by Неизвестный
“ ‘Why? Surely you’re not so foolish as they to believe the rumor that no papers are necessary at all anymore, neither a tazkara nor—’
“ ‘But I myself am a Turkish subject!’ declared the astonished apprentice fund-raiser. ‘What is there for me to fear?’
“And while talking he reached a hand into his pocket and brought out some documents to prove his point.
“The Russian woman rushed agitatedly over to me. Did I hear what they were saying? She would not be allowed to land…
“In the meantime we were requested to assemble for a medical inspection. The devil knew what it was for—some sort of quarantine perhaps, or other new rule…
“ ‘Oh my God,’ shuddered the woman. ‘What will happen when they see my eyes?’
“The inspection, however, turned out to be a lark. The whole business was carried out so comically, with such a disregard for the most elementary appearances, and seemed such a mockery of proper official procedure (the doctor, who had been up all night playing cards, was too lazy even to walk the entire length of the line and contented himself with a cursory glance at three or four of the hundreds of passengers before quickly returning to his cabin) that hopes could not fail to be aroused that Turkish landing regulations were equally uncomplicated.
“So that when the entire family had descended into a lighter that carried them toward shore until their last shouted farewell could no longer be heard and I was left by myself on deck with sunbeams glancing all around me off the eternally breaking waves (I won’t deny what’s true!) and Jaffa beckoning in the distance (and how pretty it can be from a distance!), its rooftops climbing and falling like the steps of some great parapet, I felt—I swear to you I did!—whisperings of glory in my heart. How could it even have occurred to me that they might not be allowed off the ship, that Jews might possibly be turned away from the land of Judea? I don’t mean to say of course that I wasn’t perfectly aware even then of all the painful falsehood in this cliché (what on earth do we and the land of Judea really have to do with each other?)…but I was happy, I was wrapped in the gossamer threads of a dream the likes of which have never touched me a second time before or since…And I was forced to acknowledge once again that ancient truth that even though one ‘knows’ that all things are equally unimportant and ultimately even the same, one cannot, as long as one lives and breathes, ignore the differences between one man and another, one place and another, one life and another, and one human condition and another…and that despite my intellectual awareness, I could not help feeling different emotions at different times that might be worlds apart from each other, that might sometimes be of the simplest, most humanly universal variety, and at others of the most mysteriously bizarre…because I tell you, there are mysterious combinations of circumstances in this life, my friend…”
A bareheaded adolescent girl stepped out of one of the houses in the colony and crossed the narrow street, humming to a popular Arab melody the words of a Hebrew “folk song” written by a poet in Europe:
Pretty golden bird, fly far away
Find me a husband for my wedding day.
From a courtyard opposite, a voice that could have been either a man’s or a woman’s shouted in a mixture of Arabic and Yiddish through the night air: “Rukh, rukh min hon! S’tezikh tsugetsheppet?” The little colony’s large synagogue looked down on us with its broad but dark windows. Beneath them some local citizens stood discussing their affairs. “It’s time I fired Ahmed,” one of them said. “I’ve never seen such a thief in my life.” This sentiment followed us until we neared a ditch by the side of the street from which suddenly appeared the silhouettes of two young pioneers, one dressed in a costume of dark cloth, the other wearing a blouse, torn linen pants, and no shoes. From somewhere came the words, “Innkeeper, here’s seven piastres,” from the ditch the refrain of a comic song about two Zionists. The notes quivered until interrupted by a soft Polish-Jewish voice that said: “Tomorrow it will be exactly four months since I arrived in this country.” “And how many months will it be since you’ve been out of work?” laughed a second voice that was Russian by its accent and that, we now saw, belonged to the pioneer of radical mien, who appeared to be enjoying his own joke immensely. The evening was still not through.
Chapter eight
Nor was my friend’s story.
His happiness lasted for all of two hours.
At any rate, no more than that.
