by Nava Semel
A herd of goats was skidding down the hillside, blocking the entrance to the village. We heard the muezzin calling the people to prayers from the minaret of the mosque. I pointed to him and explained to Anna that you had to take off your shoes before going into a Moslem holy place, and that even in the middle of a workday, when he was covered from head to toe in his beekeeper’s suit, Mohammed turned in the direction of Mecca, knelt on the ground and prayed.
We waited for the goats to pass, leaving behind their droppings and the echoes of their bleating, moving slowly, as if they had all the time in the world. We weren’t in a hurry either. Anna said the countryside was so different that you might think we’d arrived in another country by mistake. She held me tight, as if, for a minute, she’d confused me with Imri. At first, my body was rigid, and the poison deep inside me was still seething. Her hair smelled of honey. I hadn’t known how intoxicating it was. She was like a new queen bee, and it was hard to explain to Anna why a new queen bee had to be crowned every spring.
“And you, Anna, who do you love?”
“In the movies or in real life?” she asked, replying immediately, “Clark Gable,” and I was disappointed.
I asked Anna to whisper soft words in the horse’s ear, and she whispered something in Polish. I was disappointed again. I thought she’d managed to learn a soft word or two in Hebrew, and she said she wasn’t sure whether the word she’d said was soft or harsh.
“Tell me, Anna, and I’ll decide. I’ve already learned a few words in Polish from you.”
She didn’t answer me. “Imri trusts me!” I said.
That melted her. She leaned over and whispered the word in my ear. I heard it clearly, as if she were talking to me on a real telephone. And it wasn’t Zionka who was whispering. I couldn’t repeat that complicated Polish word. If she said what I thought she did, then the word was short and simple in Hebrew. I thought Anna had said “love.”
Chapter 26
“Stop! Stop!”
One minute, the village was quiet and peaceful, dozing in the afternoon warmth that was the first sign of the hot summer to come. Only donkeys could be seen grazing on the grass in the yards, because the people of the village were resting in their houses. And the next minute, a gang of older boys on horseback was standing in front of us, their faces hidden by kaffiyehs, pistols and daggers in their belts.
These gangs, the shabab, usually dared to come out only at night. During the day, they were afraid the English would chase them down. This was the first time I’d seen them in the daytime. I didn’t always believe Aunt Miriam’s horrible stories about all the goyim just waiting to kill us. Even Zionka thought Aunt Miriam exaggerated sometimes.
One of them hissed, Itbach el-Yahud, kill the Jews. “What’s he saying?” Anna asked. I didn’t want to translate.
“Don’t pay any attention, Anna. They’re just the shabab—a bunch of young men who make a lot of noise. They’re not the majority.”
The leader of the shabab came up to us. Anna sat erect in the saddle, holding me tightly around the waist. I felt her body tense behind me, her feet in the stirrups, signaling the horse to be ready to take off. Suddenly, we seemed to be in a movie, but I was confused. I didn’t know what part I was supposed to be playing.
“Get out of here. This is our land,” and even before Anna could reply, we saw Fahtma Daudi running towards us from the end of the narrow street, shouting.
“Don’t touch them. They’re our guests!”
The leader froze. He looked down at the small figure of Mohammed’s sister.
“You lick the boots of the Jews. Tell your brother to stop working for them, and you, foreigner,” he spat the words at Anna, “go back to where you came from. Like the cursed locust, you settle on our land, and your numbers grow greater from day to day.”
Even though I skipped over the harsh words, Anna understood everything.
“We didn’t come to steal anything away from you.” Her words in English rang out clearly, because the muezzin had finished calling the people to prayers. “You have your village and we have ours.” That was the first time Anna said that something was hers.
The leader spurred his horse, and the rest of the gang did the same, “We burn locusts with fire. And we shall burn you too.”
How do westerns end, Anna? Because you don’t like those movies, I don’t know how they end.
Fahtma took hold of the old horse’s bridle and led him gently, cunningly increasing the distance between Anna and the gang leader. Then, she shot her a sidelong glance that implied something about the leader. All of a sudden, he looked to me like a kid dressed up in a costume.
