The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  The young couple sat late by the waterside.

  The older brother and sister too were by the river, strolling along the bank.—The boy was certainly not profound, was Reuven’s judgment, but a good, brave lad, good material.

  “And Dvora, is she profound?” Leah asked. Yet she sometimes wondered at thoughts that came from her younger sister, and even in this moment had an intuition that Dvora might have more capacity than this boy Yechezkiel. But then wasn’t the woman usually deeper than the man? Hadn’t she felt something of this with Moshe?

  The pang struck and Leah fell silent, walking on. Her brother knew she was thinking of Moshe; yes, it was true that there was a touch in Yechezkiel that was like Leah’s Moshe, something adventuresome, romantically handsome … Reuven peered at Leah’s face in the half moonlight but could not bring himself to speak of Moshe; it might be more pain than comfort. For an instant he pressed her hand.

  In the morning the entire family strolled into their fields, Yechezkiel among them. Across the stepping stones where the Jordan, in the bend, flowed shallow, their first stretch of planted earth could be seen, the grain already rising out of the ground. How quickly this had happened! They all hurried to cross, Yechezkiel giving his hand to Dvora, and then also to Mameh. But just as Feigel, the last in the procession, reached the other side, a wail arose from behind. It was Avramchick. “And me? And me?” the toddler called, standing to his knees in the stream. He made a sight at once so pathetic and so comical, so sweet, standing there, that all of them burst out laughing together. Only Feigel, who could tell why, by what vagary, wiped a sudden tear from her eyes, while Gidon hurried back and fetched Avramchick on his shoulders.

  Eliza knelt, brushing her cheek against the blades of green, her long golden braids touching the ground. How lovely was this little sister in her vanity, Reuven said to himself, and her eyes glanced up and caught his thought. “Everything grows more quickly here,” she said.

  Yes, the eucalyptus trees that the kvutsa had planted had already leaped up a full two meters, he said.—Did she know that the eucalyptus was not from Eretz, but had been brought from Australia? Every plant adapted itself here, no matter how far away it came from—

  “Like our Jews,” she mocked him, and Reuven felt confused among his younger sisters, even before this child of eleven, and before Dvora already walking with her boy, and Leah already made a woman, and his mother surely wondering and pitying his aloneness. Calling to Gidon, he began to climb; he wanted to show Gidon a certain place he had found.

  Through brambles and high thistles they came to the clutter of stones, almost covered by the tangled wild growth. Here were the remains of a stone door-frame, the lintel still resting on the half-buried supports. Here was a large black rock, hollowed out for pounding grain. From long, long ago, who knew how long! Still further above were caves in the face of a sheer wall; to climb there would be a problem.

  “Even before Abraham. Even before the Canaanites,” Reuven said in curious awe, as though all who had lived here, even the cave dwellers, were in some way their kin.

  From up here, one saw every twist and wandering of the Jordan, and even on the far side, the paths up into the stony hills to the heights of Golan. A vantage point, Gidon said.

  Reuven pulled some stalks from among the rocks and stripped a few small dried kernels into his hand. He rubbed off the husks and idly put the few grains under his nose, then between his teeth, and then spat them out. The kernels were hard as though petrified. Some windblown seeds probably, that had taken root and then deteriorated in the thin soil, choked among the ruins. Still, he stripped another stalk and dropped the grains into his pocket.

  Risen from his Sabbath nap, Yankel went out late in the afternoon by himself as far as is permitted in a Sabbath stroll; in Cherezinka it had been to the end of the town by the stream, and how was he to measure it here? The shore of the Kinnereth? A little further along the shore were the huts of the Yemenites. From one of them a nasal singsong came. The door was open and he could see them, a scant minyan, squatting along the wall while their elder stood at a reading-stand they had made from a crate and placed in the center of the hut. On the side toward Yerushalayim, on a table against the reed wall, stood an ornamented Torah ark, doubtless carried by them from home.

  As Yankel hovered in the doorway, one of them came to him. Yankel knew the man, the one with the wispy goatlike beard, the stonecutter. “Shalom, a good Sabbath to you,” Yankel said. “A good week to you and yours,” the Yemenite responded.

