ALL MORNING Reuven worked by himself with his mattock around his pistachio transplants, sending his helpers to other tasks as though this were something that required his hands alone. The feel of the mattock, the steady stroke of his labor, somewhat helped him, keeping down the tumult. What was done in the square he did not want to see.
But late in the morning he was called to accompany a group of high officers from Constantinople for a tour of the Pasha’s gardens, to show them his rarities. And then they must tour the avenues and be shown the flowered embankments, the fountains and the long park, the great pride of Djemal Pasha. There was no way to avoid the central square.
As the motorcar approached, the sounds from the crowd rolled toward them in waves like from cannon bursts. “Yahud, Yahud,” and as they came closer, “Traitors, death, death to all Jews!” Reuven sat rigid, silent. Did these officers know he was a Jew? They made a few remarks amongst themselves; he tried not to hear but heard—was he craven? should he announce, Sirs, I am a Jew? The car plowed steadily into the multitude. Gesticulating, shouting with sudden spurts of laughter and outthrust arms, people half-clambered over the vehicle, pointing with enjoyment, triumph and anger to the gibbet as though these high officers would answer their cries and at once issue the command, Hang them all! Hang every Jew!
Quite close now, the car brought them amidst the inner circle of spectators who stood transfixed, gaping as though they expected something more to happen, some added gratification.
Not high above their up-angled heads hung the two figures in long white gowns like shrouds, their heads askew as in some inquiry, but in a different way—wrenched. On the death-garments large placards were affixed proclaiming their crimes. Traitors. Enemy spies. Jews.
The boy Naaman, Reuven had not known; his round young face had a look of protesting surprise. But Zev was himself, his face excited, his parted lips about to break out with some astonishing proposal that would save him.
One of the visiting officers carried field glasses and offered them now to Reuven. Was it brutal irony? Almost absently Reuven raised the glasses toward Zev. There were flies over the dead man’s mouth, in his nostrils, and crawling over his open eyes.
That night a great need came to Reuven to be among Jews. Not merely to seek out a few of those from Eretz who were, like himself, in the Turkish army; this was rather a feeling as though to stand in a crowd around the door of a shul, to immerse himself amongst Jewish folk, and it led him to the Harat al Yahud.
The street was barred—at least Djemal Pasha did not want a pogrom. Reuven’s officer’s uniform was enough, though he thought he heard one of the guards mutter something to his companion after letting him through.
Hardly a sliver of light could be seen from the heavily shuttered windows high in the walls. His own steps in the ancient deserted lane almost unnerved him.
At the Shalmonis’ it was the voice of the master of the house himself that came from behind the thick carved door in a hesitant whisper, “Who?” In their salon Reuven saw a few like himself in Turkish officer’s uniform, men he half-casually knew, one or two stationed in Damascus as translators, interpreters. Also there were a few well-connected community leaders from the Yishuv who had, instead of being sent to prison, been ordered confined to the city. And there was the brother of the exiled Nadina, the tall engineer from Haifa, Lev Bushinsky, indispensable to the Pasha. For the rest, it was the Shalmoni family, in an atmosphere of dignified calm. The daughter, Elisheva, was at her piano turning over music, though she did not play. It was in this room, with Elisheva, that he had sat with Sara Aaronson.
“Has the city quieted?” Shalmoni asked, and Reuven said, “The streets are quieter. The cafes are full.”
“Here it has been quiet,” the mother said.
“We are protected,” the daughter remarked dryly.
“It’s just as well,” the father said. “Anything could have happened. Today convinced me nothing has changed in our compatriots.”
Never before in this house had Reuven heard the father even indirectly refer to the Damascus blood libel of eighty years before. Though everyone who came here was aware that a Shalmoni had been among the community leaders accused, the family did not speak of the ghastly case. The avoidance of the subject, Reuven had always comprehended, was in no way out of shame, but was rather an aristocratic silence, in the way that high-standing families did not call your attention to their wealth and honors, either.
“We have not seen you for a long time,” the mother said. “I hope it must not always take an evil event to bring you to our house.”
He made the excuse that he had been away on an expedition, and on their questioning told how this time he had brought back cedars of Lebanon; the daughter took a lively interest and made him tell more. Elisheva even remembered the pistachio grove he had discovered and that he had given samples to Sara. When she spoke Sara’s name her voice was unflinching.
It was indeed many months since he had come to their house. Reuven had told himself he did not really feel at home in this atmosphere of an ancient, important Sephardic family; and also that this house was perhaps somewhat dismal because of the blind uncle who sat at the Sabbath table with his fixed smile of the sightless. But more truly, Reuven admitted to himself, it was because he had begun to be drawn to the daughter. It would only have brought pain.
