The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Where spring forever dwells …

  Falls the dew like pearls on Hermon

  From the snowy heights descending

  Tearlike, does it fall?

  Leah, the girls, and then everyone turned their heads toward the snow-topped Hermon. Like a prophecy was the poem, heard here!

  How fare Jordan’s shining waters

  How the hills and how the hillocks

  And the mountains all?

  And the laborers my brothers,

  Have not those who sowed with weeping

  Reaped with song and psalm?

  Oh that I had wings to fly with,

  Fly unto the land where flourish

  Almond tree and palm!

  At the end, as the goslings all clustered close around her as though under her broad wings, there was a great burst of applause, and she was sure she heard the voice of Bialik himself crying “Bravo!”

  The poet came forward and took her hand in both of his. He asked her name. Then he declared, “Leah, you are a living poem, and each of your girls is a verse of song!”

  It was more wonderful than the harvest dance in Sejera. But all was not yet over; the gift was yet to be presented. The flock of girls floated to one side, and Yaffaleh Chaimovitch stepped forward. On this day, with white bows in her long braids, and in a pink dress with ruffles that Feigel had made for her, Yaffaleh looked only as awkward as other little girls look in their clumsy stage. Her face alight, she carried a huge bouquet and presented it to the poet with the words, “Twenty-seven different kinds of flowers grown in our own gardens.”

  The beaming poet was so affected that many said they saw him brush tears from his eyes. “Twenty-seven blessings,” he said, “on the daughters of Mishkan Yaacov, who have garlanded my visit with beauty.”

  Feigel, holding Mati in her arms, and with Yankel beside her, heaved such a proud sigh of nachess that the poet recognized her as the mother and came over, offering his felicitations, even declaring yes, yes, he had already heard of the Chaimovitch family, heard great things, and he was sure much more would be heard of them!

  It was indeed the day of the Chaimovitches, everyone declared!

  * * * *

  On a Thursday, toward sundown, a visitor rode up to the Chaimovitch yard. Dvora was the first to see him, but she did not on the instant recognize Menahem. He was even darker, his eyes were more impenetrable than ever, though when he spoke his Shalom to her, they glimmered with a golden touch of warmth, like a kerosene flame in a dark corner.

  Menahem had come for her, Dvora felt at once, but she gave herself no recognition or response to this feeling. “Shalom, Menahem,” she said. “It’s a long time since we saw you.”

  Nearly a year, he reminded her.

  “You have been away?” Nothing had been heard of him, she had just realized.

  He had gone to live with a tribe of Bedouin in the south, he said, so as to learn something of their ways, as well as to learn to speak Arabic.

  Gidon and Tateh were just coming in from the fields; it seemed to Dvora that Menahem must have calculated to arrive at this hour, and as they all went into the house, the entire family greeted him warmly. Yet Feigel had to persuade him to stay for the meal, for he was really on the way to the kvutsa, Menahem said. “But at least you must take something in your mouth,” and so he sat down with them.

  There was an important meeting at the kvutsa, Menahem said, for at last the men of the Shomer were going to establish their own settlement, and it was from Reuven’s kvutsa, now called HaKeren, that they planned to set forth. All the chaverim and chaveroth would be coming, a whole crowd, to help the Shomer’s settlement get started in its first days. Suddenly he declared to Dvora and Leah—not to Dvora alone—“You must come too!” And then—to Dvora—“We are even bringing an incubator!”

  For the rest of the meal, Menahem talked more to Gidon than to anyone else, relating things he had learned among the Bedouin. For example, he explained how, by examining a camel’s track, they could tell you the age of the beast and with what he was laden. He told how by their tribal laws the test of fire on the tongue was still used to know if a man was telling the truth; he had himself seen it administered, and there was a degree of effectiveness in it, perhaps because a guilty man’s mouth became dry out of fear. And other such things he talked of. Then he had to leave; he took messages for Reuven, and repeated that Dvora and Leah should come to the founding, Galil and Nadina had sent their greetings and wanted the girls to come.

  “He is a strange one,” Leah remarked, as though to begin a discussion, but Dvora felt no need to talk of him.

