A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  Ross waved to the Bloombergs, who had turned and were walking back toward the house. As they approached he shouted down: “Been up on the roof yet? Let me take you. There’s enough moonlight. Should be able to show you something. You won’t regret it.”

  Bloomberg stepped forward while Joyce hesitated. Kirsch heard him say, “I’ll go alone.”

  Kirsch made his way to the terrace stairs and met Joyce halfway as she ascended. She almost walked past him without offering a hint of recognition but he touched her lightly on the arm.

  “Beautiful evening.”

  She smiled at him. “Yes, isn’t it just.”

  Joyce looked past Kirsch and toward the room. The serviceman had stopped singing and the violinist played on alone. Joyce climbed two stairs, then halted. Her shoulders relaxed and she turned to look Kirsch in the face.

  “Tell me something, Robert. When the car came to collect us the driver said that there were nails all over the main road and he would have to take a back route. Who exactly is intended to be sabotaged?”

  Kirsch smiled, happy to have a question that he could answer.

  “There’s a taxi strike. They’re trying to prevent other cars from being taken out. If you know which roads to avoid there’s not much of a problem.”

  “And do you have a car here?”

  “I do, yes.”

  Kirsch tried to avert his eyes from the little vest under her white jacket that was buttoned just to the point of cleavage. How interesting and brave of her to dress so unconventionally at a party of conservative women, a slap in the face to the local spinsterarchy, all those old ladies sentimental about sheikhs. On the other hand, she was an artist’s wife. Perhaps some daring or excess was expected.

  Joyce smiled at him.

  “How would you like to take me for a spin down some of those open roads?”

  “But . . .” Kirsch stammered. “Well, very much, I’d like that very much.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “Perhaps you wanted to hear more of the violinist?”

  Kirsch felt his face burn. Joyce began to move up the stairs.

  “No need,” he said. “We can leave through the garden.”

  “Good.”

  She followed him along a wall covered with flame-pink ivy geraniums. The wide sleeves of her jacket brushed against the leaves. Then they were out in the driveway.

  From his place on the roof of the house, gazing out toward the Old City, Bloomberg watched Kirsch open the passenger door for Joyce. He saw her remove her jacket, fold it, and stretch forward to place it on the backseat. He watched as she sat, then swung her legs in. He saw Kirsch close the door, circle the bonnet, and take his place behind the wheel. It seemed a while before the engine turned. Joyce’s bare arm was a white line in the window, then the line disappeared. The car pulled smoothly down the hill. Bloomberg watched until the Ford’s taillights vanished around a bend in the road.

  They sat in the car on a side road out near the British Police Training School. Kirsch didn’t know why he had brought her here. It wasn’t a beautiful place. A few dusty eucalyptus trees lined the road. There were tents visible in a nearby field, where construction of some new suburb was about to begin.

  He killed the engine.

  “Cigarettes, by any chance?” Joyce asked. “Please say you’ve got some.”

  Kirsch handed her a box of Player’s. Joyce removed two cigarettes and offered one to him. He produced the matches from his pocket. Joyce inhaled deeply, then relaxed back in her seat; the simple warmth of the air was an unholy sensual pleasure. There was absolutely no reason in the world for her to feel that she belonged here, but she knew that she did. Some travelers discovered Paris or Rome or Mexico and felt that they had come home, but Joyce had known for a long time now that Jerusalem was her destiny, and the city hadn’t, couldn’t, disappoint her.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes and then Kirsch, to fill the space (was it only to fill the space?) began talking about his older brother Marcus, killed April Fool’s Day 1918—could she believe that? King’s Own Royal Lancaster. Damn army couldn’t find the grave for two years. In the end they all went over to France, Kirsch, his parents, his cousin Sarah, stood around in the rain outside this little village, Fampoux. Father said Kaddish, never heard him speak Hebrew before. Army paid for the headstone but wanted more money for any inscription other than the name. Marcus had wanted to be a painter—not without talent as it happened. Mother wanted to put “Artist” on the stone—three and thruppence they charged them! Not the money of course.

