Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  David Nachmias greeted Fairfather with affection and Prayle with the slightest hesitation, which then was wiped away by a dignified and self-deprecatory smile. Prayle, with his acquired knowledge of the Arab, could make a more reasonable mental picture of Abu Tisein than he could of the ambiguous Josh. The man was a foul criminal, but just like some sheikh of the Beduw caught out in an atrocity that he couldn’t deny but for which he couldn’t be touched—gentle, disarming, showing his sense of guilt only in an exaggerated, but ever dignified, geniality, as much as to say that they were all scoundrels and who but God could apportion blame? David Nachmias might, of course, know nothing at all of Prayle’s paper warfare against him for the sake of Armande, but Dion was certain that he did.

  Abu Tisein lowered into a chair that dual solidity which had earned him his nickname, and listened to a flow of Hebrew which sounded more like a speech than a story. Prayle noticed that Josh in Hebrew was far more fiery and animated than he was in English; probably he had long ago discovered that the English distrusted enthusiasm.

  “What do you want me to do?” David Nachmias asked Fairfather.

  “To go with us wherever Montagne is going.”

  “And then?”

  “I shall take Montagne away. No possible scandals, David. He has done well for us, and we just want him to cool down. We might send him to East Africa, or give him a chance of dropping in France.”

  “And what about the people he has come to see?” asked Josh.

  “Unless I recognise one of them as wanted for a crime, there’s nothing I can do. Have you any idea who they are likely to be?”

  “As individuals? No idea at all,” Josh replied. “I just knew that Makrisi had been collecting funds for the Irgun Zvai Leumi. I didn’t know he was Montagne, and I didn’t know he was on his way up from Egypt.”

  “Forgive my suggestion, Captain Fairfather,” said Abu Tisein slowly, “but I do not understand how your service can keep Montagne shadowed without him suspecting it.”

  “That’s easy, David! We’re not shadowing him. We’re helping him. Mr. Makrisi has done good work for a certain department. When he pretended to have business at Deraa, they pretended to believe him and passed us the word. Dion Prayle, here, has even booked him a room at a disreputable hotel.”

  “But why not travel through Palestine?”

  “Because the thought of a peculiar Gentile calling at the office doesn’t please the Irgun one little bit—wherefore he feels safer travelling through Trans-Jordan.”

  “Yes,” said Josh, “I think you are right. And Montagne must have insisted on coming in person. But, Laurence, there is one thing I can’t understand—why is he doing this?”

  “Because, Josh, he thinks the Jews have done him dirt.”

  “Revenge? Simple revenge?”

  “Josh, I thank my God daily that I am not concerned with the sordid means by which that department of yours—the one you have nothing to do with—acquires arms. But they shouldn’t get caught. And when they do get caught, they should not let the innocent suffer. And above all they shouldn’t panic and tell David here that he’s got to get them out of it or carry the can back himsef. Am I right, David?”

  “Your imagination, Captain Fairfather!” murmured Abu Tisein. “How I envy it!”

  “Montagne looks very far ahead,” said Josh thoughtfully.

  To Dion Prayle revenge seemed an odd and fascinating emotion. He could not understand its power, for he was certain that whatever anyone did to him he would never be bothered with revenge; to add an evil to an evil was an objectless waste of time and energy. He himself seemed to be devoid of two impulses to action that were important to everyone else—getting on and getting one’s own back. Revenge was all very well as a motive in history books, but surely no sane person today, beyond Germans and primitive blacks, could long trouble themselves for the sake of its fleeting satisfaction? But was Montagne sane? He had always lived in an exaggerated, personified world of his own. He simplified everything except his own suspicions.

  “Do you agree that the Irgun is your worst enemy?” he asked Josh.

  “No! You are!” Josh answered with sudden asperity. “If it were not for you these lunatic terrorists could never have existed.”

  “Before the war, Zionism. We were all proud of it and you,” said Prayle peaceably. “Troops liked you, too. Hard to find an anti-Semite among the regulars who were here in ’38. And now distrust on both sides. Why?”

  “Because you will not see there are two points upon which we can never give way. Free immigration and the right to self-defence. When you prohibit both, you force us to illegality and you may force us to violence.”

  “And if we allowed both, we should force the Arabs to violence,” Prayle retorted. “One hell of a price to pay for your nationalism!”

  “Nationalism? Well, call it that if you like. But doesn’t its quality count for you, Captain Prayle? Where did nationalism ever have the beauty and self-sacrifice of ours? When have you seen, since the Middle Ages, rich men giving up their possessions for the sake of an ideal. When have you seen lawyers, doctors, intellectuals and men who have got used to luxury in the dirtiest of commerce—which was all you would allow them—stripped to the waist and building and planting in a wilderness where there was nothing?”

  “Western Desert,” said Prayle irresistibly, and earned a glance of rebuke from Fairfather.

  “That was for war,” Josh replied, broadly accepting the remark as fair comment. “This is for a peaceful home. To give back their spirit to the most spiritual of nations. To create a home for the miserable, the downtrodden, the most tragically misunderstood people that ever were. Do you call that nationalism? Is it nationalism when the flower of our youth lives without reward, like your monks, and day by day completes the impossible? You cannot beat such a spirit. A Jewish Palestine is inevitable. Nothing and nobody can stop it.”

  “But that, dear Josh,” said Fairfather, “is exactly what I always preach myself. So why hurry?”

  “Because my people are in danger of extinction. Our chance is now. Now!”

  “Arabs?” asked Fairfather.

  “They must give way.”

  “And there we are back at the beginning, aren’t we, David?”

  “When I was at school,” said Abu Tisein, “we had a teacher who used to tell us that Israel was the attendant of the King, and his duty was to imitate the King.”

  “His first duty is to live,” said Josh shortly.

  Abu Tisein accompanied the two officers when they left the Jewish Agency. He stumped along King George Avenue, discussing with Prayle the notables of Trans-Jordan, the help they had given in founding the early Jewish settlements and the strong bonds of friendship that still existed between individual Arab and Jew. Abu Tisein’s implicit belief was quite clear: that the Jews were only in Palestine by favour of the British, and that they could only continue by favour of the Arabs. In listening to him, Dion Prayle was conscious of a nasty sense of disloyalty to Armande. But David Nachmias was so courteous and reasonable. It was at last easy to see how Armande had been taken in by him. Only men such as Laurence Fairfather, who seemed to live at ease in this world of interlocking and contradictory loyalties, could dare to separate Abu Tisein into his component parts and to claim recognition of his purposes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fight for Freedom

  Captain Prayle lay on the hillside, looking down upon the Jordan Valley between Lake Hula and the Sea of Galilee. Whenever there was traffic on the hairpin bends of the road to Safad, he raised his field glasses; the slight movement of elbows stirred the scent of the sweet mountain herbs crushed by his body. Up the valley he could just see a shoulder of Hermon, shining a metallic yellow between the tenuous pillars of cloud that were distilled from its gorges by the cool of evening. To his right, three thousand feet below, the sea, reflecting the last of the sun, had turned a pale magenta, and along the Syrian shore parallel scarves of mist were of so frank a mauve
that they reminded him of solemn high teas in childhood and the dress worn by a beloved great-aunt.

  His mind ran on from one image of contemplation to another, for there was nothing to do but watch the road and attend at that spectacular performance staged by the atmosphere wherever the desert met the sown. At the head of the sea, black against the miracle-reflecting water, was the grove of poplar and cypress around the ruins of Capernaum and its synagogue. That was a sanctuary which he reverenced; there and there only in all Palestine he cherished certainty, unhindered by the touts and priests of organised Christianity, that he could see the same floor, the same stones that Christ had trod. Yet Capernaum was in no way an official Holy Place. What a country for accepting profitable tradition! The Christians with their Holy Sepulchre, the Jews with their Wailing Wall, the Moslems with their footprints of the Prophet—and not a scrap of serious historical evidence to justify any of them! Perhaps tradition, right or wrong, was all that mattered, for human beings seemed so reluctant to worship without a visible object.

