Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  They kept the pigeons in a loft hidden among the conifers behind the two-storey wooden house with its sloping roof and first-floor balcony that was both Aaron’s living quarters and the laboratory for his agricultural experimental station. Ever since her return from Cairo with the pigeons she had been trying to think of a better place for them. She had asked George but he had made some vague excuses; Sarah had guessed that he thought the birds might attract too much attention, and had not liked to press him. Christian Arab fishing clans were another minority the Turks were becoming wary about. The fishermen took enough risks on their behalf ferrying them out to the British monitors.

  It had been George who had taken her out last time in his boat with the rust-red sail. And it had been George who had placed the white sheet for all clear on the balcony that overlooked the broad sweep of the bay when the monitor had reappeared ten days later flying a purple pennant among its signal flags to show that there was a passenger on board who wished to land.

  Arabs and Jews united against the Turk! Exactly as it should be. If only people like Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was said to be in London raising a corps of Jewish volunteers to fight in Palestine, could meet people like George. Sarah was sure that if he did he would not continue to talk about Arabs, at least not all Arabs, like a Cossack.

  She paused to imagine a meeting between the two men. George would put on his Western suit for the occasion. But he would not wear a fez because it would no longer be necessary to don the headgear the Ottoman authorities demanded of all male citizens in Western clothing to demonstrate their fealty towards the Sublime Porte. Monsieur Jabotinsky would be wearing . . . well, she was not quite sure what the Russian Jew would be wearing, although she did dimly recall newspaper photographs of an aristocratic-looking gentleman wearing long riding-boots.

  They would talk and George would occasionally pause and play with his amber worry beads in that dignified way of his. Jabotinsky was undoubtedly a cultured man. Was he not engaged in translating the works of Edgar Allen Poe into the new Hebrew of Ben Yehuda ne Perleman? He would soon see that they could live side by side with people who had also suffered the indignities of Turkish rule. One meeting with George, she was sure, would be enough to disabuse him of these crazy notions that a reborn Jewish nation, a proper Zionist entity, could only maintain its integrity by becoming a warrior state, in a constant state of siege with its neighbours.

  But, of course, George was a Christian, and therefore more receptive to European ideas like Zionism. Sarah knew hardly any Muslim Syrian Arabs. Certainly, she knew none of them as well as George, whom she almost counted as a comrade.

  Sarah put the pigeon back with its five companions in the loft Joseph had constructed out of a few struts of wood and some wire netting. It had been Ponting, white-faced with seasickness as usual, who had helped her board the monitor and suggested that she might concoct some story to explain her absence from Zichron Jacob and spend a few days in Cairo. ‘Somebody wants to talk to you,’ he had said, and the thought of seeing Aaron again had made up her mind for her.

  Making up a story to explain her absence had not been very difficult, for even before Aaron left she had established a pattern of spending weeks away from the settlement at the experimental station. Nevertheless, to cover herself in case anybody called she had sent a note to her father explaining that she might be going to Petah Tikvah, which was not all that far from the battle front at Gaza, to see a relative of her husband. She knew that this would quickly get around Zichron Jacob and this, she had thought, was no bad thing.

  The allusion to her husband, public acknowledgement of his existence on her part, was a good opportunity to silence tongues wagging about the exact nature of her relationship with Joseph Lishansky. She had married Chaim Abraham, a Constantinople Jew of Bulgarian extraction, shortly before the outbreak of war. Soon after they settled into their new home in Constantinople it became evident to both of them that the marriage was a grave mistake.

  At first the age difference (he was some fifteen years older) had not worried her. He was not an unobtrusive man, dark and slim with chiselled features, and the marriage would not have foundered on the physical side of it had been more watertight in other compartments. The fact that he was from a more observant background than Sarah and that she was, for instance, required to supervise a kosher kitchen with separate dishes for meat and dairy could be irritating but she could have lived with it, even laughed about it. What she found unbearable was the discovery of his intolerance of the creed she had been brought up on: the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

  When they had met while he was on a business trip to Haifa she had thought he was malleable, ripe for conversion to Zionism. Instead, she found that he had merely indulged her convictions for the period of the courtship and was as violently opposed to the ideas of Dr Theodore Herzl as any of the assimilated Jews of Western Europe. How could you compare, he would argue, the half-baked Utopian theories of some distracted Viennese scribbler with so tangible a thing as the Young Turks’ emancipation of the Jews along with every other minority in the Ottoman Empire?

