When Rebecca felt the labor pains approaching, she went to Jaffa. A few hours after she came, Ebenezer was born. It was a warm day in early spring and a few days later, Nehemiah came, his face was joyful. He looked at his son, the first son of the settlement, looked at Rebecca and saw her chilly smile and looked at his son again. Doctor Hisin refused to let him hold his baby, but when he looked at his son, he perceived, not how much he looked like him, since the infant didn't yet look like anybody, but how much the baby didn't look like Joseph. He examined every centimeter in his baby's face and was then appeased, kissed Rebecca, and said to her: Suckle the young lion, Rebecca, and she shut her eyes, picked up the infant, and reluctantly began suckling it.
About a month later, her milk was still flowing but her heart was cold. She was returned to the settlement on Saturday night and the next day, the rabbi was brought from the nearby settlement and circumcised Ebenezer Schneerson, and Rebecca stood there and watched the rite of circumcision as if they were circumcising a stranger's child. And around Ebenezer, the first in Judea, stood barefoot houses charred by the beating sun. Rebecca hadn't imagined such a shrill light. She searched for corners of shade and found a baby running around between her legs. Nehemiah's sublime ideas didn't withstand malaria, typhus, and robbers. Heat waves would blaze and the hot wind plowed furrows in the ground that hadn't been worked for hundreds of years. The water was drawn from a nearby well, and when the well was destroyed more wells had to be dug. Trees born beautiful and green looked withered and weary. Rebecca observed her son, her house, and began weeping the tears that had stood behind her eyelashes the day she came to the Land of Israel. Eight years, Rebecca wept nonstop. A very little bit of the ardor of Nehemiah's speech clung to his acts. The house he built listed to the side, the nails would come out on the other side of the wall, the saplings were never planted in time and were never trimmed in time, the water came late to the ditches he didn't know how to dig properly.
The Baron's official, smelling of eau de cologne and wearing charming clothes, came with the Arab workers and the workers uprooted what was left of the citrus fruits. Instead they planted more vineyards. For some time, the synagogue turned into the official's residence. Little girls from distant settlements played a piano there that had been brought on a cart and the playing filled the broad street of the night with a dull melancholy. The flies multiplied feverishly, the pipes rusted, the roofs didn't stand in the wind, two girls from the Galilee went to live with the official in the synagogue and didn't come out of the house for a week. Drunken shrieks were heard even in the distant fields. One night, a flock of vultures was seen waiting for corpses. People were scared and started praying, but there was nowhere to do it. They prayed in the street, in the field, on the carts, in the barns where the cows refused to give enough milk. Nathan went outside and yelled: Not yet, not yet, and Nehemiah went to drive the vultures away with a stick he had cut from a hollow old fig tree that collapsed and died. The vultures didn't flee. Every morning, one of the farmers had to clean the house of the official who kept spitting black watermelon seeds all over. At night, the men gathered and Nehemiah persuaded them to rebel against the official and throw him out. The official discovered that Nehemiah was fomenting a rebellion and incited the farmers against him. At night, Nehemiah was called to the official's house to clean the latrine. Nehemiah refused to go. He was ordered to leave the settlement. Everything was mortgaged and he had no grounds to claim his plot of land. The Arab police came with the Turkish modir and the white-clad official accompanied them. He tried to smile in French. The Turk was hypnotized by the splendid French and kissed him on the mouth. One of his choked girls groaned, Rebecca laughed through her tears and went into the house, looked around, and said: This isn't our house, Ebenezer. Nehemiah and Rebecca packed their belongings, the members stood ashamed but didn't lift a finger. Anybody who dared help Nehemiah could expect to be expelled. At that time, Nathan was in the nearby settlement in the middle of an argument with the local rabbi about the year of shemittah when the land must remain uncultivated and the pointlessness of following its commandments. Nehemiah walked with his belongings to the edge of the settlement and at the collapsed dead hollow fig tree, he built a hut. Nehemiah called the hut Secret Glory after the son of Rachel Brin, and only later on, when the haggling was over and the official dismissed, did Nehemiah return to his house and Secret Glory was forgotten and turned into an area overlooking the path of the cemetery, where the first members of the settlement who died were buried, even though the first dead woman was buried in the nearby settlement, but then Nathan still fought the idea that death could live with the builders of the new Land of Israel. Rebecca went on weeping and in her mind's eye she saw the splendid carts of America and a future full of baskets of flowers and American officials equal to her beauty. Her tears didn't stop even when Nehemiah drove away the vultures, and their improved house was nicer this time and Ebenezer started crawling on its floor.
