by Meir Shalev
Rabbi Eliyahu Natan was alarmed. He implored his son not to halt his Torah studies and certainly not to become a farmer. Not to leave the “Tent of Jacob” and go to the “Desert of Ishmael” and the “Field of Esau.” But Nahum’s heart yearned for faraway places, and he sometimes felt it fluttering in his rib cage like a migratory bird eager to fly. He insisted and requested and explained and made excuses and in the end he convinced his father to let him join a group of halutzim heading for Eretz Yisrael and to give him his blessing as he set out on his journey.
The father, a good and tender man, agreed with a heavy heart. He thought of the patriarch Jacob, when he sent Joseph wearing a coat of many colors to join his sheepherding brothers, not sensing or imagining the enormous calamity that would befall his son and him. “From the pasture to the pit”: the words rattled inside him, but his mind could not comprehend them, not in their full meaning. He feared disease, robbery, heresy, even death, but not murder, certainly not at the hands of a fellow Jew.
His heart was heavy, but he did not withdraw his agreement. He imposed only one condition on his son: that he not join any of the various socialist factions or workers’ associations or one of the kibbutzim, which lacked synagogues and ritual baths and kosher butchers, and where the male pioneers, it was said, frolicked freely with the women—but go instead to one of Baron Rothschild’s moshavot, to an established community where he would find a synagogue and a ritual slaughterer, and strap on his phylacteries for daily prayer and observe the Sabbath and dietary laws.
The son agreed, and the father surprised him with a gift: a pair of excellent boots, suitable for working the land.
“My size exactly!” declared Nahum Natan as he tried them on, took a few steps, and smiled the smile of a child. “So comfortable, and the shoemaker didn’t even measure my feet.”
Rabbi Eliyahu Natan smiled a fatherly smile and did not reveal that one night, when Nahum was sleeping soundly, he had brought the cobbler to their home, and without the young man’s knowledge the two had bared his feet. The father held a large candle in his hand, and the shoemaker traced the son’s feet on a piece of cardboard and measured the circumference of his ankles and calves and the distance from his ankles to his knees, one leg at a time, for the feet, as everyone knows, are different from each other.
This scene—the lad in bed, eyes closed, shadows dancing on the walls as measurements are taken—aroused such strong emotion and anxiety in Rabbi Natan that he fled to another room to cry and calm down and returned only after washing his face. But now, as his son, Nahum, put on the boots with such delight, he relaxed and hugged him until he was again filled with fear, and more than he feared for his son’s future he was afraid of his own fear, and again felt his tears welling and again went to the other room to weep and wash.
2
Nahum Natan said goodbye to his father, his neighbors, his teachers, and his students and sailed by ship to Jaffa and from Jaffa went to the Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School. There he learned planting and plowing, grafting and pruning, and became acquainted with the pickax and the scythe. There he also became friends with his future murderer, namely Ze’ev Tavori, who came from the Galilee.
The two were very different. Ze’ev was powerful and fearless and accustomed to working hard in the fields, and Nahum was soft and gentle and a dreamer of dreams. And nevertheless they became friends. Nahum was happy that Ze’ev—“He rides raising dust, like a Janissary,” he wrote his father, “swinging a staff like an Anatolian shepherd and plowing straight furrows like a German engineer”—regarded him as a friend, and Ze’ev looked at Nahum as a delicate little brother. He learned new words from him and helped him when the need arose.
At the end of their studies the two parted ways for a while. Nahum went to Jerusalem at his father’s request, stayed there a few months, worked for a farmer in the settlement of Motza outside the city, and learned to grow grapes. Ze’ev did not return to his family’s home in the Galilee. He wandered about the country, plowing and quarrying, planting and standing guard. His muscles and experience served him well, and so did what he learned from his parents, who had taught him the value of hard work. Everywhere he went he readily found employment, but nowhere did he make friends. In his view, the farmers of the moshavot of the Judean Hills were soft and coddled, like the crumbly reddish soil of their orchards and vineyards, so different from the basalt farmers of the moshavot of his native Galilee.
