The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Every movement in the field was suspended in midair. Until that moment it had been a squabble, a fight with blows, with sticks, but no more—except for Mati’s flintstone and Abdul’s dagger, no weapons had appeared.

  None but Zev had come onto the field with firearms.

  All stared at Fawzi as though waiting for his body to topple. Then, unlimited battle would be released.

  But Fawzi sat unhurt.

  It was the mount, Gidon saw, not the man who had been hit. Ayesha wildly flung up her neck, and something like a blood-choked outcry, more human than animal, came from the wounded beautiful mare as her legs stiffened. Over Gidon’s first sense of relief that no human was slain there spread an engulfing dismay, grief for the beautiful animal, then anger. That stupid Hotblood with his shooting!

  “It was not meant! It was not meant!” Gidon cried out as Fawzi slid off his wounded horse. “Fawzi! Take mine!” And even while his heart died in him for the loss it would be, Gidon’s hand reached out the halter.

  But his friend only spat on the ground between them. “Take care of your brother, Yahud,” Fawzi said, his tone flat.

  Mati, half-raised up, had again slipped to the ground, his limbs trembling, blood oozing from under the bandage.

  Together with the sick-eyed father of Fawzi and Abdul, their uncle the mukhtar had appeared. Sitting his horse, Mansour listened to several of the angry fellaheen, glanced down at Mati, looked sharply at the wounded mare, then glared at Zev, who still held his rifle crosswise on his saddle. With an angry gesture, the mukhtar motioned his people from the field; clearly this was not the end. Dark-faced and muttering, the Arabs of Dja’adi turned and followed Fawzi as he slowly led his Ayesha. The head of the mare hung low, the tawny neck clotted with gouts of dark-brown blood.

  * * * *

  Already most of the women of Mishkan Yaacov were worriedly coming out into the open, and several began to shriek when they saw, in the wagon coming from the fields, the bloodied Mati, face down on the bed of straw. But it was not Feigel’s way to wail at the sign of calamity. Running forward with a basin of water, while Leah climbed onto the wagon with white cloths, Feigel with one quick look at the wound sucked in her cries and directed her husband: he must drive straight to Tiberias.

  Lately there had been, anew, a few instances of trouble at the Three Rocks. Stamp out vermin, and more rise from under the earth. Should not Gidon ride alongside to protect the wagon? But he might be needed here; the very air was oppressive. From the fields the Roumanians were pulling homeward, gathering their implements and turning their wagons toward the village. Some said a shot had been heard from Dja’adi—surely the wounded horse was now dead. Would there be a revenge? They discussed and disputed. A dead horse is not a dead Arab. To an Arab his horse is worth more than a human life. They could kill for a horse. Who knew what really went on in their heads? Though with Dja’adi there had never been real trouble. What was it the fellaheen had kept shouting?

  —That they had the right to graze, Gidon repeated.

  “But only on the stubble! Not in an uncut field!”

  A triple watch must be mounted. That hot-headed Zev must not go out alone.

  Zev defended himself angrily. He had done right to shoot, or Fawzi would have split Gidon’s head with the rake he was wielding.

  Gidon decided to escort the wagon past the Three Rocks and then hurry back to the troubled village. It was best, also, that Leah, on the wagon, should carry a pistol.

  Kneeling over the child on the straw, as the wagon bounced off a large stone in the road, Feigel saw the bandage slowly staining anew, and in anguish watched Mati’s blood seeping from under the edges. Leah bent with her over the wound, and in helpless terror, they gazed at each other. “Yankel, the stones,” Feigel begged, yet what could the poor man do? To avoid them he would have to go slowly. Cautiously Leah undid the cloth, and the gash lay there before them, partly clotted, but with blood seeping up through a break in the crust. Little Mati raised up his head a bit and complained, “Ima, it hurts.” Desperately Feigel held the flesh together with her fingers, her child’s blood slippery, then sticky on her hand, the wagon lurching—“Yankel.” —but still everything within her cried “Hurry—quickly,” and meanwhile Leah worried that the dust from the road could infect the wound.

  So at last in this drawn-out agony they came to the pharmacy in Tiberias. As the boy was lifted on Yankel’s arms from the wagon, women in the marketplace were already wailing, each as though the child were her own, and there even arose from somewhere the frightened beginning of a death-ululation.

