The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  A thought! Dovidl took this up. A good thought for the future when they were well established. Certain members could stay in the settlement which would be their base, while others went out to guard the villages. Their wives could tend the poultry and the dairy.

  “Wait!” Galil brought them back to earth. “We don’t even have wives!” This was true, except for the Zeiras, who were married and indeed had their own farm in Sejera. Concretely, now, how were they to obtain their first watchman’s contract?

  “Why not here in Mescha?” Dovidl suggested.

  The local settlers would never agree to dismiss the Circassians.

  “We can chase off the Circassians!” Zev the Hotblood offered. But Dovidl had already thought of a plan. The watchman, after putting in his appearance, each night went back to his sleep in Kfar Kana. So then someone had only to let a mule out of a stable through the small gate in the back wall. Dovidl himself would set up a howl, “Thieves!” The settlers would wake, rush to their barns, discover a mule was missing, shout for their watchman—and where would they find him?

  “Asleep in Kfar Kana!” The Hotblood laughed, won over.

  Whereupon they themselves, the Bar Giora, would offer their services as their watchmen who would live right in Mescha itself.

  So it was agreed. The intimate-voiced Galil, looking at Zev, reminded everyone that all that passed between them was secret. There were some who had been admitted tonight who were here for the first time and had not yet been inducted into the society. If all were ready, the induction would proceed.

  Zev was the first; leaping up from his stool, he took his place before the table. Dovidl reached back to his books on the window ledge, drew forth a Bible and placed it on the table within the glow of the kerosene lamp. From somewhere, Reuven saw, a huge pistol had appeared, and Avner placed it now beside the Bible.

  In sudden solemnity, Zev put one hand on the Bible, the other on the gun. It was Shabbatai Zeira, standing alongside of Galil, who administered the oath.

  “Say after me: In blood and fire, Judea fell, in blood and fire, Judea will arise.”

  Smacking his lips, Zev almost shouted the words.

  In Reuven, dismay was deepening. Now the boy called Herschel from the Sejera training farm repeated the oath, his voice going high at the end.

  “Reuven?” Startled, he heard Galil calling his name. Galil looked so young himself, his locks falling across his forehead. In a way it was all like what children did, making vows of blood. Yet something in Reuven held back. A swift rider he was not, and he had never held a gun in his hand. Blood and fire. The words rumbled in his head. No, he could not. In labor, in sweat, Judea must arise. In decency, in love.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I—it’s a very serious thing. I—I’m not ready.”

  He felt Dovidl’s hand on his shoulder. “We wanted you to know about us. If the time comes, we will speak to each other.” Of a sudden Reuven felt Dovidl was something more than he had judged, not only a clever one, but a man who saw into your heart. Half-babbling, Reuven added, “You know, if there is a need, you know you can count on me.” Just what he meant, he hardly understood himself.

  Early in the morning, as Leah emerged into the yard amidst the chicken-cackling and the smell of compost, an arm went around her waist from behind and a voice laughed, “Don’t pull up any trees!” It was Handsome Moshe! What was he doing here? He had come for supplies, the kvutsa was beyond, over the last ridge, on the shore of Kinnereth. The kvutsa? The same, not the same. Maxl the Hardhead was there, and a few new ones.

  “Nahama?” she asked.

  Moshe grinned. “No.”

  But Araleh had come, with Sara Zuckerman. The kvutsa had received a contract from the Keren Kayemeth to plant a whole tract of land. “Come back to us”—to him.

  And presently Reuven and Leah were aboard Moshe’s wagon, Leah sitting next to Moshe on the seat. Suffused with excitement, she hardly heard Moshe’s explanation; her hands she had to hold clasped in her lap to keep from reaching for his curly hair. So much had she longed for him, without admitting it to herself.

