4

WHEN GREEN shoots peep out in the garden plot behind the house in orderly little rows, and when washing is hung out to dry, and when hens scratch away in the yard and peck at the earth, and a pair of mules crunch fodder in the lean-to, all that a good Jewish household needs for the Sabbath Eve is gefulte fish and a sweet warm chaleh. Gidon already had caught fish in the sea, and though it was not carp, it had scales and so might be eaten.

As for an oven, there was an aged Arab from the village on the ridge, who called himself Sheikh Ibrim, though it was said he was not really a sheikh, and who spent most of his days on his horse, riding here and there and gossiping. His mount was an excellent small bay that Gidon loved to watch for its high-stepping movement, and this horse was the only possession left to him, Sheikh Ibrim constantly repeated, since he had sold his lands to buy brides for his five sons, one of whom was now mukhtar of their village, Dja’adi. All this land along the Jordan had been his, he would say, though long ago because of pestilence the village had moved up onto the ridge. Indeed it seemed, according to Kramer, that Ibrim had been paid something as a quitclaim, though the land had for decades gone to swamp with the yearly overflow of the Jordan.

When Reuven and the kvutsa had labored planting eucalyptus in the mud, Ibrim would ride near and watch them, warning them the place was pestilential. One day Reuven had tried to explain to him how the pestilence, it had been discovered, came from the sting of a mosquito, and how these trees, absorbing the water, would clear the swamp where mosquitoes bred.

Sheikh Ibrim had listened to all this, and then told the tale in the village of how the mad Jews believed the pestilence came from the sting of a mosquito, making a swift jab against his leathery old skin and laughing with the rest, for the mad Jews were all lying sick to death down there, with glazed eyes, in the abandoned pestilential khan. Seven men and two women were living there together, the women belonging to all!

In another abandoned half-ruin near the river there was now a whole family. Riding by and observing them, Sheikh Ibrim was touched by their ineptitude. They let their women cook over an open fire, like Bedouin; the big rains were coming, and the Jewish family had only open reeds for a roof. First, he sent down two of his grandsons to show them how to weave a tight roof of withes; the boys were of the age of Gidon, and while they worked, they did not take their eyes off the graceful little sister with the long swinging golden braids, Eliza, moving in and out of the house as she helped her mother at her tasks.

When Sheikh Ibrim came down, to be thanked and thanked again for his kindness, and to be given ribbons for his womenfolk, he studied the primitive cooking arrangements of the Jews, who in their curious way had brought many new tools and machines to this land, and yet did not know how to build a simple earthen oven. And so he came down again with his grandson Fawzi and supervised the construction of a taboon. Gidon quickly understood how to heat it up and showed Feigel how to use it for baking, and Feigel herself discovered that it was excellent for the Sabbath cholent.

Early that Friday, Yankel found himself sent by Kramer with his wagon to Tiberias to fetch ironwork from the smith. It fell well. Since his arrival here, each Friday the longing had come over Yankel to stand in a shul amidst the murmur of prayer from fellow Jews; alone, as each Sabbath eve approached, he had made his way along the riverbank to a little cove he had found for himself, to bathe for the Shabbat, remembering the steam bath in Cherezinka and the Jews good and bad, the friends and the swindlers gathered there, the bits of news and wisdom and also of stupid womanlike gossip that drifted through the steam, and occasionally the chance that came of a good business stroke; remembering all this, Yankel felt his loneliness.

Here also, on the road before one came to Tiberias, there were baths, he had been told, the ancient natural baths with hot water coming out of the earth; in the winter season, Jews from Jerusalem journeyed here to cure their bones of rheumatism and other ills. In Tiberias itself were synagogues, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic. Although he had to return home before the Sabbath fell and therefore would not be able to remain in a shul for the prayers, still he might find a few men lingering about the study house for a shmoos. He had labored well and felt he deserved this day.

The wagon road passed directly before the steam baths as one approached the city, and also, higher on the hillside, one saw a domed structure, the tomb, Abulafia had told him, of Rabbi Meir Baal Ness. But Yankel drove by the baths so as first to finish his business for Kramer. The town itself, with its single dusty street and the open market with its stalls for meat and fish and bolts of cloth somehow was homelike to him. The half-ruined, thick, surrounding wall of black stone made him think with a pang of sin that he had not yet gone to Yerushalayim.

Arabs and Jews were mingled in the market like peasants and Yidden at home, and what with the Sephardim in their long striped gowns, he could hardly tell a Jew from an Arab in his galabiya. Bethinking himself of Abulafia, who no longer came out to cut stone, Yankel spoke the name questioningly in a Sephardi spice shop where he bought items that Feigel had written down, cinnamon, and saffron; the shopkeeper knew the family, but Yankel had a certain shyness—he did not want to impose hospitality, especially just before the Sabbath when every household was busy, so he asked rather where the Abulafias’ shul might be found, and there, in a courtyard and up a flight of outer stairs, was a long chamber with whitewashed walls, scarred old benches and an elaborately embroidered silk curtain hung before the Ark. Now, in the middle of the day, the shul was empty. But simply to stand there a bit made him feel easier.

Last hour purchasers still stirred about the market. Yankel passed a row of Jewish butcher stalls. It was long since they had had meat; they would all become vegetarians like his son. But he was again spending from the small capital brought from Cherezinka, since he now worked mostly on his own land, and crops were yet distant. Still, Yankel thought of the faces of the children—Gidon, a meat-lover—the boy worked hard alongside him. Yankel approached a stall. Fowl was costly, and of good cattle flesh such as they ate at home, there was none. Feigel would have known what was best to put into her pots. Finally he bought scraps of sheep meat.

Then before he reached his wagon an impulse overcame him. Fine white geese sat in wicker cages. Yankel thought of Shaindeleh, jealous of her sister when he had given Dvora charge of the chickens. In Yankel there was a tenderness of his daughters, rarely shown. Feigel would relate all their doings to him and speak of the nature of each, knowing how much this meant to him, yet little passed between himself and the growing girls except that the pretty Eliza knew she could always wheedle her tateh. But lately she no longer came and sat on his lap to twist her fingers in his beard. With the youngest, Shaindel, there was another feeling in him altogether, and Yankel knew this was in Feigel too, a curious hovering sense of worry, though nothing was wrong. She was not lovely as Eliza had been even as a baby. For that matter, neither had Dvora shown particular beauty as a child; yet she had grown now into an appealing girl, round-faced, with a short neck, but warmhearted-looking and womanly, resembling her mother, and recalling to him his first sight of Feigel. When she was proposed as his bride, his first reaction had been that the maiden was no beauty such as he had dreamed of, but then he had a slowly growing feeling that she looked very nice, and even, when she flushed and her eyes came alight, beautiful. Of Leah he only thought now in a kind of bewilderment; when she had grown so tall and strong, towering over him even at home, she had seemed a force beyond him, though he felt her love perhaps more powerfully than that of any other of the children. Only—something had happened in Leah with this chaver who had gone off on one of their mysterious missions; Yankel did not permit himself to envision his daughter lying with a man, and Feigel was silent, receding as into the realm of womanish things. His thoughts returned to Shaindel, Yaffaleh as she was called here. She was too small, too young, for judgment of her appearance to be made, and yet Yankel knew in his heart that the little girl would be ugly. Her body was lumpy, fattish, and though all the girls except Eliza were like Feigel, short-necked, little Shaindel seemed to have no throat at all, her head sitting heavily on her shoulders, and her face with heavy jaws. She simply was not favored. It was foolish to worry about a little girl of six, Feigel said—no matter how she looked, she could turn into a beauty. And her nature was sweetest of all. When Shaindeleh came and took his hand to walk with him sometimes, there was nothing, nothing she wanted from him—as it would be with Eliza. Shaindel wanted only to walk with her tateh.

So, suddenly, Yankel bought two white geese in their wicker cage to bring home to Shaindeleh. Nor could this be counted as an extravagance, as it would be the beginning of a flock.

Then, starting homeward, Yankel gave himself leave on the outskirts of Tiberias to spend a few coins for the bath. There was still time if he did not linger. The bathhouse was a vaulted stone chamber—who could tell how long it had been standing here—perhaps since the times of the great rabbis who had come to purify themselves in the mikveh here. And as he put off his clothes onto a stone bench, and took the towel handed him by an elderly Jew in a yarmulkeh, Yankel experienced in that dim chamber, where he stood naked, something that he had in a way been expecting all through this day, the first day when he went about by himself a bit freely in the land.