  Yankel laid the child face-downward on a bench as the apothecary, called from behind, hurried to them. A short-bearded Jew in a yarmulkeh, half a doctor he was—and at a glance, Gottgetrei said, “This must be sewn up at the hospital. It is not for me.” Meanwhile he carefully cleaned around the wound; with the burn of the peroxide, Mati let out a howl, and this at least relieved Feigel’s heart, for in the bravery of boys, the protesting howl was permitted and meant all was yet well.

  In the crowd at the door of the pharmacy, Leah noticed their neighbor Joe Kleinman—he had recognized their wagon. “What happened, Leah?” In a word she told of the fight. Was Mati all right?

  “He’ll live,” she was now confident.

  —Good, said Joe Kleinman—he would gallop back, he might be needed in the village. Still he lingered watching as the pharmacist, calling his apprentice to mind the shop, moved to lead them to the hospital.

  Yankel again picked up the child across his arms. Was God once more demanding the offering, it came to him, again the bringing of the sacrifice to the altar, again the akeda? Had he been brought to Eretz so that a Jew might over and over be tested with the brutal sacrifice? Wasn’t one dead child—his Avramchick—wasn’t one enough?

  Then, as Yankel stepped with his burden outside the door, it was as though all the embittering perversion of history were suddenly revealed to him. There before him indeed loomed the heathen altar! The cross above the large wrought-iron gate of the Christian mission confronted him from the end of the street, just as the golden-domed heathen mosque had confronted him in Yerushalayim, replacing the Temple over the rock of Abraham.

  A sacrifice to their idols!

  Yankel stood rigid. “I cannot.”

  “But, my fine Jew, where would you take him?” Gottgetrei demanded. “This is the only hospital in Tiberias. As far as Safed—on the hilly road—the wound is sure to open again.”

  Several Sephardim had gathered, and a whole talmudic dispute rang in Yankel’s ears. It is forbidden, it is permitted, was not Gottgetrei himself a good pious Jew? But as Yankel stood dazed, uncertain—was it the body of Avramchick on his arms?—there suddenly returned over him an anger at Reuven for bringing them all to this gehenna. Was the fellaheen slaughter with knives any different than the moujik’s pogrom with hatchets? Adonai! what do you want of a Jew?

  While Yankel stood rigid, frozen, Leah cried, “Give him to me!” Yankel’s head was shaking to say no, while inwardly he cried to himself, Spit on their cross but enter the hospital! At that moment, Joe Kleinman broke through the circle and lifted Mati from Yankel’s arms. Yankel saw them walking under the cross, Feigel and Leah together with Kleinman. He could not follow; his legs were stone.

  In the mission yard a number of Arab women squatted, holding their sore-infested babies, but already the door opened as someone white-clad—a priest, a doctor, who knew?—beckoned to them. Leah took Mati over from Yosef Kleinman. “Go home,” she said, feeling his anxiety about his family, and he was a good man to have just now in the village; he would calm them all with his American humor. “Tell Gidon and the children Mati’s all right,” she said. Then she recalled that Yosef always went unarmed and insisted that he take her pistol—he would be riding alone, and trouble was in the air. “That’s what makes the trouble,” he said with his wide grin, and refused.

  When another white-clad one, in broad robes, drew close, Feigel was not
without apprehension. Might they even try to sprinkle water on her son before they treated him? From far back in the old country such tales came to her; this she knew was the terror Yankel had felt, and as the priest took the boy from Leah, the mother stayed close, holding onto Mati’s hand.

  But they did not carry him into a church. It was a whitewashed room, though with a picture of their Yoshke on the wall, a sad Sephardic face with fine eyes, not unlike those of Gottgetrei, the pharmacist; Feigel kept her gaze averted from that wall.

  They had placed Mati on a high white-painted table. Speaking their own language to each other—it was English, Leah whispered to Feigel, this was an English Christian place—the priests or doctors probed the wound. Several times Mati sucked in his breath, but now he would not cry, and one of them patted his head.

