A Palestine Affair

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A Palestine Affair Page 14

by Jonathan Wilson


  “Poor Tom’s a-cold,” Bloomberg said, more to himself than to the boy, then added, “Poor sod,” as if to console Saud for selecting such a shabby Lear as himself to be his mate in the wilderness.

  Saud approached the fire. “I hid behind the dunes,” he said. “I overheard them earlier in the evening. I wanted to warn you, but I couldn’t. I had to hide.”

  “Not your fault,” Bloomberg replied.

  Saud held his hands out to the flames, then moved away and began to collect Bloomberg’s art supplies and return them to the bag.

  “I’ll do that.” Bloomberg tried to get up, but the sharp pain in his side sat him back down again.

  “Here.” Saud dragged over the flagon of water, unscrewed the top and held it out to Bloomberg.

  “I’ve got something better,” Bloomberg said.

  This time he managed to get up and walk gingerly over to the food bag. He rummaged around for a moment, then came up triumphantly with his silver flask. A present from Joyce on their last day in London. He took a swig of the whisky, then offered it to Saud, who shook his head. The drink burned in Bloomberg’s throat. He took another, longer swig and then a third. They sat in silence for perhaps twenty minutes until the fire started to burn low. The boy was still shivering but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. Bloomberg moved over and put his arm around Saud. He led him back to the tent, got him to lie down and covered him in two of the stringy army-issue blankets, among the items that Salaman, Mustafa and the others hadn’t considered worth taking. Then Bloomberg lay down on his back beside Saud. A night from the trenches swooped, batlike, but mercifully passed in a beat. Instead he was in the Yiddish theater, the Majestic, on the Mile End Road. And what was the production in progress? “Hamelech Lear,” King Lear, of course, and Bloomberg and his friends had tears running down their cheeks—tears of laughter. They were in hysterics at the appalling, pathetic substitute culture of their parents. In the West End there was genius and here in the East End there was the Yiddishe king—an entirely different bowl of kreplach. But which stage was Bloomberg on? Drama, or melodrama? The real thing, or ersatz? Everything that he had painted for Ross was a pile of shit.

  Saud turned in his sleep and nudged Bloomberg fully awake. Bloomberg placed the back of his hand on the boy’s forehead. His fever seemed to have abated. In the morning, when they found some help, he would send him on his way. Let him go wherever he wanted.

  The dawn came bright and abrupt, a shutter lifted on the sky, not as in London, where the light staggered in tired and gray, like a drunk coming home after an all-nighter.

  Bloomberg woke to pain. Where Salaman had kicked him there was now a wide purple bruise. He touched his fingertips to the spot and winced. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt as if he had dipped it in sand, which, of course, he had. He ran his hand over the two-day stubble on his face, then rose and pushed back the tent flap.

  Outside, Saud had already repacked both bags and slung them onto the horse. Now he was sitting cross-legged on the sand waiting for the painter to appear. Bloomberg walked over to him and took the water bottle that Saud extended. He took a long swallow.

  “Are you all right?” Bloomberg asked.

  Saud nodded.

  “No temperature?” Bloomberg heard the cadence of his mother’s voice in his own.

  “I’m well.”

  The air had warmed with the first touch of the sun’s rays. Bloomberg looked around. He had only the vaguest idea of the direction in which they were headed, and he realized immediately the absurdity of his previous night’s notion to let Saud go. In any case, Saud obviously had no intention other than to continue their journey.

  There was no point hanging around. Together, they dismantled and folded the tent and within half an hour Bloomberg and Saud had begun their slow journey south, walking beside their horribly overburdened horse, who plodded forward with his head bent.

  Once they set out on their way there was nothing much to say. Saud had told Bloomberg not to worry, that he knew how far it was to Petra, and that they should be there well before nightfall. They looked bizarre, which certainly didn’t bother Bloomberg: Saud in his stained and wrinkled English schoolboy outfit, shirt out, the red-and-black tie given to him by Ross wrapped around his waist like a belt; Bloomberg with his own ripped shirt doubling as a kaffiyeh, and with his straw gaucho hat, mercifully left behind by his assailants, now perched on top. The presence of Bloomberg’s hat was more than an act of mercy, it was a bona fide miracle, as beneath its broad black sash Bloomberg had pressed the banknotes that Ross had given him to cover the costs of the trip.

