She thought about Robert Kirsch. Was he searching for her? She was his prey and target now. She missed him, missed both his unstinting admiration and the ardors of his infatuation. She missed him in bed. But her memory of him, and also, astonishingly, of Mark, was as of people from another life. She had tumbled into a clandestine world of murmur and rumor. She heard, and overheard, in the side conversations of her coconspirators, that there were riots in Jerusalem; that the British authorities were panicked, that there were no more garden parties or gymkhanas. Joyce imagined the widespread absenteeism among the serving staff of the colonial homes: no garden parties without the gardeners, no receptions without the servants. The Arab riots, so she understood, were a lucky distraction; the police were all tied up. And she imagined Robert and thought how he might handle himself in situations of violence and danger; but imagined him tenderly, as one might think of a child going into schoolground battles where the dangers were more imaginary than real.
Tonight, in the somnolent fading yellow light of a late-August evening, she had fallen asleep early. Around midnight she woke with a start; someone was in her room.
“Don’t panic,” Frumkin said, “it’s only me.”
He was sitting in a dark corner perched on the edge of a chair that was much too small for him. He was smoking a cigarette and when he drew on it the tip glowed orange. Joyce, who had been sleeping naked, pulled up the sheet to cover her breasts.
“Peter! Christ, don’t you knock before you come in?”
She’d heard that he had left the country, and perhaps he had, for a while.
Frumkin stood up and came and sat on the end of her bed. “You’ve been doing a great job,” he said.
“I suggest you go outside, wait five minutes, and then come in again. I’ll get dressed.” She said this in a teacherly way, and then disliked herself for having done so. She thought she had long ago escaped to far wilder places than the classroom.
Frumkin went to the paneled glass door and stepped onto the balcony, leaving the door open behind him. She swished the curtain across the glass, lit the small oil lamp next to her bed, turned it low, then pulled on a dress.
“Okay,” she called out.
“It’s lucky we’ve got you,” Frumkin said, coming back into the room. “Every other British squaddie is selling arms to the Arabs; you’d be amazed how much matériel mysteriously disappears from army supplies, ‘lost.’ For the Brits it’s a lucrative traffic.”
“I thought you were in America.”
“I was. The movie’s almost ready for distribution. It’s going to be a smash. I just got back here. Some problems with our cargo guy up at the port in Haifa. Extra funds were needed—salary increase. You can’t blame him. But even so, things aren’t going well. I have a feeling that the ‘props’ aren’t going to get through for much longer—unless we can persuade Metropolis to shoot another film in Jerusalem, which is unlikely, don’t you think?”
He stood close by her.
“Any problems at your end?” he asked.
“None. None at all,” she replied. “And no sign of Robert Kirsch.”
“Hardly a surprise.”
“Do you think so? I worried that he would try to search me out. He’s very persistent.”
Frumkin looked quickly at her. He seemed taken off guard. She caught his glance but didn’t make anything of it.
“Well, the riots. I imagine our captain must have it up to here.”
“Don’t mock him, he’s a good man.”
“Is he?”
“Maybe not for you.”
“I can’t understand a Jew who fights for the other side.” Frumkin pushed his hair back from his forehead.
“I don’t think he sees it that way.”
“You don’t?”
Joyce felt, for a moment, that they were all tangled together like badly cast fishing nets: herself, Peter, Mark, and Robert Kirsch.
Frumkin didn’t wait for her answer.
“Listen, because of this developing problem in Haifa we’re going to have to move to Plan B. And I need you to be a part of it. We’ve got to keep the supply going and, as I told you, the Arabs are doing a great job picking up everything the Brits have to sell and our people think it’s time that we got in on the same business.”
Joyce took one of Frumkin’s cigarettes and lit it. Part of her couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was as if she were in a movie and she could see Frumkin’s words appearing in frames beneath his heavy gestures. But her making it a movie was simply another act of translation, like the way she had shunted her own fear and proximity to violence into domestic banality: the extra care that she now took not to swim out of her depth, or the way that she sometimes hesitated before crossing the street.
“What do you want me to do?”
“There’s a British Jew, a Major Lipman, he’s more or less in charge of the military store in Jerusalem. The word is that, unlike your friend Kirsch, he’s sympathetic—perhaps more than sympathetic. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to go back to Jerusalem and make friends with him. If and when the time is right, you’ll simply pass him on to the necessary contacts and we’ll take it from there. Compared to what you’ve been up to so far this one’s a walk in the park. Oh, and leave the car here. We’ll take care of it.”
