by Meyer Levin
At least he had reverted to his own crude self. Over her distaste there nevertheless rose a dismaying wonder—could it be that Moshe had talked loosely about her even to one such as Zev, that he had boastingly described her most abandoned ecstasies the way one man does to another? Were Moshe and this Zev not after all the same sort, hunters of women?
And even this dismay in her, the brute also caught. A boor endowed with delicate sensitivity about women. “Why be angry? If a man praises a woman to another man, it’s the best compliment. After all, most of the women a man lies with are nothing but holes—”
“Zev, enough of your foul mouth. Get out of here.” This time she jumped to her feet. At least she was fully dressed, having lain down in her clothes, thinking she might have to fetch help during the night.
“Leah, there are so few women a man can talk to without pretenses. Believe me, if there was even a chance that your man would be coming back one of these days, I wouldn’t approach you. But why should we both suffer such strong need—”
“Go satisfy your need with the nearest she-goat,” Leah found herself blurting coarsely. “I’m not an animal.”
“Nor entirely am I.” He too had at last risen from the hay, and Zev was facing her with the air of a man who, having been insulted, has a certain right of response. “I am not so much an animal as you would like me to be. Because in that case you wouldn’t feel in danger of wanting me.”
“All right, you are an idealist, a benefactor of womankind. I still don’t want you. Can you believe it?”
He stood without moving closer, a man fully aware of his potency. There was no denying this about Zev. It was not a potency such as had emanated cleanly and insistently from Moshe, for from Zev it reeked. The stable was the place for it, it was part of the animal odor, and to Leah’s angered shame, she felt herself as though steeped in the after-odor of cohabitation, of two bodies in bed when the seed has already been spent and a wallowing lust is again awakening.
“Don’t play the delicate maiden with me,” Zev said, with his eyes deliberately denuding her. “I know the things women tell each other about men, the same way men tell each other about women when there’s a partner that’s something special. The women that are real women—they tell each other about me—isn’t it true? I’ve even had some women admit they couldn’t rest until they tried me, to find out if all they had heard could really be true.” He laughed grossly.
There was such a childish sexual pride in the lout bragging of his prowess that Leah was able to laugh. Poor foolish Zev, he had himself released her. And with this Leah became fully awake, all her startled night-feelings, her half-immersion in a seductive drowsiness, was fallen away and she even found herself, in a partly amused clarity, with a certain sympathy for the lout. For what else was Zev but the most bumptious of all the men of the Shomer—a braggart, a liar, a troublemaker!
Yet in spite of everything, some quality held people to him. There was a force, a self-belief, a power around him as though he were not merely a watchman on a horse but a creature of an important destiny who was meanwhile filling in with ordinary tasks, awaiting his time.
“Yes, Zev,” she said, “you are famous among women. All the wives in Mishkan Yaacov confide in each other. Each morning they count up between themselves how many you visited the night before, and describe to each other the fantastic things you did to them! They come and tempt me with their revelations until my whole body burns for you! Ay, ay, Zev, do you want to know what we really say about you? We say that in spite of being such a braggart and a nuisance, you’re a courageous shomer and an excellent horseman, only you’re sure to make trouble if you stay long in one place, because there are always a few miserable unhappy women who desperately try to get a little pleasure, so they let you in. Everyone agrees the best thing for you, and even for the Shomer, would be to get you married, but what girl would want to risk herself with such a lout? That’s what we say.”
A whole series of attitudes had come over him. At first Zev had listened with a broad smile as though to say: Go on, make fun of me, you’ll be like all the rest and lie down with me in the end; then he seemed a bit uncertain whether he should not after all show offense. A woman could refuse him, but there was no need for her to make fun of him! In the end he was like a cheating butcher who laughs when you catch him with a heavy finger on the scales. Ah, he laughs, other women are stupid, so he fools them and enjoys cheating them a bit, but you are different, with you he won’t try any tricks, he will always be honest.
