Kirsch gazed at Mayan. Not a flapper, then, not even remotely close to one. She had missed the postwar party—hats in the air, everyone!— and so, of course, had he. The difference was that he had done so through choice. He couldn’t dance and drink after Marcus had been killed, and even three years later his parents were still spreading their gloom over him, black clouds wherever he went. He’d had to get away.
“And now, Mayan, if I’m not mistaken, you have a week’s holiday coming up.”
Bassan was carving the roast chicken. As his profession dictated, he was deft with the knife.
“Yes, I have a friend from home who is living in Rosh Pinah. I’m going to visit her.”
Bassan handed Kirsch a plate.
“Have you seen the northern part of the country, Robert?”
Good God! Bassan was matchmaking! And Mrs. Bassan was smiling at Kirsch across the table in a horribly expectant manner. Christ, he could see that she already had him married off to Mayan and bouncing a couple of kids on his knees. The good doctor and his wife were investing in the Jewish future of Palestine, and Kirsch was their bond. He wanted no part of it.
“I’ve heard Rosh Pinah’s a bit of a dead village,” he replied. “Set up with Rothschild money, wasn’t it?”
He was sorry as soon as he had spoken. He sounded like an awful snob.
“Yes,” Mayan said, “you’re quite right, a haven for us poor persecuted Russian Jews. We have to take what we can.”
Kirsch saw in her eyes that she understood everything—both the Bassans’ eagerness and his adolescent response to it. She was telling him, “This has nothing to do with me,” and suddenly, Joyce notwithstanding, he somewhat regretted that such was the case.
Dinner conversation ebbed and flowed, mainly around the subject of the hospital and its personalities: doctors, staff, and patients. It was a warm night and through the room’s open windows came the sounds of the neighbors’ families and their guests, gathered to eat and talk: the scrape of cutlery, voices raised and lowered, snatches of prayer, the silver shower of a young girl’s song and the harsh gutturals of her elders. There were, too, the smells of cooking, odors that mixed strangely with the too-sweet scent of honeysuckle rising from bushes that overgrew the walls of Bassan’s house. Kirsch felt suddenly unutterably tired, as if, after the deprivations of the hospital, he was suffering from an overdose to his senses. He got shakily to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I really need to get some air.”
Bassan was quickly at his side. “Of course, of course. Your first night out. We mustn’t exhaust you.”
Mayan stood, too. “I’ll go with him,” she said. “I’ll walk him back. Don’t worry.”
“Yes,” Kirsch murmured, “perhaps I will go home.”
They walked side by side at Kirsch’s slow pace down the slope toward Jaffa Road. He found it harder to use the cane on downhill stretches and was embarrassed by his awkwardness. Occasionally Mayan lightly touched his arm, as if to balance him. They stopped at the curb-side. Above them the sky unfurled its nighttime banner: black ground with stars and crescent moon. Jerusalem’s reply was the city’s single traffic light. While Kirsch caught his breath the light changed to red. A car that had been speeding down the road skidded to a halt. The driver, head thrown back, laughing riotously, was a uniformed British officer and beside him sat a woman with long hair, her face half invisible to Kirsch and Mayan; with her outstretched hand she was caressing the back of the man’s head. It was Joyce! Or was it? The light went green and the car accelerated forward with a screech.
Kirsch felt his head spin. He broke into a sweat and his knees buckled. Mayan half caught his weight and helped him to sit by the roadside.
“Put your head down.”
He obeyed. Gradually, his dizziness passed, but when he tried to stand Mayan put her hand firmly on his shoulder.
“Wait,” she said.
He didn’t have the strength to resist her.
Eventually she let him get to his feet. They walked on up the hill in the direction of Kirsch’s flat. The air seemed to get heavier and warmer, as if someone had opened an oven door and released heat into a room that was already baking. By the time they reached his garden gate Kirsch had convinced himself that it was Joyce whom he had seen in the car.
He turned to Mayan. “Thank you so very much,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to be a nurse in your off-hours.”
