Israel (33 page)

I'm peeing on the floor, she thought distractedly. A high, keening noise had begun to build in her ears. I'll have to clean this mess up.

It was suddenly very much darker in the shadowy kitchen. Her hand rose to swat the air in search of the pull-chain that dangled from the overhead light fixture. She felt herself losing her balance and fell. She cried out, deciding that she was having a bad dream and wanting very much to be awake. She did not feel herself hit the floor.

Abe jackknifed out of bed at her call. He ran into the kitchen and lost his footing as his bare feet skidded out from beneath him. He landed spread-eagled, taking a nasty crack to the back of his head. What the hell was on the floor? The entire back of his nightshirt was soaking wet.

“Leah, where are you?” He got to his feet and pulled the light chain.

Blood—an impossible amount of blood as bright as fire had spread across the floor. More of it was seeping from between Leah's legs as she lay semi-conscious, curled up on her side.

They must have given her a sedative. All she possessed were hazy recollections, memories just beyond grasp. Leah had vague remembrances of a weeping Abe in his bloody nightshirt being comforted by their downstairs neighbors. She remembered Dr. Glueck looking very sad as he explained something to her, but his words were lost.
Then she was swathed in blankets and carried downstairs and through the store. There was a short ride through the deserted streets in the back seat of the doctor's black automobile.

And then there was Gouverneur Hospital. The ward was brilliantly lit, a vast, glaring cavern echoing with moans. They wheeled four walls of canvas screen around her bed and cut away the clotted, crusty flannel nightgown. She smelled acrid antiseptic and felt its sting as they scrubbed between her legs. Then came the stink of the ether across her nose and mouth. Her widely rolling eyes glimpsed a white tray arrayed with knives. Just before the ether swept her into oblivion she remembered Dr. Glueck's words to her as she writhed upon the kitchen linoleum.

“An incomplete miscarriage, I'm sorry to say. You must go to the hospital. I'm so sorry, my dear.”

She came out of the ether late in the day. Her eyes sprang open. She knew where she was and what had happened to her.

She also knew what had happened to her baby. An image came to her of a room deep in the bowels of the hospital. Inside that room there was a shelf, and on it rested a new glass jar containing something pink as a valentine and all curled around like a fiddlehead.

She began to weep, but softly, so she wouldn't disturb the other patients. She wanted the nurses to leave her alone with her grief.

They kept her in the ward for one more night. Abe arrived early the next morning looking haggard, with a paper sack stuffed with her clothing under his arm. He waited impatiently for the attendants to wheel the canvas privacy screens into place. When they were sheltered from view, Leah began to get dressed.

“You talked with the doctors?” she asked.

Abe nodded.

“It was a son, yes?”

“Yes,” he replied, shaken. “How did you know? You also spoke with them?”

Leah squeezed her eyes shut, willing away the image of that pitiful little thing in the jar. “No, I talked to no doctors, but I knew.”

Abe scrutinized her, worried by the unfamiliar edge in her voice. He noticed how pallid she was, like a ghost of her former self.

“We must forget this terrible thing, Leah,” he began, his manner almost formal.

She winced, waving at him to be quiet, and finished dressing in the awkward silence that followed. He pities me, she thought, and probably himself, for marrying a woman with hips like a boy, who can't even give him healthy sons. I should have died along with my son. A woman like me is better off dead.

Abe walked around the bed to her. He was going to embrace her. “Don't,” Leah warned, shrugging off his touch. She'd endured enough pity in her life. Any response from Abe—even hatred—was better than pity.

Abe jerked back as if he'd been slapped. The anger and recrimination he'd fought to repress welled up in him.
You stupid woman, how could you have lost my son?
he wanted to scream at her.

But he didn't. He said nothing to her; he didn't know what to say at such a time. As well as they knew each other, in tragedy they were still strangers.

Always Leah had been the one to reach out. Why wouldn't she now? Where was her compassion? He needed her to help him understand what had happened and what it meant.

