PASSING THE gate to Gilboa, there rattled a wagon with a whole family from Zichron, a townsman fleeing to a cousin in Yavniel, halting only to cry out, “Sara Aaronson shot herself.”
In the fourth day of her torment. Live coals in her armpits. Her fingernails wrenched out. The skin beaten from her soles, her feet like butcher’s meat. Then Hassan Bey allowed her to go to the bathroom, in her brother’s house, and there a small pistol had been hidden, and Sara Aaronson shot herself in the mouth.
Now that no more could be learned from her, the fury would fall on every Jew.
An oppressive lethargy covered the kvutsa. As with the doomed who await the executioner, every movement felt futile. Though Avraham the Secretary stubbornly continued with his manuring, the work otherwise fell off. The women gravitated to the children’s house, and even when two small girls became hysterical, the metapelet did not drive out the mothers.
Why didn’t Hassan Bey appear here already, and an end!
Leah sat with Rahel, with Dvora, talking of poor Sara Aaronson. To them she revealed much about that last time Sara had come to her in the south, in deep hunger for a woman’s friendship. How alone, how alone Sara must have been in her marriage in Constantinople, and then in her frantic secret labor of the last year, and now in her dying!
And still the search did not come, but word did come of a train of prisoners. Young Avram, driving the water-barrel wagon filled up at the springs of Ain Harod, plunged into the yard with the barrels jumping on the floorboards. The horror he had seen! A train halted on the tracks while the trainman foraged for firewood for the engine, and young Avram, hearing unearthly howling, had driven nearer. Four closed animal cars, with human hands reaching out from the airhole high in each car. Voices calling out in despair, and when he answered, one face appeared, hoisted up to the hole. It was an aged notable from Jerusalem, a Sephardi.
“Yeshayahu?” Leah cried.
“I think so. They called out so many names I can’t be sure.”
“Our own members?” Rahel demanded. “What of Misha, the party secretary in Jerusalem?” Avram didn’t know.
“They are packed eighty in a wagon, no room even to sit. They said their feet are chained. They are dying of thirst—I gave them water. They’ve had nothing to eat since the day before yesterday. As far as Jeneen they were forced to walk, in the hamseen, roped together, with the irons on their feet. Chevreh, through the boards I heard men sobbing. I promised on my life I would come to Damascus to help them. Even on the way to Siberia, I didn’t see suffering like this.” Young Avram’s voice was choked. “The train is still standing there.”
All the bread they had they threw into a wagon, and cheese, cucumbers and tomatoes, and half the kvutsa ran behind the wagon along the tracks. There was the train. Through the boards, voices called. Coins were passed to the guards, the people of Gilboa pressed themselves against the train, climbed on each other’s shoulders to reach the apertures, from which bits of paper, messages, were being dropped down. Misha, the Jerusalem secretary, was indeed inside; he managed to get his face into an opening. “Chevreh, you are our only hope.” The train began to move.
Running alongside, Young Avram kept shouting, “I’ll come to Damascus! I vow it!”
In the last moment Avraham Halperin galloped up. He had brought a few packets of the gold coins and managed to pass them through an opening.
Cries came back to them, a tumult of last messages, pleadings, a maddened shriek joined with the whistle of the engine, and after it, a prolonged Job-like wail.
What could be done? Any instant their own doom might arrive. Men and women found themselves standing dazedly in the yard or continuing absurd, meaningless tasks, like Guta ironing the Sabbath cloths.
Mounting to return to Petach Tikvah, Motke had a last bitter word for Avraham the Secretary. “I want nothing more to do with it. We should have turned him in. We still should turn him in. But one thing for certain. Every chaver who laid eyes on him had better be got out of here before Hassan Bey arrives.” He rode away.
In this last, all agreed Motke was right. Upstairs in Rahel’s room they hurriedly planned. Rahel must leave. Leah must leave. She could run with Rahel across the back fields to Merhavia, it had already been searched and was comparatively safe. From there she could get back to her girls. But what of the family at home? She was being pulled in two different directions.
