Avram's Vineyard (originally published in The Literary Review, print edition, 2010)
But they shall sit every man
under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid
– Micah 4:4
“What
is the fuss?” Hillel Yayin asked, running a purple hand, the color and shape of
an iris, through his beard. “It is one,
possibly two rows of grapes.”
“There
is a principle involved,” the Jewish Agency man, Goldmann, explained in a low,
gruff tone. “Give them a row and they take two.
Give them two and they take the vineyard…”
“Yes,
and from the vineyard it’s on to Dizengoff
Center, or the whole of
Tel Aviv or King David’s throne.” Hillel
Yayin laughed with his eyes, while his lips remained still. His dark pupils ringed with blue peered over
his thick black beard, like an animal gazing from the safety of a shrub.
“I
don’t need this, Comrade Yayin,” the Agency man said, standing up. He wore an open collared shirt in deference
to the heat, but carried a briefcase bulging with documents. Sweat circled his bald head like a
wreath. “Those two rows of grapes belong
to the Jewish Agency. They cannot be
picked without Agency approval. And the
Agency does not approve. But that is
only the first problem I came to discuss.”
“You
boys from the Jewish Agency,” Hillel Yayin shook his head in mock
disappointment, like a father teasing a son.
“You think wine grows on trees.”
The Jewish Agency man did not smile, but now Hillel did, amused by the
endless round of arguments with these rascals from Tel Aviv. He had been examining his purple hands
casually, and as he spoke he smeared them on his once-white smock, long yellow
with age. The smudge was the shape of a
swollen heart about to burst its seams.
“Don’t
be funny, Comrade Yayin, this is serious…”
Hillel
Yayin, on hearing this, threw his arms up toward the heavens, as if God alone
should be the judge of his words. “Serious,
do you know what effort it takes to make a barrel of good wine? Serious effort. All you people from the Jewish Agency know
are papers and stamps and seals.”
“Well,
according to this paper it takes twenty hired Arab hands to make the wine here
at Kerem Avram… and then there are those two rows of grapes down by the banana
plantation which are harvested by squatters.”
“Yes,”
Hillel Yayin took a step forward with his bulk, aged but still powerful in
limbs and broad of chest, to try and menace the Agency man, who was as thin as
a dry reed. “You know full well that those
twenty are the Hasan family. They have
been harvesting grapes and making wine at Kerem Avram since Noah planted his
vine. And if other Arabs come in the dark of night and steal grapes down in the
valley near the bananas, what can I do about it?” and here Yayin tried to suppress a grimace,
for he was lying. Then he continued, “We
don’t have a watchman here. The last one
you sent shot himself in the foot, remember?
Every Jewish laborer the Agency sends me doesn’t know a grape from a ball-bearing. You send me useless Jews. The only one worth his salt is Nachman Schlafland,
and the poor man has a sleeping disease.
I find him unconscious over a stack of invoices and sometimes can only
rouse him with a slap on the face or a bucket of water over the head…”
“Jewish
labor is Jewish labor, Comrade Yayin.
Jews will soon be coming from all over the world. Jews are coming from DP camps where they live
in deplorable conditions. You must make
do with what the Agency sends you…”
“I
know where this is going, Mar Goldmann…”
“The agency is sending you a
Jewish family, originally from Bavaria. They hid in the mountains during the war…”
“Bavaria?” Hillel Yayin
threw up his hands again, as if to block a blow. “Are we to make pretzels now here in Kerem Avram?”
“They
come from an area of Bavaria
that produces wine,” Goldmann explained, a tincture of annoyance in his tone,
as if the act of correcting Hillel Yayin’s assumptions, even when he was right,
was still an irritating exercise.
“The
man is a vintner. Obstmann. Mendel Obstmann. He has a wife and two girls.” Hillel Yayin let his hands fall to his
sides. He looked at the Agency man
through eyes as narrow as slits. He had
tangled with the bureaucracy of the Jewish Agency for so many years that his
ears did not believe their own testimony.
“Obstmann. A vintner.
Well.” Hillel Yayin leaned
against a cask of wine, scratching the coarse gray hair of his head as if it
was an unruly animal, all the while deftly keeping his yarmulke in place. “We’ll have to build a house for this Obstmann
and his family.”
“No
need,” Comrade Goldmann walked over to Hillel Yayin and handed him a piece of
paper from his bulging briefcase. “The
Agency will no longer employ the Hasan family.
This is a letter ordering their immediate termination. They are to leave the house and premises with
only their personal possessions and the Obstmanns will then occupy it.”
