THE RENOWN of the Shomer had become so great that villages as far away as Rehovot signed contracts with the guardsmen, while young lads were so eager to be accepted into the Shomer that they trained for a year in advance before applying for the annual examination. One unfortunate boy from a well-known Jerusalem family who stood before the committee and was refused because he appeared unstable in temperament, it was told, went out and killed himself.
In Gilboa, the wave of new guarding contracts brought a wave of new babies. Now the construction of a new Infants’ House could be added to the budget. Much debate was given to the details to make it perfect. It would be built of cement blocks; each room would hold a “generation” of six. It was Nadina who argued for the figure of six as the correct number to occupy one chavera on infant-care duty, as well as making a good-sized group to grow up together.
Several meetings had to be held on the subject of infant care. The question was even raised by Shimshoni the Practical, who was also an idealogue: whether it was right, since they were building a new and just society, that the care of infants should always be by a woman. Should there not, for the effect on the child, be a rotation with men?
Impulsively Dvoraleh cried out, “Then there should also be a rotation in childbearing!” Dvoraleh didn’t often open her mouth at meetings, but when she did, everyone agreed, she was priceless.
Nevertheless the question of child care was a difficult one. The first crop of babies—four of them, born at irregular intervals—had been a great strain on the resources of the kvutsa, Nadina pointed out. As they all knew, the couples had made their own decisions on the subject of having a child, or even in some cases, she feared, the chaver and chavera had made no decision, but in so vital a matter had let matters happen by impulse or accident. The consequent babies, though loved by all, had been intensely cared for by their mothers in the first months, and in each case the chavera’s work time had been lost to the kvutsa. Besides, on principle it was doubtful whether such old-fashioned individual care was the proper thing for a child who was to be raised in a communa. She and her chaver, Galil, had as yet refrained from parenthood precisely because they felt that the settlement was not firmly established economically, and also because the subject of group child care deserved more study and planning. But now she and Galil were ready to enter the prospective parent group of six—or really twelve, Nadina corrected herself with one of her rare outbreaks of laughter that made her suddenly look girlish.
During Nadina’s recital, Dvora had experienced a moment of guilt, for she and Menahem had been among the selfish ones. But she still could not bring herself to discuss at an open meeting whether and when she should have a child; she wished she could be as modern as Nadina.
Already, Nadina pointed out, even with the unplanned infants, certain important things had been learned. Instead of giving the mothers alternating periods of duty in the infant-room, the kvutsa had learned to avoid emotional charges of favoritism and bitter scenes by assigning the care of the babies to a non-mother. They had improvised also such simple devices as the bell-call which permitted nursing mothers to work anywhere in the settlement, as each could now come to the baby-house when her signal rang out.
Dvora’s signal had been three rings, as she was the third to become a mother. Before her own baby Yechezkiel came, she had been amused with the rest of the chevreh to hear the strokes of the bell and see the chavera flying across the yard to feed her infant, but when her own time came, a different feeling developed. Hurrying across from the poultry house, Dvora had each time experienced a curious embarrassment. Why was it? The whole kvutsa was proud of her little Yechezkiel, the first boy born in Gilboa—though of course in a communa there was as much pride for a girl as for a boy. Yet when she ran to suckle the child, she felt self-conscious. Even her own mameh had shown no embarrassment in suckling a baby before whoever happened to be in the room; with newborn Mati at Sejera there had been a constant coming and going of Leah’s friends and her own. And here in the baby-house there was even no question of being watched as she bared her breast, since strict rules of sanitation kept the chevreh out of the room. There was only the embarrassment of being seen running to the bell. Perhaps she was backward, not equal to the new ways.
The worst had come after the first month, when it had been decided to follow the example of Reuven’s kvutsa, the earliest, and keep the infants even at night in the nursery room instead of with their parents. In that way the sleep of several sets of parents would be undisturbed, they would be fresh for their work, and also, Nadina had explained, they would develop no resentments against their own babies for waking them up with their howling. While Nadina now reviewed all this at the sitting before coming to her point—everyone knew it was useless to try to get her to skip a single step—Dvora recalled how, the first nights after her baby was not there beside her bed, she had lain half-awake listening for his cries from the infants’ room across the yard. She was certain she would recognize them, a boy’s, not a girl’s, though twice, running through the mud barefoot in her nightgown, she found herself wrong. The time that it was indeed Yechezkiel who howled, Nadina herself was on night duty.
“Don’t pick him up!” she snapped when Dvora rushed into the room.
Dvora halted. Suddenly tears gushed. “I can’t! I can’t!”
“Chavera Dvoraleh, it’s the only way. It’s for the children themselves.”—Did they want a generation of strong, self-reliant young men and women to grow up in the land? or even here, children on apron strings?
“I know, I know, but maybe something really hurts him—”
“He must cry himself out.” Instead, the two other babies awoke and joined in the howling. “Chavera!” Nadina sternly commanded, “go back to your room. I am busy here.”
“Can’t I help you, Nadina?”
“It’s not necessary. You’ve done your day’s work with the chicks.”
The next day Dvora had discussed the question with the two other mothers and found that already they did not feel as strongly as she did.
“You’ll see, in a few weeks you’ll stop listening at night. My chaver is thankful he no longer has to be awakened every time a baby cries. He’s always in a good mood now.”
But the chaverim of those two were on duty at the farm, while just now her Menahem was away all week. It would have been less lonely for her with little Yechezkiel in the room. And Dvora didn’t know what tormented her most, the feeling that her baby really was crying for her, that he knew by instinct, perhaps by the odor of her breast, which one was his own mother and cried for her to be near, or the dreadful thought that once he was picked up by no matter whom, the infant quieted.
“I know I am suffering from a primitive instinct,” she would say to Menahem when he returned, “and that we are making a new kind of life here …” “But why,” she would sometimes sigh when Leah visited, “why did it have to fall on us!”
She was not as strong in revolutionary ideas and matters of principe as Leah and Reuven the vegetarian. They were the ones who lived for ideals. Often she wished that Leah would remain here at Gilboa to guide her. At other times it came to Dvora that in her womanly life she had already gone beyond what Leah had ever experienced; she was a mother.
