No Time for Tears (17 page)

Dovid’s situation was somewhat special. Working at Athlit had its advantages. In the years that he’d worked with Aaronson their relationship grew very strong, Dovid had shown great promise and his efforts had not gone unrewarded. Since Aaron had worked closely with the Turkish government on farm problems and had become a scientist of such renown, the pasha almost forgot—never forgave—that he was a Jew. He was able to intercede with the pasha on Dovid’s behalf, reminding the pasha that the men at Athlit were more valuable to the government with their knowledge of farming than in clearing the roads. The pasha went along, not out of charity but because Turkey badly needed food to feed an army.

Moishe’s position was more complicated. In spite of his hatred for the Turkish government he had no choice but to join up or be deported, and so he kissed his sister Chavala good-bye and said he would go back to Jaffa to wait for his orders. When he arrived in Jaffa, Moishe suddenly found himself caught up in the storm of arrests. Jews were being pushed and hurried along the streets, and he followed the flood of terrified and bewildered Jews, none of whom was more bewildered than he.

Moishe was on the road between Haifa and Jaffa as Baha al-Din was issuing his expulsion orders. He found old men, gray-bearded, with long coats and broad-brimmed hats, carrying all they possessed in their arms. The crowd was growing in size, as well as the outcries … “What have we done?” … “Why are you doing this to us?” … “Where are they sending us, we’ll die in the desert” … When the group of displaced Jews was thrown into the detention hall, the rooms were already bulging with people. Families were being separated … “Where are you, Isaac?” … “My baby, God, where is my baby?” …

Moishe could no longer hold in his rage. “I demand to see your commander.”

The answer was the butt of a rifle at his head.

Moishe staggered, his hand to his head, feeling the blood. Trying to shake his head clear, he called out again, “I came to join the army—”

The soldier laughed. “In Russia, you join.”

People were thrown into a room and demands were made that they turn over their money. After all their possessions were stripped from them, they were herded to the docks and amidst all the madness, walked up a gangplank onto an unfit ship that was set adrift to find its way back to Russia.

As he lay on deck, Moishe made up his mind that he would not go back, he’d rather die … Now he became aware of the
chalutz
next to him. They looked at each other, and in that moment with no need to speak, each seemed to read the thought of the other.

“Can you swim?” whispered the stranger.

“No. But if you have a plan, I’ll learn quick.”

“I have a compass, I know where we might be able to jump ship, with a lot of luck we might make it to Cairo … I understand Trumpeldor is trying to convince the British that Jews can fight.”

“I don’t give a damn about the British, they’re no better than the Turks, but back to Russia I’m not going.”

“Good. At midnight we jump … incidentally, my name is Nathan Zalman.”

The two shook hands. “If we don’t make it, our names won’t matter, but just in case, I’m Moishe Rabinsky.”

Moishe, who had never swum, jumped and was surprised to find that he’d somehow come up to the surface of the water. For a while he paddled. His pace was slower than Nathan’s, but his determination urged him on until he was almost side-by-side with his new found comrade …

When at last they hit the beach, the two lay back in complete exhaustion and disbelief. If they could accomplish this, they’d live to see the Messiah.

Chavala was frantic when Moishe did not come back that night. Dovid’s attempts to quiet her fears did no good. She sat up until dawn, convinced something dreadful had happened.

When Dovid awoke in the morning he found Chavala standing at the window. He put his arms around her and said, “We have to assume the best, not the worst, darling. Moishe is strong, he’s—”

“I’m not a child, Dovid. You know as well as I that something must have happened. He hasn’t taken his things, he was coming back after he joined up. What are we going to
do?
”

“Aaronson has connections. If anyone can find out he can….”

Chavala waited, her anxiety growing. Finally on the third day, when Dovid came home, she was sure the worst had been confirmed. She saw it in the look on Dovid’s face. Moishe was dead.

Taking her into his arms, Dovid said, “Moishe’s in Alexandria with Trumpeldor. Aaronson received this message … here, see for yourself, he’s in Alexandria…”

Tears streaming down her cheeks, she looked at Dovid. “He’s safe … thank God, he’s safe.”

Yes
, Dovid thought,
but for how long?