There were far more suitable men than himself among the Jewish officers, better educated, more polished, and indeed handsome. He had seen this one and that one begin a campaign for Elisheva; a captain had even performed piano duets with her. But nothing had happened. It was declared she was engaged and that her fiancé was at a distant front in southern Arabia. This could explain her cool self-possession.
She was not aloof. In the way of finely bred people, as he had noticed, she spoke to everyone with a show of real interest in their lives—just as now she asked every detail about his trees. Elisheva Shalmoni had been educated in France and liked to discuss French literature and music. Reuven knew little of either, and in the general conversations on Friday evenings he would often fall back on: “I must read that … No, I never have heard Debussy.”
But increasingly his eyes had been drawn to her. Today, perhaps even because of the tragic atmosphere, he let his gaze rest on her. Elisheva was indeed like a bird, delicately boned, and with a hovering air as though she might at any instant fly off. Her face was formed in the long oval of the Sephardim, with a narrow long nose that at first had seemed a flaw to him, and she had tawny hair with a touch of reddishness not unlike Sara Aaronson’s. Others were always remarking on her color, seeming to find it surprising in an ancient Sephardic family, but after all in the Yishuv, Reuven remarked, many children whose parents were black-haired were being born even totally blond and with blue eyes. “My own nephew is blond, like a Scandinavian,” he said, and it was his first personal reference.
Like a returning ghost, the subject of the Nili had again arisen: had they done right or wrong? Little was said of Zev; the taint was on him even now of having tried to escape while leaving Sara to the torturers.
“Sara acted like a heroine,” Lev Bushinsky remarked. “She will live forever like a heroine of the Bible.”
“Perhaps it would have been as well to live out her own life,” Madame Shalmoni said quietly. “I do not mean to detract from her heroism.”
Elisheva turned away her head.
—and even Zev had in the end conducted himself with dignity, the engineer said. He had watched it all. Zev had thrown off the guards to mount the scaffold himself, and he had shouted out his wrath, shouted that the British would hang his enemies, every one of them, shouted until the words were strangled in his mouth.
Some of the tension seemed to pass from among them, as though at last now the description that they needed to hear had been heard, the worst had passed. “See what their heroism has led to,” the mother sighed. “They meant well, undoubtedly, people like the Aaronsons, but it is a danger for all Jews.”
“You had only to hear the shrieks of the bloodthirsty mob,” a young officer began.
“I heard them,” Elisheva said. She was looking at Reuven; her face was white and he felt a tremor from her as though a bird shuddered in his hands. So that only he might hear, she whispered, “Oh, poor Sara.”
“You heard them? You went out?” her father asked, alarmed.
“I couldn’t keep her,” the mother said.
“Spying is a part of war,” Lev Bushinsky resumed, “and a spy knows the risks he takes.” Arabs too had been hanged by the Turks, in Jerusalem itself, he reminded them, for spying.
“Yes, but this doesn’t put all the Arabs in danger. The Arab spies simply did it for money, for themselves.”
The Turkish command was particularly on edge right now, Bushinsky reminded them, because at any moment Jerusalem—
All around there was a sharp intaking of breath like a backdrawn cry of joy. “You’ve heard something?” Shalmoni asked, but in a neutral voice.
“I believe the British have had heavy losses, but the attack continues.”
Their eyes shone, but no one asked more.
Reuven hadn’t noticed her movement, but, indeed like a bird, Elisheva had lighted closer to him. They could talk between themselves. “If only Sara could have lived to know this,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I must be romantic—I even imagined, at the time she was here, that you were perhaps infatuated with her when she was quite young.”
He was startled that she had sensed something so hidden in him, and that she had actually remembered it. Her eyebrows were a straight line, making her gaze even more direct. “Forgive me if I intrude.”
“Perhaps I was, in a way. When she was just a girl. I didn’t know it could be so noticeable.”
“Oh, I notice things about people. I remember I noticed when you used to come here Erev Shabbat, you didn’t eat meat—you’re a vegetarian, an idealist.” She wasn’t mocking.
“Oh,” he deprecated, “some ideals are not so difficult to live up to.”
“You live in a commune. That’s an ideal. Only—” she paused, half-puzzled, half-troubled. “It’s like what they were saying of Sara. She was an idealist, but did that idealism make everything right?”
He couldn’t answer.
“In a commune you share everything in common,” she said, as though not quite certain what it meant, and added in an effort at lightness, “Even wives, people say!”
Reuven was a little disappointed that she should repeat such foolishness.
“Have I said something foolish?”
“You said others said it.” He tried to pass it off. But now she earnestly kept asking more and more about the life they led, and her eyes became fixed on him with a kind of growing question. “But, Reuven, if, as you say, there are so many more men than women—more chaverim than chaveroth—and if all that we imagined was so foolish—then—then what do the other men do? Those that have no chavera?”
