by Meyer Levin
“What chance did I ever have to learn anything? I have a good head, Sara herself said I could have studied and become somebody—” It could yet be. Appallingly, Zev believed everything could yet be; he would change, he declared, he would become a decent man. In a week, in two weeks, the British would launch their great attack, they would finish with the Turks, his information was absolutely certain.
She did not even tell him of the defeat at Gaza. What use would it be?
“Hide me, Leah, get them to hide me. I tell you I know, I’ve seen the plans of battle, I know when they will strike. Sara must hold out. She is strong. Hide me. The British have surely already understood what happened here. Aaron Aaronson is in their headquarters in Alexandria, did you know that? A rescue ship is already on the way. I will lead them to her, I will free her.” His voice pitched higher. “Only I can save Sara!” He harangued the men. “You want gold to buy arms? I’ll bring you a barrel of gold. Two barrels. I’ve got it all safely hidden, don’t worry. Work with me, and I’ll buy not only rifles but cannon—”
Suddenly Motke whirled on him with the foulest of Bedouin curses. “Shut up! Shut up or I’ll finish you off!”
For a moment Zev remained silent, though eying the back of Motke’s head in the way of a man who notes down in himself how he will one day even the score. Then he began a half-whispered pleading to Leah, a new plan, she must persuade Menahem to help him to get to the north. To the Druze on the Hermon, above Metulla. “With the Druze I’m like a brother, they’ll hide me in the hills—” Her flesh began to quiver from the night chill that had come, or was it from contact with Zev?
At the gate the watchman was alert, he had heard them nearing. It was Young Avram on duty, a lad from Kovno who had been sent to Siberia while only in the Poale Zion youth movement; after two years, he had become the expert in making false papers for escapees. Finally he had made a set for himself and managed to reach Eretz on the very eve of the war. “Leah, Good! Chemda found you?”
“That’s all taken care of,” she began, but he was already staring at Zev.
“Yes, it’s him,” Menahem said, “the jewel himself. Take him up the hill and stay with him. Guard him well.”
“Who’s in command here?” Zev demanded. “Shimshoni?” “Get out of sight!” Motke snapped.
Young Avram had already grasped everything. “Quick. Hassan Bey will be coming today. Yesterday he cleaned out Merhavia. They took away seven.”
“Who?” Menahem gasped.
Young Avram began naming them. The settlement was stirring. Across the yard a few chaverim came hurrying toward them, their tea mugs in their hands; there came Chemda’s mother, whom Leah quickly reassured that the girl was safe.
Avraham Halperin, the secretary since Shimshoni had gone north, had reached them and was staring at Zev. “What’s he doing here?”
“Thank Menahem!” Motke blurted.
“He jumped on the carriage. We have to decide what to do with him.”
A few men had gathered, but they kept a distance from the pariah. Zev’s face quivered in an attempted bravado, even a kind of greeting to those who had once been his comrades.
“Only for a week, hide me—” he began.
“Avramaleh,” Avraham said to young Avram in his urgent half-whisper, “at least change his clothes. With his fancy clothes he can be recognized a mile away.” The secretary then motioned them toward the hill. Hurry. Then he waved everyone close. “Chevreh, I beg you.” Absolute silence. Those who had seen Zev were already too many. There would be an immediate sitting of the central committee.
Dvora had come running to Menahem. “Leah!” she was surprised.
“And at home?” Leah demanded.
“It’s still all right.” Late yesterday, a Yavniel man had passed by and given news of Mishkan Yaacov.
The medical case, the weapons, were already being carried off to be hidden. From every side Leah heard stories of the havoc in Merhavia, beatings, pillage. Each chaver seemed to be inwardly girding himself for their turn here, and every chavera somehow kept trying to hold her man in sight wherever he was at work.
Leah hurried up to the committee room, above the cheder ochel; it was used also as the room of Rahel and her sister Shoshana, the nurse. Rahel, wakened by some sense of emergency, was just getting out of her cot; Shoshana was up and dressed. “What, you’re joining me?” she laughed at the sight of Leah’s uniform. The story tumbled out.
