THE SETTLERS

Scarcely had Yankel returned with Gidon to their farm to complete the harvest, when the head of the administration of settlements for the whole of the Galilee, the Baron’s overseer, Jacques Samuelson himself, arrived in a carriage with the new kaymakam of Tiberias, a Young Turk hardly young, and so enormously fat that the carriage body leaped up on its springs when he heaved himself out. But after the visit of the Belly, as Azmani Bey was promptly dubbed, the long-established lone gendarme folded up his tent and decamped. In a blaze of effort, Kramer brought in more workers and set every man to completing the roofs; tiles went up in a chain from hand to hand, and, aside from a lock on the door and glass in the windows, the Chaimovitch house, the first, was ready to be lived in even before the High Holy Days. From the hut by the river Yankel and Gidon brought up the huge trunk, the bedding, the pots. And then Yankel rode up to Sejera to fetch the family.

Different enough from a year ago. His own wagon, his own mules, and now he was bringing the family to his own house.

They kept running in and out of the house, the front door, the back door—as though there was more to be discovered, as though they had not themselves placed each stone rising on the walls. Still, a person entered, and there was a room on one side and a room on the other. In the rear of the right-hand room was an innovation, for, as water was ample here, a well had been dug for each house, and in addition to the pump in the yard, there was in the back corner of this room, a sink with a smaller hand-pump. Schmulik had to be stopped from continuously demonstrating the inside pump or the whole house would have been flooded.

This would be the room of the parents with the new baby, Mati. In the front part would stand a real table with chairs. Expansively, Yankel consented to the purchase of the table and as many as six chairs—very well, even eight—in Tiberias, with the very last, he swore, of the gold napoleons he had brought with him. There might be just enough money for a bed also; let Feigel once more have a real bed to lie on, he said, though his grown daughters snorted that he too would share in this luxury.

For the other room a mirror was needed, little Eliza insisted, and she wheedled and whimpered until Feigel brought out a few coins knotted away in one of her kniplach, the last one, she said. But then Yankel declared no, let her keep her coins, he would find money himself somewhere to pay for a mirror for his daughters.

Now Eliza demanded that a curtain should divide this second room; she had had enough, she declared, of telling her brothers to turn around when she was dressing and undressing. At this, a hoot and a howl burst from Gidon and Schmulik, the younger one running wildly behind her and ruffling up her skirts, while she shrieked and chased him, with Dvora and Leah still convulsed over her airs. The brother and sister rolled on the new tile floor, pummeling each other until Eliza suddenly leaped up, demanding with haughty dignity, “Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!” and Schmulik, somehow intimidated, backed off, though with a final growl, “Girls stink,” that made Feigel give him a light slap across the mouth. It was all due to the excitement of the new house. Ordinarily, thank the Above One, her children were decent.

The great trunk was put into this room. While Leah stayed on to help arrange the house, the room was indeed crowded, so a bed was made every night for Yaffaleh on two chairs in the parents’ room. As soon as they were settled, Leah said, she would return to the kvutsa, but first she would put in a large vegetable garden. And each morning she clumped out to her labor.

Not only did she plant early-ripening tomatoes and carrots, peas, cucumbers, cabbages, radishes, lettuce and her faithful eggplant, but also, in front of the house as well as in window-pots and even in an ancient hollowed-out black stone that Reuven brought down one Sabbath from his place of ruins, Leah planted an endless assortment of flowers, so that there would always be some in bloom. From everywhere she brought seeds and bulbs and cuttings; even when Yankel drove with the whole family to Tiberias to buy the furniture, Leah managed to encounter an eccentric Englishwoman who had come to live in Christ’s Galilee and was delighted to give the big Jewish girl plants and seeds from her heavenly garden of roses and lilies.

Little Yaffaleh caught her sister’s flower-planting fever, and together the giantess and the chunky small girl would wander the shore of the Kinnereth for rare wildflowers to transplant, or, while alone, watching her growing flock of geese, Yaffaleh would suddenly perceive a blossom half-hidden beneath a rock and carefully dig it out to take home to Leah. Once in the middle of a burning hot day Yaffaleh even left her geese, to rush breathless to her big sister, her hands cupped around a wild orchid of such hues that Leah seized her and hugged and kissed her. By every law of horticulture the plant should not have lived, but twenty times a day the big and little sister knelt over it and petted the earth around it, and Schmulik even jeered that he saw Yaffaleh kissing the flower and whispering to it, until the fragile roots took hold.

A grape arbor too was put in, and from Yavneh, Kalman the Drayman brought a young fig tree, the gift of Yona Kolodnitzer from whom Yankel had bought, at last, a true Holland calf. Then Gidon carried down from the Arab village the seedling of a carob tree, that in a future year would spread wide branches to give them shade, and sweet pods to chew on.

