Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “They are not relatives of yours, they aren’t even friends, and you all live together all the same.”

  Samuel didn’t know what to say. He often asked himself about this shared life with these men and women whom nothing tied together except the fact of their being Jews like him. But he still did not accept that being a Jew, whether for good or bad, made any difference.

  “Would you share your house with someone who was not a Jew? Would you give them your land, as you have given these people your land?” Ahmed asked.

  Samuel wanted to say that he would, but he didn’t because he wasn’t sure and he trusted Ahmed too much not to be honest with him. He shrugged and tried to smile.

  “I don’t know . . . I really don’t know. I lost control of my life some time ago, and the only thing I do now is to let events take me where they will. I shouldn’t be here, I should be in Saint Petersburg. I wanted to be a chemist, to develop medicines, maybe to keep studying, as my teacher did. He was always saying that we knew very little. But I had to run away, Ahmed, and here I am, with you teaching me how to be a farmer.”

  “I don’t have anything to teach you. You have been a good pupil.”

  “I don’t want you to worry, Ahmed, no one will bother you, I promise.”

  “But what if more Jews come and you need to give them more land? Will you throw us out? The land is yours, you bought it from Saïd Aban.”

  “Do you think I could do a thing like that? Haven’t I managed to convince you that I am not your enemy? I thought you had a better opinion of me.”

  Ahmed lowered his head in shame. He could not complain about anything in front of Samuel, who had always treated him as a friend.

  But in spite of all the displays of friendliness and affection, Ahmed did not trust him and that hurt Samuel.

  One morning Abraham came to see them. Samuel was surprised because the doctor was an old man who did not like to travel too far from the Holy City.

  The doctor admired Hope Orchard. He had not thought that he was going to find the land perfectly tilled and the fruit trees so well looked after, or even those three improvised houses, modest and austere, but clean and ordered.

  “You have worked well. Other people haven’t been so lucky. A few days ago I found out about a group of farms on the coast, on the way to Haifa, set up on what appeared to be fertile land. It was an illusion: they were surrounded by swamps and the farms were wracked with fever. Malaria took them all: men, women, and children.”

  Abraham Yonah seemed to be particularly affected by this tragedy, and then he told them that he had known some of the colonists and that he himself had helped them buy the land. He was also upset by an attack against a colony in Galilee.

  “The skirmish left its dead, both among the Arabs and among our people. Apparently some bandits attacked two men who were walking to the village to buy seeds. The men defended themselves but one of them died, stabbed by the bandits. The men belonged to a colony of more than thirty families. You can imagine the commotion. They asked for justice from the local authorities, but they paid them no attention, and the local saïd did nothing either.”

  “We can’t let things like this happen, we need to defend ourselves.” Nikolai’s words were vehement and filled with rage.

  “Defend ourselves? How are we going to defend ourselves? The authorities should look after us,” Samuel replied.

  “They think the same as you in some of the colonies in Galilee, Nikolai, that they cannot allow the robbery and assaults to continue, so the men are forming armed groups and organizing themselves. They have come all the way to Jerusalem to buy rifles and anything else that they can use to defend themselves. This causes problems with the Turks . . . I don’t know, but I think that bad times are coming, for everyone,” Abraham said with regret.

  “You’ll end up regretting your help, regretting having helped so many of us to settle here. The Palestinian Jews were much calmer before we came along,” Kassia said, sincere as ever.

  Abraham nodded and smiled. Kassia was right, his life had been much calmer years before, but his conscience would not have been calm if he had refused to help all those Jews who came looking for a home in the land of their forefathers.

  This was not a land flowing with milk and honey as the Bible had promised, but every one of its nooks and corners evoked a common past, a lost history that was now being recovered. For some time now the government in Constantinople had looked with suspicion on all the Jews who had decided to move to Palestine, but what would the Turks have done with this land? Nothing. It was a lost corner of the empire, a wasteland ravaged by malaria.

  “I cannot stop worrying about the future. We have to learn to live in peace with our neighbors. You are a good example to follow, Kassia, you treat Ahmed as a friend, he has told me as much on several occasions.”

  “And that’s how things should be,” Kassia replied.

  Abraham also told them that many of the Jews who came were caught up by misfortune.

  “They are paid a pittance for working on the Judea plantations. Some of them are happy with nothing more than a bite to eat and a roof over their heads.”

  “And this is the Promised Land?” one of the women said complainingly.

  Kassia looked at her with disdain. She had grown to love this land, to which she was sacrificing the last drops of her youth. Her hands, the same hands that Jacob used to kiss and say were smoother than a dove’s breast, were now rough and cracked. Her skin, always open to the sun, was covered in little brown spots, and her hair, held in place by some pins at her neck so that it would not get in her way as she tilled the soil, seemed like a mass of straw.

  “Don’t you imagine that the fellahin live better than we do, they depend on their effendis, the owners of the land they tend, and they also suffer from the Turkish functionaries,” Kassia explained.

  “We need a revolution here as well,” Nikolai interjected.

