The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Yankel turned away into the crowded lane, and his wife and daughter followed at a distance behind him.

  Preparing the evening meal with her daughter in the narrow room, the moment seemed good to Feigel for what was needed, and she began roundabout by speaking of Dvoraleh and Menahem, and how well things had turned out between them. And Leah herself inadvertently led to the point, “I sometimes wonder at Dvoraleh,” Leah said, “if she doesn’t even think of Yechezkiel.” There was no criticism in her voice but only a questioning touch of bewilderment. Her tone, Feigel recalled, was exactly like that of a little daughter who asks about childbirth, “But Mama, if it hurts so much, then—to have another baby—aren’t you afraid?”

  “You know she does think of Yechezkiel,” Feigel said. “Even if they had not named their first child after him, she would still think of him all through her life. But, Leah, Dvora has become a woman.”

  Leah’s face turned heavy. Then Feigel began from another direction, speaking of little Mati, what a little mensch he was becoming, the love of the whole village, running, climbing everywhere on his stout short legs—

  Her daughter’s face livened up. “Oh, how my heart longs for him,” Leah said. “Why didn’t you bring him, Mama?”

  Now Feigel brought out of herself for her daughter something that she had never thought she would share. “You remember, Leah, how before he was born, I believed it could be the soul of Avrameleh returning?” Leah smiled, wondering whether her mother still held with such superstition, and Feigel smiled as well, for now all was becoming more intimate between them. “It’s a few years now since a small thing happened,” Feigel said. “It struck me so deeply at the time that I didn’t speak of it to anyone.” First she recalled to Leah the time when their little Avramchick alev hasholem was still alive, and the day when Tateh and the whole family had waded across the river to go into their field, and Avramchick had lagged behind, and they had all turned around to see him standing there on the other side of the water afraid to cross, calling “And me? And me?”

  Mother and daughter sighed over the memory, yet Feigel still held a pensive smile. She turned over a blintze on the pan, remarking that Yankel liked them crisp, and continued, “When Mati was exactly the same age as Avramchick was on that day—you were already here in Jerusalem, Leah—a thing much the same took place. We all went over to the field, forgetting him, he must have run off to look at something on the way. Then suddenly when we were on the other side, what do you think? That baby came marching through the water by himself. ‘I’m here too!’ he announced to us!”

  They treated it with a touch of laughter, though their eyes communicated something else—a seeking of meaning, and of awe. “Ah, my poor sweet Avramchick,” Feigel sighed. “But you see, my fears were wrong, what happens to us is not always the same.” And then she said, “Come home for a while, Mati longs for you.”

  Perhaps, after all, she could begin again, Leah felt, simply as a girl still learning from her mother.

  * * * *

  It was only this that Gidon had needed! With his giantess of an older sister again in the room, a female effluvium pervaded the place—like in a cow stable at times, he could swear. Even before Leah came back, he had felt uncomfortable because of Eliza. The smaller sister, Yaffaleh, didn’t trouble him, although on her chunky body the breasts were already larger than Eliza’s. But all at once in the last months with Eliza the room seemed unlivable to him. Suddenly it was decreed that if he came from outside and the door of the room was shut, he must knock. And even after knocking, he couldn’t simply walk into the room—after all, it was his room too!—but must first wait until the lady said yes, he might enter! No longer was it enough for him to turn his head when she undressed; half the time now Eliza would ask him to step out of the room altogether. The little pisherkeh! How long was it since she had stopped wetting her bed! And if by chance coming in hot and sweaty from the fields he started to change his pants, she would let out a shriek.

  Let be, he knew what it all came from, though no one had ever bothered to explain it to him, with their female secrets. Already from far back—he didn’t exactly recall how he had made the discovery—Gidon knew that women leaked blood every month. Perhaps it had even been way back in Cherezinka, when the melamed didn’t want to explain what the passage meant in Chumash, the laws about the time of the month for women, and one of the boys afterward had told him about the bloody rags, and it was nauseating what was under their dresses. And in all her pretended daintiness Eliza was just as filthy as the others too, for one evening when she was away at the Bronescus visiting her friend, their daughter Malka, he had come upon a stiffly clotted rag among some petticoats she had left lying around for Mameh to wash. The time of the month was supposed to start with girls at her age.

