“I just want to see that woman once more,” Abe said, trying to sidestep the man. “I thought of something—”
“Get out.”
Abe was petrified, but he stood his ground. He held his hands up before him in a placating gesture—all the while trying to sidle past the big man.
The violence came with obscene abruptness. Abe distractedly wondered how some were able to marshal their reflexes to defend against such attacks.
The guard carried him by the scruff of his neck, as he would a kitten, and propelled him out of the office. Abe saw the man shove open the glass door with his free arm. He caught a glimpse of the guard’s hamlike fist drawing back and sickening pain thudded into his lower back.
Abe found himself on the carpeted floor on his hands and knees. He settled down on his belly, inhaling the musty odor of the worn carpet’s nap, and waited for the agony to fade.
From somewhere above him came the guard’s gruff voice. “It’s my job to see that there’s no trouble here. I can’t risk my job. You stay out, mister, else I’ll really bust you up.”
God’s angel, sent to drive Adam and Eve from Eden, Abe thought almost wryly, for the assault had drained his nervousness, leaving him feeling oddly hollow inside. The pain was fading. Behind him the glass door clicked shut. The dust in the carpet made him sneeze.
He sat up. His palms were red and stinging, raw from the friction of the carpet. The baggy knees of his trousers were torn. “Not enough I got to lose the money,” he complained to the empty corridor.
Slowly, wearily, he got to his feet. It was going to be dreadful, but he had no choice. Steadfastly he went to the closed door. He had to see Miss Grissome and ask about that ledger.
The door was locked. Abe rested his sweaty forehead against the cool pebbled glass. “Hah,” he murmured to the guard on the other side, “so you’re afraid of me.”
He began to laugh. The sound of it in his throat was soft, diffident, but it was definitely a laugh. I might as well laugh, as cry, Abe thought. The money is lost.
He would not tell anyone what had happened. He would lie to the steward. He would tell him everything went just fine.
Abe wandered the seventh floor until he found the stairwell. He could not bear the thought of that smirking elevator attendant.
The deserted stairwell was very warm. It was still summer in New York, one of the hottest Septembers ever. It had to be as hot within these unventilated confines as it was in the sweatshop.
The sweatshop—back there again, and for how long?
Between the sixth and fifth floors Abe found himself growing dizzy. His vision darkened and he had to clutch at the banister to keep from falling. He doubled over and vomited, and through it all he was petrified that someone might hear. They would think he was a derelict, seeing his torn pants. They would think he was a drunk and call the police. He would be arrested and thrown in jail.
His spasms subsided. Gasping, he scuttled like a crab down to the ground floor. His side was aching terribly and his mouth tasted terrible.
At the ground floor another staircase descended into the basement and the gentlemen’s washroom. The attendant, a black, eyed him stonily but said nothing. Abe stepped into a cubicle and locked the door behind him. He stripped off his suit jacket, lowered his trousers and twisted around to examine his aching lower back. There was a large purple bruise over his kidney. Abe wondered if he’d been injured internally. He hitched up his trousers, put down the lid on the toilet and sat with his head in his hands, wondering what he was going to do.
One thing was certain, he would hold to his decision not to tell Stefano. Miss Grissome’s words kept echoing in his mind—“Whoever signed that receipt committed fraud.” Stefano could end up in prison if Abe made trouble. Abe could not be responsible for ruining his life.
Could he expect Stefano to pay him back? “Come see me if the union gives you trouble,” he had said. The idea initially attracted him, but he discarded it as unworkable. It would take years to pay back such a sum. Sure, Stefano would commit himself to it, for he was a man of his word, but how many months would it be before that commitment turned to resentment? The other workers would find out about it, and before very long Abe would be treated like a Shylock even by his fellow Jews.
No, Abe thought, there are some things in life more important than money.
He left the cubicle, rolled up the sleeves of his sweat-slick shirt and went to a basin to wash his face. He cupped water in his hands and rinsed the foul taste out of his mouth, not caring if the attendant was watching and disapproving.