What came to Yankel was, though in a different way, what had come to Reuven and Leah when they found themselves alone in the hollow of a sand-dune beyond Jaffa. Yankel for some moments experienced a surpassing sense of returned peace, of having overcome all his fears of the world, of being a good father, a good Jew, a decent man. The odor of wet stone with a tartness in it came into him with a kind of returning familiarity, though at home in Cherezinka the benches had been of wood. He breathed in the close warm air.

Advancing to the square pool of water, Yankel dipped in his foot. The water was indeed warm and of a peculiarly penetrating quality. It was known there were curative minerals in this Tiberias water that dissolved away the weariness from inside your bones. Slowly Yankel let himself down into the small pool, and stood on the bottom, his neck above the surface, his beard wet. His whole body felt engulfed by something good; it was a feeling akin to a stirring in his very soul. “A mechayah,” he said, half-aloud. A perfect pleasure!

“Your first time?” a voice asked in Yiddish, and Yankel made out the head of another man of about his own age in the further corner. Then began between them the thing Yankel had really most longed for all these weeks, a shmoos. A talking. A feeling-out and talking-out with someone of his own sort. A father of sons and daughters too, of children of various ages, and in such a meeting, there is always in men as well as among women the thought of a possible shidach—a match. A Russian Jew too, it seemed; his family came from Vinnitsa, the seat of a Hasidic tzaddik. But like Yankel, Reb Bagelmacher was himself from a family of anti-Hasidim, Mitnagdim; his forefathers had been bakers, bagel-bakers to be sure, his grandfather, a Talmud chacham, had opened an inn, and Yankel even believed that in his forest-buying days he had one night stayed there, in Vinnitsa. No—or at least it could not have been with the Bagelmachers, his new friend said, since the family had come here to Eretz over thirty years before, moving their inn to Tiberias. Nu, one made a living, though the season was brief. The season was just barely beginning. In winter Jews came for the warm baths, excellent for rheumatism and liver trouble. On Fridays, with a turmoil of Sabbath preparation in the pension, Bagelmacher took refuge here for his midday rest.

As for Yankel, he too told his story, perhaps exaggerating a bit his status as a merchant from Cherezinka who had liquidated his capital and come to Eretz to redeem the land. Until the new settlement would fill up he was alone, the first to come, he said, and what he missed there was a shul.

—Whenever he was in Tiberias, he was welcome, declared Reb Bagelmacher; they had their own little synagogue, Russian Jews like himself, and Yankel felt refreshed and made his way home.

It was truly a good Shabbes. Yaffaleh, overjoyed with her white geese, climbed on him in his chair and kissed her tateh all over his cheeks. The meat was in time to be cooked, though it proved not of the best. Still, Feigel kept some in the oven and on Shabbes itself the meat melted in your mouth.

At sunrise each day, the little girl went off with her geese, down to the waterside, paddling with them, sitting dreamily, not so much watching them as being with them. She gave each a name, and would question and admonish them, “Estherkeh, when are you going to lay eggs for me?” One day Estherkeh swam off, pulling into a thick stand of reeds. Yaffa followed, wading carefully in the mud bank, breathless. And soon she came running up to the house, the trophy in her hand, telling how Estherkeh had led her a clever chase, pretending to stop, paddling further, and how at last Estherkeh had wiggled into the mud, making a small hollow, and—

To eat one single goose-egg—the first? Queen Esther might become angry and lay no more, Yaffaleh pleaded. Then let her grow a flock, Feigel decided, in time there would be plenty of eggs, and geese too, for feasting. At Passover they would have a Seder with their own roast goose! But to this Yaffaleh wouldn’t even listen; she was already running back with the egg.

One morning Yaffaleh saw her white mother goose emerging from her thicket, and there, paddling to one side of her, came her brood; the child counted—seven of them, still shaped like eggs, seven goose-eggs with tiny heads. The mother turned her queenly head to make sure of them—could she count? No, a goose couldn’t count, that was why you were called a goose if you couldn’t add numbers; yet Yaffaleh felt the mother goose knew perfectly well how many goslings there should be.

Now Yaffaleh had a great desire to rush back to the house to tell Schmulik, to tell Avramchick, to bring them, the whole family must come running to gaze on this wonder. But how could she leave even for an instant? She stood transfixed. And watching, the perfection of the universe was revealed to her. How cunning, how divine was the way in which the creature floated out slowly, and her young followed, the glowing forms moving as stars moved across the Milky Way in the sky!

But how far was the foolish mother going to swim with her goslings? Suppose she swam out to the Kinnereth and a storm arose? The sea rippled in soft strokes like when Dvora combed her long flowing hair. But how foolish to worry—hadn’t she already noticed that her geese sensed, even sooner than the fishermen, any change coming over the water? Hadn’t Gidon told her that fishermen watched the wild geese on the Kinnereth so as to know when to head homeward?

Still further her Queen Esther moved with her brood; Yaffaleh waded a few steps into the water, she began to cluck, to call them back. At last Estherkeh circled; her shoe-button eyes looked directly into Yaffa’s, and she lifted her head proudly so her neck was a tower of David. Her babies were a fan of pearls behind her. Yaffaleh waded a few steps further, then, in an outburst of love, she plunged, dress and all, into the water and swam out, hugging her mother goose while the smooth beak pecked a kiss on her mouth.

Just as Dvora fed the chickens and Yaffaleh had taken charge of the geese, so Gidon was master of the mules. They were kept for the time being along with Kramer’s; he had named them Habib and Baksheesh, because Habib, the beloved, was the friendlier, and Baksheesh was always demanding an extra mouthful before he would stir. Baksheesh was a thief, too, Gidon related, but a clever one. When fodder was placed in the cribs, Baksheesh would steal from his neighbor, but not from the neighbor on his left, his partner Habib—no, he stole from Kramer’s company mules—after all, the Rothschilds could afford it!

Gidon’s bragging about this cleverness soon got to Kramer’s ears. The overseer was not one to tolerate such matters; Baksheesh must be placed in the end stall, he ordered. But there the wind blew in, and rain too when it rained. One morning Gidon went off with their ax to a small island in the middle of the Jordan, where scrub pines grew. Bringing back several slender poles, he built a lean-to against the hut. In any case Kramer had charged them too much for the feed; now they would keep their beasts at home.

Dvora received word of Yechezkiel. The young man from the ship had not forgotten her, oh no! It was Leah who brought the news, coming from Yavniel. Only a few days ago, having heard there was a sitting of the Shomer at Yavniel, she had walked there, the whole way. For she had had a thought. Perhaps Moshe had been given an additional mission, a secret one, to bring back arms, and through this had fallen into trouble? Galil would be sure to come to this meeting, at which young men were to be examined as candidates for the Shomer, which now guarded virtually all the settlements as far as Rosh Pina.

Before their closed sitting she drew Galil aside. In his direct way he answered her. Even in a secret matter she had a right to know, he agreed, and he was sure he could trust her. And it spoke well for Moshe that he had not told her; Moshe indeed was to have brought back arms for the Shomer, but this part of his mission would have been carried out only on his way back. It was known that he had left Constantinople, but from there, nothing was known. In Odessa he had not appeared, not at the Poale Zion and not at the Zionist office. Those who had to do with such matters had been notified and were still at work on the question. Yes, the vessel on which he had sailed was known, a tramp Greek lumber ship; it was now somewhere on the seas, but one day it must return to Constantinople or to Odessa. “Leah, he is important to us, not of course in the same way as to you, but believe me everything is being done. Be patient yet a while.”

Then she had tried to persuade Galil, “Let me go and find out.” At last he had promised that, if the present inquiries were futile, her plea would be considered.

While there, she had begun to talk to a likable youth, one of the applicants who were being voted on, trying to ease her nervousness. And when he learned she was Leah Chaimovitch, and that her sister was right here on the other side of the heights of Yavniel, the boy almost forgot about the Shomer!

“You know,” Leah teased Dvora, “at that moment I think he even forgot they were voting on him. He wanted to come straight here with me! He’s in the training farm at Sejera and said he would come on Sabbath Eve to visit you,” she ended.