At that time, a new official came who was more audacious than his predecessor, didn't spend time with young girls, but hated what he called those ignorant farmers with a blind hatred. He had big plans to bring ships up to Jerusalem to ram its wall and make it a big and fine open city, but nobody heeded his ideas. He came to the Land because he heard songs of a man who would sing in the cabarets of Jewish intellectuals in Poland and his name was Joseph Rayna. In Ha-Tsefira he read that the Crusaders had brought a ship up from Jaffa to Jerusalem and used it to ram the wall, he also read in a Russian newspaper that Jesus was then seen on the Mount of Olives, and after a week-long procession around the city, the wall fell. The official hired fifty Arabs who tried to bring a rotting Greek ship up from Ashkelon to Jaffa and from there to Jerusalem, but in Ramle, the Arabs ran away and because he was left without a ship and without employment, he was sent to the settlement that embittered the lives of the officials. He was chosen for that purpose by an official who met his orphaned comrade on his way from Jerusalem to Jaffa. He was so bored by the monotony of the road that he refused to look at it. The official heard Nehemiah lecturing at the community center on the citrus fruit that was to make the place flourish and discovered that, in litigation over the land of his hut, differences of opinion were revealed in favor of the Turkish side. He brought police from the splendid house of the Kamikam in Wadi Hanin and arrested Rebecca and Nehemiah and a few other people, put them in handcuffs, and took them to Ramle. Three Arab mukhtars, who had previously received a decent bribe, swore honestly that Rebecca Schneerson had whored with them in the fields near Hakhnazarea. The Arab mukhtars, who received a decent gift from a Sephardi Jew from Jaffa, who was urgently brought in a wagon hitched to four horses along with a drunk old German doctor named Dr. Kahn, tried to change their testimony, but were beaten in the courthouse and testified again what they had testified before. Rebecca looked straight at them, stopped weeping, sharpened her beauty, and they were filled with a fear that chained their body and they felt they couldn't move. Then, they opened their mouth and, in the eyes of the witch, they said: We were wrong, kill us, but we were wrong, that woman didn't whore with anybody, we lied. The big governor who came from Jerusalem didn't want to roil the waves and acquitted Rebecca. The Arabs were afraid but he also acquitted them. He delivered a venomous speech, but since he was tired and weary from a pleasant leave in Beirut, he delivered his speech in blunt words but with eyes shut with fatigue. He said that Zionism is a crime, that the Jews want to banish the masters of the Land, and why all of a sudden did they come to a land that wasn't theirs? Did they decide to crucify messiahs here again? he asked. Since most of those in attendance had no idea that the Jews had ever crucified messiahs they looked at the governor's moving lips with vague awe. The Jews, he said, were a superfluous people, wherever they were they caused trouble and wanted to start a world revolution. They are ruled by the El ders of Zion who sit in a secret house in Jerusalem and direct the world. They want to rule the whole globe, he said, and Rebecca woke him from his fantasies and said: Maybe the whole cosmos, but since he didn't understand the word and was very tired, he laughed. And when the governor laughs, all the Turks laugh too. Before he left, the governor told Rebecca: After all, that Jesus was also one of yours, and only Mohammed came in the desert and not from some hole of a Jewess. But then a rich man from the Jaffa center arrived with a Turkish modir, whose bribe amounted to a fortune and the matter was settled, and Nehemiah's lands were returned to him and he built a hut on the land, and the house that remained empty was turned into a chicken coop that Rebecca fixed up afterward.