The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  It was Leah who did most of the talking, in a German even more Yiddish than Shula’s. Gottfried expressed great curiosity about Gilboa itself; even though quartered there, he and his friends had learned little about the ways of a communa. He himself, he said, had socialist convictions, and presently Leah was explaining to him the looming question about a part of the group going to settle up north.

  “I hope it is not because we are driving them out?”

  “Not that at all!” she explained. “But among us it is a principle that as soon as one place is settled we should bring life to a new wilderness.” And so at Gilboa there were those who had fallen in love with a far hilltop where the melted snows from Mount Hermon made a waterfall.

  “Ah, yes, I have seen it! Beautiful!”—From his airplane. Nothing in the land was unknown to him. The Germans with their thoroughness!—Ah what an ideal pastoral life it would be, Gottfried said, in a place of such great natural beauty. He too was a romantic. He could even see himself remaining here after the war, to lead such an ideal life. And when he turned to smile intimately at Shula, Leah knew that this whole thing might become very difficult.

  How quickly the motorcar had covered the distance that took more than half a day in the wagon! After the war, automobiles would come, the settlements would be joined by roads, and help could come from one place to another in no time at all!

  As they arrived in the Gilboa yard, Leah experienced an odd sense of error, as when one knocks on a familiar door and a stranger appears. All was inordinately neat, as though the very ground had been brushed, and there was a gravel walk to the dining hall but—grotesquely—there was a flying squadron flag over the entrance, and a German flag flew from the roof.

  “Perhaps the young ladies would care to freshen themselves?” Gottfried said, and led them again on a new gravel path to the dwelling cottages—past Dvora and Menahem’s room, where an officer sat on the porch, reading. Of course she had known that the cottages were taken over, while the members of Gilboa lived in the barn and in various sheds. On the far side of the yard she could see a row of tents, the same tents that she had helped pitch on the day of the founding of Gilboa and that long before had been taken down. The chevreh were back in their tents, but at least, she knew, it helped their strained financial situation that the Germans were paying for their lodgings. Only the children’s house had been left to the communa. Never mind. Let this but be the worst of the suffering brought by the war.

  Leading them to what had been Nadina and Galil’s chamber, Gottfried opened the door and stepped aside for Leah and Shula to enter. The furnishing was the same, even to the Arab water jugs and the bits of ancient mosaics that Nadina and Galil had carried back from a walking trip to Caesarea. But yet the atmosphere of the room was entirely changed. Another officer, Gottfried’s roommate, his arms filled with shirts and mannish belongings, formally inclined his head, acknowledging Gottfried’s introductions.

  “But we are driving you out of your room,” Shula protested charmingly, and it seemed to Leah that her silly sister didn’t even realize the irony of her remark.

  “Please!” Gottfried had the grace to say. “It is we who have driven out your own people. I assure you we would have been quite satisfied in the tents, after all, we are soldiers, but this had already been arranged. At least for tonight you must take back your home. I assure you we shall make ourselves quite comfortable, don’t fear.” And with a gallant smile to Shula, “I will give you only a few minutes out of my sight.” He looked at his watch, a fine instrument with additional small hands and complicated markings that Mati had marveled at. “A quarter of an hour?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Shula said.

  “Not a moment more. Remember, we aviators are exact!” And he left them.

  It was clear which was his bed, for beside it stood a photograph of his parents, the father resembling him. And even in middle age, how handsome a man!

  Gottfried had, perhaps quite unthinkingly, set down Shula’s little valise on his own bed.

  Again, Leah glanced at her young sister.

  Choking hot in that closed-up dress—perhaps in the evening it would at least become bearable—fatigued from the pounding ride and the tension of sitting so close to him, Shula wanted only to strip off the gown and lie down for a while. Leah had already taken off her blouse and was sponging herself at the basin. Latching the door, Shula started to undo the torturesome gown when there was a knock. “Please. I forgot something.” It was he. Only putting a towel around her shoulders, Leah went to the door; her huge breasts against her camisole had left large damp circles. Before Shula could say anything, she had let him in. Gottfried went straight to his night table, slipped a little book into his pocket and was marching out. “Military secrets?” Shula had recovered her spirit.