—It would be best, Nadina was explaining, to plan for the new group of infants to be born all in the same season, preferably in fall. And she began to read out the names of the comrade couples who had signified to Shimshoni, just now secretary of the kvutsa, that they wanted to become parents.
Again, and even though she herself was not involved, Dvora found herself flushing. “Pnina and Josef. Gavriel and Aviva. Ruthie and Yoshka. David and Shoshana.” After each pair of names it was almost as though Nadina waited for applause. And indeed heads turned toward those named, and smiles of many sorts broke out, some knowing, some joyous, some questioning, with laughing jibes, too. “Yoshka, you really think you can do it?”
“Chevreh!” Nadina sternly put a stop to such levity. With herself and chaver Galil, she summed up, that made five couples already in the group, and as six would be the optimum number …
“Suppose Ruthie and I have twins?” called out Yoshka, the irrepressible. Nadina ignored him. For a sixth she proposed that a couple who were already parents should take part, as this would add another dimension to the experience, the question of a brother or sister relationship—something they must inevitably approach. It would be the first opportunity to raise children so that all were as brothers and sisters, no different from those who were biologically so.
And before Dvora could think, she heard her own name and Menahem’s spoken by Nadina. Would they like to undertake the sixth? And a wave of approval was felt in the room, especially toward Menahem, she sensed, for everyone seemed to know that he had carried out some very difficult and secret mission, and was deserving of respect.
No matter how it had been decided, the prospect of becoming pregnant again was welcome to her. For Dvora understood now her own mother’s numerous pregnancies; despite everything, this brought a period of peace in a woman. She would gladly enter such a period again, for lately she was troubled for Menahem. His silences were heavier. True, even in their silences they communicated. When she had first become pregnant, Dvora had held back from telling him, yet before anything showed, it was he who had one night suddenly declared, “If it is a boy, we will call him Yechezkiel.” In that moment she had gratefully known that it was this same wish, already in her own thoughts about the baby, that had kept her from speaking of the pregnancy to Menahem. How she had loved him for relieving her. It was as though in the times of silence that came over them they were wandering each through some dark tunnel, but, by the miracle that was the proof they belonged to each other, they always came out together, in the same place. The fear in her was that some time it would not be so. On that night, so relieved had she felt that they had made love unceasingly and irrepressedly, as though to conceive their Yechezkiel all over again.
But lately Dvoraleh felt a bewilderment; she did not know where Menahem would come out from these new silences. He had done something that was needed, she knew, all knew, he and Shabbatai together, though no one must talk of it. Secret duties sometimes came to men of the Shomer.
If she became pregnant, she would feel Menahem’s absences less strongly. He had been sent down for a time to the furthest guarding place, near Gedera, and he came home to Gilboa only every second Sabbath.
But to have the prospect called out in this way, as though it were about eggs for her incubator! To feel that all the chaverim were watching, and that when she and Menahem went to their room, it would seem as though the watching continued through the cabin walls.
Shimshoni’s half-bald head was glowing as he bent over the sheet of paper, adding their names.
For weeks after the meeting jests were endless. When those of the selected fathers-to-be who were on guard duty at far-off villages left at the end of the Sabbath for their posts, chaverim and even chaveroth never tired of demanding, “Have you accomplished your home duty?” And endless were the jests over the distribution of articles for personal use, as Motkeh, in charge of such supplies, promptly struck the six future fathers off his list for preventatives.
“What will a man do when on duty away from home, if he is called in for the Shomer’s night time tea?” was a favorite jest. Ever since the scandals about Zev the Hotblood, the “Shomer’s tea” in the middle of the night had become a byword.
“We’ll father a crop of little shomrim all over the land!” boasted Ruthie’s bright-tongued Yoshka.
To which Motkeh, the supply-man, would declare, “That’s my whole scheme.”
In Gilboa, following another pattern that had been started at HaKeren, the cabins were built with four chambers side by side, opening onto a common front porch, and in each room were two cots—sometimes three. When a chaver and chavera paired off, Shimshoni would manage to move people about so that they could have their two cots in the same room, without a third if they were lucky. A marriage bed such as parents used in the old country was unsuitable, for on separate cots a man and woman did not disturb each other with their different hours of rising for their tasks.
It had become a habit when Menahem was home that they would go to their beds separately, and then Menahem would come over to hers. Almost always, in that same reassuring sense that they emerged out of their tunnels to discover themselves together, he knew when she lay wanting him, and came over to her. And then, when it was done, he would return to his own cot. At times during her first pregnancy, Dvora had experienced a different kind of longing, so she would go over to him and sleep almost the whole night pressed against his back. They had discovered for themselves the pleasure of lying naked under the sheet, and when her abdomen grew round, a peaceful sleep, such as neither had ever known before, came to them when they fitted together, this time with his front against her back while his hand rested on the curve of her pregnancy.
Such a time now came again. A rotation was made of the guardsmen for the more distant settlements, and Menahem received farm duty for a time in Gilboa.
But one night, as he lay against his wife in this way, and she turned to him in her sleep as she sometimes did, and cast an arm around his shoulder, a dreadful sweep of terror came over Menahem. He lay rigid, awake but as though immovably sleepbound in his nightmare. The child within her was a heavy stone pressed against his belly.
After a long while, he was able to lift Dvoraleh’s arm away and turn her so that they were in their old position. Against his embracing hand, her abdomen was highly resilient like a breast and in her sleep his wife pressed her back still closer against him, with a sweet sigh.
But Menahem could not sleep again; he felt his forehead sweating. Without waking Dvoraleh, he slid from his cot and went to rest on hers, across the room. At last his terror receded.
He did not speak of it to her. Of what troubled him he could speak to no one, not to Shabbatai Zeira, who was made differently, not even to Galil. Once, when Shabbatai rode in from his farm in Sejera for a sitting, there came a moment of comradeliness when Menahem had an impulse to ask … But how should he ask? Should he ask how Shabbatai slept?