And Avraham Halperin himself? He was the mukhtar. If the mukhtar was missing, the Turks would be enraged. He would remain at hand—up in the cave on the hillside, Avraham declared. Young Avram could hide there as well.
Motke, instead of heading homeward, had circled back around Mount Tabor to ride to Sejera where Shabbatai Zeira lived with his mother on their farm. The Kurd came only rarely now to the sittings—he was not one for discussions—yet after Shimshoni wasn’t he still commander?
Shabbatai listened to Motke’s whole account and swiftly agreed. That the Nili had spied against the Turks did not trouble him; there were various tasks in war. That Zev was a man once cast out of the Shomer did not weigh strongly with him. For himself, the Kurd had always believed in the Hotblood, a good rider, a good rifleman, his one fault women. But all this was of no account in making the decision before them. The fate of one was outweighed by the fate of all.
Together he and Motke rode to Nazareth. With the Bimbashi, Achmed Bey, the Kurd had had many dealings. Even the finely inlaid Damascus coffee table in Achmed’s office was but a small gift that attested to their long friendship. But just now Achmed was not occupying his imposing headquarters. He had generously insisted that Hassan Bek take over his office. Achmed’s aged coffee-bearer led them to the Bimbashi’s refuge at the end of the corridor, a dank hole without even a rug.
The Nazareth chiefs eyes were red; he was shrunken and in bad temper, but some instinct turned away his abuse from the two Jews. Instead, muttering what might be taken as an apology for receiving them in this barren closet, he burst out over the pandemonium in the courtyard with Hassan Bek’s riders coming and going with their shoutings, curses, and whip-cracks. What blind geese, what rabbit-spawn were the whole lot of Hassan’s men, when one wolf of a Jew could bite their behinds and run free!
Agreeing, Zeira deposited his coffee cup on the tray and moved his stool somewhat closer to Achmed Bey. “Difficult times, Achmed Bey, difficult for you and not easy for any of us.”
Ah, everything was in the order of a man’s work. Difficult, easy, a man’s work must be done.
“We have always wanted to be helpful. For after all are we not in the same work? Are not our interests the same? Lawfulness, order, and peace.”
A measuring showed in Achmed’s eyes, as though to say, he appreciated Zeira’s people. Let Hassan Bek tear apart every Jew in the land, they were a clever, hard lot and would yield up nothing until they were ready. There was Hassan Bek’s five-hundred-pound reward for the capture of Zev the Hotblood, now doubled to a thousand. But it was not for this the Jews might want to arrange something, he was certain. And he was just as certain that Zeira’s Shomer would know where Zev was to be found.
Soon the Bimbashi at Nazareth understood the bargain that was being suggested. It was best that the hunted Jew should not be found by a Jew. The reward could naturally go to those of Achmed’s own men who brought in the spy. Or his body.
So it was agreed. And why need Hassan Bey know anything of this helpful effort? If it succeeded, let the glory come to Achmed Bey, as was only just. Nor, of course, did his visitors really know of the whereabouts of the spy. “If we knew, would we protect him? Didn’t we ourselves throw him out of our ranks for the troubles he caused in Mishkan Yaacov?” Well did Achmed Bey remember. “We are fighters, not spies. Hear me, old friend,” said Zeira the Kurd, “what does a hunted animal do? He creeps homeward to his lair.”
“Beersheba?” Achmed’s eyes measured Zeira—was this but a hoax?
Motke glanced over to Shabbatai. The thick-headed goyim! Achmed didn’t even know that Zev came from Metulla.
“I’ll send up a whole troop,” the Bimbashi cried, “and tear the place apart from wall to wall.”
Shabbatai smiled as at a figure of speech. With the approach of a whole troop of hunters, the wolf might be alerted and run off. But suppose one officer went up, and brought back the wolf or his body?
