by Nava Semel
“How do you know the horse misses me, Mohammed?” There were times when I was suspicious too. Mohammed said, “Sometimes I whisper into his ear, and sometimes he whispers back to me. But nobody ever sees it. It’s our secret.”
The sting inside me was still burning, and I blocked the entrance to the toolshed. Mohammed wanted to help me organize the equipment for the winter, but I said no. He was a little surprised, but didn’t say anything.
“Are you cold?” he asked, worried, and was already taking off his kaffiyeh so he could wrap me up in it. “What prank did you play today, my little Aza’ar? Did you hide Zionka’s duck in the toolshed?”
I trembled, and slowly pulled the door of the shed until it slammed.
“There’s a story about the leader of the village, the mukhtar,” Mohammed said. “His horse knew how to speak, but opened his mouth only in the presence of his master. When there were other people around, the horse would whinny and neigh. Nobody believed the mukhtar had a talking horse. Behind his back, they lamented, our mukhtar is mad, he sees things. Allah be praised.”
Johnny Weissmuller listened to the story too, crouched at Mohammed’s feet, looking up at him with moist eyes. I thought Mohammed was the best person to make up new stories for the Johnny Weissmuller in the movies. You didn’t have to know how to write. You just had to close your eyes and the pictures moved.
Mohammed kept on spinning his tale, and I was watching a movie.
“The mukhtar was furious. One day, when he was out riding his horse in the olive grove, he complained to his horse, ‘Why do you humiliate me this way? Why don’t you open your mouth and talk when other people are around?’ The horse said, ‘When people are convinced of something, they won’t believe anything else, even if they see it with their own eyes. Even if I talk to them with words as sweet as honey, they will hear only whinnies and neighs’.”
We heard Johnny Weissmuller gurgle with pleasure. He was fascinated. I suddenly saw a hand petting him. We didn’t hear Anna’s steps. We didn’t know she’d come outside. She was close, snuggling my dog in her arms, watching the two of us, and she said, “I’m listening to the sounds of the language. I’m sure it’s a lovely story.”
Mohammed shook her hand and asked me to translate.
“It really happened,” he explained to Anna, “and that isn’t the end of the story. The mukhtar had a daughter, an innocent girl with eyes like gray velvet. She was the only one who believed her father. Although she had never heard the horse speak, and she had no proof that the mukhtar’s claim was true, she felt that her father was not wrong.”
Anna was enchanted. Later, she said that listening to Mohammed was like reading a book. She tried very hard to understand his language. For a minute, I thought she had succeeded in catching a word or two.
Mohammed said, and I translated, “You have acted wisely. It is good that you have come to Palestine. The child is ill. He should be taken care of. He is an orphan. You will be ‘the mother of Uzik’.”
Mohammed was the first person to praise Anna for her decision to come to Palestine. I thought that, in her heart of hearts, she thanked him, and maybe was encouraged. After that, she called me “Mukhtar.”
Mohammed tied his kaffiyeh around my head. It was wide, and its ends reached the ground. The chills were gone. The sting inside me had been removed without my feeling it.
Mohammed was about to leave. I didn’t believe for a minute that his story had really happened. I’m not a gullible young girl with gray velvet eyes who believes everything like a blind bee. If dead people don’t answer when you ask them a question, and they were once people, how could a horse talk?
Anna had become sad too. Maybe because she hadn’t believed her father and left her house against his wishes.
I ran after Mohammed. I wanted to return his kaffiyeh. He wouldn’t take it. “In the spring, with God’s help, when you come to visit my village,” and he pointed to Anna too.
Chapter 13
“Tell me, rabbi, how many times is a person allowed to get married and divorced?”
“The Almighty, blessed be His name, didn’t say. He left it up to each individual man and woman.”
“And it’s all right with Him, rabbi, for you to lie, even if it’s only to the English and for the sake of the homeland? After all, it does say in the Torah ‘Thou shalt not give false testimony’.”
The teapot fell over. The boiling water spilled onto the Aunt Miriam’s best tablecloth.
