by Nomi Eve
Part Two
Chapter 4
THE WATER DANCE
MY FATHER WRITES:
In 1914, Avra, a small woman, began working as a charwoman in a Turkish army base. Shimon, who was short, dark, and very muscular, worked in the citrus groves of Petach Tikvah. In 1915, they lived next door to Avra’s sister, Zahava, who had married a man named Alexander Tsarfati. Shimon and Alexander Tsarfati worked together as pardesanim, that is, as orchard men.
About my great-uncle Alexander Tsarfati, there is an interesting story. My father once told me that Tsarfati had been deeply involved with the NILI spies. The NILI spies were a group of young Jews spying against the Turks, for the British. They believed that only under the benign protectorate of a European power, like the British, could the Jews ever establish their own country. The spies were led by a beautiful young woman named Sarah Aaronson. Sarah Aaronson was an incredible figure in Israeli history. Supposedly, she had many lovers. It was even rumored that she had an affair with Lawrence of Arabia. Several of the other spies were always known to be in love with her. NILI is an acronym for a biblical phrase from Samuel XV: Netzach Israel Lo Ishaker, “The Eternity of Israel will not Lie.” The name was chosen randomly. The spies took a dead compatriot’s Bible, let it fall open to any page, and took these words from it.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Conditions in Palestine were terrible then. There was mass hunger, malaria, crop failure, and the Turks were expelling Jews from their homes. Refugees were wanderingthe country.
I WRITE:
Alexander Tsarfati showed Shimon how to do the water dance of the orchard. And in Shimon’s mind, it was the water dance that afterward (years afterward) most reminded him of Sarah Aaronson. Not the bullets, not the many deaths, not the story of the spy in the desert—none of these things led Shimon’s mind to Sarah Aaronson quite so quickly as the water dance did.
The point of the water dance was to irrigate the orchard trees. It was the only form of irrigation used in Palestine at that time because it required no pipes, only legs. This is how it was done. The orchard men dug trenches in between the rows of fruit trees. The trenches were all connected, and each tree had its own trench that allowed the water to flow directly to its roots. Shimon stood in the middle of the row of trees. Alexander Tsarfati was at the end of the row. Alexander yelled, “Yalla, now! Jump in! Here it comes!” along with an expletive that was not directed at Shimon but at a mosquito landing on Tsarfati’s knuckles as he struggled with the pump to let the water flow. Alexander Tsarfati slapped the mosquito but did not kill it in time to stop it from drinking his blood. A red welt rose up there. Shimon, in the middle of the orchard, stood with his feet spread wide out, left foot in one trench, right one in the other, so that when the water reached him it flowed not into the two trenches he blocked off but into the two that he had left clear. The water flowed to the two mandarins. The lemons to his right remained dry. Alexander Tsarfati sucked on his knuckles. He yelled, “How is it going?” And Shimon yelled back, “Very muddy!” He was deep in mud by now because one of the trenches had given way and was caving in. Now Shimon jumped out of the first group of trenches and into the second. He felt as if his body had become machinery and wondered if perhaps next it would become the trees.
I WRITE:
On the twelfth day of April, in the year of 1915, Avra found herself in a very unlikely and awful situation. Avra was in the pasha’s inner office in the Turkish army camp outside of Petach Tikvah. Six months pregnant with twins, her first babies, she was crouching behind the inner office door, so that the people outside the office, in the entrance way, could not see her. In the entrance way sat an officer with a pug nose and bad allergies. He was horribly mean and had once yelled at Avra for upsetting a bucket, reacting as if she had not just spilled water but had committed a vicious crime. The officer snorted and sneezed at least once every fifty seconds, so that she, Avra, crouching inside the office, could hear him there. Avra was alone in the room. Her skirt was hiked up almost to her hips, and her knees were splayed and her right hand was thrust under her underwear, her fingers reaching high up into her vagina. High. Higher. One by one she put four bullets inside of herself. Just underneath her heavy womb. The officer snorted. She knew that if he came in and found her now, she would be hanged as a thief or a spy. Avra pressed the bullets higher up. This made her cramp up, but she kept pressing higher. She was so afraid that when she stood up they would fall out. The bullets were cold and hard and she felt a grim and nauseous fever swell through her as she stood up and straightened her skirt. The bullets stayed in place. Avra bent down again. This time she dipped her hand into the bucket of soapy water that she had been using to mop the pasha’s floor. Swirling her hand around in the bubbles, she washed her own smell off.
Then she mopped the floor, making sure to get the corners extra clean because the pasha checked. And then she dusted the tables and the vases and chairs. Then she dusted the wooden box sitting on the right-hand corner of the pasha’s desk. The box had contained the four bullets and still contained many more. The officer outside was blowing his nose. She lifted up the heavy bucket and left the inner chamber.
