“You’ll have to learn Hebrew,” Jonny told her.
“What about Arabic?”
“Perhaps that too.”
al-Dalhamiyya turned out not to be a station at all, just a signpost in the middle of nowhere with its name scrawled in English and Arabic under the words ‘Palestine Railways’. There wasn’t even a platform. She wondered why the train had even bothered to stop. A bundle of spades, pitchforks, crates of tinned food had come off with their luggage. A man with a horse and wagon was already waiting.
“Shalom, Amos,” Jonny called out to the driver.
Amos nodded. He wore a dirty vest, loose cotton trousers, no shoes. Tilted back off his forehead a peaked worker’s cap, the type of headgear Celia had seen Lenin wear in photographs. He tipped his chin in her direction.
“Celia,” Jonny said. Then in Hebrew. “Hi gam baa m’Scotland.”
Amos nodded again as if it were a matter of course a young Glasgow woman should turn up on his doorstep. His horse snorted, tried to nuzzle against her arm. He pulled the reins back hard.
“He’s Russian,” Jonny said, as if this somehow explained his reluctance for conversation.
Amos sprung down from his perch, started loading the railroad shipment onto the back of the wagon. He left their luggage for her and Jonny to pick up.
She would have preferred to sit up front with Amos but the space beside him was not offered. So she just hung on the back of the wagon with Jonny as Amos took off. It was a wild ride along what was hardly a track, dust stinging her eyes, stones kicking up from the wheels, the occasional high lurch as the wagon bounced in and out of a rut, the luggage and the rest of the load flying all over the place. She almost wished she was back in her cabin, the ship’s ocean rolling not half as bad as this. Amos didn’t seem to care. His job was to drive the wagon, what was going on at the back wasn’t his concern. After about five minutes, Jonny shouted for him to stop. The wagon pulled up.
“We’ll walk the rest.”
Amos just shrugged.
She had hardly put her feet back on the ground when Amos rattled off again “Friendly,” she said.
“He’s a good worker,” Jonny replied.
She realised this would be the judge of a person in this desolate landscape, wondered whether she possessed both the energy and commitment to meet the grade. “Where is this kibbutz?”
“Not far. You can just see it straight ahead.”
She shaded her eyes, could just make out some wooden sheds, lines of tents in the distance, the smoke from a fire.
“I know you’re tired. And it’s hot. But I’d like to show you something first.”
“As long as it’s not too far.”
He led her across what had been marked off as a field with posts and twine although how it would be possible to grow anything in this dry dirt she found hard to imagine. They came to an untethered wagon loaded with large rocks. Then on past a row of olive trees with their ancient twisted branches and dusty leaves. Her feet hurt, her head ached, her eyes stung, all she craved was some cool water to soothe her parched throat, moisten her dried skin, but she stumbled on, held her tongue back from any complaint.
“Here we are,” Jonny said, holding out his hand like come proud conjurer introducing his lovely assistant. They had come to the edge of a plateau. Far down below them a valley that stretched for miles to a purple ridge of hills. Through this sun-bleached desolate landscape wound a narrow river, throwing up swathes of green where crops or grasses grew along its banks. The horizon was so wide she could not take it all in.
“On the kibbutz, we call this ledge Merkaz Ha’olam – The Centre of the World,” he told her. “Straight ahead to the east, that’s the Yamuk River. Beyond that is Trans-Jordan, then on to Persia and Arabia. Follow those hills to the north and you have Syria and Lebanon, to the south Jerusalem then on to Egypt and Africa. Behind us the Mediterranean and Europe.”
All she noticed was the silence, the air still. Not a bird in the sky. Not a cloud in the sky. She really was at the Centre of the World. In the middle of her world. The rest of her life poised to begin from this spot. How it would stretch before her with this man beside her, she could not guess. She could feel Jonny restless beside her, standing apart, not touching, as if he too had the same fear of the future. He turned his back on the scene, stretched his arms out wide to embrace the terrain they had just crossed.
“And this is the land your little pushke bought. We’re going to clear these fields, then irrigate them. Over there, we’ll grow bananas and dates and lemons and grapefruits and more olives. We’ll raise families, we’ll raise cattle. And all according to just principles. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
She turned round too, trying hard to visualise this socialist Utopia from the barren landscape facing her. Where Jonny could see cultivated farmlands and cosy communes, all she could imagine was hard toil from an unyielding earth. Then across this terrain, she spied some movement. Tiny matchstick figures approaching in a kind of dusty halo. She watched as they came nearer. Four of them. What looked like two adults, two children. With the sun throwing up some kind of dreamy haze on the hot earth, they shimmered and hovered magically above the ground as they approached, the man with a staff in his hand, the children swirling and dancing in the air. She could make out the adults’ clothes. The male in a grey full-length robe, dun-coloured jacket and a matching headscarf. The woman dressed from head to toe almost entirely in black except for a trim of gold and red, a long veil drawn across her mouth. In contrast, the children’s garb shone white in the sunshine, their hair black, long and free. She opened her mouth, felt the air breathed dry into her lungs, then the croak of her voice as she asked:
“Who are these people?”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the writer and critic Lesley McDowell for the title; and to Audrey Canning at Glasgow Caledonian University for helping me with my research. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support I have received from the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) towards the writing of this novel.
About the Author
J. David Simons was born in Glasgow in 1953. He studied law at Glasgow University and became a partner at an Edinburgh law firm before giving up his practice in 1978 to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Since then he has lived in Australia, Japan and England, working at various stages along the way as a charity administrator, cotton farmer, language teacher, university lecturer and journalist. He returned to live in Glasgow in 2006.
He is the author of The Glasgow to Galilee trilogy that includes his novels The Credit Draper, The Liberation of Celia Kahn and The Land Agent. He has also written about contemporary and 1950s Japan in his novel An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful (2013). His work has been shortlisted for The McKitterick Prize and he has been the recipient of two Writer’s Bursaries from Creative Scotland and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship.
Novels by J David Simons
THE GLASGOW TO GALILEE TRILOGY:
The Credit Draper
The Liberation of Celia Kahn
The Land Agent
An Exquisite Sense of What Is Beautiful
Copyright
Published by Saraband
Suite 202, 98 Woodlands Road
Glasgow, G3 6HB
Scotland
www.saraband.net
Copyright © J. David Simons 2011/2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN: 9781908643841
ebook: 9781908643865
Printed in the EU on sustainably sourced paper.
First published in 2011 by Five Leaves Publications.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
The Glasgow to Galilee Trilogy
While The Liber
ation of Celia Kahn stands as a novel in its own right, it is also the second part of a loose trilogy incorporating two other novels, The Credit Draper and The Land Agent, also published by Saraband. The three books can be read separately and in any order.
An Exquisite Sense of
What Is Beautiful
An eminent British writer returns to the resort hotel in Japan where he once spent a beautiful, snowed-in winter. It was there he fell in love and wrote a best-selling novel accusing America of being in denial about the horrific destruction during World War II. As we learn more, however, we realise that he too is in denial, and that his past is now rapidly catching up with him. A sweeping novel of East and West, love and war, truth and delusion.
The Liberation of Celia Kahn Page 26
