The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  That night, Yochanan, sitting on the side of his bed with his head in his hands, swore to himself that he would never visit the little room again. Ruchama, already in bed, was crying. Yochanan pulled at his beard, tugging the strands from his cheeks, his chin. He wondered if the room in the new house was haunted by the carnal spirit of his first wife. He wondered if his dear late Esther’s incomparable lust for life and love were somehow responsible for the mess these children were now in. He wondered if by going there, and by dreaming his dreams, he himself was somehow responsible. He thought, “Maybe my illicit thoughts have infected the paint on the walls, the linen of the sheets, the tiles of the floors, and by inhabiting that same space they could not help but be influenced.” But then he thought of the look on his son’s face when Eliezer had sworn that he loved Golda and would care for her for the rest of his life, even if their love were unsanctioned. Yochanan remembered how they had entered the house just an hour earlier, after Golda had run away. How Eliezer had his arm around her shoulder, how they had climbed up the front stairs, moving, step by step, together forward. And even though part of Yochanan knew that it was the wrong thing to do, he found himself shutting his eyes and asking his dear departed Esther a question. He was not a man who often consulted spirits or believed in spooks. But this time was different. He conjured her image before his eyes and said, “My wife, did you haunt these children?” And the Esther in his soul looked straight at him with her lopsided loving gaze and said absolutely nothing that he could comprehend.

  TOWER OF DAVID

  Before he fell asleep, Yochanan swore to himself once again that he would never again visit the little room in the house in the New City. He kept his pledge for several months before finding himself there again. Downstairs, the musician played a sweet serenade while upstairs, Yochanan spent a precious hour dreaming of an Esther whose gazes had always been cryptic and whose influence over his life he would always love but would never understand.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Would you believe that when they were old enough, Eliezer actually married Golda? Imagine, a father and a son married to a mother and a daughter! They married very young, and according to family stories were always very much in love.

  I WRITE:

  The night of the day they were married, Eliezer’s eyes stayed open for a very long time. He held Golda close and watched over her. She slept curled up on her side, her back curved into his body like a little spoon. He encircled her, a big spoon. The room was dusty with a gray-white Jerusalem glow. Eliezer watched the shadows on Golda’s face, there in her eyebrows, the curve of her nostril, the indent above her lips. It is said that every child spends the nine months in their mother’s womb learning Torah. They learn everything that there is to learn. And then, at the moment just before birth an angel enters the mother’s womb and presses his finger above the baby’s lip, thus making the almost-born child forget everything. The little indent remains—the physical mark of all forgetting. Once born, the child must spend a lifetime struggling to relearn all that it once already knew.

  Eliezer reached over and lightly touched Golda’s forgetting spot. It was so soft. Under her nose. Above her lips. She didn’t seem to notice his touch. He took his hand away quickly though, wondering if the phenomenon continued, if there was some spot on the souls of the dead, angel-marked or otherwise mystical, where all of Life’s Torah leaked out. This dusty light on the walls, the warmth of Golda’s slim body, the sound of the Austrian musician’s violin. The little room in the New City. Surely these memories would leave him one day. Would leave her too. What then? Eliezer breathed deeply, and then he shut his eyes and hugged her tight.

  That night, as always, they shared their sleep, not just in form but also in function, and when they awoke the sun shone brightly through the window. They were blessedly mingled in the morning light, his arms wrapped around her shoulders, her head on his chest. And even though the violinist was far away, they lay in bed for hours embracing to the shadow sounds of a naughty serenade whose melody wafted over their bodies, casting away forever the need for castles with thick walls, houses with secret rooms, and spells that make love invisible.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Golda and Eliezer had two daughters, my grandmother, Avra, and her sister, Zahava. Yochanan died in 1875 after a short illness. Upon his death, the house he had built in the New City was supposed to be inherited by my great-grandfather, Eliezer. But Eliezer did not keep the house. He never really explained to anyone why he didn’t want it, but it was well known in the family that he felt a solemn duty to live in the Old City, where he was born. Eliezer sold his share of his inheritance to his younger half-siblings—the children of Yochanan and Ruchama.

  Today, the house that Yochanan built sits in the center of downtown Jerusalem. The property is beautiful, built in the old arching dome style. The descendants of Eliezer’s half-siblings all own shares of this house. There are many of them—sons and daughters and cousins and nieces and nephews and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I recently visited the house with my daughter, Nomi. We found it quite easily. It was amazing to walk around inside and think, “Here is where Yochanan stood so many years ago. . . .”

