This was the Argentina she would never get to know, even if she knew its men too intimately. At last, she was departing, never to return. She was saying goodbye to the exotic fruits and vegetables she had grown to love and to the bustling city of Buenos Aires she had grown to enjoy. She would also be saying goodbye to tango and the passions it evoked—and, more so, to Sergio, this man who, by refusing to view her as tme’ah, had given her a new sense of herself.

Her carpetbag rested on the seat next to her. Batya opened it, took out a pouch, then rose and slid open the window. She held it against the rush of air, loosened her grip, and let the wind snatch it out of her hand.

“What was that?” Sergio asked.

“My face paints.” Batya broke into a laugh. It heaved and turned into a sob. The full sense of freedom she had so anticipated finally flooded her.

Esperanza was no more.

Epilogue

The Galilee, 1897

Batya adjusted the wide-brimmed hat that protected her face from the harsh sun. She straightened her back, wiped her brow, and gazed around her at the field. In both directions stretched furrows of soil she and the others had dug and turned, breaking the stubborn packed, reddish earth into soft clods eager to accept the next seeding. The field was cut into the slope and was enclosed by a low stone fence constructed of the thousands of rocks that had previously made the field impossible to plough. It had been liberating to smash each stone into smaller pieces so she could lift and carry them.

She had imagined each rock as Moskowitz’s head.

There would be more opportunities for her silent revenge when she cleared the rocks out of the next section of the field—her own land, which hadn’t been cultivated since biblical times. God must have sent her here to do His work.

In the distance she saw her neighbors, a husband-and-wife team, laboring together. Like the rest of the local farmers, all Yiddish-speaking, these were hardworking men and women who had arrived several years before Batya and welcomed every willing pair of Jewish hands. The settlers on this land had very little; every Turkish piastre and lira had to be saved for seeds and farm tools. But they gave their neighbors their hearts—and whatever energy was left in their arms and backs after toiling on their plots to eke out sustenance.

They had escaped pogroms. They had come broken yet revived by a Zionist zeal to reclaim the land of their ancestors. Each had a story—slaughtered siblings, mothers raped in front of their children, fathers’ beards yanked out with the skin. None spoke of their private horrors; no one asked for anyone’s story beyond “Where did you come from?” The name of the place told them all they needed to know.