The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Gay, excited over some aerial feat above the Sinai desert, the group of young officers appeared for the Sunday dinner that had become customary with them. Through the glassed porch, Nahum saw them approaching, that same golden-haired one in the middle of his comrades, talking animatedly, with the swooping hand-gestures of the aviators that Shulamith’s little brother Mati had so quickly learned to imitate. Hurrying to the door, Nahum stopped them before they could enter. “I am sorry, there is no place for you,” he said.

  “But what is this! We always have our table on Sunday!” It was that same one, himself, Lieutenant Gottfried Schirmer-Hauptmann who cried out.

  “We no longer can serve you here. I am sorry.”

  One of them laughed. Surely it was some kind of a joke. And Nahum could scarcely believe it of himself. Yet he stood erect in his doorway and barred it to them.

  “Are you out of your senses? Who are you to refuse—” Another seemed about to push his way inside, and to Nahum it was as though in this instant his soul prepared itself to die. If only his mother would remain not near, and in the kitchen; at least the old man was at his shul.

  Then it was the seducer himself who led his comrades away, saying, “With a Jew, one does not dispute.”

  When his mother remarked, how was it the German fliers had not come, Nahum only shrugged.

  Early the next morning, two Turkish militiamen arrived and demanded Nahum for labor conscription. Old Bagelmacher was aghast. Had he not paid the price of a thousand francs for his son’s release! But the military police stood with ears of stone for his words. Without further ado, they plunged into the pension, seized Nahum and marched him off, one on each side, his poor mother running after them into the street with a hastily snatched blanket and a feather pillow; young dolts on the street laughed, while elderly Jews stared in terror and Reb Bagelmacher ran to the Kaymakam. It was useless. He could not get to see anyone of importance. In the street, every Jew already knew all that had happened, the tales about Shula Chaimovitch, the German cry, “With a filthy Jew one does not dispute.”

  With his wagonload of potatoes topped by a rattan cage of poultry, Yankel drove into Bagelmacher’s yard. But his old friend emerged with a countenance of thunder. “You can turn your wagon around and take it all back.”

  “What’s happened? What is it?”

  The wife came out behind the husband; glaring at Yankel, she snapped, over a sob, “He makes as if he knows nothing.” And directly to Yankel, “Take your geese and your potatoes and don’t come to us again.”

  Yankel stilled his rising anger. “What’s come over you? Did I ever bring you a rotten potato?”

  “Not your potatoes are rotted, but your daughter!” the woman screeched. “The harlot!”

  Still something in Yankel told him not to release his anger. Binyamin Bagelmacher, his friend, was gazing at him with the deep eyes of a tzaddik who weighed every word before pronouncing judgment. “Be still,” Reb Bagelmacher said to his wife. “Perhaps he really doesn’t know. A father, like a husband, is the last to know.” Already Yankel felt a tumult in his ears. He had had his misgivings, his fears, what with Bronescu’s pandering to the Germans.

  They told him. Even to the sneer uttered by the German anti-Semites, “With Jews one does not dispute.”

  And then they gave him the dreadful news of the conscription of Nahum. From such military labor as Nahum had been sent to by the Turks, Binyamin said in tragic sorrow beyond rancor, indeed in the torn voice of a man saying Kaddish, “From such labor, as we know, few will return alive.”

  Nor could Yankel at such a moment of bitterness, try to remind Binyamin Bagelmacher that his own son Reuven had nevertheless managed, even in their military labor, to be singled out for decent work in Damascus, and that surely Nahum with his cleverness—

  As to Yankel’s poultry and produce, there was no need for it, Bagelmacher was saying. The Germans would come here no more, nor would they be let in if they came. Yankel could take his produce and sell it in the market, even for higher prices.

  The last words Yankel scarcely heard, for he had already turned the wagon and was flailing against the back of the mule the whip he should rather raise against the skin of the Germans or—as the enormity of it all came to him—on his own daughter, the one that had always so gladdened his heart, his favored one, his Eliza, no less a whore than the female offspring of that poor Yemenite, the shochet Abadiya.