Something within him was in flight now. “Well, we are vegetarians.” He flushed.
The subject had awakened such self-consciousness in both of them that for an instant she seemed to take his words literally. “Oh. You mean—” She was on the point of asking, he saw, whether being a vegetarian really diminished carnal desire! As her eyes looked into his, she grew quite red, and laughed at herself.
It was as though he caught himself up, in flight from her inquiries, for a wonderful thing in his life might be happening here, and he must not run away, he must face down his shyness. If only Elisheva would not ask things directly about himself! And that she sensed this too and now put her questions less directly was a second step in this wonderful happening. The more delicate exploration of each other had begun under the pretense of generalization.
“We women are always led to believe that for men it is much more difficult, even unhealthy to abstain. Though of course modern women see this only as a masculine ruse so that men can claim the biological need for a double standard. That’s why today women are demanding more liberties. Still, though I do believe in equal rights for the sexes—”
“Yes, our women demand the right to do the same work, even to plow,” Reuven said. “My sister was the first!”
“Oh, no, thank you!” Elisheva’s laugh was musical, unaffected, a trill.
He was suddenly overwhelmed with longing for Leah. “Of course she happens to be large and strong, she’s taller than I—” But why should this girl be interested in his sister? Reuven returned to the general subject. “I too—the idea that a woman should make free with herself like so many men—I know I could not love such a woman. But I do believe in equality, then if a man expects purity in a woman, he must bring her purity too.”
He had said it, he had virtually revealed himself, and he did not turn away from her gaze. A welling up of wonderment, not yet allowed to break through for fear she might be mistaken, remained for a long moment in her eyes. But she did not pry further, she did not ask the definitive question of him. How good of her to know that it was not yet time. With a sociable smile, Elisheva turned to pick up the conversation with the other guests, as though apologizing for this tête-a-tête.
But when Reuven was taking his leave, Elisheva remarked that he must not again stay away so long, and then added that she would indeed like to see the rare trees he had planted in the Pasha’s garden.
“Whenever you want to,” Reuven said.
And so out of the human destruction of this war he was perhaps yet to be blessed with love. All the tormented nights throughout his younger years, all those frustrated years through which he had held himself continent so as to come unsullied to his bride, all would prove to have been the true way for a union without flaw between them. But what dreams was he permitting himself! He was already envisioning her returning with him to the kvutsa, but how could Elisheva live such a life—she was delicate, fastidious, a girl who had studied in the conservatory in Paris. Other chalutzoth, it was true, had come from homes of luxury and fine families, women like Nadina, yet when he thought of the Shalmoni house, of the richly laid table, the dishes served so smoothly you scarcely realized how they came to be there before you, and set against this the clamor of the cheder ochel, the jostling and clambering over unsteady benches to find yourself a place, the flies, the slop-pan on the torn oilcloth, and worse, the common toilet, and everyone noticing you coming out, and Elisheva was a girl so reserved, so private—
Reuven sensed all this as though the crisis had already come. He imagined her bravely trying to accept all the hard and ugly things of their life, as though he heard her final desperate cry, “But, Reuven—to have the chevreh know even when we—even every intimate thing we do in our room together—I can’t—I can’t!”
But somehow he would help her, and Dvoraleh and Leah would help her, and perhaps—
How foolish it was to dream so far. Yet really foolish? He knew; this time he felt sure.
Scarcely a week had gone by when Elisheva came in her carriage and found him in the garden. Reuven had not dreamed it would be so soon. He had been wondering how soon he could go again to their house.
She had indeed come to see his plants, she said, but first also—this a little breathily—she had a message for him. A man had come to the house who wanted to see Reuven. His name was Menahem. He was to be found in the Harat al Yahud in the Gelman house.
The Gelman house Reuven knew, for it was from there, from time to time, that he had been able to send word home to the kvutsa and to the family. Far less imposing than the Shalmoni house, the lower part of it was occupied by the widow Hadassah Gelman whose husband had been among the first members of the Shomer to fall. Upstairs were several rooms rented out to refugees and emissaries from Eretz.
On the second door, as the widow had instructed, Reuven knocked, and for an instant failed to recognize the gentleman who opened the door—a well-dressed gentleman, with a Van Dyke and a pince-nez. Menahem chuckled briefly. First, without explaining his presence, he gave the family news. But why had Menahem come here?
“The eye of the storm is sometimes the safest place.” Despite the end of the Nili, men of the Shomer were still being hunted. But it was not to hide that he had come here. “I spent a month hiding in your cave. Now I have to work.” It was his way not to say more of that month of hiding. Well, his eyes were somewhat affected, these glasses he wore were really necessary; still, they made a serious impression, eh? Good. He was here as a wealthy Jew from Constantinople, head of the Committee to Aid Jewish Prisoners.
