A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  “Listen, don’t be too hard on the guy. He’s got a sick mother up there or something.”

  “Look here. Next time I’d damn well appreciate it if you came to me first before you started bribing my officers to take a vacation.”

  “Bribery? Whoa, hold up there, buddy.”

  “Don’t ‘buddy’ me. You’ve got a bloody nerve.”

  For a moment it seemed as if either Kirsch or Frumkin might throw a punch. But then Frumkin suddenly held up his hands in mock surrender and started to laugh.

  “You want to arrest me, Captain? Be my guest. But believe me, it’s not a nice thing for one Yiddisher boy to do to another.”

  Kirsch, his face flushed red, nevertheless managed to calm himself.

  “You’d be surprised,” he told Frumkin. “I do it all the time.”

  Frumkin turned to Joyce, who had witnessed their exchange with growing impatience.

  “You know how the Jews got to England?” he asked her. “The boat from Russia pulled up at the London Docks. Someone got up and shouted ‘New York!’ and all the dumb ones got off.”

  Joyce didn’t laugh. Frumkin looked at Kirsch, who wasn’t laughing either.

  “Same boat, my friend. Your folks and mine. I wouldn’t start getting snooty if I were you,” Frumkin continued.

  “My family are from Holland,” Kirsch began. “We’ve been in England for two hundred years.” As soon as he spoke Kirsch realized that he sounded ridiculous.

  “Well, that’s just great. Was great-great-grandpa pals with the Rothschilds? Perhaps you can lend Sir Gerald some money to help him rebuild Jerusalem.”

  A collective cry from the crowd closed off Frumkin and Kirsch’s exchange. The falcons had taken flight and were swooping and plunging through the cerulean sky, the male in hot pursuit of the female, their long dun-colored wings fully extended.

  “They fuck in the air, you know,” Frumkin said. He looked directly at Joyce and added, “Imagine how great that must be.”

  Kirsch and Joyce lay together in bed in Joyce’s cottage. Joyce was asleep, exhausted by their strenuous lovemaking. Kirsch, eyes wide open, the events of the last couple of weeks swirling dreamlike in his mind, stared at the ceiling. Joyce turned in her sleep and nestled into him, her head on his shoulder, her free arm flung across his narrow chest. He cradled her to him and inhaled the bitter smell of her hair. He wanted to make love to her again, but once they started, she was violent and wild, and while his pleasure was intense it was mitigated by the sense he had that, while Joyce liked him well enough, it didn’t have to be him in the bed. And so he waited now, savoring this moment of quiet affection, even if she was dreaming herself in Bloomberg’s or someone else’s arms.

  In the morning they sat together outside in two of the spindly garden chairs. Joyce had brought out a pot of tea and spread a plate with cheese and sliced bread. It was the first “meal” that Kirsch could remember anyone making him in months. The heat wave of the last few days, driven by hot winds from the desert, had passed through and now the air was fresh and warm. The garden, pristine in light, and settled under a clear sky, nevertheless had a nice English country clutter and disorder about it. The grass was high and there was hyssop growing in unruly abundance out of the stone walls. On either side of the door pink mallow sprouted from used tins of olive oil. For the first time Kirsch thought he understood why Jews from around the world might want to live here, although he was aware that his reasons for thinking so, which had nothing to do with politics, or persecution, or religion, or history, and everything to do with plants, sun, sex and love, were probably out of line with the majority opinion.

  He let Joyce know some part of what was on his mind, but, as usual, she was severe with him.

  “From what you’re saying you might as well be in Italy, or any Mediterranean country with a nice climate, pretty flowers, and brightly colored birds flitting about. Don’t you have any sympathy for the Zionists? I mean, they’re not asking for very much, considering what the Jews have given to the world—and without, I might add, having received a lot of thank-yous.”

  “You don’t have to lecture me. I am a Jew, remember.”

  “Well, you don’t act like one.”

  “And how does a Jew act?”

  “With pride and allegiance, I would hope.”

  “Zionist pride?”

  “You could do a lot worse. What’s so wonderful about being English? Well, I suppose you must love it, you get to police the empire.”

  “I don’t remember your husband flaunting the Jewish company flag. For God’s sake, he’s painting churches for Ross.”

  “Shut up! Mark has nothing to do with this. And he happens to be a damn good painter. In fact he’s a bloody genius.”