“Mar
Goldmann, the Hasan family is twenty people strong. Fifteen of them can harvest, seven can make
wine -- how can one man and a wife and two little girls replace that hoard?”
“He
will bring modern methods of viticulture here to Kerem Avram. No more Ottoman mules and filth. You won’t need all those Arabs. This is an order from Tel Aviv. Those Arabs are a security risk here. The road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is just half a mile from your
vineyard. And this is Jewish land. Jewish labor on Jewish land. Get the Hasans to decamp, immediately.”
“Mar
Goldmann, there are complexities.”
“There
are not, Comrade Yayin!” and here Goldmann raised his voice. His hands shook from thinly veiled rage. His
cotton shirt was stained with perspiration.
“This is a simple matter. The
termination of employment. Here is the
form. If you do not carry out the Jewish
Agency’s demand, I will come back with a form for your removal…” and Goldmann
strode heavily out the door into the blinding light.
Every
evening except Friday, Hillel Yayin played cards with old man Ibrahim Hasan. They sat on the patio of the Hasan house,
composed of the flat, plate-shaped field stones of the coastal plain, and
played for cashews and pistachios. The
trellised vines, almost ripe with lavender-colored grapes, rolled gently over
the undulating hills. In the distance,
the sea glimmered like a bowl of light, reflecting the last rays of the sun
cast from beneath the low clouds that bordered the horizon in long, bold
strokes.
Ibrahim
Hasan and Hillel Yayin had been friends for nearly thirty years. Yayin had worked as a vintner on the Hasan
vineyard during the last days of the Ottoman period, when Kerem Avram was owned
by absentee Arab Christian landlords in Beirut. During the Arab riots of 1918, Ibrahim Hasan had
hidden his Jewish assistant from an Arab mob, Hillel likening it to Lot barring his door to protect the angels of the Lord
from the wicked men of Sodom.
Five
years after the revolt, the Christian Arabs in Beirut sold the vineyard to the Jewish
Agency, when the fertile strip along the coastal plan was much in demand and
land prices soared. Jewish kibbutzim and
moshavim sprouted along the coastal plain, growing citrus, bananas, and
grapes. Under Jewish Agency rule, Hillel
Yayin oversaw the Hasan vineyard and worked doggedly to keep the family on for
saving his hide in 1918. The Jewish
agency sent men and women, single and in families, and refugees and wanderers
of all sorts, to work the vines at Kerem Avram, but few were qualified, and
most drifted away or were forced out by Hillel Yayin’s firm hand. “Trash.
Human garbage. The scourge of the
Diaspora the Jewish Agency sends me…” Hillel Yayin would rant. In 1925 two Russian brothers had tried to
kill each other with sickles. In 1932 a
family from Poland
had begun to steal equipment from Kerem Avram and sell it to passing Bedouins. In 1941 a man who had recently owned a clock
repair shop in Krakow had died of a heart
attack while stomping grapes. Yayin,
alone, extracted his dead body from the half-barrel where it had fallen.
But
still the Jewish Agency sent more Jews.
Jewish labor on Jewish land.
Hillel kept the Hasan family on because of his blood debt, but also
because they were essential to the operation of Kerem Avram. Without them he could not bring in a
harvest. But this man from Bavaria -- this vintner
-- he seemed a bird of different feathers entirely. All evening long Hillel Yayin kept losing to
Ibraham Hasan, until the old man made short and bemused comments, often in the
form of Arabic proverbs, which he knew by the barrel full.
“Distracted,
Adon Hillel?” the old man finally asked in Arabic. “Bad news from Russia is
it? I pray to God it is not so.”
“News
from Russia? What makes you think so?” Yayin answered in
Arabic.
“A
paper you hold, all day long,” the old man spoke softly, whistling a little
between the gap of his two front teeth.
“I thought perhaps, God forbid it, that an illness or worse befell one
of your kin in that distant land.”
“No,
no,” Yayin waved a hand for emphasis, and while it was out there, it grasped a
goblet of wine as dark as blood which Yayin drained to the dregs. He looked out over the land: a crescent moon rose above the Hills of
Ephraim.
“You
are tired then,” Hasan continued, putting down his cards. “Sleep, my old friend. But not for long. For old men like us, sleep is akin to death.”
Hillel
Yayin walked back to his small shack. He
saw the light on in the front office.
When he entered, he contemplated the recumbent figure of Nachman Schlafland,
unconscious over his ledger, a victim once more of his mysterious ailment.
