‘I don’t like it when you do that,’ she said, knowing she was coming across sulky.
‘What?’
‘Lumping me in with “the English”.’
Ihsan looked perfectly handsome in the half-light and she couldn’t work out if he was laughing at her or not but his face was serious.
‘I have given it much thought, actually, and I do not in fact consider you English.’
‘Oh?’
‘You are nothing like the men in Governance House, you are different. Perhaps it is your Irish mother? Who knows, but I feel it.’
Prue knew that this statement was illogical. She had been born in a boarding house in Torquay, which was very much England, but still, she warmed when Ihsan spoke to her this way. It steadied her. She felt as if she had been curled up on a magic carpet and whisked to Jerusalem. The word sofa, Ihsan had explained to her, derives from the Arabic suffah and what comes to your minds in London when you think of Arabs? The sofa, the bed, the day-bed, the carpet, the flying carpet, the place of dreams, the closed palace . . . and he had laughed in a way she did not understand. You think we are sleeping.
Rubbing the metal case of the Kodak and twirling the tiny winding spool on its top, she dared herself to ask him if she could take a photograph, but in the end was too shy. Photographing a person was capturing them, like one of the singing canaries in bamboo cages in the souk. Instead she took a photograph of him in her head, and added details that made no sense: him holding a caught fish, standing next to a boat, or on a bridge, smiling, waving.
Jerusalem, 1920
‘The problem with Ashton,’ Eleanora said, using a cool formal voice as if he were a visiting vicar being given his supper, ‘is that he thinks of this place, Palestine, the Promised Land, whatever it might be called, as an absence. He sees a piece of desert or fallow land and thinks there is nobody here, but in fact it’s deeply populated and controlled. It’s the great flaw in his plan.’
She was pointing up to the ramparts next to Jaffa Gate, protected in fur, her hair glowing.
‘What does your husband think of him?’
She jolted at that, her right eye closing for a second, and looked up to the sky, as if seeing something secret in the distance that would be forever hidden to him.
‘My husband has been gone a few weeks now, but Ihsan tells me he is due back.’
She put her hand to her lips as if to silence herself and Willie had no idea what to say. Something lifted inside him: My husband has been gone. Then sank: due back.
‘He didn’t tell you himself?’
‘Let’s go into the souk,’ she said, stopping questions.
Eleanora slipped in front of him into David Street where they plunged into the most crowded part of the market. It was just the same as the Cairo markets: like being guided into someone else’s nightmare, like being led into a trap. She turned to wait for him and he was felled, again, by her particular, stalking beauty.
‘It’s so confusing to have you here,’ she whispered as he came near, but immediately they were separated by a flow of pilgrims. The cobbled steps of the marketplace became very steep and the soles of his boots could find no purchase as the path dipped. The buildings around them leant close together as if exchanging secrets. As they passed stalls selling holy water he caught hold of the sleeve of her fur coat.
‘What do you mean your husband left? Where did he go? Where is he now?’
Her eyes widened, thoughts passed through them, but he couldn’t read them. ‘Khaled said he would be back, but he explained nothing. He did not say when or what he is doing or why. He asked me to trust him.’
‘You don’t have any idea where he is?’
She shook her head. ‘I asked him, what is this, you are feeling more Arab? Is this nationalism? You hate the British? You must explain it to me, but he wouldn’t.’
It was an offence to Willie that Eleanora was buried under the stones of this city. City. It was a medieval prison, a locked-up fortress; it was a child’s drawing, an illustration from the Bible that they had been dropped into by magical forces. It was an unreal city. She was ahead of him again, trailing her hand against the edge of the stalls that lined the passageways, and the information that she had just given him – anti-British, gone, husband – ricocheted in his mind. But really: what the fuck is she doing here? What he meant, although he did not quite formalise the thought to himself, though the charge and momentum of it was there, vivid as a fresh scar – and he certainly knew about them – was, why is she wedded to one of them? His English sensibility was vivified, it was indignation. There was, underneath it all, outrage.
