by Alison Pick
The circle fell silent. A look of surprise crossed many faces, like wind spreading across an open sea. Ida supposed it was not so much what she had said as the fact that she rarely spoke out in the group at all.
The twin waggled his fingers at her like he had done the other day by the clothesline. “And why do you say that?” he asked.
Ida held onto the tip of her braid.
“It’s just a feeling,” she answered. She saw Levi nodding across the circle from her.
“She’s right,” he said, leaning down to pick a stone from his sandal. He straightened again, holding it as if it was an oracle in which he could see the future. “We can live peacefully with them, if we make the effort.”
“Have you read what they published in the Falastin in Jaffa?” Saul asked. “Hatred. Jew hatred, pure and simple.”
Leah said, “That paper is owned by Christians. Not Muslims.”
From the tents came the sound of other halutzim still singing as they changed into their night clothes:
Am Yisrael chai,
Am Yisrael chai!
The nation Israel lives,
The nation Israel lives!
The twin ignored this, remaining focused on Ida.
“How do you know there are good people among the Arabs?” he asked. He took a half-step toward her.
Her stomach tightened.
“What does it mean to be good?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to know,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you a little Hündin.”
Ida steeled herself. “Speaking like that has already marked you,” she said.
He looked confused for a moment, and then laughed. “You think God has stained my lips for blasphemy?”
He laughed harder, and puckered his lips as if he was going to kiss her.
Ida closed her eyes. The happiness that had been filling her body moments before was suddenly gone, as though she had been punctured. She imagined the hiss of a tractor tire deflating. But in the face of his challenge her own indignation rose. She had hidden something from the group, yes, but so had this German. And he had blackmailed her in order to do it.
He said, “Aren’t you going to tell me what it means to be a good person?”
“You know what it means,” she said pointedly. “And does not mean.”
But the German would not back down. “I’d prefer you to enlighten me,” he said.
Ida noted that, despite the vigour of the dance, Samuel—or Selig?—had kept his clothes perfectly neat, his suspender straps dividing his torso into three equal rectangles.
“Your preference doesn’t interest me,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t it?”
Ida remembered an infamous ghoum between two Arab groups she had been told about, a clan from near the River Jordan and their enemies who lived nearby; decades passed, nobody forgave, the dead piled up like timber. She stared hard at the twin for a long moment, then turned on her heel.
She felt the group’s eyes following her, and then felt Levi separating himself from them and coming after her. She stopped walking only when she had reached the river. She stood with her back to the tents and waited for him draw up beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder. His fingers crept into the tangled hair at the base of her neck, tugging gently.
She smiled at him over her shoulder, but brushed his hand away.
“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.
The moon had come up, three-quarters full, a last little slice needed for completion. Its reflection on the surface of the water was a trail of silver. From the shadow of the mountain behind them a jackal screamed in the final moment before landing its prey.
“What’s wrong?” he asked again. “Why do you dislike him?”
Ida felt the urge to unburden herself to Levi, but what would he say? She saw the twin’s leering face in front of her. She heard again Levi telling her that Zionism was the logical fulfillment of the history of the Jewish people; that taking care of the group was the highest calling of their cause.
Levi’s hand felt good, kneading her neck.
“Did he do something to you?” he asked, his voice gentle, like he was coaxing a pony to accept a saddle.
Ida drew in her breath. “He blackmailed me,” she said.
Levi took his hand away.
He walked forward to face her and tipped his head to the side as though he had just heard a gunshot far away. Ida saw this was not the answer he had been expecting; she saw that he wondered if the twin had violated her sexually. And although he hadn’t, her body contained what she imagined must be a similar mixture of shame and rage.
“What do you mean?” Levi asked.
He folded his hands neatly in front of him, and desire to unburden herself again warred against her desire to be loved by him. She couldn’t risk him judging her; she had started her story, and he would not let her draw back. The combination of love and protectiveness on his face emboldened her. He would defend her. He would be on her side regardless of what she had done.
“Tell me,” he said softly.
She examined his tanned face, the dark hair she herself had cut growing shaggy again in the heat. She wanted to know everything about him—what he was afraid of, what he dreamed of, what he had been like as a boy. Because surely to love meant to know someone completely. And the other side of the equation—she wanted him to know her too.
“I did something,” she said.
She ran the pad of her thumb against the tip of her braid.
“What?” he asked. “Something…bad?”
There was a hint of laughter in his voice, like he could not believe she was capable of any such thing. But he did not laugh outright.
“Questionable,” she said.
He was silent, waiting for it.
“I had candlesticks from home,” she said. “They belonged to my great-great-great grandmother.”
Levi looked at her, and raised one eyebrow, the way he had on their very first day together. “There’s nothing wrong with…”
And then his face showed he understood.
“Where are they now?” he asked, his voice careful.
“I gave them to Fatima,” she said.
A beat.
“Who?”
“A woman from the Arab village.”
He was looking in her eyes; she saw his face begin to close down, from the forehead to the chin, like a row of slatted blinds. It panicked her, and she forged ahead, as though she could talk her way out of it.
