The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  “It’s the tree of Abraham, sir,” Reuven said, stepping toward the officer. “We wanted to save it.”

  The same annihilating glare was now turned on Reuven. Tree of Abraham! Tree of the Jewish devil! A foul Jewish trick was here! A speeding army motor car could smash right into that cursed tree!

  It was Reuven’s fate that he again tried to reason. —If the tree were to be pulled out, the roadbed could wash away into the gully, he said, pointing.

  “Who are you? The engineer?” The Turk spat.

  And again—sealing his fate—Reuven began to importune him. Worriedly the schoolmaster, Issa, edged up to the stubborn Jew—didn’t Reuven realize who this officer was? “Bahad” he whispered. Bahad-ad-Din, the notorious. But in Reuven, an uncontrollable urge was alight—the tree! It could never reach him that men might exist who were not moved by such a work of God; his heart still was filled with the joy of the way in which the simplest, the most wretched of labor conscripts had set to work to save the giant tamarisk. “But why kill such a tree needlessly?” he cried out. “We can save it!”

  “Bring stones!” the Turk commanded. “Out with this damned tree, and block up the gully with rocks.” As for the Jew—he turned again on Reuven, and there lighted in his eyes that peculiar gleam that was known to all—the gleam that came when Bahad-ad-Din was inspired to some new cruelty. The Jew was so fond of Abraham’s tree, was he? Let him embrace it. Put his arms around it—at once! Bahad-ad-Din pointed his saber toward a pair of Bedouin in whose eyes he had already recognized an answering gleam to his own, and hardly knowing what was happening, Reuven found himself seized by this pair and pushed against the tree, his arms wrenched as far as they would reach to embrace the enormous trunk. He could scarcely keep his hold, his fingers searching for a grip in the ancient wrinkled bark. “Tie him!” the Turk commanded, now with amused satisfaction in his tone, as though he felt well disposed toward the victim who was helping carry out his clever thought.

  If they tied him with the loop that bound the tree, then as they pulled it down Reuven would almost surely be cut in two. From the crowd of conscripts who watched now with almost sporting interest, only Issa’s eyes reached to Reuven, intense and strong, as though to support him through his last trouble. Then quickly, as the two Bedouin fumbled to loosen the noose around the tree, Issa threw them a second rope. Only this, Reuven felt, might save him. They were tying him under the Turk’s instructions, a knot around his left wrist, and around the entire tree trunk and then one around his right wrist, so tight that the skin was already torn. Then his ankles, then a length around his waist, pressing him into the tree, so that he had to turn his head, the cheek against the bark. “Tighter, tighter!” Bahad-ad-Din called. “Closer! Like love!” This brought a gust of obscene approbation. Some of the men took up the sport, “Find the hole, Jew! Stick it in! Up the ass hole of your Abraham the Jew!”

  Dazedly, weepingly, his soul protested over what came upon mankind. And just before, they had cried out for Father Abraham as their own, too. And still something within Reuven calculated for survival—if the tree’s branches should break the fall, he might not be crushed. And if he should live, if his skull did not strike on a rock when the tree was brought down, oh then, he could even see these same devils helping him to climb out, and bringing him a gulp of arak to share the great jest with them. No, this could not be his death. His entire life was not calculated for this. This could not be his death.

  Already a lusty roaring came, a cracked whip over the mules, a tremendous straining from below, and it seemed to Reuven that the ancient trunk shuddered against his flesh, and that something indeed from far back, from the birthplace of time itself, and onward through aeons of godhoods imprisoned in trees, something still imbedded in the upward urge of the sap, a secret, an almost-revelation that could yet come to him before he was engulfed in the timeless stream of the hereafter, made him one with the tamarisk.

  With utter joy, with enthusiasm now, Reuven’s tormentor waved his saber, “Pull!” And then the entire episode halted. Bahad-ad-Din moved briskly out of Reuven’s field of vision. The circle of men, too, faded rearward, even Issa, the shouts from below halted, and Reuven remained there alone in his suspended limbo, feeling the pulse of the air, the pulse of the tree, and a rivulet of sweat that coursed down his armpit.