Meanwhile Feigel herself made a demand and even declared that, like the chalutzoth of Sejera, she would stop cooking and conduct a strike, unless once and for all, now that Yankel’s first crop was in and the grain was sold and they had a house, she was provided with a true oven to bake in, instead of an earthen taboon that choked her with smoke, and in a strong winter rain melted away in the yard.

There was in Mescha a settler who had built for himself a true Russian oven inside his house, the sort that one slept atop of, in the old country. No use to tell her that in the heat of this place the entire house would become a sweat bath. Good, then Tateh would have his sweat bath! Feigel retorted.

In the end, Josef Idelson, brother of Shlomo Idelson from whom Yankel had bought his mules, came from Mescha with a wagonload of tiles, and remained with them for a week while Gidon helped him build the oven. Half of the back wall was removed and the room extended outward to accommodate the structure. The oven was even given a facing of decorative tiles made in Nazareth, that glowed with yellow and green intricacies. And the cholent that issued from this real stove on a Sabbath, when they sat on their real chairs around a proper table, a cholent made with sweet carrots already from their own garden, eaten with chaleh baked from the grain of their own fields, made Feigel declare, “Now we have become human beings again.”

But a change of some kind was coming over her Big Leah, the mother saw. Though the girl was cheerful and full of song as ever, Feigel sensed that Leah in some way was letting go of herself as a young woman. She had always eaten with good appetite, but now she ate enormously; she was always clumping back into the house and was even careless about dirtying the floor while she took herself a thick slice of bread and butter, like some growing boy, like Schmulik before going out to help Gidon in the field.

The waistbands on Leah’s skirts had to be let out, and the tie-cords on her petticoats were hardly long enough now, so that the knotted ends were hard to undo, and sometimes, because of her thick fingers, Leah had to ask Eliza to unfasten her. She was still such a young girl, hardly twenty, so lively with her comrades—it pained Feigel to watch Leah sitting in the evenings with Schmulik over the endless games of dominoes that the boy liked to play until he was half-asleep at the table.

Surely it would be livelier for her at the kvutsa: the communa was growing in numbers and there were still three men for every girl. Another communa was starting too, farther along by the lake. But Leah lingered at home.

For Dvoraleh, Feigel would still not have thought about a man—a length of time had first to pass; yet the bereaved girl from day to day seemed in better equilibrium than her sister. It was Dvora rather than Leah now who tended to little Mati, with his weaning and his diapers, though Big Leah at every free moment would fondle him and cluck over him. Dvora also was seriously learning to cook, to bake bread and strudel, for with the new oven baking was a pleasure. From Sejera she had brought chicks hatched in the incubator, and already she had a fine new flock, which she was feeding according to a book from America; she had actually, by herself, puzzled out how to read English. Between all these tasks with which she occupied herself, Dvora seemed to Feigel much like a young housewife in the old country whose husband has gone to America, and who tends her baby and her home, waiting; it would be unseemly as yet, Feigel felt, for Dvora to be exposed to young men, to go visiting the kvutsoth. But Feigel did not fear for the girl. The time would come when a man would take his place in her life. Only for Leah was she troubled, and one evening, when Schmulik had fallen asleep over their game, and Leah had gone out into the yard to breathe in the night for a moment, as she said, Feigel went out to her.

“Leahleh,” she asked softly, “are you still longing for that one?” Let his name be erased from eternity, let him sit there in Siberia until ice froze over him!

It was the truth and not the truth. If he were to appear, perhaps despite everything she would go to him. But what she truly feared was that somehow the femaleness in her might make her give way to another, since not to him. Some nights, and sometimes even in the midst of the day, there came over her body such a longing, such a hunger for a counterpart, that she feared if she were among men, she would become like a certain chavera who was talked of, who went about lying with one man or another, no matter who—to give the chaverim surcease she pretended, but perhaps really to give herself surcease.

“Why don’t you go sometimes on a Friday evening to the kvutsa?” Feigel said. “On Erev Shabbat they have liveliness there, it would be good for you.”

“You needn’t worry so for me, Mama,” Leah said. “Perhaps I’ll soon go back to the kvutsa.” And then she added, “A family is a little kvutsa too.”

Then the settlement itself became livelier. One fine day, a whole group of Roumanian settlers arrived, with their leader, the same Issachar Bronescu who had last winter inspected the site. Leading a long caravan, he brought three wagonloads of possessions of his own, topped by his richly dressed plump wife, and four children, the eldest a boy of thirteen—who could tell, perhaps even a prospective groom for Eliza!

Behind the three wagons of Issachar Bronescu came a dozen others, each loaded high with bedding, trunks, and articles of furniture, truly an exciting sight. All Jaffa was empty of wagons, declared Kalman the Drayman; never before in the land had such a huge caravan been organized.

