On the day Nehemiah and Rebecca came to Jaffa, the settlements were transferred from Baron Rothschild to the IKA Company. The settlers knew the new company wouldn't soon fire the staff. The carter who brought Nehemiah and Rebecca said: It'll be bad! Everything will go down the drain, and Rebecca asked him what could go down the drain and he didn't answer, but cursed his horses.
Despite the worry, Nehemiah felt a quiet bliss. In the shadows of the mountains in the distance, he saw the sights of his childhood, the carter began singing melodies and one of them was Joseph Rayna's sad song about the rivers of the Land of Israel going to the Temple to ask forgiveness. Nehemiah longed for his wife, touched her belly, and said: That son, let it be mine! And Rebecca, who knew what he wanted to ask, didn't say a thing.
By morning, the jackals' wailing stopped and a clear blue light began filling the world. Nehemiah didn't shut his eyes and Rebecca dozed off. In the distance, as on a saccharine color postcard, the Arab village of Marar was seen, all of it like a beehive. Dogs barked and a smell of droppings and sweet basil rose from the village turned by the sun now rising fast into a kind of ruined ancient city. Later, the heat intensified with the eastern wind from the desert, and a struggle of forces raged between winter and the hot wind and when they passed by some fig trees and sycamores, the sun already blinding their eyes, the settlement emerged in the distance. A few neglected and cracking houses, fleeing, maybe eluding, thought Rebecca, limestone fence trying to unite the houses into one block, a few young trees, and some desolation that wasn't created or dissolved. The heat was heavy now and Rebecca felt dizzy.
Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, rode up on a white mare and even in the distance he hugged the image of Nehemiah in his empty arms. Nehemiah roared with joy at him. Rebecca was amazed and said: At night he learned to talk with wolves? And the carter said to her, Those are jackals, Madam, not wolves, and she said: Jackals, wolves, same pest. When they came to what Nathan called the center of the settlement and what Rebecca privately called that miserable hole, the sun was beating down with its full force. Near the synagogue, whose second story was still under construction, stood the miserable-looking men who were trying in vain to stand proudly. Nathan, who used to sit with Nehemiah in the forest and was his teacher before he ascended to the Land of Israel four years earlier, was wearing a dusty beret and his face was seared by the sun. He hugged Nehemiah, looked at Rebecca, and a forgotten smile rose up and crept over his lips. The people whose clothes looked to Rebecca as if they belonged to another climate surrounded them, there was great excitement, for some reason everybody thought that what had been broken in those years would be fixed with Nehemiah's coming, that his good sense and integrity were a hope they had cherished for days and nights. They said: Everything here is sold to the Baron, but we won't be dependent on his charity. Nehemiah smiled, some of the men he knew, others he knew only by rumor, their letters he had read several times, moldy water flowed along the ditch where they stood, Nehemiah thought of Abner ben-Ner and his heroes, and saw Arab children, barefoot, splashing in the moldy water, dragging piles of straw on their backs. A pesky buzzing of flies struck his ears but he tried not to hear. Nathan said: Soon our community will be blessed, and riots of agreement rose from mouths that were parts of faces that tried to adorn the moment with a smile that was stuck years ago to old valises. The young vineyards, crests of trees that were planted, and the limestone wall touching the houses, everything made Rebecca clearly suspicious. Nathan took off his shoes, looked at his old friend, and in the blinding light that had no corners, no ends, struck by a hot wind sharp as a razor, he started dancing with his arms spread out to the sides, and everybody stood as if they were turned to stone. The carter unhitched his horses and gave them something to chew from the crib, and Nathan, (very) isolated now, danced with a slow, hesitant movement as if he were groping in an invisible space, with his eyes shut, with great devotion, and Nehemiah put his coat on the ground, took off his shoes, too, and with the devotion of Hasids standing on the roof and yelling The Lord is God, he hugged Nathan and together they danced while everybody looked at them without budging.
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Then the things were taken off the wagon and moved to the house that had stood empty ever since the death of the woman nobody had known and by the time they tried to ask her she was unconscious and died. She was buried in the nearby settlement because the idea of death could still be fought and a cemetery of Pioneers looked like a superfluous demonstration of failure. The ruined house was moldy and in the middle of the combined kitchen-bedroom lay a dead dog. Rebecca tried to fix the house and Nehemiah to tile the roof with the help of his friends. The smell of the dead dog remained there a long time. At night, all the men crowded onto the roof, held a bottle of wine they drank because of the sudden cold that replaced the hot wind, and to the sound of monotonous, quiet singing, they finished the roof Nehemiah tried to tile. The Turks who slept in their tent next to the settlement came at dawn with the dogs but the roof was done. Furiously, they tore down some vines, lit a bonfire, and made coffee. When the coffee was ready, one of the Turks poured coffee on his friend. His friend got up and shot him. The corpse lay there with gaping eyes. Rebecca passed by with her swollen belly and saw the dead man. Suddenly she recalled the smell in the ruin and thought, Is that smell the smell of a dog? Then, she said to herself: Now I know who the dead woman was. She hurried to the cart standing there, asked the driver to take her to the nearby settlement, came there about an hour later, went to the Baron's official who was sitting there with a young girl on his lap and listening to music played for him by two pale little girls dressed in white, on flutes, and she said: The name of the woman you buried here was Jane Doe. The official saw before him a splendid woman filled with a fetus, lusted for her but was also disgusted by her, and he said: Who's the woman? And Rebecca said, She lived in an orchard near our city, she was crazy and saw visions, her father was a cobbler who was murdered by rioters, she saw her mother turned into ashes, please write her name on the tombstone, and then she returned to the settlement and with a fluttering heart she wondered why she had done what she did. A jackal who fell in love with one of the bitches who came with the Turks wailed at Rebecca's house, she blocked her ears and tried to return to the river and there was nothing around her but desert and jackals and a smell of Turks and the blood of one Turk still close to the maw of the jackal who had approached the blood and sniffed it eagerly. The yard was full of thistles and thorns and in the summer the snakes would come rustle among the stones. The rain came down and the wind broke the roof tiles. Rebecca said to Nehemiah: Look at the limestone wall of the settlement, you've built a ghetto here. And Nehemiah twisted his face, which was already seared by the sun and was sad like the faces of his comrades and wrinkles were beginning to be plowed on his forehead, and he said: We need a defense, Rebecca, the Land isn't ours yet. And she said: And it won't be, and she turned her face and went to the yard and dug a pit and didn't know why she dug a pit. In the morning, Nehemiah came out and saw the pit, deepened it and said: I'm building an outhouse. He didn't know how to pull up crabgrass any better than to dig a pit. The outhouse he put up collapsed in the first rain. The crabgrass covered the vegetables he planted. The vineyard he was given was the property of IKA. In the summer the grapes would be taken away from him and he would get only a partial payment. Then Nehemiah thought of citrus fruits. The members heard that Nehemiah had an important idea and wanted to assemble, but the synagogue wasn't finished and the members said: How can we live here without a cultural center? They went to one of the abandoned huts and fixed it up and the next night, they called it the "Community Center." They assembled in the "Community Center" and even Rebecca, who was in the last week of her pregnancy, came. Nehemiah talked about citrus fruits, how it would be possible to grow them and market them, how it would be possible to be independent of IKA and the Baron. Nathan and his friend Horowitz went to Jaffa, bought saplings, returned, and planted the first citrus grove, but a deluge came nonstop for three days and three nights and the saplings were crushed and destroyed.