  For him no visible object was necessary—well, to be fair, wasn’t it? In four years of war he had lain on many hillsides, but never had his inquisitive thoughts played with the philosophy of worship. That they did so now was due, he recognised, to Armande. She was the visible object, through whom the physical beauty of the Jordan Valley became manifest as a spiritual beauty. Before he had loved her, his own soul and all that it observed had been incomplete; nor was completion yet, for nothing but marriage with Armande could quiet the observer’s restlessness. Women—good Lord! What futile loyalties they had! A very good chap, her husband—but he suspected that this John had always brought out the worst in her, and they didn’t love each other, and that was that. But would the darling admit it? No!

  Prayle savagely cast her out of his mind. The longing for her offended against his independence. What had a woman to do with sunsets and miracles? What had she to do with the eternal? A visible object, very well—but bare and lovely Palestine was made for worship without intermediaries. Silent in the still evening it lay below him, and he was conscious of his infinite smallness; a wretched point upon the hillside that could only think of women.

  True, the events of Palestinian history predisposed a man to worship; but, on a broader view, the country was fitted, chosen for the events. Palestine, for all its groves and terraced hills belonged to the desert where a man and his God walked alone together; the land compelled humanity to be measured by a greater rod than geography or history could supply. Whether you struck a former comrade under the fifth rib in the efficient arms drill of the Old Testament, whether you healed the sick, whether you did your best, like Pontius Pilate, to give justice to warring sects, or whether you taught peace and wisdom in Safad over the hill, it had to be done on the scale of the eternal.

  The Jews of Palestine, he decided, were so eager to avoid thinking on the scale of the eternal. If they said that they could not yet afford such a luxury, it would be forgivable; if they insisted that new values must be created before the old could return, he would agree. But they didn’t. The vast majority rejected for good and all the wisdom of their prophets and scholars, laughed at it as unworldly. In fact they were off again, irresistibly attracted, worshipping the gods of the heathen, Power and Intrigue, Flags and the Firearm, and daring the remorseless logic that sooner or later restored its soul to a nation through disaster.

  And that might be Mr. Makrisi, paddling up the hill astride a donkey. Prayle steadied his elbows, and trained his glasses on a bend of the road where the traveller would come into full view. Makrisi had changed the clothes he wore at Deraa, but that beard was his. A darkness between cheek and forehead, which was undoubtedly the hollow of deep-set eyes, made his identity certain. He was dressed in an old khaki jacket from the last war and dusty Turkish trousers. It was unusual to see so poor a villager or peddlar with a beard, and, for disguise to be perfect, he should have had a dusty wife marching behind the donkey; but he would pass anywhere, so long as he did not talk too much, as a Moghreby who had settled down in the high borderland of Syria and Trans-Jordan.

  All was going as it should. Laurence was at the Rosh Pina control post, Abu Tisein somewhere in Safad, himself halfway between the two; and there were twelve of their men scattered over the more distant road junctions so that Mr. Makrisi’s trail, if he did the unexpected, could be quickly recovered.

  Prayle waited for man and donkey to reappear round the last and most northerly bend in the road, where it passed through the edge of a plantation. They did not reappear. He consulted the map. There was nowhere Makrisi could go except a deserted camp site a few hundred yards from the road. Probably he had stopped to rest.

  Then came Laurence Fairfather, swinging round the bends on a motorcycle and travelling much too fast. Prayle, watching like an anxious and impotent god what was about to happen to the mortals below him, observed that a civilian lorry on the wrong side of the road, would reach the next corner at the same time as the motorcycle. He saw Fairfather take to the verge of the road in a cloud of dust, vanish behind the lorry, come out with a sickening wobble and recover speed. That imperturbable Laurence always showed off to himself on a motorcycle; it seemed to be the outlet for the wilder side of his character, and it was, Prayle thought, a damned sight more dangerous than drink.

