The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  “First,” Tolya declared, “since you undoubtedly will hear of it if you have not already heard, I must tell you that my father was liquidated as a class enemy.”

  “I’ve already heard.”

  “At the time, I was not here. I was fighting on the northern front against Kolchak. However,” he added, as a man who makes no exceptions in the face of truth, “my poor father unfortunately remained to the end a slave of the belief among his type of Jew that you could buy your way out even of historical necessity.”

  She didn’t reply, and as this disposed of the question, Tolya now gave Leah news of the rest of the family: his mother was well and was living in this house as always—Leah would see her presently; a few rooms had been reserved for their use, for he and his wife and children also were housed here. Yes, he had two boys!

  Though curious, Leah did not feel she should ask if his wife was Jewish; however, Tolya let this fact drop out at once, with an ironically understanding smile, as though to say it was merely a happenstance, but that he was in any case quite tolerant of such sentimental remnants of long inculcated but fortunately disappearing tribal atavisms.

  “Well, Leah, you didn’t really make your way back to us on such a difficult journey only to find out what has happened to the family and to your old school friends,” Tolya said with his smile.

  No, naturally, she said, she also hoped to find out what had happened to her friends in the movement. That was to say, her movement.

  Oh, not much was heard of it nowadays, young people were so busy with other things, there was so much that was urgent to do, the revolution had so many enemies. But Zionism was by no means illegal, he said reassuringly; indeed, he had heard that in the Vilna region there was a certain amount of activity.

  —Had he by any chance heard of the whereabouts of Josef Trumpeldor? Some said he had been arrested.

  Tolya laughed his tolerant laugh. Oh, their hero was free, he could assure her. “But what do you want, Leah? He arrives here in the midst of the first phase of the revolution, when we were pressed on every side, when our first need was to get out of the capitalist war, and he talks of raising an army of half a million Jews to march through Turkey and conquer Palestine! After the October revolution I seem to remember some Bundists had him arrested at one moment, but never mind, he was let out almost immediately; he organized the Jewish Self-Defense in Volozhin and I’ll say this for him, they did excellent work against the Whites.”

  Where was he now? Did Tolya know?

  Of this he had no idea.

  As for himself, Tolya had served his exile in Siberia—oh, come to think of it, even there in Irkutsk he had encountered one of her chalutzim, a fellow who had had enough of it and returned to the revolutionary movement—

  Instantly all that Leah had been pretending to ignore in herself was a-clamor, shouting Moshe’s name within her. She even felt she was blushing. Yet she held it all back until after she had asked Tolya about his own years in Siberia, and until she on her side had related, without opening the way to ideological discussions, the story of each of the family in Eretz. And then she even exchanged with him the meager bits of information that each had received through these years about those of the family that had migrated to America. Since the end of the war, Tolya’s mother had received one letter from her sister-in-law in America, carried here by a townsman who had hurried back from the capitalist paradise to become part of the revolution. Aunt Hannah wrote that they owned their own automobile, Tolya snorted. Now Leah asked again about his Siberian days, and about that fellow from Eretz he had encountered, had he perchance been a tall one called Moshe? She was flushing.

  The measuring and recording look had returned to his eyes. “A tall one, yes! The Handsome Moshe they called him!” Her cousin waited an instant for the effect on her, smiling, then added that by another coincidence he had even known this Moshe afterward, in the October days. “He did excellent work.” And it even happened that Comrade Moshe had been sent to this very same region, in the campaign to clean out the Petlura gangs, and if Tolya was not wrong, this Moshe of hers was just now stationed in the town of Pogorna. “You’re not going to try to convert him back to Zionism!” he said with an indulgent chuckle.

  Tolya took her upstairs; her aunt lived in the former bedroom, turned into something of a bed-sitting room, and there she had placed the great samovar. Aunt Minna sat straight as ever; it was from her that Tolya had his eyes of cool judgment, but her cheeks were of a remarkable softness that carried Leah at once homeward to her own mother. It was the look of Jewish women who tenderly hold to their own woman’s wisdom, while they endure uncomplainingly the stupidities and brutalities of a world carried on by men. Now she brought out the letter from America that told of children who were first in their class, and of a growing manufacturing business, and, thank God, a good living, and asked about the dreadful happenings they had heard were falling upon the Jews in the old country, and declared since at last now the Czar was fallen, might his name be blotted from eternity, they all hoped the family had not suffered and hoped for good news, and that one day the whole family might be able to meet again.

  Without Jewish sighs or groans, her Aunt Minna now told of all that had happened to their relatives near and far; once even nodding and declaring that Leah’s mother had after all been the wise one, in taking her children to Eretz Yisroel. This she repeated with a cool side-look at her Tolya; then she added with an air of one acknowledging what was just, that things were better now, for it had to be said for the Bolsheviki that they had made anti-Semitism a crime, and indeed many Jews were high up—on the highest rung Trotsky himself, and Kamenev, and Zinoviev, and this one and that one, and the wife of this one and that one, so Jews no longer had anything to fear from the government. If only her poor husband had listened to their son … And she straightened her back and pressed her lips together and was calm.

