Wings of Refuge (12 page)

He lifted his shoulders slightly in resignation. “No use thinking about it.”

Hannah stared at the shacks, the vertical lines in the corrugated tin shimmering in the heat until the houses appeared to be melting before her eyes. She wished that they would melt. It would be unbearable inside tonight as she and Abba tried to sleep.

“Why can’t we have a nice house?” she asked. “I saw nice ones when we first arrived in Israel. Why did they send us here where it’s so hot that even grass can’t grow?”

“Because we’re
Sephardic.”
He spat out the word as if it made a bitter taste in his mouth.

“What does that mean?”

“There are two kinds of Jews—
Ashkenazi
and Sephardic. Ashkenazis are lighter skinned and come from European countries. They hold all the power in Israel and make all the important decisions. Sephardis like us are darker skinned and have no power at all. We’re descendants of the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition.”

“What’s that?”

“The Inquisition? One of the many bad ideas the Gentiles have come up with to kill our people.”

“Kill us? Why?”

Ben took a breath, about to speak, then shook his head. “Don’t ask. Anyway, our ancestors left Spain and settled in Iraq. But we really belong here, in Israel.
This
is the land God promised to Abraham and his descendants.”

Hannah had heard the name Abraham mentioned at the synagogue and knew he was an important man. “Is Abraham Ash
-whatever
or like us?” Her question amused Ben. His eyes filled with warmth and laughter. They reminded Hannah of the dark, sweet candies that had been her favorites in Iraq.

“Neither one. Abraham was just plain Jewish.”

“How do you know so much?” she asked, grateful that Ben had taken her mind off home for a few minutes. He grinned and tousled her hair.

“Because I go to school. And now that you’ll be going to school, too, you’ll be as smart as me someday.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” she repeated. Ben sighed.

“Don’t be such a baby.”

In the distance, Aunt Shoshanna straightened from the tub of laundry she was bending over and rubbed her aching back. When she finished washing their clothes, she would hang them out to dry on the rope that stretched between their two huts. It looked to Hannah like an endless job. With a house full of servants in Baghdad, Ben’s mother had never scrubbed laundry or cooked a meal in her life. Now that she was forced to do servants’ work, she appeared exhausted by dinnertime as she laid their daily fare of fish and steamed vegetables on the table. Hannah had seen her aunt crying several times since they’d left Iraq, but unlike Hannah, Aunt Shoshanna shed her tears in silence.

“We were all spoiled in Iraq,” Ben said, as if reading Hannah’s thoughts. “But the truth is, it has always been hard for our people. One of the Torah passages I had to learn for my bar mitzvah said that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, but when they cried out to the Lord, He brought them to this land flowing with milk and honey—”

“Milk and honey!
This
place?” Hannah gestured to the dry, barren landscape all around them, the row upon row of ugly tin shacks. “Our home in Baghdad was paradise! Israel is Sheol!”

Ben shook his head. “That’s just what our ancestors said after God delivered them from slavery. ‘That was Paradise,’” he said, mimicking her whiny voice. “‘Why did you bring us here to die?’ But Iraq wasn’t our home, Hannah. We were hated there. And ever since the Iraqis lost the war three years ago, they’ve hated our people even more. Why do you think we’re so poor now? They let us leave the country, but only if we left all our valuables behind.”

Tears welled in Hannah’s eyes as she remembered the confusion and fear she’d felt the night the Israeli government airlifted her family out of Iraq. Along with 120,000 other Iraqi Jews, they had left with only one suitcase apiece and the clothes on their backs, city clothes that proved to be ridiculously inappropriate for the rugged desert life they now faced in Israel.

“So quit blubbering about Baghdad,” Ben finished. “Israel is our true home. We belong here. And now that we have our own country, no one can ever persecute us again.”

“Well, if you ask me, they’re persecuting us here in Israel,” she said, unconvinced by Ben’s speech. “Why were we sent to the desert? They have cities in Israel. I saw them.”

“It’s not a desert. It’s called the
Negev
. And I already told you why. Besides, this is where most of Israel’s unsettled land is.”

Hannah scooped up a handful of hot dry dirt and flung it into the wind. “How is Abba supposed to grow food out here? We’ll all starve!”

