by Shalev, Meir
‘Sweet Margulis,’ she laughed. Her name was Tonya, and she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second.
They saw caravans of camels, ‘Turkish trains’, as Margulis called them. Levin tingled with pleasure. Hayyim Margulis was the first person in Palestine not to humiliate him, and Levin felt the beginnings of a great liking for this fragrant young man, whom he already dared affectionately call ‘Hayyim’ke’ in the privacy of his thoughts. Perhaps, he imagined happily, he would be asked to join Margulis for good. Together, he daydreamed, the two of them would possess land and Tonya, together plough the earth and build a home. For a fleeting moment the future seemed to beckon from beneath a warm canopy of hope. It was all so sudden that he could feel the back of his neck go limp from sheer bliss. But no sooner had they reached Jaffa than Margulis took Tonya by the arm and disappeared with her and their friend behind the Park Hotel, waving goodbye. Sadly, Levin watched them depart. For several hours, until he was chased off by a waiter, he sat on a bench in the garden of the hotel, looking at the spire of the Lutheran church and the flame trees glowing red all around him. When night came, he bedded down on the dunes north of Jaffa. Cold lizards crawled over his belly, and the snouts of jackals sniffed his legs. He didn’t sleep a wink, and when morning came he went to look for construction work in Tel Aviv.
‘The girls here,’ he wrote to his sister, who was then digging irrigation holes in orange groves near Hadera, ‘are callous and crass and pay no mind to a young man like me who cannot serenade them or sweeten their lives with honey. They want strong fellows who sing while they work, and I, weak and afflicted as I am, am not well liked by them. How I long for a soft, pure hand, for the fragrance of a muslin dress, for a cup of coffee with little cakes on a white table by a green riverbank.’
Levin dug foundations and pushed wooden wheelbarrows through the sand until he felt his back would break.
‘My poor hands are all blistered, and every blister has burst. My skin is peeling and full of bloody cuts. And each day’s work is followed by a sleepless night. My back and sides ache, and each thought is more worrisome than the last. Will my powers hold out? Have I the mental and physical fortitude to pass the test? I would be happiest going back to Russia or away to America,’ he wrote to Feyge, who was then singing away as she crushed stones into gravel near Tiberias.
Levin showed me Grandmother’s answer. ‘There are other women working here, and they indeed launder and cook for the men as you feared would be my lot. But how happy your little sister is! She is a real worker. Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson – I call them by their last names, and they in turn call me Levin and salute me like an officer – all lend a hand in keeping up our tent. Tsirkin, when the spirit moves him, is a most wonderful cook. Give him a cabbage, a lemon, some garlic, and some sugar, and he will make an unparalleled borscht. From a pumpkin, some flour, and two eggs he whipped up enough food for a week. Yesterday was Mirkin’s turn to do the laundry. Would you believe that a grown man washed your sister’s underthings?’
Levin was so overcome with envy and abhorrence that he made a note of his feelings in his diary, thus condemning them to immortality.
‘Do you remember that song I used to sing back home? Yesterday I taught it to the boys. Tsirkin played it for us, and we sang all night long until the sun rose and a new day of work began.’
Levin stuck his pencil behind one ear, rose, stepped out from behind the desk in his office, and began to dance slowly, describing a pained, graceful circle around his torment while singing in a high voice:
I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
You may dress me in plain cloth and call me ‘Jew’––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
I shall eat dry bread and bow to no man––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
He sank back into his chair. ‘Israel’s land,’ he said. ‘You can’t throw a stone in this country without hitting some holy place or madman.’
All around him were the first houses of Tel Aviv, with their Jewish workers, Arab coachmen, and new inhabitants.
‘Suddenly I realised that no one was ever born in this country. Those who didn’t fall from the sky popped up from under the earth.’
He began carefully peeling more letters from the rustling bundle in his drawer. Elegantly anxious, Grandmother’s large, round handwriting angled charmingly forward.