  Kirsch felt that he was prattling, yet prattling about things that meant a great deal to him and that he wished he could convey differently. In any case, she didn’t seem to be listening. After all, he continued, it was probably Marcus who had led him to Jerusalem. Having the adventure his brother couldn’t, getting away from his grief, his parents’ grief, a heaviness in the home you can’t imagine.

  “Wait a minute,” Joyce said. “Your father said Kaddish? You’re a Jew?”

  Kirsch nodded his head.

  Joyce laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s not something that I’m ashamed of.”

  Was he sometimes ashamed? Kirsch wasn’t altogether sure.

  “Well, no, why would you be? But you’re a British policeman. I mean, aren’t you, don’t you feel that you’re on the wrong side of the stockade?”

  Kirsch looked at her and felt his face redden.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Yes you do. You know exactly what I mean.”

  Immediately, Joyce regretted what she had said. She had gone too far. It was a fault of hers, a by-product of her zeal that she needed to contain, her rushes to judgment.

  Kirsch looked straight ahead.

  “Oh look, please forgive me,” she said. “I’ve been here all of a week. I’m sorry about your brother.”

  The car windows were rolled down. Someone had left a pile of empty petrol tins by the side of the road.

  “Thank you,” Kirsch said.

  Joyce tapped ash out of the window, then opened the car door to drop the cigarette and stub it out with her foot. In the moonlight she could see the walls of the training school barracks, asbestos slabs on a steel framework.

  “Shall we get some air?”

  She got out and walked a few steps, her mood lightening as she did so. No harm done. Kirsch came and stood close. He wanted to put his arms around her. A dusty fig cactus stretched its shoots like barbed wire in front of them. Although the night was still warm Joyce suddenly shivered. Kirsch returned to the car and grabbed his pullover from the backseat.

  “Here,” he murmured, placing it around her shoulders and knotting the sleeves at the front. “Your husband,” Kirsch continued, “wouldn’t he mind us being here?”

  “I doubt it,” Joyce replied. “He might even feel relieved.”

  “Why? Does he have someone else?”

  “I don’t think he wants anyone else. Not now, anyway.”

  “How could anyone not want you?”

  Joyce laughed lightly. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said. “Or him.”

  Kirsch felt his hands trembling slightly. Joyce could have said anything to him, awful humiliations, and he would still have wanted to kiss her.

  “Come on,” Joyce said, “take me back.”

  They drove back in silence. He dropped her at the foot of the driveway that led to Ross’s house. They had not been gone longer than an hour, and the party was still crowded. In all likelihood they hadn’t even been missed. Kirsch was about to ask when he could see her again— outside the investigation—when she turned to him.

  “He spoke a name,” she said, as if recalling a dream, “the dead man spoke a name.”

  8.

  In the hour after dawn it was cool on the roof. Bloomberg wore the cord trousers and thick knitted sweater that
had served him so well through several London winters. On his head he sported a wide-brimmed straw hat that Joyce said made him look like a gaucho. Ross had asked one of his servants to construct a shelter for Bloomberg, three sheets and a canopy that whipped and snapped like a ship’s sails when the wind rose. The previous day Bloomberg had begun to set out the work in charcoal: the city spread out before him with the morning sun coming over the hills. He could do this kind of thing with his eyes closed—and perhaps that would be better. The money—that’s all it was. But it wasn’t. He had to admit that of the places he had found to paint—and been sent to paint—this rooftop was the most congenial. Bloomberg had hated the workers farm, the girls in their unattractive long black bloomers, the dullness and the monotony of the quarry work he was supposed to be sketching, the heat, his own boredom. As for his “real” painting—well, there wasn’t any. By nightfall he was increasingly exhausted. He sank onto the bed, closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep. Once Joyce pressed into him, reached her hand, cradled his balls, stirred the inevitable erection, and after a repeat of his quick, bad lovemaking, turned away. He was disappointing her, although somehow it seemed she was ceasing to care. That being so, he had no idea why she stuck with him. Perhaps she was waiting for him to release her. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel for her, more that he couldn’t feel for anyone. Not anyone living, that is. Love had been stolen away by death: his mother’s swollen knuckles, her hands red from wash day—and as for Mark, the forty-five-year-old mummy’s boy, his eyes were wet with tears. Poor Joyce.

