The turrets along the edge of the wall on either side of Jaffa Gate were layered with a light sprinkling of snow. Snowflakes were coming in, through the walls, through the windows, propelled by magic, and entering her heart and settling.
It was Frau Baum, not her father, who said, ‘Come away from the window, Prue. It is cold. Cold air.’
Prue turned. Perhaps now there would be a long boat journey with him? A house in England. A villa, even. There was a lifting feeling inside her, followed by shame and a conscious putting out of her mind a very vivid hallucination of her mother’s face.
‘I suppose we must go back, then? To England.’ Prue’s knowledge of death was limited, but she knew about funerals, was vaguely aware of arrangements. He stood up straight, ran his hand over his beard, his long fingers stroking himself.
‘I’ve just spoken to Isabel’s mother by long-distance telephone from Governance House,’ he said, now holding together troubled hands as if asking for forgiveness. ‘The funeral will be soon and it certainly can’t wait for us to make the six-week journey. In which case, we shall not leave immediately. We will go in a few months. Later in the year.’
Frau Baum looked at the floor. Prue wondered where the handkerchief that the woman at the gate of Graylingwell had given her might be, the one with the cockerel. Frau Baum, whose face displayed the most emotion of anyone’s in the room, came forward with her long thin fingers covered in large stone rings and wiggled them near her as if she were about to touch her but Prue flinched and the fingers retreated.
‘Prue, dear. Would you like something to eat? Or some tea?’
She shook her head, saw them giving one another significant looks. It was now or never; they were more likely to be nice to her now than at any other time.
‘I don’t like living here, Daddy,’ Prue said, fast and in a rush. ‘In the hotel, I mean. Can we go to the villa and make a house? Or return to England? I really feel . . . I really feel . . . that I must have a home.’
There was silence. Frau Baum let out an odd noise, almost the mew of a cat, and turned to Prue’s father, whose elbow, as usual, she was holding but this time she spoke in a more forceful voice than normal.
‘She is right, of course, Charles. I agree with her. She needs a home.’ Prue was grateful; she almost smiled at her. Her father knelt down in front of her in an almost ceremonial manner.
‘It is true, darling,’ he said, ‘that we need a settled place for you to live. I shall do my utmost to arrange it. This nomadic life is no good at all.’ She realised that he was leaning down in such a way as to produce the least crease to his silk suit. There was a long pause. Finally he said in his deepest voice, ‘I have made a decision not to cancel dinner tonight because I am not sure it will achieve anything . . . for us to sit around being gloomy.’ He burrowed about in his pocket, found a handkerchief, dabbed at his eyes. ‘It will be helpful simply to carry on. Rally troops, keep the side up.’
‘If you don’t want to come, my dear,’ Frau Baum said in a rush, ‘I will stay with you?’
‘Oh no,’ Prue said, uncomfortable at the thought of being locked in this room with her, despite their recent exchange of smiles. ‘It will be better for me to simply carry on, just like you, Father.’
He smiled at her. ‘You are a strong little soldier.’
Prue did not bother to respond to this statement. They moved, together, like swans turning on a lake.
‘You will let us know if you need anything?’
‘Of course.’
When they had gone Prue stood in the centre of her hotel room. She let her hands do their flapping – violently, ferocious – and when that was done, and the muscles inside her were calmer, she dropped to hands and knees, then down on to her stomach. She shunted herself forward, made herself flat enough to fit under the bed. When she was right in the heart of the dark dust-space, she closed her eyes. She would like proof that her mother was dead. Perhaps it was a lie? A trick. She would like to see a certificate of some sort or another, a stamped piece of paper, perhaps even the telegram? They had not shown her this. Her mother had been ill for a long time; she had not been particularly kind to Prue. She had slapped her, several times – many times – across the face. She had pulled her hair, ignored her for days, left her in rooms alone, not returning until hours later, but she also remembered moments of love, before she was ill, even afterwards. The long stories she told. Mermaids. Sea creatures. Lost sailors. Usually stories to do with voyages; the sea. Prue closed her eyes, touched a scab on her elbow and began to pick at the edge of it. For tea, often, they used to simply have a boiled egg and a slice of cake and her mother would say, ‘Look at us. Tea, egg and cake.’
