The Land Agent (9 page)

L
ETTER 11

T
HE WINDOWS AND DOORS
of the dining room lay wide open. Flies crowded the table-tops for the sticky spills and wedged crumbs of the recent meal. Rafi Melamud sat at the same seat where Lev had first met him. His bald head shone with moisture, the open neck of his blue workshirt revealed sodden curls beneath. The man looked tired. It wasn’t just the large pouches under his eyes, all the skin on his face appeared to sag with the weariness of a senile hound.

Lev guessed Rafi had once been an officer in some distant army, a man used to letting his subordinates wait for their orders. For Lev was being made to wait now. As was Amshel sitting beside him, flicking at flies, constantly shifting his position, hands in and out of his pockets. Standing opposite, next to Rafi, was Amos. Ferret-faced Amos wearing the same peaked worker’s cap and arrogant look as he did at the
kibbutz
meeting where he had so vehemently opposed the proposed land acquisition. It was Amos, not Celia, who had arrived with the wagon at the al-Dalhamiyya train-stop, not to meet them, but to pick up another delivery of crates. It was Amos who had told them on the way back how much he hated PICA with its pen-pushing European financiers imposing capitalist values on pioneering socialists. Lev had asked him why he bothered working on a PICA-funded venture when he could move easily to a more communist-minded settlement. Amos had been affronted by the question: ‘I have no intention of ending up as a victim of mass murder and torture,’ he had replied bitterly.

Rafi tapped the fingers of one hand on the table-top, displacing a squadron of flies in the process. Lying in front of him, a pile of thirty-six cans of the best Norwegian sardines.

‘Your gift…’ Rafi said. ‘Our members will be grateful.’

Lev accepted the gratitude with a dip of his head although it was Mickey who had helped. Lev had asked him if he could come up with a suitable token to take to the settlement. It emerged as a choice between these tins of sardines or sets of false teeth.

‘You want to stay a couple of nights?’ Rafi asked.

‘As a visitor. Not in any professional capacity as a PICA representative.’

‘You’re happy to work?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be your sponsor then. Amos here will second you. Isn’t that right, Amos?’

Amos nodded, stretched his lips into a condescending smile as if to say:
I might hate everything you and PICA stand for but I am generous enough to support you in this matter
.

Rafi went on. ‘Good. I’ll inform this evening’s meeting as a formality. Tomorrow morning, five o’clock, I will have a hard day’s work for you. As for your brother…’

Amshel pulled in his outstretched legs, wriggled upright. ‘Yes, sir… comrade.’

Rafi smiled. ‘You can build houses, comrade?’

‘I can make you a palace for a king.’

‘There are no kings here. We just need something simple for our children.’

‘Whatever you want.’

‘You will be on your own most of the time.’

‘I can manage.’

‘We can provide you with meals. But you will have to sleep where you work.’

‘The sky shall be my roof,’ Amshel said. ‘Like Jacob, our forefather, with his pillow of stones.’

Rafi chuckled. ‘Well, unlike Jacob, the children’s house will need a roof.’

‘Of course.’

‘You will not be able to vote at our meetings,’ Rafi said. ‘Or even speak at them.’

‘You are merely an unpaid guest worker,’ Amos added. ‘It is a concept I do not approve of…’

‘…but we have to be practical too,’ Rafi continued. ‘We can give you two months on this basis. Can you finish within that time?’

‘If it’s not a king’s palace you want then I don’t see why not,’ Amshel said.

‘Good. I shall also notify this arrangement to this evening’s meeting. Amos, I assume, will not second the proposal on a matter of principle. Isn’t that right, Amos?’

‘That is correct.’

‘Amshel, I will therefore ask Celia to support the motion since she has met your brother.’

‘I doubt Celia will be at the meeting,’ Amos said. ‘She is sick.’

The thick stench of disinfectant stung Lev’s eyes as soon as he pulled aside the tent flap. He slid inside, closed up the doorway. Cracks of light stole through the tent seams, exposing a round interior partitioned off by ropes and blankets to create three separate cramped living spaces. Celia, or at least the prone figure he assumed must be Celia, lay on a cot under a mosquito net in one of them. The other two cots were empty. He took a couple of paces forward, placed the workclothes he had just picked out from the communal laundry on a vacant chair, then steadied himself with a grip on the centre pole.

