FOR EACH settlement it seemed there had to come a time that was to form its legend, a time of testing, of fever, or hunger, or of blood; so it had been in Sejera on that tragic Passover of two deaths, Dvora’s Yechezkiel and Mottel the Carpenter, and so it had been with the shooting of a Jewish watchman and two Arabs in what began as a squabble in Rehovot, and so it had been when Aaron Zeira was killed in the founding days of the Kvutsa Emek Yisroel, and now the legend of Mishkan Yaacov was to be formed.
Some would say it was only because of the misunderstandings between the ways of one people and another. Others would say it was because of hatreds being stirred up against the Jews, of late, in two Arab newspapers that had started, Falastin in Jaffa and El Carmel in Haifa. They had even tried to accuse Moshe Smilansky, Reuven’s first employer, of the shootings in Rehovot, though he had not been anywhere near. With false witnesses they had tried to get him hanged by the Turks. Menahem managed to read what they wrote to stir up the villagers, but Shabbatai Zeira sneered—how many fellaheen could read? Galil and Nadina said religious hatred was behind it all, the imam would read the papers to the villagers to stir them up. But these papers were owned by Christians, not Moslems, Menahem said, and though the Moslems disdained all unbelievers, they did not have the hatred of pogromists. The fellaheen were not moujiks. It was wrong to sneer at them. To this, Reuven hotly agreed. Each trouble had its own cause. There were feuds, killings among the Arabs themselves, much came from pride and hot-bloodedness. In the cities there might be some highly placed Arabs who did not like the coming of the Jews, while others saw advantages; but in the villages, the fellaheen were indifferent. And after each trouble, did they not settle down to peace with their neighbors?
Leah found herself staying on at home, not that there was any man to be seen in prospect for her there, but at least she was no longer subjected to annoyances by Zev the Hotblood, for the shomer had married the daughter of one of the Roumanians, Lula Janovici—he had already got her with child, it was said—and now, as everyone jested, the shomer had to take his midnight tea at home. Even though gossips had it that Zev managed a second snack through a certain bedroom window at the other end of the settlement, he at least no longer went about putting his hands where they were not wanted.
In the Chaimovitch yard, Leah had started a nursery school, a gan, using the new Montessori method she had brought from Jerusalem, and while this absorbed her energy, there was also a new friendship that gave her a sense of appeasement here.
The Roumanians next to the Chaimovitch farmyard had lost heart and returned to Kluj, and in their place had appeared an American—not altogether an American, since he was originally from Bialystok, but Joe Kleinman had spent fifteen years in America in a place called Nebraska in the west, where the philanthropic Baron de Hirsch had tried to establish Jews as farmers. The colony had fallen apart, Kleinman related, for sooner or later every Jewish farmer had put a pack on his back and gone off to peddle needles and buttons and eventually to open a store in some crossroads town, until Joe found himself the only farmer left. And since for some unfathomable reason he liked to live amongst Jews, maybe because they made him laugh, he had found himself lonesome out there in Nebraska and had decided—if with Jews he had to be, then why not in the Jewish land itself? So he had picked himself up one day, as he said, and come here to Eretz with his ever-willing wife and their two girls, the ages of Schmulik and Mati, though the boys would have nothing to do with them. Kleinman was given to jokes—his very name was a joke, he pointed out, as he was not a little man, but huge. This would have been a man for Leah! Even though he was eleven years older! But, alas, Joe, or Yosef as he now called himself, was well married. He and Leah laughed frequently over her predicament as to the size of men, and he offered, if she found a fellow whom she otherwise liked, to stretch him up for her. But at least Joe Kleinman’s presence served as a constant reassurance to Leah, for see, there were indeed some tall Jews in the world!
Now, if she would only accept a goy, Kleinman would jest, he could import her one from the American west, where none was less than eight feet tall; he would have a sample shipped along with the farm machinery he kept bringing over. Not that he had so much money as to pay for all these machines, he would say, but his wife had brothers who owned stores.