  After three hours they arrived at an oasis that was more of a ghost village: a collection of empty shacks and a watering hole, host to a stray donkey that was quickly commandeered by Saud. Still, the view was stunning. They must have been high above sea level, for Bloomberg could see before him an immense crater out of which rose the sandstone mass that, according to Saud, enclosed Petra. Bloomberg ducked into the shade of one of the abandoned shacks. He brought over a packet of biscuits and used his penknife to open a tin. He spread the jam and offered the first biscuit to Saud. High overhead, on invisible currents of air, a lone hawk rose and fell in the cloudless blue sky.

  Saud crouched close to Bloomberg and bit into the biscuit. His features were remarkably fine and, if it was true that he was a rent boy, Bloomberg saw that he must have been a popular one.

  “What did you do?” Bloomberg asked, and when the boy didn’t reply, he added, “Did you stab De Groot? Was it you?”

  “No,” Saud replied, “I didn’t kill Yaakov.” He paused for a moment, looked around him and then directly at Bloomberg as if he was weighing up not only the isolation of the place but also Bloomberg’s sanity and trustworthiness, then he continued, “But I saw who did.”

  “And who was it?”

  By way of reply Saud reached into the pocket of his creased and absurdly thick English worsted trousers. He retrieved a button, dusted off the lint, rubbed it a little on his shirt and extended it in the palm of his hand toward Bloomberg. Shiny and silver, the button, with thin strands of brown cotton still in its loop, showed the three-pronged crown that was the insignia of Jerusalem’s police force.

  “I went back to the place where he died,” Saud said. “That’s where I found it. Near the gate to your garden.”

  It was another four hours on horseback (they had transferred the load to the donkey) before they entered the canyon that gave access to the ancient city. The terrace on which Petra lay was pierced by a valley enclosed by two sandstone ridges. Bloomberg had come across colored sandstone before—it wasn’t as if Britain didn’t have any—but he had never seen colors of such depth and variety of pattern. The walls of rock reminded him of Eastern carpets, or some fanciful woven fabric. The deepest reds, purples, and shades of yellow were arranged in alternate bands, shading off into each other, and sometimes curved and twisted into astonishing fantasies. And he might have been overwhelmed, with awe or apprehension, except that his mind was elsewhere, anchored on the secret that Saud had revealed to him.

  26.

  Kirsch searched for Harlap all night in the sleeping neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Where he could, he rode his motorbike, and where streets were blocked off, closed to traffic for the Jewish Sabbath, he walked. There was no one, as yet, whom he could bring along to help. He didn’t know who could be trusted. Harlap could have any number of accomplices. Kirsch knew too that his quest was futile; somewhere, Harlap was safe inside a shuttered and locked room. And yet Kirsch continued on, as if a solution to the crime, and not only to the crime but to his other, more personal dilemmas, could be solved by movement itself. It was the way he always acted when in despair—his running away to Palestine was a case in point, running from Naomi, who was lovely and deserved better, but whom he didn’t love, and, more powerfully, trying to escape both his parents’ unending grief, and his own, over Marcus’s death. Marcus in waiting, hidden under the covers at the fo
ot of Kirsch’s bed. Kirsch, maybe four years old, his legs not stretching all the way down, and Marcus grabbing him by the ankles as he was settling down to sleep. Kirsch screaming, crying, then hitting out at his brother. Marcus’s laughter turning to apology. “Come on,” he’d said, “we’ll play something”: rolling the marbles over the carpet, the clink of glass on glass. Two nice Jewish boys. That’s what Aunt Fanny had once called them. “Nice Jewish boy,” they taunted each other with pokes to the ribs. Was that it? Was that all they had to say to each other about their Jewish lives? And Palestine? Marcus couldn’t have cared less. Last words: “Dear Bobby, We are now in the trenches again and though I feel very sleepy, I just have a chance to answer your letter so I will while I may. I’ve been lucky enough to bag an inch of candle. Many thanks for book and chocolate. Both are being devoured with equal pleasure. I am sending you a good photo of myself in a day or two.” And that was it.