“No! Tonight! And they accepted him into the Shomer?” Dvora fell on her big sister’s breast, weeping with shameless girlish joy, and then she began to fly about the hut, the yard, putting up washing, taking down washing, beginning to sweep the stoop, running inside, exclaiming, “Oh, what a pigpen, a hegdesh!” and covering the beds, and suddenly demanding of her mother whether there would be raisins in the noodle kugel.

“What’s happened, what’s come over you?” Feigel demanded, seizing Dvora’s wrists. “Not the kadahat? Your face is flushed.”

“Her friend from the ship—he’s here at Sejera. He’s coming for Sabbath Eve!” It hardly needed Leah to explain.

A guest, even a suitor, and how could there be a Sabbath meal for such a one without a fowl? From the two hens Dvora had raised a small flock. But here it was already noon. And where was there a slaughterer? There was no longer time to go to Tiberias or even to Yavniel and return. And to slaughter a chicken without a shochet—this, Tateh would never allow.

“It doesn’t matter, he’s coming to see Dvora, not to eat chicken,” Leah laughed at her mother, yet Feigel was dismayed. Somehow the whole worth of her life seemed to totter at this moment on the ability to provide a proper Sabbath meal for a guest. And in her worry she hurried out to find Yankel. Perhaps if Gidon took the mule he could still ride to the shochet in Yavniel and come back in time? Or, Feigel was even ready to ask Kramer for the loan of his horse!

“Who is coming, the Messiah himself?” Yankel gasped. “Whatever we ourselves will eat for the Sabbath, this shomer will eat, and enough!”

But Gidon had heard, and a few moments after Feigel had returned to the hut she saw him in the yard, stalking one of the chickens. “Gidon, what are you doing?”

“Have no fear, it will be a true shochet!”

Dvora, Schmulik, Eliza, even little Avramchick had joined the chase as the terrified birds flapped out of their very hands, squeaking gevald! To these doings Feigel shut her eyes. It was Schmulik who caught one of the young chickens, holding her feet while Dvora tied them. “But Gidon,” she whispered, “where are you taking her?”

Gidon winked. “To the Yemenites. They have a shochet, don’t they?”

“But from Yemenites Tateh won’t accept it.”

“A shochet is a shochet.” He shrugged. “They’re religious, aren’t they? They’re Jews, aren’t they?”

With a grimace Gidon babbled an abracadabra in imitation of a shochet’s blessing, as he made the motion of slitting the chicken’s throat. Then he imitated the bird’s final flapping, a stagger, a shivery collapse, and little Avramchick laughed, though a bit doubtfully. The Yemenites Gidon had thought of because one of them, a stonecutter, had appeared when the Abulafia the Sephardi had ceased to come. At first glance, the slender dark-skinned worker had seemed an Arab, but there were ringlets before his ears. In any case it turned out that Kramer had got him to labor for Arab wages.

In an odd nasal Hebrew, the Yemenite had explained to Gidon that he was from the little settlement by the Kinnereth. Indeed Gidon had noticed their poor straw huts at the edge of the lake, made of nothing but reed matting. It was a man of Yavniel who had journeyed down the Red Sea to the land of Yemen a few years before, and brought back a number of these families; they were like Arabs, but they were religious Jews—their tribes had lived there in Yemen since the days of the Queen of Sheba, they said. In this way, before the new wave of chalutzim came, the farmers of Yavniel had thought of bringing themselves a supply of Jewish labor. Diligent workers the Yemenites were known to be, and undemanding; they lived on very little, like the fellaheen. Only, many of them had sickened and died.

Under a pepper tree the Yemenite shochet squatted, his feet in a little pool of feathers clotted with chicken blood. He had already finished. Behind him in the hut with its straw-mat flooring, his wife was completing the last scrub-up for the Sabbath, and through the open doorway, the place shone with the many-colored covers of the pillows and bolsters on their sleeping mats.

Gidon held out the chicken. In his singsong Hebrew the shochet asked what the boy wanted. “Slaughter her, what do you think!” And Gidon held out a coin.

“Your father sent you to me?” the Yemenite asked, turning his own head on its scrawny neck with a birdlike, questioning air.

“A guest is coming for Shabbat. We didn’t have time to go to Yavniel, so quick, slaughter it.”

“A guest for Shabbat?” the shochet temporized.

“My sister’s suitor. It’s a mitzvah.” This was a touch, Gidon knew, that would fetch the man. With the religious, everything connected with a marriage was already a mitzvah.

The wizened little slaughterer had indeed begun to glow at the word. He hummed a little as he took hold of the fowl and felt it. Aha, a meaty young bird, might the children of the marriage be strong and live long! He began to intone the blessing and the knife moved so swiftly you could hardly tell what happened. The line between life and death was nothing.

The coin the Yemenite waved off. Let it be with his blessings, he said. “Are we not all descended from Solomon the King? And may the family increase. Good Sabbath.”

And running all the way back, Gidon presented the bird to his mother. “A real kosher shochet,” he insisted. “He said the same blessing as the shochet in Cherezinka.” And he repeated a few words, almighty this and almighty that, in a Yemenite singsong. Feigel gave a dubious sigh. Who knew—with Gidon, Yankel still got along, so perhaps Yankel would let it pass. Dvoraleh took her brother’s face between her hands and bestowed a kiss on his forehead. Still somewhat worried, Feigel turned the bird this way and that, inspecting it. “The Yemenites aren’t pious enough for you?” Leah cried. Taking hold of the dead chicken, she began to pull off the feathers. “They’re a thousand times more pious even than the Jews of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem!”

“People say they are half Arabs,” Feigel worried.

“They are more Jews than we are!”

“That wouldn’t be so much,” her mother replied tartly. Even while she hesitated on the final decision, Feigel rushed about, filled the large water pot. How small the bird looked, and how many mouths were they? At least Reuven, who had come from their kvutsa for the Sabbath, need not be counted, the vegetarian. She herself, Feigel calculated, need take only half a wing to make a semblance. Meanwhile she instructed Dvora to take a few raisins, a few almonds, some bread crumbs for the stuffing. Ach, how little she had taught her daughters! Nu, what would be would be. If Tateh said no, then the bird could be given to the Yemenites. With them it would be kosher, let them make a feast of it!

“In this wilderness,” Leah protested, “who is there to peer into your pot to know whether it’s supremely kosher or not? Do you think you are still in Cherezinka?”

“God can see into the pot,” Gidon quoted, but without levity, as though in all fairness offering his father’s argument. His mother looked at him with a look intended to be scolding, but it failed. “It is enough for your father to know,” she said. “Your father you must respect.”

* * * *

The father had ended his labor early and gone down to his waterside mikveh. A Jew in the Holy Land alone with his God, he would recite the words of welcome for the arrival of the Sabbath bride. Then he would walk home as the sun disappeared over the ridge, come home like a Jew from shul, saying “Good Shabbes” as he entered the house.

The afternoon waned. The aroma of roasting chicken spread over the yard. Surely it could be smelled as far as Sejera itself, Eliza teasingly declared to Dvora, and if her shomer had not really made up his mind whether or not to come on his visit, the aroma would fetch him.

The afternoon was all but gone, and the suitor had not yet appeared. Dvora tried not to show her worry, but riding from Sejera he might have come by way of the Three Rocks, where many were waylaid.

No, Leah cried, he’d come straight over the ridge, by the short cut, and besides they wouldn’t dare waylay a shomer!

Feigel, watching the sun, had another worry. If the young man should come riding after the Sabbath fell, would Yankel even allow him into the house?

In a moment Yankel would be coming home from his prayers by the river, poor man without a shul to go to. The best would be to explain about the shochet to him even before he reached the house—for surely the aroma would reach him. And the best one to explain would be Dvora herself—no, even better, Eliza. For Eliza he had a special softness.

Three times Eliza had re-done her braids, ending by tying a broad white bow atop her head. The vain one! Her mother always related that the first object she had seized in her baby fingers had been a tiny hand-mirror, and she had never since left off admiring herself. “Go, go, Elizaleh, explain it to Tateh, that with the Yemenites, a shochet does it exactly like the High Priest in King Solomon’s Temple.”

