The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Deep in the garden of the estate, behind a brick shed, Reuven had started a tree nursery, and into the shed he now brought a cot, explaining that he must be constantly watchful of the tender shoots. Away from the barracks, he was at peace. What a paradise he had fallen into! How was he deserving of this?

  Soon Reuven found that he could go off afield for days in search of rare plants to bring back for the garden, particularly when Djemal Pasha was away on army inspection. Vast movements were taking place, a score of divisions, virtually the entire Palestine army, was marching north to reinforce Gallipoli against the British.

  In a deserted hollow amongst low arid hills, Reuven came upon a strange grove of trees. They were gnarled and bowed like ancient olives, but as he made his way closer, he saw a shimmering of rose-amber tints among the leaves. Instantly Reuven felt the throb of prescience, of ancient knowledge and foreknowledge, a current going back and forth in his very veins. The trees, he saw at once, bore a species of nut—pistachio, but longer and fatter than any he had ever examined, a variety all its own—and surely it stemmed from antiquity, this isolated grove that had somehow remained and perpetuated itself in this cupped enclosure. Through all time this grove had stood here waiting. This was his own. A discovery.

  Standing beneath the branches now, Reuven held back his hand for a moment as though asking permission. His father, it crossed his mind, would have said a thanksgiving to the Lord for having permitted him this finding. Then he plucked a few of the delicately tinted shells, and opened one, examining the pale oval kernel, touching the seed to his tongue, gently biting, confirming the flavor, perfumed and sweet. It was a morsel that might have delighted a concubine of King Solomon; Reuven envisioned a slender, long-fingered hand with jeweled rings reaching into a silver bowl.

  Taking soil samples, examining the topography, sensing the wind, Reuven made his notes. Then carefully he made cuttings. One day, returned to HaKeren, he would plant such trees; the kvutsa would export the nut fruit to France, to America—what a find, what a discovery! This was something to show Aaron Aaronson, but even to him Reuven would not reveal the location!

  Hurrying back excited with his find, and seeing that Djemal Pasha’s automobiles had arrived, Reuven could not put off showing his discovery, and sent in word by an adjutant.

  In wrath, his eyes glazed, the Pasha fell on him: where had he been, on whose account was he wandering the land? where was he spying? twice he had been sent for—he should be summarily shot!

  Foolishly, Reuven’s hand was extended with a sample of his find. As he began to explain, the Pasha’s quirt came down, slashing the open palm, the samples flying in all directions. Pistachios! Did he expect the army to be fed on pistachio nuts! Famine was falling over Palestine, a plague of locusts had descended. The crops were devoured.

  —As for the Jews, Djemal cried, they could starve, whatever happened to them they deserved, and the Arabs too; they were traitors and plotting against Turkey. But his army! Where would bread come from for the army? An immediate survey was necessary to measure the extent of the disaster. As Reuven could not be found, he had set Dr. Aaron Aaronson to the task, and Reuven could consider himself fortunate that he was not sent to prison. Out! Out!

  What would happen at the kvutsa? And to the family at home? Hastily, Reuven read what he could about the plague of locusts in the Bible; … the Lord brought an east wind on the land all that day and all that night, and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And then … And the Lord turned an exceeding strong west wind, which took up the locusts, and drove them into the Red Sea; there remained not one locust in all the border of Egypt. The swarms had appeared from the east on the prevailing winds. If only strong winds would carry them away! Even if he were there, what could he do?

  He set to work planting his pistachios. What right had he, in the midst of disaster, to be gratified in his work? Toward dusk, as he planted the cuttings and the seeds in different samples of soil, Reuven heard the stomp of Djemal Pasha in the garden. At times at this hour the commander strolled. Now the tread came closer; the Pasha stood there, legs apart, with the defiant steadiness of the intoxicated.

  Then carefully, like a colossus of Ashur, he lowered his bulk over the new plants and touched the tender leaves. —Was it true that the trees were thousands of years old? Where then was the grove? Malaala? He had passed in that region. In the direction of Mesopotamia.

