The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  “Every curse!” his wife raised up her arms to heaven. “Mikosh is a good man. What have we done to deserve it?”

  “They move from one field to another,” the Yemenite said, “until the whole land is bare.”

  From where, no one knew, perhaps from the memory of the great fire itself, the wall of flame with all the small beasts of the field fleeing before it, mice, lizards, centipedes, all crawling and flying things, there now came the cry, “Make smoke!” With smoke the pestilence would be driven away.

  The whole village now, as in the days of the flames, streamed toward the fields. Wagons were brought out, madly snatched implements, flails, brooms, and tins of kerosene were loaded in. Even ahead of Janovici, the whole Chaimovitch family raced along, standing on their wagon.

  At the approach to the fields, Abba halted the wagon and they stared in awe. Nothing green could be seen. What seemed earth was not earth, but a brownish skin woven of insects. A humming arose as though what lay before them was a process of life.

  Children ran, dragging briars, dried thistles, clods of dung, whatever might burn. Smoke rose, people drew back with smarting eyes, but the plague lay shimmering, humming on the earth.

  All at once, Bronescu’s Eliyahu began to beat with a sickle on the end of an emptied kerosene can. Noise drove them off, the Yemenite said.

  Everyone began to make noise, beating with stones, with sticks, on tins, on their wagons; children started shouting, women began a high-pitched kind of scream, “Away! Away!” and presently, in- deed, a movement was seen, a corner of the earth-smothering blanket was lifting itself away, while an answering kind of noise, a weird high-pitched insect shrill somehow akin to that of the women, rose above the maddening, pulsating hum, and the mass of locusts hovered in the air, and then, to a great triumphant outcry from the people, the plague moved on. But in another moment the human exultation turned to a cry of rage and dismay as the thick horde lowered itself, hovered, and then settled on a field beyond. Rushing there, the entire mass of villagers, as if possessed, resumed the din, shrieking, howling, beating on wagon-sides, on mattock-blades, shouting. Then, like a swept-up tablecloth, a wider, larger swarm of locusts suddenly left the ground; screaming savagely and beating louder, the humans advanced step by step onto the field. The swarm continued to lift and they ran under it, insensate, the children throwing stones upward. “Away!” they shrieked in a confused, laughing cry of pursuit, and boys put fingers in their mouths and whistled; someone fired a gun, and mounted men galloped under the swarm, more of them now firing pistols and rifles, howling imprecations upward, while those with empty cans ran along, beating, beating, to keep the plague from re-alighting.

  Even though each knew the beasts would only come down again upon another field, there was a momentary end to the sense of helplessness. They had found a way. Something could be done. Now each settler rushed to his own land to see whether the plague was come upon him, cries arose. “To us! Help! Come to us!” and some ran here and some ran there, and the din and the shouting echoed from all sides.

  To help in the battle, the entire population from the cluster of Yemenite huts had been summoned, and they came, beating on kettles, raising their voices in that raucous tone of theirs, and from the center of their clamor rose up, most piercing of all, the voice of Abadiya the shochet. Around his cry, presently, the other voices died away, for Abadiya’s wordless howl had become a harsh incantation, and it was no longer an outcry against the plague, but, with recognizable sounds, with words now, it became an outcry against man, against themselves, against iniquitous daughters who had called down the wrath of The Name upon them all, against the harlots who ran to the cities and fornicated with the goyim in the land: “You shall take them to a place of stoning and hurl stones upon them!” His body shook, his raucous voice cracked, and he was taken by a paroxysm of sobbing. The whole village stood as though transfixed in a circle somewhat away from Abadiya, while the throbbing rose from all around them on the fields, vengeful, grinding. It was Leah who broke the spell, hurrying forward toward the old man, but, as she would have touched him, he came to himself, stiffened, and nearly hurled her off—the touch of a woman not his wife. Several of his own people led him away, elders from their little congregation with whom Yankel had a few times prayed before the synagogue in Mishkan Yaacov was opened.

  Little was said of the outburst. Work began again to drive off the hordes. Now flails and rakes beat them from the earth. Shula worked with the others, telling herself her feeling of guilt was absurd; no one had even glanced in her direction. And in the end what had she done—nothing! nothing! And this insane Abadiya’s poor little Yael—she too was probably just as innocent. Wasn’t she scrubbing floors for a few groschen in Tiberias?