‘Now,’ Prue said to herself. ‘Now you can cry.’
But she didn’t. The scab was not quite ready; it stuck, wetly, in the middle. She scratched around the edge of it, eventually fell asleep.
She woke, but did not want to eat. She opened her knapsack and looked in her purse: just enough money for a film at the Zion Theatre.
Jerusalem at night was cold and still. The Zion Theatre was still playing The Blue Bird, a film that had been showing for as long as she had been here, and it was about halfway through but, still, the man in the ticket booth let her in, smiling as the piastres landed on his palm.
The Zion Theatre wasn’t a real cinema. It was a large shed which her father had told her had been rented from the Armenian Orthodox Church and it was cold enough inside for her breath to make clouds. When she had seen the film previously it had been accompanied by musicians, but now all that could be heard was the squeaking wheel of the projection machine.
Prue sat down near the front, the only person in there. It was at the point in the film where the children had been trying to find the Blue Bird of Happiness and had reached the Land of the Unborn Children. Ghostly, floating children in white veils filled the screen. We are waiting to be. We can’t choose our fate. It was difficult to tell the difference between the film and her thoughts. There was a girl in a theatre in Jerusalem watching a girl looking for the Blue Bird of Happiness. All the girls merged. Were any of them alive? Inside Eleanora was the beginning of life. What was it like? A little soul, like the ones on the screen, veiled ghosts, or was it like the first flicker of a candle wick immediately after being lit? Was it like the fireflies she chased one summer, running in long grass, crushing snail shells under her feet?
The theatre doors behind her opened and let in unwelcome cold air. Footsteps made their way along the wooden floor slowly and rhythmically. She tried to see who it was without obviously turning her head. A man wearing a hat, but not one of the large black Hasidic hats, the name of which she didn’t yet know; nor was it a bowler like in London, it was something wider-rimmed.
And then: the man did it. An entire theatre to choose from, but he sat directly behind her. As close as it was possible to be. Smells of tobacco and meat and another familiar scent? Horses? Prue pushed ankles together; her toes were cold, he was breathing in thumps. The words on the screen said: Find the Soul inside Your Home. We are waiting to be. We can’t choose our fate. We are the unborn. The man behind her leant forward, so that the combination of horses, the outside, man, grew closer. She lowered her chin. Looked very carefully, studiously, at the screen in front of her.
There were fingers on her neck: rough, calloused. She rubbed the leather tips of her court shoes on to the wooden-planked floor, body stiff. Tips of fingers at first, pressing, and the slide of a hand. He did not push hard, but his hand was so big that it covered much of her neck and he cupped the whole of it. Just for an instant. His breath touched the curled ridge of her ear which was exposed because she had tucked her hair behind her ears. Then the hand let go. Prue turned round. It was a wide-faced man, with a large bulging nose.
‘A gift,’ he said; he reeked of drink, she recognised that well enough from her father’s parties: wine, cider, whisky. The acrid breath. In front of her face he dangled a wriggling, squirming pale brown m
ouse by its tail. It folded its body up, curled into a ball, its feet near-transparent pink.
‘Would you like it?’
She nodded automatically and held out her palm. The man gently lowered the mouse on to her hand and as soon as it touched her skin it became calmer and sniffed the air, as if to see who might make the next move. It sat perfectly still as if under a bush, as if deep in a hole, listening to the outside world and making a decision not to venture out there.
‘He’s trained,’ the man said; he had an accent. ‘Watch.’
He pulled a peanut in its shell from his pocket and made a clicking noise with his mouth. The mouse immediately sat up, span around and raised itself up on its back two feet, its front feet in the air.
‘I can’t take him if he is yours, and trained,’ Prue whispered, wanting it more than anything else in the world.
‘Just make the clicking noise, feed him a peanut, and he will be your friend.’
The man stood up. From where she was sitting he looked as large as an oak tree. His hat was like a cowboy’s. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the packet of nuts in a paper cone and gave them to her, tipped his hat, and then walked off towards the door. His boots were huge. He made her think of a Chinese emperor.
After he was gone, the mouse quivered and then was startlingly still, as if waiting for her to decide its fate. She considered her pockets. There were two in the pinafore on the front of her dress; they would be big enough. She dropped the mouse into the left one, a little disturbed by its closeness but not wanting to let it go. A mouse from a Chinese emperor, a gift; and then she remembered, with an obscure feeling of guilt, that her mother had been frightened of mice.
Jerusalem, 1920
Eleanora pushed past him into his room and closed the door quickly behind her.
‘Really, Willie, you look awful.’ Her fur coat was covered in melting specks of snow. She pulled her gloves off and threw them on to his bed.
‘What time is it?’
‘Four in the morning,’ she said, putting her purse on his desk.
That explained the odd dawn light. His room was all bed, all mirrors, angles. The stark reality of her in his room was like an obscenity. He could see her too clearly, but also it was as if she were disfigured. He sat up in bed and blinked at her.
‘I can’t work out who I’ll be safe with,’ she said, wilting on to his bed.
‘Not many people can at this time in the morning. What the devil did the receptionist say when you walked in?’
‘I just strode past. You should lock your door at night, you know.’
And then, as if those words were a tremendous exertion, she folded in on herself.
‘Khaled?’
‘He is in Jerusalem.’
Willie floundered around for his cigarettes. Found them, lit one. She had not taken the fur off. It was just like her to come, like this, in the night. It was a surprise, the irritation he felt. A contradiction, but there was an electricity to her that meant she would never be considered, rational. She would not wait until nine in the morning to drop in, for instance.
‘What are you doing here then?’
She was standing at the end of his bed, looking at him, and it was only then that he realised she could see it all: the scar tissues, the contours and swirls and ridges that made mountain-range lumps, the dips. The mess of his body. He pulled the covers up to his chin.
‘He’s in Jerusalem,’ she said, ‘but he’s not at home, I mean . . . he came, but he went.’
‘Where has he gone again?’
‘He’s obsessed, with this man, McLaughlin. He is photographing his actions; he says they are abominable. Which is all well and good, and I am sure that is true, but the thing is: he just keeps on leaving me.’
‘Lofty,’ Willie said.
She gave him a strange, hopeless look, then came closer to him and sat down on the bed. He smoked. Underneath the sheet his scars flared and he lurched inside with a nervous, nauseous feeling. She pulled the edge of the sheet down and touched the dead skin that covered his collarbone. It was an effort not to flinch and a bright truth in his mind slotted into a gap in the matter of his brain that had been waiting for it: he would never again be able to make love. It would not be possible to be touched again. He twisted away from her.
Her hand dropped and she flipped open her purse. ‘Can I photograph your hands?’ She pulled out a small camera.
‘Well I don’t see what that’s going to achieve.’ Her face was concentrated; she seemed to mean it. He saw that her hands were shaking as she fumbled with the clasp on the camera and a flicker of irritation filtered through him, to have been so caught off-guard. To be frank he would rather be asleep, or fucking her. He did not wish any part of him, in particular his skin, to be photographed.
‘Please?’ Her eyes were hooded, deep-set. As a child this had made her serious, as if always frowning. Now, it was more wistful. Her face looked quite red, uncomfortable; she had a hot uncertain air about her, but still she spoke as if she was offering him something. He understood that she was trying to be open to him, in her own way.
‘If you like.’ They were ugly enough to him.
‘There. Put them on the table under the lamp.’
He laid his hands flat as directed and watched her face; she tried to smile at him when she met his eye, but the expression was more of a wince.
‘Don’t squash them,’ she said. ‘Arrange them as if they are naturally just there.’
