by Alison Pick
“Shalom, bubi,” she said to Ruth.
Ruth opened one eye. She flared her nostrils; she closed the eye. Then she looked up at Ida fully, smiling weakly. “Gabriel’s here,” she said. “Our angel.”
“I see,” said Ida. “The Angel Gabriel?”
Ruth nodded.
“I missed Ruthie so I came to see her!” the boy said. But he wrinkled his nose at her leg. “I miss home,” he said.
“We miss Liora,” Ruth said to Ida.
Gabriel asked, “Where’s Salam?” He, too, knew the doll.
“She’s playing hide and seek,” said Ruth, but her bottom lip began to tremble.
A look of alarm passed over the boy’s face. “Don’t cry,” he said to Ruth. “I’ll go look for her for you.”
He got up and smiled. Ida saw he was missing his baby front teeth. One adult tooth was growing in at a funny angle.
“Salam was Sakina’s doll,” Gabriel said, as though it was his job to explain things to Ida.
“Who is Sakina?” Ida asked, but Gabriel didn’t answer. He turned to go, pleased to have a mission to find the doll. “Goodbye Ruthie,” he said, over his shoulder.
Ruth tried to answer but the effort was too much and she closed her eyes again. The blue veins spider-webbing across the backs of her eyelids stood out. She looked suddenly much younger, more nascent; an image came to Ida of Ruth as a fetus. A child of Eretz Yisrael trembling between this world and the next.
Ida stood up. All around her lay the suffering and the half-dead. Dov’s blisters had ruptured and he looked like a creature that had been buried and clawed its way back out of the earth. A halutz named Reuven with a face like cooked ham had what must be dysentery, and spent his days crouched over a chamber pot from which the most foul smells rose. There were several cases of ringworm—red scaly rashes that broke and bled. A halutza named Rachel had even started to lose her hair because of it.
And of course there was now an ever-increasing number of malaria cases.
When the doctor approached, Ida saw that his delicate eyeglasses had already broken. The bridge between the lenses was held together with medical tape so they rested on his face at an odd angle.
Ida moved closer to speak to him so Ruth wouldn’t hear.
“Can you help her?” she asked, urgently. Then, “Good morning,” she added, smiling apologetically.
But the doctor understood, and nodded to show Ida shouldn’t worry about niceties, not with what was facing them.
They looked down at Ruth’s puffy leg together. The cut was crusted with puss and the circle of red surrounding it had grown to encompass most of her shin. Ida averted her eyes; she thought of the muddy yard with the Arab children playing marbles. Then she pushed the thought away. It made her feel guilty about too many different things.
The pretty nurse Elisabeth approached them, and the three adults formed a ring around Ruth’s prone body. Elisabeth was carrying a tray of silver tools.
“I can’t keep them clean,” she said to the doctor. She was speaking in English but Ida understood from her gestures.
Elisabeth said, “Did you tell her?”
“Tell her what?” the doctor asked, switching to Hebrew.
“About your mould cure.”
The doctor shook his head no. A flush rose to his cheeks; Elisabeth was exposing something that made him ashamed, or proud, or some complicated mixture of both.
“Why not?” Elisabeth asked.
“I told the girl’s mother,” Dr. Lowen said.
Elisabeth looked at him.
“David’s wife,” he said. “With the brown curly hair.”
The newcomers, Ida realized, were still trying to keep track of who everyone was.
“With the red sleeves?” Elisabeth pressed.
“I think.” But the doctor lifted his broken glasses from the bridge of his nose to indicate their deficiency. And Ida knew the question was of no use anyway. There were several shirts with red sleeves.
“What did she say?” Elisabeth asked.
“She said nothing.”
“But all your research…”
“We don’t have any proof,” Dr. Lowen said. “People think it’s nonsense.”
“That’s not true. There was the British study. There was the—”
But the doctor shook his head.
“You need to have more confidence,” Elisabeth said. “You’re onto something important.”
“Give me ten years,” the doctor replied.
Ida’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth between the doctor and the pretty nurse, like she was following a table tennis match. She could see that the nurse was bolstering the doctor, that this was the intimacy between them.
I look down from above. The plot turns.
It wasn’t Hannah the doctor had told. It was me.
To be fair, he downplayed the issue of his research to such an extent that I thought it some half-mad side note. But I should have paid closer attention. Perhaps it truly was my fault; perhaps I deserved to die for what I’d done.
—
The next day, when Ida went to see Ruth, she found the doctor prone on a straw mattress. The bald spot on top of his head was glazed with sweat; Elisabeth was at his side, holding his hand. He was old enough to be her father. But who was Ida to judge? She backed out of the tent quietly so as not to interrupt.
Her first instinct was to find Levi and tell him the doctor was ill. She saw him at a distance, in the far field, ploughing. The sight of him upright, stretching his muscled arms in the air above his head, filled her with a kind of glee. He looked so strong it was as if the sickness had never happened.
He was working alongside Saul. The kibbutz owned one three-sided plough, and Saul had cleaned its blades, oiled the break and hooked it to the lone tractor. He rode upon it proudly, the black earth opening out like the wake of three boats behind him.
