‘Yes, yes. Of course. I’m sure. It will be very interesting. Come and sit down.’
I sat down, exercising my tongue rapidly and blowing out my cheeks, and watching curiously as a bit of further trouble developed with her unquestionably deranged escort. He seemed to be trying to shift to another table. Shoshana seemed to be trying to restrain him. They settled in the end on shifting a couple of ashtrays instead. A strange chap, ashtray fixated; no doubt to do with his conjunctival eye condition, now chronic. But no question the night was developing in unusually interesting ways. He’d left a single ashtray on the table, but as I began to whistle the catchy little Yemeni tune, he removed that as well. I affected not to notice, scattering my ash on the table as I listened to the song.
The fellow’s cavortings with his handkerchief, which he began flapping about the table, seriously interfered with my enjoyment of the number, but I was able to follow it fairly well, which was more, I prided myself, than most of the revellers in this room could do.
A tricky dialect, the Yemeni, and the words of the song didn’t mean what they said. It was one of a tradition of reversal songs – the Jewish minority of Yemen, oppressed by their Arab masters, often having to conceal their sentiments, even in song – and since this was a duet involving a lovers’ meeting and subsequent tiff, it was trickier than ever. By the end when the girl, in a rage, was telling the boy to clear off, and he was electing to understand her, in the spirit of the rest of the song, as meaning him to stay, the fun was pretty uproarious. I seemed to be appreciating it uproariously, having to correct them on only minor points of grammar. Excellent actors, too, the girl particularly convincing, eyes flashing as her fury mounted, voice powerfully audible even above my own. It wasn’t till she came across and struck me that I realized she wasn’t acting.
Obviously some ridiculous misunderstanding, as I was at pains to point out, in my near-perfect Yemeni. I seemed to be pointing it out to the manager, who was escorting us to the door.
I brooded over this in some bewilderment as we rode back in the taxi. Everything seemed to have become exceptionally nilly-willyish of late, Vayishlach-like, reversal-song-like; otherwise back to front, topsy-turvy, arse uppards. Something bothered me about this. I wondered what it was, staring out into Carmel Street. The cab turned the corner of Elyashiv, and I was suddenly aware the girl had been giggling surreptitiously for some time. I gave her a responsive snigger back and affectionately pressed her knee, almost at once receiving a paralysing kick on the ankle as I realized too late the knee had been Shimshon’s.
Reversal problems were still bothering me in the flat. I seemed to be backing discreetly out of the living-room to leave them alone, backing into my own room, backing on my flaming back. What kind of conjunctival clot had left a mattress lying about in the dark? I pulled myself up off the mattress, rested momentarily on the bed and closed my eyes to reorientate. Almost immediately a dreadful queasiness came over me. I half sat up, but found this even worse. It suddenly occurred to me there was nowhere to be sick here except in the chest of drawers, so I lay down again and tried to control it. I must have succeeded.
Shimshon was at no pains to conceal his waking presence next morning. A sharp kick on the bed, which nearly had me out of it, announced he was ready to return to the south. I opened slit eyes. He was looking down at me in the grey dawn, abnormally large hands holding an Uzzi sub-machine gun, eyes distinctly conjunctival.
‘Going off now?’ I said huskily.
‘Yes. I’m sorry to have wakened you. But since you are awake,’ he said heavily, ‘perhaps I will say one thing. Shoshana and I will be married.’
‘I know. She told me.’
‘I wanted to be sure you knew.’
‘Of course. Congratulations.’ My head ached cataclysmically.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll see you again.’
‘I don’t suppose so.’
He shouldered his Uzzi. ‘So. Shalom.’
He was holding out his hand and I took it. He seemed intent on leaving his mark there, smiling slightly as he slowly pulverized it. I couldn’t feel the hand at all as I took it back. I could only feel my head. Presently I didn’t even feel that.
