THE SETTLEMENT of Gilboa itself soon became a mother of settlements, as chalutzim went out from it just as the men of the Shomer and their friends had gone out from HaKeren in a line of wagons. They went out now to found another and another kvutsa in the Emek.
Dvora’s marriage ceremony was held when she became pregnant; indeed four couples in succession were married that day in Gilboa, and as a concession to certain leaders in the Zionist movement who gave ear to all sorts of silly gossip about the kvutsoth, a rabbi was brought from Chedera to perform the rites.
The feast was marked by a great triumph for Reuven Chaimovitch. For nearly two years Reuven had been trying to grow potatoes. In Yavniel, in Sejera, even in Rishon he had been told by those who had tried before him that the matter was hopeless. Potatoes simply would not grow in Eretz Yisroel. Planted, they rotted in the ground. If by some miracle they sprouted, the result looked like a crumpled worm covered with blight.
Again and again, in HaKeren, Reuven had planted potatoes brought, after much correspondence, by chalutzim arriving from Russia. And his spoiled potatoes had become such a jest with Max Wilner and other chaverim that he dared experiment no further.
Then in a Russian agricultural magazine he chanced upon an account of a potato blight in the Don region that had ended when seed potatoes were imported from Ireland, where only the hardiest plants had survived the terrible blight of a decade before, when much of the population had starved to death.
And so, virtually in secret, Reuven had gone about procuring seed potatoes of the Irish variety. Not daring to have Max find out what he was up to, he had had the samples sent to Mishkan Yaacov and had planted them in the garden at home. Leah had cared for them.
And behold, just before the family was to leave for Dvora’s marriage, he and Leah had dug up their first potatoes, firm, unblemished, and succulent even raw.
There was a touch of slyness in Reuven. Everyone, every Zionist notable from Jerusalem and the new Jewish town of Tel Aviv, and from Sejera, and also those from his own kvutsa who had sneered at his failed experiments, would be at the festivities in Gilboa. And so, with stealth, not even letting the rest of the family know, he and Leah had packed a sack of these very first potatoes in the wagon beneath all the good things Feigel was taking to her second daughter.
And while all the others were busy with a thousand greetings, Leah found a grater, and in the shanty that had been put up for an extra kitchen, she set to work grating her potatoes. The first to discover her secret was Rahel, who put a finger into the batter. “Real potatoes?” she asked, surprised, and Leah announced, “The first in Eretz. Reuven grew them.”
“No! But it’s been proven impossible! They rot!”
“Reuven grew them.”
Despite the rapid expansion of the Gilboa kvutsa, the cooking was still being done as it had been in the beginning, over an outdoor fire on a tin grate resting on stones. As the odor of the first potato pancakes rose into the air, Tibor the Comical from Ha-Keren, walking by, suddenly halted in his tracks. He sniffed, and cried out, “Latkes? Real latkes?” and with one swoop of his hand snatched the first browned potato pancake that Leah was sliding onto a plate, crushing fully half of it into his mouth.
Gasping with the pain of the burn, he nevertheless devoured the second half, only blowing on it a bit, with impatience, while Leah and Rahel doubled over with laughter. “Nu, it was worth it!” Tibor gasped and reached for another. “May my tongue burn out if it isn’t ambrosia!”
From then on it was a stampede. Vainly Leah pleaded that they let her set aside a pile for the feast. Vainly the sated Tibor stationed himself by her as a pancake guard, proclaiming that he was the Shomer Latkes. Could he refuse a sample to Dovidl? And Avner? And after their leaders, why, the chaverim demanded, should there be such favoritism for the privileged? Around, and behind, and under, the chevrehmen darted, teasing, pleading, snatching. Leah hit at their hands, shouted epithets in Yiddish and Arabic, choked on her own laughter and the smoke from the griddle, while they kept calling out, “Leah! Beloved! One latke!” “My soul perisheth for a latke!”
As she scraped up the last of the batter, Leah called out, “Chevreh, have mercy! It was Reuven who at last grew potatoes in Eretz, and he hasn’t even had a taste.”
