The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  And so he still suffered.

  Here in Alexandria, Herscheleh would lead Gidon and a whole flock of the lads through the lanes of cribs, expertly evaluating each whore as from wide experience. But the waiting lines of British soldiers made a man’s heart mourn for himself and for all humanity. How man had defiled what was good in life, not only with killing but with whoring. These thoughts Gidon kept to himself while he joined with the others in filthy manly jesting.

  Yet what was before him? His twenty-first birthday was approaching, it would come a few days before Pesach, and soon he was going into battle. He might be killed without ever having known what it felt like to enter a woman’s flesh.

  One thing the British had taken care of. Soldiers were issued with little rolled-up sheaths of rubber to protect them against disease; in Eretz he had never actually seen such a thing. One night under his blanket Gidon used one and found that every sensation was felt through the thin covering. Now he remembered remarks of certain young men at home; this thing, then, was also used, even in free love, to make sure that the chavera did not conceive. Rising before reveille, careful not to have it seen, he dropped the little sack into the latrine.

  In the evenings what was there to do? Watch the card-players? Roam the streets a bit with the Arab boys tugging at your jacket, offering zigzig with their sisters, themselves, or simply begging? With Herscheleh and Tuvia, a hairy-nosed maker of cement blocks from Tel Aviv, Gidon had formed a trio. Tuvia was open with his desires; they would be moving off in a few days now, that was clear from the sudden burst of activity in the harbor. A hole was a hole, he said, what did a hairy-nose like himself have to expect in life? All his life he had gone to whores, and a good whore was as good as some babbling chavera who made a great affair of it and led you on and you had to tell her you loved her—pah, a good whore was the best, but it had to be a decent show, not a line in a crib. Whereupon Herschel declared he could lead them to the real thing, real French girls—he had made the acquaintance of someone who knew.

  Gidon did not tell his chums it was his twenty-first birthday. To have them know would have demeaned the occasion even further. Let it be only between him and himself.

  At home, birthdays were celebrated only because of Leah. She never forgot. They were not big celebrations such as you read about if you read Tolstoy and Pushkin and all such, stories about nobility and birthday balls and sumptuous nameday gifts—something that was done among the goyim. But in the family there would be little gifts, a magnifying glass Leah had once bought him, and for the girls he always bought ribbons, and for Eliza even scents, in Tiberias.

  Gidon had saved his pay and now told himself with a jeer at the world, if it happened tonight, let it happen, his birthday present to himself, a man of twenty-one.

  Herschel led them first to a belly-dance cafe where they saw the usual fat women rolling their bare stomachs; there, an oily-haired young man sat down with them. Greek, even half-Jewish, he claimed—who knew what. The place to which he would now take them was not open to all comers. Indeed it was the secret dwelling of a pair of exquisite young French girls who were maintained in luxury by two of the wealthiest pashas of Alexandria. Since such men were fat and old and not free every night from their families, he winked, the French girls were eager for company … No, not expensive—indeed, if the girls took a liking to you—

  And so they went.

  It proved not precisely as the pimp had said, though at least it was no cribhouse with a waiting line. In a walled lane, behind the whoring district, a Senegalese opened the door, recognized their guest, and admitted them to a carpeted salon smelling thickly of incense. Presently a woman entered, her huge bosom half-bursting out of her spangled gown, her face heavily powdered. With inward resignation Gidon recognized her as what life offered to him—a madam, this must be—and after she had extracted orders for champagne from them all—the while Gidon calculated his funds—she spoke a few words into the hallway, in French, and then several scantily-dressed girls came into the salon. One was in a filmy chemise such as he had once secretly fingered among Eliza’s things, and another wore a loose open robe showing her black lace underwear, while a third wore a spangled ball gown cut so low that you could see the inner sides of her breasts, though not quite the nipples. At once, Tuvia put his hairy arm around this one and went off with her down the hallway. Herschel sat down with the first one, the one that wore the filmy chemise, and the one in the open robe came and sat on Gidon’s knee. At least she smelled clean and looked young. She called him chéri, and half in gestures, half in French words, conveyed that she came from Marseilles, even singing the refrain of the French anthem, laughing happily when he understood. And he? Palestina? “Yahud?” she cried, and deftly unbuttoning his fly, she took his member out, touching the circumcised tip and laughing triumphantly at her divination. Somehow, though still in the open salon with Herscheleh, he did not even feel embarrassed.

