The Settlers

by Meyer Levin

  Singing the whole way, shouting greetings to all they passed on the road, peasants and Red Army men alike, they reached the city and crowded into the opera house. So exhilarating was the atmosphere of the surging, excited mass that, even with the tumult of the ticketless outside, still trying to find a way to get in, even with the pushing and pressing together, it was good. Instead of showing irritation, the crowd raised still higher their wild feeling of a shared fantastic event, an achievement—they were here! The mixture in the crowd of strong-faced workers in their white Sunday blouses, of high ranking officers and plain soldiers hardly distin- guishable from each other, of eager, bright-faced girls with hair freshly washed and braided—with all this there gushed up in Leah a love for Russia, even a momentary nostalgia, an inner cry of joy at the success of the revolution, that only slowly resolved itself back into her own particular world—We too will achieve!

  And as to the program, never had her soul been so entirely drawn out of herself, and yet never had Leah felt her soul so entirely fulfilled, so replete. From the first measured strides of the flame-flowing figure moving toward her, toward each, toward all, toward her alone, Leah was transformed as though she had passed through some instantaneous reincarnation and was a greater being, and that being was moving toward herself, as herself, and yet as the universal soul in triumphant movement toward a victorious humanity.

  She was in a daze. How was it done! It was only a woman walking! How could she ever show it, how could her spirit carry it back to the young people who had not seen this tonight?

  In the moments between the dancer’s different creations, Leah sat in an elated trance. The hall was a-roar with cheering; she too was cheering, shouting bravos—she even joined in excited comments with her young chaverim; such purity, such simplicity, such elemental strength! and how strange it was that this woman, this spirit from America, should be the one to come here to give the perfect expression to the revolution itself. And it was true as to this ample woman, this flowing form, this Isadora Duncan—that in some essence she, Leah, resembled the wondrous dancer, was formed in the same way, of the same creative urge—only how much more harmonious and powerful was the urge of the woman on the stage!

  Through this thought something else was stirring to clarity in her—why people danced before altars, danced before gods, why Miriam, the sister of Moses, danced, why David danced before the Ark; how it was that man, a creature with four limbs that were made as in so many other creatures for useful movements, beautiful and pure as they were in a deer, a horse, how this human creature could take these movements of the same four limbs and body, and seem to free them from the limits of the flesh, to declare the poem of the entire universe through bounds and turns and unlimited combinations, seeming freed even from the fatedness of gravity! And through this woman, Leah knew why she herself in the movements she had found instinctively for her simple festivals had never felt weariness, never felt effort, or heaviness of body, but only experienced a sacred sense of purity when she danced.

  So she was carried, still in this excited mood, into the intermission, when she surged again within the exhilarated mass, and there she encountered Moshe and his wife. She had surely known within herself that he would come here, and with his Kati. In its compressing movement the crowd brought and held them all three together, churning them slowly in the multitude, unable to separate from each other until, in the same churning of the mass, other bodies would momentarily intervene, and the crowd-movement would carry one or the other of them apart … all this, in itself, with the inner rhythm of a dance.

  Their faces, Moshe’s and Leah’s, were directly toward each other as when heads are held gripped by a photographer’s clamp, immovable, and so she exclaimed “Shalom, Moshe!” And against him, a head reaching hardly to his shoulders tilted upward; Moshe introduced his life comrade, Kati, and to Kati he said, “This is Leah, the one I told you about, the emissary who has just come from Palestine.”

  As though in concert with their encounter, a tight inner swirl of the crowd now turned Leah so that she faced toward the young woman. Moshe’s wife’s face was framed in glossy black hair, with a straight part in the center. The eyes were a cool gray, and large, intelligent. Set in a delicate face with very white skin, there was a small, precisely shaped mouth, the lips a trifle thin, but of a surprisingly lively red that gave the whole face, in spite of its intellectual look, a burning sensuality.