At this a roar arose for Reuven, who was hovering at the edge of the crowd, grinning almost guiltily. Ceremoniously, the chalutzim opened a circle and drew him in. As the last pancake was lifted from the griddle, Rahel took it on a plate and offered it to him. “Our own Aaron Aaronson!” she cried.
Reuven loved her again. He loved her with the purest of comradely love. He forgave her in his heart for what she had said about his wild wheat at Sejera. If he ever succeeded in getting a good strain of date palms, she would be the first to taste the fruit.
As for Leah, in this moment her entire being overflowed with love, her love embraced all the chalutzim, all, all, and the whole Emek stretching before them, and all the fields growing green, and the whole Eretz, she could embrace the whole of the land and hug it to her body, and be appeased.
The big girl was restive. For a time she stayed in the new kvutsa, working one day in the kitchen, another day with the field crew, or even the construction crew, or suddenly, she would ask for a pair of mules so she could plow up a plot for vegetables. She kept changing her sleeping place. When the extra crowd of helpers who had come for the founding moved on, Leah remained the only one in the girls’ tent; the few others had coupled off. At once Zev the Hotblood, posted here on guard, began annoying her. He seemed to take it for granted that he could enter the tent in the middle of the night for “a little visit,” in accordance with a legend he had already made for himself when he had been the night watchman in Mescha and again in Yavniel. It was said he would slip in through the bedroom windows of grown daughters and even of young wives whose husbands were away, for “little visits” between his rounds. Indeed he had been sent away from Mescha after he had been seen climbing out of a back window one night from a house where the husband was absent; he had only been having a glass of tea to warm himself, Zev said. In this case the husband happened to be disliked by the whole of the village as an ill-tempered brute who wouldn’t share the flame of a match with a neighbor, so to spare the wife the complaint had been against Zev’s repeated absence from duty. But wherever he went there was scandal.
Oddly, in Gilboa the chaverim seemed to take it almost as a joke that Zev was pestering Leah. Surely a girl her size need not worry about being overpowered! And when she complained, Nadina even delivered her a piece of intimate womanly advice about deprivation, and psychologia, and normal life in the atmosphere of a close community, concluding with a strong hint about comrades helping each other in their natural needs.
Though everyone in the new kvutsa urged her to stay, it suddenly came to Leah how much Mameh must need her at home now that Dvora was no longer there to help. And her group of girls there in Mishkan Yaacov—after the dance for the poet Bialik, they had kept together around her, and she was teaching them vegetable gardening—her girls also were in need of her. Besides, Leah was overcome with longing for her baby brother Mati and the clever questions he had begun to ask about the sun and the stars and the universe, when Tateh, as soon as the little one could talk, tried to teach him, “In the Beginning …”
Coming home, Leah was startled at the way little Eliza in these few weeks had turned into a whole new young person! There was a new touch of decisiveness in her voice, yet this was softened by an appealing touch of girlish womanly complicity in her glance. It took a look from Mameh to make Leah realize what had happened—Eliza’s first menstruation had come, and now the pisherkeh comported herself as a full equal, or even more, as a young woman who would know better than they had how to manage her life.
When Leah, coming in from field work, pulled off her hobnailed shoes, Eliza would pointedly lift them at finger-edge and set them outside the door. As for herself, Eliza had always been dainty. In the market stalls of Tiberias she had bargained in Arabic through three separate visits for a pair of red harem slippers embroidered with glittering slivers of mica, until the beset vendor cried Allah save him! this girl would make her husband rich and all merchants poor! And he gave in to her price.
These slippers Eliza wore about the house, and strangely, while everyone else’s things lost luster or became bedraggled, Eliza’s dainty footwear lasted quite well, the embroidery never losing its glitter.
