THEN THE locusts came. Mati was the first to remark on the low-hanging smudge in the sky, borne as though on the sluggish hamseen from the wilderness that lay across the Jordan to the south. It was too low for a cloud. “What is it?” he asked Schmulik—could it be billows of smoke from some distant fire, perhaps some enormous new thing of the war?
They were watering the young lemon grove, the saplings from Reuven’s tree nursery at the kvutsa that Gidon had insisted on planting before he left for Jaffa. Now there were pale green leaves on the thin branches. They had to water the trees laboriously from barrels on a wagon, instead of from a motor pump. Even the kvutsa already had an engine for pumping water; it had been dragged by two teams of mules on a wagon all the way from Haifa. Just as Reuven had said, with the water-pumping there were now two crops a year instead of one, and perhaps there would even be three. Some day even here, they would have such an engine, a smaller one. Even without an engine, Mati pestered Schmulik to help him try to build a water wheel by the river. Already thousands of years ago, before the time of Moshe Rabenu, there were water wheels—the Assyrians and the Egyptians had them, you could see them in pictures in schoolbooks—all that was needed was an old mule or even a donkey to turn the wheel and fill buckets of water. Instead, he and Schmulik had to go down to the river with the wagon, and there Schmulik would hand up the full pails for Mati to dump into the barrels; then they would haul the water to the grove, and Schmulik would hand down the full pails for Mati to empty into the saucers around the lemon trees. The whole village said it was madness to water a grove in this way. Only Yankel Chaimovitch would be crazy enough to try to grow citrus here.
While Mati carefully emptied the water so as not to lose a drop, Schmulik stared at the approaching movement in the sky. He had never seen this. And yet, who knew from where, even from the Haggadah that he only half-listened to at the Seder on Pesach, there came to him a fearful answer: like darkening clouds low over the land came the swarms of devouring locusts.
Nearer now, Schmulik could see how the cloud settled downward, like a vast blanket on the earth. Perhaps it would remain where it lay and not spread here to their own fields. But then from behind there moved another such cloud, and now the breadth of the horizon was becoming filled.
Even the mules had become nervous. Mati, the emptied bucket half lifted, stood transfixed, staring at the approaching darkness. Schmulik called to him, “Come!” and hurried the wagon homeward, as though racing against evil, the half-emptied barrels bouncing as the wheels leaped over the rocks.
Already the entire village was in the street, each asking the other what to do, what would happen, some merely staring at the sky and awaiting their fate: would the swarms pass over them, or settle on their fields and devour the half-grown grain?
Reb Meir Roitschuler, who since the death of Alter Pincus in the raid of the Zbeh had taken his place as the Torah sage, declared that this was as in the days of the Pharaohs. The plague was not sent against the Jews but against the Turks. God was sending the plague on Djemal Pasha who wanted to seize all the grain for his armies.
Bitterly a chalutz who worked for the Zeidenschneurs remarked, “So should we smear our houses with blood, Reb Roitschuler, and will the locusts spare us enough grain for bread for our own needs?”
Reb Hirsch, the melamed, speculated that this was perhaps the rage of nature, upset in all its balance by the flying machines, the waves of the explosions and battles in the skies bringing the locusts in their wake.
A Yemenite known as Bronescu’s Eliyahu, since he worked in Bronescu’s fields, declared that he had seen this in his own land: the locusts would remain for three days on the fields, until all was devoured, and only then would they move onward.
Women gathered their small ones and ran inside and shuttered their houses, like ghetto Jews in the face of a pogrom. From the southward fields, the shomer galloped in. The locusts were already settling on the wheat, on young Mikosh Janovici’s land, the very same fields that had been burned by the Arabs. “Every evil falls on me!” he cried.
“Every curse!” his wife raised up her arms to heaven. “Mikosh is a good man. What have we done to deserve it?”
“They move from one field to another,” the Yemenite said, “until the whole land is bare.”
From where, no one knew, perhaps from the memory of the great fire itself, the wall of flame with all the small beasts of the field fleeing before it, mice, lizards, centipedes, all crawling and flying things, there now came the cry, “Make smoke!” With smoke the pestilence would be driven away.
The whole village now, as in the days of the flames, streamed toward the fields. Wagons were brought out, madly snatched implements, flails, brooms, and tins of kerosene were loaded in. Even ahead of Janovici, the whole Chaimovitch family raced along, standing on their wagon.
At the approach to the fields, Abba halted the wagon and they stared in awe. Nothing green could be seen. What seemed earth was not earth, but a brownish skin woven of insects. A humming arose as though what lay before them was a process of life.
Children ran, dragging briars, dried thistles, clods of dung, whatever might burn. Smoke rose, people drew back with smarting eyes, but the plague lay shimmering, humming on the earth.
All at once, Bronescu’s Eliyahu began to beat with a sickle on the end of an emptied kerosene can. Noise drove them off, the Yemenite said.
Everyone began to make noise, beating with stones, with sticks, on tins, on their wagons; children started shouting, women began a high-pitched kind of scream, “Away! Away!” and presently, in- deed, a movement was seen, a corner of the earth-smothering blanket was lifting itself away, while an answering kind of noise, a weird high-pitched insect shrill somehow akin to that of the women, rose above the maddening, pulsating hum, and the mass of locusts hovered in the air, and then, to a great triumphant outcry from the people, the plague moved on. But in another moment the human exultation turned to a cry of rage and dismay as the thick horde lowered itself, hovered, and then settled on a field beyond. Rushing there, the entire mass of villagers, as if possessed, resumed the din, shrieking, howling, beating on wagon-sides, on mattock-blades, shouting. Then, like a swept-up tablecloth, a wider, larger swarm of locusts suddenly left the ground; screaming savagely and beating louder, the humans advanced step by step onto the field. The swarm continued to lift and they ran under it, insensate, the children throwing stones upward. “Away!” they shrieked in a confused, laughing cry of pursuit, and boys put fingers in their mouths and whistled; someone fired a gun, and mounted men galloped under the swarm, more of them now firing pistols and rifles, howling imprecations upward, while those with empty cans ran along, beating, beating, to keep the plague from re-alighting.
Even though each knew the beasts would only come down again upon another field, there was a momentary end to the sense of helplessness. They had found a way. Something could be done. Now each settler rushed to his own land to see whether the plague was come upon him, cries arose. “To us! Help! Come to us!” and some ran here and some ran there, and the din and the shouting echoed from all sides.
