Strangers with the Same Dream Page 19

  David saw Habib recalibrating; he knew the Jews’ presence was bad for his people, but now he understood the full extent of things.

  After, David would think back to this moment. What if he had let the man drink from the clean water? What then?

  Another moment passed. Habib was weighing his options. He, too, had worked a full day. He had travelled by horseback to deliver his message to David and the night had provided no respite from the heat. Finally, he knelt down and put his face to the barrel and drank.

  This confirmed something for David, something he tried not to express aloud but that he nonetheless believed about the primitive essence of the Arabs and the way they lived. But their land itself had potential. It had sunlight, a good view; once the kibbutz took it, the halutzim would be able to look over the fruits of their labour as the fields filled out and were brought down. There would be room for babies. Not his and Hannah’s, but future pioneers’.

  David had been biding his time, and he took the chance now. The old mukhtar had come to him. It was always better to negotiate on your own territory. Even Yitzhak would agree.

  “You will need to move your encampment,” David said to Habib.

  Habib looked at David. His tongue clicked once, the word for “no.”

  And encampment, of course, was the wrong word. David knew it implied something makeshift, temporary—something more in keeping with the pioneers’ situation. Whereas Habib’s family had been here for generations.

  Habib did not ask what David meant. He lifted his head, and reached over to touch the shaft of his torch. Then he made a flicking motion with his hand; all it would take, the gesture implied, was one misplaced flame for the entire Zionist enterprise to burn to the ground.

  At the thought of a fire David began to sweat. He dug his fingers into his heavy dark curls and pulled them back off his face. He turned for the jar of good water, the one the halutzim used while they worked. It had a silver dipper attached to it with a string. He did not meet Habib’s eye, but dipped the cup in the water and drank deeply. He did it a second time, and a third.

  When he looked up he saw that the resentment in Habib’s eye had transformed into pure hatred.

  At Kinneret there had been an Arab named Youssef who lived in the village nearby. He was related to Anisa and Amir, and to Sakina—before she died. An uncle. Youssef was a true mensch, David thought. He had invited the halutzim into his home and gave them sweetmeats and rose wine, and let his women wait on them hand and foot. The women served dark red pomegranate seeds in a blue porcelain bowl; they too knew the Jewish fable that there were 613 seeds in every pomegranate to correspond to the 613 mitzvoth. There were almond and fig trees in the yard. David remembered how Ruth and Gabriel and the other children had looked upon a trip to this house as a special occasion. Youssef and his mishpocha let David and the other founding fathers feel that what they had done was okay; not just in regard to the Zionist goal but in regard to the Arabs themselves. He let them feel that their presence was a welcome one, and thus justified the entire enterprise.

  But all Arabs were not Youssef. On the contrary.

  David had believed the banker in Beirut’s promise that the Arabs would leave this land. But Habib and his people seemed to prefer their dilapidated mud houses and barren fields to their relatives’ villages in Syria or Lebanon. It was dawning on David that he would have to take a trip to Tel Aviv, back to the headquarters of the Central Labour Organization, to discuss how to remove the Arabs forcibly. He resented Habib for this, even though he knew it wasn’t reasonable, as if it wasn’t the man’s right to defend his own home in the same way that it was the Jews’ right to claim theirs.

  “You’re a bad man,” Habib said, and David knew he was referring to what had happened to little Sakina.

  “You can’t stay here,” David said bluntly, clenching his jaw.

  Habib touched his scar. “Where should we go?”

  For a moment it seemed to David that this was a genuine question, that Habib was a friend who was asking advice, and his heart softened. But the torch flame lengthened and he remembered the fire and he hardened it again. No vigilance would be too great. He saw that a heavier night watch was needed. Not one man, but two. And to protect the kibbutz he would have to give up his gun.

  —

  The tractor was fixed in a few short days. David had sent Samuel to the market to sell the candlesticks and then to town to buy a replacement for the nozzle and the tank, which was in pieces after the explosion. The younger man seemed keen to help, and it felt good to give orders and have them carried out. He remembered being a small boy in cheder, the older boys with their long sidelocks who taunted him about his high voice. How invisible he’d felt at the back of the classroom, like he would never amount to anything. Like he would never have an idea that was worthy.

