by Yoram Kaniuk
Then, since her splendid words only confirmed their suppositions and even sharpened their cunning, the Arabs announced, even without consulting anymore among themselves, that when they said a hundred pounds they didn't mean a hundred pounds, but the wind distorted their words and when she looked at the Arabs with ostentatious ennui, and peeped surreptitiously at the place where the harbor of Gaza was likely to be, and sixty-six warships had already started raising smoke in her eyes, the price went up to a hundred and fifty and then to two hundred English pounds, and then Rebecca took the money with generous weariness, got into the carriage, called the Captain to get in with her, and said: Yallah, let's get out of here, we'll buy the lands for your army someplace else.
When she came back to the settlement Haya Horowitz and Frumka Berdichevski saw a smile on Rebecca's lips. The rumor spread like wildfire and the farmers wearing clothes taken out of mothballs began coming to her house with bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine. They said, Congratulations, and when is the wedding? And Ebenezer, who was summoned from the citrus grove, appeared holding a new bird that had almost managed to fly out of the wood in which it was carved, saw the laugh on his mother's lips, and the laugh frightened him. The farmers were insulted when they heard there wouldn't be a wedding, not now-as she said-and not at any other date, and they went off disappointed and then Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, began dying and Rebecca, who hadn't seen him for some time, went to visit him. She sat next to him, held his hand, told him not to be afraid of death because there's nothing more awful than life, and then she told him about the Arabs and how they had given her two hundred English pounds for land she hadn't intended to buy. He burst out laughing and didn't stop for three days until he died with a smile on his lips. The settlement forgave Rebecca for all her insults over the years because of the laugh she gave Nathan on his deathbed. At Nathan's funeral in Roots, Rebecca recalled the first day she had come to Israel and wept. But they didn't see the first tears Rebecca wept since she went to Jaffa with Nehemiah.
At night, she lay in bed with her eyes wide open and thought about Nathan. She thought that twenty years had passed since she married Nehemiah. She tried to grasp her life and to understand what she had meant to do with it if people like Nathan died while others grew old and her mongoloid son sat in the citrus grove with a deaf girl and sculpted birds. Ebenezer came to her. She smelled his smell of resin and wood and lay still in bed with her eyes shut. He sat on the stool not far from her bed and wanted to know if the laugh he saw when she returned from the trip to the Negev was the laugh of Joseph Rayna. She told him, Maybe, maybe, but don't hang too many hopes on that. The next day, after many years of not doing that, he carved the portrait of Joseph again and she looked at the portrait and didn't say a word, suddenly Ebenezer seemed so unworthy of the gigantic and splendid war waged inside her by two valiant and desperate men like Joseph and Nehemiah, that all she could tell him was: There's a resemblance in the face but there's no resemblance in the spirit of the face.
Ebenezer was ashamed, he went outside and hurt himself with an almond branch and had to go to the doctor. Rebecca said: Nathan's wife saw you hurt, so watch where you walk, your girlfriend is only deaf and not blind, and he said: She hasn't been my girlfriend for a long time, she's married to a laborer and lives far away.
The new doctor's name was Zosha Merimovitch. Even as a child, he had known the legends about Rebecca by heart. The legends began to be embroidered back in nineteen ten, two years after Rebecca buried Nehemiah. She went back to Jaffa then to buy a plow and stayed in a small hotel.