  The wagon swayed, crashed into potholes made by their motortrucks and their cannon, and with each lurch Yankel felt cries wrenched from him—angered and bitter reproaches against his Eliza, their Shula as he thought of her now, their Shulamith—it had all begun with that whorish name—and cries rose in his soul against his dear God, Gottenu! How could either of his loved beings fling him into such torments? With the Turks and the war, and the Turkish bandits dragging him away to break his back in the desert while the German pigs seduced his daughter, with his sons scattered in what ends of the earth who knew, and perhaps killing each other from both sides—why, why, with all his woes, did his comely one, his own favored one, have to heap these added burning coals on his head, coals of shame. “You—you—” the words burst from his mouth, he howled them out to the sky—“Harlot! With a German! An anti-Semite! A dog of a Christian!”

  All the while Yankel was on his way home calling down his bitterness upon her, Shula, though she had no intuition of her father’s anger, was pervaded by a guilty uneasiness. Half-hidden in Gidon’s old hut of black stones, she was reading the forbidden book. It had been her own thought, with no suggestion whatever from Gottfried, that she must read the Christian Bible. Nor was she reading it with even a hind-thought, with even the remotest danger, of accepting their Christian belief. But again and again, after the intoxication of her trysts, she had asked herself, How can I fall in love with a man and yet remain ignorant of something so important in his life as religion is to Gottfried? On his side, Gottfried after all was not ignorant of the Jewish Bible. He knew each place that was written about, he had gone to visit places she had never seen, like the altar of Elijah near Haifa. In the same way he naturally also sought out places in the Christian Bible, as on their excursion to Kfar Nahum. (Why, it was Nahum’s name! She never had thought of it. But what matter?) And once, when Gottfried strolled with her along the Kinnereth and they had passed a group of Arab fishermen whose nets hung drying from an ancient carob, he had remarked, “How true it seems when one walks along here, that Jesus said ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’ They must have looked just like these fishermen we see here.” Or again, when Gottfried told her another tale of the miracles of their prophet, Shula could understand, she could almost see for herself, how the Christians imagined their Mashiach walking on the waters of the Kinnereth; sometimes when the surface was so smooth and shining, with the sun’s glow behind the figure of a man far off, perhaps standing in a low-laden bark, you could imagine he was walking on the water.

  So it had come to her that to understand her Gottfried she must read the Christian Bible. But how and where would she secure it to read, without stories spreading that she was already about to become a convert? Of this in itself Shula had no fear; just as she was not a religious Jew, just so would it be impossible for her to become religious as a Christian. But her poor father was so pious that the mere whisper of his daughter’s having accepted from their mission a copy of their Bible would be enough! The same way as only to be seen walking with one of them proved a girl was already seduced!

  Nor could she ask Gottfried to bring her the book, for he too might give this a wrong interpretation. Even if she were to go in and buy the book in one of the shops in Tiberias that sold crosses and holy pictures—there too she might be seen.

  Then suddenly it came to Shula that once, idling among Reuven’s books in his room in the kvutsa, she had noticed it there in Russian. Of course this had not even surprised her. Their Christian Bible, Reuven told her, contained many interesting details about the wa
y people lived in the Galilee in those days, and besides, he said, it was important for Jews to know about Christian beliefs. And Moslem as well, he had said, though he had not yet read the Koran. He meant to learn to read Arabic and study it in the original language. “If the Koran was about Eretz, you would already be studying it,” she had joked, and he too had laughed. So her oldest brother, at least, would understand her.

  A few days before, then, though there was now a new chaver in Reuven’s place, Shula had gone to HaKeren, and finding the room empty, had taken the book, trusting that the new chaver would not notice before she put it back.

  Often, lately, she had used Gidon’s hut for moments of solitude. This much even her mother seemed to understand without questioning—a girl in her moods. “I’ll be down there in the hut.” Not yet had she permitted the hut to Gottfried as a trysting place, though sometimes she let herself daydream that he found her here and …

  For more than an hour now she had been reading the book of their belief, with a doubled sense of uneasiness. First, that no one should chance on her reading it. Second, that her reading might not do something, as yet unclear, to her wondrous spell of being in love. At one passage and then another, it was as though she must ask Gottfried, “But this story—do you believe in it too?” And if he did, would it leave her still in love with him?

