Strangers with the Same Dream Read online

  “Yes,” he said. “I can help you with that.”

  They walked across the field in silence. He heard the loose threads of Zeruvabel’s fiddle, and the halutzim singing, “Who will build Galilee? We! We!”

  Night was falling fully, and the hora had begun.

  When they had passed out of earshot of the rest of the encampment, Sarah said, “I’m so glad you can help me with my wire!”

  She laughed gaily, for the second time, at the ridiculousness of her pretense. There was not a trace of guilt, nor any awareness of consequences. It was like she, too, was bowing to something preordained. Like it had been written in the stars the whole time.

  —

  The week passed like pages in a book and Yom Kippur was upon them. Who would be written in the Book of Life for another year? Some of them would die. That much was certain. Scorpion bites, malaria. There would be dysentery. Untreated heat stroke. Then there would be the less predictable deaths—an infected wound. There might even be death by revolver.

  David methodically set this thought aside.

  Hannah was still away, back at Kinneret. Her father one of the ones who had not made it.

  Young Ida came to him in the vegetable plot where he was showing the halutzim the choking weed called yablit.

  “It’s the Day of Atonement,” she said, and there was mild reproach in her voice. She paused, working up her nerve. “And Levi is very sick with the kadachat.”

  David saw that it cost her to say this, that she was by nature obedient and mild. But she was worried that they were provoking God; she thought Hashem would be angered by their refusal to cease working and observe the Day of Atonement, and would take out his mighty wrath on Levi.

  Their work was subversive, David agreed—but it was, in his mind, more like a child’s kind of mischief. Yom Kippur was the day to ask forgiveness of sins, the day to petition that the vows they would not keep in the coming year be annulled so they were not accountable. It was a prayer that anti-Semites used to justify their belief that Jews were not trustworthy. But, he reassured Ida, there was no part of him that thought Levi would actually die from their transgression.

  “So—do you think we can risk ignoring the greatest of all Holy Days?” he asked Ida.

  She whispered, “No.”

  Her eyes were downcast but large behind the lenses of her glasses. He knew she shared a tent with his Sarah. One so beautiful and the other so unremarkable. David almost felt sorry for her: her plainness meant life would be hard. But the halutzim needed to be disarmed of their religious superstition. Here was a chance that would not come again for another whole year.

  “We need you in the laundry,” he said.

  She lifted her eyes.

  “Salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land,” he said, quoting Herzl.

  Ida opened her mouth but closed it again.

  “Your work is necessary,” he said. “Today, as every day.”

  And that was the end of that.

  Ida, however, was correct that Levi was sick with the kadachat. It was not a bad case; the boy’s convulsions were nothing compared to the ones David himself had experienced many times before. Still, the appearance of the affliction meant that the mosquitoes had found them and others would be sick soon; they would have to find quinine, and quickly.

  David was happy to have an excuse to saddle the donkeys and go to Tiberias. There was, he knew, a clinic run by Christian nuns that would provide quinine, gratis, more quickly than the Agency. The Christians believed that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land was a sign that the return of their Messiah was imminent.

  The nuns spoke English. It was a queer language, to be sure. But David had been to the clinic before, when Igor from Kinneret was ill, and the young nun with the blonde hair and the big wooden cross around her neck liked him. Through the gesture of the prick of a mosquito he would be able to communicate what he wanted.

  There were other things he could do in Tiberias at the same time. They were already low on kerosene. He would purchase some oil lamps and one large glass chimney, and hire a carpenter who could build an extra trailer for the wagon. They needed bolts, and a wrench, and as much mosquito netting as he could find. And while he was there he would look for red harem slippers for his love. Not the one who was away. The one who was here.

  CHAPTER 14

  LEVI’S CONDITION GAVE THE group extra motivation to drain the swamps. David organized them into teams, one girl in each to keep the boys in line. He had heard there was a doctor back in Vienna who was writing about every boy’s desire to kill his father and sleep with his own mother—it made David laugh when he thought of it. All a boy wanted from his mother was comfort, and to be the centre of her universe. It was this they were trying to get back to their whole lives, and this would help them behave when a girl was around.

  “If not now, then when?” David asked the group.

  And they called back, “Im lo achshav, ay ma-tay!”

  As he spoke, Ruth was hanging on his arm; he shook her off.

  “That hurt,” she said, indignant.

  “I’m talking, ahuva,” he told her. The eyes of the halutzim were on him, watching closely how he responded to his daughter. Hannah was still away, and some of them knew he had gone to Tiberias for supplies and forgotten Ruth. It was not clear exactly what had happened in his absence, but when he’d returned she had clung to him and cried like an infant. And since then, she would not let him out of her sight.

  David was not used to dealing with Ruth without Hannah, and although he loved her he was irked by her neediness. He sent her off, and she went, her little shoulders sagging. He turned back to the job at hand. His energy was needed now to motivate the workers. In addition to draining the swamps, it was also critical that they get going on the one field from which they had removed enough rocks to plough. If they wanted any crops at all, now was the moment. There was even a tractor ready to pull the plough—a luxury he hadn’t dreamed of in the early days.

