EVEN A glass of tea had become a rare luxury. The familiar Wissotsky packets had disappeared from the shops, as had all else except for scant supplies of chick peas rationed by the committee of notables. Even olives were kept in the rear.
With her girls, Leah raised mint for tea. First they supplied the weak and the sickly. Everyone was gaunt; Leah herself had grown thin, and on her last visit home Shula had joked that, as with her own Nahum, it had taken a war to make Leah beautiful.
And Leah added to the jest, “Yes, and just when there are no men.”
Who could be concerned in these days over romance, over personal matters? The entire Yishuv was shriveling, dying. In the cities only half were left. Some had escaped to Egypt, some even to Damascus, but the rest had died, who knew from what, from disease, from starvation.
Among the Arab villages it was not as bad, but bad. The fellah who had a bit of earth to till still managed to hide away enough grain for his pittah, but the wage-workers now wandered about with hard, sometimes frightening, looks in their eyes. More and more of the orange growers had abandoned their groves; they had no benzine for their irrigation pumps, and where, to whom, would they sell their oranges?
Even here with their vegetable farm inside the village a night watch had to be kept over the growing cabbages, and each night the girls went out two by two. One night, dashing Dov the paymaster made a hurried stop, awakening Leah to leave not only two more British rifles that Bedouin had sold him, but a wondrous gift, a package of English tea that had been bartered along with the guns. When Dov left, Leah took it into her head to bring out a jug of real tea to the girls on watch—tonight it was Rahel who watched with Zipporah. So as not to come on them suddenly and give them a fright, she marched boldly on the gravelly path just inside the lane of cypress. Suddenly she heard a shriek such as she herself had let out on a famous night on watch long ago in the Aaronson vineyard in Zichron, when she had heard scraping sounds, and caught a pair of Arabs loading clusters onto their donkeys. Running forward now, the tea half spilling from the spout, Leah was brought up short by Rahel, holding the famous little pistol that Avner had left with her, with Zipporah behind her with a rake.
“Oh—it’s only you!” Zipporah cried.
“I almost shot,” said Rahel. And then, in relieved anger, “Leah! I’ve begged you a thousand times! Why must you wear those men’s shoes!”
It was the sound of the hobnailed boots that had frightened them.
“And I spilled half the tea. Real tea.”
The incident became a watchword with the girls whenever anything frightened them. “Don’t worry. It must be Leah in her hobnails, bringing tea.”
For Chanukah Leah decided to have a party. “Why should life be so grim?” Zipporah kept insisting. Hunger, war, fear, loneliness—enough! There were several young men in the village, after all, a few farmers’ sons with exemption papers, and even a few chalutzim who had good hiding places. Two of the girls had their sweethearts among them and saved food for the boys, who slipped over to stand with them in their turns on guard. A system had even been established—one couple on watch, the other “resting.” That still made two on guard, didn’t it?
But most of the girls were lonesome, and if word of Leah’s Chanukah party were spread to Rehovot and Beer Tuvia, surely more young men would appear.
Though there were no potatoes for Leah’s celebrated latkes, she had saved a little oil and promised to make eggplant pancakes that could not be told from the real thing. There was no sugar—who had seen sugar in a year? But they held back from the marketing cooperative a portion of honey from their hives. And on the morning of the party a farmer’s wife, Rifka Belman, astonished the girls by bringing a full crock of milk. It tasted of oranges, for her husband was one of those who at least made use of part of his wasting crop by feeding oranges to the remaining cows. Rahel brought a few bottles of wine from Rishon, and they had dates and figs, enough to make a show on the plates, and really heaps of almonds from the grove.
When the time came to dress, Rahel, who from nowhere had produced a gown with Yemenite embroidery, plagued Leah—for once!—and sat her down and arranged her hair in an upward billow such as she had seen in Paris just before the war. Then, for what to wear, Rahel pulled out the old suitcase from under Leah’s cot, and, underneath a torn sweater that even Leah could no longer put on, she found the long, loose white-wool abaya made years ago for Leah’s swan dance.
“But what’s this!”
“It was for the visit of Chaim Nachman Bialik,” Leah blushed.
