The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

The story spread in the village. “It will yet be like that among all of us.” Hannah Zeidenschneur predicted. “Only orphans will remain.”

  In the midst of all came the Turks—the Kaymakam himself, the fat Azmani Bey of Tiberias, with his entire force of eight mounted gendarmes headed by their Bimbashi.

  As they were seen approaching, a command hastily went out, “Hide all weapons!” Even the watchmen could not be certain but what the Turks would seize their arms, and as for the numerous settlers from Yavniel who had come to help—let them scatter into various houses as visitors, as relatives come for the funeral.

  Hurriedly, Leah collected rifles and pistols and ran with them to the stable where Gidon had long ago made a false bottom in a manger. From Bronescu’s shop, word came flying that the Kaymakam was demanding Zev the shomer. Of the killing of Alter Pincus and Shaikeh, the disappearance of Yosef Kleinman, the theft of the herd, the burning of the fields, the stabbing of Mati—later, later he would hear their complaints, the Belly declared, as he sipped a syrup, but first he must have the shomer, Zev the Hotblood. Oh, he knew the name.

  Despite her antipathy for the Hotblood, Feigel, when his young wife came running distraught, proved her mettle. “Into the oven with him!” Feigel cried, and she was only sorry the oven had cooled down since the last baking. Might he roast and bake in Gehenna with the trouble he had brought, she declared, though not where his wife could hear her. And somehow, with pushing from behind, Zev crawled through the oven door, howling that he would stifle.

  Already the Bimbashi’s gendarmes were thrusting into people’s houses, searching for arms, while the Bimbashi himself stood with his curved sword unsheathed in the open center of the village, surveying all.

  A step ahead of the Turks, Yankel hurried a dozen of the Yavniel men into the synagogue to say Kaddish for the slain, while Malka Bronescu and Eliza took away the men’s pistols under their dresses. “Into bed!” Feigel now cried to Leah as the last of the revolvers and rifles were pushed under the mattress. Who would dare search the bed of a woman in her time of the month?

  Two of the Bimbashi’s men strode into the house, real Turks where before there had been mostly Arabs in the police. These were squat, swarthy men with stiff end-pointed mustaches that reached out, Yaffaleh even in her terror could not help whispering to Eliza, like the feelers of the giant cockroaches, the djukim. Eliza giggled nervously, bringing glares from the gendarmes. She moved behind her mother, who was already pouring cool lebeniya from a pitcher for these djukim.

  Mati stood still, staring at the gendarmes. All that was happening burned like the wound in his back. In the midst of his fight to drive out the goats from the barley, there had been the knife cutting his flesh, and when his friend Shaikeh had tried to save the herd, he was left lying there with a hole shot through his forehead.

  Mati had seen the dead Shaikeh, even though he was not to have seen him. He had seen Shaikeh lying with Alter Pincus in their house; there had been much talk among the fathers and mothers; some said let the children see, let them see what a world we live in, here in Eretz; others said no, it is not for them to see. Though Mati had been told to remain at home, he had gone and been inside Shaikeh’s house before he had been noticed and taken out. Shaikeh and Alter Pincus had been dressed to look as though they lay asleep in their Sabbath clothes.

  Even though Schmulik all day had been bringing news that Zev was about to lead forth all the men and capture back the cattle, Mati knew the cattle were gone, just as he knew Shaikeh and Alter Pincus lay dead, just as everyone could see the fields were black and the crops burned.

  Now the Turks were poking around his house with their swords out, lifting the corners of the feather quilts on the beds. They would find nothing. This was the first part, to fool these stupid Turks was only the beginning of getting back at all the enemies, all those who were against the Jews, who tried to devour your crops, to take your cattle, to kill you.

  One of the Turks opened the door to the second room, and Leah let out a female shriek. The Turk with his sword jumped back as though stung by a scorpion.

  Now he began rooting into every corner, the cupboards, the shelves, picking up each thing that might look valuable. He took up the Sabbath spicebox made of silver. Would he try to pocket it? The Turk’s eyes moved sidewise, they met Mati’s, then Ima’s, and the cockroach put the spicebox back on the shelf. Mati looked to his mother and she smiled.

