The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Just before Passover came what had long been dreaded, an order of banishment. All Jews must at once depart from Jaffa and Tel Aviv.

  No, no, it was no Armenian slaughter, there must be no panic, the Emergency Committee pleaded. This was clearly a military measure. A British attack on Gaza was now expected and the Turks did not want Jews in the area. As well, perhaps, for the Jews.

  Only a few caretakers were to be permitted to remain, for the whole town of Tel Aviv. Hastily, Eli and Motke of Petach Tikvah assigned Standfast units to hidden posts in locked-up homes and shops, as additional guards.

  Already every road and lane northward was packed with carts, with pathetic lines of trudging exiles, with overladen mules, donkeys and the last horse-carriages. In orange groves beyond Petach Tikvah, as far as Kfar Saba, tents were springing up, huts made of mats such as the Bedouin used in the Huleh, booths of straw, none failed to observe, such as were dwelt in by the Israelites of old, the tribes that followed Moshe Rabenu into the Sinai wilderness. Attempting lightheartedness, some declared, “So, we will have Succoth all year around.”

  But more numerous were the prophets of doom. They awaited the massacre. “No! With us it shall not be!” the resistants proclaimed, and Menahem and Motke secretly distributed the accumulated pistols, rifles, grenades, to picked men in each encampment.

  Committees held incessant sittings, and somehow by Seder night a spirit of survival was developing. No massacre had yet taken place. There was even a distribution of matzoth. “I feel like in a prison of the doomed,” a wit declared, “after the hangman has passed on to another cell.”

  Then began a new phase for the Nili. From America, from England, Jews sought for a way to send relief to the thousands driven from their homes. But America had just entered the war; her ships could no longer approach, nor was there even an open way to send money. Gold would have to be smuggled in, and only through the fortnightly trips of the contact ship, the Monegam, could this be done. Through Aaron Aaronson in Alexandria, on each voyage of the Monegam, now, there came several herring-kegs filled with gold napoleons. The coins had to be carefully selected from prewar mintings; the kegs were dragged ashore in the night to be buried by Sara and Zev in the Crusader ruins until the gold could be transmitted to the Emergency Committee. Well into the summer this work went on.

  25

  HALF-RUNNING despite the noon heat, there fell in upon Leah and the girls, in the new place close to Rehovot to which they had had to move, the dark-skinned Chemda from Gilboa, daughter of the younger Zeira, who had been slain in the earlier days of the Shomer. The girl was near collapse, her delicate features drawn tight with desperation and exhaustion combined. Refreshing herself only with a few gulps from a water-jar, she hurriedly told Leah her mission—a message must reach Jerusalem at once. The Nili were caught. The last shipment of gold coins, turned over by them to the Emergency Committee, must not be found in official hands in Jerusalem, or the whole committee, the entire Yishuv would be implicated.

  Troubled by rumors that had arisen over the disappearance of Avshalom, his young cousin Naaman had gone into the desert to search for word of him among the Bedouin. Naaman had been arrested; he had collapsed in the hands of the Turks and named the whole Nili band. Sara Aaronson was being tortured in Zichron. Arrests were under way everywhere. If the Turks found the Nili’s gold in the hands of the Emergency Committee, the Yishuv would be annihilated. And the coins could be recognized.

  There had been an act of carelessness: in the gold sent up to the Jerusalem committee there were coins minted only last year. This warning had come from Zev who had managed to elude the Turkish searches in Zichron, and then had disappeared. The gold napoleons must be removed from the committee’s office in Jerusalem. “Leah, Leah help me. I tried to get to Jerusalem. I tried for hours at the station, on the road. I can’t find a way.”