They made her try it on. Studying the effect, Rahel pulled off her own embroidered belt and tied it around Leah’s waist, high under her breasts. All the girls gasped. Suddenly it was a fashionable gown. “C’est la mode Empire!” Rahel pronounced, and Zipporah fetched a glittering Spanish comb to put in Leah’s hair.
Now the whole little kvutsa began adding ornaments and rings and bracelets to beautify their Leah. “Oh, she’s a queen!” a tiny one, Pnina, cried out. “Oh, I’m going to sew myself a gown just like hers!” Leah kept protesting, laughing, but they held up a hand mirror for her to look into, and Zipporah insisted on putting kohl around her eyes: “Sit still!” The girls were having such a happy time, she submitted to everything.
Finally, perfection achieved, the girls commanded her to parade up and down for their approbation. Already hoofbeats were heard—men were coming!
Before they could even see who had alighted there burst in Zev the Hotblood, crying “What! A party, and you didn’t even invite me!” He had come along with a boy from the next village, the round-faced, red-cheeked Naaman Belkind, son of one of the early Bilu families. “And I brought my cousin too,” Naaman said, with a mixture of shyness and pride, as his cousin was Avshalom Feinberg. And with Avshalom there had to be the Hothead, for since Zev had saved him in Beersheba from being hanged as a spy, they were seen everywhere together.
Before Leah, Zev halted agape. “By my life!” He made a sweeping bow of homage to beauty. “Avshalom, speak! Even in Paris has anyone seen such as this?”
“Why Paris? Not even in Jerusalem in King Solomon’s day!” responded Avshalom.
All the girls were gawking at him, and the first remark from his lips did not disappoint them. This night would be bright. There would be glowing words, and feelings would rise and flash between men and women, and at least for tonight they would not be only girls making their shrill liveliness amongst themselves; already there was heard that lower womanish laughter that holds promise.
More young men appeared, a harmonica and an accordion played, several couples were in the yard and a few were wandering down the cypress lane, where Avshalom, with Naaman clinging to him, was the center of a small group around a stone bench. Avshalom was singing a song in French, and Rahel was joining in: “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y dan-se, l’on y dan-se—” Inside the house, another group had somehow got to singing Yiddish songs—“Oif’n pripitchik” they were singing, and passing on to Hebrew songs of the chalutzioth. Soon the hora would begin out there in the yard; Zev the Hotblood had already received a few slaps on his roving hands, and at one point Leah even asked Avshalom to take away from Zev the bottle of arak he had brought, from which he kept taking swallows.
Avshalom poured some of the liquor into a tumbler and, mixing it with water, watched it grow cloudy. Did she know this was also a favorite drink in the cafes of Paris, he said, particularly with artists and poets, though there it was made with absinthe and was even stronger than here? And he recited the praise of absinthe by a French poet, Baudelaire.
Now they were sitting together talking. Leah knew very well that nothing was likely to happen between them, for many reasons, not really his lack of height, but rather, that Avshalom was betrothed to the youngest Aaronson girl, the one who had been sent to America for safety. And also he was said to be in a deep entanglement with Sara. Everyone knew there had been something between him and Sara even before he fell in love with little Rifka; it was even said Sara had married and gone to Damascus so as to free him for her sister. But now it was said Sara had come home not merely on a visit, but had really left her husband. Not only Rifka was gone from Zichron; Aaron Aaronson was mysteriously no longer to be seen—he had gone to Berlin, it was said. Thus Sara and Avshalom were much alone together at the agricultural station. Everyone talked of them. Sara was no girl now but a mature woman. Even Rahel didn’t keep back from this bit of gossip. In the course of her flitting from place to place, she had not long ago gone to work with her agronomy diploma in Aaronson’s laboratory in Athlit on the classification of plants; but no sooner had Aaron gone off on his voyage than Avshalom had dismissed her from the station, as though he wanted no strangers there.