“We grew watermelon, cattle, and olives, and the neighbors were Arabs, who were either good friends or total enemies, and the toys their children got on their birthdays were a horse and a stick,” he told his grandchildren many years later. “Whereas in moshavot like this one,” he teased, “they danced minuets and sipped wine and chatted in French with the Baron’s officials.”
He also kept his distance from the halutzim, the pioneers who’d enchanted Nahum in Istanbul. They seemed to Ze’ev, born in Palestine and accustomed to its ways, to be both eccentric and fearful, as evidenced by their body language and manner of speech and their long-winded debates and strange enthusiasms. In addition, their propensity for intimate conversation and endless hora dancing seemed pointless to him. “They talk like they dance,” he wrote at the time to his father, “everything in circles. They never get anywhere.”
For a while he was involved with Hashomer, the Jewish self-defense group of the Yishuv, but discovered they were overly fond of fancy mustaches and belligerent chatter and ostentatious horse racing, and quit. He found himself sitting during lunch breaks with the Arab workers, whose language he spoke and whose customs he knew and whose food he loved, and even though his parents had always told him, “They’re the enemy!” it was with them that he felt most comfortable.
Once a fortnight he wrote three letters. One to his parents, the second to the daughter of the neighbors in the moshava where he was born and raised, a girl named Ruth Blum, and the third to his schoolmate Nahum. Writing was hard for him, and the length of his letters was determined by the paper he wrote on: long if he found a full sheet and short if a small slip. He would tell them where he was and what he was doing, and to Ruth Blum he added a word or two of affection or longing, and signed all his letters with same four words: “I am Ze’ev. Shalom.”
For a while he worked in Zichron Yaakov, where he heard about a plan to establish a new moshava. He informed his parents and a few friends, among them Nahum Natan. They got organized, borrowed money, and bought land in the new place. The parcel of Ze’ev Tavori was adjacent to that of Nahum Natan, and nearby was the home of another young man, Yitzhak Maslina by name, son of a Hasidic family that had come from Russia in the mid–nineteenth century, before the First Aliyah, and settled in Tiberias. Yitzhak Maslina was already married, to a woman named Rosa, and Ze’ev had known him a long time: before his marriage to Rosa, Yitzhak had worked in her father’s store, where Ze’ev’s father would buy tools and seeds.
They planted trees and vineyards, and built houses, and in that year, 1930, the same year that three of our farmers committed suicide, Ze’ev at age twenty-three married Ruth Blum, who was then nineteen and, a few months after the wedding, displayed a pleasantly bulging belly of early pregnancy.
3
Those years have passed, those people have died, but the stories live on and reinforce one another. A few of them are told here in public, at anniversaries of our moshava’s founding, in renovated versions. A few were published in various studies and books, and a few rustle underground and suddenly peek out and wink: We’re still here. Or cry for help—Let us be known—and then disappear. So we have such stories as “Stealing the Ransom Money” and “Robbing the Jerusalem Money Changer” and “The Little City Girl Who Drowned in the Ancient Aqueduct,” which are still told in public. While the tales of “The Moshava Boy Whose Eye Was Plucked Out” and “The Moshava Boy and the Prostitute from Tiberias” are only whispered.
The story about the suicide of Nahum Natan—“The Rabbi’s Son and the Neighbor’s Wife
”—is told to no one, of course, and certainly not to the general public. But when it occasionally floats to the surface in conversations among family and neighbors—each of them adding or subtracting—it becomes clear that nobody remembers the exact place or date when he killed himself or was murdered, but they argue over the type of rifle barrel in his mouth, if it was a British Enfield or a Russian Mosin-Nagant or a German Mauser, and since his bones were removed from our cemetery many years ago and there is no mark or memorial of him here, there are also those who argue over whether he was Nahum Natan or Natan Nahum, or maybe had a different name.
