The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Then the sun was visible and movement began among the building workers. He saw his father climbing up from the riverside. As Yankel neared, something eased in Reuven, and he even smiled to his father. The old man had put on the working cap.

  “What will I do with you?” Kramer grumbled when Yankel stood before him outside his cabin, a ghetto Jew with his tzitzith dangling from under his blouse. Then Kramer decided. “You are in a hurry for a house?” he repeated, including Reuven with Yankel. “Here you have stones already cut. If you know how to build, you can put up walls.” He would even pay the regular wages.

  On his father’s wages alone, Reuven saw, the whole family could not possibly be fed. And within an hour Kramer would have seen that Yankel Chaimovitch was no stonemason. “To lay stones, I know how,” Reuven said; had he not labored on the new Bezalel house for Professor Schatz in Jerusalem? And he would show his father how it was done. Kramer shrugged. It could even be seen that the overseer was not displeased, as it would be told in Jaffa that he had already settled a whole large family on the new site.

  Below the very area where Reuven had begun to clear the field, a first course of stone had been laid out, making the outline of a house. “If the Turk interferes, tell him it is a stable,” Kramer said. Shelters for animals needed no permit.

  Yankel seized hold of a barrow. He would fetch the stone blocks from the Sephardi. Yes, the Above One had made day and night, so that each day could be a renewal.

  At the end of the new day, when Reuven and Yankel, without having quarreled the whole time, came down from their labor, there was Leah arrived from the kvutsa, and the entire family was thus together. Leah had brought seeds, and with Dvora and Eliza, she was already planting her carrots and tomatoes on a patch that Gidon had cleared behind the hut. The new young men, she said, had arrived from Sejera—Shimek had fetched them in the wagon—they were good lads, she told Reuven, and Max had asked for him to come and plan the new crops. Though if he were needed here, he could stay on …

  “So that Max can do all the planning himself?”

  No, no, Reuven must not be angry. They had had a long sitting with the newcomers. It would be a good kvutsa again. And could he imagine who had appeared? Nahama had come back. She had taken over the kitchen at once, and that was why Leah had been able to come here to help the family settle. And did he know that Shimek and Nahama were now together?

  That was why the harelip had been visiting every Sabbath in Sejera. Nahama was thinner, Leah said, her skin was clear, apparently a steady chaver was good for her. And Leah gave out a sour little laugh, unlike herself. Reuven remembered about Nahama and Moshe.

  But quickly Leah returned to her truer nature. Nahama and Shimek seemed now really in love, she declared. She was happy for them, especially poor Shimek with his lip. And they were naturally being given the upstairs room. She herself had insisted.

  Leah’s face remained cheerful, but her eyes turned away. As she stooped there on the ground, poking in a seed with her finger—her way of planting—Reuven put his hand on his sister’s shoulder. “When Moshe returns,” he said, “the kvutsa ought to begin putting up a few dwellings for couples.”

  She turned her face up to her brother. “Reuven—maybe I shouldn’t have—I found some old letters from his family, in his box, and so I wrote to them. Only like a friend asking if they knew where I could reach him.”

  Reuven nodded. If only in some way he could help—but what did he know of these things, of girls and of love?

  Hadn’t she learned to trim blocks of stone in Jerusalem? When Yankel and Reuven went up to work, Leah came with them, but Kramer frowned. A woman. The stonecutters would not accept it.

  “But the stones are for our own house!” she protested.

  Who could deny Big Leah? She sat by the foundations of the house and began to tailor the stones that had to fit around the window openings. Hearing the tapping of the hammer, the Sephardi, Abulafia, came over and stood watching. Smiling up at him, Leah showed him a squared edge and asked if he thought it smooth enough. He ran his fingers over it, half-smiled, half-sighed. To Yankel he remarked, “You have a big strong girl. She works as well as a man.” Then he admonished her, “Best you should get married.” And half-smiling, half-sighing again, the Sephardi went off to his own labor.

