The Land Agent

by J David Simons

  I am writing this letter in the dining room. It is very late, I don’t even know what time it is. There is a young man asleep in a cot at the other end of the room. Or at least he is pretending to be asleep, for I believe he is watching me. His name is Lev. I think he likes me. He grabbed my hand a while ago when I took him over a cup of tea. I pulled it away, of course. Yet I could feel all my feminine wiles coming to the fore just because there was a new male in the camp. How fickle I am after everything I have just written above. At the same time, it is hard to believe I can still be attractive when my clothes are so dirty, my hair is stiff with dirt and I stink for lack of a good wash. If he had come on the Sabbath, at least then I make a little bit of an effort. But what does it matter? As I just wrote, perhaps it is better to be alone.

  In the meantime, this Lev has come here from the organization that owns our land to help us acquire some more. More land. We cannot even take care of what we have. But it is essential we get this plot as it will give us access to the river. For there is one thing that is just as important as land here in Palestine, and that is water. Our crops are dying in the field and there are severe restrictions on the amounts we can use for bathing or the laundry.

  At tonight’s meeting, I believe Lev began to realize what a nest of vipers he was sticking his hand into. This piece of land is a symbol of all our differences in this little group of ours. When we talk of land, what we are really talking about are all the tensions that lie beneath our relationships, all the things we are too frightened to say to each other face to face. Some people in our group are against acquiring the land for ideological reasons. For socialist reasons. For Zionist reasons. For practical reasons. For personal reasons. For spiteful reasons. At the meeting tonight we ended up discussing it all over again. Discuss, discuss, discuss. That is all we do here when we are not working. That is what socialism is, Charlotte. Discussions and committees and meetings. We discuss everything. In the end, it is not the one who is right who wins, but the one who can last longest. I feel I can’t even spend a penny here without a damn discussion. If I just lift up my skirts in the fields and go there and then, perhaps there should be a discussion about that too. I know it is important to talk about things as a group. That we should all feel equal. That we should give according to our ability and take according to our needs. But sometimes I am just sick of it. Sometimes I just yearn for a dictatorship (a benevolent one, of course, run by a woman) when someone just tells me what to do without any talk, talk, talk.

  Look at me, talk, talk, talking away. I am sorry, Charlotte, I must stop chattering on like this. I am so very tired. There is so much more that I could tell you but I must finish this letter so I can get this Lev to take it back to Haifa with him tomorrow. That way it should arrive with you more quickly. What price the grasping of my hand? Why, a postage stamp to Great Britain, of course.

  All my love

  Celia

  Ten

  ‘NOT NOW.’

  Lev turned over in his cot, watched a pink lizard, its skin almost translucent, slither along one of the beams, disappear into a crack. He listened to the scratch of Celia’s pen across the paper. He heard the tiredness in her sigh. He couldn’t believe he had grabbed her hand like that. The last time he had held a female hand was when he had danced the hora around a campfire with Sarah and the rest of the Young Guard. His palm had been so sweaty then, he feared she would slip from his grasp. With Celia, his hand was as dry as parchment as it was propelled towards her wrist by some hidden force outside himself. Until he heard those two words that had filled him with just a little hope.

  ‘Not now.’

  He remembered visiting his grandfather in his cottage in the woods, he must have been eight or nine years old at the time. It had been springtime, and they sat outside on a rough bench in the strengthening sunshine. His zeide’s dog, Bazyli, lay in a flea-ridden, wheezing heap at his feet, a woodpecker drilled away at some linden tree in the forest, there were butterflies in the air, poppies sprouting all around the rough grass. His grandfather had an arm around him, his ancient beard tickling his cheek as he read to him the wisdom of the great sages.

  ‘Hillel is my favourite,’ his grandfather told him. ‘For his teachings are simple and true. They speak profoundly of love.’

  Lev was not interested in these teachings of Hillel. He was just wondering if he could find a way back through the woods to his home without being set upon by the Catholic farmboys. Or chased by the dybukks that haunted the forest in search of young boys under the age of ten. He therefore had little attention for the words of the great Hillel and the Golden Rules he was supposed to live by. As for love, he knew even at that young age he would love Sarah more than the words of any ancient Jewish sage.

