Israel (24 page)

The doctor was coming every day now. Arrangements had been made to transport her from her parents' house in Jaffa to the new infirmary in Tel Aviv. The port city had seen the arrival of its first gasoline motor trucks, and Meir Dizengoff had seen to it that one was standing by for her, its canvas-enclosed cargo area rigged out as a makeshift ambulance.

Rosie read Haim's letter, carefully folded it and placed it on the nightstand. Later, when she was dressed, she would put it in her pocket, where she could touch it from time to time through the day.

She missed Haim desperately and found herself heartened by the good news in his letter. According to Haim he and the other halutzim were transforming the agricultural settlement into a place of primitive but unspoiled beauty.

“Like the Garden of Eden,” as Haim described it in his letter. Rosie, reclining against her feather pillows, smiled at her reflection in her vanity mirror.

“The Garden of Eden,” she murmured, patting her huge belly. “A nice enough place for you to grow up in, yes, my son?”

She rang the bell, for it was time to dress and go downstairs. Her mother had invited several women for luncheon. Normally Rosie found herself bored by her mother's circle, but she had been housebound for a week and was hungry for diversion of any sort.

Her mother's guests began arriving at noon. Kamel showed them into the dining area one by one.

As the meal wore on, Rosie began to suspect that her mother had laid down specific ground rules for conversation. Miriam Glaser kept the focus firmly on baby clothes and Tel Aviv society gossip in general; not once did the subject of Um Jumi or Haim come up. This was patently absurd, for the whole notion of a self-sufficient commonly owned
agricultural settlement was so antithetical to the middle-class European sensibilities of Tel Aviv that the matter was literally the talk of the town. For days the newspapers had been full of Dr. Ruppin's comments on the program. It was widely known that he was a staunch advocate of settlement.

That the subject did not seem to exist at her mother's table was highly amusing to Rosie. She perversely decided to raise the issue at her first opportunity. Haim's encouraging letter had made her feel bold. She was also eager for news.

Mrs. Wasserman, seated on her right, was the wife of one of Tel Aviv's foremost newspaper publishers. Rosie leaned towards her, whispering, “You must be very proud of your husband's exclusive interview with Dr. Ruppin.”

“Rosie . . .” her mother admonished.

“Let the girl talk, Miriam,” Mrs. Wasserman interjected. She was an overweight plain-featured woman with crooked teeth. She had always felt inferior among her friends and tended to bolster her standing by recounting her husband's successes. “Teddy hasn't printed half what Arthur told him,” she boasted.

“What do you mean?” Rosie asked, not liking her

tone.

“Just that Arthur is very disappointed in how things at Um Jumi are going.”

“Dr. Ruppin sounded so optimistic in the interview.”

“Darling, he has to be optimistic,” Mrs. Wasserman explained. “He can't let on how poorly things are going, can he? Not if he wants to hold onto his position as head of the National Fund. He's invested quite a bit of money in the farm machinery and all that land.”

“Please! You're upsetting Rosie,” Miriam Glaser cut in. “My dear, don't you pay attention,” she told her daughter. “I'm sure Mrs. Wasserman is exaggerating,” she added, but then abruptly realized that in her haste to
keep her daughter calm, she was saying exactly the wrong thing to quiet the insecure Mrs. Wasserman.

“Rosie, I know your mother thinks I'm a braggart,” the newspaper publisher's wife said huffily. “Why I'd ever make things up I'll let her say. But one thing I can tell you is that Dr. Ruppin is very worried about the climate at Um Jumi. Never mind the malaria—everyone outside Tel Aviv is fair prey to malaria—Arthur confided to my husband that Um Jumi also has yellow fever.”

Rosie's heart began to pound with awful fear. She clutched the letter in her skirt pocket. It had been written weeks and weeks ago. Was Haim even now laid up with fever? Was he calling out for her as he lay dying?

Rosie gasped, positive that her beloved was a jaundiced corpse.

“You see what you've done, you big cow?” Miriam screeched at Mrs. Wasserman from what sounded like a great distance.

“Now, Rosie, don't cry like that,” somebody whispered directly into her ear. She felt hands grasping her as she began to sway off the chair, and then quite suddenly she felt herself struck by a lightning bolt of pain.