“Don’t worry,” she replied. “No special skills were involved.”
“And listen,” Kirsch cut in, a little quicker than he had wanted to, “that trip you’re taking, I wondered, well, would you mind if I tagged along? Ross has given me a couple of weeks and Dr. Bassan’s ordered me to get some walking in and . . .”
“I’ll think about it,” Mayan said firmly.
Kirsch’s face fell.
“Oh, of course you can come”—she laughed—“as long as you promise not to bring the Rothschilds. Really, it would be too humiliating.”
“You know,” Kirsch said, “your English is truly remarkable.”
Mayan laughed. “I was in Dublin for six months before I could get here. I lived in Rathgar.” She pronounced it with a roll of the “r”s, in a way that made it sound to Kirsch like one of the most exciting places on earth. “Have you been there ever? Almost all the Jews are in the same neighborhood. My aunt owned Shrier’s bakery on the Walworth Road. There is a pub next door, The Bull and Finch.”
“And did you go into it?”
“A Jewish girl in the pub? The neighbors wouldn’t have approved.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“So I only went in when I needed a drink.”
Kirsch laughed. He had an impulse to kiss Mayan, but Joyce’s face floated before him like a reproof, and even though at that moment he hated Joyce from the bottom of his heart, he held back.
“When do we leave?” he asked.
“The next bus is tomorrow evening, after the Sabbath.”
“Well, I’ll be there,” he said.
Mayan began to walk away, then stopped and turned around. “Who was the woman in the car?”
“Someone else’s wife.”
“And you love her?”
“I thought I did.”
Mayan nodded her head as if the answer, while not altogether satisfactory, would do for the moment.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said.
Kirsch watched her until she turned the corner of his street and then he went up to his room. There was an envelope pinned to his door. Kirsch took it down and put it in his trouser pocket. He walked to his kitchen table, lit a candle and sat down. He slit open the envelope and removed an official-looking piece of paper covered in a very unofficiallooking hasty scrawl: “Heard you were out. Good show. Need to talk to you. Matter of some urgency. Please get in touch asap. Ross.”
Kirsch rolled the letter into a ball and threw it away.
31.
In the rear half of his borrowed Ford with its top rolled back, Bloomberg had his painting wrapped in a heavy cloth sack. The car had come courtesy of Freddie Peake. That had not been a problem; the Pasha still had his Rolls, two Vauxhalls, and a Sunbeam, and he knew that once Bloomberg’s painting had been delivered to Government House Ross could be relied upon to get the Ford back to him.
Bloomberg drove into Jerusalem around mid-morning. The larger military presence in the city was immediately visible: two armored cars stood parked outside the Damascus Gate in a space normally occupied by vendors offering figs and plums. Bloomberg skirted the walls of the Old City and turned onto Jaffa Road. After the silence of the desert he found the busyness of the shops and their customers to be dispiriting. Neither did he much care for the tiled roofs and small houses of the modern suburb that was expanding on either side of the thoroughfare; except for one or two buildings, the Jerusalem beyond the Old City walls was a place to disillusion the sentimentalist.
Before driving home to Talpiot he thought he
’d stop in at the Allenby for a drink. He parked the car, leaving his painting on the backseat. The bar, at that time of day, was generally deserted, although the lunchtime crowd would soon find its way in: the American bankers and the Dutch engineers, agricultural experts from France, Germans selling machinery, anyone who was speculating on the new Palestine. Now he too was a man on a mission. Bloomberg patted his shirt pocket. The button was still there, wrapped in a torn square of canvas.
He approached the tall Sudanese doorman in his white robes and asked him to keep an eye on the car and its contents. In the lobby he recognized George Saphir, a reporter for the English-language Palestine Bulletin. He was deep in conversation with a bearded, black-veiled figure who Bloomberg guessed was the Armenian Archimandrite. Bloomberg had met Saphir at one of Ross’s gatherings. The journalist, fresh out from England, had expressed an interest in doing a piece on Bloomberg and his Jerusalem paintings, but the project hadn’t got off the ground. Saphir’s bosses, the editors of the Bulletin, had little interest once it was revealed to them that Bloomberg had abandoned his Zionist commission to make paintings of local churches.
