The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Sons-in-law of the sheikh also came now to sit with the guest, and Sayed repeated his tale. The eldest son, Ismael, rose and went off. He was an impatient man who roamed much. Three riders had passed on the heights the night before last, a shepherd had seen them. Only two had gone back, in the day. Now he understood.

  Ismael roamed the few miles between the hill settlement of the Jews and their older village of Metulla. The way curved above the gorge to the top of the Chimney; behind the saucer-like top of the waterfall lay Metulla, and behind Metulla rose the slopes that led to the Druze. A fugitive attempting to escape to the Druze would have to pass this way. Ismael stationed himself and waited.

  Motke meanwhile had returned to the Arab village to fetch Sayed and the carriage. In this way, in this space of time, he might be giving Zev his chance to escape to the Druze. So he would believe.

  After dark, Zev had told them, but when the hammering stopped, he stepped halfway out and saw the two chalutzim climbing to the upper farm. Now he was before the open space of the partly stockaded compound. That foul Motke could be as cunning as himself, and guess that he would be starting earlier to elude their trap. But no shot struck him as he moved beyond the grounds. In dartings, he made his way around the slope of the kvutsa’s hill to the Metulla side. But there the hill was barren rock, a kind of marble that, in his boyhood, some of the Metulla men had spoken of one day quarrying. No shrubs to give cover. He must move swiftly down from this. Quickly, for he heard a carriage from below.

  As Zev scuttled across the Metulla road to reach the growth above the gorge, his form was for one instant visible.

  Motke was driving with his rifle at hand beside him. Sayed had his rifle at ready and raised it and fired. In the same moment came a reverberation from above, another gun. Ismael, both understood.

  The figure had vanished. Zev must have fallen, struck, and tumbled into the ravine. Ismael came galloping from the top of the Chimney, waving his rifle in the excitement of the kill.

  Clutching at roots and stones, Zev tumbled downward until he lay at the bottom. Not yet killed. Instead of terror or even an engulfing pain, an exhilaration shot up in him. As that time with Avshalom in the desert, here too he had not been destroyed. No! He was not to be destroyed. The sounds came back to him—two, three guns? or an echo? In his boyhood, when he first was brought here, the settlers had made much of the pogrom-orphan from Kishinev. The mukhtar of Metulla’s own boy, Yechiel, had taken him down here to show him the echo in the Chimney. They had stood down here shouting and shouting; Yechiel had even taught him some Arab curse words, and they had listened with joy as the words, together with their own laughter, came back to them. But later he had hated Yechiel, a “good boy.” Yechiel was still in Metulla. Could he risk showing himself to him?

  They’d be coming down for their kill. His body. Motke and Shimshoni too, he didn’t doubt, and maybe a third to make sure. Why wouldn’t he have thought it of Shimshoni? All of them, the lot of them, he would gladly sign their execution. Afraid to execute him to his face, they had made him run like a hunted rabbit.

  Zev’s fingers felt for the wound; where neck and shoulders joined blood was spreading; the bullet had passed through the flesh. From the stream, he splashed on water. He still had Sara’s kerchief, a last talisman from her hand; escape, live! He tied it around his neck, making a knot in the armpit. He was able to stand. Carefully, Zev trod in the stream, the other way, downward. Where the bank was thick with high reeds he hid, to regain strength.

  Soon he heard them up there crashing into the ravine, might they break both legs and their heads. It was good and dark now. He heard their cursing and their calls to each other and the high far echoes. One was Motke. Two others, Arabs. So he was sold! The three hunters had clambered down to the bottom, but as he had reasoned, the idiots were going the other way into the narrowing crevice of the Chimney. They thought they would find him there, cornered.

  Now was his time. The slope was not difficult here. Scrambling up on the further side, Zev circled far around behind Metulla to one of his old boyhood hiding places among the rocks. From there he could see the outlines of his uncle’s house.

  With his hands Motke felt along the foliage perhaps for some pressed down place where the body had fallen. The sheikh’s son would not leave them to go searching downstream. Afraid he would miss the gold. And Sayed kept muttering they had hit not a man but the devil, a shaitan.