We were sitting in the living room. The rabbi was holding his weekly cup of tea, complimenting Aunt Miriam as if she had prepared a special drink. Aunt Miriam jumped up. She screamed as if a wasp were flying around inside her, and she didn’t notice the stain that was spreading onto the carpet too.
“How dare you, you little smart-aleck? Is that a way to talk to a great biblical scholar? Your mother, may she rest in peace, should only forgive me. Her youngest child is driving me to distraction.”
The rabbi tried to calm her down.
“Uziel is right. There is a point to his question. I will answer you, my boy. A rabbi is like any other person, and he will have to give an accounting of his deeds, like any other sinner.”
A rabbi who sins?
I hoped my mother and father weren’t being punished in heaven now. I’d like to postpone my own day of judgment, because, seeing a list of pranks like mine, even the Almighty, blessed be His name, might collapse.
I had another urgent question to ask the rabbi. Like Aharonchik the baker, the rabbi said that all people are equal, although I wasn’t sure they were both talking about the same people and the same equality.
“Tell me, rabbi, if all people are equal, does that make God a communist?”
It was a good thing Aunt Miriam had left the room and didn’t hear the question. The rabbi smiled, though. He said it wasn’t important what you called Him, God was still God.
I looked at the rabbi as he spoke. He had a long beard and curled side locks. He wore a velvet hat over his black skullcap, and the wrinkles on his forehead got deeper every day. My thoughts wandered. I could see people I knew, but they were so different. They had nothing in common. The rabbi and me, for example. Imagine him sitting with his legs folded under him, listening to Mohammed’s fairy tales about mukhtars and talking horses. Ridiculous. Or maybe getting down on his knees and proposing marriage to Aunt Miriam, an idea so far-fetched that I laughed to myself. And there were other strange pictures in my mind. Zionka’s mother dancing a tango with Meir, the charming butcher, and Aharonchik singing the “Internationale” without anyone interrupting him, and Anna humming Arabic music that Fahtma, Mohammed’s sister, taught her. And the English pilot, who I couldn’t connect to anything except to Aunt Miriam and five o’clock tea, which meant that if you try hard enough, you can find some kind of connection between people who are complete opposites. Take Johnny Weissmuller, in the movies. I liked him a lot more than Tarzan, who was an English lord, but there was no way I could break the connection between the two. And sometimes thoughts passed through my mind that I could never tell anyone, especially not Aunt Miriam or the rabbi. Maybe God, may His name be blessed, is also “fictitious,” and we just don’t know it?
Anna was out taking a walk. She usually left the house when the rabbi came for his weekly visit. I sometimes thought he reminded her of something she would rather forget. Lately, she would wrap herself in the old coat Aunt Miriam took out of my mother’s closet, and go out of the house. She’d buried the fur coat from Poland at the bottom of her trunk. She walked in the fields and apple orchards, examined the silk worms on the mulberry trees, and picked tangerines in Alter’s groves. She once came back full of mosquito bites, and another time, she was all scratched up by thorns, but nothing could make her give up those walks. Yesterday, she came home dripping wet, saying she’d tried to drink the raindrops to see whether the rain here tasted different than it did in Lutsk. Aunt Miriam gave her a funny look and handed her Imri’s towel. Anna walked all th
e way to the gate of the English air force base. I saw the silhouette of a man on a horse, watching her from the other side, but I couldn’t tell who it was. She sometimes went up to the barbed wire, and they would speak quietly.
Anna saw our countryside with the eyes of a foreigner, so I suddenly saw it differently too, noticing details that had escaped me. The way the sky changed in winter and the clouds gathered like bees in a hive, and the color of Zionka’s eyes when her mother was mad at her.
I was born here, like Mohammed, like Imri, so everything seemed natural to me. But if I’d suddenly landed in Poland, I would probably check out all the things that seemed natural to the Poles, and I would definitely get excited about a forest I’d never seen before, or about animals—like foxes and squirrels and wolves— that I’d only seen in pictures, and I would get especially enthusiastic about snow, because that’s the only place where silent, white flakes drift down from the sky.
