The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  In the police house and in the synagogue the elders of Zichron had been locked up as hostages. Arab servants, venturing through the deserted lanes, brought back word of the tormented men flung one after another across the table in the police house, the soles of their feet bared for the bastinado. To their pleading, to their protestation that they had known nothing of the Nili, that they themselves were totally opposed to the spying, Hassan Bey cried out, How? They had known nothing of the spying? and yet they had been opposed to it?

  All, all were responsible. And until the master spy Zev was found and surrendered, all of them would be held. And if Zev, the paramour of Sara Aaronson, was not found and surrendered, then there was no telling how far Djemal Pasha would go. Let it be remembered that the Armenians had done nothing even half so treacherous, and let the Jews think deeply of the fate of the Armenians.

  —The Armenian fate could begin there in Zichron, Bluma’s keening voice reached up to Leah, and Motke, bent double under the eaves, his face livid as he labored to push the troublesome box deep into the hiding area, uttered a growl of confirmation at each dire prediction his wife called upward. The entire population of Zichron would be driven onto the roads, across the Jordan, across the Hauran, into the wastes of the desert to perish.

  Nothing would help unless Zev was found.

  Zev had escaped, it was said, from the cellar of the Aaronson house. A servant told it. As soon as Hassan Bey appeared, Sara had commanded Zev to flee, she had even managed to send down a loaf of bread to him, wrapped in her head scarf.

  “I have no pity for her! She had no shame!” cried Bluma. “As for him, Zev always brought trouble everywhere. And now disaster! If he entered this moment, I would give him over to the Turks.”

  “Better dead,” Motke muttered, and straightened to climb down. In the kitchen Bluma stood, her face drawn in bitterness. “Who gave them the right? How could they take on themselves to do this to the entire Yishuv! And the way they flaunted themselves, it was certain they would be caught, driving shamelessly everywhere together in her carriage, staying together in the best hotel in Jerusalem, spending gold napoleons like coppers! Who gave them the right to have all Jews branded now as traitors and spies? Where one morality falls, all morality falls,” she declaimed righteously. “Adultery and spying, it all goes together!”

  “Bluma!” Leah cried. “You yourself have told what Sara is suffering. What she did, she did not for herself but for the Yishuv, for the Jews. Is this a time to besmirch her? And as to the gold, how many Jews would have starved but for this gold? Haven’t we ourselves received a share of it and used it to buy arms? Oh, poor Sara.” Leah could not touch the food before her—she found herself leaning on her hands in sudden convulsive tears, in an anguish of desire that all this, all these years of war, and dread decisions, and smuggling of weapons, and constant fear, all should be wiped away and only the early days of heroic struggle and labor and even malaria and exhaustion should return, that she might be nursing her brother in the hut in the Aaronson grove and sensing his young man’s yearning, as the young daughter with a face of clear butter came to lend him one of her brother’s precious books.

  Suddenly the need came over Leah to be gone from here. She must go home to Mishkan Yaacov. The searches, the horror, would reach there too. Whatever happened to the family, she must be at home with them when it came.

  Only, her task was not finished. At once when she arrived, the eldest boy of Motke and Bluma had been sent off to tell Eli, who now came hurrying. The Tel Aviver praised her, listened to tales of the wax seal, laughed delightedly, his clever eyes showing he was filing away the scheme for future need. But as for now, the napoleons must at once be sorted out, the telltale ones hidden away until the Turks were gone—

  “We can buy arms with them right now, the Bedouin only bury the gold, anyway,” Motke intervened.

  Eli shook his head. Just now not the slightest risk could be taken. But the coins of pre-war vintage, the safe ones, must go at once to the Emergency Committee here in Petach Tikvah.

  “What for?” Motke roared. “Those frightened Jews in Jerusalem turned the whole lot over to us, good and bad. Leah risked her life to bring it. The Shomer can make good use of it all.”

  The funds had been allocated for relief, Eli insisted. “It’s up to the Emergency Committee to decide where this money goes.”

  “No, it’s up to us!” Motke insisted. “I tell you we stand at the brink!”

  “And you think I don’t know it?” said Eli. “Motke, this is no time for quarreling with the community notables.”