  Hour upon hour the population stumbled after the swarms, beating, shouting. Already a large part of the furthest Chaimovitch field was covered; the family stood in a knot gazing at the hopeless task, not knowing even at what corner to begin. Suddenly, Mati had a thought and told it to Schmulik, and Schmulik, who would not leave off beating with his flail, sent Shula back on the wagon to the farmyard. “Bring a long rope, bring iron lids, empty pots, milk cans—put stones in them to rattle,” he cried, and though she had never handled the mules, Shula lashed them homeward and gathered desperately whatever she could find.

  The moment she returned, Schmulik, seizing the rope, began frantically tying together pots and pails, while Mati filled the pots with stones. Then Schmulik unhitched the animals and leaped on Chazak, kicking the sides of the mule while he dragged the rope with the whole chain of tins rattling on the ground behind him. The mule started to gallop. Mati climbed onto the second mule; this was his invention, even Schmulik proclaimed it—what a head on him, that little Mati! Wildly like cowboys they circled the horde of locusts, howling above the din of the dragging pails the cowboys cries that the American Joe Kleinman had once taught them. And there came a marvel: the horde rose up as though on command, and the Chaimovitch field, only half devoured, was clear.

  In triumph the boys galloped on to help others, but presently the locusts were slower to rise, and then only patches lifted, and only when the hooves of the mules were almost upon them.

  Some of the farmers were giving up. Janovici stood, exhausted, limp, by the edge of his field. He was mute. His wife, his two young boys, stood back a few steps from him. The woman looked at him. They did not get on well, it was known; often her shrill curses were heard halfway across the village. But now she said his name quietly, “Mikosh, come home, it is useless.” He waved her away—with the children, too, go, go—and hesitantly they left. He stood there, his mouth a tight bitter scar, his face black with smudge, grimed with sweat. It was futile, each stroke was like striking the sea, but he could not halt, he could not give up, he trampled the locusts on the ground, he swung the back of his spade on them, all the while in a hysterical whine muttering curses.

  Yankel too could not stop. A patch of locusts had returned on his ground and he flailed at them. Wiping away sweat that was running into his eyes, he raised his head for a moment and there came into view the shrunken figure of Sheikh Ibrim on the small gray horse he still kept for himself.

  “Are they not on your fields?” Yankel wondered.

  “If you drive the devil from your house, he will but enter the house of your neighbor,” the Arab said, though with no reproach. And with a kind of wonder and pity, he continued, “Why do you labor, why do you exert yourself so? The end will be the same. They will devour all, and only then will they arise and go.”

  It was so. All was useless. Even as Yankel gazed around him, again a black cloud approached from behind, lowering itself upon the fields. His arms were heavy. Along the wagon path he saw the desolate settlers, hunched and exhausted, returning to the village. His own children still made an effort, the boys on their mules, the girls following in their wake; now and again the insects rose and moved a bit, only, insolently, to settle on the field farther on. Yet something in his
blood would not rest.

  “It will be as Allah wills,” old Ibrim said.

  It was useless to go against the will of God, and yet what was the will of God? Yankel groped in his heart for some cause for this punishment. Had he been unjust? And against some barrier in his mind there beat the vision of the moment of the raised arm that had struck down on his daughter. He denied. And even if there was a deserved punishment for him—then why the whole village, why the whole land? Why had God smitten the whole land of the Egyptians when it was their Pharaoh who was unjust? Or was it perhaps that each person in himself knows the injustice that is written against him, and that each must apply the curse to his own transgression?

  Like his arm, his mind was heavy, he could not raise up his thoughts, yet just as the blood of his arm would not rest, so too his wearied mind throbbed on, to answer in some way, to do.

  From the far end of his field, toward the village, a new outcry came. He saw Mati on the mule, riding toward him. “Abba! Abba! The grove!”

  No, this he would not tolerate, not even from God. God or the evil one, wherever it came from. The good and the evil impulse—these were not only in man but in all creation. Why had he never understood this before? To the end of his strength he would storm against evil.

