Israel (38 page)

There was the Turkish menace too. Those periods of occupation sapped her spirit more than anything. You had to contain your hatred of the soldiers if you wanted to survive. When they came to torture the men, to spread their filth throughout the cottages, to take the food out of the mouths of hungry children, you had to make yourself go numb inside. Denial of the bitterness was the only way to keep it from eating away your heart.

“Mama?” Herschel whispered fearfully. “Don't cry.”

Rosie bent low to hug her son. “Come on.” She forced brightness into her voice. “We'll go home and wait for Papa.”

The danger of shutting out your hatred is that you also shut out the other emotions, Rosie thought on the way home.

Haim began to calm down as soon as he'd passed through the gate. The setting sun gave the hills a purple glow, while the distance made their barren turns look as soft as pillows. He stood awhile, letting the cool night breezes wash away the last vestiges of his anger. Then he walked on until he'd turned the bend in the road that put Degania out of sight behind him.

No lanterns were lit in the compound at night. The Turks had confiscated all the kerosene. In a little while one of the night watchmen would light a torch to mark the gate, but for now the countryside was as dark as God had created it. Haim listened to the crickets massed along the reedy banks of the Kinneret and the cawing of the blackbirds settling down for the night in the fields.

Then from someplace very near came the summons from Yol's little Arab runner. Haim moved toward the sound until the boy's form detached itself from a black and twisted shape that turned out to be the stump of a gnarled carob tree.

“Not so fast this time,” Haim cautioned the boy. “I'll lose you in the dark.”

“All right.” The boy obediently stayed at Haim's side. “It is not so far.”

“Your name is Jibarn, yes?”

The boy nodded.

“And your surname? The name of your father?”

“I have no father. Yol will answer all your questions, I do think.”

Jibarn led him through a limestone gorge. Haim smelled burning wood and a moment later caught sight of a small, flickering fire surrounded by stones. Here was Yol's camp. Several blankets were spread out upon the dust beside the
barest trickle of a stream overgrown with cattails. Haim thought he heard a mule's soft, nervous whinny.

The site was deserted. Haim was about to ask Jibarn where Yol was when his old comrade, still in Bedouin garb, stepped from the shadows.

“I heard you coming,” Yol said. “Of course I expected you, but—”

“We came very quietly,” Haim said. He smiled approvingly. “You've learned a great deal since you left. Tell me everything.”

“Of course, but first please sit.” Yol indicated the blankets. “I will brew us some tea.”

As Haim took a place near the fire he saw Jibarn wander off into the darkness and he glanced inquiringly at Yol, who smiled and shrugged.

“Jibarn does not care to be still for very long. He will patrol the area and if intruders approach, either warn us or take appropriate action to stop them.”

“That little beanpole?” Haim chuckled.

“Jibarn has slit half a dozen Turkish throats in the last two years,” Yol said, scooping some water from the stream into a small pot. He added a handful of tea and set the utensil on the fire.

“Something tells me my old friend has changed since his Degania days.”

“Somewhat.” Yol smiled modestly.

“How did Jibarn come to join you?”

“I'll start at the beginning. When I left you on that winter's night in 1913, it was my plan to journey to Um Jumi and from there take the boat to Tiberias. Well, the boat was delayed for several nights. I found myself stuck in the last place on earth I'd wanted to be, the village of the dead shepherd. At first I despaired, but gradually perverse curiosity got the better of me. I was well known in Um Jumi, so it was not hard for me to have a talk with
the mayor. I asked him if the shepherd had left any family.”

“Oh, no, Yol.”

“The headman told me the shepherd—his name was Mohammed Ahmed, by the way—had only a grandson, a boy named Jibarn no more than eight years old.

“‘Then he is an oprhan, this Jibarn?' I asked. The headman nodded and told me that all that could be done for the boy would be done, but—Well, Haim, you've seen the miserable existence the most well-to-do fellahin lead.”

Haim nodded. The boy would have been doomed to an early death, there was no question of that.

The tea was ready. Yol poured it into two small brass cups and set one before Haim.

