—Thank you, sir. Gladly.
—He is indeed. Born in Jerusalem, as was his father. His grandfather came here as a young man from Greece. Mind you, you don’t easily find such Jews, because Jews aren’t naturally born in Palestine as Englishmen are in England and Welshmen are in Wales. Most of the Jews you see here are newcomers, and those who are born here usually leave. Dashed few stay on, and those who do are rather highly regarded, more by others, I daresay, than by themselves, which is rather a boost to their self-esteem, although perhaps not as much as all that...
—Right you are, sir. You would think, wouldn’t you, that Jerusalem would be for a Jew what London is for an Englishman; but the East End of London has more Jews in it than this entire country. I suppose that’s because London is too substantial a place to carry about with you, whereas the Jews take Jerusalem wherever they go, and the more of them take it with them, the lighter it becomes...
—Up to a point, sir, up to a point. It’s even true—why deny it?—of my own self. But my home is Manchester and the city of my dreams is London, and even if I have a warm place for this town in my heart, it’s for the idea of it, not the reality. It’s really quite extraordinary, sir, how, although I’ve been here for several months, the idea and the reality remain entirely separate.
—I appreciate that, sir ... Well, then: why don’t I sketch his biography on a thumbnail. His grandparents came here in the middle of the last century from Salonika, in the days when it was still part of Turkey, a childless couple who hoped that settling in Jerusalem might grant them their prayers for a child. And so it did, and our defendant’s father, Moses Hayyim Mani, was conceived to his mother Tamara and his father Joseph Mani, who died before his son was born. Moses Hayyim was raised with no end of love by his mother, and grew up to be such a handsome, captivating lad that the British consul in Jerusalem, who was a neighbor of theirs, took him under his wing. He was a great Bible-reader, this consul, and perhaps it was because he saw in little Moses a metempsychosis of his biblical namesake that he decided to make him a British subject; in any case, for his thirteenth birthday he gave the boy a British passport as a present, which you’ll find in this file here, Colonel. It’s a rather unusual document, written in an ornate hand such as you never see anymore, with a lovely photograph of a child with the most candid, trusting eyes. It even has a number, and we’ve cabled London to run it down and see what series it belongs to, because it was not the common practice of British consuls to grant British nationality to children for being adorable ... Be that as it may, however, the boy was pleased as punch to be a British subject and took his gift-wrapped passport with him everywhere, reciting Byron and Shelley and retelling The Canterbury Tales amid the pestilent poverty of this city, since his mother made a point of his studying English at a mission school. Then he was sent to Beirut, to study medicine at the American University. He was back within a year, homesick for both mother and Jerusalem; was persuaded to return; somehow—although just barely, it would seem—persisted in his studies while revisiting Jerusalem every few months; and finally took his mother back to Beirut, where he pressed on doggedly out of loyalty to his patron the consul until, at the age of twenty-seven, he received his medical degree. By now it was time to marry him off before he became a confirmed bachelor—at which point the consul had the idea of finding him a British wife to make him more English than ever. It took a while to locate one; but in the end he hit upon another orphan, a woman slightly older than Mani, who was descended from an Anglo-Jewish family that had made a living as camp followers of Napoleon’s army until the Egyptian Campaign, when it was taken prisoner by the Turks, from whom the French forgot to ransom it. Eventually, it ransomed itself and stayed on in the Orient; and so, in 1880, the two of them were wed. They had a baby girl who died directly after childbirth, and then a second girl who died, and then a boy, all because of incompatible blood; and indeed, when our defendant came along in 1887, he seemed of a mind to die too; but this time the Manis put their foot down; they fought day and night to save him until he had no choice but to live; and two years later a sister was born who survived too. By now the doctor had been through so many postnatal crises that it occurred to him to open a small lying-in hospital of his own—and so in the early 1890s, when Jews began building outside the walled city, he bought the house in Abraham’s Vineyard; found a tough old Swedish woman, an old maid from Malmo who had come to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage, failed to find God, and taken up free thought and midwivery; installed some beds; and ordered the latest equipment from France, including a large mirror in which the mothers could watch themselves giving birth. Then he sat back and waited for the fair sex of Jerusalem to knock at his gate. At first he got only the fallen ones: women of ill repute, compromised young ladies, nuns in the family way, pilgrimesses of dubious virtue. The Swedish midwife, who was quite cunning and resourceful, delivered each of them with hardly a labor pain, as if she took it all upon herself, and after a while Dr. Mani’s surgery developed such a reputation that mothers-to-be began flocking to it from all over. Our defendant’s father became rather the man-about-town: a debonair charmer, popular with the ladies and well liked by everyone; an excellent host, much-sought-after guest, and honorable member of sundry deputations. At about this time he became an ardent Zionist and admirer of Dr. Herzl, appointed himself a delegate to all the Zionist congresses, and left the trusty Swede to mind the shop, arriving only at the last minute even if he was in Jerusalem, just in time to give the bawling baby a cheery slap on the back, joke with its mother, snip the umbilical cord, remove the afterbirth, and help decide on a name. His own mother, to whom he was unfailingly gallant, was always at his side, putting his wife in her shadow, while the little boy and his sister ran about among the beds. In the summer of 1899 the doctor went off to one of his congresses in Europe and came back with two Jewish youngsters from a small Polish town near Cracow, a sister and brother. Our defendant remembers them well, although he didn’t understand their language. The brother was a doctor, the sister an attractive young woman; Dr. Mani sought to interest the former in his clinic and the latter in himself, since he had fallen madly in love with her as only an older man can with a young girl whom he has not time to court and seeks only to devour. The less devoured she wished to be, the more he dogged her footsteps, and before long all Jerusalem knew of his great passion, since Mani the Elder, unlike Mani the Younger, was not at all diffident about his feelings. It was indeed quite an infamous scandal ... and when the two young Polish Jews made up their minds to return home despite the doctor’s pleas that they remain in Jerusalem, he followed them to Jaffa, sailed from there to Beirut with them, and vanished. It took several weeks to discover that he had been killed in a ghastly accident in the railway station. He was fifty years old, and by the time the corpse was identified and brought to Jerusalem for burial, it was autumn.
