The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Leah tried to reach for wisdom, wisdom from somewhere, from her people, Jewish wisdom. Her father would remind her now, that there was the evil urge and the good urge, yatzer ha-rah, and yatzer ha-tov. Whatever had to do with sexual impulses was the evil urge to them, the pious. And love? Wasn’t love on the side of goodness, of generosity, of giving oneself? Was the truth not rather that both were mingled, each always within the other, instead of at opposite poles so that you were drawn first by one, then by the other? Then where was wisdom? And was a woman’s urge different from a man’s? For all that Rahel insisted that men and women had the same needs, was the urge truly the same?

  But she was racing far ahead. Perhaps, too, her worry would prove needless, perhaps this was only an infatuation of Shula’s that would pass by itself. The real question was to know the man. And she must not be against him automatically, Leah told herself, merely because he brought with him such a disturbing problem.

  Indeed, she asked herself, was she not already prejudiced against him because from the first some warning had arisen in her to be wary of the handsome German?

  Yes, another Handsome One.

  And then, into Leah’s harried thoughts, came the voice of the pretty one. “Don’t worry about me, Leah,” Shula said from the other bed. “One thing you can be satisfied I learned, thanks to you—I won’t do anything—with a man—unless I am married.”

  Leah could have leaped up and slapped her. Now it was to her own eyes that tears came. How could it be that no one, not even her own snit of a sister, understood? Almost, she could wish to let the girl get caught in the same torment, and suffer.

  Meanwhile, Shula, to her own surprise, had slipped into a tender untroubled sleep.

  Now came the phase of meetings in secret. Either it was only an infatuation or it was love, and until she was certain, she had to see him. And until she was certain, Shula told herself, there was no cause to bring torment to her mother and father. As yet, they need know nothing.

  It was not easy for a girl in the house to absent herself, and particularly in these times when the roads were filled with soldiers, and mothers were more than ever watchful of their daughters. Leah wasn’t at the house; again she had gone off to Tel Aviv to her friend Rahel to some mysterious work that fell on them now that Avner and Dovidl were away. No one was home to help Mameh in the house but herself. Then, as though heaven were conspiring, Yaffaleh just now came into her womanhood; her period was painful to her, and it was Shula who led the flock of geese down to the river. There Gottfried met her, and this time the kisses were passionate.

  Under a certain stone, they arranged to leave messages, and again heaven conspired, bringing Gottfried nearer so they could have more opportunity to be together. For there was doubled and tripled military activity now at the Samekh station, and even while Abba had not yet returned with the wagon from serving them in the south, a Turkish officer came demanding the second pair of mules, to labor at Samekh. Unless Schmulik went with the animals, who knew if they would ever be returned, and in any case what work could he do at home without them? So he went, each dawn, and while he insisted he wanted nothing more than bread and cheese, Feigel each day prepared a whole cooked meal for him with a canister of tea, and Shula would take it, riding to the station on a donkey, insisting to her mother that in midmorning the road was so busy there was no danger for her.

  There at the station, Gottfried managed to be, searching for crates of airplane parts, or loading munitions onto an Arab camel train, shouting and laughing at them, “Yallah! Imshi!” And when she was on her way back, he would already be waiting at their trysting place by the river.

  They were seen—how could they not be seen?—by that same Bedouin boy with his goats; and at another time a shomer passed close by, but he could not have been certain the girl was Shula. Yet, a word here and a whisper there, until Malka Bronescu one day demanded, “Why do you keep secrets from me? Tell, or I will tell.”

  * * * *

  Never before had Leah felt so close to Rahel, truly as though they were like their namesakes, the daughters of Laban. And if they did not have the same Jacob for a husband, Rahel ruefully jested, here they were, a Leah and Rahel with the same no-husband. Both their men were in exile, and who knew when and if they would return.