  ‘But the Jews were emancipated in Western Europe after the French revolution and still there’s anti-Semitism and persecution.’

  ‘There’s no persecution here.’

  ‘And what about the Armenians?’

  ‘What about them,’ this worthy merchant would reply. ‘They’re treacherous scum. They’re in league with the Czar! Since when does a Jew worry about friends of Moscow? The Turks are realistic. They allow people to settle in Palestine as long as there’s no foolish talk about setting up their own state. Herzl and his kind are power-hungry madmen. Every one of them secretly wants to be King of the Jews. Don’t you see that? If it was not Palestine he was willing to settle for a bit of Argentina. Even Uganda! He didn’t care what godforsaken plot the Jews were given as long as he was in charge.’

  And Sarah would sigh and think what her brother Aaron would say to hear the late literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse dismissed with such vehemence.

  Aaron had been there to welcome her when the monitor came alongside the mole at Alexandria although Ponting had not allowed her to walk down the gangway to the waiting car until he had arranged a screen of four large sailors to proceed crabwise either side of her. ‘Young ladies don’t normally emerge from His Majesty’s warships, and ports tend to be watched,’ he had explained.

  Sarah thought this unnecessary, likely to attract even more attention not less. The English always seemed to think that the Turks were much better than they were. And even if they were suspicious, the Germans were too worried about Jewish influence at home to permit any reprisals. At first she had not recognised her brother, one among several English officers waiting by the dusty staff car with its goggled chauffeur. Aaron in uniform! She could hardly suppress her giggles. But there he was, his blond hair crushed under a flat cap and even giving Ponting a kind of salute. Aaron the soldier! Incredible!

  ‘Shalom,’ he had said, which was almost the limit of his demotic Hebrew, despite his sympathy with the aspirations of the grammarian Ben Yehuda.

  ‘Nili,’ she grinned. Nili was an acronym for the biblical Hebrew of a line to be found in the Book of Samuel, chapter fifteen, verse twenty-nine: ‘And all the glory of Israel will not lie.’ It had been Aaron’s idea to use it as their password. After these greetings they spoke to each other in French.

  ‘Why are you wearing your scarf like that?’

  Ponting had persuaded her to wrap her scarf around her face like a touareg.

  ‘The major didn’t want anybody to recognise me. He thinks Alexandria is full of Turkish spies.’

  ‘If there were they’d think you were an admiral’s daughter.’ He had been going to say mistress but she was his little sister.

  They had gone to the villa he had been given on Gezira, where a Nubian servant served them iced lemon tea on the veranda. ‘Has it been interesting here?’

  ‘Certainly, very
interesting.’

  Sarah had waited for him to tell her more but her brother just smiled and sipped his tea and deposited the ash of his oval Turkish cigarette into a saucer with maddening precision.

  ‘Aaron, don’t play games. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Trying to teach the British about Joseph Flavius, among other things.’

  ‘The wells? Do they believe you?’

  ‘I think so. Up to a point. They rarely show what their true opinion of anything is. You must have noticed that with Ponting. It can be very irritating. At first you think they’re not taking you seriously so you start to talk too much. Sometimes I stand back and listen to myself and hear this jabbering bazaar merchant. Then one day you suddenly realise that they’ve been thinking quite hard about what you’ve been telling them.’

  ‘You’ve always found everyone slow.’

  ‘Compared to the Turks the English have minds like lightning. Ponting’s boss is good, Meinertzhagen. Very open-minded for a soldier.’ He waved away some cigarette smoke with an impatient backhand flap. ‘And for water they also have their pipeline of course.’

  ‘Pipeline?’

