B002FB6BZK EBOK (39 page)

The Arab greeted them and Rebecca gave the customary reply and then
the Arab sat down and she and the Captain immediately sat too, and the
Bedouins sat not far from them, and the Arab fiddled with some amber
beads in his hands, and asked: So you're suddenly here and why are you
suddenly here, maybe you've got family here? Rebecca smiled and said: My
family is three clods from the right and the Arab laughed and the Bedouins
laughed too and the Captain, who didn't understand Arabic, or pretended
not to understand, tried not to laugh and looked at the horizon, something
Rebecca wanted him very much to do, because the horizon was in the west
and there was Gaza City, and she said: I'm just touring for no good reason,
empty and wonderful, why not, and the Arab, whose misbakha in his hand
began moving nervously, said: For no good reason? By my eyes, people
don't come here for no good reason with a chariot and generals. Later on,
Rebecca explained to the Captain that since the truth is not accepted literally in the Land of Israel, the Arab understood that the distinguished
lady in the chariot and the general who surely commanded big armies came
here to sniff land and buy it for some secret army that would destroy the
holy places of Islam, which, as everybody knows, are south of here, about
twenty days away. And since he knew she was a Jew, he also knew the
exorbitant price. She waited. The Arab muttered something to himself
and went off and half an hour later he returned with two more Arabs. The
Bedouins were ordered to gather branches and twigs for a bonfire. They
made sweet black tea; Rebecca and the Captain drank it very slowly with
the Bedouins, who smacked their lips to impart to the scene the honor due
it. The two men who came with the Arab were even more eminent than he
was, dressed more splendidly, even though a smell of sheep dung and fragrant wormwood rose from them. They whispered together, their faces
darkened and they whispered together again and excitedly offered Rebecca
a hundred English pounds if she'd get out of there. She said: With all my
heart, I thank you for your generous offer and appreciate your magnanimity and your ignorance of Arabic numerals, which you gave to the world along
with the alcohol you don't even drink, one hundred English pounds is a
hole in the penny of the hair of my late grandmother who is buried so far
from here that I don't remember her name anymore and so I am not left
without a mother to thank for your generosity and with the necessary
modesty of a woman with a thousand soldiers at her disposal not far from
here, to tell you to leave me and my friend the field marshal alone before
the armies come who are now on sixty-six English warships at the shore of
Gaza and peace on Ishmael and on the holes of all the pennies. Not only
did they listen to her tensely, but the Captain was also listening. He
thought he should smile, but he understood from her trembling and her
tension that he better not take his eyes off the point he was staring at.

Then, since her splendid words only confirmed their suppositions and
even sharpened their cunning, the Arabs announced, even without consulting anymore among themselves, that when they said a hundred pounds
they didn't mean a hundred pounds, but the wind distorted their words
and when she looked at the Arabs with ostentatious ennui, and peeped
surreptitiously at the place where the harbor of Gaza was likely to be, and
sixty-six warships had already started raising smoke in her eyes, the price
went up to a hundred and fifty and then to two hundred English pounds,
and then Rebecca took the money with generous weariness, got into the
carriage, called the Captain to get in with her, and said: Yallah, let's get out
of here, we'll buy the lands for your army someplace else.

When she came back to the settlement Haya Horowitz and Frumka
Berdichevski saw a smile on Rebecca's lips. The rumor spread like wildfire
and the farmers wearing clothes taken out of mothballs began coming to
her house with bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine. They said, Congratulations, and when is the wedding? And Ebenezer, who was summoned
from the citrus grove, appeared holding a new bird that had almost managed to fly out of the wood in which it was carved, saw the laugh on his
mother's lips, and the laugh frightened him. The farmers were insulted
when they heard there wouldn't be a wedding, not now-as she said-and
not at any other date, and they went off disappointed and then Nathan,
Nehemiah's old friend, began dying and Rebecca, who hadn't seen him for
some time, went to visit him. She sat next to him, held his hand, told him
not to be afraid of death because there's nothing more awful than life, and then she told him about the Arabs and how they had given her two hundred English pounds for land she hadn't intended to buy. He burst out
laughing and didn't stop for three days until he died with a smile on his
lips. The settlement forgave Rebecca for all her insults over the years because of the laugh she gave Nathan on his deathbed. At Nathan's funeral
in Roots, Rebecca recalled the first day she had come to Israel and wept.
But they didn't see the first tears Rebecca wept since she went to Jaffa
with Nehemiah.