It was a hot day, Zosha Merimovitch was told, and Rebecca went out in the morning to buy a plow and old Michael Halperin, filled with the fury of many languid Jews, stood at the circus that had come to town and saw Jews wearing white suits, with delicate hands, smelling of perfume. He tried to excite them with the idea of a Hebrew army of ragamuffins that would conquer the land of his fathers from its robbers, bring it to life, and restore it to what it was and they nodded fondly at the barefoot ancient prophet splendid in his oriental garb, but their eyes were fixed on the beautiful Egyptian dancer, shaking her buttocks to the sound of the drum and the oud, and on the caged lion. An Arab knife-sharpener stood there and sharpened sickles, knives, and swords for all the wars Halperin said were coming. And then Michael Halperin entered the lion's cage, and the crowd held its breath. He stroked the lion's mane, stood facing him, sang Hatikvah and the modir didn't know if it was forbidden to sing it even in a lion's cage, and the lion lay on the ground, fixed watery bored eyes on Halperin, and fell asleep. The lion's grating breath and Halperin's singing were the only sounds. The lion's hair looked like Halperin's.
Halperin's singing in the lion's cage stirred memories in Rebecca of the songs of Joseph Rayna. She said to herself: Heroes in a cage of a tame lion, a cheap stage setting, a stupid attempt at would-be salvation. The words of Hatikvah always made her feel melancholy. Words full of longing for artificial horses and visions of returning from a hunt in a nonexistent forest. She despised Halperin because no Hebrew army, she thought, would spring up from his shouts and the bombastic song in a cage. And, unnoticed, Rebecca went into the cage, locked the door behind her, and then there was a silence people had never heard before. You could hear, said Zosha Merimovitch's mother, the sound of the oil in the bottles on the stand of the old oil vendor, whose knife stopped being sharpened at that moment by the knife-sharpener.
Rebecca opened the lion's maw, managed to look into its mouth, and saw how big its teeth were. The Turkish modir now stood up and started lashing himself with a turbatsh and Rebecca, who didn't know what language the lion spoke, ordered it in Arabic, which she thought was closer to its language than any other language she knew, to roll over and play cat for her. The lion did as she ordered and to the spectators, who may have invented some of it, its movements looked like coquettish rotating movements and some versions have it that even its roar sounded like a cat's meow, but Zosha clearly remembers that in the conversation about that subject, various opinions were expressed about the purring, since a Turkish cat whines yeow and a Hebrew one yooo and an English one meow, so there was no consensus about whether the poor lion whined like a cat, and the lion, who apparently smiled at Rebecca, lay on its back and then got up and roared and she didn't budge until it walked in front of her, knelt, turned its face, and she stroked its mane, straightened her dress, wiped off a few pieces of straw that had stuck to it, and said: No blood and fire, no hope, this is a place of circuses and Jews, there's nobody to erect a kingdom of Judea for here, Michael Halperin, there's no reason, and she went out of the cage. The doctor Zosha Merimovitch, who was then a little boy, trembled with fear when he heard the story and people told how Michael Halperin then went to Rebecca, bowed to her as he had once bowed to the lion, and she said to him, The lion of Judah bows to a miserable lady of exile? And in a mocking voice, she went on: You're a funny Jew, Halperin, go save another nation in another place, but never mind, you're the closest thing to a lion I've seen since the Wondrous One was here and taught the fools in the settlement how to smell the feet of robbers who went through the field. Grand pianos they've now bought for their daughters, and she left.
The doctor, now a grown-up, waited for Ebenezer. Now and then he peeped at her house but never managed to see her. And she refused to go to doctors. He waited for the bold fellow, the hybrid of Michael Halperin, Rebecca Schneerson, and Nimrod the hero. His contempt for Ebenezer was perfect, he treated him without looking at him.