At the entrance to the settlement stood Kramer with Jacques Samuelson himself to welcome the newcomers, but it was Yankel Chaimovitch who had been designated to come forward with bread and salt, and Feigel and her daughters had laden a long outdoor table with a veritable feast, offering milk to the children, and cool, refreshing lebeniyah to everyone, while the men were offered a l’chayim; on the table were herrings and cheeses, including the salty goat-cheese that Feigel had learned to make from the Arabs, and pickles and radishes, sliced onions, slabs of her own butter, loaves of fresh bread, and plates of sesame cookies that she and Dvoraleh had baked in the oven.

These were the first ten families: others were coming in a week, in time for the holidays. All the householders were of a younger age than Yankel and Feigel, with children ranging up to fourteen, but most of them only just ready to begin cheder. They had indeed brought their own melamed, a youngish one with a clipped beard, and he was a shochet too. Before a week was over, Issachar Bronescu had got the melamed to start the cheder going, and had also opened his general shop with household supplies, having fetched more wagonloads of goods from Tiberias—pails and farming tools and whole kegs of nails, oil lamps and extra glass chimneys, kerosene, and all manner of things that a settler or his wife might have forgotten to bring from Roumania.

The settlers were mainly from the region of Kluj; some had been merchants of the smaller variety, no better off than Yankel himself, as he reasoned it; one had dealt in hides, another had helped his father who sold spirits to the peasants—decent Jews, each with enough savings to get him through the first year, and perhaps even the second. Everything had been carefully planned and prepared, but none of them had ever been a farmer. A hundred times a day the men came to Yankel with their questions, put as though in truth they really knew quite a bit but were only inquiring about local conditions: what was best to plant first, and was it advisable to buy a calf or a cow, and how much should a farmhand be paid—a chalutz, naturally, not an Arab—though if an Arab was hired to do a little additional labor, how much for example? And their women flew in and out of Feigel’s kitchen from morning to night, with half of them borrowing the use of her oven to bake in.

Yet, except for all such contacts as these, in which the older family of the community was glad to help the newcomers, there soon came a separateness between the Chaimovitches and the Roumanians. Yankel had always distrusted Roumanians, and here it was his fate to have fallen among them. They borrowed implements which they did not return until four times reminded. The women, Feigel said, ran in to borrow a cup of flour, a few onions, and to bring anything back seemed unknown to them. How could you ask back a cup of flour? Some of the householders came to Yankel for advice and then went off and did the opposite. So why did they have to bother him? Also the newcomers would stroll around his parcel of land and study his house as though he had stolen in before them and seized all that was best. Or else it was as though they, having organized the entire affair of the settlement and applied for the land and arranged with the Baron’s office and the Zionist office for everything, had done him a favor in letting him slip in and benefit from all their efforts!

Of the malaria that the whole Chaimovitch family had got into their blood here, of the year of kadahat and death they had suffered while planting eucalyptus trees to protect the whole settlement, these fine Roumanians seemed to understand nothing. Besides, devotedly observant Jews though they professed to be, Yankel caught sight of one and another of them smoking on the Sabbath. “Let the kadahat take the lot of them!” Yankel grumbled.

“Nu, nu,” Feigel soothed him, “they have just arrived. It is hard for them, even though they have it so much easier than it was for us. And here they see that you already have a fine meshek and harvested fields, while their land is covered with stones. So it is only natural for them to be envious. Still, for the children, for all of us, it is better now, it is livelier to be living among people. You have a shul to go to, and the children a school.”

It was true; he had long ago fallen off from praying with the Yemenites; that had been only a curiosity, for their ways were too strange for him, and now the synagogue at the end of the open street, with the schoolroom attached to it, made a man feel at home, even if there was a Roumanian twang in the prayers. For the children too it was better, though Schmulik, while there was no cheder to go to, had done many things around the farm.

It was better, though Schmulik did not agree, having now to be shut up every day again, like in Cherezinka. Not only boys were in the schoolroom, but girls as well, since the melamed considered himself “enlightened,” and the Roumanians too had an “enlightened” outlook. So Yaffaleh had to pen up her geese every morning while she went off with Schmulik and Eliza to the study-house. The melamed would teach not only the Torah, Issachar Bronescu had declared, but such emancipated subjects as geography and arithmetic and even physiology. And he would teach in Hebrew, certainly in Hebrew, for were they not true Zionists!

Before a week had passed, Leah caught sight of Schmulik one morning running toward the river. She called to him; he ran faster, but at last halted for her to reach him. In a rage, he held out his palm for her to see the rising welt. The melamed!—But for what?

For what? In a sputtering mockery, Schmulik imitated a singsong recitation in their foreign-sounding Ashkenazic Hebrew. “That’s how we are supposed to learn. He doesn’t even know how to talk our own Hebrew here in Eretz!”

