Mr. Mani

by A. B. Yehoshua

  —Yes, sir. They were questioned quite stiffly with the help of an interpreter who speaks their language.

  —Yiddish, sir. It would appear that they had no idea what he was up to and could not have been less involved in his schemes. England, Turkey—they don’t give a fig for any of that. Their one concern is not to have his guilt rub off on them, although I do believe they feel a sort of solidarity with him, perhaps it even goes back to that bar-mitzvah chant ... Anyway, we had better get back to our story. Well, sir, he grew up, the lad did, dark-haired, bespectacled, and homely, an independent and rather solitary homo politicus drifting among the identities of Jerusalem while working out his politics and acquiring languages as though they were a batch of keys to a house with many doors. He was still a bachelor, still stirred to the depths of his soul by that woman’s womb and screams. In 1905, when he was eighteen, his grandmother died of old age, the one person in the world he really loved. Meanwhile, his younger sister was married off as she had known she would be, to the son of a wealthy Jew from North Africa who had come to purchase a grave in Jerusalem and was buried in it sooner than he had planned; once the week of mourning was over, the young man departed with his new bride and her mother, for Marseilles, to which he also invited her brother, who was employed as a court clerk at the time. Young Mani, however, resolutely declined; he was awaiting political developments, which were not long in coming, since in 1908 the Young Turks seized power and proclaimed a multinational, multiracial empire—a proclamation that so affected him that he resolved to study law and serve in the Turkish parliament. And so, letting out his two rooms in the defunct hospital that was now a pilgrims’ hostel, he put the family possessions into storage, gave his father’s old clothes to charity except for a large, warm overcoat, ordered a calling card from a print shop that said “Journalist” even though he had no journal to correspond for, and in the late summer of 1908 took the train to Jaffa, departing Jerusalem for the first time in his life. He did not once lift his head to look at the mountains sliding by outside the window, but kept his eyes on the suitcase between his legs and on his father’s coat by his side, wanting only to put Palestine behind him without a glimpse of the route whereby his father had deserted him. From the railway station in Jaffa he took a black hansom straight to the port, where he boarded a northbound ship for Constantinople. Three days later, toward evening, she cast anchor in Beirut—which is, as you know, sir, a handsome and rapidly growing city famed for its houses of amusement. All the passengers hurried ashore, he told me, save himself; for he had decided not to budge from the empty ship and there he remained, pacing the deck and listening to the sounds of song and laughter from the shore while regarding the brilliant lights of the city in which his father had perished. Toward midnight the first passengers returned to their cabins; yet still he strode the deck, watching the lights dim as the song and laughter faded away. A late moon rose in the sky. And then ... then, sir, so he says, he heard a cry; as if a huge, powerful infant were crying in the city, or so he says, sir; and with shaking hands he packed his suitcase and went ashore, passing the watchmen and entering the little streets, through which the last revelers were heading home and the last passengers returning to their ships. And all along, sir, he kept hearing the cry. And so he struck out through the winding lanes of the old city and came to the railway station, where he quickly crossed the tracks and started up a steadily climbing street until he came to a boardinghouse, a small establishment for travelers in need of a night’s lodgings. There were voices inside and a light swayed in the vestibule; and he asked if there was a room available and was told that there was; and he climbed the stairs and flung his suitcase on the bed and stepped out on the terrace and gazed down at the station below, which was flooded with moonlight, the tracks running north and south; and then, sir, he opened the squeaking clothes closet and hung up his father’s old coat ... and there it stayed for six years...

  —I do, sir. He remained in that city for six full years, until the outbreak of the war, And in the same boardinghouse and the same room, where he would still no doubt be if not for the war, as if being near the train station where his father had died held him in a vise. And I ask myself, sir, whether his act of treachery, or espionage, even if it surfaced many years later, was not conceived there in Beirut, although all my efforts to determine whether he was already planted then by the Turks have yielded nothing...