  When Zev’s warning had come to Gilboa, they could not decide whom to send. An older person would be more likely to be stopped. A man least of all could be risked. Chemda had volunteered, and now, she cried in agony, she was failing. As far as Ramleh she had come by wagon. In Ramleh she had even managed to get onto the Jerusalem train, but before it left the station the military police had gone through the carriages and taken off every Jew. She had been locked in the women’s part of the station where an Arabess had begun to search her. “I gave her money and she let me out through her own little corner, in back. I was afraid to try the train again. There were some military trucks, and a driver was going to take me—I was even going to risk it, but an officer came up and they began to discuss something. They kept looking at me.” She had jumped off. In the streets Chemda had tried to hire a horse, even a donkey, running from side to side of the square, until she noticed that a Turkish policeman had his eye on her. “When I left Gilboa, Rahel told me that if I couldn’t manage, I should come here to you,” the girl said to Leah. “Rahel herself wanted to go, but they wouldn’t let her.” From Ramleh the child had half-run all the way here. “Leah, what should I do?” she begged.

  “Never mind. It’s not a task for you,” Leah quieted her. “I’ll go.”

  You lived your own life, and if you made a mistake, you alone might suffer. But from time to time something came and locked itself upon you, a burden and a trust where you dared not make an error. The chaverim would appear with a sack of rifles and put it in your keep; until they took it away, you did not belong to yourself. Things that for yourself you could never have managed to do, you found ways to do.

  Leah set out at once. Her first thought was of Pessha Mendelowitch who kept a stand at the Hulda station, and for whom she saved out tomatoes when she could. By short cut the station was an hour’s walk away. Leah had not for a long time gone in this direction—it bordered on army encampments.

  * * * *

  Already the land seemed to be disintegrating before her. Here was the very grove where she had first gone to work in Eretz, these were the very trees she and Reuven had planted when Moshe had got the contract for their little kvutsa. Abandoned. The leaves were curled on themselves, shriveled. Then came fields of brambles, riven with open crevices as though even the earth itself had been ripped under some giant lash. Then there were not even brambles; the earth lay desiccated, broken. The world was dying away here, edging away into something else, into some cruder, earlier order of existence.

  This gave way to the landscape of war. She was in the midst of an endless disordered encampment, of wagons tipped over because of a missing wheel, of scattered heaps of ammunition boxes, of stray mules snuffling the barren earth, of piles of refuse, clusters of tents, scattered men turning to stare at her, their eyes red-rimmed, their cheeks black with stubble and grime, their gaunt bodies half-bare in the heat. To avoid them, she veered, only to find herself in the stench of latrine trenches; raucous calls came from squatting soldiers, their laughter filthy as the smell. She veered again, toward a clean patch of earth that even looked as though it were freshly raked, and pulled back, nearly losing her balance as her feet trod onto softer earth, for these were graves. So shallow were they that the mound of each body could be made out as under a thin blanket.

  Though Leah knew herself to be deemed strong and self-reliant, it was a feminine terror that invaded her legs, the terror of a woman finding herself alone in an existence made totally of men, where the slightest pretense of a world composed of men and women, of families, was absent. The terror was cutting off her breath. To work among men, even to do man’s work, to hammer, plow, tread the soil in man’s shoes, all this she had done as a woman. Her strength had been but a pretense. That she did man’s labor did not help her here. Here she was plunged into their true world where men totally removed themselves from their bond with womankind, where all energy was turned into one substance, the substance of destruction and death. No one could enter it and live.

  Then this hysteria had passed, and Leah saw with clarity. She was emerging into a different area of the encampment; there were larger
tents, in straight rows, and passing among them she saw a figure in a white dress, a nurse. This was the hospital section, then. There were signposts in German.

  Her legs still felt somewhat strange, empty, almost as after love. But now she was taking longer, firmer strides, and her fright was sealed away. There, directly before her, was the railway siding, and, as a sign of good chance, she saw that Pessha’s kiosk was open. Soldiers of all grades, officers too—German, Turkish—hundreds of men were milling around, and along the tracks stood a train with flatcars carrying cannon. Wagons and trucks were everywhere, loading and unloading.

