O Jerusalem mr-5

by Laurie R. King

  The desert sparkled in the fresh morning, washed clean and without a cloud in the vast sky. Patches of snow lay on the highest hills, melting quickly when the sun hit them. Water pooled and ran down the wadi below us, and a bright haze of green lay over the rocky waste, with here or there a wildflower, to all appearances brought up miraculously overnight. The mules lipped up tender blades of young green grass as we went, their packs steaming gently as the sun gained warmth, and the world was a very contented place.

  Except for our guides. Ali was silent as he walked, and Mahmoud seemed even more glum than usual. When I asked Holmes if he had any idea why they might be downhearted, he shook his head, and I shrugged my shoulders.

  Meantime, the Promised Land was unfolding in beauty around us, my stomach was full, and my feet did not hurt for the first morning in what seemed like many. It is an amazing thing, the difference to one’s powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make. I seemed to be seeing my surroundings anew, including my companion.

  “Your beard is coming along nicely, Holmes,” I commented after a while. “Does it itch?”

  “It begins to be tolerable. The first ten days are always the worst.”

  “And are you wearing kohl around your eyes?” We had all taken extra care with our toilette that morning, both as a necessity, having spent the night in close proximity to a filthy, goaty, smoke-impregnated tent, and because we were going into a small city filled with curious eyes. Ali had curled his moustaches with care; Mahmoud had beaten the dust from his abayya; my boots were brushed off against a corner of the tent, and my hair was securely knotted into its shapeless turban.

  “Every well-dressed Bedouin wears kohl.”

  “It’s quite dashing. Actually, you’re beginning to look remarkably ferocious.”

  “Thank you. Now repeat the conversation we have just had, in Arabic.”

  We struggled through another lesson in my new tongue. I had now reached a state of fluency roughly equal to that of a braindamaged three-year-old, and had yet to say a word in the language to anyone but my companions, but I had begun to catch whole phrases in conversations without having consciously to pick over the words looking for meaning, rather like Ali picking over the lentils for stones. In another week, perhaps, I might find myself actually thinking in scraps of the tongue. Until that time it would be exhausting work, this language with five different gutturals, six dentals, eight pronouns, and thirty-six means of forming the plural.

  In halting Arabic I informed Holmes that the rocks were red and the small flower was white, that flies were a plague from Allah and that the mules stank. He in turn described the holy city of Mecca (forbidden to infidels such as he) and told me about the true Bedu, complete nomads who survived on camel’s milk and goat’s meat in the deep desert, who lived for horses and for raiding and who looked with scorn on any who tilled the earth. I took the thin opening and slipped with relief into English for a while.

  “Your accent is Bedouin, is it not? It seems smoother than Ali’s,” I noted.

  “I learnt the language in Arabia proper, not among the fringe peoples. Mahmoud’s accent is quite good.”

  “But you still say they’re English?” It would, I reflected, explain the bacon.

  “Without a doubt. However, I should not mention it in their hearing, if I were you.”

  Holmes dropped his voice at this last remark, since our two companions had halted to wait for us. When we were before them, Mahmoud spoke, to my surprise, and in English.

  “Because the wadis are now full we must go into the city by the road. Amir must remain absolutely silent. He must not speak, no matter the provocation.”

  “You are expecting provocation?” I asked. He ignored me.

  “The one thing we must avoid is a full-body search of Amir. Even among the English, there would be consequences were a woman to be found dressed as a man. Remember: Silence.”

  He was curiously impressive, was Mahmoud, not unlike Holmes in his intensity and his complete self-control. I followed behind, subdued and not terribly interested in Arabic lessons; After half an hour or so we dipped down into a small wadi, and there we paused while Ali took a wrapped parcel from inside his robe, added to it his pearl-handled revolver and another, smaller parcel from Mahmoud, pulled the rifle from deep in one of the packs, and held his hand out for the revolver Holmes carried. Last of all he unstrapped his gold wrist-watch (the hands of which had not moved in six days), and he wrapped it all in a sheet of oiled cloth from one of the saddle-bags and secreted the whole bundle in a niche, arranging some rocks in front to keep it in place and hidden, but making certain that we saw where he was putting the armory. Natives such as ourselves were not encouraged to bear arms.

