B002FB6BZK EBOK (25 page)

Joseph and Rachel asked for compassion, but she banished them. I'll
bear the hatred that hates the only love I could have had, she said. There were pogroms then and people hid in their houses and Nehemiah went out
with his group to defend the lives of the people and they were forced into
exile for fear of the authorities and Rebecca followed him, and after the
ransom was paid, people said: Something new happened to the Jews, and
Rebecca laughed, it was because of her hatred that those things had come,
and then Rebecca and Nehemiah got married with a haste caused by the
time and the dread. Hasids again went up to the roofs and shouted to God,
Secret Glory died choked by a drunken Cossack who beat up a Jew, and
two wrinkled old women died holding onto one another in terror. A house
was burned and the smell of its smoke filled the street and a child was
thrown into the fire. Only relatives were invited to the wedding of Rebecca
and Nehemiah, there were no musicians, people were busy fixing their destroyed houses, and Nehemiah told them: Why fix what will be destroyed
again, go to the Land of Israel, and they laughed at him. But Rebecca's father came at night, hugged his daughter, touched Nehemiah's arm, and said:
Maybe that's a vision of death, maybe this nation can't be revived, but go and
erect a house for me there. Rebecca's mother stood on the side and didn't
say a word. Something deep and old rested on her beautiful face. They had
to slip out of the city at night. An old carter took them over the border. The
new arrest warrant against Nehemiah had been delayed in a tavern where a
clever Jew deceived the officials with cheap brandy. The Ukrainian who
wanted to reward Rebecca for his melancholy kept the drunk until morning.
After wandering a lot, Rebecca and Nehemiah came to the city of Trieste.
Rebecca went to the coffinmaker and told him of the coffin she wanted for
her husband and the splendid coffin of her husband, when her stomach
swelled up, she took with her on the ship. As the distance between her and
Joseph grew, she could love him like a shadow blended with who she once
was. Now Rebecca Schneerson was taken to the land she didn't want to go
to with a fetus in her belly and a husband in a coffin.

Tape / -

The journey to Jaffa took ten days. The sea was strong, and near Crete,
the stairs broke and the sailors stretched ropes along the moldy corridors,
and in the crowded halls people lay groaning. Rebecca sat on deck and
knitted a scarf. The waves would break at her feet and didn't touch her. A
Russian officer, splendidly dressed, brought her a cup of tea and said: For a brave and beautiful lady. She looked through him and saw the breakers
stopping at what could have been her steps. Twice a day she would go down
to the belly of the ship and sit at her husband's coffin and then would go up
and sit on deck. Looking with meticulous indifference at the Christian pilgrims, the Hasids in black caftans, shouting and screeching, and the Pioneers who would recite the moldy poems of Joseph Rayna and long for a
place they had never been.

The morning they left Alexandria for Jaffa, the storm stopped. The
seagulls danced dances woven of ancient and stylized geometry over the
two masts where endless banners in various colors waved in the wind.
Rebecca wondered if the seagulls didn't see an ancient Phoenician ship
now, and then, as she was stroking her belly, she wanted to sacrifice to the
god still remembered only by those eternal birds. But the times of the
birds and the times of the passengers were different. The phenomenon of
the ship would pass against the eternity of the celestial fabric and the sight
only filled her with yearning for another reality, for a place you don't long
for and where you don't return. America, discovered by her grandfather's
grandfather, Rabbi Kriegel, on his journey from Hebron, was the realm of
her dreams when she went to Nehemiah's house and asked him to marry
her. She wanted to be reborn. Even though she had never seen Rabbi
Kriegel, she remembered him as a disillusioned man who married Rebecca
Sweet Charity to her dead fiance. Thinking about America, she understood
the Hasids and pilgrims coming to the Land of Israel to visit the graves of
the dead, but she couldn't forgive the Pioneers for the insolence fostered
in them by yearnings as if that place hadn't died two thousand years ago.
The seagulls were an ancient sign that the time of the Phoenicians and the
raging gods still existed despite the dreams of the Pioneers. The birds
tried to bribe the sky with their satanic and delicate flying but her husband's coffin was launched precisely because of the hidden wisdom of the
seagulls. The sea grew calm. Her belly seemed too heavy. The eternal glass
of tea brought her by the Russian officer was too sweet and in front of her
was the saltiness of the water that almost touched her feet, but stopped
just before her. The shore approached. The pilgrims sang excited songs
whose words they read in ancient books smelling of dank gray they held in
their quaking hands. The Pioneers donned berets, white shirts, and coats.
Wrapped in bliss they looked toward the light strewn on the long sandy shore. When the ship dropped anchor opposite the hill of Jaffa, Rebecca
folded the scarf she had knitted, straightened up and stood at the ship's
railing, and her gigantic belly touched the steel cables. In the distance,
boats were seen rowing toward the ship. In the boats sat sailors with thick
mustaches and big bodies. The sky was clear and waves struck the sides
of the ship that dropped its anchors and hooted. The light was clear but
shrouded with a certain stiffness, which even now, on the first of January, in
the year nineteen hundred, looked both pungent and clear. Rebecca looked
at the hill. She saw mosques and churches, and beyond the mosques and the
churches sands stretched to the horizon. A caravan of camels raised clouds
of dust and a few distant treetops sweetened the bitterness of the yellow
desolation. A smell of lemons and sea salt rose to her nose. She felt no sense
of returning home. Never had she felt she had come to a more foreign place.