Those two horses, Shabbatai remarked, had been seen near Hittim, ridden by tribesmen of the Zbeh. Oh, how Zeira wished they could have kept that pair of steeds! And they talked of horses and guns.
The nightmare did not come again, though each night, if Dvora moved to his bed, Menahem found himself waiting for it. When she grew big so that there was no longer room on one cot, and it was natural for them to sleep apart, he felt relieved.
Then in the final months Menahem accepted another turn away from home. And on watch in Benyamina, the anxiety came over him once more, not this time as a nightmare, but with persistent imaginings that came on him during his rounds. The child would be born a lifeless lump. Or else a fear for Dvoraleh would come over him. With the first baby he had experienced not the slightest worry, but now before each Sabbath Menahem rode home in apprehension.
Yet nothing whatever happened. A second boy was born, perfectly formed and lively. Dr. Rachman had trained one of the girls, Guta Krakauer, in nursing and midwifery, and all went off without incident. When Menahem returned for his Sabbath, the three-day-old was lying in the new Infants’ House. Again a boy, and the first of “the six.” Indeed, one of the six chaveroth had not even become pregnant, and there was talk of that couple losing their turn. But Nadina was so enormous that Yoshka’s joke about twins seemed about to come true, so there might be a class of six babies after all.
Dvora and Menahem were hailed as the champions. Only, Dvora complained to him that, by the newest decision, babies had to remain in the Infants’ House from birth; the mothers were not to keep them even for the first month, and all night she had a dreadful emptiness in her, she felt hollow.
In Menahem the weight lifted. It was as though by staying away in these last weeks he had kept a curse from falling on his wife and child. If there had to be pain, it was better that he should carry it always silently within himself.
The boy would be called Giora, after the last defender of Jerusalem, for whom the earlier secret group, the one before the Shomer, had been named.
Already her second daughter was twice a mother, while what was to become of her eldest? It was for Leah that Feigel worried, even though the big independent girl had shown herself cheerful and singing when she last came to the meshek, at Passover. Between the lines in a letter from Jerusalem, now, Feigel was certain she detected a new emptiness and loneliness, for Leah’s good friends had scattered, to Turkey, to France—what was ever to become of her big girl? Still longing year after year in her foolishness for that mamser in Siberia! Therefore as the High Hoidays approached, Feigel dropped into her husband’s ear the thought that surely the time was at last come for him to make his journey to Jerusalem. The wheat crop was bountiful and entirely without blight, since they had done as Reuven said and used the deep plow borrowed from the kvutsa. To wait longer to go to the Holy City would be a failing. And in Jerusalem she could see how Leah lived, and what was doing with her daughter.
Yankel could well take his ease for a few weeks, leaving the farm in Gidon’s care. Two cows had calved, and Yaffaleh’s geese were the fattest in Galilee. The keeper of the best pension in Tiberias, Reb Bagelmacher, with whom Yankel had struck up a friendship in the hot baths, now regularly came out in his wagon to buy geese for the Sabbaths and holidays. The poet Bialik himself had slept at Bagelmacher’s pension during his famous visit, and had praised the roast goose. But the real gold mine for Yankel had proved to be Reuven’s potatoes. Though Reuven’s kvutsa was now also producing a crop, and Reuven had not stinted in handing out seed potatoes even to the Roumanians, the potato hunger of the yishuv seemed insatiable, prices remained high, and the money for the first two crops alone had bought Yankel four cows now giving milk.
So wide indeed was Reuven’s renown for the feat of the potatoes that the noted agronomist from Zichron, Aaron Aaronson, had himself arrived to inspect the second planting at the Chaimovitch farm, and Reuven had come from the kvutsa to meet him, for to the kvutsa itself Aaronson would not go because of some old, bitter dispute with the chalutzim over Arab labor in Zichron. Finely dressed in American clothes, the agronomist had just returned from a visit to that land, where the richest Jews had acclaimed him for his discoveries. Tramping with Reuven over the potato field, Dr. Aaronson had taken samples, and then invited him to come to Zichron to visit a whole new center of agronomy that he was building with money provided by the American Jews.
Sitting at the table with the whole family for tea, Dr. Aaronson had complimented Feigel on her preserves—even better, he said, than his own mother’s, and his mother’s were renowned in all Zichron. A fine, polite, polished person. It came out in the talk that Reuven and Leah had held watch in Aaronson’s father’s vineyards, when Reuven was recovering there in Zichron from kadahat, and Reuven told Aaronson he had even studied agricultural books from Dr. Aaronson’s library!
“How is that?” Dr. Aaronson said, a trifle sharply, though with a smile of curiosity. “I never let my books go out!”
“Your sister took pity on me and loaned them to me,” Reuven said. “Though I couldn’t understand the French, I studied the drawings.”
“Ah, it must have been when I was in America to publish my wild wheat discovery.”
At this Reuven in his modest way mentioned that he also—though of course a few years after Aaronson’s discovery, had found some wild wheat growing, not far from here. (That he had not then known of Aaronson’s discovery he did not say.) At once the two men were deep in discussion again. Though Feigel could not follow their talk, it was wonderful to see how such a highly educated agronomist respected her son as an equal. She brought three more kinds of jam. Reuven even took out from a yellowing envelope in his pocket the grains of ancient wheat that he had found on the mountainside. It was for just such a discovery that Dr. Aaronson had become famous all over the world, and here her own Reuven, without ever having been sent for years of study in France by the Baron, had made the same discovery! Had Reuven found these seeds only a few years earlier, Feigel grasped, it would have been her son who became world famous!
Yet for Dr. Aaronson it had to be said that he complimented Reuven with all his heart, like a true gentleman. Taking from a special leather case in his coat-pocket an eyeglass such as watchmakers use, he studied Reuven’s seeds and declared that though he himself had found eight different varieties on the Hermon, Reuven’s was still different and a ninth. “We will call it the Chaimovitch strain,” he announced, “Chita Chaimovitch!” And he carefully folded the grains into a clean paper sachet from another little case that he carried, saying he would make further examinations in his laboratory with a microscope. At this, Reuven said there was something else that he had long wanted to put under a microscope. And he told of the wheat with the fungus he had found a few years before, and of the disappearance of the fungus when the same strain had been planted in a field that had been deeply plowed. On the Arab fields the fungus was still to be found.