This part of the city was a place of stairwells and low doors, webs of passages continuing to spin onwards. They were flanked by pilgrims and conveyances of nuns marking their slow steps along the Via Dolorosa, a cloying smell of incense around them. Eleanora waited for him and when she took his arm he could see that something in her shifted: when she spoke it was the old, familiar Eleanora and he tried to hold on to the flow of what she was saying, but it was like holding water in his hands.
She was conscious, she said, that she was failing her husband. She should be immutable and fixed, steadfast. Unquestioning, but dear God, all those afternoons with Khaled’s family. His mother and sisters openly staring at the foreigner as if she was a fairy in a picture brought to life. Khaled’s sister patting her stomach, her arms indicating the rocking motion of babies. After weeks of intolerably awkward company in the houses of Khaled’s family she began to walk over to the German Colony. For a while she helped the missionaries at the American Colony with the orphans but their hopeless wet eyes and neediness depressed her. She spent time with the English wives even though she knew they gossiped about her for marrying an Arab. Khaled started to ask, why do you go to those people?
‘What did he mean?’ Willie asked and she pulled away from him.
‘He meant the British, and their confounded social expectations, and everything, class, I suppose, the prison of my home – which you, more than anyone, know about – all of that. Why was I walking back into that place?’
Willie tried to keep hold of her arm again but she found a way to shrug it from him.
‘When I became friends with Storrs’s fiancée, Lucy, he was furious.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s the Military Governor. Khaled objects to his ways of . . . imposing authority. And to Ashton’s ways of putting a British stamp on Jerusalem, too. He is cross with me, for working with Ashton.’
Then something further in her fell down and she turned.
‘This city is exhausting.’ Her lips parted, she had a gap between her two front teeth which she had hated as a child and the unexpectedly vulnerable look whenever she opened her mouth always surprised him.
‘Ihsan said there is a woman who lives near Herod’s Gate who believes she is being followed by a floating pair of hands. It’s all rather hysterical. Khaled calls it the Jerusalem sadness, but anyway: this is where I live.’
They stopped and the sign KHALED RASUL PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO was bright yellow with blue lettering and the woodwork surrounding the entire window-front of the studio was painted indigo blue.
‘Do you live above the studio?’ He was unable to connect this place with Eleanora.
‘Above it, below it and also the house next door. They are connected into one house. It is usual to have passageways between houses here.’
He watched her unlock the ancient-looking wooden door with a large metal key.
The studio was dark and smelled of rosewater and limes.
‘The maid Samia will be about.’ It was a warning. She was formal again as she allowed him into this strange world she inhabited. walls lined with shelves full of props for photographs, piles of dresses, costumes and fabrics. Willie examined a paper calendar hanging on the wall at an awkward angle:
Jerusalem
Sunday 28th March
15th of mart 131 Ottoman Fiscal
I Jammadi Awwa
l 1333.
She saw what he was looking at.
‘They can’t even agree on the time here.’
The opposite wall was covered with photographs, largely of entrances and doorways, a basket seller up under an arch.
‘These are for the European and American pilgrims. The flocks must be white. The women at the well must wear shawls; fishermen cast their nets nicely in the dawn. Everything biblical. A rabbi looking wise and ancient, a water carrier. They sell terrifically.’ She smiled. ‘Not too much modern Jerusalem, not too much truth.’
She moved deeper into the studio, towards a door at the back of the room, and beckoned him. ‘Would you like to see the darkroom?’
‘Of course.’
—–
To be closed in this space with her electrified him but he suppressed it, swallowed it. She flicked on a small red lantern so that the room was like the inside of a fireplace. Then she lit a bigger lamp. A wire was stretched across the room and clipped on to it were several photographs. Below them on the work surface trays of chemicals were lined up and around the edge of the desk glass bottles glinted. Willie listened to her breathing. He examined the photographs hanging in front of his nose. The first was of two young Arab women, as always with girls, a beauty and a plainer one, though they both looked shy and sweet.
