The Family Orchard: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Nomi Eve

  Every so often they went out together, Miriam and Zohar, to the clementine tree in the lower grove where he had found the first stones. They didn’t say much; they usually just sat there, on top of where they knew those original mosaics to still be. Early on, when he first found the stones, they had thought of looking for them elsewhere. Of looking under the grove of shamouti, under the pummelos, or under the old stand of lemons by the side of the house. But they never did. They didn’t need to. In time they came to understand that the mosaics were not an isolated phenomenon. It became clear to them that underneath all of their groves, and yes, underneath the groves of their neighbors, and underneath the groves of their neighbors’ neighbors was a secret city, a mapless ancient metropolis.

  They played the game and they lived their lives. And in time, their lives became crowded with a crazy but endearing cast of characters. They had generations of farmers and merchants and clowns. They had Persians, Greeks, Babylonians, Macedonians, Gypsies, and Jews. They had children who taught them ancient games. They had hungry priests and thirsty prophets. Once they had a spy with a skin condition. They had the ghosts of foreign soldiers who sat slumped against the trunks of the trees telling them tales of mothers and lovers in languages they just barely knew. And all the while the scent of myrrh was everywhere, wafting up from the floor tiles, curling into their blankets.

  “Yes, myrrh, you can still smell it.” Miriam passed the stone to Zohar. She continued, “Here lived the Judean princess with wheat-golden skin.” Soon she stopped talking, put her head to the pillow, and went to sleep. But Zohar couldn’t sleep. He was awake and aware. He saw the faces of the princess and of the Phoenician farmers and of the grape-growers, the soldiers, the faces of children, and of parents and prophets. He closed his eyes and watched as the individual tesserae that made up their faces lost their distinctiveness. He watched as the birds and animals that swirled around the princess’s head came to life, took flight, and began performing a delicate parade around the bedroom. Meanwhile the tiny lines on all of their faces faded until skin became smooth, eyes became bright, features no longer petrified assumed the air and expressions of the living.

  Zohar lay for hours holding his sleeping wife in the darkness, listening to the night song of the birds, the purring of the beasts, while watching those other men, women, children who were simultaneously buried so deep underneath them and lying there right between them. He watched for a very long time. And then suddenly—perhaps he had looked away for a second—suddenly Zohar noticed that pieces were missing from all of their faces. There was a gap in the princess’s right cheek; one of the foreign soldiers was missing half of his neck; a farmer had no left eye; a child, whom he recognized, had neither forehead nor fingers. These holes, these black, ugly marring holes disturbed the harmony of the whole. It destroyed them. Zohar watched sadly, as the lines of each individual tessera reemerged like some grotesque grid, first encaging their vitality and then destroying it.

  He kept watching, but soon all were imperfect artifacts again. Unreal people with holes in their faces, lines in their skin, faded colors, and no real claim on life at all. The animals and birds also became stones again, falling with gravity out of the room. Miriam half-woke up. She looked at her husband with sleepy eyes and he whispered to her to go back to sleep. When Zohar finally fell asleep his dreams all revolved around the fact that something precious had been ruined, and that they, lying atop the wreckage, were either witnesses or accomplices to a crime buried so deep no one would take the time to excavate it, or investigate it, or even believe it had ever happened.

  I TELL:

  Jeremy, when I was a little girl, my grandfather took me and my brother out to the orchard. He showed us where to dig. We dug until we reached the mosaics. I will never forget taking those stones out of the cool soil, brushing them off, and then closing my palms around them. They were my first experience with buried treasure.

  Whenever I go back to Shachar, I walk through the grove where the mosaics were once buried. After so many years of irrigation, the top layers of soil have been washed away, bringing the stones to the surface. They are almost everywhere now, decorating the soil with so many hard, white squares.

  Part Four

  Chapter 13

  ELIEZER, BY THE MANGO TREE

  MY FATHER WRITES:

  The 1940s and early 1950s were excruciatingly difficult. At home in Palestine there were the constant terrors associated with the British and Arab conflicts. And although for a long time we did not really know what was going on in Europe, once the survivors began trickling in, there were constant revelations of unimaginable atrocities.

  Despite all the troubles, we managed to get through these times. I think my mother is responsible for having helped our family through these times with her storytelling. Growing up I must have heard hundreds of her tales—she told stories about all sorts of things, but her best ones were about our own relatives.

  I always loved the story she told concerning our ancestor the Chacham Tzvi HaAshkenazi. The Chacham Tzvi was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on my father’s side. He was born in Vilna in 1660 and was a very important rabbi known throughout much of Europe. He suffered a horrible tragedy—his wife and daughter were killed by the Imperial army of Leopold I in Ofen. According to stories, the Chacham Tzvi never fully recovered from this loss.

  Also, he was the center of a big controversy in his day. The controversy revolved around a golem. A golem is a supernatural creature conjured out of the earth by a rabbi in order to protect a Jewish community from danger. Supposedly, a golem has no soul. The Chacham Tzvi had a strong reason to believe in golems: according to folklore, his own grandfather, Elijah of Chelm, actually made a golem in his own day.