“When the lighters returned, the woman and her five children were in one of them. The boatmen, annoyed at having to row them back again, angrily threw their belongings, which by now were soaking wet, over the deck. All five girls began to cry out loud. The woman lashed out at them savagely and said nothing. It was too awful for words.
“Worse yet: the woman’s sister had already entered the country! She too had no papers of course, but the traveler from Buenos Aires had somehow managed to get her safely through—and it had all happened so quickly, and the customs house had been in such an uproar, that they had not remembered until it was too late that their purse with all their money was in her possession. Now she, the mother, was left without a cent. Her sister was ashore and she had been brought back in the lighter. A pretty predicament!
“What now? What could she possibly do? Where was she going to go?
“The sky had fallen on her. The ship gave a lurch and set sail for Haifa. Soon the first mate would come by to check our tickets. As far as Haifa there was no problem, I would pay for their fare myself…but what would happen then?
“The first mate passed by without noticing them. Perhaps he felt sorry for them. Was there another piece of bread somewhere? All morning long I had been too excited to eat; now I had to swallow something to keep up my strength, to prepare for new tribulations; only once more the bread stuck in my throat—I could neither get it down nor spit it out.
“ ‘There were Jews standing there, Jews,’ the woman began to lament once her own silence had grown tiresome to her, ‘and not one of them had any pity. Not one. All they wanted to know was why did I get off at Jaffa, why didn’t I get off at Haifa. I wish I had never heard of either Jaffa or Haifa!’
“And turning to the girls:
“ ‘If you don’t shut up this minute I’ll throw you all into the sea!’
“The apprentice emissary tried to calm her. It was a woman’s way to scream, but really there was nothing to scream about. He too was getting off in Haifa, from there he would travel to Safed. And in Haifa he had a brother, a hotel owner, who would no doubt come to meet the ship. This brother was a Turkish subject too and would certainly be glad to come to her aid. In general it was, as far as he knew, far easier to land in Haifa than in Jaffa. In this respect the Jews who asked her why she hadn’t disembarked in Haifa were right, their mistake being that they hadn’t realized that she was coming via Trieste. They must have thought she had sailed on a ship from Russia, which would have docked at Beirut first, then Haifa, then Jaffa. But now all would be all right. If only she promised not to scream, he, the apprentice emissary, would do his best to help. If by any chance she had a little to money to give him…that is, she would give it to him and he would give it to the official at customs, who would understand exactly what it was for. Five francs per person should be enough, perhaps even one napoleon for all of them. Yes, one gold napoleon, or better yet, two halves would do the trick. With it in his palm that Turk wouldn’t know up from down…
“ ‘A napoleon? How much is that? Ten francs?’ wailed the woman. ‘I haven’t got a single sou. Even if they do let me land in Haifa…in Jaffa I could find my sister…but in Haifa…my children and I will starve to death…’
“ ‘There, there,’ I said. ‘Once we’re in Haifa we’ll find some way to help you.’
“I had left some twenty-five francs and a few sous, which I immediately handed to the emissary in order to work what magic he could with them.
“ ‘A napoleon is enough!’ he said.
“So in the e
nd I gave the remaining five francs to the woman ‘for a rainy day,’ and kept the leftover sous for myself. My eleven-year-old darling took her frozen hands out of the sleeves in which she had been keeping them and threw me a special look. She stuck her hands back into her sleeves, but that look gave me strength, gave me strength…so that again, for all the hopelessness of the situation, for all its radical sorrow, it seemed to me that it was definitely worth living and that there were things worth living for…Yes, that it was actually pleasant to be alive. This phantasmal notion came and went in a moment, but as long as that moment lasted it made sense. It too of course could not have withstood the scalpel of the intellect, that icicle of the consciousness of reality as it is, not to mention the nothingness that comes after as it is…Yet at that moment I wanted to cry out with all my being: Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Chapter nine
You’re not tired of listening? The fact is that there’s not much left for me to tell you. To describe to you the emotions with which we boarded the lighters in Haifa and began our short trip to the shore…for that I have neither the inclination nor the skill. We felt like a man jumping straight into the ocean as we descended the ramp of the ship. (Yes, I too disembarked in Haifa in the end, since to Beirut was another night’s voyage, which was by now beyond my powers of endurance—and besides, I wanted to see what happened to my family.) Soon our fate would be sealed: either the official in charge would accept our baksheesh and allow us into the town or he wouldn’t…ah, the Promised Land! The Promised Land! How precious it seemed just then.