  Only for those few harried months here, after their long separation while they studied in different countries, she in France and he in Turkey, had Rahel and Avner been reunited, and now Rahel turned more closely to Leah as if to know what happened in a woman, what would happen in herself, when every contact, even a letter, was cut off, and perhaps long years lay ahead, and a woman did not even know what might be happening to her man.

  They did not speak so much of what was in their hearts, but it was simply this—this being with someone who was in the same situation so that one need not even explain oneself, so that one always felt understood without words—that helped.

  For the moment, Rahel was living with her family in a small house in Tel Aviv that belonged to friends who had fled to Alexandria. Rahel’s father had suddenly decided he would at least try to grow their own food. In Jerusalem her father had attempted to engage in his old business of paper supply, but with the war this had failed and the man didn’t know what to do. Somewhat he reminded Leah of her own tateh, except that he was not so strictly observant, and also he was more of an educated man, a little higher in the scale of worldly life. But one day he had bought a watering can and a mattock, and marked off with a string a plot of land in the sands behind the house. With her French diploma as an agronome, Rahel decided she must test the soil for him and spent an entire day going to Professor Volkansky’s agricultural station in Ben Shemen to borrow a soil-bore; the next day she carried back the samples and borrowed the use of a laboratory to make her analysis. Meanwhile the father lugged can after can of water out to his tract. At one glance Leah saw the water was seeping away, but at least let them try to grow what might grow here, and each morning she labored planting cucumbers and carrots, and pulling out the choking weed called yablit. Rahel helped. The few early hours were most sisterly, but soon Rahel would run off to her thousand projects and committees. She was planning to bring out the journal again, underground, and she was holding meetings with the Herzlia Gymnasia group, those who had not joined the Turks to become officers; with them and some men from the Shomer, she planned self-defense units.

  For with each day there came more hallucinating tales of the massacre of the Armenians in Anatolia, and each day brought threats from Bahad-ad-Din to do with the Jews as with the Armenians. Now he had begun to arrest the leaders of the Jewish community, even Dr. Lubin himself, though Lubin was a German. It was said he would be sent into exile in Turkey like Nadina and Galil. How would Shimshoni’s new settlement in the north be set up, without Lubin’s help? And in the midst of all there was growing unemployment. In Jaffa there was starvation. Soup kitchens had been opened, and Arab children appeared. No, you could not send them away. And, as always, the worst was the women’s problem. Every day, more chaluzoth appeared at the party’s labor exchange, seeking work. Rahel was having a special meeting on this problem with Mayor Dizingoff’s emergency relief committee. But now there developed a new aspect of this problem. In Jerusalem, in Mea Shearim, a Bokharian girl had been found chained in the house because her father had seen her walking with a German officer. From the southern settlements, too, where soldiers were encamped for a new attack on the Suez, there came awful tales, though about Arab girls. A girl of a good Arab family had been killed with a knife by her brother for consorting with the foreigners. And, Rahel told Leah, the German officers kept seeking acquaintanceship in the Jewish settlements, because, they said, they were lonesome for civilization. They heard the sound of a piano and knocked on the door. They longed simply to engage in conversation, to hear a woman’s voice. With Jewish women, they said, they could at least converse.

  Leah sucked in her lip; of such things she already knew too well. And that night af
ter they had lain down, for Rahel had insisted Leah share her room, she talked and talked with Rahel of her problem with Shulamith. Rahel pondered the problem. “We cannot be like our older generation, opposed merely because of religion,” Rahel said. Nor on principle could an enlightened person object on the ground of race. The whole idea of their movement was positive rather than negative, a creative building up of the Jewish self, so that it would preserve itself without fear of the outside world when a few dropped away, rather than have preservation maintained through fear and forbiddance. And over and over came that phrase, “in principle”; in principle this, and in principle that, until Leah began to imagine that Rahel would bring up the whole question of Shula at a committee meeting.

