Boaz, who grew up in Rebecca's house, didn't resent the facts of his life, which changed with the years. He succumbed to the essential quality of the settlement, a quality that turned into an incurable disease, to create the past according to the givens of the present and to live in a fictional past as much as possible. His age changed. Later on, when he tried to correct the date of his birth, he couldn't anymore and he remained the age written by the Captain in the document given him by the old man who sank into the dirt, and the Captain's retrospective godfatherhood turned into a fait accompli. Boaz was the only lad in the settlement who had two birth dates, two godfathers (Klomin and the Captain), two mothers, a father in heaven, and three grandfathers: Klomin, Nehemiah, and Joseph Rayna. One of them, and he didn't know which, was also his father or perhaps wasn't, as he used to say afterward. A woman named Rachel Brin who grew shirt trees in America is his aunt, her son Secret Glory also called Lionel Secret is his cousin, the world was created when Secret Charity went down to a cellar and started sallying forth at night and made nineteen children with his stunned wife. There they shouted in cellars, said Rebecca, and not in ridiculous community centers…
Boaz was a taciturn lad. In a small settlement like that one, it's hard to guess the force of hostility and jealousy children feel for somebody who has three grandfathers, a mysterious father, and two mothers who gave birth to imaginary fathers. What the children of the founders didn't know began to be added to what the founders themselves had now forgotten, and their children's children added the rest. Horowitz's son opened an institute for the improvement of seeds that were marketed in many countries. The hothouses they started building were the first of their kind. The produce of the citrus groves, the vineyards, and the fields was good and the yield of the cowsheds was high. The eleven sons of the settlement who fell in the riots of 'twenty-nine and 'thirty-six were joined by heroes who fell in other places and were adopted after their death. Roots, which started as a small handful of graves, turned into a national parade ground hidden by pruned trees from the hot desert winds. Florid speeches were delivered in Roots on memorial days, some of which were invented as needed. Even the death date of the Wondrous One began to be commemorated among most of the nation, children in uniforms carried bouquets of flowers and stood with wooden spears in their hands and swore loyalty to the nation and to the future of the settlement. Choral singing was an integral part of the ceremonies. Throughout the Land of Israel, there wasn't a settlement whose choir sang only in the cemetery. All's Well, principal of the school who was also the husband of the kindergarten teacher Eve, sat in Rebecca's house and tried to learn from her the melody of Nehemiah's speeches from which, he thought, Nehemiah embroidered his "historical" speeches. And she would make up new melodies for him, which he tried unsuccessfully to imitate. Very slowly, he learned the fictional melodies. The Captain, who knew melodies from distant lands, taught him the art of measured grief, the words of the hymn of death, and even the consolations of the old man, who for twenty years was tormented by a damaged heart, succeeded in his premature death, at the age of eighty, to be eulogized as a Pioneer and a hero rich in deeds, who at his death bequeathed us life.
The rabbi of the nearby settlement was now beginning to enjoy coming to the settlement. He knew that here, God was the one Rebecca Schneerson conspired with, but he no longer had enough strength to fight the war of the Lord. A late spring would grant the settlement more spring than the nearby settlements. Old Horowitz told the journalist who came to interview him that the marvelous sculptures of Ebenezer, who was almost Boaz's father, were the most beautiful artistic creations he had ever seen. The aphorism about Ebenezer on the wall of the community center was contributed by the Captain. The farmers helped Boaz overcome the enmity of the children. The yearning looks of the girls he learned to accept as he had to accept his grandmother's Psalms or the mysterious whispers of Mr. Klomin and the Captain about the national-royal party. They still plotted stratagems. Every Wednesday, the Captain still asked for Rebecca's hand and got a negative reply. There was no reply from the British crown even after five letters of five hundred pages each. That was the great imminent war that granted Mr. Klomin the possibility of preparing an innovative strategy, using a short-range tactic to solve the problem of British rule. The royalist party won the settlement (with the Captain's modest support) a contract to sell citrus fruit to the British army, whose troops increased. The best agricultural deal since the beginning of the Jewish Yishuv in the Land was buying the land for a big airport. At a time when the rumor spread that the settlement was infected with the disease of death and old people were dying at the rate of one a week, the sons of the founders, with the aging Captain as agent, sold lands at an exorbitant price to build an airport. Some of the founders were fictitious in any case, and so only the local historians were interested in bearing witness to the disease of death, especially since the price yielded such great wealth. At the eulogy of old Horowitz, who wept at the sight of Nehemiah dancing with Nathan on the day he came to the settlement forty years before and followed Ebenezer when he returned Dana's body, it was said of him that he was a Pioneer not only of Hebrew agriculture in the Land, but also of aviation in the Land of Israel. From here, said Principal All's Well, the airplanes of Judah will fly to strike the enemies of the Lord. A third of the land for the new field, whose airplanes Horowitz prophesied, according to his eulogy, belonged to Rebecca. While Ebenezer was wandering from Poland to eastern Ukraine and to Russia and from there to the camps, Boaz and the other children of the settlement were working to build a new airport. The adult workers learned to appreciate his silence and the quality of his work. Boaz was then thirteen years old, strong with a solid body, and after only two weeks he was appointed supervisor of the work of his older comrades and his salary was raised. That, of course, was without any connection to his special relations with Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, whom the British discovered was a great air force expert. Boaz didn't ask how the Captain or even Colonel (for he was promoted), who had never fought in any war that anybody had ever heard of, knew how to build airfields. But when he saw how the field was built and the planes started landing, and even more marvelous, taking off, and how satisfied the British were with the field, the row of concrete antitank structures, the way of sheltering airplanes against an air raid, and building decoys to mislead the enemy, Boaz said to himself: What's to ask, maybe in Argentina they fought with airplanes in the last century. But he wasn't even sure the Captain came from Argentina. The British looked at Boaz and said: He's clever like all the Jews, and he laughed. His yellow-green eyes caused incomprehensible excitement among the officers' wives, who sat around a lot in chaise longues topped with parasols held by Arabs from Marar and looked at him. They didn't know he was building a future airfield for Mr. Klomin's royalist party. They would look at him excitedly, giggle, long for children in their wombs, and didn't know it. They were too delicate to express what every one of the children of the settlement understood; but Boaz didn't care.