The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  But one night, as he lay against his wife in this way, and she turned to him in her sleep as she sometimes did, and cast an arm around his shoulder, a dreadful sweep of terror came over Menahem. He lay rigid, awake but as though immovably sleepbound in his nightmare. The child within her was a heavy stone pressed against his belly.

  After a long while, he was able to lift Dvoraleh’s arm away and turn her so that they were in their old position. Against his embracing hand, her abdomen was highly resilient like a breast and in her sleep his wife pressed her back still closer against him, with a sweet sigh.

  But Menahem could not sleep again; he felt his forehead sweating. Without waking Dvoraleh, he slid from his cot and went to rest on hers, across the room. At last his terror receded.

  He did not speak of it to her. Of what troubled him he could speak to no one, not to Shabbatai Zeira, who was made differently, not even to Galil. Once, when Shabbatai rode in from his farm in Sejera for a sitting, there came a moment of comradeliness when Menahem had an impulse to ask … But how should he ask? Should he ask how Shabbatai slept?

  Those two horses, Shabbatai remarked, had been seen near Hittim, ridden by tribesmen of the Zbeh. Oh, how Zeira wished they could have kept that pair of steeds! And they talked of horses and guns.

  The nightmare did not come again, though each night, if Dvora moved to his bed, Menahem found himself waiting for it. When she grew big so that there was no longer room on one cot, and it was natural for them to sleep apart, he felt relieved.

  Then in the final months Menahem accepted another turn away from home. And on watch in Benyamina, the anxiety came over him once more, not this time as a nightmare, but with persistent imaginings that came on him during his rounds. The child would be born a lifeless lump. Or else a fear for Dvoraleh would come over him. With the first baby he had experienced not the slightest worry, but now before each Sabbath Menahem rode home in apprehension.

  Yet nothing whatever happened. A second boy was born, perfectly formed and lively. Dr. Rachman had trained one of the girls, Guta Krakauer, in nursing and midwifery, and all went off without incident. When Menahem returned for his Sabbath, the three-day-old was lying in the new Infants’ House. Again a boy, and the first of “the six.” Indeed, one of the six chaveroth had not even become pregnant, and there was talk of that couple losing their turn. But Nadina was so enormous that Yoshka’s joke about twins seemed about to come true, so there might be a class of six babies after all.

  Dvora and Menahem were hailed as the champions. Only, Dvora complained to him that, by the newest decision, babies had to remain in the Infants’ House from birth; the mothers were not to keep them even for the first month, and all night she had a dreadful emptiness in her, she felt hollow.

  In Menahem the weight lifted. It was as though by staying away in these last weeks he had kept a curse from falling on his wife and child. If there had to be pain, it was better that he should carry it always silently within himself.

  The boy would be called Giora, after the last defender of Jerusalem, for whom the earlier secret group, the one before the Shomer, had been named.

  Already her second daughter was twice a mother, while what was to become of her eldest? It was for Leah that Feigel worried, even though the big independent girl had shown herself cheerful and singing when she last came to the meshek, at Passover. Between the lines in a letter from Jerusalem, now, Feigel was certain she detected a new emptiness and loneliness, for Leah’s good friends had scattered, to Turkey, to France—what was ever to become of her big girl? Still longing year after year in her foolishness for that mamser in Siberia! Therefore as the High Hoidays approached, Feigel dropped into her husband’s ear the thought that surely the time was at last come for him to make his journey to Jerusalem. The wheat crop was bountiful and entirely without blight, since they had done as Reuven said and used the deep plow borrowed from the kvutsa. To wait longer to go to the Holy City would be a failing. And in Jerusalem she could see how Leah lived, and what was doing with her daughter.

  Yankel could well take his ease for a few weeks, leaving the farm in Gidon’s care. Two cows had calved, and Yaffaleh’s geese were the fattest in Galilee. The keeper of the best pension in Tiberias, Reb Bagelmacher, with whom Yankel had struck up a friendship in the hot baths, now regularly came out in his wagon to buy geese for the Sabbaths and holidays. The poet Bialik himself had slept at Bagelmacher’s pension during his famous visit, and had praised the roast goose. But the real gold mine for Yankel had proved to be Reuven’s potatoes. Though Reuven’s kvutsa was now also producing a crop, and Reuven had not stinted in handing out seed potatoes even to the Roumanians, the potato hunger of the yishuv seemed insatiable, prices remained high, and the money for the first two crops alone had bought Yankel four cows now giving milk.

