by Alan Collins
The ship’s horn woke them with its vulgar blast. It was followed by the clattering of shoes, and shouts in half a dozen different languages. The water lapped at the lower half of their port-hole. Through the top half Jacob could see through the dispersing morning mist a low-lying coastline. On a choppy sea four or five rowing boats were making slow progress toward the Athene. Peg joined him to stare at the first foreign shore she and Jacob would ever step on.
They searched and found each other’s hand and held tight. As they heard Athene’s anchor chain run out it was like the end of a chapter in their young lives. Behind them the baby whimpered, only to have his cry stifled by his mother. There seemed to be so much to say, and yet there was nothing. The approaching little boats fighting rising sea and headwinds held them spellbound. Peg was trembling. Jacob pulled her away from the porthole.
‘‘I’ll take the haversacks,’’ he commanded, ‘‘you take Joshua and help his mum. Now, let’s get up on deck. We’re going to have to fight for a place in those boats.’’
As Jacob opened the cabin door they became part of a flood of pressing, struggling bodies that carried them along passages, up companion-ways, through bulkhead doorways until suddenly they burst out on to the main deck — to be swallowed up once more by men, women and children to whom survival had become second nature. Peg held the baby close to her chest with one hand and with the other tried to shield his fragile mother from the buffetting of the refugees. She never lost sight of Jacob, who used their haversacks to cut a swathe through the crowd. When at last they got to the ship’s side and the ladder leading down to the bobbing boat, Jacob went first. He stood on the bottom step, refusing help to get Peg, the baby and the mother across the small jump to the rowing boat. He knew he had to do it himself. The huge man in the bow of the little boat grabbed them as if they were no more than parcels, passed them along to another man and seated them. Finally Jacob, too, was grabbed and dumped into the boat. Seconds later, it pulled away from the Athene and pointed towards the shore.
The gap widened quickly. Other boats were bobbing around, fully laden and fighting the rising sea. Peg, seated beside one of the oarsmen, was still carrying the baby Joshua. His mother sat opposite, her few belongings at her feet. Jacob had been ordered aft next to the man on the tiller. The woman clenched and unclenched her hands in fear. Peg said later that the woman’s eyes reminded her of terrified sheep being forced through a sheep dip. Where others allowed their bodies to sway in time with the pitching of the small boat, Joshua’s mother was absolutely rigid. Jacob, who saw only her back, could read the terror in her even without seeing her face.
Suddenly he saw the mother stand up and lunge for the baby. Simultaneously, a wave hit the boat beam-on. It threw the woman off-balance and she pitched into the sea. Jacob leapt up but the man on the tiller jerked him down. He pushed the tiller over…the boat came around so slowly that the rowers could not propel the boat to where the woman had slipped beneath the heaving waves. Peg was screaming, the refugees were petrified with fright, the crew could not agree where the woman would be by now. There was no sign of her. The boat made another futile circuit, until at last the huge man who seemed to be in charge, shouted to the rowers, who, glad of some direction, plied their oars with a frenzied enthusiasm. As the boat pulled away, Peg hugged the little boy to her fiercely until, even above the roar of sea and wind, Jacob heard the baby’s cry.
It seemed no time at all before the keel grated on the sand. They had come ashore at a coastal village called Sdot Yam, about thirty-five kilometres south of Haifa, near the ancient Roman port of Caesarea. The beach was wreathed in barbed wire placed there by the British to deter just such landings as theirs. Peg sat forlornly on a haversack, her usually ruddy complexion now white with shock. The baby in her arms was wriggling like a pet held too firmly and seeking its freedom.
Jacob was crying silently. His tears mingled with salt spray. He took in the sweep of the beach, its human flotsam, its ugly garland of wire, the harsh cry of foreign voices urging everyone to hurry up to the waiting trucks on the road above the sand dunes. Peg stumbled across to him. She wanted to comfort him but was afraid it would release more emotion than she could cope with. He sank down on the sand.
‘‘Why do things happen to me on beaches?’’ he said hoarsely. There was not a crevice, not a cliff on that beach to offer refuge. Only Peg and a baby.
