The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  But from where would this new energy come? Without a vast new wave of young chalutzim, how could the land be rebuilt? Would the builders come from the lands of the victors? English Jews were hardly Jews, French Jews would not come, American Jews would send money, but few would come, for most of them were the same Jews from Russia who had in the first instance decided to go to America and not to Eretz. Where could the masses of new chalutzim come from except Poland and Russia?

  And here was the impenetrable, the tohu v’bohu, the tumultous void, the darkness as dark as this cave. What was happening, what was happening there with their revolution? Would it prove good or bad for the movement? Would the young Jews all flock to the banner of the Bund, lose themselves in the Russian revolution, and scorn Zion?

  Menahem thought back to his own time, to the endless arguments and even the bodily assaults, in his own circle—what was more important, the revolutzia, or Zionism? And now that they had had their revolutzia, though only bits of rumors seeped through—Jews had already been given full equal rights it was said—would this draw them away from Zion? Would it be enough for their dream, merely to have more civil rights in Russia?

  Though no one had letters, no one had newspapers, tales had come through Constantinople, from the Zionist bureau there, filtering down to the Jews in Damascus. Many Jews were prominent in the new government in St. Petersburg, it was said. The social revolutionist Pincus Rutenberg, a good Zionist as well, was rumored to have returned from exile and to be high in the Kerensky government. Also, it was rumored, Trumpeldor had found his way back to Russia, and surely Trumpeldor would not forsake the movement. Yet how could one know what was happening there? One had to go there. Could someone, in some way, perhaps get to Russia? And on this, his mind could spin, on strange schemes to penetrate the impenetrable.

  Deeper in the night, Menahem fell into a different contemplation; fragments of thought, like ends of threads long broken off, seemed to cling there in his mind.

  Why was darkness created, and night? It came back to him that from the black and nether side of life must be drawn the very substance of light and life. So the Cabbalists had comprehended the secret; the roots of life fed in darkness. It was needed that he should lie here in a black cave so that illumination would rise within him. Thus the darkness would shine for him, his solitude be lifted, and he knew that he was one of those to whom a spark of destiny might be shown. It was then that Elijah came.

  Elijah who had dwelt in a cave on the Carmel—Elijah entered Menahem’s cave and approached him on the stone ledge. He was as Menahem had always imagined him, though long ago renouncing such imaginings, counting himself a rational man. Nevertheless even a rational man could conjecture on the visions that had come to Jews in the past, to Moshe Rabenu, to Saul, to David, to Samuel, and to Elijah. As always, Menahem saw, Elijah wore his garment of skins, girdled with a thong, and his staff was from an ancient olive. His lips were wide and red, and he moved quite close into the alcove, as a man who has intimate, secret matters to impart.

  “He cannot yet come down,” Elijah said of the Messiah, “because the Unnameable has not yet given him a body. But as you know,” Elijah confided to one who had been a yeshiva bocher, “there is a way to bring down Mashiach even before his time.”

  So powerful was the yearning of Messiah to come down, as he witnessed this time of terror and knew the full need for his coming, as the outcries and the pleading and the prayers of the tormented and hunted came to him, so deeply did he suffer even for those who like Menahem were becoming disillusioned through witnessing the agony that God permitted to be inflicted on His own children, to the very point where they had to cease to believe in God, where they had even to deny God—so eager was the Messiah to come down, that a spark from the flame of his soul had escaped, and this spark Elijah carried.

  “It is here within my breast,” Elijah said, and in sublime awe Menahem perceived the spark. Even while his rational mind protested—what grandmother’s tales, what childhood bobeh-meises had come back upon him—tonight, in this vision, the Messianic spark glowed and burned within Elijah’s flesh, and illuminated the ages, into the time to come.

  So it must have been across the generations at all times when the Messiah could not endure the waiting, at all times of deepest torment in the world. A spark of Messiah it must have been that moved Shabbatai Zvi along his Messianic path, until the spark dimmed, and he erred and knew fear and bowed to the will of a Sultan and became a Moslem. And had it not also been a spark carried down by Elijah that entered the body of that well-bred Jew of Vienna, Theodor Herzl, and through him brought the mission of Messiah almost to completion, until Herzl too flawed and was ready to gather Jews into another land than Israel? Just so, Menahem knew, Elijah’s spark was now reflected into himself, and he would go forth and lead Jews to Eretz. He would go forth, Menahem knew it, from this cave where Elijah sat with him, and he would bring Jews from other lands, by the impulse from Messiah, into the homeland.

  When daylight came, Menahem noticed that he had lain on a scorpion. It had not touched him. Had he been superstitious, he would have taken this as a sign.

  * * * *

  After Yaffaleh came with the evil news, Nahum had not wasted a moment. In a way he had long prepared himself for troubles of this kind. Though not a great reader, Nahum was a fairly constant reader of biographies of the great. This was a good way to learn about useful qualities in life, and Nahum had already begun to put into practice some of the points he had picked up from such books. In a biography of the powerful Rothschild family, which one of the German officers had left with him, Nahum had been struck by the way the Rothschild fortune had begun. The founder had been an ordinary moneylender in the ghetto of Frankfurt-am-Main, but he had developed a hobby of coin collecting. When he met the Duke of Baden on a small business affair, this old Roths child had learned that the Duke was also a coin collector, and thus there had developed an important connection that began with a simple mutual interest. Now in this, Nahum explained to Shula, there were several lessons. Could she perceive them? “To develop mutual interests with important people?” she said.