  To them, it suddenly occurred to Yankel, he was perhaps himself to be doubted in his worship, for had he not heard somewhere that the Yemenites frowned on the ways of the Jews from the west, the “Franks,” for might not Judaism have been polluted in being dragged all over the roads of Europe? Though these Yemenites did not even know what it was to wear shoes, or to lie on a bed instead of the ground, one thing was certain—their daughters they did not give over to apicoiresim!

  “If I may be permitted, it is a long while since I have prayed with a minyan,” he found himself saying. “Though our ways are not exactly the same as yours—”

  “Is there not one Torah for all Jews?”

  After that Sabbath, Yankel went now and again to pray with the Yemenites, even returning home to remark to Feigel that there were men of remarkable Torah knowledge among them; and whenever a chicken had to be prepared for the table of a Sabbath eve—and who knows, when Passover came, even a goose might be slaughtered—here was a shochet, just at hand.

  * * * *

  Still the family remained alone. The settlement was being built, and it was not being built. The walls of several houses could be seen standing, though of course unroofed. There came Jacques Samuelson himself, the Baron’s manager for the entire north, a man of fine bearing who always put his hand over his heart when he said “Believe me.” In Constantinople, he explained, the Young Turks had at last toppled the ancient monster, the Sultan Hamid, but whether their new government would prove good or bad for the Yishuv was uncertain; certain it was that among their first acts had been the closing of the gates to Jewish immigration into Palestine, but uncertain it was whether these measures would endure. Another few months and things would arrange themselves, he was convinced; the settlers from Roumania would come, somehow they would be admitted to the land, and the village would take on life. Patience.

  Reuven and Leah nevertheless grumbled at home about the lack of schooling for Schmulik and the girls. Leah tried to make them study Hebrew with her in the afternoons, and Yankel insisted that Schmulik read his Chumash every morning, but the boy raced through the passages Yankel set for him and then ran wild outdoors like a young Arab, or brought back fish from the sea. Let it be, Yankel said to Feigel. He had not wrenched himself away from Russia to make intellectuals out of his sons. He had come here to return to the soil, to make farmers of them, for all the ills of the Jews had come from their bookishness. Fortunately Gidon was not a bookish lad—he had finished cheder and that was enough—and as for the girls, Eliza and Dvora had learned at home to read, let them addle their heads reading romances. By next season the settlement would surely be inhabited, with a school and a shul. If Schmulik learned his numbers a year later, what did it matter? The thirty families from Transylvania were bringing their own teacher, a fine melamed, Samuelson had assured him.

  One day a forerunner appeared from Roumania, a stout merchant named Issachar Bronescu. He arrived on Kalman’s wagon from Jaffa, wearing a heavy woolen suit, though he carried with him a German book containing complete statistics on the climate of Palestine, tropical Tiberias included. But, after all, it was still winter, he declared to Yankel, and in winter a man wore winter clothing.

  Though of Yankel’s own age, Bronescu seemed younger; his cheeks were clean-shaven down to a stylish square-cut chinbeard of curly black hair. “Naturally we are all prepared to undergo hardships,” he proclaimed. Yet it was only sensible to make the best preparations; therefore he had come in
advance. And he made lists of implements, provisions, and furnishings for the settlers to bring with them, even inquiring delicately of Feigel, with apologies, about women’s intimate needs, and then of Yankel about what stock of merchandise he should import, for Issachar Bronescu himself planned to open a store.

  At least he was observant, for when he came down to their hut, he kissed the mezuzah Yankel had fixed on the doorway. “Truly pioneers,” he complimented the family. “And such fine healthy children!” Feigel offered him Yankel’s chair, and said she would bring tea. But no, she must not trouble herself, he insisted, for she was now noticeably heavy with child. He sat himself down on a box. But then, as she brought tea and sesame-seed cookies, for her sake, so a guest could be properly received, he moved to the comfortable chair. His own wife could never be so brave, Bronescu declared. He would ship an entire household of furniture here. And as for Yankel, might one ask what occupation he had followed in Russia?

  —A merchant, Yankel said.

  —And in what merchandise had he dealt?

  —Timber. Sugar.

  Aha. Aha. The visitor’s eyes still calculated the contents of the hut.

  “Roumanians,” Yankel growled, when he had gone.

  “At least—people,” Feigel said.