‘I rose from my sickbed,’ she wrote her brother, ‘and toward evening we went for a swim in the Sea of Galilee. The boys carried on like naked babies in the water, and I waded in wrapped in a sheet I threw back on shore once I was neck-deep. Then the three of them had a contest. Liberson said he would walk on water like Jesus and nearly drowned, Mirkin proved quite an artist at skimming stones over the waves, and Tsirkin played to the fish for our supper. In fact, though, I have eaten nothing but figs for the past three days.’
Levin, who had never seen his sister in the nude, was stricken with anger and shame. His short lunch break was already over. Up and down the dusty street walked young men like himself in tattered work clothes, sweaty, faded young women with hunger and disease glittering in their eyes, and fine gentlemen in white jackets and fancy shoes that never sank into the sand. One of them gave Levin a rude look, and he rose from the limestone ledge he was seated on and went back to work.
‘All afternoon I dreamed of returning at night to the sycamore tree on the dune, where I could sit in the dark with my thoughts.’
That evening, however, when he climbed the sand dune and came to the tree, beneath which he sought only to collapse until he regained his strength, he found a young couple ‘rutting like pigs’. One look from them was enough to send the despairing Levin running to the shore.
The next day he went to a bank in Jaffa and asked for a job. He was in luck. Because he boasted a good hand, knew some book-keeping, and had a nice, trustworthy smile, he was given a trial as an assistant clerk, and a year later he was already a cashier with a white jacket and a straw hat on his head. The sores on his hands healed, his skin grew soft and smooth again, and at night he strolled along the beach in a pair of moccasins, listening to the whispers and songs of the pioneers on the dunes and smelling the spicy tea they brewed in tin cans. His heart leaped inside him.
Just then, however, when Fortune, or so it seemed from his account, had begun to smile on him, a war broke out. Along with everyone else in Tel Aviv, Grandmother’s brother was banished from the city.
‘During the war,’ said Grandfather, ‘we were given a forged vasika.’
I wrote down the word vasika. I never asked what anything meant, because explanations would only have snarled the threads of the story. Vasika, kulaks, sukra, Ottomanisation – the only reason I remember such words to this day is that I still don’t know what they mean. Just like Levin and mesamsam.
‘We lived on olives and onions and almost starved to death,’ said Grandfather.
Every autumn he picked and cured a barrel of olives. I sat next to him on the concrete path, watching him peel garlic, slice lemon, and rinse stems of dill, his hands giving off a good green-and-white-striped smell. Each time he tapped his knife handle against a clove of garlic, the pure white tooth slid out of its skin with one quick tug. He showed me how much water and salt to fill the barrel with.
‘Go and bring a fresh egg from the chicken coop, my child, and I’ll show you a nice trick.’
He put the egg in the salt water, and when it was suspended halfway to the top, neither floating upward to the surface nor sinking down to the bottom but hanging by an invisible thread of confidence and faith, we knew that the salt was just right. The levitating egg seemed no less magical to me than the grafted fruit trees in our garden or Eliezer Liberson’s walking on water.
Levin found a haven during the war in a refugee camp in Petach Tikvah. Either he had erased all memory of those hard times or else he didn’t want to talk about them. H
e only remembered a single night, on which great swarms of locusts landed in the fields and devoured everything in sight with a ceaseless, menacing, yet barely audible crunch.
‘When we rose in the morning, the trees were all white and dead, stripped clean of their bark.’ The locusts’ beating wings and masticating mandibles filled his brain like a hail of tormenting grit.
When the boom of the British field guns approached from the south, Levin returned to Tel Aviv, walking slowly down sandy red streets that turned to yellow as they ran into the evening. Merchants were busy removing the boards they had nailed to their shop fronts. The smiles of the Australian soldiers strolling through town inspired them with new hope.