  Now though, he could see, unfolding in front of him, in real time, the success of this big kibbutz. It had been his brainchild. His and Yitzhak’s, and Samuel Scholessinger’s and Meyer’s too, in a way—but David had been the one who’d believed it most deeply and look, here it was! Kibbush Avoda Ivrit: the conquest or triumph of Jewish labour. There were hands in the fields and hands in the vegetable garden and the kitchen and the laundry. Labour took everything they had. But soon, if he got it right, there would be time for study groups and for language groups and the life of the mind. His vision was of a working class that was culturally and spiritually developed: one that would lead all of Israel to become “am oved,” in the broad sense that encompassed not just physical work, but intellectual and artistic work as well.

  The Zionist Executive had been divided on the idea of the big kibbutz, as had been the Battalion of Labour. David had fought the battles, and David had won them.

  He told the halutzim all of this as he stood before them after their dinner of pita, olives and yellow pudding. They had taken to gathering in the cooling evenings in the quarry, each pioneer choosing a rock to sit on, forming a ring with David at the centre. The sweating had recently left him; he had willed the kadachat away. He was capable of anything.

  Still, the air held the memory of the day’s heat, and the thick smell of manure from the fields, a choking, cloying scent. It was almost too oppressive for talking. But many of the young pioneers were desperate to cut their teeth on ideals. They had been part of Zionist Youth back in Russia or Poland; they had argued and debated for years, and now they wanted the chance to live what they had studied.

  David was speaking tonight about “creating facts” with action—with Jewish hands and Jewish labour. If you waited for diplomacy to grant you permission you could be waiting forever.

  He touched the pencil behind his ear.

  He said, “For example, we fixed the tractor. We used the money from the candlesticks. If we had waited for the Agency…”

  “I have a question,” one of the boys called out.

  David was mildly irked to be interrupted, but he said, “Of course.”

  He flexed his hands. “You do not need my permission to speak.”

  The boy nodded. “What about ‘Hagshama Ishit’? Personal realization. Aren’t we required to help attain the goals of Zionism by our own labour and sacrifice? Not by giving money for someone else to do it?”

  David ran his fingers through his beard. It was getting long; it made him feel wise, avuncular.

  “Yes,” he said. “But Hagshama Ishit doesn’t apply to us selling the candlesticks. It is primarily in response to the Jews of the diaspora who want to be invested from afar, financially, while keeping their bodies clean and unsullied.”

  There was a canker sore on the inside of his cheek and he ran his tongue over it.

  “There is no future for us in the lands of dispersion,” David said. “If we stay back, we will either be destroyed by pogroms, or will cease to be Jews as a consequence of assimilation.”

  “That sounds extreme,” Zeruvabel said.

  “It’s a fact.”

  “How do you k
now?”

  A bird called out, three high notes followed by three low ones.

  Normally, David believed in explaining one’s logic, in taking a listener step by step through a thought process, but now he said only, “I just do.”

  And as he said it, he was overtaken by a sense of certainty, and beneath this by the urgency that sometimes visited him in the middle of the night, a fierce awareness that now was their moment. Eretz Yisrael was the only place of safety for his people.

  Hannah thought the Armenian genocide was so horrific, and had been felt so intensely throughout the world, that nothing like it could ever be repeated. But David knew—how? but he did—that she was wrong.

  Greater slaughter was coming.

  The halutzim were watching him, waiting. So he said, “We, here, have committed to Hagshama Ishit. We are the principle. Even if the tractor part was not made by Jews, a Jew walked to town to buy it. A Jew will use it to make the soil bear fruit, to bring about the triumph of Jewish labour. We will expand into areas that were previously monopolized by Arabs.”

  Here he paused, thinking of Habib, the tassels on his scarf that matched his mules’ tassels. What could make a man dress to match an animal?

  “There is another discussion we need to have,” he said.

  The assembly grew quiet.