  That was one principle. Good. But what was an even deeper principle?

  Shula liked to make occasions for Nahum to display his clever thinking to her—he enjoyed it so. Especially when she honestly couldn’t see as far as he saw, he was delighted, and then she could ask of him anything she wanted.

  “Look,” her husband explained, his eyes glowing, “it shows that a man will do a big thing for a small thing, if the small thing really pleases him.”

  How had he jumped to that? His conclusion truly interested her.

  “Why, the Duke’s coin collection was a hobby, no? A small thing.”

  “Perhaps it was a big collection?”

  He laughed and patted her. Touché. But Nahum explained nevertheless: “Even a big collection would be a small thing compared to the Duke’s vast business interests. Yet he turned his whole fortune over to Mayer Anschel Rothschild for management because they were both coin collectors. Thus a small thing brings a big one.”

  Her husband’s cleverness never ceased to surprise her. But Nahum wasn’t finished with what he had learned from the Rothschilds. “The important thing is to know what people really care about. A hobby is something like being in love. You can touch a man deeply through his hobby.”

  “So how can you ever have all the same hobbies as every one you want to do business with? You won’t have time for the business!”

  “You don’t have to have all the hobbies, Ketzeleh.” Even without being himself a coin collector, if Rothschild had simply learned that the Duke loved old coins, he could have found some for him, and this also would have worked.

  —But didn’t everyone know this rule? Shula asked. To get on the good side of people? Sometimes Nahum was funny—he made himself a whole system out of what everybody naturally knew.

  Still, perhaps the way her Nahum did things was a little different. Sh
e saw how it had begun with the fat Kaymakam. Once when Azmani Bey had been invited for a holiday dinner, the Turk was still stuffing himself when everyone had finished. Papa Bagelmacher drew out his gold watch to look at the time. It was a beautiful watch he had inherited from his own great-grandfather who had been a watchmaker in Lublin, and the Kaymakam’s eyes swam over it as though it were another of Mama Bagelmacher’s apricot dumplings. Might he look at it? Papa took off the watch and chain. All at once the fat one’s sausage fingers became delicate as the feelers of an ant; he opened the back cover, the inside lid, and his mouth worked as though to lick up all he saw. Then he drew out his own watch and showed it also was unusual, it had moons and suns on the face. Everyone admired the timepiece, but Nahum had really become interested and had asked questions. Thereupon the fat one drew out a second timepiece; this one was amazingly flat, and thin as a Maria Theresa thaler. Azmani Bey sat there for another hour discoursing about famous watches, and when he left at last, the Kaymakam invited Nahum to come and see his collection.

  Nahum went the next day, and on his return told Shula all sorts of things, really intriguing. Could she imagine, the Belly had an entire special room filled with a collection of watches and clocks. He had a long shelf of books from France, Germany and Switzerland, about clocks alone!

  Then what? Must Nahum become a collector of old watches and thus a Kaymakam?

  Nahum patted her. Ay, Ketzeleh, didn’t she see? The next time they needed something important from Azmani Bey—

  “You’ll give him your father’s old watch?”

  —No, but at least, she wasn’t entirely stupid, he said.

  Just so, Nahum began keeping an eye out for old watches. To linger in little jewelry shops, to look at beautiful stones, moonstones, rubies, gave him pleasure; here in Tiberias there were only a few poor stalls with heavy silverwork, but in Nazareth where Christian tourists stayed, there were shops, and already long ago Nahum had become a good friend of the son of a shopkeeper, a Nashashibi who kept a clutter of things in his trays. Yassir, like himself, took pleasure in fine stones. And as two young married men, they had knowing jests for each other.

  Once Nahum brought Yassir a remarkable set of French postcards that a German flier had traded him for three bottles of the best Rishon brandy. The photographs were hand-tinted. In return, Yassir, another time, drew Nahum into a back room and there showed him two bronze figurines that could be coupled and uncoupled. They laughed and laughed, handling the pair in turn, making many positions.

  Since then, Nahum had developed the habit of picking up from the counter trays curious timepieces that villagers occasionally brought in, and only a few days ago Yassir had pounced on him as he entered, “Nahum, I have something especially for you!” With joyous anticipation in his eyes, he drew Nahum to the rear, and even before the boy brought coffee, took out from a velvet pouch a thick gold watch—but wait! Yassir opened the back, and with his giggle, offered the watch to Nahum’s gaze. There, in the silvery steel movement, a busy little manikin with each stroke drove his member between the legs of a silvery minikin, and in the next stroke withdrew. With moist lips, the two young husbands kept gazing at this wonder.

  And so when Yaffaleh told of the arrests, Nahum was prepared. Yet the matter must not appear as a simple bribe; for Nahum to rush to the Kaymakam would not be the right way.