  Kati looked indeed the typical woman of the revolution, even a good deal like Nadina at home without her glasses. And Leah was relieved to find in herself no feeling of hostility, or envy, or jealousy toward this woman—only a curiosity. Perhaps it was good that their encounter had come in this way, when she was so filled with the exaltation of the dance, when her spirit was lifted so high that a human entanglement was only of another, a lesser order of life. In this one look at Kati’s face, while the crowd held them inflexibly toward each other, the whole of Moshe’s life was clear to Leah; all that she had only vaguely sensed before had nevertheless been true; he was bound in his union with Kati, he was the weaker, she was the strong one, and so it would remain. It even became clear to Leah that in some way long ago when Moshe had undertaken the mission to return to Russia it must have been in the way she too had brought on for herself such a mission now; he had felt compelled to search out and test a former entanglement, to discover if he could be free of Kati, just as she had needed to search out whether she could be free of Moshe. But all lives are not the same. He had not been free, and she would be free.

  She was not even troubled as to how much about herself, and what, he had told his wife, his life comrade. That was already their affair in their life together. For it was surely clear that Moshe would never “finish his work here” and come back to Eretz.

  The young woman, with her head uptilted, was talking to her of the performance: did Isadora Duncan fulfill all her expectations?

  “Oh, more! It’s immeasurable!” Leah said, and Kati agreed it was an extraordinary experience, a cultural triumph.

  “The most remarkable aspect, as you must have noticed, is the transcendence, the freedom from technique. Moshe tells me you yourself have a talent for the dance, and have even revived a whole Hebrew form of agricultural folk dancing from Biblical times—”

  “Oh, no,” Leah laughed. “I only made up a few little celebrations for our holidays.”

  The head, even in the tightly-packed multitude, bending and tilting upward again, examined, measured Leah’s entire form. Then Moshe had most likely told her everything. “You know, there is something about you like her,” Kati went on, and tilted her head toward Moshe, as though to confirm a description he had given her. Moshe smiled broadly, letting the women talk, and Leah momentarily wondered how it was for a man standing close thus to two women each of whom he had entered. Her thoughts wandered on: it was after all not uncommon, not even unnatural—two wives had lived with Jacob, Rachel and her own namesake, Leah, and even today in Dja’adi among the Arabs—she had once asked this question of the two wives of a villager. The women had come down together to Mishkan Yaacov to work in the potato harvest. It did not trouble them; they had readily explained to her the place of the first wife and the second, and of the children of each. But then what of Kati’s way? When Moshe had arrived there in Irkutsk, hadn’t the story come back that Kati had been the companion of another comrade, and had lived with him, and then decided on Moshe? Could a woman do this, go from the bed of one man to another, and remain whole in her self? But everywhere such changes were made, Leah reminded herself, even in the kvutsoth; she was romantic, naïve. And yet she could not accept it for herself.

  The multitude all at once pressed the three of them against each other and Leah felt a shock of abhorrence. No, she wanted none of such complexities, she yearned for a simple, total union without torment, for a life on the earth, a cleanliness.

  “… But what is most remarkable is the way she moves so easily from the classical ballet to movements
that come directly from ancient Grecian urn-painting, and then to our own Russian folk-dances! And then to what is modern and entirely her own! She is the incarnation of the universal, the international, and even shows us the unity of the human masses throughout all history!” Kati declared, her tilted head turning from one to the other, and even including people close by who were catching her words.

  “It was a miracle that I had the luck to see her before I go back,” Leah said. Let Kati know.

  Now Kati burst out with great sincerity and warmth, on the establishment of a country for the Jews. It was of the utmost importance for the world movement itself, what Leah was engaged in doing—to bring to Palestine young people who would carry forward the world revolutionary movement there, and help make sure that Palestine would not hopelessly fall under the sway of capitalism and imperialism, enemies of the revolution. Also, the real question of the Jewish masses and the liquidation of the age-old pestilence of anti-Semitism, implanted by the reactionary church and the Czars, remained a great task here in Soviet Russia. And Kati tilted her head to Moshe.