Chavala’s world, that only a short time before had seemed so safe and serene, now was unraveling. Sheine had been called up to work at the front near the Syrian border in a hospital unit. Moishe was alive, but for how long … ? Maybe he wasn’t considered a soldier, but the mule corps faced death as much as any combat unit. And now Dvora had come back to Zichron to announce she was going to marry Ari.

Thinking back on that all too short respite she’d known living in Zichron, she now saw how presumptuous it was to think one was in control of her life, let alone the lives of loved ones. So Dvora was getting married … looking at her sister, Chavala remembered how she’d planned that when the day came for her sisters to marry,
she
would sew their wedding gowns and she and Dovid would walk each in their turn to the
chuppah
… now that dream was shattered, no amount of argument could convince Dvora. “Wait until the war is over, please, Dvora. I pray Ari will come back … but darling, if the worst should happen …”

“Then I’ll have his child.”

Of course … Dvora was a woman, and Chavala hadn’t even noticed. “Are you carrying his child … ?”

“Yes, and I’m proud of it. I love him, Chavala, just as you do Dovid … and whatever happens, I’ll have to accept it.”

Chavala nodded. “When will you be married?”

“Immediately.”

After Dvora left, Chavala sat in the lengthening shadows and began to come out of herself, to see in fact that she suffered from a very serious disease—self-pity. Enough. Other people had their troubles too, many of them far worse than hers, and she thought of Sarah Aaronson …

Only God knew how Sarah must have suffered when she gave up the man she so deeply loved to her sister Rivka. (The connection with herself and Dovid and Sheine did not … not surprisingly … occur to her.) Sarah was a woman of great beauty and strength of character, filled with the joy of living and had always been ready for adventure. But Rivka was different, perhaps the opposite … she was always the adored little sister, sweet, piquant and vulnerable. Living as she did on the periphery of such forceful people as Sarah, Alex and Aaron, she developed a sense of inferiority, which Sarah not only understood but blamed herself for … Rivka seemed to have been all but overlooked. She may have been much adored, but still she could not compete with them. Although she had received numerous proposals, she had rejected them out of her mistaken sense of unworthiness. Sarah decided that once again she was the one standing in Rivka’s way. Her sister’s love for Absalom was so intense, so complete that there was no question that she would ever marry anybody else. Sarah had seen them together, seen the way Rivka not only looked
at
Absalom, but how she looked
up
at him. And she wasn’t wrong. The man was unique, marvelous. After all, she had fallen in love with him, hadn’t she? Well, no more thinking about that… what she had to decide was whether she was strong enough to give up this man for her sister’s happiness, her life, really …a life that had been too often limited and frustrated, Sarah felt, because of her own actions, as well as those of others in her family. She thought, and shook her head at the irony of the coincidence, about Aaron and how he was now alone because of a woman he couldn’t have, a woman married to one of his closest friends. Aaron had managed to deny himself for somebody else … could she do as much for her own sister? Somehow she had to, but how could she stand it? For a while she considered going off someplace so that Rivka would be free to enjoy her love for Absalom, a love she’d been hiding too long. But that would be too cowardly, and Sarah was no coward. What then?

The best she could come up with was a campaign … she shuddered when she considered it …to make Absalom grow tired of her. She began when he asked her to marry him, with a rather languid, “Let’s not be impetuous.” Absalom wasn’t a man easily put off, not by Turks or shortsighted Jews who couldn’t see their future was to have their own land … or by the woman that he had made up his mind to spend his life with. What the hell did she mean? Why the sudden change? Being less than self-assured when it came to his attraction to women, he began to think she’d found or preferred someone else. He asked her.

Sarah took the opening to concoct a story that she hoped was more convincing than, God knew, she felt… “Absalom, please try and forgive me. I did love you, but more and more lately I’ve come to see that we are just too much alike, that marriage would only intensify that, and eventually we’d both be miserable—”

He was stunned, even though she seemed to be saying what he was most afraid of. “So you’ve found someone else?”

“Yes, but please, try to remember the good things we’ve shared. I know I always will.”

Wonderful,
he thought.
Live on memories. To hell with that.
Hurt, angry, he left, and his visits to the Aaronson home ended.

