“I mean your parents. What part of Europe?”
“From Peqiin,” the man repeated.
“No. I mean Russia? Poland? Lithuania?”
“I’m from Peqiin. Aaron’s the same. And Absalom.”
A look of astonishment came over Hacohen’s face, for he had never met Jews who were not from some place abroad. “Egypt or Spain?” he asked.
“We’re Jews,” Aaron said. “Our families never left this land.”
“But during the Diaspora?”
“The sons of Jacob went down into Egypt,” the Peqiin farmers explained, “but we didn’t. Nehemiah and Ezra lived in Babylonia, but not us.”
“Where did you go when the Romans drove us out?”
“We didn’t go.”
He could not believe that hidden in these hills the people of Peqiin had never fled: it was unreasonable, yet in persistent questioning he could find no Jew who remembered Russia, none who had returned with memories of Baghdad. These were Jews whose families had lived here for four thousand years, and the subservient habits of exile they had not acquired. One evening in July, when the men he was working with were at dinner, he walked upon the hills that had always known Jews, and as he did so the giant steps of the Vodzher Rebbe seemed to be striding along beside him: the huge and ghostly rebbe broke into a dance and once more gathered Shmuel to his arms. “You are the child of God, the son of Abraham,” the rebbe said. He kissed Hacohen the man as he had once kissed Kagan the boy, and cried to the hills, “You will gain your land, Shmuel, but in it you will find death.” With the rebbe’s words ringing in his ears, Hacohen went in and said good night to the Jews of Peqiin.
“I must go back to Tubariyeh,” he said.
“But why? If they stoned you?”
“To buy land.”
“You can buy land here, Shmuel.” They recognized him as a worker and wanted him to stay with them.
“My land is beside the lake,” he said, and when he reached Tubariyeh he found his hovel occupied by chickens. Chasing them away and turning his mattress over so that their manure would fall to earth, he dug a fresh hole at the head of the mattress and there he hid his English pounds, while at the foot he buried the gold coin. As soon as this was done he began applying pressure on the kaimakam, nor would he stop until he had bought his land where the River Jordan left the lake and vineyards could be planted.
It was with the memory of these lonely and frustrating years, plus the present knowledge that the Jews from Vodzh were already in Akka, that Shmuel began his march on this hot afternoon to face the kaimakam in a final effort to buy the land. As he walked through the streets where Jews ignored him, he was not an impressive figure. Even when wearing his tarboosh he was only five feet four inches tall, and his borrowed clothes hung awkwardly. His pants were too short and his shoes creaked from their country tramping. He was still a sway-back, so that his belly moved ahead of him down the alleys, and he walked with his left shoulder forward as if he were trying to edge his way through life. He smelled of the evil room in which he was forced to live and he had suffered so many disappointments that he was beginning to look like the furtive Jews who scuttled through back alleys in cities like Kiev and Gretz; but these appearances were only outward, for his mind had found a kind of peace: at Peqiin, Jews had proved they could live on the land and could make it prosper. Bedouin raiders could be kept off with guns, and he marched through Tubariyeh determined to come away from this final meeting as the owner of land.
The kaimakam, who had hoped to postpone seeing Shmuel until he had perfected his plan for mulcting him of additional baksheesh, now that the firman had been promulgated, disarmed Hacohen by meeting him at the door of his office as if he were a friend and asking pleasantly, “Why do you come out on a day as hot as this?”
“Did the firman arrive from Istanbul?”
“Not yet, Shmuel,” Tabari lied. Then, seeing Hacohen’s shiver of despair, he added, “These things take time, Shmuel. There’s the mutasarrif in Akka, and the wali …”
“I know!” Hacohen snapped, almost losing his temper. “Excuse me, Excellency. I’ve had disturbing news from Akka.”
Kaimakam Tabari became suspicious, reasoning to himself: I know the Jews have arrived, but Hacohen doesn’t know I know. So why does he tell me something that makes his position weaker? He must be doing it for a reason. Probably plans to throw himself on my mercy. To Shmuel he said, “Now what could possibly happen in Akka that would be bad news? You know the mutasarrif’s on your side.”
