Read What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories for Free Online

long, I really can’t tell how much time has passed, though the light changes ever so slightly—the sun outside again dampening—in that crack under the pantry door.
    “So would I hide you?” he says, serious. And for the first time that day, he reaches out, as my Deb would, and puts his hand to her hand. “Would I, Shoshi?”
    And you can tell Shoshana is thinking of her kids, though that’s not part of the scenario. You can tell that she’s changed part of the imagining. And she says, after a pause, yes, but she’s not laughing. She says, yes, but to him it sounds as it does to us, so that he is now asking and asking. But wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I hide you? Even if it was life and death—if it would spare you, and they’d kill me alone for doing it? Wouldn’t I?
    Shoshana pulls back her hand.
    She does not say it. And he does not say it. And from the four of us, no one will say what cannot be said—that this wife believes her husband would not hide her. What to do? What would come of it? And so we stand like that, the four of us trapped in that pantry. Afraid to open the door and let out what we’ve locked inside.

 
    I: 1973
    O n a hilltop not many miles east of Jerusalem, Hanan Cohen watched the dust rising up in the distance and knew they were having a war. The roads remain empty on the Day of Atonement, and the cloud from a convoy barreling down toward the desert could mean only one thing. Hanan put a hand to his eyes to block the sun, hoping to see better. Holding that position, with his beard blowing, and his long white robe, and the tallit on his shoulders, he looked—poised among those ancient hills—like a man outside of time.
    He walked back into the one-room shack where he lived with his wife and his three teenage sons. He undressed, put on his uniform, and took up his gun so that no one needed to ask what he had seen.
    The boys said, “We will come, too. There will be some way to help.”
    “Stay with your mother,” Hanan said.
    And Rena, who did not need her husband to make such a decision, said, “Follow your father to the city, and see if there’s any way you may serve your country in its time of need.”
    Hanan nodded, accepting. And he, along with his three boys, walked out toward the war.
     
    · · ·
     
    Rena did not sleep that night, worried as she was for her husband and her sons. The worry was made worse by the newness of the place and its simplicity. Centered in the middle of an olive grove, the shack was without running water or electricity. Whatever radio signal wasn’t swallowed by the surrounding mountains was blocked by the trees. A home so rustic wasn’t wired for a phone.
    When Rena broke her fast after dark, she thought about hiking down across the little valley out her front door and climbing the hill on the other side. For on that other small summit sat another shack, with another family. The only Jews for miles around. In it lived a husband and wife and their new baby daughter. The husband, Skote, was a friend of Hanan’s, and together they’d come up with the plan, and bought the land, and decided to settle this area of Samaria together, and build from their two families a great and mighty city on that place.
    Rena figured that Skote, too, had seen the dust. And that, most sensibly, Yehudit had taken her baby daughter and followed her husband to the closest road when he’d left to join the fight. Rena sincerely hoped that’s what she’d done. At the best of times, this was not a safe place to be alone. There was a walkie-talkie in the shack, and Rena called out to Yehudit, but heard nothing on any of the channels, only broken flashes, like lightning, of passing chatter. Rena decided against crossing. She didn’t want to find herself alone on the opposite hilltop, only to have to make her way back in the night.
    Rena sat with her back to the door and her eyes to the window. She recited psalms with her rifle in her lap, and watched for any movement that might