The Wedding of Anna F. (8 page)

All sound drew out of the world, like water down a drain.

* * *

I WAS IN THE WATER. My feet were bare and half my clothes were torn from me. My scalp felt loose and something warm leaked into my eyes. The rain, the heat pounded. I knew somehow to swim away from the metal landing all around me, away from the screaming, smoking, sinking ship. Hannah and her baby had vanished. All the sailors. The gossips. The musicians. My heart swam, lost; there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even understand how or why I had been blown clear. A long streak of lightning cut across the sky. I saw the tattered sail of a small boat a few meters away and screamed at it. I saw two silhouetted figures frantically hurling buckets of water over its side—another flash and I saw a small, terrified Bedouin boy holding up a lantern over me. The boat’s sail, full of holes, had been hit. I screamed to him for help. The two men didn’t see me rising and falling in the swells; they were too busy shouting at each other while they bailed the water from their tiny boat. They screamed in a language I didn’t understand and the boy held the lantern higher and then with his free hand hurtled something over the side, flinging something toward me, then again he hurtled, fresh fish hitting me in the face and leaping away.

Shater! Shater!

Still the men didn’t see, though I screamed, and the boy, his white cap glued to his head, kept throwing fishing baskets over the side. I was able to grab just one as a bolt lit up its woven stays, and the boat plunged and heaved away. The rain came so fast then I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I could only drop my head, clutching, riding the hard hump of that overturned basket, like a turtle’s back. I floated for what seemed like a long time, forever toward a pale crescent in the darkness. Eventually, foot by foot, I heard the sea stomping underneath me, kicking me onto an empty beach.

*

WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, the soldiers were lifting the basket from where it lay covering me, and dropping to their knees. One took his shirt off and wrapped it around my naked shoulders. I was wearing only my underwear and the rubber pouch around my neck with the passport, the false, borrowed name on it. I could remember nothing of what had happened. All was a great darkness, terrifying, soundless, like a bell shoved to the bottom of the sea.

*

ONE OF THE SOLDIERS opened a medical box and pressed something white and cool across my scalp. I closed my eyes.

“We have to move her, quickly.”

“I smell an ambush if we stay.”

“Bring the truck.”

“How is she?”

“In bad shape.”

“Can she hear us?”

“I think so.”

“We have to get moving.”

“Let me finish dressing her head.”

“I don’t like sitting here in the open like this. We could be picked off.”

“The Bedouin have nowhere to take a good position. Be calm.”

“A date leaf gives them position! Can’t you hurry?”

“We have to keep this scalp wound clean.”

“We’ll be cut off if we don’t move.”

“Almost done. Oh God. Oh my God.”

The medic began to cry. He picked me up in his arms. Tears rolled down into his beard.

“We have to be careful with her. She must speak, she must speak for all the others. She is a miracle. A miracle child. She is precious.”

Through the gauze draping over my eye, I saw nothing.

*

I AM ANNA FRANK, who rode a basket, as in a fairytale, to safety.

“This is your story then,” he says quietly. No longer writing.

“Yes. It is.”

“I noticed that you said Anna Frank. Not Anne. Why?”

“Because that’s the correct pronunciation, the Dutch one,” I assure him. I know.

“Not because it’s so close to Hannah?”

“No.”

“And the name on the passport around your neck was…?”

“Hannah, of course.”

“And who is—was—Hannah, then?” He watches me.

“That poor survivor of Belsen. She died. With the baby a so-called doctor left her with. When the ship exploded. I told you. Along with all of them. All of them gone, to the bottom of the sea.” And me left behind. Me confused. Wandering around the kibbutz with a bucket on my head.

“And was it ever discovered what caused the explosion and the sinking?”

“No. That was never determined. You can read about it in the history books. Some think the
Kostas
went down after lightning hit the munitions being smuggled to Palestine. Some believe it was the British. Some the Bedouin. But I have no suspicions of the Bedouin. Because of that Arab boy who saved me.”

I beam, suddenly, at Mr. Bardawil. I had no idea, when the day began, it would end so well, so perfectly.

But my interviewer is looking puzzled, fatigued. I suppose it’s understandable. I’ve given him so much to take in, to transcribe, this day, haven’t I?

“So you think that Palestinian boy was trying to help you?”

“He threw the fishing basket toward me.”

“What you said was—something was being thrown ‘toward’ you. And fish”—he looks at his notes—“were ‘hitting you in the face.’”

“Because they were.” It’s only if you look at a thing for too long that it blurs. As I did, three weeks ago, during Shavuot, when I learned that my old Irish lover had died, because one of his children sent me a message, and so I lit a candle in his honor, in one of the pair of silver candlesticks he’d given me so long ago. But I looked at it for too long and lost the flame and saw only the terrible hole at its center, a place so close to the wick, to the source of the burning, that it becomes nothingness, invisible. I cried out, and in my breathlessness I caused the flame to stretch and in a single glimpse finally saw everything, all at once, and how it must have been, and who I was, who only ever wanted to be good, the one who said the wonderful words,
In spite of everything, I still believe
, because it must always be possible to believe, to believe in a human being, and to be forgiven, and if so, then I could not be the emptiness next to the wick, could I…could I?