  Gidon came in then, with the Bimbashi himself just behind him. “Where have you hidden your guns?” the Turk demanded. “I know you shoot well, you are an excellent hunter.”

  “Schnapps,” Gidon said to Feigel, and, as she brought the Rishon brandy, Gidon began a conversation in words of Turkish he had picked up, about hunting in the Huleh marshes, for this Bimbashi was renowned as a killer of wild boar.

  But the Bimbashi would not be distracted. “Where is your great killer the Hotblood?” he now asked, though in better humor, indeed like a good-natured man beginning to bargain. “What trouble you give me by hiding him! If we had not to hunt for your Hotblood, we could hunt for those who took your cattle.”

  Two lay dead and they did nothing, but over a horse they were capable of hanging a man. “Zev is worthless, he only makes trouble for your women,” the Turk laughed, and stared with open lust at Eliza. A child. They had no shame.

  “Zev is gone. Do you think he would wait for you?” Gidon said.

  “May that devil roast in a thousand fires!” the Bimbashi blurted, and at this, though tragedy was around them, Eliza had to rush behind the great oven to stifle her unwanted laughter.

  There was another of the gendarmes poking in the yard, even in the latrine—might he tumble in head first!—and now in the stable, might he receive a pair of hooves in his belly! But he had moved past the manger, Feigel saw, and was now pushing the bayonet of his rifle into the hay, let him swallow needles in his bread!

  Then the Turk leaned in, searching for something with his hands. What could he have found there? The gendarme straightened. From the hay he pulled out Yosef Kleinman’s cowboy hat! Ponderously shaking the straw from it, he marched into the yard with a look both cunning and uncertain.

  “That’s mine!” Gidon rushed out and seized it. “I slept there!” But already Chava Kleinman was running from her house as though the finding had communicated itself through the very walls. Seizing the hat from the Turk, she stood trembling, while from her mouth came, as from Dvora’s that time in Sejera, the woman’s howl over death, the ululation that emerged of itself as though not from the body but from some primordial cave. Gidon tried to explain to her—by the Kinnereth, the Arab boy—and he had put the hat away here, for he was not yet certain, he didn’t want to alarm her.

  The unearthly howling continued to issue from within her, and wives came running as to some call that belonged to womanhood alone, the way each animal knows its call. Mameh supported Chava on one side, and Golda Janovici on the other, while her two little daughters buried their heads against her and wept.

  Throughout the village hysteria and panic spread; some women gathered their children into their homes, and other women ran outside and in, some of them distractedly pulling washing from their clotheslines, calling, seeking their husbands, crying out that now they too for certain would depart from this murderous land, nothing remained here but death, they would take their children and leave!

  In all this, the burial of Shaikeh and Alter Pincus was being made ready. Yankel Chaimovitch had gathered with the small band of elders who constituted the Chevrah Kadushah, the burial society of sanctification, and they were about to carry the young and the ancient body, each in its white shroud, to the wagon to be taken up the hill. Just then, even in the house of the dead, a pair of Turkish gendarmes appeared to make their search. Obtusely they crowded into the room, using their rifles to push aside the crowd.

  In blind rage Yankel hurled himself against the two of them, with each arm yanking a rifle free, forcing back the startled soldiers, dri
ving them out of the house, shouting hoarsely, “Defilers! Vermin! Can’t you see there is a burial here! May you be buried under the flaming mountain of God’s wrath!”

  Behind Yankel the entire house of mourners now let out their rage. The two gendarmes, having at last comprehended, stood grumbling with a kind of half-shame and yet bluster. The Bimbashi galloped up, to be met with a flood of complaining voices in three languages, none of which he understood. Yankel flung the two rifles at the feet of his mount. With but a few harsh words at Yankel, the Turk waved his sword for the funeral to proceed.

  In a way this had a quieting effect, as the entire village followed the wagon up the hill.

  Several headstones were now to be seen alongside Avramchick’s in the cemetery cleared amongst the rubble of some ancient village here, and each mourner from today’s village knew each grave—normal deaths from malaria, from heat prostration, even from bodily failings. In the six years of the settlement, these were the first deaths of blood.