  When a gallows broke, wasn’t the doomed man left to live, Motke asked himself. The underflow of disgust he had felt all along was now bile in his mouth. Why had he done it, why had he felt so impelled to ride to Shabbatai Zeira? No, but Shabbatai had agreed it was necessary, imperative to save the Shomer, the Yishuv, to save even Zev himself from prolonged torture, as he would surely be caught in any case.

  They had wound their way to the Chimney now, the narrow high hollow, rising until its black glistening wall was lost in the dark, but you saw far above the softer darkness of the sky, and even stars. Tomorrow there would be no hamseen. The aroma of pines and fresh water filled the hollow, constantly refreshed by the trickle sliding down the walls of the Chimney. How could mankind incessantly find ways to disturb this serenity? Motke felt as though he were Cain with the finger of God stretching downward to point him out at the bottom of this black hole.

  “We’ll wait in the carriage for the morning light,” he said. “It is useless to search for him now.”

  From across the yard Yaffaleh rushed to welcome Leah, rolling her large head against Leah’s bosom so as to press first one cheek and then the other to her sister, until Leah laughingly pulled back her youngest sister’s head to look into her face. In joy at Leah’s coming, the face was radiant. “Leah, you’ll stay here? Oh, we were so afraid for you in all the searches. If they come here, we can hide you.” Laughing, Leah kissed her. —And Menahem and the young Zeira from Gilboa, she asked, had they passed? Perhaps yesterday or early today? —No, they had not been seen.

  In Yaffaleh’s eyes Leah saw another plea. “Be with me, stay with me, I am stifling,” and in that moment, Leah thought, “I’ll take her back with me to be with the girls for a time, it will be good for her.”

  Mameh had emerged, beaming with relief. “Leah, you are not mixed up in all this trouble with the Aaronsons?”

  “Na, Mameleh.” Leah smiled broadly in denial, in reassurance. “You know our kind of work is different.”

  But Feigel was worried that some of those who were caught might reveal how there had once been gifts from Gidon.

  “Before they could beat one word out of me,” Yaffaleh cried, “I would die like Sara Aaronson.”

  Leah stroked her. “Poor Sara.”

  “What they brought down on the whole Yishuv!” her mother said.

  “Mameh, they were trying to help. They kept the whole of Mea Shearim from starvation.”

  “The Above One will judge them, not I,” Feigel said, and then added, “Leah, don’t defend them before him”—Tateh—“his eyes see only the evil they have done.”

  He and the boys were still cutting in the field, for without help they were late in the harvest. Giving Mameh quick news of Dvoraleh, of the grandchildren, Leah found herself a scythe and marched out. She could see them, Schmulik and Tateh advancing evenly step by step, and Mati behind them with a pitchfork. As she gave Mati a hug, and began to swing her scythe, Leah nevertheless saw her father smile deep in his beard, content that she was home. He would ask her little, only, “Nu, Leah, how are things in the south?” And she saw that he was already calculating; he would have to send back a wagonload with her, wheat for the refugees banished from Tel Aviv, and Tateh was already struggling with himself as to how many sacks he would load on.

  But presently Yankel spoke what was on his mind. Had she heard no news on the way, of the hunted one, might his name be erased from Eternity? And with each stroke of his scythe her father’s strong old arms seemed to be cutting down the maker of disaster. “Already when he was the shom
er here, he all but destroyed us, and now the entire Yishuv will have to pay for his evil. Why didn’t we let the Arabs make an end of him! To meddle in the wars of the goyim, that has always been our undoing—didn’t Jeremiah cry out against it? And because the king did not pay heed, Babylon came upon us …”

  He had gone back to Yiddish, and his querulous singsong seemed to reach her from the huddled lanes of Cherezinka. With all her love, with all her admiration for the labor he had brought out of himself in this place, Leah could not remain in the field and listen to his bitterness, though Schmulik worked on as though he did not hear, Schmulik the young ox. Besides, Leah had to hurry over to HaKeren, she had messages, instructions, and two heavy baskets of “eggs” to deliver; she would take Yaffaleh along for the walk.

  “Leah, good you came.” Max Wilner greeted her in the whispery voice he used when things were grave. Word had already arrived about Gilboa. The searches had taken place. Three arrested. Avraham Halperin among them; he had come down from his hiding place. But worst—the old woman, Rahel’s mother. Not finding Rahel, whose name was on his list, Hassan Bey had become enraged and seized the old woman. His men flung her to the ground; defiantly she had at once taken off her shoes, presenting her bare soles to the Turk. “I know nothing. But proceed in your own savage way.”

