The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  He was pressing her hand, almost as though clinging to it. As though from within her own thoughts, Avshalom said, “I’m such a one. And so is she. And you—no, not you. You are of the earth, Leah.” It was not to make her less; it was even in envy.

  He was perhaps about to add something, a message for Sara, but Zev had found them. As the Hothead approached, Leah had a misgiving; Zev would say something gross and loud, he was drunk, he would destroy all the feeling that had come to them here. But instead Zev spoke with gravity, each word like the careful step of a man who realizes he is tipsy. “Don’t worry about Avshalom, Leahleh, he is going with me. And as everyone knows, nothing in all hell ever happens to Zev, the foulest of men.”

  The fire had died down, the young men of the village had gone home or to their hiding places; Avshalom’s pink-cheeked young cousin Naaman, who had hardly spoken to a girl all through the party, but had taken refuge in singing around the fire, again dogged his steps, reminding him that he must get some rest. Then Naaman too must know of the journey.

  They were mounting; Leah had an impulse—she must give him something, and she looked around the room. Every scrap of food had been consumed, but in their kitchen, she remembered, she had put away a few provisions for the girls for tomorrow. She hurried, and took from a jar a handful of dates, always good on a journey. Beside his horse she reached up her hand in farewell and left the dates in his palm. “The woman of the earth!” Avshalom chuckled, and with a sudden movement bent over and kissed the top of her head. Leah’s heart quivered, and she felt a dread rush of sorrow. “Ride in peace, Avshalom!” she cried as he moved off, the last to leave.

  Then nothing was heard, neither of Zev nor of Avshalom. During several weeks the thought of Avshalom rarely came to Leah’s mind, though twice his young cousin Naaman passed to ask if they had perhaps heard mention of him from the Bedouin with whom they had contact.

  It was a bitter season; the planters dismissed the remaining watchmen from their groves—what was there to watch? They allowed Bedouin to come in freely and take fruit from the trees, full camel loads that were carried down to be sold, it was said, already to British soldiers.

  Everyone was short-tempered. Even in the shul in Ness Ziona, it was told, a fight had broken out between a dismissed watchman and a planter just after the singing of “Come, O Sabbath Bride.” Everyone knew the watchman, Pinya Bosnowitz, a steady man, with four young children, long established in the village.

  Suddenly seizing hold of the planter’s sleeve, he begged, “Take me into your yard in place of the Arab family. I will take care of your stable, my wife will work in your house, my children will work for you, we have nothing at home to eat, I can’t go home and look in their faces.” The planter tried to pull his arm free, and they fell to screaming at each other. “No, no, I won’t let you go—”

  “What do you want of me! Go to the committee!”

  “You let a Jew go hungry and the Arab you feed!”

  “God in heaven, what has one to do with the other! He has been with me since I came to Eretz!”

  “Take me too! I won’t let go of you!”

  Pinya grappled with the burly, gray-headed planter. The worshipers pulled on one, on the other, crying, “A shame! Not in shul! Quiet!” and suddenly Pinya burst into tears, then Gruzman as well. Pinya left off and went home; later Gruzman sent his boy with a Sabbath chaleh. Such things were happening.

  The Turks too were becoming nervous and more strict. Yet rifles were accumulating in the deserted old cabin in the grove, though Dov twice came into danger while bringing more. He had secured leave for a few weeks, using the time for arms-gathering, but once as he drove his cart overloaded with heavy gunnysacks a wheel snapped in a mudhole in the midst of an Arab village. When he went into a cafe for help, a military policeman was there and came out to look, asking what was in the sacks. Only Dov’s nerve saved him, as he told the girls when he arrived. “Military supplies, what else!” he had roared, and sent the gendarme to fetch him two Arabs with donkeys so that he might get on with his supplies, while leaving the wagon behind to be repaired. That same week, coming from a second trip, Dov related to Leah how he had suddenly seen before him a checkpoint at a neglected crossroads. Fortunately a military convoy appeared behind him and he managed to smuggle himself into the midst of it, passing unnoticed. So urgent was the work that he overstayed his leave, and only a warning from a Jewish clerk in the Jaffa headquarters that his absence had been noticed saved him. With an elaborate tale of a malarial attack, Dov went back unpunished.

