The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  The eyes slowly opened, and recognized him.

  All that had ever stood between them was dissolved.

  Fearful to leave Max even while fetching a doctor, as though the current of tenacity to life depended on his remaining close, Reuven at last managed to catch the attention of an orderly down the hall. Eventually a weary doctor appeared. This afterbreath of life happened sometimes in typhus cases, but the man would die anyway, he said. Yet, insistently, Reuven got Max removed from the death cart, returned to a bed, tended.

  —What had they fought over? The depth of a furrow. The buying of a water pump. How small this seemed, Reuven told Elisheva, beside the new sense, the exquisite sense, of brotherhood that had engulfed him in Max Wilner’s miraculous return to life. All these divisions in life, arguments, splitting into factions—“When we get home, if we can only remember, and stay together …”

  “Yes,” she said, never moving her eyes from his face. “Reuven, it’s certain? When you go back, you’ll take me?”

  From the happier air of her daughter, Mme. Shalmoni had already understood, and though not overjoyed, she was not hostile. Every effort had been made to put a suitable match in Elisheva’s way, the years ran swiftly, and in the Sephardi community Elisheva was already viewed, though with puzzlement, as an old maid. Well born, attractive, with Parisian chic, an accomplished pianist—what was wrong? “Modern girls are choosy.” Her mother resorted to that common excuse. “On a modern girl a match cannot be forced.” But still …

  And so Mme. Shalmoni did not discourage what she saw happening. Though Reuven was an Ashkenazi and from a small settler’s family, it still could be pointed out—as she managed to pick up from among the Palestine refugees—that an uncle in Russia was a man of importance, the owner of a sugar mill. Even if, with the revolution in Russia, the uncle probably was rich no longer, still … And Reuven himself was a very serious young man, an officer and a favorite with Djemal Pasha himself. The Shalmonis had never been followers of Herzl, yet Eretz Yisroel was in their hearts. Moise Shalmoni had believed rather in the method of Baron Rothschild, in the gradual establishment of settlements without upsetting anyone. But see, the Zionists had actually succeeded in securing a Declaration from the British. And though Moise Shalmoni was in no way disloyal to his country, still, if the British should, after all, with the American colossus at their side, complete the victory in Palestine, it would be useful to have family connections on that side too. In the future it would perhaps even be men like Reuven Chaimovitch the idealist who would be influential, just as in Russia it was now the revolutionists, the laborers and peasants who ruled. It wouldn’t hurt, Moise agreed with his wife, to have a link amidst the socialists.

  Sara Shalmoni led her daughter Elisheva into discussions. Yes, she was deeply interested in Reuven, the girl said, in that modern way that answered but didn’t answer you. In his kvutsa in Palestine, Elisheva said, Reuven was conducting agricultural experiments. Though he had never had the education of an Aaron Aaronson, he had great gifts as an agronomist. He had discovered ancient pistachio trees in the forsaken wilderness and transplanted them, and “Do you know, Reuven was the first to raise potatoes in Palestine when all the other agronomists, even Aaronson, had failed!”

  “Since when are you interested in growing potatoes?”

  If it had not been for the potato crop, half of the Yishuv would have starved to death in the plague of locusts, Elisheva informed her.

  The mother was not really a creature of prejudice. After all, was raising potatoes so very different from dealing in dried figs? And this Chaimovitch had created a garden of wonders for Djemal Pasha. With the help of the Shalmoni family, he could perhaps be sent to France after the war to study agronomy, and become as famous as Aaron Aaronson.

  “Oh, Reuven wouldn’t go away to study unless his kvutsa sent him,” Elisheva said, and tried to explain to her mother how life was lived in a kvutsa.

  Sara Shalmoni was troubled. “But are you marrying him or his kvutsa?”

  Indeed Elisheva was still a little frightened about her ability to live such a life. About joining her life to Reuven’s she had no question, yet it would also mean joining her life to that of his entire group of chaverim. Logically, Elisheva asked herself, was that so different from the usual form of marriage in society, where you accepted your husband’s family and the society he moved in? As Reuven explained, a kvutsa was like a family, only somewhat larger …

  The most difficult part for the women, he said, was in regard to the children, for in the kvutsa, though of course the parents were the closest to their own children, still the children belonged to the whole kvutsa. The kvutsa even decided when and who should have children.