Slightly as she knew Sara, Leah could not imagine her as a woman who took love lightly. Sara was of a strong and serious nature and Avshalom too, despite his flamboyance, was of a serious nature. Though he liked to pose as a man of extravagant experiences, and would often remark enigmatically that he had enjoyed everything that was to be found in Paris, such things were only what was expected of a handsome and dashing poet. His true self, she felt certain, was profound, and passionate. It could not be said of him, as of her own Handsome Moshe, that he lightly set out to break women’s hearts, that he misled young girls. Here in this room every girl would tell you, yes, she could fall in love with Avshalom Feinberg! But it would only be like innocent, excitable girls chattering to each other over the picture of a famous actor. And that was all that Avshalom would reveal of himself—an image.
This was also why Leah felt that nothing could happen between Avshalom and herself; his soul was hidden, it was pledged, whether to Rifka or Sara or both. Alongside him she felt a joyous excitement, not particularly sexual, but a great stimulation, a meeting with a person who raised her out of her day-to-day life—a poet, an artist. Others too had been to Paris, even to America. Rahel could speak of Paris, the museums, the theaters, but Avshalom really belonged inside that world of culture, of art, of a living civilization. Sometimes Leah’s heart longed for it, with a longing almost as strong as her longing for a man.
“You knew her!” she cried out as Avshalom happened to speak of the famous dancer, Isadora Duncan, of her sitting near him amongst a circle of young artists and poets at a cafe. “Oh, what is she really like?”
“Why,” he gave her a measuring look, the way Yosi the sculptor had once done at the Bezalel school, “Why, she is just like you!” he laughed. “When I came in and saw you in that dress, I felt something like a recognition, and that’s it! Yes, Leah! She even wears a gown like this, she had it made in Greece!” He chuckled with pleasure. Leah ran and brought him the book Rahel had given her with drawings and photographs of the dancer, and Avshalom quoted lines that a French poet had written about Isadora, and translated them for her into Hebrew, and gazed again on Leah, crying out how much alike they were, and this seemed to carry her a little distance into that other world.
“You long for it, don’t you?” he perceived. “You hunger for that world of art and civilization.”
“Ah,” she confessed, “and then I put on my heavy shoes and go out to work in our fields. To our generation it fell to begin from the beginning and remake ourselves. Later perhaps we can come to such things.”
“You still go on repeating all this!” he cried. “And I—I am not of the same generation? My father was a Bilu. Thirty years ago he spoke the way you do. I know, I know that our families are already supposed to be the bourgeoisie in Eretz. Ach, Leah! Sacrifice is wrong! Everyone should live out to the last urge what is in them! Leah, after the war everything will be possible here, even civilization. The Turks will be gone, the country will open up, what a land we will build! Not only another Jerusalem, but another Athens, another Paris, another London, another New York! That is what we must make here, and not a land of peasants. Why don’t we all work together, Leah, your people and ours?”
He was agleam with excitement, his entire being glowed, his fire was leaping across to her, yet it was not the flame of a man-and-woman union. She knew—who did not know, how long could it be before the Turks would know?—the dangerous way that he and the Aaronsons had taken. About the details she had not wanted to know. Now out of a sudden fear for him and out of love, too, Leah asked, “What brings you here, Avshalom?”
“—And a caravan of Ishmaelites took Joseph on the way to Egypt,” he quoted, his mouth remaining partly open, his eyes dancing like those of a child bubbling to cry out his secret.
Her heart fell. Of his mysterious trip of nearly a year ago to Egypt, everyone pretended to accept the tale that it had been a love tryst, that Avshalom had managed to reach Alexandria to see Rifka before she sailed to America, and that he had made his way back on a fishing vessel. That was when he had brought so many gifts and greetings. But then why, only a few weeks ago, had he been caught in the desert in what must have been an attempt to cross the lines and reach Egypt again? Only Aaron Aaronson had been able to save him from being shot as a spy. And now? Was he mad enough to try it once more?
Leah had put her hand to the scarab Avshalom had brought her from Gidon in Alexandria. “But for you we wouldn’t know what had become of my brother,” she remarked.
“Soon I’ll be able to tell you more.”
“Avshalom. Why, why? This time if you’re caught, they’ll hang you.” Aaron Aaronson wasn’t even in the land to help him if indeed any help would then be at all possible.
