by Alison Pick
“I’ve never done this before either,” he’d said back then.
It was all she could do now not to reach out and touch his face. But he was no longer hers. And here he was with Sarah.
Ida looked around the tent. There was half a shell, upturned, holding a spool of thread, a needle and a button. She looked at her own bed, then looked again. The revolver lay on her wool blanket.
Sarah’s red-rimmed eyes followed Ida’s.
Behind Ida, Levi’s body was dark and dense, a magnet she felt pulled toward helplessly.
“Why do you have the gun?” Ida asked. It was as though she was not speaking the words, but the words were speaking her.
In fact, it was me making her ask.
As Ida spoke, Sarah lunged forward, grabbed the gun and pulled it to her body. She looked up and saw the question on Ida’s face.
“I’m on night guard,” Sarah said, defensive.
“Sarah,” Ida said. “What’s going on?”
Tears began to leak again from the corners of Sarah’s eyes. She didn’t brush them away; it was as if she didn’t notice them at all.
“Something happened,” she said.
“Something?”
Sarah began to cry in earnest, leaning forward and holding her head in her hands. Her curls shook as she sobbed.
“Oh achoti,” Ida said. “Can I help?”
Sarah lifted her head and caught Levi’s eye. The two of them exchanged some silent signal that Ida couldn’t read. Was Sarah trying to tell Levi something? Or was it the other way around?
“Can I help?” Ida repeated.
“No,” Sarah said. And then her expression changed. “Actually,” she said, “yes. Would you give me an hour to myself?”
She glanced around the circumference of the tent with her eyes, indicating the privacy she wanted within it.
Ida hesitated. “Where will I go?” she asked. But she knew right away it was not a good question.
“Go with Levi,” Sarah said.
Ida froze. Sarah knew that she would not want to go with Levi, that her shame at her abandonment was so great as to make it impossible. But Levi nodded. Ida saw his beautiful olive skin, his long eyelashes. He would take her away. And yes, she would allow it. Even though he was not doing it for Ida. He was doing it for Sarah.
—
It was the middle of the night when Ida returned to her tent to sleep. Across the field, the halutzim were still gathered around David and Hannah’s tent. Ida again heard the sound of a woman crying.
She vowed that what had passed between her and Levi was something she would never reveal to anyone. It was something that had changed her forever.
As soon as she entered the tent she knew something had changed here too. The full moon shone through the open flap, revealing a frozen tableau. Silence filled the space; even sound had stopped. There was a tear in the fabric of time; for a moment there was pure existence.
Sarah lay on her bed. Her curls were spread out around her and her cheeks were flushed, as though moments ago she had been running. The revolver lay beside her hand, as if it had fallen from her grip. But even before Ida saw the gun, she knew Sarah was dead.
I was dead.
But I wasn’t yet released.
My spirit was still contained in my body; it would take several hours for it to leak out, to drift up over the tents, the infirmary and the stable. The house for the babies not yet born. From above, the encampment looked shockingly small and inconsequential, a set laid out by a child for her dolls. I was pulled up and almost got away, but the jagged face of the mountain caught me, delicate lace snagged on a nail.
CHAPTER 10
AGAIN, I GO BACK. I hover behind David at the top of the thresher’s floor and look out over the kibbutz with him. The fields are spread across the land in squares of colour like a woman’s quilt. The garden bristles with vegetables; the stable is at maximum capacity, and there are plans to build an extension as soon as threshing season is over. The Baby House is full of children. There were meetings—many meetings—to discuss the ideal number for the first cohort. The final decision was six, and then Thin Rivka became pregnant by mistake—oh, the broiges it caused. But late was better than early, as had happened with Hannah. And now there were seven in the first kindergarten class.
From where David stood he could see Rivka bending over the tap by the shower house, tinkering with the nozzle. Always looking for something that needed fixing. But to David, for the moment at least, the commune was a perfectly oiled machine, functioning exactly as it was meant to. The halutzim stood in a perfect line, stepping together and swinging their scythes. And there were sickles for those not strong enough for a scythe. For the women.