4
I woke with the feeling that everybody had better be very gentle with me today. I felt monolithic, unarticulated, in grave danger of shattering. Last night had been a mistake, of course, and yet there had been something about it … What had there been about it? It seemed best not to think too hard. Dangerous stresses could be set up by thought. The mind twanged and fluttered like a cat’s cradle already without any weight being put on it.
I got very carefully off the bed in a rising threnody of springs and stood for a moment with a hand on each side of my head, directing it about the room. The angle of vision seemed to have narrowed significantly. The eye of God was pitiless this morning.
‘Can I come in?’ She’d heard the springs.
‘Yes.’
She looked a bit subdued herself.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Strange,’ I said.
‘Shimshon has gone.’
‘I know.’
‘He’s disturbed, poor Shimshon.’
Demented would have been a better word, I thought, recalling the red-eyed phantom of the dawn.
‘Will you be ready to go out soon?’
‘Go out?’ My voice seemed to be vocalizing distantly like some middle-register foghorn. I listened to it curiously. ‘Go out where?’
‘We’ll have coffee in the street. Mr Benyamini below has a bad mind. He knows we’re here together. My mother has to work today, but tomorrow she’ll stay.’
‘Ay see,’ I heard the foghorn curiously sounding.
‘Have a wash, then. We’ll go.’
We went to Rothschild Boulevard and sat and had a few cups of black coffee. I had a couple of brioches as well and presently began to feel less detached.
‘You were terrible last night.’
‘Yes.’ Vagrant snatches of it had come back to me over the brioches. I sat and mused gently. Something had got into me last night, no doubt about it. As through a mist, I could recall my correction of the Yemenis’ grammar, the heady feeling of being in possession of all available knowledge. The recollection, strangely, brought no familiar heartburning. Odd. Very odd. Odder still, vestigial feelings of knowing my onions still persisted, together with a calm conviction that when the present disorders should pass all would be found to be well. Why? No use to inquire now. The mind would have its own no doubt deluded reasons, I thought, nodding slowly at my coffee.
‘Do your stitches hurt?’ she said, misinterpreting the nod.
‘No. Not really.’
‘You’ll have to have them looked at. We’ll go to a doctor here.’
‘I’ve got to take this fellow’s hat back.’ Snatches of my tango recurred then, together with thoughts of the doctor’s father-in-law of blessed memory. The old chap’s gear was certainly having a turn or two in its latter days.
‘What do you want to do now?’
She was in her tuned-in mood of inquiry. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. We decided in the end what I wanted was a little walk, and we had one, down the swarming lanes off Carmel. The day was assuming its own dream-like character, outside time. About two o’clock I had a sudden mad craving for a plate of cold borsht and a tomato. We found a place and I had them, the girl watching with some amusement and attending to a much heartier plate herself.
‘Shimshon likes such little meals,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you would.’
‘A plate of borsht wouldn’t go far with Shimshon.’
‘Well. He’s a very unusual person. Of course he doesn’t talk much –’
‘Thinks a lot, though, eh?’
‘And acts,’ she said with some acerbity. ‘Don’t be humorous about Shimshon.’
‘What is it he does?’
‘I don’t know. He won’t talk about it. I know it’s secret and sometimes dangerous. Once he had to cro
ss the border. Maybe he’s done it many times.’
‘In the south?’
‘I don’t know. He used to say the south.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If it’s something they don’t want you to know, they say it’s in the south. It’s all desert there, so who knows?’
‘Doesn’t he ring you up?’
‘Of course. It’s a military line and they never say from where. All I know, sometimes he says he’s coming and five or six hours later he arrives – whether from the north, the south, I don’t know. Probably north, since he wants me to think south. I don’t ask now. I know he can’t speak plainly.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ I said, spoon poised and staring at her.
‘What?’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’
‘Something’s wrong with the soup?’
‘It’s back to front!’
The proprietor was eating a plate of klops at the next table and he got up and had a look at my soup, a bit sharply.
‘It’s what?’ he said.
‘Back to front. It shouldn’t be north. It should be south. I need a map,’ I told him urgently.
‘You need a sleep,’ he said, after examining both the soup and me again, and went back to his klops.
