by Meyer Levin
He even made a plan. One day he would come still earlier and surprise Menahem with a visit inside. But his uncle saw his thought. After the troubles were over, Menahem said, Mati could come here one day and try it.
Mati knew it was because of the spies that Menahem had to be hidden, and that Leah had had to leave quickly, though they did not belong to the spies. The secret name was the Nili. The chief was Zev the Hotblood. With Schmulik, Mati discussed it—if Zev should come here, would they hide him?
“Don’t talk stupidities,” Schmulik replied.
“We hid him in the stove, the other time.”
“He wasn’t a spy then. He was a shomer.”
“Maybe he will come here to hide. What would we do?”
“He won’t come here.”
If Zev was hiding up in a cave, would they bring him food and water?
“If the Turks caught you, they’d hang you.”
“Even the Turks don’t hang children.”
Schmulik snorted and muttered a dirty curse, the way he did when he couldn’t find an answer.
“Who are we for, the Turks or the English?” Mati demanded at last.
“We’re for ourselves.”
“If you knew where Zev was, would you tell?”
“Idiot!” his brother growled.
When Azmani Bey came, it was first to the kvutsa, and Yaffaleh happened to be there; she had come to borrow a salve for mule-sores. The Turks came clattering into the yard; before the Kaymakam’s carriage rode Hassan Bek himself on a black horse—she knew him from what everyone said. With his glittering uniform, his sneering face, this could be no one else than the terrifying Bek who tortured prisoners until they killed themselves, as Sara Aaronson had done. And after the Kaymakam’s carriage rode eight gendarmes. Like the time they came for the conscription. But this time was surely worse.
Instantly, HaKeren was in turmoil. The eight soldiers seemed a whole army, they stomped into every dwelling, into the barn, drove their swords into the hay, shouted, reviled. Rushing past Nahama into the children’s house, they brandished their pistols even at the infants.
Every male had to come and stand in the yard. Watching from the kitchen, Yaffaleh saw the prophet-like Old Gordon— She had read his writings in the Poël Hatzaïr; Gordon was against all wars, and a vegetarian like Reuven. He had a thick, tangled grayish beard like Tateh’s, and as the Old One walked calmly across the yard, Yaffaleh herself saw how a soldier planted a kick to send him stumbling, then laughed. Gordon picked himself up without looking at the soldier and went to stand with the others.
The Bek was cursing them all, spies, traitors, every last one of them would hang in Damascus unless they produced the escaped Zev and every last Nili spy. Hoisted out of his carriage, the Belly too stood in front of the chaverim; from Max Wilner he demanded where was this one, that one—he knew them all by name.
“Conscripted for labor duty, you took them yourself,” Max Wilner replied, again and again. Even Reuven, she heard the Kaymakam ask for.
“But he volunteered—he is working directly under Djemal Pasha’s orders, in Damascus.”
“You have arms. Where are they hidden?”
“Only the two rifles permitted for our watchmen.”
“And twenty more, not permitted. You received them from the Shomer. They were bought with gold from the Nili.”
“If we had arms you would have found them.”
Behind the kitchen, Max Wilner’s chavera, Hemda, pushed a large bowl of potato peelings into Yaffaleh’s hands. “Here, quick, take this slop and feed the chickens.” As Yaffaleh took hold of it, the bowl by its weight nearly fell through her grasp, and at once she understood. Walking to the chicken run, she scattered a few peelings, while careful not to uncover the grenades. No one had followed her. Yaffaleh hid the grenades under straw, let the hens hatch them. Now she must run to Mishkan Yaacov to give warning.
“What’s befallen?” Feigel cried, though she knew. Feigel always knew beforehand, and taking the jar of salve that Yaffaleh still carried, she set it aside and began to prepare for their coming—honey-cake, and the few eggs she had saved, allowing herself only the solace of curses: may they swallow their own teeth and may their teeth devour their stomachs, she cursed; while she furiously ladled out honey: may a swarm of live bees inhabit their throats; and as she uncovered real butter: let her last morsel be sacrificed to the Belly and perhaps he would not take Tateh away.
Already the news flew and the anxious villagers rushed into their yards and out of their yards, the terrified wives called and sent children with messages. Bronescu came out into the street wearing his tarboosh and begged for calm. Since Roumania had finally entered the war on the side of the Allies, he and all the others had become Ottomanized.