Kleinman had brought with him catalogues with pictures of all sorts of American machinery, even newer things than Max Wilner knew about, and Reuven would come from the kvutsa and study the pages, while Yosef translated the particulars. What things there were! Machines to plant, machines to pick, machines to bale hay, and the biggest wonder of all, a wooden box as large as a small house—a threshing machine. The stalks went in at one end and pure clean grain poured out into a sack at the other end! Next year, Kleinman vowed, he would import one. Already he had brought a reaper, the first in the land. Kleinman sat perched on a high seat while a huge wheel with protruding blades whirled through the grain; not only the Roumanians, but Arabs from as far as Kfar Kana came and stared in awe as he reaped an entire field in a single day. Mansour, the mukhtar of Dja’adi, came down himself and after some urging took Kleinman’s perch on the machine. But if such machines were to be brought here, the mukhtar questioned reflectively, what would be left for the fellaheen to do?
In Kleinman’s house there was a large canister in which cream was turned into a sweet ice. Yosef’s wife, Clara, now called Chava, let the children turn the handle, producing ice cream for them all, and even for Leah’s Montessori children as well. Ah, America!
The village cattle grazed as a herd under the eyes of Alter Pincus, a venerable sage with a wispy white beard like a Chinaman; he was the patriarch of one of the Roumanian families. Alter’s great-grandson Shaikeh was that summer already big enough to do his running for him, while the patriarch sat on a stone, looking like a prophet except that his beard might have been thicker. Shaikeh was Mati’s age, and their companionship was one long wrestling match in which, as in the races between Gidon’s horse and Fawzi’s, neither consistently triumphed.
Mati kept his eye on his own family’s cattle, knowing the grazing preferences of each one—Schorah the black, mother of Bathsheba the beauty, and Malka the queen, who liked to stray near the riverbank and who gave the most milk; also there was Klugah the Clever, who would obey neither Shaikeh nor Alter Pincus when Mati was anywhere near, and finally Zipporah the Stupid, who would always take the wrong turn and had to be kept from entering other people’s barns to be milked.
On this morning Mati took his herd somewhat apart, to the end of the family’s fields, where the barley was being cut, and they grazed steadily on the stubble. His next older brother Schmulik, already big enough this year to swing a scythe, was deep in the field, but not able to keep up with Gidon who mowed at the far end. When their neighbor Kleinman was finished with his machine on his own fields, he would lend it to Gidon, he had promised, and what remained on the field would be mowed as by the wind. By the time Mati himself was grown up, Yosef Kleinman told him, machines would do all the work for everyone. Yet in a way Mati wanted the whole process to hold back until he had shown how well he could swing a scythe.
Just now Mati was sharpening a goad, using a flintstone he had picked up in the riverbed. The stone fitted well into his palm, and though the edge was not as sharp as a knife, he was managing to take off shavings from the stick. Thus he was a man of long ago, as Reuven had explained to him. These stones were washed down by the winter rains that made fresh crevices among the rocks below the caves; among the tumbled stones that had fallen into the stream and been slowly washed along, one could espy such flinty ones, sharp tools that had been shaped by the hands of cave dwellers long before even the time of Abraham.
Down by the river he saw a boy from Dja’adi, Abdul, with his flock of black goats. Abdul was older than himself, but younger than Schmulik, and he had a brother the age of Gidon, Gidon’s friend Fawzi, who raced his Ayesha against Gidon’s Yadid, and went hunting with Gidon as far as the Huleh.
Abdul’s goats moved in on the stubble, feeding not far from Mati’s cattle, but this was permitted, Mati knew. It had been discussed by several of the Roumanians standing in the yard with his father, and they had all agreed, very well, let the Arab sheep and goats come onto the cut fields, it was a good thing to be friends, and though there was no lack of grass up there among the rocks, let their flocks also graze on the stubble. Later, Fawzi’s father had come down, riding into their yard; as with so many of the Arabs, one of his eyes was unfocused, and he was one of those who sat all day up there in their cafe, complaining that his sons were lazy. Abba himself had told Fawzi’s father that it would be permitted for their flocks to graze on the mown fields, but not in the grain.