The sailors carefully put her down into the boat. Then the coffin was
brought down and placed next to her. Her swollen belly and her husband
in the coffin awed the sailors and they were afraid to look straight into the
beautiful face of the woman to whom the Russian officer offered a flower
before she was taken down from the ship. She despised their fear of the
evil eye but in her heart she appreciated their pretense of indifference.
She always loved events devoid of value that were played with too much
importance. Someday she would tell Boaz that in the end a state is a flag
with a land.

The sailors rowed vigorously toward the port and when she came to the
shore, a Turk in a green uniform with a red tarboosh was waiting there, and
behind him stood a barefoot Arab lad holding a somewhat torn parasol over
the head of his master. The Turk was holding a truncheon in his hand and
tried to smile at her. He stood in a vacuum strictly preserved by both Turks
and Arabs. Wherever he walked, he was surrounded by that reverential
vacuum. Behind him, near the wall of the big mosque, sat Arabs smoking
narghilas; not far from them stood skinny horses whinnying and stamping
their feet. A gigantic pile of oranges was seen, and behind it, against the
background of a small shop, two skinned oxen were hung on hooks. The
blood poured down to the ground, but because of the blinding light she
didn't see the blood. Her slippery jumping made the Turk under the parasol bend down a bit, and he leaned aside with ostentatious exaggeration.
He said in Arabic: A beautiful woman for a dead Jew. The Arabs who couldn't come close to him laughed in the niche of the mosque and one of them
laughed and started choking. The smoke of the narghilas flowed into them
like snakes. The Turk, maybe he thought they were laughing at him, hit
one of the Arabs with his truncheon. The Arab fell, his legs got wound up
in each other, and his white tongue twisted out. Two coals sprayed on his
dress and somebody crushed a sharp-smelling lemon and put out the sparks.
The Arab tried to laugh in his fear but the Turk farted in his face and the
Arab swallowed the moldy air, lifted the sole of his foot, showed it to the
Turk who was no longer paying attention to him. And he shouted: I'm your
sole! And through his lifted foot and the truncheon that very slowly returned from its blow, Rebecca's skirt was visible to the Arab. The Turk
withdrew, made room for the beautiful lady, and two barefoot sailors carefully put down Nehemiah's coffin. The Turk said with philosophical restraint, in French: We're born and we die. And he stared at Ebenezer who
was still in the sixth month of his gestation.

A Jew in a white suit, and only when he got close did she see how dirty
its cuffs were, approached and called the two sailors. From the distance,
Rebecca had seen him wiping the sweat from his forehead after he took off
the straw hat, and his watery eyes trying to hint something to her. When
he started playing with coins he took out of his coat pocket and bouncing
them one by one, she caught the lust the coins evoked in the eyes of the
sailors and so she could calm down.

The Jew with her concluded the negotiations and approached her. Once
again he took off his hat and said: Don't worry, madam, a room is waiting
for you, if it can be called that, in a hotel, and tomorrow, the funeral will
be held. And Rebecca said: I'm not worried, sir. I'll stay a while and then
I'll go to America. The Jew wiped his sweat again, took out a chain of
amber beads, played with them a little, and muttered: I don't care where
you go, madam, or when. Jews come and Jews go. For me it's the same
money. Permission for your husband's coffin is just as expensive as the
return ticket you're going to buy from me. He didn't wait for her answer.
Then he laughed. His laugh lacked symmetry and so it sounded thoroughly
superfluous to her.