  With the bereaved family, Yankel ranged himself by the double grave; he too had stood here, a father saying Kaddish for a young son, but to have to say Kaddish for your son and your grandfather together, that was at least a demand the Above One had not made of him. Marcu recited the words tonelessly in hardly more than a whisper. He was a slender youngish householder who had come here really because of Alter Pincus; in Roumania the entire family had lived on rents, and when Marcu’s own father had died, Alter Pincus had sold his properties and brought everyone to Eretz. In place of Marcu’s Shaikeh, Yankel could not forget, it might have been his own Mati who was sacrificed yesterday. Marcu had never been a part of the minyan in the shul, and indeed was a shadowy person in the village, while his wife was little seen. They had two younger children, a boy and a baby girl. It was already understood that the family would leave.

  When the villagers returned from the burial, the Turks were waiting in the square. Now the Bimbashi commanded all the men to assemble in the center of the street; they must form two groups, those of Mishkan Yaacov to be separated from the outsiders.

  What did he want of them? Everyone turned to Bronescu, to Galil, who had been sitting with Azmani Bey—had the Turk come to help here or to make things worse? If not to search for Kleinman, if not to help find the herd, let the Belly with his Bimbashi and the gendarmes together go back to Tiberias and leave them to their troubles!

  The Bimbashi, a buttoned-up lump of a man with a huge deeply-pitted nose and black hairs sprouting from everywhere, from his nostrils, from his ears, had a way of disregarding the person he was talking to and pursuing his own murky intention; one could never tell whether it was for good or bad until the last moment when he would utter his command. Perhaps he would yet march them all off to prison in his black fortress in Tiberias.

  Bronescu appealed to the Kaymakam, who sat nibbling in his carriage, watching his Bimbashi, with a faint glitter of amused anticipation on his melon-round face. Azmani Bey only waved the mukhtar aside.

  The settlers moved hesitantly, with words between them in Yiddish—who should go to one side and who to the other? Occasionally from the carriage Azmani Bey tapped with his whip handle and pointed otherwise. Though he scarcely moved out from Tiberias, it was astonishing how knowing was that fat brain; the men of the Shomer he knew, each one, and now when Menahem remained with the Chaimovitches, the Kaymakam instantly pointed his whip for him to go over to the outsiders’ group.

  “But I am their son-in-law,” Menahem stated.

  “You are a shomer. From Gilboa.”

  Menahem moved to the outsiders. “As in the days of Ashur!” Reuven muttered, his lips pressed together, as even he was ordered over to that side. Not only Ashur and the Assyrians, but in how many other times, under the Romans, the Persians, the Saracens, had Hebrew men in this land been made to stand with their hands bereft of weapons while strangers, foreign soldiers, walked commandingly among them, each step treading on their manhood!

  Standing with the younger boys just outside the line of men but apart from the women, Schmulik edged closer to where Gidon stood, as though from him rather than from his father he would know what to do.

  Now the Belly spoke. “There has been killing here. Blood and fire, as you proclaim. And in the water, too,” he added, with a mysterious knowing chortle. “Do you imagine the Turk is so ignorant?” He gazed with self-satisfaction toward Galil. “Now they have killed yours in return. And your hotbloods want to kill theirs. Let it stop! In my sanjak it is I who decide who shall die because he has killed.”

  What was the Kaymakam’s meaning? Blood in the water? One man looked to another, puzzled, yet between Galil and Menahem something else passed. Was it then not because of yesterday’s troubles that the Turk had arrived here? Was it not over the shooting of the horse that he was searching for Zev? And in Menahem the two straining hook-ends now touched each other, all but snapped together around his burden.

  For Zev had never been satisfied at being left out of the secret deed. With prodding hinting he had gone about making remarks about the vanished bandit brothers of Fuleh. He must have guessed something, perhaps from Shabbatai Zeira, for Zev had even once knowingly joked to Menahem about the bandits having vanished from the earth, but who knew about the sea? The tale had reached Azmani Bey, perhaps it was for this the Turks had come to seize the Hotblood. The Turks could be taking Zev at his word, believing it was he who had done the deed.

  Or was there something more? Could something even have been cast up from the sea? From those unfathomed depths of the Kinnereth, to enrage the Zbeh?