The ground man pitched the sheaves up for the wagon man to pack. The wagons drew up to the thresher, sailing smoothly across the field and docking like ships in a port. They unloaded the wheat sheaves, long and heavy. David watched as Yitzhak manoeuvred his wagon according to the direction of the wind, letting nature help in the lifting of the sheaves to the rick-top. Yitzhak’s sheaves were perfectly ordered. It always gave David a queer kind of pleasure to be the one on the receiving end of such fastidious work, and to add his own flourish by cutting each cord—like slicing the mother from the child—relinquishing each bundle into the thresher-mouth. The cylinder took the grain and sucked it down.
What happened inside the machine was like what happened inside a woman. The body volunteered, the body offered itself, there was the banging of steel rods, the giant vibration. Inside, the shibboleth came away, and then the grain, and then the chaff from the seed. What remained was only the golden kernel itself, like the essence of a man that could make another human.
The wheat poured out through four different funnels into four different sacks, each one better quality than the last.
It was the pure kernel, the perfect kernel, that David aspired to.
Afterwards, the sacks were tied, one by one, and carried away to feed Eretz Yisrael.
“Switch!” someone shouted from beneath the thresher floor, where dark orifices discharged the straw and the chaff. David could picture the halutz, goggled to face the stream of straw. It could bury a man alive—it was a race to shove it away before you disappeared under it entirely. Someone had to stand midstream, flinging the straw into high piles. The piles became the gorens where the halutzim would later go for love.
Which—perhaps the idealists were right about some things?—was the greatest result a man could hope for.
David looked over to the east where the baler, too, was functioning perfectly. Daniel fed straw into it; Yonatan set the wires and stacked the completed bales. The belts slapped in time, like the slapping of bodies in sex.
Yes, the whole enterprise was like the wrangling of eros into form. The heavy work, the climax, followed by the birth of the world anew.
Hannah would have called this romantic pontificating. But how could she deny its truth?
What chutzpah they had had at the beginning, to believe the revival of a homeland was something they could accomplish. David thought back with a strange nostalgia to the early battle with the Bedouin, whose scrawny billy goats gobbled up every growing thing. The crops had suffered a blight, and the grains of wheat were hard and dark like pebbles. Then when the wheat was good the locusts had come, in a black cloud that covered the sky, their mouths clicking; they had devoured every inch of the fields. But somehow, after years of broken fan belts and kadachat and babies dead from dysentery, of scorpion bites and starvation and fields turned fallow from the drought, the whole show was up and running. The wagons sailed in from the valley, one after another, the machine’s maw opened to the bundles of wheat, and the gold currents of grain poured forth, as though taps had been turned on.
He turned away from the sight of all this.
There would be no gold where he was about to go.
In the new place, they would have to grow it all from the earth up. As Hannah kept reminding him.
Why, after
all, had they been working all these years? she had asked. Just to pick up and leave?
But David couldn’t stand the accusing look in Yitzhak’s eyes. The shadow of the accident hung over everything he did here. In the new place, nobody would know.
He climbed down from the thresher. He would take a last walk around the kibbutz. In the store room, the jars of nails were perfectly ordered according to size, and each tool hung in its place against its own outline that had been chalked on the wall. This was Meyer’s work—his mark was still on everything.
For Hannahleh this had only led to grief.
Down at the schoolhouse, Ruth was in a circle of children crouched in the garden; her beloved Liora was showing them how to gently remove the weeds by pinching them from the base of the root. The children looked to Liora as if she were their mother; their curly heads—every one of them curly, noted David—bent in her direction.
Liora felt David’s gaze, and lifted her face. The light that she was named for was woven like ribbons through her hair. They held eyes briefly; David looked away.