  Fairfather stopped at the top of the hill a hundred yards from the hidden Prayle. There he admired the view, sitting astride his bike. Prayle crawled towards the rendezvous under cover of sage and camel’s thorn, and came within speaking distance.

  “If it’s him on the donkey,” he said, “he has stopped on the road.”

  Fairfather lit his pipe and continued to admire the view.

  “I didn’t pass him,” he replied, without looking round.

  “Have you the foggiest notion what you passed, bo?”

  “Nothing at all but a lorry. I hope there are thorns in the soft underbelly.”

  “There are, damn you! Then he’s turned off up the track to the old camp.”

  “All right. I’ll get Abu Tisein. Let’s meet at that patch of eucalyptus just over the crest. There’s still plenty of light, and we should be able to see down into the camp from there.”

  Laurence put his pipe in his pocket, jumped on the kick start and vanished over the hill to Safad.

  Dion Prayle had to walk. The section truck, which had dropped him near his present post, was five miles away at a road junction to the south. His route demanded careful planning, for a solitary British soldier on foot was a rare sight outside the camps and towns; if anyone but himself were on the watch, his sudden appearance on road or hillside might arouse suspicion. He waited for the dust of a passing truck to conceal his movement, then slipped across the road at the next bend and over the embankment at the farther side. From there he could reach the crest, unseen by any but the Arab fellahin far beneath him, working their little fields in Lower Galilee.

  When he reached the grove of eucalyptus, Fairfather and David Nachmias were already there. Abu Tisein had left his car in Safad and travelled the short distance, over a rocky track, on the pillion of the motorcycle. He was smiling as if he had enjoyed it.

  “Commended for gallantry,” said Prayle. “At risk of death or permanent injury etcetera.”

  “I do not mind a new experience,” replied Abu Tisein, “though I would prefer a horse. So much of my life is spent …” He made a slow, pacific gesture which seemed to imply long, patient hours of sitting in Arab tents and café s, of waiting upon government officials and Agency politicians in leisurely Jerusalem. “I enjoy a day in the country.”

  Prayle knew instantly what he meant. It was the sort of phrase he would have used himself. A day in the country covered those dangerous journeys beyond the frontiers of neutral Turkey, or the first night in a new settlement when the joyous, singing colonists put up their tents on a patch of sand that would soon be a tidy village among its orange groves, or all the pleasures of active intrigue in the open air b
etween Bagdad and Damascus.

  “Shall we start?” asked Abu Tisein. “I think, if I may advise, that the edge of the grove is better avoided. The trees are thin and movement could be seen against the going down of the sun. Let us follow that stone wall. We can stand among the thorn at the end, and our heads will be hidden.”

  Prayle and Fairfather glanced at each other. Laurence indicated by an admiring and humorous lift of his eyebrow that he was perfectly willing to accept Abu Tisein’s efficient leadership—it was the very gesture that Prayle had often seen pass between two men in the ranks when they were convinced that their officer was talking sense.

  Without any sort of insistence David Nachias quietly assumed command. Prayle was certain that if either of them had shown the minutest sign of questioning his right he would, as quietly and imperceptibly, have relinquished it. Abu Tisein’s judgment of the ground was correct; from the wall, screened by bushes, they could see into the deserted camp. There were a few huts, all but one open to wind and weather. A civilian truck—that which had raised the dust for Prayle’s crossing of the road—was parked on a strip of cracked asphalt. Makrisi’s donkey, forelegs hobbled, browsed on a miniature forest of cabbage and carrot which had gone wild in the former mess garden.

  “Are they likely to have put out sentries, David?” Fairfather asked.

  “At the way in from the road. Not here. If we go quietly we shall reach the hut. What action do you propose then?”

  “I just want Montagne.”

  “It may be dangerous.”

  “No. They won’t make trouble with British troops.”

  “What makes you think that, Captain Fairfather?” asked Abu Tisein, the hard, golden flash of the desert in his brown eyes.

  Fairfather looked at him in astonishment, and then smiled.