“I went to see Jibarn,” Yol continued. “I stayed several nights with him in his grandfather's hut. In my mind I was appeasing the old man's ghost. The boatmen came to tell me they were leaving for Tiberias, but now I was not ready. I ended up staying in Um Jumi for a month. Little by little I got Jibarn to trust me. Then one night I told him what had happened to his grandfather.”

“Yol,” Haim gasped, “You didn't! You risked a blood feud?”

“There was no chance of that,” Yol declared. “I was right there in the village. The fellahin could have executed me and closed the matter if Jibarn had chosen to speak out.”

“You put your trust in an eight-year-old Arab?”

“I prefer to think that I put my trust in God,” Yol said earnestly. “Jibarn was only the instrument God might have used to punish me had that been His decision.”

Haim nodded. “But obviously it wasn't.”

Yol smiled. “Jibarn listened, as silent and intent as an owl, as I stumbled through my halting explanation. It was quite strange, Haim, quite cathartic.” His tone was
distant as he remembered. “Jibarn has always been precocious. He's an odd boy—”

“That I've noticed.”

“Well, he was even more that way when he was younger. Sometime during that confession I broke into tears. Suddenly it was as if he was the man and I the little boy. He put his arms around me as best he could and told me that from now on we belonged to each other.”

“I shouldn't doubt that he saw it that way.”

“I thought you'd understand,” Yol snapped, suddenly angry. “I thought you of all people would understand about an orphan who needed somebody to take care of him and a man who needed somebody to care for in order to absolve his own grief.”

Haim was ashamed. Many years ago, when he and Yol first met and were sharing living quarters as stonecutters in Jerusalem, he had told the story of himself and Abe. Yol was indeed right. He of all people should have understood.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's the war perhaps. I've seen so many orphans. I guess I've forgotten—or want to deny my own origins.”

Yol patted his hand and for a moment Haim caught a glimpse of the warm-hearted jokester his friend had once been.

“So I take it that Jibarn left Um Jumi with you?”

Yol nodded. “The mayor did not hesitate to put him into my care. The boy and I wandered together, working on farms and in the towns. We stayed a good long time in Jerusalem. Jibarn had always wanted to visit the Holy City. It was my great pleasure to show it to him. I taught him Hebrew and all about Zionism. Together we both learned a bit of English. I also enrolled him in a mosque school so he could learn his own religion. It was not my intention to turn him into some sort of mockery of a Jew. I
owed it to his grandfather to raise him to be true to his own God.”

Haim was quiet for a few moments. He realized his tea had gone untouched and was now cold. He had been too engrossed in Yol's story to drink it.

“Do you love this boy as your son? I must know, Yol, so that I don't further insult you . . . I mean, he is an Arab, and I must learn to think of him differently if I am not to offend you.”

“He is not my son, Haim. Our relationship is based on debt. I killed his grandfather and now I take care of him. Do I love him? I suppose I do, but indirectly I am loving myself—or rather, I can consider myself worthy of living because of what I do for Jibarn. If he loves me I can't say. He is an Arab, after all, and sees and feels differently than we do.”

“You mentioned that Jibarn has killed Turks?”

“Absolutely, and so have I. So shall you if you choose to join us. Eighteen months ago Jibarn and I linked up with a number of Hashomer. The Watchmen are skilled horsemen; they speak Arabic and know how to live in the wild. I daresay they've battled Bedouins for so long they've come to think and act like nomads.” Yol winked. “That's why I'm dressed up like a Bedouin. If you were to cross the Jordan and journey about six kilometers, you would find an encampment of forty mounted men similarly dressed, but every man of them is a Jew and all members of the Hashomer, as I now am, I might add.”

“You're a raiding party?”

“Like the Britisher Lawrence with his Arabs to the south of us,” Yol agreed. “We do what we can to harass the Turks. We cross the Jordan, hit them and retreat before they can organize a defense. The Turks are convinced that we are nomads, so there is no danger of retribution against the settlements.”

“Until one of your band is captured or killed,” Haim
pointed out. “Then the Turks will see quite well that you are no Bedouin tribe.”