Levi, on the other side of the field, walked after his wooden plough, letting Trotsky and Lenin take the time they needed. For each furrow he opened, Saul opened three. But Ida loved Levi’s great patience—with the mules, the primitive equipment, the rich earth beneath them. He saw the process of sowing seeds as one of coaxing out that which was already there. Give the land the things it needed and it would abundantly flourish. It was not an act of God alone, but of God working through the human hand.
Ida watched as Levi pulled on the reins, and Trotsky and Lenin came to a stop. Levi got down, and walked around to crouch in front of the plough. Ida couldn’t see the object he picked up, but could tell what it was from the shape of his hands: there had been a nest in his way. This was the basis of his vegetarianism too: he did not want to hurt a single living thing.
“The doctor,” Ida said when she got to Levi, taking his hands in her own. He had carefully placed the nest out of reach of the tractor.
“The doctor what?”
“He’s ill,” she said.
Levi looked as though Ida had told him his own father was sick. His brow furrowed. “Kadachat?”
She nodded.
“What can we do?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Ida thought that Levi would know the answer, having just been through the sickness himself. And she was not surprised when he said, in reply to his own question, “There’s nothing we can do. Except wait and see.”
—
The following week a road was paved. The men opened a quarry at the base of the mountain and schlepped rocks to the road on their backs. They used hammers to smash the boulders into gravel.
“A steamroller would help push the gravel down,” Ida heard Yashka complain as she passed them in the field, and Zeruvabel said, “Steamrollers are bourgeois.”
They laughed until tears leaked out from the corners of their eyes, and Ida, hearing them, laughed too.
Zeruvabel said, “Work will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honour of tomorrow and the freedom of tomorrow.”
&
nbsp; “Easy for Herzl to say,” Yashka answered. But he turned back to his shovel, inspired once again.
A dance was planned to welcome the newcomers, who were arriving every day now. The stacking chairs were pushed to the sides of the dining hall, which had been built, in a hurry, to accommodate their increasing numbers. Zeruvabel was outside the back doorway—there was no actual door yet, only the frame—running rosin up and down his bow.
Ida stopped to listen. “You should play in Paris!” she said.
She had no musical talent, no expertise on which to base her judgment, but there was something in the high, clear notes, the ease with which the music floated out from the instrument as though it had been caught there and Zeruvabel was simply releasing it.
A pained look crossed Zeruvabel’s face. His red freckles seemed to stand out more sharply.
“What?” Ida asked.
“I once wanted to do that,” he confessed.
“To go to Paris?”
“New York.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Good question.” And then, as though remembering an answer he had trained himself to believe, “I decided my music was for our cause.”
Ida looked at him quizzically.
“It’s not just all wealth that belongs to the worker,” he said. “Knowledge too. And beauty. They belong to us all.”
Ida could see that, despite himself, these ideas pained him. He knew he had talent. He could have travelled the world.
Zeruvabel lifted his palms to his head, pressing his red hair against his scalp. He raised his rosin to his nose and sniffed it delicately, like a bouquet. He said, “My name is from the biblical hero who led the Jews out of Babylon and built the Second Temple.”
Ida tried to think what the right response to this might be. She said, “So your music can lead us out of our drudgery and into the world of beauty?”
Zeruvabel nodded, appeased.
Out by the quarry the halutzim had heard the sound of Zeruvabel’s instrument being tuned. A seed of a song was planted, and as in all things terrible or beautiful, a seed was all it took for a consequence to grow.
Ida heard a far-off voice from the field, and knew it was Levi’s.
Bo ha-baytah, ben chaviv;
Bo ha-baytah, ben chaviv…
Come back home now, dearest son.
He was singing to himself, plaintively, but across the furrows Raya and Aaron had heard him, and their two voices rose, joining in:
Come back home now, dearest son,
your father’s dead, your mother’s sick,
come back to Russia…
And the answer returned from a row even further off where Shoshanna, who had insisted on being in the fields, was digging her spade into the rough earth to the rhythm of the song:
Never budge! Never go away from here!
The shovels rose and fell. The melody changed quickly to “Kadimah,” their most beloved and familiar song:
Come home now, come home now,
come home now, labourer!
Go forward, go forward,
go forward working man!
Kad-i-mah, kad-i-mah,
kad-i-mah ha-poel!…
The sun was beginning to set. It was the end of the work day. The halutzim kept singing as they loaded the wagons and harnessed the mules for the short ride back. In place of “working man,” Yashka shouted out “young at heart!” and the chorus changed to, “Go forward, go forward, go forward young at heart!”
Then “strong of will.” Then “joyful youth.”
By the time the wagons reached the tents, there were ten of them singing at the top of their lungs, improvising behind Levi, who himself improvised the words to a nonsense song based on their beloved Hillel:
Im eineni ani, mi ani?
V’ahni l’atsmi mi li?
V’ihm lo achshav aymatay?
Ay-ma-tay?
Ida caught Levi’s eye as he drove the wagon into the yard, and joined in, the two of them singing together as if theirs were the only voices:
If not myself then who am I?
And to myself what am I?
And if not now, then when, then why?
