“What’s wrong?” he asked, seeing her standing with both hands on her haunches, massaging them ferociously with an exasperation bordering on tears. She had never had to contend with an ordinary pitchfork before, and the experience was a bitter one. “Broken your spine again?”
“Just about,” said Grete angrily. “This is real work, Paul!”
“Of course it is.”
“Yet you kids manage. How is it?”
“Technique,” he casually said, imitating a grown-up. “You are wasting your energy and working the wrong way. You look as if you were going to play golf.”
“No,” she said half-humbly, “that I could probably teach you.”
“Everything has its technique.” He used the word “technique”, which he had lately picked up, as often as he could get it in.
“Well, show me again.”
“All right.”
In his good-natured, enthusiastic way, he showed her and then thrust the tool into her hand with his grubby paws and said:
“Now let’s see you try.”
Laboriously she followed his example. “Better,” he remarked after a critical pause. “I reckon in about ten years we shall be able to trust you with the middens.”
But though, superficially, she was leading an idyllic pastoral existence, her period at Ras Shamir was not to end before she had come up against some dangers as well.
One day, while the children were looking after Karam’s sheep on the river bank, they strayed up rather too far and, all of a sudden, out of a clear sky, they saw the Jordan water being threshed by bullets and heard the crisp rattle of machine guns. The flock scattered, and Grete managed to get the children into a bunch and race them to the shelter of an overhanging rock where they took refuge, both excited and a little shaken. The machine-gun fire had alerted some of the tractor drivers, and they saw two tractors racing towards them, one driven by a man and one by a girl. Both were armed with Sten guns and kept up an answering volley in the direction of the target which, from her own position, Grete could not see. The panic-stricken flock of sheep had made off towards the kibbutz, but it had left a lamb kicking and moaning on the grass, and this sight was too much for Paul, who dashed out of cover and brought it back. He acted so swiftly that Grete was not able to restrain him, and it was lucky that the child was not hit.
By now the tractors were approaching, and while the girl on the one vehicle turned eastward towards the frontier, still firing, the second tractor stopped and Grete saw that the driver was David. He ran with great strides across the intervening field, calling out anxiously whether anything or anyone had been hit. Luckily the only victim was the lamb, which was still alive but bleeding profusely. Grete held it in her lap and David knelt down to examine it in his swift authoritative way.
“We’d better take it back to Naomi,” she said. But he shook his head.
“It’s too far gone,” he replied. “I’d better put it out of its pain.”
Swift as a thought, without waiting for anything further, he picked it up in his arms, took ten long paces away from them, and, placing it on the ground, shot it through the head. It quivered and lay still. He came back to the horrified group of children who surrounded her in her now bloodstained skirt, and said with a smile:
“We’re lucky. It could have turned out much worse.” He then listened with his head on one side like a dog. The firing had stopped.
“Stay here five minutes more and then return as fast as you can with the children.” And then, turning to Grete, he said: “You carry back the body. I’m going up to the border to see if we need any covering fire.” Without waiting for any reply from them, he ran with great loping strides back to his tractor and set it into gear with a roar.
Grete obeyed orders, and in five minutes the party set off with all speed for the kibbutz, Grete holding the still-warm and bleeding body of the lamb in her outstretched arms. She walked in a kind of speechless daze, and when one of the smaller children asked: “Isn’t David brave?” she only managed a nod, though she saw his son’s eyes kindle with pride.
At long last they got back to the camp, and Grete surrendered the lamb to the kitchens and the children to the school-room. For her part she still felt numb and a trifle dazed. She went down to the river instead of going to the room to change her clothes and, kneeling, washed the blood off her hands and from her frock, gazing as she did so at the pale white face which stared back at her from the water.
She was kneeling thus when she heard the rumble of a tractor and on the opposite side of the river she saw David riding into camp. He stopped the tractor opposite her and turned off the engine. She paid no attention but went on scrubbing the hem of her dress, sitting there like a mute child under strict orders to finish her task. There was a long silence during which she was conscious of his eyes upon her.
“Grete, you are very beautiful… I came to thank you.”
Receiving no response, he leaped back into the bucket seat of his tractor and switched the engine on with a roar. He disappeared without looking back and left her there, gazing at her own pale features rippling in the water.
Listlessly, heavily, she pondered as she stared, wondering what the word could now mean, if anything. She turned it over awkwardly in her mind and even repeated it aloud in a sardonic voice as she looked into her own floating eyes:
“Beauty!”
12. David and Grete
Now the work of the kibbutz engulfed her, and she found herself enjoying its strict routines; even its privations were welcome. The fact that she had acquitted herself honourably, if recklessly, after the illegal landing, gave her a new measure of self-esteem and confidence. David made no new move towards her, but she could not help thinking about him with anxiety. The old nightmare of the past had not been excised, and she thought herself to be a woman whose emotions were prematurely exhausted, a woman incapable of love.
A sudden twist in events disabused her of this idea, and replaced it by an even more alarming one, namely: that she had no right to meddle with the affections of David. It came about in the following manner — preceded by an hysterical attack as unexpected as it was unwelcome.
One of the smallest of the children fell out of an apple tree and hurt itself. This type of incident was common enough, and her reaction seemed out of all proportion to its seriousness. Or was it simply the desperate screaming of the word “Mother!” (Hebrew: “Imma!”). At any rate, Grete took the sobbing child in her arms and found herself cradling it, to still its crying, murmuring as she did so her old German nurse’s lullaby, the words of which she had last recalled singing to sleep her own child: “Schlafe süss… Gradually, as she cradled the child, the swinging movements became mechanical. Her mind seemed to have left her with her feelings alone. The child was quiet now, gazing at her curiously. She stared open-eyed into the void with unfocussed eyes. She continued like a monomaniac, rocking and staring, rocking and staring. The child in her arms suddenly took fright, aware in an obscure way of something abnormal in her behaviour, and started to scream out in terror. Instantly, the fear was communicated to the other children around her, and the panic spread. Some babies began to cry too.
There is no knowing how long Grete would have gone on, fixed in this posture of mad concentration. She suddenly felt the hand of Rose on her shoulder, and heard the firm voice admonishing her. Rose gently released the child and took Grete’s arm: