The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  For Moshe, Gedalia had a note given him in Sejera. On Thursday, when the kvutsa usually sent the wagon to Yaviel for the week’s supply of bread and other things, Galil would be there for a meeting. It would be well if Moshe brought along Reuven, too.

  “Go, go along with them, Leah,” Saraleh urged, “if only for a change of faces.” So on Thursday morning she put on her white blouse and mounted the wagon.

  It was on that ride, as he handled the mules, that Reuven fell to brooding, while the two of them, Leah and Moshe, sat behind on the wagon-bottom. The certainty came to Reuven that the whole family must come here, or else his young brothers and sisters would be lost to Eretz, they would surely at some time go to America. But his father, in the middle of life, what could he do here, what use would he be? A thought had been forming. There were rumors that new villages were soon to be established. A combination had been made between the two great Barons who had been settling Jews on land, Baron de Rothschild here in Eretz, and Baron de Hirsch in America and Argentina. Millions had been spent by Baron de Hirsch to transport Russian Jews to Argentina instead of to Eretz. But now these funds would be used in Eretz as well. And in the new combination there would be a different atmosphere. No longer would supervisors peer into every family’s pot. The new villages would be for families pledged to work their own parcels of land; the Zionist office was even to have a hand in selecting the candidates. Perhaps in this way the whole family could come. For himself, though Reuven believed in the principle of the kvutsa, in sharing all and not owning anything, there had nevertheless come problems. Each day, he had difficulties with Max. All their ideas for developing the land were divergent. Every idea Reuven wanted to try was “a dream,” “needless,” “premature,” a waste of their scant funds and energies. Though Reuven demanded of himself that he should live by the decisions of the group, he had come to think of Max as short-sighted, domineering, even hateful. It was wrong to feel this way toward a chaver, but what could he do? And besides, was not a family something like a kvutsa? Everyone sharing everything? Even if he had difficulties getting along with Tateh it would be no worse than with Max. Thus, his plan was forming.

  The scent from the haystack behind each house enveloped them as they arrived. Those from Sejera were not yet there. Leah sat with the wife and daughters of the mukhtar, Yona Kolodnitzer, in whose house she was to sleep. For a while they sat on the doorstep talking idly, and when the mother and girls went in, Leah sat on, her whole being filled with a kind of intoxication, as though she sensed the breathing of every infant in the village, every calf in the stables, and she knew she would not pass this night without being changed.

  In the wagon from Sejera there was also a young woman. Tiny, wearing glasses. Leah at once knew this must be the famous Nadina the Firebrand. She had just returned from a voyage abroad on some mysterious mission, and already one could see that there was something between her and Galil. Nadina too was well-educated, the daughter of a wealthy Jew of Smolensk. A social revolutionist as a young girl, she had led a strike in her father’s factory. It was Nadina, people said, who had smuggled in from Germany the pistol used in the assassination of Plehve, the “minister of pogroms.” When an informer betrayed her revolutionary cell, she had luckily again been in Berlin, and for her own safety had been lured to Palestine by the pretended sickness of her brother, a Zionist, who was an engineer in Haifa. Then the land itself had made a Zionist of Nadina. It was whispered that she was the one woman accepted as a member of the secret Bar Giora.

  As Leah approached, it was Nadina who cried out, as though not she but Leah were the famous one. “At last we meet,” she cried.

  Much was to be done. From the Bar Giora had come the first watchmen, riding the rounds. They had received the watchman’s contract at Mescha and had formed a cooperative called the Shomer. But Galil wanted to organize the whole Yishuv to be able to defend itself. Presently Shabbatai Zeira galloped up in full regalia on the Shomer’s magnificent white stallion. Zeira wore a kind of Cossack coat, with not only bandoliers but belts of bullets, and he flourished the longest rifle ever seen.

  The steed was the only one owned by the Shomer. It had been purchased with the last dinar each chaver could muster, and even this would not have been half enough but that Shabbatai’s wife had produced a small secret hoard of napoleons that her mother had given her on her marriage. Shabbatai Zeira himself had gone to Damascus and bought the mount, and when the farmers of Mescha had seen that the men were equipped with such a fine steed, they had finally broken their contract with the napping Circassians of Kfar Kana, though the dismissed watchman of Kfar Kana grumbled and made threats.

  Galil led the discussion. The entire Yishuv must be protected. Isolated points such as the kvutsa at Kinnereth, for example, must be able to defend themselves. Weapons would be needed.

  As a start, Nadina had brought back a small sum from her voyage to Europe for purchases. And from a knitting bag she carried Nadina produced a six-chamber revolver, handing it to Moshe. Presently, Galil took Moshe and Reuven aside to teach them the use of the weapon. Despite his principle of pacifism, Reuven agreed that to be able to defend was necessary. For defense, even women should learn.

  In the dark, as they emerged from the meeting, everyone was suddenly gone, Galil disappearing with Nadina, Reuven going to sleep at Zev’s. And as Leah walked slowly toward the Kolodnitzer house, Moshe came alongside her, making talk for a moment, and presently she walked with him, as one drugged, toward the goren.

  It was as though she were explaining to her mother: in your day you walked forward to stand under the wedding canopy; as you said, you had only once before seen Tateh, when the matchmaker brought him to the house, and here I am walking to the goren with a man I have worked with side by side in the fields, a chaver. Is this worse? It is as though my whole life was planned for me to come here and join myself to him on the fodder reaped from our ancient earth.

  So her thoughts mounted, and as they fitted themselves into their own little nest in the soft hillock of produce, Leah treasured to herself each small movement in her bridal night as though each movement between them were a picture she would keep in the album of her heart.

  But then the sensations were so rapid, sensations like fish darting through cupped hands, she could not hold them, and she still had to sweep away traces of shame in herself. A great inner triumph she felt, too, that she was daring to rise beyond all girlish fears, all ghetto admonitions, and to be a free woman, to be like Nadina, like Rahel, and to love. His mouth was so completely joined to hers that the sensation in her lips was one with the sensation below. It was all one. It was how you saw God, she suddenly felt, their joining, and the way of creation, and the melting together of the universe in a single unity, love, God, one flesh. This is my beloved and I am his. Why was her mind thinking? Let her only feel, only feel. Love.

  Then he lay back. She still glowed, and tried to keep out any ignorant questions, and so as not to ask them Leah turned and buried her face on his chest, her lips on the fragrant warm skin. Presently Moshe’s arm came around her and stroked her hair, and she heard from him the word that sanctified what she had done. “My beloved.”

  Moshe was not insincere. He had spilled, to be fair; his very first girl in his student days in Odessa had insisted that he should in this way protect her, and he still considered it the safest way for himself as well. This time the little spell of after-melancholy had hardly made itself felt, submerged in the triumph of a virginity. Perhaps Leah would indeed be the one, the one who would com plete and hold him. For until this time, even with a virginity, as for example with the sweaty Nahama and her fears and tears, the after-melancholy had taken seat for long spells.

  The largeness of Leah, the strong bones, fitted to his body. He had not felt so good since Katya, a student revolutionist, a real Russian girl who, he later comprehended, had almost commanded him to her because she wanted to feel how it was with a Jew.

  Moshe was from Poltava; his father, an
estate manager, had sent him to a cousin in Odessa to study medicine. He had not taken to it and had tried to read philosophy, somehow managing a year, but it was life that absorbed him. From childhood he had known he was a favored one, growing tall, with an appealing brightness in his face. All the mothers clucked out the same word, “chenevdik,” which meant that something in him sparkled to them. In adolescence the girls turned their heads to look at him and hurried away giggling. Moshe was fine with boys too, a champion hand-wrestler, and he liked everybody. Still he was somewhat uncertain when the fellows turned to him as a leader. In Odessa his cousin, a far better philosophy student than Moshe, let him lead their little circle, but somehow Moshe usually got from his cousin a feeling as to which way he should lead.

  In their student-circle discussions, Hegel and Marx were a bore to him, though he could repeat the essentials and was for the revolution.

  When they turned into activists, Moshe was given the leadership of a small unit distributing leaflets on the Odessa docks. In his unit was Katya. Moshe found himself more and more possessed by the need to be in the company of girls and one of these, a married woman, took him during the day to her bed. Despite their free-love philosophy Katya showed jealousy and left him, taking up with his cousin. The married girl dropped him because her husband became suspicious, but by then Moshe had learned to detect the already experienced and willing ones from the way they looked at him. Still, arid spells happened, and a few times he even went with the lads to prostitutes.