ELEVEN
A few moments later a feeling of welcome familiarity swept over Jacob as he climbed the dunes. There on the road were four vehicles identical to Abe Lewis’s battered ex-army truck. The only difference was that these really did have machine guns mounted on the roof hatches. A girl behind one of the guns was swinging the barrel in a wide arc. She gestured to Peg and Jacob to get into the cabin. Jacob threw their baggage up to a refugee, then helped Peg and the baby into the truck. He climbed in after her, squeezing her up against the big driver who had also commanded the boat. The girl in the hatch tapped the driver on the shoulder with her foot and the truck moved off. In the side mirror, Jacob saw the others following. High in the sky he saw a small plane circling, coming lower and lower. The trucks increased speed and soon left the main road.
In the close confines of the truck cabin, Jacob was aware of the baby smell of sour milk, and it was obvious, too, that the child had fouled himself. The driver wound the windscreen out and the side window down. The cold dawn air rushed in.
‘‘Better, eh?’’ he said. ‘‘You speak Yiddish? English? The baby has kucked, yes?’’ He held his nose and laughed.
Jacob said, ‘‘English — no, we’re not English, we just speak English. We’re from Australia. This is Pnina and I am Yakov.’’ The moment he said the names, Jacob immediately felt an affinity with the driver, the girl on the machine gun, even the army truck itself. Peg was still and did not speak, not even when the driver turned directly to her and asked the baby’s name.
‘‘Joshua,’’ Jacob answered.
‘‘That is a good name. We here in Israel need a soldier like Joshua was.’’
Israel.
The driver had referred to Palestine as Israel. Jacob stored this moment to tell to Peg later. He recalled the times during his barmitzvah lessons when old Mr Klapper tried to teach him Jewish history. ‘‘Remember, Yakov,’’ he had said, wagging a finger at him, ‘‘remember you are descended from the twelve tribes of Israel and God gave you all the land that stretched from Dan to Beersheva.’’ At the time, Jacob had wondered if that was as much as the land between the north and south headlands of Bondi beach. And now here he was, in February 1948, with a girl he loved and a baby he seemed to have inherited, thundering along a road that had now left the coast and was heading into that very country that Mr Klapper had assured him was his birthright. God was surely watching over them, assisted by a beautiful girl with a turret-mounted Bren gun.
The coastal strip had given way to undulating rock-strewn stretches where goats and scraggy sheep grazed on the thin lichens. Once the driver took his hand off the wheel to point out an ibex silhouetted against the morning sun. As it hopped across the crags, he made what he thought was a fair representation of a kangaroo: ‘‘Boomp-ad-a-boomp-ad-a-boomp,’’ and roared with laughter. The baby awoke and cried. Peg hugged him closer, the driver put a huge finger under his chin and tickled him. Joshua laughed.
Peg said, ‘‘Well, what do you make of this little bugger, eh?’’ She passed him over to Jacob. ‘‘Your turn, sport,’’ she smiled. ‘‘I reckon you — we — had better get used to it. Ah, what the hell, from here on, it’s going to be Yakov, Pnina and his nibs, young Joshua.’’
The truck rumbled over stony secondary roads. The girl in the turret also acted as navigator, calling down directions to the driver which he told Jacob and Peg were to avoid contact with hostile Arabs. The few Arabs Jacob saw did not look very hostile. Boys with sticks prodded their animals along the grazing tracks. In the wadis, nomadic tents were gathered like the depression humpies of the 1930s
in the Australian suburbs.
‘‘Jezreel Valley,’’ Avi, the driver said, pointing to a vivid slash of green that came into view at the top of a stony rise.
The girl, Nurit, dropped down out of the hatch. ‘‘Our kibbutz is down there.’’
Peg saw it first. She nudged Jacob. ‘‘Gawd, Yakov, it looks like a lot of hay sheds with oversize country dunnies!’’
Jacob, although not as familiar as Peg with Australian country buildings, had to agree that the kibbutz dwellings were, to say the least, simple structures, hardly better than the ones he had seen in Mrs Rothfield’s old photographs. The truck groaned in low gear as it went down into the valley. As it navigated the last bend in the road, a high mesh fence topped with barbed wire came into view. From the back of the truck there came a terrible, haunting wailing. The refugees banged on the truck’s tin roof. In the side mirror, Jacob saw one man jump from the truck, roll over in the dust, then get up and run into a stand of scrubby trees. Jacob grabbed Avi’s arm to show him but he shook him off.
