Pleasant smells blew from the citrus groves and the fields. Dana's schoolmates came from the Galilee on horseback; they tapped each other on the shoulder and yelled. They danced bold and "awful" dances, as Rebecca put it, until the wee hours of the morning. The splendid kingdom is realized here by a carpenter and wild people shrieking, said Mr. Klomin sadly, and he gazed yearningly at the nobility of the Captain and Rebecca. He saw them as a symbol of his dream. Rebecca agreed to describe to him what she felt when she entered the lion's cage. Mr. Klomin looked at the Captain's padded visor, ostentatiously hated the roars of the wild Pioneers, saw his son-in-law standing on the side gazing, and said: They should have begat Rebecca and the Captain, and not vice versa.
The feast was made from the Captain's recipes and the farmers drank and sang and recalled Nehemiah and his beautiful words, and late at night, when the Pioneers were still singing around a bonfire, the aging farmers sat on the side and yearningly sang old songs they had once learned from Joseph Rayna and wept when they recalled those distant days, and said: Here we married off the first son of the settlement. After they left, Dana sat and looked at the sky. Ebenezer sat next to her. Rebecca thought of men who see the features and don't understand the essence. She thought of Joseph, of the Wondrous One, of the Captain, of Mr. Klomin, and then she thought a thought that was so strange to her she tried to get it out of her mind and couldn't. She thought: Maybe we nevertheless did something important here; maybe this settlement and that whole deed aren't as small as I thought, maybe there was something in Nehemiah's vision that hasn't entirely vanished and wasn't in vain? But then she saw in her mind's eye the great war that was coming and the Pioneers shooting at the enemy and the Arabs sharpening knives in Jaffa for all the future wars and she feared for Boaz, whose image she could already discover in her.
In the morning, two Arab women cleaned up the destruction and Rebecca looked at the new house and thought, What can those two fools do at night? and she wanted to laugh despite the scattered leftovers, empty wine bottles, and the flowers eagerly pulled up. In the room, the lamentations of the oldtimers still echoed. In the sunlight, it was hard for her to see last night's thoughts as real. And so she could almost forgive her son. In the house next door, the gramophone Mr. Zucker had recently bought started playing Beethoven's violin concerto. The speaker was aimed at Rebecca's house and she linked the music with the pleasant fields of morning, the dew, the almond grove in the distance, the mountains on the horizon, and again she saw the impending storm of war and started reciting Psalms to try to change something in the world, and if she had thought of that deed in real terms, she would probably have burst out laughing. Afterward Ebenezer and Dana went for a walk. Ebenezer sewed a handsome tent, they loaded the burden on one mule and Dana rode on a second mule and Ebenezer got off and picked flowers for Dana, who put them in a bag tied to the saddle, and thus they went up to the mountains and down to the valleys, crossed wadis and rivers and at night, they looked at the stars and felt an intense closeness, some longing for one another they had a name for and didn't know how to call it, and they'd lie like that, clinging desperately, breathing each other's breath, and Ebenezer wanted to say things, but didn't know how to say them, and his hands would knead her strongly and gently. He carved birds for her, built boxes for her, crowned her with portraits, and she lusted for him, touched him in surprising places, and they would laugh wildly, like hyenas, listening to the jackals wailing in the distances and answering them.
On the third evening, they came to the crossroads of the desert. Above rose a mountain and on was it the holy house of the Shiite priests. In the distance, dawn illuminated the mountains of Moab and a profound serenity reigned over everything. Birds began chirping, when they came to the top Dana didn't find flowers but thorns, thistles, and nettle flowers she was afraid to pick because they blossomed only one day a year. They were ordered to say Salaam aleikum ya ahl el-kubur, which means Greetings to you who dwell in the graves. And at the same time, Ebenezer began blessing with head bent: El-salaam aleikum ya ahl el-duniya, which means Greetings to you people of this world. And then the old man there told them that if they forgot those words their only son would die within three months, their house would be destroyed by fire, and their name would be wiped off the face of the earth. Dana said: We don't have a son, and Ebenezer said: We will have a son and his name will be Boaz. Dana asked why Boaz, and Ebenezer said: Because he will be the grandson of Nehemiah. And when she asked what would happen if they had a daughter, he said: We won't have a daughter, we'll have a son.