  There were over thirty chaverim now at HaKeren and several new cabins had been built. The old stone relic was used only as an eating and meeting place.

  In the compound just now, there were a number of wagons, and several tents had been put up, for the whole of Sejera seemed to have arrived, preparing to go out and found the new settlement of the Shomer at the foot of Mount Gilboa.

  When Dvora and Leah reached the kvutsa, most of the chevreh were inside at a sitting which it appeared had been going on all day and night. Up at the front table sat Galil and Nadina, and there also was Reuven, who for the moment was chairman, while Max Wilner was secretary. An expert, a Professor Bodenheimer from Berlin, Leah already had heard, had been brought by the Zionist office to help with the formation of the new cooperative settlements. There he stood, wearing a suit with a collar and necktie, answering questions about his “plan.” But each question was a long rambling speech, and Reuven didn’t feel he should cut short a chaver, so that when slow-speaking Shimek began one of his dissertations, repeating what everyone already knew, it was Nadina who broke in, asking him first to wait for the Professor’s replies.

  It seemed that the expert had devised an entire cooperative system, more perfect than what had been learned in the experiences of the first kvutsa. The new system was to be a complex structure in which each member shared equally up to a certain point, but beyond that there were special rewards for excellence in production. But all this applied only to the men, and Nadina was outraged. “What about women?” the Firebrand raised her eternal outcry. “Are we chattels?”

  For the women the professor proposed a separate cooperative of their own which would undertake, on contract with the watchmen’s cooperative, to operate the kitchen and laundry, the poultry run and perhaps the dairy.

  In the midst of the dispute over this, someone interjected, “What about the members with aged or sick parents in need of aid? Shouldn’t such chaverim receive special allowances? Shouldn’t the principle be ‘To each according to his needs’?” And the hubbub became so great that Reuven put his hands to both ears, while Max Wilner took the gavel from him and banged on the table.

  Going outside, Dvora caught a glimpse of Menahem; he was sitting on a bench with the weary air of one who had heard it all and knew the outcome and would re-enter only when the palaver was over, and things needed to be done. He was telling a newly arrived chalutz about the Bedouin, and Dvora had a feeling that Menahem even raised his voice for her to hear. “They wanted me to remain,” he was saying. “The sheikh offered me one of his daughters for a bride and even without bride money.” Isn’t it an offense to refuse? “I told him my choice was already made among my own people, and that with us a man has only one wife.”

  Dvora wandered away.

  They marched out from HaKeren on Sunday morning, a whole column of them, singing. Ahead rode Galil and both of the Zeira brothers in full regalia, with crossed bandoliers and streaming head-cloths. Some forty chaverim marched along, and a dozen chaveroth, the men and many of the girls with mattocks over their shoulders. Then came wagons carrying plows, fodder, tents, large milk-canisters filled with tea, sacks of bread, huge baskets of cucumbers and tomatoes, pails and washtubs and a helter-skelter of axes, saws and building materials. Rahel had appeared from Jerusalem—would she miss such an occasion—though Avner could not come. She strode along with Leah and
Dvora, singing and chattering. Menahem, among the mounted, rode by, back and forth along the column; each time he smiled down to them and waved, but he seemed preoccupied. When a stop was made for a meal, he appeared and sat with them amidst a group of chaverim, yet paying Dvora no particular attention. It was as though everything that would happen must happen, but as yet he still left her free.

  Before sundown they reached the site, above a rill of water at the foot of Mount Gilboa; Ain Harod, the spring was called, and each began to repeat to the others that this was the historic spring where Gideon had tested his warriors, watching as they knelt to drink, discarding those who knelt with their mouths to the stream, vulnerable to attack, and taking only those who raised the water in their cupped hands, while eyeing the plain warily.

  The eyes of the settlers too were on the plain. Their apprehension was for fever and swamp. But how open, how vast was the flatland. And what a sky! This they repeated to each other while some put up tents, and others began to chop away the tangle of high brambles from the ground where the yard would be; still others, with the eager explanation that no one ever knew what the Turks might get into their wooden heads to claim against you, hitched mules to four plows and went out to make long furrows in every direction.

