The Land Agent (3 page)

‘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?

‘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, he was seen, as with the haemorrhoids he so often complained of, as a pain in the bloody
toches
.

O
N 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.

Mulk
. The absolute ownership by a private individual of non-agricultural property. ‘Just as I have bought a house here in Haifa,’ Sammy explained.

Miri
. Agricultural land owned by the State but granted in perpetuity to an individual for cultivation. ‘But stop farming for three years,’ Sammy warned with a wag of his finger, ‘and the land goes back to the State.’

Waqf
. Land that has been handed over to an institution for charitable or religious purposes. ‘For example, to build a mosque.’

Mertuke
. Common land owned by a village. ‘For example, for roads or pasture.’ Sammy sat back down. ‘There you are.’

‘You said there were five words. What about
Mewat
?’

‘Yes,
Mewat
.’

‘You didn’t tell me what
Mewat
is.’

‘
Mewat
is complicated. I don’t know if your pebble of a Polish brain can grasp such legalistic concepts.’

‘Sammy, just tell me.’

‘Why does a typist need to know such things?’

‘You know I want to learn.’

‘You won’t believe me.’

‘Please, Sammy. What is
Mewat
?’

‘All right, all right.’ Sammy’s eyes creased at the prospect. ‘Imagine. You and I, we visit an Arab village. Let’s say somewhere between here and Tel Aviv. I stay in the village but you start walking away from it. Into the desert. Across the plains. Along the sand dunes. It doesn’t matter. And you start shouting as you walk away.’

‘What am I shouting?’

‘What do I care? As long as you are saying something. And you keep on shouting and you keep on walking and you keep on shouting until the moment I can’t hear you.’

‘How will I know you can’t hear me?’

‘I’ll make a signal. Wave my hands.’

‘Then what?’

‘You look around.’

‘And?’

‘Whatever land you see that’s not already
Mulk, Miri, Waqf
or
Mertuke
, that’s
Mewat
. For
Mewat
is dead land.’

‘Dead land?’

‘Yes. Waste land. Swamps. Desert. Unused. Uncultivated. Unpastured.’

‘What’s so special about that?’

‘It means you can start to cultivate this land without permission. And if you do, you acquire rights to that land. You might have to compensate the owner, almost always the government, for the value of the original uncultivated piece of wasteland. But the land becomes yours.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘It is to the British. They can’t stand the idea of someone acquiring land this way. Just by cultivating it. They are trying to change the law. They don’t think
Mewat
is very British. Instead, they think it’s barbaric. This idea you can own something by improving it. They think it’s uncivilized. Uncivilized? Were the Romans uncivilized, Lev?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Of course they weren’t. The Romans were one of the most sophisticated cultures on earth. And do you know what they believed?’

‘They worshipped lots of gods.’

‘I’m not talking about gods. I’m talking about art.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes. The Romans believed that art was more important than property. In Roman times, if an artist came along and saw a blank wall and he painted a mural on that wall, then the rights to the wall vested in the artist. That was Roman law.
Lex Romanus
. Do you know why, Lev? Because the painting was more important than mere bricks and mortar. Art was more important than property. And it is the same with
Mewat
. Cultivating the land is the essential thing. Bringing the soil to life, planting seeds, growing crops, trees, cereals. That’s what matters. Not the ownership of some
barren wasteland. And the British cannot see that. They want to change the law. They are so uncivilized.’

Apart from learning these laws of the land, Lev also discovered he had a talent for languages. Like the southern desert plains soaking up the seasonal rains, he realized he could absorb the various grammars and vocabularies that fell all around him without too much effort. On top of his native Polish, his understanding of Yiddish, the English he picked up from Mickey, he also learned Arabic from Sammy while improving his Hebrew until he became fluent. Sammy recognized Lev’s talent as well. Not only with languages. Sammy taught him about proof of title, certificates of registration, how to reconcile the various land surveys, dealing with the landowners, mediating in disputes. Lev even thought of becoming a lawyer.

‘A bloody lawyer,’ he said out loud in English as he stretched out his legs so his heels rested on the sill of the open window. ‘I could be a bloody lawyer. Isn’t that right, Sarah? You didn’t realize that, did you? Before you ran off with that lice-ridden Shaul. That I had a brain. That I could be a bloody lawyer.’

He loved this view of the sea, the town and the harbour. How did a Polish boy from the
shtetl
end up here? With a Mediterranean sun warming the soles of his feet, the wind blowing in warm and dry from a blue, blue sea, the aroma of coffee and cardamom from the Arab coffee shop below, the bleached white buildings crowding the bay. He picked up his binoculars as supplied to him from one of Mickey’s many ex-British Army stock deals, looked out over the harbour at the almost permanent line of emigrants waiting to be rowed out to the next west-bound ship. As he focused on each bedraggled and beaten-down figure, he wondered if one day, it would be Sarah’s face he saw.

For Lev knew he had been one of the lucky ones. Life had been tough for the other pioneers. During his first few years here, there had been more Jews leaving than arriving. He had seen that from his own work, from the land purchased for groups of settlers who discovered they were
unable to survive on idealism and hard work alone. There was the unforgiving nature of the land. The heat. The failed crops. The successful crops that couldn’t be harvested for a lack of hands in the field. And then there was the malaria from the undrained swamps. Half the workforce could be out at any given time with the disease. Not to mention trachoma, dysentery and just sheer fatigue.