  Still, the big girl was restless. The family hut by the river was crowded. Planks were laid over boxes so as to widen the stone benches, and Leah slept with Dvora, who snuggled in and chattered about the boy she had met on the boat, Yechezkiel—where could he be now? He had sworn he would come to find her! Then she tried to worm the truth from Leah. “And you, Leah, didn’t you have a someone, there in the kvutsa? They say that here a chavera if she really loves a chaver—”

  “Dvoraleh,” Leah said, “it isn’t the way it seems from what people say. Our girls are very serious.”

  “I know, Leah. Oh, I know. But if a chaver and a chavera really love each other—”

  “Then with us it is the same as a marriage,” Leah said. “A marriage is only a formality.” Somehow she could not say what her little sister was really aching to know. That it had been. That to her it was like a marriage. Perhaps best that Dvoraleh should not fall into such an uncertainty. “We mostly have regular marriages.” And she told how Araleh and Saraleh got married and now had a baby.

  Her mother she could not deceive. There came a moment when they were alone in the hut, and Feigel half-hesitated before bending to lift up a full pail of water for scrubbing the benches. “You’re carrying, Mameleh?” Leah blurted out. Her mother met her eyes a bit sheepishly, and then, fully as woman to woman, she said, “It happened. And you, Leah—you are no longer a maiden?” There was only an uncertain shred of questioning left in her tone.

  At last release came, and Leah blubbered out the whole story, begging, “What do you think, what do you think, Mameleh? I know there are such men, men who feel trapped to remain for always with the same woman. And perhaps that is why—perhaps Moshe felt he had to run away from me?”

  Feigel nodded and nodded, trying to bring her daughter’s trouble into her own heart, casting over, though she had had only her Yankel in her life, all the events between men and women that she knew of. She thought of those men who had gone to America and postponed sending for their wives year after year, until it somehow became known that they had secretly taken new wives in America. And there were men also who had in them a compelling need to be conquerors of women, whose entire nature seemed given over to leading astray young girls and young wives, and perhaps each time such men really believed they loved. Yet also as Feigel was trying to find some word to help her daughter, she herself experienced a wave of relief, for there might have been a pregnancy—at least this had not happened. Then too there came to her a puzzlement at herself, that she was not ashamed of Leah, or even greatly shocked. Had it happened at home in Cherezinka, she would surely have been distraught with fear that her daughter’s shame would become known in all the village, but here, surprisingly, even a kind of curiosity rose up in her, as though she were the one who was still a girl finding out things about life. And also there rose up a faint, a shocking sense of envy, for Leah had known how it was to lie nakedly with a man in pure love. (For surely, something within Feigel told her, they had been naked, and not, as throughout all of her own life with a husband, thrusting and receiving darkly among night-clothes under the covers.) Within all of her troubled pain for her daughter, she flushed, seeing this large vibrant girl, this woman her daughter, and imagining the man, even larger, a man so handsome that every girl—and Feigel believed this was as Leah said—wanted to fling herself at him.

  What a fine couple they must have made. Feigel could see it, through Leah’s longing words—at last a man who was seemly for her. So it should be, so it should be on earth. Feigel could not find it in herself to utter a word of blame to her daughter, or to think, as Yankel would think in anger should he come to know, that the man’s desertion was God’s punishment f
or Leah’s wantonness.

  “But Mama, what should I do?” The poor girl knelt and put her head in Feigel’s lap, her sorrow of a hugeness with her body. Then raising her eyes, Leah said in the timorous voice of a little child, “I sometimes think—if I should just go and search for him?”

  The idea had only now declared itself in her, but seemed to have long been present.

  “Wait, wait,” Feigel said. “Wait.” Was this the only word given to womankind? “From what you tell me, if he is such a one that cannot remain with one woman, what good would it do to run after him?”

  “Then at least I would know…. And perhaps he is in trouble, Mama, perhaps he has been arrested—”

  “Then it surely would be known to your chaverim,” her mother said.

  So they went over and over all the tormenting thoughts that Leah had already examined again and again, and still the only answer was to wait, at least until she perhaps heard something in answer to the letter she had sent his parents. She must wait.

  Nevertheless the talk with her mother had relieved her heart, and, the hut being so crowded, Leah decided to return for a time to the kvutsa, where Nahama needed help, and where perhaps they would hear something.