Feigel kept Yaffaleh in the kitchen with her, and from the window Yaffaleh saw them coming just as she had seen them entering HaKeren, the Bek on his black steed, the Kaymakam’s carriage behind him, and the rows of mounted gendarmes.
Bronescu welcomed them to the feast already spread. The table was waiting, he said with a flourish, good news of such guests travels on the wind beforehand. —We are old friends, loyal subjects, he called the fat Kaymakam to witness; whatever must be done we shall accept and remain loyal. If there are traitors in the land we will be the first to help hunt them out!
The Bek dismounted, glancing at Bronescu and the villagers with suspicion but as yet without rage, showing that a civilized man does not respond with barbarity to a hospitable greeting, but that a proud Ottoman is not to be deceived with servile flattery, either. Let every man be brought before him, he commanded.
“Some are in your service with their wagons at the station, and the rest are in the fields harvesting grain for your army.”
“Grain to hide from us! No Jewish tricks! Bring them here!” He motioned toward the Kaymakam, who had a ledger on his knees. “Every last one is written down in his book.”
A chortle came from the Belly. Already, Azmani Bey was lifting to his mouth a slice of Feigel’s white bread thickly laden with chopped eggs and onions. “Oh, I know this village well,” he said. “The fat of the land is here, milk and honey!” And turning to Bronescu, “Your Jewel, as you call him, he was shomer in this village. Your women used to hide him from their husbands, eh—! But you won’t be able to hide him from us!”
“We drove him out, Azmani Bey, you know it—he was nearly the end of us—this is the last place he would come to, God forbid it!”
“Tea in the middle of the night,” the Kaymakam’s voice rose to a sly, obscene giggle as he said to the Bek, “Better take the women for questioning too! And what about his wife’s family? He was married here!”
“His wife has long ago left here, as you know, your honor,” Bronescu smiled.
Just then, Feigel brought another pitcher of cool buttermilk for the soldiers, and the Belly called out to her, “What of your daughter, the big one? Where is she?”
“In the south where she lives,” Feigel said firmly.
“And your son-in-law, Menahem the shomer? Where is that one? He was not found in Gilboa. Where the devil is that devil hiding, eh?”
Hassan Bek himself was now glaring at Feigel. “I know nothing of Menahem’s whereabouts,” she replied calmly. “But I can tell you where is my oldest son Reuven. He is in Damascus in the service of Djemal Pasha.”
Yankel was brought in just then, two soldiers with the noses of their rifles prodding him from the field; he carried his scythe over his shoulder. Behind the soldiers came the two boys, Schmulik too with his scythe; all the way from the field he had kept muttering to Mati, with one stroke he could slice the legs off them!
A dozen men of the village were taken away, Yankel among them, and even the melamed. Beseeching and wailing, their women ran to Bronescu, to the Kaymakam; they kept calling, each to her man, in Roumanian, in Yiddish. Who knew if they would ever see each other again, each called, and each begged her man not to make a hero of himself, not to
do anything foolish, and the men kept calling back instructions for the livestock, and to whom to go for help in worst need. And so the little band was marched away. Who knew why this one had been seized and not that one? a golden napoleon squeezed into a fat palm, a jar of goose-fat from Golde Roitschuler as the Belly was hoisted back into his carriage.
The Bek sprang onto his horse.
The women clustered around Bronescu. No, no, it would not be like in Zichron, he reassured them, gold had passed, perhaps the men might have to remain a few nights in Tiberias, but surely they would not be dragged to Damascus. He himself would go to Tiberias tomorrow, he would speak to his friend Azmani Bey, once the Bek had departed; the Belly was not so evil, it was only a show he had had to make for the Bek.
Still they besieged him. The melamed’s wife worried, her husband needed certain pills—yes, Bronescu would take them to Tiberias himself. They followed him into his house, and to each Bronescu promised all would be well. He promised.