‘I must say,’ Eleanora said into the strange red-black light, ‘my advertisements in Al Karmel have turned out to be a marvellous hit. Fourteen sequences of photographs as a result. The Moldchadsky family. The nurse from Akka, the cousins Laila and Leyla. Dimitri and his mother and her dogs even – can you imagine? – yet it’s these two girls that I like the best. I’m going to use them as handmaidens for a new Moses picture, if I can get their mother to agree.’
In the closed dark space Willie, aware of her enthusiasm, held his breath and remembered them both sitting as children in the bottom of a wardrobe at Pentrohobyn eating hot scones that she, fearless, had stolen directly from the ovens.
‘Photographs are always taken in studios here – the Krikorian rooms or the Garabad studios – with all the fuss of a great big entourage, a family and dressing up and props. Nobody before has ever taken photographs of Jerusalem people in their own homes, in intimate settings, by which I mean,’ he sensed her smiling at him, ‘of course, women.’
Despite the dark we could read her handwriting on paper in front of him: the same as it always had been. Mad and looping. Unrestrained.
She was acting . . . properly, whereas he needed to address everything. The whistle began, deep in his ears, his old problem. Then, out of nowhere, as if she heard it, she said softly: ‘Was the war terrible for you? I noticed the . . .’
‘Scars.’
‘Yes.’
‘My observer Mackie was eaten by flames, but I am alive. As you can see.’
He regretted saying it instantly, flippant and cold like that, and then, an inappropriate thought: if Eleanora were ever to see his body she would be repulsed by it. He pressed his palm against his ear, because what he struggled with more than his shrivelled skin, was the quinine-induced mosquito hum of tinnitus which came and went, maddening him with a zzzuzzz and hissss deep in the canals and runways of his ears. Like a moth trapped in his head. Or boots walking through his brain. Today it was the worst type, whistling.
‘What are these?’ he said to make that subject disappear and it took a moment for him to realise that the images in front of him were highly contrasted fragments of the girls: cheeks, legs, parts of faces, shoulders. They reminded him of a risqué jigsaw puzzle that his uncle brought home one Christmas, a French madam blowing a kiss, her leg kicked backwards and her breasts riding high.
‘Experiments, with long exposure.’ It was a series of square-format photographs that were all, to varying degrees, blurry.
‘That’s Ashton’s daughter?’
‘Yes. She was helping me. Ladies only.’ There was Prudence, looking ethereal, frowning at the floor.
‘Good God,’ he said, looking at the next photograph, this one of Eleanora. ‘It’s as if all those years haven’t happened.’
It was Eleanora sitting on a chair, her feet together, hands folded on her knees, and it seemed she had taken herself back to an exact point in time.
‘That’s you as a child.’
She seemed pleased, but also a little embarrassed.
‘Yes. I do suppose that is what I was intending.’
Willie was standing very close to her now and he touched the skin on the back of her hand briefly; she did not pull away.
He took her hand now, held it fully. She continued to talk to him, in a whisper. Injuria: a wrong. The wrongs of time. The wrong time. The longer the shutter stays open, the flesh fades, the edges are blurred, transparent, and they disappear, can you see? The camera captures not the girl but the amount of time it looked at her. It captures time. She pulled abruptly away from him, turned to the door, opened it so that light conquered the black room, and walked out.
Willie leant against the work surface, the ringing in his ears so high now that there was an angelic quality to it. Further along the worktop near the wall were more photographs arranged in a sequence. Landscapes of Jerusalem. He glanced at the closest image: a line of soldiers wearing sun helmets, British-looking. Willie picked it up. A village in the distance, the sky full of curled smoke from a blown-up house, a soldier looking pleased with himself.
‘What is this?’ he called out. Eleanora turned and squinted over her shoulder.
‘One of Khaled’s, I think.’