Dr. Aaronson became excited, asked many questions and then said Reuven was welcome to come and use his laboratory whenever he wished. But as to the fungus, he believed he knew the answer. The tiny parasite that spoiled the wheat-kernels dropped its eggs on the ground for reproduction. In ordinary shallow plowing the microscopic worms born from the eggs could crawl out, but in deep plowing, they were surely buried so far that they died.
—That must be it!
Hardly ever had Feigel seen Reuven so happy. You would have thought the Schechina had been revealed to him. Here he had puzzled his head for years, and Dr. Aaronson had found the answer in one moment.
“Ah, no, but it was you who found the answer, empirically,” Dr. Aaronson said. “What you did, plowing them under, must be taught in the whole land!”
“It wasn’t even I,” Reuven said, with his usual modesty and honesty. “It was a chaver in the kvutsa who insisted on deep plowing, and I was even against it!”
They laughed together over the tale. By such accidents, Dr. Aaronson said, many great discoveries were made—not in the laboratory, but by people like Reuven in the field, who observed things.
“A fine man,” Feigel said when the agronomist had left; “A real scientist such as we need in Eretz,” Reuven declared. And though Feigel caught the tiny flicker of envy in her son’s eyes, and though there was a sigh in her that it had not fallen to him to receive the high education of which his mind had surely been worthy—yet she was not truly worried for Reuven so far as his work went. He was satisfied in his work at the kvutsa; they had even installed for him a huge engine that pumped water, such as he had long dreamed of, and he was showing that not one but two main crops a year could be grown. All through the region Reuven was becoming known as an expert under whose hands even a stone would bear fruit.
Yet he continued among the unmated men of his kibbutz, and surely in this he could not be happy. Though Feigel did not worry about him as much as about Leah—an unmarried son of twenty-five was not as serious a matter as a lone girl of twenty-three, and no longer a maiden, even if in their world of chalutzim this did not appear such a dreadful blemish.
And so Feigel persuaded Yankel, and he harnessed a mule, and Feigel, having cooked and baked for two whole days, packed the wagon with roast goose and chicken, with chopped liver and sesame cookies and strudel, with gefulte fish and cheeses and jellies and all manner of good things for her big daughter in Yerushalayim, as well as with boiled eggs for the journey.
The first glance told Feigel she had done well to come here. Though Leah rushed to them across the courtyard, glowing and joyous in their arrival, and instantly started distributing Feigel’s good baking and cooking to hollow-chested chevrehmen who kept appearing from a bewilderment of crevices and doors, and though the yard was covered with Leah’s pots of seedlings and flowers, and though a few young girls at work among the pots came hovering adoringly near their teacher, and though Leah’s room into which she led them had jugs of flowers covering the window sill and all over the table and on the floor, still Feigel sensed an inner desolation, and her daughter’s talk was to her a tumult of emptiness.
Leah had a thousand activities, a thousand plans, though to Feigel it seemed that even the few coins needed for tea and sugar must be scarce. Hundreds of her seedlings, Leah enthusiastically explained, were going to a new kvutsa near the ancient tomb of Mother Rachel; the chevreh there were waiting for their loan from the Zionist office, but the planting could not wait; perhaps she would even join this new kvutsa; and also she was helping every morning in a children’s nursery that a friend of hers had started here in the quarter—it was a chance to learn an amazing new teaching method that her friend Clara had brought from Italy—it was called Montessori; they had Jewish and Arab children together in their kindergarten, called a gan, Moslems, Christians, Jews, all sitting together, each a darling, four- and five-year-olds. Of course few of the children had parents who could pay, and also she and Clara served them crackers and milk, which was all that some of the poorer ones had to eat all day long. Then also she was thinking of going down to plant gardens for the new city of Tel Aviv—it was a desolation of sand, gardens were needed on Rothschild Boulevard and she had been asked to put them in; also she wanted desperately to come to Gilboa to see Dvora’s new baby, but she was so busy here—how she loved her Yerushalayim. Tateh must come with her at once, she would show him Jerusalem!
Yankel would have wanted to find his way to the Wall by himself, or perhaps with a crony; perhaps he should have made the journey with a good Jew like Binyamin Bagelmacher from Tiberias, whose season had not really yet begun. It irritated Yankel that his women lingered along every stall, fingering the silks, gawking at the trinkets. Past shopwindows overladen with crucifixes and beads and medallions of their Yoshka, he fled. Surely there was some other way to the Wall, so one could walk only among Jews and avoid these horrors! Separating himself by several paces from the women, pushing on through dark, arched-over lanes, among the Arabs with their donkeys and among pithhelmeted Christian pilgrims, he inwardly fumed. What did all these goyim have to do here in Yerushalayim, the city of David, of Solomon, of Jeremiah! At last Leah called to him to turn into a side-lane, and there he saw others like himself, decent Yehudim with prayer bags. Following them down hollowed stone steps, Yankel stood all at once in the passageway so familiar to him from the picture on the wall at home in Cherezinka.
Before the immense stone blocks that reached upward like some barrier to the Other World, Jews stood intoning their prayers, some standing by themselves, others a few together, and at a distance from the men there prayed a few aged, beshawled women.
He had long delayed, true, but in these years it was as though he had been earning his full right to come here; he had made another man of himself. Or, it was as though he had in these years shredded away from himself the false flesh of the dispersion, and here he now stood, a farmer who had succeeded in feeding his family from the soil, in making a whole life in Galilee, and who was now come from there with produce in his wagon as to the Temple itself for the High Holidays. It was almost as though he had brought a sheep and would now go up to the great courtyard at the top of this high wall, with his offering.