  And if she was not at Malka’s, Malka was here, endlessly babbling, the two of them, and then for a different reason he would stay out of the room, because already Malka upset him with that look he had heard his mother say the Roumanian women had in their eyes, a sidewise look.

  The worst part about sleeping in the same room wasn’t even from the girls, it was because of himself. He couldn’t always stop himself. No matter how still he lay, he was afraid they would know, they would even smell what came out. Almost every night he fought it, in torture. He wondered how his brother Reuven the idealist could endure it all these years, since he still didn’t have a chavera. Perhaps it was true that if you were a vegetarian it was easier and that was one reason Reuven was a vegetarian. Or perhaps it was even true that in a kvutsa the girls in a friendly way helped the men by releasing their torture even if there was nothing between them. After all, it was only natural. On a farm with animals you saw how natural. He wanted to talk to Reuven but could never bring himself to begin talking about such things; they liked each other, but they were not the same.

  Sometimes Gidon wanted to howl like an animal calling a mate.

  Some nights, though he tried to keep from rubbing himself or even tried to squeeze it to choke back the seed, the stuff came out over his hand, and some of it stained the sheet. His mother surely had noticed but said nothing, it was a thing that boys could not help, it was nature just like the leaking of the girls. But now Leah would do the washing and she would notice. With Leah he had always felt more understanding than with any of the others; with her he might even bring himself to talk about the things of nature, but what could she tell him that he didn’t already know? A man had to suffer through it, that was all, until he found a modern understanding chavera, or even until he got married. The jokes about doing it with sheep, and about men with boys, he already knew from long ago; this too was in Chumash where they forbade things, and this too the melamed had not explained. Or the zonoth—he had picked up such talk from Arab boys and from some of the workers on the Roumanian farms, but these chalutzim only talked, they didn’t go. You could get diseased, the chalutzim said, and later in life become insane, or blind. It was even said there was a certain house in Tiberias. But it was better simply to spill in the hand or in a rag. Even when the time would come when he earned money—no, he must find a true chavera and they would love each other in free love, as Leah had, everyone said. Yet he was angry and could kill such a fellow as that Moshe, look how miserable he had made poor Leah, ruining her life.

  One day it came to Gidon that exactly because of Leah and the room’s being now so crowded, he could do something he had long wished but had not dared propose. He could leave the whole room to the girls and poor Schmulik, and go and live by himself. Often, passing the stone hut where they had lived before the house was built, he had thought of this. It stood empty, and had become as dilapidated as before, with the roof half decayed and the door fallen off and the floor covered with clots of dried offal. But there, with a little work, he could arrange a wonderful abode for himself. And if he were lucky enough to find a chavera, she could even slip in there to visit him. He didn’t think of exactly who. Not Malka—she was like Eliza who w
ould never do such a thing—they considered themselves superior to boys and in any case, aside from the disturbance her presence gave him, he really disliked Malka Bronescu and had no longing for her. At times a vision came of a little Yemenite girl, slim and swift, who had a few times caught his eye, there by the Kinnereth—but they were very strict with their daughters, and with Arab girls it was dangerous to meddle—no.

  The first visitor to appear in his hut came as Gidon rose the first time from the fresh straw mattress that Mama had stuffed for him—for unexpectedly she had made hardly any objection to his move except for worries about scorpions, and had come down with Leah to thoroughly clean the hut, which Leah had then supplied with a water jarra and pots of flowers.