The attendant wore no expression at all as he handed Abe a towel. Abe thanked him and dried off. He saw the man’s dark eyes flick down to his torn trouser knees.
“I fell.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” the man said. He cocked his head. “You with the union, sir? The union’s a good thing.” He held Abe’s jacket for him.
Abe knew that he was supposed to tip, but he had just enough money in his pocket for carfare downtown. He hurried out of the washroom, calling out a thank you over his shoulder without looking back.
He made a beeline through the lobby, eyes straight ahead, and after an eternity found himself out on the sidewalk. On the street at least if someone noticed his torn pants they wouldn’t speak to him about it.
A clock in a store window told him that it was after ten. He hurried to catch his streetcar downtown, it had been quite a morning, and the thought of a full day on Allen Street nauseated him all over again, but he couldn’t skip work. Not now, not when he was penniless.
He managed to avoid Stefano for the rest of the morning, but during the lunch break the Italian came over. “It all go okay?” he asked.
Abe swallowed hard and nodded. “Fine. Everything is fine.”
“They paid you? No trouble?”
Abe nodded.
“They give you the interest?”
“They gave me everything,” Abe said, too quickly, too harshly. “I’m sorry to sound nasty,” he added. “I’m tired today.”
Defazio stared at him curiously, then shrugged. “Okay, then. I’ll see you later, my friend.”
Abe watched him go off. Twenty minutes later he and the other workers were back at their machines. The clatter and hiss of Abe’s pressing irons seemed to taunt him with the same chant over and over again: You’ll be here forever. The money is gone.
Chapter 10
Tel Aviv, 1910
It was a sultry sixty-five-degree evening in November. Haim Kolesnikoff, his heart fluttering with excitement, skipped down the stairs and out the front door of the Jewish National Fund office. He stood on the creaky wooden planking that served as the sidewalk and dug his gold watch out of his satin waistcoat.
It was just after seven. Haim sighed with relief. He would not have to go back to work. His factory manager would have shut the place down for the day. Anyway, Haim was far too excited by the results of the meeting he’d just had with the fund’s director, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, to return to his desk.
Haim slid his hands into his pockets and started home. He found himself whistling happily as he strolled along.
Calm down, he warned himself. You may have convinced the Jewish National Fund, and last week you worked things out with the bank, but the hardest part is still ahead of you. You’ve yet to confront and convince Rosie.
Tel Aviv’s streets were bustling; crowds of workers were returning home from their jobs in Jaffa and stopping to shop. The little city was thriving. More small suburbs were sprouting around the nucleus, where mud and sand were slowly giving way to blacktopped roads and new waist-high toothpick-slender eucalyptus, which somewhat helped to halt the constant shifting of the sand dunes.
As Haim walked past the shops of Zangwill Street, he wondered what Meir Dizengoff would say when he heard of his plans—assuming he could convince Rosie, of course. Meir probably wouldn’t much care. He was too busy. These days Dizengoff seemed to be everywhere at once, tending to ever
y aspect of his beloved Tel Aviv. He interviewed the teachers at the Herzlia High School; he hired municipal workers; he scrutinized every blueprint for a proposed building.
That the Old Man had any legal right to control these matters was questionable, but one might as well ask a parent if he had any legal right to meddle in the affairs of his grown offspring. Like the proud papa he so longed to be, he continually extolled Tel Aviv’s virtues while ignoring its shortcomings. For example, the straight, shallow shore of the city could not compete for shipping with Jaffa’s existing natural bay, and the shifting sands and crumbly stone made building difficult, but these things did not matter to Dizengoff. As far as he was concerned, Tel Aviv was the best place on earth.
Dizengoff had never been cheerful or gregarious, and these days he’d almost totally cut himself off from the original members of the Ahuzzat Bayit. The few who did see him said that he’d soured even more except when it came time for him to address new Jewish immigrants. Then he became the inveterate optimist, expending his considerable charm until his voice was hoarse, encouraging wealthy newcomers to begin building in Tel Aviv and instructing the not-so-wealthy on how to borrow the money to do the same.
