Strangers with the Same Dream Page 13

  “David. Mukhtar,” he repeated, to make sure he had been understood.

  “Ya seyyed David,” the Arab said. Oh! Sir David.

  But there was something insincere in the greeting. He could not quite call the Arab out, accuse him of disrespect, but it was clear this old man was not glad to see him there.

  “We’ll be off,” David said. “The sun is already high.”

  The Arab followed David’s gaze skyward. He made a noise in the back of his throat and David looked at him, squinting. The Arab had a smile on his face, but it was frozen tightly in place. He said, “This valley is already settled.”

  He spoke in bastardized Hebrew. He, too, wanted to be understood.

  David could feel Hannah stiffen behind him in the wagon. He didn’t turn to look, but he knew she was drawing Ruth closer, under the shelter of her arm. Where they had been, at Kinneret, was perhaps not exactly safer, but it was known. Whereas this situation was unfamiliar.

  David shifted his weight. Somewhere behind him in line, a halutza started to cough. He resisted the urge to turn and look, instead staying upright and holding the mukhtar’s eye. But the coughing increased to a violent pitch, as though she might choke, and he finally was forced to cast a glance over his shoulder. It was the plain girl with the braids who had been late to the meeting point at Mother Lobinsky’s. She was bent double, making the terrible noise. He wished she would stop; how was he supposed to negotiate? The hacking increased and he worried briefly she might pass out. Well, at least she would be silent. But she expelled whatever had been stuck in her maw and straightened, and David turned away. What had he been saying to the mukhtar?

  “It doesn’t appear settled,” he said in Arabic. He swept his eyes across the swampy, uncultivated land. This was the crux of the matter: there were people here, true. But the land itself had gone to waste. The Eretz Yisrael he envisioned was another country entirely.

  Besides, two thousand years ago his people had lived here. The Romans had brought them down, the last stand at Masada. Since then the Jews had been exiled from almost every other place on earth. They had wandered in the wilderness, longing for their home, the yearning lodged in their bones and hearts like so many painful splinters. They had been cast off, divided, scattered like seeds in the wind. Some had taken root in other lands; most were promise unfulfilled, persecuted and baited wherever they went. Now, finally, they were coming home to blossom and bloom.

  David looked up. The old Arab was watching him.

  “The land is already settled,” the man said again, as though David had not heard the first time.

  “Your flowers are beautiful,” David said, magnanimous, gesturing behind the Arab to the dusty village, to a few straggling begonias that had been planted in window boxes.

  The mukhtar continued staring, his keffiyeh like a red scarf in a bullring.

  “I see you,” he said, finally.

  It was perhaps a bad translation, coming out in broken Hebrew, but David had a feeling the old man was saying exactly what he meant: My eyes have apprehended you. With my vision, I have taken you in.

  The unspoken corollary: I won’t forget this.

  He had moved to stand in front of David’s horse. His toenails were long and yellowed, curled over his toes.

  “Please excuse us,” David said. He gestured to the halutzim whose impatience was a wild thing bristling behind him.

  “You’re excused,” the Arab said.

  But he said it in a way that implied he was accepting an apology, that he was the one who had forgiven David. It came to David again that this Arab knew what he had done. He could see in the man’s face that he thought David had got off too easily; the old code was an eye for an eye.

  He suddenly recalled, too, like a wind passing through the valley, that Yitzhak had told him about this old Arab, warned him even. The one with the scar. A fierce, volatile soul. He would have to be shown who was boss.

  “I ask you to move,” David said.

  “And yet you do not use my name.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is Mukhtar.”

  Yitzhak’s advice was to submit to the Arabs whenever it did not cost you, thus saving yourself for the moments when submission was impossible.

  “Mukhtar,” David repeated, deferring, although it pained him.

  As he said the word, an Arab woman approached the mukhtar, and said, “Yallah, Habib.”

  David smiled. He couldn’t help himself.

  The Arab with the scar was Habib. David had won the first round.

  The Arabs left, their keffiyehs swaying, their bony shoulder blades visible through the fabric. Behind him, the line of halutzim had given up and taken off their shoes; they were lolling on the muddy earth. David would pretend it had been his idea to stop. He would use the opportunity to address them.

  There was a heap of canvas on the back of the wagon and he mounted it like it was a podium. He imagined Theodor Herzl ascending the stage at the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897. David had been only a boy but news of the distant event had reached even him, back home in Bessarabia. He remembered his parents discussing it in a feverish hush around the dinner table.

  He stood now, unmoving, his hands loose at his sides. The sun was thick and heavy. It pinned you down, made it hard to move. David waited until the group was silent. When they were all facing him, he lifted his palms to the heavens. “Today is yom ha aliya ha karka. The day of the ascent to the land.”

  The halutzim leaned forward to absorb his words. A portion of them, he knew, had been assigned to this brigade without understanding the true magnitude of what they were doing. It was his job to explain it to them, to instill in them a sense of awe at their monumental collective task.