In that great trunk brought from the old country she had found some shirtwaists of their mother’s, blouses with lace cuffs and frills down the front, and with a little needlework Eliza had arranged them so that even on a weekday, should a visitor come to the door, the young lady looked dressed for Sabbath. Unlike Leah or Dvora, she loved to sew and crochet, and from an Arab woman in Dja’adi who still came down with eggs and cheese to sell to the Roumanians, Eliza had learned how to weave straw, so that the house was now adorned with her bright-colored mats.
Though little Mati always rushed into Leah’s arms for her great hug when she came home from field work, the elder sister saw that he was quite happy to tag all day after Eliza, and if he tripped, it was to Eliza that he would present his bumped nose for the kiss that made it well.
Nor were Leah’s village girls so constantly around her. While a few kept up their gardens, they were now in the age of intimate whispery friendships, like Eliza with Bronescu’s daughter Malka, spending much of their time visiting each other back and forth.
The worst was that Zev the Hotblood, from whom she had fled, now appeared in Mishkan Yaacov on duty as shomer. No other than Zev had Galil found for them! A treat for the Roumanian wives! Quartered in a shed behind Bronescu’s store, Zev never passed Leah without a leer and a vulgar invitation. “Nu, Leah, you know where to find me! Better than Zev you won’t find anywhere!” Or, with a heavily-brushing palm too low on her back, “Ah, what a waste of good woman-flesh!”
One moonlit night Zev managed to get at her. A cow whose labor was delayed had to be watched during the night, and on the second night Leah insisted that Gidon must get his rest while she took his place in the stable, sleeping on the hay.
It was not the poor troubled beast that awakened her, but deep in the night Leah started awake to a presence. Zev was stretched out on the hay, his large hand hovering over her breast, and his face raised above hers so that were she to cry out his mouth would stop her. Even in the bluish darkness Leah saw his expression, the eyes intent as though everything was already understood and happening between them and he was watching on a woman’s face her passion rising and overcoming her. And his own features usually so heavy, with the full lips so repulsive to her, now were changed, drawn into harmony in a man’s glowing power.
She had to force herself to pull away to the other side, deeper into the straw, but Zev’s hand followed and clamped down upon her breast. Like some obscurely admitted rule of the night-game between men and women, a rigidity came over her that forbade her simply to throw off the hand. For then, if her movement aroused him further, it would become a matter of struggle between bodies alone.
“Zev, let me be,” she said. “You have nothing to do here.”
“I came because you summoned me.” Leah had not expected him to speak with such inner knowledge of women, but only crudely. Ah, he was experienced. The hand exerted a slight pressure as though of its own weight; already he was showing her that he could be skilled and delicate in his caress.
“Zev, I don’t want to have trouble with you. You’ve come to the wrong place. There’s no tea here.”
“Milk is even better.” With a knowing, testing look in the corner of his eye, his head with the lips parted was moving downward to her breast, and this time she wrenched herself free. “Go about your watch!”
“I was far on the other side when I felt your call,” he said, without stirring. “I felt you were lying here on the hay, alone, longing for a man. That’s true, isn’t it? This you cannot deny. So, in answer to your longing, and to my own desire for you, I was drawn and I came.”
“Your own desire for me or for any other female flesh! Get out!” And with this Leah sat erect. Zev stirred, and gazed at her as though there was no need for him to rise, since she must soon lie down again alongside him.
“Leah,” he said with a different tone, the easy intimate tone used by a man to a woman he has already lain with, and with whom he can be frank and comradely, “Leah, with each other you and I don’t have to have pretenses. You are a passionate woman who has far too long been deprived of her man, and I have a great lust for you. One superior article deserves another. I know that between you and me it would be something extraordinary.”
At least he had reverted to his own crude self. Over her distaste there nevertheless rose a dismaying wonder—could it be that Moshe had talked loosely about her even to one such as Zev, that he had boastingly described her most abandoned ecstasies the way one man does to another? Were Moshe and this Zev not after all the same sort, hunters of women?