To help in the battle, the entire population from the cluster of Yemenite huts had been summoned, and they came, beating on kettles, raising their voices in that raucous tone of theirs, and from the center of their clamor rose up, most piercing of all, the voice of Abadiya the shochet. Around his cry, presently, the other voices died away, for Abadiya’s wordless howl had become a harsh incantation, and it was no longer an outcry against the plague, but, with recognizable sounds, with words now, it became an outcry against man, against themselves, against iniquitous daughters who had called down the wrath of The Name upon them all, against the harlots who ran to the cities and fornicated with the goyim in the land: “You shall take them to a place of stoning and hurl stones upon them!” His body shook, his raucous voice cracked, and he was taken by a paroxysm of sobbing. The whole village stood as though transfixed in a circle somewhat away from Abadiya, while the throbbing rose from all around them on the fields, vengeful, grinding. It was Leah who broke the spell, hurrying forward toward the old man, but, as she would have touched him, he came to himself, stiffened, and nearly hurled her off—the touch of a woman not his wife. Several of his own people led him away, elders from their little congregation with whom Yankel had a few times prayed before the synagogue in Mishkan Yaacov was opened.
Little was said of the outburst. Work began again to drive off the hordes. Now flails and rakes beat them from the earth. Shula worked with the others, telling herself her feeling of guilt was absurd; no one had even glanced in her direction. And in the end what had she done—nothing! nothing! And this insane Abadiya’s poor little Yael—she too was probably just as innocent. Wasn’t she scrubbing floors for a few groschen in Tiberias?
Hour upon hour the population stumbled after the swarms, beating, shouting. Already a large part of the furthest Chaimovitch field was covered; the family stood in a knot gazing at the hopeless task, not knowing even at what corner to begin. Suddenly, Mati had a thought and told it to Schmulik, and Schmulik, who would not leave off beating with his flail, sent Shula back on the wagon to the farmyard. “Bring a long rope, bring iron lids, empty pots, milk cans—put stones in them to rattle,” he cried, and though she had never handled the mules, Shula lashed them homeward and gathered desperately whatever she could find.
The moment she returned, Schmulik, seizing the rope, began frantically tying together pots and pails, while Mati filled the pots with stones. Then Schmulik unhitched the animals and leaped on Chazak, kicking the sides of the mule while he dragged the rope with the whole chain of tins rattling on the ground behind him. The mule started to gallop. Mati climbed onto the second mule; this was his invention, even Schmulik proclaimed it—what a head on him, that little Mati! Wildly like cowboys they circled the horde of locusts, howling above the din of the dragging pails the cowboys cries that the American Joe Kleinman had once taught them. And there came a marvel: the horde rose up as though on command, and the Chaimovitch field, only half devoured, was clear.
In triumph the boys galloped on to help others, but presently the locusts were slower to rise, and then only patches lifted, and only when the hooves of the mules were almost upon them.
Some of the farmers were giving up. Janovici stood, exhausted, limp, by the edge of his field. He was mute. His wife, his two young boys, stood back a few steps from him. The woman looked at him. They did not get on well, it was known; often her shrill curses were heard halfway across the village. But now she said his name quietly, “Mikosh, come home, it is useless.” He waved her away—with the children, too, go, go—and hesitantly they left. He stood there, his mouth a tight bitter scar, his face black with smudge, grimed with sweat. It was futile, each stroke was like striking the sea, but he could not halt, he could not give up, he trampled the locusts on the ground, he swung the back of his spade on them, all the while in a hysterical whine muttering curses.
Yankel too could not stop. A patch of locusts had returned on his ground and he flailed at them. Wiping away sweat that was running into his eyes, he raised his head for a moment and there came into view the shrunken figure of Sheikh Ibrim on the small gray horse he still kept for himself.
“Are they not on your fields?” Yankel wondered.
“If you drive the devil from your house, he will but enter the house of your neighbor,” the Arab said, though with no reproach. And with a kind of wonder and pity, he continued, “Why do you labor, why do you exert yourself so? The end will be the same. They will devour all, and only then will they arise and go.”
It was so. All was useless. Even as Yankel gazed around him, again a black cloud approached from behind, lowering itself upon the fields. His arms were heavy. Along the wagon path he saw the desolate settlers, hunched and exhausted, returning to the village. His own children still made an effort, the boys on their mules, the girls following in their wake; now and again the insects rose and moved a bit, only, insolently, to settle on the field farther on. Yet something in his blood would not rest.
“It will be as Allah wills,” old Ibrim said.
It was useless to go against the will of God, and yet what was the will of God? Yankel groped in his heart for some cause for this punishment. Had he been unjust? And against some barrier in his mind there beat the vision of the moment of the raised arm that had struck down on his daughter. He denied. And even if there was a deserved punishment for him—then why the whole village, why the whole land? Why had God smitten the whole land of the Egyptians when it was their Pharaoh who was unjust? Or was it perhaps that each person in himself knows the injustice that is written against him, and that each must apply the curse to his own transgression?
Like his arm, his mind was heavy, he could not raise up his thoughts, yet just as the blood of his arm would not rest, so too his wearied mind throbbed on, to answer in some way, to do.
From the far end of his field, toward the village, a new outcry came. He saw Mati on the mule, riding toward him. “Abba! Abba! The grove!”
No, this he would not tolerate, not even from God. God or the evil one, wherever it came from. The good and the evil impulse—these were not only in man but in all creation. Why had he never understood this before? To the end of his strength he would storm against evil.
The lemon grove, with its tender leaves, the saplings they had planted here against all advice, he and his sons for once united, and with what labor they had nursed these saplings, each drop of water carried from the river. The grove from Reuven’s nursery. Despite all their disputes, even at times his hatred of Reuven, it was as though he were running now to protect the very life of his absent eldest son.
Among the small, tender trees, there was a turmoil as of Gehenna itself. Leah ran with a smoke torch, brandishing it wildly. An angry hum was over her head as the seething insects whirled. Mati and Schmulik had left the mules and were slapping with sacking against the locusts that covered the tree-trunks, trying even with their bare hands to sweep the devouring insects from the leaves. Yaffaleh too, and Eliza ran from tree to tree, striking noise from empty pails.
