admin
The decision has been made. We will make aliyah and join our children in Israel. It’s 1947; it’s time. Yes, it’s a pity that we are leaving one of our five behind. Our youngest, the baby. The one we always coddled, that Rachel held in her arms until he was four and too heavy for even her to hold. Little Meyer, though now he is almost 15. Meyer will stay behind in Cape Town, but I have figured out a way to pay for his medical degree. I am an enterprising man, a simple man, yes, but an enterprising one. A businessman, self-made. I have sold our family house and made it a boardinghouse. You might say, shame, the poor boy Meyer is a boarder in his own home, but in four quick years he will be a young man with a medical degree, provided he completes his studies and is diligent. He was always a good, studious boy and this way his meals and his housekeeping will be taken care of. It’s a shame that he will be all alone, the only one to not make aliyah, but he will be fine. A medical doctor! Maybe one day he will take care of me, tend lovingly and skillfully to my ailing bones while I enjoy my golden years, reap what I sow.
When I hugged him goodbye this morning, I could feel his frail shoulders, still a skinny boy, as if puberty had taken its time and only now hit him all at once. I felt his rough cheeks on mine. When did he get so big, no longer that impish little boy? I took his shoulders in my hands and looked at his face and I could see the little schoolboy in that face, remembered the little boy with white Russian peasant legs sticking out like puff pastries from his navy uniform knickers. His tears were wet on my cheek. But he smiled, said he would be fine. He would have a roof over his head. He will be fine.
I haven’t seen the land that I’d agreed to buy via telegram – 25 dunams of vacant land at a moshav called Rishpon – but I have a sixth sense about these things. I bought those two farms in the Western Province, didn’t I, and I have made them a success, despite no actual experience as a farmer. It’s in my bones somehow. A connection with the land, a desire to have dirt buried deep in my fingernails.
It sounds right, doesn’t it? Rishpon, the way it rolls and pops off the tongue. And where’s it located? Halfway between Tel Aviv and Netanya, between city and sea. Rachel will be able to take the bus to her card games in the city–I don’t want her to be bored. I know she doesn’t like the country, she gets restless, and I don’t want her to be miserable. She likes culture, theater, bright lights, her card games—and I could become a man of the land, become one with the land of our forefathers, make things grow in the soil where they have not grown before, make my hands turn inky with the soil of my ancestors. And as the saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. I want to be able to play while she runs off to the city, all dressed up in her finest. Pretend I am a bohemian, let my beard grow in, my hair grow long, keep dirt under my fingernails, not change my clothes for days, create a fine mess.
I don’t have much in the way of possessions. From dust to dust. We are in good health, Rachel and I, but besides our hale and hearty bodies, we don’t have much. Rachel will take care of packing our few suitcases of clothing. I am a simple man. And from this day on I will be a farmer, out in the fields all day. Maybe I will have time, when it is dark, and Rachel is sleeping, to write more chapters of my autobiography. I am bringing a typewriter, one of the few non-essential things I am transporting across the ocean, although it is essential to me.
I don’t want to arrive in Eretz Yisrael empty-handed. When I think of Israel I see rows and rows of orange trees, green leaves, growth. Ah, to smell that citrus in the air! I have an idea. The biggest idea I have had yet, perhaps. I will transplant a new breed of chicken eggs–Austrolorps–superior to any chicken heretofore bred in Israel, from Africa to Israel, a transplanted bird just like me. While Rachel packs up our belongings, sells what we no longer need, I need to tend to these eggs. Make the plan hatch, so to speak. The idea actually came to me in a dream. I know that sounds crazy but if you look at it in another way, it’s inspired. The line is thin, actually, between a dreamer, a visionary, and a crazy man. I’ve seen that many times in my life. Who are you or I to tell the difference?
I had read about an egg shortage in Israel. Immediately the idea sprang into my brain. Here was a chance for me to do something original, something new, to make my mark upon this world. I knew about a farm in South Africa where they selected hens laying more than three hundred eggs a year (only a few qualified!) and put them in a special camp together with cocks who came from equally distinguished families. In short, they were upgrade pedigree poultry. As the owners of this famous farm were both amused and impressed by my intended assault on the Promised Land, they gave me their aristocratic eggs at a special price of only four shillings each. And a special price is something I have never been able to resist.
I had to make several calls. I spoke with the chicken people in South Africa and after several conversations, the man said that he would deliver them exactly one day before our departure–120 fertile eggs. I had already written to friends and family in Israel to have an incubator waiting for me. I had worked it all out on paper. The suitcases were packed, eight brown leather suitcases, some borrowed from neighbors, all in various states of wear and disrepair, because we had never needed so many suitcases on any vacation we had taken, usually just a car ride to the shore.
