The Land Agent Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 ownfather, 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
.

Five
    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