“Oh, we’ll grow food here all right,” Ben said, gazing into the distance. “You wait and see. The prophets said that one day the desert would blossom like a rose. It
has
to happen, Hannah. And I’m going to
make
it happen!”

The first week after school opened, Hannah ran away from it at least twice a day. It was easy to do; her classroom had no walls, only a roof made of discarded packing boxes to shade students from the sun. She sat on a bench made from a board and two rocks, sharing all her textbooks with a seatmate named Dara. Hannah hated her. Dara hogged all the nice books with the colored pictures, holding them on her lap instead of in the middle, and she poked Hannah in the ribs with her bony elbows every time she flipped a page. Whenever the teacher turned his back, Hannah bolted.

Her favorite place to hide was in the “lost city,” a pile of tumbled stones on a hill behind the immigrant settlement. Abba said it had once been a town. It was nothing but a jumble of rocks and broken pillars now, but Hannah had discovered enough intricately carved fragments among the ruins to see that it had once been beautiful—like her home in Iraq had been. Now both places were lost forever. After fleeing from school again this day, she sat down on a short flight of stairs shaded by a section of wall that hadn’t fallen and dreamed of home.

“You can’t keep running away from school!” Ben yelled when he found her. He was breathless from the search and angry that he’d been sent to fetch her again. “What’s your excuse this time?”

“That stupid Dara who sits beside me won’t stop wiggling. I got tired of trying to keep my balance on that dumb board.”

“Oh, that’s just great!” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “I’m missing class again because you were uncomfortable!”

“I hate school, and I hate—”

“Save your breath. I’ve heard it all before.” He flopped down on the step below Hannah’s and leaned his back against the wall.

“Well, I’m not going back to school—ever!” she said.

“Fine. You don’t have to go back.”

“I don’t?”

“Nope. Not if you don’t want to.”

Although this sounded like good news to Hannah, there was a look in Ben’s eye that put her on guard. He was plotting something, she could tell. She wiggled closer to the wall to get away from him, waiting.

“Come back to the house with me,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”

“Is this a trick?” Hannah folded her arms against her body so he couldn’t grab her and haul her to her feet. When he turned to her she saw that he was very angry. But when he spoke, his voice was as deathly quiet as the stones all around her.

“Listen, Hannah, your days of being a spoiled brat are over. All of us have to work harder than we’ve ever worked before to make a new life for ourselves here. Ein breira, the Israelis say.
No choice
. My brothers were drafted—no choice. Our fathers have to struggle out there in the heat to grow sunflowers—no choice. But you do have a choice, Hannah. You can go back to school and
stay
there this time, or you can go back to the house and help my mother scrub clothes and cook fish.”

Hannah’s heart began to pound like a trapped rabbit’s. “But I don’t want to—”

“No? Well, guess what? My mother doesn’t want to do all the washing and cooking either, but—no choice.” He stood again, brushing dust off the seat of his shorts. “I’ll go down and tell her that she doesn’t have to fix dinner for you and your father tonight, since you won’t be going back to school.”

“I hate you, Ben! I hate you!” Hannah curled into a ball and buried her face in her lap. A few moments later, Ben crouched beside her again.

“What’s really going on, Hannah? Why do you keep running away?” After a moment, her secret sprang to the surface like an enormous ball that she was tired of holding underwater.

“I feel so stupid,” she wept. “Everyone knows their numbers and letters but me, and if the teacher ever finds out, he’ll put me in the baby class.”

“Then why won’t you let me help you?” Ben asked.

She shrugged uselessly, not understanding the reason herself.

“Well, one of these days your stubbornness is going to trap you into a corner with no way out. You mark my words.”

Hannah pictured herself chained to a laundry tub like Aunt Shoshanna, and a small crack splintered her wall of pride. “Will you teach me, Ben?” The words stuck in her throat like dry bread.

“On one condition. You can’t run away from school anymore. Promise?”

“I promise.”

Hannah kept her word for almost six months. Ben and her father tutored her every night until the electric generators were switched off and everyone had to go to bed. She caught on quickly, motivated by the sight of Aunt Shoshanna gutting fish or plucking chickens. Hannah even learned to arm-wrestle with Dara until the textbooks were square in the middle where they belonged.