And even this dismay in her, the brute also caught. A boor endowed with delicate sensitivity about women. “Why be angry? If a man praises a woman to another man, it’s the best compliment. After all, most of the women a man lies with are nothing but holes—”
“Zev, enough of your foul mouth. Get out of here.” This time she jumped to her feet. At least she was fully dressed, having lain down in her clothes, thinking she might have to fetch help during the night.
“Leah, there are so few women a man can talk to without pretenses. Believe me, if there was even a chance that your man would be coming back one of these days, I wouldn’t approach you. But why should we both suffer such strong need—”
“Go satisfy your need with the nearest she-goat,” Leah found herself blurting coarsely. “I’m not an animal.”
“Nor entirely am I.” He too had at last risen from the hay, and Zev was facing her with the air of a man who, having been insulted, has a certain right of response. “I am not so much an animal as you would like me to be. Because in that case you wouldn’t feel in danger of wanting me.”
“All right, you are an idealist, a benefactor of womankind. I still don’t want you. Can you believe it?”
He stood without moving closer, a man fully aware of his potency. There was no denying this about Zev. It was not a potency such as had emanated cleanly and insistently from Moshe, for from Zev it reeked. The stable was the place for it, it was part of the animal odor, and to Leah’s angered shame, she felt herself as though steeped in the after-odor of cohabitation, of two bodies in bed when the seed has already been spent and a wallowing lust is again awakening.
“Don’t play the delicate maiden with me,” Zev said, with his eyes deliberately denuding her. “I know the things women tell each other about men, the same way men tell each other about women when there’s a partner that’s something special. The women that are real women—they tell each other about me—isn’t it true? I’ve even had some women admit they couldn’t rest until they tried me, to find out if all they had heard could really be true.” He laughed grossly.
There was such a childish sexual pride in the lout bragging of his prowess that Leah was able to laugh. Poor foolish Zev, he had himself released her. And with this Leah became fully awake, all her startled night-feelings, her half-immersion in a seductive drowsiness, was fallen away and she even found herself, in a partly amused clarity, with a certain sympathy for the lout. For what else was Zev but the most bumptious of all the men of the Shomer—a braggart, a liar, a troublemaker!
Yet in spite of everything, some quality held people to him. There was a force, a self-belief, a power around him as though he were not merely a watchman on a horse but a creature of an important destiny who was meanwhile filling in with ordinary tasks, awaiting his time.
“Yes, Zev,” she said, “you are famous among women. All the wives in Mishkan Yaacov confide in each other. Each morning they count up between themselves how many you visited the night before, and describe to each other the fantastic things you did to them! They come and tempt me with their revelations until my whole body burns for you! Ay, ay, Zev, do you want to know what we really say about you? We say that in spite of being such a braggart and a nuisance, you’re a courageous shomer and an excellent horseman, only you’re sure to make trouble if you stay long in one place, because there are always a few miserable unhappy women who desperately try to get a little pleasure, so they let you in. Everyone agrees the best thing for you, and even for the Shomer, would be to get you married, but what girl would want to risk herself with such a lout? That’s what we say.”
A whole series of attitudes had come over him. At first Zev had listened with a broad smile as though to say: Go on, make fun of me, you’ll be like all the rest and lie down with me in the end; then he seemed a bit uncertain whether he should not after all show offense. A woman could refuse him, but there was no need for her to make fun of him! In the end he was like a cheating butcher who laughs when you catch him with a heavy finger on the scales. Ah, he laughs, other women are stupid, so he fools them and enjoys cheating them a bit, but you are different, with you he won’t try any tricks, he will always be honest.
Then a fortunate thing happened. The cow began to go into labor. Hurriedly, Leah lighted the storm lamp; the forelegs of the calf emerged and then the birthing halted. The animal got to her feet and stood in the stall with the calf partly out; she didn’t seem to feel anything at all, and began chewing fodder. After they had waited for what seemed a long while, watching with increasing anxiety, Zev, without further ado, took hold of the protruding forelegs and began a careful steady pull. The calf emerged undamaged and at once tried to rise on its wobbly legs. The mother turned her head and began to lick.
