Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  He had a few of Dostoevsky’s novels in his satchel, and when he had any free time he would read Homer’s recounting of Odysseus’s adventures to Marinna.

  Kassia tried to make sure that Jacob had time for reading and study. She did not mind working from sunup till sundown, and when Jacob insisted that she should do something in a particular way, she listened to him, but if she did not agree then she argued with her husband until she brought him round to her point of view. Jacob always gave in because he knew in his heart that his wife preferred to be the one who took charge of the agricultural work; not because she was a peasant at heart, but because she was forcing herself to become one, and to listen to everything that Dina and Zaida could teach her.

  Dina and Zaida admired the blonde hair and blue eyes of Kassia and Marinna. It was an admiration that Mohammed also felt for Marinna. Much to Ahmed’s discontent, the two of them were inseparable.

  He did not approve of Kassia hitching up her skirt and showing her calves when she pulled up weeds. Neither did he welcome her undoing two or three buttons on her blouse when the weather was hot, or rolling up her sleeves and showing off her arms. He said nothing, but Samuel noticed how upset Ahmed was because he saw how he clenched his jaw and looked away. But the Lithuanian woman pretended not to understand, not because she was unintelligent, but because she had decided that the best way to avoid conflicts was to ignore Ahmed’s displeasure.

  It was clear to all of them that Marinna would become a beautiful woman. She had inherited her father’s slenderness, long legs, and delicate hands; from her mother she had blonde hair and deep blue eyes. But she also had something that her parents both lacked, an inherent sense of joy and the ability to empathize with all who surrounded her.

  Mohammed had told her that his father wanted him to become a doctor, and that he would be sent to Constantinople or even Cairo when the time came, and that he did not want to do this. Marinna consoled him, saying that she would become his assistant.

  Samuel got along with Jacob and Kassia immediately, and also became friends with Louis, but it was harder for him to strike up a friendship with Ariel, a coarse worker from Moscow.

  Louis was the son of a French bon vivant who had impregnated a young Jewish woman. Louis’s father had a fairly important job and had traveled all over Russia, and in Moscow he had met the woman who would become Louis’s mother. He was staying with some friends and came home one evening with his face aglow. He had bumped into a young woman in the street; she was extremely beautiful, or so he assured his host. Obsessed with her, he decided to stay in Moscow until he could strike up a relationship with her. It was not easy, but in the end the young woman could not resist the attentions of the charming and gallant Frenchman. He seduced her, and by the time she realized this she was already pregnant. Of course, they could not get married, but he promised to take care of the child. He bought a modest house where he installed both mother and son. He visited them at least once a year, until one year when he didn’t come. Louis’s mother explained to her son that his father had married a woman of the same social position as him and that he would not come to see them again. Luckily he did not abandon them completely, and his mother breathed a sigh of relief to have money sent to them. She could not give her son the education she would have wished for him, but “at least,” she said, “you speak French. It’s a good thing that your father always spoke to you in his own language.”

  Louis was tall, dark, and strong. He was younger than Samuel, no more than twenty-five, and had a simple and direct faith in socialism, as did Ariel, whom he had met in the factory in Moscow.

  Samuel asked himself how it was possible that Ariel and Louis could be friends, as they couldn’t be any more different. But Louis felt an obvious devotion toward Ariel, whom he considered to be his political mentor. It was Ariel who had opened his eyes to socialism, who had told him that he should not resign himself to being little more than the tsar’s serf, who had insisted that their problem was not that they were Jews, but that Russia was in the hands of insensitive and spendthrift aristocrats, and that the day would come when peasants and workers alike would rebel without caring about anyone’s religion. But in the end they had given in to despair and decided to follow the footsteps of the Bilu, that group of young men from Kharkov who had decided to leave Russia and look for their old homeland, Palestine, the country from which their ancestors had been expelled. They saved a few rubles and began their adventure, which took them all the way to the port of Jaffa.

  Samuel visited Abraham every week. The doctor had become a good friend, and bought his medicines as well. Samuel had also made friends with Abraham’s son, Yossi, and with Yossi’s wife, Judith. Samuel liked to hear Judith and Rachel speak in Ladino.

  “My daughter-in-law and I are Spanish,” Rachel said with pride.

  Rachel never stopped fussing over Samuel, and he liked to hear the story of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain and who had found accommodation in the Ottoman Empire.

  “We have nothing to blame the Turks for. When my ancestors came to Thessaloniki they were able to have a home again. Many Jews have had influence close to the Sublime Porte; the sultans have learned to trust them. Ah, Thessaloniki! You really should see it.”

  Abraham smiled to see his wife’s enthusiasm; it was impossible to stop her when she started to talk about Sepharad.

  “We are from Daroca, near Zaragoza, our house is there and we will go back there one day,” Rachel assured him as she pointed out on an old map the city in Aragon where her ancestors had lived. “They were wrong to expel us from our homes; Sultan Bayezid knew how to take advantage of the skills of our artisans, the intelligence of our scholars, the energy of our merchants. He was happy for us to settle in Thessaloniki and he looked after us. Did you know that it was our ancestors who made the uniforms for the janissaries, the elite troops in the sultan’s army? That was how much he trusted us. He even taxed the merchants. We were more active than the rest of the Jews from other places, and Thessaloniki became almost like a Spanish city.”