“Nachman,
get up, time for sleep!” Hillel Yayin yelled, and seeing that the words did not
rouse the man, he lifted him up and carried him to his cot in the corner of the
room.
But
Hillel Yayin could not sleep. He lay in
his narrow bed and thought of the Bavarian Jewish vintner, this Mendel
Obstmann. He imagined lederhosen and
Germanic efficiencies, mixed with the Jewish propensity to treat the Holy Land
like some unredeemed clod of earth, no matter that the vines on Kerem Avram had
been planted here about three-hundred years ago, in Ottoman times, by growers
from Anatolia.
When
Hillel Yayin did fall asleep, it was nearly dawn. In his dreams, the Arab mob was pounding at
the door as they did in 1918. But this
time there was no Ibrahim Hasan to play the Lot
to his angel of God. Hillel felt the
onrush of hot breath and whiff of hatred in his face, as if a gang of avenging
demons had swarmed into this little room, breathing fire and brimstone on his
face and neck, and he awoke with a start.
Through
bleary eyes and a befuddled mind, his dream was more real than the world now
gazing upon him. His room -- a low shack
with a tin roof – was perched on the edge of the vineyard. The leaves of the vines brushed against his
one window, and the odor of sweetness was heavy on the air, pungent and
seasoned.
He
opened his door and the first rays of light descended from the Hills of Ephraim
to flood the costal plain in amber, autumnal rays. The long shadows of the rows of grape vines
appeared to race down to the sea; then a single cloud covered the sun in an
instant and it was as if that race to the water had been snuffed out by the
hand of God.
Hillel
sat on a rickety wooden bench outside his shack. The syrupy aroma of grapes mixed with the
salt breeze of the sea. Concentrating, Yayin
could detect and isolate the smell that was the dusky husk of the grapes’ skin
and he could conjure up the taste of the intense sweetness between their inner
skins and the must within. From the days
when he was a boy in Odessa
working on his father’s vineyard, there was hardly a moment when Hillel Yayin was
not contemplating the tendril of the vine, the tight cluster of the fruit, the
inches of rain and days of sun, the prime and secondary fermentation, or the
quality of oak barrels.
Yayin
had become religious late in life, and wore a long beard and a skull cap. In his youth he had been a socialist, but on
the Hasan land, at Kerem Avram, he had latched onto the cycle of the seasons of
the coastal plain of the Holy Land, its long hot summers, it short, wet
winters, and all this had lulled Yayin into an agrarian religiosity he imagined
the Jews after Joshua experienced: sowing and planting, harvesting and
threshing, all under the eyes of their tribal God, their sandals caked with dust
and robes stained purple from the vintage.
He had folded his life with the Hasans’, both when he worked for them
and when they worked for him: The land dictated the same discipline from Yayin and
Hasan if it was to yield its treasure.
This was a life guided by seasons and harvest, grapes and wine, and who
was a Jew and who a Muslim left no mark on the land.
“Saalam,
Adon Hillel,” Hasan’s wife said as she
brought a pot of black coffee and some yogurt in a jar to Yayin’s shack.
“Saalam
alachem,” Yayin responded, but he could not look the old woman in the
face. In his pocket was the folded order
of their eviction. He had to cast out
the family today.
He
sipped the coffee. Yayin’s stomach
turned sour. He spooned some yogurt but
it was heavy on his tongue, and he felt his insides flip. Out beyond his line of sight, one of the
Hasan boys was starting the tractor.
Yayin heard one of its gears slip -- a sound as familiar as the creaking
of the floorboards in his tiny shack. The
boy would then attach the cart. The
grapes would soon be harvested.
Down
in the valley, where the bananas grew, the Hasans’ cousins -- the Nashbanis --
were already picking their allotment.
Yayin could see them on the small pocket of land which used to be a
wadi, but was now drained. Their mule
and cart, an old man, two bearded youths, and several women, girls and boys,
picked grapes without superfluous movements. The Nashbanis had been tenants along with the
Hasans in the days when the vineyard was owned by the Arabs in Beirut.
When the Jewish Agency purchased the land, they grudgingly agreed to
keep the Hasans, but Hillel could not convince them to carry on the Nashbanis. So each year Yayin allowed them to harvest a
modest amount of grapes to supplement their living. Yayin thought the arrangement harmless
enough. It hardly impacted his yield,
and prevented bad blood. But this Goldmann
from the Jewish Agency wanted it stopped once and for all: no Arabs were to pick so much as a thistle on
Kerem Avram.