  The lemon grove, with its tender leaves, the saplings they had planted here against all advice, he and his sons for once united, and with what labor they had nursed these saplings, each drop of water carried from the river. The grove from Reuven’s nursery. Despite all their disputes, even at times his hatred of Reuven, it was as though he were running now to protect the very life of his absent eldest son.

  Among the small, tender trees, there was a turmoil as of Gehenna itself. Leah ran with a smoke torch, brandishing it wildly. An angry hum was over her head as the seething insects whirled. Mati and Schmulik had left the mules and were slapping with sacking against the locusts that covered the tree-trunks, trying even with their bare hands to sweep the devouring insects from the leaves. Yaffaleh too, and Eliza ran from tree to tree, striking noise from empty pails.

  Schmulik had just managed to strip the beasts from one of the saplings, but like knowing evil beings now, they only hovered, to descend again on the small, half-chewed bud-leaves. Clawing at them, Schmulik let out a cry of despairing rage. Suddenly Feigel, to help him, undid her apron-strings and wrapped the cloth around the tree, tying it together firmly at the bottom of the trunk. “This one you won’t get!” she shrieked at the buzzing locusts.

  Within all his misery, a wave of gratification came up in Yankel, of affection, indeed of love, even of the rightness that still existed in the order of the universe, just as when they had first arrived here and had had to lie in the hovel by the river, and there Feigel had made a good Sabbath.—Woman of valor!—he could have cried,—Eshet chayeel—But he said, “That is the way! that is the way! We’ll cover every tree! Run, bring clothes from the house!” Already he was stripping off his own shirt. “The pardess they won’t get away from us!”

  Again Shula took the wagon, her mother riding with her. In the stable, in the house, they first seized every old rag, an old blanket, a piece of canvas—-but anything torn you could not use, even the smallest hole they would crawl through. With a great sigh Feigel opened the ancient trunk, drawing out her last tablecloth, the one she had saved for perhaps if Leah got married. Then even sheets from the beds—but still it was as nothing, two hundred trees had been planted, and now from the other room Shula came with her arms overflowing—petticoats. All of her own petticoats she had heaped up, and Leah’s, and Yaffaleh’s, and mother and daughter were seized with a kind of laughing frenzy—skirts too! every chemise! every nightgown! The entire Chaimovitch wardrobe! Let the whole village behold! Onto the wagon they heaped it all, and still it would hardly make a beginning. Then onto the field they came with their arms loaded, half-stumbling over the trailing ends of whatever they had seized, patched old sheets, petticoats, more aprons—would the voracious beasts even eat through the cloth? No, it was the green leaves they wanted, Schmulik said; from the covered trees they were easily driven away. —For once, Mameh declared cheerfully, it was useful to have so many daughters! But even Leah was somewhat taken aback as Shula wrapped around a tree her most feminine shift, the one with bowknots of blue silk tied all around the hem and neckline. “But, Shula!” she cried. “So then?” Shula responded. “And our washing we don’t hang out?”

  From neighboring fields there came over the last of the settlers who had not yet given up and gone home. They stared at the mad Chaimovitches, the boys sweeping the locusts from the saplings, the girls binding their petticoats around the little trees—could it really save them? But what had been fetched was soon finished; again Shula raced homeward. She ran to Malka Bronescu—from Malka, from her mother, from Shoshana Mozensohn, from half her schoolmates she borrowed petticoats, and as the craze spread, other girls came with filled arms, laughing. When Shula arrived again with the wagon, her father spoke his first word to her since their great trouble. This time she had even brought the velvet gown that her mother had given her, the one she had worn at the dance in Gilboa. Yankel saw her about to bind it around a tree. “It won’t be needed,” he said. “We’ll find something else.”

  In the morning, from all the fields, the thrumming still arose. The locusts had not departed. Men hurried out to see the worst. And there, in the midst of the disaster, only the lanes of white garbed lemon trees, the Chaimovitch pardess, stood intact.

  The pious prayed in the shul. Again and again during the day the settlers would go out to look at their fields, but the plague had not lifted. They would pass the Chaimovitch grove. They did not even laugh at the strange assortment of pillowcases, petticoats, sacking. A few scratched their heads, wondering whether the trees would not suffocate? Leaves breathe in air. Several times during the day, Yankel and the boys came and unwrapped a few trees, but all seemed in order. The crops were lost, all except the potatoes and turnips that grew under the earth. Though Leah had built a smudge fire all around her vegetable garden, it too was destroyed.

