To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4 (37 page)

‘I think the word is “meet”,’ Jakob said with a chuckle. ‘Ivan is still learning English.’

‘Hope so,’ Saul said from the corner of his mouth. ‘Because he looks like he could eat the donkey and me in one sitting.’

‘Da, meet you,’ Ivan echoed as he realised his mistake. ‘You fight Africa for English?’ he asked.

‘Fight for Queensland, not bloody England,’ Saul quickly countered.

‘One day we talk battles,’ Ivan said throwing his huge arms around Jakob and Saul’s shoulders and
leading them across a dusty courtyard to a substantial stone building. Saul could see only a handful of older men and women and children in the village, guessing rightly that the younger adults were working. Saul had first noticed the fields, scraggly olive groves and vineyards beyond the little township as he and Jakob descended the winding narrow and rough track.

When Saul was introduced to the older men of the village, they seemed impressed as Jakob extolled Saul’s farming experience in far-off Australia.

‘But I know cattle – not crops,’ Saul growled when Jakob explained what he had been telling the men in Yiddish. ‘I don’t know the first thing about bloody olive trees or cereal crops.’

‘But you must know something about animal husbandry,’ Jakob argued. ‘We do have goats.’

‘Goats! We shoot them as pests in Queensland. Damned things strip the land of everything worth eating for the stock.’

‘Here they give us milk, cheese and meat,’ Jakob said, offended. ‘And an animal is an animal.’

‘I think you chose the wrong person to come with you,’ Saul replied. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t be of much help.’

‘Karen chose you,’ Jakob pointed out quietly. ‘And I think she chose wisely. God has a plan for you, which only He knows.’

Saul shrugged and stared at the men sitting around the crude wooden table watching him with some expectation. ‘I’ll have a look around and see what I can do,’ Saul finally conceded. ‘Maybe there is something – but no promises.’

‘Good,’ Jakob said and turned to the grim-faced men to explain that the young man who had accompanied him on his journey knew all about goat husbandry. They smiled and raised small cups of thick, black coffee to toast Saul’s acceptance into their struggling community.

Saul was billeted in a one-roomed stone house with Ivan as the Russian could speak enough English to explain the workings of the community. The following day he was taken on a tour of the
moshava
. The two men walked the dusty and almost silent lands to the top of a craggy rise overlooking a depression of reedy swamps.

‘We get this land from Arabs,’ Ivan said as they surveyed the large tract of swamp. ‘Land no good to Arab, so he sell to us.’

‘Not much you can do with a swamp,’ Saul agreed. ‘But it would be good land if you could drain it.’

‘How we drain?’ Ivan growled. ‘I think Jakob not so smart buy this land.’

‘Back home we find that where gum trees grow they just naturally drain swamps. You blokes ought to be planting a few around here. It looks like the climate will take to gums okay.’

‘What is gum trees?’ Ivan asked, scratching at his beard.

‘I think you call them eucalyptus trees, or something,’ Saul answered, staring down at the swamp. ‘Kind of miss them a lot,’ he added wistfully.

‘Maybe you talk to Jakob about this thing,’ Ivan suggested. ‘Maybe Jakob know about gum tree.’

‘Maybe,’ Saul mused.

After a midday meal of bread, goat cheese and green olives the two men continued the tour. It was sundown by the time they finally returned and Saul first saw the population of the village gathered. In the short time he had been in the community he had only fleeting glimpses of the younger men and women going and returning to the fields. But this time they were gathered around a bonfire at the edge of the village.

‘What’s going on?’ Saul asked Ivan.

‘What you say, celebration. First baby born in settlement. People happy.’

‘Good enough,’ Saul smiled. ‘You don’t happen to celebrate with beer, do you?’ he asked hopefully.

‘No beer,’ Ivan responded. ‘Vodka and wine.’

‘That’ll do,’ Saul sighed. ‘Better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.’

Ivan glanced sideways at the Australian. He presumed poking people in the eye with a stick was something they did where Saul came from. It didn’t sound like a good pastime – not as good as drinking copious quantities of vodka.