No impulse to moan or wail at the Wall came to him. From his prayer-bag Yankel drew out his tfillim, and wound them on. He swung himself into his long tallis. Within his tallis he was away from all the wrong in the world. Standing before the ancient blocks of stone, Yankel at long last felt his life justified. All his errors and all his unworthy past slipped into nothingness. If his eldest daughter had thrown away her virtue and was now deep in unhappiness, then Feigel would help her somehow. Perhaps Leah had suffered enough. If his sons did not follow him, then they themselves must answer for their ways. Adonai, Adonai, Yankel’s lips spoke, I have come, I am here.
Feigel and Leah watched him standing there, heavy-shouldered, another Jew among a line of tallis-wrapped Jews, swaying with a cradle-rock, close against the high wall of great stones. Feigel herself moved close. In the crevices, moss grew. She put her lips to a stone, and asked the Above One to bless her children and give them a good life. When she drew back, she sniffled and was not surprised to feel tears in her eyes. Leah was reminding her of the custom of writing a prayer, a wish, and placing it between the stones, and Feigel found a bit of paper and wrote in Yiddish, “Gottenyu, bless my children and grandchildren, and give them a good life.” She began to fold the paper, then, turning from Leah, she added, “Send a tall man, a good husband for my eldest daughter Leah.” Leah played for a moment at snatching the bit of paper so as to read Mameh’s prayer, but Feigel pressed it deep into a fissure and sealed a kiss over it.
Her man, her Yankel, said a Kaddish for his own father, and for the first little lost son Nachman, so long ago in Cherezinka, and for Avramchick, and for Dvora’s murdered bridegroom, Yechezkiel. Then he embarked on Psalms.
So as not to disturb Tateh, the women had withdrawn. Finally he came out to them. Leah wanted to show him more; through a lane where Arab dragomen in broad-sashed white abayas were leading a party of pilgrims, they came to an awesome set of wide stone stairs. A few Arabs standing there half-barred the way, muttering “Yahud,” but quite cheerfully Leah gave them a good-day in Arabic, while she handed over a coin. “Don’t worry, we can go inside,” she said lightly, but the feeling of abomination had come overpoweringly upon Yankel. Above, at the top of the broad stairway, he could see in the center of the vast open place the edifice with the glowing golden dome. For a confused instant it had been, to him, the Temple. Within that confusion, his daughter’s words babbled to him about Abraham’s sacred stone, the rock altar that had been made ready for Isaac. The stone was here, they claimed; it could be seen inside there, in the very center—she had seen it. For another few coins, inside there, in their golden-domed mosque—
Violently, Yankel pulled back. —But it is ours, our stone, our place, not theirs! the tumult shouted within him. And the dreadful mistakenness, the hopelessly inverted wrongness of the world of man swept back upon him, swept away all of God’s tenderness and rightness that he had felt when he stood before the Wall. Look how insane, how wrong and perverted it all was and forever would be! How could this ever, until Eternity, be set right? Over the rock of Abraham, instead of the Temple stood a heathen mosque. No, he did not want to enter under their golden dome, to set foot in their place of abomination! The entire history of the Jews was churning within him; how could he explain if they didn’t understand in themselves? What was all this to his own daughter, what could it mean for his own sons, that in this land, in Yerushalayim itself, on the holiest of sites, they were mere sightseers! They thought nothing of giving a few coins to a Jew-cursing Moslem guide to slip them into the Holy Place—the Jewish Holy Place that these heathens had forbidden to Jews! Here where the Temple had stood! Plowed under by the Romans, desecrated by the Christians, owned by the Moslems—tfoo! Sightseers! Buying postcard pictures of the mosque!
Yankel turned away into the crowded lane, and his wife and daughter followed at a distance behind him.
Preparing the evening meal with her daughter in the narrow room, the moment seemed good to Feigel for what was needed, and she began roundabout by speaking of Dvoraleh and Menahem, and how well things had turned out between them. And Leah herself inadvertently led to the point, “I sometimes wonder at Dvoraleh,” Leah said, “if she doesn’t even think of Yechezkiel.” There was no criticism in her voice but only a questioning touch of bewilderment. Her tone, Feigel recalled, was exactly like that of a little daughter who asks about childbirth, “But Mama, if it hurts so much, then—to have another baby—aren’t you afraid?”
“You know she does think of Yechezkiel,” Feigel said. “Even if they had not named their first child after him, she would still think of him all through her life. But, Leah, Dvora has become a woman.”
Leah’s face turned heavy. Then Feigel began from another direction, speaking of little Mati, what a little mensch he was becoming, the love of the whole village, running, climbing everywhere on his stout short legs—
Her daughter’s face livened up. “Oh, how my heart longs for him,” Leah said. “Why didn’t you bring him, Mama?”
Now Feigel brought out of herself for her daughter something that she had never thought she would share. “You remember, Leah, how before he was born, I believed it could be the soul of Avrameleh returning?” Leah smiled, wondering whether her mother still held with such superstition, and Feigel smiled as well, for now all was becoming more intimate between them. “It’s a few years now since a small thing happened,” Feigel said. “It struck me so deeply at the time that I didn’t speak of it to anyone.” First she recalled to Leah the time when their little Avramchick alev hasholem was still alive, and the day when Tateh and the whole family had waded across the river to go into their field, and Avramchick had lagged behind, and they had all turned around to see him standing there on the other side of the water afraid to cross, calling “And me? And me?”
Mother and daughter sighed over the memory, yet Feigel still held a pensive smile. She turned over a blintze on the pan, remarking that Yankel liked them crisp, and continued, “When Mati was exactly the same age as Avramchick was on that day—you were already here in Jerusalem, Leah—a thing much the same took place. We all went over to the field, forgetting him, he must have run off to look at something on the way. Then suddenly when we were on the other side, what do you think? That baby came marching through the water by himself. ‘I’m here too!’ he announced to us!”
They treated it with a touch of laughter, though their eyes communicated something else—a seeking of meaning, and of awe. “Ah, my poor sweet Avramchick,” Feigel sighed. “But you see, my fears were wrong, what happens to us is not always the same.” And then she said, “Come home for a while, Mati longs for you.”
Perhaps, after all, she could begin again, Leah felt, simply as a girl still learning from her mother.