  Later in the day Max Wilner came to see for himself the rescued grove, for the fame of it had already reached HaKeren. The kvutsa’s own grove, the grove Reuven had planted, was totally devoured. Max gazed, nodding, with a wry smile. But even had someone thought of such a thing—“Our girls don’t have so many petticoats,” he said.

  News came first from Yavniel, then from Gilboa, from Chedera, and from Petach Tikvah and the southern settlements. Everywhere, disaster. The curse was on the whole of the land.

  Unceasing, the thrumming was in their ears. It had become maddening. And by now everyone knew what it promised; the locusts were mating, the females were burying eggs in the ground, and in twenty days, some said, in forty days, others said, the plague would be renewed, tenfold, a hundredfold worse.

  What was to be done? How could they remain sitting day and night listening to the song of doom, helpless?

  * * * *

  That he had best try to keep himself clear of the drunken rages of Djemal Pasha, Reuven quickly understood. A word from Aaron Aaronson was not lost on him. “As with all tyrants,” Aaronson had remarked, when he saw Reuven installed in Damascus, “you do not approach unless you are summoned.”

  Installed on the grounds of Djemal’s residence, in a stable-barracks of palace guards, he had almost at once been summoned by the Pasha for a tour of the grounds, an estate seized from a Syrian banker named Atassi who, Djemal shouted even now with wrath, had been plotting and conniving with the French consul to betray the regime. “We have the proof! We found the papers in the French consulate! Atassi escaped with the consul to Paris, but when Paris is taken, I will get him and hang him!” The graveled walk crunched under his boots. It was Djemal’s way, Reuven soon learned, to shout to anyone, even to his house servants, about traitors and betrayers, as though he suspected them, too.

  The walks were bordered by low clipped box-bushes enclosing forma
l flower beds—a classic French garden with pieces of statuary. “Where will you put your Garden of Eden?” The Pasha had not forgotten. “Here!” With his quirt he circled the area. “Bring trees of every kind! Pomegranates and oranges. Will Jaffa oranges grow here?”

  “If the soil—” Reuven began.

  “Make them grow!” And leading up to the residence there must be a lane of palms such as he had seen at Aaronson’s agricultural station; let Reuven bring the finest palms from the Euphrates area, they must be transported full-grown. “Tomorrow you will take wagons, take a dozen men—”

  Also in the city. At once the tour was made. There must be a new plan for the central square, more open space in the middle where there stood a giant oak.

  “Ah, what a tree,” cried Reuven. “Indeed it should have space to be admired.”

  —Twenty hangings at a time had been made from its branches, the Pasha cried. It was the governor’s hanging tree. “But not for me!” How could one degrade such a tree by hanging traitors, criminals, vermin from its branches? “I put up a gallows.”

  Soon enough Reuven saw it. When he brought his laborers to the square, the gallows stood ready. Who was it for? No one answered. Only the elderly gardener, Musa, spoke to him with some freedom and self-respect; the laborers were not used to being talked to as equals, and feared to comment. Excited throngs were filling the square, jesting, shouting in a frenzy of eagerness. The culprits were traitors from high families, Musa said with equanimity, a doctor, the editor of a newspaper, they had been caught in their plottings, they had taken enemy gold to betray Turkey and rule themselves. All was politics, what could a poor man know?

  Reuven did not want to see it; he took his laborers back to the Pasha’s garden, but the next morning the figures were still hanging, their dried distorted faces above white shrouds on which had been pinned large signs announcing their treason.

  All around him there was such lust in cruelty, Reuven wanted only to creep away, to be by himself. In a cafe he encountered a few officers from Eretz, most of them translators here; the cafes were filled with political whisperings, the Turks were threatened everywhere with conspiracies, independence movements—the Syrians had secret societies, the highest Arab commanders were said to be members; why had Enver and Djemal Pasha decided to stamp out the Armenians? As an example, to frighten the Kurds, the Maronites, the Druze. All were seething, plotting to strike for independence.