No, he would not be caught. This time it was not so far to go. The British were already partway up the coast, near Raffa. He had to reach them. He had secured the entire plan for the defense of Gaza. There were heavy German guns. He must warn the British—their attack should be by way of Beersheba, not Gaza. Around Beersheba the defense was light. Besides, he had to establish regular contact with them. The contact had been broken off. A signal had been arranged for a ship to stop at night at Athlit—
No, no, why need he tell her of this? But he tumbled on. The British had left a note on a plow, about a new signal, but it was already a long time and no ship had come. Therefore he must go to them, he must reach them, he must show them that the Jews had not failed them.
She felt terrified for him.
Did Sara know he was going?
“She’s worried to death over Aaron. We haven’t heard a word since he left. Perhaps I can find out something there.”
“There? From the English?” Leah was puzzled.
“Where do you think he went?” His gaze was triumphant.
She couldn’t speak. It was all somehow wrong, wrong. He tumbled on. His old plan—a British landing, an uprising. Her group must join. He knew they were gathering arms—
—No, no, he didn’t understand. How many times had it been decided, the arms were to defend the Yishuv, it was not for the Yishuv to enter the war. Suddenly she seized his hand—why must it be he, Avshalom, who should take this deadly risk? Just now he had spoken to her of the mistake people could make with their lives, of the wrongness of turning everyone into a chalutz—let the peasants be peasants, let the soldiers be soldiers, let the poets live as poets—then he too! let him live his own role in life!
“But it is, it is my role!” Avshalom cried, so vehemently that a few heads turned to look at them in their hushed discussion. “It is exactly for me, Leah. Action is the poetry of life. The most concentrated, the most daring action becomes poetry.” He spoke of Byron, a British poet who had fought for the liberty of the Greeks, and did she know the great French poet Rimbaud? “Rimbaud flung himself into the world, he vanished into Africa, among smugglers, among brigands—he was living his poetry.”
“Sara doesn’t know you are going,” she said.
Avshalom’s face became quiet. He shook his head; his eyes grew pained. All was without pretense now before her. And a dark intuition came to Leah; this was perhaps the very cause of Avshalom’s flinging himself into such danger. Both Sara and Avshalom were driven souls, and if doom did not come to them, they would pursue it.
He was pressing her hand, almost as though clinging to it. As though from within her own thoughts, Avshalom said, “I’m such a one. And so is she. And you—no, not you. You are of the earth, Leah.” It was not to make her less; it was even in envy.
He was perhaps about to add something, a message for Sara, but Zev had found them. As the Hothead approached, Leah had a misgiving; Zev would say something gross and loud, he was drunk, he would destroy all the feeling that had come to them here. But instead Zev spoke with gravity, each word like the careful step of a man who realizes he is tipsy. “Don’t worry about Avshalom, Leahleh, he is going with me. And as everyone knows, nothing in all hell ever happens to Zev, the foulest of men.”
The fire had died down, the young men of the village had gone home or to their hiding places; Avshalom’s pink-cheeked young cousin Naaman, who had hardly spoken to a girl all through the party, but had taken refuge in singing around the fire, again dogged his steps, reminding him that he must get some rest. Then Naaman too must know of the journey.
They were mounting; Leah had an impulse—she must give him something, and she looked around the room. Every scrap of food had been consumed, but in their kitchen, she remembered, she had put away a few provisions for the girls for tomorrow. She hurried, and took from a jar a handful of dates, always good on a journey. Beside his horse she reached up her hand in farewell and left the dates in his palm. “The woman of the earth!” Avshalom chuckled, and with a sudden movement bent over and kissed the top of her head. Leah’s heart quivered, and she felt a dread rush of sorrow. “Ride in peace, Avshalom!” she cried as he moved off, the last to leave.
Then nothing was heard, neither of Zev nor of Avshalom. During several weeks the thought of Avshalom rarely came to Leah’s mind, though twice his young cousin Naaman passed to ask if they had perhaps heard mention of him from the Bedouin with whom they had contact.
It was a bitter season; the planters dismissed the remaining watchmen from their groves—what was there to watch? They allowed Bedouin to come in freely and take fruit from the trees, full camel loads that were carried down to be sold, it was said, already to British soldiers.
