by Meyer Levin
Everyone was in the house, so the two of them couldn’t speak together during the meal, but Shula’s eyes kept asking Leah something, and the moment they could go out to sit under the grape arbor, she begged, “Is he there in Gilboa? What’s happened to him? Leah, I haven’t heard—” Should she tell the girl at once what she had learned about her fine Gottfried?
The fliers had been much away, staying in a new camp near Beersheba, Leah told her, and Shula sighed in relief, for his silence was explained. She pulled her dress from her shoulder; in the waning light the reddish welt curved into the cleft of her breasts. No, it didn’t hurt any more, only an itching. Did Leah think it would leave a mark?
Leah looked closer. No, she said, luckily the cloth had protected the skin. They looked into each other’s eyes, and something like a foolish laugh and a pleading broke from Shula. “I was only trying to find out, to know what they believe, what they are really like. Doesn’t a girl have a right—she must try—or how can a girl really know the truth about a man?”
Thus, Shula herself had given Leah the moment. “Shula, believe me, there is something I did—it was from the same need—to find out—I wanted to help you to know everything about him. You remember when we slept in the room, and he came back to take away his diary? We joked it had secrets of love—”
Shula had sucked in her lower lip. Oddly, a glint of her natural liveliness, curiosity, even of girlish perversity had come into her eyes. “You looked into it!”
Leah nodded.
“He writes about me? Love?”
“About you, buba. And others.”
“Oh.”
“Your golden-haired angel from the sky, in his diary he counts them, two virgins in Belgium, three maidens in France. All he needs now is a Jewish virgin in Palestine! Then he could fly on to the next land of conquest.”
At first shock, Shula only felt stone cold. Ashamed of herself.
Then she felt wary, yet self-possessed. She was her own self, her own self before she had let herself fall into that blind dizziness of love. Yes, she saw him running out with his little book of love secrets. No, Leah was simply not capable of making all this up. Yes, she now could see behind his pure blue eyes of love, it was as though Leah had torn open for her the pure blue skies that had hidden the truth—yes, you must tear open the very skies to find the truth you need. Shula saw herself like any stupid, silly, moonstruck girl. And there was even a lightness in her as she asked Leah for every detail of how she had got hold of his diary.
And then, while Leah told her, there came a thought that Shula did not really want, but it came. Suppose when Gottfried had hurried back for his diary, it had been because this time, with her, he felt different, because with her he felt truly in love? She mocked herself for this thought, and yet now that they were talking together so openly,—in so sisterly a way, she said, “But, Leah, you too, when it happened to you—you knew he had seduced one girl after another. And yet—”
Now the big girl drew in her lip. “Yes, my sisterl. I knew.”
“And yet—even now you still long for him.”
“Shula. It’s like the kadahat. In some, the disease keeps returning. You suffer the attack of fever again and again. But each time it passes.”
Shula leaned close to her big sister. All at once she felt tears in her eyes, not for herself, but for Leah, and she hid her face in Leah’s bosom.
When she found his note under the stone, Shula left word for Gottfried this time to meet her in the hut.
For the first moment she let him hold her and say how much he had hungered for her, and she gazed back into his adoring eyes, wondering if now she would see what lay beyond. How well-armed she felt! It was not only because of what Leah had found in his diary. Even more, it was because of what she herself had read in their book. Now she was no longer awed by them, the Christians with their high church spires and beautiful paintings and their mysterious cloisters with closed walls all around them, and their nuns all married to Jesus, and the knowledge that they ruled the greatest nations in the world. How could any truly intelligent people believe the grandmothers’ tales they believed in? They must all of them in some strange way be self-deceivers or liars. No, she could not ever be taken in by one of them. And in giving him her lips she also felt reassured, she would no more be overwhelmed.
It had been bad, bad, worse than over France—he poured out his sorrow to her—two of his closest comrades, she knew them, she had danced with each of them. Egon, the aerial photographer, and Kurt, the son of the Mayor of Cologne, Kurt, who had been in his squadron from the first day, who had gone through every campaign with him, Egon and Kurt, their plane had been hit and they had crashed in flames before his eyes, and burned to cinders in the desert near the damned canal. He had bombed the damned British ships in the canal until he had no more bombs, he had dived and strafed until he had no more bullets and no more benzine—
“But you too could have fallen!” Was there a real chill in her heart?
“At such times a man doesn’t think of it.”
They sat, holding hands, the dark fate of the war, of his comrades, pulsing from one to the other, and Shula could not yet bring herself to speak as she had meant to, of his incident in Tiberias with Nahum. Then as a soldier who turns from death to life, Gottfried took her face in his hands to kiss her gently on the lips, and after this it was he who asked, “Is something wrong?”
—A good friend of hers, Shula said, had been seized by the Turks for their labor battalions, from which few returned alive. When she told him the friend’s name, it took Gottfried a moment to remember—Nahum?
“In Tiberias. In the restaurant.”
He struck his forehead. Of course. “Where I first saw you. The fat boy.”
“You didn’t know they seized him the very next morning?”