The green stick was hard to cut and Mati concentrated on his work. After a time the goad was finished, and he looked up, but he no longer saw Abdul or his black goats. Mati moved his gaze then along to the standing, uncut grain. To God it must look like golden hair on earth, if there was really a God. And deep in the smooth field he saw a slight movement. Abdul’s goats were in there devouring the grain itself.
Shouting a foul Arab word that he was forbidden to utter within hearing of his mother and sisters, Mati rushed to drive the goats out from his barley, but Abdul rose up from where he had been lying, and shouted back the filthiest of mother-curses. Brandishing his goad, Mati tried to chase the animals out; Abdul placed himself in the way, and Mati charged him. They tumbled together, rolling, scuffling, with a sudden shriek from Abdul as the pointed stick tore into his cheek. “I’ll put your eyes out!” he spat, his face close to Mati’s, his breath a stink, and his thumbs thrusting. Mati tore at the hands. Abdul’s sinews were like vulture talons. Already Mati’s eyeballs pained as though bursting from their sockets. With the flintstone still in one hand, Mati slashed, and a talon gave way. One eye was free. But from under Abdul’s other thumb, Mati felt a doubled pain, and then terror of an eye destroyed as in the face of Abdul’s father; with a heave that was beyond his own strength, he wrenched himself around on top of his enemy, in the same movement pulling his head backward, free of the grinding finger.
But with his bloodied hand, the Arab boy had reached for his dagger, and now Mati felt a burning streak along his back. Wildly he kept striking with his sharp stone, feeling blows on his head, smelling their bodies together, and in a maddening way, sensing the goats all around them continuing to feed.
Then Schmulik’s voice was on top of them, but as though from afar, commanding through a thickness of wild curses, “Leave off!” With such violence had Schmulik torn away Abdul’s knife-arm that the break of the bone was heard.
The howling and shrieked pain of the boys had already brought men running from nearby fields, Arabs and Jews arriving simultaneously and falling upon each other, the grown cousins and half-brothers of Abdul rushing with their staves at Schmuel. From above and below men came as to a tocsin, some on foot, some on mules, some on horses, and presently the entire field was alive with shouting and fighting men. A few for the first instant only stood calling out for everyone to stop—then they too started flinging accusations and insults at each other like gobs of dripping dung. Suddenly one would ride down on an adversary, who would strike back with a stave, and there would be an additional melee, men rolling on the ground, others trying to strike into the heap, still others arriving and trying to pull the fighters apart until they too were fighting.
The first boys were already separated and held away from each other, Abdul with his arm limp and face bloodied, and Mati doubled over on the ground, face down, while Gidon, who had arrived at a gallop, tried with a cloth torn from his shirt to staunch the flow of blood from the open lips of the dagger-gash in his little brother’s back. Maledictions and accusations reverberated in the sultry air.
The men, somewhat subdued by the sight of the wide-open gash, stood now in two lines, gesticulating and shouting still, but at least separated from one another. Yet suddenly at one end or the other, with a thrown stone, or an insult hurled, bodies would come together, and others add onto them, and the melee was resumed.
Already it had been cried out in the settlement that marauders in a multitude were carrying off grain from the fields, and that little Mati Chaimovitch had been cut to pieces. Barely up from his early morning sleep, Zev the Shomer came charging into the battle. It was a confused moment. A melee had started again, and from Dja’adi, Abdul’s brother Fawzi also came galloping, charging into the fight, swinging a rake. Without pause, Zev raised up his rifle and fired.
Every movement in the field was suspended in midair. Until that moment it had been a squabble, a fight with blows, with sticks, but no more—except for Mati’s flintstone and Abdul’s dagger, no weapons had appeared.
None but Zev had come onto the field with firearms.
All stared at Fawzi as though waiting for his body to topple. Then, unlimited battle would be released.
But Fawzi sat unhurt.
It was the mount, Gidon saw, not the man who had been hit. Ayesha wildly flung up her neck, and something like a blood-choked outcry, more human than animal, came from the wounded beautiful mare as her legs stiffened. Over Gidon’s first sense of relief that no human was slain there spread an engulfing dismay, grief for the beautiful animal, then anger. That stupid Hotblood with his shooting!