True, the accent was the old-country Hebrew such as Tateh used in his prayers. That could soon change. But the rod was something else! Leah marched back with Schmuel to the school. Already she had been upset to find that the girls were sent home two hours earlier than the boys. Girls needed less education, it appeared, according to this enlightened instructor who used the rod of the old-country cheder! Somehow Leah’s irritation increased on the way, as they passed yard after yard, and she saw that not a spade had been turned, though she had urged the Roumanian women to start to raise their own vegetables. Since Arab women came down every day with their baskets of eggs and greens, this seemed enough for the newcomers. Leah could already see that it was not a new life they would make here, but the old one, with peasant women coming to the door to sell all that was needed. As she neared the school, she could hear the singsong recitation. What Schmulik said was true—it sounded just like in the cheder in Cherezinka.

The melamed turned and saw her form filling the doorway. Reb Hirsch was an immaculate man; he wore a silken yarmulkeh and, even in the heat, his long alpaca coat. With his clipped beard uptilted, he had an air of self-esteem.

“Do you want to teach them yourself, Miss Chaimovitch?” He held out his pointer to her, the same one surely that had come down on Schmulik’s palm.

“This is exactly what we don’t need!” she cried. “We in Eretz don’t teach by beating!”

“Nor do I,” the melamed replied quite calmly, still using the odd Ashkenazi diction. He turned to the class. The room was quite orderly, the boys sitting in the front rows, the girls in back. Most of the children had been his pupils in the old country; they were looking on with enjoyment. “Nor do I,” Reb Hirsch repeated, “except when it comes to savages who unfortunately don’t understand anything else.” Now came a burst of laughter from the class.

All at once, it came over Leah that Schmulik had indeed been running wild. His only friends had been two Arab boys from Dja’adi, who tended a small flock of goats, and with them he swam, wrestled, climbed, explored caves.

“A quiet word, perhaps?” Reb Hirsch approached, and feeling herself awkward in the doorway, Leah retreated to give him room; in the entry, the teacher revealed to her that Schmulik had mocked him, and hurled a book at his back. As to the melamed’s brand of Hebrew, “I am aware, gveret, that the Sephardic accent has been adopted in Eretz; as in all things, it will take a little time to change our ways. I am, as you see, attached to tradition, but also somewhat emancipated; I have not come here to impose the old ways on the new.”

He really was not bad at all. Indeed he had cultural ideas. A great event was coming to their village at the end of the holidays, with the visit of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik to the new settlement—could she not do something cultural, perhaps with a group of girls? the melamed asked. Somehow Reb Hirsch had heard of her harvest dance at Sejera.

Though Leah had barely more than a week to prepare, she enlisted six of the Roumanian girls, besides Eliza, and in secrecy rehearsed a surprise. The idea had come to her from watching Yaffaleh with her geese. Eliza would be the proud mother floating with her neck arched, and the other girls her brood. All in white. And then at the end they would all chant a famous poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik, “To a Bird,” and there would be a presentation of flowers.

The girls were as excited indeed as a flock of birds, but when the movements had already been learned, it was clear that Eliza was too small to represent the mother-goose. Eliza herself saw it—she would look ridiculous, she declared to Leah. And as by a single thought, all the girls together cried out that Leah herself must be the mother. Leah demurred. How would she look, a big fat cow among the slender little girls? People would laugh. But the girls clung to her and insisted; she looked so beautiful when she showed them the movements, they said. After Leah had tried to get Dvora to do it, and Dvora had proven absolutely unable to manage the little stretching movements with the neck, she at last gave in and took the role.

Arriving with a whole party of dignitaries in a fleet of three carriages, the poet, a portly man of serious appearance, with a large imposing head, apologized that he had only a brief time to spend at their settlement, as he had yet to move onward to the kvutsoth. Then as Issachar Bronescu’s welcoming speech went on and on, it seemed there would be no time for the “cultural program.” Except for the disappointment this would be to her girls, Leah was almost glad. But the speech ended in time after all, and Bronescu’s eldest son, Tsutsig, who played Mendelssohn on the harmonica, began their accompaniment.

Leah, in a full white robe made from an abaya, which she feared would bring laughter, moved forward, with the little girls in their floating white tulle costumes moving behind her.

No one had yet laughed. Then when Leah turned her head this way and that, stretching it in the movements that were meant to make them laugh, the laughter came. She could have hugged the whole crowd! Now moving sedately, she chanted the poem’s first line, and the soft voices of the girls rose behind her in response.

Singing, singing, O my birdling,
Sing the wonders of the land
Where spring forever dwells …

Falls the dew like pearls on Hermon
From the snowy heights descending
Tearlike, does it fall?

Leah, the girls, and then everyone turned their heads toward the snow-topped Hermon. Like a prophecy was the poem, heard here!

How fare Jordan’s shining waters
How the hills and how the hillocks
And the mountains all?

And the laborers my brothers,
Have not those who sowed with weeping
Reaped with song and psalm?

Oh that I had wings to fly with,
Fly unto the land where flourish
Almond tree and palm!

At the end, as the goslings all clustered close around her as though under her broad wings, there was a great burst of applause, and she was sure she heard the voice of Bialik himself crying “Bravo!”

