The Land Agent Read online

There were no cabins in immigrant class. Just rows of benches lined up below deck. Lev picked one out, stashed his trunk underneath, laid down on the thin, stained mattress. Boaz’s feet were at his head, Doron’s head was at his feet. Within two hours of setting off, everyone was on the top deck, throwing up over the side. Everyone except Lev. The tossing of the ship, the smell of engine oil mixed in with vomit, the dip and rise of the horizon, none of it affected him at all. As others retched and staggered back to their benches, only to get up, stagger and retch again, Lev wolfed down sardines spread across hunks of bread. As others moaned about having thrown up every inch of their stomach lining along with their liver and intestines, Lev savoured the taste of vursht accompanied by a raw onion and pickled cucumber. As he enjoyed the strong, tangy flavour of a hard Tyrolean mountain cheese as recommended by Noam’s uncle, he pondered upon why he might be immune to this swaying motion. And he concluded that such had been the inner turmoil of his life up to that point, any external rocking motion was unlikely to have an effect.

  But when the ship entered calmer waters, the situation changed. Where there had been the Ten Tribes, now there were Eight and Two. Lev was part of the eight. The other two consisted of Sarah and Shaul the Great. He observed their pointless promenading together for hours around the upper decks. He watched as they stood by the railings, staring out to the Mediterranean, wasting their precious supplies of dried bread on the following seagulls. He spotted them laughing and chattering away together under the lifeboats when they could have been part of the Zionist discussion groups. He cringed at Shaul’s insincere smile when he saw him buying Sarah a trinket from a rowing-boat trader in Brindisi harbour. It was now his turn to lie moaning on a bench on the lower decks, feeling as if his whole insides had been gutted. He was too ill to surface. He didn’t see the dolphins running off the prow. He missed the full moon party when the Jews danced the hora to the music of a Romanian klezmer band. He didn’t smell the aroma of the bitter-sweet olive groves of Kalamata. He would never know the dazzling white villages of the Aegean coastline. Or the cosmopolitan crowd gathering at Alexandria harbour, where Europe met Africa met Asia. But these exotic attractions no longer mattered. Sarah was his life. The reason he did everything. He waited until she was alone.

  ‘Have you been sick?’ she asked. She plucked a thread from her cardigan. She had knitted it herself. He had helped her unravel the wool. He moved her towards the railings so the breeze could whip away the stink from the piles of excrement and rubbish scattered around the deck.

  ‘Yes, I have been sick. Ill from seeing you together with Shaul.’

  Her cheeks reddened, making her even more beautiful. ‘I like him.’

  ‘You never liked him back in Poland when he was Shimmel Feldman, the moneylender’s son. With a high-pitched voice and a head full of lice. How we used to laugh about him.’

  Sarah laughed now. ‘He’s changed. He’s grown into a man with grand ideas.’

  ‘I have grand ideas too.’

  ‘What ideas do you have?’

  ‘I want to marry you. And we can build a house in the Galilee where you can rear chickens and ride horses. And I will… I will…’

  ‘Yes, Lev. What will you do? You don’t know, do you? Because you’ve never given yourself a chance. You’ve just copied everything I’ve done.’

  ‘But I love you.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. And I love you too, in my own way. We’ve grown up together. We’ve shared so much. But you are like a little brother to me. Not a prospective husband.’

  ‘And Shimmel, the lice-ridden moneylender’s son, is?’

  ‘You know he doesn’t have lice any more.’

  He knew that. He was aware of Shaul’s glossy, black curls and the deep voice that sang the bass parts in all their songs. ‘I can’t live without you,’ he whined.

  ‘But you’re not going to live without me. We’re all going to be together in one happy kvutza.’

  Two days later, the ship dropped anchor off the port of Jaffa. Lev could see palm trees and minarets, camels strutting across the beach, fishing boats, clusters of two-storey houses with their domes and their verandas rising up the hillside from the port. People all over the ship were praying and singing and wailing and dancing. How happy they were, this ragged, stinking bunch of immigrants. He wished he had gone to America.

  His kvutza assembled. The eight tribes and the two lovers. He handed his trunk down to one of the Arab porters who had pulled alongside in the longboat that took them to the shore. A British official examined his papers, a doctor questioned him.