Then a fortunate thing happened. The cow began to go into labor. Hurriedly, Leah lighted the storm lamp; the forelegs of the calf emerged and then the birthing halted. The animal got to her feet and stood in the stall with the calf partly out; she didn’t seem to feel anything at all, and began chewing fodder. After they had waited for what seemed a long while, watching with increasing anxiety, Zev, without further ado, took hold of the protruding forelegs and began a careful steady pull. The calf emerged undamaged and at once tried to rise on its wobbly legs. The mother turned her head and began to lick.
Now, on Leah’s compliment on his work, Zev began to talk of his experience as a boy on his uncle’s farm in the northernmost of the Baron’s settlements, Metulla, on the lower slope of Mount Hermon.
Like everyone, Leah knew that Zev was an orphan of the Kishinev pogrom, and that he had been brought by an uncle to Palestine, but she knew little more. The settlers up there in Metulla were not much heard about; life there was said to be barren and poor.
His uncle had made him work without end, Zev said, and had beat him without end. Once for losing a calf—just like this it had half-emerged, he had pulled too hard and it had come out choked and dead. After the beating he had run away and lived among the Druze on the mountain ridge. There among them he had learned to ride and shoot.
—An independent boy, a bit like Gidon, she thought. But now he was bragging again about how even the Druze lads made him their leader, saying his eyes could detect animal tracks where only a shadow had passed. And “by my life” he swore, telling about the slim, smooth-skinned Arab girls who had stolen to him in the fields where he tended the sheep, and taught him their special ways of making love. No—seriously! It was unimaginable! He was ready—and now at least he made his offer half-comically—to show her these secrets at any time.
What a liar, Leah laughed to herself. The Druze were known to be the most watchful of all over their daughters. Still, she let Zev brag and tell of his adventures: Of how the sheikh himself had offered him a daughter without bride-money (just like Menahem’s tales!) and how he had even been initiated into the secret rites of the Druze religion. Oh, he could not reveal a single detail, it was truly secret, but every year, as she knew, their tribes gathered not far from here, on the other end of the Kinnereth, on the rock ledge known as the Horns of Hittim, and if she wished, he would take her, though women of course had to remain outside the secret conclave.
“Exactly like the yearly meeting of the Shomer,” Leah snorted. “That’s what you are in the Shomer—no more advanced than those superstitious tribes with their secrets for males only.”
In the end Zev had come away to the Galilee and become a shomer. “Something called me to my own people,” he said. “Leah, you will laugh at me. Everyone thinks of me as a yold. An ignoramus. I am. I admit it, I am not proud of it. When Galil and Nadina and the rest of them start with their theories from books and their arguments, who am I to give an opinion? I let them talk and I walk out. But I can tell you that after talking all night and breaking their heads, howling ‘Borochov said this’ and ‘Gordon wrote that,’ they come out of their sitting and do exactly what I decided we would have to do in the first place. Yes, they could all have become members of the Duma or professors in the university, they made great sacrifices to come here and ride the rounds on the fields, no better than an ignorant yold like Zev from Metulla. They sleep with each other’s chavera only after quoting Bialik to her, but I can tell you the
same hot little bitch rolls in the goren with Zev without waiting for even a word of poetry. All of our fine intelligentsia want to return to the soil, to labor with their hands, to produce a new people, to remake the Jews. It’s people like me who will be produced out of the earth of Eretz; here I am already, half a Jew, half an Arab, and maybe this is not exactly what they are writing about in all their literature.”
What had brought him to this outburst? Did he think that in some way she too felt herself above him? On his lone rounds in the night, were these the forces and angers boiling in Zev, and was it this also that drove him to seek some woman, some haven, some way to discharge the fury in him? Leah again felt a powerful intuition that in some way Zev would be singled out, that an event waited for him, and she could not be sure whether it would be something dreadful or of high worth.
Light was beginning to come, and the newborn animal turned toward it, while the mother’s tongue followed on the still-matted skin. “Nu, I’ll make us some tea after all!” Leah said. “You can tell everyone you spent the night having tea with me!”