Then, with the hunt ended, Motke put in, surely the vicious Hassan Bek would depart from here, his searches would be halted and all the hostages returned to their homes!
Achmed leaned forward, and touched Motke’s knee. “He who makes a promise for another binds neither himself nor the other,” he quoted. “But if a highwayman is caught and the robberies cease, there is no need to continue to search for him.”
It was Achmed Bey’s youngish brother-in-law who rode off with Motke in a carriage large enough to bring back a man’s body.
Serene as a white-haired god the Hermon sat, and in the lap of the god were sacred wonders, groves and caves, sanctuaries where men might breathe the stillness of peace and feel in their breathing how good this earth could be.
From an opening in the mountain rock, a stream issued and became a pool, and from this again issued a stream, bordered by grassy banks where a man could lie still and hear only the music of the water. A grove of ancient trees stood eternally waiting for the rites of worship to begin again, and nearby, in the face of the stone from whose mouth water rushed out, just there where it came from the mountain form, men long ago, not knowing how else to show the awe and wonder they felt in this place, had cut an alcove as deep as a human body, and here in the ancient days, it was said, even before Abraham passed this way from Hauran, the pagans in their elation offered life-blood so as to be at one with their god. Not too far away was another such place of awesome beauty. The Chimney it was called, perhaps also a place of worship and sacrifice even more overwhelming than the tender grove. Here the torrents of melted snow had first, atop the height, cut a wide smooth stone basin, and then over one edge spilled downward, through centuries cutting a chimney-like chasm, the water plunging the depth of a mountainside and flowing away at the bottom in a narrow stream. Deeper and deeper the chimney was cut until the water fell fifty times the height of a man and then flowed away between bushes and wild vegetation to join the other streams that form the Jordan River.
In spring the abundant waters from the upper basin did not seem to fall but rather to leap outward in a great shimmering wall of water, vitality itself, and no one who lived here, no one who came here, ever outgrew the spell of this sight. But in the heat of high summer the water only brimmed over the lip of the upper basin enough to keep the wetted inside of the stone chimney darkly glistening.
Down along the valley near the converging headwaters of the Jordan lay an Arab village called Halsah, a small place with only a few footpaths between the earthen dwellings. An outer lane led to the sheikh’s house, made of stone and standing higher than the huts.
His courtyard was open, and here they left the carriage until it should be needed. On the rug of the guest chamber, Motke and his companion were welcomed by the sheikh and his three sons—the sheikh himself, a broad-girdled man with the look of a confident bargainer, the sons all three with the heavy-lidded eyes of the kifsmoker. Through Halsah passed hasheesh traffic from the Syrian fields.
After the formalities, and over the second cup of coffee, Motke’s companion Sayed, the fierce-looking young brother-in-law of Achmed Bey, Bimbashi of the Nazareth District, honorably known to all of them here, explained that they sought a traitor, a spy and bandit, believed to be hiding in this area. Instantly all three sons as one leaped up, ready to mount for the hunt; with Allah’s help, this bandit would not escape them, for, in this region there was not a mole but they knew its hole. Motke could already envisage them clattering into Metulla, storming each farmyard—and with the sanction of the police! Praising and thanking them, he explained that it was a matter of law for the officer himself, the excellent Sayed here, to capture the spy. All that was asked was the sheikh’s hospitality, as Sayed would wait here with the carriage, so as not to draw too much attention, while Motke himself went forward to make some inquiries.
There were glances all around. Much was understood. There was an inner affair here among the Jews. And Motke went on foot up the grassy slope above Halsah.
Climbing toward Shimshoni’s kvutsa, he already saw their broad flocks; the dream was well on the way to reality. Perhaps he too would have been wiser to have taken his wife and children and withdrawn with this group to this farthest corner of the land. Already on the lower of their two hills they were constructing a second meshek; wood was still plentiful hereabouts, and a pair of chaverim were constructing a stockade fence around a half-finished stone house with a large yard. What did it remind him of? Pictures he had seen in his children’s schoolbooks of the stockades of American cowboys.