  All at once, and despite new baksheesh, the Turkish inspector halted the stone-laying on their walls. They should not have been so foolish, Kramer said, as to arch over the door and window openings; they should have filled the walls in solid, and opened the apertures later on. How could he pretend this was a stable? Even the horses of the Sultan had no such stables. For the present they had better stop their construction work. A new effort was being made in Constantinople itself for actual building permits.

  But at least the fields were being laid out. A gnomish, self-important personage, Chaikin the surveyor, originally from Bialystok, with a diploma from Berlin, as he let you know at once, quickly made it clear to Yankel that he had come only as a favor to Jacques Samuelson, the representative of the Baron himself; he had laid out all of the settlements. He was now very busy laying out an entire Jewish city on the sands north of Jaffa. But he had come all the way here, for how could there rise up a new settlement in the land but that it was first marked out by Berel Chaikin?

  By dint of flattery, and with Gidon running and carrying his instruments for him, Reuven managed so that the area in the chart on Kramer’s wall, penciled Chaimovitch, was the first to be measured off. Yankel and even little Schmulik, trudged out into the field, and small heaps of stones were set up as Chaikin measured the corners. At once, while the surveyor was still writing notations on his map, all the Chaimovitches set themselves to clearing rocks from their land, piling them where Reuven that first night had begun a fence. His stones proved almost exactly in the right line, they had to be moved only a bit.

  The next morning there was the entire family, girls and all. It was a sight to see, and even Kramer rode out to behold it. Reuven, bare to the waist, was carrying a huge rock against his chest, and the father with a pickax was prying out another; the sturdy Gidon and his sister Dvora and the smaller girls and the little boy Schmuel, all were swarming over the field, each trying to carry larger and larger stones, clearing their land, and as the mother brought up breakfast for them with the toddler Avramchick at her skirts, the child began imitating his brothers and sisters, wobbling toward the fence with stones in his two hands. They would hardly leave off work to eat, Reuven hurrying back onto the field with a chunk of bread still in his hand. They wanted to plant before the heavy rains.

  There they all were again at dawn, an hour before Kramer’s own men began on their jobs, Reuven and Gidon together prying away with a long iron bar at an enormous boulder. It was a bar they had borrowed from the settlement site, but though they should have asked his permission, Kramer let the matter go, watching them exert themselves until their forehead veins bulged out. But the rock was still unbudged. Then there came the father, Yankel, approaching with a mule harnessed to a drag. No—this could not be permitted—without so much as a by-your-leave!—

  “Reb Yankel!” Kramer shouted.

  Indeed, catching sight of the overseer whom he had not expected so early, Yankel showed his uncertainty. “I will take him back in a moment,” Yankel called, “in time for your workers. You promised us a loan to buy our own pair of mules.”

  The whole family was staring anxiously at the overseer. Strict as he was known to be, Kramer could not show himself hard-hearted. “See that you do,” he snapped. “And next time you had better ask me.” He rode off.

  They managed, all of them pulling and pushing, along with the mule. Looking back, Kramer saw them yelling and slapping at the animal, the older brothers prying at the rock until it finally budged and was torn from the soil. They all let out a scream of triumph, the little girl and boy, Yaffaleh and Schmulik, and the toddler Avramchick, dancing around the stone as it was dragged away. Kramer even waved.

  Gidon led back the mule. He took a handful of oats and fed the animal from his hand, pleased with the feel of the careful large lips against his palm.

  Only a few days later, the manager called Yankel into his office in the cabin. “What was my part I have done,” Kramer said, and handed Chaimovitch a large document to read and sign. This was his allocation in the settlement that was to be known as Mishkan Yaacov. Yes, a name had been given. For here perhaps was the very site where Jacob had rested after his flight from Laban.

  The overseer was beaming. A proud man—after all, he had been raised in the Baron’s colonies where every Jew thought himself a little Rothschild—he too wanted to build the Yishuv. He had kept pressing for their papers, he said—here they were. A loan for a pair of mules, a cow and seed.

  Should he go to Damascus to buy the animals? Yankel wondered. Better in Mescha, Kramer advised; he had heard that Shlomo Idelson had a good pair of mules to sell.

