnt, with all emotion: to feel it sharply, and then let it go, like tensing a muscle to relax it, like taking breath.

That gun resting on her shoulder: she had soon become used to it, much sooner than she had thought, or feared.

Chapter 3

From Clara-Chava to Manya:

How good it is to hear from you. The post is truly a marvel. To think that we can correspond with such ease. You make Nebraska sound as though it’s just another Russia. The steppe without the Cossacks. But what about your Red Indians? Tateh has also written at length about the business, selling everything from ploughshares to baked goods. We bake our bread here, too, though that’s no recommendation. But we need the sustenance, we’ve started work on the roads, so we gobble up burnt bread. Because we’re so short of tools I have been given a hammer for the job. You’d laugh your head off to see me: on the ground, legs outstretched, a rock or two between them and the hammer coming down on them as hard as my two arms can manage. Like a kid playing mud pies, though these are no mud pies. Good honest work, and hot. I’ve taken to wearing trousers and I’ve chopped off my hair for the sweat.

I’m learning how to handle a gun as well. Can’t say I’m the marksman I aim to be but I’m certainly looking the part …

And Manya wrote back: Oh, no, not your hair …

She loved Clara’s hair, forever coming undone, but when the pins held, such a gorgeous russet bush of it. It had filled her with envy. Hers was so straight and black that they joked about her ancestry, wondered aloud if she could be the cuckoo in their nest. Frieda’s hair was that lovely red shade too and the same strong texture as Clara’s. Both of them had inherited it from Tateh, who had long since lost his. But jokes about gypsies and Tatars aside, Manya’s looks were their mother’s. The straight blue-black locks and grey, almond-shaped eyes.

And oh, what she had seen with those eyes.

New York, that great bustling harbour, and the city at night an island of spangles. Uncle Nahum had met them and then, with barely enough time to get their land legs, the train pulled out of Pennsylvania Station and was carrying them over the Alleghenies and westward still, past the lakes and into the prairies, one glowing city after another, into the rippling seas of grain. So this was America, the goldena medina she said to herself, the golden land, and as soon as the words had formed in her head, her uncle repeated them. ‘So this is America,’ he said, pointing from the carriage window as they clattered across the bridge spanning the Mississippi. She had never ridden in such a sumptuous carriage before, as richly textured as the countryside they hurtled through, slowing at the silos along the silken Missouri. Even the herds of longhorn seemed beautiful to her, and the air was pungent with the smell of them when they finally disembarked in a welter of steam in Omaha, the biggest city in Nebraska.

In Nebraska were the Potawatami and the Oto, a few of them anyhow, but rarely seen in daytime, and when they were downtown they struck her as a dusty, sorry sort of people. But she loved the rhythmical sound of their names and, at night, if she listened carefully, she thought she could hear the drumbeats of their pow-wows carry across the prairie. When her mother and father and uncle said they didn’t hear them, she found that disturbing. She was in tune with the night sounds, locked in step with their music. There were different ways of seeing the world, or hearing it, she was learning, different ways of dreaming. Tateh and Mammeh had given up their dreams and Uncle Nahum dreamt of everyday things, though she had to concede his genius for surviving.

Clara was right. She’d had a good start with English, although she realised soon enough that Tateh’s version was painfully stiff and formal. But she’d hit upon her quick ear for language and was soaking up the idiom.

‘In America,’ she wrote, ‘they like to drop their prepositions. People help you understand if something’s the matter, or they go see and drop the and. They won’t dare you to do anything, it’s one doesn’t dare go out at night. They strut instead of dance. Everyone’s crazy for dancing here. The Charleston’s all the rage. I’ve seen people move their legs so fast with it, it looks like their legs are made of jelly. Or Jello. You hear it on the radio, along with the plays.’

The plays, too, were the thing. The best of them were broadcast in the evenings but they went on all day. ‘We even listen in the store. The customers, too.’

Uncle Nahum was teaching her the rudiments of the business. They began with the stocktaking on New Year’s Day, and it was there, in the brightly lit, overheated room that, ledger on her knees, she entered the items her uncle counted on the shelves and in the storeroom at the back. Nahum was Tateh’s elder brother, as thick around the middle as Tateh was wiry and thin, as rich as Tateh was poor. She had seen at a glance when he met them at the port, after they’d passed through the big hot immigration station, how unalike they were, nor had it taken her long to see why. Tateh had turned his life around but he couldn’t make the corn grow when it wouldn’t and he couldn’t have known what the war would do to them. Nahum had never waited to find out. It was the same as with her sisters. Frieda, so level-headed and upright, obeying all the rules; when Clara liked nothing more than breaking them. Frieda comfortably married to the owner of a factory. Clara hadn’t married and probably never would. But she liked Clara best. Frieda was older, more distant, and not half as much fun.

