“She’ll be here. We’re on double duty today. A party of great Jewish philanthropists from your own country is due to arrive and we shall be the picturesque pioneers who serve them.”
“What are their names?”
“Look.” Mayan pointed to the bottom of the hill. “Here they come.”
A charabanc had pulled in next to the hostelry. Kirsch saw three people get out; one was a woman in a large floppy hat. The driver came around to lend her the added protection of a blue-and-white parasol. The men were in white summer suits; the taller of the two wore a pith helmet.
“And who did you say they were?”
“I didn’t,” Mayan replied, “but whoever they are you must be very nice to them or the poor Russians here won’t have anything to eat tonight.”
“You won’t let it go, will you?”
The visitors had begun their climb, the driver relinquishing his parasol to one of the men who chivalrously continued to hold it over the woman’s head as she stepped gingerly up the rock-strewn path. Kirsch felt an apprehension at their approach, and a small wave of anger, as if the newcomers were trespassing on his property.
“I’ll be back with your drink,” Mayan said.
“Let me get it myself. I don’t want you . . .” Kirsch interrupted, but she turned swiftly away.
The English party was within twenty yards of the terrace when the man in the pith helmet spotted Kirsch.
“Bobby? Good Lord, Bobby Kirsch. Well, I’ll be damned.” He turned around excitedly to the woman.
“Look, Miriam, I’ll be damned if it isn’t Harold Kirsch’s boy.”
It took Kirsch a moment to register their faces as belonging to Simon and Esther Gaber, near neighbors from London and occasional dinner guests at his parents’ house. The third member of the group must be their son Robin. Kirsch had played with him once or twice when they were small children, and he seemed to remember that they hadn’t hit it off.
Kirsch stood up. He attempted a fluid movement but he was unable quite to hide the difficulty that he had in getting to his feet. Mrs. Gaber kissed him on the cheek; lines of sweat coursed like a delta through the powder on her cheeks and neck.
“What an extraordinary surprise!” she said.
The Gabers joined Kirsch at his table. Mrs. Gaber, acting as if the stone-block houses of Rosh Pinah were about as interesting to her as a mural in a “foreign” restaurant of the type she would never enter, launched into an urgent report of the London Jewish social scene as it had evolved in Kirsch’s absence. She was about to offer a description of the Jeremy Goldthorpe–Naomi Samuels wedding when, simultaneously, her husband butted in with a comment on the weather and her son kicked her on the ankle under the table. She remained unperturbed.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m sure Bobby is long over Naomi. I don’t doubt for a second that he wants to hear about the wedding.”
Kirsch had no chance to answer, for Mayan and Rosa had appeared on the terrace, menus in hand. Rosa was clearly the less cheerful of the two, and she stared suspiciously at Kirsch from behind a large pair of square black-rimmed glasses.
Kirsch knew that he ought to introduce Mayan, but for some reason he didn’t immediately do so, and by the time that he had made up his mind to go ahead, orders had been delivered by the Gabers and the two young women had returned to the kitchen.
“What a pretty little chalutz,” Mrs. Gaber said, “the taller one, I mean.” She dangled the Hebrew word for “pioneer” like something she might admire as long as it was held at arm’s length.
“So?” Mr. Gaber said. “We hear you’re a policeman.”
“Bobby’s a bobby,” his wife put in.
Poor Robin Gaber looked as if he might throw himself over the edge of the terrace at any moment. He must have been traveling with his parents for weeks.
“And your parents are well?”
“As far as I know. My cousin Sarah was here. She’s seen them more recently than I have.”
“Didn’t she marry the Cork boy?” Mrs. Gaber put in.
“We moved, you know. To St. John’s Wood,” her husband continued. “I’m afraid we’ve been out of touch with most of our old neighbors. We miss your parents. We used to enjoy each other’s company. Your father was a wonderful conversationalist.”
“Such an intelligent man!” Mrs. Gaber added, and then she sadly shook her head, as if Kirsch’s father, bereft and miserable, had passed away once the Gabers had decided to move.