  Chapter 3

  AVRA THE THIEF AND SHIMON’S LOVE AND GRIEF

  I WRITE:

  Avra was a born thief. As the great-granddaughter of a murdered man and the great-great-granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the British Empire she was born with a mixture of pageantry and poison in her blood that manifested itself in a compulsive desire to take other people’s nice things. In her heyday, in between the ages of seven and seventeen, the Old City of Jerusalem—all of its quarters—entertained a constant parade of lost objects. Her audience cursed. Police hunted. But she was never caught. Avra was a pro.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Yochanan and his second wife had a daughter named Avra—she was known in the family as Avra the Big. Eliezer and Golda also had a daughter whom they named Avra—she was my grandmother. I have no idea why they used the same name. In order to confuse us, I guess. My grandmother was called Avra Hayafa— Avra the Pretty. The great Israeli lexicographer, Eliezar ben Yehuda, wrote in his memoirs about his daughter playing with Avra Hayafa. That’s right, he was writing about my grandmother when she was a little girl! Avra was born in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1892. Her younger sister, Zahava, was born two years later.

  As you can imagine, the relationships in the family were all very confusing. In fact, my mother once told me that somebody was his own uncle. And when you look at the relationship, this is actually possible! You cannot easily make a family tree because the roots are intertwined all over the place.

  I WRITE:

  When she first started, she stole only small domestic objects: her cousin’s blue left shoe, her mother’s bronze thimbles, her father’s Sardinian eyeglass case. Someone in the house was always missing something. But who would suspect a child, let alone their own child, of committing a crime? And so her petty thievery continued. Avra was fair-skinned and dark-haired like her grandmother Esther. But unlike Esther, she was skinny. Esther had been curvy and soft even when she was small. Avra had no curves. She was a tiny little wisp of a girl with a flat little stomach and wrists the size of a grown man’s thumbs. Daintily small like her mother. And very pretty. Who could suspect such a fairy child of anything illegal? She seemed to have a body too small for secrets—where could she hide them? And a smile too big for breaking rules.

  But things kept disappearing, and by the time Avra turned eight her parents had begun to suspect something. By then, the thimbles and the shoes and the eyeglass cases had been joined by an entire congregation of books and socks and buttons and pieces of imported Armenian lace. But Avra wasn’t one to get caught. Before her parents’ suspicions could ripen into disciplinary surety Avra had moved on. Her habit roamed and raged out of the house. When she was nine, she stole a precious purple geode from out of an Argentinean stone merchant’s satchel in the middle of
the main street of the Arab bazaar. Also an intricate rendering of Jesus’ face from a local tattooist’s work table. Her habit had no religious qualms; it sat down at all of the city’s three monotheistic tables, and even occasionally sampled the pagan fare. At nine-and-a-half, she stole two pairs of men’s shoes from the front porch of the Omar mosque. And when she was ten, she stole the heirloom silver spoon from out of the third drawer in the breakfront in the living room of the French rabbi’s walnut bureau while all the other guests, including her parents, were listening to a viola recital in another room. At ten-and-a-half she stole seven mosaic stones from the face of a second-century B.C.E. Roman goddess that had just been unearthed behind the Temple wall by an American archaeologist with a lisp who had called Avra “Thweetie” when he found her sitting primly on a low stone wall at the edge of the dig one winter afternoon. Smiling, Avra had hopped off the wall and skipped childishly, charmingly, by and away. She returned that evening after dinner when the archaeologist and all of his diggers had gone and the night watchmen had left their posts to drink some hot Syrian ale. Avra climbed down into the pit of the dig and slipped the goddesses’ eyes, nose, and lips into her pockets—not because she really wanted them, but because after her great-grandfather’s murder, the line between legality and life had been, in their family, organically broken. At least in her genes. And anyway, her fingers just itched.

  She never kept what she stole but scattered it all around, taking particular pride in occasionally giving something back. So, for example, she might replace the Jesus tattoo with the goddess’s lips or the silver spoon with the Jesus tattoo, and though no one ever caught her trail, if they had, they would have seen that her intent was not so much to take as to confuse, and that at heart she was not so much a criminal as a clown with a misguided sense of self-expression.

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  Avra married Shimon Sepher, an emigrant from Russia. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian czar permitted some Jews to move from Lithuania to the south. In the Black Sea region, they were allowed to be farmers, to own and work the land. This was very unusual as the Jews in Europe were typically not allowed to own land or to be farmers. Among the families that moved to south Russia was our family—the Sephers.

  The Sepher family generations known to us lived in the city of Tokmach in Tavria County, north of the Crimean peninsula. The family was well educated and received a good, solid Jewish education. Some of them were very religious and spoke Hebrew fluently.

  My father’s grandfather, Yehuda Sepher, married a woman named Shifra. Together they had four children, three sons and a daughter. I have not been able to find out the daughter’s name, or to trace any of her descendants. Their three sons were Yonatan Sepher, born 1880, Nachum Sepher, born 1883, and Shimon Sepher, born 1885. Shimon was my grandfather.