“Men are too hotheaded. They burn in their own fire. I hope you don’t grow up to be that way, Aza’ar. If we women had anything to say about it, we would’ve put out the fire a long time ago, and thrown all the guns and daggers into the sea.
We sat on a mat in the grape arbor in the Daudi family’s yard, the almost ripe clusters of grapes dangling above us. The smell of the herbs Fahtma grew in the garden and in the large clay flowerpots filled the air. She picked and gave Anna some mint, coriander, summer savory, saffron, and even bitter wormwood, explaining to her the powers of each herb and which diseases it healed. These were the herbs Fahtma used to make the miracle salve for Johnny Weissmuller.
Mohammed and Fahtma’s father came to sit with us, and we sipped sweet coffee from small copper cups. He offered me one too. “A boy protecting the honor of his brother’s wife is himself a hero,” he said. We finished our first and second cups. I refused the third, because that was the polite thing to do, but I drank it anyway. The fourth I declined with a thank you. Anna followed my lead. Mohammed and Fahtma’s father studied her and said, “Our people would pay the good price of a hundred goats for a bride like you.”
I translated, and Anna blushed. Fahtma smiled and their eyes met. Her father wanted to marry her to a rich old man from a village in the Galilee, but she was secretly in love with her cousin, Imad, who rode with me and Mohammed when I visited the village.
I said in Hebrew that Imri had gotten her for free, and I didn’t add that maybe he was now paying the price for his second wife.
Mohammed taught Anna to tear the pita bread and dip it into the fresh yogurt, and I was gorging myself on olives, filling my pockets with the pits I would later throw at the Jewish National Fund box. I noticed that Anna’s legs were folded perfectly under her.
Anna hesitated. “With my hands?” she looked embarrassed, the way Tarzan did in the movie when Jane was teaching him his first words.
Fahtma nodded encouragingly. I thought she was secretly jealous of Anna, who was free to choose her own husband. I thanked God, may His name be blessed, that Aunt Miriam had rejected Zusia the wagoner. Otherwise, he would be living with us and praying for the devil to take me. Anna tore the pita, dipped it and ate it. Her lips glistened from the olive oil.
Mohammed brought the bees in a glass jar that reminded me of the hated crystal ball tossed somewhere in my room.
“Be careful,” Mohammed warned us, “the queen is a delicate creature. She started life as an ordinary worker, and now she’s suddenly responsible for a whole beehive. Do you remember the word ‘responsible’, Aza’ar? It’s the only one you really must memorize.”
To avoid the shabab, Mohammed led us to the olive grove on the outskirts of the village. From there, a side road led to our village. As we were saying goodbye, he warned us not to stray to the left or right of it.
Anna curtseyed to him, saying, “The gray-eyed girl thanks you, Mukhtar.”
“I would give my entire herd for a wife like you. Imri is a lucky man. And your heartache, mother of Uzik, is from Allah. When will your husband return?”
“I don’t know,” Anna replied in Hebrew.
“It is not good for a couple to be apart during the first year of their marriage. Many dangers lie in wait. Many evil powers wish to separate you.”
And then Mohammed told the rest of t
he tale about the mukhtar’s horse, which knew how to speak, and listened secretly to people’s conversations. That was how the clever horse discovered that none of the mukhtar’s friends were loyal to him, expect for one.
“How could the mukhtar tell which one was loyal?” I asked.
Mohammed pinched my cheek in exactly the same spot Herzl Fleischer had punched me. It didn’t hurt much anymore.
“Listen well, Aza’ar. Will he who is loyal today be loyal tomorrow?”
Now I was afraid Mohammed knew everything. The “fictitious” marriage, brides for the sake of the homeland, and the second wife staying in the Bristol Garden in Jerusalem, who refused to give Imri a divorce—all the tricks and lies, a little bit of honey and a lot of poison.
I shivered. Anna turned the horse in the direction of the olive grove. The silver-gray leaves brushed against us. Mohammed gave us some fresh pita breads and the bouquet of fragrant herbs from Fahtma’s garden, and leaned over to whisper some of his soft words into the horse’s ear. When he straightened up, he asked whether Anna knew what her name meant in Hebrew.
