“Hold on,” Kirsch said.
He got to his feet and opened the door. Mayan stood there alone. Kirsch looked at her through bleary eyes. She had washed her hair and pulled it into a shiny black braid that hung down her back. While Kirsch was sleeping the sky had gathered toward darkness and only a thin dying ember glowed over the distant mountains.
“Well, shall I come in?”
She was wearing the same white dress that he had seen her in at the Bassans’ house. Kirsch suspected that there were not a whole lot of clothes in her wardrobe.
Mayan smiled at him. Even after months in Palestine her face was still pale (Kirsch had noted that she wore a hat whenever she was in the sun) and in contrast her lips appeared very red.
He held the door open for her. She entered the room and sat on the edge of his bed. He moved to the sink in the corner of the room, splashed water on his face and looked around for a towel.
“What happened to Rosa?” he asked.
“She’s still at work. Perhaps you’ll meet her later.”
Mayan touched her fingers to the glass ashtray on Kirsch’s bedside table. She picked up his keys, then put them down again.
Kirsch stood before her.
“Is there somewhere nearby where we can eat?” he asked, but before she could answer he had bent over to kiss her. His stance was awkward and the kiss clumsy. To make things easier for him, it seemed, Mayan stood up from the bed. He kissed her again.
“Wait,” she said.
She stepped away from him, undid the hooks and buttons of her dress, and pulled it over her head. Underneath the dress she was naked.
Kirsch watched her fold the dress over the back of his chair.
“I don’t want to get it creased,” she said.
She walked over to Kirsch and let him embrace her. Her small breasts pressed into his chest.
“Here,” she said, “let me help you. Sit down.”
She undid his belt buckle and the buttons of his fly, then pushed down his trousers and pulled them off.
Kirsch lay back on the bed. The room’s only light came from outside, a handful of stars that barely lifted the darkness. Kirsch touched his hand to the back of Mayan’s head. Her hair was still wet. She moved her face down over his stomach but before taking him in her mouth she moved her head to the side and kissed him very gently all down his withered leg. Later, when she lay facedown, sleeping beside him, he saw, by the yellow moonlight that the room boxed and filtered, a track of white scars that ran like a ladder across her back.
34.
“Where do you think you’re going with that?”
The young sentry, newly assigned to his post at the gate of Government House, gestured with his rifle toward the wrapped painting in the back of Bloomberg’s car.
“I’m making a delivery.”
Bloomberg knew that he didn’t look like a credible delivery boy: he hadn’t shaved in days and his hair was matted with sand from his journey.
“What is it?”
“A painting for the governor. He’s not going to be pleased if you don’t let me through.”
“Isn’t he?”
“Listen, I know he’s not here. He’s traveling to Damascus . . .”
“Now how would you know that?”
“For God’s sake.”
“Let’s take a look, then.”
The sentry walked around to the back of the car. Bloomberg untied the ropes around the heavy cloth sacking. He had only to reveal the brown-and-red top right-hand corner of the painting for the sentry to interrupt his activity: “All right, that’s enough. Take it out of the car and you can leave it here at the gate.”
“I’m not leaving it here.”
“Then you’ll have to go on home with it and come back with a proper pass.”
Bloomberg was about to tell him to get hold of someone in authority, and that this business about a pass was nonsense, but he held back. He didn’t want to speak to anyone except Ross. He couldn’t be sure what others knew or didn’t know about Saud, and he didn’t want to be peppered with awkward questions.
“You wouldn’t like to tell me when Sir Gerald is returning, would you?”
The sentry acted as if he hadn’t heard.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Move it. You’re blocking the way.”
The road behind Bloomberg’s vehicle was empty of traffic. All that he blocked was the sun’s path to the shadowed dirt in front of him. Bloomberg backed his car up and turned it around. Freddie Peake would have to wait a few more days to get his Ford back.