‘‘I am sorry, Yakov, but this happens every time when we bring in the refugees. They see our perimeter fence and our watchtower and they go crazy. They think they are going back into a concentration camp again. It is very sad.’’ He steered the truck through gates that were swung wide for him by a young man with a rifle over his shoulder. Jacob caught a glimpse of the signboard, which read, in Hebrew and English:
KIBBUTZ JEZREEL
ESTABLISHED 1946
BY POALE EZION
THE JEWISH LABOR PARTY
The main tin shed at which the truck finally rolled to a stop was signposted ADMINISTRATION. Jacob was relieved that the walls of the other buildings he could see were made of concrete blocks. Only their roofs were tin. Avi and Nurit got out and stretched then went around the back of the truck and let the tailgate down. Jacob tried to ignore the angry, importuning voices and helped Peg and the baby out.
Nurit returned shaking her head. ‘‘It never gets any better,’’ she said, ‘‘but thank God they get over it quickly. Just as well, or they’d never survive.’’
Peg asked her what would happen to them. ‘‘This is a short stay transit kibbutz for them,’’ Nurit said. ‘‘We sort them out then send them all over the country to train as settlers. Most of them make it. Those who don’t’’ — she shrugged — ‘‘those whose minds and bodies are too damaged by their experiences, well, we take care of them in other ways.’’
Peg looked at Nurit in her trimly fitting khaki slacks and shirt. Yes, she could see herself looking tanned and fit like that, she reckoned. Then she laughed inwardly, comparing Jacob’s slight build with that of Avi. ‘‘Built like a brick shit-house,’’ she said to herself, then laughed outright.
Nurit smiled and said, ‘‘Okay, Pnina, you and Joshua are going straight to the children’s house.’’
Jacob was alarmed until he realised it was merely the place in the kibbutz where all the children lived. Nervously, he kissed Peg on the cheek. ‘‘Okay, Daddy,’’ she chided, ‘‘and what about his nibs?’’ Meekly and with a deal of embarrassment, he gave Joshua a kiss too.
He watched them go. He hated even this small separation. He marvelled at how quickly he had begun to think of them as three, and — the word rose awkwardly to his lips — as a family. He could feel himself gaining strength at the thought. Yes, he would need to be strong now, in a new country and about to experience a way of life he knew only from books. He would succeed where Shulamit and Yosef Rothfield had given up!
Avi pushed him in the back. ‘‘If you want to be a useful kibbutnik, Yakov, start by peeling potatoes.’’
Had he heard right? He looked questioningly at Avi.
‘‘You heard right, chaver, you are now assigned to kitchen duty. Over there on the hillside is your hut. Take your bags and your wife’s, and then report to the kitchen in the main building.’’
Jacob picked up his bags. He had to walk past the armed guard on the gate. The boy waved at him and said something in Hebrew. He looked so young that Jacob was sure he did not have ‘‘a wife’’.
The hut was constructed of cement blocks with unlined timber interior walls. The floor was pressed-wood sheets with a few Indian cotton rugs thrown over them. Against one wall was a sink, a small table, four chairs and a cupboard. On the table a bottle held a sprig of wild thyme, its hairy roots searching for food. An electric jug was also on the table and, surprisingly, an army-type telephone. The bedroom was scantily furnished with two single divan style beds and racks for clothing. A cheap Indian drugget covered the floor. On a rickety table there was a washbowl and jug.
He was now the proud occupier of his own flat, hut, call it what you will, and with a ‘‘wife’’ to share it. He pushed the door closed behind him to see what it was like to be in a place with its own front door. Sunlight slanted across the floor. Oddly, at that moment he had a mental picture of Mr Williams, the foreman at the printery. It was Mr Williams who always talked about ‘‘the wife’’ or sometimes ‘‘the missus’’ or, on a Monday following the weekend at home, the ‘‘trouble and strife’’. Jacob tried them all out. He rather liked ‘‘the missus’’ — it sounded manly, a good title for a partner. The more he said it, the more it seemed to fit Peg. But not Pnina.