At night, she lay in bed with her eyes wide open and thought about
Nathan. She thought that twenty years had passed since she married
Nehemiah. She tried to grasp her life and to understand what she had
meant to do with it if people like Nathan died while others grew old and her
mongoloid son sat in the citrus grove with a deaf girl and sculpted birds.
Ebenezer came to her. She smelled his smell of resin and wood and lay still
in bed with her eyes shut. He sat on the stool not far from her bed and
wanted to know if the laugh he saw when she returned from the trip to the
Negev was the laugh of Joseph Rayna. She told him, Maybe, maybe, but
don't hang too many hopes on that. The next day, after many years of not
doing that, he carved the portrait of Joseph again and she looked at the
portrait and didn't say a word, suddenly Ebenezer seemed so unworthy of
the gigantic and splendid war waged inside her by two valiant and desperate men like Joseph and Nehemiah, that all she could tell him was: There's
a resemblance in the face but there's no resemblance in the spirit of the
face.

Ebenezer was ashamed, he went outside and hurt himself with an almond branch and had to go to the doctor. Rebecca said: Nathan's wife saw
you hurt, so watch where you walk, your girlfriend is only deaf and not
blind, and he said: She hasn't been my girlfriend for a long time, she's
married to a laborer and lives far away.

The new doctor's name was Zosha Merimovitch. Even as a child, he had
known the legends about Rebecca by heart. The legends began to be embroidered back in nineteen ten, two years after Rebecca buried Nehemiah.
She went back to Jaffa then to buy a plow and stayed in a small hotel.

It was a hot day, Zosha Merimovitch was told, and Rebecca went out in
the morning to buy a plow and old Michael Halperin, filled with the fury
of many languid Jews, stood at the circus that had come to town and saw Jews wearing white suits, with delicate hands, smelling of perfume. He
tried to excite them with the idea of a Hebrew army of ragamuffins that
would conquer the land of his fathers from its robbers, bring it to life, and
restore it to what it was and they nodded fondly at the barefoot ancient
prophet splendid in his oriental garb, but their eyes were fixed on the
beautiful Egyptian dancer, shaking her buttocks to the sound of the drum
and the oud, and on the caged lion. An Arab knife-sharpener stood there
and sharpened sickles, knives, and swords for all the wars Halperin said
were coming. And then Michael Halperin entered the lion's cage, and the
crowd held its breath. He stroked the lion's mane, stood facing him, sang
Hatikvah and the modir didn't know if it was forbidden to sing it even in
a lion's cage, and the lion lay on the ground, fixed watery bored eyes on
Halperin, and fell asleep. The lion's grating breath and Halperin's singing
were the only sounds. The lion's hair looked like Halperin's.

Halperin's singing in the lion's cage stirred memories in Rebecca of the
songs of Joseph Rayna. She said to herself: Heroes in a cage of a tame lion,
a cheap stage setting, a stupid attempt at would-be salvation. The words
of Hatikvah always made her feel melancholy. Words full of longing for
artificial horses and visions of returning from a hunt in a nonexistent forest. She despised Halperin because no Hebrew army, she thought, would
spring up from his shouts and the bombastic song in a cage. And, unnoticed, Rebecca went into the cage, locked the door behind her, and then
there was a silence people had never heard before. You could hear, said
Zosha Merimovitch's mother, the sound of the oil in the bottles on the
stand of the old oil vendor, whose knife stopped being sharpened at that
moment by the knife-sharpener.