The poet came forward and took her hand in both of his. He asked her name. Then he declared, “Leah, you are a living poem, and each of your girls is a verse of song!”

It was more wonderful than the harvest dance in Sejera. But all was not yet over; the gift was yet to be presented. The flock of girls floated to one side, and Yaffaleh Chaimovitch stepped forward. On this day, with white bows in her long braids, and in a pink dress with ruffles that Feigel had made for her, Yaffaleh looked only as awkward as other little girls look in their clumsy stage. Her face alight, she carried a huge bouquet and presented it to the poet with the words, “Twenty-seven different kinds of flowers grown in our own gardens.”

The beaming poet was so affected that many said they saw him brush tears from his eyes. “Twenty-seven blessings,” he said, “on the daughters of Mishkan Yaacov, who have garlanded my visit with beauty.”

Feigel, holding Mati in her arms, and with Yankel beside her, heaved such a proud sigh of nachess that the poet recognized her as the mother and came over, offering his felicitations, even declaring yes, yes, he had already heard of the Chaimovitch family, heard great things, and he was sure much more would be heard of them!

On a Thursday, toward sundown, a visitor rode up to the Chaimovitch yard. Dvora was the first to see him, but she did not on the instant recognize Menahem. He was even darker, his eyes were more impenetrable than ever, though when he spoke his Shalom to her, they glimmered with a golden touch of warmth, like a kerosene flame in a dark corner.

Menahem had come for her, Dvora felt at once, but she gave herself no recognition or response to this feeling. “Shalom, Menahem,” she said. “It’s a long time since we saw you.”

He had gone to live with a tribe of Bedouin in the south, he said, so as to learn something of their ways, as well as to learn to speak Arabic.

Gidon and Tateh were just coming in from the fields; it seemed to Dvora that Menahem must have calculated to arrive at this hour, and as they all went into the house, the entire family greeted him warmly. Yet Feigel had to persuade him to stay for the meal, for he was really on the way to the kvutsa, Menahem said. “But at least you must take something in your mouth,” and so he sat down with them.

There was an important meeting at the kvutsa, Menahem said, for at last the men of the Shomer were going to establish their own settlement, and it was from Reuven’s kvutsa, now called HaKeren, that they planned to set forth. All the chaverim and chaveroth would be coming, a whole crowd, to help the Shomer’s settlement get started in its first days. Suddenly he declared to Dvora and Leah—not to Dvora alone—“You must come too!” And then—to Dvora—“We are even bringing an incubator!”

For the rest of the meal, Menahem talked more to Gidon than to anyone else, relating things he had learned among the Bedouin. For example, he explained how, by examining a camel’s track, they could tell you the age of the beast and with what he was laden. He told how by their tribal laws the test of fire on the tongue was still used to know if a man was telling the truth; he had himself seen it administered, and there was a degree of effectiveness in it, perhaps because a guilty man’s mouth became dry out of fear. And other such things he talked of. Then he had to leave; he took messages for Reuven, and repeated that Dvora and Leah should come to the founding, Galil and Nadina had sent their greetings and wanted the girls to come.

“He is a strange one,” Leah remarked, as though to begin a discussion, but Dvora felt no need to talk of him.

There were over thirty chaverim now at HaKeren and several new cabins had been built. The old stone relic was used only as an eating and meeting place.

In the compound just now, there were a number of wagons, and several tents had been put up, for the whole of Sejera seemed to have arrived, preparing to go out and found the new settlement of the Shomer at the foot of Mount Gilboa.

When Dvora and Leah reached the kvutsa, most of the chevreh were inside at a sitting which it appeared had been going on all day and night. Up at the front table sat Galil and Nadina, and there also was Reuven, who for the moment was chairman, while Max Wilner was secretary. An expert, a Professor Bodenheimer from Berlin, Leah already had heard, had been brought by the Zionist office to help with the formation of the new cooperative settlements. There he stood, wearing a suit with a collar and necktie, answering questions about his “plan.” But each question was a long rambling speech, and Reuven didn’t feel he should cut short a chaver, so that when slow-speaking Shimek began one of his dissertations, repeating what everyone already knew, it was Nadina who broke in, asking him first to wait for the Professor’s replies.

It seemed that the expert had devised an entire cooperative system, more perfect than what had been learned in the experiences of the first kvutsa. The new system was to be a complex structure in which each member shared equally up to a certain point, but beyond that there were special rewards for excellence in production. But all this applied only to the men, and Nadina was outraged. “What about women?” the Firebrand raised her eternal outcry. “Are we chattels?”

For the women the professor proposed a separate cooperative of their own which would undertake, on contract with the watchmen’s cooperative, to operate the kitchen and laundry, the poultry run and perhaps the dairy.