“You don’t think the Palestinian boy was trying to drown you.”

Why so fixated on this? When we were so close, so close. “No!”

He studies me with his tired calm. And now I wonder: Maybe it isn’t always possible to know whether one person means to cause harm to another person or not. To help them out…or not.

The air goes very quiet in my study. I hear a churning of wheels as a car leaves the farm road, finds my drive.

I stand, uncertainly.

“I think the first of my birthday guests are arriving, Mr. Bardawil.”

He nods and reaches for his phone. “Our time is up then.”

“No! I mean—it doesn’t have to be. I was still hoping…”

He tilts his head at me and he stays where he is, waiting for me to say something more.

“I wanted to invite you to stay, Mr. Bardawil. For my party. To help me. Perhaps help me explain to my guests, my, my situation…as I’m sure you’re going to do, as I of course want you to do, to the whole world, in your book, in your thesis…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Please, Mr. Bardawil. Let’s be honest. Haven’t I been helpful to you? Don’t you have a great deal of material now? Astounding, attention-getting material?”

He flushes at that. For an instant.

“I hope, Hannah, we’ve both tried to be honest with each other today. I told you I’m collecting stories of people who believe they have been other people.”

“But I
am
her. As I’ve explained to you. So that you can understand. My name is Frank. It
means
honest.” I lean my hand onto my desk as I come around it, putting all of my weight on it, for support. “A name matters, in the end. A good name matters. What does Bardawil mean?”

“My family name? It comes from a lake in Egypt. A lake in the desert.”

Water in the desert. Water cut off from the sea. I fidget with my skirt, suddenly nervous. So many wheels turning, so many car doors slamming. So many people, more than I remembered. “If we could just…I don’t know, how should we do this? Perhaps I should introduce you? Or maybe you should announce, introduce me?”

He starts up, a concerned look on his face. “You’ve been so helpful today, Hannah. I’m really grateful, but I really think I shouldn’t take any more of your—”

I touch his arm, impulsively, putting him on my good side.

“Can’t we just go down together now?” Because it’s time. I can hear Maia welcoming my old friends below, none of whom have ever really known me. But this person has. My interviewer. My reporter. My new, old friend. “I feel a bit weak-kneed, all of a sudden. But then again, who wouldn’t, at a moment like this?” I try a laugh.

He hesitates, and looks away. Considering, as today’s young do, their endless, marvelous options.

“Okay. Let me get you down the stairs.”

He picks up his satchel and holds out his elbow to me and allows me to hook my arm around it.

“Thank you!”

It does feel so good to lean into a man again. Linked, we go through the door, like a happy couple, he in his dark jeans, me in my silk and my bright red scarf.

My escort takes hold of the banister firmly, and I hold onto him, with no distance between us at all, and we begin taking the steps carefully, one by one. At the second landing we pause and peer down and I see that almost all of my guests have arrived and that Maia has taken their wrapped gifts away from them and put them on the hall table and handed them flutes of champagne—such a clever, thoughtful girl she is. How lucky am I, childless all my life, to have such fine young people to help me, here at this late date. We begin moving down the stairs again. Smiles of surprise are lifted, along with the glasses—no, they hadn’t expected such a grand entrance from such an old girl—and I can only press my lips together, thinking of what else they do not yet suspect. The wonder, the amazement in store for all of us. The hope.

I adjust my scarf and pat my helmet of hair hiding the scar at my scalp. He balances me at the bottom, waiting for some cue, some hint of what to do. I turn to see his profile in time to notice, up close, for the first time, the boyish pores stippled with late afternoon whiskers, the downy hair dressing his earlobe, the brow gouged with a tiny scar at the outer corner, like an anchor, a sickle…I’ve never been close enough to see this before… He’s so young, so much younger than that other reporter, whose freckled skin I stroked in the bathwater. I see him take a breath and frown, slightly, seriously, his lips parting, and I know that he is about to speak, to say something—and my heart seizes. From a great distance, hidden, in my closed ear, I hear a girlish voice:

“Wat zegt de visser?” What says the fisherman?

But I must not be afraid, I must not be, though I feel nothing but lightness, my body arcing through the air.

Acknowledgments

This story could not have been written without the kindness and support of many friends and colleagues. Thank you, Heather Jacobs, for being such a wonderful editor, and for allowing Anna to make her first appearance in
Big Fiction
. To the Carson McCullers Center in Columbus, Georgia, and to Cathy Fussell and Courtney George, warmest thanks for the gift of a fellowship that allowed me to write an early version of this novella, and for so many kindnesses, large and small, ever since. My thanks go out to my friends among the faculty and students at Columbus State University and beyond, especially to Gail Greenblatt; and to my colleagues and students at Guilford College, who continue to be such a source of inspiration to me. Special thanks to Diya Abdo, for the wonder of her friendship and for help with Arabic phrasings. I kiss and thank my mother, Margie Bellamy, for assistance with Dutch phrases. And as always, love and thanks to my husband, Dennis, for patience and for reminding me that marriage is mysterious, strange, beautiful and entirely made-up.