  WRITING MATERIALS

  The Chacham Tzvi wrote a very famous opinion (responsa) concerning golems. He wrote that a golem would count in a minyan—that is, would count as an official member of a quorum of ten praying Jewish men. Many prominent rabbis were enraged! There was even talk of excommunicating the Chacham Tzvi for his heretical opinion. But this did not happen. He was also involved in a second rabbinic controversy. He was once asked if a chicken without a heart could be considered kosher. When he decided that yes, such a bird would be kosher, the decision made many people furious. A chicken without a heart? People wondered—how could such a creature be natural, let alone kosher? But despite the controversies, the Chacham Tzvi did have many followers and was considered a great teacher and scholar all of his life.

  When my mother would tell me about the Chacham Tzvi, she would always add stories about golems. She knew many: “The Golem and the Bridegroom,” “The Plot against the Golem,” “The Golem of Prague,” “The Golem and the Missing Maid.” I don’t know if she made them up, or if they were part of folklore, but she told them like adventure stories and I loved hearing them. Sometimes I would go out to the neighbors’ chicken coop and try to pick out the one without a heart and then imagine what it would taste like if I were to cook it and eat it. But I was even more interested in the golem story. I always wondered if the Chacham Tzvi himself had encountered a golem, and if he had, how he knew that the creature even wanted to pray?

  THE CHACHAM TZVI’S OPINION:

  I shut my eyes and let the vision come to me. In the vision, a golem wandered into the synagogue just as a small community was gathering to pray. The golem was obviously not human—he moved in a stiff, unbalanced way, his face was pale as chalk, and his eyes were focused but empty. Yet there was no mistaking the creature’s piety. He was wearing tallis and tefillin, a kipah, and as the community waited for ten men to make the minyan, he sat quietly in one of the pews, reading psalms. The community consisted of nine men. They were gathered on the other side of the room from the golem. They were standing with their arms folded, obviously refusing, in the company of the creature, to even begin to pray.

  I WRITE:

  Eliezer ran out of the back door, letting it slam. He ran down the porc
h steps and into the orchard. It was evening, nighttime almost, and he had just a little bit of time before he had to be in bed. He was in a hurry. He ran past the lemons, around to the right edge of the grove where there was a single mango tree that someone kind had once planted. The mangoes were ripe and the air around the tree was sweet and mangoey and Eliezer loved it. But he didn’t come here to smell, not really, and not to eat of the fruit either. He looked around for the right stick, and when he found it, he cleared away some leaves from the ground and began to draw. A head, shoulders, two arms, two legs, feet, toes. He gave the figure eyes and a nose and mouth and ears. He even gave it a belly button and when he was sure no one was looking, he drew a penis, for good luck. Then he shut his eyes and began humming. He was a musical child and he was convinced, though he really had no reason to believe this, he was convinced that when God created the world there must have been some music playing. And now that he, too, was trying on a tiny scale to mimic the act of creation, he felt it was only appropriate that he hum. And hum, and hum some more. And so he hummed and hummed and stared at the figure and stood on one foot and then spit three times and then jumped on the other foot. But nothing worked; the figure on the ground remained a figure on the ground. He had chosen this spot for a purpose: since mangoes were his favorite food, Eliezer thought that it would be not only a kindness to the creature to conjure it from mango-scented ground, but also perhaps a temptation. He hoped that the golem would come to life, if not because he called it, then because the mangoes were calling out in a continuous fruity chorus of “come and get it.” He knew that if he were a clump of earth and he had the opportunity to have a mouth and to eat a mango, he would listen to the humming of a little boy and beg all the molecules of his existence to turn from mud into man. And in his first moments on top of the ground, rather than in it, he would grab the fruit, take big bites, and then chew too quickly.

  Eliezer apologized to the mango tree, and then he thanked the ground for trying its best, and then he left the orchard, walking very slowly back past the lemons, up the back porch steps, and into the kitchen where his mother berated him for having such dirty hands. That night, he decided that he had to do something regarding his technique. Obviously golems weren’t for amateurs to conjure. He had heard that to make a golem one had to know the correct arrangement of the mysterious letters of one of God’s more mysterious names. He wasn’t in the habit of calling on God personally, let alone of contemplating the mysteries of the Divine Name. He had thought, with naïve enthusiasm, that his humming was some kind of approximation of God’s name, or if not an approximation, then an endearment, or a nickname perhaps. But obviously he had been wrong. Eliezer had been trying for months now, and it never worked. For several minutes he wondered whether golems hated mangoes, and if maybe he should try the ground by another tree, a sweet orange perhaps, or maybe one of the lemons. Maybe golems liked sour fruit. But then he decided that if golems hated mangoes they weren’t worth conjuring and so he would stick to his original plan.

  And he would make it even better. In bed, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head and decided that he would study. Moonlight was dancing through the window decorating the ceiling in a lattice of excellent shadows. Eliezer asked the shadows to help him, to witness his solemn declaration. Sitting up in bed, he told himself and he told the shadows and he even told the moon—which he was sure was where all the golems lived when they were not living on the earth—he told them all that he would become a Baal Shem, a Master of the Name. He would learn the right combination of mysterious letters to conjure the creature from the ground.