“It was not meant! It was not meant!” Gidon cried out as Fawzi slid off his wounded horse. “Fawzi! Take mine!” And even while his heart died in him for the loss it would be, Gidon’s hand reached out the halter.
But his friend only spat on the ground between them. “Take care of your brother, Yahud,” Fawzi said, his tone flat.
Mati, half-raised up, had again slipped to the ground, his limbs trembling, blood oozing from under the bandage.
Together with the sick-eyed father of Fawzi and Abdul, their uncle the mukhtar had appeared. Sitting his horse, Mansour listened to several of the angry fellaheen, glanced down at Mati, looked sharply at the wounded mare, then glared at Zev, who still held his rifle crosswise on his saddle. With an angry gesture, the mukhtar motioned his people from the field; clearly this was not the end. Dark-faced and muttering, the Arabs of Dja’adi turned and followed Fawzi as he slowly led his Ayesha. The head of the mare hung low, the tawny neck clotted with gouts of dark-brown blood.
* * * *
Already most of the women of Mishkan Yaacov were worriedly coming out into the open, and several began to shriek when they saw, in the wagon coming from the fields, the bloodied Mati, face down on the bed of straw. But it was not Feigel’s way to wail at the sign of calamity. Running forward with a basin of water, while Leah climbed onto the wagon with white cloths, Feigel with one quick look at the wound sucked in her cries and directed her husband: he must drive straight to Tiberias.
Lately there had been, anew, a few instances of trouble at the Three Rocks. Stamp out vermin, and more rise from under the earth. Should not Gidon ride alongside to protect the wagon? But he might be needed here; the very air was oppressive. From the fields the Roumanians were pulling homeward, gathering their implements and turning their wagons toward the village. Some said a shot had been heard from Dja’adi—surely the wounded horse was now dead. Would there be a revenge? They discussed and disputed. A dead horse is not a dead Arab. To an Arab his horse is worth more than a human life. They could kill for a horse. Who knew what really went on in their heads? Though with Dja’adi there had never been real trouble. What was it the fellaheen had kept shouting?
—That they had the right to graze, Gidon repeated.
“But only on the stubble! Not in an uncut field!”
A triple watch must be mounted. That hot-headed Zev must not go out alone.
Zev defended himself angrily. He had done right to shoot, or Fawzi would have split Gidon’s head with the rake he was wielding.
Gidon decided to escort the wagon past the Three Rocks and then hurry back to the troubled village. It was best, also, that Leah, on the wagon, should carry a pistol.
Kneeling over the child on the straw, as the wagon bounced off a large stone in the road, Feigel saw the bandage slowly staining anew, and in anguish watched Mati’s blood seeping from under the edges. Leah bent with her over the wound, and in helpless terror, they gazed at each other. “Yankel, the stones,” Feigel begged, yet what could the poor man do? To avoid them he would have to go slowly. Cautiously Leah undid the cloth, and the gash lay there before them, partly clotted, but with blood seeping up through a break in the crust. Little Mati raised up his head a bit and complained, “Ima, it hurts.” Desperately Feigel held the flesh together with her fingers, her child’s blood slippery, then sticky on her hand, the wagon lurching—“Yankel.” —but still everything within her cried “Hurry—quickly,” and meanwhile Leah worried that the dust from the road could infect the wound.
So at last in this drawn-out agony they came to the pharmacy in Tiberias. As the boy was lifted on Yankel’s arms from the wagon, women in the marketplace were already wailing, each as though the child were her own, and there even arose from somewhere the frightened beginning of a death-ululation.
Yankel laid the child face-downward on a bench as the apothecary, called from behind, hurried to them. A short-bearded Jew in a yarmulkeh, half a doctor he was—and at a glance, Gottgetrei said, “This must be sewn up at the hospital. It is not for me.” Meanwhile he carefully cleaned around the wound; with the burn of the peroxide, Mati let out a howl, and this at least relieved Feigel’s heart, for in the bravery of boys, the protesting howl was permitted and meant all was yet well.
In the crowd at the door of the pharmacy, Leah noticed their neighbor Joe Kleinman—he had recognized their wagon. “What happened, Leah?” In a word she told of the fight. Was Mati all right?