She cried out, doubling over with such force that her forehead slammed against the edge of the table. Had she left blood on her mother's lace tablecloth? She couldn't tell, for she was far too overwhelmed with labor pain.

“Oh, my God,” Miriam murmured. “Kamel,” she shouted, “send for the doctor. Rosie's having her baby!”

Somehow they got her upstairs to her bed. Then her mother was there, whispering reassurances. There were cool wet clothes pressed against her forehead. They stung at first. I guess I did cut my forehead on the table, Rosie thought distractedly. I hope there isn't a scar.

The doctor arrived. He asked about the interval between contractions, and then, disbelieving, timed them himself.

“Forget the ambulance,” he said brusquely. “Tel Aviv is out of the question; she can't travel. She'll have it at home.”

Rosie spent all that day and half the night in labor. During the first hours she called for the charcoal sketch of Haim and his friend Abe, which had been taken down from the wall and rolled up to be packed in Rosie's trunk. She'd packed some weeks ago, to occupy herself and to feel that she was making some real progress toward joining her husband.

Now the rolled parchment in its leather tube went beside her on the sweat-soaked sheets. During the bad periods, when her world was nothing but grunts and contractions, she gripped that tube as she would her husband's hand had he been present.

She began to have delusions. She imagined that she had yellow fever, that Haim had it. She imagined she was back on that sandy stretch of Jaffa beach, being assaulted by the Turkish immigration officer. Haim came racing to her rescue all over again, but then the scene shifted and it was a Bedouin marauder confronting Haim. They were all at Um Jumi and the nomad wanted the baby.

A few minutes after dawn on January seventeenth, 1911, a boy was born to the Kolesnikoffs.

At Um Jumi winter gradually mellowed into spring. The cold rains turned the roads between Tel Aviv and Galilee to impassable mud. No supply carts could arrive until the sun had the opportunity to bake the sticky earth dry, and no carts meant no mail.

Haim could only wonder about Rosie. Had she carried to term? Had she come through all right? Was it a boy, a girl? Was there a child at all?

The others watched him, fascinated by his stoicism as he stubbornly maintained a cheerful manner. He was the first to volunteer for a work detail, to risk his own health
nursing fever patients. For every bucket of water the others carried from the turbulent Jordan back to the huts and dining hall, Haim carried two.

The others watched and when he was away nodded reluctant approval. Maybe the capitalist from Tel Aviv wasn't so bad after all.

Of all the halutzim at Um Jumi only Yol understood Haim. He knew his old friend was throwing himself into his work to avoid thinking about Rosie and the baby. Yol knew it had been Haim's way not to brood but to lose his sadness and worry in hard labor.

The Arabs of Um Jumi were employed by an absentee landlord who had sold a portion of his land to the National Fund. At first, the fellahin assumed the Jewish newcomers would themselves be landlords, hiring others to do the work. When they saw the Jews—men and women—providing for themselves, they respected them for it.

However, there was still a great deal of mistrust between the ethnic factions of Um Jumi. Most of the blame for the tension lay with the Jews. The halutzim were strict Zionists; they were well educated and could not help looking down on the Arab peasants. During their meetings in the dining hall they assured each other of how happy the Arabs would one day be under Zionist protection.

One night Haim approached Yol after the meeting disbanded. Popovich looked drawn. He had been up most of the night on guard duty.

Lately there had been an increase of nomad robbers from the Transjordan menacing the village. The two members of Hashomer, the professional watchmen, had left Um Jumi long before Haim arrived, after training the halutzim in the use of firearms. Now the men, in addition to their regular duties during the day, took turns on guard. It meant standing in the dark, tightly gripping one of the three twenty-year-old Lee-Enfield rifles provided by the National Fund office in England.

Haim had also received firearms instruction and took his turn. At first he found it fun. At last he was a soldier in the Jewish cause.

Then late one moonless night he heard a sound like a hornet buzzing past his head. A split second later a sharp cracking sound reached Haim's ears. He'd been shot at, he suddenly realized. Oh please, no, he wanted to cry out, not until I know what happened with my Rosie. Not until I see my son.