  ‘I know you are young, Lev,’ his grandfather continued, smacking his wet lips together, a motion Lev knew signified the advent of a serious talk on the Torah. ‘But if you remember just a few words out of all that I tell you, just a few words, then your life will be the better for it. I promise you.’ Smack, smack, smack. ‘These words come from the Ethics of the Fathers.’

  And his grandfather droned on. Lev watched the slanting light through the trees, the flick of Bazyli’s ear to a blood-sucking insect, a butterfly caught briefly in the tangle of his grandfather’s beard. But in all the dreaminess of that lazy day, he did remember a few of his zeide’s words. There were only five of them. And he recalled them now as he drifted into sleep. To dream of a cottage in the heart of a Polish wood where for a few moments he had dwelt in an intense happiness only possible in the innocence of childhood. ‘Eem loh achshav… eh matai?’ If not now… then when?

  It was still dark when Lev woke to the first of the workers coming into the dining room for a hot drink before going out to the fields. He rose quickly, folded away his cot, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, went outside to the covered pit toilets. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been up this early. The dew, the hiss of the crickets, the low-flying bats with their leathery wings disturbing the air above his head. He entered one of the huts, held his nose against the stink of excrement mixed with disinfectant, emptied his bladder into a deep shaft. For a few moments, he considered his forefathers who might have urinated on this very same spot, stopping off with their camel train as they passed through this valley en route between Damascus and Jerusalem. The uncircumcised Abram before he had made his covenant with God, marking out his territory for future generations. He shivered, shook himself off, returned to the dining room. He made himself a cup of thick coffee, sat quietly in a far-off corner watching the young men and women as they shuffled in, then disappeared back out into the darkness. He looked out for Celia. But she never arrived.

  ‘Yalla.’ Jonny rose up off the wagon seat, whipped up the reins. ‘Yalla.’ Then, in English: ‘Come on, for God’s sake.’ The skinny beast wriggled in its halter, picked up pace, kicked up some more dust. Lev gripped the seat with one hand, tried to continue eating his breakfast of a half-rotten banana with the other. A bunch of the same blackening fruit slid around on the boards behind him. Perched on the seat between them, a Gladstone bag, its leather worn and sagging. He asked Jonny where he was from.

  ‘Glasgow,’ was the reply.

  Lev thought Glasgow sounded like some town in Poland until Jonny added: ‘Glasgow, Scotland.’

  Of course, Scotland. How stupid he had been. He tossed the banana peel into a field of young citrus trees. ‘The two of you,’ he said. ‘From Scotland.’

  ‘You’ve met Celia then?’

  ‘She gave me a ride from the train-stop.’

  ‘I hope she was pleasant to you.’

  ‘Pleasant enough.’

  ‘Good. She runs hot and cold does Celia. Especially with strangers. But she’s certainly a natural with the wagon and horses. Hard to believe she was a city girl.’

  Lev tried to imagine Celia as a city girl. With a fancy hat pierced by a peacock feather, a long coat trimmed with fur, like the elegant women
he once glimpsed strolling along the Nowy Świat in Warsaw. He wondered if she had worn carmine on her lips like Ewa Kaminsky. He wondered if she and Jonny were a couple.

  Jonny meanwhile said nothing more about her. Instead, he went on to tell Lev how he had been a medical student back in Glasgow before interrupting his studies to go off to fight in the Great War. Lev noted that unlike his own brothers, who had fought in the same war but on the opposite side, Jonny had managed to return alive. He had resumed his studies, graduated as a doctor yet had never practised until now.

  ‘I came to work on the land. That was the plan. I was going to be the great socialist farmer. But there’s so much need for medical care here. Not just in our little settlement. But among the Arab villages too. Malaria, of course. Then there is syphilis, trachoma, chronic diarrhoea. Sometimes, just sheer bloody exhaustion.’