Hillel
Yayin stepped off his porch and strode toward the Hasan house. He would tell the old man, give him time to
pack his things and start his new life, avoid a confrontation with this new
Jew, this vintner from Bavaria. But hot tears began to stream down Yayin’s
face. He brushed them away with his
massive hand, but they kept coming from a spigot that would not close. So he turned away from the Hasan house and
walked to the front office. Nachman Schlafland
had risen, bathed, shaved and dressed for the day, and even sat at the desk to
transcribe orders for wine in his ledger, but he had fallen asleep in place,
his head sandwiched between the open leaves of the carefully lined book. Hillel Yayin was too tired to wake him.
Every
day, Hillel Yayin expected a truck from the Jewish Agency to pull into Kerem Avram
and unload a family of blond haired children, a slim, attentive wife, and
Mendel Obtsmann himself, with round eyeglasses, a clean white smock, close-cropped
hair, and viticulture equipment packed in crates with stenciled words upon them
in Gothic script. But no truck came to
Kerem Avram. The Hasan cousins had already
taken their yield and left, and now was the time to harvest the rest of the
grapes. At nearly 3,000 dunmans, the
work would take at least two weeks, and had to be complete by the beginning of
the fall rains. But Hillel Yayin
delayed. He could feel the quizzical
glances of the Hasan men and women, boys and girls, but they left the old Jew
in peace, deferring to his judgment.
That
night, Hillel took out an old map of Kerem Avram, and puzzled over it for some time, his
fingers tracing over the familiar boundaries, and the Turkish words which
denoted them. On the far side of the
property, beyond the row of banana trees, grew several vines of grapes of
inferior quality, which Yayin usually sold to a market in Tel Aviv, as they
were not suited for wine. He decided he
would give this parcel to the Hasans. The
land was marginal, but giving it to them was the only option other than
eviction. He would give the Hasans the
old shacks among the banana trees and partition Kerem Avram. Then he would try to conceal this from
Goldmann and the Jewish Agency for as long as possible.
The
next day Hillel Yayin decided the harvest could not wait for Goldmann’s German
Jew. But when he looked about for the
Hasans, he could not find a single one.
He searched the wine shack and cellar, the equipment shed and their back
garden. Then he walked quickly down the
rows of grapes to a small shed where Ibrahim’s eldest son lived with his wife
and two boys. The entire Hasan family
was crammed into the shack, leaning through the doors and windows, listening to
a broadcast on an ancient radio.
“What
is it?” Hillel Yayin asked in Arabic.
Ibrahim Hasan turned to face Yayin.
His eyes were wide with unclaimed fear.
“The
UN has voted in favor of partition,” the old man said the words uncertainly, as
if their meaning was unclear.
By
nightfall armed Arabs had attacked an Igged bus on the Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem road just
outside Kerem Avram and killed thirty-two Jews.
All night long shots fired up and down the road. A stray bullet hit the tractor, which had
been left in the rows of grapes and puntured its gas tank. Hillel Yayin and the Hasans hid in their
homes until the shooting had quieted down.
At
first light a beat up truck sped into Kerem Avram. Two men with rifles jumped down from the
cab. One wore mechanic’s coveralls
stained with grease. The other wore the
demin coat of farm hands on a kibbutz.
Hillel Yayin approached them.
“You,
old man, are you a kohan, a priest?” the man in the coveralls asked.
“No,
why?” Yayin asked.
“We
need you to help us move some bodies.”
Hillel
followed the men to the bed of the truck.
There were five uncovered corpses.
Yayin recognized Goldmann, the Jewish Agency man. The others were a light skinned man with
blond hair, a brown-haired woman, and two small girls. Their bodies had been abused. Hillel Yayin muttered a prayer and turned his
face away.
“Who
are they?” Yayin asked, his voice constricted, as if a tourniquet was being
twisted around his neck.
“One
is a Jewish Agency man,” the Kibbutznik answered. “Don’t know about the rest. A family who was supposed to work in a vineyard
around here. They were killed on the
road this morning. Bastards butchered
them like hogs.”
“This
is Kerem Avram, right?” the man in the coveralls asked. “We think the attacks
came from here, or the attackers fled to here.”
“Arabs
here, no,” Yayin answered, and seeing the men’s icy stares, he continued. “Not my Arabs, no. They were here last night and this morning.”
The
men grunted skeptically and indicated that Yayin should help with the
bodies. They were laid out in the
equipment shed and covered with oily tarps.
