Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
The children were resting in the Horowitz home. Dana Klomin limped
slowly to the citrus grove. It was a beautiful day, and she deluded herself
that she was going because of the beautiful day and the charming and
pleasant view, but what led Dana Klomin, whose ankle hurt, was the rare
sight of the bird. Dana's father believed in one thing only-in the charter.
He thought he was the only one who still followed in the path of the greatest Jew of our generation, Theodor Herzl. He was excited by the Hebrew
kingdom modeled on Rome, with a senate and an enlightened king, and for
him Zionism wasn't only a solution to the distress of the Jews-or returning them to their homeland-but also an act of legal and historical justice.
Mr. Klomin thought the Land was empty of people, the Arabs who lived in
it were accidental wayfarers, no one ever called that land by name except
the Jews, he said excitedly. It wasn't the homeland of any nation, no city
was a capital for them, only the longings of the Jews preserved the Land
from total disappearance, he claimed. He quoted Disraeli, who said in his
book Tancred.• "The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the Children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race
that persist its celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to
gather, will regain their vineyards."
A plot of land without declaring a historic homeland, without a flag, an
anthem, or a legal system, was merely an aftermath of nothing. The emptiness of the Land was the implementation of an essentially ahistorical
political mishap that demanded legal correction, a kind of leadership fraud,
and the proud Israeli nation had to accept the charter for the Land of Israel
and establish a strong and enlightened kingdom there on the European
model and not on the savage Asian one, establish a supreme court there, a
parliament, a decent and consistent constitution, enact a law of languages
allowing only Hebrew and ancient Latin and the Hebrew army that would
arise would establish those points of Zionist settlement that Jewish poverty had established so far without any real vision or proper planning. Zionism had to be made into a profitable business, he argued with the fervor of
a person incited by an idea that nobody can or will take seriously. He was just as disappointed in his daughter as Rebecca was in her son. Like
Rebecca, he also hoped his grandson might follow in his path. He had ideas
about breeding his daughter, an expression he himself adopted, with a scion
of the house of David, but the only scion of the house of David, Mr. Joseph
Abravanel, seemed cheap, Levantine, and devoid of greatness, and the son
was even dumber than his father. Mr. Klomin even thought of trying to
marry his daughter off to some European prince, but since he didn't know
who to appeal to in the matter, he didn't do anything. Dana, who had lost
her mother, attended teachers' college and all she wanted to do was dry
flowers, teach, and give birth to her own children so they would also love
to smell flowers. She loved the settlements, hated Tel Aviv, which had
grown and was noisy and pretentious now, she read old novels in yellowing bindings and dreamed of the simple and beautiful life in the lap of nature. She loved everything beautiful created by man or nature. She hated her
father's big words, but she loved the solitary and stubborn man who raised
her after her mother died in childbirth. When he furiously argued to her that
what we need are warrior engineers and chemists and jurists and not teachers, Dana said to him: But I love flowers and the smell of rain and a grape
harvest, and he twisted his face and shouted: From romanticism you beget
stupid children, not a Jewish state after two thousand years, Dana!
What angered him especially was her collection of smells. She'd collect
leaves and plants and blend them with liquid and seal the smells in jars
and call every smell by its own name. She had a bottle of lust and a bottle
of the smell of humility, and a bottle of a pauper kingdom, and a bottle
of Tyre and Sidon, and a bottle of licorice essence, and more and more
bottles whose very sight stirred gloomy despair in Mr. Klomin-who, of
course, was always dressed to be taken to some king or high commissioner.
Her friends went up to the Galilee and sang bold songs, sprouted mighty
mustaches, and tapped each other on the shoulder. New settlements were
set up at night and Dana's friends guarded them, but for her they lacked
the poetry she was seeking, the sadness, the shame, her smells sought birds
like the one she saw on the windowsill of Dr. Zosha Merimovitch, whose
father once argued for three straight nights with Mr. Klomin about the
squadron leaders he wanted to command the future Hebrew army. She
dreamed of a heavy pensive man who would spare her the need to choose
between her father and her friends.
