The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Their lovemaking became better, even bounded into playful lust, to little perversities that they explored still with a bit of shame, though sophisticated enough to know that such delights were common.

  Those months, into the summer, Djemal Pasha permitted Reuven to live at home, and the months passed as though some divine dispensation had been made for the married couple to be absent from the world of horror. Even the war in Palestine seemed to drowse.

  33

  THE NIGHT long, in open flatcars, passing through the Sinai, who could sleep? All was eerie emptiness, the sands as though made of mist, and at intervals from near or from far-off, who knew, a camel-bell, or a chanting. And at one time, on the ridge of a dune not far from the rail line, a long caravan in silhouette, returning the other way, to Egypt. “They always go at night so as to avoid the heat,” Gidon explained to a cluster of Whitechapel Jews.

  Inevitably the Bible experts had to remark this must be in reverse the path of the Ishmaelites carrying Joseph into bondage, and Nathan Pekovsky’s sarcasm had to emerge, from the heap of men huddled together against the night cold, “Nothing has changed, brothers—bondage it is, whichever way they carry you.”

  But few were in this mood, perhaps not even he. “It took Moses forty years, and we pass in a single night,” a schneider singsonged in wonder. Another, half-religious, said in considerable awe, “Look. From the engine, a pillar of fire.” And when daylight came, he pointed to the puffiing smoke. “A cloud by day.”

  Tensely Gidon with Herschel and Tuvia watched for the first sign of the settlements. The schneiders too were now infected with this eagerness. As strips of green appeared beyond Raffa, they asked, “Jewish?” No, these were Arab groves. Then, after the next patch of emptiness, “Jewish?” Approaching Gedera, Gidon pointed. “Jewish, Jewish, ours,” and they gazed.

  Some men began to sing to the tune of “Tipperary,” “It’s a long, long way to Yerushalayim.” Then you saw more and more red-tiled roofs, real houses, they were approaching Rehovot, and suddenly a pair of small boys came running alongside the train yelling in Hebrew, “The brigada? The Jewish Brigada?” From fields near the tracks, men and women came running, others on mules, riding alongside as long as they could, calling out questions, names. At any moment Leah might appear—hadn’t Araleh said she was now near Rehovot with her girls’ kvutsa?

  Then Gidon saw a girl, a girl with bare feet, her braids flying, riding a good horse. She wasn’t one of the daughters of grove owners, that couldn’t be. How she rode! Gaining on the train! All the men calling to her! Close enough now so you could see how her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes so clear! And she sang out a great Shalom to them, calling over and over the old familiar phrase, “all honor to you”—“Kol hakavod! Kol hakavod!”

  Her voice had the freshness of her face, her bare arms; the one glimpse of such a girl made his whole heart glad. Gidon even recalled Araleh’s half-jest, “Leah has a girl picked out for you!” And why not, why shouldn’t this be one of Leah’s girls! Gidon tried shouting to her, “Listen! Do you know Leah? Big Leah? The one who runs the girls’ kvutsa?”

  For an instant he was sure the girl was trying to race closer to him to hear what he was asking, but all the men were calling out, gesticulating, laughing, throwing kisses to the girl; the train swerved where she couldn’t follow, and she turned to gallop back with her news to Rehovot.

  Leah, and with her Yaffaleh, and all the girls, half the village carrying wine, cakes, fruit, with children running ahead waving little blue and white flags, were already crossing the fields to where it was rumored the men would be encamping. “I think I saw your brother!” the mounted girl cried out. “I think I heard someone ask for Leah.” And in the same breath she answered questions from all sides. “Oh, all fine-looking! All handsome!”

  Aviva was indeed the one Leah had hopefully picked out for her returning brother Gidon, and so constantly had Leah and Yaffaleh spun the girl tales of the heroic Gidon, of the time he had remained alone on the hill to guard their entire village, of his magic way with sick animals, that Aviva as she galloped alongside the train might even have had a romantic notion of catching a first glimpse of her destined one. Daughter of one of the early “fighters for the Hebrew language,” a Jerusalem schoolteacher named Rabinowitz, who had changed his name to Yerushalmi, Aviva had been sent down to Leah quite definitely so she might prepare herself one day to become a settler’s wife. A girl of such openness, such immediate warmth, she at once took everyone’s heart.