He thought he should tell Ruth she only had a few minutes left, that she needed to say goodbye to her playmates, who she thought of as brothers and sisters. But he knew the fuss that would ensue, how she would protest that she didn’t want to leave, she did not understand why they had to go, and David did not want to endure it, especially not with Liora right there. He would leave it to Hannah. It would be a better use of his energy to go to the stable and help with the loading of the wagons.
On his way he passed the eucalyptus grove, there on the shore of Kinneret. He touched the trees he himself had planted in the muddy banks almost a decade ago. How he had worried about them, crouching over the saplings with his watering can in the days before they had a proper irrigation system. Now they were broad and tall; the long, narrow fingers of their leaves pointed downward, as though to stroke one’s head in comfort.
He whispered goodbye to them and then turned up the trail that had been worn into the slope of the bank. Beside the dining hall he saw Rivka. It was different with her than it was with Liora. He and Rivka barely acknowledged each other. It had always been this way, any connection between them covered by an act of mutual denial. And if both people denied it, could anyone prove the act itself had happened?
Rivka was Yitzhak’s wife. She had a son, Gabriel, with a mop of black curls just like David’s.
Sometimes David wanted to go to the boy, to tell him. But of course, he and Rivka had their agreement.
Rivka’s new pregnancy was starting to show.
She lifted her head up to him. Her smile was kind. And although they almost never spoke, she now said a single word, “Matok.”
My sweet one.
A feeling rose in him then, a feeling of such sadness and remorse that he almost cried out, like a man does in the final moments of love. He tucked his chin against his chest, steadying himself.
“Shalom,” he said, offering her the generic word for peace, hello, goodbye, but by the time he managed to lift his head she had already looked away.
While David had been walking, Yitzhak must have parked the wagon and cleaned himself off from the day’s work before coming to the stables. David found him singing to one of the horses, rubbing salve on her wound. The harness had chafed and there was an angry red slash on her hind leg.
“All set?” he asked David, looking up.
David nodded.
“Malka packed you a lunch,” Yitzhak said, motioning to a basket covered in a white checked cloth that had been wedged beneath the seat.
“The oilcloth is rolled inside the canvas,” Yitzhak said. He straightened, cracking his knuckles. “There isn’t enough but you can get more in Jaffa.”
David nodded like Yitzhak was the one in charge—although it was he himself who had organized the details of his and Hannah’s departure. Their banishment. They would stop along the way and gather the two parties of the Work Brigade, and then in Jaffa at Mother Lobinsky’s to collect several other stragglers. Seventy-five of them in total. He would join in the excitement of the young halutzim as though he was one of them. As though Kinneret, and the accident, had never happened.
He had not meant to do it, of course. But there was no telling that to an Arab.
And of course the Arabs did not think of it as an accident.
The piece of white cloth had been spotted by Yitzhak, pinned beneath a rock like a trapped bird, its loose fabric flapping like a wing. It was a good thing Yitzhak had been the one to see it: another chaver might have missed it entirely. But Yitzhak knew, as he had made it his mission to learn everything he could about the Arab dialects and customs. The white cloth was their sign. They had enacted a blood feud. For what David had done, a Jew would be killed.
The kibbutz had sent Yitzhak to the Arabs as an ambassador of peace. Somehow he was able to talk them out of the feud. He had given them all of their demands: a portion of wheat and a portion of barley. Access to the water along the better donkey path. The right to turn their wagons on the Hebrew fields. Medicine from Tiberias for the eyes of the Arab children. But this had not been enough. Yitzhak had been forced to tell the Arabs that David would leave. They would not see his face again. Not in these parts.
That should settle it, Yitzhak had said. They are good for their word.
But David was not convinced. He thought that still, on a stony pathside, on a remote hillside…He would have to keep his guard up. Always.
He was sad to go. He was repentant. But he also couldn’t deny his excitement at what lay ahead. It was like being able to rewind and begin his youth again. The whole adventure of arriving in Eretz Yisrael with a sense of purpose, a sense of being chosen. That same chosenness he spent so much time trying to deny. But it was there, always, behind every action, the sense that he was carrying out God’s will.