Everyone was short-tempered. Even in the shul in Ness Ziona, it was told, a fight had broken out between a dismissed watchman and a planter just after the singing of “Come, O Sabbath Bride.” Everyone knew the watchman, Pinya Bosnowitz, a steady man, with four young children, long established in the village.
Suddenly seizing hold of the planter’s sleeve, he begged, “Take me into your yard in place of the Arab family. I will take care of your stable, my wife will work in your house, my children will work for you, we have nothing at home to eat, I can’t go home and look in their faces.” The planter tried to pull his arm free, and they fell to screaming at each other. “No, no, I won’t let you go—”
“What do you want of me! Go to the committee!”
“You let a Jew go hungry and the Arab you feed!”
“God in heaven, what has one to do with the other! He has been with me since I came to Eretz!”
“Take me too! I won’t let go of you!”
Pinya grappled with the burly, gray-headed planter. The worshipers pulled on one, on the other, crying, “A shame! Not in shul! Quiet!” and suddenly Pinya burst into tears, then Gruzman as well. Pinya left off and went home; later Gruzman sent his boy with a Sabbath chaleh. Such things were happening.
The Turks too were becoming nervous and more strict. Yet rifles were accumulating in the deserted old cabin in the grove, though Dov twice came into danger while bringing more. He had secured leave for a few weeks, using the time for arms-gathering, but once as he drove his cart overloaded with heavy gunnysacks a wheel snapped in a mudhole in the midst of an Arab village. When he went into a cafe for help, a military policeman was there and came out to look, asking what was in the sacks. Only Dov’s nerve saved him, as he told the girls when he arrived. “Military supplies, what else!” he had roared, and sent the gendarme to fetch him two Arabs with donkeys so that he might get on with his supplies, while leaving the wagon behind to be repaired. That same week, coming from a second trip, Dov related to Leah how he had suddenly seen before him a checkpoint at a neglected crossroads. Fortunately a military convoy appeared behind him and he managed to smuggle himself into the midst of it, passing unnoticed. So urgent was the work that he overstayed his leave, and only a warning from a Jewish clerk in the Jaffa headquarters that his absence had been noticed saved him. With an elaborate tale of a malarial attack, Dov went back unpunished.
To get the arms onward to Petach Tikvah, Rahel resorted to the old ruse, stuffing a pillow over her stomach and stretching out on a bed of straw that covered the rifles. If they were stopped at a road-post, she groaned as a woman in labor being carried to the hospital in Petach Tikvah.
The war was steadily coming nearer. The British were building a whole railway line up the coast to carry their cannon, and also laying a pipe to bring water all the way from the Nile for their troops.
One day Leah and Rahel came to an urgent meeting in the party’s cabin on the shore between Jaffa and Tel Aviv; Eli, from the Herzlia Gymnasia group, proposed that they organize “Standfast” units in case of evacuation. Suddenly cannon bursts were heard. Rushing out, they saw a British warship facing Jaffa. Could it be the invasion? Had Avshalom really succeeded in persuading the British to his plan?
But the British warship turned and departed.
In a few moments a chaver came running from Jaffa. The large military ironworks had been hit directly by the shells, and nothing else. “They knew exactly where to shoot. They must have spies.”
Like Leah, Rahel too had at once thought of Avshalom. Suddenly now she understood why he had sent her away from Athlit, she said. The laboratory was surely their secret spying headquarters. “Can you imagine, Leah, three months I worked there every day with Aaron Aaronson, and nothing entered my head! How they must have laughed at me!”
Then Avshalom must have reached the British safely, Leah concluded.
Two more weeks went by, and one day as she was bent, carefully pulling out an endless, stubborn length of yablit, Leah raised her head and saw Sara Aaronson coming toward her between the rows. Straightening up, Leah went to meet her. Sara was well dressed, in a gray riding skirt and smart boots, and her face was composed, though as she neared Leah saw a slight quiver pass over her lips. At once it was covered by a firm smile.
At least let her not be uncertain of friendliness here, Leah thought, and so she hurried to Sara, beaming, crying “Shalom!” and taking hold of both her hands. How cold they were. “What brings you to us?”
“I came to see you, Leah.”
“Come inside! I’ll make tea.”
“You have tea?”