“The Jews who are buying the land … they’ve landed.”
When Shmuel said this the kaimakam allowed his face to form a scowl. “They have? This is serious, Shmuel.” He waited to see what approach the Jew would take.
He had guessed right. Without replying Hacohen reached into his coat pocket and produced a roll of bills. Pushing them to Tabari he said, “Nine hundred and eighty pounds. For Emir Tewfik in Damascus.” The kaimakam did not touch the money, but watched carefully as his visitor continued to unload his right pants pocket. Out came a few paltry coins, some foreign bills, the kind of bribe a desperate man would offer for the recovery of a horse. Tabari waited.
“Excellency, this is every piaster I have in the world. Take it, but let me have the land.”
“This is a grave thing you suggest,” Tabari replied. “You want me to authorize the Jews to settle on the land before we hear from Istanbul. If I did that I could lose my job, my reputation.” He paused to let Shmuel study the matter, then added softly, “If we could wait a few months …”
Again Hacohen pushed the money at the kaimakam and said with passion, “If they come here and find they’ve been cheated, they’ll kill me.”
Kaimakam Tabari leaned back and laughed in a consoling manner. “Shmuel, Jews don’t kill other Jews! They might abuse you or ostracize you, but even that other night they didn’t kill you.” He felt sure that Hacohen controlled more money, somewhere, and he intended getting it. He stood up and moved a chair closer to his desk. “Sit down, Shmuel.”
This gesture astonished Hacohen. Never during his four years in Tubariyeh had he been allowed to sit in a kaimakam’s presence and he became doubly cautious. Tabari was saying, “I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time, Shmuel. What about the Bedouins? The raids? That is, supposing your people do get their land.” The kaimakam caught himself. “I mean, supposing we can work something out.”
Hacohen tried not to betray his feelings. The firman from Istanbul had arrived! He knew it from the way the kaimakam was acting. The Jews were going to get their land! He deduced what had happened. The messenger who had brought him news of the landings in Akka had at the same time brought Kaimakam Tabari the firman. Speaking very slowly, because he could not guess what Tabari would propose next, Shmuel said, “At Peqiin I discovered how to handle the Bedouins. First you offer to buy their friendship. And if you fail, you take a gun and fight.”
“Fight?” the amiable kaimakam laughed. “Shmuel, your bunch of pale scholars? Fight men of the desert?”
“There’s nothing else we can do, Excellency. In Europe, in Spain, we didn’t fight and we were burned alive. Here at Tubariyeh we’ll fight. But I don’t think we’ll have to.” He thought of the resolute farmers in Peqiin; for three years there had been no attacks.
The kaimakam smiled indulgently and asked, “I suppose the newcomers are all Ashkenazim?” With his fingers he drew curls down his cheeks. “They don’t seem like fighters to me.”
“You’ve seen only one kind of Ashkenazi, Excellency.”
“I’d be pleased to meet some other kind,” the kaimakam joked. “The Ashkenazim we see here in Tubariyeh … Mean, little-minded. Now the Sephardim, on the other hand …”
Hacohen had no intention of allowing Tabari to sidetrack the main issue. Istanbul had granted the Jews their land and its transfer must not be delayed. He tried to bring the discussion back to that point, but Tabari rambled on: “I’ve always preferred the Sephardim.”
Hacohen thought: Regardless of what the kaimakam thinks he sees here in Tubariyeh, the future of the Jew lies with the Ashkenazim. It’ll be the hard, dedicated men with German educations and Russian determination who’ll determine the future. Let my friends in Akka get hold of their land, and we’ll see. To the kaimakam he said quietly, “The Sephardim are more pleasant to know.”
“Yes!” Tabari agreed. “In Tubariyeh every Jew I respect is a Sephardi.” He corrected himself. “Everyone but you, Shmuel.”
There followed an awkward silence, for obviously the kaimakam was leading to something, but what it was Hacohen could not guess. He waited, and Tabari added, “So what with the newcomers all being Ashkenazim, whom I don’t like anyway, why should I risk my position?”
“It’s all the money I have,” Hacohen insisted stubbornly.