Say you love me, Abe willed. Help me understand.

“Let's go,” he said thickly. His initial humiliation had faded. Now there was nothing within him but a dark void.

One evening in January Haim Kolesnikoff received a mysterious summons to attend a closed session of Degania's governing board. The summons made it clear that Haim was to appear at Yol Popovich's request, but it did not explain the purpose of the meeting.

On his way to the dining hall Haim concluded that the meeting had something to do with that terrible night they'd searched for Moshe. As Trumpeldor predicted, there had been no trouble over the shepherd. The mourning fellahin of Um Jumi blamed their loss on the nomads.

Yol's sense of guilt had not eased. Haim well understood what his old comrade was going through. Yol had dreamed of being a righteous warrior and wound up killing a harmless old man.

It gnawed at him. The cocky, joking monkey man was a shadow of his former self. There was no joy in his life.

On his arrival at the late night meeting Haim was shocked to learn that his friend was requesting a leave of absence from Degania. The reasons for his mysterious
summons to the closed meeting became clear to Haim. For Yol to make such a request was a serious matter.

In the past Degania's officers had granted limited leaves so members could receive technical training or for such personal reasons as visiting one's parents in the old country. No one had ever asked to go without giving a reason or saying when he would be back.

Yol's request was summarily refused. The board lectured him on what it viewed as his profligate behavior. Yol countered by threatening to resign his membership.

At that point Haim spoke up. He reminded the officers that Degania's morale was to be considered. The settlement already had its first grave, poor Moshe's. Was this the right time for one of the founding members to leave under a cloud? Haim suggested that the board call Yol's leave Degania's first sabbatical. The Old Testament specified that there should be a year-long period every seven years during which the plow is put away and the fields left fallow. Yol Popovich had been in Galilee for seven years. “Yol,” Haim loudly announced, “has been here longer than anybody.”

The board relented and Yol's leave was granted.

“I've only been here six years,” Yol told Haim after they left the dining hall, his breath making vaporous puffs in the cold night.

“The board members have all been here less than four,” Haim laughed. “They'll never find out.”

“Well, I thank you.” Yol smiled thinly. “That sabbatical business was very clever.”

They walked on side by side with their coat collars turned up against the cold. Despite winter's being the rainy season the weather had been dry the past fortnight. Degania's usually muddy pathways had hardened, and keeping one's footing was not much trouble.

It was late enough for them to make their way in solitude, casting inkspills of shadow as they crossed an
occasional square of yellow light cast from a cottage window. Overhead were myriad diamondlike stars and a milky crescent of moon against a canopy of black velvet.

Once they heard the dry cough of a jackal prowling the other side of the perimeter fence. Several of the settlement's dogs picked up the scent and began to bark.

“Would you really have resigned?” Haim asked, “Or was it just a bluff?”

Yol sounded weary. “I would have done it, even though it would have broken my heart. I must get away from here, where everything reminds me that I am a murderer.”

“What happened was very sad, but it was not murder—”

“I've told no one about it. I've accepted Trumpeldor's reasoning that my confession would bring about a blood feud between Um Jumi and Degania. But I cannot stay where the old man's ghost haunts me.”

“When will you leave?” Haim asked.

“At dawn. My things are packed. I have a place on the boat to Tiberias.”

“I knew that I never should have arranged our using the fellahin's boats,” Haim said ruefully.

Yol chuckled. “I told you only trouble would come of it. Anyway, from Tiberias the roads are better. I can be on my way.”

“Where to?”

Yol shrugged. His curly hair and beard looked gun-metal blue in the moonlight.

They were reluctant to part. Both were aware that it would be a long while, if ever, before they would be reunited. They stood, eyeing each other almost crossly, hunching their shoulders and stamping their feet against the cold.

“Little monkey,” Haim finally grumbled, embracing Yol, “we are fine comrades, yes?”