Naturally, Sarah’s family was bewildered. Sarah tried to explain it to her father by saying love wasn’t enough, that she wanted a home and children and not a poet, that Absalom would never settle down, he was a free spirit, a fine man but eventually his way of life would make life impossible between them, and so forth. She was almost getting to believe it herself, as she became increasingly practiced in her lie.

Ephraim was miserable. Aaron had been forced into a life of loneliness, and now Sarah…

“You’re sure, Sarah, that you won’t regret this?”

She could only shake her head, not trusting herself to speak anymore.

Well, there could be no average man for Sarah, and where would Ephraim find another such man? One to take Absalom’s place?

He didn’t really find another Absalom, but he did find a man, a young man of great wealth, a merchant from Constantinople. Sarah amazed him by agreeing to marriage even though she hadn’t even seen the man.

Sarah was quickly married and left immediately after for her new home in Constantinople. That summer, of course, was like an unending nightmare. What Sarah had said to Absalom about being strong and independent was irrelevant only with Absalom. For this man it was like a sentence … she’d grown up an independent-minded woman in the free atmosphere of Zichron. Here she was subjected to the world of an Oriental-style ménage, where a husband’s regard for his wife was at his convenience and according to his needs.

Actually he was very fond of Sarah, but he was raised in the conventional, rigid, old-fashioned German attitudes his family had brought with them from Berlin. Sarah was never allowed, as his wife, to leave their home alone. She was sheltered, sequestered. Well, it was a kind of atonement, she told herself, for all that she’d denied Rivka in the past At least the ledger was in balance. She hoped Rivka and Absalom—oh, stop it, she told herself. She wasn’t
that
noble. She’d done what she thought she had to do. But she was no saint. She was a woman, and she felt like any other woman who had lost her man…

It was the perfect time for Rivka to come to him, to help get him through his bad times. She provided a sweetness, a serenity that he seemed to need so much after the tempestuous courtship and breakup with Sarah. Rivka was like a healing balm.

To no one’s surprise, they were soon married.

Like Sarah, Absalom tried hard to make his marriage work, but he still loved Sarah. Rivka knew when she married him that he didn’t love her but like a few million women before her, she let herself hope that with time he might.

It didn’t happen. It was obvious to everyone that there was no longer enough even to make a show, and Ephraim now understood that Sarah had sacrificed herself, a sacrifice that defeated itself. He felt only pity for the suffering of the people involved, and blamed no one. But as he watched Rivka, now so pitifully silent, he knew he had to take immediate and drastic action. Rivka was sent off to America, where hopefully she would forget Absalom and find something new and better with relatives in San Francisco.

Sarah’s letters went straight to Absalom’s heart…

Beloved Absalom, not a day goes by that I don’t think about my arrogant selflessness. Not only did I destroy what we had. I made things even worse for Rivka. Let’s hope that America can make some of it up to her…

And Absalom wrote…

Your goodness, dear Sarah, is as great as your courage. You must not go on berating yourself. It’s true, a part of me went with you when you went away. I was hurt, angry. But we two are together even if we’re apart. The love between us isn’t bounded by geography or time. I admit I’m tempted to come to you, but that would never work. You’re married, and I have things to do that might keep us more apart than we are now. Please try to think about me sometimes. I think of you from morning until the day’s end, and that is how it will be all the rest of my life.

M
OISHE AND NATHAN ZALMAN
were picked up on the beach by a British patrol and thrown into a truck. Where they were going, they could only guess, but it wouldn’t surprise them if they were hanged as spies. Without papers, how could they plead their case?

Passing the harbor at Alexandria, Moishe was overwhelmed by a sight that momentarily pushed aside his fears. Anchored in the harbor was a part of the giant British armada, the dreadnought
Queen Elizabeth
, looking as regal as its namesake. The Russian cruiser
Askold
was on hand with its five slim funnels silhouetted against the blue Egyptian skyline. There were French battleships, cruisers, destroyers, transports and smaller craft. Too bad they hadn’t come to deliver his people out of bondage, take up the challenge to free Palestine. The reality was that they were in the company of the majority of the world powers—no one cared. Only Jews could save themselves. Including these two particular Jews.