Exodus - Leon Uris [149]
“We have never given you reason to doubt our sincerity in wanting peace ...”
“Yes ... but there are powers greater than you and I who could bring us into conflict against our will.”
How true ... how very true, Barak thought.
“Barak, I am going to sell the Zion Settlement Society that land by the Huleh Lake you have always wanted.”
Barak’s heart began to beat fast.
“It is not merely benevolence. I have conditions. You must allow the Arabs of Abu Yesha to learn your farming and sanitation methods. This can only be done slowly over a period of time. I want a portion of the village’s more deserving boys to be able to attend your school to learn to read and write.”
“That will all be done,” Barak said.
“There is one more condition.”
“And what is that?”
“You must come too.”
Barak rose and rubbed his great beard. “Me? Why me?”
“As long as you are there I know the conditions will be kept and that we will be able to live in peace. I have trusted you from the first day you entered Abu Yesha as a boy over thirty years ago.”
“I will think it over,” Barak said.
“And what will you tell Kammal?” Sarah asked.
Barak shrugged. “What is there to say? We can’t go, of course. What a shame. For years I have been trying to get him to sell that land. Now if I don’t go up there we will never get it.”
“It is a pity,” Sarah agreed and poured some tea.
Barak paced the floor unhappily. “After all, Sarah,” he mumbled, “we must face facts. I am needed at the Yishuv Central and the Settlement Society. It isn’t as if I was running a candy store on Allenby Road.”
“Of course not, dear,” Sarah said sympathetically. “You are vital in your work. The entire Yishuv needs you.”
“Yes,” he said, pacing again, “and we aren’t children any longer. I am past fifty and the land is going to be very very hard to redeem.”
“You are right, Barak. We are too old to pioneer. You have done your share in building this country.”
“Right! I’ll turn Kammal down.”
He sank into a chair and sighed deeply. He had not succeeded in convincing himself. Sarah stood over him and smiled. “You are mocking me, woman,” he said softly. “What’s the use?”
She sat on his lap and was almost lost in his greatness. His huge hands were amazingly gentle as they stroked her hair.
“I was thinking of you and Ari. It will be brutal work and the hardships will be great.”
“Shhhh ... drink your tea.”
Barak resigned his position with the Zion Settlement Society, sold his apartment in Tel Aviv, and led twenty-five pioneer families out to the Huleh swamplands to build a moshav. They called it Yad El, the Hand of God.
They pitched tents below the fields of Abu Yesha and mapped out their task. No pioneers yet had faced a job so difficult. The Huleh swamp was deep, and full of forbidding tangles of thickly matted unyielding brush and papyrus which towered to heights of fifteen feet. The muck was alive with poisonous snakes, scorpions, and rats and a hundred other creatures. Wild boars and wolves lurked near the isolated base camp. Everything had to be brought in on muleback, including drinking and washing water.
Sarah was in charge of the base camp, the hospital tent, and the kitchen. Barak headed the work gangs which took to the swamps daily with shovels and picks.
In that first scorching summer they worked day after day, week after week, and month after month in hundred-degree heat, in waist-and neck-high water, slogging away the muck to start drainage channels. With machetes they hacked at the jungle growth until they couldn’t raise their arms. The women worked right in the swamps along with the men. Young Ari Ben Canaan, ten years of age, one of three children in the settlement, ran off the pails of sludge and ran in drinking water and food to the workers. The workdays were seven each week. The work hours were sunrise to sunset. Still each night they found the energy to sing a few songs of the fields and dance a hora before their six or seven hours of sleep.
At night there was the usual guard against robbers and animals.