  When David went to bring it around to the field, he found old Habib peering into its motor.

  “Salam,” David said, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. He was thinking of Yitzhak’s advice: Be kind to the Arabs whenever you could, give them the benefit of the doubt. And of course it made sense that the old man would want to see this machine.

  “Habib,” the Arab said, jabbing at his chest with his bony finger.

  “I remember,” David said.

  Habib looked into the gears, then looked at David with a plaintive expression.

  “Ya seyyed David,” he said. “Oh, Mr. David. It is hard without a plough. And our children are hungry. Some are dying.”

  David straightened, his mind leaping straight to the blood feud he feared. Could old Habib be talking about Sakina? Was he threatening him?

  David responded in Arabic. “Chabibi, my friend. I trust in Allah, as do you. The hard days we are all enduring will one day pass.”

  But this did not satisfy Habib; it only encouraged him. He launched into a story about how the Arabs had not cultivated their own land last year because the Lebanese money-lender would take almost all the final crops away. He glanced again, furtively, at the tractor. David remained impassive; the Arab’s problem was not his problem. Everyone knew you had to work the land to claim it. And did Habib not even understand that the Lebanese money-lender had sold the land to the Agency—to the Jews?

  Finally, Habib turned on his heel and left. His threadbare thawb reminded David of the yellow robes of the Sephardim. David knew the man was telling the truth about the hungry children, but the uncultivated swampland surrounding the Arab village spoke volumes. What did Habib expect?

  He knew, too, that the unworked earth would be in the Jews’ favour when they made the Arabs move.

  David turned back to the tractor. There were clods of mud in the big back wheels and he brushed them off. He touched the axle and ran a gloved hand over a spoke. But when he climbed up to the sea
t and turned the key to start the motor, an awful grinding sound came out.

  He winced and took his hand off the throttle but the noise continued until he removed the keys entirely and jumped off the machine.

  It sounded as if a rock had been caught in the gears. But he had just cleaned them—what could have happened in the intervening time?

  An image came to his mind, unbidden, of Habib’s plaintive face.

  Anger rose up in David’s belly all at once, like a wave. He thought, I could kill someone.

  From across the field, Dov had heard the grinding, and now he approached, his arms swinging at his sides. His bony elbows bulged, like a famine victim’s, but his voice was cheerful. “What’s wrong with the machine?”

  David gritted his teeth. “There’s a rock in the gears,” he said.

  Dov knelt down. “It sounds like you forgot to put water in the tank,” he said.

  David would normally have taken offence at such an accusation, but he was busy reviewing, line by line, the conversation he had had with Habib. It sounded different now, replayed in his head: the sad story had been a threat.

  “Take a look,” he said to Dov.

  “I don’t see a rock,” Dov said.

  If David had learned anything over his years toiling in Eretz Yisrael, it was to never trust an Arab. Let Yitzhak say what he wanted; David didn’t need to justify himself. He knew what he knew: old Habib had placed a stone in the machinery of their progress.

  David climbed back up on the tractor and turned and turned the key. The grinding continued. Eventually the engine coughed, but just as quickly it sputtered again, and died.

  “May I look?” Dov asked.

  David nodded, indulgent.

  Dov walked over to the tank and stood on tiptoe. David could see that the boy did not want to override the more experienced man’s judgment, but that Dov’s expertise—what was his expertise?—would not allow him to let it go entirely.

  Was there water in the tank?

  The question crossed his mind and disappeared.

  Dov crouched down and unscrewed the nozzle.

  David was seated on top of the tractor so he did not see the eruption itself, but he had a clear view of the astonishment on Dov’s face, as though he had seen a ghost or something even more terrifying and unnamable. It was like a wave was rushing toward him, and when it hit, his mouth and nose contorted and spasmed, the entire face pulling back from itself, his teeth bared, his eyes wide. And then a sound came from Dov’s mouth that David had not heard the likes of before. It was a sound that would haunt him for a long time to come.

  —

  Later, he gathered the halutzim together. Ruth was pulling at him, saying something about her doll, and he told her roughly to go sit by the eucalyptus tree and he would come and talk to her later. She started to cry but obeyed him, and he felt remorse at the sight of her little figure crossing the big horizon, her shoulders shaking.

  He knew he had to address the halutzim first, though, to nip any panic or loss of authority in the bud. There was a way to leverage every situation, but he wouldn’t be sure what it was until he began speaking. He was a thinker who discovered his own thoughts by talking. The words came from his mouth in many interwoven trails and he saw which one was best and followed it.

  He found, this way, that he was often startled by his own intellect and insight, as he might be when reading a new book for the first time.

  “We are in a difficult situation,” he began. “But we will be faced with many difficult situations this year.”

  He cleared his throat, and looked out at the young faces. Their cheeks were sunburned, their necks covered in scabs. Some had tape on the palms of their hands to cover blisters from the shovels. But they were quiet, attentive. He let the silence hang. He let them imagine the worst, and in this way the real news would seem comparatively benign.

  He caught a glimpse of Sarah at the back of the group, and slid his eyes past her. He could not let himself be distracted.