Bloomberg drove back to the cottage in Talpiot and parked the Ford close to the garden gate, then he carried the painting down the path and leaned it against an old olive tree with a convoluted trunk. He went back to the car and retrieved the books that Saud’s mother had given him. He didn’t know what he was going to say to Joyce when he saw her, and when he opened the door he was almost relieved to find her not at home.
The room was more or less as he had left it, in a state of untidy calamity: the bed rumpled and Joyce’s clothes strewn on the floor. There was a food-stained plate in the sink and two empty bottles of wine under a chair. Next to the bed Bloomberg found a third bottle, half consumed, and took a healthy swig. He sat on the edge of the mattress and retrieved De Groot’s letter from his pocket for what was now his fourth or fifth read. Bloomberg skimmed the typewritten sentences that he had almost committed to heart: “in view of the present situation I urge you . . . weapons that the Zionists are bringing into Palestine with the intention . . . desirability of my leaving Jerusalem without delay . . . may only be possible for a short time . . . great personal danger . . . must make it clear that His Majesty’s Representatives here do not hold me in high esteem . . . reasons for my contacting you directly . . . whatever action you may decide upon as the result of this warning . . . must tell you that the longer you delay the more dangerous the subsequent . . . guns arriving through the port of Haifa but I do not know . . . urge you toward the utmost vigilance . . . I am, sir, Your obedient Servant—” The signature space was blank; presumably De Groot only had reason to put his pen to the original letter, which had undoubtedly been intercepted by his killers. De Groot knew that guns were on their way. He knew that a group of radical Zionists was planning to use them for a series of assassinations to be followed by an insurrection. He knew that he himself was a target for murder.
Bloomberg put the letter back in his pocket, then stood and walked around the room absentmindedly collecting Joyce’s discarded clothes and piling them on a chair. He had to clear his head and think what to do. But this was easier said than done. He had been in Petra for only a few weeks but it was long enough to impart a spacious unfamiliarity to this place to which he had returned and this punctuated his general disorientation. He turned in the room as if it were a flimsy stage set whose walls might collapse if he pushed on them. The Jerusalem light pouring through the windows that in the first weeks after their arrival from England he had found harsh in the extreme now seemed mellow and springlike in comparison to the desert’s blanched and effacing glare. In the shadowed spaces between their trunks and the bed he stumbled and groped like a blind man. Bloomberg’s face burned and his head itched. He tripped and fell to his knees; in a delirium of strangeness the solidity of the floor seemed momentarily unreliable, as if it might turn to sand and suck in his hands and feet. He pulled himself up with an effort and approached the corner of the room where he had leaned his canvases. He tipped one back. The work, a small painting completed only three months ago, was adequate, but not much more. He had been a careful observer of the landscape, not yet in its grip.
He was about to go outside and bring in the new painting when he heard someone walking up the path. The door flew open. Bloomberg looked up expecting to see Joyce. Instead a tall, stocky man with a shock of blond hair entered the room.
“Who the hell are you?”
It was Frumkin who posed the question.
; “I might ask you the same thing.”
Frumkin took in Bloomberg’s disheveled appearance and sunburned face. “Oh, Christ. You must be the husband. Just back?”
“And if I’m the husband then you must be . . . ?”
“No, no, don’t start getting the wrong idea. I’m Peter Frumkin from the Metropolis Film Corporation. Joyce has been doing some prop work for me. She’s been terrific. Wish I’d met her at the beginning of the shoot. Half my crew was incompetent. Your wife was a godsend.”
“Is that why you nearly kicked the door in?”
“Sorry about that. You know how it is here, politeness out of the window, it’s infectious.”
Frumkin looked around the room as if Joyce might be hiding somewhere. His eyes fell on the sheet of paper that lay on the bed. Bloomberg froze for a moment, then took two quick steps, picked up De Groot’s letter and stuffed it into his pocket. If Frumkin noticed that Bloomberg was less than nonchalant in his gesture, he did a good job of concealing the fact.