Eliza walked out across the yard to meet her father. She had put on her white dress with the billowy sleeves, and with the crowning white bow, the slender girl in the twilight haze appeared to Yankel taller, she appeared like a young Sabbath Queen herself, his daughter approaching to meet him. Words from the Song of Songs, still on his lips from the Sabbath prayer, hummed in Yankel’s ears, and in this moment, as he recognized his sweet young Eliza, with the broad curve of the river in the last sunglow behind her, a hand-mirror for her loveliness, his heart stood still. In this moment all was as it should ever be, a perfection reigned in the Above One’s universe, and for this moment he had come here, and brought his Feigel and their children here through such heavy difficulties.

Eliza twined her arm in his.

“So? Has the young man come?”

“No, not yet, Tateh, they are a little worried.”

Yankel glanced up at the ridge. There was still time for a rider, but not more than a few moments. Still, suppose a Jew were to consider that instead of gazing up from below, he was watching the setting sun from the top of the ridge?

“Dvora is afraid, if he might have taken the way of the Three Rocks—” Eliza said.

Just then Yankel caught the scent from the house. “What is your mother cooking, then?” he demanded.

“Father, you know there is a shochet here!”

“What? He fell from heaven? Elijah himself, perhaps?”

“No, Tateh. Right here nearby. A perfectly kosher shochet, and we never knew it.”

“He has been hiding in a cave?”

“The Yemenites have a shochet,” Eliza said.

Yankel stopped in his tracks. “The Yemenites have a shochet. This I understand. For the Yemenites, the Yemenites have a shochet. And so what is that to us?”

“So—we have chicken for the Sabbath, for Dvora’s shomer.”

And at this moment, before Yankel could declare himself, the thunder of hooves came to them, and with his keffiyah flying in the wind, Yechezkiel clattered down the hill, streaking to outride the last rays of the setting sun, or indeed as though he were borne upon them. Already the boys were running from the yard to greet him as he reined up, the steed of the guardsmen triumphantly pawing the air.

“Baruch haba,” Yankel offered nevertheless, as the rider’s boots struck the ground. The boy seemed larger than he had been on the ship, more a man, that much had to be admitted. And glancing at the departing sun with a sternly measuring look, Yankel declared, “You arrived in time. Shabbat shalom.”

The young man laughed self-consciously. “Our mare can outrace the sun itself!”

Gidon was already stroking her flank, while she flaired the water-pail he had brought.

“Careful, don’t let her drink too swiftly,” Yankel admonished.

“I know.”

Feigel was standing in the doorway. “Shalom, gveret,” Yechezkiel greeted her respectfully. “I come to pay your family a visit. With your permission.” He included the father.

“Welcome! The guest is welcome! Come in!”

—In the old days at home, Yankel was thinking to himself, this was not how it would have happened. First there would have been a go-between to feel out the situation, then discussions of the yiches of the groom—of his lineage, of his scholarly attainments—then friendly bargaining over what the bride might bring on her side of a match—but what did his daughter have to bring in this world? He could provide no dowry for her. And besides, here in the Land it seemed that—aside from the old religious communities—things weren’t done like that any more. Two young people saw each other, took to each other, and the parents would be lucky if the couple even took the trouble to go before a rabbi and stand under a canopy, instead of throwing themselves together on the haystack as no doubt Leah had done, though Feigel and all of them were keeping it a secret from him, and the fellow who had done it with her had vanished…. And this prospective groom, what did he have to show except his horse—and the horse wasn’t his, for that matter—among the members of the Shomer everything was owned in common: the horse belonged to the whole troop of them, even the boy’s boots.

This Yechezkiel—even from the ship Yankel had felt it—the way the boy liked to preen himself. Look at him with the tassels on his keffiyah. But for that matter they all were like that, dressing up like Cossacks or like Arab sheikhs—that was part of their way.

Another question—and he could already hear Feigel fretting over it as soon as they would be alone in their bed. How could they allow a younger daughter to become betrothed, even perhaps to be married, while the eldest, Leah, was as yet unwed?

Still … this was Shabbat, not the time for worrying. And Yankel entered the house, pronouncing the Sabbath peace.

Feigel had retreated to her pots in the corner; sniffing, though he already knew, Yankel demanded, “What have you cooked here?”

Schmulik and Yaffaleh were at the other end of the room pretending to know nothing, but their eyes betrayed their complicity. Would the father’s rage burst forth now? Would he allow the chicken to be eaten?

Yankel went closer and gazed at the fowl lying on its back on Feigel’s largest plate, the head to one side with one eye staring as though in defiance. From one to the other of the family Yankel gazed, as though to settle in his mind which of them had done this thing. Schmulik tensed, ready to rush out the door if the anger should fall his way. But his brother Gidon, he saw, stood quiet without flinching under Tateh’s questioning gaze.

Now Yankel turned his eyes on his wife. With her lace shawl over her sheitl, and her gown of dark brown silk with its lace insets, she was dressed as though this were already the wedding. The stone hut shone.

And this doubting moment Feigel seized upon to light the silver candlesticks they had carried from Cherezinka and to say the prayer of the wife. The chaleh lay on the table glistening in the candlelight. Truly his Feigel was a housewife of highest merit, a beryeh, in his heart Yankel admitted it, and yet this could not alter what was kosher and what was tref.

Having completed the candle-blessing, Feigel turned to him and said calmly, “The bird is kosher. I saw myself. Everything was properly done.”

Now, with finality, Yankel turned his eyes on Gidon, while his wife continued, “I myself sent him to the shochet. Imagine, how we didn’t think of it until now I don’t know, but among the Yemenites there is a shochet!”

So with this they had thought to get around him.

It was the guest himself who saved the moment. Yechezkiel had stepped outside, and from his saddlebag he fetched back a bottle of wine, holding it aloft as he returned, his face shining. Good sweet wine from Zichron Yaacov. “For the Kiddush,” he said, like a decent Jewish boy, and Yankel could not refuse to open the wine and lift his glass as he chanted the blessing. Even the elder children, Reuven and Leah, the unbelievers, to his surprise, joined with an “Omeyn.”

Somehow Feigel had managed seats for everyone around the big trunk that was covered with the white Sabbath cloth; there was a bench that Gidon had made, and two old chairs had been acquired, and a plank on boxes made a bench on the other side. There they sat, a family with a suitor for a guest! Tearing off the end of the warm chaleh, Yankel spoke the blessing for bread. The chaleh was soft and sweet to the tongue.

He recited the “eshet chayil,” the “woman of valor” passage of Proverbs to his wife.

All was good. Feigel served out portions of the gefulte fish, made, as had to be, of two kinds of fish—fish that Schmulik had brought out of the Kinnereth, and with large servings of the fish, she hoped that small portions of the fowl would suffice.

Perhaps because the girls were all nervous at the presence of the suitor, they didn’t chatter as much as usual. And suddenly the guest himself became loquacious. Yechezkiel told how worried he had been as to whether the Shomer would accept him. He and his friend Menahem—the little dark one from the boat, surely they remembered?—they had trained themselves together, or rather Menahem had trained him, as this friend knew everything, he had been around the world as a sailor and he had learned to ride as a cowboy in America! So they had gone off together for a whole week with no provender, to live off the land. They had gone to the Huleh swamp.

“Ah!” Reuven cried. “The Huleh!” Every plant, every bird was said to be found wild there. And Gidon too grew excited. Had they seen herds of water buffalo?

“Plenty!” cried Yechezkiel. “Even wild boar—” He caught himself up, but Yankel already understood; this would-be son-in-law, to whom the boys were listening as though he were the Maggid of Dubnow himself, was simply another young atheist who would not even have stopped at eating the flesh of the wild pig of the Huleh. Yankel wanted to spit. He was not all that stupid, he told himself, he knew what went on in their world of chalutzim and chalutzoth. His eye fell on Dvora, her face glistening, her lips parted. Would it ever occur to a daughter of his after she was married to keep a kosher house? Why had he troubled so, to bring them here to the Holy Land? What was God’s land to them?

