Israel (10 page)

“I don't suggest you try it,” she spat back. “From a yokel like you he would never accept it.”

“Here now, calm down, both of you,” Glaser cut in. The glowering Turk was right behind him. “Rosie, my darling, foul-mouthed daughter, I know you like a book. You're shouting at Haim because you're angry with yourself.”

Rosie, smiling to herself upon hearing Haim's name, suddenly got very busy brushing the sand from her skirt.

“Why did the officer slap her?” Haim asked.

“It was her own fault,” Glaser replied. “Here women are considered inferior to men—”

“Only by the Turks.” Rosie's bare foot pawed the sand. “So get no ideas, Mr. Yokel.”

“You see, the Turk considered it an insult to negotiate with a woman,” Glaser continued. “Rosie, I told you it wouldn't work. Always you disobey me.”

The Turkish officer, still sullen, began a surly exchange with Glaser, all the while keeping his pistol at the ready. The halutz reluctantly handed over a thick wad of bills. The Turk holstered his gun, said something else, glaring directly at Haim, and stalked off.

“We were in luck.” Glaser sagged with relief. “The other two officers saw none of the incident. Otherwise he would have been forced to arrest you in order to protect his honor.” He turned on his daughter. “Just the same, it was too close a call and too expensive. Rosie, next time you will not attempt what must be left to a man.”

“Oh, Papa, it's too much,” she wailed, then appealed to Haim. “Am I such an idiot that I'm incapable of taking my place in the world?”

Haim was wearing an idiot's grin. Rosie was unlike
any woman he had ever met. It was her bold, arrogant style as much as her appearance that captivated him. “Rosie Glaser,” he said with heartfelt sincerity, “you are capable of doing anything you'd like.”

“Oy,” Erich Glaser sighed.

Rosie rewarded Haim with a smile and an apology. “My father was right. I was rude to you only because I was angry with myself for failing with the Turk. Please forgive me, Haim. I've caused you much trouble.”

“Well, it's over now.”

“No, I'm afraid it isn't,” she told him. “The last thing the Turk said was that you had better get away from Jaffa while you still can.”

“Yes, she's right,” Glaser broke in. “You must go away until things cool down and the Turk forgets you.”

“Maybe I'd better stay and let him arrest me,” Haim offered. “If I run, won't he take things out on all of you?”

“Hardly,” Glaser chuckled. “He'd have to testify to his own humiliation. No, he has his money, so we're quite safe. He's not a bad sort, just a Turk. He makes far too much in baksheesh to want to upset relations between himself and the Zionist Agency.”

Haim nodded. “Then I'd better go.” He found it difficult to tear his eyes away from Rosie. The wind had shifted to mold the thin white fabric of Rosie's dress to her thighs and hips.

“I'll have one of my boys take you to the coach to Jerusalem,” Glaser offered. “There's stonecutting work there for strong men.”

“Very well.” Haim hesitated. “Rosie, until I come back—” The words stuck in his throat, but finally he managed to get them out, feeling quite bold even as he spoke. “Rosie, see to it that you don't fight with any more Turks, at least not until I can return to protect you.”

“Hah! Listen to him, Papa,” she laughed, blushing
furiously. “I dare you to come back, Mr. Yokel. I'll give you a slap like the Turk gave me.”

“Enough, you two.” Glaser pointed at the other new immigrants, who'd been patiently standing by. “We've got to get these people to town.”

“Come,” one of Glaser's sons said to Haim. “This way to the coach. There is one leaving in half an hour. The sooner you're away from Jaffa, the better off we'll all be.”

Haim let himself be led away. “I'll come back in a month, Rosie,” he called.

“And why should I care when you come back?” she demanded, brushing back her wind-tossed golden tresses. “Ben, take him away before I box his ears and make them ring.”

Haim grinned at her. Then he felt the portrait of himself and Abe banging against his ribs. He pulled it out of his tunic and tossed it toward Rosie. It landed at her feet.

“I'm afraid I'll lose it in Jerusalem,” he shouted above the crashing surf and cries of the gulls. “Hold it for me, please?”