‘Who is it?’ strained a weak voice from the cot.

‘It’s me. Lev.’ And then, just in case she had no idea who he was: ‘Lev from PICA. I sent a telegram…’

Celia raised herself up slightly, looked in his direction, then flopped back down on her pillow. He fumbled with the netting until he found the gap, crouched inside, sat down on the stool by her cot. Celia lay on her back wrapped tightly in a sheet from the waist down like some mythical fish-creature. Her upper body was dressed in a plain blouse translucent
in patches where her moist skin soaked the cotton. Her hair was flattened damp to her skull, yet her lips were dry and split. The heat coming off her body was tangible. He felt his own forehead bristle with sweat.

‘You came,’ she said.

‘Yes. I am here.’

After the meeting with Rafi, Lev had gone over to the hospital tent. There he had found Jonny, the doctor from Scotland, who told him there was nothing to worry about. A fever was just a fever. Most likely a mild form of dysentery. It was only if the temperature broke, then came back again a few hours later would there be a concern about malaria. She just had to rest, drink lots of fluids, Jonny would monitor her condition. No need to move her to the medical tent either. Let her recover in her own cot. She shouldn’t be disturbed.

Lev decided to go see her anyway, to make sure she was drinking, to bathe her hot brow. Which he did now. He poured out some water from a jug into a cloth, she let out a slight moan from the coolness pressed on her forehead. He was disturbed to find himself aroused by the sound. He lifted away then dabbed the cloth lightly into the dryness of her mouth. Again she moaned. He pulled away, sat back on the stool.

‘You have a fever.’

‘I have malaria,’ she insisted.

‘Jonny said you have mild dysentery.’

‘Jonny, Jonny, Jonny. Always looking after me.’

‘That’s what doctors do.’

‘Even when I don’t love him, he still looks after me. Did he tell you I broke his heart? I let him bring me all this way so full of hope for both of us. That we could have a life together here. And then…’ Her voice drifted.

‘You need to rest.’

‘It is so hot in here. So hot. Water. I am so thirsty.’

He poured some water into a tin cup, brought his hand under her slippery neck, lifted her head to the rim until he could tip the liquid into her mouth. She coughed slightly to the first touch of the water against her throat, then gulped at it greedily. When she was finished, he let her head fall gently back against the sodden pillow.

‘In Scotland, it isn’t hot,’ she said. ‘Everything there is cold and wet and green. Jonny and I went picking blackberries once in Perthshire. It was a grand day. We met a gypsy woman who sold us a tin bucket and there was a man with a dancing bear. Can you believe that? A dancing bear. In the middle of Scotland…’

He leaned over, gently pressed her lips closed with the damp cloth. ‘You should sleep,’ he said.

‘Why am I sick? I am never sick. Even in cold and wet Scotland. When the whole world was dying from Spanish influenza, I was fine.’ She tried to raise herself from the pillow again but failed. ‘I don’t want to have malaria, Lev. I am scared.’

‘Please. Try to rest.’

‘This is what it must be like to die. To close your eyes so that the darkness swims in front of you and you fall deeper and deeper into it until you finally drift away. Will I know that I have died? Will I know?’

‘You are not dying. You have a fever, that’s all.’

‘Take my hand. Here, hold it, talk to me. Please. Tell me about yourself. And I will listen. I am too tired to talk about bears and buckets…’

He felt her hot fingers grasp his own. He watched as she closed her eyes, as her lips twitched into a silence. He spoke quietly, telling her of his small town in Poland, how his mother had died not long after he was born, how he and his three brothers had been raised by his father. He spoke of his father as a sad man, bowed down by the early death of his wife, the hardship of bringing up a family on his own, the pain of never understanding why his eldest son had disappeared, then the tragedy of losing his next two sons in a war. He told her how his brother, Amshel, had suddenly returned into his life and that he was here now, sleeping under the stars, charged with building a house for the children she was yet to have. And even though she was now asleep, he told her about Sarah, how she also had asked him to come with her to Palestine. How she also had broken his heart. And he wondered whether Celia would do the same.