by Colin Smith
The Grand New was the best a neutral civilian could do, and it was only a few minutes’ walk from Fast’s, which saved the exhausting business of haggling with Syrian cabmen who still started by demanding outrageous fares even though their ribs were often getting as easy to count as those of their horses. He walked there now, relieved to see that Magnus was no longer about. Go and slaughter the Amalek indeed!
It was a pleasant afternoon. Elsewhere in the land, in the cactus scrub around the port of Gaza for instance, the heat could be oppressive for uniformed Europeans. In Jerusalem the altitude made all the difference. On a spring day like this the climate was almost perfect, the air faintly scented with pine and purple bougainvillaea.
A cab insisted on following him, the horse’s hooves clip-clopping on the baked earth road. He had given all the drivers outside Fast’s a firm ‘no’, but one of them was always desperate enough to persist, however ludicrous the distance. The trick was to avoid all eye contact. The difficult moment came when the cabbie tired of the game and overtook, at the same time making a strange hissing sound in a last attempt to make a stubborn pedestrian stare hunger in the face.
Maeltzer’s lunch had made him sleepy, and he was annoyed he had to work. He felt like seeking out some warm spot where he could snooze for a while, stretching occasionally like some contented cat.
He paused to yawn, tapping his mouth with his hand as he did so. This was a mistake because the driver came up and hissed at him, and he caught a glimpse of an anguished old man’s face as he waved him away. Overhead a biplane was flying in the direction of the Mount of Olives. This too was soporific. The monotony of its engine reminded Maeltzer of the kind of sewing-machine used in factories that produced cheap garments, the sort that was operated by a treadle. He wondered whether the aircraft was piloted by a German or a Turk. There were said to be at least a dozen Turkish pilots in the country now. There was little chance that he was English. He had heard that the British had more aircraft in Palestine then the Germans, but most of them were very old and the Germans were always shooting them down. It would be a very brave Royal Flying Corps pilot indeed who risked a solo sortie over Jerusalem.
The plane flew off in a north-westerly direction, towards the coast and Jaffa and the dipping sun. Definitely not English.
Thinking about the English reminded Maeltzer that he had promised to inform Buchan’s parents of his capture. He got out his notebook and looked again at their address: Mr and Mrs Horatio Buchan, The Gables, Cowden-in-the-Marsh, near Brentwood, Essex. He tried to imagin what The Gables was like. Possibly a thatched roof. Bay windows, leaded lights, a gravel drive. Perhaps a tennis court at the back, not much used now. He had never visited Brentwood but he knew England quite well. He had spent two years in his newspaper’s London office, partly because a genial editor had wished to cure him of what he considered excessive Anglophobia.
Maeltzer had told Weidinger that this had not been a success. He had, he assured him, found the British strangely unwholesome at every level. Quite apart from their irritating assumption that they were the only Europeans fit to run an Empire, their upper classes had only confirmed his belief that they were either bone-headed sportsmen or effete dilettantes. The urban masses, he said, tended to be undernourished, stunted creatures with pungent body odour.
Like Weidinger and his friends, Maeltzer had found Buchan and the other British prisoners unimpressive. What was one supposed to think of a young officer discovered staring at his reflection like some tortured schoolgirl? It was true that the British had better soldiers in France and perhaps he should have reminded Weidinger that they did not have a single Guards battalion in Egypt; but it was hard to imagine them beating a people as courageous and efficient as the Germans, the technically most advanced nation in Europe. The English could be brave enough at times but their generals were abysmal, accustomed to using maxim guns on spear-chuckers. That’s why the Boers had led them such a dance.
Despite greatly superior numbers, they had succeeded in getting their troops caught up like a flock of sheep on the cactus hedges around Gaza. Over lunch he had been told that the British general, Sir Archibald Murray, had tried to direct the battle from a railway carriage that was barely out of Cairo. Lunacy! No, that was too grand a word for it. Stupidity was more like it. Stupidity born out of ignorance and sloth, plus a gentleman’s reluctance to get too involved.
Maeltzer paused for a moment to let the thought sink in, and the cab driver was instantly alongside.
‘Tired, effendi?’ he asked in Arabic. It was a dignified inquiry. He was starving but he was not begging; he was offering a service.
‘I wish to walk,’ said Maeltzer whose Arabic was quite good. He fished in the pockets of his jacket and emerged with a handful of piastres. The sadness of the man appalled him.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take this.’ The driver hesitated. ‘In case I need you later.’
‘Thank you, effendi.’ He gave a toothless smile and leant down from his perch to take the money. As he did so he suddenly grabbed Maeltzer’s hand and kissed it.
‘For God’s sake,’ said the journalist and pulled it away. At the same time he realised that an aircraft was overhead again. Its engine was much louder this time, as if it was directly above them.
Both Maeltzer and the cabbie looked up, the journalist putting one hand to the brim of his panama.
The biplane was in a shallow dive, not much higher it seemed than the dome of the el Aksa mosque, heading back towards the Mount of Olives. Almost simultaneously he heard the explosions, though it was not until he saw the black puffs of smoke around the plane that he realised they were anti-aircraft fire.