The rabbi said that God forgives even the worst sinners, because He is merciful and forgiving, and even the most virtuous of men could never reach the high position reformed sinners had, and I thought that I didn’t want to reform, because I didn’t want to give up the pranks I might sometime want to play in the future.
Aunt Miriam changed the tablecloth, apologized to the rabbi over and over again for the suffering I was causing him, and after she had put the kettle on again, Zionka suddenly burst into the room without knocking. She was all excited. I was sure the ducks had run off to the English air force base after Johnny Weissmuller.
“Imri’s on his way!” Zionka cried, “He got married again!”
We rushed outside. The rabbi pressed his skullcap onto his head so it wouldn’t fly off in the wind, and Aunt Miriam ran out after him, mumbling, “Thank God, may His name be blessed,” and “That we have lived to see this moment,” and Zionka’s mother also showed up, as usual.
They ran to the center of the village and I ran in the opposite direction. I had to tell Anna. Maybe some new Polish girl was standing near the post office or the committee house, introducing herself to Aharonchik the baker, waving around Imri’s passport that had her name in it as his legal wife. What would happen if they met each other? The new one would say, “I’m Imri’s present wife,” and Anna would have to admit that she was his previous wife. And there were still two more weddings for the homeland on the way.
Everyone was gathered around Imri, hugging him, bombarding him with questions: who did he meet, and what was the situation in Europe, and was Hitler still threatening.
Imri listened patiently, but his eyes wandered over everybody’s head. Anna was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the new wife.
Aunt Miriam began sobbing, “We were so worried. Weeks without a word. And you’ve gotten thinner, Imri, what will your mother say?” As if so many weddings and divorces didn’t leave Imri time to eat.
Imri was loaded with packages. I picked up father’s old valise, which was very heavy, and I tried to be funny, “Maybe you’re dragging around all the Jews from Poland,” but no one laughed.
At the center of the village, in the square in front of the post office, Imri opened his backpack and started giving out presents: he wrapped Aunt Miriam’s head in a silk kerchief; he gave Zionka’s mother a lace embroidered tablecloth; he gave Zionka a little doll dressed in the Polish national costume; for Aharonchik, he’d brought a packet of tobacco with a Soviet stamp on it; he gave Zusia a lucky horseshoe; and he didn’t forget the rabbi either. He gave him a prayer book from the seventeenth century that he had gotten in the rabbinical school in a small town on the Czech border, after he promised the people of the town that he would add it to the holy books in a synagogue in Eretz Israel. The rabbi kissed the prayer book and said to Imri, “And you have come to redeem Zion.”
I was the last one. Imri pulled a fishing rod out of his bag, saying, “And this is for my little brother, the only brother I have. The only one I will ever have.”
“Brother”—such a simple, exact word. Nothing could be added to it, and nothing could be taken away from it. I loved him so much, and I never told him.
I had no idea where to go fishing, because there was no river near our village. We only had a water well and an irrigation ditch in Alter’s citrus groves. Maybe someday, when Imri and I went to Tel Aviv to see Johnny Weissmuller in the movies again, we could go down to the sea and try to fish together.
Amid all the noise and excitement, Imri’s eyes looked hard at me, and I read the question in them, “Where’s Anna?” I was shocked, because I understood without letters and without words.
The small procession moved towards our house, and I insisted on carrying the heavy valise. Imri stopped and lit a Players, and in the meantime, Johnny Weissmuller arrived and jumped on Imri, licking him all over. It was now clear that Anna was close by.
She was standing at the door of the house, wrapped in my mother’s old coat that Aunt Miriam had taken out of the closet for her. Imri stopped for a minute. Then he slowly walked towards her. She too hesitated. I saw a tall, slender woman swaying like a tree in a light breeze, and then she took a step towards him. They did not touch, only the distance between them became smaller.
I didn’t want to call Imri’s new wife my “sister-in-law,” not even for a little while. And I didn’t want to know what I should call Anna now. What was she to me? There were so few people who were something to me.