Rebecca opened the lion's maw, managed to look into its mouth, and
saw how big its teeth were. The Turkish modir now stood up and started
lashing himself with a turbatsh and Rebecca, who didn't know what language the lion spoke, ordered it in Arabic, which she thought was closer to
its language than any other language she knew, to roll over and play cat for
her. The lion did as she ordered and to the spectators, who may have invented some of it, its movements looked like coquettish rotating movements and some versions have it that even its roar sounded like a cat's
meow, but Zosha clearly remembers that in the conversation about that
subject, various opinions were expressed about the purring, since a Turkish cat whines yeow and a Hebrew one yooo and an English one meow, so there
was no consensus about whether the poor lion whined like a cat, and the
lion, who apparently smiled at Rebecca, lay on its back and then got up and
roared and she didn't budge until it walked in front of her, knelt, turned
its face, and she stroked its mane, straightened her dress, wiped off a few
pieces of straw that had stuck to it, and said: No blood and fire, no hope,
this is a place of circuses and Jews, there's nobody to erect a kingdom of
Judea for here, Michael Halperin, there's no reason, and she went out of
the cage. The doctor Zosha Merimovitch, who was then a little boy,
trembled with fear when he heard the story and people told how Michael
Halperin then went to Rebecca, bowed to her as he had once bowed to the
lion, and she said to him, The lion of Judah bows to a miserable lady of
exile? And in a mocking voice, she went on: You're a funny Jew, Halperin,
go save another nation in another place, but never mind, you're the closest thing to a lion I've seen since the Wondrous One was here and taught
the fools in the settlement how to smell the feet of robbers who went
through the field. Grand pianos they've now bought for their daughters,
and she left.

The doctor, now a grown-up, waited for Ebenezer. Now and then he
peeped at her house but never managed to see her. And she refused to go
to doctors. He waited for the bold fellow, the hybrid of Michael Halperin,
Rebecca Schneerson, and Nimrod the hero. His contempt for Ebenezer
was perfect, he treated him without looking at him.

The Captain moved to the nearby settlement, which was big and rather
close to both Jaffa and Jerusalem, and the door of his house said: Captain
J.M.A.G., Citizen of the United States, Argentina, French Editor, Please
do not visit on Sunday and Wednesday. The Captain's trip to Cairo was
postponed again and again and every Wednesday he would ride to the
settlement to visit Rebecca, sit in her house, tell her about his plans, and
give her a most discouraging account of the irrigation plan for the Middle
East she had devised and still expected to realize, even though for some
time now she didn't remember why she had ever devised that plan. The
Captain didn't give up his idea of marrying Rebecca. He listened patiently
to her tribulations, the story of her weeping for eight years, the story of her
life with Nehemiah and her tribulations with her stupid son, who goes to
a doctor who probably studied horse doctoring in Beirut, to put iodine and a bandage on his face. For some reason, the Captain saw the story of her
going into the lion's cage as overwhelming proof that she would marry
him someday. Because she could never understand the disposition of the
Captain's ostensibly logical connections, she took the words literally and
learned how to go on refusing him politely. She would say her "no" pensively as if she meant "yes," while gazing softly at the Captain's increasingly pale face, and so she could keep his hope on a back burner and know
that every Wednesday he would come visit her to propose new ideas to her
and some of them really weren't bad, like building the airport years later.

While Rebecca was pondering how much alike were the Wondrous One,
Joseph, the Captain, and the German officer who played songs for her
during the war, new settlers came to the settlement. The Turkish modir,
who was banished from the Land by the British, sent her a love letter from
Istanbul and the manager of the wine press started sending love letters
with shipments of brandy he would send to her home. The economy improved, new rest homes were even built for rheumatics since the air of the
place was good for them. Roads were paved and the settlement was enveloped in thick green foliage, and there were corners where the sun never
penetrated, and Rebecca went on protecting her son at a limited distance
of time and space. One day a young teacher came to the settlement from
Tel Aviv whose name was Dana Klomin. She brought twelve little children
to show them the pit of the first settlers, which they had started digging
next to the synagogue some years before. In the community center hung
pictures of the early days and one of the farmers took the children on a tour
of the community center and showed them the pit, Roots, and told about
the tribulations, the torments, and the malaria. He told about Nathan and
Nehemiah and the Wondrous One who came riding from the Arabian
deserts to teach war. The teacher Dana was short, round, handsome in the
unaccepted meaning of the word-as Rebecca put it-her eyes were gray,
and when she twisted her ankle on a tour of the Hill of Tears, she was
taken to the home of Zosha Merimovitch the doctor, who knew her father
in Tel Aviv, and when he fixed her heel and bandaged it she saw on the
windowsill a bird made of wood that Ebenezer had brought the doctor as
a sign of gratitude for his cure. She looked at the bird in amazement, and
said: That's a bird of paradise, it almost flies and doesn't fly, like me, who
carves such a handsome bird? The doctor, who never caught on that there was anything special about the bird or Ebenezer, refused to see and turned
his face away when he'd come to him, put the bird on the windowsill because he didn't know where to put it, said: That bird was made by
Ebenezer Schneerson, who sits alone in the citrus grove and carves.