  “My diary,” Gottfried blurted, surprisingly blushing.

  “Love secrets, then!” she said.

  He blushed even more strongly, with an effort at lightness blurted “Touché!” added confusedly, “Please forgive the intrusion,” and rushed out.

  Leah re-hooked the door. “How could you display yourself like that!” Shula snapped. Her big sister let out a roar of laughter. “It’s not my bosom he’s aching to behold!” But at last the tension between them was lifted. Shula pulled her gown over her head, letting out her breath with relief, and took the sponge. There was even cologne on the stand. Imagine, these German men! She used a bit, feeling naughtily intimate, and offered the bottle to Leah, who sniffed it and laughed. Luxuries.

  In her petticoat, Shula stretched out on his bed. On the same little side-table lay a German Bible, and also, to her surprise, a Hebrew language book. Leah had already dressed and was going; she couldn’t wait to see Dvora and also to run to the children’s house to see Giora and Yechezkiel, and find out how Nadina’s little Buba was faring. “Are you coming?”

  “Go ahead, I’ll come in a moment.” An impulse had suddenly come over Shula; what would it feel like to be alone in his room as though waiting for him?

  Opening his Hebrew exercise-book she saw his writing, filling in the lessons. It looked even and methodical. Handwriting was something a person couldn’t disguise. Malka Bronescu pretended that she could read character from handwriting. Perhaps when Gottfried wrote her letters, she would show Malka his writing—where the words were not too private.

  This time he did not let her leave his arms, laughingly refusing her to his fellow officers except for his commander and once for a dance with his roommate. Circling and circling in the waltz with Gottfried, she felt hypnotized. Sometimes she caught sight of Leah, who had made quite an impression on the commander, and floated evenly by, like a queenly ship at sea.

  At one time, when the music halted, Gottfried led Shula outdoors and upward on the slope of Gilboa, to where the young pine forest began. A soft wind touched her cheeks like the brushing of the tender feathery branches when she looked up to the sky, that clear sky of Eretz over which all the diamonds of creation had been flung. Just like the scattered diamonds on a blue velvet pad she had once seen in a jeweler’s shop—where could she have seen such luxury? Not in Tiberias—there, you only saw at best bits of amber and silver ornaments for Christian tourists. Then Shula remembered; far back when they had started on their journey and come as far as Odessa to take ship, she had followed her father and mother into a jeweler’s shop where Tateh intended to buy, for his wife’s keeping, something they had much spoken of, a “diamondl.” In long discussions in Cherezinka after Mameh had sewed the gold coins into Tateh’s money-belt, the parents had decided on buying a “diamondl” as their last resource, a diamondl which Mameh was to hold in case “anything should happen” on the perilous journey, or in case starvation should beset them in Eretz, or again, in case a Jew had to flee with his family. On a blue velvet pad the jeweler—a good Jew who, having been recommended by their rich uncle, was sure not to take advantage and sell them a piece of glass as he might to a moujik—had then spread his diamonds.
This, Shulamith now saw in the sky. Tateh had only been able to buy a very small stone, and it had been set in a brooch with tiny seed pearls around it. How many times—such as the time when all the cattle had been stolen from the village—had she heard worried discussion between Tateh and Mameh, “Perhaps now we should sell the diamondl?” But it had always seemed that there might yet come a greater disaster for a Jew, though Shula also suspected, with a sudden perception of Mamaleh’s femininity, that her mother could not bear to part with her diamond brooch. That last time, Tateh had been loaned money by Reb Bagelmacher, who had even refused to take the diamondl as a pledge.

  Why had all this memory come to her now, Shula wondered, and just then she felt again the feathery brushing upon her cheek, not the touch of the delicately wafted pine branches but of Gottfried’s lips. And then on her mouth. It was a very tender kiss, and it gave her a great relief that it did not arouse her, not even the way the kisses of one or two of the boys in the village had done, boys she had quickly had to forbid. It was more like Nahum’s at a kissing game that Malka had introduced when she gave a birthday party at her house.