  The men from Yavniel, and all others who did not belong here, except for Galil, the Kaymakam commanded, must leave at once.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Galil nodded and the Yavniel volunteers began to move to their mounts and depart. Menahem too had to depart, though he managed to pass close to Gidon and remark, “Remind your mother that what’s cooking in her oven may burn.” For now he was deeply perturbed not only that Zev might be caught and blamed for the deed, but that something might be beaten out of him. Zev had only made a guess like everyone else, but Menahem felt a tragic heartsickness now, felt an enchainment from that deed that had had to be carried out, to the innocent Joe Kleinman, and onward to some unknown consequences that still might lie beyond.

  Gidon managed to repeat Menahem’s message to Schmulik, who slipped over to Feigel. She hurried back to the house. It was un-watched. Cramped, gasping in a caul of sweat, his always red skin now appearing afire, Zev had to be pulled like an enormous roast out of the oven. Gulping a whole pitcher of water, he listened as she told him of the Kaymakam’s orders, even the Belly’s strange outcry about blood in the sea. At this Zev became upset. He gave hasty instructions for his family; he himself must get far from the village. And through the back gate he was gone.

  Azmani Bey had turned to the remaining Jews, the villagers. There was still danger of bloodshed in this area, he declared. Their mukhtar must come with him to Tiberias until all could be clarified. And he beckoned to the bewildered Bronescu who, still clinging to his dignity, advanced as though it were by friendly invitation to the carriage. Now, announced the Belly, his lips broad with satisfaction at the surprise he was about to produce, the entire settlement must be evacuated until safety was restored in the area. His men would remain to guard their homes and possessions.

  An astonished gasp arose. Then came outcries. The crops! The houses! All would be looted! The poultry, the bit of livestock that remained! And what of the herd? The stolen herd? Why should the victims be punished instead of the vandals! The marauders would surely return and sack the entire settlement!

  As to the herd, Azmani Bey replied, their cattle had evidently been taken off across the river to another sanjak, where he had no authority. He would make the proper inquiries, he declared, reverting to the tone of an administrator. But for their own safety, the evacuation must proceed at once.

  In the end, again in conference with Bronescu and Galil, the
Kaymakam agreed that two men from the neighboring kvutsa could come each day to inspect the houses against pillage. The kvutsa could also send men to harvest the remaining grain.

  Quietly, Galil spoke to several of the householders and the younger men, Gidon among them. It was best to obey. The Belly knew of something. A raid in force, he had hinted, to finish off the whole village.

  Already, Galil reasoned, in the panic that had taken hold of the women after yesterday’s disasters, several of the Roumanian families had decided to leave. Rather than have the settlers infecting each other, it was perhaps better that the Turk should order them out. If there really was to be a raid, let the Turks be responsible here. They could prevent a slaughter. In a few weeks, the Belly had promised, all would be clarified and the settlers could return. No, he had his informants, the Belly, and it should not be assumed he was against the yishuv. Besides, from HaKeren, their shomer would be watching. The village would not be destroyed.

  Everywhere women were hurrying with bundles of linen and baskets of silverware, youngsters chased after squawking hens, men piled pieces of furniture, implements, crockery, they hardly knew what, onto their wagons. In the Chaimovitch yard Yaffeleh tried hurriedly to bind her geese foot to foot, but there was no room to take even half the flock. She wanted to walk to Yavniel driving her geese before her, but Gidon promised that Reuven’s kvutsa would take care of them.

  Suddenly Leah declared she would not leave at all, she would stay. Next door Chava Kleinman was refusing to leave—perhaps Joe would yet appear, perhaps he had thrown his hat as a sign for her and then escaped somewhere, and he would send a message or all at once return. Only Leah was able to talk to her—for the sake of her girls she must go. When Chava Kleinman at last agreed, it was on condition that Leah come with her.

  They tied Klugeh to the wagon; the orphan calf stayed at her side. Feigel carried out the Shabbes candlesticks, the spicebox that the Turk had eyed; the wagon was piled as high as when they had first arrived, with bedding, even with the old trunk from Cherezinka, but the new furniture had to be left in the house. At the last moment Leah rushed back for the framed picture by Abel Pam of Shulamit from the Song of Songs that she had brought from the Bezalel in Jerusalem.