The suitor was recounting tales now of wondrous fields on the other side, beyond the lakes and swamps of the Huleh, of rich, black earth. One day they would settle there, far up in the north in the foothills of the Hermon, as far as the lands of Dan; they would form their own kvutsa of men of the Shomer, and from their settlement they would send guardsmen all over the yishuv. He was speaking more and more to Reuven and Leah as though they were the heads of the family, and Dvora too looked to her big brother and sister, and not to her father and mother. Feigel brought the fowl to the table.

—Let them have their chicken, whether it was really kosher or tref only a rabbi could judge, and what did it matter to these godless ones? For himself, Yankel waved aside his portion. This way also there would be more for the guest, surely as big a gobbler as he was a boaster.

The young couple sat late by the waterside.

The older brother and sister too were by the river, strolling along the bank.—The boy was certainly not profound, was Reuven’s judgment, but a good, brave lad, good material.

“And Dvora, is she profound?” Leah asked. Yet she sometimes wondered at thoughts that came from her younger sister, and even in this moment had an intuition that Dvora might have more capacity than this boy Yechezkiel. But then wasn’t the woman usually deeper than the man? Hadn’t she felt something of this with Moshe?

The pang struck and Leah fell silent, walking on. Her brother knew she was thinking of Moshe; yes, it was true that there was a touch in Yechezkiel that was like Leah’s Moshe, something adventuresome, romantically handsome … Reuven peered at Leah’s face in the half moonlight but could not bring himself to speak of Moshe; it might be more pain than comfort. For an instant he pressed her hand.

In the morning the entire family strolled into their fields, Yechezkiel among them. Across the stepping stones where the Jordan, in the bend, flowed shallow, their first stretch of planted earth could be seen, the grain already rising out of the ground. How quickly this had happened! They all hurried to cross, Yechezkiel giving his hand to Dvora, and then also to Mameh. But just as Feigel, the last in the procession, reached the other side, a wail arose from behind. It was Avramchick. “And me? And me?” the toddler called, standing to his knees in the stream. He made a sight at once so pathetic and so comical, so sweet, standing there, that all of them burst out laughing together. Only Feigel, who could tell why, by what vagary, wiped a sudden tear from her eyes, while Gidon hurried back and fetched Avramchick on his shoulders.

Eliza knelt, brushing her cheek against the blades of green, her long golden braids touching the ground. How lovely was this little sister in her vanity, Reuven said to himself, and her eyes glanced up and caught his thought. “Everything grows more quickly here,” she said.

Yes, the eucalyptus trees that the kvutsa had planted had already leaped up a full two meters, he said.—Did she know that the eucalyptus was not from Eretz, but had been brought from Australia? Every plant adapted itself here, no matter how far away it came from—

“Like our Jews,” she mocked him, and Reuven felt confused among his younger sisters, even before this child of eleven, and before Dvora already walking with her boy, and Leah already made a woman, and his mother surely wondering and pitying his aloneness. Calling to Gidon, he began to climb; he wanted to show Gidon a certain place he had found.

Through brambles and high thistles they came to the clutter of stones, almost covered by the tangled wild growth. Here were the remains of a stone door-frame, the lintel still resting on the half-buried supports. Here was a large black rock, hollowed out for pounding grain. From long, long ago, who knew how long! Still further above were caves in the face of a sheer wall; to climb there would be a problem.

“Even before Abraham. Even before the Canaanites,” Reuven said in curious awe, as though all who had lived here, even the cave dwellers, were in some way their kin.

From up here, one saw every twist and wandering of the Jordan, and even on the far side, the paths up into the stony hills to the heights of Golan. A vantage point, Gidon said.

Reuven pulled some stalks from among the rocks and stripped a few small dried kernels into his hand. He rubbed off the husks and idly put the few grains under his nose, then between his teeth, and then spat them out. The kernels were hard as though petrified. Some windblown seeds probably, that had taken root and then deteriorated in the thin soil, choked among the ruins. Still, he stripped another stalk and dropped the grains into his pocket.

Risen from his Sabbath nap, Yankel went out late in the afternoon by himself as far as is permitted in a Sabbath stroll; in Cherezinka it had been to the end of the town by the stream, and how was he to measure it here? The shore of the Kinnereth? A little further along the shore were the huts of the Yemenites. From one of them a nasal singsong came. The door was open and he could see them, a scant minyan, squatting along the wall while their elder stood at a reading-stand they had made from a crate and placed in the center of the hut. On the side toward Yerushalayim, on a table against the reed wall, stood an ornamented Torah ark, doubtless carried by them from home.

As Yankel hovered in the doorway, one of them came to him. Yankel knew the man, the one with the wispy goatlike beard, the stonecutter. “Shalom, a good Sabbath to you,” Yankel said. “A good week to you and yours,” the Yemenite responded.

To them, it suddenly occurred to Yankel, he was perhaps himself to be doubted in his worship, for had he not heard somewhere that the Yemenites frowned on the ways of the Jews from the west, the “Franks,” for might not Judaism have been polluted in being dragged all over the roads of Europe? Though these Yemenites did not even know what it was to wear shoes, or to lie on a bed instead of the ground, one thing was certain—their daughters they did not give over to apicoiresim!

“If I may be permitted, it is a long while since I have prayed with a minyan,” he found himself saying. “Though our ways are not exactly the same as yours—”

“Is there not one Torah for all Jews?”

After that Sabbath, Yankel went now and again to pray with the Yemenites, even returning home to remark to Feigel that there were men of remarkable Torah knowledge among them; and whenever a chicken had to be prepared for the table of a Sabbath eve—and who knows, when Passover came, even a goose might be slaughtered—here was a shochet, just at hand.

* * * *

Still the family remained alone. The settlement was being built, and it was not being built. The walls of several houses could be seen standing, though of course unroofed. There came Jacques Samuelson himself, the Baron’s manager for the entire north, a man of fine bearing who always put his hand over his heart when he said “Believe me.” In Constantinople, he explained, the Young Turks had at last toppled the ancient monster, the Sultan Hamid, but whether their new government would prove good or bad for the Yishuv was uncertain; certain it was that among their first acts had been the closing of the gates to Jewish immigration into Palestine, but uncertain it was whether these measures would endure. Another few months and things would arrange themselves, he was convinced; the settlers from Roumania would come, somehow they would be admitted to the land, and the village would take on life. Patience.

Reuven and Leah nevertheless grumbled at home about the lack of schooling for Schmulik and the girls. Leah tried to make them study Hebrew with her in the afternoons, and Yankel insisted that Schmulik read his Chumash every morning, but the boy raced through the passages Yankel set for him and then ran wild outdoors like a young Arab, or brought back fish from the sea. Let it be, Yankel said to Feigel. He had not wrenched himself away from Russia to make intellectuals out of his sons. He had come here to return to the soil, to make farmers of them, for all the ills of the Jews had come from their bookishness. Fortunately Gidon was not a bookish lad—he had finished cheder and that was enough—and as for the girls, Eliza and Dvora had learned at home to read, let them addle their heads reading romances. By next season the settlement would surely be inhabited, with a school and a shul. If Schmulik learned his numbers a year later, what did it matter? The thirty families from Transylvania were bringing their own teacher, a fine melamed, Samuelson had assured him.

One day a forerunner appeared from Roumania, a stout merchant named Issachar Bronescu. He arrived on Kalman’s wagon from Jaffa, wearing a heavy woolen suit, though he carried with him a German book containing complete statistics on the climate of Palestine, tropical Tiberias included. But, after all, it was still winter, he declared to Yankel, and in winter a man wore winter clothing.

Though of Yankel’s own age, Bronescu seemed younger; his cheeks were clean-shaven down to a stylish square-cut chinbeard of curly black hair. “Naturally we are all prepared to undergo hardships,” he proclaimed. Yet it was only sensible to make the best preparations; therefore he had come in advance. And he made lists of implements, provisions, and furnishings for the settlers to bring with them, even inquiring delicately of Feigel, with apologies, about women’s intimate needs, and then of Yankel about what stock of merchandise he should import, for Issachar Bronescu himself planned to open a store.

At least he was observant, for when he came down to their hut, he kissed the mezuzah Yankel had fixed on the doorway. “Truly pioneers,” he complimented the family. “And such fine healthy children!” Feigel offered him Yankel’s chair, and said she would bring tea. But no, she must not trouble herself, he insisted, for she was now noticeably heavy with child. He sat himself down on a box. But then, as she brought tea and sesame-seed cookies, for her sake, so a guest could be properly received, he moved to the comfortable chair. His own wife could never be so brave, Bronescu declared. He would ship an entire household of furniture here. And as for Yankel, might one ask what occupation he had followed in Russia?