“He’ll live,” she was now confident.
—Good, said Joe Kleinman—he would gallop back, he might be needed in the village. Still he lingered watching as the pharmacist, calling his apprentice to mind the shop, moved to lead them to the hospital.
Yankel again picked up the child across his arms. Was God once more demanding the offering, it came to him, again the bringing of the sacrifice to the altar, again the akeda? Had he been brought to Eretz so that a Jew might over and over be tested with the brutal sacrifice? Wasn’t one dead child—his Avramchick—wasn’t one enough?
Then, as Yankel stepped with his burden outside the door, it was as though all the embittering perversion of history were suddenly revealed to him. There before him indeed loomed the heathen altar! The cross above the large wrought-iron gate of the Christian mission confronted him from the end of the street, just as the golden-domed heathen mosque had confronted him in Yerushalayim, replacing the Temple over the rock of Abraham.
A sacrifice to their idols!
Yankel stood rigid. “I cannot.”
“But, my fine Jew, where would you take him?” Gottgetrei demanded. “This is the only hospital in Tiberias. As far as Safed—on the hilly road—the wound is sure to open again.”
Several Sephardim had gathered, and a whole talmudic dispute rang in Yankel’s ears. It is forbidden, it is permitted, was not Gottgetrei himself a good pious Jew? But as Yankel stood dazed, uncertain—was it the body of Avramchick on his arms?—there suddenly returned over him an anger at Reuven for bringing them all to this gehenna. Was the fellaheen slaughter with knives any different than the moujik’s pogrom with hatchets? Adonai! what do you want of a Jew?
While Yankel stood rigid, frozen, Leah cried, “Give him to me!” Yankel’s head was shaking to say no, while inwardly he cried to himself, Spit on their cross but enter the hospital! At that moment, Joe Kleinman broke through the circle and lifted Mati from Yankel’s arms. Yankel saw them walking under the cross, Feigel and Leah together with Kleinman. He could not follow; his legs were stone.
In the mission yard a number of Arab women squatted, holding their sore-infested babies, but already the door opened as someone white-clad—a priest, a doctor, who knew?—beckoned to them. Leah took Mati over from Yosef Kleinman. “Go home,” she said, feeling his anxiety about his family, and he was a good man to have just now in the village; he would calm them all with his American humor. “Tell Gidon and the children Mati’s all right,” she said. Then she recalled that Yosef always went unarmed and insisted that he take her pistol—he would be riding alone, and trouble was in the air. “That’s what makes the trouble,” he said with his wide grin, and refused.
When another white-clad one, in broad robes, drew close, Feigel was not without apprehension. Might they even try to sprinkle water on her son before they treated him? From far back in the old country such tales came to her; this she knew was the terror Yankel had felt, and as the priest took the boy from Leah, the mother stayed close, holding onto Mati’s hand.
But they did not carry him into a church. It was a whitewashed room, though with a picture of their Yoshke on the wall, a sad Sephardic face with fine eyes, not unlike those of Gottgetrei, the pharmacist; Feigel kept her gaze averted from that wall.
They had placed Mati on a high white-painted table. Speaking their own language to each other—it was English, Leah whispered to Feigel, this was an English Christian place—the priests or doctors probed the wound. Several times Mati sucked in his breath, but now he would not cry, and one of them patted his head.
The doctor-priests were asking something of Feigel, then of Leah. Leah could only shake her head to show she did not understand English; she tried a few words of Hebrew, but they shook their heads. Anxiously, Feigel tried to ask them what they wanted, in Russian, in a half-Yiddish German, and at last between a mingling of words in Hebrew and Arabic, and a gesture of sewing, she understood and nodded vigorously. Indeed they must sew it up. But that wasn’t quite it. Leah caught the meaning—brave? was the boy brave? Then one of them, the one in the broad gown, bent his cheek against his hand, meaning sleep, and shook his finger—he meant they would not or could not put Mati to sleep. Was he brave?