Ivan generously shared his supply of precious Russian vodka with Saul that night as the young men and women sang and danced by the flickering light of the bonfire. It was rather subdued compared to similar gatherings Saul remembered from his past. On the rare occasions that the stockmen came together in his part of the world it usually ended up in a drunken brawl.

Saul sat with Ivan, admiring the graceful movements
of the young women in their long, peasant-style skirts. One girl stood out from the rest. Unlike the majority with their olive-hued skin, dark eyes and hair, this girl had striking blue eyes, fair skin and blonde hair. Saul was entranced by her swaying movements as she linked arms with the other girls to dance in a graceful circle around the bonfire.

‘Who is that girl by the fire?’ Saul asked Ivan. ‘The one with hair the colour of the desert.’

Ivan blinked and turned to see at who Saul was pointing. He squinted and then frowned. ‘That is Anna, she is what you say, sister of mine.’

Saul looked with surprise at the huge man beside him. ‘Your sister!’

‘Da, little sister,’ Ivan confirmed.

Saul was wise enough not to point out that the graceful young girl looked nothing like her brother.

‘All boy chase Anna,’ Ivan continued. ‘I break neck of boy chase Anna,’ the big Russian grunted.

Wisely, Saul did not pursue any questions about the bewitching girl who stood in the shadows of the fire. Ivan swigged from the almost empty bottle before passing it to Saul, his new friend’s question already forgotten.

‘Time we dance,’ Ivan said lumbering to his feet unsteadily. ‘All dance,’ he repeated, hauling Saul up and partly dragging him to the circle where Saul found himself beside Anna. Ivan said something to his sister and she laughed softly as she took Saul’s hand. Her eyes levelled on his and Saul registered a strange feeling he thought had died forever with Karen.

‘I am Anna,’ she said slowly as she smiled up at Saul. The sound of her voice was as sweet as the scent of the gum trees Saul so much missed.

Saul learned that Anna was Ivan’s only living relative. Their family had escaped Tsarist Russia after a pogrom against their village, but Ivan’s parents had died on the terrible trek across the seemingly unending Russian steppes to Europe.

Prior to the pogrom, Ivan had been a cavalryman in the Cossacks until he was revealed to be a Jew, although he had never felt religiously committed to his parents’ beliefs. Most of his friends had been the Orthodox Christian boys of the village who respected Ivan for his physical size and strength. He had eventually left the village in search of adventure and had joined a Cossack regiment stationed at St Petersburg. He had been happy as a soldier for the Tsar until his past caught up with him and he had been forced to choose between burning predominantly Jewish villages or deserting. He chose the latter after a troop of Cossacks forced his family out of their home and it was he who organised the exodus of the survivors to seek a new home in America. But he did not get that far. His aged parents had died in the snow, and when they reached Budapest in the Austro–Hungarian Empire, he and his sister had heard the rumours of a new land being forged in Palestine for the scattered people of David and Abraham.

Anna was now sixteen and had at first been confused by the war waged against her village in Russia. She was after all more Russian in appearance than
Jewish, but this did not matter to the villagers she thought she knew. They had turned on her family as if they had been complete strangers. So she had left her homeland with mixed feelings.

‘You like me,’ Ivan would often tell Saul during a bout of drinking. ‘You soldier, not farmer. I get you job working for me,’ he added and continued to talk about his past. Sometimes he would tell Saul a little about his beautiful sister and Saul would listen to every scrap of information. Then Ivan would burst into a sad folk song, tears running unashamedly down his weather-beaten cheeks into his bushy beard. When that time came, Saul would ease himself from Ivan’s company to allow him to mourn privately for what was lost.

The strong bond forming between the two men was reinforced when Jakob came to Saul to suggest that he might be better employed working with Ivan to provide an armed guard for the village. Armed with an old French military carbine, Ivan currently worked alone, patrolling the
moshava
’s perimeter on horseback. There had been incidences of theft in the past as well as harassment by gangs of roving men from a nearby Arab village, although nothing of great consequence.

But Jakob still worried. With only three old rifles, two pistols and a limited supply of rounds, the settlers were vulnerable to any organised attack should the nearby Arabs choose to retake the land they had purchased from them. To date they had only sneered at the European Jews who had come with aspirations to make the worthless land fruitful. They had sold the
new settlers the swamps and rocky fields and left them to learn that Allah had ordained the land to be barren. But slowly the settlers were actually redeeming what the Arabs considered worthless, and now their sneers were changing to expressions of greed.