  ‘Yes. It goes from the Nile to the Great Bitter Lake and on up to the front line before Gaza. They were gangs of felaheen laying the pipes but I don’t think they’ll be able to bring it up fast enough once their offensive begins.’

  My God! Such confidence, she thought. The British would start an offensive and they would advance. As simple as that. No question about it. They used tanks and gas last time, and still the Turks beat them back. She remembered those prisoners being shown around Jerusalem.

  ‘So this time they’re going to win?’

  ‘Yes, they are. Look, the British are war weary. I know, I saw them in London. There are food shortages there now and air raids. They badly need a victory. A nice cheap victory without the kind of casualty lists they get from France. This new general, Allenby, is getting thousands of reinforcements for a winter campaign. Not only the English but colonials: Australians, New Zealanders, Indians. They’re saying that Allenby has promised Lloyd George that he will give him Jerusalem for Christmas. In the spring some of the reinforcements will go back to France. There is even a battalion of Fusiliers coming out that is mainly recruited from New York and London Jews. Jabotinsky is an officer with them. Jewish soldiers for the first time in two thousand years! What do you think of that? What do you think all those Jews at home are going to say? All those people who thought the words Jewish and soldier were a contradiction in terms?’

  ‘They’re not going to believe it. Not until they see them,’ Sarah had said. ‘And even then some of them will still tell us it’s wrong to fight for friends of the Russians.’

  She had been thinking of Rosenblum and the last conversation she had with him when he buttonholed her at Fast’s. ‘Do you think the Americans will come as well now they’re in the war?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I should imagine they’ll go to France first. It’ll probably all be over by the time they get here. You know that Faisal’s Arabs have captured Akaba? They were led by a British intelligence officer, a Major Lawrence. He goes around in Arab clothes and apparently the Bedouin worship him.’

  ‘Will Akaba make any difference?’

  ‘Of course it will. A port will enable the British to give Bedouin rebels more supplies. Guns, even armoured cars. Their Hejaz army will be nipping away at the Turkish right flank and will help take the pressure off Allenby.’

  ‘Long life to Mister Lawrence then,’ said Sarah. And they clinked their glasses of lemonade.

  At moments like this a casual observer might have thought them lovers rather than siblings – which was exactly what the same Thomas Edward Lawrence surmised when he saw the Jew Aaronsohn talking intently to a busty and not unattractive little woman at a table in Café Groppis in Cairo the next day. Lawrence was in uniform, having had his fun around the Savoy in his Bedouin rig – the best being a wretched army clerk reduced to crimson-faced attention while being lectured on the fighting qualities of the sons of the desert by the diminutive little wog he had just been abusing. Now he had grown weary of making sudden demonstrations of the King’s English to the xenophobic soldiery. He had with him several back copies of The Times and some mail, including archaeological papers from Oxford concerning the Syrian dig at Carchemish he had been working on just before the war. He was rather hoping that Aaronsohn was sufficiently engaged to pretend not to have seen him, but the Jew had called him over.

  ‘Major Lawrence. I would like you to meet my sister, Miss Sarah Aaronsohn.’

  Afterwards she had asked her brother why he had introduced her as an unmarried woman and he could not or would not tell her. All he had said was, ‘Perhaps I have difficulty thinking of you as married.’

  He did not apologise. Aaron rarely apologised for anything. Not that Sarah had really minded, since she could not conceive ever living with her husband again. It had just been curious that Aaron should have done that. He never mentioned Joseph who had spent several weeks in Cairo earlier in the year after being discovered by an Australian patrol, wounded and half-mad, wandering in the Sinai after being ambushed by Bedouin. He had been trying to reach British lines with Absolom Feinberg, a poet who was the romantic soul of Nili and betrothed to Sarah’s younger sister, Rivka. Feinberg had been killed. After that they had started the boat pick-ups at Athlit.

  Looking back, Sarah thought her first meeting with Lawrence had not been particularly noteworthy apart from a disconcerting way the Englishman had of gazing steadfastly into people’s eyes so that you were either obliged to enter into some childish outstaring game with him or look the other way. When this happened even Aaron, Sarah had noticed, became fascinated with the contents of his coffee cup.