Leah began to explain to Mati, but he had understood their Arabic better than she. It would hurt; if it hurt too much, they would put him to sleep, but if he was brave, it was only a little sewing, sewing your skin like when you tear your shirt. “Sew,” he said. The child turned his head away and waited.
The mother must now leave the room, the priest insisted, and Feigel slowly went out to where Yankel stood. At least Leah remained with Mati.
Watching the priests put the needle through the candle flame, Mati clutched Leah’s hand tight. The needle came now. He did not cry out. In Arabic a doctor said, “A man.”
It seemed unending. Again the needle stabbed, the small body stiffened, but not a sound came. Again. Again. Twenty times. Then it was finished, the wound was dressed, The Christians made compliments to the little son, and they lifted him from the table, a bandage tightly swathed around him just below the armpits. Carefully, carefully, Mati could stand. He could walk, but not run, they cautioned him. Brave, a man!
Leah asked what was owed, and they smiled and pointed to a small box; it was oddly like the blue and white collection boxes of the Keren Kayemeth Le Israel, only a cross was on it. “Don’t ever tell Tateh!” Leah enjoined Mati, as she hurriedly put in a whole Turkish pound in silver.
On the way back the boy fell asleep in his mother’s lap. Under his bronzed face, the yellow tinge was still there from the loss of blood. “You know what,” Leah said, “we’ll ask Chava Kleinman to make him some ice cream.”
The whole afternoon a stillness had lain on the fields. Gidon rode the rounds in one direction, Zev in the other—he was after all the shomer. The Arab fields too, they saw, were deserted. Though this made Gidon apprehensive, Zev, as they exchanged a few words when they completed their circles and met, insisted it was not a bad sign. “It is they who are afraid of us,” he said. “They are afraid if your brother should die, we will take revenge.”
Zev’s thought was a vileness to Gidon. “He isn’t dead and he won’t die!” he snapped, and what did Zev really understand of the Arabs? Perhaps the best would be, Gidon speculated, if he were to ride up right now to Dja’adi and talk to Fawzi, and ask after Abdul’s arm that Schmulik had badly wrenched, and tell them Mati would be well. Though Fawzi’s spat out “Yahud!” still burned in his bowels, coming just after he had offered his own horse, his own Yadid. No, the whole affair would have to be straightened out in some other way. Perhaps Reuven should go up and talk to their mukhtar—in such matters Bronescu was useless. Though not yet. Tomorrow or the next day, after tempers had cooled.
So Gidon reflected as he rode his rounds, but underneath it all a profound dismay grew heavier. That “Yahud!” It must always have lain there even in Fawzi. Just as the whole hateful outbreak this morning had lain in Dja’adi.
Late in the afternoon Gidon had an urgent feeling that the wagon was returning, and encountering Zev at the end of his round, he said, “I’ll miss the next circle, I’m going to meet them.”
He galloped as far as the Three Rocks; the wagon was just coming, all was quiet, and Gidon rode alongside listening to the account of Mati’s bravery under the stitches. The boy was awake and grinning at their praise. She was going to borrow the American machine and make ice cream, Leah declared, and then added, “But didn’t Joe Kleinman tell you that Mati was all right? He was in Tiberias and rode home ahead of us.”
No, Gidon had not seen Joe Kleinman.
“He was worried about the trouble, and in such a hurry to get home.”
As the crop fire had started on the far side of the fields where Gidon would have been circling, it was not detected at once.
Only at the end of Zev’s own round, when he reached the high point, did Zev see the rim of the blaze. At first glance it was like a sunset reflection that sometimes came from that direction, but what was he dreaming of?—over the low streak of crimson there was black smoke.
As he galloped, the widening blaze unfolded before him, and Zev realized he could do nothing by himself to halt it. And by now he would catch no one there, unless it was an ambush as well, with the dirty cowards waiting to shoot him down. Firing off his rifle as an alarm, he now wheeled toward the settlement, cursing Gidon and the Chaimovitches, the whole lot of them, even though he had agreed that Gidon should go meet the returning wagon.
Hearing Zev’s shot, Gidon cut across the fields, galloping, leaving the wagon to enter the settlement. On the rise he saw the blaze and doubled back, yelling “Fire! Fire!”
