THE SETTLERS of Yavniel were understanding and generous. For a fortnight the families of Mishkan Yaacov were with them, only a few going on to Mescha. Every kitchen was crowded with women, every barn with sleepers, and talk, rumors, plans filled the time. Menahem and two more of the Shomer went off each day to reconnoiter. The abandoned settlement stood untouched.
Perhaps in their own way the Zbeh had counted up that in their ghoum a sufficient revenge had been reached. If Kleinman was to be counted, and he was certainly no longer living, then it was still they who had killed the more, even counting the last two who had fallen. And they had the herd.
One day a sheikh of the Tabor region, related to the Houranis of Nazareth where Menahem had lately visited, and himself a notable long friendly with the settlers of Yavniel, rode in for a visit with their mukhtar, the elder Kolodnitzer, reputed to be a sage. When coffee had been sipped, and remarks made about the weather, the crops, the health of each and his family, the sheikh remarked on the great value of friendly relationships and peace among neighbors, and the sage replied that nothing on earth was to be more highly desired or cherished, recalling how Father Abraham had been a man of peace, and quoting the psalm, What is so good and so pleasant as brothers dwelling together. Peaceful friendship was worth gold and more than gold, the sheikh remarked, and Kolodnitzer concurred, adding that life too was worth more than gold. The sheikh said, so was honor.
A few men of Mishkan Yaacov were summoned to take coffee and join in the conversation, which centered on the value of honor, friendship, of a fine horse, and on tales of enemies who had settled their differences and become as brothers.
In the end it was said that a dead horse was nevertheless not like a dead man, though a good horse is better than an evil man. Yet a horse can be replaced. Though the sheikh told a touching tale of a tribesman who so loved his mount that when the faithful animal was wounded in a fight and had to be destroyed, the master turned his pistol against his own heart and died as well. Horse and master were buried together and their burial place became a shrine. But better than a feast of mourning is a feast of friendship. A feast, a sulha, erases bad memories and replaces them with memories of enjoyment. Indeed the sulha should be one that would be long remembered, a true feast of peace and friendship with provisions of twenty whole sheep. This became reduced to twelve, since the finest geese and poultry would be added without number, and all else without measure, for who can set a measure on love among good neighbors living together in peace?
As to the vanished farmer Kleinman, the sheikh took a vow on the heads of his own sons and grandsons that not a glimpse of the American’s steed had been seen in all Galilee, and when word was known of the man or of his horse, it would instantly be brought to them.
And so wagons were loaded again and the people of Mishkan Yaacov, all but five families, returned over the heights of Yavniel toward their village. From the ridge they saw it—still only half believing, they saw the entire settlement lying intact before them, neither burnt nor demolished, and perhaps not even too badly despoiled.
In each house small things had been looted, surely by the Turkish gendarmes; here an entire iron cookstove and there a set of curtains that should not have been left behind, and in one house, even a chamberpot! Still, much worse had been expected. Also, Issachar Bronescu had returned from Tiberias where, he said, Azmani Bey had treated him respectfully, keeping him in no prison but as a guest in his own house! They had had many talks.
About the ways of the Shomer, the Kaymakam had great curiosity, but of course Bronescu knew nothing of their secrets and could tell him nothing. The brothers of Fuleh, Azmani Bey related, had been great heroes to their cousins across the Jordan. Their sisters, renowned beauties, were married to powerful families in the Zbeh. Yet, Azmani’s friend, the Kaymakam of Amman, had made strong inquiries for the missing herd, and had had interesting talks with the elders of the tribe. Perhaps things would now remain quiet. There need be no more blood—though the herd had best be forgotten. To search for it would be of no use, and would only bring more trouble. Let it be a price of peace. Too many on both sides had been killed. And indeed the Zbeh with their flocks had used, at times of scant rain in their region, to come over to this side of the river, and now complained that old grazing grounds were gone.
To Azmani Bey’s house had come Jacques Samuelson, the Baron’s highest representative, and he had given assurance that loans for new cattle would be quickly provided.
“Loans!” cried Yasha Janovici. “And my burned crops?” But others quieted him. “Who tells you to be in a hurry to pay off the Baron’s loans?”
Meanwhile Arab women began coming down from Dja’adi selling goat’s milk, lebeniya and eggs, and life resumed.
Menahem himself came for a time as shomer, and to Leah he related how Zev had been summoned to Gilboa and judged. Not only had he used firearms with needless and unwarranted haste in the scuffle with Dja’adi, but it was his loose tongue that had set the Zbeh to searching the sea for the two bandits of Fuleh, who were kinsmen. Something, it was said, had been found in the Kinnereth; though what they had found was not yet known. Zev’s loose talk had brought all this disaster. For the Zbeh had watched, and picked the moment for their revenge.