Calling, “Girls, all right?” Avraham the Secretary came up with Menahem. Motke followed, insisting this was not an affair of Kvutsa Gilboa alone, but of the whole Shomer. Shoshana quickly excused herself and left. Leah too wanted to leave, but Avraham insisted she must remain to help establish exactly what had happened.
—If it was an affair of the Shomer, Rahel said, then Shabbatai Zeira, the field commander, must be summoned from his farm in Sejera.
“It would take hours!” Menahem pointed out.
And what of Shimshoni, up north? Shimshoni was the deputy for Nadina and Galil in exile, Avraham Halperin reminded them. Clearly Avraham did not want to be burdened with this decision.
It concerned not only the Shomer, but the whole Poale Zion. He looked to Rahel: after all she was the deputy for Avner.
—And did the party, Rahel asked, have the right to decide for the whole Yishuv?
“God in heaven, do you want to refer it to the next Zionist Congress!” Motke shouted. Here and now they must decide what to do with the bastard, and quickly.
All the same arguments poured forth anew. This time Motke tried to speak more calmly. “It’s only blind chance that threw him into our hands.”
Menahem’s eyes were remote as though searching behind the darkness of chance. Was there perhaps some intention? Perhaps some use could be drawn out of what had been put into their hands?
“Yes,” Motke cried. “Deliver him to Nazareth and all the searches will stop.”
“In his hatred, if we turn him in, there’s no telling whom he will implicate,” Avraham said. “All of us, and even Dizingoff’s whole Emergency Committee, to get his revenge.”
“If he had any decency, he’d kill himself,” Motke half-shouted. Then, lower, “Yes. We have to show him that that is the only solution. And if he doesn’t see it, we have to help him to do the job.”
Rahel had buried her head in her hands.
“We haven’t any cause to decide such a thing,” Menahem said. “Unless in the face of his capture.”
“Then what do you suggest, chaver?” Motke demanded belligerently.
“Perhaps something Zev himself begged for. If we take him north, take him under guard, then if he can get to the Druze, he’s off our hands.”
Avraham the Secretary raised his head, as did Rahel.
Motke cried, “Are you crazy? A thousand to one we’d get caught on the way.”
A commotion arose from the yard, feet pounded on the stairs. The Turks already? It was again Zev, who burst in with Young Avram behind him, hanging onto him by the half-ripped sleeve of his shirt. Glaring from one to another as though he could read each one’s decision, Zev shouted, “Who made you my judges? You threw me out of the Shomer—today you have no right over me! Let me go! I’ll get away! I got away from them every time before!” Wilder than in the carriage, in a state of frenzy now, he tumbled out tales of escapes, from a German colonel in Jerusalem, from the Bedouin in the Sinai Desert when he played dead. In Egypt he had been received by the commander-in-chief! If the Shomer had but listened to him and Avshalom, and risen against the Turks, the English would already have freed the land! The Yishuv spat on him, but the British would award him their highest medals!
From boasting, he suddenly took the tone of a bargainer. “You want gold and guns? Hear me. Two barrels full of napoleons. Safely hidden, I’ll lead you there. Full to the top, the way they sent them to us.”
Rahel was glaring at him, and now Leah saw him as though through Rahel’s despising eyes. Though Young Avram had remov
ed Zev’s fine boots, and given him old work clothes to replace his expensive riding costume, thick gold rings were still imbedded in Zev’s fleshy fingers, and despite his last days of terror and hunger, there remained an oiliness about his face, a desperate guile. In Rahel, Leah saw a tightening toward judgment, decision, something that she herself, Leah knew, could never muster.
Zev had caught what was happening in Rahel. “Despise me!” he flung at her. “I’m too much of a man for you. Does that give you the right to kill me?”
“To some men,” Rahel said, pallid, “it would be better to be remembered for having the courage even to destroy themselves rather than to have their entire people destroyed.”
Zev wet his lips. “No!” he roared. “You dry bitch! No! I won’t kill myself to solve your problems. Before that, I’ll take a chance on hanging—and the lot of you with me!”
“Be quiet or I’ll end the problem right now.” Again Motke had drawn his revolver.