  All at once, like some new act in a theater, a whole group of people strode into view—a tall, helmeted German, and with him a figure recognized from photographs, Djemal Pasha himself, with his oiled, curled, Assyrian-looking beard and his flashing eyes. From others not yet in sight, something was being called to them, and the Pasha suddenly became electrified, flinging out commands, rushing at first out of Reuven’s range of sight and then back in again, this time with sword drawn, coming directly toward the tree. Was this the death?

  With one slash the commander-in-chief cut the ropes away from Reuven’s body. Blood had already gone from his feet, and his legs collapsed under him as he tried to stand on the earth; in his wrists, too, there came the needle pain of the returning circulation of his blood, and he heard a blur of half-explanations and commands all around him. Then Reuven saw, behind the Pasha, and as though not unexpectedly, the firm, round countenance of Aaron Aaronson.

  “Joseph out of the pit,” kept echoing in Reuven’s mind, while he heard the agronomist, as one vaunting the accomplishments of a valuable slave, heaping praises on him: this Reuven had a gifted and expert hand with plants, such as was unequaled in the whole land; it was this Reuven who had cultivated the Garden of Eden that Djemal Pasha himself had only this morning inspected at the Jewish settlement called HaKeren, and this man’s only sin here had been that he was trying to save an ancient and beautiful tree—gaze on it!

  The Pasha gazed. Now, in the way things seemed to happen with Reuven, it so happened that Djemal Pasha, too, was one of those men who have a particular response to trees. Perhaps there remains in them the response that caused men in ancient times to feel that certain trees, certain groves, were God-inhabited. Though this feeling would not prevent the Pasha from ordering entire forests cut down to provide fuel for his locomotives, he nonetheless was moved when he stood before a remarkable specimen of a tree. In a spurt of poetic language, Djemal Pasha declared that he was a lover of nature, of beauty, and that before them was the noblest of trees. Damascus itself had in ancient days been a city famed for its lanes of trees, its majestic gardens, and he would make it again the seventh wonder of the world; this gardener must come with him to plant the true Garden of Eden in Damascus! This man would plant him lanes of trees leading to the palace, and in the palace grounds there must be fountains, flowerbeds, far exceeding in beauty and luxury what he had beheld in the Jewish settlement.

  Then Reuven listened as Aaronson explained to the Pasha how the entire valley that lay below them, the greatest part of it still a jungled marshland, could be cultivated to match the few patches that he saw at the foot of Gilboa. The entire army could be fed from the wheat of this valley! And when the road-inspection proceeded, Reuven found himself in the third motor vehicle, between Turkish and German officers, being carried off to his new fate in Damascus.

  Removed from his post as Kaymakam of Jaffa after the international outcries over his deportation ship, Bahad-ad-Din had been made a special officer on the staff of Djemal Pasha himself, with the Jewish question as his province. First to be seized had been Nadina. Descending on Gilboa, Bahad-ad-Din had arrested this dangerous Russian woman. A few weeks later, Galil was seized and taken to Damascus. Meanwhile it was not known whether Nadina remained in prison in Nazareth or had also been taken to Damascus. At last her brother, Lev Bushinsky, the wealthy Haifa engineer, was called to an important task by Djemal Pasha, and thus was able to find out that Nadina was now imprisoned in Jerusalem. There Leah was sent.

  At the top of the stone stairway, the door to Misha’s lodging and secretariat was sealed. Fruit vendors in the lane only shrugged; they knew nothing. Hurrying to the courtyard whe
re Rahel still kept a room, Leah met her friend just returning home, dispirited. Avner and Dovidl too had been arrested; they were in the Old City prison, but she couldn’t get permission to see them, she had had to hand over a whole napoleon just to learn where they were held. The party journal had been closed down because of the article describing the deportations, and Misha was in hiding with the party records.

  “Nadina, here in Jerusalem?” she repeated. This, even Rahel had not known.