The Captain moved to the nearby settlement, which was big and rather close to both Jaffa and Jerusalem, and the door of his house said: Captain J.M.A.G., Citizen of the United States, Argentina, French Editor, Please do not visit on Sunday and Wednesday. The Captain's trip to Cairo was postponed again and again and every Wednesday he would ride to the settlement to visit Rebecca, sit in her house, tell her about his plans, and give her a most discouraging account of the irrigation plan for the Middle East she had devised an
d still expected to realize, even though for some time now she didn't remember why she had ever devised that plan. The Captain didn't give up his idea of marrying Rebecca. He listened patiently to her tribulations, the story of her weeping for eight years, the story of her life with Nehemiah and her tribulations with her stupid son, who goes to a doctor who probably studied horse doctoring in Beirut, to put iodine and a bandage on his face. For some reason, the Captain saw the story of her going into the lion's cage as overwhelming proof that she would marry him someday. Because she could never understand the disposition of the Captain's ostensibly logical connections, she took the words literally and learned how to go on refusing him politely. She would say her "no" pensively as if she meant "yes," while gazing softly at the Captain's increasingly pale face, and so she could keep his hope on a back burner and know that every Wednesday he would come visit her to propose new ideas to her and some of them really weren't bad, like building the airport years later.
While Rebecca was pondering how much alike were the Wondrous One, Joseph, the Captain, and the German officer who played songs for her during the war, new settlers came to the settlement. The Turkish modir, who was banished from the Land by the British, sent her a love letter from Istanbul and the manager of the wine press started sending love letters with shipments of brandy he would send to her home. The economy improved, new rest homes were even built for rheumatics since the air of the place was good for them. Roads were paved and the settlement was enveloped in thick green foliage, and there were corners where the sun never penetrated, and Rebecca went on protecting her son at a limited distance of time and space. One day a young teacher came to the settlement from Tel Aviv whose name was Dana Klomin. She brought twelve little children to show them the pit of the first settlers, which they had started digging next to the synagogue some years before. In the community center hung pictures of the early days and one of the farmers took the children on a tour of the community center and showed them the pit, Roots, and told about the tribulations, the torments, and the malaria. He told about Nathan and Nehemiah and the Wondrous One who came riding from the Arabian deserts to teach war. The teacher Dana was short, round, handsome in the unaccepted meaning of the word-as Rebecca put it-her eyes were gray, and when she twisted her ankle on a tour of the Hill of Tears, she was taken to the home of Zosha Merimovitch the doctor, who knew her father in Tel Aviv, and when he fixed her heel and bandaged it she saw on the windowsill a bird made of wood that Ebenezer had brought the doctor as a sign of gratitude for his cure. She looked at the bird in amazement, and said: That's a bird of paradise, it almost flies and doesn't fly, like me, who carves such a handsome bird? The doctor, who never caught on that there was anything special about the bird or Ebenezer, refused to see and turned his face away when he'd come to him, put the bird on the windowsill because he didn't know where to put it, said: That bird was made by Ebenezer Schneerson, who sits alone in the citrus grove and carves.
The children were resting in the Horowitz home. Dana Klomin limped slowly to the citrus grove. It was a beautiful day, and she deluded herself that she was going because of the beautiful day and the charming and pleasant view, but what led Dana Klomin, whose ankle hurt, was the rare sight of the bird. Dana's father believed in one thing only-in the charter. He thought he was the only one who still followed in the path of the greatest Jew of our generation, Theodor Herzl. He was excited by the Hebrew kingdom modeled on Rome, with a senate and an enlightened king, and for him Zionism wasn't only a solution to the distress of the Jews-or returning them to their homeland-but also an act of legal and historical justice. Mr. Klomin thought the Land was empty of people, the Arabs who lived in it were accidental wayfarers, no one ever called that land by name except the Jews, he said excitedly. It wasn't the homeland of any nation, no city was a capital for them, only the longings of the Jews preserved the Land from total disappearance, he claimed. He quoted Disraeli, who said in his book Tancred.• "The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the Children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist its celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards."