Rosie brushed the sand off the case and held it aloft. “For one month only. I can't be bothered watching it forever. One month! Come back for it by then or else I'll throw it away.” A smile played at the corners of her wide, sensual mouth.

I'll come back for it, Haim thought as he walked with Ben, and for you, as well.

The stagecoach ride from Jaffa to Jerusalem took all night. Haim felt like cursing the desert heat until the road began to wind uphill into the mountains and the coach passed groves of Aleppo pine and glossy green eucalyptus trees.

There were other passengers who tried to engage Haim in conversation. He was polite but replied tersely,
turning away or pretending to doze in order to be left alone with his thoughts. As dusk fell, turning the bright blue sky to lavender and softening the arid, stony landscape, Haim contemplated his first day in Palestine.

The recollection of his attack upon the Turkish officer still had the power to quicken his breathing. Haim would never have dreamed of lifting his eyes before a representative of the czar or even a Christian peasant from the neighboring village.

It has to do with leaving home, Haim thought as the coach rattled through the night past lonely Arab villages hunched between the desolate hills. Now that I am among strangers, I feel free to behave like a different person.

But there was more to the day's actions than the sense of liberty felt by a stranger in a strange land. I behaved the way I did not because I am far from home, but because I have come home, he realized.

Haim still could not explain the intensity of the rage he'd felt upon seeing Rosie struck. Anger at injustice he had felt before, but never so deeply that he was compelled to unthinking action.

Why had he done it, then? The question had great importance to Haim, for he had grown up in docile acceptance of horrific violence. Attacks against his people were a part of life.

He had never been able to remember the events that led up to his being orphaned. It was as if his life began the day he appeared upon Abe's doorstep. Everything before that, including memories of his family, seemed a hazy hallucination. Haim was never sure how much of it had actually happened and how much he was making up.

Late at night during that strange interim between consciousness and sleep Haim saw images of a tall, balding man who wore tools on his belt. There came to him the sharp smell of sawdust and the smooth feel of planed wood. During half-sleep, while his head lolled on the
pillow, Haim remembered being small enough to fit into a tin washtub with two other faceless children. A dark-haired woman with a mole on her chin was scrubbing his ears. Soap burned his eyes. The woman held him aloft and the tepid water dripped from his bare toes.

That was all—no memories at all of what had happened to those nameless people. And how could one
try
to remember something? His lack of a past had long ago ceased to be anything more than a vague bother to Haim. God had taken away, but God had also given. If Haim had lost his family, he had had Abe.

Now what concerned Haim far more than his past was the way he was reacting to the present. He had always imagined the day when he would use his physical strength to stand up for his rights. Now, within hours of arriving in Eretz Yisroel, the moment had come.

But I stood up for another, not myself. I risked my life for Rosie . . . and Rosie belongs to me. How Abe would laugh at me, Haim thought. I am not one day in Palestine and already I have chosen a wife.

Did she know? Haim decided she must. Such things were not hard to understand for people like himself and Rosie.

He remembered the way she looked at him, the way she blushed and the words she said. Yes, she had been waiting for him for just as long as he had been on his way to her.

Still, like anything prized, she would have to be earned. That was all right. Haim was not afraid of a fight. As surely as Palestine would belong to the Jewish people, Rosie Glaser would be his. Now that the decision was made, Haim could relax. His eyelids grew heavy as the movements of the coach lulled him to sleep.

Shouts and whipcracks brought him awake a little after sunrise. Haim looked out the window, craning his neck to see where they were headed.

The sun was just perched above the golden domes and slender spires of the hilltop city of Jerusalem, still quiet at this early hour. The horses' hooves echoed off the yellowing stone walls as the coach passed through Jaffa Gate. Haim caught a glimpse of a sleepy Turkish sentry waving them through. The soldier could not know him, of course, but Haim found himself instinctively sinking back into the shadowy interior of the coach.

There was a tall rectangular clock tower, very new and very Turkish with its ring moldings and cupola, perched anachronistically upon the crumbling guardhouse. Haim scowled at it, shaking his head. The clock tower might just as well have been a line of washing hung out to dry, such was its devastating effect on the previous majesty of the ancient western gateway to Jerusalem.