  THE CHACHAM TZVI’S OPINION:

  But the vision did not stop there. The men continued to refuse to pray with the golem. They were making quite a fuss. Throwing their hands up, talking loudly, pointing angrily at the creature who every so often turned around and glanced meekly at the ruckus. Finally, the men walked out of the room and the creature, seeing that he was alone, stood up, and prayed all by himself. When the golem was finished, I followed him out of the door. I followed him out of air and into earth. I was filled with an awareness that I was visiting a muddy mystical realm. A realm of golem angels and archangels, golem prophets, golem priests. I saw underground seas part, fossilized bushes burst into flame, and roots become snakes and snakes become roots, and the earth open up to swallow more earth, and more earth rise up to build itself into a mountain so high that it threatened to reach not the sky but the ground that men walked on. And all around me were golems. Golems swathed in tallitim, golems praying, golems engaged in fierce theological arguments that they held by making signs with their hands. “I see,” I said out loud. “Their prayers may be backward, but their God is backward too.” And as I said this, I suddenly found myself back in my study, standing by the window, bound in my own tefillin, wrapped in my own tallis, saying my own prayers in a fervent forward whisper.

  I WRITE:

  He planned it all out. He would beg his parents to let him study with the rabbis in the nearby town. Of course they wouldn’t be happy with his zeal, his new- found piety, but they would assent. After all, even though Zohar and Miriam themselves were not religious, there was religion in both their families, rabbis upon rabbis upon rabbis, reaching all the way back, they liked to joke, to King David himself. They would let Eliezer study as long as he agreed not to forgo his orchard work. He would agree. He would graft early in the morning and late at night. During the day he would study at the yeshiva. He would be an excellent student. The head of the yeshiva would even think Eliezer good enough to be a proper study companion for his own son. This would be a great honor. But Eliezer would not be looking for honors. He would want mostly to be left alone with the books that contained the mysteries he felt he needed. He would sneak back into the yeshiva at night, after he was done in the orchard, and open the books that were forbidden to one as young as he. The esoteric texts, the Kabbalah, the Book of Formation, would be his primary sources. He would pore over their pages, gleaning bits and pieces of the formulae he needed to make the golem, to conjure the mute creature from the ground. Eliezer took a deep breath. He heard a creaking noise from somewhere in the house, and a snoring, and then some more creaking, and meanwhile the wind outside had begun to blow. The shadows on the ceiling were waltzing about. Eliezer pulled the blankets closer around him.

  He thanked the moon with its congregation of far-off golems for lighting up the night sky. And he told the shadows, which were slowly fading, that they were really excellent shadows, some of the best he had ever seen. And he finally fell asleep, dreaming not of golems but of mangoes, big red-green golden pulpy mangoes. He was biting into a mango; his hands and his face were becoming sticky and wet with its juice. And as he ate, in his head was a tune that sounded a lot like God to him. Yes, he thought, if I were in charge of things God would have song, not a name, and the names we call each other would also have notes. He thought about these things and fell asleep with a rather pious smile on his face, even though he wasn’t the least bit religious.

  THE CHACHAM TZVI’S OPINION:

  I opened my eyes and tried to block out the vision. I half roused myself from it, but soon it came back, with a vividness I recognized as a familiar harbinger of clarity. When I shut my eyes again, the golem was still there. The men were standing with their arms folded. It was clear that they were determined to prevent their prayers from mingling with the prayers of the conjured beast. The golem continued to sit in the front pew, silently saying psalms. No sound came out of his mouth, but his lips were moving.

  And then I began my work for the day. I left the golem for last, choosing first to tackle easier issues. Sitting down at my desk. Answering questions with questions, questioning answers with answers. Of course, I would have to say a scratch is the logical conclusion of an itch, but an itch has its own esoteric ancestors in the mysterious workings of the body and might therefore be related, in some important but invisible way, to a story the hand wants to tell to the skin. The
logical conclusion of this being my earlier opinion that the story the hand wants to tell to the skin is mirrored, obliquely, by the tale the skin wants to tell to the soul, and by association, by the story the soul wants to tell to the bones, specifically, the spine and the bones of the head.

  I WRITE:

  Eliezer was lying on the ground outside, by the mango tree. Once again, it was evening; once again, he had drawn the form of a human being in the earth, and now, for the first time, he was trying something different. He thought that maybe the earth needed some help, that maybe it wasn’t quite sure what he was asking of it and that maybe if it felt him lying there, inside of the form, it would get the right idea. So he put his fingers in the outline’s fingers, his toes in the outline’s toes, and his head in the outline’s head. He even tried to put his own thoughts in the place where the golem’s thoughts would be, but he really had no idea what a golem’s thoughts would be, so he ended up thinking of rock candy, the sweet crystals stacked like diamonds in his head. After all, he told himself, golems are probably mad about candy.