Schmulik had just managed to strip the beasts from one of the saplings, but like knowing evil beings now, they only hovered, to descend again on the small, half-chewed bud-leaves. Clawing at them, Schmulik let out a cry of despairing rage. Suddenly Feigel, to help him, undid her apron-strings and wrapped the cloth around the tree, tying it together firmly at the bottom of the trunk. “This one you won’t get!” she shrieked at the buzzing locusts.
Within all his misery, a wave of gratification came up in Yankel, of affection, indeed of love, even of the rightness that still existed in the order of the universe, just as when they had first arrived here and had had to lie in the hovel by the river, and there Feigel had made a good Sabbath.—Woman of valor!—he could have cried,—Eshet chayeel—But he said, “That is the way! that is the way! We’ll cover every tree! Run, bring clothes from the house!” Already he was stripping off his own shirt. “The pardess they won’t get away from us!”
Again Shula took the wagon, her mother riding with her. In the stable, in the house, they first seized every old rag, an old blanket, a piece of canvas—-but anything torn you could not use, even the smallest hole they would crawl through. With a great sigh Feigel opened the ancient trunk, drawing out her last tablecloth, the one she had saved for perhaps if Leah got married. Then even sheets from the beds—but still it was as nothing, two hundred trees had been planted, and now from the other room Shula came with her arms overflowing—petticoats. All of her own petticoats she had heaped up, and Leah’s, and Yaffaleh’s, and mother and daughter were seized with a kind of laughing frenzy—skirts too! every chemise! every nightgown! The entire Chaimovitch wardrobe! Let the whole village behold! Onto the wagon they heaped it all, and still it would hardly make a beginning. Then onto the field they came with their arms loaded, half-stumbling over the trailing ends of whatever they had seized, patched old sheets, petticoats, more aprons—would the voracious beasts even eat through the cloth? No, it was the green leaves they wanted, Schmulik said; from the covered trees they were easily driven away. —For once, Mameh declared cheerfully, it was useful to have so many daughters! But even Leah was somewhat taken aback as Shula wrapped around a tree her most feminine shift, the one with bowknots of blue silk tied all around the hem and neckline. “But, Shula!” she cried. “So then?” Shula responded. “And our washing we don’t hang out?”
From neighboring fields there came over the last of the settlers who had not yet given up and gone home. They stared at the mad Chaimovitches, the boys sweeping the locusts from the saplings, the girls binding their petticoats around the little trees—could it really save them? But what had been fetched was soon finished; again Shula raced homeward. She ran to Malka Bronescu—from Malka, from her mother, from Shoshana Mozensohn, from half her schoolmates she borrowed petticoats, and as the craze spread, other girls came with filled arms, laughing. When Shula arrived again with the wagon, her father spoke his first word to her since their great trouble. This time she had even brought the velvet gown that her mother had given her, the one she had worn at the dance in Gilboa. Yankel saw her about to bind it around a tree. “It won’t be needed,” he said. “We’ll find something else.”
In the morning, from all the fields, the thrumming still arose. The locusts had not departed. Men hurried out to see the worst. And there, in the midst of the disaster, only the lanes of white garbed lemon trees, the Chaimovitch pardess, stood intact.
The pious prayed in the shul. Again and again during the day the settlers would go out to look at their fields, but the plague had not lifted. They would pass the Chaimovitch grove. They did not even laugh at the strange assortment of pillowcases, petticoats, sacking. A few scratched their heads, wondering whether the trees would not suffocate? Leaves breathe in air. Several times during the day, Yankel and the boys came and unwrapped a few trees, but all seemed in order. The crops were lost, all except the potatoes and turnips that grew under the earth. Though Leah had built a smudge fire all around her vegetable garden, it too was destroyed.
Later in the day Max Wilner came to see for himself the rescued grove, for the fame of it had already reached HaKeren. The kvutsa’s own grove, the grove Reuven had planted, was totally devoured. Max gazed, nodding, with a wry smile. But even had someone thought of such a thing—“Our girls don’t have so many petticoats,” he said.
News came first from Yavniel, then from Gilboa, from Chedera, and from Petach Tikvah and the southern settlements. Everywhere, disaster. The curse was on the whole of the land.
Unceasing, the thrumming was in their ears. It had become maddening. And by now everyone knew what it promised; the locusts were mating, the females were burying eggs in the ground, and in twenty days, some said, in forty days, others said, the plague would be renewed, tenfold, a hundredfold worse.
What was to be done? How could they remain sitting day and night listening to the song of doom, helpless?
* * * *
That he had best try to keep himself clear of the drunken rages of Djemal Pasha, Reuven quickly understood. A word from Aaron Aaronson was not lost on him. “As with all tyrants,” Aaronson had remarked, when he saw Reuven installed in Damascus, “you do not approach unless you are summoned.”
Installed on the grounds of Djemal’s residence, in a stable-barracks of palace guards, he had almost at once been summoned by the Pasha for a tour of the grounds, an estate seized from a Syrian banker named Atassi who, Djemal shouted even now with wrath, had been plotting and conniving with the French consul to betray the regime. “We have the proof! We found the papers in the French consulate! Atassi escaped with the consul to Paris, but when Paris is taken, I will get him and hang him!” The graveled walk crunched under his boots. It was Djemal’s way, Reuven soon learned, to shout to anyone, even to his house servants, about traitors and betrayers, as though he suspected them, too.
The walks were bordered by low clipped box-bushes enclosing formal flower beds—a classic French garden with pieces of statuary. “Where will you put your Garden of Eden?” The Pasha had not forgotten. “Here!” With his quirt he circled the area. “Bring trees of every kind! Pomegranates and oranges. Will Jaffa oranges grow here?”
“If the soil—” Reuven began.
“Make them grow!” And leading up to the residence there must be a lane of palms such as he had seen at Aaronson’s agricultural station; let Reuven bring the finest palms from the Euphrates area, they must be transported full-grown. “Tomorrow you will take wagons, take a dozen men—”
Also in the city. At once the tour was made. There must be a new plan for the central square, more open space in the middle where there stood a giant oak.
“Ah, what a tree,” cried Reuven. “Indeed it should have space to be admired.”