  Much of the book, of course, was only grandmothers’ tales. Tales of miracles, of wonders of healing, of making the blind see, and signs from heaven, such tales were in the Jewish Bible too. Like the parting of the waters, or the angels who told Samson’s mother that she would give birth to a son, a Nazarite—was that the same as Jesus of Nazareth, she wondered? what did it mean? As with Samson, a holy man who should never cut off his hair? All the same kinds of stories, miracles like the walls of Jericho falling down—but hadn’t Reuven once said, there in Jericho it had been proven that they did fall because of an earthquake? But then in their Christian Bible she came to the part that made her feel sick with disgust—the part where the Jews cried out that Jesus must be put to death, and they shouted, “We take his blood on ourselves and on our children forever.”

  But it was unimaginable! Suppose the Turks were hanging a Jew—no matter for what—could such an outcry ever be imagined?

  Surely Gottfried did not agree to this!

  Why was it in their book?

  It was all like when there had been some puzzling subject in school, like when the melamed tried to explain the Bible story of creation, and also evolution, so they fitted together, but you really felt it was all imaginings from other days.

  Surely these were imaginings of ancient anti-Semites. Even put there on purpose! Another strange thing about their book—after she read the story of their Yoshka once, she saw that it was told all over again, the same story. Four times. Why was this? Were they themselves in doubt? After the first time, Shula read more quickly, as it was all becoming familiar, only here and there some new miracles were added. But each time she came to the part about the Jews she felt nauseated, and yet read every word. In not all of them, she noticed, was there that awful part about taking his blood on our children forever. Perhaps the Christians had kept adding things. And they told the whole story four times so as to make it seem more true, and so as to make you remember and believe it, the way you repeated the same thing over and over to simple people, and the more they heard it, the more they believed.

  And so Shula sat in the hut, on the stone bench along the wall. As by habit she had sat down on the same part of the bench she had slept on as a little girl, when the family first arrived.

  Suddenly she heard a heavy tread, and—not Gottfried—her father was already inside! His face was in fury; with an involuntary movement, she tried to hide the book, but there was nowhere—and in the same flash it came to her that if she hadn’t tried to hide it, he would never have noticed what it was. He carried the mule-whip, his arm was raised—this could not be happening! As Shula’s eyes met her father’s inflamed glare, her hands flew up to protect her face, the book fell, Shula let out a scream, “Tateh! No!” And as though the scream released his movement, Yankel’s arm swung the whip.

  He heard it strike her body, while some voice that had lain unknown in him shrieked out, “Daughter of whoredom!” Then Feigel, rushing after him as he howled out his rage, seized his arm with both her hands, hanging onto it with all her weight.

  Even as the girl crumpled but also tried to seize the book, Yankel already knew what it was. The Above One, he was sure now, had sent him here with the whip. Yankel wrenched the book from Shula’s hands, but his fingers shrank away from the hideous foul thing, and it dropped to the floor. Unclean! Tref! All the while his heart was weeping. Then it was true, all that everyone except himself must already have known was true, everything vile about her was true. The abomination was in his house. For this he had brought his children to Eretz. How long, how long had his house been impure, his daughter’s body the vessel of foul seed? And Yankel’s arm dropped, taken beyond anger to defeat; tears gushed from his eyes.

  He hardly heard their womanish babble, their lies to confuse and soothe him, with Feigel swearing no, she is not—no—nothing has yet happened, Yankel—I believe her, Yankel, by the head of Mati, by the soul of Avramchick, I believe her—and then babbling some story that the girl was reading their accursed book only to see for herself what lies they told, how they taught hatred of the Jews. Yes, poor Shulamith had been attracted to the German flier, but from their own book she was better prepared to see them as they are, and not be blinded—

  —Where had she got it?

