The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  Willie said, ‘Get her away from here, back up to the tent. I assume Lars didn’t pack it all up?’ Frau Baum nodded, and helped Prue past the prickly-pear cacti, the rooks in the trees. Willie, not bothering to get on the horse again, began to run.

  The village square was surrounded by narrow streets, each with an arch leading over it, joining tall-built stone buildings to one another so that the dwellings appeared to be interlinked. There was tension in the air, like bad news, and the sky above was made up of snow colours: bright grey and sea blue. Groups of men and women stood around whispering, talking in low voices, women pulling shawls over their shoulders, shivering in the snow. At the northernmost point of the square a number of ladders had been propped against a wall of the modest mosque. On the opposite corner Willie recognised the backs and shoulders of Ashton and Wicklow in conversation with several men and he turned, walked towards them. Lofty was nowhere in sight.

  Willie called out but failed to attract Ashton’s attention. He could see in his mind’s eye Prue’s thin arms, bruised thick fingermarks at the top of them. He was in the heart of the square and as he drew closer to the ladders he saw that bundles were attached to each one. People in groups were looking at them and then away, pointing. A noise came through the air and coalesced into a sound he recognised: the women were crying.

  ‘Charles,’ he called out again, scuffing his boots. Wicklow and Ashton finally looked over at him, beckoned him towards them, and then he turned towards the ladders.

  Now he saw that attached to each ladder was a human being. He stopped. Charles was shouting to him but he didn’t hear the words. Each strung-up man was an Arab, presumably members of Al-Din’s outlaw gang, and they were tied around their stomachs and necks with rope, like a gruesome tribute to Guy Fawkes.

  He walked faster towards Ashton. ‘Good God. Are they dead?’ Ashton nodded.

  ‘Shouldn’t we get the bodies down?’

  ‘About to, but they are convinced he is still close.’

  ‘Lofty?’

  Ashton’s head lowered. ‘I’m afraid so. He’s overstepped the line this time.’

  Willie looked at him, opened his mouth to tell him about Prue. Ashton’s face, long, with its beard, its cultivated air, was surveying the square not in horror, but partly in admiration. For all of his projected artistry – the Arts and Crafts training, the jewellery making, pottery analysis, antiquarian collecting, the waving of his nets – who exactly was he? Yes, he was eternally sketching, drawing, painting, redesigning, researching, gathering, but what were his credentials, under it all, under the fez and the badly spoken Arabic? Willie understood then that Ashton had authorised Lofty to do what he did, but not only that, he agreed with it: with those men, bound on the ladders, dead.

  Willie cast around, examining the village square and the quiet murmuring of people, and then he noticed a woman silently sobbing on the ground, being consoled by two other women. He looked at the spiral staircases in each corner of the square, leading out towards covered arches and passages that led in turn to the backs of houses edging into the centre of the village. Two men had been hung there. Necks snapped, swaying in the wind like Christmas decorations on a tree. Nobody seemed in a hurry to get any of these men down.

  A small dog, jackal-like with flat ears, kept sniffing and creeping towards the ladders but was shouted away by a sobbing and wailing boy who threw stones at it, kicked dust at its eyes. The dog would not pull back, though. It snarled and then barked properly, a high bark, insistent. It was interested in something on the ground. Ashton and Wicklow had their heads bowed, close together, and were talking to one of the elder Lifta village men. The man was rocking back and forth, shaking his head.

  Willie stepped away from them, towards the dog. It was sidling forward and then springing back, giving low snarls. The boy continued to throw stones, but the dog was impervious. Once Willie was closer, he saw what the dog was trying to get to; he could smell what the dog was trying to get to. A pile of severed hands and feet, skin grey or bloody, covered with flies. The little boy was talking in fast Arabic, gesticulating, crying. Seeing Willie, he pointed at one of the trussed-up men. aba aba. Willie put his hand over his mouth, because the sight of the fingernails, and the calloused knuckles and wedding rings on dead hands, caused his stomach to heave. A swaying, a sense that he might fall. The torsos tied to the ladders had their hands and feet hacked off.