Motke approached the two lads—he did not know either one. Uncertain whether everyone in Shimshoni’s kvutsa would be aware that the Jewel was hidden among them, Motke started on something else. “It looks like a fort you’re building.”
“All the better. They’ll respect us.”
“Are they giving you trouble?” His head motioned to the village below.
The first lad shrugged. “No. In the main our relations are good. The sheikh has a passion for Maria Theresa thalers and keeps begging us to buy more land.”
“But the sons are annoying,” the other one said. “They’re always coming around, give us this, give us that—whatever they lay their eyes on, a teakettle, an iron rake.”
“As for your Jewel,” the first chaver said dryly, “he’s right in there!” The lad pointed to the half-finished dwelling within the stockade.
Had they lost their wits, here? Didn’t they understand what was going on over the entire Yishuv?
“Don’t fear.” The second one had read his thoughts. “From up here we can see anyone coming from any direction, a long way off…. Do you want to pay him a visit? On top of everything, he can’t bear being alone.”
“No.” It was enough having to carry out his task; he needed no discussions with Zev. “Where’s Shimshoni?”
Above at the upper farm, where else?
What could Motke have explained to Shimshoni? That an arrangement had been made to deliver Zev, for the safety of the Shomer and the whole Yishuv? Or perhaps only that Zev’s being here was known, that an Arab had seen three riders arrive, and only two going away, and that it was impossible to hide the Jewel any longer? Let him go. Perhaps he could even save himself and reach the Druze.
With his unwavering small eyes in his round, compact head, Shimshoni listened to what Motke told him and said, “Then do you want to tell Zev yourself what has been decided?”
Motke would not flinch from the task as he would not blink under Shimshoni’s gaze. Together they went back down the path to the lower hill, where these idealists were continuing to build while the whole Yishuv was on the brink of destruction.
In a wall-hollow between the kitchen and stable, a secret place for storing arms, Zev stood. At the mere sight of Motke, he comprehended. Instead of breaking into rage, he turned to Shimshoni the face of a man who sees his death. “I won’t, I won’t—” he began.
“Achmed Bey from Nazareth has sent a man to Halsah,” Motke said matter-of-factly.
“You brought him.”
“Then why would I not simply have turned you over?”
“You’re afraid of what I’d say if taken alive.”
Then Motke said, “Sara’s dead. She shot herself.”
Zev’s eyes went from one to the other, from one to the other. “You’re lying, to get me to do the same.”
Shimshoni said, “Zev, you understand what it would mean if you are found among us. Besides, your only chance is to leave here.”
Still his head turned from one to the other. Then Zev’s eyes became dull and his head dropped. “Where did they bury her?”
“Her father buried her in the vineyard,” Motke said. “Old Aaronson by himself.”
Zev drew in his breath. “I’ll get out after dark.”
Below in Halsah the gendarme, Sayed, and Sheikh Jibran with his eldest son Ismael had enjoyed several more coffees and sweets while the meal was being prepared. There was nothing that Sayed knew of his mission that remained unknown to his hosts. The hunted one had received much gold from the British; as was well known among the Bedouin in the Hauran, the British were lavish with their gold. For a pair of Turkish ears a man could dip his fist into a sack of napoleons and keep all he could draw out.
The Yahud hidden here must still have gold on him. Far more than the thousand paper pounds that was to be paid for his body.
Sons-in-law of the sheikh also came now to sit with the guest, and Sayed repeated his tale. The eldest son, Ismael, rose and went off. He was an impatient man who roamed much. Three riders had passed on the heights the night before last, a shepherd had seen them. Only two had gone back, in the day. Now he understood.