Joseph's hands rested like cotton on her body and were wiped out with
the passing of his laugh. Now when she felt his sweat, she felt a certain closeness to him, maybe because he wasn't part of the wild vista of Nehemiah's longings either. If you need something, he said, don't hesitate to call me.
Mr. Aviyosef Abravanel, everybody knows me! Scion of the house of David.
When a kingdom is restored to Israel, after these ragamuffins, my son won't
have to stand here and greet ships in corners bearing impending disaster,
and his eyes flashed now, his pain changed into bliss. He didn't notice her
contemplation or the change in her treatment of him, he was looking at
Jews lying near the enclosures, waiting to board the ship depressed and
despairing of the land, looking at the Pioneers who just came and who
looked too excited and hungry for love of the Land that has no love to give,
and he said: They don't know the laws of the exhilarating corruption of
these Turks ... their savagery, you've got to know how to make that baksheesh look delicate and cunning. When my son is king of Israel, guards
will stand here in scarlet and silver, with flashing swords in their hands and
the birds will sing verses from the Song of Solomon in Hebrew. The Turk
with the truncheon now approached Mr. Aviyosef Abravanel. Mr. Abravanel
put the string of amber beads in his pocket, lowered his face a bit, stooped
over, and yet-and she saw that clearly-precisely measured his rigidity and
the power of his money against the truncheon in the hands of the authorities. The Turk's look was both covetous and wicked. Mr. Abravanel's stoop
was measured and the obsequiousness was precise. She didn't imagine how
much she would enjoy that, she also felt stabbings in her belly, the pain
passed and of all the names that rose in her mind, the last of them was
Ebenezer. But Ebenezer was the only name Nehemiah intended for his
son. She felt no love for the fetus in her womb. The stabbing belonged to
Rachel's belly. The son who was to fill water jars for beautiful women of
Bethlehem and to plow the land of his forefathers was only a proper and
undesirable pause for her, for the disgrace she had brought on herself with
her love for Joseph Rayna and her marriage to Nehemiah, two things, and
she knew that well, that shouldn't have happened. Many years later, when
she'd sit at the screened window with the flyswatter in her hand, looking
joylessly at the almond groves she had cultivated, at her good citrus groves
and vineyards, and Ahbed, the grandson or great-grandson of Ahbed, would
put the big old fan in front of her and try to turn it on even though the
generator was broken, she'd think of Boaz who was both her grandson and
her son and would say to herself: How come Boaz, Nehemiah's grandson,
would be the spit and image of Joseph Rayna? And the dark plot in her blood would then be poured into the tune that never let go of her, the tune
of her secret unknown even to herself.

Moshe Isaac was born in Bukovina. In Poland he married Sarah, daughter of Rabbi Where-the-Wind-Goes-Down. After he moved to Galicia and
begat five sons, his last son Jacob was born, and then he died and didn't
move the rod even in the wind. Jacob who moved mountains with his eyes
that went blind from thirst for salvation begat Joachim the Dane, who went
to seek the traces of the Dane who saw the Sambatyon River circumventing the realms of Sabbath, found a wife in Russia, and became enslaved to
her compassion for him. His son Sambatyon the Dane begat Nehazia the
Dane, who was also called the Genius of Tarnopol, who returned his forefathers to the soil and annulled the observation of the sky not through books.
Nehazia married his cousin Miriam, daughter of Elijah, and begat Avrum
the tavern owner who taught children, and hid creatures who saw sights
they shouldn't have seen and showed them the straight path. From many
torments, he died while walking and was buried in a small cemetery where
a two-headed cow was later seen. Avrum begat Moshe Isaac who learned a
little math, wrote three books, and in his dreams would see a city named
Berlin and knew the names of its streets by heart even though he had
never been there. He married a wise and modest woman named Leah. Leah
raised two daughters who died of typhus and a young son named Nehemiah.
Moshe Isaac died young and had time to hear his son Nehemiah learn
Talmud. Nehemiah left the faith, taught and studied the Torah of the
Land of Israel, married Rebecca the daughter of the great-granddaughter
of Secret Charity, husband and father of Rebecca Secret Charity. Nehemiah
begat ... The ship emitted a long siren and then a short one. The birds
circled above the church that looked like cardboard from here. The light was
blinding. Ebenezer stabbed the womb of his mother who was looking at
the sands of the Land and didn't come to it.