After she had secured her feet in the stirrups, she sat up straight in the saddle. Shadows began to fall. We couldn’t stay any longer. It would be dark soon. I held the jar of bees close to my chest. The queen bees were still. That’s my Mohammed, I said to myself. He keeps what he knows to himself.
He didn’t wait for her to reply.
“Anna means ‘where’.” Mohammed slapped the horse’s flank and sent him home.
The road wound around the English base. We rode along an unfamiliar part of the fence. It wasn’t the place Johnny Weissmuller liked to wander around in. The Hawkers were so close, we could have touched their wings with our fingers. The trees around us were rustling. Cypress trees and old oaks and carobs that had seen a lot of darkness in their long lives. We didn’t even have a kerosene lamp. If Anna was scared, she didn’t show any sign of it.
She stopped suddenly. The end of the road. “This is the most beautiful place,” she said, full of wonder.
It was dark, and Anna couldn’t see that we had entered the village cemetery.
At night, it looked like a garden. There was no other way home.
The old horse made its way among the gravestones, and I said, “That’s because you don’t know anyone here.”
I didn’t go near the place where my mother and father were buried.
It was only in the movie that the elephant cemetery looked like a mysterious place. I told Anna what happened towards the end, how Jane’s father, the Colonel, died after spending the whole movie searching for the wondrous place that held a treasure trove of ivory, and how Jane consoled herself and Tarzan, saying that now, her father was resting happily with the other great hunters.
I’d held Imri’s hand so tight during that scene that I hurt him. I didn’t know whether dead people were happy. It was only a movie.
Anna spurred the horse on. She wasn’t afraid of cemeteries. She tried to take hold of my hand while I was talking.
I pushed her away. I’m not afraid of the dark, Anna. If Jane’s father hadn’t gone off on that long journey to look for elephant cemeteries, maybe he would have stayed alive. But then there wouldn’t have been a movie.
Anna’s hand brushed my head lightly. She touched Imri in a different way. I thought what she was saying was that a graveyard symbolized a chain of people connected to each other by love and hate, by anger and reconciliation, but there were words in Yiddish I didn’t understand. Anna said she knew three “Annas” who had lived before her and were resting in the earth in Lutsk. Someday, she would tell me her own tales about a talking horse.
In the meantime, the photographer’s horse moved slowly forward. We both understood what his neighing meant. He was as exhausted as we were. Maybe horses also had nightmares about ghosts, and didn’t think a cemetery was such a beautiful place. Anna had actually managed to get hold of my hand and didn’t let go. “Uzik, dead people can’t hurt you more than the living.” And she said something else she’d wanted to tell me for a long time, but forgot. “Johnny Weissmuller is Jewish.”
Fahtma
I’ll cross the river with Imad, my cousin. There, on the other side, no one will ever find us. I am not blackening the family honor, Anna, because the honor of lovers is also precious in the eyes of Allah, and what happened to us is from Allah. Fate is a mute horse, the good Idris, who cannot tell us where he is leading us. I will not give myself to a man only because of his wealth and his herds and his estate in the Galilee. I love Imad in the same way your soul is planted in your Imri’s soul. I draw strength from you, as if you were a well of clear water. Even though your husband married another woman, you do not lose hope.
Of all the miraculous plants Allah created, I picked for you the bitter and thorny doret el-acuv, the “turtle herb,” which will heal your sorrow. Listen, Anna, once there was a lonely fellah whose beloved had left him for his cousin. He spent that winter in his village, pining away for his love. And when spring came and he was walking along the road that led from the well to the olive tree, a turtle crossed his path in pursuit of his mate, who did not want him. And the fellah saw that when the turtle picked some herbs and threw them onto the back of the female turtle, a miracle happened. His mate returned to him as if she had never been away. The turtle climbed onto her back and they mated on the greening earth. Do you understand, Anna? The fellah knelt down and thanked Allah for his great benevolence, and then he too picked some of the turtle’s herb, and hurried to his beloved. He put the herb on her back, and she never left him again. On the day Imri returns from his travels, put some of the turtle herb on his back, and he will never leave you again.
Chapter 27
There was one question that bothered me. Were Tarzan and Johnny Weissmuller the same person?
