B002FB6BZK EBOK (26 page)

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Rebecca followed Mr. Abravanel's Arabs, who led the coffin on the back
of a donkey. Behind her, the sea ended and now she was walking in dark
moldy alleys. Niches that may have been shops swarmed with dusky
human beings with burning eyes, beyond there the honking of a train was
heard whose locomotive tried in vain to bestow an importance on the city but the palm trees had beautiful shapes and thin trunks. Rebecca calculated precisely the delusion in which she followed her man's coffin, and if
there was any beauty in the shabby outposts of the ancient east that hysterical women sometimes used to exaggerate and glorify, she knew how to
protest that misleading vision with smiling rage. The tears that would later
flow from her eyes for eight years in a row were already waiting for her
through her eyelashes. The new and ugly hotel was teeming with noisy
Jews. Outside vegetables and flowers were sold and the smell of charred
meat stood in the air. The fragrance of lemons and the sea only intensified
the smell of charred meat revolving on spits as if human beings were being
roasted. The coffin was put in her room. After the door closed behind them
and the Jew in the white suit arranged everything and even hinted to the
Turk who had followed them all the way to wait for him, only then did she
calm down. When she decided not to weep yet, her eyelids almost swelled
with tears. She went to the coffin and looked outside. She saw houses closing in on her from all sides. She looked here and there, lowered the filthy
shade, opened the top of the coffin and Nehemiah got up, stretched, and
hugged his wife. He said he would never again lie ten days in a coffin, even
if he had to die for it. His face beamed with joy that didn't fade because
of what he could see through the window or from the cracks of the coffin.
When they looked outside through the transparent and filthy shade, Rebecca
and Nehemiah saw two completely different landscapes.

The hotel was in turmoil. Jews who wanted to board the ship honking
in the harbor sought buyers for their miserable belongings. Arabs haggled
cunningly and the dignitaries among them would spit at every Jew heading for the ship, and Nehemiah, who was watching his wife's face, didn't
see the Jewish lords wearing suits and smelling of perfume who came to
take care of the new immigrants, to arrange their papers, if they had any,
and talked with the Pioneers as if they were recalcitrant children who
came to embitter their lives. Nehemiah said to Rebecca: I swear to you,
Rebecca, I've come home and I won't leave here. And she, who longed with
all her soul to leave here, was too stunned by the solemnity of his words to
respond. She thought: I've got his son in my belly, he'll learn. From the
window, on the other side of the room, a little square was seen with a carousel spun by a donkey and a camel. An Egyptian dancer in red and bright
scarves danced there to the cheers of mustached men who cheered and applauded and thrust money between her breasts. Her eyes were painted,
and even from the window they looked bold. The donkey spinning the carousel with the camel stopped, and a man in the uniform of a retired emperor
whipped him and cursed in Italian. At night, they put into Nehemiah's coffin
the body of the man who died of typhus, Rebecca took from her trunk a
black silk dress and a black silk scarf, and the next day she went to the funeral with a sweet expression of modesty steeped with charm on her face.

The tears she had wanted to weep the day before now flowed, cultivated, proper, and foreign to her. They were meant for a man she didn't
even know, and another man she didn't even know praised Nehemiah, a
cantor recited the prayer for the dead and somebody volunteered to say
kaddish. The Turk who stood there all the time and stared at Rebecca
wanted them to put up a tombstone immediately. And the tombstone
was ready that very day with the engraving: Nehemiah ben Moshe Isaac
Schneerson, born in Ukraine in 1880, buried in the Land of Israel in
the month of Teveth 5660 (1900). The Love of Zion Burns in his Heart.
The Turk asked the translator to translate for him. The translator read:
"Nehemiah Schneerson born in Russia in the year eighteen eighty, buried in
Palestine in the month of January nineteen hundred. The love of his wife
will accompany him." Rebecca whispered to the Jew in the white suit:
What is he saying, and he translated for her. She said, Why did he say
Russia, and the Jew said: For him, Ashkenazi Jews are born only in Russia,
for the Turk it's all the same, anyway he doesn't know where that is. The
Turk smiled, received what was coming to him, and left. Later on, what
was written would be corrected and the document signed by two rabbis
along with the photo of the grave against the background of the Mount of
Olives would be sent to the family of the dead man in Aleppo, Syria.