For three days Dana Klomin stayed in the citrus grove. The students got
a short letter brought to them by the grandson of Ahbed. In the letter,
Dana wrote: Forgive me for staying, give warm regards to the teachers and
don't judge me harshly, I can't leave, yours in friendship and love, Dana. The
students returned to Tel Aviv with the janitor of the school who cursed the
teacher who fell in love with a carpenter, and on the way they saw a man
wearing a strange uniform driving a wagon loaded with splendid furniture
and sporting a sword. That was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, who
after a sharp argument with the committee of the nearby settlement in
which he tried to explain for the hundred and first time why his name alone
was a guarantee of his being Swiss and that the Greek Orthodox church is
the desired answer the Jews were waiting for, while they claimed against him
that he was a fantasizer, a traitor, cheating his nation and his religion, and
they said: How long will you stay with us? He put on his fine clothing,
wanted to go to Rebecca, but since it wasn't Wednesday, he did what he
would have done if it weren't Wednesday and he had no words. He went
for a tour and when he came to Gaza he saw an Arab wearing rags and selling antique furniture, who claimed it was furniture of Modo-Louigo fifteen,
or in another language: in the style of Louis XV, he bought it as an imaginary wedding gift for Rebecca and was now driving it in a cart to her house.
When Dana entered the hut, Ebenezer lifted his face, smiled at her, and
went on working. Then he looked at her injured heel, took the heel in his
strong, rough hands, looked at it, and for the first time in his life felt that
he belonged to something bigger than himself.
He gently twisted the heel, stared at it long and hard, and felt so close
to the heel, loved the skin, the way the heel coiled into the foot, looked at
Dana, and said: I think I've been waiting for you for years, but I'm not good
with words and I have to go back to carving, wait. She waited a whole day.
Her eyes were veiled with a grief that may have always been in her and
turned into tense expectation. At night they lay down beside each other on
the mattress of leaves outside and the sky hung above them, peeping between branches, the sky was starry and black. Three days and three nights
they stayed there. When he looked at her she felt that all the smells she
had caged in bottles were now one person she wanted to pity and take care
of his strong hands that were gently creating a bird or a portrait, out of a
joyous intoxication, a dark sadness, and a disguised heaviness.
The two of them were no longer children. Ebenezer, who many years
later will be the Last Jew in seedy nightclubs of Europe, was then an eccentric fellow of twenty-six and a deaf woman had once loved to touch
him. Because he didn't know many words, he didn't clearly think love;
he bit Dana's earlobes and thought "doves." She said to herself: Maybe
that's not love, but that is what I was looking for. He thought: Got to give
her a house, give her a child, and her own pepper tree. They laughed,
something Ebenezer couldn't do without recalling his mother's angry
face.
Dana didn't understand why she yearned for a person who wasn't exciting, who made her feel heavy. Years later, when Ebenezer would sit in a
little city in Poland and think of Dana, he'd say to himself: Why didn't I
tell her I loved her more than anybody in the world and never could I love
anybody like that? But he recalled that when he was with her he didn't
even know he loved her. All he knew was that he had to be with her.
The wedding was held right after the harvest. Most of the farmers
dressed in white brought gifts. Rebecca, who sat in a house full of antique
Louis XV furniture, looked at Dana as if she were seeing the greatest fraud
of the century. What did she find in my son? She pitied Nehemiah, whose
dreams of Abner ben-Ner and Yiftach begat a pensive and foolish man who
touches a short, plump woman, smiles as if he were a mechanical doll.
Beyond the fence of the settlement the house of Dana and Ebenezer was
built. That was the first house outside the wall of the first settlers.
Rebecca built the house because Ebenezer had to stay close to the farm;
somebody has to protect what I established, she said, even if he does carve
birds. The house she built for her son was handsome, abutted the vineyard
with the ancient pool still in the middle, whose bottom was Crusader and
whose turret was Mameluke.
Mr. Klomin, who came to the wedding furious and betrayed, was wearing a light-colored suit with a flower in his lapel. He was amazed at the
sight of Rebecca Schneerson's elegant house and happy above all to meet
the Captain in his official uniform. The two of them whispered together in
Dana's new kitchen, among jars full of flowers smelling like jujubes, wormwood, mint, and citrus blossoms mixed with the smell of fresh paint, and
after a long talk each hugged the other's shoulders, shook hands, and
looked excited.