Uncle Nahum tugged at his chins as he counted, and puffed a great deal climbing up and down the ladder. After each bout of counting he came over to the stool she was perched on and checked her figures. ‘Did you get that, child? And you need to remember we’re dealing in pounds and ounces here.’ Everyone knew he could keep the figures in his head and had no need at all for her help in this, so she appreciated the time he was giving her. But he had turned off the radio for the exercise and she missed it.

So many cans of cream of tomato, chicken noodle, beef noodle soup; so many jars of peanut butter, jams and jellies. Boxes of matches and laundry powder, bottles of household bleach. The latest Sears catalogues and Simplicity patterns, and Nahum sold tacks and nails and hammers, with sleek wooden handles and shiny metal heads. He had plums and plumbs, cooking implements and cookies—barrels of them. Potatoes from Idaho and five varieties of onion. Meat grinders and fly swats and cheesecloth for straining.

Snow whirled outside and gusts of wind splattered the flakes against the windowpanes. The furnace in the basement belched and heated the air inside. So this is America, she had marvelled then. This astonishing abundance of warmth and goods.

Dearest Chava,

See? I have written your new name almost without thinking. Does it surprise you that I’ve taken to it so fast? I thought I’d have trouble with it, but I haven’t any. The trick is to see it as your part in a drama, our drama, with the whole wide world our stage. So Chava it is. My news is that I’m thinking of an exciting new role for myself as well, even if it means I don’t sleep much. This will make a little more sense when I tell you that I’ve joined a theatrical society, the Omaha Amateur Company, and as their youngest female member I’ve had the pick of all sorts of roles, from children to women in their twenties, ingenues and the like. So far I’ve played Ophelia and Juliet, and, best of all, Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. It’s very demanding, we have had so many night-time rehearsals. Tateh and Mammeh aren’t happy about these, but I know underneath they are both very proud of me, and proud of themselves for doing so much to prepare me, especially when the director told them I was ‘made for the part’. When Frieda and you and I put on our plays for them they were of course shorter than Shaw’s and maybe not as well put together, but it’s turned out to be very good training indeed.

So you can see that I’m fitting in reasonably well here, and when school breaks up in a couple of weeks I’ll have three full months to dedicate to the company, and catch up some on sleep. School is so-so and not very academic—I’m well ahead in most of the subjects. I’ve told you what I can about the Indians, but not much about the Africans here and that like the serfs they were slaves. Uncle Nahum says there weren’t many in Omaha until after the war, and then a lot came north to work in the meatworks. There are some other Jewish people and some of my classmates are Polish and Czech but we all try to be American. You know Nahum is Nathan here, and Tateh is calling himself Paul. It’s what people do when they come here, just the same as there, and I have a name I’ve been using for the acting. So here I am, signing off for now, with many fine wishes and barrels of love for you,

Your sister Manya-now-Marion

Chapter 4

Chava was on watch one day when she saw three men on horseback trotting towards the camp, kicking up clouds of grit and dust. As they came closer she could pick out the old chieftain from the village, his sword flashing from the folds of his robes, the glint on the blue steel barrels of the horsemen’s rifles, and though she expected no trouble, her fingers, almost by instinct now, reached for the butt of her own.

Many times old Abu Zayyad and his henchmen visited the Battalion’s encampment to negotiate grazing rights and seek some kind of work for the men of his village, and each time left in defeat, for all the hospitality they showed him. He was a large, swaggering man, and to some in the camp the jagged scar on his left cheek and his missing right eye appeared less the consequence of some incident or disease than the expression of his grievance. They all knew why Abu Zayyad was aggrieved. In the old days he had provided labour for the settlements but now they were working the land themselves, raising their own livestock, chickens, vegetables and grain, and building the roads that would one day cast a net over his terrain. Abu Zayyad had never been happy about these changes and had not been happy about the settlers standing guard. The guards on the old settlements had been Circassians, specially chosen by the Turks. Abu Zayyad had been pleased with that arrangement. The Circassians drank and played cards and afforded perfect cover for his raids.

At first his visits were accompanied by a pair of black goats, tugged dispiritedly as offerings, but after