  At first Lawrence had brought his papers to their table and talked in a fairly desultory way. He had paid her, she thought, only polite attention and not really come alive at all until Aaron, at considerable expense to his own ego, asked him about the capture of Akaba. The little blond Englishman brightened up then and told them how his Bedouin troops had slowly tightened their grip around the port: crawling over boiling rocks to wear down the outlying posts with their sniping, needling the Turks to waste ammunition on phantoms lost in the heat haze. As he spoke Lawrence raised his hands above the table and mimed a man squeezing off a rifle shot – almost as if, or so it seemed to Sarah, they had never seen a weapon! To her added annoyance she had seen that her brother was looking at him with an expression that she could only describe as solemn respect – even grateful for this impromptu demonstration of weapons handling. She had found herself staring resolutely at the table top. But if he was aware of her irritation Lawrence did not show it.

  ‘Then we had this camel charge, you see.’

  Sarah looked up. Sure enough Lawrence was jigging up and down in his chair waving his right hand in the air. A scimitar? A lasso? A polo stick? She had tried to keep a straight face.

  ‘I was in the lead, firing from the saddle with my revolver.’

  (Ah, not a scimitar then.)

  ‘Suddenly my beast went down. Pole-axed. Shot from under me. It was as if I had hit an invisible fence. I thought every bone in my body was broken. Do you know what had happened?’

  To her fury she had found herself shaking her head like a little girl.

  ‘The bullet came from my own pistol. I had shot my favourite racing camel in the back of the head!’

  The sound of her high-pitched laughter had echoed around the café. It was only when Sarah saw that he was laughing just as much as she was that she began to revise her opinion of Major Lawrence.

  ‘There I was, curled up on the ground while the others broke around me like waves around a rock. All I could hear was the pounding of their hooves. I thought it was the end.’

  At this, they all laughed again as if what had happened was of no more consequence than a custard pie in the face. Sarah noticed that Lawrence looked at her again but this time it
was different. He was avoiding eye contact. It was a sly look of appraisal. ‘He knows,’ she had thought. ‘He knows all about me. He knows what I do.’

  As a matter of fact Lawrence knew no such thing at the time. He discovered it the next day when he mentioned that he had met Aaronsohn’s sister to Meinertzhagen, who had recently returned to Cairo from the forward intelligence headquarters they had set up just south of Gaza.

  ‘Plucky little thing,’ the intelligence officer had said.

  ‘From Palestine?’ Lawrence had asked, beginning to catch on.

  ‘Lives up around Haifa somewhere. Runs the network there now that her brother has left. We brought her out by ship to see her brother for a few days – that and other things. Where did you meet her?’

  After Lawrence told him Meinertzhagen flew into one of his dark rages. ‘Bloody pair of fools – both of them.’

  The Oxford scholar had smiled faintly at the tautology and this made Meinertzhagen angrier. ‘I don’t know what you’re smiling at. This city is full of spies and there’s her own brother parading her about café society as if she’s a ruddy debutante. It’s a wonder he didn’t stick a notice of her arrival in the Egyptian Gazette. As if we haven’t already let things slide far enough with him wandering about dressed up like a dog’s dinner. And as if she hasn’t got enough problems. What do they think they’re at? Where do they think they are? At the end of Brighton pier, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, that’s the trouble with us amateurs,’ Lawrence had said, pretending to be offended. ‘No sense of occasion.’

  Meinertzhagen had not been a bit abashed. ‘My dear fellow, some amateurs are more amateur than others. I think we’re going to have to keep that young lady safely amused for all our sakes.’

  So the twenty-nine-year-old archaeologist, research fellow of All Souls, an officer of the Arab Bureau on temporary attachment to the Hejaz Expeditionary Force, the retiring, the self-publicist, the heroic, the sadomasochist, the noble dreamer, the unmitigated liar was privy to Meinertzhagen’s schedule for Sarah Aaronsohn from the start. And he took full advantage of it.