Ismael roamed the few miles between the hill settlement of the Jews and their older village of Metulla. The way curved above the gorge to the top of the Chimney; behind the saucer-like top of the waterfall lay Metulla, and behind Metulla rose the slopes that led to the Druze. A fugitive attempting to escape to the Druze would have to pass this way. Ismael stationed himself and waited.
Motke meanwhile had returned to the Arab village to fetch Sayed and the carriage. In this way, in this space of time, he might be giving Zev his chance to escape to the Druze. So he would believe.
After dark, Zev had told them, but when the hammering stopped, he stepped halfway out and saw the two chalutzim climbing to the upper farm. Now he was before the open space of the partly stockaded compound. That foul Motke could be as cunning as himself, and guess that he would be starting earlier to elude their trap. But no shot struck him as he moved beyond the grounds. In dartings, he made his way around the slope of the kvutsa’s hill to the Metulla side. But there the hill was barren rock, a kind of marble that, in his boyhood, some of the Metulla men had spoken of one day quarrying. No shrubs to give cover. He must move swiftly down from this. Quickly, for he heard a carriage from below.
As Zev scuttled across the Metulla road to reach the growth above the gorge, his form was for one instant visible.
Motke was driving with his rifle at hand beside him. Sayed had his rifle at ready and raised it and fired. In the same moment came a reverberation from above, another gun. Ismael, both understood.
The figure had vanished. Zev must have fallen, struck, and tumbled into the ravine. Ismael came galloping from the top of the Chimney, waving his rifle in the excitement of the kill.
Clutching at roots and stones, Zev tumbled downward until he lay at the bottom. Not yet killed. Instead of terror or even an engulfing pain, an exhilaration shot up in him. As that time with Avshalom in the desert, here too he had not been destroyed. No! He was not to be destroyed. The sounds came back to him—two, three guns? or an echo? In his boyhood, when he first was brought here, the settlers had made much of the pogrom-orphan from Kishinev. The mukhtar of Metulla’s own boy, Yechiel, had taken him down here to show him the echo in the Chimney. They had stood down here shouting and shouting; Yechiel had even taught him some Arab curse words, and they had listened with joy as the words, together with their own laughter, came back to them. But later he had hated Yechiel, a “good boy.” Yechiel was still in Metulla. Could he risk showing himself to him?
They’d be coming down for their kill. His body. Motke and Shimshoni too, he didn’t doubt, and maybe a third to make sure. Why wouldn’t he have thought it of Shimshoni? All of them, the lot of them, he would gladly sign their execution. Afraid to execute him to his face, they had made him run like a hunted rabbit.
Zev’s fingers felt for the wound; where neck and shoulders joined blood was spreading; the bullet had passed through the flesh. From the stream, he splashed on water. He still had Sara’s kerchief, a last talisman from her hand; escape, live! He tied it around his neck, making a knot in the armpit. He was able to stand. Carefully, Zev trod in the stream, the other way, downward. Where the bank was thick with high reeds he hid, to regain strength.
Soon he heard them up there crashing into the ravine, might they break both legs and their heads. It was good and dark now. He heard their cursing and their calls to each other and the high far echoes. One was Motke. Two others, Arabs. So he was sold! The three hunters had clambered down to the bottom, but as he had reasoned, the idiots were going the other way into the narrowing crevice of the Chimney. They thought they would find him there, cornered.
Now was his time. The slope was not difficult here. Scrambling up on the further side, Zev circled far around behind Metulla to one of his old boyhood hiding places among the rocks. From there he could see the outlines of his uncle’s house.
With his hands Motke felt along the foliage perhaps for some pressed down place where the body had fallen. The sheikh’s son would not leave them to go searching downstream. Afraid he would miss the gold. And Sayed kept muttering they had hit not a man but the devil, a shaitan.
When a gallows broke, wasn’t the doomed man left to live, Motke asked himself. The underflow of disgust he had felt all along was now bile in his mouth. Why had he done it, why had he felt so impelled to ride to Shabbatai Zeira? No, but Shabbatai had agreed it was necessary, imperative to save the Shomer, the Yishuv, to save even Zev himself from prolonged torture, as he would surely be caught in any case.