  After a moment Gidon followed the girl to a small chamber containing a divan and pillows. She peered closely at his member, gave it a quick squeeze for disease, he guessed, and then lay down, motioning to him. It did not really matter that they kept their clothes on, for he could not have held back, even to undress. The sensation, the relief as he plunged into her was like the balm of the plunge into the Kinnereth when your body and head were at the end of endurance, suffocating and dazed with the pulsing heat of an endless hamseen.

  The girl’s eyes were open and her face seemed to him to be dreamy. The pleasure—it was truly something entirely unlike what he had ever felt when ashamedly doing it to himself. But he could not prolong the pleasure and she laughed with a girlish knowingness, and rose. Then he saw her going behind a screen of arabesques; she must be washing her parts, and he had a moment of depressed bitterness, even a sense of filth. It came to Gidon’s mind that he had already brought down two men in death, before he entered a woman. And had those two died without knowing what this was? He had not even seen their faces, to know whether they were young or older.

  And what was this after all? It was like when some men drank so as to make themselves feel less miserable, except—as Herscheleh might jest—instead of taking something into yourself, you let something out. Gidon did not want to think of it as like a poison that you let out, like the stuff of a boil that was burst. No, no, there must still be joy to be found in it, when it was different, when it was with a girl you cared for. Yet this relief, this was why, despite all, men went to prostitutes. Something in him mourned that such had been the first time for him, and also that he alone knew.

  In spite of all, he was trying already to recapture the pleasure of it. The girl emerged; Gidon noticed she was carrying a basin, with a little towel; approaching, she bent and laved his penis with lukewarm water, smiling, it seemed to him, really naturally. Perhaps, as it was said, such girls really liked what they did. At least she was pleasant, and young, and careful of cleanliness. He experienced a lightening of heart; she looked at him and said, “Bon? Good?” as she dried him with the little towel. Instantly his member was erect and throbbing, and she laughed her girlish laugh as though this was a compliment to her. On impulse Gidon said, practicing his new-learned English, “It’s my birthday.”

  “Birt-day? Oh, yes—birsday! You? Today? How many?”

  “Twenty-one,” he said.

  She repeated it on her fingers, twice, both hands, then a single finger, laughing. She gazed quietly into his face. Pointing to herself, the girl said, “I—twenty.” Again she put up both hands, twice. Then, setting aside the basin, she came to him and with one movement pulled the black lace chemise over her head and was naked. It was the first time Gidon had seen the whole nakedness, and this somehow affected him more than his blind thrust into her. Now she began to tug away his clothing.

  Gidon flushed. “I—no more money.” He made a gesture of turned-out pockets.

  “Birs-day present!” the girl laughed. And touching her finger between her breasts, “I—Nicole.”r />
  He repeated her name. “Nicole.”

  This time he did not discharge so soon, he continued carefully to make it last, and she made sounds of rapture and breathed heavily, and let out a great happy sigh at his climax.

  When she was leading him from the room, Gidon gave her the few coins left in his pocket, and the girl said, “You come back. Ask for me. Nicole. Yes?” At the door she tipped up on her toes and gave him a quick kiss on the mouth. It was like the swift innocent kiss of a schoolmate, Miraleh, long ago in Cherezinka when he became Bar Mitzvah.

  No, it wasn’t so bad with a whore. Gidon felt almost as though he had won to himself a woman’s affection. He wondered, could she have known it was not only his birthday but his first time? With a girl, a man could know for certain, Fawzi had told him, and even tried to show him with his fingers. If he got a wife, he would do that at once, Fawzi said, and if she was not a virgin, he would kill her, it was allowed! How could a man do that, put his fingers there, with a girl he had just taken to wife, and whom he loved? But of course with them it was different, they had tribal customs. Then Gidon wondered, could a woman also know it, of a man? If he ever found his true woman—and almost certainly, for the kind of girl with whom he would fall in love, it would be her first time—would he let her believe that he too came as a virgin?

