by Nomi Eve
Meanwhile, the young “builders” were busy “constructing.” Miriam reached around and squeezed Zohar’s buttocks. She let a finger slide up and down the warm crack of his behind. He moaned, and then thrust his hips forward and then back again. Zohar shivered and then sat up and bent over his bride. He ran his tongue over the nipple of her left breast, nipping it with his lips until she moaned, and arched her back, and then he reached tender fingers down into the warm and most willing window between her legs.
MY FATHER WRITES:
After my parents were married just a few months, they moved from the city of Petach Tikvah to Shachar-Chayel (Shachar), a small citrus-growing village in Emek Chefer near the resort city of Netanya. Emek Chefer is a large fertile valley in the central part of the country, just along the coastal plain. The valley has a biblical name. The Chefer daughters were the first women in the Bible to inherit their father’s property. Their father, Chefer’s son, owned our entire valley. After he died without leaving a male heir, his daughters went before Moses to fight for their rights to their father’s property, and they were victorious. Our valley is named for the granddaughters of Chefer, who owned our land until they died and then passed it on to their sons.
I was born in Shachar on February 16, 1937. I was named Eliezer after my father’s grandfather who had died three months before I was born. My brother, Tomer, was born on April 6, 1944, when I was seven years old.
Tomer was an incredibly active child, and a troublemaker from the time he was born. We have lots of family stories about him, because he was always up to something. He started walking at the age of nine months, and was talking at one and a half. As a baby in his playpen, he would hear my father coming on his motorcycle and would start going crazy, jumping up and down and rocking the pen. When my father came home, before he would even enter the house he had to take Tomer for a short ride (sitting in front of my father).
By the time he was two, Tomer was wandering by himself all over the village. I believe there were only two cars in the village—and my father had the only motorcycle—so there were no paved roads and really no cars to worry about. But of course his wandering off always drove my parents crazy and we were always running out looking for him.
We lived in a tiny one-room house. At first, my father supported the family by farming his dunam, his plot of land, but with the outbreak of World War II, citrus exports stopped entirely, so my father had to stop farming and work as a gaffir (officer) guarding a British oil tank farm. My mother also worked—sewing insignias for Australian army uniforms. She told me that this was incredibly hard work—the uniform cloth was so thick that her fingers would go numb from trying to push the needle through it.
In the mid to late 1940s, my parents were involved (like most of our village) with the Haganah, the secret Jewish defense force. Both my father and uncle joined when they were sixteen, and were sworn in, according to my father, “with one hand on the Bible in a secret ceremony in a dark room lit by candles.” Once my father and his twin swam underneath the Yarkon River to put in place a bomb that booby-trapped an important British point of crossing. My mother was also active. She and the other women in the area often practiced throwing grenades, assembling machine guns, and other military skills. Often their work involved smuggling weapons. My mother told me that the British soldiers were easy to fool. The village women would rub up right against them and tell them that their husbands were away for the afternoon. In my own baby carriage, tucked underneath my blankets, would be a machine gun. In a neighbor woman’s carriage would be enough ammunition to blow up the High Command itself. But, in my mother’s own words, “those British were so strange.” All the women knew that the way to stop them from searching was to flirt. The more the women flirted, the more scared the soldiers looked. Sometimes, for fun, the women would try to push their luck, rubbing up against the soldiers and making such eyes as could only be taken for an invitation. The soldiers always let the women pass when they acted like this. The women were proud of their war effort. They liked to brag that they smuggled half an arsenal in their baby carriages and under their skirts.
My parents, like many in our valley, were particularly active in Haganah attempts to help war refugees immigrate to Palestine. In the 1940s, tens of thousands of Jews, many of them right out of the concentration camps, were trying to escape from Europe. Many wanted to go to Palestine, but Great Britain had severely restricted Jewish immigration. So the Haganah, the Jewish Defense Force, organized an elaborate system of illegal immigration.
