The Land Agent Read online

  After what he calculated roughly as a mile, he turned away from the railway line, leaving the tracks to head north on their journey to the Sea of Galilee, then all the way to the French sitting in Damascus. The distant hills that had been a shade of purple only twenty minutes or so before had changed to pink. The sun was at its peak now, he could feel it scorching his back as he walked. But it was an arid heat so that whatever moisture bubbled up from his body, evaporated as soon as it sweated to the surface. He began to feel dizzy. And in his heated imagination, he started to muse upon Sarah. Perhaps she had ended up at this very settlement. She could be feeding the chickens or hoeing the ground or draining swamps or sewing up holes in mosquito nets. She would look up from her task, wipe the sweat from her eyes as she observed Lev approaching and ask herself: ‘Who is that handsome young man? That prosperous-looking fellow who could be a lawyer or a respected land agent if only he were given the chance. That vigorous chap with a working knowledge of several languages and a decent amount of savings with the Workers’ Bank of Palestine. That young man who reminds me of Lev Gottleib from my hometown, the only boy I truly loved.’ And as the figure grew nearer, her heart would drum faster against the damp cotton of her blouse at the dawning recognition that this young man was indeed the Lev Gottleib of her dreams, come to rescue her from the hardship of her life, from her misguided relationship with the lice-ridden Shaul the Great. A relationship that had been as parched as the land she had tried to eke a living from with her blistered fingers and aching back. ‘Here is Lev, come to save me.’

  Lev stopped, put down his case. He was all worked up now. He poured some precious water from his canteen onto his handkerchief, bathed the back of his neck, then drank the rest. The heat on his body, the heat within his body, the heat within his imagination, he thought he might explode. He stamped his feet, kicked down at his sealed-up passion, waited until the fervour had subsided. Then all he felt was despair. This had to stop, these obsessive imaginings about Sarah. It had been over five years since he had last seen her. When would he cease to yearn for her? He picked up his case, stared off to the horizon as if it were a future free of his childhood love he was searching for. In the distance he saw what he thought could be rough signs of cultivation and civilization. Was that shimmering mass a plantation of young citrus trees? Was that vague row of bushes actually a line of tents? And that gust of dust hurtling towards him? Was that a wind storm? Or was it finally the horse and wagon of Rafi Melamud?

  It was a horse and wagon. He waved his arms at its rapid approach. The dust cloud continued to move towards him. He watched and waited. The wagon pulled up beside him. It was not Rafi Melamud who sat at the reins. But a young woman. For a moment, he thought his obsessive desires had conjured up the real-life Sarah. But this was not Sarah. This woman’s features were narrower, her figure taller and leaner. Her hair was tied up under a head-scarf, she wore a sleeveless blouse, cotton skirt hiked up to her knees, her bare legs and arms deep-tanned, muscled and white-dusted. Her breathing still laboured from her exertions with the reins, her dark eyes flickered at him with impatience.

  ‘Shalom,’ he said, his first word for hours coming out hoarse and dry.

  She leaned forward on the wooden plank that made up the wagon seat, looked him up and down. Her horse, a compact, sweating beast, panted at his ear. She shook her head, said nothing.

  ‘Rafi Melamud was meant to collect me.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s not my business.’ Her own Hebrew was slow and deliberate. He tried to place the accent. It wasn’t Russian or German or Polish.

  ‘I am looking for Kfar Ha’Emek.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘I have business there.’

  ‘It is far away.’

  ‘It can’t be far way.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘My map says…’

  ‘Maps can be wrong.’

  He decided it was better not to contradict her. ‘You can take me there?’

  ‘You came from the train?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are boxes?’

  ‘Several.’

  ‘You left them there?’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Guard them?’

  ‘That would be a good idea.’

  ‘They’re not my responsibility.’

  ‘Someone could take them.’

  ‘Who?’ he said, stretching his arms out to the empty landscape. ‘Who is there to take them?’

  She ignored his protest. ‘Was there post? Letters? Packages?’