  Kirsch wandered—he wasn’t really investigating anything except his own soul now—through the narrow alleyways and courtyards of Mea She’arim. The night was hot and the smell of sewage rode on the air and reminded him of the spill outside Barker’s house in Wadi al-Joz. Here, the surrounding houses were crowded on top of one another in loose association: a Polish village, its tiny doorways, red roofs and clotheslines transplanted to the Middle East. Sabbath candles still burned in a few of the windows but most had given up their light hours ago. What on earth did Kirsch have to do with these Jews and their squalid compound? The answer, he knew, was nothing, and everything. Although he couldn’t have explained why in either case.

  Leaving the precincts of the poor and devout, he drove his bike down Jaffa Road. There were lights on in the offices of the Palestine Weekly but nowhere else until he reached the garage of the Nesher Automobile Service, from which taxis ran all night and where the local whores gathered, indifferent to Ross’s attempts to ban them from the Holy City.

  By the time he got home to his flat, the night sky was fraying at the edges and strips of pink poked through the blue-black on the horizon. Kirsch crashed fully clothed onto his narrow bed. He woke hours later in a heavy sweat, panicked (where was his bloody watch?!) that he had already missed his ten o’clock appointment with Joyce to go to Cremisan. The light in his room felt like the starched white sheet of midday, and the heat indicated the silent intense hour when most of Jerusalem took its siesta. He found his watch, its strap broken, under his bed—it was only nine-thirty. If he rushed he might make it. He stripped off his rumpled uniform and doused himself with water. There was no time to shave. He pulled on an old pair of khaki shorts and donned the less creased of his two white shirts.

  Kirsch rode fast to North Talpiot, through dusty abandoned Sabbath streets. He made good time—there was only one traffic light in the city (Kirsch had been present for the ceremonial turning-on)—and on Saturdays there were far fewer of the carts and animals that frequently blocked the roads. Once at the Bloombergs’ cottage, Kirsch leaned his bike against a tree and, although the heat of the day demanded a slow pace, he sprinted up the path. Ever since he woke he had been cradling a pleasant and insistent romantic idea of lifting Joyce up and swinging her around in his arms. But he was disappointed. Joyce had pinned a note to the door, printed in a hasty scrawl: “Robert,” he read, “couldn’t wait. Got a ride with Peter Frumkin. Be a sweetheart and meet me there.”

  The falcons at Cremisan—first pair in a hundred years, they said— were nesting in the pine trees behind the monastery. And for a city that had only one traffic light their presence was “an event.” All manner of bird-watchers, the avid and the merely curious, had gathered behind a fence set up by the monks, and beyond which one could not step. The British contingent was large but not exclusive. Making his way through the crowd Kirsch saw that Aubrey Harrison was there, strutting around in his trademark white suit, passing bon mots to the Bentwiches and the McClellans, and then there were any number of faces that Kirsch recognized from Ross’s parties. The atmosphere among the English was a little raucous, certainly indecorous; more football than bird-watching. Outside of England a kind of continental laissez-faire operated among the expatriates; the social system was fluid—not extravagantly so, but the restraints of the parish and the provinces were weakened. Maybe the war had done that, stiff upper lip for four years and then the emotions slowly loosening, like knotted bootlaces coming untied. Kirsch’s father hadn’t even wept until a year after Marcus had died, whereas now, if his mother’s letters were accurate, he couldn’t stop crying.

  Nearest to the fence a group of servicemen passed around a pair of high-powered binoculars, and took turns training them on the falcons’ nest. Farther back, among the fair-sized Jewish crowd, Kirsch recognized Professor Ben Dov, the historian who was tapped to head the Hebrew University when it opened. He was standing under a striped umbrella chatting animatedly with two of his future colleagues, well-known scientists, and, if Kirsch wasn’t mistaken, with Frumkin. But where the hell was Joyce? Kirsch couldn’t see her. Close to him a few local Arab boys had mustered a cheap telescope from somewhere, and now they lay stretched out on the ground in a space between two picnicking family groups, each surrounded by a good number of empty and half-empty bottles. The monks, who made a perfectly adequate and somewhat underpriced red wine, were doing a roaring trade. Meanwhile, the lovebirds, utterly indifferent to all this human attention, refused to oblige with an air show.