  —Yes, Colonel. A most thorough investigation, carried out around the clock, from every angle. There wasn’t a stone left unturned. Were any Turks lurking in the background, I’m sure I would have found them. But there isn’t a Turk in sight, sir, or even a German. The whole thing seems purely self-generated by his own muddled, neurasthenic mind. That’s the point I’m driving at, and if anyone thinks there’s a lesson to be learned here, anything applicable to the apprehension of spies and traitors in the future, the only lesson I can see is that every case is unique, Joseph Mani too, who claims he spent his seven years in Beirut studying, sir. And he really did attend the American University, which was easily done with his British passport that opened all sorts of doors. His income from the rent in Jerusalem paid for his bed and breakfast, and the rest of his needs were financed by odd jobs that he found as a guide, an interpreter, and a hotel agent, because Beirut was full of visitors in those years, tourists who came from all over. The town was booming; it was the gateway to the Orient for Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen; for Austrians, Russians, and even Americans; processions of pilgrims passed through it; so did archaeological expeditions, Christian missions, journalists discovering the East. And Jews too, of course, in every possible shape and form. A bureau of the Zionist Organization was opened too, to help stranded pioneers on their way to Palestine, penniless Jewish youngsters without a visa for the Ottoman Empire, let alone Palestine, without money for a ship berth, so that they planned to continue their journey on foot and slip across the border. Mani picked them out at the train station, where he hung about every evening, as they stepped out of the coaches: pale young men and women from Russia, on the run from the law since the abortive 1905 uprising, unkempt and unwashed with their bundles roped together ... and here was this dark, bespectacled Palestinian Jew come to meet them, wearing a little necktie and attempting to hit it off with them in Hebrew, then switching to French, then going over to his smattering of Russian. He directed them to the cheap doss houses on the hills above the city, which gave him a modest commission; explained where they might find an inexpensive café told them about the Holy Land and pointed out the way to the Zionist bureau; but he never befriended them past that. From women, he kept away entirely; it was as if he had still not gotten over his twelve-year-old’s memory of that winter day in the empty house with its womb that seemed less about to bear life than engorge it, and with a most ravenous appetite. And he had his studies to keep up too.

  —Yes, sir, quite faithfully. Every morning he went to the university, where he continued to consider himself a student for six years, albeit a rather slow óne and of a special status because of the king’s English that he spoke. His examinations and term papers were postponed from year to year; his requirements were met at a snail’s pace; most of his time was spent reading the daily and weekly papers in the library; since the age of twelve, after all, he had been his own headmaster; and now he had the run of the university, whose student body was a hodgepodge of different levels and backgrounds. And yet he had a sure notion of his curriculum; it was politicojurisprudential; he studied the laws of the Turkish majlis, the American constitution, the philosophy of the Koran; but also English poetry, Sumerian archaeology, Byzantine iconography, choosing his lectures systematically and at his leisure; and if there were any he had failed to comprehend in their entirety, he waited a year or two for them to be repeated and sat through them again. Afternoons were devoted to field work, that is, to attending political meetings of Druze, of Shiites, of Communists, of Christians, of Maronites, of Catholic priests, shuttling from identity to identity,
although by now the identities were all jumbled up; a simple promenade down the main street of Beirut was an excursion to them all. And of course, he did not neglect the Sephardic synagogue, which he made a point of attending every Sabbath eve, although he was far from punctilious in his observance of the Law; he refused, for example, to kindle a fire on the Sabbath, but did not abstain from forbidden foods. Politics remained his goal; he regarded it reverentially, as a complete philosophy of life with an inner logic of its own and a reason and purpose for everything. Events in Europe and in the Balkans left their powerful mark on him, and his imagination was fired by the approaching world war. Each time his mother and sister urged him to join them in Marseilles, he refused. The Turkish authorities were growing harsher; the Germans were everywhere; foreigners were being asked to leave; he feared leaving Ottoman jurisdiction and not being allowed back. His British passport burned in his pocket like a hot coal ... and to make matters worse, Colonel, in the early winter of 1914 he had a baby—and a motherless one to boot...