  Yehuda’s uncle, Zeev Sepher, had immigrated to Petach Tikvah in Palestine from Russia in 1842. According to Turkish law, if a Jew died with no relatives in Palestine, his property would be confiscated by the Turks. This caused great distress in many families. In order to prevent the confiscation of his property, Zeev willed his property to his family back in Russia and entreated the family to send a child to inherit his farm in Petach Tikvah. The letter was found, along with other family documents, in an old suitcase under my grandfather Shimon’s bed when he moved into a nursing home in 1968. The following is a copy of this letter:

  To my relative Yehuda,

  I send you greetings and much love. And I ask you from my heart, dear nephew, please send a child to us. We are very old and God forbid our property may be taken by strangers. You must send one of your sons. And when the boy comes, tell him not to bring prayer books, we have enough. Also tell him not to worry from the sail on the boat. The same God that rules the land also rules the sea and everything will be fine. . . . Thank God I have bread on the table but I do not have a barn for the cattle to be in in the winter. It will cost 50 rubles to build it and I have only 20 rubles now. When your son comes to me he can work in my fields or for Baron Rothschild in the vineyards. If he comes, all will be well. Send a child so that the property will not be lost!

  Happy New Year,

  Zeev Sepher

  Nachum, Yehuda’s middle son, decided that he would go to Palestine to inherit his uncle’s property. This was probably because Nachum was the most religious of the brothers. But before he could go, war broke out in Russia. In 1904, the Russian-Japanese war erupted, and the czar’s draft increased its scope. All three Sepher brothers—Yonatan, Nachum, and Shimon—were in danger of being drafted.

  Of the many hardships faced by Jews in Russia, being drafted into the czar’s army was one of the worst. Many young Jewish men fled Russia in order to avoid being drafted into the czar’s army. Others pretended to be lame when they were called in front of the draft board. Some even maimed themselves rather than serve. A popular technique was to bend and tie a finger until it lost its use permanently.

  The reason they attempted to avoid the draft was that they were abused in the army, and were not allowed to practice their religion while serving. The period of service could be as long as twenty-five years! It was, for most, a death sentence. Also, many of the young Jews in the czar’s army were forced to convert to Christianity. If there was only one boy in the family he was spared military service. Sometimes, if a Jewish family had more than one son, they would give one of the boys to close friends or relatives who had no children to raise as their own. In this way, both boys would be spared from service. This happened in our family—not on the Sepher side, but in another branch, the Leibs. Rabbi Menachem Hakohen Leib, my great-great-great-great-uncle, had two sons. The second was adopted and raised by the Plotnick family. I have recently contacted the descendants of this cousin. They live today in San Francisco.

  In the winter of 1904, the eldest Sepher brother, Yonatan, had a hearing with the Russian draft committee, which was called, in Russian, the Prizawe. Yonatan wasn’t drafted because he managed to convince the committee members that he had a problem with one of his legs. He did this by pretending to limp. Years later, Yonatan would show his children and grandchildren how he was an expert at perfectly imitating a limp.

  Soon after Yonatan successfully evaded the draft, the middle son, Nachum, was called into the Prizawe.

  I WRITE:

  Ever since he was a little boy, Nachum had believed in spiritual geography. He knew that he had been born with a map in his brain and that the map had a course on it, a course in bright red ink, flowing through all of the moments of his life, and charted straight for Jerusalem. He was smaller than his brothers, which made him very short. He was more religious than his brothers, which sometimes made him the butt of their jokes. He would leave them in the morning and walk to the House of Study as they went to thresh the hay.

  “Ahh Nachum,” they said, “tell me when you find Mount Sinai on those pages, I’ll climb it with you, could use the exercise.” Nachum, carrying his books to the House of Study, wondered if God was a mountaineer, or if he lived in valleys. He wondered if God was hay or if God was grass. Or if God was both hay and grass.

  Nachum was called to the draft board on a Sunday morning at the end of May. It was the late spring of 1904. The czar’s army had just been defeated by the Japanese at the Yalu River. Nachum planned to travel to Palestine the next fall, leaving Russia right after the Jewish New Year. The night before he went to the draft board he had practiced his limp with his brothers. Yonatan was the best at it. He had shown Shimon and Nachum how to pretend that they were squeezing a pin in between their two biggest toes. “The trick,” Yonatan had said, “is to try to walk without dropping the pin or letting it poke into you.” That was the trick. An imaginary pin. They had all tried it several times, limping the length of the cottage and then outside, all the way to the barn. Yonatan had done it with his left leg, Shimon with his right. Nachum, too, chose his right one. Then, when they got tired of limping, Shimon had yelled, “Take these pins and
race me all the way to the river!” And they had all crouched down to the ground, their fingers pressing into the dirt like the legs of spiders, and then suddenly they were running, running, their feet hitting the ground with hard thumping echoes.