Kaimakam Tabari looked hurt. “I didn’t want more money from you, Shmuel. It’s just that we have to have more funds from somewhere to buy the right judgment in Istanbul.”
It was a moment of hard decision. Shmuel could feel the gold coin pressing against his leg and he was tempted to bang it onto the table as a last wild gesture; but he had learned in these matters to trust his intuitive judgment, and this reassured him that the firman was already in Tubariyeh and that he need only be insistent. He therefore held back the coin and waited.
Finally Tabari spoke. “So what I thought was”—there was the horrible phrase again—“that if you could give me the names of the leaders of your group now in Akka, when I go there tomorrow I can see them and explain the gravity of the situation …”
From a cesspool of disgust Shmuel Hacohen looked at the kaimakam, and each man was aware of what the other was thinking. The Jew thought: He’ll go to the ship with an interpreter, some tough from the Akka waterfront, and they’ll confuse and bully the immigrants. The Jews will think he’s threatening their land and they’ll surrender every kopeck they have. The bastard. The bastard.
But Hacohen was wrong about what the kaimakam was thinking, for Tabari was saying to himself: This bewildered Jew. He thinks I’m doing this merely to tantalize him. Extortion. He doesn’t realize that right now I’m being the best friend he ever had. I’d better show him.
“You won’t give me the names?” he snapped.
“Find them yourself. Steal from the immigrants in your own way.”
“Stupid!” the kaimakam cried. With anger he took from his desk the firman and slammed it on the table. “Read that, you stubborn Jew.”
“I can speak Turkish. I can’t read it.”
“Do you trust me to read it?” Tabari read the first part and watched Hacohen’s face start to break with tears of joy. Then he read the harsh final proviso about keeping the Jews from water and he saw dismay take the place of joy.
“Without water the land is nothing!” Hacohen protested.
“Obviously. That’s why I must have extra money.”
Hacohen thought: It’s a lie. It’s a lie. He wants the money for himself. Then he heard the kaimakam saying easily, “The fact is, I suspect the sultan had nothing to do with that last clause. Some friend of mine tacked it on to help me out.”
“What do you mean?”
“So that I could do just what I’m doing now. Get a little more money for myself … and give him half.”
The duplicity of what Tabari was saying was too much for Hacohen to absorb. In Russia government officials were cruel. But a man grew to understand them. In Turkish lands … His anxiety was too great and he started to laugh. The kaimakam joined him and explained jokingly, “So our position is this, Shmuel. I want you Jews to have your land, and the water too. I suppose the sultan feels the same way. But in view of that last clause I must interrogate Istanbul, and that takes …”
“Money?”
“A lot of money. More than you have left. Now, may I have the names?”
Feeling morally depleted by developments two and three times more devious than he could follow, Shmuel Hacohen took the kaimakam’s pen and wrote down the names of the Vodzher Jews who could be depended upon to get the money together, if they had any. As he penned their names the faces of his friends came before him: Mendel of Berdichev, with beard and fur cap; Solomon of Vodzh, an outspoken man; Jozadak of the next village, a fighter and a man who hated rabbis. As he finished recalling the names he dropped his head on the desk and wept.
Kaimakam Tabari appreciated the anxiety under which Shmuel had been working and he left him alone for some moments. Then he reached out and touched Shmuel on the shoulder, asking, “What good would the land be without water?”
“I wasn’t weeping for them,” Shmuel replied. “I was thinking of those who are dead and will not see the land.”
Then began a curious negotiation, an exchange that neither Kaimakam Tabari nor Shmuel Hacohen would ever forget. Tabari was convinced that the tough little Jew had more money somewhere, reserved for an emergency, and he suspected that after the land was secured he would not see Hacohen again; one of his most fruitful sources of baksheesh would thus dry up, and he hated to see anyone come into his office with money and escape. So on the spur of the moment, without really thinking, he did the thing that he would never afterward forget.
He said, “By the way, Shmuel, I have something in the other room you might like to see.”
“What?”
“Come, look.” And the portly governor threw open a door and led Hacohen to a shelf on which stood a row of twenty-two tall books bound in leather and stamped in gold. Hacohen recognized them as a fine Lithuanian printing of the Talmud, for he had seen such books in Berdichev while collecting money for the land purchase; and when Tabari handed him a volume to inspect he opened the pages reverently and before him stood the glorious, singing Hebrew that his father had wanted him to study.