Later, he thought, when things settled down a bit, he would put Avi straight about ‘‘the wife’’.
There were cleaning materials under the sink. Jacob did his best to remove the dust and any evidence of a previous occupier. He pushed the two beds together and laid down on one of them. It was surprisingly comfortable. ‘‘I hope ‘the missus’ likes it!’’ he said out loud, and laughed. He got up and looked through the window where forlorn clusters of refugees stood around waiting for direction. One looked up and beckoned to him. Jacob was seized with terrible indecision. He did not want to be associated with these remnants; Jews they may be but what else did he have in common with them? In yet another guise it was the same problem that he had confronted so many times. Jews, he knew to his own longstanding confusion, came in so many varied and wildly disparate personae that one had ultimately to realise that Jewishness was their only common factor. And that Jewishness could not be defined merely as a religion. The one thing Jacob had learned was that the rituals of belief were only the externals of Judaism. It was the five thousand years of history that daunted him, which he carried on his back like the old man of the sea, unable to discard it even if he had wanted to.
Were these refugees also part of his burden? Jacob wondered. The survivors of destroyed Jewish communities in countries that he knew only as blobs on a map of Europe. The man who beckoned to him was presuming on their bond of a common religion, history and culture for help — from him, Jacob Kaiser, a third generation Australian Jew from a country the survivors had never, in all probability, even heard of.
He pretended not to see the man. Tomorrow or soon after, he would be gone — to yet another temporary resting place, herded on and off trucks and trains until…
Shutting the hut door behind him and shutting the man out of his life, he crossed the square to the main building. He had an overwhelming need to be with Peg. The administration block was connected to others by a series of covered walkways. The signs were in Hebrew; Jacob was thankful his small amount of study of kibbutz life had included learning the names of the various sections. He soon found, or heard, the children’s house. He burst into a large, airy room like any kindergarten anywhere in the world. In another smaller room leading off it, Jacob could see the first few of a row of cots. Peg was seated on a low chair holding out her hands to steady Joshua, who struggled to maintain his balance. It was a sight he would not forget. For one fleeting moment he thought he saw his mother Alice doing just that with his little brother Solly. The picture vanished as he rushed to Peg.
‘‘Hey, steady on Jack — I mean Yakov. You’ll knock his nibs arse over turkey!’’ She looked around quickly to see if anybody understood. Across from her, a plump woman
laughed and said, ‘‘Blimey, it’s a while since I heard that. You’re not a Pom like me so you must be from down under, right?’’
Peg waved to her. She said to Jacob, ‘‘Don’t worry about me and Joshua. They’ve got it all worked out here. They were explaining, just before you came charging in like Murphy’s bull, that I leave young Josh here all day while I go out into the fields and prune fruit trees or whatever else they want doing.’’
After admiring how nice Joshua looked, ‘‘scrubbed up and in clean clobber’’, Jacob whispered to Peg. ‘‘They’ve put me on kitchen duty. I’ve got to peel potatoes.’’
Peg burst into laughter, sat Joshua down, then stood up and kissed Jacob on the cheek.
‘‘I’ll tell you something else, Peg,’’ Jacob whispered again, ‘‘they think we’re, you know, married.’’
‘‘That’s where you’re quite wrong, my lad. I’ve been talking to Nurit, the one on the gun in the truck. She’s a good sort as well as being boss cocky in the kibbutz administration. She spoke to some of the refugees who knew Joshua’s mum, the poor cow. Anyhow, she knows the little tyke isn’t ours in the usual way, and on top of all that she’s got both our passports with different names in ’em.’’
‘‘They’re not going to —’’
‘‘No bloody fear, Jack. They’re not going to take Josh away from us and really, if you were a fair dinkum socialist, you’d realise that on this socialist kibbutz they don’t worry too much about the other business.’’ She bent down and picked Joshua up. ‘‘Say hullo to Daddy. Ooh, mustn’t teach him that. He’s got to say it in Hebrew — Aba, and I’m Ima.’’
Jacob took him in his arms. ‘‘Shalom, Joshua.’’ He handed him back to Peg. ‘‘See you tonight in the dining hall. I’ve got to go and peel the spuds now.’’