Shachar is less than a mile inland from the seaside city of Netanya. Boats carrying “illegals” sailed toward Netanya on moonless nights. The shore is very rocky and there is no port. Haganah members disguised as fishermen met the refugees far out in the water and guided their lifeboats past the huge rocks that jut up from the sea. Once close enough, they lifted the refugees out of the rafts and onto their backs, carrying them through the waves to safety. The refugees would then be led inland, through dunes and orchards, and ultimately taken to Shachar and other nearby settlements where they were dispersed among all the houses. If the British came searching for illegals (which they often did), the villagers would say, “This is my cousin Shlomo from Sefat,” or “This is my sister Ruth from Jerusalem.” Everyone in Shachar and in the surrounding villages always had relatives visiting anyway, since they were close to the beach and the air wasn’t nearly as damp as in Tel Aviv.
I WRITE:
On nights they knew refugees were coming, all the young women and older girls would go to one of the restaurants in town where the British soldiers were congregating. Of course the Haganah girls were part of the plan. They would try to get them drunk. They would wear revealing clothes and dance with the soldiers, letting them press close and put their hands all over their bodies. And while the women were distracting the soldiers, the men would be on the beach. Zohar would wade out into the water, reach up into a rowboat, help a man off, throw him over his shoulders, and make his way with the refugee through the surf, and then back again, to deliver another.
Next to Shachar there is another village, called Neve Boker. Miriam had heard that the refugees who landed in Neve Boker received what you could call “a different kind of greeting.” Evidently, there were a few ladies there who competed with each other to see who could extend the most “elaborate” welcome. According to rumors (which were very credible!) a woman named Sophie Gefen was the best at this. She was beautiful and very intelligent, with one blue eye and one brown eye, black curly hair, and delicate, almost Asian features even though she was Polish through and through. At the restaurants in town, the Haganah leader would make sure that Sophie went for the captains, or sergeants, or lieutenants if there were any around. Miriam and her friends always used to joke that if only Sophie Gefen could be wrapped up as a present and delivered to the British High Command they would have had their own country a whole lot sooner.
According to rumors, on nights that they had refugees sleeping on their back porch, Sophie used to get out of bed in the middle of the night. Her husband was a heavy sleeper. He never heard a thing. Sophie would walk out onto the porch without any clothes on and slip into bed with the refugees. All the girls from Shachar used to joke that Sophie probably woke them up with the words “Welcome to the Holy Land!” or “How about some native milk and honey?” Sophie Gefen was known to have “greeted” a pair of French Jews (cousins) from Paris, a wounded socialist from Cracow, two yeshiva boys from Kovna, and a Lithuanian rabbi who had lost his faith in the dungeons of Europe, but in Sophie’s arms, rumor had it, instantly retrieved it. Everyone in the valley knew what she was up to. But no one ever told her husband, which, depending upon whom you asked, was either a great crime or an act of great compassion.
Not long after Miriam and Zohar first moved to Shachar, one of the village leaders paid Miriam a visit. Zohar wasn’t home that day, he was out working. The village leader, whose name was Horowitz, knew that Zohar and Miriam were members of the Hag
anah. Horowitz told Miriam that two pairs of British soldiers were searching through the village that very day, looking for weapons and illegal information. He asked her if she had any weapons hidden around the house. Well, they didn’t have any guns, but they had a stack of papers describing how you take a Sten submachine gun apart and then put it back together. Miriam was an expert with the Sten, she always won contests for “breaking it down” the quickest. She told Horowitz that they had some papers, and he said that they had to get rid of them immediately. Of course, this was very complicated. Eytan Rimon, who lived at the other end of the village, had a slick in his chicken coop. A slick was an underground compartment where they used to hide weapons and other illegal things.
