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YOSSEL BIRSTEIN:
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The blood bond (short story)

When Yohanan Zaid came from the North to look me up in Jerusalem, I took him for a ride with me on a bus. In the street named after Deborah the Prophetess near the spacious building of the Education Ministry whose many windows look out upon the Orthodox Batei Ungarn and also upon the churches in the area, we boarded bus No. 1. We’d take a ride there and back, exchange a word or two about the years we hadn’t met, and I might perhaps find out about his family connection with an Arab woman.

The Arab woman had turned up in his backyard one summer evening during one of my visits to Yohanan, asking him to put in a good word in favor of her son who had been arrested.

Yohanan thought that she must be mistaken, that not he but I was the proper person to turn to. We were sitting side by side having a cold drink. He pointed to me and enumerated the various activities I was engaged in: performing good deeds, a writer, and an active member of the Human Rights Committee.

In those days we, Yohanan and I, had lived in the township of Kiryat Tivon and had been neighbors on Givat Zaid, the hill named after his father, Alexander Zaid who, while still a young man, had been murdered by an Arab.

After his death, as befits a hero and founding member of Hashomer — the Hebrew Self-defense Organization — a bronze statue of him and his horse was set up on the hill. It showed him sitting on the horse — as he used to when galloping through the fields of the Galilee and the Valley of Jezreel — leaping skyward. Yohanan’s house stood beside the statue.

The Arab woman had shaken her head, insisting that she wasn’t mistaken. She knew no other Jew except Yohanan and had, therefore come specially to him so he’d accompany her to the jail and put in a good word in favor of her son who was neither involved in politics nor was he a thief.

Yohanan had also shaken his head. He’d never met the woman. She looked quite sane, was tall, wore sunglasses. Her long dress and kerchief were full of the colors of flowers and flying birds. But what did he have to do with her?

"A family connection," said the woman pointing to the statue in whose shadow we’d been sitting.

Yohanan got up to put an end to her words. He — a Jew, and she — an Arab woman? What sort of family connection could there be between them? What else did she have to tell him? He gulped the rest of his drink and without waiting for her reply, disappeared into the house.

The woman remained standing outside. She was barefoot. Yohanan was in no hurry to return. Something similar had also happened to me soon after we’d become neighbors. One day I told him, not without a touch of pride, that still back in the 1930s as a youth in Melbourne, Australia, I’d read a poem in Yiddish glorifying his father, Alexander Zaid, who had sacrificed his life for the liberation of the Land of Israel. The poet’s name, I said, was H. Leivik and cited two lines of the poem. That time, too, Yohanan had leaped up and disappeared into the house.

Returning a short while afterwards, he demanded of me for the sake of our neighborly relationship never to bring up his father’s name again.

He himself was no longer so young and already had a family of his own. But the anger of the child deprived of his father was still rankling inside him, anger at his murderers and anger at those that kept praising his father’s deeds. He’d already sacrificed enough as a boy of 10 and saw no reason why he should lift a finger now for anyone else.

Since then I was careful never to mention his father’s heroic deeds in front of him, and we went on sitting now and again in the shadow of the statue exchanging a word here and there in order to break the long silences between us.

Now, too, in the bus making its way to the Western Wall, our silence continued as we drove past streets thronging with people. At the intersection of Rehov Shiftei Yisrael and Jaffa Road, while the bus stopped at the red light, our eyes met watching pedestrians crossing the street. Three hassidim in shtraimels and kapotas (fur hats and long black coats) and three hooded nuns with crosses around their necks followed close together behind each other, all in black. For a split second they looked like one family.

Yohanan sounded a smiling cough, the cough of a heavy smoker and an old man, the smile at seeing the family of hassidim and nuns and also on account of a poster extending across a wall behind them. The poster called on the inhabitants of Batei Ungarn to watch a film about Penitential Prayers in the town of Kiev, in the Ukraine. Men separately, woman separately, on different days. In large eye-catching letters the poster promised an exciting experience for the entire family.

I couldn’t resist reminding Yohanan of his family connection. That time, returning to the yard, he had held out to the Arab woman a glass of water to have a drink, go away and stop repeating that silly talk of hers. A family connection indeed! Declining the drink the woman said that the family connection was an even stronger one. A blood bond.

Yohanan had stationed himself in front of her, scornfully repeating those words while the woman, nodding her head, insisted that what she’d been telling him was true.

"And what is that blood bond between us?" Yohanan asked.

The woman had been unwilling to answer him in my presence.

Yohanan asked me to wait a minute. The woman seemed crazy to him, and he was going to take her out of the house by the back door.

In a short while Yohanan returned and asked me to go back home. We would sit together on a different occasion. He was going to drive the woman in his car to the nearby jail where he would speak to whomever he had to. There they know who he is and who his father was and perhaps he’d succeed in bailing her son out. She’d been telling the truth, he added. There was a blood bond between them.

Hebrew copyright Yossel Birstein and Kibbutz Hameuhad. From "Stories Dancing in the streets of Jerusalem." By arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.