  The village elder was receding into a house on the edge of the square, and Ashton was now talking to another man; it seemed that he was pleading with him. Wicklow was standing erect, saying nothing; he met Willie’s eye, looked away. Coughed.

  The man Ashton was engaged with was an Arab, not particularly tall and with a small moustache. He wore a dark suit and carried a case. He pulled himself free of Ashton and walked to the dead-centre of the square. Willie watched; everyone was watching. Even Wicklow stood perfectly still, observing.

  The man undid his case and took out a large, three-legged tripod, then he crouched down and opened another, smaller case. He positioned the tripod in front of the first ladder, where the strapped-up man’s head hung forward, his mouth open, his tongue out. The blood from the severed limbs was black with ants. In no hurry, not speaking to anyone, he pulled out a slide from his photographic case and turned and looked up into the sky, as if assessing the light. He arranged his tripod as he wanted it, inserted the slide and took a photograph. He then continued to move, slowly, methodically, around the square. He took a photograph of each dead man on the ladders, including the two hanging in the corner.

  Wicklow, his expression black, put a cigarette in his mouth, did not light it.

  The man then moved backwards, to the western corner. He squinted. Wicklow was next to Ashton. Willie was near. He was photographing them. When he had finished he walked towards Charles Ashton, leaving the tripod standing where it was, but at the last minute he turned to approach Willie. Of course: it was Eleanora’s husband. The stones beneath his feet crunched. He paused in front of Willie and took from his pocket a small flask. Unhurriedly, he unscrewed the lid and slowly drank. He then offered the flask to Willie.

  ‘Water?’ he said, in English.

  Willie shook his head. Ringing in the ears. The dog began again, a more insistent bark; determined to get to the blood and flesh offered before it.

  ‘Eleanora said she thought you would be here,’ Khaled Rasul said. His moustache. His cool brown eyes. Did Rasul know what was happening to Eleanora at this moment?

  ‘I thought it important that you be included in these photographs: the world will know, then, what the British are doing.’

  Willie’s hands were shaking. Wicklow stepped forward. He had, Willie could see, his hand on his revolver and a dead-flat look in his eye. The tinnitus in Willie’s ears started to clamour, crackled through his head, drowned out the sound of the dog and the flies. Ashton gave Wicklow an alarmed glance and stood next to Willie, shaking his head at Khaled Rasul.

  Willie turned to Charles. ‘Your daughter . . .’ he began, but Ashton jolted.

  ‘Good God, he’s alive.’

  They all followed Ashton’s gaze. Wicklow, who had lit a cigarette, dropped it to the ground and with Ashton ran towards the body on the central ladder, followed by Willie. A dripping, sticky line of blood from the man’s severed wrists had left two large scarlet circles. It was true: this man was twitching. A woman who had been silently crying suddenly shouted out, began screaming.

  Willie searched in his pocket for his knife and climbed up on to the first rung of the ladder. In order to reach the rope around the man’s stomach he had to lean in close. Khaled Rasul was next to them, photographing.

  ‘Really,’ Ashton said, ‘stop it, Rasul, you are not helping.’

  But he carried on. The shutter: click. The day: a dream. A photograph. Suspended in light, and what is not light. Wicklow caught the man as he fell. He was gagging, groaning, green liquid coming from his mouth. The woman ran over, collapsed on to him. Oth
er men came forward. Voices rose in the air around them, as if a spell of immobility had been broken and the whole village, frozen in shock previously, was thawed, given permission to howl.

  The body was carried into a house next to the bakery on the edge of the square. The room was filled with people and women came forward to bathe and bandage the wounds that were still bleeding ferociously. A woman whose face was as lined as the oldest olive tree trunks bent over the grisly fly-covered hands and feet, and called to the wife: Which are his?

  Willie stood inside the door to the bakery where a group of people were surrounding the surviving man. His fear of Rasul was all-consuming. It shut down a section of his brain, reawakened it. Did Rasul know what he had done to his wife? At her behest. Those words in his mind. She asked me.