“Better take him out,” Avraham Halperin said to Young Avram. “Take Gershon with you and keep him in the cave until we decide.”
Zev obeyed, only casting back a last glance, murderous, lost.
They had to decide. If only Galil were here with his quick clear mind. “There are three alternatives, it seems to me,” Avraham the Secretary began ponderously.
Leah could not bear it; she went to the door. Suddenly Rahel jumped up and joined her, clutching her arm. “Decide without me,” Rahel mumbled to the men, almost sobbing. “I—I can’t be fair to him.”
Quiet lay over Gilboa; each man had gone to his labor, following the example of Avraham Halperin who continued with the task he had begun a few days before of manuring a harvested field. On the threshing floor, an old mule continued its endless circling with the grinding board, while Rahel, a keffiyah binding up her hair, joined Avraham’s wife, Guta, in winnowing the chaff. There was barely a breeze, the straw drifted down lazily and dust hovered in their eyes.
Leah worked with Dvora, carefully filling the water-troughs in the chicken-run. It was long since they had felt so sisterly. Dvora was pregnant again—just the start. Despite the difficult times, so were several more of the girls, Dvora said. For one thing, the kvutsa believed that with the population of the Yishuv shrinking, it was needed. And for herself, she always felt better when carrying. Yes, in regard to the children, she bore the arrangement better now, Dvoraleh said, the present metapelet was understanding of mothers and really tried hard not to have the children attach themselves to her. And after all, working here in the poultry run, she was quite close to the children’s house. And it was not as in their first infancy when, wherever she happened to be working, it was as though a magnet in her breast was drawing her back to her baby. Only—
—Only what? Leah wondered. How could she give Dvora an older sister’s advice when she sometimes sensed herself far from being a whole woman?
“Only, Leah, there’s something missing. It’s not like at home in a family when a child half the time is under your feet and you even want to give him a slap, and then he is so good you could eat him up, and it’s all one thing together. Yes, that’s it. Here, the children have their life and we have ours. You know, the monkeys, the older group has even started a kvutsa to imitate us. Nadina and Galil’s Buba started it—they hold sittings and send us resolutions and demands.” She laughed. “Their deepest life is together, with each other, their chevreh, and when they come to the parents in our hour for them, it’s almost like playacting. That’s what I sometimes feel.”
“Then could it be not the right way after all?” Leah asked of this way of life.
“Who knows?” Something of Dvoraleh’s girlish simplicity and wistfulness had returned, softening that tightening line of her mouth with its worry creases at the corners that had come from her constantly peering at her chicks for signs of the dread fowl diseases that periodically swept the flock. “You know, Leah, I’m all the time with my poultry,” her half-laugh rang out, “and sometimes I feel like I’ve become one of them, instead of a member in the kvutsa. I know which one pecks which one, better even than I know about my comrades.”
“Like I am with my flock of girls,” Leah said, at once feeling a need to get back to them.
“At least you are all day with your girls, they are human beings! Better than a flock of chickens! I pass my days here hardly saying a word to anyone, and I’m sure I’ll soon begin to cackle!”
“But after work, when you have the children—and Menahem—”
“Menahem is away so much. And even when he’s here, he’s always at a sitting, and you know I am really not one to take so much interest in discussions.” Dvora was confessing a kind of loneliness, Leah realized, that she herself sometimes also felt, even amongst her girls. It was the last thing you would have expected of life in a collectiva. Both sighed.
“Dvoraleh, it’s all right between you and Menahem?”
Only an instant the smile hovered uncertainly before widening. Yes, it was well. As though she had just measured and decided. Though Menahem was a strange man, with his silences. And indeed, intimately, woman to woman, Dvoraleh asked, just as if Leah, being older, indeed knew more of life, did any woman ever truly understand what was going on in a man?
So they worked on, and talked, as though to attest that all would continue, all their little problems would continue, this life would continue, as though thereby to exorcise the impending doom.
Yet at last night’s lengthy sitting the operating committee had spelled out the order of continuation: if Avraham Halperin were arrested, and if his replacement were arrested, and the third, down to the fifth … Several of the younger men had been sent into hiding, so that the farm was nearly denuded of males.