‘Inglisi, effendi?’
The aircraft appeared to dip down into the Kidron Valley and had disappeared from sight by the time they heard the machine-gun fire and two much louder explosions, which Maeltzer rightly guessed were bombs.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Inglisi.’ So some British flier had been brave enough to pay Jerusalem a visit after all. He searched the sky for German planes in pursuit, but could not see any. After a minute or so the aircraft briefly reappeared, flying south-west in the direction of Beersheba.
Back in his hotel room, Maeltzer scribbled a note for Weidinger asking him around for a drink that evening and tipped one of the bell boys a small amount to take it around to Fast’s. Waiting for the boy to return made it difficult to concentrate on the long article he wanted to write on the Gaza battle, plus a separate account of the demoralised English and Australian prisoners he had interviewed.
His desk was by a window overlooking the ramparts of the Citadel. Sometimes he would find himself pacing the room, and yet have no memory of drawing back his chair and leaving his desk. That afternoon he was worse than ever. He would write a few lines and then pace up and down, leaving one of the little cheroots his sister had sent him to extinguish itself in the ashtray.
The air raid was the first noteworthy event in Jerusalem since six twisting and jerking Syrian deserters had appeared on the Citadel’s gibbets after the authorities had felt the need to set a firm example in the face of the enemy build-up before Gaza. Maeltzer wanted to know what the air raid had achieved – and, more importantly, why the German squadrons had made no attempt to intercept this solitary raider.
***
In the suite of rooms below, the Widow Shemsi listened to Maeltzer pacing up and down, frowned and then went back to the task of pinning up her hair in preparation for a visit from Major Krag. Her hair was black, but henna had given it a distinct auburn tint, almost copper in strong sunlight. Not that it saw much sun, for the Widow Shemsi was famous for the kind of large hats that required hair pads and pins like duelling foils – the sort of headgear that had become unfashionably frivolous in Europe. She was a Syrian, born into a prosperous Greek Catholic trading family in Beirut: Nadia’s father had sold out his share in the family business to his brothers and become a doctor. It was the kind of background that nurtured the Levantine fluency i
n languages. French was spoken at home except to the servants, who were addressed in Arabic. There had been private tuition in English. Her German was coming along well, just as she had learned passable Turkish in order to please her late husband.
Major Shemsi had succumbed to a combination of arak and malaria in the September of 1915, when he had been part of the Jericho garrison. There had been no children between them. He had been heavily in debt at the time of his death, largely because his passion for backgammon almost equalled his fondness for hard liquor. To the astonishment of his brother-officers, his appetite for both were exceeded by the love he bore his new wife, a little over twenty years his junior and not much older than the son he had from a wife who had not lived with him for many years.
After spending the greater part of his career campaigning in the Yemen, Shemsi had met Nadia Haddad in Beirut while on civil administration duties there. At first Dr Haddad had been no more than amused when the major he brought home for cards and backgammon so obviously played court to his eldest daughter. But then his only son was among a group of students arrested as subversives, accused of being prominent members of the student wing of a secret society preaching Arab nationalism and total separation from the Sublime Porte. Suddenly the major’s admiration for Nadia was no longer a joke, but a means by which her baby brother might be saved from the gallows and eventually freed. Despite the religious differences, her parents, and especially her mother, persuaded her to take his attention seriously.
The major realised exactly what was required. As a result of the match charges were dropped, and baby brother was allowed to emigrate to the United States. Her parents salved any twinges of conscience they might have felt about the matter by telling themselves that Nadia had not done too badly. She was already in her late twenties, well past her prime. There had been a suitable young man once whose interest had pleased both them and her, but he had gone first to Egypt and then, like her brother, to California. From there his careful letters, with their involved salutes to her parents and accounts of homesickness brought on by the scent of a citrus grove, had become gradually less frequent and then ceased. Later she had heard, through a member of his family in Beirut, that he had married an Irish woman.
On the night before her Muslim wedding to Shemsi, for a nominal conversion was required, a tearful younger sister had asked her, in so many words, if she was not about to go through a fate worse than death, and she had replied that there were worse things. What she had not told her, perhaps because she was reluctant to admit it to herself, was that losing her reluctantly preserved virginity for their beloved sibling was rather exciting. And if Shemsi had his weaknesses he had indeed proved a loving husband who had tolerated her discreet church attendances for the Christian feasts just as she had pleased him with a loose veil, now entirely abandoned, on public occasions.
It had never occurred to her that if Shemsi died she might be left destitute. But the war killed off the family business, for Beirut was under blockade and there were no longer the fruits of Brummagem to supply to a greedy Arab hinterland. Her father died treating an outbreak of typhus and his death revealed that he too owed large gambling debts. Her mother had gone to live with one of Nadia’s married sisters. After Shemsi died there were siblings in and around Beirut who would have dutifully taken her in, but she did not want to live on sufferance, a widow of a certain age, unlikely to remarry. Instead, she intended to join her brother in San Francisco. However, he was not in a position to help her with her boat fare so it was necessary to save enough money for that, plus the bribes that would enable her to travel to some neutral port now that America was in the war. Meanwhile, her affair with Krag was hardly discreet. She had probably become the best known courtesan in the autonomous Sanjak of Jerusalem.
