Day After Night Read Online Free PDF

heavy
     bandage on his ankle. “It’s nothing—a sprain. We do not leave without him. We will
     make a hunger strike and shame you in front of the Jews of the world. We will report
     you to the Jewish Agency! To the Palmach!”
    The driver pointed at the British soldiers who were watching from the guardhouses
     that stood on ten-foot stilts around the perimeter of the camp. “You are giving these
     fucking British assholes reason to laugh at us,” he said. “If you don’t get in right
     now, and without that cripple, I will leave without any of you. And I am sure as hell
     not driving all the way back to get you, you big-mouth son of a …”
    Zorah grinned at the barrage of curses and realized that she had understood every
     foul word in the tackata-tackata version of what her father used to call “the holy
     tongue.”
    Papa had considered Zorah’s gift for languages a complete waste. The old man used
     to chase her away from the table while he tutored her brother, even though Herschel
     was never going to be able to understand the Talmud. At ten years old, the boy could
     barely tell one letter from the next while Zorah had been able to read Hebrew and
     Yiddish before she was seven, and spoke better Polish than either of her parents.
     In Auschwitz, she’d learned Romanian and German. She picked up some Italianon her way to Palestine and was learning French just by eavesdropping on two girls
     in her barrack.
    A young Jewish guard named Meyer walked over to the truck and took the driver aside.
     After a few minutes of animated conversation, the guard helped the lame boy into the
     front seat and told his loud champion, “Watch your manners. In a country this small,
     you might end up sleeping in this fellow’s dormitory, or working in his brother’s
     unit. No need to get off on the wrong foot.”
    The driver gunned the engine and then took off, forcing the others to chase after
     it. Their ringleader was the last to make it aboard, screaming and puffing until his
     companions pulled him on.
    Zorah shook her head at the scene.
    “You’re not Romanian, are you?” The question made Zorah jump. Meyer, the guard who
     had sent them off, was smiling at her through the fence. She would have turned on
     her heel except for the cigarette he held out through the wire—a Chesterfield, right
     out of the package.
    She took it without meeting his eyes, stroked the fine white paper, and put it up
     to her nose. The guard held out a match.
    Zorah thought about putting the cigarette away, to save it for later, but what was
     the point? Someone would start asking questions about where she’d managed to get such
     a treat; then again, she realized that half the camp would know all about this little
     exchange within minutes anyway.
    “Fuck it,” she said, leaning forward to catch the flame. She inhaled deeply and glanced
     at him sideways.
    He smiled. “Do you kiss your lover with that mouth?”
    He might have been thirty years old, with wavy brown hair, a long face, strong jaw,
     and a pair of thick wire-rimmedglasses that had probably disqualified him from fighting in the war. Given what he’d
     just done for the stupid Romanians, she decided he wasn’t a British stool pigeon at
     all, a rumor based entirely on the amount of time he spent inside the fence with the
     prisoners. Zorah wondered if Meyer was his first name or his last.
    “Aren’t you ashamed to wear such a stupid hat?” she said and walked away.
    “You are most welcome,” said Meyer, and doffed the Turkish three-corner pillbox.
    Zorah headed for the far side of the nearest building to escape his gaze. She took
     three quick, delicious drags on the cigarette, so different from the cut-rate, stale,
     military-issue stuff they sometimes got. She could have traded a pristine butt for
     a chocolate bar, or a half tube of Lillian’s lipstick, or the promise of getting a
     letter delivered to Tel Aviv or Haifa. But Zorah had no one to contact and no