* * * *
It was only this that Gidon had needed! With his giantess of an older sister again in the room, a female effluvium pervaded the place—like in a cow stable at times, he could swear. Even before Leah came back, he had felt uncomfortable because of Eliza. The smaller sister, Yaffaleh, didn’t trouble him, although on her chunky body the breasts were already larger than Eliza’s. But all at once in the last months with Eliza the room seemed unlivable to him. Suddenly it was decreed that if he came from outside and the door of the room was shut, he must knock. And even after knocking, he couldn’t simply walk into the room—after all, it was his room too!—but must first wait until the lady said yes, he might enter! No longer was it enough for him to turn his head when she undressed; half the time now Eliza would ask him to step out of the room altogether. The little pisherkeh! How long was it since she had stopped wetting her bed! And if by chance coming in hot and sweaty from the fields he started to change his pants, she would let out a shriek.
Let be, he knew what it all came from, though no one had ever bothered to explain it to him, with their female secrets. Already from far back—he didn’t exactly recall how he had made the discovery—Gidon knew that women leaked blood every month. Perhaps it had even been way back in Cherezinka, when the melamed didn’t want to explain what the passage meant in Chumash, the laws about the time of the month for women, and one of the boys afterward had told him about the bloody rags, and it was nauseating what was under their dresses. And in all her pretended daintiness Eliza was just as filthy as the others too, for one evening when she was away at the Bronescus visiting her friend, their daughter Malka, he had come upon a stiffly clotted rag among some petticoats she had left lying around for Mameh to wash. The time of the month was supposed to start with girls at her age.
And if she was not at Malka’s, Malka was here, endlessly babbling, the two of them, and then for a different reason he would stay out of the room, because already Malka upset him with that look he had heard his mother say the Roumanian women had in their eyes, a sidewise look.
The worst part about sleeping in the same room wasn’t even from the girls, it was because of himself. He couldn’t always stop himself. No matter how still he lay, he was afraid they would know, they would even smell what came out. Almost every night he fought it, in torture. He wondered how his brother Reuven the idealist could endure it all these years, since he still didn’t have a chavera. Perhaps it was true that if you were a vegetarian it was easier and that was one reason Reuven was a vegetarian. Or perhaps it was even true that in a kvutsa the girls in a friendly way helped the men by releasing their torture even if there was nothing between them. After all, it was only natural. On a farm with animals you saw how natural. He wanted to talk to Reuven but could never bring himself to begin talking about such things; they liked each other, but they were not the same.
Sometimes Gidon wanted to howl like an animal calling a mate.
Some nights, though he tried to keep from rubbing himself or even tried to squeeze it to choke back the seed, the stuff came out over his hand, and some of it stained the sheet. His mother surely had noticed but said nothing, it was a thing that boys could not help, it was nature just like the leaking of the girls. But now Leah would do the washing and she would notice. With Leah he had always felt more understanding than with any of the others; with her he might even bring himself to talk about the things of nature, but what could she tell him that he didn’t already know? A man had to suffer through it, that was all, until he found a modern understanding chavera, or even until he got married. The jokes about doing it with sheep, and about men with boys, he already knew from long ago; this too was in Chumash where they forbade things, and this too the melamed had not explained. Or the zonoth—he had picked up such talk from Arab boys and from some of the workers on the Roumanian farms, but these chalutzim only talked, they didn’t go. You could get diseased, the chalutzim said, and later in life become insane, or blind. It was even said there was a certain house in Tiberias. But it was better simply to spill in the hand or in a rag. Even when the time would come when he earned money—no, he must find a true chavera and they would love each other in free love, as Leah had, everyone said. Yet he was angry and could kill such a fellow as that Moshe, look how miserable he had made poor Leah, ruining her life.
One day it came to Gidon that exactly because of Leah and the room’s being now so crowded, he could do something he had long wished but had not dared propose. He could leave the whole room to the girls and poor Schmulik, and go and live by himself. Often, passing the stone hut where they had lived before the house was built, he had thought of this. It stood empty, and had become as dilapidated as before, with the roof half decayed and the door fallen off and the floor covered with clots of dried offal. But there, with a little work, he could arrange a wonderful abode for himself. And if he were lucky enough to find a chavera, she could even slip in there to visit him. He didn’t think of exactly who. Not Malka—she was like Eliza who would never do such a thing—they considered themselves superior to boys and in any case, aside from the disturbance her presence gave him, he really disliked Malka Bronescu and had no longing for her. At times a vision came of a little Yemenite girl, slim and swift, who had a few times caught his eye, there by the Kinnereth—but they were very strict with their daughters, and with Arab girls it was dangerous to meddle—no.
The first visitor to appear in his hut came as Gidon rose the first time from the fresh straw mattress that Mama had stuffed for him—for unexpectedly she had made hardly any objection to his move except for worries about scorpions, and had come down with Leah to thoroughly clean the hut, which Leah had then supplied with a water jarra and pots of flowers.
It was Fawzi, who appeared, laughing, shouting joyously as he neared, “I have her! She is mine!” and Gidon saw him crossing the stream, leading a colt of almost unbearable beauty, the color of honey, with her tail fastidiously arched as though she were holding up her skirts as she stepped with the finest articulation from stone to stone. Gidon rushed out and gazed at the young mare who now moved up closer behind Fawzi and placed her head over his shoulder, like a girl when she wants to make clear to everyone which boy is hers. It was unbearable. She had Roumanian eyes. Gidon leaped at Fawzi, laughing and pummeling, and they rolled on the ground. How had he got her? Surely he had begotten her off her own mother!—And you! Fawzi retorted. The best you would be able to beget is with a field mouse! Throwing Gidon off, he dodged into the hut and examined each thing, picking up Gidon’s shaving cup, his razor, his mirror, taking a sesame cookie from a dishful Mama had left there, and then through a full mouth Fawzi divulged the secret of his possession. Did not Gidon remember how in this very place, when he, Fawzi, first came down with his grandfather Sheikh Ibrim to build them a taboon, a pledge was made?