In the midst of the dispute over this, someone interjected, “What about the members with aged or sick parents in need of aid? Shouldn’t such chaverim receive special allowances? Shouldn’t the principle be ‘To each according to his needs’?” And the hubbub became so great that Reuven put his hands to both ears, while Max Wilner took the gavel from him and banged on the table.

Going outside, Dvora caught a glimpse of Menahem; he was sitting on a bench with the weary air of one who had heard it all and knew the outcome and would re-enter only when the palaver was over, and things needed to be done. He was telling a newly arrived chalutz about the Bedouin, and Dvora had a feeling that Menahem even raised his voice for her to hear. “They wanted me to remain,” he was saying. “The sheikh offered me one of his daughters for a bride and even without bride money.” Isn’t it an offense to refuse? “I told him my choice was already made among my own people, and that with us a man has only one wife.”

They marched out from HaKeren on Sunday morning, a whole column of them, singing. Ahead rode Galil and both of the Zeira brothers in full regalia, with crossed bandoliers and streaming head-cloths. Some forty chaverim marched along, and a dozen chaveroth, the men and many of the girls with mattocks over their shoulders. Then came wagons carrying plows, fodder, tents, large milk-canisters filled with tea, sacks of bread, huge baskets of cucumbers and tomatoes, pails and washtubs and a helter-skelter of axes, saws and building materials. Rahel had appeared from Jerusalem—would she miss such an occasion—though Avner could not come. She strode along with Leah and Dvora, singing and chattering. Menahem, among the mounted, rode by, back and forth along the column; each time he smiled down to them and waved, but he seemed preoccupied. When a stop was made for a meal, he appeared and sat with them amidst a group of chaverim, yet paying Dvora no particular attention. It was as though everything that would happen must happen, but as yet he still left her free.

Before sundown they reached the site, above a rill of water at the foot of Mount Gilboa; Ain Harod, the spring was called, and each began to repeat to the others that this was the historic spring where Gideon had tested his warriors, watching as they knelt to drink, discarding those who knelt with their mouths to the stream, vulnerable to attack, and taking only those who raised the water in their cupped hands, while eyeing the plain warily.

The eyes of the settlers too were on the plain. Their apprehension was for fever and swamp. But how open, how vast was the flatland. And what a sky! This they repeated to each other while some put up tents, and others began to chop away the tangle of high brambles from the ground where the yard would be; still others, with the eager explanation that no one ever knew what the Turks might get into their wooden heads to claim against you, hitched mules to four plows and went out to make long furrows in every direction.

Menahem had a special task. With Galil he rode across the neck of the plain toward a mound that rose up from the flatness, a tel—some said these hillocks were places where ancient villagers for centuries had dumped their offal, since Arabs did not make use of it as manure. Others said they were the sites of the ancient villages themselves, covered with the dust of the ages. Near the tel, the riders came to a cluster of black tents belonging to Bedouin who encamped here every spring. It was Menahem’s task now to conduct the greeting of peace.

It was for this, after the troubles in Sejera last year, that he had been sent off on his mission, following a sitting at which he himself, in anguish over the death of Yechezkiel, his closest friend, had cried out, “To be strong—good; to take revenge—we must be ready when necessary. But we have come here to live, not to kill and be killed. And what do we know of these people? Why don’t we learn their ways, and their language, and how to live in the same land with them?”

Galil had backed Menahem’s view, pointing out that although a few such attempts had haphazardly been made and a few adventurers had gone out among the Bedouin, an orderly approach to the problem was now a necessity. And so Menahem had been assigned to the task. It was not so much the settled villagers as the Bedouin who were the raiders and attackers—that must be understood; even the bandits of Fuleh were only a generation away from the life of the tents, Ostrov the Landbuyer pointed out, and with Ostrov himself, Menahem had journeyed down to Gaza, to the house of a notable who welcomed the Landbuyer as a brother. From there, after a few days of hospitality, Menahem had ridden off alongside a son of the notable to a mud-hut village near Beersheba, linked to the same family. After a time there, he had gone into the Negev region to herdsmen in their tents, living with the sheikh, also of the same clan. All this had been slow, and, Menahem would admit to Galil and some others, mostly tedious. Though as to tedium, he had found himself drifting back into a state of tranquillity that he had learned to attain in long voyages as a seaman.

He had gone out with the herds and learned something of sheep and goats, he had sat through hours of small talk about weather-signs, and accounts of remarkable feats of horsemanship, he had smoked the narghileh and in long silences punctuated by remarks of wisdom, sometimes sayings from the Koran, or even tales of the Patriarch Abraham, he had come to feel almost as one of them. He had nodded at the right time, and smoked kif, and after he had picked up enough of the language to speak, he had told of some of the wonders he had seen in the outside world. It was mostly of America they wanted to hear, of the riches and wonders.