  It was Fawzi, who appeared, laughing, shouting joyously as he neared, “I have her! She is mine!” and Gidon saw him crossing the stream, leading a colt of almost unbearable beauty, the color of honey, with her tail fastidiously arched as though she were holding up her skirts as she stepped with the finest articulation from stone to stone. Gidon rushed out and gazed at the young mare who now moved up closer behind Fawzi and placed her head over his shoulder, like a girl when she wants to make clear to everyone which boy is hers. It was unbearable. She had Roumanian eyes. Gidon leaped at Fawzi, laughing and pummeling, and they rolled on the ground. How had he got her? Surely he had begotten her off her own mother!—And you! Fawzi retorted. The best you would be able to beget is with a field mouse! Throwing Gidon off, he dodged into the hut and examined each thing, picking up Gidon’s shaving cup, his razor, his mirror, taking a sesame cookie from a dishful Mama had left there, and then through a full mouth Fawzi divulged the secret of his possession. Did not Gidon remember how in this very place, when he, Fawzi, first came down with his grandfather Sheikh Ibrim to build them a taboon, a pledge was made?

  Seizing a pencil that lay on the table, looking around for a bit of paper and finding none, Fawzi proceeded to write on the freshly whitewashed wall. Laughing all the time, he wrote in large flowing Arabic script, and with a flourish whirled around. He had learned to write!

  Now Gidon recalled how the ancient Ibrim had fingered some books of Reuven’s and asked, “Who here can read?” And the astonishment, Gidon recalled, on old Ibrim’s face when he learned that not only the boys, but also Leah and Dvora and little Eliza could read and write! Even the girls! It was then that Ibrim had turned to his grandson in a flow of Arabic which they had not understood.

  “He promised me my own horse when I could read and write as well as you!” Fawzi cried. And at last the imam up there in Dja’adi had taken pity and taught him. “Can you read this, you son of an inkpot?” Fawzi wrote more on the wall. Arabic Gidon could not read, though Menahem had learned quite a bit, and even Reuven had taught himself their alphabet. “May Allah watch over this house!” Fawzi rattled off, giving him a teasing look, and they burst out laughing together, Gidon poking at him and calling him a mamser, which Fawzi well understood, calling Gidon in turn a puny outcast from a rabbit hole, suckled by a jackal. Then they went out like brothers to examine each point of the colt, whom Fawzi had named Ayesha. With her first foal, he already planned, he would buy himself a bride!

  Gidon did not conceal his envy, for it increased Fawzi’s pleasure and pride. “For a horse such as this, all my own,” Gidon declared, “I would learn to read and write in five languages!” Fawzi gazed at him. “Her first foal is yours,” he suddenly said.

  That was far off, nor could he accept such a gift, so impulsively offered. With the Arabs, it was a gesture that spoke of great friendship in the heart, but it naturally had to be refused. Meanwhile Gidon could think of nothing else except how to get himself his own steed. He thought so intensely about it at night that sometimes even his sexual troubles subsided. A thousand plans for earning money by extra labor for some of the Roumanians he discarded; even if he could spare a few hours a week, it would take over a year to gather the money. That his father should pay him a wage he kept putting out of his head. But now every little incident with his father came to shouting. Gidon went to the house only for meals and rushed out when he had eaten, returning to his own place to brood. Once he rushed out in the midst of the evening meal because something the old man said angered him; it was Leah who came after him to the hut.

  Gidon was sitting in the dark and his big sister sat down by him without lighting the kerosene lamp. He was going through a difficult age for a young man, she said, nature was in some ways cruelly perverse and had placed in man these terribly powerful sexual urges that were badly timed; they began too early and tormented a man years before they could be released in the right way with the woman he loved. Or perhaps it was not nature but civilization that was to blame, for, in earlier times, as could be read in the Bible, and even in the time of their own mother and father, their own people too had recognized the need for younger marriages. And she believed, Leah said, it was this natural sexual need that made him so short-tempered these days, especially with his father.

  “He doesn’t have to order me, tomorrow do this, do that—I know what needs to be done, I know better than he.”

  Leah grasped his hand. “I read in a book that Rahel gave me in Jerusalem—it is a book of psychology—a Jewish scientist in Vienna says it is normal for young men to have such feelings against their fathers, even to want to kill them,” she half-laughed. “It comes from primitive urges.”