Rachel was teary-eyed, wiping her eyes with a hankie, looking around the house she was leaving behind, and hugging Meyer, who looked rather thin and pale, and wet-eyed as well. I was reminded of his first day at school, again those knickers he was wearing and how his knobby-knees stuck out. The look of trust and fear in his eyes. I had given him a quick hug and told him to study hard, but I could see that Rachel was having a tougher time saying goodbye to our youngest. I know that the depth of a mother’s love is unique onto itself. When I packed up the desk in our house, full of papers and whatnots, I saw the small white envelope with “Meyer” on the outside. On the inside was a thick lock of hair from his first haircut. Thick chestnut hair, the color and texture of the tail on a young foal.
Seeing that she was tending to him, holding his hand, talking to him in hushed whispers, I saw that I could tend to my idea, my dream. In my pocket was the cable that my brother-in-law, a fine lawyer, always wearing a suit or pressed pants and shirt, no wrinkles on him, had sent:
Import permit for 120 pedigree eggs hereby granted Government Veterinary Officer.
I had asked and asked him to send me the permit, but he hadn’t managed to get it to me. He takes too much care paying attention to detail; he is not a dreamer like me, not a visionary. But this cable told me he had gotten the permit just in time for our flight to Israel, so that I could go ahead with the purchase of the 120 eggs.
I heard a truck roll up the dirt path to our house. Finally! The young man who exited the truck looked at me curiously, just as intrigued about me as I was about him.
Where are the eggs?, I asked. For a moment, anxiety, that old friend, kicked me in the gut. What if something happened and he couldn’t bring the eggs?
In the back of the truck, he said.
Are they all fertile?’
Of course, he answered.
I wrapped up the crate of eggs as carefully as I could with plain brown paper. Then I marked in red marker, as neatly as I could, as if I were a new student in primary school, trying my best to impress the teacher, “Eggs – handle with care.” “This side up.” “Fragile.”
When our possessions were lined up in front of our house, my box with red words scrawled across it dwarfing the suitcases, my wife looked at me with that look she often gave me: “What an idiot, you will amount to nothing,” is what that look said. But I was dedicated to proving her wrong.
We flew across the ocean, leaving South Africa behind. I didn’t realize that it would be the last time I would step foot in that continent, a land which had been good to me and my children, but I knew that it would be a long time before my return. Yet I didn’t think long about Meyer, saying goodbye to him and leaving him alone with his studies. All I could think about were the eggs, cold and comfortable (God willing) in the aeroplane’s refrigerator.
I had already written to friends and family in Israel to have an incubator waiting for me. I had worked it all out on paper. Let’s say only seventy-five percent of the chickens hatched — a low estimate for such famously fertile fowls. These chicks would settle down to hard work in the new land and in no time my pioneers would work themselves up to a flock of a couple of thousand pedigree poultry.
Rachel and I had seats next to each other. Her book was open before we even lifted into the air. I had a sense I was leaving for all eternity the land of my childhood, that I would never return, but I did not want to think of goodbyes, of endings, and I could not. I had a vision of Meyer’s face, his eyes wide and questioning behind his spectacles, beginning to fill with tears, but I shut the vision out. All I thought of was those eggs, their smooth, cold sides, the thin, fragile shells, the liquids sloshing inside, all that potential for life. I imagined my thoughts holding them steady in that box, so that the shells would not crack. When I felt too warm, as the airplane’s air conditioning wasn’t working, I worried about the temperature of the eggs, of the embryos inside those eggs, imagining future generations of white, fluffy chicks that each embryonic chick would grow into, and how all credit for this sturdy super generation of new Israeli chickens would go to me, the simple, modest Leon Hodes.
I saw the articles, the headlines in the Jerusalem Post extolling me – Leon Hodes, breeder of the Chicken Extraordinaire. I imagined my advertisements: “Fowls – Guaranteed To Lay More Than 300 Eggs A Year!” Why, I would have the whole of Israel begging me to give them some of my golden eggs. And I would do it too, at a very low profit margin indeed, because my venture was inspired more by patriotism and a desire to help my new country than by any selfish hope of getting rich quick. I would walk into the Promised Land as a savior, a folk hero, a super hero for the story books.
What are you talking about?, Rachel asked, annoyed.
