The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  For the first time, though so little had been said between them, she experienced a sweep of endearment toward him, for the delicacy of his thoughts for her. And in this she could not know that all through the time of his absence Menahem in the subterranean way that was part of his being had known what was taking place with her. At intervals he had come with his Bedouin “brother,” the sheikh’s eldest son, for pleasure in Gaza, and passing through Beer Tuvia had managed to pick up a word of the doings of the Chaimovitch girls; once Galil and Nadina together had come down to the Negev in a horseback journey they had taken to study the whole of the land, and brought him news of all that was happening in Sejera and all Galilee, about the Chaimovitches and about the Roumanians arriving in Mishkan Yaacov, and thus he had known that Dvora was there at home.

  The circle around the blackened teakettle had dwindled, and Dvora realized that Menahem was speaking to her alone, as though continuing a long conversation they had been having about his visit with Galil to the Bedouin over there across the plain. “You know, Dvora, they sit there in their tents, and here we have come in our tents, perhaps like Abraham coming among the Canaanites—” It was a thought that many had vaguely felt tonight. But Menahem jumped to something else. “When I was a boy, I went once with my stepfather to a Russian village where there were no Jews—”

  But she had never known Menahem had a stepfather. The way he talked to her now was different from the way he had talked when he told his adventures. With one ear she heard him tell of his stepfather who bought pelts from the peasant hunters and bragged of tricking the thickheads who were even unable to add, but with the other ear, Dvora caught the story of his childhood, the household of stepbrothers and stepsisters, his sense that they were all in league against him, of his labor of carrying piles of pelts and drying them, of his mother who was always groaning and waiting for calamities. He talked on and on. The singing had died out with the fire; at one moment, Leah passed by on her way to the large tent for chaveroth, and Dvora said, “I’ll come later.” His words glinting with irony and bitterness, Menahem talked on, of his cheder and of how, before his Bar Mitzvah, he had organized a plot to beat up the melamed, and how his stepfather had given the beating back to him with a broad leather strap, and then shipped him off to the strictest of yeshivot, in Volozhin. Could she imagine that for a time he had been intensely religious? Night and day he had devoured the Talmud. The Cabbala had attracted him, though it was forbidden to study its mysteries before the age of forty. Meanwhile he had organized a revolutzia for the students to be allowed to read books of mathematical science. The yeshiva had cut off their food, the other boys had given in, and he, expelled, had gone not home, but to Odessa….

  It had grown chilly. Another would have put his arm around her, drawn her close. All at once, Menahem stood and gave her his hand, raising her up. It was the first contact of the flesh with him, a hand not aflame but holding a dry heat as of the sun. Dvora left her hand in his. They walked in silence and her blood made her dizzy. They came to a small tent, and it was Menahem’s alone, though all the other chevrehmen shared three and four in a shelter. Menahem was one of those, Yechezkiel had told her admiringly, who in his own way, without asking special favors or taking advantage, always managed to arrange himself.

  He drew her inside, and, stooping to kneel on the rush mat, she came into his arms.

  Menahem would know just what to do; he was a man. With her innocent Yechezkiel, would either of them have known what gesture to make next? Menahem’s kiss was solemn, and then, his voice half-strangled, he said, “Dvora, long before, already on the boat—”

  A distracting, almost frightening perception came to her. Could she even then have been seeking him, through the other? Was it Menahem to whom she had been going all the time? Or was some powerful law of life working within her, telling her this had to be so from the beginning, to make it possible for her still to believe that there is in life only one profound love? “Yes, on the boat, I knew,” she said.

  Some things, Menahem said, he had retained from his period of intense faith and belief. The idea of the destined one, the besherteh. Only the idea of destiny could explain the cruelty and tragedy he had seen in the world. Destiny had to be ruthless. And yet he also believed in the human will. Did she understand?

  Dvora half smiled in the darkness.