Alas, the real English tea was long finished. “From herbs. It’s good. I’ll give you seeds, you can grow them at your agricultural station.”
“Oh, you’ll have to show me how to plant it. I’m all alone there now.”
“Why, I just poke it in the ground with my finger. It comes up quickly but needs weeding.”
Fortunately all the girls were out working, so they could have a quiet hour. When she had settled Sara and put the kettle on, Leah said, “You’ve heard nothing from Avshalom—don’t worry. It’s a good sign. If they had been caught, we’d have heard. And nothing ever happens to Zev, the mamser.”
Sara gazed on her, her eyes never leaving Leah’s form while she distractedly unbuttoned her short jacket; then she began talking in a different voice, not that of a visitor nor that of a daughter of the Aaronson house, the sister of the world-famous Aaron Aaronson, but instead the voice of a chaverteh. “I don’t know why I came to see you, Leah— Yes, I know. It is not only that he was here on the last night before he left, that you were the last one he talked to—yes, his little cousin Naaman told me. You know, Naaman idolizes Avshalom. He noticed that he sat talking with you for a long time.” Only a few days ago the boy had come all the way to Athlit to know if there was news of Avshalom. “He’s more worried than I am. But they should have been back weeks ago.”
—And the shelling of the ironworks in Jaffa, had not that been a sign that Avshalom had reached the British? Leah hesitated to ask.
“Naaman wants to go among the Bedouin to find out if they were seen. I had to command him not to go. I left him at our station on watch so that I could come here—I wanted to talk to you.”
How alone she was. Sitting there day after day on watch for a signal. Her brothers were gone, her sister was gone, and now Avshalom too.
And yet, now that she was here, Sara didn’t seem to know how to speak, how to confide what she wanted to confide in another woman, a friend. Suddenly she was speaking of Reuven, of having seen him in Damascus, as though she had simply come to convey his greetings and bring news of him.
“You know your brother made another discovery, an ancient grove of pistachio trees. He gave me samples to take back to Aaron and Aaron was greatly impressed. He is such a gentle person, such an idealist, your brother!”
Then perhaps it was this, Leah thought, between Sara and herself—the bond of love for their brothers. For all at once the barrier was gone, and Sara was talking, talking and easing her heart.
“Leah—even though when I was still a young girl and imagined I was in love with Avshalom— But you know now when I think of it, the happiest times of my life were when my brother Aaron took me along with him and we searched in the mountains and in the desert for different plants, and at those moments when we found something— You know the feeling too? Sometimes I brought Aaron a wildflower—once we even found together the black orchid he had been searching for, we saw it at the same moment among the stones of an abandoned well—at such moments I was happy. Really happy. You too—you came with your brother to Eretz and you worked together in the fields, even in our own vineyard—I remember that was when you and I first met, when Reuven was recovering from a kadahat attack. And still, wasn’t that the happiest time of your life, no matter how hard it was?”
“It was good,” Leah said. “But then—when with my chaver—when I went out and worked together with him, when we made the first harvest in the kvutsa all of us together, and he and I worked side by side—”
“I know, I know!” Sara cried with a thankfulness in her voice. “Then on such a night it was love.”
So it must have been with her and Avshalom in their secret work, since her return from Constantinople, and it was this she had come to share, to feel again, to confirm, through another woman who had felt things she had felt. And she had come, to be in the place where Avshalom last had been. An impulse came over Leah to cradle her, to weep for her.
Sara was telling her now, “Before, when we were so young, Avshalom was always trying to say clever things, to show off his riding—I thought he was superficial, and when he began to impress Rifka, and how could he not be drawn to her, she was so lovable, a kitten—I suppose I was offended, I let him go, yes, I let him go to her. But I wasn’t even a woman yet.” The tremor flew over her lips.
Sara plunged into the story of her marriage. The empty, monotonous round of teas and dinners … and then tales of the massacre of the Armenians began to be heard. “What was maddening was the Germans. My husband did business with them and high officers came to the house, diplomats. For them it was not even hatred, it was not even religion. It was a principle of racial purity! The Turkomans had a right to purify their land, to make it one, there should be no other blood but their own—can you believe it!” And her husband would listen calmly and even seem to agree with them, until she could no longer endure it.