Reuven remained puzzled.
Menahem asked, “You know Young Avram from Gilboa?”
“I heard he was here,” Reuven said. He didn’t personally know him.
“Avram has already made some contacts. We need a little help.”
So that was it. But what help could he possibly be? With Djemal Pasha others—for example, the engineer Bushinsky—had far more influence. Within himself Reuven begged that Menahem would not ask him to do something he would feel obliged to refuse.
“Don’t worry.” Menahem knew Reuven’s scruples. “I’m not going to ask you to eat meat.” What he wanted was simple. Reuven had only to request the authorities to allocate to him a number of prisoners as day-laborers in the city’s gardens. As many as he could possibly justify and even a few more. Ay, what a fellow was Menahem! “How many do you think you can ask for? A few dozen?”
Rapidly Reuven reviewed every project he had under way. Yes, he could justify as many as twenty-four men.
Menahem had already noted down a list of those who most urgently needed to be brought out into the open air. Somehow, with gold, Young Avram from Gilboa had found his way to the keepers of different prisons. He had even secured lists. The Palestinian Jews were mostly in the Chan Pasha and the Kishleh. Each name on the list was a pang. Shimshoni. Tibor. Many had yet to be traced. “Max Wilner?” Reuven asked. Menahem shook his head. As yet untraced.
Forty had already died from typhus, from beatings; some were suicides. Out of the Kishleh, nearly two hundred had been deported to Central Turkey, it was said, God only knew where. Among them were twenty-nine from the Shomer, nearly half the organization. It was rumored, Menahem said in his monotone, that they had been sent as labor conscripts to the front in Erzerum, near the Russian border. Motke from Petach Tikvah was among them—if indeed he was still alive. If there could be some way to find out …
His eyes were fixed questioningly on Reuven. “No, such things I have no way to find out,” Reuven said. This mad brother-in-law of his could take it on himself to go all the way to Turkestan to search for them. “Max too may have been sent there,” Menahem said.
“Max,” Reuven repeated. All their contentions, the deep plowing, the shallow plowing, the bitterness over his long futile experiments with the potatoes—all this seemed so trivial now. What right did he have not to risk himself? “If I went myself and asked Djemal Pasha—”
Now it was Menahem who shook his head. “Reuven, you’re not to risk your position. We need you where you are.”
The very next morning, with a legitimate order for thirty laborers, he presented himself at the Kishleh. There, making no sign of recognition, Reuven saw two well-dressed men, Menahem and Young Avram, being escorted obsequiously from the Commandant’s office, where doubtless another gold-filled cigarette pack had been left to be pocketed.
In the mass cell he now entered, with the list Menahem had given him, there rose voices of broken men, pleading in hoarse whispers. The list had even the name of Professor Shatz, the museum builder, and only by his eyes did Reuven recognize the wraith that responded. Men lying on the floor clutched at his feet. “I’ll come back for you, I’ll find a way,” he half-sobbed.
At last Reuven led out the selected ones—a strange selection for laborers, feeble, tottering, feverish. He would have them sit far back in the garden, in the sun, with pruning-shears in their hands.
* * * *
The troops moved on, others came, cannon rolled through, planes streaked overhead; it was said the English had reached Jaffa, reached Petach Tikvah, that Jews were already returning to Tel Aviv, under British rule!
The mayor of Rehovot came to Leah; a cultural pageant was being prepared, would she and her girls take part? In the British cavalry was a Rothschild, a high officer, and the town was inviting him to a feast of honor; he would visit the colony founded by his father, the Great Donor, Ha-Nadiv.
“No, not his father, his great-uncle,” Masha Weiskopf corrected; she had become the liaison on all things to do with the British. “This one is an English Rothschild, the Nadiv was the French Rothschild.”
“Nu, does it matter? A Rothschild is a Rothschild.”
Yes, yes, gladly Leah would do it, and perhaps it should be for Chanukah, a festival for Chanukah? Indeed! the mayor agreed, and Leah began to think of it—it must be something surpassing, something wonderful. But each day she could only think—how far were they already? Almost to Kfar Saba, some said. And when would the troops of Zion come at last! A Rothschild, and other Jews, it was true, were among the British, but where were the troops of Zion? Would Trumpeldor come, she wondered. One day a caravan appeared from the south, a camel caravan without end, seeming to stretch back as far as Egypt, the animals in their unperturbed plodding appearing to have continued since the days of Joseph and the Ishmaelites. Only, instead of burdens of spices and silks, there shone from the side of each beast the reflections of petrol tins.