  And in that moment she felt entirely at ease. She raised her arms and unpinned her hair. Within the tent was black dark, but a sound came from Menahem at this movement of hers, a sound of such immeasurable relief that she was carried back to the time of their ship’s approach to Jaffa, after the long voyage they had undertaken with such fear of its perils, and their worry—would their loved brother and sister truly be waiting there on the shore? And then came the blessed moment of crying out, “They’re here! They’re waiting for us!”

  Both were kneeling; Dvora undid her dress, and knew he too was casting off his clothing. Then they lay down together on the mat; Menahem was trembling.

  7

  THE SETTLEMENT of Gilboa itself soon became a mother of settlements, as chalutzim went out from it just as the men of the Shomer and their friends had gone out from HaKeren in a line of wagons. They went out now to found another and another kvutsa in the Emek.

  Dvora’s marriage ceremony was held when she became pregnant; indeed four couples in succession were married that day in Gilboa, and as a concession to certain leaders in the Zionist movement who gave ear to all sorts of silly gossip about the kvutsoth, a rabbi was brought from Chedera to perform the rites.

  The feast was marked by a great triumph for Reuven Chaimovitch. For nearly two years Reuven had been trying to grow potatoes. In Yavniel, in Sejera, even in Rishon he had been told by those who had tried before him that the matter was hopeless. Potatoes simply would not grow in Eretz Yisroel. Planted, they rotted in the ground. If by some miracle they sprouted, the result looked like a crumpled worm covered with blight.

  Again and again, in HaKeren, Reuven had planted potatoes brought, after much correspondence, by chalutzim arriving from Russia. And his spoiled potatoes had become such a jest with Max Wilner and other chaverim that he dared experiment no further.

  Then in a Russian agricultural magazine he chanced upon an account of a potato blight in the Don region that had ended when seed potatoes were imported from Ireland, where only the hardiest plants had survived the terrible blight of a decade before, when much of the population had starved to death.

  And so, virtually in secret, Reuven had gone about procuring seed potatoes of the Irish variety. Not daring to have Max find out what he was up to, he had had the samples sent to Mishkan Yaacov and had planted them in the garden at home. Leah had cared for them.

  And behold, just before the family was to leave for Dvora’s marriage, he and Leah had dug up their first potatoes, firm, unblemished, and succulent even raw.

  There was a touch of slyness in Reuven. Everyone, every Zionist notable from Jerusalem and the new Jewish town of Tel Aviv, and from Sejera, and also those from his own kvutsa who had sneered at his failed experiments, would be at the festivities in Gilboa. And so, with stealth, not even letting the rest of the family know, he and Leah had packed a sack of these very first potatoes in the wagon beneath all the good things Feigel was taking to her second daughter.

  And while all the others were busy with a thousand greetings, Leah found a grater, and in the shanty that had been put up for an extra kitchen, she set to work grating her potatoes. The first to discover her secret was Rahel, who put a finger into the batter. “Real potatoes?” she asked, surprised, and Leah announced, “The first in Eretz. Reuven grew them.”

  “No! But it’s been proven impossible! They rot!”

  “Reuven grew them.”

  Despite the rapid expansion of the Gilboa kvutsa, the cooking was still being done as it had been in the beginning, over an outdoor fire on a tin grate resting on stones. As the odor of the first potato pancakes rose into the air, Tibor the Comic
al from Ha-Keren, walking by, suddenly halted in his tracks. He sniffed, and cried out, “Latkes? Real latkes?” and with one swoop of his hand snatched the first browned potato pancake that Leah was sliding onto a plate, crushing fully half of it into his mouth.

  Gasping with the pain of the burn, he nevertheless devoured the second half, only blowing on it a bit, with impatience, while Leah and Rahel doubled over with laughter. “Nu, it was worth it!” Tibor gasped and reached for another. “May my tongue burn out if it isn’t ambrosia!”