—Twenty hangings at a time had been made from its branches, the Pasha cried. It was the governor’s hanging tree. “But not for me!” How could one degrade such a tree by hanging traitors, criminals, vermin from its branches? “I put up a gallows.”
Soon enough Reuven saw it. When he brought his laborers to the square, the gallows stood ready. Who was it for? No one answered. Only the elderly gardener, Musa, spoke to him with some freedom and self-respect; the laborers were not used to being talked to as equals, and feared to comment. Excited throngs were filling the square, jesting, shouting in a frenzy of eagerness. The culprits were traitors from high families, Musa said with equanimity, a doctor, the editor of a newspaper, they had been caught in their plottings, they had taken enemy gold to betray Turkey and rule themselves. All was politics, what could a poor man know?
Reuven did not want to see it; he took his laborers back to the Pasha’s garden, but the next morning the figures were still hanging, their dried distorted faces above white shrouds on which had been pinned large signs announcing their treason.
All around him there was such lust in cruelty, Reuven wanted only to creep away, to be by himself. In a cafe he encountered a few officers from Eretz, most of them translators here; the cafes were filled with political whisperings, the Turks were threatened everywhere with conspiracies, independence movements—the Syrians had secret societies, the highest Arab commanders were said to be members; why had Enver and Djemal Pasha decided to stamp out the Armenians? As an example, to frighten the Kurds, the Maronites, the Druze. All were seething, plotting to strike for independence.
Deep in the garden of the estate, behind a brick shed, Reuven had started a tree nursery, and into the shed he now brought a cot, explaining that he must be constantly watchful of the tender shoots. Away from the barracks, he was at peace. What a paradise he had fallen into! How was he deserving of this?
Soon Reuven found that he could go off afield for days in search of rare plants to bring back for the garden, particularly when Djemal Pasha was away on army inspection. Vast movements were taking place, a score of divisions, virtually the entire Palestine army, was marching north to reinforce Gallipoli against the British.
In a deserted hollow amongst low arid hills, Reuven came upon a strange grove of trees. They were gnarled and bowed like ancient olives, but as he made his way closer, he saw a shimmering of rose-amber tints among the leaves. Instantly Reuven felt the throb of prescience, of ancient knowledge and foreknowledge, a current going back and forth in his very veins. The trees, he saw at once, bore a species of nut—pistachio, but longer and fatter than any he had ever examined, a variety all its own—and surely it stemmed from antiquity, this isolated grove that had somehow remained and perpetuated itself in this cupped enclosure. Through all time this grove had stood here waiting. This was his own. A discovery.
Standing beneath the branches now, Reuven held back his hand for a moment as though asking permission. His father, it crossed his mind, would have said a thanksgiving to the Lord for having permitted him this finding. Then he plucked a few of the delicately tinted shells, and opened one, examining the pale oval kernel, touching the seed to his tongue, gently biting, confirming the flavor, perfumed and sweet. It was a morsel that might have delighted a concubine of King Solomon; Reuven envisioned a slender, long-fingered hand with jeweled rings reaching into a silver bowl.
Taking soil samples, examining the topography, sensing the wind, Reuven made his notes. Then carefully he made cuttings. One day, returned to HaKeren, he would plant such trees; the kvutsa would export the nut fruit to France, to America—what a find, what a discovery! This was something to show Aaron Aaronson, but even to him Reuven would not reveal the location!
Hurrying back excited with his find, and seeing that Djemal Pasha’s automobiles had arrived, Reuven could not put off showing his discovery, and sent in word by an adjutant.
In wrath, his eyes glazed, the Pasha fell on him: where had he been, on whose account was he wandering the land? where was he spying? twice he had been sent for—he should be summarily shot!
Foolishly, Reuven’s hand was extended with a sample of his find. As he began to explain, the Pasha’s quirt came down, slashing the open palm, the samples flying in all directions. Pistachios! Did he expect the army to be fed on pistachio nuts! Famine was falling over Palestine, a plague of locusts had descended. The crops were devoured.
—As for the Jews, Djemal cried, they could starve, whatever happened to them they deserved, and the Arabs too; they were traitors and plotting against Turkey. But his army! Where would bread come from for the army? An immediate survey was necessary to measure the extent of the disaster. As Reuven could not be found, he had set Dr. Aaron Aaronson to the task, and Reuven could consider himself fortunate that he was not sent to prison. Out! Out!
What would happen at the kvutsa? And to the family at home? Hastily, Reuven read what he could about the plague of locusts in the Bible; … the Lord brought an east wind on the land all that day and all that night, and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And then … And the Lord turned an exceeding strong west wind, which took up the locusts, and drove them into the Red Sea; there remained not one locust in all the border of Egypt. The swarms had appeared from the east on the prevailing winds. If only strong winds would carry them away! Even if he were there, what could he do?
He set to work planting his pistachios. What right had he, in the midst of disaster, to be gratified in his work? Toward dusk, as he planted the cuttings and the seeds in different samples of soil, Reuven heard the stomp of Djemal Pasha in the garden. At times at this hour the commander strolled. Now the tread came closer; the Pasha stood there, legs apart, with the defiant steadiness of the intoxicated.
Then carefully, like a colossus of Ashur, he lowered his bulk over the new plants and touched the tender leaves. —Was it true that the trees were thousands of years old? Where then was the grove? Malaala? He had passed in that region. In the direction of Mesopotamia.
And in a burst, seemingly without connection, the Pasha poured out angry words. Why was it he who was blamed for sending off the Armenians from their Anatolian villages into the wastes of Mesopotamia? Why did the whole world fall on him for atrocity? Not he but Enver Pasha was in authority over Anatolia! Only just now, supervising troop movements through the area, Djemal had personally issued orders for army bread to be distributed to the Armenian women and children on the roads. Bread which the troops would soon lack! But what else could have been done with the Armenians than to remove them? If they had not been cleared out entirely, they would have risen behind the army. At Erezum they would have let in the Russians! Year after year their fanatical leaders made risings! With their mothers’ milk their children sucked in hatred of the Turks. And did Reuven imagine only the Armenians were plotting? The Maronites in Lebanon had fifty thousand rifles hidden away. He could have loosed the Lebanese Moslems on them and wiped them out, but he had refrained. Only their leaders were arrested. They would hang. As for the so-called cultural conference in Beirut, it was nothing but a mask for a secret nationalist organization; those plotters too would hang, every one of them! Even the Druze could not be trusted. And the Jews. Oh, he knew about the plans of the Jews. He knew about their secret army, the Shomer. Djemal’s eyes impaled Reuven. He could have loosed the Bedouin on the Jews, but had he done so? He was not a man to massacre women and children. He was not a hater of the Jews. They were a valuable people. The Moslems has always known them for a useful people. He would not destroy the Jews, but they must be careful. Just like others they had traitors amongst them. Where were there no traitors? Even among the highest Arab Moslems. Why had the Sherif of Mecca, the descendant of Mohammed, not yet confirmed the Sultan’s proclamation that this was a holy war, a jihad? Could the Sherif of Mecca not realize that the Arabs together with the Ottoman Moslems could constitute the greatest power in the world? Yet in the attack on Suez the Bedouin horsemen promised by the Sherif had failed to appear. With them, it could have succeeded! Who could know but what that old dog Sherif Husein was playing a double game? It was said that one of his sons had been in contact with the English. Everywhere there was intrigue, deception, betrayal.