  “I have had an interaction with the Arab mukhtar.”

  He waited for this to sink in.

  “The sheik,” he said, using the term more of them knew. “We will be making a change in our night watch policy. From now we will need two night guards at once.”

  He paused for impact.

  “And I will be giving whoever is on duty my gun.”

  This news was greeted with solemn acceptance from the halutzim. They looked like children being granted a long-desired privilege: the chance to stand on the bimah, perhaps, and be blessed.

  “What happened with the sheik?” Zeruvabel asked.

  David shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  What he really meant was, I am the guardian of that secret.

  And: I am too ashamed to tell you.

  He looked out again at the group, and saw the accusing look in Levi’s eye. But he was finished speaking. He took the pencil from behind his ear and put it back with the notebook in his satchel.

  CHAPTER 19

  IN THE END IT WAS Yitzhak who made the Arabs move. David had wanted to deal with the mukhtar himself. Wasn’t it his responsibility? But he’d had to concede that he had already sullied his relationship with Habib beyond repair. So Yitzhak was, again, forced to intercede on his behalf.

  “How did you convince him?” he asked Yitzhak afterwards.

  The argument about cutting brambles had been forgotten, or if not forgotten, dismissed. If there was one thing both he and Yitzhak had learned from a decade of living in a collective, it was that holding a grudge did not work. David understood this intellectually, but he knew it was Yitzhak, the man whose own child wore David’s face, who understood the brutal reality of it.

  Yitzhak was on his knees clearing a new vegetable patch next to a tangle of castor plants from which they would extract oil. His knuckles were cracked, and the cracks were filled with dirt. His broad face was sunburned despite the wide brim of his hat. He looked up at David and smiled, like he was talking to a simple child. He said, lightly, “A little bit of kindness goes a long way.”

  And the old rage flared inside David. Just as quickly as the fight had been forgotten it was reignited, like a flame touched by wind.

  —

  David stalked off and his mind followed his feet to the infirmary. If Ruth didn’t get better soon, he told himself furiously, something would have to be done. Before he reached Ruth’s pallet, though, he was shocked to find the doctor himself on a makeshift bed, unconscious, his cheeks pale above his beard and the beard itself mottled with saliva.

  “What happened?” David asked, frantically looking for anyone who might know. They could not lose the doctor; they needed him.

  “It’s hot in here,” he said to nobody, blousing out the sleeves of his white shirt, and a voice behind him answered, “Do you find?”

  He turned to see a boy he didn’t recognize, a boy with delicate features, high cheekbones and long eyelashes, his voice not yet broken.

  “I do find,” David said, his voice rough and sarcastic. “What’s happened to Dr. Lowen?”

  “Kadachat,” the boy said, shaking his head.

  “Clearly,” David said, dryly. And then, “Why did you not come and find me?”

  The boy said, “Do you have a solution? Something the doctor himself doesn’t know about the kadachat?”

  “I have experienced it myself many times,” David said, remembering back to when Eretz Yisrael had first entered him, the fits of shivering and convulsing that Yitzhak had assured him were the usual rite of passage. It had come so close to killing him.

  The boy repeated his question, his voice now sounding disconcertingly effeminate. “Do you have a solution?”

  Colour rose to David’s cheeks. “I would like to stay informed,” he said.

  “Should I equally inform Shoshanna? Or Leah?”

  “Go ahead. See where that gets you.”

  “Easy enough to talk about equality,” the boy said. “But where is the action?”

  David snapped. “That’s enough,” he said. Who was this rude child? He squinted to try and place the face.

  “You don’t recognize me,” the boy said.

  “No.”

  “It’s Esther.”

  David’s mind was blank. Was this supposed to help?

  He squinted again, and like a drop of dye added to a glass of liquid the face in front of him transformed; where before there had been a boy, now he saw a girl.

  Esther, he thought. A Hebrew replacement for Elisabeth.

  He looked at her, eyes wide, his amazement momentarily eclipsing his rage. “You’ve remade yourself,” he said.

  “The land has remade me,” she said. “In its own image.”