  The crowd was now pressing them inward toward the hall, and at one point the mass separated into two streams. Leah was divided from Moshe and his Kati. Her side was slower, and at one moment she glimpsed them again, in the far aisle. The crowd had thinned there, and she caught sight of Kati, a diminutive figure in advance of Moshe, her hand reaching back to him, while his head stretched above the line, turning this way and that. Just for an instant there flashed before Leah an image of a tall-necked camel being led by its driver; then she was ashamed of making fun of Moshe. He meant much to her, after all, and this was like belittling her own self.

  * * * *

  When the concert was over, when she had stood to the very last, applauding and crying “Bis!” calling out for one more, one more encore, she finally let herself be carried along by the crowd to the outside. With the roars of human joy and acclaim and gratitude for the release of their souls still holding her in her trance, Leah found herself with the mass that lingered before the theater as though to cling to their experience, and then she was with the chevreh in the wagon, everyone still talking of what they all had felt. The two wagons were already moving through the streets, the singing had begun; they sang a Red Army song and the Marseillaise and the Internationale, and the clopping of the hooves was a drumbeat to their singing; then, almost as though dutifully, someone started “Hatikvah,” and at the end a girl’s voice said somewhat wistfully, “Who knows when we’ll see such a thing again, as tonight. In Palestine we’ll be far from such experiences.”

  “We’ll build our own opera houses!” one of the boys stoutly declared.

  “Before opera houses we have a whole country to build up,” another proclaimed, like a real chalutz. Then they were singing “Anu Banu Artzah,” and “Yahalili” and homey Yiddish songs and the “Volga Boatman’s Song.” Half-stretched out on the bottom of the wagon among them, legs all tangled together, and as one breathing body with them in the dark, Leah felt at peace. She opened her eyes to the stars. Truly in Eretz the sky was different. Truly it was deeper, more mysterious, more filled with stars. But just the same she might be riding like this in a wagon across the Emek, in a wagon filled with her girls chanting these same songs that had now turned from horas to a more dreamy, wistful tone, “Eliyahu Ha-Navi, Eliyahu Ha-tishbi—”

  And so through the long hours of the night, feeling a peaceful exhaustion, a great cleansing, and a sweetness perhaps like a woman after childbirth, Leah sensed herself being carried homeward, and she drowsed.

  The sky had already emerged into a gray dawn when the wagons turned into the lane toward the manor house, and at once Leah sat erect with a start, and the chalutzim too; one by one, their puzzled questioning faces turned to each other, to her. Had something happened? Was it a smell of ashes, of death that hung over the lane?

  A few snapped branches dangled like broken limbs from the trees. The dirt road was scuffed as by many hooves. Their own horses seemed to balk, and then they were whipped into a run. Several of the boys leaped from the wagons and rushed forward.

  They burst into the silent house, and the others, from the arriving wagons, were already crowding behind them as they stood gaping in the archway of the large salon. A sound, unformed, compounded of sobbing, rage, groans, and something like a death-rattle, choked in their throats. The slaughtered bodies had not even been covered. Four lay there, hacked with swords, Lederman decapitated, and two boys with huge crosses cut in open flesh, and what had been a girl, disemboweled, her head a blood-clotted mass of hair so that at first glance no one was sure, then her sister shrieked “Essie!”

  All the girls were pulled away quickly, outside. In the stench of the befouled room the carcass of a shot horse sprawled half-tangled in the collapsed ruins of the grand piano. A dragpath of blood went through the double doorway and the hall, where the attackers must have taken away some wounded of their own.

  Other chalutzim were found—two on the stairs, Yankel Kollowitz and Stashu Gebinder—they had been on guard, armed with pistols, they must have fought. Leah mounted past them through a debris of smashed mirrors, ripped paintings, broken furniture; in the first sleeping room the dead lay in a cluster as though herded together and chopped down. The door of the baronial bedroom was open; there on the canopied bed was a small form, bloodied strips of ripped clothing streaming away from the flesh. On the naked thighs of poor little Mayana were dried blotches of blood. The small breasts, sliced away, hung by a last shred of skin. Over the face was a large embroidered feather-pillow.