  “We need something more than a revolution. We need to make this land into our home and to show that the ideas for which we had to flee were not simply illusions. Jeremiah is a good example. He treats the workers in the quarry as equals, Jews as well as Muslims, and he pays them all the same salary, a fair salary. He’s the best example we have that the Jews understand how a fair society should be,” Samuel replied.

  “Jeremiah came to see me a few days ago, he came with one of his workers, a man who complained of pains in his neck and whose arms had lost all their strength,” Abraham said.

  Jeremiah was not a man who liked talking; he preferred to listen. He had built with his own hands a house just outside the walls of the Old City, and every now and then Samuel went to visit him. At first he had done so to ensure that he was a good boss to Ahmed and Ahmed’s brothers-in-law. It did not take him long to see that he was a fair man. Ahmed himself had said so. It took some time for Jeremiah to trust Samuel and to explain to him his story. Samuel always said that those who came to Palestine had a story to tell, and Jeremiah’s was similar to those of so many others. It was only chance that had saved him from death in a pogrom in his village, near Kiev. He had fallen down the stairs and had broken both his legs, and so was in the hospital when his house and those of his neighbors were destroyed. His father, his mother, his two younger brothers, his wife and his son had all been murdered. There was no reason for him to stay, so he gathered all his money and got on an old Russian cargo ship that took him from Odessa to Constantinople, and from there he undertook the difficult journey over land to Palestine, bribing officials on the way so that they would let him go on toward his final destination.

  He had been a member of a socialist group in Kiev, a group made up of intellectuals and young workers; there were only two other Jews, but when he had joined the group it was not because he felt discriminated against because he was a Jew, but more because he felt that being a Jew made his condition of being a proletarian e
ven worse.

  “My wife was the daughter of a rabbi and liked to read, she lived in Kiev but she did not mind leaving her family to move to the farm to be with mine. She was so fragile . . . I don’t know how she could have fallen in love with me. My son looked like her. He was four years old when they killed him; he was just like his mother. He was as thin and blonde as her. My wife had taught him to read and every night she made him read me a few lines of the Bible. I felt emotional when I heard him, I felt so proud of them both, there was nothing in the world I could have desired more than to be with them.”

  Jeremiah’s story reminded Samuel of his own. They had both studied: Samuel to become a chemist, and Jeremiah, after great efforts, had managed to qualify as an engineer. Jeremiah’s father was a moneylender and a lot of tradesmen owed him money. When Jeremiah was growing up his father came to an agreement with one of his debtors—he would absolve him of the debt if the man managed to get his son into university. The merchant did not have to think twice and called in the help of all his contacts to make sure that Jeremiah could study in a good school and then go on to university.

  It was at the university that Jeremiah embraced socialism. He could not think of a better cause than that of freeing the workers from the tsar’s yoke.

  Jeremiah went to meetings with other immigrants like him who had been trained in Marxist thought. The only difference was that in Palestine there was no need for them to hide themselves. Samuel refused to go to the meetings; he had promised himself not to get mixed up in politics again, although it was a resolution he found difficult to keep.

  Ariel and Louis had also kept their faith in the revolution intact. Some days when the sun had set and they had finished breaking clods for the day, they would meet up with other Jews who, like them, dreamed of a different society.

  “It’s not about getting a society for the Jews, but getting a society where we are all equal, where no one stands on top of anyone else,” Ariel said.

  All of them followed the news from Russia extremely keenly, and they celebrated with great pleasure one of Konstantin’s letters, where he told Samuel that a Duma, or Parliament, had been created.

  Tsar Nicholas II has had no option but to cede to the pressure of all of those people who want our monarchy to be structured like our church is. The peasants have revolted this year, and the workers have gone on strike, and there was even a mutiny on the frigate Potemkin. The government has announced that a Duma will be created, but even so they haven’t managed to silence the dissident voices—maybe the decision comes too late. In every city, starting with Saint Petersburg, revolutionary councils known as “soviets” have been formed. Witte has come back into government, but he has many enemies because they think he is too liberal. I don’t know what will happen, but I am not optimistic, especially now that the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks have split. The Mensheviks wanted things to change, even though they did not support a revolution with bloodshed, but the Bolsheviks . . .

  Ever since Nikolai’s group had arrived, Jeremiah had come to Hope Orchard more often. No one had failed to notice the sidelong glances that he shot at one of the young women in the group.

  Anastasia, Olga’s sister, was a woman who looked fragile but who had reserves of strength that surprised the men. There was no job that scared her and she never allowed anyone to help her. When they reached Jerusalem she had been little more than twenty years old, and had decided to travel with her sister Olga and Olga’s husband, Nikolai.

  In spite of her youth, the men of Hope Orchard respected her. Anastasia said little and, although she was friendly, she kept a prudent distance in her relations with the others.

  Everyone asked themselves how this fragile-seeming woman, who looked as if she would break in two with every gust of wind, would survive the harsh conditions of this harsh land.

  Everyone was surprised when Nikolai and Olga announced that they were going to Galilee to meet with some friends with whom they had traveled to Palestine, and Anastasia said, firmly, that she would stay at Hope Orchard.