  But how could they wait? Tateh might at this very moment be under the lash, and who knew what he could endure?

  “Besides the gifts that Avshalom Feinberg brought that time, from Gidon in Alexandria,” Nahum asked, “what more could he reveal to them?”

  Yaffaleh was silent.

  “And Leah?” Shula said. “How much did Tateh know? Of her doings? Of arms? He isn’t supposed to know anything.”

  Then Yaffaleh said, “It’s about Menahem.”

  “You are hiding Menahem?”

  Nahum’s father put his hands over his ears and ran from the room. The mother kept half sobbing, “We can’t leave him there! The fat one is a monster. He will beat everything out of him!”

  “Tateh won’t speak,” Yaffaleh said. “He will be like old Aaronson.”

  Like the old Aaronson. But the Aaronsons had done what they had done, while Tateh had raged against even the first whisper of doing such things.

  “I’ll find a way. I’ll find a way,” Nahum promised.

  As with old Aaronson, it was happening to Yankel. By their two devils he had been summoned, and he also like Old Gordon had walked a pace ahead of them so as not to be prodded. He found himself standing there before the Belly, who even greeted him with a “Shalom, Reb Chaimovitch” followed by a weary sigh. “That you would not be foolish enough to hide the Jewel in your oven once again, I know, Reb Chaimovitch.”

  The pig. Even the tale of the oven had reached his pig’s ears, but it was already long enough ago to be a tale that everyone repeated. Yankel too sighed, a sigh far more profound. It did not rise, like the Kaymakam’s, from an afternoon’s weariness at being obliged to listen to the futile shriekings of grown men, but from centuries of standing thus, before the Inquisitor, the Cossacks’ hetman, the Graf, the Baron. “Not in the oven or even in the outhouse, as your excellency knows. Nothing but disaster has ever come to us from that one; we drove him from the village, and ours is the last place he would come to, to hide.”

  “He was a shomer. And every member of your Shomer,” the Kaymakam giggled, to show how easily the secrets fell, “each one took a blood-oath to protect his brothers to the death. Your son-in-law Menahem is one of them.”

  Already Menahem. “But the Shomer also threw Zev out, and Menahem was the first to vote against him.”

  “Then why did your chief shomer let Zev the Hotblood escape, in Har Tsafon?”

  What did he, Yankel, know of such things? Was this even true? That the Jewel had escaped, this was the cause of all the misfortune—but—allowed to escape? Yankel felt whirled around as by a sudden wind. Could Menahem have anything to do with such a thing?

  Of Menahem’s being hidden now in the cave he was aware, though even this had not been spoken of to him. Nothing was spoken of to him. But did they think that he had no eyes in his head, when Mati slipped out over the fields before dawn?

  The fat mamser had already smelled the wind of doubt and fear that assailed him. Now the questions came as from a dozen adders’ tongues, as though from a host of inquisitioners. His daughter—the big one—had she not been home last week? Why had she suddenly departed? Where was she now?

  Of her he could easily tell, that he sent her with food for the families driven out from Jaffa and Tel Aviv. And there she would remain, to help.

  And where was his younger son—the sharpshooter?

  “Gidon? Long ago Bahad-ad-Din seized him with the shipful of Jews in Jaffa, and sent him away, and it is as though he had vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “Indeed, Reb Chaimovitch? And you haven’t heard from him since?”

  What could this Pharaoh know? Of the gifts brought by that reckless, insane one, that Avshalom Feinberg, whose babbling mouth was now finally stopped in death? In sudden anger Yankel wanted to shout curses over all those meddling idiots whose intrigues and spying and self-importance, together with all their heroism, had now enmeshed and entrapped him. How could he safely answer? He would be caught by a yes or a no. Not a word! He would stand as Akiba before the Romans, let them flay the flesh from his body!

  —And the Aaronsons? Had he not known them?

  “He came in the time of the locusts. He came to everyone, to tell how to overcome the plague of locusts. Djemal Pasha himself sent him!”

  “And your eldest son—what is his name?”

  “Reuven. But he is in your own service, in Damascus.”

  “And what does he tell you from Damascus?”

  “We have hardly heard from him in the whole war.”

  “Reb Chaimovitch, Damascus is not Alexandria in Egypt.”

  “Only now and again, a w
ord that he is well.”

  —Perhaps Yankel was tired, standing? There was the bench, to lie down. Sometimes one remembered better, lying down.

  Let it come. Why should he escape what God had ordained for Jews to suffer? For the first stroke, for the fire that arose in its wake across the soles of both feet, he was well prepared.

  Azmani Bey had fallen silent as though to let Yankel hear the descending rod. Each slash became a streak of fire, and then his feet were entirely bathed in flame. The words of prayer did not come to Yankel, only a groaning, with an inner, rumbling, drawn-out Gottenu.

  There were not even questions between, to give him respite. If he had been asked again, Menahem? Would there come out of him, at some time, the word—cave? The word was pasul, forbidden, it was outside of the whole range of things that existed in the universe.