But for Rimon to come to Miriam and then to make it all the way to his house with the contraband material meant passing through the village and possibly running into the soldiers on the way. That’s where Abraham Lincoln came into the picture. Abraham Lincoln was from Lithuania. His real name was Yoni Burg, but everyone called him Abraham Lincoln because his wife was American and they spoke English at home. Horowitz organized everything chick-chock. Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Devorah, cooked a quick lunch while he ran through the village to find both couples of soldiers. When he found them, he engaged them in conversation and then invited them back to their house for lunch. The British loved Abraham Lincoln because of his good English. Later Miriam mused that maybe he even had that nickname as part of Haganah strategy to make the British interested in him. The soldiers all went back to Abraham Lincoln’s house for lunch, Devorah made something delicious, and Rimon made it to Miriam and Zohar’s house and then out again, all the way through the village to his slick under the chicken coop without getting caught!
MY FATHER WRITES:
In the later days of the British Mandate there was a very strong British military presence all over Palestine. During this time of increased tension, our people continued to secretly train for war. Often, we were under curfew and movement was severely restricted. But even under curfew, people trained. The women in our valley often used their babies to camouflage their Haganah practice sessions. They would tell the British that they needed to go to the tool tree to give their babies some fresh air, and that they themselves were athletes and needed to practice for the All-Palestine games. The tool tree is an old ficus with tools embedded in its trunk. Nobody knows whose tools they were or when exactly they were abandoned, but it was probably sometime in the end of the last century. The tree grew on the spot, around the tools. Saw blades, a lathe, hammers, they stick half out of the wood. Twice a week they would meet by the old tool tree and practice throwing grenades. The British always thought that the mothers were just getting some exercise or, more ridiculously, “practicing throwing the discus for the All-Palestine Games,” according to my mother.
Anyway, when my mother and the other mothers would bring us children to the tool tree, one of the mothers would take a turn watching the children while the others went a short distance away. They would stand in a line and throw stones at a target, which was a red splash of paint on a dead ficus trunk.
Sometimes the soldiers would come and watch the women. They would lean over the fence, a pair of them, and watch with what my mother describes as “gazes of lust and admiration.” For show, the mothers would sometimes run races or do gymnastic routines when grenade/“discus” throwing was over.
The late 1940s were a very difficult time for our family, and indeed for the whole settlement. War was imminent. The Haganah was stepping up its campaigns against the British. The British were retaliating with curfews and by tacitly ignoring the campaign of violence being waged by the local Arabs against the Jews. As a result of all this, many people in the settlement did not have regular work, and consequently, did not have enough food to eat. Our family was no exception. My mother would go to the market with a girlfriend on Fridays to buy a single fish, which they would then split—half for each family. During those years we never went hungry but we miraculously made do with very, very little.
I WRITE:
She is on the front porch, leaning against one of the brick columns. This is how I always see her. Her back is against the column, and one of her legs is up against it too, forming a triangle. Her right arm is up by her head. She is wearing a light-blue checkered cotton dress and her left hand is on her belly, fingers spread out wide. She stays there for a few minutes. When she steps into the house, the screen door slams after her. It is very hot and very humid midsummer. Sweat drips down Miriam’s forehead as she diapers the baby. Eliezer is out back digging little holes in the sandy earth at the edge of the orchard. When he hears the back door open and shut, he looks up, waves a shovel at his mother. Miriam sits down under the little porch roof, in the shade. Tomer squirms off her lap. She lets him crawl to his brother. Again she puts a hand on her belly. She knows that she is pregnant, but at the same time, she cannot believe that she is pregnant again. So soon. The two boys play in the sand. Miriam presses her fingers into her stomach. She presses hard, so that her hand indents her body.
She is a strong woman, a woman of courage and beauty. She has many friends, and when she tells a story, people always stop and listen. Miriam takes her hand off her belly and wipes sweat off her forehead. She looks into the orchard, first at her sons and then at the trees, which are green now, as it is summer, and unadorned with orange fruit. Then she looks up above the trees and into the sky, which is so blue, hot blue, blue with a vengeance.
