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

soundly, he had brought the cobbler to their home, and without the young man’s knowledge the two had bared his feet. The father held a large candle in his hand, and the shoemaker traced the son’s feet on a piece of cardboard and measured the circumference of his ankles and calves and the distance from his ankles to his knees, one leg at a time, for the feet, as everyone knows, are different from each other.
    This scene—the lad in bed, eyes closed, shadows dancing on the walls as measurements are taken—aroused such strong emotion and anxiety in Rabbi Natan that he fled to another room to cry and calm down and returned only after washing his face. But now, as his son, Nahum, put on the boots with such delight, he relaxed and hugged him until he was again filled with fear, and more than he feared for his son’s future he was afraid of his own fear, and again felt his tears welling and again went to the other room to weep and wash.
    2
    Nahum Natan said goodbye to his father, his neighbors, his teachers, and his students and sailed by ship to Jaffa and from Jaffa went to the Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School. There he learned planting and plowing, grafting and pruning, and became acquainted with the pickax and the scythe. There he also became friends with his future murderer, namely Ze’ev Tavori, who came from the Galilee.
    The two were very different. Ze’ev was powerful and fearless and accustomed to working hard in the fields, and Nahum was soft and gentle and a dreamer of dreams. And nevertheless they became friends. Nahum was happy that Ze’ev—“He rides raising dust, like a Janissary,” he wrote his father, “swinging a staff like an Anatolian shepherd and plowing straight furrows like a German engineer”—regarded him as a friend, and Ze’ev looked at Nahum as a delicate little brother. He learned new words from him and helped him when the need arose.
    At the end of their studies the two parted ways for a while. Nahum went to Jerusalem at his father’s request, stayed there a few months, worked for a farmer in the settlement of Motza outside the city, and learned to grow grapes. Ze’ev did not return to his family’s home in the Galilee. He wandered about the country, plowing and quarrying, planting and standing guard. His muscles and experience served him well, and so did what he learned from his parents, who had taught him the value of hard work. Everywhere he went he readily found employment, but nowhere did he make friends. In his view, the farmers of the moshavot of the Judean Hills were soft and coddled, like the crumbly reddish soil of their orchards and vineyards, so different from the basalt farmers of the moshavot of his native Galilee.
    “We grew watermelon, cattle, and olives, and the neighbors were Arabs, who were either good friends or total enemies, and the toys their children got on their birthdays were a horse and a stick,” he told his grandchildren many years later. “Whereas in moshavot like this one,” he teased, “they danced minuets and sipped wine and chatted in French with the Baron’s officials.”
    He also kept his distance from the halutzim, the pioneers who’d enchanted Nahum in Istanbul. They seemed to Ze’ev, born in Palestine and accustomed to its ways, to be both eccentric and fearful, as evidenced by their body language and manner of speech and their long-winded debates and strange enthusiasms. In addition, their propensity for intimate conversation and endless hora dancing seemed pointless to him. “They talk like they dance,” he wrote at the time to his father, “everything in circles. They never get anywhere.”
    For a while he was involved with Hashomer, the Jewish self-defense group of the Yishuv, but discovered they were overly fond of fancy mustaches and belligerent chatter and ostentatious horse racing, and quit. He found himself sitting during lunch breaks with the Arab workers, whose language he spoke and whose customs he knew and whose food he