Mr. Mani

by A. B. Yehoshua

  —Yes, sir...

  —Just so, sir. “Awake, sleep not”: that was the gist of it; the speech lasted but a few minutes. Whereupon he held out his arms to the Turkish officers standing about him with their shiny boots in the mud; and they lifted him and carried him on their shoulders to keep him from muddying himself. There wasn’t a peep from his large audience. It hadn’t understood a word; hadn’t understood what this new thing was that was wanted of it; hadn’t understood what was a country; barely knew where the borders of its village lay. He donned his cloak in the gathering dusk, much fussed over by the German; was escorted back to no-man’s land; and promised to come again next Saturday with more documents...

  —Yes, sir, that was his sole remuneration; we’ve verified it from sources behind the lines. But he returned every Saturday in January and February, eight times all in all; they even gave him a little flock of goats each time, so that he would look like a shepherd; not that he didn’t manage to lose most of them on his way down the first hill and end up with only two or three. They had him vary his route each time, and the German organized a special task force to track him and pick him up. Straightways he would hand them the documents with a show of scorn, saying, “You don’t deserve them,” after which he would be taken deferentially to that week’s village, where his audience had been waiting on its feet since dawn. By now every Arab between Ramallah and Nablus knew of him and was convinced he was a punishment inflicted by the Turks for their defeat—a most odd and ridiculous punishment, a sign of disarray and weakness. By now too he had his table, and a chair, and a blackboard, and even a glass of water; he stood with the Turkish officers about him and read Lord Balfour’s declaration; and then he unfurled a colored map of Palestine that he had drawn himself, with the sea a bright blue, while the Arabs stared at it and failed to comprehend why, if this was their country, it was so small. He pointed to the blue sea, to the Jordan, to Jerusalem, and said, “Awake!” and they looked to see who had dared to doze off; “Get ye an identity,” he went on, “before it is too late! All over the world people now have identities, and we Jews are on our way, and you had better have an identity or else!” And then he took a scissors from his pocket and said, “Half for you and half for us,” and cut the map lengthwise, and gave them the half with the mountains and the Jordan, and kept the sea and the coast for himself. It rather distressed them to see it snipped up like that, and they pressed forward and some even tried to touch it, but the hungry, rickety-legged, rheumy-eyed Turkish soldiers pointed their bayonets and cocked their rifles, because the German had laid down the law that not a hair of the Jew’s head should be harmed. Not that anyone would have harmed him, because the angrier he became and the more he swore at the villagers and provoked them, the sorrier for him they felt, even if they did blurt out to him like children, “But we want the sea too!” At first that stunned him, made him lose his temper; then, irately, he took another map from his bag and cut it horizontally...

  —Some eight Saturdays, sir.

  —In many villages, sir. He even got as far as Nablus and Jenin and visited prominent notables. He was much too stubborn and proud for them; he wouldn’t even taste their coffee; hardly anyone knew what he was talking about, and there were some who snickered pityingly; but there were a handful of others who turned pale and wiped the smiles from their faces, men with a smattering of learning who had studied in Beirut or Haifa or Jerusalem and strode about their villages with suits, ties, and white shoes as if they were Virgil or Plato; they listened with trepidation when he talked about the Jews who were coming; “Like locusts,” he said; “one day they’re in the desert and the next they’re upon you...” It’s a mystery, Colonel, how he was never spotted by one of our patrols. He crossed the lines in broad daylight as though slicing butter, and returned by night, walking quietly and quickly, a six-mile round-trip all in all; arrived from the north, tired, wet, and dirty, slipped into the old city through the Nablus Gate, and vanished down the empty, rain-washed alleyways; and then, together with the moon that rose from Jericho, pressed on to the stone steps of his house, where his large wife opened the door even before he touched the doorknob; never knowing where he had been or come back from but helping him out of his clothes, and bathing him, and drying and feeding him, and pulling back the quilt for him; and only then, sinking into it, did he begin to tremble all over, while the moon sank into bed beside him...

  —I beg your pardon, sir, I truly do.

  —Yes, sir, I beg your pardon, sir. I’m afraid I was a bit carried away.

  —Horowitz, sir. Oh, dear.

  —Ivor Stephen, sir. Horowitz, sir. I’m afraid I was carried away.

  —Yes, Colonel.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Quite, sir. I am rather fagged. I’ve been working on this case day and night for the past five weeks, and my passion for the truth has overwhelmed me. I’ve investigated every last detail; been in and out of his home a hundred times; even walked the route of treachery on foot—and if some fact could not be ascertained, I imagined it back into existence, because I’ve been dreadfully anxious to get to the bottom of it all.

  —No, Colonel, absolutely not. A thousand times no. Had he been an Arab, or an Indian, or a Ghurka, I would have done the same thing. Wherever the Union Jack flies, it will be my passion to know and understand. I rather fear, though, that the trial will flow by us too quickly; because Mr. Mani will plead guilty; and the prosecution—you musn’t misjudge me, sir—will be razor-sharp; and Lieutenant Colonel Keypore and Major Jahawala have already made up their minds. And the fact is, Colonel, that when you see the quantity and nature of the documents he passed to the enemy, you’ll be in high dudgeon yourself.