Angrily Zev had raged at them all; cowards and compromisers, they would yet learn that his was the way, the only way to deal with Arabs, blood for blood. Only then would Jews be respected. The judgment: Zev was brave but temperamentally unstable and unsuited for the Shomer. Expelled, he had gone off to the south. It was said he was forming a watchman’s group in the outermost settlements, near Beersheba.
“But his wife and child are here.”
Menahem supposed that in time Zev would send for them.
Of Gidon, Menahem said, it was thought best that he should leave the area for some time, as it was dangerous for him to remain. Though the Zbeh could not be certain who had stopped their raid when the village was empty, still such things had an uncanny way of becoming known.
—But if Gidon went off, Yankel growled, what of the farm? How was he to manage the work, all alone?
Schmulik was nearly of the strength of a man, and Leah would stay on and help, and as the stable was nearly empty, things could be managed.
Where should Gidon go? Should he join the Shomer, then?
Though he had proven himself, he was still young, Menahem said. But if he wanted to become a watchman, doubtless in a year he would be accepted.
It was Reuven, coming over on the Sabbath, who made another suggestion. Gidon had a natural way with horses and mules; why should he not apprentice himself to a veterinary for a year or two and learn the profession. Even if he later joined the Shomer, this knowledge would make him doubly valuable. This appealed to Gidon. Inquiries would be made of a veterinary in Jaffa.
At the end of that week, only a few days before the sulha was to take place, an Arab boy spoke to Schmulik when he came down to the river to water the mules. For gold, he would show where the cowboy’s body could be found.
Schmulik rushed to Gidon in the fields with the news, and Gidon at once came and questioned the boy. He was not the one who had found the hat, nor was he from Dja’adi but from one of the stray Bedouin tents on the way to Tiberias.
La, he did not know who had done the killing of the cowboy.
—But he had seen?
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Perhaps horsemen.” “Horsemen? Who?” Gidon demanded. In sudden terror the boy cried out—Not of his own people! Not they!
It took a coin to start him again. Not from his own tents, that was certain, but then of what people?
—La, he did not know.
—Strangers? Just what had he seen? How many?
—Two. They had leaped at the horse and dragged off the Yahud.
—Had there been a fight?
—Yes, a fight.
—And then?
He was silent. Gidon refrained from seizing him, shaking him. “Hear me. No harm will come to you. No one will know what you have told. Only I.”
The boy gazed at him uncertainly. “It is worth gold.”
“Gold. I have said it.”
The words came in a tumble. With knives they had killed the cowboy and thrown the body in the river.
“Where in the river?”
That he knew. He could point out the place to them. And the little teasing smile appeared, and the eyes looked away. First the gold.
Hurrying back to the village, Gidon sought out Menahem.—From those few tents on the way to Tiberias. Menahem knew them.
—Perhaps after all the lad’s own father was mixed up in it? Gidon wondered.
Menahem doubted it. “The ones in those tents—they live on what they get from Jews. Their women clean in the hot baths.” Let the boy be paid a few coins to begin with, and more only if he disclosed the body.
Returning with Gidon to where the boy waited, Schmulik beside him, Menahem showed in his hand a whole golden napoleon. The boy led them to the banks, where the Jordan flowed from the Kinnereth. “There,” he pointed to a clump of willows. “There they threw his body into the water. I swear by my mother, I saw it with my own eyes.” And he made as though he would take an eye out, were he not speaking the truth. “You can burn my tongue with fire.”
It was by the secluded cove that Yankel had used as his mikveh. Within his head Menahem felt a thudding, a pulsing, as though the dark secret of the universe were about to be revealed before him, and yet he would not understand it. He himself was as nothing, a scrap in the world, and his hands had touched some awful mystery. All was secret and unknowable unless by some revelation, for here he stood and Gidon stood beside him seeing what he saw, yet to him something unutterable, a balance of evils in the depths of creation, was being half-revealed, while Gidon could not know.
Schmulik had shed his shirt and trousers; diving into the water, he swam along the bottom but saw nothing. At last he rose and climbed out, shaking his head.
Vowing still more passionately, the Arab boy even offered back the first coppers that he held in his hand. The body could not have drifted, no, he had seen them tie rocks to it.
“Rocks?” Menahem echoed.
“Heavy rocks.”
“Then why do you say so only now?” Gidon demanded. “Each time you speak, you saw more. Perhaps you were close enough to see who tied the rocks?”