  So wide indeed was Reuven’s renown for the feat of the potatoes that the noted agronomist from Zichron, Aaron Aaronson, had himself arrived to inspect the second planting at the Chaimovitch farm, and Reuven had come from the kvutsa to meet him, for to the kvutsa itself Aaronson would not go because of some old, bitter dispute with the chalutzim over Arab labor in Zichron. Finely dressed in American clothes, the agronomist had just returned from a visit to that land, where the richest Jews had acclaimed him for his discoveries. Tramping with Reuven over the potato field, Dr. Aaronson had taken samples, and then invited him to come to Zichron to visit a whole new center of agronomy that he was building with money provided by the American Jews.

  Sitting at the table with the whole family for tea, Dr. Aaronson had complimented Feigel on her preserves—even better, he said, than his own mother’s, and his mother’s were renowned in all Zichron. A fine, polite, polished person. It came out in the talk that Reuven and Leah had held watch in Aaronson’s father’s vineyards, when Reuven was recovering there in Zichron from kadahat, and Reuven told Aaronson he had even studied agricultural books from Dr. Aaronson’s library!

  “How is that?” Dr. Aaronson said, a trifle sharply, though with a smile of curiosity. “I never let my books go out!”

  “Your sister took pity on me and loaned them to me,” Reuven said. “Though I couldn’t understand the French, I studied the drawings.”

  “Ah, it must have been when I was in America to publish my wild wheat discovery.”

  At this Reuven in his modest way mentioned that he also—though of course a few years after Aaronson’s discovery, had found some wild wheat growing, not far from here. (That he had not then known of Aaronson’s discovery he did not say.) At once the two men were deep in discussion again. Though Feigel could not follow their talk, it was wonderful to see how such a highly educated agronomist respected her son as an equal. She brought three more kinds of jam. Reuven even took out from a yellowing envelope in his pocket the grains of ancient wheat that he had found on the mountainside. It was for just such a discovery that Dr. Aaronson had become famous all over the world, and here her own Reuven, without ever having been sent for years of study in France by the Baron, had made the same discovery! Had Reuven found these seeds only a few years earlier, Feigel grasped, it would have been her son who became world famous!

  Yet for Dr. Aaronson it had to be said that he complimented Reuven with all his heart, like a true gentleman. Taking from a special leather case in his coat-pocket an eyeglass such as watchmakers use, he studied Reuven’s seeds and declared that though he himself had found eight different varieties on the Hermon, Reuven’s was still different and a ninth. “We will call it the Chaimovitch strain,” he announced, “Chita Chaimovitch!” And he carefully folded the grains into a clean paper sachet from another little case that he carried, saying he would make further examinations in his laboratory with a microscope. At this, Reuven said there was something else that he had long wanted to put under a microscope. And he told of the wheat with the fungus he had found a few years before, and of the disappearance of the fungus when the same strain had been planted in a field that had been deeply plowed. On the Arab field
s the fungus was still to be found.

  Dr. Aaronson became excited, asked many questions and then said Reuven was welcome to come and use his laboratory whenever he wished. But as to the fungus, he believed he knew the answer. The tiny parasite that spoiled the wheat-kernels dropped its eggs on the ground for reproduction. In ordinary shallow plowing the microscopic worms born from the eggs could crawl out, but in deep plowing, they were surely buried so far that they died.

  —That must be it!

  Hardly ever had Feigel seen Reuven so happy. You would have thought the Schechina had been revealed to him. Here he had puzzled his head for years, and Dr. Aaronson had found the answer in one moment.

  “Ah, no, but it was you who found the answer, empirically,” Dr. Aaronson said. “What you did, plowing them under, must be taught in the whole land!”

  “It wasn’t even I,” Reuven said, with his usual modesty and honesty. “It was a chaver in the kvutsa who insisted on deep plowing, and I was even against it!”