Seizing a pencil that lay on the table, looking around for a bit of paper and finding none, Fawzi proceeded to write on the freshly whitewashed wall. Laughing all the time, he wrote in large flowing Arabic script, and with a flourish whirled around. He had learned to write!
Now Gidon recalled how the ancient Ibrim had fingered some books of Reuven’s and asked, “Who here can read?” And the astonishment, Gidon recalled, on old Ibrim’s face when he learned that not only the boys, but also Leah and Dvora and little Eliza could read and write! Even the girls! It was then that Ibrim had turned to his grandson in a flow of Arabic which they had not understood.
“He promised me my own horse when I could read and write as well as you!” Fawzi cried. And at last the imam up there in Dja’adi had taken pity and taught him. “Can you read this, you son of an inkpot?” Fawzi wrote more on the wall. Arabic Gidon could not read, though Menahem had learned quite a bit, and even Reuven had taught himself their alphabet. “May Allah watch over this house!” Fawzi rattled off, giving him a teasing look, and they burst out laughing together, Gidon poking at him and calling him a mamser, which Fawzi well understood, calling Gidon in turn a puny outcast from a rabbit hole, suckled by a jackal. Then they went out like brothers to examine each point of the colt, whom Fawzi had named Ayesha. With her first foal, he already planned, he would buy himself a bride!
Gidon did not conceal his envy, for it increased Fawzi’s pleasure and pride. “For a horse such as this, all my own,” Gidon declared, “I would learn to read and write in five languages!” Fawzi gazed at him. “Her first foal is yours,” he suddenly said.
That was far off, nor could he accept such a gift, so impulsively offered. With the Arabs, it was a gesture that spoke of great friendship in the heart, but it naturally had to be refused. Meanwhile Gidon could think of nothing else except how to get himself his own steed. He thought so intensely about it at night that sometimes even his sexual troubles subsided. A thousand plans for earning money by extra labor for some of the Roumanians he discarded; even if he could spare a few hours a week, it would take over a year to gather the money. That his father should pay him a wage he kept putting out of his head. But now every little incident with his father came to shouting. Gidon went to the house only for meals and rushed out when he had eaten, returning to his own place to brood. Once he rushed out in the midst of the evening meal because something the old man said angered him; it was Leah who came after him to the hut.
Gidon was sitting in the dark and his big sister sat down by him without lighting the kerosene lamp. He was going through a difficult age for a young man, she said, nature was in some ways cruelly perverse and had placed in man these terribly powerful sexual urges that were badly timed; they began too early and tormented a man years before they could be released in the right way with the woman he loved. Or perhaps it was not nature but civilization that was to blame, for, in earlier times, as could be read in the Bible, and even in the time of their own mother and father, their own people too had recognized the need for younger marriages. And she believed, Leah said, it was this natural sexual need that made him so short-tempered these days, especially with his father.
“He doesn’t have to order me, tomorrow do this, do that—I know what needs to be done, I know better than he.”
Leah grasped his hand. “I read in a book that Rahel gave me in Jerusalem—it is a book of psychology—a Jewish scientist in Vienna says it is normal for young men to have such feelings against their fathers, even to want to kill them,” she half-laughed. “It comes from primitive urges.”
“Psychology!” Gidon repeated. “A scientist had to discover such things? This scientist should have known Tateh!”
“And Gidon, don’t think it is only men that suffer. Women too suffer from terrible needs when they do not have their man …”
He squeezed back on her hand. He was grateful that Leah had offered these words from her own inmost pain, it was like a kiss of peace from his sister on his forehead.
“Nu, Gidon,” she said with a quick-drawn breath, “the only help we can have is sometimes to talk it out. Tell me—maybe just to me you can tell it—is there some special girl perhaps that you keep dreaming of and wanting?”
“No, no,” he blurted out. “It’s not even that so much— You know what I dream and want—you’ll laugh, Leah—it’s a horse.”
And they both broke out laughing. Leah laughed like a roll of thunder. She would finally manage to get control of herself and begin to say something to him, and then the thunder would roll forth again from her mouth and inundate the room as though it would break through the walls. Her body shook like an earthquake. “A horse! A horse! And I thought it was Malka Bronescu!” This time she did seize him in an embrace that engulfed Gidon entirely, while her mouth, oddly fresh and cool, blessed his forehead.
In a rush of words Gidon explained it all—how, even if he were working as a hired hand, he could manage to buy a foal, paying it off while he raised it. But when he had only hinted at this idea to Tateh, the old man had grumbled, what did they need with a riding horse that would stand eating its head off all day without working!
Calmly now, Leah lighted the lamp. “You are right, Tateh is exploiting you,” she declared.
After that it did not even take long. From all sides arguments fell on poor Yankel. With a swift steed of their own, Feigel pointed out, they could more quickly fetch a doctor or medicine in case of need. Eliza kept repeating how pleasant things were for Malka Bronescu whose father kept a horse and often took Malka riding with him in their little brougham. —Never mind the Roumanians, Leah pointed out—a new family had just come from Russia, from Bobrusk, and even they owned a riding horse. Besides, on any homestead in the land an excellent young laborer like Gidon could command a good wage in addition to his keep, and buy himself a horse if he wanted to.
It was Shabbatai Zeira, the horse-expert of the Shomer, who on his very next journey to the market in Damascus selected a yearling of the finest desert breed, a young black stallion who, the dealer promised, would outrace the swiftest bullet. And even the price and the time of payment was no problem. “Take him, take him with you,” said the Syrian. “I know you of the Shomer!” and he grasped Zeira’s hand in termination of the transaction, both understanding full well where the price stood.
Part of the money Gidon had already sent with Zeira, for though a son does not work for wages, he now received from Yankel a monthly sum for personal expenditures. As to Shabbatai’s choice, where could an equal be found? Gidon named his horse Yadid, and slept with a long rope from Yadid’s halter tied to his wrist, in case marauders should try to steal his beloved friend.