They had wound their way to the Chimney now, the narrow high hollow, rising until its black glistening wall was lost in the dark, but you saw far above the softer darkness of the sky, and even stars. Tomorrow there would be no hamseen. The aroma of pines and fresh water filled the hollow, constantly refreshed by the trickle sliding down the walls of the Chimney. How could mankind incessantly find ways to disturb this serenity? Motke felt as though he were Cain with the finger of God stretching downward to point him out at the bottom of this black hole.
“We’ll wait in the carriage for the morning light,” he said. “It is useless to search for him now.”
From across the yard Yaffaleh rushed to welcome Leah, rolling her large head against Leah’s bosom so as to press first one cheek and then the other to her sister, until Leah laughingly pulled back her youngest sister’s head to look into her face. In joy at Leah’s coming, the face was radiant. “Leah, you’ll stay here? Oh, we were so afraid for you in all the searches. If they come here, we can hide you.” Laughing, Leah kissed her. —And Menahem and the young Zeira from Gilboa, she asked, had they passed? Perhaps yesterday or early today? —No, they had not been seen.
In Yaffaleh’s eyes Leah saw another plea. “Be with me, stay with me, I am stifling,” and in that moment, Leah thought, “I’ll take her back with me to be with the girls for a time, it will be good for her.”
Mameh had emerged, beaming with relief. “Leah, you are not mixed up in all this trouble with the Aaronsons?”
“Na, Mameleh.” Leah smiled broadly in denial, in reassurance. “You know our kind of work is different.”
But Feigel was worried that some of those who were caught might reveal how there had once been gifts from Gidon.
“Before they could beat one word out of me,” Yaffaleh cried, “I would die like Sara Aaronson.”
Leah stroked her. “Poor Sara.”
“What they brought down on the whole Yishuv!” her mother said.
“Mameh, they were trying to help. They kept the whole of Mea Shearim from starvation.”
“The Above One will judge them, not I,” Feigel said, and then added, “Leah, don’t defend them before him”—Tateh—“his eyes see only the evil they have done.”
He and the boys were still cutting in the field, for without help they were late in the harvest. Giving Mameh quick news of Dvoraleh, of the grandchildren, Leah found herself a scythe and marched out. She could see them, Schmulik and Tateh advancing evenly step by step, and Mati behind them with a pitchfork. As she gave Mati a hug, and began to swing her scythe, Leah nevertheless saw her father smile deep in his beard, content that she was home. He would ask her little, only, “Nu, Leah, how are things in the south?” And she saw that he was already calculating; he would have to send back a wagonload with her, wheat for the refugees banished from Tel Aviv, and Tateh was already struggling with himself as to how many sacks he would load on.
But presently Yankel spoke what was on his mind. Had she heard no news on the way, of the hunted one, might his name be erased from Eternity? And with each stroke of his scythe her father’s strong old arms seemed to be cutting down the maker of disaster. “Already when he was the shomer here, he all but destroyed us, and now the entire Yishuv will have to pay for his evil. Why didn’t we let the Arabs make an end of him! To meddle in the wars of the goyim, that has always been our undoing—didn’t Jeremiah cry out against it? And because the king did not pay heed, Babylon came upon us …”
He had gone back to Yiddish, and his querulous singsong seemed to reach her from the huddled lanes of Cherezinka. With all her love, with all her admiration for the labor he had brought out of himself in this place, Leah could not remain in the field and listen to his bitterness, though Schmulik worked on as though he did not hear, Schmulik the young ox. Besides, Leah had to hurry over to HaKeren, she had messages, instructions, and two heavy baskets of “eggs” to deliver; she would take Yaffaleh along for the walk.
