‘Your job?’
‘I’m pregnant, Livi, catch up! Are you interested?’
Livi takes a gulp of juice. A job in the president’s house? She can’t begin to imagine it. The orange groves are all she knows these days. The town is growing, but not fast enough for Livi to find a permanent office job. This could be perfect.
‘Of course I’m interested,’ she says.
‘Good. Because I’ve arranged an interview for you. Not for a few months, but Mrs Weizmann said that if you’re half as good as I am, you’re good enough for her.’
‘Half as good as you? The cheek!’
‘OK, maybe she didn’t say that.’
‘So, when are you leaving?’ Livi’s eyes are shining. She’s already imagining meeting the president.
‘Now who’s being cheeky?’
That night in bed, Livi thinks about working in a place where she isn’t a nameless face among many, doing the same job as everyone else. She feels a thrill of hope for a different kind of future. Maybe tonight she won’t cry herself to sleep as she has done every night since the sisters were thrown out of their home in Vranov. She never means to cry, but as her eyes close her mother’s face appears. Mumma had loved that house; she had worked so hard to make it into a beautiful home. And now a brute and his family were eating off their crockery, sitting in their chairs, lying down in their beds. When her head hits the pillow, Livi is always transported back to that day: once more, she is kicking that brute in the leg, shoving him away from Magda.
She draws a long breath and feels her throat constrict. Despite all Livi’s optimism for a new job, that night is no different, but, as she drifts off, she whispers a promise to her mother, between sobs.
I will make you proud of me, Mumma.
*
Three months later, on the day of the interview, dressed, brushed and polished, Livi heads off to the president’s house, Magda on her heels, begging her to slow down for the pregnant lady.
Now she is finally inside the house, her excitement is whittled down to a nub of dread. Nervous and dry-mouthed, Livi enters the living room where Mrs Weizmann sits on a small white sofa, her hand outstretched. Livi takes it.
‘Do sit down, my dear.’ Mrs Weizmann points to a chair. ‘I find it easier to speak in German, do you mind? Or in Hebrew, if you’re more fluent than your sister, that is. But my Slovakian, I’m afraid, is non-existent.’
‘German is fine,’ replies Livi.
‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘There’s not much to tell,’ says Livi, thinking that there isn’t enough time in the world to talk about herself, about everything she has lived through.
‘Oh, I don’t believe you, Livi. Magda has already told me quite a lot but I would like to hear it from you.’
An hour later Livi stops talking. She has given Mrs Weizmann the condensed story of her life, and is offered the job on the spot.
For the rest of the week Livi is on a high. She has met a man who makes her laugh, and now she works in the household of the president of Israel; her sisters are happily married, one with a child, the other pregnant.
But am I truly happy? she wonders.
It is at moments like this, when she is poised on the cusp of great change, that what starts as a tingle along Livi’s spine begins to pulse. She felt it just before they stepped onto the gangplank at Haifa, and then again when she, Magda and Yitzchak drove to Rehovot to make a different life for themselves, and once more on her first day at the Weizmann house. Usually, Livi takes it at face value: she’s just excited to be on an adventure, why wouldn’t she feel a tingle of anticipation? But, at other times, like tonight, the feeling along the length of her spine takes her back to Birkenau, to the hospital, where she was being treated for typhus.
There is one specific memory from her time in Birkenau that makes her feel like she does not deserve her good fortune.
She and Matilda had lain in identical hospital beds, each of them feverish, each of them suffering, but a strange twist of fate had meant that Livi had survived the night and Matilda hadn’t.
While Livi was being ‘saved’ – forced to lie on a latrine floor, her nightdress soaked in excrement – Matilda had been taken from her bed, straight to the gas chamber. The girl had been denied a new life in Israel, denied a job at the Weizmann household, and the love of two sisters. It’s crazy, she knows that, but it’s how she feels right then – as if she is walking in a dead girl’s shoes.
Livi doesn’t understand why this particular memory comes to her at times like these: she doesn’t blame herself for Matilda’s death, but she suspects she will always wonder whether, if she had lived, she might not be there, tingling with excitement for a new adventure?