  “I piss on your notables! They have money of their own hidden away. When those fine notables in Jerusalem had to put some money in the safe, they found it quickly enough.”

  “Paper. You know you can’t buy food with paper.”

  “When Bahad-ad-Din comes after us, we need guns more than food.”

  “Motke, you complain that the Nili should not have made decisions on their own. Nor can we. You can come and talk to the committee yourself. Only don’t piss on them, Motke. It won’t help.”

  It was young Chemda then who had a suggestion. “Why shouldn’t we give the coins that are safe to the committee, and the rest we can keep for arms?”

  Leah kissed the girl’s clear little forehead. Again they clambered to the attic, Motke holding a lantern while his boy snaked into the narrow hiding area and pushed out the coffer. Then, sitting on the floor in a circle around the lamp, with Eli and Bluma on watch below, they opened the leather pouches and made two heaps of golden coins, Chemda and the boy vying with each other to read out the year marks. Despite all that threatened, a calm came over Leah, almost as though they were a circle of comrades in a kitchen shelling peas. And this was a thing to remember, she told herself, that amidst the worst agitation such peace could come in sitting together at a simple task.

  At last Motke and Eli went off to the committee with the pouches of prewar coins. In no time they were back, Motke in a rare mood of hilarity. “Out! Out!” he mimicked the shrill Yiddish of a city father of Tel Aviv. “Take it away or I’ll throw it all into the Yarkon!” Not even these “safe” coins would they touch. Even the astute Dizingoff had wanted none of it. Nor should the gold remain anywhere in Petach Tikvah. Searches were expected momentarily. “If they find your guns, it’s already bad enough.”

  “For the guns,” Motke remarked, “our brave notables know that only we would be arrested. But for the gold, they too.”

  Anything that could be connected with the Nili must vanish. “Take it away, take it away!” the notables had screeched.

  The leather pouches again lay on the table. Quickly Leah packed them back into the medical case. But now what to do with it all?

  As if in answer there came a double-gallop and a wheel-whir known to all of them. “Dov!”

  The paymaster’s carriage snapped into the small yard; Dov sprang down from one side and from the other, Menahem. And what goods they brought! Even Menahem was sparkling as he quickly took down a sack which he would not even entrust to Motke, carrying it into the house by himself and lovingly laying it on the table. Folding down the neck as gently as a man undressing a bride, he let them stare. A machine gun.

  Their first. Speckless and bright.

  Studying the weapon with his sharp, matter-of-fact gaze, Motke’s boy Eytan said, “British.”

  Dov gaily knuckled the boy’s head. From the disastrous British attack on Gaza. Right now everything could be bought. They had ten good rifles, too, with plenty of ammunition.

  “You see!” Motke shouted. What could be done with this gold!

  —But the British had failed, then? Leah asked.

  —Thousands killed, Dov said, a stupid general. He could have pushed in, but at the crucial moment he had lost his nerve and withdrawn. “But they will come back, the English will come back.” He must at once report to his headquarters. On one foot, he listened to the story of the gold. No question, Eli was right, it must be take
n to Gilboa. Menahem agreed. And giving Leah a pat on the shoulder as he would a man, Dov cried, “Good work,” made a smart Turkish salute, and was gone.

  Better chance the ride at night than in daytime, Menahem decided. From the Emergency Committee itself he managed to borrow a carriage. Motke would come with him. “Take me too!” Leah cried; she had to get home, home, an end to all these adventures. Menahem glanced at her, still in her nurse’s dress. Good, all the better. Into the carriage. The Red Cross case she placed under her feet. Rifles were stored beneath the driver’s seat, and topped by a layer of feed.

  The whole way to Chedera they were not stopped even once. Perhaps it was the fine looking brougham, like a doctor’s, and the nurse in white.

  There was no wind. The air lay close, signaling a hamseen for tomorrow. Menahem had boldly taken the top down and Leah’s uniform gleamed. Now and again they passed an encampment, a control-post, a dozing sentinel. “Night is best,” Menahem congratulated himself.

  Before Chedera, Menahem pulled up, resting the horses, and debated with Motke. Half awake, Leah heard. They could take a bypath avoiding the town, but if they were challenged, how to explain it? Besides, Menahem argued, Chedera had already undergone the spy search, half its men were arrested. Again he decided on boldness, and trotted the horses forward.