  They had pulled her up and hauled her away with the others.

  There was more. One of the captured Nili from Chedera was dead in the Nazareth prison. The Bek had hung the body from the cell bars, so as later to declare he had killed himself. He had been beaten to death, everyone knew.

  In the first daylight Ismael quickly found the traces of the fall, and the spot where the body had turned on the foliage. There were bloodstains, he cried out joyously, he had not missed! But then the trail vanished as though the shaitan had been lifted from the earth.

  The Nazareth gendarme, Sayed, turned his eyes on Motke with that particular look of suspicion that was kept for Jews. Had there been a trick in all this?

  —They must search in Metulla, Motke said, where Zev had relatives, “Let me go in alone,” he managed to persuade them. “From me, they won’t hide anything.”

  * * * *

  The woman didn’t wait; she came running toward Motke from the farmyard, gathering together her wrapper, her hair uncombed, her face in stupefaction. “He was here, he was here in the night. I beseeched him, Zev, go, I always knew he would bring agony in the world. I begged him for the sake of my children, Zev, go—” and then, as though she still could not fully believe it—“He went.”

  It was his aunt who had raised him here, a poorish, neglected place with half-broken implements lying about the yard, a wagon with a missing wheel. Two girls still in their nightgowns appeared in the doorway, and their mother screamed at them, “Stay inside! … He’s gone, he went, I swear by the heads of my daughters, I don’t know where, to the Druze perhaps. I only bandaged his wound, it was bleeding.” She showed where, on the shoulder by the neck. “The width of a finger more, and it would have been all over for him,” she said with a sorrowful puzzlement, meeting something in Motke’s own eyes—wouldn’t it have been better? Was it God’s intention that had been spoiled by some error? “From when he first came to us, I tried my best with him, I swear to you—an orphan from Kishinev!” As if everyone else, too, hadn’t made allowances all his life for this. “But Zev was never anything but trouble.”

  Deep in the night she had opened her eyes, and there he was, the Jewel, standing over the bed where she lay with one daughter on each side of her, the way she slept every night since the Turks had dragged off her man with the only good wagon and the mules. That this moment would come, she had known as soon as Zev’s name spread over the land and news reached even to Metulla that Zev was the chief spy, the hunted one. She had known he would come here, if only to show himself in the height of his doing, evil or good, the way he would always show himself after his childhood misdeeds. The chief spy, the hunted one! And there had arisen in her the anger, the exasperation, yet also the bitter tinge of admiration that he evoked even as a boy. She was not his aunt in truth, but his older cousin, and when he had arrived among the group of orphans, it was to her the Jewel had fallen. And her husband, more of a decent Jew then, for it was before he had gone bitter, had accepted.

  Now in this deep night, Zev stood in her room like a nightmare. Everyone, the Turks, the Shomer, the whole land—who would not at once think that he would try to come here? And to defy them all the Jewel had done it.

  As he stood there, Malka put her fist in her mouth. In the kitchen, sleeping on the floor, lay two watchmen posted in Metulla by the Shomer to strengthen the guard against Turkish army deserters and marauders. How had he not awakened them? And her daughters would awake. “Zev, they’ll scream. Hide in the outhouse. I’ll come to you.”

  A long moment Zev hung over the bed. Why was it required of him again to set himself in motion? He had reached home. Between the two watchmen on a straw mattress on the kitchen tiles he had safely passed, knowing nothing would interfere with this destiny, knowing he would enter Malka’s room. Something in him had even known that his cursed uncle would not be there. But the two girls in the bed he had not expected. Perhaps because of them he at last now turned and made his way back soundlessly again between the two sleepers and then across the yard; the outhouse door still hung on one hinge; Zev sat. His arm heavily rose and brushed the flies from his wound.