  And again Gottfried began to talk of religion! Yet it was true, the sky like this and the shadowy earth made you feel the mystery of God.

  “Thus it must have looked to the Hebrews of old,” he said, “to your Ur-father Abraham,” he said, while she wondered what kind of an educated word that was, Ur-father? “In a place like this,” Gottfried went on, “one can almost feel God speaking, as men in olden days felt or heard God’s words. One believes.”

  His arm was around her. But as it was permitted in dancing with a man, why should this be different?

  Beyond, across the flat Emek, the darkness of the earth swelled upward in the outline of a full breast perfectly rounded, and just then in the night sky a band of mist floated over it, like a thin batiste gown rising as a woman breathed; it made Shula think of Leah’s breast when her big sister lay sleeping in their room at home.

  “Tabor,” Gottfried said quietly, in the voice of a lover careful not to disturb a beloved’s mood. Then he said, as one quoting, “And the poor shall inherit the earth!” It must be from the words of their Yoshka, somewhere she had read it, and indeed Gottfried now added, “Tabor is believed to be the place of your Rabbi Yehoshua’s Sermon on the Mount.”

  “I know,” she replied. “You have a monastery on the top. For us it is the place of the song of Dvora the prophetess. My sister is named after her.”

  “A song of war,” he said, but not ironically, and he began to speak of all the wars there had been on the plain before them, the Assyrians and the Crusaders and the Saracens and the ancient Philistines against King Saul; even Napoleon had marched here, “and you know it is prophesied that the fate of the world will be decided in a terrible battle that will take place here, the Armageddon.”

  Shula drew in her breath. Perhaps that final, enormous conflict was coming now, and she could see Gottfried in his airplane, no, not falling, not shot down wounded, she would not permit such false visions. “You remind me of my brother Reuven,” she said to avoid those thoughts. “I remember when we first came on the way to the Galilee in a wagon, as we passed here, Reuven gave us the same lecture about all the wars. But you know, he hates wars, he is a pacifist,” she added.

  “You would not believe it, but I too hate war,” Gottfried said, adding that he should like to meet her brother Reuven, he sounded remarkable.

  “Oh, he is,” and Shula wondered what attitude Reuven would take about what was perhaps happening to her? No, Reuven would be broad-minded and understanding.

  Now Gottfried said, but not in a flirting way, that he was glad he had come to this land. When he had learned that a squadron was to be sent to Palestine, he had even prayed that it would be his own, for he had sensed that in the Holy Land was destiny. And he held her shoulders closely.

  “Do you really believe your God answers your prayers?” she asked.

  “Our God?”

  “Jesus.” Saying the name was a little strange.

  Gottfried became reflective. “No, not exactly. You see, I don’t believe a person or a spirit sits up there listening to every human request. That is one of our differences with Catholics, who believe in a more personal way, even in all sorts of saints as well as Jesus and Mary, and pray to them by name. But perhaps in a very great crisis something of our own spirit breaks through and in some way reaches a universal spirit—that is to me the Christ.”

  They were silent. Her heart was beating violently.

  Shula made a slight move to go back, but as though desperate to hold her, to bridge the gap that his last words might have made between them, Gottfried said, “It was there on the Mount that Christ repeated the words Moses said on Mount Sinai, Love Thy Neighbor.”

  —He had really studied the Bible, she remarked.

  —Did she know, he said, that it was Luther who translated the Bible into German so that all could read it for themselves? Because to the Catholics it was a forbidden book.

  “No, I didn’t know.” Shula was really surprised. How ignorant she was of things after all important in a world ruled by the Christians. Perhaps then, their Protestants were coming closer to an understanding of the Jews, and one day there might even cease to be anti-Semites?

  —Yes, he said. When you took away the superstitions, all the great religions had the same truth. They sought the goodness of man, in a union with God. And here in this land one really felt in some mystical way that it must happen, perhaps even now through the return of the Jews. He hoped after the war was won his country would administer this land, and help to bring this about; he would even like to remain here and take part, he could think of nothing more important in life, and he was entirely in favor of Zionism.