  The area in back of us was a network of wadis and hills, including the (now flowing) watercourse of the Wadi el Saba, up which the British Army had made its decisive push for Beersheva in October of 1917. To our right were the remnants of the Turkish trenches, dug into the flat plain and lined by barbed wire, lengths of which remained, rusted and lethal. We gave the defences wide berth, and soon came to the rutted track to the coast that passed for a road, built originally by the Turks, used now to link the Beersheva garrison with the coastal railway up out of Egypt at Rafa. A year earlier, when Beersheva and Gaza were the front-line cities of British occupation, the road would have been an ant’s trail of military activity. Now the town was rapidly slumping back towards its usual somnolent state, and if the lorries still came and went all day and half the night, they did so with less urgency.

  Unfortunately, this state of affairs meant that the soldiers stationed there, already disgruntled at having to wait for demobilisation as the weeks after Armistice crawled into months, felt both left out and itching for something to do, and at the check-point into Beersheva it quickly became apparent why Ali and Mahmoud were so apprehensive, and why they had rid themselves of their weapons.

  Half a mile from the check-point, Ali guided the mules to the side of the road and inexplicably set about making tea. Lorries rumbled up and down, laden camels plodded softly along, and we sat a stone’s throw from the road, sipping our tea. It was not a very leisurely tea break, however; both of our Arabs were wound tight, and sat on their heels smoking and drinking and never taking their eyes off the point where the road dwindled into the western horizon.

  Without warning Mahmoud rose, tossed the contents of his just-filled glass of tea into the fire, and snatched mine from my lips to do the same. Ali, moving easily but wasting no time, gathered up all the equipment, shovelled it unceremoniously into a saddle-bag, and cinched it shut. Within minutes we were on the way east into the city, and because at Mahmoud’s insistence I had removed my attention-getting spectacles, I had absolutely no idea what they had seen to spark such movement.

  The bored soldiers at the check-point were pleased to see us, and obviously recognised our guides.

  “Why, if it ain’t our old pals Tweedledee and Tweedledum. And look, Davy, they got some friends today. Ain’t that nice?”

  “Even wogs have friends, Charlie.”

  “Too true, Davy, especially when they’re pretty as the skinny one.”

  It was fortunate that the dye on my skin obscured any blood that rose on my cheeks, because their comments soon escalated, becoming remarkably graphic. Nonetheless, all four of us stood with our eyes on the ground until the two soldiers tired of talk, and one of them strolled over and slipped the point of his bayonet under the pack ropes. The mules skittered backwards to the full extent of their leads as our possessions rained down about their hoofs. In two minutes everything we owned was spread on the ground for the inspection of His Majesty’s troops, who trod up and down and kicked the coffee-pots and tent pegs across the mud. They seemed most disappointed to find nothing more lethal than a paring knife, and I shuddered to think what would have happened to us had we retained our guns.

  They were just tiring of this when I became aware of the approach of what Ali and Mahmoud had s
een earlier: an entire caravan of Bedouin—men, women, and children, camels, dogs, horses, goats, and sheep. There was even a lone chicken, squawking in agitation from a rough cage tied atop one of the camels. The front of the caravan stopped dead at the check-point but the tail continued to move forward, spreading out until it blocked the roadway in both directions. Lorries ground to a halt, drivers leant out of their windows and shouted curses, and an armoured car, horn blaring, pushed its way through the crowd on the verge, trying to leave the town. The two British soldiers, forced to abandon us before they had finished their fun, contented themselves with loud remarks about the filthy thieving habits of the bloody wogs, then turned away.

  Ali bent to retrieve a fragile porcelain cup. As the soldier named Davy walked up the line, before any of us could react, he slipped his rifle from his shoulder and casually swung it around to swat Ali a tremendous crack on the head with the gun’s heavy butt. Ali collapsed amongst the kitchenware. I took one furious step forward, and felt Holmes’ hand freeze like a vice on my upper arm.