  “It is not the Muslims we should fear, but the Christians,” Judith added. “They are the ones who have persecuted us and accused us of the most horrendous crimes. The Ottomans have never wanted to convert us, or for us to abandon our religion, they respect us because we have the same prophets and a single God. My family had to flee from Toledo. My parents have told me that their grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents settled in Thessaloniki as well, and prospered there freely. One of my ancestors even worked in the Royal Archives at the Sublime Porte in Constantinople.”

  Both mother-in-law and daughter-in-law had open and cheerful characters, and Samuel knew that he was welcome in that house, where Rachel always insisted that he share in the tasty Spanish meals she prepared. Samuel particularly liked pan de España, a cake made with almonds whose recipe Rachel had inherited from her mother, who had inherited it from her own mother, and so on back through the generations.

  “You should look for a wife and get married,” Abraham advised Samuel.

  But he could not follow this advice: Irina’s face always appeared in his mind.

  Irina wrote to him regularly, as did Marie and Mikhail. He also exchanged letters with his friends Konstantin Goldanski and Joshua, who kept him informed about the situation in Saint Petersburg.

  It was a stroke of luck for Marie that Irina and Mikhail lived with her. Irina was the daughter that she had never had, and Mikhail was the grandson she had so long desired. And that was how she treated them, although Irina complained that she spoiled Mikhail.

  Marie asked him to come back to Paris and settle things once and for all by asking Irina to marry him. Samuel did not dare do so. Irina’s letters were friendly and polite, but not a single word in them suggested she missed him. He did not fool himself, he knew that she was not in love with him, and that she was happy in the unexpected life that she had found alongside M
arie.

  One afternoon while he was visiting Abraham, the doctor asked him to put up a group of Jews recently arrived from Russia.

  “They came here a few days ago, running away from a failed attempt at a revolution. They need a place to live, just as you did when you came here six years ago.”

  Samuel trembled. He had been living in Palestine for almost six years now and the news had reached Jerusalem that there had been an uprising against the tsar in 1905, which had been crushed mercilessly. In one of his letters, Konstantin Goldanski had told him what had happened:

  Our defeat by the Japanese was too humiliating. Lots of our friends thought that the war was senseless, but how to avoid it? We couldn’t stop confronting Japan, but it turned into a disaster. They signed a peace treaty thanks to the influence of the United States, a country with a future. But the Treaty of Portsmouth, which is what they called it, obliged us to hand over Liaoyang and Port Arthur, as well as over half of Sakhalin and Dongbei Pingyuan in Manchuria. Can you imagine a worse catastrophe? All this fed popular resentment and the revolutionaries are taking advantage of it. There are uprisings everywhere. The worst happened on so-called Bloody Sunday, a bloodbath caused by the Cossacks of the Imperial Guard when a crowd gathered in front of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg and were fired upon in the name of the tsar. What a terrible mistake! There were two hundred deaths and there will be consequences for so much bloodshed.

  Samuel was worried by Konstantin’s letters, even though he had little time to think as he worked the land. Suddenly he realized that he was thirty-four years old, his hands roughened by the plow. His face had lost its former pallor and was tanned by the sun and the wind. He said nothing to Abraham, but he felt frustrated that none of his wishes had come true. Sometimes he felt as if he were an automaton, as if the life he were living was not his own because his true life had stayed forever in Saint Petersburg.

  “They can come to be with us and stay for as long as they want. How many are they?”

  “The group I’ve mentioned is a large one. But some have already decided to head off to Galilee, where there are some farms. Others are going to set themselves up on the coast, which is where the authorities create fewer problems for buying land. But the people who will stay in Jerusalem, at least for a while, will need some work.”

  “We have cultivated a large part of the land that we bought from Saïd Aban, and there is scarcely enough left to work, but if Louis, Jacob, and Ariel agree then they can stay with us.”

  “Don’t forget to ask Kassia, she’ll have the last word,” Abraham said with a smile.

  He smiled back. Abraham was right, Kassia was the soul of the strange community in which they lived, and none of the four men would have dared contradict her.

  Samuel felt immediately sympathetic to the group that Abraham presented. Seven men and four women who said that they were socialists, and who had miraculously survived the tsar’s implacable persecution since the failed revolution of 1905.

  “You can’t imagine what it looked like, thousands of men drawn up into columns, marching toward Siberia,” one of the men said.

  “The tsar is more powerful than ever,” another one stated.

  “We have had the worst of it. There were pogroms in Kiev, in Kishinev . . . Hundreds of Jews were killed,” a woman added.

  “The worst is that we did nothing to defend ourselves. Why do we Jews let ourselves be killed? Why do we hide and wait for our persecutors’ rage to die out, wait for them to forget about us?”