But he kept silent, taking shelter in a ditch. The next bullet never came, and he was never shot at again on watch. From then on, however, being a warrior ceased to be fun, and the heft and scent of the well-oiled rifle failed to bring him pleasure. He also understood why Yol no longer proudly brandished his pistol.

“What is it, my friend?” Yol asked as the last of the halutzim left the dining hall.

“It's no good, our dealings with the fellahin,” Haim exploded. What he wanted to say had been pent up in him for a long time. “I accept the fact that I am a newcomer to Um Jumi—”

“So far I have nothing to add to this conversation,” Yol observed.

“But about living with Arabs and profiting from the relationship I do know a little something,” Haim continued. “I know it from my time as a factory owner in Tel Aviv.”

“Stop a minute.” Yol held up his hands. “I know what you're intending to say and I agree with you. We've made a mess of things with the people living here.”

“So?”

Yol shrugged. “Our coworkers don't know Arabs the way we do. To them the Arabs are merely a nuisance to be coped with, like the mud in winter and the snakes in summer. They can't even speak with the Arabs.”

“You have the language,” Haim pointed out.

“I know, I know, but with all my other responsibilities
as the damned patriarch of this project, I simply have not had the energy to convince our comrades that we ought to negotiate with the villagers and then actually do it.”

“Poor old Yol,” Haim said. “You hardly laugh anymore. You've had to grow up very quickly, haven't you?” He gazed at his friend, lost in thought. “Tell you what. I've got the language to talk with the fellahin. I'll go see their mayor tomorrow.”

“No. First we must discuss it with the others.”

“We don't yet know what to discuss. Please, leave it to me. I'll bring back something we can vote on.”

“It's risky,” Yol warned. “The workers here are just starting to accept you.”

Haim pondered it. When Rosie finally came, she too would be afforded a trial period, and then the others would vote to accept or blackball them.

“Remember what you told me, Yol, that all this bickering and jealousy was the way of it in a real family? Well, I think I've been here long enough to speak up for myself. At tomorrow night's meeting, assuming I have a profitable talk with the mayor, I'll present what I've accomplished. If the haluztim refuse me—if they see night and I see day on the issue—then I'll know I'm so different from them that this isn't my family after all.”

Yol smiled thinly. “Go on then. Have your visit. I have just two bits of advice. Don't wear clean clothes, for there are lice in those huts, and do make a big thing of refusing all gestures of hospitality once or twice. The rural fellahin are far more traditional than those who live in the cities.”

The next day after his morning chores were done, Haim walked over to the Arab sector. He did not manage to get very far before he was surrounded by a flock of gawking children who wore only flimsy rags despite the coolness of the day. They were all pitifully thin and most had open sores on their nut-brown skin.

The mayor's house was a small stone cottage in an out-of-the-way part of the village. Adult male Arabs passed Haim, giving him hard looks, but none stood in his way as he opened the gate, threaded his way past several scrawny goats grazing in the yard and knocked on the door.

An old woman with two blue dots tattooed on her forehead listened intently as he explained why he'd come and then left him on the doorstep while she relayed his message to her husband. As Haim stood waiting, he felt countless eyes drilling holes into his back.

Presently the old woman returned and ushered him inside. Haim found the mayor reclining on grimy cushions in the dark, stuffy low-ceilinged living room of the cottage. The village mayor looked to be in his seventies. He was bald and wore a white goatee. His belly was big enough to be obvious. He did not stand to greet his guest.

“You are welcome,” Kareem al-Hassad said in Arabic, smiling. “Jews were welcome when they came unasked to Um Jumi, land of our ancestors, and you are welcome now that you have come uninvited to my home.”

“I am in debt to your kind hospitality,” Haim said meekly. The old man, he noticed, was wearing a threadbare caftan and was missing three fingers of his left hand. There was a bubbling hookah at his side.

“Sit,” al-Hassad said as the old woman reappeared with two tiny cups of coffee on an ornate lacquered tray.

Haim sat cross-legged on a cushion, repeatedly refused and finally accepted the thimbleful of thick black brew, sipping it and pronouncing it delicious. At the same time he took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one. He did not smoke, but he had to go through the motion. The mayor would be offended if he thought the cigarettes had been brought purely for his benefit, as an act of charity. When he was finally persuaded to accept a smoke, Haim was careful to place the packet halfway between them.