  Fortunately neither soldier had noticed our movements, and they continued on their way to harass the camel caravan, but Mahmoud had seen my instinctive move and frowned at me thoughtfully for an instant before he bent to help Ali, who was already sitting up, holding his head and moaning loudly.

  It seemed to take forever to bundle everything back onto the mules and slip away before the soldiers could return to us, but we made our escape into the streets of the town. Near the Turkish railway station we stopped to tuck a few loose bits back into the tenuous hold of Mahmoud’s knots. The precarious load would not have lasted an hour on the road, but apparently we were not going far. Holmes and I helped Mahmoud by bodily lifting the bulge of one pack while he looped a few more lengths of rope about the whole thing, mule and all. When the knot was tied he paused to look over the mule’s back at me.

  “When the soldier hit Ali,” he said in a low voice and with perfect English diction, “it looked as if you meant to attack the man.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

  “But you would have gone to All’s defence? Physically?”

  “Under different circumstances, certainly.”

  He did not seem angry at my disobedience, just puzzled. Finally he said, “But women do not fight.”

  “This one does,” I answered. He held my gaze, then looked sideways at Holmes.

  “This one does,” my mentor confirmed.

  “Wallah!” Mahmoud muttered with a shake of his head, recited something in Arabic, and went to help Ali to his feet. I looked at Holmes with a raised eyebrow.

  “From the Koran, I believe,” he supplied. “He used the same passage the other day; it seems to be weighing heavily on his mind, for some reason. Loosely translated his words meant, ‘Would Allah make a woman to be covered in ornaments and powerless in a fight?’ A rhetorical question, of course.”

  Of course.

  FIVE

  ج

  And Joshua the son of Nun secretly sent two men out of Shittim as spies, saying, “Go and look over the land.”

  —

  JOSHUA 2:1

  Beersheva, the place of oath, the settlement whence Abraham and Isaac set out on their ominous journey into the hill city of Jerusalem for the father’s willing sacrifice of his beloved son. Before the guns of August had broken into their ages-old way of life in 1914, the residents were only slightly more numerous than in the days when Hagar and Ishmael had been turned out into the wilderness, and only marginally more technological. Now the town was an uncomfortable mixture of dust-coloured hovels older than the hills, a couple of modern buildings constructed by the Turks to demonstrate their determination to retain this border outpost, and a number of brisk, efficient structures the incoming army had thrown up to house its personnel.

  Our destination was an ancient inn at the southern end of town, a single-storey mud-brick establishment of numerous rooms leaning shoulder-to-shoulder around a central courtyard. The instant we came onto the premises a shouted conversation began between Ali (increasing my respect for the hardness of his skull) and several men who appeared from nowhere to seize our mules and lead them off.

  Halfway through the courtyard, an older man emerged from a doorway and swept up to Mahmoud, kissing him three times on his cheek to welcome him. He then took Ali’s hand, clasping it briefly to his chest, and greeted Holmes and me with less familiarity but equal enthusiasm. We stood in a cluster for some minutes before he noticed that Ali was not his usual vigorous self, and on hearing of our mishap at the check-point, he threw up his hands in horror, bemoaning Ali’s mistreatment at the hands of those sons of dogs soldiers (or such was Holmes’ translation of the epithets) and examining the admittedly alarming knot concealed by Ali’s kujfiyah. At Mahmoud’s firm suggestion the landlord finally whisked his shaky guest off to a bed.

  The shouting contest continued unabated even in Ali’s absence, touching down occasionally on Mahmoud, who would grunt a monosyllabic answer that seemed to make no discernible impression on the questioner. They ignored Holmes and me completely, but led us all cheerfully towards the back corner of the inn. We were ushered in, the flimsy door was shut carefully behind us, and I soon was given the opportunity to add to my vocabulary the words for various vermin, as well as a few expressive adjectives.