  When the dockers’ strike came and arrests were made, Moshe had luckily already left that circle because his cousin had pulled him to a meeting of the Jewish Self-defense group. It was after Kishinev. A brilliant young journalist whose articles they all read, Vladimir Jabotinsky, had addressed the meeting, stirring up a great fervor, and Moshe found himself volunteering with his bespectacled cousin to carry clubs and defend the entry to a Jewish courtyard. The boys selected him as captain.

  It turned out they were all Zionists. Moshe had never paid much attention to Zionism, but now his cousin converted him, and also one of the Young Zionist girls took to him. He had never yet known a Jewish girl who would be completely free. Basheh was quite short, with thick legs, and it irked him that she always wanted to walk with him in the street. Alongside him she looked a dwarf. Yet Basheh had her own room and she would prepare tasty things for him. And—where she had learned them he did not know—Basheh sought out all sorts of lewd tricks to arouse and please him. It was all getting somewhat dangerous, Moshe feared, for how would he have the heart to hurt her, to break off—and also she did not want him to spill, she clutched him fiercely to her at the climactic moment, she might even become pregnant so he would have to marry her.

  Four boys were going to Palestine. His father, and even his mother, urged him to go, for they still trembled that Moshe would be arrested. His cousin wanted to go but was determined first to finish his course in medicine. The girl, Basheh, just then was acting worried and would not discuss the reason. So in a way Moshe had fled.

  But he told himself he was nevertheless sincere in his Zionism and Socialism. Once in the land Moshe felt wholly a chalutz. As to the girls—here it was not so easy; the chalutzoth were few, and like Nahama with her mustache, were not as attractive as the daughters of the grove-owners who looked at him with lighted eyes but not with that other look, the look of the experienced and willing. In his longing to be in the company of attractive women he wasted many hours walking with these virtuous daughters, holding hands, reciting verses of Lermontov. They kissed tenderly, even passionately. There was that sweet one in Rehovot, daughter of a well-off planter—Moshe had even thought he might marry that one, but then how could he face the scorn of his comrades? Marrying a pardessan’s daughter! But now, with Leah, things might turn out quite good.

  For Leah there followed many glowing days. Her brother knew at once, she was certain, and looked more tenderly at her. Even so, she could not speak to Reuven of it as she might have to a sister who divined what had happened. Yet because it had hap pened for her, Leah wished more and more strongly that it would happen for Reuven, wished that she could help him find someone, and with Saraleh she went over and over the names of virtually every chalutza in the land, perhaps to invite this or that one to visit the kvutsa?

  Saraleh had sensed about Leah at once, and with her at least Leah could now exchange profound womanly insights. The whole kvutsa too soon understood and accepted the thing that had happened, accepted it as long expected, and with true comradely decency—no one made remarks. When sharing out the food, she had to restrain herself from giving bigger portions to Moshe, though after all he was a larger man and needed more nourishment! But Saraleh confessed that in her turns at serving she felt the same impulse for Araleh, telling herself he was the hardest worker. And they laughed happily together.

  It was strange to Leah that, although younger and a girl, it was she who came to know physical love before her brother. But Reuven did not appear unhappy. On the Sabbath he had started the habit of going off by himself seeking for various plants that were mentioned in the Bible. Or sometimes, climbing to the Arab village, Dja’adi, examining their crops in the field, he even managed to talk a bit with the fellaheen—Arabic was not far from Hebrew—and would bring back samples of their wheat, kernels that were small and poor—he said they suffered from a blight. Reuven collected one strain and another and planted the samples in little squares. From across the Kinnereth, on the heights, the wheat was excellent.

  Thus on the Sabbath Reuven would leave Leah with Moshe. Their arms around each other’s waist, they strolled along the shore of the Kinnereth; the whole shoreline became their bed, and through the reeds they would gaze out at the little fishing boats that sometimes came down this far from Tiberias. Leah made Moshe see how graceful was the movement of the fishermen when they cast their nets.