  From the time of Solomon, Rahel pointed out, there had been intermarriage, and even such a profound modern scholar of Judaism as Martin Buber (Leah concealed the fact that in her ignorance she did not know who he was) was married to a Christian woman—though in this case his wife had adopted the Jewish faith. “You know, that is a point that would be interesting to study statistically,” Rahel digressed. “Whether when a Jew and Christian marry, the woman is more likely to follow the man, or the man the woman? I don’t think the study has ever been done!” And Leah had the impression her friend would leap from her cot and hurry right off to try to find a book on the subject.

  “You know,” she said to Rahel, “he talks to Shula about staying in Eretz and helping build the land. Perhaps, if he is really sincere …” That was the first thing to be determined, if a man was really sincere.

  The word jumped across the room, back and forth. Sincerity, yes, that was the question, the test. In everything. They had arrived at the same point.

  Leah fell silent and let Rahel sleep.

  Then in the silence the ancient gnawing resumed in Leah. Sincerity. And had not Moshe been sincere?

  Once more Rahel said they must return to Gilboa. She must consult with the Shomer about joining forces with the self-defense committee of Tel Aviv. Some of the Tel Aviv boys were excellent. On graduating from the Herzlia Gymnasia, two had even spent a season working in a kvutsa. Though they were sons of businessmen and had only vague ideas about creating “the just society,” they could be won over to the proletarian view. Meanwhile, she must make contact with Nadina’s printer in Safed for the journal, an aged Reb who would never be suspected. Did Leah know that the very first printing press in the Holy Land had been brought to Safed in 1682? Perhaps this was even the same one!

  In all this, Leah felt, there was flight. Rahel seemed always to need to change her life, to hurry from one group to another, to run away, to hide. Perhaps she even feared that with Avner away, life might bring her too close to another man if she remained in one circle, in one place? It was a need Leah herself kept feeling, to run from one place to another, only with herself it was perhaps the opposite, that she had to move about because she was seeking for something to happen to her, rather than running away from it.

  In Gilboa, Menahem too had brought home a tale. Did Leah remember the Yemenite girl, Yael, the daughter of Abadiya the shochet?—The girl who had shown her the Yemenite dances? Leah asked. The same one. Exactly how it took place and exactly what took place, no one knew, but the girl, tempted to take a ride, had gotten into one of the German automobiles. Yael swore by her life it was nothing more, but she had been seen, and when she came home, her father had whipped her across the face with leather thongs and all but blinded her. Yael had run away from home and was recognized in Tiberias working as a cleaning woman in the German hotel. Weeping, she vowed that she was innocent, untouched, but she would not return home lest her father kill her, he would slit her throat with his shochet’s knife. And now she was to be seen in the cafes, defiantly and openly, sitting with officers and laughing.

  —She wasn’t the only one, Dvoraleh remarked.

  —No, Menahem agreed, in Tiberias it was becoming a problem. The pious who lived on collection money from abroad were completely without means, starving, and their daughters had taken to loitering by the seashore restaurants.

  Though it was not the same, in no way the same, from Yael it was not far to the problem of Shula.

  Was the German sincere? Leah repeated to Menahem and Dvoraleh, that was the real question; perhaps here in Gilboa something more could be known of him.

  “What can we know of them?” Dvoraleh said. “They stay in their world, we in ours.” Then she added, “I believe he is meeting Shula in secret. He goes every day to Samekh.” Perhaps from the word secret something came to Leah. That moment when the German had hurried back into his room to remove his diary. “Love secrets,” had been said, in jest, and his face had reddened.

  It was a shameful thing from which she shrank, and yet—if it were to save her sister? From the diary they might learn the truth of the man. Perhaps it would even point the other way, to sincerity and goodness and a true love. Or perhaps—and she already saw her vain little sister seduced, abandoned, sitting at a cafe in Tiberias.

  “You know he told Shula he wants to remain here after the war. Suppose it’s true. Suppose he is sincere and they should want to get married?” Leah found herself arguing.