  Tumultuously it was as though he were arranging all that had happened to him so he could tell it all to a woman. Her form hovered toward him, the kindly goyish neighbor woman in the blacksmith’s yard in Kishinev who thrust him into the shed among the sacks of coke, to hide until the pogrom died down. Saraleh, when she thrust him down the ladder to the cellar in Aaron Aaronson’s cottage, and then sent down a loaf of bread wrapped in her kerchief. He would unburden himself of all that had happened to him; she would hold his head and the throbbing tumult would be soothed away. There was no Sara any more, but the mother in Mishkan Yaacov had thrust him into the great dark oven. When all was safe, Big Leah had come, and again in the carriage Leah had saved him. To Big Leah he was relating it all, not his wife, long ago she had gone back to Janovici, her whining he did not need. The woman would come, who was she?

  It was Malka who came to him; she held a basin of water, and after the laving, she spread balm on his burning wound, the same balm he recalled from years ago after the thrashings. Malka kept telling him he must go, this was the first place they would search, he must go, why had he come here, it was foolish; and in the same voice Malka kept repeating with her eternal stupidity, “Where will you go?” This same stupid flat voice—how it had always enraged him—and again it was to Zev as though he were relating all this to the real woman, saying, “Even when I was a boy, I would become so angry, I’d spit on her and run away.”

  Suddenly he cried out to Malka, “Listen, the British are sending a ship for me. I have two barrels of gold hidden in Athlit. Malka, hide me, I’ll buy you a hundred cows from Denmark, I’ll build you a big new house, hide me, bring me food, keep me hidden only for a week—”

  She was staring as when the troublesome boy had told her his wild tales. “Wait one moment, Zev,” she whispered and hurried back to the house.

  Now a profound knowledge of his whole life swept over Zev, and he saw it clearly and knew how he would explain it to the real woman. That which had impelled him to come creeping back to this house was a mistake, an error of the kind that life thrusts on you, and he was now finished with this mistake and could go. But in the same clarity Zev knew that he had not the strength to climb to the Druze, and also that the welcome of the Druze was an illusion. Would he not be hunted there at once? He must go the other way, southward,-he must reach the British.

  She was returning; she carried something.

  A loaf of bread.

  “Quick, go now. Oh, where will you go?”

  A tale, something from cheder, came to him. From the days
of Abraham. Bread. They brought you bread. As a welcome, for the welcome guest. In his life everything had always been turned around. Zev took the bread from her hands and without a word slipped into the darkness.

  “Don’t tell them he was here, no one saw him!” Malka begged, and for Motke as well it was best to deny.

  “He has not been here, she swears it by her daughters,” Motke declared as Ismael and Sayed swarmed in. “Besides, how could it be? Two men slept on the floor, her daughters slept in the bed with her.”

  They burst through the house, angry. The thousand pound reward. And the gold on the body. From Halsah came horsemen, the sheikh himself and his other sons and his sons-in-law. Through all Metulla they galloped, in every house they searched and pillaged, while Sayed with two of them, surrounding Motke, climbed on their steeds up the mountainside to the Druze. The mukhtar declared the Jew had not been seen.

  In rage Sayed bethought himself of the kvutsa. It was there the trick on him had been planned. Now Har Tsafon was invaded. The sons of Sheikh Jibran had become Sayed’s deputies, the kvutsa was ransacked, Shimshoni was seized and put into the carriage—at least some Jew, Sayed would take back with him.

  “He could not have escaped, he was wounded, we will find his body,” Motke kept protesting. One more chance Sayed gave him. Again they searched every hole in the rocks, the tunnel that led to the Chimney, the caves. At the end, Sayed turned wrathfully on Motke and had him bound and flung into the carriage with Shimshoni. Ismael and his brothers rode behind. The return to Nazareth began.

  27

  BEFORE THE disaster deepened, there was just time for a rider from Har Tsafon to reach Shabbatai Zeira. The Kurd took the failure on himself. He would not hide or flee. It was he who had made the decision to go to Achmed Bey in Nazareth, and he would go again. The story must remain exactly as he had given the Bimbashi to understand. Men of the Shomer had captured Zev and held him in Har Tsafon, while he, their chief, had come to Achmed Bey. The earlier complications at Gilboa need not be known. Motke could be counted on not to reveal it and endanger the rest of the Shomer. Therefore Menahem and Zeira’s own nephew who had escorted Zev to Har Tsafon must at once be securely hidden. The error was that too many had been too tender-hearted; they should have finished Zev off on the spot.