On Sabbaths now he galloped with Fawzi, going as far as the Huleh, where they hunted quail and wild geese, which Fawzi knew where to sell in Tiberias. Often they raced their mounts. On the level stretches by the shores of the Kinnereth, the mare was likely to be swifter, while on the climb toward Rosh Pina, it was Yadid who was more likely to win.
Reaching the upper lake, a vast swamp as large as the Kinnereth, they would break off wild sugarcane stalks to suck, and feed pieces to their horses.
In the swamp they had to proceed cautiously, as tales were told of hunters who had vanished in the quagmires. Set your foot on soft ground, and soon you would find yourself unable to pull out, and sink down slowly to your knees, your waist, your neck, your mouth, your eyes, and no one would ever find you. Such were the tales Fawzi related. The pursuit of the wild boar was most dangerous, as the cunning animal would lead you to the most dangerous parts of the swamp.
Yet one Saturday a wild boar broke from a clump of high papyrus reeds not far before them, and they could not stop themselves from hunting it. Twice they lost the animal, and each time it was Fawzi who again caught his movement, the second time leaping in his eagerness onto a muddy stretch, so that he had to lie flat and extend his rifle to Gidon who, seizing the end from firm ground, pulled him out.
But they had the pig backed against the open water, his long snout vibrating as though from some long lost reptilian time, as though even now it would shoot out a stream of poison at them. The boar would charge; Yadid and Ayesha had followed close to the hunters, and as the wild boar’s tiny, evil eyes sought out the horses, the boys knew it was there he would charge, to rip the underbelly. The hunters fired together and seemed to have struck each into a burning, hating small swine’s eye.
With the greatest caution they worked their way, this time Gidon before Fawzi, who held to firm ground, until finally they could pull the enormous carcass out of the slime. It lay before them. What a repulsive animal it was, and each said, no wonder it was forbidden to eat it.
Not for its ugliness, Gidon said—it was because the meat rotted quickly and in the old days had brought disease.
Just as much that it was repulsive and ugly, a beast of Satan, Fawzi said. But the Bedouin in these parts killed the pig for skin and bristles. Some said the meat could even be sold to the Christians in their monasteries.
The wicked, challenging idea came to both at the same moment; their eyes met and they laughed. Fawzi already had his knife free to cut a souvenir. “You don’t believe in the kashrut, like your father who prays,” Fawzi said, testingly.
“I don’t believe in all these things, all those rules,” Gidon said. “Do you believe like your father?”
They fell to talking in this vein. How much should a person believe? In God, Gidon said, yes, he believed. Not exactly in everything the way it was written, and not in all the rules, but he believed in God.
Fawzi too said he believed in God, and he believed in Mohammed the Prophet. Now that he could read, he was reading the Koran, and it was different from only hearing it read in small pieces by the mullah.
But many things in the Koran were the same as in the Bible, Gidon had heard from Reuven. Not only such things as everyone knew, that Moslems also were forbidden to eat pig. But Abraham—wasn’t he too in the Koran?
“Yes,” Fawzi said, with his odd touch of merriment that came when he spoke of serious matters. “Abraham is the father of us all.”
—Did they have in their Koran the story of when Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac? Gidon asked.
—It was Ishmael, Fawzi said. Abraham was ready to sacrifice Ishmael on the altar, and was stopped at the last moment, when God sent him a sheep instead.
And he laughed.
“In your Koran, it is Ishmael, not Isaac?”
“Yes, it was Ishmael.” And they both laughed.
All at once, Fawzi cut away a section of hide from the haunch of the pig. The flesh lay exposed, firm and darkly pink. They looked at each other, and the odd, soft laugh was repeated.
“Would you eat it?” Fawzi said.
“Why not?” said Gidon. “It is only meat, and it hasn’t had time to spoil. It is not such rules that are important.”
“To eat pig is the worst,” Fawzi said. His eyes rested on the meat, in fascination.
“Do you want to taste it?” Gidon asked.
“Have you ever tasted it?”
“No.” Where would he have tasted it? Suppose it had been offered to Reuven, would he have tasted it? But Reuven was a vegetarian. But before, when he was away from home, that summer among the Russians?
Fawzi was cutting off a slice of the meat. He held it out on his dagger. Something turned in Gidon’s stomach—perhaps from the sight of the dead boar’s ugly snout.
“Not raw,” he said.
“We will make a fire.” Still with his mischievous gleam, Fawzi set about picking up twigs. Flies had been attracted, and now, up above, a few buzzards began to circle. Next, hyenas would come near. With a growing sense of disgust, of vileness here, Gidon wanted to shrug and declare they should start home. But Fawzi held the meat over the little fire, that flared up each time fat dripped onto it. Meanwhile, somehow Fawzi had got to talking of women again. He described how, on your wedding night, you could test if you had married a virgin. His older brother had told him how to test with your finger. With his free hand, he demonstrated to Gidon how to make sure. —But in a kvutsa, Fawzi said, his eyes alight, was it true the girls did it with all the men?
No, Gidon said, it was not true. Each had her own, the same as a marriage.
Was this really so? Fawzi asked, as though surprised. Was Gidon certain?
“Yes,” Gidon said. His brother lived in the kvutsa, and his sister Leah also had lived in one, and his sister Dvora was married in a kvutsa and had a child. So he knew for certain.
Fawzi seemed disappointed. The meat was ready and he held it out on his knife. Gidon shrugged, blew on it, waited till it had cooled a bit, and then took a bite. It tasted much like calf’s meat, a little sweeter perhaps.
He held the knife with the bit of meat toward Fawzi.
His friend hesitated, laughed, took the dagger by the handle, touched his tongue to the meat, then bit off a small piece, chewed once, spit it out, and laughed again, handing the knife back to Gidon.
Gidon flung away the remainder. They got up. A pity to waste such a carcass—perhaps they should tell some Bedouin when they passed their cane huts down below?
“They’ll find it,” Fawzi said. “Or let there be a feast for the hyenas.”
The hunters departed. Every once in a while on the way back, they looked at each other, somewhat abashedly, somewhat defiantly; perhaps, it occurred to Gidon, like two men who had been to a house of shame together.