  They laughed together over the tale. By such accidents, Dr. Aaronson said, many great discoveries were made—not in the laboratory, but by people like Reuven in the field, who observed things.

  “A fine man,” Feigel said when the agronomist had left; “A real scientist such as we need in Eretz,” Reuven declared. And though Feigel caught the tiny flicker of envy in her son’s eyes, and though there was a sigh in her that it had not fallen to him to receive the high education of which his mind had surely been worthy—yet she was not truly worried for Reuven so far as his work went. He was satisfied in his work at the kvutsa; they had even installed for him a huge engine that pumped water, such as he had long dreamed of, and he was showing that not one but two main crops a year could be grown. All through the region Reuven was becoming known as an expert under whose hands even a stone would bear fruit.

  Yet he continued among the unmated men of his kibbutz, and surely in this he could not be happy. Though Feigel did not worry about him as much as about Leah—an unmarried son of twenty-five was not as serious a matter as a lone girl of twenty-three, and no longer a maiden, even if in their world of chalutzim this did not appear such a dreadful blemish.

  And so Feigel persuaded Yankel, and he harnessed a mule, and Feigel, having cooked and baked for two whole days, packed the wagon with roast goose and chicken, with chopped liver and sesame cookies and strudel, with gefulte fish and cheeses and jellies and all manner of good things for her big daughter in Yerushalayim, as well as with boiled eggs for the journey.

  The first glance told Feigel she had done well to come here. Though Leah rushed to them across the courtyard, glowing and joyous in their arrival, and instantly started distributing Feigel’s good baking and cooking to hollow-chested chevrehmen who kept appearing from a bewilderment of crevices and doors, and though the yard was covered with Leah’s pots of seedlings and flowers, and though a few young girls at work among the pots came hovering adoringly near their teacher, and though Leah’s room into which she led them had jugs of flowers covering the window sill and all over the table and on the floor, still Feigel sensed an inner desolation, and her daughter’s talk was to her a tumult of emptiness.

  Leah had a thousand activities, a thousand plans, though to Feigel it seemed that even the few coins needed for tea and sugar must be scarce. Hundreds of her seedlings, Leah enthusiastically explained, were going to a new kvutsa near the ancient tomb of Mother Rachel; the chevreh there were waiting for their loan from the Zionist office, but the planting could not wait; perhaps she would even join this new kvutsa; and also she was helping every morning in a children’s nursery that a friend of hers had started here in the quarter—it was a chance to learn an amazing new teaching method that her friend Clara had brought from Italy—it was called Montessori; they had Jewish and Arab children together in their kindergarten, called a gan, Moslems, Christians, Jews, all sitting together, each a darling, four- and five-year-olds. Of course few of the children had parents who could pay, and also she and Clara served them crackers and milk, which was all that some of the poorer ones had to eat all day long. Then also she was thinking of going down to plant gardens for the new city of Tel Aviv—it was a desolation of sand, gardens were needed on Rothschild Boulevard and she had been asked to put them in; also she wanted desperately to come to Gilboa to see Dvora’s new baby, but she was so busy here—how she loved her Yerushalayim. Tateh must come with her at once, she would show him Jerusalem!

  Yankel would have wanted to find his way to the Wall by himself, or perhaps with a crony; perhaps he should have made the journey with a good Jew like Binyamin Bagelmacher from Tiberias, whose season had not really yet begun. It irritated Yankel that his women lingered along every stall, fingering the silks, gawking at the trinkets. Past shopwindows overladen with crucifixes and beads and medallions of their Yoshka, he fled. Surely there was some other way to the Wall, so one could walk only among Jews and avoid these horrors! Separating himself by several paces from the women, pushing on through dark, arched-over lanes, among the Arabs with their donkeys and among pithhelmeted Christian pilgrims, he inwardly fumed. What did all these goyim have to do here in Yerushalayim, the city of David, of Solomon, of Jeremiah! At last Leah called to him to turn into a side-lane, and there he saw others like himself, decent Yehudim with prayer bags. Following them down hollowed stone steps, Yankel stood all at once in the passageway so familiar to him from the picture on the wall at home in Cherezinka.

  Before the immense stone blocks that reached upward like some barrier to the Other World, Jews stood intoning their prayers, some standing by themselves, others a few together, and at a distance from the men there prayed a few aged, beshawled women.