Feigel sat in her corner. The children had never seen her exactly this way; Mameh was sobbing. When Yankel had been sent off with his wagon as far as Beersheba to serve the Turks, she had only cursed them with a wife’s curse, and packed hard-boiled eggs for him, and even cursed the fate that had turned her eyes to Zion when her sister begged her to come to America. What devil had entered into her? It was she more than Yankel—in her longing for Reuven and Leah, she had dragged the family to the bottom of the world, here. But now Feigel sat bereft of her last strength, she sat and let sobs come. —A stubborn man he has been to me, she was keening, as though certain she would see him no more. —And to our children he has been hard. But though his sons are good boys and good workers, what joy have they given him? “If he never comes back to us,” Feigel suddenly admonished Schmulik with a trembling voice, “you will remember that each of you left his ways, you did not follow the ways of your father, that you betrayed his beliefs, and what good is it to a father to have sons who do not follow him, and daughters who do not listen to him? He is a pious man, and even I did not help him to bring his children to follow him—”
Then, all at once, with a little gasp, Feigel leaped up from her chair, her energy returned in one burst. “His tfillim! They took him away without his tfillim and his tallis!” Darting to the shelf, she seized the embroidered bag.
Feigel scanned her remaining children. Something told her not to send a boy. Yaffaleh would have to go. “Yaffaleh, Tateh won’t rest without them.” This could not wait for Bronescu’s journey tomorrow. Surely a few other women would be setting out, and Yaffaleh must go with them. She must also go to her sister, to Shula in Tiberias—the Bagelmachers had influence with the Kaymakam. “You’ll go, Yaffaleh. Be careful.”
28
AFTER THE iron-barred door closed upon them, the conjectures and disputes ended. Be still, shah, one had to listen to the stones, to listen, yet without wanting to hear how bad would be the shrieking. But not a sound came through the black stones. The curses on Zev, on the Nili, started up again. Where had they taken Tibor, the first to be questioned? What would they do to a man? How long—
Until Tibor was flung stumbling back against their bodies into the crowded cell. His mouth was bloodied, but still Tibor wore a twist of his habitual ironic grin—he had endured. Those same two butchers did it, Tibor said, the two who dragged you out from here. It was before the Belly himself. Azmani Bey sat and questioned as though not seeing what they were inflicting on you. First, kicking, cuffings, a fist on the mouth. Also the whip, a rider’s whip. No, not to him on the feet. On the back. On a bench the Belly had there. Seven, he had received. About the railway station in Samekh, the Belly demanded. When you worked there with mules, to whom did you tell how many trains and what was in the trains? Such things. Then about Zev.
Others took longer to return. Some were thrown back into the dungeon, their feet bloodied. Some were sobbing. On the wall-bench, the men laid out the worst beaten. Old Gordon hurried to each one, “It will pass, it will pass, you see for you it is already over and done with, and the pain will pass.”
There came a long interval. Would no more be called out? Was it finished?
The Kaymakam had gone to his meal. Let the Belly feed all night long. Perhaps they would be left in peace until morning. Perhaps Zev would be captured somewhere and the tortures would be over.
Already a yellow-eyed jailer had “received,” and small bundles, packets of food, candles, messages, even Yankel’s tfillim bag had been thrust into the stone chambers.
Yankel sought a corner and recited the benedictions. Behind him he heard them starting their chalutz songs. They were gathered around Gordon, and it was their Hagalili they were singing, the way Leah sometimes sang it on the stoop of a Sabbath, when first the girls, then Gidon used to join, in the days when the children had all still been at home. Sometimes, just like the men here now in the cell, they would go over to Hillel’s song, “Im ain ani li, mi li”—“If I’m not for myself, who will be for me?” It had been a joy to his soul to lie quietly after the Sabbath meal and hear them on the stoop, knowing Feigel had admonished the children to sing low so as not to disturb Tateh in his nap.
The chalutzim were gathered around their philosopher, Gordon; at first Yankel resented the man, their Tolstoy, their sage, also a vegetarian, from whose writings Leah was always reading out loud with sighs of enjoyment and smackings of her lips, and Reuven too was one of those who sat at his feet in their collectiva. A man whose fame was that in his elder years he had come to Eretz to labor with his hands. Then what was the great wonder of it? Had not he, Yankel, done the same? —An aristocrat, a learned man, a relative of Baron Ginsberg, no less, the richest Jew in Russia. And behold Gordon leaves his entire family there, and comes to Eretz to be a simple laborer on the soil. —And is there more virtue in leaving your family behind than in bringing them with you to Eretz? But he must not be unjust, Yankel told himself, for later, he had heard, Gordon had brought over his wife and children, and there had been tragedy, sickness, the wife had died.