  They had reached the ridge at the Centre of the World. Jonny pulled the wagon to a halt, extracted a ready-rolled cigarette from his shirt pocket, struck up a match. ‘Sorry, it’s the only one,’ he said, spitting some loose shreds onto the boards at his feet.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘I prefer a pipe myself. But I’m scratching the bottom of my allowance.’

  ‘Tobacco is rationed?’

  ‘We share out everything. Food, clothes, books, tobacco.’

  ‘Clothes as well?’

  ‘We throw all our clothes into the laundry, pick up what more or less fits from the clean piles. We’ve got one good suit that does for everyone when we have an official meeting to go to. Haven’t you noticed what a bunch of misfits we are?’

  Lev did recall Rafi almost bursting out of his too-small workshirt during their first encounter. ‘And if I am not a smoker?’

  ‘Each according to his needs. No need to smoke, no need for tobacco. But I’m sure you’ve got needs others don’t have, Lev. Or you have something others need.’ Jonny stretched out a hand, grasped at Lev’s wrist. ‘Like this nice watch. It all balances out in the end.’ Jonny dragged hard on his cigarette as if to prove his point, then tipped his chin in the direction of the valley. ‘There are your Bedouin.’

  ‘I saw them from here yesterday.’

  ‘Do you speak Arabic?’

  ‘Not much. And you?

  ‘Enough to get by. Zayed’s son, Ibrahim, will probably speak with you. He knows Hebrew. A bit of English as well. Have you done business with the Bedouin before?’

  ‘My first time.’

  ‘Really? I thought you boys from PICA were well-versed in these matters.’

  ‘Sammy is the expert, not me.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take the lead, then. We’ll be invited to eat, of course. That is part of their tradition. But we must politely refuse. Which will be a relief for them as they can hardly manage to feed themselves. They will then invite us to drink with them, an offer we can accept. And remember no discussion of business inside the tent. You must go outside for that.’

  ‘What are they like, this Zayed and Ibrahim?’

  ‘Typical Bedouin. Don’t say much. Too many years wandering around the desert with only camels for company. But don’t underestimate them. There’s a shrewd intelligence lurking there behind the silences. Zayed is more traditional, of course, but Ibrahim can be quite modern in his outlook. We have a good relationship with them. We buy their vegetables. We give them medicine. They provide us with a few bottles of arak. Some extra hands at harvest time. Or help with draining the swamps. Even though there are some among us who don’t want to employ them.’

  ‘I heard all the arguments last night.’

  ‘The irony is if we argued less, we’d have all the time in the world to do our own farmwork.’ Jonny stared out across the valley. Lev followed his gaze. The sun had come up from behind the hills, the same range he had seen the day before as pink was now a shade of dark purple. A hawk swooped over the rift, then stopped to hover above the reeds in the marshland.

  ‘I thought she would love it here,’ Jonny said, tossing his cigarette into the dust. ‘I really did.’

  Eleven

  A RIDER CAME OUT to meet them. He wore the traditional dress – grey robe, dun sleeveless jacket, a matching kufiya around his head held in place with a black aggal. Lev used to wonder why the Bedouin wore such dark clothes when surely white or khaki was best against the sun. It was Sammy the King who told him it was the looseness of their clothes, not the colour that kept them cool. Across this man’s back, a rifle. And running alongside him, the most beautiful dog Lev had seen. A sleek, tan-coloured beast, long ears swept back close to its pointed face as it ran, a greyhound’s spindly limbs but full-chested, coat slightly feathered on the back of its legs and its curved tail. Lev had heard of these desert hounds before, but never seen one up close. A saluki.

  Jonny brought the wagon to a halt. The horseman pulled up beside them, shortening the reins to wrestle the lurching steed into his control. ‘Haahgh,’ the man rasped. ‘Haahgh.’ And the beast calmed. The rider, breathless, smiled at them, revealing a mouth of gaps and twisted teeth. His face was lined deep, sun-beaten, a frosting of stubble around the jaw. ‘Assalaamu aleikum, Doctor Yonny,’ he rasped with a desert-dried throatiness. ‘Assalaamu aleikum.’