  ‘Mentally ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Infectious diseases?

  ‘No’.

  ‘Criminal?’

  ‘No.’

  Broken heart? Yes.

  He went off to the bath-house with the other males, put his luggage into quarantine, held up his hands while he was searched for weapons, then stripped off his clothes. In the shower room, everyone sang Hebrew songs as they washed away with carbolic the filth of the voyage and the dirt of the diaspora. Lev found himself standing next to Shaul.

  ‘Look at us, Lev,’ Shaul shouted as he scrubbed away. ‘We have arrived. A new land. A new life. Look at us.’ Lev did look. And now he understood why Shaul was called Shaul the Great.

  Outside the bath-house, he was given a clean set of clothes courtesy of a London-based Jewish charity and waited for the group to assemble. Ariel, Shaul, Noam, Boaz, Doron joined from the women’s washrooms by Ahuva, Dalia, Ayala and Sarah. Shining, smiling faces, all except Lev’s. The Nine Found Tribes and One Lost Soul. Bound to spend a life together. They walked out of the shade of the port buildings towards the wire fence.

  At first, Lev couldn’t see. The light so bright it stung his eyes. And the noise. People shouting in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and other languages he didn’t recognize. ‘Post?’ was the predominant cry. Post from Vilna? From Warsaw? From Kalisz? From Odessa? Faces clamouring at the wire. Holding up signs: Bluma Fischel from Gorzkowice. It’s Max. British soldiers beating them back with sticks, Arab police with camel-whips. Room to let. Fresh water tap. Four can share.

  ‘Over here, Lev,’ Ariel said, pointing to someone bearing a placard: Palestine Welcomes the Young Guard from Poland.

  But Lev’s attention was somewhere else. Another sign. In Hebrew and English. It read: Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. Can you type?

  Four

  Palestine, 1924

  ‘I WAS LOOKING FOR a really attractive girl,’ Mickey Vered would explain to anyone who asked, usually a couple of young women at the fashionable Casino coffee house in Tel Aviv. ‘A knock-out. From Kiev. Because the girls from Kiev are the most beautiful in the world. Just like you. You are from Kiev, aren’t you? No? Really? Hard to believe. Well, anyway. Walk down a street in Kiev, and you will fall in love a hundred times. And instead… what did I end up with?’ And here Mickey would point to Lev. ‘I was strolling down a Haifa street looking for my Kiev girl, when I stopped this stranger here to ask for a cigarette. Five years we are together now. A married couple couldn’t be happier. Who would’ve thought a Polish immigrant possessed a pouch of such fine tobacco? Eh, Lev?’

  Lev would smile shyly, stare down at his glass of lemon tea. He had heard the story many times before. The part about Mickey asking for tobacco was true, for he never bought his own, not because he couldn’t afford it but because he didn’t want to admit he was a smoker, that there was an element of his life he could not control. But Lev also knew that Mickey had never walked down a Kiev street in his life. For Mickey was Michael Rosenblatt. From Manchester, England. Mickey had lied about his age to join the British Army which had then shipped him to Palestine to fight the Turks. Mickey told Lev he had drunk mint tea in the desert with T.E. Lawrence, that he had helped Allenby liberate Jerusalem. ‘Look, that’s me there. Right beside the General’s horse at Jaffa Gate. With my hand on the pommel. I know you can’t see my face, but those are my fingers, Lev.
Those are my fucking fingers.’ Mickey liked to swear. Mickey liked Palestine. He liked the opportunities it afforded him. He liked the sun. He liked the light. He liked the girls from Kiev.

  Mickey eventually confessed to the Army he had signed up as a minor, making his enlistment null and void. So they had to let him go. Mickey Rosenblatt became Mickey Vered, ‘vered’ meaning ‘rose’, he thought he’d forget about the ‘nblatt’ part. And here Mickey stayed. In a spacious house in the Jewish area of Haifa known as Hadar Hacarmel. Or ‘Glory of the Carmel’ in Mickey’s English, Carmel being the mountain around which the town was built. After their fortuitous meeting in the street, Lev moved out of his hostel dormitory and into a rented room in the same house. The property was owned by a Madame Blum, a widow with no children. Husbandless, childless Madame Blum was the opposite of Mickey. She hated Palestine.