  —Yes, of course we do, sir. It’s all listed right here. He himself kept exact records and received a receipt for each document. It’s all been verified, sir, because—and this is a little secret between us—we have an Englishman behind the lines who’s passed for a German since the end of the last century, and from time to time he renders a small service.

  —Right here, sir, although I’m not certain it’s in chronological order. The 22nd Regiment’s assault plan across the Jordan, the third of January, 1918. A roster of our brigade’s sick and wounded from the thirtieth of December, 1917, to the sixth of January, 1918. A report on discipline in the 3rd Battalion from the third week of January, bearing the signature of Captain Smogg...

  —There had been many complaints, sir. A divisional list of all officers on leave as of the thirteenth of January, 1918. A draft of a battle plan for the conquest of Damascus, signed by Major Sluce, from the twenty-sixth of January, 1918. The guest list for the gala evening given by the military governor of Jerusalem on the thirtieth of January, 1918. Two signed photographs of General Allenby, no date. A list of provisions sent to the 5th Australian Battalion. The deployment of our artillery in the Jericho theater as of the first of February, 1918. Some drafts of Lieutenant Colonel Keypore’s personal correspondence with his wife.

  —I’m afraid there’s more, Colonel.

  —A description of the firing mechanism of our F Howitzer, unsigned and dateless. A filled-out resupply form for artillery shells. A photograph of an unidentified young woman, apparently a tart, on the Via Dolorosa. A map of Jericho with the position of all artillery pieces from the third of February, 1918. Those, Colonel, were the cannon lost earlier this month in that unfortunate battle across the Jordan. The Germans counted each round that we fired, and when they knew we had run out of ammunition, they ordered an assault. We lost one hundred and fifty men. Although I daresay the Australians were more upset about their cannon, because men are more easily replaceable.

  —Just so, sir. He found it all in the wastebaskets or on his way to them.

  —There already has been a jolly big scandal, sir. Officers were arrested and charges have been filed. New procedures have been instituted, and a special man was brought in from Cairo and has been on the job for a week. When you call on the general at headquarters tomor
row, you’ll notice all the wastebaskets are empty. There’s now a special sergeant with a detail of two soldiers whose assignment it is to burn the waste around the clock, which he does so industriously that I believe that some of it is already on fire before it’s been thrown away There’s a permanent pillar of smoke outside military headquarters—if you look out the window you can see it right now. I say, sir, it’s clearing again! And there’s one of those black crows I’ve been telling you about. They already know that you, the presiding judge, have arrived and that I’m in here with you, although I’ll be hanged if I know how they do.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Over there, Colonel, if it’s not too hard for you to make him out.

  —A black spot it is, Colonel. And such black spots, Colonel, have been following me around for the past three weeks, because they know that the noose is tightening and that it won’t be long now. Two emissaries of theirs have already been to see me, an old solicitor and a court clerk who can stammer a bit in English. They asked to look at the Handbook of Wartime Jurisprudence, and I gladly let them have it and gave them a place to sit in my room, where they spent the whole day reading and engaging in Talmudic disputations. I even had them served tea, which they wouldn’t touch; at closing time, pale and exhausted, they handed the handbook back to me with the tips of their fingers, as if Mani’s death were already inside it, and nodded sadly and looked at each other and asked if I knew the London Horowitzes. And when I confessed that I didn’t, they began to ransack the rest of the world for some Horowitz whom I was prepared to be a distant relation of and could be given regards from, only to give up with a sigh in the end. “But this Mani is mad,” said the court clerk to me in a whisper. “Is it not beneath the dignity of Great Britain to concern itself with a madman? Why, even his father took his own life; can you not show him mercy?” But I, Colonel, looked them straight in the eye and answered curtly, “You know as well as I do he’s not mad.”

  —No, sir. Not even with that madness that masquerades as sanity until you sniff its sour smell in a warm room. No, there is absolutely nothing mad about him. He doesn’t have even one iota of that first, slight, hardly visible wobble that eventually throws a man out of orbit. He has all his senses, Colonel; the man’s soul may be a jungle, but neither his reason nor will are impaired, and he’s in total command of himself; he says what he wishes to say, and holds back what he doesn’t; and I happen to know that he is preparing a long political plea, not for the court’s benefit, but for the public and the press. He’s the sort of chap who likes his audience big and captive. He plans to let me say what I’m entitled to, and then to deliver a speech that will electrify Jerusalem, because it will be given by a man with a hangman’s noose around his neck. I feel it; I know it; that’s why he walked straight into that Ulsterman’s funk hole when he could have easily gone around it. He was tired of playing to crowds of Mohammedans assembled by the whips of Turks; nothing would do for him but to perform for all Jerusalem.

  —That’s just it, sir. It’s only a guess, but I reckon he’s sharpening a poisoned dart for us. As much as I’ve tried drawing him out, I’ve gotten precious little out of him. He composed all the drafts of his speech in Hebrew, and when I sought to lay hands on them, he quite simply ate them. They’re safely inside him now.