  Perhaps tonight something had been spoiled for him. What of Reuven? Could it really be that Reuven still kept himself pure? Now came a whole confusion of feelings, of thoughts, Gidon even thought of Saraleh, and if Araleh were killed, and should she come to love him, with a widow it would not be the first time, and yet in this, a man was not supposed to feel it mattered. Why was that so?

  Herschel was waiting for him, smirking. Almost angry because Herschel seemed to know it was his first time, Gidon only grunted at the Newspaper’s eager “How was it? Did you know what to do?”

  “All right. She was clean,” Gidon said, and wondered in himself if he would ever tell of this to a loved one, even his wife. Fortunately Herschel went on to give all the details, true or fancied, of his own whoring, and left Gidon to his silence.

  Mules were brought in ships from Corfu, and again the men became certain it was in Palestine they would land, for these mules were particularly used to such rocky, hilly terrain; the rumors about the Adriatic were only a ruse. All day Gidon labored in the corrals at the call of the Irishman, sorting the animals, examining donkeys brought for sale by Egyptian fellaheen. Speaking Arabic, he haunted the souk with the commander for bridles, for saddles; he searched out carpenters to make frames for the water-tins to be loaded onto the mules. The time for sailing was near, the great enterprise had enfevered the entire city. Then oddly at their moment of going forth came Pesach.

  Araleh and Saraleh would go to the Musaras, and offered to take him along, but Gidon found himself apportioned with Herschel and Tuvia and several other of the chevreh to the home of one of the Nissims.

  A splendid, tall, red-sashed Senegalese—the brother, Herschel jestingly whispered to Gidon, of the servant in their French whorehouse—led them into a dining hall that combined Arabian and European splendors. Huge Venetian chandeliers hung from a ceiling of Moorish arches; along the sides of the room were little bays with nests of divans covered with striped silken sofa pillows, and a vast Persian carpet that Herschel assessed offhand at a thousand pounds sterling was spread over the tiled floor. There were carved high-backed chairs, and the table was a long white field planted with silver goblets and ancient silver candlesticks encrusted with rubies. There were Arab servants in a multitude, with soft bare feet and murmuring respectful voices.

  Their host and hostess, parents of the Nissim, wore European dress, the woman in a gray silken gown with pearls everywhere, her hand smooth and soft as though it had no bones in it. A grandfather presided, wearing the long white robe that was traditional for the leader of the Seder, though his beard was fashionably trimmed and he spoke French with his family. There were small children too, a petulant-looking boy of Mati’s age who would say the four questions and who gazed on their uniforms with a curious sullen stare, as though he was not certain whether to resent them or be pleased. But it was the daughter who made Gidon sick at heart.

  The mother he had seen before—was it with Jabotinsky?—coming to the barracks with baskets of good things, even brandy-filled chocolates for the brave Jewish volunteers. But now he saw the daughter, with her round sweet face echoing the mother’s, and inevitably the words from the Song of Songs resounded in his head—“dove’s eyes, thou hast dove’s eyes, and two breasts like roes in the field”—and such was not ever for him, the pure daughter of a fine house of aristocratic Egyptian Jews who were performing the mitzvah, as his father would say, of entertaining Jewish soldiers for the Seder.

  “If these are the fleshpots of Egypt,” Herschel whispered, “no wonder so many of the followers of Moshe Rabenu wanted to return.”

  As they were seated, with a servant behind each chair, Gidon suddenly felt as though he were already describing all this to his little brother Mati. What an upside down world it was, he would tell Mati: “There in Egypt, Jews now have Egyptians for their slaves.”

  Ensconced among pillows of orange and green and saffron and purple on a throne-chair, the grandfather remarked to the guests, in a fluent Sephardic Hebrew, though to his family he spoke French, that although his descendants were only half-believers, he himself had had the good fortune of having been raised in a pious house. His ancestors, he mentioned, were Spanish Jews who had established themselves here in Alexandria long before the expulsion from Spain.