In the first confusion some of the villagers leaped on their horses, their mules, with anything they could seize, a rake, a mattock. Zev met them midway, reviling, commanding, “Sacking! Wet sacks! Do you think you can put it out with your hands?”
“Whose fields?” each settler demanded, begged, while Zev thundered from one house to the next, and Gidon on the other side charged them, “Bring mattocks, sacks, wet sacks,” and in every yard a racing in circles began, some pumping water, some women even running out with brooms to beat off the fire, others screeching at their children to get inside the house. Bronescu had flung open his shed and was handing out empty burlap sacks from a pile there. People snatched them and ran and had to be called back to wet them, wet them! A wagonful of fire fighters galloped off. Whose field? Whose field? “Yosef Kleinman’s!” Zev shouted. Yet where was Yosef? A fire-break must be plowed; Kleinman must bring his reaping machine and cut a wide swath across the grain—
“He hasn’t come home,” his wife cried out.
“But he left before us, at least by two hours!” Leah exclaimed. And on top of the conflagration a new horror-fear blazed up in them.
Not a sign of Joe had been seen on the road. At the Three Rocks all had been quiet. No, he must surely have been delayed, stopping to buy something more in Tiberias, or perhaps he had stopped at one of the kvutsoth. Yes, that was it. He must be at HaKeren. None could be spared to go there now, everyone was running to fight the fire, and Chava Kleinman distractedly ran with all the others, to Joe’s fields, then turned back and started the other way, toward the kvutsa.
Yankel had already lifted a plow onto the wagon. Eliza was emptying sacks of grain and wetting the burlap in the washtub by the pump. Yaffaleh was pumping while Schmulik lifted an empty barrel to his father on the wagon and then handed up pailfuls of water for Yankel to dump in. The entire family was starting for the fields; Leah had to seize hold of Mati, “Stay here!” To Eliza she called, “Stay with him. Don’t let him move.”
Mishkan Yaacov was all at once empty, the bit of street quiet and deserted in the waning sun, as though Sabbath had fallen.
And this was the moment chosen by the Zbeh. It was the time of waning light when the ancient Jew led the herd home, his great-grandson driving the animals from behind.
When the fighting had started in the morning, Alter Pincus had moved the herd, the Chaimovitch cows among them, somewhat closer to the village, where they could readily be moved inside the village walls, and there he had kept them grazing all day. But now, just as the herd was beginning its movement homeward, horsemen swept in from nowhere. They were in front, behind, on all sides, pounding around the startled beasts that pressed together in panic. And when Alter, too bewildered to be terrified, seized the rope of his own cow, protesting she was his, a Bedouin simply rode him down, smashing the old Jew’s head with his rifle butt.
The boy Shaikeh, darting sideward to run away, to run for help, found himself chased by a laughing tribesman who cornered him as he crouched against a rock, and, still laughing, took aim. The shot made a hole all the way through the boy’s head.
The Jews would be too busy with their burning fields now to turn back over a stray rifleshot.
Only Chava Kleinman heard it, from the path where she was hurrying to the kvutsa; in her panic it struck her as though she were hearing Joe shot dead. For a moment she stood stock still, straining for the death to pass, then she managed to make herself take shelter behind a rock, and she saw the cattle herded by the riders, white ghost waves of robes floating across the twilight haze, and patches of white from the sides of the cattle, and after this was gone from sight, she stumbled through brambles in the direction the shot had come from. There was still enough light for her to make out the thin-spun white hair and beard of Alter Pincus, and then, though she was not a brave girl like Leah Chaimovitch, she nevertheless pursued the horror and found the little boy, too; he was lying, a clump of contracted limbs against the rock, the way a child gathers itself together in a chilly bed.
Chava sat on the ground and her grief for the murdered old man and the boy was her grief for her husband, whose death she knew but would not yet admit into herself.
The fire was not yet to be readily conquered. Though there was no wind, the midsummer heat in the Jordan valley was like the inside of an earthen baking oven. Some even said the fire could have started of itself or sprung in this heat from a cigarette spark, since a donkey path went through the field. But with blackened, sweat-running faces most of them turned and looked toward Dja’adi. They must be standing up there on their hill and gloating! To take such a revenge! Let the Arab fields be set aflame in return!