The eyes bulged at Reuven. Would the plague of locusts, Djemal suddenly demanded, spread over Syria? Would it destroy the wheat of Golan?
Reuven hardly dared speak. In some strange way, this tyrant, from the day of his rescue had made an omen of him. The locust swarms were more likely to move westward out to sea, Reuven half whispered. All depended on the winds.
On the fifth day of the plague, two horsemen galloped into Mishkan Yaacov. One of the riders sat squat, riding solid like a Napoleon; it was Aaron Aaronson, Leah saw, and at once ran out to him, for this was her first sight of the famous argronomist since Reuven had written how Aaronson had rescued him from the hands of Bahad-ad-Din. As would be his way, Reuven had not told the story in all its brutality, but details had seeped through from Arabs who had seen it—it was from death itself that Aaronson had taken Reuven.
Alongside the scientist, on a more showy steed, boyish and lithe, and as usual wearing a keffiyah, rode Avshalom Feinberg. Politely acknowledging Leah’s gratitude but almost brushing it aside, Aaronson came at once to his task: the locusts. At a glance he had already measured the ravage. “You must call together the men. I will explain what to do next.”
Mati was already running to call Bronescu. Meanwhile the riders must at least have a glass of cold buttermilk—Feigel approached with the crock. Yes, he had seen Reuven in Damascus, Aaronson said, indeed only yesterday. Reuven was well, she need not worry. “Your son is probably the happiest soldier in the war.” Reuven had become Djemal Pasha’s own adviser. Oh, not for military matters, but quite the opposite—not to destroy but to plant. Not only Djemal’s palace garden, but the entire city of Damascus was to be transformed so that the name of Djemal Pasha would live forever as the creator of boulevards and parks, and it was Reuven who was to devise and plan it all, sumptuous public gardens, fountains, and avenues of trees. “So you see, what better task could have befallen a pacifist?”
Feigel glowed. And it was through him, this Aaronson himself, she knew, that such good fortune had come to Reuven; she knew also of the rescue from punishment, though the full horror had not been told her. If Aaronson had only let her, she would have kissed the man’s hands.
He had not yet dismounted; from every yard the villagers were hurrying, their wives behind them, each calling out to Aaron Aaronson the extent of his disaster—what fields, what plantings he had lost—how was he to live, where was he to get new seed, what was he to do?
Tersely, the argronomist gave orders. The mukhtar, Bronescu, must be the commander here, and they must act as an army, as one, to prevent the greater disaster that was soon to come. In three weeks the spawn would emerge. “The eggs are already planted in your soil in countless millions. The locusts may have seemed to you without number, but you must multiply them by the thousand thousands. Each pair of locusts has left thousands of eggs just beneath the surface of your soil. They will mature and emerge. The locusts ate what was green. The larvae will devour everything—you hear, everything.”
Then what could they do? They must hurry and plow: plow day and night, not once but three times, five times, to bury the larvae so deep that they could not emerge. No, kerosene would not kill them unless the entire surface of the land could be flooded, and where would they get kerosene? Lye would be more destructive than helpful. Only plowing. “But if it is not deep enough, they can crawl out. If you see them crawling out, you must dig trenches, sweep them into the trenches and bury them. Understand?” He gazed around on their faces the way a general before battle anxiously, uncertainly, weighs the valor of his troops.
Their faces had fallen despondent. Instead of a remedy, what was before them was only more labor, more disaster. To plow five times, every inch of the soil, in the space of a few days—who had such strength? —The advice of a great expert, Mikosh Janovici remarked in Roumanian, but he himself probably had never put his hands to a plow even once. Catching the words, Aaronson replied in kind, in Roumanian, for were not the settlers of Zichron all from that land? The familiarity somehow dissipated part of the gloom. Dismounting, Aaronson cried, “Here, the expert who never put his own hands to a plow will show you something.” Just inside the Chaimovitch yard, he squatted on the ground, peering close, then with the blade of his pocketknife, he made a little jab, and raised the knife to show them, on the tip, a tiny translucent bead, the insect’s birth-sack. As everyone crowded near, Leah and Mati too knelt on the earth. The farmers, the children, the whole village pressed in, as Aaronson demonstrated how by a careful examination of the soil they could tell, as he had, where to find the eggs. “The female scoops a tiny hole with her tail, she deposits her egg-sack, and scrapes earth over it with her hind legs,” he explained. Absorbed as she was in his words, Leah could not help thinking about Aaronson himself. He was unmarried. It was said he had for years been hopelessly in love with the wife of his best friend, a doctor in Zichron. A strange man. How alone he must be.
Many now, with their faces close to the earth, were searching but could not find the tiny holes. The first to succeed was Mati. Yes, yes, that’s it—they must dig them out, throw them in a pail and then bury them, deep.
“But there are millions! The earth is filled with them!” On her knees, Leah searched in a destroyed flower bed. The earth was liked a pocked skin. Something between revulsion and awe rose in her. Lifting out one of the tiny sacks she held it on her palm. A man’s face bent close to hers, over the bead of life. It was Avshalom Feinberg, with that warm, excited intensity you always saw in his face. “Just think,” he remarked, “if all the millions of human sperm were to germinate as well!”
He chuckled, and added, “Then we would really have wars, to get rid of all the grubs!”