  Certainly in his present state of mind it was better for Bloomberg to be up here above the gray domes and hewn stone than back at the cottage. Ross couldn’t possibly have anticipated what an advantage it would be for Bloomberg to be set apart, tied to a place where people were so distant that they hardly marked the landscape. He would represent the Holy City for his patron, and eventually, if he had enough time to himself, the “real” painting would return.

  “Tea, sugar, lemon, bread, marmalade—and the latter locally made, would you believe?”

  Ross stepped forward hesitantly, regretting that he had interrupted. He placed the tray down on the roof a couple of yards from Bloomberg’s straw chair, then retreated as if it were Bloomberg who was the governor of the city.

  Bloomberg carried on working. He wasn’t averse to the interruption, or the breakfast, but it was best to let Ross think otherwise. He didn’t want to interfere with Ross’s exalted notion of the artist, not at this formative stage of their relationship, and certainly not until he had been paid. When Bloomberg estimated that Ross was halfway down the stairs but still within earshot he yelled, “Thank you.”

  But Ross was still on the roof, hovering in the background, watching as the shapes of the city were accomplished on Bloomberg’s canvas.

  “You know they were going to tear the old Suq al-Qattanin down when we arrived. It was originally the bazaar of the cotton merchants— hence the name, of course. Architecturally it’s absolutely the most important of the old vaulted bazaars in all of Palestine and Syria. Utterly lovely. Preservation—so important, don’t you think?”

  “It depends what’s being preserved,” Bloomberg replied without looking up from his canvas.

  “Oh, you’ve heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Well, I do have my critics. It’s been suggested that I exhibit a bias toward the Christian sites.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Not at all. The Suq al-Qattanin is one example. Then we removed that hideous Turkish ‘Jubilee’ clock tower from the Jaffa Gate, not a damn thing to do with religious favoritism—simply an aesthetic improvement and a major element in restoring the walls. Some people seem to think the Pro-Jerusalem Society is proselytizing every time we strip some appalling Marseilles tile or rip up corrugated iron.”

  Bloomberg put down his brushes and wiped the back of his sleeve across his forehead. Ross correctly read the gesture as a cue for him to leave.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “Completely inappropriate of me. I’ll let you get to it. Can’t stop, you see. The place has taken me by the throat. I expect it will grab you too.”

  Bloomberg looked past the domes, towers and pinnacles to the austere mountains that framed his view. If you discounted the murder victim in the garden, then nothing much had grabbed him by the throat since he had come to Jerusalem, except the idea of putting a halt to the only activity that he was incapable of giving up: his work. “Death,” a friend of his in London had once said, “is most welcome for the artist. It means he doesn’t have to paint anymore.”

  “Stay as long as you like,” Ross added, “and please don’t worry about the tray, Nasr will take care of it.”

  Bloomberg painted for three hours, until the heat became oppressive. His thick cords stuck to his skinny legs, and his hands, clammy with sweat, could no longer hold the brushes without slipping. It was only nine o’clock and he was due at the workers farm again before they broke for a light meal at eleven. But really, if he had Ross to back him, why did he need the Zionist commission?

  By ten he was back in the Citadel, which had quickly become his favorite Old City café, near the Jaffa Gate, with his sketch pad open on his knees. The water line was longer than ever. Ross had told him that in the last month street sprinkling had been banned and building construction virtually halted. At the American Colony Hotel, running water was available only on alternate days. Bloomberg watched the line shuffle forward, the women veiled, the men’s faces lined and tight. All carried goatskins slung over their shoulders. The reservoir near the al-Aksa mosque was almost half a mile away and access was strictly regulated. These people in the queue were authorized water carriers who would distribute, like milkmen, all over the city.