After that time Zev appeared more than once, coming to the kitchen at the pre-dawn hour, for Leah had taken over from Mama the task of rising before everyone else to prepare tea for the men. Despite all his vulgarity and loudness, and her real dislike of much in his character, there remained between them almost the same kind of special link there is between a man and a woman who once spent a night in physical intimacy, a night which left them feeling they knew the truth about each other, but which the woman does not feel called upon to repeat.
Nevertheless Leah was restless and even a little afraid that in some foolish moment she might give way, and make another great mistake in her life. At times she would run off to HaKeren for a visit with Reuven. Staying over one Sabbath when Old Gordon held a literary meeting, she asked Max Wilner to put her on the work sheet and stayed on, telling herself that Eliza was now enough of a help for Mama in the house. But not a month had passed before she was telling her old chavera Nahama, with whom she was now on better terms, that she was thinking of trying life in Jerusalem.
“Leah, you run around like your tail was on fire,” Nahama observed. The kvutsa had voted to begin having children; she was pregnant and had taken to knitting. “Take my advice, chavera. Handsomeness is not the most important thing in a man, just as beauty is not the most important thing in a woman….” All at once Leah’s former irritation with sweaty Nahama came back over her.
When Leah asked leave of the kvutsa to go for a few months to Jerusalem to help Avner’s Rahel start a tree nursery, even Reuven chided her. “Leah, perhaps next time the kvutsa won’t accept you back.”
But in Jerusalem she did feel better. With Rahel, Avner, Dovidl, she settled into what seemed a little kvutsa of their own. The courtyard where Leah had learned stonecutting was now taken over for rows of clay pots containing Rahel’s seedlings. Except only for Yosi the sculptor, who kept his corner, Professor Schatz had at last moved the artists and artisans to his new Bezalel building, the one on which Reuven once had labored.
Leah had arrived just in time, Rahel said, for she was eager to expand her tree nursery and also to train young girls, as Leah had done in Mishkan Yaacov. To train girls in the city of Jerusalem itself for agriculture was most important. Already Rahel had several young chalutzoth busy with watering cans over her seedlings, but she hoped even to lure daughters of the Hasidim from Mea Shearim to the work and to teach them to become women of the soil.
Somehow here Leah no longer felt that persistent inner harassment, as though she were uncertain she was in her proper place for what life must bring her. To their courtyard came the movement’s every question and problem. Chalutzim would appear from all over the land to have a word with Avner, and newly arrived young men came here too; Leah could always fill an extra plate of soup and find room on the floor of someone’s room for another sleeper, and all evening they would sit around the samovar that Rahel had now moved into Avner’s room, holding discussions.
Just as Avner and Dovidl were a pair in their political work, so Leah and Rahel were a balanced combination. Nor did the cross-weave of the four of them feel unbalanced to her, even though Rahel and Avner were a man-and-woman pair; with herself and Dovidl there was a bond, too, almost the better for being untrammeled by sexual matters.
As to that side of life, Dovidl did not seem troubled. From time to time, one young chalutza or another would be seen about with him. Magnetic and finely made in his small-boned way, who could say that he was not handsome? But Dovidl seemed to brush sentimental matters aside as not of great consequence against the pressing and constant accumulation of “problemoth.” These “problemoth” were the shared fare of their intimacy, and here Leah was made to feel that her thoughts, her advice, represented the healthy wisdom of a good devoted worker without complications or outside motives, and therefore Dovidl in the end always turned to her with his “Nu, Leah, and what do you have to say?”
But then a sum of money at last arrived for the two leaders to fulfill the plans agreed on, already a few years ago, at that fateful conference in Sejera, for Dovidl and Avner to go to Turkey to study and prepare to enter Ottoman politics, perhaps eventually to seek election to represent Palestine in the Young Turk parliament. From the Labor Zionists among the needle trades in America there came a collection to be used especially for this purpose.