Sure, they weren’t the same person before the movie, but I was trying to understand what happened after the movie.
I had to get things straight in my head. If Tarzan was the English Lord Greystock at first, did that mean that when Johnny Weissmuller was off the screen, he was Jewish? Anna said it wouldn’t do him any good. Although his roar was heard everywhere, and the world champion swimmer was an admired figure, in the Fuehrer’s eyes, he was still just an inferior Jew.
When we got home, Aunt Miriam was all over me. I thought that now, she’d call me a few nasty names and yell at me, but she threw her arms around me and held me so tight, she almost choked me. She’d been so worried when it started to get dark and we hadn’t come home that she forgot to be angry.
“It’s getting more and more dangerous in this country,” Aunt Miriam wailed. “This is not Poland.”
Anna said that the calm in Poland was like the smooth white screen before the pictures appear on it. Again, she predicted disaster. Whenever she was waiting for letters, she imagined terrible things. In the village, they called her “a prophetess of doom” behind her back.
The buzzing of a Hawker coming in to land at the English base upset the horse, and he stamped his hooves. It was completely dark now. We tied him to the side of the hen house. The photographer promised he would come and take him the next day. The horse was covered in sweat after its night ride, and I ran my hands over his stringy mane, searching for a soft word to whisper in his ear. None of Mohammed’s words were right, and I stopped trying, because I was so tired.
“Tomorrow, I’ll go to look for my relatives myself,” Anna announced to Aunt Miriam, and asked her to let me go with her. It was the Passover vacation.
Early the next morning, we put three new queens into the hives. I explained to Anna that from now on, the female workers would devote themselves to taking care of the queen, because the future of the whole hive depended on the queen’s mood. The queens had large families now, Anna said, and I saw in her face how much she missed her own.
We waited near Aharonchik’s bakery for the first bus to Tel Aviv. Aunt Miriam hugged me again. I squirmed in her arms, trying to get away
.
“Take care of the boy, Anna. He’s all I have left in the world.”
Something froze inside me. I never thought Aunt Miriam felt she had so little left. Only now did I understand that she had lost her younger sister and her brother-in-law, and except for me and Imri, there was no one else in the world she could call “hers.”
Anna was wearing the dark dress she’d worn on the day she arrived, and her hat looked strange, the way it did then, when she stepped out of Zusia’s wagon, so out of place.
“You’re wearing bourgeois finery again,” Aharonchik sighed, and Anna and I smiled at each other, knowing that we were about to hear the inevitable speech about the proletarian worker’s overalls that all the Jews would someday wear as a symbol of solidarity and equality. Anna didn’t look so tall, or maybe I’d gotten taller in the meantime. The last letter she got from Lutsk, with her relative’s address in Tel Aviv in it, was in her handbag.
Zionka’s mother was going to Tel Aviv too. She couldn’t hide how happy she was when she asked Anna, “So you’re leaving?” And she whispered to Mali Perlmutter, the watchmaker’s wife, who was sitting in the last row of the bus, that Tonka Greenbaum had made Imri’s head spin. Zionka’s mother was relishing the gossip so much that she forgot about her feud with Mali. Rumor had it that Imri was not abroad on any mission, Zionka’s mother whispered more loudly, but was staying in the Bristol Garden in Jerusalem with his legal wife. Someone had seen them strolling along Jaffa Street on their way to dance in a café.
Anna and I ignored them. Sometimes, I felt sorry for Zionka for having such a mother. If the English told us to get rid of an old resident in exchange for every new immigrant, I would return Zionka’s mother to Warsaw, to her uncle, Max Rosenberg, who owned a velvet and lace factory, even though, on second thought, I felt bad for Zionka, who would have to talk to the air, like Aunt Miriam.
The bus was bouncing along through the citrus groves, and we breathed in the sweet smell of the fruit. Perfume, as Zionka’s mother had said when she asked Imri to bring some for her from Europe. The fields were covered with yellow buttercups and red chrysanthemums, and I, who didn’t have a collection of dried “flowers of our homeland,” and wasn’t a nature lover like Zionka, found myself half-boasting to Anna, “You see, we have spring too. It’s just very short, not like in Poland.”