From song to song the chalutzim continued, and now, even as sometimes with the children at home, Yankel heard the low, plaintive, familiar melody, “Eliyahu Ha-Navi,” the Sabbath song of longing for the Mashiach. Even with their atheism, they had turned it into a song for themselves. Oh, let Elijah come already, bring Mashiach, it was time. They were strange, these godless children; in the midst of their godlessness, they were Jews.
In the candle-flicker, Yankel saw Old Gordon standing before him with half-opened lips and a half-smile on his face, the simple curiosity and friendliness of Jew to Jew, as though to say, “Well, and how goes it with a fellow Yid?”
“I know your sons, I know your daughters, Reb Chaimovitch, I’ve heard you have a fine meshek. Nu, it’s good for us to meet at last, though not in the best of places!”
To Yankel’s own surprise, a lively response rose to his lips. “Why not? If Jews no longer come together in the synagogue, even a prison is good if it brings them together.”
A prolonged shivering moan arose from a body stretched on the bench, and Gordon quietly remarked, “If God hears prayers, they will reach his ears from here as well as from the house of prayer.”
“He hears, he hears,” Yankel said. “Only we, we don’t hear, and heed.”
The other man’s eyes met his with a kind of warmth and patience that made Yankel reflect, if this Gordon were not so mixed up with the unbelievers, you could take him for a tzaddik. “No, we don’t always heed,” Gordon agreed. And just then the Belly’s two tormenters plunged in amongst them anew, and glared from the one graybeard to the other. “The old one!” they commanded.
“It must be for me,” Gordon said; before Yankel could move, he stepped out.
Now complete silence fell.
When the door again opened, he was being dragged by the two guards; they cast him in, and the men caught him in their arms. His sandals were thrown in, and the bolt was heard across the door.
&nbs
p; Gordon’s beard was matted with spittle and blood; his bare feet flamed from the bastinado. But as the chaverim carefully placed him on a pallet of sacking, he gasped, “You see it’s not so dreadful. A few blows and it’s over. A Jew can endure.”
—And if they demanded of Yankel where was his son-in-law Menahem the shomer? —God seal my tongue, Yankel prayed; his turn had come.
* * * *
Distantly, from his cave, Menahem had seen the movements from HaKeren, from Kinnereth, and then in Mishkan Yaacov. He had seen that there were arrested ones led away. None at the kvutsoth were burdened with knowledge of his hiding place. Leah knew, but only about the first cave, and she was far off. Also the boys knew. Yankel was not to have known, but perhaps, in his way, Yankel knew. Let it be. But who, who had now been taken? In his mind Menahem went over each chaver in each kvutsa. It was useless to speculate nor could he go down even in the night to find out. The Belly was sly and might have left a gendarme behind for just such an occasion. He must still wait.
Waiting and solitude were part of his life, but never yet had he passed so long a time unbroken, except for the moments with young Mati. And perhaps tonight because of the turmoil even the boy would not come. No. Mati was already a chevrehman; no matter what, he would come.
At the rear of the cave was a ledge cut in the stone, in what remote century, who could tell? Menahem lay there in a kind of half-trance he had taught himself long ago when passing the nights on watch. His mind roved, making distant plans. Clearly now all was broken—the Shomer, the Yishuv. But one must think beyond. In a month, in a year, the Turks would be defeated and the English would rule here. From the vast outer silences of the world, one nevertheless caught echoes of the great waves of events. The great thrusting wave first generated by the Germans against Paris had fallen short. Then the great wave generated by the British against Constantinople had fallen short. Twice the Turks along with the Germans had stormed against the canal, and fallen short; twice the British had stormed against Gaza and fallen short. Last, in Europe, the Germans had mustered their fullest strength and stormed again against Paris, but left the goal unreached. And from where would they renew their strength? From the Russian front? There, it was said, they had plunged far, and every barrier was gone, and yet this had not availed. Through the whole length of Jewish habitation, as it happened, from Danzig to Odessa, they had swept. But could they regather this spread-out energy? Meanwhile on the other side there was an inexhaustible new ocean of strength, for the Americans were coming. Thus the final, conquering wave would have to be that of the Allies; no matter how long it took, no matter what back-and-forth movements still took place, this last added strength would conquer. On this he must calculate. The Allies would rule here. And then what was left of the Yishuv must gather itself together and rebuild itself. Waves of new energy must come, and this time fully build the land. There would be no more restrictions, no more barriers, no more need for coming into the land by stealth; the great dream would at last be realized.