A plot of land without declaring a historic homeland, without a flag, an anthem, or a legal system, was merely an aftermath of nothing. The emptiness of the Land was the implementation of an essentially ahistorical political mishap that demanded legal correction, a kind of leadership fraud, and the proud Israeli nation had to accept the charter for the Land of Israel and establish a strong and enlightened kingdom there on the European model and not on the savage Asian one, establish a supreme court there, a parliament, a decent and consistent constitution, enact a law of languages allowing only Hebrew and ancient Latin and the Hebrew army that would arise would establish those points of Zionist settlement that Jewish poverty had established so far without any real vision or proper planning. Zionism had to be made into a profitable business, he argued with the fervor of a person incited by an idea that nobody can or will take seriously. He was just as disappointed in his daughter as Rebecca was in her son. Like Rebecca, he also hoped his grandson might follow in his path. He had ideas about breeding his daughter, an expression he himself adopted, with a scion of the house of David, but the only scion of the house of David, Mr. Joseph Abravanel, seemed cheap, Levantine, and devoid of greatness, and the son was even dumber than his father. Mr. Klomin even thought of trying to marry his daughter off to some European prince, but since he didn't know who to appeal to in the matter, he didn't do anything. Dana, who had lost her mother, attended teachers' college and all she wanted to do was dry flowers, teach, and give birth to her own children so they would also love to smell flowers. She loved the settlements, hated Tel Aviv, which had grown and was noisy and pretentious now, she read old novels in yellowing bindings and dreamed of the simple and beautiful life in the lap of nature. She loved everything beautiful created by man or nature. She hated her father's big words, but she loved the solitary and stubborn man who raised her after her mother died in childbirth. When he furiously argued to her that what we need are warrior engineers and chemists and jurists and not teachers, Dana said to him: But I love flowers and the smell of rain and a grape harvest, and he twisted his face and shouted: From romanticism you beget stupid children, not a Jewish state after two thousand years, Dana!
What angered him especially was her collection of smells. She'd collect leaves and plants and blend them with liquid and seal the smells in jars and call every smell by its own name. She had a bottle of lust and a bottle of the smell of humility, and a bottle of a pauper kingdom, and a bottle of Tyre and Sidon, and a bottle of licorice essence, and more and more bottles whose very sight stirred gloomy despair in Mr. Klomin-who, of course, was always dressed to be taken to some king or high commissioner. Her friends went up to the Galilee and sang bold songs, sprouted mighty mustaches, and tapped each other on the shoulder. New settlements were set up at night and Dana's friends guarded them, but for her they lacked the poetry she was seeking, the sadness, the shame, her smells sought birds like the one she saw on the windowsill of Dr. Zosha Merimovitch, whose father once argued for three straight nights with Mr. Klomin about the squadron leaders he wanted to command the future Hebrew army. She dreamed of a heavy pensive man who would spare her the need to choose between her father and her friends.
For three days Dana Klomin stayed in the citrus grove. The students got a short letter brought to them by the grandson of Ahbed. In the letter, Dana wrote: Forgive me for staying, give warm regards to the teachers and don't judge me harshly, I can't leave, yours in friendship and love, Dana. The students returned to Tel Aviv with the janitor of the school who cursed the teacher who fell in love with a carpenter, and on the way they saw a man wearing a strange uniform driving a wagon loaded with splendid furniture and sporting a sword. That was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, who after a sharp argument with the committee of the nearby settlement in which he tried to explain for the hundred and first
time why his name alone was a guarantee of his being Swiss and that the Greek Orthodox church is the desired answer the Jews were waiting for, while they claimed against him that he was a fantasizer, a traitor, cheating his nation and his religion, and they said: How long will you stay with us? He put on his fine clothing, wanted to go to Rebecca, but since it wasn't Wednesday, he did what he would have done if it weren't Wednesday and he had no words. He went for a tour and when he came to Gaza he saw an Arab wearing rags and selling antique furniture, who claimed it was furniture of Modo-Louigo fifteen, or in another language: in the style of Louis XV, he bought it as an imaginary wedding gift for Rebecca and was now driving it in a cart to her house. When Dana entered the hut, Ebenezer lifted his face, smiled at her, and went on working. Then he looked at her injured heel, took the heel in his strong, rough hands, looked at it, and for the first time in his life felt that he belonged to something bigger than himself.