  Yes! she agreed. Yes. To change the whole structure of society! The family was a tyranny too. Look at her own family. Her eldest brother had accepted an arranged marriage and compensated himself by keeping a mistress. Her second brother was miserable in the family business.

  But another thing made Reuven worry about her. “So much of your life is music. We don’t even have a piano in the kvutsa.”

  “Why, I’ll bring mine!” Elisheva said. The Bechstein was her very own, a homecoming gift when she had returned from Paris.

  “But, you see, in the kvutsa it won’t be your own. It will belong to everyone.”

  “Of course! Why not!”

  And if someone else wanted to use it just when she wanted to play on it? “Reuven, my dear one, I’m not a baby. Only one thing I must tell you—”

  “What?” He was a little worried.

  “I refuse to become a vegetarian!” And her laughter sang out.

  But one thing she did ask of him, with a certain shyness, and only for the sake of her family. Could they have a conventional wedding here, with a rabbi and all?

  When Elisheva made known to her mother that a wedding was in order, Sara Shalmoni began again with her optimistic plans of what could be made of a man like Reuven. As soon as the war ended, Elisheva could go with him to France for his studies. “But, Mama, we will live in his kvutsa.” Now it was Mme. Shalmoni’s turn to protest. A commune! Did Elisheva with all her clever learning know what sort of a life that meant? Like the Bolsheviki in Russia! The women were common property. Men and women bathed together naked in the communes in Eretz Yisroel, she had heard it from the banker Raphael Yeshayahu himself, in exile here. And as in a kvutsa they never knew who was the father of a child, the children were raised in a separate house, like orphans.

  It didn’t help to laugh. “Mama, does Reuven seem like a man who has led such a life? His own sister is married and lives in a kvutsa—you have met her husband, Menahem, and they have two children—” Her mother was not convinced. In the commune, as there were not enough women, a chavera was expected to belong to several men—

  “Mama!” She could hardly talk for laughing, and then her mother was hurt, and so to assuage her, Elisheva told her something she at once felt she should not have offered even to her mother, but it was done. “Do you want to know the truth about Reuven? He is almost thirty years old and he has kept himself—as a woman tries to keep herself. He has waited to find the woman he loves.” Angry at herself for having revealed Reuven’s most intimate privacy, she broke into a sob.

  An astonished softness came over her mother’s face; the face became younger, and some deep longing, rising up from her girlhood, came into it. “In the old days,” Sara Shalmoni said, “you know boys and girls were betrothed early, and they were married very young, so that for the boy too—his betrothed was the first. And among our pious men—you see, that is why it is a sin for a man even to look at another woman than his own wife. That is why they turn their heads away, so as not to be tempted.” She sighed. “The truly pious ones, they lived their whole lives together, one man, one woman.”

  As it was in time of war, it was quite understandable that the Shalmonis should hold the wedding festivities on a modest scale, even as Elisheva insisted. But yet it must not seem they w
ere in any way disappointed in the groom, and therefore Sara Shalmoni decided exclusivity would be invoked; only the oldest and most distinguished families would be invited, and word would be discreetly spread that Djemal Pasha himself would attend. On the first hint, “Surely your Reuven could ask him,” Elisheva fell into a silent anger and would not speak to her mother for two whole days. Then she declared there would be no wedding at all, she would go off and live with Reuven in his kvutsa as many other couples did, unmarried. But when Reuven got out of her what was troubling her, Elisheva was astonished to find him unperturbed. “After all, if we are going to do it for your parents, why not do it as they wish?” One day the Pasha came to the garden in a good mood. The Bolsheviki had taken Russia out of the war! Now all the forces could be turned against England! Presently Reuven remarked that he was about to be married and would be most honored if his commander would look in on the festivities.