  Araleh and Saraleh had actually been married—hadn’t she heard, there in Jerusalem? Married, and by a rabbi, with a great feast in the Zuckerman house in Jaffa. Old Zuckerman, who spent his life in the shul, had complained that he had always known that such would be the result of his wife’s harboring every barefoot chalutz in the land. But every hungry mouth had been stuffed with roast goose and kishkes! And now, with nine chalutzim in the kvutsa’s new place here, and Saraleh the only woman—she needed help.

  “Oho, so that’s what you want me for,” Leah said.

  “No, not only!” Moshe dropped his voice so it was for her alone. She felt a flush in her very limbs.

  “What are you planting?” Reuven asked from behind.

  “Just now, eucalyptus trees, against malaria.”

  As the mules labored to the top of the ridge, Moshe pulled the wagon to a halt, for them to behold the land. And just as Eretz had possessed him on the dunes beyond Jaffa, at this moment Kinnereth entered into the heart of Reuven Chaimovitch. The glowing sea, slender and long, with a billowing curve like the gown of a bride, reclined before him. The bride his young manhood longed for, by her side he would pass his life, and she would give him peace.

  His sister too beheld the beauty of Kinnereth, the swelling form like the harp of King David that gave it its name; yet profoundly as Leah felt this moment of beauty, she felt it also through its effect on her brother. Her heart knew what was taking place in Reuven. And a touch of apprehension arose in her, for there is danger in feeling any love so instantly and deeply. As in that moment, in that night of dancing, when she had felt him falling in love with Rahel, who, he knew, was already Avner’s.

  “Beautiful,” declared Handsome Moshe, but there were those who recognized beauty without being possessed by it.

  “Beautiful,” Leah agreed.

  Moshe pointed out to them the lands of the kvutsa, but only a wild, uncultivated area could be seen, with the Jordan River lying there twisted like a great hairpin. It was not until the wagon was winding down near the level part of the rutted lane that they made out a structure, a small abandoned khan with a cubicle atop the roof. This was the kvutsa’s abode.

  Araleh’s Sara ran out to meet the wagon and when she saw another woman she burst into tears.—Oh Leah! She had been so alone here.—Still sniffling, she demanded first of all the quinine Moshe had fetched. They had run short, and two of the chaverim were down with kadahat, she explained to Leah, hurrying with her into the house.

  The sick men lay on their boards against the wall in the dim gloomy room lit only by a beam of light from the small square window in the thick wall. With their gaunt stubble-covered faces Leah barely recognized them, but there was Shimek, already returned from Russia—his mother had not been so sick after all. His dulled eyes lighted and he mumbled the blessing for guests, “Beruchim haba’im.” The other was a good worker known as Tibor the Jester, who had only stayed with them a few days in the old kvutsa. “Leah is here!” he cried. “With so much flesh it can’t be a vision!”

  She had picked yellow wildflowers when they stopped, and now at once found a little jug and set the flowers on the sill of the small window, in the light.

  * * * *

  It was scarcely a month since the kvutsa had come to this place, but how the members had altered! In their hut near Rehovot they had been close to civilization, among townsfolk, with a coming and going, and several other villages nearby, but here the little group was alone in a wilderness. At night, Saraleh said, not even another lamp could be seen. Saraleh didn’t stop chattering.—Ooy! she was so glad to see another girl! She wanted to hear all kinds of things that men never talked about—yet in her eagerness she didn’t give Leah a chance to say a word. It was difficult for her and Araleh here, she confided, because they were the only couple. Their happiness—she confessed she was ashamed before the other boys who were so alone.
Because of being a couple, she and Araleh had been given the little room on the roof to themselves, while down here all the men were crowded. “You can stay in our room with me, and Araleh will sleep outside on the roof, it’s so warm here,” she offered, but Leah hastily assured her, no, she would put up the usual curtain in the room below.

  Here, Leah’s romance with Moshe took place. There were no daughters of grove owners to distract him, and among the other men it seemed stolidly accepted that she was for Moshe. Even Reuven seemed to be waiting for it to happen, as though on his own part he had found his love, the Kinnereth, while she had come to her man.