  —A quite genuine baby, sir. Its mother died shortly after its birth, which took place in the room its father’s gray overcoat had been hanging in for six years. And our Mr. Mani had to register it at the police ministry, where the German officers nosing about in the thick and hostile atmosphere of those prewar days could not help but wonder about this thin Palestinian student with the glasses, this journalist without a journal, who brought his infant to a Druze wet nurse every morning, a peddler in the souk of Beirut, and sat by her reading an old paper picked up out of the gutter while waiting for his child to drink its fill. Mind you, though, the paper was not too old for him to learn from it that Turkey would soon be in the thick of it too—and so, in late summer of 1914, as suddenly as he had arrived six years earlier, he took his father’s coat down from its peg, wrapped up the baby, and made his way southward to his native city, which after Beirut seemed a poor and gloomy place, bathed in a hard, dry light. He arrived at the house in Kerem Avraham to find it full of boarders, since by now every boarder had a boarder of his own and there was no place for him, the owner, to lay his head; and so off he went to his sectaries—Hasidim, sir, is the name for them; and he knocked on their door in his father’s old overcoat with the baby in his arms and said to them, “Find me a wife.” I rather doubt that surprised them one bit, sir; it’s their habit, you see, to be surprised by nothing, so that they can concentrate on divine matters; and so all they asked him was, “Do you want a wife to mind your child or a wife to bear you more children?” “I’ll think about that,” says he, and so he does, and when he has thought he tells them, “I want a wife to mind my child and me.” Well, sir, they have all sorts of women for a man like him: young widows and divorcées who will marry whomever they’re told to; but that isn’t whom they bring him; for although they never say so, they don’t wish to have him too close to them; and in any case, they aren’t at all keen on cross-marriages. In the end they find him a wife some thirteen years older than he is, a childless but attractive woman of nearly forty who came to Jerusalem from Mesopotamia at the end of the century and has already been through two husbands: one dead and one walked out on her; and has a bit of property and a souvenir shop for tourists in the walled city, between the Jewish and the Armenian quarters. Straightways she takes to the infant as if it were her own, with all the love and devotion you could ask for, and our Mr. Mani moves in with her, sinking into the piles of pillows and quilts left behind by her two husbands and hiding his British passport under the mattress. And thus, while great armies meet in battle along the blood-filled rivers of Europe, he sleeps his way through the winter of 1915. His new wife cooks her Babylonian dishes and serves them to him in bed as if he were convalescing from an illness, and the baby joins him there, crammed with goodies and smothered with gobs of love. And yet even there, sir, ensconced in his featherbed, he still considers himself a homo politicus and sends his wife out on urgent errands to bring him all the newspapers she can, which he peruses among the quilts and pillows, even those that arrive months late—boning up on the living and the dead and studying the maps and keeping track of the progress of the war and the lines of battle, some of which have long been erased; until finally, his Turkish fez on his head, he sallies forth from his lair into a Jerusalem made poorer than ever by the fighting overseas and resumes his identity shuttle. Mornings are spent in an Arab coffeehouse in the walled city, arbitrating petty tiffs and composing writs for the courts, because even though he has brought back no diploma from Beirut, he passes himself off as a solicitor; afternoons he comes back home for a sound snooze; then up and about once more without even a change of clothes, just a white hat in place of the fez, to call on a German-Jewish professor in the new city and teach him Arabic grammar; and from there to his Sephardic synagogue for the afternoon prayer; and then to his sectaries, to translate some English correspondence; and then back home for dinner with his wife and child; and then off again, this time with no hat at all, to the Zionist Club, where he sits in the back row with a drowsing Turkish secret policeman and listens to lectures and debates, sometimes rising to ask the Zionists a question of his own; and home at last late at night to hush the day’s speakers in his head and tell them all what he thinks, which is still not at all anti-English, because it has not dawned on him yet that the English will soon arrive; so that if any thought of treachery crosses his mind, it is no more than a dim kernel, as lifeless as a pebble, as a pip that falls on dry earth and seems more the dross of the fruit than the source of a new tree. And so more long years go by, and 1917 arrives, and the expeditionary force lands in Egypt and crosses the desert until Great Britain is next door to Palestine, and on the ninth of January, as you know, sir, we took the border town of Rafah.