Then she was speaking of love. Even our body which we trusted to tell us could deceive us. Even with her husband her body had sometimes carried her away. Yet now Sara felt she knew. It was as Leah had just said, it was when everything joined together, not only the body, but what you believed in life and what you did in your life. “Now since I came back, when we go out on a task together and Avshalom will not stop—he will risk everything to find out what we need to know—then when I see him returning to the hotel, and from the light in his eye, I know he has succeeded, and meanwhile I too have learned something we need from one of their bragging officers, oh, then we have such a joy together!”
Sara had fallen silent. A melancholy came over her face. “Perhaps we had no right—Leah—do you believe in punishment for sin?”
But not for love! Not for her honesty! Could such a terror still have hold of poor Sara? “But with Avshalom—” Leah began. Then she smiled broadly to Sara. “Perhaps God isn’t too religious, either, about such sins,” she said. “When they struck the ironworks in Jaffa, wasn’t that a sign that Avshalom had arrived there to them safely?”
Again the trembling came over Sara’s lips, and her voice was small. “It was my brother Aaron who carried the information of the ironworks.”
* * * *
When Sara started homeward, they embraced like sisters. Sara’s hair was just below Leah’s lips and Leah restored there the kiss that Avshalom had bestowed.
It had been his last, for Avshalom Feinberg’s body lay somewhere under the sand, beyond Raffa, in a hole not too deep, only as deep as might be scooped for the planting of a tree. The Bedouin did not care for the labor of digging. And already the place could not be found. From Alexandria, Aaron Aaronson had sent search parties to the area. He had learned of the death from Zev.
At long last cleared and enrolled in the British Military Intelligence, Aaron Aaronson had been sent out to Alexandria—only to find suspicion, and chill, and even a belittlement which he could hardly endure. Accustomed at least to being received everywhere as a man of stature, a world-renowned scientist, he found himself left to wait hours on end in one anteroom after another, only to be interviewed finally by some subaltern who had received no instructions and could give him no answer.
Once he had been questioned about his geographical knowledge of the Sinai. They were, he knew, laboriously laying a pipeline from the Nile in preparation for their attack on Gaza; eagerly he pointed out on the topographical maps sources of underground water, if they would but dig. Called back to the same office, he was introduced to a long-faced young Englishman parading himself in an abaya, a Captain Lawrence who had, just before the war, made a survey of the Sinai area under some pretext of mapping for a geographical society; Aaronson took an instant dislike to him. Indifferently the young surveyor remarked that he did not care to gainsay him, but still rather preferred to take heed of Bedouin tradition as to water sources in the Sinai.
It was a brief and hideous meeting; later Aaronson learned that the abaya-wearer was involved in some far-reaching intrigues with the ruling Moslem of Mecca, the Sherif Husein, and that camel-loads of gold were being dispatched to stir up an Arab rising there in the Hedjaz so as to occupy the Turks during the British advance into Palestine. If so, Aaronson proposed, what about fostering a Jewish activity behind the Turkish lines? Wasn’t it high time to contact his group?
Jews? They only smiled.
Then suddenly one day Aaron Aaronson was sent for, and brought to a military hospital in Port Said where a wounded Jew from Palestine had spoken his name. There lay Zev. He told of Avshalom’s death, a stupid death, maddening in its needlessness. A death so mean and paltry, against their high purpose.
More than a month before, eaten out with waiting for the British signal, Avshalom had set forth with Zev to reach the British lines. Deep in the first night they had passed with their Bedouin guide beyond Raffa into the wastes between the Turkish and British outposts that were penetrated only occasionally by patrols. A night mist had come down on them; their guide, becoming uncertain of the sand drifts, had advised bedding down until daylight. At dawn a whole troop of Bedouin appeared and began a violent dispute with the guide. Avshalom tried to intervene. It concerned a blood feud, Zev had made out, between the guide’s tribe and these others. The guide had entered their area and they meant to take him. The terrified man started to run. Shooting broke out. Fearful of being seized and betrayed to the Turks, Zev and Avshalom had tried to hold off the entire band, but once the firing started, they knew they were lost. Himself twice hit, Zev heard Avshalom gasp that his bullets were spent and he too was finished. Crawling to him, Zev said, he found the poet dying, and then he himself lost consciousness. Under the burning sun, he had awakened only to find everything vanished with the mist, the Bedouin, the camels, even the body of Avshalom. In the end, as he crawled on, a British patrol had found him.