But all agree that he died in the autumn, on the night of the first rain of the season. This is important, because our area gets an abundance of rain. Some rainfalls are so torrential that they dig new channels in the earth, and the first rain of autumn 1930 was so strong that between its thunder and lightning and the shuttered windows, no one noticed or heard the rifle shot, except for three people: Ze’ev Tavori, who fired it; Nahum Natan, into whose mouth it was fired; and Yitzhak Maslina, whose wife, Rosa—I still remember her, Rosa Maslina, with teeth like a rabbit and legs like a gazelle—demanded that he go outside and clean the rain gutters, which he’d kept postponing despite her insistent nagging, because the rainwater had now started leaking into the bedroom.
Yitzhak Maslina leaned a ladder against the wall of his house and climbed up, and when he placed his right foot on the fourth rung, he thought he heard screams near the fence of his yard. He glanced in that direction and saw nothing, got down from the ladder, and approached with caution, lifting his storm lantern upward and to the right so he could see what was going on.
The lantern did not light up the darkness, but when Yitzhak reached the fence a mighty diagonal bolt of lightning slashed the sky from east to west, and by its light he could see two men standing in the field, facing each other, as two bluish silhouettes. The smaller of the two cried out twice “No!” and when he noticed the figure of Maslina, also bluish, he shouted, “Help, he’s going to kill me!”
Maslina immediately recognized the voice, the voice of his bachelor neighbor, Nahum Natan, and even called to him, “Nahum, Nahum…,” but the only reply he heard was a terrible roar. The bigger of the two men roared and punched the smaller one with his fist, first in the left temple, and as the man fell, he added a blow to the chest. Nahum Natan collapsed and lay on the ground, and the lightning illuminated the man who punched him, bending over and holding a long object. Maslina supposed this was a stick and that the man intended to beat Nahum with it, but when the shot was fired he understood it was a rifle, and he too shouted a great shout and lay facedown in the mud. He feared that the shooter—presumably a bandit, for the truth did not occur to him—had noticed the light of the lantern he carried and would now shoot him too.
And the shooter indeed saw him. At first as a silhouette in the open doorway, then as a quivering light, moving forward and stopping, and now the silhouette dropping to the ground and the light going out. He removed the boot from the right foot of the dead man and called out: “Come here, Yitzhak, come here now!”
Maslina recognized that voice too and was shocked. It was the voice of Ze’ev Tavori, his other neighbor. He rose and opened the gate and approached, his steps growing smaller as he drew closer, and because his eyes did not want to meet Ze’ev’s eyes he averted them downward.
Lightning bolts flashed, one after another. Yitzhak saw the corpse and was terrified. The bullet had shattered the dead man’s skull, and what was left intact was covered with blood and rainwater, brain and mud, almost beyond recognition. But his boots were the uniquely excellent boots of Nahum Natan, famous throughout the moshava.
Ze’ev Tavori asked him what he was doing outdoors at such a late hour on a stormy night.
Yitzhak Maslina spoke the truth, that rainwater had leaked into his house and he had gone out to clear a blocked gutter.
“And why did you come over here?”
“I heard shouting,” said Maslina, “and I wanted to see what was going on.”
“And what did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“You are mistaken,” said Ze’ev Tavori, “you saw a great deal. And if you don’t remember what you saw, I’ll remind you. You saw a suicide. You saw our unfortunate neighbor Nahum Natan shoot himself in the mouth.”
“But where did he get the rifle? Whose rifle is that?” asked Maslina.
“It’s my Mauser. The rifle that my brother Dov brought me from the Galilee in the same wagon as the cow and the tree and Ruth.”
Ze’ev Tavori spoke all this in remarkable detail with complete calm, adding, “Nahum stole it from my house, and I woke up and ran after him, and you saw me running after him and also heard me shouting for him to stop, but I was too late. Straightaway he put the rifle in his mouth and shot himself. Now do you remember what you saw?”
Maslina did not answer, and Tavori bent down and positioned the dead man’s big toe against the trigger of the rifle.
“Here,” he said, “like this. Look and learn, maybe one day you too will want to kill yourself.”
Yitzhak Maslina opened his mouth wide with shock, perhaps even intending to say that he had seen something else entirely, but Ze’ev Tavori was ahead of him. He picked up the rifle with one hand, extended it toward Yitzhak’s neck, right under his chin, lifting it so that Yitzhak’s eyes could not escape his stare.
