Ebenezer then built his hut in the citrus grove near the water tower, not far from the hill of the Wondrous One and nobody knows anymore why it was called that. The hill overlooked the fields and the desolation from the east to the distant mountains on the horizon, and a deaf girl who lived in the nearby settlement came one day and stayed there, sitting and watching for long hours as he built boxes or carved birds and she watched in silence. Ebenezer didn't miss his father, whose disgrace he had had to hear for years from his mother, he only yearned for Rebecca and she wasn't his. To herself she admitted that she had never managed to love Ebenezer more than she had managed not to love him, or to love his father. But those rare moments of affection for Nehemiah that increased after his death didn't touch her son. He didn't look like her, he didn't look like Joseph or Nehemiah. He didn't look like her father or like Nehemiah's mother, he didn't look like anybody she knew. Rebecca started reciting the book of Psalms a week after Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg erected his tent, which reminded her of the Wondrous One's splendid tent, and he started digging the rock of Hagar wife of Abram, which, according to his calculations, was buried there. He had ancient maps showing him ancient places long forgotten. That day in the citrus grove, Ebenezer carved his father's image on a wooden board that he planed and filed and covered with lacquer and the deaf girl wept. And then, for the first time in his life, Ebenezer knew the taste of love. The touch was nice. The deaf girl's face was twisted like a captured bird, but her voice wasn't heard and that scared him. When he lay in bed afterward and looked at the tin ceiling above his hut he felt exalted and didn't know why. His mother, who had started sitting in the big chair at the screened window with the book of Psalms in one hand and a flyswatter in the other and Ahbed and the laborers working the farm, imposed a considerable yoke on him too and he had to go out to plow and harvest, to take care of the chicken coop and the cow barn, and among the laborers who worked in the yard he met a Jew wearing a kippah who didn't believe in the resurrection of the world according to Marx and Engels like the other laborers in the other yards, prayed devotedly, and waited patiently for the messiah. He was a humble man and not unpleasant, who loved the deaf girl with a quiet and restrained love. When he'd see her coming back from the citrus grove with a light gleaming on her face, he was filled with longing and thought: If only I could grant her a soft and dreamy beauty like that. Ebenezer he privately loathed, he called him an idolater. Later on, Ebenezer explained to the deaf Starochka why he couldn't really love her and how much he yearned for somebody he didn't know who and she wanted to tell him something about her love but her inability to talk saved her from an absurd plea and she walked to the settlement, sat in the yard, and the Hasidic laborer brought her a glass of water, looked at her a long time until she grasped how strong his love was, took his hand, and kissed it. Then she started going to the synagogue and praying devotedly, smeared her crotch with red, and went to the wedding canopy with all the laborers standing around and calling out Mazal tov, Mazal tov.
His wife's silence, the laborer said later, was the grammar of messianism. He said that against Ebenezer's idolatry, but they didn't understand his words anymore than he himself understood the decree of his life and his marriage to a virgin whose wild shouts he saw in his mind's eye a thousand times when she came out of Ebenezer's hut. In those days, the Captain stopped digging for Hagar's rock and started seeking the stones of Jacob's Ladder in the mountain opposite and people who hadn't visited her house for years once again knocked on Rebecca's door and talked with her about agricultural matters on which she was an expert as she often said, reluctantly, and in the settlement rumors spread about her impending marriage.
The rumors were premature, but the Captain didn't despair and went on proposing marriage, money, travels to distant lands, and a pedigree from the eleventh century, and so when Rebecca brought up the idea of traveling south with him to find out whether those lands in the desert could be bought until her plans for the canals would be realized, he saw that as a sign whose plausibility nobody of course would understand, that the memorial to Dante Alighieri would be erected and on the other hand his desired marriage to Rebecca was already sealed. Ebenezer was left to manage the farm, the Hasidic laborer went to the Hasid village in the south, and was replaced by another laborer who wasn't a Hasid, but didn't want to foment revolution against the capitalists, Ahbed the son had long ago replaced his father who was about to die and milked the cows and the Captain and Rebecca rode in a carriage hitched to a pair of horses to the lands of Ruhama.
It was a fragrant spring day after a stormy sudden rain and flowers appeared blooming in places that were always arid. They came to a squashed hill where she had stopped on her journey with Nehemiah on their last trip. Everything was desolate and hills and hallucinatory yellow expanses stretched to the horizon. Rebecca was furious at Nehemiah that she had to travel to these distant places instead of him, with a Mexican stuffed animal who could be set as a scarecrow against planes, and then an Arab came to them who popped up from the ground wearing a suit and behind himbetween the rows of prickly pear-walked some short Bedouins.
The Arab greeted them and Rebecca gave the customary reply and then the Arab sat down and she and the Captain immediately sat too, and the Bedouins sat not far from them, and the Arab fiddled with some amber beads in his hands, and asked: So you're suddenly here and why are you suddenly here, maybe you've got family here? Rebecca smiled and said: My family is three clods from the right and the Arab laughed and the Bedouins laughed too and the Captain, who didn't understand Arabic, or pretended not to understand, tried not to laugh and looked at the horizon, something Rebecca wanted him very much to do, because the horizon was in the west and there was Gaza City, and she said: I'm just touring for no good reason, empty and wonderful, why not, and the Arab, whose misbakha in his hand began moving nervously, said: For no good reason? By my eyes, people don't come here for no good reason with a chariot and generals. Later on, Rebecca explained to the Captain that since the truth is not accepted literally in the Land of Israel, the Arab understood that the distinguished lady in the chariot and the general who surely commanded big armies came here to sniff land and buy it for some secret army that would destroy the holy places of Islam, which, as everybody knows, are south of here, about twenty days away. And since he knew she was a Jew, he also knew the exorbitant price. She waited. The Arab muttered something to himself and went off and half an hour later he returned with two more Arabs. The Bedouins were ordered to gather branches and twigs for a bonfire. They made sweet black tea; Rebecca and the Captain drank it very slowly with the Bedouins, who smacked their lips to impart to the scene the honor due it. The two men who came with the Arab were even more eminent than he was, dressed more splendidly, even though a smell of sheep dung and fragrant wormwood rose from them. They whispered together, their faces darkened and they whispered together again and excitedly offered Rebecca a hundred English pounds if she'd get out of there. She said: With all my heart, I thank you for your generous offer and appreciate your magnanimity and your ignorance of Arabic numerals, which you gave to the world along with the alcohol you don't even drink, one hundred English pounds is a hole in the penny of the hair of my late grandmother who is buried so far from here that I don't remember her name anymore and so I am not left without a mother to thank for your generosity and with the necessary modesty of a woman with a thousand soldiers at her disposal not far from here, to tell you to leave me and my friend the field marshal alone before the armies come who are now on sixty-six English warships at the shore of Gaza and peace on Ishmael and on the holes of all the pennies. Not only did they listen to her tensely, but the Captain was also listening. He thought he should smile, but he understood from her trembling and her tension that he better not take his eyes off the point he was staring at.