  The man who said these words was named Nikolai, and appeared to be the leader of the group. Nikolai was a writer, or at least he had made his living up to this point by writing for Hebrew publications. He took some papers out of his pocket and handed them to Samuel.

  “Read it, it’s a poem by Bialik. Do you know Bialik?”

  Samuel did not know who Bialik was, but he read the poem, which was called “In the City of the Slaughter.”

  “Bialik regrets the same thing we ourselves regret, Jewish passivity in the face of the massacres to which we are subjected simply for being Jews. Read it, read what this poem says. If we do nothing, the rest of the world will do nothing, too. Our cowardice will not awaken anyone’s conscience.”

  “You can’t ask for heroic gestures. It’s enough just surviving,” Samuel replied.

  “You say that to me, you who had to flee yourself? Abraham has told us that you lost your family, your mother and your brother and sister and then your father.”

  “If that had not happened I would never have left Russia. Not one day goes by that I don’t miss Saint Petersburg. I am a foreigner here.”

  “A foreigner? You’re mad! This is the land of our ancestors, we were expelled from here and should not have allowed it. We have never been equal with the others, not in Russia, not in Germany, not in France, not in Italy, not in England . . . Jews, that’s what we are, and here is where we should be.”

  “Try to make sure the Turkish police doesn’t hear you saying that. Palestine is a part of the Turkish empire. Don’t deceive yourself, we have swapped one empire for another, nothing more. This land was ours, and now it is no longer ours, and it is better for you if you accept that.”

  “I thought that Sultan Abdülhamid thought kindly of our cause. Didn’t he meet with Theodor Herzl?”

  “Herzl was in Constantinople in 1901 to see the sultan, who was apparently friendly, but nothing more. The document Herzl wanted the Turkish government to sign was a decree that the Jewish people would be allowed to settle in Palestine without restrictions. But it was not signed. The Turks can put up as many impediments as they wish, and they don’t seem keen on allowing Jewish immigrants to come en masse. Herzl died without achieving his ambition, and David Wolffsohn, the new head of the Zionist Organization, has had the same lack of success with the Turkish government.”

  Nikolai believed Theodor Herzl to be the greatest of men. He sincerely admired this Hungarian journalist, who never lived like a Jew even though he was one, and who was a witness to the rise in Austrian anti-Semitism during the period when he studied law in Vienna. Fate caused him to abandon his dream of being a lawyer and made him become a journalist for a Viennese newspaper. He moved to Paris and covered the Dreyfus trial. If France could accuse one of her officers of treason simply for the fact of being a Jew, what hope was there?

  Samuel’s words fell on stony ground. Nikolai did not listen to them, and neither did the rest of the group.

  “The time has come for us Jews to stop running away, to stop behaving like cowards, to go home, and that is why we are here. Also, we can show here in Palestine that socialism is possible. Russia is dying.” Nikolai’s eyes shone with rage.

  “Russia is eternal,” Samuel replied angrily.

  “What do you know about it! If you had seen Gorky’s play The Lower Depths . . . Do you know it? At the Moscow Art Theatre the audience couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Gorky has put on the stage a world of which the tsars and the aristocrats know nothing.”

  The group was made welcome at Hope Orchard, as Samuel and his friends now called the lands that they had bought from Saïd Aban.

  Jacob and Nikolai got on immediately, and Ariel and Louis started to try to find accommodation for everyone, while Kassia told the women about the hardships of life on the land.

  “You have to work all hours of the day and night to get anything to grow here. We don’t even keep the Sabbath. We need to earn our bread just as the men do.”

  “And when have things ever been different? I remember my mother working from sunup to sundown, looking after the family, keeping the accounts, while my father studied the Talmud,” a woman replied with a smile. She said her name was Olga and that she was Nikolai’s wife.

  “As for safety . . . We are lucky here, but we’ve heard of other farms where people have been beaten by their neighbors,” Kassia explain
ed.

  “Beaten? But why?” a young woman, barely out of adolescence, asked.

  “Rivalry between neighbors . . . ,” Kassia said.

  She told them that a group of Jews were planting a vineyard on the plains of Rishon LeZion, and that there were other places where they grew oranges. There were a number of farmsteads spread out over this patch of ground between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Farms whose owners were Jews like them and where the main danger was malaria.

  The new arrivals tried to adapt themselves to the environment. Under Ariel’s direction, they built another house. Louis and Samuel explained to them the types of crop that grew best in this arid land.

  It was not easy for them. None of them were farmers, or even manual laborers. None of them had ever seen a hoe before. But they did not protest. They bit their lips and followed Samuel’s orders.

  Ahmed was made uneasy by the arrival of these Jews who cultivated the little remaining spare land for themselves.

  Samuel tried to calm him down.

  “Are they going to stay forever?” Ahmed wanted to know.

  “I don’t know, we’ll see. But you don’t need to worry, they won’t upset you or your family.”

  Ahmed said nothing, but Samuel noticed that he was uncomfortable.

  “Some of them say that they want to go north, others that they want to stay here. They don’t have anywhere to go, we have to help them,” Samuel explained.