“I tried to hide them. But Fatima saw. She offered to keep them. She was really very kind. But the twin knew I had kept them—I don’t know which—”
“Which candlestick?”
“Which twin.”
Levi gave a half-smile.
“He took one candlestick and gave the other to his brother. He said that otherwise he would tell David what I’d done.”
And you, she wanted to add. He said he would tell you.
But Levi had gone back one step.
“We were supposed to turn in our valuables.”
“I know,” she said quickly.
His forehead was wrinkled.
“You kept your candlesticks?” he asked. “We could have sold them. The group needs money.”
This was the crux of it.
“And he blackmailed me!” Ida said.
But Levi was less interested in what the twin had done. It was Ida he was worried about. The look on his face was not one of anger but one of profound disappointment. He didn’t reprimand her or judge her verbally. He was too kind. But she saw, once again, that his ideals were real. He wanted a partner who shared them. She pictured him, still shivering from kadachat, refusing to eat the meat that would make him stronger. She had seen him with the eucalyptus saplings, planting the weaker shoot and setting the stronger one aside. He loved her, yes. But she felt the door to his heart sliding closed.
Ida lifted her eyes. One of the German
twins was crossing the field. He was holding something in his hand. A pillow, the size of a small loaf of bread. It had a flap of black fabric attached to one end and a patterned ribbon around its middle, like a sash.
Was it?
Yes. It was Ruth’s doll.
Ida turned back and opened her mouth to tell Levi, but the expression on his face stopped her. He was looking down at the dirt, his cheek puckered where he was biting it inside his mouth. It was as though she could see the thoughts passing across his face: the rainy season was coming. They were behind in their planting. They could have used the money from Ida’s candles to repair the tractor.
She didn’t know what to say, and so she asked, bluntly, “Can you forgive me?”
He reached for her face. She thought he was going to pull her to him and kiss her, but instead he lifted her glasses off and placed them on the bridge of his own nose. She laughed—he looked so ridiculous—but he said, seriously, “We see this differently.”
The smile left Ida’s face. “Please?” she asked.
Levi hesitated. “I have something to tell you too,” he said.
She held her braid, waiting.
“I saw David…” he started.
But he stopped, as though the full impact of Ida’s secret was sinking in and he could no longer trust her with his own.
“What is it?” she asked.
She wanted, desperately, to know. Everything depended on it. She could see it was something important, and she could also see Levi was changing his mind about trusting her.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Never mind.”
All the while he had been talking he’d been weaving a long string of fragrant grass, and now he tied the circle together and set the crown atop her head.
As though to spite her, Ida thought, the rains that came that winter were torrential. They washed away the taboon and drenched the straw pallets and everything smelled like mould and fermented grain. At night she shivered violently in her tent, unable to keep warm. The roof of the dining hall was made with reed mats, and fat drops smacked into her soup. The other pioneers picked up their bowls and began to dance and sing:
Rain, rain, good rain,
God of heaven, grant bane!
Look for each son and daughter,
Pure water, clear water.
Only Ida was unhappy. Levi had ceased seeking her out entirely. The cold nights seemed to last for an eternity. Then, when the rainy season was over, as though to spite her again, the land erupted into a kind of beauty she had never seen before. The grass shot up, the wildflowers tangled themselves on the hillside, purple sticker weeds and bright red anemones and blue irises. From out in the fields you could hear the drone of the bees as they pollinated the hillside, and the collared doves singing. The kibbutz had been given four horses from the Agency, and all of their bellies hung low with foals. One died, but the other three survived and stood on spindly legs in the pasture. The wheat, too, grew heavy and high. It was time for threshing.
None of the settlers had ever threshed a field.
Levi, though, seemed to know what to do intuitively, and this, too, pained Ida, to watch his quiet competence revealed in front of the group. To see them all witness to what once had been hers. He demonstrated how to win the trust of the new foals and then, ever so gently, how to attach them to the sledge and nudge them forward. He showed the rest of the group the correct way to turn up the crops with the pitchfork. He showed them the wide arc they must make to scatter chaff in the wind.
Partway through the first morning, though, the thresher broke. From over at the laundry Ida heard the bang of something caught in the gears followed by the sound of crumpling metal. She crossed the perimeter and joined the others peering into the back of the machine. Grains of wheat were leaking out with the straw.
Yashka cursed in Russian. “That’s what we get for buying it second-hand.”
“What else could we have done?” Zeruvabel asked.
Levi climbed in at the open end to see if he could figure out what was wrong.
“Careful,” Ida cautioned, but he didn’t look up at her. She could see the soles of his sandals sticking out, the leather treads worn away entirely.
Around him, the halutzim stood poised and waiting. “Pass me a wrench?” Levi called.
Yashka obliged.
“A different wrench.”
“How many wrenches do you think we have?”
But Yashka dug around in the rusted red toolbox.
“This might take some time,” said Levi.
Yashka gestured to the thresher that was now making a gagging noise as though trying to spit something out. “Maybe there’s a rock in it?”