‘Yes, come, we’ll go now,’ the girl said with some anxiety. ‘We’ll go back, never mind Mr Benyamini.’
‘I need a frigging map! I need it now, this very minute, right away, instantly!’ I declaimed, dropping the spoon in a frenzy.
‘Yes, yes, we’ll get a map. We’ll get it in the street,’ she said, wiping borsht off her blouse. ‘Come now.’
She still hadn’t latched on when we were outside, so I filled her in, boutons flashing in a nuclear burst of revelation. They’d flashed last night, of course, under cover of the stony Avdat. They’d quite possibly flashed the night before under cover of the concussion.
Vayishlach, reversal songs, and now today Shimshon … an old and continuing tradition of people forced by events to speak unplainly, to say the opposite. As the priest had said it. He hadn’t gone north from Jerusalem; he’d gone south. No marble in the north; plenty of it in the south. No identifiable rock peaks in the north; quantities in the south. And no reason why Northern Command troops should raise an eyebrow in the north – but every reason in the south.
Of course! It wasn’t enough simply to decipher the coded document. You had to decipher the man himself. You had to strip the layers off the onion skin. He’d set out to deceive. And he’d still deceived, two thousand years later. He’d got the measure of bloody old Sidqui, anyway, and bloody old Sidqui had led us all astray.
The girl had paled a bit under this incoherent flow, and she began looking distractedly about her. ‘A map, a map,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where we can get a map here.’
‘Where are we?’
‘The Carmel market. There are no book shops … Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Would any map do? Like a bible map?’
‘Of course it would do. Certainly it would do. I want a bible map!’
‘This way. My father’s shop. He has some.’
We nipped down the back doubles to it. It was a disintegrating bicycle-shed type structure, wedged in the entry to an alley. It was locked. I nearly kicked the door down in my fury, screaming at him to come out
‘It’s no good. He does this. He just locks up and goes to synagogue. What time is it?’
‘Three o’clock.’
‘He’ll be at mincha, the afternoon service.’
‘How long for?’
‘I don’t know. Mincha doesn’t last long. But it’s always possible,’ she said, looking nervously at me, ‘that he’ll decide to stay on for ma’ariv, the evening service. He often –’
‘Where’s the synagogue?’
‘Right opposite.’
‘Go and get him out!’
‘But he’s with his cronies. I don’t like to –’
‘All right,’ I said, and gritted my teeth, and went across myself.
He wasn’t in the synagogue; he was in the adjoining bet ha-midrash, the study hall, with a dozen other little old men, taking in snuff and the words of Obadiah, whose prophetical portion was the Sephardic one for that week. The old buffer was delighted as ever to see me. ‘Hello, bocher! You picked just the right moment. Settle an argument. The phrase, “How are his hidden places sought out
‘I want a map,’ I said.
‘A map?’ he said uncertainly. ‘It doesn’t need a map. The prophet is speaking –’
‘Give me a map!’ I snarled.
‘One of the roll-up maps, for the children’s classes,’ the girl said, having hastily come in behind me. ‘You have them in the shop. It’s to settle another point.’
‘Ah! A map. To settle a point. Of course. But we’ve reached here such an interesting –’
‘The map!’ I said through clenched teeth, and would have picked him up and run across the road with him, if he hadn’t come then. But he did come, and half the study circle with him, to help discuss this further interesting point.
The interior of the shop was a choking camphorated darkness, revealed, when he lit a dangerous-looking oil lamp, to be in a state of post-holocaust confusion. The stock, of prayer shawls, shawl bags, phylacteries, books, vest fringes, mezzuzahs and skull caps, was in a single heap as if flung there by some passing congregation in flight The eye of God, however, the twin of the one in my room, was keeping an eye on things, and perhaps enabled him to find where the maps were buried; which he did after some minutes, while I waited sneezing evilly and treading on various old men in my agitation.
‘Here we are. Maps,’ the old man said, rather surprised. They came in individual cardboard boxes and he blew the dust off and took one out. ‘Four pounds. Or half a pound English.’