  The doctor-priests were asking something of Feigel, then of Leah. Leah could only shake her head to show she did not understand English; she tried a few words of Hebrew, but they shook their heads. Anxiously, Feigel tried to ask them what they wanted, in Russian, in a half-Yiddish German, and at last between a mingling of words in Hebrew and Arabic, and a gesture of sewing, she understood and nodded vigorously. Indeed they must sew it up. But that wasn’t quite it. Leah caught the meaning—brave? was the boy brave? Then one of them, the one in the broad gown, bent his cheek against his hand, meaning sleep, and shook his finger—he meant they would not or could not put Mati to sleep. Was he brave?

  Leah began to explain to Mati, but he had understood their Arabic better than she. It would hurt; if it hurt too much, they would put him to sleep, but if he was brave, it was only a little sewing, sewing your skin like when you tear your shirt. “Sew,” he said. The child turned his head away and waited.

  The mother must now leave the room, the priest insisted, and Feigel slowly went out to where Yankel stood. At least Leah remained with Mati.

  Watching the priests put the needle through the candle flame, Mati clutched Leah’s hand tight. The needle came now. He did not cry out. In Arabic a doctor said, “A man.”

  It seemed unending. Again the needle stabbed, the small body stiffened, but not a sound came. Again. Again. Twenty times. Then it was finished, the wound was dressed, The Christians made compliments to the little son, and they lifted him from the table, a bandage tightly swathed around him just below the armpits. Carefully, carefully, Mati could stand. He could walk, but not run, they cautioned him. Brave, a man!

  Leah asked what was owed, and they smiled and pointed to a small box; it was oddly like the blue and white collection boxes of the Keren Kayemeth Le Israel, only a cross was on it. “Don’t ever tell Tateh!” Leah enjoined Mati, as she hurriedly put in a whole Turkish pound in silver.

  On the way back the boy fell asleep in his mother’s lap. Under his bronzed face, the yellow tinge was still there from the loss of blood. “You know what,” Leah said, “we’ll ask Chava Kleinman to make him some ice cream.”

  The whole afternoon a stillness had lain on the fields. Gidon rode the rounds in one direction, Zev in the other—he was after all the shomer. The Arab fields too, they saw, were deserted. Though this made Gidon apprehensive, Zev, as they exchanged a few words when they completed their circles and met, insisted it was not a bad sign. “It is they who are afraid of us,” he said. “They are afraid if your brother should die, we will take revenge.”

  Zev’s thought was a vileness to Gidon. “He isn’t dead and he won’t die!” he snapped, and what did Zev really understand of the Arabs? Perhaps the best would be, Gidon speculated, if he were to ride up right now to Dja’adi and talk to Fawzi, and ask after Abdul’s arm that Schmulik had badly wrenched, and tell them Mati would be well. Though Fawzi’s spat out “Yahud!” still burned in his bowels, coming just after he had offered his own horse, his own Yadid. No, the whole affair would have to be straightened out in some other way. Perhaps Reuven should go up and talk to their mukhtar—in such matters Bronescu was useless. Though not yet. Tomorrow or the next day, after tempers had cooled.

  So Gidon reflected as he rode his rounds, but underneath it all a profound dismay grew heavier. That “Yahud!” It must always have lain there even in Fawzi. Just as the whole hateful outbreak this morning had lain in Dja’adi.

  Late in the afternoon Gidon had an urgent feeling that the wagon was returning, and encountering Zev at the end of his round, he said, “I’ll miss the next circle, I’m going to meet them.”

  He galloped as far as the Three Rocks; the wagon was just coming, all was quiet, and Gidon rode alongside listening to the account of Mati’s bravery under the stitches. The boy was awake and grinning at their praise. She was going to borrow the American machine and make ice cream, Leah declared, and then added, “But didn’t Joe Kleinman tell you that Mati was all right? He was in Tiberias and rode home ahead of us.”

  No, Gidon had not seen Joe Kleinman.

  “He was worried about the trouble, and in such a hurry to get home.”

  As the crop fire had started on the far side of the fields where Gidon would have been circling, it was not detected at once.

  Only at the end of Zev’s own round, when he reached the high point, did Zev see the rim of the blaze. At first glance it was like a sunset reflection that sometimes came from that direction, but what was he dreaming of?—over the low streak of crimson there was black smoke.