Now, on Leah’s compliment on his work, Zev began to talk of his experience as a boy on his uncle’s farm in the northernmost of the Baron’s settlements, Metulla, on the lower slope of Mount Hermon.
Like everyone, Leah knew that Zev was an orphan of the Kishinev pogrom, and that he had been brought by an uncle to Palestine, but she knew little more. The settlers up there in Metulla were not much heard about; life there was said to be barren and poor.
His uncle had made him work without end, Zev said, and had beat him without end. Once for losing a calf—just like this it had half-emerged, he had pulled too hard and it had come out choked and dead. After the beating he had run away and lived among the Druze on the mountain ridge. There among them he had learned to ride and shoot.
—An independent boy, a bit like Gidon, she thought. But now he was bragging again about how even the Druze lads made him their leader, saying his eyes could detect animal tracks where only a shadow had passed. And “by my life” he swore, telling about the slim, smooth-skinned Arab girls who had stolen to him in the fields where he tended the sheep, and taught him their special ways of making love. No—seriously! It was unimaginable! He was ready—and now at least he made his offer half-comically—to show her these secrets at any time.
What a liar, Leah laughed to herself. The Druze were known to be the most watchful of all over their daughters. Still, she let Zev brag and tell of his adventures: Of how the sheikh himself had offered him a daughter without bride-money (just like Menahem’s tales!) and how he had even been initiated into the secret rites of the Druze religion. Oh, he could not reveal a single detail, it was truly secret, but every year, as she knew, their tribes gathered not far from here, on the other end of the Kinnereth, on the rock ledge known as the Horns of Hittim, and if she wished, he would take her, though women of course had to remain outside the secret conclave.
“Exactly like the yearly meeting of the Shomer,” Leah snorted. “That’s what you are in the Shomer—no more advanced than those superstitious tribes with their secrets for males only.”
In the end Zev had come away to the Galilee and become a shomer. “Something called me to my own people,” he said. “Leah, you will laugh at me. Everyone thinks of me as a yold. An ignoramus. I am. I admit it, I am not proud of it. When Galil and Nadina and the rest of them start with their theories from books and their arguments, who am I to give an opinion? I let them talk and I walk out. But I can tell you that after talking all night and breaking their heads, howling ‘Borochov said this’ and ‘Gordon wrote that,’ they come out of their sitting and do exactly what I decided we would have to do in the first place. Yes, they could all have become members of the Duma or professors in the university, they made great sacrifices to come here and ride the rounds on the fields, no better than an ignorant yold like Zev from Metulla. They sleep with each other’s chavera only after quoting Bialik to her, but I can tell you the same hot little bitch rolls in the goren with Zev without waiting for even a word of poetry. All of our fine intelligentsia want to return to the soil, to labor with their hands, to produce a new people, to remake the Jews. It’s people like me who will be produced out of the earth of Eretz; here I am already, half a Jew, half an Arab, and maybe this is not exactly what they are writing about in all their literature.”
What had brought him to this outburst? Did he think that in some way she too felt herself above him? On his lone rounds in the night, were these the forces and angers boiling in Zev, and was it this also that drove him to seek some woman, some haven, some way to discharge the fury in him? Leah again felt a powerful intuition that in some way Zev would be singled out, that an event waited for him, and she could not be sure whether it would be something dreadful or of high worth.
Light was beginning to come, and the newborn animal turned toward it, while the mother’s tongue followed on the still-matted skin. “Nu, I’ll make us some tea after all!” Leah said. “You can tell everyone you spent the night having tea with me!”
After that time Zev appeared more than once, coming to the kitchen at the pre-dawn hour, for Leah had taken over from Mama the task of rising before everyone else to prepare tea for the men. Despite all his vulgarity and loudness, and her real dislike of much in his character, there remained between them almost the same kind of special link there is between a man and a woman who once spent a night in physical intimacy, a night which left them feeling they knew the truth about each other, but which the woman does not feel called upon to repeat.