  To get the arms onward to Petach Tikvah, Rahel resorted to the old ruse, stuffing a pillow over her stomach and stretching out on a bed of straw that covered the rifles. If they were stopped at a road-post, she groaned as a woman in labor being carried to the hospital in Petach Tikvah.

  The war was steadily coming nearer. The British were building a whole railway line up the coast to carry their cannon, and also laying a pipe to bring water all the way from the Nile for their troops.

  One day Leah and Rahel came to an urgent meeting in the party’s cabin on the shore between Jaffa and Tel Aviv; Eli, from the Herzlia Gymnasia group, proposed that they organize “Standfast” units in case of evacuation. Suddenly cannon bursts were heard. Rushing out, they saw a British warship facing Jaffa. Could it be the invasion? Had Avshalom really succeeded in persuading the British to his plan?

  But the British warship turned and departed.

  In a few moments a chaver came running from Jaffa. The large military ironworks had been hit directly by the shells, and nothing else. “They knew exactly where to shoot. They must have spies.”

  Like Leah, Rahel too had at once thought of Avshalom. Suddenly now she understood why he had sent her away from Athlit, she said. The laboratory was surely their secret spying headquarters. “Can you imagine, Leah, three months I worked there every day with Aaron Aaronson, and nothing entered my head! How they must have laughed at me!”

  Then Avshalom must have reached the British safely, Leah concluded.

  Two more weeks went by, and one day as she was bent, carefully pulling out an endless, stubborn length of yablit, Leah raised her head and saw Sara Aaronson coming toward her between the rows. Straightening up, Leah went to meet her. Sara was well dressed, in a gray riding skirt and smart boots, and her face was composed, though as she neared Leah saw a slight quiver pass over her lips. At once it was covered by a firm smile.

  At least let her not be uncertain of friendliness here, Leah thought, and so she hurried to Sara, beaming, crying “Shalom!” and taking hold of both her hands. How cold they were. “What brings you to us?”

  “I came to see you, Leah.”

  “Come inside! I’ll make tea.”

  “You have tea?”

  Alas, the real English tea was long finished. “From herbs. It’s good. I’ll give you seeds, you can grow them at your agricultural station.”

  “Oh, you’ll have to show me how to plant it. I’m all alone there now.”

  “Why, I just poke it in the ground with my finger. It comes up quickly but needs weeding.”

  Fortunately all the girls were out working, so they could have a quiet hour. When she had settled Sara and put the kettle on, Leah said, “You’ve heard nothing from Avshalom—don’t worry. It’s a good sign. If they had been caught, we’d have heard. And nothing ever happens to Zev, the mamser.”

  Sara gazed on her, her eyes never leaving Leah’s form while she distractedly unbuttoned her short jacket; then she began talking in a different voice, not that of a visitor nor that of a daughter of the Aaronson house, the sister of the world-famous Aaron Aaronson, but instead the voice of a chaverteh. “I don’t know why I came to see you, Leah— Yes, I know. It is not only that he was here on the last night before he left, that you were the last one he talked to—yes, his little cousin Naaman told me. You know, Naaman idolizes Avshalom. He noticed that he sat talking with you for a long time.” Only a few days ago the boy had come all the
way to Athlit to know if there was news of Avshalom. “He’s more worried than I am. But they should have been back weeks ago.”

  —And the shelling of the ironworks in Jaffa, had not that been a sign that Avshalom had reached the British? Leah hesitated to ask.

  “Naaman wants to go among the Bedouin to find out if they were seen. I had to command him not to go. I left him at our station on watch so that I could come here—I wanted to talk to you.”

  How alone she was. Sitting there day after day on watch for a signal. Her brothers were gone, her sister was gone, and now Avshalom too.

  And yet, now that she was here, Sara didn’t seem to know how to speak, how to confide what she wanted to confide in another woman, a friend. Suddenly she was speaking of Reuven, of having seen him in Damascus, as though she had simply come to convey his greetings and bring news of him.

  “You know your brother made another discovery, an ancient grove of pistachio trees. He gave me samples to take back to Aaron and Aaron was greatly impressed. He is such a gentle person, such an idealist, your brother!”

