She didn't know how you think about going to America without tears. There was a heat wave and a strong wind blew and people seemed to be walking like shadows seeking a foothold in corners that were like shade, but didn't stop the wind. The sky was heavy and brown. An intoxicating smell of thistles rose in her nose. She pitied Nehemiah for not leaving her and now he had to pay the price of her stubborn war, but she didn't know how to tell him that. When he recovered from his illness, Nehemiah looked like a different man. A puerile rashness seized him. He put on a light-colored suit he had bought from Hazti who came every week in a cart loaded with luxuries, and something that had always been stormy in him was now appeased. He'd walk around the settlement like a hopeless lover of it, talking with his neighbors, making new plans, preparing an irrigation system, a new community center, a paved street, planting almond trees, building a sanatorium for asthmatics. His friends looked at the man whose fields and farms were failures, whose citrus groves suffered more than others, whose wife had been weeping nonstop for eight years now, whose son carved wood, and recalled the stormy nights on the threshing floor, the dreams he tried to inspire in them and were so in love with him that they were forced to invent in their common past things that never had been and never were, to increase his image and love even more. In Nathan's house a few people gathered to celebrate Ebenezer's ninth birthday. The boy sat in a corner and didn't want to talk, just looked at them and showed them a carved bird and when he laughed he looked like a jackal. Rebecca rubbed her face and was silent. Nehemiah looked outside, drank a little wine, raised his glass and said: To a hundred and twenty Ebenezer, looked outside and through the window he saw the darkness descending, lovely roofs, citrus groves, vineyards, ornamental trees, cypresses, cowsheds, chicken coops, a suppressed smell of hay stood in the air and he told them how much he loved them and added: Doesn't Ebenezer look like me? And Nathan said he doesn't look like you, Nehemiah, but thank God, he doesn't look like anybody else either. At night, Nehemiah said to Rebecca: Let's leave Ebenezer with Nathan and go on a trip. Rebecca put on a yellow dress and wrapped a scarf and in the autumn of nineteen nine, nine years after they came to the Land of Israel, Rebecca and Nehemiah left riding on two donkeys to part from the land of Nehemiah's dream. They rode along wadis and ancient riverbeds, met groups of young Pioneers quarrying rock in remote places and living on farms in the mountains. Nehemiah said: They will succeed where we failed. They yearn less for the past and more for the future. They would conquer the Land because it's theirs, they didn't come to ask for pity but to rape the Land. In Jerusalem, Rebecca prayed at the Western Wall and Nehemiah watched her from the distance. They crossed the Jezreel Valley, rode among desolated swamps, toured the Galilee, and after a journey along the Jordan, they came to the Dead Sea, lay there on their backs, and the salt bore them and the mountains around were a shadow of something that didn't exist at all. Rebecca said: I'm looking into a mirror, and she laughed, and he loved to hear her laugh. At night, they slept embracing. Never had they loved one another so much. She almost forgot her body's longing for Joseph. Nehemiah's courtesy was only salt poured on the violent and seductive sweetness. Something is dying in him, she said to herself, and something else is maybe lit. She began to be filled with hope and regret at the same time.
They returned to the settlement and Nehemiah delivered a speech that lasted from six in the evening to three in the morning, and the farmers sat lit by the halo of light, and there was still a distant echo in it of their dreams. Six hours Nehemiah talked and nobody budged. Even Rebecca sat fascinated to hear the visions Nehemiah spoke of and she really didn't know that she saw them. In the middle of his speech, Nehemiah looked at her and understood sadly that Rebecca's mind was made up. That night he parted from every corner of the farm, kissed his son for a long time, and like thieves in the night, Nehemiah and Rebecca left with their things hastily packed and after another farewell from their son who didn't understand a thing, they rode to Jaffa. Ebenezer watched them from the distance and didn't weep. Rebecca said to him: I'm going with Father and you'll join us as soon as we get settled. She didn't want to bring Ebenezer to America but she didn't want to say that, neither to Nehemiah nor to her son. Ebenezer sat and etched the face of an owl on wood. Even when Nehemiah wept for a long time and hugged him, he didn't say a thing. He just tried to understand what was happening to the piece of wood when you carve it like that so the face of the owl looks as if it burst out of the wood and is also destroying it, shattering it to pieces and at the same time, honoring it.
Nehemiah was silent all the way to Jaffa. Rebecca, who didn't know what to think about, was still dozing and trying to dream about the last days, and when she woke up and they were close to the citrus groves of Jaffa and saw the palm trees at the entrance to the city, she recalled the small details that had joined together into some picture that was not yet clear to her, and when she looked at Nehemiah she saw on his face the expression that had covered his face on the day of Rachel's wedding. His hatred now for Joseph was so strong that Rebecca almost fell in love with him.
And suddenly from the dread that filled her, maybe because of remorse, she wanted so much to save Nehemiah, to give up, to be somebody she never thought she could be, to take Nehemiah back to the settlement to his son and to his lands and to his friends, but she didn't know how to do that and was silent. Jaffa was now a different city. Jewish shops were opened in the narrow streets. Carts from settlements in Judea and the Galilee came to the city, people bought agricultural machines and seeds and sold farm products, and the city was teeming with life and they were already starting to build the new neighborhood of Tel Aviv on the sands north of the city and Arabs were still smoking narghilas next to the mosque and Turks were standing barefoot and listening to an orchestra of ragamuffins from Egypt and slapped their faces whenever they fell asleep while playing and ships anchored in the port and two locomotives were added to the railroad junction whose tracks already reached the edge of the desert and Nehemiah and Rebecca stole into the hotel.
Nehemiah didn't go out the door of the hotel and Rebecca bought a few souvenirs for her friend Rachel, met Jews she thought she had known before, and saw an elderly consul stroking the body of an Arab boy on a dark streetcorner, and then she drank tea with mint with the Jewish agent Joseph Abravanel, who reminded her that his son would someday rule the Land and didn't mock her, but quietly arranged the tickets and the cabin on the ship that had already tooted and the toots were already dancing on its masts and the ship looked menacing and beautiful among the little waves capering on the shore and then she sat next to her husband and said: I smell fire, and he said in a hollow cracked voice, You smell the future, and she felt stabbings in her womb as if there were a child in it and she wanted to give birth for Nehemiah to all the dead children she had once known but she was silent and said to him: What did I do to you, Nehemiah, and he said: You were Rebecca, you were what you were, don't cry, I love you more than any person in the world and I won't tell you again how much I love you because you won't believe me. She smiled at him and hugged him, but he put her off and as she was falling asleep, she seemed to hear the sound of weeping, but since she had never heard Nehemiah weep, she thought somebody else was weeping in one of the rooms.