  Kirsch pushed past the boys and approached Frumkin.

  “Hey, Captain, nice to see you,” Frumkin said cheerily, breaking off his conversation and extending his hand.

  Ben Dov and the others greeted Kirsch less warmly. Kirsch, disheveled, unshaven, and with his eyes red and stinging from sleeplessness, was aware that his appearance didn’t offer a good first impression. Moreover, Zionists in powerful positions, whether academics or politicians or both, were rarely sympathetic to people like him. To them, Kirsch knew, he was the enemy.

  “You must be looking for Joycie. She’s around here somewhere.”

  Joycie! It made Kirsch’s stomach churn.

  Frumkin swiveled around, using his six-foot frame to peer over the heads of the surrounding crowd.

  “Joyce! Joyce!” he yelled.

  “Forget it,” Kirsch said. “I’ll find her.”

  But Frumkin, with a quick apology to his interlocutors, took Kirsch by the elbow and tried to propel him away.

  Kirsch shrugged him off.

  “Oh, come on,” Frumkin whispered. “Give me a break, these guys are boring me to fucking death.”

  “That’s not my problem,” Kirsch responded.

  Frumkin sighed.

  “What? Jealous Oberon?” he murmured.

  Kirsch heard, but pretended that he hadn’t.

  Frumkin had succeeded in putting a few yards between himself and the Hebrew University enthusiasts.

  “It’s the money, you know. I made a little contribution to Sir Gerald’s Jerusalem fund, and now they’re all after me. Your boss must have spread the word. But, truth to tell, I’m here to shoot a picture and I’ll do whatever’s expedient. And unlike Sir Gerry, these guys”—Frumkin gestured behind him with his thumb—“haven’t got a lot to offer my crew by way of location. In any case, the university’s a dumb idea; there are already more than enough smart Jews in the world. Whaddya say, Captain K.?”

  Kirsch had plenty to say, most pertinently about the way in which the company of Jews from other countries, particularly America, always made him feel terribly English. So much so that, listening to Frumkin, a kind of core voice, terribly upper class, and not at all his own, seemed to clamber up his throat and demand admission to the lambent air. “Good Lord,” the voice wanted to say, “what utter balderdash!” But Kirsch, happily as far as he was concerned, managed to tamp it down and say nothing at all.

  Joyce appeared. She was wearing a light, short-sleeved summer frock that accentuated the dark tan on her arms and face, which contrasted starkly with the white of her ha
ir. By way of greeting she kissed Kirsch on both cheeks.

  “You look as if you’ve had a rough night, Robert.”

  “Wild woman?” Frumkin asked, then added, “It can sure get hot out here.”

  “I need to speak to you,” Kirsch blurted out, the poise and confidence that he had hoped to exhibit in her presence out of reach.

  “Speak away.”

  “Uh-oh, time for me to shove off.” Frumkin said, laughing. “In any case I think I’ve seen just about all there is to see of those cute birdies.”

  He turned to Joyce. “See you tomorrow?”

  Joyce seemed unwilling to respond. Kirsch wasn’t sure if this was a sign of her reluctance to commit to Frumkin, or simply an indication that she didn’t wish to talk about her private arrangements in front of him.

  “Well, think about it,” Frumkin said, “think about it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kirsch said, touching Frumkin lightly on the arm. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

  “Fire away.”

  “My sergeant, Harlap, was supposed to be on detail last week at the Old City, but you told him he wasn’t needed. Is that correct?”

  “That is incorrect. I asked him to come with us to Haifa. He did a great job for me keeping the gawkers at bay in Jerusalem and I thought he might do the same up there. Don’t tell me he didn’t ask your permission?” Frumkin exposed a thin edge of teasing in his voice, then quickly concealed it. “Robert, listen, I’m sorry. My fault. I offered him more money than he probably sees in six months working for you. But I did ask him to clear it with you first.”

  “So he’s been with you all week?”

  “The whole goddamn seven days.”

  Kirsch turned to Joyce. “And you saw him?”

  “Hey, what is this . . . ?” Frumkin interjected, but Joyce was nodding yes and he let his indignation fall away.

 

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