“What I’d like to know,” Tabari was saying, “is why this book has such an effect on Jews?”
Shmuel looked at the large pages—more than twenty inches tall and nearly fourteen wide. This was a book unlike those that a Muslim or a Christian would know, for each page was a separate work in itself, composed of six or eight distinct kinds of type, varying in size from very large to very small. The organization was unbelievable: in the center of the page would appear in bold type a short phrase, surrounded on all sides by blocks of different-sized type explaining and elaborating what the central phrase intended. Down margins would appear columns only three quarters of an inch wide, printed in minute letters. It was a jumble, a confusion, a thing of beauty, and no two pages were alike.
“What does it mean?” Tabari asked.
“Well, this bold sentence in the middle is an opinion handed down by the great Rabbi Akiba.”
“Who was he?” Tabari asked.
“A rabbi. He’s buried here in Tubariyeh.”
Tabari studied Akiba’s material, then pointed to one of the surrounding blocks of type. “What’s this one?”
“A judgment of Rabbi Meir, who came later. He’s also buried in Tubariyeh.”
“And this big block over there?”
“Greatest of them all. Maimonides of Egypt.” He studied the beautiful, complicated page and said, “Excellency, you’ve chosen a page most appropriate to Tubariyeh, for Maimonides is also buried here.” Then, to his dismay, he realized that Kaimakam Tabari wasn’t taking his discourse on the Talmud seriously, had not even wanted to know what the great Jewish book was about. Tabari had much earthier ideas in mind and in pursuit of them he slammed the big book closed and stared directly at his little guest. “Shmuel, will you have a synagogue in your new settlement?”
“Yes.”
“Well, wouldn’t a set of the Talmud like this … real leather. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to give the new synagogue?”
At first Hacohen thought that Tabari, in gratitude for the baksheesh he would extract from the Jews, was proposing to give the newcomers this expensive gift of books, and the little Jew almost made an ass of himself. He started to express h
is gratitude, then caught himself: My God! He expects me to buy them.
Tabari, quick to notice changes in the faces of people who came to consult him, caught the incipient smile and underwent the same degree of shock: My God! I do believe the little Jew thought I was giving him the books.
It was Tabari who spoke first. “So I thought that if you had—well—even a little extra money …”
The rest of the things Hacohen said that hot evening he could not later recall, for it was not he but some power greater that spoke through his voice. “Where did you get the Talmud?” he asked coldly.
“There was an old rabbi with some papers that had to be signed … in Beirut.”
“Did he offer you that Talmud? For some papers?”
“They were exceedingly significant papers … involving his whole community.”
“But did he offer you his Talmud?” In some strange way it was now Shmuel Hacohen’s office. It was he who was posing the questions.
“Well … it wouldn’t be exact to say that he offered the books.”
“You asked him what he had of value?”
“I expected him to come with money … gold pieces. When he arrived with only books …”
“You took them?”
“It was a matter of vital significance,” Tabari insisted.
Shmuel could not speak. He opened one of the volumes and studied the title page: Wilno, 1732. He wondered what dreadful pressure had been put on the old rabbi to make him surrender these volumes. Jews had died for these books, had been burned at the stake, had seen their children and their sisters killed. What had the old man wanted for his people so desperately that he would divorce himself from his own conscience? To the kaimakam he said, quietly, “These are rare books, Excellency.”
“I thought they were.”
“And you’d like to convert them into cash?”
“Of course. I know you said you had no more gold. But a man always keeps a little back.”
Without argument Shmuel Hacohen took from his left pocket the precious coin. Ceremoniously he placed it on the table where the kaimakam could see it. “I don’t know what it’s worth, Excellency, but it’s yours. Maimonides has said, ‘If a man build a synagogue let him build it finer than the house in which he dwells.’ I shall live with rats and lice a little longer. But the synagogue …” He looked at Tabari as if to ask: What kind of man would steal the holy book of another, then try to sell it back for profit?
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