by Meyer Levin
From Tiberias, Abadiya’s Yael had come home bringing lentils, flour, and for her little brothers and sisters, bars of chocolate. It was all earned with floor-washing, she swore by her eyes, by her soul. Only the chocolate came as gifts, the German officers had so much of it; she had done nothing wrong—would she have dared to show herself if she had done anything wrong?
Abadiya her father listened in silence to her words and even allowed her mother to take the girl into the hut, where her brothers and sisters happily devoured the chocolate. Yael slept that night on her mat.
In the dawn, the mother’s screams rose over the tiny settlement, and the young children ran from the hut, trembling and sobbing. What was seen was soon known in the kvutsa, and in Mishkan Yaacov, and not long afterward in Tiberias as well.
Leah was among the first to see the sight. Yael lay on the mat, only a brown stain under her head, where the blood had soaked through into the earth. The small pointed head was askew like the head of a bird after the shochet’s knife has cleanly slit the throat. Outside, Abadiya stood alone in a circle of men that kept a distance from him. His body was smaller than ever, shrunken on his bones, and his hollow face was upturned to the heavens, the ear-curls dangling. His eyes wore the hard shine that you could not see into. Endless, his singsong continued in snatches of prayer, of psalms, ancient words in their Yemenite Hebrew. A few words she caught; sin-offering, and whoring of the daughters, and lift off Thy punishment from Thy people—
First Leah went to Nahama’s Shimek at the kvutsa and saw to it that the new united cooperative, of which he was in charge, set aside each day a portion of milk for the children and the sick among the Yemenites. For once Shimek did not insist that he had to wait for a sitting over the matter, but on his own responsibility portioned out the first canister of milk. Then, bringing plants and seeds, she helped the Yemenites to start their gardens again. And only then did she go to Tiberias.
It was as everyone said—you had only to walk among the seashore cafes to see it. There were Jewish girls now, sitting not only with German officers, but with Turkish officers as well. They had given over completely, they were wanton and tref, the elderly Jews of Tiberias complained in rage; they pretended that it was for the sake of their parents, that the old ones were hungering, but it was told that one of them had even shamelessly brought home a portion of ham, and eaten it in the house of her parents! The entire house was tref! What should be done with them? Who could blame poor Abadiya the Yemenite?
Leah walked past the long row of cafes. Where had these girls come from? A few even had the look of chalutzoth! One or two she felt certain she had seen, perhaps at the Sejera training farm. Some turned away their faces, others looked at her with defiance in their eyes.
How could she begin? Two sat together, as yet without men—one was a slender dark girl who appeared Yemenite. Leah asked if she had known Yael. The girl gasped and half rose in her chair as if to run away. But from someone who had seen with her own eyes, the girl wanted to know what had happened, and Leah sat down with them.
On the further side of Tiberias, northward along the lake, was a cabin once used by a small kvutsa of plantation workers—Josef Trumpeldor had been among them, she recalled; they had set out a vast banana grove for wealthy Zionists who would come from abroad when the fruit was ready. But with the war, the work had been halted. In the open hut flies buzzed, and a stench arose from a few half-torn sacks of rotted straw. Was she not used to such beginnings? Only work was needed, yellow scrubbing soap, then mattocks, seed. Tomatoes, cabbages, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers —she could already see the girls hoeing along the rows. The girls would come. She would somehow bring those two frightened friends of Yael and others, one by one.
First there must be a few who knew how to work, and were leaders. Rahel might come. Perhaps Mama could spare Shula for a few weeks, and it would even be a good change for Shula. Nor did the thought fail to come to Leah that with Tiberias so close by, something more might easily grow between the pretty one and Nahum. The same thought undoubtedly came to Feigel as she urged Shula to go, go—the company of young girls would be livelier for her than sitting here in the house.