  Then perhaps it was this, Leah thought, between Sara and herself—the bond of love for their brothers. For all at once the barrier was gone, and Sara was talking, talking and easing her heart.

  “Leah—even though when I was still a young girl and imagined I was in love with Avshalom— But you know now when I think of it, the happiest times of my life were when my brother Aaron took me along with him and we searched in the mountains and in the desert for different plants, and at those moments when we found something— You know the feeling too? Sometimes I brought Aaron a wildflower—once we even found together the black orchid he had been searching for, we saw it at the same moment among the stones of an abandoned well—at such moments I was happy. Really happy. You too—you came with your brother to Eretz and you worked together in the fields, even in our own vineyard—I remember that was when you and I first met, when Reuven was recovering from a kadahat attack. And still, wasn’t that the happiest time of your life, no matter how hard it was?”

  “It was good,” Leah said. “But then—when with my chaver—when I went out and worked together with him, when we made the first harvest in the kvutsa all of us together, and he and I worked side by side—”

  “I know, I know!” Sara cried with a thankfulness in her voice. “Then on such a night it was love.”

  So it must have been with her and Avshalom in their secret work, since her return from Constantinople, and it was this she had come to share, to feel again, to confirm, through another woman who had felt things she had felt. And she had come, to be in the place where Avshalom last had been. An impulse came over Leah to cradle her, to weep for her.

  Sara was telling her now, “Before, when we were so young, Avshalom was always trying to say clever things, to show off his riding—I thought he was superficial, and when he began to impress Rifka, and how could he not be drawn to her, she was so lovable, a kitten—I suppose I was offended, I let him go, yes, I let him go to her. But I wasn’t even a woman yet.” The tremor flew over her lips.

  Sara plunged into the story of her marriage. The empty, monotonous round of teas and dinners … and then tales of the massacre of the Armenians began to be heard. “What was maddening was the Germans. My husband did business with them and high officers came to the house, diplomats. For them it was not even hatred, it was not even religion. It was a principle of racial purity! The Turkomans had a right to purify their land, to make it one, there should be no other blood but their own—can you believe it!” And her husband would listen calmly and even seem to agree with them, until she could no longer endure it.

  Then she was speaking of love. Even our body which we trusted to tell us could deceive us. Even with her husband her body had sometimes carried her away. Yet now Sara felt she knew. It was as Leah had just said, it was when everything joined together, not only the body, but what you believed in life and what you did in your life. “Now since I came back, when we go out on a task together and Avshalom will not stop—he will risk everything to find out what we need to know—then when I see him returning to the hotel, and from the light in his eye, I know he has succeeded, and meanwhile I too have learned something we need from one of their bragging officers, oh, then we have such a joy together!”

  Sara had fallen silent. A melancholy came over her face. “Perhaps we had no right—Leah—do you believe in punishment for sin?”

  But not for love! Not for her honesty! Could such a terror still have hold of poor Sara? “But with Avshalom—” Leah began. Then she smiled broadly to Sara. “Perhaps God isn’t too religious, either, about such sins,” she said. “When they struck the ironworks in Jaffa, wasn’t that a sign that Avshalom had arrived there to them safely?”

  Again the trembling came over Sara’s lips, and her voice was small. “It was my brother Aaron who carried the information of the ironworks.”

  * * * *

  When Sara started homeward, they embraced like sisters. Sara’s hair was just below Leah’s lips and Leah restored there the kiss that Avshalom had bestowed.

  It had been his last, for Avshalom Feinberg’s body lay somewhere under the sand, beyond Raffa, in a hole not too deep, only as deep as might be scooped for the planting of a tree. The Bedouin did not care for the labor of digging. And already the place could not be found. From Alexandria, Aaron Aaronson had sent search parties to the area. He had learned of the death from Zev.

  At long last cleared and enrolled in the British Military Intelligence, Aaron Aaronson had been sent out to Alexandria—only to find suspicion, and chill, and even a belittlement which he could hardly endure. Accustomed at least to being received everywhere as a man of stature, a world-renowned scientist, he found himself left to wait hours on end in one anteroom after another, only to be interviewed finally by some subaltern who had received no instructions and could give him no answer.