—Yes, sir. I gathered all this information from the defendant himself, although I was able to corroborate it from other sources. I’m dreadfully sorry to be taking so much of your time, but I have my reasons ... I assure you that I do...
—Thank you, sir. All this was nearly twenty years ago. But can there be any statute of limitations when we seek to trace, through the maze of their origins, the roots of treachery and espionage so as to keep them from spreading their rank weeds? The family was stunned by the disaster; their benefactor, the consul, was long dead; the lying-in hospital was dealt a mortal blow. For a while the Swedish midwife tried keeping it up, at first openly and then clandestinely, since the authorities revoked its license after Dr. Mani’s death; there were debts to be paid too, so that part of the equipment had to be sold and some of the rooms rented out to pilgrims; and gradually, the women of Jerusalem stopped coming to give birth there. That Christmas the city was flooded by Christian pilgrims who had come to mark the new century, and the faithful midwife suddenly regained her faith and returned with them to her native land. In December 1899 our defendant was twelve years old; he had alw
ays been an independent lad, even when his father was alive, and now he became even more so. If you try to picture him for a moment, sir, as I can, you’ll see a thin, black-haired boy with glasses and a dark complexion like his mother’s, a moody youngster who daydreamed and even talked to himself. In late December of that year the winter finally arrived; everywhere there were church bells and parades of Russian pilgrims through the streets; the two centuries, one coming and one going, were a source of universal excitement. And then one afternoon, so he told me, young Mani went down to the former hospital on the ground floor and was startled to find a young woman in travail lying on a bed, one of those Jewish adventuresses who had come to Palestine from Europe to live in the new Jewish farming villages, partly out of ideological conviction and partly to run away from home. She had reached Jerusalem on her last legs, with the address of the lying-in hospital, not knowing that it was defunct; had found no one there; and had lain down on a bed. It was afternoon; the boy’s mother, sister, and grandmother had gone to see the processions and had not come home yet; no one was there but him and the woman; and now she began screaming and sobbing, throwing off her blanket and howling for help while he stood there and stared at her, both straight-on and in the mirror. At first he was too paralyzed to move; and when at last he tried helping her undress, he couldn’t get her clothes off, no matter how she begged him, until he ran to fetch a knife and slashed them. Then he stood watching the birth canal heave open and listening to her moans; saw the baby’s head appear slowly in a pool of blood; witnessed it all: the dreadful suffering, the screams; and was made to swear while standing helplessly in that cold room that he wouldn’t leave her or lay down his knife before cutting the umbilical cord. And throughout all this he never shut his eyes. He looked now at the woman and now at the mirror, watching the birth on both sides of him ... which is how, so he says, his intense political consciousness was born, gripping the knife in that cold room...
—Yes, sir, political, sir, those were his words and that’s how he views it. Unbelievably intense; it’s the only thing in his world that matters; it is his world. And thus, in a single cold, gloomy, fin-de-siecle hour, a skinny twelve-year-old with glasses became, as he puts it, a homo politicus. And here, perhaps, lies the first, subtle kernel of the bizarre, the hideous act of treachery that came eighteen years later, on account of which, sir, you were brought from Egypt to join your colleagues on the bench tomorrow while I hammer home his guilt ... I say, though, look at how the sky has cleared! Didn’t I remark two hours ago, sir, that Jerusalem wasn’t Glasgow? Even the most torrential rains have their limit here ... and so I ask myself, sir, and you too, Colonel, whether you haven’t heard enough by now. To think of all the times my mother warned me not to forget myself, that is, not to forget my listeners, because my tongue has a way of getting carried away, especially when it has such excellent whiskey to carry it...
—Of course, sir. I have a most definite purpose in mind.
—I daresay, Colonel, that everything will fit together in the end.
—With all my heart and soul, sir.
—Thank you, sir, that’s terribly kind of you. Well, then, where were we? Ah, yes, at the start of the century, which erupted right under our defendant’s nose...
—Sir?
—What baby is that, sir?
—Oh yes, that one ... but just what was the question, sir?
—Why, yes, sir.
—Yes, sir.