In the field opposite Leah’s kvutsa, the caravan halted. Swarms of Arabs—no, these were Egyptians, even blacks from the Sudan —began to unload and pile up a mountain of tins, with shoutings, thunderous collapsings of giant pyramids, imprecations, laughter. And riding up, a neat, smallish Britisher in a sun helmet, carrying a swagger stick, quickly restored order. Suddenly the young Britisher shouted, “Leah! Shalom, Leah!”
Araleh!
What didn’t Araleh have to relate to her! The veils of destiny were drawn aside at last! Instantly, the news of Saraleh and the baby—two now. Well and safe in Alexandria. See, he had photographs. And Gidon? Through the whole of Gallipoli, like brothers! Safe, whole—yes, thank God this much she had known, Gidon had sent a message with Avshalom, poor Avshalom Feinberg. The Nili had been caught, she related; Sara was dead, Zev was captured, hundreds were in prison. Yes, Araleh knew, he had heard in Alexandria. —But Gidon? In England. England! Yes, for nearly a year. And had Araleh heard from him? Now and again a letter. Gidon was well, she had nothing to fear, he might even soon be in Eretz, he was in the new Jewish regiment—Then it was true! A Jewish army!
—Wait, wait! With a quieting up and down movement of his hand, Araleh motioned her to be calm. His lips in a twist of skepticism, he related how it was with the British. Trumpeldor’s men of Zion had been wanted and not wanted, they had been soldiers and not soldiers; under fire they had proven themselves, only to find that they were auxiliaries, porters—their wives not even entitled to aid if they were killed. But never mind. Perhaps in England it would be different than in Egypt. Two years it had taken to win the right to have a Jewish force. Trumpeldor had wearied and gone back to Russia to raise a Jewish army there—
“Is he coming?”
Who knew? But from England it was at last said the men were coming. The same commander, the Irishman of the Zion Mule Corps, would be leading them.
Then Gidon would be coming! It was as though at any moment her young brother would be standing before her.
“Ah, not so fast,” said Araleh. They would have to come through Egypt. That the commanders in Egypt would send the Jews to capture Jerusalem—of this he had his doubts. With the British—though it was promised the unit was for Palestine, the Jewish soldiers would still be lucky if they did not find themselves fighting in the trenches in France. “The first time, too, we thought we were sailing for Palestine, and found ourselves in Gallipoli.”
Still her spirits were so joyous, Leah could only laugh at his doubts. —And he himself? After all, here he was!
Ah, said Araleh, he had learned his lesson, written in stripes across his back.
—No!
Yes, to her he could reveal it, though Saraleh still did not know and must not know. Then Araleh told her his tale. He had learned; and henceforth to no power would he swear allegiance, “only ourselves.” Now, he was a contractor. They needed him, his Arabic was good, they paid him well, but no one could lay a rod on him. He was his own man and could leave.
Still, nothing Araleh said could dampen her joy. He had always been a difficult one, even in the early days of the kvutsa. And Jewish fighters were coming, it was true!
—And his in-laws? Araleh asked. The Zuckermans, she was certain, had been in Petach Tikvah among the refugees. Araleh rode off to look for them.
Where, how, could they join the Jewish army? In each village young men hurried after every British officer who rode through the street. They gathered and discussed marching in a body to the British commander. No need to wait for Jewish troops from America and England—here they were, on the spot! In Rehovot they flocked to the house of Smilansky the writer; despite his age he would be the first to join, he declared, and names were taken down. All of Leah’s girls demanded to be put on the list to be nurses, even to be fighters!
A sitting was being held to determine how to proceed, and Leah hurried to the workers’ house on the Tel Aviv shore. “My mother is free!” Rahel greeted her. Just before the flight of the Turks, a message had come from Young Avram, who was in Damascus trying to help the prisoners. It was because of Zev, Rahel related, that her mother had been freed—at least one decent thing he had done. “They brought her before him to be identified. What do you want of this old woman!’ he cried out. ‘This is not Rahel, it’s her mother. She had nothing to do with anything. She knows nothing. Let her go!’ And they let her go, she is free in Damascus!”
Then Zev was still alive. They hadn’t hanged him?
“They hanged him a few days ago. With Naaman,” Eli said.
Leah turned her head away.
Then, just outside, she saw a British officer, hesitating in the doorway, an immaculate, refined-looking man, wearing glasses. “Sholem Aleichem,” he said, and stepped in, introduced himself: “Captain Ned—well, Nathan Hardin.” He apologized if he was interrupting.
In a formal, Biblical Hebrew, such as had been used here years ago, at the beginning, the Captain explained that he was a barrister from London, and that his task in the military service was civil administration; though he realized he was somewhat beforehand, as few Jews has as yet returned, he had not wished to delay his first sight of Tel Aviv.
