In that longing, she was afraid she'd be a mirror there and see herself. In her eyes, they were so full of a future she didn't want to be in. Such a love mustn't be fostered because it's against all possibility of real disgust, she said and left. Joseph ran after her, pleaded, but Rebecca strode quickly and without turning around. From the windows of the city, frightened faces peeped out and contemptuous looks were hung on her and on Joseph running after her. Rebecca's mother put her head in the oven and Rachel's mother took her out of the oven, poured water on her, called the doctor, and Rebecca's father sat cross-legged and started praying, even though he hadn't prayed for years, and Rebecca walked to Nehemiah's house, and Nehemiah Schneerson's mother was knitting a shawl and looked outside and saw Rebecca knocking on the gate of the house. Nehemiah had dressed ahead of time, as if he were waiting for some sign. A few days before, when he saw Joseph walking around like a blind man, he wanted to mourn and then he went to the forest and vowed revenge against Judea for preventing him from avenging the cursed Exile, and said: In blood and fire Judea fell, in blood and fire Judea will rise, and now, dressed in warrior clothes he stood in the door he opened to Rebecca.
From his mother, Nehemiah inherited the intelligence of the quiet defeated people who fabricate small consolations. Rebecca said: If you want you can marry me, Nehemiah, I'll be your wife all the days of my life, and only yours, but if you don't want to, tell me now.
Later on, she told Nehemiah what had happened to her in the three days since Rachel's wedding. He was silent, sipped the tea his mother served, and his eyes filled with unshed tears. He didn't say a thing. Then they drank wine and the two of them were gripped by some spasm that united them so profoundly they had to embrace. And Rebecca felt peace for the first time in her life. For a moment she loved Joseph with an impossible love and hated him with an impossible hate, and that was the last time she thought about Joseph with that passion and disgust that had filled her from the moment she saw him at Rachel's wedding, and until her grandson Boaz was born she no longer yearned even one minute for the handsome man who was her brother, her cousin, and her only lover. When she felt peace, Nehemiah stopped being afraid of her. She drank wine and began talking gaily, she said: Does my educated lord know why God lays tefillin? Nehemiah looked out the window. In the window Joseph appeared. She said: Because it is written, The Lord hath sworn by his right hand. Does my young lord know that King David, like Joseph Rayna standing there outside, sang a song in his mother's belly? It is written that he sucked from the breasts of his mother and looked at her breasts. Don't blush, lad. And then he started singing. And it's written, Bless the Lord 0 my soul and forget not all his benefits, said Rabbi: that's because he made teats instead of intelligence. Not I, Nehemiah, the rabbis said: That's so he won't look at her groin. Don't blush! Nehemiah, who had almost not listened to her, said: You'll love me Rebecca, and she said: Maybe, maybe. I told you about David because of my violated honor, we'll go to America and start a new life. And Nehemiah said: No, to the Land of Israel, and she thought: We'll go there and from there we'll go to America. She didn't like to argue with him.
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.