  From then on it was a stampede. Vainly Leah pleaded that they let her set aside a pile for the feast. Vainly the sated Tibor stationed himself by her as a pancake guard, proclaiming that he was the Shomer Latkes. Could he refuse a sample to Dovidl? And Avner? And after their leaders, why, the chaverim demanded, should there be such favoritism for the privileged? Around, and behind, and under, the chevrehmen darted, teasing, pleading, snatching. Leah hit at their hands, shouted epithets in Yiddish and Arabic, choked on her own laughter and the smoke from the griddle, while they kept calling out, “Leah! Beloved! One latke!” “My soul perisheth for a latke!”

  As she scraped up the last of the batter, Leah called out, “Chevreh, have mercy! It was Reuven who at last grew potatoes in Eretz, and he hasn’t even had a taste.”

  At this a roar arose for Reuven, who was hovering at the edge of the crowd, grinning almost guiltily. Ceremoniously, the chalutzim opened a circle and drew him in. As the last pancake was lifted from the griddle, Rahel took it on a plate and offered it to him. “Our own Aaron Aaronson!” she cried.

  Reuven loved her again. He loved her with the purest of comradely love. He forgave her in his heart for what she had said about his wild wheat at Sejera. If he ever succeeded in getting a good strain of date palms, she would be the first to taste the fruit.

  As for Leah, in this moment her entire being overflowed with love, her love embraced all the chalutzim, all, all, and the whole Emek stretching before them, and all the fields growing green, and the whole Eretz, she could embrace the whole of the land and hug it to her body, and be appeased.

  The big girl was restive. For a time she stayed in the new kvutsa, working one day in the kitchen, another day with the field crew, or even the construction crew, or suddenly, she would ask for a pair of mules so she could plow up a plot for vegetables. She kept changing her sleeping place. When the extra crowd of helpers who had come for the founding moved on, Leah remained the only one in the girls’ tent; the few others had coupled off. At once Zev the Hotblood, posted here on guard, began annoying her. He seemed to take it for granted that he could enter the tent in the middle of the night for “a little visit,” in accordance with a legend he had already made for himself when he had been the night watchman in Mescha and again in Yavniel. It was said he would slip in through the bedroom windows of grown daughters and even of young wives whose husbands were away, for “little visits” between his rounds. Indeed he had been sent away from Mescha after he had been seen climbing out of a back window one night from a house where the husband was absent; he had only been having a glass of tea to warm himself, Zev said. In this case the husband happened to be disliked by the whole of the village as an ill-tempered brute who wouldn’t share the flame of a match with a neighbor, so to spare the wife the complaint had been against Zev’s repeated absence from duty. But wherever he went there was scandal.

  Oddly, in Gilboa the chaverim seemed to take it almost as a joke that Zev was pestering Leah. Surely a girl her size need not worry about being overpowered! And when she complained, Nadina even delivered her a piece of intimate womanly advice about deprivation, and psychologia, and normal life in the atmosphere of a close community, concluding with a strong hint about comrades helping each other in their natural needs.

  Though everyone in the new kvutsa urged her to stay, it suddenly came to Leah how much Mameh must need her at home now that Dvora was no longer there to help. And her group of girls there in Mishkan Yaacov—after the dance for the poet Bialik, they had kept together around her, and she was teaching them vegetable gardening—her girls also were in need of her. Besides, Leah was overcome with longing for her baby brother Mati and the clever questions he had begun to ask about the sun and the stars and the universe, when Tateh, as soon as the little one could talk, tried to teach him, “In the Beginning …”

  Coming home, Leah was startled at the way little Eliza in these few weeks had turned into a whole new young person! There was a new touch of decisiveness in her voice, yet this was softened by an appealing touch of girlish womanly complicity in her glance. It took a look from Mameh to make Leah realize what had happened—Eliza’s first menstruation had come, and now the pisherkeh comported herself as a full equal, or even more, as a young woman who would know better than they had how to manage her life.

  When Leah, coming in from field work, pulled off her hobnailed shoes, Eliza would pointedly lift them at finger-edge and set them outside the door. As for herself, Eliza had always been dainty. In the market stalls of Tiberias she had bargained in Arabic through three separate visits for a pair of red harem slippers embroidered with glittering slivers of mica, until the beset vendor cried Allah save him! this girl would make her husband rich and all merchants poor! And he gave in to her price.