Bloomberg intended to pass Saphir by without speaking, but the young man abruptly looked up from his conversation as if he had known that Bloomberg was approaching.
“Mark!”
Saphir rose from his seat. The two men shook hands.
“When did you get back? How are the great temples? Ross has been bragging to everyone that he’s about to own a masterpiece.”
“This morning, got in this morning.” Bloomberg felt that his voice had grown rusty through lack of use.
“Well, I’d love to buy you a drink and hear all about the trip. How long are you going to be propping up the bar?”
Saphir turned to the priest.
“Oh, I’m sorry, this is Father Pantelides. Father, Mark Bloomberg, the painter.”
Not Armenian, then, but Greek.
“Father Pantelides has just passed on to me some information that might interest you. He tells me that our governor is on his way out. The rumor is a transfer to Cyprus. There’s trouble brewing there, and they want to get Sir Gerald in early. Father Pantelides is just back from Nicosia.”
“Sir Gerald will be the governor there, it is absolutely certain.” The priest smiled. “Perhaps he will bring you to paint Cyprus.”
Everyone, it seemed, knew that Bloomberg was a gun for hire.
“Perhaps I’ll go myself,” Bloomberg replied.
“How’s your wife?” Saphir put in. “Haven’t seen her about at all. Still, as you may have heard, nightlife in Jerusalem has got worse than ever. Probably more going on in Petra.”
Saphir took a sideways look at the priest, who did not appear remotely offended.
“They even thought about canceling the teatime orchestra here at the hotel because nobody showed up during the riots. Wouldn’t have been much of a loss, I admit, but dammit we have to have music.”
“As far as I know my wife’s fine,” Bloomberg replied.
“Ah, then you haven’t seen her yet; a little fortification first, that’s the ticket. How long have you been away? Two months?” Saphir winked at Bloomberg.
Bloomberg went into the bar and ordered a double whisky. His funds were running low, but there were more than enough piastres left for a couple of drinks, and in any case Ross was about to replenish the war chest. The bartender poured the drink and Bloomberg swigged it back. The whisky burned his throat and felt good. A month ago the news that Ross was leaving Palestine would have come as both relief and a cause for panic—money had to come in from somewhere—but now he greeted it with indifference. He had lost his connection to Ross out in the desert, abandoned him at the moment that he had begun to paint his abstraction of the high place.
After a while Saphir came in to join him. He was, Bloomberg guessed, in his mid-twenties, a talker and a bubbly enthusiast for the Zionist cause. Bloomberg suspected that if he had any success as a journalist it would derive from the fact that his interviewees were unlikely to take him seriously—and that being so, they would relax and reveal their most precious secrets. Since coming to Palestine, Saphir, a Manchester University history graduate, had adopted the highly credentialed look of an agricultural worker: heavy boots, dark knee socks, khaki shorts, and a blue work shirt. He was betrayed, however, by his pale skin and soft hands.
The intervening moments had transformed Saphir, who, since the conclusion of his conversation with Father Pantelides, had grown gloomy.
“God, there are days when I miss England,” he said.
Bloomberg had noticed before how Jews who were committed to Palestine frequently seemed nostalgic for their countries of origin, whereas Jews like him, who had no special passion for the place, were equally phlegmatic about their native lands. Perhaps enthusiasm for place, irrespective of politics, was itself an aspect of personality.
“What do you miss?” Bloomberg asked.
Saphir removed his spectacles and wiped them on his shirt. “It’s hard to say. Things here are unrelenting, that’s what makes them so exciting, but also so exhausting. You know, Saturday afternoons at home I’d like to relax and go and watch a football game.”
“It was a football that started the riots here, wasn’t it?”
“My point exactly.”
A young man in a white turban peered into the bar and then moved quickly away.
“Listen,” Bloomberg said, “have you heard anything new about the De Groot case?”