—Why, yes, sir. Quite thick of me, sir. Yes, of course. I reckon it was born in the end, but I’m afraid I didn’t pursue the matter, because it seemed to me more of a metaphor ... I do believe he cut the cord with his knife and gave the baby its freedom, but as to whether it lived or not ... we must hope for the best...
—By all means, sir ... Well, then, the new century dawned on us all, each of us at his proper station, and on the Manis too, who were still quite stunned by their tragedy. The old grandmother, though pushing eighty by now, was as youthful as ever and still adored by the young lad; the mother had put on weight and was aging rapidly; the sister was only ten but already resigned to a fate of being married off young; and the four of them barely eked out a living from letting out rooms in the defunct hospital. Young Mani was left pretty much to his own devices, and being a homo politicus, as he puts it, he set himself goals and made himself friends accordingly. His first decision was to study languages; it still rankled him to have had to sit listening to his father converse with his young guests from Europe without understanding a word. And having made up his mind, he went about it as single-mindedly as an army crossing a river—which meant secretly leaving the Jewish school in which his father had placed him without bothering to inform his mother or grandmother and roaming the streets of Jerusalem until he found the Scottish Mission on Mount Zion and its School of Bible, a very Christian institution, I needn’t tell you. What interested young Mani, of course, was not the Bible but English, which he quickly mastered with an Inverness accent. But that was just the beginning. Afternoons found him in the nearby village of Silwan, where a chum of his father’s, an old Arab sheikh, agreed to chat with him in Arabic and put him through his conjugations. And that still left evenings, when he sometimes frequented an Algerian family he knew to help mind the children and pick up a bit of French. He was already, you see, quite adept at moving among different elements before he had even celebrated his bar-mitzvah, which is like a Catholic confirmation or a Mohammedan toohoor and takes place in synagogue at the age of thirteen, when you must chant parts of the Bible in a special melody that is the very devil to master—believe me, Colonel, I can vouch for that personally, and so can the Great Synagogue in Manchester ... And so, as his bar-mitzvah approached, he betook himself to one of your little Jerusalem sects, one of those black-coated, fur-hatted, curly-eared lots whom you may have come across in London, Colonel, if you have ventured to the East End...
—Most assuredly, sir ... that’s where you see them, dressed the same way. He presented himself to them as an orphan, which is what he did everywhere, sir, as if he were motherless too; and they arranged for his bar-mitzvah, and taught him the proper chant notes, and even saw to the refreshments. That was the start of his odd ties with them, which have continued to this day. I’ve questioned them about it most thoroughly, trying to get to the bottom of it, because you see, sir, it’s not as if he belonged to them or could have even if he wished to: first, because he’s a Sephardi; second, because he’s a freethinker; and third, because he’s a Zionist, which is utterly foreign to them. And yet such ties existed; initially as a matter of mutual interest and eventually as one of subtle affection; because even the most hermetically sealed system needs a secret outlet, a man who is free to come and go on special assignments and is preferably an outsider, so that no control need be relinquished over one’s own; and best of all, a queer bird like Mani, a none too reputable orphan who could easily be disowned. And so he rendered them various services, such as corresponding in English with wealthy Jews in America, negotiating the rental of flats from the Mohammedans, and preparing digests of the newspapers, which their religion forbids them to read, in return for financial remuneration or its equivalent. They made no religious demands of him, not even that he wear a hat—indeed, already as a boy he was in the habit of calling on their elder bareheaded and speaking to him respectfully but as an equal. Not that he considered himself antireligious. He sometimes even attended services, although never theirs but only those of his fellow Sephardim, whose hymns were familiar and didn’t take all day—and then, of course, he clapped a red Turkish fez on his head before going off to pray. But he quite definitely did not wish to be considered religious either, because the one thing he could not have enough of was his freedom...
—In the Deity, sir? I believe he does, although he declines to profess it. In any case, he refused to answer the question, which I put to him with the greatest delicacy, on the grounds that it was too personal.
—No, sir, a Jew is not required to belie
ve in Him. As a rule, however, he does, since he has little else to believe in.
—Are you quite certain, Colonel, that you wish me to expound on such questions of identity? It’s a dreadful bog, you know; the Jews themselves start out across it with the greatest confidence and end up floundering madly. I can’t tell you how sorry I am to be boring you like this.
—I would be most keen to, sir.
—With great pleasure, sir. I even have my own hypothesis. But for the moment, I suggest that we stick to our story. I daresay I should say a word about this sect, because from the day of his arrest they’ve gone tiptoeing after him and us, his handlers, like a flock of birds—crows, sir, if you will—all perched around the ringside; quite indistinguishable from each other, yet each of them with his clearly defined role and place. Already on that snowy night when I rushed off to the guardhouse and saw the first of them standing blackly by the edge of the square, I could tell by the way he stood there that he had been sent; not even his umbrella was his own, because since then I’ve seen it pass from hand to hand like a rifle at the changing of the guards. A night hasn’t gone by without one of them trailing behind me—along the narrow streets, into the shops, up steps and down steps ... but the moment I approach them, they vanish. What they’re after, don’t you see, is to try to read in my face whether the accused has said anything to incriminate them...
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