Two Arab notables from Jerusalem held seats there in Constantinople, and were even proposing resolutions against the sale of land to Jews—while their own families went on selling. It was only to drive up the prices, Ostrov the Landbuyer said. But as there were more Jews than Arabs in Jerusalem, if the religious ones could be got to vote, surely at least one seat could be gained.
Soon after Dovidl and Avner had gone off, Rahel took it into her head to go and study agronomy in France; somehow she would support herself by giving lessons. And despite Yosi the sculptor whistling at his work in the yard, and despite all the chevreh who came and went, Leah felt alone in Jerusalem.
8
ONLY A few years. And from the slope of Gilboa you could see, instead of a jungled marshland, long slices of cultivated soil, patterns of red and yellow and green, not only of the Shomer’s kvutsa, but of a new settlement behind it, a larger one, calling itself a kibbutz. And there was a third, edging down the flat expanse of the Emek. But all this was not to come without loss.
Still another cooperative settlement was about to be founded on a large central tract alongside the railway, near the stop at Fuleh. For months there had been delays, for in the midst of the area was a cluster of huts, an Arab village now dwindled to a dozen families. They had hardly been spoken of when Yehoshua Ostrov bought the land from a mortgage holder in Beirut. “They will move off, they will clear out, they have nothing there anyway, most of their sons have gone off to Nablus and they will go to their sons,” the mortgage banker had assured him. “When your people are ready, they will go. You will perhaps pay them a little something for their dwellings, though in any case they no longer own them, they have nothing, nothing.”
The dwellings were of mud and straw, of the poorest kind, low huts without windows, Shabbatai Zeira said after he had gone to have a look at the place; each was a single room, where in the rains the family’s few goats crowded in as well. Who inhabited the village was even hard to say. Once it had been a better place, but as it became impoverished, some of the families had moved elsewhere, and there was a mingling now of squatters—a few cousins, he believed, of the Zbeh who had settled around the railway stop in Fuleh, where some of them worked a bit as porters.
But the inhabitants of the huts had not moved off even after the deed for the lands was received. Menahem rode out with Shabbatai and Galil. The land was overgrown with thickets, except for here and there a cultivated patch of barley, barely enough for a family’s own use. Or a melon patch. In the little village, small children ran naked or with a few rags around them. The mukhtar’s guest-hut was barr
en, except for a straw mat. He came to greet them, a small, oldish man with only one good eye; a dourlooking son appeared, and also sat with them, after calling back into the near hut, from which a boy after some time came, carrying a battered finjan of coffee with yellowed little porcelain cups on a tray. Meanwhile the old sheikh had not waited to tell his woes.
No, for several years now they had not troubled to make crops, for what use was it? Each year the portion of the crops taken away by the moneylenders from Beirut had grown greater. When the grain was ready to cut, the moneylenders even sent a man to sit on the fields to watch that not a sheaf was hidden away. First the fellaheen had had to borrow money on their grain to pay the taxes imposed by the Turks, and each year the taxes grew, and then the moneylenders took their share, greater each year, until there was nothing left.
It was true, the sons had gone away, entire families had gone away, for after the land had gone back to a wilderness there was more sickness. When the Kishon River flooded in winter, the fever came. Now they had been told that nothing was their own and they must leave, but where should they go? This was where he himself had been born, and his father before him, and generations before; this had always been their place. True, the land itself had long been owned by others, in Beirut, who never came here, and to whom they had paid the first half of the crop, and from whom they had received loans in time of need. And in the last years, nothing. A few goats remained. But as they always had lived here and had cultivated this land, how could they be made to leave?
“Because for many years you have not cultivated it at all,” Shabbatai Zeira said. “This is the law, as everyone knows.”
—If the Jews would come, and the land would be worked again, the old mukhtar said, perhaps there would be work for his people as well, and they could stay here and things would be better. Thus it had fallen out in the valley of Faradis, when the Jews came.
