The Call of the Land

Sheikh Amer — with his familiar calm face, and his figure that had never bowed to the assault of the years, its stem unbent — holding his prayer-beads and toying with their beads, addressing his son Fayyad:

"Listen to me, my son, and be sensible. You are a peasant, son of a peasant. Though circumstances flung you into the city for a time, that does not mean you have become an effendi. The land is waiting for you, so take up the hoe. It is a trust upon my neck and upon yours. All through these last years I have drawn youth from its ever-renewed, everlasting youth, and so overcome adversities; and I still wrestle with it to keep the trust safe for you. How often the wolves have lain in wait for the prey, and I drove them back on their heels; how often the taxes made a mockery of my poverty, and I bore them meekly and patiently. And now, let us leave all that: go out to your land, for my old age is no longer able to call up its youth, fresh and radiant as it was in the past. But I console myself that I have begotten a son who will inherit it, and inherit my love for it and my devotion in its service."

Fayyad squirms in distress, and before long he flings down the butt of his cigarette in evident nervousness, saying: "Impossible. It is impossible for me to go back to a life of misery. So do not tire yourself trying to convince me." The father purses his lips and says:

"Misery? And what of it? A misery that provides you your bread is better than a job you wear yourself out in, only to find yourself cast off and turned out."

— "It is not a turning-out, father."

— "I see you have come to believe in verbal contrivances. Dismissal or 'retrenchment' — it is all one. What matters is that you are now idle, without work and without hope. Do you understand?!"

And Fayyad rushes off, raging and agitated. How the days had turned against him these past three months, upsetting his life from top to bottom!

Before, he had reveled in the pounds pouring generously into his pocket. And pounds meant the elegant suit, the gay necktie, the silk handkerchief peeping proudly from the breast pocket.

Yes, he had enjoyed all that — indeed, more than all that. He would buy fine cigarettes and magazines filled with pictures of beautiful women, and he found in the films of the cinema a pleasure the village could never have given him.

There he had been elegant, soft-skinned, perfumed — so how could they demand of him now that he cast off the city and go back to being a rough peasant with cracked feet!? No, no! That is too much!

And the young man throws himself down in the shade of the nearest tree, and swims in seas of thought, while processions of memories go trooping one after another through his head. His sweet, innocent childhood appears to him in the person of a child strutting in his old jilbab and his knitted cap, leaping among the green stalks of corn, or clinging to the skirts of his mother as she lifts her water-jar lightly and sets off toward the spring.

He remembers himself as a youth, going with his father to the field to rid the crops of the taint of parasites, or to take his part in laying out the land — long furrows entrusted with every kind of seed.

As for the evenings — he would join the company of his neighbors, and they would sit cross-legged on someone's bench, sipping tea to the tunes of the 'ataba songs accompanied by the strains of the reed-flute, or listening to the latest political news, recounted to them by the village's newspaper, Abu Rabah, after he had twisted it and turned it just as he fancied and pleased.

So the days carried him along, and he yielded to them, satisfied and content — until his cousin Faris came to him one day to whisper in his ear with excitement: "Fayyad! A job! — pounds and pleasure! What do you say?"

How quickly he answered Faris's temptation, and how he grieved his father with his resolve to desert the field and work with Faris in one of the workshops for thirty pounds.

Thirty pounds. He drew them at the end of every month, then went off to his parents for a night and hurried back to the city he had grown to love, surrendering to its diversions and its delights — seven years he spent at his work. Then the war ended, and with it ended the work of the military establishments. A new danger began to loom on the horizon. And a dangerous bomb burst in the workers' faces: the retrenchments.

That bomb dismayed them. It cut the threads of their hopes and made them taste the bitterness of truth in all its colors. The workshops spat them out — no gratuity, no social insurance; so let misery open its arms — and its jaws!

And Fayyad wept, and wept long. The memories pained him, and thinking gnawed at him; and added to all this were the looks of scorn cast at him by the people of his village as they set out for their fields, swift and light of foot.

He flung his face down upon the earth, and the earth drank in his tears; its dry soil grew moist and gave off a refreshing smell, and it seemed to him that the earth was whispering things. So he strained his ears and listened:

"What use is stubbornness, Fayyad? Heaven has been kinder to you than to others: you possess youth, and land, and a hoe. Many other men possess neither land nor hoe nor any source of livelihood to ward off the ravages of hunger. What are they to do, and what are they to say? Put away your stubbornness and rise, my comrade — the road of life still lies green-edged before you."

And the young man's spirit lightens. He wipes away his tears and rises briskly, tucks a hoe under his arm, and hurries off to the field. He has answered at last the call of the land, and yielded gladly to the refreshing, rain-sweet smell of the soil...

The hoe rises, and soon comes down with a force drawn from the strong arm that bears it. Stroke upon stroke struck by that gleaming piece of iron; a ringing in which the ears find rest, and from which we draw out a story — a story no man of tongue could tell so well as this mute, unspeaking piece of iron recounts it in its fluency.

Acre — Palestine