  ‘I didn’t see any.’

  ‘There must be post.’

  ‘I told you. I didn’t see any.’

  ‘There is always post.’

  She spoke so harshly that he held his hands away from his body, as if she should search him. ‘Look, no post. Now, can you take me to Kfar Ha’Emek?’

  ‘First, I must collect the crates. Then I will take you.’

  She slid to the side of her bench, indicated with a tilt of her head for him to get on board. He climbed up beside her, his suitcase and map tube by his feet, his hands grasping the plank. She yanked at the reins and they were off.

  She didn’t say a word for the few minutes it took to get back to the station that was no more than a signpost. She didn’t look at him either, just stared straight ahead, her eyes squinting against the light and the dust, her lips sucked in tight in concentration. But he watched her from the edge of his vision. For although beneath the film of dust, the tired eyes and prickly demeanour she might not have been Sarah, she was still very beautiful.

  As soon as they reached the station sign, she pulled up the wagon quick, jumped off, ran to the pile of crates. She checked the ends of each of them, until she found what she was looking for. Slid into one of the binding tapes was a pile of letters he hadn’t noticed before. She flicked through them, extracted a couple, tucked them into the waistband of her skirt. She waved the rest at him.

  ‘See?’ she said.

  He dropped off the wagon, walked over to where she stood, tapped his foot against the side of a crate. ‘What’s inside?’

  ‘Necessities.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘So many questions. Tools. Pick handles. Ropes. Perhaps some books.’ She pronounced the words slowly as if they were vocabulary newly learned. ‘Mosquito nets. And most important – quinine.’ She bent down, picked up one end of a crate. ‘Well?’

  He helped her load up the crates onto the back of the wagon. With the letters received and the work done, she seemed more relaxed. They returned to their seats on the wagon bench. She offered him some water from her canteen, shook hard at the reins and they were off again.

  He asked her name. She turned to look at him, scrutinized his face as if to assess whether he was worthy of such information.

  ‘Celia,’ she said.

  He thought she wasn’t going to ask him his but eventually, as if she were doing him a great favour, she said: ‘And you?’

  ‘Lev.’

  ‘Lev what?’

  ‘Lev Sela.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Lev Sela.’ And then in English: ‘Heart of stone.’

  ‘So you speak English?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He noted her tone had softened slightly. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘I know about Scotland.’

  ‘Oh yes? What do you know?’

  ‘It is near Manchester.’

  ‘Two hundred miles is not so near.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it always rains in Manchester.’

  She gave a slight laugh. Which surprised him as he hadn’t meant the remark to be funny. He felt a desperate need to make her laugh again but as he tried to remember some more of Mickey’s English sayings, he noticed some tents up ahead, a few outbuildings, a livestock enclosure, smoke from a fire. ‘What is this place?’ he asked.
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  ‘Kfar Ha’Emek.’

  ‘You told me it was far away.’

  She smiled at him for the first time. ‘I needed help with the crates.’

  Seven

  CELIA DROPPED LEV OFF by a low, partly plastered, brick building. ‘Give these to Rafi,’ she said, handing him the bundle of letters. ‘I must take the medicine to the sick tent.’

  Lev let the dust settle from her departure, looked around. The brick building was surrounded by tents, ten of them, patched-up, sandy-coloured affairs, he guessed they had been acquired on the cheap from the British Army now that the desert campaigns were over. It was the kind of deal Mickey might have brokered. Behind the tents, there was a stone byre fronted by a fenced-in area where half-a-dozen skinny cows chewed on some sparse gorse and a few chickens roamed. Beyond that, a rusted anvil, a wagon, buckets of tar, a couple of wooden sheds for storage, stalls for the horses, a covered area for the hay. Further off, a remote tent where Celia had already pulled up the wagon, gone inside. The compound reminded him of the small farms back in Poland. He recognized the sense of struggle and sadness about the place. Jobs half-completed, repairs needing to be done, improvements to be made. He picked up his case and tube of maps, entered the brick building.