  “I don’t believe we are God’s chosen people,” he began. He waited for a moment to let the blasphemy sink in. He touched one of his back molars with his tongue.

  “But I do believe we have been called here. It is up to us to make the dream of Zionist Socialism a reality.”

  Behind him, Ruth was muttering to her doll. How he hated that doll for what it made him remember. David made a small flapping gesture with one hand, without looking at Hannah, and she silenced the child.

  He let his eyes roam over the assembly. So many boys, their faces barely shaven for the first time. His eyes roved like searchlights, skipping over the plain girl with glasses and landing finally on a woman toward the back of the group. His breath caught in his throat. The long curls. The strong shoulders. She was both so beautiful and so Jewish. If David had an image in his mind of the women who would bring forth the children unto the new land of Israel, this was it.

  As he read to the group the passage from Judges, he imagined he was reading a love poem into her ear.

  So he brought down the people unto the water: and the Lord said unto Gideon, Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one that boweth down upon his knees to drink.

  That word. Lap. With all its connotations. He looked at the girl with the long dark curls. He felt himself growing hard.

  And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, were three hundred men….And the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you…

  The halutzim were looking at him.

  David lifted his eyes higher, to the edge of the clearing, and saw the silhouette of an Arab on his horse. The shape was backlit, but David did not need to see the scar to know who it was.

  His hand went to his pocket, where he touched the weight of the gun.

  —

  It took them several days to organize the digging of the security trenches. David worked alongside the new pioneers. He measured his body, ten years older, against theirs. When they had taken a break and were leaning on their shovels, he asked the boys what they thought about a night guard system. A young halutz named Dov volunteered to take the first shift.

  David s
aid, “Wonderful.”

  Dov said, “May I have the revolver?”

  David straightened and gripped the handle of the shovel. He tried to think of an acceptable reason to deny the boy his request. But he could think only of the blood feud, and how cautious he needed to be. He could not be caught off guard without a weapon around the Arabs.

  As though reading his thoughts, a girl said, “The Arabs mean us no harm.”

  “Are you joking?” someone answered, so David didn’t have to.

  “You can’t really blame them,” someone else said. “I’d hate us too.”

  David angled his body toward Dov. “You’ll have your whistle to blow,” he said.

  Dov said something David could not discern.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” he challenged.

  Dov spoke clearly, enunciating. “I said, I’ll kill them with my whistle.”

  David said nothing, letting his silence speak on his behalf, but it irked him to have to deal with juvenile egos. He had almost forgotten this early jockeying for power: they had gone through it at Kinneret as well, when the pioneers were first establishing themselves as a group. Except back then, he himself had been one of those jockeying.

  David gritted his teeth. He took another approach.

  “Does anyone have thoughts about how to enclose the encampment? To protect ourselves?”

  He immediately had to brace himself against the clamour of ridiculous suggestions.

  “We could roll ourselves up in the barbed wire!” someone shouted.

  “But we don’t have enough for everyone.”

  “Three people per roll!”

  “Blintzes!” someone else said.

  David’s eyes fell on a dark-haired boy who was silent, considering. He had noticed this halutz several times in the days that had passed—he had a steady determination about him, a dedication to their cause.

  “What do you think?” David asked.

  The boy smiled up at him, and David saw his front tooth was chipped.

  He said, “Digging trenches is the obvious answer. But, in a way, it makes us look afraid.”

  “In what way?”

  The boy shrugged. “In the obvious one.”

  David nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Levi.”

  “Okay, Levi. So we should forsake the trenches?”

  “I didn’t come here to take the Arabs’ land, or to displace them,” the boy said. “We will eventually be able to live peaceably together.”

  David smirked internally but kept his face impassive.

  The boy paused and then continued, “But for now we need a divider of some kind. Theory versus practice. It would send a strong message—not of threat, but of confidence—if we camped freely, out in the open air. But in reality we cannot take that risk.”

  David made a mental note of this boy. He moved his gaze along; his eyes fell on a pair of twins, with bowl cuts and suspenders. They looked about five years old, he thought. He half expected them to be wearing buckle shoes. Their lips were stained with scars from some childhood disease they must have suffered. A pox of some kind, or measles. He pitied them a moment, but he didn’t acknowledge this aloud.

  “Could you please coordinate the digging of the trenches?” he asked the first instead, the one with the higher forehead and bigger ears. The obvious choice was to select Levi, but he wanted to show his equanimity.

  “Certainly,” the boy said, although he looked barely old enough to coordinate building a castle out of wooden blocks. His brother echoed him. “Certainly.”

  So: what one said was reinforced by the other. David was not fooled into a false sense of security. Two empty promises were no better than none.

  “Please dig east of the river,” David said.