Still the Turk did not appear. The whole morning, not a rider on the road, not a wagon passed by with news. But by the back pathway from Merhavia came Nathan Ben Schmuel, son of their arrested mukhtar; the boy was hardly older than Dvoraleh’s Yechezkiel, and to Avraham Halperin he handed over a note. “Burn everything,” it said. And the boy added, “The Turks even seized our schoolbooks.”
As everyone came in for the noon meal, they gathered around a notice that Avraham had put up by the door. All Zionist documents, all letters, all membership cards and papers must be destroyed. Throughout the meal people kept running to Avraham with questions. Diaries? Diaries too. A precious complete file of Brenner’s Awakener? Yes, yes, everything. Because of the finding of such material, several of the men in Merhavia had been arrested. One of the girls asked, “Even love letters?” Avraham Halperin considered, then ruled solemnly, “As long as the Poale Zion, the Poël Hatzaïr, or anything Zionist, isn’t mentioned—?
Rahel was in a bewilderment of sorting. A whole satchel of Avner’s papers was open on her cot, notes he had made on trips through the Galilee in the old days when he could find time for such excursions and they had wandered on foot together to Arab villages, tracing Arab names to ancient Hebrew sources and wondering whether these were not families that, in the seventh century perhaps, had accepted the Moslem religion in order to survive, and, unlike the Marranos later in Spain, had lost all trace of their Jewish origin.
How could she burn Avner’s notes? “Let me take them, I’ll hide them at home,” Leah said.
Then there were old letters he had sent Rahel when she was still in Russia, about the movement, the problems, the party—there was no time to read them over to see which were dangerous, yet as something caught her eye, Rahel would stand there reading.
Dvora was more practical, piling together booklets, Menahem’s copies of brochures by Borochov, even Herzl’s portrait, even the poems of Bialik, a whole basket for the flames, keeping aside only her pamphlets about poultry, in the English that she had learned to read, though Leah pointed out that anything in English might be dangerous. And also, a pitifully thin packet of love letters, remnants of Yechezkiel …
Already the children were leaping about the fire. How can you keep a boy from enj
oying a bonfire, Rahel remarked, even if it is consuming your own youthtime? Chaverim kept running up to Avraham with letters, books: “Must I burn this too?” And then the four-year-olds, given things to fling into the flames, began dancing in a ring around the fire, and a crazed spirit of perversity, defiance, took hold of them all. Rahel joined hands with the tots, Leah joined hands with them, Dvoraleh with her little Yechezkiel and Giora. For the children, the chevreh made a game of it; let the fire burn. Better paper than the whole meshek! Let it burn, and Bahad-ad-Din and Hassan Bek and Djemal Pasha should burn in a fire too!
As night fell, three good horses were saddled; Menahem and Yaacov the Kurdi, a nephew of Shabbatai Zeira, a real bandit of a rider who knew from childhood every goatpath in the Galilee, took Zev between them, and all three with their faces half-covered by their keffiyahs rode northward by obscure pasture trails, avoiding the Nazareth region, passing through venerable olive groves, mounting onto the wilder rocky areas of upper Galilee, headed toward Har Tsafon. There let Shimshoni take him in charge and decide whether he might escape to the Druze on Mount Hermon.
And as the three men rode, the peaceful night-spell of the groves, the scent of the spent heat like dissipated anger, the presence of eternity in the stars, the breathing of their mounts, and the quiet exchange of knowing words about horses erased the pressing consciousness of their errand, until they were as a trio of the Shomer in the old days picking their path, perhaps discussing the ways of the Zubeida tribe whose sheep grazed these hills. It was from them Shimshoni had bought his first flock, but it was a mistake in Menahem’s opinion; these fat-tailed sheep were a poor profitless strain, and instead Australian sheep should be imported. Australian sheep were for the plains, Zev argued, but the Druze had an excellent mountain strain that might be blended with Zubeidas. Yaacov the Kurdi told of an old Zubeida sheikh, said to be a hundred and ten, who had purchased a bride of ten, not yet quite ready for use. “Never mind,” said the sheikh, “I am providing for my old age.”