  On this day all the girls were brimming with the wildest anticipation. For several months they had flirted and danced and been pleasant with the British and Australians—and been tempted as well—for the men came so achingly hungry for a scent of decent girlhood they were ready to fall in love and even to vow to become Jews and remain in the land. Endlessly the girls had whispered and confided amongst themselves and restrained each other’s impulses, while Leah exhorted, “Wait till our own boys arrive.” She herself had had difficulties with another great lump of an Australian who came and sat and stared at her and sighed. Even Yaffaleh, always the last to be asked to dance by the foreign soldiers, let herself dream of the time when the Jewish army would arrive; she always pictured them as marching into Rehovot with Josef Trumpeldor at the head, riding on his horse. More she did not dare.

  Detrained in the dusty Arab town of Lud, the men were marching under full pack, but briskly, on homeland soil at last. It was a lengthy march, but as they approached a large army camp across the Jerusalem highway the wave of welcomers surged toward them.

  Nearly four years Gidon had not seen his sisters. With the huggings and blurtings of news and outbreaks of laughter, there was already a sense of resumed connection with Leah, as though never broken, and the sense of some tender, puzzled response to Yaffaleh, now become a stubby, thick-legged girl with heavy, enormous breasts, who could find little to say but kept very close to him. In the midst of recognitions on all sides, Gidon’s eyes kept wandering to catch sight of the girl he had seen on the horse; that Aviva was her name he already knew from Leah, for—as though fatedness had laid a second finger on him—she was indeed one of Leah’s girls.

  “On the horse, yes! She told me she recognized you! I said look for the most handsome …” Leah called out, “Aviva!” and there was the girl in a circle of men, but her eyes at once spoke to Gidon, Wait, wait one moment, it’s you I’m coming to!

  “Leah has all her girls ready to fall in love with you, but I know which one it will be,” said Yaffaleh.

  He gave her another hug. Gidon wished he could say something easy to Yaffaleh, about all the boys falling in love with her, but already there had come a heaviness he remembered from when she was a child. “Isn’t Trumpeldor leading you?” had been Yaffaleh’s first cry just now; it was as though a promise had been broken.

  Again Gidon asked about Mameh, Abba, about Eliza’s baby, he still could not imagine beautiful Eliza married to Nahum the but-terball. And Dvora’s little ones? And Menahem? And all at once Yaffaleh’s eyes met his in such a way that an enormous protective pity welled up in Gidon, and he felt it was for her he had come home. Beyond all the patriotism and Zionism, this sister somehow desperately needed him; though he didn’t understand what it was that was lacking, he must try to help her, if a brother could.

  In this camp, word spread, they would remain only a few days before leaving for the front lines. For months in Egypt they had pressed for it, even the reluctant Bolsheviks had caught the impatience, as though to confront the worst and have it over with. But now Gidon wished there were more time.

  Though dead tired, that same night several of the boys walked with him to Rehovot. Leah’s cabin was a bower of climbing, flowering vines. The girls had put on freshly ironed dresses, and done up their hair. A Victrola played, not the eternal “Tipperary,” but music.

  Aviva sat down with him and his sisters, and soon they had Gidon relating his experiences. At the other end of the room a hora began, a
nd Leah took Yaffaleh to join. Then Aviva unfolded a sheet of paper. “Yaffaleh wrote a poem for your homecoming,” she said.

  “But why didn’t she give it to me herself?”

  Aviva smiled and began reading the poem. It was about the tiniest things of nature that you never noticed, a tiny snail, a pebble pearly with dew, and today each tiny thing glowed to her “for my brother is coming home.”

