Israel (41 page)

“I'd like to see my wife now, if you don't mind.”

Henderson scowled. “This way.”

They walked down a corridor painted pale green. “Here we are,” the physician said, but he held the door closed as Abe reached for the knob. “One final word of caution and then I'm going home to sleep. Last night your wife came very close to dying, Mr. Herodetsky. That's why we were looking for you. For a time we were sure we were going to lose her. Now you know. Whether Jew or Christian, Mr. Herodetsky, we would do well to count the blessings that the Lord bestows upon us. Good day, sir.”

Abe waited until the doctor had turned the corner. Then he went inside.

He found Sadie and Joseph sitting on the wooden bench by the desk in the maternity area. The receptionist looked just as unhappy as when Abe confronted her.

“They told us nobody can see her but the husband,” Sadie squawked in Yiddish. She was wearing a floral print dress and a black wool coat with a scruffy fur collar. “What's wrong? A sister can't visit a new mother? What is this nonsense? Joseph took off from work to come.”

“She had a difficult delivery,” Abe explained, nodding a greeting to the silent, anxious Joseph, looking uncomfortable in his suit. “She'll be here a week. Tomorrow you can sit with her, Sadie.”

“And the little girl?” Sadie was quivering with happiness. “Everything's all right?”

“She's a beautiful baby,” Abe told them. “We're going to name her Rebecca after your grandmother.” Abe smiled. “All right by you?” He assumed it was, as Sadie began to weep with joy.

Joseph clapped him on the back. “A daughter then.” He nodded, about to say more, but Abe turned away.

What can you tell me that I don't know? Abe thought. That a daughter cannot aid a father in his business nor provide for her parents in old age? That a daughter has to be sheltered, until the time comes for her to desert her family for a young man—and that there had better be a dowry to attract the husband in the first place?

When Abe went into Leah's room—crowded with two other recovering mothers, squalling babies and attendant husbands and relatives—Leah was gazing serenely out the window. Abe was stunned by how old she looked. He could have sworn the grey strands in her long black hair
had not been there yesterday. Her lower lip was swollen and torn where she'd bitten it during labor.

She turned toward him, smiling. “A fine girl, Abe,” she said, her eyes intent upon his. “This time a girl. Next time will be—”

“Sha.” Abe tenderly cupped her cheek, and then his eyes fell upon his daughter, a tiny, wrinkled, squirming thing, sighing in contentment as it nursed with eyes shut at its mother's breast.

“Abe—”

He leaned forward to kiss his wife's damp forehead. “If she's as good as her mother, she'll be worth a dozen sons.”

He was afraid she was about to apologize to him, and that would be unbearable. Who was he to be apologized to? Last night while his wife almost died delivering their child, he was drunk.

“Abe—”

He snapped out of his brooding as Joseph steered him to an out-of-the-way area of the lobby. “I got here a little flask of something,” Joseph confided, patting his coat pocket. “What do you say? A little drink on such an occasion never hurt anyone.” He drew the battered metal flask and handed it over.

Abe twisted off the stopper and took a long pull. It was whiskey, not vodka, but it would do. He handed it back to Joseph, who took a sip, smacked his lips and asked, “You want more?”

“Yes,” Abe nodded. “I do.”

On March twenty-fourth Rosie Kolesnikoff and her son Herschel attended a raucous Sunday evening dining hall meeting. There they heard a visitor report that the British were preparing to move against Turkish positions in the Transjordan. The next few months would be hard, but the end was in sight. Last year Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had fallen to the British. The Turks seemed to be losing interest in Palestine as they concentrated on Russia, which was in a shambles due to the Bolsheviks. With the Turks so eager to seize coveted Russian territory it was conceivable that northern Palestine could be liberated within the year.

The twilight sky still flashed fiery hints of the blood-orange setting sun as Rosie and Herschel left the exuberant singing and dancing in the dining hall to walk back to their cottage. Herschel was preoccupied and quiet. Usually that meant he was missing his father, but Rosie could sense that he was intent on digesting the news that they had just heard.