  Eleanora said she thought you would be here. I thought it important that you be included.

  What did it mean? Fuck. Fuck.

  Willie watched Rasul’s quick, certain movements around the square, talking to people in the village. A woman, draped in black dotted with light snowflakes, stepped forward. She began a full-throated shout. His Arabic was shaky at the best of times, he was better with the Cairo dialect. She was holding her head between her hands. She was shaking her head. Then letting out a cry. Ingliz Ingliz Ingliz. That, he understood. It was a call of blame. Two younger women came forward, also wrapped in dark colours, and tugged her away, pulled her screaming into a door which was shut on the badness, on the tight air, on the ants turning the red black.

  Willie’s hands were slimy, slicked with sweat. Rasul occasionally took out a smaller camera to photograph something. A box, which he looked into. He was not hostile towards the British, but he moved in a way that was . . . what was it? Could Willie capture it? Defiant? He surged with a quiet power as he moved. That was the only way Willie could describe it to himself.

  Ashton and Wicklow had both taken off their shirts and ripped them to be used as bandages on the man who was laid out on a bed, letting out gasps. A noble yet fairly pointless gesture at this stage. Too late. Too insincere. An elderly woman threw herself on to the floor in front of Willie and wailed; whether prayer or insult, it was filled with sorrow. Willie turned away from her, and saw Prudence walking across the square, her cheeks bright red and her hair blown awry.

  ‘It’s Prue,’ he called to Ashton.

  Frau Baum came running behind her, stumbling and reaching out for Prue, but the child hopped in front of her, tugged away.

  ‘I thought you said Elspeth had her?’ Ashton said over his shoulder, stripped down to his bare chest.

  Did I say that? Willie ran back through what had just happened. I did not. Ashton had assumed. He hadn’t asked about Prue.

  The child was walking towards the ladders. The light was dipping now; the corner stairwells with their spiral staircases brought the edges of the village houses into relief. Prue stood looking at them, for a moment, and then swung around. She walked towards the two hanging men, whom nobody else seemed to be concerned about any more. She shouldn’t see this, Willie thought. He stepped towards her. She should be protected from this, but then he stopped moving. She was not his child. It was not his place to help her. Ashton came to the door and squinted out into the light. His thin sallow chest very pale, his stomach a perfect round ball with a line of black hair down the centre of it.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘There,’ Willie said. The small girl stood alone, staring up at the dangling, hanging bodies.

  ‘Prue,’ Ashton shouted. ‘No, get away.’

  A stream of crows, rooks, birds of all sorts, took to the sky at the sound of a gun being fired from just behind the trees at the corner of the square, and Lofty stepped from behind an outhouse. Several women cried in alarm and sheltered behind men. Khaled Rasul stood up and squinted towards him.

  ‘Lofty,’ Ashton shouted, and then the Irishman looked directly at him. ‘What the bloody . . . Jesus Christ, what HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?’

  Lofty walked slowly, but at the sight of him everyone drew back, held on to one another, cried out. Prue did not look around; she was staring up still at the men dangled like autumn leaves. Lofty had his Turkish whip in one hand and a rifle in the other. A woman, kneeling in front of the ladders, saw him and began shuddering and screaming. Lofty held his rifle towards Willie’s face. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Make her stop.’

  Ashton stepped forward. ‘Lofty, old chap, things have got rather out of hand. I think we should . . .’

  ‘You,’ he repeated to Willie. ‘Get her to stop.’

  Red eyes. Here they were. Call yourself an Englishman. Coming from an Irishman.

  ‘Make her stop.’ Lofty’s rifle was trained at Willie. The circle of it, the central definition of it. The truth of the barrel of a gun at the head. Willie moved towards the hysterical woman and leant forward. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

  ‘Get out your gun.’

  Ashton, who had been wittering behind them – ‘Stop, too much, Lofty, gone too far’ – was suddenly still. Watching, as was Wicklow. Willie pulled out the small revolver that Wicklow had given him earlier.

  ‘Point it at her.’