  The Turk gazed on him with a growing leer, as though for the first time he accepted Reuven as a complete male. “You are the only Jew who has never asked me for anything!” he declared. —And whom was Reuven marrying? Into the Shalmoni family! Djemal Pasha whistled, and stared again at Reuven, as though searching for some mark of concealed but amazing prowess. Who could comprehend the Jews? A nobody from Palestine—and the Shalmonis.

  Now, Reuven said, he would even ask for something more. Could his family in Palestine receive travel permits to come to the wedding?

  All went well. In Gilboa there was not an opposing voice to Dvora’s being given leave for the wedding of her brother Reuven, particularly as this would be an opportunity to send with her the last of the hidden napoleons, desperately needed by Young Avram and Menahem in their rescue work. As to the children there was considerable discussion, for though a reunion with their father was of importance, the metapelet felt that such a drastic change of environment, with the introduction to a wealthy bourgeois manner of life, would be altogether upsetting to them, especially at their impressionable age.

  Even leaving the children behind, Dvoraleh later thought, was to the good, for after the self-consciousness of the first hours, the meeting with Menahem was like a renewal. Never had they really been together like this, almost secretly, in the privacy of the room from which Young Avram had departed, and in a large city, with its wondrous gardens, and elegant shops and the lively cafes to which Menahem took her. Here for a time you could almost forget the war. And the sumptuous home of the Shalmonis. It was even richer than the great house of her uncle in Cherezinka.

  Though all longed for Leah—oh, how she would have enlivened things—with the land divided in two, it was sadly doubtful if she even knew of the marriage. And Yaffeleh too, who had gone with Leah to her kvutsa before the arrival of the British and had of course been unable to return home, oh, how she would have loved to see Reuven married. It fell to Dvoraleh then to be closest to Elisheva, and tell her from a woman’s side about life in the kvutsa, and this too was good, for they took easily to each other and would sit for hours while Elisheva asked endless questions and Dvora replied with the simplest frankness. Only to Menahem Dvorah revealed some doubts. “Elisheva wants to, she has the greatest good will. But I don’t know. It will be hard, hard for her.”

  As for the mothers, though Sara Shalmoni was not really taken in by the bits of information Feigel at once began to let drop about the importance and wealth of her side of the family in Russia, she soon perceived what this woman’s life had been like in coming to Palestine with a large brood of children and little more than the clothes on their backs. She decided that Reuven’s mother was a real heroine. Yes, a real person. Yet Mme. Shalmoni determined that she must in some way protect her own daughter from such hardships. Perhaps, she suggested to Feigel, Reuven would agree, for the sake of the good it would do to Eretz Yisroel, to go to Europe and study agronomy? Perhaps his mother knew a bit how to manage him? “Oh, he’s stubborn,” Feigel sighed. “Gentle, but more stubborn than a mule.”

  “Exactly like Elisheva.”

  “Indeed a pair.”

  Both sighed. Though Sara Shalmoni’s was not a sigh of resignation.

  As for Yankel, just as he had known for twenty years in Cherezinka how somehow to retain his dignity in the rich house of his brother-in-law, so here. He spoke little, but not deferentially. These Sephardim did not intimidate him. Perhaps they smiled behind his back at the Russian Jew who had become a peasant; at one meal, the talk turned to the plague of locusts and he let himself be led on and told the whole story of the battle to save his pardess. Now the trees were bearing fruit. After that, it was all easier.

  The smoothest of the new family relationships turned out to be that between Elisheva’s brothers and Reuven’s brother-in-law Nahum. This young man could move to Damascus tomorrow and go into business with them, one of the brothers chortled. “And how long,” Elisheva whispered wickedly to Reuven, “would it be before Nahum took over the business?”

  Though it was “for the families” that they had brushed aside their resistance to a ceremonial wedding, when it took place they admitted to each other they were not sorry. The entire Jewish community of Damascus crowded into the great synagogue. This wedding had become an expression of a whispered hope, for here a member of one of the oldest families was being married to one of the new Jews of Eretz—and wasn’t this a sign?

  When Reuven was led up to the chupah between her father and his father, and while Elisheva, a white dove, was led around him by the mothers as though winding and binding them together, he experienced an elated sense of annealment to eternal ways. He did not stamp on the wineglass, but simply pressed it down; he saw her eyes through the veil and knew she understood the more intimate meaning of the breaking of the goblet and why he had done it gently.