  It was altogether a winter of misery. In a torrential rain the taboon melted away and Feigel had nowhere to bake her bread. The river flooded its banks, and the earthen floor was mud. A disease caught Dvoraleh’s chickens; half the flock staggered about with their heads askew, it tore your heart out to watch the poor creatures as they struggled to live, and strangled. Nor could the flesh be eaten.

  From the kvutsa, Reuven sent Leah with a book in German, and they made out that this was a well-known disease, an epidemic. In the Arab village too flocks were dying; Dvoraleh had gone up there when Sheikh Ibrim insisted they use his own oven to bake their bread, and she blamed herself for having perhaps carried back the chicken disease. Leah was fearful of bringing the contamination to the kvutsa, and scrubbed herself with yellow soap and even changed all her clothes before returning there. But in the kvutsa her own disaster awaited her. Just that day the mail had come, with a letter for her from Russia. From Moshe’s mother. Despite the roundabout way Leah had made her inquiry, the mother had understood all. For had not her Moshe written to her, the mother said, of his Leah? Of his wonderful chavera who was dear to him as no other girl he had known, and with whom he at last felt that a real life was opening before him?

  Why would this same Leah be writing to her for news of the whereabouts of Moshe? Moshe must have gone away somewhere, the mother understood, and he had disappeared. For neither had they been receiving any letters from their son. The blow of his disappearance had stunned them. She and his father had puzzled and reasoned. Moshe could no longer be in Eretz Yisroel, for whatever might have befallen him there, God forbid, his comrades would have known. And now the mother understood why his Leah had written to them, believing he might have gone homeward.

  Each day, the mother wrote, she had expected the sight of her Moshe approaching the house. She spent whole days at the window. And Moshe’s father had at last gone to Odessa to make inquiries. And then the real blow had fallen, and Leah must prepare herself.

  Moshe had been sent to Siberia.

  Leah sat stunned, unable to speak to the chevreh, even to Reuven. She let Reuven take the letter from her hand to read the rest that she had barely absorbed from the lines that quivered before her eyes. Not as a member of Poale Zion had Moshe been seized, but for his old revolutionary activities. As a mere boy handing out revolutionary leaflets in the port. Even before Moshe had gotten off the ship, the Okhrana had seized him. They had held him in secret, and only now had the sentence become known. Ten years, ten years in Siberia! Even to what place in Siberia could not yet be discovered.

  * * * *

  She would go, Leah blurted. She would go, she would find Moshe, she would be with him until together they could escape.

  And then she rushed out into the rain.

  To be alone. The chevreh understood; let her be alone. They looked from one to another, and to Nahama, the only other chavera. Nahama also—only the earlier members, such as Max and Reuven, recalled it—had had her troubles over Handsome Moshe, but now she was come to an understanding with Shimek. “Let her be by herself,” Nahama repeated.

  When Leah had not returned after a time, Reuven went out and found her sitting by the river. He sat down beside her. She turned her head, bending it down to reach his shoulder, and he raised up his arm to put it around his sister’s shoulders. The huge bulk of her body began to shake with a tremendous sobbing, heaving in enormous waves, so that his arm could hardly hold her. Yet it was the anguish of a girl, a poor girl feeling weak, helpless, small, needing desperately the comfort of a man.

  The betrothed, Dvora, was the first to come down with the fever. It came over her one afternoon while she was helping her mother with the washing, bent over the tub in the yard, for since her suitor had come, Dvoraleh had taken to helping with every household task.

  Dvora felt a tremor, her eyes saw strangely, the tub shimmered. At first Feigel, as in all things with the girls, thought of womanish matters, but she knew it was not Dvoraleh’s time of the month. Or could it even be that she had, like her sister—? No, not Dvoraleh. Feigel felt the girl’s hands, her forehead, and took her into the house to lie down. It could only be the kadahat. Schmulik ran for Gidon, who mounted the mule and rode to the kvutsa, bringing Leah back with him, and a supply of quinine, a large chunk wrapped in a page from an old journal. By the time they reached the hut, Dvora, her damp hair pasted to her face and neck, was having hallucinations. All night Leah sat with her, and Feigel kept rising, though Leah begged her, “Mameleh, sleep.”

  The worst time had come, they all knew it, the time when every evil befalls.