  Pessha stood in her kiosk, a bundle of a woman of no age, the kind men no longer saw as a woman, her skin cracked and lifeless, and her eyes alert only with suspicion over the confusion of coins offered to her. On her stand was a large jar from which she sold glasses of sweetened water, and behind her on barren shelves were a few boxes of cigarettes. From under the counter, only to certain ones, Pessha sold bread and cheese.

  “To Jerusalem?” She gave Leah the short nod of those who understand an urgency. With her head, Pessha motioned toward a stout Arab wearing broad Turkish mustaches. “I’ll speak to him. Don’t give him more than three francs. At the last moment he’ll put you on somehow.” Pessha thought there would be one more train before nightfall.

  But before Pessha could find a moment to slip out and speak to the trainman, the entire area burst into tumult. A whistle shrieked—not from the train—and men raced in every direction. Leah remained standing confused, as she saw men hurling themselves beneath the halted train; Pessha was pulling her by the hand, and as they reached a shelter trench, an airplane sound overwhelmed all the others; the sound hammered down on them and the airplanes swooped down—five, more—over the railway tracks. Dustmounds were flying upward, bombs must have exploded; Leah had half-jumped, half-tumbled into a trench so filled with men that there was no room to fall, and Pessha was still pulling her somehow, among the massed bodies, into a side-pocket, a covered-over place, dark, but alive with men’s cursing. Out of the corner of her eyes as she was pulled from the open part of the trench, Leah saw, on the earth above, a horse and the boots of a rider; the horse reared, then tumbled, and through all the exploding noises of the war, she seemed to keep on hearing the cracking of the man’s bones.

  As her eyes grew accustomed to the shelter’s gloom, she saw faces that, a moment ago, around Pessha’s stand, had looked idle, or weary, or some even cheerful, or comradely to each other; they were now one distorted face of fear and rage. How had she lived so close to man’s war these months and years and not known, not seen its face? The raid went on. In an endless unbroken curse a German officer befouled the British aviators. “Where are ours?” Where was Shula’s Gottfried, to sweep the English from the sky? Leah hardly knew which side she wished, here at this moment, to be the vanquisher. Perhaps it was true that the Turks and Germans were nearly finished. If what was left of the Yishuv could endure only a little bit longer it would be saved.

  One officer lit a match and stared at her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

  “She came to help me,” Pessha said quickly, and at last the match burned down.

  The shooting petered out like a dying argument, and the men began to clamber from the trench. Men’s hands were on all parts of her to help her; it didn’t matter, except that she noticed how quickly the sense of this had returned. She was above—the horse and rider lay before her in a mud of blood. Two of the flatcars were overturned with their cannon cargo spilled, and men were pulling out mutilated bodies from underneath.

  She had lost Pessha. The urgency of her task was upon Leah again; would a train still go to Jerusalem? Pessha was once more with her, seizing her hand from behind. “Come.” Leah could remain for the night in her house, the English had crushed the tracks, there would be no train.

  But Leah could not go backward. She would stay till the track was repaired. With a glare Pessha marched away. “Don’t give him money until he puts you on a train.”

  The sun was down to its last hour. Along the rails, an officer was shouting to a few labor conscripts who had appeared. Leah walked forward; perhaps she could learn how long it might take. No on answered her or even raised his head; the laborers were like dead beings making movements, but without life.

  Not far beyond, Leah saw the red-tiled roof of a two-story house. But this would be on the site of Hulda, where, that first year, they had planted the Herzl forest, after Reuven had torn the Arab-planted saplings from the ground. A kvutsa had settled there. Without any plan Leah walked onward alongside the tracks. It was at least in the direction of Jerusalem. But even if she walked all night she would not arrive there in time.

  Just before her, on one knee, was a tiny old Jew with his trouser-leg rolled up. Blood showed. A Yemenite, with earcurls and the spare straggly beard they had, he was moaning in his throat. She bent to the wound. His flesh was so stringy and spare, you wondered how it could bleed; a shred of bomb had cut him. “Come with me, at the kvutsa they’ll clean it and bind it up.”