  David knew she was referring to the harshness of Eretz Yisrael, the heat and the dust and the mosquitoes. But beneath all that, there was a softness to this earth. It would, with the right touch, cleave open under the blade of the thresher like a woman under a man.

  A trickle of sweat slowly rolled down between his shoulder blades. “You’re not hot?” he asked Elisabeth.

  She shook her head no. “You’re sick,” she said flatly.

  It was as though she had transformed completely, thought David. Not just in looks but in personality, the kind, capable nurse replaced by some strident bitch.

  “It’s your doctor who is sick,” David snapped.

  “He’s not my doctor,” she snapped back.

  David said, “Okay.”

  He saw that tears had risen to her eyes; who could say why? He softened, feeling suddenly fatherly.

  “It’s all right, Elisabeth,” he said, moving toward her. But she retorted, “It’s Esther.”

  David felt a sudden, desperate need to escape. The emotions of women were like wounds you could open, accidentally, meaning no harm, and the blood would gush over you forever. He did not understand this changeability. And because he did not understand it, he detested it.

  He turned away, crossed the room and knelt down before his Ruth. He wanted to take her away from here. She would grow into one of these women, raging, unpredictable, like Elisabeth—Esther—like her mother. Was it contagious, this glaring femininity? Could little Ruth catch it, like kadachat?

  Was kadachat contagious?

  His head spun. He had not considered this angle. Once a person had it, could they give it to someone else?

  But reason returned, and he shook his head, a dog shaking off water. He crouched down again and looked at his daughter, as thin and fragile as if she might break. He lifted her up as he had when she was a baby. The miracle of that little loose bundle of a barely formed person in his arms. How glad
he’d been she was a girl. With a boy he would have felt threatened.

  What would it have been like to claim his place as Gabriel’s father? He didn’t let himself wonder.

  —

  Sometimes Sakina came to him in his dreams. She had been Ruth’s age, had been playing with Ruth when the accident happened, but in the dream she seemed younger. She wore a thick braid over her shoulder and already her eyebrows had grown together into one long row of dark hair. Her lips were plump and moistened, the woman she would become showing through. She was probably not too young to be sold into marriage—he would not put it past the Arabs. She might have already been promised to some old grandfather without a tooth in his head. For the Arabs, he knew, a daughter was an excellent investment, fetching four camels, or five, or even ten.

  What had they been thinking, the old men in their threadbare jalabiyas, so occupied with their games of dominoes, with smoking their harghileh, and not noticing that a little girl had wandered out in the evening to where she did not belong. And what was David supposed to think, hearing an unfamiliar sound coming from the stables, the shadow of someone he did not recognize rooting through the hidden food stores? The locusts had ravaged every field that year, without distinction between Arab and Jew, the Arab men smoking in the cafés while their women desperately fanned the fields with their robes, and so of course the little girl had been hungry. The Arabs themselves had put her in a vulnerable position.

  It might as well have been they who had killed her.

  Still, David saw Sakina in his nightmares, forehead beaded with sweat, the tatty night dress that came down past her knees. She clutched the pillow doll Salam to her chest. Her eyes were impossibly wide, but it was the whimper he could not forget, the little sound that had escaped her in the moment before he pulled the trigger.

  —

  Passover came as it always did, along with the accompanying predictable debate about how to celebrate, if at all. The truth was that David had been waiting for his Passover for a very long time. Back at home, his own father would lead the reading of the Haggadah, the story of the Jews’ emancipation in the desert in Egypt, and how they followed Moses to the Holy Land. At Kinneret, Yitzhak had been given the honour. But here, now, David was the Patriarch. He pictured himself as Abraham or Isaac, ensconced on a plush red cushion at the head of a very long table, doling out speaking parts, reciting the holy text deep into the night. He looked over at Ruth’s pale face, her little body crumpled into nothing in Hannah’s lap, and remembered how he, as a child, had looked to the front door that had been left open a crack to welcome in Elijah, the Messiah, half expecting the prophet to appear any moment and take his place at their family table.