  Alert now, Leah recognized many houses in their stillness. Down this lane the Schneirsons lived, cousins of Avshalom Feinberg; both of the sons and the father had been seized by Hassan Bey. What grief must lie on the mother—surely she sat there in her darkness, awake within her silent walls. If one could but stop and speak a word of comfort. And then the Feinberg house itself, a tomb. She saw Avshalom on that Chanukah night, in her girls’ kvutsa, his keffiyah flying as he galloped away, so filled with life that his little cousin Naaman could not believe his death and had gone into the desert to find him. And this had brought all the disaster. Leah couldn’t breathe. Each silent house as they passed seemed now to be shrunken in a waiting terror, for half the Nili had been from here.

  Menahem was rigid, clinging, she knew, to his fury at the bungling lot of them so as not to feel pity for them. The silence tightened in the carriage.

  And then they were on the road, going past the collectiva at Karkur. Leah felt her breath returned. The worst was over.

  From the roadside a figure sprang, directly before the horses. The animals shied, half-rearing, the carriage rocked. Menahem managed to control the startled animals, but the attacker seized their bridles, crying hoarsely, “Menahem, don’t shoot!”

  It was Zev.

  Menahem pushed down Motke’s gun. Zev’s voice, in a croak of desperation, still carried an echo of his old, boasting tone. “I knew the gait of your horses!” Now beside the carriage, he recognized Leah. Whatever it was, she tried to fling it off, but Zev’s whole being had already made a claim on her. He raised his leg to mount. “Keep off!” Motke leveled his pistol.

  “Take me with you, hide me!” The desperation was addressed to Leah, while his words were to the men. Despite the revolver, Zev sprang onto the mount-step, clinging to the carriage. Motke’s pistol butt came down on his forearm, Leah heard the thud, but Zev clung. “Ride, ride,” he gasped to Menahem. “You can’t leave me!” His eyes still hung with terror and pleading on Leah, pleading out of a puffed, ravaged face, but to the men he managed even a threat in his tone, “You know it’s too dangerous for everyone, for you to leave me here.”

  “With a bullet through your head we can leave you,” Motke said.

  Zev’s eyes left Leah and he faced the two of them. This now was the other man in the wretch. He held his head erect. “I’m unarmed, Motke.” And then the boaster rose up in him, his words poured from Zev in a feverish jumble of arrogance, even of madness, yet with the glitterings of nobility that made little stabs at your heart nevertheless. “What have I done that is so evil except risked myself day and night for two years for the cause of the Yishuv? What have I done but fight for us in the way most dangerous to myself? All, all of you now, you only want to live through the next few weeks until the English save you. And I? When every last one of you finally realized that our fate was with the English, you only went and hid, you stuck your heads in the ground, you didn’t even move a finger but only waited. You, chaver Menahem—you admitted a year ago when we asked your whole Shomer to work with us—you yourself agreed that reason was on our side. And in your heart too you yourself would have become one of us, deny it! I know you too well. How many nights did we do the rounds together! But you were loyal to the decision of the Shomer. Good. Fine. Noble. On us, everyone spits—spies, vermin. But the gold we bring, oh, that’s kosher enough even for the exalted Dizingoffs and our Turkish-ass—lickers in Jerusalem—” But how could he know? How could he possibly know it was here in the wagon? Could they still have spies that had known her every movement today? Impossible. And yet something uncanny enwrapped them all, as though the carriage, the horses, they themselves, were become a substance of the night, a black haze mingling the real and the unreal, in which even your past actions, even your thoughts, were in some way mingled with what was visible and clear. Just as some strange force had caused Zev to spring at the carriage, had made him believe he recognized the hooves of Motke and Menahem’s horses from afar. A hundred coincidences, a handful of pebbles flung into the sky, had formed themselves into a chain, and drawn all of them together here in the middle of the night on this road through the silent wady.