“Leah, good you came.” Max Wilner greeted her in the whispery voice he used when things were grave. Word had already arrived about Gilboa. The searches had taken place. Three arrested. Avraham Halperin among them; he had come down from his hiding place. But worst—the old woman, Rahel’s mother. Not finding Rahel, whose name was on his list, Hassan Bey had become enraged and seized the old woman. His men flung her to the ground; defiantly she had at once taken off her shoes, presenting her bare soles to the Turk. “I know nothing. But proceed in your own savage way.”
They had pulled her up and hauled her away with the others.
There was more. One of the captured Nili from Chedera was dead in the Nazareth prison. The Bek had hung the body from the cell bars, so as later to declare he had killed himself. He had been beaten to death, everyone knew.
In the first daylight Ismael quickly found the traces of the fall, and the spot where the body had turned on the foliage. There were bloodstains, he cried out joyously, he had not missed! But then the trail vanished as though the shaitan had been lifted from the earth.
The Nazareth gendarme, Sayed, turned his eyes on Motke with that particular look of suspicion that was kept for Jews. Had there been a trick in all this?
—They must search in Metulla, Motke said, where Zev had relatives, “Let me go in alone,” he managed to persuade them. “From me, they won’t hide anything.”
* * * *
The woman didn’t wait; she came running toward Motke from the farmyard, gathering together her wrapper, her hair uncombed, her face in stupefaction. “He was here, he was here in the night. I beseeched him, Zev, go, I always knew he would bring agony in the world. I begged him for the sake of my children, Zev, go—” and then, as though she still could not fully believe it—“He went.”
It was his aunt who had raised him here, a poorish, neglected place with half-broken implements lying about the yard, a wagon with a missing wheel. Two girls still in their nightgowns appeared in the doorway, and their mother screamed at them, “Stay inside! … He’s gone, he went, I swear by the heads of my daughters, I don’t know where, to the Druze perhaps. I only bandaged his wound, it was bleeding.” She showed where, on the shoulder by the neck. “The width of a finger more, and it would have been all over for him,” she said with a sorrowful puzzlement, meeting something in Motke’s own eyes—wouldn’t it have been better? Was it God’s intention that had been spoiled by some error? “From when he first came to us, I tried my best with him, I swear to you—an orphan from Kishinev!” As if everyone else, too, hadn’t made allowances all his life for this. “But Zev was never anything but trouble.”
Deep in the night she had opened her eyes, and there he was, the Jewel, standing over the bed where she lay with one daughter on each side of her, the way she slept every night since the Turks had dragged off her man with the only good wagon and the mules. That this moment would come, she had known as soon as Zev’s name spread over the land and news reached even to Metulla that Zev was the chief spy, the hunted one. She had known he would come here, if only to show himself in the height of his doing, evil or good, the way he would always show himself after his childhood misdeeds. The chief spy, the hunted one! And there had arisen in her the anger, the exasperation, yet also the bitter tinge of admiration that he evoked even as a boy. She was not his aunt in truth, but his older cousin, and when he had arrived among the group of orphans, it was to her the Jewel had fallen. And her husband, more of a decent Jew then, for it was before he had gone bitter, had accepted.
Now in this deep night, Zev stood in her room like a nightmare. Everyone, the Turks, the Shomer, the whole land—who would not at once think that he would try to come here? And to defy them all the Jewel had done it.
As he stood there, Malka put her fist in her mouth. In the kitchen, sleeping on the floor, lay two watchmen posted in Metulla by the Shomer to strengthen the guard against Turkish army deserters and marauders. How had he not awakened them? And her daughters would awake. “Zev, they’ll scream. Hide in the outhouse. I’ll come to you.”
A long moment Zev hung over the bed. Why was it required of him again to set himself in motion? He had reached home. Between the two watchmen on a straw mattress on the kitchen tiles he had safely passed, knowing nothing would interfere with this destiny, knowing he would enter Malka’s room. Something in him had even known that his cursed uncle would not be there. But the two girls in the bed he had not expected. Perhaps because of them he at last now turned and made his way back soundlessly again between the two sleepers and then across the yard; the outhouse door still hung on one hinge; Zev sat. His arm heavily rose and brushed the flies from his wound.