‘There will be a time when they turn on us,’ Jakob had warned at the meetings of the
moshava
council. ‘A time when we will have to defend ourselves.’

‘But we are not soldiers,’ many had argued. ‘The Ottomans will protect us.’

‘The Ottomans are Muslim,’ Jakob cautioned. ‘They will be like the Europeans, and turn a blind eye, as the French have with Captain Dreyfuss.’

The situation kept Jakob awake at nights. He had an idea but it would require money and the right men to carry it out. Saul Rosenblum came to mind.

Saul had taken to the often boring and lonely task of patrolling the hills and valleys between the
moshava
and the surrounding scattered villages of the Palestinian Arabs. Astride a horse and with a rifle at his hip, Saul felt he had at last a meaningful role in the community. He was a soldier and knew his job. Sometimes he would be accompanied by Ivan and in the distance the Arab goat herders would watch the armed men on horseback. It was a tiny show of strength but it seemed to be working. The incidences of theft and harassment ceased.

On night patrols Saul sometimes took up a position close to the Arab village and observed how they went about their routine. He would look for signs
of any parties of armed men leaving the village or anything else that might indicate that a threat was emerging. But nothing unusual happened and Saul often had time to sit under the desert stars gazing into the night. It was little different, he reflected, to the life he had left behind in South Africa as a soldier.

Between patrols, Saul would find excuses to seek out Anna’s company. He would go to the fields where the young men and women removed stones from the fields before ploughing and was able to engage Anna in conversation while working alongside her. During the midday meal break they would sit in the shade of a scraggly olive tree and talk. Anna displayed an interest in the land of Saul’s birth. The other young men and women would cast knowing looks in their direction, the girls giggling while the boys smirked. But these were the only times they had the opportunity to be together as at night Anna would remain in the company of the village girls and Saul mostly with Ivan, whose fractured English was increasingly tolerable the more vodka he consumed.

A month after Saul had been living in the
moshava
a letter arrived via a tortuous route from Africa to inform Jakob Isaacs that his remaining son, David, had been killed in the fighting in South Africa. Jakob’s mourning was private and when he reappeared to the villagers he seemed a bent and beaten man.

‘I have nothing,’ he told Saul who went to offer comfort. ‘God has asked more of me than he did of Abraham.’

‘The people need you,’ Saul said, watching the bowed head of the man he had grown to know as if he had been his own father.

Jakob was a quiet and decisive figure who the
moshava
leaders had come to rely on for his organisational skills. After a discussion with Saul, Jakob had ordered the eucalypt seedlings and when they arrived in the village Saul had supervised their planting in the swampland. They were thriving and every day Saul would observe their progress. When the sun and wind were right, he could actually get a whiff of the distinct scent that reminded him of home.

Saul found life hard but pleasant as he worked to establish this tiny foothold in the Holy Land for a dispossessed people. Anna had shown no romantic interest in him and Saul sometimes felt that he may as well have been her older brother. But he was patient. Sooner or later the girl would grow to understand that his feelings for her were as strong as any he had ever experienced before. Saul had fallen in love with this sweet, golden-haired angel from the steppes of Russia. All she had to do was recognise his love to give his life meaning once again.

THIRTY-EIGHT

W
ith the weekend drawing close, Patrick found that he was experiencing an almost youthful apprehension about the unknown. Deborah was expected on the Friday night and Patrick had briefed Davies and his wife, who was Patrick’s cook, to prepare for her visit.

‘Very good, sir,’ Davies had replied and went about airing the guest’s room.

Mrs Davies had pedalled to the village to purchase something special for the weekend and was quick to inform the butcher that none other than the famous Miss Deborah Cohen would be staying.

When Friday arrived, Patrick returned from a vigorous walk to be met by a familiar face waiting for him in the drawing room. It was not Deborah.

‘John! What a pleasant surprise, after all this time,’
Patrick said to the uniformed man standing by the fire. ‘I thought you were still in Sydney.’