Skeletons at the Feast (39 page)
Anna and Callum had named the child Uri. In the months before Uri was born they had vacillated wildly between the names Theodore and Uri, debating passionately the merits of each option, but in the end Helmut had made the decision for them: He told them that someday he would like to name a son after Theo. He said that he hoped eventually he would be able to name boys after both Theo and Werner, their brothers who forever were lost.
And so Anna and Callum had a son with a name that was uncommon in Scotland, but sometimes made Anna smile when she said the full name aloud. On occasion those smiles were wistful because she was contemplating all that was gone from the world, or she was recalling in her mind's eye Uri's grave, well-chiseled face; but other times, especially as days passed and small hints of her baby's own personality began to emerge, those smiles would verge on the ecstatic because she was pondering all that nevertheless remained.
Nearby the dog barked and Uri opened his eyes. Blinked. Rolled his small head slightly toward the sound. Then he closed them again, as he slowly began to reacclimate himself to the waking world. She decided if she was going to finish the letter from Cecile, she had better return to it right now. And so she picked up the paper and started to read, catching up with the Frenchwoman with whom she had been friends since their paths had crossed at the very end of the war. Once Cecile had left the displaced-persons camp outside of Lubeck, she had returned to Lyon. Her fiance had indeed perished, as had her mother and father, but she remained surprised by the number of friends who had somehow survived. She worked now as a secretary in a small publishing house and had a cat and a boyfriend. Cecile made the future, as always, sound promising.
Anna had almost finished the letter when Uri once again opened his eyes and looked up at her. He shaped his impossibly small mouth into an oval. A greeting, she thought, though she presumed he might simply have been hungry and in a moment would use that mouth to cry out for food. She loved the glimmer of recognition she saw in his eyes when his lids first rolled back after a nap and he recognized her.
Now she lifted the boy up and into her arms, brought his face to hers, and thought of nothing and no one--not Cecile or parents or siblings or in-laws or even her husband--but her baby, and how remarkably warm this small person's skin was against hers.
a girl stood beside one of the pomegranate trees on a narrow street in Beersheba, savoring the shade she had found and watching the long parade of captured Egyptian trucks passing by. The trucks were filled with victorious Israeli soldiers now, whooping and hollering and singing. The driver of every second or third truck would press exuberantly on the vehicle's horn. She herself had been on one of those trucks until a few moments ago, when she had hopped off.
She wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, made sure that her machine gun's safety was on, and then wandered down the street to the gray-green awning of the restaurant. The ground was so hot that she could feel it through the soles of her boots--a sensation that she knew well, and one that always reminded her of how profoundly different the Middle East was from Europe. She couldn't imagine ever living in Germany again. She knew she was young, but she was confident that she would never again want anything to do with that country--or, for that matter, with the whole European continent.
The cafe was a joyous mob scene in which every table was taken and the bar was filled with young and old soldiers who were toasting to victory and the Negev and the future of Israel, and everybody was at least as happy as the soldiers who had just ridden by on the trucks. She found a table with three soldiers, including the lanky fellow whom she had agreed to meet here today, God willing. She saw him before he saw her, and so she snuck up behind him and kissed him on the cheek, pressing her lips against the coarse stubble there. He hadn't shaved in two days.
"Ah, my Rebekah," he said, standing and smiling. He took her in his long arms and embraced her. "I knew you would make it."
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