And on the day he parted from his daughter, Mr. Klomin increased his
party by one hundred percent: it now had a leader and a single member.
The Captain was appointed deputy squadron leader responsible for organization and indicating avenues of financing, activities and political empowerment, preparing strategy and tactics, and in addition the Captain was
to train leaders of the army of gladiators, lieutenants, and pashas that
would be established someday when the old-new constitution would be
shaped and the nation would recognize its three hundred Gideons, and
then the Argentinean with American citizenship and the Swiss name, who
belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, was responsible for protocol,
military, taxation, consolidation, building and general strategic forecasting.
Pleasant smells blew from the citrus groves and the fields. Dana's schoolmates came from the Galilee on horseback; they tapped each other on the
shoulder and yelled. They danced bold and "awful" dances, as Rebecca put
it, until the wee hours of the morning. The splendid kingdom is realized
here by a carpenter and wild people shrieking, said Mr. Klomin sadly, and
he gazed yearningly at the nobility of the Captain and Rebecca. He saw
them as a symbol of his dream. Rebecca agreed to describe to him what she
felt when she entered the lion's cage. Mr. Klomin looked at the Captain's
padded visor, ostentatiously hated the roars of the wild Pioneers, saw his
son-in-law standing on the side gazing, and said: They should have begat
Rebecca and the Captain, and not vice versa.
The feast was made from the Captain's recipes and the farmers drank
and sang and recalled Nehemiah and his beautiful words, and late at night,
when the Pioneers were still singing around a bonfire, the aging farmers sat
on the side and yearningly sang old songs they had once learned from
Joseph Rayna and wept when they recalled those distant days, and said:
Here we married off the first son of the settlement. After they left, Dana
sat and looked at the sky. Ebenezer sat next to her. Rebecca thought of
men who see the features and don't understand the essence. She thought
of Joseph, of the Wondrous One, of the Captain, of Mr. Klomin, and then
she thought a thought that was so strange to her she tried to get it out of
her mind and couldn't. She thought: Maybe we nevertheless did something important here; maybe this settlement and that whole deed aren't
as small as I thought, maybe there was something in Nehemiah's vision
that hasn't entirely vanished and wasn't in vain? But then she saw in her mind's eye the great war that was coming and the Pioneers shooting at the
enemy and the Arabs sharpening knives in Jaffa for all the future wars and
she feared for Boaz, whose image she could already discover in her.
In the morning, two Arab women cleaned up the destruction and Rebecca
looked at the new house and thought, What can those two fools do at night?
and she wanted to laugh despite the scattered leftovers, empty wine bottles,
and the flowers eagerly pulled up. In the room, the lamentations of the oldtimers still echoed. In the sunlight, it was hard for her to see last night's
thoughts as real. And so she could almost forgive her son. In the house next
door, the gramophone Mr. Zucker had recently bought started playing
Beethoven's violin concerto. The speaker was aimed at Rebecca's house
and she linked the music with the pleasant fields of morning, the dew, the
almond grove in the distance, the mountains on the horizon, and again she
saw the impending storm of war and started reciting Psalms to try to change
something in the world, and if she had thought of that deed in real terms,
she would probably have burst out laughing. Afterward Ebenezer and Dana
went for a walk. Ebenezer sewed a handsome tent, they loaded the burden
on one mule and Dana rode on a second mule and Ebenezer got off and
picked flowers for Dana, who put them in a bag tied to the saddle, and thus
they went up to the mountains and down to the valleys, crossed wadis and
rivers and at night, they looked at the stars and felt an intense closeness,
some longing for one another they had a name for and didn't know how to
call it, and they'd lie like that, clinging desperately, breathing each other's
breath, and Ebenezer wanted to say things, but didn't know how to say
them, and his hands would knead her strongly and gently. He carved birds
for her, built boxes for her, crowned her with portraits, and she lusted for
him, touched him in surprising places, and they would laugh wildly, like
hyenas, listening to the jackals wailing in the distances and answering
them.