  Once he had been questioned about his geographical knowledge of the Sinai. They were, he knew, laboriously laying a pipeline from the Nile in preparation for their attack on Gaza; eagerly he pointed out on the topographical maps sources of underground water, if they would but dig. Called back to the same office, he was introduced to a long-faced young Englishman parading himself in an abaya, a Captain Lawrence who had, just before the war, made a survey of the Sinai area under some pretext of mapping for a geographical society; Aaronson took an instant dislike to him. Indifferently the young surveyor remarked that he did not care to gainsay him, but still rather preferred to take heed of Bedouin tradition as to water sources in the Sinai.

  It was a brief and hideous meeting; later Aaronson learned that the abaya-wearer was involved in some far-reaching intrigues with the ruling Moslem of Mecca, the Sherif Husein, and that camel-loads of gold were being dispatched to stir up an Arab rising there in the Hedjaz so as to occupy the Turks during the British advance into Palestine. If so, Aaronson proposed, what about fostering a Jewish activity behind the Turkish lines? Wasn’t it high time to contact his group?

  Jews? They only smiled.

  Then suddenly one day Aaron Aaronson was sent for, and brought to a military hospital in Port Said where a wounded Jew from Palestine had spoken his name. There lay Zev. He told of Avshalom’s death, a stupid death, maddening in its needlessness. A death so mean and paltry, against their high purpose.

  More than a month before, eaten out with waiting for the British signal, Avshalom had set forth with Zev to reach the British lines. Deep in the first night they had passed with their Bedouin guide beyond Raffa into the wastes between the Turkish and British outposts that were penetrated only occasionally by patrols. A night mist had come down on them; their guide, becoming uncertain of the sand drifts, had advised bedding down until daylight. At dawn a whole troop of Bedouin appeared and began a violent dispute with the guide. Avshalom tried to intervene. It concerned a blood feud, Zev had made out, between the guide’s tribe and these others. The guide had entered their area and they meant t
o take him. The terrified man started to run. Shooting broke out. Fearful of being seized and betrayed to the Turks, Zev and Avshalom had tried to hold off the entire band, but once the firing started, they knew they were lost. Himself twice hit, Zev heard Avshalom gasp that his bullets were spent and he too was finished. Crawling to him, Zev said, he found the poet dying, and then he himself lost consciousness. Under the burning sun, he had awakened only to find everything vanished with the mist, the Bedouin, the camels, even the body of Avshalom. In the end, as he crawled on, a British patrol had found him.

  Only then, in the hospital, had Aaronson broken out in rage at their months of delay, shouting at the Intelligence officer, “But for all of you, he would be alive! I was already in Alexandria weeks before he left Palestine! If you had let me send a signal, he would never have started on this insane journey!” From that day forward the operation was under way.

  Aaronson himself could not reappear in Palestine., Zev, recovered, would be sent back on the contact ship. He and Sara must take command of the gathering of information. Every two weeks the ship would return to pick up their material. Aaronson would remain at Intelligence headquarters to interpret it, and to transmit particular tasks to them. As for Zev’s absence of a few months, who would have noticed, since he was always moving about? To those few who secretly knew he had gone off with Avshalom, he would explain that Avshalom had made his way to the other side and was training to become a flier in a French aerial squadron. This everyone would readily believe.

  And what should be told to Sara?

  “The truth,” Aaron said. “To Sara alone.”

  Then began the effective work of the Nili. Sara Aaronson and Zev circled the land, gathering up from their ring of helpers the required information. Daringly, as though to carry on Avshalom’s ways, she returned to the hotels frequented by high officers. Now it was Zev, resplendent in fine new clothing, as the husband, a wealthy merchant, who appeared to carry her off at the crucial moment. Their packets of information were prepared and were picked up by a swimmer from the contact ship, one of the Zion men who had remained in Alexandria. Presently he too began bringing greetings and family messages and then gold napoleons from those in Alexandria, until it seemed that the entire Yishuv must be aware of the contact, and the secret could not but come to the Turks. Among the community leaders, whispered discussions were held, some insisting that a stop must be put to the whole Aaronson affair. And then, instead, there arose a desperate need for it.