  And in a burst, seemingly without connection, the Pasha poured out angry words. Why was it he who was blamed for sending off the Armenians from their Anatolian villages into the wastes of Mesopotamia? Why did the whole world fall on him for atrocity? Not he but Enver Pasha was in authority over Anatolia! Only just now, supervising troop movements through the area, Djemal had personally issued orders for army bread to be distributed to the Armenian women and children on the roads. Bread which the troops would soon lack! But what else could have been done with the Armenians than to remove them? If they had not been cleared out entirely, they would have risen behind the army. At Erezum they would have let in the Russians! Year after year their fanatical leaders made risings! With their mothers’ milk their children sucked in hatred of the Turks. And did Reuven imagine only the Armenians were plotting? The Maronites in Lebanon had fifty thousand rifles hidden away. He could have loosed the Lebanese Moslems on them and wiped them out, but he had refrained. Only their leaders were arrested. They would hang. As for the so-called cultural conference in Beirut, it was nothing but a mask for a secret nationalist organization; those plotters too would hang, every one of them! Even the Druze could not be trusted. And the Jews. Oh, he knew about the plans of the Jews. He knew about their secret army, the Shomer. Djemal’s eyes impaled Reuven. He could have loosed the Bedouin on the Jews, but had he done so? He was not a man to massacre women and children. He was not a hater of the Jews. They were a valuable people. The Moslems has always known them for a useful people. He would not destroy the Jews, but they must be careful. Just like others they had traitors amongst them. Where were there no traitors? Even among the highest Arab Moslems. Why had the Sherif of Mecca, the descendant of Mohammed, not yet confirmed the Sultan’s proclamation that this was a holy war, a jihad? Could the Sherif of Mecca not realize that the Arabs together with the Ottoman Moslems could constitute the greatest power in the world? Yet in the attack on Suez the Bedouin horsemen promised by the Sherif had failed to appear. With them, it could have succeeded! Who could know but what that old dog Sherif Husein was playing a double game? It was said that one of his sons had been in contact with the English. Everywhere there was intrigue, deception, betrayal.

  The eyes bulged at Reuven. Would the plague of locusts, Djemal suddenly demanded, spread over Syria? Would it destroy the wheat of Golan?

  Reuven hardly dared speak. In some strange way, this tyrant, from the day of his rescue had made an omen of him. The locust swarms were more likely to move westward out to sea, Reuven half whispered. All depended on the winds.

  On the fifth day of the plague, two horsemen galloped into Mishkan Yaacov. One of the riders sat squat, riding solid like a Napoleon; it was Aaron Aaronson, Leah saw, and at once ran out to him, for this was her first sight of the famous argronomist since Reuven had written how Aaronson had rescued him from the hands of Bahad-ad-Din. As would be his way, Reuven had not told the story in all its brutality, but details had seeped through from Arabs who had seen it—it was from death itself that Aaronson had taken Reuven.

  Alongside the scientist, on a more showy steed, boyish and lithe, and as usual wearing a keffiyah, rode Avshalom Feinberg. Politely acknowledging Leah’s gratitude but almost brushing it aside, Aaronson came at once to his task: the locusts. At a glance he had already measured the ravage. “You must call together the men. I will explain what to do next.”

  Mati was already running to call Bronescu. Meanwhile the riders must at least have a glass of cold buttermilk—Feigel approached with the crock. Yes, he had seen Reuven in Damascus, Aaronson said, in
deed only yesterday. Reuven was well, she need not worry. “Your son is probably the happiest soldier in the war.” Reuven had become Djemal Pasha’s own adviser. Oh, not for military matters, but quite the opposite—not to destroy but to plant. Not only Djemal’s palace garden, but the entire city of Damascus was to be transformed so that the name of Djemal Pasha would live forever as the creator of boulevards and parks, and it was Reuven who was to devise and plan it all, sumptuous public gardens, fountains, and avenues of trees. “So you see, what better task could have befallen a pacifist?”

  Feigel glowed. And it was through him, this Aaronson himself, she knew, that such good fortune had come to Reuven; she knew also of the rescue from punishment, though the full horror had not been told her. If Aaronson had only let her, she would have kissed the man’s hands.