Haim had been dropped from Dizengoff’s social list, and at first he was hurt and upset. After all, Meir had been the guest of honor at his wedding and had witnessed the certificate. Eventually, however, Haim came to understand that Dizengoff was wrapped up in a dream. Haim could understand, for he was working hard to bring about a dream of his own.
He passed a shoe store and saw the products of his own factory displayed in the window. His business was successful, as were all the other Jewish businesses in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, including Dizengoff’s new shipping company. Tel Aviv welcomed commerce and clamored for more. It was next to impossible to go bankrupt in Tel Aviv, for the city’s interdependent business sector considered itself to be one big family.
Haim was gradually phasing in young Jewish trainees at his factory. He was also attending weekly planning sessions at the Jewish National Fund office. Unlike the private get-together he’d just had with Dr. Ruppin—Haim was no longer obliged to deal with an assistant to the director—these weekly sessions were attended by all the community’s business leaders.
Haim, feeling stuffy in suit and tie, would sit with these men, all of them far older than he. Dizengoff would preside and Dr. Ruppin would sit in, now and then quietly offering his comments. Important business would be discussed. Baksheesh for the suspicious Turkish authorities was arranged in the attempt to ensure that the tenuous relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the first Jewish city since Biblical times did not further deteriorate. They also worked out agreements with the Anglo-Palestine Bank to see to it that the newly arrived working-class halutzim could borrow to establish themselves.
When he wasn’t participating in city planning, Haim was at his factory. At the end of the long day his back ached, not from honest physical labor but from bending over ledgers and endless sheaves of orders and bills. With wealth came responsibility, and Haim cared for neither. In Russia it was Abe who wanted wealth and who took pleasure in seeing to the accounts.
Haim frequently found his mind wandering during the workday. He would look at his hands, holding them up to the light to see if they still showed any of the calluses he’d built up when he cut stone. He would daydream about those days in Jerusalem when he and Yol worked together, strong and tanned beneath the hot sun. True, the work was grueling, but Haim had been the equal to it. In those days he could rightly call himself a halutz. No, it was not money that he needed but hard work and comradeship.
Haim paused as several workers stepped from a doorway into his path. There were no cafes in Tel Aviv, for the rabbis had forbidden them, but there were innumerable workers’ clubs where a man could get coffee or a glass of wine on credit. The men blocking Haim’s way were just leaving such a club, rowdy with happiness over the end of the day. They were laughing over a shared joke, but their raucousness quickly faded as they noticed Haim behind them. They began to fall over themselves to get out of his way. “Excuse us, Mr. Kolesnikoff.”
“Nothing to excuse,” Haim said heartily. “A little fun is natural after a hard day’s work.”
“We were careless not to see you,” the speaker insisted, not listening to Haim. The worker was big, about Haim’s height, though not as broad in the shoulders. He wore an open-necked cotton shirt with rings of sweat in the armpits and a leather-visored cloth cap, which he doffed. “If you’ll excuse us now, sir, we’ll be on our way.”
Haim watched them hurry off. How he longed to invite them back to the club so he could buy them all more coffee and bask in their conversation.
Such madness, he reproached himself. He gazed inside the club. The place was dense with blue cigarette smoke and redolent with the aroma of fresh coffee. The bare wooden tables were all ringed with halutzim enjoying each other’s comradeship.
If he entered, all conversation would end. The proprietor would clear a table for him and he would sit all by himself staring into his coffee as the halutzim filed out in groups of two and three, muttering to themselves and shaking their heads.
It was no use trying to pretend he was still one of them. He could shed his jacket and tie, but much more than his attire separated him from the workers. The halutzim who came to Palestine were socialists, just as he had been—and still was in his heart—although he blamed none of the working class for scoffing at that. After all, he owned a factory. That made him an exploiter, benign or not. At twenty-eight he was far more like Meir Dizengoff than like any of the young men in that workers’ club.