‘Father, he doesn’t want to buy it!’
‘Of course. Would I sell him? It’s just a matter of interest. It’s very reasonable. For a map,’ he said.
‘Very reasonable,’ a couple of the old men said. All of them were trampling about pricing the stock, and finding all of it very reasonable.
I took the map with trembling hands and unrolled it. It was marked in tribal divisions.
‘Have you got a ruler?’
‘A ruler? I don’t think I’ve got a ruler. Do I sell rulers?’ he asked the girl.
He did not sell rulers, but one of the old men had a tape measure with him, and I managed with that.
It went thirty centimetres from Jerusalem to Mount Tabor in the north, so I swung it round and found thirty centimetres from Jerusalem to the south. It landed in the Wilderness of Zin. Could there be a habitable place in this wilderness?
There was a habitable place. There was the oasis of Hatseva; the ancient watering place of Hatseva.
10 The Wilderness of Zin
Southward. [Joshuah 15.1]
1
We met Agrot there about four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He’d been driving since six from Nazareth, across country almost cut off by floods, and he was wet, tired and bad-tempered. The oasis of Hatseva was, as oases go, far from being romantic. A rather dreary though dense tangle of eucalyptus and other flora, it sat weirdly in a featureless expanse of geological rubble, at the moment lashed by rain and howling winds.
When last used to any purpose it had been a Roman military post, and today it was an Israeli one. From midday onwards, Shoshana and I had sat in a little prefab hut, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and making conversation with the commander, a keen bible collector. He was hunting around for ‘a really nice specimen of an early Latin Vulgate’, misplaced somewhere in his kit, when Agrot arrived. Agrot had a private word with him, and then a few minutes later we were sitting alone in another room.
I’d swapped my shtreiml for a large black sou’-wester, and he seemed to find nothing odd in my sitting around in it. He simply said brusquely, ‘You don’t look so bad. I’ve got news.’
It concerned the Arab who
’d photographed me in Nazareth. The Nazareth police had picked him up late Friday night. They’d picked up a few other street photographers as well, only this one had been clot enough to have the negative still in his possession. By breakfast time Saturday seven of his associates were in the clink with him. Quite a lot had been found out by now.
I said, ‘What is it – a Jordanian government network?’
‘It’s a syndicate. A private syndicate.’
It was a Jordanian-Syrian syndicate, started apparently in 1961, when a sharp upturn in scroll prices had attracted business brains in Amman and Damascus. One of the members, an Amman bookseller, had contacts with the Ta’amireh Arabs, and had been able to organize a first look at anything new that was found. They’d bought and sold three or four things at very much better than normal academic prices before the priest’s scroll had appeared – to present them with a poser. They hadn’t dared take a normal option on it – as they’d hitherto been doing before raising a buyer – in case it somehow got away from them. In the end they’d had to buy it, outright, for £9,000.
‘Who advised them?’
‘Sidqui. He was the best they could get. Apparently the earlier stuff had gone abroad, illegally, so they couldn’t trust anyone attached to the university. Sidqui was a good bet. He’d got grievances against the university. They’d retired him early because of ill health. He was fine for them.’
‘For us, too,’ I said jovially. ‘Well, now they’re barking up the wrong tree –’
‘Let me finish,’ he said wearily. ‘There’s the military angle.’
The military angle came from the Syrian end. One of the Damascus backers was connected with the so-called Palestine Liberation Army, some of whose more militant members were springing the raids from Jordan. The syndicate couldn’t buy themselves a raid, but they could buy advance information and also the right to participate if necessary.
‘It’s proved necessary,’ Agrot said. ‘A bunch of their men is coming in with a raiding party this week – either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, according to weather. No – please,’ he said, as I tried to speak. ‘Just listen a minute. I’m very tired. I was up all night interrogating these men, and I’ve been driving all day. We’ll take a helicopter back – I’ve asked the commander to whistle one up. The roads are impossible. We have to be back there tonight.’
A Long Way to Shiloh Page 14