Tumultuously it was as though he were arranging all that had happened to him so he could tell it all to a woman. Her form hovered toward him, the kindly goyish neighbor woman in the blacksmith’s yard in Kishinev who thrust him into the shed among the sacks of coke, to hide until the pogrom died down. Saraleh, when she thrust him down the ladder to the cellar in Aaron Aaronson’s cottage, and then sent down a loaf of bread wrapped in her kerchief. He would unburden himself of all that had happened to him; she would hold his head and the throbbing tumult would be soothed away. There was no Sara any more, but the mother in Mishkan Yaacov had thrust him into the great dark oven. When all was safe, Big Leah had come, and again in the carriage Leah had saved him. To Big Leah he was relating it all, not his wife, long ago she had gone back to Janovici, her whining he did not need. The woman would come, who was she?
It was Malka who came to him; she held a basin of water, and after the laving, she spread balm on his burning wound, the same balm he recalled from years ago after the thrashings. Malka kept telling him he must go, this was the first place they would search, he must go, why had he come here, it was foolish; and in the same voice Malka kept repeating with her eternal stupidity, “Where will you go?” This same stupid flat voice—how it had always enraged him—and again it was to Zev as though he were relating all this to the real woman, saying, “Even when I was a boy, I would become so angry, I’d spit on her and run away.”
Suddenly he cried out to Malka, “Listen, the British are sending a ship for me. I have two barrels of gold hidden in Athlit. Malka, hide me, I’ll buy you a hundred cows from Denmark, I’ll build you a big new house, hide me, bring me food, keep me hidden only for a week—”
She was staring as when the troublesome boy had told her his wild tales. “Wait one moment, Zev,” she whispered and hurried back to the house.
Now a profound knowledge of his whole life swept over Zev, and he saw it clearly and knew how he would explain it to the real woman. That which had impelled him to come creeping back to this house was a mistake, an error of the kind that life thrusts on you, and he was now finished with this mistake and could go. But in the same clarity Zev knew that he had not the strength to climb to the Druze, and also that the welcome of the Druze was an illusion. Would he not be hunted there at once? He must go the other way, southward,-he must reach the British.
She was returning; she carried something.
A loaf of bread.
“Quick, go now. Oh, where will you go?”
A tale, something from cheder, came to him. From the days of Abraham. Bread. They brought you bread. As a welcome, for the welcome guest. In his life everything had always been turned around. Zev took the bread from her hands and without a word slipped into the darkness.
“Don’t tell them he was here, no one saw him!” Malka begged, and for Motke as well it was best to deny.
“He has not been here, she swears it by her daughters,” Motke declared as Ismael and Sayed swarmed in. “Besides, how could it be? Two men slept on the floor, her daughters slept in the bed with her.”
They burst through the house, angry. The thousand pound reward. And the gold on the body. From Halsah came horsemen, the sheikh himself and his other sons and his sons-in-law. Through all Metulla they galloped, in every house they searched and pillaged, while Sayed with two of them, surrounding Motke, climbed on their steeds up the mountainside to the Druze. The mukhtar declared the Jew had not been seen.
In rage Sayed bethought himself of the kvutsa. It was there the trick on him had been planned. Now Har Tsafon was invaded. The sons of Sheikh Jibran had become Sayed’s deputies, the kvutsa was ransacked, Shimshoni was seized and put into the carriage—at least some Jew, Sayed would take back with him.
“He could not have escaped, he was wounded, we will find his body,” Motke kept protesting. One more chance Sayed gave him. Again they searched every hole in the rocks, the tunnel that led to the Chimney, the caves. At the end, Sayed turned wrathfully on Motke and had him bound and flung into the carriage with Shimshoni. Ismael and his brothers rode behind. The return to Nazareth began.