Nevertheless Leah was restless and even a little afraid that in some foolish moment she might give way, and make another great mistake in her life. At times she would run off to HaKeren for a visit with Reuven. Staying over one Sabbath when Old Gordon held a literary meeting, she asked Max Wilner to put her on the work sheet and stayed on, telling herself that Eliza was now enough of a help for Mama in the house. But not a month had passed before she was telling her old chavera Nahama, with whom she was now on better terms, that she was thinking of trying life in Jerusalem.
“Leah, you run around like your tail was on fire,” Nahama observed. The kvutsa had voted to begin having children; she was pregnant and had taken to knitting. “Take my advice, chavera. Handsomeness is not the most important thing in a man, just as beauty is not the most important thing in a woman….” All at once Leah’s former irritation with sweaty Nahama came back over her.
When Leah asked leave of the kvutsa to go for a few months to Jerusalem to help Avner’s Rahel start a tree nursery, even Reuven chided her. “Leah, perhaps next time the kvutsa won’t accept you back.”
But in Jerusalem she did feel better. With Rahel, Avner, Dovidl, she settled into what seemed a little kvutsa of their own. The courtyard where Leah had learned stonecutting was now taken over for rows of clay pots containing Rahel’s seedlings. Except only for Yosi the sculptor, who kept his corner, Professor Schatz had at last moved the artists and artisans to his new Bezalel building, the one on which Reuven once had labored.
Leah had arrived just in time, Rahel said, for she was eager to expand her tree nursery and also to train young girls, as Leah had done in Mishkan Yaacov. To train girls in the city of Jerusalem itself for agriculture was most important. Already Rahel had several young chalutzoth busy with watering cans over her seedlings, but she hoped even to lure daughters of the Hasidim from Mea Shearim to the work and to teach them to become women of the soil.
Somehow here Leah no longer felt that persistent inner harassment, as though she were uncertain she was in her proper place for what life must bring her. To their courtyard came the movement’s every question and problem. Chalutzim would appear from all over the land to have a word with Avner, and newly arrived young men came here too; Leah could always fill an extra plate of soup and find room on the floor of someone’s room for another sleeper, and all evening they would sit around the samovar that Rahel had now moved into Avner’s room, holding discussions.
Just as Avner and Dovidl were a pair in their political work, so Leah and Rahel were a balanced combination. Nor did the cross-weave of the four of them feel unbalanced to her, even though Rahel and Avner were a man-and-woman pair; with herself and Dovidl there was a bond, too, almost the better for being untrammeled by sexual matters.
As to that side of life, Dovidl did not seem troubled. From time to time, one young chalutza or another would be seen about with him. Magnetic and finely made in his small-boned way, who could say that he was not handsome? But Dovidl seemed to brush sentimental matters aside as not of great consequence against the pressing and constant accumulation of “problemoth.” These “problemoth” were the shared fare of their intimacy, and here Leah was made to feel that her thoughts, her advice, represented the healthy wisdom of a good devoted worker without complications or outside motives, and therefore Dovidl in the end always turned to her with his “Nu, Leah, and what do you have to say?”
But then a sum of money at last arrived for the two leaders to fulfill the plans agreed on, already a few years ago, at that fateful conference in Sejera, for Dovidl and Avner to go to Turkey to study and prepare to enter Ottoman politics, perhaps eventually to seek election to represent Palestine in the Young Turk parliament. From the Labor Zionists among the needle trades in America there came a collection to be used especially for this purpose.
Two Arab notables from Jerusalem held seats there in Constantinople, and were even proposing resolutions against the sale of land to Jews—while their own families went on selling. It was only to drive up the prices, Ostrov the Landbuyer said. But as there were more Jews than Arabs in Jerusalem, if the religious ones could be got to vote, surely at least one seat could be gained.
Soon after Dovidl and Avner had gone off, Rahel took it into her head to go and study agronomy in France; somehow she would support herself by giving lessons. And despite Yosi the sculptor whistling at his work in the yard, and despite all the chevreh who came and went, Leah felt alone in Jerusalem.