“Of course there’s a rock in it,” spat Zeruvabel. “There are a hundred rocks in it. Because we didn’t clear the field properly, because we didn’t have the right machine!”
“We had the machine,” someone corrected, “but it was broken.”
Saul slid down from the mountain of wheat. There was nothing to do but wait.
From across the field David was approaching. His black curls bounced with his step; he was holding his daughter, Ruth, in his arms. She was pale, collapsed against her father’s chest. The nurse had placed a new bandage loosely around her leg; Ida kept her eyes away from it, but could not ignore the feeling of guilt and regret that landed in her gut whenever she thought of Ruth.
David stood in front of them and waited until everyone was listening. “There are brambles to be cut at the bottom of the yard,” he said.
As he spoke, Ida noticed how hollow his cheeks were as well. He wiped at sweat on his forehead with his billowing sleeve. From the back of the group came a voice. “We’re going to cut brambles? In planting season?”
They all turned to look. It was not every day someone challenged David.
The voice belonged to Yitzhak, the new halutz who had arrived back from Kinneret with Hannah. Ida could see from the way David looked at him that the two men had some kind of history.
“You can clean the toilets if you prefer,” David said.
Insult beyond insult.
“In planting season?” Yitzhak repeated again. He cracked his knuckles.
“There’s a whole work crew waiting. What would you suggest?”
David shifted Ruth higher on his hip and wiped at his forehand again. He scrunched his eyes like he was trying to focus and steady himself.
“I’ll tell you what I would suggest,” Yitzhak said. “I would suggest we send men to work at the factory to make money. Then we purchase proper machines. Poof! The field is down. Then threshers, then wagons to carry the sheaves to the machine, then done. Easy! That’s what I would suggest.”
Ida had heard rumours of a contingent of workers who wanted to abandon the fields—only briefly!—to work at the factory in Tiberias, but up until now nobody had voiced this idea aloud to the group.
The look on David’s face was difficult for Ida to read. It was as though he was weighing his words very carefully lest he say something he regretted.
“I don’t know what kind of utopia you’re trying to build,” he said finally, “but my utopia doesn’t include—”
But Yashka interrupted. “Forget the factory. Let’s just steal the Arab’s wheat!”
“There’s no need to be disparaging,” someone said.
“He’s not being disparaging,” chimed in another voice. “They really don’t have any!”
“Exactly. So they steal ours! Every time the one with the scar on his face passes he leaves with his thawb puffed up twice as large as before.”
“I don’t know why you persist like this about the Arabs!” Leah said. “This is their home too.”
But her comment was ignored.
“We have watchmen,” Yashka said.
“A watchman, not watchmen. One! And with a whistle instead of a gun.” The old argument hung in the air.
Yitzhak said, “When I got here it was taking three hours to get around the field. Toda
y we went three times before lunch. The threshing should be started.”
“I am aware,” David said hotly, his face pinched.
“Well, I’m just noting. Now three of our machines are broken.”
“The machine from Prague just needs cleaning,” David said.
“But it needs seven men to do it!” Yashka jumped in.
“We sent Zeruvabel to clean it,” Yitzhak said. “Let me tell you something. Zeruvabel is not a mechanic! Yesterday I watched him tightening a bolt with all his strength. He leaned in and gripped and sweated and pushed. And then? He’d forgotten to put the washer on first. Would you like to know how long it took him to unscrew the bolt?”
But nobody wanted to know.
“We must be patient while he learns,” David said, as though Zeruvabel himself was not right there in front of them, flushed with shame.
“Do you think we should be patient?” Yitzhak asked. “Because Zeruvabel is really a musician. A talented violinist! Aaron over there, on the other hand, is a trained mechanic.”
“But Aaron is in the gardening crew.”
“My point exactly.”
Ida had been thinking the same thing, but she would never in a million years have given voice to the thought. She wondered who this Yitzhak had been to David at the old place. How did he have such confidence to stand up to him?
“What about talent?” Yitzhak went on. “Can we not admit that each of us is not identical to the other?”
Raya jumped in, unable to restrain herself. “What about the American machine?”
“Broken as well,” Saul said.
“Once we fix it, though! It cuts its own straw, blows away its own dust.”
“It only takes two men,” someone else agreed.
“So what’s the problem?”
Saul rolled his eyes. “The carrying device. The elevator.”
A cork had been popped and the entire kibbutz’s frustrations sprayed out. A side argument erupted about whether buying the plough had been the correct use of resources. What about a chicken incubator? Come to think of it, what about some chickens? A water pump to irrigate the fields? Leah railed against the women’s assignment to kitchen duty—was it or was it not a world where equality reigned? Shoshanna launched into a tirade about the treatment of the Arab girls who could be married off to a man four times their age and forced to labour alongside his other wives while he drank bitter coffee in the souk. Did the pioneers not have some responsibility to try to prevent this? Then from the back of the crowd there was a ripple as someone tried to come forward. Ida saw that it was one of the German twins.