Haim felt miserable now, estranged and lonely. He was willing to trade everything he had except Rosie once again to count himself among the pioneers. The point of coming to Palestine in the first place was not to grow rich but to help establish a homeland.
Yol Popovich had recently come to Tel Aviv for a fortnight’s visit with Haim and his wife. Rosie warmly welcomed him. Yol, gloatingly eyeing her obviously pregnant state, slapped Haim on the back.
The friendship between the two men was as strong as ever. A steady stream of letters flowed between them, so there was none of the awkwardness that often attends such reunions.
Yol looked gaunt and beneath his tan his skin had a yellowish cast to it, since he had contracted malaria very soon after he got to Kinnereth.
“Of course at Kinnereth malaria is merely a nuisance, hardly a debilitating disease,” Yol boasted, swaggering about Haim and Rosie’s front parlor in his red Arab shoes and baggy cotton work clothes. On his head was a kaffiyeh, held in place by a leather thong and draping loosely over his neck and shoulders. “So despite my fever I planted trees and dug ditches, and in between I ate perfectly loathsome food and drank no schnapps, not even a little wine. Well, what do you two say? Am I a mensch or what?”
Yol told them the initial experimental project at Kinnereth had gone so well that Dr. Ruppin at the National Fund decided to hand over a tract of land for them to develop with no fund supervisor present. They were given three thousand dunams—seven hundred fifty acres—on the east side of the Jordan River. The settlement was called Um Jumi, from the name of a nearby Arab village. The workers who took it on, Yol included, were among the most experienced in the country. Their goal was not to settle permanently at Um Jumi, but to make a start of it and then hand it over to another settlement group in a few months. The original pioneers would then go on to tame another tract.
Late one night after Rosie was in bed, Haim and Yol sat up talking. Yol fetched his valise; packed inside were his cartridge belt and revolver. Haim was enthralled with the weapon and with Yol’s anecdotes of his self-defense training among the Hashomer, the closest thing to a Hebrew warrior class since the time of Masada.
“And what do I have to show you in return,” Haim moped out loud, “my ledgers from the shoe factory?”
Yol, usually flippant, grew serious. He studied his friend and then softly asked
why he wasn’t happy. “Remember, you knew marriage would mean you’d have to share your dream.”
Haim protested that he’d never once regretted marrying Rosie and that he looked forward to their first child. He then told Yol about Rosie’s promise that if he allowed her to complete her work as Dizengoff’s secretary, she would give him his chance to do what he wanted to do.
“I would join you in an instant,” Haim said, longingly hefting Yol’s revolver, then shrugged in resignation. “But I fear it is too late.”
“Maybe not,” Yol murmured. “Haim, fetch us a drink.”
Haim brought to the table a bottle of wine. By the time the flagon was dry, they had hatched their plan.
Haim turned the corner onto Herzl Street. He opened the whitewashed picket gate in front of the blue two-story cottage that was his home. The front lot was still nothing but sand, but from the back yard came the musty odor of composted soil. Haim arranged for the stuff to be carted in so that Rosie could begin a flower garden under her mother’s tutelage. Miriam Glaser supplied her daughter with seeds, bulbs and incidentals, including a servant to do the heavy work. Rosie diligently puttered around the seed beds, but it would be at least another season before the garden’s promise was realized.
Haim walked the side path around the cottage into the back yard. Rosie, seven months pregnant, was seated in a wicker chaise lounge with a sketch paid on her lap. She wore a heavy scarlet muslin caftan and had a grey wool shawl wrapped around her shoulders against the slight breeze. During her pregnancy she chilled easily during the evening.
Haim stood quietly for a moment. Rosie, engrossed in her drawing, had not yet noticed him. He loved to watch her like this; it allowed him to study her every feature. If he tried to gaze at her while she was aware of it Rosie would start to fidget, blush and finally scold him.
Now he had the chance to notice how the last rays of the setting sun brought out the glinting coppery highlights in her golden hair. He smiled at the way her perpetually sunburnt nose wrinkled and her lips pursed as she pondered her work.
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