  Menahem had a special task. With Galil he rode across the neck of the plain toward a mound that rose up from the flatness, a tel—some said these hillocks were places where ancient villagers for centuries had dumped their offal, since Arabs did not make use of it as manure. Others said they were the sites of the ancient villages themselves, covered with the dust of the ages. Near the tel, the riders came to a cluster of black tents belonging to Bedouin who encamped here every spring. It was Menahem’s task now to conduct the greeting of peace.

  It was for this, after the troubles in Sejera last year, that he had been sent off on his mission, following a sitting at which he himself, in anguish over the death of Yechezkiel, his closest friend, had cried out, “To be strong—good; to take revenge—we must be ready when necessary. But we have come here to live, not to kill and be killed. And what do we know of these people? Why don’t we learn their ways, and their language, and how to live in the same land with them?”

  Galil had backed Menahem’s view, pointing out that although a few such attempts had haphazardly been made and a few adventurers had gone out among the Bedouin, an orderly approach to the problem was now a necessity. And so Menahem had been assigned to the task. It was not so much the settled villagers as the Bedouin who were the raiders and attackers—that must be understood; even the bandits of Fuleh were only a generation away from the life of the tents, Ostrov the Landbuyer pointed out, and with Ostrov himself, Menahem had journeyed down to Gaza, to the house of a notable who welcomed the Landbuyer as a brother. From there, after a few days of hospitality, Menahem had ridden off alongside a son of the notable to a mud-hut village near Beersheba, linked to the same family. After a time there, he had gone into the Negev region to herdsmen in their tents, living with the sheikh, also of the same clan. All this had been slow, and, Menahem would admit to Galil and some others, mostly tedious. Though as to tedium, he had found himself drifting back into a state of tranquillity that he had learned to attain in long voyages as a seaman.

  He had gone out with the herds and learned something of sheep and goats, he had sat through hours of small talk about weather-signs, and accounts of remarkable feats of horsemanship, he had smoked the narghileh and in long silences punctuated by remarks of wisdom, sometimes sayings from the Koran, or even tales of the Patriarch Abraham, he had come to feel almost as one of them. He had nodded at the right time, and smoked kif, and after he had picked up enough of the language to speak, he had told of some of the wonders he had seen in the outside world. It was mostly of America they wanted to hear, of the riches and wonders.

  Of long-standing feuds he had also learned, unending tribal feuds over the use of a well, or over a violated daughter, or an insult that had to be avenged. Of the small signal flag on a tent that told of a marriageable daughter he also knew, as he knew the unceasing copulation-jokes among the young men who had no bride money, no woman to lie with, and also he was laughingly shown the sport of using a sheep. All this was as the bestiality he had touched time and again in the bleak life of a sailor and wandering laborer; to be a man among men, one had to share in their contaminations, though, in the seven years of his world-wandering from adolescence to manhood, all this had passed through him much as a gonorrheal dripping and fiery injections that finally cleaned it out. So after those years, when a voyage had carried him back to Odessa, Menahem had remained among the Jews, taken up with the good lads of Kostarnitza, told them his tales of adventure, and joined them to come to Eretz. The bedbugged cribs of any seaport became, for his tales, mysterious seraglios in Barcelona, a veiled Princess Fatima beckoned from the hidden rear door to a walled garden in Alexandria, the flea-ridden filthy cot of a grimy Bowery hotel became a room with a private bath and the miracle of electric light, and a voyage on a train of cattle-cars, watering the doomed beasts and shoveling out the steaming droppings, became a cowboy’s odyssey over the vast spaces of the American wild west.