  Schmulik came down with the fever the very next day. Should they send to Mescha for Dr. Rachman? But he would only do as they were doing; had not Leah nursed Reuven and half their kvutsa through the kadahat? Still, the presence of the doctor—if anything should happen, God forbid, and they had not gone for the doctor?

  Before evening Yankel himself, though he had struggled all day to remain on his feet, gave way to the pestilence. The hovel was like the kvutsa on that first day when the family had passed by, a dark heap of misery. Feigel moved from her stricken children to her sick husband, wiping their faces, begging them to swallow a little soup, praying to the Above One that, if one must be taken, it should be herself, but only after she had brought into the world the soul she carried within her.

  And when Dvora seemed to have passed her crisis, sitting up weakly and asking for food, it was the turn of Gidon, and then as though some stern angel were marking each off on his list, it was the time of the little one, Avramchick.

  The child was stricken worst of all. On the second day, as the mother held him, rocked him, his flesh was afire as though the little body were passing through Gehenna itself. “The doctor, the doctor,” she begged. Who would ride? Gidon lay sick, and Yankel too. But Reuven had now come from the kvutsa, and borrowing Kramer’s mare, he galloped to Mescha.

  Avramchick was not as the other boys had been when little; he was like a happy angel from the sky, and Feigel had always trembled for him, picturing him to herself as a soul not yet entirely fast within the body. Gidon and Schmulik she recalled on their sturdy small legs, and the way Reuven too had been as a child—all the boys had tugged away from her, marching into every doorway and thrusting their noses into every man’s workshop in Cherezinka, from the moment they could move about. But Avramchick still clung to her skirts. His large pale eyes were gray like some tranquil sky and looked on everything with pleasure but without surprise. Nor did he try to seize hold of everything he laid eyes on, the way boys did who were strong in themselves.

  This was not to think that he was like the girls. The girls even as toddlers were as they were now, Leah busily trying to d
o all that she saw her mother or her brothers doing, Dvora passive but willing and even in her first years like a sweet flower, freely ready to give off her perfume, and Eliza vain and decided in her ways, saying yes to this and no to that, and Yaffaleh with her large head and thick limbs, goodness itself, hugging every living creature, a dog, a cat, a wounded bird, her geese. Yet all the girls were in some way the same, they were true in their essence, in their fate as women, just as the boys were manly.

  Only Avramchick was not like any one of them. Feigel did not let herself think of the little Nachman she had lost. And she was haunted now by an image that came back from a while ago, the image of Avramchick on that Sabbath when they had crossed to the fields, left alone on the other side of the river crying, “And me!”

  He had never quite reached his strength in his body, so that now in his fever Feigel was terrified that his soul might decide to return above. He it was who had almost at once on arrival in Eretz Yisroel caught the eye-sickness, so that his pale gray eyes were rimmed with red, like sometimes the moon when strange things are to happen on earth. The child had not complained of the irritation, only come and buried his face in her skirts when the eyelids burned, just as he had done now when his whole body began to burn. She had laved his eyes in diluted boric acid. She had sniffed the odor of a poultice brought down by Adefa, the Arabess who brought down goat-cheese from Dja’adi and had shown her how to make the cheese after Yankel had bought their own goat. The poultice smelled of urine, it was like the remedies of the moujik wives in the old country, and though sometimes Feigel had followed their advice—as when Reuven had the whooping cough and she had made him breathe in the odor of burning dried dung, and it had helped him—an instinct this time held her back from applying the poultice to Avramchick’s eyes; too many Arab children were half blind. Leah had continued the laving with boric acid, and this had brought down the inflammation. But now even quinine did not bring down the fever. Avramchick retched. It was as though the poor child was not himself doing this, for he did not wail, but rather as though his little body produced the ugly mucus while his eyes looked steadily at her to say this was not he, so that she pressed him close in her terror as though by her own strength to hold his undecided soul within this world. Avremeleh, Avremeleh, she crooned, and when the chills shook him, Feigel wanted to take him back within her body and keep him safe until he was well. It was as though he were even less certainly in this world than the unborn child within her, now nearly come to term; the thrusts were determined and sturdy, to tell her he was already like the other boys, his brothers. But Avramchick lay on her distended body, his small arms around her sides, and his head in the cave between her heavy breasts.