  Leaning on her arm, he could manage to limp along. “A thousand blessings on you, daughter of Israel.” Might her womb bear fruit. Might she live to see her children’s children’s children, down to the last of whom, and into eternity, he lavished his blessings. Though surely still in pain, he moaned no more but only blessed her. Who knew, perhaps he was Elijah the Prophet.

  All the trees, she noticed, now were but stumps; the Herzl forest had been cut down for train fuel.

  They had reached the gate. Just inside it, piles of iron rail and portions of machinery covered the yard. There were army tents; soldiers, laborers stirred around. Then, further, Leah noticed several battered motorcars and even an enormous lorry. Who knew? Perhaps Elijah’s blessing was indeed at work.

  From the doorway of the kvutsa’s building, someone cried out “Leah!” A girl held up a lantern; the girl was one of her own, from the first gardening farm in Tiberias! Chava— Yes, Chava-Hates-Eggplant they had called her. As Leah sang out the nickname, they laughed, hugging. Before anything else, Elijah’s wound must be tended, and again things fell out well, for Chava herself was the kvutsa’s first-aid girl, and as they washed the Yemenite’s leg, counting each droplet of water, several of the chevreh clustered around and all was related. The army had quartered a repair station on them; the army mules drank all their water while their own few remaining cattle were howling with thirst. They had no well of their own so water had to be fetched in barrels from the well of an Arab grove owner who raised his rate every day. Meanwhile Chava’s chaver, a capable looking lad with reddish freckles, naturally called Gingi, begged Leah to convince Chava and the rest of the girls that they must evacuate. The British would surely bomb this place because of the repair station.

  All through the meal of soup and chick-peas, with a tea made from some sort of wild grass, the arguments were passionately repeated: the girls would not leave without the men, the men would not leave and abandon the farm. The girls argued, “There’s nothing left but a few cattle, and we can take them along,” but also it was known that if the men so much as stepped beyond the gate, the Turks were likely to seize them for labor service. Within their grounds they somehow had protection through the German motor-vehicle repair chief, whom they helped.

  On this Leah seized. Might any motor vehicle be going to Jerusalem? She must reach Jerusalem, it was urgent.

  Gingi understood. He went off, quickly returned. It was well. And this very night!

  Leah must get a few hours of rest, they insisted; she could use the cot of their watchman. In the still-dark they woke her, pressing bread on her for the journey, and led her to the enormous lorry. Stacked on its body, now, looming above the tents, were upended airplane wings that had been repaired here. A middleaged German was the driver; without questions he accepted Leah, only warning her that she must get off before the checkpoint at the main highway; she would find him waiting for her a
distance ahead.

  The German handed her some kind of army jacket; in this, should a sentry hold up a lantern, she could pass. He was about to boost her up the high step, but Leah swung aloft like a man, and heard an admiring grunt.

  Yet when he stopped for her to drop off, and she circled through a field alone in this nowhere, a dark speck of humanity moving in this dark night, known only to one being, this laconic German driver who might not even wait for her, Leah found herself whispering, “God help me.” Could there be a God? In all this absurdity, could there really be a God to devise fates that hung by such slender chances? And overhead the sky, the wondrous sky of Eretz with its boundless quiet, with its clarity and beauty that in times of agony spread healing over your heart …

  The truck was there waiting. At long intervals the German made remarks. He had a daughter her age. “Huebsches Maedchen.” Large like her. How he loved his machine. The Jews made good mechanics. Arabs were good too; if they wanted, they could be clever with machinery. But—and he imitated their indifference— “In’sh Allah.”

  As the mammoth vehicle slowly ground its way up the tortuous road on the climb to Jerusalem, her whole body was bending forward as though to help it. Before seven probably no one would be at the Emergency Committee’s office. Still, suppose the police came early and broke in? Now the lorry was impeded by a tangle of donkeys and army wagons. Now by another huge vehicle, even slower than theirs. At last they were passing the brickworks at Motza, to climb the final height. At the edge of the city, the German halted; here she must get down. As Leah thanked him he said, “Your people is the people of God. May your people be saved.”