  —Major General Philip Chatwood, sir, with his Australian and New Zealand cavalry. It was a short, easy battle, and by February news of it had reached Jerusalem and caused great excitement. Our Mani was jolly well shaken, so he told me, in a state of utter turmoil—and I asked myself, sir, what exactly was the meaning of it? Was this the jolt that turned under the dry pip that was playing dead, down into the warm, dark, blanketing earth?

  —Yes, sir. What I mean, sir, if you’ll forgive me for being rather literary, is, was this the beginning of the treachery that was soon to burst forth into the open? What could all that turmoil have meant in a man who called himself a homo politicus but sat through the war in Jerusalem with his face turned north toward Turkey, blind to what was happening in his backyard? What had he thought would happen? Was he still the boy waiting for his father to come home? Because all at once, here is Great Britain in the south, and he’s as shaken as if his father had made a secret circuit of Palestine and come back at him from the opposite direction...

  —His allegorical father, sir. I only meant it as a parable.

  —I beg your pardon, sir. It was just an attempt at interpretation...

  —As you wish, Colonel ... why, of course...

  —Yes, indeed, sir, that’s what I’m aiming at. It will all fit together in the end. I’m dreadfully sorry, sir.

  —I’ll most assuredly be quick about it, sir; the events now become quicker themselves. The armies prepare to lock horns, and in March we suffer a stinging setback in Gaza, although it’s clear to all that we haven’t said our last word yet. All summer long there is a constant trickle of nebulous rumors; it’s not that the Turks are deliberately spreading them, it’s just that they themselves don’t know where the English bull, our esteemed Sir Edmund, who in late summer moves his cavalry into the Holy Land, will strike from. By now it’s autumn, sir, the season of the Jewish holidays, although quite frankly, autumn here is just more of summer with a bit of an evening breeze; but it’s the time of the Jews’ New Year, when they rise in the middle of the night to blow a ram’s horn; and he felt the winds shift to southerly and rose one day himself and set out, taking his British passport from under the quilt and sowing it into the lining of his old coat. His first stop was Bethlehem, where no
thing seemed to have changed: the Turks shuffled about as always and the Arabs were their usual sleepy selves; only in the eyes of the Jews did he notice a soft gleam that made him stretch his neck a bit, as if straining to hear foreign voices. A party of Jews was on its way to Hebron to pray in the Cave of the Patriarchs, and he traveled with them for a while until their way was blocked by a Turkish detachment bound for Gaza, at which point he left the main road and caught a ride on a cart heading down into the desert of Judea. It was late afternoon; the sun was setting; a mixed company of Turkish cavalry and infantry marched by, singing a jolly Turkish tune, as if homebound at last, their officer brusquely ordered the cart aside and told its occupants to stay put; and our Mr. Mani had no way of knowing that as the last Turkish soldier marched by him, four hundred years of Turkish rule, the only rule he had known in his life, were peeled away as though they were a puff of wind ... And so they remained there in that no-man’s land, south of Hebron on the way to Beersheba, not far from the tents of some Bedouin, who extended them their hospitality. It was the thirty-first of October, and our Mani had no idea either that Sir Edmund had taken Beersheba that same night. They lit a fire to warm themselves and sat around it...

  —I wouldn’t say pleased, sir. Burning with anticipation was more like it. He was deucedly impatient to come in contact with us, even though he had no idea what that meant; but he did know that if he stayed where he was, there would no longer be any way back. And indeed, the next morning he found himself encircled by Chatwood’s cavalry under the command of Captain William Daggett of the quartermaster’s corps of the 67th Regiment. Captain Daggett’s affidavit, sir, is here in this brief, and he’ll be the first to take the witness stand tomorrow. An indomitable warrior, sir, a most esteemed member of Chatwood’s staff; a vain old bloody-tempered Scotsman who refused to be questioned at first and had to be locked up for two days before we could get the story out of him.