  Almost a year had gone by since their arrival, and Nikolai, like the rest of his group, was aware that this piece of land did not provide enough for all of them. He had come to this land to work, to build a future, and there was not enough room for them all in Hope Orchard.

  “We will go in a few days’ time, and we will always be grateful that you took us in,” Nikolai said.

  “You will always be welcome here if things go badly for you in Galilee and you decide to come back. You know that the situation up there is complicated, and all the more so since the skirmishes with the Arabs began,” Kassia said, upset to be losing these people whom she considered her friends, especially Olga.

  “I’m staying,” Anastasia said.

  “What do you mean, you’re staying? You should come with us, we can’t leave you here. Our parents would never allow it.” But it was clear from Olga’s voice that she had given up the battle for lost.

  “I am going to stay here, sister, I want to live in Jerusalem. I will go only if Kassia asks me to, but if it’s no inconvenience then I will stay. I won’t be a burden on anyone, I know I can earn my living by my own work.”

  Neither Kassia nor Samuel, nor Jacob, Louis, or Ariel put any obstacle in the way of her staying with them.

  They all promised to write and to visit whenever they had time. Olga told Kassia to take care of her sister.

  “She may look like her heart is made of stone, but it is only a façade. We lost our parents too young and I brought her up myself. I did the best I could, but sometimes I’ve asked myself if her bitterness was because I barely ever had time to laugh with her, or to console her in the long winter nights whenever she had a nightmare. I had to work hard to look after us both, and . . .”

  Kassia took her hand and begged her not to reproach herself.

  “Anastasia is a good girl, she just needs time for the tenderness that dwells in her to blossom. I will look after her, you can trust me.”

  “I couldn’t bear for anything to happen to her . . . She’s the only person I have . . .”

  “Come on, don’t say that! You have Nikolai, your husband, who adores you.”

  “Yes, I have Nikolai, and you have Jacob, but you have Marinna as well, your daughter is marvelous. I wish I could have a daughter like her!”

  They fell silent. Olga had confessed to Kassia that she could not be a mother; she did not know why, but after five years of marriage she had still not fallen pregnant.

  They left at the beginning of the autumn of 1907. Even Ahmed said that he missed them.

  Samuel did not know how it happened, but little by little Anastasia became his shadow, following him around and asking him to let her help make his medicines. He didn’t put up too much resistance. Anastasia cleaned everything in the little hut where he had set up his laboratory, and the cuvettes, scales, weights, mortars, jars, and all the other utensils were always spotless. She also kept his books in order, those books which Samuel kept as if they were jewels: Carbonell’s Elementos de Farmacia fundados en los principios de la química moderna, Jourdan’s Farmacopea Universal, Caventou and Pelletier’s studies of quinine . . .

  Samuel, like his master in Saint Petersburg, had focused all his knowledge of chemistry toward pharmacy.

  Everyone in the house was accustomed to seeing them together at all hours, so no one suspected that the relationship between them had changed.

  It happened on one of those afternoons that Jeremiah came to Hope Orchard without warning. He was always made welcome and Kassia invited him to stay for dinner. Samuel was making some medicines for Abraham, but he left his work to spend some time with his friend.

  Jeremiah was arguing with Jacob about which political party he should join, Poalei Zion (The Workers of Zion) or Hapoel Hatzair (The Young Worker Party), whose leader was a man named Aaron David Gordon. They had all met him and the
y had all been impressed. He was middle-aged and went from one side of the country to the other with a crowd of followers, preaching about the purifying effects of work.

  But Jacob was critical of Gordon.

  “Yes, he’s a special man, but he does not place socialism above all other kinds of reality. He never stops reciting the Talmud or the Bible, and he is truly Tolstoyan, it is extremely clear how much Tolstoy has influenced him.”

  “You can’t accuse him of not being a socialist,” Louis replied.

  Jacob, Ariel, and Jeremiah were more inclined to go with Poalei Zion, a party formed by a group of Marxists who had decided to realize here what they could not in Russia. There was another man who stood out among the leaders of Poalei Zion, a man named Ben-Gurion, whom Samuel criticized for his insistence that a Marxist society could be allied to a specifically Jewish one.

  “Ben-Gurion,” Samuel said, “wants this land to belong to the Jews, so he adds the word ‘Jew’ to every text or accord published by Poalei Zion.”

  “Would we be here if we weren’t Jews?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Those of us who have left Russia haven’t all gone to Palestine. How many of us have traveled to the United States, to England, or to South America? We are here because we had to go somewhere and we have chosen Palestine,” Samuel replied.

  Jeremiah’s attention was still lost in Anastasia’s face, but she seemed to pay him no mind, she didn’t even blush. When the quarryman left, Samuel said that he had to finish preparing the medicines that Abraham had ordered, which he had promised to deliver the next day. Anastasia followed him to the shed as she always did when he was working.

  The silence and the darkness of the night had taken control of Hope Orchard, and Samuel dozed off as he was waiting for one of his medicines to infuse. He fell down onto the mattress while Anastasia washed the flasks he had just used. He did not know how much time had passed, but suddenly he awoke, feeling Anastasia’s body pressed against his own. He did not resist.