Saphir was looking toward the door, immediately distracted.
“De Groot? Oh yes, I forgot your involvement. No word there, the whole thing’s more or less forgotten, especially now. Robert Kirsch was in charge of the investigation, and he’s been shot. Poor bastard. Perhaps you heard?”
“His cousin came to see me.”
“Really?” Saphir said, still staring past Bloomberg. “Look, I do believe that’s the mufti. I wonder what he’s doing here? I’m sorry, Mark. I was hoping we’d have time but . . . duty calls.”
“So they’ve made no progress at all?”
“The Kirsch shooting? It’s been weeks. God knows who pulled the trigger. Your friend Sir Gerald is the man to ask, and as of now he’s on his way to Damascus. Off for a few days antiquities hunting with his wife, I believe. I expect he’ll announce the Cyprus move when he returns.”
Bloomberg didn’t bother to repeat his question about De Groot.
“Well, nice to see you,” Saphir said.
The relationship was always slightly awkward, Bloomberg thought, between the Jews who were staying and those who were only passing through: the reason, he suspected, was that no one was ever quite sure to which group they belonged.
Saphir walked quickly out of the bar in pursuit of his quarry.
Bloomberg ordered another double, gulped it down, then went outside. Should he drive to North Talpiot, or first pursue his business in the Old City? The sun was a white disk and the heat of the day, turning on the wheel of summer’s end, floated like a wave over the city. Bloomberg’s eyes were red and his mouth, despite the liquor, still tasted of sand. A lorry laden with building materials skirted a parked car and, out of habit rather than need, the driver leaned loudly on his horn. Bloomberg clapped his hands to his ears; sucking deep breaths, sweating profusely, and feeling that somehow a decision on where to go next had been made for him, he stumbled and swayed down the Jaffa Road in the direction of the Old City.
He entered blindly through the Jaffa Gate, shielding his eyes against the sun. The shutters of most of the stalls in the bazaar had been pulled down for the duration of the afternoon siesta, but some were only half or three-quarters of the way closed and offered, like seductively lifted skirts, a glimpse of their wares: a half sack of pistachios, thin crescents from a stack of copper plates, bottles of rosewater cut off at the neck. Saud had given Bloomberg directions to his mother’s home, but finding the place was another story. The suq, once entered, demanded that you got lost,
and for most of its visitors the obligatory derangement was a happy state: pilgrim, tourist or local shopper, the warren of alleyways would lead you eventually to the place that you sought, even if, at the outset of your journey, you were hardly aware that you had a destination in mind. In the first days after their arrival in Jerusalem Bloomberg had moved indifferently through the maze of the bazaar, but he had heard from Joyce how its objects—a rug, or gold-embroidered kerchief, or apricot papers—searched you out, rather than the other way round. He had dismissed such talk as romantic hokum, but now he saw how the feeling might be true. A donkey guided by a small boy clopped on the cobblestones in front of him, stopping once to unleash a powerful stream of yellow piss onto the wall of a long low-roofed windowless building that seemed to have its back to the alley. Eventually Bloomberg arrived near the Street of Chains without at all knowing how he had got there. Here the market was enclosed and its pink domed ceiling vaulted to a narrow opening that allowed light to fall in a bright shaft, as in an Old Master’s rendition of celestial beams descending. Bloomberg, standing in the halo, laughed to himself: how his friends from the East End would have loved this moment, the arrival of St. Mark in Jerusalem.
He climbed two flights of broad, chipped and broken stone steps and knocked on the al-Sayyids’ door. A skinny boy, no more than nine or ten, came to answer; his eyes were clouded by trachoma and there were little scars on the surface of his lids. Bloomberg peered past him into the home. He was about to ask for Saud’s mother but the boy reached out and took him by the arm.
“Come,” he said. “Yes, come.”
He drew Bloomberg inside, tugging gently on his arm using the method of a dealer in the bazaar as he brought an anxious customer into the back of his shop to view a prize piece.
A Palestine Affair Page 20