  On work animals Yankel considered himself an expert. That very day Kalman the drayman, who had appeared with a wagonload of floor tiles, could take him to Mescha on his way back. The next day, there came Tateh, driving his own wagon behind a high standing pair of work animals, and tied to the tail of the wagon was a black ewe with milk-filled udders nearly touching the ground, that Idelson had given him into the bargain! More! In a wicker crate in the wagon, Yankel had two fat hens, and at once Dvora took them in her charge.

  As for the mules, they might have been the finest steeds in Arabia, the way Gidon was already currying them. Nor could even Reuven find any fault in the animals or in the price Abba had paid.

  In the morning the procession went out to the cleared field. Though Yankel had dealt in horses and mules, he had never thrust a plow into the soil and was somewhat uncertain of himself before Reuven, who had plowed and sown.

  From all the land around it, their section stood out, flat and clean, with the stones they had carried off lining the edges. Soon the soil would shine, open and black, the only portion that was plowed.

  At the corner of the field, Yankel halted. Mameh too had come, and the whole family grouped behind the plow. This time even Reuven did not show impatience with his father as Yankel raised his beard to heaven and asked a blessing upon their field.

  Who first would put his hands to the plow? Yankel hesitated. Perhaps it would be better if Reuven, who knew how—

  “You begin, Abba,” Reuven said. “It isn’t difficult. Only hold on, and if you strike a stone, pull back.” On his own shoulder Reuven slung the small leather pouch of seed.

  “Nu, God willing,” Yankel said, and took hold of the handles. He had forgotten the reins. He stooped, then put them around his neck as he had seen peasants do. Gidon begged, “Let me hold the reins.” It was such a fine morning. There were clouds but the air did not yet smell of rain. There was a breeze, and even from here one could see that the Kinnereth was rippled. Already birds were circling; the girls were there to shoo them off the seed. Yankel felt kindly, and let the boy take the reins. So they began.

  It was indeed an odd feeling to f
ollow the plow, different from what a man had felt at anything else in his life. It pulled you, and yet you were the master. So in the middle of his life he was transforming himself to a man of the soil.

  Gripping the handles more tightly than need be, Yankel strode firmly, but almost at once the plow swerved. He could feel Reuven behind him, watching critically. With an effort of his shoulders, Yankel tried to straighten the implement, but the point stuck in the earth and the handles were wrenched from him as the plow stood on its end. Gidon pulled the beasts to a halt. “Slowly, slowly.” Reuven came up and with his mattock dug out a rock. At once the beasts pulled ahead and Yankel stumbled as the plow lurched forward. But then for a stretch it went smoothly and even in a straight furrow; he felt his son behind him, spreading the grain, and turned once and saw with what an expert movement of the wrist Reuven flung the seed so that it fell evenly as raindrops on the opened soil. Feigel and the girls stood behind in a cluster. Tears came to Yankel’s eyes, and this time too he whispered the Shehechiyanu. To have come to this moment!

  But meanwhile his furrow had gone crooked.

  4

  WHEN GREEN shoots peep out in the garden plot behind the house in orderly little rows, and when washing is hung out to dry, and when hens scratch away in the yard and peck at the earth, and a pair of mules crunch fodder in the lean-to, all that a good Jewish household needs for the Sabbath Eve is gefulte fish and a sweet warm chaleh. Gidon already had caught fish in the sea, and though it was not carp, it had scales and so might be eaten.

  As for an oven, there was an aged Arab from the village on the ridge, who called himself Sheikh Ibrim, though it was said he was not really a sheikh, and who spent most of his days on his horse, riding here and there and gossiping. His mount was an excellent small bay that Gidon loved to watch for its high-stepping movement, and this horse was the only possession left to him, Sheikh Ibrim constantly repeated, since he had sold his lands to buy brides for his five sons, one of whom was now mukhtar of their village, Dja’adi. All this land along the Jordan had been his, he would say, though long ago because of pestilence the village had moved up onto the ridge. Indeed it seemed, according to Kramer, that Ibrim had been paid something as a quitclaim, though the land had for decades gone to swamp with the yearly overflow of the Jordan.