“But so far they've not caught or killed any of us.” Yol shrugged. “It's a chance we're willing to take. The British have Jerusalem; Jaffa may soon fall. The Allies are slowly advancing, but the rains are coming. The mud may do what the Turks cannot—stop the British in their tracks. When the roads dry the British will again advance, and it is our hope to have sufficiently weakened key Turkish positions to make that advance all the easier.”

Haim made a face. “And you've come to ask me to join you?”

“I've come to offer you the opportunity to join us, old friend. The Hashomer will accept you at my behest. Jibarn, you see, fights with us but is loyal to me. An Arab boy is a great help to a band of Jews desiring to appear to be Bedouins. He is talented at stealth, and on the rare occasions when he is discovered, his appearance and charm usually persuade the soldier to lower his guard. That's when Jibarn's knife does its work.”

Haim shuddered. “This is a thirteen-year-old boy you've turned into a killer.”

Yol shook his head. “I've not done anything of the kind, but perhaps the world has, just as it's made a killer of me. Jibarn is an Arab, and they hate the Turks as much as we do. Anyway, he won't be thirteen until next year.”

“All the worse, Yol. My Herschel is going to be seven. Would you like to recruit him?”

Yol took a deep breath to control his temper. “What I would like to do,” he began quietly, “is offer Herschel's father an opportunity to fight for his homeland.”

“The British are doing well without our help—”

“
I
wouldn't do it just for the British,” Yol said.
“I'm
doing it for myself. I think any Jewish man who does not fight for Palestine in its time of need is going to be heartsick for the rest of his life.”

Haim nodded, acknowledging the truth. “You know, sometimes we get news at Degania. Maybe a Jewish soldier in the Turkish army will tell us something, or somebody passing through has seen a newspaper. One way or another a little news reaches us. Last month we heard that Jabotinsky has finally persuaded Weizmann to go along with his idea for a Jewish legion and that Weizmann has changed the British mind about it.”

Yol shrugged. “You hear more than we do. We can't make contact with any of the settlements for obvious reasons. But if Weizmann is behind the idea, then the entire Zionist Federation has come around to it.”

“This fellow who brought us the news also said the Allies were about to announce something big. He didn't know what, but he thinks it has something to do with the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour, and his country's turnaround on the legion.”

“I don't know about any of that,” Yol said, “but I did hear about Trumpeldor's Gallipoli venture.”

“He asked me to go with him,” Haim said, “after you left. I should have gone.”

“And if you had, you'd have been covered with mule shit and your back scarred by a British whip. They flogged the Jews, you know, whipped them as if they were no better than the mules.”

“At least the Jews in the Mule Corps earned some respect. You said it yourself, Yol. Nobody knows about you and your Hashomer friends. The Bedouins you pretend to be will most likely get the credit for your victories.”

“I'll let Ruppin and Weizmann worry about such matters,” Yol replied. “I'm for the Allies, my friend, but I have no confidence in the British letting us fight alongside them. They'll have this Jewish legion—if it ever comes about—learning how to parade for the rest of the war. I don't know about you, but I'd rather kill Turks than learn to salute.”

“Would
you?” Haim did not want to look his friend in the eye. “Monkey man, I'm afraid.”

“Nothing wrong with that. Everyone's afraid.”

“Not like me. I hate the Turks. They beat me last time they were here, Yol. I want to kill them, but I'm afraid I'll be killed. I want to fight, but I'm afraid to fight. I'm afraid for Herschel's sake—”

“Stop,” Yol commanded. “Don't carry on so. You don't owe me any explanations.” He paused. “Remember that last night together in Jerusalem? I was for Kinnereth and you were going to Jaffa to court Rosie Glaser. I told you marriage would change your dreams.”

“Rosie has changed me,” Haim admitted, smiling ruefully. “She's taught me to think twice. I enjoyed life more when I didn't think so much, and I think Rosie liked me better that way as well. She seems disappointed these days.”

Yol looked away, embarrassed and helpless to advise his friend. “In a week I will send Jibarn to this spot. I don't want to risk him any closer to the kibbutz. Can you find your way back here alone?”