Soon they became at ease with him, and more flowed from this refined British Jew. A good Zionist, he knew everyone—Weizmann, Sokoloff, Zangwill, Jabotinsky—the whole struggle for the Jewish army he related to them, and with him Leah even felt free to ask about the hints Araleh had given that in the high command there was no liking for Jews. Smiling with a tinge of regretful but civilized tolerance, the Captain assured them—not really at the very top. Of course, everywhere there were bound to be some who didn’t like Jews—yet after the Declaration, how could the British be doubted!
The Declaration?
The Declaration of the Jewish National Home! Palestine! At their dazed faces, the Captain caught himself up. But of course it was quite natural that in the midst of the fighting it hadn’t yet been made public here. Very well, perhaps he was indiscreet, but he couldn’t keep from sharing it with them. And the Captain quoted, having apparently memorized every word. “ ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people …’”
Messiah! In their own days! They were living to see it! Rahel too, Leah saw, was weeping. If Avner were only here! And Dovidl. But surely they knew. Surely in America they knew.
“The whole world knows!” the Captain assured them, beaming.
If Sara Aaronson could have known, Leah thought. And Zev, before they hanged him.
“A Jewish nation could protect this side of the Suez Canal,” Eli observed. “A great political stroke, too, for the Allies. To win the help of every Jew in the world.”
—Exactly, and the point had not been overlooked, Captain Hardin agreed. And just as Jewish wealth and influence all over the world could help, so the Arabs too were being drawn into the British orbit with pledges of a vast kingdom. Just as the Jews looked to Jerusalem, the Arabs looked to Mecca, and the direct descendants of Mohammed, in Mecca, led by British officers, were already raiding the Turks, across the Jordan. Oh, he smiled in pride, the British were clever statesmen. And a certain amount of idealism must be counted into it, as well.
Why not? Could there not be good, as well as evil, in politics? Why was it more realistic to doubt than to believe? Leah asked herself. Why shouldn’t she believe, and be happy?
Perhaps it would be best for the moment, Captain Hardin added, not to talk of the Declaration, not to raise excitement, until it was officially announced. Doubtless the General was holding the news back for a great occasion, such as the capture of Jerusalem.
On that very same day, when Leah returned home to her girls in Rehovot, glowing and bursting with the great news but managing to keep it within her, there was Araleh just returned from taking petrol supplies to the commander’s headquarters. And there he too had heard a momentous piece of news. In St. Petersburg a second revolution had taken place, the real one. Armed workers, commanded by the Bolsheviki, had seized power!
Instantly Leah saw her Handsome Moshe among them. Free!
Oh, these were truly Messianic days!
* * * *
Every few days, some of Reuven’s men were changed for others, to breathe a bit in the open. Each evening in Menahem’s room lists and plans were made. Young Avram and Menahem managed to be received by a certain Kadi, a whole box of chocolate-covered gold pieces was presented, a plea was made on religious grounds, and lo! they had permission to send in kosher food to the Jewish prisoners. In a warehouse belonging to the Shalmoni brothers, a kitchen was opened. Elisheva came to help, and there Reuven saw her, a kerchief around her head, stirring huge tubs of soup. “You look like a real chalutza!” he said.
Tables with benches were set out in the warehouse, and each day now, when Reuven led his men there for a full noon meal and even an hour of rest, he lingered in the kitchen and spoke with her. How good it was, he told her, to see even the most emaciated of the men in the prisons coming back to life, as decent food was brought to them.
Then, more even than the food, it was a piece of news that imbued everyone with new force. Young Avram came upon it in a German newspaper only a few weeks old that he bought at the stand in the Ottoman Palace Hotel. Great Britain, it said, had made a desperate political gesture, in the form of a proclamation in favor of Zionism. A so-called Jewish National Home was to be fostered by the British in Palestine!
Oh, if they could shout aloud, dance in the streets! Mama Gelman, working in the kitchen, flung her arms around Young Avram, and then Elisheva flung hers around Reuven. It was their first embrace.
No matter that the article went on to sneer at the crude British effort to secure the help of world Jewry by promising them Palestine while they did not yet possess it and were being thrown back with great losses. Here was Herzl’s dream, a great power supporting Zionism. And not a word of this Declaration had the Turks allowed to come out! Clearly they were afraid of its effect. The Homeland would come to be!
Each day, while the men rested, Reuven and Elisheva sat together in a quiet corner they had found behind sacks of supplies. Reuven felt in a state of repose with her now, as when a delicate plant could be seen to have taken hold, and to be growing. The story that she was engaged was not true, Elisheva revealed to him; she had let it spread, she admitted with a mischievous sparkle, because it made a protection around her. A protection from whom? Oh, men and their devices.