Gottfried gave her an odd glance. No, no, he had not known. Not exactly. It came back to him now, there had been a misunderstanding, and it was indeed Kurt—poor Kurt—he choked, but mumbled, yes, Kurt had put in some sort of complaint. Since the young man was a friend of hers, Gottfried hated to say this, but it had been a question of insolence. Totally unprovoked. “He refused to let us into the place.”
“You don’t know why he did it?” Gottfried gazed at her, puzzled. She said, “Nahum is in love with me. And he heard stories about you and me.”
“That boy?” She could see he held back a feeling that it was comical.
“Since we were little.”
“Oh, I am sorry. I—I must do everything to get him released.” He was gazing into her eyes with utmost candor. “My dear one, how could I possibly have imagined? Poor fellow. But how could a boy like that—” It was as though Gottfried now touched on something that all the world—that particularly persons like herself and himself—quite naturally understood, and indeed it was something Shula had felt since knowing herself even in childhood to be the loveliest girl in the village—it was like a natural law. The most handsome man and the most beautiful girl belonged together. Only here all at once she was ashamed of the assumption.
Now she added, “You let something out, about the Jews, Gottfried. Everyone heard it.”
At this, though not about Nahum, he flushed. Then Gottfried gazed again into her eyes and said, “I am ashamed. It came out in anger. It was not myself speaking, Shulamith, believe me. Unfortunately we have been brought up in this. I swear to you as a grown man it is not my way of thinking. Or how could I be here with you, my dearest?”
“I know what you are brought up in,” she said. “I read your Bible.”
“You read it.”
“To try to understand you.”
“You are wonderful!” His eyes, still resting upon her, now had that milky Christian look.
Then she spoke of the terrible lines in their book about the eternal curse on the Jews.
—But this was a working out of the divine will! Gottfried said passionately, still gazing at her. See, had not the Jews indeed been scatter
ed all over the world? The prophecy was dreadful, he agreed. Only in divine things could there be such ultimate dread. And the Christians believed it because they had seen it coming true.
“And you believe this, too, that we are forever cursed?’
“My dear one, what was that curse? For refusing to accept the Messias. And what is the meaning of the Messias? Love. Christ is love, unbounded love. That is what we believe and what we teach, my Shulamith.” His face had become exalted in that glowing way you sometimes saw on the faces of their nuns.
“And now that we are returning here,” she said, “are we still cursed and doomed if we do not believe that he was the Messiah?”
It was in a different tone that Gottfried replied. Until now his words had come easily, like in school when you are ready with the answers. But now it was as though he were thinking, searching himself, from word to word. “To many of us Christians,” he said, “the return of the Jews to the Holy Land can only be a part of the divine design, it is a sign that the return of Messias is near. Must we all believe that this return will again be an appearance in human form? Or will it not rather be in the spirit, the teaching of Christ? You yourself have spoken to me, Shulamith, of the interpretation of your brother—how I should like to meet him—that in his ideals and the ideals of his movement, the people itself is the Messias. Your brother speaks of the Jewish people. But when all the peoples of the world accept the ideal of love for one another, accept the ideals of Christ the Messias, and live by them—then Christ is returned within us, and the prophecy is fulfilled.” Was he saying this to please her?
All differences would be swept away, Gottfried declared in a kind of exaltation, or be swept upward into something higher, a beautiful civilization of justice, a culture that would be brought to the entire world, to all mankind.
“But how can you believe this when all over the world men are fighting and killing each other?”
He looked at her as though astounded and then with a tender patience, like a teacher who is surprised to realize that the brightest pupil has all along missed the main point, Gottfried explained: “But this is our mission in the war. It is we who must bring it to the world. This is how it will come in our victory.”
The effect of his words on her was just like when she read in their book of their strange beliefs; what he said was so strange to her that Shula felt momentarily she did not know who he was. And yet she felt that perhaps something was missing in herself since—as in their book—all this was so clear and believable to millions and millions of people.
And then he said that even their love, love between a Jew and a Christian, was a symbol of the fulfillment.
And he embraced her. In his arms Shula was as two different persons, she was herself as she had been in previous times with him, an infatuated girl, and yet she was like a wise old Jew who has seen the ways of the world during thousands of years. And it was as though Gottfried, far back in these years, were some godlike Greek who had come to this very place by the Kinnereth and told a Hebrew maiden of their wondrous Greek deities, and she had looked on their beautiful, harmonious statuary as she had seen it in Leah’s art book, while the conquering Greek had told how they were spreading their culture and civilization to all mankind, to the ends of the earth.
Quietly in his arms, Shula came to the second part of what she had prepared. “Gottfried, I must tell you something,” she said, and though he pressed her ardently, she still felt in possession of herself. “You know my sister Leah had a terrible experience with a man she fell in love with, and I have seen her suffering. I would never be able to give myself to the man I love except in marriage.”
His embrace did not relax. It even became more tenderly possessive. “I know, my dear one. I would only want you like that.” And he kissed her very tenderly, and she responded tenderly, not letting her mouth move on into the mad twisting and devouring of a few times before. This much she had attained on her way to womanhood, Shula told herself, and she had Leah to thank for it. She did not feel helplessly at the mercy of her desires as Leah must have been, or even of her curiosity.
