Uzi rose, letting his unbelted stool fall sideways, and raised both hands in mock surrender. “Je suis de Palestine.” I’m from Palestine—the French phrase he had rehearsed. The boy relaxed his hold on the sword-stick, and Uzi pointed to himself, said, “Juif,” then pointed to the two boys. “Juifs?”
They exchanged a glance, then shook their heads.
“Tobias? Elias?” Uzi said the names he assumed they hadn’t heard in a long time.
They recoiled. Uncertainty furrowed their young brows. Their cheeks were pink and soft, and their upper lips did not show a first fuzz. Under their work shirts there was no muscle mass. This was a good stage for them to arrive in Eretz Israel; there they’d develop and become men.
Uzi searched his pocket for the flash cards and showed them the one that translated to Do you want to come to Eretz Israel with me? He added, “A kibbutz,” and showed them a flash card that read Une grande famille.
The eyes of one of the boys suddenly widened as he looked past Uzi. Uzi turned and saw the tavern keeper and another man.
“What is going on here?” the second man asked Uzi in English.
“We’ve been looking for these boys,” Uzi replied, relieved to have an interpreter. “Their uncle left them in that village—” He scrambled to find his slips of paper, wishing he could pronounce the names of the places without them.
“Where is that uncle?”
Uzi took a guess. “Killed in the war. There are relatives in Palestine who want to raise the boys. Parents,” he added, using the French pronunciation to strengthen his case. “If the boys want to come, that is,” he said, glancing at them.
From their positions by the cows, out of sight of each other, the boys stared at him with identical childish, blank faces, as if they’d been trained to show no emotion.
“I am their teacher,” the man said. “Are you saying that I was wasting myself on Jews?”
Uzi had never encountered anti-Semitism in its naked form. Arab hatred of Jews stemmed from mounting territorial disputes. What was the basis for it here? How had Jews wronged these people? Yet all over Europe, hateful words progressed to actions—to the murdering of Jews. Uzi had never felt the sting of such a hateful remark uttered with no shame.
Concealing his fury, he forced a smile. “You didn’t waste your time, I’m sure. Are they good students?”
The teacher puffed a nonverbal reply and stepped away.
Uzi sensed movement behind him and turned his head in time to see half a dozen men from the tavern approaching. One burly man carried a pitchfork. They surrounded Uzi, and the stares they had speared him with at the bar exploded into shouts. Breath smelling of alcohol assaulted him. One man raised a fist four centimeters from Uzi’s nose.
They would pounce on him the moment they spotted a twitch of fear on his face, Uzi knew. The first to throw a punch would unleash the crowd’s aggression, and this Jew-hating mob might turn murderous. Recently, Arabs had lynched a Jewish merchant in the Haifa market.
Uzi hadn’t come here to fight. It wouldn’t deliver the children to him. But prepared he must be. He inched his foot toward the stick-sword that the boy had dropped. Uzi knew he was younger and quicker than all of these men, and he was an expert in kapap, the hand-to-hand combat developed by the Haganah in response to the British decree forbidding the Jews to carry arms.
Three men stepped forward.
In a flash, Uzi picked up the stick and planted himself in front of them, body taut, knees slightly bent. He held the stick with both hands, one on each end, and raised it in a defense-attack position. His eyes fired a warning.
Stunned at his quick maneuver, the men stopped moving. Uzi read a tiny loss of determination on their faces. The pitchfork was lowered. Uzi straightened and dropped one end of the stick but not his guard. He scanned the men’s faces, locking eyes with each one in a message of his strength. He stopped at the tavern keeper and gestured with his chin to signal that the two of them should step aside.
The tavern keeper moved, and the men parted like the Red Sea.
Adrenaline still flowing in him, Uzi followed the man deep into the cowshed, where they stopped behind a pile of hay. Uzi selected the flash card that read Puis-je payer vos dépenses? He raised two fingers to indicate both boys. He didn’t know whether they would go with him, but first he had to clear this hurdle. If the boys left, this man would lose two laborers.
“Cinquante mille,” the man said. With his finger, he sketched the number in the air.
Fifty thousand francs? “No,” Uzi said. That sum was several times more than what Miriam and Hilda had given him. Two thousand? he signaled with two fingers.
Eight, the man signaled back.
They settled on five thousand. Uzi opened his backpack and kept his hand deep inside while locating the bills.
They walked to the front of the cowshed, and the man shooed away the crowd. Only the boys remained. He spoke to them. They lowered their heads. Their chins trembled, and they put their arms around each other.
They glared at Uzi. “Non,” they said in unison.
Confused, Uzi wondered if he should just leave. He had ruined this life for them. Or had he? When the tavern keeper and his wife accepted the boys, they must have known they were Jewish. Going forward, though, the whole community would know it too.
He pulled out the dictionary and found the word for “morning.” “I will return,” he said, drawing an outward arch with his finger. Then he touched his own temple: Think about it.
It was dusk when he caught a ride with a farmer heading back to Châtillon-sur-Indre. In the horse-drawn cart’s bed, two sheep were lying on straw. Uzi stretched out alongside them and closed his eyes, taking comfort in these familiar creatures that never hurt anyone. Guilt gnawed at him; he’d been warned not to burst through a door. For a while, the tavern and the farm had given the boys some permanency—but now a stranger had shown up and exposed their identities without the chance of bringing their parents back from the dead.
Uzi recalled the evening in the kibbutz’s common dining room when the members had made the decision to send representatives to Europe to rescue children. One member, who had come from Poland as a child, was sent there; he spoke the language, though he knew nothing about the country. But whom to send to France? No one was fluent in the language or had any experience there, so the only useful skill the group could think of was ingenuity. And Uzi, already a young leader, was chosen. There simply was no one else.
No wonder that he’d failed in his first attempt. What hubris had made him think that removing two traumatized boys from their secure environment was best for them? But then again, they must have been circumcised, a practice Hilda told him was unheard of among the locals. In the long run, after a trying transition in Israel, embraced by their people, they would never have to dread exposure again.
Madame Therrien smiled widely when she opened the door, revealing a crooked front tooth. She gestured for Uzi to follow her.
Perplexed, he walked behind his landlady as she crossed her kitchen, where her mother was at the stove. She went out the back door and through her lush small garden shaded by an oak tree, the air suffused with the fragrance of thyme and marjoram. Her steps were quick, a reminder that, despite her mourning dress and tight hair bun, she was still young. She walked across the alley and entered another home.
The house was dark, the kitchen a deserted mess of piled-up dirty pots and dishes. A putrid-smelling garbage pail was overflowing. Madame Therrien led Uzi to the front parlor, where a man was sprawled on an upholstered chair, drinking directly from an uptilted bottle.
At his feet, a child of perhaps four years was playing with building blocks. His light hair was matted. When he lifted a dirty face to the visitors, it lit up with a broad smile. The man glanced at Uzi, then raised his bottle in salute.
Madame Therrien pointed to a photo on the mantel and nodded sadly heavenward. The photo showed a lovely bride wearing a hat over chin-length brown hair and holding a bouquet of flowers.