Then one day Hannah’s teacher showed the class pictures of the Holocaust. Cattle cars stuffed with people. Gas chambers and crematoriums. Piles of shoes and discarded clothing. Bodies stacked like cordwood in mass graves. Liberated survivors with protruding ribs and hollow eyes.

“These were families, like yours and mine.” Tears washed down the teacher’s face as he spoke. “They were forced from their homes, tortured, and killed for only one reason—they were Jews. Like us.”

Hannah didn’t wait until the teacher’s back was turned to run. Nor did she stop when she heard him calling her name. Ben found her among the ruins of her lost city an hour later.

“You broke your promise!” he shouted. “You said you wouldn’t run away again!”

She lifted her head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

All of Ben’s anger released with a rush of air when he saw her face. “What’s wrong, Hannah? You’re white as a ghost . . . and your hands are shaking! What happened?”

“Why does everyone hate us? You said our ancestors went to Iraq because people wanted to kill them. And you said the Iraqis hated us, too. But what if they had lied to us, like they lied to the Jews in Europe? What if they had tricked us and put us on trains and taken us to gas chambers and burned us in ovens . . .”

“Shh . . . Hannah . . .” He laid his hand on her head. “That’s why we got out of Iraq—before something like that did happen.” He exhaled wearily as he sat down on the rock beside her. “I’m sorry you had to find out about the Nazis. But now do you understand why we can’t go back home?”

“What if it happens here?” she whispered. “What if all those people who hate Jews come here?”

“The Israeli military will beat them back again,” Ben said angrily, “just like they did the last time!”

For a terrible moment, Hannah was afraid she might be sick as images of the Holocaust replayed in her mind. “You mean . . . you mean they already
came
here?”

Ben groaned. “Don’t tell me you never heard about the War of Independence, either?”

“Tell me.”

He plucked a weed from between two rocks and slowly tore it into little pieces, taking his time answering. “As soon as Israel declared its independence in 1948, the Arab nations went to war against us. They refused to recognize the nation of Israel and vowed to push every last Jew into the sea. There weren’t even a million of us against thirty million of them—from six different nations. But we won, Hannah. And we’ll win again if we have to. This is
our
land,
our
home, and they’re never going to push us off it again!”

Something shifted inside Hannah’s heart, the way her body would suddenly shift in the backseat of the car when their driver in Baghdad turned a corner too fast. By learning about the Holocaust, she had also turned a corner—faster than she would have liked, certainly—but now, for the first time, she hadn’t bristled when Ben called Israel their home. Her teacher had explained that Jews were scattered among the nations—other people’s nations. That’s why countries like Germany could pass laws to kill them. But Israel was a Jewish nation. Their homeland.

“These rocks you’re sitting on prove that this is our land,” Ben said. “There are ruined cities like this one all over the country, and whenever archaeologists dig them up, they find stuff that once belonged to our ancestors. Like when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls down by Qumran a few years ago. Those were Jewish scrolls, buried for two thousand years. They prove that Israel belongs to us.”

Hannah looked around at the stones of her beloved lost city. They had always seemed more like home to her than the ugly shack she shared with Abba. “Do you think there might be some scrolls buried here, too?” she asked.

“Maybe. Nobody has dug up these ruins yet. They’re not very important compared to all the others.”

“Then
I’ll
dig them up.” She would prove that these ruins were once a Jewish city, this bit of land, Jewish land. As much as Hannah hated this broiling patch of desert in the middle of nowhere, it was still Abba’s land, Abba’s corrugated tin shanty, and no one had the right to take it away from him as they’d taken away his villa in Baghdad.

“You can’t just start flinging dirt around,” Ben said. “You have to know how to do it properly.”

“Then I’ll learn how,” she said. And Hannah meant every word.

CHAPTER 6

THE NEGEV, ISRAEL—1961

H
annah stood in the doorway of her tent at the archaeological site as the first jeep pulled into the desert compound. “Hey, Rivka,” she called to her roommate in the tent behind her. “I think the eggheads have finally arrived.”