"Michener, James - The Source (uc) (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Michener James A)

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sentence reached Tabari: "Did you say Hacohen? The Jew from
Russia?" When he knew that it was the little land buyer who was
being stoned he summoned his guard and went to the town gate,
where torches showed the naked and bleeding Jew wandering
vainly outside the walls.
"Take him home," Tabari ordered. "You, you and you, give
him your clothes." When gendarmes reported that officers of the
rabbinical court were wrecking Shmuel's hut, Tabari hurried there
and said to the mob, "Go home, all of you."
As Shmuel regained his mournful room he saw with gratitude
that the searchers had not reached the money intended for the
purchase of his land. He fell on his mattress, too bewildered to
cry. The sentence of the court had been so unexpected, the punish-
ment so harsh, that he was content to have escaped with his life,
and as for the kaimakam's intervention, this Shmuel could not
explain, but as he wiped his sores with a dirty cloth he asked him.
self: Did he keep me alive only so that he could rob me of what I
have left? The thought was unworthy, for Shmuel could remem.
ber that as he had stood naked outside the walls the torches had
shown him the kaimakam's face, and it was that of a man who
could not tolerate such punishments. If in the forthcoming
months Tabari stole all of Hacohen's savings, this would not
alter the fact that tonight he had acted as one human being to-
ward another. Why had he done so? Shmuel fell asleep before he
found an answer, but Faraj Tabari, sitting alone in his room over.
looking the mosque, asked himself the same question and replied:
He was little and he had a swayed back, but he looked like my
brother-in-law, so I had to save him. And for the first time the
kaimakam expressed the hope that his brother-in-law might soon
visit Tubariyeh to explain which of the new ideas could be put
into practice here.
The next days Shmuel would not remember. In a daze of pain
from the stoning by which Eretz Israel had rejected him, its
mountains falling upon him in his nightmares, he lay upon his
rinattress while insects came to inspect his wounds. Each of the
Jewish communities left him alone, the superstitious Sephardim
viewing him as a curse and the vengeful Ashkenazini hoping that
he would die. By tradition Arabs did not come into the quarter
where he lay, so his fever and nightmare were allowed to run
their course and for two days of delirium Shmuel imagined that he
was back in Vodzh, through whose cool lanes he went seeking
timber.
When he recovered, unaided by anyone, he went into the alley