“Joyce coming back soon?”
Bloomberg shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you, I’m afraid.”
Bloomberg kept his hand in his pocket, and crumpled the letter into a tight ball.
Without having been invited to sit, Frumkin slung his long frame onto the bed, propped himself up on the pillows and stretched his arms above his head, clasping his hands together.
“So,” he asked, “whaddya make of the Holy Land?”
Bloomberg relaxed a little.
“The land interests me, but not the holiness.”
“I feel the same way. Speak any Hebrew?”
“Not a word.”
“You should try, you know.” Frumkin managed to sound both nonchalant and critical. “It’s the language of the future for this place.”
“Then you think the Jews will triumph?”
“Oh,” Frumkin said firmly, “we’ll triumph all right.”
Bloomberg smiled.
“Ah, come on. That’s right, I said ‘we.’ You Brits are unbelievable. You can’t spot us, can you? But I’ll bet your cold island buddies would pin you for a Jew in two seconds.”
“You’re right about that.”
Outside, a small plane crossing the sky broke the silence of the afternoon.
“Hey,” Frumkin said, “that was a nasty business you and your wife went through with Mr. De Groot. You were the talk of the town for a while there.”
Bloomberg tried to remain calm. Was this man as easygoing as he seemed, or was something else going on?
“Were we? I’m happy to say I missed most of our celebrity.”
“They ever catch the killer?”
“You’d know that better than I.”
Frumkin nodded. He got up from the bed and gestured toward the stack of Bloomberg’s paintings.
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Please yourself.”
Frumkin crouched down to review the work, flicking the canvases toward him as if he were moving hangers in his wardrobe. He stopped at one of Ross’s early commissions.
“Wouldn’t have figured you for a church man. But you’ve got that dreary place, all right. Scottish hospice, right? How come you don’t paint your wife? She’s a beautiful woman.”
Bloomberg chose not to respond.
Frumkin stood. “Well, I’d better be going. Listen, gotta piece of paper? I’d like to leave a message for Joyce.”
Instinctively, Bloomberg tightened his grip on the crumpled letter in his pocket. “You can give me the information,” he said. “I expect she’ll be back soon.”
The sound of a sputtering engine filled the air. At first Bloomberg thought it must be another plane, but the noise grew closer.
“Maybe that’s her now,” Frumkin said.
The engine cut and both men heard the garden gate swing open; then came the sound of two voices.
Frumkin moved quickly to the door and pushed it open. Joyce was walking down the path in the company of a uniformed British army officer, but it wasn’t Lipman who accompanied her.
Bloomberg pushed past Frumkin into the sun-filled overgrown garden.
“Mark!”
Joyce ran toward Bloomberg and held him in a long embrace. For the first time in more than a year he felt that he could hug her back and mean it.
Athill and Frumkin watched the couple’s reunion, Athill with mild embarrassment, Frumkin in a state of mounting apprehension.
Joyce, spying Frumkin over Bloomberg’s shoulder, was the first to break away. Frumkin spoke before she could say anything.
“Nothing important,” he said, “nothing that can’t wait.”
Joyce gave him a look of withering hatred. She wanted to spit at him, but she knew that she mustn’t, and in any case her tongue was like a heavy stone inside her mouth.
“But I thought you wanted . . . ,” Bloomberg began.
“Doesn’t matter,” Frumkin interrupted firmly. “I’m late for a meeting at the American Colony. They want my advice on selling cinema films to tourists.”
He turned toward Athill. “You know Gerry Ross? Good friend of mine. I’m a contributor to Pro-Jerusalem. Tell him Peter Frumkin from Metropolis says hello.”
Athill nodded, a slightly baffled expression on his face.
Frumkin set off toward the gate. It was a short while before they heard him kick-start a motorcycle that he must have left in the grove of eucalyptus trees a hundred yards or so down the path.
