When she, all large eyes and frail bones, arrived, a man in uniform helped her onto the dock and asked her in Yiddish, “Vi iz ayer nomen?”
“My name is Hela Herstat.”
The little man smiled under his grizzled beard. Hela had a classic sound to it, he said, but the age of the European superiority had died in the camps. She shouldn’t keep a remembrance from a war that had humiliated all sides. Ela, a similar name, was a lovely tree and also meant “goddess” in Hebrew.
Her translucent skin stretched over her high cheekbones, as she nodded slowly at the mention of her survival. Having outlived her parents and little sister, losing her name would be the least of her losses.
Fifteen minutes later, she spelled her name for the man who registered the newcomers: “E-L-A.”
“Beautiful,” he rejoiced. “Will you keep your last name?”
“For a while.” The delicate raise of her lips was as elegant as the swaying of her head. Her gestures had more to do with different times than with her current state.
“Off you go to Eilon, a new town in the Negev desert,” the clerk said.
“I have family in Haifa,” she said softly.
“Do they have a place for you?”
“No, but—”
“Next.”
So she set her gloomy gaze on the Mediterranean as she departed from another safe place, each parting harder than the one before.
She stepped toward the bus in a swan-like motion, as if many heads would turn after her. Under her sea-beaten clothes and between her tattered skin and visible...
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