In their fury the farmers smote their sacks harder on the ground, a close line of them like a line of demons making an inroad on the line of flame. But beyond the end of their line the fire moved forward with a hissing devouring sound, like some exultant beast. A hundred paces inward, their arms and heads lit up by the approaching flames, Yankel Chaimovitch and the young Mikosh Janovici and still another plowman stumbled after their mules through the dark, while boys shouted and goaded to keep the animals from shying away from the oncoming scorching heat.
Already by the time the fire fighters had reached the scene, Kleinman’s fields were cindered, and the flames had now eaten half across the sector of Yasha Janovici, the father-in-law of Zev. At least with Zev now, no fault could be found; he commanded with skill and presence of mind, he was everywhere, flailing with two sacks at a time where a spear of flame suddenly shot forward, riding ahead of the plowmen to trample a path for them, galloping where new sparks could be seen. Early, he had thought to send Gidon back for Kleinman’s American reaper, and Gidon was now slashing a secondary firebreak beyond the plowline, should the flames leap across.
In the sweat and fury of their labor the entire village worked as one, the Roumanians and the two Russian families; even the melamed, his torso bare, swung shovelfuls of earth against the smoldering edges of the fire. A number of women worked by the water-barrels that had been hauled to the field, wetting the sacks and passing them forward, the younger girls running with them to the fire-line, the larger girls and boys standing with Leah and flailing at the flames.
Slowly, slowly, the blaze was conquered, leaping up again in one corner to jump the plowlines, or stealing out from a patch of smoldering cinders only to be smothered again. Two entire holdings had been lost, Kleinman’s crop and Janovici’s.
Wiping their smarting eyes even though each fire fighter told the others not to, snorting, spitting and half-vomiting to retch out the acrid smell that crawled through the nostrils and throat down into the very intestines, the settlers were already saying to each other that all must bear a share of the loss.
As they slowly drew into a group, casting a final look for spots of flame over the dead fields, curses and mutterings of vengeance sparked up again out of their weariness. Young Gidon did not join in this. Once he remarked to young Mikosh Janovici, “If it came from Dja’adi, they would not have done it here, they would have done it on the same field where the boys stopped them from grazing.”
Mikosh gave him a puzzled half-angry look, but did not reply.
Then Gidon suddenly realized that, Zev being married to a Janovici, it could indeed have been a revenge.
Only when, limp and stretched exhausted in their wagons, they dragged themselves toward the village, did the night’s full catastrophe come to them. A few of the older people who had remained at home stood half inside the gate around Chava Kleinman. She had made her way back. Even in the dark it could be seen that her face was haunted.
From all those standing there around her, in Roumanian, in Yiddish, the same words came like bird shrieks; Alter Pincus and Shaikeh murdered, the Zbeh, the cattle, the entire herd, Alter and Shaikeh …
So it was the Zbeh after all, Gidon realized. The fire to draw away the whole village. And then the herd, and blood. The Zbeh from over there, from the heights of Golan. Something came to him from far back, from cheder memory. This was Cain, this was Esau, this was embittered Ishmael.
* * * *
Chava Kleinman could not be left by herself, and Leah went over to spend the night in the house with the wife and daughters of the missing Yosef. The little girls went quietly and obediently to their room; the first time the mother looked in, they feigned sleep—but then as she stood in the partly opened doorway holding the lamp, an intake of breath, less than a sob, came from the smaller girl, and the brave pretenses were ended. Chava went in to them.
Leah heard them weeping together, the three of them, and waited for them to cry themselves out. Sitting alone by the table, she struggled against the feeling that her nearness to anyone brought misfortune and tragedy. Moshe, Dvoraleh’s Yechezkiel, Avramaleh. It was she who had begged Mameh to come to Eretz and bring little Avramaleh here. No, she would not yield to such a way of thinking.
If only there were noises, animal calls, voices, hooves! Even the jackals were silent tonight. As though the cindered fields lay on a dead world.