  The door flew open, crashing off its primitive hinges, and half a dozen lads staggered in carrying all our possessions aside from the livestock, which when deposited on the floor left us with only one room to move in, a room currently occupied by the snoring Ali. Mahmoud caught one of the boys by the shoulder, pointed to the tent sprawling massively sodden across the floor, and told him to take it up and spread it on the roof to dry. Out went the roomful of damp, smoky, goaty hair; the cheerful voices retreated, and were heard from the open window, until finally thumps and footsteps overhead told of the task being carried out.

  Next through the doorway came a meal, a platter heaped with rice and hunks of tough mutton (a change from the tough goat’s meat we had eaten most nights) and a stack of bread, with mugs of laban and bowls of dates and dried figs. The lads dribbled water over the fingertips of our right hands from a long-spouted pot, stood there talking over our heads for a while, and then went off, politely propping the door back in the doorway as they left. The three of us ate, making balls of meat and rice from the platter and tossing them back into our throats. I was gaining confidence at eating with my less dextrous right hand, but Mahmoud, long practised in the technique of eating without chewing, finished first. He wiped his greasy fingers on his robe, went to check on Ali, whose stentorian snoring never paused, and then came back.

  “He sleeps,” he said unnecessarily. “You remain here; I will return.” He wrestled himself out the door and left.

  Holmes and I looked at each other, wrapped ourselves in our abayyas, and went to sleep on top of the baggage.

  Ali woke us late in the afternoon, complaining mightily of a sore head and grousing at the cold food he had to eat. (I shuddered at the little footprints on the platter and averted my eyes.) Before long Mahmoud swept in.

  “One hour,” he pronounced. Ali immediately stood up, deposited the platter and empty bowls outside the doorway, and he and Mahmoud began to turn out and reorganise our possessions. Two cups, a bowl, and the smallest brass coffee-pot, its handle snapped off under Charlie’s boots, were set to one side, and everything else was bundled neatly into a surprisingly small pile. When the tent was carried in a short time later, smelling of sunshine, it too was reduced to a snug roll in the corner.

  Holmes and I sat on our heels out of the way and watched.

  Our house restored to order, Mahmoud reached for his sheepskin coat. We made haste to do the same, and followed him out of the door.

  The early evening air was sharp with the smoke of cook fires and the day’s warmth was fast departing, as it always does in the desert. We walked in a leisurely fashion through the mud-brick town, past two wells bus
y with women and a mosque in a park, through a whirl of children playing what appeared to be an Arabic variation on cricket, and ignored by soldiers and glanced at by the native residents. Finally we entered a large and very new-looking cemetery—a military cemetery, full of the dead from Britain and Australia and New Zealand, men who had died ensuring that this, the southernmost town of the ancient Israelites, should be the first town prised from Turkish hands.

  In the smoky gloom of dusk, we strolled to the end of the sad, neat little park, and then turned to retrace our steps. On our way into the cemetery we had avoided a canvas-sided army lorry that stood near the entrance—hardly surprising that Ali gave it a wide berth, as its driver was behind the wheel with a glowing cigarette. The only surprising thing was that we had not been intercepted and thrown out on our ears the instant we appeared, four untidy Arab natives daring to defile a British military cemetery. Indeed, as we approached the lorry a second time, coming closer to it in the near darkness, the driver’s door opened. I braced myself for a quick fade into the twilight, but to my relief, instead of abuse, the head that came out merely said, “You’re alone,” and withdrew.

  The motor spluttered and roared into life, the driver’s door slammed shut, and we had barely time to tumble after Mahmoud up and into the back of the lorry before it was in gear and moving.

  We stayed behind the canvas, though the back flap revealed the town fading behind us. The check-point on the Gaza road slowed us briefly, but the sentries did not bother to look in the back. Soon we were bouncing down the pitted road, clinging to the sides in an attempt to take the edge off the worst of the jolts. The night became colder and the road got no better, for what seemed a long time, after which we turned abruptly to the right, and the road grew worse.

  Ten minutes of this, and the lorry dived into a pothole, gave an alarming crack from somewhere in front, and the engine died.