At seven Herschel was a skinny miniature of Haim. His blond hair was straighter and lighter than Haim's but
still his father's gift, as were his handsome features and blue eyes.

Rosie watched Herschel as he walked with his hands thrust into the pockets of his baggy shorts, eyes narrowed in thought. He was all gangling arms and scabby knees, but there was something very grown-up about him.

She knew what Herschel was thinking. She'd seen the way he perked up when the speaker mentioned Transjordan.

He knows that's where his father probably is, Rosie thought.

It had been six months since Haim left them, half a year since that night when husband and wife loved each other so exquisitely, and teary-eyed father and son exchanged their private farewells outside the cottage, beyond Rosie's hearing. During those months the Turks had come and gone twice. As always, their presence was odious, but with the Balfour Declaration and the Central Powers' promise that they too would provide for a Jewish homeland in exchange for Zionist cooperation, the beatings and other mistreatments had lessened.

There was still disease. The years of overcrowding and malnutrition had taken their toll on both young and old, and medical care was hard to come by. The Turks and Germans restricted movement about the region. People had to depend upon the compassion of individual soldiers; some, both Turk and German, would allow a mission of mercy such as transport of the sick to a hospital. Other soldiers would order the carts back and threaten to shoot if their decree was not obeyed.

Herschel ran ahead of Rosie to pull open the door of the cottage. No key was needed, for there were no locks in Degania. That the members might steal from each other was unthinkable, and locks were useless against enemy soldiers.

As Rosie crossed the threshold into the dark cottage she knew Haim was back. Later on she analyzed her
intuition as a composite of the smell of cordite and gun oil in the one-room cottage, the creak of the floorboards behind her, the glimpse from the corner of her eye of Herschel frozen in place, staring past her at someone stepping lightly from behind the door.

“My love,” she whispered even as she was turning to meet Haim's embrace.

“Papa?” Herschel was not at all sure of the identity of the fierce Bedouin hugging and kissing his crying mother.

“Papa?” The boy's voice still shook with uncertainty, though the joy began to expand inside him. The Bedouin was wearing leather slippers and baggy canvas trousers cinched at the ankles. There were the filmy cotton brussa shirt, the striped caftan and the black cotton coat. On the man's head was the kaffiyeh, cinched in place with an ornate braided headband, called an akal.

The Bedouin looked down at Herschel and the boy began to shiver—in fear, in love, in awe. It
was
his father! He had been fooled by the nomad garb and by the full honey-colored beard, but Herschel knew his father's eyes.

“Papa!” His father was moving toward him, brushing back his coattails as he hunkered down to scoop up his son. Herschel's eyes widened as he took in the scuffed gunbelt glittering with brass cartridges, the leather holster and the worn wooden butt of the revolver.

A gun, Herschel thought. His father's rough beard was tickling his face and he sobbed his greetings between kisses. My father is a Jew, but he has a gun like the Turks. I thought Jews could only farm and let others hurt them, but my father has a gun. He fights!

He knew his father was gone to fight the Turks, but only in an abstract, unreal way, as he knew that he'd been born seven years ago and that in a forever from now, they said, he would die. His formative time on earth had been spent since the advent of the war. No one had ever thought to tell him of the Hashomers' early role in the defense of
the settlements. He didn't know the kibbutz had a cache of rifles or that the bowed, meek farmers had the knowledge to use them.

Now as he hugged his father, Herschel made the connection between his father's absence, his father's gun, and the defeat of the Turks that everyone said would soon come. Herschel, his young mind reeling with reports of war and his heart set ablaze by the touch of his father's huge strong loving hands upon him, realized that the ability to endure hardship was only the half of it. A man also needed the wherewithal to fight back.

Seven-year-old Herschel did not have the words to express what had happened to him, but he had just made the transition from a resigned, long-suffering Jew to a Zionist.

“Are you back for good?” Rosie asked hopefully, wiping away her own tears.

Haim shook his head. “No, my love. Yol is waiting for me in the rocks a little way from the compound. The rest of the band is camped along the Jordan. We've come north because the Turks are falling back. I wanted this chance to see my family.”