  “To deserve our land we must fight for it!” Zev mocked. “And who has carried on this fight? Who but we? Yes, spies. In a war, one spy is the worth of a thousand, ten thousand men. Who told the English ships where to strike in Jaffa, at the armament yard? Who gave the British aviators the locations of encampments for their bombing? And I—what evil have I done? Did I betray anyone? Was it I who babbled and brought down Von Kressenstein and Bahad-ad-Din and all their spy-hunters on us? When I was ambushed in the desert with Avshalom and we shot out our last bullets, so we could get to our allies with the plans for the defense of Gaza, when I got two bullets in me, and was also left for dead, was that evil? Believe me, I would prefer to have died in place of Avshalom. But I lived and I accomplished our work.” He half turned to Leah. “If it had been Avshalom who lived, is Avshalom a man you would have despised? No! a hero. But Zev is a lout, a braggart, a traitor, a spy, shoot him down like a hyena.”

  “Enough, enough!” Leah couldn’t endure it. “Take him! It’s not for us alone to decide.”

  “It’s not for us to decide?” Motke whirled around with fury—as though he could execute her right along with Zev. “But you can decide! You can decide for everyone to risk their hides if we’re caught with this slime in the carriage, or even worse if we get to the kvutsa and the Turks are sitting there. Then every last chaver will hang. That you can decide for us! With his women this schvants could always save himself!”

  Tears of rage, denial, bitterness over gossip—and why shame?—all of this together choked her. It was all so unworthy at this terrible moment. Leah felt paralyzed, but Menahem had turned on Motke. “Enough!”

  “I swear to you if we’re stopped, I’ll say you captured me.” Zev had caught the moment; it was his begging voice now.

  They were still over three hours from Gilboa. Even without the hunted man, if they were stopped and the guns were found, and the gold, they were destroyed. Perhaps with the spy bound as though captured—

  “We can’t remain standing here!” Menahem cried. “All right, tie him. Get in!”

  Zev had already leaped in beside Leah. Her heart contracted a notch tighter. The foulness of him, to have run away leaving Sara— Even this thought he caught in her. “I swear to you I refused to leave Sara, she commanded me to reach the English. I swear to you I am not that much of a swine. She commanded me.”

  Motke had flung her a rope, and it was she who had to tie the wrists that Zev extended with a movement suddenly arrogant. Avoiding even touching his skin, Leah bound him.<
br />
  “The feet too,” Motke angrily instructed, and Zev with a snort stuck out his feet for her. His boot struck the medicine chest. Uncannily, the same way he had divined that the oncoming carriage was theirs, he now divined their errand. He took in her nurse’s uniform. He pushed the chest with his foot and sensed its heaviness. “Our gold!” he cried.

  His eyes had come alive. “Our gold you’d save, but not me.” No one answered. Motke sat clenched, clearly with all his strength holding back his urge to put a shot into the jackal and make an end.

  Menahem lashed the horses. Zev squirmed this way and that, his shoulders and legs pushing at her while he kept up a wild incoherent incessant monologue, his voice sometimes dropping so it was only for her, sometimes rising for the men, too. “Leah, believe me. Between you and me there was always something, we understand each other—” Even in this extreme moment, a low note of suggestion crawled into his voice—the wretch, the vermin, how could she still pity him?—“Leah, you are a real woman and I respect you. I swear to you I would give my soul to exchange places with Sara at this moment. But they had already seized her and she sent down the servant, she commanded me to flee and the truth is, it’s the only chance for her too—as long as they don’t catch me, they will keep her alive. If I can only get word to the English, believe me they’d come, they’ll send a warship straight to Athlit, they’ll land a rescue party! Leah, everything they say about Sara and me is filth, lies. I worship her, I respect her. I worshiped Avshalom—when he lay dying in the sand, I wept over him, I wept like a baby, the only time in my life I wept and wept. I lay over him to protect him and shot at them until I was hit twice and I believed I was dead. You know what that is? To believe you have died? And then I was gone, nothing. Leah, you at least believe me. Sara and I went everywhere together to carry on the work. How else could we do it? Would the German officers in the Hotel Fast babble their secrets to me? But in the end she wouldn’t have to go with them because she would pretend she was with me. That’s why I had to buy good clothes and even wear rings, to show I was rich, an important man. I swear to you, just as it was with yourself, nothing happened with Sara. I love women, I have made some women suffer, I have given some women joy, but I am not such a coward as to leave a woman to save myself—” and on and on, in a tormented kind of truth, in self-pity, in arrogance.