  As he galloped, the widening blaze unfolded before him, and Zev realized he could do nothing by himself to halt it. And by now he would catch no one there, unless it was an ambush as well, with the dirty cowards waiting to shoot him down. Firing off his rifle as an alarm, he now wheeled toward the settlement, cursing Gidon and the Chaimovitches, the whole lot of them, even though he had agreed that Gidon should go meet the returning wagon.

  Hearing Zev’s shot, Gidon cut across the fields, galloping, leaving the wagon to enter the settlement. On the rise he saw the blaze and doubled back, yelling “Fire! Fire!”

  In the first confusion some of the villagers leaped on their horses, their mules, with anything they could seize, a rake, a mattock. Zev met them midway, reviling, commanding, “Sacking! Wet sacks! Do you think you can put it out with your hands?”

  “Whose fields?” each settler demanded, begged, while Zev thundered from one house to the next, and Gidon on the other side charged them, “Bring mattocks, sacks, wet sacks,” and in every yard a racing in circles began, some pumping water, some women even running out with brooms to beat off the fire, others screeching at their children to get inside the house. Bronescu had flung open his shed and was handing out empty burlap sacks from a pile there. People snatched them and ran and had to be called back to wet them, wet them! A wagonful of fire fighters galloped off. Whose field? Whose field? “Yosef Kleinman’s!” Zev shouted. Yet where was Yosef? A fire-break must be plowed; Kleinman must bring his reaping machine and cut a wide swath across the grain—

  “He hasn’t come home,” his wife cried out.

  “But he left before us, at least by two hours!” Leah exclaimed. And on top of the conflagration a new horror-fear blazed up in them.

  Not a sign of Joe had been seen on the road. At the Three Rocks all had been quiet. No, he must surely have been delayed, stopping to buy something more in Tiberias, or perhaps he had stopped at one of the kvutsoth. Yes, that was it. He must be at HaKeren. None could be spared to go there now, everyone was running to fight the fire, and Chava Kleinman distractedly ran with all the others, to Joe’s fields, then turned back and started the other way, toward the kvutsa.

  Yankel had already lifted a plow onto the wagon. Eliza was emptying sacks of grain and wetting the burlap in the washtub by the pump. Yaffaleh was pumping while Schmulik lifted an empty barrel to his father on the wagon and then handed up pailfuls of water for Yankel to dump in. The entire family was starting for the fields; Leah had to seize hold of Mati, “Stay here!” To Eliza she called, “Stay with him. Don’t let him move.”

  Mishkan Yaacov was all at once empty, the bit of street quiet a
nd deserted in the waning sun, as though Sabbath had fallen.

  And this was the moment chosen by the Zbeh. It was the time of waning light when the ancient Jew led the herd home, his great-grandson driving the animals from behind.

  When the fighting had started in the morning, Alter Pincus had moved the herd, the Chaimovitch cows among them, somewhat closer to the village, where they could readily be moved inside the village walls, and there he had kept them grazing all day. But now, just as the herd was beginning its movement homeward, horsemen swept in from nowhere. They were in front, behind, on all sides, pounding around the startled beasts that pressed together in panic. And when Alter, too bewildered to be terrified, seized the rope of his own cow, protesting she was his, a Bedouin simply rode him down, smashing the old Jew’s head with his rifle butt.

  The boy Shaikeh, darting sideward to run away, to run for help, found himself chased by a laughing tribesman who cornered him as he crouched against a rock, and, still laughing, took aim. The shot made a hole all the way through the boy’s head.

  The Jews would be too busy with their burning fields now to turn back over a stray rifleshot.

  Only Chava Kleinman heard it, from the path where she was hurrying to the kvutsa; in her panic it struck her as though she were hearing Joe shot dead. For a moment she stood stock still, straining for the death to pass, then she managed to make herself take shelter behind a rock, and she saw the cattle herded by the riders, white ghost waves of robes floating across the twilight haze, and patches of white from the sides of the cattle, and after this was gone from sight, she stumbled through brambles in the direction the shot had come from. There was still enough light for her to make out the thin-spun white hair and beard of Alter Pincus, and then, though she was not a brave girl like Leah Chaimovitch, she nevertheless pursued the horror and found the little boy, too; he was lying, a clump of contracted limbs against the rock, the way a child gathers itself together in a chilly bed.