  —You’ll see him tomorrow, Colonel, in the dock. Don’t be fooled into thinking he’s following the proceedings, because the only thing on his mind will be his speech: about this eternal battle-field of a country that is spawning another catastrophe and about all the locusts waiting to arrive ... although if you take a good look around you, Colonel, what you see here is one big wasteland with jolly few people anywhere. I told him as much, too. “Forget all that,” I told him; “Find yourself a good barrister who will tell the court about your childhood, and your poor dead father; you’re going to get yourself hung, and the more of your political balderdash, the more rope you’ll wrap around your neck.” But he just smiles at that, cool as a cucumber. A most political animal; and most politically calm! Quite certain that there’s politics in everything he does ... and yet I know, sir—and the knowledge turns in me like a knife—that there’s another story here. There’s someone else lurking in the background whom he’s out to get back at, and all his politics are mere autosuggestion.

  —A quite sensible thought, sir. In fact, I had it myself. I had a hook installed in the ceiling without his knowledge and a length of rope left in his cell one night, and I instructed the guards to look the other way in the hope that he would put an end to it. Well, sir, that night he pulled out the hook and coiled up the rope, and the next morning he handed them to me in a neat bundle without a word, which was his way of telling me that he meant to have his speech. And so he’s been whittling away at it—and though I haven’t a notion what’s in it, I would be most delighted to be spared it, because it can only stir up feeling against us.

  —No, sir. It’s nothing that could affect the sentence. He’s as good as dead already, sir, unless one of those crows can fly to Buckingham Palace and come back with a royal pardon. The case against him is open-and-shut, sir, and you musn’t be misled by my qualms. Tomorrow morning I’ll be there like an immovable body, and your two colleagues won’t need to be convinced; Lieutenant Colonel Keypore would like nothing better than to see the man swing for those lost cannon across the Jordan, and I don’t believe he’ll relent ... oh no, not him but nonetheless, sir ... and now, sir, I am ... I am speaking not only as a soldier, but as a British subject too ... if it were possible ... you see, once the trial starts, it will proceed most speedily, with a rapidity we have no ... control over ... and so I thought that perhaps we should consider ... since there is...

  —Sir?

  —Yes, sir, the interested parties have already made inquiries. It turns out there’s a Turkish scaffold in the tower, with enough rope and tackle to hang us all. If the Turks had seen to their stock of artillery shells as they saw to their rope, we might not have taken this city so easily. And there’s an Arab who served as the hangman’s helper and claims he can manage things quite splendidly ... so you see, sir, that’s why I say ... because ... and I know I’ve been talking nonstop ... but we have seen ... we have seen...

  —Sir?

  —What boy is that, sir?

  —Ah, yes, of course, the boy ... but I have told you, haven’t I, sir ... I rather think ... I mean ... but in what way?

  —Oh.

  —Oh...

  —Why, yes ... directly, sir ... why, of course, the boy...

  —His name is Ephraim. Our Mani claims he’s his, and there’s no reason to doubt him, even though they don’t look at all alike. The lad, you see, is blond and blue-eyed, and his dead mother, or so the story goes, was a tubercular young Jewess from Russia or thereabouts whom Mani picked out from all the bundles and luggage unloaded at the Beirut railway station, where he waited for his clientele. I can’t say if she was a proper revolutionary—you’ll find youngsters whose only terror has been directed against their parents, yet who are so certain they’ve committed crimes against the state that they feel compelled to flee. In any event, she attached herself to him; and accustomed though he was to the whims of such gypsies, whom he always managed to shake off, he could not get away from her. Perhaps she was as political as he was. Whatever the reason, something about her touched his stubborn, gloomy old bachelor heart. Perhaps she wanted a child from him, being afraid to push on to Palestine, or not believing she could get across the border, yet desiring something Palestinian of her own. Your guess is as good as mine. He didn’t talk much about her, sir. In any case, they had no money, and they lived together for a year or two by the railway station in that boardinghouse I spoke of, which was in West Beirut, sir, in the Moslem quarter, an extremely poor part of town, so he says, by the old Sephardic synagogue, where he dropped in every Friday; with a bit of luck, sir, we’ll be there soon and see it all for ourselves ... When her time came they were afraid to go to
hospital, lest they be asked for their papers and risk expulsion by the Turks as foreigners. And anyway, he believed that he could deliver the child by himself, because he had been through a birth once before and had even cut the umbilical cord. Still, he fetched a Moslem midwife for good measure; but the woman had a frail constitution; and she lost too much blood and died the day after giving birth. That left him with the infant, who grew up to be a bit slow and a stammerer, but an agreeable child who grew handsomer with each passing day and had his mother’s good looks, which had already been ravaged by illness when Mani met her; only now, via her son who was unfolding like a flower, did he realize how beautiful she must have been. You’ll see him tomorrow, Colonel, a four-year-old seated in the front row. I’ve allowed him to be present for the first session, so that he can enjoy the fine room and the officers in their uniforms and remember that his father was given a fair trial and not simply thrown to the dogs...