  The clear-eyed young Commissar from the village had already arrived. Seven survivors were in his own house, he said. He had heard shooting soon after midnight, but had arrived too late, and had only been able to take away the survivors, two with saber wounds. One couple luckily had been out in the fields. Petlurists had attacked the house, coming he didn’t know from where—small bands were still active in the area, made up of peasants who then disappeared into their villages. Certainly none were from here.

  The wounded could not tell much more. Suddenly the troop of horsemen was upon them. The outside watchman had been cut down with a saber. Yankel and Stashu had fired from the stairs and hit one or two; the leader on the horse had been killed, they believed. Two girls who slept in the attic had escaped by hiding on the roof.

  The bodies, seventeen in all, were ranged and covered by their comrades. Two members went to Kiev to notify the families of those who were from there.

  At noon came a detachment of Red cavalry. Depositions were taken. Moshe arrived the next morning; he had only learned late at night in Kiev of the massacre. Kati came with him. Several of the parents from Kiev arrived, and from the nearest town with a Jewish cemetery came an elder of the chevrah kadushah, the sanctified burial society. There were hysterical discussions over the burial, but at last it was agreed to bury all the victims together in the town.

  Solemnly and in sorrow, Kati declared to Leah that the Red Army would hunt down the nests of the remaining Petlurists, and that the revolution would root out anti-Semitism even from the Ukraine. Four Red cavalrymen were posted in the manor.

  Leah remained only a few days more with the remainder of the chalutzim until she felt steadied enough to go on with her journey. The sense of mission gave her no rest; she had now to erase the knowledge in herself that the mission had partly been an excuse to find her former lover, and that she had dallied because of her personal problem. Day and night she held sittings with the chalutzim, planning which should start on the way to Odessa, and how they would manage the journey, selecting a responsible one for each group of four, instructing them where to find Menahem. Then she set out on her further journey, saying only a friendly goodbye to Moshe in his office.

  Without rest Leah traveled, wherever she could squeeze her way onto a train, or clamber onto a roof, waiting half the night in one station or another; she found her way even as far as Vilna, found a dozen little groups o
f one sort or another in various towns, here and there a training farm that Trumpeldor had started several months before, and from each place she was sent on to the next. Through her the scattered groups were beginning to link themselves more firmly together. Were they really wanted in Eretz? Could they really enter Palestine now? Would there be work for them?—Yes, yes, come, come, and especially girls, young women, come! She would welcome them onto her own training farm, the movement must grow, they must build a Jewish workers’ land.

  In some areas the young Zionists were already in grave doubt as to how their movement here would fare under the Bolsheviki; in some towns where the hostility of the Bundists was unabated, the chalutzim met her in secret, for who could tell when their movement would be declared illegal?

  At the end of two months Leah started back to Odessa, with six young chalutzoth clustered around her all the way from Minsk, with enough adventures and difficulties and even comedies, with false papers here and flirtations there, with crossings through forests from Red zones to White zones and back again to Red zones; and in the meantime Odessa had been seized by the Whites, and for the last crossing a peasant smuggler took them in his wagon as though they were a bridal party, all dressed up and singing. At last, one fine morning, she marched her girls into the Jewish Defense House where a cry went up, “Leah!” and from every corner young pioneers she had sent on the way flocked to her, relating all their adventures.

  The whole band from the manor rushed to her, theirs was the first claim, she was theirs! At the training farm, they told her, a Red Army commissar had after all discovered that one of the older peasants had called in the Petlurists; they had intended, after killing all the Jews, to seize the manor house and its lands. But recently a large new group of chalutzim had arrived there from Kiev for training. Moshe had sent them. He had been transferred to Kiev itself, to a higher post.