Another day she said quite seriously, with a real effort as though she had made up her mind to overcome something in herself that was a barrier between them—that engagement tale—in a way it was not entirely untrue. No, she was not betrothed. But some other thing had happened with a man, and because of it, she had wanted to protect herself from men. Then, as one half-scornful of her naïve self, she told of how she had once fallen in love in Paris—of course in Paris a girl had to fall in love—
For a moment Reuven feared it would be the common tale, the Paris seduction, and he even began in his heart to be ready to love her nevertheless. If she had once given herself out of love to a man, it was as his own sister Leah had done.
But it was something else she wanted to tell him. “It seemed that all the while he was courting me and telling me his love, he would go home to sleep with his mistress.” Elisheva uttered a rueful laugh over her own foolishness, and yet her eyes questioned him with uncertainty about all men, even himself. “You see, I knew the ways of Paris, but it seemed to me that a—he was from our own, from a fine Jewish family—it seemed to me that Jews didn’t behave that way …” Her self-conscious laugh, begging him. What was she really trying to explain to him? “Of course I know they do. Here, my own brothers. I was silly to be so upset. Oh, perhaps nothing would have developed, and I would not have married him in any case as, aside from a girl’s infatuation in Paris, there really wasn’t anything to hold us together, he wasn’t even musical …”
Momentarily Reuven’s heart fell, what did he himself know of music? But she caught it up—“I don’t mean educated in music, that’s not important, but responsive—” This he was. And she returned to her story: “The idea that this way of behavior was so natural for a man, that he wasn’t even ashamed of it—it made me ashamed. I—I’m not one to have many confidantes. But you remember poor Sara. She was in Europe then, and we were friends, and she laughed at me and said the man didn’t exist who was like what I wanted. Pure. So—” Elisheva stopped, and then as one who decides to complete a confession, no matter what the embarrassment, she said, “I told Sara I would wait until I found such a man.” In that moment, Reuven almost shouted out to her, “Yes! Yes!”
Elisheva had mustered the strength to look into his eyes. “If this was my condition, Sara told me, I would be an old maid. And that’s what my mother thinks is happening to me. She keeps inviting all these handsome young men to the house. I know what they are like, what they all do about women. So I let them believe I am engaged.”
Still Reuven sensed there was more. He must wait for her to reveal herself, before he too should reveal. It was not that she was so strictly moral, she said. Nor was it that she disdained the physical act, but—on the contrary—and it came in a half-whispered outburst—it was because such men had made something dirty and diseased of it.
Was it only this? Was her search for a pure man nothing more than a fear of disease?
“Oh no, no, Reuven, you must believe me, if I loved a leper, I would go to him without thinking of contagion. But when—when a disease comes from a degraded act of love, then it is really unpardonable, loathsome. And so, when you said—what you once said, when we discussed equality of women, about respecting your future mate—” There were tears in her eyes. They could do no more in this corner than reach their hands to each other and they let them remain clasped. In a moment Elisheva lifted her head resolutely and said, “Reuven, you know, my own uncle, Leon, the one who was born blind? Only after I was away in school, in a class in physiology, did I realize it was syphilitic.”
Now a tenderness rose in him, a reverent sense of something growing between them that was altogether personal, that had no relationship to the war or their stations in life or even to Eretz. Still, her troubled sense of purity too was somehow linked to all the other plagues that were nourished by man’s good impulses turned evil, to all that he himself wanted to heal in the world. Just so her great-grandfather in the Damascus blood libel had been a victim of another human pestilence, born of the perversion of religion. Reuven felt that his entire being was growing, that with Elisheva he would enter into complexities he had never admitted into his life as a chalutz, and that this was part of the wonder of love that was at long last opening to him.
Her hand was moist in his. Was it possible for two people together to refuse the self-degradation and pestilence of the world of man? “People laugh at idealists,” Elisheva said, “but why shouldn’t idealists too have a right to live in their own way in this world? Even in the midst of war, Reuven—you grew gardens.”
His very soul was touched and rejoiced. “You don’t believe that I have been a coward?”
“A coward! You, Reuven!”
He shivered at how close he had come to never finding her, how he had failed several times to recognize his bride who sat there by her piano waiting for him. A Hasidic tale came to Reuven’s mind, the tale of the Jew who for year after year sat before the gateway to the palace of the King, waiting to be admitted for an audience. At last, grown white with age, the Jew asked the guard, “When may I go in?” And the guard replied, “But I am guarding the gate from others. For you, this gate has always been open. This gate was made for you alone to enter.”