There were four or five pictures underneath this one, they appeared to have been taken the same day. Eleanora had moved further into the other room. Willie gathered them up and slipped them into his jacket pocket then quickly closed the door behind him.
Tea was served by the highly disapproving Ethiopian maid Samia. Willie sat mute; Eleanora talked, almost to herself, about the particulars of the house. Like many of the old houses of Jerusalem, four or five hundred years old, the central living space had two staircases, one burrowing downwards towards dark kitchens and utility areas and the other spiralling upwards towards roofs. A flight of stairs. She had never before thought of stairs in terms of movement. On the table in front of them was an incongruous marmalade cake. Finally, she stopped speaking and stared at the complex woven patterns in the rug beneath their feet. Peacock feathers entwined around pomegranates.
‘Houses bury one,’ she said after a long pause. She did not look directly at him but more vaguely around the room.
‘I often feel I am suffocating here, just as I did in Wales.’ She gestured to a sideboard which stretched the length of a wall, topped with tureens and etched crystal fruit bowls. Samia could be heard moving up and down steps. Willie rubbed his hands together with impatience. How could Pentrohobyn Hall, with its rooms and corridors, parlourmaid, kitchenmaid, cook, groom, nanny, chauffeur, the French governess, the gardens and all of that, be similar to here? On the wall was a portrait of a handsome young Arab in an ornate walnut frame.
‘Is that your husband?’
She nodded, frowning at him. He stood up to inspect. Younger than he had imagined, a moustache, confident clear bright eyes. Willie’s mind hovered around the vicious sting of the fact that she had not refused all other men for him. She had run off and married a foreigner. It was too ludicrous, but he could not stop looking at Rasul’s eyes.
The face of Eleanora’s father came to his mind – its purple nose with broken veins – and he could feel even now his hand on Willie’s shoulder. There was unspoken history between their fathers. Old bastards together, was how Eleanora put it. One was indebted to the other in a complicated, long-standing connection which resulted in Eleanora’s father paying for Willie’s school fees at Lancing College, insisting Willie summer with them at Pentrohobyn. Willie never knew the whole sum of it, but he suspected it was something to do with Eleanora’s mother who died giving birth to her.
The condition Eleanora’s father, for re
asons of his own, put on the payment of Willie’s school fees was that he serve in the army for a minimum of three years and so, aged sixteen, Willie had joined the 1st Life Guards. He was moved to Windsor, then to Knightsbridge where he caught measles but survived, and then, in 1914 when he was nineteen, he was finally discharged by purchase and free from the army by which he meant free from her father.
Returning to Pentrohobyn, Willie had bribed a stable boy for a ladder and climbed up to Eleanora’s window. He brought with him a box and in it a very bright yellow shining shivering thing: the golden oriole. To him, the implication of this gift – never mind the daring climb into the bedroom window which if her father knew would result in him being scalped or whipped across Wales and England too – was obvious, but her face had been pale when he’d rapped on the glass. She let him in, of course, in the old way, but she hurried back into bed. Did not smile, or welcome him.
That year she was engaged in silent, mental warfare with her father. She refused the debutante rounds, claimed to be too ill to go to the balls. She shrieked when she touched Willie’s gift of the oriole because it was stuffed and she’d thought it real. He had got it from the taxidermist in Shrewsbury. She went off to Switzerland soon after, and what kind of joke was played on him by the fates that two months later war would be declared and his military discharge annulled? Reinstated immediately, promoted to 2nd Lieutenant by October of that year, whisked far away from sycamore trees and yellow birds.
He wrote to her, a few months or so later. It meant marry me, that bird. Did you not realise? But he never knew if she got the letter. Her old devil of a father might’ve interfered with the post. Lying on a bunk on a deployment train he’d told Mackie about it. You gave her a stuffed sparrow? Golden oriole. Fucking finch, you stupid fool. That the war had taken him away and brought Khaled Rasul to her was – Willie turned from the eyes looking at him from the photograph – unbearable.
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