  With shaking hands, Willie held the gun towards the village woman who was sobbing on the ground. She was about the same age as Eleanora. She looked up at him. Behind her the men were hanging from the ladders. The dismembered hands and feet were rotting in a heap. Wicklow stepped forward, Ashton stepped forward, everyone looked up at Lofty and there was a click, but not a gun. The compression of a shutter. Rasul had photographed it.

  Lofty jumped a little at the sound of the camera, and swung around. Willie let his arm drop; the woman bent forward and continued to sob. Wicklow moved to her, said something, tried to help her up. Ashton, rubbing his beard, furious, began to shout at Lofty.

  ‘What the devil, what the fuck, do you think you have been doing?’

  ‘Oh, His Majesty’s Service, Charles.’

  At this, Willie watched as Ashton turned away and saw his daughter on the other side of the ladders, staring at them.

  ‘Who left her there, on her own, in the middle of this?’ Ashton shouted, standing half-naked, having dedicated his shirt to the wellbeing of one of the men barbarically attacked. He walked at first, then ran towards her.

  You did. You did. You left her there. Willie looked up at the sky. There were no more snowflakes; it hadn’t been a real flurry, just a few noble attempts, a falling for no reason.

  London, 1933

  Charing Cross Road, then Denmark Street, leading to St Giles, and of course it is raining. ‘Let’s walk, my friend.’ He is shy: that is the central thing about him, I realise; the alarming thing. In person so different to the letter-writing Ihsan whose pen sings warmly: ‘Habibti. When it rains in Jerusalem I think of you in London . . .’

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Ihsan asks, and then four footsteps later he asks me the same question and I say no, although I am, because who isn’t hungry in London at this time? Everyone tired and looking for work. I am still living off the fat of Piers’s family but the girls I know, the artists’ models at Slade, and the tramps in the pub are always ravenous and I starve myself with them. It is a way of feeling part of things, I suppose, although with most of them there is a mode, a mood, a modern way of thinking which rather lends itself to the encouragement of self-extinction. I am wearing Piers’s trench coat with long deep pockets. It is much too big for me.

  ‘London rain,’ Ihsan says, ‘just as you described it.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s the same as any other rain.’

  He stands in the street with his palms up and his lovely face directed at the sky, with his Jerusalem breath and his Jerusalem hair getting wet, refusing to put up his umbrella.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It is different. You’re skin and bones inside that coat,’ he said, looking at me instead of the sky. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘If you like the rain I want to stay out in it.’

  ‘We make a good pair then, don’t
we? The baby is happy enough with the nurse?’

  ‘Well, she’s not really a nurse and he’s not really a baby, he’s two, but yes, he is fine with her.’

  He takes my arm, it is the first time we have touched since he arrived, and before long, with the rhythm of our feet, we are moving in tune again, huddling together against the December cold.

  ‘Jerusalem is such an unhappy city, Prue. It is a relief to be away from it.’

  I don’t quite know what to say to this. It is a city that has burned in my mind all my life, but I can’t, in all honesty, picture it that well. I see twisted alleyways, endless stairs. I remember the coldness of the wind and a feeling of parts of it always seeming to change shape, a bit inconsistent, unsettled.

  ‘I’m not here for long. Business for my family,’ and he refuses to see any London sights, so I tug him towards the doors of Lyons on Tottenham Court Road, and after a moment’s hesitation he comes in. The tea room is very popular, due no doubt to the rain, and it takes the nippy, tucked up like a penguin in her black and white uniform, a minute or two to find us a seat. In the end we are lucky because it is a table for two next to the window; we need not share and we can watch people scurrying past.

  Ihsan looks distinctly exotic compared with the drab English faces staring gloomily into their cups around us, almost dandy, in a natty suit which is smart and yet somehow not the British style, and so quaint with his bow tie. As soon as the tea things are laid along with cake and a small pot of cream, the feeling between us is awkward and not quite as I’d wished. The waitress looks at him as if he is about to steal everything in the shop, as if she wishes to move the teacups away from him to keep them safe from his foreignness, but Ihsan doesn’t notice or, at least, if he does he does not let on.