  So now, as Menahem lived his season with the Bedouin, absorbing the tales on their side of some legendary invader of harems, or of the faithful love of a steed for its master, he became meanwhile as agile on a horse as any of the tribe, and learned the rhythms of coffee-pounding, and the contemptuous epithets of the tent dweller for the settled villager whose soul was soft as donkey shit; he heard tales of long ago and not so long ago, tales of herds of sheep and of cattle, but best, of horses cleanly driven off from the possession of the plodding tillers of the soil, the spineless fellaheen. But these were not habitual raiders, the Beni Aghil; such things happened when they happened. Sometimes, too, on the mat of the sheikh, there would unwind probing discussions with him, touching on the forefathers of long ago, the cleverness of Jacob in winning all the striped sheep from his father-in-law, though some said this was no longer true of the marking of sheep; others told tales of Ishmael, the true first son of Abraham.

  And so now among the Bedouin near Gilboa, when the greetings of peace had been exchanged, and Menahem and Galil had been welcomed into the guest tent, and while the coffee was being pounded, and as Menahem passed excellent Turkish cigarettes to the half-dozen men who had gathered, he was able to acquit himself well. He spoke of the Beni Aghil, where he was as a son, and the tribe was favorably known to the meager little sheikh with whom they sat, who stemmed from below Beit She’an. Delicately Menahem probed as to their numbers, and their habits of movement, and let it be known that he and Galil were of the Shomer. Of them indeed the sheikh said he had heard much, as excellent horsemen and men of honor. Many more compliments were exchanged, with probings on each side, until at last the time came to make clear that the men of the Shomer would be dwelling nearby, and that they wished to dwell in harmony together, for were not all of them sons of Abraham? The sheikh and his sons would be eagerly awaited in the settlement, so that the men of the Shomer would have the honor of offering them hospitality. And if medicine was needed for the eyes of their children, or if there was any other such need, the house of the Shomer was their house.

  So, with a last ceremonial coffee, and a last distribution of cigarettes, the visit was ended, and Menahem and Galil rode back, agreeing in their assessment that good relations could be established; the lands of the kvutsa were well outside the seasonal grazing area of these Bedouin.

  The chaverim were gathered around the campfire. A kettle steamed on the rocks to be picked up now and again for replenishing a mug of tea. Leah’s voice joined in the wordless Hasidic melody that someone had launched into the air, and other voices joined. Menahem squatted down beside Dvora.

  The tales of Menahem’s voyages she had heard in the evenings when he had sat with her and Yechezkiel; he would draw from his wanderings and adventures until you wondered what to believe, and just when you decided it was all
imaginings, something would be proven true, not that Menahem cared to offer proof. But someone else on another day might mention an event, a person who had figured in Menahem’s tale. Thus, he had taken part in a revolutionary plot to assassinate the Czar and his ministers; Nadina the Firebrand, as everyone knew, had escaped capture in these events only by a hair. Once Menahem told of having received a pistol in St. Petersburg from a certain Lutek. And from Nadina, Dvora had at some other time heard how she had delivered a pistol to a certain Lutek. There could be no doubt that Menahem had done something there, escaping “in his own way.” And he would simply go on to relate the adventures in Africa, in Brazil—he could speak Portuguese and English too, and yet he seemed to take none of this as of any consequence.

  How much and how little need a man reveal of himself for a woman to join her life to his? With Yechezkiel there had been nothing that needed revealing—a great stalwart boy, good hearted through and through, cheerful when his body was active, when he rode, when he worked in the field, a great eater, and she had simply felt love. All year Dvora had tried to think about that love. Not only to feel, but to think. Around her she could see husbands and wives, her own mother and father, with no flush of tenderness ever between them, and yet in their late years they had produced a child. It seemed that, when the time came, something had to happen in a woman, and in the life that continued from then onward, a man and a woman always managed to find things to talk about together; they talked of each thing needed and wanted in the house, and then of their children, their neighbors, their relatives, so that all this together must take the place of that first romantic time of overwhelming love.

  When she thought of Yechezkiel now, she felt a love and sorrow that was oddly very much like the love and sorrow over dear little Avramchick. And the thought came to Dvora that Menahem was aware of this change in her grieving and that it was for this Menahem had waited—that in his being near her in the last days and yet making no advances, no claim on her, Menahem had in some wonderfully considerate way been sensing out all this that she now recognized in herself. He had been sensing out whether he could not come nearer and enter her life.