Sarah’s Nine Tribes would probably have started out on a road gang, helping to build the country’s infrastructure while strengthening the solidarity of their group through the sheer hardship of their labour. They would have lived in tents by the side of the road, survived off a diet of bread and soup, quinine tablets and sweet tea, spent the day hammering rocks into gravel. When one section was finished, they would strike camp and move off to another part of the country. Once they had proved themselves as a
kvutza
, they might start to look around for a piece of land to start building their own settlement. Lev would have noticed the Nine Tribes in any proposal for any land that PICA owned. And he knew enough of Those Bloody Zionists too to have them check their records if he had wanted to. Yet he never did.

But recently, the number of Jews leaving had been on the decrease. There was more work around, especially in Haifa with its train station, its port that was always being built, the talk of bringing oil here all the way from Iraq. A university for science and technology had just opened its gates. Buildings were going up everywhere, spreading along the beachfront, crawling up Mount Carmel.

‘As long as everyone has work, there won’t be any trouble,’ Mickey said. They were sitting on Madame Blum’s veranda, Mickey with his hands in a clasp behind his head. Not a smidgen of sweat staining his shirt. For Mickey never perspired. Even now in the hottest part of the afternoon, the air hardly stirred by the lacklustre efforts of an onshore breeze. ‘But don’t pretend to yourself there is a great mix between the two cultures.’

‘You do business with the Arabs,’ Lev noted.

‘Aha! But we merchants do not know of cultural, religious or ideological boundaries. We do not care who controls access to Jerusalem’s Western Wall. We do not see any difference between a penny and a
piaster, a pound Sterling or a pound Palestinian. Business is business, Lev. It makes no distinctions. Business even likes conflict, it flourishes on conflict. But once the trade is done, the Arabs go to their areas and we go to ours. We’re like chalk and cheese. Oil and water. Milk and meat. The British and the French.’

Lev knew Mickey was right. The two peoples kept apart. The Arabs in the
shuk
, sitting under the shade of blankets propped up with poles, surrounded by baskets of olives, figs and almonds, cloths laid out with bananas, watermelons, cobs of corn. Or hard at work on the construction sites, or unloading the crates off the harbour boats. From his office window, he watched the merchants at the grain market in their stiff
tarbushes
, the officials striding in and out of their administrative offices just along the street. He passed them outside their coffee houses, sitting on tiny stools, playing cards, smoking their strange pipes, the smell of burning charcoal in the air, always men, never any women. At night-time, he would see some of the young men, migrants from the outlying villages, asleep on rooftops or on the beach. They seemed to move at a different pace from the Jews. They were less frenetic, they had a different attitude towards time, they worked according to the cooler parts of the day. There was a rootedness about them that Lev envied, an ability to sit still and observe. Who were these people? What did they think of us? What did they think of him? ‘Look at that ambitious Jew,’ they might say. ‘Rushing around in the heat of the day in those tight clothes. Always rushing. Always pushing. Taking our land from underneath our noses. At extremely exorbitant prices, of course.’ A smile and a cough into a hand at that last remark. ‘Why not sit down, sip a little coffee, light up a pipe?’ Perhaps this is what they thought. He had no idea. He had no Arab friends.

Lev. Lev Sela. Heart of stone. Always pining for Sarah. Mickey had tried to introduce him to other women. He took Lev to social events at the British club where Army daughters smoked cigarettes, laughed confidently and ignored him. He took Lev to Tel Aviv, a town that appeared
to be sprouting out of sand, where every third person operated a soda stand. There, Lev would spend his weekly earnings on a glass of milk and a slice of cake at the Casino coffee house while Mickey pretended he was a British officer and danced the foxtrot with girls from Kiev. Lev would walk the beach while he waited for his friend to do whatever he had to do with them behind the dunes.

Lev could never understand why Mickey was so lucky with the girls. After all, he never considered his friend with his fleshy face and pockmarked skin to be particularly good-looking.

‘That’s because I’ve never been in love,’ was Mickey’s response.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You and that childhood sweetheart of yours. What was her name? Sharon? Shoshana?

‘Sarah.’

‘Yes. Sarah. Well, she’s spoiled everything for you. Now every time you meet a girl, you are searching for another big love. And you feel disappointed if you don’t find it. Girls pick up on that. It’s like a sixth sense. A female phenomenon. Like a dog pisses on its territory, they know your heart has already been claimed by another.’

‘Fine. You’ve explained the reason for my failure. But you still haven’t told you me why you are so lucky with the opposite sex.’

‘What makes you think I’m the lucky one?’

Back in Haifa, Lev typed away, learned his languages, studied the property laws, corresponded about land that he never saw. For it was Sammy who did all the fieldwork, who tested the soil, met with the owners and the prospective purchasers, carried out the negotiations, sealed a deal over a cup of thick coffee and a slice of orange. Until one day, Sammy called him into his office:

‘How long have you worked here?’

‘Almost five years.’

‘You realize when I advertised at the docks for a typist, I imagined a pretty young woman from Warsaw or Riga?’

‘I realize that.’

‘And you were the only person to come forward.’

‘I realize that too.’

‘And all I wanted was for you to type, to file and to make tea.’