“This war isn’t enough for you?” she asked. He was another handsome one. It was said that first Sara Aaronson and then her younger sister had fallen in love with him, and for the sake of her stricken sister, Sara had accepted a match with a rich merchant from Constantinople and gone there to live. Avshalom and his Sons of Nimrod—enough trouble they had caused the Shomer in Chedera.
Aaron Aaronson was now starting out to inspect the fields, and as Leah followed, Avshalom walked beside her, leading his horse. His step was quick and light, like the animal’s.
—Did she know that her young brother Gidon was fighting with the British? he asked. With a Jewish unit led by Josef Trumpeldor, in the terrible battle of Gallipoli?
No! Leah had not known. Of Trumpeldor’s gathering a Jewish army in Alexandria, whispers had come. And that Gidon would join such an army was a foregone conclusion. But—in Gallipoli? One day, it was dreamed, they would appear victorious, here in Eretz driving out the Turks. But they were in Gallipoli? Was he certain? How did he know?
Ah, he had ways of knowing.
Then did he know more? How did he know of Gidon?
Gidon had been one of those mentioned, since everyone knew him to be a good fighter.
Mentioned? By whom?
Ah. Avshalom Feinberg assumed a mysterious air, but the air of a man who is drawing you on to ask more. The Jewish troops wore the Star of David on their caps, did she know that? he said. And their unit would be only the beginning. Perhaps after Gallipoli the British would even land them here in Eretz on the coast. The entire Yishuv should be ready to rise and join them, and free Eretz from the Turks! “Then the land will be ours. Only when we have fought for it and shed our blood can we claim the land as ours!”
But—to fight here openly against the Turks? It would be mad —Djemal Pasha would obliterate every Jew, as he had done with the Armenians. Already he kept threatening it, again and again he promised it!
Yet Avshalom’s words raised an echo in her. Where had she heard them—almost these very same words about fighting for the land! From Dovidl, from Avner, before they were sent into exile. And from Galil too. “Only when we have fought and shed our blood for it can we claim this land as ours.” And to secure arms. To be ready. But they had meant not to fight for the British. It was to be for the Yishuv itself. To save it, against no matter whom. When the test came, here in the land. And as for Josef Trumpeldor, everyone had understood he had left Eretz to join the Russian army. It was still the Russian patriot in him. The English were on the side of Russia, and therefore for him, the case was clear. And for Gidon and all those in Alexandria to join with him —they were young men, they must have been drawn into the war and they preferred to go together as Jews. Just as Dovidl and Avner had wanted the Jews to go together as Jews if they had to be in the Turkish army. In every country, Jews were fighting for that country. And it would be better if they could be together.
From the excited way Avshalom watched her, she knew he was following her every thought. No, Avshalom said, it was not the same for Jews to fight on one side or the other. All Jewish strength must go to the side of the democracies, the French and the British. There it would count.
—Could Jews count at all, in this great world conflict? Leah wondered. “We are so small. We must only try to save ourselves, and continue our work. How can a few Jewish soldiers help decide the war, for one side or the other?”
Again Avshalom took on a mysterious air. “We can. There are ways where a few count as many.” Then he stopped. —If she wanted, he added, he would try to find out something about her brother Gidon.
Vaguely, Avshalom let her understand that he had connections. After all, he had many friends in France. Perhaps in a roundabout way he could receive news. Through Aaron Aaronson, who still received letters that came on American ships, as his experimental farm was supported from America. And through American friends contact could also be made with the British.
Leah fell silent. Why she could not tell, but she felt wary, as one sometimes feels in an unfamiliar place. She felt as though she were being drawn the wrong way, perhaps. “Do you hear from Sara?” she asked.
“Aaron hears,” he said. Then he added, “It’s what she writes underneath the postage stamps, in tiny microscopic letters.” He walked a bit in silence, then burst out, “If you want to know what Djemal Pasha and his partners are doing to the Armenians—before Sara left, it was agreed we must look under the stamps.” It was an old Jewish device, even in Russia it had been used. “What you’ve heard is nothing, a few massacres. Like pogroms, you think. Let me tell you. A pogrom passes. This is something else. It is a complete plan. It is the annihilation of the whole people. To kill them all.” It was done town by town, village by village, he said. First the men were taken away as though for the army, but they were murdered in a wood or a ravine. Then the whole village, children, old people, women, were rounded up and marched off, with horsemen with knouts to keep them moving on the road. “Wherever they pass, no one is allowed to come near them with food or water. They are driven eastward into the wilderness, and the dead and dying are left by the roadside.” The two of them were standing stock-still now, and Avshalom, his face no longer boyish, cried out, “Not in one village, and not in ten, but already in half the Armenian towns this has happened, Sara writes. It is attested. Christian pastors have gone out and seen it. Only in the cities, the Armenians have not yet been molested. But the Turks will finish with those, as well. It is the greatest slaughter the world has ever known. And if the world knows, it does nothing to stop it. That’s what I hear from Sara.”
He flung the words at her as though to accuse her of having expected gossip of a lingering romance, a broken heart. “You’re afraid they’ll do to us as to the Armenians. The whole Yishuv sits trembling. And exactly because of our fear, Bahad-ad-Din will take whatever he wants from us, and when they have squeezed all they want out of us and are ready to repeat the Armenian slaughter on us, they’ll do it. And no one will interfere, not even their cultured German allies.”
She could not speak.
“Would the Armenians be any worse off if they fought back?” Avshalom demanded. It was said that in one city on the Russian border they had fought, and held off a whole Turkish army until the Russians came. “And that is what we Jews must prepare to do while there is still time.”
—With his band of twenty Sons of Nimrod he would hold off the Turks?—
“Don’t laugh.” And by now Avshalom was altogether another man, flaming, fanatic. “Perhaps not twenty, but a few hundred could carry out a great deed. Seize a stronghold on the coast—the beach at Tantura, or better, the Crusader port at Athlit. “The whole area there is virtually unguarded. In half a day the British fleet could reach us. With their landing secured by the Jews of Palestine, the British could cut straight across to Damascus—”
She could not help reminding him, had not he and his band even given up their guns when the Bahad-ad-Din demanded them? At least the men of the Shomer had managed to hang onto their weapons.
Avshalom glared at her. “You know well enough why we had to give up our guns. They had me and Alexander Aaronson, they had already beaten the soles off our feet. Then they gave us three hours before they would seize our sisters and turn them over to a barrackful of their officers.”