  Struggling with the outdoor cooking fire that smudged her cheeks and smarted her eyes, Leah caught herself worrying about how her hair would look should Moshe come by. And when the whole kvutsa except Saraleh went out to the fields, Leah at first walked between her brother and Moshe, and then, when Reuven got into an argument with Max Wilner about where to plant oats and where to plant wheat, she walked ahead with Moshe alone.

  The air at night was a warm balm caressing the skin. One night in a nest of high grass by the shore she lay in his arms, with only their clothes between them, and Leah’s thoughts were in turmoil. Just as Rahel was with Avner, should she not become Moshe’s complete chavera, his woman? Yet she saw her mother’s face, and even her aunts’, and would she herself want her younger sister Dvora to do such a thing? Entire generations of behest and condemnation seemed to weigh against the honesty and simplicity that should rule between a man and a woman in their desire, so that, still, she lifted his hand away from her clothing.

  One thing Leah happily noticed was how, just now, she no longer felt the largeness and fleshiness of her body but felt feminine and delicate like Saraleh. But then suddenly there would intrude the desolate words of poor stricken Nahama, “Beware, he is a heartbreaker.” The words would not go away. And another image assailed Leah, the image of her Moshe making light with that pardessan’s daughter in Rehovot, even lying with her—not simply like this, but more completely. It was lewd to imagine such things. Yet a sudden wanton sense of power arose in her; that village girl could not succeed, could not hold Moshe, but she herself could be the woman really to hold this man. Poor Nahama had not been strong enough, either. But might it not truly be that he was destined for herself? And Leah asked herself, how could she know such feelings—she was an ignorant girl, not yet eighteen—though she had read Anna Karenina, where there was such a man as Moshe.

  And also the greatest curiosity of all now urged her. To know what it really was with a man. But this was unworthy; not merely to satisfy this would she begin!

  They were staring into each other’s eyes; his eyes were warm, liquid, darkly luminous like the waters of the Kinnereth, and he pressed his mouth on hers again, and turned so his weight lay on her and she felt his manhood, as she called it to herself, it was throbbing, through the cloth. But Araleh had married Saraleh, and in her girlish palavering—womanly now—Saraleh had told Leah, Ooy, she had been such a bourgeoisie, she had not been able like a free woman to bring herself to it before marriage; even though she had felt how Araleh suffered, yet she had made him wait. With this, Saraleh would suck in her lower lip, peering at Leah but not openly asking her whether she had already yielded to Moshe.

  No, it must not be a yielding but a meeting of two beings, Leah told herself, and “Not yet, not yet,” she groaned, managing to turn so that his body was off her body and the throb against her was gone. Oh, why could she not be a complete companion to him, like Rahel to Avner?

  A wagonload of eucalyptus seedlings arrived from Chedera, and at dawn Leah arose to go with the men to plant them along the muddy, flooded Jordan banks. Not only did she feel the hollow urge in her hands to be planting, but now her entire body de manded to cleave alongside Moshe wherever he went. Since a woman could not stand for long in her skirts in the muddy water, Leah took Reuven’s other pair of trousers and went behind her curtain. If Tateh should hear of this, brother and sister jested, a woman going forth in men’s clothing, a sin of sins! But Leah could not pull Reuven’s trousers closed and had to hand them back. Then came a roar of remarks from the men, with Tibor Kalisher declaring that the first test of a chavera must be whether she could wear the trousers of a chaver. Of a brother one did not speak! And another pair of trousers was flung in to her. Leah herself had patched them—Moshe’s. In a tumult of confused feelings the big girl drew them on, flushing as she closed the buttons; it was as though what she had not been able to go through by the Kinnereth was by this now foredoomed, consented.

  When she came out, to Tibor’s banter—he was up and working now, but Shimek still lay ill and offered his boots—she didn’t dare look at Moshe. At least she had on her own blouse! But while she lifted her arms to tie a kerchief around her hair, Leah felt Moshe’s eyes on her as though he too knew it had all been decided. She felt his gaze on her breasts, upraised in the movement, and as her nipples, become stiff and aching, pressed against her shift, she knew with startling clarity that this must be the aching in the stiffness of a man.