  After gifts of money and good Rosh Pina tobacco, they were at last admitted down a dungeon stairway, beneath the Old City wall, downward and downward until they stumbled into a tiny chamber that smelled of damp stone and centuries of urine. There Nadina was, her face thinner, undaunted. While Rahel recited all the news, Nadina carried Leah’s canister of soup to her cellmate; the poor Arab woman must eat of it first, she was pregnant. “She’s tubercular, something must be done for her, look at her eyes—” they were reddish under circles of kohl. Of Avner, of Dovidl, she was certain they would be deported, but who would act in their place? The cellmate was a prostitute, incarcerated for stealing a German officer’s watch—the woman didn’t even belong in this prison in the first place, Nadina indignantly declared—she belonged in an ordinary jail, and in any case she must be hospitalized, they must see to it.

  Noting down the woman’s name, Rahel meanwhile kept talking of all their problems, of the paper’s being closed down. “It must be started again underground,” Nadina declared. Perhaps—she had a thought—a place the Turks would never suspect—there was a printer in the religious community in Safed. Avner would know. They must get to see Avner.

  But how? Rahel had pleaded with Bahad-ad-Din himself for permission to visit Avner as his wife. The cunning devil had demanded if they were legally married, knowing they were not, and then had refused the visit. Suddenly Nadina changed to Russian. “I think she understands Hebrew,” she said of her cellmate, “and who knows why they put her in here? Leahleh—” and at last she asked after her child.

  Sitting closer to Nadina, and glowing because of the surprise she had brought, Leah uncovered from the depths of her basket a small clay pot, in which there grew a red geranium. “Buba watered it herself before I left.”

  “See what my little daughter has sent me!” Nadina jumped up, holding the pot before the Arab woman, who touched it with a longing smile. “Attiya too has a child,” Nadina said. And passionately, “You see now how wise it is, Leah, that the children belong to the whole kvutsa? If they should send me and Galil also into exile, she won’t feel so deprived of her mother and father.”

  A lawyer with connections in Damascus had been hired by her brother and was doing his utmost to arrange that Nadina and Galil should be exiled together, Leah told her. “Then you can take Buba with you.”

  “Leah, have you lost your senses! To take the poor child away from her home, from the kvutsa! I would never make such a selfish decision!” Her tone had gone back to the other voice, the voice of discussions in the movement.

  Of herself, Leah knew she could never be so disciplined. That was why Nadina was a leader. In these last times the yearning for a child had come upon Leah, even in the midst of these dreadful troubles, the war, and the arrests, the danger that the whole movement would be utterly destroyed and even the whole Yishuv. At odd moments, at the mere sight of a baby clinging to a mother, this yearning came upon her. In one way this longing relieved her: somehow, strangely, it had replaced the longing for a man. She would return to Gilboa, Leah just then decided, and ask to work in the Infants’ House. The decision eased her. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after Buba myself. Perhaps the war will be over soon, it will be only a short separation for you.”

  To Dovidl and Avner, too, with a whole succession of bribes, Leah and Rahel at last managed a visit. Already the two labor leaders were judged: it was to be deportation, but not to the interior of Turkey as with Galil; these two were to be expelled from the Ottoman realm. Gone was their new Ottoman citizenship, and their application to form a Jewish fighting unit had been flung in their faces.

  In the underground warrens of the citadel, beneath what was called David’s Tower, there they sat, both pallid, the color of the stone walls, but in good spirits. While Rahel talked with Avner, Leah drew Dovidl to the other corner. Though as always she had an amused desire simply to hug him—the way he held up that large head of his—she started to impart all the latest news. But Dovidl knew everything already, it must have reached him through the stone walls, and he began a whole analysis of the entire world. Perhaps more account should be taken of the French influence in the Levant. Still, he felt that the party’s Ottomanization decision had been correct; what did she think? And he gave her telegrams to send to the Poale Zion leaders in America; urgent efforts must be made to secure ship passage for Avner and himself. Among the Jewish workers in the American needle trades the Poale Zion was strong, despite the opposition of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund, though among the furriers it was said, the Bund was entrenched. Still, everything could be changed once he and Avner reached America. Besides, a quick German-Turkish victory was not at all as certain as it had appeared a few months ago. With the possibility of a stalemate or even a negotiated peace, the status of Palestine might very well become an open question. The British had thrown back the Turks from the canal, and to protect their canal they might very well, if it came to a negotiated peace, work for a special status for Palestine as a buffer area. And then, in such a situation, Zionism might come in as a solution acceptable to both sides. What did she think? Or even in the event of a possible Allied victory—