Joyce drew deeply on her cigarette. The whorish intimacy of the assignment depressed her. They were thrusting her back into the female realm, lipstick and laughter; it was the inversion of her solitary nighttime world. Frumkin was asking her to be charming—and she had never been much good at that. A week ago, somewhere near Ramleh, on her last assignment, coasting the last hundred yards down a narrow street toward an appointed rendezvous, her engine and headlights off, blasts of jasmine and honeysuckle filling the air, she had been stopped by a local policeman. Smiling, laughing, she had stepped out of the car, pretending to be a little tipsy, “on my way home from a party in Jaffa . . . pulled over for a cigarette, left the brake off. Silly me!” The young man, happy as all hell, it seemed, to have an attractive woman to talk to, had let her go with a few words of admonishment, and that was the closest she had had to come to charming a stranger.
“Will you do it?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“For Chrissake”—Frumkin tried hard to keep his voice down, but he was fuming—“it’s not a fucking game. We’re trying to make history here.”
Frumkin said this, Joyce thought, exactly as she had heard him say “We’re trying to make a movie here” to a recalcitrant actor high on the ramparts of Jerusalem—was it Titus himself?—who was refusing the direction to take his hands off the battlements and wave his arms.
“You know what’s going on now,” he continued, “and you know what happened right here in Jaffa three years ago. That was a bloody massacre, fifty greenhorns off the boat, five nights in a hostel and then a welcoming committee with knives from your neighbors and guns from your local constabulary. That’s who was doing most of the shooting. The fucking Arab police. And people like Kirsch think they have to play it fair. Now imagine if it isn’t only the Arab police who have the guns, and it already isn’t. We have to be armed too. You know that. You obviously believe it. When the time comes the Jews here have to be able to defend themselves. Trust me, when push comes to shove, two hundred British cops aren’t going to protect the Jews.”
“And when will the time come? Because I don’t think I want to be here when it does.”
“Not for a while, but it will come. And you will have already done your part, for which everyone will be eternally grateful.”
Frumkin stood up. He was well over six foot, heavily muscled in the shoulders but narrow-waisted. The cloth of his shirt was fine, and undoubtedly expensive, but the tight cut made him look something like an overgrown schoolboy.
He circled behind Joyce and put his hands on her shoulders. Softening his tone, he said: “No more gunrunning, all you have to do is meet the major once, and then, if you don’t
think you can pursue things, you don’t have to. What could you possibly lose?”
He lowered his face into her mass of white hair and kissed the back of her head.
“You’re a good one, Joycie,” he murmured.
30.
Kirsch could walk now with the aid of a cane. If everything went well Dr. Bassan would release him from the hospital at the end of the week. Each day he took himself a little farther around the hospital grounds. This morning he ventured onto the patio. Four beds had been set up to provide sun treatment for tuberculosis patients, but only one was occupied. The beds, narrow four-posters, were draped in rectangular cotton screens with the canopy area left open so the patient could absorb the sun’s healing rays in privacy.
He watched a nurse bring out and unfold a camp bed. Before setting it up she rolled up the sleeves of her white uniform. She must have been new, Kirsch thought, because he didn’t recognize her. She was sleek and tidy-looking, her skin was pale, and Kirsch imagined that she hadn’t been in the country all that long. Her hair was piled high, and twice she stopped what she was doing to pin her white cap more tightly into position. She disappeared through the patio doors, then returned holding a little girl in her arms. The child still had her shoes and black stockings on, her head was wrapped in a black-and-red kerchief. Her legs were stick thin. The nurse laid her patient very gently onto the camp bed. Immediately, the girl turned onto her side and pulled her white shift up to cover her head. The nurse tugged at the sheet.
Kirsch understood the impulse not to be seen. He didn’t much want to be seen himself, not by most people, anyway. Nevertheless he couldn’t resist the impulse to help. He took a few slow steps across the pebbled courtyard.
“Come on,” he said to the girl, “come out of there, the sun’s good for you.”
“She won’t listen,” the nurse responded. “Rachel does this every day.”
Rachel peeked out from beneath her self-constructed veil. Kirsch guessed she couldn’t be more than nine or ten years old.
“I do listen,” she said, in heavily accented English, and then she began to cough.
The young nurse pulled at the veil and this time Rachel offered no resistance. She let the nurse wipe the blood and spittle from her mouth. Kirsch looked at Rachel’s face. Her long eyes slanted up toward the temples and were riveting in expression. She was going to die, and she knew it.
Kirsch walked to the patio wall and stared down into a neighboring building’s roof garden. There was a petrol can covered by an embroidered cloth that served as a table, and on it wildflowers in a jam pot. Kirsch could see through a window into the spotlessly clean and tidy household: a little white bed and books piled on the floor. It was an image of domestic simplicity that, at this moment in his life, adventure having brought him down with a bump, touched him to the core.
“Would you like to live there?”
The nurse was standing at his shoulder.
“Right now I wouldn’t mind at all. Although the place I let is rather nice. But this one seems more cheerful, must be because I’m not there.”