Of long-standing feuds he had also learned, unending tribal feuds over the use of a well, or over a violated daughter, or an insult that had to be avenged. Of the small signal flag on a tent that told of a marriageable daughter he also knew, as he knew the unceasing copulation-jokes among the young men who had no bride money, no woman to lie with, and also he was laughingly shown the sport of using a sheep. All this was as the bestiality he had touched time and again in the bleak life of a sailor and wandering laborer; to be a man among men, one had to share in their contaminations, though, in the seven years of his world-wandering from adolescence to manhood, all this had passed through him much as a gonorrheal dripping and fiery injections that finally cleaned it out. So after those years, when a voyage had carried him back to Odessa, Menahem had remained among the Jews, taken up with the good lads of Kostarnitza, told them his tales of adventure, and joined them to come to Eretz. The bedbugged cribs of any seaport became, for his tales, mysterious seraglios in Barcelona, a veiled Princess Fatima beckoned from the hidden rear door to a walled garden in Alexandria, the flea-ridden filthy cot of a grimy Bowery hotel became a room with a private bath and the miracle of electric light, and a voyage on a train of cattle-cars, watering the doomed beasts and shoveling out the steaming droppings, became a cowboy’s odyssey over the vast spaces of the American wild west.

So now, as Menahem lived his season with the Bedouin, absorbing the tales on their side of some legendary invader of harems, or of the faithful love of a steed for its master, he became meanwhile as agile on a horse as any of the tribe, and learned the rhythms of coffee-pounding, and the contemptuous epithets of the tent dweller for the settled villager whose soul was soft as donkey shit; he heard tales of long ago and not so long ago, tales of herds of sheep and of cattle, but best, of horses cleanly driven off from the possession of the plodding tillers of the soil, the spineless fellaheen. But these were not habitual raiders, the Beni Aghil; such things happened when they happened. Sometimes, too, on the mat of the sheikh, there would unwind probing discussions with him, touching on the forefathers of long ago, the cleverness of Jacob in winning all the striped sheep from his father-in-law, though some said this was no longer true of the marking of sheep; others told tales of Ishmael, the true first son of Abraham.

And so now among the Bedouin near Gilboa, when the greetings of peace had been exchanged, and Menahem and Galil had been welcomed into the guest tent, and while the coffee was being pounded, and as Menahem passed excellent Turkish cigarettes to the half-dozen men who had gathered, he was able to acquit himself well. He spoke of the Beni Aghil, where he was as a son, and the tribe was favorably known to the meager little sheikh with whom they sat, who stemmed from below Beit She’an. Delicately Menahem probed as to their numbers, and their habits of movement, and let it be known that he and Galil were of the Shomer. Of them indeed the sheikh said he had heard much, as excellent horsemen and men of honor. Many more compliments were exchanged, with probings on each side, until at last the time came to make clear that the men of the Shomer would be dwelling nearby, and that they wished to dwell in harmony together, for were not all of them sons of Abraham? The sheikh and his sons would be eagerly awaited in the settlement, so that the men of the Shomer would have the honor of offering them hospitality. And if medicine was needed for the eyes of their children, or if there was any other such need, the house of the Shomer was their house.

So, with a last ceremonial coffee, and a last distribution of cigarettes, the visit was ended, and Menahem and Galil rode back, agreeing in their assessment that good relations could be established; the lands of the kvutsa were well outside the seasonal grazing area of these Bedouin.

The chaverim were gathered around the campfire. A kettle steamed on the rocks to be picked up now and again for replenishing a mug of tea. Leah’s voice joined in the wordless Hasidic melody that someone had launched into the air, and other voices joined. Menahem squatted down beside Dvora.

The tales of Menahem’s voyages she had heard in the evenings when he had sat with her and Yechezkiel; he would draw from his wanderings and adventures until you wondered what to believe, and just when you decided it was all imaginings, something would be proven true, not that Menahem cared to offer proof. But someone else on another day might mention an event, a person who had figured in Menahem’s tale. Thus, he had taken part in a revolutionary plot to assassinate the Czar and his ministers; Nadina the Firebrand, as everyone knew, had escaped capture in these events only by a hair. Once Menahem told of having received a pistol in St. Petersburg from a certain Lutek. And from Nadina, Dvora had at some other time heard how she had delivered a pistol to a certain Lutek. There could be no doubt that Menahem had done something there, escaping “in his own way.” And he would simply go on to relate the adventures in Africa, in Brazil—he could speak Portuguese and English too, and yet he seemed to take none of this as of any consequence.

How much and how little need a man reveal of himself for a woman to join her life to his? With Yechezkiel there had been nothing that needed revealing—a great stalwart boy, good hearted through and through, cheerful when his body was active, when he rode, when he worked in the field, a great eater, and she had simply felt love. All year Dvora had tried to think about that love. Not only to feel, but to think. Around her she could see husbands and wives, her own mother and father, with no flush of tenderness ever between them, and yet in their late years they had produced a child. It seemed that, when the time came, something had to happen in a woman, and in the life that continued from then onward, a man and a woman always managed to find things to talk about together; they talked of each thing needed and wanted in the house, and then of their children, their neighbors, their relatives, so that all this together must take the place of that first romantic time of overwhelming love.