* * * *
Now the image came to Leah, for the festival. Eight girls in white, she would have, for the candles, and the ninth, the torch-lighter, would be weaving in and out in a pattern of flame. Oh, she would make something beautiful.
But on the days before the event, news was bad. The Turks had ceased their flight and established a strong line; the Yishuv was cut in two; none could pass to the Emek, to the Galilee—every contact was severed. Heavy rains fell, and Araleh appeared again, unshaven, exhausted. The battle was desperate in the hills. His camels were useless, slipping and breaking their legs on the wet rocks. The British cavalry was halted, he could not bring up enough water to them for their horses; the Turks had cannon high on the ridge at Ramellah and were slaughtering the attackers. A Rothschild had fallen, Major James, the one for whom the mayor had planned the feast.
Then, on the very eve of Chanukah, an awesome thing happened. Late in the afternoon, a motorcar appeared, filled with British Jewish officers, Captain Nathan Hardin among them. They came from the commander’s headquarters, and they brought news of the capture that very day of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, on Chanukah!
Who could cope with such a strange event?
The heart nearly burst with the wonder of it.
Streaming to the synagogue, the pious and even half-pious cast glances of triumphant scorn and pity, too, on the doubters and godless ones, the apicoiresim encountered on the way. So great was the joy that numbers of these atheists even came to the shul, standing at the edge of the crowd of worshipers.
—Did Abba know, Leah wondered. Surely such news must be carried on God’s wind to the pious. Jerusalem, on Chanukah!
Yet it was as though God had allowed an imperfection to remain. Had Jerusalem been freed by Jewish arms on this day, could even the worst atheist retain a single doubt?
Still in a kind of puzzled, muted awe, Leah clothed her girls in the candle-sheaths. The entire population now, in Sabbath clothes, was gathered outside the shul. Long and eloquent were the discourses over the miracle. None failed to describe the symbolic sacrifice of the fallen Rothschild, surely the Yehuda Maccabee of our own time. And though willingly Jewish blood would have been given in place of each British hero who had fallen, surely by the design of the Unnameable there had been blood from men of far-off lands, of races from all the world, from India, from Australia, from Scotland: was this not a sign? Since the nations of the world had again and again destroyed the Holy City, as they had again and again carried off the people of God to slavery and exile, was it not a symbol of the coming of Redemption that soldiers from many far nations of the world had been brought here to open the way for the restoration of Jerusalem?
Such a fervor of wonder had seized them all, Leah felt some token must burst out from her, to mark the event, and suddenly she knew. Pulling aside the quickest of her girls, Shoshana, Leah instructed her to hurry as far back as the crossroad to Jerusalem, and from there the girl would come running with her lighted torch!
The eight girls in their white sheaths Leah had arranged on the steps of the synagogue. And now Shoshana could be seen from far, torch aflame. The multitude divided for her. Up the broad steps the girl ran, to where the mayor stood amongst the group of notables and British officers. Into the hands of the startled mayor Shoshana thrust the torch, crying “Yerushalayim!”
“Jerusalem is free!”
What sobbing, what exultation broke out! As though they had truly only this instant heard the news. At a whisper from Leah, the mayor knew what to do. He stepped before the row of girls, and lighted each candle, torch to torch.
Then in chorus her girls sang out the psalm of jubilation:
Were our mouths filled with song as the sea is with water, Were our tongues loud with exaltation as the roaring billows of the sea—
Yet we would be incapable of rendering sufficient thanks to Thee, O Eternal, our God and God of our fathers—
They were living again in the days of Yerushalayim. Nothing had happened in all the centuries between.
Now the Yemenites began to chant and clap hands, their women began to ululate, and the whole population jubilated.
The congregation’s leader, Reb Gedalia Feitelbaum, began to chant the Kaddish for the fallen. “Yisgadal,” and the voices fell in with him, a sea of solemn voices. Captain Hardin too knew the Kaddish in Hebrew, and the unbelievers half-remembered, many women knew the words and even children from religious homes solemnly moved their lips.
With each word, Leah repeated in her mind a name: first, this Major James Rothschild who had fallen; then Sara Aaronson’s name rose in her mind, praised and exalted; and her own baby brother Avramchick who had died of malaria, extolled and revered; and Dvora’s fallen beloved Yechezkiel, and Zev’s name hovered there, and Avshalom Feinberg too, and the murdered American settler of Mishkan Yaacov, Joe Kleinman, then all, all, each huge Australian who had fallen, and the English soldiers, and the passive, dark little souls from India, and even the wretched, famished Turks.
* * * *
All the churchbells in England, in France, in Rome rang out the victory, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. In Notre Dame special services were held: it was as though the Crusades had triumphed again, the Holy City was restored to Christendom, and in the most perfect, the most meaningful time, as a divine gift, for Christmas.