As Gottfried did not go on to say any more about marriage, she did not speak of it either. As though understanding her and out of his higher love restraining himself, his kisses remained tender, slow, sweet clingings of the lips. Just as they were parting, Shula was almost tempted to remark, “Perhaps you’ll write in your diary—one Jewish virgin in Palestine, still unconquered.” Then she felt somewhat ashamed of her thought because of the way the knowledge had come to her. Let it all end quietly, without rancor. He would not come back.
Then a new thing happened. One day Malka told her that Nahum had come home to Tiberias.
Whether this was Gottfried’s doing Shula did not know. And Nahum did not come to see her. She went to Tiberias.
When the dark young man came into the doorway of the parlor, there moved all through Shula something odd, questioning, as though she were a girl of the olden times, seeing a suitor brought by a matchmaker, and finding to her surprise that he was not as she had feared. She was a trifle ashamed, and afraid to feel happy. The sudden feeling confused Shula so that she let out a little giggle at herself.
Nahum had become slender. His mouth was no longer thick, but outlined as in miniature paintings from Persia, such as one saw in the souvenir shops, pictures of noble princes. His eyes appeared larger, and at the sight of her they glowed. Thus he stood before her.
18
THEN THE locusts came. Mati was the first to remark on the low-hanging smudge in the sky, borne as though on the sluggish hamseen from the wilderness that lay across the Jordan to the south. It was too low for a cloud. “What is it?” he asked Schmulik—could it be billows of smoke from some distant fire, perhaps some enormous new thing of the war?
They were watering the young lemon grove, the saplings from Reuven’s tree nursery at the kvutsa that Gidon had insisted on planting before he left for Jaffa. Now there were pale green leaves on the thin branches. They had to water the trees laboriously from barrels on a wagon, instead of from a motor pump. Even the kvutsa already had an engine for pumping water; it had been dragged by two teams of mules on a wagon all the way from Haifa. Just as Reuven had said, with the water-pumping there were now two crops a year instead of one, and perhaps there would even be three. Some day even here, they would have such an engine, a smaller one. Even without an engine, Mati pestered Schmulik to help him try to build a water wheel by the river. Already thousands of years ago, before the time of Moshe Rabenu, there were water wheels—the Assyrians and the Egyptians had them, you could see them in pictures in schoolbooks—all that was needed was an old mule or even a donkey to turn the wheel and fill buckets of water. Instead, he and Schmulik had to go down to the river with the wagon, and there Schmulik would hand up the full pails for Mati to dump into the barrels; then they would haul the water to the grove, and Schmulik would hand down the full pails for Mati to empty into the saucers around the lemon trees. The whole village said it was madness to water a grove in this way. Only Yankel Chaimovitch would be crazy enough to try to grow citrus here.
While Mati carefully emptied the water so as not to lose a drop, Schmulik stared at the approaching movement in the sky. He had never seen this. And yet, who knew from where, even from the Haggadah that he only half-listened to at the Seder on Pesach, there came to him a fearful answer: like darkening clouds low over the land came the swarms of devouring locusts.
Nearer now, Schmulik could see how the cloud settled downward, like a vast blanket on the earth. Perhaps it would remain where it lay and not spread here to their own fields. But then from behind there moved another such cloud, and now the breadth of the horizon was becoming filled.
Even the mules had become nervous. Mati, the emptied bucket half lifted, stood transfixed, staring at the approaching darkness. Schmulik called to him, “Come!” and hurried the wagon homeward, as though racing against evil, the half-emptied barrels bouncing as the wheels leaped ove
r the rocks.
Already the entire village was in the street, each asking the other what to do, what would happen, some merely staring at the sky and awaiting their fate: would the swarms pass over them, or settle on their fields and devour the half-grown grain?
Reb Meir Roitschuler, who since the death of Alter Pincus in the raid of the Zbeh had taken his place as the Torah sage, declared that this was as in the days of the Pharaohs. The plague was not sent against the Jews but against the Turks. God was sending the plague on Djemal Pasha who wanted to seize all the grain for his armies.
Bitterly a chalutz who worked for the Zeidenschneurs remarked, “So should we smear our houses with blood, Reb Roitschuler, and will the locusts spare us enough grain for bread for our own needs?”
Reb Hirsch, the melamed, speculated that this was perhaps the rage of nature, upset in all its balance by the flying machines, the waves of the explosions and battles in the skies bringing the locusts in their wake.
A Yemenite known as Bronescu’s Eliyahu, since he worked in Bronescu’s fields, declared that he had seen this in his own land: the locusts would remain for three days on the fields, until all was devoured, and only then would they move onward.
Women gathered their small ones and ran inside and shuttered their houses, like ghetto Jews in the face of a pogrom. From the southward fields, the shomer galloped in. The locusts were already settling on the wheat, on young Mikosh Janovici’s land, the very same fields that had been burned by the Arabs. “Every evil falls on me!” he cried.