In Gilboa the story had been told as a mere tale. But from Avshalom it had a different ring. And why else had Alexander Aaronson at once taken his sister Rifka off to safety in America? “I saw my Smith and Wesson in the hands of an Arab in Nablus the day after I turned it in.” Then with a fine Arab curse, Avshalom laughed. “Never mind, I bought it back, I have it.”
Now he turned his face to her, serious, fiery. “Leah, this is no time for the Shomer to despise us, and we them. You are a woman of sense and everyone respects you. I plead with you, bring us together into one united organization to defend the Yishuv.”
Perhaps indeed there was far more to him than she had known, perhaps because of old hatreds between the planters and the chalutzim, someone like Avshalom had been misunderstood. “Twice already the Turks have had me in their hands,” Avshalom said, “and I vowed if I got away with my life, I would pledge that life to fight them.”
Of one of his arrests she had heard only vaguely; it seemed to have been over a prank, for on an outing, a number of the sons and daughters of the orange growers had galloped down to the beach at Caesarea. Couples had wandered off, with only an occasional flicker of a lantern as they strolled. Near the ruins of Caesarea the Circassians had a village, and from there someone had spun a tale about Jews making lantern-signals to British boats. This tale had been embellished with further tales about camel caravans bringing sacks of Jewish wheat to the shore to be sold and taken off at night to enemy vessels. As a result of the wild story, the Kaymakam of Nablus had raided Chedera, arresting a dozen young men, Avshalom among them, and it had needed the influence of Aaron Aaronson with Djemal Pasha himself to keep them from being hanged.
And now Avshalom declared, “Leah, when we lay in their dungeon waiting to be hanged, something came over me like a vision. After their lashing I had a malarial attack. I lay on a stone bench and I saw everything clearly as it could and must happen. The story about us that they invented—what is a story, Leah, but the inspiration for truth? The flickering lights on the beach, the signals to the ships—yes, that is exactly what we should do!” He would make contact with the British, with the French. Not at Caesarea, where too many Circassians wandered about, but at the ruins of Athlit. “Aaron’s experimental farm covers the whole shore behind the ruins. Look, Leah, if the Shomer works with us, we can prepare, and plan with the British, and on the appointed day, seize the ruins and raise our flag. It is an impregnable position—a hundred men could hold it against an army. And the Turks have no real army here—Djemal Pasha emptied Palestine for Gallipoli. While the main Turkish army is still held up in Gallipoli where your brother is fighting them, it needs only a small British force to land where we hold the shore. They could cut the Turks in two.” Then he quoted Herzl, “‘If you will it, it need not remain but a dream.’ ”
Now she felt she understood Avshalom Feinberg. He was a poet aflame with a vision. “You have a great imagination, Avshalom,” Leah said. “It would make a wonderful poem. Why don’t you write it?”
He flung her an angry look. “In times like this one does not write poems,” he said. “One lives them.” And he walked ahead quickly, as though to rid himself, in disgust, of her lumpish lack of understanding. Then all at once he halted. Before them was the little lemon grove that her father had saved from the locusts. In their rows, the trees stood still attired in all their raiment, the patched sheets, the striped pillow cases, but more than anything, the white petticoats.
A gale of laughter burst from Avshalom. All his angry wild plans seemed forgotten. In delight he cried out something in English. “Petticoat Lane!”
When at last he stopped laughing, he explained to her; Petticoat Lane—it was a famous street in London. —And this that they had done, she and her father and the whole family, this was not a wild thing of the imagination? he demanded. This was not poetry? This was not impossible?
But it had saved the trees, she explained.
“Against a vast army of locusts that covered the earth, and against which nothing could stand. Except only a bit of human imagination, a bit of daring, Leah!” And he was changed again. Now his words poured forth not as a grandiose vision but in simplest reasonableness, as though there could be no other way of thinking. What future lay before the Yishuv with the Turks? Only famine, disaster, massacre. If the Turks won they would destroy every minority, impose Ottoman culture completely, as they had already shown was their intention. The beginning was already here, with Hebrew virtually outlawed, with even a Keren Kayemeth stamp a crime. But even aside from the Jewish fate, what kind of world could there be? All that was alive in the world, all that was new and fresh in the arts, the whole modern awakening as he had seen it in Europe—in painting, in literature and in freedom of thought—all was in the spirit of the French. It flowed out from Paris. To such a world their strength must go, win or lose, live or die.
She thought him a poet, he knew, an impractical man—but was such a man as Aaron Aaronson impractical? A scientist, a man of sober judgment. “He too has decided, Leah.”
What was he leading to? What had they decided? What did he want of her?
“Our fate is with the Allies. In whatever way possible we must help the Allies.” Perhaps it would not yet lead to a landing on the Palestine shore, but was not Palestine a battlefield nevertheless? Had not the Turks and the Germans already attempted to sweep down and capture the Suez Canal? “They will try again, you can be certain. The war is here, and we can be of great value, regardless of our numbers.”
Had she not heard, in wars, of work carried out behind enemy lines?
The word for it came from within herself—spying. Leah did not repeat it to him; it was abhorrent. Even the clever look in his eyes now seemed to her to have become somehow besmirching, as Avshalom measured her response to his revelation. Oddly, he did not even seem to notice her immediate aversion.
—Why did she think they had come here, he and Aaronson? he asked her. True, to help the farmers against the plague—this, Aaron would have undertaken in any case. But it fell well for their greater purpose. From Djemal Pasha, Aaron Aaronson had received authority to go everywhere, he and his helpers, even to enter military areas. The disposition of the army, the fortifications, the condition of the food supply both for the soldiers and the civilian population, all this information must be gathered and sent to the other side. This was the great task—
Now Leah made herself say it. “You mean to spy?” She tried to keep out of her tone any shock, any revulsion over the word itself. When a human being opened his secret before you, when he was ready to put his whole life into the most terrible danger, because of his deepest beliefs, how could you shame him?
“In today’s wars,” Avshalom said, “it is called Intelligence. It is the way one person can serve with the weight of many. It is even a way to save the lives of many soldiers, when the battle comes.”
She did not want to say it was wrong. But her head was shaking slowly from side to side. “It is something I could never know how to do.”