  “Psychology!” Gidon repeated. “A scientist had to discover such things? This scientist should have known Tateh!”

  “And Gidon, don’t think it is only men that suffer. Women too suffer from terrible needs when they do not have their man …”

  He squeezed back on her hand. He was grateful that Leah had offered these words from her own inmost pain, it was like a kiss of peace from his sister on his forehead.

  “Nu, Gidon,” she said with a quick-drawn breath, “the only help we can have is sometimes to talk it out. Tell me—maybe just to me you can tell it—is there some special girl perhaps that you keep dreaming of and wanting?”

  “No, no,” he blurted out. “It’s not even that so much— You know what I dream and want—you’ll laugh, Leah—it’s a horse.”

  And they both broke out laughing. Leah laughed like a roll of thunder. She would finally manage to get control of herself and begin to say something to him, and then the thunder would roll forth again from her mouth and inundate the room as though it would break through the walls. Her body shook like an earthquake. “A horse! A horse! And I thought it was Malka Bronescu!” This time she did seize him in an embrace that engulfed Gidon entirely, while her mouth, oddly fresh and cool, blessed his forehead.

  In a rush of words Gidon explained it all—how, even if he were working as a hired hand, he could manage to buy a foal, paying it off while he raised it. But when he had only hinted at this idea to Tateh, the old man had grumbled, what did they need with a riding horse that would stand eating its head off all day without working!

  Calmly now, Leah lighted the lamp. “You are right, Tateh is exploiting you,” she declared.

  After that it did not even take long. From all sides arguments fell on poor Yankel. With a swift steed of their own, Feigel pointed out, they could more quickly fetch a doctor or medicine in case of need. Eliza kept repeating how pleasant things were for Malka Bronescu whose father kept a horse and often took Malka riding with him in their little brougham. —Never mind the Roumanians, Leah pointed out—a new family had just come from Russia, from Bobrusk, and even they owned a riding horse. Besides, on any homestead in the land an excellent young laborer like Gidon could command a good wage in addition to his keep, and buy himself a horse if he wanted to.

  It was Shabbatai Zeira, the horse-expert of the Shomer, who on his very next journey to the market in Damascus selected a yearling of the finest desert breed, a young black stallion who, the dealer promised, would outrace the swiftest bullet. And even the price and the time of payment was no problem. “Take him, take him with you,�
� said the Syrian. “I know you of the Shomer!” and he grasped Zeira’s hand in termination of the transaction, both understanding full well where the price stood.

  Part of the money Gidon had already sent with Zeira, for though a son does not work for wages, he now received from Yankel a monthly sum for personal expenditures. As to Shabbatai’s choice, where could an equal be found? Gidon named his horse Yadid, and slept with a long rope from Yadid’s halter tied to his wrist, in case marauders should try to steal his beloved friend.

  On Sabbaths now he galloped with Fawzi, going as far as the Huleh, where they hunted quail and wild geese, which Fawzi knew where to sell in Tiberias. Often they raced their mounts. On the level stretches by the shores of the Kinnereth, the mare was likely to be swifter, while on the climb toward Rosh Pina, it was Yadid who was more likely to win.

  Reaching the upper lake, a vast swamp as large as the Kinnereth, they would break off wild sugarcane stalks to suck, and feed pieces to their horses.

  In the swamp they had to proceed cautiously, as tales were told of hunters who had vanished in the quagmires. Set your foot on soft ground, and soon you would find yourself unable to pull out, and sink down slowly to your knees, your waist, your neck, your mouth, your eyes, and no one would ever find you. Such were the tales Fawzi related. The pursuit of the wild boar was most dangerous, as the cunning animal would lead you to the most dangerous parts of the swamp.

  Yet one Saturday a wild boar broke from a clump of high papyrus reeds not far before them, and they could not stop themselves from hunting it. Twice they lost the animal, and each time it was Fawzi who again caught his movement, the second time leaping in his eagerness onto a muddy stretch, so that he had to lie flat and extend his rifle to Gidon who, seizing the end from firm ground, pulled him out.