Kirsch sensed that the conversation was about to turn to Marcus’s death and his parents’ subsequent suffering: these were subjects that he did not wish to hear Mrs. Gaber reflect upon. He turned to Robin, who thus far had not uttered a word.
“How long are you here for?” Kirsch asked.
“We’re out for a month. I’m sure the firm could have spared me for longer, but I didn’t want to give them the opportunity.”
“Don’t belittle yourself,” Mrs. Gaber said. She had given their tiny conversation a hawklike monitoring. “Robin is a brilliant barrister,” she added.
The shadows on the hillside broadened as the sun rose behind the Manor, and its roof threw an arklike pattern onto the garden. Mrs. Gaber went off in search of “the little girls’ room” and the three men fell silent. Eventually Robin asked Kirsch a few questions about his work, but without probing overmuch. He wasn’t such a bad chap, Kirsch thought, and he even began to enjoy a certain relaxed quality in their conversation, something that he hadn’t experienced much since coming out to Palestine. Did Kirsch have more in common with the Jews his own age from his part of London than he had previously believed? Robin Gaber’s stories of their mutual acquaintances made him laugh, and he wished for a moment that the hot summer’s day were in England, not here, and that he were lying on freshly mown grass under fleecy white clouds without a care in the world.
Mrs. Gaber returned to the table. She stepped over Kirsch’s walking stick, which he had placed on the floor beside his chair, but, to Kirsch’s relief, she chose not to offer a comment.
“Nice and clean,” she said, “everything clean.”
Mayan and Rosa appeared carrying plates of chicken and rice. They set them down carefully before the diners. Mayan was no longer smiling.
“Tell me, young ladies,” Mrs. Gaber began, “are you here because of persecution?”
Mayan shrugged her shoulders.
“Not at all,” Rosa responded, trying halfheartedly to appear both cheerful and accommodating. “My family in Odessa was prosperous.”
Mrs. Gaber’s face fell; she seemed disappointed.
“Then why on earth did you come here?”
Kirsch was waiting for an opportunity to mention Mayan, but Mrs. Gaber monopolized the conversation while Mayan patiently explained the roots of her youthful idealism. Kirsch noticed that Rosa was staring at him, urging him, or so Kirsch thought, to speak up.
“Look at your hands,” Mrs. Gaber suddenly exclaimed, grabbing hold of Rosa’s wrist as she went to move a plate of olives into the center of the table. “What kind of work have they made you do here?”
Mrs. Gaber turned Rosa’s palms so that everyone at the table could view the calluses on her fingers.
Rosa pulled her hand free.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“She worked on the road in Beersheva. It’s not a thing to be ashamed of. Women can break stones too.”
Kirsch looked at Mayan. He had seen gangs of women dressing stones for paved roads in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. They squatted on piles of rocks and chiseled away, chips flying past and sometimes into their faces. They wore long skirts and white headdresses that looked like beehive bandages.
“Well, a good thing she’s here now, that’s all I can say,” Mrs. Gaber told Mayan.
“This . . . this is . . .” Kirsch began to stutter an introduction, but the Gabers had turned full attention to their food. Mayan and Rosa quickly left.
“It is wonderful what they�
�re doing here, isn’t it? Truly a miracle. Now, Bobby, when are you coming back to England? Your parents must miss you terribly.”
Kirsch mumbled a noncommittal reply, sat in silence for a moment or two and then excused himself from the table. He tracked down Rosa in the kitchen.
“Where is she? Where’s Mayan?”
Rosa gave him a look of indifference, or perhaps it was disgust. “She’s gone.”
“Where to? I mean . . . she can’t have left.”
He moved past Rosa toward the adjoining room. The door was locked.
“Please open this door,” he said.
“You can’t go in there. It’s where the waitresses change.”
Kirsch banged on the wooden panels. “Mayan. Mayan. Please. I’m sorry. Please open the door.”
There was no reply from inside.
Kirsch turned to Rosa. “I’ll just wait here, then,” he said.