The Sephardi stonemason, Noach Abulafia himself brought Leah to the sage of their synagogue, who nodded and nodded as she argued how much better it would be for the daughters of the old Tiberias community to learn to grow their own food, rather than be tempted by the cafes. She would keep the strictest watch on the girls, Leah promised, indeed let them send to her only those who were already in difficulty at home.
—But would the kashruth laws be observed? the sage demanded. She was even ready to promise to keep kosher. —And the Sabbath? And all the other mitzvot? He eyed her ponderously. “Those who want to will observe all the mitzvot, naturally!” she said. “But I can’t promise to force everyone.”
The sage turned his heavy gaze onto Noach Abulafia, and sighed, as though to say, You see, I have uncovered their real intentions.
Nevertheless Noach sent her two girls, sisters, from the poorest part of the community; it was the same tale, they had brought home tref food and been driven from the house.
Within a week she had assembled ten girls for her kvutsa; they scrubbed and even whitewashed the cabin, and cleared the ground around it, and suddenly spirit was born and singing was heard.
To secure seed was not easy, aside from what she brought from home. Every grain was now as a drop of water in the desert. Leah appealed to Max Wilner; it was truly a matter of importance for the movement. These girls would not only be saved from a life of shame, shame for the whole Yishuv, but would be won over to their new way of life; they would become rooted in the soil, productive. The flow of pioneers from Europe was halted, how else could their movement grow?
Max smiled indulgently at Leah’s familiar words. The record so far of transforming girls from the beggar halukah communities into productive workers was not such as to create optimism. And what did these girls know of planting? The seed would be wasted.
“And I? I don’t know how to plant?”
—And who would guard their place? They were on the open highway. Things had become so bad that townspeople roamed the roads, pulling roots from the ground to appease their hunger.
“We will stand guard ourselves,” Leah declared.
And stand guard they did, after HaKeren had allowed her corn to plant, after she had begged a loan from the Baron’s agent, Jacques Samuelson, to tide the girls over until their first produce was grown.
In heavy shoes and men’s jackets, her girls took their turns on guard duty at night, carrying their mattocks as weapons. Zipporah—the closest friend of the murdered Yael—even showed Leah a dagger she carried, a decorated Arabian blade given her by a German officer.
It was Zipporah who proved to be Leah’s first triumph. As though herself astonished, the girl confided one day as she worked alongside Leah that what she had most feared had not happened at all. She did not miss the company of men. “Not in that way.” A girl could get along happily without their piggish doings. “Isn’t it so, Leah?” she asked intimately.
“Yes,” Leah said. “It’s so.”
In short order, Leah Chaimovitch’s experiment gained fame. As the green shoots appeared, and the young women were to be seen in the rows, weeding, watering, even on their knees pulling out yablit, the weed that ran just beneath the surface of the ground, the whole of Tiberias sang with praise. Our daughters have shown us.
Why should Jews sit and hunger, while all around them there was earth? One after another, vegetable gardens were planted, while the bearded ones with their wives ran to Leah for seeds, for advice—ten generations in this land, and they had never so much as planted a carrot!
Over the entire yishuv the story spread of Big Leah and her meshek of girls, and how she had rescued several of the girls from a life of evil (though Zipporah went off after a time and was seen in the port of Haifa). Presently there were committee meetings in the Poale Zion cabin on t
he Tel Aviv shore; Leah was sent for, and she and Rahel organized a whole movement. A member was detached from Gilboa and sent to Jerusalem to supervise vegetable-growing on a plot of land opposite the Hungarian Orphans’ Home —the land was owned by a good Jew in Hebron and freely loaned for the purpose. And thus in the very middle of Jerusalem, and also in vacant lots on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, Jewish daughters were seen at their gardening.
With Shula too the hoped-for had happened. Not only did she recover her liveliness and good spirits, but where the girls had anticipated an atmosphere of drabness, expecting to go about dressed like Big Leah in lumpy work-clothes and hobnailed shoes, here was Shula in a bright cotton duster, with a gay kerchief on her head, and every evening she would exchange bits of finery, or loan out her hand-lotion, or show them how to keep the luster in their hair, or suddenly, laughingly, she would be applying the Arab women’s kohl to their eyelids.