Johnny Weissmuller, who I can say with confidence is “my dog,” was standing between them. I didn’t hear what they said, if they talked at all. They still hadn’t touched.
What were they to each other? I asked.
If a man and a woman married under a real wedding canopy, and the groom covered the bride’s face with a real veil and gave her real wine to drink and broke a real glass—and it was still all fictitious—then was God, may His name be blessed, who is the most honest and just of all, taking part in the lie, or was He sitting up there in heaven and suffering?
I hadn’t had time to tell the rabbi something I’d very much wanted to say to him. I couldn’t take a chance that Aunt Miriam would have another outburst. My mother and father got married once and never got divorced for the sake of any homeland. They just died.
The Rabbi
And they shall be told, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the land.” That is the wish of the Creator. You are a woman, Miriam, and although I am a rabbi, I am also a man. Listen, Miriam, that is the way souls and bodies unite. When a child is created, the Almighty asks the angel in charge of the pregnancy to come to Him and He says: At this moment, a person is being conceived from someone’s seed. Here is the drop, take it into your hand, protect it from harm, and plant the seed in the womb.
It is the Almighty, blessed be His name, who decrees what the fate of that drop will be. The entire history of a person is in the hand of the angel. But the Almighty, blessed be His name, does not decide whether a person will be righteous or evil. That is up to the person alone.
Chapter 14
The second bride’s name was Tonya Greenbaum, and everyone called her Tonka.
None of us had ever seen her, except for Imri, of course, who had to.
But even so, all of us knew almost everything about her, much more than we knew about Anna. Zusia the wagoner had a cousin whose niece on his grandfather’s side had a neighbor, who was also Polish, and she knew Tonka’s family personally. Zusia told the whole village that Tonka was a modest and proper young lady from a good family, seven generations of rabbis, and she played the piano and spoke three languages, was an only child who would inherit everything from her father, and if any trouble came along, she had an uncle who moved to America after the First World War, and owned a textile factory on Seventh Avenue in New York. An excellent match. Everyone in the village said that if Imri had a brain in his head, he should keep on being Tonya Greenbaum’s husband forever.
Zusia did not forget to emphasize the most important detail. Tonka was beautiful. She had many suitors, but did
n’t want any of them because she didn’t think they were good enough. Our Imri had won the hand of this Jewish princess from Vilnius, and he really should lose no time in going to the Jewish Agency to ask to be released from his obligation to marry two more times for the sake of the homeland, because if he stayed married to Tonka Greenbaum, he would have a great future ahead of him. Zusia was sure that the Jewish Agency people were sensitive and would understand Imri’s feelings and, if it were necessary, Zusia was prepared to talk to his cousin on his mother’s side, who worked in the Settlement Department, and ask her to pull some strings, because he was ready to do anything for Imri’s happiness and, of course, for Aunt Miriam’s, whose whole life had been one of suffering. I sometimes suspected that Zusia the wagoner was ready to do anything especially for Aunt Miriam. Zionka told me secretly that many years ago, he’d wanted to marry her. Aunt Miriam rejected him at the last minute, and no one knew why.
The gossip about Imri’s second wife spread throughout the village, as if everyone had known her from the day she was born. Aharonchik described her in great detail to every customer who came in to buy half a bread or a braided challah for the Sabbath. Hair as golden as wheat on a collective farm, and deep blue eyes. A perfect figure and impeccable manners. An elegant and graceful woman, who wore only the latest Paris fashions, as if she had just stepped out of a magazine. A princess like her, the experts claimed, had yet to immigrate to Eretz Israel because she had suddenly become enamored of Zionism. It was obvious that she had fallen head over heels in love with our Imri. He had been granted a gift from heaven. Imri was set for life. All of us were, and Aunt Miriam’s troubles were over.
Zusia the wagoner was in high spirits. Tonka would soon arrive and the most beautiful new immigrant in Palestine would be living in our village. In the meantime, she was staying at the Bristol Garden guest house in Jerusalem, and Zusia explained to everyone that she was waiting until her enemy, Anna, went away.