“ ‘According to two witnesses shall a matter stand,’ ” he said. “If we testify together, you will receive a gift of a cow like my cow, a Dutch cow, pregnant by a prize Dutch bull. But if you tell a different story, you will also kill yourself, the same way. Three people have already killed themselves here; there will be one more.”
Yitzhak wanted to say that there had been only two suicides, but his body was wiser than his brain: he froze and kept quiet.
And now a brief and necessary explanation: When Yitzhak Maslina was a boy in Tiberias, he worked each summer, as mentioned above, at a shop belonging to the father of Rosa, the girl who would become his wife. First he worked as a porter and a delivery boy and then cleaning and stock sorting, and eventually accounting as well, but he was mainly engaged in thinking about Rosa, his employer’s daughter.
In Tiberias, Rosa was known as Toothy Rosa because when her baby teeth fell out they were replaced in the front of her mouth by a pair of incisors so huge she could not close her jaws, giving her a slightly ridiculous facial expression. But when she got older people started talking about “Rosa’s teeth” and also “the rest of Rosa,” because apart from the teeth she became a lovely, graceful young woman with long legs and a fine blossoming body.
Once, when Yitzhak Maslina walked into her father’s storage room, Toothy Rosa was up on a ladder and asked him to bring her a package from the floor. When he raised the package he also raised his eyes and saw a few inches of her thighs. Whenever he saw her thereafter, that picture came to mind, and always, even many years later, when she was his wife and he could no longer bear her voice or her presence or her teeth, he would feel the same longing for “the rest of Rosa.” It was enough to recall that day and that ladder and the mystery of her thighs hovering above him.
But let me return to the accounts he managed back then for her father, for these too he had not forgotten. Even now, all those years after he handled them, he still excelled at calculating profit and loss quickly and precisely and immediately understood the meaning of Ze’ev Tavori’s words, and the chilling touch of the rifle barrel under his chin enhanced his talent for calculation.
He backed off and said, “Suicide is a bad thing in every respect, a cow is a very good thing, and a pregnant Dutch cow is even better.”
“You can also have his boots,” said Ze’ev Tavori, “because they are too small for me.”
“But what will I say? That I took them off the dead man?”
“Absolutely. You took them so that a thief would not come and steal them. You took them with you f
or safekeeping. That’s what you say to them now, and later we’ll see what to do with them.”
Yitzhak Maslina hesitated, but excellent work boots were nothing to sneeze at. He bent over quickly and tried to remove the left boot from the foot of the murdered man. But the boot refused to be removed, and for a moment it seemed to him that the dead man was pulling away his foot, and he recoiled with fright.
Tavori chuckled and Maslina tugged and finally fell on his rear end in the mud with the boot in his hand, and the murderer chuckled again and said to him, “Now run to Kipnis and tell him everything you saw and that I am standing here in the rain guarding the body.”
Kipnis was the chairman of our committee, a tall, sharp man with a wicked sense of humor.
“At this hour? People are sleeping now.”
“When a man commits suicide you’re allowed to wake the chairman of the committee at any hour,” said Ze’ev Tavori, and prodded him: “Run, run already! Run and tell him what you saw and I will stay here with this wretched carcass.”
“And we’ll both say it was suicide?” Yitzhak Maslina again asked, seeking confirmation.
“Obviously suicide,” said Tavori. He pointed with the rifle barrel at the exploded head of the dead man and again turned it toward Maslina, bringing it very close to his forehead. “Doing what he did to me, what was that if not suicide?”
4
Everyone thinks now and then about suicide, and some even ponder the best way to do it and wonder what heartbroken relatives and shocked friends will say. In general, there’s something appealing and intriguing and contagious about suicide, and sometimes the thought arises not only out of pain and despair and distress but a desire to punish somebody else or to arouse pity and attract attention or perhaps out of temporary boredom or weakness. Therefore the members of the committee decided to tell the British police sergeant that Nahum Natan was a soft, weak man who lived alone and could not deal with the hard labor and the loneliness, and because he had no one close to him to share his troubles with, no wife and no children to take care of, he was influenced by what the two previous suicides had done, and did the same.