From the moment he was born, Rebecca claimed that Boaz was her son, that she had held him in her womb as a pledge. Dana held the baby, suckled him, and was afraid to let Rebecca touch him. At night Rebecca started whispering her Psalms angrily and furiously, prayed to a lord of another world, a strange, hostile one, who once lived with her forefathers in cellars. Dana wept and told Ebenezer that Rebecca was praying for her death, and Ebenezer tried to calm her but didn't know how to say that in the few words he used. He said: I'll protect you, Dana. She hates me, said Dana, and wept. I'm so scared, she loved Samuel, I wanted to understand, I couldn't, I looked at my son, he doesn't look like me, not like his mother, he had green-yellow eyes like the eyes of a demon, he laughed, a laughing baby he was, he touched his mother and would turn his face away from her, and Ebenezer went to his mother and said to her:
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You're praying for Dana's death, said Ebenezer. And she said: I'm praying to who I want and for what I want. You're not even the son of your father, not the grandson of your grandfather, you didn't come out of me, you came out of the coffin of a Jew who died of typhus and was buried in Jaffa under another name. Give me the only son I deserve. At night Rebecca yelled at the fence so they would hear: Ebenezer is the son of Nehemiah! Who else could be the father of a mongoloid who begets sons of a king if not a man who died on his wife at the shore of Jaffa to punish her for a life she didn't want to live? No Joseph would have begat a silent bird carver who tries to sleep with the daughter of a eunuch from Tel Aviv who begat his daughter from a charter translated from ancient Latin.
Dana heaped up pillows and boxes and blocked the doorway and Ebenezer paved a new path around the old house and Rebecca sat at the fence and wished for her grandson and couldn't see him. At night, no light was turned on in the house. Ebenezer sat in the house holding a rifle. Every noise made Dana Jump. One day, one of Dana's friends was brought who had a stomachache and volunteered to guard the yard and whenever he saw Rebecca approaching he aimed his rifle at her and said: I'll shoot you, and she giggled and said Shoot, fool, and he aimed, trembled, and didn't dare shoot until one day he crossed over the barricade and hired himself out to work in her yard.
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Boaz was born in the nearby settlement, in a small hospital, on April third, nineteen twenty-eight. On that day and at that hour, in Tarnopol, Galicia, Samuel Lipker was born. Samuel's sire then wrote a great poem on his unrequited love for Rebecca Schneerson. Then he wrote a lament on the death of Jews that would be written again later on by a man named Lionel Secret. The lament and the love poem to Rebecca were the only two successful poems ever written by Joseph Rayna. But they were left with his clothes before he was shot to death. No one remains who will remember them except for one man who recited them to Ebenezer and then died with a piece of bread wet from the damp of the wall stuck in his mouth. Joseph wrote about the most horrible disaster as if he envisioned it. The words walked among ruins of Jews and a path strewn with human obstacles who didn't know what they hoarded in their minds, came to Ebenezer, who stood in Cologne and recited the lamentation and the love poem. In its words, Ebenezer heard a distant melody reminding him of his love for his mother. And Joseph Rayna didn't go to America to save himself because he thought that if he went there, he would betray Rebecca. And so, without knowing, Lionel Secret learned from Ebenezer the melody of the great lament he would write years later, and would restore the first love of his mother Rachel, her love for Rebecca Secret Charity and the great-granddaughter of her daughter, but by the time he wrote the lament, his mother was dead and buried in New Jersey under the name of Rachel Blau, faithful wife of Saul Blau.