The Land Agent

by J David Simons

  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.’

  ‘I know.’

  Sammy smiled. There was a sweetness in the man that Lev loved. Even when Sammy was angry, the gentleness of his nature could not be hidden from his eyes, from bursting out of the rosiness of his lips. Which Sammy smacked together now in anticipation of what he was about to say. ‘I am delighted you took the initiative to learn beyond your duties of typing, filing and making tea.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Your apprenticeship has been served.’

  ‘What? You are dismissing me?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am telling you that your time has come.’

  ‘My time for what?’

  ‘Time to be a proper land agent.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Take a look at this.’ Sammy passed him a file. ‘A kibbutz is after an additional plot in the Jordan Valley. It’s only about 250 dunams. I was supposed to visit them tomorrow. But I have a meeting with Those Bloody Zionists in Jerusalem. I want you to go and see what matters are like on the ground. The area is probably mostly swamp-land anyway. Find out who owns it, if there are any tenant farmers working on it.’

  Lev read through the correspondence with the same excitement and concentration as if they were letters from his long-lost sweetheart. The name of the kibbutz was Kfar Ha’Emek. Village of the Valley. ‘Can I negotiate a settlement?’

  ‘Don’t run ahead of yourself. This is a reconnaissance trip only. Get a sense of whether the owners want to sell, an idea about price, how much the kibbutz needs this land in the first place. But keep your cards close to your chest until we know all the facts.’

  Mickey clapped his hands together when he heard the news. ‘This is your big chance, my young virgin,’ he said with an inhale of one of Madame Blum’s Russian cigarettes. ‘These kibbutz girls are like Jezebels. Sharing work, sharing food, sharing beds. Your one night in the Galilee will be a night of bliss.’

  Six

  TAKE THE MORNING TRAIN on 25th from Haifa to Damascus. Descend al-Dalhamiyya. We will meet you. Rafi Melamud.

  Lev had seen from a map that al-Dalhamiyya was a small Arab village but he now discovered that its eponymous station wasn’t a station at all. It didn’t even have a platform. Just a signpost in the middle of nowhere with its name scrawled in both Arabic and English lettering under the words ‘Palestine Railways’. But neither Rafi Melamud nor any of his comrades were to be seen. Lev looked around, shielding his eyes from the white light bouncing off the bleached earth, expecting to see the kicked-up dust of an approaching horse or wagon. Nothing. Just waves of heat blurring the horizon. He walked around the sign, finding it hard to believe this place could be a scheduled stop. He laid down his cardboard tube of rolled-up maps, stacked the crates that had been unloaded with him in a way that provided some shade, sat down on his small suitcase.

  He was situated somewhere in the middle of the Jordan Valley rift. There were ranges of hills to the east and west of him but the immediate landscape was bare except for this railway track and a few hardy shrubs. Somewhere off to the north-east was the village of al-Dalhamiyya. Somewhere in between was the tiny settlement of his destination – Kfar Ha’Emek.

  He scraped his fingers into the ground, dug out a handful of chalky dust, let the particles sift through his hand. Why would anyone want to live in such a place? Why here, when the breezes of the coastal plains were only a few hours journey away by train? But he could already hear Sammy’s words of response in his head. ‘Land is land is land.’ He flipped the cap off his trench-watch, a gift to himself bought off a British soldier with his first pay packet. Rafi Melamud, if he were coming at all, was thirty-three minutes late.

  He had felt so buoyant when stepping down from the train. After all, he was now a young man filled with responsibility and purpose, dressed smart in his freshly-ironed shirt and a fancy tie borrowed from Madame Blum’s late-husband’s wardrobe. But his self-esteem was deflating with each passing moment, as were the creases of his shirt as he roasted in the heat. He recalled a ruse his father employed with the customers at Mr Borkowski’s alcohol and tobacco store, pulling Lev back from his eagerness to serve. ‘Let them wait, son,’ his
father advised through a stink of liquor. ‘Make them uncomfortable, let them know who’s in charge.’ His grandfather, on the other hand, took an entirely different view of tardiness. ‘According to Jewish law, to make someone wait is a sin,’ he told Lev. ‘For you are guilty of theft, guilty of stealing their time.’ Between his father and his grandfather, his upbringing had been a bundle of contradictions.

  His time was being stolen now, yet he could not help but marvel at the silence. He closed his eyes. It had been a long time since he had experienced such a void of sound. He had to go back to his snowbound village when he and Sarah would go out to the edges of the forests, look back across the wintry fields, hold hands and hold their breath, listen to nothing. So unlike Haifa with its metal grinding of the seabed in the dredge of a harbour, the screeching gulls above the fish baskets, the shouts of the traders within the grain houses, the muezzin’s insistent call to prayer from the minarets.

  He dozed in the swollen heat, then woke to slap away at the flies and the mosquitoes, took a sip of water from his canteen, shook the contents next to his ear. Less than a third full. He either stayed where he was and baked to death or found his own way to the settlement. He eased back against the crates, hands behind his head, brought to mind the location of Kfar Ha’Emek without having to unroll his map. He had a talent for that, conjuring up images of words and objects in his head. That was what had helped his learning of languages, holding mental pictures of vocabularies before his eyes until he could learn them by heart. He pictured the geographical position of the settlement as being about a mile directly north along the railway track in the direction of the Sea of Galilee, then off to the north-east for another mile towards the hills lining the far-side of the valley. A forty-minute journey at the most.

  He counted the railway sleepers as he walked. And as he built up a steady rhythm to his gait, he found himself thinking again of his grandfather. His zeide had been dead for more than five years. Zelda had been right. The wasting lungs had killed him before the winter was out. She had then gone into the village, found Mr Borkowski at his alcohol and tobacco store, dictated a letter for him to send to Lev at the headquarters of the Young Guard in Jerusalem. The envelope, adorned with a list of scored-out addresses, was eventually forwarded to him at the offices of PICA in Haifa. The message was short. Grandfather dead. Where is my tooth? He had forgotten all about Zelda’s dental request. Her tooth was not buried under some olive tree overlooking Haifa bay as desired but lay where he had tossed it, not far from his grandfather’s cottage.