Levin dug foundations and pushed wooden wheelbarrows through the sand until he felt his back would break.
‘My poor hands are all blistered, and every blister has burst. My skin is peeling and full of bloody cuts. And each day’s work is followed by a sleepless night. My back and sides ache, and each thought is more worrisome than the last. Will my powers hold out? Have I the mental and physical fortitude to pass the test? I would be happiest going back to Russia or away to America,’ he wrote to Feyge, who was then singing away as she crushed stones into gravel near Tiberias.
Levin showed me Grandmother’s answer. ‘There are other women working here, and they indeed launder and cook for the men as you feared would be my lot. But how happy your little sister is! She is a real worker. Tsirkin, Mirkin, and Liberson – I call them by their last names, and they in turn call me Levin and salute me like an officer – all lend a hand in keeping up our tent. Tsirkin, when the spirit moves him, is a most wonderful cook. Give him a cabbage, a lemon, some garlic, and some sugar, and he will make an unparalleled borscht. From a pumpkin, some flour, and two eggs he whipped up enough food for a week. Yesterday was Mirkin’s turn to do the laundry. Would you believe that a grown man washed your sister’s underthings?’
Levin was so overcome with envy and abhorrence that he made a note of his feelings in his diary, thus condemning them to immortality.
‘Do you remember that song I used to sing back home? Yesterday I taught it to the boys. Tsirkin played it for us, and we sang all night long until the sun rose and a new day of work began.’
Levin stuck his pencil behind one ear, rose, stepped out from behind the desk in his office, and began to dance slowly, describing a pained, graceful circle around his torment while singing in a high voice:
I shall plough, and I shall sow, and I shall rejoice––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
You may dress me in plain cloth and call me ‘Jew’––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
I shall eat dry bread and bow to no man––
Only when I am in Israel’s land.
He sank back into his chair. ‘Israel’s land,’ he said. ‘You can’t throw a stone in this country without hitting some holy place or madman.’
All around him were the first houses of Tel Aviv, with their Jewish workers, Arab coachmen, and new inhabitants.
‘Suddenly I realised that no one was ever born in this country. Those who didn’t fall from the sky popped up from under the earth.’
He began carefully peeling more letters from the rustling bundle in his drawer. Elegantly anxious, Grandmother’s large, round handwriting angled charmingly forward.
‘I rose from my sickbed,’ she wrote her brother, ‘and toward evening we went for a swim in the Sea of Galilee. The boys carried on like naked babies in the water, and I waded in wrapped in a sheet I threw back on shore once I was neck-deep. Then the three of them had a contest. Liberson said he would walk on water like Jesus and nearly drowned, Mirkin proved quite an artist at skimming stones over the waves, and Tsirkin played to the fish for our supper. In fact, though, I have eaten nothing but figs for the past three days.’
Levin, who had never seen his sister in the nude, was stricken with anger and shame. His short lunch break was already over. Up and down the dusty street walked young men like himself in tattered work clothes, sweaty, faded young women with hunger and disease glittering in their eyes, and fine gentlemen in white jackets and fancy shoes that never sank into the sand. One of them gave Levin a rude look, and he rose from the limestone ledge he was seated on and went back to work.
‘All afternoon I dreamed of returning at night to the sycamore tree on the dune, where I could sit in the dark with my thoughts.’
That evening, however, when he climbed the sand dune and came to the tree, beneath which he sought only to collapse until he regained his strength, he found a young couple ‘rutting like pigs’. One look from them was enough to send the despairing Levin running to the shore.
The next day he went to a bank in Jaffa and asked for a job. He was in luck. Because he boasted a good hand, knew some book-keeping, and had a nice, trustworthy smile, he was given a trial as an assistant clerk, and a year later he was already a cashier with a white jacket and a straw hat on his head. The sores on his hands healed, his skin grew soft and smooth again, and at night he strolled along the beach in a pair of moccasins, listening to the whispers and songs of the pioneers on the dunes and smelling the spicy tea they brewed in tin cans. His heart leaped inside him.