—A merchant, Yankel said.

—And in what merchandise had he dealt?

—Timber. Sugar.

Aha. Aha. The visitor’s eyes still calculated the contents of the hut.

“Roumanians,” Yankel growled, when he had gone.

“At least—people,” Feigel said.

It was altogether a winter of misery. In a torrential rain the taboon melted away and Feigel had nowhere to bake her bread. The river flooded its banks, and the earthen floor was mud. A disease caught Dvoraleh’s chickens; half the flock staggered about with their heads askew, it tore your heart out to watch the poor creatures as they struggled to live, and strangled. Nor could the flesh be eaten.

From the kvutsa, Reuven sent Leah with a book in German, and they made out that this was a well-known disease, an epidemic. In the Arab village too flocks were dying; Dvoraleh had gone up there when Sheikh Ibrim insisted they use his own oven to bake their bread, and she blamed herself for having perhaps carried back the chicken disease. Leah was fearful of bringing the contamination to the kvutsa, and scrubbed herself with yellow soap and even changed all her clothes before returning there. But in the kvutsa her own disaster awaited her. Just that day the mail had come, with a letter for her from Russia. From Moshe’s mother. Despite the roundabout way Leah had made her inquiry, the mother had understood all. For had not her Moshe written to her, the mother said, of his Leah? Of his wonderful chavera who was dear to him as no other girl he had known, and with whom he at last felt that a real life was opening before him?

Why would this same Leah be writing to her for news of the whereabouts of Moshe? Moshe must have gone away somewhere, the mother understood, and he had disappeared. For neither had they been receiving any letters from their son. The blow of his disappearance had stunned them. She and his father had puzzled and reasoned. Moshe could no longer be in Eretz Yisroel, for whatever might have befallen him there, God forbid, his comrades would have known. And now the mother understood why his Leah had written to them, believing he might have gone homeward.

Each day, the mother wrote, she had expected the sight of her Moshe approaching the house. She spent whole days at the window. And Moshe’s father had at last gone to Odessa to make inquiries. And then the real blow had fallen, and Leah must prepare herself.

Moshe had been sent to Siberia.

Leah sat stunned, unable to speak to the chevreh, even to Reuven. She let Reuven take the letter from her hand to read the rest that she had barely absorbed from the lines that quivered before her eyes. Not as a member of Poale Zion had Moshe been seized, but for his old revolutionary activities. As a mere boy handing out revolutionary leaflets in the port. Even before Moshe had gotten off the ship, the Okhrana had seized him. They had held him in secret, and only now had the sentence become known. Ten years, ten years in Siberia! Even to what place in Siberia could not yet be discovered.

* * * *

She would go, Leah blurted. She would go, she would find Moshe, she would be with him until together they could escape.

And then she rushed out into the rain.

To be alone. The chevreh understood; let her be alone. They looked from one to another, and to Nahama, the only other chavera. Nahama also—only the earlier members, such as Max and Reuven, recalled it—had had her troubles over Handsome Moshe, but now she was come to an understanding with Shimek. “Let her be by herself,” Nahama repeated.

When Leah had not returned after a time, Reuven went out and found her sitting by the river. He sat down beside her. She turned her head, bending it down to reach his shoulder, and he raised up his arm to put it around his sister’s shoulders. The huge bulk of her body began to shake with a tremendous sobbing, heaving in enormous waves, so that his arm could hardly hold her. Yet it was the anguish of a girl, a poor girl feeling weak, helpless, small, needing desperately the comfort of a man.

The betrothed, Dvora, was the first to come down with the fever. It came over her one afternoon while she was helping her mother with the washing, bent over the tub in the yard, for since her suitor had come, Dvoraleh had taken to helping with every household task.

Dvora felt a tremor, her eyes saw strangely, the tub shimmered. At first Feigel, as in all things with the girls, thought of womanish matters, but she knew it was not Dvoraleh’s time of the month. Or could it even be that she had, like her sister—? No, not Dvoraleh. Feigel felt the girl’s hands, her forehead, and took her into the house to lie down. It could only be the kadahat. Schmulik ran for Gidon, who mounted the mule and rode to the kvutsa, bringing Leah back with him, and a supply of quinine, a large chunk wrapped in a page from an old journal. By the time they reached the hut, Dvora, her damp hair pasted to her face and neck, was having hallucinations. All night Leah sat with her, and Feigel kept rising, though Leah begged her, “Mameleh, sleep.”

The worst time had come, they all knew it, the time when every evil befalls.

Schmulik came down with the fever the very next day. Should they send to Mescha for Dr. Rachman? But he would only do as they were doing; had not Leah nursed Reuven and half their kvutsa through the kadahat? Still, the presence of the doctor—if anything should happen, God forbid, and they had not gone for the doctor?

Before evening Yankel himself, though he had struggled all day to remain on his feet, gave way to the pestilence. The hovel was like the kvutsa on that first day when the family had passed by, a dark heap of misery. Feigel moved from her stricken children to her sick husband, wiping their faces, begging them to swallow a little soup, praying to the Above One that, if one must be taken, it should be herself, but only after she had brought into the world the soul she carried within her.

And when Dvora seemed to have passed her crisis, sitting up weakly and asking for food, it was the turn of Gidon, and then as though some stern angel were marking each off on his list, it was the time of the little one, Avramchick.

The child was stricken worst of all. On the second day, as the mother held him, rocked him, his flesh was afire as though the little body were passing through Gehenna itself. “The doctor, the doctor,” she begged. Who would ride? Gidon lay sick, and Yankel too. But Reuven had now come from the kvutsa, and borrowing Kramer’s mare, he galloped to Mescha.

Avramchick was not as the other boys had been when little; he was like a happy angel from the sky, and Feigel had always trembled for him, picturing him to herself as a soul not yet entirely fast within the body. Gidon and Schmulik she recalled on their sturdy small legs, and the way Reuven too had been as a child—all the boys had tugged away from her, marching into every doorway and thrusting their noses into every man’s workshop in Cherezinka, from the moment they could move about. But Avramchick still clung to her skirts. His large pale eyes were gray like some tranquil sky and looked on everything with pleasure but without surprise. Nor did he try to seize hold of everything he laid eyes on, the way boys did who were strong in themselves.

This was not to think that he was like the girls. The girls even as toddlers were as they were now, Leah busily trying to do all that she saw her mother or her brothers doing, Dvora passive but willing and even in her first years like a sweet flower, freely ready to give off her perfume, and Eliza vain and decided in her ways, saying yes to this and no to that, and Yaffaleh with her large head and thick limbs, goodness itself, hugging every living creature, a dog, a cat, a wounded bird, her geese. Yet all the girls were in some way the same, they were true in their essence, in their fate as women, just as the boys were manly.

Only Avramchick was not like any one of them. Feigel did not let herself think of the little Nachman she had lost. And she was haunted now by an image that came back from a while ago, the image of Avramchick on that Sabbath when they had crossed to the fields, left alone on the other side of the river crying, “And me!”

He had never quite reached his strength in his body, so that now in his fever Feigel was terrified that his soul might decide to return above. He it was who had almost at once on arrival in Eretz Yisroel caught the eye-sickness, so that his pale gray eyes were rimmed with red, like sometimes the moon when strange things are to happen on earth. The child had not complained of the irritation, only come and buried his face in her skirts when the eyelids burned, just as he had done now when his whole body began to burn. She had laved his eyes in diluted boric acid. She had sniffed the odor of a poultice brought down by Adefa, the Arabess who brought down goat-cheese from Dja’adi and had shown her how to make the cheese after Yankel had bought their own goat. The poultice smelled of urine, it was like the remedies of the moujik wives in the old country, and though sometimes Feigel had followed their advice—as when Reuven had the whooping cough and she had made him breathe in the odor of burning dried dung, and it had helped him—an instinct this time held her back from applying the poultice to Avramchick’s eyes; too many Arab children were half blind. Leah had continued the laving with boric acid, and this had brought down the inflammation. But now even quinine did not bring down the fever. Avramchick retched. It was as though the poor child was not himself doing this, for he did not wail, but rather as though his little body produced the ugly mucus while his eyes looked steadily at her to say this was not he, so that she pressed him close in her terror as though by her own strength to hold his undecided soul within this world. Avremeleh, Avremeleh, she crooned, and when the chills shook him, Feigel wanted to take him back within her body and keep him safe until he was well. It was as though he were even less certainly in this world than the unborn child within her, now nearly come to term; the thrusts were determined and sturdy, to tell her he was already like the other boys, his brothers. But Avramchick lay on her distended body, his small arms around her sides, and his head in the cave between her heavy breasts.