Nehemiah wasn't thrilled by the sight of Mr. Abravanel, who came to
talk with him in the locked hotel room about the wretched settlements. An
empty suit, he said to Rebecca who made tea and served them. A pleasant
wind blew from the sea. Nehemiah wanted to go immediately. Rebecca
wasn't thrilled, but the hotel wasn't her heart's delight either and so it was
decided to leave the next night. Mr. Abravanel, whose son would rule Israel
after those ragamuffins, arranged everything and the next day a cart waited
for them at the door of the hotel. Nobody peeped out the windows. The
streets were dark. The Turks were already beating one another in their dark rooms. The cold of the night before vanished in a dry chill. A wind
blew from the Libyan deserts. A precarious smell of cardamom, raisins, and
droppings rose in Rebecca's nose. Nehemiah smelled lemons and honey.
The road was deserted and the sky was strewn with stars.

On the day Nehemiah and Rebecca came to Jaffa, the settlements were
transferred from Baron Rothschild to the IKA Company. The settlers knew
the new company wouldn't soon fire the staff. The carter who brought
Nehemiah and Rebecca said: It'll be bad! Everything will go down the drain,
and Rebecca asked him what could go down the drain and he didn't answer, but cursed his horses.

Despite the worry, Nehemiah felt a quiet bliss. In the shadows of the
mountains in the distance, he saw the sights of his childhood, the carter
began singing melodies and one of them was Joseph Rayna's sad song about
the rivers of the Land of Israel going to the Temple to ask forgiveness.
Nehemiah longed for his wife, touched her belly, and said: That son, let it
be mine! And Rebecca, who knew what he wanted to ask, didn't say a thing.

By morning, the jackals' wailing stopped and a clear blue light began
filling the world. Nehemiah didn't shut his eyes and Rebecca dozed off. In
the distance, as on a saccharine color postcard, the Arab village of Marar
was seen, all of it like a beehive. Dogs barked and a smell of droppings and
sweet basil rose from the village turned by the sun now rising fast into a
kind of ruined ancient city. Later, the heat intensified with the eastern
wind from the desert, and a struggle of forces raged between winter and
the hot wind and when they passed by some fig trees and sycamores, the
sun already blinding their eyes, the settlement emerged in the distance.
A few neglected and cracking houses, fleeing, maybe eluding, thought
Rebecca, limestone fence trying to unite the houses into one block, a few
young trees, and some desolation that wasn't created or dissolved. The
heat was heavy now and Rebecca felt dizzy.

Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, rode up on a white mare and even in the
distance he hugged the image of Nehemiah in his empty arms. Nehemiah
roared with joy at him. Rebecca was amazed and said: At night he learned to
talk with wolves? And the carter said to her, Those are jackals, Madam, not
wolves, and she said: Jackals, wolves, same pest. When they came to what
Nathan called the center of the settlement and what Rebecca privately
called that miserable hole, the sun was beating down with its full force. Near the synagogue, whose second story was still under construction, stood
the miserable-looking men who were trying in vain to stand proudly. Nathan,
who used to sit with Nehemiah in the forest and was his teacher before he
ascended to the Land of Israel four years earlier, was wearing a dusty beret
and his face was seared by the sun. He hugged Nehemiah, looked at Rebecca,
and a forgotten smile rose up and crept over his lips. The people whose
clothes looked to Rebecca as if they belonged to another climate surrounded
them, there was great excitement, for some reason everybody thought that
what had been broken in those years would be fixed with Nehemiah's coming, that his good sense and integrity were a hope they had cherished for days
and nights. They said: Everything here is sold to the Baron, but we won't be
dependent on his charity. Nehemiah smiled, some of the men he knew, others he knew only by rumor, their letters he had read several times, moldy
water flowed along the ditch where they stood, Nehemiah thought of Abner
ben-Ner and his heroes, and saw Arab children, barefoot, splashing in the
moldy water, dragging piles of straw on their backs. A pesky buzzing of flies
struck his ears but he tried not to hear. Nathan said: Soon our community will
be blessed, and riots of agreement rose from mouths that were parts of faces
that tried to adorn the moment with a smile that was stuck years ago to old
valises. The young vineyards, crests of trees that were planted, and the limestone wall touching the houses, everything made Rebecca clearly suspicious.
Nathan took off his shoes, looked at his old friend, and in the blinding light
that had no corners, no ends, struck by a hot wind sharp as a razor, he started
dancing with his arms spread out to the sides, and everybody stood as if they
were turned to stone. The carter unhitched his horses and gave them something to chew from the crib, and Nathan, (very) isolated now, danced with a
slow, hesitant movement as if he were groping in an invisible space, with his
eyes shut, with great devotion, and Nehemiah put his coat on the ground,
took off his shoes, too, and with the devotion of Hasids standing on the roof
and yelling The Lord is God, he hugged Nathan and together they danced
while everybody looked at them without budging.

