Aharon Appelfeld - Tzili - The Story of a Life

Once Tzili tried to get off the stretcher. He scolded her roundly. On no account was she to get off the stretcher until she saw a doctor. He knew that this was so from the first aid course.

And the fat woman who had saved Tzili started entertaining them again at night. She would sing and recite and expose her fat thighs. The merchant raised Tzili’s head and she saw everything. She felt no affection for any of them, but they were carrying her, taking turns to carry her, from place to place. Between one pain and the next she wanted to say a kind word to the merchant, but she was afraid of offending him. He for his part walked by her side like a man doing his duty, without any exaggeration. Tzili grew accustomed to him, as if he were an irritating brother.

And thus they reached Zagreb. Zagreb was in turmoil. In the yard of the Joint Distribution Committee people were distributing biscuits, canned goods, and colored socks from America. In the courtyard they all mingled freely: visionaries, merchants, moneychangers, and sick people. No one knew what to do in the strange, half-ruined city. Someone shouted loudly: “If you want to get to Palestine, you’d better go to Naples. Here they’re nothing but a bunch of money-grubbing profiteers and crooks.”

The stretcher bearers put the stretcher down in a shady corner and said: “From now on somebody else can take over.” The merchant was alarmed by this announcement and he implored them: “You’ve done great things, why not carry on?” But they no longer took any notice of him. The sight of the city had apparently confused them. Suddenly they looked tall and ungainly. In vain the merchant pleaded with them. They stood their ground: “From now on it’s not our job.” The merchant stood helplessly in the middle of the courtyard. There was no doctor present, and the officials of the Joint Committee were busy defending themselves from the survivors, who assailed their caged counters with great force.

If only the merchant had said, “I can’t go on anymore,” it would have been easier for Tzili. His desperate scurrying about hurt her. But he did not abandon her. He kept on charging into the crowd and asking: “Is there a doctor here? Is there a doctor here?”

People came and went and in the big courtyard, enclosed in a wall of medium height, men and women slept by day and by night. Every now and then an official would emerge and threaten the sleepers or the people besieging the doors. The official’s neat appearance recalled other days, but not his voice.

And there was a visionary there too, thin and vacant-faced, who wandered through the crowds muttering: “Repent, repent.” People would throw him a coin on condition that he shut up. And he would accept the condition, but not for long.

Pain assailed Tzili from every quarter. Her feet were frozen. The merchant ran from place to place, drugged with the little mission he had taken upon himself. No one came to his aid. When night fell, he put his head between his knees and wept.

In the end a military ambulance came and took her away. The merchant begged them: “Take me, take me too. The child has no one in the whole world.” The driver ignored his despairing cries and drove away.

Tzili’s pains were very bad, and the sight of the imploring merchant running after the ambulance made them worse. She wanted to scream, but she didn’t have the strength.

IT WAS A makeshift hospital housed in an army bar racks partitioned with blankets. Soldiers and partisans, women and children, lay crowded together. Screams rose from every side. Tzili was placed on a big bed, apparently requisitioned from one of the bombed houses.

For days she had not heard the throbbing of the fetus. Now it seemed to her that it was stirring again. The nurse sponged her down with a warm, wet cloth and asked: “Where are you from?” And Tzili told her. The broad, placid face of the gentile nurse brought her a sudden serenity. It was evident that the young nurse came from a good home. She did her work quietly, without superfluous gestures.

Tzili asked wonderingly: “Where are you from?” “From here,” said the nurse. A disinterested light shone from her blue eyes. The nurse told her that every day more soldiers and refugees were brought to the hospital. There were no beds and no doctors. The few doctors there were torn between the hospitals scattered throughout the ruined city.

Later Tzili fell asleep. She slept deeply. She saw Mark and he looked like the merchant who had taken care of her. Tzili told him that she had been obliged to sell all the clothes in the haversack and in the commotion she had lost the haversack too. Perhaps it was with the merchant. “The merchant?” asked Mark in surprise. “Who is this merchant?” Tzili was alarmed by Mark’s astonished face. She told him, at length, of all that had happened to her since leaving the mountain. Mark bowed his head and said: “It’s not my business anymore.” There was a note of criticism in his voice. Tzili made haste to appease him. Her voice choked and she woke up.

The next day the doctor came and examined her. He spoke German. Tzili answered his hurried questions quietly. He told the nurse that she had to be taken to the surgical ward that same night. Tzili saw the morning light darken next to the window. The bars reminded her of home.

They took her to the surgical ward while it was still light. There was a queue and the gentile nurse, who spoke to her in broken German mixed with Slavic words, held her hand. From her Tzili learned that the fetus inside her was dead, and that soon it would be removed from her womb. The anesthetist was a short man wearing a Balaklava hat. Tzili screamed once and that was all.

Then it was night. A long night, carved out of stone, which lasted for three days. Several times they tried to wake her. Medics and soldiers rushed frantically about carrying stretchers. Tzili wandered in a dark stone tunnel, strangers and acquaintances passing before her eyes, clear and unblurred. I’m going back, she said to herself and clung tightly to the wooden handle.

When she woke the nurse was standing beside her. Tzili asked, for some reason, if the merchant too had been hurt. The nurse told her that the operation had not taken long, the doctors were satisfied, and now she must rest. She held a spoon to her mouth.

“Was I good?” asked Tzili.

“You were very good.”

“Why did I scream?” she wondered.

“You didn’t scream, you didn’t make a sound.”

In the evening the nurse told her that she had not stirred from the hospital for a whole week. Every day they brought more soldiers and refugees, some of them badly hurt, and she could not leave. Her fiancé was probably angry with her. Her round face looked worried.

“He’ll take you back,” said Tzili.

“He’s not an easy man,” confessed the nurse.

“Tell him that you love him.”

“He wants to sleep with me,” the nurse whispered in her ear.

Tzili laughed. The thin gruel and the conversation distracted her from her pain. Her mind was empty of thought or sorrow. And the pain too grew duller. All she wanted was to sleep. Sleep drew her like a magnet.

SHE FELL ASLEEP again. In the meantime the soldiers and refugees crammed the hut until there was no room to move. The medics pushed the beds together and they moved Tzili’s bed into the doorway. She slept. Someone strange and far away ordered her not to dream, and she obeyed him and stopped dreaming. She floated on the surface of a vacant sleep for a few days, and when she woke her memory was emptier than ever.

The hut stretched lengthwise before her, full of men, women, and children. The torn partitions no longer hid anything. “Don’t shout,” grumbled the medics, “it won’t do you any good.” They were tired of the commotion and of the suffering. The nurses were more tolerant, and at night they would cuddle with the medics or the ambulant patients.