  “Artists are exempt, are they? What about your friend Frumkin? Is he going to help drain the swamps?”

  Joyce, Kirsch noticed, seemed to falter a little, but she quickly recovered her equilibrium.

  “I have no idea,” she replied.

  As if working to endorse Kirsch’s view that nature was more compelling than politics, a hoopoe darted across the garden and fixed Joyce’s attention. Then, abruptly, her strength seemed to ebb and she let out a deep sigh.

  “I should probably have gone with Mark.”

  Throughout their dispute over Zionism Kirsch had been building toward a declaration far different from the type he had thus far expressed. He wanted to say, “I love you,” and he had been on the point of doing so when Joyce had spoken. Now, he found himself momentarily struck dumb. The hoopoe, on its return journey, flashed black and white across the high grass. Kirsch tracked its flight. Out of frustration, or jealousy or the simple confusion that Joyce’s presence induced in him, he replied: “You couldn’t have.”

  “What do you mean? That he didn’t want me to? Believe me, I could have forced the issue.”

  Kirsch had a choice now. He could own up to the deal with Ross, or he could take the cover that Joyce had unwittingly offered him. Yes, he could assert, he knew that Bloomberg had insisted on traveling alone. But what choice was there really? The blemish on his character was infinitely preferable to losing her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” Joyce replied, relenting a little. “I’m sure most people think that Mark left me behind against my will. In any case, the truth threatens them.” She collected the breakfast things and brought them back into the cottage.

  Somewhere not too far away a lone church bell tolled, inviting congregants to Sunday morning services, and soon it was joined by peals that thronged the air from all directions. Chapel at St. Paul’s, Kirsch’s school, in the year the war started: Kirsch, along with O’Keefe, a Catholic boy, was excused from services, but Kirsch went anyway. He loved the hymns: “Oh Jesus I have promised to love thee to the end,” and his favorite of all, “To Be a Pilgrim.” “He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster,” Kirsch had sung with gusto, “let him in constancy follow the Master.” No one seemed to object to his presence, although occasionally his housemaster, Jenkins, would give him a funny look, and once after Kirsch had lifted his voice in a particularly beautiful psalm turned song, Merlin-Smith, the choirmaster, a beet-faced Welshman with a booming voice, had stopped him on their way down the chapel stairs: “Enjoy the hymns do you, Mr. Kirsch? Well, your people wrote them. I suppose you can sing ’em!”

  Joyce reappeared. She came up behind him and circled his shoulders with her slender arms.

  “Robert, I have to go. Which doesn’t mean that you have to. Sit here as long as you like. It’s a lovely day.”

  “Got another date with Frumkin?”

  “You really have no right to act like this, you know. You’re the one with whom I’m betraying Mark, not Peter Frumkin.”

  Joyce lowered her head and kissed Kirsch on the neck. At that moment he couldn’t have been happier.

  “More film work?”

  “He’s given me a real job. I’m in charge of props. We’re going
back to the desert today.”

  “I thought he’d finished there weeks ago.”

  Joyce shrugged. “It’s a short trip. Maybe they have to reshoot a couple of scenes. It can’t be much, the stars took the steamship home from Haifa. Everything is winding up. Peter himself is going next week.”

  Kirsch, while delighted to hear this news about Frumkin, did not feel entirely at ease. Joyce was lying to him about something, he was almost certain. But, if she was, that made two of them with secrets to keep.

  “I’ll leave too,” Kirsch said, and stood up. “Let me drop you off.”

  “No need, Peter sends a car.”

  “For the props girl? That’s pretty fancy.”

  Joyce smiled. “You’d better go home and change, Robert, you’re not looking very authoritative. In fact, you’re starting to look like a painter.”

  Kirsch inspected his rumpled shirt and shorts.

  “Yes, it wouldn’t do to turn up at the station like this.”

  “Which reminds me, how is the investigation?”

  It was Kirsch’s turn to shrug. “We’re making some progress,” he said, “but it’s slow. I thought I was onto something on Friday but . . . You did say Harlap was up there with you all week, right?”

  The sound of a car horn interrupted him.

  “Oh, that’s me,” Joyce said and began running toward the gate. She turned and blew him a kiss, then walked quickly toward the waiting car.