  Leah listened, agreed, put in a question, all the while wondering what would happen to Dovidl in America, where he would sleep, whether he would find himself a romance—

  Suddenly the jailer was ordering her and Rahel to leave. “Yallah! Yallah!” One more coin. One more moment. Now Avner and Dovidl were enjoining the two of them. Should there be no more opportunity to meet, this was the program for the movement: two points. First, arms. Jews must prepare to fight for the land. Arm themselves, however possible. In the final resort rely on no one. “Only ourselves. Be ready to fight.” Under no condition should the Shomer or any settlement give up arms, as the sons of Zichron had already done, to their eternal shame! “But Bahad-ad-Din gave them one day, or he would seize their sisters.” “Ach, threats! Even if they try to seize our women, better to use the arms than to give them up!”

  The second point, Avner said, was pioneering. Redemption of the land must continue, wars or no wars. Whichever side won, the land must be redeemed. As for himself and Dovidl, wherever they were sent they would work to train pioneers. They would enroll young people.

  A whole new training movement must be started—in Russia, in America, wherever there were Jews. A Legion of Workers. Arms and labor! The girls must relay this to all the chevreh. This was the two-point program!

  “Yallah!” cried the jailer.

  Was it the parting? Rahel and Avner gave each other a hug.

  Dovidl came to the iron door. “Nu, Leah. Shalom.” Impulsively she leaned down and seized his face, planting a kiss on his cheek. They laughed. “Take care of yourself,” she admonished. “Shalom, shalom.” How she loved him. This was pure, good love.

  The next morning Misha the secretary came running. “Quick, quick, to the station—”

  Somehow Leah and Rahel pushed their way through to the side of the train just as it began to move, Leah pressing a path through the clutter of vendors, of Arab women, of urchins crying baksheesh, Rahel darting forward and almost reaching the window where Avner’s head stuck out. They ran alongside, losing ground. The train had already passed the end of the platform and they still ran, keeping their eyes on the window; suddenly Leah collided full tilt with a Turkish soldier who nearly tumbled over, cursed, then regained his balance. His glare turned into a lewd grin as he called to a comrade, “The big one for me, the little one for you—their men are gone!” And in clumsy Hebrew h
e shouted after the girls great boasts of his prowess.

  16

  AS HE felt daylight coming, the world around Gidon began to reveal itself in stages. First, it moved in immense shadowy forms of blackness in which the man-made forms of the vessels were hardly distinguishable from the forms of nature; then the land-mass came away from the sky, detaching itself as a great blotch. A mountain was before them, higher than Mount Carmel; the shape rose like an enormous prow massively emerging from the graying dark of the sea. As luminosity came, the heights receded somewhat, and in the foreground appeared crags and ravines and boulders below the unapproachable mountain. But also with the light came the full sense of man-made power gathered on the sea before it.

  What he had seen in the harbor of Alexandria that had so overwhelmed him had only been a segregated section of the immeasurably enormous engine here brought together into its wholeness. Spanning the narrowing sea from Europe to Asia, the armada began to glitter, to shine in the rising sunlight; it became one single, extended structure, from tugboat to the most towering of battleships, the new Queen. Even Herschel, who had started enumerating the vessels, the dreadnaughts, the destroyers, the minesweepers, left off and fell silent, for it was a sight each man had to draw into his own self.

  Until this dawn they had been uncertain. They were far from the Palestine shore, but neither were they in the Adriatic. Now they saw they were at the mouth of the Dardanelles.

  And from the whole of the armada, a massive burst of sound emerged, a battle roar. It came out of the vessels, it came out of the men, it came from Gidon himself, it came from the mules in the bowels of the vessel, and it culminated in a shuddering, concerted burst of cannon fire that must shatter even the mountain that they faced. From all around him Gidon saw streaks of red fire and bursts of smoke, and augmenting all this, in an ultimate wave of thunder, came something he had never seen before, a man-made cloud of airplanes.