Levin did not return to the bank. He found a job in a stationery shop, where he learned the art of fixing fountain pens. Reverently he took apart the writing instruments of famous men like Brenner, Ziskind, and Ettinger, rinsing their parts in a solution made from sycamore galls that he himself had picked, honing their nibs, and overhauling their wells. ‘Our political future lies in your hands,’ said the shop owner with a smile as he watched Levin inspect Arthur Ruppin’s black Waterman, and Levin felt a wave of contentment. The owner liked him and even introduced him to young ladies, the daughters of his friends. If only Levin hadn’t missed the smells of straw, smoke, and dusty feet. He wanted to wrap himself in a blanket of stars and grass, to sleep on threshing floors and sand dunes. In the end he persuaded his boss to let him double as a travelling salesman, and once a week he set forth on a donkey to peddle his wares to the nearby Jewish colonies.
‘I loved those trips.’ His lungs grew used to the dust, and the patient plod of the donkey gave him a sense of well-being. His route wound between fragrant walls of orange and lemon groves and hedgerows of thorny acacia bushes that glowed with little yellow fireballs, passed the barred iron gate of the Mikveh Israel Agricultural School, and turned into the vineyards of Rishon le-Tsiyyon. The sea of flowers through which he rode seemed continually to part before him. The songs of pioneers travelled through the air. Spying a group of them sitting down to eat, he would bashfully rein in his mount and stand watching from a distance until he was invited to join in. He ate heartily of the Grade D oranges and the bread dipped in cooking oil that still gave him heartburn, and chipped in with a contribution of his own, the sweet rolls and Arab cakes that he bought in Jaffa expressly for this purpose.
‘And kamardin too?’ I asked.
He gave me a mournful smile of surprise. ‘No,’ he said. ‘By then I was a little better off.’
‘Sweet Levin,’ a pretty blonde pioneer with a peeling nose once called him, laughing as she kissed his cheek after he had summoned up the courage to place a sticky crumb of cake in her beaked mouth.
‘My heart skipped a beat.’ At night he dreamed of her and of the farmhouse he would build for her and their children. There would be rows of sprouting vegetables, diligent hens, a cow, and no end of work. ‘Even now I read farm journals the way women read cookery books,’ he told me with a bitter laugh. ‘Every time I travelled that way I looked for her blue kerchief among the trees and grapevines.’ By the time he felt bold enough to ask about her a month later, he was told that she had died of typhoid fever. Once again he was plunged into deep gloom.
‘I never even knew her name until she was dead,’ he wrote to his sister, who had learned by then to plough with a team of oxen.
‘It was my first furrow in the Land of Israel,’ she wrote. ‘At first I couldn’t manage to steer and press down on the plough at the same time. Liberson had to take the reins from me. Now, though, I can plough straight as an arrow.’
She came down with malaria too. ‘But their sweet blood is curing me,’ she wrote to her brother.
Shlomo Levin made his rounds with pens, inkwells, stationery, nibs, commercial forms, and pencils in the saddlebags of his donkey. Though twice he was robbed and asaulted, he proved to be a first-rate salesman and was taken in as a partner in the firm.
That year the first Jewish settlers pitched their tents in the Valley of Jezreel. The Feyge Levin Workingman’s Circle decided that ‘Comrade Mirkin and Comrade Levin should enter the state of matrimony’. Together with the beekeeper Hayyim Margulis and his sweetheart Tonya from Minsk, who was later to fall in love with Rilov, the future pedagogue Ya’akov Pinness, and his pregnant wife Leah, who would die that same year, they formed the first group to scour the Valley for purchasable farmland, ‘to search out the country’, as Pinness put it biblically. Thus they became the founding fathers of the village.
‘We had a donkey called Katchke. By day he hauled water from the spring, and by night, while we slept, he put on a frock coat, polished his hooves and glasses, spread his ears wide, and flew off to London.
‘Just as the King of England was sitting down to breakfast, Katchke knocked with one hoof on the door of the palace. The King invited him in and offered him a soft-boiled egg in a cup and the softest white bread you could imagine. As soon as Katchke began to tell him about our village, the King ordered his servants to cancel his other appointments for the day.
‘“But Boris the King of Bulgaria is waiting in the royal office, Your Majesty.”
‘“Let him wait,” replied the King of England.
‘“The Queen of Belgium is in the garden.”