  Kirsch went back inside the cottage, sat on the bed, and lit a cigarette. Bloomberg’s paintings were stacked on the opposite wall, the top one facing Kirsch: Jerusalem by moonlight. Bloomberg had made the environs of the city look as desolate as the moon. Kirsch had to admit that the painting moved him. There was a loneliness in it even more intense than his own. He stood up and moved around the cottage, opening drawers and lifting piles of clothes. He felt slightly ashamed, quite uncertain if he was conducting this search as a policeman—after all, Joyce had experienced a break-in—or a jealous lover. Eventually, having discovered nothing of interest aside from Joyce’s discarded underwear, his shame got the best of him and he left.

  As soon as Kirsch got into his office the phone rang. It was Ross.

  “Would you mind coming over?”

  “I suppose not, sir.”

  Whenever he spoke to Ross, Kirsch had to suppress the rage that he felt; what came out instead was grudging obedience. Ross tended to respond magnanimously—a kind father giving his bolshy adolescent son time to come around.

  “It’s something rather urgent. I’d rather not go into it on the telephone.”

  “I’ll come right away.”

  “Good.”

  Kirsch rode toward Abu Tor. He swerved left into the village, taking a corner faster than he had intended, and it was lucky that he did so, for the first bullet only grazed his arm and the others missed their target. Kirsch tried desperately to halt his skid. He felt the bike slide with him, an excruciating pain in his leg, and then he tumbled sideways, his body spinning into a sandy ditch at the side of the road.

  When Kirsch came to, his head was cradled in the arms of an Arab woman. She had put down her basket of groceries and was wiping his face with a wet cloth. Looking around, Kirsch saw that she wasn’t alone. A group of women were crouched around him, the embroidery on their black dresses an indecipherable tapestry of vivid pinks and yellows. The women were talking fast in what sounded to Kirsch like clicks and sighs. He raised his left hand to his head and felt no blood. Then the pain from his wounded right arm and his crushed left leg overwhelmed him, and he passed out.

  27.

  Joyce’s driver took the Nablus Road north of the Damascus Gate. The windows were open and the city’s wayward sounds reached in as punctuation marks on the obliterating white light of the summer morning: church bells, a donkey braying, the occasional klaxon from an automobile, and once what sounded like gunshots, rapid and distant. The car passed St. George’s Cathedral and the American Colony and gained the first hill with its engine groaning; by the time they reached the summit of Mt. Scopus its chassis was shuddering and seemed ready to convulse. Joyce tipped sideways in the backseat and almost banged her head on the door frame. It was only after they had passed the village of Sha’afat that the road leveled and the noise diminished to a murmur, and they were already eight miles out of Jerusalem, heading toward Ramallah, when Joyce realized she was traveling not toward, but away from the desert.

  She leaned forward. The driver was the same man, Aron, who had driven her home from the Allenby Hotel after her first dinner with Frumkin.

  “Where are we going? What’s this route?”

  Aron slowed the vehicle a little.

  “North: Nablus, Jenin, Nazareth, Haifa. Mr. Frumkin will meet us there.”

  “I understood our meeting was near Beersheba . . .”

  “Haifa,” Aron repeated laconically, as if Joyce’s misunderstanding were of no consequence.

  Joyce sat back in the leather seat.

  “Do you have something to drink?” she asked.

  “We can make a stop in the next village.”

  Aron parked in a small courtyard near the ruins of an old church. He got out and approached a small shop where boxes of cucumbers were on display under a tattered green canvas awning. Joyce watched him go in, then got out of the car herself and walked toward the dilapidated church walls. At the entrance to the site there was a thin wooden sign nailed to a pole, its message barely visible under a layer of dust. “Here the parents of Jesus missed him on their return from Jerusalem when he was a boy.” The information struck Joyce as oddly tender and evoked a reflecting sadness in her. Her own mother had never seemed to care very much about anyone except herself, while her father, although he had done his best when Joyce was a young child, couldn’t really wait to get her off his hands and into college. He had, of course, other interests outside the family. Had anyone ever “missed” her? Undoubtedly there was Robert Kirsch, poor puppy dog, but not Mark, almost certainly. He had loved her, that she was sure of, but the signal gaps in his life had always been paintings destroyed or not yet done. Joyce’s absence, short-term or extended, weekend visits to friends, her one long trip to America to see her mother, had affected him about as much as a change in the weather outside his studio window; perhaps the light was a little darker and he was obliged to make a small adjustment to his palette, but nothing more. Joyce smiled at her own self-pity—feeling sorry for herself was an attitude she had long ago determined to renounce. The Jewish women on the workers farms certainly didn’t feel sorry for themselves. At the dock in Haifa Joyce had seen a short-haired woman about her own age wearing a straight dress with a leather belt and sandals. She had a shovel in her hands and was filling bags of coal. It was her first glimpse of local labor—the descriptions of Palestine that she had heard in London come to life—and she had been filled with a kind of rapture. Mark had been less enthralled. She thought he was embarrassed to see women working this way.