When she thought of Yechezkiel now, she felt a love and sorrow that was oddly very much like the love and sorrow over dear little Avramchick. And the thought came to Dvora that Menahem was aware of this change in her grieving and that it was for this Menahem had waited—that in his being near her in the last days and yet making no advances, no claim on her, Menahem had in some wonderfully considerate way been sensing out all this that she now recognized in herself. He had been sensing out whether he could not come nearer and enter her life.

For the first time, though so little had been said between them, she experienced a sweep of endearment toward him, for the delicacy of his thoughts for her. And in this she could not know that all through the time of his absence Menahem in the subterranean way that was part of his being had known what was taking place with her. At intervals he had come with his Bedouin “brother,” the sheikh’s eldest son, for pleasure in Gaza, and passing through Beer Tuvia had managed to pick up a word of the doings of the Chaimovitch girls; once Galil and Nadina together had come down to the Negev in a horseback journey they had taken to study the whole of the land, and brought him news of all that was happening in Sejera and all Galilee, about the Chaimovitches and about the Roumanians arriving in Mishkan Yaacov, and thus he had known that Dvora was there at home.

The circle around the blackened teakettle had dwindled, and Dvora realized that Menahem was speaking to her alone, as though continuing a long conversation they had been having about his visit with Galil to the Bedouin over there across the plain. “You know, Dvora, they sit there in their tents, and here we have come in our tents, perhaps like Abraham coming among the Canaanites—” It was a thought that many had vaguely felt tonight. But Menahem jumped to something else. “When I was a boy, I went once with my stepfather to a Russian village where there were no Jews—”

But she had never known Menahem had a stepfather. The way he talked to her now was different from the way he had talked when he told his adventures. With one ear she heard him tell of his stepfather who bought pelts from the peasant hunters and bragged of tricking the thickheads who were even unable to add, but with the other ear, Dvora caught the story of his childhood, the household of stepbrothers and stepsisters, his sense that they were all in league against him, of his labor of carrying piles of pelts and drying them, of his mother who was always groaning and waiting for calamities. He talked on and on. The singing had died out with the fire; at one moment, Leah passed by on her way to the large tent for chaveroth, and Dvora said, “I’ll come later.” His words glinting with irony and bitterness, Menahem talked on, of his cheder and of how, before his Bar Mitzvah, he had organized a plot to beat up the melamed, and how his stepfather had given the beating back to him with a broad leather strap, and then shipped him off to the strictest of yeshivot, in Volozhin. Could she imagine that for a time he had been intensely religious? Night and day he had devoured the Talmud. The Cabbala had attracted him, though it was forbidden to study its mysteries before the age of forty. Meanwhile he had organized a revolutzia for the students to be allowed to read books of mathematical science. The yeshiva had cut off their food, the other boys had given in, and he, expelled, had gone not home, but to Odessa….

It had grown chilly. Another would have put his arm around her, drawn her close. All at once, Menahem stood and gave her his hand, raising her up. It was the first contact of the flesh with him, a hand not aflame but holding a dry heat as of the sun. Dvora left her hand in his. They walked in silence and her blood made her dizzy. They came to a small tent, and it was Menahem’s alone, though all the other chevrehmen shared three and four in a shelter. Menahem was one of those, Yechezkiel had told her admiringly, who in his own way, without asking special favors or taking advantage, always managed to arrange himself.

He drew her inside, and, stooping to kneel on the rush mat, she came into his arms.

Menahem would know just what to do; he was a man. With her innocent Yechezkiel, would either of them have known what gesture to make next? Menahem’s kiss was solemn, and then, his voice half-strangled, he said, “Dvora, long before, already on the boat—”

A distracting, almost frightening perception came to her. Could she even then have been seeking him, through the other? Was it Menahem to whom she had been going all the time? Or was some powerful law of life working within her, telling her this had to be so from the beginning, to make it possible for her still to believe that there is in life only one profound love? “Yes, on the boat, I knew,” she said.

Some things, Menahem said, he had retained from his period of intense faith and belief. The idea of the destined one, the besherteh. Only the idea of destiny could explain the cruelty and tragedy he had seen in the world. Destiny had to be ruthless. And yet he also believed in the human will. Did she understand?

And in that moment she felt entirely at ease. She raised her arms and unpinned her hair. Within the tent was black dark, but a sound came from Menahem at this movement of hers, a sound of such immeasurable relief that she was carried back to the time of their ship’s approach to Jaffa, after the long voyage they had undertaken with such fear of its perils, and their worry—would their loved brother and sister truly be waiting there on the shore? And then came the blessed moment of crying out, “They’re here! They’re waiting for us!”

Both were kneeling; Dvora undid her dress, and knew he too was casting off his clothing. Then they lay down together on the mat; Menahem was trembling.

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