Two She-Bears by Meir Shalev Read Free Book Online Page A

horse.
    The man who was killed, Nahum Natan, was born in Istanbul, the only son of the eminent rabbi Eliyahu Natan. He was a mild-mannered young man, gentle and refined, very different from his murderer. Nor did he in any way resemble the two farmers who took their own lives here that same year. He was a bachelor and lived alone, whereas they were older men with families. One killed himself because he was drowning in debt and the other because of an incurable illness. Whereas Nahum, in the embellished version of his death, did it because he could not endure, given his personality and background, the workload and atmosphere of the moshava. There were even those who tacked the epithet “pampered” on him after his death.
    The Natan family had produced many rabbis and scholars, and Nahum’s father, Rabbi Eliyahu Natan, was the greatest of them all. An exalted Torah scholar was he, and his official title of Hacham truly befitted a man so wise.
    Had Natan followed in his path, he would have remained in Istanbul and become a rabbi as well. But the halutzim, the pioneers who came through Istanbul on their way from Eastern Europe to the Land of Israel, filled him with longing and wonder. And the pioneer girls, with their uncovered braids, thickly layered on their heads, often golden braids, a rare sight in his city, and their eyes—some of those blue eyes gazed at him, and amazed and aroused him.
    Word quickly spread that at his home a hungry halutz could get a bowl of soup with rice, beans, leeks, onions, and meat bones. The pots of soup were filled and emptied, the blue-eyed gazes deepened, conversation ensued, golden braids were braided, bright ideas flashed like lightning, ripped the darkness, electrified and freshened the air, which had been stagnant for many years. Nahum Natan was seduced by Zionism, and aspired, so he informed his father, to make aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and work its land.
    Rabbi Eliyahu Natan was alarmed. He implored his son not to halt his Torah studies and certainly not to become a farmer. Not to leave the “Tent of Jacob” and go to the “Desert of Ishmael” and the “Field of Esau.” But Nahum’s heart yearned for faraway places, and he sometimes felt it fluttering in his rib cage like a migratory bird eager to fly. He insisted and requested and explained and made excuses and in the end he convinced his father to let him join a group of halutzim heading for Eretz Yisrael and to give him his blessing as he set out on his journey.
    The father, a good and tender man, agreed with a heavy heart. He thought of the patriarch Jacob, when he sent Joseph wearing a coat of many colors to join his sheepherding brothers, not sensing or imagining the enormous calamity that would befall his son and him. “From the pasture to the pit”: the words rattled inside him, but his mind could not comprehend them, not in their full meaning. He feared disease, robbery, heresy, even death, but not murder, certainly not at the hands of a fellow Jew.
    His heart was heavy, but he did not withdraw his agreement. He imposed only one condition on his son: that he not join any of the various socialist factions or workers’ associations or one of the kibbutzim, which lacked synagogues and ritual baths and kosher butchers, and where the male pioneers, it was said, frolicked freely with the women—but go instead to one of Baron Rothschild’s moshavot, to an established community where he would find a synagogue and a ritual slaughterer, and strap on his phylacteries for daily prayer and observe the Sabbath and dietary laws.
    The son agreed, and the father surprised him with a gift: a pair of excellent boots, suitable for working the land.
    “My size exactly!” declared Nahum Natan as he tried them on, took a few steps, and smiled the smile of a child. “So comfortable, and the shoemaker didn’t even measure my feet.”
    Rabbi Eliyahu Natan smiled a fatherly smile and did not reveal that one night, when Nahum was sleeping