  For four days Leah stayed with them, for she could not allow herself to run off to satisfy her foolish longing without first working here on her mission. From one courtyard to another in Cherezinka she managed to thread her way to members of her old-time youth group. So much had happened to each one, how could they have held together? In one or two she encountered a wistful reawakening. But this one could not convince her husband, and that one had aging parents to care for …

  She must look to the younger generation. Only when Leah had managed to gather nearly a dozen lads and girls who listened with wonder to all she told of the communes, and agreed to meet together and study Hebrew with a veteran of the Poale Zion she had unearthed, and to perhaps form their own little kolhoz and practice growing vegetables, did she decide she had good reason to go on to Pogorna, as there had been a lively Young Zionist movement there even in the time of the Czar.

  And to get him off her mind so that she could work wholly on her mission, in Pogorna Leah went directly to find Moshe. He was, her cousin had told her, a commissar of agriculture, organizing collective farms, and the central administration building was readily pointed out.

  At first, Leah decided, she would only get a look at him, just to find out her own reaction. She even had the door to his section pointed out. Then, scolding herself for such juvenility, she decided she would walk directly into that office.

  Just then the door happened to open; Leah heard his voice calling out cheerfully after a pair of young kolhoznicks who emerged laughing. She walked into the room.

  There he sat, the same Handsome Moshe, his black curly hair perhaps slightly receded, his form exuding energy as ever—no sign of Siberian suffering, she saw with relief, or of war injuries —and before she could form more of an impression, he had leaped up, cried out her name, and was embracing her with a full kiss on the mouth, and another, while bursting out to his comrades with a great joyous laugh—she had scarcely noticed there were several more tables in the room—two men and a woman—“Excuse me, comrades! My greatest love has just walked in, returned to me out of the past!”

&nbs
p; The two men chortled broadly; the woman, who was middle-aged, made a pulled-down mouth over the incorrigible Moshe and his many loves, and the Handsome One cried, “No! This is not for the office!” and bundled Leah out of the room, calling back, “I’m going on an inspection!” The men laughed, while the woman comrade groaned as though to say: What can you do with a rascal like that?

  Keeping stride with him down the corridor, Leah already felt a liberation all down the length of her limbs. For always, walking with men of average stature, there was a restraint even on the size of her steps. Beaming sidewise at each other, they still didn’t speak; all there was to say and ask was in such a tumult, the many subjects were like a crowd at a door blocking each other, each trying to get out first, and meanwhile the sheer tumultuous sense of their physical closeness seemed to overwhelm everything.

  “Siberia agreed with you,” she declared.

  “Oh, Siberia, that was a long way back. Before the revolution!” he laughed. She had spoken in Hebrew, he answered in Russian. Doubtless his Hebrew was rusty—how many years had passed?— As though she wasn’t aware!—it was almost as long as the number of years Jacob served Laban— No! what a muddle was in her head—yes, that had been fourteen, and besides the comparison didn’t really fit, no, not at all.

  “We could go to the canteen—” he hesitated. “No, the devil, a restaurant is no place for us to talk.” They were outside the building. He gazed on her afresh, grinning appreciatively. “Leachka! How did you manage to get here!”

  “I came for our women’s movement,” she declared, her beaming face belying her, virtually admitting she had come to find him. “But I couldn’t resist going to Cherezinka to look for my family,” and she told how her cousin had known of him and had got travel documents for her.

  “Oh, Comrade Tolya, oho! With papers from Tolya, you can travel on the Moscow Express!”

  But they still hadn’t really spoken to each other. A dozen times Moshe had been stopped by comrades with problems to straighten out, but now that they were in the open air, he drew her aside, and, as they gazed at each other, she could hardly longer beat back the real question: Was he still with the one from Siberia, was he really married? And whatever the answer to that question, she had also to know from within herself now that she was near him again—was she forever fated, or not?

  “I know!” Moshe cried. “I know where we will go!”

  He called to a guard near the entrance. In the sentry-box, the soldier picked up a telephone, giving the crank a few turns, and she heard him tell a Comrade Anatol to bring the machine for Comrade Mitya. Naturally Moshe would have taken a party name.

  “You are high up!” she laughed. “An automobile!”

  “I have to do field work,” he chortled, the old Moshe who always managed to arrange things.

  “And all this time you couldn’t send me a letter?” She couldn’t stop beaming, and it was not really a reproach.

  “The Czar allowed me one letter a month, so I wrote home.”

  The recollection of the first touching letter from his mother swept upon her. “Only from your mother we knew you were arrested. Moshe, she wrote to me so tenderly. Your parents are all right?”

  “All right,” he replied matter-of-factly. “Luckily Father didn’t do anything foolish and I was able to get him legitimized as an expert in hides.”

  The automobile, a battered but meticulously polished vehicle with a patched top, halted before them, and they squeezed into the back. Moshe gave instructions.

  “Where are you taking me?” she laughed.

  “On your mission!” he laughed back, but would tell her no more, and as he settled into the seat, their thighs molded as one, and she felt Moshe’s arm pressed by their closeness against the side of her breast.