“Absolutely.” Yol patted Haim's shoulder. “Now go home to your wife and son.”

“What will I tell them? Rosie will rail at me for letting you go, and Herschel, he'll cry for his uncle—”

“Thanks for reminding me,” Yol exclaimed. “Wait one second.” He dashed into his room and reappeared a moment later with something wrapped in an old cloth. “I carved this for Herschel's birthday next week.” He thrust the parcel at Haim. “When you give it to him, be sure to say I made it, yes?”

“Of course I will,” Haim promised. He carefully unwrapped the birthday gift. It was a small prancing horse hitched to a wagon that could be rolled along on its delicate spoked wheels.

“This is magnificent work,” Haim murmured. “I'll show it to Herschel and then put it away for when he is older and can appreciate it. This is far too delicate for a three-year-old.”

“Do what you think best.” Yol's mouth twisted into a sad smile. “Now go home.”

Haim took one last long look at his friend and turned away. He could hear Yol calling softly to him as he walked back to his cottage, his boots crunching the brittle mud. “Tell them Yol got bored with this dreary place and went off to look for some fun.”

In the spring it was voted that the original founding kibbutz disband itself and reform to embrace all of the newer, permanent settlers. Degania, it was thought, could more smoothly and equitably function if there was no distinction between the most recently accepted and the charter members.

Another problem to be resolved was how to care for the children. Each mother kept her own with her throughout the work day. This was acceptable as long as women stayed in traditional roles, but some of the more radical
ones had begun to insist that they do the same kinds of work as the men.

“We didn't come to this country to cook, clean and do laundry,” these women maintained.

At first the men argued. “You have your gardens to till and cows to milk,” they pointed out. “We could never again hold our heads up if it became known that the men of Degania allowed their women to push plows.”

Gradually it became clear to everyone that work details had to be mixed if a cooperative program was to succeed, and something had to be done with the children. A mother could keep track of her children in the laundry room or the garden, but not in the fields.

None of the women would hear of giving up their hard-won right to do communal work in order to look after their children. Finally it was agreed that each child was the responsibility of the kibbutz. A building was set aside as a nursery, and two women—one of them Rosie—volunteered to look after the children. At the end of the day the mothers came to collect their offspring and take them back to their cottages for the night.

The day-care arrangement worked well for everyone, especially Rosie. She had never really enjoyed doing domestic chores or the arduous agricultural work, but she loved children and they loved her. The governing board complimented her on the job, and Rosie, regaining her self-confidence, once again felt the desire to sketch and paint. She referred to the children as her “puppies” and confessed to Haim that if she'd known she was so well suited for this kind of work, she would have used her time in Tel Aviv to train as a teacher. As it was, it would be several years before any of the children were old enough to require formal schooling.

The spring and early summer of 1914 proved to be a good time for Degania. Slowly the cobblers, merchants and lawyers who'd come to settle the land began to understand
how they could profitably cultivate the Jordan valley. Strategies were devised, a special system of crop rotation was implemented, and all at once there began to occur a real improvement in the quality of life.

For one thing, the years of work had begun to eradicate the surrounding swampland. This cut down on the number of flies and mosquitoes, reducing in turn the incidence of fever. Pepper tree saplings were planted and took root. This encouraged the kibbutz to plant an avenue of cypress trees leading from the gate to the water tower. The flourishing cypresses became a sort of symbol. Every day the workers could walk past them, remarking to each other how much taller they looked since yesterday.

A flower garden was once again attempted, and this time the wild boars stayed away. One day, quite suddenly it seemed, bright flowers appeared, contrasting nicely with the pale green of the saplings. On that day the workers of Degania realized that they had begun to transform their desolate stretch of Galilee into a place of beauty.

Degania's success had led to the establishment of similar agricultural settlements. Arthur Ruppin, head of the National Fund, made the trip from Tel Aviv to inspect what he had helped bring about at great risk to the fund's meager resources, and even his own reputation.