  Shula gazed up into his face. Why had Gottfried declared this to her? Her limbs were trembling, but it was an inner trembling that a man perhaps would not detect even though he had his arm around her. She must go back now, she said, the girls would begin to talk about her. “You know how silly girls are,” and before going they moved very closely together as one being, and the trembling rose all through her. “Dear one,” he whispered. But then while clambering down, Gottfried had to take his arm from around her and she felt more calm; the danger that he had perhaps not even known about in her had passed for the time being.

  When he opened the door to the room for them and bade them sleep well, Shula saw that the bedcovers were off and that the sheets had been turned back by his Arab, and for an instant she had a silly impulse to ask Leah to change beds. But when she was lying in his sheets (though it was certain that the servant had placed fresh ones) she would not deny herself a daring, delicious moment of snuggling down, with her cheek on his pillow, as though turned to a husband for a good-night kiss. And the imagined kiss swept her blood, for in bed that was surely how things began.

  Shula turned her face upward and lay rigid, forbidding herself. Excited, she could not hope to sleep. Then Shula was aware that her big sister too was wakeful in the dark. Shula wanted to speak. On her lips were the beginning words, Leah, are you awake? But a tumult was in her mind as to just what should follow.

  Then she heard Leah’s voice, “Shulaleh, you can’t sleep?” And the words that tumbled out in anguish, different from anything she had expected to say, were, “Oh, Leah, now I know how terrible it must be for you. And it doesn’t go away, as people say, does it? Year after year I see that it remains in you.”

  After a long moment, Leah’s voice came, not offended, not hurt, and even with a touch of humor within its warmth. “No, Shulaleh. At another sufferer I can’t be offended. Only you don’t know, may you never really know how terrible it is. And I only want to help you, so you should never know. So it won’t be for you like for me. Or even worse.”

  At this, Shula’s tears began, and even in the dark Leah knew it, though the sobs were stifled in the pretty one’s throat.

  “Has it really become serious, Shulaleh?
” the big sister asked, and only then, to answer her, the sob broke out. “I know this sounds like old-fashioned advice,” Leah said, “but perhaps the best thing is to stop it now, and not see him again.”

  “And you? Would you have taken such advice?”

  “But he believed in everything I believe in,” Leah said. “We might have had a life together here.” And in her unended words it was as though she could not stop believing that that life might still come.

  Shula said, “He thinks of remaining here.”

  “What!”

  “He loves this land, Leah. This is sincere. And when the war is over, Germany would help the Jews to develop the land, and he wants to stay and be in the administration. He thinks there is nothing more important in life.” She sucked in her breath, sharply, perhaps she had said too much even to Leah.

  “All this he told you?” Leah did not even add, What if Germany should lose the war? Her mind was striving, searching—what did the man really mean? And if perhaps he was truly in love with Shulamith? That too had to be given consideration. Men, too, sometimes changed their lives for love.

  A Christian. The cry from forever rose in her, “It will kill Tateh,” but to this there was also a reply. It did not kill them. It deadened the hearts of such fathers toward their daughters, it was true, and could even deaden their hearts altogether, and yet in life, if a love of this kind happened to a girl, wasn’t it more of a sin and even a greater imposition of suffering to destroy the daughter’s love, to make her give it up for the sake of the father and mother, when it was she herself who would have so many more years to suffer? And even not counting the heartbreak of the man in the case!

  And indeed on principle, Leah demanded of herself, since she was a freethinker and believed in all freedoms, could she rule out intermarriage? But if they were to intermarry with Christians, why had they come to Eretz? How devilish was the Master of Life, if indeed such there were. Against each thing you believed in was set another thing you also believed in. Almost at this moment she grasped what it was that her Moshe had tried to expound when he and Rahel argued over a rule called dialectics. A rule from Karl Marx. But a rule from philosophy—did it help you solve what was in a girl’s heart, did it help you to help your young sister?