“Because of the swarm of passengers the woman’s five children were separated at the last moment into two different lighters. I sat in the first of them with the two oldest daughters, while she and the younger ones followed at a considerable distance behind us.
“We neared the shore. I could see Jews standing there, on dry land…how lucky they were to be there already, to have that legal right. What more in life could be desired?
“A tumult of shouts reached my ears. My heart was in my throat. What now?
“ ‘Relax, Jews, relax!’ a heavyset, butcher like Jew with a flaxen beard and a Turkish fez on his head cried out to us from the shore. ‘There’s free entry here.’
“I couldn’t believe my ears.
“ ‘Free?’ The apprentice emissary, who was the first to leap ashore from the lighter, winked at the bearer of good tidings. ‘But that’s impossible.’ He and his brother were so busy exchanging winks that they forgot to kiss each other.
“I followed behind him with the two children at my side. In the second lighter, which was still far out in the bay, I could make out their mother’s terrified eyes. No doubt the nightmarish thought had occurred to her that the incident with her sister might repeat itself, that I and the two girls would bribe our way past customs and that she would again be left behind…
“ ‘Mama, Mama!’ shouted the eleven-year-old with all her strength.
‘Don’t worry! Here no one gets sent back!’
“The heavyset Jew grabbed our things. ‘It’s settled then. You’ll be staying at my hotel.’
“And in my ear he whispered,
‘A slight misunderstanding. It’s not completely free. You’ll need a visa. I’ll explain it all later…’
“The apprentice emissary had already disappeared.
“ ‘Did they take money from you?’ The Jew who rushed up to me now appeared to be Rumanian and was, I soon learned, a hotelkeeper too. ‘Those vampires! Entry is totally free here, it doesn’t cost a thing. I wouldn’t advise you to go with him, he’ll make you pay through the nose…but what is the matter with you, young man?’
“My tears now were no longer the half-hidden, intermittent ones that I had shed in Port Said over the abrupt transition from our unmitigated bad luck to the fairy-tale goodness of that miraculous Jew. I simply felt empty inside, weak in all my limbs; my head was about to split in two and there was a terrible scream in the back of my mouth. I saw the Russian woman with her children drawing nearer to shore with an insane look of excitement on her face, coupled with the refusal to believe that she was actually safe; I saw Jews, who looked much the same as Jews elsewhere, standing on the soil of the Holy Land, the land I had dreamed of since I was a boy; I saw the pure blue waters of the bay as they rose, fell, broke from faraway worlds upon this promised shore…this shore that made me think of the Jew in London who had come to that other shore, and of his ‘daughter’ who had landed in Jaffa with the man with the little, curled mustache…It was too much for me, it churned in my guts and flooded my face with hot, gasping tears…ah ah ah ah ah !
“ ‘They didn’t allow us to land in Jaffa!’ panted the happy woman, reciting her adventures to the Jews gathered around her.
“ ‘Here they allow and in Jaffa they don’t?’ asked one of the bystanders. ‘The law should be the same everywhere.’
“ ‘Terkele shiksa,’ said the Jew with the flaxen beard.
“ ‘But look how this young man can’t stop crying!’ said the second hotelkeeper, half marveling at me, half making fun. ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he mimicked. ‘Fool, what is there to cry about?’
“I suppose the way I must have looked just then more than justified addressing me in such affectionate terms.