  The truth was that he did not care where they dug. The trenches would only be temporary; the Arabs would move off within the month. David had counted no more than ten buildings, a few made of stone, most made of straw and mud. The yards were overrun with brambles. The mortgage holder had assured them that the Arabs would be easily dispatched to their brothers in Nablus, their sons in Beirut. Wherever.

  But the next morning, Dov reported that the Arabs had come, and had stood watch on horseback late into the night. His voice was sullen as he said this, as though, in this loss, he had won.

  CHAPTER 12

  IT WAS THE TWINS who volunteered to build tables in time for Rosh Hashanah. The halutzim had been taking their meals on the bare earth, and while this had a rugged charm, the Germans saw a job that David wanted done, and stepped in to oblige.

  “With tables, we’ll need chairs,” Selig said.

  “There are orange crates in the tent with the motor parts,” Samuel said.

  David had little trouble telling them apart. Samuel was the one whose forearms were more defined. He had the bigger ears. He spoke excellent Hebrew; Selig’s was merely passable.

  “We’ll need some proper chairs,” David said.

  He had in fact been campaigning for some from the Agency, saying the halutzim were more likely to fall ill with kadachat if they sat directly on the muddy earth, although he had a second, ulterior motive. In his mind a game was forming, a game they could play with the chairs. He and his cousins had played it as children, his beloved Bubbe looking on and clucking and laughing. She turned the crank to the music box; when the music stopped you had to find a seat. Each round, a chair was removed, until there was only one remaining and a winner was declared. The game was called Going to Jerusalem.

  Well, they had gone. Here they were.

  Sometimes the hair rose on David’s arms when he thought of the task they were accomplishing, of everything his people had had to overcome to make it to this land of milk and honey.

  Yes, in the game, the players were knocked down one by one until there was just one man left standing.

  David would be that man.

  The boys were looking at him. Samuel and Selig. Levi had wandered over too.

  “We can bring back the boulders for chairs,” Levi said. They had just finished the work of clearing the field, hours and hours of back-breaking labour.

  “You’re kidding?” David said.

  But he saw that Levi had pressed his lips together, bracing himself for the labour.

  “I can help,” Selig said, in halting Hebrew.

  His brother jumped in. “I’ll help Levi. You rest.”

  “I’m fine,” Selig said, his voice sharp. His eyes were sunk deep within their sockets, and his gaze was otherworldly, as though perpetually seeing something from the well of the past.

  “Are you sure?”

  There was something between the twins that David could not identify; some desire of Samuel’s, perhaps, to protect his brother. Selig sank to his knees, as though exhausted. This seemed to confirm Samuel’s resolve; he squeezed his brother’s arm, and then glanced toward the pile of rocks at the perimeter and then at Levi, who smiled, his broken tooth flashing like a charm.

  David left them to it. On his way across the field he came upon a girl, sitting on a tarp. White material surrounded her like the train of some elaborate wedding dress. She held a needle aloft in a plump hand, and a spool of red thread.

  “Shalom,” David greeted her. He noticed how her curly armpit hair sprouted from under her blouse.

  “Shoshanna,” she said. She lowered her needle, and made to hide it among the billowy folds.

  “I’m sewing,” she said hastily, as though she needed to justify her work to David; as though he had asked. But drawing David’s attention toward her task had its desired effect, and he came closer.

  “Are you embroidering?” he asked.

  Her cheeks were already rosy in the heat, but she flushed more deeply. “Just something small.”

  She held up a sleeve for him to see; it was covered in an elaborate pattern of red roses. The petals blossomed down the shoulder; the vines wove their way around the cuff. Shoshanna looked both pleased, as though she had done some
thing she would be praised for, and ashamed, as though she knew she had done something wrong.

  David was of the second opinion.

  “Is that necessary?” he asked, leaving her space to conclude, herself, that it was not.

  “Beauty is necessary,” she said.

  He drew himself up, surprised she had answered back.

  “It is a secondary necessity,” he said.

  “Children need beauty to grow into adults.”

  Her round cheeks shone pinkly, filmed with perspiration. There was something slightly porcine about her. The upturned nose.

  “There are no children here,” David said.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Other than my daughter,” he said.

  From somewhere across the field came the sound of a motor starting up, then failing, then starting up again.

  “We have to work,” he said, frustrated.

  “Work is beauty made manifest,” Shoshanna said.

  “Beauty is for later,” he said, annoyed that he had to set his foot down. “When work is done and we need inspiration.”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Shoshanna said, and he almost laughed out loud. This was not an especially bright girl, only a girl capable of memorizing quotes. He had simply to learn how to bring her alongside.

  He asked her to stop her embroidery, and left assuming she would obey. He went to the place where a greenhouse could one day be, and bent over his tray of seedlings. Each sprout neatly arranged by species. He carried the seedlings, tenderly, over to the new water tap. Beside it, in the open-air kitchen, Hannah was preparing the meal, elbow-deep in a bowl of mush, her hair pulled back from her face with a kerchief.

  “Eggplant?” he asked her.