What? I didn’t realize that I was talking out loud. I thought just my hands were gesturing. The lights were off, the plane was dark. I had been whispering to the baby chickens, in utero, in egg, not realizing that my hushed utterances of love could be heard by those around me, or at least, by my wife. Maybe I was crazy? I can’t worry about how I seem. Rachel knows me well, surely she knows I’m not a lunatic.
I thought I was just thinking in my mind, darling. I’m just so excited! Nervous and excited! But what’s new, nu? I’m always nervous and excited!
She just sighed. A loud sigh. And she rearranged her sweater around her shoulders, like a mother hen, I thought, adjusting herself while sitting in her nest. I was used to that sigh. There’s nothing like the sigh of a disappointed woman. It said a lot through the years, shifting only a little in tone and duration to say quite a bit: Ah, if only, if only I hadn’t married you, if only my first husband hadn’t died; it sounds like a love story doesn’t it, our beloveds suddenly fallen ill and struck dead from the flu in the epidemic, and then we find each other, and we create a family out of the ashes of the old, but, ah, sigh, how has that love story ended. I hope this godforsaken plan of yours doesn’t fail. I just want to see my daughters again, see my grandchildren, those sweet faces, chubby knees, but I wish I didn’t have to leave my baby behind, why, oh why, is life so difficult.
Yes, I knew all that was entailed in that sigh. And so I didn’t answer, just kept thinking about those eggs, their white smooth cold sides, the little embryos inside, how God so cleverly designed those eggs, the fragile hair-thin edges between air and liquid, holding life so tenderly within. For a moment I thought of Rachel’s belly, swollen tight with each of our children and the daughter she had with the man I never met, her belly a swollen egg. Had she enjoyed making love with her first husband in that one year of marriage more than with me? That was something I often worried about when I was feeling low. She must have moaned with pleasure with him as well, there was probably nothing special about my lovemaking abilities. But was he better at it than I was? He was her first. She would never say, of course. This had bothered me more when we were first married, and I was still a young man. I could feel anxiety start to course through my veins, ache in my back. But then I trained my mind onto those eggs. I willed those little embryos to be safe, praying to God to keep the aeroplane on a sure and safe course, for it not to take any sudden lurches, and to land safely, smoothly. I prayed for those eggs to hatch only when they were safe and warm in the incubator on the moshav, for the little chicks to be healthy and vibrant and then to grow into fat white chickens that would lay eggs only for me. I could see those eggs lined up in long rows inside the hen house, a wooden shack I would build myself, with my own hands. I could hear the chirps and fat, happy singing of the contented hens. How much could I charge for each egg? One shekel, five shekels. . .the shekels began to accumulate in my mind, shiny silver coins clinging and clanging and amassing into a giant pile of coins. Ah, the living would be easy. Not that I am afraid of hard work, not at all. But these eggs would take care of themselves; all I had to do was make sure that I turned them daily, kept them warm, kept out foxes and other predators. Some of my schemes have not worked, true, but this one was destined to. I had planned so well for it.
After eleven hours of flight, during which I managed to catch some shut eye, the plane landed with a slam. Rachel’s red leather purse, which she had been clutching fell onto the floor.
The eggs? How were the eggs? I tried to rush off the plane. I didn’t wait for Rachel, but I was sure she would understand. It was all I could do to control myself and not push past the other passengers. I couldn’t help but jostle and elbow a few men, and I felt their annoyance, but I ignored it. Water off a duck’s back.
Outside the sunlight felt different. Palm trees dotted the runway, which reminded me of Africa, but the heat was not heavy and wet, the sun didn’t beat down on me from above like an African sun, like an ever-present God. The vegetation was not lush and green. I wanted to kiss the ground, the ground of my homeland, my ancestors, but I sensed I should control that impulse. I blew the ground a chaste and fast kiss instead.
On the tarmac I begged the man to unload the large black case first, angular and wrapped in tape. I had to unravel all that tape, which had taken me so long to wrap. I opened the latch, then the door, holding my breath. I ignored the pounding of my heart, my rapid breathing.
Twenty-eight eggs had shattered, the yellow insides slithering in a wet mess. And yet there the others still sat in their prim lines, white shells pristine and un-shattered. A small miracle.
Suddenly their tight ovals reminded me of Meyer as a baby, newly born, wrapped up in thin white cotton by the nurses at the maternity hospital, handing him to me in my arms, like a big warm egg. The promise of a new life. The innocence. The others I had never seen right after they were born. He had looked at me with clear grey eyes, expectant, wise. I had made a promise to myself to take care of him always. And now what had I done?
I knew that Rachel had seen the cracked eggs when I could hear her loud sigh. A sigh of discontent. No reason to show any concern. It would only rattle her. I composed my face. I carefully closed the box, pulled it gently along the tarmac, cringing inwardly at every bump.