  On the last words, Aviva lifted her eyes to his, and he knew she was already one of the family, she understood all his tenderness and apprehension for Yaffaleh. The poem brought back a moment long ago when he was sitting by the Kinnereth fishing, and Yaffaleh, a child, plump, her skin always a bit sweaty, suddenly dumped herself into his lap and whispered, “I love you.”

  —Poor Yaffaleh, Aviva was saying, things would be difficult for her, not really because she wasn’t the most beautiful of girls—other girls no better-looking were sought after by men—but because Yaffaleh was over-sensitive. “She doesn’t know how to take things in an ordinary way, everything has more meaning for her. Even if she were a beauty, she would suffer. Perhaps even more.” Aviva had put into words what he felt. They glanced at Yaffaleh dancing in the hora, but the moment the circle broke up, she would be by herself. Again Gidon felt the aching need to help Yaffaleh, but now there was a stronger ache in him, to draw close to this girl beside him and hold her. He wanted to say how from the moment he saw her racing alongside the train on the horse … But Aviva herself started it, laughing—Had he noticed her on the horse?

  And then it was easy, he even said it to her—about his feeling from that first moment, that she was racing right to him! And Aviva only flushed slightly and chattered on, telling him the story of their horse.

  It was the same horse that Zev, the Nili, had used before he was captured. The night before Zev was caught the horse had disappeared, and the next day, strangely, it had come back to them. And then they were talking familiarly of all sorts of questions—the English, did they really mean to give the Jews a state?—“No one will give it, we must make it,” Gidon repeated, and she felt exactly the same. Oh, unquestionably at last she was the one! If only he had a few more days to be near her.

  First they were posted in a shell-pocked khan on a hilltop not far from Nablus, across a valley from the Turks. They extended their barbed wire down the hill, they made night patrols. At eight o’clock each morning a bombardment was received from across the valley; Herschel declared this made him homesick for Achi Baba. Even the schneiders in a few days became so acclimated that they refused to stop their pinochle games in the courtyard to take shelter during the cannonade.

  Sitting on watch, Gidon wrote Aviva letters about the kind of life he wanted one day to live, and here at each mail call it was he who received more letters than anyone! Aviva too wrote about the kind of life she wanted when the war was finished, and she too preferred a farm village, a moshav, to a kvutsa.

  Then they were on the march to new positions. Perhaps something would be starting soon. It was over half a year since the capture of Jerusalem, and there had been no effort to drive the Turks from the rest of the land.

  From Jerusalem they started downward to the Dead Sea. In the pulsing heat of early August, with full packs, they marched on the highway of crumbling earth, keeping their lines widely spaced so that each would not swallow the dust of those ahead. But the dust from their own feet filled their mouths, and blinded them as well. Now and again in the heat haze as you tramped past, a figure was seen fallen to the ground. You passed on, clinging to your own endurance. Your knees must hold and keep you from toppling at least until the descent was finished, at least until the flatland before Jericho.

  —So the Jews wanted to show their mettle? Very well, someone in the command headquarters must have declared with a diabolical delight, he had just the place for the Jews.

  One advantage Gidon knew he had over his comrades: he came from the Jordan valley, he had lived his youth at the other end of this earthen gash that stretched from the Kinnereth to the Dead Sea, his body had been tempered in this furnace. But for four years he had lived in other climates, and his body had changed. And at this end the Jordan valley was far deeper below sea level than at home; the air here was more oppressive, each breath had to be brought in at the command of his will. He could even follow the course of the dry burning air drawn down into his body the way one follows the level of very hot water when dipping gradually into a steaming bath.

  Sweat blinded him, and he was uncertain whether his vision wavered, or whether Herschel on his left was wavering on his feet. Now his companion was missing. Herschel was stretched on the ground. Gidon managed to put a water-bottle to his lips, and though Herschel knew to be careful, he could not stop gulping and Gidon had to pull the canteen away.

  Through the haze the Irishman’s voice came from above where he sat his horse. Gidon had nothing against the Irishman, yet there are times when to a foot soldier the sight of a man on a horse, no matter who he is, brings an automatic revulsion.

