Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Hacohen tried not to betray his feelings. The firman from Istanbul had arrived! He knew it from the way the kaimakam was acting. The Jews were going to get their land! He deduced what had happened. The messenger who had brought him news of the landings in Akka had at the same time brought Kaimakam Tabari the firman. Speaking very slowly, because he could not guess what Tabari would propose next, Shmuel said, “At Peqiin I discovered how to handle the Bedouins. First you offer to buy their friendship. And if you fail, you take a gun and fight.”

“Fight?” the amiable kaimakam laughed. “Shmuel, your bunch of pale scholars? Fight men of the desert?”

“There’s nothing else we can do, Excellency. In Europe, in Spain, we didn’t fight and we were burned alive. Here at Tubariyeh we’ll fight. But I don’t think we’ll have to.” He thought of the resolute farmers in Peqiin; for three years there had been no attacks.

The kaimakam smiled indulgently and asked, “I suppose the newcomers are all Ashkenazim?” With his fingers he drew curls down his cheeks. “They don’t seem like fighters to me.”

“You’ve seen only one kind of Ashkenazi, Excellency.”

“I’d be pleased to meet some other kind,” the kaimakam joked. “The Ashkenazim we see here in Tubariyeh … Mean, little-minded. Now the Sephardim, on the other hand …”

Hacohen had no intention of allowing Tabari to sidetrack the main issue. Istanbul had granted the Jews their land and its transfer must not be delayed. He tried to bring the discussion back to that point, but Tabari rambled on: “I’ve always preferred the Sephardim.”

Hacohen thought: Regardless of what the kaimakam thinks he sees here in Tubariyeh, the future of the Jew lies with the Ashkenazim. It’ll be the hard, dedicated men with German educations and Russian determination who’ll determine the future. Let my friends in Akka get hold of their land, and we’ll see. To the kaimakam he said quietly, “The Sephardim are more pleasant to know.”

“Yes!” Tabari agreed. “In Tubariyeh every Jew I respect is a Sephardi.” He corrected himself. “Everyone but you, Shmuel.”

There followed an awkward silence, for obviously the kaimakam was leading to something, but what it was Hacohen could not guess. He waited, and Tabari added, “So what with the newcomers all being Ashkenazim, whom I don’t like anyway, why should I risk my position?”

“It’s all the money I have,” Hacohen insisted stubbornly.

Kaimakam Tabari looked hurt. “I didn’t want more money from you, Shmuel. It’s just that we have to have more funds from somewhere to buy the right judgment in Istanbul.”

It was a moment of hard decision. Shmuel could feel the gold coin pressing against his leg and he was tempted to bang it onto the table as a last wild gesture; but he had learned in these matters to trust his intuitive judgment, and this reassured him that the firman was already in Tubariyeh and that he need only be insistent. He therefore held back the coin and waited.

Finally Tabari spoke. “So what I thought was”—there was the horrible phrase again—“that if you could give me the names of the leaders of your group now in Akka, when I go there tomorrow I can see them and explain the gravity of the situation …”

From a cesspool of disgust Shmuel Hacohen looked at the kaimakam, and each man was aware of what the other was thinking. The Jew thought: He’ll go to the ship with an interpreter, some tough from the Akka waterfront, and they’ll confuse and bully the immigrants. The Jews will think he’s threatening their land and they’ll surrender every kopeck they have. The bastard. The bastard.

But Hacohen was wrong about what the kaimakam was thinking, for Tabari was saying to himself: This bewildered Jew. He thinks I’m doing this merely to tantalize him. Extortion. He doesn’t realize that right now I’m being the best friend he ever had. I’d better show him.

“You won’t give me the names?” he snapped.

“Find them yourself. Steal from the immigrants in your own way.”

“Stupid!” the kaimakam cried. With anger he took from his desk the firman and slammed it on the table. “Read that, you stubborn Jew.”

“I can speak Turkish. I can’t read it.”

“Do you trust me to read it?” Tabari read the first part and watched Hacohen’s face start to break with tears of joy. Then he read the harsh final proviso about keeping the Jews from water and he saw dismay take the place of joy.

“Without water the land is nothing!” Hacohen protested.

“Obviously. That’s why I must have extra money.”

Hacohen thought: It’s a lie. It’s a lie. He wants the money for himself. Then he heard the kaimakam saying easily, “The fact is, I suspect the sultan had nothing to do with that last clause. Some friend of mine tacked it on to help me out.”

“What do you mean?”

“So that I could do just what I’m doing now. Get a little more money for myself … and give him half.”

The duplicity of what Tabari was saying was too much for Hacohen to absorb. In Russia government officials were cruel. But a man grew to understand them. In Turkish lands … His anxiety was too great and he started to laugh. The kaimakam joined him and explained jokingly, “So our position is this, Shmuel. I want you Jews to have your land, and the water too. I suppose the sultan feels the same way. But in view of that last clause I must interrogate Istanbul, and that takes …”

“Money?”

“A lot of money. More than you have left. Now, may I have the names?”

Feeling morally depleted by developments two and three times more devious than he could follow, Shmuel Hacohen took the kaimakam’s pen and wrote down the names of the Vodzher Jews who could be depended upon to get the money together, if they had any. As he penned their names the faces of his friends came before him: Mendel of Berdichev, with beard and fur cap; Solomon of Vodzh, an outspoken man; Jozadak of the next village, a fighter and a man who hated rabbis. As he finished recalling the names he dropped his head on the desk and wept.

Kaimakam Tabari appreciated the anxiety under which Shmuel had been working and he left him alone for some moments. Then he reached out and touched Shmuel on the shoulder, asking, “What good would the land be without water?”

“I wasn’t weeping for them,” Shmuel replied. “I was thinking of those who are dead and will not see the land.”

Then began a curious negotiation, an exchange that neither Kaimakam Tabari nor Shmuel Hacohen would ever forget. Tabari was convinced that the tough little Jew had more money somewhere, reserved for an emergency, and he suspected that after the land was secured he would not see Hacohen again; one of his most fruitful sources of baksheesh would thus dry up, and he hated to see anyone come into his office with money and escape. So on the spur of the moment, without really thinking, he did the thing that he would never afterward forget.

He said, “By the way, Shmuel, I have something in the other room you might like to see.”

“What?”

“Come, look.” And the portly governor threw open a door and led Hacohen to a shelf on which stood a row of twenty-two tall books bound in leather and stamped in gold. Hacohen recognized them as a fine Lithuanian printing of the Talmud, for he had seen such books in Berdichev while collecting money for the land purchase; and when Tabari handed him a volume to inspect he opened the pages reverently and before him stood the glorious, singing Hebrew that his father had wanted him to study.

“What I’d like to know,” Tabari was saying, “is why this book has such an effect on Jews?”

Shmuel looked at the large pages—more than twenty inches tall and nearly fourteen wide. This was a book unlike those that a Muslim or a Christian would know, for each page was a separate work in itself, composed of six or eight distinct kinds of type, varying in size from very large to very small. The organization was unbelievable: in the center of the page would appear in bold type a short phrase, surrounded on all sides by blocks of different-sized type explaining and elaborating what the central phrase intended. Down margins would appear columns only three quarters of an inch wide, printed in minute letters. It was a jumble, a confusion, a thing of beauty, and no two pages were alike.