  He had not yet dismounted; from every yard the villagers were hurrying, their wives behind them, each calling out to Aaron Aaronson the extent of his disaster—what fields, what plantings he had lost—how was he to live, where was he to get new seed, what was he to do?

  Tersely, the argronomist gave orders. The mukhtar, Bronescu, must be the commander here, and they must act as an army, as one, to prevent the greater disaster that was soon to come. In three weeks the spawn would emerge. “The eggs are already planted in your soil in countless millions. The locusts may have seemed to you without number, but you must multiply them by the thousand thousands. Each pair of locusts has left thousands of eggs just beneath the surface of your soil. They will mature and emerge. The locusts ate what was green. The larvae will devour everything—you hear, everything.”

  Then what could they do? They must hurry and plow: plow day and night, not once but three times, five times, to bury the larvae so deep that they could not emerge. No, kerosene would not kill them unless the entire surface of the land could be flooded, and where would they get kerosene? Lye would be more destructive than helpful. Only plowing. “But if it is not deep enough, they can crawl out. If you see them crawling out, you must dig trenches, sweep them into the trenches and bury them. Understand?” He gazed around on their faces the way a general before battle anxiously, uncertainly, weighs the valor of his troops.

  Their faces had fallen despondent. Instead of a remedy, what was before them was only more labor, more disaster. To plow five times, every inch of the soil, in the space of a few days—who had such strength? —The advice of a great expert, Mikosh Janovici remarked in Roumanian, but he himself probably had never put his hands to a plow even once. Catching the words, Aaronson replied in kind, in Roumanian, for were not the settlers of Zichron all from that land? The familiarity somehow dissipated part of the gloom. Dismounting, Aaronson cried, “Here, the expert who never put his own hands to a plow will show you something.” Just inside the Chaimovitch yard, he squatted on the ground, peering close, then with the blade of his pocketknife, he made a little jab, and raised the knife to show them, on the tip, a tiny translucent bead, the insect’s birth-sack. As everyone crowded near, Leah and Mati too knelt on the earth. The farmers, the children, the whole village pressed in, as Aaronson demonstrated how by a careful examination of the soil they could tell, as he had, where to find the eggs. “The female scoops a tiny hole with her tail, she deposits her egg-sack, and scrapes earth over it with her hind legs,” he explained. Absorbed as she was in his words, Leah could not help thinking about Aaronson himself. He was unmarried. It was said he had for years been hopelessly in love with the wife of his best friend, a doctor in Zichron. A strange man. How alone he must be.

  Many now, with their faces close to the earth, were searching but could not find the tiny holes. The first to succeed was Mati. Yes, yes, that’s it—they must dig them out, throw them in a pail and then bury them, deep.

  “But there are millions! The earth is filled with them!” On her knees, Leah searched in a destroyed flower bed. The earth was liked a pocked skin. Something between revulsion and awe rose in her. Lifting out one of the tiny sacks she held it on her palm. A man’s face bent close to hers, over the bead of life. It was Avshalom Feinberg, with that warm, excited intensity you always saw in his face. “Just think,” he remarked, “if all the millions of human sperm were to germinate as well!”

  He chuckled, and added, “Then we would really have wars, to get rid of all the grubs!”

  “This war isn’t enough for you?” she asked. He was another handsome one. It was said that first Sara Aaronson and then her younger sister had fallen in love with him, and for the sake of her stricken sister, Sara had accepted a match with a rich merchant from Constantinople and gone there to live. Avshalom and his Sons of Nimrod—enough trouble they had caused the Shomer in Chedera.

  Aaron Aaronson was now starting out to inspect the fields, and as Leah followed, Avshalom walked beside her, leading his horse. His step was quick and light, like the animal’s.

  —Did she know that her young brother Gidon was fighting with the British? he asked. With a Jewish unit led by Josef Trumpeldor, in the terrible battle of Gallipoli?

  No! Leah had not known. Of Trumpeldor’s gathering a Jewish army in Alexandria, whispers had come. And that Gidon would join such an army was a foregone conclusion. But—in Gallipoli? One day, it was dreamed, they would appear victorious, here in Eretz driving out the Turks. But they were in Gallipoli? Was he certain? How did he know?