When the Haganah men left, Ibrahim Hasan came out of his home
weeping. When Yayin saw him, tears
flowed down his own face in proportional sympathy.
“We
must flee… those men will come back and chase us away or kill us.”
“No,
my friend,” Hillel pleaded. “I will
protect you, like you did me.”
“No,
Hillel. Different now. Bigger than you or me. More men.
More blood. We must flee…”
The
Hasans began to hastily pack their belongings.
“We
take not a pin that is not ours, Hillel.
Kerem Avram is yours now…” The
old man was still crying, but silently.
Then the same truck which carried the bodies of Goldmann and the vintner’s
family burst through the gate. Several
of the young Hasan men sprinted out through the vineyard and toward the bank of
banana trees. The Haganah men pursued
them. For a moment, the valley was
filled with shots, and then silence.
Ibrahim
and the remaining Hasans were herded into the truck. The man in the greasy overalls examined
Hillel Yayin through narrow, critical eyes.
“We’ll
come back for those bodies…” the man said, and the truck sped away.
Hillel
ran to the front office. He roused
Nachman Schlafland, who had fallen to the floor during one of his spells, and
told him he had to flee. There was a war
on. The man was dazed, staring at Yayin
without comprehension, but on hearing the word war he stuffed clothes in a
carpet bag and fled down the road.
That
night, Hillel Yayin tried to sleep, but his eyes refused to close. Out beyond the door, he thought he heard the
sound of overripe grapes falling to the ground in heavy thuds, like the hail
which often fell out of the sky in Russia when he was a boy. He listened for some time, trying to fit the
noise into the repertoire of vineyard sounds.
Then in a flash he realized that people were harvesting the grapes.
A
full moon hung over the coastal plain, lighting pale figures picking the
fruits. Hillel Yayin could see it was
not the Hasans: he knew their shapes and
forms, even in the half-light of the moon.
He walked closer. Some were the Nashbanis, but most were men
and women he had never seen before.
“What
are you doing?” Hillel asked in Arabic.
“Go
away, Jew,” one man spat, his voice clear but his figure indistinct. “These are Arab grapes on Arab land.”
There
was a noise, and then the world slowed down for Yayin, fell silent and black. When he awoke in the morning between the rows
of denuded grape vines, he realized he had been struck by the broadside of the
ploughshare which lay beside him.
The
Arabs were finishing their work in the dim morning light, loading grapes onto
wagons pulled by mules and trucks.
Hillel went back to his hut and bandaged his head, which continued to
bleed, and sat heavily on his porch step.
His wine shack had been picked clean of equipment. Bottles and barrels of wine had been carted
away, and everything in his shack except for his bed had been stolen. Somewhere in the distance, a shot rang
out. A dog barked down by the coast, and
another dog, somewhere in the Hills of Ephraim, answered back.
There
was a great rumble of shaking earth, and once again the Haganah truck was in
Kerem Avram. A dozen armed men jumped
out the back of the flatbed, shooting at the squatters. One or two fired back. The mechanic with the greasy overalls brandished
a pistol at Hillel.
“You
senile old man! Get the hell out of here,
you bastard! Don’t you know this is a
war? Get out of here before we have one
more body to bury!”
But
Hillel Yayin did not move, so the mechanic, still brandishing his pistol, picked
him up by his armpits, and muttering curses, dragged the old vintner to the
threshold of Kerem Avram and dumped him onto the road.
Hillel
Yayin began to slowly walk up the incline toward Tel Aviv. At the summit of the hill, he thought of Lot’s wife and knew he should not look back, but after
thirty years among the vines, he succumbed and looked down on Kerem Avram. The Haganah men had subdued the
squatters. Several lay dead or
dying. They had overturned the carts of
grapes, which lay in moldering heaps.
Many vines had been trampled or uprooted in the fighting. The Hasan house had somehow caught fire, and
billowing black smoke curled up into the dusky blue sky.
Hillel
continued to walk toward Tel Aviv.
Soon, on the side of the road, he saw a recumbent figure. Coming closer, he saw it was Nachman Schlafland. The man had succumbed to his illness and
collapsed in a heap next to a clump of thistle.
Hillel gently nudged him with his foot.
“Wake
up, Nachman, it is time to move on. Come
on, get up. How can you sleep now?”
When
the clerk did not budge, Hillel Yayin became enraged. He began to kick the man in the ribs
repeatedly and only stopped when his foot grew sore. Schlafland continued to sleep. So Hillel Yayin sat next to the still body,
his breath regular with the rhythm of yawning slumber, and waited for him to
awaken.