  The dining room was laid out with six long, trestle tables, assorted chairs and benches. At one end there was a cloth partition beyond which he guessed was the kitchen area from the sound of pots being washed and scrubbed. At the other end of the room, a solitary figure sat bent over some spread-out sheets of paper on the table.

  Lev called out to him. ‘Rafi Melamud?’

  The man looked up then his voice came out deep and fierce. ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Lev Sela.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘From the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association,’ Lev said as he approached the table. ‘From PICA.’

  Rafi Melamud was a solid boulder of a man with a thick neck and round head, hair cropped short. As he leaned back in his seat, his short-sleeved work shirt stretched tight around his powerful chest, as if it were a piece of child’s clothing on an adult’s body. He didn’t get up. ‘I expected you tomorrow,’ he said, waving his hand over his papers. ‘These accounts are for you.’

  ‘No, today. It was definitely today.’

  ‘Definitely tomorrow.’

  ‘I have your telegram.’

  Rafi’s steady look challenged then quickly softened. ‘What does it matter? You are here now.’ He motioned to the chair opposite. ‘Sit.’

  Lev did as he was told.

  ‘Hungry?’

  Lev nodded.

  ‘The midday meal is finished.’ Rafi called out to the kitchen: ‘Shoshana.’

  ‘Yah,’ came a cry from behind the cloth partition.

  ‘Is there soup?’

  ‘There is always soup.’

  ‘We have a guest.’ Rafi clasped his hands in front of him, the knuckles on his thick fingers were grazed, his fingernails filled with dirt. ‘You walked from the train stop?’

  ‘Celia brought me.’

  ‘Ah yes, Celia. Were there boxes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. The new tools. And post?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I almost forgot.’ Lev handed over the bundle.

  ‘Letters are always good. They are our only hope.’ Rafi flicked through the envelopes until his eyes clouded over in disappointment. ‘Ah, here is your soup.’

  Shoshana waddled in. A stout young woman with large, bovine eyes, an enormous bosom, a filthy apron and a stink of sweat about her. ‘Here,’ she said, handing Lev a tin cup with one hand, a chunk of bread with the other. ‘It’s all there is.’ She glowered at Rafi. ‘Until I’m permitted to kill another hen.’ She turned her back on them, returned towards her kitchen.

  ‘You are my little chicken,’ Rafi shouted after her. ‘You want that I should kill you?’

  ‘I want I should cut off your dirty tongue for my soup,’ Shoshana called back, before disappearing between the folds of the cloth partition.

  Lev sipped at the hot liquid. It was thin and salty with some slithers of tough meat. He soaked it up with his bread and ate.

  ‘From Poland?’ Rafi asked, flicking away some flies from his paperwork.

  ‘Tak.’

  ‘Polish is for the weaklings in the diaspora. We speak only Hebrew here. Where is Sammy the King?’

  ‘I thought only PICA called him that.’

  ‘The four kings of Israel. Saul, David, Solomon. And Sammy. King of the Land. Where is he?’

  ‘He had a meeting in Jerusalem.’

  ‘You can help us?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘You look too young.’

  ‘I’ve been with the organization for a number of years.’

  ‘You can lend us money? We need a tractor. More tools. More food. More everything.’

  ‘I have no authority in money matters.’

  ‘Bah! Then what do you have authority in?’

  ‘I am here to discuss the land.’

  Rafi grunted. ‘Ah yes, the land. The land is simple. There is an area down in the valley. About 250 dunams. Half is occupied by a Bedouin family. They have a large vegetable plot, the rest for grazing. The other half is swamp. The Bedouin use it for watering a few buffalo, goats, horses, a small herd of sheep.’

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘If we have the land, we have access to the River Yarmuk, a tributary of the Jordan. That is the most important matter for us. Then we can draw off water, then we can irrigate, then we can bring life to this dried-up place. Sammy knows all of this.’

  ‘I had a look at the maps before I came. I can’t see the plot you’re talking about.’