“You've not come home, Papa?” Herschel asked.

“I can't stay, but it'll only be a few months more, my son, and then I will be home for good. Meanwhile I want you to take care of your mother. Is that understood?”

Herschel, gazing up at the sun-burnished giant, nodded wordlessly. He drank in every detail of his father's appearance, struggled to memorize his voice and the way he walked. These memories would be all he would have to sustain him during the next interminable absence.

“Has the boy been all right?” Haim asked. “He studies? He's healthy? There's food for him?”

“He learns his lessons because I've told him that his father wishes it. He has Hebrew, Arabic and English; he's shown an aptitude for mathematics and the sciences. We
teach him and the others what we can from the textbooks.” She shrugged. “As for the other questions, he eats what everyone eats, which is not enough. Thank God the fever leaves him alone. He's as healthy as any boy who so desperately misses his father—”

“Oh, Rosie,” Haim turned away from her.

She threw her arms around his neck. “Forgive me. I said that only because of my disappointment that you can't stay. It is only because I love you.”

Haim kissed her lightly. “Your idea of love talk always has been a little rough.”

Rosie rested her head against his chest. “I've been so worried.”

“The Turks have yet to get a shot at us.”

“But you shoot them, yes, Papa?” Herschel insisted.

“Yes, we shoot them, but you mustn't say anything to the Turks when they come.”

“I won't, Papa, I promise.” Herschel's hand reached up and his small fingers tentatively brushed the holster—he could not bring himself to touch his father's revolver—and then jerked away.

“Everyone here is proud of you and Yol,” Rosie said.

“So the man at the gate told me. I understand why you had to explain my disappearance. I'm just afraid the secret will leak out. It's for you and Herschel and the others that I worry.”

“No one has ever told the Turks anything they wanted to know, and no one ever shall,” Rosie assured him. She took a step back in order to look him over. “You've not been wounded, God forbid?”

Haim laughed. “Just once did I even come close. We were waiting for a Turkish patrol. We didn't know it, but this particular patrol had a real Bedouin of its own acting as a scout. We'd never heard of such a thing, you understand; the Arabs hate the Turks as much as we do.

“Anyway, this nomad came around behind our position, and as luck would have it, I was the one he discovered. Evidently he was going to plant a knife in my back when Jibarn—he's an Arab boy who travels with us—saved me by—”

Haim stopped abruptly as the memories flooded back: Jibarn riding the Bedouin piggyback; his glee as he slit the nomad's throat. “Let me just say that Jibarn killed the man before he could harm me.”

“If an Arab boy fights with you, why can't I?” Herschel implored.

“This boy is older. He's thirteen—a man already. If you were thirteen it'd be different.” Haim winked at Rosie, who was glowering at him. “Anyway, that was the only close call. You know what he said to me, Rosie? ‘Haim, I will not allow anyone to harm you.'” He shrugged, smiling. “He seems very much attached to me, even more than to Yol, who—Well, it doesn't matter.”

“Haim, what if you just didn't go back?” Rosie pleaded, hugging him. “What if you just stayed? Yol would understand.”

“Listen to me,” Haim said gently, holding her at arm's length. “Many Jews have volunteered to fight. Since the liberation of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Palestinians have flocked to Jabotinsky's call. The Jewish Legion has been formed and is being trained in Egypt, but it has seen no action. I've come to believe what many have said, that it never will. The Balfour Declaration promised us a home in return for our aid in this battle. My group is fulfilling the Zionist part of the bargain. The more fighting we do now, the sooner this will be over. Besides, when the Turks and Germans withdraw to Degania—and they are coming this way, I'm sorry to say—could you expect me to hang my head and polish their boots?”

“No.” Rosie colored. “You are too brave and strong . . .” Her voice grew thick. “Too fine for that—Oh,
Haim, I feel shy with you. Like a bride. I wish we could . . .” She trailed off, her eyes on Herschel, who was staring up at them.

“I love you,” Haim murmured, “and I long for you. Soon we will be together again and there will be time, proper time. For now it is more important that we three be together as a family.”