  Aron came out of the shop. He was holding a box of Player’s and a box of matches. He offered Joyce a cigarette. She took it and inhaled deeply. Aron’s fingers, she noticed, were stained yellow from nicotine.

  “There’s a spring at the foot of the hill,” he said. “I’ll fill a bottle there.”

  The water was cool and tasted good. Joyce poured a little onto her fingers and dabbed it, like perfume, behind her ears and on her wrists.

  After about five minutes they crossed a narrow plain. Aron took one hand off the steering wheel and gestured to his right.

  “In winter this is a pond.”

  Joyce surveyed the landscape. For a moment, perspiring in the Middle East heat, she remembered skating in New York, and the black corduroy dress that her father had bought her on her eighth birthday; it had a red velvet lining, sleeves that flared at the wrists, and a scalloped hem. She twirled on Ridgeley’s Pond, the red lining flashing in the gray December light.

  “Flash floods and then the water colle
cts here,” Aron continued.

  They negotiated a barren ridge and suddenly she could see all the way to the Mediterranean: it appeared as a distant gray-blue band. Aron, glancing into the mirror, slowed down to let Joyce enjoy the view, but a lorry, its engine droning, accelerated behind them and tried to overtake. The Arab workers in the back of the truck cheered and waved at Joyce. Aron maintained his slow pace, stubbornly demonstrating that he controlled the road. The lorry driver leaned on his horn and gesticulated. Aron slowed further, almost to a stop. The driver pressed relentlessly on the horn while his passengers shouted and brandished their shovels and pickaxes.

  Joyce bent forward and tapped Aron on the shoulder.

  “Stop it,” she said, “you’re being ridiculous.”

  Aron shrugged. “Let them wait,” he responded. “Believe me, they have nowhere to go that matters.” Nevertheless he put his foot on the gas and pulled away.

  A burst tire outside Nablus delayed them for more than three hours. While Aron negotiated with the mechanics at a nearby garage Joyce passed the time sipping mint tea in a small café. In both venues, prominently displayed, was a photogravure of Haj-Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and in both he appeared to be scowling. The cracked green walls of the café were additionally decorated with a mural of the Old City, its great mosques disproportionately represented as occupying almost the entire area within the walls. There wasn’t a sign of the Jewish presence. Each side, Joyce thought, mapped the other’s invisibility. In terms of pure numbers the Arabs perhaps had more right to do so than the Jews, and yet, even though the Jews were a minority, it seemed to Joyce axiomatic that Palestine belonged, at least in its greater part, to them. How had she come by this idea? Sitting at her small wooden table, the scent of nana leaves rising from the steaming tea, Joyce felt suddenly and disarmingly aware that, back in London, it was possible that in addition to being enchanted by the practical content of Zionist dreams— pastoral, socialist, utopian—that were so movingly relayed to the packed, eager audiences at Toynbee Hall, she had also been seduced by the broad promise those dreams seemed to offer of an end to Jewish loneliness. And at the time this, as far as it directly concerned her relationship with Mark, was something to which she had been dedicated with all her heart. Was her commitment to Zionism then merely personal after all? An absurd desire to change Mark through changing the world? For the whole of this last year, it seemed, ever since he had turned away from her, Zionism had been both Joyce’s hope and her sanctuary. Mark had no idea of quite how many meetings she had attended, and no knowledge of the murmured names, Arlosoroff or Buber, that were now as familiar to her as Cézanne or van Gogh. He must have thought, as she slipped out into Fordwych Road on weekday winter evenings and headed off in the rain for “the theater” or “to a concert” that she had a secret lover. And in a way she did, but only, surely, for his sake. But even so, her hopes were doomed. Mark had nothing but derision for Weizmann and his Jewish state, which is why she hid the bulk of her journeys from him. And yet he seemed to receive only pain from living as a Jew among the Gentiles of England. It was as if he drew the strength of his art from bitterness and detachment, and he was more frightened of losing those supporting structures than anything else.