He sat beside her at the table. For five minutes neither of them spoke. Eventually Rosa got up and unlocked the door. Kirsch pushed past her into the room. It was empty, but a door in the opposite wall had been left flung open to the garden. He crossed the room and looked out. Mayan was nowhere to be seen.
Kirsch made his way back to the terrace and surveyed the view in every direction. He couldn’t see her. He was sweating and the drops of perspiration ran down his nose and onto his lips.
Mrs. Gaber sat poised with a sliver of roast chicken on her fork.
“Robert,” she said, “you seem to be walking very strangely. Is there something wrong?”
In the evening Robin Gaber came down from the manor and drove Kirsch up to the Arab village of Djuannin. He had borrowed a car from one of the office workers. It was kind of him. At lunch Robin had seen that Kirsch was in a state and he had urged his mother not to pester him. Kirsch had wandered off in search of Mayan, a hopeless endeavor as he lacked the strength to go far and Mayan clearly didn’t want to be found. He had asked for her in the local grocery shop, a provisional, cramped box of a place where a young boy slid on a rolling ladder to the high shelves, throwing down tins to the customers like an agile monkey in the forest canopy pelting unwanted visitors. No one had seen her. If Mayan had returned to Jerusalem without him, then Kirsch was a dead man. Toward three in the afternoon, leg-weary and heavyhearted, he made his way back to the hostelry. There, he had collapsed onto his bed until Robin Gaber, holding a hip flask in one hand and a set of car keys in the other, had shown up to suggest a drive. They set off up a narrow track. The car bumped and jolted, then seemed to lower its head and charge at the surrounding hills where the sinking sun curled its red cape over the horizon.
Now Robin and Kirsch sat on a cluster of rocks; they passed the brandy flask between them and watched as the flocks and herds returned to the village from the low pastures. Twenty fat black cows slogged past, a few little calves skipping sideways at their tails. Behind them walked two men incongruously dressed in what looked like Russian peasant outfits: boots, jerkins and black caps.
Robin looked over at Kirsch. “Strangest Arabs I ever saw.” He tried to suppress a laugh. “Must be Jewish cattle.”
“Apparently there are no problems here,” Kirsch replied. “The Jews and the Arabs drive to the same pasture. At least that’s what Mayan told me.”
There was a clear spring above them that ran into a drinking pool. Kirsch watched the cattle jostle together by the water. He had explained to Gaber how he had messed everything up with Mayan, and now he wished that he hadn’t done so.
“What are you going to do now?” Robin asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Find her, apologize. Explain that I’m not the snob that she thinks I am. What else can I do?”
The night came on fast, and the salient points of the landscape by which Kirsch was orienting himself—the manor, the hostelry, Djuannin’s minaret—seemed to disappear in the click of a heavenly camera shutter.
“Do you think this place could be home for you?” Gaber asked.
A startled expression crossed Kirsch’s face as it occurred to him for the first time that unlike his fantasies of life with Joyce, a future with Mayan (any chance of which he had just blown out of the window) might mean a long-term commitment to living in Palestine. Kirsch remembered the blisters on Rosa’s fingers: interim police work had been fine until his troubles started, but he wasn’t sure that he was ready to help build a state, or fight for one.
“Home?” Kirsch looked out into the blackness. “Home’s England, isn’t it?”
“It is for me,” Gaber said. “Although I sometimes think,” he added ruefully, “that the reason so many Englishmen like to take a turn at running the colonies is that we’re in England.”
“They’re running away from the Jews, you mean?”
“Well, not only us—there are other pariahs, but we’re a part of it. Out in India or even here, they can play all the old prewar games, ornament themselves with plumed helmets and pretend that nothing has changed. It’s not the foreign peoples whom they despise, especially if they come with a title attached, the prince of Bangalore or the nawab of Patudi, no, it’s the ‘foreigners’ in the England they’ve left behind, people like you and me who’ve made it up the ladder. People they didn’t want to see on the ladder in the first place, let alone climbing it.”
“But here half the colonial staff is Jewish: Samuels, Bentwich . . .”
“Kirsch . . .”
Kirsch laughed.
“Yes,” Gaber added, “it’s a tricky one. Satraps and riffraff—all Jews. That’s a recipe for trouble, don’t you think?”