  ‘I curse the day my husband ever brought me here,’ she told Lev at least once a day. Herr Blum, a dealer in raw cotton, was killed when he was run over by the Haifa to Damascus train. No-one knew how the accident happened. Whether he was drunk, his foot got caught in the track, or even if he were pushed. It was a strange demise. Especially as the train didn’t run that often. Madame Blum was left to hate the dust and the sun and the heat and the noise and the sweet coffee and the pitta bread and the olives and the halva and the dates and the almonds and the British and the Jews and the French and the Arabs and the bad manners and the lack of efficiency and the bad time-keeping and the young harlot who steals your husband when your back is turned. Mickey had a remarkable patience for Madame Blum. He would listen to her constant complaints with interest, he would light her Russian cigarettes, make her tea, massage her shoulders.

  ‘She is a childless widow. I am like a son to her,’ Mickey explained to Lev.

  ‘Even so. Your compassion surprises me.’

  ‘This is a nice house. Bright, well-proportioned rooms. A European-style toilet. Conveniently close to the harbour. Close to my office.’

  Lev was never sure what exactly Mickey did for a living. Mickey told him he traded in this and that, wheeled and dealed, imported and exported, called himself an entrepreneur. Sometimes there would be an excess of grapefruit on the table at Madame Blum’s, or almonds, or bananas or grapes. In the kitchen, there might be crates of wine, boxes of stockings, buckets full of artificial teeth. Outside in the small garden, ploughshares, an electricity generator, bales of cotton.

  Although they generally spoke Hebrew together, Lev began to learn a little English from Mickey, who, in turn, practised his Yiddish. To Lev’s surprise, it seemed the Jews of Manchester spoke that hybrid of higher German and Hebrew quite fluently.

  ‘Vas ist de vetter heinte?’ Mickey would ask him over breakfast each day.

  To which Lev’s reply was always: ‘The weather is bloody hot. But I believe it is raining in fucking Manchester.’

  It was on Mickey’s hectoring that Lev finally changed his own name. Or, at least, his surname. ‘Everyone must have a new name in Palestine,’ Mickey declared. ‘Look at me. Look at Abraham, our forefather.’

  ‘What about Abraham?’

  ‘God changed his name from Abram to Abraham. From “great father” to “father of all nations”. Father of Arab and Jew alike.’

  And so Lev changed his name. A new name for a new Lev. No more Lev Gottleib. But Lev Sela. Lev meaning ‘heart’. Sela meaning ‘stone’.

  The offices of the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association in Haifa faced the sea, with a view of the harbour that was always being built to turn it into a proper deep-water port. The construction work was a constant reminder to Lev that he should have taken that early advice from Noam’s uncle back in Vienna and invested in cement. Not that he ever had much money to invest. But the breeze into his office was fresh and free. And he earned enough money to live on.

  The Palestine Jewish Colonization Association was commonly abbreviated to PICA. ‘Because it was always PICA-ing up land here and there,’ according to one of Mickey’s English puns Lev could never understand. PICA bought land that it would long-lease to Jewish individuals or collective settlements. It also invested in factories, mills and wineries. The organization was funded by a wealthy benefactor who preferred to remain anonymous to the point it was forbidden to say his name either in public or in private. This person was known simply as the ‘Anonymous Donor’. But everyone knew he was a famous banker, an elderly French aristocrat, one of the richest men in the world.

  While this Anonymous Donor provided funds in support of PICA’s offices in Palestine, Lev knew the real talent behind the Association’s acquisitions and investments, especially when it came to land, lay with his employer and only other staff member at the Haifa office. The man who had once held up the placard advertising for a typist at the Jaffa docks. Samuel Ziv. Otherwise known affectionately as Sammy the King.

  Sammy the King was in his mid-fifties but had all the energy, both physical and mental, of a man thirty years younger. Sammy came from somewhere in Russia, he would never admit to exactly where. He could speak Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, English and French as well as Russian. But it wasn’t of languages that Sammy was the king. It was of the soil.