  It was Reuven’s, Shula said, and Yankel’s rage burst out anew—Reuven’s! He might have known. All of them betraying him, deceiving him. And now in the middle of the girl’s weeping and protesting and swearing her innocence to her mother, she even had the indecency to shout out against him; how primitive could her father be over the mere reading of a book, to come and spy on her!

  Only then did Feigel seize her daughter, crying out, “Shula, he didn’t come because of the book!” And Feigel told her what had been done to Nahum in Tiberias, because of that German officer of hers.

  Staring at Feigel unbelievingly, Shula made her mother tell it again. And Nahum had closed the door in their faces? And they had cried “Filthy Jew” and sent the Turks to seize Nahum?

  The girl sat, stunned, not even feeling the smarting from the blow of the whip. Her mother had at last drawn her father away, and they had left her sitting there.

  In the following days her father did not look at her face, or speak to her. In the house the heaviness was unbearable. At least to Yaffaleh, Shula wanted to say something, to explain herself, but what could she explain? Schmulik in a boy’s way tried to show sympathy, pumping water for her kitchen tasks, telling her news—yet how much of her story had come to him? That Tateh had beaten her for reading the Christian book?

  And even poor little Mati kept looking at her, bewildered, as if he wanted to ask but dared not—should he cease admiring the flier in the air? Should he no longer want the German aviator to be victorious over every enemy in the sky?

  A hamseen came, and in the oppressive atmosphere even to breathe seemed not worth the effort. The image came to Shula of Nahum, in this dread heat, made to lift iron cannon-shells and carry them. This was what loving her had done for poor Nahum.

  She had to see Gottfried. Only once more. For one thing alone—to have him do something about Nahum.

  But to her note under their stone she found no answer. It lay there. Had he been spoken to? Had he been driven away?

  Even Malka Bronescu was avoiding her. In the village street, it was as though everyone were watching her the way one watches a crazy person to see what insane thing he will do next. The worst was that now her longing for Gottfried was returning. Perhaps he had been hurt, even shot down, killed. No, somehow she would have known; in their vengefulness the Jews would have told her. Yes, that was how she had just now thought of them, Tateh a
nd all the rest, “the Jews.” And how could she be certain it was Gottfried who had cried out insults against the Jews when Nahum barred the door? She owed it to Gottfried to hear it from himself. And how should poor Gottfried have known that Nahum was in love with her? had always been in love with her? All Gottfried knew was that the boy refused to let him and his friends into the restaurant. So the angry outburst from the Germans was natural…. But still, to have gone and complained to the Turks? Could she be in love with a man who could be so vindictive? It must have been one of his comrades who had done it. But then Gottfried could have stopped it. What sort of man was this who had taken her heart? How did a woman know what was true in a man?

  The sky and the sea and the yellow ripening fields, all nature seemed so certain of itself, and would tell her nothing. Nor would God. For despite everything, Shula felt there was God, yet neither God, nor nature—nature that sometimes told you things through your own body—would give her a single sign.

  Was the longing a sign? At some moments Shula even wished her father had continued with his whip until he had whipped it all out of her, the way a dybbuk is driven out, the way some of their nuns were said to whip themselves when they had evil desires until they fell unconscious.

  The silence, the silence around her. She was so used to the village girls running in and out of the yard, to liveliness and gossip, and at one moment it came to Shula with an inner bitter laugh and then a gasp of pity, that now she knew what it must be like to be an ugly girl, an ill-favored one who was left out of everything. On impulse she went down to the river to keep Yaffaleh company with the geese.

  It was then that Leah came back from Gilboa, seething with all she had found out there. Mama was alone in the house kneading, her hands not as strong as they used to be; Leah took over the task—where was Shula? And Feigel told her the new woes that had befallen, the girl halfway to seduction and conversion, the father raising a lash to his daughter—could he even be blamed?—God alone knew what was happening with the girl. Even though there was something in herself, Leah thought, that had always been a little envious of Simla’s femininity and prettiness, even if, for Shula’s vanity, she had perhaps in some hidden part of herself wanted the girl to suffer a little—it would have been only a little, not deeply like this. How should she begin? “Shula, let what happened to me at least serve some purpose, let it help you—”