  ‘Show me what you have.’

  Rafi moved his papers, Lev extracted the maps from the tube, rolled them out on the table. ‘One is from the time of the Turks by the Palestinian Exploration Fund,’ he explained. ‘It’s about sixty years old. This other one we made with the help of the British from campaign maps they produced during the last war. We used these when we first bought the land for your settlement. Where is the piece you want?’

  Rafi twisted the maps around, peered in close, ran a dirty-nailed finger down from the Sea of Galilee. ‘I don’t see it,’ he said. ‘It should be here but I don’t see it. Where the hell is it?’

  Lev went round to Rafi’s side of the table. ‘Where should it be?’

  ‘There. Outside this pink boundary. What is this boundary?’

  ‘Inside that is the land we lease to you now.’

  ‘No, it cannot be. This shows your pink boundary as going right up to the River Yarmuk. I told you we don’t have land to the river.’

  ‘You do according to the maps.’

  ‘Damn the maps. I know my own land. Our boundary is this ridge, not the river. The river flows below the ridge. Your pink line shows the ridge and the river as if they were the same line. But the river does not go like this. It twists to the east, then back again to make a bulge. And inside this bulge is the land we want.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How can both maps be wrong like this?’

  Rafi sniffed hard. ‘What does it matter? Just alter them.’

  ‘We can’t do that. According to official documents, the land doesn’t exist.’

  ‘I can assure you it does. It’s got a swamp full of malaria and a family of Bedouins on it.’

  ‘I need to see for myself.’

  ‘It is not far to the ridge. From there you can look down on this land that does not exist. I’d take you myself but I have to finish these accounts now you are a day early. Come, I will point you in the right direction.’

  Rafi took him outside, indicated a rough dirt road rutted with the grooves of wagon wheels. ‘Down there. Straight line for a half-mile or so. Until you come to the ridge. We call the place the Centre of the World. You won’t need your maps to show you why. We can talk again later. After supper. After supper is the time for talk
ing.’

  Lev headed off east along the track, passed rows of citrus saplings, a field of wilting wheat, another of sorghum, a line of eucalyptus trees shedding their ribbons of white bark. Then as he reached the ridge, the land suddenly opened out before him, the width and depth of the view taking him by surprise.

  He needed a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the vast space, the brightness. Before him a valley that stretched eastward for miles to the pink ridge of hills he had seen earlier. These hills would be part of Trans-Jordan, then beyond to Persia and Arabia. To the north, there would be Syria and Lebanon. To the south, Jerusalem then on to Egypt and Africa. Behind him was the Mediterranean, then Poland and the rest of Europe. Rafi was right. This really was the Centre of the World. And below him in the valley was the Yarmuk River, not flowing parallel to the ridge on which he stood but meandering eastwards to take in its grasp a piece of land that did not figure on any map. He could make out the Bedouin encampment dotted with black tents, flaps raised against the sun and for the capture of any breeze. He cupped his hands over his eyes. A man on horseback moved among the goats, children were playing in the dirt, a cluster of women watching over them from the shade of a tent. Part of the land had been cultivated with a few rows of vegetables. But a large section was just swamp, a couple of figures bent low with their baskets among the reeds.

  Eight

  THE DINING ROOM was surprisingly quiet for a group of over thirty people. No laughter. No strident voices. Some dull-toned conversations, that was all. Mostly men, perhaps about ten women, all about the same age, in their mid-twenties, even younger. Lev sat beside Rafi, feeling very much the city boy in his long trousers and shirt, although he had given up on the tie. Those sitting close by barely acknowledged him. Not, he felt, out of any rudeness but rather a weariness that excluded the burden of conversation with a newcomer. Everyone seemed caught up in their own islands of existence. He noticed Celia over at another table, reading a letter while she ate. A few lucky others did the same with the post they had received. He spooned up the same soup he had eaten earlier except for a few beans added to fill out the broth. Bread, jam and honey on the table, this was the evening meal after a hard day’s work in the fields.