Free The Wedding of Anna F. by Mylene Dressler

The rain, the heat pounded. I knew somehow to swim away from the metal landing all around me, away from the screaming, smoking, sinking ship. Hannah and her baby had vanished. All the sailors. The gossips. The musicians. My heart swam, lost; there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even understand how or why I had been blown clear. A long streak of lightning cut across the sky. I saw the tattered sail of a small boat a few meters away and screamed at it. I saw two silhouetted figures frantically hurling buckets of water over its side—another flash and I saw a small, terrified Bedouin boy holding up a lantern over me. The boat’s sail, full of holes, had been hit. I screamed to him for help. The two men didn’t see me rising and falling in the swells; they were too busy shouting at each other while they bailed the water from their tiny boat. They screamed in a language I didn’t understand and the boy held the lantern higher and then with his free hand hurtled something over the side, flinging something toward me, then again he hurtled, fresh fish hitting me in the face and leaping away.
    Shater! Shater!
    Still the men didn’t see, though I screamed, and the boy, his white cap glued to his head, kept throwing fishing baskets over the side. I was able to grab just one as a bolt lit up its woven stays, and the boat plunged and heaved away. The rain came so fast then I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I could only drop my head, clutching, riding the hard hump of that overturned basket, like a turtle’s back. I floated for what seemed like a long time, forever toward a pale crescent in the darkness. Eventually, foot by foot, I heard the sea stomping underneath me, kicking me onto an empty beach.
    *
    WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, the soldiers were lifting the basket from where it lay covering me, and dropping to their knees. One took his shirt off and wrapped it around my naked shoulders. I was wearing only my underwear and the rubber pouch around my neck with the passport, the false, borrowed name on it. I could remember nothing of what had happened. All was a great darkness, terrifying, soundless, like a bell shoved to the bottom of the sea.
    *
    ONE OF THE SOLDIERS opened a medical box and pressed something white and cool across my scalp. I closed my eyes.
    “We have to move her, quickly.”
    “I smell an ambush if we stay.”
    “Bring the truck.”
    “How is she?”
    “In bad shape.”
    “Can she hear us?”
    “I think so.”
    “We have to get moving.”
    “Let me finish dressing her head.”
    “I don’t like sitting here in the open like this. We could be picked off.”
    “The Bedouin have nowhere to take a good position. Be calm.”
    “A date leaf gives them position! Can’t you hurry?”
    “We have to keep this scalp wound clean.”
    “We’ll be cut off if we don’t move.”
    “Almost done. Oh God. Oh my God.”
    The medic began to cry. He picked me up in his arms. Tears rolled down into his beard.
    “We have to be careful with her. She must speak, she must speak for all the others. She is a miracle. A miracle child. She is precious.”
    Through the gauze draping over my eye, I saw nothing.
    *
    I AM ANNA FRANK, who rode a basket, as in a fairytale, to safety.
    “This is your story then,” he says quietly. No longer writing.
    “Yes. It is.”
    “I noticed that you said Anna Frank. Not Anne. Why?”
    “Because that’s the correct pronunciation, the Dutch one,” I assure him. I know.
    “Not because it’s so close to Hannah?”
    “No.”
    “And the name on the passport around your neck was…?”
    “Hannah, of course.”
    “And who is—was—Hannah, then?” He watches me.
    “That poor survivor of Belsen. She died. With the baby a so-called doctor left her with. When the ship exploded. I told you. Along with all of them. All of them gone, to the bottom of the sea.” And me left behind. Me confused. Wandering around the kibbutz with a bucket on my head.
    “And was it ever discovered what caused