As she passed by the officer, she noticed for the first time that he had a red birthmark behind his left ear. The bucket banged against her knees. The metal handle dug into her palm. She threw the water into the parched brown-gray soil behind the barracks. Avra watched it trickle into the earth in random squiggles and lines. She could not move from this spot. And as she stood, riveted and revolted, she clenched the muscles in her vagina around the hard metal. She could feel each bullet lodged there. And although she knew it was impossible, she thought that she could feel them stacked as high as her lungs. “Dear God,” she said out loud. “Dear God.” Though she was not the least bit religious, Avra knew the proverb: the mother who, while pregnant, takes a fright, gives birth to a child wearing the face of the mother’s fear. For several seconds Avra felt as if she were some kind of mystical mirror and all of the world was reflected on her skin. “Dear God,” she said again, this time in a whisper, “what will my babies look like?” Leaning over the earth, she retched. The twins in her belly began to kick as the last of the soapy water disappeared into the earth, leaving a splotch of darkness on top of the droughted soil. Avra stood up and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and then she put her hands on her lower back, pressing there with her palms in an effort to ease the pain of carrying such a burden.
MY FATHER WRITES:
In 1916, a NILI carrier pigeon was caught by the Turks. The message the pigeon carried tipped off the Turks as to the existence of the spy ring. Soon they came for Sarah. They took her and her elderly father, and they tortured them both for several days. Sarah’s torture was severe. Her fingernails were ripped out, her palms burned, the hair was pulled out of her head; her body was beaten repeatedly. But she did not give up any information.
Sarah Aaronson begged to be allowed to return home one last time before she was to die. Her captors acceded. She was walked home in chains. When she arrived home she went to the bathroom. There, she wrote a letter to the other spies telling them to be brave and assuring them that she had not given away any secrets. Then she took a pistol out of a hidden cabinet and shot herself in the mouth. She did not die immediately. Paralyzed, floating in and out of consciousness, she died four days later.
According to my father, my great-uncle Alexander Tsarfati was actually the man who acquired the gun Sarah Aaronson used to kill herself. Supposedly, when things began to look very dangerous for the spies, Sarah asked her companions to procure her a weapon, “for self-defense.” And Tsarfati was given this assignment.
I do not know if this story is true. My great-uncle would never speak on the subject of the spies, and my grandparents, Shimon and Avra, who were very close to Tsarfati, always remained silent on the subject too. My father heard the story when he was a child. He heard it from an older cousin, who, along with my grandparents and great-uncle,
died many years before I began writing this history.
I WRITE:
Avra sewed the bullets into the stuffing of a dark purple saddle pillow. The cloth was very thick, and afterward her fingers stung from pushing the needle through it. Shimon took the saddle pillow, tacked his horse with it, and then rode up north with Alexander Tsarfati. Shimon tore open the pillow and gave the bullets to Sarah Aaronson. He put them in her hand. Alexander Tsarfati gave her a gun. Sarah held these things for several minutes, not saying anything. She curled her fingers around them and then she thanked the men profusely. Later that night, Shimon and Alexander went with Sarah down to the beach to wait for the messenger ship from Cairo. It was a cold night, the water was choppy in a dark silvery way. Sarah spotted the swimmer first, but before the man could make it to shore, they all heard the horse-thud and jangle of a Turkish patrol. Everyone scattered. Shimon ran after Sarah. She was very fast. She led them into a cave where they waited together in silent darkness until someone came to tell them that it was safe to go back outside again.
The next morning, Alexander and Shimon traveled home. On the way, Alexander told Shimon stories that he hadn’t wanted to hear before. Stories about Sarah Aaronson whose legendary beauty was no longer legendary to Shimon but as real as his own heart beating. Shimon agreed with his friend that she was the most beautiful, the most alluring woman he had ever met. They traveled on. Alexander was quiet for a very long time, and then he suddenly said, “We spies are now spying on each other.” Shimon did not ask him what he meant but he was stricken by the image of Sarah running ahead of him in the dark, and he wondered if the sand knew who ran across it, and if the darkness knew her name, and if the seawater too were in love with Sarah, or if it just seemed as if it should be, like all the rest. When they finally arrived back to Petach Tikvah, Shimon was very weary. Avra held out her arms to her husband.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Avra went to her father’s house in Jerusalem, which was very near to “Dr. Wallach’s hospital,” in order to deliver the twins. She went two months before the birth. This institution later became Shaare Tzedek, one of Jerusalem’s best hospitals. The birth was difficult, but the twins were born healthy on July 7, 1915. Avra and the babies stayed in Jerusalem for a month, then Shimon came to bring them home. The boys were absolutely identical. Avra tied different colored strings around their tiny wrists in order to tell them apart.
I WRITE:
Later, she would think about what she had done. Avra would remember how it had felt to crouch down behind the inner office door. She would remember how, as she had pushed the bullets into her body, the words unlikely and awful had come into her head. They had come into her head and had hung there, as if describing not only this one moment but also the entire universe for several seconds.