Tape / -

Then the things were taken off the wagon and moved to the house that
had stood empty ever since the death of the woman nobody had known
and by the time they tried to ask her she was unconscious and died. She was buried in the nearby settlement because the idea of death could still
be fought and a cemetery of Pioneers looked like a superfluous demonstration of failure. The ruined house was moldy and in the middle of the combined kitchen-bedroom lay a dead dog. Rebecca tried to fix the house and
Nehemiah to tile the roof with the help of his friends. The smell of the
dead dog remained there a long time. At night, all the men crowded onto
the roof, held a bottle of wine they drank because of the sudden cold that
replaced the hot wind, and to the sound of monotonous, quiet singing, they
finished the roof Nehemiah tried to tile. The Turks who slept in their tent
next to the settlement came at dawn with the dogs but the roof was done.
Furiously, they tore down some vines, lit a bonfire, and made coffee. When
the coffee was ready, one of the Turks poured coffee on his friend. His
friend got up and shot him. The corpse lay there with gaping eyes. Rebecca
passed by with her swollen belly and saw the dead man. Suddenly she recalled the smell in the ruin and thought, Is that smell the smell of a dog?
Then, she said to herself: Now I know who the dead woman was. She
hurried to the cart standing there, asked the driver to take her to the
nearby settlement, came there about an hour later, went to the Baron's
official who was sitting there with a young girl on his lap and listening to
music played for him by two pale little girls dressed in white, on flutes, and
she said: The name of the woman you buried here was Jane Doe. The official saw before him a splendid woman filled with a fetus, lusted for her
but was also disgusted by her, and he said: Who's the woman? And Rebecca
said, She lived in an orchard near our city, she was crazy and saw visions,
her father was a cobbler who was murdered by rioters, she saw her mother
turned into ashes, please write her name on the tombstone, and then she
returned to the settlement and with a fluttering heart she wondered why
she had done what she did. A jackal who fell in love with one of the bitches
who came with the Turks wailed at Rebecca's house, she blocked her
ears and tried to return to the river and there was nothing around her but
desert and jackals and a smell of Turks and the blood of one Turk still
close to the maw of the jackal who had approached the blood and sniffed
it eagerly. The yard was full of thistles and thorns and in the summer the
snakes would come rustle among the stones. The rain came down and the
wind broke the roof tiles. Rebecca said to Nehemiah: Look at the limestone wall of the settlement, you've built a ghetto here. And Nehemiah twisted his face, which was already seared by the sun and was sad like the
faces of his comrades and wrinkles were beginning to be plowed on his
forehead, and he said: We need a defense, Rebecca, the Land isn't ours
yet. And she said: And it won't be, and she turned her face and went to the
yard and dug a pit and didn't know why she dug a pit. In the morning,
Nehemiah came out and saw the pit, deepened it and said: I'm building an
outhouse. He didn't know how to pull up crabgrass any better than to dig
a pit. The outhouse he put up collapsed in the first rain. The crabgrass
covered the vegetables he planted. The vineyard he was given was the
property of IKA. In the summer the grapes would be taken away from him
and he would get only a partial payment. Then Nehemiah thought of citrus fruits. The members heard that Nehemiah had an important idea and
wanted to assemble, but the synagogue wasn't finished and the members
said: How can we live here without a cultural center? They went to one of
the abandoned huts and fixed it up and the next night, they called it the
"Community Center." They assembled in the "Community Center" and
even Rebecca, who was in the last week of her pregnancy, came. Nehemiah
talked about citrus fruits, how it would be possible to grow them and
market them, how it would be possible to be independent of IKA and the
Baron. Nathan and his friend Horowitz went to Jaffa, bought saplings, returned, and planted the first citrus grove, but a deluge came nonstop for
three days and three nights and the saplings were crushed and destroyed.