He thought back to when he had come to this place, full of hope, full of promise. And now the new place lay ahead in much the same way. Empty. Waiting for him to make his mark. He thought of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, and of the valley they would reclaim today. God promised that Israel would be returned to her homeland under the rule of David…
He thought—he was certain—that the worst was now behind him. When of course the opposite was true.
David could hear shrill crying from over by the Baby House. Hannah would be trying to extract Ruth from the other children. Eventually she appeared, carrying Ruth in her arms. She must have bribed her with something, for the terrible noise had stopped. Hannah installed Ruth in the wagon carriage with her doll, where the child sat with tears rolling down her cheeks but no sound emerging from her mouth.
“You’ll have a wonderful time, bubala,” Yitzhak said, ruffling Ruth’s hair. She looked at him with an expression of such betrayal that David turned his head away.
Hannah, he knew, did not want to go either. She was afraid of what would happen if she left her father. She had promised, at her mother’s deathbed, that she would stay and take care of him. It had become an obsession for her. But even Hannah saw—must see—that now they could not stay. Not after what had happened.
David would not let little Sakina ruin him.
Still, he was shocked by how easy it was to leave. He’d expected a gathering to come and wave them off, but in the end, the threshing was a huge machine that could not be stopped. To pause one cog was to halt the entire process. So it was only Gaby and Lenka who came out of the kitchen, rubbing their chapped red hands on their aprons, and Yitzhak with the accusing look in his eye.
Hannah climbed up beside David and sat on the bench, her jaw set and her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“The tractor is making a sound.” David lifted his chin in the direction of the field, and Yitzhak nodded but did not turn to look. He would take care of it later.
“Shalom,” Yitzhak said. He was standing with his hand on Thin Rivka’s back; Rivka held eyes with Hannah but did not look at David himself.
Nobody else saw them off; it was as if they were making a secret getaway. The halutzim were in the fields, making the big wheel turn. David took the reins. He lifted a hand; Yitzhak lifted a hand in return. So much unspoken in that one gesture.
David turned the horses and they galloped out of the field.
CHAPTER 11
IT TOOK DAVID AND HANNAH longer than expected to collect the halutzim. Someone from the second Work Brigade was late meeting them in Petah Tikva, and a young woman in glasses had seemed to be lost within the walls of Mother Lobinsky’s boarding house in Jaffa; only at the last minute did she emerge, hair coming loose from her braids and sticking out in all directions. But finally they were off, and it seemed like a minor miracle to David that their straggling line of pioneers reached the Emek while the sun was still high. And then, a minor catastrophe: the Arabs appeared almost immediately after. He had hoped for a day or two to establish his authority with the new group. It was a tricky job, leadership in a movement that was about equality, and he would have to be subtle, earning the young halutzim’s trust. He needed some time. But as their motley group wound its way through the valley, the Arabs from the nearby village came out of their mud houses to watch. David spotted the leader immediately, an old man whose face had been disfigured in some ancient battle. The black and white keffiyeh always made David think of a chessboard. Did the old man know what David had done? Of course. Word spread between the Arab villages, through market stalls and Bedouin tents, like wildfire. He felt the mukhtar looking at him knowingly, as if they were sharing some kind of terrible secret.
“The Hebrew tribe is here to settle this valley,” David said, motioning to the long line of halutzim like a snake’s tail stretched out behind him. And then he switched to Arabic; he wanted this understood.
“I am the mukhtar,” David said, and touched his nose.
His Arabic was passable; what he had learned came from watching Yitzhak deal with the Arabs. Yitzhak had been the lead negotiator of land purchases in the Emek; once the land had been bought, it was Yitzhak who determined exactly where new settlements would be put up. He was a universal farmer; he bought cows and horses in Damascus, mules from Cyprus, sheep in Turkey. This old Arab would surely know Yitzhak, and for a moment David considered invoking his friend’s name to work as a salve on the slow-building tension. But more than peace he wanted respect; he wanted to assert his authority.
