“Dagmar.” Her mother didn’t turn from the canvas. “Why so late?”
Dagmar hung up the wool coat, tickets tucked inside the inner pocket. “We had trouble drafting this month’s newsletter, Mutti.”
It was true the Maccabi Hatzair meeting went longer than usual, but it was also true that she and her best friend, Dov, had taken the long way home so they could plot, as they had for years, their departure to the Land of Israel, only this time they had the tickets, bought that afternoon, for a ship leaving in three weeks. They were seventeen years old: if Hitler hadn’t come to power, their parents never would have approved of them setting off on their own for the dusty edge of Arabia, but now she and Dov believed they would let them go without too much of a fight.
Dagmar hurried to the kitchen, grabbed a chocolate-ginger cookie from the counter, and sat at the breakfast table with a marked-up copy of the newsletter. The chocolate-ginger cookies were the only thing her mother baked that she could still swallow. Ever since her mother had been barred from the art school, she filled the hours she would have spent teaching with baking. Since the family of three could only eat so many pastries, Dagmar and her mother had walked plate after tinfoiled plate over to the neighbors, until they stopped answering their doors. Dagmar read through the statement, circling the Hebrew words she didn’t know. Having the best Modern Hebrew in the chapter, she had been voted translator, and even if she had to work through the night, she would have the translation perfected for tomorrow’s printing.
“Dagmar, sweetie, come paint with me,” called her mother.
“I’m busy!”
Her mother came and leaned in the kitchen doorway. She wore lipstick and a wool skirt even though she hadn’t left the house that day. Dagmar admired the strength her mother showed in keeping up appearances, but lipstick was degrading, and the woman who put it on while fellow Jews were having their beards cut in the streets ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous.
Her mother said, “I don’t like these meetings. They’re dangerous.”
Dangerous! In other words: courageous, admirable. Imagine her reaction when she finds out about the tickets for the Kampala. Without looking up from her notes, Dagmar answered, “It’s better to die on your feet, Mutti, than live on your knees.”
Her mother walked over and kissed her on the head. “Oh, my Dagmar. My little Dagmar and her big plans.”
Ziva tossed a bruised lychee at the rotten basket, wondering if she could have painted with her mother that night and still have completed her translation. She picked another lychee from her lap. It too was bruised. Tossing it, she realized she was moving as slowly as her empty-headed young charge.
Enough. She sat up straighter. She had to focus. Keep working, fighting. She might have lost an important battle at last night’s meeting, but she hadn’t lost the war. Articles needed to be written for the kibbutz newsletter, question-and-answer sessions had to be organized, posters needed to be printed and tacked everywhere. There was no time for woolgathering. The answer was no. No, she could not have painted with her mother that night. It was as true then as it was now: the only way to accomplish something extraordinary was with extraordinary commitment.
“We’re not leaving until we sort through every one of these crates,” Ziva told Claudette. “Don’t sit back every time you pick up a lychee. It’s a small waste of time, and small wastes of time add up to a big waste of time. You don’t want to be a big waste of time, do you?”
Claudette shook her head, hunched forward.
“Oh!” Ziva gasped. She’d forgotten to take her arthritis pill.
She reached over her distended belly for her bag. How could she be expected to remember to take all these pills at their various prescribed times? With food, without food, before bedtime, in the morning, these together, these at least four hours apart? She opened the pill organizer, a big, ugly plastic thing with as many pockets of color as her mother’s palette, and struggled to identify the steroids. The green capsules curbed nausea, the white tablets numbed her throbbing bones, the yellow ones prevented dizziness, the red and blue gelcaps supposedly stemmed the accumulation of fluid in her abdomen, the tiny orange pills thinned her blood so it didn’t pool in painful blue bulges around her ankles, and the pink antihistamines soothed the incessant itchiness caused by all this medication.
As she picked out two chalky tablets, she noticed the younger woman gawking at her and her stockpile of pills. “What are you looking at?”
“Sorry.” Claudette averted her eyes.
“Sorry again.”
Ziva washed down the pills with a chug from her tin canteen. In the distance, beyond the peanut fields and cabbage fields, tall eucalyptuses marked the kibbutz graveyard. Under the shade of those trees lay Dov and the other pioneers and a slab of earth waiting for her. Tonight she would remind Eyal that the cemetery hadn’t been tended to since last autumn.
When the truck came at the end of the day to fetch the women, Ziva insisted they sit in the back on the metal benches with the other field workers, mostly Arab men. Once again she had to tell the driver that she didn’t see why she should sit in the front on cushy seats. Because she was a woman? A Jew? An employer? She left out “old.” As the truck bumped over the dirt path, the setting sun made a golden wonder of the wheat fields. Ziva breathed in the early evening air, so cool and loamy, sweetened by the overripe lemon trees. In the distance, the lights of the villages twinkled on the darkening hilltops, little man-made constellations.
The truck parked behind the dairy house, and the tired workers clambered out. A young Arab with the most striking eyes—irises as gold as honey and long black lashes—held out his hand to help her down, but she waved him off, saying, “Go away!” Everyone tried to help her now. You reach a given age, and people think you can’t do the simplest things on your own. Shaking his head, the fieldhand ran to catch up with the other men heading back to the nearby Arab village of Kfar Al-Musa. Sitting on the floor of the truck, Ziva eased herself over its edge. When her feet were secure on the asphalt, she stood and brushed off her backside.
“Your Eyal’s a busy man, eh?”
Ziva turned to find Hanoch, still bitter over her insistence, back in 1978, that the television his brother had sent him from America should be installed in the clubhouse. His decrepit gray mutt sat beside him.
“And how’s Noam?” said Ziva, knowing his grandson was rumored to be a drug dealer in Miami. “Busy, too, I hear.”
Hanoch would not be deterred. He smiled and clapped his hands as if someone had finished a grand joke. “Remember when we replaced the benches in the dining hall with chairs? And oy, what a hullabaloo you made! Individual chairs, you claimed, would undermine our sense of comradeship. Ha! And now look at what we’re talking about and who’s the mastermind behind it. The son of the great Ziva Peled.”
Watching Hanoch and his tired dog tottering away, Ziva found it hard to accept that the bitter old man was ten years her junior. Turning for the seniors’ quarters, she said, “Hopefully you’ll do a better job tomorrow, Claudette.”
Claudette followed. “Eyal wants me to see you home.”
Ziva gave her a sidelong scowl. “I don’t need anyone to walk me home.”
Claudette walked alongside her anyway, gaze fixed on the pavement.
Ziva clenched her fists and looked ahead. “I’ll let you walk me home—for your sake, not mine.”
In silence the women passed the water tower, the tallest structure on the kibbutz by far, and a row of houses belonging to younger families, their porches strewn with soccer balls, scooters, small shoes. How long had it been since they closed