  The festivities had not tired them. They mounted to what had been her own chamber, facing the inner courtyard with its fountain. In each was a kind of vow, a prayer that nothing should mar the culmination.

  From the barracks talk of men, bragging or filthy or even longingly sentimental, from solemn male arguments about just how to bring a woman to the point of ecstasy, Reuven knew that the principal thing was not to be hasty; he had heard so many jokes about the quick ejaculation, and about the woman left lying unsatisfied. But he was certain he could control himself, in all these years had he not held back, held back, and almost always conquered his urges?

  How thoughtful of his dear one—she had changed her room for him! The feminine things were gone, the frills and the delicate colors, the curtains were different and—as he noted it, Elisheva buried herself against him—a large bed replaced her maiden’s bed. During the long kiss his fingers sought to undress her. “It’s too complicated,” Elisheva whispered and slid away to her bathroom. It was for him now to undress and Reuven did so in haste so as to avoid any awkward moment, then lay down on the bed; she did not make him wait but flew out to him; in the lamplight he only glimpsed her nudity and she was quickly against his body.

  Without the foam of her clothing, her form was so slight, the small breasts, the little naked feet, the smooth fragile limbs like a gazelle’s, his palms ached with tenderness. Then Reuven felt through the length of her small body a slight involuntary shudder. As though to apologize for it, she clasped herself closer to him. It must have been when she first felt his member against her. Her mouth clung to his in ardor, in desperation, and she drew him over upon her. But he could not enter. They murmured endearments, “I know,” “I’ll try not to hurt,” “Don’t worry about me, my darling,” even with a touch of sophisticated laughter, “I must have waited too long.” He must not press, he must only let her feel the touch of it, and the tenseness there would relax, and just as a flower does, her petals would slowly fold back and open to him. As Reuven imagined this, an uncontrollable throbbing came, and the sperm. In the same movement, her body shuddered, but her arms tightened around him while she half-moaned, “No, no, don’t be sorry, it’s my fault.” And it was she who recovered fi
rst, was able to make light of the accident. They really were both such innocents. Yet Elisheva was conquering a repulsion, he sensed. She lay quite still, the spent fluid on her thigh; awkwardly he hurried to bring a towel. Then they lay side by side and tried to make light of it. Her hand lay over her sex as in famous paintings of nudes. A thought of how stupid he was came to Reuven—surely he had known he must first arouse her. But she had been so ardent. Softly, Elisheva began to laugh. She was watching his member as it slowly of itself rose. Reuven too began to laugh. Still the consummation did not easily take place; she whispered “I’m trying,” and he entered with the greatest caution, waiting after the slightest penetration for her muscles to become accustomed and to relax. It took a long while, but a great sigh of relief, of accomplishment, arose from both, and within the wondrous pleasure an enormous relief that though each had waited so many years, everything was well. They lay still, hands clasped. After a moment, Elisheva raised herself and said, “See, there’s even a little blood. No, no, darling, it didn’t really hurt. In the old days, a servant would hurry out with the sheet and show it to all our relatives!”

  But then, despite her bravado, a dreadful thing happened. A whiteness came over Elisheva. She tried to hold back, she sat, rigid. “What is it, dear one?” he cried tenderly, alarmed, but she had slipped out of bed to her bathroom. Reuven too rose from the bed and half-crossed the room, hovered, asked if she was well, and felt an anger at the course of civilization in man that could even mar the beauty of so wondrous and long-withheld a natural experience. He heard the tap-water. At least she had not fainted. He must be watchful, Elisheva was so delicate. In a few moments she came out, reaching for his hand, her body still seized at moments by small shudders. “Forgive me. I’m so ashamed. It must have been the champagne.” They were both able to laugh a bit. Then they lay tenderly with their arms around each other and knew that they really were married, that they could love each other, even in touches of ugliness and inadequacies of the flesh. Slowly Reuven began to feel eased. It was like this really to be loved, to be wed. They slept peacefully together.