  He had long delayed, true, but in these years it was as though he had been earning his full right to come here; he had made another man of himself. Or, it was as though he had in these years shredded away from himself the false flesh of the dispersion, and here he now stood, a farmer who had succeeded in feeding his family from the soil, in making a whole life in Galilee, and who was now come from there with produce in his wagon as to the Temple itself for the High Holidays. It was almost as though he had brought a sheep and would now go up to the great courtyard at the top of this high wall, with his offering.

  No impulse to moan or wail at the Wall came to him. From his prayer-bag Yankel drew out his tfillim, and wound them on. He swung himself into his long tallis. Within his tallis he was away from all the wrong in the world. Standing before the ancient blocks of stone, Yankel at long last felt his life justified. All his errors and all his unworthy past slipped into nothingness. If his eldest daughter had thrown away her virtue and was now deep in unhappiness, then Feigel would help her somehow. Perhaps Leah had suffered enough. If his sons did not follow him, then they themselves must answer for their ways. Adonai, Adonai, Yankel’s lips spoke, I have come, I am here.

  Feigel and Leah watched him standing there, heavy-shouldered, another Jew among a line of tallis-wrapped Jews, swaying with a cradle-rock, close against the high wall of great stones. Feigel herself moved close. In the crevices, moss grew. She put her lips to a stone, and asked the Above One to bless her children and give them a good life. When she drew back, she sniffled and was not surprised to feel tears in her eyes. Leah was reminding her of the custom of writing a prayer, a wish, and placing it between the stones, and Feigel found a bit of paper and wrote in Yiddish, “Gottenyu, bless my children and grandchildren, and give them a good life.” She began to fold the paper, then, turning from Leah, she added, “Send a tall man, a good husband for my eldest daughter Leah.” Leah played for a moment at snatching the bit of paper so as to read Mameh’s prayer, but Feigel pressed it deep into a fissure and sealed a kiss over it.

  Her man, her Yankel, said a Kaddish for his own father, and for the first little lost son Nachman, so long ago in Cherezinka, and for Avramchick, and for Dvora’s murdered bridegroom, Yechezkiel. Then he embarked on Psalms.

  So as not to disturb Tateh, the wome
n had withdrawn. Finally he came out to them. Leah wanted to show him more; through a lane where Arab dragomen in broad-sashed white abayas were leading a party of pilgrims, they came to an awesome set of wide stone stairs. A few Arabs standing there half-barred the way, muttering “Yahud,” but quite cheerfully Leah gave them a good-day in Arabic, while she handed over a coin. “Don’t worry, we can go inside,” she said lightly, but the feeling of abomination had come overpoweringly upon Yankel. Above, at the top of the broad stairway, he could see in the center of the vast open place the edifice with the glowing golden dome. For a confused instant it had been, to him, the Temple. Within that confusion, his daughter’s words babbled to him about Abraham’s sacred stone, the rock altar that had been made ready for Isaac. The stone was here, they claimed; it could be seen inside there, in the very center—she had seen it. For another few coins, inside there, in their golden-domed mosque—

  Violently, Yankel pulled back. —But it is ours, our stone, our place, not theirs! the tumult shouted within him. And the dreadful mistakenness, the hopelessly inverted wrongness of the world of man swept back upon him, swept away all of God’s tenderness and rightness that he had felt when he stood before the Wall. Look how insane, how wrong and perverted it all was and forever would be! How could this ever, until Eternity, be set right? Over the rock of Abraham, instead of the Temple stood a heathen mosque. No, he did not want to enter under their golden dome, to set foot in their place of abomination! The entire history of the Jews was churning within him; how could he explain if they didn’t understand in themselves? What was all this to his own daughter, what could it mean for his own sons, that in this land, in Yerushalayim itself, on the holiest of sites, they were mere sightseers! They thought nothing of giving a few coins to a Jew-cursing Moslem guide to slip them into the Holy Place—the Jewish Holy Place that these heathens had forbidden to Jews! Here where the Temple had stood! Plowed under by the Romans, desecrated by the Christians, owned by the Moslems—tfoo! Sightseers! Buying postcard pictures of the mosque!