  —Emancipated and modern as they were, could they really entirely free themselves from those backward ideas of sin, Reuven wondered, as he walked behind Moshe and his sister in the trousers. A love affair was certain now, and to their mother he had promised that he would watch over his young sister, and what did he himself know of love? Work, work to exhaustion was the only way to rid himself of the image of Avner’s Rahel that tormented him every night. Even when he lay down, with his body, his very bones, dissolving from exhaustion, still the sexual torment came, as though his sexual organ was not part of that body but a fierce adversary that waited untired for the night, perversely strong when the rest of the body was exhausted, and would not let him sleep.

  Moshe—who really knew Moshe? He did not boast of his women among the chevreh, but only gave a wise smile when certain names were mentioned. Yet could one say to a chaver, stay away from my sister? To speak intimately to Leah, Reuven knew, was now his duty, but this had become dreadfully difficult, as though she were an older and not a younger sister. Perhaps—walking ahead of him the two of them looked so fitting together—perhaps this could be a good love for her with Moshe? Reuven wanted Leah to have the joy of love as he knew she wanted it for him; she was always pointing to girls for him. And also, since they all believed in the freedom of love, how could he raise questions when it was his own sister and with their own chaver?

  So as he and Leah were laboring close to one another planting the slender tree-stalks in the mud under the knee-deep water, at one movement their eyes met and both began to speak, almost together, “Reuven” she began, flushing, while Reuven said, “Are you in love with him, Leah?”

  “I want terribly to be close to him all the time,” she gasped in a half-wail, sucking in her lower lip, like Saraleh.

  All at once Reuven felt an overwhelming wish for their mother to be here and take from him this burden, take care of her daughter. He straightened up and they looked at each other, and a girlish, somewhat silly smile came over his sister’s large round face. At least there was no estrangement between them, Reuven felt, with some relief. But what should he now say to her? Forbid her? “Leahleh, you know all that is said about Moshe. He runs after every woman he sees.”

  “I know,” she wailed, and Leah’s simple, good face had a contortion as before tears. “And I know there’s no one else for him to look at here, so even a big horse like me—”

  “No, no!” Reuven declared almost sternly, “Leah, you are beautiful! You are a big beautiful girl!” His voice dropped a bit lower. “I have to admit the two of you looked handsome together.” And he felt a pang of guilt. It was as though he had just given his sanction to his sister.

  If it was to happen she would have wanted it to happen here on their own piece of earth in a beautiful way. But when the restless urge was on her at night and she felt Moshe sleepless too, on the other side of the hanging, it could not happen in that
way, for everyone would know they were slipping out, her brother would know, she would not be able to face them all.

  Not yet. It must happen perhaps, but not before the eyes of all.

  * * * *

  When their first crop, a stand of fodder, was cut and brought in, and the intoxicating scent from their hillock of fresh hay filled the yard, Saraleh picked up a song she had heard somewhere, about the haystack, the goren.—“In the goren, in the goren”—the song went—in the goren, couples made their nests, and passing by you could not see them but you could hear their twittering.

  Once each week on his donkey there came Gedalia the Carrier, a shriveled, parched-looking Sephardi who brought not only the post but messages gathered along his route, and small purchases he had been asked to make such as medicines, or needles and thread. This time he brought a letter from home, from Mameh. Her brother Simha still wanted them all to come to America, she wrote. If things were not well, Mameh knew Reuven would never say so, but Mameh counted on her, Leah, to be sensible and remember that whatever happened, they could always come home to gather new strength. Gidon would soon be Bar Mitzvah; he had grown. He rode horses and was strong. Dvora too had become a young woman and longed for her older sister.

  How homesick she was for them! No, not too much for Cherezinka, but for the family, her father too, ununderstanding as he was. Leah longed for the sight of Tateh with his fringes dangling over his trousers.