Bloomberg noticed that Joyce’s dress was badly stained and that her eyes were red, but whether from tears or exhaustion he couldn’t tell. She slumped down into one of the garden chairs.
“Well,” Athill said, “I should leave you two alone. Mr. Bloomberg, very glad to meet you, sir. I hope your trip south was productive. I’m an admirer of your work.” He looked at Joyce. “I expect we’ll talk again very soon.”
They were back where they had started in the wild garden with the sounds of the muezzins drifting up from the mosques in the nearby Arab villages. A late summer evening chill was in the air. Bloomberg fetched a blanket from the bed and draped it around Joyce’s shoulders. The sun had set without its usual fanfare, or perhaps they simply hadn’t noticed. Bloomberg’s wrapped painting still stood where he had placed it against the olive tree. He had brought out what remained of the wine and they took turns swigging from the bottle. He had a pack of Lubliner cigarettes and Joyce chain-smoked until there was only one left. He wanted to tell her about Saud and De Groot’s letter but she looked so beaten that he decided to wait. Finally, it was Joyce who broke the silence.
“Robert Kirsch was shot,” she said.
“Yes, I know. He’s in Shaarei Zedek. He’s all right, though.”
“How do you know that?”
“His cousin was passing through the desert, you know, as people do . . .”
Joyce laughed, surprising herself because she thought that she had lost the capacity to do so.
“Anyway, she looked me up, gave me the news from Jerusalem.”
“I want to find him,” Joyce said, her voice trembling a little, “if he’s still here, that is. He’s been released from the hospital. He might be on his way back to London. But I have to find him.”
“Ah, then nothing’s changed.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I suppose, that you’re in love with him.”
“But that would be a change, because I wasn’t, you know, to begin with or even when you went away.”
“But you love him now.”
“I don’t know,” Joyce said. “Would you care if I did?”
“You probably won’t believe me,” Bloomberg replied, “and you’d have every right not to, but I think that I would.”
Joyce shivered a little, even though she was the one who had benefit of the blanket. She had the sensation that she was being closely watched, although there was no one in the vicinity.
Bloomberg got up from his chair and walked over to his painting. “In the morning I’ll
show you this,” he said. “You need to see it in the daylight.”
He carried the wrapped canvas into the cottage and set it against the wall. When he came out Joyce had risen and was squatting in a corner of the garden. He could hear her lift her dress and then the sound of her pissing on the ground.
Joyce headed back toward the cottage; she could feel the damp hem of her dress touching the back of her legs.
“What did you do while I was away?” Bloomberg asked. “Apart from falling in love, that is.”
“Nothing,” Joyce replied. “Nothing at all.”
She came and sat in his lap, laying her head on his shoulder. He put his arms around her and rocked back in the chair. He breathed in the almond scent of her skin, then ran his hand through the tangles in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
There were tears on her face.
“Don’t,” he said, but then he realized that the tears belonged to him. “I’ve left it all too late, haven’t I?”
Joyce kissed him gently on the forehead. “I don’t know,” she said.
She stood up from his embrace and went into the cottage. Bloomberg followed and watched her light the oil lamp.
“I know who killed De Groot,” he said. “It wasn’t anybody called Saud. It was Jews.”
Joyce stared at him; she didn’t seem the least bit surprised.
“Which Jews?”
“Jews who wanted him dead.”
He pulled the paper ball from his pocket and began to smooth it out on the bed.
“Read this,” he said.
Reluctantly, it seemed, Joyce took the letter and held it near the lamplight.
“Jews assassinating a Jew.” Bloomberg spoke while she was reading. “That’s not supposed to happen, is it?”
Joyce held a corner of the letter near the top of the oil lamp.
“What are you doing?” Bloomberg said.
Her hand dipped the paper toward the flame, but at the last second she changed her mind and withdrew it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Give it to Ross when he gets back. Along with this.”
He pulled the silver button from his pocket and showed it to Joyce.
A Palestine Affair Page 23