Only then, in the hospital, had Aaronson broken out in rage at their months of delay, shouting at the Intelligence officer, “But for all of you, he would be alive! I was already in Alexandria weeks before he left Palestine! If you had let me send a signal, he would never have started on this insane journey!” From that day forward the operation was under way.
Aaronson himself could not reappear in Palestine., Zev, recovered, would be sent back on the contact ship. He and Sara must take command of the gathering of information. Every two weeks the ship would return to pick up their material. Aaronson would remain at Intelligence headquarters to interpret it, and to transmit particular tasks to them. As for Zev’s absence of a few months, who would have noticed, since he was always moving about? To those few who secretly knew he had gone off with Avshalom, he would explain that Avshalom had made his way to the other side and was training to become a flier in a French aerial squadron. This everyone would readily believe.
And what should be told to Sara?
“The truth,” Aaron said. “To Sara alone.”
Then began the effective work of the Nili. Sara Aaronson and Zev circled the land, gathering up from their ring of helpers the required information. Daringly, as though to carry on Avshalom’s ways, she returned to the hotels frequented by high officers. Now it was Zev, resplendent in fine new clothing, as the husband, a wealthy merchant, who appeared to carry her off at the crucial moment. Their packets of information were prepared and were picked up by a swimmer from the contact ship, one of the Zion men who had remained in Alexandria. Presently he too began bringing greetings and family messages and then gold napoleons from those in Alexandria, until it seemed that the entire Yishuv must be aware of the contact, and the secret could not but come to the Turks. Among the community leaders, whispered discussions were held, some insisting that a stop must be put to the whole Aaronson affair. And then, instead, there arose a desperate need for it.
Just before Passover came what had long been dreaded, an order of banishment. All Jews must at once depart from Jaffa and Tel Aviv.
No, no, it was no Armenian slaughter, there must be no panic, the Emergency Committee pleaded. This was clearly a military measure. A British attack on Gaza was now expected and the Turks did not want Jews in the area. As well, perhaps, for the Jews.
Only a few caretakers were to be permitted to remain, for the whole town of Tel Aviv. Hastily, Eli and Motke of Petach Tikvah assigned Standfast units to hidden posts in locked-up homes and shops, as additional guards.
Already every road and lane northward was packed with carts, with pathetic lines of trudging exiles, with overladen mules, donkeys and the last horse-carriages. In orange groves beyond Petach Tikvah, as far as Kfar Saba, tents were springing up, huts made of mats such as the Bedouin used in the Huleh, booths of straw, none failed to observe, such as were dwelt in by the Israelites of old, the tribes that followed Moshe Rabenu into the Sinai wilderness. Attempting lightheartedness, some declared, “So, we will have Succoth all year around.”
But more numerous were the prophets of doom. They awaited the massacre. “No! With us it shall not be!” the resistants proclaimed, and Menahem and Motke secretly distributed the accumulated pistols, rifles, grenades, to picked men in each encampment.
Committees held incessant sittings, and somehow by Seder night a spirit of survival was developing. No massacre had yet taken place. There was even a distribution of matzoth. “I feel like in a prison of the doomed,” a wit declared, “after the hangman has passed on to another cell.”
Then began a new phase for the Nili. From America, from England, Jews sought for a way to send relief to the thousands driven from their homes. But America had just entered the war; her ships could no longer approach, nor was there even an open way to send money. Gold would have to be smuggled in, and only through the fortnightly trips of the contact ship, the Monegam, could this be done. Through Aaron Aaronson in Alexandria, on each voyage of the Monegam, now, there came several herring-kegs filled with gold napoleons. The coins had to be carefully selected from prewar mintings; the kegs were dragged ashore in the night to be buried by Sara and Zev in the Crusader ruins until the gold could be transmitted to the Emergency Committee. Well into the summer this work went on.