Kirsch didn’t know what he thought—and that, he now saw, was a problem. He had set off for his adventure in Palestine as if he were going out to Ceylon or Australia, or any outpost of the empire. He hadn’t thought about the Jews much at all; he’d been thinking about himself, and his brother and his parents, and not really loving Naomi, and the prospect of decent weather—that too. Kirsch remembered how he had been ill one wartime winter and a huge icicle had formed outside his bedroom window, hanging from the roof edge like a harpoon. It wasn’t long after his recovery that the family received word that Marcus had been killed. Kirsch had gone upstairs, opened the window and hacked away at the icicle until it crashed into the garden, shattering into a thousand crystals.
He looked across at Gaber, then up at the sky, where the moon floated small and distant like a lone jellyfish in the dark waves of the sky.
“I’ll drive you back,” Gaber said.
Around two in the morning, unable to sleep, Kirsch heard a noise on the path outside his room. He got out of bed and walked to the door. When he opened it he saw Mayan standing about twenty yards away. He couldn’t guess how long she had been there, pacing up and down, poised, it seemed, between flight and return. He called to her from the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please come in. I was horrible. I’m sorry.”
They made up their discord very gently on the bed. Later, when Mayan was lying in his arms, her sleeping face washed in moonlight, the thought crossed Kirsch’s mind that she had forgiven him too quickly. For a moment the sensation of being trapped overcame him, as it had during dinner at the Bassans’ when he had suspected them of matchmaking. But the feeling soon passed. After all, what kind of a catch was he?
He touched his fingers to the scars on Mayan’s back. Her body stirred and she turned away from him. She opened her eyes and stared at the wall.
“You want to know how I got the scars?”
“Not if you don’t want to tell me.”
“What would you like to hear? A Cossack’s whip?”
“I think you’re confusing me with Mrs. Gaber.”
Mayan reached for the twisted sheet, made an attempt to disentangle it and pull it over her, then gave up and threw the linen to the side. She lay back naked on the bed, the length of her small, compact body fully exposed.
“It was a Cossack’s saber. I was six years old.”
Kirsch lay
in silence. Somewhere nearby an electric wire buzzed and fizzed.
“It wasn’t a Cossack’s saber. It was in a car crash. My father was driving his van on a street that ran near the sea. We had set out to collect a delivery of books at the port: two hundred copies of an English language primer, Jews heading for America were desperate for them. It was raining hard and he skidded on the wet road and drove into a wall. The van’s windshield shattered and its glass flew out. I was flung forward and then back into the jagged pieces. I was fifteen. Perhaps some local anti-Semite had thrown a rock at our windshield, who knows? Would it please Mrs. Gaber if that were the case?”
“Don’t,” Kirsch said. He shifted onto his side and kissed Mayan’s face.
“I’m going back to Jerusalem tomorrow,” she said. “I have to be at the hospital. What are you going to do?”
It was the same question that Robin Gaber had posed only hours earlier. Then Kirsch had been devastated because he thought he had lost Mayan; now he had her but felt equally unhinged.
“When will you come back to Rosh Pinah?”
“Perhaps I can come again next weekend.”
“Then I think I’ll stay here,” Kirsch said.
He couldn’t tell if she was pleased by his decision or not.
It seemed that they had hardly fallen back to sleep when they were awoken by a voice calling from the path outside their room.
“Mila, Mila. Your bus is here.”
Mayan rose quickly from the bed. Kirsch sat up drowsily.
“Who’s Mila?” he asked.
Mayan had started to pull on her clothes.
“I am,” she said. “Ludmila, although only Rosa knows that.”
Kirsch nodded. It was common for the new Jewish immigrants to drop their old names and take a Hebrew one instead. It was a way they used to anchor themselves to the place.
“Then I shall call you ‘Mila’ too.”
Was that Kirsch’s way of saying no to a life in Palestine? He thought that it might be.
Mayan stopped smoothing down her skirt to look at him. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.
Rosa called out again from closer to the window.
A Palestine Affair Page 25