The Wedding of Anna F. Read Free Page B

once you do know, you can’t ignore it. That’s what’s happened to me. Three weeks ago.”
    “Three weeks ago.”
    “Yes. My memories came back, or at least some of them, right out of the blue.”
    “Do you mean nothing precipitated this belief? This…discovery?”
    “Well, there was something. A moment. A feeling. Of illumination. I was lighting a candle at the time.”
    “And why were you doing that?”
    “I mean, it was Shavuot, but my family was never observant, so it wasn’t really that. It’s just a candle is a lovely thing.”
    “So you were lighting a candle. And perhaps looking into its flame.” He makes some quick notes.
    “Yes, exactly! I was looking into its flame, and then suddenly after all these years I remembered who I was. How I made it. How I got away from Belsen. How I landed on that beach.” I watch him, scribbling, while I roll my tongue around in my mouth. Oh, that salty beach. The smell of char, of burned rubber, mixed together with the stink of fish and cooked flesh. My cheek lodged in sand, my deaf ear clogged with it. My head hidden under a woven basket. My first sight of that beach, when the screen was lifted off, was pieces of blue sky crowded with the heads of men carrying guns.
    Time to turn and swim back to my interviewer.
    I smile at his bowed, curled head. “You take notes like a newspaperman. I used to know a newspaperman very well.” I wait while his wrist—he’s left-handed, how interesting—undulates around a shorthand I don’t recognize. I wonder if he’s writing down more than I’m saying. Perhaps he’s jotting down what I look like, sitting in this chair, with my skirt ballooned over my knees and my scarf draped over my shoulder and my hair so composed. To be seen is to be captured. But to speak, to speak is to move.
    “Palestine is where you were found and adopted by your Jewish parents.”
    “Yes. But my mother and father didn’t really take to being pioneers, kibbutzniks. They were too much city people. Have you been to Palestine, Mr. Bardawil?”
    He looks up. “I am Palestinian, as it happens.”
    “Oh. What a coincidence.” I adjust my red scarf, a little embarrassed to have been so wrong about his name. “Then you will understand! Do you remember the air?”
    “No. I’ve never lived there.”
    So white and hot, I remember, suddenly, intensely—the air around that kibbutz. Around the small, clean houses, and the chicken coops knitted with staring eyes, and the vegetable gardens, and the lean-to goat sheds. A little damp inside the communal kitchen, where they let me eat anything I wanted, where they brought me back to life, gave me a home. But maybe it isn’t the right time to say so just now.
    “I didn’t feel myself to be really there, though. I mean, I didn’t belong , Mr. Bardawil. No one knew what to do with me, you see. I was a complete mystery to them. I spoke several languages. I couldn’t remember what town or city I came from. I was all the time walking around with a bucket on my head. Then my parents adopted me and took me in.”
    He considers me with those young, critical, student-ish eyes. The left hand isn’t moving now. Only the finger stroking the pen.
    Bardawil. Bide a while.
    “I was a little mad, then,” I explain.” But I soon stopped behaving that way. Mostly, to be honest, to please my new parents. They had been through so much even before they started to help me, Mr. Bardawil. They didn’t expect the hardships of kibbutz life to be so—well, hard. They were city people, and they wanted to be good after the war, they wanted to help build—but in the end, the life didn’t suit them. And my father, who was a lawyer, didn’t like it that if they adopted me there as a refugee child, they’d have to share me in common with the kibbutz. Which was a normal practice at that time. So they decided I needed quiet and cool air, and a good Jewish doctor, and my own home and bedroom. And my father worked things out quietly