Inside, the heat was sweltering as it seemed the A/C wasn’t working. The line for customs was long but what choice did I have?
“Where is the permit for these eggs?” An Israeli custom officer with a thick Israeli accent stood before me, asking me for the papers. He was young, no older than thirty, his skin tanned, his arms taut and muscular.
I handed him the permit, so expertly found by my brother-in-law, the fine lawyer. He grabbed it and only glanced at it. “How do we know these eggs don’t have diseases? We can’t bring diseases into the country.”
“They no more have diseases than I do, sir.” He raised one bushy eyebrow at me quizzically. He didn’t realize I was joking, of course. He didn’t understand that humor was the way in which I greeted the world. What choice did I have? I was reminded again of my age, how my body is no longer nineteen years old despite feeling perennially nineteen inside, deep in my kishkes.
“Leon!, here I am.” It was my brilliant son-in-law, Sam Levin. It was a Sunday and he was dressed in dapper clothes–no dirt underneath his fingernails, no sir,—a white crisp shirt, not a stain on it, and khakis, but he was wheeling a beaten-up wooden rectangular box that didn’t quite suit his image. The box must be meant for me.
We embraced, he kissed Rachel on the cheek, and then I had to ask, “What is this contraption?”
“It’s your incubator, the only one in all of Israel. It wasn’t easy to find.”
Ah, so the battered suitcase was mine; his dapper image would remain intact. Mine was long gone. Apparently, he’d had great difficulty locating an incubator for chicken eggs and finally found one that had been bequeathed to a widow from her husband, a farmer with outlandish ideas. For a moment as he described this deceased man I thought he was describing me, foretelling my death and the little I would have to bequeath to my poor wife. He explained that instead of payment for the incubator, this woman wanted half the eggs. Meshugganeh! What did I expect in Israel—but a country full of Jews with crazy ideas and pushing hard bargains! And yet, how wonderful. I felt as if I were home. Finally, a country full of people just like me. I also felt as if I had no choice in this matter. This widow pushed a hard bargain. I told him I agreed to the exchange.
“These eggs must be inspected now.” The Israeli customs official called our attention.
He opened the wooden box roughly with his strong hands, so that it banged on the ground. The eggs were still lined on their shelves within the box. I smelled straw and the fresh smell of the eggs, grass, vanilla, sawdust. He shined a white pencil flashlight against each egg. “Met, Met, Met,” he kept saying. I chuckled, thinking he was saying, “Meat, Meat, Meat,” and finding his accent endearing. Sam saw me chuckling and he looked confused, even angry. His face went pale. He whispered to me. “What’s so funny, Leon? He is saying they are dead, dead, dead! Met is dead, in Hebrew!” You old fool, he might have added. Idiot. Shlemiel. Those poor baby chicks. The piles of shekels in my mind fell from their heights to the dirt ground with a crash and a clang.
Only 16 eggs still had alive baby chicks within them. And now 8 had to go to this enterprising widow. I had 8 eggs to my name. And yet it was still something. I envisioned the chicks following me in a line about the moshav, as if I were their mother, imprinted upon them from birth, then hatching their own eggs, still creating a stellar breed of their own. I took those 16 eggs and transferred them into the incubator as tenderly as I could. I ignored the customs official’s scoffing smile (and that of my son-in-law, or maybe that was pity on his face.)
I would get more ideas of how to make things grow in this land where nothing has grown before. I will grow oranges, pears, carrots, turnips, all from the sweat of my own brow and the toil of my own hands. Did you know that it takes six years for a single orange tree to bear fruit? I must be patient and enterprising. Always thinking of the next plan, the next way to drum up business. I must keep my brain and body moving, not show any concern, nothing to ruffle Rachel’s feathers.
“Come on, Rachel, my darling. Happiness awaits us,” I said. I took her soft warm arm in
mine, the heat rising off her doughy, white arm like warm air rising off bread baking in the oven, ready to see the patch of earth we would call our home for the rest of our lives.
_______
Laura Hodes is a writer of nonfiction and poetry. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Lilith and Allium. She writes frequently about art for the Forward. She was born in Zimbabwe, grew up in Long Island, and now lives in a suburb of Chicago with her husband and four children. She has a degree in English literature from Yale and a law degree from the University of Chicago.
The piece, “Counting Chickens,” is an excerpt from her manuscript, Arrivals and Departures, in which each chapter is either an arrival or departure in the life of her family. Leon was her paternal grandfather; Meyer was her father, of blessed memory.