“ ‘Oy,’ I whimpered like a naughty child in front of them. ‘We’re in Palestine.’
“ ‘So much the better then, why cry?’ persisted the hotelkeeper.
“The bystanders broke into smiles. ‘He’s crying for joy…for joy that he’s here…’
“ ‘He cries easily,’ sniffed the woman with a shake of her head. A last drop hung from the tip of her nose; all else appeared already to have evaporated, and she was once again the person she had always been.
“I wiped away my own tears…why attempt to deny it? A warm trickle of happiness filtered through me as I looked now at my little friend, who refused to budge from my side, now at the shore. And each time I looked at her—who knew what lay in store for her?—I understood again what I had already realized that morning, that is…that as long as we are alive…whatever happens to us does make a difference, it does…and that the unbridgeable abyss between the two men we had encountered the day before in Alexandria and Port Said was present also in our two comings ashore: that of the woman’s unlucky sister in Jaffa, and that of the child who had landed with me there in Haifa. I tell you, looking at that shore, I understood as though in a vision that—for the time being, anyway—it was the closer of the two…closer than the one reached by that middle-aged child in cold London. While as for sheer beauty…
“Listen, do you know what I’m going to tell you? Both of us hate all those empty words about beauty that are bandied around us day and night, both of us know that they are meaningless and sometimes even tempt us to deny the existence of beauty altogether. Say what you will, though, I wouldn’t know what else to call it…it was beautiful then. The great sea was ravishing, and the bay in Haifa doubly so. You see, I really did believe in beauty then…in the beauty of nature…of the cosmos…of something even higher than that. But of course that too was only nerves!”
Chapter ten
The dark alleyway beyond the synagogue, through which we at last headed home, was deserted; no one besides us was out-of-doors anymore. The moon had dropped down the other side of the sky until its sickle shape lost its tint of frozen smoke and shone again with a golden brilliance. Soon, however, it disappeared behind a patch of cloud wafted by the light, steady land breeze, and was gone.
Despite my companion’s poor health and recurrent difficulties with both his booted and his bootless foot, we had continued to stroll that night through the colony’s few, silent streets—but regarding the characters in his story, and the fate of the family once it was safely ashore, I could not get him to say another word. Perhaps he himself had no further knowledge of them; perhaps—though why hide it from me?—he had parted from them that very day. In any case, our conversation passed on to other things, which
we discussed with much feeling too.
Yet when we finally returned to our inn, which belonged to a local citrus grower who was by no means poorly off, my friend’s malaria began to act up again, and he lay down fully clothed and soon fell asleep.
“He doesn’t eat much and he certainly doesn’t have much to say,” complained the innkeeper to me about him after he had apparently dozed off, “but we’re up half the night because of him. He keeps crying out in his sleep…I suppose he has bad dreams, eh? It must be the malaria…and to think that people like him want to be pioneers…and gripe that us farmers don’t give them work!”
“Malaria?” knowingly asked the man’s oldest son, the one who was about to set out for his uncle in Chicago. “Quinine and castor oil, that’s the ticket!”
While the innkeeper’s wife set the supper table, the talk went from malaria to other current diseases. Some neighbors dropped in to chat and changed the subject to the opening of new shops and the question of bank credit, which they protested went only to those who did not really need it. It was nearly nine o’clock. The innkeeper’s daughter, who was finishing the last grade of the local school, sat studying French beyond the oilcloth at the far end of the table. They talked, yawned, drank coffee, and ate pickled herring just as they always had done.
Yitzhak Shami
The Vengeance of the Fathers
Translated by Richard Flantz *
* I would like to express my indebtedness to Professor Gershon Shaked for access to his notes and introduction; to Professor Ezra Spicehandler for looking over the manuscript of the translation; and to Dr. Sasson Somekh for some hints on Arabic forms in this book.—R.F.
Chapter one
Since olden times, with the blossoming of spring, the Mo’ssam1 has been celebrated in the hill-country of Samaria.