  It was Araleh who suggested that they too catch fish, at least for their own table, but Max Wilner as usual was opposed, on the calculation that investment in a boat was not justified. The argument raged for two night-sittings and became acrimonious when Saraleh offered the point that they could also use the boat for pleasure. Were they here for pleasures? Max sneered. At this barb Saraleh burst into tears, Araleh got angry, and Leah for the first time felt that a hidden bitterness was in the men, even in Max, for having to live without women.

  Somehow Araleh secured a small half-broken boat which he patched and caulked after his working hours; he had traded a pair of Saraleh’s hose for it to an Arab fisherman, and one moonlit evening the married couple took the boat out a distance on the water, and sat there quietly. They were still keeping to themselves the knowledge that Saraleh was pregnant; only to Leah had she told the secret, under the strictest promise that not even Reuven, not even Moshe, would be told until Araleh agreed. A woman simply had to confide in another woman, and this her husband understood. But they were perplexed. A baby, in a kvutsa? What problems this would bring! Leah imitated Max Wilner tightening his lips. “You should have first brought it up for discussion. It is not in the plan. We are not yet ready for such luxuries.”

  Araleh’s little vessel meanwhile belonged to all, and on another night Moshe and Leah, lying on its bottom, drifted under the moon. The boat fitted like a seashell around them, Leah whispered, and then it rocked gently with their clasped movement. And this time, this time something happened within herself that came as an overwhelming surprise, as though an enormous wave rose up inside her and carried her on its crest to an infinite pinnacle and then sweetly ebbed her down. She gasped, she was in awe at such joy. Moshe held her fiercely, exultantly, and Leah knew what she felt was at last like what the man felt. And at the same moment Moshe had given his seed in her, let happen whatever might happen. And Moshe did not turn away afterward nor did she feel that instant of strange misery in him; even in his voice to her a change had come. It was not as though, in that mysterious unspoken struggle of mating that went on between a man and woman
even in love, Moshe had given in, but as though he had admitted to himself, this was she, he need seek for no other. Leah was content.

  Then came the day when Reuven pronounced the wheat ready for cutting. That night he hardly slept, and he was up before the others, stoning his scythe, and one for Leah as well. The entire kvutsa went out to the field, even Saraleh standing in line with the men, though for her a sickle had been provided, as she was not strong enough to hold a scythe and besides everyone understood now that she was pregnant, though the problem had not yet been brought up.

  When tall Moshe cried “Now,” the whole line swung in unison and made a step forward.

  The sweat soon came, and songs came; for a time Reuven restrained his step so as to keep in line with the others, but when Moshe moved ahead Reuven swung faster and kept up with him. Now Araleh stepped ahead and the cutting became a bit of a contest. Leah showed them what a woman could do, and kept up with the foremost.

  Toward breakfast time, all were nearly in line again, and turning they saw Saraleh, who had gone back, now bringing their food on the donkey cart across the cut field. All the harvesters drew up straight and gazed back on the expanse of their labor. “Ours.” It was an elation. This was not only the grain of the land but the grain of the workers. A new way was being cut across this field, and Max solemnly declared, his face for once shining with pleasure, “Chevreh, we have made history.”

  That night in a long sitting they went over their calculations; Max had kept the accounts, and even when the crop was estimated at a low price, it was certain that they had covered the entire loan of the Keren Kayemeth for the mules and seed and their food, and could calculate for their labor a wage one-fourth larger than they might have earned on hire. With enthusiasm Max foresaw how a kvutsa such as theirs could settle on a piece of land such as this, and how they, the workers themselves, without owners and without the Baron’s experts to tell them what to plant and what not to plant, could develop their cooperativa, with their own cattle, their own fowl, how they could enlarge the farm, and bring farming machines from America, and resettle the land! “Chevreh, do you know what we have done here? Not only have we produced a good crop—we have produced an instrument! No more will the chalutz have to stand in the slave market and depend on the whim of the planter for a day’s work. No more do we have to bring ourselves down to the standards of the fellaheen. We can set our own pace, our own development, and the fellaheen can learn from us if they want to. We have shown that the kvutsa is the solution! We don’t have to wait for villages to be built and owners to arrive to reclaim the land. We ourselves can go out on land that belongs to the whole Jewish people, and reclaim it!”