  From long before Gidon’s ears were well accustomed to the Irishman’s code regarding his men. “When it comes to my men’s legitimate rights, I’ll fight the whole bloody King’s Army for them, but no soldier in my command can expect to be coddled.” With one glance the mounted commander had satisfied himself that there was nothing serious here. “All right! On your feet! Let’s get on with it!”

  The chaplain too had reined up, and while Herschel’s eyes were still glazed, and Gidon was helping him to rise, the Irishman engaged the rabbi with a display of Biblical erudition. “They say, now, this is the place where Elijah was fed by the ravens, the orbim. That’s Hebrew for ravens, isn’t it? But elsewhere in the Bible, the Rock of Oreb is described as being not here but in Gilead. Now, Gilead was where Elijah was raised, and where he would naturally flee to when he had to hide.”

  The rabbi agreed there might be a contradiction as to the location.

  “Gidon,” the Irishman asked, “as I remember, don’t you come from Gilead? Do you know the whereabouts of the Rock of Oreb?”

  A thousand ravens should eat him, the Biblical scholar! Gidon was loosening Herscheleh’s packstrap, maybe he could manage both packs for a bit. Through the heat-shimmering air more words filtered down. “Now didn’t the old Hebrew tribes name themselves after certain places? Couldn’t there be a tribe named after the Rock of Oreb, where they lived? Wouldn’t that name be Orbim?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the chaplain. “I see what you are getting at.”

  “Exactly,” said the Irishman. “The ravens—the orbim who fed Elijah with meat and bread, couldn’t they have been Hebrew tribesmen called Orbim? Instead of ravens?”

  “Quite a thought,” said the chaplain. And Gidon could have shot the two of them. He had got the pack off Herschel but Herschel, wobbly and dazed, was trying to pull it back.

  Just then the chaplain reached down and lifted the pack, placing it across his saddle. “All right,” Gidon thought. “You’re reprieved.”

  In his mind Gidon found himself already writing about the incident in a letter to Aviva. All the time now he was saving up incidents to tell her, like when a man comes home from labor in the fields, full of things to tell his wife.

  And then he saw himself at home, in the meshek. Only it wouldn’t be as a son on his father’s farm. At long last he must start his own life. Could he get land and begin a meshek of his own? Because of the Balfour Declaration, Jews would be helped to settle more land, and surely the soldiers would come first. Or should he go back and finish learning to be a veterinary? Could he now take the time? A sense of years wasted like this bleak wasteland around him came over Gidon.

  They reached the banana groves of the Jericho oasis, a green island in the engulfing desolation; they drank from the fresh water springs, and moved onward. A new energy came to Gidon. He was now marching homeward! Only a day’s ride up the Jordan valley, if they once broke through, was the meshek and the family.

  Still a
nother day, and they had come as far as the Auja, a stream with live sweet water flowing into the Jordan. Here Australians were encamped, cavalry. Doubtless soon there would be the big attack. Perhaps it was for this the 38th was being brought here. And then it would be over.

  —Not at all! predicted Nathan the Red. They would be sent to Europe, to another front.

  “Impossible!” Tuvia argued. They had enlisted to fight here and here alone.

  “There’s only one way to be sure of that,” Pekovsky said, “and that’s to get yourself killed here. You won’t have to try.”

  Beyond the Auja, they had moved into the desolation of desolation.

  What could nations find to fight over here? Nothingness, emptiness. And were there really men with rifles hidden beyond the yellow ridges, and were there really cannon imbedded behind the emptiness? Even on Achi Baba there had been signs of habitation, ruined houses, stone castles built by men.

  The column turned onto the bed of a dry wady, trudging, automatized; only red-rimmed eyes could be seen in these walking slabs of dust. Further up, a trickle of fluid appeared among the stones of the wady. Despite forbidding commands, men knelt and took the bitter water on their palms, touching it to their thickened parched lips, if only at once to spit out the stinking sulphurous muck. Between high barren chalky walls, they struggled further into the ravine, careful now to stay close under the cliffs, so as not to be seen by the Turks who were said to be entrenched on the opposite heights.