When, when, why?
CHAPTER 7
THE DANCE WAS NOT supposed to start until later, but who could resist the singing? The men from the quarry, with the fine dust of ground rock streaked across their faces, jumped down from the wagons happily. Hannah and Rivka, who had been preparing the evening meal, put down their knives and came into the field, wiping their hands on their aprons. They hesitated briefly, torn between their duty in the kitchen and their love of celebration, but the latter won out and they tipped their faces to the sky and started to clap. Ida saw that Rivka was pregnant. Behind them were Elisabeth and Shoshanna, their skirts hiked up, carrying aprons full of wheat sheaves. The women shared a conspiratorial glance and ran to join in too, crossing the field with their arms linked together: now there was critical mass. A ring formed. They would all dance the hora.
Zeruvabel, who had a foot propped up on a pile of lumber, began to play in earnest. He picked up the pace and bent over his instrument, his cheeks flushed with pleasure and responsibility. His foot tapped, keeping time. He drew his bow back and forth over the strings with such speed Ida could barely see his arm. She suddenly understood how, for the story of the kibbutz to turn, Zeruvabel’s music was required. He may have given up a career in the concert halls of New York, but it was not for nothing. This was what it was for.
Ida couldn’t stop herself; she ran to get in on the dance and was swept up immediately into the sway. She linked arms with Shoshanna on one side and Levi on the other. His muscled elbow hooked her in. Once things had started on a good path they wouldn’t change. She was being guided by something bigger than herself. They could renounce God all they wanted, but how could anyone deny that He was here with them in their enterprise, in the sowing of the fields and the growing of vegetables and the sharing and most of all the dance? The circle had formed almost of its own accord, young people joining from every corner of the kibbutz: someone who had been currying the new mules in the new stable now crossed the field; someone else who was practising balancing an earthen jug on her head—like Rebecca from the Bible—carefully took the vessel down, set it beside some oilcloth and a jar of kerosene, and joined the dance as well. Saul’s whistle bounced wildly on the lanyard around his neck. Zeruvabel leaned forward into his fiddle to draw from it everything possible. Levi’s body was warm and alive beside her. The wheel tilted one way, then tilted the other, the circle of life unsure which way to spin; then all at once it began to whirl and there was no stopping it. Several latecomers stood at the sidelines unable to break in. They stomped and whistled along. Then, a miracle, there was a slowing of the circle and they, too, were linked in.
When the circle got too big, the women made a smaller one in the centre, Sarah and Shoshanna taking Ida by the arm and pulling her in. The three of them spun in the opposite direction to the men, and now there were two concentric circles moving against each other, interlocking gears that made a wheel turn. Ida flew past Levi, and both of them grinned. Nothing would stop them. They would dance forever.
I look down at Ida. I wish I could warn her. What she was living then was the happiest moment. The moment before things went wrong.
—
Many hours later the hora wound down. It was well after midnight. Ida bent to take off her sandals—her feet were pulsing. When she straightened, she noticed David and Sarah standing by the tractor. Their heads were bent together, discussing the Arab effendi, she suspected, or the eucalyptus saplings due any day from the nursery outside Damascus.
Around Ida, other comrades were catching their breath. They stood in the dark night, stars sharp like knife points above them. Heat beat from their faces. Spent as they were, they were unable to fully stop moving, as if their bodies had been cranked tight by some invisible hand and could only rest once the spring had fully unwound. Shoshanna bo
unced back and forth from one leg to another like a boxer at the start of a match. The pretty nurse Elisabeth must have thought the same thing; she made a jab at Shoshanna and got her head under her arm and held it there and made a chomping noise like she was going to eat her ear. The two of them laughed uproariously. Only the German twins, a few paces from the others, seemed less than engaged. They were in some kind of argument.
“Du idiot,” one said.
“Na, du musst was reden!” the other replied.
“Wenn du wilst dass ich dein Geheimnis halten, du mal lieber etwas netter zu mir!” said the first. They fell into a strained and huffy silence.
Yashka leaned back to look again at the stars. He said, “Work is early! I guess we’d better…”
He paused before he could finish his sentence. Head cocked to one side, eyes alert.
“What?” Shoshanna asked.
But they were quiet, their hearts still banging in their ears from the dance. And then they heard what Yashka had heard: the gallop of hooves passing.
“The Arabs,” Zeruvabel said.
“At least it’s not the Cossacks,” said Yashka.
“They’re probably razing our crops,” said one of the twins, who had removed himself from his brother and inserted himself back into the group conversation.
“What crops?” Saul asked, his fingers pulling idly at the lanyard around his neck.
“The wheat is growing! Give it time,” Levi said.
“Never trust an Arab,” the twin answered.
Ida pictured Fatima standing with a hand on her low back to support the child in her belly, her skin brown with the sun and the wind. She recalled the pantomime when they had first met, Fatima showing Ida that she would protect her candlesticks, and her secret—whatever it was—as well. And the way she had held her lip between her teeth as she tried to help bandage Ruth’s wound.
“I don’t think they’re so different from us,” Ida said.
“Who?” the twin asked.
“The Arabs,” Ida said.