Maeltzer continued to pace her ceiling, his footfalls regularly punctuated by the creaking of single floorboard. Shemsi thought this must be when he turned round. For several weeks now she had intended to raise the matter of his marathon perambulations, but somehow she could never bring herself to do it. There was a quality of authority about the journalist, which would make even the lightest reproach seem like a gross impertinence. Not that he was anything but civil to her. Most of Krag’s brother-officers cut her dead, whether out of prudery or jealousy she couldn’t tell. Maeltzer invariably wished her the time of day, opened doors and raised his hat when appropriate, without ever making the slightest suggestion that he might wish to be on more intimate terms with her. She sometimes imagined she detected a hint of defiance in his manner, the devil-may-care attitude of a man who was answerable to no one but himself.
This was a lot more than she could say for the gentleman she was expecting. She sighed again, more a kind of impatience with herself than self-pity, and examined her face in the cheval glass. She was not pleased with what she saw. In the last few months she had aged, she knew that. What men called ‘the bloom’ was gone. For some reason, although her diet was perfectly adequate, she was beginning to lose weight. She had always been too slimly built to achieve the contemporary notion of beauty, but now she fancied that her cheeks were stretched and sallow-looking. And one of her front teeth had begun to darken. She practised a crooked smile which almost hid it. Well, it would have to do. It would certainly do for Major Krag.
5
A couple of hours after the air raid Magnus’s sandaled feet picked their way carefully along the striated Byzantine flagstones that paved Christian Quarter Street.
Russian pilgrims once came there to buy their funeral shrouds, but the pilgrim trade had died along with the peace when Turkey found itself at war with most of Christendom. For the first time since the Byzantine emperors the Eastern Church did not dominate the Christian establishment of the city. Most of the Russian and Greek Orthodox had fled along with French and Italian Catholics and all the Anglican schism.
While the war lasted, the Lutherans were meant to be looking after the interests of their departed co-religionists. Their showpiece was the Church of the Saviour with its great square belltower. The church had been completed in time to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm’s arrival in Jerusalem almost twenty years before on the tour that had done much to revive the notion of pilgrimage in fashionable Europe.
Along the Christian Quarter Street a few of the shops that specialised in selling objets de piété and other religious bric-a-brac were still open. Their proprietors believed in miracles. They believed that those recently arrived members of the Austrian and German contingents whose kitbags were not already bulging with olive wood crucifixes, rosary beads, nativity sets, Noah’s arks, heads of John the Baptist and splinters of the true cross would certainly pass by sooner or later. As an act of faith it was impressive; as is often the case, its rewards were mostly intangible. In order to feed their families some shopkeepers had begun to offer the soldiery real bargains. Men who had once amassed fortunes out of the pilgrim trade were now reduced to selling their wives’ jewellery at olive-wood prices.
As he walked Magnus tapped the pavement with his cross, his blazing eyes looking everywhere and nowhere at once. He was one of the few relatively young civilian men to be walking the streets of the Old City that afternoon. Male citizens of Jerusalem who had not already been conscripted into one of the Arab regiments presently confronting the British along the Gaza-Beersheba line rarely ventured out in case they met up with an army patrol anxious that they should share their fortune.
There were, in addition, estimated to be another three thousand actual deserters hiding out within the walls. And even those who by virtue of their sex or age were obviously non-combatant tended to conserve their strength by staying at home as much as possible given the shortage of food. During the last two years the land had not only suffered the casual depredations of warfare, with cavalry grazing their horses in hard-grown barley fields and treasured olive groves being chopped down for fuel, but harvests had also been destroyed by a plague of locusts that would have satisfied any Old Testament prophet’s longing for divi
ne retribution.
Such locals as were out mostly regarded Magnus without much curiosity. Before the war there had been many like him around – men who had allowed their conceit to blow them across that blurred frontier which divides genuine grace from plain lunacy. The only people who paused to give him a second look were occasional groups of soldiers, Turkish and European. Some were tempted to tease him, but there was something about the evident madness of Magnus’s gaze from the cosy nest of his full beard, that made them resist.
Weidinger was in one of the shops. He had just concluded a most satisfactory deal over a gold bracelet for a younger sister when he spotted Magnus outside. The shopkeeper, a lugubrious Greek Catholic Syrian whose roots in the country went back a couple of thousand years or so, paused in his mournful wrapping of the gift and followed the officer’s stare. ‘Blessed by God,’ he said. He spoke German. He also spoke Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Yiddish and a smattering of Syriac. He was, after all, a Levantine trader.
‘You think so?’ said Weidinger, watching the Swedish messiah loping down the street.
‘Also by man. There’s always meat on that fellows’ plate.’
‘So I’ve noticed,’ said Weidinger, recalling his conversation with Maeltzer. He was not all that interested.
‘Yes,’ said the Syrian. ‘People think he is like this’ – and he screwed a bent left forefinger into his temple – ‘but he has money.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Weidinger. ‘He begs for it.’