  He said, “The tractor is broken.”

  Unspoken dismay travelled through the crowd like a wave. Was God was punishing them for working on the Day of Atonement? David knew they were thinking this, but none of the group voiced it, and he felt their silence as the pulse of blood through his veins. Workers were expendable. Where one fell, another would rise. It was the machinery, the hardware, that kept the whole enterprise running. They needed the tractor to plough. David thought again of Habib. Especially if they wanted to be different from the Arabs at all.

  “We must repair the tractor,” David said.

  He touched the pencil tucked over his ear.

  “Who has an idea?”

  His voice was the hand that wound the instrument, and the sound came right away, the chorus of voices, all young, all male: “We could take the Arabs’!” someone called out.

  “I refuse to take Eretz Yisrael by stealing,” the idealist Zeruvabel scoffed. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t come here to displace Arabs.”

  “It was a joke,” the first boy said. “The Arabs don’t have a tractor.”

  “Levi can repair it!” someone else suggested.

  “Do you forget the kadachat?” Shoshanna said. David noted that she was the first girl to speak.

  “There is a part missing,” he said, giving them another piece of the puzzle. In fact, there were several parts missing—a bolt had been blown off in the explosion, and the plastic gasket had melted in the heat.

  “We can make it from our bare hands!” This from one of the youngest, barely sixteen.

  David smiled, indulging. He felt something touch him from behind and flinched, but it was only Ruth.

  “Abba…” she started, but he said, sharply, “I’m busy!” The girl sat down, silent, but he felt her there, a heavy planet in his orbit. He turned his focus back out to the group.

  “We will have to find a way to pay for the repair,” he said, gracing them with the answer he had been seeking.

  “Can’t the Agency do it?” the youngster asked.

  “Eventually,” David said. “But it would take longer than we can afford to wait.”

  He cleared his throat for emphasis. “We will have to find a way to purchase the missing part.”

  “I have twenty lira,” the same boy called out.

  There was a smattering of laughter. This amount of currency would not even buy a handful of halvah at the market in Jaffa. It irked David that the group of them seemed to not understand the gravity of the situation: without the tractor, they could not plough; without ploughing there could be no planting; without planting there could be no new settlement in the Jezreel valley. No new big kibbutz.

  He steadied his face. “It’s a good point,” he said. “Does anyone have any money? Or anything we could sell?”

  But nobody did, and eventually he had to dismiss everyone with the request that anyone who had an idea about how they might find money to come to him any time, day or night.

  When he spoke the word “night,” he felt a rush of blood to his loins. As the others dispersed, he looked out to see Sarah whispering something into Ida’s ear. Where he had avoided her before, now he stared directly at her. The large group breaking up afforded him disguise.

  He felt an urge to give her the new slippers. After all, Hannah was gone. And even if she had been here, it would not have mattered. She would never suspect him.

  But at the thought of his own guilt, his own culpability, the image of Dov convulsing in pain flashed in front of him and he winced. He found himself wishing the boy would not recover so that his own mistake would not be revealed.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE THINGS DAVID NEEDED to forget were mounting inside him and he threw himself into work in order to avoid them. He was only a decade older than most of the others here, and yet it seemed a lifetime ago when he’d had no wife, no child, and was free to live as big and as wild as life would permit him. He remembered when Eretz Yisrael had seemed to h
ave no edges at all, stretching and opening wider and wider, like the rim of the birth canal when something new was being born. Now, in this new place, he could see the adventure the land afforded, could see how the young halutzim were experiencing it as a rebirth, but he felt only an intense responsibility—to his Bubbe, to Bessarabia, to all Jews worldwide, as though the building of Eretz Yisrael was resting on his shoulders entirely.

  He had almost killed a man with his negligence.

  And there was the girl from before. Sakina.

  It had been an accident. But she didn’t know that as she died.

  The tryst with Sarah was of a different order. He did not let it puncture his conscience.

  And in any case, where was Hannah and why had she not returned by now? She was the one who had abandoned him.

  He let himself feel the indignity of this, the shame and embarrassment, and in this way absolved himself of what he had done. In some distant part of himself he could see his own childishness, his hypocrisy. Hannah’s father was dead. Her beloved father Avraham. She had gone to sit shiva, or as close to shiva as the secular Zionists would allow. But David clung to the feeling inside him, lodged like a piece of gristle in his maw that he could never quite chew through and swallow down; the feeling that he had been wrongly abandoned, and the wild rage that came over him in return.

  On top of it all, Hannah had left him with Ruth. The girl hung around his neck like a stone. How did anyone accomplish anything at all with a child? He cast about in his mind, trying to think what he could do with her.

  “Where’s your doll?” he asked in the morning when he woke up to find her limbs wrapped around him.

  “Salam,” Ruth said, supplying the name.

  “Salam,” David repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said. “Remember?”

  Her bottom lip protruded and David silently cursed himself for bringing it up.

  “Where could she be?” Ruth said, and began to mimic the pulling open of drawers, the opening of closets to peer inside.

  “Let’s go find her,” David said.