On Friday evening there was always a gathering, and though it had seemed since the war that there were no young men to be seen anywhere, young men appeared. Someone was sure to bring a harmonica or an accordion, singing began—soon there was a hora.
Nahum came by on weekday evenings as well, and sometimes even in the day. Their very first produce he bought in advance, so that the kvutsa’s debt was quickly and proudly paid off. Once more, the Bagelmacher pension was faring well—the Germans had returned, even some of Gottfried’s band, though he himself was discreet enough to stay away.
Nahum would come by with a cart on Mondays to pick up his vegetables. One time, as he was about to leave with a load of large perfect cabbages—what a pity to feed them to those German fressers who lacked for nothing!—Nahum beckoned to Shula. Bending from the cart, he whispered that he had something that he particularly wanted to show her. Then he called to Leah that he would bring Shula back before dark. She sprang onto the cart and, amidst bantering cries from the girls, they made off.
Instead of driving toward the pension, Nahum turned upward on the hill that overlooked Tiberias. Near the top he swerved onto a set of wagon ruts that soon petered out. Still he maintained his mystery. Leaving the wagon, Nahum led her a short way down a goat-path, moving nimbly on his small feet, and presently Shula saw a black stone hut with a terraced courtyard covered by a grape arbor. Behind and above the house, where the hill rose sharply, was another terrace covered with vines, and further above that, a third terrace, and up there were some ancient olive trees.
An Arab who seemed as ancient as the trees came out to greet them, showing a few stubs of black teeth in his smile. He and Nahum talked for a few moments while Shula stood aside; this was a man’s affair. How quiet, how heavenly was this place; perhaps the most beautiful view of the Kinnereth she had ever seen was from here, for the sea lay all whole before her, its surrounding hills like a glowing bronze frame holding an antique hand-mirror. Now Nahum drew out a money-pouch and counted large silver talers onto a stone table. There were Arabic phrases, touchings of breast and forehead, smiles and blessings, and then Nahum came back to her where she had seated herself under the arbor, petting a small nosy dog that had approached.
“I have it!” he said.
That he had been buying this place she had understood. But what for? What would anyone do with this mountaintop? Surely Nahum couldn’t be imagining that it would one day be a home for them, even if he was now taking it for granted that he would win her. Oh, she did not quite like him to be so sure, but why else had he brought her here?
Nahum’s face was beaming; rays seemed to emanate from the skin, as on pictures she had seen of the sun god of the Egyptians, Amon Ra. Nahum Ra, she would call him if things really went well between them; in all their years of knowing each other she had not until now felt an impulse to give him a nickname that would be private between them.
In a flood of words, as she stood now beside him, he was showing her his vision. Yes, he had bought this land; there were a hundred dunams here, and he had been buying it bit by bit with his own money that his father paid him as wages. When Salim died the land would be his. There was time. What would he do with it? One day he would build. An enormous hotel would rise on this site, like the luxury hotels of Europe, like the fashionable watering places such as Marienbad and Karlsbad where the crowned families and the famous and wealthy of all the world came for their cures.
“And what crowned families will come? The Yeshayahus of Jerusalem?” she teased him.
—Ah, but wait! Look at this view, was there any view in all the world that was more beautiful? Even the fabled Lake Como of Italy had nothing to compare with this!
“Nahum, you have been keeping secrets from me. I didn’t know you had been to Italy.”
Guests had told him—before the war there had been at the pension well-traveled Jews, even aristocrats from England, from Germany, and all had sworn there was no view in the world so beautiful as this. And did one need to be told? Didn’t she know within herself—as he did—that nothing anywhere could be more beautiful?
“Yes,” Shula said softly.