  They turned their faces to talk to each other; instead their mouths met, and in the sensation it was as though layer after layer of longing dissolved away within her, as though the prolongation of the contact of their lips was in itself a necessity, a part of the intervening years of separation dissolving away, like a lump of sugar held in your mouth the old Russian way while the tea seeps through and dissolves it, and this must be given a certain length of time.

  The vehicle had already passed through the town into the open flat countryside where stacks of reaped grain stood at intervals. A quaint notion came to Leah—in the land of the proletarian revolution, she and her lover had met to kiss in a motorcar driven by a chauffeur!

  How long was it since she had thought of anything so light-heartedly!

  Simultaneously they broke off the kiss. Now they could delay questions no longer. —And the revolution? she asked. —And the chevreh in Eretz? Moshe asked.

  And when Moshe started describing the revolution, how even with Kerensky the prisoners had at once flocked back from Siberia, she had to keep interrupting, “But you. You got to St. Petersburg and then? Where did you live?” She still could not make herself say “with whom?” And why didn’t he himself speak of that part of it? Perhaps after all that part with his Kati had ended? Perhaps after all it was unimportant?

  On her side, Leah told of how it had been for the chaverim, Dovidl and Avner deported, Galil and Nadina sent off into exile in Turkey’s own Siberia, leaving their child in the collectiva—

  “They have a child?”

  “And you?” It had come out of her.

  Yes. He had a little boy— And they gazed at each other with faces that said, we are mature. We must be honest with each other.

  “I will admit to you when I first found out you were in Siberia, I was about to leave Eretz and go there to join you, Moshe. And then I heard you had a chavera there already.”

  His hand covered hers with an honest, friendly grasp. “Leah, I would a thousand times have preferred if it was you that came to me there.” And, “But you know I am not the kind of man who can remain long without a woman.” She did not draw away her hand. Then he inquired, “And you?”

  Instead of replying, Leah asked, “And she?” Coyness was not in her, but she could not leave herself altogether helpless by at once telling him the truth about herself. And it would be as though she were making a claim on him by revealing her long chastity.

  “She?” Moshe repeated.

  “The one who came to you in Siberia, isn’t she the one you knew even long before in Odessa? And she is now the mother of your son.”

  “Yes,” he said, still holding her hand and gazing frankly at her, “Kati. She and the boy are in Kiev. Kati is in the housing administration.”

  “And so you are married.”

  Still keeping his eyes on her, Moshe nodded. “We registered our union.”

  “And you still have to do with other women, the Handsome Moshe,” she remarked, as over an old friend’s inevitable foibles. But even while she concluded it was finally broken between them, an image came to Leah of a broken candle still held together by its wick, and who knew, if lighted it might even be melted whole again. Moshe had nodded to her last question as well, a helpless wicked boy; it was as though to her alone, not even to his wife, could he show himself, as though they two had a truly profound understanding that engulfed more than a past sexual episode.

  His marriage seemed somehow to recede into another such sexual matter, not much deeper than the rest, and perhaps leaving open for them the profound relationship that went beyond.

  To Leah it was as though her soul were passing through a swift series of adjustments, of comprehensions, beginning with the simple self-accusation, “But, foolish one, you knew perfectly well that Moshe couldn’t have remained alone and unattached. And even before you started on this journey you knew that you had to meet him, not so much to find out his own condition, whatever that might be, but to find out in what way and how deeply you were still bound to him. In coming this far, you already admitted that even his being married might not release you. So now you have arrived at this point and you must find out what remains.”

  “And you?” Moshe
repeated. “I thought of you often and much in these years, Leah, and I am not saying this only to please and to appease you. Nor will I pretend that I never also remember other girls, from before. There are some that I remember with great fondness and joy, as I hope they remember me, even if they are married and faithful to their husbands. But when I thought of you, it wasn’t always so much of our love-making, though, truthfully, Leah, and I don’t ask what other experiences you had, but what happened between us was as good as ever happens between a man and a woman. At least my philandering serves for me to tell you this. But with you it wasn’t only sexual memories, it was all sorts of things. In the kvutsa once, the time your face was covered with smoke and smudges from cooking over the stones, and you screamed at us in a real fury, a real Chaimovitch rage, that the kvutsa once and for all had to buy a stove! And the boys were so terrified, they agreed so quickly that you burst out laughing, and said it didn’t matter, you didn’t want it!”

  He chuckled softly, as though all that in Eretz had been his true life, and she had been the center of it.

  “So you don’t really intend to come back?” she said.

  The same honest gaze as before met her eyes. “I can’t say, Leah. Something within me keeps believing that one day I will go. Sometimes it is as though I am hearing someone relate the story of my life, and I hear them say, ‘And then Moshe suddenly gave up all he was doing and went back to Eretz to look for his chavera, Leah—’”

  She laughed at his playacting. “You see, instead it was Leah who came to look for you.”

  “No, truly it might have been the other way—” Was he again only the charmer, Handsome Moshe who said to each girl what she wanted him to say to her? He went on, “Leah, as for my life with Kati and Volya, I can tell you it is not fundamentally this that holds me here. Well—perhaps Volya—”