  The Seder was long and meticulously carried out; the sullen boy, with just the proper degree of formal respect underlaid by a superiority to the ways of the past, rattled off the four questions. But what struck Gidon, with a secret feeling of shame as well as an impulse to share the jest with Herschel, was the moment when the beauteous daughter of the household arose from her seat to pass with a silver ewer and a little towel along the table for the hand-washing ritual. As his own turn came and she bent over so that the musk of her breasts reached him, the similarity with that laving ritual on his birthday night made him flush.

  What sort of person was he being turned into? At home he had never had such cynical thoughts.

  The mules were already being hoisted onto their transport vessel, kicking savagely in midair, their screams intermingled with shrill piping from the troopships, with steam whistles and braying boat-horns and military auto-horns in the port and with hoarsely shouted curses and commands. Araleh, checking a long list in his hand, called out “The saddles!” Trumpeldor himself hurried over to the Irishman, shouting above all the noise; the special saddles for the muleteers had not arrived from Cairo.

  The commander seized hold of Gidon: “You come with me.” A translator might be needed—and they stormed up and down the railroad yard from one Arab dispatcher to another.

  But it was Trumpeldor, galloping among the sidings, who suddenly caught sight of a carload of saddles being shunted from one train to another. Atop the heap sat a Sudanese guard, his rifle across his knees. “Ours!” Trumpeldor shouted, swinging himself by his one arm onto the moving train.

  Letting out a jumble of shouts, the guard raised his rifle. Gidon caught a few words as he ran toward them.

  “He says they’re for the British Desert Lancers.”

  In the commotion, the engine had now been halted, while an immaculate Lancer captain sauntered up. “Saddles for the bloody Jewish muletenders?” he said to Trumpeldor. “My dear fellow, I’m requisitioning them for my Lancers. Your Jews can ride on their fat Jewish behinds.”

  Josef’s face became stone. By now he understood English well enough. It was as though his entire body was about to explode from within. Leaping over the tracks, the Irishman was beside them, shouting. “Boody Jewish muletenders, are they? You’ll be begging them on your bloody knees for a drop of water. I command you, give over my saddles!” Though the Irishman’s was the hi
gher rank, the Lancer captain drew his pistol. “Go command your rear-line sheenies. You’ve no command over me!”

  Gidon was transfixed. Was this then how it was to be? Away from Russia, living in Eretz, he had indeed forgotten. Was it a great stupid mistake to believe that when Jews acted like other men, the Cossacks of the world would be changed?

  The Irishman and the Lancer had faced each other down. Suddenly a staff officer hurried over, and settled the affair. The muleteers were to have their saddles.

  As they returned to their transport, the Irishman seemed to feel he had to say something. Jews, Chinamen, golliwogs or bloody British dukes, all were soldiers to him, and the bloody Desert Lancers or the King’s Guard itself had no more right—

  “It doesn’t matter,” Trumpeldor said stolidly, and at last Gidon felt he understood this habitual expression of Josef’s. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Never had there been such an armada. As far as the eye could see, stretching like a metallic covering over the water, were the ships of their expedition. Surely, each man repeated in awe that he himself was here, that he was part of something so overwhelming, surely this was a day of historical fate.

  Despite their direction out to sea, the old conviction again swept over the men of Zion—they were headed for a landing on the Palestine coast. Naturally there would be a deceptive sweep outward. No, really they were for Palestine.

  And what of his brothers and sisters? Gidon wondered. Could they in some way sense his nearness?

  At home, it was somehow known that a Jewish army was gathering in Alexandria. From messages written in minuscule script under postage stamps and sent through Switzerland, word had arrived in the Yishuv. Surely Gidon would not sit idly by, Gidon would join the fighters. And Mati was seized by a doomlike fear for his brothers. When the girls had lain down on their side of the room, Mati turned to Schmulik with the fear that tormented him. He saw them, on one side Reuven, who had somehow become a Turk in a tarboosh, and on the British side Gidon; they lay behind rocks, each shooting at his enemy, and suddenly Gidon leaped up in a wild charge and Reuven—Reuven must recognize Gidon at once, Reuven must stop shooting—