A natural pose was difficult to maintain. Noises from deep in the hotel could be heard: kitchens waking up. She took ten, eleven and then twelve photographs until he said, ‘Did you know when you were training with your husband that you would be taking photographs one day of another man’s hands in the middle of the night?’
She paused, and lowered her head. He saw that her eyes were wet. He snatched his hands away from her.
‘Well I suppose this brings things to a catalyst, rather?’
Then, out of nowhere, she said, ‘I liked your father.’ All the past came down on them like a lingering smell and he was inclined to throw the ashtray at her. He did not want to talk about his father. She sat there, on the edge of his bed, a sharp intense light around her, a crackling, and a bad twitch.
‘I was always trying to run away from Pentrohobyn, do you remember?’
‘Ellie,’ he said. What he meant was shut up.
‘You’re a foolish idiot for coming here,’ she said gently. He moved towards her and they sat next to one another on the bed, formally now, upright, looking like orphans deposited in a dormitory.
‘Do you remember,’ she said, her voice cracking, ‘I can write backwards and forwards, equally with both left and right hands, and the nuns at my school thought I was a child of the devil for this skill?’
‘Oh yes. I remember that now.’
‘Well. Perhaps I am a devil after all. Those nuns were right?’
‘I don’t think so.’ All the tension through his body was concentrated at a singular point in his temples; very soon it would – he knew – move deep into his ears and begin the torture.
Her hand pulled away. ‘Khaled has other things on his mind. Revolutions, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love him.’
The dawn light ripened. Was she a magic-lantern image, of everything he wanted, but couldn’t touch? He wanted to understand a definite thing about her. Might he ask if she was happy? Was she happy?
You can be happy with Rasul?
No: he would not ask that; why would a man ever ask a woman that? She didn’t belong here, though. She needed to be in the vast Pentrohobyn, with its corners, its fallen rooms, its lofty arched ceilings, its leaking, peeling, struggling wooden beams, running and running from room to room in a dress.
‘What kind of bloody man doesn’t come home to his wife first and foremost?’
‘He said that he is staying away to protect me, that he brings danger. He is not here long, then going again. It will all make sense, eventua
lly, he said. And then, I’m sorry.’
They were both silent. Something in Willie throbbed, but he did not know if it was his heart or head or loins.
‘Don’t worry,’ Willie said, ‘because we can find a way to be together.’
‘I can’t see you again, you understand?’
They had both spoken at the same time. She looked at him and shook her head. Crack in the room, crack in the day, as if it was all just a scene in a painting and someone had slashed the canvas with a knife.
‘Tell me, Eleanora. Why did you come here, to my room, tonight? To tell me you love him and don’t want me?’
‘I don’t want this child,’ she said, putting her hand on her stomach, ‘and I don’t want him to know.’
‘Does he know how your mother died, Ellie?’ And she turned quickly and stared at him, pushed a stray hair from her forehead. ‘What I mean is,’ the ears began, the moths in the ear canals, the tremulous bells, ‘you could explain?’
What was this? He was helping her explain to Rasul? A wretched taste in his mouth. She shook her head.
‘I don’t understand any of it,’ he said. ‘Tell me, then.’
So she told him.
It went like this: the story of Eleanora Roberts and the famous Khaled Rasul. The unlikely love. Photograph the space. The thing that exists between earth and sky. That is what Khaled told her when they first worked together in the darkroom in Zürich. She had looked down towards earth, then up to the sky. How does the thing integrate into the sky? What is its relationship with the sky? Find how the light builds architecture.
Khaled taught her about light, layers, fragments. About keeping the shutter where it is, stepping into the picture, stepping out of it again, how to walk, to look, to keep walking and looking, to see the entrance and to look again at the entrance. Khaled Rasul was an enigma; this concentrated person, this self-taught photographer from a biblical place. Nobody comes from Jerusalem. Who comes from Jerusalem? She had, of course, seen pictures of the Holy City. It appeared to be an endless web of tunnels and arches, doorways and stairwells. Later, she understood his obsession with framing things.
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