—And the hot springs, he continued. The hot springs were the equal of any in Europe, even better, even more curative. It needed only to be known. From the whole world people would come, for added to all this was the appeal of the Holy Land. See, Nahum said, after the war, whichever side won, this would be a changed land. The world of Europe and America would come here to Palestine. There would be automobiles everywhere. There would even be airplanes linking Palestine to Europe, and one day he was certain, to America! Airships would bring people from across the ocean! And a modern land would be built here, a modern land, not only a land of tillers of the soil. The dream of the chalutzim, with Jews becoming peasants again—that phase would soon be over. No, this would be a land of energy, of machinery, of electricity. See—see there—
And she saw, far down where the Jordan flowed out of the Kinnereth, where the river twisted like a hairpin, gleaming through the valley, down past Mishkan Yaacov, there where the Yarmuk joined the Jordan and the waters fell, tumbling in fall after fall. Down there a German engineer had studied it out and calculated it out, Nahum said, and not long ago, dining at the pension, he had told how a vast electrical station could be built, generating power from the falling waters, and from this the entire country could be electrified—everywhere there would be light, everywhere machines would turn!
At that moment, as though in response to Nahum’s vision, they heard the roar of motors over the sea. An airplane came streaking the length of the Kinnereth, from the south northward until they could clearly see the black eagles painted under the wings—it was German. Then higher up came another—but that was a British one. No, there came two British airplanes.—Unfair! something cried in her. Nahum was carefully not looking at her, nor did he make the slightest movement, yet every question within him reached into her as though he had asked it.
Not now, not yet—she could not answer him yet. The battle was engaged. She could even see how the movements of the airplanes were as the fliers always described them after their return from battles. She could see Gottfried’s hands making swooping gestures as he explained a fight to Mati, and Mati’s hands as he in turn explained to the village boys, “You must get above and behind the enemy.” Swerving, the German plane pointed itself upward. Good! Good! something cried in her. Good! They won’t get you!
And then! Oh, look out! look out! For still another airplane now appeared, even higher in the air. Was it German? was it British? Three to one? No, no, unfair, unfair! It was so high up she couldn’t see—
“It’s German,” Nahum said quietly.
As they plunged into their own trails of smoke, as matchlights of fire showed from their guns, as they swept past each other and doubled back, Shula could hardly keep track of which was which; at moments they seemed to hover shuddering in the air in a fearful almost-quiet; then the battle moved southward and the small distant sounds were like sounds from toys rather than great machines in a death-rage.
The battle must be over Mishkan Yaacov, Mati must be watching—with those sharp eyes, Mati might even see if one of them was he.
Far up, one airplane hovered and then began to twirl, spiraling downward as they did sometimes in daring flying feats, as Gottfried had once done before her eyes, explaining afterward that it was not mere bravado but a way to shake off an enemy in battle. Only now the airplane did not straighten from its spiral but plunged with a trail of heavy smoke into the sea.
Shula had seized Nahum’s arm, digging her fingers into it. He placed his hand over hers.
“German? British?”
“I couldn’t see,” Nahum said, still stroking her hand.
The remaining fighters were coming toward them—one, and two behind. The first rose, rose, and was opposite them—German.
Then it was the second German plane that had fallen.
Suddenly the two enemies half-circled and turned back, away, southward.
“They must be running out of gasoline,” Nahum said. “The British are far from their base. They have never before come this far.”
She still clutched his arm. Now she was able to turn her face to him. At once he said, “I’ll take you down. Perhaps we’ll be able to find out.”
During the ride Nahum said nothing, concentrating on driving the cart quickly without overturning on the steep descent. The cabbages jumped on the bottom.
Where would they be able to find out? Whom could she ask?
“I’ll pass their headquarters,” Nahum said as though in answer. “Perhaps we’ll see someone that one of us knows.”
As they reached the edge of Tiberias, two German automobiles sped by. In the second one she saw Gottfried. He was leaning forward talking intently to the driver.
Nahum too had seen him. He turned the horse, at a walking pace, toward Leah’s kvutsa. He still asked nothing. The words gushed out of Shula of themselves, “Nahum, Nahum, marry me!”