  Menahem stared at her, brooding. “True. It might possibly be love. But does a man himself know how much is true of what he says to influence a woman?” He was gazing at Leah so that she knew he was thinking about herself and Moshe; his eyes were full of compassion.

  Hesitantly, so that she could draw back by treating it only as a joke, Leah said, “Perhaps he writes down the real truth in his diary.” And she told in what embarrassment the aviator had snatched his “love secrets” out of the room.

  So quickly did Menahem seize on her hesitant thought, that Leah herself was taken aback. Why not? he said. They ought to have a look into that diary. If Dvora and Leah felt that the fate of their sister was involved, why not have a look?

  He became practical. The diary must not be taken out of the room but looked at on the spot. Gilboa’s own women did the cleaning. Dvora might go in—But no, Dvora protested, she wouldn’t be able to read a word of German.

  —Rahel? Menahem asked Leah.

  Instinctively Leah felt that Rahel would not do it. She would raise all kinds of principles about a person’s private life, spying—

  Menahem’s dark look passed across his eyes. “Never mind, don’t even trouble her.” Perhaps, Leah said, she herself would be able to make something out. Their alphabet she could read. And German words she might make out from Yiddish.

  With a kerchief over her head, and a pail and rags, Leah entered the room the next morning after the officers had gone off. The little book in its soft red-leather cover lay in its place. If he left it there so openly, surely it was not so secret, the other man must feel free to look into it. She could imagine the two of them sitting and talking about their conquests, their seductions. A touch of nausea came to her because of the way men are. Thoughts arose of the time she and Moshe had lain softly rocking in the bottom of the small boat on the Kinnereth, and again of that first time in the goren. Had those times not been sacred? And could it be—in some hut in Siberia, to a comrade in exile, or even to his woman there, that Moshe might be—She was trembling. Resolutely Leah opened the little book.

  The handwriting was neat, like a good schoolboy’s, and many of the words she could understand. She had opened it near the back, automatically, as one opened a Hebrew book, and almost at once she saw her sister’s name. Her heart bounded in a leap of fear and shame, and yet she read on. By sheer force of her need, she managed to understand nearly all that was written.

  “Is it really love this time?” he asked himself. Then came some words she did not know for certain, there was something long, poetic, the word kiss, Leah felt she mustn’t read on— What was she seeking exactly? And then her eyes picked up a name—Genevieve. “Not really the same as with Genevieve—” It would be here. — Her sister’s entire life. If she could only absorb the whole book in one glance
, only know the meaning of certain words that were strange to her—leafing back hastily, she found the name again, Genevieve; he was in France now, he spoke of soon reaching Paris, there were other names on other pages, a Lisette for many pages, and here, a whole sentence she was sure of, “For me, the affair always has to appear serious.” And then she came to an open page, like for a new chapter. He had just left France, he said, and there in the very first line, making her head pulse, were the words for which she had committed this shameful prying: “I leave France behind me with three maedchen the fewer.”

  Oh, why were men like that? Oh why? Leah could not stop the upsurge of tears. She didn’t even know for whom, for what. Softly, as though it were some dead animal thing, she set down the diary in its place. The whole question and shame of having spied into it was gone, swept away in a sense of grief, of dismay. Oh, why wasn’t she angry? “May his airplane crash into his grave!” Leah declared to herself, but even this did not help.

  And how could she tell Shula? Hadn’t she herself known of her Handsome Moshe that he was a seducer, hadn’t Nahama even warned her “He’s a heartbreaker,” and had it stopped her from making a fool of herself and was she cured of him even today?

  Also, she must be absolutely certain, she must ask Menahem the exact meaning of that word “Maedchen,” or, perhaps better, Rahel.

  The whispers about Shula Chaimovitch and the flier had come to the chubby Nahum as well by a hint from Malka Bronescu. And at once he knew which flier was meant. And it was here in his own place that Shula had first encountered the German.