Immediately, Kirsch regretted his wan expression of self-pity. He wasn’t the one coughing up blood.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Inexcusable.”
He looked at the nurse to see if she had already judged him an egoist. She was smiling. He liked her bright brown eyes and what he thought of as an eagerness in her expression.
“You’re allowed to feel sorry for yourself,” she said. “You’ve been here for a long time.”
He couldn’t make out her accent—Russian perhaps, but already retuned by Hebrew.
“I’ll guess that you’re newer to these premises than I am.”
“As it happens I was here when they brought you in.”
She had seen him at his worst then, crushed and bloodied.
“What’s your name?”
“Mayan.”
“I’m Robert Kirsch.” Kirsch kept his right hand on the crook of his walking stick and extended his left, but he was a little unsteady and as a result the angle at which he made his offer seemed to invite informal hand-holding rather than a handshake.
Mayan laughed and took his hand in hers.
“Yes, I know who you are,” she said.
To fall hopelessly in love with one’s nurse was the greatest cliché of all—how many thousands of those back from the war had done it? Robert remembered Marcus’s letters home, his paeans to the “tender lights” with their “sleepless passion” for the wounded and the dying. Now it was his turn to see how easily it could be done. And were it not for Joyce he would have fallen already, here and now, on this scorching white Jerusalem afternoon, while the two TB patients scratched a rough orchestral background of coughs and spits.
“Captain Kirsch,” a voice called out from the hospital interior, “there’s someone here to see you.”
He let go of Mayan’s hand and turned with the irrepressible expectancy that it was Joyce, even though he knew by now that his hopes would be dashed.
Not Joyce, then, of course, but Ross. The governor stood in his tropical whites holding a bunch of pale lilies and looking for all the world, Kirsch thought, like a colonial version of the angel of the Annunciation. But what had he come to announce? It was, perhaps, Ross’s tenth visit to the hospital, and while the content of the first five had inevitably been limited to inquiries as to the state of Kirsch’s health, expressions of concern and words of encouragement, the more recent conversations appeared to be circling a subject that Ross couldn’t quite bring himself to pounce upon: namely, or so Kirsch imagined, who had shot Robert Kirsch and why? Ross, Kirsch couldn’t help but notice, had become a master of the last-minute swerve: discussion of the recent riots would, miraculously, it seemed, lead into the latest cricket news from England; an update on how the police station was managing without Kirsch tumbled randomly, but not awkwardly, into “humorous” anecdotes concerning Ross’s recent attempts to train a group of elderly Russian nuns from the Convent of the Ascension to sing Wagner. But Ross, Kirsch felt, need not have bothered to be so enterprising in his narratives. Kirsch should probably have told him that his tactful and politic deviations were a waste of time (he could hear Ross saying to his wife, “The chap must be given time to pull himself together”), as he had no particular interest in having the salient questions about his would-be assassins answered. The truth was that during this entire period of sickness and recovery his mind had been focused entirely elsewhere—on Joyce. But thus far he had said nothing to Ross, preferring to let him find his own way through the thickets of embarrassment that surrounded their meetings.
But here was Ross again, proffering his flowers to Mayan, as if he had brought them for her rather than for Kirsch, and once again Kirsch sensed a nervousness in the governor that implied the strain of avoidance.
“Well, you’re certainly looking a lot better, color’s back in your cheeks, walking with only a cane. Can’t imagine they’ll be able to keep you here much longer.”
“Bassan said the end of the week.”
“Home for the Sabbath.”
Kirsch smiled. He couldn’t remember another time when Ross had made direct reference to the fact that Kirsch was a Jew. “That would be nice,” he said.
Mayan went in search of a vase.
Ross and Kirsch walked down a white-walled corridor and sat in two battered leather armchairs situated in a vestibule close to one of the children’s wards: a mural before them showed the Pied Piper of Hamelin as a black silhouette with children of diminishing size following him out of town. Above them a ceiling fan revolved slowly and ineffectively. Ross’s upper lip glowed with perspiration.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
Ross coughed, then continued: “The day you were shot, you remember I’d phoned you. I needed to talk to you about something we were, still are, worried about. It’s an ugly problem: guns coming in from all over the place, getting through at the ports, di
sappearing from army supplies. We caught three of our chaps—court-martialed them; one was a captain, Jeremy Billings over in Ashdod. The guns go to both sides, to whoever comes up with the money—and the sniper who took a potshot at you could have been Arab or Jew, although I have a hunch that it’s the Jews who have it in for you. At any rate, at the time I rang you we didn’t have a lot to go on. I was going to ask you to get involved, do a little sleuthing, make some inquiries, have you try to pin down who’s running things in Jerusalem, find out who’s taking bribes, look into who’s doing the smuggling and who’s bringing the damn weapons in. But here’s the awkward thing.”
A Palestine Affair Page 18