No, no, he had been afraid to come closer.
“Show us exactly where.”
“Here, here.” He stood by the water’s edge.
Mati had appeared. When Gidon had come for Menahem, he had known. At once, without a word from them, he understood all that was happening and would have dived into the water but Gidon forbade him. Schmulik went in again, exactly at the point the Arab boy showed. Among mud and smooth stones on the bottom he suddenly touched the edge of a rough feeling rock, and scooping with his fingers around it, felt that it was large, and sunken in. Then alongside it, partly under the mud and as though one with the mud, his fingers touched another substance and instantly withdrew. Even he, who had been taught by Gidon to clean out the entrails of a slaughtered animal, now drew back, and quickly emerged.
Both Menahem and Gidon returned with him into the water, there where he led them. When Menahem put his hand to the substance, it was as though something locked itself tight in his breast; the two groping and striving ends that had touched were at last locked together, and he was sealed within himself. To what purpose he did not know, but a design was being carried out in him that was not as in the lives of others.
Laboring together, going several times up for breath and down again, they at last freed the body and brought it to the surface. Where the large rocks had been tied at the neck and at the feet, the ropes were imbedded in the decay, and in the water Gidon cut them away from the bluish bloated form. The corpse rose and floated of itself between Gidon and Menahem, while Schmulik climbed out onto the bank and with a broken-off eucalyptus branch drew it near.
Gidon, himself sickened, caught the long solemn gaze of Mati, a gaze bewildered yet comprehending. “Take Mati home,” he said to Schmulik.
“Say nothing yet,” Menahem instructed the boy.
Schmulik was reluctant to go, for had he not discovered the body? And here was a matter of full manhood. Though his insides churned, though the taste of worse than bile was in his throat and mouth, he would not take his eyes off the corpse as the men turned it and counted the knife-gashes where the flesh still held, rotted, formless. Even in the hands—Kleinman must have seized at their daggers with his bare fingers. And the front side of the head, what had been the face—one could not look.
“Go away!” Gidon cried angrily to Mati to cover his sobs, and Mati retreated a small distance.
So they covered the form as much as they could with Menahem’s dark shirt, and the Bedouin boy stood before Gidon with outheld hand for his money. “I have told you the truth.” Menahem laid the gold coin on the boy’s palm and he fled.
She was strong, Chava Kleinman insisted, strong, strong. If Joe could die such a death, then she could bear to see it, and who could tell what would haunt her more, the sight of it or the guilt of an ultimate desertion? At last in Leah’s company she saw. She looked and looked until her eyelids slowly closed of themselves. Then the shroud was placed. The chevrah kadushah came, and the whole village followed.
After the seven days of mourning, Chava closed up her house, asking Leah to take the chickens and the goat. Issachar Bronescu’s daughter Malka was soon to be married; he would arrange for his son-in-law to take over the Kleinman meshek.
The American reaping machine Chava gave to Gidon. Then she returned with her daughters to her sister in Omaha, Nebraska.
Yankel never again bathed in his mikveh. It was contaminated.
* * * *
The feast was held. Mansour the mukhtar and several elders of Dja’adi, together with Sheikh Ibrim, the father and grandfather of many, expressed their anger at the ugly deed that had been uncovered. It was surely the new bandits of the Three Rocks that had done it, they kept repeating, and they surely had taken Hawadja Kleinman’s fine mare.
The ancient Ibrim fell into talk with Menahem and spoke of that first pair of bandits who had made an evil place of the Three Rocks—the sons of Faud of Fuleh, whom he had known in former times, a worthless one, a hyena. He was no longer in Fuleh? Ah, then Faud had surely gone back to the Zbeh with his remaining sons, or his grandsons, who must now be grown. It could well be that the same bad hyena blood was in them, and that, hearing there was trouble, they had come racing to pick off what could be picked off. And it was the fate of the American to have run into their path.
His yellowed eyes peeped into Menahem’s.
—So it must have been, the men of Dja’adi repeated all around them, to Reuven, to Menahem again, to all who would listen, and who could say otherwise?
It was indeed a big sulha, with notables from as far as Nazareth, even Saïd Hourani himself on the Arab side, to show how good was the peacemaking, for should not the sons of Abraham, cousins and brothers, dwell side by side in peace? The Kaymakam from Tiberias also arrived, Azmani Bey in his fez, and for the Jews, Yehoshua Ostrov could be seen in his flowing Arab robes, and the smiling Jacques Samuelson as well; and Galil arrived at the head of a delegation of the Shomer, their bandoliers resplendent, their rifles highly polished, their steeds caparisoned with tassels.
