Tzili: The Story of a Life

25

THEY MADE THEIR WAY southward. The peasants stood by the roadside displaying their wares: bread, vodka, and smoked meat. But the refugees walked past without buying or bartering. Suffering had made them indifferent. But Tzili was hungry. She sold a garment and received bread and smoked meat in exchange. “Look,” said one of the survivors, “she’s eating.”

Now she saw them from close up: thin, speechless, and withdrawn. The terror had not yet faded from their faces.

The sun sank in the sky and the crust of the earth dried up. The first ploughmen appeared on the mountainsides next to the plains. There were no clouds to darken the sky, only the trees, and the quietness.

They moved slowly through the landscape, looking around them as they walked. They slept a lot. Hardly a word was spoken. A kind of secret veiled their faces. Tzili feared this secret more than the dark nights in the forest.

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.