  These slippers Eliza wore about the house, and strangely, while everyone else’s things lost luster or became bedraggled, Eliza’s dainty footwear lasted quite well, the embroidery never losing its glitter.

  In that great trunk brought from the old country she had found some shirtwaists of their mother’s, blouses with lace cuffs and frills down the front, and with a little needlework Eliza had arranged them so that even on a weekday, should a visitor come to the door, the young lady looked dressed for Sabbath. Unlike Leah or Dvora, she loved to sew and crochet, and from an Arab woman in Dja’adi who still came down with eggs and cheese to sell to the Roumanians, Eliza had learned how to weave straw, so that the house was now adorned with her bright-colored mats.

  Though little Mati always rushed into Leah’s arms for her great hug when she came home from field work, the elder sister saw that he was quite happy to tag all day after Eliza, and if he tripped, it was to Eliza that he would present his bumped nose for the kiss that made it well.

  Nor were Leah’s village girls so constantly around her. While a few kept up their gardens, they were now in the age of intimate whispery friendships, like Eliza with Bronescu’s daughter Malka, spending much of their time visiting each other back and forth.

  The worst was that Zev the Hotblood, from whom she had fled, now appeared in Mishkan Yaacov on duty as shomer. No other than Zev had Galil found for them! A treat for the Roumanian wives! Quartered in a shed behind Bronescu’s store, Zev never passed Leah without a leer and a vulgar invitation. “Nu, Leah, you know where to find me! Better than Zev you won’t find anywhere!” Or, with a heavily-brushing palm too low on her back, “Ah, what a waste of good woman-flesh!”

  One moonlit night Zev managed to get at her. A cow whose labor was delayed had to be watched during the night, and on the second night Leah insisted that Gidon must get his rest while she took his place in the stable, sleeping on the hay.

  It was not the poor troubled beast that awakened her, but deep in the night Leah started awake to a presence. Zev was stretched out on the hay, his large hand hovering over her breast, and his face raised above hers so that were she to cry out his mouth would stop her. Even in the bluish darkness Leah saw his expression, the eyes intent as though everything was already understood and happening between them and he was watching on a woman’s face her passion rising and overcoming her. And his own features usually so heavy, with the full lips so repulsive to her, now were changed, drawn into harmony in a man’s glowing power.

  She had to force herself to pull away to the other side, deeper into the straw, but Zev’s hand followed and clamped down upon her breast. Like some obscurely admitted rule of the night-game between men and women, a rigidity came over he
r that forbade her simply to throw off the hand. For then, if her movement aroused him further, it would become a matter of struggle between bodies alone.

  “Zev, let me be,” she said. “You have nothing to do here.”

  “I came because you summoned me.” Leah had not expected him to speak with such inner knowledge of women, but only crudely. Ah, he was experienced. The hand exerted a slight pressure as though of its own weight; already he was showing her that he could be skilled and delicate in his caress.

  “Zev, I don’t want to have trouble with you. You’ve come to the wrong place. There’s no tea here.”

  “Milk is even better.” With a knowing, testing look in the corner of his eye, his head with the lips parted was moving downward to her breast, and this time she wrenched herself free. “Go about your watch!”

  “I was far on the other side when I felt your call,” he said, without stirring. “I felt you were lying here on the hay, alone, longing for a man. That’s true, isn’t it? This you cannot deny. So, in answer to your longing, and to my own desire for you, I was drawn and I came.”

  “Your own desire for me or for any other female flesh! Get out!” And with this Leah sat erect. Zev stirred, and gazed at her as though there was no need for him to rise, since she must soon lie down again alongside him.

  “Leah,” he said with a different tone, the easy intimate tone used by a man to a woman he has already lain with, and with whom he can be frank and comradely, “Leah, with each other you and I don’t have to have pretenses. You are a passionate woman who has far too long been deprived of her man, and I have a great lust for you. One superior article deserves another. I know that between you and me it would be something extraordinary.”