Time passed. Avra would go about her housework and would think about how she had stolen the bullets, how she had swirled her hand around in the water, how she had walked past the officer with the pug nose and she would tell herself that it had been wrong to think unlikely and awful. Because what she had had to do on that day had been so antithetical to life that such words— unlikely, awful—spoken in the language of the living, could in no way describe her deep grief toward the task she had volunteered to do. Could in no way describe the residue of this grief, left behind forever in the wake of the bullets, left behind in the cave of her own body. But as she did not know the language of the dead, and as it had not really been a death moment either (no, not a death with the twins suspended overhead, shading the bullets with their yet unlived lives), Avra could find no right words to tell herself the story of what she had done that day in the pasha’s office.
She would think about these things over and over again after Sarah Aaronson died. Sometimes Avra would catch herself dreaming about Sarah Aaronson, and she would reach out and try to touch the other woman’s beauty in her sleep, but then Avra would wake up in the darkness and feel jealous of her dear husband sleeping by her side. Shimon had had a chance to see Sarah Aaronson when she was still alive. All Avra had ever seen was a photograph. And still the words bothered her. Unlikely, awful. Awful, unlikely. They kept her awake, came to her at odd times and made her nervous.
And then one day, Avra was mopping her kitchen floor while the twins took their afternoon nap. She stopped and leaned against the mop. Her bare feet were covered with cool water. She looked down at her hands and then up at the ceiling and then down again at the mop, at the bucket, at the water. She told herself to hush. She told herself that in order to speak the truth about the day in her life when she stole the bullets for Sarah Aaronson’s gun, she would need a grammar of skeletons and a vocabulary of fruits and flowers. “For this,” she said, almost out loud, “for this I would need other mouths.” And then she mopped her kitchen floor until it sparkled.
The water dance always reminded Shimon of Sarah Aaronson, more than the feel of bullets in his hand, more than the memory of all the deaths and the secret conversations. And when the years passed and technology changed and pipes came to Palestine, huge and heavy lead pipes that they had to carry into the orchards on their backs, Shimon did not really believe in their existence. After he had laid the heavy pipes into the earth, and checked their connections and then turned a spigot and listened as the water coursed through their metal bodies, he would sometimes walk to the middle of a row of trees, and when no one was looking he would do the water dance anyway, even though there were no trenches for his feet and no water to divert, and even though the trees now got their nourishment from other sources. Shimon would stand in the middle of the rows of trees and jump from one imaginary trench to the other, thinking, We are each an orchard. And this life is a water dance. And God is the one who jumps between our trees.
Shimon would always remember running with Sarah on the beach in the dark. And he would always remember how Sarah had leaned back in the cave pressing her body into the cold stone. Sometimes as the years passed by, Shimon would think about his dead brother Nachum. In his head Shimon would see him walking to the House of Study. Or sometimes he would see Nachum, as if out of the corner of his eye, running next to him, always a stride ahead or a stride behind. And then Shimon would think about Sarah again. And he would wonder if on the day she shot herself, God had been dancing in Sarah’s orchard with particular skill and gymnastic fervor, or if the opposite were true and that on the day that she shot herself, God had chosen not to dance the steps of Sarah’s dance at all. Causing some of her roots to parch and others to flood. Causing her orchard to wither.
MY FATHER WRITES:
Sarah Aaronson did not lead the spies alone. She was joined in the leadership of the operation by her older brother Aaron Aaronson. Aaron was an agronomist and was famous throughout the world for discovering the biblical “Mother Wheat” growing wild in the hills of Palestine.
There is a fascinating story about one of the NILI spies who died in the Sinai desert. The spy’s name was Avshalom Feinberg. Long before Sarah Aaronson was killed, Avshalom Feinberg and his partner tried to cross the Sinai Desert in order to reach the British in Cairo and give them information about Turkish troop movements. At that time, a trip through the desert was very dangerous. One risked losing the way and dying from thirst or hunger; also, travelers were often attacked and killed by bandits.
CLUSTER OF DATES
Avshalom Feinberg was rumored to be Sarah’s lover. According to legend, his companion spy was also in love with her. The two men entered the desert together. Sarah remained behind in Palestine, waiting to hear if they made it across.
Feinberg never made it to Cairo. His partner arrived alone. He said that they had been attacked by Bedouins who killed Feinberg and dragged away his body. The body was never found, but many years later, a group of Israeli soldiers were in the Sinai Desert when Bedouins led them to a date palm tree that they called Al Jud. In Arabic, Al Jud means “on the Jew.” Although there was no proof, the soldiers surmised that the tree called Al Jud marked the grave
of the NILI spy. Supposedly, Avshalom Feinberg had had dates in his pockets, and after he died the tree grew out of his body from the seeds of the dates. There is one version of the story in which the soldiers gathered around the tree and picked its fruit while saying the prayer for the dead. And there is another version of the story in which nothing of the sort ever happened.
DATE PALM TREE
For many years, the spy who made it out of the desert was blamed for the other’s death. People believed that he killed his comrade in order to eliminate Feinberg as a rival for Sarah Aaronson’s affections. People believed that the spy who lived killed his companion, buried his body, and then made up the story of being attacked by the Bedouins. Only after many years was his name cleared of suspicion.