In that hut of misery Big Leah moved from one to the other, bringing broth, bringing tea, her eyes in their dark hollows hardly closed all week, her voice sometimes hoarse and whispery from weariness. One good thing, the anguish for Moshe was for the time covered up in her, though with all her life she would have preferred to have her family in health and let the anguish burn. “Rest, rest,” she kept urging her mother, “or you too will fall sick with the fever, and then what will become of the children?” And on her side Feigel kept repeating the same to Leah. It was Leah more than her mother who hovered over the stricken Tateh, mopping Yankel’s brow all night long in the worst night of all, and holding him down when he struggled with the wild strength of the enfevered to rise to go to the fields.

Gidon was the first to rise, tottering out, declaring he was well, it was finished; he fed the mules and watered them. The others still lay stretched toe to head on their pallets around the walls.

And it was Leah who, before Dr. Rachman arrived, quietly lifted the limp body of Avramchick away from the breast of his mother, who did not yet know that the fever had at last burned through the final fragile hold of the flesh on his uncertain soul, which had risen away.

With this first sacrifice a legend arose about the soul of Avramchick and the plight of his brother Reuven.

For when Reuven borrowed the swift mare from the supervisor, Kramer, his ride was known, as everything is known that happens in the land. Among the Arabs of Dja’adi it was known that a Yahud was galloping to Mescha on the famous swift mare of the tawny mane. The Arabs of Dja’adi wouldn’t touch what belonged to Hawadja Kramer, for he had long established friendship with their mukhtar, and old Ibrim had received money for long-abandoned land. And though Kramer did not employ any villagers in the construction of the houses, there were greens and eggs bought from them, cheese and olives as well, and soon more Yehudim would arrive with money.

But across another twist of the Jordan was the village of the Zbeh, a bitter, marauding clan who had a long-standing feud with Dja’adi, a ghoum that had endured for twelve years and claimed some thirty dead from each tribe. Despite this or because of it, what was known in one village was instantly known on the other side; a few horsemen of the Zbeh were constantly circling around, and nothing escaped their eyes.

Nor would the Zbeh have dared to try for the steed while Kramer himself rode her; he stood too well with the Turks, and the bastinado was a certainty. Yet here was an opportunity to waylay the mare.

Since it was certain dark would fall before they could reach the settlement, Dr. Rachman had at first urged Reuven to wait overnight; he would come in the early morning—he was the one doctor who never had it in his heart to refuse, though what could he do? he said. “Quinine you have, and they all have taken quinine. Reuven, you went through a bad kadahat yourself, you know there is nothing much I can do.”

But his baggy unhappy eyes acknowledged that there was the one thing: to be there. For the doctor to be there. This one added remedy, could it be denied that it sometimes made the difference? For the eyes of the sick, particularly a sick child, to fix themselves on the face of a doctor?

And so they rode out, hoping to pass the dangerous place atop the ridge still during daylight, and they reached the ridge in time, but nevertheless four of the Zbeh stormed out from behind a rock shelter, blocking the way.

Though he could not recognize each man by name, nevertheless Dr. Rachman knew the Zbeh and the tribe knew him, for had he ever refused to come to tend a daughter of the tribe bleeding in childbirth? “Yours you can keep, Hawadja Doctor,” the first marauder called, “but the tawny mare we must have.”

In Yiddish Reuven shouted to Dr. Rachman, “I’ll hold them off, go, go on to my family. Send help!” And in the same moment Reuven jumped down, pulling Kramer’s horse with him into a crevice, while he fired off the revolver that Kramer had insisted he carry. Dr. Rachman’s horse reared but moved on. Perhaps Zev the Hotblood, the shomer in nearby Yavniel, might hear the shooting and come galloping.

How it was Reuven never understood, but in that single moment he had slipped like some experienced warrior into the best position. The crevice was like a trench and a verge of rocks gave him a protected firing point. Kramer’s mare stood strangely quiet, like some heroine—it even came to Reuven’s mind—in an opera when men fight over a woman, and she waits to be led away by the victor.

The Zbeh fired at his rocks and he fired with his pistol, still not aiming, only hoping to keep them off, and even in this moment tormenting himself with the thought that he did not want to kill. They wheeled before him for position; doubtless they did not want to injure the steed. Ceaselessly they screamed blood-curdling curses at him, obscenities in Arabic, filth against a man’s mother.

The sun was behind him, directly in their eyes. Would they rush at him to seize the horse?

And then there happened something that Reuven did not understand. Their shouting suddenly ceased. They drew together on their mounts. He saw them in a cluster, one huge dark menacing form. And instead of charging upon him, they wheeled and thundered away.

What became widely talked of afterward was learned from a very old shepherd of Dja’adi, who sometimes talked with a very old shepherd of the Zbeh.

The Zbeh tribesmen related that they had beheld a golden circlet coursing around the head of the Yahud, a live, golden circle of light that was protecting him. An angel hovered over the Yahud, they saw, and so they had departed.

Some said the mare had tossed her tawny mane, and with the sunlight coming through it directly into their eyes, the Arabs had seen a golden vision.

But when Feigel had passed beyond the stony silence of her first grief, and when she heard the story told, she said it was the soul of Avramchick that had paused on the way to heaven and hovered over the head of Reuven his brother, protecting him from the murderers.

* * * *

The little white bundle with the body of Avramchick was placed in the ground high up at the far edge of the fields, just beneath the tumbled stone ruins of the village of ancient times. It was Reuven who chose this place that was to become the cemetery of Mishkan Yaacov, and in his choice was the thought that this was where his own body would lie one day.

And so, as they repeated to each other—the family, and the chaverim from the kvutsa, and the Chevrah Kadushah, the sanctified burial men who came from Yavniel, and the elders of the Yemenites as well, and Kramer and his workers—this little body in a shroud was the first sacrifice here.

It seemed to Reuven as though some blind, compelling perpetuation was in process, and they were bound forever, as in the most remote of times, to place their sacrifice in the earth when coming to dwell in the land. The thought terrified him, he wanted to wrench himself away from it—even Abraham had been freed of that gruesome demand. He must banish, banish this thought; who could free him of it? His eyes caught sight of Leah, but in all her sorrow he would not add to her burden this dread fantasy that had come to his mind. To this haunting vestige of an ancient superstition, there now joined itself the legend people had already begun to tell of how the soul of Avramchick had saved him. Was he then after all not even a rational man? Was it not reason and will that had brought him back to this land, this earth? Was all that a self-delusion and a pretense, and was modern man even more ironically the slave of unremitting determined commands? Yet meanwhile his lips were moving automatically, and then with intention, in the Kaddish of his father and brothers.

Yankel’s eyes were downcast; he could not look into the face of his wife. It was not that he feared an accusation, but because he, a man, did not know how to reach to, even to acknowledge, the suffering of a woman, of his wife.—“Praised and extolled,” he repeated, “exalted and glorified, lauded be the Name …” A man could affirm, but in all these days and months of hard life since they had come here, he had time and again wanted to touch his wife with words of understanding, words she must need, just as he himself had so dreadfully felt the need for a talk with a man like himself. Just so, Yankel knew, his Feigel must also feel the need for a woman, a woman to whom there could be an outpouring of her womanly heart. Even with all the sons and daughters of her flesh to sustain her, Yankel knew her need, how in Cherezinka she would sit for long hours with her sister Hannah and be assuaged; here, she had not even a neighbor-woman. The thought of leaving this place, of perhaps going on to America or even returning to Cherezinka, prevented Yankel from looking up into the face of his eldest son; yet words prepared themselves in his mind. “For the sake of your mother, we must go. This is too much to ask of a woman—see what this land is doing to her.” And he would also be impelled to break out, “You wanted your young brothers to be brought here so they would have a new life in their own land, but instead of life, it is bringing them death.”