  By noon, the line had thinned and Bloomberg was alone in the café. He remembered, without caring very much, that, for the second day in a row, he had missed an early-morning appointment with Robert Kirsch. Ross, who understood priorities, would take care of that. And in any case, what could he add to what Joyce had already given the policeman? The golden name.

  After five nights of sleeping in the city’s hidden places, its drained cisterns and empty vats, with only his case for a pillow, and days spent in the dark corners of churches, or on the move, venturing out at dusk to steal fruit from one stall, bread from another, Saud had returned home. He had arrived before dawn, taken fresh clothes from the line, then crept in and hidden his case under a mattress. His beloved books: he should have destroyed them days ago, but he couldn’t. He had collected his goatskin from the room where his brothers slept, and then tried, using as little water as possible, to scrub his face and silt-stained arms. As he closed the front door he had heard his mother stir in her bed.

  Now he shuffled forward with the others who were in line for water. It was best, he had decided, to go about his business because surely by now the police would be looking for someone hiding, or someone loose, scared and running. The important thing was that no one could have caught more than a glimpse of him scurrying down the hillside, he was sure of that. Once in the suq he greeted the merchants whom he knew and moved on, his lips parched and his eyes stinging from lack of sleep.

  He had reached a sign advertising LIPTON’S TEA AND SHERBET when he saw the two policemen approaching. His instinct was to run, but sudden movement on his part would only draw their immediate attention. So he breathed in and turned to face the stall on his right, squeezing his feet into a space between the open sacks of spices as if he could be invisible among the cardamom and black pepper and, for a moment, when they called his name, that was how he felt, as if the word “Saud” had floated past him and attached to someone else, the stall owner in his red tarboosh, or the artist sitting in the café—or it had been absorbed by the stones, or swallowed into the narrow path of blue air that ran the length of the bazaar above him.

  9.

  Kirsch had not been inside a synagogue since his peremptory bar mitz
vah at the Bayswater Synagogue eleven years ago. His father, going through with the ceremony in deference to his mother and the pressures from her family, had joked all the way through the service, and continued to do so when they had strolled in Regent’s Park later in the afternoon. Now here was Kirsch in Jerusalem: endless visits to the Holy City without once crossing a holy Jewish portal. He had been in plenty of churches and mosques, mostly tagging along with Ross, where he had pretended to be interested during his superior’s lectures on the Crusader lintels of the Holy Sepulchre or the startling arabesques of a mural on the Haram. He now suspected that by staying away from the temples, he had been trying too hard to demonstrate his impartiality. He wasn’t much of a Jew, but for everybody here his religious affiliation, nominal as far as Kirsch was concerned, seemed to be the salient thing about him.

  The room he now entered, which had the appearance and feel of a small damp wine cellar, could not have accommodated more than twenty or so worshipers. A thin curtain partitioned off the cramped, ill-ventilated area set aside for women. From this dank corner the wives and daughters of the pious could hear but not see the activities of their men. The sanctuary seemed to receive most of its light through a single window, although thin pencil lines penetrated from holes in the ceiling.

  Rabbi Sonnenfeld occupied a seat before the crudely presented ark, which was no more than a wooden box draped in black velvet. Behind him against the wall stood a black marble table covered with phylacteries, prayer shawls and prayer books. Above that three rows of wooden pegs displayed at present a single black coat and hat.

  As Kirsch approached, Sonnenfeld tapped his head, and Kirsch, who had removed his hat on stepping out of the sun, quickly replaced it. Kirsch looked around for an empty chair and pulled it up close to the rabbi.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  The rabbi waved his hand.

  “This is not a difficult case for you, Captain Kirsch. The descendants of Jacob employing the tactics of Esau. What will be hard is presenting the truth and getting your government to act on it.”