  Sammy knew everything about alluvial deposits, levels of acidity, what was good for cereal crops, for vegetables or for tropical fruits. Just by smelling a handful of earth he could tell whether it came from the Upper Galilee, the Valley of Jezreel or the Maritime Plain. A taste licked from a wetted finger would inform him whether it lacked potassium, nitrogen or phosphorous. When he unfurled a map across his desk, he didn’t see uncultivated land. He saw its earthly potential. He imagined ploughed fields, orchards and plantations. He saw oranges, grapefruits, dates, almonds, melons and bananas. He heard the hiss of the barley tickled by the breezes from the north, the crack and crinkle of the tobacco leaves drying in the desert hamseen. His mind’s eye squinted to the yellow of the sesame fields. Sammy the King was PICA’s man on the ground in more ways than one.

  In the five years Lev had worked for PICA, he had come to love Sammy. He didn’t think of him as a king, more as a prophet, a wise man like his grandfather in the woods, a kinder, happier, more sober version of his own father, a protector like his long-lost brother Amshel. He admired Sammy’s great understanding of how a person could be attached to the land. ‘Land is land is land’ was Sammy’s answer to everything. For Sammy appreciated what it was like to work the soil, to catch the earth under fingernails, to have it ingrained into the skin, to smell the mulch in the turn of the hoe. He saw how men and women cultivated the soil to survive, how they returned to the same place year after year to feed their flocks, how they saw beauty where others saw only limestone and dust. All this made Sammy a tough but fair negotiator, a man with compassion for those who lived on the land, a man who possessed an even temperament, which was a valued commodity in this hot-tempered country where attachments to land were so complex.

  But Lev learned there was always one subject that could be relied upon to upset Sammy’s equanimity. And that was the mention of the organization which, like the Anonymous Donor, should never be named in his presence. The KKL. The Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael. The Jewish National Fund. Or as Sammy the King called them: Those Bloody Zionists.

  According to Sammy, Those Bloody Zionists had a more zealous approach to land acquisition than PICA. Once the target area had been identified, Those Bloody Zionists would go all out to purchase the land, then worry later about the funding, the infrastructure, the resettlement of the tenant farmers – the fellaheen – already living there. PICA, on the other hand, operated in the image of its founder and backer, the Anonymous Donor. PICA was more French. It was more bureaucratic. It was more cautious. It wanted the proper financing to be in place, budgets to be drawn up, compensation agreements worked out. All of which gave Sammy more time to deal sympathetically with those whose lives might be affected by PICA’s acquisitions. To many, Sammy might have been a king, but Lev also knew that to his detractors, h
e was seen, as with the haemorrhoids he so often complained of, as a pain in the bloody toches.

  Five

  ON HIS FIRST DAY AT WORK, Lev had been presented with an Adler 15, also a German machine but not as elegant as the Kanzler 1B of his Polish youth. Like the Kanzler, it had four rows of keys, but with a single rather than a double shift. He had sat down in front of it, rested his chin on clasped hands, quietly thanked Ewa Kaminsky. He wondered how life was treating her in America. Whether she had found her lipstick in the push-up tubes. Whether she had taken his father to visit an amusement park. Or whether it was possible for his father ever to be amused by anything. He had then fluttered his fingers over the casing, felt the pads tingle in anticipation of their contact with the keys, breathed in the ink on the fresh ribbon, lined up the PICA-headed paper and began.

  His job had been to type up letters written in Sammy’s scrawl. These letters could be in English, German or French. Since Lev couldn’t fully understand any of them, it made no difference. There were letters to benefactors and agencies all over the world. There was an ongoing correspondence with the British administration in Jerusalem. Then there were negotiations with Arab landowners in Damascus and Cairo. Letters came in and letters came out. Their subject matter? Always land. The ten thousand square miles that constituted Palestine, of which PICA owned or had concessions to about 240 of them. There would be issues about maps and surveys and certificates and the title deeds known as kushan. The Turks had their version of the legal ownership of Palestine, the British had theirs, the Zionists and the Arabs had theirs. Sammy the King had his.

  ‘There are only five words you need to know,’ Sammy once told Lev, as he counted them off on his fingers. ‘Mulk, Miri, Waqf, Metruke and Mewat. They are like the Arabic version of the Five Books of Moses. These are the real laws of this land.’

  Sammy stood up from behind his desk, lit a cheroot. And as he paced, so the lesson began.