She took the children. Tomer in his stroller, Eliezer holding her hand. She knew that she shouldn’t be going at all, not in her condition, but she went anyway. To the tool tree where she left them in the shade, in the care of one of the other mothers. Then she stepped out onto the field where she raised her right arm and squinted so as to see better the target. The cool stone fit perfectly in her hand. Closing her fingers around it, she took a deep breath. With her left hand she pushed away the hair that kept falling into her eyes. Then she stepped back, letting her arm swing back, her hand drop down, and then bringing it up again with enough force so that the stone careened through the air, and crashed into the target with a loud bull’s-eye that caught the other women’s attention. Then she did it again. And again. Bending down to pick up another mock grenade from the pile of stones at her feet. And the other mothers stopped their own throwing to watch her, applauding when she threw the last one. Applauding at the way the stone left her hand like a bullet and at the strong grace of her body in the blue checkered dress. She shut her eyes and watched the stone on the inside traveling on a straight path but through a different war, a private darkness, traveling toward a target no one else could see.
Over the next few months her belly swelled. When the other women found out she was pregnant they wouldn’t let her practice with them anymore. Everyone was always afraid for a new baby. A woman shouldn’t exert herself in such a condition. And then there were those scornful women who looked at the squirming babe in Miriam’s arms and then down at the one in her belly and said unabashedly, “How could you? In times like these when you don’t even have enough food for the ones you already have?”
In the afternoons, when Eliezer was at a friend’s and she was alone with Tomer in the house, Miriam would go out onto the back porch. First, she would shut her eyes and imagine the row of women, their dresses hitched up when they leaned into the throw, their arms reaching up. Then she would open her eyes, and raise her own arm high. Planting her feet strongly, she would step back with her right leg. Raising her arm, she would lean forward, and then shift back, her feet not moving, but her legs accepting the intimate exchange of energy from front thigh to back thigh, to calf to heel to toe, and then lift her left foot into the air as some invisible stone careened out of her palm. Out and over the orchard. Hitting a phantom mark. Stepping back, she would squint and then throw again and again, with perfect aim, at the ripening fruit on the trees.
Zohar would always associate the birth of his third child with butterflies a
nd ashes. The ashes because the year the baby was born, there was a premature frost accompanied by a severe hailstorm that ruined most of the crops on the trees. That spring, the village burned an entire season of ruined fruit. While the burning was in progress a thin film of citrus ash hovered over all the houses and seemed to coat everything in a gray but sweet, almost caramelized, carapace. The amber-colored ash settled on the porches and branches and windowsills like a death you could eat like candy. Then they buried what was left after the fire and even the most secular among the pardesanim was heard to murmur prayers as the earth was opened up and then closed again, full of the still-glowing orangy embers of an entire season’s bounty.
The birth would always make him think of butterflies because when the infant was seen right away to be missing fingers and toes, the head doctor of the birthing unit had taken Zohar aside and told him that he must immediately visit “another child, an extraordinary child who was born with this very same deformity.” So, the next day, with Miriam still in the hospital, Zohar had left Tomer with a neighbor, and had taken Eliezer to visit the other little boy, who, like their own new baby, had been born with blunted hands and feet.
The family lived in Zichron Yaacov. Their son, the parents told Zohar, had been inspired by the great local naturalist Aaron Aaronson, who was the brother of Sarah, and who himself had been one of the leaders of the NILI spies. Even as a baby, the poor child was enamored by “all things wild and natural.” But while Aaronson had cultivated fruits and flowers, this child collected butterflies. The parents took Zohar through the house to a back room whose walls were lined with glass cases. In the cases were hundreds of mounted butterflies. “All in all,” the little boy told Zohar and Eliezer proudly, “I have one hundred and forty-two varieties. Many from overseas.” He then showed them a huge cage of fine wire mesh on a back porch. Inside the cage were five or so bright bright-blue butterflies. The boy explained that he kept them this way until they died, and then he preserved them, mounted them, and added them to his display. “ Sometimes, though,” he admitted, he “suffocated the creatures to prevent their wings from losing their color.”