Then also to Yankel at this moment came that Sabbath image, when all his sons and daughters had walked onto the field with him, and little Avramchick had cried from the other side of the river not to be left behind; Yankel seemed to feel the child’s hand slipping into his, after Gidon brought him across the stream and set him down. Yankel turned away his head, but everyone saw the tears come onto the father’s face.

—Perhaps then, Leah told herself, it was all too much to ask for, from the older generation, from her mother and father. She would take them back to Cherezinka, and then go on as far as Siberia to seek Moshe, one faraway day to return with him to Eretz, to the kvutsa.

Yet as they all turned from the little area of fresh earth, where Leah promised herself she would come and plant a tree, her eyes were assaulted by the sun-drenched blaze of the valley, yellow and red, quilted with wildflowers, sparkling with dew, “exalted and glorified,” offering an anguish of over-exuberant life.

It was the mother who released the final thought that they all felt within them. “Now we are bound to this land,” Feigel said. “We could never leave our Avremeleh to lie here alone.”

During the days of sitting in mourning, Gedalia the letter carrier came on his weekly round and brought Feigel an envelope that had been two months on its way from her sister Hannah in America. Then surely Hannah must have had a premonition.

While the rest all clustered to hear Hannah’s words, Leah, who also had received a letter, seized the moment to be alone with it. Moshe’s mother had written again.—Our dearest Leah—she wrote, and there was important news. They had received the name of the Siberian village where almost certainly Moshe was living. It was in the region of Irkutsk. Moshe’s father had traveled to St. Petersburg and engaged the eminent lawyer Igor Rabinovitch, a specialist in defending social revolutionaries, a lawyer with the highest connections in government circles, and thus Moshe’s place of exile was known—the village of Tarakusta—and the moment further word was received, Moshe’s dear Leah would be the first to be told.

She could not contain herself. “Tarakusta!” she cried. Did her father know of the place? Had Reuven perhaps heard of such a place? Surely Dovidl would know, or certainly Avner. Didn’t someone in the kvutsa have a book with a map of Siberia? “Tarakusta, in the region of Irkutsk.” How did one arrive there? How long would such a journey take?

There still remained two days to sit in mourning, and though her mother told her it was not an obligation of women to sit the whole seven days, and that her father would not think ill of her if she went to the kvutsa to try to find out more, Leah contained her impatience; she could not cut short this farewell to her little brother.

That very afternoon Dvora’s young shomer, Yechezkiel, appeared from Sejera. Riding over to the kvutsa, he came back with a Russian geography schoolbook that one of the chalutzim had carried with him to Eretz. There was a large map spread over two pages, a map of the whole of Russia, but the part that showed Siberia was empty and white as the snow itself. Here and there appeared a speck of a name; Irkutsk they found, but there was no Tarakusta. Then, as they raised their heads from the book that was spread under the lamp, Yechezkiel struck his brow for not having thought of it before—in Sejera there was someone who would surely know! A new chalutz had appeared, only recently escaped from Siberia with false papers he had made for himself. He knew everyone among the exiles! The stories he told!

It was to Leah as though she were already on the way to Tarakusta—only how could she let the family remain here like this in all this misery—her mother heavy of heart and a month before her time? Even with Dvora to help in the house, should anything happen there was no midwife nearer than Yavniel, and the doctor was still further, in Mescha. Suddenly a plan came to Leah. The entire family must move for a time up to Sejera. There, at least, there were people, a whole village of older settlers, besides the training farm. Mameh would not feel so lonely there, she could talk out her grief to other women like herself who had also suffered in their lives, also lost children. And Schmulik and Yaffaleh could go to school in Sejera. As for leaving the farm for a time, the animals they could take along with them. Reuven could come over occasionally to keep an eye on the crops—in winter little care was needed, the grain would grow—and when the houses on the hillside were completed and the Roumanian settlers arrived, then they could all return and live like human beings!

Feigel did not disagree. Yankel was still weak from his fever, she said, and away from here he would perhaps not feel he must be up and laboring from morning to night. A midwife was to be had in the village of Sejera, and besides, the thought came to her, in the state Leah was in, it was best to go with her, or the girl might even try to leave for Siberia!

Only Gidon refused to fall in with the plan. “I’ll stay and take care of everything,” he said. But who would take care of him? Feigel worried. —He himself! her son laughed, and even patted her. “Mameleh, go!” There were a few workers in the other hut, he would manage very well.

The chickens that had survived in Dvora’s flock they took with them. Yaffaleh wept at parting from her geese, though Gidon promised he would watch over them: “I won’t eat even one!”

A sprawling one-time caravanserie only a few minutes’ walk outside the Sejera settlement was being used as the farm training center, and the director, Yud Eichelberg, by moving a few chalutzim about, cleared two rooms together for the Chaimovitches; though narrow, the rooms were whitewashed and even had tiled floors. In the same structure, Nadina too was housed, and Galil, and at the long table in the cheder ochel—the eating hall—Nadina pointed out to Leah the young comrade from Siberia, a husky lad with a clever glint in his eyes. Tarakusta? Moshe? Who hadn’t heard of Handsome Moshe! Lustily, he told the story. “That one! Imagine Tarakusta—you know what it is? In the furthest wastes, whole days by sledge from the railway, ten huts, maybe twelve. The Siberians there fish through holes in the ice. Besides our Zionists, we had in Irkutsk a little band of social revolutionists, already a few years they were there, and to one of them, his girl came out from Odessa. Very comfortable. One day this couple hears that this same Moshe is in Tarakusta—a long time ago a comrade in their cell. Fifty versts on a sledge they travel to greet him. Piff-paff, the social revolutionist comes back alone, the girl has remained there in Tarakusta and is living with Moshe! For Handsome Moshe you don’t have to worry, even in the furthest wastes of Siberia!”

In her torment Leah did not know what to do with herself, where to hide, where to go with her foolishness. Not back to the kvutsa. Though no one would taunt her, no one would laugh behind her back, how would her eyes in her shame meet Nahama’s? So Leah told herself she could not leave her mother here, she must at least remain until after the birthing. At Mama’s age, who knew what might happen, God forbid.

Everywhere on the training farm, Big Leah was to be found at some task, wearing hobnailed men’s shoes as she clumped through the barn to help with the milking, or even with shoveling out manure. Or one encountered her constantly in the yard, fetching this or that for her mother.

To her sister Dvoraleh in the clouds of her love for her shomer, Leah surely could not talk of what had happened to her; let Dvoraleh dream. Her mother had somehow heard the tale, and Leah was thankful that Feigel did not speak of it. But a great sweetness had come between them in these weeks. Feigel at last let herself be tended, and when the time came, the big girl lifted up her mother from the bed and carried her in her arms to the birthing stool that the midwife had brought to the room.

Eliza and Yaffaleh were sent away, but Dvora, soon to be married, was allowed to take part in the preparations, spreading out linen, and fetching hot water from the big kitchen. Only after the pains came rapidly did Chaye-Pesya, Sejera’s midwife, thrust her out.

It was Leah’s hands that received him, the throbbing new flesh on her broad palms, as though this little brother were in a way her own child that she had missed creating, when she had let her moment pass by. It was as though her mother out of her boundless goodness and understanding had even brought this child for her.

Leah turned him on her hands, and then the cry of life was heard, so powerful a cry that it resounded from the stone walls of the old caravanserie, the round little face fiercely red—the cry of anger, the cry of Chaimovitch rage! “A true Chaimovitch!” Leah laughed, for all at once her healthy, cheerful laughter had returned.

“Give me him,” and Leah let her mother feel the black hair on his head—not fuzz but hair—and the thrusting limbs. “Avramchick,” Feigel whispered. “Nachman.” The soul had returned again, but this time in a sturdier body.

Schmulik, in the yard, was sent to call Yankel from his post as stablemaster. “Tell him a briss, a briss!”

Yankel walked in with dignity, nodded and nodded over the newborn, and said to his wife, “Nu, Feigel, a fine boy. Rest, sleep.” And as the women shooed him out along with Schmulik, he added, “To give birth in Eretz Yisroel, truly a mitzvah.”