The Chaimovitch family walked up through the fields together with other families of the village, while the young men, Gidon among them, formed a galloping troop, wearing Arab keffiyahs, pulling up with their steeds pawing the air. Then suddenly a group of mounted Arabs galloped out to greet them, the mukhtar’s son in the lead, howling as they sped, whirling and also pulling up short, their mounts pawing the air; then the two groups of horsemen charged abreast in a race over the hill to the open field before the village.
Here the feast was spread. To begin with, platters of fine goat cheese, olives, pomegranates, grapes, jugs of cool lebeniyah, baked eggs, and piles of warm pittah. From the Jewish side, heaps of gefulte fish and potato pancakes and preserves and Feigel’s thin-flaked strudels alongside the thin-crusted honeycakes of Dja’adi.
Over smoldering live embers the spitted sheep were crackling, and in the center, the mukhtar’s own contribution, tended by a specialist from Kfar Kana—a whole calf, inside of which there was a roast lamb, inside of which was a dove.
The notables of both sides greeted each arrival with embraces, pledges of eternal friendship: Are we not all sons of Abraham!
From behind the crowd now came Schmulik, leading a finely caparisoned mount. Though his every sinew throbbed to ride her, Gidon took over the halter and led the noble animal to the center of the open circle, presenting her to Fawzi.
The young men fell on each other’s necks, embracing in brotherhood.
Among all the men who were there, who could not recognize at once that this was the most perfect, the swiftest, mare to be found in the souk of Damascus, white, with an arched tail and lean withers, a steed of the sort that was bound to become legendary.
Fawzi mounted. In the very first race he was ahead of the whole field, like a flying banner.
Mati found himself alongside Abdul, with whom, that day in the barley field, he had begun the scuffle that ended in bloodletting. On Mati’s back was the scar which Abdul now touched and examined, running his fingers along it, and then showing on his own body various wounds and scars from that day and from other times. Watching the horsemanship games, they laughed together when an awkward rider lost his balance and half tumbled from his saddle. After many riders had missed, it was Gidon whose lance pierced the tiny red handkerchief that hung from the branch of an oak. Great cries arose from both sides at his perfect horsemanship.
The women of Dja’adi appeared, carrying large circular trays of lamb and rice. With great forethought, the animals had been brought to Yavniel for slaughtering, and all had been prepared the Jewish way. “Kasher, kasher,” the mukhtar assured the guests, and many, even of the older ones, though Yankel smilingly refrained, tore off pieces of meat with their fingers and dipped hunks of pittah to scoop up rice, all smacking their lips and exclaiming over the excellence of the feast. Then to Issachar Bronescu was given the honor of slicing open the roasted calf, and after him the Arab mukhtar, Mansour, ceremoniously cut open the lamb within the calf, and held aloft the dove.
Eyes were already puffed with overeating, but the feast was renewed with great compliments. Young lads of Dja’adi formed a line with Fawzi at the head. A drumbeat began; straight-backed with arms straight down at their sides, clasped hand to hand, they began to stamp out the debka, Fawzi’s free hand waving a kerchief, as he whirled up in sudden leapings, with high calls of song. At one moment Fawzi swept Gidon into their line, into the leader’s place, handing him the kerchief to whirl. Straight as young trees, their feet moving ever more swiftly in perfect unison, the young men danced.
Leah, flushed, happy, could scarcely keep her feet on the ground. Reuven’s whole kvutsa was there, Old Gordon as well, and chaverim from Kinnereth and Gilboa. Standing with Leah, Reuven’s feet too began the movement, brother and sister caught into the Arab ululation with a Yahalili! and already they were in a hora circle, their feet stamping the ground. Old Gordon was on Leah’s other side—it was like the early days. “Yahalili!” A chaver had brought an accordion along, and he picked up the beat. Several young Arab lads were drawn into the hora, stomping in the circle while the Arab girls moved closer and laughed more freely. Songs rose, in Arabic, in Hebrew, and of the elders all wore beatific smiles, as to say at heart we are all alike, all friendly. People passed food to each other insistently—fruits, delicacies—and those who drank filled each other’s cups with wine, and all declared and truly felt they were as one, that each people was good, that they were good neighbors and true friends.
Yet, beyond the warmth of a pledged friendship, of knowledge of healed wounds on both sides, beyond exclamations of good will, what could each group say to the other? They stood in little circles, Jews, Arabs, with ready smiles on their faces, all nodding, all smacking their lips and putting their hands over their hearts to vow they could not eat a morsel more, and beaming and exclaiming at the excellence of the feast.
So, on the eve of the first world war, the two villages above the Jordan made peace.