Would she arrange, he suddenly asked, for him to speak with Menahem? “Don’t fear—not about Intelligence, Leah.” The sparkle had returned in his eyes. “Who knows, we and the Shomer might still lead a British invasion into the land, together.”
Only Nadina and Galil could have decided whether even to bring such a question before the committee. And if it went before the committee, Menahem reflected, how long could the secret remain a secret? That was the great danger of the whole plan. It could not long remain unknown to the Turks. Such a one as Avshalom would himself give the secret away; he was impetuous.
Of the cause, Menahem did not need to be convinced; he had already calculated in his mind on which side lay the best hope for the Jews. Certain ideas had come to him, even of the sort Avshalom spoke about. At the Samekh station, how simple it would be for a wagon-driver to keep count of the war materiel coming into the land. Even at the Fuleh station, someone in a cigarette kiosk could see what army units, what officers, were arriving. Such information would be valuable to the Allies. And simply here at Gilboa, the number of German fliers.
Avshalom’s wilder plans, such as raising the flag at Athlit—that was a poet playing at war. True, such landings had been made. Yet aside from all this, even at a minimum, the need for some kind of cooperation between the different Jewish defense groups for procuring arms, for readiness and a united resistance in case of another Armenia—surely for this purpose alone it was necessary to bring Avshalom’s request before a meeting. The question was, how far should the shomer go?
He would have put it first before Shimshoni, who commanded in place of Galil, but Shimshoni’s answer he knew in advance. Straightforward, plain, Shimshoni detested the sons of the planters and would never agree to work with them. Perhaps better, if they went first to the Herzlia Gymnasia group in Tel Aviv with whom Rahel was in contact?
But meanwhile, as Avshalom had put it, suppose he himself—suppose some knowledge came to him that would be of importance to pass on? What should he do?
Troubled, Menahem came late to his cot. It was often so, from late sittings, or from night duty, that even when he was at home in Gilboa, he had hardly a word with Dvora. Yet this night he sensed Dvora lay awake.
She too was troubled. Where was she to find feed for the poultry flock? It might even come to the point where the chickens would have to be slaughtered, and the communa would have to feast on them.
Of the secret problem he did not tell her, but of the problem of unity they talked a long while. It was a long time since they had had such a good talk together, and after a while Dvora came over to his cot and into his arms.
After the thrumming had ended, and the plague of locusts had risen from the fields, hovered like a low cloud, and at last floated away, all had lain barren and still. Not a shoot, not a leaf on a vine, not a speck of green was to be seen except for the patch where Yankel and the boys removed the coverings that had saved the lemon trees. They returned home with the wagon heaped with petticoats, and Feigel and Shula set themselves to washing and ironing, first those that had been borrowed, tubful after tubful.
In the vegetable garden behind the house, a patch too narrow for the plow, Yaffaleh worked, squatting low to the ground as she dug out egg-pouches and dropped them into a bucket. A few of her geese had discovered the delicacy and their long necks bent into the pail as they gobbled the eggs. In the larger garden, Leah plowed, burying the eggs the way Aaronson had instructed. She must plant at once, quick-growing beans, squash, carrots. Schmulik came, impatient for the mule and the plow. Abba with the good pair of mules was already back in the fields. Into the dark they labored and every day without halt, to leave no earth unturned, to bury the egg sacs.
Already the famine was acute in the cities. Wagons came from Jaffa, from Jerusalem, merchants searching to buy the few sacks of grain hoarded away from last year. Wheat was worth its weight in gold. Potatoes, turnips, anything, they begged.
To HaKeren came representatives from all the kvutsoth in the region, now numbering nearly a dozen, some dominated by the Poale Zion, some by the Poël Hatzaïr. No matter, in this they must act together. The real famine was yet to come, Max Wilner reminded the delegates, and in the wild speculation that had already started, who would suffer more than the workers, the unemployed, the poor in the cities, and the low-salaried teachers? They must take certain things on themselves. All that they produced must be distributed under their own control. First they must supply those who were most needed in the Yishuv. Workers’ kitchens, before any other consideration, must be assured of supplies. They themselves must ration their sale of milk, for children, for hospitals. He proposed a central cooperative to which they would all send their produce, eggs, milk, vegetables, grain when they had it, and from there the food would be sold according to their own priorities, without going through the hands of speculators.
For once, the two groups were in agreement. But what produce was there to distribute? The grubs were appearing, devouring all.
Mati saw them first, small white wormlike things dotting the compost heap. He called Schmulik. Under their very eyes the crawling dots were drawing together, forming a little mass, like ants forming an army. And the mass began to move.
This must be the danger Aaron Aaronson had spoken of. They had not thought of searching the dungheap for egg-sacs.
Hurriedly they began digging a trench. By full morning it was a frightening thing to behold—like a creeping white lava, the living, devouring, pulsing blanket smeared itself onward. Despite all that had been done to destroy the eggs, the grubs oozed upward out of the garden patches and began a creeping devastation of the new plantings. From yard to yard the outcry was heard. With brooms, the women tried to sweep the pestilence into hastily dug troughs, but even from those, unless they were full ditches, the white lava swelled outward.
On Leah’s plowed field, they had not come up, but the neighboring vegetable garden, once the Kleinmans’, was covered with the milky horror, and as Tsutsig Bronescu ran from one side to another with his mattock, his wife screamed that the flood was invading the kitchen, the house. And Leah saw one edge of that flow slowly extending, like spilled milk, in her own direction. With armfuls of straw, she hurriedly laid a barrier of fire, but unbelievably, as though commanded, the devouring wave divided itself as it neared the barrier into two prongs reaching out to encircle the line of flame. On one end, Leah ran, flinging down straw to extend the fire, on the other end Mati furiously chopped open a ditch, while Feigel came with a broom to sweep the worms into it.
In the field, Schmulik and Abba labored a second time to save the grove. From the hillside of Dja’adi, which had never been plowed after the locust plague, the white phlegm was rolling inexorably downward. No wrapping, no cloth could this time protect the young trees; at once they had understood this. The grubs de- voured even the bark. Only a deep trench could stop the flow. Abba plowed as deeply as he could, while Schmulik labored with the mattock to dig the furrows deeper, pausing only to glance at the creeping whiteness—how long would it take? a day? Given a day they could dig their moat all around the grove.