Free When We Danced on Water by Evan Fallenberg

for Martin’s neck.
    She threw herself at him. Martin, caught off guard, reeled backward and hit the door with Leah barreling into him. “Swine,” she shouted in Hebrew. “Pig! You vile filthy German goy, you barbarian!” She pushed herself far enough away from him to swing her fists at him. Martin let her hit him, protecting only his face. When she scratched him he caught her wrists and tried talking to her.
    â€œMrs. Berger,” he pleaded in Hebrew, “please …”
    A guard pulled Leah off Martin. She continued screaming, and Amatzia was shouting, and the guards blew whistles and in the midst of it all, as the visitors were pushed from the room, Vivi and Martin stood silent, gazing at one another. But Martin disappeared from her vision, was removed from the room with all the other guests, before they could utter a single word to one another. Several of the other prisoners shouted at Vivi since her guests were the cause of the ruckus, but she did not care. On the way back to her cell she felt as though she had just solved a riddle, found the missing piece in a puzzle, but did not yet know what it was. She felt very still at the core of her being.
    After her release from prison, Vivi returned to her base. She was efficient and capable as ever, but watchful now, guarded. She wondered who had informed on her. She no longer socialized with her fellow soldiers and spent as much time with Martin as possible. Her incarceration began to feel like a rite of passage, a solo trek into the desert from which she had emerged purified and silent. On weekends she returned only rarely to her parents’ house in Haifa. No one ever mentioned Martin or prison.
    In June Martin returned to Germany for summer courses and Vivi spent the last two months of her army service planning a dramatic escape from Israel as soon as possible after her release. Her army service ended the week before Rosh Hashanah. She went to synagogue with her parents and prayed for a good year.
    Martin had sent her a ticket that would remove her to Germany during the ten days of repentance before Yom Kippur. She was relieved to think she would be gone by then, could not face the Kol Nidre service in which she would be asking God to cancel the oaths she had made during the past year just before flying to Berlin to live with her uncircumcised German Christian boyfriend in what had been, only forty years earlier, the all-time capital of Jew hatred.
    On a Tuesday morning in mid-September, Vivi emptied her bank account, then returned home to pack a medium suitcase and a long, squat duffel bag full of clothing and shoes and—at the last minute, on her way out the door—a prayer book, left a note on the dining room table, and caught a bus to the airport. She was airborne before her parents even knew she was gone.

Chapter 12
    I t is Sabbath dark outside, but Teo has no way of knowing so in his underground studio. Nelly will have prepared a good, special meal for them this evening, as if she were a regular Jewish housewife, with wine and challah bread and chicken soup, but he does not think about returning home, not yet. He sits, depleted, looking around the studio as though he has only just seen it for the first time. He catches sight of himself in the mirrors, first on one wall and then the next. He has spent a lifetime looking at himself in mirrors, but now, instead of his turnout or musculature or the angle of his head, it is his face that he notices. It is pinched, sagging, timeworn. Colorless. Even his brilliant eyes, blue and green, cannot salvage it. His shoulders sag and he sits hunched and humpbacked, something he has never, ever allowed himself to do—in front of another living soul, or even alone.
    So he was right. The girl has been damaged by a man. How badly, he cannot say. Nor is he sure he wants to know. Why should he get involved in the sad, stale story of a woman half his age? Why, he asks himself, is he preoccupied