  Ah, he had ways of knowing.

  Then did he know more? How did he know of Gidon?

  Gidon had been one of those mentioned, since everyone knew him to be a good fighter.

  Mentioned? By whom?

  Ah. Avshalom Feinberg assumed a mysterious air, but the air of a man who is drawing you on to ask more. The Jewish troops wore the Star of David on their caps, did she know that? he said. And their unit would be only the beginning. Perhaps after Gallipoli the British would even land them here in Eretz on the coast. The entire Yishuv should be ready to rise and join them, and free Eretz from the Turks! “Then the land will be ours. Only when we have fought for it and shed our blood can we claim the land as ours!”

  But—to fight here openly against the Turks? It would be mad —Djemal Pasha would obliterate every Jew, as he had done with the Armenians. Already he kept threatening it, again and again he promised it!

  Yet Avshalom’s words raised an echo in her. Where had she heard them—almost these very same words about fighting for the land! From Dovidl, from Avner, before they were sent into exile. And from Galil too. “Only when we have fought and shed our blood for it can we claim this land as ours.” And to secure arms. To be ready. But they had meant not to fight for the British. It was to be for the Yishuv itself. To save it, against no matter whom. When the test came, here in the land. And as for Josef Trumpeldor, everyone had understood he had left Eretz to join the Russian army. It was still the Russian patriot in him. The English were on the side of Russia, and therefore for him, the case was clear. And for Gidon and all those in Alexandria to join with him —they were young men, they must have been drawn into the war and they preferred to go together as Jews. Just as Dovidl and Avner had wanted the Jews to go together as Jews if they had to be in the Turkish army. In every country, Jews were fighting for that country. And it would be better if they could be together.

  From the excited way Avshalom watched her, she knew he was following her every thought. No, Avshalom said, it was not the same for Jews to fight on one side or the other. All Jewish strength must go to the side of the democracies, the French and the British. There it would count.

  —Could Jews count at all, in this great world conflict? Leah wondered. “We are so small. We must only try to save ourselves, and continue our work. How can a few Jewish soldiers help decide the war, for one side or the other?”

  Again Avshalom took on a mysterious air. “We can. There are ways where a few count as many.” Then he stopped. —If she wanted, he added, he would try to find out something about her brother Gidon.

  Vaguely, Avshalom let her understand that he had connections.
After all, he had many friends in France. Perhaps in a roundabout way he could receive news. Through Aaron Aaronson, who still received letters that came on American ships, as his experimental farm was supported from America. And through American friends contact could also be made with the British.

  Leah fell silent. Why she could not tell, but she felt wary, as one sometimes feels in an unfamiliar place. She felt as though she were being drawn the wrong way, perhaps. “Do you hear from Sara?” she asked.

  “Aaron hears,” he said. Then he added, “It’s what she writes underneath the postage stamps, in tiny microscopic letters.” He walked a bit in silence, then burst out, “If you want to know what Djemal Pasha and his partners are doing to the Armenians—before Sara left, it was agreed we must look under the stamps.” It was an old Jewish device, even in Russia it had been used. “What you’ve heard is nothing, a few massacres. Like pogroms, you think. Let me tell you. A pogrom passes. This is something else. It is a complete plan. It is the annihilation of the whole people. To kill them all.” It was done town by town, village by village, he said. First the men were taken away as though for the army, but they were murdered in a wood or a ravine. Then the whole village, children, old people, women, were rounded up and marched off, with horsemen with knouts to keep them moving on the road. “Wherever they pass, no one is allowed to come near them with food or water. They are driven eastward into the wilderness, and the dead and dying are left by the roadside.” The two of them were standing stock-still now, and Avshalom, his face no longer boyish, cried out, “Not in one village, and not in ten, but already in half the Armenian towns this has happened, Sara writes. It is attested. Christian pastors have gone out and seen it. Only in the cities, the Armenians have not yet been molested. But the Turks will finish with those, as well. It is the greatest slaughter the world has ever known. And if the world knows, it does nothing to stop it. That’s what I hear from Sara.”