“Terrible, isn't it?” clucked the slightly built passenger seated across from Haim. He was the only other person in the coach who was awake. “It looks like a tarboosh.”

“Excuse, please?” Haim understood most of the other
fellow's rattling Hebrew, but that last word escaped him.

“A tarboosh? Means a fez. You know, those hats the Turks wear.”

Haim shrugged. “All right, but I don't understand the reference.” The diminutive man had a short black beard and a head full of closely cropped black woolly curls. He had long thin arms and hands so incongruously large that they looked like shovel blades attached to the fellow's pencil wrists. The man was no older than Haim, but like a monkey he could in repose appear old, gnarled and wise.

“The clock was built to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of some sultan,” the fellow was saying. “Anyway, it went up just last year. I always thought there was more to it than the Turks giving a birthday present to a sovereign. They wanted to show that Jerusalem belongs to them, that it's Turkish, see? So they put a big fez on it.” He sat back, a proud smile stretching across his bearded face.

Haim shrugged. “When the city is ours we'll tear down the fez.”

“I see you're just off the boat. Never mind, you'll get the hang of things soon enough.” He stuck out his oversized hand. “My name is Yol Popovich. I am from Poland, but for the last two years I have been a halutz,” he added proudly.

“Me, I've been here only for a few hours, but already I have battled a Turk,” he grinned, something about the brash good nature of the monkey-man drawing him out.

“This I've got to hear about,” Yol Popovich laughed. The coach began to slow and the change in rhythm set the other passengers to stirring and yawning and stretching. “All out,” the driver called as the coach came to a stop.

“Come, I'll buy you your first Zionist breakfast,” Yol offered as he waited for the driver to hand down his suitcase, “and after you throw up you can tell me all about your adventure.”

Haim's new friend took him to an Arab stall beneath the shadows of the ruins known as the Citadel of David. At Yol's suggestion they carried their meal to a nearby cypress looming over a bent fig tree. The halutz pointed at two mounds between the tree trunks.

“Graves,” he said, his brown, beady eyes full of mirth. “Hope you don't mind.” He peeled off his cotton shirt to spread it out on the grass for a blanket. “I don't know who is buried there, but the Arabs say it is two lovers from feuding families. Makes sense, yes? Oh, I forgot, you wouldn't know. You see, the trees? Well, the Arabs take the fig tree as a symbol of the female principle and the strong, tall cypress to represent the male.”

“But they are merely trees.” Haim shrugged. The least he could do for this funny fellow was be polite. “You are fond of the Arabs?” he asked, munching his breakfast.

Yol nodded. “They are clever and full of quirks—entertaining, the way I knew people to be in Lublin. A nice change from all the serious, dull Zionists.”

Haim was too shocked to reply. He lowered his eyes and concentrated on his food.

“How do you like it?” Yol asked, gleefully watching Haim eat. “You're doing well. I couldn't stomach that stuff for weeks.”

Haim shrugged again. “I've had worse. What is all this, anyway?”

“That flat bread is called
pita
, and the mush you're dipping it into is a crushed pea called
humus
. The salty stuff is
za'atar
; I don't know how they make that.” He paused. “You're sure you're not going to throw up?” He looked disappointed.

“Positive,” Haim chuckled. “And these?” He held up several small green oval objects.

“Come now, even in Russia they must have olives.”

“What they had and what we had are two different things,” Haim said. “Olives I've never seen.”

“You'll have your fill of them here, my friend,” Yol sighed.

“You really don't like this food?”

“What's to like?” Yol made a face. “In Lublin my father was a baker and loved food.” His eyes went dreamy. “Ah, Haim, then we had what to eat—roast capons so tender they'd melt in your mouth. Flank steaks with tiny new potatoes cooked right in the pan with the meat. Fresh fish, and many kinds of cheese.” Yol's bare, bony chest rose and fell in a massive sigh of resignation. “I've tried to get the halutzim to acknowledge the lack of anything decent to eat here, but they all consider fine food to be a sign of weakness.” He shook his head. “What's the big deal over something good to eat?”