‘“She can stay there,” said the King. “Today I plan to talk with Katchke, a Hebrew donkey from the Land of Israel.”’
7
‘Grandmother Feyge,’ said Uri, dreamy-eyed, ‘walked through a field of jonquils in a dress without panties, just like a Ukrainian peasant. She got pregnant from the pollen. That’s why to this day my father cries and sneezes when the jonquils flower down by the spring.’
The Committee counted the months and concluded that Grandmother would give birth around Shavuot, the holiday of first fruits. ‘And what better first fruit could there be than the first child of the village?’
‘Tsirkin and Liberson were thrilled by Grandmother’s pregnancy,’ said Grandfather in a tone that made it seem perfectly normal. The two of them went on dangerous expeditions to bring her lemons from across the Jordan, caper buds from the mountains of Samaria, and partridge chicks from the Carmel. Two devoted women comrades were sent from a settlement in the Jordan Valley to wait on her during her difficult last months. They read to her aloud from selected works of fiction ‘and the writings of Movement theoreticians’.
‘As ridiculous as it may seem, the myth of the firstborn child retains its power,’ said Meshulam Tsirkin, who never forgave his father Mandolin and his mother Pesya for finishing second. ‘Your grandmother Feyge carried the child of the whole village in her womb.’
Feyge strolled radiantly among the tents along the muddy paths of the village, her voice grown so opulent that it charmed man and beast alike.
‘Mirkin too, who only loved her in partnership with Eliezer Liberson and Mandolin Tsirkin and never forgot his Crimean love even on the day he brought Feyge to his tent, looked at her moonily then,’ said Pinness.
‘He rubbed her belly with green olive oil,’ declared Uri, adding an embellishment of his own.
When it was time for Feyge’s accouchement, she was rushed by cart to the railway station, which was several miles away. The entourage had hardly left the village, however, when it saw the train come around the blue bend of the mountain and roll into the station.
The story of my uncle Avraham’s birth was one of the most famous in the Valley. On the village’s fiftieth anniversary it was even dramatised by a director from Tel Aviv, who astounded the locals with his purple pants and his loud efforts to bed every young girl in sight.
Mandolin Tsirkin and Rilov the Watchman ‘jumped on their horses, galloped off like two Cossack lightning bolts’, and caught up with the train. Over the protests of the engineer, who brandished a coal shovel, Rilov leapt from his horse into the locomotive, subdued the man with an angry glare and a stiff prod to the chest, and yanked the brake handle.
; ‘We’re not just anyone, we’re Committee!’ he told the engineer and his sooty assistant, who lay shivering on a pile of coal, stunned by this pronouncement and the sudden stop of the train.
‘On your feet and shake a leg if you want to die in your own bed, you dead jackal, you!’ shouted Rilov. ‘Full steam ahead!’
The train started out with a groan, leaving behind a great wake of sparks, columns of smoke, two saddled horses, and Grandmother Feyge and her forgotten entourage, which ran shouting toward the tracks. There was no choice but to give birth in the fields.
My uncle Avraham was delivered an hour later, Grandmother and Grandfather’s firstborn son and the first child of the village. ‘He was born in our field, on our earth, beneath our sun, in the exact place where Margulis’s main irrigation tap now stands.’
That day the cicadas kept up a steady roar in the fields. The pioneers sat up singing all night, and in the morning Rilov and Tsirkin reappeared, having run all the way back. Rilov did not even apologise. After sipping some water, he demanded a general meeting to decide what the child should be called. ‘He’s already been given a name by his mother,’ he was told. ‘It’s Avraham, after her father.’ Eliezer Liberson muttered something about ‘comrades taking impermissible liberties’ and even wrote in the village newsletter that ‘the child is as much ours as hers’, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Knowing that the birth of a first child afflicts all men with a sense of their own mortality, Fanya Liberson, who had been shanghaied from her kibbutz several weeks previously, made Grandfather leave Grandmother’s tent.
‘Fanya and my poor wife Leah moved in with her. The two of them embroidered nappies for little Avraham and wove him a cradle of reeds they had cut by the spring.’