  ‘Wa-Aleikum Assalaam, Zayed. And this is my friend. Lev.’

  ‘Assalaamu aleikum, Lev.’

  ‘Wa-Aleikum Assalaam.’

  Zayed bent over toward his hound. ‘Run,’ he shouted. ‘Run. Run into the sun.’ And then on returning upright: ‘I must set him free. Or he becomes restless.’

  Lev watched as the dog raced eastwards away from them, pawing up dust as it ran towards the river. Its grace at speed was remarkable. But then it had to be fast to chase down the desert hares and gazelles it was trained to kill.

  ‘Do you hunt, Lev?’ Zayed asked.

  ‘I used to go into the forest with my brother. He was the hunter.’

  ‘And what did you find there?’

  ‘Deer. Boar.’

  ‘Boar?’

  ‘Wild pigs.’

  ‘Hah! I envy you. Here I find only a skinny hare, if I am lucky.’ Zayed turned to Jonny. ‘My youngest son…’

  ‘I know. I received your message.’

  ‘Good. But first you must eat.’

  ‘We have no time to eat, Zayed. Allah did not make enough hours in the day to complete all the work I must do.’

  ‘So be it. But you must let me invite you and your friend Lev for coffee.’

  ‘Coffee will be good.’

  ‘Then come. Follow me.’

  The large tent was made of woven goats hair, the flaps lifted to allow what little breeze there was to pass through. Lev sat quietly, sipped from a small cup of sweet coffee flavoured with cardamom as he watched Zayed and Jonny in murmured conversation opposite. Directly outside the tent opening, two women made butter by shaking a skin-sack of sheep’s milk that hung from a wooden tripod. They spoke quietly as they swung the sack between them. Lev selected a dried date from a brass plate by his side, bit down on its tough sweetness. He was glad to see his host had left his rifle outside. For he had no idea how Zayed would react to their imminent discussion. After all, this was supposed to have been a quiet chat with an Arab landowner willing to sell off a malaria-infested swamp at an inflated price. Not a discussion with an armed tribesman occupying land that didn’t appear to officially exist. He flicked away a fly, chewed on another date, as he pondered on how to best approach his host. He felt his eyes heavy in the heat and the slow-paced atmosphere of his surroundings. Only for his mind to shudder back into alertness when Zayed clapped his hands and called out: ‘Rafiq. Bring Rafiq.’

  One of the women, who had been churning the butter, got up, came back with a young boy. He must have been about seven years old. His eyes were swollen, almost completely sealed up with a crusty discharge.

  ‘This is Rafiq,’ Zayed said. ‘My youngest son.’

  Rafiq clung to his mother’s robes.

  ‘Stand up straight,’ Zayed comm
anded.

  The boy did as he was told.

  ‘I will need to see him outside,’ Jonny said.

  ‘Go with the doctor.’

  Jonny took the boy to the opening of the tent. There, he prised open one eyelid then the other, twisted his head one way and then the other, as the boy winced against the pain and the sunlight.

  Back inside, Jonny said: ‘It is good you asked me to come.’

  ‘He will go blind?’ Zayed asked. ‘Like his uncle?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It is early in the disease.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  ‘I will squeeze the lids to see if I can get rid of the poison. Then I will add some drops into his eyes.’

  ‘What is this medicine?’

  ‘It’s a plant extract. I don’t know the word in Arabic. We call it “witch hazel”. I will leave you the bottle.’

  Zayed muttered the word back to himself.

  Jonny went on: ‘The most important thing is to keep the boy’s face clean. Boil water and when it cools, bathe his eyes with a clean cloth, then add some of these drops. Everything must be as clean as possible, Zayed. Tell the women not to wipe the boy’s eyes with spit and the hem of their robes. And keep him away from the other children.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘No, there is one more thing.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He must not rub his eyes.’

  ‘Do you hear that, Rafiq? No eye-rubbing.’

  ‘I suggest also you tie his hands behind his back.’

  ‘Tie his hands. All day?’

  ‘All day. And all night. I will come back in a week to see how he is.’